Fighting demons; the twisted role of the political shaman

Mark Dorroh

One of the silliest aspects of election rhetoric is the oft-repeated promise that candidates, if elected, will "fight" for us. Elected officials who spend all their time fighting are not what I want. What I want from my leaders is competent governance.

Unfortunately, it's not particularly exciting to declare, in a stump speech, "I'm going to Washington and competently govern for you!" Such a declaration would be truthful, even refreshing, but a guaranteed applause line it's not.

As anyone who has spent time observing career politicians knows, fighters seldom accomplish much beyond making inflammatory headlines. The leaders who get useful things done are the pragmatic idealists, driven by core beliefs but also aware that in a policy debate, neither side can (or should) get 100 percent of what it wants. Today's fighting politicians and their blinkered constituencies tend to ignore principles of rational discourse, instead wallowing in visceral reactions to real or perceived injustice. They burn with an outraged sense of entitlement and are contemptuous of mutually-respectful dialogue.

Combative, ultra partisan politicians feed upon the arrogant assumption, cherished by too many voters, that the folks on the other side of the issue have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion, so we must fight them, triumph over them and leave the field of battle with trumpets playing and ideologues braying.

Fighting, as a method of governance, is also distressingly devoid of ethical considerations. Fighters substitute rage for reason; their means of debate are the expression of righteous indignation, not compelling argument. Thus, "fighting politicians" have become the shamans of modern republican democaracy.

Shamans - the witch doctors indigenous to all primitive cultures - fight demons while currying favor with friendly spirits. A shaman whose tribe is in trouble has two basic missions: he must first identify the demon who is the source of the trouble, then engage it in battle and, hopefully, carry the day. He may enlist friendly spirits to assist him, but his first job is to name the demon.

The role of the shaman is so pervasive in human history precisely because primitive people don't understand that bad things happen to good people because reality is indifferent to the welfare of any single organism, even when that organism is one's own precious, irreplaceable self. When the rain doesn't fall and the crops wither, the primitive mind assumes the tribe has either lost favor with its gods or has engaged the attention of malignant spirits. That's when the shaman earns his bread and butter by naming and fighting the evil spirit or spirits who are to blame.

Modern shamans have modern demons to name and fight. Today's widespread and largely unchallenged belief that "special interests" are at the root of all evil in America is one prime example of the modern demon. Special interests have become the all-purpose scapegoat of contemporary American politics.

Special interests are (if the conventional wisdom of the doctrinaire Left and Right can be believed) out to rip you off, ship your sons and daughters off to be slaughtered in unjust wars, marginalize public expression of your religious beliefs, make every nation on earth hate America, discriminate against you and yours, murder your "pre-born" babies, export your jobs to other countries, destroy the institution of holy matrimony, poison your environment, impoverish your grandparents and entice your children into a life of vice and degradation.

So what is a special interest, and what makes it so scary? Upon closer investigation, we discover that all a "special interest" actually amounts to is a group of people with shared beliefs and/or means of earning a living who hire a spokesman to tell our leaders what effects new laws, regulations or tax code changes will have on them. The politicians I've talked to over the years say they use lobbyists primarily as a source of free research. The officeholder called to vote on a tricky and complex bill first acquires a position paper from the lobbyist of each interested group of citizens, then makes up his/her mind based on all available information - plus the values and principles he/she articulated to get elected in the first place.

This seems, at least to me, to hardly to qualify as anything approaching an intrinsically evil process.

The real problem with special interests is not fundamental to that process. Rather, the real problem occurs when government alters its mission from enforcing reasonable laws to legislating personal morality and/or redistributing honestly-earned wealth.

A government which has embraced those dubious missions is a government which will regularly be manipulated by the angriest minority or the most ruthless majority. That's when special interests morph from their role as rational adviser/advocates into smug, self-righteous petitioners seeking to use the power of government to bully fellow citizens into their version of utopia.

If we, the voters, would all get together and conspire to exclude government from the business of taking wealth from Citizen Group A and handing it over to Citizen Group B, or of trying to dictate matters of personal conscience (especially in regard to religious belief systems and human sexuality), the scary special interest groups would instantly lose their evil aspects and be blessedly returned to performance of their original missions; providing our leaders with vital, advocacy-based information.

Let's implore our politicians to give up their shaman's robes and masks, quit trying to name the demons and return government to the carefully limited role the Framers envisioned. Or, to put it another way, the next time a candidate promises to go to the halls of power and "fight for you," run, do not walk, to the ballot box and vote for his/her opponent, no matter what flavor of idology he/she may espouse. Do this often enough, and our twisted political shamans will finally begin to comprehend that what we want is not serial ideological dustups, but rather competent governance.

Then and only then will America be able to leave the "fighting" to our excellent professional military.

Sex, lies, video tape, "Nunn's Nickel" and weapons of mass destruction

Mark Dorroh

Arms Inspector David Kay has spent the past week talking about his search for WMD in Iraq, but only selected portions of his remarks are being repeatedly cited in most news reports. Kay's belief that Saddam probably didn't have stockpiles of WMD immediately prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom is something one reads and hears often. Also mentioned frequently is Kay's belief that was a failure among U.S. intelligence agencies and the information they gave President Bush.

What doesn't get mentioned nearly so often is Kay's assertion that his post-war inspections have uncovered plenty of evidence that Saddam had WMD-related projects in the works and possessed a number of missiles with ranges in excess of Desert Storm armistice/Security Council resolution limitations.

The WMD research-and-development projects and illegal missiles are significant because, according to the language of Resolution 1441, Saddam had an obligation to report them (which he failed to do) and allow unfettered access to their sites (which he also failed to do). Violation of either of those provisions of 1441 was enough to trigger serious consequences for noncompliance, up to and including armed intervention.

Also, many news reports ignore the fact that Kay has repeatedly said it wasn't just American intelligence that miscalculated the presence of Saddam's WMD stockpiles. While the Russians were publicly skeptical on the matter, they were nearly alone in their skepticism. Intelligence services of the French, the Germans and the Brits all thought the same thing as President Bush: that Iraqis probably had WMD stockpiles. The argument preceding the invasion wasn't over whether or not Iraq had them, it was over what should be done about it, another factoid seriously underreported by the media.

Heavy (and heavy-handed) media emphasis on selected portions of Kay's remarks reminds one of the way in which the infamous Rodney King beating was handled by American media. We all saw, dozens of times, the portion of the videotape in which the helpless King lay on the ground as deputies wailed away on his prostrate form with truncheons. What I saw exactly once on television was the portion of the tape in which the six-foot-something, 230-pound Rodney King lunges at a deputy, nearly knocking him down.

Apparently, network news editors didn't think that part of the tape was as sexy (or as useful for ratings) as the helpless-on-the-ground video images. That left many with the impression that the beating was utterly arbitrary and unprovoked. And while King's actions did not justify the savagery of his beating, the underreported lunge was essentially censored by members of the 4th Estate whose professional and ethical obligation is to tell the whole truth, not just the bloody, exciting bits that make police look like monsters and criminals look like victims (lest we forget, King's extreme drunkenness behind the wheel initiated a police chase with speeds approaching 100 mph, and King was so loaded when they finally apprehended him, the cops thought he was dusted on animal tranquilizer).

Another interesting feature of the reporting done on Kay's WMD conclusions is the criterion by which reflexive Bush-bashers define a "lie." By any reasonable standard, relying on (nearly everyone's) flawed intelligence - intelligence which assumes the worst of someone with a history as bloodstained as Saddam's - does not rise to the definition of a lie.

On the other hand, a few years back, chronic Clinton-bashers did in fact catch a president in a lie when he testified that he'd not done what DNA evidence later proved he had.

Unlike George W. Bush, William J. Clinton was not relying on anyone else's flawed intelligence. He knew the truth, and chose not to tell it.

Yet many who defended Clinton then accuse Bush of lying now. And the classic Clinton defense, that the flawed testimony was all "just about sex" ignores the fact that, no matter what the underlying issue, the president intentionally lied about it in a deposition to a federal court investigating an alleged civil rights violation.

Compared to accepting possibly flawed intelligence - with which three out of four major national intelligence services agreed at the time - the chant, "Bush lied, people died" becomes a curiously empty and misguided mantra … sort of like that of the sheep in Animal Farm who would lie around in the pasture for hours, chanting "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" ad infinitum.

It should be noted at this point that Eric Arthur Blair, a former socialist who saw the light after serial depredations of human rights and dignity at the hands of his coreligionists in the 1930s, darn well knew the definition of a lie … and of an empty chant as well.

In a larger sense, our treatment of presidents Clinton and Bush shows how crazy we can get when we allow gut reactions to influence our higher-order mental processes. Even when Clinton did things Republicans loved (his support for meaningful welfare reform, NAFTA, GATT) many choked on giving credit of any sort to "Slick Willie." Similarly, "Cowboy George" gets precious little credit from the other side of the aisle for his support of No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program.

Partisanship can get ugly, and seldom respects the truth. That was sadly illustrated by this week's funeral, in Kentucky, of former Governor Louie B. Nunn. I lived in Kentucky when Nunn won the race for governor in 1967. If memory serves, it was about a week after the vote was certified that the lame-duck, 100-year-old, opposition party administration announced a state budget shortfall of something in excess of $10 million. The week before Nunn took office, there was a second audit that put the total deficit at $20 million. When Nunn took office and did his own audit, the deficit turned out to be more like $24 million. A hundred-year reign of any single political party (in the case of Kentucky in 1967, the Democrats) will nealy always engender such monkey business … as will a 12-year reign, as Republicans in Congress are so busy proving in 2006.

Faced with the prospect of, among other things, being forced to throw mentally retarded adults out of state homes for lack of budgetary ability to continue caring for them, Nunn supported a two-cent increase in the existing three percent sales tax. It came to be known, in the bumper-sticker wisdom of the day, as "Nunn's Nickel."

So, just for grins, let's review the circumstances behind the promulgation of the "Nunn's Nickel" sales tax hike.

Former one-party administrations caused the deficit that made the tax increase necessary; 3/5 of the final "Nunn's Nickel" state sales tax existed long before Nunn ever even ran for office; a legislature controlled by the loyal opposition approved the two-cent increase.

But Louie Nunn, because of "Nunn's Nickel," never won another election. Once again, the hoary and cynical adage that "in the Real World, no good deed goes unpunished" has been certified Q.E.D.

The common denominator in these stories is that perception does not equal reality. Lamentably, truth becomes a dispensable luxury when partisan rhetoric and editorial agendas taint the delivery of information to the public.

We'd do well to remember those sorry facts when trying to wring the truth from stories about sex, lies and weapons of mass destruction.

Constitutionality, lifestyle choices and the sex police

Mark Dorroh

I've discovered doctrinaire liberals believe two things:

1. Most people aren't very smart, and

2. They, the clever liberals, must make certain decisions for us, lest we injure society through our stupidity.

That's the main reason the average American worker pays out in taxes 40 cents of each dollar earned. The assumption is that we would not make wise choices on how to spend our money, so the government has to do it for us.

But before we condemn liberals too harshly, we must recognize the unfortunate fact that these days, many supposed conservatives are every bit as willing to use the power of government to tell citizens what to do with their property, up to and including their own bodies. Since one's body is one's most fundamental possession, anyone who believes in property rights must find such strictures offensive. It's bad enough to be told what you must do with nearly half your income, how much more ridiculous and wrong is it to be told what you may not do with 100 percent of your own body?

Court decisions decriminalizing sexual activity between consenting adults have been derided as "judicial activism," but they're really just recognition of the fact that government has never possessed any Constitutionally-derived power to regulate what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors. The reason the rulings are happening now is, legal awareness is finally catching up with the outrage of gay and lesbian citizens, who are justly sick of government usurpation of unwarranted control over their private lives.

There are those who say the court rulings open the door to legal child molestation, bestiality and incest. But anyone who claims they can't see the difference between adults having sex with each other and adults preying on children, animals or their own siblings is being deliberately obtuse.

Children are not mature enough to make decisions about with whom they will engage in sexual activity: They are also not old enough to sign binding contracts or vote, so a clear precedent is established in regard to what adults can and cannot do with kids.

Bestiality violates laws against cruelty to animals.

And a quick study of the egregious genetic mistakes birthed in the final generations in ancient Egyptian royal dynasties will make evident the biological necessity of leaving in place our laws against incest.

There are no such reality-based reasons to forbid homosexual or lesbian romance, or even marriage. If the members of a given church decide they want to honor marriages between same-sex partners, isn't their right to do so protected by First Amendment guarantees against government interference with free exercise of religion?

Yeah, I know, Mormons had to give up polygamy before Utah could join the Union, but there have been precious few polygamous, polyandrous, homosexual or lesbian unions that have done anything like the damage to society as that done by one man/one woman couples having out-of-wedlock babies.

Letting government remain in the business of prohibiting homosexual and lesbian behavior makes about as much less sense as the welfare state practice of paying heterosexual parents to sit home, unemployed, having baby after baby for us to support. Charity should be voluntary, neither mandated nor prohibited by government. So should love, sex and marriage.

Finally, there's a fairness issue here. It flies in the face of everything we know about human nature to think sexual orientation could be the result of a "lifestyle choice." Ask a gay guy when he first became aware of his proclivities; he'll tell you between the ages of about eight and eighteen. The same thing goes for his lesbian gal pal. And honestly, can anyone make a lifestyle choice at that age? Even if they could, kids and adolescents are notorious conformists, wanting nothing more than to be exactly like all their friends. The last thing one of them would ever choose to do would be to act different in such a basic and despised way.

No, our gay and lesbian fellow citizens are that way because that's how God made them. And unlike some folks who apparently know more than I do, I don't make a habit of criticizing God's work.

On the other hand, if you're put off by freakshow gay pride parades, welcome to the club. They are held mostly to freak out the straights … and they'll disappear when the straight community quits being freaked out by them.

All this yadda-yadda will eventually sort itself out, as the elder generation dies off and is replaced with people who have had openly gay and lesbian family members and friends for years. Their parents (and grandparents) knew plenty of gay and lesbian people too, but in the old days, they used to stay in the closet, if possible, their entire lives. Strangely, this was regarded as honorable. It was also terribly dishonest.

Traditional American values are and always have been those of honesty and forthrightness, not the furtive hiding of one's genuine nature to satisfy someone else's expectations. The only thing these anti-gay bashing rulings of federal and state courts have recognized is the fact that our Constitution does not now and never has had provisions for sex police.

Mandates, pledges and honesty in government

Mark Dorroh

Prince George County District 2 Supervisor Henry Parker wants localities to consider just saying "no" to partially-funded federal and state mandates. "Just tell them we're not going to fund them," he said recently. "Look at all the good things our minority citizens have achieved that way."

Parker's right. Nonviolent resistance has a proud and successful history in the American civil rights struggle. Could it be used to put an end to this sorry game of Pin-The-Costs-On-The-Locality?

Of course, as Parker is well aware, unless nearly every city and county in the country participated, it wouldn't work. Those that did would lose their share of state/federal funding, money their own taxpayers have sent in and wouldn't get back. That would provide a powerful incentive for other localities, especially less affluent ones, to not join the resistance.

But even if that idea wouldn't work, Parker's got another one that would. Unlike nonviolent mandate resistance, it wouldn't rely on any level of governmental participation. It would be done at the ballot box by individual voters.

Want more honest government? Then begin demanding of legislators a pledge to raise taxes as much as necessary to fully pay for any program implemented by subordinate levels of government.

Honoring such a pledge would force state and federal lawmakers to start being brutally honest about what new programs and services really cost. No longer would they reap the glory for supporting bills to authorize popular measures while passing the buck (or, more accurately, the lack of bucks) down the line.

Any candidate who won't take the no-unfunded-mandates pledge should be rejected by voters on grounds of essential dishonesty. Those who take the pledge then don't honor it should be recalled.

And as long as we're on the subject of honesty in government, here's an idea of my own; isn't it time to end the blatant dishonesty about who pays corporate and business taxes? I think it would be very refreshing, not to mention truthful, to quit pretending taxes on corporations and small businesses come from some magical pool of money. That seems to be the primary assumption of those who say, "tax the businesses, not the people."

Taxing businesses is a sneaky, fundamentally dishonest way of taxing individuals and families while telling them you're getting the money from someone else. That's because tax bills paid by businesses and corporations can come from only three sources; customer product/service prices, worker wages and benefits and/or investors' interest and dividends. Last time I checked, customers, workers and investors were all "people." "Aha," I hear you cry, "why not take the money from fat-cat investors?"

There are a several excellent reasons to not take more money from investors. First, American investors already pay a higher capital gains tax rate than investors in most other industrialized nations. Also, it has yet to be demonstrated that government is any better at spending money than businesses. Putting aside the minority of high-profile exceptions like Enron, the opposite seems to be true. Businesses are constrained by market competition to reduce waste and deliver quality. Government is under no such strictures. Sure, most government employees are conscientious and competent. But the bad ones (bureaucrats who spend most of their work time fighting internecine turf wars, rude and careless public service types, etc.) are nearly impossible to fire. In the business world, unless you treat your good workers well and get rid of your bad workers, you'll lose market share to those competitors who do.

Another good reason to not take even more investors' money through taxes has been illustrated by the woes of investment markets over the past few years. Have you noticed how many pension funds and 401 (k) accounts have been hurt? That's because pension funds, retirement accounts and lots of other financial instruments used by working-class Americans are dependent on investment markets.

Ironically, it is American capitalists who have made the Marxist ends (workers owning their means of production) achievable. Meanwhile, corporate money managers who invest our insurance premiums and loan payments give us all an interest in (and benefits from) capital investment markets.

The tax-the-businesses crowd has used a classic Marxist means (getting people to believe mammoth, counterintuitive lies) to achieve their ends (redistribution of wealth based on subjectively-defined "social justice"). It's the same game state and federal leaders have been playing for decades, pretending, through semi-funded mandates passed down the levels of government that tax-supported programs and services cost less than they really do.

It's time to stop the serial lying. Send this column to your state and federal legislators. Tell them the game's up; they can be honest about who pays corporate taxes, take the no-unfunded-mandates pledge, or pack it in.

Imposing freedom on foreigners

Mark Dorroh

There is a body of foreign affairs theory which questions the wisdom of imposing western-style institutions on other nations. Their argument against our (armed) encouragement of representative republics in places like Iraq is that these are cultures historically ill-equipped to handle all the choices afforded individual citizens by republican democracy.

One interesting thing about such arguments is their historical resonance, especially here in the American south. It wasn't so long ago that voting rights were being denied American citizens of color because a lot of white folks thought Negroes had a culture which had not equipped them to handle the choices afforded individual citizens in the voting booth.

The idea that only certain kinds of people can "handle" freedom has, at its heart, the racist notion that only we of European descent have sufficient historical ties to representative governmental institutions to be able to hire our own leaders and run our own economies.

While it is true that cultures go through stages of development, start small, grow great, then eventually become querulous old geezers, whining about the Good Old Days That Never Were (i.e. - modern France, Germany, Belgium, etc.), free enterprise economies and democratic government serve human needs that transcend geography, history and race.

Or to put it another way, people are people, and we all want basically the same things. Beyond food, clothing and shelter, we all desire a reasonable degree of comfort and security and a better life for our kids. No matter what your cultural tradition or ethnic derivation, those are your primary goals, shared with every other person on the planet.

Still, there are those who would discourage free economies and universal suffrage in some parts of the world, on the theory that some cultures don't adapt well to "western values."

The same people who make this argument usually also believe government is a more equitable distributor of wealth than the natural process of individuals making choices about where they'll work and where they'll spend the money they earn.

Historically speaking, the reverse is true. Governments devoted to income redistribution have never truly served the people they were set up to serve.

The worker's paradise of the U.S.S.R. was a mug's game by which a small number of party members took what they wanted from everyone else, then doled out what was left to the workers who actually produced it. Ranking party members got Black Sea dachas, everybody else got to stand in line for shoes.

The reason socialist economies have been so unsuccessful is that properly-functioning political and economic systems must be based on recognition of how individuals actually behave.

Capitalism and its political equivalent, democracy, recognize that people are, by their nature, self-interested. Rather than try to deny or change that, the democratic capitalist revels in it. Our nation accordingly has a system that protects the right to accumulate capital, lend it, tend it, and grow wealthy while helping finance everybody else's hopes and dreams.

The reason America is so rich and powerful is because free enterprise encourages each of us to perform to the best work we can do in exchange for the best wage we can get someone to pay us. It makes the companies we work for compete for our labor by offering better wages and benefits than alternative employers. And all that self-interested encouragement to do good work, plus market competition, helps customers get the best products and services for their money.

Compare the relative lack of poverty in America to the near-universal poverty in Cuba. There, some of the world's hardest-working people are trapped in a basket-case socialist economy. Back in the 1990s, Fidel Castro's own grandson was spotted by a reporter, playing in a rock band with an American dollar bill glued to the front of his guitar.

Some cynics think greedy corporations are exporting all our jobs to Mexico and China, but if that's so, why are there thousands of people, every single day, bending heaven and earth to get into America, legally or otherwise, just for the opportunity to work at whatever jobs remain?

There's an old Cuban joke about the Castro regime. It goes, "The revolution has had three great successes; health care, race relations and sports. And three great failures; breakfast, lunch and dinner."

Soviet workers used to say, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." May such jokes never apply to the U.S.A. So long as government's control over our economy remains minimal, they never will.

And yes, Virginia, people from other cultures, even those with no indigenous traditions of self-rule or market-driven economics, can prosper from our example. Because people are people, no matter where you go. We all crave freedom and wealth, and regardless of what you might have heard, that's a good thing.

Little bitty thoughts from my little bitty mind

Here are some Christmas/New Year musings from (I hope) everybody's favorite noisy white male.

John Ashcroft is not my favorite U.S. Attorney General ever, and I'm not totally enamored of every single feature of the PATRIOT Act. But it's been two years and three months since the atrocities of 9/11, and because no attack even vaguely approaching that scale has been inflicted upon the homeland since, I must concede he got something right.

Some of us think the capture of Saddam does not make America safer, but consider; just a week after Saddam was shown to the world as a bearded, exhausted old man being inspected for head lice, Libya's megalomaniac Col. Kadaffi announced he will allow unfettered, unannounced inspections of all his suspected facilities for the manufacture, research and storage of weapons of mass destruction.

Coincidence? Somehow, I doubt it. Colonel Kadaffi may be a little nutty, but he's far from stupid.

1972 Revisited? Unless the Democrats get their act together, we're going to get treated to a rerun of the presidential elections of 1972. That's when a much-despised, moderate Republican incumbent routed a decent, slightly left-of-center Democrat who was a perfectly competent U.S. Senator but who would have been a lousy president.

Howard Dean calls himself "the candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." OK, but he's also the guy who, had he been president in 2002-2003, would have left Saddam Hussein in his numerous presidential palaces while the UN arms inspectors would have been either still kicked out of Iraq ... or still waiting outside the gates of suspected WMD facilities while some Ba'ath party bureaucrat gave them a song-and-dance about why they weren't allowed to go inside just yet.

Then again, President Dean might have been able to keep the French on our side. Whether that's more important than forcibly ending one of the bloodiest dictatorships in human history is something for future generations to determine.

Modern Graven Images and the Weird Judge Who Wants More of Them

Judge Roy Moore knew he was going to lose in his battle to keep on display, in a taxpayer-supported building, his ugly little graven image of some artist's impression of what the 10 Commandments might have looked like - had they been written in English instead of Hebrew. He's now launching an appeal which he knows he will lose.

His media-savvy grandstanding and utter contempt for both the First Amendment and Second Commandment remind me of two other famous southern demagogues: George Wallace and Huey Long. His object is not to win legal battles so much as to stir up enough anger and confusion to get himself elected to higher federal office.

His stated position, "Idolatry today, idolatry tomorrow, idolatry forever!" is curiously familiar to a lot of Alabamans ... not to mention in direct opposition to one of the 10 Heavenly Laws he says he seeks to honor. I can't imagine why no one else has noticed this, or at least not talked or written about it anywhere I've been lately. I just hope the people of Alabama eventually see through this particular false prophet. We were warned about guys like Moore in the Bible, and the U.S. Constitution gives us the power to stop them. Thank God (literally) and the federal judges who enforce the law, no matter how unpopular it makes them.

The (Wrong) Reason for the Season

Speaking of the Deity, while I certainly enjoy giving and getting gifts, I really do wish we could break Christmas into two holidays, one for the hoopla, the other for a quiet, dignified religious observance. The December occasion would be the loud and festive one; it comes at the traditional time of Saturnalia, the Roman feast days which celebrate the shortest days of the year. That's when it would be appropriate to have a big material deal of a celebration, give everybody presents, gobble figgy pudding and guzzle eggnog. When the days are shortest, what you're celebrating is the beginning of the end of the cold months, the preparation for the rebirth of spring.

Then, sometime in March or April, we could have the religious Christmas observance. It would be much more historically accurate, since spring is when the shepherds would actually have been out watching their flocks and looking for extra-bright stars. Look it up: most Biblical scholars and certainly any sheep herder know that spring, not midwinter, is when the ewes are lambing. In winter, the flocks are sheltered near home, munching fodder, not out in the predator-filled fields under the close watch of shepherds. For the Spring Christmas, we could have the religious holiday, the midnight services, the quiet gatherings of family and friends, the symbolic renewal of faith in the first months of the New Year.

My plan would put the Spring Christmas pretty close to Easter, but what's really wrong with that? It would be far less distressing than our current confusion and endless arguments over whether it's a good thing to combine a spiritual holiday with materialistic fun and games. The combination of Saturnalia with Christmas was a marketing scam aimed at converting Romans, just as allowing graven images into our temples was done to get gentiles with their Hellenistic beliefs and their love of fleshy art to convert to a better religion.

Isn't it time for modern Christians to correct those two specific abominations? But if we do, please don't tell Judge Moore. He's already darn near terminally confused. The overload of all that truth at once might literally kill the poor fellow.

Judicial activism vs. mob rule

If I never again hear the loaded term "judicial activism," it will be too soon. Throughout our nations' history, that characterization of a given federal court ruling has been shown time and again to be based primarily upon the question of whose ox gets gored.

In the 1930s, liberals screamed judicial activism when the U.S. Supreme Court killed off some of FDR's more imaginative "alphabet agencies." In the 1960s, conservatives got equally rowdy when the rights of the accused were vigorously protected by the Miranda ruling.

These days, it seems that nearly every high court ruling is promptly slandered as the product of someone's judicial activism. "These matters should be left to legislators," is the common refrain from one side or the other. The logical problem with that reaction is that judicial interpretation of laws - relative to the Constitution - is our nation's most essential bulwark against the tyranny of the majority.

If the state legislatures of America were free to do anything they wanted, the rights of Americans would be altered every time we crossed a state line. That's not a nation, that's a confederation. When Americans tried confederation as an alternative to federalism, the results were a disaster. The Constitution was written as an alternative to the Articles of Confederation as a specific remedy the interstate squabbling which, among other things, levied tariffs on other states.

Then, in the short-lived Confederate States of America, dustups between the several sovereign states caused them nearly as much grief as the Army of the Potomac. For instance, Georgia kept its militias home for the first critical months of the war because duly-elected legislators decided Virginia's problems with the United States Army were Virginia's, not Georgia's. They later relented, but in the early days of the Civil War it was Georgia state law that Georgia troops would be permitted to fight the Federals when and if they crossed the Georgia state line, and not a moment sooner. One shudders to think what such an arrangement would have meant for the world in 1941.

Part of the reason the hackneyed and meaningless term "judicial activism" crops up so often in American history is that people have very short memories. The fact of the matter is, there have been cases of supposed judicial activism that unquestionably turned out to be the right thing to do.

Laws forbidding interracial marriage were struck from the books only within my lifetime. There were tens of millions of people, black and white, who believed interracial marriage was wrong, so legislatures encoded that belief into state laws. But those laws violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of association, so the court struck them down. In other words, it was judicial activism that killed off racist laws allowing states to decide who could marry whom based on skin color.

Moreover, there is a built-in remedy for judicial activism. If courts do stray too far from the will of the majority, that remedy is constitutional amendment. Amendments are really hard to adopt because our founding fathers didn't want folks messing around with the country's master legal document unless there was an overwhelming majority who thought it absolutely necessary. Of the hundreds of amendments proposed over the years, fewer than one out of ten has actually gotten further than introduction on the floor of Congress or a state legislature. And that, for better or worse, validates all those court rulings characterized as judicial activism, simply because Americans have not seen fit to exercise our collective right to overturn them.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment, the Balanced Budget Amendment or the Right to Life Amendment, but in the absence of action by the constitutionally mandated super-majority, the statutes and prior rulings those amendments were designed to get around must be allowed to stand. That doesn't mean the Supreme Court was right or the proposed amendments were wrong, it just means that the rule of law has prevailed. And that's far more important than any single issue or statute could ever be.

As distasteful as some U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been (and this week's majority ruling on campaign finance reform, in this writer's opinion, stinks out loud), without judicial interpretation of the Constitution, we're in danger of living in a nation run by a majority with no limits on its power. And that's an incredibly dangerous state of affairs: Remember, a lynch mob is a majority too.

So let's knock off the ceaseless, pointless diatribes against judicial activism; the sole alternative is mob rule. As society changes and grows, our courts act to moderate the capricious will of the majority. Each side is going to win a few and lose a few, and that, in turn, will continue to nurture and sustain the great American tradition of responsible government. The creators of the Constitution who carefully balanced powers between the branches of government, and between state and federal authority, were brilliant, even prescient.

Ask any happily married interracial couple.

Neocons and Arab idols

"Future TV," a popular Arab network in the Holy Land, has a hit show on its hands. Arab Idol is based on the same popular British show that inspired American Idol, and folks throughout southwest Asia are now being treated to images of attractive, talented young people singing their hearts out. Fans by the thousands send in votes for their favorite contestants via the Internet and the keypads of their cell phones. So much for the conventional wisdom that the "Arab street" disdains decadent Western institutions, including, presumably, singing stars and their anti-Islamic Hollywood values. But there's more to Arab Idol's popularity than refutation of clueless conventional wisdom. Some see the show as, heaven help us, a sort of primitive democracy.

In a feature aired on National Public Radio, a Palestinian engineer says of Arab Idol, "At last, Arabs get to vote on something!" Then, he quickly asks the interviewer, "Are you going to quote me? No names, please."

Yikes! This poor man is so used to minding his mouth - lest he run afoul of Yasser Arafat's secret police - that he won't even crack wise when the frame of reference is a silly television show. His fear is especially significant in 2003, a full decade after the last of the great western police states, the U.S.S.R., imploded and disappeared. Since 1900, virtually every nation in Europe and the Western Hemisphere has availed itself of the political and material benefits which accrue to those who embrace government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, the ideals of egalitarianism and self-rule have yet to gain wide acceptance among our Arab and Persian cousins.

Part of the reason is probably the different schedules on which human cultures grow, become stagnant, decay and are reborn. After challenging Europe for primacy during the Dark Ages of 500 years ago, the great civilizations of Islam fell into their own stages of stagnation and decay. Who knows when their Renaissance will finally begin? One would expect it to be sooner rather than later. After all, radio, the Internet and TV have deeply penetrated these nations with their presentations of the unimaginable freedom and relative prosperity in the Western democracies.

So why haven't the people of the Middle East risen up and taken control of their own governments, as the English began doing at Runnymede and the Americans did conclusively in the final years of the 18th century? They live geographically much closer to Greece, birthplace of democracy, than, say, Canada or Taiwan, but their ideals of freedom and self-determination languish, submerged in a hellbroth of xenophobic dictatorships run by brutes and religious fanatics. All of whom, in turn, are defended by the corps of supposedly progressive freethinkers in Europe and America who would never agree to live in Syria or Iran, but who claim these wretched excuses for governments are just as good as any libertarian democracy. These persons are the spiritual descendants of the cabal of smallbore intellectuals and pseudo-scholars who spent 70 years defending Communism as a "noble experiment," even though precious few of them ever actually lived in a Communist state.

The NeoConservatives of the Bush administration have their work cut out for them, promoting republican democracy in the Middle East. Nations with little or no history of indigenous democratic institutions or the belief systems which support them are going to take a while to become accustomed to the idea that rulers are required to serve the people's interests. Their system has it the other way around; now, the people of the Holy Land are required to serve the interests of the rulers, their childish prejudices and pointless wars.

It would help matters considerably if those who claim democracy is "just one of many equally valid political systems" would quit pretending tyranny is the equal of democracy. No matter how cunningly one deconstructs the proposition, reality has proven otherwise time and time again. That fact, predictably, didn't stop a nutty professor in Florida from asking God to inflict upon American troops "a million Mogadishues" at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (see "smallbore intellectuals and pseudo-scholars," above).

If and when we all accept the overwhelming historical evidence that democracy and respect for individual rights are universal, not merely Western values, Arabs may finally get the chance to vote on something more important than a television talent show.