Letter To My Daughter

“All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures.” Chris Hedges, Truthdig

In a few weeks you will turn eighteen. You will be eligible to vote, a right that women in this country struggled to obtain for three quarters of a century. Fearless women. Women armed with iron will and determination. Resolute women. You should never forget -- or take for granted -- the blood, sweat and tears that made it possible for you to exercise the franchise. Civil rights in this country are never given -- they have to be won -- and then protected, guarded, with unrelenting vigilance. 

Your education in our local public schools didn’t prepare you to be an engaged citizen, and our degraded media landscape, 95% of it controlled by corporations with their own interests and agendas, which, you will learn, has little to do with your interests. Corporate media mainly serves to obscure, confuse, or distract the public. How many times in your young life have you heard me rail at the television, furious at the mindless trivia that passes for news or apoplectic at the refusal of the weather person to say the words “climate change?” Understand, my daughter, that you must pay more attention to the subjects the corporate media doesn’t cover than those it does. If you want to be informed, you must look elsewhere, to independent media where real journalists are more intent on exposing the motivations of the powerful than they are cozying up to them and repeating their talking points. Here are a few names. Amy Goodman. Jeremy Scahill. Allan Nairn. Mehdi Hasan. Patrick Cockburn. Abby Martin. Robert Fisk. 

It’s no fault of your own that you have yet to realize how limited American democracy -- and I refer here to federal and state offices more than local ones -- is, and that it is so by design. The Founding Fathers, all white, all male, many of them slave owners, placed, from the beginning, the sanctity of private property above the needs of the people. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few, had no love of popular democracy. They feared the mob, the uneducated masses whose passions might be manipulated by a demagogue or charlatan, and they created impediments to popular sovereignty. One of these constructions, the Electoral College, is why the nation and the world is saddled with the malignant fraud who currently occupies the White House. 

Polls consistently show that the majority of the American public supports some form of universal health care, secure retirement, good and affordable public education, protection of the environment, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a reduction in military spending. The problem is that what people want and what the political system is willing to deliver are two completely different things. The United States Senate is firmly in the hands of the Republican Party whose base of support is in underpopulated rural states; our state, for instance, has nearly 40 million people, but we have the same number of Senators as Wyoming and North and South Dakota whose combined populations are puny by comparison. You are destined to learn about the tyranny of the minority. This is not an accident. It’s one reason why the popular will is continually thwarted. 

As it is want to do, money has perverted our political system. There is a pathology of great wealth in America. Too few hands control too much wealth, and that wealth enables these few hands to bend the political system to their will and for their interests. This breeds more tyranny. The wealthy are largely unaccountable. Their greed is sanctioned and protected by the legislators they buy and control. 

The broad American middle class built after World War II, when Germany and Japan and most of Europe was in ashes, has been shrinking for decades. Today it’s practically shrivelled. To go into all the reasons here would make this letter too long, but let me give you a thumbnail version: the decline of manufacturing and organized labor, and the decision of the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional constituencies after electoral losses in 1968 and 1972, coupled with a conservative backlash against the 1960’s counterculture, got the ball rolling away from the middle class and toward the wealthy. Ronald Reagan convinced people that government was the source of their problems, and that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy was the magic solution. Democrats went right along. 

I have this nagging feeling that I haven’t done enough to leave you and your brother a more just world and a more promising future. I write this letter to you because I’m afraid of what’s coming, of the world you are soon to inherit. The dark forces of racism, ignorance, cruelty, brutality and bigotry are marching all over the world. Almost as deadly is the absolute denial in the corridors of power, particularly in Washington D.C., of the onrushing climate catastrophe. It borders on the criminal, but to whom can we appeal? The wealthy believe their money, power and influence will shield them from climate change, as if they inhabit an alternate biosphere. Climate change is only for the rest of us. 

The answer? I don’t know. Vote wisely, but don’t expect too much from political leaders. Cultivate a healthy suspicion and remember that all governments lie, as the great American journalist I.F. Stone famously said. Real social change rarely comes from the top -- it starts from the bottom, with people willing to demand change, like the brave women who agitated for decades until they won the right to vote. Carry that legacy into your future. 

The Heavy Stone on America's Back

“What it does mean, as we’ve seen, is that simplistic scenarios of good against evil encourage people to interpret conflict as non-negotiable.” Elaine Pagels

Independence Day. 4th of July, a hallowed day in American history, birthday of the nation that one day would refer to itself as indispensable. The white men who agitated to sever the ties with Great Britain and its King, our Founding Fathers, declared their independence and took up arms to make it so. They were the elites of the colony, property owners -- including human property -- African slaves who served as both labor and capital. Despite the high-blown rhetoric about liberty, the founders would fight tooth and nail for decades to maintain a lucrative trade in African people, buying and selling, exploiting their labor to raise tobacco and cotton, to drain swamps and clear forests, build cities. 

The American myth is messy, laced with inconvenient truths. George Washington was a land speculator and a slave owner; Thomas Jefferson fathered children with a slave woman; Abraham Lincoln believed that Africans should be repatriated to Africa; J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI hounded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Race has always been the heavy stone on America’s back; white supremacy has been a feature of America since the very beginning, though we are indoctrinated to believe otherwise. 

Until Trump rode the escalator down from his lair and declared that he, and he alone, had solutions to all the problems and weaknesses caused by his predecessor, the first black president, Barack Obama, white supremacy occupied the fringes and moved in and out of the shadows. Trump tossed the reliable dog whistle aside in favor of a megaphone, and made clear whose side he was on, the aggrieved white working class preyed upon, or ignored by, the black president and his liberal followers. Brown and black people got all the advantages, free food, housing, medical care, all sorts of bounty, while poor whites suffered in silence, lost their grip on the social ladder. Trump’s megaphone was loud, insistent, he knew where to lay the blame and on who.

Myths are powerful. Forcefully repeated lies assume the outline of truth. A few thousand unarmed Central American migrants becomes an invasion, an immigration problem becomes a full-blown border crisis. Our flag waves, God Bless America is sung, and we assume that we are what we have been taught, a shining democracy, envy of the entire world, a force for all that is decent and good and just and righteous. 

Army tanks rumbling through Washington D.C. are the perfect symbol of America at this moment, when the American grip on the planet is slipping, when the vestiges of democracy are faltering, when the benevolent face of America is exposed for what it is, a mask, a disguise. When Uncle Sam extends his hand it is covered in blood. Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Yemen. Uncle Sam’s bloody hand reaches for the throat of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden. Uncle Sam’s bloody hands tear an infant from his terrified mother. Uncle Sam snarls, threatens, blusters, bullies. Once Uncle Sam declared War on Poverty, now he wages war on the poor, he puts children in cages, holds prisoners indefinitely, punishes the victims. 

Myths die hard, but they do die.

Star Spangled Nightmare

It’s the 4th of July and part of me feels compelled to write something high-minded about America. Land of the free, home of the brave, 1776, beacon of liberty -- all that stuff. Yes, take the exalted path and pen something in praise of the birth of a free nation, steeped in the principles of the Enlightenment. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock, a few of the fabled founding fathers that Michelle Bachmann always refers to in her speeches to Tea Party faithful – as if to say: if we only return to the time-tested values of our white fathers, all will again be well.

Today the star spangled banner will play from thousands of loud speakers, Gob Bless America will be sung in ballparks and arenas, hot dogs will hiss on BBQ grills, bands will march…

Damn it! Why is a vision of a leering George W. Bush slipping across my mind? Why is Dick Cheney sinking his teeth into Jefferson’s neck? Why is that skinny bitch Ann Coulter flashing her insipid tits at John Adams? Am I losing my mind? Am I having a waking nightmare? Is this what psychosis feels like when it finally takes hold?

Wow! Where did that come from? It was like 2003 all over again, when Dick and W ran roughshod over the Constitution and lied through their teeth about the need for America to invade and occupy Iraq. But it’s better now, right, and if the Founding Fathers are gazing down on this fruited plain, surely they are smiling?

OK, maybe not. Washington is teary-eyed and Jefferson is livid with rage, John Adams can’t believe what has become of America, and John Hancock simply mutters, “Bastards, bastards, bastards” over and over. The venerable Founders look at the current Congress, aghast that a single great leader cannot be found beneath the dome. Instead they see a house filled with clowns, idiots, shysters, fools, pederasts, homophobes, morons, perverts and criminals, all of them grubbing for money from corporate lobbyists and shilling for wealthy donors. Of the two political parties, one is in thrall to a failed ideology and the other is craven and intellectually bankrupt. Meanwhile, the president is a serial coward who repeatedly raises the white flag and flees the battlefield before the first shot is fired.

And the people, the good, decent American people that Mitt Romney and Bachmann and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are always droning on about, how are they getting on? Not so well. Many are running scared in the face of a bewildering economy that serves the few on the backs of the many, swimming in debt or waiting to lose their homes to the maw of a pitiless foreclosure machine. The cost of living rises but decent jobs at living wages are harder to find than a moderate Republican, and the playing field that once made sense and held promise is now tilted against wage earners.

Washington, the military hero, cannot fathom how easily the nation commits its sons and daughters to murky wars in distant lands, and how little sacrifice is asked from the people, and how these wars go on without end, long after the rational for them expires. The military generals cow the politicians and in turn the politicians frighten the population with predictions of dire consequences should our soldiers come home before the mission is complete. The huge footprint left by the American military colossus on the globe – particularly in places where oil is found -- tells Washington that something besides national security is in play…

Whoa, man, this is getting heavy. Don’t be such a downer. What about fireworks and cold beer, juicy hamburgers, and American flags snapping in the breeze? Don’t stress about the economy, distant wars, political gridlock or the fact that the FBI and the NSA spy on us. Forget all that dark stuff. Crack a cold Budweiser and stick your head in the sand. Now you’re behaving like a patriotic American.