Tom DeLay, God And Original Intent-- Happy Halloween

George Orwell wrote that "religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel," a take on Alfred North Whitehead's "religion is the last refuge of human savagery" and Samuel Johnson's "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." All three adages fit Tom DeLay, who claims to be on a mission from God, equally well. Samuel Johnson, Boswell assures us, was referring only to "false patriotism."

DeLay's egregious corruption drove him out of his leadership role in the House GOP and then out of the House entirely. Until he was rescued by a corrupt Republican appeals judge, his guilty convictions, seemed sure to send him to prison. Last week he told a bunch of teabaggers in Burleson, Texas that God has told him to lead a constitutional revival.

"He believes that he is being led to encourage, or promote, or participate in sort of a new a new revolution for the country-- not armed battles and muskets and all that stuff, but in terms of ideals," said Barry Schlech, the vice-chairman for the Texas Patriots PAC.

DeLay said the best way to start this revolution is for conservative tea party candidates to lay claim to the U.S. House. DeLay spent part of his time detailing how faith helped him through his criminal trial that involved charges of laundering money from his congressional campaign funds-- DeLay’s conviction was overturned earlier this month.

But Schlech said he doesn’t see DeLay returning to Congress.

"I didn’t get the sense-- with what he said-- that he wants to ever be in office again," Schlech said. "He’s going to be an advocate, not in the background but maybe in the forefront."

Or maybe the storefront, figuratively speaking. DeLay hasn't just been dancing with the stars since being driven out of Congress; his lobbying firm, First Principles, is as sleazy and shady as he has always been, although he does claim everything he does is countenanced from Above. "God has spoken to me… I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn’t be underestimated."

According to the Dallas Morning News what DeLay claims God told him to do is to “shut down” every part of federal government that is not specifically based on the Constitution. “It’s time for a constitutional renewal, a constitutional revival,” DeLay said in Burleson, adding that this revival is inherently linked to a “spiritual awakening” he sees happening across the country. He said conservatives have allowed “the left to intimidate us, cut off our heads, put us in prison… It’s time for a revolution,” DeLay said. “I am not advocating for revolution in the streets. But if that’s what it takes … ”



That kind of palaver about original intent of the Founding Fathers is part of that last refuge crap we were referring to at the beginning of this post. I had it in my mind since reading David Simon's brilliant review of 12 Years A Slave, particularly these paragraphs:

[F]or those still desperate to mitigate our national reality at every possible cost, this film will be an affront. It is not intelligently assailable by anyone, though the racial divide and resentment that still occupies our national character a century and a half after abolition will prompt certain creatures to pull at threads, hoping against hope. Mostly, those who want to pretend to another American history will just avoid the film or the discussion that ensues.

The second screening did leave me with one additional thought, something distinctly political that could not fight its way through the more fundamental human reckoning produced by the first viewing.  It’s this: Anyone who acquires the narrative of 12 Years A Slave and finds it within his shrunken heart to continue any argument for the sanctity and perfection of our Founding Fathers, for the moral wisdom of their compromised document of national ideal that begins the American experience, or for their anachronistic, or understandable tolerance of slavery is  arguing from a desolate, amoral corner.

If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history. And for hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitutions under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool’s journey to decay and dishonor.

There is some considerable wisdom in the American Constitution, and more found within the 27 sanctioned efforts to amend and improve the weaknesses and moral lapses that were allowed to co-exist with the adoption of the original template. There is, at some key points in our history, even more wisdom in some of the liberalizing and rationalizing assessments of the U.S. Supreme Court in adopting the improved morality of a later age to constitutional language and code. We have journeyed far, and by many metrics, we have acquired a greater claim to our own humanity.

For anyone to stand in sight of this film and pretend to the infallibility or perfect intellectual or moral grandeur of a Washington, a Jefferson, or a Madison is to invite ignominy from anyone else sensate. Slavery was abomination, and we, in our birth of liberty, codified it and nurtured it.

It took Lincoln, and a great war, to hijack the American experiment from its original, cold intentions by falsely claiming, a century and a half ago, that the nation was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal.  It was founded on no such thing.  It required blood, a new birth of honor and a continuing battle for civil rights that is still being fought for this nation to be so founded.

In the echo of this film, the call for a strict construction of our national codes and a devotion to the original ideas of the long-dead men who crafted those codes in another human age, rings hollow and sick and shameful.

Rewatching "The Wire" is a great backdrop for Robert Reich's new piece on the resurgence of Social Darwinism

The "chicken nugget" scene from Episode 2 of Season 1 of The Wire

KID NO. 1: Man, these shits is right. yo.
KID NO. 2: Mm-hmm.
KID NO. 1: It's good with the hot sauce too, yo.
KID NO. 2: Most definite.
KID NO. 1: Yo, Dee, you want some nuggets?
D'ANGELO: Nah, go ahead, man.
KID NO. 1: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.
KID NO. 2 [drawn out, dubiously]: What?
KID NO. 1: Mm. Motherfucker got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. Till he came along niggas be chewin' on drumsticks and shit, gettin' they fingers all greasy. He said, Later for the bone, nugget that meat up, make some real money.
KID NO. 2: You think the man got paid?
KID NO. 1: Who?
KID NO. 2: The man who invented these.
KID NO. 1: Shit, he richer than a motherfucker.
D'ANGELO: Why? You think he get a percentage?
KID NO. 1: Why not?
D'ANGELO: Nigga, please, the man who invented them things, just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.
KID NO. 2: Naw, man, that ain't right.
D'ANGELO: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?
KID NO. 1: Shit.
D'ANGELO: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in that basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better, some shit like that. Believe.
KID NO. 1: He still had the idea though.

by Ken

Sometimes I think digital-cable On Demand is a blessing, sometimes a curse. No, I don't mean the pay services, but the ones that are free, or rather included in the humongous sum I pay every month for my cable bill. It was bad enough that HBO's On Demand service recently started rerunning The Sopranos from the start, when I hadn't rewatched the early seasons in many moons, putting them up four episodes at a time. When I discovered it, they were already up to episodes 5-8, which I wolfed down. Then I went back to my VHS set of Season 1 and filled in episodes 1-4, since which I've been going crazy waiting for episodes 9-12.

So then I noticed that on the HBO On Demand series list, right below The Sopranos there was The Wire, so I checked to see what they had up, and it turned out to be episodes 1-4. As I've written, I had originally tried to watch the pilot episode when it was first aired, and found myself confused and not especially interested in puzzling it all out. It was only several seasons later that I dipped into the series and found myself riveted, and then managed to catch up on the earlier seasons via a non-HBO rebroadcast offered on an oddly unpredictable schedule in the wee hours of the morning, with commercials inserted. (Thank you, DVR!)

I remembered that The Wire can't be watched casually; it requires full attention. Which protected me from dipping into the On Demand offerings for a good couple of days. When, naturally, with HBO On Demand still stuck on episodes 5-8 of The Sopranos, I took the plunge into The Wire, and even though I'm pretty sure I had actually seen episode 1, I was amazed at how much seemed totally unfamiliar, and in this connection I'm not counting the wealth of detail regarding situations and characters which would have been harder for me to absorb back when I didn't know the characters (even allowing for the considerable haziness that's set in since I finally traversed the series the first time).

It's a lucky thing that both The Sopranos and The Wire engage in such riveting story-telling, because otherwise it would be all too easy to become hopelessly mired in awe at the contributions of the huge numbers of people, behind as well as in front of the cameras, involved in such productions, as marshaled by creator-overseers David Chase (The Sopranos) and David Simon (The Wired). All of these people have gone on to other things, many of them concerned chiefly with keeping a roof over their heads and their families fed, and so it may not be in the forefront of their daily thinking that they contributed to such landmark productions, both of which carved out significant chunks of our social fabric and explored them in remarkable breadth and depth. When you do a job really well, it stands a chance of staying done.

After I'd laboriously done the transcription of the scene at the top of this post -- which is to say before I found it posted on YouTube, which would have made the transcription far less laborious than doing it from On Demand -- I was directed by Nation of Change to a swell new post by Rober Reich, "The Rebirth of Social Darwinism," in which he asks, "What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want?"

I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. . . .

What Reich has to say gibes neatly with a pair of pieces I sort-of-wrote about earlier this week, Reich's own "Restore the Basic Bargain" and Jeff Madrick's "American's New Robber Barons."

Season 1 of The Wire dates back to the prehistoric time of 2002, when it was possible for most Americans to believe that this terrifying portrayal of inner-city life had nothing to do with them. By then more and more Americans had already tumbled to the expedient of walling themself off from lower-class nastiness behind gated walls and fences.

By, say, 2009, when the final season of The Wire had already concluded, a shitload of middle class and upper-middle-class and even lower-upper-class Americans were learning that once people with the wherewithal start walling themselves off, it's a natural progression to narrowing the perimeter of those walls, eventually to protect only the wherewithalliest. (Jeff Madrick in his piece devotes a fair amount of attention to debunking the idea that the protected class is as large as the top 20 percent, arguing that 1% is an altogether reasonable number, though the reality is probably more like .1%.)

It seems safe to say that the upper half (or whatever fraction) of the 99% never saw it coming. Hell, incomprehensible numbers of them still don't. Unfortunately for them, for most of us in the 99%, Social Darwinism doesn't have "cutoff " points. The Social Darwinians get to decide who stays in the magic circle with them, and the fewer people they let inside their gates, the fewer people they have to share their booty with. Of course, as Bob Reich pointed out in that earlier piece about the rupture of the old economic "basic bargain," whereby the workers who produce goods are paid fairly enough to be consumers of the goods they produce, and you have an economic as well as social system capable of sustaining itself.

If you want to see what it looks like when that system begins to break down, The Wire is an excellent place to look.

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As David Simon of "The Wire" collects his Drum Major for Justice Award, he'll know it's worthwhile when I burble, "Gosh, I'm a really big fan," at him

In David Simon's landmark HBO series The Wire, Baltimore Sun City Editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) talks to three of his reporters, Mike Fletcher (Brandon Young), Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress), and the infamous M. Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), an ambitious young man who refuses to let mere facts, which are not only dreary but tedious to gather, stand in the way of his fast-track career path.

Okay, it's an odd name: the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. I expect that every first conversation everyone has with anyone associated with the Brooklyn-based progressive think tank begins with, or at least includes, the question, "So what's the deal with the name?"

But DMI does terrific work, producing usefully down-to-earth, solidly grounded studies of economic-based issues that affect our everyday lives, always accompanied by carefully considered, thorough research--with a special emphasis on urban living (meaning cities--you know, those densely populated places that disappear as if by magic during presidential campaigns, except of course when cash-starved candidates sneak into them to shake their money trees). Howie and I are both fans, and were happy to be included on the Blogger Host Committee for DMI's annual benefit, scheduled for later this month, before it even occurred to me to check out the link for the benefit I'd been given.

I knew the bash was Tuesday evening, May 20, at Cipriani 23, Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street in Manhattan. Beyond that, not being exactly what you'd call a habitué of the banquet circuit, I wasn't giving the event itself much thought. Then I checked out the benefit link, and that changed in a hurry.

There are three winners of 2008 Drum Major for Justice Awards, and I'm afraid I'm going to give unfairly short shrift to two of them:

* Melissa Mark-Viverito, an energetic longtime community activist and labor organizer who is now a member of the New York City Council. She's being honored--

for outstanding work on behalf of her diverse urban district and city-dwellers nationwide,

and--

* Steve Phillips, a longtime education reformer and civil-rights and employment-discrimination lawyer who founded PowerPAC.org, "a statewide social justice organization working with community organizations and activists to build political power in California." He's being honored--

for his work to advance a progressive agenda in California.

I'm sure they're both committed, productive individuals whose accomplishments make them richly deserving of this honor. I am looking forward to learning more about and from them.

But the other honoree is:

* David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who burst into the world of big-time network TV when his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, his gritty account of life on the city's drug-infested streets, was turned into the great 1993-99 NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street by one of my favorite film directors, Barry Levinson (another Baltiimorean) and writing-producing partners Paul Attanasio and Tom Fontana. Simon then applied the TV smarts he acquired working on Homicide as a writer and producer when he turned his later book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood into the HBO series The Corner. And that, of course, set the stage for The Wire, of which Simon was (as Wikipedia puts it) "the creator, show runner, executive producer and head writer."

(The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was written with Ed Burns, who would be a key collaborator on The Wire, and again on Simon's new HBO project, a seven-hour miniseries adaptation of Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright's Generation Kill, his account of being embedded with Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, scheduled to air in July.)

The Wire may have had the most remarkable word of mouth of any TV project I'm aware of, including The Sopranos. As far as I can tell, there are two categories of people: those who didn't see the show, and those who regard it as one of the great achievements in television.

My experience with the show was a little strange. I watched the first couple of episodes, none too carefully, and found myself already way behind in keeping track of the characters and plots. And I didn't feel terribly compelled to catch up. I let it go. Over the next few years I kept hearing about The Wire, though. Not enough to make me watch. After all, if I'd been unable to keep up after a couple of episodes, what were my chances of getting caught up at that late stage? But enough to make me curious, and steadily curiouser.

Finally, as the fifth and final season approached, I was hearing such remarkable things about the series from such serious people that I took the plunge. I caught reruns of the last episodes of the fourth season as HBO was running up to the new-season premiere, and became familiar enough with the characters and plot to be prepared for the final sprint.

And I have to say, it was one of my great televiewing experiences, with the series' remarkably precise and powerful dramatization of the local drug lords and their pervasive corrupting influence on their neighborhoods; the neighborhood folk who scratch out existences in their orbit; the city criminal-justice establishment (both police and prosecutors) and its top-level political hierarchy; and, most fascinating to me, a fictional version of Simon's own alma mater, the Baltimore Sun. Simon gave us what seemed to me an eerily believable representation of the process whereby an overweeningly ambitious but lazy and fact-indifferent reporter can hornswoggle a set of pompously self-satisfied but pathetically gullible top-echelon editors.

Clark Johnson--a Homicide veteran, of course--in addition to directing a bunch of Wire episodes did a bang-up job in the sweetheart role of City Editor Gus Haynes, perhaps the only wholly sympathetic character I saw in Season Five. Gus's old-fashioned dogged journalistic creed, shared by a sprinkling of similarly uncompromised denizens of the city room (which is under intense and growing morale-crushing pressure from the paper's relentless waves of staff cutbacks), tries to resist but is ultimately mowed down by the phony reporter. (The twittish higher-ups are played with repellent persuasiveness by David Costabile, as Managing Editor Klebanow, and Sam Freed, as Executive Editor Whiting. But then, the whole massive cast is uniformly sensational.)

One nice thing about television is that, at least for shows that make it to and stay on the air for at least a while, they never disappear, thanks to all those thousands of cable channels desperate for programming, and of course the ubiquitous DVD. I've found Wire reruns running on BET, and I'm sure they'll be turning up elsewhere, including HBO itself. Of course the earlier seasons are out on DVD, and no doubt we'll soon have a "complete" package.

Buffalo (New York) Mayor Byron Brown will be on hand to present Simon's Drum Major Award, which, by the way, is being given--

for deftly exploring the realities of America's neglected cities.

I suppose not everyone at the shindig will be in awe of David Simon. For example, the friend I'm going with doesn't own a TV. There's really no point trying to explain to him the state I'm in anticipating the big moment when I get to shake Simon's hand and say something timelessly clever, like, oh, "Gosh, I'm a really big fan." Let's hope there aren't going to be any video cameras.

(A couple of years ago Howie got me into the annual fund-raising shindig of People for the American Way, of which he's a board member, and I went kind of nuts imagining what I could say when I met PFAW founder Norman Lear, of whom I'm in unmitigated awe, both for his remarkable TV producing career and for his outspoken, unabashed liberal advocacy. Perhaps I was lucky to be spared my "Gosh, I'm a really big fan" moment--I never did get to meet Norman.)

The DMI benefit link includes all the info about the event, including the attendant auction and ticket information.

AFTERTHOUGHT

I feel rotten about my characterization of City Editor Gus Haynes as "the only wholly sympathetic character" I encountered in The Wire Season Five. Unfortunately I still don't know how to put it better. Gus for me is the most something character, but I don't quite know how to put a finger on what.

In fact, though, there are lots of enormously sympathetic characters among the victims of hopelessness in the Baltimore streets, like poor Bubbles (Andre Royo, above), trying so hard to escape his drug addiction, and of course all those all-but-doomed kids. I guess the difference between them and Gus Haynes is that Gus has resisted corruption as a matter of choice--he had realistic alternatives.

Even among the other "have" characters, there are altogether admirable ones, like Assistant State's Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy) among the prosecutors and Detective "Bunk" Moreland (Wendell Pierce) among the cops. While so many of the people around them are compromising themselves or simply taking the easy way out, they achieve near-heroic status.

One of the amazing things about The Wire is the astounding number of characters created in genuine depth. And fortunately, among all the monsters and go-alongs there are a good number of "good guys" we can root for. They may be outmanned, but they keep putting up their best fight.

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