Banking Bandits Get Their Reward

By now everybody must know that the top banking executives responsible for our economic meltdown have no shame. Otherwise they would not have dared give themselves such hefty bonuses as a deeply perverse reward for actions that caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes. The $33 billion that the executives of the nine banks bailed out with taxpayer funds paid themselves in 2008 is all one needs to know about the depth of their amorality.

But it also speaks volumes about the inefficiency of a system of rewards that has nothing to do with performance. “No Rhyme or Reason: the ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’ Bank Bonus Culture” is the title of the report by New York’s Attorney Gen. Andrew M. Cuomo unmasking this scandal. It concludes: “ ... compensation for bank employees has become unmoored from the banks’ financial performance.”

That would not be of public concern if bank executives and their stockholders would bear the full price of such folly. But not one of those top nine banks that distributed bonuses of at least $1 million to each of 5,000 top executives faced the consequences on their own. Instead, taxpayers were called upon to pony up what will eventually be trillions of dollars to save the banks and the nation from this disaster. As the Cuomo report notes:

“Two firms, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch suffered massive loses of more than $27 billion at each firm. Nevertheless, Citigroup paid out $5.33 billion, in bonuses, and Merrill paid $3.6 billion in bonuses. Together, they lost $54 billion, paid out nearly $9 billion in bonuses and then received TARP bailouts totaling $55 billion. For three other firms—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan Chase—2008 bonus payments were substantially greater than the banks’ net income.”

In each instance, those bonuses on average more than doubled earnings and were in turn more than doubled by the government bailout in TARP funds. Those funds, and the nonrefundable tens of billions passed on through the AIG bailout and other government programs, come from the very taxpayers already reeling from a banking collapse brought on by reckless lending practices.

Yet the $306 billion in toxic assets that Citigroup—a leader in the irresponsible practices that created such “assets”—managed to pile up are also now guaranteed by taxpayer funds. And being on the public dole didn’t prevent Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit from “earning” $38 million last year.

The Merrill Lynch bonuses were paid as the company was about to collapse. It was saved at the last minute by being purchased for $50 billion by Bank of America in a deal engineered by the federal government and facilitated by $45 billion in bailout funds to BofA. On Monday, Bank of America agreed to pay $33 million in penalties to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle an SEC complaint that BofA had deceived shareholders about those billions in bonuses.

One of those handsomely rewarded was Thomas Montag, now with BofA, who received a $39.4 million bonus for his work at Merrill Lynch, a reward for his performance as Merrill’s trading and sales chief, a position in which he presided over the billions in mortgage acquisitions that fueled the company’s downfall.

The banks, considered “too big to fail,” were quickly showered with enormous amounts of money, contributing to a U.S. deficit expected to grow to $1.86 trillion this year. But homeowners are not too big to fail, and they were left to the tender mercies of the very bankers who swindled them with flaky mortgages.

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department criticized the major banks for their abysmally weak effort to aid distressed homeowners who are more than 60 days delinquent on their mortgages. Only 9 percent of those who qualify for assistance under President Obama’s foreclosure prevention plan have been entered into trial programs to determine whether their mortgages will be modified. BofA, one of the major holders of distressed mortgages, has entered only a scant 4 percent of its eligible mortgage holders in the program.

Citigroup has managed to begin the process with 15 percent of those eligible, while Wells Fargo has begun with only 6 percent of its eligible borrowers. Compare that snail speed in helping folks keep their homes with the alacrity with which the federal government responded in bailing out the banks when they got into trouble.

The choice from the beginning of this debacle has been: Do we bail out the banks that caused the problem in the hopes that they will help ordinary folks or do we start with government relief for distressed mortgage holders? The decision to aid the bankers first was based on the assumption that for the first time in their lives they would do the honorable thing and surrender space in the lifeboats to those most vulnerable.

Health Care Tyranny by 13 Obstructionists

For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.

The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote—and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now, the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle—and potentially bringing about another disaster.

Here we have a major congressional push to fix a health care system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.

In the Senate, both parties have outsourced health care legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any health care bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.

This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their health care will on the other 96 percent of us.

Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal health care. So why are they leading the fight to stop—rather than pass—reform?

Because when tyranny mixes with legalized bribery, constituents’ economic concerns stop mattering.

Thanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the health care industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions—a massive sum further enhanced by geography.

Remember, politicians trade favors for re-election support—and the best way to ensure re-election is to raise money for TV airtime (read: commercials). In rural America, that airtime is comparatively cheap because the audience is relatively small. Thus, campaign contributions to rural politicians like these 13 buy more commercials—and, consequently, more political loyalty.

The end result is an amplifier of tyranny: Precisely because the undemocratic system unduly empowers legislators from sparsely populated (and hence cheap) media markets, industry cash can more easily purchase tyrannical obstruction from those same legislators. In this case, that means congresspeople blocking health care reform that would most help their own voters.

Of course, there is talk of circumventing the 13 obstructionists and forcing a vote of the full Congress that cannot be filibustered. Inside the Washington palace, the media court jesters and political aides-de-camp have reacted to such plans by raising predictable charges of improper procedure, poor manners, bad etiquette and other Versailles transgressions.

But the real crime would be letting the tyrants block that vote, trample democracy and kill health care reform in the process.

THE BOGUS TERRORIST THREAT-William Pfaff

Janet Napolitano, Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security (a totalitarian-sounding office the United States did very nicely without until 2001), gave a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday, meant to convince American civil libertarians and security specialists that the country can be kept safe, and neighborly as well.

President Obama, she said, has been very forceful “about seeing the threat of terrorism in all of its complexity, and in bringing all of our resources, not just the federal government, to bear against violent extremism.”

She said, though, that the danger has not diminished in the eight years since 9/11. (A month ago I heard a think-tank expert flatly predict that there will be a major al-Qaida attack on the U.S. this year, “probably nuclear.” I’ve been hearing that from his group since 2003.)

Napolitano recommended that Americans do more to make their counterterror approach “a shared endeavor, to make it more layered, networked and resilient, to make it smarter and more adaptive, and to make sure that as a country, as a nation, we are at the point where we are in a constant state of preparedness and not a state of fear.”

She cited, as good examples to citizens, the alert store clerk who three years ago reported men “trying to duplicate extremist DVDs.” That led the authorities to men planning “to kill American soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base.”

Just last month, she said, a vigilant traveler spotted two employees exchanging an unscreened bag at the Philadelphia airport, and this “ultimately stopped a gun from getting on the plane.”

She advised her listeners to make emergency plans for their families. They can go to the “www.ready.gov” site on the Web or consult their local “America Corps council.” The Homeland Security Department has appointed a “task force” to review its color-coded threat system that has done so much to keep the nation safe. She has recently added “a prominent former computer hacker” to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, to help the department “understand our own weaknesses that could be exploited by our adversaries.”

Eight years after the al-Qaida attacks do Americans need such reassurances? Since 2001, there has been no actual terrorist attack reported inside the United States, much less one involving al-Qaida. Plenty of people have been killed by fellow Americans, ordinarily in old-fashioned ways, during that period—by burglars, holdup men, muggers, drug dealers, drunks on a rampage, in Saturday night shoot-ups, in family troubles, or fooling around with the family guns. More recently the killings have included armed grade-school children shooting their classmates, also mainly an all-American affair.

So far as terrorism is concerned, such episodes as have been disclosed by the government have nearly always seemed farcical affairs, involving guys with a grudge hanging out, usually detected by semiprofessional provocateurs lingering around mosques or Muslim neighborhoods, asking disgruntled guys if they wouldn’t like to blow up the tallest building in America. The guys say, “Sure, where is it, how do we get a bomb, and will you loan us the money to go there?”—and they end up in a federal pen. This is not serious.

Professional estimates are that when the casualties of war in Iraq and Afghanistan are left out, the total number of victims of international terrorism since 2001, including the Trade Tower victims, are about the same as the number being killed by lightning—or the number of Americans being killed these days by people Tweeting on their cell phones while driving.

A well-known estimate in 2005 in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence was that more are killed by severe allergic reaction to peanuts, or bathtub drownings, than by international terrorists.

Terrorism and political violence can be big, big problems today if you live in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan or Iran, or in China if you are member of a non-Han minority like the Uighurs and Tibetans.

The newspapers I read today reported that in the last two days two family barracks of the Spanish Civil Guard, the paramilitary police, have been blown up, presumably by the Basque separatist ETA—which over the years has killed 825 people in Spain. They said the Iraqi government has attacked the Iranian political exile movement the People’s Mujahedeen, which used to be under American protection but has been handed over to the Iraqis.

In Nigeria, sectarian militants have been fighting the army, and 80 people have died and 4,000 have fled. Inhabitants of the Swat Valley in Pakistan are afraid to go home, even though the Taliban has left. The poor people in South Africa’s shantytowns are rioting because nothing has improved for them since the African National Congress took over the government.

There is a lot of need around for homeland security. You’d think America has more than its share. Secretary Napolitano might relax and think of ways to distribute the surplus.

Book Excerpt: ‘Empire of Illusion’-Chris Hedges

Celebrity worship banishes reality. And this adulation is pervasive. It is dressed up in the language of the Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people like Pat Robertson or Joel Olsteen, the aura of stardom, fame and celebrity power. These Christian celebrities travel in private jets and limousines. They are surrounded by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience, and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal fortunes. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated.

“What does the contemporary self want?” asked critic William Deresiewicz:

The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge —broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

By Chris Hedges

Nation Books, 240 pages

We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers—Neal Gabler calls them “essentially drama coaches”—to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial empire, when she wasn’t insider trading, telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with we look and how we present ourselves to others. There are glossy magazines like Town & Country which cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set-pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

The Swan was a Fox reality makeover show. The title of the series referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” in which a bird thought to be homely grew up and became a swan. “Unattractive” women were chosen to undergo three months of extensive plastic surgery, physical training, and therapy for a “complete life transformation.” Each episode featured two “ugly ducklings” who compete with each other to go on to the Swan beauty pageant. “I am going to be a new person,” said one contestant in the opening credits.

In one episode, Cristina, twenty-seven, an Ecuador-born office administrator from Rancho Cordova, California, was chosen to be on the program.

“It’s not just the outside I want to change, but it’s the inside, too,” Cristina told the camera mournfully. She had long black hair and light brown skin. She wore baggy gray sweatshirts and no makeup. Her hair was pulled back. We discovered that she was devastatingly insecure about being intimate with her husband because of her post-pregnancy stretch marks. The couple considered divorce.

“I just want to be, not a completely different person, but I want to be a better Cristina,” she said.

As a “dream team” of plastic surgeons discussed the necessary corrections, viewers saw a still image of Cristina, in a gray cotton bra and underwear, superimposed on a glowing blue grid. Her small, drooping breasts, wrinkled stomach, and fleshy thighs were apparent. A schematic figure of an idealized female form revolved at the left of the screen. Crosshairs targeted and zoomed in on each flawed area of Cristina’s face and body. The surgical procedures she would undergo were typed out beside each body part. Brow lift, eye lift, nose job, liposuction of chin and cheeks, dermatologist visits, collagen injections, LASIK eye surgery, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, liposuction of thighs, dental bleaching, full dental veneers, gum tissue recontouring, a 1,200-calorie daily diet, 120 hours in the gym, weekly therapy, and coaching. The effect was suggestive of a military operation. The image of a blueprint and crosshairs was used repeatedly through the program.

Cristina was shown writing in her diary: “I want a divorce because I think that my husband can do better without me. And it would be best for us to go in different directions. I am not happy with myself at all, so I think, why make this guy unhappy for the rest of his life?”

At the end of the three months, Cristina and her opponent, Kristy, were finally allowed to look in a mirror for “the final reveal.” They were brought separately to what looked like a marble hotel foyer. Curving twin staircases with ornate iron banisters framed the action. A crystal chandelier glittered at the top of the stairs. Sconces and oil paintings in gold frames hung on the cream-colored walls.

The “dream team” was assembled in the marble lobby. Massive peach curtains obscured one wall.

“I think Cristina has really grown into herself as a woman, and she’s ready to go back home and start her marriage all over again,” said the team therapist.

Two men in tuxedos opened a set of tall double doors. Cristina entered in a tight black evening gown and long black gloves. She was meticulously made up, and her hair had been carefully styled with extensions. The “dream team” burst into applause and whoops.

“I’ve been waiting twenty-seven years for this day,” Cristina told host Amanda Byram tearfully. “I came for a dream, the American dream, like all the Latinas do, and I got it!”

“You got it!” cheered Byram. “Yes, you did!”

Reverberating drumbeats were heard. “Behind that curtain,” says Byram, “is a mirror. We will draw back the curtain, the mirror will be revealed, and you will see yourself for the first time in three months. Cristina, step up to the curtain.”

Short, suspenseful cello strokes were heard. There was a tumbling drumroll.

“I’m ready,” quavered Cristina.

The curtain parted slowly in the middle. An elaborate full-length mirror reflected Cristina. The cello strokes billowed into the Swan theme song.

“Oh, my God!” she gasped, covering her face. She doubled over. Her knees buckled. She almost hit the floor. “I am so beautiful!!!” she sobbed. “Thank you, oh, thank you so much!! Thank you, God!! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this!! Look at my arms, my figure … I love the dress! Thank you, oh!! I’m in love with myself!”

The “dream team” burst into applause again. “Well, you owe this to yourself,” said Byram. “But you also owe it to these fantastic experts. Guys, come on in.”

The crowd of smiling experts closed in on their creation, clapping as they approached.

At the end of each episode the two contestants were called before Byram to hear who would advance to the pageant. The winner often wept and was hugged by the loser. Byram then pulled the loser aside for “one final surprise.” The double doors opened once more, and her family was invited onto the set for a joyful reunion. In celebrity culture, family is the consolation prize for not making it to the pageant.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

By Chris Hedges

Nation Books, 240 pages

The Swan’s transparent message is that once these women have been surgically “corrected” to resemble mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their problems will be solved. “This is a positive show where we want to see how these women can make their dreams come true once they have what they want,” said Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia North America, producers of The Swan. Troubled marriages, abusive relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem problems—all will vanish along with the excess fat off their thighs. They will be new. They will be flawless. They will be celebrities.

In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens. People knelt before God and the church in the Middle Ages. We flock hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and reality television. We fashion our lives as closely to these lives of gratuitous consumption as we can. Only a life with status, physical attributes and affluence is worth pursuing.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows such as The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super Sweet 16, and The Real Housewives of ... The American oligarchy, one percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom ninety percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced, perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw $200,000 parties and have $1 million dollar weddings. This life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying.

The working classes, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are shut out of television’s gated community. They have become largely invisible. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved, and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling, and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. It is, as Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities, evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help bestsellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality and who grasp the hollowness of celebrity culture, are shunned and condemned for their pessimism. The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation, and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled, and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame, and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything.

American Idol, a talent-search reality show that airs on Fox, is one of the most popular shows on American television. The show travels to different American cities in a “countrywide search” for the contestants who will continue to the final competition in Hollywood. The producers of the show introduced a new focus in the 2008-2009 season on the personal stories of the contestants.

During the Utah auditions we meet Megan Corkrey, 23, the single mother of a toddler. She has long dirty-blond hair, and a wholesome, pretty face. A tattoo sleeve covers her right arm from the shoulder to below the elbow. She wears a black, grey, and white dress reminiscent of the 1950s, and ballet flats. She is a font designer.

In an interview Corkrey says, “I am a mother. He will be two in December.” We see Corkrey with a little blond boy, reading a book together on a beanbag chair. Breezy guitar music plays. “His name is Ryder.” We see Corkrey kissing Ryder and putting him to bed. “I recently decided to get a divorce, which is new.” The guitar music turns pensive. “The life I had planned for us, the life I’d pictured, wasn’t going to happen. I cried a lot for a while. I don’t think I stopped crying. And Ryder, of course, you can be crying, and then he walks by, and does something ridiculous, and you can’t help but smile and laugh.” We see Corkrey laughing with her son on the floor. “And a little piece kind of heals up a little bit.”

The montage of Corkrey’s life fills the screen as the rock ballad swells. “I can laugh at myself, while the tears roll down …,” sings the band. We see Corkrey and her son looking out a window. She holds her son up to a basketball hoop as he clutches a blue ball.

“It was kind of crazy, I found out Idol was coming to Salt Lake, and I’d just decided on the divorce, and for the first time in my life it was a crossroads where ANYTHING can happen!! So why not go for what I love to do?”

Corkrey enters the audition room. The judges—Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi—are seated behind a long table in front of a window. They each have large red tumblers with “Coca-Cola” printed on them. They seem charmed by her exuberant presence. She sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Show Boat. Her performance is charismatic and quirky. She improvises freely and assuredly with the rhythms and notes of the song, beaming the whole time.

“I really like you,” says Abdul. “I’m bordering on loving you. I think I’m loving you. Yeah, I do. Simon?”

“One of my favorite auditions,” says Cowell in a monotone.

“Yess!!” grins Corkrey.

“Because you’re different,” continues Cowell sternly. “You are one of the few I’m going to remember. I like you, I like your voice, I mean seriously good voice. I loved it.”

“You’re an interesting girl. You have a glow about you, you have an incredible face,” says DioGuardi.

The judges vote.

“Absolutely yes,” says Cowell.

“Love you,” says Abdul.

“Yes!” says DioGuardi.

“One hundred percent maybe,” smiles Jackson.

“You’re goin’ to Hollywood!” cheers DioGuardi as the inspirational rock music swells.

“YESS!!! Thank you, guys!” Corkrey screams with delight. She runs out of the audition room into a crowd of her cheering friends. The music plays as she dances down the street waving her large yellow ticket, the symbol of her success.

Celebrities, who often come from humble backgrounds, are held up as proof that anyone, even we, can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are living proof that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment, are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, eventually leads to frustration, anger, insecurity, and invalidation. It results, ironically, in a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. We beg for more. We ingest these lies until our money runs out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity culture. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. Those who fail to meet the ideal are belittled and mocked. Friends and allies are to be used and betrayed during the climb to fame, power and wealth. And when they are no longer useful they are to be discarded. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency, and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, voted off a reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, non-persons. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with others are forms of weakness. And those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose. Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are branded as failures. They are responsible for their rejection. They are deficient.

In an episode from the second season of the CBS reality game show Survivor, cast members talk about exceptional friendships they have made within their “tribe,” or team. Maralyn, also known as Mad Dog, is a fifty-two-year-old retired police officer with a silver crew cut and a tall, mannish build. She is sunning herself in a shallow stream, singing “On the Street Where You Live.” Tina, a personal nurse and mother, walks up the stream toward her.

“Sing it, girl! I just followed your voice.”

“Is it that loud?”

“Maralyn, she’s kind of like our little songbird, and our little cheerleader in our camp,” Tina says in an interview. “Maralyn and I have bonded, more so than I have with any of the other people. It might be our ages, it might just be that we kind of took up for one another.”

We see Tina and Maralyn swimming and laughing together in the river.

“Tina is a fabulous woman,” says Maralyn in an interview. “She is a star. I trust Tina the most.”

Maralyn and Tina’s tribe, Ogakor, loses an obstacle course challenge, in which all the tribe members are tethered together. If one person falls, the entire team is slowed. Mad Dog Maralyn falls several times, and is hauled back to her feet by Colby, the “cowboy” from Texas.

Because they lost, the members of Ogakor must vote off one of their tribe members. The camera shows small groups of twos and threes in huddled, intense discussion.

“The mood in the camp is a very sad mood, but it’s also a very strategic mood,” says Tina. “Everyone’s thinking, ‘Who’s thinking what?’ ”

The vote is taken at dusk, in the “tribal council” area. It resembles a set from Disney World’s Adventureland. A ring of tall stone monoliths is stenciled with petroglyphs. It is lit by torches. A campfire blazes in the center of the ring. Primitive drums and flutes are heard.

The Ogakor team arrives at dusk, each holding a torch. They sit before Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst.

“So I just want to talk about a couple of big topics,” says Probst, who wears a safari outfit. “Trust. Colby, is there anyone here that you don’t trust, wouldn’t trust?”

“Sure,” says Colby.

“Tell me about that.”

“Well, I think that’s part of the game,” says Colby. “It’s way too early to tell exactly who you can trust, I think.”

“What about you, Mitchell? Would you trust everyone here for forty-two days?” asks Probst. “I think the motto is, ‘Trust no one,’ ” answers Mitchell. “I have a lot of faith in a good number of these people, but I couldn’t give 100 percent of my trust.”

“What about you, Mad Dog?” asks Probst. “These all your buddies?”

Maralyn looks around at her team members. “Yes,” she says unequivocally. “Yes. And, Jeff, I trust with my heart.”

“I think friendship does enter into it at some point,” says Jerri. “But I think it’s very important to keep that separate from the game. It’s two totally different things. And that’s where it gets tricky.” Jerri will say later, as she casts her vote, “This is probably one of the most difficult things for me to do right now. It’s purely strategic, it’s nothing personal. I am going to miss you dearly.”

“Jeff,” Maralyn breaks in. “I’m conjoined with Tina. She is a constellation. And, the cowboy [Colby]! The poor cowboy has dragged me around so many times [during the obstacle course challenge]. I appreciate it.”

“I’d do it again,” laughs Colby broadly.

“Hey, you hear that? He’d do it again!” says Maralyn.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

By Chris Hedges

Nation Books, 240 pages

It is time to vote. Each team member walks up a narrow bridge lit by flaring torches, again looking like something out of Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, made of twisted logs lashed with vines, to a stone table. They write the name of the person they want to eliminate and put it in a cask with aboriginal carvings. Most of the votes are kept anonymous, the camera panning away as each person writes. But as Tina, Mad Dog Maralyn’s best friend and “constellation,” casts her vote, she shows us her ballot: Mad Dog. “Mad Dog, I love you,” she says to the camera, “I value your friendship more than anything. This vote has everything to do with a promise I made, it has nothing to do with you. I hope you’ll understand.” She folds her vote and puts it in the cask.

“Once the vote is tallied, the decision is final, and the person will be asked to leave the tribal council area immediately,” says Probst.

Five people of the seven voted to eliminate Maralyn.

“You need to bring me a torch, Mad Dog,” says Probst. She does so, first taking off her green baseball cap and putting it affectionately on Amber, who sits next to her and gives her a hug. The camera shows Tina looking impassive.

“Mad Dog,” says Probst, holding the flaming torch Maralyn has brought him, “the tribe has spoken.” He takes a large stone snuffer and extinguishes the torch. The camera shows Marilynn’s rueful face behind the smoking, blackened torch. “It’s time for you to go,” says Probst. She leaves without speaking or looking at anyone, although there are a few weak “bye” ’s from the tribe.

Before the final credits, we are shown who, besides her friend Tina, voted to eliminate Maralyn. They are Amber, who gave Maralyn a farewell hug along with Mitchell, Jerri and Colby, Maralyn’s “cowboy.”

Celebrity culture plunges us into this moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to “succeed.” The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the highest good. “I simply agreed to go along with [Jerri and Amber] because I thought it would get me down the road a little better,” says young, good-looking Colby in another episode of Survivor. “I wanna win. And I don’t want to talk to anybody else about loyalties—don’t give me that crap. I haven’t trusted anyone since day one, and anyone playing smart should have been the same way.”

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths; superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. In his masterful essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote: “The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”

“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition,” wrote C. Wright Mills:

In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains access to the President of the United States. It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military. It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated. Then, a second feature of the star system begins to work: all the stars of any other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward the new star and he toward them. The success, the champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely with other champions to populate the world of the celebrity.

Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside to the glamour of celebrity culture. “If only that were me,” we sigh as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the red carpet. But we are as transfixed by the inverse of celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and debasement that comprise tabloid television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and The Howard Stern Show. We secretly exult: “At least that’s not me.” It is the glee of cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds to the Roman Colosseum, to the pillory and the stocks, to public hangings and to traveling freak shows.

In one segment from Jerry Springer: Wild & Outrageous, Volume 1, a man and his wife sit on the Springer stage. They are obese, soft, and pale, with mounds of fluffy brown hair. Their bodies look like uncooked dough. The man wears a blue polo shirt and brown pants. The woman wears a dark pink shirt with long sleeves and a long black skirt.

“I have a sex fantasy,” the man tells his wife solemnly. His voice is quiet and nasal. She recoils with raised eyebrows. “Do you remember that bachelor party I went to three weeks ago? There was a stripper there. She was dressed up as a cheerleader, and she just turned me on. I mean, I got—I have this thing—I don’t know if it’s her or the outfit, I think it’s the outfit. But, I’d really love for you to dress up as a cheerleader. For me. And do a cheer that’s especially for me, and. … You could be my cheerleader … of my heart.”

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

By Chris Hedges

Nation Books, 240 pages

The woman, still sitting in her chair, has her hands on her hips and looks affronted. There are close-ups of the Springer audience bursting into raucous laughter, hoots, and applause.

“I brought her here to show you—” continues the man. He is cut off by the whoops of the audience.

“Let’s bring her out!” says Jerry. The audience cheers.

Shaking yellow pom-poms, a skinny blond girl in a purple and yellow cheerleader outfit runs out onstage. Her body is like a stick. She turns a cartwheel and moons the audience, smacking her own bottom several times. Behind her, the obese man is shown grinning. The obese woman is waving in disgust at the cheerleader.

“Is everybody ready to do a cheer just for Jerry?!” squeaks the cheerleader.

“YEAAAHHH!!!” hollers the audience.

“I can’t hear yoooouuuuuu …” pipes the cheerleader, lifting her skirt up to her waist.

The audience goes crazy. She leads a cheer, spelling out Jerry’s name.

“Now that you’ve seen these pom-poms, how’d you like to see these pom-poms?” she squeaks, shaking her flat chest. A rapid electronic beat fills the studio, and the lights dim. She takes off her top, her bra, and, gyrating her hips, slides off her skirt and underwear. Her bottom is about three feet from the whooping men in the front row. The obese man’s arms and legs are waving around in excitement, as his grimacing wife shakes her head repeatedly. The naked cheerleader leans back on the floor and does the splits in the air. She then jumps into the fat man’s lap and smothers his face in her tiny chest. She runs into the audience and does the same to another man and a gray-haired woman in a cardigan who looks like a grandmother. The cameramen follow the cheerleader closely, zooming in on her breasts and ass.

While the naked, ponytailed girl runs around leaping into the laps of members of the audience, the crowd begins chanting, under the deafening electronic music, “JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!”

The girl finally runs back onstage. The music stops. She collects her pom-poms and sits down naked, dressed only in a pair of white tennis shoes and bobby socks.

“JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!” chants the crowd.

In a later portion of the episode, Jerry says to the man, “So this is really what you want your wife to be doing?” The naked cheerleader is seated beside him, and his wife is no longer onstage.

“Oh, yes!” he exclaims. The audience laughs at his fervor. “It really excites me, Jerry. It really does.”

“All right,” says Jerry. “Well, are we ready to bring her out?”

“YEESSSSS!!!” bellows the audience.

“Here she is!” announces Jerry. “Cheerleading Kristen!”

The wife runs out onto the stage. She is in an identical purple and yellow cheerleading outfit, with yellow pom-poms. Her fluffy brown hair is tied into two bunches on the sides of her head. She resembles a poodle. Her exposed midriff is a thick, white roll of fat that hangs over her short purple skirt and shakes with every step.

She turns a clumsy somersault. She prances heavily back and forth on the stage. She does cancan kicks. She yells “WHOOOOOO!!!” Her husband is seen behind her, yelling with the rest of the audience. She leads a cheer of Jerry’s name, but forgets the Y. The audience laughs. She finishes the cheer. There is a shot of Jerry watching quietly at the back of the studio, leaning against the soundman’s booth, his hand covering his mouth.

The wife continues to high-step back and forth. The clapping and cheers subside. The audience has fallen silent. “WHOOO!!” she yells again. She does, in complete silence, a few more lumbering kicks. A few individuals snicker in the crowd. Jerry is shown at the soundman’s booth, doubled over in soundless laughter. The woman is confused. She looks to the side of the stage, as though she is being prompted. “Oh – OK,” she says.

She takes center stage again. “All right,” she says. “You’ve seen these pom-poms.” Individual giggles are heard from the audience. “Now what about THESE?” Her husband watches eagerly. The naked stripper, sitting behind her, laughs.

The stripping music comes on. The lights dim. The wife does more cancan kicks. She trots back and forth. She takes off all her clothes except her underpants. The audience is clapping to the beat, whooping, and laughing. Some of them are covering their eyes. Others are covering their mouths. She continues prancing onstage, doing the occasional kick, until the music stops.

“JER-RY!! JER-RY!! JER-RY!!” chants the crowd. Her husband wraps his arms around her naked torso and kisses her.

“You made my wildest dreams come true,” he tells her.

Individuals laugh in the audience.

“Aww,” says Jerry, shaking his head. “That is true love.” The woman collects her scattered clothes. “That is—that is—that is—true love.”

Celebrities are skillfully used by their handlers and the media to compensate for the increasingly degraded and regimented existences that most of us endure in a commodity culture. Celebrities tell us we can have our revenge. We can triumph. We can, one day, get back at the world that has belittled and abused us. It happens in the ring. It happens on television. It happens in the movies. It happens in the narrative of the Christian Right. It happens in pornography. It happens in the self-help manuals and on reality television. But it almost never happens in reality.

Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do not need. Celebrities humanize commercial commodities. They present the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state. Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an episode of America’s Next Top Model, gushes to a group of aspiring young models, “Our job as models is to sell.” But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy. The commercial “personalizing” of the world involves oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion. “We sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures Honest Joes at heart,” Richard Hoggart warned in The Uses of Literacy. We do not learn more about Barack Obama by knowing what dog he has bought for his daughters or if he still smokes. This personalized trivia, passed off as news, diverts us from reality.

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojeck calls celebrity culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.” He goes further:

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system. The family, the state and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production. However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded. The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity. The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation.’ Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity.

This cult of distraction, as Rojeck points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, and economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations who have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them.

Celebrities have fame free of responsibility. The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

Marie Cocco’s

So is there good news, or bad? Are we poised for an economic rebound or are we perched on the edge of another unnerving cycle in which Wall Street analysts—along with politicians with a huge stake in talking things up—try to chat us out of our funk?

Goldman Sachs, fresh from returning the $10 billion infusion of taxpayer money that helped keep it afloat during last fall’s credit crisis, posted a record-breaking $3 billion profit in the second quarter. That’s enough to dedicate nearly half the firm’s revenues to compensation—that is, to the eye-popping salaries and obscene bonuses that we’ve been led to understand were one cause of the financial and economic meltdown. Nonetheless, Goldman’s good fortune is good news for New York limo drivers, landscapers, bartenders, nannies, real estate brokers and home-improvement contractors. Sometimes a torrent really does trickle down.

Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts are raising profit forecasts for U.S. companies at a pace not seen since April 2007, according to the Bloomberg financial news service. So things are looking up if you’re an executive who can boast of achieving those fatter profits, or even if you are a middle-class investor worried about your retirement portfolio.

But then, there’s Staples.

The office-supply chain sent me an e-mail advertisement just the other day boasting that it is offering 25-cent specials on some back-to-school supplies. Glue, pencil sharpeners, erasers, pens, pencil cases—a quarter is all it takes.

As a leading economic indicator, I’m going with Staples.

Nothing deflates irrational exuberance like retailers who are practically giving stuff away to get people into their stores. This is how things look in the real economy, the one in which unemployment is 9.5 percent—the highest in 26 years—and is expected to rise. This is the economy of pay cuts and freezes, reduced hours and workers whose employers who have stopped contributing to 401(k) retirement plans.

Those upgraded profit forecasts that are such good news for investors are based on analysts’ views that business costs have been reduced so much that profits can rise. But the “costs” that have been pared amount to far more than free coffee in the break room. The cuts have come directly from layoffs, reduced work hours, pay freezes and benefit reductions that are going to continue dragging down the economy.

That’s why the arithmetic of this recession still looks pretty dismal, and why the politics and psychology of it are starting to become disconnected from reality in a scary way. Scary because we seem ready again to declare that everything is hunky-dory—or soon will be—because certain elements of a rebound, notably those tied to investments, are becoming visible. This should really worry us.

Because during the past decade, a recovery was declared successful even as it was detached from the larger mission of building an economy based on rising productivity and, most crucially, rising incomes, across a broad swath of society. For years it was a “jobless recovery’’—an upturn in overall economic activity that wasn’t based on job creation but relied heavily on more spending by those who already have jobs.

Meanwhile, we seem poised for continued income stagnation among most workers. Even when the economy starts producing jobs, it is unclear whether business will hire back the same number of workers. The slack labor market will depress incomes, as workers eager for employment will accept lower pay and stingier benefits than those they may have enjoyed in the job they lost in the downturn.

Where, after all, will even the most skilled autoworker earn comparable pay and benefits to those that were lost? Nowhere.

From 2000 to 2007, households with working-age adults made no income gains at all, according to an analysis by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute. It’s the first time on record that there was an economic expansion that didn’t revive incomes. This contributed mightily to the credit crisis—as incomes stagnated, more and more people turned to riskier and riskier borrowing to fill the gap between what they earned and what they wanted to buy.

It’s true there was an unacceptable cultural expectation that you can live beyond your means. But even in the era of 25-cent specials and two-for-one restaurant deals, families need a means to live. Only when we have that again can you believe anyone who says our economic nightmare is over.

GORE VIDAL

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.

I was first made aware of this development in 1946 when I was limping around in army uniform in New York City and noticed that the local police (admired by none) were beginning to run wild, possibly because so many of the able-bodied young had, like myself, been serving for some years overseas. I recall that some sort of parade was being held and what looked to be a thousand or two citizens were trying unsuccessfully to cross Fifth Avenue. I waited on a street corner for an hour in my uniform, limping from my disability earned by my service in the war. But after nearly an hour of waiting, I stopped a policeman who was wandering idly around and asked him politely when I’d be able to cross Fifth Avenue. He shrieked at me, “Go call da mayor!” And I said, “Oh I will, I will.” Actually, I did know the mayor at that time, but he was not available on that sacred day. I did make a protest as a veteran who had mustered out with a disability for life, but this seemed to be a cause of great merriment. In any case, that was my first experience of a Nazi-like police force in New York City, a city pretty much home to me from childhood on.

I was also aware as the years passed how often friends would be beaten up in front of what were called “faggot bars.” Meanwhile, the police never seemed to stop an incessant whining about the enormous dangers to which their work subjected them as they gallantly served our great city, even though they were insufficiently paid and admired. I thought then that the whole damn lot of them should be sent to Camp Lejeune to be put through a strong course of basic training by the Marine Corps.

I also propose this as a solution to the problem that they currently pose us, not only on Fifth Avenue but in Harvard Yard, where a young policeman recently distinguished himself by being rude to the president, complaining with the irresistible policeman’s whine that he and the president were just alike in their problems, only he was being particularly bugged by the press, in effect, said, “join the club.” Now that they were becoming buddies in embarrassment, the little corporal said, characteristically allowing his envy to show, “You’ve got a bigger lawn than mine”—thus, proving how serious daydreaming can place yourself into a position of parity.

But the true meaning of the mess in Cambridge has been carefully avoided by a media incapable of getting the point to anything if they can excitingly change the subject to something else. So here we now have a cast of characters that includes the president himself, a distinguished scholar and a feckless young policeman who on the radio said, when asked why he had behaved so rudely to the “old” scholar, he said because the old guy had been rude about his mother. I haven’t heard this excuse since the playground of St. Alban’s in 1935.

One interesting fallout from the tragic business in Cambridge – and it is tragic, let me tell you – was that the president was forced to speak suddenly in his own voice, and at his very best, and not swathed in the authority of his great rank, but simply as a citizen making a sensible comment about a nobody policeman. Yes, I mean “nobody” literally – I know all human beings, if they are Americans, are highly valued and worshiped, indeed, for their wonderfulness and their helpfulness to fellow citizens. I state this ironically, as you might suspect. After all, why would the young man be armed unless he was a superior citizen, elected, as it were, by his fellows to ride herd on an unruly mob unless he was demonstrably special by virtue of being legally armed, which is how we are supposed to tell them from us?

But there the president was, saying, this is stupid. But he did not say, “How dare you go after a 58-year-old man who is one of the great scholars of the country and think you can get away with it?” Unfortunately, it never seemed to have crossed the president’s mind in this crisis that he is expected to do something about it. I know there is a great deal, as they say, on his plate, but after displays of this sort, he should call together a commission involving every section of the country. Every municipality is complaining about local police forces run wild. And no one does anything about it. And our masters are armed to the teeth and would seem more likely to fire at us instead of at the troublemakers. I can’t think of any civilized country that would allow this, from the look of these bulky guardians of the peace, to whom no right-minded person would allow even a slingshot to be given.

So, we are a weirdly militarized citizenry governed by the worst elements in the United States, and something is bound to blow up, as I have felt for some time now. In my wanderings around the U.S., I talk to people without money, without power, ordinary voters, as well as nowadays, people maimed by war, or time, or life or whatever, and I am convinced more and more that this is a vicious country in which the police are allowed to run amok, absolutely independent of anyone, and that is why from time to time they are allowed to get away with murder. One surprisingly knew that a wrinkle has been discovered in the seamless surface of our troubled state. Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

I would suggest that the president, if he wants to be useful—and not many presidents do in my experience—he might as well call together a commission in response to citizens of every major municipality in the United States who are complaining to central authority about police forces out of control. And no one dares do anything because the police will say, “Well, you know they are acting like this because they are bad people who hate us because we are good people, rescuing cats from trees and otherwise loved by every decent person in the land.”

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves. Certainly to hear them complain—you’ve never heard such whines as from a policeman who feels he’s been wronged! Apparently, all Earth owes him a living, and he’s the bravest man on any block.

One aspect of the events in Cambridge was that the president could have been characteristically brilliant on this subject, as he has been on so many subjects having to do with our general welfare as citizens (and he is also one of the useful, hands-on presidents), but the media, conditioned always to miss the point, went out of their way to miss the point here by many a mile. They blamed it all on – you guessed it – RACE! Well, you can blame anything on race, including Scripture, or the tides and the moon, and this and that, but that president and that professor are by coincidence both black, which to the plain horror of the media, had nothing to do with the brave little corporal who was feeling his oats and wanted to have some fun with an older man who couldn’t fight back. They get very bored in those jobs, and, of course, he was armed with a gun, and able to kill anybody he wanted and probably get away with it—what a temptation!

Anyway, the president has not done what he should have done, which is to have reminded us that the United Kingdom—a more livable nation than the United States, let me say with first-hand experience of both—has disarmed its police. There are no angry men wandering around carrying guns over there. This is a lesson to us, but we’ve armed practically every grange house in the United States because our regular guys just want to swagger around.

Incidentally, it was quite funny to hear one of the favorite adjectives that our new masters use to describe vicious civilians who deliberately mock them, like the professor and myself on Fifth Avenue, and I think they would include the president, too, if the Secret Service was not lurking nearby. Their term for any civilian who criticizes them is “arrogant,” but they are themselves far gone in arrogance and spite.

Let us accept the facts staring us in the face—that demonstrably we are no longer a republic. We are no longer governed by laws, only by armed men and force. This is just like the days of Billy the Kid. You have an armed man going down a dusty street and that is authority. And it has come to this for us.

If the media will ever become alert to real news, they will put paid to their universal cry that no matter what happens of a disagreeable nature in the streets or elsewhere in public, it is due to racial hatred. Both corporal and president made no attempt to clear this matter up. Arguably, you can say that everything is subject to it or tarred by it, but it was not true in this case. The young man with the gun seems to have been correct on these issues; he was training others like himself to put up with the lesser breeds, and to say that this was race-inspired because both the president and the professor were black—am I making too subtle a point?—is a serious, murderous mistake in a country like ours.

As I listened to the fallout from these stirring events, I wondered if this might be a moment when the media would reform themselves and only print actual news; for one thing, not all explosions of temper and so on are attributable to race. It would be nice if the media realized how dangerous they when they begin to falsify motives which, to be blunt, they have no authority to do. If a black person is in any way in a jam of any kind, it is because he is responding to racism or if a white person goes berserk over anything with anybody, racism drove him to it. This is a great, great red herring like some giant whale gliding across the pages of police dockets.

So let me mention the real issue. The real issue is class. We have the greatest divide between the very rich and the very poor of any country on Earth, surpassing even France. And this division gets wider and wider as financial disasters overwhelm us. We were already in pretty bad shape before things began to fall apart a year or two ago. We must acknowledge that our character, never much good in these matters, is now reprehensible, and the police seem to have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge for a full professor and his—plainly, in their view—insulting income, which they figure must be considerable. The days of greed through which we all lived now have not done us much good, nor have they taught us any lessons, but you cannot live long with such divisions, which in my view as an outsider overlooking the scene seems to be a nation of total liars. Everybody is lying. Television lies, candidates lie. And everyone says, “Oh they always have.” I love that excuse. Well they haven’t always done that. Sometimes lying to the people is a great mistake. And it is well-known that the rich will tell almost any lie to avoid paying taxes.

My last view of what looked to me to be parade’s end occurred during a walk in the woods that I took below a Duke University campus building, where I saw a broken bridge over a stream. I turned to what looked to be a local farmer, who realized that I was looking with “suspicious” interest at a vast pile of repair work: bags of cement, etc., and he anticipated my question: “They’re going to rebuild this bridge—it’s something very, very big,” he said. “Why in the middle of the woods?” I asked. “There are no roads here.” He said, “No, there’s a trail, true, it’s not much of a trail.” “So why are they building such a huge bridge,” I wondered, “when they’ve been happy apparently for many years with a very small bridge?” And he said, “Well, we’ve been told by the feds that they fear that there may be civilian insurrections. And they want to be prepared for them, and they need this bridge, no matter how small, to cross the stream in case of an emergency.”

Needless to say, I had no quick rejoinder. But he seemed to want to talk, and so I said, “What was here before?” And he said, “A small bridge which a small pickup truck could go back and forth over.” So I asked, “And who told you that it was in case of civilian problems?” And he said, “Well, everybody told us that and explained the size of it and most people here thought it was better to have a big bridge than no bridge at all, and here we are.”

I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”

A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer.

FRED REED

AFTER

It could almost make you turn aginst the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Anti-war.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled The War in Afghanistn is Not Worth Another American Life. I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed ninety-five Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the

BEFORE

Joshua Bernard

Somewhere there is a picture of me, looking almost exactly the same.

The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:

“Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard's family is feeling right now, and that Curley's ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency.’

I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.

Big fucking deal. Shit happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The other kid is dead.

But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the US.

But Gates. The words “decency” and “unconscionable” coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. “Intelligence” agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK—they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping acquiescent ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam—they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before—but they learned something more important: Their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.

Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.

In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunch rolls out of his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the trinity of the badly wouned, Mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.

Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional sadists do things to people that would make you gag.

Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t sign.

Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.

Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to refer to smarmy over-groomed bloodthirsty office warts as pussies, saying that they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzalez, Clinton, Perleman, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, George Will, Dershwitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.

Blue Dogs: The Special Interest Pets

“Fiscal conservative” is one of those terms used by politicians of all sorts to describe themselves, without any real justification. Parroted mindlessly from one news cycle to the next by major media outlets, that phrase is often used to mislead the public about the priorities and policies favored by those who claim to embody budgetary prudence.
Consider the Democrats in the Blue Dog caucus, who constantly trumpet their fiscal conservatism and enjoy hearing that claim echoed in the media, especially now, when they are threatening to block health care reform. The Blue Dogs don’t like the public option for national health insurance; they bemoan the estimated trillion-dollar cost of covering everyone; and they zealously defend the prerogatives of the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical manufacturers (who coincidentally give them millions of dollars in contributions). When it comes to spending money on the health of uninsured or underinsured constituents, the Blue Dogs worry about every penny.
But when the budget debate turns to military spending, the voices of the Blue Dogs suddenly turn sweetly indulgent. Confronted with the gross waste of taxpayer dollars on Pentagon boondoggles, including weapons programs that are outdated or simply don’t work, these fierce budget watchdogs lose their bark and bite. They never lose their appetite for useless contracting that brings money to their own districts, however.
The F-22 fighter plane, touted as the most advanced military aircraft in the world, offers a fine example of this syndrome. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is trying to cut the F-22 program because the planes don’t function very well, aren’t needed in the foreseeable future and cost nearly $400 million each. In a speech he delivered on July 17 about the need to reform the defense budget, the exasperated defense chief said: “Every defense dollar diverted to fund excess or unneeded capacity—whether for more F-22s or anything else—is a dollar that will be unavailable to take care of our people, to win the wars we are in, to deter potential adversaries and to improve capabilities in areas where America is underinvested and potentially vulnerable.”
His pleas for fiscal sanity have been consistently ignored by Blue Dog Democrats as well as Republicans, who have joined forces to save the F-22. Among the proud ringleaders of this campaign is Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall, whose House district happens to include contractors with deep interests in the jet program. Unconcerned with ever-increasing cost overruns or questions about the aircraft’s safety and usefulness, Marshall recently corralled enough votes of his fellow Blue Dogs to save the F-22 program in a committee showdown.
Indeed, Marshall is typical of the Blue Dog mentality in his enthusiasm for useless military spending. He is an outspoken advocate of the missile defense program—perhaps the biggest waste of money ever undertaken by government, because it doesn’t work as advertised and almost certainly never will—at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars so far. As far as the Blue Dogs and their Republican allies are concerned, there is hardly ever such a thing as a wasteful military contract—and certainly never in their own districts. The United States now spends on defense roughly the total amount spent by all the other countries in the world combined, yet the fiscal conservatives rarely ever find programs worth cutting. We also spend more per capita on health care than most developed nations, yet our politicians cannot figure out how to make that huge expenditure pay for universal care, although every other wealthy nation does it.
So whenever someone describes the Blue Dogs as fiscally conservative because they oppose health care reform, remember how promiscuously they spend our money on projects that are far more wasteful and far less likely to benefit anyone, except the contractors who donate to their campaign coffers. Remember that self-righteous posturing over spending has very little to do with saving public money or serving the nation’s greatest needs. When politicians say they’re fiscally conservative, chances are that they are anything but.

WHAT CAUSES AUTISM

"There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can’t compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks … to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons," actor and comedian Denis Leary controversially argued with patented flippancy in a chapter called "Autism Shmautism" from his 2008 book Why We Suck: A Feel-Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid. "I don’t give a shit what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you—yer kid is NOT autistic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both."
That explosive insult, intensified by Leary’s decision to pen his riotous book under the assumptive moniker "Dr. Denis Leary," is just one of many bombs that has rocked either side of autism’s increasingly contentious divide. That currently includes, on one side, scientists and researchers hard at work on discovering the causes of the escalating neurological and developmental disorder, which according to a recent Cambridge University study could affect one in every 64 children. Complicating those efforts is the fact that autism’s far-ranging spectrum of psychological conditions has only widened with time, an increase in diagnosis, awareness and the overall environmental toxicity of our lives which we take for granted.
But Leary’s crack also roiled the other side of autism’s battlefield. It’s commandeered by distraught parents of autistic children, who have mobilized their frustration with a medical and pharmaceutical establishment increasingly short on definitive answers but seemingly long on unnecessary pharmaceuticals and inflammatory theories. Along the way, it has become a critical mass movement aimed at injecting major amounts of anecdotal evidence into what before was almost purely a psychiatric or scientific debate.
As a result, the conflict over autism has come to resemble autism itself: A connectivity disorder, fraught with crossed neurological wiring, threatening to spark into mass distraction.
Throwing fuel onto that already considerable fire is the newfound publicity parents have received thanks to the help of celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, who helped found Generation Rescue, a research, treatment and public relations program that has, among other things, launched a full-frontal assault on what it argues is too many toxic vaccines given to too many children in their first few vulnerable years of life. And they’re not alone: From Oprah Winfrey and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to doctors and researchers, Generation Rescue and other organizations, including the Coalition for SafeMinds, a private non-profit investigating the dangers of mercury and thimerosal in medical products and vaccines, are charging into the breach with facts and scores of studies.
"There’s no queston that, along with clean water, vaccines are the primary public healthy victory—miracle really—of the last 75 years," explained pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp to AlterNet by phone.
Karp speaks with authority from either side of the autism divide: An assistant professor of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, he is also probably the most widely read pediatrician in America, thanks to his successful books The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block. And as a pediatrician to celebrities like Madonna and more, he’s not lacking in credibility when it comes to publicity either. But he’s not a fan of justifiably distressed parents of autistic children railing against the scientific record, such as it is.

"To look at vaccines as anything other than a victory is twisting the truth," he added. "That is not to say that we don’t have to alter them regularly, but we’re not just giving shots to make more money. We’d make more money if we didn’t give them. What has happened is that, in the autism debate, anecdote has replaced science in parents’ minds. And that’s easy when a child gets a vaccine and then suddenly, they’re not normal anymore. But you need science to make intuition and anecdote work, and science has demonstrated that vaccines aren’t related to autism."
That has been borne out by hundreds of studies reviewed by America’s chief independent advisor on science and health policy, the Institute of Medicine, as well as studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and more. Recent research has dug deeper, finding that autism could have its roots deep in the brain’s neurological connectivity or its genetic mutations. In a recent study published in Archives of General Psychiatry, University of North Carolina researchers discovered that the brain’s amygdalae, almond-shaped nuclei tasked with processing memory and emotional reactions, was 13 percent larger in younger children with autism than those without. Another new study has found that children from mothers with autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis are three times likelier to have autism than those who are not.
And so the list of theories goes on, as does the scientific research, in spite of the highly public battle over vaccines.

But parents of autistic children have heard all kinds of theories before, some of them that sound like they came right out of Leary’s book, and none of which have seemed to help stem the increase in autism. During the ’50s and even to our current era, the "Refrigerator Mother" theory has posited that cold, distant and otherwise abusive parenting is partially to blame for children diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. This psychogenic thesis was indirectly put forward by Child Psychiatry author Dr. Leo Kanner, who founded the first child psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and, together with Hans Asperger, pioneered the modern study of autism. Children exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only … were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude."
And while the theory has been largely discredited in America, other countries still find some merit to it. As the Guardian reported in 2007, South Korea and Seoul National University’s influential child psychiatrist Michael Hong has openly disputed the consensually accepted rise of autism, putting the numbers closer to 1 in every 10,000 children. ... Hong claims that much of what is now diagnosed as autism can be attributed to reactive attachment disorder, in which children between six months and three years—autism’s sweet spot, if you will—fail to form normal attachments to their parents because of neglect, abuse, separation or just a general lack of responsiveness or attention to their attempts to communicate.
Once you factor in the dramatic rise in the toxicity of our environment or the often unnecessary desire to narcotize our socialization with prescription drugs that come with their own basket of nightmare side effects, including death itself, reasons to unconditionally trust the scientific, medial and pharmaceutical industries have a tendency to disappear outright. In June 2008, the Archives of General Psychiatry published a government-funded Yale University study that concluded citalopram, an antidepressant widely used to treat depression and mood disorders, was no better than a placebo for autistic children’s repetitive behaviors, such as flapping or rocking in an agitated manner. Of course, the list of ways citalopram can fuck you up is much longer than the list of ways it can help. But that didn’t stop doctors from prescribing it to autistic kids, or slow down its profitability. In the last decade, Forest Laboratories, which marketed citalopram as Celexa in the United States, saw its stock surge from around $10 a share to around $50-$80 a share, until the econopocalypse, and perhaps the Yale study, brought it back to Earth.
"According to my friends who’ve attended medical school, much of their time is spent learning the pharmacokinetics of prescription drugs," Jane Johnson, director of the Autism Research Institute’s Defeat Autism Now! project and co-author, with Dr. Bryan Jepson, of Changing the Course of Autism, explained to AlterNet via email. "This is unique to the United States; in other countries, it’s still understood that nutrition plays a vital role in health. But parents can be part of this problem: It’s much easier to simply give a pill and call it a day. I have to admit I’d prefer that myself."
Whether that pill comes in the form of questionable pharma or too-convenient theories about Refrigerator Mothers, medicine and psychiatry have contributed to the breaking of public trust in ways they might not like to admit. It was in fact doctors, led by a surgeon named Andrew Wakefield, that first sparked off the vaccine controversy in 1998, after Wakefield published a study in The Lancet, one of the world’s most well-respected, peer-reviewed medical journals, claiming that there was a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The ensuing firestorm was worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, and its theme of compromised doctors, voracious lawyers and death-bringing vaccines laced with mercury eventually made it onto television in the pilot of the ABC drama Eli Stone.
In short, if scientists, doctors and pill-pushers want to get anywhere with not just anti-vaccine crusaders but autism itself, they are going to have to, whether they like it or not, acknowledge that they are not exactly flawless gatekeepers when it comes to public interest. In fact, that they could be wrong about a great many of things. Especially when it comes to a disorder like autism, which is simply, perhaps purposefully, awash in indefinition. And if the rise of autism can indeed be traced back to diagnosis alone, as some doctors argued to me off the record during research for this article, that would be on the medical community as well. They simply cannot escape being part of the problem, as well as part of the solution.
"Their role could be best described as self-protective and fear-based, in that sound science has not been pursued for fear of what may be discovered," claimed SafeMinds president Theresa Wrangham, in an email to AlterNet. "The restoration of trust in vaccines will follow when independent, unbiased studies are conducted, the true risk and benefit of vaccines in use today are known, and at-risk populations are identified." "Autism is the fastest-growing developmental disability, with a 10 to 17 percent annual growth rate, but diagnosis and increased awareness alone do not seem to account for that dramatic increase," Lee Grossman, chief executive officer of The Autism Society of America, asserted via email to AlterNet. "It is an incredibly complex condition. The saying goes that if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism."

Some help from outside the battle terrain could be on the way, in the form of increased government support from the Obama administration, which has promised increased funding for research, treatment, public awareness and screenings, especially of infants. That’s a marked difference from the previous administration, which was no friend to science or parents in general, if you ask Karp.
"Throughout the past eight years with Bush," he said, "the government was unwilling to advance the issue on the scientific agenda. And that too-slow response by the government and the medical community has made parents feel they had to speak out even more. And it’s not that pediatricians are bad people, but it is true that with tighter insurance reimbursements, we are trying to address health, nutrition and prevention all within the space of a short office visit. What has to give is the conversation. Doctors tend to say, ‘Look just trust me.’"
But that ship just doesn’t sail anymore. Especially in our digital age, where everything from publicly edited knowledge sites like Wikipedia to critical opinion publications like The Huffington Post, which has given opinionated figures like Karp, Carrey and more a platform to share and moderate their theories with sizable readerships, carry just as much weight as the family doctor, who most families don’t actually see more than a few times a year, and too quickly at that. The skepticism extends even to the science itself, which spends billions a year to tear apart a massively complicated human disorder only to often, as Wakefield allegedly did, reassemble it wrongly, and then ask for more funding. And while trial and error are endemic to science, parents of autistic children are exacting in the search for more triumphs and less error, trials and tribulations.
"There seems to be an endless cycle of press releases touting some newfound gene to blame, with each new study failing to replicate the last," argued Johnson. "To date, it’s fair to say that little of use has been found in over a dozen genome scans, and our understanding of how genes work is changing. Many diseases, like heart disease and cancer, are a combination of genes and environment: You’re born with increased risk, but your behaviors and exposures will be pivotal in determining whether or not you get the disease." Wrangham agrees. "From SafeMinds’ perspective, there is a growing body of evidence and research demonstrating that autism is a disorder with a multifactorial etiology that is highly treatable with causation likely to be based on genetic susceptibilities and exposure to environmental factors. There is most likely a genetic predisposition which loads the gun, but ultimately, one or more environmental events are what pulls the trigger."
Wrangham’s weaponry metaphor is apt, given that war terminology worked its way into every facet of the issue I ran into while writing this article. A spokesperson at the National Institute for Mental Health told me to contact researchers and scientists "on the front lines" on the battle against autism, while some parents of children with autism referred to themselves as "warrior moms." For all of their individual beliefs and theories, everyone contacted for this story seemed to be consumed with defeating an overarching enemy that simply escapes concretization.
Karp understands both sides of the mindset. "The battle concerns me as a physician," he admitted. "My life has been dedicated to helping families and children, and I have sometimes put my own family aside to do so. And I’m not alone, so that there are these concerns against the doctors is unfortunate. But parents feel abandoned by the doctors and the system. If their children are diagnosed with a disease, parents have to fight through a bureaucracy that isn’t made to make it easier for them. And while the whole system is stacked against them, they are dealing with the pain and sorrow of their children."
The way forward demands that the political, scientific and medical community and the paying public that it supposedly serves, including parents of children with autism, meet in the middle of the battlefield, shake hands and rebuild that inefficient system from the ground up. Along the way, it must admit that it is not simply vaccines laced with heavy metal, or excessive reliance on deadly prescription pills, or even some undiscovered gene that is the problem. All of those are merely symptoms of a greater disorder, which is the current relationship off all the involved parties, and how they perceive and profit from, unwittingly and otherwise, the data they receive. From pharmaceutical companies capitalizing on autism’s treatment all the way to the parents, as Leary says, just looking to justify their crappy child-rearing skills by doping their kids with pointless antidepressants, everyone needs a wake-up call. Especially since the culture-at-large has been additionally complicated by a dramatic rise in environmental toxicity and increasing distraction, wherein narcotic overstimulation and omnipresent media and technology have given humanity’s collective amygdalae a run for its hard-earned time and money.
"All life is a combination of nature and nurture, or in the current jargon, genetic and epigenetic," Karp concluded. "But there has definitely been a drive towards the mass-production mentality in our lives. We see that in our school system and in the medical community as well. Progress is good, but at a certain point you get to the wrong side of the line where you are missing time to sit and discuss things with your doctor, time to ask a few more questions and to be seen as the full person as you are. Sometimes we are throwing out the baby with the bath water."