Can we really be as religious a nation as we’re cracked up to be? Or are we sound-bite religious? Just asking.

There’s a question the politicians don’t have the fortitude to ask. I don’t think the preachers do either. What kind of a society are we willing to pay for?

Caring for the other guy doesn’t come cheap. It doesn’t come from political shell games, like giving the richest 10 percent of the population a tax break and calling it a break for everyone. Words are cheap, games are cheap, but putting our money where our mouth is hurts.

The politicians figure we’ll vote for them as long as they don’t raise our taxes, and if they cut them, so much the better. But the more they cut those taxes in Washington the more expensive state and local government becomes, and the higher your property taxes climb.

That’s the sleight of hand that’s been sending people to Washington to represent the corporations that are cutting your pay and benefits and shipping your jobs to India.

Another game is to say we don’t have to use tax money to help the poor and the sick, let the churches do it. Well, are the churches doing it? Some of them are having trouble keeping their doors open.

Most of us can’t afford to send our sons and daughters to college, much less graduate school. Most of us can’t afford to get sick. But we sure do like those tax-cutting tricksters intent on transferring what’s left of middle-class affluence to the rich.

What’s that about?

The corporations are getting the government they paid for. And we’re getting the government we’re not willing to pay for. What a deal. A deal struck in the most religious nation in the western world, and it sure wasn’t made in heaven, was it?

—DM

This is far too specialized country for me to explore, but I would like to suggest that it might be worth exploring. We in the West are inheritors of the Greek ideal of physical beauty. But Middle Eastern thought is haunted by the idea of veiled beauty. We in the West are inheritors of the Aristotelian ideal of naming and categorizing, but Middle Eastern thought is comfortable with the nameless, mystery within mystery.

I suspect this difference lies at the heart of our misunderstanding, today more than in the Middle Ages, because the West is now less constrained by religious tenet from celebrating physical, especially female beauty. Our billboards, films, advertisements and fine art stand in stark contrast to the Islamic tendency to conceal what is treasurable. They offend Muslim sensibilities as surely as veiling women offends Western feminists.

Aristotle’s profound influence on Western thought has not stifled mysticism. There is a rich strain of it in Judeo-Christian tradition. But his influence has been decisive in science, medicine and mathematics, so much so that we tend in the West to obscure how much we owe the Muslim Arabs, Persians, Turks, Berbers and Indians in these fields.

In the West the dichotomy between these disciplines and metaphysics is broad and deep, deeper even than, say, the gap between homeopaths who treat symptoms and those who treat the whole body. But the Muslim East managed to make immense strides in science, medicine and mathematics without indulging such a dichotomy.

For example, the concept of the British exchequer, with its modernist money strategies, comes straight from the Arab mathematicians of Toledo, Spain, which the Arabs call al-Andalus. The Normans of England, like their Norman cousins in Sicily, appreciated the Arabs’ preeminence in these fields.

Similarly suggestive is our word for alchemy, which we associate with medieval attempts to turn base metals into gold; it is simply the Arab word for chemistry with its article, al-Khemiya. And while the Arabs certainly hoped to transmute base into noble metals they simultaneously entertained the notion that in its deepest sense alchemy is the transmutation of the human soul from base to noble. It has never been a stretch or a strain in Muslim thought to associate science and spirituality.

My hope is that by respecting these differences the East and West can defang the simpleminded dimwits in their midst. This would mean that the Muslims would come to appreciate that we can no more renounce our heritage from the Greeks, with its insistence on the connectedness of physical beauty and truth, than they can renounce their profound sense of the connectedness of spirituality and science. It would mean further that they must respect that we are as inspired by physical beauty as they are inspired by hidden mysteries.

Can they appreciate our reverence for Primavera? Can we appreciate that they would choose to veil what is prized, whether it be the chasteness of women or the beauty of secret gardens or truths secreted in poetry and song? Can there be such respect? It’s not a matter of live and let live, but of understanding.

I think the chances of such broad cultural understanding are as great or small as the chances of understanding between Shia and Sunni, Jew and Muslim, Christian and Muslim. Extremism is the enemy. Whoever insists that all must bow down before one religion or one sect is the enemy. If that shoe fits, wear it, whether you are Muslim, Christian or Jew.

—DM

The tragedy of an artist’s life isn’t poverty, betrayal, obscurity; it’s that he can’t hear what he heard or see what he saw. His vision escapes him. He writes a perfect line. Then he pauses, wondering if he can write another. Finally a perfect stanza appears. But then what he heard slips away, gets lost in words that are not quite right. They work, but they don’t sing. They don’t fly. And as for the thought, it loses itself in a labyrinth.

The painter conveys his vision from the sketch to his canvas. He even improves on it. He’s ecstatic. To the canvas he brings color, and he sees that the color is right. He understands this vision needs a certain brush stroke, and it comes to him. But somewhere between this auspicious beginning and the finish the painting fails. Perhaps the artist didn’t know when to stop, a common failing. Perhaps the sectors failed to make a whole. Critics may hail this work. It may sell well. But the artists know his vision eluded him.

No amount of success can spare the artist this tragedy. It is the purest thing in his life. Nothing adulterates it.

Other failures fall short of tragedy. Chief among these is the artist’s decision to succeed rather than doing his best, fearing his best might not be commercial enough. He knows he’ll never know, because he didn’t do his best. It has coarsened him. Something is lost, but it’s not as great as the loss of the artist who set out to do his best.

We are all profoundly indebted to the artist who aims as high as he can, commerce be damned. No vision really fails, but some carry the race of man farther than others.

—DM

The minuet between Congress and the President over when to quit Iraq touches perilously on the great American story. You know, the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and nobody hears of him again, or the wife who pleads girls’ night out and ditches all her mistakes for new ones.

In many ways we are the children of the great American story, and that is why our behavior immediately after World War II was so astounding and blessed. We stayed and rebuilt what we had been forced to destroy.

Don’t think I’m making a sly case for George Bush and his anything-for-a-buck ethos. I’m not. The great American story has a despicably immoral aspect at its heart, the refusal to take responsibility for bum decisions. The husband sauntering out of the house for his pack of cigarettes is leaving behind a pack of lies and irresponsibilities. The wife whose night out with the girls turns out to be forever has abandoned not just her family but her own soul. They both need to stay and say, I made a mistake, I want to renegotiate the deal.

The argument that the Iraqis need now to take responsibility for their own destiny only goes so far. It’s handy and true in a pathetically obvious way, but it is we who need to take responsibility for a tragic mistake. We can do so by saying, We’re leaving now, but we’re not abandoning you. You take over your lives and we will help you rebuild, not by feeding the piggish business cronies of Dick Cheney and George Bush but by emulating what once so honorably we did in the Marshall Plan.

We need to leave, yes, but with self-respect, not like Saigon. We need to lay it all out as a matter of policy and integrity. We need to say we know that the British carved Iraq out of Mesopotamia in a way that guaranteed oppression of the Shias. We need to say we acted on phony intelligence. We need to say our business dealings in Iraq have been haywire and corrupt. We need to leave with the whole sordid mess on the table.

If we did that, if we could bring ourselves to do it, we would have the everlasting respect even of our murderous enemies. I don’t expect them to stop trying to murder us, but I do know they would have a much harder time doing it if we could bring ourselves to the point of such honesty. It’s not as if we have no precedent. Ask Germany and Japan. We can do it, but we must break with the great American story in which the heroes have no decency.

—DM

As I listened disapprovingly to my own voice answering the poet Martina Newberry’s questions I thought that asked such good questions even a doofus might say something interesting. Martina is the author of Running Like a Woman With Her Hair on Fire, released in 2005 by Red Hen Press. Her poems have been published widely. She interviewed me for Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal, where I’m a contributing editor. I hope you’ll drop in.

—DM

(This is a transcript of a recent podcast for journalism students around the world.)

Lost Story Disease is ravaging the planet. Its toll will be much greater than the Spanish Flu’s. While there are no cures for such diseases as cancer, there is a cure for Lost Story Disease. It’s called better reporting.

Here are some of the most important lost stories:

The Dow Industrials Average. Every day the television networks report the Dow average as if they were taking the blood pressure of a heart patient. If it’s up, the economy is purportedly good, if it’s down, the economy is iffy. If it’s up, some (empty-headed) anchor exclaims, That’s what we want to hear! Who’s we? And just what does the Dow tell us? It doesn’t tell us the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. It doesn’t tell us the small investor has no way to hold Wall Street wheelers and dealers accountable. It doesn’t tell us anything about insider trading. It doesn’t tell us how hedge funds are run for the super rich and allowed unconscionable tax breaks. It’s like the best-seller list: there’s a lot less there than meets the eye.

Iraq. Were Americans ever told that a beautiful green-eyed redhead named Gertrude Bell created Iraq and loaded the dice in favor of the Sunni Arabs because she thought Shia Islam detestable? Would it have made any difference if Americans had been told about Gertrude Bell and her role in that squalid piece of gerrymandering?

Instead of blabbing on about winning or losing in Iraq why hasn’t hasn’t the notion been discussed that a certain sector of American society has already won big in Iraq, making billions of dollars doing shoddy work while their fellow Americans foot the bill in blood and taxes?

With dozens of correspondents in Iraq did we really have to wait for an inspector general’s report to learn that billions of dollars in tax money have been wasted in Iraq on shoddy construction, design and engineering? Was it so hard for correspondents to learn that generators and turbines were defective, that hospital plumbing wasn’t working, that medical waste was being improperly disposed? Were the correspondents too busy listening to the official bullshitters inside the Green Zone to give us an inkling of these scandals?

Housing. Day after day we’re told housing is booming, housing is slipping, banks loans are easy, bank loans are defaulting. But what we’re not told is that an economy based on buying and selling each other houses with Chinese money may not be good for the country. We’re not told that hell-bent development is not in all cases good for us. Watersheds are threatened. Farms vanish, and produce from contaminated foreign sources sickens us. The housing story is complex and multifaceted, but what we get is a one-sided pro-development story, as if the economy depends on a never-ending home construction boom and paving the country with cement, when in fact the economy needs to be considerably more diversified and serious consideration to conserving open land is needed. Why? The developers buy a lot of advertising and they throw around a lot of money, some of which ends up in political pockets.

The press. The press isn’t telling one of the most important stories of our time because it would have to tell the story on itself. Piratical media giants have stripped newspapers of their ability to cover the news in order to squeeze more money out of them for investors. The great newspapers are dying. The blogosphere is growing, but unless you read the blogs you’d hardly know it. And that isn’t the half of it. The consequences of such a debilitated press to our political health are profound, but don’t look to the media moguls to tell you so.

The Merchant Marine. We hardly have one any more. Why? Same old story. Corporate greed. Putting their ships under foreign flag enables owners to circumvent safety laws. But in times of war, or the kind of long-lasting terrorist threat we now live under, having virtually no merchant marine of our own leaves us naked to the whims of foreign nations. The U.S. Navy exists, in part, to protect ships that no longer fly our flag. Flying foreign flags means that foreign countries, which may or may not happen to be on good terms with us at any given moment in history, have something to say about their operation. Can this be good for us? No, of course not. But it’s good for corporations who don’t want to pay Americans decent wages or protect their lives. The result is our ships are crewed by poorly paid foreigners under flags of convenience, as they’re called. How often is this important story reported? As well, say, as Alec Baldwin’s latest conflict with Kim Basinger?

The predator class. We live in a predator state. But do we know it? And if we don’t, whose fault is it? Since the Gilded Age we have celebrated the exploits of robber barons. For screwing and sometimes even killing ordinary workers they have museums, streets and parks named after them. Now we elect their latter-day incarnations to high office. We pretend they have our best interests in mind. And all the while a predator class of people who exist to hound and ruin us has been created. Just sit in a bankruptcy court if you have any doubt about this. The banks pay people big bucks to figure out how to work us over for fee after fee. ATM fees, transfer fees, cancellation fees, bad check fees, good check fees, you name it and their hands are in our pockets. Then there are the collection agencies, the credit rating agencies, the mortgage boilerplate writers, the lying insurance adjusters, the crooked appraisers, the whole Dickensian money-grubbing, pilfering lot of them. But the press would have you believe that when such injustices arise they’re reported, and indeed sporadic instances of rapine behavior are reported. But the plain fact that Americans are everywhere being cheated and abused by these predators goes unreported. If the average American spent two days of his or her life in a bankruptcy court there might well be blood in the streets. And don’t think for a moment the press doesn’t know this.

Eminent domain. In the 1960s urban renewal became code for getting poor minority members out of the way so members of the predator class could make bundles of money building high-end homes and malls. The concept of eminent domain was often used (misused) to achieve this end. What typically happened is that business interests bribed elected and appointed officials one way or another to seize private property by a legal process called eminent domain, leaving the owners no choice but to sell for whatever price the government set. Sometimes the prices were fair, sometimes they were criminal. But they were never generous. Sometimes a bribe was actual money, sometimes the promise of money, or the promise of a job, or maybe putting in a good word at a good college for some official’s kid. Eminent domain was meant to be a last resort employed only when it was abundantly clear that taking property by such draconian means was in the public’s interest. That’s not easy to determine.

Back in the 60s public housing was often built on waterfronts because they were deemed shabby and undesirable. Now, since James Rouse demonstrated that the key to a city’s revival often depends on a lively, festive waterfront, eminent domain is being used to reclaim those waterfronts. There are always the usual contentions that the community will do even better by its poor, but everyone knows the poor are once again being shoveled off the playing field by the predators. Does anybody want to make the case that this story is well covered?

The volunteer army. This much-vaunted concept is now being called into question by such politicians as New York Rep. Charles B. Rangel, who says politicians would be less inclined to send our young people to war if they thought their own children might have to go. So Mr. Rangel proposes we bring back the draft. There has been a great outcry from the generals and the politicians against his proposal, even though our military is clearly stretched too thin. But do we know how many sons and daughters of the rich and powerful are serving in our military? I don’t know if there is a quantitative way to answer this question. But I know it’s a question that the press ought to be asking. We can certainly tell how many college graduates are serving. We can tell how many years of education our serving sons and daughters have had. We can certainly publish reports about whether the children of hawkish politicians are serving. Is this story impossible to write? I don’t think so. I think there is no serious will to cover it.

Immigration. Here we go again. He said, she said. The church said. The politicians said. But what has the impact of cheap illegal immigrant labor been on our legal labor force? How have illegal immigrants been used to bust unions, to deprive the middle class of its dream of security and education? Do we know? No. What we know is what the blabbermouths on both sides of the issue say. But we don’t know the actual facts any more than we knew until last week that the reconstruction of Iraq has turned into a monstrous and corrupt failure while the politicians back home have been hailing its success. Where has the press been in all this? Is this story too hard to cover? Impossible? I don’t think so. I think it’s a tough story, even an expensive story to cover, and that may be the reason it isn’t covered. If the newspapers could replace their reporters and editors with illiterate illegals they surely would. As it is, asking them to cover this story fully and properly would be asking them to say dicey things about some of their biggest advertisers. You get the picture, right?

The civil service. Every night we hear the Washington press corps telling us what’s going on. Well, here’s some news for you. They’re telling what they’re being told is going on. The United States has the best civil service in the world. It actually works. It’s hardworking. It’s competent. It’s generally honest. But year after year politicians get themselves elected by telling us how bad our civil service is, how corrupt, wasteful, lazy, overpaid, over- privileged, overstaffed, blah, blah, blah. For the most part, it’s baloney. Without the civil service the country would grind to a screeching halt. Services and information we depend on would dry up. The politicians know this. They’re lying to you when they claim otherwise. Yes, there is waste, corruption and incompetence—mostly caused by political pressure—but it is every day vastly outweighed by effectiveness, integrity and devotion to country. But the civil service is an easy, cheap target, and that’s why politicians from Jimmy Carter to George Bush have waged a deceitful war on what should be a source of great national pride. They need somebody helpless to run against, and a civil servant is an easier target than your average dishonest banker or CEO. Civil servants at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency could have kept us out of the disastrous Iraq war if the politicians had respected them and listened to them. The nation would better understand its health and its destiny if the politicians would refrain from corrupting the statistical evidence so competently gathered and organized by various agencies. But where is this story in its grand and portentous outlines? As we celebrate Al Gore’s reinvention of himself as a prophet of global warming, why hasn’t the press reported that in an earlier incarnation as vice president he demoralized the entire civil service while claiming to reinvent it? Why hasn’t the press reported that President Bush’s ill-advised and disastrous campaign to privatize government originated on Al Gore’s watch? Is this another one of those too-hard-to-cover stories? The very data White House appointees try to corrupt and distort is the data the press corps serves up every night.

The sad truth is that the press doesn’t tell the country how the country works, how its economy works, how the system works, because the press is part of the system. Can this be good for us? Isn’t this as important a story as Don Imus’s cruel mouth and his fall at the hands of hypocrites?

Politicization of government. For a long time now the bureaus, agencies and departments of government in Washington and in the federal regions have been politicized by the party in power. This process, so reminiscent of the Nazis and Soviets, has accelerated to an unprecedented degree in recent years, and the consequences remain unexplored in the public arena. Many people have seen the memorable German film Das Boot. It’s about a U-boat crew whose operations are spied on by a Nazi Party politico who has been given rank as a member of the crew. The consequences are awful. Think of this film whenever you hear about our government being infiltrated by “layered-in” politicos. The trouble is you won’t hear much about it from the press. These apparatchiks come to the agencies as political appointees, but over time the system is finagled to give them civil service status. The practice is compromising the integrity of the government, which is supposed to serve the public, not the political party in power and its agenda. These hidden stooges distort data, rewrite findings to suit their party bosses, and intimidate honest civil servants. Have you thought about this much? If your answer is no, it’s probably because the press hasn’t bothered to tell you much about it. It’s so much easier and cheaper, to just get some blatherer to feed us a sound bite or two. This isn’t journalism, it’s a con—a con perpetrated by media bosses who have no intention of living up to their special obligations to the republic under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Remember Das Boot, and remember that our government is being salted with similar apparatchiks while the press plays blahty-blah-blah.

Forensic accounting. Piratical capitalism threatens our society as much as terrorism. It lies at the heart of the destruction of the middle class, the immigration debate, the health care disgrace, the corrosive power of the insurance and oil lobbies, and many other ills that we are only beginning to seriously examine. But all the Fourth Estate does about this issue is to synopsize events and deliver the usual he said-she said reports that pass for legitimate journalism. What is really needed is a high degree of forensic accounting. The power of business lobbies is so great that we can’t count on the government to expose and prosecute corporate corruption. Occasionally it happens, but more often it doesn’t. The corporations are not only not paying their fair share of taxes, they are corrupting a society that has too long patted itself on the back for its compassion. There is a serious question as to how patriotic the behavior of our corporations is, and yet when the issue of patriotism is raised by politicians it is usually to bully dissenters. The loyalty of the big corporations belongs to shareholders rather than the society that has made their successes possible. There is no way to curb this trend, to fashion for ourselves a caring kind of capitalism, without forensic accounting. But who will be the accountants? How will they derive their authority? Who will pay them? These are questions the press isn’t raising, and we all suffer the consequences. The public needs to know what makes this country and its foreign policy tick. Only forensic accountants and forensic economists are able to explain this, and yet this is just the kind of journalism we’re not getting.

Israel and the United States. Why is it a given in American journalism that what is good for Israel is good for the United States? What if what Israel thinks is good for itself is actually bad for it and everybody else? Why should the conjunction of the apocalyptic views of American Zionist evangelicals and Israeli far-right Zionists be fair game in the daily news, especially because it lies at the root of Arab terrorism? Why was the connection between this extraordinary alliance with the Iraq war not explored by the press? What if the United States were to demand that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders while at the same time absolutely guaranteeing Israel’s territorial integrity? Would that bring peace or would Israeli rejectionists continue to settle Arab land, thereby giving the lie to their long-held contention that all Israel really wants is peace and stability? Who knows the answers to these questions? But why aren’t they being asked and explored? Why is Arab rejectionism bigger news than Israeli rejectionism? Do a majority of Americans really want an extreme evangelical agenda to drive our foreign policy?

There are many other lost stories. For example, why journalists ignore the problems of the working poor. You might make your own list, then reduce your list to key words and search the web to see how much coverage has been given these issues and who gave them the coverage. This is not only a good exercise in rudimentary research, it will give you a broader view of the profession to which you’re devoting your lives.

—DM

Sound byte journalists and fundamentalists have a common enemy: reason. Together they bring us to an ugly celebration of simplemindedness in which he who can reduce the complex to the absurd triumphs, meaning he gets elected or swindles us or both.

Fundamentalists says let’s go back to the simple word of the Gospels or the Old Testament or the Quran. They represent themselves as purists. But there never has been anything simple about any word, as a forensic philologist will tell you. But what do fundamentalists care about what anybody has to tell them? Their glory, their rapture, is their deafness.

They have found their ideal medium in today’s degraded journalism, where television anchors interrupt people to hammer home their own views and warp discussion, where flackery passes for news, and where anything that can be reduced to an inanity is elevated over discussion.

The fundamentalist and the sound byte journalist demonize whatever is multifaceted and data-rich. Instead of mining issues they shut the mine down and declare it off limits. Instead of challenging a proposition by showing where it leads—as in reductio ad absurdum—they push dimwit samplers at us. They will set us on the road to Sparta, not Athens. Is that our chosen road?

—DM

Every spring a grand obsession to suppress the lowly dandelion berserks Americans. I’ve never understood it. I love dandelions, their indomitable sauciness. Perhaps Americans are offended by them in the way they might be by flecks of dandruff on a black canvas by Robert Motherwell. Perhaps dandelions offend the purist in them. To me they redress the unrelieved boredom of the greensward.

I’m perfectly willing to tend my roses, to fertilize trees, shrubbery and flowers, but why I should poison the beloved earth to ruthlessly track and kill the wondrously complex dandelion is beyond me. They cheer me as much as birds at their feeders outside my kitchen window in winter. I understand why golfers despise them, about as much, that is, as I understand golfers.

There’s a grass seed advertisement running on television now in which a woman brightly chirps, We don’t like dandelions. Perhaps it was the dark mood I was in, but the comment reminded me of all those hot topics, like gay marriage, our society uses to divert itself from the simple task of treating each other decently, a task from which no religion could honorably dissent.

I understand why they’re not the favorite flowers of baseball and tennis players, since they don’t abide rules. But as a gardener I’d much rather spend money on another rose bush than walk run around executing these guest stars scattered on the grass, to borrow a phrase from Omar Khayyam.

—DM