…offer a brief yet thorough intro to the origins of the neocon think tanks and their ongoing efforts “to quietly influence American public policy by identifying, training, and churning out conservative journalists, thinkers, and  pundits – many of whom now hold positions of power in the media.”

Jeff Sharlet interprets Bush’s religion not as orthodox Evangelicism, but more like one of those PoMo spiritual melanges, made up of a little Jesus and a little New Age magic. Sharlet particularly notes the extent to which Bush and his team are absolutely certain they can achieve anything they want just by believing hard enough that it can and should be done:

“Bush believers long for absolutes, but they don’t care about empirical definitions. They’re not literalists, in the sense that they don’t cling to language. In fact, they don’t trust language, which is why they read clunky, soulless translations of scripture, when they read it at all. The Community Bible Study approach to biblical education through which Bush found his faith is not based on intense reading, but on personal meditations built around a sentence or two. Bush himself doesn’t study the Bible; he samples phrases and invokes them like spells….When he speaks of ‘wonderworking power’ (a reference to the gospel standard “Power in the Blood”), as he did in his now infamous ‘mission accomplished’ speech, he is drawing that power into being, to make his desires into reality. Politics, strategy, books, the Bible — everything falls away in the realm of magical realism.”

Suddenly, a lot of aspects of these past four years begin to make sense.

For I’ve been studying New Age thought factions on an amateur, part-time basis for the past almost-year. I’ve listened to, read, and in a couple of cases interviewed people who promote versions of the positive-thinking mantra. Some versions are more spiritual than others. Some versions are more individualistic and materialistic than others.

The British seminar leader and hypnotherapist Paul McKenna, loves to rhetorically ask his audiences, “What would you do if you absolutely KNEW you couldn’t fail?” Meanwhile, local ex-ad copywriter Rebecca Fine promotes “The Science of Getting Rich,” a “Certain Way” towards personal wealth, based on the teachings of 1900s pamphleteer Wallace Wattles. (To Fine, “certain” means both specificity and doubtlessness.) Follow the program, Fine says, and the dough will flow your way.

There are a few catches in Wattles’s plan. He didn’t like charity, antitrust actions, or organized labor; instead of forming schemes to redistribute wealth, he wrote that concerned citizens should help the poor learn to generate their own wealth. And you have to really believe you’re channelling the flow of material energy your way. As Fine writes: “Wattles says that instead of questioning how these principles work, you’ll need simply to accept them and begin to practice them.”

This ties in well with Bush’s famous refusals to admit ever having made a mistake. Christianity is big on self-doubt and self-denial; “not my will but thine be done.” But in the positive-thinking realm, doubting yourself’s about the worst sin you can make.

So: Bush isn’t really a Bible thumper; though he’ll gladly seek Bible-thumpers’ votes. He’s really one of the globalization-era spiritual fusionists. He’s part of the target market for Wayne Dyer pledge-drive books and Successories motivational posters. He could be a leader of “no money down” seminars. The Force is with him (albeit, in my opinion, it’s the Dark Side).

I imagine some voters have interpreted this insistant attitude, which scoffers such as myself have derided as “hubris,” as just the sort of can-do mindset they want in a leader. Top-heavy tax cuts WILL stimulate the economy! Iraq and Afghanistan WILL become stable democracies! Abstinance-only education WILL eliminate unwanted pregnancies! Privatization WILL make Social Security more solvent! Why? Because WE SAY SO, that’s why!

But I, for one, still belong to the skeptics (or, as a Bush aide quoted in the NY Times derided us, “the reality-based community”). I believe an acid-tripper, no matter how devoutly he believes he can fly, should be led away from the temptation of an open fifth-floor window. I believe the most assertive, positive-thinking management wasn’t enough to keep certain dot-com ventures alive.

And I believe corporate cronyism is neither good for government nor for business.

I believe no one country should, or even can, unilaterally impose military conquest and shock-therapy economics across the globe.

I believe marriage is not profaned but enhanced by being expanded to more possibilities.

I believe one-sided “news” coverage is not “fair and balanced.”

I believe freedom is not slavery. I believe war is not peace. I believe ignorance is not strength.

And I firmly, positively, believe we can do better.

…to expect the worst, dirty-tricks-wise, from Bush campaign czar Karl Rove in these last two weeks.

…can barely conceal his inside-the-Beltway pundit’s drooling glee over the potential new scandals Bush is capable of instigating.

…getting relevant again. Witness its piece on “The Bush Campaign’s TV Commercial If He Was Running Against Jesus.”

The week of Bush’s inauguration in ’01, The Onion (which, as some of you know, has a partial joint ancestry with The Stranger) ran a fake news item declaring “Our long national nightmare of peace and prospierity is finally over.” One Dan Chak has gone and peppered the original piece with web links showing how nearly every disaster mentioned in the spoof story has come true.

Utne magazine (formerly Utne Reader) has put out its twentieth-anniversary issue. In keeping with its current perky eco-lifestyle format, its cover displays a CGI happy-face orb within the bold headline “GOOD INTENTIONS: They have more power than you think.”

Utne, you may recall, was originally intended as a Reader’s Digest-esque reprint mag for the so-called “alternative press.” In a season when most “alternative” pubs are screeching toward an election-time frenzy of anger, Utne tells us to not worry, be happy.

As I’ve been noticing, the Presidential campaign’s been all about projections of attitude. Bush has propagated the image of a hard-strutting office cowboy. Kerry wants to be seen as a shining beacon, guiding us out of the Bush-made mire. The anti-Bush-but-not-exactly-pro-Kerry left, which includes much of the “alternative press,” is big on the power of righteous rage.

But unlike The Nation, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Stranger, Z, CounterPunch, et al., Utne would like us to remain mellow about everything. In a four-article package, it tells us to embrace the power of coincidences, the flow of intention, westernized Buddhist chanting, and empathy with nature. These articles don’t mention politics, but they do claim our attitudes can influence the world around us (treating AIDS, relieving traffic jams, etc.).

The mag proposes to solve America’s political crisis a few pages later, in “Radical Middle to the Rescue.” Associate editor Leif Utne (whose dad Eric started the mag and whose mom Nina runs it now) believes we could all get along if we all just sat down and talked through our differences. He’s certain we’d all learn the value of a “pragmatic idealism,” of stepping “outside old ideological boxes to fight boldly for the common good.” If this sounds suspiciously like the near-right mumblings of the Democratic Leadership Council or The New Republic, that’s because it is, both in Mr. Utne’s intro and in the mini-profiles of some of his favorite neo-centrist operatives (why not bring back nuclear power?).

In between the positive-thinking stuff and the radical-middle stuff, there’s an excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin’s new book The European Dream. (The story’s cover blurb: “It’s About Belonging—Not Belongings.”)

Rifkin notes that many or most Euro countries now have stronger economies, better health care, better education, longer vacations, less violence, fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer prisons per capita than the US. At least in the Utne excerpt, Rifkin doesn’t credit these accomplishments to the legacy of paternalistic Euro-socialism, or to the US-led restructuring of the continent’s post-WWII socio-economic infrastructure.

Instead, he posits a “European Dream,” an ethos and set of ideals he finds different from the American dream of accumulation and disposal.

To Rifkin, Europe’s all about belonging to a culture, a subculture, an extended family, a tribe, and/or a peer group. America, he contrasts, is all about the rugged individual, building empires and conquering the land.

He sees the ideal European home as a happily raucous, funky little dwelling on an urban street or country village; the ideal American home as a single-family McMansion isolated on ten acres of exurbia.

Rifkin also notes that Americans still go to church a lot more than Euros. He seems to interpret this statistic as putting Americans in a backward zeitgeist of discipline and blind obedience, as differentiated from a Euro zeitgeist of enlightenment and empowerment.

This brings a contradiction to Rifkin’s primary thesis. Religion is, to use the rave-promoters’ use of the term, “tribal.” Agnosticism is individualistic. Religion, at its highest, seeks an identification with values other than those of mindlessly getting and junking stuff. Secular capitalism (or hypocritical faux-religious capitalism) has no problem with all that.

But people, and continents, are full of contradictions.

So are magazines.

Utne itself pays frequent lip service to promoting A Simpler Life, while more passionately promoting what might be called “eco-materialism.”

The anniversary issue’s got “special advertising sections.” One promotes assorted hemp products; the other exclusively plugs Organic Valley brand food products.

A small ad in the front of the issue promotes the Tweezerman® cuticle pusher with the headline “Choose to Make a Difference” and a Gandhi quotation: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The ad doesn’t explain just how a fingernail tool, even one whose “ultra thin hand-buffed edges will not scratch nail,” will help bring Gandhi’s ideals into reality.

The issue’s other ads sell such psychographically-niched wares as Earth Friendly® dish soap, Pax World Mutual Funds (“funds even a redwood could love”), Stonyfield Farm yogurt, Maranatha peanut butter (“Newton obsessed over gravity, Einstein over matter. We chose nut butters”), Peace® Essential 10 cereal (“Do your bowl a world of good!”), and Liberator® angular pillows (“Bedroom Adventure Gear”).

The back-cover ad invites the reader to “Join the Dansko Revolution” for “Peace, Love and Happiness.” Assorted casual shoes are arranged in the shape of a peace sign, over a faint background image of trees. It reminded me almost exactly of the old 7-Up billboard with a pseudo flower-power design, as seen on the cover of Tom Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool. Frank explored how big advertisers quickly re-interpreted the anti-consumption aspects of hippie ideology into a pro-consumption message to a target market. Eco-materialism is a direct descendant of that concept.

But eco-materialism can also be something else.

Hippie-era philosopher Alan Watts once said something to the effect that America wasn’t really a materialistic nation. If we really worshipped personal possessions, he opined, we wouldn’t oversate ourselves on so many shoddily-made things, just to throw them out.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the kinds of sales pitches found in Utne presage a different relationship between people and their stuff. A relationship that promotes owning fewer things, but better-designed, better-made, and better-cared-for things. Something closer to Rifkin’s European ethos, giving greater respect toward the land, the city, the home, and the family heirlooms.

Or perhaps it’s just another tribal status symbol to buy your cuticle files from people who quote Gandhi.

…on the did-they-or-didn’t-they “booing Republicans” item (thanx to Paul Hughes for the tips):

• How the Associated Press retracted its booing story;
• how the Bush press office may have influenced the retraction.

Michael Kent offers the good news that something I wrote about didn’t really happen. I speak of the story that Bush told an audience about Clinton’s heart surgery, and that the audience booed.

Kent writes:

“There were no boos… it was a total fabrication. The video reveals absolutely no booing. The AP edited the story soon after it had gone out, but it was too late by then. Feel free to watch it yourself.But it’s certainly revealing that you would so easily believe such a lie so easily. Perhaps you’ll correct this on the site? Eh, I’ll continue reading it anyway, as I have for years… I’ll just take your political statements with a grain of salt… as I have for years!

…the near-right speakers fool you—the GOP convention platform is a hardline far-right screed.

…I’m not independently wealthy. Like many of you, I’m increasingly desperate to find a way out of a personal-fiscal pit. So I give a hoot about the economy. So do those nutty Canadians at Adbusters magazine. They’ve just started a movement to dump current economic models (especially the gross national product) and instead develop something called “True Cost Economics.” (The name derives, at least in part, from their desire to see the environmental and human costs of business/ventures added into their balance sheets.)

ABC News Now, channel 114 on Seattle Comcast digital cable.

It’s cable news version 4.0. It’s not trying (yet) to compete for ratings against CNN, Fox, or CNBC/MSNBC. It’s there to give ABC an outlet for long-form coverage of live events without breaking into the main network’s entertainment schedule, and to repurpose the network’s vast archive of interviews and magazine-show segments.

It launched last month with the Democratic convention. Now we get to see its regular schedule. It’s a simple, almost-no-nonsense format. A few original shows throughout the day (such as Inside the Newsroom, where reporters in their shirtsleeves discuss the day’s ongoing events). News briefs at the top of the hour. Clips from recent editions of World News Tonight, Good Morning America, Nightline, 20/20, PrimeTime, and This Week. Simple graphics with no headline “tickers.”

And unfiltered, unedited speeches and testimony by political figures. Some of these are similar to C-SPAN events, covered by the same camera pools. But they can still be quite fascinating.

Today I saw Kerry at a Las Vegas middle school, deftly handling questions about educational funding, public transportation, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump. He behaved as a thorough professional, shaking hands firmly and giving solid eye contact.

Last night I saw Bush at a Virginia community college, mumbling something about schooling as being vital to the growth in American jobs. His incoherence without a script and his nervous body language made him look like he wanted nothing more than to get the heck outta there and back making deals with big contributors.

ABC only promises to keep ABC News Now going through Election Day. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture. Like a less-snide version of its overnight show World News Now, it’s the work of a bigtime news organization getting to play with a low-budget, low-profile outlet.

…really doesn’t like the current president.

…that, 30 years after the media-driven fall of Nixon, “American journalism is at its nadir.”

…has a remarkably serious, positive assessment of the “graphic novel” phenom.