In the United States of America in 2009, what does it mean to be a black man?

According to the Bureau Of Justice Statistics, 4,777 black men out of 100,000 are in jail or prison right now; for white men, that number is 727. A black man is six and a half times more likely than a white man to be in jail today, right now. SIX AND A HALF MORE TIMES.

Whatever the reasons are for that, none of them are good enough. This is an outrage, an epidemic, and all you need to know about it is this: We ain’t doin’ a damn thing about it.

Well, not nothing: we are building nicer juvenile detention centers.

Dirty Red posted on this general topic recently, and in response to a comment I left, he suggested that I post on this subject as well.

I think he’s right.

And what I’d really like to see is many more people post on this topic. Why is a black man more likely to go to prison than to college? Why is that acceptable? Why aren’t we talking about it? Why did we elect a black president, only to watch as he studiously avoids dealing with racial issues?

Many of my heroes are black men, some for their talent, some for their contributions, some for their struggle. Dwane T. guest posted on this very blog about his good friend Johnny Gammage, who had a fateful encounter with police from upscale suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh one day, an encounter which led to his untimely death, for which several officers stood trial and for which they were all acquitted.

In other words, you may be a highly educated, highly successful black man, never have had the slightest problem with the police, no criminal record and no criminal intent, and you may end up dead because you are a black man.

If that’s not something to think about in the United States of America in 2009, there’s the comment box: Tell me why.

It seems I cannot absorb any information these days without gasping, scratching my head and wondering what the hell this person could possibly be thinking.

This means either that I am going insane or that I am far ahead of the curve, which in practical terms are roughly equivalent.

On the other hand, I made a woman laugh last night. We met briefly online at a site where Tavis Smiley was making an appearance after hosting his new documentary “Stand” for a select few (I guess I’m not that well connected yet or I would have paid for my own plane ticket to attend), and it was just the two of us killing time, and she found me amusing.

I told her that she obviously did not know me well, that I am the most annoyed person I know. It’s almost impossible for me to socialize anymore, because nobody wants to talk about the things that I consider essential to talk about.

Whew.

I wrote recently (amidst no evidence that anybody noticed) that the national government headed by president Barack Obama lacks clarity in its policy making and its positions. Nowhere is that more evident than in Afghanistan. So, I eagerly followed my Twitter link (I am JerzyWalt) to the latest New Yorker article on that very subject.

Sigh.

Steve Coll writes “The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs.”

The above is a list of things the U.S. did wrong, which implies that there are things the U.S. could have done right. Let’s examine that: we supported those who were fighting the Soviet Union; the alternative was to give up that chip? Perhaps, but does that sound like rational policy? We “averted” our “eyes” as Pakistan developed the bomb, or we welcomed it as a useful counterweight to India’s similar capability, India being more in the USSR sphere of influence and Pakistan more in the US sphere of influence? I read a lot of news in the 1980s and 1990s (and in every decade of my life, really); I recall plenty being written on this subject. It is plain ignorant to, today, describe it as some sort of clandestine, frowned-upon activity.

We failed to recognize the “menace” of al Quaeda in the 1990s? Does this guy get to just make stuff up? Clinton’s missiles may have missed, but they were aimed at al Quaeda. As I see it, 9/11 is a simple failure of airline security, spectacularly exposed. Is it now some sort of de facto principle of American foreign policy to declare al Quaeda an all-time significant threat? They’ve been more despicable than Hitler was? In any case, we knew who they were in the 1990s, and there is plenty of evidence that we had all the information we needed to pre-empt 9/11, but for an inept new president and his equally inept security team.

Our investments in Pakistan’s democracy were “erratic”? In other words, we didn’t pull hard enough on the levers of another nation’s political apparatus? And our track record when we do such things is…? (See: Iran, Philippines, most of Central America, a good chunk of South America, Haiti…you get the picture.) It is far from clear that there was anything that the U.S. could have done to help Pakistan avoid the circumstances which soak it today, except perhaps one: Not invade Afghanistan.

In other words, the point is this: the only sensible policy in that region is none at all. MYOB, and all that stuff. It’s their turf, their world, their stupid fight, let them have it. If the Afghanis do not feel like taking up arms against the Taliban, well, have we really forgotten that essential lesson of Viet Nam so soon? We cannot win a war for a country which is not itself committed to winning that war.

It’s just that plain and it’s just that simple.

Which is why, when not a speck of that sensibility was apparent as I read the New Yorker article, I got that feeling again that I’m either completely out of it, or far ahead of the curve.

And as I said, it feels like insanity either way.

Coll goes on to write: “For several months, the Obama Administration has been rethinking American policy, hoping to depart from this history of dysfunction. It has announced a formal strategy: an adaptive counterinsurgency doctrine that seeks to emphasize the security and the prosperity of the Afghan and Pakistani people above all; economic and development aid; vigorous diplomacy; and carefully targeted warfare, particularly aimed at Al Qaeda. Already, however, Obama and his advisers have had to confront the puzzle of which policies in their new portfolio will promote stability in the region, and which will promote instability.”

Yes, rethinking American policy, that’s what we need. Surely the Obama team will miraculously discover some combination of methods which has never been tried before; surely there are things we can do which will guide this fragile situation to an acceptable outcome.

Um…why? Let me put it to you in these terms: my 17 year old daughter has abysmal judgment when it comes to men. (Not really, but close enough for this analogy.) Surely there is something I can do, something I can say to fix that, so that once I’ve done those things, from that point on she will always choose wisely and the problem will be solved.

Preposterous on its face, right? I have literally no control and barely any influence when it comes to what her heart, mind and hormones tell her to do, and it would be equal parts ignorance and hubris on my part to believe otherwise.

Yet, we are supposed to believe that there is some combination of U.S. policies which will solve a centuries old dispute in a region about which we know next to nothing and within which we have close to zero influence.

The Afghanis know one thing for sure: we will eventually leave. And when we do, who will have their backs? So, what exactly is their incentive to side with a U.S. policy which will only mark them as targets upon our departure?

Would you do it?

So why should they?

Are you still basking in the glow of the wondrous event? Are you still giddy with delight? Are you still stunned in amazement that the United States of America managed, in the year 2008, to elect a black man to the presidency?

If so, then perhaps you have not noticed what a mess he is making.

First and foremost, President Obama has utterly failed to establish coherence and clarity in the national government. Are we closing Guantanamo or aren’t we? Are we going to release men who have spent seven years in harsh confinement on non-existent evidence or aren’t we? Will these men be given human rights or won’t they? Are we done fighting fruitless wars or aren’t we? Are we going after American officials who lied to and misled other Americans or aren’t we?

Are we investing in industries that work and will lead us forward, or in industries that are dead and dying and represent an era which nearly killed the planet? Are we interested in rational climate change policy or in balancing right-wing nonsense with left-wing nonsense, and thereby sentencing future generations to a world which was wholly unprepared for the coming changes?

Today’s young men and women being sent into the villages and mountains of Afghanistan and being told, “figure out who to shoot, and don’t dare be wrong.”

Tomorrow’s young men and women being told, “You will have to be the ones to figure out what damage we did to the environment and what to do about it.”

I still shake my head at Tavis Smiley, an earnest and well-intentioned man, asking for some sort of verdict on this presidency at the 100 day mark, and pleading in the end for a shred of optimism.

This administration could correctly be accused of committing a comedy of errors, except none of it is the least bit funny.

And now Nancy Pelosi has gone rogue. The Speaker Of The House, first woman ever to hold that post, has accused the CIA of lying to Congress, of giving “misleading briefings.”

The specific issue to which Pelosi refers is the use of waterboarding as as an interrogation technique, but the ghosts she is really waking up are the ghosts of Bush Administration policy, especially during the first term, when the administration ran amok and assigned itself absolute powers to decide which laws it would and would not follow, and which information it would and would not share.

Pelosi may be entirely correct, but now that she has put the accusation on the front pages of the nation’ newspapers, they must be addressed. And so countless news cycles will now be laced with this issue at a time when it is vital that President Obama focus on the issues which confront this country and the world today and tomorrow.

I was skeptical of Obama’s mantra of “change” from the time of his primary campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. I saw a man who had found certain buzz words but who was scarily evasive on substance. But by January and the Atlanta debate, I knew he would be the nominee, because by then he had found a way to make Hillary Clinton look like a female version of John McCain, and he had found the right arguments (really, one: “Are you ashamed of your vote to authorize the Iraq War?”) and bludgeoned her with them.

It wasn’t hard to run against the Iraq War, which was winding down during the campaign anyway, ensuring that President Obama would not have to actually make any tough calls on that front. But who else was available to vote for, who might have been promising real change in American military policy?

We were led to believe that man was Obama. He was the man to take a fresh look at American strategy and tactics, to recognize the need to reclaim American prestige and honor abroad. And he did have a very successful whirlwind trip across Europe and the Middle East in the early weeks of his presidency, and he may one day demonstrate that the outpouring of good will he received throughout that trip can and will lead to brighter days for American honor abroad.

Please don’t accuse me of writing some sort of obituary of this presidency so early on. However, there are some very disturbing signs, even at this early stage. There is not a single decision this president has yet made which could be declared “bold” or even “daring”. Nothing, not one thing. And he has made a steady series of decisions which could, in contrast, have predictably been made by either a President McCain or a President Mrs. Clinton.

In other words, was that mirage I saw in Iowa and New Hampshire a “good call” by my gut? Was Obama willing to say anything to get elected? Was his lack of a Washington track record the exact asset he needed to attack a government gone awry? Was he permitted to run a stealth campaign, and are we all now supposed to be so enraptured by the history making precedent that one of his parents was black (the absentee parent, in point of fact; Obama was raised by white women) that we don’t allow ourselves to ask him: “Change? What change? Specifics, please.”

Or does change mean: “Bush spent stimulus money on THAT; I”m spending it on THIS.”

“Bush chose to bail out THOSE industries. I choose to bail out THESE industries.”

“Bush chose to fight THAT senseless foreign war. I choose to fight THIS senseless foreign war.”

In discussing this with my daughter last night, I said that I don’t see Obama so much as a transformative figure but more as a transitional figure. There were candidates in this past presidential election season who did promise real change; Kucinich and Paul come to mind. But they had no chance to win even their party’s nomination, let alone the actual presidency, because they lacked access to money.

Obama showed that a candidate can raise millions of dollars on short notice if he has a well established internet fund-raising mechanism. Obama can rightly be described as the first person to figure out how to use the internet to win the presidency.

We can only hope that this discovery opens the way for exciting, engaging new voices to emerge and generate a degree of momentum which might propel them into the thick of a presidential election. We can only hope that these voices are well enough supported so that they cannot be ignored, so that either President Obama gets about the business of bringing actual, badly needed change to this country and by extension the world, or we can get busy finding somebody who will.

Sexting, a term which did not exist in 2008, is the act of sending a sexually explicit photograph from one cell phone to another.

Children do it. Perhaps they are being curious, perhaps risque, perhaps malicious. To none of them does it seem to be anything more than something to do.

Wrong. Wrong in a big way. Law enforcement considers these acts child pornogrpahy. Nevermind that everybody involved is a child, nevermind that in most cases all of the participants are fine with it. The law says it is a felony and a sex crime.

Philip Albert, an 18 year old who lives in Florida, got mad at his girlfriend one night and sent her sexually explicit photos to people on her contact list. He is now a registered sex offender. Of course, she was also in possession of child porography, even though the subject was herself.

A Viginia High School assistant principal was arrested for being in possession of child pornography for simply investigating a sexting incident. Those charges were later dropped, but the man’s reputation was of course smashed to bits.

Now think of this: your lovely young daughter takes a risque picture of herself using your cell phone. Guess what? You are now in possession of child pornography, and even more disgusting, of your own child. Have fun fighting that one in court while keeping track of all the headlines and rumors you will need to dodge along the way.

The real problem, of course, is the heavy-handed approach this society has taken in the last generation with regard to the sexual exploitation of children. What began as an honest effort to indentify behaviors which could harm children has evolved into a one-size-fits-all withch hunt, where many acts are considered to be roughly equivalent.

On a topic I will write more about soon, a 21 year old Pennsylvania man faces dozens of felony counts for engaging in consensual sex with a 15 year old. On her next birthday that activity will be considered legal. For want of several months, this young man, a bright  college student, may be going to prison for decades and will certainly spend the rest of his life on a sex offender registry.

As much as many of us abhor the over-sexualization of children, we must be careful with our terms. Is a young woman of 15 a child? Is her 21 year old boyfriend a pervert? Are 14 and 13 year olds who swap naughty pictures of each other felons?

Does anybody care to slow the train down a little to stop and think about who is being run over by this madness? Lives irreparably harmed, not by the acts themselves, but by society’s and law enforcement’s reactions to those acts?

Is anybody out there who is willing to stand alongside me and say, “Stop The Madness!!!”?

Anybody?

Thanks to my impeccable connections and significant social status (OK, because I know Morris O’Kelly, who works for him), I was invited to re-appear on the Tavis Smiley radio program this past weekend, to discuss the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Here is the audio from that segment:

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I didn’t get to say all I had on my mind; hell, I was lucky to remember half of what I intended to say, and they had to cut some of that for the sake of brevity. Brevity is not my strength…

Basically, as those who followed many of my earlier posts are aware, I am skeptical that President Obama can make a significant difference in the arc of human history, and I am highly skeptical that he can win a second term. ‘Tis true that the Republicans do not currently have their act together, but they remain a formidable force, as evidenced by Arlen Specter’s realization that he, a three term Senate incumbent, could not win the Republican primary next year, and so he switched to the Democratic party. We’ll see how much of a Democrat he turns out to be.

And for certain, the Republican party will not stay down indefinitely. They will find their voice and they will find compelling figures to speak in that voice, but more than anything else, they will wait for their chance to pounce when events do not turn out the way President Obama wants them to.

In the Tavis Smiley interview I commented that the U.S. government is the only thing standing between U.S. Auto and bankruptcy, which is a clear attempt to interfere with the marketplace, which has for years been steadily choosing more and more foreign made autos, which are uniformly better made and in many cases, cheaper; i.e., a better value than American made autos.

Why? Well, U.S. Auto became complacent, for sure, but the real underlying reason is that the cost of making an auto in the U.S. is much higher than it is in other countries, primarily because of the health care and pension burdens borne by U.S. Auto.

It is quite correct to point out that the union movement won those benefits, at a time when the industry was flush with cash. These obligations prevent these companies from becoming more “lean and mean” when economic circumstances change, and herein lies the conundrum: these benefits were won fair and square, and standards of living for hundreds of thousands of workers are based on those benefits. Should workers be forced to give them up? Funny you should ask: even as President Obama drags these companies through the wringer, he insists that pension and health care benefits will be preserved, especially for retirees.

In other words, the structural reforms needed to allow these companies to compete on a level playing field are not only not coming, they are being specifically ruled out.

Now, don’t read this as me saying that the unions should be blown up. My feelings run strongly in the direction of protecting workers and their hard won standards of living. No, this is to point out the incredible difficulty President Obama faces as he tries to interfere with the market. This is to point out that there are degrees of complexity beyond the grasp of any man or woman who attempts to unravel them. This is to point out that this is an entrenched problem with no clear solutions.

As I pointed out to Tavis, the only thing we know for sure is that President Obama is using the peoples’ money to keep these companies afloat, and it is not clear how we get that money back.

I also commented on the war in Afghanistan, a war which President Obama has committed to fight for at least another five years, a war which he intends to intensify in the near future. What I don’t understand is why. Does President Obama believe we can win in Afghnanistan? We had the Taliban completely on the run several years ago, and now they are perhaps stronger than ever and are making dangerous inroads in neighboring Pakistan. The actual enemy, Al Quaeda, has clearly been severely weakened and marginalized; they were never more than a scraggly bunch of haters in the first place, with one spectacular success to their name: 9/11. That single victory had enormous repercussions, especially with regard to American prestige. President Bush chose to take the bait and treat this band of terrorists as a state-level enemy, and now American might has been committed, for five years and counting, to tracking them down in the mountains of southern Asia, as if it would be possible to find and kill them all, as if there would be a point at which we could declare “victory”.

I thought we had elected Obama to bring fresh ideas in this regard, to perhaps counsel us that it is time to treat these terrorists as criminals and bring them before courts of law; to disrupt their ability to conduct finance and to travel; to work with other nations to see to it that the organization can no longer control a population through force and terror. In other words, to treat them like the gnats that they are.

Evidently not.

So, 100 days in, and doesn’t it seem as though President Obama is on TV every other day?, the jury is most definitely still out, as I said to Tavis. Perhaps in a year we will know if President Obama truly does have new, bold ideas, and if so, how those ideas are playing out.

As of today, his ideas seem not so bold and not so likely to succeed and, if truth be told, not so different than a President McCain or a President Mrs. Clinton might have come up with.

I, for one, am still waiting for evidence of the great new leader we were promised.

Ann Coulter has a new book: Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, and is currently making the rounds of various talk shows. A quick trip through YouTube turns up a nice sample.

I don’t have a catchy word to describe my political point of view, and I’ve never felt I needed one, but I would probably consider myself more liberal than conservative as the terms are commonly employed. More than anything else, I abhor the reckless efforts by people such as Coulter to paint her political opponents with a broad brush. It may be fair to label certain political points of view as “liberal”, but it is not fair to accuse all “”liberals” of using victimhood as a tool. Is it fair to accuse some of playing politics with victimhood? Yes. Is it possible to find examples of that all across the political spectrum? Certainly.

Our current president is making great hay with the vicimhood of the working poor and the squeezed middle class. He got a lot of votes from people who believe that the economic system treats them unfairly. Are a large number of these people simply lazy? For sure. They would love nothing better than to have the government provide them with a level of comfort that they never have to earn. But - are there real victims of economics? Certainly. Are their issues and concerns real? Just as certainly.

Our previous president built an eight year mountain of debt and a relentless assault on liberty by declaring this country victims of a scraggly group of haters. Was he playing the victim card in order to win votes and pursue his agenda? He most certainly was.

So, it cuts both ways.

In listening to Coulter in her interviews, I’ve begun to notice that she’s not quite as erudite as she perhaps thinks she is. She believes that the word “prescient” has three syllables, not two. She believes that it’s important to separate the wheat from the “chafe”. She believes that doing nothing to rebuild the economy is quite correct because the market will sort things out and decide who are the winners and losers.

Where was this sort of commentary when it was the Bush administration providing the stimulus? What is Coulter’s response to the assertion from liberals as well as conservatives that the world banking system teeters on the brink of collapse? Is it Coulter’s view that this, too, should be shaken out by the market? Does she not recognize that the unfettered market is what caused the problem in the first place?

When will Coulter be writing her book: “Greed: How Corporate Pigs Have Nearly Destroyed The World“?

Maybe I should write that book. It seems somewhat unlikely that Coulter will.

So let’s see: during Bush’s eight years in office we started two wars, blew up the deficit and nearly ground capitalism to a halt. During much of that time he had a willing Congress at his disposal.

Blame the liberals?

My question is this: since Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are both single and seem not to be attracting much interest from the opposite sex, doesn’t it make perfect sense for them to get together? It doesn’t really matter if they aren’t sexually attracted to each other; they have so much else in common that it probably wouldn’t even be an issue. They’d be too busy bashing liberals to even have the time for sex anyway.

But give Coulter credit: she is a media firebrand. She dutifully writes outrageous books, goes on the liberal media, takes her bashing in good spirit and cashes her royalty checks. (No doubt she also receives hefty advances.) Coulter is an industry unto herself.

I do think it’s time to fire back, though. I do think it’s time we figured out who we can elevate as a liberal counterweight to Coulter’s right wing hate mongering.

The problem is, I’m not much of a fan of hate-mongering from either side of the spectrum. I think it’s a senseless waste of human brain power to engage in the sort of sweeping judgments that play well to certain crowds while stalling actual progress.

So if I was to attempt to become such a counterweight, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much bashing in my book, well at least not ideological bashing. But I would actually find it useful and entertaining to write a book bashing the bashers.

Now there’s an idea…