The Mirror of History

The story about medical experimentation in Guatemala is a harrowing reminder of our past, yet our reaction to this story is itself a snapshot of where our society is today, and I see a welcome image of hope for Progressives, in this time when disillusionment and disappointment seem to be almost overwhelming.

Amy Goodman's October 5 interview with Susan Reverby, the medical historian who recently brought to light the unpublished documentation of the project, puts the incident in perspective. As an authority on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, she is very familiar with the social attitudes of those decades when the lives of some were simply and plainly not considered to be as worthy of respect as the lives of others. In the case of Tuskegee, poor black sharecroppers in Georgia who were found to already have syphilis were studied, without being told that it was syphilis that they suffered from, they were lied to about the nature of their medical treatment, and they were never treated for their disease, even after penicillin was found to be an effective cure.

The study in Guatemala is even more egregious due to the fact that individuals who were institutionalized in a prison and in an insane asylum, as well as some army soldiers, were actually infected with syphilis, surely without their knowledge, although what they were told was a detail that had been left out of these newly discovered physician's notes. And even in the atmosphere that allowed for the Tuskegee experiment to go on for forty years, from 1932 to 1972, Susan Reverby points to a comment in a letter referring to a statement by the surgeon general himself, showing that he knew that it would not be ethically acceptable in the United States, as the most shocking aspect of her discovery.

On one hand, it is difficult to acknowledge the wrongs of our nation's past. Many would prefer not to think about them. When Glenn Beck spoke of “restoring honor” to the United States during his rally in Washington, for example, his statement rang of the personal experience of a man who seeks to put his own past behind him. He said,

“Let's be honest. If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad. It has been both, but to concentrate on the bad instead of learning from the bad and repairing the bad and then looking to the good that is still out in front of us within our reach— We have a choice today. We can either let those scars crush us or redeem us.”

When Glenn Beck looks into the mirror of history, while acknowledging the bad, he cannot bear to dwell for long on those painful aspects. Assuming that what has worked for him in his own life will work for the nation, he turns toward the language of religious redemption, seeing those shameful instances as a part of a necessary spiritual path, as all-too-human lapses, their lessons being those of faith rather than of seeking deeper self-awareness. And whenever Progressives are characterized as the “blame America first” crowd, this abject refusal to look in the mirror and take responsibility for our collective actions, particularly in the “America” that stretches all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the colossal societal disconnect is strengthened.

On the other hand is the hope that surrounds this story. I perceive this moment to be a brief flash of the hope that Barack Obama campaigned upon, the hope that progress brings. That we find this story to be so horrifying, that the president's immediate apology to the nation of Guatemala is seen nearly universally as the appropriate response, shows that the rate of progress is, like the growth of a child, slow and nearly imperceptible to those who are witness to it day in and day out, yet society is moving forward.

Furthermore, by facing up to the attitudes that decided that it was acceptable to do in Guatemala what was not acceptable to do in the United States, the story links us to other past actions that our nation has taken in the Americas that merit attention, if we want to find realistic answers to problems such as illegal immigration or improve our relations within the rest of America. Rather than fearing that our scars will crush us, or refusing to accept blame beyond doing so in seeking redemption, we must study our image in that mirror in order to link our past actions to issues that continue to affect us today.

Walt Long's novel, The Travelers, achieves this goal. It is a story about the smuggling of illegal immigrants through a community in southern New Mexico that not only humanizes all of the factions involved, but also makes the link between the social realities that so many of the travelers are escaping in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and the part that the United States has played in helping to create those situations. This novel evenhandedly depicts the complexities of a vexing issue, offering not answers, but respect for the fact that it is as complex as the human character is.

Similarly, the past year's unveiling of classified State Department documents from the Nixon era merit close examination, as they go a long way in explaining how the brutal dictatorships that gripped the Southern Cone region of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay were the results of a concentrated effort by the United States to weaken social movements that were becoming legitimized through democratic processes, thus threatening the veracity of the neo-liberal narrative.

“History does not refer merely […] to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it, the past, with us. And we’re ‘unconsciously controlled’ in so many ways, that history, the past, is present now in all we do.” - James Baldwin

Small Change

The small steps that lead to giant leaps for humankind are often not recognized as such when they are being taken. They may require some time for discovery, or processing, or convincing. They may be small occurrences that pass by, hardly noticed, or big events that are celebrated, but for small reasons. Despite the deep-seated fears that are being played upon by forces that have a vested interest in preventing humanity's progress toward creating a more tolerant and just society, and despite the woeful cries of those who bemoan the slow pace of such progress, I believe that this health care reform represents one of these unrecognized small steps.

This is Rosa Parks, refusing to sit at the back of the bus - an unremarkable event, at the time it was occurring, that followed several other such acts of resistance to racial segregation, except that Ms. Parks was already part of a larger movement that was peacefully pushing for progressive change. The other persons on the bus that day could not have known of the potential that her small act of tired defiance held. But Rosa Parks did.

She intuitively felt the spark that lit the fire that was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which inspired U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. to call for a movement of "Massive Resistance," which was met by the Southern Manifesto, which was followed by Browder v. Gayle, the civil action law suit that outlawed racial segregation on buses in each state under the Fourteenth Amendmen's "equal protection of the laws," which lead to the sniping and bombings of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders' homes and churches and the formation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and on and on, back and forth, with the Freedom Riders testing the law on buses, lunch counter sit-ins, and other non-violent demonstrations against bigotry in the South, which were opposed by more lynchings, bombings, and defiance against the federal government, until the unified dignity of the civil rights movement won out over horrific images of police brutality and the news of little girls dying in their church finally ushered in a era of equal rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions that insisted upon the wholeness of racial integration.

The health care reform is being celebrate as a political victory for President Obama and for the Democrats. It is possibly the most controversial issue the nation has faced in recent history, with opponents on the right furious that it has gone too far, while progressives are angry that it didn't go far enough. But despite all of the vicious politics surrounding it, the passage of this legislation is about something much bigger than all of that. At the same time, despite the monumental effort it took the Democrats to finally pass it, and the emotional fervor stirred up by the Republicans and their backers in the insurance industry in opposition to it, it is really rather less than all of that. This is only a small step forward, a tiny spark that helps to keep the flame of human progress alive. But its potential to set a new fire aglow must be properly understood, if it is to spread to something far greater than the people on the proverbial bus could ever imagine.

This potential lies in a serene place, away from all the rabble of misplaced anger and repressed entitlement on the one hand and disillusionment mixed with sadness about being so demonized on the other. It is the promise of patient, yet persistent, change, the same promise that the election of this president represented. And it is a part of the same march forward that the civil rights movement was a part of, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women's rights movement, and all other human rights movements that continue to push for the social evolution of our species.

This change requires an elegant kind of thought process that is somewhat foreign to the either/or, absolutist mentality that seems to be encouraged by the culture of the United States today. This thinking tolerates the coexistence of what, on the surface, might appear to be conflicting ideas, so that ideology will give way to the flexibility that is necessary to get things done in society. It is the kind of thinking that is necessary for social change to take place, because its flexibility allows those who are trying to introduce new ideas to do so in a way that assuages the fears of those who are resistant to change. It is incumbent upon progressives to be careful in our push for change, to show that we are not a threat to others in our quest to reform an unjust system. While we must stand by our ideals, we must also be able to recognize the limits of society's willingness to change and find creative ways to nudge at those boundaries. In the face of exasperating misinformation and mis-characterizations of our intentions, we must be content to take baby steps and let time be the messenger of the good news that social cooperation is actually less costly than separation and divisiveness.

Such maturity of thought can recognize that individual liberty and social responsibility are interrelated; that democratic principles and social welfare policies are not mutually exclusive; that ownership of property and wealth is not equivalent to freedom; that tyranny and hidden taxes can be imposed by private institutions as well as by governments; that giving can be receiving and big can be small and patriotism can be other than the uncritical acceptance of a self-serving narrative.

Such thinking makes sense out of the actions of a man who campaigned on the promise of "change," who was supported by progressives because he seemed to have come out of left field and was seen to be uncorrupted by the political process. He spoke of the civil rights struggle and the "end of small politics,"constantly drilling at his message of "change," which spoke to progressives as a change from the Right to the Left. It was a brilliant campaign slogan, a nebulous, open promise that could mean almost anything. And when things came down to the wire, voters who were offered two images of "change" chose the one that looked and sounded and acted the most like real change. But this change turned out to be less dramatic, less obvious, less palpable than we would have liked to see, and many progressives soon gave up on the new president, expressing the kind of dismay that Frank Rich and Micheal Moore and many other disillusioned supporters have expressed.

But perhaps the president's apparent timidity to make big changes is not due to weakness, nor inexperience, nor naivety, nor crass political maneuvering, but instead comes from an insight that is difficult for all but those few who have faced the struggle to succeed in a covertly racist society can immediately comprehend. The man has spent his whole life honing his ability to convince others to overlook the color of his skin, his unconventional upbringing, and his unusual name to give him a chance to show what he is really made of. It has not only been his persuasiveness that has been most crucial to Barack Obama's success, but his ability to follow it through with action and intelligence, and by asserting himself in a measured and non-threatening way. This is a kind of progress that connects individual achievement with social responsibility, that works from the inside while never forgetting all those who remain on the outside, that understands that one must sometimes tack in one direction to create the headwind that will move them in another direction, that utilizes subtle, patient, and even controversial techniques to slowly soften hard-edged thought structures and create small but significant change.

When we see the health care reform from a larger historic perspective, we can begin to understand how President Obama's actions mirror those of the man that he admires so much, Abraham Lincoln, and how the current situation mirrors the abolition of slavery. Lincoln ran for office as a vociferous opponent of slavery in the United States, and as soon as it became clear that he would soon become the president of the United States of America, the secessionists began to form the Confederacy. The attempts to find a compromise by President-elect Lincoln and outgoing President Buchanan that would convince the southern states to remain part of the Union could not go far, because the stance that one class of people had the right to enslave other human beings in the names of "heritage" and "freedom" and "states' rights" had become entrenched and non-negotiable. Lincoln pointed out during his inaugural address that the stated purpose of the U.S. Constitution was "to form a more perfect union" and offered up the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution that would have protected slavery in those states where it already existed, in order to ensure that new territories would not become slave states. He was criticized by the Copperheads for not giving in on the issue of slavery and thus taking the nation into civil war, criticized by the abolitionists who felt that he was not doing enough to end slavery, and deeply despised by those who put their own desires above their allegiance to the principle of democracy as social progress toward becoming a better and stronger union. Lincoln could not prevent the Confederacy from being formed, but he refused to negotiate with Confederate agents and thus legitimize the Confederacy, and both the Union and the Confederacy danced around the issue of who would be the aggressor in the ensuing civil war, until Confederates in South Carolina, with the aim of claiming U.S. federal property, could not contain themselves any longer.

Now, as then, it is not the proponents of progressive change who are causing the divisiveness that is tearing at the heart of the nation. Rather, it is those who refuse to let go of an ideology that is, at its core, a claim of entitlement of the "haves" at the expense of the "have nots," the clamoring for the rights of corporations to enslave individuals in the names of "heritage" and "freedom" and "states' rights," that is dividing the nation.

The passing of the health care reform legislation by the Democrats and the vow by the Republicans to use the dwindling resources of the states to fight against it is a huge political deal, as what will surely be torrid midterm elections approach, but it will only be a small chapter in the nation's history. Whatever increase in the level of anger and, as many are worried about, violence on the part of those on the Right who see this as a major threat to their idea of what the nation is supposed to be about, will reveal the deeper core of this issue, that sense of entitlement that manifests itself as racism and sexism and homophobia and religious- or class-based exceptionalism when the veneer of civility is worn thin by fundamentalist populism, and it will all lead back to the 2008 elections that brought the Democrats into power in Congress and an unusual black man into the White House. But as the civil rights leaders who were brutally attacked by the police in Selma, Alabama, know from experience, these kinds of outbreaks open up those people's eyes who want their nation to be a shining example of humanity's best character, who were previously unaware of the deep level of contempt for universal human dignity as well as for the federal government that underlies conservative ideology.

The images pile on: Representative John Lewis, a longtime veteran of the civil rights struggle, and others on their way to vote for the legislation being spat upon; reports of death threats and brick throwing; Sarah Palin's goading of violence by presenting individuals in the cross hairs of a gun; President Bush wiping his hand on President Clinton's shirtsleeve after shaking a Haitian person's hand... These images speak far louder than any denials of reality can. And they present conservatives with the dilemma of looking at their own contradictions, because they can't have it both ways. They cannot label William Ayers as a terrorist and a traitor to the nation and at the same time hold up those who are willing to commit acts of violence against members of the government as patriots for a cause. I believe that most sympathizers of what William Ayers did thirty years ago have matured and now see the enormous error of trying to further a just cause through the instigation of violence. (To those who disagree with this conclusion, I would point out the fact that the radical elements of the anti-war movement in Berkeley were the original cause of the Reagan backlash against liberal ideologies that has persisted throughout these thirty years and remains as a bedrock of conservative thought structures today.) If it is democracy that is at stake, then the violent overthrow of democracy cannot be the answer. If nationalism is the calling, then states' rights cannot trump federal law. If government is the problem, then making the government less effective cannot be the solution.

Perhaps this rise in anger is a direction that President Obama foresaw and chose to take on in order to force the nation to deal with the polarization that has been increasing in recent years. Perhaps he knew that the level of contempt that so many would hold toward him is deeply rooted in our society, yet it is no match for the will for humanity to progress, with the weight of all of history behind it. Perhaps he understood the larger significance of his presidency and saw the opportunity to use his skills as a real "uniter," taking on the dual role of president of all of the people of the United States and at the same time gently, patiently, through persuasion and follow-through, inching the nation forward in its quest to become a more perfect union. And perhaps this is the answer to his non-involvement in the political struggles of the legislature on an issue that is so important to his presidency, as he was attempting to set the example of how a president should be everyone's president and not simply be the leader of one party. That the Democrats could not see the forest for the trees, having wasted an entire year being, themselves, too timid to come together and get this task completed, was painful to observe. It took the president's final stepping in, convincing such actors on the far left as Dennis Kucinich that there was a larger cause at stake, then conceding to the anti-abortion contingency on the right in a big way, thus providing the political party leadership that the Democrats are so desperately lacking.

Of course, many concessions were made, from the very beginning, in order to get this legislation passed. That is why this is really just a small step forward. But the fact of its passage, no matter how watered down or what was necessary to secure it, is the spark that could lead to the fire that brings the United States to face its inner demons. The political victory is just a small reason to celebrate. The spark that has been lit lies in the potential to change the politics, themselves.

President Obama will have learned from this experience, during which many have labeled his leadership as weak, wobbly, foggy, uninspiring... But he seems to have come to the realization that the nation was not ready for his attempt to be a national leader by distancing himself from the political circus ring or refusing to be a bully. He has been faced with the classic progressive dilemma of how to be ahead of the curve, yet be able to relate to the bulk of those who are following behind in a way that makes sense to them. Real leadership means that someone is ahead of the pack, leading the way, setting an example, not that someone is powerful because they are the most forceful or they have hung around the longest, having amassed their power, essentially, by default. But the president may have just learned the difficult lesson that the entrenched political system in the United States only understands the language of force, and that changing this system will be a much longer-term project that will have to remain secondary to the project of ensuring that the Democrats can address the current economic situation in demonstrably effective ways while at the same time defending themselves with honor and finesse against the vengeance of the party that knows how to raise a rabble and manipulate the fears and emotions of their constituency to gain support for their causes.

For their part, the Democrats could muster some finesse by looking at the larger significance of the health care reform not as a victory so much as the continuity of a long struggle for human rights. It follows the constitutional mandate "to promote the general Welfare and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" by limiting the tyranny of the insurance companies that separates society into those who can afford health care and the astounding number of those who cannot, which weakens the nation's work force, and which imposes hidden costs on employers.

Let us fan the flames of what has been sparked, that is, a movement that is willing to stand before the clamor of the fearful and the misguided, just as Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others bravely did, and insist that the country come together to reclaim our government so that it will work for the people instead of for the corporate financiers of all of the politicians. The next political battle will be over the ideology of deregulation, but to get at that issue we will need to force our representatives to take a long, hard look at the way that government works, focus on why it is so frustratingly inept and wasteful, and figure out how to limit the corrupting influences of lobbying and campaign financing as a better fix than simply dismantling it. Today, health care - tomorrow, returning our democracy to its most basic principle of "government by the people." Now that would be one giant leap for humankind.

Seven Twenty-First Century Social Sins

In honor of International Human Rights Day, The Seven Twenty-First Century Social Sins

1.Power without Wisdom
2.Pleasure without Awareness
3.Science without Humanity
4.Knowledge without Understanding
5.Politics without Accountability
6.Commerce without Conscience
7.Spirituality without Connection

I believe in a progressive philosophy of examining ideas from the past, processing them to find what about them is useful and not so useful in the present, and reworking them so that they can help us to move society forward - to progress. In this way, beautiful customs that have passed on through time can be respected and continued, notions that may have been the product of ignorance or that have become obsolete can be discarded, and new customs and traditions can be woven from those most durable threads of tradition, being reinforced in the process.

In keeping with this philosophy, here is my updated version of the list that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi laid out in 1925 in the journal, "Young India." His list of social behaviors to avoid was, of course, the product of his place and time, which was Colonial India struggling for self-determination and social justice. Gandhi's Indian revolution was truly innovative as a widespread social movement in its rejection of the use of violence, and his ideas, manifested by his actions, have been an inspiration to all who have advocated for social change through peaceful resistance – from figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Howard Zinn, Wangari Maathai in Africa, Ramzi Kysia of the Free Gaza Movement, to artists and musicians such as John Lennon, Bob Marley, and many, many more, from around the globe, representing all walks of life.

Although Gandhi's potent demonstration of the power of non-violent insistence upon change is timeless wisdom, this updated version of Gandhi's Seven Social Sins is necessary because the original applied to a world that has changed significantly since that time. In 1925, the idea of Communism was gaining ground, the European Empires were experiencing their final decline, oil dependency was on the rise, geopolitics were undergoing tectonic shifts, and Free Market Capitalism had yet to become the weapon of choice to be wielded by the United States in order to maintain its total dominance upon the world stage of today. In those years between the two World Wars, workers and poorer people of the world were demanding inclusion in the new kinds of governments that were replacing the waning monarchies, while those who had benefited from the monarchical structures and their hierarchical social constructs sought to hold on to their power and wealth. This was only one chapter in the eternal class struggle that stretches throughout the story of human civilization, but at no other time in history was the notion that the lesser classes might become enfolded into the structures of governance more energized, as the dismantling of old regimes gave way to new opportunities.

It was this wave of opportunity that opened the door to new ideas about how societies should structure themselves, and what pitfalls they should avoid, that Gandhi was boldly walking through when he presented his Seven Social Sins to the subcontinent of India and to the world. Here is his original list:

1.Wealth without Work
2.Pleasure without Conscience
3.Science without Humanity
4.Knowledge without Character
5.Politics without Principle
6.Commerce without Morality
7.Worship without Sacrifice

The differences between the two lists reflect very different attitudes that have arisen with time. Gandhi's version was just like his dress - simple, basic, unadorned. The list appeared, with no discussion whatsoever, for his followers to contemplate as they struggled to recreate an independent India. I have recycled Gandhi's list, demonstrating my philosophy of examining, processing, progressing, and have adorned it with a few new ideas of my own. As the people of the world seek ways to demand social justice in the face of the current economic uncertainty, a cohesive foundation for how to challenge social policies and philosophies that have failed to live up to their promises will be of the utmost importance. It must be stressed that this is a matter of basic human rights, not one of capital flow or market readjustments. Gandhi framed the struggle of the poorest classes of India as being the same struggle as the entire society's right to self-determination against British colonialism. This lesson that various social struggles are not fragmented, but rather, are all one and the same - struggles against wildly unequal distribution of wealth, against the hoarding of power, against the undermining of democratic principles, against environmental destruction - are all connected.

1. Wealth without Work - Power without Wisdom

The idea of, “no wealth without work” has its origins in the ethical argument against usury, or the charging of interest on loans, long seen as a social evil as well as a weakness of character. This idea appeared in the form of "just price theory," from the economic thought of the Middle Ages, and later, in Adam Smith's "Labor Theory of Value," both connecting a product's value to the labor used to produce it, which was further connected to the greater social good by its promotion of industriousness in individuals. As the Industrial Revolution dramatically raised the level of the world's commerce to new heights, economic theory leap towards new understandings, and capitalism based on credit and investment banking did away with the ethical frown upon what was once called "usury." In response to new imbalances that arose along with these changes, socialist philosophy took up the old slogan anew, as laborers felt the need to stand up for themselves, striving to once again recognize the value and dignity of work, to instil pride in each individual's role in society, to raise the status of the worker from that of the mere commodity belonging to the wealthy owners of the corporations that were steadily building their own empires.

Although the ideals behind "no wealth without work" may be noble and just, I feel that this phrase no longer resonates in today's world, where investment strategies and the use of credit have become acceptable means of obtaining wealth that offer some level of greater social good in society. The caveat here is that these means not be taken to excess, which is the hard-learned lesson of the economic collapse of recent years. There is a point of balance between being too dependent on borrowing and not borrowing at all. In a system that thrives on the flow of capital, more than anything else, it is of the greatest import to make sure that not only those who already have large amounts of capital to invest have access to credit. And, despite that tough lesson about handing out credit as if it were Halloween candy (indeed, on college campuses, credit card applications were literally handed out along with candy bars), there are some positive signs that "usury," when carefully initiated and vigorously regulated, can offer a greater good to society, as evidenced by the growing movement of "micro loans" to the world's poorest citizens. These people, often women who have come together to form small cooperatives in impoverished regions, do not need much to help them improve themselves and their communities.

My idea is to look at financing of any sort, in any amount, not simply as a means of trade for goods and services, but as a source of power. Money is power. Many things offer power, including social status, physical strength, pure numbers, access to government representatives, charisma, the secret to nuclear fusion, etcetera. As the lesson about depending too strongly on credit has taught us, so, too, does any kind of power require moderation. This moderation is a kind of Wisdom. Therefore, Power Requires Wisdom.

No power without wisdom. No mere marketing of ideas without digging into the basis of those ideas, who is paying for the marketing of them, how they benefit certain individuals more than they offer any greater good, and how their very veracity might be in question. No unfettered freedom of access to government officials without some show of how the policies that one is pushing for would actually offer some greater good for society. No governmental position of power without strict mediation of how that power can and cannot be used. No trusting that those in power are there because they somehow deserve to be there, without any proof that they are capable or to be trusted with their power. No monarchy or dynasty. No impunity. No lack of oversight and regulation.

To tie power with wisdom is also to re-assert the relationship of those who hold power with those who allow them to hold that power. It is a reminder that in society, the many give tacit consent to their rulers when they do not voice their opposition to this relationship. If the many would understand that they, too, hold power - of numbers, of denial of services, of the ability to stop commerce, in entirely peaceful ways, especially when they can become organized and act in unison - then the powerful would be wise to look after the well-being of the larger community instead of only their own self-interests. And wisdom is, further, a connective and expansive force. It sees in terms of interaction rather than competition, relationships rather than enmities, community rather than self.

I feel that this framing of the issue, of no power without wisdom, without oversight or moderation, without connection, without a larger scope of vision addresses the ills of the modern world more than the framing of the issue as no wealth without work, as the former can be seen as a divisive point that can only degenerate into class struggle, in which the lower classes are viewed as committing one of the biblical seven cardinal sins - envy - while the upper classes are viewed as committing another - gluttony. The real sin here is that of generalization, which feeds the perception that the extremes of a situation are the norm, and that the actions of some represents the sentiments of all. The issues involved in class struggle are not simple. Rather, they are infinitely complicated, easily misunderstood by oversimplification, and inherently divisive. So, by replacing the reference to class struggle, as well as to the outdated connection of wealth to physical labor, with a very different characterization of wealth as a form of power, I hope to take a positive step forward toward the goal of reformulating how societies understand the problems presented by inequities of wealth and other types of power.

2. Pleasure without Conscience - Pleasure without Awareness

Mahatma Gandhi was devoted to a life of simple living, weaving his own clothing out of cotton, and minimizing pleasure and extravagances for the sake of spiritual purity. In this context, pleasure itself was to be avoided, and the having of pleasure was, if not sinful, then connected with guilt. I reject the idea of guilt trips that religious codes tend to impose, so I have substituted "awareness" for "conscience," and I believe that this admonition fits in with modern attitudes about how pleasure enhances our lives, which we should not constantly feel conscientious or riddled with guilt about. I feel that the 1960's cultural revolution - of progressive rock music, personal and sexual freedom, use of mind-altering drugs - ushered in a new understanding of how pleasure can actually enhance one's awareness in surprising ways, and is not always an act of pure hedonism, when that expanded awareness is a connective force instead of an isolating one. It is possible to have keen awareness while experiencing pleasure, if we put our minds to it, as opposed to closing ourselves off to the wider world and pretending that we are in some other reality. Celebrations such as Christmas and Thanksgiving are other examples of how we can enjoy ourselves while at the same time being thankful for the source of our joy. As long as we do not take things to extremes, do not celebrate for the sake of the pleasure itself, and make sure to remain aware of and connected to the larger situations around us, pleasure does not have to bring on pangs of conscience. Pleasure with awareness has the power to heal and re-energizing us to face larger realities with renewed vitality.

3. Science without Humanity

Einstein reiterated this idea with his famous quote, "It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." What Gandhi warned the world against, Einstein commiserated had happened. Einstein spoke of atomic weapons, but his observation goes well beyond that in today's world of i-phones and c-scans and gm-foods. The degree to which we do not understand how our gadgets work, let alone the consequences of their manufacture, distribution, and use, has lagged farther and farther behind the level at which we are enamored with them. And from this level of comfort with not understanding derives a tremendous disconnect, a fatal attraction to having no interest in understanding the world around us which leaves us dangerously vulnerable to campaigns of misinformation - the ultimate paradox of the "information age." So society becomes fractionalized, compartmentalized, separated into clusters of special interest groups, digesting information in small bits, sound bites, disambiguated twitters, and our ability to comprehend what it all means for our society, and what it says about us as human beings, gets lost in the onslaught of fragmentized info-porn. This is the nightmare that science fiction writers could not have dreamed up. The computers have not become frighteningly human-like, rather, the humans have become like machines. We must work to regain our humanity in the face of this advanced dependence upon technology.

4. Knowledge without Character - Knowledge without Understanding

Gandhi's idea of "no knowledge without character" carries the implicit meaning that it is "moral" character that must not be lacking. It seems to me that this kind of language was the norm in Gandhi's day, when speaking of how persons were to act in society, with all of the religious connotations included, whether those be Hindu or Muslim or Christian or any other. However, being a proponent of the idea that religion and "morality" are not necessary to motivate people to be upstanding and kind and generous, I want to get away from moralizing. The idea of "no knowledge without understanding," does just that - it takes knowledge out of the realm of a gift that must be paid for with morality and places it in the realm of a kind of power that requires a moderator.

To moderate knowledge with understanding seeks to take knowledge further than the mere collection of information. It ensures that the human element will be present, so that we will not be machines, nor will machines that collect information be anything like humans. To actually understand something is connective. It looks beyond the information and tries to make sense of it, using capabilities that only the human mind possesses. This is, in large part, what makes us human - to understand past, present, and future; to understand that when I do a certain thing, a predictable outcome will occur; to understand that symbolic sounds can be developed into language...

But "no knowledge without understanding" pushes us further, to keep learning new things, to strive to make sense out of what we know so far, to ask "why" after we know "what" and "where" and "how." It goads us toward the wisdom that, to paraphrase Socrates, a wise man understands how little he knows. And it entreats us to continuously connect all of the tidbits of information together into a larger understanding.

5. Politics without Principle - Politics without Accountability

Gandhi hoped that politics could be principled, that the political arena would be self-regulating, in a way similar to how the world of business was supposed to be mediated by such economic theories as the "invisible hand." Politics that lacked principle would be unacceptable to the citizens of a democracy. However, it seems that the opposite has come to pass, that politicians who choose to be principled cannot compete against those who are willing to market themselves insincerely, and worse, spend much of their energy attempting to demonize their political opponents - a process that continues on far past the political campaigns to infect governance itself. The result is that truths become buried under infinite levels of rhetoric, all constructive conversation on issues gets left by the wayside, and citizens become either polarized or cynical about the process, a situation that can only lead to a crisis of confidence in government. So the foundations of democracy - government by the people - begin to crack.

While one would reasonably expect politics to be principled, in its absence, what is needed is accountability. When individuals are found to be in blatant disregard of facts in their politicking, they need to be expelled from being involved in any way from the political process. Accountability would literally apply to accounting in terms of how much money is being spent on campaigns, and limits need to be placed, so that the process is not infected by its insipid undermining of the democratic process. And accountability would also apply in regard to openness of government, with fair access of all to their representatives, and a tracking of how much time and resources are being spent on the actual work of governance, along with further limits on how much precious time and resources can be spent politicking. Forcing the agents of government to account for their actions in a much more immediate and transparent way would go far to reign in the unprincipled politics that have caused so much confusion, polarization, and cynicism in today's political arena, and would begin to repair the foundation of democracy upon which the nation stands.

6. Commerce without Morality - Commerce without Conscience

While Gandhi spoke in terms of morality, I wish to move away from such terminology, for the reason that I have already stated, and also because of the danger of moral relativism. Morality is not universal.
It is dependent on society's mores, understandings, and distinct viewpoints. Not only does morality differ from society to society, but from individual to individual, as each one of us is free to develop our own belief systems within pluralistic societies that include many different religions and philosophies. Yet, some sort of code of conduct, some moderator, some set of principles, must apply to everyone in society, where we must all treat each other with a certain amount of respect, regardless of our personal moralities. A different framing of this concept would be to turn to "conscience," instead.

In this context, "conscience" does not imply guilt so much as empathy and compassion. When we are considering how to treat others in society, conscience can be our guide, as this goes beyond any religious moral code or belief system. The logic of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is as universal as any principle gets, having been present in systems of thought from Confucianism to Buddhism to Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions to New Age philosophies to any thoughtful consideration of how to be a conscientious person. Similarly, when we have conscience about how our actions will effect the different strata of society and the environment, those larger entities within which we all operate, we connect ourselves with our surroundings and thus have a vested interest in doing those things that will help to keep those bodies vibrant and healthy.

This connective principle applies to all aspects of our lives, extending into how we conduct the commerce that is required in modern society to obtain most if not all of our vital needs. The idea that commerce is not a part of the human experience, that the same codes of conduct do not apply to the businesses that we create, participate in, and interact with, because these entities are not actual human beings, makes no sense, whatsoever. The strongest moderator of them all, beyond principle, beyond meek attempts at accountability that consist of fines which are simply worked into the cost of doing business, beyond awareness, which informs, but does not motivate to act conscientiously - conscience must be the moderator of commerce, as it is not something separate, but something that is at the very heart of the human experience and what society is all about.

Economic understandings that separate the "market" out from our daily lives and assume that scientific theories and numeric formulas hold all the answers to how money flows through society have been called into question again and again. Their failures to describe, let alone predict, economic realities might be remedied if they were to be reunited with human considerations, such as defining costs in terms of loss of productivity due to workers' health issues and attitudes, and with even more expansive evaluations of cost, such as the costs to the ecosystem imposed by pollution and environmental destruction. This expansive view of cost analysis might just find that there is a correlation between conscience and the well-being of our businesses in the same way that individuals find themselves to be happier when they are conscientious members of society.

7. Worship without Sacrifice - Spirituality without Connection

The name of "Mahatma" meaning "Great Soul," was given to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi while he was agitating for improvements in the desperate living conditions of poor workers in 1918, against largely British landlords, their militias, and their government supporters. He was arrested for his "agitating," which consisted of making detailed studies of the atrocious living conditions, leading clean-up campaigns, helping village leadership to initiate new school and hospital building, and advocating for the rights of the untouchables. He practiced Hinduism all his life, insisting that all religions were equal, their main purposes being to encourage compassion and brotherhood, while also all having their weaknesses to hypocrisy and dogma. As the title of his autobiography indicates, "The Story of My Experiments with Truth," he was dedicated to the search for Satya, or Truth. And he sought purity, simplicity, and self-sufficiency, practicing spiritual as well as politically-motivated fasting.

Mahatmas Gandhi was, of course, an extraordinary man, and his radical simplicity would be unacceptable in today's world, where appearances are all-important and we are bombarded by commercial messaging from all sides. Jimmy Carter was laughed out of office when he suggested that we all turn down our thermostats in the winter and wear sweaters instead. When the mantra of a whole society is "consumerism," because going without is pessimistic, unsupportive, and unpatriotic, it is extremely difficult to change attitudes and habits that seem to be rights rather than privileges. I can't help but note that Micheal Moore, who certainly isn't one for spending big on fancy wardrobes or expensive haircuts, is the closest thing to a modern-day Gandhi as we are likely to have, as he has been advocating an action plan that combines going without in order to get our personal finances back under control after such over-dependence on credit, involvement in the processes of government, and a program of person health as a microcosm of public health. In his most recent film, Micheal Moore, like Gandhi before him, has tied economic justice with religious-based ethics. Certainly, such concepts can
be seen as a kind of "sacrifice" that can be practical as well as spiritual.

Although this is a holistic approach to social ethics that seeks spiritual guidance, expressed as "worship" by Gandhi, once again, my concern about resonance in a society that emphasizes materialism over spirituality drives me to seek some other way of framing the issue that he was getting at that does not tie worship and spirituality to sacrifice. The idea is to find an approach that nurtures the whole person, so that however we each see ourselves, some sort of a spiritual dimension would be present in our attempts to find a social code that makes sense. My feelings on how this spiritual dimension can be interpreted in the most wide range of possibilities, by adherents to many different religions, or to no religion at all, is to advocate for spirituality as connection.

This connection would be with what we each understand to be "God," and with each other, and with nature. Any sacrifice that would come from the seeking of spirituality would be generated by the desire to connect, and therefore to give something of oneself, to look beyond personal gain, to purify ourselves with the aim of achieving deeper connections through such practices as meditation or prayer or ritual or song and dance or simply taking a moment to be in awe of the universe around us. At the heart of what it means to be a human being is to connect, in mirror of the synapses in our brains. Connecting is conscience, is accountability, is understanding, is humanity, is awareness, is wisdom. The connective principle is what I believe God to be, a higher purpose than the individual, that which we all seek in the form of love, comfort, community, one-ness of being.

This kind of spirituality does the opposite of separating us into different religions and sects. It manifests the idea that Gandhi expressed about the purpose of all religions being to instill compassion and brotherhood. Tragically, he was not successful at convincing the Hindus and the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent that their religions were of this nature, instead of allowing distrust and enmity to cause the division into what is today India and Pakistan. Gandhi was, in fact, murdered because of this rivalry, which he was trying to mediate, and today, these nations are still plagued with ethnic and religious violence.

Nonetheless, I believe in the will of the people to work together to bring an end suffering, to put a stop to violence that only leads to more violence, to push our societies toward progressive change by challenging the status quo and insisting, non-violently, that society must re-order itself so that all will enjoy the benefits of peace and more equitable prosperity. As for the current situation in the United States, the biggest hurdle that must be overcome is the influence of lobbyists and campaign donations on the political process. There needs to be a concerted, focused campaign toward reforming this system, led by a massive citizen's movement, because the politicians are not going to do it on their own. But behind this focused campaign, let there be a set of guiding principles. These are a start, a push toward the process of innovation to come up with new kinds of ideas that might resonate even more strongly. For if we consider the huge success of freeing India from British ownership that Gandhi did achieve through years of influential writing and speaking about his new ideas, acting positively, and sacrificing his freedom as he languished in jail for years, only to come out fighting once again, and then go on to look at all those who he inspired who have also been successful at instituting changes large and small, then our tasks will also appear to have achievable solutions.

Peace is a State of Mind

President Obama's success depends upon the bravery of trust in the process of creating peaceful change.

I recognized the power of his motivations early on, and I have supported him despite several faltering steps that he made at the beginning of his presidency. It was only when I learned that President Obama had made a deal with the pharmaceutical companies to help pass his health care reform that my support had wavered, as I wondered just how far President Obama would go in playing this kind of politics, after winning the presidency on the strength of his inspiring speech titled, The End of Small Politics. But, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, my trust in the bigger process prevailed.

I had allowed myself to wander, briefly, away from my own arguments about why President Obama deserves our trust and support, even though many of his actions seemed contrary to his message of “change.” I had seen in his visage a figure who did have big plans to end small politics, but who was a practical visionary, who understood that he had to work carefully within the system as it exists. I saw a man with ideas that were more expansive than most people could even comprehend, a longer-term plan that involved patiently negotiating the change that he had promised, and a keen intelligence about how to face the world's colossal complexities. I had seen great promise in his cross-racial identity. And I had hoped that I was right and everybody else was simply wrong who immediately jumped to the conclusion that, because everything was so complicated and his actions were confusing, he had been a fraud during the election, that there never was any “change we can believe in.” By taking this attitude, they have joined the ranks of those who had always disliked and mistrusted Barack Obama, for whatever reasons were in their hearts, and are thus failing to provide the support that he told us that he was going to need to enact that change. As I wrote on my blog, “Change We Can Believe In” is not a spectator sport.

For those of us who believe that this could and should be a less violent world, that nations could solve their differences through peaceful negotiation instead of through war, that a great nation does not need the greatest show of military might to sustain its greatness, it seems that our ideas are always being brushed aside as naive, as politically unfeasible, as unrealistic idealism. And now, we who see in President Barack Hussein Obama a truly transformative figure, because we understand the stupendous scope of his vision and see the alert shine of competence in his eyes, are again and again being sidelined by so many skeptics who do not believe that President Obama is interested in creating peace in the world, and that the Nobel Peace Prize was just so much wishful thinking.

When the President of the United States already has a record of working on nuclear disarmament, and this President had immediately, upon taking office, moved to show his commitment to changing policies of the previous president that were offensive to the ideas of democracy and world citizenship by signing the statement about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and then stressing the importance of the State Department in creating less militaristic, much more negotiation-oriented foreign policy, and furthermore, when this President reaches out to the Muslim world with a truly inspiring speech in Cairo, then backs off of an aggressive and destabilizing plan to place missiles in Eastern Europe, and actually takes action to engage with repressive regimes in Iran, Burma, and the Sudan in order to apply this nation's power peacefully, I say that this is major change toward a more stable and peaceful world that is more than worthy of a prize.

President Obama is making huge strides in several important areas in the world already, yet I find that people focus only on the difficult domestic situation wherein the military, as well as other organizations that operate in the murky, secret realm of “national defense,” such as the CIA, are made up of career operators who have other ideas than creating peace in the world. President Obama faces the conundrum that he is expected to act militaristic, as the Commander in Chief of the world's largest military, so it is difficult for people in this society to see him as an agent of peace. I would go so far as to say that peace is, in fact, regarded in this society merely as an ideal that dreamers and artists dwell in, not a viable reality.

The question that we must ask ourselves is, why is the idea of peace so unthinkable? Could it be that our society is afraid of peace? In a society that is afraid to trust anyone, a society where violence is a social norm, born of the swagger of entitlement, there is a deep-seated fear of what might happen if everybody were to lay down their arms, as well as their cynicism. Therefore, we must tear down this wall of fear, and find in ourselves the strength of character to admit that it is war and state aggression that is not viable. It is not naive to realize that modern warfare is not a noble endeavor, as it invariably either devolves into an asymmetrical morass or an unthinkable nuclear confrontation. There are no longer any “good wars,” and I believe that President Obama does understand this.

The situation in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, is not a simple matter of drawing down troops and walking away from a disaster of our own making. Whatever solutions there are will involve patient unraveling and insistent determination. And while it is a long-term process, we must all not only support but actively work diligently to help enact a change toward greater stability, because ultimately, peace is a state of mind.

Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: It Looks Like You've Blown A Seal

The “national conversation” about the direction in which the United States is moving has grown ridiculouser and ridiculouser, if it can even be called a “conversation” at all. In fact, the definite lack of anything even resembling a “conversation” has turned the entire country into a madhouse of hyped-up fears and misdirected anger that are tearing the fabric of democracy into tiny, tattered pieces. While they see themselves as “patriots,” defending what they believe to be the real values and integrity of the United States of America against the agenda of a group of less-righteous reformers, these quite recently fired-up conservative activists are doing the nation a terrible disservice by preventing any constructive conversation from occurring, thus subverting the process of deliberative democracy and laying the groundwork for the very kind of social disharmony that Mussolini played upon in Italy and Hitler utilized in Germany.

The largest point that the “Teabaggers” are missing is the concept of “speaking truth to power,” where such tactics as citizen protests and street marches are necessitated by groups who have no voice in a national conversation, due to repression or social inequality instituted by the state, itself. But the people who are causing such a scene now are by no means a repressed group. They already have a seat at the table and are fully able to make their voices heard through regular channels of communication, through public discussion forums, through the news media, through access to their representatives, etcetera. Unlike the Iraq War protesters, for example, whose reasonable opposition to the attacking of a nation without any discernible proof of the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction or connection between Saddam Hussein and the actual 9/11 attackers was completely ignored by the Bush Administration and subverted by the war-mongering media, having been labeled as “unpatriotic” for wanting to be sure about these things before sending our troops into battle, not to mention destroying the lives of innocent people in Iraq and destabilizing the entire Middle East, there is no silencing and no sidelining of the groups who are taking to the streets now. The Obama Administration has been trying to invite conversation with conservative groups, and because of the fear that the president would be labeled as a “socialist” by these groups that it is actually the progressive, single-payer supporters who are being left out of the discussion.

So, whereas legitimate protest movements can only arise organically through bottom-up, grassroots community organization of repressed voices, which is actually the case for the single-payer movement, what is occurring now is an attempt by a set of top-down, well-funded, politically-connected, behind-the-scenes power brokers – insurance and health industry lobbyists, small-government ideologues, and other social and economic conservatives – to stir up unwarranted fear and underlying prejudices in order to simply shout down their opposition, instead of allowing any conversation to occur at all. This is a dangerous situation, indeed, for let us not forget that the Nazis came to power within the framework of a democratic government, and were enabled to commit their atrocities against the Jewish people by demonizing them as internal enemies of the state, just as progressives are being demonized by the right today. Italy was not a democracy when Mussolini rose to power, but there, too, internal enemies of the state were declared and targeted, Jewish people being primary among them, as well as anyone who did not go along with Mussolini's single-minded plan to create a better, stronger, and more pure Roman Empire.

In the face of these disgraceful and entirely undemocratic tactics, where facts do not seem to hold any sway and even the very nature of what democracy is supposed to be about has been co-opted by religious and economic ideologues, those who believe themselves to be centrist as a way of bringing the nation together have been bending farther and farther over under their pressure, which means that the result of the Obama presidency, so far, has been a reactionary lean to the right instead of the opening up of the national political discussion that progressives believed that Mr. Obama represented during the election.

Up until, well, today, when I read Matt Taibbi's recent articles on the fuckfest that “health care reform” has become (Sick_and_Wrong; PhRMA's Big Bribe Comes In) I had been arguing that President Obama has been cunningly biding his time to be able to work forward an eventual and practical progressive agenda, patiently negotiating the political landscape, showing Solomon-like leadership qualities, and living up to his promise to be everyone's president, not just the partisan Democratic party leader. However, I have finally come to the conclusion that he has, indeed, fallen prey to the Presidential Bubble, surrounded as he is by his army of advisers and assistants, out of touch with his campaign promises and his earliest grassroots progressive supporters. As Matt Taibbi so expressively points out, President Obama has already sold the country out on health care reform, and unless something changes drastically very soon, there will be no meaningful reform at all, rather, things look to get even worse for the citizens of the United States.

This is disastrous for democracy, for the nation, for the Democratic party, for progressives, and for virtually everyone except the healthcare industry. I am glad that I was able to get out of the United States and into a country where reasonably-priced healthcare is available (Uruguay) before this shit-storm hit the fan. The man who campaigned on a platform of change – and, very specifically, on health care reform - has turned out to be more timid about this change than his rhetoric promised. He has let the political hacks persuade him to retain the status quo, to not upset the apple cart too much, to take bribes from the pharmaceutical industry to ensure that his campaign coffers will be full. He has acquiesced to the demands of the noisy, violent, and misguided right, which is beyond disappointing. While I believe that Barack Obama is in no way fascist, I do believe that by allowing this health care reform “debate” to be guided by the industry lobbyists and their reverberating echo chamber on the right, who do not see the connection between individuals' access to health care and the health of the nation, itself, by failing to show leadership and direction on this, one of the most important issues that he campaigned on, Mr. Obama is allowing insipid fascism to sneak into his presidency and infect everyone that it touches more severely than the swine flu virus ever could.

Looking back again at History's lessons, let us remember that both Italian fascism and German Aryan fascism grew out of a desire to find a centrist, “Third Way” that would bring all segments of society together as one in service of a stronger, more unified, more pure, more directed, and supposedly more superior nation. Both of these fascist movements originally portended to represent this centrist middle way between the conservative, wealthy old guard who sought to maintain their positions of exclusive power, and the organizations of low-class laborers who were demanding more opportunities to participate in their own governance, the great promise of a new type of government called “democracy.” Fascism grew out of the desire to quell divisive polarizations, and the draw of this centralizing idea around the strength of the unified nation makes the present day struggle between the left and the right and the desire of this president to draw them both together, however that can be achieved, concerning to behold from this historic perspective. For what was accepted as the “middle ground” was, in truth, quite a bit further to the right than what was publicly admitted by the fascists who needed the support of the masses, the workers, at the same time that they much more discretely sought the wealth of the elite. It is this behind-the-scenes connection with sources of wealth, while purporting to be working in the interests of the general population, that is of greatest concern to me, and it defines the connection between Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism that I have been exploring in these essays.

The key here is to determine what fascism really is, and to not make false accusations. President Obama is not a fascist, as he has been accused of being by elements on the right. Socialism is not the same thing as fascism. And Obama is nowhere near being a socialist, anyway, having, for example, rejected offhand the single-payer option and accepted those pharmaceutical industry bribes. It is, frankly, ridiculous to even insinuate that a single-payer health insurance plan is somehow tyrannical socialist fascism. What it is is the government using its massive size to drive down the cost of health care, a notion that is actually highly capitalistic. What we have right now is actually more tyrannical and anti-capitalistic, where insurance companies interfere with the real supply-and-demand equations and create an inefficient, bloated, and politically protected system that costs the consumer more than what the services and products are actually worth, considering that the whole rest of the world pays less for their healthcare needs than the citizens of the United States are forced to pay. Just look at the financial disclosures of these companies – they are up there with the oil companies in percentages of pure profit that they are raking in as more and more U.S. citizens fall behinderer and behinderer.

If government officials insist on listening only to the health industry lobbyists, with their campaign contributions and exclusive party favors in hand, who have been infecting the “national discussion” about health care reform with self-serving vitriol that plays upon the emotions of people who are easily led astray by media personalities who gleefully revel in the effects that their enormous, gaseous egos have upon the single-minded and ill-informed, well, then that is what is fascist in this equation: the secretive collusion of business interests with government, along with their emotionally-laden, propaganda, dispersed by their allies in the media posing as independent agents, preaching uber-nationalism and phaux-populism and laying false blame for the nation's financial problems upon illegal aliens and big-government teat-suckers and hippie-dippie, love-in lovin', peace-nickety, morally-deprived, long-haired, dirty, Air America-listening, socialistical, untrustworthy intellectualistic, community-organizing “America”-haters...

To sum up, dear citizens of the United States of America: You are foaming at the mouth, and your engine is smoking, and in every sense of the phrase imaginable, it looks like you've blown a seal!

Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: How Fear and Laziness Lead To A Headache-Inducing Web of Conspiracies

In my essay titled, Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: Lessons from History, I began by decrying the polarization in the United States with the view that it is extremism on the religious, economic, and political right that is causing division, while the ideology of the progressive left works toward freedom, democracy, and respect. However, I did not elaborate on this introductory point, only returning to it at the end of the essay, where I addressed Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism. Rather, I went on to express dismay about the New World Order conspiracy theory, how it diverts attention from the real culprits of greed and repression, and then I launched into my exploration of what a failed democracy might be, looking into several terms in their historical usages, and thus arriving at “fascism,” to embark on a more detailed study of its complicated nature. After showing how fascism can creep insidiously into democracy when democratic principles are not adhered to, I summed up my conclusions about what constitutes fascism:

“The tendency toward totalitarianism, militarism, fundamentalism, populism, in conjunction with the economic-political policy of corporate collusion with top members of the state, the perpetuation of the idea that the workers and middle class must depend on those same corporate leaders as the best path between the extremes of oligarchy and socialism, the deceitful way that popular support is gathered, and the opportunistic method of utilizing crises to gain inexorable power and control – all of this describes what fascism is.”

That essay was written back in the fall of 2008. Now, there is a new president, a man who I consider to be an honest broker, a progressive, a natural-born leader with amazing skills of communication, intellect, and patient practicality. He is a relatively dark-skinned man with African ancestry, but not simply a black man, rather, a man of mixed race, which, to me, is a beautiful realization of the connective principle, a representation of complexity, and a hopeful symbol of real, peaceful, progressive change. During the election, he promised government transparency and inclusiveness. He said he wanted to make government work for everybody. He moved people in a way that no politician in recent memory had. Perhaps I am now wrong to stave off the cynicism that has caused so many in the United States to give up all hope for real change because they cannot believe that such a man as I have described could actually exist, that his presidential campaign rhetoric had been politics as usual, and that the “change” that he spoke of was a hollow promise, a ruse. While many of his initial supporters on the left have already become disillusioned, there are all of the people who opposed his candidacy in the first place, who do not trust him, who even fear him, either because they are ideologically opposed to progressive ideals themselves, or because they believe in the conspiracy that Barack Obama is an agent of the dark forces that rule the workings of the world from behind their secretive curtain, that he is actually a Secret Militant Muslim, CIA-sponsored, America-hating, Tyrannical Fascist, or some combination thereof.

So, in this essay, I intend to go back through those different characteristics, which, as I explained in the previous essay, do not each on their own indicate fascism, but which do tend to be expressed in some degree or other in fascism, to take a close look at how Barack Obama is not a fascist, and then to examine how this conspiracy theory, combined with the politics of the United States' democratic system, has brought its society to this level of insanity.

Let me begin with populism, since it is this characteristic that those who see fascism in the face of President Obama seem very concerned about. Yes, Barack Obama was swept into office by what might legitimately be called a massive wave of populist support. This wave was even more populist, in the sense of a grassroots groundswell, than any other popular support for a candidate in recent memory, because Barack Obama overwhelmed the Democratic Machinery itself, defeating seven other candidates and the heir apparent, herself, moving literally from the fringes to the center of attention, with historic amounts of small donations at the beginning. This presidential campaign was a particularly heady one, after eight years of Republican stewardship of a nation that was plunging into the abyss of economic uncertainly. The stakes were high, and people actually cared, getting involved within their communities and showing up by the tens of thousands to hear a man speak who actually made sense to them and gave them hope. All of this was, indeed, frightening to his political opponents, and so they did their best to paint the scene as a mob-mentality, his enthusiasts as blind lemmings, his campaign's stage-craft as nefarious, dangerous, cult-of-personality-building propaganda. Well, duh – it was an emotionally-charged national political campaign, brilliantly run, headed up by a man who actually HAS a magnetic personality and is able to communicate eloquently, sound sincere, look good, and appear presidential, all qualities that are sorely lacking in most of our politicians. The whole point of what has long been referred to as “political pageantry,” since well before Mr. Obama and his team came along, is to get the supporters riled up and active. As far as mindlessness and a mob-mentality is concerned, I never witnessed any unruly behavior or heard any sloganeering or hateful rhetoric at his gatherings, nothing as inane as the bizarre “Drill, baby, drill!” that the Republicans were mindlessly chanting at their convention, due to a lack of any other issue that excited them. As the Ayn Randers like to point out, envy is one of the deadly sins, and first the Clnton campaign, then the Republican Party were as green as Kermit the Frog when they saw the amazing power that Barack Obama had over people. Populism, in the simple sense of a popular majority, is precisely how United States presidents get elected, when they are not being appointed by the Supreme Court. And just because a candidate is more popular than, say, the Beatles, does not mean that there is something frightening afoot. It simply means that more people than ever are getting involved in the democratic process, and that somebody actually shows real leadership abilities.

Militarism – Candidate Obama had to present himself as tough and capable enough to be the Commander In Chief of the world's most powerful military. It is a job requirement of any president of the United States of America. I would characterize the culture in the United States as being pretty militant in general, and Obama had to appeal to this character to get elected. But one of his major campaign points was the pulling out of the United States military from Iraq, because we had no business being there, and to instead re-focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan. The reality is that that is an even bigger quagmire than Iraq, and in my opinion, we do not really have any business being there, either, but the Democrats cannot afford to be peaceniks when it comes to national presidential elections. Other than that, President Obama has very clearly put an emphasis on the State Department and the Special Envoys to help negotiate peace in both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in Pakistan, deliberately rejecting the belligerent, militaristic foreign policy stance of his predecessor. Additionally, he has been trying to clear up the mess that the military confinements of the men at Guantanamo Bay present to the United States, returning the rule of law where the military tribunal system had been failing miserably. And as to the United States themselves, there has been no sign of any military crackdown on anyone, no rise in police brutality, nothing – not even domestic spying – that would indicate the usual signs of brutal fascism. It is, in fact, citizens who are ideologically opposed to everything about President Barack Hussein Obama who are becoming militant in the United States at this time, not the President nor any of his supporters.

Fundamentalism – In my previous essay, I tied the willingness to use violence toward some “higher cause” with fundamentalism, and again, the opponents of President Obama are the ones showing themselves to be fundamentalists, not the president. I, myself, am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal progressive, and I consider Barack Obama to be a practical progressive. However, he has, from the moment he was elected, made a concerted effort to reach out, to talk to everyone, to negotiate and deliberate, to bend toward whoever is willing to constructively discuss issues with him, to be inclusive. This, to the chagrin of us lefties, at times. But he said, “I will be your president, too.” to the entire nation, and that is certainly far from the exclusive attitude that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had taken, and far from the usual politics on Capital Hill. Although the right is throwing a tizzy fit about his emergency spending in light of the unprecedented economic crisis the country is facing, the left is also angry that he has not done more to reign in the financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars (during the still-Bush Administration, mind you). Another example of his straying from the liberal game plan was his turnaround on his promise of transparency, where he decided that he should keep the most recent prisoner abuse pictures secret, as well as deciding with the CIA on some other issues that angered us liberals. That is not fundamentalism. That is practicalism, and I give him credit for that, even though I disagree with him. If anything, his fundamental issue is to make the government work properly again, more democratically, as well as more efficiently, and there is really no fundamentalism present, in the sense that I described it, as reductionist ideology riddled with contradiction, in anything that Mr. Obama has said or done.

In the health care reform debate, the President is most definitely not the fundamentalist. The reform was one of his election mandates, and it must be done. The health care system in the United States is an absurdity. Access to health care is a human right, not something to make maximum profits off of. Lack of health care in the United States is weighing the nation's productivity, as well as its spirit, down. It is one of the founding principles in the United States Constitution, the part about, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” That means that it is one of the government's jobs to promote the well being of the people of this nation. The fact that it is the insurance companies, the for-profit health centers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that are behind the “grassroots” protests, where uninformed people are screaming and shouting and threatening violence because they are being told that this is some kind of government tyranny, speaks for itself. (Look it up – politifact.com, snopes.com, factcheck.org.) The President has not said anything like, “You're either with us or against us.” He has continually said that he invites constructive conversation, yet all he gets in return is yelling and screaming and threats with guns.

Totalitarianism – Observers have pointed to the unusually large number of “czars” that President Obama has appointed to help him sort out the mess that George W. Bush left him as a sign that he has made a power grab that amounts to totalitarianism. To those who distrust him, I concede that this looks scary. However, as with the fears about his mob-mentality following, one need only observe actual reality to see that, at least so far, nothing nefarious has happened. These so-called “czars” made a cleaver talking point for his political opponents, namely Senator McCain, the man who doesn't know how many houses he owns, so he must know something about delegating authority, and House Minority Whip, Eric Cantor, who is desperate to keep his name in the news cycles as a future Republican presidential contender. The reality is that they are presidential aids that have been appointed to keep particular focus on specific issues, as a practical way for the President to efficiently deal with many different issues at once. None of the czars have done anything crazy, other than to try to solve complicated problems. So the man can multitask – not scary, not totalitarian, at least not so far.

A real totalitarian state subordinates all of its individual parts to the service of the state. The cult-like leaders that usually represent totalitarian states are god-like embodiments of that state. Everything is about the state, itself, which demands unquestioning loyalty to itself and its leader. That is the face of totalitarianism, and I do not see any of that in the Barack Obama presidency. No-one is being silenced. No-one is being forced to submit to the demands of the state. The “death panels” that Sarah Palin thinks are a part of the government health insurance package are a myth, a scare tactic that anyone who seeks real information can see to be the exaggerations that they are. Everyone has continued to live their life just as they were before he was elected, well, as long as they have not lost their job or their health care or their bank accounts, which has by no means been a totalitarian plot to ruin everyone's wonderful Bush-era sunny days. There has been a certain fascination with Barack Obama and his family, which some might see as a cult following, but I do not see it as any more than the media's obsession with Brittany Spears or Micheal Jackson or Governor Sanford's love life.

None of these overt characteristics that may be present in a fascist state actually stands up to any close examination of the Barack Obama presidency, particularly the two possible characteristics that have been singled out and exaggerated by his political opponents that say that he is fascist. However, there are the more complicated, more covert factors to consider. First is the set of characteristics that are actually areas of some concern to me, because they are more systematic problems as well as holdovers from the previous administration, having to do with political-economic policies that tie business interests with agents of the government in a way that undermines democracy itself. Corporate collusion with government officials, the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman school of thought about trusting the business elites to lead to the highest form of freedom, and the opportunistic use of crises to grab more wealth and power all fit into the conversation about what happened with the financial institution bailout that occurred just at the end of Bush's days, and then with President Elect Obama's earliest decisions about who would lead his all-important economic team. It was the bailout, with its total lack of oversight over all that money being doled out to the irresponsibly greedy financiers by other financiers, that was so infuriating, and which lead me to write about insidious fascism sneaking into our beautiful democracy in the first place, not any spectre of a populist candidate that made me think of Hitler or Mussolini speaking of the need for purity and cleansing of the nation in front of giant crowds. Then came the Obama economic adviser decisions, which caused me to question my faith in the man, as so many others were loosing theirs or pointing to that action as a distinctive lack of any promised “change” whatsoever. In order to maintain continuity, the reasoning went, Mr. Obama chose men from Goldman Sachs and the likes, the same group of people that had created the whole mess in the first place and then cleaned up to their own outrageous advantage. It seemed that the president-elect was doing exactly what the liberal left was afraid of, which was being corrupted by the same powerful business interests that had helped to get him elected – not much of a change at all. Those seeds of fascism do exist, and they must be watched closely, to see if they sprout, or to see if they will get weeded out by this president if they do sprout.

The final issue is one of deception. This is difficult, because it might lead to my having to face the fact that I have been deceived. If this is so, then either Barack Hussein Obama was simply toying with my heart, whispering sweet nothings in my ear, buying me chocolates and flowers, all as a ruse to get himself, well, we all know where that all leads. No-one likes to have their heart broken, thinking there is love when it was really just lust, or greed, or self-aggrandizement. Yet, we have to continue to try...

A much worse-case scenario is that the Obama presidency is not just a matter of one man's political ambitions, but rather, a conspiracy by the darkest of figures, who worked in the shadows to set Barack Obama up with a fake birth certificate, funneled money from his “rich father in Africa,” placed him in the nation's most prestigious law school, put him to work for the CIA through the guise of being an editor at Business International Corporation, got William Ayers to ghostwrite his fake biography, had him live in a small apartment in Chicago and pretend to be a “community activist,” moved him through the corrupt Illinois political process, and then orchestrated his presidential campaign, all in order to place him as their puppet in the White House in order to continue to amass even more power, to enslave the world's population to death, destruction, and indentured servitude from behind their evil curtain of already omnipotent hidden power.

Sadly, I am not making this conspiracy stuff up. Sadly, people fall prey to this kind of complicated conspiracy because they fear what they do not understand, they sense that, somehow, there have been lies and manipulations that were hidden by secrecy, and then the perpetrators of the conspiracy are able to convince them that any “information” that comes from outside the circle of conspirators themselves is suspect, and that it is they who shed light in the dark corners of the world. It was the secrecy itself that lead to the mistrust in the first place, the kind of secrecy that the Bush Administration was so fond of, but which goes well beyond that, with the secret workings of the CIA and other black operations by the United States government to destabilize democratic governments that have been considered to be dangerous to the economic prosperity of the United States throughout the world. In fact, an archive of classified documents from the Nixon Administration has just come to light, about the abhorrent behavior of United States government operatives in South America. The truth that these secret operations exist should appall all citizens of this nation that holds itself so proudly to be the beacon of Freedom and Democracy to the world, and now would be a good time to call for an end to the web of operators that work in the shadows of the world, even within the United States, one must assume, affecting political outcomes of democratic elections and spreading rumors and lies, and even actively removing leaders, such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, or Salvador Allende of Chile, or stopping the left-wing “Frente Amplio,” which, ironically, is now in power in Uruguay, in order that the people of the United States may have more gasoline to guzzle and more sugar to consume and cheaper goods, produced by laborers whose lives have been kept miserable so that we could live more comfortably.

Pardon my anger. It is this secrecy, along with the sheer hypocrisy, that leads to the anger and the distrust. But the anger and distrust must be directed at the proper culprits. To simply throw anger and distrust around, willy-nilly, eventually consumes the individual. Finding the proper target can be extremely difficult and frustrating, especially when the anger and distrust are being manipulated for some ulterior purpose. But being lazy or giving in to the frustration in the search for a culprit is the easy way out. And all of this is compounded by the state of the culture in the United States today, for as life grows more and more complicated, with new technology, the world wide web of infinite imagery and information and entertainment, new and more complex understandings the universe, and simply more and more people, it seems that the basic response to all of this complexity is to compartmentalize and to reduce and to simplify in order to try to make some sense out of it all. Sound bites, text messaging, and Twitter all exemplify this tendency to abbreviate and reduce, and it leads to a sort of mental laziness, an unwillingness to try to understand the details and the complexity of the world. So rumors and misinformation spread more quickly than ever before, fed off of this reductive tendency, and spurred on by the gullibility inherent in the notion that, because you perceive that you have been lied to and deceived by “them,” you can therefore only trust “us.”

Barack Hussein Obama is a figure upon whom the conspiratorial lies and misperceptions are grafting at lightening speed. The conspiracy theory that I had been so concerned about in my first essay was the 9/11 conspiracy, which had expanded into the idea that the elections didn't matter, because the powers that be were going to manipulate everything to their own benefit. They supposedly have the awesome power to affect everything, from the government policymakers, to the votes that disappeared into the Diebold voting machines, to the whole charade of Sarah Palin having been put forth, all parts of their evil plan. And now that Barack Obama emerged as the winner, he is assumedly their agent of choice. Now, I distrust the voting machines, because there is no way to verify the votes. However, to take my distrust of the Diebold machines, and place it in the hands of an international cabal of powerful puppet masters lets the Republican operatives, who have been in charge of the voting system and completely capable of stealing votes all on their own, off the hook. But the perception that the election was illegitimate, bizarrely, not only fits the narrative of the One World Order conspirators, but the same rumors about villainous manipulations of the whole political process have been swallowed line, hook, and sinker by Barack Obama's political opponents, who are gullible to the tale because they neither like nor trust this man who has darker colored skin, international family connections, and ideas that are admittedly vaguely socialist, but which are being conflated with fascism for purely political gain.

The whole thing is beginning to make my head spin. That Hitler used conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers and others whose international ties amongst the Jewish diaspora were supposed to have caused them to have undermined the Germans during and after the Great War, in order to enslave the German workers, and now, we have conspiracy theories about international bankers who have been undermining the United States so that their evil enslavement can be exacted, wherein the belief is that the international conspirators are also the fascists, is headache-inducing to think about, at the very least. Where does the irony end – and where oh where is my bottle of aspirin? People have been whipped into a frenzy over government involvement in lowering the price of health insurance as a form of government tyranny, yet they didn't mind the spying, infiltration of organizations trying to counter repression and injustice, and deregulation of the banking and mortgage industries that looted everyone's pensions and 401K plans. And a smart guy, from a single-parent home, who made his way through the world with his brains and his good looks, who has some refreshingly different ideas about how government can function, well, he just isn't to be trusted... Isn't innovation and being able to rise up to higher levels of society supposed to be, uh, the “American Dream?” The real conspiracy is that the “American Dream” is a nightmare, not because of any international overloards maliciously manipulating everything from above, nor because envious socialists want to get their hands on everything in sight, but because of plain old greed and a thought system that praises selfishness, and the most greedy and selfish will play on the fears and ignorance of those who do not bother to see the world as complex, yet knowable, if they would only continue to seek answers from many different sources and viewpoints.