I didn’t watch the Republican debate last night because I have a low threshold of tolerance for watching wack jobs be treated as if they were rational, functional members of society. I’m glad to see that the race appears to be quickly narrowing down to a contest between Mitt Romney, representing the party’s sane adult wing, and Rick Perry, representing the whoop-de-do crowd (and proud of it). I would like to believe a majority of the country’s voters wouldn’t be so dumb as to get fooled again by another loudmouthed, swaggering Texan with a sketchy relationship to fact and reason, but, as H. L. Mencken once said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Sigh… This would be more enjoyable to watch if I had more faith that the better angels of our nature would ultimately prevail.

I was in Washington DC on vacation the week the news media was all a-twitter about some congressman’s crotch shots. I haven’t the slightest interest in wasting time on such things. Some of us consumers of information and entertainment actually have a taste for quality content, and would prefer to find coverage of the decision-making process on bringing troops home from Afghanistan, or the real reasons Republicans feel so threatened about putting Elizabeth Warren in charge of consumer financial protections, or a substantive examination of the various issues comprising health care reform on the front pages of major newspapers. You know, real news.

Maybe acknowledging that much of what the Tea Party movement is belly-aching about was identified and explored by the counter-culture back in the 1960s would kick-start a spirited public dialogue and crowd the trash out to the margins. “Power to the People.” “Small is Beautiful.” “Question Authority.” These are not new ideas. Dressing up in costume and throwing tantrums can be lots of fun, but at best all it can do is influence people in power. The real game is what the adults are doing.

Republicans are the ones who kept bashing Vietnam-era anti-war protesters over the head with the slogan “America: Love It or Leave It,” so what’s with the “Love Your Country, Fear Your Government” stuff that the Johnny Reb-come-latelies are fulminating about? Most of us youthful Baby Boomer lefties got the memo: you’re supposed to grow up and take your place as a responsible, functioning member of society; build long-term relationships; rack up consumer debt in pursuit of your personal vision of the good life (ideally including a mortgage); etc., etc. The American system is far from perfect, but it actually does a pretty good job of offering maximum individual freedom to a highly diverse population. As a woman, I don’t take that for granted.

At DC’s National Portrait Gallery, I wandered through an exhibit that noted the push-pull between the Declaration of Independence’s manifesto on individual liberty and the framework of laws set out in the Constitution. American culture was built from the start on a dance between these polarities. Individual stories play out in infinite patterns, but we’re all bound by the same laws. If we don’t agree with how the system operates, we’re empowered to try to change it. This whole democratic experiment in the idea of self government is a work in progress, and it’s a relatively new development in the global arena.

It’s no small thing that Congressional Republicans have recently started coming around to supporting the anti-war position. I wish they had had their crisis of conscience about fiscal matters back when George W. Bush decided that going to war in Iraq was a good idea and there was no need to worry about the costs, but better late than never. The U.S. has been playing the role of world cop ever since World War II, and we can’t afford it any longer. Europeans have enjoyed significantly better social services over the last half century than Americans because they’ve been able to rely on us to foot the bill for a massive military and provide defense around the globe. Those days are over. The Obama administration has begun making this case in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent remarks in Brussels that a new generation of American leaders, for whom the Cold War was not a formative experience, is unlikely to continue giving the Europeans a free ride. The times they are a-changin’. Finally.

The Vietnam era culture wars exposed some critical fault lines in how American democracy functions. Since then, a great deal of progress has been made, especially in the realms of personal freedom and equal rights. But we still have a long way to go to make good on the promise of “government of the people, by the people and for the people” that Abraham Lincoln invoked in the Gettysburg Address. The good news is that a majority of Americans genuinely seems to want the system we’re told we have. How we might pool our efforts to make substantive progress towards our shared goals will take a lot of work and discussion. You’d think that process would be more newsworthy than the adolescent antics of yet another ego-challenged politician.

In wading into matters such as American foreign policy, it’s important to maintain a sense of humor. It can be a life preserver when currents threaten to become turbulent.

In that spirit, as the madness of the Iraq war was getting underway several years ago, a writer with Slate Magazine compiled some of the verbatim utterances of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and presented them in the form of poetry. It was published a few months later as a book entitled Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. Here’s a taste, taken from a Department of Defense news briefing in February 2002:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

We’re wa-a-a-ayyy down the road from the Twilight of Post-Modernism, here.

A major problem the U.S. faces in beginning to transition away from the war-based economy we have maintained ever since World War II is the degree to which both political parties have enabled (and, not coincidentally, profited from) an essentially imperialist machinery. Bill Clinton passed up a historic opportunity to begin building a peacetime economy by cutting corners and emphasizing a rush towards globalization instead of capitalizing on the opening provided by the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989. Now, after eight disastrous years of George “Frat Boy” Bush and Dick “Dr. Strangelove” Cheney at the helm, the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the entrenched pathologies of our capitalist system being unleashed around the globe. I expect the implications of that will be with us for awhile.

“In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries – the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators – the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile new element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.”

I can see Obama positioning himself to steal thunder from both the left and the right in advance of next year’s election.  He seems to be moving in the direction of the ground staked out by Barbara Lee and Tom Hayden in the renewed focus on the economic ramifications of our overseas military operations (including some of Leon Panetta’s recent remarks).  At the same time, he now looks to be in a position to claim ownership of the theory of a smarter, sleeker military focused more on intelligence and diplomacy than troops on the ground that Rumsfeld clumsily attempted to float.

I don’t think it’s overly hyperbolic to put Osama bin Laden’s demise in a league with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in terms of the historic opportunity it offers for the U.S. to radically shift priorities on our global commitments.  Obama now has the macho cred to pull resources away from defense and switch them over to the home front. I think Hayden has it right in saying, “Now we shall learn whether there is another agenda that keeps 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

To put it in Tolkien terms, Obama is an Aragorn to George W. Bush’s pathetic, faux-Boromir routine.  At least Boromir, for all his faults, had an actual, heroic track record as a warrior.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke those words to a West Point assembly today. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. General Douglas MacArthur’s similar remark dates back to World War II. Why didn’t some genius in officialdom drive this point home when the long, bloody Vietnam War finally came to a close? How much blood might not have been spilled around the world, and lives destroyed, if American presidents post-Vietnam hadn’t been so eager to strut their macho cred—with a namby-pamby Congress mostly serving as willing enablers?

Oh, never mind. I told my politico son recently that there is no middle ground between “George W. Bush top administration officials should be formally investigated for war crimes” and “Bush was a decent chap who tried to do the right thing and made a few mistakes.” That’s the real fault line in American politics today. I’m cynical enough to assume the Bushies will get away with it, at least in terms of any legal proceeding. But that’s a different matter than setting the historical record straight. One of the saving graces of this wildly individualistic culture is that people can quite literally get away with murder, but the opportunity exists to clean up the system so the next guy won’t be able to commit the same crimes and get off so easily. It’s a start.

One of the significant insights about American society that arose from the turbulence of the Vietnam era was that the system reflexively functions to protect the interests of capital—even when it comes at the expense of preserving such niceties as democracy and the protection of the rights of individual citizens against large predatory powers. This is what’s delicious to watch about the quandary in which the Republican Party now finds itself: the divide-and-conquer fear-mongering tactics that have served them so well for so long require them to scream Socialism! at anything Obama and the Democrats do in an attempt to begin correcting this longstanding, egregious problem. At the same time, the rabid Tea party activists on the extremes of their right flank are screaming and lighting torches about essentially this same issue.

Out here in Gomorrah on the Left Coast, a story of epic proportions is playing out that I expect is going to be useful in helping to restore some balance to the profits vs. people equation. Last September, as the residents of San Bruno, a small city south of San Francisco, were going about their normal daily business of getting dinner on the table, a gasoline line blew up without warning and took out half the neighborhood. In an instant, eight people died and 38 homes were flattened. The comedy of errors (I use the term loosely) began immediately. Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility company that owned the pipeline, had been too cheap to install an automatic shutoff valve, which resulted in an additional hour-and-a-half of leaking gas fueling the resulting conflagration. Never mind that, earlier in the year, PG&E had sunk millions of dollars into an election-year attempt to defeat a neighboring county’s ballot initiative designed to provide its residents with an alternative to PG&E’s absolute monopoly on gas and electricity provision.

But that was only the beginning. Even those disinclined to question the sanctity of corporate profits don’t tend to easily dismiss a fiasco of this magnitude. The ensuing investigation is still playing out at both the federal and state levels, and it’s proving to be a textbook case of corporate malfeasance and lax government enabling of same. After the San Bruno accident, PG&E falsely stated that the pipe that exploded was seamless, when in fact it had substandard welding. The utility has been dangerously spiking pressure on gas lines in its aging infrastructure, in an effort to exploit regulatory loopholes and avoid having to do the quality work that would accurately assess the condition of its pipes. The George W. Bush administration was only too happy to bend over backwards and let industry rewrite the regulatory rules and promise to police itself. PG&E has been ordered by the National Transportation & Safety Board to accurately document the status of all its pipelines by March 15^th, and has already had to admit that it can’t find records pertaining to about 20% of them—some of which lie under heavily populated areas.

This would be Dr. Seuss territory, except that it’s not funny at all. The San Bruno accident could happen anywhere. Not to be cynical, or anything, but my basic impression is that this kind of stuff is business-as-usual in corporate America. PG&E is just the latest one that happened to get caught, in a particularly egregious circumstance. If there’s any silver lining to this mess, it’s that kneejerk attempts to automatically equate government regulation with socialism aren’t likely to win friends and influence people.

Last night, as I watched the ugly mug of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blather on in a news clip about how Republicans wouldn’t tolerate any more deficit spending, the thought “When did the truth become completely irrelevant?” occurred to me. The man is either cynical to the bone or an idiot (or both). Ronald Reagan launched the era of “Live Out Your Fantasies Through Deficit Spending” in politics, an idea George W. Bush picked up and ran with, big time. Now that the reality check has arrived, we’re going to be paying for it for a long time to come.  I’m no apologist for the idiocy that abounds on the Democratic side of the aisle, but give me a break. The Republican Party has lost all credibility as bearers of the standard of fiscal prudence.

I take heart in a realization I had during the darkest days of the Bush administration, back when Dick Cheney was in full-bore Dark Lord mode, the likes of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay were riding high, and Karl Rove was gleefully spreading his poison over everything he touched. I simply refused to believe they would get away with their concerted effort to overthrow our constitutional form of government. A motivated hustler can get far in American society, but, once the sleeping giant of populist anger gets roused, look out. I know Sarah Palin makes Europeans extremely nervous, because they have a living memory of how much damage a populist demagogue who seems like too much of a jerk for people to take seriously can do. But we Americans have different strengths and failings to our system of government. The roots of our problems run considerably deeper than anything to do with the current gallery of losers obsessed with hogging the spotlight, and so do the solutions. I believe a long overdue reckoning has arrived.

My bet for next year’s election is that the seriously reality-challenged folk will want to go out for another round with Sarah, which will leave the Republicans sufficiently weakened that Obama will be able to mop up and handily win re-election. Our problems won’t be over then, not by a long shot. But, as with the process Jerry Brown is getting underway here in California, at least we’ll be on a road heading back into the light of day, where things like honesty, integrity, and fact-based historical context actually matter.

Jerry Brown was sworn in as California’s governor for the third time this morning. I was in college when he was first elected to the office. The Vietnam War had formally come to an end earlier in the year, and Watergate and the Nixon presidency were finally behind us. For a brief window of time, it looked as if the conservationist ethic and ecological principles that had evolved out of the cultural turbulence of the 1960s would be able to take root and begin transforming the unhealthier aspects of American society. (We Californians are accustomed to being an experimental cauldron for innovative ideas; the successful ones then fan out into the country at large.)

Then, for reasons that defy easy explanation, something went wrong on a grand scale. Former California governor and master illusionist Ronald Reagan went to Washington, taking with him a grab bag of Tinseltown tricks and a nihilistic philosophy of “Buy Now, Pay Later.” The Republican Party became duly addicted. The strategy worked long enough to give the Bush family a chance to play out its dynastic fantasies, but Bush the Younger managed to run both the economy and foreign policy into a ditch before he sailed off into the sunset. Now the bill is coming due for decades of reality avoidance and profligate spending.

I don’t mean to imply that Democrats have their hands clean in the mess we’re in, not at all. But, circa 2011, they’re more likely to be wearing the mantle of rational, responsible adulthood in any given situation. Which brings me back to Jerry. He’s quite fallible, but he’s shown over time that he’s capable of learning from his mistakes, his heart is in the right place, and he’s always been a maverick. I can’t imagine a better person to be stepping into the state’s highest office at this critical juncture in our history. It’s going to be quite an interesting ride.

2004 was the year in which I started to really pay attention to the difference between political campaigns and governing. I simply couldn’t understand how Republicans had become so successful at perpetrating massive fraud on the American people, time and time again. The Democrats have all kinds of flaws, no question, but historically (at least in my lifetime) they have been the party that genuinely tries to protect regular folk against abuses of power and authority by the well-connected. In recent decades, Republicans have unabashedly been out to rig the system on behalf of the rich and powerful, trotting out lame theories like “trickle down economics” to try to justify the unconscionable. Democratic presidents have significantly better track records on matters such as responsible stewardship of the economy—but, judging by the way political campaigns are run these days, such antiquated concepts as facts, accountability, and historical context have become disposable commodities. For some people, the ends justify the means.

As I write, the air waves are full of words being generated about how this election is a referendum on Barack Obama, the Democrats are going to get creamed in the House tonight, maybe they’ll even lose the Senate, etc. etc. etc., blah blah blah. My response to this is variations on a theme of “Hogwash!” with some “yawn” sprinkled in for good measure. “A Lie can get halfway around the world before the Truth gets its boots on,” as the old saying goes. Lies have ruled the day for way too long at this point, and there are signs everywhere that the truth has finally gotten its boots on. The next two years are going to be about the truth catching up, and things could get interesting. Despite all the wackiness (much of it embellished by the freak show that passes for a mainstream media in this country), many of the Tea Party candidates are decent people asking the right questions. It’s a fair enough assumption that at least some of the ones who make it into the hallowed halls of Congress after tonight will opt to follow the truth wherever it leads rather than selling out their principles for short-term personal and/or partisan gain. History shows that we Americans sometimes accomplish great things when revolutionary winds begin to blow.