POCKET PARADIGMS

Jazz

The essence of jazz is the same as that of democracy: the greatest amount of individual freedom consistent with a healthy community. Each musician is allowed extraordinary liberty during a solo and then is expected to conscientiously back up the other musicians in turn. The two most exciting moments in jazz are during flights of individual virtuosity and when the entire musical group seems to become one. The genius of jazz (and democracy) is that the same people are willing and able to do both.

Judaism

I grew up with the deep and abiding belief that there were three branches of Judaism: your Reform, your Orthodox, and your Liberal Democratic. Of these three, the last was clearly the most important.

Juries

The principle of jury rights involves the power to say no to the excesses of government, and thus serves as a final defense against tyranny.

Language

Speak United States. This rule, taught me by my high school math teacher, Mr. Breininger, was the best literary advice I ever got.

Law

THE TECHNOLOGY of torts, with its tyranny of precedents and its infatuation with retribution over resolution, has, in the words of the country & western song, walked across our heart like it was Texas. No politics, no ideology, no culture has been immune. All of American life has been hauled into court. Thus we find in our path not only the endless droppings of corporate attorneys, but civil rights advocates who insist that the law will lead us to love each other, feminist counselors who believe that the world's oldest conflict can be settled on appeal, colleges that publish what amounts to a lawyer's guide to correct sex, and public interest activists trying to run a revolution out of the courthouse.

Obviously the law has had a crucial role in such matters as civil rights and bringing the megacorporation to heel. But such achievements hardly justify an exclusive contract to direct the course of social change. If today's lawyer-leaders had come to the fore thirty years ago, the 60s would have been just a lawsuit, not a cultural and political revolution. There would have been no music, no madness, no drama, and without them, probably not much change as well.

Laws should be handled like prescription drugs, but many of our politicians think of them as being more like popcorn or M&Ms -- something to munch on. This is unfortunate since much of America's success to date can be traced to one simple rule: don't make too many rules. Much of America's failure to date has come from ignoring this rule.

Throughout history, community order has largely grown out of the cooperation and effectiveness of individuals, schools, families, and the strength and local institutions. The police have been there not to maintain order, or even to define it, but to assist and protect the community and to intervene in those rare cases the normal community systems can't handle. One should not expect the fire department to come over and cook your dinner safely or light the logs in your fireplace; nor should one expect the police to replace the normal functions of individuals, families, and community institutions. Yet that is precisely what we have done.

The drive for family and community remains so strong that some of the young have created a surrogate for what has disappeared. They call it a gang.

Whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust.

Liberals

Future historians seeking to discover why America so easily surrendered its democratic traditions and constitutional government will find plenty to study in the rise of a liberal aristocracy that became increasingly disinterested in such values. Like all aristocracies, it existed primarily to protect itself, had an impermeable faith in its own virtue, and held in contempt those who did not share its values or accept its hegemony.

Three reasons liberals have a hard time winning elections:

1. NPR has a program called "Marketplace" but it does not have one called "Workplace."

2. Liberals talk more about gay marriage and abortion than they do about healthcare, jobs, or social security.

3. Liberals give the impression that if you want to vote Democratic you have to give up your gun and your Bible.

Liberals might attract a lot more voters if they would stop dissin' them so much. Once you eliminate all those who smoke, are too heavy, live in the suburbs, believe in Jesus, belong to the Green Party, own a gun, or lack etiquette when discussing ethnicity, you don't have that much to work with.

Liberals are now, for most part, differentiated from conservatives by an occasional admission that there might have been a brief era in which just a smidgen of social welfare might possibly have been an appropriate transitory modality. The other way you can tell liberals and conservatives apart is with a stop-watch. A liberal thinks someone should be thrown off welfare after three years while a conservative says two. A liberal thinks a drug offender should spend 17 years rather than 35 years in prison.

Sending a liberal to Washington these days is, in the words of the late civil rights leader Julius Hobson, like sending a eunuch to an orgy.

Liberty

Remember that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a good lawyer, and the right skin color.

Lies

The endless argument about who said what to whom about what in order to get us into the Iraq war demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.

This stunningly low bar has been implicitly invoked many times - most recently and dramatically to exonerate our two latest presidents - and it helps to explain the decline of American politics. Once you leave your judgment of politicians to a court or a prosecutor, it is far too late to do much about them.

In 2003, I was asked by Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.

One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command.. -

Life

Life is a endless pick-up game between hope and despair, understanding and doubt, crisis and resolution.

Life in America has become one big docudrama and you can't tell what's real and what's make believe.

Managerial class

Recent decades have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar members of the technocratic elite. This class junked sixty years of social democracy, helped wreck the Russian economy, made every American worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language, trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.

And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.

The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a nature that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."

America used to make things people wanted, said things that needed to be said, and fixed things, including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in the blue, riding only on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished."

Media

The journalists' job is not to make the stew but to gather the ingredients. So don't jump to too many conclusions about what I dump on the table. It's only the result of today's forage.

Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of ideas." In the end, the hated Internet is a far better heir of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, and Mark than is the the typical American daily or TV channel; and H.L. Mencken would infinitely prefer a drink with Matt Drudge than with Ted Koppel.

The basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting."

Media bias is not limited to bad politics; it includes bad math, typically manifested in an inability to count above the number two. According to the mass media, our world is one giant 'Crossfire' show divided into pro and anti, liberal and conservative, war and appeasement, free market and socialism. When such bifurcation fails because of the number of participants - as in sports, Democratic primaries, or reality shows - the media solves the problem by ultimately reducing the number to one, with everyone else a loser.

In the end journalism tends to be either an art or just one more technocratic mechanism for restraining, ritualizing, and ultimately destroying thought and reality. If it is the latter, the media will take its polls and all it will hear is its own echo. If it is the former, the journalist listens for truth rather than to rules -- and reality, democracy, and decency are all better for it.

The press needs to learn the difference between a con and a concept.

The media teaches us that life is a vicarious experience

Wouldn't it be nice if the media covered the breakup of the republic as well as it covered the break-in of an office?

The media has been on the take big time - but instead of bribes, it has taken endless bromides - freely and without skepticism - from the most corrupt and damaging leadership this country has even known.

Gone is the ground rule that once required social and political change to be covered -- even if the publisher didn't approve of it. Gone is the notion that if you made news, they would come. In an age of corporatist journalism, in which Peter Jennings has become the professional colleague of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, it no longer matters. News is just another item in the multinational product line with little value outside of its contribution to market share and other corporate objectives

Shouldn't a business like journalism that yaps so incessantly about ethics run somewhat fewer, shorter, and less repulsively self-promoting stories about its trade association dinners? Or at least give equal time to the corrugated steel manufacturer's annual gathering?

Many reporters aren't reporters anymore; they're just semiotic sharecroppers on some corporate plantation.

A news conference is a device by which the establishment keeps large numbers of reporters in one place to keep them from covering the news every place else.

If you want to complain about anonymous sources in journalism, is it okay to quote "leading experts" in order to bolster your case?

Why does the media always refer to people defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as "activists" or "advocates?" Wouldn't "citizens" do just as well?

TV treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.

IT IS in the nature of democracy that we are constantly being called upon to act before we have all the facts. It should not surprise us that writing about democracy is as incomplete as its subject. Journalism, after all, is to thought and understanding as the indictment is to the trial, the hypothesis to the truth, the estimate to the audit. It is the first cry for help, the hand groping for the light switch in the dark, the returns before the outlying precincts have been heard from.

This writer proposes to serve not as an expert, but rather in the more modest and, I would argue, more constructive journalistic role of being the surrogate eyes and ears of the reader. Consider me simply someone who has traveled this trail several times before and thus might remember where the clean water is to be found, the names of some of the rarer plants and possibly even a shortcut home.

Absent a smoking gun, editors often favor stories that explain import, perceive perceptions, and reveal meaning. Detailed chronicles of the daily joys, inanities and mishaps of politics have faded. News is being replaced in no small part by the reflections of various writers about what the unreported news means to them or is supposed to mean to us.

The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else.

THE media is purportedly our surrogate priest, parent, and teacher, but is, in fact, gangs of burglars breaking and entering our brains and stealing time and space from us in a way not even our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary became merely unusual and finally universal as we moved from manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment, and points of reference became ever more distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature.

Today, outlets such as C-SPAN and PBS function as karioke bars of political centrism. Far from encouraging the sort of vibrant debate our country needs, they apply a gag on democracy by limiting how one may speak about it. In fact, what shocks many people about less restrictive talk radio is really just the sound of democracy happening.

Reporters became the first group in human history to dramatically improve their socio-economic status simply by writing about themselves, self-casting themselves among the very elite from whom they had once been expected to protect their audience.

Journalism has always been a craft - in rare moments- an art - but never a profession. It depends too much on the perception, skill, empathy and honesty of the practitioner rather than on the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills. The techniques of reporting can be much more easily taught than such human qualities and they can be best learned in an apprentice-like situation rather than in a classroom.

The point of a democracy is not to prohibit crooks or demogogues from running for public office, but to defeat them. Similarly, the First Amendment says nothing about objectivity, professional standards, national news councils, blind quotes, deep backgrounders, or how much publicity to give a trial. Its authors understood far better than many contemporary editors and journalistic commentators that the pursuit of truth can not be codified and that circumscribing the nature of the search will limit the potential of its success. Nor can there be an institutionalization of the search for the truth; it always comes back to the will and ability of individuals.

Mid East

The most misleading myth about the Middle East is that an end to violence is a necessary precondition to peace negotiations. An end to violence should rather be one the goals of peace negotiations. The killings emphasize the need for such talks rather than serving as justification for avoiding them.

Israel is a state like all the rest.

AIPAC is just another political group like the National Rifle Association. It is not a religion but one more Washington lobby corrupting the political process and making American voters less powerful.

The policy of the Israeli government is clearly distinguishable from the theology of Judaism to all but a small yet powerful and noisy crowd including neo-conservatives, cable TV anchors and semantic bomb throwers. Israeli policy reflects Judaism about as well as George Bush reflects Christianity.

Osama bin Laden is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters where he came from.

If what goes on in the synagogue doesn't stay in the synagogue than it can not be expected to be treated as though it were still there. In other words, if you're going to ask American taxpayers to subsidize Israel and back its policies, the matter should be handled no differently than building a B2 bomber or putting a federal agency's office in some congress member's district. If you want to play by religion's rules act like a religion. Otherwise, the rules of politics govern. And anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is either a cry baby or a scoundrel.

If there is another disaster such as the World Trade Center, it will also be in no small part due to our policies in the Middle East including that towards those toward Palestine. No issue has done more damage to America and none continues to cause a greater threat.

The curable cause of the present disaster is not to be found in a cave in Afghanistan nor at a military headquarters in Palestine. Rather it is to be found in a half century of abusive American policy towards the Islamic world including a deadly, criminal embargo against Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood; the promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of a string of leaders against the best interests of peace and our own security; the covert employment (to our later regret) of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated refusal to listen to the nearly unanimous voice of the United Nations in general assembly.

If the conservatives insist in leading us into a war, they should at least follow their own principles as they do so. This would mean putting the whole thing on a pay-as-you-go basis - which is to say paying for conflict at the gas pump. During the earlier iteration of the Gulf War I figured that about $15 a gallon would do the trick. Surely the oil industry is pure capitalism at its best and ought to act that way by paying a user fee to the Pentagon for its war, which it can then retrieve from its customers. And if the latter are not quite as patriotic as they were when the true cost of war was better hidden, it will merely prove again the omnipotent magic of market forces.

The curable cause of the present disaster is not to be found in a cave in Afghanistan nor at a military headquarters in Palestine. Rather it is to be found in a half century of abusive American policy towards the Islamic world including a deadly, criminal embargo against Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood; the promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of a string of leaders against the best interests of peace and our own security; the covert employment (to our later regret) of the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated refusal to listen to the nearly unanimous voice of the United Nations in general assembly. We have wantonly - and at enormous damage to our creditability, safety and honor - pursued the goals of militarists, CIA adventurists, the oil industry, the Israeli lobby, and the Ivy League imperialists of the Council on Foreign Relations - all mindlessly cheered on by a servile and slanted media.

Minorities

The great 20th century social movements have been successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. The minority elites have joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest drive around town in their Range Rovers, who speaks for those who, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives from the law of averages?

Moral values

Why do all moral values have to go into families and TV? Can't we save a few for public policy and budgets?

The pious American's taste is for the specific, not the general. We appease our gods by human sacrifice, not by conforming to their will.

Multi-culturalism

If humans were truly moral, the concept of race wouldn't even exist. It has no biological, and only a limited taxonomic, justification, serving largely as an excuse for one group of humans to do harm to another.

Once we accept the unpleasant persistence of human prejudice, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we drift away from a priggish and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes techniques of mitigating harm, towards what Andrew Young has called a sense of "no fault justice" and towards emphasizing countervailing human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against hate and fear. We move from being victims to being survivors. We start to deal with some of the real problems of creating a multicultural community; we actually start to envision it, to build it not on false politeness but upon realistic interdependence.

Multicultural communities will be constructed not by the hustlers of the diversity trade but by a growing local and personal regard for common sense, fairness and, yes, reasonable self interest. The new multicultural community will work because it is jointly and severally proud of itself, leaving behind the self-hate that so often accompanies the hatred of others. It will work because there are adequate jobs for people of every group -- thus eliminating one of the primary causes of ethnic triage, and it will work because our educational system will teach not a prudish diversity but simply the way the world really is, which among other things, is very diverse. Our children will learn to enjoy and incorporate this diversity and as they do so will undoubtedly find it odd that their elders couldn't get any closer to the matter than a rigid and legalistic sensitivity.

Why is it so hard for universities to deal with multicultural issues while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck who said when offered German champagne that his patriotism stopped at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers a fair multicultural deal: a good living for the owner in return for good food for the patrons.

Museums

There is a tendency in the museum world these days, as elsewhere in America, to use design as a substitute for evidence, style as a substitute for reality, empty space as a substitute for substance, and abstract words as a substitute for specific knowledge. Ironically, it all costs a lot of money that could better be spent on creating the sort of alternate realities that actually draws people to such places.

Neighborhood government

NEIGHBORHOOD GOVERNMENT offers an antidote to the chronic gap between government and governed, There is, after all, little reason to cling to the notion that the solution to our problems is to spend more money on a form of government that has increasingly shown its incompetence. To say that because the crime rate is rising sharply we should therefore double the size of the same police force that has thus far been unable to cope with it; to reward with more concentrated power a city government that has spent decades on absurd, disruptive and cruel planning; to continue to vest the power of educating our children in an administrative system that appears to lag as far behind the human intelligence norm as the children its miseducates do in reading and math -- surely this can have little logical justification. Neighborhood government is another way. It is not some utopian scheme but a pragmatic approach. It is, in fact, contemporary large city governance that is utopian in that there is no empirical evidence that it works. It is under this form of government that we generally find the worst crime, the worst education, the worst health, the worst pollution, and the highest unemployment.

New world order

The new world order emanates from a mandarin class that is neither left or right. Its members often are the sort of which it has been said that when they are alone in a room, there is no one there. In such a culture the marketplace of ideas essentially shuts down. There is no longer any real politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi.

If your goal is the economic well-being of the inner party rather than the general welfare, a strong case can be made that most people will accept their exclusion with quiet desperation. Thus you can cut their services and deny them aid and they will not revolt. For those few who show signs of trouble, you simply write laws that restrict their employment, take away their driver's license, or ensure them incarceration using whatever ruse, such as drug laws, that works.

Parents

Peter Ustinov says that the trouble with middle-aged people is that they're too far away from either of the most important mysteries of life: birth and death. My father used to say that the reason that grandparents and grandchildren got on so well was because they had a common enemy. For myself, I think one of the problems with parents is that they can never decide whether you should be in the White House or in jail. They exaggerate both their expectations and their disappointments. But remember that most of this exaggeration comes from two sources; hope and love. They have higher hopes for you than anyone other than yourself and this is nice. But you know your hopes often disappoint you and that's hard enough. It's even harder sometimes to deal with someone else who has high hopes for you.

Love is also a two-edged blade. It provides warmth, humanity, and comfort, but it also demands and takes. Remember that Mr. Spock didn't understand love because it wasn't' logical. In fact, especially with your parents, its manifestations sometimes seem to border on mental illness. Which is why, perhaps, so many people go to psychiatrists looking for love.

Adults conform just as much as teenagers do. The problem is that teenagers are asked to conform to both adult and teenager values at the same time. This can be a little confusing. But there's something else wrong with the setup. Adults tend to regard your age as the ragged, unruly end of childhood, rather than the beginning of adulthood. Go back a couple of centuries and you'll find 16-year olds who were captains of ships and 14 year olds who were serving as apprentices or doing a full day's adult work on the farm.

Patriotism

The tendency of some to accuse other Americans of being unpatriotic because they oppose the Iraq war is not only libelous, it's dumb. Many of these same people have cheered or helped the most profound loss of American sovereignty in its history, namely that resulting from the creation of such increasingly plenary institutions as the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. They have helped to sell out their country to a mess of corporations developing the legal means to overrule America's laws and constitution. So when someone suggests that you're less than patriotic, ask them how they stand on free trade, because that's the biggest battle this country has ever lost.

We pledge allegiance to the republic for which America stands and not to its empire for which it is now suffering.

Police

WE'VE GOT TOO many people in this country employed trying to prevent other people from being bad and not enough people employed helping other people to be good.

Politics

The game plan of America's mandarins absolutely assumes a widening gap between the governed and the governing and between rich and poor, one that will have to be met by force of one sort or another. Those in power are prepared to do business with most favored nations abroad and to suppress least favored citizens at home. This is a policy without redemption. It is not only economically cruel and profoundly anti-democratic, it is deeply subversive and destructive of American ideals and culture. Those who run the country, whether in government, business or media, seldom anymore speak of this land with feeling, affection or understanding. They carry forth their affairs unburdened by place, history or culture -- without conscience, without country and without any sense of the pain they have caused. America is no longer for them a place to serve and to love. And because they have, in the name of global glories, cut themselves off from their own land, it is becoming for them increasingly a place of danger -- a place of long, grim shadows, the sort of shadows that too often conceal a foe.

Politics to be about remembrance. The best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common memory of the constituency. Politics was also about gratitude. Politicians were always thanking people, "without whom" whatever under discussion could not have happened. You not only thanked those in the room -- as many as possible by name -- you even thanked those without -- for "having prepared the wonderful meal which we have just partaken of." The politician was the creation of others, and never failed to mention it. Above all, politics was about relationships. The politician grew organically out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted. Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during the great carnie show we call a campaign. Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson spoke for many contemporary politicians when he answered a question about his memories of Thanksgiving Day football games by saying, "Memories? That's not my style."

Reform breeds its own hubris and so few noticed that as we destroyed the evils of machine politics we also were breaking the links between politics and the individual, politics and community, politics and social life. We were beginning to segregate politics from ourselves.

THE world of machine politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King It was not the product of spin doctors, campaign hired guns or phony town meetings. It welled up from the bottom. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.

Sure, it was corrupt. But we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate, Iran-Contra or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return.

POLITICS IS THE SOUND of the air coming out of the balloon of our expectations and it is the music of hope. Politics is laundry lists and dirty laundry, new hospitals and old hates, finding out what others think about it, and the willing suspension of our closest beliefs in order to get through the next month or year. It is, suggested one writer, a matter of who gets what, when, where, and how. Not least, as Paul Begala says, "it is show business for ugly people," a theater in which each voter and candidate writes a different morality play. In the end, the only test of political faith is when it is put to work. It is a test that is graded on a curve -- not by its proximity to perfection but by its improvement over all previous, adjacent and potential imperfections. Vaclav Havel says that "It is not true that a person of principle does not belong in politics; it is enough for his principles to be leavened with patience, deliberation, a sense of proportion, and an understanding of others." This is the part of politics that doesn't appear in any platform. Done badly, it becomes demagoguery and manipulation. Done well it makes every voter a part of the office the politician holds. It is a standard to which every person in office, including our presidents, can be held.

WE HAVE to move towards a politics that offers not a choice between left and right but between corporatism and democracy, not between big government and big business but between overbearing institutions and supportive communities, not between winning and losing but between power and sharing, and not between oppression and anarchy but between the force of the state and the good sense of its citizens.

If you're going to be serious about politics -- the way a race track aficionado is serious about horses -- then the first thing you got to figure out is what's fact and what's fluff, what you can believe and what you can't. Fantasies are for sex, not politics. And democracies fail not because of excessive skepticism about their leaders, but rather due to a mass illusion that everything is going to be all right.

GK CHESTERTON, the British liberal and populist, argued that the only place a practical politician could start was with the ideal. Any other commencement of the political journey invites the creation of illogical and unsatisfactory remedies. The ideal provides a constant and necessary navigational marker from which one can compute a compromise's true cost in distance and time. Without such a marker, a purposeful trip becomes mere random motion. In politics, this can -- over the years -- produce directionless compromises lumped upon each other leaving us finally, with a system that nobody wanted.

We live now with dishonest politics, disinformed and disinforming media, disconnected cultures, disjointed economics, dysfunctional communities and disrespected citizens. To attempt to repair such conditions without a morally conscious politics makes as much sense as trying to revive a body without a heart. This is not romanticism, idealism or naivete, just basic political anatomy. That we have come to accept a politics that offers no choice save between our acquisition of abusive power or our submission to it speaks only to the depths of our delusion; it says nothing about that which is possible.

Traveling along the American political and cultural fault line I keep bumping up against anomalies -- being forced to choose between abstract policy and specific decency, between the way it was and the way it is, between the matter that annoys us and the one that might kill us. It seems odd, yet it is right there in the midst of the anarchy, anger, ambivalence, and angst of unsettled America that one finds most strongly those traits of character, individuality, and stubbornness that got us through our first few centuries. It is messy, and it can be cruel, wrong, and dumb, but it has something that the talking heads, with their self-serving pleas for a "civil society" and their dainty rules of "public discourse," can not approach: the robust vigor of a democratic spirit trying honestly to find its way.

We can, as those in charge would like, continue to define ourselves primarily by neatly described identities -- either natural or acquired. We can remain interminably and ineffectually absorbed and angry about the particulars of infinite special injustices. Or we can ask what is it that makes our society seem so unfair to so many who are so different? If the young black in Watts and the militia member in Montana and the mother of six in Dorchester share untended miseries, might not those miseries share some common origins? Can we find universal stories in particular pain? If we can, it is the beginning of true change.

For many years now, the Republican right has engaged in a politics of cultural bullying that is the direct descendent of the southern segregationists. It is based on anathematizing a minority in order to solidify its own political base around false assumptions of purity and superiority. It is an illusion that deceives much of its own constituency into thinking that ultimately minor cultural differences are more important than such issues as economics, healthcare or public education. Thus it is not only mean, it is masochistic. One minority ends up being hurt by another that is being conned and hurt in other ways.

There is a lusty tradition in American politics of citizens of disparate sorts, places, and status coming together to put power back in its proper place. At such times, the divides of politics, the divisions of class, the contrasts of experience fade long enough to reassert the primacy of the individual over the state, democracy over oligopoly, fairness over exploitation, and community over institution. This could be such a time if we are willing to risk it, and one of the soundest way to start is to trade a few old shibboleths for a few new friends.

The system that envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it." The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing houses, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms from the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century of human existence. What should be merely portraits on the wall of our memories run our lives still, like parents who retain perpetual hegemony over the souls of their children.

At root, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.

To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers. Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

It is a lifetime's work to clear away enough debris of fraudulent divinities, false premises, and fatuous fantasies to experience a glasnost of the soul, to strip away enough lies that have been painted on our minds, layer after layer, year after year, until we come to the bare walls of our being. Still, it is this exercise, however Sisyphian, that helps mightily to keep us human. Inevitably such an effort initially produces not beauty or satisfaction, but merely a surface upon which we can work our will should we so choose, a barren facade empty of meaning, devoid of purpose, without rules or even clues to lead us forward. We stand before the wall as empty as it is.

Polls

POLLS are a standardized text by which the media ascertains how well we have learned what it has taught us.

Populism

More than any other political philosophy, populism offers the potential for those who serve this country to seize a bit of it back from those who control it. It brings right and left libertarians together against the totalitarianism of the American middle. It creates common ground for whites and blacks to stand upon as they fight their common predator. It emphasizes the issue that should be emphasized: economic justice, decentralized democracy and an end to the concentration of power.

Post modernism

IN THE postmodern society -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. Thus we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism. Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.

UNLIKE MOST of the world's democracies, in America you don't need a majority to govern, you only need to be first. So firmly do we accept this notion that we are repeatedly surprised when a minority victor has trouble governing. We attribute the inevitable results of popular disagreement to a "failure of leadership" or "gridlock" rather than to an electoral system that doesn't even try to reach a consensus. This truth is rarely apparent because American journalists are more likely to believe in the two party system than they are to trust in God.

Power

TOO MANY, particularly in places of power, have become the spoiled brats of human progress.

President

WHEN we elect a president, we not only choose a leader, we describe ourselves.

Privatization

A REALLY SIMPLE RULE ON PRIVATIZATION: Ask the following question: Is this something about which citizens should have a say? If the answer is yes, don't privatize.

Process

WHEN I was circulating a book to various publishers, one turned it down saying, "We're looking for civics, not solutions." I had long suspected that. Which is why we continue to have a Middle East peace process but no peace. And no one around here seems to mind.

I meet alot of process people in Washington. They're like vehicles without a drive belt. They make a lot of noise; they just can't go anywhere. Getting things done is now a radical act. Then there are the virtual people. They only exist as images of themselves. Talking to one of them is like watching a bad cable show without a zapper. Some scientists believe that at the rate things are going, process people and virtual people will eventually evolve into species reproductively incompatible with the rest of us. There are already reports of process people and real people mating and producing only sterile offspring ~ a sort of mule that understands all the main policy points.

Progressives

People who complain about progressives are like the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security and Medicare. The other day, however, he got so mad that he climbed into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back.

Public interest groups

GO BACK TO the 60s and Ralph Nader was about the only public interest lawyer in town who wore a suit and his wasn't pressed. Today, many advocacy groups have drifted into the lawyerly style and pace of the establishment they are supposedly trying to change. They have, in their own way, become capital institutions, part of the ritualized, status-conscious, and very safe, trench warfare of the city.

Quakers

Quakerism exemplifies the power of personal choice because it prescribes personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless of the era in which we live in or the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And the witness need not be in words. The Quakers say "let your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisis' advice that one should "preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words"

There are about as many Quakers today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000. Yet near the center of every great moment of American social and political change one finds members of the Society of Friends. Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after year between those great moments. Because they have been willing in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering that of God in every one "

Reaganism

With the election of Reagan, this country began to turn its back on values that had sustained it throughout its first two centuries - values that included balancing power and wealth with concern for, cooperation with, and compassion towards others in the community we called America. In their place came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous virtue of the market, a faith almost creationist in its absence of objective foundation, intellectually barren when not actually dishonest, and as monomaniacal as the creed of the religious fundamentalist. Every other aspect of existence - religion, family, morality, creativity, politics, community, tradition, ethnicity - was declared merely a byproduct of the marketplace. For the first time in our history, the self-serving delusions of the privileged few became the standard for the whole nation, propagated in politics, on campuses and in the media.

Radicalism

I'm not a radical; I'm just a moderate of time that has not yet come.

Reality

SOME TIME around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy.

THE SYNTHETIC images once largely contained within the spheres of entertainment, recreation and culture have become ubiquitous. In fact, an extraordinary portion of the gross domestic product is currently devoted to deception in one form or another, concealed though it may be as marketing, advertising, management, leadership seminars, news, entertainment, politics, public relations, religion, psychic hotlines, education, ab machine infomercials, and the law. We have become a nation of hustlers and charlatans, increasingly choosing attitude over action and presentation over performance and becoming unable to tell the difference. It's not all that surprising because, whether for pleasure, profit, or promotion, and in ways subtle and direct, our society encourages and rewards those who out-sell, out-argue, and out-maneuver those around them -- with decreasing concern for any harm caused along the way.

We live in a time of democratic disguises when everyone -- at least until they reach their place of employment -- can be whoever they want. A nation of poseurs treating life as though it were an endless masque ball. Those who fail at the deception are the poor, the fat, the shy, the awkward, and the otherwise terminally declasse. For the rest, a manic preoccupation with style and attitude tempts them to become not a reflection of who they are but what they want others to think they are. Our primary business as Americans is to fool each other.

In a society informed by theme park announcements and run by theme park rules, reality becomes the property of the management. Life becomes a giant magic show in which the audience is not allowed to see the real action or the mechanisms that create the real action, but only a dramatization of the action. Our participation is limited to the consumption of false images and false words as we become permanent hostages of the prestidigitators. Even a moderately skeptical and energetic media might help us remember again. But the media is an essential part of the legerdemain, making information ever more a lever of control rather than of freedom. Just to glimpse the problem could change the way a journalist wrote or spoke of the world. But the rules of the magic kingdom rigidly discourage that.

Rebellion

The words revolution and rebellion attract unjust opprobrium. After all, much of what we identify as peculiarly American is ours by grace of our predecessors' willingness to revolt in the most militant fashion, and their imperfect vision has been improved by a long series of rebellions ranging from the cerebral to the bloody. There is not an American alive who has not been made better by revolution and rebellion. In fact, the terms sit close to what it means to human, since it is our species that has developed the capacity to dramatically change, for better or worse, its own course without waiting on evolution. No other creature has ever imagined a possibility as optimistic as democracy or as devastating as a nuclear explosion, let alone brought them to fruition.

Without revolution and rebellion we would let mating and mutation do their thing. Instead, regularly dissatisfied with our condition, our body, our home, and our government we overthrow genetics through application of imagination, dreams, ambition, skill, perseverance, and strength. Every new idea is an act of rebellion, every work of art, every stretch for something we couldn't do before, every question that begins "what if. . ."

Yet nothing grants us immunity from responsibility for our acts. So if we are to revolt, rebel, avenge or assuage, our duty is not only to the course we set but to what we leave in our wake.

Every act in the face of wrong carries twin responsibilities: to end the evil and to avoid replacing it with another. This twin burden is analogous to what a doctor confronts when attempting to cure a disease. There is even a name for medical failure in such cases; the resulting illness is called iatrogenic - caused by the physician. In politics, however, we have been taught to believe that simply having good intentions and an evil foe are sufficient..

Religion

Religion is absolutely fair territory for critics when it leaves in its wake war, a crusade against another religion, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of constitutional government, or the endangerment of domestic tranquility.

If Pope Benedict XVI talked about Jews the way he talks about gays or treated blacks the way he treat women, what would we call him?

The relationship between the American media and the Catholic Church can fairly be described as necrophiliatic: the only thing that really matters about the church is the Pope and the only really good Pope is a dead one. Once dead, whatever God does with the Pope's body becomes somewhat redundant. The press has already sent him to heaven, giving him credit for things he never did and avoiding some of the things he did that are not sufficiently encomium enabled.

We have always had Christian fundamentalists in this country. We just used to call them New Deal Democrats.

Whether you call it God or Nature, argued Thor Heyerdahl, "the disagreement is about the spelling of a word." Unfortunately, a great many people have died in the name of correct orthography.

If you violated the conformity of the ancient church you might have found yourself branded a heretic or an apostate. Today, if you violate the rules of the secular culture you may find yourself branded a neurotic or dysfunctional. Not all churches are run by people in robes.

It helps to separate our moral decisions from those of religious form, not because they are necessarily exclusive, but because it allows us to see morality out of costume.

The ultimate irony of the conservatives it that they pretend to be a bastion of Christian politics when, in fact, they are comprised in no small part of despoilers, usurers, war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters and groupies of false prophets - all of whom are frowned upon by the book they pretend to follow. And its opponents, who are more faithful to the words the conservatives only quote, are often such good Christians that they never say a mumblin' word about it all.

On the one hand, we have those enveloped in a retro version of Christianity devised by some highly successful hustlers and charlatans and, on the other, we have liberals who seem to believe that politics begins and ends with abortion and gay rights - and in a cargo cult that delivers salvation through SUVs, Botox injections, the right wine and Vanity Fair. It is rare anymore to hear liberals speak of things like pensions, health care, or labor issues. Thus they have little to talk about to the fundamentalists save the issues that divide them so sharply.

The magnificence of America lies in the opportunity not to have to agree with other Americans. The Christian right has clearly forgotten this, but so have liberals who send all sorts of unconscious signals that they will be no less vigorous in imposing their values should they get the chance. Both these messages, because of their implicit aggression, become extremely threatening to the other side.

Respect

Respect is essential in a functioning society, yet not only are we losing the concept, we don't even hear much about it. In a society where citizens exhibit mutual respect, class and ethnic conflict is mediated, people feel better about themselves and children are sent in good directions. In a society lacking respect, we start to behave like too many rats in a cage, we lose the sense of both the needs of others and of their value to us, and adult and children alike become lonely warriors in false empires of one.

Revolution

Revolutions are defined not by the wonder of their promise but by the horrors of what preceded them. They replace evil, but without a warranty.

Safety net

BOTH conservatives and liberals use the term "safety net" to refer to matters that used to be called "social welfare," "decent healthcare," or a "war on poverty. The phrase reveals how far we are from doing anything about these things because a safety net is something typically placed to prevent death in case one falls or has to jump from a building. In other words, your last chance in the midst of a major disaster. A safety net may rescue you from the consequences of a few seconds' leap; it doesn't get you to hospital or fix your broken limbs rescue your child still inside the building, give you decent housing, or restore your livelihood after a recession.

There are two basic ways of securing oneself against others: (1) not making them mad at you and (2) defending yourself when they are. What is so striking about our leaders is that they spend so little effort on the first option and so much on the second. The problem with this is that you not only shield yourself from bullets but from the rest of life as well. And it's worth remembering that no one lives in a medieval castle for protection anymore. It turned out that they weren't as safe as the inhabitants thought.

September 11

The wondrous mystery of America is found not in its perfection but in its ability to improve, its perpetual search for a more perfect union. The idea had been fading for some time, not just because we came to think of power as an adequate substitute, but because we came to ignore such mundane matters as teaching children democracy with the same vigor that we teach them how to drive or about the dangers of drugs. And so we tried to recover from 9/11 with a flag and loyalty to a place called America, but without its dream. We used instead military power, anti-democratic security measures, seductive technology, and yet another elephantine bureaucracy -- offering still more temptations for guerillas with simple weapons and no love of life. The 9/11 attackers, and the tens of millions around the world who share some measure of their anger, have only seen our money and our fist -- not the decency, democracy and dream that made America strong in the first place. These virtues are still lying in the rubble. Our job is to recover them, revive them, share them, and become once more a model rather than a target. Only then will we be both safe and free.

Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.

This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.

In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

Silent generation

Even members of Confederacy had the grace to secede from the union; my generation has remained within like a deadly virus, subverting it, shaming it, screwing it, stealing from it, and finally strangling it. It will likely be known as the worst generation - the one that brought the First American Republic down - unmatched in the damage it has done to the Constitution, the environment, and a two century struggle to create a society democratic and decent in its politics, economics, and social concourse. To be sure, when we were young we were, as we said then, somethin' else. We launched the civil rights, women's, gay, and environmental movements, not to mention creating some memorable music before descending into disco. Soon other things started to go downhill rapidly. We became not only the generation that invented the phrase, 'never trust anyone over thirty,' we proved it.

Sixties

Up close, the 1960s often lacked the romance that time has given them. After all, at the end of the decade Nixon was president; tens of thousands of young American men and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had died in a pointless war; charismatic leaders had been assassinated, and the cities were still smoldering. We had moved from "I have a dream " backwards to a dream deferred.

In my neighborhood on Capitol Hill, the Age of Aquarius often looked more like a war zone. Many of the people there were not part of a counter-culture but of an abandoned culture.

As a product of the fifties in which cynicism and disengagement were the highest forms of political activity, I found myself unable to identify with the Aquarian optimism of those just a few years younger than myself. Aquarius was not an age, I thought, but brief happy fireworks in the long night before human understanding.

The 1960s, in many ways, was a huge example of what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, as are many periods of great social and political change. The fragility of such chronologic cultures hurtling through a small window of opportunity is often missed by participants. In the 1960s, Bobby Seale presciently warned, "seize the time," but for many it seemed no more likely that the Age of Aquarius would disintegrate than it might have seemed possible to post-Civil War radical Republicans that their work of reconstruction would be undone barely a dozen years after it started. Still, history favors eruptions more than steady processions, and these uprisings, brief as they may be, are the major seasons of social and political change.

Struggle

The advocate, the committed, the seeker, the free thinker, the rebel may live in a world that is seldom depicted let alone honored. They may be ignored, disparaged, or even punished; they may lack constituency, funds, or moral support. They may, like the urban itinerant Joe Gould, feel most at home "down among the cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats." Yet in the end, they can attain that most precious victory of remaining truly human, a state confirmed not by their ultimate triumph but by their interminable effort, and not by their fame but by their fortitude.

Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it. Knowing what we know now about how it's turned out, what would we do if we suddenly found ourselves back in 1830? Would we bother?

Success

One of the problems with living around powerful myths is that you can start to feel personally responsible when they don't work out. If you don't lose weight, have better sex, kick your phobia, earn 20% annually in the stock market, or get the job you want, there are few around to tell you that such outcomes are pretty normal. Instead, we are surrounded by hucksters of success and salvation constantly luring us towards illusory certainty. If we succumb to these chimeras of profit and prophesy, if we accept the idea that God rightly favors the successful, the economy justly favors the lucky, and society fairly favors the glamorous, it can ultimately leave us with a sense of failure for no greater fault than being a normal human being. It is hard in such a context to remember that nearly all people who dial the 900 number beckoning them on the cable screen continue to find hard times on easy street. And it is hard to remember a time when humans had other than monetary value.

Survivors

Survivors of abuse, oppression and isolation somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry, philosophy and religion:

• You are not responsible for that into which you were born.
• You are responsible for doing something about it.

These individuals move through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.

Systems

Complex systems usually try to save themselves by doing the same they have been doing badly all along -- only harder. This is because the salvation of the system is implicitly considered far more important than the solution of any problems causing the system to fail.

The "system" is not America. The "system" is not us. It represents neither the land nor its people, neither our ideals nor our souls. Rather the "system" is a set of institutions, values, rules and forces that have been imposed on our lives and upon the culture of America. One reason so many of us feel disaffected is because we know in our hearts -- even if we can't find the right words or actions -- that much of what we find in the "system" no longer matches what we believe America should be about. Yet the "system" runs America.

Television

Everything that television does becomes television rather than what it starts out to be.

Terror

The media has has repeatedly misled and lied to the American people concerning the practicality of the war on terror and has kept from its pages and airwaves doubts on this score. In this it has behaved with a reckless negligence which, if committed behind the wheel of a car, would be considered criminal. The only way out of our crisis is to reduce the anger of the most rational, thus also reducing the constituency of the least rational. Yet we have done nothing since September 11 to improve relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and we have done nothing to make Israel do likewise. Instead we have persisted in constructing an illusion of security and a fantasy of strength and alienating aggressiveness that can be penetrated at any moment by a sufficiently determined though not particularly skilled adversary. We do not have homeland security, only a homeland hubris that may prove, in the end, to have been our real enemy.

The war against terrorism is the political equivalent of a stock market bubble - hope, hubris and hyperbole parading as fact.

The only way out of our crisis is to reduce the anger of the most rational, thus reducing the constituency of the least rational.

Three thousand people is, of course, too many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an argument for the end of democracy.

Of course, there can be peace with so-called terrorist organizations; it's just a matter of whether one waits the better part of a century like the British in Northern Ireland or you start talking and negotiating now.

One of the reasons America is in so much trouble is because it happily makes all sorts of compromises in order to get along with large dictatorships such Russia and China, but thinks it can handle smaller operations like Hamas, North Korea, and Iran by simple obstinacy and belligerence.

The media and politicians call what happened on 9/11 terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders. This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten.

There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.

This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.

Think tanks

THE EASIEST WAY for the media to give the impression of independent analysis is to call upon "experts" at the various think-tanks around town. Many of these experts are, in fact, former government officials biding their time until recalled to the inner sanctums of power or are currently serving as consultants to those in office. While think tanks can sometimes be productive and occasionally provide a haven for truly original thinkers, they primarily function as the Catholic Church of conventional politics, their priests propagating the faith, blessing the faithful, redirecting the errant and showing up at fundraising dinners to add a little class and offer the benediction. And their collection plates are regularly filled by large corporations with some distinctly non-academic goals in mind.

Tolerance

The common thread across all forms of faith these days - conservative and liberal - is certainty and a contempt for those who do not share it. Our recovery, however, will begin not with triumph over our tormentors but with the discovery of tolerance for them. Tolerance is a word much out of favor these days yet its organization and promulgation is the underlying genius of the American system. It has been also described as the concept of reciprocal liberty: I can't have my freedom unless I give you yours. It is based not so much on shared values as indifference to unshared values.

Trade

For nearly all our history, any US official who dared give up American territory without a struggle would be pilloried or worse. Yet today the greatest surrender of sovereignty in US history, our signature on the GATT agreement, is chalked up as an inevitable result of globalism. This abandonment is not controversial, nor even readily apparent, because Americans simply have not been told that it has occurred. They do not know that their country -- which defeated in turn the British, the Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the Germans (twice), the Japanese and outlasted the Soviet Union, has surrendered without a whimper to a junta of trade technocrats armed with nothing more menacing than cell phones.

Truth

The endless argument about who said what to whom about what in order to get us into the Iraq war demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.

In 2003, I was asked by Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.

One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command.

Yes, some of the Bush capos may have done it so poorly from time to time that they can be successfully prosecuted. But our ultimate standard for judging their words and claims - whether as a Sunday talk show commentator or as an ordinary citizen - should be an ethical and not a legal one. If we let such con artists get away with their ultimate trick - which is having us believe that if we can not prove their swindle we must accept it - we will have fully surrendered to their treachery.

Values

With the election of Reagan, this country began to turn its back on values that had sustained it throughout its first two centuries - values that included balancing power and wealth with concern for, cooperation with, and compassion towards others in the community we called America. In their place came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous virtue of the market, a faith almost creationist in its absence of objective foundation, intellectually barren when not actually dishonest, and as monomaniacal as the creed of the religious fundamentalist. Every other aspect of existence - religion, family, morality, creativity, politics, community, tradition, ethnicity - was declared merely a byproduct of the marketplace. For the first time in our history, the self-serving delusions of the privileged few became the standard for the whole nation, propagated in politics, on campuses and in the media.

War

From the moment we commence a moral intervention we become a part of the story, and part of the good and evil. We are no longer the innocent bystander but a full participant whose acts will either help or make things worse. Our intentions become irrelevant; they are overwhelmed by the character of our response to them. The morality of the disease is supplanted by the morality of the cure. Any other course amounts to reckless and negligent political malpractice.

Washington

The difference between being intelligent and being smart is that the former only requires data, the latter requires judgment in how you use it. The capital is full of intelligent people but short on smart ones.

Washington's "greater sophistication" is virtually indistinguishable from rampant cynicism and mindless profligacy, and its autoerotic fascination with power for its own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity.

At times I felt trapped in the compound of some bizarre cult of overwrought rhetoric, infantile premises, and manic mythology. There were no ideas, only a leader; no ideology, only icons; no inquiry, only arrogant certitude.

In June the soft stillness of southern summer returns to Washington. In the everything-controlled environment of the newer city it's easy to ignore but along the one-syllable, two-syllable, three-syllable blocks of older Washington you can't miss it: the leafy canopy, the human tableaux on porches and stoops, and the sounds -- a siren, a cry, a song -- all the more startling because of the broken quiet. It is during these slow, pregnant green days that Washington becomes most true to itself, and a sweet place still.

If we are robbed on the street we can call 911; but what number do you call to save a whole city?

A city in which the American dream and the American tragedy passed each other on the street and do not speak.

The new Washington disdains nearly every contact with the city as a community and treats the place as part shopping mall and part Plato's Retreat for the ego. It is the city of real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you damn well better not leave home without It, clone of Gotham, sire of scandal so tawdry that it has discredited political corruption, the city in which a day's work can consist of a memorandum revised, a two-hour quiche lorraine and martini lunch and four phone calls to say you're all tied up. The city in which never have so many been paid so much to do so little. The city which has changed from a sleepy southern village to a catatonic northern metropolis.

I feel like an exile in my native town, a town partly occupied by guards who demand I prove I am not a terrorist and partly filled with people who seem just to be passing through the place as if it were the world's largest Marriot Hotel lobby.

The local political scene can be fairly divided into three camps: the hustlers, the apathetic and the defeated

MUCH that is written about Washington stays comfortably within the two by three mile area in which one finds the White House and the Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department, the Pentagon, the Watergate and the National Press Club. As typical pasture in the American west, this spread could support about 120 cows and their calves.

ALTHOUGH THE MEDIA presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district.

Thus Washington is awash in the politics of particulars. Go to a congressional hearing concerning something you consider a good idea and you are likely to be startled by the number of people and interests this benign concept will allegedly injure.

The town's most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more.

HOW ONE COMES to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it. Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better. There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play.

OFFICIAL Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.

FEDERAL WASHINGTON is a culture in which much seems to happen but little gets accomplished. It is a culture in which neither the battles nor the words about them are necessarily real, in which the interests of the federal enclave inevitably proceed those of the country, and in which speaking of something is considered the moral equivalent of actually doing it. It is a culture that can admit neither to itself nor to the larger world the degree to which its various systems are out of control. Nor can it admit that when it defines corruption only by its most precise legal limits it exempts itself from any broader decency. It is finally a culture that has been remarkably successful at isolating itself from the reality it is attempting to govern. The abstract, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy. It is, in the end, the place described in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real: "Turn back, traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place and there are no birds in the country except wild birds that are tamed and kept in cages."

JUST AS the Soviets tolerated free thought only within the limits of "socialist dialogue," so debate in Washington is circumscribed by the limits of what might be called Beltway discourse. Ideas that adjust or advance the conventional wisdom are valued. Those that challenge it are ignored or treated with contempt. Beltway discourse is informed by a number of disciplines but tends to ignore others. The teachings of law and political science as well as those of economics and similar pursuits of quantification are considered important; those of history, anthropology, religion, literature, philosophy and the arts tend to be discounted.

ALTHOUGH the media presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district. Washington is awash in the politics of particulars.

THE TOWN'S most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more.

THE ABSTRACT, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy. It is, in the end, the place described in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real: "Turn back, traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place and there are no birds in the country except wild birds that are tamed and kept in cages."

IF THE federal government were a city it would be the third largest in the country --- bigger than Chicago. It takes a lot of energy to run Chicago, but then that's Chicago's business. It takes a lot of energy to run the federal government, but the federal government is supposed to be doing something other than just running itself. Nonetheless, in that government every decision of every day must be weighed against two often uncomplimentary sets of requirements -- those of America and those of the system that runs it, the de facto third largest city in the land. Even in the best of times, the system may come first; in the worst of times its demands become obsessive as it struggles to maintain itself.

THE NUMBER CRUNCHERS form an important Washington subculture, led by the uncritically accepted shamans of economics. The latter's success with ex cathedra calculations has encouraged much of Washington to speak so confidently about numbers that one almost forgets how many of them were once only English majors.

The effect of numbers on the city has been profound. At times it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. The idea of a budget bureau at the federal level only goes back to Warren Harding. As late as 1975, Austin Kiplinger could write that the president's budget officials were outnumbered by those of the various departments and thus "have to be especially sharp" and make up in clout what they lack in numbers. Today, few feel sorry for the White House budget squad, which has not only replaced many of the functions of departmental financial officials but those of the departments themselves.

As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point.. Thus, what should be a debate about programs becomes one about arithmetic.

Every day in Washington, many of the best and the brightest occupy themselves computing figures, defending them before Congress, citing them before a trade association or recalling them on C-SPAN. Adding and subtracting are among Washington's favorite activities, often providing a digital shield against discussing what the figures actually represent.

IT IS TEMPTING to see all politics in terms of techniques, tactics, symbols and strategies. This is how much of the press views the matter, a practice that tends to project Washington as an Olympics for political athletes whose performances are judged not by their value to the country but in comparison to their peers. As in conventional sports the differences can be exceedingly small yet produce a cascade of journalistic superlatives.

Weather forecasts

BETWEEN THE TIME your editor awoke and the time he got out of bed this morning, three to four inches of snow had disappeared. Between breakfast and four pm another two inches vanished. At this rate we may be facing a serious drought by bedtime.

Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers, in the course of doing their jobs, typically stumble upon facts that point to danger, neglect, waste, or corruption. Far too often this discovery is met not with approbation and as a sign of exemplary public service, but rather as a threat to the agency or company. Among the consequences: firing, reassignment, isolation, forced resignation, threats, referral to psychiatric treatment, public exposure of private life and other humiliations, being set up for failure, prosecution, elimination of one's job, blacklisting, or even death. .

Why bother?

Let's turn off the television, step into the sunlight, and count the bodies. As we were watching inside, the non-virtual continued at its own pace and on its own path, indifferent to our indifference, unamused by our ironic detachment, unsympathetic to our political impotence, unmoved by our carefully selected apparel, unfrightened by our nihilism, unimpressed by our braggadocio, unaware of our pain. Evolution and entropy remained outside the cocoon of complacent images, refusing to be hurried or delayed, declining to cut to the chase, unwilling to reveal either ending or meaning.
We shade our eyes and scan the decay. We know that this place, this country, this planet, is not the same as the last time we looked. There are more bodies. And fewer other things: choices, unlocked doors, democracy, satisfying jobs, reality, unplanned moments, clean water, a species of frog whose name we forget, community, and the trusting, trustworthy smile of a stranger.

Someone has been careless, cruel, greedy, stupid. But it wasn't us, was it? We were inside, just watching. It all happened without us -- by the hand of forces we can't see, understand, or control. We can always go in again and zap ourselves back to a place where the riots and tornadoes and wars are never larger than 27 inches on the diagonal. We can do nothing out here. Why bother?

Why bother? Only to be alive. Only to be real, to be made not just of what we acquire or our adherence to instruction, but of what we think and do of our own free will. Only, Winston Churchill said, to fight while there is still a small chance so we don't have to fight when there is none. Only to climb the rock face of risk and doubt in order to engage in the most extreme sport of all -- that of being a free and conscious human. Free and conscious even in a society that seems determined to reduce our lives to a barren pair of mandatory functions: compliance and consumption.

Words

WE DON'T HAVE to worry about Trojan horses much any more. The real danger comes from Trojan words and phrases — appealing statues of rhetoric concealing the enemy.

Writing

• Speak United States. Avoid the private languages of academia, technocracy and corporations.
  
• As an English teacher wisely noted, you are allowed only three exclamation points in a lifetime. Use them carefully.
  
• Remember that you are talking to a reader, not your therapist. Since you're don't pay your readers what you pay your therapist, you should give them something they will enjoy.
  
• If you're having a hard time, write for one reader: a friend, a relative, your child, George Bush. This helps remove the speechifying and makes the task less confusing.
  
• Do not use all caps except in headlines or acronyms.
  
• If you suffer from writer's block, just sit down and write crap. Pay no attention to style, content, or spelling. Just write something. Then read it again tomorrow and save all the good stuff.
  
• Capitalized words can be used for anything that would go on a door, a map, a gravestone, in an address book or at the beginning of a sentence. They are not for words you just think are important.
  
• If you're being funny or ironic, don't feel you have to say so. Never explain a joke. It annoys your good readers and the dumb ones still won't get it.
  
• Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker used to say if you can't be funny, be interesting.
  
• Avoid abstractions. If the evening was indeed 'fabulous,' give us some solid evidence. And if you do a good enough job of describing an incident, you won't need to call it 'racist.' Think of yourself as a photographer using words instead of a camera. Good photographs speak for themselves.
  
• Stories are almost always more interesting than opinions. Use the southern approach and argue by anecdote.