Ship of State

If We Ignore Climate Change, We’re All on a Sinking Ship

Patricia J. Williams

November 7, 2012   |    This article appeared in the November 26, 2012 edition of The Nation.

A man walks through piles of debris that have not been removed by the Department of Sanitation outside of homes damaged from flooding that inundated the area during Hurricane Sandy in the Queens borough neighborhood of Belle Harbor, New York, November 8, 2012. Reuters/Lucas Jackson

The moment of the Republican National Convention that stands out for me was not Clint Eastwood’s conversation with a chair full of air. Rather, it was when Mitt Romney proudly purported to distinguish his agenda from that of President Obama. Vowing to take “full advantage of our oil and coal and gas,” he went on to make a remarkable contrast. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” he said, smirking and rolling his eyes while the audience roared with derisive laughter. “My promise…is to help you and your family.”

In truth, Obama’s track record of planetary healing hasn’t been all that great. But it was Romney’s sneering dismissiveness of the very thought that revisited me as Hurricane Sandy howled into New York City. I’ve had the same shudder of alarm during every hurricane over the last decade, regardless of who’s in charge, for the political absurdity feels as huge as the tragedies themselves: George W. Bush’s consulting with oil executives to develop climate change policy. Enduring indifference to American infrastructure. Sarah Palin’s anthem of “Drill, baby, drill!” The United States’ failure to sign on to even the weakest of climate change conventions, like the Kyoto Protocol.

Meanwhile, the last two decades have seen a pattern of planetary fever and chills. Studies establish that human activity is causally related to the melting of the Arctic ice, the collapse of fish stocks and the rapid rates of extinction within all classes of life forms. It’s not a question; it is fact.

After 9/11, planes were grounded for three days; since then, climatologists have wondered if a rare spike in the range of daytime and nighttime temperatures in the same period was due to the lack of jet engine “contrails” in the sky. Imagine if we had the political will to ground planes again to further test this phenomenon. Imagine if we had the will to ban driving one day a week.

But peacefully bringing the engines of industry to a halt is not going to happen, neither for experimentation nor for putative healing. In the meantime, we can fight over whether a state should be able to defy federal guidelines and dictate who can build more houses on their shores; whether earthquake disaster relief can be used for hurricane victims; whether one nation should rein in its pollution problem if another won’t do it first.

Or we could see this as a matter of the looming extinction of much of what sustains life forms such as ourselves. There’s much to suggest that unless we do something fast, air quality will continue to deteriorate, temperatures to rise, and oceans to become too acidic to support their present vibrant diversity.

Some argue that individual states and municipalities are better able to decide how to handle disasters, that more jobs will be created that way, serving more local businesses. But making states compete for resources in the face of environmental disasters that do not respect political or geographic boundaries is like having daylight savings time on Fifth Avenue but not on Sixth: it’s inefficient, confusing and costly. And it’s unfair. Most insurance policies don’t cover flood damage anymore, for example; if it’s economically rational for companies not to take that kind of risk, what kind of moral sense does it make for governments—charged with the public interest—not to fill that gap with some kind of safety net?

Few will forget that, during Hurricane Katrina, some residents of the Ninth Ward died not from drowning, but because authorities were apparently given a greater charge to protect property than to save lives. On Danziger Bridge, police shot at an unarmed black family who appeared to be heading toward the higher ground of a white neighborhood. The bridge is a good metaphor for how we might approach a future of droughts, fires and storms. We can sustain our bridges as pathways that link us, or we can burn them and dig deeper moats. We can address climate stress as collective catastrophe, or we can draw a thousand thin blue lines to mark a multiplicity of war zones.

In New York City, 50,000 homeless people need shelter every night. Hurricane Sandy displaced tens of thousands more. Despite exhortations from the mayor, many homeless people resisted going to the shelters—underfunded facilities that deserve their reputation as being madhouses of chaos and assault. Regardless of the forecast, many instead seek refuge deep inside subway tunnels. I wondered about them as those tunnels flooded. Did a welfare system that makes living in a subterranean cave seem like a life-sustaining option send evacuation notices to those hidden colonies in time?

I also thought of the wealthier denizens in the sleek high-rises, whose storm prep meant clearing the shelves at Gourmet Garage. Many of them stayed too, preferring to brave the lack of lights, elevators, heat and water in deference to their fear of public spaces. I confess I was among this latter group, snuggled under the covers in cashmere socks, bobbling upon the fantasy that my end of the Titanic really was “Nearer My God to Thee,” and that there would be lifeboats for my kind.

In the longer term, however, the risk to planetary life places us all onboard a sinking ship. All hands are desperately needed to widen our sense of what’s at stake: Will a tree dying in the forest be heard? Will a bee dying of insecticide be felt as a loss in the human hive? Will humanity see itself—in all its variety—as one species, to say nothing of one species interdependent with many?

There’s nothing wrong with the babble of prayer politicians proffer in the face of disaster, but faith and miracles do not a system of earthly governance make. The very etymology of the word ”republic” is a condensation of res publicae: Latin for the law governing public property, or shared roads, bridges and waterways. After all, even Noah finally got down to the business of building an ark.

To help the hurricane victims, please consider donating to the Coalition for the Homeless or Housing Works.

 

CSPAN Event: Gender, Sexuality, and the 2012 Elections

NEW YORK, NY
Friday, November 9, 2012

Columbia University hosted a discussion on women’s issues in this year’s election and how those issues may be addressed during the upcoming Congress.

Panelists focused on women’s health, reproductive rights, marriage equality, poverty and political participation. They also considered what issues should be at the top of the feminist and LGBT political agenda and how these communities can best affect change in the new presidential administration.

Speakers included Professor and MSNBC host Melissa-Harris Perry and Columbia University Professor Patricia Williams along with Rebecca Traister, Salon.com Columnist and others.

To watch, go to:  

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Gender-Sexuality-the-2012-Elections/10737435772-1/

 

What Romney Means When He Says What He Doesn’t Mean….

Did Mitt Romney Just Endorse Affirmative Action?

Patricia J. Williams on October 19, 2012 – 2:59 PM ET

            “I learned a great deal,“ said Mitt Romney when asked about women’s pay equity during Tuesday’s debate.   He was referring to his term as governor of Massachusetts, when, while assembling his senior staff, he became golly-gee-gobsmacked by the fact that “all the applicants seemed to be men.” Romney was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 till 2007, not the dark ages, so this lack of women in his world seems to have come to him later in life than most. Nor is it a question he seems yet to have asked about the upper management ranks of Bain Capital Private Equity (24 women out of 164 according to their online photo gallery), Bain Capital Ventures (3 out of 36), or the Republican Party leadership for that matter.

But better late than never, right? Clueless, brand-spanking-new Governor Mitt then proceeded to interrogate his staff: “How come all the people for these jobs are all men…” How come, indeed? However in the world? Pray decipher this mysterious riddle.  The answer envelope please: “Well these are the people who have the qualifications.” 

“Well gosh” said Mitt, who apparently lives in a world where “gosh” is acceptable parlance among hepcats, ”can’t we find some women that are also qualified?”  Well gosh yes, Mr. Romney!  And the next thing you know, he and his team were making “a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.  I went to a number of women’s groups and said can you help us find folks?  And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

I can’t do better than the fifty shades of parody that already suffuse the internet, so let me skip over the obvious.  Indeed, the deliciously salacious and show-stopping nature of that particular metaphor has tended to obscure the no less startling significance of what Mitt said next:  “One of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two because I recognize that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes they need to be more flexible.”

Mitt Romney, in other words, would seem to have been endorsing affirmative action.  His own description of what he did in Massachusetts is exactly the practice just argued last week before the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Fisher v. Texas.   Hear it again, paraphrased with race instead of gender:  How distressing! All the applicants appear to be white! Good gracious, can’t we find some blacks and Latinos that could be qualified to be part of the team? Let’s make a concerted effort to seek out some black-people groups and see if they can help us find folks we can recruit into the ranks of Bain Bond-age!  (As an interesting aside, Bain Capital Private Equity has 0 black faces on its portrait gallery of upper management team; Bain Capital Ventures, 1.)

That said, it’s possible that Romney doesn’t understand what affirmative action really is.  To the Republican Party, as well as to many misinformed Americans of other political stripes, affirmative action signifies “unqualified,” as well as “reverse” discrimination, specifically against white men.  Through this smeared lens, integration seems a zero sum game, rather than a process of inclusion for all.  But the actuality of affirmative action means widening a given pool of people considered, by searches and by advertising, and then applying an “all things being equal” or so-called “mild preference” for under-represented groups like women, minorities or the economically disadvantaged.  Again, it is precisely what Romney describes himself as having done.   

But the Supreme Court seems set to strike even that little down.  In the 2007 combined cases of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”   If this overly simplistic logic of “colorblindness” is extrapolated to women’s rights (as in, “I don’t see gender”), then Romney was sexist for so much as noticing that the pool was all-male.  In the Fisher case, where the University of Texas is defending its practice of taking race into mild account to diversify the admission of twenty percent of its class, the Court seems poised to take that logic to precisely such an extreme ideological and anti-remedial end. 

Of course, one of the peculiar features of the current debate around affirmative action is that accusations of “preference” only seem to come into obvious play when the job-seeker is black.  Confusing the issue further has been a very self-conscious tactic on the part of right wing organizations to make women their lead plaintiffs in attacks on affirmative action; indeed all the major cases in recent years have featured white females suing schools for discrimination based on race—as in (Cheryl) Hopwood v. Texas, (Barbara) Grutter v. Bollinger, (Jennifer) Gratz v. Bollinger.  This intentional placement of race and gender on opposite sides of the table disguises the degree to which precisely the same arguments can be—and have been historically–used to defeat women’s quest for inclusion in schools and employment.  Indeed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has written about the then-dean of Harvard Law School’s complaint back in the 1950’s that admitting any women at all was bad for the profession, resulting only in the displacement of more productive male students.

 Thus, the extent to which gender- and color- “blindness” is deployed as a strategy for selectively protecting norms of inequality becomes clearer when one applies that standard across a broader spectrum than race.   It also clarifies the degree to which Romney’s anecdotes during the debate are at factual odds with his policies and executive actions.  Suppose, for example, we just ask if all those women Romney supposedly hired in Massachusetts weren’t displacing “more qualified” men.  Perhaps looking through that filter would explain why, despite Romney’s debate claims, the number of women appointed to public leadership positions actually declined during his governorship.  Suppose, too, that we just re-label all that “flexibility” Romney said women (but not men?) needed, and call it “special treatment” and “special accommodations” and “special favors.” After all, doesn’t whining about having to go home and make dinner for the kids sound awfully like the kind of “entitlement” that his favorite 47% of Americans call for when suffering from a bad case of the “victim”-hood crankies?  Perhaps that lens explains why, six months into his governorship, Romney eliminated the Massachusetts’ Office of Affirmative Action. 

It’s hard to decipher whether Romney is lying about his commitment to integration, or whether, despite his fine education at Harvard Law School, he really doesn’t know what affirmative action is.  After all, as a cultural matter, virtually no American of any stripe thinks to ask what kind of affirmative action put Representative Paul Broun onto the House Committee on Science and Technology when he decries embryology, evolution, and climate science as “lies” delivered from the pits of Hell.  No one thinks to ask if Representative Todd (“legitimate rape”) Akin didn’t displace a smarter, more-deserving black female applicant to Worcester Polytechnic Institute—which school actually granted that numbskull a degree in management engineering.

Regardless of whether Romney is dissembling or just ignorant, there is a more comprehensive ideological logic at work in the answer he gave on Tuesday.

His solution for helping “young women and women of all ages” is:  “We’re going to have employers in the new economy, in the economy that I’m gonna bring to play, that are gonna be so anxious to get good workers they’re gonna be anxious to hire women.”  It will be, he promised, an economy “so strong that employers [will bring] them into their workforce and [adapt] to a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford.”  This dreamy poppycock is absolutely consistent with his and Paul Ryan’s libertarian extremism.  Economic forces alone will make employers want to hire women; there’ll be so many extra jobs they’ll have to hire some women.  Trust the invisible hand…

So let’s just assume for a hot hypothetical second that every woman in the nation were employed.  The precise issue Romney was asked was about pay equity: about all those women doing twice the work of their male peers, backwards and in high heels, but getting paid less for it and being passed over for promotion while the men they train leap over them and up the corporate ladder.  While it was terribly kind of Romney to let his chief of staff go home to do family things, he never answered the question of what executive action he would take to ensure equality of opportunity as a legal matter and of right.  Again, that’s because, as a far-right libertarian, he doesn’t believe there’s a role for government to do anything other than defend the borders and leave businesses to their own devices.  

But left to market forces alone, we have… well, we have what we have:  77 cents to a man’s dollar.  Consignment to jobs that ensure all the women go home in time to make dinner, while the big boys stay on to do the heavy lifting.   Just ask Lily Ledbetter.

Reality Shows

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

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Our Lizard-Brain Politics

Patricia J. Williams | October 10, 2012

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s uses his hands to make a point during the first presidential debate with President Barack Obama at the University of Denver, Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

My cabdriver grew chatty when I asked him to take me crosstown to Columbia. “Do you work there?” he asked. “How much do students pay to attend?” He wanted to know because “in my country, all education is free. I didn’t have to pay to go to university.” I didn’t ask him where he came from, but it could have been any number of places: Norway, Barbados, Brazil, Cuba, Malta, Scotland, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Trinidad and Tobago, Hungary…

He was driving a cab to earn money while he pursues graduate work and was upset by a conversation he’d had with earlier passengers. It was the day after the first debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, and they had praised him for his English and his “articulateness” about politics. But when he mentioned the fact that his higher education had been free, one of them sneered, “So how much was that worth, now that you’re driving a cab in America?”

He wondered aloud at the disdain, flummoxed by the assumption that the value of his education would be understood only in terms of the job he held. His words made me think about a significant shift in American cultural assumptions over the last few decades. Education has become much more of a commodity, with an ever tightening correlation between how much you pay and how knowledgeable you’re thought to be. This feeds a dangerous turn in our attitude toward universal education. “College isn’t for everybody” is an increasingly common political mantra. And if colleges and graduate schools can’t prove an immediate “value added” in boosting one’s salary, then all that learning isn’t “worth the investment.”

My cabbie was on a roll: “Education is not a luxury. It is a necessity for survival, like water and bread and roads and democracy. How can you be part of this world without education?” By now, we had arrived at Columbia’s wrought-iron gates. I paid him, and as I schlepped my bags to the sidewalk, he stuck his head out the window and left me with this zinger: “How can one truly be free if responding to things only with the amygdala?”

Ah yes, the amygdala. The little cluster of basal ganglia that regulates emotional response, sense memory, mood. It was quite an evocative reference, particularly after a presidential debate where a great deal of time had clearly been spent coaching Mitt Romney in the precise vocal intonations and hand gestures of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, millions of dollars’ worth of media punditry was expended not on evaluating the candidates’ empirical claims, but on haruspication of the public’s response to the tilt of heads, the glint in eyes, the twitch of whiskers. The virtual absence of prefrontal cortical activity in post-debate analyses should remind us that without critical thinking, we are not much more than that little nub of neurons that constitutes the lizard’s entire brain.

Critical thinking is the most valuable product of a good education. It allows us to negotiate the world using both the executive functions of our prefrontal lobes as well as the emotional intelligence of our limbic system. A psychologist friend says it’s akin to the power of metaphor: being able to understand comparisons at a deep level means we must be neither hyper-scientistically literal nor awash in one’s feelings, but able to make creative connections among different experiences, languages and worlds. “It’s a process of becoming, of being tried, tested and true,” he says.

But while some of us are worried about the primal pulsings of amygdalae, Republican Representative Paul Broun, a medical doctor who serves on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, is vigorously denouncing “evolution, embryology, big bang theory” as “lies straight from the pit of hell.” Similarly, Republican Representative Todd Akin, an engineer who serves on the same committee, is infamous for his comments questioning the possibility of pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.” It’s tempting to dismiss these statements as simply nonsensical or ignorant, but a truly thoughtful and critical response must uncover all the faulty structures of knowledge that must sustain such belief systems.

“Our political discourse reminds me of The Velveteen Rabbit,” says my friend the psychologist. “It’s about concepts that sometimes come alive by being true.” Come again? I asked him, baffled. And then he read me a passage from that enduring story, in which there is a tension in the nursery between two toy rabbits, one stiff and freshly store-bought, “all white plush with real glass eyes,” and the other, a thoughtful, well-worn existentialist.

“What is REAL?” the Velveteen Rabbit asks.

“You become,” ventures one of the older, wiser toys. “It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily…or who have to be carefully kept. Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby…. But once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

Over here in the land of the Real, politics is not a game of charades, and the empiricism of the claims makes a difference in our lives. I suppose it all comes down to how you define “truth,” to say nothing of education. The bottom line in this election—indeed, what’s literally on the line—is a civil, secular system of governance in which the ability to profit from one’s ideas has always been fueled by a generosity of education. It’s this fundamental notion that has underwritten our civic commitment to public libraries, public schools and universities, public research facilities, public health institutions, affirmative action, the First Amendment, public broadcasting and, yes, even Big Bird.

Elections 2012….

The Emancipation Proclamation at 150: a miracle in need of an encore

Abraham Lincoln was a revered hero to my family, but Martin Luther King’s message is that the fight for justice is never over…

• • Patricia Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 September 2012 16.34 EDT

Martin Luther King Jr: the power of the liberatory word. Photograph: Francis Miller/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Like many African Americans, I grew up thinking of the Emancipation Proclamation as a totemic document. Abraham Lincoln – the ambiguity of his persona notwithstanding – was a kind of god to my family, an immortal whose words sparked a new epoch: a dream made manifest. The Emancipation Proclamation was magic – a tribute to power of naming to call forth something from nothing.

As an adult – and as a lawyer – I now see the Emancipation Proclamation as exemplary not only of the liberatory power of language, but of the complex relation between legal utterances and how they are put into effect by the institutions of government. The commands of executives and the sentences of judges depend on a supporting hierarchy of institutional actors, a faithful community of acolytes, a legion of believers in the justice of a particular system.

The violent word is always relatively easy to enact. For it is a complicated reality of our democracy that the general rituals of condemnation run with extreme efficiency: police, jurors, wardens, legislators coordinate who is disciplined or enfranchised, in or out of incarceration, dead or alive.

The liberatory word, on the other hand – that which commands new life, or orders political regeneration – that word always seems harder, more amorphous. Or is it, perhaps, that we don’t have the institutional hierarchy or community of agents who might be charged with regeneration and social healing?

If not magic then, I do think that the Emancipation Proclamation was a kind of miracle.

Today, we have urgent need of new proclamations from which new miracles might spring. For such a prodigiously endowed nation, the United States has the widest gap between rich and poor, among the most racially segregated educational systems in the developed world, and close to the highest rate of incarceration on the planet. We know this to be true. And yet, 46% of the American electorate support Mitt Romney for our next president – a man who recently disparaged the other “47%” who intend to support President Obama, as “victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it”.

Martin Luther King Jr called the American project an endless moral commitment; that commitment to regeneration seems endangered at the moment. If I had the power of magic words, I would speak into being an Edict of Education, a Provision of Health and Welfare, an Encyclical of Enfranchisement and a Mandate for a Goodly Mixing of our promised Melting Pot.

• © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Warren’s Commission…

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

The Real Risks of Fake Outrage

Patricia J. Williams | September 12, 2012

My friend G. lives on Martha’s Vineyard, an island with a complex social order. During the winter it is among the poorest districts in Massachusetts, but in the summer it vies for position as one of the richest. The year-round population is largely working-class; the summer folk are well-off, and their numbers include more than a few celebrities.

In the last week of August, G. took the ferry to the mainland to stock up on supplies at Walmart; on her return, she took a taxi home from the boat landing. Unlike in New York, the local cab companies are small businesses run by individuals who work other jobs to make ends meet. Four or five rusty vans wait at the ferry dock, and you share a van with anyone else going in your direction.

On this particular trip, G. shared her cab with an elderly couple dressed in full nautical regalia. The woman wore a red blazer and navy trousers; the gentleman sported an ivory-tipped cane, bow tie and a seersucker suit. A man carrying a shoulder-mounted camera with a long telephoto lens was filming the cab as G. boarded—and she assumed that one or the other was a famous novelist, a great diplomat or some long-retired Nobel laureate. As it turned out, however, it was the cab itself that was the main attraction: the cameraman was a Republican tracker for Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren’s opponent in the Senate race. “He’s been following us for days,” the driver said wearily.

“Us” was Martha’s Vineyard Taxi, an enterprise owned by Morgan Reitzas, a struggling musician and part-time fisherman. Reitzas was hired by the Warren campaign to drive her to fundraisers and for sightseeing on the island. Reitzas was caring for his 4-year-old daughter, whom he’d brought along for the ride. When the tracker tried to film the inside of the van, where Reitzas’s daughter was seated, Reitzas ordered him to back away and put his hand over the lens. The resulting footage shows the confrontation, as well as the clattering spin as the camera hits the ground.

A great deal more than the camera went into spin mode. The video was posted online, where it quickly got more than 100,000 views on YouTube. Within hours, the executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party had denounced Reitzas as a violent “campaign aide” to Warren and falsely asserted that Warren had passively witnessed the entire encounter. In response, her campaign issued a statement: “The person featured in the video was not a member of the Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts staff. He is a cab driver. Elizabeth did not see what happened.”

The blogosphere greeted this with snide innuendo. “Consider the subtext behind ‘He is a cab driver,’” wrote a blogger at American Thinker. “The impression given is that the cab driver, as would be expected of a little person who was not a Harvard professor, was unknown to Ms. Warren.” The Brown campaign—which in April got police to remove a Democratic tracker from an event—sent an unctuous letter to the local board of selectmen urging them not to revoke Reitzas’s license and expressing concern about “how he would support his family…. He seems like a regular guy who’s just trying to get by like everyone else.”

Reitzas’s Facebook page was scoured for signs of villainous connections and a photo of him surfaced, with what hostile commentators described as “his arms around” Warren and her husband, while standing in front of an old lighthouse. It was taken during a sightseeing stop (“I’ve been photographed with many celebrities over the years, driving the cab,” Reitzas moaned) but became proof that he was lying, lying, lying and that Warren was more than just a good customer. Ultimately, his time in the spotlight exposed him to so much harassment that Reitzas took down his Facebook page, hired two lawyers and held a press conference at which he issued an apology for his aggression, denied (again) any political connection to Warren, revealed himself as an unregistered voter with no affiliation and explained (again) that he was trying to protect his daughter.

That this passes as a “political” story at all is troubling. Yet there are a thousand similar nonstories across the country during this election season. Their manufacture and magnification represent a crisis of public discourse, and we are distracted by them at our peril.

Here’s a story that matters: The balance of power in the Senate is at stake, and Warren’s campaign has been battered by huge investments in negative advertising funded by ALEC, the Koch brothers and big banks. After all, Warren designed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; she predicted the financial collapse well before most and fought against the 2005 Bush-era law that drastically constrained the ability of ordinary people to declare bankruptcy in the face of that collapse; she has devoted her career to reforming fraudulent lending practices, women’s wage inequalities and unfair credit schemes. It is no slight to Scott Brown—a mild-mannered moderate Republican whose political identity is configured around the amiability of his pickup truck—to say that Elizabeth Warren has more to offer in a time of economic tremulousness.

Socrates said rhetoric is the art of persuasion. He also said that persuasion in the absence of fact is mere flattery of one’s audience; and flattery unsustained by truth is neither art nor rhetoric but purest demagogy. Like the nonstory of Morgan Reitzas, too much of our political discourse is degraded by hyperbolized trivia whose fantastical properties deliver us only and exactly what we want to hear. Apparently all we want to hear about is sex, car crashes and the bleed that leads. Lacking that, the random folly of a cab driver having a really bad day would seem to suffice. It surely is time we grew up.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/169887/real-risks-fake-outrage

Michelle Obama at the DNC….

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Magnum Opusby Patricia J. Williams Sep 5, 2012 9:48 AM EDT

My television tuned to PBS on one side and my computer streaming live from Charlotte, N.C., on the other,

I settled in for the launch of the Democratic National Convention. If the tinny speakers didn’t reproduce the ecstatic high of being there, it provided an interesting insight into the power of media filters.

The live-streamed convention had its share of poking-at-you attention-grabbers, in particular the relentlessly flashed tweets from random Americans, like “Can’t wait to hear FLOTUS bring down the house!”—stuff that gave Republicans a run for the money in terms of sounding all tingly and wholesome.

Alas, I am not a tweet-y personality: yes, ideally, I’d have liked to text-message the nation as well, to tell everyone that I too was aglow at the prospect of “FLOTUS” on stage, but my brain still refers to her with the full, long-winded, rolled-out thrill of “the first lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama.” And my feelings were complicated as I waited for Michelle Obama to speak. I wondered whether her daughters were doing their homework on the topic of this convention, and why Mitt Romney shouldn’t have been instantly disqualified from the race for touting unrestrained oil and coal exploitation while smirking—actually smirking!—at the president’s efforts to “slow the rise of the oceans” even as Hurricane Isaac shivered the timbers of the Republican arena in Tampa. And why we have to have these dog-and-pony shows called conventions anyway, that go on for days, when all I really want to hear is the candidates debating each other for hours at a time like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, arguing till they drop from intellectual exertion, without commercials, without interruption, in complete sentences, in full paragraphs, with footnotes rather than tweets rolling across the bottom of the screen so we can fact-check everything they say instantly.

But that’s longer than 140 characters. It wouldn’t fit.

First lady Michelle Obama waves as she takes the stage during day one of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 4, 2012. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

When the first lady did speak, she was great. She looked young, sweet as a flower, in a bright silky frock, the skirt swirling with a garden of what seemed to be petunias. She spoke quickly and well, intelligently and powerfully. She talked of her father who died young from complications of multiple sclerosis, propping up his walker while he prepared to go to work, always with a smile. And of his pride in his children going to college, partly on scholarship, partly with his financial help—because although he himself never went to college, he was among a generation of the working class who earned a decent enough living to support a family and to fulfill the American vision of what it means to be a man.

One can see what a precocious child Michele Obama must have been. One can understand how proud her hardworking father must have been. One is glad she had that chance.

On television, the team of correspondents agreed she “knocked it out of the park.”  On my computer, there was a contented little stream of smiley faces, made from colons and parentheses.