…in a recent column, quotes Pat Moynihan:

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

I’m a liberal, and I believe the first part of Moynihan’s statement. I believe politics is a subset of culture, not the other way around.

We can’t just elect or defeat a Presidential candidate and really change things.

We can’t just protest, no matter how spectacularly, and really change things.

We can’t just “deconstruct texts” and really change things.

We’ve gotta do the hard, lifelong work of building a national, permanent, progressive-populist movement.

And to do that, we’ve gotta construct a culture. Not just a “counterculture” or a culture of opposition, but a forward-looking, all-embracing, universally-welcoming aesthetic/zeitgeist.

All the aspects of current hipster and historic coopertative cultures can be part of this: Music, books, video/film, food/drink, architecture, small business, non-profits, artists, craftspeople, sidewalk philosophers, preachers, cafes, bars, “third places,” the Net, and so on.

They don’t have to be all coordinated or uniformly “on message”—the point is to free up human ingenuity to solve human problems.

And yes, there will be political rifts and divisions within such a non-top-down culture. There will always be geographic and other interests wanting, say, more funding for their own areas of interest.

And yes, there will be “cuture wars” within such a culture. There will be hammered-dulcimer people who don’t like heavy-metal people, sexually-reserved women who don’t care much for sexually-expressive women, etc. etc.

But all that’s part of the whole point—to liberate the whole mongrel beauty that is the US from the twin dictatorships of Hollywood/Madison Avenue corporate culture and right-wing authoritarian culture. To advocate a third choice, which is really millions of third choices.

It’s a task for the long haul, not for an election cycle. So take your vitamins, get into shape, and live for it.

You have, I’m sure, heard of the infamous “Stanford Prison Experiment.”

…suggests that, just maybe, wealth and happiness don’t necessarily mesh together.

While the Bushies have blanketed the airwaves with one slick, fraudulant attack ad after another, the Kerry camp’s been toying with little-seen test-market commercials, looking for a single “theme” slogan that would rise above the clutter.

I say they should have lotsa themes, lotsa slogans, lotsa attack angles.

Last week, I berated the influence of product-style “branding” in US politics. But forget that beration for a moment and imagine some of the most successful brand campaigns of all time.

Small- and medium-time brands, with limited ad budgets, are the ones that benefit the most from single-message themes. The truly dominant brands use multi-faceted campaigns that illuminate the product’s image from different angles.

Budweiser has the eagle, the “B” crown, the horses, the cartoon “Bud Man” (who never appears on TV, only in bar merchandise), the serious commercials, the jokey commercials, and a panalopy of slogans, some used simultaneously. The effect is to position Bud as a brand too large, too magnificent, to be summed up by just one phrase or just one symbol.

So should a Presidency, and a Presidential campaign.

The messes created and/or compounded by right-wing peurilety are too many, and too varied, for their solutions to fall under one memorable rubric. We’ve gotta figure at least a semi-graceful exit out of Iraq, get working folk working again, reverse the consolidation of wealth and power, fix health care, put out fewer greenhouse gases, wean ourselves off of petroleum addiction, rebuild communities, promote tolerance, break up a media monopoly or two, stare down the radio demagogues, etc. etc. etc.

How can you stick all that in one pithy mouthful? I say don’t even try. Instead, have different sub-themes, about all the things Kerry promises (or oughta promise) to do.

As for an overarching meta-theme, Kerry’s recent ads already have one: “Together, we can build a stronger America.”

It’s longish, but it’s stuffed w/meanings.

The very first word implies a sharp change-O-course from the divisive, hyper-competitive social ethos of the past decade or two.

Imagine: Instead of early economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of competition, society grows via folk working hand-in-hand. Legislation gets enacted on the basis of what might work best for the most people, not what might attract the most campaign contributions. People in high office seek consensus, not domination.

Could it happen? I insist it could, not just that it should.

Kerry & co. should also so insist.

Sometimes, our present-day life in occupied America seems like a bad science fiction novel.

By “bad science fiction novel,” I don’t mean a brisk, high-energy pulp adventure story of 1950s vintage.

I mean a ponderous, relentlessly grim-n’-geeky, multi-volume saga of 1980s vintage.

You know, those thousand-page trilogies that tried to shoehorn in all possible fan-favorite elements in the same story—”hard” science, magic, sword and sorcery, palace infighting. monsters, and a sniggering teen-nerd sexuality; all delivered in an ultra-humorless tone, with extraneous sublots and sub-subplots dangling every which where, distracting readers away from the lack of a compelling main narrative.

Sci-fi trilogies of the pre-cyberpunk years often depict scary, foreboding worlds. Similarly, the geeks running today’s conservative establishment posit a vision of a scary, foreboding America, eternally besieged within an even scarier, more foreboding world.

Trilogies are full of near-incomprehensible jargon, catch words, acronyms, and bureaucratic geekspeak phrases that often conceal more than they reveal. So does today’s U.S. federal government, with its straight-faced doubletalk about “weapons of mass destruction related program activities” and such.

Trilogies depict freakishly misunderstood stereotypes of human behavior and interaction, and demand the reader accept them as just the way things are in this fictional universe, with no questioning allowed. So do the likes of Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al., who, with their incessant screeching and posturing, insist that we can make the rest of the world adore us by shoving them around, that we can defend “freedom” by destroying it, and that anybody who disagrees with this is a terrorist.

Grim sci-fi, just as much as the less pretentious pulp sci-fi, wallows in physical impossibilities portrayed as hard science. Exploding spaceships might not make noises in trilogy novels (as they wouldn’t in real life); but the writers do play havoc with accepted real-life laws of mass, energy, and matter; often coming up with convoluted pseudo-explanatory excuses for doing so. Likewise, the right wing’s yarn-spinners insist to us, with no hint of irony permitted, that monopolies are good for competition, imperial invasions are good for democracy, pollution is good for the environment, conservative-only talk TV is “fair and balanced,” bigotry is Christlike, and the best way to persuade others toward your point of view is to insult and belittle them.

And most importantly, grim SF offers up a skewed definition of heroism and/or antiheroism. Grim-SF protagonists don’t have to be noble, inspiring, or all that heroic. They’re the good guys because the writers say they are; they can do evil things and it’s still OK. And in our century, we’ve got a ruthless gang of powermongers who regularly whore themselves out to big campaign contributors, who put the greed of the few ahead of the need of the many, who deliberately consign the domestic economy and the global environment to the figurative toilet, and who still, with total sincerity, believe themselves to be the noblest, most righteous figures on our planet.

Oh yeah—grim SF “trilogies” don’t always top out at three volumes. They can go on for seemingly ever, spreading their joyless aesthetic of bitter struggle, until people stop buying them.

Let’s hope people stop buying the fictions of our federal storytellers soon.

As the local media cheerlead over the official start of Boeing 7E7 production, the current-affairs zine The Next American City has a long, lucid essay about “Seattle’s Boeing Fixation.”

Writer Sarah Kavage cites the 7E7 assembly-plant location derby as a classic example of corporate job blackmail, a now-familiar ritual that encourages communities to give companies too much to get too little back. (In the case of Seattle/Everett, it’s a mere 1,000 final assembly jobs.) Kavage suggests cities and states find the courage to back away from the game:

“Ultimately, the Puget Sound region will likely have to wean itself off of Boeing, whether it wants to or not. Even if the company stays in town, the region’s influence over it, for better or for worse, will continue to diminish….”Nationwide, our leaders must better manage the difficult balance between long-term regional needs and the needs of large employers. Doing so requires more than passing regulations and bribing companies with incentives. It means actively investing in the infrastructure, environmental protection, education, and social services that keep the quality of life high. And it means investing in local business development and potentially forging agreements with other states and countries to limit the size and nature of incentives.”

…whether the government and the news media (and, by extension, the private sector) are now run by autistics.

One of my long-standing “received ideas” about the failures of the ’60s was that hedonism was a lousy pretext for a revolution, though a great way to advertise one.

Every now and then, I find someone who begs to differ. These would include the Scandinavians who’ve started a nonprofit porn site to benefit rainforest preservation. (Found via Pagan Moss.)

Washington Post commentator David Von Drehle claims the country’s “red states”/”blue states” split is a deliberate long-term strategy promoted by both politcal parties’ strategic teams.

As he puts it, both parties want to win national elections, but not by much. They’d rather each have their own dominant states and counties, in which each party could engage in safe monopoly politics, and which would add up to an even split in Congress and the Electoral College.

The whole thing, if you buy Von Drehle’s assessment, reeks of some of our age’s most pervasive business trends—consolidation, centralization, and the relentless shout of branding.

As Tom Frank pointed out in the April Harper’s, the Great Plains states have withered economically under Republican policies, yet they’re among the most solid Republican-voting ares in the whole country. Frank claims it’s all because the Republicans have successfully sold their “brand image” as the only politicians who care about the heartland, even as their actual policies contradict the sloganeering.

And, of course, you all already know the nasty things left-wingers say against right-wingers and people who live in right-wing-controlled areas.

I’m not a Democratic strategist, thank the Goddess, so I can say a big fat “Nuts!” to all that.

I say we work beyond the artificial rhythms of election cycles, beyond the lesser-O’-two-evils line. I say we bring progressive ideas and policies back to the land. Let’s bring back the good ol’ days of prairie populism. Move beyond the comfortable “base” of your own subculture. Set a figurative table big enough for the carnivores and the vegans alike.

The right’s only natural constituencies are the billionaires, the CEOs, the plutocrats, and the authoritarians. Everybody else belongs in our camp; and it’s about time we welcomed ’em all in.

…what the Columbine killers were really like. One, supposedly, was a depressive; the other was a psychopath who believed himself superior to just about everybody. Together, they had no specific targets. They just wanted the imagined power and glory of killing as many people as they could.

…of Bush’s appointment to the Presidency, Todd Gitlin equated his rise with a “renaissance of anti-intellectualism.”

AS WE ALL WAIT for the housing-price bubble to go “Pop!,” citizens and families that have already over-invested in homes and condos, or who hope to sell same at currently inflated prices, await the loss of their lifetime material dreams; while renters, and homeowners saddled with property taxes based on inflated resale prices, hope to breathe easier; and local governments and school boards in many parts of the country, who’ve become dependent upon inflated property taxes based upon inflated home prices, wait to see their own fiscal situations go from bad to disastrous.

…wants to tell you precisely how to argue with conservatives.

…are getting taller, and Americans aren’t.”

HERE’S A STORY about teenagers sleeping together (really, just sleeping!) that’ll calm anybody. They’re fighting for the right to relax, dammit! They want their ‘power naps,’ and they want them now!