From all across the nation and around the world, messages of compassionate solidarity have poured forth, many of them through writer Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign.

There has also been an escalation of the debate about how society, and schools in particular, should handle the issue of bullying. We may disagree about the particulars, but I think there is widespread consensus that the kind of society we’d like to build is not one in which pathological harassment—especially among children—goes unnoticed.

The ignorant snots in New Jersey who surreptitiously filmed Tyler Clementi having sex with another student and then broadcast their handiwork are just that: ignorant snots. They would also be ignorant snots if they’d filmed Tyler with a girl, and they’d still be ignorant snots if Tyler hadn’t tragically offed himself. Likewise, the sniveling twits in Minnesota who chose to direct their energies toward making Justin Aaberg’s life as difficult as possible would also be sniveling twits if Justin were still with us. These kids did not suddenly become maladroit asshats at the moment their victims abandoned ship.

But, to be honest with you, I’m not nearly as concerned about snots and twits being snots and twits as I am about vibrant young people ending their lives because of said derelicts. The issues are directly related, but are not inseparable. If a person chooses to harass another, that’s his or her fault, and he or she should be held responsible for it.

The same goes, though, for anyone who commits suicide. And almost all of us have stood hypnotized in the face of that deceptively tranquil abyss at one or more points in life. When that happens, you back away slowly. You look at something else. Maybe go volunteer at a homeless shelter, or go weed the yard, or anything, really.

It strikes me that we probably need to be directing at least as much effort to supporting and empowering young people as to building programs and committees and other bureaucratic infrastructures to combat the bullying which has been going on among human offspring for thousands of years and will likely continue in some form or another for thousands more. There is room for improvement in both areas, but ask yourself which approach is healthier and has a better chance of success: educating and toughening up kids who are being trained to believe that their sexual orientation makes them victims, or accelerating the transformation of our schools into mini-police states?

Teachers who turn a blind eye to repeated cruelty and harassment need some further education themselves. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I am saying that “fixing the schools” is in no way a treatment of the root problems here.

So my message to troubled teens is this: It can get better, it really can. And it will start to get better when you look to yourself for answers.

It’s not your fault that some of your peers behave like idiots. It’s not your fault that sometimes society looks the other way in the face of cruelty. It certainly wasn’t Tyler Clementi’s fault that two of his “friends” mistook abject indecency for cuteness. They don’t deserve to be defended. But the fact remains that they did not push Tyler off that bridge.

One of the hallmarks of being a mature, centered individual is distinguishing what you can’t change from what you can change, and learning to focus on the latter. And it really is best to get started learning that lesson before deciding to go to sleep forever. In fact, you will still be working on this assignment as long as you’re alive. At no point will you ever feel completely and utterly at peace with yourself. If you do, check your pulse and get back to me. Irritability, in the biological sense, is a trait common to all living organisms, from paramecia and pine trees to persons.

I’d like to let you in on a little secret: what societies consider “normal” or “acceptable” changes over time, and it also changes from one person to another in the same time. The people who live next door to you in one direction may not care if you’re a boy that likes other boys, or a girl that likes other girls—it’s possible they might even envy your self-actualization—while your neighbors in the other direction may consider you condemned to eternal damnation because of it, and may try pretty diligently to get you to think just like they do, because of their heartfelt concern for your immortal soul.

It’s very difficult to deal with being “different.” I’m not making light of it. People will call you names, or worse, and it hurts. Sometimes it can hurt more than anything else. And as long as they feel they’re getting something out of it, they’ll continue. Isn’t that a bitch?

So what is the best response to this kind of inanity? It depends on the situation. Sometimes it really is best to do nothing; sometimes it really is best to ignore asshats like the insignificant insects they are. And sometimes it’s not—sometimes you have to fight back, either alone or with others like you. There is a time and place for going to your teacher, or your principal, or your parents, and saying, “Look, I don’t know how to deal with this.” And though many will cringe to hear it, and though I think it’s probably very rarely the smartest choice, there is a time and place for just breaking someone’s face.

Because, unfortunately, some people are tactile learners only.

One problem is this: it’s very difficult not to internalize the negative things that people might say about you over and over again. When someone gets beat up, verbally or physically, a common reaction is for that person to end up feeling that he or she somehow deserved it. As much as we like to pretend otherwise, we are not entirely rational beings. But if you identify that tendency, and say to yourself “No—that’s stupid—I won’t do that, I am not that,” well, that’s a step in the right direction, at least. The kind of confusion we’re talking about here is the result of bottled up, misplaced anger. As different as they may be in virtually all other respects, one thing that all of the world’s major religions and psychoanalytic traditions agree on is that anger is self-destructive. To paraphrase what Buddha is supposed to have said, “Harboring anger is like picking up  a flaming coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else—it is only you who will be burned.”

In no situation is hanging yourself or jumping from a bridge the best response. Because however much you may think those bullies have gotten under your skin, by taking your own life, you’ve just hurt everyone who cares about you much, much more. You’ve taken pieces of them with you that they can never get back. And you’ve taken from yourself something that you can never get back.

Let me tell you another secret: in the vast majority of cases, shithooks don’t really care what you like to do with your private parts. You’d be surprised, in fact, how little people in general care about whether you like girls, or boys, or both. Sure, they can get all worked up about it if their pastor or their favorite politician gets them rolling on it. We’re really good at thinking what others tell us to think—and somehow there are those who still doubt that we’re monkeys at heart. Luckily, we’re capable of being much more than that.

All a bully cares about is getting a reaction from his victim which will enable him to feel better about his own gaping insecurity. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if you don’t give a bully what he’s looking for, he’ll  look elsewhere. And if he experiences that obliviousness enough, he’ll learn to keep his misery to himself until he finds a healthier way to deal with it.

You should also be aware that you live in a society which encourages you to wrap up the bulk of your ego in your sexual activity. In my opinion, if we’re going to change anything about society which is going to help put an end to this kind of discrimination and harassment, it will be that. I sometimes think it’s taken for granted that this is just a part of human nature. And it’s true that, as organisms with hormones, we are easily mesmerized by the pretty lights of sex and sexuality. But our culture also encourages many young people to become sexual beings way, way ahead of schedule, and the subdivision of human beings into separate sub-species based on their preference of sex partner at any given time is far from natural, and you can empower yourself by refusing to stand for it and choosing not to embody it in your own existence.

If you’re safe and responsible, you can choose to get it on with boys, or girls, or both, or—newsflash—no one at all. It’s up to you. There’s probably some genetic component to the choice you’ll feel most comfortable with, but then again there are genetic components to all kinds of behavioral patterns. It doesn’t mean we don’t have brains and can’t make decisions, can’t try things or choose not to try them.

Maybe you’re concerned about what your family’s, or your own, religious beliefs say about being attracted to people of the same sex. I can only repeat something that has been often noted elsewhere: many of those same traditions also advocate publicly stoning unruly children, eating certain things at certain times of day, punishing adultery with death, the silence and complete obedience of women in many contexts, and so forth. People ignore the parts they don’t like, and they do it all the time, no matter what they say. How you interpret a given religious tradition, or if you follow one at all, is your choice and your business. You have to take responsibility and ownership of that. It doesn’t make it easy, but it does put you in control.

Maybe you’re worried about what your friends and family will think of your sexual behavior. Again, there’s no easy answer, but let me assure you of this: anyone who truly cares about you and is deserving of being in your life will come around eventually if not immediately. You may have to allow them space and time; you may have to get through some serious emotional hurdles. But you must also be true to yourself and remember that if you can’t respect and love yourself, you can’t really respect and love anyone else.

So feel free to do your thing without feeling that you’re marked for life. You can “be gay” without wearing extremely tight clothes or listening to Lady Gaga all the time, although that’s fine if it’s your cup of tea. You can “be straight” without buying a pickup truck, a gun rack, and covering your walls with centerfolds. You are who you decide you are; you are not who society says you need to be based on what you do with those things down there. There is a difference between Planet Television and Planet Earth.

The only thing I would advise you to be, without qualification, is safe.

And since—like Tyler and Justin—you only get one go at life, it’s best to make yourself comfortable in your own skin as quickly as you can. The alternatives are not very attractive.

There is always someone you can talk to, and we all need help finding ourselves. Don’t be a martyr. Be an example.

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The BBC News reports:

Mr Obama acknowledged “sensitivities” surround the 9/11 site, but said Muslims have the same right to practise their religion “as anyone else”.

“Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable,” Mr Obama said.

Since a New York developer announced plans to build a 13-storey Islamic community centre and mosque about two blocks from the former World Trade Center site, prominent Republican politicians and a host of conservative pundits have attacked the project.

Some relatives of people killed in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 are also opposed to the plan. . .

. . .[Obama] told the group of US Congressmen, government officials and foreign dignitaries that America’s tradition of religious tolerance distinguishes it from “our enemies”.

“Al-Qaeda’s cause is not Islam,” he said, “it is a gross distortion of Islam”.

The President’s defense of the project has been hailed by those who understand the symbolic significance of such an endeavor, which reaches back to the foundations of the United States as a diverse, intercultural nation built upon religious and ideological freedom.

But it will fuel further dissent among those who can only view a mosque in lower Manhattan as an “Islamic triumphalism,” to quote former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, or a “stab in the heart,” as former Republican Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin labeled it—those who do not understand or refuse to acknowledge the clear, gaping difference between extremist acts of terrorism and a largely peaceful global religion.

If the actual ‘Ground Zero’ site were being transformed into a replica of the Qa’aba, we might have a serious issue to discuss. But the construction of an interfaith community center several blocks away—in what is after all one of the most diverse and thriving communities in the United States—is hardly more than cannon fodder for conservative polemics bent on galvanizing the nation’s overwrought Right.

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There has been dissent among  the families of some victims of the tragedy, and many Americans say the building of a mosque so near a sensitive area is at best in poor taste, and at worst a defiant “triumphalism,” to quote former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R).

In conservative America, there is widespread belief that all Islam is bent on the destruction of the American way of life, on the conquest of the US and the world. And historically, Islam is an aggressive religion: it rose out of western Arabia early in the 7th Century and within a hundred years had spread, mostly through warfare, across the peninsula and far beyond.

This, though, is hardly unique among the Abrahamic religions. One has only to open the Old Testament to discover divine commands of genocide; the entirety of European colonialism was carried out in the language of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Any religion can be distorted into a pretext for violence and conquest.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s Christians, for instance, see themselves at least ideally as benevolent and humble servants of their creator, and mentally discard the more violent elements of the Bible as relics of another time.

Americans must realize that this, too, is the case with nearly all of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, who represent almost a quarter of the global population. Only a tiny minority of Muslims actively commit and condone terrorist acts in the name of Islam—and this minority receives the bulk of the media attention. Just as fringe zealots like self-proclaimed messiah David Koresh or hate-mongering fundamentalist Fred Phelps do not represent American Christianity to the rest of the world, so terrorist acts carried out in the name of Allah should not be viewed as a token representative of Islam.

As Abdulrahman El-Sayed writes in The Guardian:

On 11 September 2001, I sat helplessly in my secondary school classroom, watching live as the twin towers crumbled. The effect on my outlook as an American and a Muslim cannot be overstated. I grieved as both that day – and with me Muslim Americans grieved the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, the discomfiture of a country on its own soil and the purposeful misinterpretation of a creed of peace.

The Cordoba House project, which seeks to construct a mosque and interfaith development centre near Ground Zero, aims to transform that grief into hope. For America, this project embodies an exemplary response to those who question whether our country can stick to its principles in times of pressure, whether our collective national identity supersedes differences in ethnicity and religion, and whether our passionate defence of liberty extends to all Americans. For Muslims, this project represents Islam as the majority of its adherents understand it – a faith that would dignify the human experience through compassion and respect.

Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that the widespread unrest and violence in the Middle East today is historically a byproduct of Western colonialism and economic exploitation, specifically of the Western powers’ reorganization of the region according to self-serving, artificial political borders through the post-World War I Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. Although the conflict certainly bears some relation to religion and is often expressed in religious terms, the fact remains that the hostility of Iran is a direct consequence of the CIA-engineered deposition of Mossadegh in 1953; the problems in Iraq are the legacy of the rule of a US-backed despot; and the frustration and hostility of Palestinians is not due to the mere presence of Jews in the Levant, but to the militaristic expansion and apartheid-like policies of a US-backed Jewish state in Palestine. To ascribe these conflicts to a supposed pathological nature of Islam would be gross oversimplification and, frankly, willful ignorance.

This, nonetheless, is how many ostensibly patriotic Americans choose to see the world.

So one can label Cordoba House as a “triumphalism” while remaining firmly in the mainstream. It is, unfortunately, a far-from-outlandish position in today’s sociopolitical climate. But one could also consider the merits of such an endeavor. The establishment of a mosque near—not on top of, but near—the Ground Zero site could be viewed as a gesture showing America’s commitment to respect for other cultures, as a way of demonstrating to well over a billion peaceful Muslims that we do not fault their rich sacred tradition for the actions of twisted men who abuse that tradition as a platform for destruction and bloodshed.

This certainly appears to be part of the intent of the project’s chief organizers, Ms. Daisy Khan and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Rauf is known as a moderate and conciliatory Muslim figure with a documented history of outreach and bridge-building, not the fomentation of hatred and violence. The site in question is already peacefully functioning as a makeshift mosque.

But however noble the intent and commendable the symbolic value of Cordoba House, even the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out some of the obvious practical problems. As the BBC reports:

The Anti-Defamation League, a group that tries to stop anti-Semitic attacks, condemned those who had displayed bigotry in their opposition to the mosque.

But it went on to state: “The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”

Relatives of 9/11 victims have come down on both sides of the heated debate.

Mike Burke – whose firefighter brother was killed when the towers collapsed – recently told the BBC: “I think the first concern for the families is that the religious beliefs of the terrorists who struck is going to have such a prominent place right around the corner from Ground Zero.

“This is not an… anti-Muslim effort. It is understandably… emotional for them to be suddenly told that around the corner from where their loved ones were killed they’re going to put a mosque.”

There can be no doubt that some Americans—likely including some potentially emotional visitors to the 9/11 site—will continue to look on the presence of Cordoba House with hostility, and its sensitive location could lead to perpetual unrest and attract acts of defacement or worse. Already in the planning stages the facility has provoked at least as must angry grandstanding as constructive debate. In this light, the choice of location seems an unwise safety risk and an affront to common sense.

And yet much more than common sense is at stake here. Even those angry patriots who positively cannot see the conciliatory value of the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ should remember Jesus’ highly counter-intuitive command: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. The point is not that Cordoba House is the product of America-hating fanatic conquerors—the absurdity regularly blasted over much of the American airwaves—but that enmity of this kind is always destructive and regressive. America is by its nature a multicultural nation, and respecting this is not radical progressivism. It is a core American value. Nowhere is this diversity more apparent and more engrained in daily life than in New York City.

Whatever the fate of the project, it has highlighted rampant, raw, and emotionally charged prejudice festering in the American consciousness, and has galvanized the lingering tension and heartbreak left in the wake of the tragedy nine summers past. How the controversy is handled will determine whether America takes a collective step forward, or two steps back.

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Not because of any crazy dream I may have of a Church of God minister somewhere in America waking up one day and realizing that the lesbians who run the dairy farm down the road are his existential equals. More like, because maybe this might help preclude the possibility of a referendum ballot measure declaring that rape is non-consensual sex between a black man and a white woman. All it takes is 52%, apparently.

Dr. Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had this to say about Vaughn Walker’s ruling:

Judge Walker’s decision will be appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, also located in San Francisco — the most notoriously liberal appeals court in the nation. Inevitably, the case will be then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision handed down by Judge Walker, especially as expressed in his findings, was clearly constructed with such appeals in mind.

Thousands of cases make their way through the Federal courts each year. Some are important, but only a few have lasting legal significance. Whatever happens on appeal, the decision handed down yesterday by Judge Vaughn R. Walker will reverberate for decades to come. Yesterday, a very important gavel fell on marriage. The central institution of human civilization suffered a direct hit, and its future hangs in the balance. [Emphasis added by Jesus.]

With divorce rates remaining quite low and actually dropping in states like Iowa and Massachusetts since they have recognized same-sex marriage, it has yet been adequately explained to me how gays getting hitched in any way threatens “the central institution of human civilization.” I would think that legalization of gay marriage might actually help things at least a little by potentially preventing gay men from becoming Baptist youth ministers, marrying, having three and a half children, and later mixing things up with destructive rainbow-colored midlife crises.

People around me seem to keep getting married and having children, and even allowing gay friends and neighbors to babysit their spawn. Shocking! The end is clearly near.

No, I’m afraid what may have taken a “direct hit” is the ability of the “moral majority” to further calibrate law to Old Testament specifications. The Family Research Council—which, you might have heard, attempted to “defend faith, family, and freedom” by trying to get Congress not to object to Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ law—is not going to replace the Supreme Court just yet.

Here’s an idea: how about state governments stop recognizing marriage altogether? The government could sanction same- or opposite-sex civil unions, but cease issuing marriage licenses as such. Weddings could be handled by God and the wedding coordinator alone. Would that stop the earthquakes and hurricanes, or make them worse?

This issue is going before the Nine sometime in the next few years, I feel fairly sure, but what will happen there is anyone’s guess. The appointment of Kagan did not fundamentally alter the political constitution of the Court; furthermore, while Kagan is famously an opponent of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ she also said during her confirmation as Solicitor General that she would defend the Defense of Marriage Act.

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The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the president of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the prime minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the “road map.” The president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: “It’s all Arafat’s fault.” Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber.

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Half of the town of Zhouqu, in the south of Gansu province, was submerged. Water rose to the third storey of buildings and sludge as thick as two metres blocked major roads. Three hundred homes were engulfed by mud in the nearby village of Yueyuan, said an official.

China’s worst flooding for a decade has already killed more than 1,400 people, left hundreds missing and caused tens of billions of pounds in damage across a large swath of the country. About 12 million people have been evacuated.

But last night’s disaster in the Gannan Tibetan prefecture appears to be the worst single incident so far this year. Landslides levelled an area about 5km long and 500 metres wide, officials said, and more than 300 houses collapsed.

Residents rescued about 700 survivors, the state news agency Xinhua reported. Another 45,000 people were evacuated and thousands of soldiers converged on the area to dig out survivors and blast away debris that had created a barrier lake several kilometres long.

Zhouqu town is in a valley. Heavy rain quickly ran off the steep, barren hills, triggering mudslides and swelling the river.

China’s Xinhua news agency has said that rapid flooding and mudslides have rendered the destroyed town of Zhouqu inaccessible to motor vehicles. “We can only use spades and our hands to rescue the buried,” said police officer He Youxin.

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Among many of those who decry any semblance of a comprehensive, socialized single-payer health care system, there seems to be, apart from a fear of the federal government’s incapability to efficiently administrate pretty much anything (there is more than a smidgeon of truth to this as things stand, I’ll grant), a characterization of socialized medicine as an unfair redistribution of wealth. Why should *my* taxes go to pay for *that guy’s* appendectomy? or what-have-you. Just more taxing and spending. And so on.

The “moral majority” in the US has been historically built largely upon good old-fashioned Scots-Irish values of self-reliance. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though it has its dark side. A little more of that kind of thinking would do many of us some good, myself included. So the conventional wisdom among many goes something like this: honest, hard-working folks ought to be able to buy their own damned insurance. If you need a “handout,” you need to get off your butt and get a job. Et cetera, et cetera.

The problem is that this admirable ethos does not provide a rational basis for excluding, in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful state, health care from the core of fundamental citizens’ rights. Now, the existence of such rights is widely recognized among even the most enthusiastic government bashers. You don’t often hear people ask why their tax dollars should go to help pay for roads or schools or fire departments, for instance, as has been often noted in the dialogue on health care.

One might ask: if we’re going to socialize health care, why don’t we also completely socialize food and housing? The socialization of medicine is viewed in many quarters as a giant slide down a slippery slope to cataclysmic government control of the universe right down to subatomic particles, as a landmark along the cheery way to a welfare state.

Well, t’aint necessarily so, you see. Because, if you’re in reasonably good health, you can go to school, you can go to work, you can do what it takes to be a productive little solider. You can earn money and go buy yourself some food and a place to live, and maybe even a litter box for your cat.

You can’t do those things nearly so well if you have a systemic infection, or can’t afford chemotherapy. No pursuit of happiness for you. And even in perfect robustness of constitution, you can’t go to the doctor’s office with your paycheck and buy some health for the hard weeks ahead.

Health care is somewhat unique among fundamental rights in this sense. It is a basic prerequisite to functioning as a human being and a component of civilization. Most of the rest of the world has realized this. If we provide free and compulsory education to young people, and if we provide highways to zip down and police to tell us not to zip quite that fast, then where is the rational basis for taxpayer resentment of investing in universal health care, of all things?

We can come up with plenty of scary scenarios and troubling anecdotes to count against the institution of socialized medicine in the United States. As it happens, we can also consult some compelling success stories. Britons may get chapped by irresponsible spending in the NHS, but they sure do keep a’comin’ back.You might have heard that Canadians sometimes cross the border to receive cutting-edge treatment for chronic illness, but you might not have heard that even many perfectly healthy Canadians make sure their nationalized plans will be in effect during any travels in the US. French hospital-goers seem at least reasonably content with a national health care system that actually covers more costs as the elderly or gravely ill go downhill. Imagine that.

We have a great many obstacles to overcome. It is salient to ask how the federal government could manage even basic universal care when the systems already in place are so inefficient and corrupt. Do you smell anything funny? I smell lobbyists.

Certainly we can point out that funding even a rudimentary form of public health care would be easier if we weren’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the world’s most luxuriantly corpulent military contracting apparatus.

But if someone has a good argument as to why health care should not be considered a fundamental right essential to the pursuit of a decent quality of life, I’ve yet to hear it.

H O M E ▪ A b o u t ▪ W h e r e  i s  A s p h o d e l ?

(I inadvertently sat through an entire episode of Glenn Beck yesterday, Cthulhu preserve me.)

I did; I’m sorry. I was barrelin’ through hospital bills and scholarship letters and I didn’t even notice what channel was on until it was too late.

For one hour, the television blared an endless parade of inanities. There was a lot of discussion about blood coming out of people’s eyes and running down their faces. At one point Beck asked his viewers at home to stand while he read from a 1950s Air Force manual, maybe? Yes—yes, that did happen. I can’t remember if that was before or after our nation’s most celebrated professional hysteric enjoined me to promise my family that I would never let progressives tell me 2 + 2 = 5.

Methinks mayhap that’s a reference to 1984, but I can’t be certain.

Progressives, you realize, were literally sent to destroy America (by the Old Ones, possibly). They tried this once before in the 1960s, in the guise of “dope-smoking hippies,” with mixed results. Now they want to fiscally obliterate the police forces of U.S. cities while preserving their snooty opera houses, to quote the maestro. Dear old Glenn took time out of his frantic concerns to explain to those of us who’ve trouble distinguishing Il barbiere di Siviglia from Le nozze di Figaro that opera houses are like Mountain Dew and Cheet-ohs in the Great American Pantry, while our men and women in blue are best represented by milk and organics.

Wait. Does this mean that if I get real, real stoned and come down with a case of the opera munchies, but am rudely interrupted by the local fuzz en route to the theater, I can politely ask to see the police officer’s expiration date? Glenn sure does seem to care about America, like George Washington did, ergo his word must be red-blooded truth. Always did wanna see me one ‘em fancy operas.

Surely I can trust George Washington. (Mental note: US currency should read ‘In George Washington We Trust.’)

Now, this wasn’t my first run-in with Mr. Beck. My GB cherry was unceremoniously popped one afternoon long ago at a Sunday lunch chez my folks, where Fox News is frequently aired at a volume less than conducive to conversation. I’ve seen snippets here and there since. Everywhere I find Fox News on the tube, it seems to be blasting at jet takeoff levels. Fox News must be kind of like the movie Predator—no way to go ‘cept Dolby Surround.

Yesterday, however, was the first time I devoted any serious thought to the phenomenon. How is it, I wondered, scrambling to fill my inner blackboards with scholarly-looking figures and charts, that this vaudevillian vitriol has been completely pWning the prime-time ratings in the US for months on end, with more than three times the viewership of Hardball, Beck’s closest competitor?

After much sweating, putting on and taking off of spectacles, a little bit of screamin’ punctuated by stretches of low moanin’, some cinematographically frustrating pacing back and forth, and maybe even a nice cry or two—see, I love my brain, and I fear for it—I finally came up with an answer: because Glenn Beck is like Indiana Jones with torch in hand, slowly but surely mapping out the subterranean temples of his viewer’s limbic systems.

The limbic system is the primarily sub-cortical part of your brain which handles, shall we say, the more organismic office duties of your central nervous system: things like blood pressure, memory imprinting, sleep cycles, and instinctual gut-wrenching fear of the nameless dread which waits patiently below and beyond. Not things like economics, political philosophy, sociology, and other spurious recreational activities of certain scheming un-American progressive elitists with advanced educations.

That’s how he does it, plain and simple. Watching Glenn Beck writhe and gesticulate before the camera is, I imagine, much the same experience as attending a tent revival conducted by an ex-social studies teacher turned acid-dropping televangelist. No unified message is easily discernable: there is only subtext, décor, and a pervasive, entrancing rhythm.

To be fair, I am on familiar terms with a number of staunchly conservative-minded people, and the majority of them readily admit that Glenn Beck parties too far out past the asteroid belt even for them.

But, you know something? They still watch him. Well, hell! It’s entertaining, for sure. And if you can keep even marginally sympathetic folks entertained for long enough, you can get them to swallow at least some manure.

I’m not claiming that the other mainstream pundits are serenely grazing in celestial pastures of enlightenment. Maddow and Olbermann have both demonstrated a certain degree of proficiency at the limbic lambada. (Mental note: never use that phrase again.)

But there is at least some cohesiveness and sober rationality to what pretty much everyone in the mainstream media who doesn’t run his or her own private outfit on Fox News has to say, you know? We might not always agree with them. Better yet, we might do ourselves the favor of recognizing that the mass-produced American left and right are both just different sides of the same megacorp interests party that has been running the show for a long time now.

Ah, but that is precisely the realization that the mainstream has been carefully crafted to obscure. To paraphrase Chomsky, you’re allowed to argue for either the flag-ripping, God-hating progressives or the back-to-the-Bible-or-back-to-the-jungle fundamentalists. What you must never, ever do, on pain of a visit to Room 101, is question whether or not all of the socially acceptable political discourse is rather shallow and phony. We are, to an alarming extent, living in the dystopia not of 1984, but of Brave New World. There’s no need to take time out from work and the kids to formulate your own opinions thanks to the modern miracle of mass communications.

If you were a Native American, what would be the difference
between Columbus and Hitler?

Chris Hedges: Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn

Joseph Dana writes that Israeli soldiers arrested on Monday afternoon three 14-year-old Palestinian boys walking along a wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in:

At 12pm on Monday August 2nd, three children who had been walking near the wall in Bil’in village were arrested by Israeli soldiers. The three 14-year-old friends Moatasem Ali Mansor, Majde Burnat, and Mohamad Abu Rahmah often take walks near the wall. Today they were detained by soldiers behind the wall for three hours. While behind the wall their families tried to negotiate for their release to no avail. They were then arrested and taken away in an army ambulance. This happened three hours ago, and no ones knows where they have been taken yet. Soldiers claim that the boys were throwing stones.

Palestinian children must enjoy throwing stones almost as much as the IDF loves peppering once-productive Lebanese farms with live cluster munitions (which, by the way, most of the world—with the natural exceptions of the US, China, Russia, and of course Israel—just outlawed.)

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