How do you know that the economy is in a real recession, not just an imaginary one, one that's all in your head, a "mental" recession? When a Republican is out of work.

A particular Republican is out of work, actually: lobbyist and former US Senator Phil Gramm, the guy who said that the recession was something entirely imagined by a "nation of whiners" -- until he was laid off himself. OK, I'm aware that the newspapers say that he quit "to end this distraction." But trust me, he's out of work, and I don't think there's any doubt that this was a "quit or be fired" moment. Okay, he's really more of an involuntary retiree than the victim of a lay off, and I'm sure he has some rich Republican friends who'll front him his rent and grocery money should it come to that. Still, the fact remains that at this point, the architect of one of the pillars of Reaganomics is radioactive to any potential employers.

Most of the news media have covered this from the inevitable "Presidential horse race" angle, wanting to know what it means to the "contest" between Obama and McCain that Gramm wrote pretty much the entire McCain campaign economic plan; how much of an embarrassment is this to John McCain? And the focus is on that because the top candidates firing, dismissing, cutting themselves off from, betraying, denouncing, renouncing, and/or accepting the only-semi-voluntary resignations of their closest friends, allies, advisers, and staff has been a recurring thread this year, to the point where most news editors and many journalists are begging the rest of the commentariat to throw the phrase "throw (someone) under the bus" under the bus.

But there's a bigger news story here than the wannabe horse-race handicappers trying to juggle the odds on which "horse" will cross the "finish line" ahead of the other, and I'd like to thank the Washington Post's columnist E.J. Dione for calling it to my attention last Friday on Countdown with (No, Really, This Time) Keith Olbermann. Because Dione came very close to predicting this news story, a week in advance, pretty much by accident, with his column for July 11th, 2008: "Capitalism's Reality Check" (registration required). Because in a very real way, the 2008 election isn't about Barack Obama or John McCain. In a weird sort of a way, it's an actual national referendum about Phil Gramm. Because before he was before he was UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm, before he was Senator Phil Gramm, before he was U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, he was Texas A&M University professor of economics Dr. Phil Gramm, whose entire life's work has been about laissez faire economics. He wasn't just the a contributor to the Republicans' "Contract on with America," he was one of the main intellectual architects of Reaganomics, and for him, its founding principle was this:

In the long term, Dr. Gramm argued, it is basically impossible for a business to stay in business by harming its customers, without some unfair form of help from the government. If all government help is withdrawn from businesses, and a free market prevails, then customers will flock to the business that doesn't harm its customers, that business will earn more money than the businesses that do harm their customers, and the bad businesses will either go broke and close their doors or get bought out by the good business. This means that in a free market, any form of government regulation aimed at preventing companies from harming their customers is unnecessary. What's more, the effort that the government spends on checking up on companies that it thinks could go bad costs money, so they have to raise taxes to pay for the compliance checkers, including taxes on those companies. What's more, companies that are having to look over their shoulders at hovering, hostile government regulators have to practice business defensively, have to divert resources that could go into making better, cheaper products into dealing with regulators, have to hire and pay the people who do nothing but placate the regulators, and those costs get passed on to the customer. So according to Phil Gramm (and most other hard-core laissez faire economists) any kind of government regulation of business at all achieves no good end, gives customers no better products or more products than they would have had under a laissez faire market, and does so at a higher cost. Therefore any kind of consumer or citizen or environmental protection by government is an inherently bad thing.

When he was doing his academic work back in the 1970s, American businesses' regulatory compliance costs were at their all-time maximum; from the 1890s to the early 1970s, fed-up American voters had demanded more and more protection from companies by government. And when Phil Gramm was doing his academic work, the US economy was in horrible shape. In hindsight, we can see that this had more to do with horrible budgetary mismanagement during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and the wreckage wrought on the federal budget by the ever-escalating costs of having just lost a major land war in Asia, than it had to do with corporate regulation. But voters, eager for a fast way to repair the wreckage of the Carter-era economy, were willing to listen to the many US businesses who were claiming that there wouldn't be so much inflation if they didn't have to spend so much money hiring people to protect them from unnecessary government regulators. And, in fact, by the end of President Reagan's first term, this academic and political argument had so thoroughly won the day that it not only became a permanent bedrock principle of the Republican Party (where it was no big surprise, as hands-off-big-business had been Republican party dogma since the robber-baron days of the 1880s and '90s), but it even became the majority position on economics in the Democratic Party, as well.

So we've spent the 28 years since Ronald Reagan won his first election to the US Presidency rolling back regulation after regulation, trusting more and more in "voluntary compliance" and "market-based solutions." And even where some regulations were too popular to repeal, businesses in formerly heavily regulated industries like banking, lending, real estate, and finance found ways to shift all of their actual money, all of the actual economic activity, into what had been niches too tiny to come to regulators' attention during the heyday of government regulation. We got exactly what Phil Gramm devoted his entire career to trying to persuade us to want, an almost completely unregulated economy. So it's not terribly surprising that Phil Gramm thinks that our current economy is really, really great; he just wants his side's politicians to make whatever bare-minimum entirely-symbolic gestures are necessary to placate the American voting public long enough for the "invisible hand of the market" to weed out the bad actors and turn the economy over to the good companies, still at a lower cost than government regulation.

But here's what E.J. Dione was writing about, a week ago last Friday: Phil Gramm, and his friend John McCain, and a few equally hide-bound ideologues with no actual business experience of their own, are practically the only people left on the planet who still think so. The same companies that spent the 1970s through the 1990s begging for less and less regulation are now begging for more and more regulation, and so are ever more of the Republican politicians that are beholden to those companies. Not just the American voters, but American companies, are standing up to Phil Gramm and saying en masse, "We tried it your way, and it turns out that it doesn't work." They don't want to hear from some pointed-headed economist turned politician turned lobbyist, who not only never managed a business but who never even worked a day of actual work in his life, how the economy "ought to work." They can see with their own eyes that it didn't turn out that way.

There is, actually, a reason why it doesn't work. It would not be entirely fair to penalize Professor Gramm, Ph.D., for not having foreseen this; much of the math didn't exist during his academic tenure. There have been an awful lot of advances in economics, especially coming out of the application of the school of mathematics known as "games theory," that couldn't have been made without fast and inexpensive computer simulations. But having done the math, and seen the results, there's a perfectly logical explanation in plain English that we can now give. When I do give it, it's going to sound so obvious that you're going to ask, well, sure, why didn't they see that coming? And all I can say to that is, you weren't there, it was a much more primitive world back then. Anyway, here's the reason why it doesn't work: all too frequently, the market doesn't have time to fix itself. Suppose that even just one company cheats by finding a way to make its products more profitable in a way that harms the buyers or that downstreams costs to its non-customers, imposes costs on them involuntarily, and manages to keep this at all secret for even a matter of months, or at most a couple of years. It can then drive prices down to the point where none of its competitors are making any money. They go bankrupt; this company then buys them out or monopolizes the market.

As one company cheats, therefore, there are morally crippling pressures on other companies to find ways to match the cheating company's prices; if anybody cheats, they all know within a matter of at most a few months that they have to cheat, too. Nor can they go public with their knowledge that the other company "must be" making deadly safety compromises with their product or dumping toxics onto an unsuspecting public. They know from their own business experience that that's the only way that the other company can be making that product, in the same market they are, with the same raw materials costs and vaguely similar wages and the same broadly-known business practices ... but they can't prove it in a court of law. It could take them years to find the evidence they'd need to protect themselves if they made that accusation and got sued for libel and slander. And they don't have years; they'll be out of business long before then, probably.

Nor does it help that we had a wave of shareholders' rights lawsuits back in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the same conclusion: company boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder return in the short run, and since it is a fiduciary duty, they can be sued for not doing it. If there are investors out there (and there are) who think that the company should take insane risks with public safety because their competitors are doing so and thereby returning more value to their shareholders, it doesn't even help if the company that would rather do the right thing and wait for the market to catch up is still somehow minimally profitable, or if it has the cash reserves to wait until the evidence comes out: they'll still get sued, there'll still be a hostile takeover of that company, and new management will be put in that has no such optimistic faith in the goodness of markets.

And all of that makes Phil Gramm what he richly deserves to be: a retiree. At age 66, he's an academic economist who, through his success in politics, actually got to experiment with an entire nation's economy. As a "scientist" who still won't admit that the experiment didn't produce the results that his hypothesis said it would, even after all the evidence is in, he deserves to never work again; he's not just a bad person, he's a poor scientist. So he belongs where he is now, laid off, unemployed and unemployable, living off of Social Security and his US Senate pension, not anywhere near the reins of power; Gods help us, if he could, he'd repeat the experiment again, rather than admit that his model was flawed, in hopes it would turn out differently a second time.

(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives legal immunity to the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying on in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

For the last couple of days, the news has become increasingly unwatchable to me, because it drives me stark raving nuts when everybody, and I mean everybody, who's speaking up on a news story has it wrong. Or, in this case, two news stories: Barack Obama's announced support for telecom immunity, and Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to reform and expand the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, elevating it even higher in importance in his administration than it was in this one. And all week long, almost every single reporter and analyst, regardless of their politics, has read these two stories the same way. Senator Obama, they have concluded, is "tacking towards the center," announcing policy positions that he doesn't believe or doesn't care about, in order to distance himself from the (presumably unpopular) Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, to make himself appear to be more "moderate" and therefore less "radical" or "liberal" to the (presumed to be anti-liberal) American voting public. Analyst after analyst has quoted the axiom that all Democratic nominees change their positions to appear more liberal while they're campaigning for their party's primary and then, once they have the delegate lead sewed up, change their positions again to be more "centrist;" that supposedly the Republicans do the same thing, tacking right in the primaries and tacking center-ward after the primaries.

Because obviously Barack Obama can't possibly mean what he says when he says he supports the warrantless wiretapping program that allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on any phone call, as long as what they at least say that they're trying to do is only pay attention to the calls that are between (actual or suspected) enemy agents and (actual or possible) enemy contacts overseas, he can't possibly really accept the argument, implicit in this bill, that if the NSA secretly tells a telecom company that the President approved this tap, the company should secretly and immediately comply, right? It's got to be just election-year posturing, right? Keith Olbermann and John Dean have both been going on all week about how they're just 100% sure that it must be a secretive conspiracy on Barack Obama's part to lull the Bush administration and the telcos into a false sense of security, then spring the trap on them with criminal, not civil, prosecutions next January. Right?

Wrong.

I think he actually means it.

And I'm a little bit disappointed, but not terribly surprised. And I'd rather he didn't, but I don't care enough to base my vote on it, not least of which because on this issue, there's no meaningful difference between him and John McCain. But that's not the point that I want to, that I feel that I need to, explain. Let me explain why I think he means it. (Again. I explained most of this, in part at least, when the warrantless wiretapping program first leaked to the public, I'm pretty sure.)

The fact of the matter is that going all the way back to the deployment of the telegraph, all the way back to the Civil War, in every war the US has ever fought, our spy services have spied on Americans in total violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But rather than detail it war by war, let me point out to you the history of the NSA's original warrantless wiretapping program: Operation Ivy Bells, 1957 to 1975.

The National Security Agency as we now know it was founded by President Truman in 1947, to collect most of our WWII signals-intercept capabilities into a single agency and retool it from spying on our German and Japanese enemies on behalf of our Russian allies (and ourselves), to spying on our Russian (and Chinese, but mostly Russian) enemies on behalf of our German and Japanese allies (and ourselves). You can't entirely keep a secret that big, certainly not once a department gets big enough to get its own huge headquarters building, but for the first roughly 18 years of its life, the long-standing joke was that the acronym NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything." Rumors got out, but officially the very existence of the NSA was classified Top Secret. During the Cold War they mostly specialized in intercepting and decoding radio signals, but they did have one very, very ambitious phone-tapping program. It used customized Navy submarines to "tap" the trans-Pacific phone cables. Originally they only tapped a local underwater cable, but it expanded to tap all deep water telephone cables going into the Soviet Union. Yes, all calls from anyone, including any innocent civilians, who called anybody in Russia, including ones they had no 4th Amendment right to hear, were recorded, brought back, skimmed for useful intelligence, translated, and if any was found, it was put to use; then the tapes were erased and reused. The program only ended in 1975 when one of the NSA's own people sold the secret of the program to the KGB for cash. But even then, the American public didn't hear about it.

Why do we know anything at all about the NSA, officially, now? Because in 1971, President Nixon ordered the NSA to eavesdrop on all anti-Vietnam-War groups, too, also without a warrant, on the shallow excuse that some of them might secretly be controlled by Soviet spies. This so offended someone, and we're still not even sure who, that they blew the whistle, eventually leading to Congressional hearings in October, 1975: the famous Church Committee. It was in the Church Committee hearings that the government was grudgingly forced to admit that the NSA even existed, and that it had been used to spy on Nixon's political opponents. Even then, Ivy Bell never came up, not until long after the statute of limitations had run out. But no further attempts to set up any program even vaguely like it were set up until 1978 or later. Why 1978? Because having abused the privilege of spying on Americans for political reasons, the NSA was put under a figleaf of court oversight, and I do mean a figleaf, their own captive and pretty much entirely complaisant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. At which point the NSA went back into the business of spying on Americans, in total secrecy, without ever being turned down once, despite never having to turn in anything resembling enough evidence for a real search warrant, for a bit more than a decade. And that whole time, there were people mounting legal challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, arguing (quite correctly) that it was a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And they got nowhere. You know why they got nowhere? Because the American government, including the courts, are run by grownups. And their attitude was, "who cares?"

They allowed FISA and the FISC/NSA to go forward, spying on Americans, because they knew that the real safeguard on Americans' actual liberty wasn't the FISC. It was the teleco employees themselves who'd have to install and maintain the taps, or who would inevitably discover them in the course of their work. It was the NSA's own employees, its own culture, who were trusted because the one and only time any White House ever abused the NSA for political reasons, somebody blew the whistle. And when they did, Nixon didn't have the guts to even try to make up a plausible national security reason for why he'd tapped Democratic Party offices and anti-war activists. I remember my Dad, and other adults I knew at the time, disgustedly arguing that if Nixon'd had the guts to say, "Yeah, I did it. I had evidence that wasn't good enough to get a warrant or to make a public accusation, but too good to completely ignore, that there was a Soviet spy in there somewhere, and I had to find out if it was true. So I had spies break into that party's offices. It turned out it wasn't true, so I didn't tell anybody because that would have unfairly tarred them with a false accusation, and we didn't use the information we got improperly. Would you rather I had ignored rumors of Soviet spies inside a major political party?", then he might have successfully finished his second term.

But anyway, afterwards, as far as everybody in any kind of a position of authority in Washington was concerned, the Watergate impeachment hearings and the Church Commission hearings proved that the FISC was a pointless exercise; that the real precaution was the guaranteed certainty that so many people would know if the White House was abusing its spying capabilities, one of the people who knew would have a conscience attack. And that's what's so uncomfortable about the whole Terrorist Surveillance Program at AT&T and other telecos, the warrantless wiretaps that let the NSA skim the entire Internet backbone and all long-distance phone lines for evidence of al Qaeda plots: nobody, and I mean nobody, has come up with even a suggestion that anybody in the NSA used those taps for anything but legitimate purposes, or even a hint that any information that they weren't supposed to be looking for was passed to the White House, or even a single clue that any actual American's privacy or political rights were impaired in even the tiniest way ... but somebody blew the whistle anyway. And that's not actually supposed to happen. Implicit in the relationship between America's spy agencies and America's telecom companies that goes all the way back to the original American Telegraph system in the 1860s is an agreement that everybody would keep their mouths shut unless something went wrong, and that agreement was breached.

So if you think that no matter what he was told or how famously fair-minded a man he is, Barack Obama can't possibly be really okay with a bill that forgives every telco for participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program if they claim that they at least thought that the President had ordered it? That he must only be claiming to be okay with it for political advantage, for fear of being called soft on terror, or to reassure swing voters, or to establish the appearance of some distance between himself and the left-wing blogosphere? I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.

(And an irrelevant aside: my Bush Countdown Clock from NationalNightmare.com reminds me that there are now only 200 days left in the Bush Administration. And for much of that time, Congress is going to be in recess. Rejoice that there's really not much harm that the man can do in that little time, with no more resources or authority than he has left.)

One last thing I forgot to mention. Remember how, yesterday, I mentioned that somewhere, some Gen Xers are probably going to make a ton of money off of "saving the planet" from "global warming?" I forgot to mention that this actually has the potential to contradict not one prediction I made years ago, but two of them. Not just my prediction, over the last 18 years, that the Baby Boomer generation was going to wreck this country by dragging out their fundamentalist/secular spite-fest indefinitely, but another prediction that I was even more sure of than that one, one made more recently.

Back during the 2006 election, one of the things I was crabbing about regarding my own (Democratic) party was a lie I got very tired of them telling, almost all of them implicitly and some of them explicitly: the promise that electing Democrats would return us to the Clinton economy. What I was pointing out at the time, even occasionally going farther back to the primaries of the 2004 presidential election, and what I have stood by for years, is this premise: "Anybody who tells you that they have a plan to return the economy to where it was in 1999 is either an idiot or a liar." Yes, Bill Clinton did something that no President has done since before WWII, and no President since him. He not just balanced the federal budget, he actually made our only consecutive payments against the principal on the national debt in the last 50 years or more. But he didn't get the money to do so because his economic policies were so brilliant, nor was it because of the economic policies of the Republicans who controlled Congress during his terms. The biggest thing that went "right" with the economy of 1992-2000 was the dot-com stock market bubble of the 1990s. The capital gains taxes paid by active stock market traders on their ever-rising stock prices as they churned in and out of (actually worthless) dot-com stocks were the only thing significantly different between his budget and his Republican predecessor's. Nor was the dot-com stock bubble something he did on purpose; it was almost entirely driven by American industry's desperation spending on hardware and software to fix the Y2K bug. Yes, that investment did improve productivity, some, and was mostly worth it for its own sake, mostly, just as the people predicting "The Long Boom" in stocks were claiming. But not enough to make the whole stock market rise in profitability indefinitely, not at the 20% or more per year rate that it would have had to keep rising to keep balancing the federal budget. That defies gravity. And what I said in 2006 was that unless there turned out to be another problem that forced all American business to invest yet again in one industry at the same time again, you were never again in your lifetime going to see a bubble like that one.

One reason I was sure of this turned out to be wrong; until now, there was usually at least 20 years between bubbles, because once burned, each generation of investors has always learned to distrust bubbles, making it impossible to inflate another one until a new younger, still naive, generation came along. This should have made the housing bubble impossible; sadly, it didn't. But the housing bubble didn't do nearly as much to raise revenues for the federal government as the dot-com bubble did, because since Clinton, there is no capital gains tax due on the profit, however wild or inflated, from the sale of a primary residence that you've owned for 2 years or more. So still, I stood by my claim that we were going to stay in deep do-do until we found some non-bubble way to grow the economy way, way more than it has been growing in my adult lifetime, until we came up with some major tax revenue (not rate, revenue) increases, which meant that sooner or later, the US government is in for something resembling bankruptcy. At the rate we're borrowing, our interest payments are rising even with artificially low interest rates. When those rates go up (as they inevitably have to), that line of the federal budget is going to skyrocket, bankrupting the country, wrecking the currency even faster than it's going down now. That's why I've been campaigning and arguing for years that we need to expand the labor force in this country, to take in tens of millions of new legal immigrant citizens and put them to work; we need their taxes.

But here's where I may have been wrong in one particular: we may yet have, gods help us, one more ridiculous stock market bubble in this generation of investors: a green technology stock market bubble. Odds are, most of the companies making money on it will be just as fraudulent, or at the very least have business plans just as indefensibly stupid, as the software and Internet stocks were. But it would no longer surprise me if we got one. I will say this, though, in defense of Bill Clinton: may the gods grant that the President and Congress, if we do get an explosion in capital gains tax receipts because of yet another stock market bubble, be at least as smart as he was about resisting the call to lower taxes, be at least as determined as he was to use that money to pay down debt rather than count on it continuing to come in at that rate forever.

On McCain and me: Over the next five months, some of you are going to suspect me of being obsessed, and not in a good way, with John McCain. You're probably right. As Inigo Montoya would say, let me explain; no, it is too much, let me sum up. I was raised Reform Democrat, to the extent I was raised anything at all, but Jimmy frakking Carter turned me into a Republican. If you ask me to name the worst president of my lifetime, it's not Bush the Younger, nor Reagan, it's that dimwitted clumsy fundamentalist moron from Plains, Georgia who had a talent unmatched even by the present administration for spinning gold into straw. Had I not been cheated out of my vote in 1980, I would have voted for Reagan, because four more years of Jimmy frakking Carter would have completely and utterly destroyed this country.

Reagan did then go on to discredit Republican beliefs for me, turning me back into a Reform Democrat. But all through the 80s and 90s, I had my eye on one guy who I really thought could have stood for the kind of Barry Goldwater libertarian (with a small "L") Republicanism that I could have still gotten behind, a guy I easily preferred over at least half of the people in my own party; not coincidentally, someone personally mentored by Goldwater, John McCain. And when he started sucking up to the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, and then worse when he co-authored legislation authorizing our military courts to use confessions extracted via torture as evidence, it literally broke my heart; by the time he got around to recently abandoning any pretense of being a deficit hawk to endorse Bush's borrow-and-spend economic policies instead of his own lifetime obsession with sound economic policies, I was already too bitter to hate him any more. And so, like anybody who's been hurt badly by someone they loved, I'm sickly obsessed with trying to understand why they would hurt me like that. I will not defend this, and I can only half-heartedly apologize for it, but I do acknowledge it.

On civil wars: Whenever I bring up Strauss & Howe's dire warning (back in 1989) that if America's (then future) Baby Boomer leaders are allowed to force a crisis of principle any earlier than 2010, the result could be a second American civil war, people scoff at me. And yeah, unsurprisingly, already in the last couple of days I've had people ask me for examples of how such a thing could happen. Here's one thing I'll say about that. We've already come closer than I ever wanted to come in my life. The then-famous (and dangerously too-quickly forgotten) "White Collar Riot," in which thugs hired by top Republican elected officials used violence and the threat of mob violence to stop the counting of ballots scared me then, and still scares me, more than anything the terrorists have done or ever could do. If I had to choose between losing a city every couple of years to terrorist nukes and having our elections overtly disrupted by organized partisan violence against election boards even once in my life, I'd choose the terrorists. We can rebuild buildings. We can rebuild cities, if we have to, all evidence in New Orleans to the contrary. I am less confident that we can rebuild the Constitution if it gets destroyed. The prospect that any election might be The Last Election should scare any American enough to be prepared to fight in the streets to overthrow those who'd attempt it, no matter what the cost.

But there's an even more plausible scenario that worries me. Four of the current five Supreme Court justices have taken public stands that the federal government should not decide the "abortion issue," and many millions of Americans agree with them that America should be returned to the status quo ante Roe v Wade, where the legality of abortion is decided by state legislatures and state courts, permitting, banning, and/or regulating abortion on a state-by-state basis. After all, they argue, that's how we were for almost two centuries; what would be so bad about going back to before that? Ah, but that was before we had 35 years' worth of (fake) Christian fundamentalist politicians teaching two whole generations of their followers, easily a third or more of all self-identified Christians alive today, that Abortion Is Murder ... and that it's God's political and spiritual Issue Number One. Now I want you to imagine this. Substitute any two adjacent states in your mind, but I'll pick two close to me for the example: my own home state of Missouri and the adjacent state of Illinois, the two states that the bi-state metropolitan area of St. Louis straddles.

Polls show, and legislative history suggests, that if Roe v Wade were overturned, the Missouri legislature would ban all abortions, and the Missouri Supreme Court would uphold such a ban. Similar sources show that the Illinois legislature would continue to allow abortions, with roughly similar levels of regulation to those allowed by current Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th amendment, in other words, no particular change in the status quo. What this means is that Missourians, mostly quite happy to have successfully stopped the murder of children within their home state, would face the prospect of their citizens sneaking across the border into Illinois to murder a child, then trying to sneak back into Missouri to resume their lives. That's a situation that would be about as morally tolerable to them as the current situation of rich people jetting off to third-world hellholes with the intent of semi-safely hiring child prostitutes, with the added complication of being affordable and easy for anybody with even a beat-up used car and a tank of gasoline.

If you think Missourians wouldn't try to ban this and stop it, let me remind you that Missouri already has a law strictly penalizing any adult who "smuggles" a teenager across the border into Illinois to evade Missouri's parental-notification laws. Nonetheless, Missouri (and every similar state) would be at most no more successful at stopping such cross-border traffic, traffic guaranteed by the US Constitution's guarantee that all citizens have the right to interstate travel, than the slave states were at shutting down the Underground Railroad. Nor would they be any more successful at stopping out-of-state abortion clinics from advertising to Missourians (if nothing else, via the Internet) than slave states were at stopping abolitionists from getting their literature into the hands of southern blacks. And if you think that Missourians wouldn't resort to cross-border violence if the US Constitution wouldn't let them stop "the trade in murdered babies" any other way, let me remind you that for all practical purposes, Missouri's "border ruffians" invented "bushwacking." Heck, I'm pretty sure I had ancestors who were terrorists in "Bleeding Kansas."

From Dred Scott to Fort Sumter was only 4 years. I would seriously expect religious civil war between the states of the United States in no more time than that after an overturning of Roe v Wade.

There are probably fewer than ten books that I push off on anybody who will sit still for them; it is a mark of how much I suck that I have very mixed luck getting people to actually sit down and read them, even though these are all books that completely changed my way of seeing the world, books that opened my eyes to, and clarified, whole ranges of news stories, historical events, and global phenomena that were previously inexplicable to me. For example, almost nothing about American life and our economy makes nearly as much sense before you read Joel Garreau's Edge City as it does afterwards. It's almost impossible to put current political jeremiads in context without having read the best of jeremiads, once about a generation and time we now remember as heroic, Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers. I don't know how interested I am in hearing almost anything that people have to say about the politics of masculinity, as it is almost certainly shallow and ill-informed, if they haven't read Susan Faludi's Stiffed. I'm pretty sure that if I'm talking educational policy or history with you and you haven't read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I'm going to be constantly wishing you had. I'm not sure that it's aged well, but for a very long time I wasn't interested in hearing technological or cultural speculation from anybody who hadn't read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. If you have any kind of a pet theory about economics and you haven't read P.J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, I really have to wonder why not, and if you'd still think the same thing after you read it. For all the reasons I talked about the other day, Pfeffer and Sutton's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense is working its way onto my list of books that I think you really ought to have read.

But to get to the point, there's a book I've been hyping for almost 20 years now as the book about American history, the book without you having read it, I don't know how in the heck you manage to either understand anything about American history, or even keep it all straight in your head: Neil Howe and William Strauss, Generations. I know some of the reasons I've had a hard time getting people to actually sit down and read it. It is thick as a brick, and it starts out kind of slow and very, very deliberately. The reason it does so is the other reason why (until recently) you'd heard very little about it except from cranks like me; Strauss & Howe set out to do something that all professional academic historians had declared impossible, namely, identify an easily understandable and completely predictable recurring trend in American history, one with dominating and important influence over how the country's history has turned out, and will continue turning out. Grand Unified Theories of History were, and still are, frowned upon, so the first couple of hundred pages of Generations are grindingly methodical specifically in an attempt to prove to academic historians that no, we're not the only ones who noticed some parts of this, no, they're not all that controversial even within your field, no, we're not making as sweeping a set of assertions as you might think, and no, we didn't pull this out of our backsides without doing a ton of rock-solid statistical analysis first and developing a solid theoretical model.

And at the end, it goes further, and it won my heart thereby at the time, by adding, and no, they weren't expecting anybody to believe them yet. Instead, based on their theoretical and statistical analysis, they made not quite 90 years' worth of predictions for American history and said that if their theory was right, more of their predictions than could be expected by chance were going to come true; if substantial numbers of them did not, it would prove their theory false. As I said, it's been just shy of 20 years since Generations came out. And with very few exceptions, those 20 years have been very, very, very good to Strauss & Howe. In fact, their book and the work of its small but devoted cult of follow-on researchers who were impressed by them early on have become mandatory reading for political campaigns this year.

By coincidence, I've been going through it again myself for about a month now, slowly and carefully. phierma and cos_x and I have been getting together Tuesday nights to catch each other up on our favorite TV series and movies for a long while now, a chance to socialize while they get work done on their various projects. When we ran low on TV series and movies that one of us had that the other(s) were eager to catch up with, it turned out that they love to be read to, and I love to read aloud, so we started working on books, and their choice for the second book was Strauss & Howe, Generations. Last Tuesday night, we got to the first of the "prediction" chapters ... and I got halfway down the first paragraph and my own jaw fell right out of my head. You see, this would be my first time re-reading it since 9/11, and one of the things that I had failed to remember was that something very, very like 9/11 was something that they predicted. They completely failed to predict the exact timing; on the contrary, they specifically said that New York City being attacked, and a major chunk of it destroyed, by Islamic terrorists was a distinct possibility at any time. What they were specifically saying was that if their theory was true, how America would react would be different based on whether it happened in 1990, 2000, 2010, or 2020. And as I started going through the paragraph on how they predicted America would react and how America would change if we were attacked in the year 2000 or in the first couple of years thereafter, my jaw dropped right off all over again. They nailed it. In spooky, but in hindsight not astonishing, ways.

This is the point where, in order to make any sense out of the rest of this, I have to oversimplify their theory in an entirely unconvincing way, one that most of you will flatly refuse to believe because you haven't read the book and seen their extensive statistical and historical and scientific evidence for their argument. But here's the best I can do. They define a "generation" as a group of people, born in a consecutive range of years, who can't help having a lot of traits in common because they were all roughly the same age during major world-changing events. A major war, like say World War II, has different effects on elderly leaders and recent retirees, on people in mid-life career, on people of fighting age or people just enter the workforce, and on children. Individuals will differ, but everybody who was (again, same example) a child during World War II is going to have some things in common with other people who were children during World War II. Since a "phase of life" is roughly 20 or so years, they hypothesized, and their statistical research backed them up, that while demographic wobbles don't follow the same pattern, a new generation comes along about every 20 years. And as they statistically analyzed the generations on a wide variety of traits, they discovered that they can be generalized into only four types, and that they repeat in a specific pattern with one and only one important exception so far in American history going back to the 1620s. Because your attention is at a premium, rather than generalize, let me give specific examples, the four generations who made up most of the American population on September 11th, 2001, from oldest to youngest:

• John McCain's Silent Generation were aged 59 to 76 on 9/11. They were the kids who were just too young to be part of WWII, on average born ten years too late to be war heroes or to have made heroic sacrifices on the home front. They spent their young adulthood sucking up to the GI Generation who'd fought that war and who swept into unquestioned political power after the war. Then around 1965 or so, they were (this time) just barely too old to be part of the Consciousness Revolution, their average member just over that magic "over 30" line that the next generation after them, who dominated the Consciousness Revolution, defined as untrustworthy, and their youngest members already young adults with families and too many responsibilities to go chasing off after a cultural revolution. Not that that stopped them; embarrassing numbers of them spent the 1970s in binges of destructive behavior from trying to pretend they were still uninhibited teenagers (when they had been no such thing in their actual teenage years), leaving an amazing trail of broken marriages and substance abuse hospitalizations behind them.
  
  
• George W. Bush's Boom Generation were aged 41 to 58 on 9/11. Their childhood came just as the last of FDR's and Billy Sunday's Missionary Generation were dying off, and if some of them didn't know that, they did grow up noticing that America, while wealthy and powerful, was also smug, self-satisfied about its wealth and power, deeply corrupt, and completely lacking in any meaningful national conversation about values. They grew up as teenagers and 20-somethings to make that their mission, starting an all-out intra-generational war on campuses, mostly between the fundamentalist, reactionary, authoritarian right wing of their generation and the free-spirited, revolutionary, utopian left wing of their generation. The left wing won all the battles but lost the war, not that almost any of them ever admitted that. What really undid them was that by the late 1970s, the wreckage that the Silent generation had made of their kids chasing after the liberal Boomers' Consciousness Revolution, and the even more appalling wreckage the early-wave liberal Boomers had made of their own lives let alone their kids, sparked a massive counter-revolution, splitting them mostly by age: the first half of their generation generally fundamentalist Republican, the last wave (who were too young to see or experience the worst of the wreckage first-hand) still secular or New Age utopian socialists. Per Strauss & Howe, if you think they're the first idealist generation to experience this split, you are 100% wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s this split became known as the Culture Wars. But by the end of the 1990s, they were beginning to reach real positions of power, and it was starting to produce a counter-trend towards trying to find a "third way" within both ideological wings of their generation, a set of ideals they could (mostly) all coalesce upon, that would be the new national consensus. The project was, at best, half complete on 9/11.
  
  
• For Barack Obama's (and Lyndie England's) 13th Generation, aged 20 to 40 on 9/11, the wreckage the Silent and Boom had made of American family life, mostly by neglecting their kids (and sometimes outright despising them as annoying distractions from more important things, as if anything could be more important) during their various ideological and spiritual and religious and political crusades, wasn't something they had to read about in the newspaper. Even the relatively unscarred survivors like Obama knew plenty of casualties first-hand, people whose lives had been no different than their own who ended up dead, crippled, in prison, on the economic scrap heap, strung out on drugs, trapped in criminal gangs, or otherwise destroyed. A few of them, especially some of the ones who were raised on at least a little of the Boomers' early liberal spiritual values, tend to retain the compassion to attribute their own survival and success to luck; the rest, having been raised on a rising tide of reactionary right-wing spiritual values, attribute their own survival to innate superiority over the losers. (Again, if you think they are the first generation to come after an idealist generation and turn out this way, you need to go back and look at the Lost generation or the Gilded generation.) Still, on 9/11, almost everybody in that generation looked at it as their crisis; as young adults and rising adults, it was going to be them who did all the work and took all the risks. Typically, to the disgust of the process-and-fairness oriented Silent generation, they didn't ask "what's fair?" To the even greater disgust of both the left-wing and right-wing ideologues of the Boom generation, they didn't ask "what's right?" No, a generation that grew up fast and hard and mostly on their own cut straight to the bottom line and asked "how much is this going to cost?" Some believed the Boomers who said it wouldn't cost much, would result in power and glory and wealth, and rushed off to any old desert hellhole the Boomers asked them to go to. Some counted the cost a little more accurately, and better estimated the trivial gains, and took firm stands on pure cost-benefit lines: Afghanistan is worth it, Iraq isn't.
  
  
• The Millennial Generation's (no obvious name jumps out at me for an example) youngest members had only just been born on 9/11; their eldest members had just graduated high school. These (mostly) kids were told on 9/11 not to worry, and that everything we as a country was about to do was For The Children. This completely and utterly failed to surprise them; for their entire life, for as long as any of them can remember, everything has been For The Children, in hopes that they wouldn't grow up ill-educated, burned out, jaded, cynical, mercenary, amoral, and nearly unemployable like Gen X and Gen Y. They were assured that years later, it would be their turn to band together in teams with peer-enforced morality, like they had been since their first DARE classes in grade school, and clean up whatever mess the Boomers and the 13th Generation had made of world by then. 100% unshakably convinced that when they do, the whole US government and the entire US population will be on their side and give them everything they need to do so, few if any of them have complained about this.

Strauss & Howe's hypothetical threat of WMD attack on Manhattan took into account the statistically likely lifecycle trends and growing-up patterns of these four generations:

• If the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 1990s: The GIs would still be clinging to power, the Silent Generation would be at their most inclined to dither and debate rather than act, and the mostly still powerless Boom would still be in full-fledged ideological internal warfare, both within themselves and against the (then still mostly hated by the Boomers) GIs. The government would achieve very little, would be accused of lying about the threat, government evacuation plans would be elaborate, sophisticated, and completely unworkable. The few young 13er entrepreneurs who rushed to the scene of the catastrophe would mostly go unnoticed; the only ones who would make the news would be the ones pilloried for scalping the attack survivors during the rescue. We would end up rebuilding the damage sections of New York but doing little if anything else, leaving the main problem to be dealt with all over again decades later.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2000s: The Silent Generation might be in charge; at the very least, they'd make up a lot of the manpower in Congress and in the White House staff. More likely, they predicted, it would be a Boomer president technically in charge. They couldn't predict, in 1989, if it would be a liberal new ager or a reactionary fundamentalist. Either way, they predicted that the Silent generation White House staff and top military brass would draw up for him an elaborate, technocratic reaction, a carefully negotiated and calibrated proportionate response that could be made to look like a bigger response. The Boomer president would present it to the nation as a moral challenge, a war between right and wrong, but be mostly accused by most people of just saying so to shill for his own side in the ongoing argument with other Boomers. A 13er Generation military, seeing a chance to gain quick and easy glory kicking around impoverished third-worlders, would ride jauntily off into the desert. (Strauss & Howe's naive overconfidence in the American legal system is probably what prevented them from predicting how many of those 13er troops would actually be piratical mercenaries rather than in US uniform; an amazing oversight, since they do document the huge numbers of pirates and mercenaries in similar generations before them.) Whatever then went wrong would be blamed on their poor education, surly attitudes, poor morals, and the lawless gang-like behavior of their worst members, not Boomer ideological divisions or Silent generation poor generalship. And since generations like the 13th make rotten soldiers, historically, well, yes the result would be disastrous, so yes, there would be plenty of scapegoating afterwards. Some of it would consist of quests for the worst of the "bad apples" in the military. But the main result would be a re-ignition of the old ideological wars within the Boom Generation, a screaming match between liberals and conservatives over who lost the War on Terror, postponing for years any attempt to build a national consensus behind a single set of shared values. How intense a re-ignition of those conflicts? One possible outcome they present all too much evidence for is the possibility of religious civil war in the US some time in the 2010s, one that would use up and destroy the Millennials' optimism and teamwork habits instead of benefiting from them.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2010s, preferably late 2010s: A few elderly Silent might still be in Congress and in a few offices in the Pentagon, finding satisfying work making sure that there were good, fair procedures for dealing with captives. But the reigns of political power at nearly all levels would be in Boomer hands. A terrorist attack on American soul would be the final catalyst to end their internal squabble once and for all, and whether the result was called compassionate conservatism or third-way liberalism (two terms Strauss & Howe couldn't predict in 1989, but their description is clear enough) it would be the new American political consensus for decades to come. All internal American struggles over, the country would rally to war against the terrorists and any perceived allies of the terrorists, confident that we were right and broadly unified. Grizzled and old-before-their-time 13er veterans of some early 21st century brush-fire war would find that the new crop of Millennial soldiers were nothing like the grunts they served with, that these kids were great kids ... and enthusiastic and uncomplaining cannon fodder. Cynical 13er business executives, if curbed of their natural instinct to war profiteer, would turn their pragmatic attention to squeezing out maximum productivity to (profitable) national service, churning out a new generation of wonder-weapons (produced by research teams of bright, excited Millennial scientists) in amazing quantities. America would march a multi-million-man army into the Arab world equipped with insane numbers of ultra-tech vehicles and weapons, and Save The World.

That they got the results of 9/11 so eerily right was only the first thing that ran chills down my spine. If I get it done and on the queue before I leave for tomorrow night's party, I'll have the other one for you tomorrow morning; if not, the next night.

I see in the news, this week, that former President Jimmy Carter is holding his own private meetings with the leaders of Palestine's Hamas "party," the winners in the last round of Palestinian elections, in an attempt to get his beloved "two-state solution," the "Middle East Peace Process" for which he won his Nobel Peace Prize, back on track. He has even offered to oh-so-informally ferry messages between Israel, Hamas, the Fatah Party (who lost the elections but who the US and Israel are still pretending to be the government of Palestine), and the US. This is, quite reasonably, being mocked, because neither Israel nor the US has any intention of negotiating, even informally, with a political party that still endorses world-wide genocide against Jews, and Fatah has no country to be negotiating on behalf of. (Beth Marlowe, "Carter offers to be Hamas go-between," Associated Press, 4/15/08.)

But a funny thing happened to me over the weekend, regarding this story: I heard it wrong, in an interesting way. Someone who was at the St. Louis Polymunch asked me if I'd heard the story that Jimmy Carter had agreed to meet with Hezbollah. "Iranian Hezbollah?," I asked incredulously -- and then I was struck dumb, with what must have been the most bizarre expression on my face. Yeah, I know, it turns out to not be true. Nor is it likely to ever be true, given that the current President of Iran has been identified by several of the US Embassy hostages from 1979 as one of their captors, and that for entirely legitimate reasons a main street in Iran's capital city is still called Death to Carter Avenue. The idea that Iran's president, or any high ranking member of Hezbollah, would sit down face to face with former US president Jimmy Carter, and vice versa, was so mind bogglingly radical that I sat there, completely pole-axed, for several minutes trying to parse the consequences. And then my face broke out into a beatific smile.

Oh, sure, even then I realized that the person who asked me this had to have heard it wrong, as it turns out that they did. But if it were true?

Because what is true is this: over the course of the Carter administration, the US and Iran treated each other abominably. Jimmy Carter was complicit in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranian communists, socialists, and Hezbollah members, back when Hezbollah was a relatively peaceful political party advocating (along with their coalition partners) a return to democracy in Iran. In response to this, a student activist group within Hezbollah, within hours of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, lead a mob rush against the US Embassy in Tehran; the Marines guarding the embassy, uncertain if their orders permitted them to machine-gun thousands of civilians even if they were attacking our embassy, retreated and were captured along with the embassy personnel ... and, notably, the CIA station chief for Iran, the man who'd really ordered the capture and torture-murder of all those dissidents, who himself is said to have confessed to this under torture himself before being murdered. And for the next 444 days, with the permission of the Iranian government, those militants continued to occupy our embassy, in total violation of all the norms of international law, and held our diplomatic staff hostage demanding that we return the Shah (who had fled to New York when the revolution came) and all the money he'd stolen from the country if we wanted our hostages back. And there they sat, until the next President, Ronald Reagan, "solved" the problem by bribing the government of Iran to return our hostages by having promised them a large shipment of anti-tank missiles in return.

And neither country is anywhere near ready to forgive the other for this.

And so on Saturday, when someone who'd misheard the news on the radio in their car asked me what I would think if Jimmy Carter were going to sit down with Iranian Hezbollah, what I worked through in my head was this. What if Jimmy Carter were to hold such a meeting, look the Ayatollah and the President of Iran in their faces and say something like, "OK, look, I admit it: I screwed up. When I gave the 'island of stability' speech that the Shah took as my permission to keep doing what the CIA was telling him to do, I had no idea what the CIA was actually telling him to do. If you look at my record back then, you would see that if I had known, I would never have permitted it. But it was my responsibility to know. And what's more, I should have thought to ask, when all my staff were telling me it was so important that I not deviate from the speech they handed me. And at the very least, I should have realized that if I didn't know why they were telling me that, I needed to not improvise my own lines until I found out what they were so worried I was going to say. All I can say in my own defense is that it was a long day, and I was tired, and I got carried away and I shot my mouth off without thinking. That was wrong of me, and I know that hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people died because I did. But please believe me when I say: I didn't know, and if I had known, I would have stopped it, and I am terribly sorry that I didn't. Will you forgive me?"

And in my fantasy, the Ayatollah looks at the President of Iran, and they nod at each other, and the Ayatollah says something like, "Mr. Carter, we didn't know that you didn't know. And this idea that everybody else in the world has about the sacredness of embassies is, well, because of the way they put it, offensive to us spiritually, and I don't know why it isn't offensive to you, too, since nothing is sacred but Allah, or as you call Him, God. And we really believed that you were intentionally taking the Shah's side after he'd kidnapped, tortured, and murdered so many of our friends and family members and co-workers, and our anger hardened our resolve to the point where we could not back down. And we still think that that money you have frozen in Iran's former bank accounts in your country is all money that the Shah stole or intended to steal, and surely you must realize that by now, and it really does belong to the Iranian people. Nor are we ever going to forgive your country for taking Israel's side against the entire Islamic community, not even you, because just because you want to give the Palestinians back half of their land doesn't excuse your wanting to let Israel keep the half of their land that Zionist terrorists stole from them during the British Mandate. On this, our countries will never agree until you come around to our point of view. But we now admit, especially in light of your generous apology and your humble explanation, that what we did to your embassy and its staff was wrong, too, almost as wrong as what the Shah did, and unlike the Shah, we have nobody to blame for having given us such bad advice as your CIA gave him. For the atrocities the Shah committed in your name, for the orders he mistakenly thought you had given him, we forgive you. Will you forgive us for holding your ambassadorial staff hostage for so long?"

Not much of a start if it were to happen, and it's never going to happen. But just as a fantasy ... my gods, what would change if for the first time since 1979, Iran and the United States didn't so fervently hate one another? What else could change? How much good could spread in the world if those stiff-necked religious old men would apologize to each other and ask each others' forgiveness?

I really wasn't going to, but ended up too lazy and tired Friday night to change the channel and thereby not watch a mediocre-looking documentary that was showing on MSNBC called "Meeting David Wilson." The premise was mildly interesting. Young black college graduate from Newark named David A. Wilson, wannabe documentary film-maker, taking some time off to fiddle with the genealogy fad, found out that by coincidence the last slave owner to own a direct ancestor of his was a guy named David Wilson; records from the time describe him as the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county, one of the wealthiest in all of North Carolina. Then a spot of weird luck put him in touch with the current owner of the ruins of that plantation ... a late-middle-aged white guy whose name turns out to be David B. Wilson. Turns out that David B. Wilson's great-great-grandfather was the guy who owned David A. Wilson's great-great-grandfather.



Part of the documentary, the mildly interesting parts, are about David A.'s meeting with David B., then the get-together between David A.'s family and David B.'s family. But to pad it out to an hour, or because he thought it was an interesting question (I couldn't tell you which), before the first meeting David A. Wilson and one of his white friends each took out video cameras to interview people at random, him asking black people what would you say if you got a chance to meet the heir to the family that owned your family back then? And his white friend asking white people, of course, what would you say to someone who wanted to meet you because your family used to own his family? The thing is, like almost all man-on-the-street interviews, the fatal flaw of this part of the documentary is that none of the answers are particularly coherent. None of the people who were asked had ever put any thought into the question before they were surprised with it. So unsurprisingly, none of the answers were terribly deep, or terribly interesting. For what it's worth, about half of the black interviewees felt that David A. Wilson was owed some kind of an apology by David B. Wilson, but only about 1 in 10 brought up the subject of any kind of reparations.

Late in their getting-to-know-each-other process, David A. asks David B., entirely hypothetically, what he would say if the subject of reparations came up? Turns out that David B. had never put any thought into it, either. He gave a lame-sounding answer that he obviously sort of remembered from hearing somebody say something about it on TV or the radio, with no particular confidence or conviction, something about how much better off the descendants of slaves are now than their distant relatives in former slave-selling towns in Africa are, to which David A. gave a canned (but not any more convincing) angry retort about how if it weren't for black slaves, white people in America wouldn't be any better off than anybody in Africa is right now. And that's the part I've been thinking about, in my spare minutes this weekend, off and on ... because if you look at this documentary, and think about the relevant history, you can see with your eyes that it's just not true. How so? Here:

David B. Wilson takes David A. Wilson on a tour of the old plantation, abandoned and in ruins because the property is basically worthless. We see the "mansion" of "the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county," remember supposedly one of the wealthiest in the state, and you can see that by modern standards it's barely bigger than the average middle-class house: call it 8 to 10 rooms, maybe a scootch over 2000 square feet, no indoor plumbing. Out back are the crumbling, ivy-eaten ruins of three (or maybe four) one-room barracks for the field slaves, 10 to a building. So at the time of emancipation, this is what the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county had to show for the work of three generations' worth of 30 to 40 employees? Employees that he didn't have to pay, didn't have to provide any health care or benefits to, barely had to feed? But maybe you're thinking that obviously, without the slaves to work it, that original David Wilson cashed it out, invested it in something that surely must be producing wealth today, right? Turns out: no, not so much. On the contrary, his son was the last guy to own the house; it got condemned and boarded up not long after he inherited it, because the family was in bankruptcy.

Our day's David B. Wilson grew up on a tiny little farm that his grandparents had built up from nothing, is the first of his generation to find work off of that tiny dirt-poor farm. And even though his yearbook shows a heck of a lot nicer-looking high school than the one that David A. Wilson went to in the (then) insanely awful slums of Newark, unlike David A. Wilson, there was no thought of David B. Wilson going off to college. No, what he has to show for three generations of his family's effort of rebuilding after the bankruptcy of their slave-owning ancestors is ... a medium-sized barbecue restaurant that he's very proud to have started himself. So let's face it, if David A. Wilson had been serious about demanding reparations from the family that inherited all of that wealth that his ancestors had made for them, at the end of a whip, for free -- what was there for him to take? And divided up across the 40 or so relatives who showed up at that meeting of the two Wilson families, if the law would somehow let them take David A. Wilson and his family for every penny they have, how much would each of them have to show for their ancestors' century of work -- less than the price of a 10-year-old high-mileage used car, I'm thinking. Which got me thinking: that's all their ancestors' century of work achieved? That's all their former owners have to show for it?

But you know what? It plays out across the whole region of Dixie, too. I've seen a fair number of old Confederate mansions, and none of them was all that impressive. And most of the land they were on was lost in bankruptcy not long after the Civil War. Which got me thinking of Ken Burns' documentary on World War II, because one of the things he mentions in there is that in the cities of the south like Montgomery, Alabama where they did a lot of the manufacturing for the Arsenal of Democracy, they practically had to rebuild these "major southern cities" into real cities from scratch, blowing them up to 10 times their pre-war size and population and giving them their first 20th century amenities 50 to 100 years after everybody in the north got them, and almost all of it funded by taxes paid by northerners. Why? Because the whole south was, and if you think about it apparently always had been, just that broke.

And trying to figure out how that could possibly be true, how a century's worth of work by 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 slaves could have produced so little lasting wealth, it occurred to me that there's another example in this hemisphere, an even bigger one: the entire Spanish Main, everything from Mexico to central South America, which the Spanish Empire also carved up into plantations that were the model for America's southern plantations, with roughly similar slave populations to do roughly the same work. The difference there is that in much of Latin America, emancipation has still not come; the same black-brown families are still owned by the same white families, who still control them by owning the land they live on and every bit of property they rent and every morsel of food they can get. And when you look at the fabulous wealth of the wealthiest Latin American white corporate oligarchs ... it's pretty pitiful. They've had at least one more century of slave labor invested in their countries, and they don't have any more to show for it, mostly, than poor barely-working-class David B. Wilson does.

Which, I guess all I can say by way of closing thought, makes slavery even more tragic than most of us have ever thought. Several centuries of degradation, pain, humiliation, rape, murder, and unrewarded back-breaking toil at the end of a whip, all that suffering and all those deaths, and none of it even achieved anything, none of it left much of anything to show for it. I guess it turns out that when you don't have to pay someone what they're worth to get their work, you just don't end up putting them to much of any actual productive use after all.

The local press are making a big deal out of the fact that 75 years ago today, the United States repealed the single greatest mistake in the history of the republic. Even bigger than the Iraq War. Even bigger than praising the Shah of Iran as an "island of stability." Even bigger than the "3/5ths compromise" and other inclusions of slavery in the original Constitution. Hands down, the single dumbest thing that the US ever did to itself was outlawing the manufacture, import, distribution, and sale of alcohol without criminalizing possession or use, and 75 years ago today, with the repeal of Prohibition, we started the process of repairing the damage that we did to ourselves with that stupid, stupid mistake. Of course, the anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition is a local news story here in St. Louis because the city's largest remaining employer is Anheuser Busch. Everybody in the St. Louis metro area knows somebody who works for, or used to work for, the brewery. When Prohibition came along, the Busch family kept as many of the employees and brewmasters on as they could afford, kept them employed in money-losing make-work jobs, betting that Prohibition wouldn't last long, and they won that bet. But that's not the reason why the story interests me. The reason the story interests me is that I've been looking for an excuse to bring up Prohibition again for a while now.

Lest you forget, or weren't here the last time I went over this subject, here's what was so pathologically stupid about the way that Prohibition was implemented: it normalized, it legitimized, doing business with the Mafia. It certainly didn't create the Mafia, let alone the far older and far more ubiquitous broader concept of ethnic organized criminal gangs, the kind we call lower-case-m mafia nowadays. Ethnic mafia are a well-studied phenomenon; they provide the only available employment for discriminated against ethnic immigrants who are shut out of legal employment and/or denied protection by police and the courts. During Prohibition, and in the years leading up to it, that was mostly ethnic groups that weren't considered "white" at the time, as silly as that sounds now: Italians, Irish, Jews, and to a lesser extent Poles. But whatever country you're studying, in whatever time period, the rackets that ethnic mafia go into are entirely predictable: gambling, prostitution, smuggling, loan sharking, blackmail, extortion, violence for hire, and brokering stolen goods for and money laundering for other criminals. But there's always been a limitation on how big a mafia can grow. All of those are businesses where the customers are criminals, too, and where nobody in government really sympathizes with them. That's a built-in limit to how big their markets can grow, and how safely they can operate.

Always, that is, except this once. And that was the problem. As Al Capone once told a reporter, when he sold it, it was called bootlegging, but when his customers served it at their parties, it was called hospitality. There was no stigma for almost anyone, no risk to them, from being known to do business with a bootlegger. As a result, everybody, and I mean everybody in America, had what reporters spent most of my life calling "mafia ties." Even the law-abiding citizens who never touched a drop of liquor during Prohibition could be "tied" to at least one friend, family member, employer, employee, or member of their church or of one of their clubs who "did business with the Mafia," as journalists liked to put it. Everybody. You could tar whoever you wanted with that brush. Which, for decades, meant that you couldn't really tar anybody with it. And that had two horrific effects on the democracy itself. First of all, it made the top mafiosi fabulously wealthy, by giving them legally unhindered access to a huge market for a monopoly product. And secondly, it legitimized them in the eyes of all too many police, judges, and elected officials. It gave them something that only one other mafia in all of history has ever had, the Russian mafia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and that's upper class social acceptability.

And of course, we know what they did with all of that money and all of that access to politicians. They went out and bought themselves a political party. They could afford to buy the biggest and the best, the party that every American was going to vote for after blaming the Republicans for the Great Depression, the Democratic Party. So they funded huge campaign contributions, and gave numerous other favors, to any Democratic nominee for office who'd take them. And all they wanted in exchange was one thing: immunity from prosecution. No mafia member must ever be arrested; if he has the ill fortune to run into a cop that isn't on the take, no prosecutor must indict, no judge must allow charges to be pressed without dismissing them. And if at first in some places that only applied to Volstead Act violations (the Volstead Act was the implementing legislation for Prohibition), it didn't stop there. Especially not once politicians were, themselves, subject to blackmail if the amount of money they took from the Mafia ever got proven, as opposed to merely suspected. No, it meant that in the "machine controlled" cities of the US, in New York and in Los Angeles and in Chicago and in Kansas City and in New Orleans and in Miami and (perhaps to a lesser extent) in every other large city of the US, it meant that criminals who were accepted into the Mafia, who submitted themselves to the jurisdiction of New York City's "five families" Crime Commission, could run numbers rackets, run prostitution rings, smuggle heroin, shark loans, blackmail politicians and wealthy businessmen, extort smaller businessmen, fence stolen goods, and hire out their enforcers to murder people for modest cash payments, with near total impunity.

In 1946, an awful lot of the GIs who came home from the War looked at this setup with grown-up eyes for the first time, read what the crusading journalists were documenting, and collectively asked themselves, "Did we put our lives on the line, did we watch our buddies get slaughtered like hogs in the mud, to remove the fascists from German and Japan, only to come home to a country run by mobsters?" And since the Republicans were still completely discredited, politically and economically, the result was something called the Reform wing of the Democratic Party, or the Reform Democrats (as opposed to the Machine Democrats) for short. It took a decade to get any serious number of Reform candidates into office, especially higher office. The real process of de-mafiazation of America didn't really get started until 1961, when mob-installed President John F. Kennedy's little brother Bobby, once appointed Attorney General of the US, turned out to have quietly been a Reform Democrat. Which, of course, famously is what got both him and his brother whacked by the Mob, but the writing was on the wall. By the time Reagan swept into office in 1981 on a platform that included ridding America of the last of the Mafia-controlled cities and Mafia-controlled labor unions, there wasn't really much of a Mafia left for his Attorney General to go after. But it still clings grudgingly to life in a couple of cities, bribing politicians and judges to look the other way as they run a variety of small-time scams, and still gets away with it all too often.

Which is to say that criminalizing the sale and production and import of alcohol while decriminalizing the purchase and use created a nation-wide culture of corruption that went almost all the way to the very top, and which permeated almost all levels of society. And once a culture of corruption got that thoroughly ingrained into American life, once being a gangster and being above the law and having politicians in your pocket was even briefly made acceptable, it will have taken an entire human lifetime to root it out.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this, probably tomorrow.

My sleep schedule's gone a little random, and my head's gone a little random from trying to fight it; basically, my circadian has backed itself into a corner where I can only sleep during the hours that I most need to be getting other things done, and fighting with my body over this to try to reset my internal clock is making me groggy. Besides, there is an essay I want to write, on a topic that really interests me, but I know for a fact that (a) some of the arguments I wanted to make looked really stupid when I sat down to write them out, and need to be rethought, and (b) it's a trivial topic that's not worth the probably 20 or 30 paragraphs it would clock in at now. No, really, I'm sure. So let me edit this one for brevity, and in the meantime, send you to somebody else's column, with only a thought of my own to supplement it: TheDeadGuy over at Everything2.com, "Get Drunk on History." (Thanks, xydexx, for showing me this.) Great, great stuff.

It resonates with me because it ties in to something I'd been thinking of saying, by way of refutation of one of the criticisms of Barack Obama's now-famous speech about racism. I can't find the link right now, but it was in a vid-cam dialog between two black commentators, and one of them said that the problem with the Obama speech is that it was basically a history lecture, and Americans don't care about history. What I'd been looking for an opportunity to say is, uh, no. Your average extended-cable package has more historical documentary channels, now, than it has cartoon channels or movie channels, only barely fewer than it has news analysis channels. If you look over the New York Times best seller list any given Sunday, there are only barely fewer books of history in that list than there are celebrity biographies, and arguably celebrity biographies are history books, too. Historical fiction, historical romance, historical war movies are all doing great at the box office. The American people love history. It's one of our favorite subjects, one of the top things we spend our own money on to be entertained by.

What we hate, for entirely justifiable reasons, are our history textbooks and history classes.