A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation.

The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced to resign last week, was such a perfect, surreal, and toxic example of everything that is wrong with our politics that I am daring to hope we can actually learn something from it.

In case you’ve been taking a media fast, here’s a quick recap. (Frank Rich has a much more detailed account in Sunday’s New York Times, complete with many of the relevant links.)

Shirley Sherrod, head of the United States Department of Agriculture’s rural development office in Georgia, a civil rights hero, married to a civil rights hero, and the daughter of a civil rights martyr, has lifelong bona fides as a human rights and justice advocate.

Last week, Andrew Breitbart, a reckless, relentless right-wing media propagandist (whose shaky credibility seems no impediment to Fox News), posted an excerpt from a speech Shirley Sherrod gave to an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, doctored to make it look as if she used her public position to discriminate against white farmers who came to her office seeking help. Since the NAACP has recently been publicly condemning racism in the Tea Party movement, there’s good reason to think Sherrod’s talk to that organization was targeted as a way to retaliate.

Without investigating—without even watching the full tape of Sherrod’s speech—Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requested her immediate resignation, demanding by phone that she pull off the highway and send it via her Blackberry. The same day, national NAACP President Benjamin Jealous denounced Sherrod for “abuse of power” and “shameful” actions.

Once they bothered to look at the entire speech, first the NAACP and then Tom Vilsack apologized, and reportedly, Sherrod is considering another job at Agriculture. Sherrod said on TV that she deserved a call from the President, and a few hours later, he obliged, expressing regret.

Are you remembering to breathe? While this story and all the other horrors unfolded, children went swimming to cool off, people worked hard, birthday candles were wished-upon, most of the systems that sustain our world kept ticking over, love overflowed.

So what is going on here?

The incident has been condemned for racism, and surely racism has a great deal to do with it. The disintegration of our national discourse on race (which was never all that stable anyway) has been hyper-accelerated by the right’s tactic of defending against charges of racism by leveling the same charge at the attackers, baselessly, shamelessly, over and over again.

If all you have is a hammer, they say, every problem looks like a nail. Glenn Beck’s favorite hammer is Hitler: he pummels every social policy and political statement he dislikes with comparisons to Nazism, to the extent that a Daily Show clip diagnosing him with “Nazi Tourette’s” has garnered over a million hits on the show’s site. Fox’s second-favorite hammer is racism; a year ago, Glenn Beck made headlines calling President Obama a racist, something he and his colleagues have continued to do with accelerating frequency. Once Sherrod was dismissed, Fox quickly picked up the story, and a string of the network’s commentators, including Newt Gingrich, denounced Sherrod for her “racist attitude.”

If Shirley Sherrod had been white, it’s very likely the rush the judgment would have been slowed enough to view the speech in its entirety. And if she had transgressed, it’s much more likely she would have been given a chance to redeem herself: rest in peace, former Ku Klux Klan organizer Robert Byrd, whose coffin lay in state in the Lincoln Catafalque of the Senate Chamber, not a month before Shirley Sherrod was pulled off the highway and summarily fired. That this was done on the watch of an African American President was not sufficient to change the entrenched pattern.

The incident has been seen as an expression of what’s wrong with the media: the extent to which these snippets of heavily, tendentiously edited video are validated and repeated with such force that they become reality in many people’s minds; the way new and old media tend to run them without checking. No disagreement: unless there is some way to introduce awareness and refusal, to disrupt the cartoon version of reality that spreads virally through these videos, the future of our national discourse is likely to resemble one of those whack-a-mole games, where poking your head into public space invites a crushing blow. (Van Jones had a nice op-ed on this.)

The incident is perhaps most telling with respect to public leaders’ response to this climate. It is very important to recognize that Shirley Sherrod was dismissed before the tape was ever broadcast on Fox. In other words, Obama administration leaders (plus the NAACP and almost every else) have so completely ceded power to control the public story to Fox and its ilk that they preemptively punished themselves to avoid being beaten up by Glenn Beck. Have you ever seen one of those depictions of the child who is trained to assist in his own punishment, marching dutifully to the woodshed to fetch a switch? That’s what happened here, and Shirley Sherrod was the one who bore the pain of it.

Remember to keep breathing now. Lots of us give our power away at some time, in some relationship, whether to another individual or an opposing political force. But if you have given it away, then only you can take it back. The choice is yours.

I’m not all that big on psychological explanations for social phenomena, but most of my direct exposure to self-punishing behavior like this has been with highly traumatized individuals who are stuck in a cycle of reactivity. Panic takes hold, breathing stops, the neocortex surrenders to the more primitive parts of the brain, which administer a chemical bath evoking the fight, flight, or freeze response. Typically, the person becomes so organized around his or her defenses that every stimulus feels like an attack. The traumatized person’s responses are trained to hair-trigger readiness. Once the cycle has been set in place by actual experience, without intervention, the traumatized person will compulsively repeat it, cringing in anticipation even of blows that never come.

Some people may be too far down this path to fully recover, but for many, there is an antidote, and it is awareness. You train yourself to notice your own reactions, and over time, with practice, what had been a compulsion becomes a choice. Things still strike a match in your brain, but self-awareness enables you to refrain from touching it to the fuse.

I can’t see any way out but making this a lesson, getting as many people as possible to speak out about the roles of racism, media manipulation, and hyper-defensive politics in this fiasco. Right now, almost everyone involved has apologized to Shirley Sherrod. That suggests a moment of receptivity. Let’s not waste it on arguments over whether this scandal turned on racism (it did), the terrible state of the commercial media (it did), or traumatized politics (it did).

This just in, friends: such events are always caused by a combination of such forces, each contradicting, reinforcing, or somehow distorting the other. And when people temporarily awaken, see what they have done, and apologize, an opening is created to learn. Let’s not waste it.

It’s a blues moment in America. A time for the bittersweet aesthetic of broken things made beautiful. For me, there is only one consolation and one hope, and they are the same thing: the sad news lives alongside the happy. Neither is truer than the other. Life is this and this and this, all at the same time. Even as the body politic is gripped by this terrible reactivity, while defensive reflexes shoot off like dandelions bursting into seed, there is always the chance to fill your lungs and brain with oxygen and make a different choice.

Take another breath. Listen to the divine Bettye LaVette, “Let Me Down Easy,” a masterpiece of yearning. Imagine the awesome power of awareness in action. Yearn for it. It’s yours.

This is in contrast to the cultural assumptions that dog losers in the economic race: they are lazy, they fail to plan ahead and conserve, they deserve punishment for spending beyond their means, their misfortune is self-created. Rather than meriting the benefit of the doubt, they deserve to suffer. Nearly a week ago, Paul Krugman’s “Punishing The Jobless” column on the shameful Congressional failure to extend unemployment benefits quoted Sharron Angle, the Republican senatorial candidate from Nevada:

…who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”

Cognitive scientists call this the “just-world fallacy.” Some people have such a profound desire to believe that the world is just (perhaps as a holdover from childhood hopes), that they collect or invent reasons why certain people prosper and others suffer, rationalizing and justifying the existing order of winners and losers. Believing that people earn and deserve their fates lessens the believer’s anxiety about the possible impact of random events or forces on his or her own life. It confers the presumption of merit on the rich and the presumption of fault on the poor.

But ultimately, no presumption is immune from reality. This week’s buzz has has included some harbingers of possible change.

Friday’s New York Times carried a fascinating piece about wealthy homeowners defaulting on mortgages.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.

Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, says they are also “[L]less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest.” And, although the article doesn’t say so, more entitled to please themselves without much attention to what anyone else thinks.

A day earlier, Krugman pointed out that despite a huge boost in corporate profits and stock trades, “All the buzz lately is that the Obama administration is ‘antibusiness.’ And there are widespread claims that fears about taxes, regulation and budget deficits are holding down business spending and blocking economic recovery.”

Krugman correctly blames lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, profiled in the Washington Monthly. It’s the nation’s most profligate lobby, spending vast sums to scare people witless (including $800,000 a day to defeat healthcare reform):

“What we always said was the Chamber does best when there’s a Democrat in the White House, because you want businesses to be scared,” a former Chamber lobbyist said. “There’s no better time to raise money than when businesses are scared.”

Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s president, is himself portrayed as an improvident spender and talker, running up organizational deficits at least proportional to the federal deficits he denounces. His extreme stance against scientific evidence of climate change caused Apple and other major corporate members to withdraw; and some local chambers regularly distance themselves from the national organization. But while the current leadership’s tactics may be cruder than usual, it is all part of a decades-long effort to dismantle the financial regulations of the New Deal. (I wrote about it back in May, linking to some of the original strategy documents.)

In some ways, the most encouraging signs of a shift come from a corporate study of CEOs (who, like philanthropies, like to examine themselves: whether the reason is narcissism or the evergreen hope that they will thus discover the secret of success, who can say?). IBM’s just-released biennial study, entitled Capitalizing on Complexity, provides a really interesting snapshot of the way these leaders see themselves and the world. This summary is offered by IBM’s Chair:

1. The world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.
2. They are equally clear that their enterprises today are not equipped to cope effectively with this complexity in the global environment.
3. Finally, they identify “creativity” as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.

On the one hand, the report is affirming of the cultural values I’ve been espousing:

Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for “disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,” a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing
experimentation.

Although the report doesn’t say so—in fact, it doesn’t offer any advice about how to learn creativity, just an imperative to do it—the skills and habits of mind that cultivate creativity are intrinsic to artistic practice, and can best be learned in that realm.

Perhaps inadvertently, the report also undermines the pervasive superstition that the future can be known and controlled:

Increasingly interconnected economies, enterprises, societies and governments have given rise to vast new opportunities. But a surprising number of CEOs told us they feel ill-prepared for today’s more complex environment. Increased connectivity has also created strong — and too often unknown — interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate consequence of any decision has often been poorly understood.

Still, decisions must be made.

You can feel the desire to hold onto the fantasy of a knowable and controllable world in that phrase, “For this reason.” It alludes to the delusion that when things were simpler, the ultimate consequences of decisions could be fully understood. I find it fascinating that so many of us cling to this dream despite abundant evidence to the contrary: the law of unintended consequences is one of the toughest to evade, as any student of public or private hopes and realities can testify.

So contemporary superstitions still exert some force, but the overall message is that CEOs, like the rest of us poor humans, don’t know what to do, and that to face that truth, it’s best to be dextrous, flexible and improvisatory (developing skills, not blueprints, letting go of what doesn’t work); and to stay in touch, listening to and communicating with those involved in and affected by your actions.

There’s a chilling aspect to the report, too. Especially in the absence of reliable external guidance, the hope is that people will rely on an internal sense of what is right to guide their actions. After all, creativity is amoral: it takes tremendous creativity to invent new poisons, devise deceptive advertising, or defraud stockholders. What’s missing from the IBM study is what’s missing from the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying efforts, and from the psyches of mortgage-defaulting millionaires as well as the right-wing politicians who are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits to punish the jobless: any serious consideration of the roles of compassion and social responsibility in commercial, governmental, or financial systems. Here are some of the words that don’t appear, either in IBM’s main text or its quotations from participants: ethics, ethical, moral, morality, democratic, democracy, participatory, participation, poverty, wealth, social justice, equality.

I’m familiar with the argument that claims a kind of neutrality for business: it’s a tool, like a screwdriver, with no intrinsic moral or ethical character. How you use it is up to you. Maybe so, but as they say, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if all you have is an understanding of your work in the world severed from any requirement to do the right thing, every economy looks like ours, a once-vibrant sector depleted by the self-dealing and self-serving choices of leaders, public and private.

To the extent that IBM’s report faced and admitted the dawning role of uncertainty in a realm that once claimed triumphal certainty, I applaud it. But I’m even happier about the way it supports (however inadvertently) questioning our collective wisdom in awarding economic winners a benefit of the doubt denied to those impoverished by the policies they promote.

When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob flapping over Iceland?

Jon Gnarr, the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, is a comedian by trade. In fact, it was widely assumed that he embarked on his election campaign primarily to satirize political conventions, using his skills as a humorist to highlight the absurdity of his city’s actual existing government.

Then he won.

The Reykjavik city council has 15 seats, and Gnarr’s party (”The Best Party,” of course) won six of them. Needing coalition partners to govern, Gnarr announced he wouldn’t form an alliance with anyone who hadn’t seen all five seasons of the 2002-2008 HBO series The Wire, a brilliant, challenging, complex portrayal of the interlocking realities of Baltimore’s illicit drug economy, police, schools, government, media, and politics.

I watched the 60th and final episode yesterday on Netflix, and if only I could speak Icelandic, I’d offer my services to Gnarr. The series ought to be compulsory viewing not only for elected officials, but for everyone who takes part in electing them.

I’ve been thinking about The Wire all week, as I’ve read about the wreck of our economy, with more and more jobs lost and many commentators continuing to be astounded—astounded, I say—at the private sector’s failure to do much about it.

In times of great uncertainty, people are fearful of spending their money. They tend to be guided by conventional wisdom of the kindergarten variety: I’d better keep all my pennies in the piggy-bank, because if I spend them, I might end up with none. Hiring new employees is an investment in the future that many business-owners are currently unprepared to make. The median duration of unemployment is edging close to six months; and when you add up official figures for all the categories of job-seeker, the overall unemployment rate is a terrifying 16.5 percent. (Which means the unofficial rate is higher still.)

When fear spirals, someone needs to step up and loosen its grip. Spending may be counterintuitive according to piggy-bank philosophy, but our public sector should right now be spending money to create employment, initializing the flow of opportunity and capital needed to revive the economy. Instead, economic reality has been pushed aside in favor of comic economics, where austerity is prescribed, in a throwback to the days of bleeding the patient to cure disease, a treatment that often ended by bleeding the poor person dry.

Paul Krugman had a great recent column on the way this dynamic takes hold. He demolishes the arguments for austerity in the face of fear, equipping readers to take this advice:

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

There are exceptions to the austerity rule, of course. Usually, no matter how loud the austerity buzz, you can’t go wrong spending money on the things the right-wing embraces, notably war. It used to be that launching a war could be counted on to jump-start industries and employ large numbers of job-seeking young men. But over $281 billion so far in Afghanistan (and counting) hasn’t done the trick. (If President Obama gets the supplemental funding he has requested from Congress, his own allocations for the Afghanistan War will total $100 billion in a year and a half in office.)

But our wars figure remarkably little into our national dialogue about the economy. In a massive act of misdirection, we are told to pay no attention to the national punishment budget (i.e., wars and prisons), to focus instead on social spending as the culprit. As The Wire excelled in showing, in every realm of power, from the streets to the statehouse, the official reality that is proclaimed for public consumption often bears little resemblance to the principles and behaviors that actually guide power-relations. And so it has gone for the federal role in job creation, where brave pronouncements about stimulating the economy serve as camouflage for pathetically weak initiatives. I wrote back in March about President Obama’s tax credit legislation, touted as a major response to joblessness:

[T]he benefit amounts to forgiveness of the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax, plus an additional $1,000 in tax credit if the employee is retained for a year. This equals a fraction of the cost of hiring someone. It ought to be called the McDonald’s-Wal-Mart bill, because it will primarily benefit low-wage, high-turnover businesses. Hire someone for minimum wage, keep him or her for a year, collect the benefits….

In The Wire, drug lords, corner boys, dockworkers, school officials, newspaper editors, and city council members all pronounce nobly high-minded ideals, and some actually practice them to the best of their ability. But they are vastly outnumbered by those whose prime directives are looking good (and if that’s not possible, saving face), and evading or defeating their competitors at any price.

Drug suppliers murder those who threaten their dominion, or, when the flow of blood threatens to drown them, form cartels to convert competition to shared self-interest. School officials distort curriculum to raise test scores, quickly suppressing any experiment that might disrupt school funding, even successful ones. Newspaper editors turn a blind eye to faux news if it sells papers. Union officials grease all the right palms to keep the docks working, postponing the day when the rank-and-file will feel the full impact of mechanization and the concomitant loss of jobs. Public officials trade in bribes and cover up misdeeds that might hurt their election chances. And the police, who along with drug dealers create the through-line of all five seasons, cook crime statistics to match the prevailing political winds.

There are benefits to the system, to be sure. The Wire’s intricate drug trade choreography is as elegant a depiction of robber-baron capitalism as I have seen, featuring street-corner equivalents of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and for that matter, Horatio Alger. The survival-of-the-fittest ethos that marks each of the city’s interlocking systems offers tremendous scope for the gifted, and there is a kind of beauty in seeing them exercise it, like watching an athlete pull ahead of opponents, making it look easy.

But mostly, the takeaway, while always riveting, is less uplifting. It is the stark truth of self-serving patterns of power, holographic in their omnipresence, from corner-boy spats to political horse-trading: that in a corrupt system, those in power almost always know what is right, but almost always choose what is expedient.

In the column I cited above, Paul Krugman attributes our dismal performance on public-sector spending to distorted but bright-sounding ideas that become conventional wisdom without first passing any real-world tests. Maybe so. But I attribute it more to that basic political lesson taught by The Wire. Public-sector job-creation is absolutely essential to recovery (and if you’ve been reading my stuff in the last year or two, you know that includes public-sector arts jobs). You could say that the Obama team is beholden to the banking industry, like every administration, and that would be a part of the truth. But at bottom, the fact that a Democratic administration with epidemic unemployment has not proposed a new WPA seems to me attributable to one thing: an appetite for political self-preservation that supersedes the public good.

The Obama team (like every other presidential team since Ronald Reagan abolished public service employment with one of his first presidential pen-strokes) is afraid to come out for public-sector job creation because Democrats feel politically vulnerable to Republicans who denounce government spending. While such denunciations form the sound-track whenever the right is in office, those same administrations have typically run up record deficits via tax cuts and industry subsidies. From the micro to the macro, far too much of electoral politics is consistent with The Wire’s philosophy of saying whatever will win, then doing whatever you can get away with.

The calculation is simple: in exchange for looking like cost-cutters at a time when the wind is blowing toward austerity, the Obama team is willing for vast numbers to live with the downward spiral of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, underfunded schools and our whole sad (and still-unfolding) saga of licensed depredation. Like the drug lords and police commissioners in The Wire, they aren’t troubled overmuch by asking the body politic to bear the cost for of their refusal to act with courage and conviction.

Iceland got its wake-up call from a crippling banking collapse triggered by financial deregulation that has by now greatly devalued the nation’s currency and almost put its stock exchange out of business. Two years ago, the country’s unemployment rate was 1 percent, and now it’s around 8 1/2 percent. The cost of the crisis is estimated at more than three-quarters of Iceland’s gross domestic product.

On this Independence Day holiday, my wish is to wake to the sound of awareness dawning in time to head off a comparable result in the U.S.

Meantime, this holiday calls for citizenship education. Follow Jon Gnarr’s advice and watch The Wire, which will at least kindle the hope of honor among thieves. In the first season, Bunk Moreland, played by the wonderful actor Wendell Pierce (who was one of the artist-activist delegates to the White House meeting I helped organize in 2009) is talking with Omar Little (Michael K. Williams’ deeply beautiful and disturbing portrait of a gay thief and murderer who consistently outsmarts the drug lords). In a strategic move of grandmaster chess, Omar comes forward to identify a killer:

Bunk: So, you’re my eyeball witness, huh? [Omar nods] So, why’d you step up on this?
Omar: Bird triflin’, basically. Kill an everyday workin’ man and all. I mean, I do some dirt, too, but I ain’t never put my gun on nobody that wasn’t in the game.
Bunk: A man must have a code.
Omar: Oh, no doubt.

The series’ theme song is “Way Down in The Hole,” with a different artist’s version for each season. They’re all great, starting with the Blind Boys of Alabama. Here’s the last one, by Steve Earle, who also has a recurring role as the AA sponsor of the series’ most redemptive character, Bubbles, played with angelic sweetness by Andre Royo. Art illuminates life.

My favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, is famous for spinning a lengthy essay out of the ancient poet Archilochus’ animal maxim, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin’s game was distinguishing those whose views are shaped by a single, defining idea from those who draw on many sources for a result both more textured and less reductive.

But the hamster’s teaching doesn’t fit either category. It isn’t about knowing, but about asking one big question: “Am I there yet? Am I there yet? Am I there yet?”

This seems to be the question of the day. My long-time activist friends keep asking how they can know whether they are having an impact. They ask it in aid of summoning the energy to continue. In the pauses between activities, the question bangs around my own brain like an echo: is what I want—for the world and for myself—coming or not?

As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, the answer can only be, “Who knows?” The lesson history tells is this: Win some, lose some. The wheel never stops turning. So no matter how hard I try, I can only come up with one conclusion, that the greatest meaning is to be found in doing what one desires and embraces most strongly, for its own sake, and not for the promise of a result.

In this context, it was especially interesting when last week, a colleague pointed me to a kind of historical marker: a confidential memo to the leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, authored in 1971 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”

In measured prose—sort of a low-intensity jeremiad—Powell bemoaned the anti-capitalist tenor of sixties intellectual life and activism and its impact on the media and society. He noted that social criticism is “wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy,” which is a refreshingly moderate view in comparison with today’s pervasive desire to silence critics altogether. As exemplars of the problem, he singled out attorney William Kunstler, consumer activist Ralph Nader, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and author Charles Reich.

Powell’s prescription brought together a set of realizations that had been dawning on the right since Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election: that if they had any hope of winning future elections and policy battles, they would have to apply their best thinking, and considerable resources, to shifting public opinion their way.

Powell outlined a series of interlocking measures that in the intervening forty years have been lavishly financed and energetically promoted by ideologues, funders, and other operatives of the right. He advocated creating cadres of scholars and speakers, vetting textbooks for the proper indications of “belief in the American system,” promoting more airtime and faculty posts for pro-capitalist views on campus, applying the same monitoring and pressure tactics to the media—and because all of this is rather gradual, pressing now for direct political influence through Congress and the courts (he suggested the ACLU as a model):

The educational programs suggested above would be designed to enlighten public thinking — not so much about the businessman and his individual role as about the system which he administers, and which provides the goods, services and jobs on which our country depends.

But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

One way to look at this is as good news for hamsters everywhere, since almost every element of the right-wing campaign Powell lays out has been actualized since he wrote this memo summarizing his and his colleagues’ thinking. I’m pretty sure the moment long since arrived when they were able to gaze at each other in satisfaction, offering a resounding “Yes!” to the question, “Are we there yet?”

Another is to take a deep breath and acknowledge that at present, the remedy is for advocates of responsive government, economic democracy, environmental stewardship and the other positions Powell opposes is to create the same sort of synergies and collaborations that shifted public opinion rightward. Only, the wheel must turn the other way, toward an enhanced understanding of public interest, public responsibility, and common good and a strong commitment to reverse the damage the corporate ascendancy has done to community life and the body politic.

It seems likely that history is on our side, since the disastrous effects of our almost mystical coronation of unmediated capitalism are evident in rising rates of unemployment, home repossessions and runaway industry, even as our largest financial corporations rake in unprecedented profits. (Here’s a nice compilation of relevant numbers from Americans for Financial Reform.) Unless collective suicide is the goal, this has got to be pulling the wheel toward the other direction.

Remember, Powell’s confidential memo was written in a moment when it seemed to many of us that progressive critiques and ideas were clearly on the rise, that we had every reason to expect a period of strong democracy, including well-regulated business and finance sectors. But as it turned out, that was exactly when the wheel began turning the other way. Something similar could happen now: who knows? While progressives don’t have the willingness to walk in lock-step that marked the right’s ascendancy of the last four decades, so many overlapping, related, and potentially reinforcing expressions of economic democracy are emerging these days that they may just have a comparable impact, despite our unruliness.

But as I reread Powell’s memo, the thing that comes through most strongly is how uncynical it seems. I think he was mistaken—and given many of the positions he took as a Supreme Court justice, I’m ready to argue that he may by now have been appalled at the consequences he failed to predict—but boy, was he sincere! A sense of belief, of embrace of a beloved mission, of congruence of conviction and action, pervades the document. I don’t doubt that Powell would have gone on promoting these ideas even if they hadn’t rung such a loud bell with his cohort, the big chiefs of American business.

Sometimes, when I hear that question spinning in my hamster-like mind—”Am I there yet?”—what strikes me most strongly is its existential irrelevancy. By now, I know I will continue to perform those acts that seem truest and closest to my essence, whether or not I think they are likely to produce results in my lifetime. By now, I know it isn’t even the right question.

When the right question is asked, past and future fall away. The wheel keeps turning, fueled by the alignment of desire and action. Sometimes it turns our way, sometimes not.

“Are we here now?” Almost.

Marching in the streets isn’t the only way to speak out. The tide can be turned when a sufficient number of people of goodwill, especially those who have no direct stake in the specific controversy, stand up for human rights and social inclusion by writing letters and op-eds, engaging neighbors in conversation, making art about the issues, educating other members of their own communities, and countless other actions. I am glad when I see black and white people—whose families may have been here for generations (voluntarily or not)—take public stands on this issue, which adds to the general understanding of how basic human rights, not special interests, are at stake.

It reminds me of a time I was part of a presentation on the cultural price of racism at an arts conference in the Midwest. A young African American man approached the other presenter and myself after the session ended.

“That’s a great gimmick you guys have there,” he said.

“Gimmick?” we asked.

“You know,” he explained, “being white and talking about racism.”

That was more than twenty years ago, but the degree to which it is still a “gimmick”—an oddity, a rare event—shames us all. That’s why I’m glad to see a couple of recent statements making the rounds. If you haven’t already seen it, check out Tim Wise’s essay on RedRoom.com entitled “Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of White Privilege.” In measured tones, he creates a hypothetical, asking the reader to speculate about the likely reaction should the recent excesses of the Tea Partiers and their ilk have been performed instead by people of color, for instance:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government. Would these protesters–these black protesters with guns–be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

That’s also why I was glad to see Frank Rich’s interesting column in today’s New York Times. Historically, anti-immigrant movements arise at times of economic stress, when personal prejudices are whipped into public campaigns by demagogues who want to ensure the continuity of their own privilege and power. The current version seems to offer a slightly new wrinkle. Rich describes how the rise of the Tea Parties’ “Take Back America” movement has granted permission for public bigotry to Republicans courting that angry white segment of voters. He makes the increasingly obvious point that as racism against people of color rises, so does the determined denial of its existence:

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

Some people say that a tacit moratorium was imposed on acknowledging racism during the Obama campaign, a measured silence that was presumed to smooth an African American candidate’s path to the Oval Office. You could even argue that if it was a conscious tactic, it worked: if more had been made of race, perhaps many Americans’ racism would have surfaced in response, causing Obama to lose the election. But now, more than a year later, we are paying a very high price. Our national conversation has retracted to the point where the right wing is allowed to co-opt the term “racist” to describe advocates of racial equality and most of the rest of us don’t talk about it all.

It was especially surreal, this last week or so, to be working with dedicated community artists, talking with them about how to handle the anti-immigrant feeling that arises in communities when a newcomer group asserts its right to be visible in the public arena, as by the creation of a mural or festival. Often, those who resist such assertions of cultural heritage are themselves descended from immigrants, although the irony of doing unto others the harm that has been done to your own ancestors rarely figures into the conversation.

Each such situation appears distinct in scope, in consequences, in specifics and details. But at heart, they are all the same. If it possible to inspire longtime citizens to empathy for those oppressed by such policies, that is the best course, because it educates even as it advances justice. And if it is not, then those who embrace justice tempered by love must make ourselves known as an unbreachable majority, prevailing despite objections.

A few years, I had the opportunity to address public cultural officials in Sant Boi, a town near Barcelona that was a stronghold of Catalan culture against the repressive forces of the Franco regime, which aimed to eradicate a heritage strongly associated with political resistance to fascism. Not long before I visited, the first Catalan constitution guaranteeing cultural rights had been introduced, the Statute of Autonomy. New immigrants were arriving from Latin America in large numbers, and quite a few long-time Catalan nationalists were resistant to what they saw as a dilution of their own embattled culture and heritage.

I will leave you with a few paragraphs from my talk, which casts the choice as doing the right thing willingly or gruntingly:

Your situation is…complicated by a conflicted relationship with Spain, which might be symbolized by the question of whether Catalonia is its own nation (nacion) or a nationality (nationalidad) within the Spanish nation. There is a painful history of cultural suppression before the restoration of democracy, and I imagine that creates an intricate ambivalence, a simultaneous desire to be connected and to be protective.

So in a sense, the tangled relationship between Catalonia and Spain mirrors the tangled feelings that arise between new, non-Catalan immigrants and those who feel protective of Catalan cultural heritage. This is undeniably challenging: it is natural to want to protect what you have, especially if it has been threatened. Yet if the predominant social atmosphere is one of suspicion and resistance, the result is perpetual alienation and conflict, escalating fear and mistrust.

You have a very difficult and noble task, which is to behave toward newcomers to your community as you wish others beyond Sant Boi to behave toward you: with respect and a spirit of inclusion, recognizing and appreciating differences within a presumption of equality. In your jobs within the municipal cultural sector, your responsibility is to maintain an overview, a larger perspective than that of a single individual looking only at his or her own feelings and circumstances. You have a great opportunity to extend a hand in both directions: to people who have been here for generations and feel threatened by newcomers; and to newcomers who fear that they are unwelcome. This is a challenge, but it is a worthy one. It reflects the cultural policy of Catalonia: as the Statute of Autonomy says: “the only truly free country is the one in which each individual may live and freely express different identities without any hierarchical or dependent relationship between them.”

I said to these people in Spain what I would say to every one of my fellow residents of the United States:

Thus, the goal…must be to find a way for everyone to live together in mutual respect and appreciation. There is no other legally, morally or socially viable position; anything other than a sincere commitment to inclusion will exact a high price, poisoning your own culture with resentment and resistance. So this social challenge becomes a personal challenge for everyone in your positions: will you embrace it willingly, or accept it reluctantly and grudgingly?