The March of Regress--A Cautionary Tale

Inasmuch as I am a person who grew up with a lot of religion and subsequently lost it, I think—and, on this blog, write—a lot about the process of ditching one’s faith and the benefits of doing so. A lot of secularists do this. We get smug about our lack of faith, and, from our post-God perspective, look down on those who still thrash in the coils of organized religion with a mixture of self-congratulation and pity. We tend to look upon believers as somehow less advanced, less evolved, than we are. But given enough time, they, or their descendants, will, we hope, wake the hell up, break out of the shackles, and join us in an optimistic, humanistic, and brighter future.

What we all too frequently ignore is that the process often goes the other way.

I realized this while I was shuffling about online, pretending to do some research on Joseph Pulitzer, and ran across a website for a nonprofit organization on whose board Michael Pulitzer, Jr., his great-grandson, serves. The biographical blurb under his picture said that he was active in his Mennonite church.

It shook me. Joseph, the progenitor of the American Pulitzers, was a deeply irreligious man. He abandoned his ancestral Judaism and, although nominally Episcopalian after his marriage, never paid much attention to it. He appears to have been thoroughly secular, an assertion supported by one of his employees’ statement that that he ascribed to what was then called the “Higher Agnosticism,” a philosophy about which I’m going to have to learn more one of these days.

But, some generations hence, his great-grandson is now an active churchgoer. I find that odd, and, if I’m honest, a bit dispiriting. But the process of moving from secularism to religion can be quicker than that, and I’ve got an example a good deal closer to home.

My maternal aunt is an interesting example. Actually, she’s an interesting person, period. She was a bright kid—she got her undergraduate degree in French, studied for a year at the University of Caen in France, got her master’s in math, and became a schoolteacher, and later on, a principal. But it was her politics that interests me most.

By all accounts, she was passionately committed to racial equality from a very early age. I’m not sure where a girl from an upper-middle-class, socially-striving family in (what was then) a wealthy neighborhood picked that up. It might have been an atavism, some genetic memory of her mother’s family’s tough times in Russian Poland, whence the Tsars chased them in 1889. It might have been from my grandmother herself, who, as a teenager, brought home a little Mexican kid she found begging for change on Cherokee Street. His name was Frankie Lopez. I don’t know what had happened to his parents, but she dragged him back to Idaho Street, gave him a bath (“which, I can tell you, he desperately needed. Poor little thing”), and sat him down at the dinner table, where he remained a regular fixture—in fact, a sort of unofficial adoptee—for years. He and my uncle, egged on by my great-grandfather, would wrestle like Lou Thesz and Strangler Lewis. Later on, he went to work in my great-grandfather’s auto parts supply business on South Broadway, and eventually became an auto mechanic and owned his own garage. Fifty years later, he wept like a baby at my great-grandfather’s funeral.

At any rate, she got deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 60’s. She marched at both Birmingham and Selma, hustled my staunchly Republican grandfather into giving her all his old office equipment for use at the NAACP office in Denver (where her then-husband, an Englishman whom she met in France, was getting his PhD in French literature), and, when it turned out she and her husband couldn’t have children, adopted four African-American children who were “wards of the state”—the unadoptables. The kids no one else wanted.

I don’t think I’ll be telling any tales out of school, or saying anything she wouldn’t agree with, if I say that my aunt is neither the warmest, nor the most nurturing, nor the most maternal of people. Some people are cut out to be moms, some weren’t. Some of my cousins are doing okay, some less so. But even if she was no great shakes as a mother, I always thought that was a pretty noble thing to do.

My self-consciously haute bourgeois grandparents were appalled. My grandmother, who had assiduously shlepped her daughters to finishing school, dance lessons, piano and violin lessons, horseback riding lessons, and a host of other activities designed to distance her progeny from the cold-water tenement flat where she’d spent her earliest years, was, simultaneously, both affectionately condescending and bewildered.

“Can you imagine,” she said to me years later, “what it was like for me to get off of that plane in my mink and my jewelry—people dressed up to get on airplanes in those days, not shlubby like you do—and to be met in the airport by this girl in this peasant dress down to her feet, and sandals, for God’s sake, with these two huge hippie braids and all these black children climbing all over her? I thought I’d have a heart attack. I was mortified.”

My grandfather, who maintained an air of chilly reserve to his dying day, never went much farther than a shrug and a quirk of his right eyebrow, but it was pretty obvious how he felt.

She was, however, a big favorite of my Russian-born great-grandfather, the Communist. My mother was blonde, pretty, demure, popular at school, a cheerleader, and, in college, a sorority girl. She took to my grandmother’s relentless agenda like a fish to water. She was the perfect daughter for a family clawing its way to moneyed middle-class respectability. My great-grandfather hated her guts. He used to make her cry on purpose. My aunt—small, dark, sharp-featured, intense, edgy, scornfully dismissive of her mother’s ambitions and blazing with that peculiar righteous indignation of the far left—well, now, her he liked just fine.

I’m not sure if civil rights was a sort of gateway drug into broader counterculture activism or not, but she was, throughout most of my childhood, a raving leftie. My brother and I still laugh about some of the presents Aunt Lynne and Uncle John got us. One year, it was “Ban the Bomb” tote bags made out of real hemp. If we’d hung on to them until we were old enough to know what hemp was, we probably would have smoked them as teenagers. Another year, it was the “Save the Whales” board game. That one was actually kind of fun. I remember being the only kid in fourth grade who knew what “baleen” meant, even if I still giggled at “sperm whale.” And she was, unsurprisingly, vocally anti-religious and openly derisive of my mother’s Christianity, about which I’ve blogged elsewhere and which she came to after seven miscarriages and a child who died two days after his birth.

But somewhere along the way, she reversed course. Completely. She is now a right-wing Republican conservative Christian who believes, absolutely and unapologetically, in the literal death and resurrection, supply-side economics, and the six-day account of Creation.

I’m genuinely not sure what occasioned the change, which, while not overnight and not completely without process (she went through a short spell of liberal Quakerism) nonetheless happened remarkably quickly. But there are, I suppose, a few watershed events that may have moved the process along.

The first was, in all probability, political.

My cousins’ formal adoption was held up for years by the fierce resistance of a Philadelphia-based organization of African-American social workers, who were ferociously opposed to the idea of white families adopting black children. To take black children out of their culture and raise them as “white” children amounted to, they argued, was “cultural genocide.” Their words, not mine. “White adoption of black children erases their heritage and will lead to the final extinguishing of our people.” Again, their words, not mine. This group—the name of which escapes me and doesn’t matter anyhow, since it no longer exists—filed legal injunctions to block the adoptions from going through, excoriated my aunt and uncle, accused them of racism, harassed them with threatening phone calls, and eventually gave up.

They were fighting a dragon that was already dead. My aunt and uncle went to great lengths to ensure that their children’s cultural heritage was honored. Their house was full of books by authors like Don Freeman and Ezra Jack Keats—books by, and about, people who looked like them. A picture of Rosa Parks was prominently displayed in the entrance to their house. She did her homework, knew not to wash the kids’ hair too often, learned what to do about ash, and even learned how to do African braiding at an Afrocentric salon in Philadelphia.

But it was immensely wounding. She genuinely wanted to work tangible and lasting change. And her treatment by people whose side she thought she was on must have felt like a betrayal, and probably estranged her from the fringes of the American left, and from activism.  

The second event was when she broke her arm.

She took a pretty bad spill while roller-skating with her kids and fractured both her radius and her ulna. It took quite a few surgeries to put her back together again, and she’s still got a serious scar running up and down the length of her inner arm. Her reaction to the experience was interesting. Instead of bemoaning her bad luck, she became fascinated by healthcare and by the human body, and when she was recovered, she ditched teaching and school administration, went to nursing school, and became a neonatal nurse, devoting the rest of her career to taking care of preemies.

To hear her tell it, that’s what turned her around on God. The more she learned about how bodies work, the more convinced she became that it didn’t all happen by accident. And with every tiny life that she helped save, and then cared for, the more convinced she became that this God had a plan for each life.

She was also going through a divorce at the same time she was in nursing school. It was pretty amicable. I suppose she and my uncle both realized that she was a difficult person to be married to, and they remain friends. But as amicable as any divorce can be, the process is still a pretty big upheaval—particularly so when you’ve got four smallish kids at home. That may also have had something to do with it, and doubtless, my mother’s proselytizing—as indefatigable as her own mother’s attempts to civilize her daughters—in all likelihood eroded her resistance to Jesus’ embrace.

Regardless of the reasons, she’s pretty firmly ensconced where she is now. And it troubles me. I’d like to think that the march of secularism and the death of religion are inevitable—but my aunt’s example shows that they’re anything but. Adversity is part of the human condition, and most likely always will be. It’s tough to contest Jesus’s prediction that the poor will always be with us, or the Preacher of Ecclesiastes’s assertion that man is born to trouble as the sparks rise. And adversity has a tendency to send people running back to the arms of the Lord, to take refuge in what they once didn’t pay attention to, or didn’t believe in.  It troubles me because I wonder if, as concrete as my own nonbelief is now, I too might suffer a relapse one day. And it troubles me because...  well, Christ, who knows? She might actually be right.

In any case, examples of people like my aunt ought to humble us nonbelievers, and knock a little of the smugness out of us. Our way is not so absolute that people can’t find their way out of it, nor so invincible that it cannot be eroded.

Why Ebonics Shouldn't Be Dissed.

Mention the word “ebonics” around most (white) people, and you’ll generally get either sneers or passionate denunciations of it. They’ll call it ghetto-talk, and tell you that they only want black people to succeed, but that that degraded, vulgar, debased mutation of English that they speak is keeping them from doing that.

Well, maybe, but I doubt it. I bet that Rosa Parks could have talked like Winston Churchill, and they still wouldn’t have let her sit in the front of the bus.

Regardless, anti-ebonics is bigotry, even if those who express it claim good intentions. In essence, when white people say that when black people should speak “proper English,” what they’re saying is “Be less black. You may not be able to do anything about being black, but for God’s sake, try not to SOUND like it. Try to sound more like us, instead.”

It’s not only bigoted, it’s hypocritical as hell, too. White people mangle English just as badly as any ebonics speaker ever did. The next time I hear someone say “Me and him went to see Toby Keith last week,” I’m going to throw the speaker through a plate glass window. Why is how black people speak any worse than how white people abuse English?

Knee-jerk anti-ebonics also originates in the mistaken, yet pervasive, notion that it was once proposed as an alternative to teaching standard American English in public schools. This isn’t true. Replacing standard English was not what Afrocentric thinkers of the 60’s and 70’s proposed. They proposed codification of Black English (which they named ebonics, the language of ebony-colored people) and its development as a literary language. This was not a new or radical idea, as we’ll see later. But somehow, it got around that militant blacks wanted to use our hard-earned tax dollars to pay for teaching kids bad English—an untruth that, nonetheless, met with fierce resistance and withering derision. Now ebonics is a joke—a punchline for dialect jokes of the lowest kind. Because the word “ebonics” has been so thoroughly derided, and because the associations are so completely negative, I’m going to ditch the term and refer to it as “Black English.”

Attacking and deriding Black English is, regardless of the stated intentions of those who do it, a personal attack. To deride someone’s language is to devalue the speaker, because language is an integral part of who we are. It is intimately tied to our very identity, as Andre Aciman describes in his memoir Out of Egypt, as he discusses Ladino, the Spanish-Jewish dialect spoken by his grandmothers:

“It was the language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.”

Attacking Black English is not only hateful and harmful. It also indicates ignorance of both the nature of language itself, and of the history of peoples and languages.

It should be by now a truism that no language is superior to any other. All languages have the same capabilities and limitations. Because there is so little genetic variation among humans as to be absolutely negligible, all humans, which we now know thanks to Noam Chomsky, are born with the same cognitive/linguistic capability—universal grammar is part of the human genetic endowment, regardless as to what kind or color of person you are. Essentially, we’re all genetically hardwired to speak the same pan-human language, with minor variations. Thus, there’s no reason to believe that any language is of lesser or greater value.

I would also argue that Black English isn’t a degraded or incorrect form of English, but that it is the distinctive language of a discrete nationality. African Americans are in America, but not entirely of America. They have been, historically, excluded from the mainstream, sequestered to enclaves and, within those enclaves, speaking a language embedded in which is a distinctive culture and history.

Black English, like all languages, is a product of the history of its speakers. English, for example, is the Celtic/German/Latin/Norman French mishmash that it is because of all the things that happened to the English people—and, like Black English, it was once the derided language of a downtrodden people. 

After the Norman invasion of 1066, English was the language of conquered peasants. Norman French was the language of the overlords. Even though English persisted (albeit with some modifications—we use English, “cow” and “pig,” to describe the animal, but French, “pork” and “beef”, to describe the meat. The peasants raised them, but the aristocrats ate them), French was still the language of the court. It took a Shakespeare—a genius of low birth, writing in the common, vulgar vernacular for the amusement of the common, vulgar masses—to show that English could be used to express the most sublime ideas and the most eloquent description of the human condition, and in doing so, to prove that English had as much value as French.

Black English is no different. It reflects the unique history of African Americans. Its vocabulary is, pretty much in its entirety, English. Slave traders broke up groups who spoke the same languages and sold them in different locations, on the not inaccurate assumption that it would be more difficult for people who weren’t able to talk to each other to organize and rebel.

Accordingly, English words were transposed on top of African ones. But because most American slaves originated in western Africa, they spoke languages that belonged to the West African language family, which all share a similar grammar. The verb “to be,” for example, is not conjugated in the West African language family. Whereas we conjugate the verb (“I am,” “she is,” “they are,”) the West Africans don’t bother. There’s no good reason why they should, either. Conjugation adds little to language in either clarity or expressiveness.

Displaced Africans, upon arriving here, replaced African words with English ones—but the underlying West African grammatical structure of their native languages persisted. Thus, when African Americans use sentences like, “I be tired,” or “They be at the store,” it’s not lazy English—it’s an example of the persistence of West African grammar. This persistence argues for its robustness and resilience. Black English has a remarkable level of cohesion with surprisingly little regional variation. In every major American city, Black English is more or less the same—it retains the same cadence, syntax, vocabulary, and even accent whether it’s spoken in New York, Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.

It wasn’t just grammar that persisted, either. Africans brought with them a rich folklore which, like their language, morphed in reaction to their new surroundings, but survived. Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” stories, for example, originate in Africa. Anansi, the Trickster Spider of West African folklore, became Brer Rabbit in this country: African folklore, adapted to an American context.

These and other examples argue for Black English’s status as a language in its own right. And those thinkers who coined the term “ebonics” and attempted to codify it and to develop it as a literary language weren’t the first to try this. It’s an idea with lots of historical precedent.  

Take Czech, for example. Originally, it didn’t even have a name. It was the language of the peasants of Bohemia, which itself was an unfashionable backwater of the Hapsburg Empire—just another regional variant of the garbled jumble of Slavic soup of East Central Europe.

But in 1846, the Czech intellectual Frantisek Palacky decided that Czech wasn’t just a ragbag collection of grunts and gutturals spoken by uneducated pig farmers or the illegitimate cousin of Russian and Polish. It was the language of a people, with their own unique history and culture. He began writing in Czech, founded journals in it, and used it to tell the story of his people. A century later, it is the language of Milan Kundera, of Vaclav Havel, of Nobel Prizewinner Jaroslav Seifert, and of Jaroslav Hacek, the author of Good Soldier Svejk, one of the truly towering works of comic literature in the human canon.

Yiddish is another example. In the 19^th century, damn near no one liked it, including those who spoke it. It was the ebonics of German, a degraded form of German written in a degraded form of Hebrew, the language of a despised and persecuted people.  

German Jews, who’d abandoned it a long time ago, were deeply embarrassed by their Eastern coreligionists’ Yiddish, calling it a “piggish jargon.” The “better class” of Russian Jews also detested their own mother tongue, and called for their brethren to abandon it and start speaking Russian. Hebraists and Zionists, embarrassed by its ghetto/shtetl associations, called for Hebrew—the language of Moses, the Prophets, King David, and a bunch of other people who may well have never existed—as the “official” Jewish language.

But writers like Mendele Mocher Sforim, S. An-Sky, Y.L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, and ultimately, Nobel Prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer thought differently. They recognized its value as the language of the Diaspora, reveled in its pungent expressiveness, and began writing in it.

Black English hasn’t yet found its Shakespeare—that writer who uses it to create works of such power that it cannot be ignored. There are plenty of artists working in it and using rap as a medium, but I’m fearful that rap’s too-rapid commercialization and subsequent bowdlerizing will bastardize it and sap its vigor before its potential is realized. And in any case, Black English is going to need a novel or thirty before most people admit that, like English, Czech, and Yiddish, it’s an appropriate vehicle for expression and a language of its own, and worthy of respect.

In the meantime, however, neither Black English nor its practitioners should be mocked. It’s not a zero-sum game—African American children can, and should, learn standard English—but the development of Black English does not have to come at the expense of teaching proper English. Its development as a literary language should be encouraged. And those of us who don’t speak it should consider ourselves fortunate to live in a time when we might actually witness the flowering of a new literary language coming into its own. 

Please Stop Calling the Republicans the "Business-Friendly Party," As If They Were the Only Game in Town.

It’s a truism of American politics that the Republican Party is the “business friendly” party, largely because of the GOP's definition of the term as adherence to two ideas: 

1. Lower taxes, and
2. Less regulation.

The GOP's devotion to these two laissez-faire economic principles approaches the religious. In today's political climate, it's heresy to question them. And their fanaticism on the subject has led to the perception, shared by Republicans and non-Republicans alike, that the GOP has a monopoly on being good for business.

But there’s something fundamentally wrong with this equation. According to the GOP's definition, "business friendly" translates to “give ‘em what they want whenever they ask for it whether or not it’s good for them." By that logic, the parent who lets their kid subsist on pixie sticks and Hershey’s Kisses is a “kid friendly” parent. Furthermore, even leaving out all the arguments one could make about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama being among the most “business friendly” Presidents we’ve had, the Democrats’ model of public/private cooperation is, in the long run, better not only for the majority of Americans, but for business itself. 

Under its current corporate configuration, American business is fundamentally unable to look ahead. Admittedly, this accusation sounds counter-intuitive. After all, the existence of venture capital is, by definition, based on the ability to look ahead, and all the major banks and investment houses have projections/forecasting departments staffed by uncounted numbers of analysts whose job it is to do nothing BUT “look ahead.”

But by ahead, I mean way ahead. Rarely does one read projections that go much beyond the next quarter or fiscal year. Forget about thirty-, twenty-, or even ten-year projections. It’s all about short-term gain, and, again because of the corporate structure of most American businesses, there's good reason for this shortsightedness.

First, investors won’t wait decades for a return. They want returns soon, if not now. And this isn’t unreasonable, considering that most American investors are over 65 (retirees make up the largest group of investors, and the median age of the retired investor is 67). If they take too long a view, they’ll be dead before they realize it.  

Secondly, corporations are run not by proprietors, but by employees. CEOs are just as much employees as are the guys on the assembly line (albeit they do own more of the company). They serve at the pleasure of the directors and the shareholders. They aren’t thinking about their legacy, or about a business they can pass down to their children. They collect a paycheck and stock options, and, all too often, couldn't care less about what happens after they go as long as they get theirs. If the meltdown of 2008 showed us nothing else, it showed that far too many corporate executives operate under the “IBG” principle: “When the chickens come home to roost, it won’t matter, because I’ll Be Gone.” Apres moi, le deluge. 

This is why the government—a disinterested entity which does not function like a business, and, indeed, shouldn’t, and which exists not to turn a quick buck, but to look ahead for future generations of Americans—needs to take an active role. And in doing so, be a better friend to business than business is itself.

This isn’t a new idea. The government has been in the incubator business for a long time. The prime engine of 19^th century economic expansion was the railroads, which provide an excellent example of public/private collaboration. The railroads simply would not have happened were it not for the government pushing their development, providing the land, the capital, the protection (both financial and physical), and, frequently, the labor itself (such as Chinese immigrants brought here at the taxpayers’ expense, or prison chain-gangs).

As corrupt as the process of building them was—and it most certainly was, rife with sweetheart deals, kickbacks, and plain old-fashioned bribery and influence-peddling—the railroads did get built. And the ability to move vast amounts of people and products across unimaginable distances at unprecedented speed laid the groundwork for America’s 20^th century industrial primacy.  

This model provided the United States with the prime engine of economic expansion again in the 20^th century with the postwar construction of the federal Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Again, the process was fraught with corruption, backroom deals, and shady dealing on the part of major corporations like General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil (all of whom had good reasons for wanting highways, not streetcars or light rail, to be built). But once again, public empowerment of the private sector had worked, again generating millions of jobs and trillions in revenue.

Massive investment in physical infrastructure isn't the only way government helps business. Virtually all of the major technological advances of the last 50 years have either been directly created, or heavily subsidized, by the federal government: microwave ovens being just one small, but lucrative, example of gadgets generated by the space program that subsequently made it to the commercial sphere. The research which eventually led  to the Information Revolution conducted at Bell Labs, the Xerox Research Facility at Palo Alto, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc., was funded, in large part, by your tax dollars. And profitably. Even if not immediately.

Think of the Internet. In the late 1960’s when the idea of computers exchanging data was first murkily emerging, the smart money wouldn’t have touched it any more than they would have touched a plutonium-coated leper. Most Americans didn’t know what a computer was. It was science fiction, and capital doesn’t mess around with science fiction. Thankfully, the U.S.Government (specifically, the U.S. Military, which recognized its potential as a means of military communication) funded that research, which led to the development of the prime engines of economic expansion in the 21^th century. Pretty good return on the initial investment of your tax dollars, even if it did take forty years.  

It should be clear to even the most casual observer that the Next Big Thing—the next engine of economic growth—is going to be renewable, sustainable energy. The added urgency to developing alternative energy is that not only will it be profitable--it'll be necessary. 

The first reason for this is that we’re running out of oil. Opinions differ as to when “peak oil” production, and the subsequent decline, is going to kick in. Many industry professionals believe we’ve hit peak oil already. But no one in the industry seriously doubts we’re approaching that point. Oil- shale refining, drilling in wilderness preserves, and other schemes to squeeze yet more oil out of the ground are short-term band-aids. The clock is ticking on oil. 

And secondly, the bad publicity is becoming intolerable. No serious person really doubts that rampant fossil fuel consumption is contributing, in terrifying ways, to global climate change and compromising our health. Alternative energy—wind, solar, plant-based, you name it—is going to be the juggernaut that carries us forward.

But again, the IBG-driven short-sightedness of American business leadership kicks in. In the short term, it's cheaper to just keep doing things the way we're doing them now. Peak oil may not hit for a few decades yet, and when it does—ten, twenty or thirty years down the pike—the suits now calling the shots will either be retired or dead. And it won’t be their problem.

Inevitably, when one makes this argument, Solyndra gets thrown up as, at worst, an example of bald-faced corruption on the part of the Obama administration, or at best, as an example of why the government should stay out. But supporting Solyndra, and companies like it, is what the government should do, precisely because it’s not the (immediately) profitable move, but because it’s the responsible move.

American business needs the government—not merely for the resources that an entity the size of the government can throw behind new ventures, but to save it business from itself. American business needs an entity that is not dependent upon shareholder approval or animated by the corporate “get rich now” ethos to originate and support what the “smart money” won’t touch until it becomes irresistible not to. American business needs the long-term vision of the government—an entity which is not beholden to shareholders, but to the future of the American people. 

Paul Ryan May Be Just The Dreamiest Congressman Out There, But for Pete's Sake, Quit Calling Him an Intellectual.

Republican sexuality creeps me out. Generally, they hate and fear sex, probably because that party is comprised almost entirely of Evangelicals and WASPs, two of the most repressed groups in human history. So they suppress it and hide it. But as Dr. Freud taught us, you can’t crush it down—the sexual urge will surface. So their sexuality finds expression in the disturbingly erotic attraction they evince for their candidates.  

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current orgy of gooing and cooing over Mitt Romney’s pick for VP, the dreamy, blue-eyed, fit-as-a-fiddle Paul Ryan. Read the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan Facebook fanboy/girl pages on Facebook. Those Conservative broads just soak their collective capacious, poly/cotton, six-to-a-pack-at-Walmart panties over this guy.

“Such a beautiful family,” they sigh (SQUISH). “Look at those eyes!” they moan (GUSH). “He’s like a knight in shining armor!” they whimper (GLOOSH). And worst of all, “He’s so smart! He’s such an intellectual” (SPLURSSSSSHHHHHH).

Barring the vulgar sound effects I added purely for the sake of cheap comedy, I’m not making any of this up. These are real quotes.

The Republican fangirls (and, one can only assume, some boys) are not alone in their adoration. The mainstream media also went gaga for him, blathering about his “undeniable brilliance”, his “impressive brainpower”, and the “intellectual heft” he brought to the ticket. Which left me scratching my head. Paul Ryan an intellectual?

Bitches, please.

“Intellectual” is, like “obscenity”, a tough concept to define. But, to swipe Justice Potter Stewart’s line about obscenity, I know an intellectual when I see one. Paul Ryan ain’t one. He’s actually not very bright. Matter of fact, this twerp is actively anti-intellectual. And here’s why I think so.

1. He doesn’t have any of the traditional markers. Paul Ryan holds no advanced degrees, speaks no foreign languages, and has no significant publications to his credit. Now, while it’s not necessarily a prerequisite to have an advanced degree or fluency in a language other than one’s own, either or both is, in today’s world, a pretty good indicator.

         At the very least, having them indicates a quality that Ryan doesn’t have, namely...

2. Intellectual curiosity. Ryan exhibits none. This guy, by his own admission, hasn’t changed his opinion on anything since he was 14. If your thinking hasn’t evolved since you were 14, it’s not only a pretty good indication you’re not only NOT an intellectual—it’s a pretty good sign you’re stupid. The guy is content to believe what he’s believed since before he finished puberty. Finishing that process alone ought to change your view of the world. But not Paul Ryan.

3. Paul Ryan has no significant publications to his credit. Intellectuals generally do a lot of writing and publishing. This is how we know they’re intellectuals. The one “book” he’s participated in “writing” (the originally-titled “Young Guns,” coauthored with those intellectual heavyweights Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy) was ghostwritten. Again, I can’t define “intellectual,” but whatever they are, I’m pretty sure they write their own books.

4. The guy doesn’t have an original thought in his head. The much-lauded "Path to Prosperity" Ryan budget contains precisely no new ideas, no innovative solutions, or any stunning, earth-shattering revelations. Yes, the deficit is a big problem, but no one on either side of the aisle debates that. His economic philosophy, as expressed in his budget, is nothing more than a warmed-over rehash of the same tired, shopworn old supply-side, trickle-down claptrap peddled during the Reagan years—which even its architect, David Stockman, now openly disavows. Because it didn’t work.  

5. He is avowedly anti-science. The examples are legion: he thinks scientists are involved in a “global conspiracy to delude the public about climate change”; under his budget, over 1 million college students would lose Pell grants over the next ten years; he voted to take away federal funding of both PBS and NPR; and he is opposed to stem-cell research. Again, I can’t define what an intellectual is, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t anti-intellect. There is nothing in this guy’s voting record or public utterances to suggest he respects knowledge, or those who add to, gain, and share it. In fact, there’s a lot to suggest he doesn’t.

6. Bill Maher makes an excellent point about this guy, which is worth quoting in full: “Why is he the intellectual of the Republican Party? He has, from what I can see, two ideas. One, let’s stop having rich people pay taxes at all, and poor people should look for food in the woods. This is the intellectual? He’s a step up from Sarah Palin? Actually, you know, he’s more articulate than Sarah Palin, but tell me one area where he and Sarah Palin would disagree. I cannot find one area. So somehow, he’s the smartest guy in the party, and she’s the stupidest woman on earth, but they agree on everything.”

Hell of a point. Most Republicans will, at mention of the Belle of the Bible Belt, kind of grin sheepishly and admit she’s as dumb as furniture. But there’s no difference between her thinking and Paul Ryan’s.

7. Finally—and let’s let this nail close the coffin on Paul Ryan’s “intellectualism”: the dumb son of a bitch still takes Ayn Rand seriously.  He says it himself: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” 

Problem is, no serious academics or intellectuals take Ayn Rand seriously. They never did. She’s not taught in the political science or political philosophy departments of any legitimate, accredited universities. She’s a tenth-rate philosopher and a 15^th-rate novelist. If Ayn Rand is a serious philosopher, David Barton is a serious historian.

And, much like her acolyte, she also didn’t have an original thought in her head. Her “philosophy”, that “Objectivism” and “rational self-interest”, was lifted, part and parcel, from Herbert Spencer’s late 19^th century “social Darwinism”—essentially, in society, the fittest should survive and the rest of them die. Through a little misreading of Nietzsche in there—“God is dead, and let’s go beyond good and evil”—and mix in a dab of anti-Soviet resentment, and you’ve got Ayn Rand in a nutshell.

Ayn Rand appeals to the barely-literate, the mean-spirited, and the guilty. Her garbage is what upper middle-class 14-year olds who’ve heard their grandfathers bitch about welfare and extol the virtues of being a self-made man read to justify their own privileged existence.

Ryan, in his pandering bid to woo Bible-beatin’ middle America, has recently back-pedalled from his prior endorsement of the half-baked “philosophy” of this outspokenly atheistic, abortion-havin’, adulterous, altruism-hatin’ Russian radical, but make no mistake—by his own admission, he’s a big fan.

Again, I can’t define “intellectual,” but I know anyone who takes Ayn Rand seriously sure as shootin’ ain’t one.

John Stuart Mill once said, “I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”

Being conservative isn’t necessarily a mark of stupidity—there are plenty of very intelligent conservatives with legitimate reasons for their beliefs, who articulate their views well, and who make valid criticisms of leftist thought and policy. Friedrich Hayek, Irving Kristol, John Podhoretz, P.J. O’Rourke, David Brooks, and Leo Strauss all leap to mind. I disagree with them, but I can respect them. But Paul Ryan isn’t in their company. He’s not one of them. He isn’t fit to carry their library card. 

You know, I remember a far, far distant time—2011—when Newt Gingrich was supposed to be the in-house intellectual of the Republican Party. Newt, at least, has a doctorate in history. I’ll give him that. But somehow, he’s had to give up his seat to the mediocrity in pants that is Paul Ryan.

I put in this picture for no other reason than it angers Romney and Ryan supporters. That's as good a reason to add a picture as any. 

I'll Punch You Right In The Heart If You Think I'm Poor.

The election of 2012 may well be remembered by future historians as the Fight for the Middle Class. The words “middle class” are as much a mantra to both Romney and Obama as “maverick” was to Sarah Palin. The parties are fighting like piranhas on bath salts for the privilege of being the One True Champion of the Middle Class.

But neither side is saying much about the poor.*

This is because America hates poor people.

Let’s just admit it. We hate the poor. We detest them. We make brutal fun of them at best (watch an episode of the mercifully-cancelled "My Name is Earl" or pay a quick visit to peopleofwalmart.com, if you don't believe me)--or we insult them by using some of the ugliest words and phrases in the language: “Welfare queens.” “White trash.” “Niggers.” “Trailer trash.” Our hatred of the poor cuts across racial lines. We hate and mock and fear poor whites as much as we do poor blacks. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that America’s perennial “race problem” is more about class than race. I think Americans hate poor people worse than we hate black people. It’s just convenient that so many black people are poor. Makes it easier for us to conflate the two categories of people we hate the most.

This disdain for the poor is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that I wonder if it’s become part of our genetic code. And, honestly, I’m no better than anyone else.

I was recently caught in a traffic backup that put me home a half-hour later than usual. I fumed behind the wheel, inching forward, until finally I saw the source of the snarl: a twelve-year-old, rust-spotted Pontiac, hood up, smoke pouring out, stopped in the center lane.

The driver—one of those skinny, flaxen-haired, wife-beater-clad, chinstrap-bearded types that Missouri produces in such vast numbers—was standing helplessly beside his car, arms outstretched as if to say to all us angry motorists, “Hayell, man, I ain’t got no idear why she quit.”

I lost it. “Get your &#%$ing oil changed next time, you @%#ing redneck!!” I shrieked from behind closed windows, revved my engine just to let him know how mad I was, and sailed merrily on before I realized that I—a card-carrying Socialist—had just cursed a poor person for having the audacity to let his poverty inconvenience me for half an hour.

It’s not just that we hate poor people—we’re also terrified of being thought poor ourselves. Our politicians aren’t stupid. They’re appealing to the “middle class” because no one in America wants to admit they’re poor. We can stand being called “middle class.” But not even the poorest among us can stand being called “poor.”

"Socialism never took root in America,” said John Steinbeck, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Never were truer words spoken. We don’t think of ourselves as poor—and we go to great lengths to convince ourselves (and anyone who’s watching) that we’re not.

In fact, we make ourselves poorer so that we don’t look poor. We drive cars, live in houses, and buy clothes more expensive than those we need, but that make us think we look rich. The rash of outlet malls creeping over the landscape like open herpes sores exists solely so that we can wear Polo, Calvin Klein, and Ann Taylor—just like rich people wear!—without actually having to pay full price. In essence, they’re there to help us fool people into thinking we’re not broke as junkies.

~          ~          ~

I can't say for certain where this peculiarly American dislike of poor people comes from. I suspect, however, it comes from our Calvinist Puritan roots. Prosperity, to the Pilgrims and their ilk, was a sign of God’s favor. Those whom He loved would He bless with riches (which goes completely counter to everything Jesus ever preached, but don’t expect Christians to be Christlike). This idea is the source of what sociologist Max Weber called the “Protestant work ethic”: work your ass off and make all the money you can. Get rich or die tryin.’ Otherwise, people might think God doesn’t like you.

This idea finds secular expression in a phrase that's become America's nickname, its unofficial moniker: “The Land of Opportunity.” “America is the Land of Opportunity!” we tell ourselves in civics class, political rallies, and damn near everywhere else where Americans gather to tell ourselves how great we are. It’s our most sacred shibboleth. Our national Kool-Aid. It’s practically an article of religious faith. “Anyone can make it in America! You just work hard, apply yourself, keep your nose to the grindstone, don’t take any wooden nickels, and you, too, can end up a millionaire!” 

And it’s sort of true, maybe, kind of, a little. Both my grandfathers were born dirt poor, worked their asses off, and ended up doing okay (although honest labor may have had less to do with it than I like to imagine. My father is fond of saying, “Sonny boy, one of your grandpas went to jail, and the other one should’ve”).

But “The Land of Opportunity” has a dark side that is terrifying in its implication. If America truly is the Land of Opportunity, it means that if you don’t make it in America, it’s... your... fault.

Taken to its logical conclusion, if you’re poor in America, it means there’s something wrong with you. You’re defective in some measure. It means that you’re lazy. Or stupid. Or dishonest. Or immoral.

Think about how we talk about  those poor people who have the nerve to collect welfare: “They’re lazy. They’re promiscuous. They have all these kids they can’t take care of. They don’t want to work. They’re thieves. They’re all on drugs. They’re like animals, they just want free handouts. They’re just soaking up my hard-earned tax dollars.”

Cripes, who’d want to be described like THAT? Who’d want to help THOSE people? No wonder we treat the poor like lepers. No wonder we flee, not just from the physical location of the poor, but from any association with them.

What’s implicit in calling America “The Land of Opportunity” is that the poor deserve their poverty. And much of America buys it, which turns traditional values upside down. The rich have become our folk heroes—and the poor have become the villains of the American narrative. This makes it okay to treat the poor like criminals—insisting, for example, that we humiliate them by making them undergo drug tests before they get their welfare check. Or implementing a draconian “three strikes and you’re out” policy and calling it “welfare reform.” Or entertaining such inhuman proposals as scrapping free and reduced lunch programs for poor children in public schools, as I recently heard right-wing AM talk radio host Michael Savage suggest.

The truth, as anyone who cares to get beyond the current American cacophony of wealth-fetishizing sycophancy knows, is different. In most cases, people are poor for reasons beyond their control. Their jobs go away, they get sick and can’t pay for it, their families couldn’t afford to educate them—dear God, there are a zillion reasons for poverty that have nothing to do with any fictitious inherent defects on the part of the poor.  

But many of us don’t want the truth. We’d prefer to pretend. We’d prefer to idolize the rich and deny compassion to the less fortunate. We’d prefer to vote Republican, since, after all, that’s the party of the rich—like us—and that Mitt Romney, who is, after all, a millionaire (like we’ll be some day), better represents our economic interests than the party of the free welfare handouts. We’d prefer to project, through our clothes and houses and cars and stuff, the fantasy that we’re rich.  

We’d prefer to believe we’re just temporarily embarrassed members of the Middle Class.

---

* With the exception of Mitt Romney, who says, quote, “I’m not worried about the very poor.” Good on you, Mitty. I just bet you’re not. 

"There's No Such Thing As Money."

I remember the moment when I realized America had lost its collective mind.

Sarah Palin had just wrapped up her interview with Katie Couric, delivering quite possibly the most embarrassing interview performance in televised history. I mean, Jesus, even if you don’t like the lady—and I don’t—it was painful to watch. “Well, that’s it,” I thought. “If that’s what comes after John McCain’s coronary, we might as well make it unanimous for Barack.”

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, from Sarah's historic interview--a moment in television history proving that two dunderheaded broads whose joint IQ doesn't equal my shoe size can still be fascinating, as long as they're hot. 

But that didn’t happen. Within seconds of the Couric/Palin interview, Fox News commentators began talking about how Mrs. Palin had done a “brilliant job fielding tough questions from a hard-as-nails interviewer.”

This is horseshit of a mindboggling level of audacity. Katie Couric lobs more softballs than a minivan full of lesbians. But tons of people chose to believe Fox News’ interpretation of the events. And I realized that a large chunk of the American public just flat out chooses to opt out of reality.

I don’t think it was always this way. I truly do believe that at earlier times in our history, we as a nation and as a people have been more engaged with reality. But for some reason, we just opt out of it now.

I’m not sure why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that television has a lot to do with it. I’m not saying there’s no place for escapism, but at least in the old days, when you went to see a movie, you entered the theater, a physical place distinct from the rest of the world. The lights went off; and when the movie was over, the lights came back on and you left. It was like waking up from a dream. There was a definite break between the fantasy world of the movie and reality—a distinct separation between fantasy and reality.

But television is in our homes (in many houses, in every room in the home), on our computer screens, on our phones. It surrounds us with a damn near inescapable cocoon of fantasy and unreality, integrating fantasy into the fabric of our daily lives. It’s warped our collective psychology and both facilitated and hastened our headlong retreat from the real world.

Resulting in huge chunks of America that willingly swallow the biggest, most baldfaced whoppers you can imagine and outright lunacy like,

• “Your child set fire to the shop teacher not because he’s a psychotic little asshole, but because he’s gifted.” 
• “Taking pills will help you safely lose weight.” 
• “Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.” 
• “The Koch Brothers’ economic interests are your own.” 
• “Barack Obama was not born in the United States.” 
• “Lower taxes on billionaires will result in more jobs for all of us.”
• "People actually care about what you made for dinner/where you visited recently/how your health is when you post it on Facebook."

But perhaps the most glaring evidence of our retreat from reality was the economic meltdown of 2008.

I don’t get the Great Recession. I don’t. I mean, I do, sort of, maybe, in the sort of foggy way that most people get it... banks made a ton of bad loans to people who had no way of paying them back, and then somehow it all went to shit and now everyone’s scared for their jobs. I guess I get it, a little bit.

But on a much more fundamental level, I don’t fucking get it at all. We still have the ground. Stuff still grows out of it. We still pull metal and fuel out of it. People still need to eat and wear clothes and buy stuff made out of metal and drive cars and stay warm. It isn’t like we lost a big chunk of the ground. It isn’t like the western half of the U.S. fell into the ocean. The economic meltdown was not caused by a drought, a flood, a famine, a hurricane, or anything else that affected our ability to produce stuff that other people need.

In other words, nothing that happened in the real world actually affected either our needs or our ability to produce goods to meet those needs. Nothing physical, material, or based in reality happened to change the system. 

But we’ve succumbed, somehow, to some sort of worldwide mass psychosis. Modern capitalism is based on absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Zip. Bubkes. Zlich. The entire “financial industry” based on a delusion—a perception of reality. But it’s all, essentially, one big bubbleful of nothing. We've opted for the fantasy that nothing actually amounts to something--and we've allowed it to ruin countless lives. 

Here’s how I understand it. A bunch of banks knowingly lent a bunch of nothing (okay, not nothing, some pieces of paper with some numbers on them, but for our purposes, it was still pretty much nothing) to people to buy houses with nothing. The banks then took this nothing that the people who bought the houses had promised to them, and packaged and re-packaged and re-re-repackaged this nothing into different and various other forms of nothing, which they then sold to other people, in exchange for more nothing. The other people then used this new nothing to finance their acquisition of more nothing, and with that nothing, they were able to leverage their ability to borrow more nothing, which they then SOMETIMES used to do some actual stuff, but mostly was just in exchange for more nothing.

Along the way, different chunks of this nothing were given interesting names like “stocks, “bonds,” “hedge funds,” “derivatives,” “money markets,” “options,” “futures,” “mutual funds,” “triple renooberated fiduciary allocatives,” and other terms which I don’t understand, and neither do you, and that’s precisely what the people who gave them those names intended. But at the end of the day, they were all just names to signify the transfer of nothing from one set of people to another set of people.

Didn’t matter, though. The nothingniks figured out ever more ingenious ways to make money off of nothing. They would bet nothing against nothing. You could buy a piece of the odds of those bets—which were nothing—and then resell that nothing for more nothing. And then you could shave little bits off that nothing and repackage those little shaved bits of nothing into other forms of nothing with new and even more opaque names.

And everything was going along swimmingly, until someone committed the financial equivalent of yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater and said, “HEY! They’re not paying back their nothing! There’s nothing here!”  At which point, it all went to shit in a global cataclysm of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and people started beating each other up in Athens and camping out in Zuccotti Park.

And somewhere along the line, we forgot that the whole goddamn thing was all about nothing.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Our species seems prone to losing our collective shit in vast numbers. Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds may well yet be the best book on the subject ever penned, with chapters on Tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Land Bubble, the Crusades, and other hullabaloos and to-dos over absolutely nothing. But in recent years, no one example, or person, better sums up what I’m talking about than Robert Maxwell, the British media baron who fell off his yacht and drowned in 1991.

This is Robert Maxwell, the biggest crook in Britain's history, and a virtuoso of the art of making nothing look like something. 

Maxwell, while alive, was one of the world’s wealthiest men—or so people thought. But after he died, it turned out that he was zillions of pounds sterling in debt, he’d looted his companies’ pension funds to pay off debts, and his empire, an intricate web of more than 300 different companies and entities, collapsed in flames. He’s still the biggest crook in Britain’s history.

I wouldn’t call him precisely a hero, but I am fascinated by him, and I’m not the only one. For some reason, this great, fat, replete, smiling bastard, this ubershnook, this super-criminal who could have stepped off the pages of a James Bond novel (in fact, he was the inspiration for Elliot Carver, the villain in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies), captivates a lot of people. He’s been used as a character in novels. There are tons of books about him (I’ve read five of them), two plays, and a full length BBC movie, Maxwell, starring David “Poirot” Suchet in the title role, and written by a guy named Craig Warner.

I mention the writer because, being of that persuasion myself, I like writers, and because this guy Warner is a bona fide genius. Two passages that he wrote illustrate, perfectly, the delusion I’m talking about.

In one scene, Maxwell, discussing the value of his companies with two of his bankers over dinner on the roof of his London skyscraper, waves his great fat flipper of a hand and says dismissively,

We talk about “tangibles” and “intangibles,” but do we really know what we mean? Cash is supposed to be tangible. But cash has no real value. It’s just paper. And on it is a promise of something, a promise of some sterling silver. But who goes to the Bank of England to demand their silver? No one. We just trade the promise.

Later on, Maxwell is dictating his plans for the next day into his little pocket tape recorder:

Buy as much MCC [Maxwell Communications Corporation, his flagship company] as you can. Support the price. Take the money from MCC itself and give it to Robert Maxwell Holdings for investment. And then to McMillan to buy their printing presses for half what they’re worth, and then buy them back at half price, which gives us a 300% profit on those assets, which we’ll record as trading profit. We shall go back to MCC and buy more shares and we can use their certificates to guarantee loans, which will then be funneled through Liechtenstein, and with that, we’ll buy more MCC shares. And, well, if anyone asks who controls Liechtenstein, we’ll say “who the FUCK knows. It’s a charitable trust. We’re not omniscient.”

He pauses, smiles, and then turns the recorder back on and says,

There’s no such thing as money.

See, Maxwell got it. He knew that the system was all based on nothing, and he figured out how to manipulate it, work it, and leverage all that nothing into a seat in Parliament. Yachts. Planes. Helicopters. Mansions the world over. Suits from Savile Row, shoes from John Lobb. Art and antiques. Invitations to the best parties, access to world leaders, dinners with the Queen, awe and admiration, women, Cuban cigars, and enough caviar, prime rib, and champagne to eventually swell him up to over 400 pounds.

He figured out how to turn fantasy into reality. Granted, it all came tumbling down, but he had a hell of a run at it while it lasted.

Amoral as all hell? Well, sure. But there’s something in me that admires the hell out of a guy who figures out that it’s all based on nothing and makes a hell of a livelihood at it. Especially while the rest of us continue, willfully, to believe in the fantasy that the gobbledygook and doubletalk slung at us by the bankers, stockbrokers, estate attorneys, financial planners, Federal Reserve, and President means or signifies anything more than a great, steaming, pile of nothing.

You can watch the entire movie "Maxwell" on YouTube. Well worth the time. 

Of Baseball, Cuba, Corporate Power, and Free Speech.

I’m a newly-minted baseball fan. Suddenly, after close to forty years of simply not giving a damn about sports of any kind, I am a rabid baseball-a-holic and diehard supporter of the St. Louis Cardinals.

It happened last year, when the Cards, in one of the most dramatic World Series games ever (Game 5, bottom of the eleventh, two outs, two strikes, bases loaded, David Freese belts in a grand slam homer) defeated the Texas Rangers.

In other words, the team once owned by Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis' oldest and most beloved business which, thanks to George W. Bush, was picked up at a bargain-basement price by the Belgians, defeated the team once owned by Dubya hisself.

If you don’t see cosmic significance in that, you’re crazy.

My old Midwestern rust belt city’s jaw-dropping ass-smacking of Dubya’s Rangers at the eleventh hour turned me, formerly indifferent verging on hostile to professional sports, into a fan. Since then, I’ve been watching baseball, and the issues surrounding it, with a lot of interest. And it frequently strikes me that baseball, that quintessentially American sport, is a flashpoint for many other issues which with Americans wrestle.

For example, the latest brouhaha engendered by Florida Marlins’ GM Ozzie Guillen’s comments on Fidel Castro.

For those of you living in hermetic isolation who missed it, Ozzie Guillen recently gave a magazine interview wherein he said he admired Fidel Castro for his ability to stay in power and flip off the world’s biggest, baddest superpower from less than 90 miles off its coast for more than 50 years.

Now, while it is less than a ringing endorsement of unqualified support for all the aspects of El Jefe’s character (and honestly, considering the old bastard has survived a zillion cockamamie U.S. plots to kill him, including, but not limited to, planting explosives in his cigars, who DOESN’T have a sneaking admiration for him?), it still wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Not if you’re the GM of a team in a city where exiles from Castro’s Cuba make up a big chunk of the city’s population and wield a hell of a lot of political and economic clout.

Couple of things to point out here. One, Ozzie is Venezuelan by birth. And after more than a hundred years of essential U.S. colonization and tyranny, it’s understandable that the Venezuelans might be oriented more towards Castro than towards Washington. Ask Hugo Chavez. He sure is.

Two, Fidel Castro, as son-of-a-bitch dictators go, is a little lower on the Satanic Maleficence of Son-Of-A-Bitch Dictators scale than, say, Saddam Hussein. Or Muammar Khadafy. Or the Kims of North Korea. Or the Assads of Syria. Or the Saudi royal family. Or Kony. Or Idi Amin. Or General Suharto. 

Predictably, though, Miami's rabidly anti-Communist and Republican Cubans—who, thanks to their economic success and thick concentration in Dade County, have a hell of a lot of political influence—went absolutely loco. They choked on their cigars, spilled their mojitos all over their white suits, and frothed at the mouth with holy righteous indignation that someone said something about Fidel Castro that didn’t end with, “...and demons should sodomize him with fire-ant covered rattlesnakes in hell forever and ever, amen.”

Ozzie called a press conference, apologized profusely, said he’d been “misquoted,” that he "hated Castro," that he’d been “thinking in Spanish and speaking in English,” and essentially stumbled over his own dick in an attempt to backtrack faster than Mitt Romney in a room full of pro-lifers and show how sorry he was by groveling like a prison bitch.

And the Marlins, just to show Miami’s Cubans just how appalled, shocked, indignant, and aflame with holy righteous indignation they were, suspended him for five games.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

Dumb thing to say? Well, yeah. But Ozzie Guillen broke neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of Major League Baseball. Poor judgment or not, he exercised the basic American right of free speech. Ironically, a right which, presumably, Miami’s Cuban exiles came here to enjoy. And he was penalized for it.

My father makes the point that while he has the right to say what he said, the Marlins, likewise, have the right to suspend or fire him. Legally, it appears my dad is right. They do. But I’m not sure they should. It’s illegal for corporations and companies to punish, penalize or discriminate on the bases of race, religion, age, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation. Those categories are all protected classes. Why, then, is it acceptable and legal in the United States to penalize someone for exercising their constitutional right to free speech?

Regardless as to why it’s legal, it is. Which raises, in my mind, an even more disturbing issue. The First Amendment protects our right of free speech from the government. But free speech does not seem to have any protection whatsoever from corporate power, the ability of which to muzzle American citizens grows apace.

This scares the shit out of me. It should scare you, too.

What I wish the Marlins had done is issue a statement saying, “The Florida Marlins neither endorse nor agree with the statements made by our General Manager. We, like  you, think Fidel Castro is an asshole. However, inasmuch as he made those comments as a private citizen and did not claim to speak for this organization as a whole, there’s really nothing we can do about it, so kindly fuck off and take your goddamned protest signs with you.”

Putting principle above profit would have been the morally laudable thing to do. But they didn’t. And, more to the point, they couldn’t. You see, they’re a corporation. And corporations are, by definition, incapable of acting in a moral fashion.

This is not to say that they always act in an immoral fashion. They don’t take the low road any more than they take the high road. They are utterly amoral entities. Low road and high road, right and wrong, moral and immoral, are immaterial. They always take the profitable road, because that’s the only one they’re capable of taking.

It is illegal—a prosecutable crime—for the directors of publicly held corporations to act in any manner, or perform any action, that may jeopardize the corporation’s profitability. Even if it's the right thing to do.

Now, they dress this amorality up in fancy, high-falutin’, altruistic-sounding language: “We, the directors of this publicly-held entity, have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard the economic well-being of our shareholders.”

It sure sounds nice. Look at the words they use. Public. Fiduciary. Well-being. Responsibility. Safeguard. Cripes, you’d think they were Mother Theresa.

But strip away all the high-blown rhetoric, and what they’re really saying is, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make money, regardless of whom or what we fuck over in the process.”

This has terrifying implications for American citizens. Because corporations are very good at making money—indeed, have a legal mandate to be very good at it—and because money is the mother’s milk of American politics, it means that the government has ordered corporations to take over, to the detriment of the citizenry.

Say that a corporation owns a manufacturing facility which produces toxic waste. And the people of the neighboring town, understandably, would prefer that said toxic waste not seep into their groundwater, get blown into their air, or settle all over their crops.

The moral thing, of course, would be to truck it away somewhere safe, or, better yet, find a way to make your shit without generating poison. But corporations can’t act morally. They can only act profitably. So if it’s cheaper for them to hire lobbyists, form PACs, make political contributions, subvert democracy, and get the laws rewritten so that it’s perfectly legal for them to dispose of their toxic waste wherever the hell they feel like it, that’s what they’ll do. Citizens be damned.

Essentially, corporations are, by definition and by legal mandate, sociopaths.

Which is why it was disheartening as hell to see the Marlins management take the weaselly way out instead of standing up for their employee and his Constitutional right to free speech. Disheartening. But not surprising.

Ozzie’s not alone. The list of public figures who’ve been taken down by the bitches’ brew of public indignation and the alacrity with which corporations move to protect their economic interests is getting pretty long. 

Tragically, though, I’m afraid that Jimmy the Greek, Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Tracey Morgan, and all the others who’ve been punished because of “offensive” things they’ve said are just the beginning. Their ordeals are merely the harbingers of something even worse. Corporations don’t care about the constitutional rights of Americans. They only care about their bottom lines, and if profitability depends on running roughshod over our rights, then it’s our rights that'll go. We have no recourse against them. And so long as they continue to increase their power, it’s only going to get worse.

You don’t have to like Helen Thomas, for example. You don’t have to agree with her assertion that the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is “[for] all the Jews [to] leave Palestine and go back to Europe.” I don’t. But she shouldn’t have lost her job for saying it. 

What the cases of Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Jimmy the Greek, and all the rest of them show is very simple: We have allowed corporations to criminalize dissent. And when dissenters have no protection, then we have no plurality of thought. And when that happens, democracy dies. 

But who cares? So long as we still have baseball (and we will, so long as team ownership continues to turn a profit), will anyone miss democracy or even notice when it's gone? 

Batter up.