Rogue Columnist

I have reached the point where I say enough. Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I've reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.

So said the president in Tuesday's "stormy" debt-ceiling meeting with Republican leaders, according to news reports. No, Ronald Reagan wouldn't be sitting there. He would have already worked out a deal with his fellow Irishman, Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. The debt ceiling was raised repeatedly and uneventfully during the Gipper's deficit binge. Will Mr. Obama yield? Of course. He's already surrendered to the fraudulent assumptions of the right-wing radicals: That government "must tighten its belt" during the worst economy since the Depression, that spending and the dreaded deficit/debt are our biggest problem, even that Medicare and Social Security must be on the chopping block.

Some of you are offended when I refer to him as President Hoover, the self-made man who started as a progressive but became trapped by his gratitude of reaching the elite and his own mental limitations at a time of tectonic change. Perhaps you're right. Other examples come to mind: Jimmy Carter without the Southern Baptist sanctimony. And William Howard Taft.

If you missed the news, the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being built in China as modules to be assembled in California. Fourteen million Americans are officially unemployed and the U-6 (real) rate of unemployment in the Golden State is 22 percent. The project is, according to the New York Times, "part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer." The original Bay Bridge was built during the Great Depression by Americans, employing thousands and, along with other infrastructure investments of the era, stimulating numerous American industries. We used to do these things and do them well. But no more. We buy plastic tubs from China at Wal-Mart to fill with other stuff we buy from China at Wal-Mart while working, if we're lucky, at stagnant- or low-wage jobs. We're crazy.

The last space shuttle mission is scheduled to begin Friday. After that, we cede space low-earth orbit to the Russians, who I guess won the space race after all, and more important exploration to China and India. In my lifetime, we put men on the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. NASA has been neglected since the Nixon administration, with the inadequate shuttles our only manned program. Now, nothing. We're told the private sector will take over. And it will do this…how? Why? Corporate America is sitting on its profits, not hiring Americans, not investing in America. I don't doubt some or another space boondoggle using federal corporate welfare, but Boeing is not going to take us to Mars. Where's the profit margin? We once did great things. Now we're crazy.

The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun on the debt ceiling. President Hoover is busy, as usual, negotiating against himself, begging for a few hundred billion in tax hikes while conceding trillions in budget cuts. These will only slow the economy at a time when the federal government should be aggressively investing in infrastructure (and not "roads and bridges"). Last I checked, Mr. Hoover has put Social Security on the table. Who needs John Boehner when the nominally Democratic president will give the social compact the coup de grace by himself. The nation sits cow-like as this transpires. The richest nation in history is "broke," we're told. Taxes can't be raised. It would hurt those precious "job creators," even though the Bush/Obama tax cuts have been an abysmal, demonstrable failure. Average Americans vote to protect the interests of the oligarchs. How else to explain it but…crazy.

I've tweeted Al Gore's must-read "Climate of Denial" several times. This eloquent piece goes in depth about the media's complicity in keeping climate change out of the degraded public square. Yet nobody re-tweeted it. People have stopped listening to the former vice president (even as his vile successor's policies remain in place). Yet I wonder if there's anything more important than this for progressives.

Gay marriage? A historic victory in New York, but the cultural right has been losing this one for some time. Wall Street contributions helped, and why not — gays are a very lucrative demographic. Some of Seattle's anarchists trashed Capitol Hill early Sunday, ahead of the Pride Parade, to protest the co-option of gay rights by commercial culture. So it's an easy gimme by the oligarchy, while it continues to destroy the planet. Should climate change be for the left what "tax cuts" are for the right?

President Obama is happy to let it lie. He's the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush. Yet he faces re-election in 2012 and I don't buy the meme that he's a shoe-in because of the craziness of the right.

Last night, I finished the late Alan Bullock's magnificent book, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. It's a reminder that no matter how much one has studied a topic, he or she can have vast new landscapes opened by the best historians as tour-guides. The book was completed just as the Soviet empire that Stalin built was falling apart, and the moment was marked by the greatest hope. Yet Bullock also reminded us of the bloody paths that contingency can create, particularly when broad social, economic and cultural forces and destabilization ("history from below") are harnessed by evil genius ("history from above"). The book ends with a deeply moving coda of promise. But that comes after a thousand pages examining the two greatest mass murderers in history; worse, men who could move nations to do their killing.

I think about all this as we sit seemingly becalmed, summer opening. Americans could be forgiven a moment of desire for, as Frank Fukuyama put it, the end of history after the long standoff of the Cold War. But this is not 1989-90. Now we are a nation of simpletons in denial. Thus, President Obama could make a speech about Afghanistan where the media report it as if we're actually leaving this hopeless morass. He can say, "it's time to focus on nation-building here at home" but he lacks the conviction to build even one — just one — segment of true high-speed rail. We treat Randian ravings as serious policy options and allow the cruelest policies to be passed by those who also brandish their "Christian" values at every speech. One of our two major political parties' platforms is essentially based on returning America to the 1880s, without a frontier and with more than 300 million people in a complex society.

As I write this morning, I see headlines for stories saying the United States and its allies will "release 60 million barrels of oil to offset supply disruptions caused by unrest in Libya." And presumably also to help keep gas prices down for the trip to Wal-Mart (recent acquisition: the U.S. Supreme Court). And they note oil prices fell. I want to scream, "America uses 20 million barrels of oil every day and China is fast catching up, you fools! Prices are falling because of fears of a new recession!" But, in a calmer state, I think, maybe it's me. I don't understand the new rules of engagement:

You know me: I am more of the school that sometimes history rhymes (Mark Twain) than history repeats itself. Nevertheless, as the Great Disruption continues and, as a conservative commenter wrote on my Seattle Times blog, "How's that hopey-changey thing working out for you," we are required to take stock. We face a mammoth debt and deficit, mostly because of the Bush/Obama tax cuts, the wars and the Great Recession. Speaking of which, no major criminal prosecutions have resulted from the greatest assemblage of frauds in history leading the world financial system to the brink of collapse. In fact, the banksters, hedge-fund boyz and other Wall Street playerz are doing better than ever. The 14 million "officially" unemployed, along with tens of millions of others, not so much. The middle class is imploding as the social compact is badly damaged. President Hoover, like his namesake, has surrounded himself with agents of the plutocracy — the difference being that the real Herbert Hoover never would have remained embroiled in two simultaneous wars and ruinous defense spending.

Every day the question grows louder for those paying attention: What the hell is happening to us?

Cullen Murphy, an editor at Vanity Fair, took it head on with his book, Are We Rome? As a review in Salon put it, "He argues that America, like Rome, is threatened by self-inflicted wounds — in particular our mania for privatization, our fading belief in government and the ensuing decay of civic society, our vast and unsustainable military, our ignorance of the outside world and our short-sighted attitude toward immigration and assimilation."

I taught at a small college in Oklahoma years ago, then started my journalism "career" there. One of the first things I learned is that Oklahoma, along with Singapore, has the most intense thunderstorms in the world along with their attendant tornadoes. Nearly every day in the spring and early summer, they form atop New Mexico's spookily beautiful Caprock bluffs and then move east. So many days I would see a black line along the horizon in the morning. In the middle of the day, the darkness might be so complete that the streetlights would come on. Tornado watches were routine; warnings and sirens things to dread. Drenching rain, golfball-sized hail and then violent wind were commonplace during the season. People watched carefully for the formation of a funnel — if they could see the sky in the darkness and rain. Major damage was more rare in the rolling woods of the eastern part of the state; west of I-35, watch out. The movie Twister, for all of Helen Hunt's considerable charms, doesn't even begin to capture the terrifying majesty of an Oklahoma storm.

All the old-timers had Tornado Alley lore. About pieces of straw driven through telephone poles. About the freak contingency of the storms: How one side of a street might be leveled and the other look as if nothing at all were amiss. About cars picked up and put down yet the occupants lived. And the little towns that once existed before being swept off the map. Every town has a section that is prone to get hit. Soon you learned your own storm wisdom, such as the strange color of the sky after a twister-laden front had moved past. Before coming to Arizona Territory in the late 19th century, my great-grandparents lived in Indian Territory, the eastern half of what became the state of Oklahoma. A tornado was my grandmother's earliest memory: Of being carried into a shelter before the monster leveled the little settlement, killing one of her sisters.

I think about this in the aftermath of the Joplin, Mo., tornado. The region suffers through the occasional bad year, where the most intense level of tornadoes can even destroy brick buildings. The so-called "super outbreak" of 1974 is the prime example, where 148 twisters struck 13 states on April 3 and 4. There was Terrible Tuesday in 1979, when an EF-4 — reportedly five-miles wide at one point — lethally struck the suburban edge of Wichita Falls, Texas. It was part of a storm that ravaged the Red River Valley, coming way too close to the little college town where I lived. Now we're living through another super outbreak year: Nearly 1,000 tornadoes and 500 dead. Or we're entering something different.