DEAD PARROT

Number 26 -- Saturday, May 24, 2003

WANTS AND PASSIONS

Cotton Mather, the Ayatollah of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was not an agreeable man. Once, having preached a two-hour sermon in front of four or five thousand people to a girl about to be hanged for killing her illegitimate child, he was so pleased with himself that he rushed a copy to the printer while the murderer was still dangling from the gallows. To pad the thing into a saleable booklet, he appended accounts of other executions to which he had been privy and of the comfort that he had offered the criminals at the end. Historian Vernon L. Parrington tells the story, adding that Mather's diary "is a treasure trove to the abnormal psychologist... What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that were forever spying out occasions to magnify self!"

Mather is said to have been particularly interested in the crime of sodomy and to have searched his conscience deeply over the fate of some chickens that a fellow Bostonian had abused. That the sodomist must die was not in doubt, but what about the poultry, innocent in one respect yet defiled before the Lord? In such rarefied moral speculation, he is the direct lineal ancestor of Ayatollah Rick Santorum (R-PA), the senate's leading scourge of alternative lifestyles.

Highlights of Santorum's history, as summarized by Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch (5/1), include a stint as a lobbyist for the World Wrestling Federation and service in the House of Representatives, where he once explained his indifference toward environmental protection by telling a reporter that "Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now." With these credentials, he mounted to John Heinz's senate seat after Heinz was killed in a plane crash and soon, a rising young star, held third place in the Republican hierarchy.

A good deal has been written about Santorum's not-so-fatal interview with Lara Jordan of the AP on April 7, and the salient parts of the text have been reprinted in many places, including the New Yorker (5/5). Having once put his foot in his mouth, Santorum began to engulf himself python-fashion, working his way from a specious distinction between homosexuality and homosexual acts to a bizarre allusion to "man on dog" sex--at which point Jordan complained that he was "freaking [her] out." But the senator plunged on to the kernel of his argument: that in order to curb the degeneracy of the times, the state has the right to limit individuals' wants and passions "because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire."

A state that did not set some limits on its citizens would not be a state, so the question becomes which behaviors are to be curtailed and which are to be enfranchised. As an example of the "wants and passions" that Santorum and his party wholeheartedly encourage, consider the passion for driving large, heavy, overpowered automobiles. In a story on developments in the auto industry over the past two decades, the Times (5/3) reported that in comparison with 1981, the average American vehicle has 93 percent more horsepower, weighs 24 percent more, and goes from 0 to 60 mph 29 percent faster. But although fuel economy could have been improved 33 percent over this time if we had been willing to forego the improvements in "performance," it has instead declined to its lowest point since 1980.

Lobbyist Gloria Bergquist of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, has an explanation for this. "We have 30 models that get over 30 miles per gallon," Bergquist says, "but the top 10 most fuel-efficient vehicles are less than 2 percent of sales. I would call this report a consumer sales report. It shows what consumers are buying."

What Bergquist means is that her industry isn't responsible, because it just follows the customers' wants and passions. And whenever some radical legislator proposes setting strict standards for fuel economy, people like Santorum are the first to squeal about the threat to freedom and the American way of life. As long as what I'm making love to is a Ford Explorer, the rest of the world will just have to asphyxiate on the consequences. But the minute I decide to climb into my own bed with another man, the Ayatollah's beady eye will be pressed to the keyhole and his crooked and diseased mind will be churning.

HOW RIGHT-WING THINK TANKS THINK

The "Political Lexicon" column in DP #24 commented on the debased use of the word "credibility." Now Michael Ledeen, who holds the "Freedom Chair" at the American Enterprise Institute, has given this perverted concept what may be its ultimate expression. "Every ten years or so," Ledeen says (as quoted in Harper's, 6/03), "the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

BASHING MR. DASCHLE

Throwing against the wall may also be the preferred strategy for domestic political opponents, and Tom Daschle's fate should teach Democrats a lesson that will be important in next year's election: the more timid your criticism, the harder they throw you. When Daschle mustered the temerity to say, at the start of the Iraq war, that he was "saddened" by the failure of diplomacy, Republicans immediately cast him as the second coming of Benedict Arnold. The assault was so vitriolic that someone entering the story in the middle of it would have thought that the senate Democratic leader had been caught radioing American positions to Iraqi artillery spotters or slapping American POW's around in their hospital beds.

What Daschle SHOULD have said was not that diplomacy had failed but that Bush never had the slightest interest in seeing it succeed. In February and March, what passed for diplomacy was bullying the likes of Micronesia and Eritrea and Uzbekistan into line to provide political cover that would make war more likely, not less. Knowing that Tom Delay & Co. would throw him against the wall anyway, Daschle might as well have told the whole truth rather than the milktoast version.

Going limp doesn't help either. Though Daschle immediately stopped saying anything critical of the crusade in Iraq, he remains the target of a blistering partisan attack. A story broken by Roll Call and picked up by the New Republic (5/12) quotes a memo circulating among conservatives: "we propose to destroy Daschle's credibility (sic)" and "ultimately help end his political career." The memo previews an ad sequence in which folksy characters in a South Dakota barbershop spread lies about Daschle's position on the "death tax." To make the campaign seem an outburst of indigenous home-state feeling rather than the production of Washington carpetbaggers that it actually is, the sponsors have cobbled up a front group called the "Rushmore Policy Council."

And oh, yes--Rick Santorum, who seems to have something of a canine obsession, has called Daschle a "rabid dog." It all seems a bit harsh from a party whose leader entered office promising to bring a new "civility" to government.

THE ROAD TO BANKRUPTCY

As Bush barnstorms golf courses and plastics factories to build support for his tax cut, the mantra word that appears at least 12 times in every speech (Boston Globe, 5/14) is "jobs."

Even though 1.5 million jobs have evaporated since Bush's gigantic tax cut in 2001, he keeps on talking as if everyone accepted the premise that a further cut, the bigger the better, would put more people to work. This junior high school debating strategy--assuming as a given that which one's position requires one to prove--is called begging the question. In a weekly radio address this month, he tucked his wishful postulate discreetly into a subordinate clause:

"Since [congressional opponents of another mega-cut] already agree that tax relief creates jobs, it doesn't make sense to provide less tax relief and, therefore, create fewer jobs."

John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker (5/12), decides to run with the dubious premise a little bit and see where it takes him. Bush wants to cut a minimum of $550 billion and claims that the measure will create a million jobs by the end of 2004. In the unlikely event that it does so, Cassidy reckons, each new job will have cost the federal government $550,000 to "create."

If job creation were really the goal, this method would be stupefyingly wasteful. As Cassidy points out, a much more efficient means would be to keep taxes at their current level and distribute the money to the states, which could use each $550,000 lump to create eight or ten good jobs. They could rehire teachers and teachers' aides and cops, keep libraries and parks open, lay on people to clean up waste sites, build schools, repair roads.

But job creation is NOT the goal. The goal is dismembering government and, at the same time, putting discretionary capital in the pockets of those who will soon be asked to pony up a record $200 million just for the primary phase (in which he will of course be unopposed) of Bush's re-election campaign (Times, 4/22). Dick Cheney is getting ready to pass the hat and Karl Rove is getting ready to apply the proceeds.

Meanwhile, those who oppose the tax cut are having some trouble making themselves heard. When Bush spoke at the aptly-named Airlite Plastics in Omaha, the Secret Service first told protestors that they could rally at the back entrance of the building, then reneged and forced them a block away (Grand Island Independent, 5/13). According to the Arizona Republic (5/13), cable providers in Phoenix and Tampa have refused to run a TV spot produced by MoveOn.org, the anti-war group that has moved on to contesting Bush's domestic policies. Though the spot re-enacts an actual incident--in Eugene, Oregon, last month, 50 parents really did sell their blood in order to raise money for a teacher's salary--the cable companies regard it as "too controversial" and "in poor taste." As for taste, the purveyors of stuff like "Spring Break in Cancun" may not be the most convincing arbiters. But the real chiller is the idea that you can have political discourse without controversy--which is, of course, equivalent to saying that you don't need political discourse at all.

[A later bulletin from MoveOn reports that Cox Cable in Phoenix reversed itself under pressure and began to carry the ad.]

POLITICAL LEXICON

GOODS ON GLOBALIZATION

Themes for pieces:

women's issues

globalization

labor

Kerry the Calculator/Lieberman the Tool/Edwards the Novice