Who was that Nazi I saw you with last night?

After a recent post on Nazis, I have received a number of responses from people who offer updates on the revival of Naziism throughout the world.  Anne, who lived in Germany while her father was stationed there in the military and who returned there to study as a college student, keeps me informed about what she hears from her friends in Germany.  She tells of the National Democratic Party (NPD) and a number of murders attributed to it and its neo-Nazi allies.  As a student, Anne did an intensive study of the culture and social psychology that define Nazis.  She finds the defining traits displayed by many social and political factions in current times.


The term Nazi  has been so overused that it has become a cliche that denotes little.  Like the other N-word, nigger, it is used as a pejorative with no attention paid to its denotative origins.  It is uttered to insult, abuse, and hurt.  That is dangerous, because it deprives people of knowing what is actually involved in the Nazi mindset so that they are unaware of when their own thinking and attitudes contain elements of what makes up a Nazi.  


For most, the term Nazi conjures up the Holocaust and its systematic extermination of millions of Jews and other minorities, but its glib use fails to recall the social and intellectual postures and attitudes that made the reign of Naziism possible.  We forget, if we even knew, that the gas ovens of the Holocaust were first used on the German civilians that Hitler called the "useless eaters," the people  with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities who were unable to perform profitable work and required care.  Cost accountants determined that these disabled people contributed nothing to the national economy, but were in fact an expensive liability, so the solution was to euthanize them.  This "final solution" for ridding society of its useless eaters and the liabilities they incurred was adopted by those officials in the Third Reich who were put in charge of ridding Germany of the Jews.  


Anne and the serious students of the formation of Naziism point out that the Holocaust was based upon a more basic premise that people could be divided into classes of who was deemed valuable and who was not, who is superior and who is inferior.  Once people accept that premise, which the German people largely did, it occurs to the superior that their lives could be a lot better if they could eliminate the inferior.  The key to that kind of thought is that anyone you don't like can be designated as inferior and made a candidate for elimination.  The Germans particularly did not like Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone else who pissed them off for some reason.  So, it was okay to kill them.  


The financial problems of the developed countries have resulted in the designation of a new class of useless eaters by some people. An article in The Atlantic contends that the impending demise of Europe and the eventual failure of America are because there are too many old people on pensions, useless eaters, and not enough young people who contribute to productivity.  Advances in medicine have prolonged life expectancy and controlled births, creating the imbalance between old and young.   Moreover, these old people raise up in rebellion and protest when the governments propose reducing or taking away their pensions.  Furthermore, they tend to watch their money and do not spend a hell of a lot to  stimulate the economy. One blog recommended this article as brilliant.  The article and its advocates seem irritated that old people do not seem willing to go gently into poverty, destitution, and beyond when it is proposed for them.  As it is in the Paul Ryan budget. 

Well, at any rate we are now informed about whose lives are valuable and whose are not.  This way to the gas ovens, ladies and gentlemen.


We can now get  on with our lives.  Or without them. 

And so it goes.
   

The Supremes, 43 million Americans, and Karl Marx

In the partisan frenzy over the Affordable Care Act and what the Supreme Court might do to it, the underlying reasons behind the bill have been  buried in the blizzard of propaganda and lost sight of.  The first issue the bill addressed was that 43 million citizens wer can't afford it.  Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcies bye not covered by health care insurance.  About a third of the nation go without recommended medical treatment because they families.  And the cost of healthcare keeps climbing.   Despite the insistence by those who oppose government-sponsored health care that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world, the fact is that the U.S. lags behind the systems of most developed countries.  


Congress is the focal point of the contentions about health care.  That fact is a serious misdirection of public attention, largely motivated by an audience-desperate media and the Internet.  The real issue is not the partisan deadlock in Congress.  Congress is merely a reflection of the American people, and politicians and media-types do not dare attribute the healthcare debacle to the citizens.  They want their votes, their attention, and their dollars, and they live in fear of offending the people out there by an honest reporting of their attitudes and actions and what their actual political stances reveal about them.

Politicians keep saying that the political divide in America is merely the difference of opinions among a people who love their country.  The fact is that the partisan camps have become camps of enemies.  The nation has reached a point that James Madison warned about in the Tenth Federalist Paper:  "So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts."
 
 Madison amplifies the reasons for those "unfriendly passions":

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Madison saw that the effects of animosity could be moderated by a republic with a separation of powers and the attending checks and balances among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and among the states.   The scheme he outlined has worked fairly well over a couple of centuries as the history of the U.S. demonstrates a steady diminishing of the "schemes of  oppression" through which one faction holds another in an unequal and degraded state of thralldom.  But that separation of powers is rendered ineffective and useless when the final arbiter of factional disputes, the judiciary, acts in the interest of one of the factions.  


That is the point where the angry animosities about health care bring us.  In recent decades the contending forces in American politics have abandoned the goals of workable compromise for the raging hostilities of class warfare.  The political propaganda that circulates through the national nervous system is the propaganda of hate and war.  It is not the propaganda of peace and mutual problem-solving.  The media feed on conflict to garner public attention and create audience by inflaming passions, not inciting a reasoned discussion of facts and circumstances.   As a nation, we have reached the point where the problems of contending interests are insoluble, and the moderating processes of government are ineffective.  Those who study the nature of  national discourse in its precedents and its effects upon the people have noted for some time that we have, once again, reached a stage where rebellion and insurrection appear to be the only option.  The people are divided into camps that hate each other, and some actively propose schemes of oppression on their perceived enemies.  So far, the class warfare is on the level of legislation against minorities, labor, women, certain creeds, and political affiliations.  The people have become mobs waiting for a pretext to vent their rage against each other. 


This is what makes any decision by the Supreme Court so crucial at this juncture.  The advocates of affordable and accessible health care have received a very clear message from their opponents that the opposition does not care if health care is not available to them.  Government sponsored health care is socialism or communism, the opposition contends, and must be prevented at all costs.  The opposition dismisses those for whom health care is out-of-reach as expendable, that amounts to 43 million Americans.  The stage for insurrection is, thus, set.  It puts the Supreme Court in the position of deciding whether the issue can be resolved by reasoned compromise or raging violence.  As Madison says, "It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.'

The Supreme Court is being tested for its state of enlightenment and whether it can rise to the level of statesmanship to moderate the contending passions.  

An informing aspect of this has been raised by the Pope.  He recently commented on the failures of Marxism to fulfill the expectations of people in the places where it has ruled.  He made those comments prior to his visit to Cuba.  The larger context for his remarks are that factions within the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in Latin America, are aligning themselves with Marxist principles as a way to free people from the schemes of oppression under which they live.  The failures of Marxism are apparent and thoroughly analyzed for why Marxism, as it has been formulated, has been simply another form of oppression.  However, for many it is the only hope to be freed from the oppression of inequalities that is in circulation.  And that fact  underscores the paucity of enlightenment and statesmanship operating in the world at this time.


Marxism has a horrible record for relieving the world of oppression.  But Marx had a very shrewd understanding of what brings humanity to the point of rebellion and insurrection.  However, his observations are shared by political philosophers of many beliefs.  And America has reached the point where the viability of the republic is under a crucial test.


That is the burden of the Supreme Court in addressing the issue of health care:  43 million people versus a scheme of oppression. 

   

Sandra Fluke: the new Emmanuel Goldstein

It is one thing to give the ignorant and mentally-challenged the right to free speech.  It is quite another to give them the right to amplify their free speech and make it part of competent dialogue, but that is what the Aberdeen American News, which is a perennial contender for the World's Worst Newspaper Award, does with its letters-to-the editor.  

In Sunday's paper, the AAN (which also stands for Asinine Always News) published a letter from an Elsie Arbach of Gettysburg.  She writes:  "I am curious as to why the extracurricular activities of Sandra Fluke are considered laudable and defensible. According to her testimony, they minimized her attention to her law degree."

Of course, Ms. Fluke's testimony, which can be read here it its entirety,  makes no mention of her "extracurricular activities."   She appears at a Congressional hearing to speak on behalf of women who are in circumstances in which they cannot afford contraceptives.  One of those women needs contraceptive pills to treat an ovarian disease.

We surmise that the comment in the letter-to-the editor originates from the false libels against Ms. Fluke uttered by Rush Limbaugh.   He stated on air that Ms. Fluke had so much sex that she wanted the taxpayers to subsidize it because she could not afford it.  Limbaugh and Elsie Arbach simply lie about what Ms. Fluke said and her purpose for testifying.  We also surmise that Arbach is one of Limbaugh's ditto heads and neither knows nor cares if she is lying.  

But the responsibility for publishing this lie goes to the Aberdeen American News.  There was a time in journalism when letters-to-the-editor were fact checked.  They were checked because if a newspaper published a false statement about a person, particularly one that defamed their morality, the newspaper could be sued.  If a newspaper back then published a statement such as the American News did, all Ms. Fluke's attorneys would have to do is bring the transcript of her testimony into court and show that she did not say what the published letter said she did.  The falseness of the statement in the letter was sufficient evidence of the presence of malice and damages were presumed.

When I last worked for a newspaper, the editors and reporters dreaded the ritual of the editor walking out of his office with a stack of letters-to-the-editor, which he would distribute to the editors and senior reporters for fact-checking.  It was also our job, if we found falsehoods and errors, to call the letter writer and explain why we could not publish the letter.  We hated this.  The stupid people who write falsehoods about other people tend to get belligerent and abusive when they are told they have written a lie.  They usually went into a defaming rage against the editor who called them and then canceled their subscription to the paper.  It was not a pleasant part of the work week.

Case law since that time has changed the way slander and libel laws are applied.  Now one has to prove that a false statement did measurable damage regarding a person's profession or occupation.  The courts have, in effect, endorsed the presence and use of malice against people as permissible as long as it does not measurably affect their earnings.  

So, that leaves wretched publications like the American News free to publish whatever libels it pleases.    That does not absolve the newspaper from being party to a falsehood and a libel. The newspaper has a right to devote itself to partisan hackery, which is abundant on its editorial pages, and it is part of the free enterprise system of selling harmful junk to the public.


In Orwell's 1984, the novel contains a hate figure named Emmanuel Goldstein who is presented as an enemy of the people by the state media.  It is doubtful whether such a person actually existed, but the purpose is to excite and distract the people with hatred as part of the brain-washing process through which they are controlled.  Sandra Fluke was created by Limbaugh as a hate object and that hate object is passed along by the letter in the American News.


In so engaging in this kind of nefarious enterprise, the American News disqualifies any claim it makes to being a medium of journalism.  It is merely a facilitator of the angry and insane incivility that possesses American politics.  But its financial success probably relies on it serving that role.  Reading the Aberdeen American News is like smoking tobacco.  Or crack.  It is not anything like reading legitimate journalism. 

The Governor shows how it's done in middle school

Lunch was a bit somber Friday, but the intensity of a legislator we know who was the restaurant penetrated.  My family had come from the hospital where my mother-in-law had just been given the last rites.  The legislator was wondering if we had signed a petition yet to repeal South Dakota's atrocity to education, HB 1234, and he was worked up about it.

What he was worked up about was the attitude and spirit behind the bill that he found had nothing to do with what is good for the state, but everything to do with the state Republican attitude that its purpose is to defeat anything the Democrats propose, no matter how absurd, how dishonest, or how damaging.  After the state legislature passed HB 1234, that attitude was fully on display, he said, in the halls of the Capitol.

Our lawmaker friend said he had never seen any governor in the past come into the halls of the legislature to celebrate with or berate members of the legislature before.  After the passage of HB 1234, Gov.  Daugaard came into the halls with the Republican legislators and they were chortling in glee and high-fiving each other  like a bunch of middle schoolers who had just won some small athletic contest. It struck the legislator in the most emphatic terms then what the real agenda of GOP politics is in South Dakota,  to win at all costs, even if it means the destruction of the state. 

He said that demonstration inspired him to carry petitions to repeal the law and tell people about the incident whenever he could.  The GOP  is mindlessly in a rage to destroy everything that stands in the way of total domination by its puerile attitude and goals.  

The legislators fervor got through to us in the midst of a very somber time.  

The ascendance of James Crow, Jr.

It never occurred to progressives during the celebration of electing a black president in 2008 that Obama's election would inspire a resurgence of racial, religious, and gender discrimination.  From the outset, GOP leaders announced that their main goal for the country was to get Obama out of office.  While progressives were basking in the idea that America had surmounted its racist past by choosing a black man as its leader, the conservatives were boiling with an intense anger and resentment that propelled the nation backward into that pre-civil rights past.  The GOP, once the party of Lincoln that began the liberation of black America, now openly courted the forces of discrimination and oppression as it power base.  Its mission became the push backward to overturn the racial, ethnic, and gender equities that the civil rights movement had established.  The values that conservatives wanted to conserve were not the liberating and elevating ones of Lincoln, but the regressive and oppressive values of George Wallace and Orval Faubus, southern governors who openly professed their racial hatred and made it a governing principle.  


The GOP agenda is snarled up in its efforts to maintain the appearance of beneficence while serving the insidious purposes of the social regressives.  While indignantly denying any racial agenda, it has launched federal and multi-state legislative proposals to reduce voting rights, subjugate women, oppress labor, punish immigrant minorities, dismantle public education, and impose the Christian version of sharia on the nation.  The rage and incoherence demonstrated in its presidential primary campaigns is one symptom of its furor to reverse the equities that have been granted since World War II.  The rage to defame the designated groups is too volatile to suppress.  It keeps spilling out in words and deeds, often in absurd and obvious ways that fool no one but the perpetrators of the new Jim Crow. 





One such instance of malicious contrivance was one of the last efforts of Andrew Breitbart, who devoted himself to the craft and dishonesty of fabricating misleading, often stupid lies out of videos.  Just before he died, he provided Fox News with a video that showed President Obama as a law student introducing and hugging one of his Harvard Law School professors,  Derrick  Bell.  The GOP has an essential interest in painting Derrick Bell as a raving "racialist" and accusing Obama of being one of his adherents.   Derrick Bell was a developer of the Critical Race Theory.   The Critical Race Theory as Bell conceived it provides an incisive explanation of what the GOP is promoting in its agendas of oppression. 


Derrick Bell posed the Critical Race Theory when gains made during the civil rights movement were stalling, were being blocked, or were in danger of being reversed.  As a legal scholar, Bell was primarily interested in how attitudes about race affected the law.  He examined the way racial biases affected the formation of law, its application, and judiciary challenges.  His basic premise was that racism is not a cultural aberration, but is ingrained in American society in ways that seem to many an integral aspect that defines the society.  



Two opposite perspectives operate in America.  One, which is usually but mistakenly identified as "liberal," is that social pathologies such as racism are undeniable aspects of society as demonstrated in history.  Slavery, the dispossession and oppression of the American Indian, women's suffrage and rights, religious intolerance and persecution, to name a few of those aspects, are facts of history that America has struggled to rise above.  It is tha struggle  which has defined the values and the unique force that America has represented to the world.  Freedom, equality, and justice were the goals set by the founders, and America has  worked gradually toward achieving them,  recognizing that there are those segments of the population which do not want those values to apply to all people.  


The opposite perspective is held by those who take offense against people  who openly acknowledge America's history, its transgressions against human rights, and regard the struggle to surmount its past and present inequities and oppression as the driving national purpose.  Those who are offended by this acknowledgment prefer to dismiss America's past transgressions against humanity and assert that America was created with a divinely bestowed exceptionalism.  They regard any criticism of America as a weakness,  an expression of anti-patriotic of values, an obsequious deference to foreign thinking.  They conceive of international bullying as the demonstration of national strength and leadership. Any apology for insults or violence done to others  is portrayed as an obsequious degradation of  America by them. Obama's apology to Afghanistan for the mistaken burning of Qurans has met with denunciations of his character and intellect for them.  However, anyone who does not treat those denunciations  with obsequy is upbraided for incivility. Both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have shouted that they will never apologize for America.  

Emmet Till in his casket.

The picture that  launched the civil rights movement

The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has been an explosive gauge of the state of civil rights, race, and violence in America.  It has demonstrated to the nation some stunning realities that cannot be obscured by the false rhetoric of dismissal and denial.  The killing has struck the nation with the kind of force that the lynching and murder of Emmett Till in 1955 had in forcing America to face the racial realities.  The killing of 14-year-old Till gave the civil rights movement the impetus to become the major  concern on the national agenda.  The killing of Trayvon Martin has brought the nation to that kind of confrontation with reality again.

Trayvon Martin

 The spirit of Jim Crow has emerged again as a force in American social and political life.  The work of America in trying to make liberty, equality, and justice its defining values is never done.  And there is always the chance that the forces of discrimination and oppression will become the majority.  Many would like to retreat into fascist chauvinism and insist on the America that once sustained slavery and conducted genocide against the American Indians and designated labor and women to the status of servitude. 


America has still to become America, if its people will allow it. 

Piss on some corpses, burn some Qurans, shoot some kids

Gen. Patton once told his troops that war is man's greatest adventure.  What he did not tell them in that speech is that war kills people, innocent as well as soldiers doing what they are told, and it also kills that part of human nature that aspires to higher, peaceful things.  

Liberation of Dachau

When American troops liberated Dachau, they found piles of dead Jews and barracks filled with emaciated people.   Their reaction was to line up about a hundred German guards against a wall and machine gun them down. In the killing spree that followed, more than 500 German troops were reported executed, some by liberated camp inmates who killed them with their bare hands.  The troops that did the machine-gunning were referred to Gen. Patton for possible war crimes prosecution.  Gen. Patton dismissed the charges and absolved the men of wrong-doing.  They simply did, he said, what they were trained to do.  


Then comes the 38-year-old Sergeant Robert Bales last Sunday in Afghanistan who is accused of leaving his post on his base, walking into nearby villages, and shooting down 16 people, including nine children.   The sergeant was on his fourth tour of combat duty in his 11-year career.  The previous three were in Iraq, where he incurred a brain injury when a vehicle he was in overturned from a roadside bomb and where he also lost part of a foot.   No officials have offered any informed conjectures about why Sgt Bales may have done what he was accused of.    Some initial responses from the military indicate he had been drinking and just seemed to snap. Reports also claim that the day before the massacre, Sgt. Bales was next to a colleague when the colleague's leg was blown off.   A man who joined the Army in response to 9/11, serves four tours of combat duty in 11 years does not suddenly snap.  The issues that bring him to the point where, like the liberators of Dachau, he guns down a bunch of people are long in the making.   They are issues, however, that the advocates and perpetrators of war cannot and will not face.  Those who see war as a patriotic glory cannot afford to confront the insidious insult of an 11-year combat veteran being thanked for his service.  They refuse to consider that what is being said to the troops when thanked is heard as, "Thank you for your service, you fucktard.  Now shut up and do the obscene and insane things you are trained and told to do, and we'll support you with stupid bumper stickers and phony expressions of gratitude."

Oh, and by the way, it would be most convenient if you would get your fucktard head blown off so we don't have to hear and feign concern about any post traumatic stress bullshit.  We'll give you a fucking hero medal to put on your grave marker.  Thanks for your service.  

 The military services do an excellent job of training the troops in the arts and sciences of killing.  That training includes some measures for survival, but little consideration is given to psychic survival, how to deal with the results of rage and violence that are part of the combat experience.  When the American troops liberated Dachau, the combat troops who entered the camp were not prepared for the boxcars full of dead inmates or the grotesque emaciation of the living.  Their revulsion and rage over what they encountered induced the need to eliminate the cause of the atrocities they witnessed.  Atrocity was met with atrocity.

 The war on terror has not been fought in the primary area that acts of terror are intended to attack.  While acts of terror may inspire fear and intimidation, their most pronounced effect is to disorient their targets, intellectually and morally.  Much talk and blame-placing has been expended on whether the U.S. government should have anticipated and prepared for the 9/11 attacks, but as I mulled them over with other veterans, we all shared an incredulity that 19 men could be found who would volunteer for suicide missions.  We found the idea ludicrous that a commander could ask for 19 volunteers to step forward from his troops and volunteer for such a mission.  Such a request would be met with derision.   The idea of such a mission was so far outside of western culture and history that we regarded it as an absurdity.


America and the rest of western culture regarded the Muslim religion as just another creed that promoted peace, goodwill, and rules of behavior that avoided what it defined as sins.  We chose to overlook the fact that many tenets of Muslim practice are in direct opposition to the rights and freedoms conferred by American democracy.  Our thinking was so entrenched in the idea that America's enemies would come from political organizations, such as communists and fascists, that we could not conceive of the idea that the most successful attacks to be waged against America would come under the auspices of a religion.  Many Americans, particularly those of us on the left, have cautioned against equating all Muslims with the Islamic jihad.  We have insisted on full exercise of the First Amendment,  denying that the insidious forces that gather to kill do their organizing  under its protection.  We've allowed sects which exist for the destruction of everything America stands for to exist and develop under the rubric of religious freedom.  If any political group were to openly plot sedition, treason, and destruction of the Constitution in such a way, all the possible strictures of law would be applied to suppress and expel it. 

A basic tenet of the Muslim religion permits violence and warfare in the pursuit of sectarian goals.  This difference was emphasized during the heyday of the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King, Jr., cited Christ in his nonviolent, passive resistance to Jim Crow while Malcolm X said, "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence."  

Let it be acknowledged that there is a constant in the history of Christianity where atrocity is committed in the name of the Christian god.  In America, it begins with the destruction of the Pequod Indians at Mystic, Massachusetts.  It raged during the prolonged violence between Irish Catholics and Protestants.  And it was the motivating force in the Bosnian War when the Serbian Orthodox Christians not only exterminated the Muslims, but also the Croat Catholics.  In our country, those who lust for violent dominion ensconce themselves in Old Testament passages on vengeance, and choose to ignore The New Law laid down by Christ in the New Testament.  However, the mainline Catholic and Protestant denominations give at least lip service to Christ's mandate for reconciliation, peace, and good will.  That said, the fact is that damned few Christians take Christ's words seriously,  although some subscribe to convoluted theological obfuscations to justify their need for  violence.  

Despite the doctrinaire hypocrisy of American religious faiths, Americans cling to  a vague, vestigial notion of respect for diverse life, probably in the hope that if they cannot muster it themselves, other people will give them respectful regard.  And it is clinging to that notion that makes 9/11 and the constant atrocities of the Jihad so effective.  In Iraq, when the local forces weren't setting of bombs against the NATO troops, the Shiites and Sunnis were bombing each other.  And when they could, the Islamic forces would video tape a beheading for the edification of their enemies,  It is the constant killing of anyone at any place by Muslim factions that so wears away at the American pretense for tolerance and justice.  It is hard for people to believe in tolerance and justice in circumstances where such concepts are systematically derided and denied.  This is the huge psychological force that works constantly on our troops, and it makes it seem absurd for Americans to cling to the concepts of just and fair conduct when those concepts have no  relevance to their lives and are used to mount attacks against them.  

The damage that war inflicts upon the human brain is not only from explosive devices.  It is also caused by the constant denial of moral standards as operative forces.  However, the effectiveness of Islamic assaults comes not through just the constant mindless violence.  it also comes when the country that soldiers believe they are fighting for demonstrates a hypocritical treachery.  When political campaigns turn from the critical discussion of national goals and policies for achieving them into the ad hominem assaults against character and intellect,  the tactics of the Jihad easily displace the moral certitudes for which the country makes claims. The outrage at the burning of Qurans seems preposterously absurd in the  face of mass suicide bombings and the subjection of women to unspeakable denials of humanity. To those soldiers who have been designated as expendable human beings by their countrymen, responding to atrocity with atrocity seems part of the way the world is working.

America has  no coherent battle plan for dealing with the disorientation delivered through atrocities delivered in the name of Allah.  The mental health of the troops are not much of a consideration.  And the problems become worse when the country they return to is largely dysfunctional.  Maybe we can finally learn something about war from Sgt. Bales.   Most likely, not.  May as well take a wiz and burn a Quran or two.

What the troops are fighting for.

No racism here. 

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A big, scarlet letter A for A--holes

The national obsession with punishment has reached the  point where one writer sees the rate at which we put people in jail in America  no longer as a solution for crime, but as the symptom of an epidemic in mental health raging through the populace.  Incarceration is one of the things for which  South Dakota leads the nation.  It has twice as many people in jail as its neighbor North Dakota.  The case is made in a new book A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America by Ernest Drucker.  By 2010, the U.S. had 1.6 million adults in prison.  

Drucker points out that prison doesn't solve problems with crime, but rather intensifies them.  Half the people who get out of prison end up back in within three years.  That's because convicts are branded and are deprived of the ability to get along in society. Drucker writes,  "Denying ex-cons access to the jobs, school or housing they need, is a recipe for driving them back to prison."

 I have long been skeptical that prisons serve a constructive purpose, for the most part.  Fifty years ago, I worked on a series of stories the newspaper I was at did on convicted criminals.  My main interview was with a very old prisoner who joined a religious order and became the assistant to a Catholic chaplain.  During the interview, I asked him what people in prison were the most dangerous and posed the biggest threats to public safety.  He said the wrongfully convicted..  For them, the idea of justice had totally failed and developed a desired to get revenge on a society that wrongfully sent them to jail.  Furthermore, he said prisons do not encourage the convicted to change their lives in constructive ways, but provide them thorough schooling in crime.  It provides them with motives for being anti-social.  His comments were predictive when the same prison he was at in Illinois released 13 men from death row when DNA evidence proved they were wrongfully convicted.  


Prisons, however, are the most obvious symptom of a society that has become obsessed with punishment and ostracizing people from society for absurd reasons.  Our schools, which are under attack for academic reasons, are places where absurd obsessions with punishing kids have become prevalent.


In Sioux Falls, a 15-year-old middle school student was suspend under the zero tolerance for drugs policy  because he gave a classmate a dietary supplement capsule of fish oil.  His parents protested because the kid is a promising athlete and the suspension for drugs on his record would spoil his chances of qualifying for an athletic scholarship to college.  The first question that instance raises is about the competence of the people who handled the situation.  The punishment was reduced, but a school spokesman said, "Even if it is an over-the-counter drug, it may be a threat to another student. We certainly have our eyes out and want to protect every student while they are in the school building. Our policies are designed to do that."   Of course, the question is how that protects the future of the student who gets punished on a drug count for trafficking in fish oil.  






However, the idiotic paranoia that drives schools into absurdity was typified in a comment on the story in the Aberdeen American News:  "The school did the right thing. Using the Athletic Scholarship argument gets the case the publicity needed to send a message to the kids that it really is ZERO TOLERANCE.  Don't ever think a kid won't try to tamper with a harmless vitamin capsule. They have come up with other even more sneaky schemes."  


This is the thinking that is shaping school policies.  These schools are not places anyone with a three-digit IQ would want to send their kids.  


Another example occurred in North Carolina where a nine-year-old boy was suspended for sexual harassment for calling a teacher cute--but not to her face.  The Huffington Post explains it this way:  "After a substitute teacher overheard 9-year-old Emanyea tell another student a teacher was 'cute,' school officials put him on two-day suspension for sexual harassment."  He is also alleged to have said the teacher was "fine" in a suggestive way.  


Justice was eventually served when the school district investigated the situation and determined that no sexual harassment was involved.  Then the school district
gave the principal Jerry Bostic one hour to decide whether to quit or be fired. He retired.




But that raised another question of excessive punishments:  Bostic said, ""One mistake in 44 years, and I'm not given the benefit of the doubt. I really don't believe I was treated fairly."  


When we are among the world leaders in the rate of incarceration and students are shone the levels of intelligence demonstrated above by school authorities, Drucker's diagnosis of an epidemic becomes enlightening.  There is a movement in society much more concerned with oppressing and tearing down than in the possibilities for freedom and building up.  It is reflected in the condemnatory propaganda that dominates our election campaigns.  It is more evidence of the massive intellectual failure that is reshaping America.