Dear President O-bomb-a...

Dear President O-bomb-a,

I was a supporter of you in your first Presidential campaign and took great pride in the election of an African-American person to the presidency of the United States. However, I now reflect that in many ways, that achievement, that breakthrough, was the true high point of your Presidency, and that it has been just a downhill journey of one disappointment, compromise and betrayal after another ever since. A brief list would include:

(1) A response to the financial crisis of 2007-08 that did much to help large banks and financial institutions but little to help the huge number of ordinary people who were losing their houses due to mortgage chicanery on the part of the very banks and financial institutions that you saw fit to provide a lifeline to. Years later now, still little has been to help the common homeowner, and Wall Street is swimming in cash. After years when your administration let Wall Street get off the hook for its past malfeasance and fraud by merely paying fines that though large, were minor business expenses for companies with multi-billion dollar global operations, your team has begun to more aggressively prosecute Wall Street criminals, but this is too little, too late.

(2) An Economic Stimulus program that was too small and too watered-down to do much good. You made it one-third tax cuts, to sweeten the deal for anti-tax Republicans, and hopefully attract their support, but this failed on two levels. It did not attract the Republicans, and it meant less money for public works programs and other such things that could have done much good. To give credit where due, the Stimulus program did help save us going off the cliff altogether in 2009, but our crumbling infrastructure and continuing high rate of unemployment testify to the inadequacy of this program and what has come since. Of course, you are not completely to blame for the incredible level of Republican obstructionism, but I do fault you for how you have responded, or failed to respond to this; see below.

(3) Pro-corporate Health Care Reform. When it came to putting forward a new health care reform, you gave up very quickly on the reform that many Democrats and progressives wanted, a truly national, single-payer plan, on the order of health care systems in Canada or the UK. Showing your tendency to cater to corporate interests, which also was no doubt a factor in your failure to take strong action against Wall Street as noted in item #1 above, you instead put your stamp of approval on a health care reform plan that strongly caters to the needs and wishes of for-profit health care and insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. More people will now have access to health care insurance, which is a good thing, but leaving health care in the hands of profit-driven health care companies may mean that we will still not be able to achieve any reduction in the soaring costs of health care, because ever-increasing costs also mean soaring profits for these companies. Even if it was truly politically impossible to advance such a program all the way through the process, I wish you had at least started out making a strong case for the benefits of a single-payer program. Then, if you had to cave in to the many and moneyed interests calling for something more pro-corporate and less pro-public, you would have at least helped advance a more comprehensive, more truly public program in the national political conversation, setting a standard that could be a reference point for future conversations and policy discussions. But no. As usual, you demonstrated either a lack of guts or a lack of vision, or perhaps you were just showing us that deep down, you are not really a progressive, a liberal or a Democrat: you are really just a moderate Republican, pro-corporate as much as possible, though with some sensitivity to certain liberal issues such as minority rights, gay marriage, etc.


(4) Failure to educate the public. This to me is perhaps your biggest failing. Nearly every initiative you have advanced has been blocked if not crushed by vehement Republican obstructionism, yet you have failed to explain this to the public, resulting in the public tending to think that the problem is "too much partisanship" and "Washington gridlock" rather than putting the blame where it truly belongs, the ideologically-driven, anti-government extremism of the Republican Party, particularly its Tea Party wing. When you make statements, as you have many times, such as "Washington is broken....we can do better," you make it sound like the Democrats are equally to blame as are Republicans for the current state of affairs in which so little positive is being accomplished. No doubt there is opposition between Democrats and Republicans such that a superficial glance at the situation may cause one to ask, "Why can't both sides compromise? Why can't they get along?" That is however a terrible inadequate analysis of the situation. The Democrats of today are not pushing for anything extreme or radical. They are only standing up for the same kinds of programs that have existed for decades: Food Stamps, unemployment insurance, voting rights, Head Start, public works programs, supports for arts and science. It is the Republicans who are pushing a radical, extreme agenda. They want to either greatly reduce or do away with that same list of programs just mentioned above. This is NEW.

In the pre- Tea Party era, most Republicans accepted the value of at least SOME of those programs, and often worked with Democrats to modify such programs or introduce new ones, like the CHIP (Children's Health Care Initiative Program) that Dems and Repubs worked together on not many years back. But now.... oh my god. The current crop of Republicans are the most wild, extreme, truly RADICAL anti-government Republicans this country has ever seen. This needs to be discussed. This needs to be known. This is not just "Washington Gridlock." This is one side of the table not wanting to negotiate or achieve anything positive, but simply over turn the table and set it on fire. In this respect, the current crop of Tea Party-dominated Republicans are arsonists, willing to burn down every public-oriented program, any and every thing done by the government for the people, in search of their
anti-government utopia. You, Obama, should have educated people about this, but instead, you took the cowardly, mushy approach of declaring Washington "broken" without saying enough about who had done the breaking. In this, as with your refusal to fight for a truly PUBLIC health care system, I see you being more devoted to your own political survival and reputation as Mr. Reasonable, Mr. Above the Fray, than to actually advancing progressive, liberal or democratic causes.


(5) Education reform that is just the Bush policy warmed over with some fresh cheese on top. As an educator, I was very hopeful that with your election, we would have seen a turning away from the Bush era of "No Child Left Behind" so-called "education reform" and its focus on endless testing of students, micro-mananagement of teachers, classrooms and curricula, "accountability" systems which mean huge and expensive growth in bureaucracy rather than more support for low-income school districts. Instead, what you and your Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have given us is NCLB ("No Child Left Behind") on steroids. You fail to grasp the basic point that social, economic and income inequality in our society are the main factors in why students in poor districts perform more poorly on tests. If you really want to improve education and close the achievement gap between rich and poor, white and non-white, for god's sake, look at the many types of inequality that separate these groups and look for ways to lessen that inequality. Anyone with half a brain should not be surprised that kids from poor families, in underprivileged, crime-ridden, poverty-wracked neighborhoods achieve less in school than kids in lily-white, upper-income suburban Shangri-Las. One group of kids grow up in poverty, have little access to books and culture, and suffer malnutrition to boot while other kids get private tutors and therapists, and culturally enriching summer trips to Europe. Who will do better? Hmm..... Is that really so hard to figure out? If you want to equalize the education, equalize the resources and the social circumstances. Ask any fifteen-year old who they would expect to do better in school, rich kids with lots of resources, or poor kids with little, and they can see this.

Oh, but you and Arne and your team of profit-driven, corporate-oriented education experts know better. Your approach is to subject students and teachers to ever more testing, ever more assessment, ever more collection of data, with all of that data then being used to punish teachers, schools and students by closing down schools, laying off teachers, and depriving students of continuity and stability when they do not know from year to year if their schools will be open or closed and if their favorite teachers will still be around. Your and Arne's signature education policy of "Race to the Top" is just "data-driven" bullshit! It only sounds good to those who have swallowed whole the anti-teacher, anti-teachers' union, anti-public education propaganda of groups like the Gates Foundation, the Walmart-based Walton Foundation and the Broad Foundation. Your good pal Arne has ties to these groups, and I guess you must like them too, Mr. President. I guess that is why you show so little support for public education and see so much good in dismantling, privatizing, standardizing and corporatizing it. Oh yes, and kudos too for your great solution to the student debt problem. Letting interest rates fluctuate on the market will really make Wall Street happy and give some nasty surprises down the road to students and their families when they find their loan interest rates changing radically from one year to the next. The Market always knows best, right?

(6) War, Security and Syria. I have previously expressed my regret and anger over your rising use of drones as a supposedly risk-free way of attacking other countries and killing people our National Security people decide deserve to die. I will not rehash all the ways in which that policy is in my view totally misguided. Now, though, we face the prospect of major military action against Syria, in response to the apparent use of sarin gas or other chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. I have no love for Assad, and I also feel great sympathy for the suffering people of Syria, but I find it extremely sickening that you are putting so much energy into advancing this very questionable rush to war, whose effects are so unpredictable and potentially calamitous, when so many other issues right at home in the USA need attending to. You seem much more concerned with this than the steadily mounting damage being done to our own most vulnerable citizens by things like food assistance to the poor and education assistance for children being cut off by mean-spirited Republicans in Congress. President Obama,you seem to be morphing into President Bush before our eyes.

Beyond the myriad possibilities for very bad things coming out of this so-called "surgical strike," from the deaths of hundreds or thousands more Syrians sure to be caused by our bombing, to possible retaliation attacks by Syrian-sponsored terrorist groups, to greater Russian involvement in order to support their side in the conflict, I come to the inescapable conclusion that you have been totally co-opted by the National Security State--the mind-boggling, multi-billion dollar hugeness of our military forces, defense contractors, national security and surveillance organizations and the many private companies who suck at the teat of national security, and militaristic-minded people and organizations who always see military action as the best, if not only solution to ANY international problem. I fear that our militaristic tendencies have become so entrenched, so financially lucrative and so politically self-sustaining, that any President from now on into the foreseeable future will behave just like you, who I now dub President O-bomb-a the I, but probably not the last. America makes so little effort at real diplomacy, that I am afraid it is really just window-dressing for our military operations. I don;t think we have really tried very hard to bring together the different parties in Syria. Even in the Vietnam War period, there were the Paris Peace Talks. Any equivalent effort today? I am not aware of it.

It is a very sad state of affairs, which leaves me doubtful that America will play any truly positive or creative role in world affairs in coming years. In the last ten or so years, we have seen America provide zero leadership on the most important issue for the survival of the planet, this being Global Warming, which some prefer to call Climate Change. Instead, America seems capable only of pushing for more war, more strikes, more surveillance, more drones... We are like one of our bad "boom--boom--boom blow up the bad guys!" action movies translated into international policy. I just wish I could leave the theatre...

This will be your most lasting legacy, President O-bomb-a. I voted for you in 2008, but I voted for the Green Party in 2012, and if you were running for a third term, which thankfully you cannot, I would vote Green again. America and the world deserve better than a leader who only shows a spine when it comes to attacking other countries and raining down death and destruction.

National Security Through the Looking Glass

There are several events in recent weeks that I see as connected by a common thread, from the acquittal of George Zimmerman to our continued use of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan to the closing of embassies in Arab and Muslim-majority nations in anticipation of possible terrorist strikes against US targets. In all of these cases, the use of violence is justified by the fear of violence and the belief that the best way to achieve safety and security is by pre-emptively attacking and killing others before they can kill you. Why not just kill everyone in (a) any country we don't like, (b) any religion we don't like (c) any racial or ethnic group we don't like, or (d) all of the above? Wouldn't that be the logical extension of the pre-emptive, stop-the threat-by-any-means necessary, shoot-first-and-ask-questions later philosophy that seems to be increasingly popular in American life? I would prefer (e) none of the above, and in this essay I will attempt to explain why.

George Zimmerman, carrying a gun, followed Trayvon Martin through a gated-community housing complex in Florida and eventually shot and killed him because he perceived the seventeen-year old black teenager to be a dangerous person who had to be confronted and if necessary, subdued with deadly force. The nefarious activity that Mr. Martin was engaged in was walking back to the home of his father's girlfriend after purchasing some candy and a drink at a local convenience store. Mr. Zimmerman clearly had a distorted view of Mr. Martin, who was just a teenaged kid coming back from a store carrying junk food, not a dangerous person in any way. George Zimmerman claimed that he was driven to using his gun when Trayvon Martin over-reacted to Mr. Zimmerman's pursuit and confrontation of Mr. Martin by lunging at him and slamming his head against the pavement. In the course of the trial, the jury reached the conclusion that Mr. Zimmerman was justified in killing Mr. Martin.

The fact that Trayvon Martin was not engaged in any kind of criminal or antisocial activity when George Zimmerman decided to pursue him and confront him, that George Zimmerman was the person carrying a truly dangerous, indeed lethal weapon, not Trayvon Martin, and that Mr. Martin, seeing a strange man following him and possibly also seeing Mr. Zimmerman's gun, had just as much justification in feeling threatened and using force against George Zimmerman as Zimmerman did against Trayvon Martin, and that all that ensued was a result of George Zimmerman's decision to pursue and confront Trayvon, did not apparently factor into the jury's decision. They seemed to accept as persuasive the Zimmerman defense's argument that Mr. Zimmerman, feeling threatened by the presence of a black teenager in his community, had the right to hunt him down, confront him and kill him. Mr. Zimmerman received no penalty or punishment for killing a young man who was simply on his way home with a drink and a snack when a stranger with a gun decided he was a threat that had to be dealt with. Bottom line: fear is sufficient grounds for killing.

In what I see as a parallel case, on October 14, 2011, a drone missile strike launched by the U.S. military in the Arab country of Yemen ended the life of Abdul Rahman Anwar Awlaki, a sixteen year old boy visiting relatives. This teenager was under suspicion of nefarious activity not because of anything he was actually doing, but simply because he was the son of the militant cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, who had been previously assassinated in a drone attack two weeks earlier on September 30, 2011. Abdul Rahman was killed along with six other suspected militants. The grandfather of this slain teenager wrote a poignant essay reflecting on his grandson's death in the New York Times on July 18,2013.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html

I did not agree with the killing of the boy's father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was slain for inciting violence against the USA through the internet and other means, but I can see that in that instance, there was at least some kind of understandable rationale, that the man was viewed as dangerous to US interests because he was actively provoking others to undertake attacks against American forces and citizens. I do worry, though, that this sets a precedent that anyone anywhere who says something at all anti-American or even criticizing America could be seen as a threat and made a target for long-distance assassination. But why kill his sixteen year old son? The reasoning seems to be, the more we kill, the better; the more they die, the safer we will be. This is a very short-sighted, myopic and entirely inhumane view of the situation, with terrible and extremely dangerous implications, it seems to me, as I will explain further below.

The link I see between the killing of the seventeen year old black boy in Florida and the sixteen year old Arab boy in Yemen is that in both cases, a judgment was made that because these boys might be threats to safety and security, they were legitimate targets for pursuit and killing. Neither Trayvon Martin nor Abdul Rahman had committed any crime. Neither was charged with any crime or afforded a trial in which their guilt and innocence could be proven in a court of law. No. There was no judge, no jury, no juridical process, which is to say, no justice. Only execution, "extra-judicial killing," justified by fear of potential threats, not actual actions.

It disturbs me greatly to see this same trigger-happy logic applied both here at home in America and in our actions overseas. George Zimmerman reserves the right to kill people who he sees as potential threats to the security of his gated community. The American government reserves the right to kill people who we think might be potential threats to national security. The really twisted part is the assertion of the right to kill people who have not necessarily done any actual action that causes harm, but who merely look suspicious (Trayvon Martin) or who are related to or who are in the physical proximity of others who are deemed threats (Abdul Rahman). This gives both the private citizen, the aspiring vigilante, and our military, police and other such security forces quite a lot of lassitude to kill quite a wide range of people on the basis of extremely sketchy information or even just vague suspicion.

This is all justified by fear. Fear of criminals, fear of black people, fear of terrorists, fear of Muslims, fear of Arabs, with perhaps a little hate and bigotry thrown in for good measure, too. But does following such policies actually make us any safer? Does it actually reduce the threats that are so feared? I would argue that at least in some ways, such policies can make things worse. If young African-American men have to live in constant fear of being hunted down and targeted like Trayvon Martin, never knowing when they might run across a George Zimmerman-like vigilante, it is only going to make African-Americans more angry and stressed and increase tension between racial groups, leading to more, not less potentially violent confrontations, and increase the odds that people of all racial and ethnic profiles will be packing guns and following the shoot first, ask questions later philosophy, expecting that if they do end up shooting and killing someone, that they might be able to escape any punishment the same way that George Zimmerman did.

In our government's foreign relations, I also do not see the never-ending drone attacks making us safer. We may be killing some people who are actually dangerous terrorists, I don't doubt, but there is a lot of evidence that we are killing lots of other people too. What we might dismiss as "collateral damage" is not going to be forgotten, let alone forgiven, by the friends, relatives, fellow tribal members and countrymen of those we kill. They will be angry. They will hate us. They will seek revenge. This should not be a surprise to anyone. When we suffered the 9/11 attacks, Americans were angry. They hated the perpetrators. They wanted revenge. This is universal human psychology. I shook my head in disbelief when I saw some so-called intelligence experts testifying in front of Congress several months ago, claiming that our drone attacks were not causing any major reaction among the population in Yemen or Pakistan or elsewhere. Fast forward to the last few days, and suddenly America is closing all its embassies in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East because we are scared shitless of the possibility of some unspecified attacks. This would seem to be the very kind of blowback that our experts told us was not an issue. Any person with a higher-than-moronic level of intelligence could have seen this coming.

And even as we close down our embassies in fear of terrorist attacks, we are launching new drone attacks in Yemen and elsewhere. I wonder if we might not be creating the very enemies that we fear. Is it because we want to have people we can kill with impunity, even as we accuse them of wanting to do the same to us? Have we gone through the looking glass and reached full-fledged insanity?

There is no such thing as total safety and security, but we keep being told that if we take certain measures, such as drone killings and total surveillance of all our telephone and digital communications, that we will be safer, things will be better. That is a dangerous myth peddled by those who gain advantage by increasing our fear and anxiety levels. I am in fact very suspicious of our national security state, because I think that in the end, what it is most interested in protecting is its own security. I note an interesting sequence of events. First, Edward Snowden releases documents that reveal the full extent of our national security surveillance operations. A major explosion in the media and in the Congress ensues,and there is a genuine public outcry, on both the right and the left. Though a lot of the media discussion remains on the idiotic level of "Where is Snowden now?," members of Congress start talking about the need for legislation to cut back this extremely broad and possibly out of control surveillance program. The President and his national security team protest that any cutback would be dangerous to our national security, that they are doing what they do to "keep us safe," and that we must not back down one inch or one dollar from our massive, and also massively secretive, national security operations. Still, some politicians keep talking about taking action, and one bill putting some brakes on the national security crowd almost gets passed through the House of Representatives.

Then, a very short time later, the very national security state that had been threatened with possibly cuts and restrictions now tells us that there is a very big, very real threat of massive attacks in the Middle East, and so embassies must be closed and American cautioned not to travel. Could it be that this is simply a ploy to make Americans cower in fear and back off from any discussion of cutting back our massive national security apparatus? Is there really a clear and present danger, or is this public relations to ensure the security and safety of the national security state?

I worry that by spending so much of our government money on national security, we are starving our country of resources that could be deployed for other purposes, such as jobs programs to help the unemployed, rebuilding of rotting infrastructure, cleanup of polluted areas, development of clean energies to help us turn back the specter of global warming and climate disaster, investing in poor communities that are breeding grounds for crime,addiction and hopelessness, and so on and so forth. If we sacrifice everything for national security, and it doesn't even really make us safer, but only agitates our current enemies and creates new ones as well, what kind of fools are we? If we seriously believe that encouraging more people to carry guns and shoot at anyone who makes them feel nervous or threatened is a wise policy, what kind of hellish society are we building for ourselves and our descendants?

A basic principle of morality in many religious traditions is a simple sense of reciprocity. We should not be doing to others what we do want done to ourselves, whether in the street, in our cities, or in other countries. We have to learn to trust and communicate and seek common ground with others, not always assume that we are in the right, others in the wrong, and that we are justified in using force.

But we Americans just love Love LOVE our guns and explosions, don't we? Sigh...

They Scare Me: My Fear of Fascism in America

At the end of each academic year, when I see my students' final essays and research papers, I have time to reflect more deeply on the material that I teach and how it is interpreted by my students and related to their own experiences of life and their own views of the world that we live in. As my students come mainly from lower and middle class backgrounds, I feel they afford me a fairly representative window on the state of mind of Middle America. Not the elite, more liberal and cosmopolitan America of privileged enclaves on the east or west coast, but the more conservative America of less cosmopolitan, more average and ordinary Americans. And every year, what I see when I peer into this collective mentality scares me.

In teaching a World History class that surveys the interaction of civilizations and peoples around the world from about the Renaissance onward, a major theme I try to convey is the huge and continuing impact of colonialism. I strive to explain that the West greatly benefitted from the centuries of colonialism, including the long period of African enslavement, while other regions suffered, and that even the supposed end of colonialism in the 20th century has not meant an end of Western control over and meddling in other regions, with the post-WW II and even moreso, the post-Cold War political and economic order paving the way for substantial corporate control over many nations and their resources, amounting to a new type of colonialism, a corporate colonialism, with America now the inheritor of the mantle of colonial master-in-chief. When we get to the end of the course, I attempt to impress upon my students that resentment toward colonialism, and toward America in its role as global military enforcer of the current, corporate business-centered order, is a key factor that inspires and drives international terrorism, such as the 9/11 attack and other radical Islamist actions. I talk about how the American government, through its military forces, through the CIA, and most recently, through remote controlled drone attacks has often used force against other countries, including assassination, and that this is part of what motivates people around the world to dislike, resent and even hate America to the point of engaging in violence.

Furthermore, I tell my students that we are in a very dangerous time. If we Americans continue on the path laid down by Bush and largely continued by Obama of using force against an ever-expanding range of terrorist targets around the world, meaning that we kill and terrorize ever growing numbers of people through what we believe to be legitimate anti-terrorist actions, we will run the perpetual risk of simply inciting more acts of violence by people seeking revenge against us for acts of violence that we have perpetrated against them. By killing terrorists we will create them. Witness our killing of Osama bin Laden. That really stopped Islamic terrorism once and for all, didn't it?

I comment that a cycle of bloody revenge can become a self-perpetuating dynamic that can go on for decades or centuries, and I ask my students if this is what they want for America and the world. I tell them of the simple but important concept of "blowback" as something that we Americans should take more seriously. We cannot simply use force around the world as often as we like, set up military bases everywhere, send our troops and CIA everywhere, and expect everyone else in the world to cooperate and agree with us and love us unconditionally and never get upset with us, never disagree with us, and never strike back against us. That is unrealistic and short-sighted, but it seems to remain the guiding principle of American foreign policy.

I suggest to my students that there could be an alternative path for America to follow in its relations with other countries. America could try to treat other countries with more respect, withdraw our military forces from places where they are not welcome, and negotiate with countries or groups that we have tensions with. In my view, this would greatly reduce the risk of perpetual terrorist blowback and revenge cycles. However, REAL negotiation has become fairly alien to American foreign policy. What passes for "negotiation" these days is American representatives telling other governments or groups what they must do to avoid brutal punishment from us, including economic sanctions that can cause as much suffering and death as military invasions. That is not negotiating; that is just a slightly diplomatic form of bullying. Real negotiation would mean sitting down at the table as equals, saying here are our priorities, our needs, and listening to those of the other side as well, and then trying to work out a deal.

I would like to think I am a fairly insightful observer and a somewhat persuasive advocate for my ideas, but when I see my students' views on world affairs as expressed in their end-of-term papers, I realize I am sadly mistaken about my ability to make a dent in the view of the world that many of my students seem to share. After all the discussion of colonialism, the resentment of foreign domination resulting in terrorist blowback and the dangers of an American foreign policy resting mainly on the use of military force, what I hear from my students is that colonialism is all over, terrorists and Islam are evil,and that America must continue to use military force to "protect our freedom."

I am struck that the young of America have been very effectively brainwashed into this simplistic, militaristic, pro-bully, anti-terrorist, anti-Muslim view of the world. From the coverage of the tragedy of 9/11 that never really looked hard at other countries' and peoples' grievances against the USA to President Bush hailing "Mission Accomplished" about our great work in Iraq to President Obama's celebration of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, from the long-running television drama "24" to "Zero Dark Thirty," the recent cinematic tribute to the CIA, to the military and to the use of torture, to the paucity of voices in the news media, even the so-called "liberal media," questioning our militaristic foreign policy, to the proliferation of video games that train people in the visceral pleasures of blowing away your enemies, there is little that lone educators like me can do to resist the overwhelmingly militaristic and jingoistic mentality reigning in America. I hope to plant a few seeds of critical thinking here and there, inspire a few students to imagine something more than endless war as the natural order of things, but it may be useless. I will keep trying but without great confidence that I am achieving much.

Something else I teach about in presenting the history of the 20th century is Fascism. For most of my students and I would imagine for the vast majority of Americans, Fascism is something that they confidently believe has been dead and buried since World War II. Yes, Hitler and Mussolini were bad and the Holocaust was horrible, but it is all over now,they would say if asked. If only I could take refuge in a similar belief that the world has truly closed the book on Fascism! Instead, I fear that Fascism is reviving and that it now waves a red, white and blue flag. Obviously, this is not the exact same thing as German Nazism or Italian Fascism or any of the other extreme right-wing movements that afflicted Europe in the 1920s and 30s. I know that the original Nazi movement is gone. I know that Mussolini is dead. But I see certain trends and tendencies, certain preferences, that to me seem strongly reminiscent of Fascism in 21st century America.

Fascism is actually quite hard to define, as anyone who has investigated the scholarly literature can attest. As a professor teaching introductory course, however, I have to find simple, direct ways of defining and explaining things. I therefore have come to understand Fascism as a style of social organization, and indeed a view of the world, simultaneously both a way of being and a way of thinking that is centered on the use of brute force to attain and maintain authority and dominance. On top of this there is typically overlaid an ideology of extreme nationalism, with intensive devotion to the flag and other patriotic symbols, but I think the raw love of brutality is really the more fundamental feature. What serves brutality is valued above all, and so there is a powerful devotion to weapons, to soldiers, to policemen, to any thing, person or social institution that is related to the use of violence. In fact, it might be said that the ideology of nationalism is just a means to the end of the worship of violence; that the love of the nation or the flag is just the excuse for enjoying hating, shooting and killing the enemies of the flag and feeling really really great about being really really brutal. Nazis were extremely patriotic, let's not forget. They really loved their flag, their nation, their uniforms, their military, their Fuhrer, and they felt perfectly justified in using force against others and invading and attacking other countries.

Loving violence (think video games and action movies). Respecting brutality (note the rising popularity of super-violent sports like mixed martial arts and cage fighting). Glorifying professional agents of violence (endless proclamations in the media and our politicians that soldiers, policemen and trained assassins like Special Ops soldiers and CIA agents are the finest Americans). Assuming that our country is always justified in using force (think of the Iraq and Afghan wars,the drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, "war games" training exercises and military maneuvers right on the borders of Iran and North Korea, and many of our politicians not wanting to limit America's freedom to use military force by signing international treaties or submitting to any kind of international authority). This is America today. Is this also Fascism? I fear that it might be, or if not, something disturbingly similar.

It is late now, and I am tired. It is dark out and it seems dark in here too. Perhaps in the morning when the sun is shining and I can smell spring blossoms on the breeze I will feel differently, but I doubt it. I have been watching this train rolling down the tracks for a long time, and I know it is going to keep on coming. The train is called America, and it scares me.

Still, history is full of surprises. Things can turn and change quite suddenly. All that seems solid can crumble unexpectedly. No one saw the Fall of the Berlin Wall coming, nor the Tiananmen Square protests. Maybe the forces of Fascism can yet be derailed. I do hope so, and I would like to see Paganism as part of that effort, hence my call for non-violent, non-militaristic, non-nationalistic, pro-ecological, and pro-artistic forms of Paganism. The same tendencies should be applauded among other forms of religion as well.

McCartney the Pagan?

Dear readers: The political landscape in the United States is so disgusting right now, with my former state of Massachusetts electing as U.S. Senator a man who seems to have no credentials beyond good looks, a red pick-up truck, and an anti-government attitude, Obama deciding probably too late that it is time to actually put some brakes on the out-of-control banking industry and to perhaps also do something about the millions of people unemployed and losing their homes, CIA-directed drone attacks in Pakistan increasing, and the Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the right to unlimited financial contributions to political campaigns out of respect for the principle of "free speech". Ugh, what a mess. I can hardly stand to think about it just now, so I am going to take a different direction, which may seem totally apolitical at first, but will prove to have some political relevance in the end, and indeed some Pagan spiritual significance as well.

One of the things I did to celebrate the end of the 00 decade was to make song compilations of some of my favorite jazz and rock/pop artists. The one that proved most interesting was Paul McCartney. The very mention of his name may cause some of you to click away from this blog in annoyance, I know, because his reputation for some time has been of a once-great artist gone to seed, half-heartedly churning out sickeningly sweet musical pablum like "Silly Love Songs."

I beg to differ. Particularly since the death of his wife Linda in 1998, McCartney has been releasing a series of recordings which, while not perfect nor necessarily all up to the standards of his 1960s Beatles recording, contain a great deal of musical inventiveness and some occasionally quite moving lyrics, though admittedly his music is usually stronger than his words. It seems that with his hit-making days behind him, he has been feeling more free to be experimental and audacious, reminding listeners that John Lennon was not the only Beatle with avant-garde aspirations, and George Harrison not the only one to tinker with unusual instruments from other cultures. The arrangements on these records of the 2000s show a continuing curiosity with multi-layered sound textures and many intriguing contrasts.

Paul McCartney's most recent recording, made in partnership with another British musician known as "Youth," the two together calling themselves "The Fireman," is entitled "Electric Arguments" (2009), and was very well reviewed. With good reason: it is like a series of loose jam sessions with both high-energy and lyrical moments, freeing up McCartney to throw many different musical flavors and colors up in the air and see where they fall. Some of the lyrics are taken from a poetry anthology laying around the studio, and not all of the words necessarily make perfect linear sense. Not to worry: the whole is definitely greater than the parts, and the groove is definitely greater than the logic; or maybe it IS the logic here. The mood swings from exuberance on some tracks to wistfulness on others, but the overall feeling one gets from listening is definitely a sense of uplift and inspiration.

I do detect a certain Paganesque theme in many of these songs, one also to be found in earlier Mac songs all the way back to the 1960s. This is what brings me to the title of this piece, questioning whether it might be appropriate to consider McCartney a Pagan of sorts. There is an ongoing celebration of nature here, particularly of the sun and of birds, with one boisterously affirmative song entitled "Sun is Shining," and a beautiful, slightlty melancholy ballad called "Two Magpies." Obviously, this echoes Beatles songs associated with McCartney like "Good Day Sunshine" and "Blackbird," not to mention "Mother Nature's Son" and "I'll Follow the Sun."

Selecting songs for my personal compilation, I noted other songs from the 00 decade that also express a powerful love of the natural world. A 2001 song from the "Driving Rain" album called "Spinning an an Axis" talks about the earth spinning around the sun, and the wonder of the sun rising each day with new promise. That may sound a bit cliched and mundane, but the music adds a lot to this, and I find something else of some significance hidden in the song. There is an odd reference to "the day of the culture bat," which I only recently figured out may actually be a nod to the "culture battle" or "culture wars" that have embroiled and embittered political life in recent years in the USA and elsewhere. The song seems to find the cosmic reality of earth and sun more important than the transient problem of politically-motivated culture wars. I ask you, is that a Pagan perspective or what?

A fine 2005 acoustic ballad from the "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard" album is "Jenny Wren," which tells the tale of a young woman driven to silence, like a bird that loses the power to sing, by the poverty and horrors of her life. The comparison of a young woman to a traumatized bird is highly effective, but again I would raise the question of whether the use of a metaphor derived from the natural world might again bespeak an essentially Pagan sensibility.

McCartney's 2007 album "Memory Almost Full" contains several poignant meditations on aging and death, which I believe is also implied in the title of the album. The most humorous is "Mister Bellamy," which seems to describe the situation of an old man suffering some mental malady, perhaps dementia, preferring to retreat into his "upstairs" rather than deal with other people, with careworkers intervening to talk him down. The song "You Tell Me" combines reminiscing about childhood experiences of happy times, most of which involve being out in the summer sun, naturally, with questioning whether one's memories are really to be trusted: "You Tell Me" if these things really happened or not. Let us note that songs about dementia and the unreliability of memory address some very adult concerns, a far cry from the "Silly Love Songs" stereotype. In another song from this album, "The End of the End," McCartney explains how he would like his funeral to be conducted in a joyous manner, while also expressing his hope that the afterlife will bring him to a place of even greater joy.

As the somewhat disquieting 2007 "Memory Almost Full" has been followed by the boisterous and inspiring 2009 "Electric Arguments," it would seem that McCartney has found his way back to the sunshine. As the tabloids have not told of any new great love in his life since his unfortunate divorce from his second wife, Heather Mills, it is tempting to speculate that he has tapped into some new spiritual inspiration of somewhat Pagan character, but this is of course just conjecture.

The exuberant tone of many of McCartney's various paens to nature brings me to reflect on how the last great surge of political liberalism, even radicalism, in the West was in the 1960s and 1970s, to the soundtrack of just such exuberant and idealistic music, often linked to a love of nature. That was a time when a massive wave of inspiration rose up to counter the grim realities of racial segregation and brutal war. It occurs to me that something similar is needed now. The right wing, reactionary side of society, is riding the wave of fear, anger and paranoia, telling people to put their trust in guns and the military, and to not look to any hope or beauty, just more "security," more punishment, more prisons, more invasions, more restrictions, a grim dog-eat-god, every-man-for-himself vision of the world that is perfectly reflected in apocalyptic films from "Mad Max" and "The Terminator" to the recent "Book of Eli." We need to hear the hippie voice again, the voice that sings of beauty and sharing in this world that we live in. We cannot reason with the right-wing fear-mongers, but we might be able to out-sing and out-dance them, and create an expanding space in the public consciousness for a different, less fearful, more loving and celebratory world view.

Sometime rationality is overvalued, and we need to tap into something greater, older, deeper--while not altogether rejecting rationality, let me be clear.

I raise my glass to Paul McCartney for his late-career outburst of Paganesque exuberance. It is a lesson to us all.