A radical in the fifth grade…

Not that I thought of it in this way, but I’m quite sure I had a radical streak in me at an early age. I just didn’t think of things the way other people did. I didn’t get hung up on preordained ways of thinking or solving problems. I cared little for established systems that seemed to veil how things actually worked.

I was quiet a lot of the time because of it. A person like I was (and am) finds it easy to step on toes and absolutely hates doing it. I’m more the quiet, thinking type: I analyze, come up with a solution, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, I try again. But this brings guffaws from lots of folks who are convinced they know a lot and know exactly how a thing should be done, so I’ve often kept quiet. I suspect my quietness has often been misunderstood by others, and I remember times when I’ve opened my mouth and been sure that no one understood me.

An example of the latter happened around a game of “four square” during recess at the religious school where I attended the fifth grade. There were maybe forty kids total in the whole school, and they ranged from kindergarten to a healthy crop of four seniors. Everyone had recess, even the seniors who would mostly stand in a circle by themselves talking of things the rest of us frankly didn’t give a rip about.

Instead, we played four square. One or two of us were pretty good at the game, and it was not uncommon for one of the better players to claim the fourth square for the bulk of a recess. I was just learning the game and had improved to the point that I could start to challenge the better players who were a grade ahead of me.

On this particular recess, I had been in the third square for a while but could not oust the best player from the fourth square. We’d go at it, but whoever was in the first or second square would end up “out” and we would both be safe for another round. Of course, this couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later one of us was going to have to go. I was too much of a threat to hang around in the third square, and I wanted the fourth square, in which I had barely ever set foot, as much as anything.

The play was fierce; the final decision centered on my square. I let a ball go that my opponent had hit. It was out-of-bounds! I knew it, but he was quicker to claim victory than I. “That was in!” I was slower, less confident. “No, it was out!” These may not be the exact words, but something to this effect occurred. The atmosphere got uncomfortable. I started to seethe, and everyone knew I disagreed with my opponent. Before I could properly state my case, democracy charged in to save the day, and the vote was not in my favor. I trudged to the back of the line, knowing for a fact that the ball had been out and that the fourth square should be mine.

At this point you may be wondering, “Is this guy still holding a grudge about a four square game after some twenty years?” Well, no…and at the same time, yes. You see, I don’t care about losing the game and having to go to the back of the line. That would happen many more times during the next six or so years that I spent at the school. It was the after-conversation that keeps me holding a grudge. Someone noticed how upset I was and said something like, “That’s democracy at work.” In effect, democracy had solved the problem and right had been done, so just get over it, kid. In reply, I blurted, “Well then I hate democracy.”

Oh, the chorus of boos! I was immediately shamed into silence. Though I knew I was right, I was the quiet sort. I may not have been right in saying that I hated democracy. I didn’t, and don’t hate it. That was just the heat of the moment spilling out of my pent-up, pre-adolescent pores. No, the problem was that I was right, and I knew it, but my voice didn’t count. No one had a better look at where the ball landed than I. It landed right below my nose. I clearly saw (and remember to this day) the ball landing on the “out” side of the line. The ball had not touched the line. It was out. No one will ever be able to convince me otherwise. I had been six linear inches away from the point of decision. The next closest person had been six feet away.

Democracy had failed, in this instance, to come up with the right answer. In fact, it was not the right time to rely on democracy, practiced as it had been. Sometimes democracy itself has to rely on proximity to a problem, on expertise, on the force of the closest witness. If it doesn’t, it becomes its own type of oppression. We have only to think of the Civil Rights Movement to see this is true. The same change might have been made decades earlier if enough weight had been thrown behind those who saw best and clearest.

But this still does not explain my ongoing grudge. Not at all, because what happened next, after I uttered the impossible words “Then I hate democracy,” is what jangles me to my boots to this day.

“Ooh, liberal,” intoned one of my classmates who was about my age. There was quick agreement and general grumbling about what I had said. My shame deepened. “Liberal” was just about the worst thing a person could be called in that environment. The only way to top it was to say something tasteless about someone else’s mother — and that certainly was not allowed at a religious school such as this.

It was a confusing development for me. I knew I had been right to pick on democracy as the culprit of my untimely four-square demise, but it had obviously come out wrong. So I kept coming back to it, as I tend to do when something stumps me. I considered the resulting “liberal” epithet for years after the fact and decided that’s what it was. It was an epithet of the primary definition: “A defamatory or abusive word or phrase.” A curse word. Something you name a person, place, thing, or idea that you don’t like and completely reject. The problem with epithets, as with this one, is that they almost always conceal the more complex truth of reality. You use the epithet because you don’t understand the thing in question, because it troubles you, and because epithets tend to make things go away. The epithet is a charm, a curse, a spell to banish the ogre from sight.

The irony was immense. In fact, I was not a liberal in the way my classmate meant it. I grew up in what I now consider to be a hyper-conservative environment, but I really didn’t understand the terms conservative and liberal back then. Most folks still don’t understand them. When folks use the term “liberal” in the way it was applied to me in that moment, they mean someone who in their imagination shuns all law and order and civility and who steals from their own pocket through taxes to give to the poor who don’t deserve it because, it is thought, the poor don’t work at all, so serves them right. A manipulative legislative anarchist, might be another way to describe what they actually picture in their running-scared minds (all the more ironic, because this same type of hyper-conservative loves anything to do with the Robin Hood legend and self-identifies with the poor that Robin Hood saves through his robbery of the rich).

“Liberal,” in the mind of this sort of person, is another word for bogey man. The Big Foot, the abominable snow man, goblins and witches and every other monster of the imagination all sprout from the same soil. The thing is too terrible to look at, the fear behind what is unknown is too powerful, like a tsunami that does not exist but, because the cry “tsunami” has gone up, everyone on the beach just runs even though it was a mere child who first said the word after water washed over them where they sat on the fringe, their first experience of what we all know is just a normal wave.

But one only runs when one is sitting on the beach; from one’s own high tower of unquestioned ideology, the tsunami is only an ogre; the epithet is unleashed with full force to banish the thing back into the hole from where it must have crawled.

This is the way such folks use the term “liberal,” and it goes without saying that many of those who consider themselves “liberal” use the term “conservative” in the same unthinking way: as an epithet. To both sides it means enemy, darkness, and evil itself.

How ironic, then, because in another context the same politically hyper-conservative sort of person whose sixth-grade child would already be steeped enough in the going conservative lingo to have the epithet “liberal” spring from their lips during a four-square near-dust-up — this same politically conservative sort of person in another context would deride the same “liberal” for their overridingly strong belief in democracy. “We’re not a democracy,” they would say. “The Founding Fathers started a Republic. Democracy is nothing more than mob rule. Rome weakened and fell because of mob rule, the rowdies in the street. Etc., etc.” And, in fact, this was the going conversation in the environment in which I and many folks like me grew up.

But back to the irony of it! I had been roundly put down not for merely criticizing but for openly declaring that I hated that which a true liberal holds most dear: democracy! It is, after all, the Democratic Party, dear Republicans. Democracy, because a true liberal believes in the ultimate equality of all individuals under the law regardless of race, creed, or sexuality (let the whole mixed bag exist together as long as they don’t threaten anyone’s individual living space and then deal with them as individuals). Democracy, because a true liberal believes everyone should have access to the gears of government. NOT that everyone should get their own way, but that everyone should have equal access. Democracy, because, though it doesn’t always make the right decision, we have to make decisions somehow and the majority vote is the way of decision-making least likely to cause a revolution that might disrupt the equality of all persons, thus eliminating access to the ruling gears of society to some or most.

How I laughed about a dozen years later when I realized for the first time that the only liberal on the four-square court that day was every person but myself!

Then what was I?

Frankly, I was nothing. I was outside. I was not enfranchised. My vote, my protest, did not count as it should have counted, with the proper weight given to it. I was new at the school, and when the reigning prince of the four square court says it’s “in,” then it’s “in.” No one doubted my opponent, who declared quickly and confidently his victory. My reply was quieter than his declaration and must have seemed the whine of a sore loser. Indeed, I was sore. I knew it would be taken this way, and this further weakened my response and raised my frustration. My position was not one of strength, and I had the added pressure of my wanting to belong in a group that yet considered me outsider.

I had learned a valuable lesson: if you want the goods, you have to get to the top of the heap; the closer to the top, the better the goods. In later years, after establishing myself, I would fight the same fight and win, but not that time. My description of what had happened was never heard. My input was not wanted, because to listen to me would not be to depend on the opinion of the all-wise and comfortable majority but would be to trust in the one closest to the occurrence.

My solution would have been a radical way of thinking: let the one closest to the ball make the call? What if he’s wrong or dishonest or just mistaken? Such a thing did not fall within the dominant pure-democratic system already in existence that stated all differences were to be decided by majority vote. I was voted to the back of the line partly by folks who had at the time been at the back of the line, partly by those who had been chatting and not even paying attention to the game, partly by those who were friends with my opponent (put these together and it was an easy majority for him), but it didn’t matter. That was the system in place. I could either join in, or just stop playing.

So I joined in. After my embarrassing declaration that I “hated” democracy, which I knew was not true, and after a host of other such embarrassing occurrences I may one day share in a blog post, I was shamed into it. How does a fifth-grader go about changing the rules of four square against the opinion of everyone else, let alone the system of ignorance in which he finds himself?

Besides, deep down I knew there was a deeper problem — every system depends on honesty, and not everyone is honest. What I learned that day is that the democratic system depends on honesty as much as any other system. If all had been honest, most would have admitted that they didn’t really see the play and that the two of us involved should sort it out rather than having everyone “vote.” A teacher should have gotten involved to play the part of moderator, to hear our separate sides and make a final ruling. That would have been better, I think. I don’t think we would have come to blows about it. On the contrary, we ended up something like best friends as it was, as competitors often do.

So why do I hold a grudge? Because of the after-response and my being called a “liberal,” that’s why. Nothing could be more preconditioned. Nothing goes more unquestioned among conservatives, and the same principle is at work throughout our politics and social discourse. Adults were nearby, but there was no correcting of the misapplied label, the epithet. It was a school setting, but there was no attempt to understand. The cat-call “liberal” was in fair play, as it is to this day among the hyper-conservative right-wing mindset. It is the epithetical foundation of a host of epithets that have been built upon it. Its only valid claim to existence is the claim that the “other side” has a similar set of delusions raised against it. The end, therefore, of knocking down the opposing wall justifies whatever means.

My true grudge, then, is not against any of my classmates, not against the school, not against my parents, nor against anyone else’s parents. In fact, it’s not against a particular person at all. I consider all these to be unwary victims of their environment.

Here’s the substance of my grudge, and its object will soon become apparent. It is this: that at about the same time as the four-square occurrence above, right-wing pundits started hitting the airwaves and writing books and selling tons of advertisement, thus reviving an all-but-dead AM radio band (would that it had died? yes, almost). It was known that the mainstream media was “liberal” and these talk-show hosts made a show of “leaving” it, when in fact all they did was restore a long tradition of populism and demagoguery to the mainstream where lots of folks could hear it.

What was unwittingly created was a counter-evil, an alternative media even more sinister than that which had prompted it. If what was hated was mannered journalism that stuck to the “facts” but at times only reported the “facts” that fit in with the mainstream of liberal thinking, what was created was a doggerel monster that gives shit for dealing with facts opposed to it and relies instead on epithets, labels, preconditioned thinking much like that which the purveyors of this brave new media supposedly despised (but now conveniently labeled “common sense”), and unprovable conspiracy theories based on their own “facts.” In so doing, they guaranteed that sound political discourse would continue to fade to a background murmur in these United States.

“Guaranteed, you say?” Yes, because we live under a system driven by profit. Smut sells, as every pornographer knows, and it sells like hotcakes. For a time, maybe, it seemed right, it seemed OK, maybe even a necessary balancing out of the political spectrum, but the new two-headed monster was and is in every way just as bad or worse than the one-headed monster of before. As the new head grew, the old head was forced to mirror it in order to keep drawing sustenance from the body politic whose ears and eyes brought the advertising dollars both heads rely on for survival. Competition bred a feedback loop of monstrous proportions. So go ahead and pick your head, but understand that it’s a monster sticking its tongue down your ear no matter which one you pick. Best to hold its ugly head at a distance and watch those shifty eyes when it’s talking to you.

All of this serves to illustrate what’s at the bottom of our clashing system (and who can deny that it’s clashing? who doesn’t see the inconsistencies within it?) Politics and profit, government and big business, are fighting a cold war against each other. The one poisons the other. Neither can exist without the other. That’s what makes true and positive change so gosh-darn impossible. Change isn’t built into the system. Rather, two competing systems have grown up together and both of them are designed to conserve themselves. The system is limping along and there’s nothing the system can do to cure the debilitating disease afflicting it; all it can do is apply band-aids — now by Republicans, now by Democrats, and, probably sooner than later, back to Republicans. Same band-aids, different hands. Same effect, different rhetoric.

Our system — not that I think any of us should take direct responsibility for it; we have inherited it, and like a rundown house there’s only shame in thinking you have to preserve it in all its ruin, and taking too much ownership of it before we’ve really made it our own may stop us from doing the needful — our system conserves itself in every twisted guise of its liberal (in the traditional sense of the word, meaning democratic equality and liberty) and profiteering self. Within this system, the liberal and the conservative are not so far apart as most people are told to think that they are. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin that most Americans seem scared to lose.

A major problem is that many Americans only ever look at one side of this coin, and, thus, there are two sides drawn repeatedly up against one another: the supposedly libertarian and conservative “Right” and the supposedly liberal and progressive “Left.” These sides pull at each other like two tug-of-war teams on each end of a rope. We tend to root for one team or the other without realizing that it’s the whole system we ought really to be concerned with preserving, if that’s what we really want to do.

Instead, when our team isn’t far enough right or left, we form a Tea Party or a MoveOn.org to increase the proper torque in the right direction. We do this despite the fact that the worst thing that could happen if we want the “American system” to survive would be for one “team,” either “conservative” or “liberal,” to win. We do this maybe because some of us sense that we HAVE to do it because the other side is doing the same and if we don’t balance the two out there’ll be trouble, but that smells of necessary insanity.

If one team were to win, that team would pull the losing team into the deep dark trench in the middle. The losing team would plummet and take the winners with them. In my opinion, either direction leads to a dictatorship. One might resemble the puritanical government of an Oliver Cromwell. In its most extreme it could lead to groups like homosexuals and those who have AIDS either lynched or gassed or taken to the electric chair, or all three. Imprisonment? Oh, definitely. Wouldn’t that be tasty? In the other direction, the result might reassemble something like the failed Soviet Union.

In other words, Hitler or Stalin? Pick your poison, but I’m currently fed up with the poison we already have in our system.

And yet, that’s exactly what all the punditry is about and leading to: Ra, ra, ree, kick ‘em in the knee! Ra, ra, rass, kick ‘em in the ass! Why? Because the goal of every large media corporation is undoubtedly to secure an ever greater share of the market. Why? Because that’s what for-profit corporations must do in order to survive; they must constantly increase their profitability. Why? That’s the subject of a whole ‘nother blog post.

So damn the truth. Damn honest talk. Instead, say whatever it is that will keep them coming back, and the more one says, the more one has to say.

Picture Fozzie Bear finally finding a type of joke that gets good laughs, but it consists only of harmful half-truths. At first, Fozzie feels a twinge of guilt, maybe. But the laughs make him feel good, and he never intended to hurt anyone. He’s just Fozzie Bear, after all. Then, one day, J.P. Morgan the theater owner fires Kermit the Frog and offers Fozzie a raise if he’ll host the show. Big corporations and gimmicky gadgets backed by big investors want to sponsor Fozzie’s own hour on the tube. So Fozzie keeps on telling those funny half-truths. He lives in a penthouse, now, after all. He might lose it if he…if he stopped. He couldn’t, he can’t stop now. He might even try, but the consequences are made clear to him. To do so would be an act of heroism, and, let’s face it, we’re talking about Fozzie Bear, here. If Henson doesn’t rescue him, Fozzie’s a cooked goose on the string of a sinister, faceless, soulless puppet-master. (Oh, how I miss Jim Henson, by the way!)

We all know how this works. The further one pushes reality, the further one has to go beyond the breaking point of absurdity in order to keep the audience coming back. Last week it was the one-armed man, but all the folks have seen him before. This week it’s the flaming tower of giant pink flamingos. Next week, the apocalypse, the part of the anti-christ now being played by Obama because W’s no longer in office. Say what you want about either of them, but please!

Always some tidbit you’ve never heard before, like the lady at church everyone goes to for gossip. She might even shed a tear just to prove her sincerity; she might even believe that tear in the perverted tangle that is her version of the human heart.

Always some incomplete pat of “history,” always some confusing dash of “principle” or “common sense” that you’re not told but rather implied that if you don’t hold to it you must be an idiot. Always what you want to hear, because it comforts you that someone out there has the answer to the bogey man you’re convinced is hunting you. They’ve seen it! Out there, in the bushes! Boo, it’s coming to get you! Lock your doors! Vote Republican (oh wait, that didn’t work, vote Tea Party!)

Why is this comforting? I don’t know. I suppose it’s human nature to feel better when someone else confirms your worst fears, but only a fool keeps listening to a voice that’s merely preying on those fears.

Never mind that the voice comforting you is the same voice that convinced you of the bogey man’s existence in the first place and that got you all riled up against that hairy but unclear visage. Don’t apply the same dose of healthy skepticism to what this comforting voice is telling you as you would apply it to the crooked auto dealer down the street.

After all, it might be true in a way — that’s what makes it so interesting and so very, very hard not to listen.

So don’t listen to me. This is all radical talk. Neither conservative nor liberal, but radical since the fifth grade. I don’t really care what your preconceived ideas are. This is what I see. This is what I know. I’ve seen and read a lot, and these are some of my conclusions. I believe them to be rather modest, but you won’t see what I see from the inside. You’ve got to exit the insane asylum first.

If you are still listening, this is my advice: if one or the other cable news outlet and their associated radio hosts currently have your ear, stop listening. If anything, listen to the “other” side because you already know what “your own” side is going to say — it never really changes — but you have most certainly had some of what the “other” side is actually saying misrepresented to you.

“Now?” you ask. Yes, now, right near the end of an election cycle. No better time.

No better time to start scouring the internet for fact-checkers, for starters. There are independent fact-checkers and fact-checkers funded by party. Check them out and balance them out. You want to know who to vote for? Try the most honest, the ones that don’t get beaten up by fact-checkers every single day. With that, stop worrying so much about party. It’s not the answer; it proves you’re an easy mark.

Focus on honesty, and realize it’s impossible to find a politician who’s always open and honest. That just doesn’t fall into the job description, Tea Party, Republican Party, Democratic Party, or Party of the Weekend Drunks included. Well, scratch that last one. They might be too open and honest.

Finally and most difficult of all, follow or at least acknowledge the money trail. Greenbacks are flowing every which way right this minute. Big donors donate to all parties so that no matter which one wins they’re sure to win — and yes, this includes the Tea Party. Donations take all shapes.

It’s a harder way to vote. It’s unsettling and makes you feel less certain that your vote means anything. But that’s my intent, to unsettle anyone reading this. The fact is that we live in a democratic republic: we vote for leaders democratically and then THEY make the decisions — democratically, perhaps, but their wallets sure get as big a say as you or I. So be unsettled, and don’t let any voice settle you back down with their easy answers. There are none. Rather than look for a ninth-inning, two-out home run, understand the scope of how deep this all runs and how powerless we are to just “fix” it. It should be cause for mourning, for sobriety, and for modest attempts to make things better. This thing is a mess and is going to be a mess for some time. In fact, if you know any real history, it has been a complicated, self-conflicted mess from the get-go. The quickest way to clean it up would be a totalitarian takeover by either the “right” or the “left.”

You might for a moment almost convince yourself that the right type of takeover would be fine, but you know better, deep down.

Deep down in your radical self where no party has a hold, you know better.

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