Today's Stories

July 6, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Hussein's FBI Interviews

July 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Gob Smacked

Eamonn Fingleton
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story

Jeffrey St. Clair
Is the Bald Eagle Really Back?

Mike Whitney
Running on Empty

Pam Martens
The Parable of Michael Jackson's Debts

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

Paul Craig Roberts
The Big Whorehouse on the Potomac

Patrick Cockburn
The Haggling Over Iraqi Oil

Anthony DiMaggio
A Perilous Path: Iraq and the Language of De-Escalation

Roger Burbach
Honduran Coup: Target Left?

John Ross
Left's Grip on Mexico City Slips

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet Jim Demint: Coup Apologist

Gareth Porter
The Iran Canard

Andy Worthington
Finally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings Case

Saul Landau
Bad Times, Worse Habits

David Macaray
How We Spend Our Money

Adam Federman
The Recovery That Wasn't

Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care

Russell Mokhiber Black Caucus Muzzled on Israeli Kidnapping of McKinney

Robert Jensen
Beyond Independence

Robert Bryce
Hey, Paul Krugman, Here are 2.4 Billion More Climate Traitors

Belén Fernandez
The Situation in Honduras

Missy Comley Beattie
Would Jesus Pack Heat?

C. G. Estabrook
La Cina e Vicina

Stephen Martin
The Fog of Economic War

Charles R. Larson
Adichie on Her Own

Lorenzo Wolff
A Voice Like a Newsreel: the Soul of James Carr and the Civil Rights Movement

Kim Nicolini
The System That Hijacked New York

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Kazak and Stadler

Website of the Weekend
Paul Krassner v. Larry King

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Wall Street White House

Nikolas Kozloff
Spinning the Honduran Coup

Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
Lost in Patagonia

Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

Brian Tokar
Climate Bill: Cap(italize) and Trade(Off)

Dan Bacher
Panama Canal North?

Website of the Day
Scheuer on Immigration: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

July 1, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Iran and Us

Alberto Vallente Thorensen
Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal

Paul Craig Roberts
Pirates of the Mediterranean

Robert Weissman
150 Years

Manuel García, Jr.
The New Crisis in Aviation

Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
Honduras, a Coup With No Future

Norman Solomon
The NYT and Troop Deaths: Abstract Quality Journalism

Franklin Lamb
Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk

Martha Rosenberg
When Doctors Boo

Diane Rejman
Mothers and Military Lies

Website of the Day
The Color of the Race Problem is White

June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Debt Deflation Arrives

Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

Benjamin Dangl
Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

Todd Gordon
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

Kenneth Libby
Conditions for Citizenship

Julian Vigo
Feeling Michael Jackson

Website of the Day
Inside the Mega-Churches

June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

James G. Abourezk
Where the Money Isn't Going

Ralph Nader
The Holes in Obama's Financial Regulation Plan

Carol Miller
Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Greg Moses
Jobs First

Website of the Day
Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

Nadia Hijab
The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
Nothing

Farzana Versey
The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
You Provide the Tweets, We'll Provide the Info War: the Media and the Iranian Protests

Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
Bill Quigley
"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
Haiti's Elections: "Beat the Dog Too Hard"

Website of the Day
Worst Slide Story

June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

Dean Baker
Making Financial Regulation Work

Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
Ray McGovern
Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
Jean Casella
Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

Gary Leupp
Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

Website of the Day
The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

Website of the Day
The Most Spied Upon Town in America?

June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

Website of the Weekend
Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

June 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Case of Netanyahu and the Curious Incident

Robert Sandels /
Nelson P. Valdes
U.S. Cuba Policy: a Case of Post-Diplomatic Strees Disorder

Anthony DiMaggio
The Iranian Elections and the Faith-Based Media

Robert Weissman
Obama's Financial Sector Reform Plan: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Joshua Frank
These Are Obama's Wars Now

Jonathan Cook
Canadian Ambassador Honored in Illegal Park Built on Razed Palestinian Homes

Reza Fiyouzat
Iranians in the Streets

Norman Solomon
Obama and the Antiwar Democrats

Ali Jawad
Reformists are Islamists, Too

James Ridgeway
Am I on Crack When It Comes to Flight 447?

Website of the Day
The Death of the Ghost Prisoner

June 17, 2009

Carl Boggs
Torture: an American Legacy

Dr. Bryant Welch
Torture, Psychology and Sen. Daniel Inouye: the True Story Behind Psychology's Role in Torture?

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Obama Will Outspend Reagan on Defense

Liaquat Ali Khan
Obama's Gift to Pakistan: a Civil War

Jonathan Cook
Beating and Torturing Children

Binoy Kampmark
Gordon Brown's War Inquiry

Karim Makdisi
The Lebanese Elections: a Box Office Success?

Dave Lindorff
Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black

David Swanson
In Congress: 32 Heroes, 21 Frauds

Gene Marx
How Fox News is Helping to Nationalize the GI Sanctuary Movement

Website of the Day
The Diamond Mine That Ate Mirny

June 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Looming Peril: a Plague of Snakes

John Ross
Undermining Mexico

Afshin Rattansi
Guarding the Revolution

Marc Levy
How I Nearly Won the War

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Behzad Yaghmaian
Iranian Youth Make History

Brian M. Downing
Democracy in Iran

Merle Lefkoff
Israel's Angels in America

David Macaray
Charles Manson and Me

Robert Jensen
Finding a Stubborn Hope to Live in a Dead Culture

David Swanson
An Exit Strategy That Keeps Wars Going

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament Fundraiser

June 15, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iranian Elections: Sure They Stole It...Up Front and Honestly

Patrick Cockburn
A Whole New Ballgame in Iraq

James Ridgeway
Did Composite Parts Bring Down Air France Flight 447?

Marjorie Cohn
Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam

Rannie Amiri
Iran and the End of the "Obama Effect" Myth

Dave Lindorff
How Obama is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Elections and the Hysterical Media

Leonard Schwartz
The Angel of History and the Ghetto of Gaza

Martha Rosenberg
Start Your Engines, Drug Reps!

Website of the Day
Single-Payer v. Public Option

June 12-14, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?

Gareth Porter
The CIA's Drone Wars

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Parlor Trick

Mark Ames
Elmer Fudd Nation

Esam Al-Amin
What Really Happened in the Lebanese Elections?

Franklin Lamb
Carter in Lebanon

Patrick Cockburn
Prisoner Swap in Iraq

Andy Worthington
The Long Ordeal of Mohammed El-Gharani

Heather Gray
A New Perspective on the Confederacy: Southern Greed During the Civil War

Felice Pace
Why NPR Refuses to Report on the Single Payer Movement

Ron Jacobs
Flashback to the End of a War That Really Did End

George Wuerthner
Burning Questions: Why the National Fire Plan is a Trojan Horse for Logging

Jeffrey Buchanan /
Trinh Le
Biloxi Trailer Blues

David Ker Thomson
Americana

Renaud Lambert
Brazil: More Dependent Than Ever

Kevin Zeese
Congress and the Health Business Lobby

David Macaray
SAG Vote: A Lesson in Solidarity ... Not

Evelyn Pringle
FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers

Chris Genovali
Blood Sport Auction: Why eBay Should Stop Selling Guided Hunts for Bears, Wolves and Cougar

David Michael Green
The Rhetorical President

Brian J. Foley
Our Solar System is Not a Suicide Pact!

Charles R. Larson
No Safe Return

Kim Nicolini
Foreclosure is Hell: Sam Raimi's Frightfest

David Yearsley
Bach on Torture: Mr. Cheney, They're Playing Your Song

Lorenzo Wolff
Intent to Discord

Poets' Basement
Chris Jordan

Website of the Weekend
The Red Room

June 11, 2009

Kathy Kelly /
Dan Pearson
Down and Out in Shah Mansoor: With the Swat Refugees

James Bovard
The Latest Torture Cover-Up Scam

Tristan de Bourbon
The Toy Makers of Chenghai: the Financial Crisis Seen From China

Dave Lindorff
The Wheels are Coming Off the Recovery Program

Kevin Zeese
The Case for Disbarment of the Torture Lawyers

Ralph Nader
The Craft of Sam Maloof: a Visionary Woodworker

Harvey Wasserman
The GOP's Trillion Dollar Reactor Plan Goes Radioactive

Nicole Colson
The Anti-Abortion Movement's Climate of Violence

Mark Weisbrot
Showdown Over the IMF

Dan Bacher
Big Water's Big Lie Unravels

Website of the Day
Top 10 Most Absurd TIME Covers

June 10, 2009

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Obama's Doublespeak on Iran

Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine
The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib

Kathy Kelly
Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Fear Rules

Rev. William E. Alberts
First the Torture of Truth ...

Peter Lee
Obama and North Korea: a Warm-Up in the Offing?

Carol Miller
Why We Need a Holistic, Cradle-to-the-Grave National Health Care System

Emily Ratner
Dreams of Flight in Gaza

Robert Weissman
The IMF's Accountability Moment

Dave Lindorff
The Sutra of the Crushed Volvo

Website of the Day
Starving in Gitmo

June 9, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Back From the Dead: Pentagon Pork!

Mike Whitney
Is Hyper-Inflation Around the Corner?

Stan Cox
Biofuel's Drug Problem

Sibel Edmonds
The Battle Against the State Secrets Privilege

Jonathan Cook
Where the Victim is the Guilty Party

David Macaray
A Bad Time for Unions

Robert Jensen
In South Africa, Apartheid is Dead, But White Supremacy Lingers On

Nadia Hijab
The Obama Difference

Mark Weisbrot
Vulture Funds Descend on Argentina

Website of the Day
Waging Non-Violence

June 8, 2009

John Ross
Mexico: Politics as Drugs / Drugs as Politics

Paul Wright
Deconstructing Gus: How a Former Prisoner Took On and Took Down Corrections Corporation of America's Top Lawyer (and Cheney Pal)

Paul Craig Roberts
Long-Term Economic Memory Loss

Franklin C. Spinney
"Natural Growth:" Israel's Demographic Hogwash

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon's Elections: Return to the Status Quo

Uri Avnery
The Tone and the Music

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Loyalty Oaths

Eric Toussaint
/ Damien Millet
The Partisans of Capitalism Have Lost All Credibility

Jim Goodman
The Dairy Oligarchy

Norman Solomon
Words and War

Reza Fiyouzat
When Accusations Fly: the Spectacle of the Iranian Elections

Website of the Day
Latino Jobless Rate Soars

June 5 -7, 200

Alexander Cockburn
High Words, Low Truths

George Galloway
Our Convoy to Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama in Cairo

Jennifer Loewenstein
How Much Really Separates Obama and Netanyahu?

Franklin Lamb
Watching Obama's Speech in Lebanon

Mike Whitney
The Biggest Rip Off Ever?

Andy Worthington
Death at Guantánamo

Missy Comley Beattie
Peace Be Upon You?

Farzana Versey
Walk Like an Egyptian: the Oprahfication of Obama

Stanley Heller
Obama's Non-Starter

John V. Whitbeck
Nothing Comes From Nothing

Robert Weissman
GM: the Path Not Taken

Lee Sustar
The Fall of GM: Why Workers Will Pay the Price

Dave Lindorff
What a State-Run GM Could Do

William Blum
The Great, International, Truly Demonic Iran Threat

Ernest Callenbach /
Harvey Wasserman
A Green-Powered Trip Through Ecotopia

Greg Moses
By George! Austin Leads the National Recovery

Ron Jacobs
The Meaning of Yasser Arafat

David Yearsley
Art Set in Concrete:
the Desolate Urban Landscape of High Culture

Tim Stelloh
Pot Home Invasions: Bud and Blow Torches

Belén Fernández
The Joksters: Obama and Thomas Friedman

David Ker Thomson
The Academics

Karyn Strickler
Clean Coal: a Dirty Joke

Christopher Brauchli
Judicial Amnesia and the Federalist Society

Charles R. Larson
Leaving Tangier: Exile and Exploitation

Kim Nicolini
"Hunger:" Art With a Punch

Lorenzo Wolff
Good Head (Or Why the End of Hand-Crafted Music Isn't (Necessarily) the End of Music)

Poets' Basement
Jenkins, Orloski and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Tankman

July 6, 2009

Reflections on History, Race and Nation

Of Fireworks and False Memories

By TIM WISE

"...the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further...the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

-- James Baldwin, 1952.

I have this fantasy, the indulgence of which I resist, due in part to the impracticality of it, but also, and mostly out of a general distaste for inviting potential violence upon my person. It only comes to mind once a year really, on this day in fact, as cities and towns across the United States gear up for their respective July 4th celebrations, replete with fireworks, hot dogs, and lots of red, white and blue banners, flags and wardrobe accessories ubiquitously assaulting the visual landscape from sea to shining sea.

In the fantasy, it's incredibly hot out, even as the daytime sun recedes, giving way to the darkening skies that will soon serve as the canvas for a colorful explosion of incendiary art: the end product of two unstoppable forces--American self-love, and Chinese manufacturing--brought together in an audacious display of grandiosity, not unlike, say, Siegfried and Roy, or at least Peaches and Herb.

As Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" blares from the back of a sound system loaded onto a truck, and the yearly Independence Day parade begins, I bide my time. Then, just as the first procession of Boy Scouts passes by, I turn to the man standing next to me, the one with the big "God Bless the USA" button on his hat, and say:

"Why can't you just get over it? I mean, why do you people insist on living in the past? That whole 'breaking away from the British thing' was like more than 200 years ago for God's sakes. Isn't it time to move on?"

In the fantasy, the man's head explodes, bloodless but powerfully and very, very final, at which point I move on to the next reveler, knowing that I only have so much time in which to put an end to this special brand of sanctimony by thought-murdering the assembled. After all, once the big sky-booms begin, no one will be able to hear me.

Truth is, I'm not a violent person. But if I thought this would work, I just might try it. This is, of course, exactly the kind of thing that whites (especially white conservatives) say whenever the subject of racism is raised, and always, if it is linked to the brutal national legacy of enslavement, Indian genocide and imperialistic land grabs. As in, "Oh, that was a long time ago, get over it," or "Stop living in the past," or as one intrepid soul explained to me last week in an e-mail, "Shit happens." That an otherwise literate, and by his own claims, well-informed individual would think nothing of turning hundreds of years of oppression--during which millions perished as a result of white supremacy--into the equivalent of a bumper sticker, should be more than enough to dampen the enthusiasm with which we celebrate our nation at this time of year. At least, it would be if the moral calibration of the people of said place played any role whatsoever in our understanding of the national self. Naturally though, it doesn't.

Shit happens. In other words, the past is the past, and we shouldn't dwell on it. Unless of course we should and indeed insist on doing so, as with the above-referenced July 4th spectacle, which is, to put it mildly, about some old shit. Or as many used to do with their cries of "Remember the Alamo," or "Remember Pearl Harbor," both of which took as their jumping off point the rather obvious notion that the past does matter and should be remembered, but which underlying logic apparently vanishes like fog before noon when applied to those historical moments we'd rather forget. Not because they are any less historical, but merely because they are considerably lessconvenient.

Truth is, we love living in the past when it venerates us. When it elevates us. When it places us upon the pedestal we have grown accustomed to seeing as our national birthright, as something to which we are entitled, as if placed there by the very hand of God Almighty, who of course speaks only English, lives in the suburbs, and drives a Hummer. If the past allows us to reside in an idealized, albeit mythical place, from which we can look down upon the rest of humanity as besotted, benighted inferiors, who are no doubt jealous of our greatness and our freedoms (and so that, of course is why they hate us and why some attack us), then the past is the perfect companion: an old friend, or lover, or at least a well-worn and reassuring shoe. If, on the other hand, some among us insist that the past is more than that--if we point out that the past is also one of brutality, and that this brutality, especially as regards race, has mightily skewed the distribution of wealth and opportunity in our nation--then the past becomes a trifle, a pimple on the ass of now, an unwelcome reminder that although the emperor may wear clothes, the clothes he wears betray a shape he had rather hoped to conceal. No no, the past, in those cases, is to be forgotten. Or if not forgotten, at least it is to carry no weight in the halls of power, such as the Supreme Court, which has reminded us repeatedly, and most recently this past week, that as regrettable as the history of anti-black racism is in this country (a history in which they themselves have played more than a mere supporting role), there is virtually nothing that can be done to remedy the effects of that history. It is, in the eyes of the court mere "societal discrimination," a bloodless and apparently perpetrator-less crime, mentioned in a dismissively clinical tone, and without regard for possible repair. In other words, shit happens, sayeth Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy. So suck it up.

Of course, so as to put a more benign and intellectually appealing gloss upon their position, white folks will often dress it up in the language of compassionate concern. Thus, they insist that dwelling on past injustices, or the present-day effects of those, is unhealthy, whereas dwelling on the supposed glories of the past is perfectly salubrious. Yes, those bad things happened, they might admit in a moment of temporary honesty, but to spend too much time on such matters is to create, or perpetuate an already-created mentality of victimhood among the, well, victims, though we shouldn't think of them as such. And so the right, with this master stroke presents itself as the defenders of black and brown dignity, merely seeking to protect them from the self-imposed straightjacket of victimization, rather than as the charlatans they really are: people who never, in any era gave two shits about the well being of people of color, and who stood in opposition to every single advance towards racial equity in this nation's history, but who now deign to pose as modern day inheritors of the legacy of MLK.

But their hypocrisy in this regard is stunning, or rather, it would be, were one capable of being shocked any longer by the patently dishonest pedantry of such persons as these. After all, it seems beyond obvious that they would never tell the parents of a murdered child to "get over it," or to "move on," nor warn them that their continued recitation of their family tragedy was somehow turning them into carriers of a deadly social pathogen known as victimhood. No indeed; rather, crime victims are able to parlay their victimhood into celebrity status, and market their suffering to the masses, who will then elevate them to the status of experts on the subject of crime, as with John Walsh or Marc Klaas, whose only claim to expertise on crime control policy comes from the fact that their children were viciously murdered. But if this is all it takes to be an expert on crime, then I guess the fact that I once got food poisoning from eating a bad oyster in Tacoma means I'm qualified to weigh in on quality control standards in the nation's fisheries. And no, I am not analogizing murder to food poisoning. For the record, a good childhood friend of mine was murdered exactly 29 years ago today, but this sad truth fails to imbue me with special insights on the particulars of proper crime control, though Nancy Grace would beg to differ I suppose, and although I would, as a result of this fact, reap the never-ending compassion of the very people who inveigh against the adoption of a victim mentality when the victimization is because of race.

Likewise, those who claim to be concerned only about the debilitating effects of a victim mentality never tell Jews to stop dwelling on the Hitlerian holocaust--indeed, historic Jewish victimization is today used to justify virtually any depredation against Palestinians, all in the name of Jewish nationhood, surrounded by cries of "never again"--and they don't say it to Cuban exiles who still can't get over their families' lost financial stake in Batista-era casinos, or to the Kurds who were gassed by Saddam, or, for that matter, even to the religious fanatics who claim to be victimized by the fact that they aren't allowed to recite a decidedly Christian prayer over the intercom in a public school. Oh no: to these there is nothing but sympathy. Their victimhood is recognized, honored and cultivated like soybeans in the post-Dust Bowl midwest. It is ennobled, even as the victimization of peoples of color is disregarded, downplayed, dishonored and turned into a subject of ridicule.

Of course, that the right--and especially its white members--would prove to be hypocrites on the subject of the harms of "victimhood" should hardly surprise. After all, this is a bunch that has, in every era, posing as the arbiters of tradition and defenders of all that is holy and true, played the consummate victim. Even as they sought to conquer the indigenous of the Americas they claimed victim status, notably, whenever those they sought to extirpate opted to fight back, rather than to go gently into that good night. And they claimed to be the victims of witches in Salem, and Papists, and foreign potentates (against whom those seeking to become citizens must still today swear a vow of bitter enmity), and abolitionists, and impoverished immigrants, and Jews, and evolutionists (also known in some quarters as scientists), and communists, and union bosses, and integrationists, and fluoridated water, and the United Nations, and hippies, and secular humanists, and feminists, and more communists, and the New World Order, and now Mexicans, and Mexicans, and Mexicans, and affirmative action, and multiculturalism, and of course big government, and taxes and welfare, and the liberal media, and gay marriage and Muslim terrorists.

The white right loves victims, as long as they are the right kind. In keeping with their great admiration of victimhood status, Glenn Beck inveighs on behalf of such an elevated and salutary identity as this, every time he implores Americans to return to "who we were on September 12th" of 2001. Such an entreaty takes as a given, after all, that we should bask in our victimhood, wallow in it, let it envelop us like a warm blanket, or perhaps an old discarded chrysalis, no longer functional but oh so reassuring about the place whence we come. Yes, if we can just get back to that, Beck assures us, we will recapture the purpose and mission that is ours to claim; we will soar to new heights, on the wings of the wronged, the attacked, the victimized, never allowing ourselves to forget for one minute what happened, nor even to get two days beyond it, always bringing it up, always using it as the excuse for anything and everything we do to anyone else in the world. It will allow us to claim the mantle of victim in perpetuity, until the end of time. And if we waver in our commitment to living as permanent targets of ill-fortune, never fear, perhaps Osama bin Laden will slaughter a few thousand more of ours in a new terrorist attack: something for which one of Beck's TV guests recently hoped, and with which Beck took no umbrage nor uttered even a syllable of indignant protest.

In other words, victimhood, far from being self-defeating, is a status to which the right has long aspired, and a label they have long sought to wear, like a badge of honor on their lapels. They have wanted nothing so much as to be seen as the ultimate victims, of every evil conspiracy ever concocted: to usurp God and nation and mom and apple pie. Their concern is not that blacks and other folks of color, by remembering history, will somehow chain themselves to a crippling narrative of victimization, but quite the opposite: that by remembering history, they will perpetuate the recognition of who did the victimizing. It is not victimhood they mind, but an honest appraisal of their own implication in the injury.

Which is no doubt why Beck, on this very day--Independence Day--announced on his radio show that he "hates the last one hundred years or so of American history." For it is that century in which the prerogatives of his kind of people (and the kind of people favored by the right generally) began to be effectively challenged. That was the century in which women got the right to vote, formal apartheid was dismantled, very much against the will of conservatives, child labor was outlawed, and workers received at least some basic protections from exploitative bosses. And so it is that one hundred years that has made a victim out of Glenn Beck and others like him. They now pose as the victims of a new America they can't even recognize, and can't abide. They claim to love the country, but actually only love the Leave It To Beaver version of it, which of course was always a fantasy, indulged by those whites too wrapped up in their racial narcissism to recognize how fundamentally insane was their rendering of the national truth.

This is why white folks suffered such apoplexy at the words of Jeremiah Wright, back in the spring of 2008: not because they had evidence to contradict what he said about U.S. militarism, the murdering of innocent civilians by the American empire, or about the regular and repeated medical experimentation done on black folks throughout the years--all of which has been amply documented by whiter and far less "radical" persons than he--but because his words forced a comeuppance with truth, for which they were none prepared. We had preferred the sanitized lie, and were incredulous that some among us might not be willing to play the game as we had played it for so many years.

Sadly, our national willingness to confront hard truths--or more to the point our unwillingness to do so--is a contagion, the likes of which has clearly infected the President, as evidenced by his July 4th message to the nation today, a copy of which arrived in my e-mail inbox as I was writing this, in fact. In it, President Obama--a man who surely knows better but who, having traded honesty for political viability, now finds himself tethered to patriotic blather as a condition of his public image--begins by insisting that on this day we should remember the "courageous group of patriots" who "pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us were created equal." Of course, as I'm sure the President learned at Columbia (or for that matter in prep school in Hawaii), most of them believed in no such thing. For many of the revolutionaries, indeed most, freedom and liberty were to be the preserve of white men only. And so, while whites like my own sixth-degree great grandfather received 10,000 acres of land for his service in the war, the 5000 blacks who served every bit as valiantly as he received no such prize. Indeed, slaves who fought rarely even obtained their freedom as thanks for their service. That is the truth of the independence we celebrate today: namely that it would remain a lie, even in theory, for virtually all non-white folks for another century, and in practice, for nearly two.

In other words, whereas Glenn Beck sees fit to condemn the last one hundred years of American history, it is only this century--and especially the last half of it, what with its steps forward, however incomplete, towards racial equity--that true lovers of liberty can possibly endorse and celebrate. The rest is mostly a menagerie of oppression, broken promises and outright lies: fraud masquerading as fact, tyranny posing as freedom, overt white supremacy and racial fascism smiling through the toothy grin of half-assed Constitutional guarantees that weren't worth the parchment upon which they were written.

And so as the fireworks pop outside my window, and the celebrants of our national glory retreat to their homes, filled with the warm fuzzy feeling that only raw and naked hubris can provide, may the rest of us--the non-celebrants, who value truth more so than comfort--pledge to continue troubling their sleep, disturbing their dreams, and haunting their patriotic consciousness well into the future: a future which, in the absence of an honest appraisal of where we are and where we've been, will be little more hopeful than the past from which we've only recently begun to emerge.

And if their heads explode, well, all the better.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005) and "Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama." He can be reached at:timjwise@mac.com.

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