Rogue Columnist

In the 1980s, when in real life we came very close to nuclear war, David Brin wrote a novel called The Postman. His main character lives through the apocalypse and is wandering in the woods of Oregon where he finds an abandoned mail truck. He puts on the postman's coat for warmth and carries a mail sack to a nearby town in hopes of getting food. But they think he is a real mailman, and latch onto him as the embodied hope that the United States survives and is recovering. The book is far superior to the Kevin Costner film. As Wikipedia summarizes, "Despite the post-apocalyptic scenario, and several action sequences, the book is largely about civilization and symbols."

So does it matter if the U.S. Postal Service, facing persistent deficits, private competition and the prevalence of email, intends to kill 120,000 jobs, eliminate Saturday service and shut down 3,600 post offices in smaller towns? I think it matters profoundly, and not least on the level of civilization and symbols.

As MSNBC's Bob Sullivan makes convincingly clear, the Postal Service's alleged financial trouble is largely the result of an accounting swindle from the Bush administration. This is backed up by a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Laying off 120,000 people in the worst labor market since the Depression is nuts, and will fall especially hard on minorities who already face much higher unemployment.

Back when students were taught American history, they learned about the isolationism into which the nation retreated after World War I. It did not turn out to be splendid. Nobody would accuse us of that now: We're fighting undeclared wars on three continents, maintaining hundreds of military bases in scores of nations, policing the global commons of trade and oil transit with the U.S. Navy, going to great and disadvantageous lengths to manage China's peaceful rise to global power, trying to keep Israel, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan from starting World War III and carrying all the burdens of soft empire.

Yet we have entered an isolationism every bit as dangerous as its predecessor in the 1920s and 1930s. It is an isolationism of the national mind.

How else can one fully explain the vanishing act of climate change from the national discourse? No other event, not even the latest marital/divorce saga of the newest invented celebrity, will more adversely affect life on this planet short of a major nuclear exchange. But the growing costs and enormous future consequences of climate change are absent from our policies and politics. Meanwhile, one of our two major political parties, the Republicans, has been captured by extremism and madness. But the major media, where most Americans get their "news," won't truthfully discuss it. What happens to such a nation?

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

Let's start out with the Arab Spring. Americans know little about the world, especially a place as complicated as the Middle East. This situation has been made worse as news organizations have cut back foreign bureaus and coverage. Thus the uprisings lumped under the Arab Spring have assumed this simplistic narrative: Arabs have risen up against tyrannical regimes and it's a new day of Jeffersonian democracy. This doesn't fit the facts. For example, the military has ruled Egypt pretty much ever since the British pulled out. Deposing Mubarak, whatever the inspiring protests seemed to show, was business as usual. Mubarak came out of the military; the military reasserted control, a fact underscored by the alleged killing of 13 protesters today. The Persian Spring was quickly and bloodily suppressed by Iranian security forces. To make a sweeping generalization, "democracy" in the Middle East will likely be very different than we imagine, leading to regimes that are anti-American, anti-Israel (and the Israelis do themselves no favors here), and installing Islamic law. Juan Cole has the best handle on the region.

Americans hoping for some good naturally make a tie-in with the Occupy movement. The most apt correlation I can see is that the elites still somehow find a way to maintain control, backed by police and the military. Before "Support the Troops," Americans were historically suspicious of a large standing army, and for good reason. With the ubiquitous police violence against Occupy protesters we have seen the militarization of law enforcement that has troubled older cops for some time. Now the oligarchs have the White House, Congress, courts and robocop law enforcement to do their will.

I am over Occupy, a point I first made in a blog post for the Seattle Times, which attracted 120 comments the last time I looked. Some of these points need to be fleshed out.

The best takedown I've read so far of the Joe Paterno/Penn State crime comes from Jim Kunstler. He ends with something I have pondered more than once: "Every new day that dawns lately gives further proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished." As someone who grew up on the razzle-dazzle years of Frank Kush's Sun Devils, playing in the disrespected Western Athletic Conference and having teams such as Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State get all the attention, I never bought into the deification of Paterno. But who would have thought the fall would come from this. Child rape, a cover-up that lasted for years and more rotting shoes left to drop. As I wrote about Bishop O'Brien, he of the hit-and-run should-have-been vehicular homicide, crisis reveals character. The revelations continue to redefine disillusionment.

The study of history makes one wary of claiming something new or unprecedented. Monsters have always roamed in our midst. But the rotting corruption in nearly every important national institution is unlike anything I've come across in our history. In the American exceptionalism argument, I tend to come down on the side of exceptionalism, but today what makes us extraordinary is our criminality, ignorance and decadence. D.H. Lawrence wrote, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer." Maybe so. But it was once capable of grand and good things, especially through the collective institutions it built. No more.

Look anywhere. The Air Force can't be trusted to handle the remains of dead soldiers brought home, from wars our leaders lied us into and maintain and expand for the profit of defense contractors, as well as to lock up oil supplies because they won't come clean with us about future scarcity. The Great Recession is a product of corruption taken to stratospheric levels.