Once again the marchers swirl through the streets chanting the names of the victims, and once again mothers and fathers are shown on television weeping for their dead sons.   We have come a long way towards burying racism.  We still have a long way to go.  We should not overlook the widespread presence of guns as a major obstacle on the road to achieving racial justice.     

We ask men and women to slip on a bit of blue cloth and to leave all their history and culture and fear in the locker where their police uniforms hung a few moments ago.  They have driven to work hearing radios full of reports of school shootings, gun smuggling across state lines, and the “re-branding” of AK-47’s as sporting rifles.  Now those people are supposed to leave the station house without fear that all those guns will be aimed at them. 

Excess violence by police officers is partly about the residual racism of white versus black. But that is not all it is about. It is also about firearms.  We are awash in violence, and our society is being held captive to gun violence by the hysteria of those who would cherish an antiquated constitutional amendment right into an early grave.  Every school shooting brings more anguish over our inability to control the use of firearms in our culture.  But our calls for greater domestic control of firearms are met by a louder salvo from the NRA that gun control is somehow un-American.  So far the NRA has been more effective.  But just as we are captive to random and accidental death in our own homes from misused pistol fire, so blue on black violence is partly due to the presence of guns in our homes.  We have to begin to recognize that aspect of the problem. 

The men and women who wear blue and try to protect us are facing a society bristling with weapons.  There is a pistol or rifle for every single man, woman and child in the United States.  Those guns are in cars, homes, apartments, cabins and campers.  The policeman’s fear that the person they are facing has a gun is not irrational.  In fact the police are trained to expect the presence of weapons, and they would be foolish not to have that expectation.  Guns are everywhere, and the police have to expect that every traffic stop or other interaction can result in gunfire.  Do the math.  If there are almost 1100 people living in an urban block in a major city, the police know that there are probably more than 400 weapons that can be deployed at them by the residents in that block alone.  Is a policewoman alone in a stairwell of an apartment building to believe that all those guns are sporting rifles with which to hunt deer? 

The fear of violence and the intolerance that some police show when they meet any resistance whatsoever is grounded in the officer’s fear of someone taking their lives.  Every traffic stop is an occasion for violent death delivered by 17 cents worth of lead. 

We have a black man in the White House and many in Congress.  In the political forums of our nation we are actively discussing a woman presidential candidate.  Black and brown people are increasingly present in our best schools and in middle class neighborhoods.  Looking back at the road many of started to travel in 1965, those facts should be a source of great satisfaction.  We have made progress.  We still have a long way to go in perceptions of people and in being color blind in the treatment of non-whites of all types.  We are making progress towards a blended society in which browns, yellows, blacks and whites all share in the benefits of our economy.  We must continue to finish the work already started, and the remainder of that road will be long and tortuous.

To get there we have to deal with other social issues as a matter of urgency. Legislative pandering to the gun lobby exacerbates racism and makes possible some of its worst excesses.  We are way overdue in starting to deal with the avalanche of weapons in our homes.   Until we affirmatively address gun prevalence, there will be men and women marching in the streets chanting “Marcus” the way they once chanted “Martin.”

August 2014 Interview on the Lon Woodbury Show about Vicarious
Violence:

To listen to the interview, which focuses on vicarious violence and its effect on teenagers in our society,
please click on sco.lt/8vhhWi or paste that URL into your browser.  The link will take you to The Woodbury Report, hosted by Lon Woodbury, at which you can read a summary of the interview. You will be redirected to the interview at the
site by clicking through from the first URL above. 

One reader has told me that The Fourth Army is "anti-sports," and that in my effort to have us recognize vicarious violence in all its forms, I have denigrated "clean, healthy team play."  That shows a lack of close reading of my comments about sporting events in the book and elsewhere..

There are some "sports" that are beyond consideration by decent, ethical people.  Boxing is one of those.  Some elements of professional US football and hockey accept permanent and serious injury to players as the price of a full stadium.  I condemn those parts of mass spectator sports forcefully and will little reservation, and I urge others to do so as well. 

Mass spectator sports may be healthy and a means of focusing sentiments and emotions on human achievement.  No one should deny that World Cup 2014 is such an event.  As of June 19th more than 46 million tweets had been sent registering sentiments and views about the players, referees and matches.  At one point, more than 200,000 tweets were focused on WC2014 per minute.  While there may be an excess of public expense, gambling and drinking involved in the World Cup games, no one is dying because of WC2014.  In this case, nationalist emotions are focused on scoring points rather than on body counts.

Universal games are a useful thing when they let emotion and frenzy build up and then dissipate. 

There is an astounding moment in our recent history when soldiers in the French, British and German armies chose balls over bullets on the battlefront.  In the first years of World War I, the infantrymen on both sides of the trenches declared a Christmas Truce, put down their rifles, played soccer with each other in No Man's Land and sang Christmas carols. That event was never repeated in the conflict, but it showed the common humanity of the foot soldiers on both sides and soccer matches united those men rather than pulling them apart.

That lesson should not be lost on us.  It is useful to focus great resources on games and sports events.  We should not do that blindly or without reservation.  Many parts of pro sports need to be reformed and changed for the health of the players and the spectators, and we need to recognize that sports can be a forum for violence, hatred and aggression if left unchecked.  We should always choose balls over bullets when we can, and maybe over time, bullets will become a historical memory only and Christmas Truce will be

Shoem - The HIdden



Sunlight dapples down through the elms
Spreading a Turkish carpet of gold and shadow 
Over the bricks of the sidewalk
Men and women bend to each other
Glasses of wine sparkle in the sunlight
As do eyes and murmurs.

The tables have been pushed to the edge of the street
The house itself is built on the sandy, wet clay of the city
Tilting and groaning under past agonies that few suspect
The upper stories lean out into the sky a full meter
Casting darkness over all who pass below

In the street bicycles and the occasional car
People pass by and think how quaint is this city
Look at the café in the house leaning across the street to touch its neighbor
Few of them know that the house is bowed by
The fear that dwelt within its walls for so long.

The very old in the neighborhood
Remember that the house did not always lean and twist
As it does now
 
The city’s houses have a long tradition
Of hiding the pursued
Under the steep stairs, between additions and rafters
Hidey holes have served priests, unwed mothers,
Political refugees, even philosophers, and a girl named Anne.

In our era
Nazi officers, Gestapo, police and informers
Have swirled through its dining rooms in winter
And sprawled on its terrace in summer
Laughing and snorting with the exclamations
Of those who conquer.

While above them, a mere few feet away
Cowered Jews in hiding
Lying silently between the rafters on rags
To muffle any cough, stifle any sigh
When the officers left with full bellies
The smells of their scraps rose to torture the hidden


The house groans with its secret knowledge
Its step gables
No longer a stair for angels to come and go

Though the hidden never touched the walls
Their fears, their stifled coughs, and unspoken words
Seethed through the rafters and bounced off the walls
Forcing the house to buckle and twist

The horror of those years still visible today
On both bricks and flesh.

The American voter continues to be confronted with a number of foolish and dishonest political acts that are simple chicanery.  Typical of this genre are:  election districts that are so tortured in configuration that they resemble airline route maps more than contiguous counties, the justification of voter documentation laws to disenfranchise poor and barely literate voters,
rampant public lying by political committees shortly before elections followed by contrition and “mistakes were made”apologies after the election.  The list is endless and lest anyone say that American ingenuity is on the ropes, the sheer creativeness of some of these efforts is breathtaking.


It is not of this political skullduggery that I write.  Far beyond Nixonian dirty tricks and totally in a category by itself is the Citizens United case which effectively disenfranchises the American voter by opening the floodgates of corporate money and influence in the election process.   The most sweeping damage to American politics in a century was done not by a few men in a dark room stuffing ballot boxes but instead in the temple of justice of the Supreme Court where five justices banded together to sweep away a century of law about the role of corporations in the election process.  These five justices opened the floodgates of monied interests to influence every election.  Justice Roberts should not be proud of this handiwork.


The case should properly be called “Citizens Eunited,”because it truly cost the US voters their potency.  Like eunuchs, US voters still have an outward appearance of normalcy, but in reality they have lost that which gave them power and made the US the world’s greatest democracy.  The importance of Citizens Eunited cannot be overestimated. 


As voters we are now reduced to a sort of federal motor vehicles department.  Through our votes we collectively issue a license to some person whose character and ethics we little understand.  What we do learn about a candidate is subject to endless spin, camouflage, “correction,” and packaging.  Inconvenient truths and facts are distorted beyond recognition.  The American middle class voter is fed endless streams of sound bites but few real speeches that show character,  and even the limited televised debates are scripted and get more production time than most full-length feature films.  Citizens Eunited enables stealth candidates to come into office without our even knowing what they stand for or who they are. Perhaps we should award an Oscar for best fictional character in the Congress, although it might be hard to pick the winner out of more than 400 made-up and contrived people. 



Issues are no better. Corporations form huge combines of trade associations and politicalinfluence groups with innocuous names to lobby for the special interest dujour.  Much of the time we are unable to tell who or what is behind the lobbyist group. 
“Citizens for a Fair Wage” may suggest that the group is pro-labor and for an increase in the minimum wage, and then we find out that it is funded by an association of restaurant chains to ensure that minimum wages are not
increased.  We started that camouflaging the names of statutes under the last Bush presidency when  a law called “No Child Left Behind” consistently cut aid to schools and dependent children. 



Recently the Democratic Party started identifying all the political funding of the Koch brothers who actively try to influence think
tanks, scientist and universities along political lines.  The denunciation of the Koch brothers should not be understood to be a
restoration of democracy.  Instead it is simply one political group pointing the finger at another political group, when both of them are doing the same thing and taking money from lobbyists and corporate interests right and left.  The tee shirt of this age is emblazoned with the phrase:  “My lobbyists can beat up your lobbyists.”


And lobbyists there are aplenty.  Trying to influence the Affordable Care Act, the health and drug industries fielded an avalanche of lobbyists armed with“white” papers, studies, position papers, legislation drafts and other tools of influence.  There were more than 3,800 lobbyists registered and actively involved in forming and shaping policy on the first national health legislation in
decades. That is more than ten lobbyists for every member of the House.  Added to the sheer numbers of lobbyists crowding out the voice of concerned citizens is an endless parade of fact finding trips and conclaves in tony resorts for Congresspeople to “drill down”into the issues while drilling down into the buffet and the bar.  What voter has a chance against all that money and
power?


A very wise businessman once taught me to always find out who the person across the table from me is working for.  In the business world, someone’s boss may be a board of directors, or a government minister, or another powerful executive. 
In American politics today, a member of Congress doesn’t work for us, the voters.  Those running for another election will tell us that they want our votes, but that vote only gets them a seat. From that moment on, they work for lobbyists. The only limitation after the vote is whether they will draw the line at total intellectual dishonesty while in office.


Less than total honesty is the norm.  The trade associations and lobbying groups will produce whatever “science” and policy papers that justify their own positions, and we have seen numerous scandals in which university professors have been paid by drug companies to ignore unhappy facts about drug outcomes and by coal companies and utilities to tell us that global warming is a myth propounded by tree huggers.  Those same lobbyists tell us that using implements made in China is just fine even if thousands die there from the effects of too rapid industrialization.  We are all too well aware that there are communities dotted across the land in which there is so much combustible methane in the water supply from fracking that homeowners can light their lawn sprinklers for the Fourth of July instead of buying sparklers.  Of course the natgas industry tells us that is just fine and “very, very limited” when it occurs.


Until 2010 there was some limited control over the use of corporate money to influence political debate. Since Citizens Eunited there is almost no real control over the corrosive power of megamillions being channeled into
the political process.  To survive as a vibrant democracy, we must begin to take the political process back, to
restore our votes, to find a way where our voice carries as much weight as
General Motors’coffers and to remind our Congresspeople for whom they work. That
process will be long and complicated, and we will have to fight yet another army
of lobbyists to get that done.

                                                                                                                      
March 13, 2014

It is hard sometimes amidst the constantly recycled photos and opinion clutter of the 24-hour news machine to discern what is actually going on in the Crimea or in the Ukraine. But this much is clear.  Fearing that all or much of the present Ukraine might unite behind a strongly pro-Europe regime, Putin has sent troops into the Crimean Peninsula to hold an area of strategic and historical importance to Russia.  He has then lied about whether the troops are Russian and told the world that the soldiers are instead spontaneously armed citizenry who want to protect ethnic Russians. That can hardly be true. The soldiers are wearing the same field combat uniforms and seem to be protecting only air force, naval and army bases. 


Is this the common Russian bear hug so indicative of Putin’s foreign policy?  It is certainly bare aggression, and we can make no mistake about it.  What is promising in the situation for the moment is that bullets are not flying. That is a tremendous achievement. Let us not forget that World War I started not that many miles away from the Crimea, and over some of the same“sacred causes”:  Pan-Slavism, protecting Russian Orthodox worshippers, ethnic minorities, strategic access to naval ports and protecting historical influence areas.


The Crimea has long been seen by Russia as crucial geography and as the gateway to the Mediterranean. The area has an infamous war named after it in which thousands died for little geopolitical advantage for the western European powers. 
Since that time, the ethnic mixture in the Crimean Peninsula has continued to shift with Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians all competing for power in the various governments that have held sway in the area.  At times the ethnic composition of
Crimea has been artificially adjusted, as happened when Stalin exiled thousands of Muslim Tatars to Uzbekistan and other areas. Many of  those people were never able to return, and roughly one third of the Crimean Tatars still live outside the Crimea.  Thousands died in Stalin’s forced relocation.


The importance of the Crimea to Russian armed forces is well known.  Russia views their Crimean bases as their access point to the Mediterranean, the Middle East and all of North Africa.  Very large and modern air fields and naval bases are held by Russia in the area, even though the surrounding country is part of the Ukraine.  The famous submarine base camouflaged inside a mountain that was celebrated in the James Bond classic is located not far from Sebastopol. Today that is a tourist attraction and not an active base, but it is clearly a symbol  of the strategic military importance that Russia attaches to the Crimea and has
since the time of Catherine the Great.


We must be clear that Russia has long been extremely sensitive to any Westernization of the Crimea. It is to be celebrated that Putin and Obama are trading words and not missiles, but it is necessary for all of us to militate for the idea that posturing and threats of economic sanctions do not escalate into armed confrontations and then into war. We should acknowledge that sanctions are likely to be a weak and ineffective response.    US allies in Europe are highly unlikely to agree to sanctions.  If Putin cuts or even interrupts the natural gas supply from Russia to France and Germany, the circumstances for both countries would be catastrophic, driving the price of energy in Western Europe very high and limiting production of goods.  More than a third of the energy supply in both countries comes from Russian gas, so Merkel and Hollande will talk bravely but act very slowly to back up President Obama. 



For now, Russia and the US are slowly backing away from the confrontation, and we are instead seeing Lavrov and Kerry trade verbal broadsides.  Let us actively encourage the retreat and accept that a special status must be accorded the
Crimea, even if Kiev turns solidly to the West – which is by no means certain.  A bear hug leaves one with crushed ribs and bruises.  A bullet hole is much harder to get over.


 

How  do we explain the phenomenon of more than 11,000  non-Syrian “volunteers” fighting in the Syrian ‘civil war’ (New York
Times, Feb. 1, 2014, p. A7)?   Some of those who have traveled to Syria to join in the struggle come from as far away as Indonesia, and knew virtually nothing of Syria or its conflicts before arriving there.


Before analyzing the motivations of men traveling half way around the world to engage in a struggle not their own, we should pause to ponder, and then discard, the phrase “civil war.”  There is no such thing.  The Syrian struggle to overthrow Assad has gone on for more than three years, forced millions of people into squalid camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and led to
widespread and documented crimes against civilians in which chemical weapons were deployed.  There is nothing
civil about the conflict.  One of the sides is not wearing a uniform. That doesn’t make the war civil or restrained. The Syrian Revolution has provoked the anguish of millions around the globe but is hardly any closer to resolution, in part due to a stalemate
between a newly resurgent Russia and the bumbling, inconsistent foreign policy of the US.


In this sorry episode of neglect and failure to act, let us not miss the existence of thousands of volunteers who have swarmed to a conflict in which they had no part. It is in conflicts like these where the constitutionally violent of every generation assemble to do death to others. They endure great hardship and are prepared to sacrifice their lives for a cause that is not their own.  Some will not survive, and others will be crippled and scarred for life by fighting in Syria.  Many of the Indonesian volunteers are Sunni Moslems who have heard of atrocities against Sunnis in Syria.  Yet it seems hardly likely that isolated acts against a Moslem minority would justify volunteering to die in a war thousands of miles away from one’s home.  No, we must look deeper into
human bloodlust to find the reasons for these actions.


It may well be that we have permitted a small percentage of men and women to believe that elective violence is acceptable during some part of their youth and that killing others in the service of some ideal or cause is a correct way of growing up.  We have nurtured and exploited violence in films, videos and books which show an endless cavalcade of explosions and shootings – all in the service of some cause that is deemed by the makers of those entertainments as worthwhile.  That ocean of violent images and acts grounds and inspires thousands of elective warriors who serve in no army.  These men and women materialize from all over the globe, hungry for blood, zealous in their cause, and eager to deal out death to others.  These people
ask only“where’s the fight?” not what the fight is about or whether the side they have chosen has any reason to be fighting. 


It is not enough for us to see this and think of it as an isolated phenomenon.  It is not.  We see the young focused more
on violence and killing in the hours they spend watching television and playing video games than on celebrating peace and humility in mosques.  Instead of channeling the energy and drive of the young into the building of schools and roads, we lead them to believe that it is acceptable to engage in making war.  Their cause is only a flimsy excuse for involvement in a conflict which they little understand.  We should ask
  ourselves what role we have had in allowing these people to believe that their
  conduct is any way rational and acceptable.

On November 20, 2013 another boxer slipped into a coma and was given minutes - not hours - to live.  Magomed Abdusalamov survived but still lies in a hospital gradually regaining movement and function.  His near-death was celebrated and applauded by thousands of people at Madison Square Garden in the hours before he collapsed.

Make no mistake; this is no better than Roman gladiators fighting to the death.  Boxing is a sport in name only, and the purpose of the contest is for one man to beat another into unconsciousness.  Knock-outs are celebrated and recounted, and the matches are beamed across the globe to millions of people while sponsors hawk shaving cream or cologne during the commercial breaks.  Our society takes men, and now women, from disadvantaged backgrounds and promises them great riches if they will but sacrifice their health and even their lives for the amusement of others.

We have laws against dog fights and cock fights, but apparently believe that no one needs protect a poor kid from the projects.  Even worse than the boxers and those who exploit them are the people who watch.  Boxers know that the bloodiness of the matches is increasing, and television cameras capture it in close ups.  According to the Svinth Study in 2011, 103 boxers have died in the ring or shortly after a bout since 2000.  We know that the risk of death is immense, and we also know that permanent and irreversible neurological deficit diseases are rampant in the sport.  The term "punch drunk has nothing to do with alcohol.

Can any decent, right-thinking person not demand that this "sport" be outlawed?  There will be those who will try to stay on the gravy train produced by the misery of these men by trying to use equipment to soften blows to the head or avoid death, and that is laudatory but futile.  The cost of this savagery to our society is immense and ultimately of even greater cost than the lives and health of those poor devils we have prancing around in the ring for the amusement of the bloodthirsty.

Ban Boxing Now - make that your goal in 2014. 

We finish one battle over the shutdown and  default on our debt only to begin a new battle on different fronts.  The first estimates are that the shutdown cost us as a nation more than $34 billion, and there can be no doubt that many creditors have put in place plans to slowly offload our tarnished bonds or at least make us pay a higher rate of interest for borrowing.

Having learned nothing from that,  the newest Populist heroes opine that they were right to force millions of government workers to stay home.  Many, many people have lost ten days pay that they could ill afford to lose, and it will never be made up for many of them.  We need to remember who voted in the House to kill the Affordable Care Act 41 different times.

US medical care has been in trouble for a very long time, and those who would tear down the ACA offer nothing in its place.  They know what they don't want, and that is anything created to reform a system full of rot, rationing of care to the poor, and denial of care to those working in lower paid jobs.  What they do not offer is any viable, meaningful substitute.

As distasteful as Washington is, we have no choice but to join the game until we can reform how it is played.  Remember who voted the way they did, save your newspapers and become informed about these votes. Then start supporting the people who will turn those people out of office as soon as possible.