THE TEDIOUS AND SLOW PROCESS...

OF JUSTICE FOR EDWARD SNOWDEN may never be concluded to encapsulate the veracity of what he actually did or did not do, or answer the question as to whether it was or was not an act of patriotism or merely the act of an uncaring backstabber.  Out there in the scary world, the demons of our imagination will roam freely; and yet many facts will forever be safely locked away in the protective cages of what we call National Security.  One day, he may be back on American soil and sitting at the defense table; flanked by his lawyers, dozens of armed court officers and additional protection provided by our government in the form of the Secret Service and others, with the room itself inlaid with metal detectors; and all who sit in the courtroom will, of course, have the highest security clearance; which means that neither your nor I will be present; and if the past is any prologue to this imagined future - Snowden will, as always, look almost serene.

 

  By design or habit, he will be dressed as an ordinary citizen, steel rimmed glasses sliding down his sharp nose.  You see people like him every day, passing you in the street, riding with you in a bus or on the subway, neither monstrous or heroic.  From time to time, he will whisper to his lawyer.  He may even make a note or two on a yellow pad.  His eyes will wander around the courtroom, with its civil service design and the words In God We Trust nailed in sans-serif letters on the wall somewhere above where those who will be judging him will be sitting with stone-faced arrogance; and in some curious way, Snowden too, will become a spectator. As will the majority of his lawyers.  This is, after all, a unique American procedure wherein the defense will not be provided with all the information that the Government possesses on the defendant, in that he is considered by Uncle Sam to be  a renegade-turncoat wh0 committed espionage, a contemporary Benedict Arnold.

  And this will be the moment that helps explain the intensity of the public response in the Snowden story.  It is one thing to sit back with detached opinions about what he has or has not done, another tabloid soap opera that has little to do with our daily lives; other than, of course, the fact that the basis of our democratic freedom and the real possibility that it has forever been lost by having the folks at the NSA, walking arm in arm with the ever vigilant neo-cons, like twin nocturnal burglars extracting any information they wish to gather about each and every one of us until Snowden leaked to the public what they had been up to. 

  Naturally, with the way Uncle Sam treats cases such as this, the bet is that Snowden will be found guilty on all counts.

  And if you can believe the look on his face, Snowden will most likely seem to be happy, even with a verdict of guilt.  What he did by leaking his stolen information, he thought, needed to be done for the safety of his  and our country.  The fusion of our belief system produces the militant, a warrior fighting for an idea, and those who protest about his breaking the law; the two figures are conjoined: the warrior and those who believe that, right or wrong, the law must always be protected.  And whatever that verdict actually turns out to be, most of us will be uneasy with a question about the role of average American, those not in the know of how American intelligence agencies protect us from ourselves. 

  America, like all countries ruled by secretive politicians and covert agencies of intelligence, can become a oligarchy of the stupid, wherein anyone with opinions not held by those in power can be silenced, jailed, or driven into exile because they are ideologically suspect; while being replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and political hacks.  Not so long ago, we too, once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in movies or television - on ideological grounds.  During the McCarthy era we, too, lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars on ideological grounds by those who couldn't challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel.  Much like those on the political Right these days, who wish to impose the party line on everything from abortion to the content of television shows, and deem those who stand against them as communists or socialists; and in the current political climate, we do not know how dangerous Snowden is or was.

  This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state.  That's ludicrous.  But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted daily by the temptation of the totalitarian solution, which includes those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders.  They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of who in any way, shape, or form - disagree with them.  Apparently, nothing makes some Americans blood quicken when it comes to revenge.  My question is this: which do we prefer, men and women with the courage of their convictions, or those who prefer propaganda and oratory and complete adherence to their world-view?

  The answer is up to us...

notes to an old friend...

YOU WERE A MAN WITH A SKIN COLORED BLACK...
AND I WAS A MAN WITH A PELT TINTED WHITE, and once-upon-a-time, we were good friends.  All friendships are difficult, but for awhile, ours endured.  It somehow didn't matter that I was the son of  German-Belgium immigrants and you were the descendant of African slaves; back then, we generally saw the world the same way; were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.
  


  Yet, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955,  which was the year that Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman.  Back then, the two of us were in our first year of college, and as the college years inched by, there was even more awful evidence of man's apparent capacity for stupidity and murder.  But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American.  And between the two of us there was a wonderful exchange: Hemingway for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O'Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays.  Somehow, we remained optimists.  As young men, we had read our Camus and Sartre, we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too.  That simple faith, with a hint of irony, was at the heart of our friendship. 


  As America grew older, things began to change between the two of us.  Now irony wasn't enough.  Nor was bebop or Camus.  There was no longer a realistic way to avoid the truth:  A shadow had fallen across the land and upon the once bright fields of our friendship.  It was obvious that the most powerful country in the world was now being torn apart.  There were marches in Mississippi and riots in Chicago.  You went off to  became a Doctor in my old hometown of Denver, wrote to me that you had become associated with the Black Panthers; and I went off to a Lutheran Seminary in Nebraska to become a minister, then went-off to march with Martin Luther King in Mississippi. We had both begun both to recognize the existence of a permanent Black Underclass, with all of its fierce negative power.  Our America was moving even farther away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.
  


  It was then that you began to retreat into the defensive clichés of glib racialism.  Your argument was a simple one:  the Black Underclass was the fault of the White Man.  Not some white men.  All white men.  Including me. 


  You recited various examples of a surging white racism, the Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, resurgent Klan in the south, continued reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving in their neighborhoods, white cops to quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects, persistent examples of racial steering in middle-class housing, the Al Campanis controversy.  Certainly had become real in the United States, only a fool could deny that; as I began to see more and more African-Americans moving from rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels; and you became more and more enraged.  By then, we were estranged. 


  Whites - liberal or otherwise - were no longer as committed to the cause of black Americans as they once were in the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.  Around that time, white liberals like me were pushed out of the movement by your Black Power crowd; the lies  of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, and others were convinced that it was time to take a hike.  "Black Pride" was now equated with the hatred of whites.  Reverse racism had become the norm; which is why, for many Americans, that it may be a long time before whites will cry again the way the did for the little girls who died in the Birmingham bombing, or for Medgar Evers, or Malcolm X, or King.  In the best possible world, of course, this ought to have never happened to either the black nor the whites.


  I am not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit, but it seems to me that there is an extraordinary amount of work to be done to repair our collapsed relationship, and the time to begin is now. In the end, out of self interest, that is the reason I am writing this, and is the most important thing I could think of doing in order to repair the comradeship I once had with you.  In the best of all possible worlds, of course, I would have more answers than questions about the divide that has grown between the two of us, obliterating our once bright affinity for each other.  And the reason for all of the above is really quite simple:  I miss having you in my life...

"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin 


THE CYCLE OF CYNICISM AND BITTERNESS IS,...

OF COURSE, BEST OBSERVED IN WASHINGTON.  In days long gone, the genius of the American system had been its ability to compromise.  We learned from the butchery of the Civil War that failure to compromise could unleash the darkest, bloodiest impulses of the American character.  Over the years, we developed in Washington a non ideological style that helped us avoid direct conflict.  Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost; politics was a long season like baseball, in which even the greatest hitters failed six times out of ten.  Most of the time, the system worked.  Slowly.  Wearily.  But in the end, it did work.  The struggling process created the American political style, which brought into being leaders who were effective - Sam Rayburn, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Taft, and Tip O'Neill  - who employed a basic courtesy when dealing with their opponents.  They disagreed on many issues.  They were capable of immense vanity.  But they didn't think it necessary to destroy the enemy.


  This only began as we inched our way into the Twenty-first Century, trod through the immense sludge and muck of the always eager for a photo op and illegitimately elected Bush Administration, and on into the ooze and slime of the Tea Party, that the names of Santorum and Cain  and Cruz and Paul popped-up and took root like growing weeds; men who, in the past, would never have risen to higher office because the American people would not have tolerated them.  They were cheap, vulgar, ignorant, parochial and cynical.  The men who truly changed this country, who moved it along, who made it better, men with clarity and vision and a certain amount of grace had been replaced by the birdbrained-buffoons of the Right, interested only in getting reelected no matter what it cost to the  average American's way-of-life.  Those who had come before them had been Americans before they were Texans or Kentuckians, or Democrats or Republicans.  They respected the contract.  They respected the Presidency.  They did not think it necessary to destroy the enemy.  We now had those who swung broadswords of racism or ideology at other Americans because the the American people had the audacity to elect a man-of-color into the office of The President of the United States.  Twice! 

  I am not certain whether or not Barack Obama is the greatest president we have ever had.  But I know he is certainly not the worst.  This is a country, after all, that elected Warren G. Harding once and Richard Milhous Nixon twice.  But from the moment of his election, Mitch and Newt and others began the sustained campaign of personal abuse of any president in memory.  No rumor, no allegation, goes unprinted and is aired on the radio by Limbaugh and Beck and on the television set by Hannity and O'Reilly on Fox News.  An alleged man of God, Mike Huckabee, peddles accusations of treason accusing Obama of anything that will bring Mike more attention and more money.   The Republicans linked arms in a spirit of mindless obstruction, led by the Tea Party, somehow managed to get an enormous economic plan through Karl Rove and his buddies, along with the Koch brothers and their cohorts, cutting through the theoretical non-biased Supreme Court, and were then on their way to an unending political witch hunt against both Obama and Hillary Clinton on Benghazi led by another idiot, an almost convicted felon turned California Congressman by the name of Darrell Issa.

  Meanwhile, reporters began entertaining themselves in the new political circus, even though Obama was actually accomplishing a few things as president.  He established the Lilly Ledbetter Act, won on health-care reform with the Affordable Care Act, rid the world of Bin Laden, established new Veteran's Care Services, and began supporting same sex marriage, in spite of being overwhelmed by the Tea Party who spent millions on attack ads and refused to join the process of compromise  He could not overcome the Republican refusal to pass legislation in the Congress, but in some real ways the country was in better shaped than it had been on the day he took office.  Unemployment was down.  The economy grew stronger.  And yet Obama remains the most hated president in memory.  


  Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance on politicians.  But the vehemence of the attacks against Obama seems more a reflex than thought and analysis.  These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism, they sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies.  They sneer at weakness.  They sneer at those who work too hard or do not work hard enough.  They fill columns moralizing about Obama and then attack others for moralizing.  The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and the journalist's duty is to sniff it out.  Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise.  Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call.  What chance does Obama have?


  Domestically, he's indicted for being too liberal or not quite liberal enough, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to pubic opinion or too desirous of consensus.  In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in the of Ronald Regan's Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, or using naked power to get your way by killing 100 thousand innocent foreigners and 4 thousand of our own soldiers with icy dispatch just like training-school pilot  George and draft-dodger Dick did, in a war based upon a lie.  We need only to listen to John McCain or take a peek at Lindsey Graham to hear that rhetoric spewed forth over-and-over again...


  ...And if this goes on, if we continue to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, escalating the horror by the hour, the country is doomed, and I can only repeat what I have said before as I recall, once again, what the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said so long ago: "We have met the enemy and he is us..."