One More Lawsuit

by Rich Miles

April 1, 2005

I would imagine that Michael Schiavo is, amongst all his other feelings, hoping never to see another lawyer, or the inside of another courtroom, as long as he lives. His hopes will not be fulfilled, as the Schindler family and others seem determined to continue to "fight over the bones" in this matter.

However, if Michael could bring himself to one last act in the legal system, I would recommend that he file suit for defamation of character, libel, slander, whatever is most appropriate legally, against the shameless, grossly uninformed, politically motivated, self-serving group of self-righteous hypocrites who have dragged his name through the mud for weeks, months or years now, many of them people whose only knowledge of the matter was based on fifth-hand opinions, devoid of fact. I would think a short list of defendants in such a suit would certainly include Frank Pavone, Randall Terry, James Dobson, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist. All of these people, in the course of presenting themselves as protectors of Terri Schiavo (another person they've never met, nor even seen), have said shameful, demeaning and humiliating things about a man they never met, or if they have met him, never knew anything about his actions toward his wife other than what her mean-spirited, emotionally unbalanced family had to say about him.

But as is so often the case with the radical right, they will get away with their scurrilous behavior because it is more painful to the wronged parties to call them to task than to say simply, "Let it go".

Much has been said, and will continue to be said, about poor Terri Schiavo's life and death. She is at peace now, but her name will not be allowed to pass into obscurity - she will become the symbol for even more shameless posturing by radical ideologues, people who cannot even imagine, who WILL not imagine, the hell Michael Schiavo has lived through. Whether you believe Michael's statements or not - and frankly, considering the source of the nastiest criticisms about him, I do believe him - what cannot be denied is that he stood by her for 15 years, when it would have been so much easier to bail out long ago. It's not the money - that was mostly gone long ago, and whatever is left of it is in no way adequate compensation for what he's experienced. It's not that, after several years of waiting to see if Terri could ever recover, Michael decided to move on with his life by finding someone else to love and create a life with. It's that no one - NO ONE - who opposes him seems ever to have considered what he has been through.

All these folks who knew so little about the facts of the matter, crowing about their religious beliefs (THEIRS, as if any of this was about them), and how cruel Michael Schiavo was to Terri: did none of them ever for one minute apply the simple test of asking what they would have done if they had been faced with such a hideous set of choices? Does it not even register as inconsistent that the Schindlers and Michael were quite close for nearly 8 years after Terri's incapacity? If he is such a cruel and horrible person, and as is now being said, always has been even back to before Terri became ill, how did the Schindlers bear dealing with him all that time, until he proposed allowing her to die?

And one final question: how is what Tom DeLay did in his father's case so different from the Schiavo case? Other than the fact that DeLay SAYS it's different, I mean?

So much noise, so many accusations cast against a man so few could have known, and so little thought behind the slanders. One begins to suspect that this has become the American way. Our courageous Congress will show us if this is really true - and, I suspect, they will attempt to do so in very short order, before the smoke clears. Before the body is cold.

The Fiction of Freedom's March

By Rich Miles

March 4, 2005

Let me tell you a little story:

This past summer, when Ronald Reagan died, I was in Europe, specifically Scotland and Spain, and was able to watch the international reaction to the death of an American elder statesman.

At first, the reaction in the local European media was a mild, respectful sharing of our national grief. But as the days passed, and American media lingered over this, and would not let it rest, and indeed seemed to see Reagan's influence in everything good that's happened in America and the world since about 1776, I began to be a bit embarrassed to be an American in Europe. At least three times, in pubs or restaurants, I was approached by total strangers and asked the moral equivalent of "do you folks really deify Reagan like that?" I had to try to explain that no, we didn't, it was just media hype, etc etc. And when Ronnie was wrapped in glory and included as one of those who earned our respect during the D-Day celebrations all over western Europe, I really just kinda hung my head, and tried not to speak too much in public so I wouldn't be recognized as American. It was unbelievable - literally, as no one believed the praise that was being heaped on a dead B-movie actor and mediocre former president, who spent all of WWII in California making films in which he PLAYED war heroes.

I bring this up because, in a friendly pub in Scotland, one of the folks I talked to just flatly rejected the notion that "Reagan defeated Soviet communism, and brought down the Berlin Wall", and all the rest - he maintains that all of that would have happened about the same way no matter who the president of the United States was. And of course he's right.

And I bring THAT up because I see another such myth in the making, and it burns me up: Bush is going to be given the credit for anything good that happens in the Middle East in the next 80 years or so, and is going to be regarded as the man who brought democracy to that region, and it just infuriates me to see Bush get the personal credit for something that, again, would have happened more or less the same way if you, or I, or Bonzo the Chimp were president of the U.S. And that includes the invasion of Iraq - if we hadn't gone there, eventually the Iraqi people would have risen up on their own, with results that no one could predict any more than we can what's going on there now.

Bear this in mind: people always do what they perceive to be in their own best interests. NO ONE does anything that isn't to their benefit, EVER. It's not cynical to say this, it's simply a fact, and if anyone reading this cares to dispute the contention, I can explain it to you in greater detail.

Therefore, the folks in Lebanon who are rising up against the Syrians, and the folks in Iran who say they want a democratic government, and Hosni Mubarak, who became a democrat after Condi Rice snubbed him, and all of the folks in that region and around the world who are making moves toward democracy are doing so because they see it as in THEIR best interests, NOT because America told them to, or because they believe America will stand by them in their struggle toward freedom, or because they find us such an inspiration (they don't, by and large) - but because they think it's high time, and they see an opening for it based on current conditions in their countries. In Lebanon, the entire uprising is based on a gross miscalculation by the Syrians, not by anything the Americans or the Russians or the Saudis (the SAUDIS, for crying out loud!) have said or done.

So in the not-too-distant future, when Bush is called the great emancipator or some such nonsense - recognize it for what it is, PR and propaganda with barely a shred of truth to it, which is usually laughed at abroad, and should be here as well.

Means Testing

Class Warfare Or Simple Fairness?

By Rich Miles

Feb 22, 2005

In his Feb. 22 column, David Brooks, usually a reliable shill for the Bush administration, delivers a rather harsh indictment of Bush’s most recent budget. He also manages to spread the blame around, including onto the victims by saying he is “offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young”. I goggled in disbelief at that sentence - at least one of our nationally-distributed pundits believes that our old people are a “burden” to be alleviated by some as-yet-unnamed champion of fiscal soundness.

There is, however, one bit of truth to Brooks’ diatribe – federal entitlements (ALL of them, and Social Security the least among them) are out of control, and have been for years. And one way to make a significant dent in that problem is the one way no politician will even bring to the table: means testing.

Let’s look at one of the basic tenets of the existing Social Security system: the wage cap. This number has risen steadily over the years until today, it stands at $90,000/year and rising. This means that, if you earn $90K or more, you stop paying Social Security taxes on any additional income for the rest of that year. The principle under which this idea has always operated is that there is a maximum SocSec benefit when you retire, and you should not have to pay into a system beyond what you can ever hope to receive in return. Thus, a wage cap.

But the failure in this principle is that you can still collect full benefits at retirement whether you need it or not, despite the fact that the wealthiest among us stop paying into the system when their income reaches the cap levels.

Due to an unintended consequence of the Senior Citizens’ Freedom to Work Act of 2000, which was intended to eliminate the benefits penalty for seniors who earn money, it is now possible for a 68-year-old person who receives $200,000 a year from unearned investment income to get the same benefit as a 75-year-old person who makes $12,000 a year bussing tables because she HAS to. These are just broad examples – plug in whatever numbers you like here, the above statement remains true.

But if anyone points this out and suggests that maybe it’s not quite fair for a millionaire to receive government payments, he’s accused of “class warfare”, of seeking to penalize those who managed during their working years to provide a comfortable living for themselves in retirement. Most of the people making such claims are the very people we’re talking about here, but never mind that for a moment; if the Social Security system is in “crisis”, how much would it be helped from that crisis by a graduated means test that would reduce benefits, eventually to zero, as one’s other earned or unearned income increases beyond a certain level?

I’m not talking about a return to pre-Freedom to Work days, where our McDonald’s worker gets her benefits cut as her income rises to $12,500. I’m talking about not paying benefits to people who genuinely and provably don’t need them. Surely our elected representatives, smart as they are, can come up with a formula for this that wouldn’t harm those in need, but would address this drain on Social Security’s resources?

To enact such a plan, whatever its details, would require two things: a willingness on the part of wealthy people to do something selfless in the interest of those who are just barely scraping by in old age, and a high level of political courage in Congress to go against the wishes of the people who pay for re-election campaigns.

Sadly, neither of those requirements seems to exist in our country today. No politician in his right mind is going to risk the political fallout of offending the wealthy with such a proposal. And “compassionate conservatives” don’t even seem to understand the question.

That's Why They Call It Gambling

By Rich Miles

January 20, 2005

Attention Young People!

I’m not quite sure what that means, since no one has actually put forth a plan, but it would be safe to say it includes those in the range of -30 to about 45. That’s right – MINUS 30. People who won’t be born for 30 years. That’s the age range I’m going to address here. You older kids, help the little ones out, OK?

There has been a lot of talk about “reforming” Social Security lately, and I’m writing to you young folks because, if what President Bush says he wants to do comes to pass, you will be the key to how the reforms will work. And folks like me – over that age range – are pretty worried about it. So I’d like to cut through the massive numbers of numbers, and offer some observations that I feel certain the White House will not provide for you. Forgive the somewhat brusque prose about to come. There’s a lot to say.

The President says, based on projections that virtually no one else can see, that the SocSec program is “in crisis”. What he doesn’t tell you is that his projections for the economy’s growth if we DON’T change anything is only about ¼ of the projection of economic growth if we do it his way. It can’t be both ways, but he’s trying to tell you it can be, and will be.

Bush wants to set up privately held accounts which will require a huge amount of borrowing to get started. We’re already in deep debt due to his tax cuts, and the costs of this start-up exceed the projections for what will happen if we do nothing all the way up to 2042.

He wants all of us to become savvy investors – to pay close attention to how the stock market works, and know when it’s time to adjust or increase or decrease the investments in our private accounts. If you don’t do this, you’ll get about the same return from it that you will if no private accounts are ever set up, and even if you do pay attention, it might not be any better. Are you willing to put in that amount of effort to learn about markets and then monitor your account, for an iffy return?

He also doesn’t mention that the only people – the ONLY ones – who are guaranteed to come out better in a privatization plan are the people who administer the plans – the stockbrokers and fund managers, who will take their account maintenance fees no matter whether your investments go up or down.

But the best part is this: in the guise of creating an “ownership society”, what he’s really saying is, if you choose the private account and it goes belly-up, or you become disabled before you retire, or anything else unexpected happens – you’re on your own for the retirement income that would have been produced by the account. You will, by most estimates, still get some kind of reduced benefit from the government, but your private account is yours – for good or ill.

Are you willing to run that risk? Are you willing to support the President in dismantling pretty much the only social program ever created in this country that WORKS? Are you willing to let him bribe you into gambling with not only your future, but that of your children, and your parents, and your brothers and sisters?

Remember the old adage – “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” And this plan – as vague as it remains to this date – doesn’t even look that good.

Logic 101

by Rich Miles

January 7, 2005

In Washington state, Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi led his Democratic opponent by 42 votes on Election Day. Despite state law mandating a recount because of the closeness of the result, Rossi claimed victory, and resisted the recount even in the face of numerous reports of voting and vote counting irregularities. A win by 42 votes was just fine with him, thank you very much, the people have spoken, let's move on. And in the inevitable recount, when his opponent drew closer, he continued to insist that "the voters had spoken", and no further recount was needed. Finally, when a third recount, conducted under closer scrutiny than the first two, gave his opponent a victory, he decided that recounts weren't such a bad thing after all, and indeed what was needed was not a recount, but a revote.

In Ohio, now known as the "Florida of 2004", more than 40,000 reports of voting and vote counting irregularities were received by election authorities. Some reports suggested at least the possibility that these irregularities, if corrected, could have resulted in a victory for John Kerry, which would have meant a John Kerry presidency. Despite all these indications, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who like Katherine Harris of Florida in 2000, was the state chairman of President Bush's reelection campaign, has actually gone so far as to defy a legitimate court subpoena in order to avoid having all the voting irregularities in Ohio cleared up.

And in Kentucky, the Republican-controlled state Senate, under the banner of "the will of the people", has refused to invalidate the election of a state senate candidate, despite a very clear constitutional provision making her ineligible even to run in the election.

So what have we learned from all this?

In the study of logic, for those of you who didn't take that very popular course in school, there is a thing called a "syllogism". In short, a syllogism is a line of logical argument that can be stated in the form "If A and B, then C”. I mention this because, in the three examples above, we have a perfect syllogism:

- People who don't wish to have all the votes counted in an election, or who are willing to overlook the law as long as it benefits THEIR candidate, are not really interested in the "will of the people" so much as they are interested in pulling a fast one on the people.

- Republicans, far more often than Democrats, don't wish to have all the votes counted, and are willing to overlook the law to their candidates' benefit.

- Therefore, Republicans are trying to pull a fast one on the people.

This has happened too many times now for it to be coincidence. In nearly 100% of the disputed cases relating to the 2004 elections, Republicans have wanted NOT to count all the votes, and Democrats have wanted to count them as accurately as possible, despite considerable resistance including a Republican congressman actually saying on the floor of the House of Representatives, that people who question the vote in 2004 were "aiding the terrorists".

So again, what do we learn from this?

It seems clear to me. How democracy can ever be served by NOT counting the votes in any election for any office, or by not insuring that the election was conducted as freely and fairly as possible, or by not espousing a thorough investigation of any irregularities, is a concept I simply cannot understand.

"The people have spoken"? "It's time to move on"? "Get over it"?

Not just yet. But thanks for your concern.

The Past That's Worth Remembering

by Rich Miles

Dec. 23, 2004

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

Remember that quote? I promise not to use it for every column I write, but it just seems to work for so many occasions. So here’s the scoop:

I have a rather extensive collection in book form of Doonesbury cartoons. They go all the way back to 1971, and in rare moments of leisure, I like to read them over again from time to time, just to see what was going on back then. Recently, I found a collection entitled “Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years”, and since I had previously (before 2001) held the belief that Ronald Reagan was, by and large, the worst thing that had ever happened to this country, I thought it might be instructive to take a look at what Garry Trudeau thought of him when Reagan was a current issue. Trudeau is not what one would call an exhaustive source of historical accuracy, but he does have a gift for catching the gist of history in those four daily panels.

So anyway, guess what I found out? I discovered that the same sorts of things that George W. Bush is doing today, which is to say rolling back decades of social progress, plunging the nation into staggering levels of debt that will last for years if not decades, and an almost breathtaking ability to simply ignore reality and the will of the American people, were all hallmarks of that previous administration as well. In other words, we don’t remember history as recently as 20 or so years ago, and so we’re bloody well repeating it.

Now, if your reaction to the above was a resounding “Well, duh!”, then I am sorry to report that you have just wasted a minute or so reading material that was not intended for you. No, the people I am speaking to in the above paragraphs are those unrepentant and unbendable right-wing partisans who, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their president is either a criminal or a nitwit or both, will still say that W is “a great man, a real American, our only hope for the future”, and blah blah blah. What does it take for you to see it? Does he, as Trudeau once posited about Nixon, have to knock over a bank before we will acknowledge that he and his minions are inexorably dismantling our country with the left hand, while the right hand waves a flag and the mouth says “terrorist threat” one more stinkin’ time?

I’m about to run out of words for this column, so let me give you the “button line” for next time: As I already copped to last week, I am indeed a liberal Democrat. If W were a fairly decent Republican president (an oxymoron to my way of thinking), I still probably wouldn’t like him, but I wouldn’t be this rabid about him. The genuine hideousness of this administration goes beyond partisan politics – and the whole point of this blog, for me, is to keep illustrating why.

The Robbery Continues

By Rich Miles

Dec. 17, 2004

Dear Bush Voters:

I have a question for you. It’s a sincere question, not meant to be a “wise-guy” remark, or anything like that. I really want to know this.

What is it going to take for you to recognize that George W. Bush and his cronies are embarked on the most profound redistribution of wealth in history, and that this redistribution is almost exclusively UPWARD?

I mean seriously – how much of your money, and your children’s money is he going to have to take away from you and give to people who are already obscenely wealthy before you start to notice? How long can he say, “It’s your money, not the government’s money” before you notice that he’s not talking to you, he’s talking to corporate CEO’s, and his friends in the oil business, and large Wall Street brokers, and other folks who already have most of our money anyway?

Bush has just completed a two-day economic summit at which he discussed ways to take even more of your money from you, while continuing to tell you that he’s doing this for your own good. In the Bush speeches which emanated from the summit, at least two major initiatives were outlined: so-called “tort reform”, and Social Security reform. So let’s look at those for a minute:

First, tort reform: in essence new laws that would eliminate large monetary awards for corporate and medical errors. Bush has said repeatedly that this is a necessary reform to help keep medical costs down. But large malpractice awards have been shown to contribute less than 1.5% to the record increases in the rise of medical costs in the past four years. So who benefits if these laws are put on the books?

Why, large corporations of course. The ones that run huge medical, or pharmaceutical, or any other corporate megaliths. The ones who are already obscenely wealthy and who under the first Bush administration have become more so. The people and companies who will no longer have to worry about multimillion dollar payments to people they’ve harmed. The people who will see the occasional $250,000 or so fine or jury award as simply a cost of doing business, but will do little or nothing to correct the error that caused the harm in the first place, because there’s no financial incentive to do so. And so the harm will continue.

Next, Social Security reform – the much-touted “private investment accounts”, which sound so attractive to us free-spirited, rugged individualist Americans, until we look closer and see who will benefit most from them: not us, who will be at the mercy of the markets for our retirement benefits, but two main groups: employers (large and small), who will pay less to the SocSec system, and stockbrokers, who will receive their commissions and account maintenance fees whether the market goes up or down. Do you really feel competent to run a stock trading account, on the success of which your life may literally depend one day?

But when these questions are asked, there are two more or less standard responses: first, the questioner is engaging in “partisan politics”, which generally means you disagree with anything Bush says, or you’re promoting “class warfare”, which generally means you care more about the poor, the sick, the old and the victims of corporate greed than you do about CEO’s and huge corporations. So the question never gets answered, and the robbery continues.

And let’s not even get into tax cuts for the wealthy, and massive federal deficits that will take decades to pay off, thus making them your children’s debts.

So again, I really want to know: what is it going to take for you to realize that George W. Bush is robbing you? And what will you be willing to do about it when the light comes on?

Tossing Around Big Numbers

By Rich Miles

Dec. 12, 2004

"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."
- attributed (probably wrongly) to Sen. Everett Dirksen

The famous quote from the late Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois), which as it turns out he probably didn't say, nevertheless illustrates something that the recent presidential campaign said about Americans: many of us aren’t very good at math.

During the campaign, President Bush said, on a tiresome number of occasions, that Senator Kerry’s proposals for new spending would cost more than $2 trillion, which, as he pointed out, “is a lot even for a liberal senator from Massachusetts”. The line always got applause.

However, the President repeatedly failed to mention that the same folks who made that estimate about Kerry’s proposals also pointed out that Bush’s new spending proposals, coupled with his tax cuts, would cost somewhere in the vicinity of $3 trillion. Kerry’s failure to make that point stick was one of the many reasons he lost the election, but that’s a discussion for another time.

But let’s look at the use of numbers in the public discourse for a minute, in a way that we “average Americans” can understand:

Let’s set the average annual income in America at $40,000. It’s not accurate, in fact is probably quite high, but just for the sake of argument, let’s use that round number.

A Stealth fighter/bomber plane – just one of them – costs about $60 million dollars (by Lockheed’s 1988 estimate). That’s 1500 annual salaries’ worth, per copy, and we bought at least 67 of them.

The recently-disclosed “secret” plan to launch a new spy satellite, one that most experts agree isn’t needed and in fact is useless except in cloudless daylight, is estimated at $9.5 billion dollars. That’s 237,500 salaries.

And the startup costs of the “privatization” of Social Security, lowball-estimated at $1 trillion, represents 25,000,000 average annual salaries. That’s 25 million, for those who don’t care to count the zeros.

One commentator, David Brooks in the New York Times, fired off, as the unsubstantiated potential Social Security shortfall over the next several decades, $11 trillion – or the entire average salaries, at our imagined $40,000 a year, of 275 million people! That’s not far short of the entire current population of the United States, including under-12-year-olds who contribute precious little to the tax base.

And the cost of George W. Bush’s FIVE tax cuts in the past 4 years (over 95% of them going to corporations and wealthy individuals) is just under $1 trillion over the next decade – another 25 million salaries.

So my question is, are your minds as boggled as mine is by the above numbers? If so, good, because that's what the guys who use these big numbers want to happen.

But let me give you some more numbers: in 1969, the year Sen. Dirksen died, total federal spending including Social Security was $187 billion dollars, and we were in a war in Vietnam. The federal budget showed a small surplus of $3.2 billion that year.

In 2003, total federal spending, NOT including Social Security, was $2.16 TRILLION. That’s an increase of 1174%, over a period of time when inflation added about 5% per year on average, or, if compounded, less than 200% to the overall cost of living. Democrats held the presidency for only twelve of those 34 years, and were a majority in Congress during the only five years of the 34 in which there were balanced or surplus budgets.

So now, two more questions: do we have a little clearer idea of how much money a trillion dollars is? And do we know who the party of “fiscal responsibility” is?

You do the math.

A Clarification for the Math-Challenged

by Rich Miles

Dec. 10, 2004

On Dec. 10, a letter writer took one of our local columnists to task for actually expressing an opinion in his opinion column of Dec. 7, saying that supporters of the Fairness Ordinance (and by extension, opponents of the anti-gay hate campaign locally and nationally) obviously hadn't "heard the voice of the electorate" on Nov. 2. Apparently, columnists are only allowed to express "warm and fuzzy" opinions, and when they get into saying what they believe about a controversial topic of importance to our city and country, some folk feel the need to try to cut him off at the knees. But that's not why I'm writing this - that columnist is a big guy, a REALLY big guy, and can defend himself.

What I want to say here is...well...I mean really...this "the people have spoken" and "Bush has a mandate" crap simply has to stop. Since it seems that a lot of people are merely repeating what they've heard elsewhere and don't actually understand what they're saying, let me offer some facts about this matter for the mathematically challenged:

The surface-noise word these days is that George W. Bush won the election by a popular-vote margin of 51-48% over John Kerry. However, the truth (as displayed by Wikipedia.org among other sources) is that Bush received 50.7%, and Kerry received 48.3% - a margin of 2.4%, not the 3% in the surface-level numbers. That's a significant 20% reduction in the margin between the two major party candidates.

However, even the most innumerate among us will note that these numbers do not add up to 100%. Third-party candidates nationwide represented a total of 1% of the vote. So in the final count, 49.3% of all Americans who voted for a presidential candidate voted AGAINST Bush. His final total was a margin of 1.4% of the popular vote, less than one-half of the 3% Republicans have been crowing about since the day after the election. This represents 1.8 million voters, not 3.7 million as stated after November 2, a reduction of 50% in that margin of victory. Add to this the fact that only about 60% of eligible voters actually bestirred themselves to vote, and the high rate of voting "irregularities" that remain unresolved nationwide, and it turns out that Bush got at most the votes of about 30% of voting-age Americans, and about 20% of all Americans of all ages.

How any of this, even the largest of the above numbers, amounts to a mandate is a logical leap that simply boggles the mind.

In truth, far from receiving a mandate, he barely squeaked by, and there are some indications that he didn't really even do as well as he seems to have done. However, barring a miracle, it appears we're going to inaugurate him again anyway.

But if people like that letter writer think that Americans who disagree with Bush and his policies are just going to lay down and die because he and they keep shouting "Mandate! The people have spoken!", they've got a major surprise in store. We still think he's wrong whether he won the election or not, and we're still going to do all we can to thwart him in his misguided attempts to dismantle the America we know and love. So get off your high horse. We're not buying.

And besides, vox populi was never vox dei, and most assuredly isn't now.

The Other, Our Enemy

The Other, Our Enemy

By Richard Hauenstein
Dec. 7, 2004

The people must believe that they are not manipulated in order for them to be manipulated effectively.
- Winston Smith, “1984”

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!

- Jack Nicholson, “A Few Good Men”

As I write this, it’s Pearl Harbor Day - the sixty-third commemoration of what used to be the worst sneak attack ever perpetrated on American military forces and civilians. That is, until those bloodthirsty, freedom-hating, anti-American, non-Christian Al Qaeda fanatics turned a beautiful late summer day into the rallying point for our national hatred of all things Muslim, Arab or Middle Eastern. But we’ve always had someone to hate, haven’t we? It’s part of our national make-up, in fact it’s part of being human.

Back in 1990, around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, I read an article by a sociologist on the topic of “the universal other”. He (I think it was a he ) said that every society had to have a common enemy that could be used by that society’s leaders to keep the people under control – to distract the people from what the leaders were doing by making them fear the “other”. He went down a long list, all the way back to the Pharaohs of Egypt and their use of the Israelites for this purpose. If the Egyptians could hate a common enemy, they would be less likely to notice that the Pharaohs were robbing the common people of their substance, and living a life that the people couldn’t even aspire to.

The author included as examples of his theme the Romans and their subjugation of “barbarians”, Napoleon’s dream of world conquest, the British Empire’s appeal to King and country in subjugating people of color all over the world, Hitler’s use of the Jews (again) as the source of all post-WWI ills in Germany; and the author expressed concern that, since the Soviet Union could no longer be used to frighten children in the West, a new “Other” would have to be found to keep us in line. And he surmised that this new enemy would be – the Arabs.


As history shows us, less than a year later, the Gulf War (now called the First Gulf War – how sad that we continue to number our wars) initiated America’s overt war against the Arab nation of Iraq. As opposed to the West’s extremely long covert war in the same region.

In fact, history shows us something else as well: in the 228 years of the Republic, America has almost never been without an Other, to hate and fear, to unite us as a nation, and to use as a distraction from what has happened and is happening to our country from within.

In the beginning, the Other was England. Then, Indians became bloody savages who tried to keep us from fulfilling our manifest destiny, even before the term was invented. Then, with some overlap, it was African slaves, southern rebels, Indians again, Germany in two world wars, Japan in one, a long stint with the Soviet Union, and Vietnam and Red China thrown in for good measure.

And now, it’s the Arabs again, as we spread freedom throughout the Middle East one Iraqi corpse at a time.

Now, it’s true that many of these Others attacked us, though if the truth be known, only one of the above did so unprovoked – Japan, 63 years ago today. While I am in no way defending what was done to America on Sept. 11, a dispassionate reader of history would have to say that it was not an unprovoked attack from any but the shortest of short-term perspectives.

And if one can in fact do such an unemotional read, an interesting, almost counter-intuitive fact emerges from the welter of information: from 1991, when the Soviet Union fell and the First Gulf War ended, until Sept. 11, 2001, the world was not in perfect apple-pie order, I don’t mean to suggest any such ludicrous thing – but what is almost unarguable is that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and before the rise of Islamic terror in its current form, we had no discernible common enemy against which to unite. In fact, on many levels our former enemies of the last half of the 20th century, Russia and Japan and Germany, became our friends and trading partners.

The overall net result of this unprecedented era of agreement between major nations was one of the most prosperous times in the history of mankind, at least for the Western nations. America built up unprecedented budget surpluses, the stock market went to all-time highs, the global economy came into being and began to flourish, and it looked like the national debt was going to approach zero some time in the near future. We had enemies, of course – but we didn’t live under a daily cloud of fear that, even in the heartland of the country, we could be attacked at any minute. Based on results, this relatively fear-free atmosphere was a positive influence on America.

And so, to bring this short history lesson to a close, I pose two questions for your consideration: Do we really need an “Other” to unite us in hatred? And will we ever be grown up enough as a nation, or as a species, to live without one?