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The Case for Multiculturalism

What is the alternative? 
Who decides which of many cultural possibilities should be the Monoculture, and which of the many others should be Multi? 
Has there ever been a civilization or empire that has thrived without multiculturalism? It seems that the richest countries and societies, like the richest estuaries, benefit from the best of all contributing cultures. 
Is not multiculturalism simply the cultural extension of a free market of ideas, each competing and blending in an evolutionary, dynamic process, so that most of us today are unaware that the potatoes we eat are a recent import from Peru, our coffee and chocolate are imports from American indigenous culture and horses (if you live in America) are a contribution by Spanish culture a few centuries ago to a continent that had no horses (their closest American relatives seemed to have been hunted to extinction thousands of years earlier)? 
Should we not use paper, eat pasta, or use compasses simply because these are developments of Chinese culture? 
Do we eschew maps because they were invented in Iraq? 
Or do we avoid Hindu-Arabic numbers (as Florentine bankers were forbidden to do in a spasm of anti-multiculturalism in the 1200s) because they are non-European in origin? Do we mandate a return to the Roman numeral system that had neither decimal points nor zero, not to mention negative numbers or any capacity to do complex calculations by lining up digits on papyrus or paper?
Do we forbid Judaism or its outgrowths, Christianity and Islam, because they are all Mediterranean imports that crowded out Norse and other native religions? 
Do we ban democracy, a Greek import, or the Christmas tree (a German import), or the Yuletide log (a Scandinavian import)? 
Do we ban firearms, since they were invented by Chinese culture, or cars, the internal combustion engine, jet planes, rockets, submarines, interstate highways, or Volkswagens, since they were invented by Germans? 
Should we forego stock exchanges, since common stocks were invented by the Dutch? And should we prevent our military forces from continuing to use the metric system since this system was created and standardized during the French revolutionary in protest of the idea of a using measuring anything in the the length of a king's "foot"? 
I do not know what development we will be foregoing in the name of stamping out multiculturalism, but we would live in a grayer, poorer, more miserable society if we spurned all advances and developments not home-grown.

Reflections on 9-11 Ten Years Later

10 years ago I was then as now in Switzerland, although for different reasons (we live here now, but were vacationing then) perhaps the safest place on the planet, and the remoteness of the event in some ways amplified its urgency and confusion.  What on earth was happening and why?   My sister-in-law had flown back to London only the day before and she was the one who called us in the afternoon to tell us to turn on the TV, that "they were flying airplanes into buildings."  
The United States seemed like a different, more solemn place when we returned in late September, 2001.   There were flags everywhere and a sense of unity that I had never sensed before.  Being an American, something I took for granted, seemed almost palpable.  It was sad that it took such a horrific crime to remind us of what generations passing through Ellis Island knew - that the 7% of the planet lucky enough to call themselves American live in a special place, if for no other reason than that we can respond with such shock and horror to the idea that violent death can come literally and suddenly from a cloudless blue sky.  This is a reality known all too well in places from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine and Israel, from the Sudan to the Congo to Somalia.  War with its random mass killing of innocents who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time was supposed to happen There, not Here.  

The fact that we continue to feel that this fundamental, un-written rule had been violated is part of what makes our country so great on one hand but so insensitive on the other.  American Exceptionalism quickly took on an ugly, retributive, militaristic form and the horrors of that day were used to justify at least two wars and countless actions of questionable legality whose horrors made the deaths on 9-11 a rounding error in an unspeakable international body count.   I hope that a decade out, we can unlearn the false lessons of 9-11, the ones politicians used to start wars and win elections, and take time to reflect on our common humanity, on the insanity of the idea that whether you live or die, whether you have a right to an existence free from random terror whether from suicide bombers or attack helicopters or predator drones, should be a function of where you happened to be born and whether someone somewhere was mad enough about something your government did that they were willing to make your life so much collateral damage.   

I remember the Parisian headlines declaring that "We are all Americans now" or the candlelight vigils for the 9-11 victims in Tehran and the Gaza strip.  I remember our media intoning solemnly about how we would be forever changed, a truth that for the 99.8% of Americans who did not lose a loved one that day lasted for all of 6 weeks.  We quickly returned to partisan bickering, with the party in charge during the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor managing to turn it into a megaphone moment then use it to justify two wars and some of the most viciously dishonest political campaigning seen in any Western country since Germany in the 1930s.  Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, sponsor of the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, was called an ally of al Qaeda because he did not think it was right to strip federal workers transferred to the new department of their existing benefits as Bush proposed.  Another decorated Vietnam combat veteran had his service record impugned by a well-financed campaign that introduced a new synonym for slick, dishonest, character association into our political vocabulary:  swift-boating.  You were either for Bush or against him, and he expanded the size and power of the federal government in ways the Tea Party (had it been invented yet) should by all rights have been up in arms against.  Tax cuts in a time of war, historically unprecedented, were not only continued, but deepened.   They neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy.  Disastrous deregulation of everything from coal mines to deep oil drillers to the financial industry (who lobbied hard to make sure that options on mortgage backed securities were not regulated as insurance products) created disaster after disaster until we now face a fiscal shortfall that those who intoned about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD are telling us is the next imminent threat they have a great idea about how to fix.  

So we are firing teachers and first responders (after the Party of 9-11 voted several times to refuse to pay for the healthcare of first responders who risked everything to search for survivors in a smoking toxic pit), closing public health clinics, defunding Planned Parenthood (97% of whose services have nothing to do with abortion and who provide life-saving pap smears and mammograms to a disproportionately indigent population) and at least 45,000 Americans every year, over 15 9-11's worth of people, die for want of health insurance in one of the world's most prosperous countries (the battle now is being shifted to coverage for cancer, which 9-11 volunteers are being denied despite the study published in Lancet showing a 19% higher risk of cancer among those working in The Pit).  But because we don't see those 45,000 dead, half a million perhaps since 9-11 itself, jumping from a smoking building, our telegenic culture has trouble mobilizing a concerted response, even though insuring our children is much less costly and involves far less sacrifice than combating politically-inspired violence, something our cash-strapped government somehow managed to find a spare trillion dollars to fight.
I was as angry, saddened, and heart-broken about the anguish of those in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on that awful day a decade ago, but our response to it has taken the lives of so many more innocents, most of whom are not commemorated or even acknowledged, many of them Americans, that my response to the memories of that day are tempered by awareness of what followed.  Until and unless we can never again allow such radical, disproportionate, and self-defeating behavior in the face of politically-inspired violence, behavior that crowds out efforts to address things that really do kill Americans in significant numbers, then we are only one attack away from the next catastrophic over-response.  The fact that no one in our government went to prison for ordering torture, indefinite detention without charges, or for illegal spying on Americans suspected of no crime, whereas Republican governors are spending billions suing that same government for forcing citizens to stop free-riding our healthcare system does not inspire hope. 

And for those who want us to believe that Greed is Good, that without further lowering of their taxes the top 1% of earners will refuse to hire anyone (or anyone in America, at least), let's remember those unionized government employees who ran into burning buildings when everyone else (including many of those in the top 1% who would later join the Tea Party and support slashing the funding for their rescuers' healthcare, pensions, and right to collective negotiation) was running out did not do what they did because of the promise of a fat bonus.  I doubt anyone in the police departments of the Port Authority or of New York City thought of their top marginal tax rate before deciding whether or not to help make sure everyone they could help had been rescued.  The America that inspired the world on the day and in the weeks since was not about getting and spending but about giving and serving.  Government service had not yet become an open term of derision in the right wing of one party, and no one cared if the bodies found in the rubble were Democrats, Republicans, independents, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or agnostic.  We were all Americans and when we are at our best it is not about greed or materialism.   We are better than that and if we hold the ideals of sacrifice and shared purpose, of not leaving anyone behind to die whether in a burning building or for want of healthcare, up as the model of what we can be, then there might just be hope for us all.

If any of the following were in the Bible, I might just believe...

  

Fundamentalists allege that the Bible represents the "inerrant word of God" as Jerry Falwell among others put it: 

 The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

The god described in this inerrant text is omniscient, meaning all-knowing, not just of things that were but of things that will be.  As our understanding of the universe's creation unfolds, Genesis, the bible's creation stories (there are actually two mutually exclusive ones in the same text) appear not just inerrant, but wildly off the mark.  Claiming our planet is only a few thousand years old is as big an error as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York City, for example. 

Thanks to the poetic nature of the bible, it is sometimes possible for fundamentalists to wriggle out of embarrassing omissions.   The absence of dinosaurs, for example, can be explained by a single reference to "giants" roaming the land, never mind that this interpretation would incorrectly make dinosaurs coexist with us rather than precede us by hundreds of millions of years.  

Trying to force this deeply superstitious, misogynistic, scientifically- and geographically-challenged text to fit unfolding reality is increasingly difficult.   This even side-steps why this book of all possible holy books was chosen (have fundamentalist Christians read the Rig Veda - in English or Sanskrit - considered holy to 900 million Hindus, for example, before rejecting it?).

Since it has become almost unsportsmanlike to continue to point out the gaping logical and scientific lapses in the bible, a work clearly not ready for prime time (or our time at least), why not instead work backwards?  Using the same poetic license of the bible's authors and editors, imagine what a truly omniscient god might have told his scribes to scribble, particularly if he really wanted to wow them.  

Mention of any of these natural wonders in a book meant to explain all things would have attracted converts and settled pointless internecine bloodshed and persecution.  Yahweh speaks frequently and often of other, competing gods of whom he is jealous, indicating he was not so much denying their existence as competing with them.  

So why would he not not mention quarks or protons or anti-matter, or the incredible depth of time?  Why did he not let people know how small they were relative to their own planet, the population of cultures of which they were completely ignorant, to Jupiter, to the sun, or to their own galaxy, not to mention their expanding universe?   Wouldn't this humble them more than telling an elaborate story of a great flood, a story that would make no sense to anyone who understands that 90% of biomass lives in water?  

Had someone been able to foresee quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, and evolution thousands of years before these things were understood, THAT would be impressive, even miraculous.  It might have even settled the question of the existence of god.  

And so ... were something like this in the Bible, I might just believe: 

And in that time there appeared among them a great teacher who traveled from the east and spoke in a strange manner of an advanced civilization that had invented paper, the compass, and ships many times larger than Noah's ark. 
This teacher spoke of a vision he had of a time to come that was even more amazing than this Kingdom of which he spoke, which he called the Middle Kingdom, but all suspected to be fantastic, since everyone then knew the World to only be as large as the One Great Empire of Rome which occupied the land inhabited by the monotheists who believed in One Great God they called Yahweh but who seemed powerless to help them against the Romans of many gods who regularly suppressed their uprisings with great bloodshed and many crucifixions. Yet the people were still restive and wanted the Romans to leave so they could go back to their ways, but this man spoke of a land even better than the land of milk and honey the One Great God had promised to Abraham. The teacher's vision caused multitudes to leave their tent to hear him, but this worried the religious elders greatly who gathered to ask what should be done with this Gentile from the East. A decision was made but before they could act, the great teacher gathered together his students and told them this story that was passed secretly by one who was there:
In the beginning there was a tremendous concentration of matter, of everything that now exists and much, much more. In a fraction of a fraction of a second everything expanded across an unimaginable expanse met with anti-matter and 99% of it was destroyed immediately. What was left expanded, stabilized, and electrons found protons and the first hydrogen atoms began to coalesce. Hydrogen gas collected under incredible pressure over vast periods of time and heated to a degree where the repulsion of the positively charged nuclei was overcome and a great unleashing of energy created entirely new matter. The light that reaches our face from the morning sun is nothing more or less wonderful than the energy emitted from this process, carried to us across a distance so vast it takes several minutes to reach us. We see and feel the sun not as it is but as it was several minutes ago. Wrap your minds around that.
And while you do, consider that our sun was not formed first; no my brothers and sisters, other stars collapsed, died, exploded, spewing the newly created heavy elements resulting from the fusion of all these nuclei that eventually ended up as the stuff that makes up our bodies and our world. For truly I say unto you that our bodies are made of star dust. We, my children, are what is left of that grand and mysterious process the evidence of which will be detected one day by future men and women (yes, I tell you my brothers, women will one day not be despised and shut in their tents and told to remain silent in the presence of their husbands - some will not even take husbands but live independent and happy lives, and will be able to time the number and frequency of their children) all these things will come to pass and so many more, for if I were powerless to predict these things, the things of men, how could I possibly be believed when I claim to speak of metaphysical things beyond the realm of men? 
But I do not speak of these things for I have no way of knowing them one way or another. I can only know what I can see and sense and this vision that came to me was as real as any. Are you not tired of the old, small, jealous gods, always plotting and scheming and fighting over a world that is so small? I bring you the universe entire, expanding and so much larger and vaster than we could ever imagine it. I bring you pulsars and quarks and neutrons and protons and strong and weak forces. Let me tell you about the universality of gravity, that elegant force that always and everywhere seems to obey certain laws that can be reduced to the simplest of variables - tell me, my brothers, the weight of an object and its distance from another object, and I can tell you its gravitational attraction to that other object. And all objects, even the tiniest mustard seed, imperceptibly exert this universal force. And let me tell you that anywhere you stand on this planet, if you drop a stone it will be accelerated toward the center of the earth at 9.8 meters per second-squared, terms that may mean nothing to you since until the French Revolution which is a great upheaval in the Roman territory now called Gaul, there was no such thing as the meter, developed to liberate ourselves from measuring things by the feet of kings, and until a man named Galileo who will live not far from the center of the great empire now occupying our land and oppressing our people, but long after this empire has collapsed - yes, this too shall come to pass - developed a water chronometer, there was no accurate way of measuring time, certainly not in small units. 
But if your scribes can tell you of lakes of fires and 700-year-old men and you take it on faith, can you not also open your minds to far more amazing ideas that happen to be true? It shall come to pass that this 9.8 meters per second-squared will be a constant gravitational force on the surface of the Earth, but that since mass and gravitational force are inversely proportional, the moon, which men will visit in great vessels propelled by fire and walk upon its surface, has only one-sixth the gravitational force of the Earth, so that those men can bounce upon it and lift heavy objects with ease. In space whose vastness and coldness will terrify future thinkers once it is understood, there is no gravity at all, and water floats in giant spheres as will your body when you travel there, as your greatest of great grandchildren someday will. 
Oh, there are so many wonders to share with you, wonders far more mind-expanding than the silly stories of floods and houseboats and women created from ribs. Let me tell you about evolution and the vast expanse of time, and of our kinship with all living creatures, even the lowly earthworm which, brothers and sisters shares 40% of our genetic code as we do. 
What is a genetic code? It is something even more amazing, a set of instructions handed down from parent to child, from generation to generation, present in every cell that has all of the information needed to make each of us. All of this information is stored in a pattern of 4 different chemicals, the order of which determines how every part of every cell is to be made, how much, and when it should be shut down or sped up.
Think of that, my children - each of you has half of your genes from your father and half from your mother - despite your persecution of women, they are as important to making you you as your fathers and your father's fathers. And in fact, all of us are conceived female but to become male a gene turns on which makes us insensitive to a chemical called testosterone and that tiny difference makes all the difference - all the wonderful and sensual differences - that distinguish men from women.
I call you my brothers and sisters and children even though I do not look exactly as you and my tongue stumbles on the sounds you use so freely because these differences are truly as of nothing. We are all brothers and sisters and share common ancestors who looked very little like us and might even consider as food if they met us today. But all tribes of Israel and all people everywhere belong to the same species and share almost all the same genes with very few differences, minor ones really, that make us appear to be a bit different than we really are. 
And did you know, my children, that you need not fear or be repulsed by your bodies and its excretions anymore than you should be repulsed by the husks remaining after the grain has been harvested? Did you know that men have seeds not unlike the pollen of plants and like plants, many more seeds will be cast than can ever fertilize the ovum of women, and many more conceptions will occur than will ever survive to term, and that many more babies will be born than can ever survive to have children themselves, but that a time will come when people will find ways to keep babies alive, almost all babies, not fewer than half as is now the case, their first year of life, and that they will develop technologies that will allow a man or woman at birth to expect to live and reproduce with a success rate we cannot even begin to imagine. Wo unto him today who has fewer than a dozen children or his name and his genetic material will not be passed onto the next generation. But once these wonders of the new age come to pass, clean running water that you can drink without sickening, pipes to carry your waste into a central place so it does not contaminate your drinking water, vaccines to make illnesses that have plagued us for eternity bad memories, and wondrous medicines that really work, for those with or without faith, because in those times to come men and women will understand that your immune system made up of countless white cells floating in your blood stream are what fight infection, and that many illnesses thought to be demonic possession now because they frighten us and we are powerless to do anything so we make up stories to explain what we do not know will be understood to be nothing more than chemical imbalances that a pill taken once or twice a day can cure or treat forever. 
No longer will those who hear voices telling them to murder their children be treated as prophets or allowed to carry out their plans. Instead, they will be treated with compassion and the voices will leave them and there will be peace in their families who will understand that diseases of the mind, like diseases of the kidney or the lungs, have nothing to do with the moral goodness or badness of the sufferer. Such knowledge may throw all religious experiences into question, especially by those who are doctors specializing in these illnesses and who see firsthand how the words of a sick man and the words of a charismatic would-be prophet are indistinguishable but both respond to treatment. 
Our entire sense of reality will be threatened by this new awareness that so much of what we see and seem is a function of chemical reactions, understandable and in many cases changeable for better or worse. Other scientific fields will challenge our sense of stability and fill us with humility. We will learn the age of the earth is not in the thousands of years but in the thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands of years. Most of the earth's history did not involve us because people did not evolve until the last fraction of a second of earth's hour. We are close relatives of the chimpanzee and slightly less close relatives of the gorilla. The chimpanzees have 99.8% of the same genes as we do, my brothers and sisters, and at this awareness, some men will cringe and like the fable of Adam and Even want to seek refuge in their ignorant innocence, but once these things are learned, they cannot be un-learned. 
There will be creatures discovered many, many times more massive than the greatest land animal, the elephant, living in the ocean right now, unknown to our scribes because they never bothered to travel to those great oceans. These enormous whales as they will be called (not the large fish in that silly story of Jonah) are mammals like us and actually dwelled on land for a time before deciding to return to the sea. But they did not evolve gills again so were forced to hold their breath under water and blow it out of a great hole in their heads when they surface. 
And did you know that all life began in water and that even today most life remains in water. If all living creatures were piled up and weighed, it will be discovered that over 9 parts of every 10 of that mass will live in the water. This will make that silly story of Noah and his house boat doubly absurd since a flood that threatens land creatures will be welcome to the 90% of life that has not evolved to live on land. 
I do not mean to shock you, my children, but look carefully at your bodies. Did you know that you are all of you farms, cultivating tiny forms of life that the men and women of future generations will call microbes? Some of these microbes make you ill, but most of them live in peace and are essential to digesting your food and eliminating your waste. You have more of these microbes than you have of cells. And each cell, remember, has a complete set of instructions to make you you. There will come a time where if a man struggles with another man or with a woman (for in those future times, women will be considered as people too, and slaves also, since slavery will be ended and all laborers paid for their wages and free to work for another master or not at all) and commits murder but no one witnesses the crime, did you know that people in that time will be able to use as little as a hair or a tiny piece of skin and find within it the set of genes that is unique to that one person (unless he has a monozygotic twin, but I digress)? The science of crime will surpass the science of the courts of that time, and juries will be swayed not to understand what this means, but many innocent men will be set free when it is clear that the hair or the skin or the blood at the scene of the great struggle was not theirs? One piece of hair!
Now look again at your hands and tell me if they are mostly space or of matter? I tell you this: most of the universe including most of you is empty space. Even the densest bone or rock or piece of metal is mostly space. The mass of everything is contained in the nucleus, which is as tiny relative to the electrons swirling around as the tiniest mouse is to the largest of our temples, but imagine if all the weight of the temple were in that mouse and the rest was empty space. Each atom is like this and your body is made up of billions and billions of atoms, all attracted to each other by a complex array of forces, but none actually touching. 
And as the Greeks once knew but our scribes have forgotten, we stand not on a plane but a sphere and we revolve about the sun once every 365 and a quarter days and our sun is but one of billions upon billions of other suns that appear to us as stars not because they are smaller - many aren't - but because they are so distant. Wow unto him among us who does not understand the incredible scale of forces not known no but one day to be tapped by scientists in a country on a continent our people do not know exists, forces that exist in the tiniest center of an atom, where protons and neutrons are clustered together and can be unleashed by splitting that atom and destroying a city and all of its women and children and oxen and cats and dogs, dropped from a machine made not of wood but of metal, a light metal alloy yet to be developed, powered not by a sail but by a series of tiny explosions of a purified liquid extracted from the fossil remains of great creatures that our scribes do not even know died hundreds of millions of years before our species appeared. Yes, I tell you that men will untap these forces then regret the terrible destruction they have wrought, because in those days to come people will not accept the divinity of total war, of genocide of entire peoples, the way King David at the Battle of Jericho commanded his men to slaughter not just all women, children, and babies, but all animals too. In those days to come there will be great and prodigious slaughter but there will also be a great outcry against that slaughter and this outcry will come loudest from those who do not follow our Yahweh or any god at all. Yes, I tell you, that this and so much more will unfold.
These modern people will speak of rights and war crimes and trials not of religious authorities or kings but of men and women - for in those days there will be judges like Judy - common men and women like them. Even kings can be tried for trying to violate a housemaid but even in that day, the king will be able to afford a much better attorney so may go free.
They will introduce words alien to our ear but well known to our Greek predecessors such as democracy and republics. They will give all of their citizens, not only men of noble birth, the right to vote, although not all will use that right. 
They will have amazing talking boxes that will transmit talking images of men and women talking 24 hours a day, not needing candles because electrons stripped from the nucleus of certain chemicals will give off an energy - created when an current of those electrons passes through a resistor - that causes a filament in a glass bulb to glow and turn night into day. These talking boxes will carry not just images of talking heads but also of ladies wrestling each other in enormous vats of mud and dogs balancing themselves on wheeled wood devices they will call Skateboards. This great talking box will amaze but also distract and even though children at that time can be amazed with the fact that a beam of electrons traveling at the speed of light is hurtling into space and then coming back down again to form those pictures, images, and sounds, they will find this less interesting than watching cats jumping into and out of a cesspool. 
There is so much more, my children, but I see that the religious authorities are coming now and do not like the commotion I have created with my teachings. They are asking if I have been given a permit to speak and if I am of the right sect and I have traveled so far I honestly can't remember who is considered the right sect here - have I passed from the land of the Pharisees or am I still in the land of the Samaritans? 
They are taking me away and perhaps will break my body on the rack or burn me alive as all are commanded to do who follow the jealous and angry Yahweh, but these visions I have of the future are true and I hope that one of you who has ears has heard and will write down the truth so that when false prophets come, theirs are not the only fables who are propagated through the ages. 
Think for yourself my children. If you hear my screams from the Temple basement, it is only the elders doing what they feel they must do to maintain order and keep women and Gentiles and all of you in their place. Forgive them for they know not what they do. But explore, be truthful, and follow the truth wherever it takes you. Many are called to this path of painful exploration, but few will follow. It is a lonely path and expect to be mocked and derided by those who have not studied and do not know. No one is blinder than he who will not see. I cannot lie and say I have seen a god I have not, but I can imagine a future without this god and it is a good and prosperous future, free from the petty superstitions and prejudices of our people, divided like all agrarian people into warring tribes and factions that hate each other more than they hate the Romans. 
But even the Romans are farther along the path than we are and do not fear scholarship and science as we have been taught to do. Yes, they have their augurs and their high priests but they also have so many gods they don't take any one of them too seriously and leave each other alone to make their own choice. 
Well, I must go now because I live in a time and place where we have no choice; our god is chosen for us by who our father happens to be and what piece of dirt we happen to be born on, but I tell you that in the time to come, the universality of all things will make the pettiness and silliness of our world view shrink to insignificance. 
Peace be with all of you. What need I fear if the world and the elders are against me as long as the truth is on my side?

You Cannot be Pro-Life but Oppose the Environmental Protection Agency

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Either President Obama is playing a much deeper game than I appreciate (always a possibility) or he has completely caved to the Republicans when he recently over-ruled the EPA. 

Let's face it:  the Far Right will never give President Obama credit for what he does, so he should stick to first principles.  Most Americans do not realize, for example, that President Obama in effect lowered taxes, by preventing the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule, and proposed a deeper set of budget-balancing cuts (with no new taxes) than the measure ultimately adopted.  He doesn't get  credit for playing nice with the schoolyard bullies who still call him a socialist, Muslim, Kenyan-born, black-power-advancing, government-growing, tax-and-spend liberal (not that those are all bad things, but the maddening thing is that none are true).  

President Obama is a milquetoast right of centrist who is drifting further to the right in an attempt to appease people who will never invite him to play their reindeer games.  He did not get the memo but the all-white Tea Party did not take to the streets 28 days into his administration mad, mad, mad and wanting to "take their country back" because of anything he did or proposed to do.  They are simply furious about who he is, a black man with a D after his name, even though the daylight between his policies and the white guy who handed him two wars, a recession, and a set of disastrous, budget-busting, non-economy-growing tax cuts on his way out of the White House is at times indistinguishable.  

Obama risks losing his base in a calculated move to pre-empt Texas commercials about all the Texas coal-burning plants that would have to close (or so they claim) to comply with stricter EPA rules they knew were coming but somehow never bothered to make the necessary changes.  As with the budget, it was a game of chicken and Obama blinked.  

The spectacle of a few thousand Texans unemployed, rolling blackouts (during record heat waves and out-of-control forest fires) is probably a gift Obama would rather not give to Perry and the Texas fossil fuel industry.   Rolling back the regulations' implementation until at least after the election was a wise move politically but a stunningly retro move environmentally.  The EPA estimated that the regulations due to go into effect in 2012 would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year.  As long as those bodies are not seen falling from towers in lower Manhattan, it's almost impossible to get a television-addicted American audience to be moved into action.   Why save a life when your power bill might go up a nickel a day, or you might be forced to turn your thermostat up 2 degrees in summer and down a couple in winter?  Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting such a thing a few decades ago.  He wasn't wrong, just early.  

I wish President Obama would get out ahead of these fossil fuel apologists and pre-empt their arguments.  He should be making any or all of the following points:

• The EPA is a pro-life agency.    Sensible regulations of the emissions of pollutants and carcinogens saves far more lives than futile attempts to prohibit abortion.  (Why futile? Consider the experience in Latin America where abortion rates are higher despite almost universal prohibition, and of Western Europe where rates are lower despite far fewer restrictions than in the United States.)  Put bluntly, you cannot be pro-life and anti-climate.
• Protecting the environment and energy independence are national security issues.   It makes no sense to send young men and women halfway across the world to protect our access to our energy drug of choice when we could enter a program of recovery and declare our energy independence both by decreasing demand and diversifying supply away from non-renewable sources. 
• Protection of the environment and sustainability are religious mandates.  Sustainability should resonate with evangelical Christians (as it is beginning to among some such as Jim Wallis), Obama should remind Americans of faith.  It is a strange and narrow belief system that respects only fetal life, but has such scant regard for the health and safety of post-natal life, or of life in rivers, streams, and oceans, god's creation (according to every major religion) toward which we must show responsible stewardship, not mercenary disdain.  Not a word in the Bible commands us only to do what is right if it does not threaten job creation, or asks us to balance the life of a child against another shekel of potential profit.  There is nothing wrong per se with making a materialistic argument, but let's not cloak it in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist clothing.   I cannot speak with authority for those adhering to  Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, or any of a few thousand indigenous belief systems, but I do know that those of us who are the spiritual equivalent of independent voters find the utilitarian calculus life versus profits to be deeply troubling and morally offensive.  If human life really is sacred, then it cannot and should not be pitted against the marginal inconvenience of tuning down a thermostat or putting on a sweater.  
• Government should not be protecting one industry (fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists) over another (millions of green jobs we can not even imagine yet).  When the government forces companies to pay the true cost of the air they pollute, then yes, all things being equal, the price of each unit of energy using fossil fuel technology will rise from where it had been when the companies were using our rivers, oceans, and atmosphere as a free dumping ground.   The fossil fuel industry, which last time I checked was plenty profitable, chooses to pass that cost onto consumers or to fire workers or close plants, so be it, but if their model is not economically viable once externalities are eliminated, then that is the free market talking.  They also have another option:  pay their top executives less or return less money to shareholders, or some combination of the above.  The fossil fuel industry is presenting us with a false dichotomy anyway, threatening massive job layoffs and rolling blackouts unless they can continue to use our resources without paying for them.  Many rice plantations in the South collapsed and the cultivation of cotton became less profitable after plantation owners were forced to pay their workers but this does not mean that the government should have refused to end slavery simply because the cost of this new regulation would have economic consequences.  Many candlestick-makers went out of business when the light bulb was invented but does this mean the government should have manipulated the market to protect the candlestick industry as the coal industry wants the government to do now (failing to price something like air or water that has definite value but cannot be efficiently priced without a referee in the game is just as manipulative as artificially increasing the price of something the government does not want you to buy, such as imported goods hit with tariffs or light bulbs slapped with fines).   I don't know what percentage of the economy should be oil, natural gas, coal, solar, wind power, geothermal, or pure research, but let the marketplace decide.  Ironically, the marketplace cannot decide if we continue to act as if water and air are free, in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry which gobbles up or pollutes these things over competition that does not.  
• Those who think we should not innovate, adapt, and grow are Luddites and defeatists. The status quo fossil fuel shills are convinced that America must fail where the Japanese, Europeans, and even the Chinese (finally) are making major breakthroughs.   Why do Republicans think Germans are so much smarter than Americans?  Why have they already declared defeat before even entering the arena?  The rest of the world is not waiting.  If we hesitate, they will eat our lunch. 

I hope President Obama can come out swinging.  Part of me is thinking he is getting all the ugly stuff out of the way early before his campaign really kicks off, but when he goes on the attack against those who have said so many untruths about him, I hope he can choose not just to engage but to frame the debate.