Graphic: United Federation of Teachers.

Like most informed people, I’ve watched in disgust as over a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws to prevent Democrats from voting.

They don’t come right out and say that’s what they’re doing, of course. To hear them talk, it’s about preventing “vote fraud.” That follows a script from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works for America’s super-rich against the 99.9 percent.

Those same people were curiously incurious about vote fraud in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2000 election was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, voter suppression, and “spoiled” ballots in Florida — where the election machinery was controlled by George W. Bush’s brother Jeb. The Bushes’ dirty tricks made the vote count so close that a recount was needed. Then, Bush’s friends on the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount and they awarded the presidency to Bush. Rather than cast doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded without a fight. Later, a consortium of six major newspapers (including The New York Times) and the University of Chicago did a comprehensive recount and analyzed the data under various assumptions. In every scenario, Gore won.

The 2004 presidential election was stolen by the Bush-Cheney machine in much the same way, but this time in Ohio rather than Florida. A University of Pennsylvania statistician found that based on the data, it was virtually impossible for Bush to have won the 2004 election. But the ever-subservient news media ignored the evidence of massive vote fraud when it benefitted the Bush-Cheney regime.

At the retail level, however — that of individuals or small groups of people conspiring to vote fraudulently — very few cases have been documented. Republican cries of “vote fraud” are simply a pretext to prevent voting by groups likely to vote Democratic: minorities, young people, the poor, and the elderly.

In the eyes of Republicans and their super-rich corporate paymasters, such people have no business voting in the first place. They’re not “the right kind of people.” If they were good enough to vote, they’d be rich. And corrupt. And white.

The Republican agenda is simple: Government should be of, by, and for the rich and the politically connected. Voting by the common people is a nuisance that should be minimized as much as possible.

Democrats want more people to vote for the same reason that Republicans want fewer people to vote: The majority favors ideas, programs, and policies that Democrats say they support, even if their actions often contradict their promises.

Progressives believe that for democracy to be legitimate, voting should be extended as widely as possible. No group should be deprived of the vote, either directly or through subterfuge.

But It’s Not That Simple

But the issue isn’t quite as simple as either side pretends. Democracy as an institution was not handed down to us on tablets from Mount Sinai. It has taken many forms in many different times and places.

In the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, literacy tests were used to prevent black citizens from voting. That’s an unsavory purpose. The law was also used to harass and humiliate black citizens. That’s despicable.

On the other hand, consider the official justification for the law: In order to be properly informed about the issues, voters had to be able to read. If they couldn’t read, then they couldn’t be properly informed. If they weren’t informed, then they couldn’t vote intelligently. Society has a legitimate interest in limiting the vote to people who can vote intelligently. You can say that the argument was abused, and it was, but it’s not a crazy argument. It makes sense.

In the early days of the American republic, voting was limited to white male property owners. Women couldn’t vote. Even if they were free and not slaves, blacks couldn’t vote. That limitation of voting rights led to a particular kind of government and political system. It was worse in some respects than our system, and better in other respects.

Even in the birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, only white male Athenians could vote. Women couldn’t vote, and were considered about equal in status to horses. Foreigners couldn’t vote, and were considered fit for enslavement. That limitation of voting rights led to a government and society that was pretty good for white male Athenians. Its results were pretty good for all of Western civilization that came afterward, giving us foundations in science, philosophy, art, and politics. The cost was what we’d call injustice. Athenian males disagreed.

The Real Issues in Voting Rights

The real issues in voting rights are:

• What values do we consider most important?
• What kind of society and government do we want?
• And who counts as part of “we”?

From a political-science standpoint, democracy only works in small political units up to populations of about 500,000. When a political unit is bigger than that, democracy breaks down because (1) it’s impossible for the majority to know what’s going on, and (2) each individual’s vote is so diluted that it has almost no chance of making a difference. Ancient Athens had a population of about 250,000 — of whom only about 30,000 could vote.

With larger populations, democracy degenerates into oligarchy, just as it has in the United States. Democracy is no longer about rule by the majority, because that’s practically impossible. Instead, it becomes a device by which the ruling oligarchy deceives the majority into consenting to whatever the oligarchy does for its own benefit. It’s a way to give the majority of people the illusion that they have some control without actually giving them control. In essence, voting is transformed from an exercise in governance into an act of consent to be ruled and exploited by the oligarchy.

That said, there is some wider benefit in having people feel that they are part of the society. That applies even if the political system is corrupt. Voting rights are a way to recognize people as full citizens, giving them status and respect. People who feel that they are part of the society are more inclined to cooperate with others, help the needy, and contribute in other ways that the ruling oligarchy neglects because it’s too busy stuffing its bank accounts and starting wars.

For those reasons, I think that voting rights should be extended as widely as possible, even though the people voting are unlikely to have any power. It’s not a political but a social exercise: People who can vote are part of our society. We, as their peers, show them respect and acceptance.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Technorati Tags: voting, elections, Republicans, vote fraud, democracy, Jim Crow

I recently saw the movie “The Help,” which chronicled the insults and indignities suffered by black people in the early 1960s.

Its basic theme, of black people humiliated and oppressed by whites who were either racist or oblivious, rang true. It was consistent with my experience in life, though it took me many years to understand that experience.

As a child, I knew almost nothing about racism. It never occurred to me that racial differences were significant.

I don’t say that to establish how virtuous and enlightened I was, because I wasn’t. Virtue requires conscious choice. And children, no matter how clever, are almost never enlightened. I didn’t choose not to be a racist. I simply wasn’t one.

Even as a child, I was a nerd. I lived in a world of books and ideas, not of people. I still do. I might not remember your face (or your race), but I’ll remember numbers and facts about you. We nerds don’t dislike people, but people don’t register with us as vividly as do ideas, facts, and principles. As a character on the delightful and quickly-cancelled TV sitcom “Wonderfalls” said of himself, “It’s a borderline autistic thing.”

By the way, that’s not just a funny line from a TV show. Some neuroscience researchers think that autism is an extreme form of male cognitive organization. But I digress.

In my primary school class, Greg was the only African-American kid. There were no Hispanics or Asians, so except for Greg, we were all white. As far as I could tell, no one treated Greg any differently from the rest of us. I never noticed anyone make hostile remarks about him or pick fights with him. Of course, as a nerd, I wasn’t attuned to that kind of thing. However, I would have noticed it if it had been intense or repeated.

Much of the time when I was a child, one or the other of two black ladies took care of me.

Margie, my parents’ housekeeper, was from Alabama. She’d previously worked in an ice cream shop, which to a seven-year-old boy seemed like a glamorous and exciting job. She taught me how to scoop ice cream “the professional way” and how to make chocolate sodas. She praised the childish comic strips that I drew and she encouraged my artwork. She nagged me to practice for my piano lessons.

Bea, my grandparents’ housekeeper, was a plump, good-natured lady a little over four feet tall. Whenever my father saw her, he jokingly asked Bea if she was standing up or sitting down. She was devoted to my grandparents and to me. She taught me a lot, including personal hygiene.

And yet, there was something odd about Bea’s relationship to my grandparents. I didn’t understand it at the time. My maternal grandfather loved Bea but hated black people. That wasn’t what he called them, but you can guess the word he used.

After a while, I realized the inconsistency of my grandfather’s attitude: he hated black people in general, but every black person who he  knew personally was “different.” The ones he knew were all right. It was only the ones he didn’t know who were — well, whatever he thought they were. He never elaborated on the subject, at least not to me.

In high school, one of my best friends was John, an African-American who again was one of a very small number of black students at the school. Everyone, including John, made jokes about race, but as far as I could tell it was all good-natured. Just as with Greg in primary school, I was never aware of anyone being unfriendly to John or saying hateful things on account of his race. He was a very likeable guy, and as far as I could tell, everyone liked him.

In college, one of my friends was Charlie, a pre-med student. That was when I first became aware of race as an issue, though I was still fairly obtuse and insensitive about it. Charlie was one of a fairly small number of black students at our college.

My perception might have been unfair, but it seemed to me that most of our black students confirmed the worst racist stereotypes. I thought that they weren’t serious about their studies, and that they complained constantly about real and imagined insults. Looking back, I’d guess that my perception was biased by those very same racist stereotypes, but that’s what I thought I saw.

Charlie was different. (That sounds just like something my grandfather would have said.) Unlike the other black students, he wasn’t on scholarship. Whenever you saw Charlie, he was doing one of three things: studying, participating in class, or working at one of the part-time jobs he held to pay his way through college. The other black students thought he was “acting white” and viewed him with disdain. He graduated with straight ‘A’s. I’m sure that he’s now an eminent doctor somewhere.

How much hurt and anger lurked beneath the smiles and easy-going demeanor of all those black people? Were they really as happy as they seemed?

I hope so. But I suspect it was partly because they knew what happened to black people who expressed dissatisfaction or stepped out of line.

What have I learned from all that? I suppose it amounts to this:

• A just society doesn’t treat any group of people as second-class citizens.
• Even if people smile when they’re mistreated, it doesn’t mean they’re happy about it or that they think it’s okay.
• An injustice done to any person is an injustice done to all of us, and we should treat it as such.

As well as what I always knew:

• All people have infinite worth and importance. To the extent that we can, we should treat them that way.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.”

That quote has been attributed to various people: to the Irish satirist Oscar Wilde, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, and the French social reformer Francois La Rochefoucauld, among others. Perhaps they all said it.

But it spotlights a truth: However much we dislike hypocrisy, it serves an important social function.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, now claims the right to order anyone killed, anywhere in the world, without a trial or conviction for any crime.

Here’s a non-surprise: The U.S. government has been doing that for a long time.

Someone gets in the way, whether of the U.S. government, the oil companies, or the multi-national corporations, and he gets killed. Saddam Hussein, who was the first President Bush’s favorite Middle Eastern dictator until he got too independent. Ngo Dinh Diem. Patrice Lumumba. News reporter Danny Casolaro. Now, it’s Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi‘s turn. He has a target on his back because he annoyed the oil companies.

But in the past, there was a difference. Even if the president knew what was going on, he avoided any personal involvement. He had “deniability.” The president pretended that he knew nothing about it. And the rest of us went along with the charade.

Yes, it was hypocritical. But that’s the point. The hypocrisy was a good thing. When a hypocrite sins covertly, he breaks moral and statutory law but he acknowledges their validity.

President Obama and President G.W. Bush are not hypocrites, at least not on the issue of government-sponsored murder. They embrace their evil acts. They even boast about them. By so doing, they deny the validity of the moral and statutory laws that forbid such evil acts.

Not only do they do evil, but they compound their sin by weakening the moral foundations of civilization. They avow that we are nothing more than lawless, bloodthirsty barbarians. And they have the power to prove it with their actions.

So let’s hear it for hypocrisy. If people are going to sin, they should at least have the decency to lie about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Two basic forces shape the universe: Law and Love, or if you prefer, Rules and Results.

Those forces also generate the two basic viewpoints about human and Constitutional rights. Both are currently on display in a dispute over gun control laws.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the “Bill of Rights,” states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Opponents of gun control laws latch onto the part that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Supporters of gun control laws argue that “the people” refers to Americans collectively rather than as individuals, so the right to keep and bear arms applies only to people in government-organized military organizations.

Frankly, I think that opponents of gun control laws have the better Constitutional argument. The text says what it says. And via the Fourteenth Amendment and later court decisions, the Constitution applies to states as well as to the federal government. Therefore, one can make a good case for an individual right to own guns.

But that’s not the only question involved. The larger question is whether rights are an end in themselves, or are justified because they produce good results.

Consider Timothy Egan’s recent column about the January 2011 shootings in Tucson. After avowing that he grew up around gun owners and supports private gun ownership, he starts talking about results. He cites statistics showing that more gun ownership leads to more gun deaths, more often of the innocent than the guilty.

Conservatives and libertarians argue that gun ownership makes everyone safer, but they really see that point as irrelevant. Their main response to Egan’s argument is to say that results don’t matter. Only rules matter. And according to what they say are the rules of the U.S. Constitution and “Natural Law,” the government has no business restricting or discouraging gun ownership of any kind. You can probably even find a conservative or two who thinks it’s in the Ten Commandments.

As usual, the dispute between rules and results leads to further questions:

• If rights are an end in themselves, how do we know that? How do we know what rights we have? And if respecting rights in a particular case would lead to terrible consequences, should we still respect them in that case?

• If rights are justified because they produce good results, then results for whom? “The greatest good for the greatest number?” Or just for the Wall Street sharks and corporate billionaires who bankroll libertarian think tanks and publications? How much good does a right have to produce, and with what degree of reliability, in order to qualify as a right?

Because the choice between emphasizing rules and results is so fundamental, there’s no way to prove that one choice is right and the other is wrong. Different people make the choice based on their personal history, psychology, and the dominant viewpoint of their society. And the choice itself is a false dilemma: you need both law and love, rules and results. Having only one of them would be like trying to do mathematics with only odd numbers.

It’s peculiar that many evangelical Christians, as conservatives, think that rules are more important than results, because Jesus taught that rules should be guided by love.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

This isn't Nazi Donut, but it looks similar. I liked to sit at the counter.

Intellectual humility can come to us in surprising ways. Sometimes, it’s served up in a donut shop, along with darned good coffee and the best chocolate donuts in town.

Mine came garnished with ignorance and bigotry, but it was helpful anyway.

Years ago, I went each morning to the local gym to work out with a trainer. After the gym, on my way to work, I stopped at Busy Donut, where I sat at the counter to read the morning newspaper, drink coffee, and eat two chocolate donuts.

The news was idiotic then, just as it is now, but at a lower volume. The coffee was outstanding. The chocolate donuts were to die for.

Busy Donut was definitely a working-class establishment. At the counter, I sat beside truck drivers, sales clerks, gas station attendants, and of course policemen. If there’s one thing that cops know in any city, it’s where to get the best donuts.

Unlike most people with too many university degrees, I know all those people quite well. I worked in a factory where I was the only person who didn’t speak Polish; an elderly lady in the factory office taught me enough to get by. I was a drugstore delivery boy: one of my customers was nicknamed “Maalox” because she ordered a case of it every week, but she tipped well. I drove a taxicab part-time for a couple of years. As a paralegal (which isn’t hard and requires no law license), I helped lower-income people handle their debts. And like most students, I did my share of delivering pizzas, busing tables, and working in bookstores.

I found that on average, blue-collar workers weren’t significantly less intelligent than university professors or other members of the more affluent and respected classes of society. The main difference was that they lacked educational opportunities. As a result, their views of the world were based on common sense but were sometimes uninformed or misinformed.

But let’s get back to the counter at Busy Donut, which on that morning had not yet earned its unofficial name of “Nazi Donut.”

I was sitting a few seats down the counter from several gas-station attendants who were in a heated conversation. Because I was reading the newspaper, I didn’t listen until this line grabbed my attention:

“… This police officer was a Jew-boy, and he admitted it!”

Yes, I know that anti-Semitism is supposed to be scary. But it was so ludicrous that I choked on my coffee and almost burst out laughing. The police officer “admitted that he was a Jew-boy?” My gosh, had he no shame?

Those gas-station attendants weren’t jackbooted storm troopers filled with hate. They were just ordinary people who had been misinformed and misled. They trusted their favorite magazines and radio shows to tell them the truth: instead, they were fed a steady diet of fantasies, lies, and stereotypes. That misinformation distorted their view of the world and of other people.

And I don’t even want to beat up too harshly on the sources of their misinformation. The human mind is a frail and fickle thing. It leaps very quickly from the premise “I don’t like him” to the conclusion “He must be evil.” And since it’s established that he’s evil, “He must be doing evil things.”

The latest example is a story in right-wing circles about the recent shootings in Arizona of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Judge John M. Roll, and several others.

It goes like this: That dirty Kenyan Muslim Socialist Obama (they call him a “Kenyan Muslim Socialist” because they can’t use the n-word) wants to seize our retirement savings — presumably to give the money to undeserving black people. Judge Roll said that Obama couldn’t do it, so Obama had him assassinated. All the other shootings were just a smokescreen. Never mind that Judge Roll wasn’t even scheduled to be there. Don’t confuse us with the facts.

Let’s follow the chain of reasoning, shall we? Obama is black. And he’s uppity, and he uses big words, like he thinks he’s better’n us white folks. And he somehow got to be president. So he must be lying about being an American, or about being a Christian, or something. And that means he’s evil. Because he’s evil, he does evil things. Killing a judge is an evil thing, therefore Obama must have done it. Is that about right?

It reminds me of Woody Allen‘s example of the syllogism:

• All men are mortal.
• Socrates is a man.
• But Socrates is a homosexual.
• Therefore, all men are homosexual.

These kinds of beliefs are ludicrous, of course. But people who hold such beliefs quite honestly think that they’re true. They’ve been fed information that is at least mistaken and sometimes deliberately false. And based on that information, they’ve arrived at conclusions that are false and could lead to violence.

Have any of us ever accepted false information and thereby reached false conclusions? Of course we have.

Sometimes, we know a lot. But we usually know far less than we think we do. And at least half of what we think we know is probably wrong. So it behooves us to be a little careful about what we think we know: whether in politics, science, religion, or personal relationships.

Otherwise, we risk becoming like the benighted anti-Semites at Nazi Donut. And that’s not worth it, even for the best chocolate donuts in town.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

He's from the government and he's here to help you.

Reason Magazine, a venerable libertarian publication, recently published a column arguing for the abolition of drunk-driving laws.

Back when I was a libertarian, I spent some time as a Research Fellow at the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara, California, writing papers and giving seminars about abstruse philosophical topics such as the grue-bleen paradox and St. Augustine’s theory of knowledge. I also wrote an article for the magazine, in which (foolish youth that I was) I argued for abolishing all public education.

Reason was established back in 1968, when the pointless but profitable Vietnam War still dragged on (much like the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, which are equally pointless but even more profitable). President Johnson had decided not to run for re-election, and America was graced with Richard M. Nixon as its new president.

The similarities between that election and the election of 2000 are striking. In both cases, a generally right-thinking and competent but un-exciting Democrat (Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Al Gore in 2000) had served as vice president in the previous administration. A ruthless and somewhat amoral Republican (Richard Nixon in 1968, George Bush in 2000) was able to win by tarring his opponent with the real and imagined sins of the previous administration. Unlike the 2000 election, the 1968 election was not stolen by the Republican establishment, but it was still a close call.

Now, I have a confession. As bad as he was in many ways, I’ve always had a soft spot for Nixon. As far as I can tell, Humphrey was a perfectly nice man whose heart was in the right place. Nixon was not, even though he was a patriot and he did care about the United States.

In 1960, when he ran for President and lost to John F. Kennedy in a close vote marred by allegations of fraud, Nixon did the same thing as Al Gore did in 2000. Rather than challenge the election and besmirch the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Nixon conceded the presidency to Kennedy. Nixon was a proud man of humble birth, and conceding a tainted election to the patrician Kennedy must have been one of the hardest things he ever did.

And Nixon was one thing Humphrey wasn’t: he was brilliant. He knew the issues inside and out, not just tactically but in terms of history, philosophy, and geopolitical strategy. Unlike most politicians, he wrote his own books instead of using ghostwriters. He wrote out the manuscripts in longhand on yellow legal pads. I’ve read some of those books. Their intelligence, learning, and insight rival those of Winston Churchill, who was also brilliant and had shortcomings, though he sometimes used ghostwriters.

I never met Nixon, though I did correspond with him once in an attempt to get him to write something for a book; he ultimately turned me down. Friends of mine who knew Nixon personally confirmed what I had inferred from his writing and his behavior: He had a mind like a computer but not much of a conscience.

I’d like to focus on that last qualifier: “not much of a conscience.” Nixon might not have had much of a conscience, but unlike some of our more recent politicians, he did have one. In a sense, he was an extreme version of all of us: he would do wrong sometimes, but then he would feel guilty about it. It’s his feeling of guilt that, in my eyes, redeems Nixon morally. He was a flawed man trying to do his best and often failing at it.

Most people have heard about the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation as president. What most people don’t know is that it was indeed about a “third-rate burglary” that Nixon didn’t authorize, though he probably wouldn’t have disapproved either.

Nixon lied to Congress and to the American people not to cover up his own crimes, but to protect some of the people who worked for him. The lies and coverup brought down his presidency. At that time, it was unimaginable to most people that their president would lie to them. Even comic-book heroes shared that belief. In an early 1960s comic strip, President Kennedy impersonated Clark Kent to help Superman protect his secret identity. Echoing the sentiments of most Americans, Superman said “If I can’t trust the President of the United States, then who can I trust?”

Today, of course, we have lower expectations. President Bush and Vice President Cheney lied to Americans and to Congress about WMDs, illegal wiretapping, torture, and their own war crimes, but no one is surprised except the benighted viewers of Fox News. Bush and Cheney still walk free, living in luxury at taxpayer expense, instead of being in prison where they belong. And unlike Nixon, they seem incapable of guilt or remorse.

In any event, those were heady days for Reason Magazine and for libertarian true believers. The conceit behind the name of the magazine was the idea that only one political philosophy was rational and correct: libertarianism, in its mainstream or its Ayn Rand variant. Libertarians believed that their viewpoint was so clear and obvious, just like 2+2 = 4, that anyone who knew about it had to realize its truth. The only reasons why someone wouldn’t believe in it were that:

• They hadn’t heard about it (no one had preached the Gospel to them);
• They were stupid and unable to understand it;
• They were mentally ill;

or, and this was the favorite explanation,

• They were just plain evil and deliberately denied what they knew was the truth.

That attitude has interesting parallels with the attitude held about non-believers by some Christians. But I’ve gone far afield from my initial topic of drunk driving.

I agree with the Reason article that the main impetus behind drunk driving laws is “to punish sin,” as well as to give police and court officials an excuse to disrupt people’s lives for their own sadistic enjoyment. However, the issue is not as simple as one side being “right” and the other side being “wrong.”

Drunk driving laws, to the extent that they have any rational justification, are about risk. A drunk person is more likely to cause an accident than a sober one. The argument is that we cannot allow that risk. Of course, anti-drunk-driving fanatics exaggerate the size of the risk, but that is not the main point. Any society will legally prohibit some risks and not others.

For example, if I point a gun at you but do not fire it, then you have not been injured but you are at risk of being injured. For that reason, it’s illegal for me to point a gun at you. Technically, it’s a case of assault, but without battery because I didn’t fire.

It comes down to where we draw the line: how much risk is too much? That’s a value judgment that we should collectively make as a society and embody in law. Fifty years ago, it was illegal to drive drunk but it wasn’t considered a hanging offense. You could also drive with kids in the front seat and ride bikes without a helmet. You could get on a plane without being harassed by security guards, and the flight attendant would cheerfully stow your gun in the overhead compartment. People survived. They had a few more risks but they had greater freedom. Were they right? They thought so.

Our latter-day Carrie Nations seem to be obsessed with scourging “DDs:” Drunk Drivers. Drug Dealers. Deadbeat Dads. But their main phobia is risk: risk of any kind and of any magnitude, however small. We should not let them and their obsession with total safety stampede us into a totalitarian society.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Back in 2005, my friend Miles Gloriosus interviewed George W. Bush at the White House. He found that Bush was quite different from his public image.

Actually, I should say that Miles claimed to have interviewed George W. Bush.

Miles is a good man. He’s a war veteran decorated for his heroism in the Battle of Macho Grande. But he’s also a drunkard, a libertine, and an incorrigible liar. So I cannot attest to the accuracy of his report, but it does sound plausible.

Mr. Bush released his own book about his presidency last week, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit Bush’s revelations to Miles. What follows is his interview from 2005. I’ve added some links to explain people, places, and events that might be unfamiliar to readers who don’t know Miles.

–N.S. Palmer

My Interview with George W. Bush

By MILES GLORIOSUS

Copyright 2005 by Miles Gloriosus.

Morning. I was getting my laundry out of the dryer and preparing to see my girlfriend. Well, she’s not actually my girlfriend. She’s a model on the provocative-but-tasteful “Republican Vixens” Web site. There’s something fascinating about a blonde born-again Christian who mouths neoconservative war slogans while dressed in black leather. I firmly believe that if she knew me, she’d want to be my girlfriend.

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“Gloriosus?” the caller said.

“Yeah? You and what army?”

“The president wants to see you.”

“Roosevelt?”

“No.”

“Larry Summers?”

“No.”

“Martin Sheen?”

“No. Bush. George W. Bush. That one.”

It was starting to sound authentic. Secret Service agents are notorious for having no sense of humor.

I ended up that evening at the entrance to Blair House, a diplomatic residence across the street from the White House. A couple of thick-necked types with black suits and earpieces hustled me inside, then through a tunnel that led under Pennsylvania Avenue to a lower floor of the White House. We climbed some stairs and went into an office in the residence. Bush was sitting at a desk reading some papers. He waved the agents to wait in the hallway outside.

“You know why you’re here?” he said.

“I suppose that you’re either going to talk to me or have me killed. Or both,” I said.

Bush laughed. “You’ve got a pair on you, boy, I’ll say that for you. But it’s nothing so lurid as you might imagine. To tell the truth, you’re no threat. Do you own a TV network? Can you out-shout O’Reilly? Can you untangle Hannity‘s non sequiturs? Could you even get a letter to the editor published if we didn’t want it to happen? Not a chance. Killing you would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “you do seem to have figured out a lot of things. I don’t often get a chance to talk to smart people who don’t work for me and aren’t trying to kiss my keister. I just thought we could chat. It’s more fun to do that when you’re talking to someone who can understand.”

I pulled a micro-cassette recorder from the pocket of my sport jacket. It’s standard equipment for an old ex-newspaper reporter like me. I said, “Do you mind if I tape this, just to make sure that I quote you accurately?”

“No taping,” Bush said. “I’ll take that recorder, please.”

I handed him the recorder. Not much point in arguing about it when there were half a dozen heavily-armed Secret Service agents just outside the door.

Bush opened a desk drawer and tossed the recorder inside. He pulled a $50 bill out of his wallet and gave it to me. “That should cover a new recorder. Don’t worry. I’ll expense it.”

“Now, here are the ground rules for our chat,” he said. “You can take notes. That’s all. And when we’re finished, on your way out, don’t try stealing any of those White House coffee cups or ballpoint pens. The FBI warned me about how many Ramada Inn bath towels you have in your apartment. What you get is a one-on-one with the president. What you don’t get is anything that would prove you were really here.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

Bush got up. There was a Mister Coffee machine on a table in the corner. “Do you want a cup? It’s fresh. Then we can get started.”

“Sure,” I said. “Black …”

“… with three sugars,” he said. “I take mine the same way. Aren’t those FBI boys amazing? By the way, I can get you an introduction to that girl of yours on the Web site. Nice young lady. She’s in the neuroscience Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins. Jewish, too. That stuff about her being born-again was just to keep Ashcroft from raiding the Web site. He always had a bug up his shorts about that kind of thing.”

He gave me the coffee, sat down in an easy chair, and took a sip from his own cup. “All right, we’re comfy. Ask your questions.”

I took a deep breath. “Everyone thinks that you lied about Iraq having WMDs and being connected to 9/11. Did you?”

“You bet your sweet bippy I did,” he said. “But that’s not the question to ask. The important question is, why did I lie? That’s what makes me either a traitor or a true patriot.”

“All right, why did you lie?”

“Because whether you like it or not, the world economy still runs on oil. The country that controls the largest oil reserves will have guaranteed prosperity at home and irresistible clout abroad. Which country do you want it to be? Russia? China? Japan? For me, there’s only one acceptable answer: the United States, and only the United States, is going to control that oil.”

Bush dropped another lump of sugar into his coffee cup. “What’s the alternative? Picture gas at $20 a gallon,” he said. “Picture unemployment that would make the Great Depression seem like the roaring 1990s. Picture Don Rumsfeld prancing around in one of J. Edgar Hoover‘s old pink dresses.”

I broke into a cold sweat. I had a bicycle, and I was financially secure. But the image of Don Rumsfeld in a dress … I finally understood the kind of horror that the P.O.W.s at Guantanamo had to endure.

I said, “As for the 9/11 attacks, some people think that they were staged. They believe that your administration either let them happen or actively helped them happen. Did you?”

Bush waved his hand dismissively. “No matter what I say, people are going to believe what they want to believe about 9/11. A lot of them think it was damn suspicious that I kept sitting there with the schoolkids reading My Pet Goat after learning that the attacks were underway. Others think I was a coward for flying all over the country in Air Force One instead of going right back to the White House after the attacks. As for me, I don’t worry about that. I focus on moving forward, not on looking back.”

I said, “I notice that you didn’t answer my question.”

Bush grinned. “No I didn’t, did I?” He chuckled. “My, aren’t you the observant one? It’s too bad that The New York Times and The Washington Post don’t have anyone quite that perceptive. They might have caught on to my little Iraq scam in time to prevent the war. If they’d had any cojones, which of course they don’t, they might even have asked me a tough question or two.”

Bush got up and started rummaging through the piles of books on his desk. “You know what Ralph Waldo Emerson said? ‘Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.’ Emerson wrote that in his book The Conduct of Life. I have it here someplace, if I can just find it … It’s a really nice edition. One of those leather-bound jobs from Easton Press, I think.”

Bush stood up from his desk. “I can’t find it,” he said. “But getting back to your question about Iraq. Sure, I lied my head off to start that war. It was discreditable as hell, as Emerson said. But if my analysis of the geopolitical situation was correct, then my discreditable little war will save the American economy from ruin and preserve our country’s status as a world leader. I care more about that than I do about abstract morality. And though it sounds terrible, I care more about the welfare of Americans than I do about the welfare of Iraqis.”

“My job as president isn’t to be a ‘fair arbiter’ between the needs of Americans and those of everyone else in the world,” he said. “My job is to protect the interests of Americans and America. God bless the rest of the world, but if they get in the way of what I think is best for America, then I’m sorry, but screw ‘em. Bombs away.”

I said, “Excuse me, but you seem to have a very limited notion of who’s American. You aren’t doing what’s best for working people who see their sons and daughters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose jobs get shipped overseas, whose wages go down and whose taxes go up while giant corporations and multi-billionaires pay almost nothing in taxes on incomes higher than they’ve ever had before.”

Bush sat back down and took another sip of coffee. He thought for a minute. “America is an abstraction,” he said. “It means something different to everyone. It means people you know, places you grew up, holidays and customs you cherish. It means your family, books you like, and TV shows you watch. At a slightly greater remove, it means people similar to you, whom you think you understand.”

“For you, America is those working people you talked about so eloquently. It’s the soldiers who fought beside you in the battle of Macho Grande. It’s cab drivers and unemployed computer programmers. For me, on the other hand, America is rich people. Very rich people. People who either inherited their money or made it through graft, monopolies, and crooked deals. I don’t apologize for it. I was born into that estate. So when I talk about standing up for America, I’m being perfectly honest. I stand up for the America I know. I’m not indifferent to the ‘little people’ you love so much, but they’re not on my ‘A list’ any more than I’m on theirs.”

I said, “You also talk ad nauseam about how Americans are free. And yet we’ve now got your so-called Patriot Act, pre-emptive arrests, and no-fly lists that stigmatize people as terrorists when they’ve done nothing ‘wrong’ except criticize your administration. We’ve got a government that taxes and regulates almost every aspect of life, from toilets to cars to our personal speech and conduct. How does that make you a defender of freedom?”

Bush nodded. “Yes, all that endless prattle about freedom bores me sometimes, too. But define what you mean by freedom. Is it everyone doing whatever he wants? Then you have no society. The freedom to fly on Air Force One? I’ve got it. The freedom to get thrown out of your house and live in a shelter? You’ve got it.”

“I support the freedom for myself and other members of my social class to extract wealth from millions of working schnooks like you and to commit egregious crimes with impunity. But notice that in all my public statements about freedom, I never define what I mean by it. And nobody ever asks me. Just like standing up for America, when I say that I’m defending freedom, I’m being perfectly honest. I defend what freedom means to me.”

“Let me tell you something else about freedom,” Bush said. “Most people really don’t want it. They want to be told that they’re free, because it flatters them and makes them feel like Davy Crockett. But when it comes to actually being free — and having all the responsibilities that freedom entails — they’d much rather have Uncle Sugar looking out for them and telling them what to do.”

He stretched in his chair. “What the American people want isn’t freedom,” he said. “What the American people want is cheap gasoline. Dirty movies and cable. Sports. Bread and circuses. They want a shot — even if it’s a very small shot — at the big score. Yes, the chances of an honest person getting rich are lower than ever before. But if he or she does hit it big, the payoff is bigger than ever before. That’s what I provide to every American: not a fair shake, but a shot at the big payoff.”

“Mr. President, may I ask you something … a little sensitive?”

“Ask away,” he said. “I might not answer.”

” I don’t agree with you about anything,” I said. “But you seem … well, smarter than I expected.”

“Ain’t it a bitch?” he said. “Do you think I enjoy letting everyone believe that I’m a drooling moron who’s just a sock puppet for Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? I don’t. I’m a human being. Sometimes it hurts my feelings to hear what people say about me. But it’s like Sun Tzu said in The Art of War: ‘Though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.’”

“What that means is, trick your adversaries into underestimating your strengths and overestimating your weaknesses,” he said. “It worked for me in Texas, and it works for me now.”

There was a knock at the door. A Secret Service agent stuck his head into the room. “Mr. President, they’re waiting for you in the theatre.”

“What’s the movie tonight, Frank?” Bush said.

“It’s ‘Sleepless in Seattle‘ again, Mr. President. The First Lady insisted.”

Bush snorted and looked at me. “Chick flick,” he said. “I’d invite you to stay, but I know that you have to file your story. Frank, would you conduct Mr. Gloriosus out?”

“Yes, sir,” the agent said.

Bush stood up and stuck out his hand. I hesitated for a moment, then I took it.

“It was good to meet you,” he said. “And if you ever get to be too much of a pain in the ass, we’ll always have Gitmo.” He laughed.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said. “Goodbye.”

With Frank and another thickneck at my side, I walked back through the tunnel to Blair House.

When we reached the entrance, Frank handed me a piece of paper. “The President told me to give this to you,” he said.

I looked at the paper. It said “Ilsa, she-wolf of the Young Republicans, 301-555-1111. Don’t call after 11pm.”

I hopped onto a Metro train and headed home. I still thought that Bush was a disaster for America, but at least now I understood him.

And I really liked the White House coffee cup I had in my jacket pocket. I hoped that Ilsa would like it, too.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it — good and hard.”
– H.L. Mencken

America’s current election campaigns by the two major political parties remind us yet again of the stupidity, foolishness, and gullibility of the electorate.

In California, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate is  Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of computer maker Hewlett-Packard. So far, she has not promised in her campaign to do for California what she did for Hewlett-Packard: throw people out of work, run the state into the ground financially, and walk away with a Golden Parachute severance package.

In Nevada, Lunatic Republican Sharron Angle, who can’t tell the difference between the border of Mexico and the border of Canada, is running for the Senate seat held by Gutless Democrat Harry Reid, who can’t tell the difference between caving in to Republicans on every issue and fulfilling Democratic campaign promises.

In Delaware, anti-masturbation scold Christine O’Donnell is running as the Republican Senate candidate on the platform that she is just as ignorant as the most ignorant people still capable of signing their names on a voting register. One wonders if she really cares about winning, or if she just wants to raise some cash and get people to pay attention to her.

What gets lost in all the hoopla, gets lost on purpose. If you bog everyone down in nonsense about who’s a witch and who supports death panels, they don’t have time to discuss substantive issues. Like unemployment. And ruinously expensive, unjustified wars. And an increasingly  oppressive police state. And the fact that government should promote the greatest good for the greatest number, not just enact policies to benefit Wall Street, giant corporations, and the super-rich.

The truth is that democracy is a sacred cow but it really doesn’t matter that much. It’s just a means to a goal. The goal is to promote a just, free, humane, and prosperous society.

Whether the government is chosen by voting, by hereditary titles, or by a lottery isn’t important. If it does the right things, then it’s a good government. If it does the wrong things, then it doesn’t matter how many votes it gets: it’s a bad government.

We have a middling government that’s trending toward bad. Voting doesn’t seem to help much. I wonder what will.

A news story this morning reported that a lesbian couple was kicked out of a shopping mall for kissing. The mall management later apologized for the incident, of course, but it’s worth thinking about what happened and why.

Once upon a time, most shopping areas were on public streets. In public spaces, people have an uncontested right to engage in almost any behavior that isn’t dangerous, aggressive, or obscene. Kissing, especially if it’s just a casual display of affection and not a make-out session, certainly falls into that category.

In the last few decades, however, private corporations have swallowed up more and more of our public space. They argue, not without basis, that they have a right to control what happens on their private property. Thus, in a mall, you may not wear funny clothes, hand out political leaflets, or — apparently — kiss.

Thus, the areas in which Americans may exercise their Constitutional rights to freedom of expression shrink in tandem with the growing privatization of our public space. Libertarians and tea party activists should think about that.

And if they really want to understand privatization, they should look up the “enclosure movement” in 16th-century England, which turned over public land to wealthy private owners with political connections.

A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.