All in the Family

Calhoun's Cannons for March 18, 2013

I think Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow may have just solved our gridlocked Congress. On a recent "Real Time," Bill asked the panel why it was that conservative Republicans seem incapable of recognizing the existence of anyone unless they are part of their own family.  The case in point was Republican Senator Rob Portman.  Portman was a sponsor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and for years was a staunchly anti-gay marriage.

Then his 21 year-old son came to him and said, "Uh, Dad, I have something to tell you," and suddenly Portman is declaring that his strongly held "family values" now requires him to support gay marriage so that gay people (like his son) can "have the joy and stability of marriage that [he] had for over 26 years, that I want all of my children to have, including our son." 

At that, Rachel Maddow wryly noted that it was too bad Portman (and other conservatives) didn't have a poor son or one who just lost his job and had no medical insurance. The audience laughed, but there it was; the solution to our gridlocked Congress.

Oh, yes, I know you're probably thinking that Portman's conversion was nothing more than typical hypocrisy or political expediency now that he senses that's he's on the wrong side of history on this issue.  But I suspect it's much more troubling than that.  I suspect Maher's question is closer to the mark: something is lacking in Portman's world view and/or psyche.

For some reason, certain types of people truly are incapable of extrapolating past their own noses or the noses of their immediate family and extending an issue out to include other people. For example, Portman, in discussing this issue, noted that he had gay friends, even while sponsoring DOMA and supporting the anti-gay-marriage Republican platform that called for a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage in all states.

So clearly he had to have known that his bill would exclude them from ever experiencing the "joy and stability of marriage," but that gave him no pause.  He was incapable of understanding how granting the "joy and stability" of legal marriage to himself while denying it to his gay friends was a flawed and intellectually dishonest proposition. And so he never asked one of the basic questions: As an American citizen, granted equal protection and rights under law, in what way am I sufficiently different and more deserving than my gay friends so that I can honestly justify my denying them what I reserve for myself? 

The answer, of course, is, he couldn't. And having a gay son only made his political/moral stance even more untenable. But Maher's question remains: Why was Portman unable to ask that broader question while he was writing DOMA?

That basic inability to move beyond the Kingdom of Me and Mine, would certainly account for Congressman Paul Ryan's appallingly draconian New, Unimproved Budget, for example.  Now that's a dream budget if you're a rich white guy living in the realm of ME, but a disaster if you're poor, brown and female, for example.

And so Rachel Maddow rhetorically said, Wouldn't it be wonderful if Republicans also suddenly had a poor son or a jobless son.  Maybe then those problems would be addressed as well. 

Indeed.  Think of what would happen to lawmakers incapable of operating outside the borders of "immediate family" if every conservative legislator suddenly had a daughter who's just lost her job and her health insurance and has just been diagnosed with breast cancer; a son whose disability checks have been cut short, a son-in-law illegally brought to this country as a child who's about to be deported, leaving his pregnant wife and their two kids alone and jobless; a mother whose pension was decimated by the Wall Street banksters who's living on Social Security and Medicare and now her benefits are being Paul Ryanized and she's about to be turned out into the street.

Now imagine a Congress filled with Congressfolk smugly secure in their insular, ideologically pure Kingdoms of Me and Mine, that is breached by family members coming to them to say, "Uh, Dads, Moms, we need to talk."  And suddenly, problems that were originally "out there" are now all in the family.  And being all in the family, they would now be worthy of attention and a "change of heart."

Just what America needs now -- A Portman-ized Congress filled with changes of hearts, gridlock over, problems solved, and the country moving forward once again as a family -- a bigger family, a more varied family, yes, but still . . . a family.     

The Question, Part II

Calhoun’s Cannons for Nov 7, 2012

Ah, blessed silence.  No more political ads.  No more robocalls.  Silence. 

No, wait.  I spoke too soon.  Can you hear it?  That awful moaning, that eerie muffled shrieking, the boiling, rumbling, growling rage thundering almost, but not quite, out of hearing range. It’s the minions of Rush Limbaugh, old white guys, radical anti-science, anti-modernity, anti-government wing nuts who have hijacked the Republican party, plus the near entirety of the white South (and who said the Confederacy was defeated?).  And I don’t think they’re very happy.

I can certainly understand that fury.  When you live in a Fake Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Frank Luntz/Donald Trump created bubble long enough, pretty soon you get to thinking that’s reality.  Then something like this comes along and it’s all, Woa! You mean the rest of the country doesn’t think President Obama is the Anti-Christ Muslim Kenyan Socialist Hitler who’s going to turn all our children gay, kill all our grannies in his ObamaCare “death panels,” and then declare America to be a colony of surrender-monkey France?

Guess not.  Quel shock.  But Democrats shouldn’t be going all giddy and waving big foam #1 fingers in the air.  Winning an election is one thing.  Governing is quite another.  And there remains one HUGE question to be answered.

In his concession speech, Governor Romney called on Americans to “pray” for the re-elected President.  While prayers are always nice, what went missing from that speech was the exhortation to his fellow Republicans to stop their mindless stonewalling and get back to the work they were elected to do. 

Which means that there remains One Key Question that this election has still left unanswered:  Will the Republican leadership, Mitch McConnell and the various Young Turks, Paul Ryan, included, once again meet behind closed doors to swear to one another that their one overriding agenda for the next four years is to once again block anything the President and their Democratic colleagues propose? 

In short, will the Republicans in Congress double-down as Rocks in the Road once again or decide to sniff the (real) air, read the (reality-based) tea leaves, and start to engage in the hard, messy work of actually governing?

Which involves compromise, pragmatic hold-your-nose deal-making and, above all, requires that politicians stop believing their own fake PR, made-up wishful thinking, and reality-free ideology. I mean, if hurricane Sandy had one lesson to deliver it was this:  Magical thinking and reality-free ideology doesn’t stop storm surges and howling winds.  

Here in California, there are some signs that reality is modestly returning while Grover Norquists’ blood-oath, evil-grip siren-song (We don’t need to raise taxes to pay for anything.) seems to be lessening.  As of this writing, Governor Brown’s initiative to vote to actually tax ourselves in order to keep our schools from bleeding out looks like it may well pass. Amazing.

And prompts another question: Is it possible that Battered Wife Nation, Suicide Nation, a country that somehow allowed itself to be convinced that it didn’t deserve to live in a decent society, that it was o.k. to gut its middle-class and move its jobs offshore in order to move all that nice profit up to the 1% while leaving the 99% with crumbs, that its kids didn’t deserve a future, that its working poor and most vulnerable should be tossed to the wolves since they were nothing but freeloaders and bums, has suddenly decided that they deserve better after all?

If so, then late being better than never, maybe prayers are in order.  Prayers of thanks

       

Rumble in the Mumble

Calhoun’s Cannons for October 12, 2012

Unlike the previous debate, Joltin’ Joe, the Veep, at least showed up wide awake.  O.K., he grinned far too much, which, on the split screen made his wide flashing of enormous teeth look almost maniacal.  But he was scrappy and awake and in pit bull mode and soon had his opponent skittered into silence. 

Which was about the only place Paul Ryan could go. Youthful earnest vagueness and meaningless political clichés are no match for an old guy talking about actual realities on real ground. So advantage almost always goes to incumbents who can bring to the game a real sense of how cliché gets trumped when it goes from a tidy sound bite into a messy reality.

And if there’s one thing that makes our PAC-run, TV-fake, hyped-up, poll-driven political campaigns so fatuously destructive it’s this: Cliché and sound bites and FrankLuntz talking points stop all thought cold.  That’s what they’re designed to do – hit the amygdala, shut the rational brain down, juice up the adrenaline, stop complex thought. But what then goes missing when its needed most are the “what-ifs” and the “then-whats” that are required in order to follow the cliché down the rabbit hole to track how it will play out in the real world.

And the Veep debate was particularly interesting to me because there was a real contrast between young Ryan spouting neat, clean clichés and Biden who brought in his messy sack of history to show how things really work – We did this, then we had to do that because this went ker-blooey, so then we had to figure out how to do that.  All of which repeatedly brought home how buzz words simply hide a constantly shifting bag of snakes and surprises. Realpolitiks.

Bags of snakes and surprises and  logical and unintended consequences is why voters really need to get their own heads out of the clichés fed to them by the political strategists and insist their representatives track down those rabbit holes. They can start by becoming semanticists and constantly ask: “What, exactly, do you mean by that word?  Be specific and please illustrate how that would play out in real time.” 

For example, in an effort to make themselves seem tough, Romney and Ryan – the dynamic duo of Warrior Princes  -- have been beating the war drum clichés about preventing Iran from getting the bomb or showing “leadership” in the middle east. O.K.,   fair enough.  That’s what candidates do.  And a mostly unified world is also concerned about Iran and the killing going on in Syria. But what the Duo have so far refused to answer – and Ryan skated away from last night – is exactly how they would accomplish that.  It’s the one question that no American politician wants to answer.  Instead, they want the war drum music to play in the background in order to give their listeners the subliminal impression of how military tough they are, without getting into the cold realities of what their cliché is hinting at.  And the voters also happily buy into that little piece of theatre by never asking themselves just what cliché means either. 

Except during the debate when Joltin’ Joe finally let slip a hint of what’s being coyly alluded to in that war-thump music:   Bombing Iran, an act of war sure to loosen a huge bag of very deadly snakes that nobody wants to face, and putting boots on the ground in Syria, an act sure to destabilize an already unstable region.  Anybody in America up for that?  If so, please step to the front.  The Army recruitment center is just down the road.

If not, then it’s back to the voter to ask themselves follow-up questions involving the words, “exactly,” and “be specific,” “How would that work out in real terms?” and “What’s the downside of this?” 

If this debate illustrated anything for me it was this: The pragmatic brain understands that the world is a constantly shifting place of hard edges and fuzzy illusion where doing nothing is often not an option and doing something too often comes with costly built-in penalties. The cliché brain doesn’t understand that complexity; it’s happy with smiley-faced simplicity.

Which set up the final question of evening: Which brain will show up in the voting booth come November 6^th?   

   

No Merit Badge for You!

Remember a few months ago when the Boy Scouts announced that No Gays Allowed was now their official policy.  No gay kids, no gay scout leaders or employees.  No gay need apply.  And they declared they were doing this to "protect the children."  So some fabulous young scouts were out on their keisters, along with some fabulous scouting leaders.

Then the L.A. Times comes out with an exhaustive report after "examining 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 [and] found that Scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign -- and helped many cover their tracks."  [that] "Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, 'chronic brain dysfunction' [???] and duties at a Shakespeare festival."  And that "The details are contained in the organization's confidential 'perversion files,' a blacklist of alleged molesters, that the Scouts have used internally since 1919.  Scouts' lawyers around the country have been fighting in court to keep the files from public view."  And, "In about 400 of [500] of those cases -- 80 percent -- there is no record of Scouting officials reporting the allegations to police.  In more than 100 of the cases, officials actively sought to conceal the alleged abuse or allowed the suspects to hide it, The Times found."

Well, sure.  I can see the problem.  When you're getting a merit badge in wilderness tracking, for example, the first thing you learn is you must correctly identify the right footprint.  No good rushing off on a deer track if you're hunting a panther.  So, listen carefully, Scout leaders:

1.  There's gay people.  2.  There's straight people.  3.  There's pedophiles.
You can be a gay pedophile.  You can be a straight pedophile.  But the key word there is:  pedophile.  That's who you're supposed to be looking for, not gay people. HUGE difference.. 

So, no merit badges for you.  You've been tracking the wrong people. 

Oh, America, Get Over Yourself!

Thanks to the media and America's generalized narcissism, a whole lot of us are getting all riled up over those crazy Muslims, wringing our hands and saying, O, O, why do they hate us?

Well, first of all, many of them actually have a long, long list of perfectly valid reasons and if Americans bothered to read much history, they'd understand the list very well.  But, secondly, a whole lot of the DeathToAmerica! foofarrah in the streets, the "Arab Street," isn't about America at all; it's about local politics -- who's going to prevail in a newly liberated country.  Will it be the conservative Salafists?  A more moderate group? Secularists?  Another dictator?

And, as any political organizer knows, having a great hot-button trigger that's easily understood is a great way to get a good turnout. Remember in New York when a group of Muslims wanted to build a mosque near Ground Zero?  That was a perfectly legal, proper thing to do in the Land of  Freedom of Religion, right?  Remember how perfectly decent people suddenly lost their marbles and turned into raging, ugly, racist bigots, snarling and hissing about "muslim murderers", and etc.  Shameful.  Disgraceful.  But there it was: Americans coming unglued, having an irrational, emotional, ugly, bigoted flare up over . . . what?  Another group of Americans who just wanted to build a house of worship.

And Americans are now having a fit over another group of people having an irrational, emotional, ugly flare up over . . . what?  A crappy, ridiculous film.

This is what a certain percentage of people always do. Including Americans. So, get over yourself.  You're also no better than you ought to be either.

Awwww, Mitt.  You don't love us freeloading bums anymore, do you? 

So Mitt finally spilled the beans of his heart:  He thinks 47% of us lazy, good for nothing citizens, are a bunch of tax-shirking freeloaders who want to loaf around all day eating bon-bons and waiting for our government checks.  That we "pay no income taxes," are "dependent upon government." and we're all food-stamp black welfare queens who are going to vote for Barack Obama no matter what Romney has to say.

Well, first of all, Mitt clearly didn't see last week's Time Magazine's cover story on "Subsidy Nation," a brilliant exploration of how everyone in the country is on the mooch -- farm subsidies, energy subsidies, infrastructure subsidies, tax breaks -- subsidized everything that touches our lives. (That electric bill you just paid doesn't begin to cover the real cost of getting that power to you.  Ditto your water bill. Fill your gas tank?  Take off the gas/oil subsidies/tax-breaks and you'd have heart seizure watching the pump ratchet up the real (unsubsidized) price per gallon. Hospitals, public health, streets, airline safety, schools, public safety, you name it, every bit of it is communally subsidized by all of us.  Which will come as a shock, no doubt, to privitizing Ayn Randers of all stripes, including Paul Ryan, bless his heart.)

True, Mitt forgot to note that all us 47% moochers were paying payroll and sales tax, something The Mitt might have overlooked since he may not be familiar with getting an actual "payroll check" as opposed to a "dividend check."  And I'm sure he forgot the fact that those moochers who did pay income tax were taxed at a higher rate for their income than he was.  And, yes, he likely overlooked that, according to the Tax Policy Center, over half of those moochers who paid no taxes, "more than half were elderly and more than a third were not elderly but had income under $20,000.  Which means that "about half of those were off the rolls because they had low incomes."

So, in MittWorld, people who are so poor they don't hit the income tax threshold are moochers.  Noted one wag on the New York Times comment page, "He's talking about the 47% who clean his toilets, do his laundry, drive him around, clean the hotels, pick the fruit and vegetables.  Maybe if Mitt and his snobby pals paid a living wage, the working poor wouldn't need food stamps.  He really does look down his nose at the rest of us."

Ya think?      

The United States of Wonderland

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for August 31, 2012

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrine he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

        H.L. Mencken

             Are you kidding me?  That’s all I could think of as I watched hour after hour of the brain-scrambling Republican convention.  Are you kidding?

            True, when someone starts out with a lie, it’s always fun to see where they’re going to go from there without constantly stepping in it, unless they’re a Republican and stepping in something as mundane as a “lie” has apparently ceased to be a concern anymore.

            But three days of cynical mendacity combined with collective amnesia turned the convention into one long Saturday Night Live Emily Latella skit.  You remember Emily, Gilda Radner’s loopy old lady who kept getting things wrong, but that didn’t stop her from steaming off into outrage about some misperceived topic, like “violins in the street.”  When corrected that it was “violence, not violins,” she would squint unrepentantly at the camera and blithely change the subject.

            Only the Republican Party is no loopy, addled Emily.  Instead, what was on tap was a convention cynically built around a lie – the repeated and deliberate misstatement of a reference made in one of President Obama’s speeches.  In that speech, while the President lauded individual enterprise, he also pointed out the obvious:  Success isn’t strictly singular, that businesses benefited from communally built infrastructure and the “that” in “you didn’t build that,” reference was to “bridges, roads, etc.” which were built by taxpayers. 

            True, it was an awkward sentence, but the meaning was absolutely clear to anyone not language challenged.  Or a political party willing to disgracefully take that clear meaning out of context, twist it into a lie, brazenly plaster signs saying “We Built It,” all over the convention center and make that lie the singular leitmotif on the lips of almost every speaker at the podium. And even though they had to know it was a lie, they spoke it anyway. Which raised an awful question:  Who could possibly trust anything those guys say?

            But that wasn’t the worst of it.  What became truly creepy was the collective willingness of everyone to go down the memory hole. (It’s the internet age: does no one google FactCheck anymore?) This signal amnesia wasn’t just hypocrisy, like Delaware businesswoman, Sher Valenzuela, who lauded her “I Built It” successful business but “forgot” to mention it was aided by $2 million in (government funded) SBA loans and $15 million in (government funded) contracts.  Or the parade of  “I Built It” governors crediting their state’s recovery on their own singular efforts while ignoring the GM taxpayer bailout and all those Washington stimulus checks they happily cashed. (Talk about a gaggle of serpent-toothed ingrates chewing the hand that fed them.)

            No, this was not run of the mill hypocrisy at work, but a profound disconnect from the historical record, the factual narrative.  Listening to speaker after speaker spin their tales was like reading a complex historical novel from which Republicans had redacted any reference to their role in that story.  Down the memory hole they went, bemoaning the terrible state of affairs while utterly ignoring their part in creating the crisis and/or making the crisis infinitely worse.   There is a reason this Party-of-No, Do Nothing, Republican-led Congress is so loathed by the voters.  On day one of Obama’s election, Republican Senator McConnell clearly stated that his party’s one over riding goal wasn’t jobs or helping American workers retool or working across the aisle to set things right, but to get rid of Obama – throw the bum out of the bar, in the inelegant parlance of Speaker Boehner.  And it was the lock-step Republicans, monkey-wrenching Tea Partiers and a gaggle of Democratic hacks that brought pointless pain to millions of ordinary Americans caught in the crossfire of their spite, their destructive policies, fantasy math, and the overriding political strategy that keeping the country in dire straits would mean a guaranteed Republican win in 2012.

            All of which went missing for three nights of astounding amnesia and false narratives. That’s not normal hypocrisy, that’s pathology. And while you can campaign on lies and rabbit hole history, you can’t govern that way.

            Which is why, when Paul Ryan, the fresh-faced Leave It To Beaver veep nominee stood before the American people and repeated that foundational lie, a lie he had to know was false, then fell down the memory hole of “fake facts,” and Mitt Romney slid from a sweet, smiley-faced wish list of unsupported platitudes and into irresponsible, bellicose war-talk, and we were left with Anne Romney telling us we should “trust Mitt,” well, my only response had to be, “Are you kidding me?”

            Then my head exploded.

                        .

.     

Alice in GOP Land

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for August 23, 2012

“When someone shows you what he is, believe him.”

            If you’re still a member of the Grand Old Party, please accept my most sincere condolences.  Yes, it is a shame.  It was only 158 years old, in the prime of its life, and now it’s dead – killed off by idiots.

            I mean, Congressman Akin?  Really?  Guy’s on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.  How the hell did that happen?   Science?   A guy who thinks women’s bodies can kill off sperm when they’ve been “legitimately raped” but not so much if they’ve only been illegitimately raped. Really? 

            Missouri, you have a lot to answer for.  Put a paper bag on your head and go stand in the corner. (Stop smirking, Oklahoma.  You’ve got “Inhofe,” the climate-change denier.  That state’s drought-riddled corn is no longer as high as an elephant’s eye because the bright golden haze on its meadow is smoke from a state that’s burning up due to global warming. Honestly, were do the Republicans get these guys? )

            O.K. I admit it’s been comic watching all the mainstream GOP bigwigs scrambling away from Akin – Noooo, don’t know that guy, never heard of him – while at the same time they were begging him on bended knee to drop out of the race --- Plueeze, plueeze Todd, you’re killing us.  For some weird reason they thought maybe voters would confuse a God-driven theocrat like Akin with “mainstream” Republicans and recoil in horror. 

            Which actually is funny since at the same time the party big wigs were trying to strong arm Akin out the door like some flea-infested loon, the party platform committee itself was voting on a plank that supported Akin’s views perfectly –  no abortion with no explicit exceptions for cases of rape or incest – legitimate or not.

            Which gives hypocrisy a bad name.  Makes people think that your party is in such philosophical disarray, or so full of liars that you can’t figure out what the hell you stand for except for one overriding Grand Old Principle:  Say anything to win at all costs by any means necessary.

            And anyway, it does no good to paint Akin as some lone-wolf, God-obsessed loony outlier.  He’s joined at the hip with Vice-presidential pick, Paul Ryan. They’re spiritual twinsies.  Ryan co-sponsored a bill that defined fetuses as “people entitled to full legal protection,” which would have to treat abortion and some forms of birth control as murder, backed bills that would cut off federal money for Planned parenthood and the Title X family planning program, voted for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted against a bill that would expand federal hate crime laws to cover sexual orientation. 

            In short, Akin is no outlier.  His beliefs are totally compatible with the Republican Party, the party platform and the Vice Presidential nominee, a Veep who, if elected, would be one heartbeat away from the Presidency and/or be the tie-breaker in a divided congress.

            Doesn’t get more central than that.

            As for the Presidential nominee, well, Romney noted that “His [Akin’s] words with regards to rape are words that I can’t defend.”  He made no comment on the ideas behind the words, just parsed the verbiage, then scampered for the door.

            And that’s the problem.  Nobody’s doing the follow-up questions anymore.  Like, How is it possible, in this day and age, for a man to head up a committee with the word “science” in its title, yet be so abysmally ignorant about basic biology?  Or are we meant to believe that he’s just an isolated case, some ignorant theocrat toodling on the edges of the conservative fringe? 

            That might be a pleasant fiction to be spoon-fed, but it’s hard to reconcile with this: Akin’s mind-set is clearly in lock-step with a huge number of his Republican colleagues and is aligned with the Republican party platform, so that’s the real question: Has the GOP finally become the radical theocracy it dreamed of becoming when it used Christian evangelicals as a tool to gaining more political power?

            I mean, who could forget the 1990’s and the “Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate?” [Norquist?  Grover Norquist?  Yes.  You think these people go away?  They don’t.  They get reborn and return, again and again.]  Remember the lobbyist Jack Abramoff  and the “Christian Coalition’s” evangelical poster-boy, Ralph Reed, scheming to fleece several Indian Casinos by using Reed, with his scrubbed cherubic face and publicly professed Christian piety, as the front-man? At the time, using Reed as judas goat to deliver the Christian right votes to the Republicans must have seemed like a good idea.  But twenty years later, I suspect the law of unintended consequences is becoming clear:  Theocrats answer only to God, not party bosses – the godly tail now owns the GOP elephant.

            And the tail is wagging.

               

           

Holy Ryan!

Calhoun’s Cannons for August 13, 12

            Did a Mormon just throw a Hail Mary pass?  Right there in front of the retired battleship Wisconsin in historical naval Norfolk?  (I looked, but I didn’t see any banners announcing, “Mission Accomplished,” and neither Romney nor Ryan were wearing jump suits, (neither men served in the military, but that critical military subtext was still on delicious display.) Well, Quel astonishments!

            Unless that Hail Mary Pass turns into another McCain-Palin moment and the Ryan tail starts wagging the dog.  After all, truth has its own creepy way of oozing past smiling teeth, no matter how tightly clenched, and Romney’s teeth were on display when he introduced Ryan as, “the next president of the United States.”  A gaff, yes, but a prescient one, I suspect.

            After all, we’ve been down this road before; floundering campaign, candidate can’t seem to get traction, back-room Pols decide the candidate needs a Veep pick with some energy and excitement and behold! Sarah.  And the rest is history, which didn’t go well. 

            In Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney will get energy, all right. But he’ll also get Ryan, the Ayn Rand fanboy, Tea Party darling, leader of the No-Compromise Radical Republican Young Guns that repeatedly hijacked Obama’s agenda and did everything they could to stonewall, stall, filibuster and stymie their Democratic foes while the country’s needs went begging.  (Among the grim consequences were the U.S. bond ratings downgraded, the recovery stalled, desperately needed legislation sidetracked or killed).  But that didn’t stop Ryan from forcefully and gleefully dumping those consequences on the President’s head during his rousing introductory speech.  J’ accuse! thundered Ryan, with a straight face and nary a mention of his role in the obstruction, like the man who burns the house down then blames the match.  It’s become a typical Republican hypocrisy that constantly makes one’s head explode. And should put us all on notice: With Ryan, as with Sarah Palin, facts need not be in evidence.

            Which the voter really, really needs to remember because with Ryan comes Ryan’s infamous budget plan, which aims at downsizing government by privitizing Social Security and Medicare and making deep, punishing cuts to the social safety net. It’s a budget that various experts, who do like to deal with facts in evidence, have decreed to be a deficit- exploder that would throw the poor under the bus while increasing tax breaks for the rich – which, of course, is the Ayn Randian wet dream. (As Randian fanboys know, “the poor” are “parasites” and the sooner they’re done away with the better.  John Galt and his ilk don’t do “moochers.”)

            But there it is nonetheless, that budget, the 800 pound spike that Romney drove through his own foot in order to stop his teeter-tottering cold.  Bam! Nailed himself and his gossamer thin, smoke and mirrors, now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t campaign firmly to the radical right-wing Republican base -- Romney’s breathtaking go for broke auto-de-fe to the Tea Party.

            But an unexpected consequence of that choice appeared in the first few days of the duo’s introductory tour. There he was, bubbling with life, tossing off  sound-bites like confetti, young Ryan, vigorous, active, charged up and stemwinding the crowd with skilful, stirring rhetoric that outlines his vision for America while Romney stands awkwardly nearby looking like a tired out-of-place roadie waiting to adjust Ryan’s microphone.

            It was pure TV messaging:  With his veep pick, Romney had outsourced himself.  He became Ryan’s me-too wingman, Ryan’s beard, Ryan’s stalking horse.  Why go to Romney, when Ryan’s the Idea Guy, The Guy With The Plan, the forceful,  articulate, exciting Stemwinder On The Stump, the guy the camera loves, the ratings-getter media darling, the Pit Bull without the lipstick.  

            Déjà vu?  You betcha! 

            Well, if the public can get past the false narratives that are now rolling out from both parties, and can get access to some real facts as opposed to faux facts from people who view “facts” as opinions from an alternative universe, this election, despite its PAC-guaranteed Mad Hatterish hideousness, will be critical for setting the country’s direction for the foreseeable future. 

            The can has been kicked down the road about as far as it can go and just how we chose to deal with that can will have real-world impacts on all of us.  We can go back to trickle-down economics and try another version in hopes it will work this time.  Or we can rethink and recalibrate what we want to be as a country and who we want to be as a people. We’ve dithered enough and our string is running out. And I doubt the choices will ever be clearer

            And in a game with stakes this high, I don’t think a Hail Mary Pass is going to cut it. Time to get serious.  No more lipstick on pigs or pit bulls. Please.    

It Wuz Ayn

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for May 3, 2012

            It could only have been her. Who else in the world could have talked a whole country into collectively committing suicide?  Turn it into a heedless fiddle-playing grasshopper who had no responsibility for its future because winter would never come?  Who could make a whole nation believe that it was so exceptional, so special, so wonderful, so King-of-the-Worldish that it didn’t need to undertake those annoying chores like taking out the garbage, washing the windows, mowing the lawn and paying the mortgage, all of which are part of the adult responsibility required to maintain a civil society?  Who could feed the adolescent ego to such a degree that a whole generation of boomers would grow up to become right-wing Randian Republicans, all convinced that they were John Galt and it was time to shrug?          

            Ayn Rand, that’s who. And why not?  Hers was the irresistible siren song for every 18 year-old brooding in his room in the basement, picking at pimples and daydreaming about the cool, blond Dagny Taggart, while Mom keeps hollering down the stairs that he needs to do his homework, clean up his room, take a shower and come take the garbage out. Terrible. Take the garbage out. That’s for mooks, for losers, for leeches and takers, not for job-creating Masters of the Universe!

            And so John Galt was secretly born in the hearts of millions of average Americans – the belief that the benefits they received by living in a civil society, the schools they attended, the roads they drove on, the public health measures that helped keep them healthy, the regulations and subsidies that kept their food safe and affordable, everything in the social compact that surrounded them, all paid for by taxes by their hard-working fellow citizens  – all of that should be eliminated, de-regulated, privatized, profitized and paid for by The Other Guy, while they alone would be exempt, would be the special ones, answerable only to themselves.  Not for them the taking out of garbage.  Or paying the taxes that kept the schools and roads open so others could also benefit.  No.  Once he’s gotten his, John Galt doesn’t do The Commons for anybody else. That is for the moochers, the leeches.

            Did I say “siren song?”  Crack cocaine is more like it.  It was irresistible to the self-centered sociopathic 18-year old mind.  Fortunately, most people were able to outgrow Randian sociopathy when they grew up, got a job, had a family.  That’s when a world-wiser adult realizes that paying for a civil society actually brings benefits, secures a better future for their kids, and offers vital protections against the brutal way capitalism often operates in the real world.

            But a few people never grew out of that mind set. Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Fed, was one of those life-long fanboys of Ayn.  He was also one of the most powerful financial advisers to all the Masters of the Universe for years, which gave his Randian world view extraordinary legitimacy. The Koch  Brothers are fanboy beneficiaries extraordinare, as is Congressman Paul Ryan.  He’s a Super Fanboy who requires that his staffers read her interminable Atlas Shrugged.  His proposed federal budget is Ayn at her chilling best.

            Which is all well and good.  In a capitalist, consumer society, sociopathy has its special charms and pay-offs for a certain few.  But here was the most amazing part of  Ayn’s mind-trick:  Her few fanboys managed to convince a huge majority of normal adults --who knew better-- that they should repeatedly vote for Master of the Universe policies that would benefit a handful of real John Galts, while hurting all those useless, contemptible moochers and leeches  -- themselves. 

             It was a brilliant piece of political ju-jitsu, all blind self-destructive noses, scissors, and fearful, misdirected spite on the part of the voters.  While the manipulative, sociopathic Randers smiled. Ayn would have been so proud.   

            So, how did it all work out?  Look around you at what happens when Atlas shrugs: For the moochers, an underwater mortgage, a looted national treasury, record unemployment, outsourced jobs, busted unions, voter suppression, a crumbling, bankrupt Commons, a failing health system, a failing school system.  In short, a system in collapse, a country without a future.

            And for the Masters of the Universe? The happy continued massive transfer of the nation’s wealth upline, with the booming Wall Street casino once again open for business-as-usual.   

            And why not?  Johnny Galt needs a new pair of shoes.

Ayn's Fanboys Rule!

Calhoun's Can(n)ons for April 29, 2001


True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.  Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt had no idea. The Cult of Ayn Rand is now in full flower in Washington in a gaggle of powerful players. And they’re writing and trying to pass laws that don’t just affect your Senior Prom, they’re now writing laws that will affect your life.

A wag once noted, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: “The Lord of the Rings” and “Atlas Shrugged.” One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Alas, Representative Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, was one of those 14-year olds, but he didn’t get the joke. Instead, he’s an Ayn Rand Fanboy who requires his staffers to read her massive screed, “Atlas Shrugged,” which is a risky thing to do since it will plunk him into the Bin of the Shameless Hypocrites when they learn that Ryan’s father died when Ryan was 16 and thereafter Ryan received Survivor’s Benefits from that anathema to all Randians: Social Security. Which, ironically, puts Ryan in the class of people Ayn Rand most despised: parasites and moochers. (“Bootstraps, young Ryan. That’s all you need: Bootstraps!”) And may explain why Ryan now wants to “transform” and “privatize” Social Security as we know it right out of existence. (“A bootstrapped safety net for me, zip for you. Ayn wouldn’t approve, you know.”)

Ryan is being touted as the courageous savior du jour with his budget proposal that basically gives more tax cuts for the rich and the shaft to everybody else. Which is quintessential Rand. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed was also a Fanboy of Rand, even wrote her a fan letter, although he couldn’t have read her novels very carefully. On his watch, after the Randian Masters of the Universe on Wall Street blew up the financial world and nearly brought this country down, he expressed surprise and confessed that it never occurred to him that any Master of the Universe would be so irresponsible and reckless as to destroy his own company.

Obviously, Greenspan never bothered to read the ending of “The Fountainhead.” Some fan.

And now the Cult of Rand has churned out Part I of “Atlas Shrugged,” a loving-hands-at-home movie filled with earnest reverence and bad writing, while offering full employment for second-string character actors. It’s now playing at your local Cineplex, though if you want to see it, I’d recommend you hurry since Part II has been canceled and Part I won’t be there long.

A Romantic Rand Renaissance in the era of Facebook (We’re all one big interconnected Tahrir Square, now.) seems strangely anachronistic, like watching Republican Congressmen suddenly morphing into Civil War reenactors on the floor of Congress and yelling about the South Rising Again! But I suppose it’s to be expected.

In hard times, when the world has suddenly turns upside down and flies totally out of control, a good number of people apparently find comfort in turning back into teenagers. And there is nothing more powerfully attractive than RandWorld’s ego-stroking, romantic world view, which is basically the normal 14 year-old’s sociopathically delusional belief that his individual needs alone stand athwart the world -- “ I AM JOHN GALT!”-- while Mom is hollering down the basement stairs that he needs to stop picking at his pimples and get his homework done.

Most of us grow out of that phase. But a few don’t. Safely wrapped up in RandWorld, the Paul Ryans of this world grow up believing that society is made up of Prime Movers (them) and everybody else (moochers). They forget that Dagney Taggart didn’t build her railroad with those soft white manicured hands: Moochers did, one spike at a time; Commie Bums and Socialist Moochers and Union Parasites who knew what the real world is like and demanded whiney Dagney pay a living wage and pony up her fair share of taxes to help build and pay for a safety net because building railroads is hard, dangerous work and those builders needed a safety net for when times got tough.

That’s who built Dagney’s railroad. Without them and their steel-bending hands, Dagney Taggart would just be another rich second-rate dreamer sitting in a bar buying drinks for anybody who would listen to her while she drew her useless plans to build a railroad and make it run, all scribbled out on the back of damp cocktail napkins.

Buddy, can you spare a dime?