New Orleans Christmas: Heroes and Villains

"Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes" is the headline of the story by Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson in USA TODAY. It begins:

In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house.

Peterson and his wife couldn't afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

In one sense, it is a perfect holiday story, about the willingness to help and can-do spirit of the people, rather than the impersonal government.

Clearly, charities and NGOs are heroes in New Orleans and government is a villian. The story cites a Harris poll that shows Habitat for Humanity has an 85% positive rating for its work in the Gulf, while FEMA has a 72% negative rating.

But that's not the whole story.

The article highlights a number of NGO's (non-governmental organizations, including those we know of as charities) that are doing vital work that the government is not:

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations - "NGOs" ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups - are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

--snip--
In New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

The article quotes experts who enumerate reasons for the effectiveness of NGOs v. the government: NGOs are smaller and more nimble, they listen to what people need, government lost the people's trust early in the Katrina debacle and never got it back, the NGOs are more experienced in dealing with the kind of needs they see in New Orleans, and the kind of people in need,such as the poor, the elderly; various levels of government are bickering, and there is no effective leadership.

All of this is probably true, and the NGOs are to be praised. But the article and its analysis leave out other important points. Government agencies like FEMA have been effective in the past. Why aren't they now? Apart from the cronyism that infects the Bush government, and the corporate philosophy that places image above real leadership, there is the toxicity of "privatization."

A great deal of responsibility for that must be borne by the Bush administration, and earlier Republican administrations, that bled dry the funding for public services conducted by or organized by government---by directly cutting budgets of federal agencies and programs, and by indirectly bleeding state and local governments.

Why did they do this? The "philosophy" as stated was that government is inefficient, but private enterprise has the incentive of efficiency to keep costs down and get the job done, because their profits depend on it.

Certainly the bled dry government agencies have largely failed, especially FEMA and the monstrous money-eating disaster called Homeland Security, where the corporate model meant "branding" the agency was more important than actually addressing its mission and tasks, as a Washington Post series is revealing.

Government is failing because the people in charge expect it to fail. The resources, including people in the agencies with talent and experience, have been stripped. Leadership fails because the Bush administration isn't interested in using government to meet people's needs, because it might just show that government can be effective in doing so.

There is also the conspicuous failure of private contractors in New Orleans to do anything but pig out on fat no-bid government contracts, leaving the real work to non-profits.

It's the same lesson as Iraq, where much of what the military used to do is being ineptly and expensively done by private contractors, who operate above the law (sound familiar?) and at least some of whom are stealing American taxpayers blind.

Anti-government stories play well. But Katrina's lesson should be that only the federal government has the authority and resources, not necessarily to solve all the problems itself, but to lead, organize and coordinate an effective and timely response. When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.

Moreover, it has the responsibility to coordinate and effect preventive measures beyond the capacity of local resources. When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.
It isn't government that has failed New Orleans. It's the Bush government, and its policy of rewarding its corporate pals. It's privatization and the corporate model to do the public's business that has failed.

The American Christmas Wins the War: A Holiday Happy Ending

It began in earnest several weeks ago, launched by politically and doctrinally extreme Christian fundamentalists, with their designated media loudmouth Bill O’Reilly providing the show-biz fulmination, basically to promote a book by John Gibson, a Fox News producer, called The War on Christmas.

Its other political and economic dimensions were expressed by Agape Press, with their slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo.

What most people heard about it was the sudden anger over store clerks saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” But what it was supposed to be was far more audacious.

In his Agape essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians! Christmas is definitely ours.” He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.” The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”

He continues: “There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries -- such as the American Family Association (AFA) -- to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.”

So the idea was economic intimidation, which is certainly the vulnerability that business presents, as anxious as they are about anything affecting retail in the very serious season where they make upwards of half their sales for the year.

There is another economic factor that bleeds over into politics. Baker begins his essay by pointing out that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. This therefore is supposed to be another such issue. It has the special advantage of being a new one, which means political fundamentalist groups can raise lots of money by scaring people with it.

For even true believers get a little soft on the old issues that don’t raise fears so dependably, out of sheer boredom and weariness. The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively. It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping---with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.

Stuck somewhere in this mess is the perennial charge that the true meaning of Christmas is being lost. Usually the culprit is the profit motive, but Gibson and others added regulation and political correctness. They have lots of Swift-Boating examples, many of which have been debunked, though finding overbearing acts of misinterpretation by clueless bureaucracies is not that difficult.

As Christmas approaches, the noise is abating as this attempt has deflated. Yet these groups have found a real danger, and a real war on the American Christmas---in the mirror. They have met the enemy, and it is them.

The most alarming core of fanaticism is the same as at the core of the attempt to change the science curriculum in the Dover PA schools. The recent ruling by Judge Jones reproduces statements of the fanatical fundamentalists on the school board, as summarized by georgia10 at Daily Kos (with page numbers from the Judge's decision):

1. The board members wanted a 50-50 ratio between the teaching of creationism and evolution in biology classes (p. 95)

2. The President also wanted to inject religion into social studies classes, and supplied the school with a book about the myth of the separation of church and state. (p. 96)

3. Another board member said "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." (p. 102)

4. At a meeting, a board member's wife gave a speech, saying that "evolution teaches nothing but lies," quoted from Genesis, asked "how can we allow anything else to be taught in our schools," recited gospel verses telling people to become born again Christians, and stated that evolution violated the teachings of the Bible. (p. 103)

5. Other statements by board members included "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state," and "liberals in black robes" are "taking away the rights of Christians, " and "2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Notice how similar even the language is to the Agape essay.

The fanatical anger over Christmas being stolen from Christians is in a factual sense nutty as a holiday fruitcake. First of all, nobody is trying to take away a single Christian religious celebration, anywhere in America. Nobody is going into anybody’s churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ.

Plus the idea of the “Christmas holiday season” being stolen from Christianity is historically ludicrous. Of all the elements of the traditional American Christmas, about 95% of them have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. Many predate Christianity by centuries, going back to indigenous celebrations of the winter solstice, the celebrations of fire and light in the winter darkness, the post-harvest feast, the mysteries of death (winter, darkness) and resurrection (spring, light) that is as least as old as the very ancient recognition of the bear as a sacred animal that "died" in the winter and was "reborn" in the spring.

Many indigenous cultures see the winter as a time of the earth’s pregnancy, and so birth and children are part of it. Though gift-giving probably has its roots in Greek festivals at the New Year, the Roman Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools and Misrule, the Christian emphasis on the Christ child probably had something to do with gifts to children becoming the focus. The whole “naughty and nice” aspect also predates Christianity, as does the Yuletide, the so-called Christmas tree, holly, etc.

Other “traditions,” developed independent of Christianity and well after it began. The modern “Santa Claus” is mostly a combination of various mythic and folk figures (both gift-giving and punishing ones), given his contemporary form by Coca Cola and other businesses.

So nearly all “Christmas” traditions are “heathen”, Pagan and secular in origin. The early Church readily admitted that it used the Roman mid-winter festivals to celebrate a birth that more likely took place in the spring or summer.

But what’s truly serious about this is the attempt to assert exclusive power over the American Christmas, as it has evolved (there’s that word again!) along with the country.

Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions. I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews. In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.

But there was tolerance and more—there was sharing. That was the spirit of—the meaning of—Christmas, as America practiced it. The songs we sang give it away---they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.

Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions. In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.

These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area. That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.

Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.

And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.

So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community. The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.

These are appropriate in another way. Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along. But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals—and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)

The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions. They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them. They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.

Without a direct or conscious intent perhaps, this attitude informs religious freedom in the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.

It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century. There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world---from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.

And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.

Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate. And it never was all that Constitutional. But diversity gives us the compensation of much more to be shared.

“Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.

So the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth. Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.

All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.

Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s—European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.

Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations. But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)

Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice. I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a great time.

In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.

Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians. In their churches it can be true. But it simply isn’t the case otherwise. In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.

This is the way the Republic ends?

Let's review some of the events of this extraordinary week, in which serious threats to American democracy were revealed. They bear a striking resemblance to the growing evidence of the climate crisis. Both conclusions come from data accruing over time, suddenly exploding in terms of quantity and threat, so quickly that it is difficult keeping up with each revelation.

What's going on politically now can be summarized in this way: if this is not an ongoing campaign to establish a dictatorship, we are headed there anyway.There were two sets of revelations. The first pertains to controlling dissent through intimidation, harrassment, disinformation and spying, though the major issue of civil liberties and the important issue of wasted resources applied to the wrong problem are also involved.

Mid-week it was revealed that the Pentagon has been spying on the activities of various antiwar groups, including Quakers, and designating their lawful and constitutionally protected activities---especially protests against deceptive military recruiting-- as terrorist threats.Late in the week there were reports of repeated instances of spying on hundreds and probably thousands of individuals within the U.S. authorized by the White House---but not by any law.

These revelations created a furor in Congress, and added to other civil liberties concerns, and concerns about government gone wild and going after the wrong targets while neglecting quite obviously necessary matters to protect the public (like ensuring that first responders can communicate), led to the U.S. Senate refusing to renew and extend the Patriot Act. The Act extends provisions that allow for unwarranted intrusions, and mask them in secrecy.

The political firestorm resulting from these revelations forced the White House to gamble on becoming highly aggressive. Yes, said the President in a radio address Saturday, I authorized the spying, to protect the American people, and if you are against it, or against the Patriot Act, then you are making it easy for terrorists to strike again.It's a ploy that worked before. However, when put in context of related news this week and earlier, it may be the most important moment so far in Bushcorps attempt to overrride democracy and accelerate its own reign of terror against political dissent and opposition. If American public opinion doesn't continue to bang away at Bush's credibility, this will be a Republic we can't keep, after barely a wimper.

These were only the most publicized of such revelations. Proposals to reorganize Homeland Security to perform domestic spying and to use Transportation Department operatives to spy on Americans in the transit system were exposed by E Pluribus Media.

In addition to the abuses to peace groups revealed this week, there was the story of a college student who was visited by federal agents because he requested Mao's Little Red Book through an interlibrary loan system for a political science paper.

Such acts of government terrorism are familiar to anyone who was part of various movements in the 1960s---for peace, Civil Rights or Native American rights, for example--as well as to anyone familiar with the Red-Baiting 50s. Computers and the Internet add a new patina, as well as new ease for tracking and intrusion.

Whether by evil intent or simply misguided priorities, once the bureaucracies involved get these marching orders, abuses are automatic and fully predictable. Spying is done, reports are generated because the more threats, the more funding, and the more power.

All of this, plus earlier proposals for giving the military more power domestically, is only possible if Americans are both cowardly and stupid enough to fall for the fear mongering again.

There is however a new and even more insidious element to this undermining of democracy, if not blatant attempt to establish a one-party dictatorship. This is the activity that could shake this nation to its foundations: the growing evidence that the sanctity of voting has been violated, that voting results have been falsified, and that the result has been the election of George Bush as president, in 2000 if not also in 2004. And the continuing operations and plans to make this secret theft of democracy permanent.

The GAO report last month was sobering---so sobering, that the mainstream media is in major denial. The collection of evidence of vote-tampering, etc. continues, last week centering on the issue of electronic voting machines, specifically those of Diebold.After years of accusations, fragmentary and anecdotal evidence, including the views of insiders, a test was conducted last week in Florida which conclusively proved that a hacker could manipulate Diebold machines from a remote location to change the votes, and it would be undetected.

Not only the results of the test but its pattern convinced a Florida election official to conclude that votes in his county were changed in the 2000 election, enough to change the outcome in the state and then in the nation. Diebold protested the test itself, but not the facts of the test's outcome.In 2004 Diebold's president guaranteed that Bush would win the election.

Last week it was widely publicized that Diebold is being sued by some of its own stockholders for withholding information from them, including the vulnerabilties of its voting machines. Not as widely reported, while Diebold was competing in several states to install their machines for future elections, their officials continued making contributions to Republican politicians, even after these contributions were supposedly halted.

That Republicans continue to plan staying in office by manipulating elections was made clear by the Bush nomination to the Federal Elections Commission of a man notorious for concocting and carrying out voter suppression schemes, including the haphazard listing of Florida felons in 2000 that robbed thousands of legitimate voters of their voting rights.

These machines are still scheduled to be used in the 2006 elections in a number of states, some of which succumbed to Diebold and Republican pressure last week to approve them. Except for Democrats on the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Kerry's quiet observation that he lost every single precinct in New Mexico that used touch-screen voting machines, regardless of whether it was a Republican or Democratic area, the political consequences of a loss of public confidence in the vote has perhaps made Democrats very hesitant to strongly raise this issue.
They have reason to be afraid, for a crisis of confidence could be exploited by Bushcorps, to install the dictatorship it seems to be preparing on all fronts.