Month: May 2010

Back To The 50s

by digby

I realize that facts are irrelevant to this faith based argument but this should give at least a moments pause to even the heartiest tea partier:

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

Some conservative political movements such as the “Tea Party” have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

“The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts,” says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. The real problem is spending,counters Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, which organizes Tea Party groups. “The money we borrow is going to be paid back through taxation in the future,” he says.

Individual tax rates vary widely based on how much a taxpayer earns, where the person lives and other factors. On average, though, the tax rate paid by all Americans — rich and poor, combined — has fallen 26% since the recession began in 2007.

You would think this news would come as a big relief to the tea partiers who seem to think they are enduring the suffering of Jesus under the tax burden. But it won’t. The anti-tax sentiment among middle and working class people actually means “stop giving my money to people I don’t like” (and among the Peterson level deficit fetishists, it’s “taxes are for the little people.”) Neither of those sentiments are actually related to the deficit, but the deficit is a lovely excuse for such selfishness.

The deficit scolds and the anti-tax zealots who wring their hands over their grandchildren’s debt are all unwilling to pitch in for that debt and help pay it down today. Apparently, the only acceptable way to help their grandkids is to make their kids suffer in their old age. They call this family values.

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Cops

by digby

Another routine day on the mean streets of America:

I used to worry that the many police officers who were called up for Iraq and Afghanistan would bring their warlike attitudes back to the streets of the US. Lately I’ve been thinking I may have had it backwards and the police are taking their bad habits overseas.

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Fundamentalist Destruction

by digby

As those who read this blog know, for some time I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the psychology that leads so many people on the right to be so thoughtless about the future of the planet. The other day Amanda Marcotte offered up another intriguing insight:

It was hard for me to wrap my head around the arrogance and short-sightedness that led to this disaster, until last night, in the course of my bedtime reading, I was reminded of the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan. The two incidents don’t necessarily seem to have much in common; the Taliban deliberately set out to wipe out these priceless artifacts because they offended their joy-killing, art-hating sensibilities. The oil spill, of course, is an accident. But I’d argue that there’s a common thread between the incidents that led up to both these acts of unfathomable destruction. Whatever the ostensible excuse the Taliban had for destroying the Buddhas, outsiders can clearly see that they’re motivated mainly be a petulant unwillingness to engage or regard anything that makes them feel smaller or less important. Pleasure and beauty offend fundamentalists, because these things are out of their control and present a threat to their death grip on power. Art reminds people that there’s something more than the tightly controlled, colorless existence offered by fundamentalism, and so the fundamentalists are wary of it…
“Drill, baby, drill!” was a slogan that revealed that, for conservatives, the potential for environmental destruction is a reward unto itself. It excites. It makes you feel big and important, that mere nature will bend to your will. Only softies care about things like preserving the past or securing the future. Past and future are concepts that offend the narcissism of right wingers, since both concepts remind you that there’s more to this world than you and what you want. Preserving the environment for its own sake seems pointless, since that just means that it’ll survive you, which reminds you that you’re mortal and will one day be forgotten. And so just as the Taliban blew up those Buddhas that stood as stark reminders that there’s more to this universe than their petty little egos, so American conservatives yelled, “Drill, baby, drill!”

That egotism is part of a certain strain of fundamentalism to be sure.

Plus they just enjoy ruining things for other people. And animals:

I’ll never forget sitting in a crowd of wingnuts at a family gathering watching some footage of the Exxon Valdez spill and watching them all laugh uproariously at dying, oil covered birds flopping around on the beach.

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Don’t Go There

by digby

So Andrew Sullivan is on one of his quirky crusades against Elena Kagan, to force her to answer questions about her sex life so that people will know how that affects her judgment on gay rights issues. And yet, except for a lot of Harvard whispering, there’s no evidence that Kagan is gay. As Richard Kim says:

I don’t know if Elena Kagan sleeps with women or men. I don’t know if she sleeps with anyone at all. I don’t care. What I do know is that she has never claimed to be a lesbian, that she’s never spoken out in the first-person as an advocate of gay rights and that she has never publicly discussed a romantic relationship with a woman. Gay isn’t some genetic or soulful essence; it’s a name you call yourself–and Kagan has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay. Is she straight? I don’t know, and again, I don’t care. Why does she have to have a sexuality at all?

Kim asks whether or not we should have asked John Roberts about how his heterosexual life experiences affect his decisions making and I do recall lots of talk at the time about about Roberts’ “late marriage” and odd views toward women. (This picture raised eyebrows for the same reason Kagan’s hairdo raises them today.) But aside from a lot of snickering, I don’t recall anyone suggesting seriously that it should be brought up in the hearings.

This is not a door anyone should want to open. If we are going to ask presidential nominees how they will apply their sex lives to cases, it’s not going to be pretty. In fact, it’s downright alarming.

I wrote about this topic a couple of weeks ago and don’t really have anything of substance to add. The woman has a right to be a single, middle aged career woman without being forced to answer questions she doesn’t want to answer about her intimate life. If she’s not out there crusading against gay rights, there absolutely no reason to assume anything or even bring it up.

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Cerebral Enterprise

by digby

Ezra Klein interviews Simon Lazarus, “public policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center and a frequent commentator on the Supreme Court and the intersection of the law and economic and labor issues” who makes an extremely important observation:

EK: This is one of those things that’s coming up in a lot of my interviews. Everyone agrees she’s brilliant and hardworking, but they really emphasize her tactical intelligence, her ability to negotiate out to the position she wants. I guess more people have seen it because she worked on the Hill and in the executive branch. But I don’t know how to weight it. How important are these skills?

SL: I think it’s an important skill, but it’s a different skill. Being a judge is a cerebral enterprise. It’s not like political negotiation where you’re trading this piece of the decision for that piece of the decision. It’s more being able to understand other people’s intellectual frameworks and figuring out ways to work within those frameworks and nudge them in the direction of results you favor. Stevens was just extraordinarily good at this, and I think Breyer is good at it too. But on this court, which is so dominated by intellectual legal superstars, you have to be able to play at that level in order to get in the game in the first place. For instance, I don’t think Earl Warren would be enormously effective in moderating Roberts’s or Kennedy’s views because they wouldn’t take him seriously. That doesn’t mean Warren wasn’t a great justice. But it’s a different court today.

That’s right. “Consensus building” is completely ineffectual in our current political environment (and the Court is nothing if not political), because we are in an era of ideological polarization. It’s chicken or feathers. If you exalt consensus, all you will get is a consensus for conservatism and a sharp move to the right because they are playing a different game entirely.

For example, here’s a smart observation from one of Ezra’s commenters, which shows that his particular skill is fairly useless on today’s court:

The press, once again intent on creating truth from its own ignorance by process of repetition, keeps emphasizing the importance of Obama appointing a smart consensus builder to replace Stevens. Of course, Breyer, a pragmatist with a sharp legal mind who gets along well with Scalia, already fits this mold.

How’s that working for us?

Ezra continues:

A lot of what you’re saying sounds like a defensive vision for legal liberalism. That’s a change, right? The old version was that conservatives wanted a passive judiciary that wouldn’t try to legislate from the bench while liberals wanted an active judiciary that saw social justice as part of its mandate. But you’re saying that it’s now flipped and conservatives want the active judiciary while liberals want a more passive court that won’t impede legislative progress. Is that right? And if so, is that a sufficient philosophy for liberals? SL: Over the last 20 or 30 years, conservative majorities have done so much damage to very significant New Deal and Great Society and kindred social legislation that undoing that damage would actually be a very affirmative broad goal to set. And the philosophy behind that goal, a philosophy that Justice Stevens held close, is that it’s critical for judges to interpret statutes to promote the basic goals that Congress had in mind when it enacted the statute.

I’m fairly sure that’s where the “strict constructionists” come in and say that what matters is what the Founders had in mind. They were apparently ordained by God. (Actually “strict constructionism” has a real (if idiotic) meaning in legal philosophy, but in practice it’s used by the right to convey the idea that the wrong people are benefiting from rights that were only meant for Real Americans.)

The discussion reminds me of the tale of Huckleberry and The Box Turtle phonying up the congressional record so they could mislead the court into believing that the congress intended the opposite of what it actually intended. It didn’t go over very well. I suspect they have since learned that it’s not necessary since today’s conservative Court majority doesn’t actually care what the congress intended. These days it’s just ignoring the intent of the congress and making it impossible for people to exert their rights in court by using illogical reasoning in its opinions. Where do you find consensus on something like that? Agree to only do it half the time?

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As California Goes, So Goes The Nation

by digby

It looks like the California GOP thinks as Arizona goes, so goes the nation:

For the last decade, many California Republicans have tiptoed around the issue of illegal immigration and sought to distance themselves from Proposition 187. GOP standard bearers from Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have sought to downplay the issue and set themselves apart from the views embraced by former Gov. Pete Wilson during his 1994 reelection campaign, which had a central tough-on-immigration message.

But now, apparently, it’s time to party like it’s 1994. Spurred on by Steve Poizner’s consistent campaigning on the issue, with big assists from a distressed economy and the national immigration discussion ignited by a new law in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has decided she can ignore the issue no longer.

Whitman launched a new radio ad focusing on immigration this weekend. And who did the Whitman campaign turn to shore up Whitman’s tough-on-immigration bona fides?

You guessed it — Pete Wilson.

In a new 60-second radio spot, Whitman turns to Wilson, who says: “I know how important it is to stop illegal immigration, and I know Meg Whitman. Meg will be tough as nails on illegal immigration.”

It’s hard to believe that Jerry Brown is going to be governor again, but it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. If it doesn’t win, we will know that the right is definitely on the march. If they can’t even fight them back here, then fasten your seatbelts.

Whitman, by the way, has proven already that money goes through her hands like a sieve — and she’s cratering.

Not long ago Meg Whitman had such a huge lead – 50 points – over Steve Poizner for the GOP nomination for governor, many folks thought the race was over and started sizing up her chances against the Democrats’ Jerry Brown.

When she came in to talk to our Editorial Board last week, Whitman brushed off news that some polls showed Poizner had closed the gap to about 10 points. Still 10 points isn’t anything to scoff at, especially with only a little more than a month before the polls open.

Well, this week ABC’s SurveyUSA poll shows that Poizner is now 2 points behind her – 39 percent to 37 percent.

As Utah goes, so goes the nation?

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Let Them Order from Amazon!

by digby

When the librarians are forced to take to the streets, you know the world is going to hell in a handbasket:

About 50 librarians and book supporters gathered on all four corners of a busy Hollywood intersection last Friday evening during rush hour, earning honks in support of saving L.A.’s dwindling library system. This year, it has already faced major cuts–for one, libraries are no longer open seven days a week–and now faces even heavier ones in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposed budget, which will take affect July 1st when libraries could go from six to five days of open doors.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a single misspelled word on the signs.

h/t to Shayera

Shop Teacher In Chief

by digby

Robert Kuttner gets to one of my major gripes about Obama in this piece for Huffington Post in which he points out that Obama repeatedly fails to use the political moment to give an ideological lesson to the public:

This has been a providential month for teachable moments. They have included the details of the government’s civil fraud case against Goldman Sachs; the gruesome and needless corporate murder of miners in West Virginia; the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico; and then to complete the circle, the stock market going berserk because a technical error caused a domino effect of computerized automatic selling.

What do these events have in common? Every one of them demonstrates why the private profit motive cannot be relied upon without some steering or harnessing mechanism by government. A president committed to rallying public opinion to the cause of a more balanced economy would be all over these teachable moments, connecting the dots, rebuilding the ideology of managed capitalism, making the case for tougher government action in the public interest, and rallying the citizenry to his cause.

Let’s review how President Obama has actually done. read on

He’s been unlucky/lucky enough to govern in a period of great volatility and it’s a great disappointment that he’s failed to use the one gift everyone agrees he has — oratory — to educate the public about liberal values. As Kuttner points out, other presidents have not hesitated to do it when they are given the opportunity:

So let’s pause for a moment to review the bidding. The market economy has had a meltdown and regular people are still suffering. The administration is getting little credit for the half-steps that it has taken. The public is still uncertain whether government is part of the problem or part of the solution.

You might think, with these well timed gifts, that a progressive president would demonstrate leadership. Had the tables been turned, and the government rather than the private market perpetrated a series of disasters, you can just imagine how Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush and their strategists would have gone to town.

But after 16 months of pummeling by the right, this presidency is still pursuing his Quixotic quest for common ground. Obama’s most notable speech in recent weeks was his May 1 commencement address at the University of Michigan. The White House had plenty of time to decide what message the president wanted to send. It was characteristic Obama and the president had some very good lines about the importance of government:

“Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. (Applause.) Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them. (Applause.) Government is this extraordinary public university — a place that’s doing lifesaving research, and catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small. (Applause.)”

But then he said this:

Now, the second way to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate….[so] if you’re somebody who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in a while. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. (Applause.) It is essential for our democracy. (Applause.)

Now, while we should appreciate the plug for the Huffington Post, there is something profoundly offensive about the presumption of moral equivalence….as if we are fringe left the way Limbaugh is fringe right. The fact is that Limbaugh, Beck, and the Wall Street Journal routinely lie. HuffPost and the New York Times editorial page don’t. And while writers like me push Obama to be more resolute and more effective, we don’t demonize him. Obama’s juxtaposition of the moderate left and the lunatic right as both worthy of attention reminds me of Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as the fellow who is so high minded that he won’t take his own side in an argument

I complained about that as well.

At this point there’s no longer any reason to assume that Obama doesn’t get it or is just trying to get his legislation through and doesn’t want to alienate Republicans. He is what he appears to be, which is a dry, pragmatic, status quo, technocrat who makes symbolic leftward gestures while offering center right policies. The power of his iconic status is enough to create the illusion of idealism, which keeps him interesting. The Right is freaky enough to keep the left wary of going too far in challenging him.

But the right smells that he prefers to avoid fights, whether for psychological or ideological reasons, and they are successfully pushing him ever rightward while portraying him as a radical socialist. It’s very clever. But then they are far more clever at macro-politics than anyone on the left*.

Kuttner lays out a speech he’d like Obama to give:

“My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

“And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

That would be a great speech. But I think it’s fairly clear that it wouldn’t be a speech that Obama would give because he doesn’t believe that, or if he does, he certainly doesn’t think it’s politically expedient to talk about it.

He knows that the “savvy businessmen” have made some boo-boos along the line, obviously, but it’s not at all clear that he doesn’t chalk it all up to some sort of act of God (or Invisible Hand) that was beyond the capacity of mortal humans to prevent. After all, these companies and banks are all run by very smart guys, who can’t possibly be so stupid or greedy to create this mess by virtue of their own inadequacies or self-centeredness. They are The Best and the Brightest this country has to offer, and by the technocrat’s definition that means they are important but dispassionate cogs in the great machine that makes the world work. If they are actually human fuck-ups and greedheads, what ever shall we do?

Kuttner concludes with this:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

That’s because they believed in those things. At this point I think Obama is better compared to Herbert Hoover (hopefully without the full-blown depression.) He just wants the government to operate efficiently with a minimum of fuss.

*They have a different set of problems right now, which are evening up the score for the moment. But they have many years of brand identity to get them through this momentary blip — especially with the Dems failing to take the opportunity to damage their project.

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Elena, We Hardly Know Ye

by digby

Everyone who knows Elena Kagan says she’s a great gal. This is deemed to be a huge asset because she will supposedly charm Anthony Kennedy into doing her bidding and then the liberals will have a 5-4 majority. Strangely, though, you can’t find anyone who knows what her views on the law, culture, society, morality, policy are. I suppose it’s possible that she has none, but that’s unlikely. You really can’t reach her age without forming some opinions about the world and you can’t reach her level without having any brains. So, it’s likely that she’s just been very, very careful not to let anyone know what she really thinks in anticipation of this day.

The thing I’m hearing the most is that she and Obama are very much alike and that they have a strong personal relationship. So, if you like Obama’s worldview and governing style, you’ll like Kagan. I would expect a lot of split-the-baby opinions — and we’d best keep our hopes up that Anthony Kennedy is a lot easier to charm than the Republican congress has been.

Meanwhile,the nomination fight looks to be fairly hideous, although no one believes at this point that she won’t be confirmed. Of course, considering the fact that Obama has 59 Democrats he could have confirmed Glenn Greenwald if he’d wanted to. It looks as if he just wanted to avoid a fight, which may be another trait he shares with his friend Kagan.

They’re going to get one anyway, of course. She could be to the right of Jim DeMint they’d still smear her as a terrorist and bail-out loving socialist before they confirm her. The Republicans understand that these Supreme Court confirmations are important ideological battles and they relish using them for political purposes. They also have great respect for what the court can do for them over the long haul and they are willing to spill blood today for gain tomorrow. Democrats don’t want to make trouble and prefer to avoid a fight. And in this case, that happens to fairly represent the president’s style as well.

Let’s hope it all works out. We’ve probably got 30 years or so to find out.

Update:

As Kevin Drum writes:

[R]ight now Obama has the biggest Democratic majority in the Senate he’s ever going to have. So why not use it to ensure a solidly progressive nominee like Diane Wood instead of an ideological cipher like Kagan? . . . . When Obama compromises on something like healthcare reform, that’s one thing. Politics sometimes forces tough choices on a president. But why compromise on presidential nominees? Why Ben Bernanke? Why Elena Kagan? He doesn’t have to do this. Unfortunately, the most likely answer is: he does it because he wants to..

To Obama, it isn’t a compromise at all. These people truly are his preference because they don’t make trouble and that’s what he most respects.

Update: Greenwald’s already there.

Four Dead In Ohio

by digby

A big mystery was solved this week:

The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 were given an order to prepare to shoot, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.

“Guard!” says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, “All right, prepare to fire!”

“Get down!” someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, “Guard! . ..” followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.

The gunfire volley from the Guard killed four and wounded nine. The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy – why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.

The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years.

“I think this is a major development,” said Alan Canfora, one of the wounded, who located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed. “There’s been a grave injustice for 40 years because we lacked sufficient evidence to prove what we’ve known all along – that the Ohio National Guard was commanded to kill at Kent State on May 4, 1970.”

[…]

This excerpt from a copy of Terry Strubbe’s Kent State recording contains the order for the Guard to prepare to fire. The word “Guard!” can be heard at 9.3 seconds. “All right, prepare to fire” begins at 19.5 seconds. “Get down!” is spoken at 22.3 seconds. The final “Guard!” is at 23.7 seconds, and the gunshots begin at 26 seconds.

The review was done by Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, two nationally respected forensic audio experts with decades of experience working with government and law enforcement agencies and private clients to decipher recorded information…

Although they occasionally testify on opposing sides in court cases hinging on audio evidence, Owen and Allen concur on the command’s wording. Both men said they are confident their interpretation is correct, and would testify to its accuracy under oath, if asked.

Here’s an excerpt from Nixonland on Kent State, which offers some important perspective as we think about what this all means:

On the Kent State campus there were bomb threats at fifteen-to-thirty-minute intervals. Eleven a.m. classes were cut short; the commotion outside was too great. The university radio station and intercoms announced, “All outdoor demonstrations and gatherings are banned by order of the governor. The National Guard has the power of arrest.” But when a class session let out on a major university campus, it looked all the world like a “gathering.” Only a fraction of students had heard the radio and intercom announcements anyway. University administrators could have told law enforcement that. But the governor had banned university administrators—quislings—from the operation’s planning.

Fifteen minutes to noon. Students made their way toward whatever it was they did on an ordinary Monday. A general saw what looked to him like a mob. Three minutes later, someone rang the Victory Bell and started rousing rabble for a noon rally. A minute after that, a campus police officer shouted the riot act into a bullhorn. He was standing by the ROTC rubble; now the military’s staging area, its ashes a constant reminder of what these students were capable of. Hardly anyone could hear the announcement.

A jeep made its way across the common: another hail of rocks.

At 11:55 guardsmen were ordered to load and lock their weapons and prepare to disperse gas. Two columns of troops moved out in a V, one directly east, another northeasterly. The eastbound company had to summit a steep hill south of Taylor Hall, a major campus building—the kind of slope, on college campuses, useful for wintertime sledding on cafeteria trays. As they trudged, they dispensed tear gas from their M79 canister guns. The boldest demonstrators picked up the hot metal cans and threw them back. Under suffocating gas masks, their visibility limited, the guardsmen pressed forward, determined to push the students into retreat. The militants hustled beside Taylor Hall for cover. The soldiers were unaware that they had only about a hundred yards to go before they would run into a fence. The fence curled around to keep them from moving east or north; a gymnasium kept them from moving south. They were trapped, with nothing to do but turn around—a retreat under fire, the most dangerous of military maneuvers. Sixty or seventy soldiers, trapped. What was it President Nixon had said about the “pitiful, helpless giant,” faced with “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy”?

Lots of roofs: from which one would the sniping begin?

They were afraid they were out of tear gas. Radicals who thought their adversaries only armed with blanks shrieked insults, threw rocks, waved strange flags. “Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!” The guardsmen couldn’t tell, but felt like they must have been surrounded.

They looped around for their humiliating return journey.

Then, at 12:24 p.m., several guardsmen stopped, turned almost completely around, dropped to one knee, and took aim at a cluster of students far away in a parking lot beyond the fence.

Sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds.

Thirteen students down, mostly bystanders.

One was paralyzed. Four were killed: Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeff Miller, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, ages nineteen, nineteen, twenty, and twenty. The Associated Press’s dispatch went out. The Dow dropped 3 percent in two hours—the most dramatic dip since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Two Students, Two Guardsmen Dead, the local paper reported.Those two students had it coming, much of Kent decided.

A respected lawyer told an Akron paper, “Frankly, if I’d been faced with the same situation and had a submachine gun . . . there probably would have been 140 of them dead.” People expressed disappointment that the rabble-rousing professors—the gurus—had escaped: “The only mistake they made was not to shoot all the students and then start in on the faculty.”

When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under
law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones—America—support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up? …

Signed by one who was taught that ‘to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.’” “I extend appreciation and whole-hearted support of the Guard of every state for their fine efforts in protecting citizens like me and our property.” “When is the long-suffering silent majority going to rise up?”

It was the advance guard of a national mood. A Gallup poll found 58 percent blamed the Kent students for their own deaths. Only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.

A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.

Many recalled the State of Ohio’s original intention for the land upon which Kent State was built: a lunatic asylum. President White was flooded with letters saying it was his fault for letting Jerry Rubin speak on campus. Students started talking about the “Easy Rider syndrome,” after the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda movie about hippies murdered by vigilantes. Townspeople picketed memorial services. “The Kent State Four!” they chanted. “Should have studied more!”

“Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher.

“Have I your permission to quote that?”

“You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.”

“But you had three sons there.”

“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.”

A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.”

Time had called the Silent Majority “not so much shrill as perplexed,” possessed of “a civics-book sense of decency.” Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.

Copyright © 2008 by Rick Perlstein.

I often make the mistake of thinking that America didn’t used to be so mean. That’s a middle aged person’s error, I’m afraid — from one who is beginning to fall prey to nostalgia for her youth. I am genuinely shocked by the callousness of people who laugh at a mentally ill person being shot with a taser and I’m sickened that people blithely suggest that terrorist suspects should be stripped of their citizenship and tortured — but then I always was shocked by this harsh worldview. I just forget sometimes what it was really like.

People keep wondering if violent video games and television have made people less sensitive and empathetic. Wrong. This country has always been full of people who think this way — and they are always considered to be the salt of the earth Real Americans while those who struggle for change are rabble-rousers and shit-disturbers. The liberals and the reactionaries (the hippies and the straights) have been at it forever.

The country eventually disengaged from Vietnam. But that was only one skirmish in our ongoing tribal struggle — it still rages today. History can now record what really happened that day at Kent State. But I think we can assume from the Nixonland excerpt that whether or not the Guardsmen shot under orders was never really the issue anyway.

The funny thing is that the same Real Americans who believed the protesters deserved it would join the tea parties today and complain mightily about government overreach. In fact, many of them probably have.

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