None Dare Call Him “S”

“The chainy snake will get you if you don’t watch out…”

When I wrote that line back in the final year of W’s presidency, I wished I had thought of it a few years earlier, because I expected the resulting song to soon lose relevance. Little did I know that in the final year of the next 2-term president, who would be a Democrat, the song’s subject would still cast a long, dark shadow in D.C. In fact, when that Dick started tossing around his pronouncements against Obama’s historic nuclear agreement with Iran, I truly wished that my song had lost relevance. Even if the song had some kind of hit potential, I would, for the good of the country and the future possibility of peace, gladly give up any chance of personal gain from it. Please let this man become irrelevant, and I’ll happily let my song go down into the dust with him.

But what would you call a man who’s been so wrong about so many things? For about a decade, beginning in the late ‘70s, he raised and spent a lot of money trying to convince the U.S. defense establishment and the general public of the threat posed by a super-secret and incredibly-advanced Soviet Union anti-missile system. The CIA could find no proof of its existence, but he said that this just showed how well the Soviets had hidden it. I saw a Committee for the Present Danger video on TV, and at first it impressed me, but the more I thought about the premise, the less believable it seemed. I soon decided that no such system existed, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 proved me right, and proved the CIA right, while proving Dick wrong.

Does that remind you of anything? Like, maybe, Iraq’s phantom WMDs? I had concluded, after Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N., that Iraq had no WMDs. People with a logical thought process, looking at the Iraq invasion, quickly concluded that the military action had more to do with oil and U.S. regional hegemony than it did with possible WMDs, but what would you call someone who really believed Iraq had WMDs, despite the complete lack of evidence?

Many people have also wondered how Dick could possibly have sounded so smart when he spoke in 1994 about the reasons for not invading Iraq, and then could have shortly pulled a full 180 to advocate for the deeply-foolish strategy he had previously opposed. At first it mystified me too, but then I concluded that in 1994 he had recited, as the official position of an administration he had worked for, a memorized script written for him by someone much smarter than himself.

So what would you call a man who can’t tell the difference between a 1% threat and a 100% one (the famous 1% doctrine)? How about a man who utters a simplistic phrase like “We don’t talk to evil” in response to a genuine offer of diplomatic cooperation? Or someone who could believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, despite all evidence and logic to the contrary? What word would describe someone who remains convinced that removing Saddam was the right thing to do, despite the huge expense, the death and destruction, the resulting chaos and the ongoing civil strife, because otherwise Mr. Hussein would have become the modern-day equivalent of Hitler? Can you think of a word for someone who could link Saddam to the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen as well? What if that person speaks in a seemingly-rational manner, but in doing so, presents nonstop irrationality in the content of his speech?

HW reportedly referred to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz circle in his administration as the crazies, but I think there’s a word that better describes them — it starts with an s and rhymes with cupid. The sometimes laughable phantoms that haunt their simple minds don’t exist, though it’s hard to prove it to them because their minds don’t respond to logic and facts. The good news is that this contingent of our political adversaries are not malevolent, but just dumb, and sometimes even very dumb people can be persuaded to go along with smart policies, but the bad news is that they can be extremely dumb, which can make the job of persuasion to smart policy an extremely difficult task. The first step to success, though, is to correctly understand the nature of the challenge.

How I Helped to Get Nixon Elected

If confession is indeed good for the soul, even if that soul grew up in a Protestant family that didn’t have a structured confessional environment, then it might be a good time for me to finally admit publicly, for the first time, that I did a bad bad thing: Back in the election season of 1968, I told a lie.

Growing up in a conservative Republican family, watching events unfold during that summer, with Nixon making it clear why he was smiling as he issued his appeal to the silent majority, I felt that Dick simply had to win in November. I was certain that if Hubert Humphrey took the oath of office in January of 1969, the United States would go Communist before the end of that year. I believed this so strongly that I even thought of writing a book about the looming Communist threat, and how HH and other prominent Dems didn’t take it seriously enough, although now I can’t imagine what kind of factual data I would have presented to support such an assertion and fill out an entire book, let alone how I would have gotten a book published in that long-ago era which predated the wonderful self-publishing tools currently available.

That era also predated our modern partisan polarization, and a significant percentage of voters who identified with one party still felt the need to vote for moderate candidates of the opposing party, at least in part to assure themselves, and their personal circle, of their own political moderation. I saw an opportunity when my friend Brian’s mother said, during a political discussion, that she would be open to voting for a Republican that year if the party put up somebody reasonable (as opposed to Goldwater, from the previous presidential contest). I knew Brian’s family was Catholic, and they usually voted for Democrats, which back then seemed connected in my mind, but I figured I could get his mother to vote for Nixon if I presented the case properly.

What case did I make? I told her that Nixon would end the Viet Nam war quickly, and peacefully. Lyndon Johnson’s VP had little credibility at that point in terms of how he might settle the conflict, whereas Dick claimed to have a plan to accomplish this seemingly-impossible goal. While RMN hadn’t revealed quite how he intended to pull off this feat, the Republicans did have some plausibility in this regard, since Tricky Dick served as the VP for the man who ran in 1952 on a promise to end the Korean War and who kept that promise. Eisenhower also spoke openly about his personal hatred of war, the financial toll it takes on taxpayers, and the danger of the growing military industrial complex.

This Nixon peace case seemed to have worked, since Brian’s mother did vote for Nixon, and perhaps his father may have done so as well, but at the moment when I forcefully presented the argument, did I really think Dick would genuinely conclude peace negotiations over the Viet Nam war? Not for a second. I felt quite sure that he would soon mount a more aggressive military engagement that, I believed, would somehow resolve the situation. I worried about the dominoes falling, and I knew RMN would keep that from happening. I obviously read his intentions correctly, though I couldn’t have had any concept of the living hell he would unleash, or the lingering human and environmental toll it would take in southeast Asia.

I remember meeting Brian in a school hallway on the sunny November morning after election day, and how we smiled and celebrated Nixon’s victory. Little could we have guessed at that instant how much we would both be cursing the man’s image in less than 2 years, and the negativity that his win would set in motion. The racist War on Drugs that I wrote about last week is but one facet of an enduring legacy of malfeasance that will take many more years to unwind, and much greater effort to undo. We have Nixon to thank, or actually to curse, for helping to launch the D.C. careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, along with many other monsters he let loose. 

Fellow progressives, bless me for I have sinned. My last confession was never. 48 years ago I told a political lie that changed someone’s vote for the worse, and that helped Nixon win a close election. Oh, my God, am I sorry with all my heart! Even 46 years ago I had realized that I had sinned against people and causes that I held dear, and I long since pledged to never commit such a sin again. Amen.

Quote From The Diary: “… the whole problem is really the blacks.”

“Bad boys, whatya gonna do when they come for you?” While I had plenty of respect for Bob Marley already, during the ‘90s that respect widened, particularly due to that song. I heard it many times, and never tired of it — in fact, I quickly concluded that it was the best part, and perhaps the only good part, of the TV show Cops. I had no interest in the show, but during that decade, all too often those episodes came my way during my frequent visits to my family, because a certain family member — the one who hogged the channel changer — really liked watching it

Early on, I noticed that officers on the screen showed a bit more respect than what I had experienced in a few of my interactions with some local policemen. On the whole, I certainly wouldn’t complain about my treatment, especially because some officers have treated me very well, including one NY State Trooper who gave me a short ride back and forth to a filling station when my van ran out of gas on a four-lane highway. I have met a few bad cops, though, and I definitely know they’re out there, though I didn’t see any of them onscreen in Cops. However, I also don’t want to overemphasize my own bad experiences, because long before I knew the names Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, I was quite convinced that people of color routinely experienced much worse than my own personal worst.

After watching a few more episodes, a different thought popped up: Take away The War on Drugs by making the controlled substances legal and regulated, and then 95% of the activity in the plot line disappears. Cops would have few, if any, reasons to detain, search, frisk, harass, follow, chase, intimidate, handcuff, beat, shoot and arrest the vast majority of those who fall prey to these actions. Clearly, some Cops like this system, and the excuse it gives them to do these things, because they like doing them — those Cops would almost always be the Bad Cops, the real authoritarian types, but many officers do understand that this system does little to serve and protect most citizens. I personally am in no danger from a person smoking a joint, any more than from someone downing a shot, unless they get into the driver’s seat of a car, in which case, just as DWI can trigger serious legal consequences, presumably, in a properly-regulated environment, so would driving under specific kinds of drug influence. I feel quite certain that legal professionals could craft appropriate penalties and standards to address such a situation.

George Soros, through his organization Drug Policy Alliance (which I am a member of), points out that the War on Drugs is a perfect example of authoritarian government policy in action. This authoritarianism has taken its heaviest toll on the black community in the U.S., although it has racked up countless other victims inside and outside of our borders. I had imagined that prior to crafting the War on Drugs policy, the Nixon cabinet had discussed how to create a system to monitor and assert control over those people, and, as it turns out, what I imagined did occur. One of Nixon’s 2 German Shepherds, as identified in All the President’s Men, was John Ehrlichman, who told journalist Dan Baum in an interview, “Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue … that we couldn’t resist it.” The other German Shepherd, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary in 1969, “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that while not appearing to.”

So The War on Drugs has only been a miserable failure if you believe, as We the People were told, that the purpose was to reduce drug use. If you understand that the purpose of The War on Drugs was to criminalize a lot of black people, plus some other poor and young people, then it absolutely has succeeded in doing that. Plus, it has lowered the competition for tobacco, alcohol and prescription meds, which accounts for why major corporations in those industries fund anti-drug programs, like Drug-free Kids. And, last but not least, it has picked the pockets of the U.S. taxpayers to the tune of well over $1 trillion, creating some very comfortable careers for authoritarian types in law enforcement, the prison system, government bureaucracy and related endeavors. 

In theory, conservatives ought to oppose much of this for the same reasons as progressives, but I suspect that, despite what they might say, a significant percentage of those who self-identify as conservative would agree with what Nixon said back in 1969, as recorded in Haldeman’s diary. Still, I take it as a hopeful sign that some conservatives these days do agree that The War on Drugs has failed, that too many nonviolent drug users are currently sitting in jail, and that our tax dollars shouldn’t keep on funding this failed and counter-productive policy. Maybe one day soon the entire War on Drugs edifice will fall, as the Berlin Wall did, and will take its place in the dustbin of history.

Give Me a Break, John — Part 2

When Give Me a Break John aired his 10 libertarian grievances on his ABC 1-hour special back around the turn of the millennium, the most memorable moment for me came when he suggested that regulation of air and water pollutants serves no purpose, asserting that the air and water in the NYC vicinity are amazingly clean, and would be so with or without such regulations. To demonstrate his water point, he took a dip in the Hudson River.

Mr. Stossel’s got a few years on me, but not many, so his youth roughly spans the same era as mine, but evidently he either doesn’t remember certain details of that time, or perhaps he never knew them in the first place. George Carlin used to do a very funny bit about swimming in NYC waters during his childhood, and he certainly wasn’t talking about clean water. I also noticed that Mr. S. didn’t catch and eat a Hudson River fish, and most residents along the Hudson know that no matter how much cleaner the river is now than when George Carlin was growing up, the fish swimming in those waters still carry inside themselves deadly PCBs from that river water.

As clueless as John apparently was about the water pollution stories, which included the Cuyahoga River fire and similar tales, I still have to wonder how he missed the air pollution. Various school groups from my upstate area took visits to NYC, and I remember that looking downriver while crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, you couldn’t see any of the Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon, but you could always clearly see the smog cloud.

Following my HS visits to the NYC smog cloud, I headed to the midwest for college, getting to know the Chicago smog cloud much better. As one of my colleagues said, “The air in this city starts 100 miles out.” For most of the 1970s I lived in that metropolitan area, and had occasion to return to it from every major point on the compass. Without planning to do so, I had the experience of seeing that smog cloud when approaching from N, S, W and E, plus a few other variants as well.

Early one morning I also got to experience how the sun rises, or actually doesn’t, when living inside the smog cloud. As a consolation for pulling an all-nighter in preparation for an exam at Northwestern, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll get to see a sunrise, for the first time in my life.” But actually, I didn’t. As I sat, book in hand, glancing out the east-facing window, twilight slowly gave way to full daylight, but the sun never appeared on the horizon. About an hour after the official sunrise time, the sun slowly appeared above the smoggy haze, and around 8, I walked over to the dining hall on a bright, sunny morning, prepared for my exam but disappointed by the hazy sunrise episode.

Fast forward a few decades, and in 1998 I set out from Brooklyn with a companion on my way to visit Wyoming. Along the approach to Chicago, I spoke to my companion about the smog cloud, and I kept a watchful eye. We got closer, and closer, and I never saw it. Then somehow we got by the city, and looking in the rearview mirror on that partly-sunny afternoon, I didn’t see any smog cloud. Slowly, as we cruised through western IL and into IA, I came to the realization that the Chicago smog cloud of the 1970s was gone. Later, after returning to Brooklyn, I made a similar observation on a return trip to NYC from upstate, noting that I no longer saw a smog cloud on the horizon when looking downriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

I would not give the all clear sign the way Mr. S. does, because combustion engines running on petrochemicals still spew poisonous toxins, especially those running on diesel fuel, but I would assert that the air quality in major U.S. cities improved remarkably between 1970 and 1998. John wants to tell us that whatever change occurred in this period happened naturally, and not because of the environmental regulations that began taking effect in the early 1970s. Strangely, at least for John, this natural air renewal hasn’t happened in foreign cities that, coincidentally, lack strong air quality regulations. Perusing the list of cities worldwide with the worst air quality, you have to get down the page quite a ways before you find a U.S. metropolis. We still have plenty to do, but we have made significant progress, and I feel quite certain that without those clean air regulations, that old smog cloud would still be visible looking downstream from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

John calls himself a libertarian. Coincidentally, so do David and Charles. And what business are those 2 Koch Bros. in? They’ve got fingers in different pies, but many of their revenue streams connect to fossil fuels in some way. As the Porter Ranch gas leak reminds us, a large proportion of pollution can be traced to fossil fuels, without even touching on the climate change discussion. David and Charles would like the freedom to pollute the air and water without any pesky government regulations interfering with them in any way. John wants to tell us that such air and water pollution won’t do us any harm. Could there possibly be a connection between the rich guys who want a certain message trumpeted in the media, and a guy coming along and playing the exact tune that the rich guys want? 

Oh, and about climate change, David and Charles, whatever they actually believe, still obviously want to confuse the issue and make everyone question it, if possible. Then John comes along recently with his media opinion piece suggesting that the climate scientists have a financial interest in exaggerating the threat. Personally, it sounds to me like a certain media mouthpiece might have a financial interest in dismissing the threat of climate change, and of air and water pollution. John, you say we don’t need regulations to keep our air and water safe? You say air and water magically clean up pollution and renew themselves without us doing anything? John, give me a break!