President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the . . . → Read More: If you really loved America, you would have died on 9/11]]> All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity.

President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying.

Of course that’s not what Obama meant. He meant that appearances to the contrary, America is not a nation of torturers, bullies, shrieking cowards and bomb-flinging xenophobes.  Not a nation that glorifies the work ethic while scorning the worker. Not a nation that worships the wealthy and demonizes the poor. Not a nation that saves its banks and leaves its ordinary citizens to fend for themselves in an economic wasteland.

I was living in Hawaii, 5000 miles from New York City, when the planes flew into the towers. Hawaii, even Honolulu, often seems to have little connection with the United States—more like a self-governing colony, possibly a dependent, but not a state. Most of the people I talked to about the attacks on the day and in subsequent weeks regarded them as horrifying and tragic but not as an assault upon themselves as citizens.

It was a distant disaster. Not so for everyone, of course, but for a lot of people. I remember reading a letter to the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin from a woman, I think from Michigan, who had been forced to overstay her Hawaii vacation while the flights were grounded. She was resentful because so many businesses in Waikiki weren’t flying American flags in the tragedy’s wake.

Maybe that’s a product of Hawaii’s history, with barely more than a century passed since the forcible US annexation of the country, and less than a half century passed since statehood. Maybe it’s the prime chunks of real estate still occupied by the US military, who were, in even more recent memory, using a historically and religiously significant island for target practice.

The idea that the attacks were a response to US behavior seemed immediately plausible in a place where US behavior had recently been considerably less than ideal. Empires breed resistance; the difference between the US empire and ones that preceded it is that ours exists in a day when attacking the imperium on its home ground is relatively easy.

A few years ago, New York Times resident moron Tom Friedman allowed as how Americans had collectively gone nuts after 9/11. Certainly he did, and a lot of other people did, but not everyone. Anyone who didn’t go nuts, though, and went public with their sanity, could count on being scorned and marginalized and bullied by the hysterics and cowards who came into their own on that day.

God has taken center stage. The first words Obama spoke at the ceremony were a fragmentary quote from Psalms: “The Bible tells us — “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

The full line is “For his anger endureth but a moment; in His favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Linking 9/11 to God’s wrath is something one might, a few years ago, have expected more from Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson and less from Barack Obama. But here we are.

Obama closed his speech as he began it, reprising the quote from Psalms and saying, “With a just God as our guide, let us honor those who have been lost, let us rededicate ourselves to the ideals that define our nation, and let us look to the future with hearts full of hope.”

Obama is not a careless orator, or a thoughtless one. Bookending the speech with quotes from the Bible, ending it with a shoutout to God as the guide for our nation, wasn’t an accident. It was an homage to the fundamentalist conception of a Christian nation, and it’s the last thing anyone listening, of any religion or none, should have wanted to hear.

But here we are.

If 9/11 was, as so many people wish it to have been, the fuel for this country’s terrible beauty, then let’s mark it as that. Let’s make a monument of an endless loop of the towers standing on that clear day and then hit and then tumbling down upon the dead, and sell tickets so the fools who wish for some sort of glory arising from the day can fling themselves on the eternally smoldering rubble and hope that their deaths may one day precipitate the same kind of homicidal desperation among the people whose fears and anger matter in this land.

Thank you, good night and God bless this Blog.

Updated 9/24 to resolve a point of theological distinction: originally I described the opening line as including a quote from a Christian psalm.

Thet thar is an actual headline from an actual post at the Atlantic Wire, which has supplanted Slate as the silliest respectable (in the social society sense) daily commentary site of this infant century. The theory is that if the president gives Republicans most . . . → Read More: Republican Face: Our Most Precious Natural Resource!]]>

Thet thar is an actual headline from an actual post at the Atlantic Wire, which has supplanted Slate as the silliest respectable (in the social society sense) daily commentary site of this infant century.

The theory is that if the president gives Republicans most of what they want in the debt-ceiling extortion scam they’re running, then they won’t have to be embarrassed by not getting every single fucking thing that they want. Which is no doubt true. And as a special bonus feature, Republicans having reluctantly accepted Democratic proposals to cut Medicare will run against Democrats on the the issue. “They cut Medicare. We want to preserve it.”

All well and good. The writer was meant to parrot what she’d been told and then mix it about a bit so it sounds as though she’d given some thought to the matter, and that’s what she did. She gets good marks. But it’s not yet illegal to actually think about an issue, not just pretend, so we have to take marks away for her failings on that front.

In any event we know that as we speak, the president has seized the Speaker of the House by the throat and is saying, “Look here, you bastard: we’re going to give you what you want and not a great deal more!”

Not too long ago I got an invitation to join an email list of progressive movers and shakers. I am the very definition of not a mover and shaker . . . → Read More: Why I want to rain pissed off people down on Washington]]> Not just Washington, because getting there isn’t practical for a lot of people. State capitols too, and wherever else a lever would do some good.

Not too long ago I got an invitation to join an email list of progressive movers and shakers. I am the very definition of not a mover and shaker but I joined anyway. There’s limited agreement on what a progressive is but we’re getting closer to a unifying theme. These are some serious people, some of whom I had heard and others I hadn’t. They do serious stuff often involving money and political campaigns and academic things and, to a limited extent, organizing. The general thrust is creating a progressive infrastructure with which to reorient American politics. Which is a good thing.

There are a few labor people involved and some more coming, but organizing in the classical sense isn’t a priority for most of the participants. I think mass actions are among the best tools available to bring about rapid change on particular issues; to bring those issues to the forefront in the minds of our friends and neighbors and to bring some considerable and one hopes eventually unbearable pressure to bear on those Washington insiders of whom we hear so much.

I’ve been told with various degrees of emphasis that mass actions aren’t that great a tool. Specifically, the times aren’t ripe and the ROI is low. Return on investment. Yikes. A few people have said organizing for mass actions is a fine idea but not in isolation. That’s a sentiment with which I agree. There has to be some plan for what to do with people’s attention once you have it. Inviting them to pile on is good but you want to enlist them for the long term.

So a few people, but generally not. In some instances the response was patronizing, and in one or two, borderline vituperative.

A lot of the discussion is about tactics. Somebody recently said something about tactics which I found not really defensible, and other people seconded it, so I wrote an email about it (and got a couple of heartening responses!) which I’m reproducing here because I’m a bit of a narcissist, on good days.

One note Johnny, that’s me.

Somebody quoted Stalin’s one death=tragedy/10 million=statistic as an argument for promoting individual stories of hardship with which people can identify. But Stalin’s 10 million were what eventually drove Communists and Socialists in the US away from support for the Soviet Union. One death, they could have said “It’s only one death; what’s that in the big scheme? Sometimes it’s necessary that people die.” 10 million, and they ultimately said “This is horrible, this is unthinkable; it’s too much murder.” Those deaths on that scale were inescapable and outweighed any lingering admiration for the fight the Soviets put up against the fascists, and any sympathy for their losses in that fight.

Well, one unemployed person struggling is one unemployed person struggling. One unemployed person can be dismissed. “Gosh, that’s so sad.” One unemployed person is not the face of millions, she’s the face of one. When people see her, they don’t see millions; they see her. When politicians see her, they see her. She’s one vote. She’s one constituent. She’s the person constituent services are designed to help. “Don, call the Springfield office and see what they can do for her.”

One unemployed person can be and usually is attacked and marginalized by the opposition. It doesn’t take much to smear one person; it takes a monumental effort to restore her image. One unemployed person can be counterbalanced by one person who lost her job and created her own business. “Losing my job was the best thing that ever happened to me.” That’s what unemployed people do, if they’re worth a shit. They seize the day! They make lemonade out of lemons! It’s the American way! Only losers don’t bootstrap their ways out of trouble. But you’re not going to find 10 million people who say losing their jobs was the best thing that ever happened to them.

This is why I am so keen on organizing. Somebody else–several someones else–mentioned the failure of Democrats and the President to go all carpe diem on the current crisis when the moment to do so arrived. You know what would have helped? A million unemployed people gathered in Washington all telling their stories to their elected representatives at once. A hundred thousand losing their homes and telling their stories to their representatives at the same time. That would still help. But how many buses has Arianna Huffington chartered to bring unemployed people, or people losing their homes, to Washington? I remember her chartering a bunch of buses for that tragic clown show with Jon Stewart but I don’t remember her chartering any buses for a rally of unemployed people or newly homeless or people struggling to stay in their homes. They aren’t going to show up on their own in their isolation.

I remember the Machinists trying to put together that union of the unemployed, but that’s an online effort and so far as I know it hasn’t amounted to much although it’s still in progress. Organizing people requires the laying on of hands. That’s why you have things like Netroots Nation, so you can see each other and shake hands and talk, and see each other’s eyes. That’s what works for political campaigns. Get out the vote efforts are people getting other people to the polls. Knocking on their doors, picking them up in vans. Calling people works, and talking to them in person works even better. Politicians go out to shake hands. Physically touching somebody works. Being in the room works. Looking in their eyes works. That’s why Republicans try so very hard to fuck with get out the vote efforts.

People are dropping off the map every day. People hit their 99 weeks every day. Somebody else brought up the subject of economy-related suicides. No doubt there are a bunch of suicides nobody except friends and family know about. No doubt there are a bunch that the people involved tried to present as accidents so that their life insurance would hold. It’s not as though the people in line behind them can wait around for the success of a generational effort to transform the political orientation of Congress. That effort is a good thing, vital to sustain whatever short-term gains can be made. But.

People. Need. Help. Now. Today, this instant. A lot of them won’t get it before they’ve lost everything. That’s what getting help requires these days. You don’t get Medicaid until you’re destitute. You don’t get welfare money until you’re there. You don’t get food from the food bank until you’re there. You don’t get food stamps until you’re almost there.

One person in isolation gets hysterical or irrational because there’s nobody there. Sooner or later, a lot of people who are unemployed begin to doubt themselves. Maybe I’m just stupid or useless. Maybe I’m just weak. Maybe things will never get better. Maybe suicide really is a workable option. Maybe it’s the best option. Maybe it’s the only option. People feel better when they’re part of a group undergoing the same thing. The larger the group the more assurance they have that they’re not out of work because they’re stupid or weak or otherwise defective. The more support they have, the more energy they have. The more they feel that their anger is justified and shared. The more focused they are.

You don’t get large groups of people together by accident. You just don’t, especially when the people are vulnerable and defenseless and ground down by their circumstances and exhausting themselves trying to keep their faces turned away from the abyss. There are 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the country now. There are more than 40 million living in poverty; the percentage of working-age people in that category is higher now than any time since the early 1970s when the benefits of the War on Poverty peaked. There’s some overlap of course, but even so that’s a lot of people, and there are still more who are impoverished but don’t slide under the absurdly low poverty line.

That’s a lot of people, and they’re in every community, every gender, every race, every religion. Put them together. Help them feel good. Help them do good. Help them not take no shit no more. Train people in the laying on of hands and then send them out to do it. Put flyers up in shop windows and on telephone poles. Unemployed? You’re not alone. Join us, in the church basement or the union hall. You hate unions? That’s okay, we’ll help you anyway. Knock on doors. Know somebody who’s unemployed? Tell them about us. Unemployed yourself? Here’s a flyer. We’re having a get-together. Little food, little company, a chance to get together with people who know what you know. Share some war stories. We’ll call to remind you, maybe give you a ride if you need it. Maybe we can do something about this.

And etc. Lay on the hands. Not everybody responds to it but a lot of people do.

Anyway. That’s what I’m thinking.