Salt Lake Tribune looks at that city’s race for mayor and in doing so questions my good friend D.K., also known as David R. Keller, associate professor of philosophy at Utah Valley State College and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics.
DK, a native, envisions a vibrant, modern Salt Lake City.
“The real issue that transcends the sky bridge or the mayoral race is the fundamental question: What kind of city should Salt Lake be?” Keller says. “A celestial city or a cosmopolitan city? A city that reflects the values of one particular social group or the value of pluralism, which is fundamental to the American experience? The latter option is more economically viable, and, more importantly, interesting.”
Of course, pluralism requires a “live and let live” mindset and that’s not where members of the LDS Church are coming from. Proof of this can be found in the church-mandated worldwide proselytizing/recruitment efforts. And in the state’s arcane liquor laws.
Having lived in Salt Lake City twice, I will say it’s a great place with great people. Yet, I could never quite get comfortable there. The reason I could not has everything to do with the fact that the Mormons can’t quite get comfortable with me, and those like me, living among them as neighbors.
D.K. and I have talked before about the difference between a place settled by pilgrims and a place settled by pioneers. Salt Lake was settled by pilgrims—those with a religious agenda. Yet, we expect Salt Lake as a Western frontier city to embody the pioneer spirit. But that’s not the case. Salt Lake embodies the pilgrim spirit, much like the New England states once did.
As in most arguments about American culture, the debate eventually winds its way to an economic answer. For pilgrims, like pioneers, both share a love of American money. The Mormons have become more adept than most at gathering this money. Thus, the fundmental question is: Will Salt Lake’s desire to become even wealthier than it already is, lead the LDS Church to embrace pluralism? In the short term I don’t think it will, for the simple fact that the economy in Salt Lake has been, and remains, quite strong. Hence, there’s little incentive to change.
Last night during the AFL-CIO-hosted Democratic candidates forum in Chicago audience members were given the chance to ask pressing questions. None were more pressing than Steve Skvara’s. Skvara, from Indiana, worked at LTV Steel for 34 years before he was forced to retire due to a disability. Two years later LTV went belly up and Skvara lost his pension.
Go to the 2:45 minute point in the video above to see Skvara’s tear-jerking appeal for reform.
Near the end of President “I’m the decider” Bush’s press conference yesterday, he said something interesting.
I’m like any other political figure. Everybody wants to be loved — just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don’t enable you to be loved. And so, when it’s all said and done, if you ever come down and visit the old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say, I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics. And that’s important to me.
If you believe, as many do, that Bush is a dolt, then you can take his above statement at face value and give the man some credit for having convictions.
On the other hand, if he’s something more than a frat boy gone bad, if he is in fact a calculating, semi-intelligent member of the American aristocracy–and I believe he is–then we must examine which convictions he refers to. Is it his desire to make his buddies in the military industrial complex, of which the oil industry is front and center, rich beyond compare? That’s a good bet.
With the possible exception of WWI and WWII, the United States doesn’t enter wars for idealogical reasons. I know that may sound shocking, but a close analysis of American history resolves the question. We enter wars for financial gain, pure and simple. Given that, Bush can pound his fist and make faces all he wants, while telling “the people” about his noble fight for a democratic Middle East. It simply isn’t believable. There’s too much evidence to the contrary. Not on TV. In books and well-researched print articles from serious journalists like Greg Palast.
I’ll give him this, Bush does not play politics. His reign has shown that politics–that tired old system whereby consensus is sought–matters not. This man, and the peolpe he is surrounded by, have no concern whatsoever for the American people, nor the people of the world. His rhetoric about democracy is a joke. Given that we don’t have a democracy at home, how could we possibly export such a system abroad?
Yo! What Happened To Peace? is an exhibition of anti-war posters that’s opening in Brussels, Belgium on July 20th. The exhibition has already been shown in Los Angeles, Rome, Milan, Chicago, Tokyo, and Reykjavik.
See more images in the Flickr gallery. The image above is also available for purchase from Etsy.
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is running for U.S. Congress as an Independent and she hopes to topple the current Speaker of the House in the process.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Sheehan, a Californian, announced she will challenge Nancy Pelosi if the lawmaker has not moved to impeach Bush and Cheney by July 23–the day she plans to arrive in Washington after her 13-day caravan to the nation’s capitol.
“My campaign is going to happen, because we know she is not going to put impeachment on the table,” Sheehan said.
A spokesman for Pelosi said her “focus is on winning the war in Iraq.”
If you believe Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson–the bowtie-wearing preppie who poses as a TV newsman–the word “empathy” has no place in the nation’s political dialogue.
In a recent speech in Iowa, Senator Obama said, “Somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other. You know, people talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is an empathy deficit.”
Carlson’s snooty retort: “How high is this guy? It’s like, what is he — he always talks between bong hits? I mean, what is that? What does that mean, an ’empathy deficit’?”
In the first presidential election, only 4 percent of the population was eligible to vote, because you couldn’t vote if you were a woman, couldn’t vote if you were slave or African American, couldn’t vote it you were Native American, couldn’t vote it you did not own property. So that left nearly everybody out. It’s not that they established democracy; they established the possibility of democracy, and that possibility is, I think, what people look back to.
Every step along the way, every bit of democracy we have has required great sacrifice, blood, death and financial ruin on the part of the people who did that extension of democracy. It’s always been the establishment that has opposed it. The establishment doesn’t bring us progress. Progress comes from the grassroots.
Hightower on excessive corporate power and the outsourcing of American jobs:
Well, that’s what the Boston Tea Party was about. It wasn’t about a tea tax; it was about the East India Company being allowed to monopolize the tea trade in this country and in England…So it was a rebellion against a global corporation. They engaged in what would be considered corporate terrorism today by going aboard the East India Company’s ships and dumping the tea overboard.
The founding fathers would have definitely been opposed to oil giants or any kind of giants. They hated corporations. They feared corporations. Again, the East India Company was a large part of what the rebellion was about. They didn’t believe corporations should have any more unique standing in society than the corporate charter itself. They put very strict terms on allowing a corporate charter to be issued. Today you go down and file a piece of paper. You don’t even have to go anywhere. You just e-mail it in. But in those days you had to have a clear public purpose.
I was working to digest my dinner last night when that daily process became unnecessarily difficult. It wasn’t the food’s fault, nor my stomach’s—it was the TV’s fault, for that’s where the news that Scooter Libby would walk away from his 30-month prison sentence was found.
Barry Grey, writing for the World Socialist Web Site, calls the move, “A monument to the lawlessness of the Bush administration and the utter corruption of the American ruling elite.” A conservative patriot couldn’t have said it better.
Nixon’s people broke into a hotel room and went to jail. These people take the White House illegally, twice, lead the nation to war under false pretenses and blow a covert CIA agent’s cover in a scheme to discredit her husband. And “we the people” just stand by and let them. Will anything at all wake this nation of good people from its slumber?
Just a few years ago, Webb described America’s elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were “cultural Marxists,” and “the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood” were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means “the military-industrial complex,” and “the Cheney factor,” the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class — sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China — are becoming interwoven in his mind.
The story shows Webb’s transformation from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy to an advocate for the rural coal miners of southwest Virginia. “Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he’s taking many of his old views with him,” writes Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet also points out that Webb is an historian and author.
As Webb relates, the Scots-Irish first emigrated to the U.S., 200,000 to 400,000 strong, in four waves during the 18th century, settling primarily in Appalachia before spreading west and south. Webb’s thesis is that the Scots-Irish, with their rugged individualism, warrior culture built on extended familial groups and an instinctive mistrust of authority, created an American culture that mirrors these traits.
Sounds like an interesting read, and it’s good to know at least one Democrat Senator is constitutionally ready for the fight it’s going to take to win our country back.
Independent documentary film, One Bright Shining Moment, offers a compelling look at the 1972 Democrat Party nomination, which went to the rogue Senator from South Dakota George McGovern.
It’s uncomfortable and sad to realize the issues the nation faced in 1972 are exactly the same issues we face today—total and utter corruption of the executive branch, an unpopular and illegal war and the inept response from the opposition party. Yet, no matter how dark it gets in America, real men and women of conscience continue to fight for change. Activist, author and actor Dick Gregory is one such man. He appears in the film several times and each time he has nothing but truth to share.
