Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks

The New York Times
June 19, 2005

By FRANK RICH

To understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.

That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."

That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.

Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.

But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.

The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."

Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they're being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.'s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles's bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.

But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

Geo-Green Strategy

So I have a question: If I am rooting for General Motors to go bankrupt and be bought out by Toyota, does that make me a bad person?

It is not that I want any autoworker to lose his or her job, but I certainly would not put on a black tie if the entire management team at G.M. got sacked and was replaced by executives from Toyota. Indeed, I think the only hope for G.M.'s autoworkers, and maybe even our country, is with Toyota. Because let's face it, as Toyota goes, so goes America.

Having Toyota take over General Motors - which based its business strategy on building gas-guzzling cars, including the idiot Hummer, scoffing at hybrid technology and fighting Congressional efforts to impose higher mileage standards on U.S. automakers - would not only be in America's economic interest, it would also be in America's geopolitical interest.

Because Toyota has pioneered the very hybrid engine technology that can help rescue not only our economy from its oil addiction (how about 500 miles per gallon of gasoline?), but also our foreign policy from dependence on Middle Eastern oil autocrats.

Diffusing Toyota's hybrid technology is one of the keys to what I call "geo-green." Geo-greens seek to combine into a single political movement environmentalists who want to reduce fossil fuels that cause climate change, evangelicals who want to protect God's green earth and all his creations, and geo-strategists who want to reduce our dependence on crude oil because it fuels some of the worst regimes in the world.

The Bush team has been M.I.A. on energy since 9/11. Indeed, the utter indifference of the Bush team to developing a geo-green strategy - which would also strengthen the dollar, reduce our trade deficit, make America the world leader in combating climate change and stimulate U.S. companies to take the lead in producing the green technologies that the world will desperately need as China and India industrialize - is so irresponsible that it takes your breath away. This is especially true when you realize that the solutions to our problems are already here.

As Gal Luft, co-chairman of the Set America Free coalition, a bipartisan alliance of national security, labor, environmental and religious groups that believe reducing oil consumption is a national priority, points out: the majority of U.S. oil imports go to fueling the transport sector - primarily cars and trucks. Therefore, the key to reducing our dependence on foreign oil is powering our cars and trucks with less petroleum.

There are two ways we can do that. One is electricity. We don't import electricity. We generate all of our needs with coal, hydropower, nuclear power and natural gas. Toyota's hybrid cars, like the Prius, run on both gasoline and electricity that is generated by braking and then stored in a small battery. But, says Luft, if you had a hybrid that you could plug in at night, the battery could store up 20 miles of driving per day. So your first 20 miles would be covered by the battery. The gasoline would only kick in after that. Since 50 percent of Americans do not drive more than 20 miles a day, the battery power would cover all their driving. Even if they drove more than that, combining the battery power and the gasoline could give them 100 miles per gallon of gasoline used, Luft notes.

Right now Toyota does not sell plug-in hybrids. Some enthusiasts, though, are using kits to convert their hybrids to plug-ins, but that adds several thousand dollars - and you lose your Toyota warranty. Imagine, though, if the government encouraged, through tax policy and other incentives, every automaker to offer plug-in hybrids? We would quickly move down the innovation curve and end up with better and cheaper plug-ins for all.

Then add to that flexible-fuel cars, which have a special chip and fuel line that enable them to burn alcohol (ethanol or methanol), gasoline or any mixture of the two. Some four million U.S. cars already come equipped this way, including from G.M. It costs only about $100 a car to make it flex-fuel ready. Brazil hopes to have all its new cars flex-fuel ready by 2008. As Luft notes, if you combined a plug-in hybrid system with a flex-fuel system that burns 80 percent alcohol and 20 percent gasoline, you could end up stretching each gallon of gasoline up to 500 miles.

In short, we don't need to reinvent the wheel or wait for sci-fi hydrogen fuel cells. The technologies we need for a stronger, more energy independent America are already here. The only thing we have a shortage of now are leaders with the imagination and will to move the country onto a geo-green path.

Week in Review

Well, I have to hand it to the Bush Administration - it got one right. Agreeing to Debt relief for African countries is a no-brainer that people have been wanting for years. Glad they finally got around to it.

Unfortunately, that was the only one. The House, in a surprising show of bipartisan intelligence, overwhelmingly supported a provision to the budget to exempt libraries and bookshops from being subject to a provision of the Patriot Act. Make no mistake - the FBI can still find out what you're reading, it just needs to go through legal channels to do so. The Patriot Act goes further to allow "fishing": warrentless searches which are supposed to generate possible terrorist suspects based on reading habits alone. So the House did the right thing - which is why the White House today insisted that Bush would veto the budget if the provision was included.

In other news, the Republican effort to end government oversight of corporations proceeds at a dizzying pace. Over his objections, the Bush EPA deliberately misconstrued the findings of a new report on Selenium to allow companies to dump more (the report called for less.)

And in response to questioning during the Guantanemo hearings today, a spokesperson for the army stated that it was fully legal to hold prisoners there for life without having to file any formal charges. And a military lawyer testified that he was appointed to represent a client, but only allowed to see the client on the condition that he force a guilty plea to "unspecified war crimes."

Bush Admin defangs tobacco lawsuit

WASHINGTON, June 15 - Senior Justice Department officials overrode the objections of career lawyers running the government's tobacco racketeering trial and ordered them to reduce the penalties sought at the close of the nine-month trial by $120 billion, internal documents and interviews show.

The trial team argued that the move would be seen as politically motivated and legally groundless.

"We do not want politics to be perceived as the underlying motivation, and that is certainly a risk if we make adjustments in our remedies presentation that are not based on evidence," the two top lawyers for the trial team, Sharon Y. Eubanks and Stephen D. Brody, wrote in a memorandum on May 30 to Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The two lawyers said the lower penalty recommendation ordered by Mr. McCallum would weaken the department's position in any possible settlement with the industry and "create an incentive for defendants to engage in future misconduct by making the misconduct profitable."

At the close of a major trial that dozens of Justice Department lawyers spent more than five years preparing, the department stunned a federal courtroom last week by reducing the penalties sought against the industry, from $130 billion to $10 billion, over accusations of fraud and racketeering.

The decision generated protests from health advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who accused the Bush administration of political motives, and it prompted an internal departmental inquiry. But details of the behind-the-scenes debate over the issue had remained a mystery.

Medicare for All

Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.

But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.

Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain.

So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all.

But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with those interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played a secondary role in Truman's failure but have since become a seemingly invincible lobby.

Let's ignore those who believe that private medical accounts - basically tax shelters for the healthy and wealthy - can solve our health care problems through the magic of the marketplace. The intellectually serious debate is between those who believe that the government should simply provide basic health insurance for everyone and those proposing a more complex, indirect approach that preserves a central role for private health insurance companies.

A system in which the government provides universal health insurance is often referred to as "single payer," but I like Ted Kennedy's slogan "Medicare for all." It reminds voters that America already has a highly successful, popular single-payer program, albeit only for the elderly. It shows that we're talking about government insurance, not government-provided health care. And it makes it clear that like Medicare (but unlike Canada's system), a U.S. national health insurance system would allow individuals with the means and inclination to buy their own medical care.

The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system. Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer system would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured.

Nonetheless, most reform proposals out there - even proposals from liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call for some combination of mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy insurance from private insurers.

Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason these proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the insurers must be appeased.

That belief is rooted in recent history. Bill Clinton's health care plan failed in large part because of a dishonest but devastating lobbying and advertising campaign financed by the health insurance industry - remember Harry and Louise? And the lesson many people took from that defeat is that any future health care proposal must buy off the insurance lobby.

But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked it all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to sell to the public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics: reformers will do best with a straightforward single-payer plan, which offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be explained.

We need to do this one right. If reform fails again, we'll be on the way to a radically unequal society, in which all but the most affluent Americans face the constant risk of financial ruin and even premature death because they can't pay their medical bills.

Nixon and Bush, pt.2

Don't Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.

more bad news

Two quick notes, in case you haven't been listening: (find or post your own links)

1) The Republican controlled EPA has completely distorted the key scientific findings on Selenium contamination in order to justify- you'll never guess- not having to hold industrial polluters accountable. The government bases its case on a scientific study, but the author of that study has repeatedly told them they've got it wrong.

2) The Montgomery country school system in Maryand adopted a sex ed course 6-0 a bit ago. Now, after radical conservatives have attacked it for - get this - acknowledging that gays and lesbians exist, they voted to ban all mention of such offensive topics. The New York Times, Washington Post and others have various accounts. The reason why this is so bad is two-fold: first, montgomery co. is actually a very good school system, the best public system in Maryland, educating some of the brightest young kids. Second, the blogosphere reports that this is emboldening the radical right to sue school districts all over the country whenever a teacher mentions anything (evolution, homosexuality, critiques of capitalism) that questions the basic social and religious worldview they have attempted to instill/indoctrinate. (I'm apparently quite retrograde for thinking the POINT of education was to question basic assumptions through careful analysis of difference. Oh well.)

Losing our Country - Paul Krugman

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what's going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try to do something about the politics of greed.

nixon and bush

Nixon's grand plan was to concentrate executive power in an imperial presidency, politicize the bureaucracy and crush its independence, and invoke national security to wage partisan warfare. He intended to "reconstitute the Republican Party," staging a "purge" to foster "a new majority," as his aide William Safire wrote in his memoir. Nixon himself forthrightly declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends the "institutions" of government had to be "reformed, replaced, or circumvented. In my second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of these three methods -- or whichever combination of them -- was necessary."

But now George W. Bush is building a leviathan beyond Nixon's imagining. The Bush imperial presidency is the highest stage of Nixonism. The commander in chief has declared himself by executive order above international law, the CIA is being purged, the Justice Department is deploying its resources to break down the wall of separation between church and state, the Environmental Protection Agency has been ordered to suppress scientific studies, and the Pentagon has subsumed intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the United States with blunt military force as its chief foreign policy.

The three main architects of Bush's imperial presidency gained their formative experience amid Nixon's downfall. Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's counselor, and Rumsfeld's deputy, Dick Cheney, one after the other, served as chief of staff to Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, both opposing congressional efforts for more transparency in the executive.

With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney remarked in 1976, "Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." During the Iran-Contra scandal -- when members of the Reagan administration formed an offshore, free-standing, unaccountable enterprise that sold missiles to Iran and deposited funds in Swiss banks in order to finance the Contras' war in Nicaragua -- Rep. Cheney, a Republican leader in the House, argued that the congressional report criticizing the administration's "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law" was an encroachment on executive authority.

The other architect, Karl Rove, Bush's senior political aide, began his career as an agent of Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti -- "ratfuckers," Segretti called his boys. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Rove operated through a phony front group to denounce "the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media."

Under Bush, the Republican Congress has almost completely abdicated its responsibilities of executive oversight and investigation. When Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, held hearings on Bush's torture policy in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White House prodded rabid House Republicans to attack him. There have been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists that the Senate vote to confirm John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations while refusing to release essential information requested by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise was the necessity of muzzling the press. The Bush White House has greatly neutralized the press corps and even turned some reporters into their own assets. The disinformation on WMD in the rush to war in Iraq that was funneled into the news pages of the New York Times is the most dramatic case in point. By manipulation and intimidation, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced the press from dissenting professionals inside the governmen

In Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap

On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it's those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it's part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane - those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.

This is progress of a sort, but it's also repression, since it means that pop culture has succeeded to a considerable extent in burying something that used to be right out in the open. In the old days, when we were more consumed by social class, we were also more honest about it.

There is an un-American secret at the heart of American culture: for a long time, it was preoccupied by class. That preoccupation has diminished somewhat - or been sublimated - in recent years as we have subscribed to an all-purpose, mass-market version of the American dream, but it hasn't entirely disappeared. The subject is a little like a ne'er-do-well relative; it's sometimes a shameful reminder, sometimes openly acknowledged, but always there, even, or especially, when it's never mentioned.

This was particularly true in the years before World War II, when you couldn't go to the movies or get very far in a novel without being reminded that ours was a society where some were much better off than others, and where the class divide - especially the gap separating middle from upper - was an inescapable fact of life. The yearning to bridge this gap is most persistently and most romantically evoked in Fitzgerald, of course, in characters like the former Jay Gatz of Nowhere, N.D., staring across Long Island Sound at that distant green light, and all those moony young men standing in the stag line at the country club, hoping to be noticed by the rich girls.

But there is also a darker version, the one that turns up in Dreiser's "American Tragedy" (1925), for example, where class envy - a wish to live like his rich tycoon uncle - causes Clyde Griffiths to drown his hopelessly proletarian sweetheart, and where the impossibility of transcending his lot leads him inevitably to the electric chair. (In the upstate New York town of Lycurgus, where the story takes place, Dreiser reminds us that "the line of demarcation and stratification between the rich and the poor ... was as sharp as though cut by a knife or divided by a high wall." )

Some novels trade on class anxiety to evoke not the dream of betterment but the great American nightmare: the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom. This fear gets an earnest and moralizing expression in early books like P. H. Skinner's 1853 novel, "The Little Ragged Ten Thousand, or, Scenes of Actual Life Among the Lowly in New York," which is pretty much summed up by its title. By the turn of the century, though, in works like Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" and Frank Norris's "McTeague," about a San Francisco dentist who, unmasked as a fraud, sinks to a life of crime and degradation, the treatment had turned grim and unflinching.

These books were frankly meant to shock their middle-class readers - to scare the daylights out of them - even as they played on their sympathies. They suggested that the worst thing that could possibly happen to an American was to topple from his perch on the class ladder, as happens to poor Hurstwood in Dreiser's "Sister Carrie." In his besotted pursuit of Carrie (who meanwhile trades on her beauty and charm to move up from her Chicago boarding house to the bright lights of Broadway), he loses everything and crashes all the way from restaurant-owning prosperity to scabbing for work as a trolley car driver.

The poor are noticeably absent, however, in the great artistic flowering of the American novel at the turn of the 19th century, in the work of writers like Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, who are almost exclusively concerned with the rich or the aspiring middle classes: their marriages, their houses, their money and their stuff. Not accidentally, these novels coincided with America's Gilded Age, the era of overnight fortunes and conspicuous spending that followed in the wake of the Civil War.

To a certain extent James, Wharton, et al. were merely writing about the world around them, though in James there is sometimes a hint of aesthetic snobbery, a sense that refined writing required a refined subject matter. (In "The Ambassadors," for example, he explains that the Newsomes made their fortune in manufacturing, but can't quite bring himself to be so vulgar as to tell us exactly what they made.) In Wharton and Howells, on the other hand, there is frequently an edge of satire, and sometimes a hint of seismic rumble.

Wharton's most vivid characters are not the aristos, the sons and daughters of the great New York families, who are all a little bloodless and sexually underpowered, but people like Lily Bart, whose lifestyle outstrips her pocketbook and who winds up in economic freefall. And then there are the climbers and the nouveaus, people like Undine Spragg in "The Custom of the Country," who arrives in New York from provincial Apex City, Kan., determined to rise up in society the old-fashioned way - by marrying, which she does not just once but three times, if you count the one that was supposed to be a secret. One of the messages of the novel is that in America new money very quickly, in a generation or less, takes on the patina of old; another is that the class structure is necessarily propped up by deceit and double standards.

But to a generation of writers after Wharton that structure - the lives and mores of the rich, the well born and the climbers - proved endlessly diverting. Young men and women on the make, and older ones trying anxiously to cling to their perch, throng an entire bookcase full of American fiction.

John O'Hara, for example, made a whole career of chronicling the upper and upper middle classes from before the First World War until after the Second, and no one ever observed more astutely the little clues that indicated precisely where one stood on the class ladder: the clubs and fraternity pins, the shoes, the shirt collars. J. P. Marquand pored over much the same territory and, like O'Hara, became both a popular and a critical success. Every now and then a racy book about lowlife - "Tobacco Road" for example - would catch the public fancy, but for a surprisingly long time middle-brow fiction in America was about upper-middle-class life.

What was the appeal? Vouyerism, in part. (It didn't hurt O'Hara's sales one bit that he saw it as part of his mission to inform us that upper-class people had very busy sex lives.) Fiction back then had a kind of documentary function; it was one of the places Americans went to learn about how other Americans lived. In time novels ceased to be so reportorial, and after World War II, moreover, as the middle class in America swelled in numbers and importance, the world of the upper crust lost some of its glamour and importance.

The old kind of class novel - about striving and trying to move up by learning the upper-class code - is still being written. "Prep," a first novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, about an ambitious scholarship girl who finds herself in over her head, smoldering with class resentment, at a school that closely resembles Groton, recently became a surprise best seller. But more often the upper class is portrayed these days as a little beleaguered and merely trying to hang on, like the members of the New England family in Nancy Clark's 2003 novel "The Hills at Home," all failures in one way or another, who have retreated back to the ancestral manor, or like Louis Auchincloss's WASPy lawyers and businessmen, who have a sense of themselves as the last of a breed.

Elsewhere in the fictional landscape, a number of young writers - short-story writers especially - are still working in the afterglow of our once very hot literary romance with the world of Wal-Marts and trailer parks, so vividly evoked in the writing of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason and Frederick Barthelme, among others. But to a considerable extent novels these days take place in a kind of all-purpose middle-class America, in neighborhoods that could be almost anyplace, and where the burdens are more psychic than economic, with people too busy tending to their faltering relationships to pay much attention to keeping up with the neighbors.

It's a place where everyone fits in, more or less, but where, if you look hard enough, nobody feels really at home. Our last great middle-class hero, someone who really enjoyed his vacations and his country club, was John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, and he died a premature death. Nowadays when a writer like Richard Russo, Russell Banks or Richard Price comes along, with an old-fashioned, almost Dickensian vision of life among the poor and working classes, it's a little startling; they seem like explorers who have returned from some distant land.

Novel reading is a middle-class pastime, which is another reason that novels have so often focused on the middle and upper classes. Mass entertainment is another matter, and when Hollywood took up the class theme, which it did in the 1930's, it made a crucial adjustment. During the Depression, the studios, which were mostly run by immigrant Jews, turned out a string of formulaic fantasies about life among the Gentile upper crust.

These movies were essentially twin variations on a single theme: either a rich young man falls for a working girl, as happens in, say, "Easy Living" to take one of many examples, or an heiress takes up with a young man who has to work for a living (in a number of cases he's a newspaperman, which was Hollywood's idea of a truly disreputable profession back then).

Joan Crawford made a specialty of the working girl role, in movies like "Sadie McKee" and "Dancing Lady" and also did the heiress in "Love on the Run" and "I Live My Life" But the great example of this genre is "It Happened One Night" with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, who famously dispensed with wearing an undershirt.

"It Happened One Night" implicitly answered the question of what an upper-class woman got in return for trading down: great sex. In other versions of the story the upper-class person is merely thawed and humanized by the poorer one, but in every case the exchange is seen as fair and equitable, with the lower-class character giving as much as he or she gets in return. Unlike the novels of class, with their anxieties and sense of unbridgeable gaps, these are stories of harmony and inclusion, and they added what proved to be an enduring twist on the American view of class: the notion that wealth and privilege are somewhat crippling conditions: if they don't make you an out-and-out twit, they leave you stiff, self-conscious and emotionally vacant until you are blessed with a little lower-class warmth and heart.

The formula persisted right up through movies like "Love Story" and "Pretty Woman" though it seems to be in disuse now that films, like novels, are increasingly set in an upscale, well-scrubbed America where WASP's are an endangered, pitiable species. Like the in-laws in "Meet the Fockers" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" they are still hopelessly uptight but not that wealthy anymore.

Television used to be fascinated with blue-collar life, in shows like "The Honeymooners," "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son" and "Roseanne," but lately it too has turned its attention elsewhere. The only people who work on televison now are cops, doctors and lawyers, and they're so busy they seldom get to go home. The one vestige of the old curiosity about how other people live is in so-called reality television, when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie drop in on rubes in "The Simple Life," or when upper- and middle-class families trade moms on "Wife Swap" and experience a week of culture shock.

But most reality television trades in a fantasy of sorts, based on the old game-show formula: the idea that you can be plucked out of ordinary life and anointed the new supermodel, the new diva, the new survivor, the new assistant to Donald Trump. You get an instant infusion of wealth and are simultaneously vested with something far more valuable: celebrity, which has become a kind of super-class in America, and one that renders all the old categories irrelevant.

Celebrities, in fact, have inherited much of the glamour and sexiness that used to attach itself to the aristocracy. If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney. And if Edith Wharton were still writing, how could she not include a heavily blinged hip-hop mogul?

But if the margins have shifted, and if fame, for example, now counts for more than breeding, what persists is the great American theme of longing, of wanting something more, or other, than what you were born with - the wish not to rise in class so much as merely to become classy. If you believe the novels of Dickens or Thackeray, say, the people who feel most at home in Britain are those who know their place, and that has seldom been the case in this country, where the boundaries of class seem just elusive and permeable enough to sustain both the fear of falling and the dream of escape.