Wartime blues

A friend of mine who is actively involved in veterans' affairs sent me a link to the Web site of folk singer/songwriter Jason Moon. He's an Iraq War veteran who has struggled with PTSD and is using his music to heal himself and for outreach to others with similar problems.

Well worth a listen: www.jasonmoon.org.
Jim Cornelius, Editor

Whatever happened to the American Left?

Just listened to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” piece entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”

The premise was that the right has, over a period of decades, come to dominate the political discourse through greater message discipline, building better “movement” infrastructure and the development of bully pulpits including talk radio, the Internet and niche magazines. It was all interesting and the analysis was fine — as far as it went.

But it missed what I consider to be the biggest reason that the left is on its heels, despite putting Barack Obama in the White House in a landslide in 2008. That reason is cultural: the left has allowed itself to be perceived as effete, elitist and anti-patriotic. That’s a caricature, of course, but many on the left seem unable to stop sharpening the pencil that draws it.

Two local cases in point:

Back in 2004, I was having a conversation with a local Democratic Party activist who must have assumed we were of like mind because we both disliked George W. Bush and opposed the Iraq war. This woman fulminated against all the “flag wavers,” essentially depicting patriotic Americans as dupes and rubes. I said, “I hate to tell you this, but I have a flag pole in my front yard and I fly the American flag every day.”

“But… but…” she spluttered, “You read books!”

No kidding. She really said that.

More recently, my friend Jack McGowan gave a beautiful, heartfelt invocation during the Sisters Folk Festival’s community show on Sunday, September 11, remembering the attacks of 10 years before and his experience as a member of Oregon’s Flight for Freedom, which went to New York City to show solidarity with that wounded metropolis. He closed with the third stanza of “America the Beautiful”: Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears.

Later, someone expressed to me some mild discomfort at the patriotic tenor of Jack’s words. Huh?

The American Left has alienated itself from its natural work-for-a-living constituency because it has allowed itself to be portrayed as anti-American. And that, I’m afraid, is because some on the left are anti-American. Too bad, because America needs a genuine progressive voice to continue to ensure that the blessings of liberty are extended to all its citizens, to promote the access to opportunity and the principle of the common weal that are essential to making the pursuit of happiness more than a chimera for the vast bulk of our population.

Back in ’04, Howard Dean said his party needed to be talking to the guy with the Confederate flag on his pickup truck bumper. He was right. Of course he got so much crap for it that he climbed down. By 2008, candidate Obama was talking to a San Francisco fundraising crowd about folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion.

Well, if you’re trying to come across as an elitist snob, that’s a pretty good job of it. That’s how the left has ceded the field to the likes of W — a blueblood born-on-third-base aristocrat posing as some kind of regular guy. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.

I’ve seen this before. I went to college in Santa Cruz and my girlfriend at the time went to Berkeley, so I was exposed to plenty of idiots who claimed to speak for “the people” yet obviously despised them. Until those kinds of voices are marginalized, until the American Left embraces the “American” part of that moniker, there will never again be a successful progressive movement in this country. Who wants to work with people who look down on them?

And until there are real countervailing sources of power, the looters will continue to pillage a once-great nation.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Fat, broke and ignorant. Is this the best we can do?

I laid a bum trip on my brother yesterday, as the stock market plunged 630 points. I called him up and opined that the S&P credit downgrade was just a milepost on the road to the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Cheerfully, of course.

Not sure it was appreciated. He’s a small business owner trying to navigate the shoals and buffeting winds of our nasty economic condition. A dose of “we are well-and-truly screwed” isn’t especially helpful.

I do that a lot. Can’t help it; I’m a cultural pessimist. Being a student of history will do that to you. After all, it’s all about picking through the ash heap of nations and civilizations that flourished, flowered and fell. Unfortunately, the U.S. keeps throwing up mileposts on the highway to oblivion.

More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight and more than 20 percent qualify as obese. Before anyone accuses me of “fatism,” let me state right here that I’m not advocating government intervention in people’s lifestyle choices. But criminy, folks! How can you create a vigorous culture when you can’t do a pushup? The burdens of obesity-related health problems on our health care system are, well, huge. We all pay for this, one way or another.

America is merely average in international education rankings, which doesn’t bode well for our potential leadership in an information-based economy. A shocking number of people lack basic communication and mathematical skills. This ain’t good, people.

Then there’s the national debt. Sovereign debt is a huge problem across the developed world; we’re not alone here. But it’s grating (if unsurprising) to see a problem that requires wise policy decisions and concerted effort degenerate into a farcical American partisan political circus. I don’t believe for a minute that the folks we send to congress — most of them at least — don’t recognize that getting out of this debt hole will require genuine entitlement reform (that’s where the big money is) and higher taxes. But both left and right are so wedded to zero-sum ideological positions that a comprehensive tackling of the nation’s finances is impossible.

S&P may have been out of line in basing their downgrade on a political judgment (and what's with a $2 trillion math error in the analysis? See above.) Still, they aren’t wrong. We’re dysfunctional and there is little prospect of that changing. And President Obama has got to stop blaming Bush for everything. Seriously. It doesn’t help.

The pessimist in me teeters on the brink of cynicism — a belief that what’s broken can’t be fixed. We're fat, broke and ignorant and we're gonna stay that way. The patriot in me wants to shout: “Is this the best we can do? No! C’mon, get it together America!” The pragmatist says, just do what you can where you are. That’s my brother’s approach and I think he’s got it right. I’ll try not to throw any more buckets of doom his way.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Don’t know much about history…

Just read that California is going to require the teaching of gay history. Swell.

Not that I have any problem acknowledging that there were gay people doing significant things throughout history, just as there are today (although the concept of “gayness” is a recent development). My problem is with the breaking of history into smaller and smaller subsets, to the point where it’s just a bunch of pieces of tile, not a mosaic.

David McCullough, one of the finest popular historians ever to put pen to paper, had this to say on the subject:

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

In the sixth grade, my daughter spent a lot of time learning about Africa and did a project on Tanzania. She enjoyed it, learned a lot, did well on her project. But she hasn’t learned boo about how her own country works. What she knows, she’s learned from her parents.

I’m all for a broad perspective on the wide and wonderful world, but dammit, it is not xenophobic to expect your child to learn her own history first. Sorry, but it is much more important for her to understand the U.S. Constitution than it is for her to know about Tanzania.

The Department of Education’s 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. That's pathetic.

Most Americans don’t know in which century the Civil War occurred, much less anything about its causes and effects. Even fewer have any grasp of how the American economy developed or how the rights they take for granted were won.

Breaking history free of a fixation on the mainstream triumphalist narrative that dominated for many decades is a good thing. A great thing. But you can’t appreciate “A Renegade History of the United States” (which is wonderful, BTW) if you have no clue about what happened in the first place. If you don’t understand the narrative, a counter narrative or alternative narrative doesn’t have any resonance.

Unless there’s a grasp of the bigger picture, all the pieces of women’s history, African-American history, gay history or whatever, don’t have any context. They are rendered essentially meaningless.

When only 12 percent have a firm grasp of the subject, I’d say that we should stop worrying about teaching gay history and try just teaching history.

Jim Cornelius, Editor