Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

To people all over the world, there is an insatiable curiosity about the nature of the “American mind.”

A minimal perusal of the foreign press would bare this out. As would an evaluation of the traffic of news Websites, including this one, which shows about half the readers are from other countries.

In short, inquiring minds all over the world want to know why we are so, well, fucking weird.

The stories now swirling about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s last minute surprise pick as his Republican running mate, provide an interesting opportunity to evaluate this American psychology.

But as I write those sentences, I realize immediately that I am way over the heads of Palin’s fans and could easily be lumped into a category of Americans that came under a direct attack from the podium of the Republican National Convention this past week, even though I don’t live in New York or Washington and never attended Harvard or Yale myself. And I’m certainly not rich.

That in itself reveals a certain rampant schizophrenia here.

Leading up to Palin’s address, and in an attempt to immunize her against the scandal stories now in the works about her tenure as a governor and mayor in Alaska, speakers such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani assailed the press as “elitist” for daring to question Palin’s qualifications for taking second place in the White House, “a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

For the next few weeks, we are going to be treated to sound bite after holy sound bite hammering this theme, by people who could only be described as elitists themselves. And therein lies a fascinating conundrum.

How could Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and a rich guy of considerable education himself, call anyone else an elitist? I suppose it is all part of Karl Rove’s voodoo for winning elections, expressed best by Lincoln’s line that “you can fool some of the people some of the time.”

Palin herself hit this theme hard in her address, to wild applause in the GOP convention hall in St. Paul.

“I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” Palin said.

I should point out here that there are many ways to communicate a message. Perhaps the most effective in this mass media age is through short and often funny one-liners. So before I go into more detail, look at Bill Maher’s take on HBO.

Bill Maher On Elitism and the Bitter-Gate ‘Scandal’

The one line most used by bloggers who link to this YouTube video is this one, although it’s not the most important.

“If you think the Democrats are going to take away your bible, you’re an idiot. If you think they’re going to take away your gun, you’re an armed idiot,” Maher says. “And if you think they’re going to take away your gun and give it to a Mexican to kill your god, you’re Bill O’Reilly.”

Now that’s funny and says something about our psychology and how we communicate.

This press analysis in the Sunday New York Times takes a different tack, although it is far from elitist and even by title is merely a freshman-level take on the issue.

(For the uninitiated, 101 indicates a first-year or freshman-level course, while 501 is a masters-level course, thus the title of this column).

Media Bashing 101

The Times writer points out that we have “played this video game before,” and shows how Republicans often devote time and effort to slamming the “mainstream,” “elite,” “establishment,” “left wing” “Washington insider” members of the so-called “fourth estate” (the press).

Indeed, the Republican tradition of media-bashing goes back decades, at least to the convention of 1964 when former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called out “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators,” and the Cow Palace in San Francisco burst into jeers and catcalls at the reporters there. The sentiment was immortalized in Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew who memorably charged that many in the press corps were mere “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and for good measure — “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

The piece ends with a quote from Karl Rove, who is described as “the former Bush political-swami-turned-Fox News-commentator,” who was asked how he could still bash the media since he is now in the media.

“I’m not in it,” Mr. Rove said. “I’m around it.”

The Times writer then concludes, “It’s not clear what the distinction is, or what he meant, but somehow it felt emblematic of the week in St. Paul.”

What that points to is a disconnect between reality and political spin, which is arguably a very American psychological and sociological trait. It simply does not work that way in much of the world, only here, where we pioneered democracy and capitalism. And that, my friends, is what we call “irony.”

To truly understand this, reading newspapers is simply not enough.

You could enroll in a Ph.D. program, sign up for a carrel in a research university library, check out hundreds of books, and devote eight years of your life to studying this problem, and you still might not understand it.

Or, you could simply do a few choice Google searches and spend a few minutes finding experts who have spent their life studying it — and believe in the power of Web publishing to illuminate the minds of those who truly want to know something about the truth of the matter.

This is just one example, but at a glance, it appears to be an interesting and worthy starting point to try and understand what the author calls the “dark sides of capitalism.”

The Moral Psychology of Capitalism

This is useful for starters because it takes a stab at going beyond a dictionary definition of elitism. (One of the things you learn in a Ph.D. program is that dictionary definitions are not enough. You often have to write your own).

Elitism is the view that some people belong to elites while others do not. People are ordered in in-groups and out-groups: Either you are in or not; either you are a Harvard alumni or you are not; either you have certain status symbols or you don’t.

In capitalism, there is no welfare system which secures an egalitarian social structure, thus capitalism directly or indirectly supports social hierarchy. If we believe that all human beings are of equal value, how can we accept the elitism of capitalism?

When the economic differences in a society are so great as in the USA, people want to move upwards on the social ladder. This seems to create elitism, because it is when you belong to the elite that you can have privileges and material comfort. Elitism says better-than not being-with; it is a most destructive value.

Elitism is one of the most subtle kinds of evil that exist, it means looking down on other people because of lack of money, social status or lack of education. Elitism is a key trait of racism, fascism and nationalism, and if I am right in claiming that capitalism reinforces elitism, this in itself gives reason to be skeptical to capitalism.

The article goes on to evaluate egoism, competition, the idea of “taking possession of,” and dehumanization in society. But that should be sufficient to peak your curiosity, and leads to this conclusion.

Despite what Palin and C-students such as George W. Bush and college drop-outs such as Karl Rove, and many of their followers, believe, this is not just some elitist jibber jabber.

If we have not learned anything else over the past eight years, this lesson should be crystal clear: If the voters put the dumbasses like them in power — I mean those born to elitism but who did not read the books and learn to cheat instead — we end up with a government and a society that resembles the place in the movie “Idiocracy.”

In other words, there is nothing elitist about advocating the election of educated, qualified people for public office.

It may be time for all those unemployed and underpaid workers in this country with no health insurance who may lack the education to understand this complicated world to stop listening to the elitism argument, and realize it might be a good idea to elect some smart people to govern for a change.

We tried it in the 1990s. What was the result?

A government that worked to give us what we all want: peace and prosperity. It also gave us a balanced budget. Remember the peace dividend?

I do. And I want it back. You?

Senator John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate on the Republican ticket has launched a firestorm of bad press not quite blown out by all the news coverage of Hurricane Gustav. We figure this election is all but over anyway, but what the heck. Let’s play the conspiracy game.

Maybe Palin, in addition to being a redneck, anti-abortion nut with nice legs, who was for the bridge to nowhere before she was against it, is really Opus Dei?

I’m just now getting around to watching The Da Vinci Code film.

Wiki - The Da Vinci Code

While I don’t put much stock into these religious myths, the masses seem to. So I wonder if it was a conspiracy that I was bumped from the BBC once to talk about New Orleans by none other than Tom Hanks?

And, while we’re at it, I was lured to New Orleans in the first place at the turn of the century by the Jesuits at Loyola University, surely the protectors of the Catholic Church, where they proceeded to try and destroy my academic career.

Maybe I’m from the royal blood line myself, eh, one of the last of the true descendants of Mary Magdalene? Maybe that’s why they’re trying to kill me : )

Sorry, but even though it’s Tuesday, I’m in a Monday kind of mood.

Sarah Palin as Veep. What a freaking joke. Wonder how long it will take for Karl Rove to convince McCain to drop her?

Stay tuned…

by Glynn Wilson

Artur Davis, the soft-spoken and little-known Congressman who represents much of the area from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, was in town this weekend while Congress takes a break from the August heat in Washington, D.C.

Glynn Wilson

Rep. Artur Davis at the Young Democrats cookout

Dressed casually in gray slacks and a blue buttoned-down shirt, Davis showed up to shake some hands at the Birmingham Young Democrats’ cookout in George Ward Park on Southside.

I was able to catch up with him for a few minutes to press my concerns about the threat to the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable” searches and seizures, and to finally get some answers to questions his press staff seem incapable of responding to — electronically or otherwise.

In northeastern Jefferson County, where a concern for the Second Amendment’s protections for gun ownership are paramount politically, very few people have ever even heard of Davis. An unscientific survey of average working people in Clay, Pinson, Center Point, Trussville, and Roebuck shows that he has almost no name recognition in this part of the world.

And since the newspapers and television news stations and radio talk shows in Alabama spend almost no time covering such “trivial” things as the threat to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from the Bush administration’s illegal spying operations over the past seven years, the average construction worker here doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about that either.

But among active Democrats who were in attendance at the cookout, there is an awareness that Davis — along with Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president to run against Republican John McCain — voted for the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which included a provision exempting telecommunications companies such as ATnT from lawsuits for their admitted role in illegally spying on Americans since 9/11.

The main reason Davis supported the bill, he said, was political.

Since Davis endorsed Obama early on, and since President George W. Bush threatened to veto any FISA bill that did not contain telecom immunity, the moderate Democrats who hold sway in both houses of Congress did not want to give McCain ammunition in the last three months of the presidential election race by allowing the spying law to expire in August.

McCain could have used that as evidence that the Democrats are “weak on terror,” Davis said — as if he wasn’t going to run ads saying that very thing anyway. He has already.

In his defense, Davis did offer a legal answer to the question as well.

Davis is a Harvard-educated lawyer who interned at the Southern Poverty Law Center and clerked for U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson — the federal judge who ordered Judge Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments Monument out of the State Supreme Court building in Montgomery and one of my personal heroes. He also worked as an assistant U.S. attorney before running for Congress, unlike Alabama’s current attorney general Troy King, who had never tried a case in court.

Standing in the George Ward Park pavilion with the aroma of barbecued chicken in the air, Davis made the case that the new FISA bill was an improvement over the old one.

Under the old law, passed in 1978 in response to President Nixon’s abuse of federal resources to spy on opposing political activist groups, there was no provision for protecting American citizens abroad, Davis said. The new law extends those rights overseas beyond the nation’s physical borders “for the first time,” he said. It was a compromise the Democrats would never have gotten out of the Bush administration just a few months ago, he claims.

The new law also strengthens monitoring of the federal government’s spying by the so-called FISA court, he said, although critics have said the court is nothing more than a “rubber stamp” for the executive branch, no matter who is in power.

The new bill also changes the language for obtaining warrants to spy on Americans from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion,” he said, although in a country run by an Imperial President who thinks he is a king who derives his power from God and is not beholden to the law, that improvement seems hardly enough to stop the abuses.

Which brings us to the last issue, where Davis makes a good point.

Whether the law is enforced in a way that protects civil liberties “rests on the integrity of the executive,” Davis said.

So he is hoping one of the questioners at this year’s presidential debates makes sure to ask Senator John McCain the question: “Can we count on you to be responsible in enforcing the FISA law?”

Or, in other words, will you abuse the power of the presidency to spy on political opponents, like Nixon and Bush? We might also add: Will you also politicize the Justice Department to jail your enemies?

Whether Davis’s answer will assuage the critics on the left in the Democratic Party is questionable.

According to Ben Mazzara, the local organizer for the Greater Birmingham Democracy for America chapter, a group set up by Howard Dean to help register new voters, Davis’s position is much like a lot of the Democrats in Congress now, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They have so far refused to bring articles of impeachment against Bush-Cheney or to hold Karl Rove in “inherent contempt” for his role in the political prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman.

“They have placed winning elections above the Constitution,” Mazzara said at the cookout.

He said that may pale in comparison to how Bush and the Republicans have “eviscerated” the Constitution. But it certainly contributes to the low public approval ratings of this Congress and may cause problems after the election, he said, even if Obama wins.

According to Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert who often appears on MSNBC to talk about these issues, history and the country may not judge the Democrats kindly. Check out this exchange on Keith Olbermann’s show:

TURLEY: … the most remarkable if not bizarre aspect of all of this [is] that President Bush’s allies in the last seven years have been the Democratic leadership and the Democratic members that have repeatedly stepped in to protect him, not just from impeachment, but serious investigation. And it’s part of a very cynical political strategy. It has succeeded.

The Democrats know that they can retain the Congress if they just let this guy (Bush), you know, sort of ripen on the vine. And that they are afraid that there could be a backlash if they try to impeach. But of course, that’s literally all politics and no principle. They took an oath in the House of Representatives. And the most important thing they have to do as House members is to stand firm in the face of presidential crimes.

And I think history will be very, very severe, not just for Speaker Pelosi, but all of the Democrats, of how they could let this come to pass where they stood silent and did nothing in the face of such compelling criminal record.

We will see if that prediction comes true, along with another one we made awhile back when covering the issue at the time: Will the issue come back to haunt Davis if he decides to run for governor of Alabama in 2010?

Good News, Bad News Friday in Washington

Senate Passes Bush’s Spy Bill With Telecom Immunity

According to Richard Cohen, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Davis is a fine lawyer with a promising future in politics.

“Two things were obvious about Artur from day one here,” Cohen said. “He was going to be a gifted lawyer and was destined for great things in politics.”

But according to William Crain, a regular commentor on one of the largest and most influential e-mail lists in Alabama, “Davis is DLC (Democratic Leadership Council).”

If you want to examine the nefarious ways and means of the DLC, he said, read this article and others like it on the site.

The key quote from Davis, which makes a lot of sense from a practical political point of view, goes like this.

“If you don’t win, you don’t get to do anything,” he says. “If you don’t figure out a way to translate your message into at least 51 percent of the vote, then you will not do very well.”

True, but is it possible to win elections and remain true to the Constitution at the same time? Some people think so. It just takes work to educate the people and the press.

“The reason that there is much dissention in the Democratic Party ranks today is caused by the leaders of the DLC, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Al Frome, Rahm Emmanuel (and others),” Crain said. “If you don’t like Neo-Conservatives you will certainly not like Neo-Liberals. And the DLC is Neo-Liberal. You don’t want a Neo-Liberal for governor.”

To learn more about Davis’s background and to read about some of the controversies on the sources of his campaign funding, check out this SourceWatch page, which shows he takes a lot of money from New Yorkers. You can also check out this page from OpenSecrets.org, which shows that Davis takes a lot of money from corporations such as Southern Company, one of the worst polluters in the American South.

Ho, hum. Yawn…

Karl Rove’s minions have been hard at work today, high on meth and Red Bull, trying to follow-up the media coverage in the Siegelman appeal by trying to anonymously and otherwise discredit reliable sources.

Since I have other blog business to do around here and don’t have anymore time to waste on them, I’ll just leave it to former journalist of some note and now lawyer of some note in Montgomery, Priscilla Duncan, for the response.

A comprehensive statement of Karl Rove’s use of the media to attack Jill Simpson

by Priscilla Duncan

A response to: Unappealing Power Play

A Response To the Editors of The National Review

Dear Editors:

I am the legal counsel for Dana Jill Simpson, and we are demanding a retraction for the false and misleading statements in your August 5 editorial.

Ms. Simpson wrote an affidavit that was released just before Gov. Don Siegelman was sentenced last year. She was only the first of several persons who have testified regarding the political aspects of his prosecution. Included among them were law professor Scott Horton and former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones. Conyers’ inquiry was not solely based on her statement as you stated.

Ms. Simpson’s sworn testimony to the Judiciary Committee was structured exactly as Conyers and Lamar Smith requested. That testimony was backed up with about four pounds of Ms. Simpson’s documents, which you apparently haven’t taken time to examine.

She did not testify to Conyers in a private interview — where do you people get this stuff??

The hearing was in the form of a deposition to majority and minority counsel — three each. She was questioned four hours, sworn to tell the truth and there were no restrictions on inquiry. Ms. Simpson and I even offered to Republicans to answer questions over the telephone prior to the inquiry, but they evinced no interest.

During the time we were in Washington, we never met with Conyers or any member of the Committee or any member of Congress for that matter. Ms. Simpson has never met Conyers.

Ms. Simpson’s account has never changed, only the questions. Many of the “stories” as you refer to them, were detailed earlier to journalists or lawyers, but were not released due to their selection of topic. Other issues simply were not explored. 60 Minutes interviewed Ms. Simpson in three cities for more than 6 hours and telephoned numerous times on fine points. The two minutes of Ms. Simpson’s interview that 60 Minutes chose to use was not selected by Ms. Simpson. If there really were inconsistencies in her testimony, Karl would have something else to offer besides calling her “a lunatic,” a word Google associates with Rove 99,800 times.

In her Congressional testimony Rove is mentioned 16 times. Obviously, no one on your staff has read it, and you are repeating false information vomited out by Mr. Rove and his henchmen. Rove attacks Ms. Simpson because he knows she knows more. Her information about such matters is vast. Rove can’t afford to testify without knowing it all, and for this reason he has attempted to lure her into a defamation action against him for the scurrilous lies he has told about her in GQ, Weekly Standard , Powerline , News Busters and now The National Review.

I am sure Rove has steadily cursed the Republican counsel in the Judiciary Committee for not grilling Ms. Simpson with more gusto last fall — but then, Rove ran out of Washington like a scalded dog two weeks before Ms. Simpson testified on Sept. 14. He resigned Aug. 31.

As Ms. Simpson says, “Slander is the ultimate revenge of a coward.” Rove has trampled through government like a wild boar in a turnip patch for too many years. Now that he’s being hunted, he is hiding in the woods from the House Judiciary Committee. He needs to come out in the sunshine, tell the truth and stop being terrified of Ms. Simpson.

That it takes a small town lawyer in Alabama to do it, casts shame on all you puffed up big-city pundits. Barry Goldwater would be embarrassed by you and so would William F. Buckley.

PD

And What is Objectivity Anyway?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Aug. 3 — Imagine Alabama as a cave and the people as prisoners who have been chained since their childhood deep inside in the darkness, where good information is almost impossible to come by.

Their lives are stuck in an unmovable chain of events limited by discrimination in education, a narrow range of job opportunities and a press with only the profit motive to guide its deliberations. The people are thus chained with their heads aimed in one direction, their gaze fixed on a single wall.

Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, which puts out lots of light.

And between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which various animals, plants and other people, seen as puppets, move along and form the rest of the world outside the cave called Alabama. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows, sometimes on a screen that resembles a TV.

Behind this cave there is a well-used road, and upon this road people are walking and talking and making noises. The prisoners believe that these noises are coming directly from the shadows they are watching pass by on the cave wall.

The prisoners engage in a game, naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of objects.

Inside the cave there is an island, where radio talk show hosts parrot the unreality gleaned from the shadows on the wall. Anyone who objects to the Zeitgeist of the cave and tries to tell people they are jumping to conclusions based on shadows on a wall is banished from the island and paraded in public as an “idiot” or, Dog forbid, a “liberal.”

This story is adapted from the Greek philosopher Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which symbolizes the trek from ignorance to reality, where truth is gained from looking at universals in order to gain understanding of experience. The things which people perceive as real are actually just shadows on a wall.

Just as the escaped prisoner ascends into the light of the sun in Plato’s story, the people of Alabama must use the Web to amass knowledge and ascend into the light of true reality. Otherwise, they are doomed to a life of ignorance and damnation.

Allegory of the cave

A Missionary Blogger

This is the story of one missionary who descended into the cave and tried to unchain the people by starting a blog, doing his best to tell the people they were jumping to wrong conclusions about the world by depending on just the information displayed on the shadow on the wall. But like any mob, they objected to the missionary’s message and started throwing stones his way.

One of the main sermons of this missionary has to do with the search for an attainment of objective knowledge. The mob was not interested in hearing about it. But like the Bourbon Street preacher who carries the cross every Saturday night in the New Orleans French Quarter trying to save the lost souls of the sinners, the missionary went right on blogging.

One of the main conclusions drawn by the mob is that the term “objectivity” is an unchallengeable principle of journalistic “professionalism,” defined as “fairness and balance.”

Some also included the properties of “disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship,” although after more than 100 years of debating the subject, the mob could never quite agree on what it really meant. But they developed an online encyclopedia to define it.

Objectivity (journalism)

Interestingly, over in another section of the same encyclopedia, unbeknownst to the people stuck in the cave called Alabama, another group of people were discussing something called objectivity in science.

Here, an objective account of something is one which attempts to capture the nature of the object studied in a way that does not depend on any features of the particular subject who studies it. An objective account is, in this sense, impartial, one which could ideally be accepted by any subject, because it does not draw on any assumptions, prejudices or values of particular subjects.

Science is mostly regarded objective in this sense. This objectivity in science is often attributed with the property of scientific measurement that can be tested independently. It is thus intimately related to the aim of testability and replication.

To be properly considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person-to-person, and then demonstrated for third parties, as an advance in understanding of the objective world. This is referred to in academic circles as “peer review.”

Scientists first started using the Internet to exchange these ideas - before the prisoners of ignorance in the cave got their hands on it.

In the modern political era, sometimes the “facts” were tested in courts of law, Congress and the “court of public opinion.”

The idea was to come to a consensus as a society on what constitutes “demonstrable knowledge,” which would then confer powers of prediction on the possessors of this knowledge, sometimes passed on through a technological construction.

While in the Alabama cave none of this mattered, the missionary went right on preaching his daily sermon anyway.

Sometimes the missionary would point out to the people trapped in the Alabama cave that there was another cave far away in a place called New York. And there was a blogger in New York called Jay Rosen, a college professor who spent most of his time trying to reason out the role blogs will play in the new millennium as the century of the mass circulation daily newspaper comes to a close.

And there the discussion often turned to this question of objectivity, even though the people in the New York cave have not yet figured out that there is a connection between objectivity in journalism and objectivity in science either.

Getting the Politics of the Press Right

One very well respected Washington Post reporter, Walter Pincus, who moves the debate forward but has still not quite figured out the connection, says the important thing is for journalists to have the courage to admit they they’re participants in the political system.

He wrote an essay for a new magazine called Frank: Academics for the Real World, which is published by the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas, although it is not free online. In a piece called “Power of the Pen: A Call for Journalistic Courage,” Pincus does something rare for any mainstream journalist, according to Rosen. “He openly argues for a more political press. He even uses the word ‘activist,’ which is forbidden in the mainstream newsroom code.”

According to Rosen’s interpretation of the article, Pincus says that courage in political reporting sometimes means the courage to admit you’re a participant — a player, a power in your own right — within the struggle for self-government, the battle for public opinion and the politics of the day.

Rosen also cites Josh Michah Marshall of the Talking Points Memo blog, who says the important thing is to show integrity — “not to be a neuter, politically. Having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well.”

This mix used at the TPM combines political argument, dogged investigative work, news aggregation, a filtered community forum, some media criticism, and user-assisted reporting to try and get at the truth for the people in the cave with access to the Internet.

But according to the people in the cave called Alabama, and especially those who hold a place on the talk radio island, this is all just laughable non-sense from “liberals” who just oppose George W. Bush’s actions as president because they are “lackeys of the Democratic Party,” a party which everybody in the Alabama cave knows is no better than Soviet Communism, the “evil empire” itself.

Nevermind that even many Republicans in other caves realize Bush is the worst president in American history, or the fact that their favorite political party, the Republican Party, acts a lot like the Nazis in Fascist Germany - who our parents went to a lot of trouble of defeating in a great war many years ago.

But for a missionary or a blogger to point that out amounts to a form of treason to the mob in the cave. They and their representative bloggers just love to throw stones marked with the word “liberal” at anyone who disagrees with them - even if their conclusions are based on nothing more than shadows on the wall of a cave.