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Why is Hollywood So Liberal?

I'm out in L.A. doing an Oscar story. Yesterday, I spent some time with the young actor Ryan Gosling, who's the dark-horse contender for the Best Actor award this year, up against some stiff competition--Forrest Whitaker, Peter O'Toole, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc. (in fact, Gosling's such a long shot, he's betting against himself.) Gosling got the nomination for his intense, disturbing portrayal of a crackhead schoolteacher in Half Nelson.  He struck me as a very thoughtful, warm guy--not at all the prima donna type. And he seems to be struggling to craft a career that balances the industrial-strength glamour of Hollywood (he made all the girls swoon in the weeper The Notebook) with his own personal ambitions to make smaller, independent, more "difficult" movies. He's definitely a young actor to watch.

But the talk of the town out here is the dust-up among Hollywood's big political donors. When mogul and onetime FOB David Geffen called the Clintons liars (Geffen is now backing Senator Barack Obama), it set off fireworks across the country (Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign demanded that Obama cut off all ties to Geffen), and here in L.A. One reason: Hollywood money is a crucial factor for any Democrat who seriously wants to be president. You simply cannot get the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party--and you cannot win the White House as a Democrat--without the money-raising muscle of Hollywood. So the stakes are very high in this early skirmish between Clinton and Obama.

The whole incident demonstrates that fact once again, and it also reminds us how liberal Hollywood is. A conservative Democrat or a Republican is simply not going to find anywhere near as much money out here as a liberal--a "real" liberal. Why is that? Why is Hollywood so liberal?

First off, I'm not taking any political position here. It may be a great thing, it may be not so great, that Hollywood is a bastion of liberalism. Some people like it, some don't. That's not what I'm after here. Second, I'm not talking about the actors themselves. Artists in our culture, most of them anyway, have long been on the more progressive side of our politics. Perhaps it has something to do with the kind of work they do, perhaps with the fashions of the artistic community, perhaps because as artists they have a different experience of the world. Dunno.

No, I'm wondering about the moguls. Geffen, Katzenberg, Spielberg, Reiner, Lear, Saban--the big-money moguls are power players in the Democratic Party, and they lean unmistakably left. That has not always been the case in Hollywood. Once upon a time, the men (and they were all men) who ran Hollywood leaned unmistakably right. Louis B. Mayer was chairman of California's Republican Party for years. Irving Thalberg led the effort to defeat progressive Democrat Upton Sinclair when he ran for California governor in 1934 on a platform of ending poverty in the state. Daryl Zanuck was a staunch Cold Warrior who, like many moguls, helped enforce the notorious blacklisting of actors, writers, directors and others who might have had some association with communism. And Walt Disney was a deeply anti-union, anti-communist social conservative.

So what's going on today? What happened? I'm wondering if the real reason the big-money players in Hollywood have become so liberal is that it's good for their business.

Sex sells. Always has, always will. If you put a pretty woman, scantily clad, in front of a pile of radial tires, you will sell more radial tires. There's probably some algorithm for it. And once Hollywood was able to shake off the shackles of the "Hays code" the opportunities to make more by showing more and doing more in the bedroom on screen were simply irresistible.

The cash Niagara of more explicit, more sexually liberated movies has had a political consequence, it seems to me. Imagine, for a moment: If social conservatives had their way and American culture was remade in the manner they advocate--Hollywood would take a beating. Movies would change--they'd be less sexually suggestive, less "transgressive" of middle-class morality, less likely to champion lifestyles at odds with "traditional values." (They also might be a lot more boring--but that's beside the point.) And the big moguls would make less money--a lot less. (Artists would certainly and rightly rebel against the constraints on their freedom to imagine and depict the world--but I'm not talking about artists. I'm talking about businessmen and businesswomen.) So: Sex sells. And that shapes Hollywood's politics.

But I wonder if there's another factor (and I admit I'm going even farther out on a limb here). Hollywood is now one of the biggest transnational, mega-corporate industries in the world. The interests of the people who make a pile of money from Hollywood movies are intimately bound up with the culture of international business. And that culture increasingly treats nations and their parochial interests as obstacles to progress, to the natural order of The Deal. As Samuel Huntington and others have provocatively suggested, the way "transnational elites" see the world--and see their interests in the world--is often at odds with the way many of their fellow citizens see the world. Here's how Huntington famously (or infamously) put it:

“America's business, professional, intellectual, and academic elites... [have] attitudes and behaviors [that] contrast with the overwhelming patriotism and nationalistic identification with their country of the American public. . . . They abandon commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large.”

It's what some on the left call "community without nation"--the notion that national loyalty and all it entails can be superseded by a broader allegiance to the abstract goals of trade, of human rights, global environmental stewardship, and a more egalitarian distribution of the world's resources.

I wonder: If American foreign policy, or environmental policy, or even our religious culture "offends" people around the world, does that harm Hollywood's business interests? And if it does, might the risk to the movie business's bottom line account for some of the reason Hollywood moguls lean left? Is the Republican Party bad for business out here?

And please let me emphasize: I am trying to provoke a discussion, not take a position here. I may be a liberal; I may be a conservative. No matter here. I'm just trying to "push back" a little.

And I invite you to "push back," too.

February 22, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (269) | TrackBack (0)

I Stand Corrected

I'd like to offer my sincere thanks to all of you who pointed out significant factual errors in the posting, "Is Giuliani 'White' Enough?", including:

The Republican Party has nominated a Catholic for national office--William Miller in 1964; the Republicans nominated Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas--who was nearly half Native American--for vice president in 1928; Earl Warren--nominated by the GOP for vice president in 1948--was the son of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants; John Kerry is not an Irish Catholic.

These are obvious errors, easily checked, and I apologize for my sloppiness.

The point of the piece was to poke a little fun at the whole "Is-Barack-Obama-Black-Enough?" discussion by turning it on its head a bit and pointing out that "whiteness," like "blackness" in America, is not a biological given but a social construct. I also sought to explore the challenge I believe Rudolph Giuliani's candidacy represents for today's Republican Party. As Ken Mehlman and many other GOP leaders have acknowledged, the Republicans must attract more non-white voters in an increasingly diverse America in order to be successful. One only has to look at election results to see the evidence of this challenge. And I wondered whether Giuliani's politics--a distinctly urban mixture of tough-mindedness, pragmatism, and palpable ease with "the roiling racial and social diversity of the big city"--presented a specific and fascinating challenge to today's GOP. It was an effort at provocation--marred badly by those factual errors.

I really do appreciate the "pushback." I'm learning a great deal from all of you. And I thank you.

Keep 'em coming.

February 19, 2007 in Correction | Permalink | User Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

Is Giuliani "White" Enough?

There's a lot of talk these days about Senator Barack Obama's racial identity: "Is Obama black enough?" The question has become a kind of shorthand for a national discussion of the Illinois senator's mixed-race, international background and what it might mean for him as a presidential candidate. It plunges us into our oldest dilemma--the social construction of race and its meanings in the American polity. Who counts as "black"--whether measured by the old, ugly concept of "one drop of blood" or the new, indeterminate notion of authenticity of experience--is an issue it seems we've never been able to escape. And until our country achieves true racial justice, equality and harmony, I suppose it will always be with us. Race still matters so much in America. That might sound depressing--and it is in many ways--but it's better to talk about it--to open up our preconceptions and labels and misunderstandings to a searching examination and a freewheeling discussion--than to sweep it all under the rug as somehow too intimate, too painful, too troubling, too rude to raise in a presidential campaign.  Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis liked to say. Obama himself has clearly thought deeply about these matters, and the excitement surrounding his candidacy stems in part from what he has to say about us as a multi-racial nation with a history scarred--and ennobled--by our struggle over racial difference, power and justice. His remarkable autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, is a deeply moving contribution to this discussion. But I'd like to flip the question about Obama in a way, just to see what we might come up with here. So, instead of asking, "Is Obama black enough?" how about asking, "Is Rudolph Giuliani white enough?" Huh? Well, just as "blackness" is an identity we invent and impose on each other (a "socially constructed concept," as they say), so is "whiteness." And "whiteness"--or the "lack" of it--might also have important political ramifications. Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III is a proud Italian-American; both his mom and his dad were immigrants. He was mayor of New York City--perhaps the world's greatest experiment in diversity. And he's running for president in the Republican Party, a party that even former chairman Ken Mehlman has acknowledged faces genuine problems reaching out to non-whites. In 2000, George W. Bush won 62 percent of white males--and lost the popular vote. Bush won 60 percent of the white male vote in 2004--and just 50.7 percent of the overall vote. As any GOP strategist will tell you privately, the Republican Party has become too dependent on white male voters. So what does this have to do with Giuliani? He's a white guy, right? Well, yes and no. Who counts as white in America has been a fluid concept in our history, and Italians have only recently--and perhaps incompletely in some quarters--been admitted to the racial club. It was just 85 years ago, in 1922, in the fascinating case of Rollins v. Alabama, that a black man named Jim Rollins was tried and convicted for "miscegenation"--the crime of having sex with a white woman. On appeal, Rollins' conviction was overturned because the woman in question, Ms. Edith LaBue, was a Sicilian immigrant, a fact that the court held could "in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman." (Anyone who's read William Faulkner's novels will recognize the Alabama court's unease about calling a Sicilian woman white.) Italians--like Irish, Jews, Poles, Greeks and now Hispanics and others--have struggled in our history to achieve "whiteness." It's not a given--not a fixed characteristic. It's always been a designation granted to a group by the dominant culture. But that's a done deal for Italian-Americans, long ago. They're white--now. But the question for Giuliani is whether there is some shadow, some echo of the old attitudes in how some voters might approach his candidacy. Giuliani is at odds with Republican base voters on several major issues: abortion, gay rights, gun control, immigration. His positions on these matters--combined with his background--confront Republicans with a distinctly "urban" candidate--an ethnic son of immigrants at ease with the roiling racial and social diversity of the big city that many GOP voters see as a threat to their notion of America. This is a party, after all, that has nominated precisely one ethnic immigrant candidate for national office in its history--Greek-American Spiro Agnew (the Roosevelts and Eisenhowers had been in America for centuries). Republicans have never nominated a Catholic for national office. Democrats have a different record--Irish-Americans Al Smith, John Kennedy and John Kerry; Polish-American Edmund Muskie; Norwegian-American Walter Mondale; Italian-American Geraldine Ferraro; Greek-American Michael Dukakis; Jewish-American Joseph Lieberman. Look at a map of the 2004 election results, county by county. What you see is a nation divided by diversity. Rudy Giuliani's candidacy challenges that division, and raises the question: Is he white enough? So the Giuliani candidacy might tell us something about today's Republican Party. And about America.

February 16, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (82) | TrackBack (0)

Reparations for GTMO?

Should the government of the United States pay reparations to those men who were falsely imprisoned for years at the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay?

It's a serious question.

This week, President Bush signed an executive order providing for trial by military commission of three detainees who have been singled out to face something that may--or may not--be due process. Court battles lie ahead. The other men--more than 400 of them, locked in the cells and cages behind the wire at GTMO--remain in legal limbo, labeled "enemy combatants," a terminological innovation designed to deny them the protections of either prisoners of war or of common criminals. BUT--what if we are wrong about some of these men? What if, in the shock and trauma following 9/11, we ended up seizing people who were not in fact terrorists, who did not in fact do or mean us harm, and hauled them around the world, interrogated/tortured them, cut them off from their families, and incarcerated them without trial for years? What would we owe them?

First, no matter how you feel about what the United States has done at Guantanamo Bay--whether you feel it's a justified and lawful wartime measure or a disgrace on the nation--most of us would agree on a couple of big principles: Our country should not imprison the innocent. And when our country makes a mistake--when we break faith with our commitment to the rule of law--we are a great enough country to admit it, and make amends.

Second, we have to stipulate something, as the lawyers say: We have no idea how many innocents might have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. That's because the procedures for determining who the prisoners in our custody are and what--if anything--they have done are deeply flawed, most legal scholars agree. Detainees have been denied access to much of the evidence against them, including the identity of their accusers; they have no right to legal representation; evidence derived from coercive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo--including techniques amounting to torture under international standards--is allowed to be considered; and hearsay is admitted.

Now, it is true that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and officials at the prison all claim that there are "no innocent" men in the cells at Guantanamo, that they are all "bad people" who were all "picked up on the battlefield," "dangerous," "the worst of the worst."

Those claims are false. By the government's own admission, 38 of the 558 prisoners--7 percent--who have been held at Guantanamo are "no longer enemy combatants." The US government is gradually releasing them. If they were so "dangerous," truly "the worst of the worst," would we really just let them go? The potential fraud of this designation was noted--with a hint of outrage--by US District Judge James Robertson in 2005: "The government's use of the Kafka-esque term 'no longer enemy combatants' deliberately begs the question of whether these petitioners ever were enemy combatants." In other words, they may well be innocent.

That's not all. Administration officials--from the president on down--have constantly claimed all the men at Guantanamo were "picked up on the battlefield." This is also demonstrably false. According to the military's own determinations--as researched and analyzed by Seton Hall University Professor Mark Denbaux and his son John Denbaux in a thorough report--55 percent of those held at Guantanamo did not commit any hostile acts against US or coalition forces; 40 percent have no definitive connection with al Qaeda; 18 percent have no definitive connection with either al Qaeda or the Taliban; and only 5 percent of the detainees were actually captured by US forces. Most of the rest were sold to us by bounty hunters in Pakistan. The "worst of the worst?" Read those statistics again--the military's own official findings on the men they are holding in those cells--and ask yourself, again: If some of these men are indeed innocent, what do we owe them?

In 1988, the United States Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the "Civil Liberties Act of 1988," which formally apologized to the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and provided for symbolic compensation of $20,000 per person. The law's purpose was to "acknowledge the fundamental injustice" of what our country had done. In signing the bill, President Reagan said, "What's most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here, we admit a wrong."

Honor. For millions in this country and around the world, what has happened at Guantanamo Bay has stained the nation's honor. President Bush himself has acknowledged that the prison has become a symbol of injustice, dismaying our friends and inspiring our enemies. The new Democratic Congress is considering cutting off funding for the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forcing the administration to shut it down. Perhaps the Congress should go further--establishing an independent commission to review claims of innocence from those men already released from GTMO, and, if the panel concludes there have been wrongful imprisonments, providing for an American apology and compensation. That would say a lot about our country. It might remind people what's at the heart of our democracy--an ideal of justice, the commitment to truth. And that would surely inspire our friends and dismay our enemies.

Sometimes, as Ronald Reagan knew, the honorable thing to do is admit you've done wrong. And--honorably--seek forgiveness.

What do you think?

February 15, 2007 in War | Permalink | User Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Pelosi's plane

"We're Article One."

That's what former Speaker of the House Jim Wright liked to say. Wright was talking about the place of Congress in the Constitution: It comes first in the document, right after the preamble. Jim Wright, who was not a bashful man, believed placement was prerogative in constitutional law; Congress came first because the Framers saw it as primus inter pares, as the first among the co-equal branches, the main driver of our national experiment in representative democracy simply because it was closest to the people. Wright was right; that's a standard scholarly reading of the document, as well.

Jim Wright's institutional claims come to mind in the wake of the ridiculous flap over what kind of government plane the current Speaker of the House should be able to fly. By now, you surely know the story (or should, if you've been following my ABC colleague Jake Tapper's excellent coverage of it): Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California is now the leading constitutional officer of Congress--i.e., she's Speaker. Second in the line of succession to the presidency. She's a Democrat. She's a woman. She's a liberal. Her predecessor was Rep. Denny Hastert of Illinois. He's a Republican. He's a man. He's a conservative.

After the 9/11 attacks, Speaker Hastert was, for security reasons, given "shuttle service" by Pelosi military transport to and from his congressional district in Illinois. This year, citing the same security concerns, the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives asked the Department of Defense to provide a plane that could get Speaker Pelosi to and from her district in California--which would require a bigger and costlier plane than Hastert used.

What did the Bush administration do? Leak the story--to The Washington Times, a kind of house organ for conservatives in the capital. And sit back and watch the flap.

This is hardly bipartisan comity between the branches of our government. Moreover, it seems downright disrespectful. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker. Deal with it. If security requires the constitutional officer of Congress to fly military transport to and from her district, then fly her. The Sergeant at Arms requested "non-stop flights, unless such an aircraft is unavailable." Seems eminently reasonable. BUT--and here's complaint (or perhaps the fake complaint, given how much GOP lawmakers have used military transport over the past several years)--it will cost more. Perhaps a few million dollars a year more.

The federal budget will soon exceed $2.9 trillion. The "burn rate" of the war in Iraq is more than $8 billion a month. $12 billion in cash vanished into thin air in Iraq. The Capitol Visitors Center is $335 million over budget. And Congress is Article I.

Do the math.

February 8, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (67) | TrackBack (0)

Hate Speech: A response

Thanks to all who have weighed in on the issue of John Edwards' "blogmaster" Amanda Marcotte. All voices and views are welcome here. The whole point of "Pushback" is to provoke a discussion, to take a look at the news and start talking about it. And that, of course, is the hope of the blogosphere--a place where hard facts, sharp opinions, original insights and roiling passions combine to deepen and extend our national debate. With any luck, it'll make us all smarter and better citizens. So: I truly appreciate all who have pushed back at me here.

Let's continue.

First, a lot of you have objected to my suggestion that some of what Marcotte has written "might well be construed as hate speech." Here's what I hope is a representative sampling of some of those objections:

Posted by: Karen | Feb 7, 2007 1:20:57 PM: "The title of this post is absolutely ridiculous. None of those posts are hate speech. But nice attempt at silencing free speech, Mr. Moran."

Posted by: Seth | Feb 6, 2007 8:07:57 PM: "This is hardly hate speech. It may be raw and not my style, but it doesn't fall within the parameters of hate speech. Perhaps you're thinking of Limbaugh, Colter and Savage? They are the real experts on hate speech in commercial blog/radio show America today."

Posted by: Mark | Feb 7, 2007 2:51:36 PM: "Apparenlty Terry Moran has never read Blogs before, because if he had, he would realize that these remarks are hardly "hate speech", espeically when considering the lovely langugage Malkin, Coulter, and Limbaugh use on a daily basis."

A couple of points. First, it seems to me that trashing the sacred beliefs of another person in sexually explicit or scatological terms for the purpose of wounding and delegitimizing the other person could fairly be construed as hateful. The gutter is always the comfortable resort of haters. That's why white supremacists use the word "n*****" and slander all black men by portraying them as sexually predatory beasts; that's why antisemites repeat the blood libel. For another disgusting example of this kind of discourse, check out what "James" wrote about Islam in response to my post on Edwards and Marcotte (at 2:40:24 PM EDT); pure hatred, in my view.

There are all kinds of ways to dispute what another person says or believes. Sometimes, giving offense is a great way to make a point, to get heard, to break through the unspoken oppression of certain views. But to seek to obliterate the legitimacy of another person's faith or other allegiances--and wound them in the process with the vilest terminology--isn't debate. It's rhetorical gangsterism.

There are plenty of examples of this tactic across the airwaves, the Internet and campaigns these days. A lot of what Ann Coulter has said could certainly be construed as hate speech; Rep. Rahm Emanuel and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised the issue in the last election, demanding that Republicans "denounce Ann Coulter's hate speech." When the Catholic League's Bill Donahue declares, ""Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," that could be construed as hateful (and stupid). Rush Limbaugh comparing liberals to cockroaches could be construed as classic eliminationist rhetoric, used by haters for centuries to avoid real debate against their opponents, delegitimizing and dehumanizing those who disagree with them. The list goes on--on both the right and the left.

Now, it's a free country. Rush Limbaugh can spew all the hatred he wants. So can Ann Coulter, Amanda Marcotte, or me. But political leaders are different. In order for a government of compromise, consensus and common sacrifice to work, we expect our leaders to disavow hate, to conduct our public business in a manner respectful of all our citizens, consistent with our best traditions. Hate breaks down the sinews of the body politic and sets us against each other as enemies to be defeated. This is fatal to a diverse, democratic republic. Lincoln, as usual, said it best: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And so it seems fair to me that we ask politicians who embrace those who spew what might be construed as hatred whether they endorse or disavow it. That goes for Vice President Cheney--who is a regular guest on Limbaugh's program--or for John Edwards, who has hired Amanda Marcotte. This isn't about censorship. It's about leadership.

Second, there's the issue of the blogoshpere itself. A lot of people have told me that what Marcotte and others (liberal and conservative) are writing is just par for the course out there. Blogs, I'm told, are different. They're new--they're edgy--they're breaking the boundaries of old-fogey media and ushering in a new era of public discourse. I buy a lot of that. But speech is still speech. And hate is still hate. If you call a black man a "n*****" on a blog, it's just as offensive as shouting it in his face. It seems to me that bloggers (and those who post comments on them) sometimes forget this; the lack of a flesh-and-blood interlocutor and the anonymity the internet offers unleash the rhetorical beast in us. Rage, vituperation, insult, slur, infantile taunting--you see a lot of that on many blogs. That, I am told, is just the rough-and-tumble world of bloggers, having at each other and everyone else with raw gusto, just like those old pamphleteers to whom they are so often compared. OK, fine, whatever. But you don't get a pass from the tenets of basic decency in civil discourse just because you blog.

Third, my bro. Many of you have noted that I am the brother of Rick Moran, who writes the Right Wing Nuthouse blog, and you have concluded that I am somehow in cahoots with Rick, or share his view of the world. For the record, I had no idea Rick was writing about this subject when I posted yesterday. But far more important: I love my brother something fierce. I am very proud of him. We do not agree on many, many things (as decades of uncomfortably loud dinner table disagreements have demonstrated). In no way do I endorse anything he writes; that's not for me to do here. But I will never disavow him. I will always defend him as an honorable man. And I really don't care what anyone says about it. He is my brother.

Finally, can we all lighten up a little? In that spirit, try this little piece of internet genius: http://roxik.com/pictaps/. Have fun.

February 7, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (124) | TrackBack (0)

Does John Edwards Condone Hate Speech?

A bit of a tempest is brewing over the strident and profanity-laced writings of John Edwards' official campaign "blogmaster," Amanda Marcotte. She joined the Edwards campaign last week, and she's already gotten a lot of attention.

At issue are Marcotte's comments on her own blog, Pandagon (http://www.pandagon.net/), which has staked out a prominent place in the left-wing blogosphere. It's pretty strong stuff; her comments about other people's faiths could well be construed as hate speech.

Questions: What, if anything, does it tell us about Edwards that he's joined up with this blogger? Is Edwards' association with a person who has written these things a legitimate issue for voters, as they wonder--among other things--whom he might appoint to high office if he's elected? If a Republican candidate teamed up with a right-wing blogger who spewed this kind of venom, how would people react? Is the mere raising of this issue a kind of underhanded censorship, a way of ruling out of bounds some kinds of opinion? Are we all just going to have to get used to a more rough-and-tumble, profane, and even hate-filled public arena in the age of the blogosphere?

ON THE CATHOLIC TEACHINGS ON BIRTH CONTROL:

Last year, Marcotte blasted the Catholic Church's position on birth control: "Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology." (Side note: Would there be a different reaction if John Edwards "blogmaster" had insulted Islam to this degree? Is it "okay" to trash Catholicism--but not Islam?)

ON THE DUKE RAPE CASE:

"I had to listen to how the poor, dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f***** her against her will--not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair."

ON REPUBLICAN VOTERS:

“Voters who are motivated by misogyny, homophobia, and racism aren’t going to leave a racist, misogynist, homophobic party for one that is all those things but just less so.”

ON CHRISTIAN SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL:

"...on top of the usual motivations behind Christian Zionism—hatred for Muslims, a desire to bring the end of the world, political opportunism and a chance for ministers to make their congregations feel like they are a part of something dramatic and important so their pocketbooks fall opeN..."

ON NASCAR:

“There’s no real reason that NASCAR has to have a political edge to it, much less be some weird symbol of Southern male white supremacy and yet through careful Republican marketing, it has become just that.”

ON THE CRUCIFIXION, FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS, AND TORTURE

"The paradox was this—how can anybody look at the figure of Christ on the cross and think that’s anything but a condemnation of torture? For the thinking person, it clearly is. But for the fundamentalist, that image creates anxiety about death and makes them cling to their hierarchical values even more, and those values include the belief that Muslims are inferior, not-saved, and eligible for torture. They’re going to hell anyway, by the fundie logic, and why should god get all the fun of punishing them and making them suffer?”

February 6, 2007 in Politics | Permalink | User Comments (628) | TrackBack (0)

The End

Sometimes, it ends abruptly--a single moment, a single crucial mistake. Sometimes, it's over before it began--the odds so long there was no chance at all. And sometimes, it's agony.

For all of us who live and die with Chicago sports, last night's Super Bowl was agony. Da Bears went down. And it wasn't pretty. Witnessing a debacle like this one really hurt. The slow, grinding death of our hopes as the minutes ticked away, the flickering possibilities that kept firing off sparks every time we looked at the scoreboard and found ourselves still within reach, and the dreaded, leaden weight of our own errors--it all made for a very bitter experience. And what made it more excruciating was that, for a few moments, it was heaven. Our beloved Bears leapt out into the lead, and our hearts were racing. Devin Hester's return felt like lightning striking.  Every step we took seemed charmed--the interception, the long run, the rifled TD pass. We could do no wrong. Then, inevitably, ineluctably, our worst fears took shape in the drizzle and damp, and reality set in--in the person of Peyton Manning. The rest is silence--at least for me.

But this year's Bears taught us one thing. There's glory in the struggle, in defying the naysayers and living the dream, even if it's only for a brief moment. And so, for that moment--many thanks, to this year's Monsters of the Midway.

February 5, 2007 in Sports | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

How the death penalty really works

Death-penalty trials are intense. The ideal of our justice system--that impartial jurors will be presented facts by skilled advocates under civilized rules of evidence and come to a reasoned judgment--is put to a searing test. A capital case (and I've covered many in my career) is a visceral struggle, a matter of blood and sorrow, fear and pity, rage and mercy. I've felt at times covering death-penalty trials that I'm witnessing something that reaches deep into the human past, long before our country was imagined. Something almost tribal, something even pre-rational.

I say this not to make a point either for or against the death penalty. I am merely trying to describe what in my experience as a reporter really happens in a courtroom where a life is at stake, because another life has been savagely taken. As the debate over capital punishment continues in America, it is worth taking a steady look at how this thing really works, at the deep emotions unleashed in death penalty cases, and what they mean for the operation of our justice system.

Billy Slagle killed Mari Anne Pope. There is no doubt about that. It happened in 1987--almost twenty years ago now--in the pre-dawn hours of a summer morning in West Cleveland. Slagle, 19, wanted money for his next day's drinking. He was stoned on marijuana. Mari Anne Pope was babysitting a neighbor's two children, and when Slagle broke in to the house, she and the children awakened. The little ones escaped, but not before seeing Slagle on top of Mari Anne Pope in her bedroom. She was praying, her rosary in hand. Billy Slagle stabbed her 17 times with a sewing scissors. He was arrested on the scene, covered in blood, and confessed. Mari Anne Pope died a few hours later. Her broken rosary was found on the floor, a few feet from her bed.

Mari Anne Pope was one of 20,096 people murdered in the United States in 1987. By any reckoning, her killing was vicious. Billy Slagle was tried, convicted, and condemned to death. The question the courts have now been grappling with for two decades is: Was the jury's decision to put Billy Slagle to death reached in a manner consistent with our ideals of justice? Was it a reasoned judgment or a gut reaction? Was it a verdict under law or a paroxysm of emotion?

Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected Slagle's appeal for another hearing in his case. You can read the court's order by clicking here. You can read the court's original decision in the case by clicking here.

The issue that has bedeviled this case for twenty years is the conduct of the prosecutor. It was a high-profile trial; the community was shocked by the crime, many people justifiably seething with anger. The state was seeking the death penalty, and the prosecutor was determined to secure it.

During the course of the trial, the prosecutor told jurors that Slagle (an American Indian) "...and his kind...represent some of the greatest threats against community and civilization as we know it;" that Slagle "had crawled out of a hole;'" that Slagle (who took the stand) "had the nerve to tell you "I pray, I pray;'" that Mari Anne Pope "was ready to meet God, and Billy was ready to send her to meet Him;" and that Slagle "has no conscience" and his life "has been one big lie." When Slagle was on the witness stand, the prosecutor asked him, "You don't like prayers, do you Billy?"

So far, our courts have decided that the prosecutor's conduct in this trial was either proper under the law, or that it did not affect the case in any serious way. This may be just; it may be unjust. I take no position here.

But what I want to draw your attention to is the issue of raw, primal emotion in the case--and in our system. The reason we have jury trials and not blood feuds or vendettas is that we believe a group of citizens, fairly informed, can reach a reasoned judgment about what happened in a case, and what should be done about it. It might not be a perfect system, but it is a noble one. That hope defines us. It separates us from gangs, savages and lynch mobs. It is a very great ideal.

It is an ideal that is very hard--perhaps impossible--to see at work in a death-penalty case like Billy Slagle's, or in many others. Instead, we have a crying contest, a competition to see which side can break the jurors' hearts harder--either the prosecution with its portrayal of Mari Anne Pope as a devout Christian killed with bloodthirsty fury, or the defense and its portrayal of Slagle as an abused, alcoholic teenager. Why should those issues--and the emotions they trigger--matter? Would the case have turned out differently if Mari Anne Pope had been a drug addict? A hooker? Slagle's girlfriend? Would there have been a different verdict if Slagle had been a devout Christian struggling with alcohol addiction? If he'd shot her instead of knifed her?

We are beyond the realm of reason here, it seems to me. We are dealing with our most primitive emotions--fear, rage, pity, hatred, sorrow. But this is how the death penalty really works--the only way it could really work, given the stakes involved.

Do you think such a system is just?

February 2, 2007 in Law | Permalink | User Comments (41) | TrackBack (0)