Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality

by Sara Robinson


We need to stop this. We have gone on too long assuming that our right-wing opponents are, in all times and places, unchangeable and unchanging. Yes, their arguments are confoundingly short on evidence and fact. Yes, their logic loops are closed up so tight as to be frustratingly impervious to reason. Yes, they absolutely do mean to do us -- and our democracy -- grievous harm.

Here's the good news. That Great Wall that separates our little reality-based community from The Fantasyland Next Door is not a monolith. Nor are the inmates of that Otherworld necessarily locked in there for all time and eternity. There's evidence -- from scientists, from experience, from history -- that there are cracks in that wall. They are small and subtle, to be sure (that's why nobody's ever noticed them before): at this point, they are mere hairlines, faint traces that are hard to spot without a good flashlight in the hands of someone who knows where to look. But, as someone who's spent much of her life pacing one side or the other of this wall, I am here to tell you: there are places where it fails. People do cross it, and survive to tell the tale. And, rather than continue to wallow in our frustration, it's high time we mapped those cracks, find effective ways to widen them, and eventually exploit them to help both afflicted individuals and our larger culture break through the insanity.

It will be slow, thoughtful, methodical work. What I'm offering here is just an opening tour of the rockwork, an explanation of where the cracks are and why they formed. At first, actual opportunities to exploit these weaknesses will be small and fleeting. But my hope is, with time and practice, we'll get more observant, and more creative, and more adroit in taking advantage of them when they appear. That's the goal of this series.

This first installment summarizes some pertinent ideas culled from John Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience. These are some of the basic ideas and definitions I'll be using as a springboard in the posts that follow.

Dean wrote this book with the express goal of using his own status as a bestselling author to popularize decades of social science research that should be -- but isn't -- common knowledge among politically-literate Americans. If I had to bet, I'd guess that grousing, joking, analyzing, and commiserating over the confounding nature of the non-reality-based community probably accounts for a quarter of all the words ever produced in Left Blogistan. For several years now, we've been trying to puzzle this riddle out on our own, with limited success. But, happily, it turns out that social psychologists have had the map to the right-wing authoritarian mindset nailed down for years. Dean wants us all to know what they know.

Research into "authoritarian personalities" began in the aftermath of WWII, as scientists tried to figure out how otherwise civilized people succumbed to the charisma of Hitler and Mussolini and allowed themselves to be willingly led into committing notorious atrocities. The inquiry continued through Milgram's famous experiments at Stanford in the early 60s; later, some of it became subsumed in the work of The Fundamentalism Project convened by Martin Marty at the University of Chicago in the 1980s and early 90s. Long story short: there is now over 50 years of good data on these people coming from every corner of the social sciences; but since almost none of this has been common knowledge outside the academy, nobody on the progressive side has really been putting it to use. Dean clearly wrote the book hoping to change all that.

The bulk of Conservatives Without Conscience is based on the research of Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, a social psychologist specializing in the psychology of authoritarianism. Altemeyer received the prestigious Association for the Advancement of Science prize for behavioral sciences for this research, and it is widely accepted in academia (though, as you might imagine, not so much among conservatives!). What follows is my brief synopsis of Dean's brief synopsis of some of Altemeyer's findings.

Leaders and Followers
Authoritarians come in two flavors: leaders and followers. The two tiers are driven by very different motivations; and understanding these differences is the first key to understanding how authoritarian social structures work.

Leaders form just a small fraction of the group. Social scientists refer to this group as having a high "social dominance orientation (SDO)" -- a set of traits that can be readily identified with psychological testing. "These are people who seize every opportunity to lead, and who enjoy having power over others," says Dean -- and they have absolutely no qualms about objectifying people and breaking rules to advance their own ambitions. High-SDO personalities tend to emerge very early in life (which suggests at least some genetic predisposition): you probably remember a few from your own sandbox days, and almost certainly have known a few who've made your adult life a living hell as well.

High-SDO people are characterized by four core traits: they are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to expanding their own personal power, and amoral. These are usually accompanied by other unsavory traits, many of which render them patently unsuitable for leadership roles in a democracy:

Typically men
Intimidating and bullying
Faintly hedonistic
Vengeful
Pitiless
Exploitative
Manipulative
Dishonest
Cheat to win
Highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
Mean-spirited
Militant
Nationalistic
Tells others what they want to hear
Takes advantage of "suckers"
Specializes in creating false images to sell self
May or may not be religious
Usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Dean notes: "Although these collations of characteristics…are not attractive portraits, the are nonetheless traits that authoritarians themselves acknowledge." In other words, these guys know what they are, and are often quite unabashedly proud of it.

High-SDO people are drawn to power, and will seek it ruthlessly and relentlessly, regardless of the consequences to others. Many cultures (including ours, up until a few decades ago) have found these people so dangerous that they've evolved counterweights and backstops that conspire to either keep them away from the levers of power, or mitigate the damage they can do (and I'll discuss some of those in the last installment). However, modern America seems to have lost all vestiges of this awareness. Now, we celebrate our most powerful social dominants, pay them obscene salaries, turn them into media stars, and hand over the keys to the empire to them almost gratefully. They have free rein to pursue their ambitions unchecked, with no cultural brakes on their rapacity. They will do whatever they can get away with; and we'll not only let them, but often cheer them on.

We’re now at the point where these sleek Machivellian manipulators are recognized around the world as the face of American business and governmental authority. While the bulk of "Conservatives Without Conscience" goes on to explain the ways in which various members of the Bush administration have demonstrated classic high-SDO behavior, I'd also argue that our willingness to accept high-SDO leadership also accounts for toxic bosses, incompetent business planning, crooked accounting, political graft, and many of the other dysfunctions that afflict American corporate life as well.

And yet, while these leaders are compelling, they will not be the main focus of my discussion of authoritarians. As I said: these personality traits emerge as early as three or four, and people who have them are almost always well beyond the reach of change. They have always been with us, and probably always will be. Since they represent a very small slice of the population, dealing with them effectively will, in practice, largely involve strategies to recognize them, isolate them, and prevent them from aggregating large hordes of followers.

It's those followers that we need to look at -- because they are sometimes capable of change, if you know where the leverage points are. The next two parts of this series will focus exclusively on them; for now, let's look at what Dean and Altemeyer have to say.

While the high-SDO leaders are defined by Dean as dominating, opposed to equality, desirous of personal power, and amoral, right-wing authoritarian followers have a different but very complementary set of motivations. The three core traits that define them are:

1. Submission to authority. "These people accept almost without question the statements and actions of established authorities, and comply with such instructions without further ado" writes Dean. "[They] are intolerant of criticism of their authorities, because they believe the authority is unassailably correct. Rather than feeling vulnerable in the presence of powerful authorities, they feel safer. For example, they are not troubled by government surveillance of citizens because they think only wrongdoers need to be concerned by such intrusions. Still, their submission to authority is not blind or automatic; [they] believe there are proper and improper authorities…and their decision to submit is shaped by whether a particular authority is compatible with their views."

2. Aggressive support of authority. Right-wing followers do not hesitate to inflict physical, psychological, financial, social, or other forms of harm on those they see as threatening the legitimacy of their belief system and their chosen authority figure. This includes anyone they see as being too different from their norm (like gays or racial minorities). It's also what drives their extremely punitive attitude toward discipline and justice. Notes Dean: "Authoritarian aggression is fueled by fear and encouraged by a remarkable self-righteousness, which frees aggressive impulses."

3. Conventionality. Right-wing authoritarian followers prefer to see the world in stark black-and-white. They conform closely with the rules defined for them by their authorities, and do not stray far from their own communities. This extreme, unquestioning conformity makes them insular, fearful, hostile to new information, uncritical of received wisdom, and able to accept vast contradictions without perceiving the inherent hypocrisy.

Conformity also feeds their sense of themselves as more moral and righteous than others -- a perception that's usually buttressed by the use of magical absolution techniques that they use to "evaporate guilt," in Dean's words. Because they confessed, or are saved, or were just following orders, they can commit heinous crimes and still retain a serene conscience and sense that they are "righteous people." On the other hand, when it comes to outsiders, there is no absolution. Their memory for even minor transgressions is nothing short of elephantine (as Bill Clinton knows all too well).

Dean lists other traits of right-wing authoritarian followers, most of which flow directly from the three core traits above:

Both men and women
Highly religious
Moderate to little education
Trust untrustworthy authorities
Prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own)
Mean-spirited
Narrow-minded
Intolerant
Bullying
Zealous
Dogmatic
Uncritical toward chosen authority
Hypocritical
Inconsistent and contradictory
Prone to panic easily
Highly self-righteous
Moralistic
Strict disciplinarian
Severely punitive
Demands loyalty and returns it
Little self-awareness
Usually politically conservative/Republican

Remember this list, because these specific characteristics form the foundation of the discussion that will unfold in the next two posts. It is these traits that we will find the cracks in the wall.

As a final point: Dean's book puts to rest once and for all the right-wing shibboleth of "liberal fundamentalists" and "liberal authoritarians." Altemeyer and his colleagues have found, through decades of research, that authoritarians almost universally skew toward the far reactionary right on the political scale. This very much includes Stalinists and other "left-wing" totalitarians: though these men used socialist rhetoric to create "Communist" political orders, they're classic examples of high-SDO leaders taking control by whatever means they had at hand, and using them to create archetypal far-right authoritarian states. Dean and Altemeyer make it clear that authoritarianism is, by long-accepted definition, overwhelmingly a right-wing personality trait.

Dean is also emphatic that authoritarianism, in all its forms, is completely antithetical to both classical conservatism (he still considers himself a Goldwater conservative), and to the founding ideals of America. We must be clear: when right-wingers threaten liberals, they are directly threatening the seminal political impulse that created our nation. An operative democracy depends on having a populace that is open to new ideas, able to think for itself, confident in its abilities, willing to take risks, and capable of mutual trust. America was founded as the world's first radically liberal state. History has shown us that the nation's best moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong liberal orientation.

Authoritarians aren't merely constitutionally incapable of this kind of cultural and political openness; they are actively hostile to it, and seek to stamp it out wherever they find it. Everything in their souls drives them to dismantle the democratic impulse, and bring people under the heel of hierarchical authority -- which is why history has also shown us that the nation's worst moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong right-wing authoritarian orientation.

In my next post, I'll move away from Dean's book, and into a deeper look at the psychology of right-wing followers. We'll take a brief look at some of the reasons people are drawn into right-wing authoritarian belief systems -- and a longer look at the events that cause some of these same followers to eventually choose to abandon those systems.

It's in those reasons that we'll begin to find the cracks of daylight. See you Saturday.

Dave's Not Here

By Mrs. Robinson

For the four years Orcinus has been in existence, Dave's been known to take off for a week or three now and again. Always before, he'd just put out the "gone fishing" sign, lock the place up, and paddle off into the Pacific sunset, leaving an open thread and a six-pack on the porch for any friends who dropped by.

This time, for the first time, he's decided to leave the keys with a housesitter -- someone who can keep the conversation going while he's off communing with whales.

Hello: I'm Sara Robinson -- the notorious and ubiquitous Mrs. R -- and I'll be your blogger this month. Stick around and put your feet up. I'll do my best to keep the posts coming, the quality high, and the trollish horde from making a mess on Dave's rug.

In keeping with the dominant themes of this blog, which include the patterns and prognosis of far-right movements, I'd like to begin my tenure with a short series on John Dean's newest book. "Conservatives Without Conscience." Dean has been everywhere right, left, and center in recent weeks flogging the book, so I'm probably safe assuming most of you are well-acquainted with his basic arguments. What I'd like to do over the next week or so is delve a little deeper into the book's specific points -- the ones that never quite got covered on the book tour -- and then apply some of Dean's truly fascinating research to the various issues Dave addresses here at Orcinus, as well as some other stuff I've been involved with.

Often, the discussions here have taken a dark and daunting turn. It's been sobering to watch the shadow of proto-fascism creeping across the soul of the America we thought we knew. We find ourselves besieged by authoritarians everywhere we turn, in every possible flavor -- political, economic, cultural, religious, military, sexual, you name it, we've got it. Where on earth did these people come from? How did they amass such power? Why do we seem to be breeding so many of them? And -- most importantly -- how can you negotiate with people who live inside such tightly closed logic loops that they are impervious to fact, and regard any compromise as weakness?

These are the questions that make our heads hurt. While Dean's book offers potent answers the first three questions, it doesn't attempt to answer the fourth one. But between his analysis, plus Dave's astute observations of the behavior of right-wing extremists, plus my own long experiences with people recovering from fundamentalism, I think I'm seeing the outlines of at least a few possibilities that could change the dynamics of the situation going forward. These people may be a special kind of crazy -- but Dean's gift is in revealing the patterns and logic that underlie the craziness. Once we understand that, we just might finally find the tricks that will break the spell.

That's my hope, anyway. At the very least, we can maybe move the dialogue forward a bit, out of rage and despair and on toward more practical solutions. More on Friday: see you then.

Gone spyhopping

I'm off for a ten-day break from all electronic contact in the San Juans. I have another long trip coming up later in August as well.

I've done this kind of thing before and have usually just left the blog idle. My thinking has always been, well, this is a writer's blog, and my readers are accustomed to this kind of absence. It's part of the package.

But it has, on the other hand, always seemed unfair to regular visitors here. And with the length of these two trips, it seemed especially unfair.

So I've decided, for the first time, to invite a guest blogger to post here. Rather than look for someone else who's already blogging (thereby forcing them into double duty) I've decided to invite one of my regular commenters: the estimable Mrs. Robinson.

Longtime readers know that Mrs. R is a thoughtful and skilled writer, deeply and well informed from a variety of sources, and pretty funny as well. She also happens to be a former professional writer and editor who shelved that career awhile back, and it's seemed to me she's ready scratch that itch again.

So, please welcome ... Here's to you, Mrs. R.

Nasty liberal bloggers

Well, Lanny Davis isn't the only ostensible "centrist" Democrat out there worrying about the effects of those nasty liberal bloggers on the national discourse -- alongside, of course, a whole batch of right-wingers who are themselves known to have to wipe the flecks of foam from the corners of their mouths. Unsurprisingly, most of their alleged evidence of a problem is itself highly problematic.

As the folks at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting have documented, the hand-wringing is reaching epic proportions.

And the funny thing is, those "nasty" bloggers just happen to be more popular because they reflect a broad public consensus -- which is to say, they are far more mainstream than they are "leftist":

In fact, you can find the kind of Democrats Diehl likes on the Internet—at sites like Bull Moose, for example. It’s just that they tend to be much less popular than the sites of Democratic bloggers who—like the overwhelming majority of Democrats—oppose the war in Iraq.

What's especially amusing is the way these political reporters have internalized right-wing talking points -- which are part of a specific political propaganda strategy based on projection -- about the alleged nastiness of liberal bloggers, a la the latest Malkin-O'Reilly teamup.

That is, all that "joking" talk about killing off liberals and rounding up ragheads is just "normal politics," but if liberal bloggers use some swear words or hardball political tactics, then gosh almighty, they've just come unhinged!

There was a local permutation of this recently from P-I columnist Joel Connelly, an ostensible "centrist" Democrat (he also coauthored the autobiography of one of my political mentors, Cecil Andrus) who waxed wroth on behalf of GOP senatorial candidate Mike McGavick, who he deemed the "victim" of "poisonous politics."

Mind you, as Goldy explains, McGavick is facing a shareholder lawsuit for entirely legitimate reasons, soime which ostensible "Democrats" should find disquieting as well:

Further adding to the outrage is the fact that McGavick had already made millions at SAFECO, and had a generous termination package in place. By rewriting his termination agreement after he announced his voluntary retirement, handing McGavick many millions more than he was contractually due, SAFECO has potentially performed an end-run around our campaign finance laws, indirectly dumping truckloads of cash into this Senate race via McGavick’s own unlimited, personal contributions.

Worst of all, Connelly concludes that the problem, again, is those nasty liberal bloggers:

The anti-McGavick campaign has been a mean, low-down attack on a stand-up guy.

On the horsesass.org Web site, which helped spawn the lawsuit, founder David Goldstein held forth last Thursday: "McGavick's midlife conversion to 'civility' is a joke to anyone who remembers the vicious campaign he ran on behalf of Slade Gorton."

Not true, Goldie, and you didn't even live here then.

Well, Goldy is more than capable of defending himself, and he does so here. But I'd like to add a word or two to this; perhaps Goldy didn't live here then, but many of us who did, and who were in fact covering politics back then, had exactly the same assessment of Gorton's campaigns.

The truth is that Gorton, in his final two campaigns in 1994 and 2000, developed a singularly nasty and divisive style of politics that deliberately pitted the rest of the state against those awful "Seattle liberals." It worked to perfection in 1994, but not so well in 2000.

The 1994 campaign had a genuinely ugly underside to it that was little reported on at the time but no less real. I had an up-close view of it, since I was on the editorial board of the Bellevue Journal American back then and monitored the race closely. I also participated in the board's simultaneous interview of Gorton and his opponent, then-King County Councilman (and now county executive) Ron Sims.

In the interview, Gorton repeatedly referred to Sims as representing "inner city" interests; he must have said "inner city" or "urban" a dozen times or more. It didn't take a genius to figure out he was doing this precisely because Sims was a black Seattleite. It was the kind of pitch -- carrying an unstated racial charge, but one that the candidate could deny -- that would work especially well on the far more conservative Dry Side of the state, though he obviously was trying it out in GOP-leaning suburban Bellevue, too.

It was a kind of subtle nastiness, but nasty nonetheless, and certainly divisive. And it worked so well in 1994, he obviously thought he'd try it again in 2000. That time, against a white suburban tech-firm executive named Maria Cantwell, it didn't work so well.

McGavick's plea for civility, in reality, is just as certain a way of evading the issues as if he went after his opponent, Cantwell, personally -- a strategy that the McGavick people probably realized would come up dry anyway. Now all McGavick is running on is how uncivil and nasty the Cantwell people are.

In the meantime, how does McGavick stand on those endangered orcas whose ESA status is under assault from his financial supporters at the Building Industry Association of Washington? I've e-mailed McGavick's office asking for his position on the orca listing, but have not heard back from them. But, judging from the anti-ESA position he stakes out on his Web site, I'd have to guess that he opposes protecting those killer whales.

You know, if political reporters were genuinely concerned about nasty personal politics obscuring the debate over serious issues, they would be asking Republicans like McGavick these kinds of issue-oriented questions -- instead of regurgitating right-wing talking points about the alleged nastiness of liberal bloggers and making that the story.

[Daryl at Hominid Views has more.]

UPDATE: Connelly, in an e-mail, points out that McGavick was not involved in the '94 and '00 campaigns. My point was that Gorton had a history of running nasty campaigns. Moreover, as Daryl details, Connelly's recollection of the '88 campaign is somewhat at odds with the record.

Orca territory

[click for enlarged image]

Nature writer Brenda Peterson has an excellent piece in the most recent issue of the National Park Conservation Association's magazine focusing on the Puget Sound's endangered orcas. Regular readers here may enjoy noting that it provides a slightly different perspective on the annual OrcaSing event at Lime Kiln State Park I described here. (Peterson, it's clear, actually heard the concert on land.)

She mentions something of special note that I managed to neglect discussing in my feature story on orca recovery for Seattle Weekly: the imminent removal of dams from the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula, which it's hoped will provide a fresh bounty of salmon for the orcas:

Clearly, things need to change if orcas are to remain in the waters of the Pacific Northwest for future generations. Fortunately, there is reason for hope, including a growing demand to restore healthy populations of salmon to the waters off the coast.

"The removal of two dams on Washington’s Elwha River, beginning in 2009, will be one of the most significant river restoration projects of our time and a boon for resident orcas," says Josh Walter, Northwest rivers coordinator for the National Parks Conservation Association.

These dams should have come down a long time ago, and would have if not for the running interference from former Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, whose fetish for blocking conservation and recovery efforts of all stripes played a big role in his ultimate defeat in 2000. With Gorton out of the way, state and federal officials were finally able to complete a removal plan in 2004.

As it stands now, it will probably take at least another decade before we start to see the Elwha River salmon return to any significance, and a full 30 years before they beging to near their historical levels. We just have to hope it's not too late to help the orcas by then.

The martyrdom of Mel

The brouhaha over Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic slurs emitted during his DUI arrest ("The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world") is just one of those inevitable Hollywood train wrecks, like John Belushi dying young and Liz Taylor getting divorced.

I mean, think about it: Combine a superstar with more money than God, a reputation for erratic and aggressive behavior linked, supposedly, to a drinking problem, and a track record of closeted anti-Semitism. Well, what did you think was gonna happen?

Of course, Gibson has been getting slammed, particularly by Jewish leaders, who found Gibson's initial apology -- which tried to pin the blame on the demon rum -- somewhat wanting:

The U.S. Jewish Anti-Defamation League said that the apology was not enough and that Gibson should be ostracized by his peers.

The group's national director Abraham H. Foxman said, "It appears that the combination of liquor and arrest has revealed his true character.

"We believe there should be consequences to bigots and bigotry. One way to combat bigots is to put a price on bigotry.

"I would hope that if this is in fact true, that his colleagues condemn him and distance themselves from him."

What was immediately clear was that Gibson had a real problem that would affect his bottom line, including his forthcoming role as a producer of a miniseries about the Holocaust:

His most immediate issue is with Walt Disney Co., which is distributing "Apocalypto" and which also, through its ABC television network, has a development deal with his company to make a miniseries about the Holocaust.

Several prominent critics of "The Passion" have stepped forward to suggest that Gibson, who denied there was an anti-Semitic undercurrent in his movie about the last hours of Christ's life, has now shown his true colors.

"Mel Gibson's apology is unremorseful and insufficient," said Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who added: "His tirade finally reveals his true self and shows that his protestations during the debate over his film 'The Passion of the Christ,' that he is such a tolerant, loving person, were a sham."

Foxman called on Hollywood executives to "realize the bigot in their midst" and "distance themselves from this anti-Semite."

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, urged Gibson to drop the Holocaust project, saying it would be "inappropriate."

Rather predictably, there's been a knee-jerk defense of Gibson in the right-wing blogosphere, as SZ at World O'Crap has detailed. Locally, as TalkCheck has been documenting, radio talk-jock (and former GOP gubernatorial candidate) John Carlson has been telling us that Gibson's rant "wasn't really anti-Semitic."

And what do you know? All of them manage to blame liberals for the problem. Amanda at Pandagon notes:

Forgive me for being a little skeptical of the idea that Mel Gibson got his wild ideas about a Jewish conspiracy from overdosing on Al Franken. As badly as Chavez wants for the criticisms of neoconservatives to be an extension of the long history of rumor-mongering about how Jews secretly control the world, the truth is that criticisms of neocons do not in fact have the markers that coded references to this legend have. In order for her little theory to work, Chavez has to imply that neoconservatism is a mythical entity, as fictional as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But the hawkish direction of the Republican party is hardly a myth and it did in fact result in the invasion of Iraq. Anti-Semitic legends generally have the Jews plotting in secret to take over the world; critics of neoconservatives don’t think there’s anything going on in secret and generally have the wealth of articles and policy proposals and conservative rhetoric to point to as evidence of this change in the direction of American conservatism. Oh yeah, and no one seriously thinks either that all neocons are Jews or that all Jews, or even most Jews are neocons.

I've been waiting to see how Gibson's apologies have shaken out before commenting. Obviously, his first attempt came well short of owning up to the problem.

But his followup apology, on the surface at least, appeared to go much further:

"Hatred of any kind goes against my faith," he said in a statement issued through his publicist Alan Nierob.

"I'm not just asking for forgiveness," Gibson said. "I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing."

Gibson said he's "in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display" and hopes members of the Jewish community, "whom I have personally offended," will help him in his recovery efforts.

"There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark," Gibson said.

"But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith."

However, the response has been somewhat mixed:

"Anti-Semitism is not born in one day and cannot be cured in one day and certainly not through the issuing of a press release," Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said in a statement. Gibson should read about Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, among other things, Hier added by telephone from Israel.

"When Mr. Gibson embarks on a serious long-term effort to address that bigotry and anti-Semitism, he will find the Jewish community more than willing to engage and help him," he said.

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the process requires hard work. "You can't just say I'm no longer a drunk; you can't just say I'm no longer a bigot. You need to work hard at it, and we're ready to help him," Foxman said.

There's a good reason to balk, for now: Gibson has in the past used evasive word games to avoid making clear exactly where he stands regarding a number of ideas that are typically part of an anti-Semitic worldview, and at other times he has grown aggressive and caustic in denying that he is even remotely anti-Semitic.

Those past denials have all been blown up now, and in retrospect look cynical and manipulative. What would make his current apologies any less hollow -- especially since the wording is so similar?

You see, lots of bigots deny that they "hate" the targets of their bigotry. They limit the notion of "hate" to a purely personal and visceral one, and thus find themselves blameless. Many of them are capable of having friendships with members of the target group, but they usually rationalize these friendships as "exceptions" -- and then readily prop them up as proof that they are not bigoted. This, despite their holding beliefs that are part and parcel of agendas that are truly hateful: racist, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, whatever.

A closer look at Gibson's apologies, moreover, reveals one big component missing: What about Mel's dad?

Now, the question here isn't about how Mel feels about his 86-year-old father, nor is this an attempt to drive a wedge between him and his father. (Indeed, it has been by pretending that this is the case that Gibson has so far evaded any serious attempt to answer the very serious questions that linger regarding his associations with anti-Semitic beliefs.)

Rather, it is a question about Gibson's own beliefs: What does he believe about the size and scope of the Holocaust? What does he believe about the role of the Jews in world affairs, both historically and currently? Does he in fact believe in the kinds of conspiracy theories that his DUI rant suggested?

This is largely because of what Gibson has said in the past, particularly when compared to what his father has written and said.

Take, for instance, his 1995 interview in Playboy:

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about Bill Clinton?

GIBSON: He's a low-level opportunist. Somebody's telling him what to do.

PLAYBOY: Who?

GIBSON: The guy who's in charge isn't going to be the front man, ever. If I were going to be calling the shots I wouldn't make an appearance. Would you? You'd end up losing your head. It happens all the time. All those monarchs. Ifhe's the leader, he's getting shafted. What's keeping him in there? Why would you stay for that kind of abuse? Except that he has to stay for some reason. He was meant to be the president 30 years ago, if you ask me.

PLAYBOY: He was just 18 then.

GIBSON: Somebody knew then that he would be president now.

PLAYBOY: You really believe that?

GIBSON: I really believe that. He was a Rhodes scholar, right? Just like Bob Hawke. Do you know what a Rhodes scholar is? Cecil Rhodes established the Rhodes scholarship for those young men and women who want to strive for a new world order. Have you heard that before? George Bush? CIA? Really, it's Marxism, but it just doesn't want to call itself that. Karl had the right idea, but he was too forward about saying what it was. Get power but don't admit to it. Do it by stealth. There's a whole trend of Rhodes scholars who will be politicians around the world.

PLAYBOY: This certainly sounds like a paranoid sense of world history. You must be quite an assassination buff.

GIBSON: Oh, fuck. A lot of those guys pulled a boner. There's something to do with the Federal Reserve that Lincoln did, Kennedy did and Reagan tried. I can't remember what it was, my dad told me about it. Everyone who did this particular thing that would have fixed the economy got undone. Anyway, I'll end up dead if I keep talking shit.

The theory he's referring to crops up all the time on the Patriot/militia far right, particularly among the tax protester/anti-New World Order set (see here for a sample). I first heard it from the Montana Freemen, who seem themselves to have taken it from the notorious anti-Semite, Marvin 'Red' Beckman.

Indeed, the whole "New World Order" theory set is riddled throughout with anti-Semitism, in no small part because that's where it largely originated. Even Pat Robertson's attempts at peddling a slightly sanitized version of it was discovered to have anti-Semitic roots throughout.

When he released The Passion of the Christ, Gibson claimed he is not anti-Semitic by arguing thus:

"Neither I nor my film are anti-Semitic. Nor do I hate anyone, certainly not the Jews. They are my friends and associates, both in my work and my social life. Anti-semitism is not only contrary to my personal beliefs, it is also contrary to the core message of my movie."

But as I've said, anti-Semitism comprises not merely hatred of Jews -- it is also constituted of a willingness to believe the ancient "blood libel" and deicide charges. Holocaust denial is also a significant component.

Then, after the furor erupted over The Passion, he gave an interview with Peggy Noonan that included evasive answers about Holocaust denial:

"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

Well, as I pointed out at the time:

It's important, of course, to understand that this is exactly the storyline pushed by Holocaust deniers, namely, that yes, there were many Jews killed in Europe during World War II, but they were only a small part of the total who died in the war, and the "6 million" number is grossly exaggerated. Not only is this exactly what Hutton Gibson told the New York Times, you can find the exact same views at such Holocaust-denial organs as the Barnes Review, the Institute for Historical Review, and the Adelaide Institute.

Of course, these are all organizations with whom Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, has direct and open associations. He gives speeches before them and writes for their various publishing organs. Hutton Gibson speaks at Holocaust denial conferences and has continuing significant associations with such anti-Semites as Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute.

Even before The Passion was released, he made headlines by telling the New York Times that 9/11 was actually a Jewish plot:

The actor's father, Hutton Gibson, told The New York Times he flatly rejected that the terrorist group led by Usama bin Laden had any role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11.

"Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson told The Times.

"So what happened? They were crashed by remote control."

He and the actor's mother, Joye Gibson, also told The Times that the Holocaust was a fabrication manufactured to hide an arrangement between Adolf Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany to the Middle East to fight Arabs.

"Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told The Times. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?"

Said Joye Gibson: "That weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe."

Just as the film was being released, Hutton Gibson gave an interview that included this gem:

To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know there in control and they're going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people...They killed several generations of us Americans (referring to WWWI, WWII)...The Jews weren't in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia. America had no right to fight in foreign wars (in reference to WWI and WWII).

Gee, sounds rather like people who claim that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," doesn't it?

Ah, but what does Mel Gibson think about all this? In the same interview with Noonan, he makes clear that he believes everything his pop says:

"My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life."

Amid the Passion uproar, Mel Gibson was interviewed by Diane Sawyer for ABC's "Primetime," during which he offered these thoughts about the Holocaust and his father:

MEL GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

DIANE SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million, millions?

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

DIANE SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father's views were your views on this.

MEL GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father and it's not going to happen. I love him. He's my father.

DIANE SAWYER: And you will not speak publicly about him beyond that.

MEL GIBSON: I am tight with him. He's my father. Got to leave it alone, Diane. Got to leave it alone.

Why, exactly, do we "got to leave it alone"? Because of some ridiculous Hollywood-script-style notion that a father-son relationship is some kind of sacred thing?

As I observed before:

What has been startlingly absent from Gibson's denials so far has been any kind of repudiation of his father's beliefs regarding the Jews and the Holocaust. Merely claiming that one is not anti-Semitic doesn't cut it -- because many, many Holocaust deniers likewise deny that they are anti-Semitic (just as many white supremacists deny that they hate blacks). They only want the truth, they claim -- when in reality, their entire purpose is to bury the truth.

And later:

So while it's fine for Gibson to claim vehemently he is not anti-Semitic, that isn't persuasive evidence in itself, given the wealth of evidence suggesting that he is in fact. What's been strange about Gibson's denials hasn't so much been what he has said, though that's problematic enough. It's what he hasn't said. At no point has he ever actually explained his own thoughts regarding these controversies. His spokesmen have simply said that he and his father "don't agree on everything." And Gibson has warned interviewers away from interfering with his relationship with his dad.

Until Mel Gibson comes clean and gives a full public airing to these issues, it's going to be hard believing anything he says isn't just another cynical PR cover story. And whatever reconciliation he says he's seeking is going to quietly creep down the memory hole.

Unlike most Hollywood train wrecks, which are all about the cult of celebrity anyway, this one, in stripping away the mask of celebrity, actually has meaning beyond mere gossip columns and tabloid titillation. Because the questions it raises cut to the nexus of the culture wars, where truth is constantly under assault by people who want to erase memory and revise history.

As the right-wing conventional wisdom now circulating settles into the system, it'll gradually become Mel Gibson who is viewed as the victim. After all, everything can be blamed on those nasty, unhinged liberals. Even all the wars in the world.

'Strawberry Days' are here again

Just a reminder to my regulars: We'll be discussing my most recent book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, as part of the Sunday book salon discussion at Firedoglake today. The first part of the discussion last week, hosted by Jane Hamsher, was a pleasant success.

I'll be joining the discussion at 2 p.m. PDT today. See you there!

Bottom feeders

Michelle Malkin is a walking wonder of sorts -- capable of speaking out of both sides of her mouth simultaneously without imploding. The drooling hypocrisy, however, is quite the mess.

This week -- as part of her schtick decrying "unhinged" behavior from the left -- she decided to attack Jane Hamsher with a string of charming epithets, calling her, variously, a "nutball," a "Hollyweirdo", and most of all a "bottom-feeding blogger." So much for civilized discourse, eh?

Malkin makes much of Hamsher's pull-no-punches style, particularly her attacks on Kate O'Beirne, claiming: "She threatened O'Beirne on her blog: 'The bitch is dead meat'."

Threatened O'Beirne? Goodness, let's read the post ... oh, I see ... she threatened her with negative Amazon reviews! Oh my Lord in Heaven! What's next? Printing her home phone number?

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that cursing and profanity aren't really my style, though I do use them when the occasion warrants. And I have argued that obscene hate mail and vicious sexism have no place in the left's repertoire.

But there is a place for profanity. Even if it's not my style, I well understand that the outrageous behavior of the right inspires real and righteous outrage; people are being killed on behalf of their agenda, after all. After awhile, it's only natural to respond to constant abuse -- the threats, the charges of treason, the constant personal attacks, the outrageous abuse of power -- with a straight shot to the face: "Aw, fuck you, asshole."

I think bloggers like Atrios, Digby, Tbogg and Jane -- and scores of others -- do a good job of giving voice to that outrage, and it's needed. Reason and facts often are next to worthless when confronting these jerks, and though I do my best to provide them, I also applaud those who fight back -- especially when they do so with as much wit as you often find in left Blogtopia [yes, skippy invented that term].

That said, I'll admit I was disconcerted by the photoshopped image of Joe Lieberman in blackface that got Malkin's shorts in a bunch, originally accompanying Jane's post at Huffblog and since removed. It obviously was playing fast and loose with old racist stereotypes, which is always a dangerous business, if for no other reason that it can be easily misconstrued (just ask Steve Gilliard).

As with all such cases, it all boils down to intent. If this had been posted to derogatorily suggest that Lieberman was secretly a "black man" at heart (the kind of thing that is known to occur at certain far-right sites) then it would be a clear-cut case of race-baiting. If the intent, on the other hand, is to portray Lieberman as a pretend black sympathizer in the mold of a minstrel showman (as the artist responsible later made clear in the post's comments) then it's fairly harmless. Dumb, and not particularly effective, but harmless.

The upshot is that Malkin rushes to use the image to suggest that Hamsher is no friend of colored people. Can you say projection? I knew you could.

After all, this is a person who:

-- Writes for and openly promotes VDare, designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

-- Regurgitates and promotes in the mainstream racially charged conspiracy theories concocted and promoted for years by white supremacists.

-- Publishes fraudulent history as a way of justifying the mass incarceration of an entire ethnic group during wartime.

-- Has a long history of using bogus arguments and conspiracy theories to gin up hatred of Muslims.

In sum, the entire arc of Malkin's career has been predicated on one primary accomplishment: she can get away with publishing racially charged nonsense that, if written by a white person, would raise immediate questions of racism. Because Malkin is Asian American, she gets a pass. Talk about playing the race card. Malkin's only real talent, it seems, is providing bigots with prepackaged excuses for their bigotry.

A satirical photo made in questionable taste rather pales in comparison. The waters Malkin habitates are as foul and scum-laden as any on the planet, and she obviously not only swims rather readily in them, she positively feeds on them. That, folks, is the very definition of a bottom feeder.

UPDATE: TBogg has more, including an illustrative response from Malkin's defenders.

Nuke 'em all

Well, you can add yet another voice to the eliminationist chorus from the American right ...

Seems the staff of Rep. Richard Pombo has been overdosing on the kool-aid:

"Connecticut should have its statehood taken away from it. The foolishness of its pampered residents should be demonstrated to others by a government program to bulldoze the entire state, salt the land and construct a windfarm to supply NYC with electricity. And its residents should be relocated to Guantanamo Bay where they can take a number behind the 3 who hung themselves this weekend, since they seem so intent on suicide."

-- Daniel Kish, a senior adviser to Pombo, in an email

What inspired this outburst? No, it wasn't the looming likelihood that Connecticut voters are about to turn out Sean Hannity's favorite Democrat -- though Lord knows, that has plenty of Beltway types screaming about the blog apocalypse.

No, it was an editorial in a Connecticut newspaper opposing ANWR drilling.

I wonder what he wants to do with my state. I mean, if an editorialist becomes representative of an entire state -- and plenty of our editorialists have in fact weighed in strongly against ANWR drilling -- then what does that make an elected official? After all, our junior senator is the one primarily responsible for stopping the latest attempts at opening ANWR.

For some reason, I'm guessing nukes are involved.

[Via Atrios. For more on Pombo, see here.]

Another 'random gallery of lone shooters'

I see that Michelle Malkin is continuing apace in her career focus -- namely, providing bigots with excuses for their bigotry -- by offering up, in the wake of Friday's gun rampage at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, a gallery of 'lone shooters' who all just happen to be Muslim.

It's all part, you see, of her campaign to prove that the notion of a lone Muslim gunman is just "a myth."

Well, folks in Seattle already know that Malkin really has no shame when it comes to exploiting human tragedy as a way to advance her political agenda.

And her old animus towards Seattle -- largely ascribable, I think, to the fact that her career ran into some rocky shoals here that were almost purely of her own making -- has come floating to the surface with the Haq incident. Funny how an entire article to which she links us can discuss "Seattle's culture of victimology and the shooting of Jews" without once mentioning either David Lewis Rice or Buford Furrow.

So, just as a handy reminder, here's another "random gallery of lone shooters":



This is Joseph Paul Franklin, a serial killer who not only murdered 20 people (a large number of them mixed-race couples) but also attempted the assassinations of both Larry Flynt and Vernon Jordan. Franklin was a longtime Klansman who subscribed to white-supremacist Christian Identity beliefs about race-mixing.



This is Paul Hill, a Florida anti-abortion zealot who gunned down an abortion provider and his bodyguard outside a Pensacola clinic. Hill, who was executed in 2003, expressed no remorse for the murders, and told reporters he expected "a great reward in Heaven."

Hill, incidentally, was only following in the footsteps of another "lone gunman" named Michael Griffin, who had gunned down Dr. David Gunn outside an abortion clinic two years earlier in Pensacola. [Couldn't locate his picture.]



Then there was John Salvi, who walked into a Brookline, Mass., clinic in December 1994 and opened fire, killing a receptionist and wounding three others. At trial, Salvi testified that he acted out of a belief in a conspiracy against the Catholic Church. He later committed suicide in prison.



Another abortion-doctor sniper was James Kopp, who was convicted of murdering Dr. Bernard Slepian at his home in 1998, but who also was responsible for a long string of anti-abortion sniper shootings. He was an active member of the anti-abortion group "Lamb of Christ." His trial is currently under way.



And let's not forget our bravest Aryan warrior, Buford O. Furrow, who walked into a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles and began shooting at children and women -- that, after having gunned down an unarmed Filipino postman on his route. Furrow was a longtime Washington state resident and Christian Identity follower, active at the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho.

Of course, all these folks were considered "isolated incidents" at the time. Certainly, no one at the time connected them with mainstream Christianity.

This was, in fact, simple common sense. Most Christians reject murder in their names categorically -- it's hard to imagine a more un-Christian act. No one stooped to smearing all Christians with the acts of these fringe, often mentally unstable, figures whose "Christianity" is a perversion of the religion's core beliefs. In fact, not only did even the harshest critics steer clear of any such suggestion, but it became something of a faux pas to point out that these folks do, in fact, claim to be "Christians".

Too bad Michelle Malkin and her cohorts can't say the same when it comes to radical Muslims who go on "lone gunman" rampages. It is true that dismissing these cases as "isolated incidents" is nonsense -- as I've just said, the wellsprings of hate are many these days, and we can't be certain where Haq's arose, though radical Islam certainly is a prime candidate.

Neither can it be said, however, that these men any more reflect mainstream Islam than Buford Furrow represents mainstream Christianity. Saying so, in fact, is just another kind of hate.

When hate hits home

[Seattle Times photo by Ellen M. Banner]

Horrifying moments like Friday's shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation in downtown Seattle always leave communities stunned and shaken, and ours is no different right now.

But these moments also present special opportunities -- particularly the opportunity to transcend the virulent hatred that motivates killers like Naveed Afzal Haq. Consider what took place at the scene:

Haq, he said, had hidden behind plants in the foyer of the Jewish Federation. When a young teenager, aged 13 or 14, came into the building he said, Haq took her hostage and forced her to go inside.

There, Haq opened fire with two semi-automatic handguns, one a .40-caliber and the other a .45-caliber weapon.

"He said, 'I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,' before opening fire on everyone," Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center, told reporters on Friday. "He was randomly shooting at everyone."

Kerlikowske said today that Haq ordered the employees not to call 911 while he continued shooting, wounding Dayna Klein, a pregnant woman, in the arm. He said Klein had protected her womb with her arm. She fell to the floor after she was shot, but managed to crawl back to her office and call police.

The Seattle police chief called her one of the heroes of the day.

Klein was still on the phone with the 911 operator when Haq came into her office, again demanding she stop calling police. Instead, she convinced Haq to talk to the 911 operator.

Dayna Klein, as Robert Jamieson adroitly points out, was a hero twice: first for shielding her unborn child from the bullet that shattered her arm, and next for ignoring the warnings from the gunman and calling 911.

Even more remarkably, her doing so managed to help defuse the situation, because it put the gunman in contact with dispatchers who talked him out of shooting any other people:

Their professionalism helped ease the gunman's rage after he told them he was holding a pregnant woman, and had a gun pointed at her head.

"I shot her once. I shot her in the arm," he tells the operators, according to a police statement in a court document.

An operator says Klein might need an ambulance. The gunman replies: "I don't care."

Eventually he says: "I'll give myself up ... I'll put my gun down."

He set down his weapon. He walked out of the building. Seattle police officers were waiting for him.

It was a remarkable moment, partly because it illustrated both the universal dynamic at play in scenes like this, as well as how we might best confront them. Enraged killers like Haq, as they're stalking their victims, are people who have managed to completely objectify and dehumanize their targets, so that they are no longer people but mere things -- and in the process, they become insanely inhuman themselves. What Dayna Klein and the two dispatchers managed, almost miraculously, was to touch some small remaining part of Haq that was still human.

Scenes like these always create long, abiding waves of sorrow that ripple through the community. The first is for the immediate victims:

Six women were shot, including 58-year-old Seattle resident Pamela Waechter, who died from her injuries. Other victims were:

• Klein, 37, of Seattle, who was in satisfactory condition early Saturday at Harborview Medical Center with a gunshot wound to her arm.

• Cheryl Stumbo, 43, of Seattle, who was in serious condition at Harborview.

• Carol Goldman, 35, of Seattle, who was shot in the knee. She was in satisfactory condition.

• Layla Bush, 23, of Seattle, who was in serious condition.

• Christina Rexroad, 29, of Everett, who was wounded in the abdomen. She was in serious condition.

The larger target of Haq's attack -- the Jewish community -- is the next focus of concern, especially because this is nothing new for them. Sadly, there is a long history of lethal maniacs making scapegoats out of Jewish people, globally, nationally, and locally.

Haq selected his victims specifically because they were Jews, and that makes this act clearly a hate crime. As I explained in Death on the Fourth of July:

Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays—to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community.

In this sense, questions about whether this was an act of "terror" seem beside the point: as I've explained in more detail, hate crimes indeed are a kind of terrorism. Specifically, this terrorism is the kind inflicted by our fellow citizens in an attempt to intimidate and deprive others of their fundamental civil rights. (For more on hate crimes and the laws against them, see here and here.)

However, there are some special considerations that complicate the picture in this case. It was not a "reactive" hate crime (the most common kind) in which a member of the majority community lashes out violently -- rather, it was the rarest kind, a "mission" crime in which an unstable, usually psychopathic personality carries out a personal program to rid the world of a perceived evil.

This becomes clearer as details about Haq's past emerge -- especially the fact that he appears to have swung between Christianity and Islam in recent years:

Yet Haq was frustrated at his lack of friends and female companionship. He told friends he felt alienated from his own family, in part because his career had disappointed his father and also because he had disavowed Islam last year, converting to Christianity.

Haq had begun studying the Bible, attending weekly men's spiritual group meetings, only to stop coming a few months after his baptism.

He had told the group's leader that he seen too much anger in Islam and that he wanted to find a new beginning in Christianity.

Yet in the midst of his shooting spree in Seattle Friday, he declared himself an angry Muslim.

It seems that Haq has had a variety of mental-health issues in the past decade:

Montelongo said Haq seemed depressed by the tension that had grown between he and his family. And he said Haq talked about suffering from bi-polar disorder. But that he seemed to improve in how he coped with what Montelongo described as his own anger.

And then there was this:

In March, Haq was arrested for lewd conduct at a Tri-Cities mall. It was Ullah he called to bail him out of jail, because he was too embarrassed to call his own family, Ullah said.

Haq, it appears, had been receiving mental-health counseling afterwards, but then dropped out -- and then reappeared in Seattle.

Seattle has a history of dealing with tragedies like these -- especially in which the Jewish community is targeted by a mentally unstable person who has bought into the dogma of anti-Semitic hatemongers. The most notorious of these was the 1985 murders of the David Goldmark family by David Lewis Rice, who had decided he was going to singlehandedly eliminate the "top communist" and "top Jew" in Washington -- even though Goldmark was neither. (The Goldmark family had long been politically active progressives; Goldmark's brother Peter, incidentally, is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in eastern Washington's 2nd District.)

The Friday shootings also echoed the 2000 rampage of Buford Furrow at a Los Angeles Jewish day-care center. Furrow, you'll recall, was a white supremacist from Washington state who'd been undergoing mental-health treatment in the Seattle area for several years.

The city, in fact, is still reeling from the more recent killing rampage by a young man from Montana named Kyle Huff, who gunned down six ravers in the early-morning hours after a rave because he hated ravers and "this world of sex that they are striving to make," telling his brother in a letter that he wanted to "kill this hippie shit."

The Huff massacre was not a classic hate crime, because these typically involve prejudice against race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, while Huff's hostility was almost purely cultural. But if we see more of this trend, it may be time to rethink that.

What all of these incidents have in common is the mental instability of the actors; and I've explored previously how that affects the way society and the law must deal with the perpetrators. In the case of Buford Furrow, for instance, his mental illness became a mitigating factor in his eventual sentence, as prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty in large part because of it.

Marking off rampages like Furrow's, Huff's, and Haq's as "isolated events" caused by mental illness is a cop-out, however. Because, as the case of David Lewis Rice made all too clear, these mentally unstable types are almost always stirred up and driven to their insane acts by haters of various stripes, the kind whose voices seem each day to be growing louder in our public discourse. These cultural vampires have developed a real knack for inspiring mentally unstable people into horrific acts of violence.

Who did this in the case of Naveed Afzal Haq is still unknown. Certainly there is no shortage of anti-Semitism lurking among certain factions of Islam, and this may have been his inspiration. But it also lurks among certain corners of Christianity as well, and if these were among the "Christians" to whom Haq was exposed, then the source of his motivation may well have been some of the same far-right influences that were responsible for these previous cases.

Regardless of the source of the hate, there remains, in the face of it, only one appropriate response: the community must stand up and, contrary to the desires of the rampaging madmen and haters, build bridges where they hoped to burn them down.

As with all hate crimes, this kind of effort is absolutely essential for the healing process to begin:

Well, it's true that community responses against emanations of racial hate -- particularly hate crimes -- often take on the trappings of Liberal Chic and its attendant self-righteousness. But it's important to understand that in the case of hate crimes, these kinds of demonstrations play an essential role in curbing the crimes. They have real practical value, which is why you'll see them attract support not merely from civil-rights groups and liberal churches, but also from law enforcement and city officials.

The vast majority of hate-crime perpetrators, as I explain in Death on the Fourth of July, believe fully that they are committing these crimes with the unspoken approval of their respective community -- that they are merely acting on its real desires. This (combined with a high incidence of narcissistic/antisocial personality disorders) lends itself to another common trait of hate criminals: they rarely believe they've done anything wrong. And it's important to note that these perps consistently held these views well before they ever acted upon them.

Thus, high-profile and widely sanctioned expressions of community disapproval of these crimes play an essential role in discouraging further such acts. They inform any would-be hate criminals that, contrary to their preconceived notions, the community at large clearly does not approve of these kinds of acts, and rather than being community heroes, they will be pariahs.

In the case of Naveed Afzal Haq, it's clear that he believed he was acting particularly on the "unstated wishes" of the Muslim American community. And this weekend, the Seattle Muslim community stood up en masse and repudiated his horrific act. Muslim leaders were all over local television, mourning the victims and condemning the violence; local Muslims paid visits to Jewish centers to pay their condolences to reach out to them as human beings. The Muslim community also issued a statement:

We categorically condemn this and any similar acts of violence. We pray for the safety and health of those injured and offer our heartfelt condolences to the family of the victims of this attack. We also hope that the perpetrator of this crime is brought to justice.

There is no room for such acts of violence in our city and community. When one of us is attacked, none of us are safe. We refuse to see the violence in the Middle East spill over to our cities and neighborhoods.

We reject and categorically condemn any attacks against the Jewish community and stand in solidarity with the Jewish Federation in this tragedy.

This is an admirable start, and precisely the kind of bridge-building that incidents like this can inspire, amid the sorrow and pain. What's needed, as well, is for the entire community to stand up and repudiate this act, and all hate crimes, for exactly the same reason: The louder that voices of hate speak and inspire acts of hate, the more we will stand up and repudiate them, because they poison and destroy our human community.

When we do this, we not only blunt their hate, but there is also the chance that we can defuse it, as Dayna Klein managed to do last Friday. Because when we stand up for what is human in all of us, there is a chance, however small, that we can even touch the vestiges of humanity that lie buried beneath the layers of hate in people like Naveed Afzal Haq, before they ever act.

'Strawberry Days' at Firedoglake

UPDATE: Here's a link to the opening discussion. Please feel free to join in.

I'm terribly honored to announce that my most recent book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, has been selected for the next book salon discussion at Firedoglake. There will be a hosted discussion this Sunday, July 30, and another the following Sunday, Aug. 6, in which I'll participate. (It will probably be hard for me to stay away from the first discussion, truth be told.)

Coming as it does on the heels of their smashingly successful discussions of Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act?, Eric Boehlert's Lapdogs, Sam Seder's FUBAR, and George Soros' The Age of Fallibility, I can't help being just a wee tad ecstatic over the decision by Jane, Redd, and the gang to host my year-old book.

(Not only that, but they made a copy of Strawberry Days the prize in their recent Michelle Malkin rap contest, a bit of subtle and wicked humor. Hope you enjoy, Punaise!)

Despite its being a year old now, I think Strawberry Days has, if anything become even more current. Among the subjects it explores are:

-- The hole in the Constitution that the internment episode opened up -- namely, the potentially illimitable powers accorded to the executive branch during wartime, including the power of the military to indefinitely incarcerate civilians, based solely upon their race, in a non-battlefield situation, without review by the courts. It also discusses how the Bush administration has made use of these precedents en route to its own expansion of powers.

-- The crude racism that drove the anti-Japanese-immigrant campaigns for much of the first half of the twentieth century, and the indispensable role it played in eventually bringing about the mass incarceration of 120,000 people. While the text was published before immigration became a national debate, readers will readily recognize the astonishing similarities between that earlier nativist campaign and the current one playing out on our southern border and elsewhere.

Somewhat secondarily, it remains the only text that specifically addresses -- and repudiates -- Michelle Malkin's apologia for the internment. Fortunately, Malkin's thesis has shown no real longevity and is now largely ignored. Nonetheless, the revisionism that it represents lives on in a multitude of similar "conservative movement" enterprises, and its exposure is if nothing else helpful in seeing how one might go about dealing with the latest permutations of right-wing psychosis.

One of the real reasons I'm so tickled is that, truth be told, Strawberry Days hasn't done terribly well so far.

When it's been reviewed, it's gotten excellent reviews, including a glowing piece in the Seattle Times. But the problem has been getting it reviewed; I think that book editors (like many book consumers) saw it as a regional or local-interest offering primarily (and certainly it has done well enough regionally), but not something they wanted to spend the space on reviewing. Haven't there been a bunch of internment books already?

Of course, I knew there were a lot of internment books already available. But Strawberry Days is fairly unique in a lot of regards: it's constructed more as a non-fiction narrative than as an academic or strictly historical work. It also examines critical aspects of the internment and the Japanese American community that are often missed in other texts, including a frank assessment of the role of white supremacy in the overt oppression of the Japanese immigrants, as well as the role of the agricultural life among the Japanese.

But, you know, people won't know that without reading it. So it largely went unreviewed in any major publication. The only national newspaper (so to speak) to review it was, ironically enough, the Washington Times, which wrote glowingly about it.

And, even though we sold out the first two smallish (2,000) runs, the publisher reports tepid sales and so far is hesitant about putting it out in paperback -- a critical step for this book, I think, since doing so seem to me critical to helping it find its audience. It's the kind of book I think people would be far more likely to pick up for $16 instead of $30.

So I'm hoping the interest generated by the FDL book salon can help get Strawberry Days over the hump. It's part of a critical chain of support for what I'm doing here: the book writing gives me the time and financial space to blog. If it doesn't stay afloat, then I'll probably have to shutter the other things I'm doing. That's not a threat, just a reality.

I've set up the link above to go to Jane's Amazon page for the book. If you haven't gotten a copy, you should do it pronto. If you already have one, well, see you at Jane's place.

'Beyond politics'

One of the really offensive aspect of the right-wing drumbeat of eliminationism is that so many of its purveyors -- notably Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators, including Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin -- try to slough off criticism of the nastiness of the things they say and write by pretending that it's just "entertainment," or merely a "joke".

The crude reality, of course, is that the things they say are not only deeply personal, they play out in the real world by poisoning our personal lives as well as our public discourse. Pretending afterward that it was all "just kidding" is palpable disingenuousness.

And the right-wing response -- claiming that liberals are responsible for the poisoning of the public well -- is especially offensive because it not only serves to disguise, but provides a positive justification for, the escalation of this kind of rhetoric into real action.

In upstate New York's Orange County, a left-leaning city councilwoman named Gail Soro is reaping the consequences of this kind of rhetoric:

The bent windshield wipers annoyed her. The sex toy glued to her windshield back in June made her furious. But finding a horse's head in her swimming pool yesterday hit Wawayanda Councilwoman Gail Soro right where she lives.

It left her angry and frightened last night, as state police scoured the Orange County town for suspects. They were treating it as a case of harassment and trespassing, at the very least.

Soro and her husband, Ed, were in the pool until about 8:30 p.m. Monday night. Yesterday morning, they noticed the water looked a bit dark. They thought that an animal might have died in the pool.

Ed Soro grabbed the skimmer, raised a dark object from a corner of the pool and called out to his wife as he dragged it to the surface: "That's a horse's head."

She quickly went back into their house. "I was hysterical," she recalled last night.

As the day went on, her hysterics gave way to anger. The stunt with the windshield wipers and the sex toy both happened at Wawayanda Town Hall, where Soro is the lone Democrat on the five-member Town Board.

But the horse's head was brought to their home, while they slept, where their grandchildren come over to swim.

Soro, to her credit, is not backing down:

Gail Soro sent her own message last night: She won't be chased out of office. She's up for re-election next year, and she's running. Soro's been right in the middle of tussles over growth and planning that are the hot-button issues in the town.

Still, she wondered if her story would discourage others from running for office.

"Who would want to put up with this?" she said.

Republican Councilman Dave Cole acknowledged that he's knocked heads with Soro, but he flatly condemned what was done to her yesterday.

"This isn't politics. This is beyond politics," Cole said. "This is beyond the pale."

Credit Councilman Cole with recognizing that this kind of thuggery has no place in American politics.

Too bad he doesn't also take the time to note that the conservative movement's chief figureheads are the folks most publicly fomenting it.

[Hat tip to Rob.]

UPDATE: Edited to reflect that this Orange County is in New York, not California.

The bicycle solution

I've only alluded to it previously, but your humble correspondent is also something of a bike nut. I try to bicycle to work, to the store, on errands, as much as possible. Fiona rides a third wheel behind me to school.

I don't write about it a lot because, well, it's really not all that interesting. But the concept of bike commuting -- and the ethics involved in it -- is something I am interested in, and recently had a chance to write about.

Specifically, I've got the lead piece in this week's Seattle Weekly, and it's about the realities of bike commuting in Seattle, a supposedly bike-friendly community. It's kind of a local thing, but I like to think that the idea of bicycling as at least a partial solution to a host of environmental and political ills -- from global warming to our dependency on oil -- is something that goes unnoted by too many people. I actually tend to blame it on what I see as a culture of convenience and laziness endemic to Americans generally, but that's mostly when I'm feeling grumpy.

In any event, be sure to check it out, as well as a couple of sidebars only available online: a piece on how bikes and cars can get along, and another with tips for beginning bike commuters.

Oh, and if you happen to live in the Seattle area, be sure to pick up the latest edition of Seattle Magazine, which contains my in-depth look at the Minutemen of Whatcom County. Unfortunately, it's not available online.

Conserving orcas, and humans too

One of the words you don't hear used a lot in the debate over global warming is conservationist. Most of the people raising the alarm about its effects are described as "environmentalists."

The two are related, but significantly different. Conservationism is about trying to keep the environmental resources we currently have intact; it's about ensuring that those resources are not being wasted in the short-term pursuit of the dollar. It is, in reality, conservative in the best sense of the word.

Environmentalism, in contrast, encompasses a whole panoply of beliefs aimed at improving the planet's environmental health, many of which take a much more idealistic approach to issues. Some of these -- including the so-called "deep ecology" movement -- are in fact profoundly inimical to the approach taken by conservationists. And many are, frankly, fairly radical in their belief systems.

This is partly why so many of the apologists for global warming are able to get away with pretending that their opponents are radicals with an anti-business agenda -- just call them "environmentalists" and you're halfway there to framing them negatively. It doesn't matter if you're actually talking about a mass consensus of trained scientists.

But the fight over global warming, when you get down to basics, is essentially conservationist -- it's about conserving the environment we currently have. It's about trying to prevent the catastrophic effects that radical climate change could have on all of us -- on our livelihoods, on our economies, on our survival itself. There's nothing the least bit radical about it. If anything, it is often criticized for being too accomodating, in its approach to using natural resources, to those who would exploit them.

Unfortunately, the American right -- in its knee-jerk defense of all things corporate, as well as its complete capture by religious fundamentalists -- is eager to obliterate the hard scientific realities presented on a number of political fronts, not merely global warming. So it keeps presenting a picture of scientists and their supporters as radical environmental wackos with an anti-business political agenda.

They also take a ridiculously short-term view, both economically and in the raw impact on human life (which always becomes an economic issue anyway), of the effects of their own agenda -- namely, unfettered exploitation of the environment -- on the rest of us. The results, in fact, are responsible for what is about to be a significant, and perhaps irrevocable, change in the natural world that supports us all.

When you contrast this with, say, a strictly conservationist outlook, it becomes fairly clear which party is the more genuinely radical of the two. Take your pick: the faction conducting a radical experiment on the global environment, or those warning that the change is a major disaster in the making -- and, moreover, that it can be at least ameliorated if not prevented altogether?

Yet somehow -- mostly by wrapping themselves in the mantle of "traditional" capitalist values -- the corporatists and their enablers manage to depict their opposition as the "radical" faction and themselves the "common sense" side.

This dynamic is starting to take root in the battle over the Puget Sound's endangered orcas. Lynda Mapes had a pretty solid feature on the difficult road to recovery ahead for orcas in the Sunday Seattle Times. It included this passage from the people who are filing suit to overturn the listing:

"I see catastrophic economic impacts," said Tim Harris, general counsel for the Olympia-based Building Industry Association of Washington, a plaintiff in the suit. "I see it slowing and crippling development, driving up housing costs and hurting jobs."

This is, of course, simply a short-term view of the matter. Because there will be other catastrophic impacts, of a much broader, more severe, and longer-lasting variety -- if the Puget Sound orcas are allowed to go extinct.

As Mapes' piece explains (and as I explored in depth in an earlier piece for Seattle Weekly), the orcas are an ideal indicator species of the overall health of the Puget Sound ecosystem, precisely because they are long-lived creatures who reside atop its food chain.

What we know is that when orcas start disappearing, the chief reason is that they're not getting enough to eat -- particularly the chinook salmon that constitute the large majority of their diet. There is, of course, the impact of the loss of tourism dollars drawn to see the killer whales here (estimated currently at well over a million dollars annually) would be only the first felt. If those salmon are disappearing, then whole other segments of the Puget Sound economy that make their living from it as a resource (particularly fishing) will begin to suffer. In other words, the traditional conservationists who use the Sound to make their living are going to be affected, disastrously, as well.

There is, moreover, the stark reality of the waters they inhabit:

Secondly, the recovery plan is expected to seek a reduction in pollution and chemical contamination in the orca's habitat. That would mean addressing industrial-waste disposal, agricultural and household use of chemicals. It also would mean dealing with discharge from wastewater and stormwater. And it would mean cleaning up contaminated sites and sediments.

Today, the orcas' home waters are a stew created by 17 pulp and paper mills in the Puget Sound and Georgia Basin region; 34 million gallons of raw sewage a day spewed by the city of Victoria, B.C., into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and thousands of discharge pipes from industries, sewers and storm drains. Contaminated areas dot the region, including 24 Superfund sites around Puget Sound still not cleaned up.

Southern residents have become the most contaminated marine mammals in the world. They carry loads of toxins high enough to suppress their reproduction and make them more susceptible to disease.

The story concludes with a quote from Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research:

"It's not a popular solution. But what's called for is looking at the big picture. We have an endangered whale eating a threatened fish. We have to change our ways. I hope this is part of the wake-up."

The problem is that the armies of the right are fully invested in keeping everyone asleep on issues where science, and hard common-sense reality, are not on their side. And they do this by constantly muddying the issues, presenting false choices as the only ones available, and grossly distorting both the science and the scientific debate.

A prime example of just how intentionally obtuse they can be was noted by Chris Mooney the other day, in the form of Peggy "Divine Dolphins" Noonan's recent ruminations on global warming:

During the past week's heat wave -- it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday -- I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warming is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

Well, as Mooney points out, many of these questions were in fact directly addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which put out a detailed report answering most of Noonans's questions back in Geneva in April 2005.

But the IPCC's answers weren't the ones that Noonan, and the Republican right generally, wanted to hear. So they keep asking the same questions, and when they get the same answers, they pretend that the politics that they say is "contaminating" the science renders any serious judgment impossible -- when in fact the only people injecting politics into the science are those on the right who are busily plugging their ears to the evidence.

But as weather maps like this become increasingly common -- as do the rolling blackouts caused by the demand for air conditioning as a result -- the evidence will keep getting harder to ignore. You can pretend, as the Bush administration has been doing, that we can all just "adjust" to the realities of global warming. But when those realities include a frying-pan America addicted to air conditioning and the energy it consumes, the economic equation begins to shift, heavily.

That, in the end, may be what finally awakens Americans to what has been happening to our national policies, especially those in which science plays a significant role. Playing semantic and partisan games with science in pursuit of short-term political and personal gain is bad for a lot of things: bad for the environment, bad for wild animals, bad for humans. But it's also bad for business.

The conservationist ethic, with its eye on preserving what we've got, always recognized this reality. It might be time to start breathing life back into it.

That right-wing logic

My dad is always sending me crappy e-mail jokes. You know the kind: dependent on stereotypes, often predicated on violent fantasies, and utterly devoid of wit or insight. I think everyone has someone in their family like this.

I love my dad, though, and am content to have him send me these things. It's kind of a way of staying in touch.

So last week he sends me this joke. It depends on the usual stereotypes (this time about rural hicks and professors), but ...

Two South Texas farmers, Jim and Bob, are sitting at their favorite bar, drinking beer. Jim turns to Bob and says, "You know, I'm tired of going through life without an education. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the community college, and sign up for some classes."

Bob thinks it's a good idea, and the two leave.

The next day, Jim goes down to the college and meets Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes: Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Jim says. "What's that?"

The dean says, "I'll show you. Do you own a weed eater?"

"Yeah."

"Then logically speaking, because you own a weedeater, I think that you would have a yard."

"That's true, I do have a yard."

"I'm not done," the dean says. "Because you have a yard, I think logically that you would have a house."

"Yes, I do have a house." "And because you have a house, I think that you might logically have a family."

"Yes, I have a family."

"I'm not done yet. Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife."

"And because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual."

"I am a heterosexual. That's amazing, you were able to find out all of that because I have a weed eater."

Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to go meet Bob at the bar.

He tells Bob about his classes, how he signed up for Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Bob says, "What's that?"

Jim says, "I'll show you. Do you have a weed eater?"

"No."

"Then you're a queer."

OK, so I laughed at this one. Because this is what passes for logic not just among rural hicks, but nearly the entire right wing in this country.

[FWIW: In strictly logical terms, the joke illustrates a false syllogism, or more precisely, a failed enthymeme. A simple Venn diagram would make clear how it fails.]

This is true not just when it comes to sexual politics and cultural assumptions. It's also true of nearly every other issue that the American right confronts these days:

-- Worried about global warming? You're the same as the Nazis!

-- Opposed to the war in Iraq? You're "objectively pro-Saddam". Even if it turns out later you were right.

-- So you object to nativist scapegoating in the immigration debate? You must be part of the "open borders crowd" willing to surrender our national sovereignty to the "Reconquistas"!

-- You think Joe Lieberman is an out-of-touch Democrat who needs to be replaced? You must be an angry liberal blogger!

-- Think President Bush overstepped his constitutional bounds by ignoring the law and ordering surveillance of American citizens? You must by a traitor who wants to harm national security!

The list, and the beat, goes on and on.

And you were wondering why so much of our modern discourse resembles Bizarro World? Wonder no more.