Evolution Revolution
If we follow the line of Weber's reasoning of religion-as-social-credit to its
logical conclusion, the true nature of many of our current political debates,
such as the teaching of evolution in public schools, is suddenly made clear.
When examined objectively, the first thing about American evangelical Christianity that stands out is the functionally benign nature of most of its beliefs. In day-to-day life, it does not matter if we descended from hairless apes, were formed from Play-Doh by a senior citizen in the sky, or were ejaculated by the Egyptian sun-god. Unlike, say, the worship of Kali, mainstream evangelical Christianity does not require the murder of unsuspecting travelers. Unlike members of Jim Jones' People's Temple, believers do not remove themselves from society. Unlike the Anabaptists of Münster, they do not practice polygamy or seek to expel nonbelievers from their towns (unless, of course, they publicly call community mores into question, as Mona Dobrich did). For all that their idea of cosmic history was disproved in the eighteenth century, people who hold to the Biblical account of creation (to cite one example of evangelical belief) go to work, shop at Wal-Mart, and eat nachos at Applebee's just as effectively as atheists do.
To continue with the example, trying to argue against the idea of the Biblical creation on the basis of rational argument is useless, for those who continue to perpetuate creationism do not do so because of rational conviction. Rather, the creationist meme serves some utility beyond the obvious, namely: It serves to identify a community of believers to one another. In other words, it is a social truth rather than being a scientific truth. The primary purpose of creationism, much like Jesus fish bumper stickers, is to identify members of the religious community to one another. It is, in other words, what Emile Durkheim, the French thinker who with Weber deserves the title of "founder of sociology," would have interpreted as a totem, a banner for a community to rally about.
To Durkeim, as it would later be to Lévi-Strauss, the tendency towards dichotomy is at the core of human thought. (It is in the context of this idea that Derrida's "deconstruction" must be understood, and, according to evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Donald Brown, may even be hardwired into how we understand reality. We are programmed, in other words, to see the world in sets of opposites.) This is seen most dramatically in the division of human endeavors into the profane, that is the everyday, and the sacred. The totem is the physical embodiment of the sacred; the cult of the totem is what defines the community. However, while for Durkheim's Australian aborigines, totems were physical objects such as churingas and other fetishes, for American evangelical Christians, they are emblematic ideas such as creationism. Whether or not the Earth is six thousand years old does not matter; what matters is that the community agrees that it is.
The same totemic argument that applies to creationism arguably applies to school prayer, "obscenity," sex education, or even the words "Jesus Christ" as they are understood amongst American Christians. Rather than referring to the historical rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago, the words "Jesus Christ" refer to membership in the community of belief. Saying "I have Jesus in my heart" is the functional equivalent of, say, embracing the Wolf totem. It marks those who adhere to it as co-believers in the sacred, members of the same tribe. George W. Bush proclaiming his acceptance of Jesus has made him a good man, far from being hypocritical, it, if understood on its own terms, is a deeply sincere action. He, in effect, was declaring himself-despite his privileged origins-to be fundamentally the same as soccer moms from the Midwest and small business owners from the South.
So why has there been such an upsurge in religious feeling in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Nixon or Eisenhower never had to invoke their personal relationships with Christ. Why have Americans felt the need to create these communities of faith?
One possible explanation, of course, is the events of September 11, 2001. There is nothing that creates a sense of community more than an external threat, and in a time of stress, the "imagined community" becomes more homogeneous-which is to say religiously consolidated. Outsiders-atheists, Muslims, the French-become increasingly regarded as suspicious, while the community rallies around its own totems. Seen in this light, suddenly all the posters being sold at truck stops of Jesus weeping over the ruins of the World Trade Center make a frightening amount of sense.
However, even a cursory examination of history shows that this tendency in American life long preceded 9/11. The intrusion of right-wing religiosity into politics came not from the rural South, but from the privileged suburbs, where middle-class organizational skill and fundraising ability combined with grass-roots feeling to form a potent cultural force. As Lisa McGirr argues in her Suburban Warriors, the birth of the New Right, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution's conflation of laissez-faire economics, legislated morality, Old Testament patriarchy, and the struggle against the Evil Empire, began in wealthy, privileged enclaves such as Orange County, California, in the 1960s.
McGirr makes a compelling case for the rise of the New Right as a contradictory blend of traditional Western libertarianism, belief in self-sufficiency and property rights with economic dependence on defense spending and a deeply-held belief in the importance of the family. These memes served an evolutionary purpose in a frontier society, but which are somewhat atavistic in suburban developments. Hostility to outside interference makes a certain amount of sense when an ad-hoc local government and the freedom to scratch out a primitive living are all that one requires or expects; it makes less sense when one works for a salary, pays income tax, and relies on federal funding for utilities, roads, schools, firefighting, and law enforcement.
These feelings were magnified by having passed from the triumph of World War II and the economic boom of the postwar period into the defeat of miasma of the 1970s. Many Americans felt their traditional mode of life is being destroyed. The shift to a corporatist, service-based economy has provoked a gender crisis. The old constructions of difference-the dichotomies between sacred and profane, domestic and public, male and female-have broken down. This has been reflected in the meta-narrative of the last three decades of infotainment, as American men unmanned the economic downturn and women who would prefer to be homemakers rather than co-wage earners have taken refuge in Dirty Harry, Rambo, Martha Stewart, George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim "mission accomplished." The brilliance of the New Right's strategy is combining all of these anxieties into one cause: "Stick with us and we'll stand tall, provide for our families, and kick some ass."
The whole "gay marriage" debate provides an excellent case study for this phenomenon. Just as homosexuality was equated with having Communist sympathies in the 1950s, gays once again find themselves playing the canaries in the coal mine of our collective anxieties. In a world where marriage is becoming more a legal recognition of mutual affection and less an economic necessity, a prerequisite to raising children, or a religious sacrament, same-sex couples see no reason that they should not have the same legal rights as any Russian mail-order bride. The subtext to conservative objections to this movement is not so much an objection to homosexuality per se, but a rejection of the ongoing redefinition of marriage and family life-a change that is, at its root, economically driven.
It appears, then, that the tenets of American evangelical Christianity have become a rallying point because they have become identified with the idea of the authentic, autochthonic community. The fact that these goals-the dismantling of the social welfare state and the maintenance of the military-industrial welfare state, laissez-faire liberalism yoked together with paternalistic morals-policing-have nothing to do with Christianity is not important; what matters is that these policies materially benefit the community that identifies with these symbols. Opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and immigration merely provide a convenient focus for this particular political community, whose interests are then cynically exploited for votes by politicians.
Thus, we return to the real significance of what happened to the Dobriches. The people of Georgetown were not "ignorant, shallow bigots"—unless one wants to call a large part of America by these labels. They were, rather, frighteningly ordinary. Behind what seemed like narrow-minded bigotry was the anxiety three decades of uncertainty. To them, the values the public community represents, and the political and economic interests of that community, were synonymous with the religious community. The persecution the Dobriches experienced was, in effect, the displaced anxiety of the modern world.
If progressives are to make any headway in changing the face of American politics,
we must understand the engine driving religious support the conservative political
machine. Rather than shrilly repeating our positions as if their inherent logic
was a given, we must rather make Americans see that that the values we represent
are their own, and that the restoration of a progressive, New Deal system is
in the best interests of themselves and their families. Hopefully, by addressing
the root causes that drive voters to the standards of conservative Christianity-the
irrelevance of the military-industrial complex, the economic rot of the heartland,
the empty values of a consumer society-we can appeal to the community of faith,
thereby outflanking and, ultimately, defeating the enemy.
Unlike many commentators who have criticized the Dobriches' neighbors' "ignorant, shallow attitude," "bigotry," and general sense of entitlement to Christian hegemony, I was less outraged by their case than I was perplexed. Delaware is, after all, not the Deep South. No barefoot urchins out of a Faulkner novel march along its rural roads; no attack dogs savaged civil rights activists on its city streets; backyard pools are more common than fishin' holes. The state governor, Ruth Ann Minner, is a Democrat, as are both senators, and though the one state Representative, Mike Castle, is a Republican, he's voted against the party line on repealing restrictions on stem-cell research, torturing "enemy combatants," and giving Federal courts jurisdiction on the Terri Schiavo case. If anything, therefore, one would expect Georgetown, located in Sussex County, home of the gay and lesbian vacation mecca Rehoboth Beach, to be more accepting than the norm. Why, then, do its denizens seem to equate Christianity with good citizenship, with social integration, with patriotism itself?
A century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber asked much the same question about the United States as a whole. Though he is better known for marrying Calvin and capitalism with his (now somewhat dated) bon mot on the "Protestant work ethic," Weber's lesser-known essay, "Churches and Sects in North America," has not only held up rather well over the past century, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the power of religion in U.S. culture. "Churches," Weber argued, are distinct from "sects" in that the former, like the Lutheran church that dominated religious life in Germany, are all-inclusive and compulsory, while the latter are voluntary associations of those who feel themselves to be the spiritual elite.
Yet, for all of this, Weber saw membership in a Protestant sect as one of the most powerful political and social forces in the modern world. The "proof" of an individual's salvation, and the basis for his admission to a sect, was the external performance of morality, sobriety, and thrift. "This proof," Weber wrote, "became the exclusive foundation for the social cohesion of the congregation. And the great mass of social formations, which have penetrated every corner of American life, are constituted according to the schema of the 'sect.' " Conversely-and here is where Weber speaks directly to the Delaware case-an individual bereft of a sect (or who belongs to a different one, as the Dobriches did) is rootless, ostracized, alien. To profess religion is to be integrated into the community; to do otherwise is to be the Other.
In Weber's Europe, religion was not only structurally different from American sects, it was also functionally different. "The question concerning church affiliation. . . is on par with the Homeric question regarding place of birth and parentage, as a German nose and throat specialist, who had opened a practice in Cincinnati, discovered," he wrote. "On asking his first patient what was ailing him, the very first thing the man said, to the utter astonishment of the doctor, was: I am from the Second Baptist Church in X Street." Weber's deutsche doctor's astonishment at his patient's incongruous utterance is certainly understandable-at least until one comprehends the real meaning, which is that the physician needn't worry about his fee. In Weber's Germany, private religion was for the individual conscience, and the true public religion was the cult of imperialistic nationalism. Social credit derived from coming from a good family, no matter whether one's father had risen from the Junker squireocracy or descended from the purple of commerce. Just as modern college students are besieged by credit card offers, a student at Heidelberg found more than enough people willing to extend him credit after he had tasted blood in an elite dueling fraternity and "won his colors" (and perhaps a few facial scars)-a sure sign of a bright future.
Conversely, in America, a land of vast distances settled by dislocated immigrants, where a man could come from anywhere to do anything and where the aristocratic schmiss that was the lingering kiss of the schläger duel meant no more than having been kicked in the face by a mule, social credit came from church membership. In America, Weber wrote, one does not ask if someone goes to church, but rather to which church they belong. Membership in a church "of good repute" was essential for any business venture. "As far as I am concerned, everyone can believe what he likes, but if I discover that a client doesn't go to church, then I wouldn't trust him to pay me fifty cents," a traveling salesman said to Weber in Oklahoma. "Why pay me, if he doesn't believe in anything?" A man in a church is a man integrated into society; a man without a church is rootless. People in the past were no less cynical about politicians than we are now, but they could be assured that they would serve local interests and not loot the public treasury if they had been vetted by a sober congregation and admitted into the spiritual elite.
Weber's ideas about "sects" hit me like a bolt from above. Like most over-educated, ocean-hopping, politically liberal urban dwellers, organized religion has always been slightly embarrassing to me. Jewish members of my social circle tiptoe shame-faced past the Lubavitch mitzvah tank, order sushi on Yom Kippur, and decry circumcision as male genital mutilation. Catholics are more likely to be found chanting to Vishnu in yoga class than lighting candles to the Virgin, and Hindus cheerfully trade recipes for beef stroganoff. Unlike many of my friends, though, I don't characterize religious people as deluded, ignorant, or, in the Delaware case, inherently bigoted. As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am forced on a daily basis to consider how religion can both bind a society together and tear it apart. I know that faith is a force to be reckoned with-and while I may not believe in religion, I certainly do believe in religious people.
Moreover, it's clear to me that the collective willful ignorance of religion so prevalent amongst liberal intellectuals-the dismissal of faith and the faithful as an awkward cultural atavism-is our great blind spot, the fatal flaw of an ideology that is otherwise eager to embrace anything different from itself in the name of cultural relativism. The idea that religion is a concrete evil to be stridently fought tooth and nail-the approach taken by the don of atheism, Oxford behavioral scientist Richard Dawkins-is likewise the wrong tack. As Weber saw a century ago, without understanding how religion works in this country, and its effects on our political life, we can not understand how American society works-and therefore, we can certainly not hope to change the status quo.
Manifest Destiny
In my liberal agnosticism, I thought for a long time that the true character of American religious polity was best described by the 1534 Münster rebellion. In one of the more colorful events of the Reformation, an apocalyptically-tinged, paranoid sect of Anabaptists (so-called for their practice of re-baptizing converts as adults) seized the city and expelled all unbelievers. Their religious mania quickly spread to the execution of "heretics," mandatory polygamy, and the belief in the immanent descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The government response at Münster in 1534 was the same as it was in Waco, Texas in 1993: Lutheran and Catholic leaders united to begin an eighteen-month siege that ended with the storming of the city and the massacre of most of the surviving Anabaptists. Münster, I thought, illustrated the essential character of Protestant evangelicalism-the constitutional need for absolute political supremacy in order to found a "city on a hill" and the inability to accept anything less than absolute conformity to the faith. These ideas had been imported to this continent with the Puritans, and they have remained with us ever since in the tenets of the Baptist church.
What Weber understood, though, is that while much of America may call itself Baptist, our religious makeup is equally tinged with Methodism. Beginning as an eighteenth-century revival movement within the Church of England led by John Wesley and his friends, Methodism was the greatest religious movement the English-speaking world had seen since the Restoration of 1660 had installed moderate Anglicanism as the British state church. However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodism represented a paradox: Simultaneously ecstatic and sober, traditional and charismatic, working-class and elite, revolutionary and insistent that it was merely a movement within the Church of England, it challenged contemporary ideas of how religion fit into the political landscape.
The essential religious divisions in post-Napoleonic Europe were between the conservative order that upheld monarchy, centrally-controlled economies, and the state church (the anti-Dreyfusards in France, for instance, published in Jesuit newspapers); liberal laissez-faire parliamentarians such as Weber who embraced Darwin and Adam Smith and quietly disparaged religion; and avant-garde socialists who saw all religion as "opium for the people." Yet the very fact that national churches had been a political reality in Europe since the sixteenth century meant that they were for the most part, under the radar, more likely to be dismissed than actively attacked. Even in Sweden, the country that American liberals most often hold up as an atheist, socialist paradise, the Lutheran church only automatically stopped enrolling newborns in 1996, and didn't separate from the government until 2000. While Upton Sinclair may have written that "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross," fascism came to Germany precisely because of liberal thinkers like Max Weber, who was in favor of what J. L. Talmon called "totalitarian democracy" because he thought it would advance the cause of the German volk more efficiently than the Kaiser and his conservative order ever could.
Early America, on the other hand, was a land ill-served by the clergy of the established church. Methodist circuit riders, filling the vacuum with charismatic preaching, were eager to create communities out of scattered settlements—and the people were eager to have them. Peer-led, based on community acclamation, and ultimately democratic, the Methodist message appealed to everyone from Yankee industrialists to working men, farmers to shopkeepers, and slave-owners to African-Americans; it also sparked the mass religious movements of the First, Second, and Third Great Awakenings. Naturally, the Methodist dichotomy between ecstatic revelation and hard work, thrift, and sobriety could not stand, and the movement separated into separate strands, both respectable, such as the United Methodist Church attended by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and popular, such as the Pentecostal churches that embrace speaking in tongues and snake-handling.
As widely variant as the beliefs and practices of the Methodist-derived sects might be, one Methodist-derived idea that has infused all of American religious life is the idea of instantaneous conversion. We are all familiar with the script from George W. Bush's 2000 election campaign and any number of ironically-perused Chick tracts: Having hit mental, physical, and spiritual rock-bottom, terrified of an eternity spent in the flames of hell, a despairing sinner begs Jesus to come into his or her heart. Suddenly everything is illuminated; the sinner feels himself to be saved; and all sins are forgiven. This trope is not only a powerful incentive-it is also an eminently capitalist one in which unproductive behaviors are exchanged for a life of hard-working productivity and social credit in the bosom of the community. It is the spiritual equivalent of declaring bankruptcy: All bad credit is forgiven.
The implication of this cultural script is that anybody can join the community; all it takes is a simple act of will and the performance of conversion. (I mean "performance" here in the linguistic sense, in J. L. Austin's sense of phrases that are also actions, such as "I christen this ship the Queen Elizabeth" or "I pronounce you husband and wife.") Unlike early Methodism, in which God had to touch the individual, in modern conversion it is the individual who reaches out to God. Unlike Puritanism's stringent entry requirements, there is no need to prove oneself one of the elite; one can be an alcoholic, a drug addict, an unwed mother, or a homosexual. However, by entering the Church, one is reborn into the community. (The caveat, of course, is that one must continue behaving in a godly manner and fighting against one's anti-social impulses.)
The implications of the Methodist instantaneous conversion are, if anything, even more chilling than the elitist Puritan "city on a hill." If salvation is only open to God's elect, then the "city on the hill," in order to exist in a non-chiliastic world, will always need to compromise and make a place for the imperfect members of society. Methodist conversion, on the other hand, is manifest destiny incarnate. Everyone can be part of the congregation of the faithful; all that is necessary is the desire to join. Even Mexicans (the cultural and ethnic boogeyman of the moment) can become part of the community—that is, "Americanized"—by accepting Jesus in evangelical fashion. (And, indeed, much current evangelical missionary activity is Spanish-language).
Thus, there is no conceivable argument not to join. With salvation democratically open to all, excuses dissolve before the weight of community opinion. If one is in a milieu where the vast majority of people believe, the pressure to conform to social expectations is extreme. To deny the community's will is to do more than brand oneself as irredeemably Other; it's to brand oneself a sinner and worthy of community scorn. Thus the comment one made to Mona Dobrich about her eleven-year-old son: "If you want people to stop calling him 'Jew Boy,' you tell him to give his heart to Jesus."
Because of its evangelical nature, American religion has condemned itself to perpetual jihad against all those who believe differently. When Georgetown businessman Kenneth R. Stevens told a Times reporter that mandatory Christianity was Georgetown's "way of life," he was telling a deeper truth than he may have realized. The First Amendment aside, America is a Christian nation, just as to be a Swede is to be a Lutheran or to be Italian is to be Catholic. The difference is that, ostensibly cordoned off from the official governance by the First Amendment, never having its "establishment" questioned or been subjected to a Civil Constitution of the Clergy or kulturkampf, religion's ubiquity in American polity has remained unchallenged. With no establishment of religion, there has been no religious establishment to be attacked by radicals or discredited for supporting a government that had led the nation into a national calamity such as World War I.
]]>The fact is, loans are a necessity for paying for college nowadays, and a college degree is the de facto doorkeeper to a middle-class lifestyle. However, the average private college costs an average of $22,218. What’s more, the amount of scholarships available—especially to Joe Suburban Teenager—is nowhere near the demand. Accordingly, the amount of student loan debt in this country is immense—$477 billion. (Contrast this, however, with $5.6 billion a month for the Iraq war.)
In most every other industrialized country, higher education is at least partially paid for by the government (though this is changing with the current laissez-faire turn in Europe). In America, though, we don’t have a parliamentary system that, for good or ill, factors in everyone’s needs: We have lobbyists, and student loan corporations pay handsomely for representation in Washington. Accordingly, student loan lenders enjoy some of the most favorable conditions in the industry. Thanks to a bill signed by Clinton in 1997, student loan debt, unlike consumer debt, can never be discharged. They can even take payments out of your social security—and this holds true both for the wholly inadequate subsidized federal loans and for the private loans most students wind up having to get. What we essentially have is a system where a small number of companies are siphoning off a lifetime’s wages in exchange for fronting the opportunity to earn them in the first place—a postindustrial version of debtor’s prison.
These have a very real effect on people’s lives. While not everyone is so unfortunate as to be saddled with debt, those with high loans wind up paying in interest what they would otherwise be investing in the economy—or their own further education. Student loans put a dent in home buyers’ ability to qualify for reasonable mortgages. Bureaucratic cock-ups ruin people’s credit. In the end, it seems to be more sensible to go to a lower-tier state school—or even bypass college entirely—than to follow the “traditional” middle-class pursuit of high educational achievement. Furthermore, for those saddled with student loan debt, monthly payments make it more difficult to get married, buy a house, and raise children. “Family values,” my ass.
But the government isn’t the only one who’s been bought. . The schools have payola found themselves immersed in the midst of a payola scandal. To quote Generation Debt author Anya Kamenetz, “Lenders and schools have/had deals whereby schools would push students to a certain lender or lenders in exchange for kickbacks from the lenders.”
The fact is that the student loan industry hasn’t been playing by the
rules for years—and in the end, this makes us all poorer as the middle
class’s money is sucked into the coffers of a few corporations. The way
out of it is to put more pressure on politicians than the lobbyists do to get
candidates to promise to change the system. Increase subsidized loans. Lower
interest rates. And take the private lenders out back and shoot them. In the
wake of the payola scandal, , the
Democratic-led House has already set an example by passing the College Cost
Reduction Act of 2007, funded by reducing subsidies to student-loan
companies. We’d like to see the Senate—and the presidential candidates—follow
suit.
NIXON
ON
FEAR VS. LOVE:
People react to fear, not love - they don't teach that in Sunday School, but
it's true."
ON ETHICS:
"Publicly, we say one thing....Actually, we do another."
ON JEWS:
But by God, they're exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust
the bastards. (Referring to Jews to Bob Haldeman)
The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.... The lawyers
in government are damn Jews.
You can never put, John, any person who is a Jew on a civil rights kind of case,
or freedom of the press kind of case, and get even a ten percent chance. . .
. Basically, who the hell are these people that stole the papers? It's too bad.
I'm sorry. I was hoping one of them would be a gentile.
"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing
marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What
is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."
- May 26, 1971 (White House Tapes released March, 2002)
What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews, Bob.
-14th of September 1971
JEWS VS. BLACKS:
NIXON: Jewish families are close, but there's this strange malignancy that
seems to creep among them — radicalism. I can imagine how the fact that Ellsberg
is in this must really tear a fella like Henry to pieces — or Garment. Just
like the Rosenbergs and all that. It just has to kill them. I feel horrible
about it.
ZIEGLER: Could make up an English name.
HALDEMAN: - Rosenstein could change his name. - _[general laughter]
ZIEGLER: It is right. It's always an "Ellsberg.'
NIXON: Every one's a Jew. Ellsberg's a Jew. Halperin's a Jew.
HALDEMAN: Gelb's a Jew.
NIXON: But there are [unclear] — Hiss was not a Jew. Very interesting thing.
So few of those who engage in espionage — are Negroes. - In fact, very few
of them become Communists. If they do, they like, they get into Angela Davis
— they're more the capitalist type. And they throw bombs and this and that.
But the Negroes. — have you ever noticed? - Any Negro spies?
HALDEMAN: Not intellectual enough, not smart enough - not smart enough to be
spies.
NIXON: The Jews — the Jews are, are born spies. You notice how many of them
are just in up to their necks?
HALDEMAN: A basic deviousness.
ON HIS CRITICS:
N: I think we can destroy him [John Dean] -- we must destroy him.
Haig: Have to.
N: We never can allow this to happen - even if I was guilty as hell, but I'm
not (unintelligible). I was dragged into this, son of a bitch, because of stupid
people. Well-intentioned stupid people.
Haig: That's something entirely different. Here we've got a vicious little coward
who's trying to protect his ass at any cost.
N: And therefore he's got to be destroyed.
-May 8, 1973
ON MEXICANS VS. BLACKS:
"I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they're
not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans
are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal,
they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't
live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.'
ON BLACKS:
"The second point is that coming out - coming back and saying that
black Americans aren't as good as black Africans - most of them, basically,
are just out of the trees. Now, let's face it, they are."
-Richard Nixon to Donald Rumsfeld July 11, 1971 (White House Tapes)
"You have to face the fact that whole problem [welfare] is really the blacks.
The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to...'
President Richard Nixon
-Alone In the White House, p. 110
ON INDIANS:
"The Indians are bastards anyway," Kissinger told the president.
"They are starting a war there."
"While she [Gandhi] was a bitch, we got what we wanted too," Kissinger said.
"She will not be able to go home and say that the United States
didn't give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she's
got to go to war."
"We really slobbered over the old witch," Nixon told Kissinger
-White House Tapes, Nov. 5, 1971
ON GREEKS:
"I don't want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened
to the Greeks.
Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that,
so was Socrates."
-May 26, 1971 (White House Tapes)
ON ITALIANS:
"They're
not like us. They smell different, they look different, they act different.
The trouble is, you can't find one that's honest.'
Richard Nixion to John Ehrlichman
-White House Tapes
GEORGE
W. BUSH
ON
FREEDOM AND POWER:
"There ought to be limits to freedom."
- May 26, 1999
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-CNN transcript from 12/18/2000 (photo-op with Congressional leaders)
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
-Governing Magazine July, 1998
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about
it."
-Business Week, July 30, 2001
"This is an impressive crowd: the Haves and the Have-mores. Some people
call you the elite - I call you my base.'
- at the Al Smith Dinner, New York, October 20, 2000.
"When you're the president's son and you've got unlimited access
combined with some credentials from a prior campaign, in Washington, D.C., people
tend to respect that. I mean, access is power. And I can find my dad and talk
to him any time of the day."'
- August, 1992
ON AMERICA'S SECURITY:
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care.
It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- George W. Bush, 3/13/2002
"People don't need to worry about security."
- February 23, 2006, on his Administration approving the sale of six major U.S.
shipping ports to the United Arab Emirates. Two of the hijackers involved in
the September 11, 2001, attacks came from the Persian Gulf country, and most
of the money for the plot was funneled through the banking center of Dubai.
Dubai was a key transfer point for illicit nuclear technology sales to North
Korea, Iran and Libya that were led by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.
ON BLACKS:
"Do you have blacks, too?'
-to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
DICK
CHENEY
ON
HAVING PRINCIPLES:
"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if
you lose."
- Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff, 1976.
"We also have to work the dark side, if you will. We have to spend time
in the shadows. It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."
- September 16, 2001
AS A ROLE MODEL FOR AMERICA'S CHILDREN:
"Go fuck yourself."
- On June 22, 2004 Leahy and Vice President Dick Cheney participated
in the US Senate class photo. During this time, Cheney upbraided Leahy for Leahy's
recent excoriations of Cheney over Halliburton's alleged war profiteering. The
discussion ended with Cheney telling Leahy to "... go fuck yourself" and giving
Leahy the middle finger.
ON CIVIL RIGHTS:
In 1986, Cheney voted against a sense-of-the-House resolution calling on
the white-controlled government in South Africa to free Mandela. (He eventually
was released in 1990.) Cheney also opposed economic sanctions against South
Africa. He voted against measures that sought to ensure the application of a
variety of US civil rights laws.
- Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, p. A13 Jul 26, 2000
ON THE THREAT OF SADDAM HUSSEIN:
"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties
is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.'
-to the Discovery Institute after the first Gulf War, on August 14, 1992, when
he was Secretary of Defense.
"Saddam Hussein's offensive military capability, his capacity to threaten
his neighbors, has been virtually eliminated.'
- April 29, 1991, at the Soref Symposium talking about the First Gulf War.
DONALD
RUMSFELD
ON
LYING:
"Don't quote me on this, okay? I don't want to be quoted on this, so don't quote
me - Sometimes the truth is so precious, it must be accompanied by a bodyguard
of lies."
- U.S. Department of Defense, News Briefing, September 25, 2001
ON THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE:
"Have you killed anyone yet?"
- to General Charles Holland
ON BLACKS:
This July 22, 1971, conversation (National Archives) lasted about an hour
and focused on Rumsfeld's future in the Nixon administration. At the time, the
39-year-old Rumsfeld was counselor to the president.
Nixon: "It doesn't help. It hurts with the blacks, and it doesn't help with
the rednecks because the rednecks don't think any Negroes are any good."
Rumsfeld: "Yes."
Nixon: "Black Americans aren't as good as black Africans. Most of them are basically
out of the trees ... Now, my point is, if we say that, they [Nixon opponents]
say, 'Well, by God.' Well, ah, even the Southerners say, 'Well, our n--ger is
[unintelligible].' Hell, that's the way they talk!"
Rumsfeld: "That's right."
Nixon: "I can hear 'em."
Rumsfeld: "I know."
Nixon: "It's like when our black athletes, I mean the Olympics, are running
against the other black athletes, the Southerner may not like the black but
he's for that black athlete."
Rumsfeld: "That's right."
Nixon: "Right?"
Rumsfeld: "That's for sure."
CONDOLEEZA
RICE:
Rice
has served on the board of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles
Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Transamerica Corporation,
Hewlett Packard, The Carnegie Corporation, The Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, The Rand Corporation, and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.
She was also on the Board of Trustees of the University of Notre Dame, the International
Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan, and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors.
She also headed Chevron's committee on public policy until she resigned on January
15, 2001, to become National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush. Chevron
honored Rice by naming an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice after her, but
controversy led to its being renamed Altair Voyager.[9][10][11]
SCOOTER
LIBBY:
In
1996, Libby wrote a novel titled "The Apprentice,' which has recently gained
new attention. A New Yorker columnist reprinted passages describing extremely
graphic scenes of pedophilia, bestiality, rape and incest. One particular scene
describes the rape of a young girl by a bear. These scenes are too lurid to
be posted on this site, however, you can read the New Yorker article via this
link:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051107ta_talk_collins
KARL
ROVE:
ON
THE OUTING OF A CIA AGENT:
"Wilson's wife is fair game.'
- to Chris Matthews, July 21, 2003, one week after the "outing'
of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson (reported in ABC News Original
Report, 10-1-2003)
Rove also did work during those years for clients other than politicians. From
1991 to 1996, he advised tobacco giant Phillip Morris, ultimately earning $3,000
a month via a consulting contract. In a deposition, Rove testified that he severed
the tie in 1996 because he felt awkward "about balancing that responsibility
with his role as Bush's top political advisor" at a time when Bush was governor
of Texas and Texas was suing the tobacco industry.
Allegations of conflict of interest
In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel, successfully advocating
a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000
in Intel stock at the time but had been advised by Fred Fielding, the White
House's transition counsel, to defer selling the stock in January to obtain
ethics panel approval. Rove offered no advice on the merger which needed to
be approved by a joint Pentagon-Treasury Department panel since it would give
a foreign company access to military sensitive technology. [36] In June 2001,
Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held
almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On 30 June 2001, Rove divested his
stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each of Enron,
Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. On 30 June 2001, the White House admitted
that Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the
same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.
"What do you mean evil? Do think Hitler was evil?"
"Sure," I said, unsure where this was going.
"Then how can my company be evil?"
"Well, because Reed Elsevier pushed my company out of business in a single breath."
"We're free to choose who we buy from. Aren't you? Don't you shop at Wal-Mart?"
"Um, but Reed wouldn't even let me bid on work. They wouldn't take my phone calls when I tried to offer them the same price as the companies from India."
"Did we break any laws by doing that?"
"No, but pushing the laws to their limits doesn't make an action like driving dozens of typesetting companies into bankruptcy and putting all of their workers in unemployment lines doesn't make it right."
"So you're saying you're against capitalism?"
The conversation didn't improve from there-which isn't surprising for a conversation that starts with Hitler and heads straight towards communism.
And why do people have to go right for Hitler? Is there no measure of evil smaller than world war combined with genocide? As the child of a Holocaust survivor, I would like to humbly request that we keep Hitler out of discussions of the cruelty one man deals another that falls short of those cataclysmic extremes.
Moreover, why am I anti-capitalist because I think Reed-Elsevier pushes their weight around economically?
I admit freely that at the time, my company couldn't compete with India for the labor intensive task of typesetting. Neither could my other competitors. And when Reed Elsevier bought up about 25% of the publishing industry that was my customer base, they dutifully sent the work where it was cheapest.
I don't think they were wrong. I don't think outsourcing is, by definition, bad. But I do disagree that Reed's actions were simply the natural result of an honest capitalist.
The reason is oligopoly-a consolidation of buying power. If I shop at Wal-Mart, I am only one buyer making one decision among many I will make. By comparison, Reed had become one of just a handful of buyers of typesetting, and they did it in just over a five-year period from 1994 to 1999. The time between their last acquisition of Harcourt, which led to them having 30% of my company's business, and their decision to dump us was less than 6 months.
Could my company have adapted to overseas competition? Yes. And we were. We had, in fact, established our own operation in Manila where we paid people three times the going rate. We were well on our way to matching the prices from anywhere in the world through a combination of technology and efficiency brought by treating our workers with respect.
But time is what we did not have. And, as a direct result, my company's 150 employees in America and 50 in Manila lost their jobs. Because we were small ($10 million in annual sales) versus our customer (over $7 billion) we were crushed by their choice to "shop at Wal-Mart."
Now back in the early part of the 20th century, big business argued against minimum wage laws because they would "deny the right of employees to negotiate with their employers." That meant, if you offered to work for a dime an hour, that was your choice-which was ludicrous because the worker in that situation had no negotiating power.
Does believing that it is government's duty to alleviate that natural disparity of power that develops under capitalism make me a communist or anti-capitalist? I don't agree with that at all. I firmly believe in "free markets." But I also think oligopolies are no better than monopolies for the growth of a free economy.
So was it OK for Reed not to use my company? Of course. If my company was non-competitive, was it OK for it to go out of business? Probably. Was it legal to buy up 1/3 of my customers and then cut us off the vendor list in six months? Likely. Was it Hitler? Not even close. But was it "good?" No.
It was evil.
And I think the Reed-Elsevier ethics manual says it best.
"Some types of conduct are always illegal under certain competition and
antitrust laws. Employees and other representatives of Reed Elsevier must avoid
even the appearance of such conduct."