Rachel Farris and Friend

Our friend Rachel Farris, otherwise known as blogger Mean Rachel, visits DogCanyon with a great post. We’re proud to welcome her to the Canyon, and recommend everyone read this, visit her blog regularly. You’ll wanna send her presents.

By Rachel Farris

BP’s wells aren’t the only things failing around Texas these days.

Education is quickly draining out of Texas classrooms, and as the oil spill made its way onto Texas beaches this weekend, word of the brain-drain that is our State Board of Education has most certainly gotten out. The spoof public relations Twitter account for BP, BPGlobalPR, tweeted a Texas-sized zinger that quickly zoomed to the top of Twitter.com today, garnering over 100+ retweets in less than two hours: “Our oil hit Texas beaches yesterday. Fortunately, in 20 years their school books will say nothing happened. #bpcares“.

Tarballs and tainted history. Lucky us.

The Texas State Board of Education has been caught in the national spotlight of mainstream news sources (see How Christian Were the Founders?) ever since, like a smelly oil well in the wind, reporters picked up the scent of how completely whacked-out the current SBOE members are–or, as the New York Times more politely put it, when the SBOE approved a curriculum that “put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks.” Now, thanks to the SBOE’s it’d-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad antics, BPGlobalPR’s tweet today pushed the long-term risks of a state board rewriting history to perhaps a larger–and younger–following with a taste for schadenfreude.

As far as I can see, the only thing worse than George W. Bush being back in Texas is the state of education here. Bill Hobby, former Lt. Governor of Texas, recently called Texas the “Laughing Stock State” as a result of the SBOE’s desire to remove from the pages of textbooks notable Hispanics like Lorenzo de Zavala, who helped draft the constitution of the Republic of Texas. As if erasing history wasn’t enough, Republican SBOE members like incumbent Ken Mercer want to actually rewrite history by replacing them with ultra-conservatives like Sean Hannity, who once said, “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” Where do you think they’ll tuck that quote in the margins of a second grader’s social studies text? In the “Washed Up TV Hosts Who Historically Have Incited Violence” chapter?

Without a change of board members, as Governor Rick Perry continues to inexcusably refer to the BP oil disaster an “act of God,” Texas’s textbooks will soon reflect the same type of Republican ideology that Mercer’s opponent, Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau, correctly called “a butchered curriculum…riddled with inaccuracy.”

And with teachers like Rick Perry and Ken Mercer at the helm, why even bother with standardized tests?

Related Articles:

• The World Is Rich, But It Is Not Mine
• Oil Spill and Flag…Worth a Thousand Words
• A Troubling Pattern in America’s Obama Story
• Bars for BP
• When Johnny Came Home

This world is rich, but it is not mine.
Where I live, hungry children are crying
I am not angry, at my own condition
I just want people to know my position.

Procol Harum, from a statement by South African Stephen Maboe

Congressman Joe Barton says he doesn’t want to live in a country in which those in authority are held accountable.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but I’m getting the spirit of his comments – and his beliefs – just right. He apologized to BP for the Obama Administration’s audacity and its demand that BP put $20 billion in escrow to compensate Americans devastated by the oil giant’s Gulf spill.

I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize,” Barton added. “I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.

Other Republicans (John Cornyn, Michele Bachmann) shared Barton’s concerns. Some tried to distance themselves. Whatever.

The point is that Barton spoke from his heart. In the worldview of Barton and his ilk, humanity divides neatly into two categories: the ruled and the rulers. It is a violation of natural law to hold rulers accountable. Surviving fish do not punish sharks for the flounder they eat.

This is why the modern conservative movement sits so uneasily with democracy. When the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush president, it fit the natural order as seen by conservatives like Barton.

Most conservatives are not as stupid or as honest as Barton. They do not trot out their anti-democratic, authoritarian sentiments so readily. Instead, they hide behind democratic language, talk of the American Founders, etc. etc.

How is it that these people so detest the authority of elected, theoretically accountable government while believing that corporate authority is above the law, above reproach, above criticism? To them, all government is illegitimate, maybe especially democratic government in which the little fish can and sometimes do vote to restrain the sharks.

Sharks, in the oil patch or on Wall Street, are products of what the Bartons see as natural evolution. It’s social Darwinism made political doctrine. Further complicating the picture is the fact that most of them don’t like Darwin at all. Still, his thought is very useful to their political worldview even though it challenges their nutty religious dogma. So be it. Only a little fish would demand consistency from a shark.

The toxic BP oil spill is going to kill both the sharks and the fish, of course. But Barton is undeterred by this. He wants to save what sharks there are to be saved, especially, I guess, the British hammerhead, the one the real American Founders threw out of our waters 235 years ago.

This brings me to the powerful Procol Harum song quoted above, This World is Rich. Here are the rest of the lyrics (you can hear a clip or buy the song here):

This world is rich, but it is not mine
My people are starving, that must be a crime
When some have so much, and some have so little
There must be a place, we can meet in the middle

This world is rich, but it is not mine
This world is rich, but it is not mine

Our water is poisoned, poverty’s intense
We cry inequality, they just build a fence
We don’t even own the ditch where we’re dying
This world is rich, but it is not mine

This world is rich, but it is not right
We’re asking for help, before we run out of time
We can’t live on talk, we just need a hand
We’ll walk from the slums, to the promised land

This world is rich, but it is not mine

In America, we like to fantasize that everyone believes in democracy and in equality of opportunity. It’s not true. The battle lines here are the same as they have always been throughout the world. There are those that have that want the rest of us to believe that’s the natural order of things. Our poverty is either a sign of God’s disfavor or our own fault. Their wealth is a sign of God’s favor. This is the way the universe is ordered.

Joe Barton did us a favor by defending BP with his ridiculous apology. His subsequent retraction only amplified what he and many like him truly believe. We should take them at their word.

Related Articles:

• Tarballs and Tainted History
• Oil Spill and Flag…Worth a Thousand Words
• A Troubling Pattern in America’s Obama Story
• Evangeline, the Oil Spill and Highway 61
• A Requiem for the Gulf

There is an ugly pattern in coverage and conversation about Obama. The media’s immediate recourse to dubious language like “the Gulf oil spill is Obama’s Katrina” is just the most recent example.

Juxtaposed against the overt “get over it” arguments about Bush’s appointment, this presents us with some unpleasant suspicions about the national character. About Bush the media asked, “When will he succeed?” About Obama they ask, “When will he fail?” Obama’s the show that doesn’t belong on Broadway, and the critics clamor: when will the curtain come down?

Obama’s reflections at a San Francisco 2008 fundraiser about the source and symptoms of white, working class frustration would prove his undoing, we were told. Okay, then, surely the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” preaching would take Obama out. A poor debate performance against Hilary Clinton? Disqualifying, said many.

Obama’s handling of the health care debate? The economy? Jobs? Too often the questions turned not on healthy, objective, rational critique, but on when this guy’s Broadway show would close. It’s not a quite a birther rant, but it’s of the same family.

Part of this is just the media’s attempted fulfillment of the clichéd American celebrity narrative: the star that rises from nowhere must crash and burn. I think unrestrained and unthinking Obama worship fed the “star” part of this storyline. I’m anti-authoritarian by nature, and I read too much history and covered politicians far too long to imagine superhero exploits from any of them, ever.

I’m for radical democracy because I believe in the wisdom of the public, not distant proclamations from an unapproachable elite or single political celebrity. In my view, the president is a hired hand. I don’t even like it that there is a song called “Hail to the Chief.”

When the depressive Maureen Dowd asks that Obama show some melodramatic anger, it says more about our addiction to melodrama and our celebrity obsessed culture than it does Obama.

There’s a big difference between critique or heartfelt, courageous advocacy – pressuring Obama on health care or financial reform, for instance – and leaping to conclusions about his character or fitness for office.

The latter, I’m afraid, is connected to his undeniably historic achievement as the first African-American president of the United States. This wasn’t supposed to happen so soon, we’re told. It sent America’s unquiet racists into fits. It has led the media intelligentsia to frequent, hysterical predictions of presidential doom.

And it’s not just the media or the right wing that fall into this questionable pattern. Many Democrats do, too. Once again, I’m not talking about legitimate criticism or advocacy. That’s necessary in a democracy. It’s healthy. Unconditional loyalty and hero worship are not. Neither is hyper-sensitivity based in old prejudices we pretend to have outgrown.

Democracy requires honest introspection from its citizens. We shouldn’t let our hopes for the post-racial era confuse our thinking about the national psyche, race, and the cultural impact of Obama’s presidency.

Why, we should ask ourselves, is America so willing so often to predict the end for Obama?

A couple of quick points. No one should misread these thoughts as a reduction of Obama criticism to issues of race. Our circumstance is, of course, more complex than that. But race matters, as Cornel West says. We can’t throw out a question involving race and the Obama presidency under the false premise that such a question reduces all questions about the Obama presidency to race. That’s a transparently phony dodge.

Also, this piece isn’t a review of Obama, a defense of Obama, or a critique of Obama. My only intention is to raise a question about a pattern in the Obama media story. I think that pattern is worth examining, because I think the examination will tell us something about ourselves.

Related Articles:

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• Fatal Fantasies of Our Technological Omnipotence
• “If She Opened Her Eyes, Maybe We Can, Too.”
• Tarballs and Tainted History
• Oil Spill and Flag…Worth a Thousand Words

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.” – Robert Benchley

The little girl sat at the table with her face leaning close to a small piece of paper. Her dark, bobbed hair swung forward, slightly obscuring the soft curve of her cheeks. She did not notice her mother enter the room.

“What are you doing, mija?” her mother asked.

“I’m writing daddy a note.” She answered without looking up, her concentration focused on the careful shaping of words and letters.

“Oh, mija.”

Nancili Mata wanted to cry. Instead, she smiled, and did not let emotion take control of her. When she surrenders to her sadness, she does so in private.

“I have to be strong because if I’m not my little girl will see me, and then she’ll hurt more than I will,” she explained.

At age seven, Stephani Mata has the oversized, startled eyes of a child finding amazement in the mundane. A happiness moves across her round face, and it rarely disappears. She has figured out a way to deal with a sadness no child should ever have to confront.

“They are just so sweet when she writes them,” Nancili said. “They make me want to cry. But I don’t. I won’t let myself.”

The notes began appearing after the funeral out in Pecos. Nancili found them stuck to pictures of her husband, Johnny. In the hallway of their new home, or on shelves, anywhere there was a photo of Johnny Mata, a message from Stephani might be attached.

“Dear daddy,” she wrote. “I miss you. But I know you are happy up in heaven with Jesus. Love, Stephani.”

Johnny Villareal Mata and his wife, Nancili, were supposed to grow gray together in the house he had bought for her in the North Hills area of El Paso. In seventh grade, she had told the shy Johnny, “You’re going to be mine.” He only smiled, unaware that the entire course of his life might be determined by the strong-willed girl with high cheekbones and unabashed honesty.

Nancili got what she wanted, though, because it made Johnny so happy to provide for her dreams. The house at the foot of the Franklin Mountains, however, was also a dream of his. As a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army, Johnny had managed his money well enough that they were able to build a new home with a two car garage, and a view of the Franklins out of almost every window.

“In a way, I felt like a queen,” Nancili said. “Johnny and I, we had known each other for fifteen years, and I think the longer we knew each other, the better we were. At the end, he was like, ‘Okay, this is your dream. I bought you a house.’”

Every day, the mountains across from her new home have a different look. Nancili Mata notices how the light changes the color of the rock, and the softening created by a passing cloud obscuring the sun. The desert heat can give the Franklins a frightening sharpness before they are colored, and made inviting by the long light of a new morning. She feels this way, too. There are dramatic changes inside of Nancili, and she struggles to be strong, to understand.

“I have my days. I like to go to the cemetery in Pecos and do my talking to Johnny. Most of the time at the cemetery, when I start getting depressed, I pray, and it helps.”

Almost a hundred people showed up at the home of Domingo and Elvira Mata the first night news came that their son, Johnny, was missing in Iraq. Each night, a priest performed a rosary, and prayers were offered for Johnny’s safe return. The crowds and the candles did not go away until Johnny’s casket, being transported by the army, was met at the Reeves County line by police cruisers. Thousands lined the roadways, silently watching the procession, holding up candles in the 3:30 a.m. desert darkness.When he was buried, half of the 10,000 population of Pecos surrounded the church, or stood in the withering desert heat at the graveyard, waiting for the arrival of Johnny’s funeral cortege.

Nancili did not get to see her husband for a final time when his body was returned. Brutalized by gun fire, she became convinced what was left was not the man she loved.

“I thought about seeing his body, and then another day I talked to my priest, the chaplain, and it made me realize it wasn’t gonna be Johnny any more,” she told a visitor. “It was just a body. And the way my husband always was, he was clean, always good-looking, detailed, and he would like to be remembered the way he was. I was speaking to the funeral person, and he said he didn’t even get to see him because he [Johnny] was so wrapped up in a blanket. I think we made a pretty good decision, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.”

Everything Johnny and Nancili Mata had dreamed about was killed in that Iraqi ambush in Al Nasiriyah. Settling into his duty station at Fort Bliss, Texas, Johnny Mata decided to invest his savings in the new home. In January 2003, Stephani, and her big brother, Eric, moved into their own bedrooms. Before the family had finished unpacking boxes, however, Johnny got orders for overseas deployment. While his family adjusted to the new house, he was packing bags for a long trip. By March, Johnny Mata was in Kuwait.

“We made a video the night he left, and you could hardly see Johnny because Stephani was all over him. Every time you look at the picture, she’s climbing all over her daddy.” Nancili drew her index finger across the recesses below each eye, pressing away the tears. “Stephani is such a daddy’s girl.”

Johnny Mata was movie star handsome. A photo that circulated in his hometown of Pecos, Texas, showed him with his strong, angled jaw tilted slightly upward, dark, wavy hair shining in the sun, and a smile that dominated all of his other distinguishing features. Nothing, his family said, ever deterred Johnny. Even Pecos, suffering a kind of dry desperation on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, did not wear down Johnny Mata the way it did so many of the other young people. Great commerce, and big dreams have never come closer to Pecos than the eighteen wheelers howling past out on Interstate 20. But none of that ever affected Johnny’s attitude. He loved his parents, Domingo and Elvira, and his four brothers and sister. He loved his wife, and his children. And he loved his country, so much that he was willing to go to war.

“He always wanted to serve his country that way,” Nancili said. “The reason that it didn’t bother me was because I would see it in his heart. If he wanted to do anything, it was like excitement. You would see that glow. You would see that glow.”

While Nancili spoke, an old-timers’ baseball game was being played on a nearly grassless ball diamond beyond a tall fence. On the outfield wall, carnations, made out of tissue, spelled out the message, “In your honor, Johnny.” A blast furnace wind meant that even the shade of a temporary awning did not offer relief from the heat. Flavored ice cones and barbecue were being sold behind the bleachers. Money raised was to be donated to local charities in the name of Johnny Mata. His daughter, wearing a tee shirt, spun around to show the silk screen to a stranger; “In honor of my father and hero, Johnny Mata.” Mata’s face, encircled by the text, shines through the cotton fiber.

As a mechanic, Johnny Mata had acquired expertise in all of the heavy vehicles used by the United States Army. When his commander-in-chief, the President of the United States, issued orders that the 507th Mechanized Company relocate to Kuwait, Johnny saw his role as that of a soldier doing his job. He and Nancili did not talk about the politics of going after Saddam Hussein. There was no point to such a discussion. Orders were orders. He had to go, and so did all of the other soldiers in his outfit.

No one at Fort Bliss knew about faked documents trying to prove Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Nigeria.They didn’t know there were no provable connections between Saddam and al Qaeda terrorists. Their commander-in-chief, they were certain, took his duties as solemnly and seriously as everyone at Fort Bliss. If the president said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, every soldier accepted the statement for fact. As hazy as the politics were, they were irrelevant to everyone shipping out from Biggs Army Air Field at Fort Bliss. A soldier does not debate the politics of a presidential decision.He follows orders.

“We don’t think about no politics in our family,” said Domingo Mata. Johnny Mata’s father is a man whose impressive size reflects an appetite for all of life’s pleasures. He had been hovering nearby, listening to his daughter-in-law answer questions.

“Politics is just when someone tells you they’ll do something so you’ll help them get something they want, and then when they get in there, they forget all about the people who got them in. In our family, we just do what we need to do, what we think is right. That’s all Johnny did. When he went up there, (Iraq,) he just wanted to help all those little children who were hungry, and hurtin’, you know?”

Logic told Nancili and all of the Matas that they did not need to fret too much over Johnny’s deployment. Even though Johnny was in Kuwait, the president sounded like he was trying to give the situation time to work itself out, peacefully. Surely, he did not want a war. Besides, Johnny was not with a combat unit. He fixed vehicles. His work was done at the rear. By the time the 507th moved through, the Matas reasoned, the Marines, infantry, and air support were certain to have secured the area and chased off, or killed the enemy. Odds of Johnny Mata encountering harm or great danger were considered minimal.

But Nancili Mata knew her husband, and it made her worry while her family expressed confidence.

“I did not think he was safe. I said, ‘Johnny, I want you to tell me, if a vehicle is broken down, how are you gonna fix it?Are you gonna go out there and fix it, or are they gonna bring it to you?’ And he said, ‘Well, sometimes they bring them and sometimes you have to go out there and fix them.’ And I said, ‘Okay, if they break down you send somebody else to fix it,’ knowing well that he wouldn’t do that. He would go out there.”

She believed in her president, though. This was the United States of America. George W. Bush had grown up just down the highway to the east. He had to have the basic, common sense that comes from learning to live on such a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Nancili Mata shared that with the most powerful man in the world. Her family traced its lineage way back to the days when the state had been called Tejas, and it was ruled by Mexico. She knew the kind of sensibilities a place like this could provide a person, the cold, clear judgment it taught by the desert heat. There was no reason not to trust a president who came from here. Surely, her president would be guided by restraint and honor, a wisdom swept clean by the dry, desert winds of his youth.

Instead, Nancili Mata has new troubles.

“I worry, sometimes, that he, (God,) will come for me, too. And I’m ready. I want to go be with Johnny. But we…I’ve got these two kids to raise. I have to be here for them. I want to see them grow up. And then I’ll go see Johnny.”

Eric, who is 16, has already made plans. After high school graduation, he will enlist. “My intentions are to go into the Army,” he said. “My father’s death has strengthened that decision.”

Stephani Mata walked up and touched her mother’s arm, needing nothing more than closeness. Just then, Nancili tilted her head back, and lifted her eyes toward heaven, as if she were speaking directly to her husband. Her gaze burned through the makeshift awning protecting her from the white, hot Texas sky.

“Wait for me,” she said.

And then her voice softened.

“I’ll be there. But not yet.”

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To many, they are a dangerous nuisance. Pet cats and puppies disappear. Coyotes, or “ghosts of the city” as a recent study calls them, get the blame. That study (pdf), by Ohio State’s Stanley Gehrt, says coyotes “have become the top carnivores in an increasing number of urban areas across North America…”

If pets disappear, though, so do skunks and rats. I think it’s a fair trade.

Years ago I sat on a little rise near the Rio Grande with my father and watched a pair of coyotes tag-team a deer, one resting while the other ran the deer in circles. The next, fully rested, took up the game so the partner could rest. It took four cycles. I’ll spare you the end of the story, except to say the coyotes seemed skilled and well-fed.

It’s almost too easy to paint a romantic metaphor here: wild things persist and thrive, despite human gated communities, speed bumps, stop-lights, WalMarts, chin-pulling urban planners and beleaguered city councilmen who themselves get tag-teamed at churches and Christmas parties by suburban couples who’ve lost cocker spaniels and tabbies.

You know why coyotes do so well? Because they are not ideologues.
They take great advantage of an evolved mammalian trait too often derided by humans as lack of conviction or commitment: mental flexibility, a willingness to live with uncertainty and unpredictability so that more alternative courses of action are opened.

Coyotes, we say, are wily. As regards humans, the English poet John Keats called it “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Every ideologue in human history has failed. That’s because most ideas are contingent and bound up with current or past circumstances and often unsuited to tomorrow’s risks and opportunities. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized this. It’s why Jefferson said we need a revolution every generation. The U.S. Constitution is not an idea, and it’s a terrible mistake to read it like a list of commandments. The Constitution’s greatest feature is the inbuilt recognition of the need for its own mutability.

Jefferson, however, did hold one truth as immutable or “self-evident”: human equality. Does this contradict the fundamental insight of the Enlightenment, the insight that truth is man-made and fallible?

Maybe, but the recognition of human equality was a truth made necessary by the fact that every other idea for ordering or enforcing human inequality by economic prowess, religion, skin color, geographic origin, I.Q., or arm strength was doomed from the start.

The trouble is, of course, that technology has now empowered ideas with the ability to take us all down with them when they go.

A further trouble is, in politics those of “negative capability” often seem to be at a disadvantage in debate with stubborn ideologues. The former are made to seem weak and uncertain, the latter strong and certain, no matter how demonstrably false the ideas they cling to (the free, unregulated market comes with an invisible hand that blesses all; fossil fuels are infinite in supply and safe for the environment; war is peace, et cetera).

But who is really stronger, the coyote or the domesticated dog?

I think Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime to possess Keat’s negative capability. The trait was made more politically attractive by its juxtaposition with the many failures of George W. Bush’s stubborn clinging to ideas already bled to death during the world’s most violent century.

I fear Obama’s attraction to Abraham Lincoln is already being trivialized by the press, but it’s a fact that Lincoln might have been the last president to possess this quality.

We should be cautious about judging Obama in the light of our own sticky ideas. It’s not that anyone should quit advocating for what they believe. Democracy depends upon it. It’s simply to put into action the recognition that in America’s gulch or green belt, if we want to survive, we’re going to have to eat a skunk or two.

Published first at FireDogLake. A first clue to the origins of DogCanyon and the armchair coyotes.

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To those not fortunate enough to have lived in Texas, there is in this a mild suggestion of hypocrisy. A visitor from back East might be shrewd enough to put it gently, especially if he is still here. “Texans are a paradoxical people,” he might say.

In response, I’d resort to the Bible – “Let he who is without sin…” – except the phrase makes me edgy as the preacher whose eyes dart nervously about the sanctuary when he comes to that “without sin” part. The good pastor is well aware that his congregants, in their innocence, believe he’s been qualified by Jesus Himself to throw stones. They have come, he’s certain, to watch him hurl a few. In his dilemma is the origin of the phrase, “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

The thing is the congregants know they’ve got the preacher in a tight, and they know he’s going to have to put some lumps on a few heads to get out of it. It’s how they guarantee a Sunday’s salvific entertainment.

The orthodox spiritual practice of intolerance is a path chosen by too many Texans. And they can be particularly noisy. Of late, they’re grabbing more attention than usual because 1) Gov. Rick Perry is pandering to them to help him get through a tough Republican primary; 2) the presence of a person of color in the infelicitously named White House has challenged a fundamental tenet of their faith.

The rest of us are a lot more like that preacher than we might want to think, though. A few years ago, state Rep. Warren Chisum sent around a pamphlet claiming that Copernican science was a Jewish conspiracy. The sun, it said, revolves around the earth. Believing otherwise buys a certain ticket to Hell. Many of us fell back on the motto mentioned above. We pulled our rhetorical pistols, aimed for the dirt at Chisum’s feet and said, “Dance, sucker.” He did, in an awkward jig of an apology for the error of his ways. Such is the spirit of the range.

Texas, like the rest of the Southwest and West, ceased to be a frontier more than a century ago. Family farmers and ranchers were bought out by agribusiness. Hitchin’ posts gave way to speed bumps. Corporations imposed a new feudalism, the old feudalism being the very thing our individualist ancestors fled. The mind, however, is a powerful thing, and the popular myth of rugged individualism lives on. “The tendency to practice symbolic frontiersmanship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan, whether he be an intellectual, a cowboy, a businessman, or a politician,” Larry McMurtry wrote some years ago. The turning of the millennium changed nothing in this regard.

Ann Richards used her humor and her country naturalness to embody the role of a frontierswoman, albeit a tolerant and sophisticated one. She was elected governor. Once in office, she seemed to challenge the cherished myth, though, and a certified city boy and corporate lackey, George W. Bush, took advantage and ran her out of town. Subsequent events proved the skirmish to be of some significance to the rest of the world.

What’s behind the conformist contradiction of our individualism? Texans know the modern world took away something close to their hearts. Still, we pretend it’s still here, just under threat. The more extreme and devoted believers say eternal vigilance is required if the individual is to survive. They believe their uniqueness can survive only by sacrificing the uniqueness of others. That people who hate Darwin practice this brand of social Darwinism is, well, unlucky.

Tragedy arises from such thinking, of course, because exactly the opposite is true.  The uniqueness of others is all we’ve got to guarantee we might ourselves make a good and unique mark upon the world.

Until we understand that, duck and dance.

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The distinction is not trivial. Brand is about a list of facts or attributes. It’s character people use in sizing up strangers, checking in on friends, weighing the merits of a politician.

Coca-Cola is not about content. In fact, it’s nearly content-less. It is a successful brand. Character is all about content. That’s why it’s important in politics. We predict future actions of others based on our beliefs about their character. We can make those predictions because characters appear in stories, and stories follow certain arcs.

We organize our social selves through narratives. We tell stories. We listen to stories. We organize our memories in stories. Even our dreams are stories, though sometimes crazy ones. They are often crazy because our brains try mightily to organize the random neuronal firings during sleep into coherent narratives.

Narratives have characters. They don’t have brands. They have protagonists or heroes. They have victims. They have villains. They have helpers and other secondary characters.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry tried to establish his role or character. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Kerry presented himself as a valiant war hero. That’s such a stock character that Americans would have no trouble understanding it.

The problem was, Kerry didn’t act like a hero. He did not quickly and forcibly stand up to his attackers (Swift Boaters who, with strategic brilliance, diminished Kerry the Hero) as a hero would. He didn’t behave like the character he wanted to establish. A good novelist or film-maker wouldn’t make this mistake. Kerry’s movie flopped.

George W. Bush and his handlers understood the role of character, as infuriating as their success is. One could look at the time of Bush’s national public life, from the start of his campaign in 1999 to the end of his term in 2008, as a decade-long movie. Bush’s character was well defined. Americans thought they could predict what the character would do. Many of us knew the character was a hollow fabrication, but our early predictions of Bush disasters went unheard because of the power of his narrative fictions.

Historically, many progressives have believed that Universal Reason would lead their audiences to reach the right and just solutions if they were just given the facts. But people don’t think like that. We think in stories, stories influenced by emotion, by habit, by expectations.

After 2004 there was a lot of talk about values. The term “framing” is all about values, though many mistake it as another word for “spin.” The term originated in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, and by it he referred to the narrative frames that dominated social interaction. For instance, a hospital comes with predictable roles. Janitors clean, surgeons operate on us, nurses nurse. The hospital is a frame with predictable roles.

In political and cultural communication, our frames and narratives have to match up. We can’t have the Big Bad Wolf reminisce about his compassionate grandmother while he swallows Red’s grandmother. It’s a matter of character, you might say.

We may find it becomes surprisingly easy to express our values if we begin by thinking of who we are. What is our character? Just like we do in our private relations, we might discover that we naturally communicate our values through characterizations in narratives voters can understand.

Barack Obama understands stories. His grasp of cultural narrative and character is one of the things that most alarms his opponents. His character is well-defined, and most of the Republican attacks upon him are intended to 1) Undo or replace the characterization; or, 2) Point out how his actions don’t match the character Americans believe him to be.

Forget brand. We are writing the novel of America’s future. We must write the characters of that future.

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• Little Words Mean Life or Death: Framing Health Care

“Little words can mean death or life to someone.”

-Electra, in Sophocles’ tragedy, Electra.

People die who could be saved. People suffer who could recover. Those are the consequences of the private insurance-based health care system in America today.

We can reform the system at little cost and no risk to our own health, saving hundreds of thousands or millions of lives and medically treating millions more who go untreated.

I can’t write it any plainer than that. The facts are not in dispute. The U.S. ranks last in measurements of citizen health among the six top industrialized nations. So how do insurance industry hirelings (otherwise known as conservative Republicans) make their case against health care reform? How do they justify this inhuman, deadly status quo?

Conservative propagandist Frank Luntz tells them how. Lie. Am I overstating it to claim that such lies, if successful, will cause death and harm to millions? No.

In the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ play from which the epigram above is drawn, Orestes justifies a deception with these “little words”:

Can a mere story be evil? No of course not – so long as it pays in the end.

Is there a more concise way of defining the anti-ethic that seems to drive so much of our American political life? Is it not how the mainstream media assesses candidates and officeholders? Is it not how politicians assess themselves? Is it not what makes it possible for a nation to promote death and suffering to enrich and empower a few insurance executives and the politicians they keep in their servants’ quarters?

The story Orestes told himself – that mere stories can’t be evil – is itself evil. That’s tragic irony, of course. I believe it’s fair to label Luntz’s stories evil, without irony or exaggeration.

This last week, my colleagues, George Lakoff and Eric Haas, wrote about Luntz’s health care lies and made recommendations for framing the principles of reform. You can read that here.

Luntz suggests that opponents of reform humanize their language about health care to avoid humanizing health care. He recommends raising unfounded fears of treatment delays in a system in which government simply plays its moral role of citizen protector. He says it should be argued that bureaucrats would destroy the patient-doctor relationship. He suggests conservatives argue for, “A balanced, common sense approach that provides assistance to those who truly need it and keeps healthcare patient-centered rather than government-centered for everyone.”

As Lakoff, Haas and I argued, an American Plan will recognize that health care is part of the moral mission of government. It will cost less and do more to save lives and keep Americans healthy. Private health insurance runs administrative costs of 15 to 20 percent, with most of those costs stemming from the effort to deny treatment. An American plan can reduce that overhead to three or four percent.

Perhaps the most important difference between our approach and Luntz’s is that our principles are true. They are honest expressions of progressive values. You can read policy recommendations our values might produce in Jacob S. Hacker’s report, “Healthy Competition.”

Luntz’s talking points are based on lies. The “true” value motivating Luntz and his followers is, “Profits matter more than life.” They don’t dare say that, though.

At the center of the insurance industry’s argument is the claim that a national health care plan will have government bureaucrats destroying the patient-doctor relationship. In other words, we are being told to beware of bureaucrats by the completely unaccountable and invisible private insurance bureaucrats who have for decades been denying payment for sound medical care because it falls on the wrong side of their spreadsheets full of numbers.

HMOs and other private insurance schemes are governments. We just don’t get to elect them. Since the insurance industry first waded into the health care business less than a century ago, they have managed to use the government we do elect to eliminate their risks, guarantee their profits, and legalize what is nothing more than accountant-managed euthanasia.

Yes, Electra, little words can mean death or life. It is evil to use the words of life to promote a world of death.

I hope Frank Luntz will think about that. I hope the media that covers the health care debate will think about that. Winning is not a measure of morality. It can’t justify an evil story. Truth really is the best medicine.

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It seems like only yesterday that right-wingers were condemning critics of a president as un-American, chanting “Proud to be an American,” and branding as traitors to America those opposed to state torture. Today, they say their enemy is America. Oh yeah, and these are the same people who decried so-called “situation ethics.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry got quite a bit of attention from his public flirtation with the secessionists during an Austin teabagging orgy. Just the week before, Perry endorsed the quirky “Tenth Amendment” movement and a states’ rights resolution. I say quirky, but 23 states have adopted these non-binding paeans to antebellum saber rattling.

Here’s a sample paragraph from the resolution adopted this year, by a vote of 43 to 1, by the Georgia State Senate:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the Dixie Chicks if they’d said something about nullifying the Union?

Near as I can tell, the beard these extremists are hiding behind is concern over the national debt and mythical tax increases. Nevermind that it was George Bush who took the debt to historic levels. All President Obama has done is cut middle class taxes and sent billions of dollars to the states in the form of an economic stimulus. Southerners, at least, ought to notice he sent the aid without the carpetbaggers.

To be fair, there were contemporary secessionists before Obama. Some don’t like the so-called “war on drugs,” some are just anti-authoritarian. I can sympathize. The war on drugs has been a tragic failure, at least from a democratic, crime-fighting point of view.

And I don’t like authority much, either. I tend to agree with Jefferson. We could use a revolution every generation.

However, Federal authority and Union-wide efforts are necessary prerequisites of many things I do like, like Interstate Highways, the U.S. Post Office, a national defense, insured bank accounts, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, air traffic control, environmental protections, a common currency, etc., etc., etc.

The secession/nullification talk is not just anti-authoritarian, and it’s not confined to the South. Generally, Southerners like authority and hierarchy. They don’t mind somebody on top, as long as they can be on top of somebody else. Call it the Great Chain of Teabagging.

But people such as Gov. Perry, and the elite consultants behind the public hate-filled, secessionist comments of powerful right-wing officeholders and wannabees, are another story. They know exactly what they are doing. They are running their 2010 campaigns, and they are hoping they can drive a big anti-Obama, racist turnout in a mid-term election in which Obama won’t be on the ballot.

This cynical manipulation is so morally repugnant that it’s hard to find adequate words of condemnation. How do you say, “Go to Hell, but stay in the Union?”

These manipulators fully understand that the term “states’ rights” calls up images of lynching, of fire hoses and snarling dogs, of governors standing in the doorways of schools keeping children of color away.

Their coded message to the angry: We’ll take you back to those glorious days when most knew their place, and when we could punish the uppity ones without any old federal government telling us that we can’t.

You know, one of the old forms of violent, racist punishment that disappeared (not so many years ago) after passage of the Federal Civil Rights Act included driving a wedge in a tree stump, sitting a naked black man on the stump so that his testicles hung inside the wedged gap, then pulling out the wedge. A knife would be left behind to assist the victim in a necessarily self-mutilating escape. Another kind of teabagging, you might say. How dare the federal government interfere with a sovereign state’s right to turn a blind eye to such practices?

I know many conservatives are not full of hatred, are not racists, and just have different views about democracy and government. Still, do their more legitimate political aspirations excuse their alliance with those who hate and those who would manipulate that hatred in the pursuit of power?

No. Such was the famous Nixonian “Southern Strategy,” and I know no better definition of “Un-American.” I don’t want them to leave, I just want them to leave their hatred behind. The haters will not listen to me. But they might listen to those responsible conservatives whose legitimacy they skulk behind. Talk is not enough. It’s all too easy to say “compassionate conservatism,” as we’ve learned. Responsible conservatives must repudiate the hate, reject the code words, turn the haters away from their rallies and leave them to their private hells with no false promises of aid, comfort, or a return to bygone days of wedged stumps and hanging trees.

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Those accompanying Bush on his plane ride back to Texas complained that Obama had impolitely criticized their hero in his inaugural address. But such criticism is inevitable when Obama’s philosophy of democratic government is juxtaposed against Bush’s contempt for the people’s will. The GOP can no longer claim to be just libertarian-lite that wants government off our backs and out of our lives. It is the party that wants desperately to tell us what to do. The video (found on youtube) accompanying this essay reminds us of the consequences of authoritarian rule.

The press, by and large, refuses to acknowledge the real battle line in American politics. It assumes that both parties share a devotion to democracy. That may, once, have been true. But it is no longer. Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location. Domestic spying. Voter suppression and ballot manipulation at unprecedented levels. Torture. The theory of the unitary executive. The so-called “Noble Lie.” War based on deceit. Efforts to give government the power to determine acceptable behavior in private lives. End of habeus corpus.

I don’t believe most conservative Americans share this authoritarian vision. Many who vote for Republicans are simply blind to the party’s real values. Those values have been hidden behind lofty rhetoric about freedom or compassionate conservatism. The many failures of the Bush Administration helped make its motivating values more visible. But not visible enough.

Democrats have made gains in recent years in Western states where voters are more individualistic and libertarian. This is telling, because the GOP gained dominance by pasting together an unholy alliance of Western individualists and Southern bigots comfortable with enforced class- and raced-based hierarchy — along with suburbanites who like John Wayne movies but don’t like racism made obvious at their dinner parties. That alliance has cracked.

But old habits die hard, and party affiliation is sticky. Much of the GOP magic depended upon a kind of us-against-them social glue that held unlikely allies together. Ideology has little to do with the social and cultural clubbiness that defined much of Bush’s GOP.

Democracy, as I’ve written before, is resilient, and the 2008 election was a sign of that resiliance. But we have much further to go if democracy is to survive the 21st Century. To survive, its advocates cannot shy away from the real battle line. We are not fighting conservative opponents who share a commitment to democracy. Our disagreements are much more fundamental than any line items in federal or state budgets.

We believe in the wisdom of the people, all of the people. We believe all are born morally equal, that is, due the same dignity and respect and deserving of equal protection and opportunity. Bush Republicans do not. They believe in a natural hierarchy that (what a coincidence) they are born to lead. Fundamentally, they believe they are above the law, above responsibility, above accountability. They believe that our lives, the lives of the people, belong to them and not to us.

That is what we are fighting for. That is the engagement that will mark the Obama years. We need to describe it for what it is.

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