Responding to a Call

 Every month, I have the opportunity to speak on KMAN, a regional radio station in Northeast Kansas about work that's happening at the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy. During the last visit, I was asked about the recent guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial following the murder of George Floyd. There were a couple callers with comments about the topic. This wasn't surprising and was, frankly, expected. With a listening audience covering quite a stretch of rural Kansas, the perspectives of most listeners go beyond the perceptions of what a college-town such as Manhattan might be. 

One caller followed up with an email. I took a bit of time later that day to respond because I found it important to engage someone seemingly interested in the topic but maybe not having access to information that might broaden their perspective. Below is the exchange. Maybe it's helpful for you, too.

[Note, in my email response I sent attachments but include articles as links here.]

---
1st. I found it interesting that you questioned my source on the number of blacks killed compared to whites, yet you only read about the shooting. Sounds like your source was bias. Most major newspaper headlines said black teenage girl gunned down by white cop. This is a bad narrative to push. The only way to get the truth is to watch it. So when you question my source, yet believe your source, it's kinda contradicting. 

This year alone 50 whites killed by cops, 30 blacks. 

Tony

---

Tony,
 
Thanks for your call this morning on KMAN. My comments about the source of information you were referring to weren’t an attack. I hope it didn’t come across as dismissive. Instead, it really was a statement about the need for all of us to be aware of our sources of information. I thought you were still on the call and were going to be able to respond with respect to the specific source you were mentioning. In an academic environment, we always scrutinize sources of information that serve as the basis for claims and arguments, especially if they aren’t peer-reviewed and have a higher accountability than something on a blog or personal website that doesn’t base information on agreed-upon expectations. This is true even when you agree with it, which is important, so we don’t have confirmation bias since we easily gravitate to positions we agree with think rather than what we don’t.
 
As I said on the air, I don’t prefer to watch unnecessary violence, especially deaths that are often preventable. So, your comments could very well be true. But my point was that, even if there was such a situation, there are ways to disarm someone without killing them.  This is where interventions into training and practices become important. This Nature article says much more about this. 
 
In the article “Does Race Matter…?”, research based on information from more than two million 911 calls in two US cities enables the authors to conclude that white officers dispatched to Black neighborhoods fired their guns five times as often as Black officers dispatched for similar calls to the same neighborhoods. For suggestions about what might work given this research, you can read that Nature article already mentioned. 
 
In Schwartz (2020), Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country. For example, some metropolitan areas demonstrated very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans. You were right—and I agree with you—that more whites are killed. A quick search about demographics from the Census shows us that white people constitute the majority of the U.S. population, at 76.3%. Blacks are 13.4%. So, your comment about 50 white and 30 blacks needs to be put in context and that is why I asked if this was raw data or a percentage earlier this morning. This point gets explained well in this article point out, in lay terms, the range of disparities. For example: 
 

“Among all [metropolitan statistical areas], the analysis found, black people were 3.23 times as likely to be killed by police than white people. Among MSAs, researchers said the figures "varied greatly."

 

At the low end, black deaths in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Ga., area were 1.81 times greater than white deaths. That figure rose to 6.51 in the MSA with the highest level of disparity -- Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, Ill.

 
These findings aren’t necessarily uniform as you can find here, but as this article highlights, the ways in which people conduct research makes a big difference. This is why it is essential to understand what data people are using and how. This is why I asked about the source of your information this morning. 
 
Finally, I’m also including some information here that I hope you’ll take a look at since your comments today indicate you’re seeking better understanding about the issue at hand. There are some good general mapping databases below that will allow you to easily see information that you can manipulate to view raw data for different populations (i.e. black v. white victims). Here are two accessible datasets that you might find useful about the topic of police shootings, more generally. 
 
Mapping Police Violence
 
Police Shooting Database
 
I hope you find all of this helpful as you seek to better understand the issue of police violence and the role of race. 

Thanks for the call today. 

Tim

A pandemic is not a deliberative moment

As I shift my teaching this semester from face-to-face to online (thanks Zoom!), I'm thinking about the learning opportunity that comes when you're teaching about dialogue and deliberation theory. Foundational to deliberative democracy is the idea of citizen participation and engagement with a wicked problem that requires people to wrestle with the tensions and trade-offs on a particular policy decision.

While there are many reasons engage people in decision-making processes that inform an appropriate response to this crisis as it relates to the distribution of resources, COVID-19 is not a deliberative problem. Instead, it is a classic example of a technical problem. It's helpful to remember that "technical" is not "simple." This pandemic is an urgent and technical one. So when we're thinking about something like public health, it's important to defer to expertise within the particular domain. It can also highlight how technocratic approaches can be very helpful in such challenging times. The example from Iceland is something many other countries could benefit from.

In short, there are times when deliberative processes are essential and necessary. And, as is the case with our current pandemic experience, advocacy for informed public health strategies based on expertise rather deliberation is the way to go right now on this particular issue.

Finally, make sure to wash your hands and don't touch your face!

from Coronavirus GIFs via Gfycat

"He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.”

The Belleville-News Democrat, the local paper from the community in which James T. Hodgkinson lived, provides a perspective that I think we need to attend to in the midst of this highly publicized act of violence towards members of Congress and their staff with a gun.

The paper quotes a neighbor of Hodgkinson:

Aaron Meurer is a neighbor of the Hodgkinsons and said he noticed in the last two months James had been gone. The alleged shooter’s wife Suzanne told him her husband was travelling. 

“She said that he went on a trip. She wasn’t real specific,” said Meurer, unclear whether the couple had split up recently.”He’s been gone for the last two months, so I haven’t seen him around too often.” 

Meurer said he occasionally cut his neighbor’s grass to help out. He didn’t know the neighbors well, just socialized from the lawn, and said his neighbor would fire guns on his rural property, commonplace in the open area outside of Belleville. 

“I knew he was a Democrat, a pretty hardcore one. I know he wasn’t happy when Trump got elected but he seemed like a nice enough guy,” recalled Meurer, who said the couple lived across the street for about six years. 

“He seemed like he was sem-retired, he was home a lot. He used to garden a couple of years ago,”said Meurer, who runs his own trimming and removal service. “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” 

Meurer said during the campaign Hodgkinson had a lone Bernie Sanders sign near the road in his front yard. He thought that Hodgkinson had raised foster kids who had grown up. He also thought there were grandchildren who visited occasionally. 

“We were neighbors but we didn’t talk every day. When we saw them in the yard we’d say 'hi' and go on our way,” said Meurer. “He seemed like a normal guy, a regular guy.” 

Meurer suggested that perhaps “this Democratic rhetoric made him snap. I know he was a pretty hardcore Democrat.”

What is most concerning to me right now, aside from the vast availability of high capacity firearms and this being the 154th mass shooting in 165 days, is the rhetoric we use to speak of our fellow citizens and how we identify so strongly with/against political parties. As Meurer said, “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” Have we come to a point that we can't share our humanity with someone if they don't share our political affiliation? Disagree passionately. Debate policies. And consider that your view might not be as airtight as you maybe thought. When we demonize the other, we create a space that, with the wrong ingredients, makes members of Congress become targets rather than fellow citizens with differing views.

Art from my mother's college days hanging in my home office. 

The National Institute for Civil Discourse is leading the Revive Civility and Respect campaign and it seems we need to figure out how to engage one another about the significant issues and challenges we face--even when we disagree deeply. We can do this locally. Here in Kansas we organized Kitchen Table Conversations about what it means to be a citizens and a member of a community. A dear friend and colleague in Kentucky inspired me to do this. The point is, we need to be able to talk with neighbors, colleagues, and coworkers about the issues that matter to us. Retreating into enclaves or disconnecting all together can lead people to take detrimental and sometimes deadly action. 

I'm sure I share many of Hodkinsons' frustrations with the current administration, but I know that actions like today only hurt us, not help. After listening to the Speaker of the House and Minority Leader today speak about the day's events, I would love to see a bit of a reset in how we approach our national politics. A serious challenge is that we have made everything partisan. Republican Senate leadership left a seat vacant on the Supreme Court because of partisan politics. We are on the verge of having millions lose health coverage, in part, because the oft-demonized President Obama's name is connected with the otherwise conservative healthcare model we have in the United States. We need better ways to engage, disagree, and deliberate. 

People across the country and the world are watching and listening, taking in the rhetoric and being shaped by the discourse that immerses them. We can do better. We must. We need to have things to talk about with neighbors regardless of which box they marked at the last election.

Bubbles

It has been nearly four years since I've done anything with this blog. In many regards, it feels like a vestige tail from a digital animal long gone. Yet, here it is. And it is particularly because it is something that feels out of place that I would like to start using this more.

Since I last did anything here, I've become more active via Facebook and Twitter. I've written academic articles and am working on a number of projects that get at the heart of the types of questions I want to explore professionally. I hope to outline some of that work here in the future. So this is a reintroduction of sorts. While I will continue to write, post, and engage through various media, it seems like a step back from the always immediate and ever-present cycle of news.

I realize that, in my own little way, I contribute to the constant process of refreshing of News Feeds and the like. It makes me think of one of my favorite lines from a writer that I should turn to more often than I have in recent years. This is the first of two points I want to make.

In an essay published in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice, Thomas Merton has an amazingly timely and insightful remark that I often think of when I'm finding myself consumed by "news," particularly the immediate and round-the-clock process we now see through uncritical eyes. Here is Merton's quote:

What was on TV? I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too. 

This leads to my second point: not only might we be well-served to step back a bit, but we would also seemingly benefit from speaking and engaging with others unlike ourselves. As we know from the "blue" and "red" feeds that shape our lives, and this great SNL skit below, we largely live in our own bubbles and (mostly) like it that way.

John Oliver has also done a great job pointing out, in more detail, our bubbles.

I argue that we can and should engage with those around us, particularly those who don't share our political views. A recent story in the Manhattan Mercury about my work spells this out a bit more. I made a similar point in a USA Today interview: we can't scapegoat or honestly clump everyone who doesn't agree with me into some category, as easy or as comforting as that might be.

“This racial stuff to me is BS and I’m tired of hearing it. I have it made because I’m a white male? I’m prejudiced? That shit is long ago." pic.twitter.com/s6X6imuKfQ

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) November 20, 2016

So what is to be done? Here are some interesting/thoughtful/provocative links to help us see beyond our bubbles.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html 
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump/#!
• http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/18/liberals-should-stop-ranting-and-seek-out-silent-trump-voters-like-me/

I hope to, with some regularity, write here rather than always posting and sharing via Twitter and Facebook. You're welcome and encouraged to follow here. You can sign up for RSS, but I will also make these posts available through other media. But as Merton helpfully reminds me, there is a benefit to stepping back. I am easily consumed by information, but I'm not always sure it's helpful. I'm going to try to do my part make sense of our work, not only through the algorithm Facebook thinks I want but through a more critical perspective and one that is open to others.

Kludgeocracy: Government Through Patchwork Fixes

As the recent “fiscal cliff” episode highlights, there are serious ongoing debates about the size of government in the United States. Underneath the cacophony of partisan voices across the political spectrum, Steven Teles points to a larger inherent problem in our democratic decision-making structure. In his provocative recent essay, “Kludgeocracy: the American Way of Policy,” he argues we are witnessing the rise of “kludgeocracy,” a form of government “with no ideological justification whatsoever” (1). This results in layered policy solutions, and multiple mechanisms that can distance citizens from decision-making processes. Teles defines kludgeocracy as:

“an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows” [Microsoft’s operating system] (1).

He continues:

“‘Clumsy but temporarily effective’ also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response. From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system (which has only gotten more complicated, if also more just, after the passage of Obamacare), our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country” (1-2).

The implications for kludgeocracy are numerous, with the most insidious feature being the “hidden, indirect and frequently corrupt distribution of its costs” (2). Teles uses the current U.S. tax code as an example of kludgeocracy. The tax code, he suggests, is “almost certainly the most complicated in the Western world, both on the individual and corporate side” (2). There are estimates that direct and indirect costs for complying with the complexity of the tax code are $163 billion each year. That is in addition to 6.1 billion hours spent complying with the filling requirements of the tax code. Taxes are but one example of the costs of kludgeocracy at work.

With layer upon layer, public policy becomes more complex and vexing. As a result, organized interests have a much more realistic possibility of shaping policy rather than average citizens. This is especially true when issues are out of the public gaze (3). Moreover, Kludgeocracy reinforces the image of government incompetence and/or corruption by masking the government’s extensive role in our lives through habits of “dishonesty and evasiveness rather than openly making the argument for a muscular role for government.” For instance, the fact that so much of our welfare state is jointly administered by either intergovernmental agencies or through private contractors makes it very difficult to attribute responsibility when things go wrong. This leads to blame for the government in general rather than being “affixed precisely, where such blame could do some good.” One result of kludgeocracy, then, is “diffuse cynicism, which is the opposite of the habit needed for good democratic citizenship” (4). What are citizens to do when they have no idea what agency or agencies to engage about an issue of public importance?

The costs of kludgeocracy lead to questions about what to do in response. This requires that we understand why American politics has so frequently turned to “kludge solutions.” Teles identifies three interlocking causes: the structure of American institutions, the desire to preserve the fiction of small government while also addressing public problems, and the emergence of a “kludge industry” that supplies a “constant stream of complicated, roundabout solutions” (4). The implication of these interlocking issues is that this complexity leaves citizens out of public decisions because our system of government, and the kludge industry intimately connected with it, functions without opportunities to include strong citizen voices.

American institutions generate complex policy partly because of numerous
“veto points for action.” Not only is there separation of power between Congress’ two bodies and the president, but there are also other less obvious veto points such as separate subcommittees. The recently passed health care reform bill went through five separate committees in Congress, for example. This is all in addition to hyper-partisanship and the ability to filibuster within the Senate. This veto power functions less as a roadblock and more as a tollbooth, with “the toll-taker able to extract a price in exchange for his or her willingness to allow legislation to keep moving.” It is through this process that programs don’t get changed or replaced, but added to as “new ideas have to be layered over old programs” (5).

In addition to this “tollbooth” legislative process, once laws are passed the dynamic between levels of government in our federal system is affected by kludgeocracy. The federal and state governments are “pervasively intertwined” and this leads to what has often been called “marble-cake federalism.” The consequence is that domestic policy in the United States lacks clearly defined lines of responsibility. Additionally, spending is also done in a way that is best described as “indirect.” Federal monies come with a bewildering array of regulations and requirements. The result is that Americans have a more active, but also incoherent and frequently ineffective, state (7).

In addition to the kludge of government, an “army of consultants and contractors” has made itself an indispensible piece in the kludge pie; the kludge industry has “significant resources to invest to ensure that government programs maintain their complexity, and hence the need to purchase their services” (7). This expert-focused approach to complex policy issues further diminishes the voice and agency of those outside the kludge industry.

So what gets us out of this mess?  Teles notes that kludgeocracy is not an accident; rather, it is a predictable consequence of deep features of the American regime. Because of this, it would be facile to pretend that “its baleful effects can be reduced without major (and extremely unlikely) changes in our larger system of government and dominant values.” But Teles suggests that subtle changes can occur at the margins and offers his own list of remedies. These include eliminating or radically reducing the filibuster in the Senate and substantially reconsidering our system of federal grants to states, among other recommendations. But his recommendations are squarely focused at federal government and become somewhat perplexing when he admits that significant institutional reform is, at best, a long shot. When is reforming how the Senate functions, for example, not a serious challenge? Nevertheless, Teles suggests that a more plausible target is an attack on the kludge industry, “given that it both lives off of and helps create demand for policy complexity” (8). The most important tool against policy complexity, he argues, is a change “not in institutions, interests, and rules, but in ideas” (8). It is only when politicians are explicitly associated with kludginess that change might begin to occur. To accomplish this, there is a necessary step of increasing the “visibility of policy complexity’s costs” so that politicians and citizens might recognize what is occurring (9).

Making kludgeocracy into a recognized public problem will be an uphill battle, Teles warns, but helping citizens see the manifestations of it in their ordinary lives is an essential first step. Teles writes: “When they get frustrated trying to figure their way through federal education aid programs, or flustered trying to understand their taxes, or perplexed at the complications of our civil litigation system, they need to recognize their problem as a part of a larger system that connects up to other, seemingly unconnected grievances” (9). Teles argues that giving a name to the designed complexity of piecemeal governance—kludgeocracy—is a necessary step if American democracy is to be simpler and more effective. From the standpoint of being concerned about the sidelining of citizens, Kettering can benefit from this line of research because utilizing the term “kludgeocracy” is yet another way of naming the institutional and systemic challenges inhibiting citizens from having a stronger role to play in policy decision-making. Whether the term becomes something used or not, the ideas behind kludgeocracy could be useful to Kettering’s thinking about the challenges of a highly professionalized and expert-driven approach to public problems.

Half time, looking back and forward

If you're like the estimated 100 million Americans who watched Sunday's Super Bowl, you presumably experienced numerous commercials (many with gratuitous demonstrations of the female body). Yet the one commercial I continue to think about came from the quintessential American--Clint Eastwood. If you didn't get to watch it, you can check it out right here.

Listen to what he says. He speaks about Americans working together, pulling together to save our economy and ourselves from despair. People are hurting and scared. Eastwood asks, "How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And how do we win?" Detroit and American auto manufacturing (and US manufacturing more broadly) was saved by the federal government. 

It was a few years ago so we've presumably forgotten all about that. It was a big deal. People called it the breaking point for American democracy (they were unaware that corporations would soon be citizens, although that didn't seem to bother those most vocal about the "bailout"). The Trouble Asset Relief Program was a big deal. It wasn't just the auto companies. But the biggest banks would much prefer for us to forget about their reception of copious amounts of money. 

Without going on about this, I want to simply call attention to the leading candidate for the Republican Party in this year's presidential election. Mitt Romney wrote an important piece that stands in sharp contrast to the words of Eastwood and the belief that many Americans now have about the role of the federal government with respect to the auto industry. Bailouts weren't and continue to be unpopular. But they served a purpose. In a time when money wasn't to be had, the government stepped up. It played an important role in helping to save and restructure an industry very important to this country. A recent Washington Post story highlights this point. 

Both Chrysler's video and the WP story point us back to Romney's op-ed in The New York Times. You can read that here. America is about more than free markets. It's about people and a way of life that is worthy of support from the government when necessary. Capitalism is very good and important. But we must acknowledge that we stand to lose a great deal when we only look at the numbers; when it's only about winners and losers in the world of competition. Behind the closures of factories are entire communities decimated and broken. People hurt and scared. And while unemployment is now down to 8.3%, we're not there yet. We need to continue to invest and improve this country. What scares me greatly right now as we look forward to the 2012 election is that we stand to shift course dramatically if Obama loses to the Republican candidate (presumably Romney). Being reminded of the differences between these two is important. Don't lose sight of how they view the world and the role of government.

Citizens or Consumers?

Writing about health care reform, Paul Krugman poses a very important question: "How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as 'consumers'?" It's a good question. Taking the time to read Krugman's article is well worth the few minutes in order to better understand some of the changes being suggested by Republicans. Medicare is at the heart of the matter and it has a profound way of shaping our next (current?) election cycle. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly put together a video stressing the impact of such a move away from Medicare as we know it to a voucher system that will somehow work with private insurance.



But stepping back from some of the political positioning of the Democrats and Republicans, how does language of the market shape our democracy? Lizabeth Cohen studied 20th Century America and classified it as a "Consumers' Republic." When did we shift our thinking to apply the consumer model to everything?

 

The book that really made me think about the use of language and how we think about citizens was Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services. It made concrete what I was thinking at the time. I felt--and feel--strongly that we're transforming the role and relationship of government with citizens. But more than that, we're changing the ways that citizens think of themselves, how they act and engage in the world. If we wholehearted adopt market language, what changes occur? Are we more than we buy? One of the challenges we face in the United States is the dramatic shift away from active citizenship to a model that makes us more like Amazon. I love the ease and ability of order books or (nearly) anything else on their website, but when we make government replicate that model we radically alter institutions.

But rather than talk about abstract "government," we can see how a consumer model changes many other institutions as well. Cooperative Extension is everywhere. But in recent decades and years, there has been a strong push to replicate the Amazon (or insert some other amazing one-click shopping type of website here). Where are the relationships between Extension educators and community members? Norman Rockwell's depiction of the County Agent has been replaced by a digitized button.

This..

...or this?

Fundamentally, we must ask: What kind of people do we want to be? The challenge is that we must also ask what kind of people we want to be, together. Market language and thinking gives each individual a "vote" but only to the degree that their decision-making based on purchases turns citizens into an aggregate that does little to recognize the human person and his or her ability to be a relational being. But if we embrace this notion that we're simply consumers, we are little more than data. I don't want to be data. I am a citizen.

Sippin' Tea

The Tea Party is something completely new in American politics. It's a grassroots political movement that doesn't bend to the wishes of the establishment, regardless of whether we're talking about Democrats or Republicans. It's a movement of citizens committed to the Constitution and a limited role of government in our lives. There's no controlling what these freedom-loving citizens will do. That's the narrative we've been told over and over.

The Tea Party makes as much sense as this scene.

But as I think more about what's going on in America politics and continue to read article after article on all that is Tea Party, I solidify my belief that it's a load. A total load. It just makes no sense to me, not simply in that I disagree with the fundamental beliefs held by those of the political right, but more that I just don't think the Tea Party makes sense. Not much more than the image of the Alice's tea party with talking rabbits and such.

Everywhere I turn, I'm reading something about the Tea Party. Perennial candidates like Christine O'Donnell (who ran in 2006, 2008, and now in 2010) "emerge" as if she hasn't been on the ballot multiple times before. Sharron Angle, another darling of the Tea Party, has held public office for a number of years. She's not quite the new candidate emerging from life outside of politics. Palin, the former VP candidate and half-term governor, wears the mantle of the "government is the problem" position championed by Ronald himself. It's new yet old at the same time. It's an interesting world.

So what gives?

Matt Taibbi, over at Rolling Stone, offers his take on the Tea Party and what's going on behind the rhetoric of the movement that's sweeping America. While maybe lacking a certain degree of sensitivity (but it's Rolling Stone so he gets to write like this so he gets a pass), Taibbi gets to, what I think, is operating below the radar of what gets talked about. Of course it's great fodder for media outlets (I hesitate to use the phrase "news outlets"), but probing just a bit more than the superficial stories of anger folks all over the country reveals a layer of confused and paradoxical dynamics to make one wonder if there's any thought going into what so many are saying and doing these days.

I'd recommend you reading the entire article. It's quite good. You can access the Rolling Stone article here.

Obama and Othering

The many Obamas.

There is a high level of anger and frustration in the United States these days and many reasons to feel so. Employment still remains a high concern for many citizens and opportunities continue to disappear. The hope of many cities to return to glory days isn't little more that a wishful dream. With the continual departure of jobs to cheaper factories and cheaper labor costs, once jobs disappear it is unlikely they will return. When economic times get tough, the once stable and manageable relationships among citizens become a little bit less so.

One of the "Faces" of the Tea Party.

It almost seems like an afterthought, but there has been tremendous change during the last couple years: the election of Obama as president, a very large domestic policy shift with equally divisive laws enacted, and an undercurrent that things are changing. The ability of someone like Glenn Beck to become an overnight leader highlights the feeling that many Americans have about the changes taking place. The Tea Party Movement has become a force to be reckoned with, both for those on the left and right of politics. What we know about this movement is that it is composed of predominantly white, male, married, over 45, and Republican folks. What has emerged as an "angry" group of citizens wanting to reclaim and take back their  country highlights the sense of normalcy and identity for citizens who long for yesteryear. However, these fond memories are amnesic because we've been growing further and further apart for quite a while. MSNBC has done a really interesting photoblog of some of the faces of the Tea Party.

Some of the most striking examples of this distance and identification of the "other" has been growing considerably just in the last few years, especially as Obama emerged as a candidate and then when he was elected to office. Just today, there are stories about Obama being portrayed a a terrorist, gangster, Mexican bandit, and as a gay man. It has only recently been taken down. It had the title, "Vote DemocRAT." Nice. Billboards, the American way to advertise, have highlighted the feelings across the country by those who see Obama as something quite distinct from themselves. You know, black. 

So I'm left to wonder: what would make everything all right for those who oppose everything going on today with regards to Democratic control, legislation, and the highest office held by none other than Barack Obama? 

Just vote?

Click here to check out more.

Parker Palmer and Politics of the Brokenhearted

Two great figures of contemporary thought: Bill Moyers and Parker Palmer. Palmer speaks to much of the recent work he's been doing, but it carries the thread from his earlier works. His notion of a politics of the brokenhearted is very important, especially in a world where we turn to violence and division when things are in discord rather than taking that moment to consider an alternative to division. 

Populist movement, popular puppets, or a spiritual rebirth?

Frank Rich has echoed and articulated very clearly what others have been saying as of late: people are being duped. While the populist rhetoric is soaring, the reality on the ground is something quite different. Rich clearly captures this: 

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Enlarge This Image

Barry Blitt

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Thanks Frank. 


Yesterday's gathering in Washington, D.C. of the loose band of tea partiers and the like led by the pseudo-prophetic Beck have expressed strong anger at the current administration and have cloaked their frustration in the "federal government is meddling in my life and is on my back" kind of phrases. I have many issues with folks who want to rid their lives of the evil government while simultaneously enjoying the aspects of a federal government (I, at least, enjoy using roads.) However, there's another issue that emerged yesterday unlike much of the rhetoric and language being used by those on the extreme right. 


Yesterday, for Beck at least (and seemingly many others numbering somewhere shy of 100,000), his take on all of this was quite religious. And not in a subtle way, either. Nearly everyone who spoke invoked religious language and expressed a sentiment that the United States needs a renewal, a rebirth of sorts, from the wayward ways. This is maybe where it gets confusing because it seems like it would be difficult to say a country need a spiritual rebirth only since the last presidential election. Other prominent figures have noted this is the end times. So what's going on here?


Interestingly absent from the show on the steps yesterday was mention of Beck's own religion: Mormonism. I guess it would have just been a little too difficult to work that in when the narrative being told is that of the faith of the founders of this country (although they were more of a ragtag group of deists and such). Beck said, "Something that is beyond man is happening" and "America today begins to turn back to God." While trying to become a figure for the civil rights movements in a radically altered and confused way, there are serious issues raised by what Beck and others say. Speaking as someone who spent six years formally studying theology, I not only get frustrated by what Glenn Beck says, but also what it means when one begins to unpack and problematize the theological issues at hand. For Beck, God incarnate is someone quite different from the Jesus in the New Testament writings of old as well as the writings of liberation theologians. 


James Martin, S.J., has a very good essay on this issue of liberation theology and the great discomfort the words of Jesus as expressed in the writings of the New Testament mean for those whole profess a Christian faith. Social justice hasn't sat well with Beck for quite a while (do a quick YouTube search and you'll see). There's something really difficult for those who want to espouse Christian faith while also saying that government doesn't have role to play and you sure as hell better not think about any type of redistribution. Making Jesus a free-market capitalist is quite a stretch when you read the New Testament. Critically reading such texts, for many Christians, would force an internal conflict that is often unwanted.  Folks like Francis of Assisi and others took seriously the life of Jesus and what that meant for them. I'm not saying everyone needs to become a mendicant, but there is an orientation in one's life that must challenge many of the destructive institutions in our lives. When I write "institutions," I'm not thinking about the evil government, but rather the ways in which our society is driven by capitalism. I just doesn't jive with much of what Jesus lived and died for. There is much that could be written about the distortion of Christianity from shortly after the earliest Christians to its acceptance and adoption by the Roman Empire and in every subsequent generation, but hat is not the point. The point is that making an anti-government and lower taxes rally fit with Christianity doesn't work. It really doesn't work when you're also claiming to be leading a new civil rights movement. Courtland Milloy of the  Washington Post raises the ever important but absent question in all of this: when do we want to return to in history? At what point was it "right"?


No matter; people weren't gathered to hear too many facts. Rather, they were there to be rallied, to reclaim America from some (straw man?) socialist federal government taking over peoples lives. If that's the case, why would Paul Krugman's piece a few weeks ago be so spot on? As he reminds us, the U.S. is failing desperately, not because of a lack of religion but because of a lack of understanding how a society actually functions as a society and not a collection of individual islands functioning autonomously. E. J. Dionne Jr. asks us to think about all of this, to move beyond a politics of stupidity. I'll close with a few paragraphs from Krugman:

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.