A Time For Choosing

by Cliston Brown | Jul 6, 2014 | Political Commentary

I stayed the night last night in an unfamiliar city in southern California, and needed to get some breakfast before embarking on an eight-hour drive home. As I knew nothing about the town, I didn’t know where I could find a good breakfast place, but there was a Denny’s right next to my hotel. It’s not the most spectacular food, but it is predictable and cheap, and when it comes to road food in an unfamiliar location, predictable-and-cheap is often preferable to the alternatives.

As I ordered—a shaved ham-and-egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses on sourdough and hashbrowns—the server asked if I’d like anything else, maybe a short stack of pancakes.

For a second, I was sorely tempted, and then it hit me that the question—which could be paraphrased as “Would you like 600 calories’ worth of pancakes, butter and syrup to go with the 1,100 calories of ham, egg, cheese, potatoes, bread and grease?”—was really a metaphor for the last 70 years of American politics: “You don’t have to choose one tasty meal or the other, hungry patron of mediocre breakfast food! You can have both!”

This is the same idea we Americans have been sold from the political menu since the end of World War II, and by and large, we have happily consumed it. “Guns OR butter? Who says you have to choose? You can have guns AND butter—and you can put that butter on that extra side of pancakes!”

In the heady postwar era, it really did seem like we Americans could have all we wanted and never have to concern ourselves with the consequences. While most of Europe and large swathes of Asia and Africa were devastated, America was the only major industrial power that was largely unscathed. America became the material colossus of the world, the leading supplier of goods. Factories worked in three shifts around the clock, and well-paid jobs were there to be had by anybody who grabbed a high school diploma one day and walked into the local factory the next.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and it is easy to look back and realize that it couldn’t last—that sooner or later the rest of the world would rebuild itself and compete with us, and that we would no longer be the only major seller of industrial and consumer goods, with inevitable consequences for the postwar U.S. economic boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s, with skyrocketing inflation and a growing dependence on cheap imports, made it plain to people such as President Jimmy Carter that the nation’s voracious consumerism needed to go on a diet. The late 1970s was an era of downsizing and increased efficiency—smaller, fuel-efficient cars, turning down the thermostat, installing solar panels. The gravy train was also over, certainly, in the political realm; we either had to raise taxes or cut services, or some combination thereof.

However, Ronald Reagan—who ironically rose to political prominence by delivering a speech, on behalf of the doomed 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, titled “A Time For Choosing”—came along in 1980 and essentially told us all that no, we did not have to make any hard choices. We could continue to have all the essential government services, and we could also institute massive tax cuts (largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans). He gave us a third option by which we could avoid both raising taxes and cutting services, and we eagerly took it: Put it all on the credit card. We’ll pay it off later. Reagan told us we could have both the tasty sandwich-and-hashbrowns meal, AND the pancakes, and we listened because it was what we wanted to hear.

The truth is that we do face hard choices as a society, and the longer we put those choices off, the higher the bill is going to be. In the same way that a person who makes no responsible choices at the table will eventually suffer health consequences, the longer we go on failing to choose as a society, the more it will hurt us in the end.

So our choice is this: do we continue to allow a small number of extremely wealthy people to continue to hoard vast sums of money, more than many of them could spend in dozens of lifetimes, while everybody else lives either in poverty or the realistic possibility of poverty? And let’s be honest, that’s exactly the situation we face. How many Americans today live a life of quiet desperation, knowing that if they lose a job or suffer a major illness, they go from financially comfortable to bankrupt, or even homeless, in a few short steps?

Do we continue to pay our bills as a country on a giant credit card, knowing that at some point, future generations will have to pay the bill? Hell, they’re already paying the bill. As colleges have raised tuition to meet growing costs, students have had to take on massive amounts of debt that were largely unheard of prior to the 1990s. They are then entering a job market in which there are very few jobs for them, in part because older workers, whose ability to draw secure pensions has been severely eroded, lack the financial security to retire. Those same older workers, faced with working into their 70s, are also faced with partially or fully supporting their adult children—as upwards of a third of all Americans between 18 and 31 now live with their parents. And their adult offspring, more and more, are faced with delaying their careers, thereby delaying their ability to save money, pay off their loans, buy homes, have children if they wish, and eventually retire. We are just now starting to see the consequences of our failure to choose.

Sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to understand that we have to choose the sandwich or the pancakes, and maybe eat only half of what we ultimately do choose. We have to unlearn the lie, which we have eagerly accepted, that we can have everything we want and that we never have to choose—that we can continue to spend trillions of dollars on a bloated military budget, and idiotic wars of choice like the war in Iraq, and that we can simultaneously continue to give tax breaks to bloated billionaires and corporations. Meanwhile our cities fill with the homeless and hungry; our bridges and roads crumble; we are losing an entire generation of Americans whose careers and paths to financial security appear hopelessly blocked; and our educational system continues to collapse, in part because of continued political meddling, and in part because teachers are so poorly paid and underappreciated that the most promising college students choose fields such as finance. We need to decide whether it is more important to fund the things that will benefit our society as a whole, or if we are going to continue to buy more of what we don’t need and can’t afford.

Even if you disagree, as I do, with the solutions Reagan advised us to choose in 1964, he was right about one thing: that we do, in fact, face a time of choosing. But he was wrong, when he told us in 1980, that he was just kidding.

Divergent: Where the Politics of the Evangelical Christian Persecution Complex Meets the Big Screen

by Cliston Brown | Mar 23, 2014 | Political Commentary

My wife and I saw Divergent today, and while I thought it was an extremely entertaining, high-quality movie, I found one thing in particular to be deeply troubling when we discussed the movie at an early dinner afterward:

Why is it that the “Erudite” faction—the intellectuals—were the evil people who were trying to take over the society and violently wipe out the “rightful” rulers, the “Abnegation” faction?

My wife was also interested in this question, so she looked up the author of the book, and discovered that the writer, Veronica Roth, was reported to be a “moralistic, devout Christian.”

Admittedly, this aroused my suspicion, and I began to look at the movie the way that I know many evangelical Christians look at society, from my own personal experiences and the experiences of friends. When I began really thinking about the movie, I started noticing several notable parallels:

1) The main character, Triss, is deeply uncomfortable about sex and firmly denies the sexual advances of her love interest, Four. The high level of her discomfort about sex becomes clear when we learn that is one of her greatest fears. Evangelical Christianity, of course, has a near obsession with premarital chastity, and Triss, the movie’s heroine, behaves exactly the way the evangelical religious culture would expect her to behave.

2) The plot is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and as anyone who has observed the “end times” element of evangelical Christianity knows, a post-apocalyptic society is a major focus of evangelical Christian thought.

3) Even though we learn that Four’s father abused him as a child, when Four’s father asks his son to save his life, Four does it—exactly what would be expected in a culture in which “honor(ing) thy mother and father” is paramount, regardless of parental transgressions.

4) The Abnegation faction consists of “simple, modest folk” who dress plainly, eat simple foods and behave, at all times, in an unfailingly virtuous way. This mirrors some of the practices—and the conceits—of many evangelical sects that discourage dressing or behaving “immodestly” and decry being “worldly.” They also harbor and shelter outcasts who have run afoul of the intelligentsia; the parallel here is that evangelicals like to view themselves as outcasts from the “immoral” society around them. It seems obvious that the “Abnegation” faction is a stand-in for evangelical Christians.

5) “Erudite,” the intellectual faction, is presented as scheming, evil, and jealous of the prerogatives of the ruling faction, which the “Abnegation” faction has somehow managed to become. How these simple, unassuming, virtuous people became the rulers of the post-apocalyptic Chicagoland is hard to imagine—unless one takes the view, as evangelical Christians in America do, that “God’s people” are the rightful rulers of our “Christian nation.” It is also worth noting that, in Judeo-Christian texts, Satan is portrayed as scheming, evil and jealous of God, and that he uses his intellect to turn the godly toward sin—so it hardly seems a stretch to see a parallel in the movie between intellectuals and Satan himself. This linkage of intelligence and evil should be deeply troubling for those of us who value evidence and intellectual inquiry over blind faith and unquestioning obedience.

6) The Erudites, consumed by their elitist arrogance, decide that they, not the righteous Abnegation faction, should rule. They use their intellect to control and corrupt the “Dauntless” faction—the military—in order to round up and execute the Abnegation faction. This is crucially important, because it lines up, chapter-and-verse, with the tenets of the persecution complex that is rampant in American evangelical Christianity. It is taken as an article of faith among evangelical Christians that they inevitably will be persecuted for their faith. In the evangelical community, mistrust of intellectual “elitists”—who, in the evangelical view, cleverly twist and spin the truth, idolize science and other “worldly” things, deny the Bible, and generally seek to corrupt our “Christian nation”—runs very deep.

I have some personal experience that informs my knowledge of the evangelical persecution complex. When I was about 10 years old, two friends of mine from school recruited me to join an evangelical imitation of the Boy Scouts. In between hikes and campfires, we were constantly being told by our adult leaders that we, as Christians, might one day be tortured, even killed, for professing our faith. (Finally, one night we were taken into the sanctuary where the Wednesday night services were taking place, and we were told to raise our hands, close our eyes, and softly, rhythmically chant “Jesus, Jesus.” Even as a 12-year-old, I found this experience decidedly weird, and I never went back.)

In short, I think the parallels between the movie and some of the stranger obsessions of American evangelicals are frightfully clear. I can’t help but wonder whether the flurry of books and movies such as this one, as well as Noah, Son of God, the impending Exodus, the Twilight series, and some of the obviously Christian morality parables being filmed by artists such as Tyler Perry, isn’t indicative of a serious push by the evangelical community to reverse their declining hold on American culture and politics via the aggressive use of the arts.

But most of all, I’m deeply troubled by the equating of intelligent people with the forces of evil, and I think we have to be wary of letting this train of thought get down the tracks unchecked. There has long been a tendency toward mistrust of intellectuals in American society—as noted by Frenchman Alexis deTocqueville in his seminal 19th-century work Democracy in America—and in the decades that have followed Charles Darwin’s publication of his Theory of Evolution, this anti-intellectualism has been taken up in a full-throated way by fundamentalist Christians as well. I think it is extremely dangerous when popular culture begins to reinforce this longtime loathing and mistrust of intellectuals.

I can almost smell the book barbecue now.

Cutting Through The Crap On Ukraine

by Cliston Brown | Mar 11, 2014 | Political Commentary

I know it’s folly to even engage in discussion with Republicans on this topic, but seriously, can some Republican please tell me what exactly we can do about the Russian takeover of Crimea? I keep hearing these Republican politicians yammering about Obama being weak—because they’ve been playing the “Democrats are weak” card for 70 years and they still haven’t figured out anything any more original than that—but seriously, if we had elected Mitt Romney president in 2012, what, exactly, could he have done that would have prevented or reversed what has happened over there? Here’s a hint: the honest answer is “not a damn thing,” short of starting a war, and if you really think that going to war with Russia is an intelligent thing to do, I suggest consulting a couple of fellows named Bonaparte and Hitler and asking how that worked out for them. It’s also worth noting that when Napoleon and the Nazis, respectively, froze their asses off in Russia 130 years apart, the Russians did not yet have a stockpile of nuclear weapons—or you can bet your bottom dollar that Paris and Berlin would have glowed in the dark for decades.

Of course, Obama is blamed for “being weak on Syria” and, thereby, emboldening Russia to invade a country it has no business invading, but I would suggest that our idiotic invasion of Iraq might have set more of an example—and may well have also robbed us of any moral authority or credibility we have to criticize the Russians for their actions. In fact, I could point out that Russia has a much stronger case for its actions in Crimea than we had for our actions in Iraq. The Russians at least can claim, with real justification, that Crimea is historically and ethnically Russian and may well prefer to be part of Russia. We claimed that Iraq was linked to 9-11 and was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and when those factually challenged claims proved inconvenient, we changed our story to removing a dictator and striking a blow for democracy. I don’t suspect the Russians would have very much respect for any lectures we might want to give them about the appropriateness of armed incursions into other nations.

Now, I know that the Republicans would tell us about that glorious day when Saint Ronnie stood before the Berlin Wall and exclaimed “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And then he circled the gates, blew his horn three times, and the wall fell. Of course, that’s not exactly the way it happened. What actually happened is that 40-plus years of U.S. containment policy, started by Harry Truman and continued by eight more presidents after him, isolated the Russians and wrecked their economy, and they had to pull back from Eastern Europe and Central Asia to save themselves from collapse. But the Gipper was on the mound when the winning run scored, so naturally, the Republicans give him all the credit, and they like to contrast his “strength” with Obama’s “weakness.” It’s a very simple and satisfying trope, but it’s also complete horse hockey, as Colonel Potter was fond of saying in M*A*S*H.

The bottom line is this: the next time a Republican yammers about Obama being “weak,” ask your Republican friend what another president might do differently. You’ll get an answer, of course, and it will be either 1) vague or 2) unrealistic. Because vague and unrealistic are what they do. But the facts on the ground are pretty simple here: if we want the Russians out of Ukraine, there won’t be a quick or satisfying solution; it will take years of isolation and economic pressure, just as it took to destroy the Soviet empire.

Hell To Pay In Oklahoma

by Cliston Brown | Jan 7, 2014 | Political Commentary

I see that Oklahoma has potentially gotten itself into a bit of a pickle.

You see, the good, conservative Christian politicians of the Sooner State decided they were going to show everyone who was boss by putting up a Ten Commandments monument on the state capitol grounds. This decision, of course, runs contrary to the Constitutional prohibition of the establishment of a religion, but that’s what you’ve got to love about conservative Christians who yammer endlessly about how much they believe in the Bible and the Constitution: they’re never in a hurry to disregard either one of those sacred documents the second it serves their purposes to do so.

Well, it turns out that the Devil is in the details, and Oklahoma might just have Hell to pay.

The Satanic Temple of New York City has stepped up to the plate to request its equal treatment under the Constitution. It has designed a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed little devil, to grace the capitol grounds along with the Ten Commandments. While it is not necessarily a Satanic figure, the fact that the Church of Satan decided to adopt Baphomet as its symbol certainly has not helped the billy goat’s reputation any.

The folks in Oklahoma have decided not to just take this lying down. They cleverly moved to deny the original b-a-a-a-a-a-d boy his place in the sun by placing a moratorium on new monuments at the Capitol.

You see how that works, don’t you? Aw, shucks, Satanists, now that we’ve placed the Ten Commandments monument, well, the Capitol grounds are all full now. Sure is a shame about that charmin’ Billy Boy y’all had in mind, but you were just a little too late. Y’all come on back when we build a new state Capitol, sometime around the 23rd century. You know, when the Rapture comes and we move the Capitol to Uranus. Your-Anus! Get it? Haw haw haw haw! Ain’t that a good one? But just in case y’all didn’t get it—we know you heathen New York City boys are a bit slow—you can stick your statue, and all your fancy talk about the Constitution, where the sun don’t shine! Now don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.

See, this is how they’re going to show us all that they’re going to do what they damn well please in Oklahoma. In much the same way that a dog urinates on a bush—and for essentially the same reason—the State of Oklahoma has decided to demonstrate that Christians are the favored class in that state; that everyone else belongs to an inferior class with fewer rights; and that those in a lesser class must accept the dominance of the favored class.

But here’s the funniest part of all, folks—you’re going to spend years, and God knows how much taxpayer money, fighting this case in court. Because no matter what some of the more fringy right-wingers would like you to believe, the states do not have the right to nullify federal law. We fought this battle—literally—150 years ago, and your side lost. You cannot legally extend a particular right to one class of people while denying it to all others.

So, God help you, Oklahoma, because you’re going to have a Devil of a time with this one.

Doesn’t that really get your goat?