Everyone agrees he’s a bad guy. Paul Wolfowitz in the Wall Street Journal lists dozens of good reasons why the U.S, should intervene to unseat this nut case dictator. What he doesn’t say is why he and his neo-con cronies didn’t do the job themselves while they held power and were busy invading other Islamic countries. Instead, Dubya and company – including the Wolfman – removed the U.S. sanctions against Ghada… Kad…. Libya.

Thanks, Wolfie. You can go back under your rock now, along with Scooter and Rummy.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says President Obama is not likely to make any pronouncements on Libya. No hope, no change. Reagan bombed Moammar’s compound in 1986, but that only killed a bunch of other people and didn’t really shake any sense into Guh-Daffy.

It’s time to offer the Libyan strongman an honorable option, a way out that saves face for him, saves the lives of his countrymen and saves the U.S. what it cares about most: money. Let’s invite Guh-Daffy to enjoy a safe life of exile – along with any other former U.S.-supported tyrants of the Middle East – like Hosni Mubarak, Abdullah of Jordan or any of the rest.

We could even construct a Middle Eastern theme park for them, in Texas, where they could continue to rule over simulacra of their former domains and be visited by dignitaries like ex-president George W. Bush, who could pretend he was traveling to foreign lands again, instead of being confined to the USA under threat of indictment abroad for human rights violations. They could even have some oil wells. Mubarak could still reign over “Little Egypt” and Kah-Daffy could pretend to resist regular U.S. Marine invasions of “the shores of Tripoli,” the way pirates fight at certain hours outside Treasure Island in Las Vegas.

While we’re at it, we could relocate Israel – the entire country and population – to the Texas panhandle. We could reconstruct the Holy Land there, fly it piece by piece from its current location like Hearst did with San Simeon. Expensive, yes, but cheaper in the long run. Then we could bomb the original into dust to prevent the Israelis from being tempted to return “home.”

Boy, would that solve a lot of heartbreak. It would drop the level of tension dramatically in the Middle East and raise the I.Q. of the Lone Star state by quanta. It’s a win-win.

You think these plans are grotesque and immoral? Current U.S. foreign policy in the region is much much worse. Future visitors to such a Middle Eastern theme park would find it as incredible as the Creation Museum, only with less attractive, much deadlier, dinosaurs.

Bush recently canceled his planned February 12 talk to a Swiss group after international organizations pressured the Swiss government to detain Bush on charges of torture and other human rights violations. Last year Swiss authorities refused a request by U.S. officials to send Roman Polanski back to California to face decades-old rape charges.

Vigilantes on both sides of the Atlantic have been left frustrated by this stalemate.

“Why should criminals be allowed to go free simply by avoiding the jurisdictions where they committed their crimes?” wondered Bernard Schittkopf, legal counsel for many ex-Nazis brought back from foreign hidey-holes to face justice in Israel or The Hague.

Bush told an interviewer last week that he was through with politics. “Hell, after invading two countries, toppling a dictator, breaking new ground in wiretapping and renditions and detentions without charges, not to mention having a Supreme Court decision named after you, what more is there to do?” Critics complain that his retirement came a dozen years too late.

Some Republican lawmakers have objected to the secret U.S.-Swiss talks, claiming the torture of the Bush-Cheney years was justified to fight terrorism and that anyway there really is no such thing as rape.

“None of this is actually anyone’s fault,” said Georgia Assemblyman Clarence Thomas, who is no relation to the U.S. Supreme Court justice of the same name. “Stuff happens.”

We supported Saddam Hussein for many years, until he crossed us. We support the murderous Colombian government because they protect Chiquita Brands and Coca Cola and Occidental Petroleum. Many such private U.S. corporations are themselves human rights abusers outside their home country, with no fear of reprisal from governments, domestic or foreign. We bribe repressive Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt to make nice with Israel and repress their own dissidents. And, of course, we support the oppressive Israeli regime itself, which seems to be taking its revenge for the Holocaust of World War Two by re-inflicting it on the Palestinians.

The U.S. styles itself a beacon of liberty but has turned its back on the democratic aspirations of human beings in every region of this planet. We want to keep the world safe, not for democracy, but for U.S. corporate profit. Most Americans, and American mass media, are in denial about our muscular foreign policy, though it has remained consistent at least since the U.S.-Mexican War of the 1840s. Two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Butler, laid out U.S. corporate-military strategy succinctly in his classic: War is a Racket.

Mr. Hamid’s article asks: “Could the U.S. find itself on the wrong side of history?” With all due respect, the U.S. has been proudly marching up and down the wrong side of history since World War Two. The U.S. military triumph in that conflict proved a Pyrrhic victory. The United States became a world power and adopted a paranoid, proprietary approach to the planet, a tragedy that continues to haunt us. We developed Frankenstein security agencies and mega-weapons: the CIA, the NSA, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb and on and on.

Our official paranoia conjured The Communist Menace as a monolithic bogeyman to justify our own interventions on behalf of capitalism worldwide. Tim Weiner’s account of the CIA’s creation and operation in its earliest decades – Legacy of Ashes – details how the early failures of the agency begot ever larger catastrophes as their secret budgets mushroomed. We began to overthrow democratically elected leaders (starting in Iran and Guatemala) and replace them with authoritarian rulers amenable to bribery, all in the name of national security and regional stability. But the world was neither more stable nor more secure.

We lost the Cold War too because the process of waging it demanded a cynicism that undermined our American ideals more effectively than any Soviet propaganda ever could. The simplistic Manichean sensibility we developed in the Cold War era – of East vs. West, Us vs. Them – continued after the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own mismanagement. It continues today.

Remember the Peace Dividend? That was supposed to be the glorious redirection of our military expenditures to domestic and humanitarian projects after the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down. We could at last beat our swords into plowshares and rebuild our schools and roads and medical system. Surprise! There was no dividend because peace was a non-starter. The U.S. government could not imagine how to function in a world without enemies.

We still propped up useful despots. George H.W. Bush told Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator who imposed martial law and jailed or killed his political opponents: “We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process…” When Bush the younger declared that the 9/11 suicide pilots “hate us for our freedoms,” perhaps it was the Marcos-Mubarak brand of freedom he inadvertently meant. We supplied weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, but like all good things, it came to an end.

The United States needed a post-Cold War demonic other to justify metastasizing Pentagon budgets and military-industrial bloat. U.S. policy makers declared a war on drugs, but it proved a disappointing stop gap. Drugs were everywhere and nowhere. The more tons of drugs the U.S. interdicted and the more smugglers they busted, the more drugs and smugglers arose to take their place. Every victory showcased more defeat.

The War on Terror – featuring Radical Islam, Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden and a shadowy cast of millions – proved a godsend for the megadeath war machine the U.S. government has become, justifying Strangelovian expenditures on armaments and foreign bases, along with multiple invasions of “strategic” countries. But the U.S. tendency to support repressive regimes only works if those regimes play ball. We can’t invade them all. Can we?

Popular Democracy – once the acknowledged U.S. brand – now seems to threaten the American political establishment, at home and abroad. Right-wing demagogues and the corporate political stooges in Congress and the Supreme Court have thus far kept the locals in line by mis-directing popular anger, invoking Jesus and stoking nativist fears of foreigners and infidels, including the president. But Obama wants to show Wall Street he’s a pussycat, not a tiger: Let’s play. I won’t hurt you! The Mad Hatter runs the Tea Party but it doesn’t matter that it makes no sense, only that the party continues, with Glen Beck as the White Rabbit (o my o my) and Rupert Murdoch as March Hare. One lump or two?

Obama’s Chicago pastor, the Reverand Jeremiah Wright, drew self-righteous media scorn in 2008 when he described the September 11 attacks as payback for U.S. terrorism and said “American’s chickens are coming home to roost.” He was merely stating the obvious, but America failed to learn from that event or to do any soul-searching. The Bush-Cheney junta simply used those attacks to justify more waves of violence which have never ended.

American’s chickens will continue coming home to roost, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East and Latin America. Popular uprisings are not an Islamic plot against The Free World – wherever that may be now – but simply a logical consequence of denying people their basic human rights and hoping they’ll be too intimidated to object. But it is only the majority of Americans who appear intimidated.

We the people have outsourced our own justifiable political outrage and our capacity to protest wrongs. Do we figure others – in say, Egypt and Tunisia – can do it more cheaply that we can? Maybe this time the revolution will be televised and we can just sit back, relax with our favorite beverage and watch. No one does passivity better than we do. Ask any dittohead. And anyone who tells you any different is a liar or a foreigner or probably both.

So, uh, who we cheering for again? And… who’s cheering for us?

Whites of European ancestry professing heterosexual Christianity have run the show in the USA since before the country’s independence. They are now feeling surrounded and outnumbered as the United States more accurately reflects the proportional population of the planet. The paranoia of the powerful old guard goads them to tweak the Constitution: “Freedom of religion? Great – except for Islam. Freedom of speech? Certainly – as long as it doesn’t affront our majoritarian values. A presumption of innocence? Everyone’s entitled to that except terrorists of course, whom it’s okay to torture and lock up indefinitely.”

Members of the straight, white majority feel themselves slipping into minority status in our multi-cultural society. Their nativist rage and increasingly vocal intolerance reflects their fear of losing a power based less on achievement than on skin color and inherited privilege. They have taken to hiding behind hate speech and ever-higher walls of gated communities. While such fears may be understandable, they are not acceptable.

If our society is to meet the many daunting challenges ahead of us, it’s counter-productive to re-fight battles for racial and religious and cultural tolerance that we won more than two hundred years ago. We can not afford to be squabbling over who is “more American” as the world burns. We have to move on.

Several years ago I published a book tracing the profound influence of Texas values on U.S. political policies of the past two hundred years. The creation myth of Texas warrior culture is the battle of the Alamo in 1836. The Alamo myth – still taught in Texas public schools – conjures a small band of 180-odd freedom fighters battling for independence against a much larger Mexican force bent on suppressing their rights.

But it was a borrowed revolution. The only native Texans in the Alamo were those of Mexican descent. Whites who died there – of Scots-Irish ancestry – came from Tennessee, South Carolina and elsewhere. Driven by violent race hatred, these men killed Native Americans with impunity and enslaved Blacks, before rising against the Mexican authorities largely because they despised their skin color, language and religion. By dying in the Alamo their martyrdom ignited racist outrage and a thirst for vengeance that remains unslaked almost two hundred years later.

The astonishing rate of execution in Texas – which accounts for more than a third of all U.S. executions – is only one vestige of the retributive “take no prisoners” Alamo attitude. Minorities are disproportionately represented on death row in Texas, as they are in the general prison population nationwide. Texas – like many candidates for public office in the 2010 elections – makes a show of circling the wagons to keep “them” (outsiders) at bay.

Such primitive behavior is not logical. But logic is not the point. When right-wing extremists opine that Barack Obama holds a “Kenyan, anti-colonial world view” it sounds nonsensical. It’s a code phrase meant to signify that Obama is not one of “us” (right-thinking traditional Americans, white and Christian). The right has tried to make the election about the non-Caucasian, perhaps socialistic, Islamic sympathizer, Barack Obama. He represents many nativist fears of change. His attempts to conciliate his enemies cannot succeed because their hatred of him is not logical, or based on any policies. It is visceral and beyond rational discourse.

Rush Limbaugh has said of the president, “I hope he fails.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “Our goal must be to make Obama a one-term president.” Not a single positive policy suggestion sullies the agenda of Obama’s enemies. All they want, the country’s welfare be damned, is to wrest control of the agenda for their corporate masters.

The very hope Obama’s election offered the rest of the world, that the United States might rejoin the global community of nations for the common good, is what worries conservatives most. The problem and paradox is that the harder and dirtier Obama’s political enemies fight to exclude Obama and his ilk and maintain “purity,” the less of the republic there is to save. We must not allow the American democratic experiment to end in suicidal bigoted imperial rage. Those who would recreate the Alamo will share its fate.

Rescuers say it may be Christmas – three more months – before they can drill a hole wide enough to pull the men one by one up to the surface. Three simultaneous drilling operations are under way, attempting to rescue the miners sooner. Some of them appear emotional on camera, irritable and rebellious. When their request for wine was refused, the miners complained. Some are reportedly riding mining machinery “recklessly” in the tunnels. It’s hard to blame them.

Not long after falling rock trapped the miners in Chile, motorists heading into Beijing on a major highway from Inner Mongolia became snarled in a monster traffic jam that lasted ten days and stretched sixty miles. Truckers hauling coal from Mongolia crowd the G110 Highway because it has no coal checkpoints. So they don’t need to bribe inspectors to ignore their illegal loads. A few accidents and breakdowns helped create the longest traffic jam ever (so far). The trapped truckers had to pay roadside entrepreneurs nasty marked-up prices for their survival staples of noodles, cigarettes and amphetamines, a capitalist coup. Anyone who has ever spent a motionless hour in commuter traffic can only sympathize with the horror of a ten-day stall.

Before you shake your head and say, too bad for them, at least it’s not us… Wait. We may not be hung up in a Chilean copper mine or a Chinese traffic jam, but we’re stuck just the same in our own intractable dilemmas, like Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama claims the fifty thousand U.S. soldiers still on the ground in Iraq are “non-combat” troops. But that only proves we’re still stuck with public officials who will say anything, true or not, despite the rhetoric of “hope” and “change.” Mission accomplished again? Same mission, equally accomplished.

Every occupation of Afghanistan has failed, but the U.S. feels exempt from history. Exceptional. We’ve been there nine years already with no end in sight, Since we lack any defined goals, we have no idea what “victory” in Afghanistan might look like. So year after year we kill more Afghani civilians and sacrifice more American soldiers for… what, exactly?

We are stuck with a militaristic foreign policy. We pursue global military dominance as our tattered social safety nets fail to relieve the desperate conditions millions of our citizens must now endure. We are stuck with an unworkable capitalist model. But the tiny percentage of the ultra-wealthy who control our media and our government like it this way. They’re doing better despite the widespread suffering. To consider another economic system is Unimaginable! UnAmerican! Our dysfunctional “freedom from government” is tops in the world. No?

Nobody – rich or poor – wants to pay taxes so public services are deteriorating and disappearing. Our roads are bad. Our schools are worse. Our libraries and police departments are underfunded. Occasional acts of billionaire noblesse oblige – Zuckerberg donates to Newark! Gates pledges billions against AIDS! – make headlines and substitute for sustainable public policy planning. California spends more for prisons than for education. That’s criminal.

The State of Virginia recently executed a retarded woman, though hundreds of studies show the death penalty does not deter capital crime. On the contrary, state sanctioned murder only adds to the climate of violence in our country. But God help anyone (except He won’t!) who dares challenge the right of citizens to carry concealed assault weapons in church.

No mass rebellion is likely. We are too wired up to act. Oldies watch the CBS Evening News. Kids are plugged into Play Station. Everyone in between is attached to their Blackberries, I-phones and myriad digital doodads. Recent research shows that unless you unhook from your techno-fix sometimes you cannot process the information you’re receiving. We are too addicted to our gizmos to understand or evaluate what we know.

Even adults like to believe there must be some responsible person somewhere who can clear up traffic jams, rescue lost miners or attend in a rational way to the disappearing American middle class. But as our shrill, primitive political rhetoric demonstrates, nobody wants to be the grownup in America. Public officials and political players prefer to point fingers and call each other names than to grapple with problems in an honest, pragmatic way.

That’s much easier of course, though utterly unhelpful. Coming unglued will not help us get unstuck. If our species goes the way of the dinosaurs it will be because we failed to grow up. Christine O’Donnell may be right about evolution after all.

None of our problems is inevitable. But we show no sign of gearing up to liberate ourselves from any of them. Instead we double down, hoping to grab what we can before the whole show folds, which all but guarantees that fold it will. Our fate resembles that of the trapped Chilean miners, forced to endure a long, excruciating survey of their potential demise. Is this our grave we see before us? Except no one is coming to save us. It’s up to us. So if you feel moved to pray for those trapped miners, you might also spare a few words for the rest of us.

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The eyes of the stranger are large but he sees nothing in the town.

– African proverb

A stranger in Johannesburg immediately notices the serious security measures in place everywhere. High walls are topped with electrified razor wire. Dogs are visible or audible behind the walls. Signs warn of alarms that will bring “rapid armed response” from one of many thriving security companies. Locks and chains and gates and guards with guns are common accessories of homes and businesses. The presence of so much defensive and offensive hardware creates tension, lends a hard edge even to the best areas of the city, and prompts a question: what’s going on here?

South Africans have pondered that question at least since the late 1940s, when apartheid became the country’s official policy. Grappling with the moral and psychological dimensions of this enforced, segregated system of exploitation, Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, published in 1948, describes part of the price the “dominant race” would pay for that policy:

“We shall live from day to day and put more locks on the doors and get a fine fierce dog… and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forgo.… We shall be careful and knock this off our lives and knock that off our lives and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown.” And that fear still reigns across this land.

Much has changed since Paton’s day and much remains the same. Apartheid was finally abandoned in 1990, after moral censure and economic pressure from the rest of the world. The country’s first free elections in 1994 brought in a black majority government run by the African National Congress, which continues its monopoly on political power.

Under ANC leadership, a new black elite has emerged, blurring the traditional South African equation of race with class. But recent demographic data from the Human Sciences Research Council shows that “the proportion of people living in poverty in South Africa has not changed significantly” in the post-apartheid years, and in fact,“those households living in poverty have sunk deeper into poverty and the gap between rich and poor has widened.”

To be white in South Africa in 2010, even as a foreign visitor, is to feel retroactively complicit in the brutal racist violence which ruled here politically for decades and still tyrannizes the hearts and minds of millions. It feels like slogging knee-deep in swampy borrowed karma because of your skin color. Many whites here would prefer just to forget the past and move ahead. But many blacks say it is impossible to move on from an era that whites never truly acknowledged or understood.

Under the apartheid system’s “pass laws,” black Africans were restricted to live in certain areas and only permitted to work in other areas during specific hours. Those laws are gone but the economic imperatives remain to keep that practice in place, creating a sense of time warp.

Each morning black workers stream into commercial and residential areas in large numbers, getting down from trains and buses and the vans that serve as collective taxis here, setting off on foot, sometimes for long distances, to the places they work. They move slowly, in contrast with the occasional whites out walking or jogging for exercise. Most of those who are driving cars are white.

Every afternoon, that human tide reverses, as the blacks migrate back toward the transport they will ride home, to the poor townships and shanty towns where they must live. This strange and troubling ritual feels anachronistic and wrong. But with South Africa’s rate of unemployment above 25 percent (by some estimates, closer to 40 percent), anyone with a source of income, however meager, however long their commute, is not the least fortunate. Theft is rampant, hence the security hardware.

Millions of poor South Africans continue to endure a lack of basic services such as running water or electricity, a shameful ongoing legacy of apartheid and a powerful indictment of the post-apartheid regime, which has failed to provide jobs or provide sufficient housing for the poor, despite their many promises and their sixteen years in power.

Apartheid’s bad old days were much worse for the black majority, of course. That past is on display in many places, including the former women’s prison downtown, now a museum, where black and white political prisoners were confined separately for their activism. Black women were held in much smaller, more primitive cells. Newtown’s Africa Museum has a large exhibit detailing the six-year treason trial of prominent anti-apartheid activists, many of whom later became government leaders.

Soweto’s Hector Pieterson Museum reruns period TV footage of the 1976 protests in which police opened fire on unarmed students, killing dozens, including the 13-year-old Pieterson. The Apartheid Museum provides details of massacres (like Sharpeville) and cold-blooded state murder (like that of black leader Steve Biko). On the sunniest days, apartheid’s ghost casts a lingering chill over parks and skyscrapers, highways and malls.

Last year’s off-beat science fiction movie, District 9, identified the shadow over Johannesburg as coming, not from the past, but from an alien flying saucer that has hovered above the city for decades. The movie’s plot involves the forcible relocation of the aliens – who resemble giant prawns – from their longtime ramshackle detention site in the center of the city to a more remote location. The prawn people are portrayed as detestable and incomprehensible but highly intelligent and dangerous. Beneath the superficial distancing devices – the high-tech make-up and zap-zap special effects – the film is really a metaphoric documentary about South Africa.

Forced relocations of undesirables, a hallmark of the apartheid years, have also been part of South Africa’s preparations for the World Cup soccer tournament in June. Clean-up efforts have involved relocating residents of unsightly shanty towns from their previous all-too-visible sites. Under the euphemistic “Breaking New Ground” policy, Cape Town officials shifted township residents from their homes along a route between the airport to the city to a remote location invisible to soccer tourists, “with minimal infrastructure and far removed from people’s places or potential places of work,” in the words of reporter Robert Wilcox. “Looking much like a concentration camp, this settlement was named ‘Blikkiesdorp’ – Tin Town, by those herded there.”

South Africa hopes that by staging one of the planet’s premiere sporting events the country will receive a financial windfall and lots of favorable international publicity. Germany made a tidy profit hosting the 2006 World Cup, but South Africa will find it harder to duplicate that feat. The long, expensive flights here from almost everywhere else in the world, exacerbated by the recent economic downturn and the inflated internet ticket prices on offer have caused a revision downward in the number of visitors expected to attend these events.

According to Bloomberg‘s Mike Cohen, “South Africa has spent 34 billion rand ($4.6 billion) to host the soccer World Cup…” Most of the 130,000 jobs the tournament created were for low-paid unskilled laborers. With the ten new stadiums and supporting infrastructure now completed, most of those temporary jobs are finished. So who stands to benefit?

“The big secret about the World Cup is that only the rich will get richer from it,” in the words of South African playwright Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom. The lion’s share of World Cup income will benefit sponsors and international media. Some owners of top-end hotels and restaurants here will no doubt reap benefits. Also profiting are the government officials who got kickbacks from the contractors awarded the construction contracts.

Many more ordinary people, some of whom have served football fans for years here, will be excluded. As journalist Claire Byrne notes: “The stadium ‘cooking mamas’ — women from townships who serve up cheap local fast-food at games — are being moved out to make way for FIFA sponsors, such as McDonald’s.”

Most South Africans tell pollsters they are “no better off” now than in 1994 when apartheid was abolished. In fact, there has been a net job loss since then. Afraid of racial retribution, nudged out of jobs or limited in their career trajectories by the ANC policy of black affirmative action, many whites have fled the country, taking needed skills and knowledge with them. The ANC’s promised commitment to education has not materialized in order to train a new generation of skilled workers to run the economy. The largest crisis here is one of confidence: in the government and in the future.

Many outsiders think of South Africa in terms of Nelson Mandela’s triumphs: over his enemies, his own bitterness and his impulse for revenge. Mandela’s “long walk to freedom” is surely one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring stories. But contemporary reality is not Invictus or happily ever after. As R.W. Johnson describes the post-apartheid era in South Africa’s Brave New World: “Mandela’s warm personality and inclusive spirit were stamped indelibly on the nation’s heart in these years but… his well-loved face was merely the mask of a very different regime.”

Johnson’s book provides a disheartening account of how the African National Congress sold out their ideals when they came into office in 1994, after the country’s first free election. The ANC dumped their socialist agenda in order to appease the IMF and attract international investment. Once in power they succumbed to corruption and cronyism, playing to the aspirations of middle class blacks and their own political elite, ignoring the hopes and desperation of the poor majority who voted for them.

Thabo Mbeki, the powerful government organizer behind Mandela and the man who succeeded him in office, dismissed all criticism of ANC ineptitude or malfeasance as “racist.” Conditioned by his decades of exile, dodging assassination attempts as his father sat in prison, Mbeki centralized control unto himself and purged his rivals from within the party, sometimes brutally. A few grim statistics from the daily media here show how Mbeki’s chickens are coming home to roost right now.

One thousand South Africans a day are dying of AIDS. This horrifying and largely preventable slow-motion holocaust is part of Thabo Mbeki’s legacy. As the nature and the scope of the epidemic were becoming clear in Africa and worldwide, Mbeki construed calls to fight the disease as a political attempt to blame Africans for this plague and stigmatize them anew. He disputed the science and refused to take responsible action in the years when it could have saved millions of lives. Men, women and children continue to suffer and die for Mbeki’s misbegotten paranoia.

It is eerie to stand in a busy place like Johannesburg’s Park Station, the city’s main bus and railway terminal, knowing that at least one of three people in the large crowds there are HIV positive. South Africa now has 5.8 million AIDS sufferers, more than any other country in the world. South African President Jacob Zuma has pledged a renewed commitment to AIDS education and testing. He recently announced that his own HIV test came out negative.

For most politicians, such a result would be unremarkable. But Zuma’s personal habits are more flamboyant than those of most public officeholders. Married five times, he has three current wives and approximately twenty offspring, some from extra-marital liaisons. During Zuma’s recent visit to London the British press slimed the 68-year-old ruler as an oversexed buffoon.

When does he find time to govern? South African media chastised Zuma for setting a bad example by having unprotected sex with a friend’s daughter, who was known to be HIV-positive. Zuma earned further scorn by protesting that he had showered afterward to reduce his risk. The young woman accused him of rape, but he was judged not guilty in court. Then he became president.

Zuma recently opined that the country only has about four more years to blame their former white supremacist rulers – who left office in 1994 – before they must assume full responsibility for their own problems. That’s almost exactly how much time Zuma has left in his presidential term. Four years seems a long time to justify political drift and not to address pressing social problems such as the galloping crime rate here, mentioned by anyone who hears you are going to South Africa.

There are fifty murders a day in this country of about 50 million people, the same murder rate as in the United States, which has six times the population. Much of this violence is directed toward the foreigners from Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa who are perceived to be taking jobs away from locals, since they will work for less money, and committing violence against them, because they are desperate. Crisis is a relative term. Many South Africans would agree that their country is in crisis right now. But conditions in Zimbabwe and the Congo, among other nations, are so much worse, that the flood of immigrants here continues unabated.

Five hundred people a day cross the border from Zimbabwe into South Africa. More than twenty-five percent of the economically active adult population of that country has fled from it, to escape the despotism of Robert Mugabe. For decades Mugabe and his friends have looted the land, ruining the economy, and persecuted anyone who objected.

As the ruler of Zimbabwe’s most powerful neighbor, Thabo Mbeki was uniquely placed and morally obliged during his presidency to intercede against Mugabe’s destructive, inhumane policies. Many here and around the world pleaded with Mbeki to do so. But he refused. The result of Mugabe’s megalomania has been the slow starvation of a once prosperous nation and a desperate exodus which has caused bitterness and bloodshed in South Africa.

Faced with such unpleasantness , it’s no wonder Zuma prefers to accumulate wives and children and pin the country’s intractable problems on the old apartheid system for another four years. ANC youth league leader Julius Malema has built his own career by calling for vengeance against the hardcore resistance of Afrikaner farmers, the Boers. In his public appearances, Malema likes to sing an anti-apartheid song which includes the lyrics, “Kill the Boer,” which often receives large applause.

In early April, not long after Malema had regaled another audience with this violent anthem, a white separatist farmer named Eugene Terre Blanche was murdered at his farm. A divisive extremist, Terre Blanche founded an Afrikaner Resistance Movement and famously threatened civil war to maintain white rule in Africa. After three years in jail for assault and attempted murder, Terre Blanche in 2008 began calling for a “free Afrikaner republic” to be created inside South Africa’s borders.

Terre Blanche is only the most recent and most famous white farmer to die from violence. The South African Human Rights Commission estimates that about 2500 white farmers have died as the result of more than 9000 violent attacks since the end of apartheid. White farmers’ organizations claim the number of fatalities is closer to 3000. The Commission found that the rate of attacks on white farmers has increased 25% since 2005. The vengeful racist massacre that many feared when apartheid ended, but which Mandela seemed to have averted, is taking place in its own protracted, stealthy way.

Until Julius Malema called a BBC reporter a “bastard” last month, his anti-Boer rants had not been censured by Jacob Zuma or the ANC. Indeed, the once-impoverished, poorly educated Malema now lives in splendor in Sandton, one of the most upscale sections of Johannesburg. His shrill, extremist rhetoric clearly serves some influential vested interest.

Now, only weeks before the World Cup matches will begin here, Malema has been publicly reprimanded by the ANC and ordered to attend an anger management class, though most of his outbursts appeared calculated, if not scripted. Race baiting is not likely to play well in the international spotlight the FIFA soccer matches will bring.

For Malema, the Boers are convenient prawn-like foils to deflect blame from the enfranchised ANC back to the ghosts of apartheid. Zuma too seems content to pin his nation’s problems on the past. Many unemployed South Africans consider the immigrant population, legal and illegal, as the biggest threat to their well-being and perhaps to their survival. The fear and revulsion humans feel for the alien prawns in District 9 holds up a sci-fi mirror to this sort of scapegoating.

Infected by the prawns, the protagonist of the movie begins to mutate, slowly becoming a prawn person himself, which horrifies him and everyone he knows. There can be no worse fate, though the change does endow him with some special powers. More hideous even than having to co-exist with the Other is becoming the Other. This fear has driven the policies of the Afrikaners and British for three hundred years in South Africa, leading to the madness of apartheid and continuing today. Of course, the fear of Otherness is primal and widespread. It’s a prominent feature of U.S. History – up to and including our ongoing religious conflicts – and the recent immigration legislation in Arizona.

And speaking of wacky movies as fun house barometers, in Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic 2012, John Cusack and others battle catastrophic computer generated imagery to escape Certain Doom. In the final, throwaway scene, an officer of the CGI craft tells survivors that one of the only places on the planet that didn’t sink into the sea was KwaZulu Natal, on the eastern coast of South Africa, so that’s where they will head. It may not be the Promised Land, but it’s as lovely a place as any to watch the world end. And begin again.

Doppelganger theorists point out that Kim suffered a serious stroke in 2008. But since then, North Korean media reported 122 official visits he made to “factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest… to prove, presumably, that Mr. Kim was alive and well and very much in charge.”

Which possibility is less likely? That Kim made a miraculous recovery and adopted a grueling ceremonial schedule? Or that a stand-in cut the ribbons and took the bows? Cynics point out that Mr. Clinton himself has not been real since sometime in the 1980s, when he was replaced by an unprincipled testosterone-driven opportunist.

We should not be surprised that international diplomacy is now the practice of surrogates. Many of our military functions are subcontracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and other branches of Murder, Inc. We outsource torture and invade countries with (often mis) guided missiles. We live in the wondrous age of clones and drones.

Our political discourse is as synthetic as the foods we eat, driven by a demagogic logic that bears scant relation to reality. Our print and broadcast pundits prefer to generate outrageous headlines for a quick ratings spike than to craft helpful or thoughtful commentary. Hence the (oxy)moronic “Fox News” network. Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are as authentic and toxic as Kim Jong-il, alive or dead.

Television substitutes for millions of “personal” lives. Celebrities act as stand-ins for those who would rather watch than live. Sports and movie stars are grotesquely overpaid because mass audiences find it easier and more comforting to cheer and jeer for designated others than to puzzle out their own, less predictable, existences.

Our addictions to chemical additives and fast food in lieu of natural nutrients make us fat. Our addictions to trash talk and the mindless incitements of half-educated pundits and politicians degrade our mental and emotional functions. We are increasingly unable to differentiate garbage calories from natural energy or malignant chat from substantive civil discourse.

Advertisements once cautioned us to “Accept no substitutes.” But substitutes are mostly what we have now. Was the man who ran for president on a platform of positive change and moral responsibility abducted during his pre-inaugural trip to Hawaii? Was he replaced by the business-as-usual guy now in the White House, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Barack Obama?

Birthers who obsess about Obama’s citizenship are sniffing at the wrong fireplug. It’s not where Obama was born that matters, but where he went.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned in the 1830s that a standing army was a threat to democratic society. We now have one of the largest standing armies in world history. Military priorities supersede our increasingly critical social and civic needs. We squander our resources and terrorize innocent human beings by bombing Afghan villages instead of building schools and highways in our own country or providing health care for our citizens.

War is not a valid substitute for rational foreign or domestic policies. Where is the president, the politician or the pundit who will say so?

In a world of surrogates, substitutes and clones, a body-double for Kim Jong-il is not so scandalous. The original dictator – son of another dictator – did not seem all that fabulous a fellow anyway. So it’s hard to mourn his passing, or lament that phonies may be impersonating him.

In fact, maybe whoever’s pulling the strings could design a more humane model of Kim for the coming decades. Then we could follow their lead and improve all the ersatz bull dada which rules our own culture and our own lives.

Gates is more upset about the image of a dying Marine gaining currency than he is about the multiple wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged. The Bush regime especially has been adept at controlling and sanitizing the images of war, prohibiting photos of flag-draped caskets or military burial services. As if war were a distant abstraction, without bloody, fatal consequences.

What is “appalling” of course, and beyond any rational “judgment and common decency” are the wars themselves, in Iraq – built on lies – and in Afghanistan – purportedly in revenge against a Saudi guerrilla there. Neither conflict can be justified or withstand scrutiny – moral or political – but that does not bother Robert Gates. His brief is to run the wars, test the weapons, keep the military in fighting trim and try to minimize the psychic damage to the American soul. That was why he protested the photo. Psychic damage.

What we need is many more photos, of dead and wounded U.S. fighting men and women. But also of Iraqi and Afghani civilians. Why does AP not show us the torn and bloody children of our “muscular foreign policy”? The American people are not nearly appalled enough by the wanton destruction committed in our name. There is no strategy worth this carnage. Control of petro resources cannot justify this ongoing murder.

AP needs to fill the pages of its clients’ publications with the wages of our sins of aggression. Some Americans will not be affected, but the majority might be angry enough to speak up at last against these obscene “appalling” exercises in futility. The consequences are real, to bodies and minds, of soldiers and civilians. So we deserve to see those consequences for ourselves, to understand the policies rational planners like Gates and now his cohorts in the Obama regime have accomplished, flying in the face of “law… or constitutional right.” Not to mention common decency.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs and plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.

Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.

The California group – named the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) – has been doing radical, politically incorrect street theater for twenty-five years. Made up of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, ex-convicts and formerly homeless men and women, the group voted to name itself with the same initials of the police force with whom many of them had sparred.

LAPD founder and director, John Malpede, wrote the play, Agents & Assets, based on a 1998 hearing transcript of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. The Committee examined allegations of CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged minority communities in California cities. As journalist Gary Webb detailed in an explosive 1996 newspaper series, “Dark Alliance,” the CIA enabled huge shipments of cocaine to enter the United States to raise money for the anti-government forces in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

The U.S. Congress had denied funding to the Contras. But President Reagan called them freedom fighters and compared them to America’s founding fathers. So Oliver North and the CIA found a way to get money for Contra military actions, though it meant creating a huge new class of crack addicts among America’s ethnic urban poor.

As Malpede told a Bolivian audience after one performance: “We work in the poorest part of Los Angeles, where people come when they have no place else to go and end up living in the streets. LAPD lives and works in an area affected by drugs. It was the anger of Los Angeles citizens – that the CIA might have been involved in smuggling crack cocaine into the country – that sparked these legislative hearings. These hearings are also a metaphor for all things the U.S. government does all around the world that they shouldn’t, instead of taking care of their own people.”

Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. Each performance is unique, since the “second act” is a discussion among local expert panelists, the actors and the audience about how the issues raised in the play are relevant to the “here and now” of each production.

Agents & Assets began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the play showed its political potency. Agents & Assets also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws. For its South American premiere, the play, titled Agentes y Activos in its Spanish language version, toured a country where much cocaine originates.

As the play shows, in 1998 CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz denied and obfuscated the CIA connection to Contra drug smuggling. Just this month, under pressure from the ACLU, the Agency released a highly redacted CIA Inspector General’s report about CIA torture techniques. Some of the same players were involved in both episodes. Porter Goss, chairman of the dramatized hearing, played down the allegations of CIA malfeasance in the 1980s. Later, as CIA Director under George W. Bush, Goss lobbied for keeping the torture report secret to avoid damaging America’s reputation and CIA morale. The Agency’s history of immoral, illegal acts and its failure to accomplish anything except slime the U.S. reputation is the best argument for its dissolution.

Agents & Assets reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, in order to pay for an illegal war. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. By speaking the words of lawmakers who permit systemic abuse, the actors bear witness against them.

Bolivian media and government officials expressed interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. After rehearsals and performances in Cochabamba, the show played Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre and Santa Cruz. Questions and comments in every city reflected the intense emotions the issues of the play raise about the drug war, notions of justice and international relations.

As Bolivian historian, activist and ex-government official Rafael Puente reminded audiences, though events in the play might seem remote, the same sorts of things were happening here in Bolivia at the same time. In 1980 the CIA enabled the violent narco golpe de estado (drug coup) of General Luis Garcia Meza. As Puente noted, former DEA agent Michael Levine wrote about these events in his book, The Big White Lie.

Ex-Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie emerged from his Bolivian hiding place to oversee the arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances of the narco dictatorship’s political opponents. Cocaine exports reportedly totaled US$850 million in the 1980-81 period of the García Meza regime, twice the value of official government exports. Puente described the huge CIA cocaine processing plant at Huanchaka, in eastern Bolivia, where the drugs were produced to help finance this repressive regime.

The United States has always maintained a duplicitous drug policy. Officially the United States expresses moral outrage about the manufacture and importation of illicit substances. For thirty years the “war on drugs” has consumed enormous human and financial resources. But the CIA has an even longer history of dealing drugs to finance covert wars around the world the U.S. prefers not to acknowledge publicly. (see The Politics of Heroin by frequent Agents and Assets panelist Alfred McCoy). Most Americans seem unaware of this dark history. But, as one Bolivian audience member put it, “everybody knows the CIA is the biggest drug trafficker in the world.”

Former cocaine addict and current LAPD actor Kevin Michael Key told a Santa Cruz audience, “It’s in the interest of the governments to continue narco-traffic as a means of controlling the people. Criminalization is the American way. Though rehabilitation exists, many drug users are simply locked up in jail. The demand for rehabilitation has to come from the people.”

In answer to a Bolivian man’s question about whether or not Obama will change things, John Malpede opined that, “Changing drug policy is not a high priority for Obama. Changes in drug policy have come from communities or states in defiance of federal law, to reduce penalties and put treatment in place of jail time.” Malpede’s tag line for the show, that “the war of drugs imposes a military solution to a social and public health issue,” was widely printed in the Bolivian press.

Bolivians have their own defective drug war in place, thanks to Law 1008, passed in 1988 under intense pressure from the United States. Anyone accused of drug violations under what one former law school dean calls this “inhumane” law loses basic human rights, such as the presumption of innocence, the safeguards against self-incrimination, the right to a defense, to an impartial judge, to due process or to a speedy trial. Law 1008 expands the definition of ‘trafficking’ to mean ‘to produce, possess, keep, store, transport, deliver, administer or give as a gift.’ Judges routinely hand out harsh sentences, since an accusation is tantamount to a judgment of guilt, and they fear public outrage for giving lesser punishments.

The law rewards denuncias or snitches. These snitches often turn in people for the reward money with whom they have grudges unrelated to drugs. Police routinely resort to torture to extricate confessions from the accused. Such forced confessions are all that is needed for proof of guilt in Bolivian judicial proceedings. In their book, The Weight of Law 1008 (1996), the Andean Information Network compiled heartbreaking narratives of poor, illiterate Bolivians hounded into prison because they could not pay the bribes that were demanded by officials to make their cases disappear. Several of these drug war victims report being tortured under the direction of gringo DEA agents.

On the post-show panel at one of the Oruro performances, two drug officials parried questions from the audience about Bolivia’s war on drugs. Alex Alfaro, Departmental Director of the Special Police Force to Fight Drug Trafficking, said drug production was rising in Oruro. In the year he has worked there, his forces have found seventeen cocaine labs. So far in 2009 the police have confiscated more than a ton of cocaine, as much as in all of 2008.

Alfaro said a kilo of marijuana costs one hundred dollars (U.S.) and a kilo of cocaine, $1200. He handed out anti-drug pamphlets, warning of the dire organic consequences of using marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol and inhalants. But members of the audience, unaccustomed to access to these usually invisible officials, began to ask penetrating questions.

What did Alfaro, and the public prosecutor appearing with him, Franz Villegas, think of Law 1008? Villegas fudged his opinion, merely describing it as a drug law. Kevin Michael Key asked if the men thought the CIA really was involved in drug trafficking in the 1980s as the play alleged? They did not know. Was it a good or bad for Bolivia that the Morales government had expelled the DEA? Alfaro said it was a national government decision, not his. He said he had worked with the DEA and “they supported us. Now the national government helps us fight drugs…”

A Bolivian woman said: “You are preoccupied with drug consumption and apprehension. Is there any attention being paid to the health aspects of this problem?” The two officials made no attempt to respond. Someone else asked: “Is drug enforcement a form of social control?” The public prosecutor answered that “Drug enforcement involves citizen participation. It’s everyone’s fight. Denuncias are an important part of the system.”

Someone else asked: “What about innocent people caught up and arrested under Law 1008? Like a taxi driver whose passenger might have drugs without the driver’s knowledge?” Most of the personal stories in The Weight of Law 1008 center on and decry false accusations. Villegas said: “We don’t accuse people just to accuse them. I don’t know of a single case where a taxi driver has been unfairly jailed…”

And so it went that night in Oruro, as the drug officials evaded questions and shaded their responses in ways that precisely mirrored the dynamics of Agentes y Activos, in which the CIA Inspector General danced around issues, answered questions he had not been asked or flat out lied about the CIA’s links to the Contra cocaine scandal. The show was not only relevant but was being replayed immediately afterward in an updated, Bolivian mode right out where everyone (except the officials themselves) could see it.

Agentes y Activos played theaters and schools, public plazas and even a prison, helping to show that the real struggle is not between Bolivia, where coca grows, and the United States, where much cocaine is consumed. Rather, the greater problem lies within each country, between each government and its own people.

By declaring war on drugs, the United States and Bolivia have both declared war on their own populations, but only against the small-time users and dealers, not the powerful few who profit most from the ongoing, proliferating traffic in illicit drugs. If all the world’s a stage, then it’s time for a new global act. This “war on drugs” thing isn’t playing well anywhere, in any language.

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

– Eugene V. Debs¹

Two hundred forty souls reside now inside the American prison at Guantanamo. Most were kidnapped and taken there by U.S. government employees. None has been charged with any crime. None has enjoyed anything resembling due process of law. Some of these 240 men were boys when they arrived – four, five, six or seven years ago. Most of them have been tortured by “trained professionals,” trained and paid by the U.S. government, by us, you and me.

These prisoners sit – abused and untried – in defiance of many rules and values on which American society prides itself. Our Constitution celebrates and protects the rights of individuals. Millions have fought and died in the past two centuries or so to preserve those precious values. But as long as the Guantanamo prisoners are denied the rights and protections enshrined in our Constitution, America is not and cannot be a free society. As Debs knew, we cannot predicate our own freedom on the oppression of others, whoever they may be. That is not true liberty.

The former vice president, Dick Cheney, argues that without the ability to kidnap people at will, to torture them without restraint and to jail them indefinitely, our country will be at greater risk of terrorist attack. He is wrong about that, as even he must know. His daughter has said that Cheney is now speaking out – after hiding out during much of his tenure in office – because he is afraid he may be prosecuted for war crimes. Cheney should be, both afraid and prosecuted. No one knows better than he does, after his many decades in power in Washington, how far outside the laws and values of our country his policies deviated.

As president, George W. Bush allowed these abuses of American values. But it was the bullyboys he set up in power – Cheney and Rumsfeld and their legal hired guns – who pushed far beyond the limits of law and decency. They did so out of fear. Bullies are cowards who hide their fears with bluster and meanness. Cheney and Rumsfeld, full of bluster, talked tough while quaking in their boots. Remember when Cheney threw out a baseball at a major league game wearing a bullet-proof vest? Who was he afraid of? Better to ask, of whom is he not afraid?

Tough-guy, sadistic cowards are familiar characters in our history and our culture. They represent one part – shameful but all too real – of human nature. It is easy in times of stress and uncertainty to give way to their shameful impulses. But acting out of fear – as bullies do – is no way to live or to run a country. Better to heed the words of the brave men, like Debs, who had the courage to go to jail for his beliefs. Or the real warriors who fight for our country, the top generals who have testified that America will be safer with Guantanamo closed and torture stopped once and for all.

In the anger, fear and panic that followed the attacks on the United States in September 2001, we allowed these bullies to command the vacuum of grief and disbelief with their long-mulled plans for U.S. military supremacy in the Middle East. They told whatever lies they thought would procure backing from the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. They ran roughshod over American values, in the name of upholding them. It is time to disavow these violations and clean up the mess they left to us. Of what are we afraid?

We voted for Barack Obama to break with this lawless regime and restore the values our Constitution honors. Mr. President, you must hold firm to your commitment to close Guantanamo. There is no prisoner there so “dangerous for America” that he does not deserve the due process of law that our society holds dear. If we cannot offer these protections, even to our avowed enemies, then there is little to choose between their values and our own. You have already articulated these beliefs. Please do not be swayed by the menacing cowardice of Cheney and his ilk, or the NIMBY legislators of your own party who would rather pander to their poll standings than do the right thing, which is to bring Guantanamo prisoners into our own prison system and try them, or to let them go. We must not be hostage to our own paranoia, our own weakest nature.

We voted for you, Mr. President, because you promised to act out of conscience, not fear. We are trusting you to abjure the brutal, fearful policies of the recent past, and restore the Constitutional values which made our country great. In you reside our hopes for the American promise that brought you to this office, that you may restore our faith in our own destiny, and the faith of our brothers and sisters around the world.

1. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), American labor leader and five-time presidential candidate, was the only person to run for the presidency while in prison.

Deep thinker Ann Coulter went on TV to call Sotomayor a racist. Revered statesman Newt Gingrich texted that same sentiment to various folk. Media seemed less interested in his (typically mean and shallow) message than the fact that the old bozo had figured out how to text. Resident network intellectual Pat Buchanan declared Sotomayor – Princeton summa cum laude and Yale law review – “not that smart.”

University of Utah dropout Karl Rove opined that there are lots of “stupid” Ivy League graduates. Most people presume his long association with the Yale and Harvard alum George W. Bush taught him that. Michael Goldfarb and other National Review types offered their carefully reasoned opposition. Goldfarb objected to the way the Supreme Court nominee pronounces her own name, saying that “It Sticks In My Craw.”

Failed Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee called Sotomayor a nominee of the “far left.” Of course he also referred to her as “Maria,” throwing his own judgment into question. And how about Democratic Senator Ben Nelson, who did not rule out a filibuster of the nomination, even before he learned who the nominee was?

The problem is not simply that media offer conduits to amplify the uninformed opinions of mindless political hacks, attention junkies so thoroughly unqualified to discuss Sotomayor’s legal history and philosophy that they must resort to racist, sexist name-calling. There is seldom any effort to engage the blatant inaccuracy and stupidity of these unwelcome, all-too-familiar “critics.”

Coulter asked why liberals did not show the same empathy for the black Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as they seem to demonstrate for the Latina Sonia Sotomayor. No talking head pointed out that Sotomayor has decades of judicial experience while Thomas had none. His was a cynical nomination by George H.W. Bush, as a less-than-mediocre right-wing replacement for the great jurist, Thurgood Marshall, simply because he was black. Thomas also stood accused of sexual harassment, a charge he never refuted. Instead he blamed the victim and shifted the debate to be about what he called a “high-tech lynching,” then wormed his way into lifetime office, past red-faced wishy-washy liberals including Kennedy and Biden.

Part of the problem is that most media-ready conservative spokespersons possess no substantive knowledge or moral credibility. They are merely dependable attack dogs, foaming at the mouth. Coulter routinely calls people fags and racists; Gingrich is a political thug who resigned in disgrace and profaned his marriages; Rove made a dishonorable career as an unprincipled scumbag. We should demand accountability from the networks and print media who enable these vermin to spew their poison.

Rupert Murdoch deserves particular opprobrium. He provides Rove’s venomous bile outlets in the Wall Street Journal and on Fox News, where Rove joins Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck and other numbskulls, whose vitriol and histrionics substitute for reasoned discourse. Murdoch’s media empire has done more to distort, degrade and dumb down the American democratic process than Tom DeLay, Lee Harvey Oswald and Rush Limbaugh put together. Any sense of civic responsibility mass media ever displayed toward the national political conversation has long since been superseded by a meretricious urge to peddle outrage for profit, no matter how tasteless or untrue.

The diminution of the Republican Party – which staked all on its radical right wing – and the impoverishment of political discourse in our country have fed each other’s decline. The spectacle of politicians sacrificing political ideals for personal ambition is neither new nor surprising. But Rove and Cheney have taken that to new levels, trashing not only all Republican ideals, but Constitutional principles and human decency as well, routinely debasing language and governance with lies and character assassination to maintain their power. They now have the chutzpah to use the complaisant whorish media to condemn the petty sins of the Obama administration. They should answer for their transgressions in a court of law, not on Fox News Sunday.

TV has long been trapped in an oppositional format. Conflict makes for drama. Actual intelligent discussion is too boring. If somebody is not shot or defamed every thirty seconds the audience may turn the channel. It’s amazing that millions of human beings still tune into this trash. But Murdoch and his ilk are not merely polluters. They are perverts, deforming issues and reputations for money. Already a billionaire, Murdoch, 78, clearly cares nothing about the cultural and political damage he wreaks, or the devastation he will leave behind. His straw dogs, on and off his payroll – all trashy bark and no substance – will continue to provide the lowest common denominator for political discussion in our country until we have the will to turn them off.

After a fifteen-month trial, the presiding judge, Cesar San Martin, said, “The charges have been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.” The court found that Fujimori targeted various political opponents for kidnapping and assassination. Fujimori was also found guilty of killing fifteen people, including an 8-year-old boy, at a suburban Lima barbecue.

Earlier, Fujimori received a six-year prison term for ordering an illegal search. He still faces two corruption trials. He resigned from office while in Japan, which granted him political asylum because of his Japanese ancestry. In 2005 he left Japan for Chile, apparently to re-launch his Peruvian political career. He was detained there and extradited to Lima to face trial in 2007. Why did Fujimori abandon his Japanese safe haven? Was he deluded by a messianic belief that he could get away with anything, as he had for a decade as president?

The Lima judicial proceeding represents a major milestone, the first trial of a democratically elected head of state in his own country. It was also courageous, considering Peru’s violent past and Fujimori’s continuing popularity. His daughter is a member of the legislature and intends to run for the presidency in 2011. She has vowed to pardon her father if elected.

Equally courageous are the recent trials of Argentina’s former military leaders, who presided over the disappearances of up to thirty thousand Argentine citizens in the 1970s and 80s. In 2005 the government of President Nestor Kirchner removed legal protections that had shielded abusers of power from prosecution, allowing their cases to proceed.

Trials of former Argentine government officials accused of state-sponsored terror (kidnapping, torture and murder) have not simply stirred up painful memories. Trial witnesses have disappeared. Judges and prosecutors have been threatened with death unless the trials are stopped.

Apologists say the brutal tactics of the military regime were necessary to combat terrorist threats. That defense should chill the hearts of U.S. citizens, since that is precisely Dick Cheney’s rationale for the illegal kidnappings, torture and detentions without charge – our very own “dirty war” – that became U.S. policy in the Bush years.

Peru and Argentina understand that unless they identify and condemn the abuses of power committed by their own governments, their current and future regimes will lack legitimacy. “The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” as William Faulkner said. To pretend otherwise is to implicate current and future governments – of Peru, Argentina or the United States – in those crimes and abuses.

It took an outsider – a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzon – to indict the notorious Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Enabled by Henry Kissinger and the CIA, Pinochet took power in a bloody coup on September 11, 1973, murdering the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The Chilean justice system was too cowed and compromised by Pinochet’s bloody reign of torture and murder to act against him, even after he left office.

Garzon’s indictment caused Pinochet’s brief detention in England in 1998. He was finally indicted in his own country in 2000, but died of natural causes at 91 in 2006 before he went to trial. Accused of assassinations, kidnappings, tortures, murders and drug trafficking, Pinochet told investigating judges: “I don’t remember, but it’s not true. And if it were true, I don’t remember.” (His words are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s testimony during his Iran-Contra deposition.)

Garzon lamented that “justice was too slow,” in Pinochet’s case. Now he has written a 98-page complaint accusing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other ex-Bush officials (John Yoo, William Haynes, David Addington, Jay Bybee and Douglas Feith) of constructing a system that allowed torture in violation of international law. Garzon accepted jurisdiction because several Spanish citizens at Guantanamo allegedly suffered torture. Will justice be too slow in this case too? Will Americans be content to let Spanish courts do their legal dirty work?

Congressman John Conyers recently released a report entitled: “Reining in the Imperial Presidency,” detailing a long list of possible Bush executive branch violations of the Constitution, human rights and the public trust. The Conyers report says: “The Attorney General should appoint a Special Counsel… to determine whether there were criminal violations committed pursuant to Bush Administration policies that were undertaken under unreviewable war powers, including enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless domestic surveillance.” Conyers is very late with this, but better late than never.

As Mark Danner wrote recently in The New York Review of Books: “There is a sense in which our society is finally posing that ‘what should we do’ question. That it is doing so only now, after the fact is a tragedy for the country…” How big a tragedy? Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, noted earlier this month, that “the U.S. leadership became aware… very early on…that many of the [Guantanamo] detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value and should be released.”

But Wilkerson says that – after the incompetence the administration displayed during 9/11 and the Iraq invasion – Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were adamant that no more mistakes be admitted. “Moreover,” writes Wilkerson, “the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man…” Wilkerson waited seven years to reveal these realities, a shameful injustice. But it would be a far greater injustice never to reveal them at all. Does anyone doubt that a serious investigation of human rights violations by Gonzalez, Woo, Feith, Bybee, Addington and Haynes will lead to Rumsfeld and Cheney?

As Danner says, “…even as the practice of torture by Americans has withered and died, its potency as a political issue has grown. The issue could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, and whether our laws and ideals truly guide us in our actions or serve, instead, as a kind of national decoration to be discarded in times of danger. The only way to confront the political power of the issue, and prevent the reappearance of the practice itself, is to take a hard look at the true ‘empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years,’ and speak out clearly and credibly, about what that story really tells.”

On her April 7 blog post, the estimable Digby spells out the stakes: “It’s not just about ending these practices. By refusing to investigate them, and even actively invoking claims like the “state secrets privilege” to shield and avoid any possibility of a reckoning, the Administration implicates itself. Because they must use the same extreme claims of executive power, in some cases more so, to facilitate the cover-up… In failing to wrestle with this, or letting Spain do it for us, we lose ourselves.”

Concepts such as “respect for human rights” and the “moral responsibility” of the United States have not been heard in Washington since the Carter years. Their re-emergence in our national discourse is long overdue. Nixon-era cynicism and abuse of power multiplied in the smiley-faced Reagan years, then exploded under Bush and Cheney.

We must redeem our national soul before it is too late. Peru and Argentina have shown that, with sufficient political will, despite great risks, it is possible to face the truth. Without facing the truth, and all its implications, we can have no self-respect as a nation, nor can we hope to regain respect and credibility within the world community.

We cannot count on our spineless, complicit Congress to drive this issue. They could and should have done so years ago. Demanding accountability is a job for us, we, the people. Not just in Peru. Here too.

The conspiracy-minded may intuit the heavy hand of Dick Cheney behind the Taliban cleric’s claim, since Cheney recently warned that President Obama’s policies were making the county less safe. No doubt it is far-fetched to believe that Cheney would employ a sheikh to mastermind a terrorist attack in order to vindicate Cheney’s dire predictions, not to mention the immoral, unconstitutional practices he embraced during the Bush era. And that would allow Cheney to blame Obama.

Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said Wong might have been depressed because other students in his English class at the immigration center he attacked had mocked his poor language skills. Perhaps his teacher is culpable for failing to raise Wong’s fluency level. The bullies among his classmates merit blame, but they might merely have been attempting to acculturate more rapidly. The students must have noticed that ridiculing anyone slightly different from mainstream bland is as American as chop suey.

Some liberals said Wong probably suffered from the prejudice of American racists against new immigrants. Some racists blamed immigrant culture itself (them non-white foreigners) and the policies which allow disturbed or unstable individuals from other countries to compete with the disturbed and unstable native born.

Gun opponents blame the killing spree on the gun culture, of which Wong was an avid member. Second Amendment absolutists accuse the Obama regime of threatening to take away their cherished weaponry, though no such policy has been declared. Out of fear that new, more restrictive gun regulations might someday possibly be imposed under Obama, there has been a huge recent upsurge in applications for background checks to purchase more firearms. The NRA used to flaunt the bumpersticker: “When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Guns.” They could amend that to read “Since Guns are Legal, Only Paranoids Hoard Guns.”

Given the recent epidemic of mass murder, with so many unbalanced individuals turning weapons on relatives and strangers alike, it is hard to understand what a “background check” actually uncovers. The week of the Binghamton shootings, a man murdered five members of his family. In March an Alabama gunner killed eleven. Last Christmas Eve in Los Angeles a lunatic dressed as Santa shot nine people and himself to death. The April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, in which 33 people died, still holds the modern record. We can only hope no one will try to break it.

Many officials and pundits attribute this latest rise in rampage killing to the economic downturn. Wong had recently lost his job at Shop-Vac, which manufactures vacuum cleaners. You could blame Wong’s boss for giving him the boot, but even more his former co-workers, who showed no surprise at Wong’s wanton madness. They had even joked among themselves about how he might someday show up at work with a weapon and shoot up the place. Ha. Do greedy bankers and hedge fund managers deserve the blame for Wong running amok? Yes and no but no…

Not long ago Wong’s wife left with their children, apparently adding to his embitterment. Perhaps the heartbreak of his wife’s departure pushed him over the edge. Maybe she realized she had to get away before he murdered his family. In a soon-to-be-posthumous letter to a local TV station, Wong himself blamed police harassment. Or as Wong put it: “Because undercover cop gave me a lot of ass during eighteen years.”

The potential list of contributing culprits to this senseless horror is ample, even if tangential and contradictory. In Roshomon, the classic Japanese story made into a film by Akira Kurosawa in the 1950s, each person involved in a crime conveys their very different versions of the incident. Even the dead murder victim testifies through a medium at a courtroom séance to offer his take. If we could contact Jiverly Wong through a spirit medium, he might be angry that others appear to share any responsibility for the act he alone committed.

Suicidal killing sprees are desperate outbursts against feelings of impotence that corner the killer. A murderous rampage is a final, irrational attempt to be taken seriously. Jiverly Wong wanted to make a statement in the worst possible way. And so he did. The pain he inflicted will linger long in many lives, but he himself will soon be forgotten. Who can name the Virginia Tech gunman?

Victims of the American social experiment who go down shooting are doomed to justifiable obscurity. They are but symptoms and statistics and by now, clichés. But their enablers and accomplices — human and systemic — remain among us. That is why we tend to look beyond the crazed shooters, to identify the people and problems that poisoned their brains. So they don’t poison ours.

As reported by John Byrne in Raw Story, Gingrich thinks the government should pay teenage girls not to get pregnant. He also said states should consider paying teenagers who are already pregnant to take prenatal vitamins to forestall subsequent medical costs. Among other proposals to promote social health “fundamentals,” Gingrich also suggested paying people not to smoke.

Gingrich is the kind of conservative who probably opposed federal subsidies to farmers not to grow certain crops, in order to maintain food price levels. So he now appears to be going against his own philosophy. But the Gingster may be on to something here. Paying people not to do stupid or venal things has its limits, of course. It’s too expensive to pay bankers not to be greedy. But perhaps the ultimate capitalist morality is to refrain from wicked or idiotic behavior not out of personal pride or a sense of justice – which have clearly failed as social safeguards – but for cash.

Motorists could be paid to give up their cars. Bicycle riders could get tax breaks, along with skaters and joggers. Instead of Academy Awards, we could have prizes for creative recycling, green living practices and growing the most productive garden. The Armed Forces could reward soldiers for not killing civilians. The government could subsidize the removal of dumb or hateful media commentary from the public airwaves. With all that dead air on radio and TV, people might go out for more fresh air, perhaps earning a modest federal reward in the process. The government could offer tax and mortgage rate reductions to renters and homeowners who take in homeless individuals or families. We could pay Mexicans not to emigrate.

But what is a fair wage for good behavior? A 22-year-old British woman recently auctioned off her virginity on the internet for millions of dollars. How much should a teenage girl receive to remain unpregnant? Should the amount be based on the number of propositions she has received? Is it enough for the government to provide free birth control information and equipment? Should you be able to buy birth control pills with food stamps? Or that first bottle of wine? The one that’s good for you?

How do we know who deserves to be paid for not smoking? Do you have to smoke first and then quit to collect? What standards could we apply to prevent non-heroin shooters and non-sky divers asking for government subsidies to avoid those behaviors? How would we tell the rank feigners from the true refrainers? Sarah Palin could collect a remittance for not shooting wolves from airplanes, but most of us never have to struggle with that sort of temptation.

We could pay the lobbyists to leave our legislators alone. And we could reward our elected officials any time they stop themselves from saying or doing anything shameful or foolish. But if the Gingrich system of pay-to-not-play turns out to work with the politicians, it’s going to make Tim Geithner’s bailouts look mighty stingy.

In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the “essential metaphorical thrust” of the film, which he said aimed “to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring “a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war…”

Rosenbaum indicted “the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”

In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: “It’s definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It’s about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents’ generation.”

But Rosenbaum’s Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film’s central relationship between Michael and Hanna.

Michael’s passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.

Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant’s favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don’t want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally — or perhaps surpassingly — guilty comrades.

The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna’s illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.

As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. “My parents, my teachers, everyone.” The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: “The only question is why you didn’t all just kill yourselves?”

Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the the Holocaust. The film’s underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge. Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.

Power’s book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world — in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere — over the past hundred years. “The key question” writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, “… is: Why does the United States stand so idly by? The most common response is, ‘We didn’t know.’ This is not true.”

“Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it,” Power says. “Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.’” It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand any action. Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act. U.S. officials “were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.”

Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government. We are, in this moment, as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich. We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation. Starting well before the invasion of Iraq — which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred — we knew the “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses. But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren’t sure.

In his Sunday column entitled: “What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us,” Frank Rich remarked upon this “American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago… Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.” Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, “How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead ‘normal’ lives while genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad. If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors.

For Bernard Schlink, this knowledge, that his parents’ generation denied, “makes me aware how thin the ice is on which we live.” Schlink believed that German culture and institutions like courts, universities, churches, unions and political parties “all seemed so solid.” And yet it all broke down, “relatively easily.” In America too. Somehow we allowed our government to invade a country that had committed no aggression toward the United States. We allowed our government to declare an emergency in order to violate human rights of many thousands of individuals, to commit torture, to incarcerate people for years without trial or hearings of any kind. And today we continue the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. We continue to jail and abuse individuals without charges. And we all know it’s wrong. And it’s time to deal with it before our “land of the free” is irreparably compromised.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has laid out The Case for a Truth Commission (Time, Feb 20). As Leahy says: “For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans. We need to get to the bottom of what happened — and why — to make sure it never happens again… to find the truth….

“But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America’s reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it…. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.”

It’s not just our right. It’s a fundamental need. German society is still — and may always be — in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years. Samantha Power is now an adviser to Barack Obama. Nobody knows better than she does the moral imperative for admitting and redressing the moral lapses of government. We must hope that she wields her influence to make the machinery of government responsive to the deepest needs of our culture. Karl Rove continues to flaunt congressional subpoenas to testify. He figures he can stonewall indefinitely, that there will be no day of reckoning for lawless U.S. officials. We must do everything in our power to prove him wrong.

Of course the British grip on reality has always been tenuous. Consider Royal Family members such as: Henry the 8th, George the 3rd, or Edward the 7th. Bonkers, the lot. The Duke of Edinburgh has about as much class as the Dukes of Hazzard.

Then there’s Prince Charles, now 60, who plans to fly his private jet on a multi-nation tour to promote the reduction of carbon footprints. Good thinking, Chuck. The man who preferred Camilla to Diana will inherit the position he’s waited for all his life just as everyone else his age is superannuated. And these few are but the merest lunatic fringe of the whacko ruling class that has carried on madly for centuries at British public expense.

England is a country where cross-dressing is considered high comedy. Bangers and mash passes for haute cuisine. They drink their beer warm. And the Spice Girls are thought of… at all. The best-known British ambassadors worldwide are the football hooligans who bash and brawl wherever they travel.

British neurosis is embedded in their language. “Balmy” is a British word that applies to much of British culture. Only a society of whingers and wankers could come up with words like “whinger” and “wanker.” But by now any Brits who may be reading this screed will have their knickers in a knot. Or maybe, a twist.

England is currently suffering “the highest teen pregnancy rate in western Europe, a binge drinking culture that leaves drunk teens splayed out in the streets and rising knife crime that has turned some pub fights into deadly affairs. The number of robberies carried out with knives rose 18 percent for the third quarter of 2008 compared to the year before, according to government figures released in January,” writes Gregory Katz in The Huffington Post. “In the latest symbol of what some are calling ‘broken Britain,’ 13-year-old Alfie and his 15-year-old girlfriend Chantelle became parents last week,” says Katz.

The British are enduring an ongoing identity crisis. In The Guardian recently, Paul Kingsnorth called his country’s dilemma “the fate of an imperial power which long ago lost its empire, became home to many of its former victims, and as a result was both ashamed and unsure of itself.

“What is Englishness’?” asks Kingsnorth. “Having to constantly answer this question is a key feature of our national identity… Englishness, in other words, can be identified by a need to constantly ask what Englishness is…” Sheesh.

Which brings us to Winston Churchill and Sherlock Holmes.

The British are not entirely wrong about their cultural icons. Churchill was a mythic figure, as well as a flesh and blood human. He wrote history and enacted it. As both an author and a public official he was a maker of myth. His rhetoric elevated historic moments into legend: “Blood, sweat and tears… Our finest hour… Never have so many owed so much to so few… An Iron Curtain has descended…” etcetera

Perhaps the British already considered Churchill mythical when they turned him out of office, just after he’d brought them through World War Two. Maybe they wanted to put the war’s suffering behind them. And Churchill – who personified their struggle – was too strong a reminder. Turning the man into myth put a salutary distance between those dark days and a more hopeful future.

But how could most Britons believe Sherlock Holmes was real? While it’s true that Arthur Conan Doyle invented Holmes in the 1880s, he could not kill him off. He tried, but then had to resurrect him by popular demand. First incarnated on the stage by American actor William Gillette, Holmes has proved a remarkably durable creation.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Holmes is the “most portrayed movie character” with at least 70 actors having played the part in more than 200 films. Such ubiquity lends him credence, as do the societies formed in his honor, like The Baker Street Irregulars. Members play what they call “The Great Game,” pretending Holmes is real. In 2002 the Royal Society of Chemistry inducted Holmes as an honorary member, the only fictional character so honored.

If the chemists can claim him as one of their own, why not the British public? A brilliant observer and deductive reasoner, Holmes liked to say, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Considering the absurdities and corruption that pervade modern political and cultural life, it is comforting to think that a man of Holmes’s superior powers of thought, however arrogant, quirky and addicted (he’s still a Brit!), once helped steer society straight.

The “Churchill myth” and “Holmes reality” may be wishful thinking. But Americans can sympathize. Any day now I hope to find out the Bush years were just a bad dream. What I think our country really needs next is the kind of iron-fisted leader who has served us so well in eras past: Philip Marlowe say, or maybe Popeye.

Benedict is the Vatican ’s own George W. Bush — a divisive ideologue who pretends to foster goodwill — as long as you agree with him. Since his election to the papacy in 2005, Ratzinger has affirmed his opposition to a woman’s right to govern her own body and to any form of birth control except abstinence. No condoms, period. From a church leader of millions, such sentiments — ignoring overpopulation and the spread of HIV — are irresponsible at best.

Benedict’s brand of Christian brotherhood was on full display in 2006 when he quoted a 14th century text to say” “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will only find what is evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” If that was his way of “reaching out” to Muslims, it failed, as it failed to address the equally, if not surpassingly, barbaric behavior on the part of the Roman Catholic Church during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Benedict should be apologizing, not accusing.

Besides insulting Muslims and Jews, Benedict refused to meet with the Dalai Lama, a prominent Buddhist leader, in 2007. Also that year, in Brazil , the Pope proclaimed that the native populations of South America had been “silently longing” for the Christian faith colonizers brought to that continent. Incredibly, he said that “the proclamation of Jesus and his Bible did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”

Several South American political leaders found Benedict’s historical revisionism wildly disingenuous; pointing out that the Catholic Church had in fact enabled “one of the most horrific genocides of all humanity” in the Americas. Like Bush and Cheney. does Benedict really believe infallibility is an elective office? His views are as medieval as the institution he serves.

Pope Benedict has found various ways and occasions to condemn homosexual behavior. Before he was pope, Ratzinger opined that homosexuality is a “more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil….” He also said it “was not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account.” Last December the Pope decried homosexuality as “a violation of the human order.” Whatever happened to the Biblical injunction: Judge not, lest ye be judged? He reads the Good Book as selectively as any other self-styled theocrat, e.g., Bush ignoring Thou shalt not kill.

Of course the pontiff is entitled to his bigoted views. But he is polluting our moral and political atmosphere by foisting his backward, mean-spirited opinions on the rest of us. He is preventing his church from entering the twenty-first century as a full partner in the world community, with respect for those who hold divergent views or values. If he cannot help promote peace, harmony and constructive dialogue on this diverse, troubled planet of ours, he needs to shut his sanctimonious trap.

Such transparently poisonous nonsense would seem ludicrous on its face to all but the most deluded partisan right-wing warriors. But McCain — who surely knows better — is courting and grooming “Joe” as an attack dog, to say things the candidate himself prefers not to utter.

By accosting Obama on a public street, thus making it into the news cycle, and then becoming a point of contention in a presidential debate, Wurzelbacher ascended from a well-deserved obscurity to fifteen minutes at the pinnacle of presidential politics as an apparent arbiter of common taste: the Average Joe. But his inflammatory views make him more pox than vox populi.

Joe is but the latest and least vetted of many incredible opinionators who commandeer media platforms in this campaign from which to bestow their “wisdom.” Media outlets pay big bucks to individuals who have disgraced themselves or disgraced the system or simply failed upwards from unsuccessful political careers to paid punditry.

We have a minor tradition of convicted felons turning to media for a living. Oliver North and Gordon Liddy are examples of political abusers, crooks and liars who now offer their opinions as talk-show hosts. As long as they have an audience their employers will keep paying them. But who in the world listens to those clowns?

Karl Rove has probably done more to demean and subvert the democratic processes in the United States than anyone in recent memory. He has slandered opponents, politicized government and promoted war as a campaign tactic. He has flaunted Congressional subpoenas with apparent impunity. Some hail his political “genius” for getting George W. Bush into office twice. But Rove has no moral credibility.

We don’t need to ask Rove the question Joseph Welch put to Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” We already know he does not. But instead of answering for his many crimes in Congress or in courts of law, Rove pontificates about Obama’s fitness for office or McCain’s campaign strategies for megabucks on the Fox network and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Why would anyone trust anything this scumbag has to say?

Unlike Karl Rove, Robert Shrum has not undermined the democratic system with illegal or mean-spirited tactics. But neither has he won any of the various Democratic presidential campaigns he has advised over the years. Yet here he still is, after publishing his memoir entitled No Excuses, offering advice to candidates and voters alike through The Huffington Post and various op-ed pages. Why should anyone listen?

And why should anyone pay attention to William Kristol, the neo-con sage whose track record on issues makes Shrum look Solomonic? Kristol has wrought more than enough destruction as a cheerleader for the misbegotten Bush-Cheney junta wars in the Middle East. He apparently pushed for Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate. Do we really need to hear more from this discredited bozo in the pages of The New York Times? Enough already.

Assessing the veracity and gravitas of most radio and television commentators, we are confronted by an appalling paucity of perceptive political observation. Fox offers nothing but white noise, in the racial and the aural sense. Talk radio whips ditto heads into emotional frenzies that the “hosts” themselves don’t really share. Their humongous salaries put them in another, higher economic class than the listeners they stir up. Theirs is an exercise in populist cynicism and professional expediency.

We tend to gravitate toward mainstream media and internet sites whose opinions we already share. But the myth of the uncommitted, undecided voter provides a rationale for shrill, outrageous stories and charges that bid to change our minds and our votes. Along with the unreliable mainstream media commentators, the marginal mumbles of Joe the Plumber only add to the uncivil, uninformed babble drowning out any meaningful discussion of urgent issues we can no longer afford to ignore.

Despite the president’s record low approval rating, surveys that reveal more than 80% of Americans think the country is headed the wrong way and almost as high a percentage who believe the war in Iraq is “a mistake,” Congress has consistently enabled all these horrors, even with the Democratic majority that entered the House and Senate in 2006.

We have — perhaps — finally understood that it is time to reverse the lazy voting habits that provide U.S. politicians with a higher rate of return to office than the apparatchiks of the old Soviet politburo. It is time to hose down the Augean stables of politics-as-usual. Throw the rascals out, every single one of them. Political party affiliation must no longer be the criterion for electing officials. Incumbency is the only crime that matters.

That same Rasmussen poll shows that only 49 % of voters “believe that the current Congress is better than individuals selected at random from the phone book.” Right. Fed up does not begin to describe it. This is a great chance to clean House — all of it — and make a rousing start in the Senate. It really matters much less who comes in than who goes out: everyone associated with the last two, four, six, eight or more years of legislative malfeasance and governmental dread. No one who has ever been wined or dined by corporate lobbyists or aspires to become such a creature (a la Trent Lott) should be eligible to return to Washington suck up more swill from the public trough.

A favorite Berzerkley bumper sticker said: Nobody For President. In a spirit of phonebook populism I say: Anybody (Else) For Congress.

Nancy Pelosi is the perfect target, a Bush enabler extraordinaire, despite the wishes of her San Francisco constituency. She took impeachment off the table. Let’s take her off the menu. She voted to bail out the fat cats. Let’s throw her overboard. Cindy Sheehan is running for Pelosi’s seat on an independent ticket. Perfect. Republicans and Democrats should be replaced by third, fourth or fifth party candidates wherever possible. Members of the two dominant parties are tainted a priori with guilt by association. They cannot hear the voices of anyone but their own corporate patrons. Raus, bitte.

“If they’re in, toss ‘em out,” could be a catchphrase of the anti-incumbency movement. It is clearly already a movement in American hearts, simply in need of national co-ordination. Bye-bye, Mitch McConnell and Barney Frank. Adios, Dan Burton and John Boehner. Don’t let the swinging door hit your butt on the way out, Steny Hoyer and Ted Stevens. Here’s your hat and what’s your hurry, Roy Blunt and Connie Mack. Get ready for that heavenly Roll Call, John Murtha and Tom Tancredo . . .

What a glorious vision, all those lifer political hacks filing off into a well-deserved oblivion like the legislative lemmings they are. alle-flippin-lujah. Time for Mr. Smith to come back to Washington and drive the toads out of Toad Hall. So let’s grab pitchforks and torches, head for the voting booths and scourge the incumbent monsters from our political landscape while we still possess the power to do so.