earthwirehead's Open Salon Blog

The Questionable Death of Emmanuel Goldstein bin Laden

Sun, 8 May 2011 07:05:05 -0400

"...as usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience.... Goldstein was the renegade who had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programs of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure... All crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea..." George Orwell's 1984

---------

“...If that is truly the case, we can expect to see "Emmanuel Goldstein bin Laden" morph like a Japanese toy robot, as the marketing geniuses who packaged Bush and his wars in the first place try even more desperately to fine tune their pitch to a changing market. At some point, if all efforts fail, we can probably expect to see "bin Laden" canceled like a bad network sitcom. The reports of the climatic final gun battle will be thrilling, the returned corpse problematic at best. And yet the news will be reported with a straight face.....by people who will certainly know better...” The Many Lives of Emmanuel Goldstein bin Laden (M. Martin 2007)

--------

Just as there remain unanswered questions from the original tragedy of 9/11, so too are disturbing questions raised by the announced death of Osama bin Laden. Since that announcement, a nationwide cathartic carnival has erupted--an orgy of fist-pumping, cheering, and flag-waving. Such an atmosphere makes it very difficult to raise such questions...but also very important.

First and foremost, there is the question of the legality of what has just occurred. The only charges brought against Osama bin Laden under U.S. law are conspiracy indictments dating from the late 90’s (no charges in connection with 9/11 have ever been made). After the fact protestations of legality have been issued by Attorney General Eric Holder, but these are no more compelling than the arguments of the previous administration’s pet lawyers authorizing torture. Even the Nazi leaders who authorized The Holocaust received trials. But of course, the America that sponsored those trials was the America that also regarded waterboarding as torture... and tried as war criminals those who employed it.

That America, the America of 1945, is long gone. In the America of 2011, waterboarding is merely “enhanced interrogation”....and the President of the United States can circumvent with ease anything approaching a Nuremberg Trial, obliged to do nothing more than direct U.S. military operatives in the cold blooded assassination of a foreign national on foreign soil.

Granted, the United States has been in the assassination business for some time now. But typically, these operations occur in theaters of military operation in which the presence of American military is either sanctioned by international law or invited by local government. By all accounts, the government of Pakistan received no notification of this operation until after its objective had been carried out. Had any country other than the United States (or perhaps Israel) carried out such an operation, the international condemnation would have been fairly swift... and fairly universal.

There are also very disturbing questions raised by the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s body at sea (as much beyond any forensic examination as was the rapidly disposed wreckage of the World Trade Center), as well as the Obama Administration's steadfast refusal to release any documentary evidence of the assassination.

Just as it was impossible to question the official narrative of the original events of 9/11, so as well is it impossible to question the official account of the death of bin Laden. There is little doubt that the U.S. government would not be claiming bin Laden’s death if there were a significant chance that the claim would be disputed. But there are reasons to doubt that the death occurred as described--not least among them the persistent rumors over the years that Osama bin Laden, a man with significant long term health problems, had already died.

Equally disturbing is the timing of this event. The inevitable question is “why now?”. The official answer is that finding bin Laden managed to take all of ten years. Speculatively, it seems rather more likely that the timing has a lot more to do with the impending ten year anniversary of 9/11 and the slightly less impending U.S. Presidential election. Osama bin Laden’s value as a “Goldstein” figure was already wearing thin with time, the inability to bring him to ground a growing embarrassment. By taking him out, President Obama has morphed overnight from a Carteresque failure with an uncomfortable middle name and a questioned birth certificate into a Reaganesque figure of steely-eyed command... and a dispenser of ultimate justice.

It would be excessive to suppose that the bin Laden assassination has assured Obama's re-election-- but not by much. After having invested heavily for a decade in the emotional and propaganda value of bin Laden's death, the GOP has no choice but to let Obama cash in on that investment. Attempts to separate the deed from the commander who ordered it will only serve to alienate the majority of Americans. Not only does the assassination bring Obama much needed credibility with Republicans, it has all but silenced critics on the left and independents who feel the President’s domestic agenda has fallen short. Just as George Bush’s posturing atop the smoking ruin of the World Trade Center made questioning his presidency a virtual act of treason, Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for paramilitary raids has made his presidency-- at least temporarily-- largely bulletproof.

Also, taking out bin Laden now means that the current unseemly celebration of his death will have played out by September 11, 2011, and that the administration will have a free hand to conduct memorial ceremonies with appropriate dignity. Likewise, the administration will be free to privately try, execute (and, likely, also bury at sea) the so-called "self-professed mastermind of 9/11" (professed after being tortured perhaps hundreds of times) Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Once that has occurred, the books will be considered officially closed on 9/11....if not on the endless state of war that tragedy was used to justify.

But even more than the potential illegality, the arrogant lack of transparency, and the cynically opportunistic timing, most disturbing of all is the idea that Osama bin Laden could have remained at large in a multimillion dollar compound in Pakistan for years...supposedly without the knowledge of U.S. intelligence services.

The United States has at its disposal massive facilities whose sole purpose is to intercept and monitor electronic communications, as well as spy satellite networks capable of reading a licence plate or the headline of a newspaper from low earth orbit. If the massive build up of U.S. spying capability over the last ten years could not find Osama bin Laden in a large walled compound in an urban area of a friendly country, what good is it? Pakistan’s own intelligence service is being scapegoated for the oversight, but this is misdirection at best. Pakistan has neither the technology or resources to conceal a target from the American military industrial complex...at least, not a target that it really wants to find.

Finally, the question must be asked of those who first supported Barack Obama for President in what now seems a previous lifetime: is this what you wanted?

There is little doubt but that Obama just went a long way toward cementing his reelection. But he has also gone much further than his despised predecessor in demonstrating abject contempt for the rule of law, both domestic and internationally. It seems increasingly likely that future historians will simply describe the last decade as the “Bush/Obama era”, as the partisan and personal differences between the two disappear beneath their common commitment to a presidency-- and a government-- that are beyond question, reproach, or accountability.

Let's Have a Real Debate on Citizenship

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 08:01:02 -0500

There is a debate on citizenship that conservatives want to have. There is another debate on citizenship that some progressives are trying to have--so far, typically, without much success. There are arguments to be made, both good and bad, in both debates. I say we should have them both.

First, the conservative argument--which can be summed up in the closet racist and blatantly inhumane phrase “anchor baby.” Ironically, given their supposed reverence for the U.S. Constitution, teabaggers and their conservative fellow travellers have expressed an enthusiastic willingness to tamper with one of the core tenets of American society: the concept, as stated in the Constitution and reinforced by the 14th Amendment, that anyone born on American soil is, indeed, an American. Their reason for doing so? The fact that an increasing number of those native born Americans happen to be the offspring of people who happen to be in this country illegally. What anyone with a heart and a mind sees as a consequence of human beings attempting to make a life for themselves under adverse conditions, they see as a deliberate criminal effort by “illegals” to swindle American taxpayers by acquiring social services for which they are otherwise unqualified through the good graces of their newly-born citizen offspring.

This is as fundamentally inhuman and wrong-headed as the assertion (not surprisingly, often from the same people) that being homosexual is a matter of conscious choice. It shows a shocking lack of empathy for one’s fellow humans to suppose than someone chooses on a whim a sexual preference that can get you randomly killed on a street corner in a lot of places, render you ineligible for military service, and render virtually impossible the ability to enter into a legally recognized state of loving commitment with the person of your choice. It shows an equal lack of empathy to suppose that anyone would endure the extraordinary risks and dangers of traveling to this country illegally (frequently through the good graces of coyotes who will kill or abandon their clients in a heartbeat, should the need arise) and live in constant danger of deportation...merely to acquire a fraudulent welfare check.

Unfortunately, as heartless and wrong-headed as they are, these fair weather constitutionalists do have a point: no other industrialized nation on earth has as liberal a concept of citizenship as the United States, and there is, indeed, a social cost to that liberality. Canada, for example, has public health care and other social services that Americans would kill for and often die for lacking--but unless you speak English AND French, have an education, and an employer, you are NOT going to legally emigrate to Canada.

Nor are you likely to be employed as an illegal immigrant--which is really the point, and the real issue that quack notions like “anchor babies” are intended to distract from. If we don’t want people in this country illegally, all we really have to do is leverage punitively expensive measures against individuals and corporations that provide employment to undocumented workers. We don’t have to change the constitution, we don’t have to deport newborn infants. We just have to be willing to sanction the hell out of those who exploit illegal immigrants (and maybe accept the idea of national ID card...but that’s really part of a different discussion).

Consider for a moment that phrase, “individuals and corporations”. It leads us into the second emerging debate on citizenship, the one that conservatives and corporate-owned mainstream media don’t want you to hear about...or think about.

In a recent article entitled “Walmart is not a Person” (excepted from a forthcoming book), commentator and author Thom Hartmann made the entirely reasonable argument that the best way to undo the damage of the Citizen United Decision might be to close the legal loophole granting corporations First Amendment protection in the first place. The means of doing so? An amendment that explicitly defines the Bill of Rights as “humans only”-- in other words, to make it a matter of established law that not Walmart, Exxon-Mobil, AT&T or any other artificial legal construct enjoys the rights of U.S. citizenship.

The tricorn hat crowd should love this. The word “corporation” does not appear once in the original Constitution they treat as inerrant holy writ, and there is ample evidence (as Hartmann points out) that the Founding Fathers harbored a deep suspicion and resentment toward such entities. That resentment boiled over in the lead-up to the American Revolution as the REAL “Tea Party”--an event in which an insurrectionist gang wearing identity-concealing disguises destroyed over $2,000,000.00 (in current dollars) worth of property belonging to a multinational corporation. So... people who like to compare themselves to the Founding Fathers should be all over dismantling corporate power, right?

Don’t count on it. For all of the powdered-wig posturing and supposed reverence for the ideals that produced the American Revolution, the various groups that make up the “tea party movement” have never really been about anything else but making sure that the election of 2008 would be nothing more than a speed-bump in the path of the corporate/state power consolidation set into motion during the Bush Presidency. The people who show up at the rallies may be hapless bumpkins, gun nuts, and racist buffoons...the people who pay for the events are about as hapless as Dick Cheney.

Let’s not forget that the core issue in the “Citizen United” case was whether or not the right-wing front group of the same name was free to advertise a hatchet job film about Hillary Clinton in violation of the McCain-Feingold Act. And now, thanks to the most reactionary right-wing Supreme Court in U.S. history, McCain-Feingold is history--and corporations now have a first amendment right to spend as much money as it takes to subvert as many elections as it takes to get what they want. The modern corporation was essentially created in 1886 as a workaround to subvert legal restrictions on large concentrations of wealth. It has worked quite well. The plutocracy of majority corporate shareholders who effectively run this country are not likely to give it up without one hell of a fight.

Just as attempts to deliver average Americans from the predations of an out-of-control healthcare system have been successfully relabeled as “socialism”, efforts at limiting the ability of large corporations to subvert U.S. democracy can expect to be slandered as “attacks on free enterprise” and worse. Not that it matters very much: any anticipation that the American progressive movement is going to be any more adept at fighting back against creeping corporate fascism than they have been to date is highly optimistic.

Just for argument’s sake, though, how about we have a real debate on citizenship? If it is acceptable to put parts of the Constitution on the table for purposes of restricting the citizenship of actual humans, it ought to be just as acceptable to consider restricting the “citizenship” abused by corporations on behalf of the relative handful of humans who directly profit from their existence.

A constitutional amendment can be many things, address many things. Citizenship is just one of several issues addressed in the 14th Amendment in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, although it is certainly the most important. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment guaranteed that the slavery that African-Americans had been delivered from at great cost would not merely re-emerge in a different form. It states unequivocally that any person “born or naturalized” in the United States is a citizen and cannot be deprived of their fundamental rights by any state or local jurisdiction, for any reason. If you are born in America, you are, simply, an American.

These same protections ensured the status of children born to the immigrants who flooded into this country in the Civil War’s aftermath. Those immigrants, their children, the subsequent immigrants (for as long as we would take them)... they helped build the greatest expansion of industrial power and prosperity the world has ever seen. If there is any true basis for the notion of “American Exceptionalism” it is that accomplishment--that a nation was made of peoples of many nations, and that of that diversity came greatness.

It can be fairly argued that this expansive and uniquely American notion of citizenship and nationhood is a luxury this country can no longer afford. Possibly so. America is not what it once was. What worked for a country that had for all its history been its own frontier may not work for a country that is now as thoroughly constrained as any of the “Old World” nations of Europe.

But it can also be fairly argued that this country has lost its way and become divided against itself as thoroughly as has ever been the case since the Civil War. It is very doubtful that the current tensions will escalate to a war between states (not least because the divisions run equally through every state, and the entire country), but very reasonable to assume that healing these divisions may very well require measures as sweeping as the post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The so-called “Reconstruction Amendments” addressed long-standing shortcomings in America’s original founding documents, and established new definitions of nationhood and citizenship. A new round of redefinition may well now be in order, as well as a little more honesty. There is a fundamental unfairness and hypocrisy to an immigration policy that turns a blind eye to the exploitation of undocumented workers, only to ritualistically scapegoat the victims on the eve of elections. Equally hypocritical, if more well-meaning: the notion that anyone has an inalienable right to parent children that neither they nor anyone else can afford to support, either in a host country or the place of their birth. The world is not inexhaustible.

Nor is the patience of those who have been and continue to be exploited. The “citizenship” and supposed inalienable rights of corporations have been used to created what is rapidly becoming the wealthiest oligarchy in human history. Their wealth comes at the expense of undermining the core democratic values of an American society to which they give astonishingly little in return. Sooner or later, one way or another, that issue will be addressed.

The Tea Party Movement is an elaborate fraud, the latest re-invention of Harry Dent’s “Southern Strategy”, but the resentments it exploits go beyond the anxieties created by the country’s first African-American President. In an increasingly pluralistic country, the issues of race, religion, and sexual identity the Republican Party has used to militate Americans against their own interests will lose power. Unless the staggering inequality in this country is reversed, the next “tea party” may have a lot less interest in cosplay reenactments of the last revolution... and a lot more interest in a real revolution of their own.

So, yeah...let’s have a real debate on what it means to be an American and who (and what) gets to claim citizenship. And let’s do it now...while America still exists; while that citizenship still has some measure of value.

My Big Fat Greek-German Juke Joint: Soul Kitchen Reviewed

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:11:05 -0500

Living in a city that has all but done away with its non-mall-based cinema, I can be forgiven for only just now getting around to writing about the 2009 German film comedy Soul Kitchen. I would be less forgiving of myself for not doing so. It's a highly entertaining film that deserves to be noted.

The story told in Soul Kitchen has to varying degrees, been told in films like Kinky Boots, Mambo Italiano, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It has been perhaps been told with greater narrative depth... but perhaps not as entertainingly.

Zinos Kazantsakis is a young German of Greek family who, for reasons never entirely explained, operates a dingy diner out of a reclaimed warehouse building that he has purchased and renovated in an industrial area of Hamburg, part of which he rents out (apparently with highly intermittent remittance) to an elderly boat builder--a fellow Greek named Sokrates. He has also somehow managed to acquire a fairly consistent clientele of stolid working class folk whose task in food runs toward the sort of thing any supermarket fast food section stocks in abundance--breaded fish fillets, hamburgers, pizzas.

Assisting him in this endeavor are waif/artiste waitress Lucida and tatted-out rocker waiter Lutz. Zinos himself handles kitchen duties...a task for which his primary qualification is that he owns the place. Zinos has dubbed his enterprise "Soul Kitchen"--this is also not exactly explained, but given Zinos’ predilection for early 70'- style long hair (complete with mutton cop sideburns) and large collection of original LPs of the era, not a lot of explanation is required.

As the story opens, Zinos is getting through yet another challenging day as a restaurateur, trying to deal simultaneously with a malfunctioning dishwasher and repeated (and increasingly irate) calls from his girlfriend Nadine. Nadine and her family are gathered at another, far nicer restaurant for a dinner that Zinos is expected to attend. It's an important occasion: Nadine is moving to Shanghai to pursue her intended career as a journalist. Zinos' reaction to both the move and the dinner is one of not-entirely quiet resentment. In one phone conversation, Zinos expresses his willingness to follow Nadine to China. Her response is both skeptical and unenthusiastic. On his way to the dinner, Zinos runs into old school chum and real estate developer Thomas Neumann. More on him in a bit.

From this point ensues the first of several coincidences upon which the thin plot fundamentally depends, with Zinos stepping away from Nadine's farewell dinner for a smoke at precisely the same time as the restaurant's chef, Shayne, explosively explains to a demanding patron that gazpacho is, indeed, served cold and quits/gets fired. As they are both standing and fuming outside the restaurant, Zinos tells Shayne that he thought the food was great. Shayne (not knowing that Zinos even owns a restaurant) impulsively asks Zinos for a job. Even more impulsively, Zinos offers him one.

A few days later at Soul Kitchen, the two other major linchpins of the plot arrive. One is Zinos injuring his back trying to repair the aforementioned broken dishwasher. The other is the arrival of Zinos's recently-paroled petty gangster brother, Illias. Illias's parole is of a type one would not likely encounter in the U.S. As long as he can find a job, he's free to leave prison during the day, but required to return at night. Even though Illias assures him that he has no intention of actually doing anything at Soul Kitchen, Zinos signs the parole paperwork anyway, much to the consternation of his indignant staff.

As he leaves, Illias borrows a twenty and asks his brother to keep his prison record a secret-- and all but runs into chef Shayne, who is quite serious about taking Zinos up on the job offer. Despite differences of opinion regarding food, Zinos's injured back convinces him to hire Shayne--bad temper, hip flask, and ever-present chef's knife notwithstanding. Zinos then leaves to consult w/ a physical therapist recommended by the now-absent Nadine, a pretty brunette named Anna.

The plot thickens as Shayne’s innovative cuisine and caustic attitude drive off Zinos’s regulars, even as aforementioned waiter Lutz’s band (which uses the restaurant as a practice space) and Illias’s attempts at becoming a DJ (with stolen equipment, in hopes of impressing aforementioned waitress Lucida) attract a younger and more hip crowd...one that actually likes the food. Further complications arise as it becomes evident that Zinos’s old school chum Thomas (who looks remarkably like a less queer Anderson Cooper) would like to acquire Zinos’s property and resell it to a bigger, even less scrupulous developer (the reliably vile Udo Kier), and as tax and health department officials inform Zinos that his informal little kitchen has a month, more or less, to comply with sanitation requirements and pay back taxes. Meanwhile, Zinos’ back gets steadily worse, leaving him ever more dependent on the ministrations and advice of his pretty physical therapist..even when she has to hand him off for emergency treatment from a Turkish chiropractor nick-named “the Bonecrusher”.

Of course it mostly works out in the end, with a fair amount broadly telegraphed and utterly predictable. There’s not much real doubt that Zinos will find a way past his troubles, or that the resolution will defy all logic. Nor is there much doubt that foreshadowed romantic pairings will eventually occur, or that Zinos and Ellias will eventually do some long-overdue growing up. An awful lot goes without explanation--the relationship between middle class, ethnic Zinos and excruciatingly elf-like and patrician Nadine is very particularly inexplicable, just dropped in place as a given. That Zinos has been able to operate his establishment below the official radar of local tax and health authorities until they are narratively required is equally unexplained (even though the Health department inspectors do not exactly come as a surprise under the circumstances).

These are minor criticisms, though, far outweighed by what the film gets right: nicely written dialogue delivered by charming, if slightly improbable characters, a soundtrack that solidly pays tribute to 70’s and 60’s era Soul, and food prep sequences that give the best Cooking Channel programs a run for their money as food porn. You won’t be analyzing the plot for days on end after seeing Soul Kitchen...but don’t be surprised if you wind up humming a lot of the tunes.

Slouching Towards Irrelevance

Sat, 2 Oct 2010 11:10:01 -0400

I may have to give up on commenting on American politics.

I mean, really, what's the point? Things have descended to the level where a major party is running a senatorial candidate who is incapable of distinguishing getting busy with a copy of Hustler from having an affair--and is apparently equally incapable of telling the difference between attending a seminar at a university and receiving a degree from one. The only "jobs" Christine O'Donnell have ever held are running for public office and telling college students that touching their naughty bits makes Jeebus cry-- yet the blistering idiots that have taken control of the GOP regard any effort at fact-checking this female Munchhausen as equivalent to a witch-hunt... perhaps not wholly without reason, given that one of the more credible claims she makes about her past is having once made out with a would-be Satanist on a sacrificial alter (apparently she wondered, briefly, about the blood).

Meanwhile, the bloodless corporate sellout who could very possibly have run for and won the U.S. Presidency as an independent has the nerve to wonder why the people who put their passion, time, and money into his candidacy are not prepared to do the same for the party he decided to place ahead of their aspirations and hopes. Barack Obama was by no means the candidate of choice for the corporate establishment (that would've been Hillary Clinton), but as soon as they realized that he was almost certainly going to be elected, they began the process of making sure that their interests would be represented.

Obama was always far more centrist than either his campaign rhetoric or the despairing hopes of progressives led one to believe, but by the time he took power the principal difference between his positions and his predecessor's on matters of economic and military policy... amounted to little more than the ability to describe them in complete sentences. His administration continues to prosecute an utterly pointless war in Afghanistan, continues to conflate the welfare of America with the welfare of corporations, continues to watch on in apparently helplessness while the planet's capacity to support human life is eroded, and happily contributes to the even faster erosion of U.S. civil liberties.

I am beginning to think that the main reason the Election of 2008 produced so few real results is that the Democratic Party has no real interest in governing. I mean, come on--in the entire horrific eight years that Bush and his junta held power, the GOP never once had the kind of mandate that Obama and the Democrats received in the last election... yet they still managed to impose upon America a radical ring-wing agenda that at this point appears to be permanent. I don't know if it was always so, but the contemporary Democratic Party resembles nothing so much as a dog chasing a car--neither one has the slightest idea what to do if they actually catch the object of their pursuit...and, perhaps equally, neither one has the ability to actually do anything with it.

Contemporary Democrats seems quite content to be the permanent minority party Karl Rove once envisioned--after all, if they don't have power they can wring their hands over the GOP's open whoredom to the same wealthy elite that they merely service with greater discretion. They can wring their hands, protest, and attempt to convince gullible voters that things would be different were they in charge--and on the strength of that promise, win votes and campaign contributions and retain what a lot of Americans would like to have...a job.

One of the more hypocritical criticisms Democrats level at Christine O’Donnell is that she’s nothing more than a con artist who discovered that politics is the sweetest con of them all. Such criticisms amount to little more than an elderly prostitute telling a young upstart to find her own street... since this one’s already taken. It would be a lot easier to take seriously the idea that the dangerously cute Ms. O’Donnell was a threat to the Republic... if the Republic weren’t already such a monumental threat to itself and the rest of the planet.

I was recently interrupted on my nightly walk to the neighborhood supermarket’s beer and wine aisle by a call from a volunteer working for the organization formerly known as “Obama for America”, who was contacting those who had contributed time and money to The President’s campaign in hopes of soliciting more of the same on behalf of The President’s party.

Because I was raised in the traditions of the American Old South, I actually let her launch into her scripted litany of why now--more than ever-- the Democratic Party needed me. Life more recent (and the impending need to select a bottle of wine) eventually brought me to interrupt her.

“No offense,” I said, “but I’m going to cut this short. You’re right--in the last election, I firmly believed that Barack Obama was the last best hope for America as a country... I still do.”

“And that’s why, unfortunately, you’re not getting a dime.”

Profiles in Cowardice

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:08:54 -0400

For awhile, over the weekend, it looked like we had our guy back. By ‘we’ I mean those who had supported the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. 'Our guy' had come out strongly and passionately in defense of Cordoba House/Park 51, the proposed Islamic community center and place of worship erroneously vilified in the media as the 'Ground Zero Mosque'.

It was a reminder of what it was like, back in the waning days of the horror presidency of George Bush, to hear Barack Obama proudly articulate what would have once been considered core principles of American civil society and democracy... and sound like he meant it.

Alas, the moment was all too brief. Friday's stirring defense of tolerance and civility became Saturday's nuanced capitulation, as The President made it clear that all he had meant to defend was the constitutional rights of the Cordoba House organizers, not the initiative itself. Unlike his predecessor, our current president at least understands that he took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, our current president also differs from his predecessor in that there is apparently not a single principle upon which he is willing to take an uncompromised stand.

New York was America's first truly diverse city and continues to be perhaps the most culturally and ethnically diverse city in the country. There was a time when the erection of yet another mosque in New York would've been no more noteworthy than the addition of another synagogue or ashram, or the discovery of yet another coven of wiccans worshiping Gaea butt-naked in Central Park. But that was before it became politically expedient to slander one of the world's great religions and one of the world's great peoples iin the same jingoistic, reeking breath.

It doesn't matter that there are Caucus Mountain Region (i.e., “Caucasian”) practitioners of Islam as blue-eyed and redheaded as any inbred Alabama hillbilly, or that there are entire cultures of devoutly christian Arabs who have known Christ for centuries. It doesn't matter, because for some time now it has been a matter of U.S. public policy to conflate all Arabs and all Muslims-- and slander roughly a quarter of the world's population as "terrorists". That slander was necessary to sell the idea that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden were somehow connected, just as 9/11 itself was necessary justification for the transformation of America into an imperialist police state.

Even in his initial defense of religious tolerance, Mr. Obama spoke of Ground Zero as "hallowed" ground, perpetuating the myth that a piece of real estate is somewhat sanctified by having been selected as the scene of political theater and mass murder, legitimizing the notion that the sacred myth of 9/11 trumps all, up to and including the Bill of Rights.

Meanwhile, as Obama equivocated in his defense of tolerance, the successors to George Bush’s intolerance and willful ignorance were absolutely unequivocal in their resolution to make political hay from the general populace’s worst and most base instincts--notable among them, Newt Gingrich (who ought to know better) and Sarah Palin (who apparently knows nothing at all). Even worse than Obama’s dithering: the outright capitulation of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has outrightly come out against the Cordoba House Project. This may play well with his yokel constituents in those parts of Nevada outside the Las Vegas city limits (who will likely vote for his crackpot tea party opponent anyway), but it does very little to reassure a wider plurality of Americans that their government is in the hands of people with either courage or a first-hand familiarity with the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, a number of New York State congressional representatives seem determined to follow his unfortunate example.

At the root of it all, the unhappy truth about the American people: despite the fact that the only thing that defines us as a “people” is the body of law derived from our founding documents, there has never been a particular shortage of Americans who believe their particular ethnicity or religion defines American authenticity. Ironically, this impulse is usually labeled “nativism”, even though those most inclined to it are equally prejudiced against Native Americans and the most recent immigrant arrivals, legal or otherwise. But that irony flies as far above the heads of most nativists as the jets that carry civilized people from one coast of this semi-civilized country to another. They regards themselves, and only themselves, as “real” Americans--equally indifferent to the one-time immigrant status of their forebears and the rights and dignity of those with whom they share this country.

Throughout American history, the nativist tendency has been the special province of the poorer and least educated among us, and time and again has been manipulated by the wealthy and powerful--”conservatives”, if you will-- to divide the general populace against one another, the better to rule them. The current bigotry against Arabs, Muslims, Hispanic immigrants, and anyone else who qualifies as “different” does not vary meaningfully from earlier orchestrated discrimination against Irish, Eastern Europeans, Africans, or Asians.

What does differ is the alarming extent to which institutionalized bigotry and ignorance has become an accepted norm of American society over the last ten years. As is the case with Global Warming, there is a tipping point--a point past which no amount of corrective effort can offset a destructive change that can only be permitted to run its course. And-- as is the case with Global Warming-- it is not clear whether or not that tipping point might already have been reached.

This is why Barack Obama’s dithering, Harry Reid’s cravenness, and the outright moral cowardice of virtually every elected official in New York State is so very crucial and so very inexcusable. Those who would call themselves leaders in a democratic society have an obligation to lead and to lead by example. All it takes to defeat a lie is to tell the truth. All it takes to tell the truth is to have the simple courage to do so. If we as a society cannot collectively find the courage to overcome the lies we’ve been repeatedly told over the last decade, I very much fear for the future...but I also very much fear we share deserve what becomes of us.