I started this blog in 2007, in the middle of the Bush debacle, when it seemed the world had turned upside down, that Americans had fallen asleep on the job. All we needed to do, I figured, was change the world.

I’m not so sure about that anymore. It’s a big world. It can be hard – and frustrating – when you try and shove it around.

I used to think it was every citizen’s responsibility to engage in political debate for awareness and enlightenment. But given the hysteria in the  so-called “news” today, such debate has essentially descended into trying to change someone’s opinion.  It’s like convincing a Mets fan to switch to the Phillies because you “know” the Phillies are better to root for.

This is useless.

I also once believed that the Information Age would put an end to disinformation once and for all. I naively reasoned (how 2004 of me) that  self-publication would spread “truth” as fast as a mouse click. No more manipulating and deceiving the folk.

But the Internets had another plan. Instead of more “truth” out there, we have nonsensical hysteria. The noise is so loud, you can’t get a reasoned thought in. Just follow any Yahoo news article’s rant (er, comments) section. It’ll break a democratic’s heart.

The truth is, none of us “knows” the truth.  And who’s to say that my “truth” is the same for someone else? Yet we’re threatened by dire consequences if we ignore so-called “truths” all the time. Typically the country is “being destroyed.”

And yet it’s not. Or maybe it is. It hasn’t yet. All that we do know with certainty– and in the end, all that we can reasonably hope to impact – is what’s happening in our own lives.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t universal truths, and by no means am I arguing for a society run by individuals acting according to their own self-interest, which is a wholly different and self-defeating thing.  That’s selfishness and it leads to exploitation, which is anathema to wise people everywhere.

What I am saying is that changing one’s own life (and directing those of our children) through acts of responsibility – being a responsible parent, a responsible consumer, a good friend, a kind neighbor – this can spread goodness out from circle to circle and – dare I say it – change the world.

OK, there are exceptions. Do you join mass movements against Nazis? Yes, if it’s Germany in 1936, you join the cause. But this isn’t Germany in 1936, and healthcare reform is not the second coming of the Politburo. But try to convince a dug-in, full-of-certainty Hannity/Limbaugh/FOX/Tea Party fanatic who won’t be budged. It’s changing the world all over again: You’re pushing against a mountain.

So maybe for the most of us, most of the time, focusing our energies on influencing the areas of our lives that are within our power to influence may be the most effective method to move things positively forward that we personally have.

The first thing I wrote on this blog was the beautiful quote from Ghandi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I didn’t realize it then, but I guess I had it right, right at the start. These are wise words to live by, and I’ve tried to take them to heart.

Meantime, the lights will be on here as long as Rob C keeps paying the bills, so have a random read now and then.

And thanks.

(You can find me at eric-heller.net, a personal blog about poetry and Internet Marketing.  And voila, my first in-bound links. Take that, Google.)

Right-wingers are a different animal, and since their party gave up its  conservative roots a long time ago, I have little concern – and not a little glee – watching the right-wing Republican Party self destruct. When you consider the mess that right-wingers have made of the economy, the environment, our foreign policy, (pick a topic), their current implosion seems a just and fitting reward.

So the web is full of articles from Republicans looking for the way out of their abyss, and with every post they remind us just how deep their problems are.

Consider this article from the The Becker-Posner Blog, a website out of the classical conservative school, called “The Serious Conflict in the Modern Conservative Movement.” They argue that the ideological disparities between classical “economic” conservatives and “social” (or “family values”) conservatives are the culprit:

Well said. But I’d go further:  Social conservatives and traditional conservatives can no longer hold their party together because their inherent contradictions can no longer be sustained.

That’s what you get when you abandon the traditional ideas of small government and the like for the more electorally enticing – though inherently hypocritical – “social issues.” Like “Clear Skies Initiatives” that make it easier to pollute; frantic appeals to gun-toting outdoor-types while undermining the national park system; “small government” that starves public works on one hand but dictates personal behavior on the other and spies on its own citizens; “Christian Coalitions” that appeal to bible-thumpers while ignoring The Beatitudes, the poor, and 90% of Jesus’ teachings.

These were the kinds of hypocrisies that would make a progressive pull their hair out for the last twenty years or so. But ultimately such contradictions cannot continue, because people can be duped for only so long. And in the age of blogs and electronic media such duplicity gets even harder to pull off.

So going after gays/liberals/latte-sipping intellectuals, science and “elites” now makes them look nasty, backwards and foolish. For one, even Republican families have kids coming out of the closet. The culture is moving on and becoming much more accepting in this area. And do they really think Joe SixPack is the kind of guy to navigate the economy? To keep the banks together? Scapegoating and appeals to mediocrity fall flat when the times call for our best and brightest.

And then there’s a bigger problem, one which transcends these internal contradictions.  In an era when Baby Boomers – approaching retirement and living longer – can’t afford their anticipated quality of life; where most people struggle with debt, health costs, college tuition; where Americans have been rejecting consumerism for a more natural, local-based lifestyle, and when yet another financial crisis feeds a growing suspicion of big business’ role in creating these problems, small-government, hands-off ideas no longer appeal in a mass way.

If the Party can’t hide beneath a less-impactful cover of “family values,” and the culture rejects even those old-time conservative economic ideas, then there ain’t much there, there. However the conservative movement comes to define itself, it’s going to be on the outside looking in for a long time to come.

Sometimes I get thoughtful comments, sometimes off-color pings that make me laugh out loud. Once in a while I get a disturbing email, like the guy who blasted my BlackBerry three times while I sat in my car at the ShopRite demanding in four-letter terms that I should ship myself “back to the other socialists in Canada”.

Yesterday I got one from the disturbing category.This came from someone named “b*fox” (I’ll betcha ”fox” is a reference to that fabbie news channel ). Since this is a public forum and a free country, I’ll reproduce this one in full:

On one hand, I’ve gotten much meaner notes than this one. I found myself wondering why this one struck such a nerve.

For one, I have read “Atlas Shrugged” – well, most of it. I also read “Anthem” and “The Fountainhead” (two times through, back to back.) I’ve written about my break with Ayn Rand and the Objectivists before; I rejected that philosophy because, like all fanatics, Objectivists assume that their way is the only way without exception to solve all social ills.

That’s called zealotry, which makes Objectivism no different – practically speaking – from communism, fascism, or libertarianism.  Demanding that a single philosophy should be followed without exception gets you ideological tyranny. It’s a social change dead-end.

I was a fanatic myself, two different times: Once of the Right (God Bless Ronald Reagan) and once of the further left, let’s say.  But as I’ve gotten older and – dare I say it wiser – I’ve come to believe that no framework for understanding the world fits every situation, every time.

I think that’s why this note from b*fox got under my skin so. I don’t know what political bucket I fit into anymore, except that I no longer define myself by any single one. When people assume that I’m a “liberal” I blanch, and not just because of the way the Right has come to define the term ( “bleeding heart, limp-wristed, welfare-spending, enemy-loving wimp” -thank you Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and FOX News.) I could live with the WWll-era definition, where “liberals” were open minded, anti-racist, and open to social change within the confines of capitalist democracy.  But this definition no longer lives in our social consciousness.

So then here’s b*fox, a fellow citizen who rejects anyone’s thinking that falls outside of his rigid conservatism, and takes the time to submit a blog’s form to make it clear. Here’s a guy who boasts – proudly – that he “earned” a college degree without challenging, arguing, engaging or defending an opinion. I’d say this guy ought to remove all references to his degree from his resume. This is no kind of education.

Cornell West once said, When  your prejudices and preconditions no longer sustain you, you’ve been educated. I’d suggest b*fox give some thought to this. But then he’d ignore these wise words because they came from that “liberal” Cornell West. A sad thing for him.

And for us. I assume that democracies are still the most effective way we’ve found to organize a peaceful society, and I think history defends that position rather well. So running into narrow-minded folks like this guy is disappointing indeed.

I aim for optimism. It’s really never too late to change, and given that we’re in the early days of our Information Age there’s reason for being hopeful. Even for someone like b*fox. Not that he should agree with my viewpoint; rather, I’m simply suggesting that he consider other ideas even when they don’t jive with his own.

One can’t deny that people are rejecting the old right-wing fear tactics in a way that transcends modern memory. Obama’s popularity remains surprisingly high even in the face of a Right-wing propaganda machine, which keeps falling flat. And I’m not saying that everyone should be a fan of Obama. What I am saying is that disagreements should be reasonable or honest, and not because he’s a “socialist”, a “non-American”, or “dictator”, terms which the republican party employs and right-wing fanatics actually seem to believe.

I don’t know what my personal political bucket should be defined by.  When you tie yourself down to a unbending viewpoint, you spend your energy rejecting any idea that doesn’t neatly fit with your preconception. And you’ll miss an awful lot of good ideas as a result. Political ideaologues devote their efforts to defining a perfect society. Imagine one that’s filled with open-minded, contemplative citizens? That’s a world I could be happy living in.

And thank goodness for that. Whew.

Still, if the RNC is forgotten they are not yet gone. So if you haven’t seen the latest bit of nastiness out of the Republican Party, and you feel like you could stand 1:24 of hateful creepiness, or if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the economic uncertainty, the flu pandemic, global warming, or any of the other dozen or so serious, historical calamities we face today - or maybe you’re nostalgic for the bad old days of Bush 43 - then have a seat, perhaps poor yourself a drink (because after watching this junk I sure needed one) and take a gander at this load o’ crap.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKNbi-_Mxo8

See what I mean? Now it turns out things aren’t so bad after all. These people who made this video could have been our leaders just now.

But when this eloquent man said “parents have to teach…children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets…It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work ” I became transfixed. These were the kinds of words more common for a community organizer, not a national politician. Certainly not a US Senator. They could only come from someone who possessed – and understood – social conscience. This has been absent from our political leadership for long time.

The American left has been splintered and largely ineffective – on a national political level – for a long time, too. Since the end of the Vietnam era. This is what happens when large social movements lack a cohesive ideology. You’ll be hard pressed to find many Marxists or Communists among the progressive community, perhaps rightly so. But a national movement cannot be sustained when it can only define itself by what it is NOT: “Not right-wing,” “not pro-business,” “not racist,” “not pro-war,” “not Bush.”

And we’ve seen the result. The progressive movement – responsible for some of the greatest social achievements in American history – watched as the democratic party continued to shift rightward, appeasing conservatives to the point where Republican dogma – small government; free trade, laissaiz faire – became our conventional wisdom. And look at the mess it’s made.

But things are changing, and of all the eloquence in President Obama’s inaugural, the most thoughtful and perhaps overlooked were these words:

People were concerned that Obama “lacked experience” to be president. When it comes to diplomacy, or acting as Commander in Chief, or running a national government, that’s probably true. But our first 21st century president brings an altogether different kind of experience that surpasses any other president before him: He brings experience born of community organizing. For a country that strives for democracy, this is special indeed.

I think our community organizer president has quietly and with little notice just proclaimed the new American progressive movement, and he did this simply by recognizing a trend already well underway.

He calls it the Era of Responsibility. And what makes this proclamation all the more authentic – and so much sweeter – is that this is nothing new. Progressives have been living this way for a long time. We just didn’t know what it was called.

Many progressives have been living responsibly – even at greater cost and greater effort – for some time.  We make responsible purchase choices to buy fair trade and not free trade; we reject factory farming; we support local growers and buy produce that doesn’t poison the earth, or ourselves. We strive towards globalization that creates a just and sustainable world. Progressive moms are embracing natural childbirth options, nursing their children again, while parents turn off the TV, reject commercial media, and let our kids get back to the business of childhood, otherwise known as “free, unstructured play“. We’re disdaining pharmacology as the only option for wellness. We’re building new communities through the co-housing movement. Those who can are investing in socially responsible businesses that consider stakeholders, not stockholders. We’re buying cleaner cars; we’re recycling and “going green”. Progressives have been doing all of these things and much more in their own lives, among their own families, for a long time.

Who knew we were starting a movement? The Responsibility Movement.

President Obama will never be all things to all people. The pundits have been claiming that progressives will be disappointed and conservatives pleasantly surprised by what they believe will be a centrist leader.  There’s some truth to this – on a political level. But we’re already passed those worn out paradigms of “liberal” or “conservative”. Progressives can move on. We’ve got more important work to do. The Era of Responsibility is upon us.

Hm. Who is this friendly fellow? Expect to see a lot of stories like this coming our way as January 20 approaches, as the media recasts the story of the Bush Disaster into “good guy, bad people”.

Of course the reality of the Bush Years is too dark to paint over with an “aw shucks” wink and nod. Because even as he plays it well – the man can portray a kind of charm when he wants – falling for this line ultimately belittles the enormous harm his administration has done to our country.

Most presidents go through positive reassessment. Take LBJ; hated left and right, he now gets credit for his attempted war on poverty and the great civil rights bills he pushed through a reluctant congress. Truman is another one: Derided as a simple-minded political hack during his time, perspective shows that he navigated the post-war period with a fair degree of wisdom and without personal political calculation. Rare indeed.

But this upward reflection doesn’t have to be standard practice. There have been really bad presidents who do not deserve such reassessment. 43 is all of that, and since I like to keep my posts brief I won’t spell it all out for you here. Instead, here’s a ready-made Google search for you. It’s got 1.1 million reasons why. Have at ‘em.

We really need to be careful before we turn the page on the last eight years, even as the media tries to convince us otherwise. This is history that must not be forgotten, otherwise it can be – and most likely will be – repeated.

So this is special indeed.

It’s not Obama’s election alone that’s so pleasing. So many concepts that have stained our modern political era met their demise on November 4. I’m talking about ugly things like “Trickle-down Economics,” “Southern Strategy,” Identity Politics”, “Family values”, and those enraging – but effective – “soft on” taunts (soft on terror; on communism, on criminals, yadda yadda yadda). Just like that, those nasty attacks that helped elect some of the worst people to office for 60 years simply vanished into thin air, exploded.

And not a moment too soon.

OK, before I get carried away, it’s not Morning in America. We’ve still got ourselves some problems, and plenty of them. For all we know, President Obama might start “triangulating” his way to the center-right, taking with him all of this astonishing joy we found in his election, and breaking a few million hearts along the way.

I certainly hope not. And it doesn’t have to go down like that. There have been good presidents in American history who’ve done good things. No one can be all things to all people. But I think President Obama can do some good things. Maybe even some great things. For the first time in my adult life, I’m willing to gamble on American politics as an agent of social change. For friends who have known me for a long time, this might be a surprise. I’m surprised myself.

Either way, we can certainly revel in the final, long overdue demise of those tried-and-true McCarthy-Nixon-Atwater-Rove attack strategies, tactics which go all the way back to 1948, the Truman presidency, when the first “soft on communism” taunts were used to knock off the remaining New Dealers left in government. And those race-baiting, red-baiting, you-name-it-baiting methods have been used ever since to scare people into voting against their own interests. The old bait and switch. The hoodwink. The bamboozle.

For the first time in the modern era, such tactics are suddenly, wonderfully, out of gas. Dead on arrival. Why? Because a graceful, thoughtful, confident candidate chose to simply rise above the slander. He sidestepped the punches. They never landed. And it could be that they never will again. Partly we have the decentralized New Media to thank, the blogs which so effectively magnified the attacks and showed their implications, like McCain’s embarrassment when the old woman called Obama “an Arab”, or when they shouted “kill him” and “terrorist” at his rallies, or Palin self-destructing in front of Katie Kouric and the millions who watched it on YouTube. Think of it: We could have had George “Macaca” Allen as president-elect right now. The Fourth Estate may have re-emerged in 2008 as the Blogosphere.

And they helped the good guy win for a change. We’ll see what comes of it. But for now, it sure feels pretty damn good.

But I voted for him anyway, and very happily so.

I’m under no illusions that a President Obama would pursue the progressive policies that are important to me. I don’t want any off-shore drilling, or even “some” nuclear power. I’m disturbed by the militarization of our culture. I think advertising to kids needs to be much less pervasive. The corporate influence over social policies is frightening. Meantime media concentration continues unabated, and our economic policies are so tilted to favor the top 1% that it’s become a joke.

Obama has been silent on these – and other – progressive causes. Truth is, no candidate promoting progressive ideas would win national office today. That’s because America is – by and large – a conservative country. I don’t mean “conservative” in the Milton Freedman, William F. Buckley, right-wing sense. I mean that – with a few historical exceptions aside – you just don’t see major changes in American culture take place over a short period of time. American social change is slow – sometimes painfully slow.

Even knowing this, I voted for Barack Obama anyway, because he’s a thoughtful, reflective, smart, refreshingly sincere candidate, in a way that I’ve never seen in my lifetime. He’s also run a flawless campaign, he clearly knows how to manage a large, national organization (the Democrats are running their best campaign in many years), and he strikes me as a man who will listen, contemplate and make carefully considered decisions. Considering the government we’ve had for the last eight years, these traits aren’t just refreshing, they may be vital.

And there’s one more thing. You can’t be aware of American history – which must be acknowledged as a history built on racism – without recognizing the remarkable reality that a majority of Americans appear willing to vote for a man based not on the color of his skin but rather – dare I say it – on the content of his character. There’s no reason to belittle this. It bodes well for us all.

I had to hit F5 on that one. I could barely believe my browser.

American history can be broken into a few major economic eras, and one of them may be coming to an end. I’m talking about the Era of the Free Market. Born out of the Chicago School of Economics, led most notably by Milton Friedman, it was an economic philosophy well-suited for the post-War conservatives – soon to be popularized by Reagan – who saw an intellectual opportunity to put a nail in the coffin of their arch-enemy the New Deal.

As Wikipedia puts it, this view holds that “regulation and other government intervention is always inefficient compared to a free market.” It’s the way we live, and have been living, for a generation. It’s why even young people – who know little about economics, politics or history – will, for the most part, almost always espouse a knee-jerk acceptance to the “Dangers of Excess Government”.

Now one of the most visible representations of the Free Marketers – Alan Greenspan – has made this startling admission:

You remember Alan Greenspan. He used to run around with the Objectivists, as a much-favored disciple of Ayn Rand. Objectivists believe that only the free market, when allowed to prosper in pure, unregulated capitalism, delivers the ideal form of human society. That’s because when individuals are free to act according to their own self interest (the theory goes), then you have a society of right-thinking, right-acting folks. According to the Objectivists, such societal freedom can only be realized under complete separation of state and economics, similar to the separation of church and state.

In other words: Regulations: very, very bad. (How a man who ideologically rejects all forms of regulation was allowed to run the Federal Reserve – the most powerful economic regulatory organization in the world – is a head-scratcher. But searching for logic among hypocrisy is often a futile exercise.)

You should check out the Objectivists sometime. They make a lot of sense when you read them, especially when you’re like 18 or 20 (I speak from experience) and have yet to live in the world – and by “live” I mean work, sweat, earn, experience, and interact with people beyond your own immediate family. That’s when you realize that few things ever neatly line up in your day-to-day existence the way they appear to line up when you’re reading books. Sure, many people are motivated by self interest. And just as often they are motivated by compassion and empathy and selflessness. You simply can’t build a social order around one or the other, since both are true.

What Objectivists fail to recognize – just like passionate Free Marketers or Communists, for that matter – is that no single ideology will satisfy every problem. If you ever find an economic or political philosophy that seems to do that, then my advice to you is to run, quickly, for you will have found yourself among zealots.

Here’s hoping for a whole lot fewer zealots running the instruments of power, from here on in. I’ll take a leader with an open mind and intellectual curiosity – I don’t care what party they’re from – over an ideological zealot anytime. Because a person with those skills will have the flexibility to apply a variety of approaches to solve a dilemma, rather than be handcuffed to a single view. Like trying to manage the US economy through 30 years of varied circumstances by eliminating regulations as part of an unquestioned trust in free market-based solutions, every single time. It’s bound to fail, eventually. And so I welcome you to the first economic disaster of the 21st century, brought to you not by “greed” on Wall Street (as if that’s something new and rare) but by an absence of appropriate rules and boundaries to keep things in good working order. Regulations by any other name.

I hope it’s a lesson well learned. We’ll see.

Anyway, getting back to Mr. Greenspan – I’ll say this much for the guy; it takes a lot to admit a major exception to one’s entire life’s rule. Turns out you CAN teach an old dog a new trick or two, at least once in a while.

I mean, really.

But this is the depth of desperation to which the McCain campaign has actually fallen. They’re robocalling “undecideds” across the country with this very message. And now they’re also calling the guy a “socialist” (as if).

Obama is many things. “Radical Leftist” he is not. But regardless, US Representative Michelle Bachman has been on Hardball calling for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to “find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.” If you haven’t seen it, and haven’t just eaten, take a few minutes (it’s long but worth it) and watch:

If this ticks you off as much as it does me, then your next mouse move should be to sign this petition to censure this nut. Oh, and tell your friends to do the same.