Lux et Veritas

The Conscious Search for Morality

Friday, December 31, 2010

2011 should be the era of a conscious search for morality. In my mind, morality has to do with the civilized behavior between one party and another, whether that be between individuals, corporations, and nation states. In short, it is about doing no harm. 

The conscious search for morality starts with civilized discourse that conveys understanding of self, the separation of emotion from fact, understanding others, examining the impact of one on the other, and the practice of doubt. No-one knows everything. But more important is the understanding that part of that truth is pursuing what is not known. 

In the midst of a world-wide economic crisis, the US has voted in a Republican majority that has little if any morality and cannot see the impact on its various constituencies. That blindness will defeat them at the polls in 2012, and it will guarantee the re-election of President Obama. 

Though the Repubican and Tea Parties are determined to defeat the President, they are, nevertheless, forced to govern. That will require some sort of cooperation and negotiation with the President. But it will also require their examination of the impacts of their proposed legislation on everyone and everything. They may believe that citing relevant portions of the Constitution to substantiate proposed legislation is a kind of legal justification, but it is distant from issues of morality. Focusing on their proposed policies by referring to the matter of morality (do no harm)  as I have defined it is Obama's weapon against the Republicans' lack of governance and irresponsibility.  This sounds naive, but it is a better course of action than bullying and filibuster.

Health reform. The Republicans claim, and the Virginia Supreme Court has supported them, that the Federal government cannot force people to buy health insurance. The legislative debate that will undoubtedly ensue has to focus on the impact of reversing the health reform bill on the affected voters who stand to benefit having universal access to standard health care. It is a moral question, and one that the President can formulate in that way. The debate becomes less of a struggle for control between parties and more of a matter of "the right thing to do". 

If the President intends to engage the rest of the world, then his most potent weapon is the issue of morality. Let's take Israel and the Palestinians. The question to both is what is to be gained by the continuance of their policies and actions. It asks the question of what is the impact on the majority of people in both countries, if current policies regarding expansion of settlement on the West Bank and mutual recognition persist. The goal of peace and the fixing of borders is put off, until that discussion is undertaken. 

Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on military gains and progress in reducing government corruption, the question is what the impact on every concerned part and ordinary person is the persistence of corruption. What is an alternative policy of, say, promoting a viable economy and how it affects the same constituency?

This all may sound silly, but there seems to be no other successful way to resolve conflict. We have failed to reform Iraq and Afghanistan and to defeat terrorism. And now the focus should be on moral questions having to do with the positive future of both places. 

Morality has seemingly forever been the isolated province of religion. But, in my view, it is a practical way to confront both domestic and international relations.  

December 31, 2011 - The Year of Self-Denial

This year is notable for a majority of the media and world citizens practicing wide-spread denial of reality and personal responsibility.

1. The Banking and Investment community refuses to take responsibility for their role in bringing down not only the US economy, as well as world wide, but refusing to recognize that their continued risky practices with their depositors money keeps the economy in decline. Most serious is their refusal to regulate derivatives and to take account of the vast array of priceless commodity swaps that are off their books and by themselves would make the banks too big to fail seem insolvent.
2. The inability or unwillingness of the Obama administration to totally revamp that industry by breaking up the banks too big to fail; accounting for worthless investment instrument; and restructuring the industry forcibly by bringing back the Glass-Steegal Act.
3. The Republican Presidential candidates total unwillingness and ignorance of what is going on in this country that affects their constituents' struggling to make ends meet and their continuing blather about such unimportant and harmful stands on universal health care, the charge of murder regarding abortion, their desire to rewrite the constitution and invest undue powers in the Executive, and strong strain of stupidity, mean-spiriteness, and grasping onto a set of ideologies that are pure fantasy and irrelevant to governance.
3. The media's failure to recognize that they are the carriers of the big lie spread by the media, the right wing Tea Party national legislators, and various talking heads and writing observers. Their irresponsibility in not providing a detailed analysis of both that big lie but the Republican Presidential candidates, who to a person do not have the character or intelligence to even become the party's candidate. That the media fail to pinpoint and underscore their total denial of the basic provisions of the Constitution with regard to social and economic equity provides the fertile soil for the scandalous backgrounds and behaviors of radicals on all sides of the political spectrum and the proliferation of blogs that add to the confusion and build up the pile of lies and deception about the reality of our world-wide moral relapse. Raising false hopes about the potential for a kind of Jeffersonian democracy following the Arab Spring, when in fact the future of these country's political environment will continue to be dominated by religious and political dictatorship.
4. The self-denial of the voting public to understand that racism and religious and ethnic bigotry are thriving and have spawned outrageous disrespect and misrepresentation of President Obama, illegal immigrants, voting rights of minorities and foreign born, and their refusal to recognize that their right wing representatives in Congress are hell-bent on taking away the government's role in social security, medical treatment, and, unemployment benefits. Almost totally unrecognized as some of the root causes of those voters' role in denying their own rights is their twisted belief that they are less worthy than the 1% who believe they are supreme and the 99% lazy and shiftless and not deserving of temporary government relief.
5. The military's failure to recognize that their continued support of troops in Afghanistan will not change anything there and that their words of promised victory of some kind with new tactics is an echo of Vietnam. Like Iraq's decline into a bigoted and corrupt strong man government, Afghanistan is crippled by its wide-spread corruption of all kinds and an unspoken cozy relationship with Pakistan that keeps the Taliban and competing tribes in power and supplied by arms.

There is no '12 Election, December 9, 2011
When House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, announced that their primary goal was to make Obama a one term president, the Republican Party started the two year feast to eat themselves. And so they have with their fight over the increase in the US debt ceiling, their opposition to the President's jobs bill, and, now internecine attacks between the leading Republican Presidential nominees. Romney is unfit to be either a candidate or President because he has repeated demonstrated his flip-flopping on his very liberal programs when he was Massachusetts Governor. He is, therefore, an outright liar. Newt Gingrich, the now leader in the Iowa caucuses, is being attacked by Romney for his politically expedient role as former house speaker and his basic character. He is not only an outright liar, he is an unfeeling public figure. He has no understanding of the sufferings of the 99%, when he declared that corporations should buy up the foreclosed properties and rent them to their former owners. (Of course at a great profit to the corporations and investors who can leverage other investments from the bargain buying of distressed properties and the tax breaks they would receive.)

Some will remember the Dole-Clinton Presidential election campaign, when it was clear Dole was tired, too old, but more important, in reality disinterested in becoming President. Dole, for all of his missteps, entered the campaign as a "believable" contender. Neither Romney, who is eating Gingrich( and the Republican Party is eating Romney because he is not conservative enough) nor Gingrich who is playing the ersatz intellectual former history professor are, therefore, fit to even run. neither are tall enough morally to tie Obama's shoes. There is, thus, no real 2012 Presidential election, because the only candidate is Obama.

False Morality

Saturday, April 16, 2011

False morality seems to dictate medical treatment, violence against non-believers, and the Republicans' blind goal to rid the US of all of the remaining beneficial elements of the New Deal and The Great Society. This morning's Washington Post article, "Stem Cells Were God's Will, says the reciptient of treatment.

T.J. Atchison, the recipient of stem cells to reverse chest down paralysis, born baptist, said it was "God's Will" that he should be the first recipient of such treatment. Though the stem cells he received were not from a live fetus, but were about to be thrown away, the reaction of the local Pentacostal Minister warned him of death threats from the community that believe both stem cell research and its connected issue of abortion, from which some stems cells are derived, are immoral. Later, he came around to Atchinson's belief as did the community which responded with concern and aid to the family. Nevertheless, this set off great debate among opponents.

Rayan's budget bill which the House passed yesterday is another example of false morality, in this case that the budget deficit is more important than the public services, in particular Medicare, the elderly and poor need to keep alive. Ryan and his Republican supporters would rather protect the rich than serve the poor, elderly, and indigent. The Tea Party and Republican leaders in the House and Senate have put the social and health program they want to destroy as a moral cause they must win. In this case, morality may very well result in the their defeat in the '12 elections and guarantee the re-election of the President whom both leaders pledged to defeat as their prime governance goal when the the new Congress took over.

In both cases, morality destroys the equity and free speech the Constitution provided. Abortion is "stare decisis", meaning it is the law of the land. No similar ruling by the Supreme Court has been rendered about stem cell research, though medical researchers have found ways to avoid using stem cells from abortions.

What jumps out of these recent explosions of false morality is that personal decision making about terminating a fetus and being restored to health by way of stem cells application is invaded. More to the point this false morality is a burden on society that must bring up unwanted children and find expensive ways to take care of indigent people who might be brought to health by advances in science. The impact of this false and very abstract morality is that it does harm to a wide swath of humanity.

My point of this raging is that few if any take into account the widespread after-effects of applications of "false morality", or that some commonly accepted Judeo-Christian principles have been breached in a very serious way. These breaches are not really political. They are at the center of true morality, which is, in the end, to do no harm.

 

 

 

 

Keith Olberman

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Keith Olberman is the last "Angry Man" of what I call "opinion journalism. Some of us "older folks' remember and read and seen the film from the book of the same title by Gerald Green. The book is a family doctor, Green's father, a good one, a cranky man because of the lies, corruption, and injustices that he saw all around him that outraged him. He was, above all, a moral man. You could be describing Keith Olberman.

There is no question that Keith acted "over the top" regarding his very strong opinions, in particular his feuds with former bosses and some of the most heinous right wing talk show hosts, notably Bill O'Reilly. Like Gerald Green's angry man, Keith shined his strong journalist light on "what is really doing", or, for the most moral of us it was as close to the "truth" as you can get. 

The standard response to Keith's aggressive search for what's really going on is that he is a "leftie". It is the standard tactic to scare the public away from a person, a kind of branding akin to the too often used political label "socialist". His reply to such charges is: "I am an American".

What has happened to "Americans" in the last two years is scandalous. Lies about the birth place of President Obama; a serious revival of racism; a different kind of ethnocentrism mainly directed a immigrants mostly "of color"; the cheating and profiteering of the banking and financing community that are largely responsible for the economic meltdown, that has used TARP funds to gamble some more and pay themselves bonuses; the pledge by the incoming Republican House majority to reverse Obamacare that already benefits its constituents; and the massive moral confusion so many people, faced with economic disaster or not, feel as to what is good and bad, right and wrong.

To many this defense, this disposition of our moral confusion, of what I have written is often termed "soft". What is "hard" is the need and exercise of hegemony that reflects America's strength, competitiveness that pushes out "the small people', the disregard of people in need because they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and, lately, the assassination of a member of Congress whose democratic politics burn in the minds of Arizonans and may have contributed to the hate of the shooter, though the connection is weak. But the America of Keith Olberman is about "equity" and "fairness" that is far more inclusive than the tough behavior of those who want to silence him.

It is time to look aside from Keith's sometimes outrageous pursuit of "the truth", and visualize what he means by being "an American.

 

 

The Mid Term Election Madness

Monday, October 18, 2020

At 74 my memory of past nutsy mid-term national elections has faded. But a cursory look backword does not reveal the level of madness of the 2010 mid-term elections. Simply, the resentment against Washington and President Obama is mostly about the economy. 'Why didn't you give us jobs?", Mr. President seems to be the very loud undertone to every political persuasion from far right to far left. The Republicans lie and say demeaning things about the President. The Tea Party utters the most ridiculous and strangely Nazi style prescriptions for how to run a central government. And, as the case with every re-election period, even  the Democrats are both divided and trying to distance themselves from Obama.

The President has achieved much in two years to correct socio-economic imbalances, re-regulate the banks and investment houses that got away with murder during the Bush era and still think it's a matter of time before things go back to where they were before they caused the crash. And there is health reform, though seriously compromised by the health insurance industry, at least a stepping stone to get things under control. And other important policy successes, not legislative, dealing with international problems. Peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians may be a fantasy, but at least the important issues are on the table and accomodations or none are choices that have to be openly made.

The real stumbling block is truth. No-one at either political extreme seems to know what that is. I wonder somtimes whether the Republicans and the Tea Part have any idea they have come to believe  their own lies. I also wonder whether the Democrats running for Congress have any idea that their distance from Obama, which they choose to exercise to coincide with their districts' political leanings, is about abandoning the very serious political goals Obama erected to change the entire nature of politics at the federal level. Most of the old white guys still think that the President is out of touch with their reality of smoke-filled rooms, merely an image of many years ago, and decisions made without any tranparency at all. The fact of the matter is that they are out of touch to the extent that the electorate doesn't really want of that anymore and instead would prefer tackling the economic problems of employent or unemployment.

So, though the outcome of the mid-term elections ostensibly is a prescription for the President's second term aspirations, it is more about the state of madness and misrepresentation that have been fomented from all sides of the political spectrum. But that is not the level of subtletly the media would engage. So, we are looking at rather the panoply of lies, both big and small, put in action by both the left and the right. For the unsophisticated and/or confused voter class, these distinctions are too subtle. So, we are left with how the winds blow when the nut class right wing takes their seats in the next Congress. Beware of statement bearing too many lies and little truth.

President Obama Cannot Be Fairly Judged by the Opposition of the Republicans and the Tea Party That Have Bottled Up His Agenda by Spreading the Big Lie

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The big lie that has been spread both by the right wing media and the retreat by former pro-Obama media columnists, moderators, and commentators has been confused with the integrity of the Obama Presidency. They have destroyed his success by associating his programs and legislation with "socialism", big government, big spending, and similar phrases of disdain and disrespect for his office. The talking and writing class have decided that Obama's score in passing legislation that coincides with his pre-election goals is an evaluation of Obama as President of the United States. 

How can he succeed when even his own Democratic party doesn't support him and worries more about the mid-term elections than serving the voters that put them in office? They, too, along with a large part of the voting public have bought into the Big Lie, which has now become universally accepted truth. To support the President in passing the health reform bill is tantamount to losing the election. 

All of this may be "reality" that has taken root because it's easier for the voting public to accept a media bite the conservatives have put together to damn Obama and his health reform, as one example, than it is to try to understand what it's all about. I reject that Obama has not gone out to the public to sympathize with their plight. Each effort is criticized by the Big Lie authors. If the legislation is complex, muddy, and hard to understand, it is the fault of Obama's efforts at bi-partisanship. His tactic is a smart one, because it puts the responsibility for legislating at the feet of the legislators. That's what they are supposed to do. This is an uncomfortable turn-about from the usual and old politicsal tactic of brow-beating and offering pork by the President. Change is hard. And Congress would rather rely on the old politics than consider that the legislative environment needn't be that way. 

The summary of all of this is that Obama cannot be judged by the standards of his opponents. And the columnists that keep score of success and mostly failures, and depict the passage or failure of health reform as the turning point in his Presidency are using old standards of Presidential leadership. This is one case of where just about everyone cannot truly evaluate Presidential leadership. He cannot be an LBJ, because the opposition would get him for being a dictator, or, worse, a Hitler. So, he is who he is, a model of integrity and a change agent that they don't get, and so he is a failure, weak, ineffectual. They're dead wrong.

Eddie Crist and Obama's Afghanistan Policy

Saturday, October 17, 2009

This morning's Washington Post features an article and Post editorial that seem unrelated but have the common theme of "wanting to do the right thing but can't get it right". The first is about a child criminal Eddie Crist. The second is still another prescription for an Obama Afghanistan policy that works.

Eddie Crist, following a crime of drugs, assault, and other anti-social behavior is caught up in the juvenile justice system in our Nation's Capital. He is sent for drug rehab which he does not complete. Then, later, to a foster home, only to escape to eventual commit murder. What would have prevented this chain of events?

Probably nothing much. And why? Because the boy's ties to a highly criminal peer group and the values of a criminal life were so ingrained that no amount of better solutions could have successful, even assuming the best care he could have received had the District government been committed to it. By the time Eddie reached his teen years, his very strong commitment to his peers was firmly ingrained. He knew no other way of life, which he viewed with suspicion and rebelled against.

The lead editorial, "Second Chance", lays the blame for current political unrest following the corrupt reelection of Karzai on Obama. His second chance is to influence Karzai to drop his corrupt ties to the drug trade and warlords and then follow with a commitment to more troups to turn the Taliban away. The first suggestion to strengthen ties with Mr. Karzaii to lead him to govern more democratically is very similar to how little influencce the DC government had to change Eddie Crist's life. Too ingrained cultural and political practices make Karzaii unmovable. More troops will accomplish the goal of convincing Afghanistis and Karzaii of the US commitment to making a better world for them. But both Karzaii and "them" have no understanding of democracy, substituting opium poppy growing for a similar profit crop.

While supplying Eddie Crist with better and well monitored treatment and rehab may have resulted in a less recidivist experience, no country can impose a set of cultural values and political behavior on another country. For at least a thousand years, Afghanistan has been invaded and occupied by many countries and we have today to reflect on whether any of those influences have reversed behaviors that continue corruption and further resistance to still another invader/occupier, the US.

I have not mentioned the very negative actions that Pakistan has taken to stop the flow of Taliban and arms that have kept unrest in Afghanistan. It's just more of the same, one weak nation state interfering with another weak not nearly nation state.

Aghanistan is a bad investment. If there is a need for US presence there, it should be to train troups, who also very anti-western allegiances, and to influence the growth of a legitamite economy

 

Why Obama is Having Such a Difficult Time: Changing World Wide Behaviors

Sunday, September 27, 2009

A great deal of media time has been devoted to the role racism has played in the objections by Congress mostly and the well financed lie-mongers to Obama's universal health care goal. As has also been chewed over, another factor is the objection and fear of the massive changes he proposes in just about every sector of daily life. If you are laid-off, male, of color, and in your fifties, there is a good chance future employment may be impossible, demeaning, and below past incomes.

Underlying all of these vey real and very frightening conditions and embarrassing behaviors is that "the game" is changing, irrespective of efforts to keep things the same. And there is the underlying belief by many that things will go back to where they were pre-meltdown. That last on is fanatasy!

One of the leading indicators of the inevitability of this game change is that there will be increasing bank failures or bankruptcies and that, as a result of more reduced availability of both short and long-term credit, there will be increasing unemployment. In the same way as Japanese bankers have resisted to resolve "bad loans" and to continue to extend credit to failed enterprises, American bankers have looked the other way to their "bad loans" and have not dealt with negatively priceless credit default swaps that are still on their books and that seem to go unreported. What else did Obama's stress tests not report about these problems that would leave many big banks "insolvent"? All of this is covered over by reports of quarterly profits and money for less outrageous, but nevertheless outrageous, bonuses that seem to reward accomplishments to garner fees and to invent derivatives on life insurance policies. Who among them is getting credit for changing the game to chart a less risky but still profitable future? Watch out! There will be calls for more bail out federal monies.

The federal government's investment in the insurance, banking, and automobile sectors is based on some sort of quid pro quo that there will be no more of what brought them down. But, in the meanrtime, there is little evidence that different profit and product goals have been seriously studied or planned to be implemented. The advertisements for American made automobiles claim that the new vehicles are, all of a sudden, much more fuel effficient and now "green". More of the same old game using faddish words and catch phrases to convince the public that change is already underway.

One of the most important potential game changes that is not yet so evident or forthcoming is military and policy decbates about our conduct of the Afghanistan war and the tone of political reactions to the possibility that the US may "pull back". It's not just that we are wasting human lives and increasing the national debt in a country more corrupt than Vietnam with Taliban financiers everywhere and dangerous influcences by Pakistan. It is that even President Obama who has previously taken the position that this is the "important war" has to deal with these facts that have become more obvious. Many advisers have proposed shifting the role of the military away from counterinsurgency to training local forces. Assuming he chooses this option, how does Obama reverse himself to deal with these stark realities, and deal with the heat from the same folks who are trying to destroy him on the health care issue?

There is little help from the chattering class and experts to explain and support the notion that this war highlights the futility of war and the fantasy that the US can build viable economies and democratic practices in places where the new American sponsored government wants to keep things the same corrupt way. More to the right there are the usual suspects like Bill Kristol and the persistent team of  outspoken conservatives that believe in their hearts that to deny additional troops (that eventually leads to a political hole we got into in Vietnam) is nothing short of a retreat from winning the war and a threat to our national security. The real threat to our national security are those friends and foes we have in the Middle East that are supporting not only Al Qaeda and the Taliban but a host of other terrorist groups we monitor but do not reveal as different and even minor threats. But enough of these unreported groups can put together enough resources from these donors to deliver what is commonly called a "dirty bomb" to anyone they choose. Obama is, like most politicans, still focused on American power to combat the enemies that our media continue to milk for sales of one sort or another, whether they be newespapers, TV, blogs and so on.

But even here there is slight evidence that the game about war is changing. Though very late, after amost 8 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is finally a lot of attention by the media on the debates in the White House and in the military about continuing the current so-called mission in Afghanistan. What is surprising about this sudden awareness of alternatives to outright war is the amount of detail, not enough in my book, about the realities of a very corrupt recent election of corrupt Karzai and his family ties to drug-dealing and to the war lords who have a great stake in keeping the status quo going on in the same way it has been in play for centuries, even millenia.

My friends call me an uncontollable optimist on the matter of "the game". Please do not confuse what I think is the inevitable change in the game with other hardened and somewhat naive liberals that change must be forced as the result of the tribulations that economic recovery will necessitate. In my mind, not unlike the reasons for the fall of the Iron Curtain, we, including the Defense Department and the bankers/financiers, just can't afford to go on the way we have been doing since the end of WWII. to do so is to encourage more melt-down and the loss of America's standing abroad.

It has been clearly demonstrated that the private financial system is just as corrupt, self-driven, unmindful of risks to investors and clients as they and the rest of the private sector accuse government of being of being a blundering giant that wil take all of our freedoms and at the same time continue to be inefficient, meddliing, and corrupt. The most damning piece of evidence on the private side is the forces that "caused" the meltdown. "Caused" is a blame word that unfortunately applies in this case. The most damning piece of evidence of government corruption, in particular fomented by the previous administration that took things to their extreme, is that the Fed, in particular, just wasn't watching the meltdown happen but, as its Chairman testified, was surprised.

I am not going to repeat the prescriptions for changing the game that have been flying around the media and have merit. My concern is that there will be great difficulties finding the right people to not only do the dirty work of overseeing in the most complete way changing the game. My concern is also that instead we may find ourselves unable to imagine a better way. We have been so dysfunctional for so long that people have gotten used to conflict, war, inaccessbility to social equity and the chance to resurrect and expand the meaning of "inalienable rights" that we may experience a long "grey" period as the Japanese have. Obama has so frequently laid out his vision of America's future that his words have gotten "cold" and unbelievable to too many voters, e.g. his falling polls numbers. But at the same time, there is little publicity about him that reinforces my belief that he is the only leader of the highest quality in the world who can start to take us all by the hand and walk us slowly toward a different life in our own country.

The Worst of Times, The Best of Times

Wendesday, December 17,2008

This year will go down in the history books as "when everything fell apart". It is also a kind of reckoning that has exposed not just greed but bad judgment on the part of just about everything and everyone. It proved that goernment was asleep when it should have "been minding the store" and that the private sector, the vaunted"market place", is just as inefficient and inept as it claims governemnt is. The questiion is who and with what ideas will be able to chart a direction where the most will benefit. My personal opinion is that nothing will change until the government, private sector, and voters are schooled in and believe that: 1) War and violence don't work to change anything or anyone's culture, unless the goal is to destroy and completely rebuild the society of the enemy completely as we thought we did at the end of WW II; 2) Businesses have to abandon their reliance on the market value of their stock which invited greed, corruption, and the breadown of the financial system that profits from fees, complex financial instruments, and leverage without a comprehensive analysis of risks to themselves, the market place in general, and the consumer: 3) Comprehensive and efficient standard health care and housing for all income groups are inalienable rights; 4) A totally revamped auto industry that can develop, build in the US, and sell fuel efficent, environmentally safe, and dependable vehicles at a price that can compete with foreign auto comanies ; 4) Tax and direct subsidies yield the greatest benefits to the most people; 5)  And so on.......... Unless we aggressively embark on programs as clearly identified national and federal government initiatives and goals, we will repeat the worst of our history.

The best of times is the election of one of the  most unique Presidents of the United States, Barack Obama. His political goals, his unique politics, charisma, active listenting, and his abililty to manage his cabinet promise the achievement of a different America that will be respected, not feared by the rest of the world. That means the revamping of the role and functioning of government to do its job as guided by legislation and leadership and to constantly monitor and regulate, where necessary, all programs in a  business like manner. The bad times have provided an opportunity for this great man, Barack Obama, to begin to right things and to create a different moral atmosphere to the greatest benefit of the most people equitably.

Racism, the Obama Candidacy Campaign, Community

Monday, May 20, 2008

Never since the 1960 John F. Kennedy campaign has there been such a focus on the dividing lines between the candidate and the general population. In 1960, the dividing line was Kennedy's Catholicism. The underlining fear then was that the Pope would be telling Kennedy what to do, thus ignoring the dominant culture then of white, male, Anglo-Saxons.

In this tumultuous Democratic candidacy campaign, the dividing line is race. It's right out there. And it's not just Obama's membership in Rev. Wright's church and the inappropriate things Wright said that could have destroyed Obama's chances. It's not just Obama's meeting at age 8 with a then Weatherman, now professor. It's not just the media's attention to these matters and the supposed opposition of white working class males and older voters to a "black president". It's not just the feminists who support Hillary because she is linked to improving the status of women and because "It's time for a woman president." It's not just Hillary's charge of elitism in connection with Obama's remarks at a supposed fundraiser and her ex-president husband's remarks that have tarnished his reputation among the "black community". It's all of these undercurents and more that are in play in this historic campaign.

But the underlying fears are that, as in the case of Kennedy's Catholicism, that President Obama would be listening to the radical voices similar to that of Reverend Wright and, that, as a result, there would be a wholesale revolt by the Africa-American population against past and present racial oppressors he would foster. Obama is seen by some, to draw this picture to expose its extremes, as the hypnotic spy for the black community who is going to displace the white population from their seats of power, old-style politics, and cultural dominance.

This last fear is at bottom tied to the broad issue of race. At the political extremes of the right-wing of the Republican party are strongly held beliefs that the authors of the Constitution, all white men, Christians, mostly wealthy, land and slave owning, meant that its provisions were for people like them. Further, the media has reported that the conservative right wing of the party believes that everyone else in this country are "only guests". Not only blacks but even immigrants who have become citizens and wholesale participants in society fall into this category.

An Obama presidency inevitably means that these cultural biases and the old politics of WASP dominance, back-biting, ideological jousting, and decisions make in secret, have to move aside for something very different. Obama pledges that he wants to form a community of people with diverse everything to confront and to solve together common problems. In its purest sense, that means holding in abeyance, if not pushing aside, those beliefs and practices which prevent even identifying the problems and, thus, not solving them. Whether any of Obama's goals become reality, there is the potential for a great shift from what divides community to that of what brings a community together. And that means enormous adjustments in the politics of governance. Obama threatens to take away the sticks and stones, gossip, false claims, self-denial, and dominance through intimidation from the dominant political culture, i.e. "the old politics".

There will be great tumult. And I say, "Let the fun begin".