I hung out my flag today. It’s not something Liberals are known to do. It is hard to pinpoint when or why it happened, but somehow right wingnuts captured the flag, wrapped themselves in it and Liberals stood by and let them get away with it. Liberals decided flying the flag or wearing flag lapel pins was a right wing thing and they certainly did not want to be seen as right-wingers.

So it came to pass that if you had a flag out on the Fourth or had a flag decal on your car, you were automatically identified as a right wing Republican. Some of this can be traced back to the Vietnam War era when displaying a flag came to mean you were for the war. It even became fashionable among some circles to burn or deface the flag.

The notion of the flag coming to stand for a certain ideology is one of the worst things that has happened to this country in the last few decades. And we Liberals have no one to blame for that but ourselves. You can surf the net and find plenty of left-wing rants about how the flag is just a symbol and how we need to get beyond symbols. You can also find some arguing that flying the flag is a nationalistic throwback in these days of the global economy.

An article in salon.com captured the entire debate pretty well. It was titled, “Flag pins are for losers,” then proceeded carefully go back over which Presidential candidates had worn flag pins at the debates and which had not, finding those who stuck with their flag pins ended up losing. But the quote that jumped out at me was this:

Lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don’t want sticking to your fingers these days.

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

Let’s examine the logic of this for a minute, because it is the same logic that has been used for years to justify not flying the flag on the Fourth, the same logic that has been used to link the flag to an ideology. In essence the writer was saying because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the other idiots who got us into Iraq all wore flag pins, that somehow polluted the flag.

There is no question that they dishonored that for which it stood, but flying the flag does not mean we honor their dishonor. Quite the contrary, we seek to reassert America’s true values, to cleanse the flag of the stains of the past few years.

Notice the quote:

Men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

Well, salon (I won’t justify naming the writer of such idiocy), like a lot of Americans these days you seem to have little sense of history. Men–and women–with little flag pins or big flying flags have been doing nasty things in the name of the flag for a long time.

They interned Japanese during the Second World War and persecuted Germans during the First. If my memory serves me right one of the more notorious pictures of a lynching shows a U.S. flag. In fact the Klan loved to wrap themselves in the flag. If you remember Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York you’ll remember how the so-called nativists wrapped themselves in the flag to justify their murder and mayhem against the Irish.

Yes, there is no question “little men with flags” tend to come out of the dark corners of the American soul during times of strife, covering whatever noxious deeds and perversions they have with the stars and stripes, as if somehow that made everything all right.

A paragraph in an old CommonDreams article captured what many still feel:

After Dr. Johnson said patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, the cynic Ambrose Bierce amended it with, “I beg to submit that it is the first.” Then H.L. Mencken jumped in: “But there is something even worse: it is the first, last and middle range of fools.

Again note the logic, which is similar to the salon piece: if scoundrels wrap themselves in patriotism, then somehow patriotism is suspect. It is interesting to note that Samuel Johnson also was against the American Revolution, writing that when colonists emigrated to America they gave up their rights. Known as “Bitter Bierce,” Ambrose Bierce spent most of his life working for William Randolph Hearst. As for Mencken, his anti-Semitism and his isolationist sympathies (some argue he was a Nazi sympathizer) had him arguing against going to war with Hitler.

So quotes about patriotism and scoundrels come from interesting sources to say the least. Yet, the larger logic still confounds–why just because wingnuts wrap themselves in the flag should the flag suddenly become their property?

To me the wingnuts have already taken too much of America in the name of the Republican Counterrevolution. They have increased the income disparity to the worst it has been in a century, they have given us $4 gas and two-bit health care, and they have lowered this country’s international standing to the lowest point it has been in at least a century.

When the rest of the world sees them wrapped in the flag they think all Americans subscribe to those ideas. We don’t! And by flying the flag we show that we stand for a different America, an America that stitched those stars and stripes together they way Betsy Ross did in that apocryphal story.

That America stands for the words of the Declaration and the Constitution. It believes that even though we have often failed to live up to those words, that the words still mean something. It is often fashionable to recite the Declaration on this day, especially the phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

What is usually left out, especially by the adherents of the Counterrevolution is what follows:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

In other words, the Declaration itself proclaims in no uncertain terms what I have called the main principle of Liberal America: government exists to keep the playing field level.

So to me those who fly the flag this day are celebrating that principle, for it is the principle that runs through the history of this country like the threads that knit the flag. So to me the flag affirms:

The belief that government exists to do good for the people. It serves to level the playing field when those with power and money seek to tilt things in their direction, to assure that the votes are counted fairly, to maintain a free and open “marketplace of ideas,” to stimulate our society to positive ends whether in the arts or research, and to provide an equal education so that every American not only starts from the same point, but also has the same opportunities every step of the way on into college and even professional school and work. Its values lie behind the ringing inaugural addresses of FDR and JFK as well as what is the single greatest American speech of the last century, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” masterpiece.

The fingerprints of liberalism lie everywhere on this nation, from public buildings built by the Works Progress Administration, to schools, roads, homes and utilities paid for by government grants, loans, and subsidies. You cannot pass through the core of any city, drive on any road, visit any national park, or enter any school, hospital, or government building without passing over ground built by Liberal America. Liberalism pervades every American household, where someone has benefited from government programs, ranging from college loans to unemployment, from the minimum wage and collective bargaining to regulations assuring the safety of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We do not live in fear of someone arbitrarily knocking down our doors in the middle of the night or of not being able to speak our minds, because the people who fought for those rights believed in the level playing field.

The American flag is NOT about racists or nativists, it is not about rip-off tycoons and spout-off television loudmouths, and it is not about inequality and injustice.  Today I think about how every stitch in that flag represents those who fought for those rights. Many of them died so the rest of us might enjoy them.

So I proudly fly my flag in their honor and in honor of the values they fought for.

I hope more of us will do that, for it is time we take back the flag and take back our country.

Tagged with: $4 gas • American flag • Consitution • Dick-Cheney • flag pins • Fourth of July • George-W-Bush • inalienable rights • income disparity • Japanese Internment • level playing field • liberal americans • Liberals • patriotism • Republicans • Republican_Counterrevolution • Samuel Johnson • Vietnam War • wingnuts

Friday it will be the Fourth of July, which in an election year takes on added meaning. Of course, there will be the usual cliche’s about we would not be having an election if it were not for the Fourth of July, but as a first-generation American whose family came to this country as political refugees, the Fourth of July holds special meaning for me, for without the Fourth of July there would be no me.

I won’t bore you here with my family history–you can read it in the about link above–other than to say that recently we were going through some old family photographs as part of a book I have been asked to do about my grandfather. Among those photographs was a picture of my family on the boat as it pulled into New York Harbor, You can tell it’s New York because the base of the Statue of Liberty is visible.

The person who took the picture–I suspect it may have been my uncle, for he made a living photographing tourists on the French Riviera as a way of getting together the money to bring he and his mother to America–made sure to focus on the people and not on the statue. That was exactly the right decision. It’s also a good message for this holiday.

In recent years, the Fourth seems to focus more on the “statue,” the external events, then the people. As an example my son was privileged to attend the annual DC Fourth celebration which he watched with his wife-to-be from the Capitol steps. They had to stand in line for several hours in the heat to get a spot and then endure an evacuation when a thunderstorm threatened.

They had a chance to see Stevie Wonder live and witness the famous DC fireworks display first hand. I would be lying if I didn’t say they were impressed. To see such a show for free from a front row seat on the steps of our nation’s Capitol is a rare privilege. But note my emphasis on the word free. They did not pay for the show and strangely enough no politician questioned the expense of the fireworks or the appropriateness of Stevie Wonder as the main entertainment.

Now what does this have to do with my uncle’s picture and the fact that we have lost the emphasis on people that once used to characterize the Fourth? In small towns across America they still celebrate the Fourth the old-fashioned way, with a downtown parade in which anyone who wants to can participate, usually wearing something red, white and blue. The candidates march also, but even they recognize this is a nonpartisan affair.

As the Fourth has become more commercial, those parades are slowly becoming extinct, and as they become extinct do does the role of the people in the Fourth, which has now become an occasion for yet another holiday sale and a day off. More people in America probably spend their time watching the Fourth on television than decorating their tricycles or wearing Uncle Sam suits or just carrying a flag. In fact flags on the Fourth are now a rarity rather than common in many neighborhoods.

But the Fourth is about the people. There has long been a tendency to celebrate the Fourth as the achievement of the so-called Founders, which was not inconsiderable, but we forget that the fact the Fourth even occurred was not due to the founders, most of whom never carried a musket during the revolution but about thousands whose names now lie on worn old tombstones that are largely forgotten.

I once was privileged to walk through the cemetery at Concord, Massachussets where many of those who died at the conflict that began with the shot “heard round the world” at the rude bridge lie buried. Their stones are simple and bear only the briefest mention of their deaths in one of the world’s most seminal events.

For all its immortality that bridge isn’t much, a wooden arch that spans a creek not much wider than the average bedroom. The bridge speaks a particularly American dialect, built and rebuilt from logs linked together ina fashion that evokes that legendary American dwelling–the log cabin.

But the bridge sits in a valley, so when you stand in its center at the top of the arch you look across at the hilly fields where they could see the British marching towards them. What must have been going through their heads as they looked out at the “lobsterbacks” knowing not only that they were outgunned, but that if they fired at all it would be a “shot heard round the world.”

You can actually walk to Emerson’s house from there and also that of the Alcotts and others of the Concord literary set, but it is those worn gravestones that I kept coming back to, perhaps hoping they might speak to me.

On July 3, John Adams wrote the following letter to his wife;

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Adams’ letter often gets quoted at the Fourth, but we seem to have lost sight of its meaning, for above all it is about the people. One sentence makes that clear:

I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.

So we are back to the railing of a ship entering New York harbor before most people even believed there would be another world war, a ship that would deposit my family at the place so many immigrants had come before them–Ellis Island. As refugees they gave up everything to come here because they believed in the possibility of America. That combination of sacrifice and “tryumph” lies at the center of Adams’ thoughts.

Today we seem to want the one without the other. The emphasis of the Fourth now on media events rather than the people is one indication of that. No matter which political party or persuasion you belong to you have to admit, sacrifice has not been high on our list especially of “the Toil and Blood and Treasure.”

We’ll leave aside rants on the work ethic or income equality on this day and talk only of toil for the community. How many of you reading this have done something for your community lately? As for blood, this country now prefers to wimp out of its wars, refusing to declare war so that everyone must share in the sacrifice. Again, we’ll leave aside what you think about Iraq and Afghanistan and merely ask have you ever pressured Congress into properly declaring these wars so that the military burden is shared by all of us? and finally there is the treasure part. No one seems to want to pay for government any more. We are willing to spend billions on lottery tickets but consistently vote against taxes.

So as Adams saw the tension between “toil” and “tryumph,” so today that tension persists. Yet I look at that photograph and think about those graves and I have to agree with Adams’ feelings about posterity. We can not think otherwise, for, as I have said before, if we lose faith in the people, we lose faith in ourselves and our democracy.

Tagged with: American flag • American people • Concord • D.C. • democracy • Ellis Island • Emerson • Fourth of July • John Adams • lobsterbacks • New York harbor • rude bridge • small towns • Statue of Liberty • Stevie Wonder • Uncle Sam • Washington

For Father’s Day my son gave me a CD I’ve wanted for awhile, Merle Haggard’s “Bluegrass Sessions.” In that CD lies a story about how America has changed in less than a generation.

Hags has always had a checkered reputation among white liberals as does most country music. It reminds me of the famous line from the original “Grand Ole Opry,” when host George D. Hay said, “This ain’t grand opera it’s the grand ole opry!” For white liberals, especially of the limousine variety, country music gets associated with the word redneck a lot and many of them think of Merle Haggard as the biggest redneck of them all. Some progressives would no more have a Haggard CD in the house than watch Bill O’Reilly or read a book by Ann Coulter.

But to lump Haggard with those two is to completely misread the man. First, he’s got more talent. I remember reading once that his voice covers eight octaves. He also recorded one of the first country concept albums–and one of the greatest American recordings–a two record tribute to Jimmie Rodgers titled “Same Train, Different Time.”

Merle Haggard is actually one of a dying breed, a country performer who came up the hard way, from the poorest of backgrounds with a stint in San Quentin on his record, where legend has it he heard Johnny Cash and decided to become a country singer.

Like Cash, Loretta Lynn and others, Haggard gave a voice to those who didn’t have a voice, who needed someone to tell their stories, from those who worked the cotton fields like Cash’s family or the mines like Lynn’s or the California labor camps filled with displaced Okies like Haggard’s family.

The Counterrevolution tried to turn Haggard into an icon, an Ann Coulter with a guitar, but he shunned the role, for he is a more complex soul than that. He also was plainly uncomfortable with being used. Sometimes when he would sing “Okie from Muskogee” he would do it with that famous Haggard smirk he can get. Some got it, some didn’t, and some refused to say they got it.

Back a few years ago, country music stars wrapped themselves in the flag and those who didn’t were soundly castigated. Remember the Dixie Chicks? In a London concert lead singer Texas native Natalie Maines said on stage,

We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.

Immediately after the remarks hit this side of the pond, a firestorm broke out, with people calling for a boycott of the Chicks and smashing CDs in demonstrations designed to attract as many cameras as possible. In one of the most controversial reactions, radio stations stopped playing Chicks’ recordings. Gail Austin, Clear Channel’s director of programming for two Jacksonville, Florida stations said:

Out of respect for our troops, our city and our listeners, [we] have taken the Dixie Chicks off our play lists.

That was 2003, but in a signal of things to come, one of the country performers who spoke out for the Chicks was none other than Merle Haggard.

Five years later even stars such as Toby Keith, who plays a star-spangled guitar, and Tim McGraw had changed their tunes. According to CommonDreams.org

:Now Keith says he is a lifelong Democrat and has claimed he never supported the war….Tim McGraw - the biggest contemporary country star - has a hit single with If You’re Reading This, about a dead soldier’s last letter home, and the Dixie Chicks, boycotted in 2003 after lead singer Natalie Maines told an audience in London: “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas,” won five Grammy Awards this year.

But the biggest story of all is Haggard. This fall when Haggard came out with the “Bluegrass Sessions” he had America talking yet again. This time the center of attention was a song titled “What Happened?” The tag line of which is:

What happened? Where did America go?

I can’t quote any more of the lyrics because of copyright restrictions, but let’s just say “What Happened?” is an interesting song the covers a lot of bases. Some of them echo themes in the book Strange Death. For example, Haggard’s chorus laments the decline of “mom and pop” owned stores at the expense of corporate behemoths such as Wal-Mart. He also hits the high price of gasoline (and this was before it hit $4) and one of his–and America’s favorite topics–the evening news.

On the other hand there a Reagan-like complaint about Uncle Sam spending your money and an ambiguous line about “truth that stood for years” no longer means anything. Finally there is the requisite reference to 9/11.

In many ways, “What Happened?” is a laundry list of the complaints that you can find in any recent poll about the attitudes of American voters. In short, they are angry and frustrated. Back a year ago, just before the Iowa primary, a Des Moines Register poll showed:

Sixty-four percent of Iowans believed “things have gotten off track.

After the release of his album Haggard did a most un-Haggard-like thing: he hit the road hustling his CD and gave interviews that made clear exactly how he felt about what had happened to America under one George W. Bush.

No less than Time ran a story, “Does Merle Haggard Speak for America?” which laid it all out:

Merle Haggard has always had his guitar hardwired to the gutbucket pulse of Middle America. Back in the Vietnam era, he seemed the essence of a historic political migration: white males fleeing the feminized, antiwar, politically correct Democratic Party.

In the interview Haggard went after George Bush, mincing no words:

The folks don’t have a say-so anymore. They’re being force-fed—music, yeah, but every other darn thing too. I supported George W. I’m not exactly a liberal. But I know how that Texas thing works, who those oil folks are and what they wanted in Iraq… I’m a born-again Christian too, but the longer I live, the more afraid I get of some of these religious groups that have so much influence on the Republicans and want to tell us how to live our lives.

But Haggard wasn’t done:

The thing that gets under my skin most about George W. is his intention to install fear in people. This is America. We’re proud. We’re not afraid of a bunch of terrorists. But this government is all about terror alerts and scaring us at airports. We’re changing the Constitution out of fear. We spend all our time looking up each other’s dresses. Fear’s the only issue the Republican Party has. Vote for them, or the terrorists will win. That’s not what Reagan was about. I hate to think about our soldiers over in Iraq fighting for a country that’s slipping away.

Then Haggard did something even more unprecedented he wrote a song endorsing Hillary Clinton for President with the line:

This country needs to be honest/This country needs to be large/Something like a big switch of gender/Let’s put a woman in charge.

Back in the 1960s there was a saying that when Lyndon Johnson lost Walter Cronkite was when he knew he had lost the American people. When George W. Bush lost Merle Haggard he had to feel he had lost the American people. The Counterrevolution also has to be worried that maybe America is finally catching on to its game.

Haggard’s support of Hillary Clinton also hints at an important dynamic that the Democrats would be wise to heed. Clinton’s successes were fueled by what might be termed “Haggard voters,” working class people who have long represented the core of Haggard’s audience. With Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the election there has been much speculation about where these voters will go come November.

If I were Barack Obama and the Democratic Party I would be sure I did not lose the “Haggard voters.” The themes he evokes in “What Happened?” are essentially about a country in which the playing field has become tilted so much that we have to wonder, “Where did America go?” Merle Haggard may be trying to tell the Democratic Party it needs to recover this theme.

What do you suppose would happen if Haggard wrote a song for Obama? That truly would signal change is in the air.

Tagged with: bluegrass sessions • counterrevolution • country music • Democratic Party • Dixie Chicks • George-W-Bush • grand ole opry • Haggard voters • Hillary Clinton • Johnny Cash • Loretta Lynn • Lyndon Johnson • merle haggard • Obama • okie from muskogee • The Strange Death of Liberal America • Tim McGraw • Toby Keith • what happened • working class

I am on the road again for the first time in many years, returning to some places on the East Coast I had not seen since before the millennium turned. Being a Midwesterner, I always like Midwestern small towns because at least a few of them are trying to resist becoming what I term Gasoline Ghettos–those villages of motels, restaurants, and other tourist traps that now line the outskirts of virtually every major Interstate highway intersection.

The East Coast has a different appeal for me in the it is so old that Gasoline Ghettos often have a tough time muscling aside two-hundred year-old houses and shops. But I think what has impressed me most about the landscape of this trip is how much America is becoming alike.
Even on the East Coast now the Gasoline Ghetto is becoming the primary architectural style. And where there aren’t gasoline ghettos, the chains with their recognizable buildings and neon signs are everywhere. Whatever corporate marketi8ng department decided that all Pizza Huts or Best Buys should look the same should be consigned in the manner of Dante to a hell of sameness.

Before becoming disabled, I used to travel a lot, but I finally grew tired of what every serious business traveler knows as the “where am I now” syndrome that comes from staying in motels that all look the same no matter where you are so that one morning you wake up, look out the window and for a minute you have to think to remember where you are. So I started looking for bed-and-breakfasts or anything that wasn’t a chain. Once I stayed in a local motel so bad that in the morning there was a small snow drift inside the front door. But I knew exactly where I was.

When I started writing The Strange Death of Liberal America, I decided that each chapter would begin with a description of a place–a real place–because I felt one of the more insidious developments of the Republican Counterrevolution was that it was rapidly taking away the local and the unique. Everything is now owned by a chain and if everything is owned by a chain that makes all of us mere cogs in the wheels that those chains move.

Critics as far back as the late Lewis Mumford have been writing about the dangers of homogenization but I don’t think it really hit home until this trip. Because of my disability this is the longest trip I have taken away from home in five years and the only way I was able to manage it was to finally intimidate a certain airline into providing me with what is known as “handicapped” seating. I always though those seats were reserved for George Bush and Dick Cheney, but found out people like me that have trouble being shrink-wrapped into a seat in the middle of an aisle can actually avail themselves of these seats–although it practi8cally takes an Act of Congress to reserve one.

Two years ago on a car trip back from a college basketball tournament with my son it was he who was quite familiar with the ways of the Gasoline Ghetto, having ridden the team bus for four years and stayed in cheap motels. One morning at one of those ubiquitous buffet breakfasts, while my wife and I muddled through what for us was unfamiliar territory, he had a plate full in less than two minutes. When I asked him his secret, he said, “They’re all the same. After four years you get so you can do it in your sleep.”

Then he told us that the night before after a particularly embarrassing loss their coach refused to buy them dinner and instead went to the grocery store and bought bags of cold cuts and bread. The players decided they wanted to eat as a team so they proceeded to take over the motel lounge until the manager threw them out saying the lounge was for guests only. They protested they were guests (in fact the team probably buttered their bread fairly well the two nights they were there), but the manager would have none of it.

In Strange Death I wrote about the impact of the chains on intellectual creativity, particularly the media chains that have made being an innovator like Elvis or a Louis Armstrong or any kind of rap or hip hop artist an endangered species because they threaten that eternal soundtrack that runs in supermarkets, telephone hold backgrounds, motel lounges, and restaurants. Until my son talked about life on the road, I didn’t really realize how corporate chains have insinuated themselves into our minds.

Most Americans now live in suburban developments where the houses are churned out by computers and look the same whether in New York or Georgia or New Mexico. When we travel, we stay in a Gasoline Ghetto. In between we may listen to CD�s also turned out by the same conglomerates or one of those programmed radio stations owned by the likes of Clear Channel. Local or individual character is rapidly becoming extinct. You literally don’t know where you are.

What does this have to do with America? Think Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s warning that a very clever Michael Moore turned into Fahrenheit 9/11. But Moore missed the deeper message–although it does not diminish the power of his movie–that is, if you live in an environment of physical sameness, sooner or later it will metamorphose into an environment of intellectual sameness. Gasoline Ghettos become intellectual ghettos, for the minds no longer stimulated by the unique, the unusual, the imaginative lose the power to imagine. They atrophy the way any muscle atrophies that is not used.

Atrophied brains lead to people who are easy to manage, people who are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Even more, those who protest or even engage in the intellectual equivalent of my son’s basketball team eating in the motel lounge will swiftly be dismissed.

We need to do all we can to insure that architectural uniqueness and independent voices do not die. This is also where the blogosphere comes in. Right now it is the only outlet for some of us. We need to fight to be sure it does not become the equivalent of a Gasoline Ghetto dominated by the equivalent of chains. Because when it does guess who will be wearing the chains?

Tagged with: architectural sameness • blogosphere • chain stores • Chicago • Clear Channel • clear_channel • college_basketball • creativity • Dick-Cheney • Elvis • fahrenheit_451 • fahrenheit_9/11 • gasoline_ghettos • George Bush • interstate highway • lewis_mumford • Louis_Armstrong • Michael_Moore • motels • ray_bradbury • The Strange Death of Liberal America • where_am_i_now_syndrome

As just about everyone in blogdom knows, recently the Democrats decided to issue credentials to CERTAIN bloggers to attend the convention. I have long referred to what Skippy the Bush Kangaroo call blogtopia as blogdom, because in recent years it has turned into a rather feudal place where certain well-connected blog nobility seem to call the shots, from getting noticed by the national press to being invited to conventions.

Anyone who has lived in blogdom can predict who is on the list. I won’t increase their already inflated hit counts by citing them here. I will only say that these blogs are to the Net what ABC and CBS are to the mainstream media. Their voices are as predictable and as independent as the New York Times. These are not folks who will rock the boat. You won’t see any posts coming out of Denver that focus on Bill Clinton’s role in the mortgage crisis.

Sounding as if he were hyping a stale donut, Aaron Myers, Director of Online Communications for the DNCC, stated:

Since we began planning, one goal has been at the core of all our efforts: to engage as many communities as possible in the Convention experience. We’re excited to provide bloggers with the opportunity to be the eyes and ears of so many at this Convention. Today, we are shattering the standard we set just four years ago, when the 2004 Democratic Convention was the first to credential blogs. This year, we will more than triple the number of blogs credentialed to witness history in the making.

Bobby Clark, Deputy Director of ProgressNow–for whom progress is made one baby step at a time–uttered this BS about the credentials:

We are proud to cooperate with the DNCC to ensure that for the first time, so many citizen journalists will have the tools and access they need to cover a national Convention. The progressive movement really is a ‘Big Tent’, and we think this unique event will be a huge hit with bloggers, non-profit leaders, and even some members of the professional media.

Note that word “cooperate.” When this campaign is over check the final financial statement filed by the Convention and if you don’t find a payment to ProgressNow, I will be very surprised.

As for the number of bloggers, triple means 55. Fifty-five–that’s all the bloggers who will be invited to the Democratic National Convention–and some of those were invited only after the AfroSpear protested that the bloggers were predominantly white. Not only are they white they are Wonderbread white–long since grown stale and irrelevant.

Those of you who are reading this have randomly wandered on this blog–which according to my tracking stats a fair number are reading for the first time–or even got here because Google sent you to this site because this post mentions sex [just had to throw that in there]. Any Newbie who has cruised blogdom knows that choosing 55 blogs to cover the convention is about like choosing the winner for American Idol [we'll get that link in here also].

There are literally thousands of blogs of the Net. What is interesting about the Democrats’ choices is that the blogs that dominate their short list are old and stodgy and frankly somewhat middle-of-the-road. When you think about it this is not only narrow-minded, but stupid. This is going to be a close election and blogs could play a role in determining the outcome, but by choosing the old guard, they have revealed that they have little interest in reaching out to a variety of ideas.

Pam Spaulding at Pandagon all but predicted what would happen:

As a candidate in the general pool, which will be announced at the end of the month, I think that list will probably generate even more heat than the release of state blogs, given the volatile nature of the blogosphere “A-List” — and “everyone else” conflicts that erupt from time to time.

To top this off, a “Big Tent” for bloggers will be in part hosted (and no doubt raking in money) for the most notorious, hypocritical, exclusionary and frankly self-promoting blog on the net–the one with the orange pages. If the “Big Tent” is anything like the orange blog expect folks to be kicked out for drinking the wrong kind of coffee, wearing the wrong t-shirt, letting slip the wrong phrase, or speaking in the wrong accent. Also expect Big Orange to make Big Bucks off this effort.

In the official announcement the Democrats put out about inviting blogs to the Convention, you have to read the fine print to find out:

Bloggers will be required to pay for their own travel and accommodations. All bloggers are invited to apply for housing through the DNCC media housing process.

Now some of the better bloggers I know are not rich folks. We all know what will be the inflated price of lodging at the DNC, so if you’ve got a spare thousand or two lying around you might be able to cover the convention. In other words, the bloggers covering the DNC will be the same bloggers who fell all over millionaire Ned Lamont a few years ago because they did not have a clue what working class voters wanted or thought about. These are also the bloggers who said in 2006 the economy was not an issue and as late as last spring sang the same tune.

But guess what, even for the princes and princesses of Blogdom, covering the DNC will hardly be a picnic. Pam Spaulding relates the rules for bloggers that were laid out to her by Myers:

Floor access for the general pool bloggers (that includes the MSM), will given in 30-45 minute blocks of time via floor pass credential, which will be obtained at a specific table/area in the hall. There will be no limit on how many times a general pool blogger can receive this pass during the convention. The general pool bloggers will also have a designated area to obtain the pass separate from traditional media so they aren’t competing with them for floor access.

When you aren’t getting your valuable 30 minutes of floor time guess where you will be–on a basketball practice court that has been converted into a media room where you get to watch on TV just like the rest of us. Think about the thirty minutes? Have you ever been to or seen one of those conventions? It can a good part of thirty minutes just to get from one part of the floor to another or to find a specific delegate you might want to interview.

And here is another thing you can bet on: those passes will be very scarce for the “big moments” such as Obama’s speech. But just supposing you land one of those coveted passes–will someone drag you off the floor in the middle of the speech because your thirty minutes are up?

So in that overused phrase here is the bottom line for bloggers at the DNC–fork over $1,000 or so for airline tickets, lodging, food all to sit on a practice basketball court and watch the goings-on on television. Of course, we know certain bloggers will have their expenses paid.

Perhaps the best idea for the right way to do this came from Jason Rosenbaum at The Seminal:

I’d like to propose a different way of selecting blogs for these positions. Blogs are an outsider phenomenon. They represent the everyday citizen and activist commenting on political goings-on. Likewise, the Democratic party says it is the party of the average American. Given our party and our movement’s focus on people, I propose those bloggers with the least access should be given credentials.

This means people who work for the state or national party or traditional media outlets are passed over - those well connected in politics can find other ways to attend the convention and there will be plenty of traditional media coverage there already. The focus should be on those who traditionally are outsiders. This means bloggers going to the convention should be activists who occasionally work against the party establishment, women and minorities who are always underrepresented, and community builders who have brought together average citizens outside the normal political establishment.

As for the rest of us we’ll be watching on TV in comfortable chairs, maybe even wearing our pajamas (remember when they called us pajamahadeen), probably with our favorite brew on hand, and if like me you are disabled, maybe even blogging from bed.

Maybe in the end we got the better deal.

BTW: Just so this won’t be viewed as sour gripes, I did not apply or want to apply for blogging credentials. Seems like their application form said little about those of us with disabilities.

Tagged with: American Idol • Barack Obama • blogdom • bloggers • blogs • blogtopia • Democratic National Committee • Democratic National Convention • Democratic Party • sex • Wonderbread

Sometimes I tend to get behind, so I am now writing about a special Juneteenth which occurred on Thursday, the nineteenth. According to the National Registry:

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on une 19^th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

At events across the country, families again gathered to tell the stories yet one more time, stories that speak of the resilience and creativity of African Americans.

Juneteenth should also be a day in which all of us recognize how African Americans have enriched this nation. It would not be too much to say America moves with an African American rhythm, sometime awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, and many times hesitantly, but that syncopated, off-the-beat cadence is there not merely in our music, our poetry, our speech, the way we walk and dress, but in the very soul of America.

There are those who would deny that soul exists and others who would hold that what W.E.B. DuBois called the “souls of black folk” could never exist in the minds of white folks. But just the same it is there, for without Juneteenth America would be something else, something not quite aa vital or alive.

But something special ran through Juneteenth in this extraordinary year, something that had to bring a special edge to the celebration, for this Juneteenth, African Americans could rejoice that for the first time in American history a black man carried the Presidential nomination of a major political party. A year form now the celebration could be about an African American President.

In honor of this special Juneteenth, I include a poem that is sometimes read on this day, Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise:”

Tagged with: Abraham Lincoln • African Americans • Barack Obama • Civil War • emancipation proclamation • Juneteenth • Maya Angelou • W.E.B. DuBois • YouTube

In the current feud running through the Democratic Party, supporters of Hillary Clinton blame the Democratic National Committee for much of the mess because the DNC would not bow to Clinton’s demands over the Florida and Michigan delegations. But actually the situation is more complex than that.

It goes back at least as far as the 2004 Dean campaign and actually back even to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Both Dean and Clinton challenged the regular establishment–Dean from the left and Clinton from the right. By the time Clinton left the White House he and his Democratic Leadership Council were the establishment as signified my the elevation of Clinton aide Terry McAuliffe to head of the DNC.

But McAuliffe was bounced after the debacle of 2004. John Kerry’s loss was bad enough, but the Democratic Party took a big hit in that election and blamed McAuliffe. There were some in the Party who felt that McAuliffe had not mastered the new modern campaigns that Howard Dean and Karl Rove both emblemized, campaigns that used the Internet and other communications technologies to mobilize the grassroots. The grassroots Rove and Dean appealed to were, of course, entirely different, but each in his own way had proven effective.

So when it came to selecting a successor to McAuliffe, Dean threw his hat in the ring and even though the DLC types were not happy with his candidacy they failed to mount a formidable opposition candidate. From the beginning Dean clashed with the DLC which by now had become the old guard.

Some of the conflict between Dean and the DLC stems from the 2004 campaign. In that campaign Dean was asking a very relevant question: What if the whole Hollywood production that has been titled “America’s Right Turn,” was nothing more than a phantom, a marketing creation, a fad, right up there with Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch dolls? What if the strategy of the Democratic Party was merely like one of those bad Hollywood sequels, Rocky VIII, Crocodile Dundee Does Kansas City, Superman Redux? What if there was an error on the part of all the pundits who have made American politics a cacophonous squawk like a huge flock of crows descending on a particularly foul and rotting corpse?

Dean officially announced his presidential candidacy in June 2003, fully a year ahead of the convention and half a year before the first primaries. In his announcement he threw down a gauntlet to his own party saying, “Most importantly, I have wanted my party to stand up for what we believe in again.” What Howard Dean was trying to tell us was that the rise of the Republican Counterrevolution could be a much more complex and sinister phenomenon that the mere fact that one bright morning in America people had suddenly awakened and decided to become Republicans.

Howard Dean showed that Liberal America still had a pulse, and a pretty strong one at that. All the prescriptions and therapies being advocated by the self-designated care givers such as “slowing down” and “relaxing,” “toning down” the advocacy may in fact be doing the patient more harm than good.

After his election as head of the DNC, one of the biggest disputes was over Dean’s “Fifty State Strategy,” which was designed to rebuild the party from the ground up in every state. The old guard saw this as ridiculous because it was essentially throwing away money on states the Democrats could never hope to win.

After the Democrats won in 2006, you would have thought it was a time for rejoicing, but the DLC-types were determined to poison the water. Former Clinton aide and now-television-commentator James Carville fired a shot at Dean during an election night analysis on CNN. It surprised me that a person for whom numbers represent the main weapons of a well-stocked arsenal should come out shooting without any ammunition other than remarks from some anonymous Republicans (his wife, maybe). After comparing Dean to Donald Rumsfeld (as low a blow as one Democrat can make against another), Carville pointed out,

“There was a missed opportunity here,” he said. “I’ve sat down with Republican pollsters to discuss this race: They believe we left 10 to 20 seats on the table.”

The morning after Carville became even bolder calling for Dean’s resignation in a meeting with reporters:

Asked by a reporter whether Dean should be dumped, Carville replied, “In a word, do I think? Yes.”

The candidate Carville actually proposed to replace Dean was none other than Democratic Leadership Council chair and Kentucky Representative Harold Ford:

Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager.

For those of you not familiar with the Democratic Leadership Council a brief aside is in order. In 1985 a group dominated by conservative Southern Democrats including Al Gore, Chuck Robb, Sam Nunn, John Breaux, and an Arkansas governor named William Jefferson Clinton organized the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) with the initial mission of securing the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination for a moderate Southerner.

By 1990 Bill Clinton had became chair of the DLC. His first act was to preside over the formulation of the 1990 New Orleans Declaration. This document would become the blueprint for Clinton’s future and that of the Democratic Party. The most telling of these principles are:

We believe the Democratic Party’s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government.

We believe that economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone. The free market, regulated in the public interest, is the best engine of general prosperity.

When Howard Dean entered the race in 2004, many saw his candidacy as an opportunity to end the reign of the DLC. When he became head of the Democratic National Committee similar hopes emerged. But the DLC would make like difficult for Dean. Carville was not the main thorn in Dean’s side, that came from former Clinton staffer and supporter Rahm Emanuel, who during the 2006 campaign openly feuded with Dean, at one point storming out of a meeting with DNC chair. According to Chicago Tribune reporter Neftali Bendavid, who witnessed the meeting Emanuel banged his hand on the table then:

Chided Dean’s grassroots plan, “No disrespect, but some of us are arrogant enough, we come from Chicago, we think we know what it means to knock on a door. You’re nowhere Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That’s fucking bullshit.”

Emanuel then released a letter demanding Dean release funds to his own Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Fortune called the letter:

The political equivalent of Microsoft executives arguing over how many Xboxes to ship where for the Christmas season.

Fortune went on to note Emanuel could sling the mud just as well as Carville, saying that in a meeting Emanuel:

Obliquely suggests that Dean is nearly as big an obstacle as Karl Rove to a Democratic win.

Any systems thinker worthy of the name could see the ultimate result of the Emanuel strategy would be a one-state party. But what is more important to note is that the Emanuel-Dean feud is about more than money–it is about ideological control of the Party. A lengthy investigation by Truthout uncovered the ideological roots of Emanuel’s machinations:

According to Democratic candidates who ran for House of Representative seats in 2006, Rahm Emanuel, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, took sides during the Democratic primary elections, favoring conservative candidates, including former Republicans, and sidelining candidates who were running in favor of withdrawal from Iraq.

An examination of individual races reveals a pattern of financial and political support for wealthy conservative candidates and an assault on their grassroots-supported opponents who were running on platforms that included a full withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

In review of Bendavid’s book on Emanuel in The American Prospect, Sarah Goldman writes:

He is adamant that “we have no base!,” a view that clearly guided his strategy for selecting candidates. As Bendavid writes, “he would not support the most loyal Democrats, or those whose populism was purist. His only criterion, he said, was who could win.” This kind of single-minded, values-be-damned vision is anathema to some on the party’s left.

The plot gets even more elaborate. In researching this article, two names popped up that make the credentials fight a bit clearer. One is Donna Brazile, the former Gore campaign manager who is currently being pilloried for her vote in the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegations and the other is Nancy Pelosi. Here is reporter Nina Easton’s account of a meeting between Brazile and Emanuel:

As I arrive for a July interview with Emanuel at DCCC headquarters, former Gore campaign chief Donna Brazile is standing on the sidewalk, buttonholing him. A party veteran, Brazile has seen more than her share of internal Democratic Party squabbles, and she’s worried about this one.

Some party activists view Emanuel as the instigator of a feud that is dividing the party. Dean may be the object of sighs and eye-rolling by pragmatic, big-donor Democrats-the crowd that has generally signed on with Emanuel-but as a populist hero to party activists and the “netroots” he helped spawn, the former presidential candidate has his own powerful base. So Brazile tells me she is here to deliver a compromise plan she hopes will cool the fires between the two men.

So TWO YEARS AGO, Brazile, to her credit, was trying to settle the dispute.

As for Pelosi, according to a recent report, guess which candidate she is supporting to replace Barack Obama in the Senate should he win the White House? Rahm Emanuel.

At this point, we need not go over the bitter hearings over the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegations other than to place them in the context of this larger dispute between Howard Dean and the DLC:

There has been a struggle in the Democratic Party between Howard Dean’s DNC and the Clinton wing of the Party. The alternative organization Dean formed after his unsuccessful bid for president, Democracy for America, was a direct slap at the Democratic Leadership Council. So the struggle yesterday was a struggle between two factions of the Party.

In the end the dispute was about something much bigger–the future of the Democratic Party. In many ways it resembled the conflict between Dean and the DLC resembles the conflict that almost tore apart the 1912 convention. That also was a dispute between Democratic progressives and conservatives. While my ideological sympathies are clearly with the Dean wing, it is clear the feud has to end or the result will be disaster next fall.

Donna Brazile may not exactly be well-liked by Clinton supporters but two years ago she had the right idea when she went to visit Rahm Emanuel and propose a compromise. Brazile and others like her will hold the key to extricating the Democratic Party from its difficulties.

Several weeks ago I predicted Dean would be gone as a result of the delegates dispute. Sometimes it is nice to be wrong. Barack Obama renamed Dean as head of the DNC, showing where he stands in the feud. Hopefully this will move the party forward and perhaps end the feud.

I wrote a piece about Obama facing a task comparable to that of Woodrow Wilson in uniting a divided Democratic Party. Let us hope this move helps to heal those divisions much as Wilson was able to heal those of 1912.

Tagged with: 2006 election • Democratic Leadership Council • Democratic National Committee • Democratic National Convention • Democratic Party • Donna Brazile • fifty-state strategy • Hillary Clinton • Howard Dean • James Carville • John Kerry • Karl Rove • Nancy Pelosi • Rahm Emanuel • Terry McAuliffe • Woodrow Wilson