Exploring the Connections

Rhetoric and Rage

by John M. Buchanan
The Christian Century, May 18, 2010

By all accounts, the crowd that gathered outside the temporary quarters of the Roman governor in Jerusalem on a Friday morning 2,000 years ago whipped itself, or was whipped by skilled political operatives, into an angry frenzy. The issue was what to do with a Galilean peasant who had run afoul of the carefully structured arrangement between the authorities of the occupied people and the greater authority of Rome, as represented by its appointed governor. The crowd became a mob that played a decisive role in the execution of a man innocent of wrongdoing.

Crowds can become dangerous mobs. The people in them can be swept up in anger and rage and may say and do things they would never do on their own.

Angry rhetoric on the public airwaves is also potentially dangerous. When a talk show host says, "We have to get rid of these people—these bastards," he crosses a line between expressing a political preference and inciting violence. Sure enough, violent and potentially violent acts began to happen to politicians involved in the health-care reform bill. Is there a connection between angry rhetoric and actual violence? Is there an accountability—if not legal, then at least ethical—that everyone who speaks publicly in a free society should be held to?

I believe that the rhetoric of rage is connected to violent behavior. Our fragile experiment in republican democracy, which is based on the God-given liberty of every individual, leans heavily on the tradition of civil dialogue—and that tradition fades in the midst of shouts and threats of violence.

Columnists and spokespersons from both sides of the political divide understand what is at stake. In the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming that "nativist extremist groups have increased 80 percent since President Obama took office." In the Chicago Tribune, John McCarron writes that "while Tea Party folks have some legitimate beefs . . . they better start guarding their right flank as well as their left. . . . Some unhinged believer will fly his Cessna into an IRS office in Texas, or blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City . . ."

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan says that there are many reasons why we have become a violent culture, but she says "one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is lower the temperature. Any way you can . . . . Just lower it."

John M. Buchanan is editor and publisher of the Century.

RUST RAGE

by Noam Chomsky
In These Times , May 4, 2010

On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.

Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.

His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

“Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on.”

He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.

Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he also couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged; or a legal system in which “there are two `interpretations’ for every law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.”

The government leaves us with “the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of thousands of people a year,” with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.

Stack traces these ills to a social order in which “a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities—and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours.”

Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”

Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants and destroy families and communities.

An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.

Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest economy, investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.

Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt—the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.

In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S. counterparts—in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.

Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units “are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation,” Lee writes.

Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.

In the U.S., the Tea Party movement—and even more so the broader circles it reaches—reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party’s anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.

California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public system of higher education is being dismantled.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other governors are joining in.

Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs—a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.

California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It’s much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.

Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of private power.

However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions—and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.

But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).

At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit—the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system.

It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.
___________
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.

Integrity rejoices at passage of hate crimes legislation

October 22, 2009

For immediate release

LOS ANGELES, CA--Integrity applauds the passage today of the groundbreaking legislation making it a federal crime to assault an individual because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.

"Since 1988 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church as been on record supporting legislation protecting all Americans from hate motivated violence," said Integrity President David Norgard. "And so we rejoice today with all who have worked so long and so hard to move this legislation forward. Our prayers are particularly with Judy and Dennis Shepard and their family, who turned the tragedy of the death of their son Matthew into advocacy on behalf of all those vulnerable to hate crimes because of their sexual orientation or gender identity."

In her 2007 letter in support of the bill passed by the Senate today, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori included this quote from former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold: "The fact that Matthew was an Episcopalian makes our grief no more sharp, but it does give us a particular responsibility to stand with gays and lesbians, to decry all forms of violence against them - from verbal to physical, and to encourage the dialogue that can, with God's help, lead to new appreciation for their presence in the life of our church, and the broader community."

Integrity is grateful for the work and witness of ALL those who have stood with the most vulnerable down through the years -- and is committed to continue that advocacy as we follow the Lord who called us always to remember that it is in service to "the least of these" that we live out our call to seek and serve Christ in all persons.

###

CONTACT: Louise Brooks
Director of Communications
tvprod@earthlink.net
626-993-4605

American Pie

Editor's Desk
The Christian Century, November 18, 2008

In the course of discussing tax policy with an unlicensed Ohio plumber, Barack Obama suggested that "spreading the wealth around" a bit more would be good for the country. Obama was trying to explain why he wants to impose a modest tax increase on people who make more than $250,000 a year while reducing taxes on those making less than that amount. John McCain and his supporters immediately seized on Obama's remark as a sign that Obama favors a socialist form of income redistribution.

The notion that a progressive income tax is a form of socialism is ludicrous. Since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, Americans have recognized that those who are flourishing most in society should pay a proportionately higher share of tax. After all, they are the ones benefiting most from the social stability and infrastructure that government provides.

Talk of socialism would be laughable except that it is part of a larger, disturbing reality in American politics: it has become almost impossible to talk about the disparities in wealth that have arisen over the past three decades and about how this stratification undermines democracy and fosters unequal outcomes in other areas of life, including educational opportunity and access to health care.

Since the late 1970s the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled and the share for the top 0.1 percent has tripled. More than 40 percent of total income goes to the wealthiest 10 percent—their biggest share of the nation's pie in at least 65 years. The very wealthy have become enormously wealthy, while middle-class workers have seen their wages stagnate—barely keeping pace with inflation—and at the same time have had to deal with sharp increases in the costs of health care and education.

In light of this trend, the dispute between McCain and Obama on taxes is minor: Obama wants to return the top marginal tax rate to 39 percent, where it was under Clinton, while McCain wants to keep it at 35 percent. Both men, in other words, would maintain the mildly progressive tax system that currently exists. The current system is actually much less progressive than it was in earlier decades—under Eisenhower the top tax rate was 91 percent, and under Nixon it was 70 percent. Those were hardly socialist administrations.

Though tax rates are not the only factor shaping economic conditions, they are an important measure of how the burdens of common life are being distributed. The warnings about socialism should be seen for what they are: a blunt effort to block any discussion of the ominous fact that the U.S. has become a nation of increasing inequality and, for many, of declining opportunity.

by the Century editors 

We need a better butterfly

by Sr. Joan Chittester, OSB
From Where I Stand, Vol 6, no. 10
October 20, 2008

Sometimes it isn't just one thing, sometimes it takes a confluence of things to make the invisible visible and the dark light. Things like butterflies and somebody else's mortgage and Irish bookies and attitudes all coming together, at once, and apparently independent of one another. But, underneath, not really isolated or unconnected at all. In fact, together, they say something very important to us all.

If you were wondering what "globalization" really means, for instance -- before, that is, you found yourself living in the middle of it -- the answer lies in all of the above. A piece at a time. All leading to more of the fullness of the definition of that reality than any one of them alone might suggest.

"The Butterfly Effect," according to the work of physicist Edward Lorenz in 1961, is the awareness that a slight change in one part of a system can cause cataclysmic effects in another. Depending on other conditions in the atmosphere, "One flap of a seagull's wings," he said, "could change the course of the weather forever." Bird wings on one side of the globe, he went on, can cause or avert a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe. That's an interesting concept at best when considered in a science lab. It's a potentially devastating one when practiced in politics.

The point is clear: One false systemic step on one side of the globe can bring down systems a world away. And it has. And that is globalization.

The lab exercise is only too clear now. Even here.

A default on a home mortgage by the neighbor who was never vetted for the loan seems to have little to do with me until it becomes clear that every fourth house on the block, as one man told me on a return flight from Newfoundland last week, is repossessed as a result of it. Now the corner store and two industries in that town are on the brink of closing for lack of business and his own house value and business plans are also now in jeopardy in the process.

On top of all that, Irish bookies this week simply declared the U.S. election over and paid off their debts with congratulations to the winners. The world clearly thinks it has as much a stake in the U.S election as we do, enough to risk money on it -- as they have on our banks, our stock market and our economic policies.

Finally, when I tried to have a conversation several years ago with two young men, one in finance, the other in insurance, about the rising U.S. debt and the financial bubble in which we had staked our common future, one explained to me patiently that nothing could happen because "we have the strongest economy in the world," and the other one told me with gusto that what I didn't understand was that "debt was good!" Debt, he instructed me, "makes money."

Well, for some, maybe. But not for all. Debt does not make money for the worker whose jobs will be lost as companies close because of it. It does not make money for nations around the world whose economies are tied to ours and whose own infrastructure will suffer as a result of it. It does not even make money for banking systems everywhere built on debt and now drowning in it. Most of all, it will not make money for families who will have to choose between food and education for their children as their jobs dry up and costs rise and their wages disappear.

The butterfly in this system is the next president of the United States who, no matter who he is or what he promises these next three weeks, will be faced with the reality of what can be done and must be done two months after that.

No matter what he's saying now.

The advantage is that the country wants change -- and they are going to get it. How much change is yet to be seen.

The problem is that the country expects change -- big change and fast. How little change it will abide is yet unclear.

But one thing is sure: Heaven help the president who does not or cannot produce it in necessary measure. Not simply for our sake but for the sake of those on the other side of the world who also had nothing to do with the collapse.

There is one other butterfly in the ointment, however, more worrisome than the first. This one is in Korea where a financial researcher in Seoul was fired for saying that "people made unwise financial decisions because they were too greedy." His company called that an "individual view out of line with our institute's original purpose." Indeed. Isn't that where the problem started in the first place and haven't we all had enough of that already?

Yahoo filed that story under a category called "odd" news. Not any more.

If the explanation of the present economic meltdown is true, institutional greed isn't odd anymore, it's standard. And those who saved rather than spent without collateral, are about to pay for it.

From where I stand, a new president is going to have to change more than the system. He's going to have to change the very attitudes that are at the foundation of economic institutions around the globe. It might be a good idea to start with greed and debt and over confidence. And when he's done with that one, he might want to do something about changing a legacy of war and torture and American imperialism-and the notion of a monarchial presidency, as well. At least for starters.

Fantasy Land

Editorial, The Christian Century, October 7, 2008

Speakers at the Republican National Convention mentioned God 43 times; speakers at the Democratic Convention, 22 times. One thing was clear: American civil religion is alive and well. At both events God was regularly invoked as the guide and protector of American greatness.

John McCain declared in his acceptance speech: "I'm going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank him: that I'm an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth." Barack Obama concluded his speech with biblical language, referring to "that American promise. . . that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen. . . . Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess." The politicians tied God closely to American greatness and to the promise of America; the hope and faith they confessed was hope and faith in America.

Judging from the speeches at the two conventions, the promise of America is primarily the promise of individual achievement. Countless stories were recounted of individuals rising above circumstance and triumphing against the odds. We were repeatedly told that such stories could happen "only in America." And we heard again and again that in the U.S., if you work hard enough, success is assured. "Anyone can make it if they just try hard enough," declared Joe Biden, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee. "With work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within reach," stated McCain - the faith referred to being a generic faith, or just faith in hard work.

Of course, hard work should be affirmed. But it is simply not true that anyone can make it with hard work. What about the single mother who works two jobs to pay the bills and is desperate for child care—do we say to her only, "Work hard"? Is that all we have to say to the youths who attend dismal public schools? To the veteran who can't afford college? To those without health care insurance?

While we can hardly expect political conventions to articulate a tragic sense of life, the unrelenting celebration of American possibility and God's blessing on it has an infantilizing effect. Civil religion encourages us to live in a fantasy world in which the U.S. is the country that counts most and individual effort conquers all obstacles. The Christian religion, by contrast, would encourage us to be in solidarity with those who are not making it, and help us fashion a politics courageous enough to talk soberly about the country's distinct failings.

Reject new nukes, arms control groups tell US Congress

by agency reporter, Ekklesia News, April 16, 2008

Twenty-eight arms control advocacy and religious organizations called today for a key committee of the US Congress to stop the administration from building a new nuclear weapon.

In a letter to the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee organized by the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers), the groups warned that support for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program “would seriously undermine the credibility of US leadership on non-proliferation and disarmament.”

Congress previously provided no money for RRW, citing the lack of a comprehensive US nuclear weapons policy to guide nuclear arsenal decisions. Nevertheless, the Bush administration requested $10 million for the program in its budget request.

“At a time when former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry to call on the US to work for nuclear disarmament, it doesn’t make sense to start building new weapons,” said Devin Helfrich, a lobbyist for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

“The leaders of this committee understood last year that there is no solid justification for this program, yet the administration asks for money year after year. Congress and the people of the United States are committed to reducing the nuclear danger, and a step toward that end is eliminating funding for RRW.”

Testifying before the House in 2007, former Senator Sam Nunn noted the 'strategic error' the United States would make by producing new nuclear weapons at a time when other countries are considering developing their own arsenals. “[I]f Congress gives a green light to this [RRW] program in our current world environment,” he argued, “I believe that this will be: misunderstood by our allies; exploited by our adversaries; and complicate our work to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons.”

Read the full text of the letter: www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=3251&issue_id=51

FRONTLINE: Sick Around the World

For those who might have missed the excellent FRONTLINE show—"Sick Around the World"—broadcast on PBS (Channel 8) last evening, here is some good news. This excellent examination of five different Health Care  Systems around the world, and comparing them with what we have in the U.S., may be viewed in full at:

http://tinyurl.com/5qaqfe

The site also includes links to study and teachers' guides that can  be used with groups.

How the US conscience has become diseased

By Giles Fraser
Church Times, November 30, 2007

It was called “tortura del agua” by the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis used it, as did the Japanese and the Vietcong. We now call it waterboarding, and all reasonable people would also call it torture. That is, except — because it is a technique now widely practised by the CIA, and because the United States wants to claim that it does not torture prisoners — that the current US administration calls it an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Once again, Mr Bush’s dodgy dictionary finds new ways to lie.

This is waterboarding. First, the victim is trussed up, often strapped on to a board, facing the ceiling. The board is then angled so that the head is set slightly lower than the body. Things are scarier when they happen upside down. A rag is stuffed into the subject’s mouth, filling the cavity. The nostrils are blocked. Very slowly, a few drops at a time, the rag is saturated with filthy water. The subject starts fighting for breath, sucking in what little air there is available through the rag. Increasingly, he inhales more water than air and his lungs begin to fill up.

Another version involves water and cellophane wrapped around the head. There will be no tell-tale marks of torture, no scars or bruises. Wrapped in cellophane, or drowning with a rag down your throat, it is not even possible to scream.

Of course waterboarding is torture. In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out waterboarding on a US civilian. So why are the CIA not being charged with war crimes, 60 years on? Apparently, these are special circumstances. The war on terror justifies “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The bad guys must be stopped, at any cost. Only thus will Americans be able to sleep safe and well. So goes the argument, such as it is.

This is what makes the war on terror such a well of moral evil. Americans are fed a constant diet of fear about the outside world. Many of them do not have passports. Local newspapers and TV channels think the story of the local dog caught in a tree is more newsworthy than thousands dead in a faraway land. Full of anxiety, they lock themselves up in gated communities and vote for the toughest talk on the market, even if it comes from amoral politicians who go to prayer breakfasts and defend war crimes.

I love the United States, but its moral conscience has been diseased by the war on terror. It is now time for American churches to speak out more clearly.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney.

Electoral Dysfunction

by Eugene Robinson
Truthdig, October 25, 2007

WASHINGTON—Has America become a mean, ungenerous, cramped and crabby nation, a deeply insecure colossus—one that just might be taking all those Viagra and Cialis commercials a bit too personally? Is the country desperate to find scapegoats to blame for a perceived decline in, um, vigor? Or is America still a confident land of hope and promise, a place still potent with possibility?

It’s watching the Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail that makes me pose those sweeping questions. I’m just suggesting a context for assessing the actions and rhetoric of a party that seems to be in the throes of andropause.

That’s the popularly accepted term for “male menopause,” which medical dictionaries tend to describe as a “purported” syndrome rather than an actual clinical diagnosis. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion on whether dads go through a Y-chromosome version of what used to be euphemistically called the “change of life.” But I think the “Daddy Party” has been presenting clear symptoms.

The latest was the Senate vote Wednesday in which Republicans, supported by a handful of red-state Democrats, narrowly scuttled the Dream Act, a bill that would have provided a path to U.S. citizenship for some young undocumented immigrants—but only those who did everything this country once found worthy and admirable in pursuit of the American Dream.

Under the proposal, men and women who fulfilled several conditions—they had to be under 30, had to have been brought into the country illegally when they were younger than 16, had to have been in the United States for at least five years and had to be graduates of U.S. high schools—would have been given conditional legal status. If they went on to complete two years of college or two years of military service, they would have been eligible for permanent residency.

Let’s see. Here was a way to encourage a bunch of kids to go to college rather than melt into the shadows as off-the-books day laborers—or maybe even gang members. And here was a way to boost enlistment in our overtaxed armed forces. Aren’t education and global competitiveness supposed to be vital issues? Aren’t we fighting open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The vote against the Dream Act was so irrational, so counterproductive, that it seemed the product of some sort of hormonal imbalance.

“I do not believe we should reward illegal behavior,” sniffed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who led the successful fight to kill the measure. But the potential beneficiaries of the Dream Act didn’t do anything illegal; it was their parents who made the decision to come here without papers.

The real reason for denying at least 1 million young people the opportunity to make this nation stronger is that illegal immigration is the scourge du jour. Undocumented immigrants are convenient scapegoats for perceived American decline, convenient targets for the unfocused anger that Republicans seem to believe their constituents feel—the sense that “they,” whoever they might be, are taking something away from “us.”

George W. Bush’s veto of the bill reauthorizing the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program—an action backed up by loyal House Republicans—had the same defensive, bitter sense of we’ll-show-them-a-thing-or-two. The Republican Party has to be aware of the polls showing how concerned Americans are about the health insurance crisis. They have to be betting that the act of saying no—in what looked like a fit of andropausal pique—would play better with voters, perhaps subliminally.

And just listen to the Republican candidates’ rhetoric about our great nation’s place in the world. With the exception of Ron Paul, every one of them agrees that America is under siege, molested not only by dangerous bands of Islamic terrorists—which is true—but also by sovereign nations such as Iran, China and Russia that have had the temerity to pursue what they see as their own national interests. Which is a bizarre way of looking at foreign relations.

The solution, according to the Republican presidential hopefuls, isn’t give-and-take negotiation. It’s chest-thumping. It’s a series of declarations about what we will find “acceptable” and what we won’t. Maybe this is calculated; maybe they’ve decided that national security is the only issue that gives any of them a chance against any Democrat in 2008.

But I think they’re badly misreading the country. I think this is still fundamentally a hopeful, generous nation, aware of both its challenges and its strengths. And not yet ready to start downing Levitra by the handful.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com .

© 2007, Washington Post Writers Group