Does TREME Need a Script for Another Season?

This morning BBC News broke the following story about Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans during the Katrina crisis:

Mr Nagin, 56, is accused of using his office for personal gain and of accepting bribes and other illicit gratuities while the city of New Orleans reeled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  

According to the federal indictment, Mr Nagin accepted more than $160,000 (£100,000) in bribes for his family business.

In exchange, Mr Nagin allegedly helped local businessman Frank Fradella secure millions of dollars in contracts from the city in the wake of Katrina.

Mr Nagin is also charged with accepting payoffs worth at least $60,000 from another businessman, Rodney Williams, who was given contracts for engineering, management and architectural work in the city.

Fradella and Williams have already pleaded guilty in connection with the case.

Since David Simon is a former journalist, we can expect that he knows a good story when he sees one. This one should fit nicely into the plot line for Treme that he has already developed!

Business Attacks the Community (again)

Since I am no longer part of the corporate world, I feel I can read accounts of the debate over BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) practices with some degree of detachment. In that context I was particular interested in "The hidden danger to companies with BYOD," the latest post by James Kendrick to his Mobile News blog on ZDNet. Whether or not it was his intention to do so, Kendrick framed the debate over BYOD as a question of values. On the one hand the great asset of BYOD is that it tends to increase the productivity of the individual worker. However, the "hidden danger" he has in mind is that the price of that increased productivity is a decrease of any sense of the workplace as a "community of practice," a principle that emerged from studies of workplace anthropology that identified situations in which social interactions within the workplace could solve challenging problems beyond the grasp of any one individual.

Those studies provided a trove of anecdotal evidence that would be repeated with great frequency back in the days when everyone was drinking the "knowledge sharing" Kool-Aid. The problem was nor that the evidence was specious but that most businesses were looking for some kind of magic bullet that would provide them with both individual productivity and increased knowledge sharing, not realizing that, in their own bean-counting mentality, the time spent sharing knowledge was time not spent on individual productivity. The fact is that, in the prevailing social context of work, because job security has become a think of the past, every individual must constantly under the gun over whether or not (s)he will be able to keep her/his job; and, at the end of the day, all this is going to matter is whatever metric of productivity prevails every time that worker is evaluated.

I would further suggest that the deterioration of any strong sense of community in the workplace entails the side effect of similar deterioration in the world at large. This is what Robert Putnam called the "bowling alone" phenomenon. The fact is that the deterioration has only progressed further since Putman's article about this phenomenon first appeared in 1995; and these days it seems as if we are only aware of a sense of community when the members of that community gather in the wake of a major disaster, whether it is a hurricane like Katrina or Sandy or the latest instance of a mass shooting. Perhaps, if we recognized that the lone gunman responsible for such killing is the reductio ad absurdum of individual productivity, we might finally make a serious commitment to reversing that trend that, last night, President Barack Obama declared cannot be allowed to continue.

Plato on Health Care

The greatest surprises in reading Plato arise when he takes on topics I had not expected he would address, often in discussions where those topics do not initially seem relevant.  Health care is a good case in point.  This shows up in “Laws,” of all places.  Perhaps this was because this was the last of the dialogues he wrote, so his own health and mortality were likely on his mind.  As usual, what I discovered turned out to be fascinating.

First of all there was the nature of how health care was practiced.  Clearly, there were those among the free men who received training in the necessary arts.  However, they usually had slaves.  Physicians would then share their training with their slaves, so the slaves could act as assistants.  Where things get interesting, however, is that the slaves did more than just assist their masters with their masters’ patients:

Now have you observed that, as there are slaves as well as free men among the patients of our communities, the slaves, to speak generally, are treated by slaves, who pay them a hurried visit, or receive them in dispensaries?  A physician of this kind never gives a servant any account of his complaint, nor asks him for any;  he gives him some empirical injunction with an air of finished knowledge, in the brusque fashion of a dictator, and then is off in hot haste to the next ailing servant—that is how he lightens his master’s medical labors for him.  The free practitioner, who, for the most part, attends free men, treats their diseases by going into things thoroughly from the beginning in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence.  Thus he learns something from the sufferers, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his powers.  He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patient’s support, and when he has done so, he steadily aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading the sufferer into compliance.

It should not be surprising that slaves received health care, since an unhealthy slave was clearly not of much use to his/her owner.  What is fascinating, however, is that training slaves in the medical arts enabled a two-tiered system of health care.  Slaves would be administered to by other slaves through a system that bears an uncanny resemblance to the way in which we have “industrialized” health care.  Through these operations, the slaves would free up the time of their owners to deal with health care as the service it deserves to be, grounded in a rich foundation of communication between the health care provider and his patient.

The possible corollary is that the intervention of insurance as an industry is responsible for bringing this two-tiered system into our own culture.  Those who need insurance the most, assuming they get it at all (even if they get it under a legal obligation to provide it), find themselves receiving the same industrialized health care given to Greek slaves.  Only those with the wealth and power to afford otherwise receive “service-based” health care, because their wealth entitles them to it.  In other words the economic division that has now divided our society so sharply has turned us into a society of a new class of slaves (a state of affairs that Spike Lee had observed during the interviews he conducted for his film about Katrina, When the Levees Broke).

If this is truly the way things are, then any debate about whether or not “under God” belongs in the Pledge of Allegiance is misplaced;  the real debate should be about that final phrase, “with liberty and justice for all!”

Disadvantage Pornography

Presumably, the title of Jonathan Raban's piece about the photographs of Dorothea Lange for the New York Review was entitled "American Pastoral" because, as his point of departure, he invokes William Empson's Some Versions of the Pastoral. As Raban put it, Empson's book "casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses." Under that hard light this was a genre "in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land" (Raban's words). Raban's article reviews two books about Lange and her images of poverty, particularly during the Great Depression; and his own hard light does not try to hide the extent to which photographs now declared to be "iconic" were actually artifacts of scrupulously applied techniques that often distorted the "reality" of the original image. Thus the images we now celebrate were actually products of, to put it bluntly, the most manipulative form of propaganda; and, while that propaganda may have been serving the noble causes of the Farm Security Administration, it is still a precursor of that consciousness industry that now manipulates the judgments of public opinion as skillfully as Lange manipulated her negatives.

This led me to wonder whether or not the concept of pornography needs to be broadened beyond its usual sexual connotations. This is far from an original idea. In Plato's "Republic" we are treated to the spectacle of the ordinary man walking through a field where a bloody battle has just been concluded, struggling over the temptation to look at the corpses. The implication is that such voyeurism is vile but that it is hard for our all-too-human nature to resist succumbing to it. These days television has made this particular form of voyeurism socially acceptable in the name of crime investigation programs that dwell on "scientific" approaches to the analysis of evidence from a crime scene. My guess is that Plato would have recoiled from not only the imagery but also the self-serving justification of revealing those images for their "scientific" nature.

As Henry Miller once observed in an essay concerned with the distinction between obscenity and pornography, the obscene may offend; but the pornographic titillates. He saw himself as a writer of obscenity but denied that it was ever his intention to titillate his reader. This reader was certainly never titillated by his texts, certainly not in the visceral way in which I responded to the texts of The Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin. On the other hand I have come to appreciate the titillating affect that other subject matter can have, whether on myself or on others. Thus, those with a constitution for reading the Marquis de Sade are more likely to be aroused by his rich palette of assaults on the body, rather than just the sexual elements. Ultimately, the theme that links Sade back to those corpses in "Republic" is one of violation, whether it involves leaving a body to the ravaging of nature or invoking a human agent to do the ravaging. Whether the reader is aroused by identifying with the violator or the violated is left as an exercise for the student. I have not pursued this question in any great depth, but I would guess that both options are possible.

In this broader context, then, should we smash the iconic status that society has accorded to Lange and view her work, instead, as a new genre of pornography? Poverty clearly ravages the body (not to mention the spirit). It is all very well and good to make a spectacle of poverty to provoke a public reaction that will rise to the aid of its victims; but what about that sector of the public that, for one reason or another, just gets off on the spectacle? Long before cable television required us to use three digits to select a channel, I remember seeing a play set in the future about parents who become concerned when their children spend all of their time in front of the television watching "The Hungry Children Channel." The implication was that this was entertainment that had displaced cartoons about mice beating up cats. The corollary of that implication is the proposition that the disadvantage of (many?) others had become the "new" source of entertainment, if not the sort of titillation we associate with pornography. In many ways The Hungry Children Channel served as a reductio ad absurdum of the Farm Security Administration in terms of both their goals and the methods applied to achieve those goals.

Today, however, it is not just hungry children. It is entire families that still have not been able to rebuild their lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is the entire population of the Maldives, whose very land will be under water in their lifetimes if we do not act on the climate crisis with more determination. It is the current generation's version of Lange's own subject matter, out of work and displaced from foreclosed homes with absolutely nothing productive to do and nowhere to go to seek change. The family depicted in that play can now draw upon the whole world for the entertainment it gets through its television set. If one simply indulges in the images without trying to do anything about them, is that not pornographic?

Norman Mailer's Diagnosis of Mind Rot Revisited

Almost two years ago I wrote an "appreciation" post about the writer Michael Tolkin in which I used some of Tolkin's comments to reflect on one of Norman Mailer's last public appearances, which had the good fortune to be captured on video by Book TV. That reflection tried to go down two paths. The first concerned the deterioration of our capacity for telling stories, which actually had its origin in a 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin. The second had to do with the deterioration of the stories themselves.

For several years my wife and I have pretty much avoided going to movie theaters (this in spite of the fact that there is an "independent cinema house" on the Plaza Level of the building where we live). As this blog should make clear, I have no trouble filling my time with "live" performances; and we decided that it made more sense to pay for a level of cable service that would provide us with movies that interested us, even if it meant waiting a few months to see them. Recently, however, I have discovered that we are watching fewer movies and more "extended series," not all of which are on the cable "pay" channels. This has led me to wonder whether this has to do with the capacity for telling stories or with the stories themselves.

About fifteen years ago, when I first started doing research into narrative, I took some time to play with one of those software products that claimed to help you write a screenplay. (This was somewhat in the vein of a study I had done about thirty-five years ago into what made Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "dice composer" work as well as it did.) I did not get much out of the screenplay software other than discover that this particular product was front-loaded with a heavy emphasis of character development. Before worrying about what the plot line would be, the user was required to build up a "cast of characters," sketching out each one in terms of both physical attributes and psychological motives. My guess was that the underlying philosophy was that, if you put a bunch of people together in a room, one of more stories will emerge from the interactions among their character attributes.

Whether or not I accept this philosophy, I find myself reflecting on just how impoverished the characters are that I encounter while reading reviews of films. I compare that with the rich character structures I have found in HBO projects such as John Adams, Generation Kill, and True Blood (choosing examples that run the gamut from the historical through the contemporary to the fantastic). This is not to say that network television has avoided such character structures; but character does not tend to sell soap. Thus we have a series like Southland, which is taking some interesting non-formulaic twists to members of the Los Angeles Police Force, offered to viewers to fill some blank space in the NBC schedule with little (if any) hope for renewal. On the other hand there is at least some buzz that ABC will renew Castle, which, while far lighter than Southland, has been taking some interesting approaches to departing from the formulaic in developing the regular characters.

Thus, if there has been a deterioration in the stories that are being told, regardless of the size of the screen, the problem may have something to do with a tendency to populate those stories with abstractions, rather than with the personalities who give life to those stories. Perhaps this is a narratological version of that Google-making-us-stupid problem that Nicholas Carr explored in the Atlantic Monthly. One approach to the sort of cognitive impairment that Carr tries to explore involves a preoccupation with getting answers without giving any attention to the reasoning behind those answers. This would be similar to focusing only on the destination of the plot-line, so to speak, without caring very much about how the line leads to that destination, let alone the extent to which that line moves at all through the motives (pun intended for those who can notice) of the characters. For all his superficial airs, even Rick Castle goes through life with a non-trivial set of motives; and the production team should be credited for establishing a connection between those motives and the adventures that unfold in each week's plot-line.

This is a phenomenon that I have examined in other settings. I have called it the "objectification of the subject" in past writing about both politics and business. Populating a story you tell with cardboard abstractions of personalities is no different from treating your political opponent or customer as an "abstract object," rather than a motivated individual. The consequences of trying to hide behind such abstractions probably rose to the most catastrophic level when we saw that strategy leading to the devastating mismanagement of the aftermath of Katrina. Yet for all the abundance of examples that caution us against such "objectification of the subject," we continue to practice it; and it continues to deteriorate not only the quality of our lives but the very stories we tell about those lives.

The Bush Legacy Endures

When The Wire invoked the metaphor of a "new day" for a radical reformist shift in the power structure of the Baltimore Municipal Government, the ensuing narrative wasted no time in undoing that metaphor. As an assiduous student of the poetic wisdom of such narratives, I have subsequently taken a very jaundiced view of that metaphor, most recently with regard to our State Department (for which, incidentally, I have also appropriated the bowl of shit metaphor from The Wire). However, while the new Administration of Barack Obama may be making positive advances on our country's reputation in the global arena, there remains an Augean pile of dirty laundry left behind by George W. Bush on the domestic front; and our current economic mess is just the stuff at the top of the heap. Buried deep in that pile remains the disgrace of Hurricane Katrina. Not only may that be the blackest blot on the Bush escutcheon (particularly since it involves other members of the family); but also it is a "gift that keeps on giving" (or taking away, as the case may be), even as there are those today still trying to clean up the mess.

One of the more interesting clean-up efforts involves a claim made by six New Orleans homeowners that, in the words of Jon Wiener's recent post to The Notion, one of the blog sites for The Nation, the Army Corps of Engineers "failed to heed environmental laws in building and maintaining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shortcut for large ships between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans during Katrina." Federal Judge Stanwood Duval will rule on this claim in a trial scheduled to begin on April 20. This will not be an easy case for the Judge; but it will be made more difficult by the possibility that the "well of evidence" has been poisoned. Worse yet, the poisoning can probably be traced back to the influence (if not direct actions) of the Bush Administration.

This is the basic story as Wiener reported it:

Louisiana State University is firing a leading hurricane scientist who was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for their pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. Ivor van Heerden, who had been deputy director of LSU's Hurricane Center, says the school's former president, previously a Bush appointee, had earlier threatened to fire him if he testified.

Tenure exists, we are told, to protect the expression of views that are unpopular with the powerful. This is another case where the person who needed the protection of tenure didn't have it. LSU was able to fire van Heerden because he is an untenured Associate Research Professor.

Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

When van Heerden was first asked to testify in spring 2007, he said in an interview Sunday with Harry Shearer on KCRW's "Le Show," LSU's then-president, Sean O'Keefe, told plaintiffs' attorneys that if van Heerden testified against the Corps he would be fired. O'Keefe had been appointed to high offices by both Presidents Bush – George W. Bush named him head of NASA in 2001, and George H. W. Bush had named him acting Secretary of the Air Force in 1992.

According to van Heerden, the LSU president said that "nobody from LSU was going to embarrass the Bush administration or upset the major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts."

The second clause in that final quote is the real reminder of the extent to which the legacy of the Bush Administration is still with us. Whether or not this emerges as an embarrassment, the more important victims are those "major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts;" and that is why New Orleans remains stuck in all that mud created by Katrina. The good news, however, is that van Heerden may still get his day in court. Whether or not he is an "expert witness," he can still be called to testify as a "fact witness;" so claims such as those van Heerden published in his book, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why during Hurricane Katrina – the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist, may still be presented as evidentiary "facts" and subjected to cross-examination like any other such evidentiary facts. This trial may thus provide an excellent opportunity for van Heerden to rehearse his presentation, because he is likely to present it again in a second trial, which will decide, as Wiener put it, "a massive class action suit seeking hundreds of millions in damages from the Corps." The people of New Orleans will thus be facing quite a few days in court over the coming months. Let's hope that the decisions turn out in their favor.

Rehab as an Employment Opportunity

Whether we are talking about goods or services, layoffs come from companies that are providing supply in areas where demand is decreasing (if not vanishing). If we want to think about creating jobs, we should think about where demands need to be met. The recent emphasis of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on areas such as education and infrastructure not only see to the needs of the general American population but also should provide a significant number of opportunities for employment; and, if Barack Obama is still shy about being perceived as "too progressive," he seems to be willing to embrace this part of the CPC agenda. However, opportunities beyond that agenda are beginning to take shape, some of which may well amount to making lemonade from the lemons of the current economic crisis. Consider the following story the Claudia Parsons filed for Reuters this morning:

Experts say more and more people in finance are seeking treatment for addiction as the global economic crisis sinks its teeth into a high-stakes industry where confidence is the name of the game and nobody wants to admit to a weakness.

"We absolutely do see more people coming in naming either a job loss or huge financial reversals or big investments with Bernie Madoff," said Sigurd Ackerman, medical director at Silver Hill Hospital rehabilitation facility in New Canaan, Connecticut.

"They're being admitted with depression or increases in substance abuse, or both."

Ackerman said there was a high concentration of financial professionals in the town, 40 miles from New York, whose main streets are lined with high-end boutiques catering to the well-heeled wives of hedge fund managers and bankers.

"You're supposed to be a master of the universe, you're supposed to be on top of everything," said one financial services executive who began alcohol rehab in August.

At a time when most businesses are imploding, rehab could become one of the major growth industries behind economic recovery:

Robert Curry, founder of Turning Point for Leaders, a coaching and consulting firm in New Canaan that creates treatment programs for senior executives, said the financial crisis was a factor in more drink and drug use.

"We've got more than 50 homes in foreclosure in this town and that's unheard of," Curry said. "Domestic violence incidents have spiked, and that is very closely tied to substance abuse."

Struggling with a divorce, the Connecticut executive sought help at Turning Point. A residential rehab program will be just the first step in a program that would last at least a year and include follow-up counseling, therapy and support groups.

Curry is a former financial executive who started working with substance abusers two decades ago, around the time his alcoholic father died and he realized he had a drinking problem of his own. Despite the recession, demand is growing.

"Companies are downsizing," he said. "Budgets are being trimmed, and yet we're seeing an increase in our business."

For those who might doubt that there is serious money in this opportunity, Parsons concluded her report with a few figures:

A month in rehab costs from $25,000 at Caron [Treatment Centers in Manhattan] up to around $60,000 at high-end private facilities. Curry said most of his clients pay out of pocket for privacy reasons.

The Connecticut-based executive was paying his own way.

"It's more than I'd like," he said. But "it's less expensive than losing your job ... less expensive than losing a client or losing your family, or losing your home or getting in trouble with the law."

Irony is clearly at work here, but there is also a message for those wondering what sort of knapsack of skills will be most suitable when entering the job market. The best answer may be found in the grammar of our language. Ten years ago it seemed as if the providing of both goods and services depended on having the right skill set for manipulating objects, frequently through some form of technological mediation. Rehab is not about manipulating objects (concrete or abstract). It is about engaging with subjects, dealing with people as if they were people rather than entries in a database. We have sustained at least of quarter century of work practices that have tried to abstract away such a need to engage with subjects; and those work practices persisted even when they provoked such catastrophes as the mismanagement of the aftermath of Katrina. Perhaps Jean Baudrillard's "chicken" about the infantile preoccupation with objects is finally coming home to roost. If you want to be a gainfully employed provider again, your skill set had better include the ability to engage effectively with other people!

"Attention has now shifted to the real economy."

Those are the words of Masatoshi Sato, a broker at Japan's Mizuho Investors Securities, as reported on Al Jazeera English, in reaction to a worldwide drop in the markets. That same report also provides an explanation for the fall in the United States:

Investors' mood soured after a government report showed that sales at US retailers last month fell by the biggest monthly drop in more than three years.

This brings us back to that fundamental precept that was ignored when bailout was first being debated and continues to be ignored: If Main Street is unhappy (as demonstrated by, among other factors, a drastic decline in sales), then Wall Street cannot help but be unhappy, whatever our Government may be doing to cheer it. Sato-san's "real economy" is the economy where "real people" (rather than the once and future "Masters of the Universe" in the financial sector) have to make basic purchases for food, clothing, and shelter. We need to get behind the problems I examined yesterday and start making serious moves towards an economy that supports sensible consumption of necessary goods and services without relapsing into addictive consumerism. None of the markets around the world can recover until the ability to exchange money for such sensible consumption has been restored. This means that people around the world need to be earning living wages, protected by regulations against efforts to thwart legitimate management of those income resources. It means that those people can once again claim to be part of the economy, rather than exiled from it as victims of the War Against the Poor.

The latest issue of The New York Review has a piece by Max Hastings entitled "The Most Evil Emperor." The basic argument is that, while Hitler was brilliantly ruthless in bring European country after European country into submission, he was utterly incompetent in managing the empire he had accrued. By never being able to get beyond conquer-and-pillage, Hitler basically squandered the resources of each of his conquests, turning each one from an economic asset into a military liability. This may well describe how the American Ruling Class has ended up waging its War Against the Poor. Like Hitler, the American Ruling Class may have been striving to create a new class of slaves; but they have created a social infrastructure that is too incapacitated to contribute to that "real economy," even as slaves. Like Hitler, they may ultimately be undone by their strategic ("Mission Accomplished?") success.

Can the interests of the "real economy" be salvaged? I suppose the question we have to face is that of who is up to the task of salvaging it. John McCain certainly does not come off as having either the ways or the will. Barack Obama has given the matter serious thought and offered a vision in which we shall all work together at the salvaging. However, he will only be able to do this as President if he can assemble an effective staff that he can dispatch across the country to implement that vision of working together effectively. Note that I have not identified anyone in the current Administration. This Administration seems to know more about where all the local churches are (particularly the ones with High Rollers, rather than Holy Rollers) than it does about where that metaphorical Main Street is. I cannot imagine Main Street trusting anyone from the Administration to come in and fix things. They still remember how they fixed things in New Orleans. Listening to the latest statement from President George W. Bush on today's PBS delivery of BBC World Service News, I was struck only by his inability to form coherent, let alone convincing, sentences.

There is one other possibility. People can start working together without someone like Obama leading the way on the national scale. Obama is far from the only one who has been successful as a community organizer. Perhaps we just need a critical mass of like-minded community organizers to start the ball rolling now, as they had started rolling the ball that resulted in Obama's nomination, working with whatever resources can be scrounged up by hook or by crook. The best way to demonstrate that Government is the fundamental problem behind our financial catastrophe is to start climbing out of that catastrophe without expecting any commitment of resources from that same Government. If Obama could get enough people shouting "Yes We Can!" over that objective (and then acting accordingly), he will have demonstrated that he will be the most qualified person next to occupy the Oval Office.

Two Views of Labor Day

Reading John Nichols' post to The Beat blog this morning on the Web site for The Nation, I realized that, if we wish to seek out differentiation between the Democratic and Republic parties in this election year, we need look no further than their respective plans for today. For the Democrats Labor Day offers the opportunity to return to a long-standing base in organized labor, which has fallen into a state of neglect that began in the days of Jimmy Carter's Presidential campaign:

Barack Obama will return to the traditional heartlands of the American trade union movement on this Labor Day, marching in and speaking at the close of the annual Labor Day Parade in Detroit and then flying later to a huge LaborFest celebration in Milwaukee.

The Detroit appearance brings the Democratic nominee back to the spot where the party's presidential candidates historically began their fall campaigns.

It was in Detroit in 1960 that a young John Kennedy, who had defeated labor-favorite Hubert Humphrey in that year's Democratic primaries, won over union members with a speech that embraced the union movement with a passion and a precision that helped him to win the confidence of working-class voters.

"I welcome the support of working men and women everywhere and I am proud of the endorsement of the AFL-CIO," JFK told a crowd of 100,000 in the city's Cadillac Square. "For the labor movement is people. The goals of the labor movement are the goals for all Americans and their enemies are the enemies of progress."

Kennedy followed in the footsteps of Democratic nominees Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson in choosing to open his campaign in Detroit with a warm embrace of the labor movement.

As the years passed, however, Democratic nominees sought to distance themselves from unions.

Nichols' account of Barack Obama's own words shows us a man determined to close that distance and honor the labor movement once again:

The 2008 Democratic nominee says in his Labor Day message that, "It's time you had a president who honors organized labor, who has walked on picket lines, who doesn't choke on the word ‘union,' who let's our unions do what they do best and organize our workers and who will finally make the Employee Free Choice Act (legislation that would remove barriers to organizing) the law of the land."

He also says, "America was built by its laborers, but today our workers are struggling just to get by in an economy thatno longer works for them. That's why we cannot afford four more years of the failed George Bush economic policies – policies that Senator McCain has proudly embraced and promises to continue."

The statements echo Obama's newly-populist message – debuted in his acceptance speech at last week's Democratic National Convention. "The struggles facing working families working families can't be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs," says Obama, who will be promising policies that eschew tax breaks for companies that move jobs out of the U.S. and promises to redirect them to companies that create jobs in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

The Republicans, on the other hand, decided to begin their own Convention on Labor Day. This leads me to shift my attention from the politicians themselves towards all those workers responsible for the infrastructure without which the Convention could not take place. The obvious question to raise is: Is the Convention venue in St. Paul a union shop? If it is not a union shop, then, whether or not it was intentional, the Republican Party has sent a loud and clear message to organized labor; and that message is as far from Obama's as one could hope to get. If it is a union shop, the message is not much better and may even be a bit worse. In this latter case the message is, "We do not care if this is a holiday created in your honor. 'The business of America is business;' and we need you to work today, even if we have to pay more for your efforts." This may be the ultimate refutation of that precept of Pierre Bourdieu, which I have recently become fond of citing: There is something worse than passing noticed; it is being noticed and then summarily dismissed!

Now, to be fair, John McCain himself seems to know better than to let workers pass unnoticed:

For his part, John McCain will won't [sic] be speaking at Labor Day events. Instead, he'll be taking a bus tour through Toledo, a community devastated by manufacturing job cuts since the enactment of trade policies that favor the outsourcing of factory work.

Furthermore, the determination of the Republicans to make sure that Hurricane Gustav does not tar them, one more time, with the brush of Hurricane Katrina has reduced Convention activities to a bare minimum of procedural work and a blatantly overt absence of festivities. As Jonathan Beale put it in his dispatch last night from St. Paul to BBC News:

In short, the order has gone out - there will be no fiddling while Rome burns.

So, no razzmatazz on the opening day. On Monday there will be no political speeches, just procedural activities that will allow the convention to officially get under way.

In the words of Rick Davis, the chairman of the McCain campaign "we want to be respectful of the situation".

This may free up many of the infrastructure workers to celebrate Labor Day after all. As Nichols pointed out, they will be in the perfect place to celebrate:

The biggest event in the Twin Cities this Labor Day will not be the Republican convention, however.

It will be a "Take Back Labor Day" festival at Harriet Island in St. Paul, featuring Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Mos Def, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and other musicians as well as speeches by Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern and other top labor leaders who are ardent Obama backers.

With all due respect to those musicians who have given their time for this event, I just hope that someone remembers to lead a rousing chorus of "Solidarity Forever!"

The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Following up on yesterday's attempt to examine the role (or lack thereof) of the United States in the current tensions between the European Union and Russia, it would appear that we shall have to contend with some Americans who are not about to take passing unnoticed sitting down. Indeed, according to a report for Reuters filed this morning by Tabassum Zakaria, one of them has decided to pass on the Republican Convention (not to mention the lightning that may strike New Orleans a second time) and board a plane that will take him to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Ukraine, all of which he happens to be visiting for the first time. The happy wanderer (warrior?) in question, for those who have not already guessed, is Dick Cheney. I have to wonder if his absence from the Convention was planned. After all one purpose of these conventions is to build up a good image for the media; and, when it comes to media relations, Cheney has built a reputation for being the Republicans' greatest weapon of mass destruction. However, since that reputation extends to policy (both domestic and foreign), as well as media relations, one has to wonder just what the motives behind this trip are. I am reminded of a physics teacher who taught me that, in order to get the rapid timing right for detonating the first hydrogen bomb, it was necessary to get everything in place to achieve critical mass through four synchronized atom-bomb explosions. Cheney may only be visiting three countries along the "line of tension" with Russia; and, unless his diabolical powers are greater than previously assumed, he will not be able to visit them simultaneously. Nevertheless, this feels a lot like an attempt to create a critical mass that will not only revive the spirit of the Cold War but also raise it to a red-hot temperature.

I have already reviewed Tom Hayden's arguments regarding the validity of this motive as a "double whammy" that, with one blow, can deal a crippling blow the to Democratic Presidential campaign while, at the same time, resurrecting The Project for the New American Century, whose obituaries were written almost two years ago. That motive would then extend to getting NATO "back in the game" at a time when its very relevance is under review, particularly when the European side of the game is being played quite well by both the European Union and the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe). Furthermore, it is clear from remarks by Gordon Brown reported this morning on the BBC NEWS Web site that European leaders do not pose a threat of "pacification" (to invoke the current Republican rhetoric of choice) but are quite capable of standing up for their own principles while trying to ease the current tensions at the same time.

There is little we can do about this. The Vice President is an official a representative of our Executive Branch as the Secretary of State is; and, as far as I can tell, he has not yet committed any impeachable offense in planning this trip. The most comfort I can take is from a story that Howard Fast once wrote, entitled "Cato the Martian" (which I first read in Groff Conklin's 17 X Infinity collection, which also happened to be the first place I read "The Machine Stops"). Fast was an author of both conscience and courage who understood the value of science fiction in setting a cautionary tale. Here is a slightly oversimplified summary I found on the Web:

Martians use broadcasts to study Earth. The protagonist, named after his Roman counterpart, is a specialist in Latin who begins and ends every speech, "Earth must be destroyed." Fearing a nuclear attack from Earth, he persuades the normally peaceful Martians to fire atomic weapons at the planet to precipitate a suicidal war between East and West. Instead, Earth attacks Mars.

Like the fictitious representations of NATO and the Soviet Union in Fast's tale, it would not make much deliberation for the European Union to arrive at the conclusion that there is more to gain from working with Russia in opposing the United States than in breathing life back into NATO and letting the Americans call the shots (perhaps literally, rather than metaphorically) one more time. If the Europeans are not that well read in American science fiction, they probably have a better appreciation for the history of Ancient Rome and Carthage, which would be all that would be required for events to play out along the lines of Fast's plot!

Hillary Trumps Bill

There is a good chance that more eyes were on Bill Clinton last night than were on his wife the previous night. On Tuesday night there seemed to be general agreement that Hillary had "gotten on board" the Obama campaign; the only question that remained was whether her rhetoric could stir her loyal followers to get on board with her. On that same Tuesday, however, Bill was still the loose cannon, playing semantic games with unnamed hypothetical candidates almost as smoothly as he had played them over the semantics of "is" during the Lewinsky Affair. I had to wonder whether Obama had come to the Pepsi Center not so much for a "surprise" follow-up to Joe Biden's speech as to be ready for damage control if Bill launched another one of his volleys.

Fortunately, as Al Jazeera English reported, Democrats could all rest easy that this dog did not bark in the night:

Bill Clinton, the former US president, has offered his backing to Barack Obama's presidential bid, hours after the Illinois senator clinched the Democratic nomination.

"Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world," Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, in his most robust endorsement yet of Obama.

Clinton told the convention on Wednesday night that Obama "has a remarkable ability to inspire people".

The former president's speech had been eagerly awaited by Democrats in view of his own past criticism of Obama and his ambivalence about the Illinois senator.

Clinton said that Obama had "hit one out of the ballpark" when he chose Joseph Biden, the Delware senator who was set to speak at the convention later on Wednesday, as his running mate.

Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds in Denver said the speech showed the Clinton's had gone out of their way to endorse Obama.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said that Clinton could have seen Obama as continuing his political legacy if wasn't for the bitter primary electioon battle with Hillary Clinton, his wife and the New York senator.

Nevertheless, things are rarely (never?) what they seem in politics. If Hillary's speech provided any number of reasons for the analysts to start scratching their heads and picking apart her words with a fine tooth comb, then there was no shortage of reasons for doing the same for Bill's contribution.

One way to begin this analysis would involve one of my favorite techniques, the sorting out of subjects and objects (particularly in the context of the efforts to call attention to the neglect of Katrina at this week's Convention). This had a lot to do with the morning-after analyses of Hillary's endorsement speech. Borrowing from one of her earlier texts, we were all still left wondering, "What does Hillary want?" Much of our perplexity can be traced back to the number of sentences in Hillary's speech where she, as opposed to Obama, was the subject. However, while some may see this as a coded "objectification" of Obama, I see it as a rhetorical move meant to reinforce the sincerity of not only those sentences but also the entire speech. Hillary is best when she is talking about Hillary. We all know that, but that does not mean we have to take it as a liability. Rather, in this case by "talking about Hillary" she personalized her endorsement in the strategic move to get the most resentful of her followers (the ones talking out loud about going over to John McCain) to follow her one more time, even if it was not to her ultimate leadership.

I would argue that we can examine the text of Bill's speech through the same lenses. Bill is also his own favorite subject; and, to go back to the Lewinsky Affair again, we know how much rhetorical punch he can put in a direct first-person declarative sentence (even when that sentence is false). In a somewhat creepy way Bill is not that different from George W. Bush: He attaches more importance to connecting with us over what he believes than he does to whether there is, as Plato put it, "justified truth" to that belief. I believe that both Clinton and Bush managed to get into the White House on the strength of that rhetorical strategy, but applying that strategy on behalf of someone else is a neat trick for even the best of orators. Hillary pulled it off (even if it was "just a trick"); but, when we back down from the rhetoric and look at the grammar, Bill did not.

This is not to say that Bill avoided those first-person declarative sentences entirely; there just were not enough of them. In this case Obama was the subject of Bill's sentences far more than Bill was (and far more than Obama was in Hillary's speech). The result came close to a reading of Obama's resume; and, even if the tone of the reading was dramatically stirring, the text was not, in part because it has become so familiar. One result of this "over-subjectification" of Obama is that we are more likely to remember the baseball metaphor for the selection of Biden than we are to remember anything else from the speech; and this had more to do with setting the crowd up for Biden's speech that with rallying them behind Obama.

Consider now those last quoted paragraphs of Al Jazeera analysis. I definitely agree with Reynolds that Hillary put a lot of effort into her speech. As Kevin Connolly put it in his analysis for BBC News, she needed to come across as "a lifelong Democratic Party worker;" and this may have been her most important goal in the face of supporters threatening to leave the fold. Bill, on the other hand, is the one who, as Reynolds put it, went "out of his way," because that "way" was not really aligning with the "way" of "a lifelong Democratic Party worker" (and perhaps it never really did). As a result, Hillary's endorsement came "from the heart" (even if it was "faked sincerity," in the spirit of George Burns), while Bill's just came from his going "out of his way."

In that respect I would probably also take issue with Bishara. Perhaps the rift between Bill and Obama had to do with the recognition that Obama was not particularly interested in continuing Bill's "political legacy." It may have been the legacy of economic prosperity, but much of that prosperity burst in an economic bubble with global reverberations. Then there was the ill-managed effort at health care reform and the crisis in the Balkans, which was just as poorly managed. Obama had good reason to ground his own campaign rhetoric in the need for "change we can believe in"—not just change from the messes made by the Bush Administration but also from much of that Clinton "legacy" that involved more ill will than most Democrats would care to remember.

Finally, compare Bill's performance with that of Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy could invoke his late brother's rhetoric and stir his audience with the audacity to hope that, once again, the torch would be passed. Bill just does not want to let go of the torch, and he is not getting the message from either the electorate or his party leadership. In retrospect this may have made him a liability to Hillary's campaign; will we have to worry that he will now be a liability to Obama's?

Bush Family History Repeats (sort of)

Reading Marie Cocco's Washington Post column this morning, as it was reproduced on Truthdig, I thought I caught another whiff of the repetition of history (without any Marxian overtones of farce). Her headline, "When It Costs Too Much to Support the Troops," certainly had a familiar ring; but that was not the repetition that tweaked me. Nor was it the introductory story she offered to justify the headline:

The comment was outrageous, but it was not the least bit surprising. A psychologist responsible for assessing returning war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder—a psychological ailment that could entitle them to monthly disability payments—told staff members not to diagnose the illness because to do so would increase the government’s costs.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” the psychologist at a Department of Veterans Affairs center in Texas wrote in an e-mail. She suggested diagnosing a less severe disorder that would not carry the greater long-term disability costs.

Rather, I was struck by the way in which she escalated this account to its obvious generalization, calling it "a demoralizing reminder of the way the U.S. health care system works for just about everyone."

This historical memory this provoked was one of our current President's father. In this age in which elections are strategized in terms of large collections of highly specialized demographic units, it turned out that one of the units that seemed to cohere in its opposition to George H. W. Bush was what we now call the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community. When the press picked up on this and hit the elder Bush with a question about how he planned to win over this group, his reply was that he "wished the homosexuals would just go away;" and the press had a field day with that answer. Unfortunately, this happened during the 1988 campaign, which is the one that made him Bush I.

Just go away. It was that phrase from history that was ringing in my ears, but now it was a new Bush Administration casting it in a new light. It is a light that differentiates the population of the United States into two categories. In one category we have the "productive members of society," where the semantics of "productivity" amounts to "serving our needs and interests as we wish them to be served." In the other category is everybody else; and, whether the issue is health care, education, or even serving your country, Bush II has revived his father's attitude in a broader context. In his heart of hearts, he wishes they would all just go away.

Well, not only did not the LGBT community refuse to go away; they have now received a significant vote of confidence from the California Supreme Court. That casual dismissal by Bush I-to-be was also a dismissal of the very diversity that is such a great asset to this country. It also provided an interesting foreshadowing of his wife, Barbara, observing that Katrina victims had better conditions in the New Orleans Superdome than those they had in their homes. I suppose we can now see Barbara as having taken the first step towards generalizing her husband's attitude, so it should be no surprise that her son would take matters to an even more general level.

Still, just what did the elder Bush mean by "just go away." I suppose that the most innocuous reading was that he wanted them to stay away from the polls on Election Day. Less innocuous would be the implication that they should cease to be Americans, picking up their life style and settling somewhere else, like Canada or Holland (where all sorts of permissiveness runs wild, they say). In the case of the current Bush, however, the semantics may be more brutal. With his strong convictions of faith and Divine Justice, "go away" could well mean "depart from the living." If he could go to Sinai in the spirit of delivering the Mosaic Code to the Arab World, he could just as easily see himself as the mortal instrument of the Last Judgment in his own country.

I have suggested that the ultimate goal of the War Against the Poor is the creation of a new class of slaves. Since slaves are objects, rather than subjects, when they cease to satisfy their "productivity goals," one can simply dispense with them, as one might dispense with a car one no longer wishes to drive. If one is to recognize a need for motivation at all (which is not necessary if they are really objects), it is only through the simplest of slogans, like the one about work making freedom, which kept the prisoners in the Nazi death camps at their jobs in the vain hope that they would eventually be delivered from that hell-on-earth. However, it is that connotation of "dispense" that supports the semantics of "go away" in the world of the current Bush Administration; and, if the LGBT community could hold fast and not "go away" to satisfy Bush I, then all of us in that "second Bush II category" should hold just as firm. As they used to chant in protest against the Vietnam War, "Hell, no, we won't go!"

The Return of the Hooverville

This morning, according to a recently filed BBC NEWS report, President George W. Bush tried to assure his audience at the Economic Club of New York that the economy is "basically sound" (quote from the BBC report, not necessarily the words of the President). Was it an editorial comment that the column of related links on the Web page featured a photograph of former Republican President Herbert Hoover? Bush seemed to know better than to echo Hoover's motto that "prosperity is just around the corner;" but I was less interested in his words than I was in a BBC video report, which I saw yesterday through my PBS feed, featuring a tent city in Ontario, California, built by those who had lost their homes as a result of the consequences of the mortgage crisis. I remembered that my father had told me about similar camps that had formed during Hoover's Great Depression. He said they were called "Hoovervilles;" so I was glad to see that there was a "Hooverville" entry in Wikipedia. Here is the basic description from that entry:

A Hooverville was the popular name for a shanty town, examples of which were found in many United States communities during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The word "Hooverville" derives from the name of the President of the United States at the beginning of the Depression, Herbert Hoover. They used Hoover's name because they were frustrated and disappointed with his involvement in the relief effort for the Depression.

These settlements were often formed in unpleasant neighborhoods or desolate areas and consisted of dozens or hundreds of shacks and tents that were temporary residences of those left unemployed and homeless by the Depression. People slept in anything from open piano crates to the ground. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for technically trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated out of necessity.

Some of the men who were made to live in these conditions possessed building skills and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of box wood, cardboard, and any scraps of metal they could find. Some individuals even lived in sewer mains.

For the record the word also has an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as "a shanty town."

Things are somewhat different this time, at least in Ontario. Andrea Bennett, Staff Writer for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin created an article for the newspaper's Web site last night (only a few hours after I saw the BBC video) that has dignified the camp with a proper noun: Tent City. Furthermore, that "grammatical escalation" is being accompanied by some degree of institutionalization by the city of Ontario:

A plan to control and secure Tent City, a homeless encampment that began with two dozen locals last summer and has since grown to about 400 people, was made public Thursday by city officials.

Mayor Paul Leon told homeless providers and volunteers that those who have ties to Ontario may stay at the camp, but all others must leave by Monday.

That's also when the homeless staying in tents or trailers on the city-owned site by L.A./Ontario International Airport will be divided into three groups: those known to be from the city, those who claim to be and everyone else.

Wristbands will be issued accordingly, said City Manager Greg Devereaux.

The last group has one week to go and will be provided transportation, if needed, to their cities of origin.

What struck me the most about the BBC video, however, was their focus on camp dwellers who could still take the camera crew back to show them the suburban house they used to own but could no longer keep because of escalating mortgage payments. Not all of them were victims of foreclosure. Some effected their own sale, but it was the loss sustained by that sale that meant that they were now living in a tent. (There were also those fortunate enough to be living out of a mobile home, but one such woman still declared that she did not want other members of her family to see how she was now living.)

That suburban culture had not yet emerged in the days of the Great Depression. Indeed, we have basically deluded ourselves into believing that homelessness is strictly an urban phenomenon, whether it involves the down-and-out living in a cardboard box over a heating outlet near Grand Central Station or families victimized by Hurricane Katrina. This demographic shift has transformed the Hooverville into the "Bushburb," the American suburban dream now turned into a nightmare by the greed-centered financial mismanagement of the current Administration. (I found the epithet "Bushville" through a Google search; but that search directed me to the blog run by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee. In that context I would prefer to stick to my own terminology!)

Will our President take the time to visit Tent City and see what is happening there without the mediation of a television camera? Will his parents pay such a visit, as they did to the New Orleans Superdome after the Katrina disaster? If so, I suspect it will be harder for Barbara to come out with another callous remark like that one about conditions for the Katrina victims being better than those they had at home! After all, these are suburbanites who used to be counted as part of the "base" for the Republican Party. Let us hope that, for all of the flaws that Bennett reported about it, the institutionalization of Tent City will include provisions for its residents to vote in November. If our electoral process is supposed to be, at least in spirit, about every voice being heard, then the State of California is obliged to make sure that those voices are not neglected!

Of Governments, Celebrities, and the Rest of Us

This morning I found myself reading a release from the African Press Agency (APA) as a follow-up to my "Celebrity Priorities" post. In that post I had written about Steven Spielberg's decision to resign from the position of artistic advisor to the 2008 Olympics, apparently under the influence of Mia Farrow, who was one of the signatories of an open letter about Darfur sent to the Chinese president. As might be expected, the APA story focused on another signatory, Bishop Desmond Tutu; but the basic story was still the same (except, perhaps, that in Tutu's case the "bully pulpit" metaphor has a closer tie to its literal semantics). The fact that I am still reading reports about celebrities taking on questions of human rights when "designated officials" have failed to do so set me to wondering. As journalists would say, this story has "legs;" but how far will those legs carry it?

My own reading skills tend to lead me to look for the "story behind the story," so to speak. In this case I suspect that the background story can be summarized in a single general question: Who speaks for the victims? We certainly get more than our share of reports about victims, whether they are on either side of the border between Sudan and Chad, still trying to recover from Katrina, or trying to cope with the aftermath of the latest mass shooting in "middle America." When catastrophe strikes it does not take the media long to get "on the scene" to shove their microphones and cameras into the faces of such victims; but those reports rarely endure longer than 24 hours. New catastrophes create new victims, the media run elsewhere, and they leave behind victims who are still victims with all too much to say and no voice with which to say it.

Our civics lessons taught us that the virtue of a representative government is that, through the structure and functioning of representation, every citizen has a voice that can be heard. How much value is there in telling this story to the young when they will then grow up to learn it is a myth? The real message of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke was that, from any practical point of view, the victims of Katrina had no voice at all. In that respect they were (and still are) no different from the survivors of the many massacres in Darfur, who have never labored under the illusion that their country provided them with a representative government. Thus, regardless of the particular type of government that controls a given piece of geography, it is simply not realistic to assume that the institution of government can be counted on to speak for the victims among its citizens.

So it is that we turn our attention to celebrities. Sometimes celebrity status can be institutionalized: This is basically what Nelson Mandela did last July, when he made the commitment to support a "brain trust" of elder statesmen (one of whom happened to be Desmond Tutu). The United Nations has taken a similar approach with "special ambassador" status that has been assigned to those who understand the principle of the bully pulpit, such as George Clooney. Then you have those like Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn, who, without institutional support, decide to commit their voices in the interest of others whose voices cannot be heard. (In Jolie's case her initial self-motivated initiative later converted to one with an institutional connection.)

Still, there is something disconcerting about celebrities filling a vacuum created by the inability of governments to speak for their victims. I suppose the greatest problem is that the space of victims is growing faster than it can be managed by the space of celebrities. There is also the problem that giving voice to a victim is more than a matter of having a good heart: It requires that one achieve enough understanding (in the semantics of the social theories of Jürgen Habermas) of what the victim is actually saying to be able to faithfully render that voice from the bully pulpit. This is no easy matter, particularly when the cultural context of the victim (which, as Clifford Geertz taught us, shapes the very identity of that victim) is radically different from that of the celebrity. Finally, there is the problem that speaking for a victim is rarely a one-shot affair; only mainstream media reporters can get away with treating it that way. Speaking for another requires a sustained commitment that may well end of conflicting with the celebrity's "day job" (such as the latest entertainment project that will provide not only financial resources but possibly further celebrity status).

This does not mean that we should dismiss the efforts of those celebrities who appreciate these problems and manage to deal with them. However, they cannot do it alone; so we should think of them not as solving a problem but as showing us a viable path to solution. This seems to me the spirit behind Habitat for Humanity. This is an institution that hears the voices of victims who need homes and then goes out to build those homes. The institution benefits from photo opportunities that show Jimmy Carter (another member of the Mandela "brain trust") with his tool belt participating in one of those building projects; but Carter is there to demonstrate that anyone can do this sort of thing. (My wife and I ran into a Habit for Humanity team on a train in Eastern Europe when I was attending an artificial intelligence conference in Budapest.) The real question that faces us, then, is: When someone shows you such a path in a loud, clear, and persuasive voice, how will you respond?

Choosing to do Something Useful with Your Life

The real story about John Edwards is not that he has left the race for the White House. In Nedra Pickler's report for Associated Press, the real story emerges through a couple of paragraphs about half-way down the page:

Edwards planned to announce his campaign was ending with his wife and three children at his side. Then he planned to work with Habitat for Humanity at the volunteer-fueled rebuilding project Musicians' Village, the adviser said.

With that, Edwards' campaign will end the way it began 13 months ago _ with the candidate pitching in to rebuild lives in a city still ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Edwards embraced New Orleans as a glaring symbol of what he described as a Washington that didn't hear the cries of the downtrodden.

Yesterday I heard one of the guests on Democracy Now make the observation that Edwards was the only contender in the primary process who used the word "poverty" in his speeches. These two paragraphs demonstrate Edwards' decision that it is more important to do something about poverty than to be the lone voice talking about it in a political process that has reduced the phrase "public servant" to a bad joke. This means that my choice has now been narrowed to two candidates in the California Primary, both of whom received a Chutzpah of the Week award for disregarding the people's business through their absence from the Senate floor, choosing, instead, to spend that time on the campaign trail. Now that Edwards no longer holds nor seeks public office, he seems more intent on doing the people's business than any of those who are still "inside the system!"

Chutzpah for the Sake of Attention

I sometimes worry whether commenting on the "right to bear arms" is riskier than raising questions about either patriotism or extreme religious beliefs; so it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I have decided that the Chutzpah of the Week award should go to the National Rifle Association. However, this is not a case of arguing over what is or is not allowed under the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights but one of what might be called "indelicately exploiting a delicate situation." The basis for the award is a report filed by Associated Press writer Michael Kunzelman. Here is Kunzelman's lead:

The National Rifle Association has hired private investigators to find hundreds of people whose firearms were seized by city police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to court papers filed this week.

The NRA is trying to locate gun owners for a federal lawsuit that the lobbying group filed against Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley over the city's seizure of firearms after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.

In the lawsuit, the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation claim the city violated gun owners' constitutional right to bear arms and left them "at the mercy of roving gangs, home invaders, and other criminals" after Katrina.

The NRA says the city seized more than 1,000 guns that weren't part of any criminal investigation after the hurricane. Police have said they took only guns that had been stolen or found in abandoned homes.

My argument is that this is a situation that was based in a chaos from which those institutions that make the city of New Orleans what it is are still recovering. Now is not that time to exploit that painful recovery process as part of the lobbying interests of the NRA. The implication of the language of the lawsuit that only gun owners' were vulnerable to "roving gangs, home invaders, and other criminals," because they no longer had their guns, is an insult to a police force that was stretched beyond its limits when the entire population was vulnerable.

Yes, in a time of chaos, bad decisions get made: Some are questionable; others are flat out wrong. We all know this. However, this is not the time to be arguing over one of those decisions, particularly when so much positive recover work is taking place. We do not need distractions like this, particularly if this is more a matter of the NRA flexing is muscles of influence in preparation for the candidate selection process that is about to begin. The chutzpah does not reside in "the principle of the thing" but in the rather inept way in which that principle has been converted into action at the wrong time, if not the wrong place.

Ideology and Expertise

I have not figured out whether it is good news or bad news that, in the wake of making our country an embarrassment in the global community (as was demonstrated most vividly last week in Bali), President Bush has appeared to shift his attention from international to national affairs. After all, I suspect that, if you were to just walk up to people on the street and ask them with what major national event they would associated our President, most of those folks would probably respond, "Hurricane Katrina." So when I read last night's Reuters report by John Crawley under the headline "Bush wants market solutions for U.S. airline delays," my immediate reaction was, "Can this turn into a mess worse than the impact of Katrina?"

Of course air travel is already a pretty awful mess, and there is nothing like a holiday to aggravate the mess. However, when things are at their worst, is it really the best time to experiment with market-based ideology? I cannot help but remember my history lessons about how both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong tried to apply Communist ideology to agriculture and brought on famines that devastated their respective countries. It is all very well and good to think out of the box, as long as you remember that the operative word is "think!" Even Franklin Roosevelt, who believed that, in confronting the Great Depression, doing anything was better than doing nothing, did not try to attach ideological baggage to the things he tried.

The more fundamental question we need to ask, however, is just what Bush means by "market solutions" and what premises and consequences are associated with that meaning. Fortunately, Crawley has provided us with a few of Bush's own words:

The truth of the matter is, we need a more rational way of allocating gates among airlines.

There are any number of ways to pick apart this assertion. The most important is probably the premise it appears to embody that markets are rational. As far as I can tell, the only settings in which markets are rational are in economics textbooks; and, as more and more economists seem willing to acknowledge that markets are primarily phenomena of the social world, those textbooks are quickly fading out of fashion, if not out of print. Perhaps Bush really meant "efficient," rather than "rational." This is another favorite adjective for economists who prefer the cleanliness of mathematical models to the grubby realities of the social world; and isn't "throughput" the major concern of holiday travelers? Here, however, we have to remember that, particularly from the subjective (and not necessarily rational) perspective of the consumer, "effectiveness" may count for more than efficiency. The last time I raised this distinction, I was discussing the patient's-eye view of health care; but it is just as valid for the traveler's-eye viewpoint of airline operations.

In fairness, however, we should still see what sorts of proposals are on the table, regardless of the weakness of the premises (not to mention their potential consequences):

The Transportation Department has struggled to finalize details of its congestion plan for the New York region -- especially JFK -- after meeting stiff resistance from airlines and some members of Congress to centerpiece initiatives such as the administration-preferred plan that would make airlines pay a premium for flights during the busiest times of the day.

But regulators, according to aviation sources late on Monday, are coalescing around a plan that is to be announced on Wednesday by Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and would, over the longer term, manage capacity and competition by auctioning some takeoff and landing rights.

In the shorter term, the sources said, the government is expected to impose hourly flight caps at JFK for the summer of 2008.

It seems as if, between keyword advertising and eBay, auctioning has become the new hammer (pun intended), wielded by a small boy who sees everything as a nail. This may be due in part to the way in which it has provided mathematicians with new opportunities to experiment with models, even if those models are firmly ensconced in the objective world, safely protected from the messy details of the subjective and social worlds. The problem, of course, is that, when the models are used in a predictive capacity, their predictions are limited to the objective world, which is just not the world of holiday travelers.

I actually had my first taste of auction-based thinking at a talk that John Seely Brown gave in the auditorium of the (then) Xerox PARC Auditorium for an event sponsored by the Wharton School (one of those academic monuments to the objective world). Brown was extolling the virtues of low-level communications in highly distributed networks as an alternative to the hierarchy of a "classical" Weber-style bureaucracy. The example he chose to invoke was air traffic control, which, from the point of view of risk to loss of life and property, is a more critical problem than passenger throughput at airports. Brown suggested that the heavy cognitive load on air traffic controllers could be alleviated if every airplane could carry a software package that would enable individual planes to "bid" for the available landing slots at airports. Cynic that I am, I found the following voice ringing in my ears as I thought about this suggestion:

This is your Captain speaking. We hope you have enjoyed your non-stop flight from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a winning bid for a landing slot at Kennedy Airport. However, I am happy to report that we have won a bid for a slot at Logan International Airport outside Boston and will be landing there in about an hour.

While I am clearly serving this up as a joke, it also demonstrates what happens if we fail to think through narrative scenarios when we bury our heads too deep in the mathematics. We remember Hurricane Katrina (and associate it with President Bush) because, after the Gulf Coast was flooded by the elements, the entire nation (if not the world) was flooded with such narrative scenarios; and there was not the slightest thing funny about any of them. As I said in my second paragraph, the operative word behind trying to solve any problem is "think." Depression has become too much of a way of life in this country and the President is perceived as being far too detached from that depression for him to take on another problem and fail to think through those irritating details of premises and consequences.

It's the Poverty, Stupid!

The good news about the Associated Press report of the study by the Trust for America's Health, which ranks Mississippi as "the fattest in the nation," is that it goes beyond (in its own words) "making Mississippi the butt of late-night talk show jokes" by recognizing that this is not so much a story about obesity, or even the impact of obesity on public health, as it is about poverty. Here are the key paragraphs from the report:

Poverty and obesity often go hand in hand, doctors say, because poor families stretch their budgets by buying cheaper, processed foods that have higher fat content and lower nutritional value.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a self-described "recovering foodaholic" who lost 110 pounds several years ago explained during a Southern Governors' Association meeting in Biloxi last weekend that there are historical reasons poor people often fry their foods: It's an inexpensive way to increase the calories and feed a family.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the nation, and the Delta is the poorest region of Mississippi.

That Delta region, of course, shared with New Orleans the dubious honor of being one of Katrina's prime targets. Thus, all the that cautionary prose by Walter Mosley that I cited yesterday applies as much to the Delta (if not the rest of Mississippi) as it does to New Orleans. Couple these observations with President Bush's announcement last month that he would veto legislation to renew a program that provides health coverage to poor children, and we see that the Delta is as much a "front line" in the war against the poor as is that fortress of unbridled capitalism, the new floor of Saks devoted entirely to designer shoes. When the neglect of the impoverished by public health policy is at stake, it is hard to ignore what I have previously called "the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge." Scrooge, of course, ultimately changed his ways, but only through the narrative machinations of his creator, Charles Dickens. The fate of the population of Mississippi rests in the hands of agents acting of their own free will, rather than the decisions of some skilled author; and, if there really is a war against the poor, then someone should be asking those agents which side they are taking in current and future battles.

The Inexorable Rhetoric of Literature

The mainstream media are already in the process of "celebrating" the second anniversary of the Katrina disaster. As early as last night ABC News had already relocated their anchor to New Orleans. Those scare quotes are, of course, an indicator of irony; and the irony, in turn, is a reminder of an arrogance of an industry the cares only about selling soap, regardless of whether the news is good or bad.

As I write this, I am listening to Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex oratorio, whose libretto is basically Sophocles as interpreted by Jean Cocteau. That interpretation begins with an Oedipus full of his own arrogance for having saved Thebes from the Sphinx now having to contend with the outbreak of a plague. When the Delphic oracle declares that the plague is a punishment for the murder of its previous king, Laius, Oedipus' arrogance leads him to demand that he learn the truth behind his murder, whatever the consequences may be. The ultimate consequence, of course, is that he pays for his arrogance.

Reading Walter Mosley's essay for The Nation about Katrina I could not help but be reminded of the arrogance of Oedipus. It is the same arrogance that transmogrified a culture from waging war against poverty to waging war against the poor. It is the arrogance of what Lewis Lapham has come to call the "American Ruling Class" that constitutes the focal point of Mosley's well-wrought prose:

Not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age.

The disaster named after the hurricane is not confined to the areas affected. Every emergency room, empty bank account and outsourced life's work could be named. We live in a country rife with ignored and condemned poverty. The rich, high on their great corporate steeds, ride over us believing that they are out of the reach of global warming and its symptoms, of terrorism and dwindling natural resources. When government officials tell them to evacuate, they drive their cars, board their corporate jets or simply climb to higher ground with ease. At this very moment they are looking down on Baghdad and New Orleans, Pakistan and Sudan, you and me. The feeling of invulnerability that these people have is unfounded, but nonetheless it makes them reckless. They take chances and cut corners believing that everything will come out all right. Their delusions of grandeur and ultimate power put us in ever more dire straits.

However, Mosley does not stop with criticizing that Ruling Class. Rather, he then extends the argument to recognize how all American citizens have had their values warped by the Ruling Class, particularly through the influence of the media controlled by that Class:

If we call ourselves Americans (and mean it), then we are all victims of Katrina. If we breathe the air or eat fresh fruit, if we call on our cellphones, drink water from a plastic bottle or just nibble on a chocolate bar, then we are Katrina; we are the rising waters around the ankles of this world.

When the day comes to mark off the two-year point since the deluge descended on the Gulf of Mexico, we should take care not to make too much noise. We shouldn't march in that shadow of time or even protest. Rather, we should sit alone in a room with our imaginations open to feel what they experienced on that day: the waters rising, rising and us climbing stairs and ladders, chairs and fire escapes; sitting on rooftops while bodies float by; calling out to passing boats and helicopters that go by in mute witness; being pressed to the roof by the rising tide and being engulfed shouting, shouting out for the ones we love underwater, unheard; the darkness swirling around us as we die with no one coming to save us, or themselves.

This, in turn, brings Mosley to the climax of his conclusion:

Two years have passed and we are still exporting democracy while we continue living under the semibenevolent oligarchy of international corporations and their candidates. This two-year point measures how far we have sunk under the weight of the rich and their political flunkies--while so many of us still celebrate them as if they were pop stars. We experience the silence of drowning men and women. We call out and are not heard. We believe in systems and people who have no faith in us. We perpetuate the rising temperatures and waters and hatred and feelings of hopelessness. New Orleans's defeat is also our defeat. Its closed schools are a metaphor for our minds and our futures. We see the storm's passage but we don't see it coming. But it is coming. And there are no leaders, no corporations, no benevolent billionaires who are going to save our grandmothers and our babies. We must unite outside of the systems that lie like fast food heaped on golden platters at our feet. We must organize at the ground level, where the water has already begun to rise.

Thus, by invoking the rhetoric of literature, Mosley has seen through to the painful premise that the havoc of Katrina also serves as a metaphor for the havoc that Ruling Class arrogance has brought and will continue to bring. Furthermore, the environmental implications of that arrogance have escalated the consequences from the Gulf of Mexico to the entire planet (as any number of this summer's news reports have confirmed). Mosley believes we must unite to confront this arrogance. Cocteau, however, understood that such arrogance can only be brought down by "an inconvenient truth;" but, as the Gore lecture/documentary has demonstrated, that truth will not set us free but will bring us down along with the arrogant. This is what I shall be thinking when I sit alone in that room, imagining how others felt when the levees broke and the water kept rising.