How We Betrayed What We Stand For – Part One

WC has argued for a long time that the United States betrayed its values and principles in its treatment of illegal detainees after 9/11. The conclusions are so clear that WC has been baffled by those who claim otherwise, or those who claim not to care. WC was appalled when both the Obama Administration and Congress failed to at least examine how and why it happened.

The Constitution Project assembled a Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It’s bipartisan, its members’ credentials are impeccable and its Report is out. And that Report is a devastating indictment of our country’s conduct. Without the power to compel testimony or the production of records, working solely from publicly available information, the Task Force has meticulously documented a pattern of behavior that constitutes war crimes.

While the Report contained specific Recommendations, it’s doubtful that our pusillanimous, ineffective Congress will act on them. Or even read them. But you, WC’s readers, should. Over the next few weeks, WC will review portions of the Report and offer his comments. 

Key Links: The Constitution Project / On-Line Report on Detainee Treatment

Finding 1

We engaged in torture in violation of international law and in violation of treaties to which the United States is bound. The flimsy excuses and justifications generated by John Yoo and David Addington were examined with care by the Task Force and unanimously rejected. 

The Task Force’s Appendix 1 supports in devastating detail the basis for this Finding.

Finding 2

Let’s be clear about this. The Task Force concluded that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are legally culpable for the torture and treatment of detainees. The details in Appendix 2 to the Report are detailed, gruesome and damning. An appallingly long list of other government officials went along with the pretexts and rationalizations; some even pressed for more “enhanced” techniques. The FBI, to its credit, refused to participate.

Worse, in a transparent implied admission of guilt, the White House tried to game our system of government, arguing that if the Geneva Convention applied to the military, it didn’t apply to the CIA, authorizing the CIA to engage in the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation.” The Geneva Conventions bind the United States, not “all of the United States except the CIA.”

The Task Force’s Appendix 2 establishes the elements of this finding beyond a reasonable doubt.

Finding 3

The second worst problem with torture as an information gathering technique is that it doesn’t work. The victims will say almost anything to make it stop. Many of the techniques were intended, over time, to make the victims pliable and suggestible. At that point, the detainees will adopt any suggestion.

And if the illegal detentions and street sweeps do pick up someone who is genuinely a terrorist, torture makes it impossible to  prosecute them for their crimes. The torture will come out at trial. Even the sorry excuses for trials before so-called military tribunals.

The Task Force acknowledges that it was not permitted to review classified information, and that the government claims it possesses valuable information obtained by torture that must remain classified. The excuse is thin. It’s unlikely there’s still a reason to hold whatever the torturers got secret and, in the circumstances, the burden is on the government to show anything was “extracted” that’s valuable enough to justify leaving criminals unpunished. Some of the claimed valuable information is more than ten years old now; it stretches credibility to claim declassification would jeopardize national security.

The Task Force turns next to the ongoing embarrassment that is the Guantanamo detention center. WC will take those Findings up in a later post. In the meantime, WC strongly recommends every thinking American read the Report. 

National Anthems

National anthems are one of the very odd aspects of modern culture. America’s national anthem is a bad poem by lawyer and very amateur poet Francis Scott Key called “The Defence of Ft. McHenry,” written in 1814. Key gave the poem to his brother-in-law, Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, who saw that the words fit the popular melody “The Anacreontic Song“, by English composer John Stafford Smith. It was the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians in London. The octave-and-a-half drinking song was popular in America at the time. Nicholson stole the tune, set Key’s poem to it and took the poem to a printer in Baltimore, who anonymously made the first known broadside printing on September 17. Much, much later, in 1931, it was made the national anthem.

The song celebrates the survival of a naval fort guarding Baltimore following the British Burning of Washington and the British Raid on Alexandria, Virginia, although you won’t glean that from the part sung at baseball games. While we only sing the first stanza, the national anthem in fact has four stanzas. The American national anthem is solemn, pompous, plodding and famously difficult to sing. It’s against the law to be disrespectful during a playing of the national anthem.

But sacred cows make the best hamburger, as the late Jay Hammond used to say. And no one is better at cutting down sacred cows than Terry Pratchett. The fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city on the Discworld, has an anthem, too. Unlike the U.S. anthem, the stanzas after the first one are largely reduced the “ner, ner, ner” since that’s what folks sing anyway. Here, in its glory, is the Ankh-Morpork National Anthem:

When dragons belch and hippos flee
My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee
Let others boast of martial dash
For we have boldly fought with cash
We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes
We own all your generals – touch us and you’ll lose.

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Morporkia owns the day!
We can rule you wholesale
Touch us and you’ll pay.

We bankrupt all invaders, we sell them souvenirs
We ner ner ner ner ner, hner ner hner by the ears
Er hner we ner ner ner ner ner
Ner ner her ner ner ner hner the ner
Er ner ner hner ner, nher hner ner ner (etc.)
Ner hner ner, your gleaming swords
We mortgaged to the hilt

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Hner ner ner ner ner ner
We can rule you wholesale
Credit where it’s due.

Ankh-Morpork boasts it has never been invaded. It’s true that invaders have entered the City many times (the City gates are rusted open), but in each case, after a few days they find they no longer own their horses or armor, and a month after that are just another minority with its own graffiti, ethnic restaurants and complaints. It shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s all there in the anthem.

In mocking national anthems, Pratchett is reminding us that patriotism is well and good, but that when it slips into jingoism, into chauvinism, that patriotism becomes dangerous, not just to other countries but to the health of our nation. Pratchett explored this in more detail in his terrific novel, Jingo [Amazon link]. The most virulent strain, American exceptionalism, is especially dangerous. Most recently, it got us into a horrific and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, as just one example.

There is much to admire in the United States. But there is room for improvement, too. Anyone who tells you, “My country, right or wrong,” is a fool or a liar, and not to be trusted. Pratchett coats the lesson with humor. WC isn’t sure that the super-patriots understand it’s a joke.

Something to think about the next time you have to listen to the national anthem.

WC Helps the GOP Out: Admitting the GOP’s Real Problem

WC will selflessly offer serious, substantive advice to the Republic Party. Why? Because it’s just too painful to watch. The poor thing needs help, if only to avoid having the Republican-led U.S. House drag the country into another recession.

Everyone who has read a self-help book knows the process. The first step to problem-solving is to identify the problem. The second step is to address the problem in a mature, competent way. And the third step is to take action to prevent the problem from recurring.

Step 1 – Identifying the Problem.

Recognizing the Problem

When was the last time you heard the Republicans mention the previous president? Acting as if there was no George W. Bush administration is a kind of bizarre denial. It’s pretty obvious why the GOP pretends Bush/Cheney didn’t happen. Here’s a partial list.

• The worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance.
• Two unfunded land wars in Asia.
• In the case of the invasion of Iraq, either a war based on an intentional lie or the most staggering intelligence failure in American history
• A huge cut in the U.S. income tax at the time of those two unfunded, multi-billion dollar wars
• An unfunded new Medicare prescription medicine mandate
• Deregulation of the housing finance industry, leading to the worst economic disaster since 1929.
• Unilateral abandonment of U.S. compliance with the Geneva Accords, government-sponsored torture and a host of war crimes.

Remember, WC said this was just a partial list. But, yeah, there was this very lengthy and very embarrassing series of utter failures by a guy who was a Republican. But the problem isn’t that a Republican president committed this horrifying series of blunders.

The problem is that the Republican Party won’t come to grips with that reality. The Republican Party pretends the 8-year Bush Administration didn’t happen. It’s an astonishing kind of group denial. If it happened in an individual that person might be diagnosed as neurotic.

Step 2 – Dealing with the Problem.

The Republican Party refuses to admit the problem exists, let alone that it is a problem or that the Party needs to deal with the horrifying mistakes of its former titular head. So you get embarrassing spectacles like Senator John McCain (R, AZ) accusing Charles Hagel, nominee for Secretary of Defense, when he says the Iraq War arose from faulty intelligence. Instead of attempting to defend the decision to go to war in Iraq, McCain accused Hagel of attacking the soldiers who had fought and died there. Because, you see, it wasn’t a Republican president who made the decision to send soldiers there. That guy doesn’t exist.

And you have the GOP challenging reform of financial regulation because it will “hurt the country competitively,” because the Great Recession wasn’t triggered by the failure to adequately regulate the financial sector. Because, you know, there was no failure to adequately regulate the financial sector because Bush-Cheney didn’t happen. The Great Recession is the fault of President Obama, or a Democratic Congress, because Bush-Cheney didn’t exist.

The over-stated, over-hyped “debt crisis,” the very tired horse the GOP has long since ridden into the ground, into shambling zombie-hood, is entirely the fault of President Obama because, you know, Bush-Cheney never happened.

It’s all a weird kind of denial. Andrew Sullivan has his proposed cure:

Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance, accept weak and false intelligence to launch a war they were too incompetent to fight or win, sat back as one of the worst hurricanes all but took out a major city, and was so negligent in bank regulation that we ended up with Lehman and all that subsequently took place.

These were not minor errors. They were catastrophic misjudgments which took an era of peace, surplus and prosperity and replaced it with a dystopia of massive debt, a lawless executive branch, two unwinnable wars, and a record of war crimes that had their source in the very Oval Office.

When will the Republicans hold themselves accountable for the things that have persuaded so many that this bunch of fanatics and deniers are unfit for government? When will they speak of Bush and Cheney and repudiate them?

WC thinks Sullivan’s treatment will happen the same day the Senator Imhofe introduces a carbon tax, which will be the same day Rep. Broun proposes a national holiday for Charles Darwin.

Some Republican needs to work up the courage to say, “Our party made grievous mistakes. We’ve moved beyond them. We’ve learned from them. Here’s how.” A group of Republicans needs to hold Congressional hearings on, at a minimum, how we got into the war in Iraq and the treatment of “detainees” by the United States. That should include the torture, the “extraordinary rendition” – outsourcing our torture – and the murder of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Under Bush-Cheney, the U.S. abandoned not just Republican values of conservatism and constitutionalism; it abandoned American ideals. The Republican Party has some soul-searching to do if it wants to reclaim those values and ideals.

Step 3: Preventing a Recurrence.

It’s easy to prevent a recurrence: don’t elect arrogant Republicans who think their immediate goals are more important than the Constitution. But WC is here to help the Republicans, at least this once, so let’s recast the solution this way: Republicans should ask themselves, and answer honestly: “Why am I doing this?” If the answer is to benefit anyone other than the country as a whole, they shouldn’t do it. If it’s for a lobbyist, a big campaign contributor, or their own kid, they shouldn’t do it. If it is for some platform item that reflects a special interest, they shouldn’t do it. If it benefits any of those folks, even incidentally, they should ask themselves if the benefit to the country as a whole is great enough to engage in self-dealing. And generally answer “No.”

Note this test works for Democrats, liberals, conservatives, progressives and Randites, too. It doesn’t work for Teabaggers, because they seem to be incapable of logical thinking.

Because when our elected officials take the oath of office, they swear to defend the Constitution, not their constituents. They swear to uphold the United Stats, not line the pockets of their family, friends and campaign contributors.

WC will now relax in the happy glow of service, utterly confident his advice will be totally ignored.

Americans Murdering Americans: al-Awlaki

AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Deployed on a Predator Drone

Here’s the lead paragraph from a New York Times article yesterday:

A federal judge in Manhattan refused on Wednesday to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Excuse me? “Died in a drone strike”? Don’t you mean “Was murdered in a drone strike”? Sure, the perp was the United States, but it was premeditated murder. Must be a typo.

You say that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist, a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being, who had decided his religion entitled him to murder and encourage others to murder innocent people? But WC has examined the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments to the U.S. Constitution with care and, so far as he can discover, there are no exceptions in the U.S. Constitution allowing the murder, without trial, of despicable, miserable excuses for human beings. The Fifth Amendment, for example, says “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” There doesn’t seem to be an exception for despicable, miserable excuses for human beings. It says “no person.”

In fact, what sets us apart from most other countries is that we give the worst kind of thugs the full panoply of constitutional rights. The United States, at least until recently, abhorred and refused summary executions. Timothy McVeigh, the homicidal goon who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killed 168 people, including children attending day care. He seems by any sensible measure to have been a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being. Yet we indicted, tried and convicted him. We did not simply shoot him when there was some evidence linking him to a horrific crime.

Any sensible, thinking citizen should be very worried if the U.S. government, without trial, operating completely in secret, can simply kill someone because they are a suspected criminal.

One of WC’s anarchist friends asks the question this way: when is a government authorized to do something it forbids its citizens to do? You and I are forbidden under pain of criminal prosecution from killing someone because they are a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being. (WC notes the NRA may feel differently about this. But that’s a topic for another blog post.) We allow the government to kill people – over WC’s objections; WC detests the death penalty – only after long, careful and thorough consideration. Including trial by jury, and right of appeal. Under what circumstances can the U.S. government completely short-circuit that whole process?

The answer is that we don’t know. We do know that there is a policy memo. Attorney General Eric Holder has very loosely described it in a speech to Northwestern University Law School students. Attorney General Holder said in that speech that due process wasn’t judicial process. Actually, it is, at least when it comes to summary executions. And there’s certainly nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives that summary power to the executive branch. The Times has an article from anonymous sources that have seen the memo. Here’s their summary:

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

So if the CIA or NSA or another of the plethora of secret agencies decided that an American abroad was “taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda,” without describing the evidence against him, or analyzing the quality of the evidence, then “Boom,” one Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone and the American is an expanding cloud of greasy black smoke? Is that what it has come to? Is that what the Teabaggers hallowed Founding Fathers intended?

Let’s do a thought experiment. Instead of Al Qaeda, let’s substitute the last bogeyman that the United States confronted: Commies. And instead of Yemen, let’s substitute that infamous bastion of evil, Cuba. If WC was birding in Cuba, and some faceless Washington bureaucrat decided, without a hearing and without presenting evidence, that WC was “taking part in the war between the United States and Communism” by spending his birding dollars in a Commie country, could WC then be vaporized? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Feds have the power of summary execution. In the absence of knowing the standards applied to decide who gets executed, and without knowing the evidence, how can you possibly answer the question?

All of which takes WC back to Judge Colleen McMahon’s decision of January 2, 2013. Several reporters had filed Freedom of Information requests seeking copies of the memorandum that AG Holder had discussed and various persons had described. She concluded it could not be produced under the Freedom of Information Act:

However, this Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. But under the law as I understand it to have developed, the Government’s motion for summary judgment must be granted, and the cross-motions by the ACLU and the Times denied, except in one limited respect.

There will be appeals, and the final outcome may be different. But the bottom line is this: under the laws enacted by Congress and the policies adopted by Presidents Bush and Obama, we are not presently entitled to know the rules under which our government may murder us.

It gives a whole new meaning to the “war on terror.”

If you aren’t frightened, you should be.

The Disease That Is Killing Americans

Dan Wasserman, ©2012

We have an untreated disease that is killing 30,000 Americans each year. Today that untreated disease killed 20 young elementary school students in Connecticut. And 8 adults. WC has no words to describe the horror and the sorrow.

Or the anger.

We call ourselves “exceptional,” but we cannot even have an adult conversation about the existence of this untreated disease. 30,000 people. The population of Fairbanks. Each year.

If someone calls it the “price of freedom,” WC gets to ask “free from what” and “free to do what”? What has the Second Amendment, as interpreted by our culture and, yes, the U.S. Supreme Court, gotten us since Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968? Other than a million deaths and injuries from firearms.

Are we, as a society, as a culture, mature enough to admit that the status quo is unacceptable, and that something has to be done? Or will that admission require still more carnage, still more grieving parents, still more blood?

Reducing the Federal Deficit: A Modest Proposal

The “war on drugs” has made the United States the country on the planet with the most citizens in prison. Our prison population is through the roof, as WC has shown in earlier blog posts.

It’s also costing the federal government and incredible amount of money.

Federal Corrections Dollars by Year (Source: Office of Management and Budget)

That’s $8.5 billion dollars in 2012. That number can be halved if we released nonviolent offenders. And the nonviolent offenders are overwhelmingly drug offenders.

The war on drugs is over. We lost. It was a boneheaded idea in the first place. Addictive drugs trump the fear of criminal sentences; to a junkie, the next fix is more important than a jail sentence of any length. So the idea that harsh sentences will deter drug users was a non-starter. It didn’t stop the federal government from putting nearly 100,000 citizens in prison, about half of the total federal prison population. If they are three-time offenders, and more than a trivial amount of drugs are involved, they are in prison for life. There was an especially poignant example of the unbelievable harshness of this mandatory sentence in the New York Times recently.

So let’s save $4-5 billion by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. The idea behind the harsh sentences has failed. It’s time to move on.

A Given Definition of “Exceptional”: Islamophobia

Islamophobia, in a single subject, captures the worst and the best of the United States.

There is no question that hate crimes against Islams are at epidemic levels. That domestic terrorism in Wisconsin – ironically against Sikhs, not Islams – is only the most recent horrific example. With the exception of bloggers like Glenn Greenwald at Salon, the carnage is both under-reported and horrific. Here’s part of Greenwald’s list:

• The Islamic Society of Joplin opened a mosque in 2007 in Joplin, Missouri. Almost immediately, the sign in front was set on fire. It was arson. On the July 4, 2012, someone probably thinks they are a patriot was filmed by a surveillance camera throwing burning material onto the roof of the mosque in an attempt to burn it down, causing some fire damage. The FBI offered a $15,000 reard, but the arsonist remains at large. On August 5, the day after the the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin, the Joplin mosque burned to the ground, completely destroyed by a fire that began in the middle of the night. It was almost certainly arson.
• In October of last year, a Texas man pled guilty “to a hate crime charge stemming from an arson of a children’s playground at the Dar El-Eman Islamic Center in Arlington,” and admitted that the fire was “part of a series of ethnically-motivated acts directed at individuals of Arab or Middle Eastern descent associated with the mosque.”
• After a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee triggered intense community opposition when it attempted to expand in 2010, a fire that was ruled to be arson damaged the mosque; after facing years of vandalism, bomb threats, and efforts by local and state officials (including state judges) to block its expansion, the mosque was finally able to open only this week only after the DOJ and a federal judge (to their credit) intervened on the ground that the mosque’s religious liberty was being infringed.
• In August of last year, an Oregon man was indicted “on federal hate crime and arson charges for intentionally setting fire to the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center.”
• In May of last year, a fire at a mosque in Stockton, California, WC’s hometown, was ruled to be arson.
• Last year in southwest Houston, surveillance cameras “captured images of a group of at least three men in masks” attempting to set fire to a local mosque; “prayer rugs at the back of the mosque were doused with gasoline.”
• In 2011 in Dearborn, Michigan, an attack on one of the nation’s largest mosques was thwarted when a man was arrested carrying large amounts of explosives.
• In Massachusetts last year, the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester was set on fire by a man apprehended before the fire could spread.
• A fire that seriously damaged a mosque in Wichita, Kansas on Halloween night last year was ruled to be arson.
• In July of this year, a South Carolina mosque was vandalized; such vandalism against American mosques is incredibly common.
• On the 4th of July this year, the home of a Pakistani Muslim family in Texas, who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, had the word “Terrorist” spray-painted onto it and then had ignited fireworks left on their doorstep.

Can you imagine the public reaction if these attacks had been against, say, Baptists?

But amongst all this racism, horror, fear and betrayal, you can also find the qualities that define the Americans’ better instincts. In response to the events in Joplin, a teenaged member of that mosque, Joplin high school student Laela Zaidi, began using social media to discuss the importance of the mosque to her community.

Most significantly, a little-publicized online campaign to raise the $250,000 needed to rebuild the mosque has produced extremely quick and inspiring results.

Joplin Mosque Fundraising Effort

Overt Islamophobia is nearly mainstream. It’s socially acceptable bigotry. Shameless opportunists like Peter King and Michele Bachman make McCarthy-esque attacks.

But just when you are ready to despair, a small mosque in an obscure town in the southwest corner of a middle-America state can raise $262,106 in 48 hours to replace a torched building.

In Interior Alaska, the winters are very long and very dark. Such sunlight as there is is thin and feeble. It’s gloomy and depressing. WC heard a mother tell her very young daughter, “Wait and see; there will be two whole minutes more daylight tomorrow.” Against the unrelenting bigotry against Muslims in America, against undisguised racism and irrantionality, we have the fundraising drive for the Joplin mosque: two more minutes of daylight tomorrow.

A Given Definition of “Exceptional”: Regulation and Death Rates

There were 535 deaths in air crashes in 2009 according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s report. Air transportation is closely regulated. Pilots are licensed and carefully examined. Aircraft are regulated and inspected. It’s not perfect, but the death rate is 0.05 passengers per billion miles flown.

There were 32,885 deaths in the U.S. from automobile accidents in 2010, according to the Center for Disease Control. That’s about 1.25 deaths per million vehicle miles travelled. Automobile operator licensing is much less strictly regulated than air pilots; automobiles themselves are hardly regulated at all. As a result, it is 200 times more dangerous driving to the airport than it is on the flight when you leave. Still, most states, even Alaska, do require drivers to have insurance in the event of an accident. You have to pass a driving test and a written test. You have to appear and demonstrate you can still see every five years.

There were 31,513 deaths from firearms in the U.S. in 2010. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. Neither firearm ownership nor firearm manufacture are regulated. There are no requirements for insurance of any kind. There are no tests of any kind for the right to possess a firearm.

Unlike aircraft and automobiles, which serve a useful purpose, firearms are created primarily to injure and kill, and to do so at a distance. In any sane world, we’d closely regulate and license the right to carry or use such a tool. We’d require liability insurance before you could carry one around. But this is America. This is the Second Amendment. This is the mass insanity of the National Rifle Association.

Remember, too, that less than half of American households report that they own or possess firearms. Those 31,513 deaths come from half of the population. Automobiles, by comparison, are owned by 89% of Americans. With half of the ownership rate, firearms cause a nearly-equal number of fatalities.

Airplanes carry us places. As do automobiles. Firearms serve no documented useful purpose, except in the narrow area of hunting. There is no evidence that owning a firearm makes you safer; exactly the opposite, in fact.

On the evidence, there’s a direct relationship between the level of regulation and the level of harm. Firearms are about as dangerous as you can get. And are utterly unregulated.

Is WC the only one who thinks this is utterly wrong? Or “exceptional”?

Exceptional? E.L. Doctorow Weighs In

It’s unsurprising that E. L. Doctorow, one of the best writers in the English language, could write a much better essay than WC on the absurdity of any claim by the U.S. to being exceptional. But his four phase analysis of recent history and its blight on everything the U.S. claims to stand for is devastating. WC bows to a master. Doctorow’s Phase Three of the path to unexceptionalism is succinct, spare and precise:

Given corporate control of legislative bodies, enact laws to the benefit of corporate interests. For example, those laws sponsored by weapons manufacturers wherein people may carry concealed weapons and shoot and kill anyone by whom they feel threatened.

Give the running of state prisons over to private corporations whose profits increase with the increase in inmate populations. See to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American.

When possible, treat immigrants as criminals.

Deplete and underfinance a viable system of free public schools and give the education of children over to private for-profit corporations.

Make college education unaffordable.

Inject religious precepts into public policy so as to control women’s bodies.

Enact laws prohibiting collective bargaining. Portray trade unions as un-American.

Enact laws restricting the voting rights of possibly unruly constituencies.

Propagandize against scientific facts that would affect corporate profits. Portray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists.

Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with these measures,  portray the federal government as unwieldy, bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals.  Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry to support this view.

WC declines to indulge in any tendency to conspiracy, but if you were setting out to destroy everything out country stands for, that’s pretty much how you’d go about it.

Exceptional? A Few Notes on the CIA Inspector General’s Report

WC recently read the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General’s Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities dated May 7, 2004. The fact that it is heavily redacted – sometimes entire pages at a time – doesn’t stop it from being a whitewash of the years of torture performed by the United States. It is a sickening, nauseating chronology of what happens to a country that loses sight of its values.

Summaries and analysis of the Inspector General’s Special Review are available from the ACLU at its Torture Report site.

But as a service to his readers, WC will summarize the unredacted parts of the Special Review: by twisting law, logic and medical science beyond recognition, the Inspector General concludes that the torture inflicted by the United States on hundreds, perhaps thousands of persons who were not even charged with a crime was not torture. That despite unassailable evidence of post-traumatic shock syndrome there was no lasting harm done to anyone. And that no crimes or violations of treaties occurred.

While the Special Review makes ten recommendations, all of are left to wonder what those might be because they are are all, in their entirety, rdeacted.

The comforting, self-serving whitewash would be a lot more persuasive if it were not for this one paragraph, in a section called “End Game,” which somehow escaped the heavy black pen of the censors:

The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.

Special Review, Par. 237, p. 96

Let’s be very clear about what the CIA is saying: we are holding detainees – persons not charged with a crime – as prisoners because the CIA is worried that if they were released they’d tell the world the gruesome details of what America has done to them.

So even though the CIA’s Inspector General, over the course of the 100 pages of heavily redacted Special Review, assures his readers we have done nothing wrong, we have committed no crimes, we have violated no treaties, it’s important we keep the folks we tortured locked up so they can’t tell anyone what was done to them.

That single paragraph gives the lie to every unredacted paragraph and partial paragraph in the Special Report. And it compounds the felonies committed by the U.S. We tortured people because they wouldn’t talk; now we hold them prisoner because we fear they will.

So much for exceptional.

War Crimes, War Criminals and Exceptionalism

WC offers serious props to Spencer Ackerman, at Wired, whose Danger Room has taken a long, hard look at the United States’ use of torture in its so-called war on terror. And unflinchingly looked into the possible war crimes committed by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

WC is no expert in the area of international law or the complexities of the various Geneva Conventions. But WC does know that the United States prosecuted Japanese after World War II for waterboarding. It’s a matter of public record. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month while the CIA held him at an undisclosed “black site” prison.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, WC hoped for a public investigation into the conduct of the CIA, the FBI and private contractors. Not necessarily with a view to criminal prosecutions, but rather to get at the truth. The thing about playing fast and loose with international conventions is that it cripples your ability to complain when others violate those conventions. And it surrenders the moral high ground. WC would like for his country to be the good guys. It’s not. A careful, credible investigation might have helped restore the nation’s reputation.

That didn’t happen. Instead, there was a closed door, confidential investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, much criticized by the former Bush administration members and the Neocons for looking at even the lower levels of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism. WC can’t call it a “white wash” because no one knows exactly what was done. But the absence of a public process, the refusal to “look backwards,” raises suspicions in all but the worst of the Neocons. That “investigation” closed in June 2011 when Holder announced he’d pursue criminal investigations in just two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees.

And now, it turns out, State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.” The lightly redacted memo – thought to have been expunged by the Bush Administration – has surfaced in Danger Room, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

No big deal, you say? Think about this: the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarik, was overthrown for, among other crimes, torturing prisoners. Egypt and Mubarik hosted at least one of the black sites where some of the worst U.S. torture of prisoners occurred. Any records of those black site activities are now in the hands of Egypt’s new government. Zelikow’s letter is now a public record. Those records, in the hands of the International Criminal Court, could lead to an indictment of U.S. citizens involved. It’s true that, shamefully, the U.S. has backed out of being a party to the Rome Statute that underpins the ICC. But the court has jurisdiction of crimes committed by non-members in member states. Egypt, however, is a member state.

In the best case we will be presented with the ugly spectacle of the United States trying to wiggle out of an international crime. Publicly. For a long time. Not very “exceptional.”

Corruption Risk in Alaska – Why a D+ Seems Generous

Q: Why does New Jersey have all the Superfund sites and California have all the lawyers?
A: New Jersey got to choose first.

The State Integrity Investigation describes itself as “a $1.5 million public collaboration designed to expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols — and spotlight the states that are doing things right.” It has conducted a study of the corruption risk – not the current level of corruption – in all 50 states.

The idea was to develop criteria to evaluate the risk of corruption. Judging by the number of convictions – Illinois’s four governors who have gone to jail; Massachusetts’ three consecutive house speakers who are in the pen – was deemed too variable. Aggressive prosecutors, federal enforcement when the state governments get corrupt; it was found to be an imprecise measure. Which is just as well, given Alaska’s recent history.

Alaska got a D+ and ranked 27th, just barely in the bottom half. Close call. We nearly flunked! New Jersey finished first.

The limits of WordPress won’t allow WC to put a full link to the graphic here, but here’s a screen shot of Alaska’s report card:

Not a report card you'd want to show to your parents.

Oddly enough, WC finds the grading to be too generous. If you’ve ever tried to find recent campaign financial reports in the Alaska Public Offices Commission’s on-line database, you know better than to give it a C+, and if you’ve ever tried to find lobbyist reports you know a C is incredibly generous. From the track record of the Alaska Commission on Judicial Qualifications, which is in charge of policing state judges, you’d think the judiciary deserved halos.

Ethics Enforcement Agencies? Two words: Ben Stevens. See what WC means? A C- is very generous. WC’s teachers were a lot tougher with the red pencils than the SII.

If Alaska indeed ranks 27th, the 23 states that are worse must be very bad indeed.

(Memo to The Newt: Perhaps you could direct your considerable energies to your avowed “home state” of Georgia which, on the evidence, could use some help. You have that personal experience in corruption, after all.)

The Anchorage Daily News’ Sean Cockerham has written a nice article on Alaska’s rating, which WC commends to this readers.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves: The Myth of Upward Mobility

It’s a cherished belief: Americans who work hard can succeed and reach a higher point on the economic ladder than their parents. Anyone can be a Ben Franklin or a Henry Ford and rise from abject poverty to the very highest economic success. It’s a big part of America being “exceptional.” “Only in America, land of opportunity.” As Julia Issacs, of the Brookings Institution put it,

For most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American Dream. Indeed, much of the American spirit is grounded in the belief that with determination and hard work, one can rise from humble beginnings and achieve a comfortable, middle-class life, if not great wealth.

In fact, among the wealthy countries, the United States has the lowest rates of upward mobility. One well-regarded German study found,

The main driver of the difference in the pattern of male intergenerational mobility in the U.S. from that of each of the other countries in our study is the low mobility out of the lowest quintile group in the United States. Indeed, it is very noticeable that while for all of the other countries persistence is particularly high in the upper tails of the distribution, in the U.S. this is reversed – with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers in the U.S. will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. We view this as a challenge to the popular notion of an “American exceptionalism” in economic mobility. Indeed, the combination of a high proba- bility of American sons of the poorest fifth of fathers remaining in the lowest quintile group, the lower probability of “rags-to-riches” (poorest to richest) and slightly lower probability of “riches-to-rags” (richest to poorest), places the notion of American exceptionalism in a new light. The U.S., or at least the population of young U.S. men, seems to be distinguished from other countries by having greater low-income persistence, rather than less, having fewer very large positional changes across generations, rather than more, and possibly having a greater persistence of high income, rather than less.

Congressional Budget Office data support the German conclusion:

Income inequality in the United States

If you are born poor in America, in the bottom 20% of the economy, the odds are heavily against your ever doing better. Partly that’s because the poor in America are in worse shape than the poor in other nations. Nutrition, health and educational opportunities are all lower. At the physiological level, it’s not only hard to learn when you are hungry; it’s impossible to learn if you are malnourished. The extraordinarily high incarceration rates among the poor, usually resulting in single parent households, further contributes to the problem.

As Paul Krugman put it,

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

Mitt Romney doesn’t support any of these solutions. He thinks we should discuss class inequality, if at all, in “quiet rooms.” None of declining number of Non-Mitts support these things; most are vehemently against them. Ron Paul positively froths at the mouth at the idea. Congress, composed mostly the top 20%, seems much more interested in looking after their kids than looking after America’s kids. So the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen.

Martin Luther King, whose day this is, utterly rejected the idea of discussions in quiet rooms. That was where racial inequality was discussed – and preserved – for decades. When a Republican tells you we can’t afford school lunch programs, or can’t afford better schools, or can’t afford health care? They’re telling you we can’t afford the American Dream. When a billionaire like Mitt Romney tells you that it is inflammatory or class warfare to discuss the issue in public, he is repudiating the American Dream. President Obama, if re-elected, cannot by himself restore the goal of equal opportunity. Especially with the current Congress. But the odds are immensely higher than with a newly-elected plutocrat like Romney.

Now That’s a Screed: Der Spiegel on Republican Presidential Wannabes

The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel has weighed in on the Republican presidential candidates and it isn’t pretty.

They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…

Harper’s Magazine columnist Scott Horton summarizes:

At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk.

Ouch. WC supposes for a given definition of “exceptional”?

The New Gilded Age

Back in undergraduate school, shortly after the end of the Dark Ages, WC was made to read William E. Leuchtenburg’s The Perils of Prosperity, an economic and political history of 1914-1932. As a simple, accessible summary of the period from the U.S. entry into World War I to the start of the Great Depression, WC doesn’t think it has been surpassed. The mindset of Americans in the 1920s should sound familiar:

Americans, as one English writer noted, were “a people who, of all the world, craved most for new things, yet were all but Chinese in their worship of their Constitution and their ancestors who devised it.” Leuchtenberg, 205.

WC finds himself in a bizarre mirror image of that Gilded Age world view. The resemblance is uncanny. The Teabaggers are the spitting image of their Gilded Age grandparents and great-grandparents.

Maybe it’s because the economics are so similar, and especially the incredible concentration of wealth in the hands of so few. We find ourselves in a new Gilded Age.

Financial Inequality in the U.S., 1979-2008

The top 1% has succeeded over the last thirty years beyond their wildest dreams of avarice; the majority of Americans, over the same period, have experienced a decline in income. Not since the Gilded Age, the 15-20 years before the Great Depression, has their been such income disparity in America. Access to that lucky 1%, the mobility that Americans cherish so much, is at an all-time low.

Economic Mobility by Nation, 2005

The U.S. has fallen to the level of the famously class-entrenched United Kingdom by some measures of economic mobility. The heart of the American self-image – that your situation may be bad but your children’s will be better – is increasingly untrue.

The politically neutral Congressional Budget Office has recently released a report documenting these trends. The CBO concludes:

• For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007).
• For others in the 20 percent of the population withthe highest income (those in the 81st through 99thpercentiles), average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent over that period, much faster than it did for the remaining 80 percent of the population, but not nearly as fast as for the top 1 percent.
• For the 60 percent of the population in the middle of the income scale (the 21st through 80th percentiles),the growth in average real after-tax household income was just under 40 percent
• For the 20 percent of the population with the lowest income, average real after-tax household income wasabout 18 percent higher in 2007 than it had been in 1979.

What alarms WC isn’t just a concentration of wealth on the cusp of passing the inequities of the Gilded Age; it’s the increasing barriers to mobility, the increasing failure of the American dream. As George Packer wrote recently in Foreign Affairs,

Like an odorless gas, economic inequality pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of its democracy. Over the past three decades, Washington has consistently favored the rich — and the more wealth accumulates in a few hands at the top, the more influence and favor the rich acquire, making it easier for them and their political allies to cast off restraint without paying a social price.

More than any other crisis facing America, this is the one that troubles WC the most. Unless movements like Occupy Wall Street can break the ideological lock that conservatives have, unless progressives can snap voters out of the carefully fostered illusions and distractions neocons have created, America as WC knows it is going to come to a bad end. Packer’s conclusion is pretty good:

Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth — a rebuke to the very idea of the American dream. Inequality divides us from one another in schools, in neighborhoods, at work, on airplanes, in hospitals, in what we eat, in the condition of our bodies, in what we think, in our children’s futures, in how we die. Inequality makes it harder to imagine the lives of others — which is one reason why the fate of over 14 million more or less permanently unemployed Americans leaves so little impression in the country’s political and media capitals. Inequality corrodes trust among fellow citizens, making it seem as if the game is rigged. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can — immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms — and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers. Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy.

Welcome to the new gilded age.

Exceptional: Plutarchs and Control of Congress

William Domhoff’s essay on Power in America, “Wealth, Income and Power” back in 2005 (updated October 2011) helped start the current discussion of wealth distribution in the United Sates. It’s a critical starting point.

That focus on the analysis of distribution of wealth has been brought to Congress now. For example, Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, documents that “members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, a nearly 25 percent increase over the 2008 total.”

That, in turn, led to the creation of one of the better graphics that WC has seen this year.

Distribution of Wealth in Congress - 2010

(WC believes this chart was created by Professor Domhoff, but cannot be certain.) If there is any reader who thinks that the Senators and Representatives who are among the top 10% of the nation’s wealth aren’t looking out for themselves and their peers, well, WC has a great deal for you on the Cushman Street Bridge.

Roll Call‘s study also shows that the wealth increase isn’t a result of the rich getting richer; it’s primarily a result of the sea change in the 2010 election. That’s right. The Teabaggers who gained control of the House are wealthier than the Representatives they replaced.

And this chart gives a whole new level of understanding to the Republicans’ refusal to consider taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, doesn’t it? The fix is in, and it turns out not to be the fix the Teabaggers thought they were getting.

It’s as simple as this: the whole improbable story, never supported by a competent economist, that a tax increase on the rich would discourage jobs creation? It’s a lie. This is all about greed, and the unwillingness of our Plutarchic Congress to impose a tax upon themselves.

The whole idea of electing successful businesspersons to run our government? Can we agree we’ve tried that? Can we agree it hasn’t worked out so well? For anyone except those rich folks we elected?

Six of the 100 U.S. Senators (6%) live where 80% of their constituents live. 30 House members (7%) live where 80% of their constituents live. So much of “exceptional.” So much for a representative democracy.

Why WC Is Proud of President Obama

President Obama, October 19, Chesterfield County, VA, Photo Jay Pau/Getty Images

WC has criticized President Obama from time to time because no president of the United States is ever above criticism. If you examine his actual record, as opposed to the mischaracterizations, lies, distortions, hyperbole and – frankly – racism from the right, it’s a pretty remarkable set of achievements in very difficult times.

The truth is that this President has done a good job in what has been one of the most challenging periods of modern history. Among his accomplishments:

• He saved the economy from ruin (until the Tea Party took over the U.S. House) with a stimulus that was as large as possible given the political realities.
• Presided over a stock market that fairly quickly recouped many of its losses.
• Presided over nearly unbroken consecutive monthly increases in private sector job growth (unfortunately balanced by monthly decreases in public sector jobs which WC blames mostly on the Republican tactic of starving government).
• Enacted the only meaningful healthcare reform ever in our history.
• Passed financial reform (no matter what my progressive colleagues say, he did achieve this).
• Saved the auto industry (which all of the Republicans are on record as opposing).
• Fired the first salvo of the Arab Spring with his remarkable speech in Cairo in June 2009
• Greatly reduced the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in a responsible way (and headed toward almost total withdrawal)
• At least partially stabilized the situation in Afghanistan.
• Stopped numerous terrorist attacks in this country
• Stopped torture as a United States policy, and has proven it is unnecessary as wellas illegal.
• Repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
• Joined the international community in a measured and responsible way to bring down an odious tyrant in Qaddafi, without the loss of a single American life.
• Killed a whole generation of al Qaeda leaders.
• And WC believes his audacious assassination of Osama bin Laden will go down as one of the bravest military actions in American history.

He’s accomplished all this with a Congress that is as bitterly divided as any time since the eve of the Civil War, while dealing with thinly disguised racism and revolting accusations about his parentage, his religion and his family.

Compare him to each of the whining, bitter Republican candidates and ask yourself how there can be any question of the President’s chances of re-election.

Yes, WC is proud of President Obama. Don’t let his occasional criticism make you think otherwise.

You want “exceptional”? How about a country that can produce a leader like this?

American Follies: Reality Television

Just when you think American culture has sunk as low as it can go, something comes along to demonstrate there is no longer any lower limit to what our culture will put on display. It’s all in limbo: “How low can you go?”

Readers will forgive WC for thinking this was a headline from The Onion, but yes, The Quitter’s hair styling salon, Beehive Beauty Shop, will get its own reality television show. Produced by TLC, the same folks who brought you The Quitter’s surreality television show.

Gag me with a spoon.

Coming next year: septic tank pumping reality television, where the metaphor becomes the reality. It would be a crappy show about crap. All crap, all the time. Have your people contact WC’s people; we’ll do lunch.

Palin’s Mythologizing of American History

When I think back on all the crap
I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
But my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973)

There are probably as many interpretations of Simon’s song as there are thoughtful listeners, but WC is a photographer and for WC’s purposes, it stands for the tendency of Kodachrome film and photographers to make the world and history look like a slightly over-saturated, summer’s day. There aren’t many cloudy, stormy or rainy days captured on Kodachrome. And it’s an excellent metaphor for the Republicans’ increasing tendency to mythologize U.S. history.

U.S. history more than any other subject filled our heads with crap. An important part of a liberal arts education is unlearning the lies we were taught in high school, learning the inconvenient details that were left out of our history books and appreciating our country for what it is, not some idealized fiction.

Much of Palin’s recent blathering about the American Revolution comes from her own natural gift for arrogant ignorance, but a considerable portion traces to the nonsense that is stuffed into the heads of high school students. As a journalism student, The Quitter apparently missed or slept through any college courses that might have given her a more accurate understanding of American history.

WC recommends any readers who think high school history classes are truthful read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen (Amazon link). Loewen reviewed a dozen high school U.S. history books and, to put it kindly, found the textbooks made some mistakes. It’s not a matter of “political correctness” or  ”balanced views;” Loewen demonstrates that the dozen texts he reviews are chock full of lies, mythologized views of events and blatant Eurocentricity. The lies range from stupid (“President Truman ‘easily settled’ the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb.”) to outrageous (“Reconstruction removed the worst of the obstacles facing Blacks in the South.”) to infuriating omissions (half the books never mention the Ku Klux Klan).

So when Palin says the U.S. Constitution was drafted to “make everyone equal,” to a considerable extent she’s simply parroting high school textbooks’ omission of the enshrinement of slavery in the U.S. Constitution. Sure, shame on The Quitter for not knowing better, but critical thinking is a learned skill.

And at the risk of upsetting some readers, when you believe that one book is literally true – the Bible, for example – perhaps it is hard to avoid carrying that belief over to other books.

When WC was in high school, the shocking differences between what we were being taught and what we saw on the television news each night trained WC in skepticism. When his history book stated, “America has never been invaded” and WC’s family members died in the Aleutian Islands, well, it teaches you unintended lessons. When you read the very few sentences in The American Experience on the War of 1812 admitting the British burned Washington, D.C. you know someone is lying. When you hear politicians on television and read in your textbook claims that “America has never lost a war” and know that the U.S. sued Britain for peace back in 1812; well, you just might think that writers like Loewen are on to something.

When your teacher says, “Our country, right or wrong” and you buy into it, you get disasters like Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq. If you’ve read the Federalist Papers, you know that was the last thing that Hamilton, Madison and Jay wanted.

The problem is that Palin has bought (or pretends to have bought) the lies, simplifications, omissions and distortions. She has wrapped herself in the flag of the myth of American exceptionalism. It’s a mixture of cynicism, ignorance and arrogance. To see her posturing for a run at the Republican presidential candidacy… It’s frightening to any thoughtful person, regardless of political party. And a damning indictment of our educational system.

This Is for Jerome

From Ta-Nehisi’s New York Times review of the movie “X-Men – First Class

I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn’s widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states’ rights, minus the “right to own people” part.

About the only time WC saw his high school friend, Jerome Davis, really angry about the racism at the high school, Jerome cut loose with a similar screed. It says too much about America that more than forty years later things haven’t gotten much better.

WC has fallen out of touch with Jerome. If a reader knows how to find him, pass it along.