Epilogue

Throughout this book we have shied away from delving too deeply into any particular religious text, with a focus on examining general claims as broadly and generously as possible. Christianity was used mainly as a byword for any other religion, purely because it is the most prevalent in the U.S., and because current political issues are so intimately tied to it. This is not to excuse the other major world religions: Judaism is comparable enough to Christianity that most of the same doctrinal criticisms would apply (others, such as the unnecessary cruelty of the kosher slaughtering process, remain its own); criticism of Islam, in contrast, has been politicized to such an extent that it is now regrettably the province of Islamophobes,^¹ but it remains as the others: a discredited and ultimately harmful phenomenon.

There are several reasons for this generality. First, the major world religions have been thoroughly studied and critiqued, a process that has seen religious claims lose much ground to scientific progress. Second, even a thorough debunking of religious mythology is insufficient to disprove the source of the mythology itself, which will always be viewed as beyond rational reproach due to its nature as a non-rational mode of thinking. This standard of proof is tailor-made for a race to the bottom, in the course of which individual claims become more and more vague and rational thought is reduced to a burden. This is not to say that these criticisms are not important, though. The current imbroglio regarding the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes attests to the fact that proactively refuting religious claims about the material world is crucial to protect the church/state divide. Yet because these groups have consequently begun to insist that the creationist doctrine be presented not as scientific fact, but as a dissenting (yet equally valid) opinion, it also attests to the fact that a more thorough rejection of mystical thought is necessary. There will always be intelligent design proponents who will push for its inclusion in public schools even if the claim itself is shown to be unscientific, so long as its doctrinal source (the idea that god may be real, at its base, informs creationism's place within the pantheon of beliefs) remains unassailable.

And so, we have sought to do just that, to assail the doctrinal source itself: the possibility of god existing in some way with which humanity could conceivably interact. We have proven that god cannot exist: it has been restricted to a purely and irrevocably theoretical realm which cannot be beheld by human consciousness in any form. Even if a particular conception of god endows it with the ability to alter that human form in logic-defying ways, we would cease to be humans and instead become something else entirely upon god's willing, a unique life form with no memories of its former self and therefore no appreciation for eternal life or the hedonistic excesses of Heaven. Perhaps most importantly to the collective disposition, these notional expressions of infinite bliss have been established as more than merely unrealistic; they have been established as inherently undesirable. Any form of afterlife in which one's consciousness continues unabated into the hereafter would eventually become an infuriating cycle of the same perception-limited activities, or a disorienting, amnesiac trip in which memories are erased manually by god to preserve excitement. Or, the third way: the afterlife is not an afterlife at all, but a series of births and deaths which continue ad-infinitum without any continuity or recollection of past lives. Dying an infinite number of times would do little to make the process more bearable, even if there is an indication that some irreducible essence of the individual would persist into the next life, because the resulting individual is the same in only that one superficial and ultimately irrelevant way (its soul, perhaps).

We have also attempted to establish that a positive belief in the possibility of god's existence beyond that notional realm in fact shares a place within it. This is not to venerate or sanctify the god-belief, but rather to show that a deeply held, consistent religious belief is untenable for any period of time due to the multitude of possible incongruous manifestations with which a god claimant could court possible believers. When our blue bioluminescent being found a credulous witness who was truly taken by its impressive display of powers, it disappeared and was soon replaced by a similarly glowing red being, which made equivalent claims yet professed to be a different creature. Both claimed to be the real god. The theist searches for reasons to disbelieve, and he or she must eventually find one: for example, that the redness of the second being signified its demonic nature and betrayed it as nothing more than a trick of the Devil, or that Russell's teapot is a concept which is meant to be risible and therefore is not meaningfully similar to a heartfelt belief in god. But now the theist is no longer a simple theist: he or she is a theist who feels that risible concepts should not be afforded a similar level of respect or belief as non-risible ones (when in reality the risible concepts are just as likely to exist), or that the color red signifies malice and trickery. Given the high number and variation of theoretical would-be gods, a dedicated theist would very quickly become mired in a morass of arbitrary beliefs and no longer able to function as a rational or even coherent individual.

"God and Whose Army?" is a very pointed question, and more than just a snappy riposte. It is meant to call attention to an often forgotten aspect of religious belief: its indelible effect on the attitudes and actions of its followers. Assuming these effects are isolated as in a vacuum, this would not necessarily be problematic, but when our beliefs impinge on others in even a small way, they are owed reciprocal justification for that unsolicited intrusion. This problem is even more pronounced when religious ideology is offered as a rationale for a political action, such as voting against equal rights for homosexuals. A pluralistic political system will always play host to a wide variation in religious outlooks, from differing faiths to the numerous and often hostile sects within those faiths, and further still to those with no religious belief to speak of. The one common trait among all citizens of any society is their experience of the mundane, which is guided, at least in part, by reason and empiricism. The secular is therefore the ideal place from which to draw constructive political argument: it heads off the impasse that would always result from interfaith discussions (or discussion between the faithful and the faithless) where there are no other means of reaching a common ground.

While it is logically impossible to honestly hold a god-belief, one's veneration of belief, as well as a proclivity to act as though one believes, carries its own set of problems. When the Vodounist's son was killed, his attempts to entreat the gods for answers resulted in little information of any use, and indeed only complicated an already-arbitrary outlook (that bad things should not happen to good people). The general inscrutability of the gods precludes their usefulness as arbiters of justice, and any attempts to elucidate upon their preferred vision of the world can only result in frustration as they endeavor to explain godly logic to beings which are less than godly by design. The danger of an abandonment of belief in mystical justice is minimal compared to the abandonment of belief in its accuracy or relevance. If one holds that bad things do happen to good people, this theistic impetus to live well is destroyed--yet the spurned theist would not then adopt a more effective secular impetus in its stead if belief in the mystical persists. A disaffected theist is the most dangerous creature on Earth, a danger mitigated only by the generally short life of such an openly hubristic belief in the fallibility of the gods.

A secular impetus for morality is found rather trivially in our own inborn self-interest, which, transformed by rational hypothetical such as the modified Lockean Proviso presented in Chapter 6, becomes a collective self-interest in the well-being of others. The lack of a bona fide "perfect crime" is reason enough to forego the commission of even a highly lucrative felony for fear that such will later be committed against the original criminal by those who have noted his or her success (and who are likely more skillful criminals). Rational self-interest is forward-thinking self-interest, rather than the short-sighted sort which emphasizes immediate benefit at the cost of long-term survival. The cost of avarice is fatal, both to those who lack the basic goods required for survival, and to those whose unchecked acquisition endangered them; in the latter case, this is both a matter of circumstance and morality. In essence, atheism ought to lead one to a clear-thinking rejection of conservatism (both social and economic) as a viable orientation. That many so-called atheists have failed to embrace this is a testament to the monopolistic hold of irrationality (of which religion is one stripe) on public life. The secular irrationalities are most enduring when buttressed by intellectual solipsism, the resounding dismissal of which would have stopped Rumsfeld from remarking, on the existence of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction program, that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." True secularism is not the result of an accident or a prejudice, but an epistemologically sound rejection of spiritualism;^² we who call ourselves secularists have no excuse to pursue our own pseudo-religions (the 9/11 Truth and anti-vaccine movements spring immediately to mind as examples of such highly problematic pseudo-religions).

It is likely that America will continue to move in a secular direction, while politicians and the populace at large will continue to pay lip service to the creator. The religious right pinned their hopes to the Presidency of George W. Bush, who failed to follow through on many of their pet projects such as the Federal Marriage Act, a 2002 law which would have defined marriage as strictly between a man and woman. It is his inconsistent realization of their vision for a more strongly faith-oriented America which renders Bush's failed Presidency an unreliable indictment of the religious right itself--had Bush been more effective at implementing their preferred policies, there might have been a paradigmatic shift away from religiosity in politics. However, faith-based argumentation was alive and well in the 2008 Republican presidential nomination race: Mike Huckabee enthusiastically appealed to the religious right by calling for an America which is more in line with god's standards and by speaking of his belief in miracles, while Mitt Romney advocated for a more general religion (his Mormon faith, which is viewed with some suspicion among other Christian groups, made it difficult for him to be openly sectarian). Neither was Democratic nominee Barack Obama shy about exhorting progressives to reach out to people of faith and end the conservative dominance on religious discussion, although he also reminded the faithful that they too needed to make some sacrifices to take part in a pluralistic political system, and could not simply vote against legislation because their reading of the bible told them it would legalize sinful behavior (though his religiosity increased along with the frequency of his prayer and scripture reading after taking office,^³ as President, Obama would publicly reaffirm the notion that America is not a Christian nation in any official sense, but rather one bound by general values).

What is important in this last analysis is that the faithless press for change and do not heed the calls to associate with religiously-motivated reformers with similarly progressive ideals. Doing so might strengthen our numbers, but would simultaneously legitimate the idea that politically-incepted change, even for the better, can be justified through religious doctrine. This idea should be anathema to everyone, atheists and religious alike (recall that it was the Danbury Baptists who implored Jefferson to build the wall of separation). Progressive supporters of Affirmative Action would likewise be reticent to welcome into their midst a racist who justifies his or her paternalistic support of AA by arguing that African Americans simply cannot compete on an equal level to Whites due to their genetic inferiority, and so deserve a state-sponsored leg-up. This is not hidebound ideological purity; the addition of these viewpoints dilutes and hampers the message itself. It is this demonstrably negative outcome which leads us to demand secularism and refuse racism, not the incidental ideological differences. Any such atheistic overtures would at any rate fail the reciprocity test: full credence is not given to the religionist's beliefs, and this relegates any use of religious rhetoric by an atheist to the level of crass exploitation.

Religious reformers, however, should be eager to fight alongside atheists for social justice; if they are unwilling to do so because of the atheists' negative opinion on the admixture of politics and religion, this would reveal that the propagation of the religious motivation itself is their ultimate goal, and not social change. The state is inextricably secular, so the onus on religious reformers to associate with likeminded secularist reformers is far stronger than that which rests on the secularist reformers to build bridges toward their religiously-motivated counterparts.

Religion cannot lead to bona fide humanitarian social change for the same reason that non-defensive violence cannot^⁴--the use of either as rationale for altering the course of society besmirches the movement at the onset and constitutes a significant divergence from humanitarian ideals. Utilizing one's religion as a rationale for instating change in the lives of others, whether or not it is ultimately beneficial to them from the perspective of a leftist atheist, is intolerant at its heart--so any socializing movements which cite religion as their motivation are socializing only accidentally, not by design. Insofar as secular movements become similar to religions, they too are often easily corrupted by slavering adherents (state communism in the U.S.S.R. did not merely outlaw religion, it often replaced it), so it is in any liberal reformer's best interest to avoid even a slight association.

There is, in the end, little reason for a secularist to couch his or her arguments in anemically polite terms. If others are not willing to frame their arguments in an inclusive manner which everyone can understand and deliberate upon, then they are owed nothing in the way of politeness or patience from the unbeliever. They are owed reciprocity, but the responsibility to frame one's arguments in an inclusive way is an intuitive reaction to our inevitable plurality, whereas treating all creeds with rhetorical kid gloves is not. Too often this politeness is directional, enforced by those who benefit the most from it. Politeness is not impartial--it has a tendency to prevent harsher judgments, and these are almost always critical of the status quo. The irony of course is that we have been studiously polite in calling for an end to this prejudicially-enforced politeness in political discourse. This is not reflective of an inconsistency on the part of the author, but rather a conscious choice--when confronted with perceived rudeness, there is a tendency to avoid replying to the issues raised in favor of criticizing the lowbrow stylistic choices made by the arguer.^⁵ Imagine a well-reasoned paragraph arguing for some philosophical principle, capped off by a string of expletives. This does nothing to invalidate the argument, but it does give detractors a convenient excuse not to answer the points raised--yet it may also get their attention and cause them to ponder something they would have otherwise passed over without so much as a second glance.

The existence of actual persecution is not necessary for conservative Christians to cry foul: in 2008 election, Sarah Palin alleged that "faith in god in general has been mocked" throughout the election. She was referring of course to the political season in which the first major televised dialogue between the two candidates took place at Pastor Rick Warren's church, and in which her principal rival Barack Obama had already deemed any attacks on Palin's bizarre faith "offensive."^⁶ It is thus not worth walking on eggshells--these in particular are made to break easily, because the shells are far more valuable as broken shards than they ever were as intact, pristine ovals.^⁷ The use of invective as an attention-grabbing tool may contribute to intractability and a siege mentality among certain conservatives, but it is those very conservatives who were the least likely to come around in the first place. Those who react to the invective in an inquisitive fashion ("Why does my outlook arouse such ire? Is it perhaps justified?") tend to be the same rightists who are capable of introspection; invective acts as a potential entryway and little more. It thus with few reservations that we present the following:

The Republican Party and its rightist offshoots have devolved into gangs of solipsist pedagogues, collections of empty suits and automatons, racist holdovers,^⁸ eager College Republicans and nepotistic old money fronted by the movement's rising stars--an anti-science veteran of spiritual warfare (Louisiana governor, castrator, and one-time exorcist^⁹ Bobby Jindal, who signed into law the anti-evolution Louisiana Academic Freedom Act), a tongue-speaking "hockey mom" living in the end times (Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and possible progenitor of a new independent conservative movement, who attributes her successful gubernatorial run to the spiritual intercession of a Kenyan witch hunter named Thomas Muthee), a proudly anti-intellectual and homophobic ex-plumber (Joe Wurzelbacher, who famously equated a vote for Obama with a vote for the death of Israel; he later traveled there to broadcast an explicitly pro-Israel perspective during the conflict with Hamas), a fundamentalist Christian dominionist and Fox News commentator (Mike Huckabee, who supports nothing short of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East: the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians from what he terms the "Jewish homeland"--an idea touted in 1989 by current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), a puritanical power-broker (the well-connected Islamophobe and homophobe Sam Brownback, who as a fundamentalist lawmaker has worked to remove pollution controls and bring the government in line with Christian teachings, mainly behind the scenes^¹⁰), a moralist Mormon who wishes to "double Guantánamo" (Mitt Romney, whose political positions, save for a consistent opposition to gay marriage, are remarkably fluid, perhaps owing to his inability as a Mormon to rely heavily on religious demagoguery), an Evangelical Lutheran whose church preaches that the Pope is the Anti-Christ (Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, who has insinuated that homosexuals prey on children and who, after being told by god to run for office, fasted and prayed for three days to be sure that it was in fact god's wishes for her to do so^¹¹), and a former Mormon missionary (Jon Huntsman Jr., former governor of Utah, whose endorsement of gay civil unions in a state which overwhelmingly opposes gay rights^¹² may sabotage his future in the party^¹³), a virulently homophobic creationist (former senator Rick Santorum, who blamed the many Catholic Church sexual abuse incidents on homosexuality^¹⁴ and liberal permissiveness, and who announced a possible 2012 candidacy--on the condition that prayers point him in that direction)--and trumpeted by a notably deteriorating cast of dishonest shills, from William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Leo Strauss down the line to Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh.

Meritocracy this is not. The pursuit of rightist fame is in reality a pandering form of selling out which is not unlike the ubiquitous late-stage career conversion to Christianity among notables. The faithful are an ever-exploitable source of patronage for artists, writers, and politicians who find themselves in the twilight of their popularity. Even the most inveterate failure can hope to find success in the world of shadows and aether, that self-reinforcing post-modern milieu in which inaccuracy is seen as bold and brave defiance of fact. Sufficiently shielded from the consequences of failure, these manipulators can flatter their uncritical audience in perpetuity, taking advantage of their common misconception that intractability is a desirable and defiant mode of hardy or masculine behavior (see the prevalence of tough-talk and jingoistic imagery among the right). Is there any other explanation for the employment of Bill Kristol--aside from the notoriety of his father, of course? Such nepotism is at once an abrogation of the putatively meritocratic free market (appointed relations have not proven themselves and are quite often inept) and its greatest distillation (who are we to say that success should not be passed on to one's relations, despite their ineptitude?). This flux illustrates the inconsistency which is demanded of those who wish to continue to hold up the free market (or state capitalism, which is nepotism writ large; this is illustrated well enough in the many political appointments of George W. Bush) as a defensible arrangement.

Only politeness could have prevented this well-supported yet venomous judgment of willful emptiness, and only those beset by subconscious feelings of inadequacy would voluntarily align themselves with these sorts of rules lawyers, Benny Hinn-style manipulators (the level of audacity necessary to canonize Ronald Reagan, perhaps the greatest triumph of style over substance in American political history, might give even Hinn pause^¹⁵), and snake oil hucksters. The choice of Sarah Palin in 2008 was in effect the culmination of decades of decline: it was at once crassly manipulative (the McCain campaign chose the relative unknown in order to entice disillusioned former Hillary Clinton supporters and other women) and startlingly naive (she had little to offer other than base sloganeering, a ploy which by that time had been publicly repudiated even by President Bush). Palin has since abruptly resigned from her post as governor of Alaska, raising questions about her ability to lead and further distancing independent voters, to begin work on her memoirs. Titled Going Rogue: An American Life (a reference to a McCain aide's earlier description of her independent--and unhelpful--campaign activities), the book was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent, an arch-conservative whose résumé includes a collaboration with author John Stacy McCain. McCain is associated with the League of the South, a secessionist and misogynist group which is considered a White supremacist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has publicly spoken out against interracial marriage. Going Rogue targets the shadows and aether demographic; as such, its early success as reflected in pre-order best-seller lists was the result of bulk orders by right-wing organizations and high discounts (the book is being offered free of charge to subscribers of Newsmax magazine, the print version of the Newsmax website; the latter recently--briefly--hosted an article by John L. Perry warning that a military coup may be necessary to reign in the Obama administration^¹⁶). This method of inflating best seller numbers is a favored tactic of the right wing.

It takes a party of opposition enamored with centrism to electively compromise with a group known for employing bureaucratic obstructions, journalistic collusion and intimidation (see: Pentagon analysts disseminating propaganda on news programs, the staged June 2005 tour of Guantánamo, inexperienced reporter Jeff Gannon asking softball questions at White House press conferences, mock news conferences and town hall meetings stacked with party members, political reprisals against media entities such as Knight Ridder and NBC which questioned the administration's claims, and even the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to journalists such as Armstrong Williams for beneficial reporting), gerrymandering, fear mongering (Tom Ridge, former Secretary of Homeland Security, has admitted that the Bush administration pressured him to raise the alert level during the 2004 elections, though ample evidence of its misuse existed prior to this), exploitation of racism (latent racism in the case of the Southern Strategy and John McCain's near-incitement to violence of his supporters in the 2008 election, overt racism in the case of post-September 11^th Islamophobia^¹⁷), and electoral fraud (leaving aside the obvious chicanery in 2000 and 2004,^¹⁸ Diebold voting machines are well known for their lack of security; Republicans have also placed posters in predominantly black neighborhoods which dishonestly remind the inhabitants that anyone related to felons cannot vote, and which give an incorrect date for election day^¹⁹) to distort and misrepresent the wishes of the American people (such as they are^²⁰). The conservative ascendancy, understood as an incidental outcome of processes illogical and unfair, is justly relegated to the status of historical accident, rather than proof of a stirring popular confirmation of conservative principles. American conservatism, like its religion, may or may not be sincerely held (and trends certainly do point to a lessening of religious influence and church attendance, especially among the younger generation; it should also be noted that identification with the Republican party fell substantially from 2001 to early 2009 among all groups except one--those who attend church frequently), but its nominal pursuit is nonetheless fatal.

Yet the baseness of the Republicans should not absolve the opposition of their many sins. Democrats employ a threat of their own, a passive threat of alternatives: do not vote for third parties, we are told, because doing so simply leeches votes from the Democratic candidate and results in a Republican win. In 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was blamed for Gore's technical loss in Florida, but it was never asked why 100,000 leftists preferred the Green Party to the Democrats, as evidenced by the Democratic Party's nomination of right-leaning centrists in 2004 and 2008. Genuine change, to borrow Obama's parlance, is thus put off every four years, with no conceivable end in sight: Republicans do their best to sabotage the federal government, and the Democrats periodically return to undo a portion (a small portion, unreliably) of this damage, all the while ignoring that the wounds, still festering, can be exploited by a manipulative right wing which blames the victim for its own suffering.^²¹ But what good is the election of Democrats, aside from providing a comfortable living to Democratic politicians?

It is yet to be seen if the Obama administration will break strongly enough with the policies of his neoconservative predecessor. Early signs of hesitance concerning issues such as healthcare reform (Obama's plan, a far cry from universal healthcare, would benefit insurance companies but not individual Americans--who would be penalized for lacking insurance--and is not set to take effect until after the 2012 election, an indication that reelection concerns have superseded healthcare policy^²²), economic policy (the Senate overwhelmingly rejected efforts by Senator Bernie Sanders to attach credit card interest rate caps to a May 2009 credit system reform bill signed by Obama; additionally, the vaunted stimulus package was compromised and ineffective--less than 10% of the funds had been put into action five months after the act was passed), the environment (proposed emissions standards are insufficient to adequately combat climate change; Obama has also opened up areas of national forest for logging and has proposed to review a law which banned road-building in these areas, despite his support for the law during the campaign), the War on Terror (which will escalate, at least in Afghanistan, in spite of its name change to "Overseas Contingency Operation"^²³), transparency (in addition to his position on state secrets, the Obama administration has refused to reveal the names of White House guests, including some number of executives in the healthcare industry, though it later partially relented in the face of criticism;^²⁴ the Obama Department of Justice has also argued, similarly to its predecessor, that information regarding a criminal investigation--in this case, into the identity of the Plame leak--can be suppressed in order to avoid future embarrassment and ensure the cooperation of officials), gay rights (the Obama Department of Justice has argued the "separate but equal" interpretation of such^²⁵), and education (the Obama administration is withholding education funding in order to push states to increase the use of less regulated charter schools and to emphasize test scores as a condition for grading teachers and providing funding, two important planks of the disastrous No Child Left Behind law) are not heartening. Obama ran on a platform of repudiation--change, as he put it--but has moved only slightly toward the center on most issues, even those for which progressive action has the open support of the American public. For example, his promised repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely, with the administration's support of a June 2009 Supreme Court decision to reject a challenge to the law, and its reaffirmation of the anti-gay rule's "relation to the government's legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion";^²⁶ the Obama administration has also sabotaged Congressional attempts to impose limits on executive bonuses in bailout-receiving corporations,^²⁷ failed to reduce the bloated defense budget (it has instead been raised), affirmed the Bush administration's stance on warrantless wiretapping as beyond the purview of courts (the Obama administration has gone so far as to defend the Patriot Act's wiretapping and national security letter provisions in September 2009--the latter, of which 200,000 have been issued, essentially empowers the government to collect personal information on any individual and bars them from disclosing that they have been the subject of a privacy invasion^²⁸), proposed a cut of more than $300 billion from government healthcare programs such as Medicaid, and attempted to remove the legal requirement that a defendant's lawyer be present during police questioning. He has allowed financial industry players and lobbyists to make inroads into his administration in spite of campaign promises to the contrary, but has also tightened restrictions for the hiring of lobbyists to work in the administration.^²⁹ He has ordered the closing of Guantánamo and publicly released graphic Justice Department torture memos but worked to prevent the release of classified Abu Ghraib torture photographs^³⁰ and delayed the release of a C.I.A. torture report, in spite of promises to the contrary. He has reaffirmed the Bush administration stance toward detainees at Bagram (that they have no rights to speak of and no recourse to habeas corpus; these detainees are thus in a markedly worse predicament than they would have been even at Guantánamo^³¹), and maintained an expanded executive power (threatening to veto the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act because it requires executive officials to report to Congressional leaders on covert actions^³²), again, in spite of emphatic promises to the contrary. He has reinforced U.S. economic and political meddling in South America, backing off from criticism of the anti-democratic, unconstitutional, and increasingly violent (toward protestors and dissidents) Honduran coup government which deposed reformist president Manuel Zelaya (the coup was undertaken by a graduate of the School of the Americas, where Honduran troops are still being trained, and is supported by well-connected business and political interests in Honduras and the U.S., including several former aides to the Clintons and lobbyists with ties to John McCain; the ostensible reason for the coup--Zelaya's attempt to illegally seek a second term through popular referendum, a framing which has been repeated in the U.S. media--is manufactured: the referendum called for by Zelaya was in fact a nonbinding poll assessing public opinion regarding the addition of a referendum to reform the constitution, which would have been added to the same November 2009 ballot which could not legally include Zelaya's name as a candidate^³³) and stepping up the U.S. military presence in Latin America, principally through the use of private military contractors, in order to fight against Marxist guerrillas and drug traffickers. He has stated that the interrogators who used the aforementioned memos as a legalistic excuse to torture will not be prosecuted, despite evidence that the memos were written after such methods were adopted and formulated without complete information (the 2004 C.I.A. Inspector General report, released on August 24, 2009, found that the Agency deliberately withheld medical information in presenting its case to the Justice Department), except in a few cases of clearly excessive waterboarding (neither, it seems, will those Bush administration lawyers who provided the excuse face trial).^³⁴ He has refused to end the process of extraordinary rendition, preferring instead to add new oversights to the practice which will prevent detainees from being shipped to abusive counties, although the "diplomatic assurances" required are not a guarantee of humane treatment (they had been used by the Bush administration), despite campaign promises to the contrary. Neither will the Guantánamo detainees be freed upon its closure^³⁵: the White House will hold them (and any others deemed by the government to be dangerous--even those who have never seen trial or have been acquitted of all charges by a commission) indefinitely on U.S. soil under a new doctrine known as "preventive detention," thus overstepping even the reluctant, vacillating boundaries honored by Obama's predecessor (he has also circumvented Congress in doing so, choosing instead to justify the doctrine via Bush-era laws). He has also revived the idea of trying the remaining 240 inmates held there through slightly altered military tribunals which would disallow evidence gleaned through torture, but has fallen short of advocating the more comprehensive protections found in a civil trial (the same trials which have successfully dealt with accused terrorists in the past) due to the difficulty of proving guilt using evidence coerced under torture and the necessity of revealing such torture to the public. The Obama administration has even considered allowing the September 11^th hijackers held at Guantánamo to plead guilty (disallowed in general military tribunals) and receive a summary execution in order to sidestep the prospect of any trial, civilian, military or otherwise. Finally, it seems that the use of largely unaccountable contractors by the U.S. will not abate: a provision in the 2010 defense funding bill which would have eliminated the use of contractors as interrogators was opposed by the Obama administration (under which the number of private contractors working abroad has increased significantly^³⁶), despite the earlier opposition of both Obama and Clinton to the use of contractors.

The damage done by the Bush administration and its predecessors is extensive, and the solution required is extensive, but decisive action has not yet materialized--and is increasingly less likely to do so as the Obama administration's first year comes to a close. Obama has thus far proven himself a consummate Democrat, an establishment politician making weak rhetorical plays against the status quo while remaining ever conscious that the party is ultimately beholden to it. To this end, he has gone beyond mere inaction: Obama has copied many of Bush's most troubling strategies, solidifying executive power and staging summit meetings in which opponents (in his case, single payer advocates) were barred outright.

Though the prospect of a leftist reformer President in Obama was largely fabricated in the minds of his supporters (Obama portrayed himself as a canny centrist rather than bona fide leftist, and his February 2008 yea vote on the F.I.S.A. telecom immunity bill should have made this clear to an impartial observer), it is not merely by this criterion that he has thus far fallen short, but by the standard implied in his aforementioned reversals on specific key issues. His administration has, to put it simply, failed to deliver on even the modest reforms promised during the campaign. The disappointment felt by many of his one-time supporters, youthful idealists who created and made viable Obama's candidacy (the others, similarly careerist politicians who continue to support Obama out of perceived necessity rather than the belief that he has thus far been effective, are a different story), should be immense--yet it may also be productive, if such results in a greater awareness of the two-party system's absolute lack of potential for genuine reform.

It is the recognition of the Republican Party's implicit worth, necessary as it is for the maintenance of the two-party status quo, which constrains the Democrat's better impulses (such as they are) and weakens their powers of oversight. Democratic officials overwhelmingly voted to authorize the Iraq War and many (Nancy Pelosi, for example^³⁷) knew of the Bush administration torture programs yet failed to raise an objection, though such was their duty. As President, Obama has displayed a deep-seated fear of an increasingly unbalanced right-wing opposition, capitulating immediately to Representative Joe Wilson's shouted accusations during a healthcare address and allowing the resignation of Special Advisor for Green Jobs and one of the few progressive voices in the administration, Van Jones (the victim, alongside A.C.O.R.N., of a successful smear campaign conducted by Republicans and dutifully repeated by the media).

The dialogue between Democrat and Republican, largely between the center-right and far-right, discourages genuine moral development. This dialogue's skewed malignity was best illustrated by Joe Wilson's outburst during the President's September 9, 2009 healthcare address to Congress. In it, Obama reiterated his commitment to forcing illegal immigrants to suffer with and die of preventable disease, by that time a matter of public record in any of his healthcare proposals. This was vocally attacked by Wilson, who shouted "you lie," alleging that the President's commitment to preventable death was not steadfast enough. Thus the most notable (and effective) opposition to a middling, ineffective Democrat healthcare proposal is both factually inaccurate and morally unconscionable (this is not for lack of trying--progressives have been vocal too in their opposition to the ineffective proposals, but their voices are drowned out by the rightist opposition and dismissed by Obama with platitudes). This is the outcome of a political process in which middling and ineffective Democrats hold a popular monopoly on the opposition to factually inaccurate, morally unconscionable thought. True to form, the ultimate result of Wilson's outburst was an immediate proposal by Senate Democrats to require proof of citizenship for participation in any new healthcare plan (a requirement which is costly and further empowers insurance companies by allowing them access to sensitive information).

The Democrats are not left-leaning, nor, it seems, do they wish to be: progressive groups have been browbeaten and threatened with defunding for daring to criticize right-leaning Democrats (Rahm Emanuel called these groups "fucking stupid" for criticizing the Democrats' vacillations on healthcare reform). Jane Hamsher of the FireDogLake blog writes that progressive groups have largely responded to this pressure by capitulating:

When the White House met with bankers after the AIG scandal and they said they didn't want to be criticized for getting huge bonuses paid for by taxpayers, the White House complied and "cooled their rhetoric." The President told the public that Timothy Geithner had been instructed to do everything in his power to claw back those bonuses, and the House passed a bill doing just that. But it died in the Senate.

You remember all those campaigns by the unions, by the online groups, by liberal economics and finance organizations pushing the Senate to take it up?

Which means that the teabaggers were in perfect position to harvest all of the discontent over the bank bailout, and no coherent liberal critique was offered. I heard it over and over again -- if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn't the last time something like that happened -- just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.^³⁸

Perhaps it is time to pursue a third party headed by a political outsider who is beholden to neither major party nor the well-connected lobbyists whose interests only occasionally intersect with those of the innumerable indigents whose lives currently depend upon government programs, let alone humanity as a whole. Entrenched political machines worry of their own survival first and foremost, and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure that the system which entrenches them remains unchanged. Yet the system itself, in addition to (or because of) its party-entrenching effect, also precludes true democratic expression. It is thus no coincidence that capitalist interests reinforce the system at every turn.

The military has much in common with organized religion, from its distinctive command structure organization to its policy of encouraging some form of dehumanization of the other. It is then unsurprising that the military is closely associated with religiosity: 40% of the military's active duty personnel (and over 60% of chaplains) described themselves as evangelicals, compared to just 14% of the U.S. general population. Christian bookstores in the U.S. sell copies of The Soldier's Bible, a print published by Holman Bible Publishers (a company owned by the Southern Baptist Convention), available in colors representing each branch of service. The evangelical bible is prefaced with a tract which argues that a Christian must be born again (baptized as an adult) to secure eternal life. By all accounts, evangelicals have infiltrated the military.

Private contractors too are often expressively religious. Jeremy Scahill writes in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army of the company's genesis as the scion of wealthy, conservative forces associated with the rise of the religious right and interest groups such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family. The founder and former CEO of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is the son of Edgar Prince, a wealthy industrialist for whom "personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society," according to Gary Bauer, a close friend of the Prince family and fellow Christian conservative.^³⁹ The younger Prince is a staunchly religious conservative who interned with George H.W. Bush in 1992 but switched his allegiance to Pat Buchanan after Bush proved to be too friendly to homosexuals and thus not conservative enough.^⁴⁰ Through his sister's marriage, Prince is related to the DeVos family, whose Amway corporation was described by a former distributor as cultish in its behavior toward customers and employees: "They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place."^⁴¹ Blackwater has also hired Joseph Schmitz, former Department of Defense inspector general, whose controversial tenure was criticized for failing to investigate the possibility of human trafficking among contractors in Iraq in 2004 and for awarding a lucrative and wasteful $30 billion contract to Boeing in 2003.^⁴² Schmitz was also charged with the task of investigating Lieutenant General William Boykin (otherwise notable for his involvement in planning for and covering up the use of torture and assassinations in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), who made repeated anti-Muslim and pro-Christian comments while in uniform, including the now-infamous remarks "I knew that my God was a real God and [the Muslim's] was an idol" and "[George W. Bush is] in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."^⁴³ Schmitz, who was not hesitant to employ religious rhetoric himself (when pressed about this during a speech, he replied: "The American people, unlike other people around the world, are profoundly religious. That's a historical fact. So for us to pretend, somehow, that we shouldn't be acknowledging the existence of Almighty God is just--it ignores reality, sir."), cleared Boykin of any wrongdoing in terms of his bigoted religious remarks, and instead found him in violation of a few minor procedural regulations.^⁴⁴ Finally, Prince is closely associated with Chuck Colson, a Watergate conspirator, progenitor of faith-based prison programs (in 2006, an Iowa court found such an application of public funds unconstitutional; Colson maintains that such religious indoctrination is necessary to stop the spread of Islam), and Bush advisor who has made numerous anti-Islamic and dominionist comments (an example of the latter: "events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially-controlled regime").^⁴⁵

In a later Nation article, Scahill remarks on several of the latest allegations against Prince, claims which came to light in an ongoing suit brought by Iraqi civilians who allege that its employees committed war crimes in Iraq (Blackwater previously tried to file a motion for a gag order to prevent comments in the media, but were unsuccessful):

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.^⁴⁶

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."^⁴⁷

If true (the likelihood of this is very high), their testimony would provide proof of perhaps the most egregious instance of U.S. aggression in decades: a religiously-motivated slaughter of innocents which was facilitated by an invading force, achieved increasingly through the use of unaccountable mercenaries, and paid for by executive collusion.

The politicization of public life has extended to the military as well, and it carries with it an official doctrinal prejudice demonstrated by such events as a 2008 compulsory PowerPoint seminar on suicide prevention at R.F. Lakenheath, a U.S. Air Force base in England. At this presentation, which was mandatory for 1,000 of the base's personnel (it was emailed to the rest), Rick Warren's book A Purpose Driven Life was adapted to suicide prevention in the military. The presentation's slides malign Charles Darwin and evolution, favorably comparing the transcendent "god-given" purpose of religion with the "self-given" purpose of Darwin's "humanism" and "man-given" purpose of Karl Marx's communist ethos, concluding that the best form of suicide prevention is developing "purpose-driven airmen." Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation broke the story on the Daily Kos blog. She writes that another presentation, titled "FAITH is Foremost," referred to the death of Pat Tillman, the (irreligious) pro football player turned Army Ranger who became the subject of controversy when the Army falsely reported that his death was the result of an enemy attack (he was in fact killed by friendly fire), an especially insensitive move given the following:

I'm sure everyone remembers Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich's outrageous remarks that Tillman's parents' dissatisfaction with the investigation of their son's death was caused by their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, saying in an ESPN.com interview, "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more--that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough." I'm fairly certain that the Tillmans would not be very happy to find out that their son is now being used as an example in a presentation promoting religion to the military.^⁴⁸

Other examples abound: In 2005, several cadets at the United States Air Force Academy came forward with accusations of religious intolerance, citing instances of open anti-Semitism, officially-sponsored showings of The Passion of the Christ,^⁴⁹ and the use of athletic banners reading "Team Jesus." In 2006, seven officers appeared in a taped fundraiser for the evangelical bible study group Christian Embassy in full uniform. In 2008, cadets at West Point and the Naval Academy complained of religious indoctrination:

In interviews at West Point, seven cadets, two officers and a former chaplain said that religion, especially evangelical Christianity, was a constant at the academy. They said that until recently, cadets who did not attend religious services during basic training were sometimes referred to as "heathens." They said mandatory banquets begin with prayer, including a reading from the Bible at a recent gala.

They said the primacy of faith was apparent at West Point. This year, all cadets received a book about moral development based on the cadet prayer. At his commencement speech this year at West Point, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren started and ended with a quote from the Bible when God speaks to Isaiah, and he cast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a clash between American and radical Islamic approaches to religious liberty.^⁵⁰

Though such proselytization is formally against military regulations, there is evidence that its leadership encourages a close connection between a soldier's religion and his or her duties. For example, two television documentaries--God's Soldier, a Military Channel series filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Iraq which features open proselytization by fundamentalist chaplains, and Travel the Road, a reality series on Trinity Broadcasting Network which in its second season embedded the show's missionary hosts with a unit in Afghanistan and depicted their open proselytization--were created with the full cooperation and encouragement of the military (which is known for being otherwise quite selective in deciding which independent organizations will be able to use its resources--for example, filmmakers must first clear any script with Pentagon officials before it grants them permission to rent vehicles and other assets; this is done in order to ensure that the artist's message is sufficiently pro-military, and goes a long way in explaining why Hollywood so often glorifies violence).^⁵¹

Even conscientious objection to military service has been legally tied to religious belief. It was only in 1971 that conscientious objector status became available to those citing a humanistic (rather than explicitly religious) aversion to war; the very same Supreme Court case (Gillette v. United States) upheld the constitutionality of requiring the draftee to demonstrate a deeply held aversion to all wars, rather than just wars of aggression. Thus one must hold either a religious belief which spurns all participation in armed conflict (uncommon, but easily falsified) or a secular outlook which finds even wars of self-defense unconscionable (even less common, and difficult to prove). This high threshold serves to minimize conscientious objection, but it does so at the expense of any pretense of fairness toward atheists, who are asked to hold what is essentially a religious disbelief in an entity's right to self-defense. The inability of the government to institute a constitutionally sound draft may provide some explanation of its decades-long absence: despite an increasingly desperate personnel situation in the armed forces, the most publicly visible call for conscription came from a Democrat (Representative Chuck Rangel of New York) who was interested in ensuring that the affluent are equally represented in combat (in the process making a rhetorical point about the viability of the Iraq War itself--a cogent point, given that a highly privatized volunteer force is the easiest to manipulate into costly and unnecessary foreign wars). Rangel's proposal failed spectacularly.

While the military's treatment of atheists and religious minorities is troublesome, it is trivial compared to its official treatment of gays (as well as the unofficial treatment of women^⁵²). The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which bars gays from serving openly in the military, has resulted in the discharge of more than 12,000 gay service members since its 1993 inception. The policy is now opposed by 75% of Americans, who feel that gays should be able to serve, whether openly or not (surprisingly, 64% of Republicans agree). The problem seems to be the military high commanders, who according to John McCain "almost unanimously" hold that the policy "works."^⁵³ But a December 2006 Zogby poll finds that 73% of troops feel comfortable around gays and lesbians, and only 27% of troops who are aware of at least one gay peer say that it "has a negative impact on the morale of their unit."^⁵⁴ Even assuming that the efficiency of the military is paramount, we must ask if the minimal loss of unit morale is worth the loss of 12,000 eager soldiers.

75% of troops take showers privately "usually or almost always."^⁵⁵ Privacy is evidently not the source of discomfort among troops, in spite of the greater intimacy military life seems to require. The only remaining explanation is a prevailing homophobia among military commanders and policymakers, perhaps the most odious expression of which is the paternalistic "it is for their own good" argument which strives to keep openly gay individuals from serving in order to preserve their own safety. This is perhaps the starkest illustration of the idea that the lionization of soldiers necessitates their dehumanization whenever the discussion centers on some negative aspect of their profession. It presumes that soldiers are intolerant to a dangerous degree, unable to accept a homosexual among their ranks without becoming so enraged as to put them in danger, and further, that this is not problematic. It presumes that a highly trained, physically and mentally conditioned individual cannot handle being ogled and perhaps occasionally propositioned, as though a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" would result in another Matthew Shepard every other day. Are our representatives abroad not supposed to be better than this? If they cannot tolerate American homosexuals, why are they being asked to police a population which is even more foreign to them? Are our Armed Forces staffed with hyper-religious, deeply homophobic racists, and is this acceptable? Is it respectful to servicemembers to shrug our shoulders and walk away, mentally consigning them to the same group of irredeemable offenders as the most frothing member of the Westboro Baptist Church?

One explanation for any lingering homophobia may be contained within another Zogby statistic: 40% of troops have not received any sort of training for the prevention of anti-gay harassment in the last three years, despite such being mandated by the Defense Department. It appears again that this is a consequence of the proclivity to blame preventable mismanagement for the policies which in turn aggravate the consequences of that mismanagement. Here is yet another vicious cycle.

In the end, though, we must ask why it is important for homosexuals to enjoy the same oppression opportunities as heterosexuals. It is not--the institutionalized homophobia of the armed forces is merely one (in comparison minor) aspect of its noxiousness. In arguing against that homophobia, we are merely conceding that while the institution exists, even in its present form, it ought to be available to all, regardless of sexual orientation. The argument for inclusion is not meant to support every action those included individuals might take as a result--gays are just as likely to compromise their morality in the course of following orders as straights. The Mafia too spurns homosexuals, but we do not often criticize it for that one intolerance.

The religiosity of the armed forces is not incidental. The command structure logic of the military is strikingly similar to that of religion: commanders are seen as essentially infallible, issuing orders which are only constrained by legality. God issues orders which are disseminated through preachers and Biblical scholars, equivalent to the legalist interpretation of a military order's constitutionality (in either case, this is the only criterion, even when the edict flies in the face of good judgment). "Perhaps the commander knows something I don't" is comparable to other solipsistic modes of question-begging which provide a ready-made, necessarily unfalsifiable doubt to cast upon any believer's better judgment about the appropriate use of force. In both cases, this slavishness is seen as necessary because the stakes are too high: fail to follow a religious edict and you risk the wages of sin; fail to follow an order, and risk jeopardizing absolute national security (or one's career). The military only need provide a seed of doubt that the seemingly-unnecessary mission is actually essential, or that the massacred civilians in question were secretly terrorists-in-training. This doubt, no matter how minor, gives the order receiver a reason to discount his or her own rational misgivings about the mission's expediency. In a similar way, public relations representatives can create an artifice of controversy where none exists by claiming that the massacre of civilians was an accident, or that there were militants among the killed civilians. The oft-cited inability of investigators to fully test these assertions in the chaos of war leaves open a perpetual doubt, which, not matter how minor, is exploited.

The practical difference between an American soldier and an American mercenary (or a mercenary employed by an American contractor) is thin and rhetorical. The latter is a shade less accountable, but the biliousness of one group does not speak highly of the other. The principle difference is not the lack of accountability, because neither public nor private forces are held to adequate standards. When discussing privatization of the military, law enforcement, the prison system, or the education system, it is important always to speak first of privatization's role as a method for redistributing wealth to those who are already enriched (generally the friends and co-conspirators of politicians) at the expense of the public and private funds which would have otherwise gone to alleviate the worst effects of poverty or to some other valid (and increasingly ignored) use. There are other benefits of privatization, but they are related to the enrichment benefit (for example, a greater lack of accountability facilitates the use of atrocity in the service of subjugating a foreign population and securing its material resources). Both public and private military forces are highly religious and open to crusading, so while the move to privatization cannot be understood as wholly religiously-motivated, neither can it be considered rational--it rests instead on a similar and interconnected form of short-sighted self-interest. To this end, it has served its masters well, but its masters are rare--far more numerous are those who consider themselves its master yet are beholden to it and ever more endangered by it.

For this reason, although the privatization of the armed forces is wasteful and unnecessary, it is a separate concern from our criticism of the illicit use of the military. The aforementioned foreign incursions, whether fought by those in the direct or indirect employ of the state, cannot be defended. Soldiers and private military contractors alike must, for the first time, make the correct moral decision and desert immediately.

There is an increasing awareness in the U.S. that the status quo has failed--that the present market arrangement is a shambling contraption which is held together by masking tape and leaks poison. The rightist extremism of the Bush administration has plunged the nation into a recession, driven up the national debt, laid waste to two countries which posed America no imminent threat, corrupted the federal government with cronyism and political appointees,^⁵⁶ allowed hurricane victims to wallow in toxic muck, facilitated the torture of innocent detainees and then attempted to justify such maltreatment as expedient and forgivable, held in its thrall more than 80,000 such detainees without due process protections, facilitated an expansion of the perpetual war, and perhaps worst of all, conjured up this stuff of nightmares into the mundane realm. That these abuses are even occurring on Earth lends them a singularly odd credence. The profound audacity of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle and others to bring these policies into the real world has cruelly overstretched the dialogue to incorporate an ideological clash between those who would support them and those who would not, between those who would support the torture of children in secret prisons and those who would not. Were it not for the bare existence of the Bush administration, their supporters would not have found cause to defend such practices as history has manifested them. If the last eight years have spawned a monster, it is one of a twisted reality in which battle lines are redrawn over the corpses of the million victims of its brutality, who must be accounted for rhetorically by the war's architects and those inevitable provincials who pick that side as casually as most select a sports franchise. And the inevitable wages of this blood-spattered apology is a loss of moral clarity in those offering it.

But we must be forever cognizant that these policies were not merely the doing of the Bush administration (nor were many of their worst dealings particularly novel--America has engaged in torture and killing to various degrees since its inception, much of it outsourced^⁵⁷). It is unfortunate that none involved with Iraq War will ever see a war crimes tribunal (or better yet, a trial by a truly representative international body), but our popular moral opprobrium might, as Justice Jackson argued, go some distance in ensuring that similar atrocities will not be repeated.

Why then did we fail to learn this very lesson after the Vietnam War? The answer lies to a large extent in our mental disconnect between the policy-maker and the policy-enforcer. During Vietnam, even William Calley was zealously defended by the American public, whereas draft-dodgers, anti-war protesters, and even the helicopter pilot who tried to thwart the My Lai butchers^⁵⁸ were popularly marginalized. There is an establishment belief that the ignominy of the mission, and the ignominy of the actions taken in its service, are irrelevant to one's patriotic duty to perform it, and dissent is ruthlessly quelled--sometimes violently, as in the case of the Kent State shootings in 1970, but more often with the passive hostility of a compliant public who marginalized anti-war protesters as blinkered idealists and cowardly draft-dodgers (ignoring that the unwinnable and unsuccessful war cost 60,000 American troops and 5-6 million Southeast Asians their lives, and would have cost fewer if it had been ended sooner).

The public reaction to protest in the U.S. is in general a curious one: although protests against the Iraq War often set turnout records, those who took part in them were dismissed as effete peaceniks when they behaved orderly and as dangerous rioters when they behaved disorderly^⁵⁹ (all were ignored by the media,^⁶⁰ unlike the right-wing protests against Obama, despite the comparably low turnouts of 50-70 thousand at any event^⁶¹). Protestors must be seen as milquetoast and ineffectual for defenders of the status quo to popularly marginalize them, but if the disaffected stopped being milquetoast and ineffectual these status quo defenders soon find their world changing drastically. There is no perfect medium: protestors are thugs and opportunists (any group which is less than perfectly docile) or idealists and hippies (fully peaceful picketers). There is as well an inconsistency in the police's enforcement of order during protests: leftists are often detained and abused for something as minor as yelling (the Department of Defense has referred to public protest as "low level terrorism"),^⁶² whereas rightist protestors against Obama's perceived attempt at healthcare reform have been able to carry pistols, rifles, and other weapons along with explicitly threatening signs unopposed, in some cases outside of the President's location (and these protestors are dangerous--a government census worker was murdered in September 2009, hanged in a Kentucky cemetery with the word "fed" written across his chest and his Census paraphernalia taped to his body). The bias is clear--and enduring. It was earlier manifested as Cold War nationalism, a pro-capitalist, anti-communist propaganda campaign which was comparable to modern rightist movements in terms of size, scope, and composition.

Such anti-communist paranoia has not abated--it has merely been absorbed by a general paranoia against perceived anti-religious socializing forces. As Rick Perlstein argues in "In America, Crazy is a Preexisting Condition," one of many reactions to the singularly disgraceful displays of the tea parties and associated protests, rightist fanatics have existed in roughly unchanged form for more than a century. Perlstein cites numerous examples of past protests which bear a close resemblance to the current disgruntled in terms of rhetoric and capacity for violence. One such example--the pronounced opposition to President Kennedy among the right wing--is especially applicable:

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news.^⁶³

Kennedy's assassination, far from being an outlier or the product of a sudden paradigmatic shift, was the logical outcome of a radicalized opposition which (inaccurately and intractably) perceived itself as dangerously marginalized:

In that year, a kind of fever lay over Dallas, wrote William Manchester in his book Death of a President. People carried huge billboards calling for the impeachment of the Chief Justice, Earl Warren. Cowboy-booted executives placed 'KO the Kennedys' bumper stickers on their cars. Jewish stores were smeared with swastikas and Kennedy's name was booed in classrooms [news of his assassination, on the other hand, was met with cheers in many classrooms]. The Dallas city council rushed through an ordinance banning attacks against visiting speakers, but many still feared the worst, especially in a town where guns could be bought without a licence or any kind of registration.

There was more than gunfire. The day of the assassination, 22 November 1963, the Dallas Morning News printed a full-page advertisement, ominously bordered in black, accusing Kennedy, again among a long list of other complaints, of being a Communist patsy. It was signed by the American Fact-finding Committee, which eventually was identified as a group of right-wingers led by Nelson Bunker Hunt, of the oil-rich Dallas family. It was this advertisement that prompted Kennedy's remark: 'We're heading into nut country today'.^⁶⁴

The difference between then and now, Perlstein argues, is the media's reaction to these dissolute elements. In the past, they would have been rightly ignored; today's easily-cowed corporate media, in contrast to the comparably independent corporate media of yesteryear, invites the fanatics onto news programs (or gives them their own show). Whereas the clearly deranged individual shouting idiocies from the street corner would have been written off then, they are now interviewed extensively.^⁶⁵ The fringe has always existed; it is now given center stage because corporate elites have realized that idiots are useful in shifting the debate away from honest introspection.

It may be argued that this attention placates the right wing and prevents an unnecessary violent action (as happened in Kennedy's case, but not in Clinton's); if this is the case, then these protestors are no better than thugs and ought to be regarded as such: through shaming, marginalization, and an emphatic declaration that threats are not reciprocal. If it is not the case, then there is nothing to gain by giving voice to loudly and incoherently shouted prattle. Any discussion of the thought, "Perhaps Obama is a Kenyan-born pretender and the anti-Christ," is meant to accomplish two things: to rhetorically minimize the possibility of criticism from the other direction, and to distract would-be progressives from the President's as-yet dismal failure. That one is the goal of Republicans and other of Democrats does not mitigate its overall impact on the dialogue: one of corrosion.

In the end, it is important to do what is right regardless of popular opprobrium (which is so often contradictory and manufactured--see for example the widespread belief that some number of protestors spat at returning Vietnam veterans, accounts which have never been corroborated by anything other than hearsay^⁶⁶). The same could be said of voting: if democracy depends upon an honest articulation of the people's wishes, then hedging one's bet--voting for a Democrat even though one is supportive of leftist parties--distorts those wishes and invalidates the election's results. The U.S. plurality voting system is thus a contradiction: politicians are charged with representing the populace, but they cannot do this if the populace is too frightened of the alternative to vote honestly. If one cannot even legally sign a contract under duress, then a leftist who casts a vote for Obama in order to prevent the election of the warmonger John McCain cannot be said to have expressed a meaningful opinion. That Obama has proceeded to act as a rightist should be a clarion message to any conscientious voter: the time to educate oneself on the issues and cast a vote for a candidate, rather than against the alternative (disagreeable though it may be) is now. Both Obama and McCain promised to pursue programs of unnecessary violence; though perhaps McCain could have been seen to have intended to kill many more than Obama, it is not moral to sacrifice the lives of those in one candidate's crosshairs in order to save the lives of those in the other's, even if one group is more numerous, because one's support for killing remains on the electoral record (and, much like the uninvolved actor hurtling toward innocent bystanders in a runaway mine cart, voters are not directly involved in carrying out the programs for which they vote and are thus unable to cite a utilitarian moral calculus as the reason for altering its path--we are captive in the same way and require a moral impetus, and thus moral involvement, to steer the cart one way or the other). Our intent--preventing what is likely a greater atrocity--is not recorded on the ballot.

Vote for the candidate who pledges to stop all killing, and pursue direct action to stop the violence should he or she lose the election. Neither major party is interested in true reform; the Democrats pursue the same destructive agenda as the Republicans, and are motivated by similarly illicit concerns (financial and career gain; indeed, of the $11 million given by Wall Street lobbyists in the first 10 months of 2009, Chuck Schumer, D-New York, has received the most--$1.5 million^⁶⁷). With some notable exceptions (Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold, and Barney Frank, for the most part), the Democrats are progressive only in comparison to the far-right Republicans and have proven unwilling to break sufficiently with the dictates of capital. The skewed political spectrum in the United States only moves from center-right to extreme-right, and must be pulled leftward. But the disparate leftist parties in the U.S. have proven mostly ineffective, partly due to the purposefully marginalizing actions of the mainstream, partly due to intractability and infighting, and partly due to a conscientious effort to avoid the underhanded methods the major parties. Only the first two need be remedied.

Unite under a banner of leftism, not under communism, socialism, collectivist anarchism, green politics, or any of their myriad oppositional schools, for these are details to be hashed out, not unyielding end goals to be pursued to the detriment of the progressive movement itself. If all are provided for, the mechanism--non-state collectivist anarchist communes, state-run redistributive bureaucracy, worker ownership of the means of production--is immaterial. Efficiency at once becomes less imperative and easier to maximize, given the preventive strength of a commonly-emphasized social safety net. The disparate leftist groups in the U.S.A. have accomplished relatively little, due in part to petty infighting which serves only the opposition. In order for a third party to succeed, these wings must be united under the same banner; for change in the electoral system to be possible, sufficient numbers are required, and this can only be attained through leftist solidarity. In arguing against casting a vote for a third party candidate, it is often said that a third party cannot win due to the intractability of the voting public and the exclusivity of the electoral system, but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a form of circular thinking which overlooks the fact that most Americans are politically provincial and thus susceptible to the sort of buzzword marketing (see: all media uses of the word "liberal") which is responsible for distorting their views. The electorate at large is not right-wing, though neither is it left-wing: it is pre-political, vulnerable to fear mongering but also possessing the human potential for education. Reciprocity requires this acknowledgment: of a human being's worth, but also his or her responsibilities as a member of a community.

Today, U.S. troops are widely seen as the innocent victims of bad policy and lionized by a public which felt it necessary to adopt the slogan "Support the Troops" without any indication that public support was ever in question.^⁶⁸ Striking at the shadows of perceived oppression is a favored evangelical tactic, and indeed, everyone supports the troops, because the troops are human beings.^⁶⁹ It is impossible, though, to move beyond that baseline without an implicit support for their mission. "Support the Humans" might be an effective replacement, conveying the same message without the pernicious subtext, but its utterance might cause the speaker to realize that the second sentiment, rather than complimenting it, often nullifies the first by asking for support for the troops' many victims (which, despite their menacing foreignness, remain just as human as a U.S. soldier).

The establishment of these warmongering leaders' destructive referenda required armies of loyal foot soldiers, both in the literal (the United States military) and euphemistic sense (political appointees).^⁷⁰ The blame must not stop at the highest level, because those yet in possession of consciousness and free will have the final say (and thus, complicity) in the criminal misuse of their faculties. If the vicious cycle is to be broken, culpability must extend beyond the few elites who are effectively beyond legal reproach. If even record-setting protests can be disregarded, though, the expression of moral opprobrium must translate into deed, principally in the form of voting but, failing its efficacy, also in the form of direct action--against property first and agents of oppression second.

At the same time, we must not join with the bloodthirsty chorus which calls for punitive measures for the sake of mere vengeance. A lack of punitive measures has contributed to the "anything goes" climate and repeated instances of abuse, but punitive measures can be abusive, and we torturers-in-turn would be little better than the Abu Ghraib guards who humiliated and assaulted their own charges. It is not our failure to legally punish mostly-peaceful soldiers (torturers, as well as directly abusive soldiers, are quite another thing), but rather our failure to even register moral disapproval at their actions which is most problematic. It is about rhetoric, as always. Legal justice is an imperfect, pragmatic thing (however, a biased justice system, such as one which turns a blind eye toward torturers while incarcerating political activists and recreational drug users, has a moral dimension all its own--the recognition that the law is subordinate to morality is not meant to excuse the worst excesses of a prejudiced, inconsistent court, and certainly the language of magnanimity and lenience can be co-opted to excuse those who pose an imminent threat to others), but our moral judgments are mitigated by no such concerns and must be stated clearly and emphatically. Similarly, the problem is not merely that the aforementioned abuses took place, but that they were normalized and rhetorically supported. And the reason this was done was to avoid culpability at all costs.

This is demonstrated pointedly in the leaked torture memos, which were labyrinthine in their attempts to provide a legal shadow of doubt for torturers. For example, page 16 of the Bybee-Rizzo memo holds that an action only constitutes torture if there is a "specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering." Further, the intent must be express (stated openly), and cannot be predicated on a "good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering." What constitutes a good faith belief? One that is honest, but not necessarily reasonable. What constitutes an honest belief? One that is based on the "advice of experts" (advice which was routinely twisted by the Justice Department--see for example the citation of a sleep study by James Horne as proof that extreme sleep deprivation was not torture. Horne later expressed his outrage that the results of his experiments, which restricted themselves to controlled environments with subjects who experienced no additional stress factors, were misrepresented to justify 11 day non-controlled sleep deprivation periods^⁷¹). Read narrowly, the memos argue that it is possible to simulate drowning on an individual in one's custody while believing (neither reasonably nor expressly, but at the same time based upon so-called "expert advice") that the panicked, drowning detainee at one's thrall is not suffering severely.^⁷²

It must finally be asked if any such torturer could be said to have acted in good faith, provided they have read the memos, which concede that a court may object to their actions? Is it possible to read and understand a legal argument which sidesteps the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by pointing out that such a prohibition was directed against convicted individuals and not detainees who have not even been charged with a crime, accept this as adequate justification for committing torture, and remain a morally exempt agent of the state? An individual who fully digests the memos' slipshod legal reasoning and maintains a good-faith belief in spite of it is highly devout or dangerously uneducated--perhaps too devout or uneducated to be placed in a position which allows him or her to hold such extensive power over another human being. Neither can one cannot remain a "good faith" actor if he or she is aware that the "enhanced interrogation" program was being used to ferret out a confession to substantiate a manufactured link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, in order to justify an act of aggression (one of the victims of torture who provided such a link, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, later recanted his confession and committed suicide--allegedly--in a Libyan prison^⁷³). In reality, the only good faith actors were the few who refused to take part in torture, legally sanctioned or otherwise.^⁷⁴

Although the common excuse for U.S. soldiers' and C.I.A. torturers' misbehavior casts them not as autonomous human beings but as the unthinking tools of state violence, this is an inaccurate characterization, and we know better. It is lucky for them that we do, because a conscious forfeiture of one's humanity would otherwise legitimate the casual preemptive destruction of any who would participate in a war of aggression. If a soldier is no different than a missile, then disarmament in more peaceful, responsible times would see him or her disposed with comparable callousness. This is the danger of abdicating one's conscience to an authority: consistency demands that the wholesale, willful removal of one's own decision-making capabilities (and thus, their humanity), results in a wholesale, willful removal of their human rights.

Those who ask soldiers to maintain their conscience may be called bleeding hearts, but it is lucky that our hearts bleed minimally and voluntarily; otherwise theirs would hemorrhage copiously and unwillingly when the many victims of their cruelty (and the victims' families, and others impoverished or otherwise brutalized) illustrate in spectacular fashion the idea that an aggressive military presence succeeds most at creating and radicalizing opposition. Soldiers are not just tools; they are rational adults, and it is time they begin to think as such.

Truly, the same could be said of most Americans. There is no place in the modern world for the destructive, polarizing influence of nationalism and religion. We must not categorize ourselves as distinct from other human beings, as exceptional--the rules do apply to us, and an honest application of such would render the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of aggression unconscionable, and those who started and fought them as criminals. Japanese war criminals were prosecuted for waterboarding in the wake of World War II, and the torture memos released in April 2009 acknowledged that the U.S. has condemned foreign governments for employing identical methods of torture.^⁷⁵ Yet we waterboarded, yet we tortured. We knew better but we excused ourselves because we are American. The primary lesson which must be taken from the disastrous last decade is that we are Americans second, human beings first.

While the institutors of Bush policy cannot be tortured in turn, the weaponized ideology of aggression and exceptionalism they wielded must be given no quarter. Doing so will by natural course marginalize its most public wielders, and those who have most closely associated themselves with discredited ideology may quickly find themselves unpopular (Alberto Gonzalez, the memory-challenged former Attorney General, was unable to find work following his resignation--though most other former Bush administration officials have navigated the amorphous, permeable wall separating political office and private consulting quite well).^⁷⁶ Like swords are beaten into plowshares (and the Bible used for kindling), rightist ideology must be transformed by discrediting its more regrettable tenets and preserving the humanistic and secular heart of all ideologies--that we must, at the end of the day, still live among one another. Reality has a "liberal bias," and we cannot sidestep this by claiming not to reside there--we live in the here and now, and neither past traditions nor hope for future salvation can remove us from it.

Surely if we talk openly among ourselves, the better, more honest ideology--that of love and kindness--will win out over debasement and prejudice. If it does not, then we must not treat the intractable as subjects, merely as intractable, yet always as individuals. Theirs is the ideology which robs us of humanity, and it is false. We are better than that, and they are as well--they simply do not know this yet. It is our job, as moral individuals, to make this known.

Our conscience is unassailable, but by this we do not mean that all are rational in the economic sense, nor in the criminal justice sense which would justify excessive punishment for criminals by arguing that they chose, with perfect foreknowledge if not explicit consent, to undertake an action which is sometimes met with violent reprisal by others. This judgment forgets that the punisher is yet a moral being, not a force of nature, and is thus still bound by the rules which the crime and punishment philosophy itself lays out in criminalizing the punishable behavior. It is true, for example, that breaking and entering in Texas may result in injury by homeowner, but this does not legitimate any unnecessary violence on the part of that homeowner (morally, at least; legally, the case of Joe Horn, a Pasadena resident who shot and killed two robbers as they fled his neighbor's house, puts the lie to any Texan claim of proportionality. Horn, who was warned by a 911 dispatcher not to escalate the situation before he exited his home to confront the men, was exonerated by a grand jury).

We can be afraid or unable to make our conscience actionable, but freedom of thought (to the extent that it exists) demands purity of thought and thus, secularism of philosophy. Even the total inability to escape the exigencies imparted by society and genetics cannot abrogate the commonality of those exigencies as secular phenomena, explainable and thus recognizable, if not escapable. That some have managed to overcome these exigencies, at least provisionally, cannot be equated with the rags-to-riches argument (that because some have become rich, all can). There is a limited amount of resources, but there is not a limited amount of self-consistent, rational philosophy. That some have attained a provisional rationality (that is, the closest we may come to true rationality, a proximity which differs within various schools of thought) is an argument that all are able to so. If there wasn't some provisional rationality attainable by all, there would be no reason to discuss the issues among ourselves, there would be only prejudice and unthinking action, and the use of force to keep it in check. But this force would be instituted by those with just as tenuous a grasp on rationality (individuals), so it cannot be just if mere deliberation is unjust. In either process, the lack of rationality is considered fatal.

The rationality required by deliberation is not unattainable, as certain communitarians argue;^⁷⁷ a genuinely secular outlook (and one which recognizes itself as secular) is sufficient. Only by defining rationality as omniscience can it be said to be unattainable--the elimination of omniscience as a possibility redefines the scope of the problem and places rationality firmly within the grasp of human consciousness. A sound refutation of the infinite perspective also abrogates the idea of a fully deterministic universe, and imparts to us the freedom of choice required to undo the many damages caused by the nihilistic inaction which our forebears had attributed to their inability to stand against the tides of predestined fate. In so doing, they stood with the tides of fate, actively reinforcing the machinations of those who cannot justify a free will action and so rely on the blameless and holy as a scapegoat. The Bush aide quoted in Chapter 6 was in one sense correct: we make our own reality, but it is a reality constrained to the sphere of human influence. The inability to alter the very fabric of space and time does not consign one entirely to the tides of fate--in overstretching the concept of human capability, the aide sought only a pretext for inaction; in overstretching the concept of idealism, the aide sought only a pretext for cynicism.

In this way, the theist idea is the ultimate perversion of knowledge-seeking. It sets up as the end goal of the pursuit of truth an absolute which is by definition not attainable through the rational employment of knowledge. It is in this sense an absolute propounded to distort the very definition of "absolute": in one instance (during an attempt at conversion) it is attainable, in the next (during an attempt at arguing an irrational or destructive principle by citing relativism as the natural consequence of god's imperceptibility) it is forever beyond our grasp. And if we cannot even know the entity responsible for having set the universe in motion, perhaps we are similarly in error questioning the priest's interpretation of that entity's edicts (or the politician's). Residing within this seed of doubt are the concepts of "doubling" and "the big lie." The former consists of any number of ultimately hollow rationalizations for the commitment of immorality in the service of some overarching organization or principle; religion, being ubiquitous, respected, and mystical, is the most potent of the "doubling" weapons. The latter is a propagandistic technique which may be better described not as a seed of doubt but as its mature, imposing arboreal parent: whereas the "doubling" rationale is timid and wheedling (and often unspoken, lest its emptiness become manifest), "the big lie," a mendacity so large and unashamed that it seems it must be fervently believed by its teller (and by supposition, possibly correct), is described by its temerity. "The big lie" was on full display in the 2004 election, during which Karl Rove found it necessary to portray Bush as the militaristic candidate, despite the immense gulf between his service record and that of Senator John Kerry. Although Kerry had by all accounts a distinguished war record (though this "war record" was far more distinguished after he publicly threw away his decorations in protest), Rove attacked it directly through the infamous Swift Boat ads. Nakedly inaccurate and pandering, the ads were nonetheless effective. So the seed of doubt blooms more fully in its brash defiance of truth.

None among us sets out to be an immoral person. Somewhere along the way, though, youthful idealism sometimes falls by the wayside, butted aside by what we come to tell ourselves is steely pragmatism--a seemingly protective, assertive impulse is twisted through an adversarial economic system which provides a readymade absolution for aggressors and their agents in the chain of command. Capitalism must end, for it has made hostages of us all--and for what, the enrichment of elites at the perpetual expense of everyone else? It is time to stop accepting trickle down scraps, the illusion of economic growth. It is time to stop tolerating the yearly deaths of hundreds of thousands due to poverty, lack of access to medical care, and pollution, deaths which are necessary only to ensure that the affluent remain ludicrously so (in terms of the world as a whole, most of America is ludicrously rich).

The capitalist power arrangement is not worth maintaining, and though its enforcers--those who benefit disproportionately from its continuation--will stop at nothing to thwart honest reformers, this cannot excuse our lack of action. Only a direct threat is sufficient for us to go on living in their thrall. So long as the prospect of suffering some injury is removed by a degree of plausible uncertainty, we cannot cite the possible retribution of moneyed interests as an excuse to remain supine. Like the Good Samaritan must spring Khadr from his Guantánamo cell, so must we, insofar as we are reasonably and safely able, stand against injustice in the course of our lives.

We must also avoid cynicism and defeatism (attitudes most perniciously felt with respect to the environment, which, while battered, is not yet entirely destroyed), as well as its converse, the triumphant yet false view that our myriad human rights abuses are strictly in the past (most commonly reflected in the dismissal of racism, homophobia, and sexism as effectively over; these prejudices, despite the President's own dismissal of racism, are very much still with us--indeed, hate crimes, stoked by anti-immigration rhetoric, have been sharply on the rise in last decade^⁷⁸). Both extremes are calculated to excuse little more than indolence.

Noam Chomsky closes his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," with a clarion call to reject the cynicism of irresponsible intellectuals who, like mercenaries, crassly applied a veneer of logical rigor to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. These arguments, which baselessly presumed that the Vietnamese regarded the war in the same manner as the U.S. (an attitude now condemned by former Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who in Errol Morris's 2003 documentary The Fog War argues for a concerted attempt to truly understand and commiserate with one's adversaries, a policy which he admits was not pursued by the U.S. in waging the Vietnam War) did not adhere to the principle of reciprocity, dehumanizing both the inscrutable foreign opposition and the Americans who are assumed too uneducated and complacent to raise an objection. Chomsky concludes:

Of course, there are also those two-legged beasts of burden that one stumbles on in the countryside, but as any graduate student of political science can explain, they are not part of a responsible modernizing elite, and therefore have only a superficial biological resemblance to the human race.

In no small measure, it is attitudes like this that lie behind the butchery in Vietnam, and we had better face up to them with candor, or we will find our government leading us towards a "final solution" in Vietnam, and in the many Vietnams that inevitably lie ahead.

Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. "Why should they? What have I done?" he asked. Macdonald concludes: "Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster." The question, "What have I done?" is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam--as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.

The Fog of War takes its name from Carl von Clausewitz's theory of war as inevitably and insurmountably complicated: confusion and thus moral imperfection are to be expected in the rough business of frantic mass killing. If war is inexorably obscurantist, then it is impossible to fully understand one's enemies, and thus impossible to heed McNamara's advice.

The Fog covers all; it cannot be used to excuse one side of the conflict while forgiving the other its transgressions. If the ongoing War on Terror truly justifies the Patriot Act (used overwhelmingly not to combat terrorism, but to pursue drug cases) or the torture and slaughter of civilians, then it must also justify terrorism--America's enemies are after all just as confused as U.S. soldiers, and may honestly believe that committing terrorism is the only way to protect their families, way of life, or national identity. Any excuse offered on behalf of U.S. troops taking part in an act of aggression must also apply to suicide bombers, if we are to be honest. And if we aren't at least honest, what is to recommend our way of life over the force supposedly bent on destroying it?

Evil (or, more precisely, the act of following evil orders) isn't banal, as Hannah Arendt suggested--it requires extraordinary leaps of logic, irrational forms of justification which are fatal to others and, more damningly, to oneself. It is only the outward placidity born of unthinking which gives the evil an outward sheen of banality. Were Arendt to glimpse Adolf Eichmann--the original subject of her observation--after being forced to earnestly follow through on the myriad implications of his hastily-adopted justification, she would see a bewildered, deranged man afraid of his own shadow, but not banality. Perhaps he would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a malady which has been on the rise in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with an increasing suicide rate, this rise in P.T.S.D. may indicate that modern soldiers are at least struggling with the implications of their participation in a war of aggression. What must be said to them in the final act is simple: focus this regret not on drink or suicide, but on a constructive testimonial against those who bid you misuse your faculties, with the aim of preventing others from suffering a similar fate.

In addition to Chomsky's final question, we must finally ask if the fog of war is being used to excuse atrocities in much the same way the platitude "god works in mysterious ways" is commonly employed: to protect from free inquiry those in positions of authority who are unable or unwilling to justify their actions. When immorality is established, amorality is argued; when inconvenient reality is determined, fantasy is offered. Under this fog of shared solipsism, militarism and religion undeservedly propagate themselves as invasive species which thrive on the absence of reason, kindness, and respect for others. This species of solipsism is the last refuge of long-discredited ideology, the progenitor of a false debate between positions no longer sincerely held. It distorts the human tendency to reserve judgment and give equal consideration to all sides by broadening the debate beyond hope of resolution. During the resulting impasse and pageantry, the least fortunate are left on the sidelines, starving and wasting away of preventable illness as the world drowns in snake oil.

No more. The existential questions have been put to rest, and no longer can they serve as a comfortingly inscrutable reverie to be pursued to the detriment of meaningful reflection. Every generation claims that it will address the failings of the previous one, but the threat of nuclear or environmental catastrophe have raised the stakes, and the victims of our inaction are not merely potential--they exist and suffer in the present moment. Because we cannot live forever, the future belongs to our progeny, and to our progeny alone. Those who are willing to sacrifice themselves to achieve Heavenly immortality should not hesitate to sacrifice some material comfort for the lasting justice of a sustainable future for their children.

If a perpetual presence on Earth is required to cause a human being to act in a manner which is beneficial to future generations (so the religionist charges in casting atheism as an excuse to act in a short-sighted self-interested way), then religion is no better than atheism in this regard: both hold that one's earthly body must necessarily die. Religion holds that the body's spirit lives on in some other plane, but this plane is not Earth, and it cannot interact with Earth. One is just as separated from the corporeal in either scheme. Thus Heaven is not, and cannot be interpreted as, the superior impetus to care about the world postmortem. But does secular thought provide this impetus?

If we live for others, then our fear of death is mitigated by the knowledge that the world has been improved by our presence and may safely live on after our passing. Biology only demands that we pass our genes along, but it also compels us to protect our offspring, in order to ensure that they have a high chance of passing along genetic material. Implicit in this is a concern for the offspring of others--after all, ours will need a mate with which to create more offspring. Can we not die peacefully, knowing that we have done everything in our power to ensure the survival of the human race? Is it not comforting to know in one's final hours that although this particular journey has come to end, it has in its course fostered the opportunity for countless generations of consciousness to experience the world as it is, and as it can be? Our lives are narratives, and like all stories they must ultimately come to an end. But they need not perish entirely with their main character; if our stories impact the world in a positive way, they will live on in the grateful words and inspired deeds of others. So immortalized, the one enduring aspect of experience--not consciousness, but that which facilitates it: memory--can live on. And if we wish for this narrative immortality, then we must ensure that the story's tellers--our descendants--can live to tell it. This requires the wisdom of largesse on our parts.

The nightmare scenarios presented within this work need not come to pass--the poor and imprisoned need not justifiably yet violently revolt against their captors, just as the near-depleted fisheries of the world's overexploited oceans need not institute the more passive rebellion of extinction-related scarcity and starvation. Collapse is preventable, but change we must. It is time now to go about entrusting to others (and to ourselves) that mutual respect which is our entitlement--a human right bestowed not by god, nature, or king, but by us, and not because we are afraid, pious, or patronizing, but because we are common.

1Such Islamophobia exists in America as well as in Europe. See for example the French legislative view of burqas--full body garments worn by some Islamic women--as uniquely patriarchal vestments. Though secularism is cited as the motivation for this attitude (which may soon result in a ban on wearing the garments in public and has already resulted in the denial of citizenship for a Muslim woman who had lived in France for nearly a decade at the time due to her "insufficient assimilation" into French culture), a lack of criticism for nun's habits and other traditional religious garb reveals a more prejudicial character which places the view more generally among widespread European nationalist fears of increasing Muslim immigration and birth rates. A ban on burqas in particular would be less in line with the French concept of laïcité (a notion of separation of church and state that is generally more robust than that found in the U.S.) than its previous ban on all religious insignia in public schools. The former targets one religion and particular and thus may be considered a state abrogation of laïcité; the latter, on the other hand, targets all religions equally with the aim of separating religious expression from the public sphere.

See also the treatment of Islam in Sam Harris's The End of Faith. Harris views terrorism as a natural outgrowth not of a generalized religious irrationality but of particularly Islamic beliefs (this strangely causes him to come to a similar conclusion to that of the American fundamentalist Islamophobes who maintain that terrorists "hate us for our [religious] freedoms," though Harris might use "modernity" in place of "freedoms"). Indeed, Harris is respectful of the mystical bent in general--he defends the belief in the existence of mystical and psychic phenomena (experienced through meditation, fasting, etc.), which he sees as fulfilling a necessarily spiritual dimension of the human mind. Rather than attack both generalized mysticism and religion, Harris instead views particular religions as having twisted the better aspects of mysticism.

This Islamophobia reached new heights in October 2009, when a group of Republican lawmakers called for an investigation into Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations, which they accused of "spying" through Muslim interns on Capitol Hill. Their accusations were based on an internal document in which the organization laid out advocacy strategies, one of which was the placement of Muslim interns in Congressional offices (which is neither illegal nor particularly nefarious, and at any rate is far less extensive than the level of political infiltration of Christian groups such as The Family). Nothing in the memo establishes that C.A.I.R. is actually spying; the House Republicans' evidence for this comes from the profoundly Islamophobic book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America, which conflates Islam with terrorism and states that young Muslims are being taught to attack non-Muslims. Glenn Greenwald writes that one of the House Republicans (Sue Myrick of North Carolina) contributed a foreword to the book; one of its authors, Dave Gaubatz, is a racist extremist:

He previously called Obama a "crack head" and wrote that "a vote for Hussein Obama is a vote for Sharia Law."

Gaubatz -- a civilian agent who worked for The U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations -- was also the source for the "bombshell story" from supreme Muslim-hater Melanie Phillips, who wrote a 2007 piece for the British Spectator with this screaming headline, immediately promoted by leading right-wing blogs: "I found Saddam's WMD Bunker!" It details how Gaubatz personally found bunkers where Saddam's WMDs were kept in Iraq, but "the [Bush] administration failed to act on his information, 'lost' his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam's WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war." As a result, Saddam's WMD are now in the hands of Syria, and the world has been fooled into believing that he had none.

Source: Glenn Greenwald, "GOP House Members Call for Investigation of Muslim Political Activity," 15 October 2009, accessed on the website of Salon at http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/15/ investigation/index.html, 16 October 2009. Brackets in original.

3The preacher Obama has most frequently visited since taking office is Camp David navy chaplain Carey Cash, an Islamphobe who has written that Islam has "from its very birth has used the edge of the sword as a means to convert or conquer those with different religious convictions." Tim Reid elaborates in The Times Online:

Mr Cash, a chaplain in one of the first units to reach Baghdad, believes that a "wall of angels" protected his troops when they fought their way to the Iraqi capital in March 2003. During his deployment he baptised more than 50 servicemen. In his book, A Table in the Presence: The Dramatic Account of How a US Marine Battalion Experienced God's Presence Amidst the Chaos of the War in Iraq, Mr Cash said of the mission: "Yes, our men were lost and separated. But our God was not confused. Just as He had from the very beginning of the war, He was providentially working all things together for the good of a cause that was just and true."

He added: "Sadly, grace is often absent in Islam, which is based upon binding religious law, requiring strenuous adherence to every tenet of the 'Five Pillars of Allah'.

…

Mr Cash has been criticised by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog that monitors proselytising in the military, for his work with Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry.

According to the watchdog, the group's goal is to transform the US military into a force of "government-paid missionaries for Christ".

Source: Tim Reid, "'Islam is Violent' Says President Obama's New Pastor Carey Cash," 15 October 2009, accessed on the website of The Times Online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_

americas/article6875323.ece, 15 October 2009. Ellipses not in original.

7For an excellent example of this gambit in practice, see the aforementioned "liberal media" phenomenon. Nothing of substance need be included in these allegations for them to have an effect on the easily-cowed corporate media, which overcompensates and turns a blind eye toward rightist corruption (and ignorance: Palin alleged in 2009 that the media had targeted her deliberately, and that her infamous inability to answer broad questions about which newspapers she reads and her take on Bush doctrine was the result of character assassination and "gotcha journalism").

The same docility led The New York Times to welcome as an op-ed columnist Bill Kristol, an arch-conservative ideologue and strident supporter of the Iraq War whose record of incorrect predictions and published retractions could fill a seven volume set. Kristol, a harsh critic of the Times itself, remained an outspoken detractor of the newspaper even while on its payroll and used the platform to advance an inaccurate conception of reality which was disparaged even by other conservatives (including Pat Buchanan, an open racist who has spoken of a coming race war and who has provided regular commentary on "left-leaning" cable news channels MSNBC and CNN). Fired in January 2009, Kristol is reportedly moving on to The Washington Post, another newspaper which has been the subject of rightist complaints of bias (and which is already host to numerous dissenting views from neoconservative war supporters, including Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan; the latter is the founder of the Project for the New American Century, a think tank which advocated shortly after the attacks of September 11^th that the U.S. depose Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding his actual involvement in the attacks). Though Kristol is gone, the Times still employs war cheerleader David Brooks, a similarly fact-challenged former editor of the unprofitable neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard.

Statistical analysis of cable news networks over the past several years has found that Republican and/or conservative input is routinely favored over that of Democrats and/or leftists across the board. The blog Think Progress compared the number of Republican and Democrat lawmakers who were invited on CNN, CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and MSNBC news programs to discuss Obama's proposed stimulus package from 6:00 AM January 26, 2009 to 4:00 PM January 28, and found that the proportion skewed Republican by a factor of at least two to one for each channel, save Fox News, which surprisingly invited eight Republicans and six Democrats. CNN had the worst ratio, with seven Republicans to two Democrats. The survey can be found at http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/28/cable-news-stimulus/.

Finally, CBS News has recently named Republican activist Jeff Ballabon Senior Vice President of Communications. Ballabon has gone on record to state that Democrats are fundamentally bad people, and feels that "Obama is incredibly dangerous." Ira Forman of the Huffington Post writes:

During the 2004 elections, JTA reported, "AIPAC has touted this election [in 2004] as a 'win-win' proposition, noting Bush's strong support for Israel and Kerry's 100 percent pro-Israel voting record in the Senate." In response, Ballabon wrote, "Bush and Kerry 'win-win?' Republicans and Democrats indistinguishable? It would be funny if Jews weren't being killed."

Source: Ira Forman, "CBS News Pick Claimed Democrats are Bad People," 20 February 2009, accessed on the website of The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-forman/cbs-news-pick-claimed-dem_ b_168688.html, 24 February 2009. Brackets in original.

In the end, the failure of corporate media is as stirring an indictment of the free market as one is likely to find. The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues and to do so in an honest, balanced way, signaled the rise of right-wing talk radio and right-leaning cable news networks (though the original doctrine would not have covered cable news channels). These corporate broadcasters folded eagerly to the demands of conservatives, who alleged under-representation, without investigating the very thing mandated by the Fairness Doctrine: the opposing view, that conservative under-representation is a myth, one meant to ensure not fair representation but a pro-conservative bias. This is most clearly manifested in Fox News but is seen in the other networks as well (MSNBC, for another example, employs Joe Scarborough, a one-time Republican Representative who campaigned for the privatization of several government agencies such as the Department of Education, and who has argued strongly in support of torture on his program). Even mainstream media organizations and journalists which are considered part of the putative "liberal media" only go as far as ridiculing far-right commentators for the worst of their charlatanism, and devote little or no time to actual leftist criticism of Democrats or Republicans. The mainstream media reflects the skewed American political spectrum, which runs from center-right to far-right; Fox News and MSNBC, though they are at times opposed, are part of the same establishment.

Stung over its losses in 2006 and 2008, the Republican party has turned to Fox News, the now-infamous cable news organization whose Obama-era campaign to become a right-wing church of political activism illustrates the constant rhetorical flux between objectivity (its "Fair and balanced" motto and actual status as a nominal news organization) and naked subjectivity (Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" and 9/12 Project, "Hannity's America," Bill O'Reilly's Culture Warrior, hundreds of thousands of dollars in what amounted to free advertising for the fringe tea party protests in 2009, and even a legal argument propounded by Fox lawyers, in a successful 2009 appellate court case, that freedom of speech protected their regular lies and distortions) necessary to assuage the beleaguered, yet extant, political consciousness of neoconservative activists who would otherwise quickly realize that their prejudices are being reinforced by slanted reporting. Fox cannot act as both a neutral news source and communal haven for would-be besieged Middle Americans, but rather must continually balance the two extremes: travel too far in either direction and Fox risks losing its audience to pernicious fact (an actual "Fair and Balanced" Fox News) or to network cancellation (a Fox News which doesn't even claim to be Fair and Balanced--this is, after all, the organization responsible for doctoring photographs of New York Times columnists in an effort to smear them, rather crudely, by making them appear ugly; this is a nakedly dishonest tactic and one whose excessive, unapologetic repeat would alienate the viewers who genuinely believe its claims of objectivity. There is also the defense offered by their own newscasters--when pressed about his use of misleading rhetoric, Beck responded that he was little more than a rodeo clown and warned viewers not to mistake his claims for gospel truth). Writ large, this is the very problem of religion: without its claim to objectivity, there is nothing to recommend it over the alternatives, but the claim of objectivity itself abrogates the vast majority of its practice as genuine religion. It is a shell game, and we all lose.

10As a member of The Family, Brownback has been instrumental in furthering the goals of the fringe religious right. He was behind the aforementioned Constitution Restoration Act, as well as the Broadcasting Decency Enforcement Act (created in the wake of Janet Jackson's accidental exposure at the Superbowl, the act would raise fines for such incidences to $325,000). Jeff Sharlet writes that while Brownback is unapologetic about his attempts to create a theocracy, he prefers to combat secularist and Islamic influence in the shadows:

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell -- one explicitly dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading organizations on the religious right. James Dobson's Focus on the Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from discussing the proceedings. It's a little "cloak-and-dagger," says a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win passage of Brownback's broadcast decency bill and made the president's tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to day, the VAT is instrumental."

…

Brownback points to his friend Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under Reagan, as an example of a man who wields power through backroom Fellowship connections. Meese has not held a government job for nearly two decades, but through the Fellowship he's more influential than ever, credited with brokering the recent nomination of John Roberts to head the Supreme Court. "As a behind-the-scenes networker," Brownback says, "he's important." In the senator's view, such hidden power is sanctioned by the Bible. "Everybody knows Moses," Brownback says. "But who were the leaders of the Jewish people once they got to the promised land? It's a lot of people who are unknown."

Source: Jeff Sharlet, "God's Senator," 25 January 2006, accessed on the website of Rolling Stone at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator, 12 October 2009. Ellipses not in original.

19In a separate instance of misleading political tactics, current Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele enlisted homeless and other low-income individuals to distribute a series of misleading fliers which stated that he was endorsed by several Democrats and African American politicians (he was not) during his 2006 Senate bid. The indigents were bussed in from nearby Philadelphia with the explicit goal of (according to an anonymous campaign staffer) confusing black Democrats into voting for Steele, who was never identified as a Republican in the material. Source: Matthew Mosk and Avis Thomas-Lester, "GOP Fliers Apparently Were Part of Strategy," 13 November 2006, accessed on the website of The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/12/AR2006111201084.html, 20 February 2009.

Both Steele and Palin are examples of a curious form of affirmative action within the Republican Party, designed not to increase access and opportunity for minority politicians or citizens but to paternalistically court minority voters in the wake of Democratic minority candidates' successes. Palin followed Clinton, and Steele (who has attempted to make the Republican image more relatable to African American youths, not through a change in policy, but through a calculated change in rhetoric which was no more sincere than his 2006 election fraud; indeed, Steele had earlier defended former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich's decision to hold a fundraiser at a Whites-only country club) followed Obama. But these were neither effective nor empowering choices, suggesting that status as a minority alone was sufficient in their appointment. It is ironic then that the typical conservative criticism of affirmative action--that it results in less qualified individuals being chosen merely because of their race--is being observed in affirmative action only as it is practiced by insincere conservatives. The starkest indication that the opponents of fairness do not understand it must be their inability to successfully instantiate their own crass versions of the same.

20See "The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America is a Myth" on the Media Matters website, a study which catalogues numerous polls and finds that a majority of Americans (in many cases a wide majority) have become more progressive on a number of social and economic issues (including government intervention in the economy, stem cell research, crime and punishment, the environment, and even the War on Terror--45% feel that a reduction in overseas military presence is the best way to reduce terrorism, the most common response in that particular poll) over the last several decades than is commonly accepted. The study, available at http://mediamatters.org/progmaj/report, shows that rightists do not even have technical majoritarianism on their side.

Nevertheless, a more accurate label than "progressive" might be "provincial." There is a discrepancy between the answers given in these polls and the behavior (electoral and otherwise) of the American public, which may be progressive in theory but is, apparently, uniquely vulnerable to regression and manipulation, via the employment of solipsistic and misleading arguments (in addition to other anti-democratic barriers). Given the innate yet perhaps neglected American civil consciousness (one that trends toward fairness and understanding, at least in theory), an appeal to reason would only reinforce these liberal tendencies and cause them to manifest more consistently, and prevent provinciality from resulting instances of voter cognitive dissonance such as that which occurs in nearly every Congressional race (Americans have a generally low opinion of Congress as a whole but retain their own lawmakers with startling regularity) and which has obfuscated the current healthcare debate (polls find that a majority of Americans hold a number of misconceptions about Obama's proposed bill--to put it mildly). If Americans understood the need to educate themselves on political issues, they would not, for example, react more favorably to the question "Do you favor or oppose the federal government temporarily taking over major U.S. banks in danger of failing in an attempt to stabilize them?" than they do to "Do you favor or oppose the federal government temporarily nationalizing major U.S. banks in danger of failing in an attempt to stabilize them?" (A February Gallup Poll found 54% of Americans in favor of "taking over" banks and 44% in opposition, while only 37% are in favor of nationalization, and 57% oppose it, despite the questions' equivalence.) Source: "Americans' Views on Bank Takeovers Appear Fluid," 24 February 2009, accessed on the website of Gallup at http://www.gallup.com/poll/116065/Americans-Views-Bank-Takeovers-Appear-Fluid.aspx, 1 March 2009.

22Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone on record to state that the single-payer option is no longer being considered. In fact, the administration has deliberately formulated its current healthcare plans to exclude even the future option of single payer healthcare in America. Plans for a public option (which would compete with private insurance sans price cap on premiums) have been put off until 2013, and this option is estimated to apply only to a scant number of Americans (9 million by 2019).

This public option, as of July 2009, is likely to be removed from any compromise legislation, as is the requirement for employers to offer health insurance for their workers. An Associated Press article enumerates some other compromises (between the President and Congressional leaders, many of which are Democrats):

The deal calls for exempting more small businesses from a requirement to offer coverage, trimming subsidies to help people buy health insurance, and making any government-sponsored insurance plan negotiate payment rates with medical providers -- instead of dictating them.

Source: "A Look at the Deal Worked out on Healthcare," 29 July 2009, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/29/us/politics/AP-US-Health-Care-Overhaul-

Deal.html, 29 July 2009.

That Obama's healthcare package is a far cry from universal healthcare has not stopped its opponents (and the media) from painting it as such. In its current form, the legislation proposes a weak public option which is not competitive (it is "self-sufficient," and has no funding advantage against private insurers, especially if there is no tax increase on the wealthy to fund it--this kind of public option is little more than a new insurance program which is offered by the government but behaves otherwise as a private entity), yet its failure, miscast as the failure of universal healthcare, would delay that much-needed program for decades. Robert Reich writes that the healthcare program will, however, significantly benefit large pharmaceutical companies:

Big Pharma, for example, is in line to get just what it wants. The Senate health panel's bill protects biotech companies from generic competition for 12 years after their drugs go to market, which is guaranteed to keep prices sky high. Meanwhile, legislation expected from the Senate Finance Committee won't allow cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada and won't give the federal government the right to negotiate Medicare drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. Last month Big Pharma agreed to what the White House touted as $80 billion in givebacks to help pay for expanded health insurance, but so far there's been no mechanism to force the industry to keep its promise.

(It would later emerge, through a leaked internal memo, that the White House secretly met and compromised with Big Pharma representatives in July. The memo, since disavowed by both the White House and industry representatives, is available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_258285.html). Source: Robert Reich, "Obamacare is at War with Itself over Future Costs," 20 July 2009, accessed on the website of Salon at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/20/ healthcare_divisions/, 20 July 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised not to sign any healthcare bill which adds "one dime to deficit, now or in the future." This pledge was immediately exploited by Senate Finance Committee, which is requesting that the Congressional Budget Office use a 20 year estimate for such a calculation rather than the more standard 10 year period. A group of rightist Democrats and Republicans who sit on the committee (known as the gang of six) have thus far successfully stymied healthcare reform:

Conrad is a member of the Finance Committee's Gang of Six and has opposed pursuing health care reform in 2009 because of concerns over the budget deficit.

He fought earlier attempts to tabulate the cost of the bill at five years, insisting instead on ten. And in the spring he battled Democratic leadership's efforts to include reconciliation language in the budget. He lost that fight but managed to write the language narrowly enough to make using the process - which allows Democrats to pass reform legislation with a simple majority because it prevents a filibuster - more difficult than it otherwise would have been.

Source: Ryan Grim, "'Gang of Six' Moving Goalposts on Health Care Costs," 15 September 2009, accessed on the website of The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/gang-of-six-moving-goal-p_n_287218.html, 16 September 2009.

As of October, the public option was indeed lost. The battle has moved on to abortion: anti-choice Democrats and Republicans are pushing to eliminate insurance subsidies which cover health insurance plans with abortion provisions (nearly half of all current insurance plans received through an employer have abortion provisions). If successful, this restriction would effectively eliminate such plans from the marketplace. Source: David D. Kirkpatrick, "Abortion Fight Complicates Debate on Healthcare," 28 September 2009, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/ health/policy/29abortion.html, 29 September 2009.

23Among the many disheartening signs that the war in Afghanistan will continue to spiral out of control is the replacement in 2009 of General David McKiernan with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As commander of Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal was tasked with killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a task which he sought to accomplish through the use of brutal interrogations at Camp Nama (slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute you for it"--though several of the members of his task force were indeed prosecuted). Tom Engelhardt writes of McChrystal's plans for Afghanistan (and soon, Pakistan) in Mother Jones:

The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak--that is, expanded--war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

Source: Tom Engelhardt, "The Pressure of an Expanding War," 21 May 2009, accessed on the website of Mother Jones at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/pressure-expanding-war, 23 May 2009.

Ellipses in original.

Another disheartening sign is the rapidly increasing presence of C.I.A. agents in Afghanistan--this escalation has occurred alongside similar increases in military presence and preemptive Predator drone strikes.

29See for example Obama's top economic advisor Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: both have close connections with big business deregulators and the Wall Street financial entities responsible for the economic crisis. There is as well as his nomination of Ignacia Moreno, a lawyer for General Electric and other industrial giants aligned in opposition to pollution regulation, for Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division. Obama has also appointed Alexia Kelley, a radical anti-choice campaigner who has argued that abortion is comparable in moral terms to torture, to the position of Director of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services. To the position of ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Obama appointed a former Raytheon executive (James B. Smith); another former Raytheon executive is the new Deputy Secretary of Defense (William Lynn III, for whom Obama waived his own ethics rule requiring lobbyists to wait two years before working on similar issues in the administration). Pediatrician and opponent of single-payer healthcare (and brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a political bully who has made a career out of helping to elect right-leaning Democrats and who has since threatened progressive party members with reprisals for refusing to vote on the administration's projects) Ezekiel Emanuel was brought on as Obama's healthcare policy advisor in a move which bodes badly for universal healthcare proponents (though perhaps not as badly as his original choice, industry lobbyist Tom Daschle). Matt Taibbi summarizes the disconcerting financial sector picks made by Obama:

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team -- at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

Source: Taibbi, "Wall Street's," 8.

31On 24 April 2009, the Washington D.C. Circuit court ruled that the Supreme Court recognition of habeas rights in Guantánamo detainees did not carry any attendant benefits--indeed, the court reaffirmed a previous dismissal of a similar case in 2008, finding that for the purposes of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the religious freedom statute which petitioners argued should have entailed constitutional rights for detainees given that Boumediene had provided them with habeas rights), detainees are not "persons." They therefore have only the rights explicitly granted to them by the Supreme Court or through existing law. The Department of Justice under Obama "filed briefs in March urging the Court of Appeals to reject any constitutional or statutory rights for detainees. The Obama Justice Department further argued that even if such rights were recognized, the Court should rule that the previous administration's officials who ordered and approved torture and abuse of the plaintiffs should be immune from liability for their actions." Source: "Appeals Court Rules Gitmo Detainees are Not 'Persons'," 24 April 2009, accessed on the website of Raw Story at http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Appeals_court_rules_Gitmo_detainees_are_0424.html, 24 April 2009.

As investigative journalist Alan Nairn writes, Obama's position on such brutality largely misses the point:

For every torment inflicted directly by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the secret prisons, there were many times more being meted out by US-sponsored foreign forces.

Those forces were and are operating with US military, intelligence, financial or other backing in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Nigeria, and the Philippines, to name some places, not to mention the tortures sans-American-hands by the US-backed Iraqis and Afghans.

What the Obama dictum ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage.

Source: Allan Nairn, "The Torture Ban that Doesn't Ban Torture: Obama's Rules Keep It Intact, and Could Even Accord With an Increase in US-Sponsored Torture Worldwide,” 24 January 2009, accessed on the website of Allan Nairn at http://www.allannairn.com/2009/01/torture-ban-that-doesnt-ban-torture.html, 25 May 2009.

33In spite of this, the U.S. government has refused to recognize the incident as a coup, because this would require the total cessation of aid under the U.S. Foreign Appropriations Act. In addition, the U.S.-dominated I.M.F. has disbursed more than $160 million to the coup government, despite having earlier shown that it was possible to cancel funding--during the Zelaya administration, I.M.F. disagreements with his economic policy had resulted in a cessation of aid. Source: Mark Weisbrot, "IMF: Stop Funding Honduras," 3 September 2009, accessed on the website of The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ cifamerica/2009/sep/03/imf-honduras-aid-zelaya, 14 September 2009.

The Cold War, it seems, is not over. The language used to describe the coup has become reflective of the old anti-leftist rhetoric of the past several decades:

[The coup] has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war. Two decades later, those former officials -- including Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and Daniel W. Fisk -- view Honduras as the principal battleground in a proxy fight with Cuba and Venezuela, which they characterize as threats to stability in the region in language similar to that once used to describe the designs of the Soviet Union.

"The current battle for political control of Honduras is not only about that small nation," Mr. Reich testified in July before Congress. "What happens in Honduras may one day be seen as either the high-water mark of Hugo Chávez's attempt to undermine democracy in this hemisphere or as a green light to the spread of Chavista authoritarianism," he said, referring to the Venezuelan president.

Additionally, several Congressional Republicans are attempting to sabotage political appointments in order to pressure the Obama administration to lift sanctions (such tactics have thus far proven effective in mitigating the administration's criticism of the coup government). Source: Ginger Thompson and Rob Nixon, "Leader Ousted, Honduras Hires U.S. Lobbyists," 7 October 2009, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/world/americas/08honduras.html, 9 October 2009. Brackets not in original.

36Although contractor presence in Iraq is being gradually reduced in the long term, private military contractors are finding the war in Afghanistan to be a lucrative opportunity. A Department of Defense analysis finds that contractors constitute roughly half of the U.S. fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan, a proportion that is likely understated, according to Jeremy Scahill:

In neither Iraq, nor Afghanistan, do these numbers include the armed contractors working for the US Department of State or for private entities or individuals. That means that the Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy forces working for the State Department are not included in this count. Nor are those who work for the CIA or other covert US agencies. In other words, these statistics are a conservative estimate of the total number of private armed personnel on the US payroll in these countries.

Source: Jeremy Scahill, "U.S. Increasing Use of Private Contractors in War Zone," 25 August 2009, accessed on the website of Common Dreams at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/25-4, 29 August 2009.

The increase in contractors accompanies a shift from Blackwater (Xe) to Triple Canopy, a contractor based out of Virginia (but founded and still closely associated with Obama's home state of Illinois) which as a history of questionable ethics and unnecessary violence similar to that of Blackwater. On May 7, 2010, Triple Canopy will take over Blackwater's security and bodyguard role in Iraq and has already received additional contracts for similar services in Israel. Scahill writes that

Also like Blackwater, Triple Canopy has hired mercenaries from countries with atrocious human rights records and histories of violent counter-insurgencies. Among them: Peru, Chile, Colombia and El Salvador. In fact, in Iraq, Triple Canopy hired far more "Third Country Nationals" than Blackwater and DynCorp and has used more TCNs than US citizens or Iraqis. As I reported in my book, Triple Canopy used the same Chilean recruiter (who served in Augusto Pinochet's military) Blackwater used when it hired Chilean forces, including some "seasoned veterans" of the Pinochet era.

Source: Jeremy Scahill, "Obama's Blackwater? Chicago Mercenary Firm Gets Millions for Private "Security" in Israel and Iraq," 2 April 2009, accessed on the website of AlterNet at http://www.alternet.org/world/ 134594/obama's_blackwater_chicago_mercenary_firm_gets_millions_for_private_"security"_in_israel_and_iraq_/, 12 April 2009.

This is not to say, however, that Blackwater is fading away. Scahill has written of its myriad other business dealings, including a new role in fighting the drug war and an expanded intelligence wing known as Total Intelligence Solutions, which will act much like a privatized C.I.A. (such intelligence contractors now account for a majority of the U.S. intelligence budget). Police functions are also increasingly privatized, with cash-strapped cities doling out contracts to security firms whose agents will be held to an even laxer standard than law enforcement officers (impossible though this may seem). One disconcerting recent instance of this move to privatization can be seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where police efforts by Blackwater and many other contractors sparked accusations of excessive force and racism (see Scahill's "Blackwater Down," available on The Nation website at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/scahill, and "Overkill in New Orleans," by Daniela Crespo and Scahill, available on the AlterNet website at http://www.alternet.org/story/25320/overkill_in_new_orleans/). There is even a new wing called "Personal Security Awareness," which bills itself as a general training program for organizations (including faith-based organizations) working abroad.

48Chris Rodda, "Creationism: The Latest in Military Suicide Prevention," 30 November 2008, accessed on the website of Daily Kos at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/30/105157/02/379/667800, 3

December 2008.

Rodda has also written of the American Defenders of Freedom, a ministerial organization which sparked some intra-military controversy in 2008:

ADOF is an evangelical Christian ministry which evangelizes and proselytizes military personnel by using the military's chaplain corps to distribute prayer coins by the tens of thousands sporting the official U.S. military branch emblems -- three out of the four branch emblems, that is. The Navy coin had to be redesigned last year because then Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter, who stepped down last month after staying on through the Obama transition, denied ADOF permission to use the Navy emblem on this evangelizing tool. According to the ADOF's January 2008 newsletter, Secretary Winter's respect for the constitutional and military prohibitions on this government promotion of religion was the work of Satan:

"The Navy Prayer Reminder Coin was completely re-designed (an improvement) because the Secretary of the Navy would not give permission to use the official Navy seal on the Navy Prayer Reminder Coin – Satan is always at work."

The organization, though, is heavily promoted by both the Army (including its chief of chaplains, Major General Douglas Carver, who has also called for a day of fasting in commemoration of Passover) and the Air Force. Source: Chris Rodda, "Army Chief of Chaplains Promotes Ministry that Called Navy Secretary Satanic," 21 April 2009, accessed on the website of The Public Record at http://www.pubrecord.org/religion/ 853-army-chief-of-chaplains-promotes-ministry-that-called-navy-secretary-satanic.html, 6 May 2009.

49A showing of this film in 2004 inspired a team of Special Forces Officers to write the Arabic for "Jesus Killed Mohammed" on their transport and to provoke Muslim soldiers into an engagement during an Easter Sunday raid (this would not be the last time that the military has baited so-called insurgents into fighting--in 2007, it emerged that the Army had been leaving out fake weaponry as bait and sniping any Iraqi who comes to pick it up). This incident is recounted in "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military," a May 2009 Harper's article by Jeff Sharlet which also contains: accounts of secretive all-male prayer meetings at the U.S. Air Force Academy in which members plot to abrogate church-state separations, an interview with a Lieutenant Colonel who argues, similarly to notorious racist Pat Buchanan, that black slavery was useful because it gave slaves an opportunity to hear the gospel (he was later promoted with Obama's approval), a speech at the Officers Christian Fellowship in which another Lieutenant Colonel exhorts Christian soldiers to be wary of "spiritual terrorism" by non-Christians within the ranks, and even an endorsement by four-star general and head of U.S. Central Command David Petraeus of Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel by Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy, a book which argues that a highly Christian military is necessary to counter "anti-Christian bias" in America. Source: "Harper's Magazine Cover Story: Evangelical Proselytization Still Rampant in U.S. Military," 16 April 2009, accessed on the website of The Military Religious Freedom Foundation at http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/ press-releases/harpers_blast.html, 4 May 2009.

The Harper's article in question, which details many more instances of such abuses (and the military's wanting attempts to excuse them), can be accessed at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488.

50Neela Banerjee, "Religion and Its Role are in Dispute at the Service Academies," 25 June 2008, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/us/ 25academies.html, 12 January 2009. Ellipses not in original.

Religion in general is an important part of the military social apparatus. In 2008, an atheist soldier sued the U.S. Department of Defense alleging discrimination against atheists in the military (he was told that he would not be promoted because he refused to put his "personal beliefs aside and pray with the troops"). The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which joined the suit, has been contacted by roughly 8,000 troops who have made similar complaints (and this is not the first suit brought by the organization--an earlier suit filed on behalf of Army specialist Jeremy Hall alleged that attempts to organize meetings with his fellow atheist soldiers were met with threats of reprimand and denial of reenlistment by Major Paul Welborne, who later disrupted the meeting). Source: Randi Kaye, "Atheist Soldier Sues Army for 'Unconstitutional' Discrimination," 9 July 2008, accessed on the website of Cable News Network at http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/08/atheist.soldier/index.htm, 12 July 2008.

A newer lawsuit alleges that missionaries were embedded with units and routinely distributed Dari language bibles to Afghanis (though proselytizing is banned by the military). The same suit, which is also being filed by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleges that atheist soldiers were forced to attend prayer meetings and anti-Muslim presentations. Source: "Attorneys for Atheist Soldier to Amend Lawsuit," 16 December 2008, accessed on the website of The Kansan at http://www.thekansan.com/news/x1009171451/ Attorneys-for-atheist-soldier-to-amend-lawsuit, 1 January 2009.

Al Jazeera later obtained video footage of U.S. soldiers at the Bagram base in Afghanistan which corroborates the circumstances of the aforementioned lawsuit (chaplains were shown with Pashto and Dari language bibles). In the video, troops are exhorted by Lieutenant Colonel Gary Hensley, chief military chaplain for Afghanistan forces, to "be witnesses for [Christ]." Hensley continued:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

Another incident caught on film depicts a soldier thanking his church for sending bibles to Afghanistan and proposing that while it against regulations to proselytize, it is not against regulations to give gifts. Source: "'Witness for Jesus' in Afghanistan," 4 May 2009, accessed on the website of Al Jazeera at http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200953201315854832.html, 5 May 2009. Brackets not in original.

After the news story was released, military officials at Bagram confiscated and burned the bibles.

52Women too have a difficult time in the military, and their problems extend far beyond glass ceilings and old boy's club prejudice: a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a male comrade in arms than to be killed in action. Interviews with female soldiers in a 2007 Salon article contain allegations of rampant abuse, much of which undoubtedly owes to the military's current practice of waiving criminal and violent records for over 10% of new recruits (the military also has a long-standing policy of allowing gang members to enlist, so long as they are passive, rather than active members--this standard is not well-defined, and is being increasingly relaxed for gang members as well as for potential recruits belonging to white supremacist groups). In one such instance, three women died of dehydration in the sweltering Iraqi summer of 2003 because they didn't want to drink water just before nightfall--the dark path to the latrines had become a favorite hunting ground for rapist troops. Source: Helen Benedict, "The Private War of Women Soldiers," 7 March 2007, accessed on the website of Salon at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_ military/, 2 November 2008.

There is also the case of LaVena Johnson, a 19-year-old female soldier serving in Iraq, whose body in 2005 was found with "a broken nose, black eye and loose teeth, acid burns on her genitals, presumably to eliminate DNA evidence of rape, a trail of blood leading away from her tent and a bullet hole in her head." The initial investigation by the Army ruled her death a suicide, in spite of the evidence of foul play and lack of any previous diagnosis of depression or suicidal behavior. Source: "The Tragic Story of LaVena Johnson," 27 June 2008, accessed on the website of Salon at http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/06/27/lavena_ johnson/index.html, 20 November 2008.

Finally, the story of Sgt. Carlos Renteria, who on Christmas day 2006 drunkenly choked, slammed, and attempted to smother his wife Adriana, indicates that the military's woman-abusing problem extends to the home. Sgt. Renteria was arrested (his second for domestic violence), and the Army claimed it would pursue the case, but he has seen no reprimand for his actions, and in fact has been promoted. During the intervening two years, Adriana tried unsuccessfully to seek justice but has received no counseling and has been told that the military would not pursue the case further. She recalled being told by an assistant at the inspector general's office: "Honey, we are not going to bring a soldier back who beat on his wife a couple of times or because you feel things weren't done correctly. He is over there fighting for his life." Source: Lizette Alvarez, "Despite Army's Assurances, Violence at Home," 22 November 2008, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/us/23abuse.htm, 23 November 2008.

Andrea's case is in many ways similar to that of Halliburton employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who was drugged and then raped and beaten by Halliburton employees--one of which lay sleeping nearby after she awoke--while working in Iraq in 2005. Leigh was held in a shipping container without food or water for more than a day and was told that she would be fired if she left Iraq to seek treatment. She has been unable to secure even an investigation by the Department of Justice since the incident occurred, and her contract specified that sexual assault and discrimination allegations be left to private arbitration. In October 2009, the Senate finally reacted in a small way: it voted (over the objections of 30 Republicans and complaints by the Department of Defense) to begin requiring contractors to eliminate contractual clauses which would prevent such cases from going to court. Known as contractual arbitration clauses, these stipulations are used often by contractors to effectively ensure that lawsuits will not be brought against them for a variety of criminal acts--the arbitration process rarely works in favor of the claimant, and confidentiality clauses further silence the wronged individual.

In summary (Helen Benedict, from an article summarizing some key points from her 2009 book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq):

Between 2006 and 2008, some 40 women who served in the Iraq War spoke to me of their experiences at war. Twenty-eight of them had been sexually harassed, assaulted or raped while serving.

They were not exceptions. According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed.

The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.

Source: Helen Benedict, "Women at War Face Sexual Violence," 17 April 2009, accessed on the website of British Broadcasting Corporation at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8005198.stm, 30 April 2009.

It should be noted, finally, that these numbers are increasing, in large part due to the fact that the Department of Defense has done little to combat the problem. Speaking before a House panel in 2007, Representative Jane Harman (D-California) presented some troubling statistics:

In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are prosecuted.

Defense statistics show that military commanders took unspecified action, which can include anything from punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.

The Pentagon did not even trouble itself with an explanation to the investigatory panel:

But when it came time for the military to defend itself, the panel was told that the Pentagon's top official on sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show up despite a subpoena.

"I don't know what you're trying to cover up here, but we're not going to allow it," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, said to the Defense official who relayed the news of Whitley's no-show. "This is unacceptable."

Source: "Sexual Assault in Military 'Jaw-dropping,' Lawmaker Says," 31 July 2008, accessed on the website of Cable News Network at http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/31/military.sexabuse/index.html, 20 July 2009.

56See Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science for a vast collection of the ill effects of these political appointments on issues ranging from stem cell research to the environment.

The president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James McCarthy, also lashed out against Bush's permanent appointment of friends of the administration with no science education or expertise to science-related organizations. One such appointment was that of Todd Harding, a 30-year-old political science graduate who chaired the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans, to a leadership position in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Far from merely partisan, these Bush appointees are highly biased and unqualified. (This is leaving aside the many appointments of industry insiders to posts which are charged with overseeing that industry, a tactic Obama has repeated). Source: Juliet Eilperin and Carol D. Leonnig, "Top Scientist Rails Against Hirings," 22 November 2008, accessed on the website of The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/21/ AR2008112103359.html, 22 November 2008.

A June 2009 survey by the University of Edinburgh finds that commercial interests are also inimical to the practice of good science:

One in seven scientists says that they are aware of colleagues having seriously breached acceptable conduct by inventing results. And around 46 per cent say that they have observed fellow scientists engage in "questionable practices", such as presenting data selectively or changing the conclusions of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.

…

The study included scientists from a range of disciplines. Misconduct was far more frequently admitted by medical or pharmacological researchers than others, supporting fears that the field of medical research is being biased by commercial interests.

Source: Hannah Devlin, "One in Seven Scientists Say Colleagues Fake Data," 4 June 2009, accessed on the website of The Times Online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6425036.ece, 8 June 2009. Ellipses not in original.

Later, it came to light that from 1997 to 2004, pharmaceutical corporation Wyeth employed DesignWrite Inc. ghostwriters to produce more than 40 medical journal articles touting the effectiveness of hormone replacement drugs for menopausal women. The corporation is now being sued by more than 10,000 women who allege that the drug caused them to develop cancer:

Wyeth, which was forced to set aside more than $21 billion to settle suits over its diet-drug combination known as fen-phen, was criticized for using ghostwritten articles to market the drug. Manufacturers sometimes pay firms to ghostwrite favorable reports of their drugs and then hire doctors to put their names on the journal articles.

More than six million women have taken hormone-replacement medicines to treat menopause symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings. Wyeth's sales of the drugs topped $2 billion before an independent 2002 study found users had a higher risk of breast cancer.

Source: Jef Feeley and Sophia Pearson, "Wyeth Used Ghostwriters to Tout Hormone Drugs," 6 August 2009, accessed on the website of The Philadelphia Inquirer at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/ 20090806_Wyeth_used_ghostwriters_to_tout_hormone_drugs.html, 9 August 2009.

See also Monsanto, the multinational agricultural research corporation and major polluter which successfully applied its substantial resources toward denying tenure (despite the unanimous support of faculty) to Dr. Ignacio Chapela, a Berkely professor who had written an article concerning the contamination of native species by Monsanto's genetically engineered crops. This cross-pollination has become the subject of numerous successful lawsuits in which Monsanto has alleged copyright infringement on farmers selling plants containing their patented genetic code--plants which were fertilized by seeds carried via wind from Monsanto-licensed farms nearby. Several of these patents have since been revoked, though Monsanto's extensive lobbying connections continue to render any attempt at oversight of its many patent claims (including a standing claim of ownership on any porcine offspring created through the use of its patented breeding and herding technique) difficult and piecemeal.

60For a piercing firsthand account of this phenomenon, see Matt Taibbi's piece "Iraqt-Up!" In it, the journalist attends one of the largest anti-war rallies in Washington D.C. and discovers that the media had an agenda in its coverage: despite paying an inordinate amount of attention to pro-war counter-protestors (he counts one journalist for every two protestors here--40 to 80--and notes the general hostility of the reporters toward peace activists), the reporters in attendance glossed over the incredibly large turnout of anti-war protestors (more than 200,000 were in attendance) and falsely compared the two groups in news stories.

According to the vast majority of American newspapers and news services, 30,000 was a solid estimate for the size of the Saturday crowd. Each of the news outlets used a different rhetorical means to avoid a true description of the crowd size that day.

Fox News was among the most disingenuous. On Saturday evening, the news crawl was telling viewers that "at least 30,000 gather in DC to protest military action in Iraq: a smaller group demonstrated in support of action."

Well, "at least 30,000" is not technically incorrect, of course. There were "at least 5" there as well. But we all know what Fox was saying.

The Associated Press reported "tens of thousands" of protesters, but also quoted police spokesman as saying that a "permit had been issued for 30,000 protesters." That 30,000 figure would be roundly circulated in the headlines of AP-subscribing papers around the country.

Source: Matt Taibbi, "Iraqt-Up!," 1 February 2003, accessed on the website of CounterPunch at

http://www.counterpunch.org/taibbi02012003.html, 1 September 2009.

62See for example the many abuses of protestors at the 2009 G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, many of whom were peacefully gathered. At the University of Pittsburgh, many students were not even protesting (the incidents were captured on film), but were attacked with tear gas and manhandled violently by police in full riot gear, who refused to explain the reason for the attack.

Despite the quite peaceful countenance of leftist protestors, police in general react with disproportionate brutality. Assuming that they are morally sound in doing so, would a protestor likewise be morally sound in throwing a Molotov cocktail at the assembled police? Even a robust conception of self-defense would legitimate this, given that the only difference between a riot squad and a violent street gang is the manner of clothing worn. If a street gang approached leftist protestors in the manner of a riot squad, they would be justified in practicing "anticipatory self-defense" by the logic of those police and their supporters. Police actions are different with respect to legality (and even then, only occasionally), but not morality; where disproportionate force is used against assembled groups, lethal self-defense is legitimated. This is true even when ostensibly less-than-lethal devices are used, given the proclivity of police to overuse such measures (see especially Tasers, which have since 2001 resulted in roughly 400 deaths at the hands of U.S. police, who seem to view them in the same way a child does a water pistol).

If the police attempt to stop a moral action, they are acting immorally--but it is possible that they do not know this. If it is made known to them, and they continue to interfere, then any subsequent force on their part is a declaration of willingness to abuse the rights of their charges and constitutes an actionable instance of harm, which can be defended against with lethal force if necessary.

65There is also a religious similarity between the 2009 right-wing protests and their antecedents. Demonstrators carry signs which proclaim that Christ, not Obama, is king and which stress that the U.S. is "one nation under god"; nearly one in five conservatives believe that Obama is anti-Christ (another one in five are unsure). Beyond sloganeering, however, there is an element of proselytization by Mormon convert and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, who has repeatedly recommended the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a far-right anti-communist Christian supremacist, to his followers. Alexander Zaitchik writes that the work most heavily lauded by Beck--Skousen's The 5,000 Year Leap--is nothing short of alternate history propaganda:

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

…

"Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity," says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. "By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years."

In addition to being a virulent anti-communist, Skousen was a racist:

In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."

This instance of racism is unsurprising, given the pronounced undercurrent of racial fears in the right-wing protests of both eras (in Kennedy's time, the fear of integration; in the Obama era, of redistributive programs which are perceived to be beneficial to minorities at the expense of Whites). Right-wing pundits such as Beck and Limbaugh have accused Obama of being racist against Whites, in a scattershot but undeniably effective rallying call for protestors who are themselves overwhelmingly White and, if not outright racist, beset by a number of the same racialist fears. Source: Alexander Zaitchik, "Meet the Man who Changed Glenn Beck's Life," 16 September 2009, accessed on the website of Salon at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/ beck_skousen/, 16 September 2009. Brackets in original. Ellipses not in original.

66There are, however, many well-corroborated stories of anti-war protestors being spat at by counter-protestors. See "Drooling on the Vietnam Vets" by Jack Shafer, in which the author discusses The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Vietnam veteran and professor of sociology Jerry Lembcke. Lembcke's exhaustive research found no well-supported instances of attack by expectoration upon any returning veterans. Shafer concludes that the myth is perpetuated largely due to a widespread hesitance to question the soldiers' claims:

The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn't go to Vietnam--that being most of us--don't dare contradict the "experience" of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety.

Source: Jack Shafer, "Drooling on the Vietnam Vets," 2 May 2000, accessed on the website of Slate at http://www.slate.com/id/1005224/, 4 August 2009.

In the end, though, the existence of a few spat-upon soldiers does not establish any significant post-service persecution. Perhaps the expectorators were incensed, and rightly so, at the actions of the Vietnam veterans, and chose to express this in the only available and publicly visible way. Though the author's father and grandfather both served in Vietnam (the latter with some regret, as well as many health problems), I would not disparage anyone who attempted to express at their transgression a modicum of outrage, artless and perhaps counterproductive though it may have been. The enormity of the crime cannot be adequately spurned by words in the few moments returning soldiers were visible, and spitting is harmless.

There is perhaps another reason that the myth is so persistent: many returning soldiers felt, on a subliminal level, that they deserved such a reaction. A conscientious soldier--one who realized, perhaps for the first time, the profound harm which had been done by this war of aggression--might have thought, "Veterans are being spat upon and not harmed otherwise? We should be so lucky."

68"Support the Troops" is only as consistent and self-aware as any other pro-military slogan has been. This is an organization which has attempted to co-opt anti-war songs (the Clash's "Rock the Casbah" was adopted as an anthem of the first Gulf War; when left-wing anti-war singer Joe Strummer heard the title was scrawled on an Iraq-bound American bomb, he wept) and films (Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, both anti-war satires). It is also the organization responsible for airing recruitment commercials in which heroic soldiers climb sheer cliff faces to vanquish computer-generated dragons (it is telling that young people are enticed into service with images of monsters and abstract heroism, but must subsequently be desensitized to violence against their fellow human beings with explicitly human-shaped training targets). There is finally the story of America's Army, a free computer game which acts as a realistic combat simulator as well as a recruitment tool (its creators openly admit that the game, which provides direct links to the Army website, is propagandistic).

Nick Turse writes of the military's successful penetration into popular culture and children's entertainment in his 2003 article titled, "Bringing the War Home: The New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex at War and Play":

Chris Chambers, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, a former Army major and the deputy director of development for "America's Army" admits that the game is a recruiting tool. However, in response to criticisms that its scenarios of blood, violence, and killing are excessive, he says, "The game is about achieving objectives with the least loss of life." He notes as well that it "doesn't reward abhorrent behavior, it rewards teamwork." To highlight the point, Chambers notes that a player who frags (assassinates) his drill sergeant instantly materializes inside a jail cell. Killing non-U.S. personnel, however, is perfectly acceptable as long as it's done the Army way.

The Navy-produced "America's Army" is only the tip of the military's video iceberg. While the game may be a recruiting device masquerading as a toy, there's nothing clandestine about who was involved in its creation. Much less evident is the Army's role in "Full Spectrum Warrior" (FSW) – a videogame for the recently unveiled Microsoft Xbox system that will be released to the public early in 2004. FSW is a realistic combat simulator that allows the gamer to act as an Army light infantry squad leader conducting operations in "Tazikhstan," a fictional nation, nestled between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. Following the lead of America's present commander-in-chief, the game leaves out all gray areas, casting Tazikhstan firmly within the axis of evil due to its fanatical strongman Mohammad Jabbour Al-Afad, a former guerilla leader of Mujahideen fighters. His "hatred of the western world is well known" and he has turned his nation into "a haven for terrorists and extremists," especially "Taliban and Iraqi loyalists." In short, "Tazikhstan" is a one-stop shop for evil-doers.

He notes that Full Spectrum Warrior was in fact a revamped version of Full Spectrum Command, a military training tool for infantry. Source: Nick Turse, "Bringing the War Home: The New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex at War and Play," 16 October 2003, accessed on the website of Nick Turse at http://www.nickturse.com/articles/tom_warhome.html, 15 August 2009.

America's Army is now in its 3^rd incarnation, and the military has similar propaganda in other popular video games, such as Halo 3. Mother Jones writer David Goodman argues that this is just one aspect of a disconcertingly wide-reaching military recruitment structure in the U.S., which includes a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act which grants recruiters access to information about students:

The No Child Left Behind Act was enacted in 2001 as the signature education law of then-President George Bush. But unbeknownst to most people, including its sponsors, because I spoke to people in the late Senator Ted Kennedy's office about this, it's a provision that requires all high schools to turn over directory information to the military on all juniors and seniors. So that's contact information ranging from phone numbers, email addresses, cell phone numbers.

So the No Child Left Behind Act has, in fact, become the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft itself. And there are stiff penalties for high schools that don't comply with this law. The Pentagon is now, they say themselves, the largest repository of information on 16-to-24-year-olds in the country; they have 34 million names.

Source: "The Thousand Yard Snare," 4 September 2009, accessed on the website of On The Media at http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/09/04/03, 14 September 2009.

See also Goodman's 2009 Mother Jones article "A Few Good Kids?," which details the unprecedented access (to records and contact data pertaining to minors) currently enjoyed by the military, and which is available at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/few-good-kids.

69This has not stopped politicians from striking at the shadows via the legislature. The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act (signed into law in 2006), for example, prohibits protests during soldier's funerals, with a penalty of up to $100,000. In 2009, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) added an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 which would essentially classify as hate crime any attack upon a soldier's possessions, family, or person which was brought about in response to their service. The amendment, which has not yet been approved, requires a significant fine and jail sentence for offenders.

This tendency reached its nadir on September 17, 2009. Speaking before the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, a member of Iraq's Council of Representatives called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops and questioned the appropriateness of the invasion. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) responded to Saleh al Mutlaq with indignation:

"I have never heard one word of gratitude from the Iraqi people about the 4,300 Americans who lost their lives," he exclaimed.

"We went to Iraq to try and free your people and now we're being blamed for sectarian violence," he said. "Don't blame us because that type of bloodlust exists in your society."

A defiant Mutlaq responded, "You were the ones who pushed your troops. We did not invite you."

It was at this point that an exasperated Rohrabacher threw up his hands and stormed out of the room.

The temerity of Rohrabacher should be appalling to anyone even slightly familiar with Iraq. Source: Christopher Hayes, "Rohrabacher to Iraqis: Be More Grateful!," 17 September 2009, accessed on the website of The Nation at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/474337/rohrabacher_to_iraqis_be_more_grateful, 18 September 2009.

75Importantly, though, there was pronounced ignorance among even high-level officials about the history of harsh interrogation methods, many of which were created by using examples found in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program, a training regimen originally used to prepare soldiers for the eventuality of their capture by an unscrupulous enemy (the manual notes that these harsh interrogation techniques often produced false confessions, and, more importantly, that their use in non-controlled environments is likely to produce serious long-term physical and psychological harm--torture). Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti write in The New York Times that

The top officials [C.I.A. director George J. Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

Source: Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use," 21 April 2009, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/ 22detain.html, 23 April 2009. Brackets not in original.

Another instance of hypocrisy: though it refuses to acknowledge that white phosphorus is a chemical weapon, preferring instead to classify it as "incendiary munitions," the Pentagon has referred to the substance as such in a declassified report on Saddam Hussein's deployment of chemical weapons against the Kurds. Ever complicit, The New York Times ran a piece in 2005 in which reporter Scott Shane referred to white phosphorus as "incendiary munitions" which are "incorrectly called chemical weapons." Source: Nico Pitney, "Exclusive: Classified Pentagon Document Described White Phosphorus as 'Chemical Weapon'," 21 November 2005, accessed on the website of Think Progress at http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/21/ phosphorus-chemical/, 15 May 2009.

78This historical ignorance was most recently repeated by President Obama on the eve of his first Presidential trip to Africa:

I think part of what's hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism – I'm not a big – I'm not a believer in excuses.

I'd say I'm probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's occupied my office. And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism.

And yet the fact is we're in 2009. The West and the United States has not been responsible for what's happened to Zimbabwe's economy over the last 15 or 20 years. It hasn't been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we've seen elsewhere in Africa. And I think that it's very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.

And I think the people of Africa understand that. The problem is, is that they just haven't always had the opportunities to organize and voice their opinions in ways that create better results.

Source: "Interview of the President by AllAfrica.com," 2 July 2009, accessed on the website of The White House at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Interview-of-the-President-by-AllAfricacom-7-2-09/, 12 July 2009.

Obama has also attributed his successful candidacy to an absence of racism and indicated that the many virulent and inaccurate attacks against him were not evidence of prejudice. Later, the Democratic organization called Democracy Corps held focus groups to determine why conservatives are opposed to Obama's Presidency and found very few willing to admit openly that race was a factor:

[Senior advisor Karl] Agne said conservatives "truly identify themselves as a minority and feel under attack in a lot of ways." He added that members of this voting bloc also explicitly rejected the mainstream media and labeled conservative commentators on talk radio and on Fox News as "truth tellers."

Despite their vehement opposition to Obama and the Democratic agenda, [James] Carville noted that conservatives were also unhappy with their own party primarily because they believed Republican leaders are abandoning core party principles.

"When Republicans try to be like Democrat-lite," one conservative focus group participant said, "they're not going to convert any Democrats to them and they're just going to lose conservatives."

Source: Michael Falcone, "Study: Obama Foes Aren't Race Driven," 16 October 2009, accessed on the website of Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28399.html, 16 October 2009. Brackets not in original.

Notwithstanding the fact that few would openly admit to having racist inclinations, the grievances cited by the right wing, when they lack explicit racial overtones (examples of overt racism, especially among the tea party protestors and "birthers," are readily available), are scattershot and reflective of a preference for the same paranoid language utilized by racists. It is possible to paint Obama as a stealth-socialist pretender precisely because the balance of racial power in the U.S. renders him an easy target, a blank canvas upon which any nefarious plot can be envisaged. The proof of this is simple: in a Presidency thus far rife with inconsistency and only slightly distinguishable from its disastrous predecessor, these individuals cannot register an accurate complaint. The demands to see Obama's "real" birth certificate, then, are not brought about by a genuine or well-founded fear that Obama's place of birth is outside of the physical U.S., but function instead as a convenient bugbear for a right wing simultaneously angered at the temerity of this African American, and yet unwilling to enunciate this clearly (old guard Republicans such as Jesse Helms, who served as an unapologetic racist until 2003, notwithstanding).

Yet it is not solely Obama's race which has angered the opposition: it is his image as a redistributor of wealth from (hard-working) White Americans to (lazy, undeserving) African Americans. Black Republicans can avoid this stigma by behaving in a manner similar to that of Michael Steele (who could not be mistaken for a defender of African American interests), but African American Democrats, no matter how rightist, can be painted as blinkered crusaders for welfare cheats. Thus the relationship between the free market and racism is laid bare: in order to see the poverty of African American individuals as acceptable, one must explain that poverty via the language of personal responsibility. There are two such explanations: racial inferiority, and, perhaps even more nefarious, cultural inferiority. No such prejudice is necessary on the part of leftists, who maintain that the system itself is responsible for poverty--not those who are least able to escape it.

For an example of such paranoid language, see the many assorted calls (typically by White conservatives) to return to a moral, nostalgic past. Tim Wise writes that such language is nefarious, because at best it demonstrates an ignorance of (or nonchalance about) that past's profound inequalities; at worst, it demonstrates an active wish to return to the days of segregation and highly normalized racial hatred. These individuals are dangerous, he writes,

because such persons, through their lamentations about having lost the nation they so fondly remember, disregard as if they were a mere annoyance, unworthy of consideration, the lived experiences of millions of their fellow countrymen and women: peoples of color for whom so many of those days were anything but good, far from simple, and part of an era that can only be thought of as innocent by a people utterly inured to suffering, wholly incapable of even defining innocence, let alone identifying it, and unable, for reasons of their own racial narcissism, to stare truth in the face. In this case, the truth that their recollections are the very definition of selective memory. Perhaps worse, delusion itself.

Yet these dangerous minions are all around us. We could see them in the town hall meetings this summer, for instance, shouting about how they wanted their "country back," and how we should return to the nation the way the founders envisioned it. No, the shouters would insist, they didn't mean the part about slavery, or the part about women not voting, or the part about killing indigenous people. They only meant the good stuff: you know the part about limited government and perhaps powdered wigs. And muskets, and duels at twenty paces, and wooden teeth, and other such cool things as that.

And perhaps in this, they were telling the truth. But if so, this only suggests that to them, the bad parts--the enslavement of Africans, the murder of Native peoples, the vicious suppression of women's rights--are but a mere trifle of history. Not worth even thinking about. Oh yes, there was that, but really now, who cares?

…

Yet it all seems strangely perverse, seeing as how the "innocence lost" narrative is inherently about the proclamation of victimhood, about imagining the majority as embattled by those who would sacrifice the greatness of the past on the altar of modernity and all its attendant evils. It is the ultimate victimology. And it is far more dangerous than any equivalent form put forth by the truly oppressed. For when the dominant group in a social order proclaims itself aggrieved, insists that it is the marginalized faction, and yet still has its relative power, its guns, its bombs, its police forces, its military, its majority status (in numbers and certainly in influence), that sense of grievance becomes more than mere annoyance. It becomes deadly. The backlash engendered by that sense of victimhood, linked with firepower and the strength of the state apparatus becomes a potential source of real fascism, properly defined and historically conceptualized. It is always the notion of national decline and the need for rebirth that lay at the root of fascism, after all.

As a writer and lecturer, Wise has conducted extensive and important research on contemporary race issues. Source: Tim Wise, "The Avatar of Amnesia: Glenn Beck, Historical Memory and the Evil of Right-Wing Populism," 19 October 2009, accessed on the website of Red Room at http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/the-avatar-amnesia-glenn-beck-historical-memory-and-evil-right-wing-populism, 21 October 2009.