There’s something about Bush declaring a smackdown of Hezbollah that reminds me of the Pharoah Ramses II and his truthiness version of the battle of Qadesh. In 1273, Ramses declared victory over the Hittites despite massive Egyptian casualties and the loss of Syria. Lo and behold, as Bush does his hamster dance of hegemony, here comes Hezbollah’s announcement of historic, strategic victory.

It’s exceedingly difficult for the average person to draw rational conclusions about what’s going on between Israel and Lebanon. The pundits have placed almost as much emphasis on the meta-analysis of the media war as the actual, physical, bullet-wound-causing conflict.

In the Israeli corner, we have doctored photos and cries of Hezbollywood.   In the Hezbollah corner, we have Israel’s obsession with getting out the message and Israeli propaganda pamphlets raining from the sky (I saw this on the news last night - sorry, no link).

Israel’s “right to defend itself” is countered by the bodies of civilian martyrs. The reluctance of Lebanon to recast their freedom fighters as terrorists is countered by the tarring of all Islamic countries as tribal throwbacks that condone such hideous practices as honor killing.    

As I watched the news last night, it was clear that the terms of the cease-fire were dictated by Israel. They issued the demands, and they were keeping all the Lebanese prisoners. Was my first thought “Israel won!” No, my first thought was “this will never be over”, because the focus is on defining the winner instead of solving the problems. Anyone who has been watching the news from the Middle East for the last couple of weeks knows that it’s highly unlikely that Hezbollah will allow Israel just to count coup. Egregiously inaccurate spin is just likely to crank up passions-of-no-return on both sides.

It’s time for someone to say it: framing is the same thing as spin - in fact it’s spin on the word spin that helps the people working on your campaign to see their efforts to manipulate the media as somehow more morally righteous than the “smears” and “swiftboating” coming from the other side. Framing is about positive partisanship, the alternative to wishy-washy compromises of civility - but it also enables way too much asshattery.

In the political realm there’s a very thin line between spin and an outright lie. There’s nothing so disheartening to the voting public as an opportunistic lie (except maybe a nest of cronies dedicated to propping up an obvious lie). Standing on a lie is a standing invitation to merciless mockery.

PR spending DOUBLED under the Bush regime. Honestly, there’s a point where all the words and images don’t even have any meaning anymore. I swear every time I turn on the news now, all I hear is “blah, blah, blah…” I’m suffering from spin-exhaustion.

Israel is currently in a conflict with neighboring states. There is a complex history behind this conflict that involves numerous wrongs by all parties. Israel is now making hard decisions about when to attack and when parry: whether these decisions are righteous, necessary, or Machiavellian is not for the American TV audience to decide. The only thing the “media war” can achieve is public pressure for the U.S. to throw its weight around on one side or the other. It seems to me the U.S. shouldn’t be throwing its weight around at all here. This is something that needs to be worked out between the parties involved, and with all the media manipulation at hand, U.S. intervention on behalf of the side with the best “message” is likely to a) make the situation worse by inflaming passions over media misrepresentation, and b) encourage even more manipulation of the media now that the media has proclaimed itself a crucial arena for “warfare”.

If Israel runs roughshod over Lebanon with their superior armed forces, then they may have to deal with strained relations with their other neighbors. Or maybe those neighbors will prefer to make nice with Israel, downplaying Islamic ties in favor of practical statecraft. This is Israel’s call to make. Turning this into a “media war” in the U.S. is just another way to make global affairs all about “us” (and our Media Power) and not “them”.

The strangest thing happened while I was on BART (the San Francisco commuter train) on Friday. The girl standing next to me, who had been complaining loudly about the over-crowded train, spit at the people standing on the platform right before the door closed. Her friends immediately started doing a victory dance, singing “Boo-boo-be-doo - we spit on you!”

The fact that all these kids immediately knew how to celebrate the spitting on random commuters made me wonder if this is part of an evolving subculture. It’s probably not that far a leap from spitting to the pyrotechnic subculture. Random violence seems to be bubbling up from the ground. Yet because it’s happening in a familiar setting, we’re striving for labels other than “terrorism”. Our children aren’t terrorists. They’re just confused by hormones. Only “other people” are terrorists.

The irony was that I was returning from watching a live filming of Link TV’s Mosaic (there are streaming episodes here if anyone is interested). The most moving part was a woman who expained the ambivalence that the Lebonese people have about Hezbollah. To the Lebonese, Hezbollah is not necessarily a terrorist organization. Many see Hezbollah as an organization of “freedom fighters” and Israel as a terrorist state that has killed over a hundred people and levelled whole neighborhoods to do their “Boo-boo-be-doo - we spit on you!” victory dance.

My landlord just got back from Mumbai, where almost 200 people were killed and 700 injured in train bombings on July 11. While the U.S. has been too distracted by Lebanon to give Mumbai a second thought, I wonder whether 7/11 will provoke the same sort of reaction in India that 9/11 did here - with “kill the terrorist” flash games circulating by email in a matter of hours and general patriotic warmongering? Where will the anger of the people turn?

Mumbai trains are famous for their hot, over-crowded conditions - and this again takes me back to the spitting girl on the BART train. While the commuters on the platform probably wouldn’t regard themselves as having anything to do with her problems, I don’t think her actions were irrational. It seems to me that in an era where a lot of things that oppressive forces are systemic or anonymous, it’s hard for people to figure out where to pursue their fight for justice. These kids were angry at everybody. An anonymous stranger symbolizes everyody.

I’m thinking that it’s time to get rid of the word “terrorist”. First it’s far too easy for politicians to label anyone they dislike a “terrorist supporter” (or possibly a “terrorist” for wearing the wrong t-shirt or hugging a tree in a logging zone). Second, too many mental acrobatics have to occur to separate the “terrorists” out there from other sorts of violence from spouse-beating to “pyrotechnic subcultures”. In the end we should be looking for the source of the anger and repeatedly asking ourselves whether we’ve shut down the alternatives to spitting and basement bombs.

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On an entirely unrelated note - a friend of mine just launched a web site called Dabble for organizing and sharing online videos. Could be very useful for people who want to put together “video albums” for their particular cause.

Last month Judith Schwartz sent me a copy of her novel Doublethink. I read very little fiction so the book soon got buried in my inbox. Something about Schwartz’s enthusiasm about how a book could change the political imagination and change the direction of the country stuck with me, though. I put Doublethink in my backpack, carried it around with me all over Berkeley, and I when I finally got a chance to relax in a coffee shop for a bit, I pulled it out.

Honestly, it was hard for me to get through the first few pages because the protagonist, Joe Winston, starts out with a political outlook that’s so different than my own. This was Schwartz’s intention: she draws a detailed, and respectful, portrait of how a neocon true believer sees the world. At the start of the novel, Joe has all the comforts and advantages of a politically-crafted elite, though his family troubles suggest cracks in the facade.

When Joe’s cushy job gets outsourced out from under him and a donation to a charity raises a red flag for Homeland Security, Joe discovers how tenuous his life of privilege really is. All the laws he supported in the name of family values and national security start to turn against him, and he finds himself on the outside of the gated communities that had been shielding him from the brutal world he helped create.

While Joe learns the ropes of this new world, he rediscovers the value of human dignity, and his growth as a human being enables him to heal some of the rifts in his family. However, now that Joe is aware of how the agenda of the elite has distorted the lives of everyone else, he finds the courage to take the necessary political action.

Schwartz’s book covers many issues of current political debate and imagines the dystopian outcome. I haven’t read a book like this since Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and a recommend it heartily for people who want to see what all the threads of the daily news would look like once woven into the tapestry of the future.

Progressive economist Jared Bernstein has written an article about economic policy that has strong affinities with Fuller’s position on dignity as a unifying value for the Democratic party. The article is reprinted below with permission.

The YOYO Handcuffs
By Jared Bernstein

Here’s a test: name one economic policy, other than tax cuts, associated with outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow.

Give up?

Now think about this: what is the economic policy of the Bush administration? What about the Congress? What about the Democrats?

If all you could come up is that the first two aforementioned groups want to cut rich people’s taxes, I’m with you. Beyond that, none of the above has offered a coherent strategy for meeting America’s economic challenges.

And these problems are prodigious: global economic competition; 46 million people lacking health insurance; the seemingly inexorable climb of inequality; obscene CEO compensation packages totally unrelated to performance; an economy that’s doing fine, until you consider the people in it.

Each of these problems needs concerted thought and action. But while the administration’s new nominee for Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is certainly an able economist, he will likely be as ineffectual as was Secretary Snow.

There’s a reason why the nation’s economic policymakers are suffering from a deficit of ideas: It’s YOYO economics.

YOYO is an acronym for “You’re on your own,” and it is the guiding light of economic policy as practiced today. The idea is that no matter what the problem is, the solution is less government and more markets.  You’ve seen many examples of YOYOism in action, but here’s a primer:

Problem: The looming health care crisis.

YOYO solution: individualized Health Savings Accounts, designed to create better “health care shoppers.”

Problem: The economic insecurity associated with globalization.

YOYO solution: more education. If you’re not smart enough to compete with cheaper, skilled workers abroad, well, “you’re on your own.”

Problem: Solvency in your old age.

YOYO solution: Try your hand in the stock market with a private account.

And underlying all of this is the biggest YOYO tactic of all: cut taxes to the point where government is forced to contract so there’s no question of an activist agenda. If you can enrich your donors along the way…well, then it’s a “twofer.”

The problem is, as is becoming undeniably clear, YOYOism doesn’t work. It failed lethally in New Orleans. It’s done nothing to stop the growth of the uninsured, the rise in poverty, the decline in median earnings (i.e., the real earnings of the typical worker, down 2% over the recovery, while productivity is up 15%), nor the rise in the profit share of national income, now at a 39-year high.  The public rejected it with the failure of the Bush-push to privatize Social Security, and now the polls show deep dissatisfaction with the president’s management of the economy.

There’s a countervailing message rising out of the anxiety generated by the new economy:

“Policy makers, work with us. We’re in this together. Rebuild a government that we can believe in, and we will do so. Conceive and articulate an agenda that harnesses the tremendous capacity, skill, and flexibility of our economy to meet the challenges. Instead of creating 300 million individual risk-bearing silos, let’s pool risk though universal health insurance coverage and a strengthened pension system. Let’s build an ambitious public/private partnership with the goal of energy independence to replace the jobs and wages lost to globalization.”

You have to strain to hear this message, but it’s there. It is, however, in desperate need of amplification.  The new treasury secretary can’t help–his hands are tied by YOYO ideology. So the question is: who will step up and amplify this liberating message?

In the U.S. Alaa Ahmed Seif Al Islam would be a celebrated public intellectual, and would probably be a highly paid consultant. He’s an award-winning journalist-blogger, open source developer, and a human rights activist. On May 7, 2006, Alaa was beaten and jailed for participating in a protest to support a free, independent judiciary in Egypt.

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the hope that the combined efforts of online activists might be able to free Alaa. Journalactivist Jon Garfunkel has done some excellent in-depth analysis of the various strategies attempted by online activists, including his own foray into purchasing Google AdWords. Garfunkel makes an important observation: while online activists may get swept up in the crowd cause of the moment, their attention span is notoriously short. They don’t follow up on whether their effort actually worked. Alaa is still in jail.

In California the cost of living has risen sharply over the past few years: the poorest people are paying more for food, transportation, rent, and heating. Middle class salaries are slipping, pensions have vanished, and a few top predators are exploiting their rank to grab every ducet in sight.

Average people are so mired in the difficulties of day to day life that it may be hard for them to appreciate that what little they can afford is being subsidized by slave labor abroad and an underground workforce at home. Three years ago I attended a project manager’s meeting where a shrill hyper-manicured woman cried out, “But who will do the work?” It was clear that she felt her position entitled her to be above work, and something must be going tragically wrong if she didn’t get to make others do the work for her.

In the context of the international scene, the U.S. is still the bully on the block. We think we’re solving problems when we figure out how to keep the servants cheap. There’s no question that much of the highly educated U.S. workforce is underpaid and underplayed, but that problem can’t be fixed by shifting it to other countries.

What do you know - occasionally our congressional representatives are good for something.

I just discovered that a documentary called Dignity of the Nobodies is making the rounds on the indy film circuit. The director Fernando Solanas has a distinguished history in covering human rights issues in Latin America. Dignity of the Nobodies explores the lives of the people who have been struggling to survive in the Argentina slums, in the wake of a national economic disaster. It also attempts to instill the nobodies with the dignity of telling their own story. This quote from a protester says it all: “work is dignity … they are destroying all dignity.”

My friend Jon Garfunkel is doing some research on milblogs. Naively thinking that milblogs were about the authentic voice of soldiers, I thought it would be edifying to check a few out. To my horror and outrage (or was it “shock and awe” - President Bush’s favorite weapon against the citizens of his own country…?), the first thing I found was that milblogs were being brought under the arm of the vast U.S. military PR campaign. Taking a page out of the Wal-Mart book, U.S. Central Command has been cultivating bloggers as part of a viral marketing strategy to drive traffic to CENTCOM’s own web site. It’s certainly a lot easier to push a message if all the buzzy-bees come to you! And if that doesn’t work, the military has a project to create the illusion of American support to fall back on.

Recently the U.S. has been facing significant challenges to one of the fundamental principles of our Constitution, the separation of church and state. As pundits and litigators rattle swords over beachhead issues like prayer in schools and Intelligent Design, it’s edifying to consider the logical outcome of theocracy. Afghanistan has provided a timely demonstration in the form of a Christian convert that faced the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. While the Afghan court system cheated the question by tossing the case on a technicality, Muslim religious leaders prayed for the death penalty and threatened to whip up the anger of the people to tear the man who dared to turn away from their god “to pieces”.

Because Afghanistan is a theocracy, their government may not be able to adhere to their agreement to abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They can’t let all converts off on a technicality. Perhaps they will try a variation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell - though Afghan policymakers should take a hard look at how well that’s working for the U.S. armed forces first. Or should the U.S. offer amnesty for all?.

Given the collapse of the Human Rights Commission and the failure of the U.S. to incorporate Universal Declaration into its domestic legal system (not to mention our willingness to resort to torture), there may be no genuine defenders of freedom of conscience left. It may be only a matter of years before we see people on trial for their religion in the U.S., complete with lynchings, witch burnings, and crucifixions. It’s time to call on the U.S. government to restore the principle of separation of church and state in our own country, and lead by example in order to promote the wisdom of freedom of conscience throughout the world.