Author: Ed Weathers

THE NEXT PRESIDENT’S FORTY-YEAR TERM

There has not been a new appointment to the United States Supreme Court in almost 10 years–the longest the court has ever gone without change. Change is coming. If you care about the future of this country, you will cast your presidential vote this November with the Supreme Court, above all other things, in mind.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist is 79 years old. He’s been on the court for 32 years. Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is 84 years old. He’s been on the court for 29 years. Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is 74 years old. She’s been on the court for 23 years.

Supreme Court justices are, of course, appointed for life. It is not unusual for a justice to serve for 20 or 30 years or more–witness the examples above. As life expectancy increases, the tenure of justices will likely increase, as well. Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a justice at the age of just 43. Don’t be surprised if he remains on the court for 40 years or more.

There is a good chance that the next president of the United States will get to appoint at least three, and possibly four or five, Supreme Court justices. Rehnquist and Stevens are old; they are almost certain to be replaced in the next four years. O’Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 71) have had some health problems in recent years; either or both could leave the court soon. Justices Antonin Scalia (68), Anthony Kennedy (67), and David Souter (64) are each at an age when serious health problems are not unusual.

What this means is that the man we elect president in November is likely to determine the fabric of the law in this country until the year 2034 and beyond. This election is not about the next four years, it is about the next forty years.

Forget foreign policy–a president can change that on a whim. (See George W. Bush’s about-face regarding the United Nations in the last year.) Forget economic policy–the economy generates too much of its own momentum to be controlled by politicians. Forget legislative policy–elections in the House of Representatives can turn that upside-down every two years.

But the rulings of the Supreme Court affect all of us immediately and for generations. A Supreme Court decision today will control the law for decades. Witness last week’s decision that, according to most analysts, left federal sentencing guidelines in chaos.

In the past, presidents appointed justices who defied “liberal” and “conservative” labels. President Eisenhower, a Republican, appointed Earl Warren, who was later villified by conservatives as a superliberal. President Kennedy, a Democrat, appointed Byron White, who voted against abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. But things are different today. If George W. Bush is elected, his neocon handlers will demand that he appoint justices as predictably and consistently “conservative” as Scalia and Thomas, who almost always come down on the side of the police and the corporations. If John Kerry is elected, he is almost certain to appoint “liberal” justices like Ginsburg and Stevens, who believe in individual privacy rights and strict limits on police powers.

Over the next thirty years, the soul of our nation will be up for grabs. Two things make that inevitable:

1) There will be more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil–terrorists never go away–and when that happens, it is almost certain that the response of the Congress will be to pass laws that put more and more power into the hands of the FBI, the CIA, the police, and other elements of the so-called “security” establishment. Congress will also pass laws that cede more unilateral, unchecked power to the executive branch. That is what Congress has always done in the face of fear; it’s what the Alien and Sedition Acts did in 1798 and what the U.S. Patriot Act did in 2001. Today our nation is closer to an imperial presidency, with the executive branch having greater unchecked powers and more control over the dispensation of “justice,” than at any time since the Sedition Act of 1918.

2) Technology will bring Big Brother closer to reality than ever before. Progress in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, computer technology, and surveillance systems will make it possible, even easy, for the government to find out everything about us and to use it in ways we can never discover. (A relevant digression: researchers are very close to increasing life expectancy to 120 years or more. The next set of Supreme Court justices may serve for sixty or seventy years or more. This is not science fiction.)

Together, these facts mean the next Supreme Court will decide where on the scale from fascism to democracy this nation will settle for at least two generations. These are some of the questions that that Supreme Court will have to answer in the next 40 years:

¥Does the executive branch, in the name of national security, have the right to read our e-mails without a warrant?

¥Does it have the right, without a warrant, to examine what we look at on the Internet?

¥Does it have the right to put cameras in every public place to watch every citizen’s public movements?

¥Does it have the right to use nanotechnolgy or heat-sensitive cameras to watch us through the walls of our bedrooms in the name of national security?

¥Should every citizen be required to carry a national I..D. card with our genetic fingerprint on it?

¥Should that national I.D. card contain a chip, like those in toll-booth E-Z passes, that can tell the government every store we’ve entered and every house we’ve visited? Should it also contain a global positioning chip that can tell the government where we are at any moment?

¥Should the FBI be permitted to create a DNA profile (from loose hair samples, for instance) of any citizen it wants, in the name of national security?

¥Should insurance companies or employers or police be given access to our DNA profiles, to find out if we might be prone to, say, heart attacks or alcoholism or criminal behavior?

¥Does the government have the right to “tag” people it thinks might have terrorist potential by implanting computer chips under their skin, perhaps at birth?

All this, of course, goes beyond questions that the Supreme Court must answer much sooner, in the next two or three years:

¥Is the so-called War on Terror really a war, when no war has been declared by Congress?

¥Does the “War on Terror”–an expression with no meaning in the law–justify giving the President unending war powers?

¥Can any President, ever, hold people in jail indefinitely, without giving them access to courts not controlled by the executive branch?

¥Can the executive branch order the torture of prisoners for any reason?

¥Can the FBI or the Transportation Security Administration maintain a list of people who are not allowed to fly on airplanes?

Let me finish with a current real-world example of the kind of issue the next Supreme Court will have to decide. Today, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security fund a program called “Matrix,” which stands for “Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.” The Matrix program includes a computerized data-mining system that provides state and federal agencies with massive amounts of information about U.S. citizens. Recently, the company that came up with the Matrix data-mining program provided the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service with a list of 120,000 people in the United States who have “high terrorist factor scores.” Because of their names, their ethnicity, their neighbors, their divorce records and who knows what else–their friends? their political columns?–120,000 people in the U.S. are now on a list. You may be there for reading this. I may be there for writing it. The government isn’t really saying how the list was determined or who is on it. They’re not saying if the list is being used to decide whose luggage gets searched at the airport or whose emails get read or who gets stopped in traffic. Very little has been revealed about Matrix.

The current administration doesn’t want you to know about Matrix, but it is real. (For more on the subject, go to http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18311890 or http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14257&c=130 .)

Sooner or later, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide if Matrix represents a constitutionally appropriate defense of national security or an unconstitutional threat to the privacy of American citizens. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, George Bush’s declared favorite justices, are on record as saying that the U.S. Constitution does not give American citizens the right to privacy. For the sake of your children and grandchildren, you might remember that when you vote in November.

AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL

In the environs of Lake Woe is Me(mphis), all tax increases are “modest,” all spending cuts are “severe” and politicians not up for reelection use “only” in front of words like “ten million dollars” at an above average rate. But when incumbents are shaking hands and kissing babies, not a discouraging word is heard about taxes or spending.

They talk about their experience in office and ask us to trust them for another term. They spend mounds of money to buy ad space and airtime to detail the successful programs they have overseen. But one thing they do not talk about is the limits of government and more importantly, the limits of government spending. Neither do their opponents because voters donÕt elect people who tell them what theyÕre not going to get. Nobody ever comes to power by promising too little.

Recent op-ed space was provided by The Commercial Appeal to our county mayor, sheriff and district attorney to publish earnest requests to keep their budgets intact. Other public officials have joined the refrain with their equally heartfelt pleas. All imply that chaos will reign in the streets if these “essential” services are so much as nicked in the imminent budgetectomy.

This is not an attack on Misters Wharton, Luttrell and Gibbons with whom I became acquainted in 2002 when I ran for the state legislature. They are ethical and devoted public servants. Nor is this an anti-government diatribe.

Although I ran on the GOP ticket, I am not the kind of Republican who thinks that the only good gubmint is a dead gubmint. I like to remind even the most ardent opponents of a centralized bureaucracy, that the U.S. military, inarguably the finest fighting force in the world, is run by the same government they so despise.

\And I have no doubt that these men sincerely believe that everything they do is vital. But so does every politician who cannot fathom that taxpayers might actually tire of being held hostage by veiled public sector threats that without more money, the sky will fall.

There is, however, a legitimate limit to what can be provided by government. There is also a limit to what can be demanded of taxpayers. A wish list by elected officials that contains more and more “essential” services every year cannot co-exist with a growing resistance on the part of citizens to bankroll SantaÕs groaning bag of goodies every budget season. It is impossible to make every boy and girl constituent happy.

A couple of centuries ago, the British political philosopher Edmund Burke opined that taxes are what we pay to live in a civilized society. A couple of decades ago, the American political satirist P.J. OÕRourke quipped that giving money to government is like handing your car keys and a bottle of bourbon to a teenage boy. Neither man is wrong.

It is na•ve to believe that self-preservation at all costs is the sole province of the public sector. Anyone who has worked in corporate America will testify that managers throughout the ranks will do what it takes to protect their turf and never voluntarily reduce staff or cut spending. They do this because no department in an organization wants to be the one to suffer personnel cutbacks.

Why? Because the more people a division has, the bigger the budget. The bigger the budget, the greater the salary and personal power. The greater the personal power, the more dynamic the career of the manager in question. So, expecting the average executive in any organization to watch over someone elseÕs money is like asking Michael Jackson to babysit.

But a major difference between the public and private sectors is that a manager at Proctor and Gamble doesnÕt get to argue that without more marketing dollars for Tide detergent, the world will collapse under the weight of all that dirt. Cataclysm is the rhetorical stock and trade of government and crime and education are the favorite Chicken Little declarations. This budgetary season is no different.

So I have some suggestions that might work to take this out of the hands of those who cannot, for reasons of absolute subjectivity, manage to find even a penny to cut.

1. Determine how much of the budget must be eliminated to bring us back to the last time we operated in the black. Adjust this for inflation. This is the new budget maximum.

2. Calculate what percentage this reduction represents.

3. Demand that every division, including the executive branch, reduce personnel by this percentage across the job position spectrum; that is from the lowest ranks right up to hizzonerÕs staff.

4. Freeze these numbers at this level for a minimum of five years, at which time an increase would have to be presented at public forums and then voted on by the electorate. We read all the time about the gains in productivity created by technology and the many jobs that have been rendered obsolete. Funny how jobs never seem to disappear in the public sector.

5. Eliminate pay raises of any type until we are operating with a surplus and in the meantime permanently remove any automatic ways to increase pay across the board. Give employees raises if they do more each year with the same resources. Companies across America operate this way, having not only to eliminate raises to remain viable, but to reduce salaries in many instances. Two years ago, the company for whom I now work enacted a 10% pay cut across the board, including the president.

6. Eliminate COLAs. See above.

7. Increase the government workday by thirty minutes, with no additional pay. This ought to minimize the need for additional positions in the future. All salaried people in the private sector work when our bosses tell us with no regard to the clock, only to what must be done. We are not compensated for this. If we comply, we get to keep our jobs.

8. Require that all elected officials be employed in the private sector for at least ten consecutive years before they are eligible for public office. This would instill respect for the real world in ways that cannot be communicated except through experience. A majority of elected officials have spent most, if not all of their professional lives deriving monetary benefit, either in whole or in part, from the public sector.

9. Create a rotating board of unpaid citizens from all walks of life to oversee all government budgetsÑnone of these citizens can be nominated or chosen by elected officials. If they serve, they cannot benefit in any way from their tenure or ever run for office. This creates legitimate obstacles to an entrenched bureaucracy conferring its spoils on citizens for gain at a later time.

10. Assess a fine for any public official who uses the word “only” in front of a number followed by the words “million dollars” in the same sentence and deduct this from his salaryÑthe fine to be equivalent to the percentage by which he seeks to justify the increase.

OÕRourke likes to say that God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat because God is a rather demanding being who insists on accountability. Santa Claus, on the other hand, might make a list and even check it twice, but seldom distinguishes between the naughty and the nice. ItÕs time for government to realize that there is no Santa Claus.

FOOLS AND THEIR MONEY

As I predicted last week, the Republicans now want to put Ronald Reagan’s face on the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton, or on the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson. Another movement is under way to put Reagan’s face on half of all dimes, so he would share that currency with Franklin Roosevelt. Republican senators and congressmen are already preparing legislation to these effects.

I have an alternative proposal: Remove all political faces from all U.S. currency. Replace them with pictures of purple mountains, fruited plains, and shining seas.

The United States is supposed to be a country ungoverned by royalty or divine right. We don’t bow down to kings, we don’t kneel to queens. We have never had a saint elected to the White House, despite what Dick Cheney says about Reagan and my mother says about FDR. It is time we stopped worshipping our presidents. We should stop standing up when they enter the room. (As civil servants, they should stand for us.) We should stop addressing them as “Mr. President” and instead call them just plain “Bill” or “George.” We should, please, please, stop playing “Hail to the Chief” when they enter the room. And we should stop creating iconography that idolizes them, on our money or anywhere else. That way leads to imperial presidents who think they can start wars on their own, who feel no need to follow international treaties approved by congress, and who believe they can jail or torture whomever they please, the courts be damned. “Hail” is but a half-step removed from “heil.”

When it comes to virtue, I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for any president we’ve ever had, and that includes Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington. Of necessity, presidents are tough, ambitious politicians. Both the adjectives and the noun require them to do their work far from the realms of virtue. In terms of integrity, most presidents have been neither worse nor better than your average CEO.

I have known only one president virtuous enough to be put on a coin. His name was Terry Weathers. He was my father. (Yeah, yeah, sentimental slop. Forgive me this once: Father’s Day is next week.) My father was, for a time, president of the New York State School Boards Association. This office brought him not one Roosevelt dime nor one scintilla of power, but no one in any White House ever worked harder than he did, as an unpaid volunteeer, to fulfill his official duty, which was to try to improve the public schools in his state. There are thousands of other such selfless men and women who have been presidents of school boards, Little Leagues, and downtown improvement organizations. They deserve far more than a Reagan or a Kennedy to be on our bills and coins. Put those presidents on our money.

In case you weren’t paying attention, here are the people on our current currency:

Penny — Lincoln

Nickel — Jefferson

Dime — Roosevelt

50-cent piece — Kennedy

Dollar coin — Sacagawea, Eisenhower, Susan B. Anthony

Dollar bill — Washington

$2 bill — Jefferson

$5 bill — Lincoln

$10 bill — Hamilton

$20 bill — Andrew Jackson

$50 bill — Ulysses S. Grant

$100 bill—-Benjamin Franklin

$500 bill–William McKinley

$1,000 bill — Grover Cleveland

$5,000 bill — James Madison

$10,000 bill — Salmon Chase

$100,000 bill — Woodrow Wilson

Bet you didn’t know there even was a $100,000 bill. Actually, it was never in general circulation. It made a brief appearance in the 1930s and was traded only among Federal Reserve banks; it was as evanescent as Woodrow Wilson himself. How meaningful is it to have your face on money? The $10,000 bill has on it a forgotten man named after a fish (Salmon Chase was Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury). Since 1969, the largest paper money in general circulation has been the $100 bill. Poor McKinley, Cleveland, Madison, Chase and Wilson must have had worse press agents even than the inept U.S. Grant. At least Grant is still circulating.

And now the Republicans want Reagan in our pockets, too.

A nationally-syndicated editorial cartoon yesterday showed Reagan’s head towering above those of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. It was a funny cartoon, though I suspect the cartoonist was trying to be serious. Mount Rushmore is of course itself a bizarre and laughable monument to presidential idolatry. Presidential images would be better left to hang on dim stairway walls in musty federal buildings or to reside in shadowed nooks where backroom politics are perpetrated.

But the Mount Rushmore image did get me thinking. Thanks largely to the policies of Reagan and his neocon descendants, the rich today are richer than ever. Therefore, if we must put Ronald Reagan’s mug on our money, let’s do it right. Let’s put him head and shoulders above all other presidents: I hereby propose the Ronald Reagan million-dollar bill.

RIDING REAGAN’S COFFIN

Forgive me, but I am about to speak ill of the dead.

In the coming months, the Republican propaganda machine will shift into high gear. Their goal: to turn Ronald Reagan into a saint. Just watch. First will come the coffin in the Capitol rotunda. Then there will be a proposal to put Reagan’s face on the dollar coin. Next will come a demand that his statue appear on the Washington Mall. And at the Republican Convention in September — oh, just wait. The highlight of that week will be a long, elegiac video of Saint Ronald, with moving music, snippets of favorite speeches, and the voiceover of, say, Charlton Heston. When the video ends, there will be heard the rapturous cheers of the faithful.

Then George W. Bush will try to ride Ronald Reagan’s coffin back into the White House.

For that reason, it is necessary now to speak ill of the dead.

As president, Ronald Reagan was a mediocrity. He has left no legacy. He did not change the world in any significantly good way. His greatest achievement was to win a war with Grenada. He ran for president blaming Jimmy Carter for high gas prices and for letting Americans be taken hostage in Iran — both situations that no American president could have prevented. (If you believe otherwise, then you must blame George W. Bush for today’s high gas prices and for the 2,700 Americans killed on 9/11.) Reagan came into office spouting stories of welfare mothers driving Cadillacs–stories that, it turned out, were simply figments of his speechwriters’ ever-fertile imaginations.

On Reagan’s watch 241 marines were killed by terrorists in Lebanon. On his watch, Antonin Scalia, the most reactionary Supreme Court justice in generations, was placed on the bench (thereby negating Reagan’s admirable appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor). On Reagan’s watch, the U.S. supported and armed Saddam Hussein in Iraq. On Reagan’s watch the proposed Star Wars anti-missile system made us the laughing stock of the world military and scientific community, and America’s poorest schoolchildren were told that ketchup was a vegetable.

And on Reagan’s watch, the most insidious threat to the Constitution since Watergate took place: Iran-Contra. If Reagan knew that Oliver North, John Poindexter and their cronies were breaking the law in the Iran-Contra deal, then Reagan was a criminal. If he didn’t know, then he was merely a figurehead.

All the evidence points to the latter: that Ronald Reagan, as president, was in fact simply a figurehead–a voice, a grin and a head of good hair. An official inquiry by a nonpartisan commission later declared that Reagan just “didn’t understand” the Iran-Contra scandal and that while it was going on, the White House was “in chaos.” Just as his opponents had claimed before his election, Reagan wasn’t so much president as an actor performing the role of president. He didn’t need to understand the scripts. He simply had to read them aloud.

In this, George W. Bush is in fact the natural political heir of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, famously, refused to consider any national policy that could not be written down on a 3 X 5 notecard; Bush, it appears, refuses to read even that much. Reagan reduced national policy to two simple concepts: 1) taxes are evil and 2) the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire. Change “Soviet Union” to “Iraq/Iran/North Korea,” and “Evil Empire” to “Axis of Evil,” and you’ve got George W. Bush’s entire national policy. Just like Reagan, Bush sees the world as the Black Hats vs. the White Hats, and, beyond that, has almost no ideas of his own. Like Reagan, Bush simply reads aloud what his speechwriters put in front of him. George W. Bush is Ronald Reagan in miniature. Reagan was a better actor.

The Republican propaganda machine would have us believe that Ronald Reagan singlehandedly brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Soviet Union. This, of course, is nonsense. The Soviet Union fell apart because, as any political scientist, liberal or conservative, will tell you, it was the product of a flawed economic and political system and because discontented empires ultimately bankrupt their rulers. To the extent that any American president could claim some credit for the end of the Soviet Union, Reagan could claim only to be the last of eight Cold War presidents who had contributed to that end, beginning with Harry Truman.

No, Reagan left no meaningful legacy–nothing as significant as Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation or Richard Nixon’s overtures to China or Jimmy Carter’s lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.

Speaking of Carter, let me end with a true story. In 1989 (I believe it was), shortly after he left office, Ronald Reagan came to Memphis to deliver a speech to a group of businessmen. He read the speech, collected a reported $100,000 speaking fee, and immediately left town. That same week, Jimmy Carter came to Memphis. During his stay, Carter picked up a hammer and helped build houses for the poor as part of Habitat for Humanity. Carter received no money. That’s the difference, to my mind, between a pitchman and a statesman.

May Ronald Reagan rest in peace. He was, to all appearances, a genial man. But in the months to come, let us not be led astray. As president, Ronald Reagan was no saint.

REMEMBERED. At a 2001 local Republican event three revered nonagenarians Ð l to r, former city councilman Bob James, longtime Republican figure John T. Williams, and GOP activist Peggy Hemperly — posed for the camera. WilliamsÕ death last week and JamesÕ death earlier this month both occasioned generous tributes from a wide variety of friends and admirers.

PANOPLY:A fundraiser for District Attorney General Bill Gibbons at the midtown home of Rex and Johnnie Amonette last week turned out a large and diverse group of supporters. In this picture can be seen former Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout (far left) and guest-of-honor U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (second from right). Others include Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton (next to Gibbons), former mayoral/council candidate George Flinn (far right), state Sen. Mark Norris, and Republican national committeeman John Ryder. Harold Collins, a sometime aide to Mayor Willie Herenton, is poised at the door to admit late arrivals. One of those expected who did not arrive was U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr..

WOMAN TO WOMAN: U.S. Sernator Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D-AR) last week was the second speaker in the current yearÕs Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce ÒFrontline PoliticsÓ series, this year co-sponsored by the Memphis WomenÕs Foundation and featuring prominent women in politics. Here the senator talks things over with Memphis city council member Barbara Swearengen Holt.

LEGISLATIVE VETS. Three former members of the Tennessee General Assembly gathered last week at a fundraiser for Republican legislative candidate Chuck Bates. The three, all former state representatives, were (l to r) Harold Sterling, Chris Turner, and Larry Bates (father of the honoree). Another former legislator present at the affair but absent from this picture was Ed Williams, also a veteran of the Shelby County Commission. Sterling, a former assessor, is running again for his old job. Turner, now General Sessions clerk, is in a reelection race.

WHY I WON’T WATCH FAHRENHEIT 9/11

I rented Michael Moore’s movie Bowling for Columbine recently. After 15 minutes, I shut it off. Michael Moore’s movies make me squirm–but not for the reasons he intends. I squirm because I belong to that shrinking minority of Americans who don’t like to see people embarrassed in public.

Michael Moore embarrasses people in public, and I don’t like it. I’m not talking about public figures like Charlton Heston or George Bush or Roger Smith (the General Motors executive Moore eviscerates in Roger and Me). I have no problem with Moore pointing out the stupid, venal, or dangerous policies of actor-shills, presidents and corporate executives. No, I have a problem when Moore embarrasses ordinary citizens–a GM security guard, a bank clerk–in order to wring a little laugh from the audience or make a point that can be just as well made in another way. In the first fifteen minutes of Bowling for Columbine, for example, Moore goes into a bank that offers a free gun to anyone who opens a new account. He opens an account, asks for a gun, and gets it. Granted, this is a telling statement about how easy it is to get a gun in this country–from a bank, no less. But along the way, Moore also seems to be politely mocking the sweet teller who opens the account for him and the perfectly nice bank manager who hands him the gun. After he’s handed the gun, Moore then ambush-interviews the bank manager, peppering him with well-rehearsed questions about the socio-political correlativism of guns and banks. The manager, clearly not prepared to answer such complex questions on the spur of the moment, hems, haws and stumbles. We laugh at him. But which of us could answer such questions cogently without some time to think about them? Moore is trying to make a statement about guns in this country, but I came away from this segment angry, not about stupid American gun laws, but about rude American film directors. I felt sorry for the bank manager. That’s when I turned the movie off.

Public humiliation has become the most popular sport in America. Virtually every hit “reality” show on television is really a “humiliation” show. People get fired by Donald Trump, thrown off the island on “Survivor,” rejected by The Bachelor, and reduced to screaming fools on “Fear Factor.” We watch and laugh, or gloat, as if we were better than them. And then there’s the hugely successful “American Idol.” Don’t tell me that the viewing public watches “American Idol” to discover talented singers. No, you and I both know that we watch in order to laugh derisively at the poor fools who think they can sing, or dream they can dance, but who in fact have no talent whatsoever–unless you count their willingness to make fools of themselves in public. Okay, I’m pretty sure most of the talentless know they are talentless and just want their two minutes on national tv, but that doesn’t change the fact that Americans watch in order to laugh at them.

Public humiliation on television goes back almost to the medium’s origins. I still remember a show from the 1950s called “Queen for a Day,” on which women stood before the audience and told the pathetic tales of their lives–drunk husbands, children with polio, accidents in the kitchen–in order to earn the audience’s sympathy. The wife with the most pitiful tale won a refrigerator. I hated that show. It embarrassed me. In more recent years, we’ve had the “I Slept With My Boyfriend’s Dog” school of Jerry Springer television, which simply took the public airing of besmirched underwear to new depths.

The question now is this: Are Americans still capable of embarrassment? More importantly, are we capable of being embarrassed for someone else? Do we feel sympathy any longer for someone who has been or is being publicly humiliated?

I of course haven’t seen Michael Moore’s newest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which just won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. I understand from the reviews that the movie blasts the Bush administration for its ties to the Saudis and its failures before and after 9/11. That’s fine with me. A politician’s policies are fair game. Besides, no one can embarrass George Bush more than George Bush embarrasses himself every time he tries to speak off the cuff. (If I need to establish my anti-Bush bona fides here, let me say that I just sent the Kerry campaign a check for 2% of my annual income. If you haven’t done the same, you’ll have no right to complain if Bush wins and gets to appoint Scalia clones as the next three Supreme Court justices, thereby embarrassing the whole country for the next 30 years.)

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll agree with the politics of Moore’s new film. But not necessarily with the tactics. There’s one scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 that all the reviewers have mentioned as one of the “best” and “funniest” in the movie–”vintage” Michael Moore. It’s a scene in which Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and chief architect of the Iraq War, is preparing for an interview. Wolfowitz, unaware that his actions will later be seen by millions, sticks a comb into his mouth, wets it with spit, and then runs it through his hair. Apparently we are expected to laugh with gleeful superiority at this picture of the Bush administration’s biggest brain behaving grossly. But I wouldn’t laugh. I would simply be embarrassed for the poor man. After all, who among us doesn’t pick his nose when he thinks no one is watching? Who doesn’t bite his finger nails and spit them secretly into the corner of the motel room when he’s alone? Who doesn’t have some disgusting habit which, if revealed to our friends, would make us want to crawl away and die? I hate Wolfowitz’s unilateralism, his imperialist arrogance, and his conduct of Middle East foreign policy. Only Michael Moore could make me call Paul Wolfowitz “poor man.”

I don’t plan to see Fahrenheit 9/11. All the “news” in it is old news to anyone who reads and is interested in politics. Mostly, though, I don’t care to see people publicly humiliated. I would think by now that we Americans would have learned what a callous indifference to the humiliation of others can lead to. If you’ve forgotten, just take another look at the photos from Abu Ghraib.

TORTURE PORN

Here’s to the pseudo-literate Puritans of the U.S.A..

If you want to get through to the American public, don’t put it in words–put it in pictures. And if you really want the average American to perk up and pay attention, make the pictures about sex. From Janet Jackson’s nipple to Iraqi prisoners’ penises, nothing does it for us like sex, you betcha.

For two years now, organizations like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have been telling us that George Bush’s imperial drones have been abusing prisoners beyond the limits of the Geneva Conventions. These organizations have long warned that prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo are being humiliated, tortured and (in some suspect cases) murdered in the name of the War on Terror. The ICRC has issued regular press releases about prisoners being deprived of sleep for days, made to endure extremes of cold and heat, exposed to near-drowning, and tied up and forced to contort themselves for hours in positions of agony–all of which adds up to torture by anybody’s standards except, perhaps, those of Donald Rumsfeld. These warnings of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch have been in the newspapers and magazines for two years.

And for two years, Mr. and Mrs. America have paid no attention.

You see, like pre-literate three-year-olds, Americans need to see the pictures to understand the story.

America’s newspapers and magazines now know their proper role in the media arena: Their role is to tell Tom Brokaw, CNN, and Fox what pictures to show, so at least some small bit of the news can actually get through to John and Jane Q. America. Thank you, Seymour Hersh. Thank you, The New Yorker. Nobody reads what you have to say, but hell, if you can direct Peter Jennings and Bill O’Reilly to the pictures–especially if they’re pictures of piles of naked people with, ooh la la, leering young women in the foreground–we’ll sure as heck look at those.

Because Americans don’t read. And we love both sex and the shame it makes us feel.

Pseudo-literate. Puritans.

According to the U.S. Department of Education (USDE), 96% of Americans can in fact read. That’s pretty good, by world standards. But a quarter of those supposedly literate Americans could not, according to the USDE, “draft a letter explaining an error on their credit card bill” and at least another quarter could not follow the ideas in this column. (No jokes, please.)

Even those Americans who can read, don’t. According to the Pew Research Center (whose frequent, admirable polling work should be required reading for anyone in the media), in a recent survey, 68% of Americans say they are getting their main news about this year’s presidential campaign from television, while only 15% are getting it from newspapers, and just 1% are getting it from magazines. No wonder George Bush–the nation’s Illiterate-in-Chief–didn’t concern himself with the torture scandal until 60 Minutes put it on the air.

It’s even worse than that. According to the Pew poll, only 10% of Americans get any of their campaign news from magazines like Time and Newsweek, while fully 20% get it from “morning TV shows.” Maybe Seymour Hersh should just send his sources directly to Katie Couric.

He should make sure they bring pictures of naked people with them.

My guess is, if the only pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib showed fully-clothed prisoners being threatened by attack dogs or electrodes, the American public would have just shrugged the whole thing off by now. But bring sex into those pictures, and we suddenly weep and gnash our teeth in self-loathing. There’s nothing a Puritan loves better than to beat himself up over sex.

A psychologist friend told me last week that in some mental-health circles the theory has it that the American public is, in his words, “getting off” on the whole Abu Ghraib torture story. We are, according to the psychologists, both attracted to and repelled by the lascivious, sado-masochistic aspects of the scandal. We are titillated by the images of helpless, naked men forced to perform fellatio on each other and to pile into heaps of faux-homosexual activity. We are mesmerized by images of healthy young American women gazing at the penises of men tied up and hooded. But then, note the psychologists, we are also the spiritual descendants of the Puritans, whatever our denomination. And so we loathe ourselves for gaping at precisely what attracts us.

This is a persuasive theory. After all, what else can you expect from a nation that, on the one hand, has made Internet sex sites the biggest industry on the Web and, on the other, falls into a red-faced faint over JJ’s Superbowl Boob?

So perhaps that’s the real reason for our “outrage” over what happened at Abu Ghraib prison: We hate ourselves for loving Torture Porn. For the American public, what happened in Abu Ghraib is really a sex scandal. You watch: When the pictures of grinning young women in uniform and naked young men in bondage stop coming out, and the story is merely about suffocation, electrocution, and other forms of individualized terror, the American public will turn their attention somewhere else.

If it’s not in pictures and it’s not about sex, we just don’t care.

Case in point: On Friday, May 21, the Red Cross issued a press release stating that the United States may be holding prisoners on Diego Garcia, a small island leased from the British in the Indian Ocean. The Geneva Conventions call for the Red Cross to have access to all prisoners worldwide, but Rumsfeld and company have not allowed the Red Cross to check up on any of our prisoners outside of Afghanistan, Iraq or Guantanamo. (Other human rights organizations have warned that the U.S. may also be sending some prisoners to countries where they can be tortured by surrogate sadists, so American sadists don’t have to dirty their hands.) The prisoners in Diego Garcia, if there are any, are out of sight. That means, for the American public, they are also out of mind.

You probably missed this Red Cross press release. It was in the small print on the Internet, primarily on foreign press sites. The mainstream American media, it seems, have given up on such news. No sexy pictures.

Two weeks back, there was another nonsexy news item you might have missed: The U.S. State Department issued its annual human rights report. Originally, the report, titled “Supporting Human Rights and Democracy,” was scheduled to come out May 5, but then the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. White House pols arranged for the report’s release to be postponed for several weeks, fearing it might be, um, just a tad embarrassing. You see, this year’s U. S. Human Rights Report condemns 101 other countries for their human rights violations. When this was brought up in Mexico City at a recent international conference following the Abu Ghraib news, the audience laughed derisively.

And why not? Our Illiterate-in-Chief can barely bring himself to apologize for Abu Ghraib’s atrocities. Of course, this is the same president whose White House counsel, Albert Gonzales, two years ago actually recommended that we not abide by the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales, by the way, has been touted by neocons for the next appointment to the Supreme Court. Think of the laughter that will generate in the rest of the world.

So are the prisoners we hold on Diego Garcia being tortured by Americans? Are other prisoners, in other places we don’t know about, being tortured by proxies working under the guidance of Bush’s drones? Most Americans will never know, even if Seymour Hersh tries to tell us. We can only hope that among the soldiers and intelligence agents “debriefing” those poor souls are a few with their own digital cameras.