As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

At his Grand Old Opry gig, Nixon bragged that White House performances by Merle Haggard and others had been huge successes with his “very sophisticated audiences” because the country singers spoke to “the heart of America.” He was lying, of course. In his diary, Nixon aide Bob Haldeman confessed that the Haggard concert “was pretty much a flop because the audience had no appreciation for country/western music and there wasn’t much rapport.”

Nixon’s tricky fib and Haldeman’s confession are just more evidence of conservative elites’ cynical manipulation of lower middle class whites in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and other transformative rebellions of the 1960s. Nixon had nothing in common with Merle Haggard’s audience. Blueblood George H.W. Bush had nothing in common with Lee Greenwood’s audience when he deployed Greenwood in his 1988 campaign. That didn’t mean they couldn’t pretend.

The right-wing colonization of country music is still very much in play. There was the 2003 Dixie Chicks controversy. Southern whites burned their albums and country stations blacklisted their music after Natalie Maines said she was ashamed of George W. Bush. And then there was Sarah Palin in 2008 singing “Redneck Woman” with country star Gretchen Wilson in 2008. Next thing you know Mitt Romney will sing about his trailer park upbringing.

This would seem to argue against the point of my “Untamable Melodies” piece. On the surface, it looks like one musical genre has been both domesticated and instrumental in the conservative domestication of its audience. A deeper look tells a different story. Country music, too, is untamable and can still be transformative and transcendent.

First, consider historian Steven Mithen’s points in his terrific book, The Singing Neanderthals. Music evolved from human proto-languages or what Mithen calls “hmmmm” utterances. They are marked by different tones, rhythms, animal sound mimicry etc. When language evolved further, though, it took over human-to-human information exchange. The “hmmmm” habit continued on in song, dance and ritual. It escaped language altogether. Its meaning was no longer even linguistically describable. Nineteenth Century composer Robert Schumann said that the only way to explain what music means is to play it again.

Perhaps because of its natural ineffability, it was used to communicate with the transcendent or the supernatural. Gods, for instance. Music has been escaping the confines of language and the mundane ever since. It is, as noted earlier, always lighting out for the territories with Huck Finn.

It’s significant that that the song that began the contemporary conservative/country music alliance was Merle Haggard’s 1968 hit, “Okie from Muskogee.” Haggard has said repeatedly he meant it as a parody. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee” was a line said in jest as Haggard’s tour bus passed by the Oklahoma town. The song was captured by conservatives, it didn’t create them.

The same is true of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” He wrote it to mock the rednecks that beat him up outside of a New Mexico bar. An already existing conservative audience took up the song as their own anthem, as they had done with “Okie from Muskogee.”

There is, of course, a difference between pure musical expression and music with lyrics. Music may have escaped language, but what do we make of language that rides the musical magic bus?

We think of 1960s protest music as helping persuade a sleeping public about the horrors of war, segregation and economic exploitation. I think it’s the case, though, that a growing progressive culture used the protest songs not to persuade but to promote emotional, in-group solidarity. The songs’ polemical content was almost incidental. Dylan and others left the genre behind, I believe, because the need for polemics constrained their freedom and creativity.

My point is that music has always outrun efforts to domesticate it or use it for limited ends. It was born out of the oh-so-human desire to understand, escape or transcend earthbound limits, and its nature remains. Just as Henry Ford accidentally helped drive the popularity of Woody Guthrie or John Coltrane, the conservative colonization of mainstream country accidentally created a big market for the outlaw music of Waylon Jennings and Billie Joe Shaver.

Most importantly, we humans necessarily share music’s escape artistry. Contrary to nihilistic deconstructionists and other pessimists who talk about an escape-proof prison house of language or the impossibility of freedom, music lights an always-unrolling road to glory.

In July of 1972, at the height of Nixon’s popularity, Johnny Cash visited the White House. He refused Nixon’s request that he play “Okie from Muskogee” or Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac.” Instead, Cash sang the anti-war “What is Truth” and the poignant elegy, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a song about the Pima Indian WWII hero who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima but who died a lonely alcoholic, tossed aside and forgotten by the nation he had served.

Cash’s White House defiance raised a flag of its own, and when we salute it we speak of the love and anarchy that remains at the heart of the human endeavor.

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Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

Tucking the fiddle just so under his narrow chin, he bows each string once, and then, pinching his eyes at the difficulty of playing in E-flat, he begins to play one of his favorites, the 19th Century hit “Home, Sweet Home.” He whispers John Howard Payne’s lyrics as he plays.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Henry Ford’s industrial brainstorm – a moving conveyor that brought parts for assembly to stationary workers – was matched only by his insight that mass production was worthless without mass consumption. So, he helped invent American consumers. They, like his assembly line workers, would have the goods brought to them for assembly into an all-American consumer lifestyle. In this there would be harmony.

Henry worried, though, that all this innovation would lead people to lose sight of the simple virtues of an earlier agrarian era. So, he conjured up some of those antique trappings – old time fiddling and folk dancing, in particular – and created popular demand for 19th Century folkways. Auto dealerships sponsored dances and fiddle contests that garnered enormous nationwide publicity. American musicologists like John Lomax certainly deserve more credit for the musical substance of the folk revival(s). Henry gets credit for his publicity campaign.

From his music room, Henry could look across a great meadow named “The Path of the Setting Sun” because the summer solstice sun set between a carefully landscaped notch among the trees. It was Ford’s own Woodhenge. Fiddle in hand, he knew he wasn’t making music so much as conducting a movement. Like Merlin atop Glastonbury Tor, he hoped to cast a spell across the land, using music to shape the character of his people in an image of his liking.

But a funny thing happened. Music may be the best measure of the human spirit’s fundamental irascibility and love of freedom. Like Huck Finn, music is always lighting out for the territories. It is neither domesticated nor domesticating. Music is liberating.

Ford played a vital role in the growing popularity of old-timey music. He hoped it would instill a mild docility and respect for mythic village propriety and authority. It backfired. Ford was less like a Merlin and more like Mickey Mouse’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” From Ford’s perspective, the musical magic and the future got out of hand.

Through complicated cultural traditions, routes and inventions (radio, inexpensive phonographs, Joe Hill’s IWW labor songs; W.C. Handy, 19th Century abolitionist Hutchinson Family singers, the Lomax family, etc.) the fad he created helped make possible the widespread popularity of the Blues, of Woody Guthrie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Rock & Roll.

Ford’s costly folkways initiatives were not sufficient for such musical revolutions, of course. But they may well have been necessary. There were many other influences upon the culture, but one wide road to musical innovation and rebellion led from Ford’s Fair Lane Mansion on Michigan’s River Rouge to the open fields of the Newport folk and jazz festivals.

Here’s another example of music’s revolutionary potential. Stalinist policies outlawed Baltic folk music and mandated mass singing to help pacify and discipline the people. As Andrew Cronshaw points out, the habit of mass singing led to 1988’s Estonian Song rally, an electrifying gathering in Tallinn of 300,000 full-throated, independence-seeking citizens credited with helping topple the authoritarian regime. Like so many Joshuas at Jericho, they sang down the Iron Curtain.

Music’s escape artistry is the creation of the human spirit. We may find ourselves unfree, confined, manipulated and impoverished by a contemporary world that seems to grow closer to an Orwellian or Huxleyan dystopia every day. But if the music we make is unchainable, then so are we. Or so can we be. From the tens of thousand of Youtube amateur musicians to church choirs to garage bands to hip hop to progressive Americana, to campfire singing and children’s piano recitals, humans seem always to be levitating on a musical spell of their own making.

Speaking at 1964’s Berlin Jazz Festival, Martin Luther King said:

Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties — and, if you think for a moment, you realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

I am not arguing that music is always inhabited by entirely progressive ideals. Overt right-wing political strategies (George Wallace, Richard Nixon etc.) to colonize mainstream country music and use it to conservative ends have paid the Right obvious dividends. More on that next installment.

Meanwhile, I return to Henry Ford, alone in his aerie, trying to fiddle the world into conformity with his paternalistic vision. Once set free, the melodies made it clear the land he surveyed wasn’t his it all. This land is ours.

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Clearly unthreatened and acting with a sociopathic coldness, Pike had obviously dehumanized his targets. I just don’t think it’s possible to act in that fashion against other human beings if you regard them as sharing your humanity.

But I also think a concept of authority is growing in America which wants to justify any action by authority against anyone perceived as defying its power.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote:

I can’t see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We’d think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That’s what I think here.

These twin evils – individual loss of empathy and social retreat to authoritarian absolutism– feed one another. Sociopaths seem “normal” in the midst of an anti-human milieu that condones dehumanization and violence.

Pike’s pique and subsequent action has, thankfully, been widely condemned. That is all to the good, but the rash of brutal and excessively violent treatment of peaceful OWS protestors is another reminder of the need for vigilance and humane leadership.

Pike might have been deterred in a culture less forgiving of unnecessary violence. There is plenty of evidence of a rising authoritarian absolutism. We see it in the more extreme fundamentalist churches and in the lazy and dangerous embrace of private armies and security firms. We see it in all forms of “eliminationists” who see their opponents not as fellow humans to be persuaded but as enemies that should be cleansed from the nation.

It must annoy the hell out of your average college policeman that students usually easily intimidated over parking violations and library fines are refusing his or her authority. That is, in the authoritarian mind, not the way the world is supposed to work.

That the authorities across America are threatened by a few nylon camping tents is, well, damning. A culture so morally confused it can’t deal humanely with what are at most unusual inconveniences for bystanders is a culture on the edge.

Some remain silent about the violence against peaceful citizens because they share the mentality of the abusers. Others have tactical reasons: messy street scenes can hurt the public image of protestors even when the moral motivations of the demonstrators are shared by a good majority. So, send in the police to mix it up and it’s a threefer. You clear the streets, reassert authoritarian absolutism, and turn public opinion against your political opponents.

It’s time for President Obama and other national political leaders to speak out forcibly against police brutality. And the rest of us should join them in denouncing these decidedly un-American actions.

In the essay quoted above, Fallows also asks another very good question.

And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?

These new cop costumes are just another sign that we are slipping ever more dangerously toward a police-state mentality that is okay with excessive force in the name of authority. It will be argued that the sci-fi riot gear is needed to protect the “peacekeepers.” Really?

Needless to say, the police have dangerous jobs and they deserve all the protection we can provide for them. But isn’t it a bit odd that they are better outfitted than the men and women of our military were when first sent to Iraq back in 2003?

In any case, I’m not arguing against the protection of men and women who secure our safety and security. I am saying that such militarized peacock displays have no real place in a democracy and are intended, in part, to signal to the rest of us to stay quiet and do what we’re told.

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It’s true that contemporary racism doesn’t look exactly like yesterday’s racism. In many social circles white people no longer use the N-word. Lynchings have disappeared it hate crimes haven’t. We can all eat at the same restaurants and use the same drinking fountains and restrooms. But this self-contratulating myth that we as a generation have magically transcended race is not just immoral, it’s destructive. It blinds us to a racism that continues to have terrible consequences.

Rick Perry’s policies punish people of color. He’s tried to walk back his talk of secession, but he mentioned in purpose multiple times in order to fire up right wing nuts who heard the code for just what it was: a harkening back to a time when white people ruled and people of color were considered less than human.

We are very reluctant these days to brand anyone a racist. Even racists. I suppose there’s some good in that. At least we realize that racism is so evil we shouldn’t toss the word around lightly. Is the name of a hunting lease enough to earn Perry the brand? I don’t know. But the rush to issue a blanket pardon — “Rick Perry is not racist” — seems a bit too much to take. A governor who plays upon racial prejudice as Perry did with his secession comments should not be pardoned for their racial implications.

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Whatever else 9/11 is, it is an extraordinarily personal trauma. It comes to consciousness within its own hall of mirrors, images and thoughts appearing un-summoned and then disappearing before they are neatly understood.

It is the day we fell to earth, and with that thought my mind leaps and I’m in a limo on a New Mexico highway with David Bowie’s alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. I glance out the window at a white horse that seems winged as it glides beside our car. Like Bowie’s character, Thomas Jerome Newton, I ride the horse into memory fields as the song from The Fantasticks, “Try to Remember,” whispers like the ghost of irony on the soundtrack.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow
Try to remember the time of September
When love was an ember about to billow
Try to remember and if you remember
Then follow, follow.

The Fantasticks? It’s a musical about two fathers who pretend to hate each other to trick their son and daughter into pursuing forbidden love, a conspiracy among modern Capulets and Montagues to marry Juliet and Romeo. Like I said, the thoughts come unbidden. Maybe I’m thinking about the destructive power of manipulation, about the arrogant and terrible fools who toy with the hearts of others out of their own ambitions.

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel

And then there’s another image in the mirrors, Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, an image that also appears in Roeg’s movie. In the painting, life goes on as a tiny Icarus splashes unnoticed into the sea below. But if I try to draw a parallel between Bruegel’s Icarus and America, the thought falters. Surely we would notice if we fell?

Poet William Carlos Williams wrote about that painting. But it’s another Williams poem, “The Descent,” that offers hope of a way out of the hall of mirrors (pardon auto-formatted line-breaks):

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even

Whether we know them as “collateral damage” or “civilian casualties,” slaughtered innocents deserve perpetual mourning from those of us who survive. If we are to find renewal, it will be the accomplishment of such memories, as Williams hints.

We like to think this was something new on our shores, but it was not. If we are to mourn the innocent dead, we have to include the indigenous Americans, don’t we? And many others: slaves, mineworkers, murdered protestors, the wrongfully condemned and on and on. Still, there are the ugly memories of brutal civilian carnage during the 20th Century’s great wars, and 9/11 taught us just how artificial our calendar is. The New Millennium was wishful thinking.

Panic and madness followed 9/11. The towers fell over and over again on our screens. Those in power puffed their chests and promised vengeance. We felt unsafe and uncertain, and power used those frightening images to scare us into giving them permission to war and to diminish fundamental democratic rights in the name of security.

In horrorshow ways, we responded to the falling buildings by jackhammering the foundations of our own social order.

It need not end there, though. Renewal is always possible. Didn’t William Carlos Williams tell us that? The universe is open, after all, and when the Dude abides, that’s what he’s agreed to.

How many millions of words about 9/11 have been uttered? How many experts, commentators, psychologists, and politicians have tried to tell us what that day means? Many today are critical of our repeated return to the events of 9/11. There is concern that it’s driven by commercialized sentimentality and the pursuit of ratings that repeatedly reward the attackers with renewed attention. There’s something to that criticism. And I’m uneasy with the task of explaining its meaning because I do not yet know what it is.

I get help excusing my tentativeness from Cathy Caruth, author of Trauma: Explorations in Memory:

The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemas of prior knowledge – that cannot, as George Bataille says, become a matter of ‘intelligence’ – and thus continually returns…

It was Ben Saunders’ cool essay on Spider-Man, American pop culture’s longest-lived meditator on the existential anguish caused by our ultimate powerlessness, super-powered or not, that pointed me to Caruth. Spider-Man is forever failing his own sense of justice and fretting over such traumas as the possibility he played an innocent role in the death of the woman he loved (Spider-Man No. 121).

I feel better about my wild and willful, post-9/11 stream of thought. I mean, if Spider-Man can hang with it, I oughta try. He asked, “What good is my fantastic power if I cannot use it?” (Spider-Man No. 1). I suppose the fathers of The Fantasticks asked themselves the same thing.

Another shattered community, the Beatles, came together again in 1995, virtually and long after John Lennon’s murder, to make a song from a tape Lennon had left behind. In “Free As a Bird” the Beatles sing:

Whatever happened to
The life that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
Where did we lose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so free

Speaking for Icarus, for Spider-Man, for Bowie’s Thomas Jerome Newton, for the Beatles, and for post-9/11 America, an earthbound Lennon asks, “What’s the next best thing to be/free as a bird.”

The next best thing. That seems like an appropriate earthly prayer on this September 11, 2011.

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This isn’t likely to change the minds of the bigots, though. They live in a zero sum universe. If someone of slightly different appearance is driving a nice car, they assume it’s a nice car that should be their own but isn’t because the undeserving person of slightly disappearance got it through theft or government hand-out.

Here’s the story.

Here’s how WPost’s Ezra Klein summed it up:

So Texas, with its booming economy, may have more to benefit from with its large immigrant population, both illegal and illegal. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all states would immediately benefit from a big influx of immigrant workers.

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The Ourorboros

Jonathon Swift went too far in his “A Modest Proposal” (1729) when he proposed the eating of human children as a solution to Ireland’s economic woes and the plight of the hungry poor. If we were looking for a solution to our own economic crisis that might be acceptable to more people, and so better suited to a democracy, wouldn’t it be efficacious to simply let the hungry youngsters starve to death?

There are 12 million hungry children in America. Statistics on the cost of raising and educating children in America (including private and public spending) show we will spend more than $2 trillion – that’s $2 trillion – on these 12 million insatiable mouths. (Because we are talking about kids in hunger, I’ve discounted by 75 percent the middle class average cost of raising a child.)

Think of the savings. Two trillion dollars! And we could add to these savings the wealth the children would consume as adults if they survived. We could cut public transportation, prisons, welfare, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare! The mind boggles. We simply replace the inefficient safety net with a safety scaffold, so to speak.

Basing his argument on Tertullian’s satiric masterpiece, the Apology, Swift unfairly exaggerated the depravity of those of great wealth and power. Tertullian said, “Man’s flesh goes belching, fattened on man’s flesh.” But that’s an impolite image, and it challenges the nettlesome taboo against cannibalism. We could erase that taboo with a focused advertising campaign, I’m sure. But that would cost money. This Even More Modest Proposal saves money and asks of us only a certain passivity and inaction.

Now, when bleeding hearts complain that our Even More Modest Proposal is uncivil or mean-spirited, we could point out that 40 million to 52 million civilians were killed during WWII, a struggle that saved the free from the chains of fascism. We, too, are engaged in a struggle for freedom, and the necessary expired people will, initially, number only 12 million. Mere drops in a bucket. And, the rest of us will have many more buckets, gilded ones at that.

I must agree with the thoughtful champions of freedom at FoxNews. The necessary expired people aren’t really people at all. The impudent and unfunny Jon Stewart recently collected FoxNews characterizations of the poor: They are “the moocher class,” “the takers,” “parasites,” “raccoons,” “utterly irresponsible animals.” Starving such beasts in the name of freedom and the flourishing of the rest of us is only just. Our consciences would be clear, would they not, and our bank accounts overflowing.

There is, I know, the following problem. As the Gospels tell us, in Matthew 26:11, “for ye have the poor always with you.” In other words, just as soon as we disappear today’s 12 million hungry children, another 12 million hungry children will take their place.

This is a vexing mathematical difficulty. I think we must recognize its validity and launch an ongoing program, one backed up by the Constitution. Therefore, this Even More Modest Proposal includes a call for a constitutional amendment that bans the hungry. The hungry must be allowed to perish, continually and without pause.

Someone will no doubt say, “Wait, you said only 12 million would die. Now, over time, it looks like you mean many, many multiples of 12 million.” Yes, but I submit that the 12 million will, in each instance, always be far less than the number of civilians killed in WWII. You can’t fool us with your numbers games.

Needless to say, we will probably have fewer confessed hungry children once they realize that by whining, “Please sir, I want some more?” they are righteously condemned. I think we will hear a lot more, “No, not hungry, not in the least. Thank you anyway.” This effect (call it the Temporarily Saving Their Skinny Asses effect) would delay costs of disposing of the deceased, allowing us to invest delayed disposal costs and further improve our financial condition.

When one runs the whole way through the mathematics, a consequence emerges that deserves mention. There will, inevitably, come a time when our numbers are greatly reduced by the regularly enforced starvation required by our Even More Modest Proposal. Eventually, only two of us will remain, one hungry, one not. Maybe the two will share an apple.

Because it is helpful to give names to things, we might call this the “Ouroboros Effect,” and as a mathematically guaranteed consequence, it is a blessing. The eating-its-own-tail Ouroboros, the Jungians tell us, is a symbol of rebirth, the eternal return. It represents the “dawn state.” In other words, this even more modest proposal is naught but a humble call for human life everlasting, forever renewed in a sacred cycle that gives one goose flesh to contemplate.

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–Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn, in the novel, True Grit.

“He is not my friend.”

–Young Mattie Ross, speaking of Rooster Cogburn, in True Grit.

The American myth of the rugged, self-sufficient individual is ever-present in our culture. Think of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, a character based on the nameless “Continental Op” of Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest. The characters abandon the very concept of community. They no longer even want a name that could be known by others.

The myth, of course, is just a fictionalized reflection of a belief held by many Americans: the self-contained individual is all. The furtherance of individual liberty, with little regard for the fate of the community at large, is the only legitimate role of government. The belief comes with magical thinking (or cynical slight-of-hand) that unrestrained selfishness will produce more for all than selflessness, altruism, or compassion.

Charles Portis’s True Grit and the 2010 film version by the Coen Brothers turn the myth on its head. In the process, the works tell us something about loneliness, inequality and the pursuit of friendship in contemporary America. We can look at the “true grit” of the book and movie as a reference to the courage to befriend others selflessly despite differences and barriers.

Friendship, in the sense of a durable bond of deep affection achieved without regard for utilitarian gain, lives an uneasy life in America. Aristotle believed deep friendship is a cornerstone of democracy because it establishes a moral model for relations within the City. It acknowledges our essential human equality and interdependence.

The Enlightenment, for all its many benefits, dispensed with ideas about the moral or political importance of friendship, or sympathy, or empathy. Kant was especially keen to separate his moral imperative from squishy emotional attachment. That view gets human nature wrong, of course. We know that now thanks to advances in the human sciences, which reveal that we are born to be friends.

Democracy can’t survive as blood sport; it is a stranger to the dog-eat-dog fighting pit. I think our current economic difficulties offer evidence aplenty.

What does True Grit have to say about all this? Surely most of us are familiar with the story. In the 1870’s, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires the crusty and cantankerous Rooster Cogburn to help her track down and kill or capture her father’s murderer. A middle-aged Mattie narrates the story of her past. In the course of their adventures, the wild and wooly Rooster develops a deep affection for Mattie. And Mattie, after a fashion, reciprocates.

As written by Portis, though, the characters depart from the usual American melodrama. Mattie is no picture of innocence. She’s all about vengeance. Mattie’s a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian who reduces her relationships to utilitarian cash calculations. Rooster manages to open her heart a bit, and we love her because this spark lives in her. At one point in the book, the adult Mattie acknowledges the inhumanity of her faith in Election (humans are fallen and can’t do anything about it; God decides or elects the saved).

I confess [Election] is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it.

Rooster is distant and uninterested in Mattie at first. He gets involved for the possible reward money. He’s lonely, though, and as they ride along, Rooster can’t help but tell stories of his past broken relationships and lost friends. In the end, the villains are vanquished. But Mattie has been bitten by a rattlesnake. Rooster, in an almost impossible act of love and endurance that kills Mattie’s horse and almost kills him, saves her life with a heroic journey to a faraway doctor. Mattie thinks of true grit as a blinkered, world-be-damned determination. Turns out to have more to do with love and friendship.

The budding friendship doesn’t last beyond the adventure, except, maybe, in their hearts. A quarter century later, Mattie hears that Rooster is appearing in a Wild West Show in Memphis. When she arrives to visit him there, she discovers he died three days earlier, of something he called “night hoss.” It’s a cowboy reference to nervous ponies that keep them awake at night. (Early in the novel Rooster says he has no such regrets: “I sleep like a baby. Have for years.”). Despite that bluster, Rooster’s night hosses are likely the loss of friendship and connection he’s suffered. He’s died of a perpetually broken heart.

For her part, Mattie has never married, and from her tone, never made another friend. Hers is a cautionary tale.

The Coen brothers and their longtime composer-collaborator Carter Burwell accent the theme with a beautiful score based on 19^th Century Christian hymns. By choosing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” the filmmakers manage sly references to two very different American movies, 1943’s The Human Comedy and 1955’s Night of the Hunter. Frank Rich described the story of The Human Comedy as a “Whitmanesque vision of the country…a fairy tale dream of democracy.”

In Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum plays a sociopath, a serial killer on the trail of two children. In the former film is the promise of community; in the latter, the psychopathology of the loner – the rugged individual in the extreme.

Like True Grit, both movies involve children’s tragic losses. And both employ the song, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” As used in True Grit, the song evokes Mattie’s faith. At the same time, the “everlasting arms” also seem to refer not to God, but to a faith in fellow humans. The last time we hear it, before the credits, the snake-bit Mattie is literally in Rooster’s arms.

By mixing up the standard narrative, Portis and the Coens awaken us to the promise – and the difficulty – of friendship in our American condition. They are telling a good yarn, but it’s a tale that subverts the romance of the rugged individual. It’s tragic that the tale can’t end happily. Today, such an ending wouldn’t ring true. Tomorrow, maybe, because like Rooster, a part of all of us knows there “is no beat of a good friend.”

Watch the clips of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” from both The Human Comedy (sung as a song of brotherhood and solidarity on a troop train) and Night of the Hunter (sung by the stalker Mitchum as a murderous taunt from the dark). Mitchum’s character, Harry Powell (a self-proclaimed preacher in the fire-and-brimstone tradition), has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on the knuckles of his right and left hands, at the ends of his not-so-everlasting arms. These clips carry similar tattoos.

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Paradoxically, the false portrait of humankind feeds both an unwholesome worship of dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of powerless in the face of godlike market forces that must be obeyed no matter the cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe or gross economic injustice.

Its roots lie in the gloomy Hobbesian picture of unredeemable, brutish humanity and in the Enlightenment’s faith in universal reason. Twentieth Century conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and excuse the inevitable social destruction caused by unrestrained greed, simply invented new concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem essential.

It’s just one of many ironies that this authoritarian view was swallowed whole hog by so-called libertarians. It should be noted that Robert Nozick, author of the seminal libertarian book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, later spit out the worm he’d swallowed and repudiated his earlier work.)

The ugly, empirically false portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses unemotional reason to reach pre-determined ends. This is the widely discredited but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another color in the picture, which some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those pre-determined ends are always selfish or self-interested.

We are, these conservatives say, rats.

As virtually every field within the human sciences has found, we are nothing like that. Because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can and do act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not isolated, but interconnected in many ways. We are competitive, but we are also cooperative. Reason and emotion are intertwined. There’s no such thing as unemotional reason. We don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.

In his new book, The Fair Society, biologist Peter Corning writes:

Contrary to the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where everybody’s basic needs are met…where there is a robust sense of ‘reciprocity’ – a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.

Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff have been urging us to understand the new 21^st Century understanding of human being and thinking. Dozens of others have made similar points. We can’t advance a progressive social vision using false assumptions disguised as unbiased scholarship, assumptions intended to forever preclude a fair, progressive, democratic society.

In her new book, Cultivating Conscience, UCLAS law professor Lynn Stout demolishes the concept of “homo economicus,” the descriptive name for the lonely, selfish, hyper-rational and exclusively materialist creature invented by conservative propagandists.

That view, Stout says, “implies we are psychopaths.”

It should come as no surprise that corporations and wealthy conservative ideologues funded the multi-decade effort to convince Americans our nature is other than it is. First came the Rand Corporation. It was there that economist Kenneth Arrow articulated the so-called “rational choice” theory. Here’s how historian Alex Abella summed it up in Soldiers of Reason:

Arrow’s rational choice theory would become a mainstay of economics and political science; by the 1960s…it would redefine the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity…When applied to corporations, the theory exempted them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their shareholders…

Next came the so-called “law and economics” movement, centered mostly at the University of Chicago and spearheaded by Richard Posner, Gary Becker and others. In a nutshell, its propagandists insisted that the “rational actor” model be employed to decide legal disputes.

Such right-wing benefactors as Richard Scaiffe funded the law and economics movement with millions of dollars to the University of Chicago, the Manhattan Institute and other institutions. The funding was not intended to help a search for truth. It was intended to paint a picture of human nature that justified unbridled greed and the injustice that follows from its institutional legitimacy. There are echoes here of other authoritarian traditions that condemned the rabble to justify elite power. The religious myth about the Fall of Man, for instance, is accompanied by the assertion that only priests and pastors can save us from ourselves.

Conservative columnist David Brooks is clearly alarmed that the dark vision of humanity that fueled the conservative movement for decades is being unmasked. He is trying to fit the new, more humanistic and hopeful portrait into a scheme for more, not less, authoritarian control. In his book, The Social Animal, Brooks recommends the new human sciences be employed to shape (read: control) people’s behavior. He leaves untouched all questions about whether such control is moral.

Edwin L. Rubin, who elaborated on the “rat choice theory” mentioned above, summed up the motivations of those who invented the cruel, selfish homo economicus:

…rational choice theory and rat choice theory, when combined, provide a comprehensive argument for an unregulated market, an argument grounded in a theory of human behavior and human choices.

Just last week, philosopher John McCumber took on the rational actor model and homo economicus in the New York Times:

Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

A moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large. That was the goal of the confidence men who sold us a false and destructive view of our own natures. So successful were they that many progressives (and most Democrats) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

Our most important a task involves replacing the deceitful view of humankind with the new – and true – picture of cooperative, empathic and complex human being (we can, obviously, be selfish, cruel and violent – but that’s not all we are).

A society organized around the values generated by such a picture will look radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves.

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It may be spring in the Mideast, but a chill wind is howling in America as America’s Right puffs its cheeks like Old Man Winter. Education and the personal freedom to control one’s body and sexual life fuel powerful democratic movements. What kind of movement then is America’s Right engaged in?

French social scientist Emmanuel Todd is explicit about the democratizing power of literacy and reproductive freedom. They lead to:

…the transformation of the political system, a spreading wave of democratization and the conversion of subjects into citizens.

But the American Right seeks the opposite, the conversion of citizens into subjects. That they do so while speaking of liberty is just more authoritarian “denying and distorting of information” in the words of Italian humanist, Auschwitz survivor and anti-fascist Primo Levi.

Is the Right really mounting a war on contraception? While far-right conservatives have largely succeeded in snookering the credulous news media into framing its anti-birth control agenda as all about abortion, they seek much more than an abortion ban.

In a moment of unintended candor, a leading conservative Texas state legislator, Wayne Christian, recently confessed. The Texas Tribune asked Christian whether he was engaged in a war on birth control. He answered:

Of course it’s a war on birth control, on abortions, on everything. That’s what family planning is all about.

Christian is no isolated crank. He has helped lead the charge to eliminate spending on family planning and force women to undergo sonograms before a pregnancy is terminated. In Texas, insurance companies no longer have to cover birth control.

Despite the recent federal budget fight over Planned Parenthood, progressives seem only drowsily aware of the assault on birth control. Painful as it is to do, we should listen more carefully to Rush Limbaugh, who recently mocked birth control and laughed in agreement when a caller said a woman should just keep her legs closed. We should also keep tabs on the Family Research Council, which thinks birth control is a contrivance of the devil.

On education, the Right’s assault is well underway. According to Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 34 states and the District of Columbia have cut aid to K-12. Forty-three states have cut funding for public colleges and universities.

This weekend, we can add Texas to that list. The Legislature, wrapping up a session that looks more and more like a Rick Perry for President campaign commercial, is cutting public education by $4 billion and locking 20,000 qualified students out of a college education.

Most Americans don’t support these anti-democratic policies, but they don’t really know they are happening. It’s a very small number of conservative elites driving the agenda. Their followers are blind and weak, convinced by decades of conservative propaganda that all their troubles stem from a too-big liberal state or from various “Others.” Some of these Others, demonstrably poor, stand accused of taking more than their fair share. The contradiction is lost on the intellectually infirm.

America’s most dangerous myth is the “It-Can’t-Happen-Here” story. The cowed political press continues to treat the profoundly authoritarian conservative agenda with kid gloves.

And Democrats get the framing wrong on most of the issues at hand. For instance, millions of American Catholics defied the Vatican on birth control. Don’t we think Catholics and non-Catholics would defy the anti-contraception Wayne Christians of the world? But we allow the debate to be framed solely around the question of abortion when we should be talking about the War on Contraceptives, government control of our bodies and private lives and the loss of personal liberty.

We get deep in the wonky weeds on education, and we always have. The fundamental issue is simple to frame: Without free public education there is no democracy, there is no America.

But, of course, It Can’t Happen Here, so why worry. That’s my great frustration. I know most Americans are deeply committed to democracy. We stood in awesome solidarity with the pro-democracy rebels in Egypt and elsewhere. But many are blind to the real struggle at home.

Primo Levi, in a 1974 essay called “A Past We Thought Would Never Return,” wrote these words:

Every age has its own fascism and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of the privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.

In his brilliant, just-published essay on Levi, Stanislav G. Pugliese adds:

…the attempt of the fascist state to seize control of the family through social legislation (preventing abortions, outlawing contraception…)

Let’s check off the list with reference to the American Right’s agenda. Paralyzing public education. Check. Outlawing contraceptives and abortions. Check. Denying and distorting information. Check. Undermining systems of justice. Check (Patriot Act; tort reform). Forced labor (union busting; wage and pension cuts). Check. Nostalgia for an imagined world of perfect order, authority and obedience. Check.

With regard to America or Americans, the word “fascism” is taboo. We could be prohibited by convention from using the word “cancer,” too. But rogue cells would still destroy bodies.

There is no comparison to Hitler here. His was a special evil. I would just like the Right’s agenda to be seen for what it is, profoundly anti-democratic and authoritarian. When it is seen for what it is, and if it’s not too late, Americans will condemn it. And defeat it.

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