Why indeed? In some cases, as in southern California, assessors are lowering evaluations. But in other areas, such as Nevada, where the assessment formulas are more complicated, evaluations are holding fast or even rising. Many communities will lower evaluations and then raise tax rates, but this is bound to strike most homeowners as sleight-of-hand and nobody can predict the political fallout from such a maneuver.

The political challenge with this is that anything but lower evaluations is so counterintuitive that taxpayers are bound to be up in arms about it, and it won’t be long before lawyers see lucrative court cases looming.

The even larger problem is that the housing boom, which has enabled Washington to claim credit for American prosperity, was in fact a symptom of economic illness. It consisted of buying and selling each other houses with money borrowed from China.

The rising costs of fuel make that kind of lifestyle untenable. The suburbs are probably cooked. Cities with good public transportation look increasingly desirable, especially medium-sized cities like Providence, RI, and Portsmouth, NH. Rural America now must reorganize itself, having depended on cheap fuel since World War II. The mega malls that have destroyed the cores of small towns and cities are now dinosaurs, and the cheap foreign goods on which they’ve thrived are becoming expensive because of high shipment costs.

One alternative for strapped towns and cities is to provide homeowners with the tax relief they will inevitably demand and tax businesses more. This won’t be popular either, and it too is counterintuitive. But too many towns have depended on homebuilding to support town services and have failed to encourage business growth. They have bought a bill of goods from homebuilders and banks, and now banks, having been burned by their own greed, are reluctant to make the loans businesses need to expand.

With transportation costs soaring, it’s possible that local industry and farming will revive. It’s possible we’ll import less and become more self-sufficient. And the countries from which we have been importing so much may have to do the same, because they too are facing rising fuel and transportation costs.

Globalism may have been overtaken by peak oil.

But we must prepare for a horrendous yowl from homeowners if assessors fail to give them some relief because arguing for static or even higher taxes in an environment in which property values are plummeting won’t go down well. The upside of this is that communities may have to sober up from their oil binge, stop giving the store away to homebuilders and mega-malls and start figuring out how to revitalize business.

Meanwhile, whole neighborhoods have been spoiled by foreclosures, creating a problem for police, fire and social welfare departments. In other words, demands have been put on communities without an expanded tax base to pay for them. These communities, lulled into complacency by a predatory climate, must now seize the initiative. Salvation is not going to come prettily packaged from state capitals or Washington.

The news anchors keep talking about Main Street, but the fact is that main streets were long ago sold out to malls using Wal-Mart as magnets. Main Street has been rotting for decades. Where have the anchors been?—DM

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry.

If you have any trouble defining an “authorized” American, just study the people surrounding John McCain or the majority of people we regularly send to Washington to conduct our business. Study our advertising. Oh sure, there’s Naomi Campbell, a standout among how many beauties of North European origin?

I’ve never had one of those stunning minds that enunciates recognitions before everyone else, so I’ve had to come by these reflections the hard way, in West Islip, New York, as a child, in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley as an adolescent, in the Navy and in Rhode Island and the South as a young man, in Washington as a middle-aged man, and back in the Hudson Valley as an old man.

In the Hudson Valley I’ve studied the interaction of deeply rooted residents, summer people and retired newcomers. It has been shaped by fear, bigotry, money and accommodation. Newcomers with authorized faces have had a better time of it, as usual. The nativism that insists we look as we did when we had a famous spat with British look-alikes benefits the authorized newcomers to the point of tolerance, not acceptance.

Others have had it tougher, particularly Jews, African-Americans and Hipanics, because the virulent hatred hounding them has followed them everywhere they go. But the Irish, Italians, Poles and many others, have all suffered the sting of nativism and xenophobia. When they haven’t been cast as the Dark Other, they have been sufficiently “other” to license a distinct cold shoulder.

But the tension hasn’t been one-sided. Locals, as the rooted people are often called pejoratively, have good reason to fear and resent “outsiders.” It’s one thing for a person to say, as I often hear, I’ve lived in this town for forty years and I’m still considered an outsider, quite another thing to understand the reason for this. This is a good time in history to try to understand the reasons for disquiet. The huge disparity between northern wealth and southern poverty worldwide has caused the dislocation of large populations, resettlement, resentment and friction. In some cases colonialism is the direct cause, in other cases cheap labor. France and the United Kingdom have been trying to absorb great numbers of former colonials. The U.S. invasion of Iraq has dislocated millions of Iraqis, but the United States has resisted efforts to resettle many of them here. Hispanics, Asians, Africans, East Europeans and Arabs have all immigrated in large numbers, seeking better lives. The more social injustice and poverty, the more migration.

Urbanites seeking the peacefulness of the countryside bring with them a change in a way of life that no one bargained for, no one voted for. They represent, at the same time they bring new money, the slicing and dicing of farmland, the kind of transformation of rural America that in England drove the
poet John Clare mad. They represent impatience with local mores, they represent ways of doing things that don’t conform to traditions. Often they represent highhandedness and hifalutin notions of how things ought to be done. And, in spite of what every developer and his son swears to town boards as if it were gospel, the newcomers represent higher taxes, and with them a financial threat to the elderly and the young. The money they bring simply doesn’t offset the costs of the services they need.

And, of course, very often they look funny. They don’t look like cousins, the way our British oppressors did, and we persist in thinking that we ought to look like the British (who don’t look like the British anymore, either), even when the filmmakers and advertising people who perpetuate this image do not themselves conform to it. Their underlying assumption is that a North European look is more likely to make money for them and their clients than an unapproved look. It’s a nasty piece of business in a culture that prides itself on its multi-ethnicity.

I love the looks of Andy Garcia, Morgan Freeman, Rosario Dawson and Angela Bassett, for example, but they’re accepted versions of Americans, not authorized. Millions of us still can’t see our children married to people who look like them. We don’t like to talk about this, but we know it, and voters in Pennsylvania and West Virginia may just have voted on it.

I remember being ten or eleven years old and standing in front of a buxom blonde cashier in a small Catskills town during World War II. She was smiling benevolently at me while thumbing through my ration stamps, looting them for her friends. I was a summer kid. It was okay to do this mean thing because you weren’t doing it to someone who counts. Who was I going to complain to? The local cops who had grown up with her? I left the market crying. I hadn’t filled my shopping list because I no longer had the right stamps. My money wasn’t as good as that of the people she’d grown up with. To make matters worse, I had a crush on her.

That’s the sort of thing that happened between the rooted and the newcomers, and the more your face deviated from the authorized standard, which could be seen in all the Pepsi and Camel ads, the sharper the slight was apt to be. Some of us were doomed never to look like Kate Greenaway bucolics.

Things have changed, but not that much. The Vietnam war had something to do with it. The children of the poor whom we sent to fight and die there had to work out their own accommodations, and when they returned, those who did, there had been spilled blood and agony to bond them. The authorized face no longer meant as much to them, because foreign faces had died with them and sometimes even saved their lives.

The town I was talking about changed remarkably after that monstrous war. The veterans didn’t have much sympathy for the old prejudices, which, in the new scheme of things, seemed to them quaint.

Histories of that town have been written without much if any attention to its anti-Semitism. There are now so many newcomers they even get elected to the town board. Their money has painted over many a qualm and prejudice, and it’s now entirely possible that too little attention is paid to those qualms. After all, outsider money was buying a change in a way of life nobody but the outsiders wanted. True, outsider money was needed because local economies that had thrived in the 19th Century were no longer vital, but much beauty, accomplishment and peace of mind was being destroyed.

Now even the newcomers, beholding the changes their influx has wrought, are inclined to bemoan the loss of miles of farmland filled with food-producing bees and unpolluted vineyards and orchards. The bees are the latest loss, and that’s a story more urgent than global warming and much less discussed.

All this tension between urbanites seeking a breath of fresh air, as they used to put it, and the rural communities they changed was heightened not only by cheap fuel but the assumption that there never would be an energy crisis. Schools were consolidated on the same assumption. Mega-malls with parking lots as big as landing fields were built on the same assumption, destroying town centers. Public transportation was neglected. New means of transportation, like light rail, sail-assisted ships and lighter-than-air transport, were ignored. And then to conduct the Cold War and now to conduct the ill-managed war against
terrorists the infrastructure necessary to support this impractical automotive society has been neglected and is falling apart.

This brings a new kind of crisis to rural America. It can’t afford to bus
its children to hell and gone. It can’t afford to cover fifty or a hundred miles a day in pickup trucks. It can’t afford to drive long distances to mega-malls. It can’t afford the high prices transportation costs create. It can’t find enough work. It can’t afford insurance. It can’t pay the taxes necessary to pass homesteads on to children and grandchildren. And it may never be able to afford to do these things again. The people who commute from the exurbs and far suburbs are finding it too costly. Wages are stagnant. Inflation is rising.

The clash between newcomer and old-timer has been overtaken by more urgent considerations.

Perhaps the high cost of transportation will bring industries and jobs back to America. There are signs of it. Our steel industry, for example, is reviving. Canada’s manufacturing sector is reviving after years of decline.

But it will always remain to us to define and then redefine the face of America. We are racial profilers, whether we admit it or not. And we Americans are hardly the only ones. We don’t need to suffer the obloquy of this squalid failing alone. It’s an equal-opportunity affliction besetting all of humanity. To redress it, we should be as aware of the perpetrator’s fears as we are of the victim’s misery.

We should take each other’s prejudices seriously, whether we love them or love to hate them, because our culture doesn’t change as quickly as we claim it does and it’s possible to do it irreparable damage.

I don’t wear one of those authorized faces. I can pass for any number of ethnicities, none of them North European or Slavic, and so I know how it feels when someone believes he or she can get over on you because you don’t look like his cousin. But I also have North European ancestors, and I know xenophobia is not as easy to deal with as a felony crime.

While I thank my stars I’ve lived to see so many previously unaccepted and unauthorized faces gracing my life, I also suffer the heartache of understanding how it feels to be encroached, pushed out, covered over, dissed. I remember my consternation when some people professed not to understand what African-American youths meant when they said they had been dissed. What was not to understand? The lingo? How far a linguistic leap was it from diss to disrespected, dismissed, discounted?

It’s a two-way street, this business of prejudice, and with our ill-considered conviction that all development is good, all development is progress, we are losing much of value, because you can scurry over problems only to have them bite your behind.—DM

The more important issue is the press’ mindless acceptance of the received boobism that changing one’s mind, one’s position about issues, is bad. Anyone who embraces this mania du jour doesn’t hold out much promise as a leader. Anyone incapable of course corrections in response to changing circumstances is a meathead.

And yet the press maintains its ludicrous flip-flop watch as if it were a national security alert. If we elect those who never change their minds and never alter course we deserve what we get. The notion of flip-flop is bogus. It panders to ideologues. But insistence on inquiring and flexible minds in our leaders is essential. The press confuses integrity with ideology.

If Alexander the Great had not been what our feckless press is calling a flip-flopper he would have been Alexander the Loser. —DM

The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the pundits, the voters and the candidates. But there were triumphs. As Senator Hillary Clinton said in graciously conceding the fight to Senator Barack Obama, there are now eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling, and none of us will forget it. Bless you, Senator.

There is talk in the press of examining misogyny in the coverage of Senator Clinton’s historic run, but the truth is the misogyny stood out in all its squalor in talk shows, late night entertainment and coverage as starkly as racism stood out in West Virginia. Self-examination is good, repentance is better. But, as we all know, the press repents of little.

This election offers us many opportunities to mend our ways. New York voters had already put aside misogyny in the interest of granting themselves a competent and caring senator. There have been thirty-five women senators in our history. The time has long since passed to put a woman in the White House. And an African-American. And a Hispanic. And a Native American. Well, you get the picture.

The more we succeed in raising the level of discourse, the less agism, sexism and racism will matter. Smear of any kind poisons the political atmosphere.  The press is like the rest of us: the majority try to be fair, but we fail, we tell ugly jokes, we mock, and we sneak our prejudices into our efforts at humor.

We can do better, and the wonderful truth about the now ended primaries is that for all their disheartenments they have elevated public discourse and struck telling blows against our worst prejudices, and we have Republicans and Democrats alike to thank for that.—DM

But the other dirty little secret we keep shuffling under the carpet with a nod and a wink is gender prejudice. Hillary Clinton would be as much handicapped by misogyny as Obama would be by racism. She won in West Virginia because she handed the state’s voters a chance to express their reservations about a black man in the highest office. She played the race card. The quintessential elitist painted a half-black, half-white Chicago community activist as an elitist, and the voters swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

But in November, when this squalid spectacle that the Democrats have chosen to call democracy in action is over, the voters may well remember that they no more want a strong woman than they want a smart man of color in the White House.

What then? Could there possibly be a bright side to handing over the presidency to anyone as unqualified as John McCain simply because we are sunk in our prejudices and can’t climb up out of them even when it’s in our interests to do so? However much I would deplore such an outcome, I think the answer is yes. Yes, because we must at long last stare our prejudices in the face. Yes, because we must remember that our failure to do so at the birth of our republic led inexorably to our bloodiest war. Yes, because we have gone far too long without the benefit of women at the helm of society and state. Yes, in the name of decency, honor and plain smarts.

It may turn out that at the cost of the election the Democrats have bestowed upon the country a great gift of reckoning. In one primary campaign they have given us the choice of a man of color and a woman, inviting us to be the fair and open-minded people we say we are in spite of the historic evidence. Dick Cheney may not know how to shoot straight, but the Democrats remember how to shoot themselves in the foot. And this time that knack may just serve the nation well, even if it gives us another disastrous presidency.

The West Virginians have shown us just how stark our choices are. They have even shown us that most Americans prefer the dishonest McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday to a real solution, thereby reminding us once again how easy it is to sucker the American people into voting for people whose ambitions exceed their intent to do us good.

But there is another scenario. What if between now and November millions of Americans say to themselves, Enough is enough? Meaning, Let’s look at the issues. Let’s elect a man of color or a woman simply because we think they might be more willing to change things than John McCain. That would be a start, wouldn’t it? That would say that we can move on past race and gender bias. It would say we can put our own futures before our fondest prejudices.

So maybe it isn’t the gift West Virginia has given Senator Clinton or the rebuff it has given Senator Obama that we should be looking at. Maybe it’s the gift of exposing our dirty little secrets we should be grateful for.—DM

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you.

They are not unlike the telephone trees we encounter when we approach an insurance company, an HMO or almost any other large institution. Their underlying message is, If you persist in bothering us, we’ll wear you out while pretending to help you.

In several years of browsing municipal and county web sites I have yet to encounter information about how to get a copy of an important document or report. That would contribute to transparency. We ought to be able to download public documents.

There is no reason municipal officials can’t field the public’s questions interactively. If they won’t do it online you can be pretty sure they’re ducking the same questions in person.

These web sites offer an ideal opportunity to encourage community and regional dialogue. As with professional sports or a debate society, there should be rules against politicking, but within those constraints a useful exchange of ideas and information can and should be conducted.

Instead, what we have is a chamber-of-commerce approach, boosterism spiced with a modicum of information and telephone numbers. This is not communication. It’s certainly not transparency. It’s a preemptive strike against real public scrutiny, and it’s pervasive, which should tell us something about the demeanor of government in our country.

The problem is not just Washington. A security-state mindset has taken hold in our most humble communities. The public’s right to know is touted and at the same time thwarted by officials who do not truly believe in the public’s right to closely examine what their elective and appointive officers are doing.

A tide of government arrogance has arisen because the media no longer serve the public good. They have abdicated their responsibility to keep government transparent because they believe it costs them too much. News organizations no longer have the staff or owner writ to delve into the workings of local government. The consequence is the decline of transparency.

Across the nation, for example, local government has been able to give away the public weal to developers because of a lack of media inquiry and all the ways officials find to stonewall public access. Zoning and tax breaks have been given that come back later to screw the taxpayers. Codes have been bent out of shape or ignored, and codes that should be enacted are round-filed simply because inquiry has been discouraged.

For example, a state hydrologist in a drought-ridden Southern state may have found that the aquifer in a certain region or locality can’t support further development without building a costly reservoir that might also require a road and a bridge. The community’s leaders are aware of this finding, but they go on permitting development anyway. They may argue that they do so to create jobs or to respect owners’ rights to sell or develop property, but the fact remains that the public discourse about the hydrologist’s findings that should have taken place has been suppressed by a combination of media laxity and government contempt for the people’s right not just to get details but to get the whole picture needed to protect the aquifer.

This is not honest government. It’s government by diktat. Putting aside for a moment the absence of media responsibility, an honest municipal web site would have announced the arrival of the hydrologist’s report and made it available online. It would have said the municipality’s officials are prepared to discuss the report with the public after studying it themselves. That would be honest government. Instead, most local governments take the disingenuous position that the report was available all along in the state capital and it was not their duty to disseminate it. Technically true, but deceitful.

If this is the litmus test of a municipality’s transparency, its commitment to full discourse, then most units of government fail it miserably. —DM

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual.

She has invited us to wallow in polarization, preference for easy answers and empty slogans. She has turned springtime into a slog in the mud, showing us she can mock her opponents and us too for being so wrongheaded as to think an eloquent, consensus-building African-American can lead us, but she can’t heal wounds or lead us anywhere on Day One except back into the abyss of paralysis politics. Better than most, she knows nothing can be achieved in Washington without seeking consensus, and yet she has chosen to try to march us off a cliff.

She has, in short, proven what we feared at the outset, that she is a divider, not a unifier.—DM

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market.

We can no longer support this kind of society in vast swaths of America. Rural life is already stunned by rising fuel costs. And yet none of the presidential candidates is addressing the inevitable transformation. They are acting as if we are confronting a temporary inconvenience rather than a sea change—witness the patently silly gas holiday proposals of McCain, Clinton & Co.

We must challenge the existing mindset that suburban development is the only way to improve the local economy. Apply to every community issue this question: Would doing this be energy-efficient?

With each consequence of a society presuming it would always have cheap fuel, another way of life vanished. As property taxes rose to support suburbs and exurbs, the young and the elderly found it difficult to pay them. Homes and farms and small businesses could no longer be passed to

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What small communities can do

1. On the town web site and in the town hall publicize businesses and artisans who are willing to take on apprentices so local kids can find jobs. Municipal web sites are all too often passive affairs. They could become interactive with citizens, banning partisan politics but encouraging a free exchange of ideas.
2. Offer a carpooling match service so people who can’t afford to drive to a job can cooperate to make it affordable.
3. Give an incentive to a local car repair service to convert diesel engines to use vegetable oil (and start with the town highway vehicles)
4. Maintain a centralized exchange co-op so a person with one skill can exchange work with a person with another skill.
5. Offer incentives such as tax forgiveness and expedited building permits to small businesses to move into the village.
6. On the town web site and in the town hall maintain a roster of local skills, services, businesses, and contractors, especially those who don’t advertise, including hairdressers, house cleaners, ironers, handymen, landscapers, window washers, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, builders, carpenters, painters, roofers, haulers, hunters, trappers, farmers, orchardists, dairymen, gunsmiths, taxidermists, excavators, sewer pumping, repair skills of all kinds (bicycles, sewing, autos, tractors, small engines, appliances, lawn mowers), and teachers of all kinds (swimming, music, art, English, foreign language, cooking, catering, gardening, computers, woodworking, horseback riding), doctors, dentists, chiropractors, veterinarians, attorneys, physical therapists.
7. Make a list of all municipal and community services that could benefit from volunteers. Recruit the elderly, especially those living in retirement homes and communities, to develop and maintain the municipal web site, help maintain public buildings, volunteer at town halls and in school offices. Prepare a volunteer contact list.

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the next generation. Our merchant marine shrank to a shadow of its former glory, fed by shippers’ greed and avoidance of Coast Guard safety regulations and union salaries. Deregulated airlines now imprison passengers without water or toilets during long waits to take off. Antiquated air control systems contribute to long delays.

Then, when the manufacturing sector was exported, we switched to what we called a service economy, but the service economy failed to support the growing middle class created by the manufacturing sector. To supplant manufacturing wages we began to build, buy and sell homes on a scale that by the nineteen-nineties had become the basis of our economy.

Inefficient construction methods with lone drivers running around in their pickup trucks, pedestrian-hostile malls and housing developments, highways traveled by lone drivers in fuel-guzzling cars and trucks—all of it presumed endless cheap fuel.

Meanwhile we failed to maintain and expand efficient, nonpolluting transportation: river barges, railroads, subways, light rail and electric trolleys and buses. We sneered at economy vehicles and we pooh-poohed innovation such as lighter-than-air transport. We built a short-sighted society, and we were assisted in that delusional task by a conspiracy of the oil, media and political elites.

But there is an upside. We can renew urban and village life. We can revive local and regional transit systems. We can reshape the way food comes to market. For example, up and down New York’s Hudson Valley and in New York City, farmer’s markets sell produce and products brought short-distance by the farmers themselves, eliminating middlemen and costly long hauls and enabling the farmers to keep on farming instead of selling their land for unsustainable developments.

This is the moment in history to rationally define the word sustainable. Because fuel has been cheap we have presumed that building as many houses as possible makes for viable, sustainable communities. It doesn’t. Developers will promise anything, but they intend to deliver toilet water. Communities have been allowing growth where the aquifer can’t supply enough water and the earth can’t absorb enough waste. Villages have assumed that all growth is good when in fact certain kinds of growth should be limited for the common good. Communities have assumed that more houses will invariably produce an adequate tax base, but this flies in the face of our national experience of strained fire, police, road and water-sewer services. The anchor store of a mega-mall will pick up and relocate or shut down at the drop of a hat, as is already happening in the weakening economy. These stores have no roots in a community, no loyalty except to profit, just as absentee-owned newspapers have no commitment to the communities from which they expect advertising.

We must examine all these issues and ask ourselves the hard questions needed to reshape a society based on fuel efficiency, not wastefulness. We must redress the lies of the oil and auto companies and undo the results of their continuous lobbying against building a fuel-savvy society. We have the tools to do this. For example, we can use computer modeling to create sustainable communities and examine how they would function under certain conditions. We don’t have to reshape society by guess and by golly. But we must find the political will to do it, and we must be willing to renounce the lies that have been our comfort food. This is the work of heroes. We can do it.          —DM

When television reporters say General Motors or Ford have decided to downsize, they say something like, “Heavily unionized General Motors announced a plan to downsize its North American operations this morning.” Notice the anti-union bias. It is assumed that part of GM’s trouble is its unions. There is never a story saying, “Badly managed General Motors…” or “Unimaginative General Motors…”

But that’s hardly the only problem with this kind of knee-jerk reporting. First, it’s not reporting at all, it’s putting a GM press release on the top of a huge stack of assumptions. There is rarely any reportage about huge salaries and bonuses paid to executives for managing their companies poorly or chopping them up and shipping them overseas. There is never any reportage about whether there should be any more obligation in American society to limit profit margins in order to share more with workers. It is presumed that whatever is good for shareholders is good for everyone. And sometimes it is simply assumed that whatever is good for executives is good for the rest of us. These undemocratic assumptions essentially take healthy discussion off the table—and that is their intent.

There is no talk about how much profit should be used to reinvest in the business. There is rarely any talk about how much of the national tax burden corporations should shoulder. Instead, it is assumed that lowering corporate taxes helps them compete with overseas companies. If that is true, then why shouldn’t there be more journalistic discourse about what happens to our economy when they sell their assets to foreign interests instead of improving their competitive positions?

Why are these assumptions not open for inquiry? The press works for corporate America, that’s why. It’s worth your job in the American press corps to press such inquiries against the unexpressed but well known biases of the business offices.

In the journalism industry itself it has been assumed that conglomeration of the media is good. There has been little talk about its impact on the role envisioned for journalism by the Founding Fathers. There has been almost no discourse, except from such visionary institutions as the admirable Poynter Institute, about whether failing newspapers can be reimagined in the hands of local owners. Why? Because the press is by nature inclined to talk too much about what is wrong with the other guy and much too little about what is wrong with yours truly. Could a small daily in local hands, devoted to covering local news in depth, remain profitable in the Internet age? How profitable? Profitable enough to satisfy enlightened owners who operate a newspaper not merely to make money but also to serve the community? We don’t know, but we do know that the press is not encouraging a discussion of this vital issue.

Let me give you one of the more egregious red herrings the press has been peddling since 2003. Ever since we invaded Iraq and began calling it the front line in the war on terror, the press has left unchallenged President Bush’s repeated assertion that he, The Decider, is simply responding to events on the the ground, as he has put it. He claims he is making his decisions according to what his generals on the ground tell him. There are so many problems with this assertion that you have to wonder how a free press has let him get away this for so many years. First of all, in our republic the military is not supposed to make political decisions, not only because it is bad for us, but because it is bad for the military. It politicizes them, and a politicized military is not an effective military. It also encourages ambitious field officers to ingratiate themselves with an ideologically driven White House by telling the President and his men what they so clearly want to hear. This accounts for the recent dust-up between Admiral William Fallon, a plain-spoken officer, and General David Petraeus, our brilliant but somewhat less straight-talking commander in Iraq. Admiral Fallon thought General Petraeus a political suck-up and said so. It may well have cost him his command. This kind of thing isn’t good for us. Why hasn’t the press raised the point that we could spend the next hundred years in Iraq responding to developments on the ground and make very little headway, because we are in fact dealing with historical circumstances that we didn’t take into account in the first place? Did we intend to go into Iraq and hand it over to Iran, our avowed enemy? That is certainly how it is turning out, and yet the press week after week obediently quotes the President as saying he is awaiting his generals’ reports in order to decide what to do next. Why isn’t the press talking about the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, which is certainly that there is no overarching vision for Iraq, that we are merely reacting to this or that turn of events? Why isn’t the press asking, Uh, Mr. President, Mr. Decider, there seems to be a logical anomaly in what you are saying? Do we just barge into a place and see what happens? How long do we keep on getting ourselves killed and bankrupted doing that? Do we keep on letting generals decide our policies who may or may not have the grit to tell politicians the unpleasant truth? Is this leadership?

But this issue of our appetite for red herrings is more important than Iraq, more important than the sub-prime mortgage crisis, more important than the election campaign, because if we come to live in a nation where there is little or no local coverage of news, we will be living blind, and others will be making decisions for us that will put money in their pockets while they cheat us.

Such a nation—thousands of blind communities—is bound to make the wrong decisions about its national destiny. In fact, it won’t be making the decisions at all. They’ll be made in clubs and corporate offices. Is that what we want? Of course not, but that is exactly where the American press, which we are so fond of calling a free press, is leading us.

Instead of playing blind man’s bluff and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, the press should be nurturing a broad and sustained debate about the kind of society we want. The pervasiveness of entertainment news, if it can be called news and not gossip, is no accident. It coincides with conglomeration of the press, the concentrating of the media in fewer and fewer hands. But all the while, the media moguls have said concentration will give us a better press. There has been ample time to test this contention, and the unequivocal answer is that it has not given us a better press, just as more than thirty years of trickle-down economics has not made the average worker more prosperous.

It is no accident that the press fails again and again to challenge each of these assumptions. To raise these issues the media would have to confront their own dereliction, the lies their corporate bosses have foisted on the public.

When you consider the failure of the press to reexamine its operating assumptions, it’s not difficult to understand why the presidential election campaign seems to snatch at one red herring after another. The press can pretend all it likes that Hillary Clinton’s fib about coming under fire in Bosnia when she was First Lady or Barack Obama’s sitting in a pew listening to Jeremiah Wright rant is a major story, but they are major stories in lieu of major stories, in lieu of the stories the press isn’t pressing. When Hillary Clinton tut-tuts and tsk-tsks about the Obama-Wright connection, what is stopping the reporters from saying, “Senator, what do you think about President Bush’s comment today that the tax rebates will fix the economy? What do you think, Senator, about the argument our corporations make that they can’t compete and pay higher wages?” Serious questions. What is stopping the press from changing the direction and the demeanor of the debate? Is it because that’s the not the role of the press in a free society? Well, if that’s the answer, is it the role of the press to suppress discourse about its own concentration in a few hands, about the issues it hardly ever raises?

The press is as responsible for the conduct of serious debate as the politicians. It is not the ironclad obligation of the press to indulge the politicians in their diversionary ping-pong. It is not the obligation of the press to assist the politicians in chucking red herrings at the electorate. The press is not supposed to be a parrot. So when its pundits complain of election campaigns as content-free zones, the public should remember the press has had a big hand in creating and sustaining these content-free zones.

If the press were doing its job the Sunday talk shows and their egocentric formats would be about the people, not the big talking heads, not the big shots, but ordinary people with ordinary problems that are, at the end of the day, far more interesting than Eliot Spitzer’s disappointing behavior or John Q. Pundit’s swollen opinions. Why aren’t these shows, assuming they’re of any value at all, correlating the decline of unionism with the decline of the middle class? We know the pundits use statistics to prove any point under the sun, so why can’t they find any data about this issue? Why aren’t they correlating the collapse of our manufacturing sector with the rise of our biggest industry, the prisons? And why aren’t they discussing why we have comparatively the biggest prison industry in the world? We freely discuss other nations’ prison systems, and the press freely reports that discussion, so how do we explain such silence about our own prisons and our mammoth prison population?

And these are only a few of the issues we’re not having a national discussion about. And it’s not all the politicians’ fault. They’re glad not to discuss anything difficult. They’re glad not to discuss anything that raises questions about their ideologies, which are often shallow and won’t stand up to much scrutiny. But why is the press so glad to play along? Why is the press so quick to talk about its First Amendment rights and so loathe to talk about its responsibilities as a privileged fourth estate?

The reason is that the owners of the press don’t want to spend the money necessary to do the job. They don’t want to raise issues that inevitably impinge on the way they themselves do business. They are part of the red herring fishery. Our Founding Fathers viewed the press in a very different way. They viewed the press as a kind of court of last resort, as a watchdog that would keep the politicians and the corporations honest and keep them out of our pockets. The Founding Fathers may not have imagined a press with the lofty ideals of The New York Times or The Washington Post, but they did envision a press whose owners would at least try to balance greed with civic responsibility.

The argument of the media moguls is that they are entitled to run efficient and profitable business and to do whatever is necessary to that end. But the discussion we’re not having is about the special nature of the Fourth Estate. If these business people wanted to run a business unburdened by the special vision of the Founding Fathers, they should have gone into another business. And that too raises questions the press is ducking. What is the responsibility of American business to the people? Does it have any responsibility to its workers, to the national infrastructure, to the nation’s defense? Or is its sole job to make money for its executives and its shareholders? Notice I haven’t spoken about its obligation to compete with foreign companies, because we have already witnessed that when push comes to shove American companies are hardly averse to selling themselves to foreign competitors.

Listen to this debate premise. Resolved: that American business has no responsibility in a global economy to improve our health, education and overall wellbeing. You can see those eyeballs roll in the boardrooms. You can hear media bosses saying, What, is this guy kidding? But isn’t it a valid premise for a debate, because it happens to impact every single one of us? So where is the debate? Where is the inquiry? Where are the studies?

There are corporate executives and politicians who will say such a premise is too naive to entertain or too shallow or too uninformed. Yes, well, would you mind taking a minute to explain why? Oh, you’re too busy making money. Well, may I ask, Money for whom? The guy who is sick and can’t pay his doctors? The family who can’t afford to send its kids to college? The old people who eat pet food? Are these the people you and our big, important press are too busy to explain such matters to?

As for the press, it has certainly spent time explaining to us celebrity behavior, American Idol, Pat Robertson’s latest lunacy, Jeremiah Wright’s angry screed, so couldn’t we have a little time exploring my naive, shallow, uninformed question about just how much responsibility our businesses have to what we have always been proud to call the American way of life?

We not only need a free-ranging debate about the kind of capitalism we want and how we choose to meet the challenge of strong global competition, we need a debate about the role of the media in our society. But how do we hold the board rooms responsible? How do we bring them to the debate? Our dilemma is that we have come to prefer slogans to inquiry. The media, including the book publishers and the filmmakers, have been telling Congress for decades that they are giving the people what the people want: violence, trivia, celebrity fecklessness, and a youth culture whose self-absorption knows no bounds. But is this true? Can the media be believed? For the sake of promoting a discussion, there are strong indications the public does not prefer what the media say it prefers. For example, Pew researchers have found that the public wants news stories about money and disasters, not celebrity trivia, not sex. Perhaps if media coverage of economic issues had been deeper and more consistent, the mortgage crisis could have been averted, home buyers would have refrained from overreaching, banks and insurers might have been constrained to act more prudently with other people’s money, and the public might have savored the possibility that an economy booming because of a rage to buy and sell homes might be an inherently unhealthy one-horse economy, just as Washington, with its obsessions about power, is an inherently unhealthy one-horse town.

So how do we get the big shots to the table to get serious about where we’re going, how to get there, and what their responsibilities as citizens are? The politicians and preachers are quick to talk about our duty to defend the country and support the troops, but have you seen any statistics about how many sons and daughters of the rich and powerful are in Iraq? Could such statistics be developed? If so, who would want to generate them? Not the think tanks of the right, certainly. As for the think tanks of the left, they seem as ideologically muscle-bound as their right-wing antagonists. The point is not to twist each other’s tails, the point is to head in the same direction. We spend more time trying to paint each other as un-American than we do remembering that we all belong to the same country and wish it well.

But wishing it well isn’t enough: we need to reexamine the assumptions that we have accepted as set in stone.

Iraq’s separate sects, peoples and provinces have far less in common than the original thirteen states.

Seen in this context, the debate over how long to stay in Iraq looks very different from the debate the press has framed. The picture we’re getting is that if we leave there will be chaos, genocide and further threats to our domestic security, and therefore discussion about leaving is political blather.

What is behind this? Does it mean that the Arab states, which have been saying for decades they want foreign powers out of their hair, have no responsibility for peace in Iraq? Does it mean we must continue to drain our treasury and abandon our social goals to keep the peace between Kurds, Turkmen and Sunni and Shia Arabs? Does it mean we must indefinitely guard Iraq’s borders against Iran? Does it mean we actually believe there will be a finite point in time when Al Qaeda can’t reconstitute itself in the Arab world?

What is wrong with the canonical view of Iraq is that developments
in Iraq — on the ground, as President Bush is fond of saying so deceptively— should dictate what happens next. That is clever by half. It sounds rational, but it is tricky. Developments on the ground are ephemeral, they don’t change the essential historical facts with which we and the Iraqis are dealing. We can spend the next one hundred years responding to developments on the ground and achieving very little. We invaded without historical perspective and we can’t extricate ourselves by responding to periodic reports from commanders “on the ground” who may or may not be trying to ingratiate themselves with the current occupant of the White House. The Bush Administration has sold us a distorting frame in which to view Iraq. The future is not in this or that development or trend; the future is in understanding the historic complexities and behaving as if we have some respect for them. We are engulfed in our own magic thinking about Iraq. There is no development or trend or statistical set that is going to provide a clear signal about anything. The British were selfishly wrong to create Iraq as it is constituted today. They did it for their own colonial convenience, not for the Iraqis, just as we invaded for our purposes, and to claim now, as the White and John McCain do, that developments will justify a decadent and debasing policy is disgraceful, and indeed murderous. There is no easy solution, no foreign imposition that is going to solve the problem. It is, as it was, a Muslim problem exacerbated by foreign meddling.

If we ran our domestic affairs by responding to the facts on the ground, what would happen to our ideals, our social goals, our responsibilities to the disenfranchised? Such a notion is intellectually bankrupt.

The comparison has been made between our so-called duty to stay in Iraq and the prolonged presence of our troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. Japan made war on us and committed genocide in China. Germany attacked our allies and embarked on genocide. As for Korea, we got into it for better or worse because of John Foster Dulles’ discredited domino theory. Accepting those facts, it remains questionable whether we should be staying so long, and it is only Ron Paul and one or two other “fringe” candidates who have had the moral fortitude to raise questions about this.

How do these circumstances argue for a prolonged occupation of Iraq? And even if they do, can we afford it? Can we afford to keep on dancing to Al Qaeda’s tune? Our politicians are quick to say Medicare and Social Security are bankrupting us; isn’t the Iraq war? And if we stay, can we afford to prevail in Afghanistan? And what about the severe stress our soldiers are experiencing? What about breakouts of violence elsewhere? And, perhaps most importantly, what about our continued denial of the realities of Middle Eastern history?

When CNN’s Michael Ware, a blunt and diligent reporter, tells us there will be hell to pay if we leave in the next year or two, there is no reason to doubt him. But does it mean we shouldn’t? We have paid a hellish price morally and financially for going in, we and the Iraqis will pay a hellish price when we leave, but at the end of the day there are other issues to address, including our future as a prosperous nation. We have been foolhardy and we have unleashed dark forces, but we have no reason to disbelieve Arab and other world diplomats who say our presence is stirring the pot.

It’s almost certain a majority of Muslims regard our occupation of Iraq as another Western crusades against Islam. Ultimately the Arabs must accept responsibility for achieving what they have said they want, control of their own destiny. We regarded foreign meddling in our civil war as a hostile act; why should we suppose the Arabs don’t feel similarly?

There may be bloodshed and chaos when we go. There may be bloodshed and chaos if we stay. But that’s not how our discourse should be framed. We have larger interests and concerns, and so do the Muslims. A financially weakened America does no one any good, and the Iraq occupation is weakening us.—DM