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.

[W]as removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.

And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

Do yourself a favor and read the entirety of this excellent Times article by Michael Winerip. Its distinguishing feature is a true diversity of stakeholder voices, and a true willingness to question official pronouncements, both increasingly rare in daily journalism.

I read Winerip’s piece on Monday morning. By Wednesday night, googling the three words “principal,” “Joyce,” and “Irvine,” yielded a million and a half hits.

This story has spread like wildfire through every one of the overlapping circles my life intersects: artists and arts educators (Joyce Irvine had successfully transformed the school into an arts magnet, accelerating educational vitality and improvement); human rights advocates (the Times reported, for example, that “37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children”); and everyone with heart enough to care more for actual existing children than serving a system that has been allowed to fail them over and over again. In our cycle of failure, each new initiative or policy sounds good enough on paper to generate official approval and public hope, but only until its real impact becomes evident and another bright, top-down idea eventually takes its place.

This story has seized so much attention because it is a perfect illustration of the madness of the system, in which absurd ideas are granted a sort of logic by being enacted. In this case, the key element is measuring educational improvement. In Vermont, as is most other states, standardized test scores are used to evaluate a school’s performance. Of course, here on planet earth, schools don’t perform, students (and teachers, staff, and administrators) do. And the only sensible way to evaluate a student’s performance is to assess that individual’s progress: it’s how and how much Jenny or Jamal learned that counts, not how many questions each answered correctly on the standardized test. But:

Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.

Ms. Irvine said that in a room she monitored, 15 of 18 randomly filled in test bubbles. The math tests are word problems. A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.” Five percent of Wheeler’s refugee students scored proficient in math.

The twisted logic behind these rules is surely well-intentioned. Understanding the disparity among school districts’ capacity and resources, federal policymakers believe they can help level the playing field by imposing national pressures and standards, rewarding those who comply and compete for supplemental funds (like “Race to The Top,” a testing-based competition that has garnered an amount of attention and approval vastly disproportionate to its size, which equals about one percent of aggregate education funding). There’s an intention of fairness (however disembodied and limited their idea of fairness) in applying the same rules to all school systems. And a naive faith in competition as the driver of progress.

But it’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed.

We are caught in a crazy mind-warp in this country. Intuitively, experientially, absolutely, we know that the best way to nurture a healthy society is to pay attention to individuals and communities, allowing room for adjustments, supplements, and alternatives to large systems and their economies of scale. Possibility resides in human particularity of difference, not in treating all of us like units in a vast machine. No one in a position of power would voluntary submit to the interventions they typically prescribe for the rest of us. In fact, if we want good schools in this country, all we have to do is apply a single rule: offer the same education to every child, even the poorest, as is provided for the children of elected officials, corporate executives, and others who wield social power.

I’ll quote James Lawson again, because he articulated best the goal of a humane society: “A social order of justice tempered by love.”

Love isn’t dispensed by federal authorities. It has to be delivered to children at ground-level, as Joyce Irvine reportedly did with such excellence and integrity. In any decentralized system, the ideal role of the highest level of authority focuses on the things no local authority can do alone: support sharing, exchange, and collective learning; carry out research; provide resources to equalize disparities at ground-level (so that every school is given the ways and means to provide decent education, not just those that conform to federally imposed pressures); and protect free expression and human rights that may be at risk in localities.

At a time of epidemic unemployment, when public spending is almost the only proven remedy, why aren’t we employing legions of teachers, teachers’ aides, teaching artists, and other educators who could engage all students as Joyce Irvine has evidently done in Burlington, VT? Why, instead, are we creating the conditions for her removal?

There’s a madness to the system that seems to sever policymakers’ brains from recognizing real experience rather than the gross generalizations and numeric scores to which it is so often reduced. Statistically, formal education confers certain social advantages (i.e., by definition, the educated are more likely to advance in professions and corporations, leading to economic gain). So we try to reduce education to simple, measurable elements—test scores, curriculum standards, etc.—extracting and reproducing perceived indicators, hoping for shortcuts to advantage. As almost always, the system fails to recognize the difference between correlation and cause-and-effect. As almost always, the human story gets left behind.

Apart from the necessary acquisition of technical skills (which can be accomplished in many ways), I judge people educated if they have learned to use their hearts and minds to something like capacity, if they cultivate curiosity and enjoy satisfying it, if they question their own biases and assumptions along with those of others, if they are capable of knowing and expressing who they are and to whom they are accountable in this life, if they resist being domesticated into the system. I don’t find these qualities much more present in our school systems than on our street-corners or a hundred other locations. It is insane to think you can get them by pulsing children through imposed educational processes and standardized tests, let alone by removing talented educators from their jobs to make way for these things.

I love the writings of Raymond Williams, considered the father of engaged adult education. In his wonderful essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” Williams writes of the contempt he encountered at university for the people he grew up with as the child of a Welsh railway worker, the feeling that they lacked a special and necessary kind of cultivation that earned social privilege:

[A] few weeks ago I was in a house with a commercial traveler, a lorry driver, a bricklayer, a shopgirl, a fitter, a signalman, a nylon operative, a domestic help (perhaps, dear, she is your very own treasure). I hate describing people like this, for in fact they were my family and family friends. Now they read, they watch, this work we are talking about [i.e., commercial culture]; some of them quite critically, others with a good deal of pleasure. Very well, I read different things, watch different entertainments, and I am quite sure why they are better. But could I sit down in that house and make this equation we are offered? Not, you understand, that shame was stopping me; I’ve learned, thank you, how to behave. But talking to my family, to my friends, talking, as we were, about our own lives, about people, about feelings, could I in fact find this lack of quality we are discussing? I’ll be honest—I looked; my training has done that for me. I can only say that I found as much natural fineness of feeling, as much quick discrimination, as much clear grasp of ideas within the range of experience as I have found anywhere.

Our educational goal should be to bring all students the means to recognize and develop their own gifts, to become fully alive and fully aware, to understand their own capacity for action in the world and feel able to fulfill it, to acquire the skill and knowledge that equips them for this task. This is labor-intensive work, and we have the people to do it, and the madness of the system stands in the way.

I’m laid up with a cold today, sniffling and coughing and generally feeling sorry for myself. But sometimes the change in perspective that comes with being stuck in an ailing body concentrates one’s vision, allowing you to see past the extraneous to the heart of the matter. Do that google search—principal Joyce Irvine—and click on some of the deeply outraged editorials and other commentaries this scandal has engendered in just a few days. You never know when even a small incident may begin to trigger a tipping-point. May we use this opportunity to awaken from the madness of the system!

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.

It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I am ready to explore relationship again, which for me means meeting men. The trouble is, I live the life of a writer and speaker whose main subject is culture. In comparison with the normal pattern of going to an office each day, I spend a remarkable amount of time alone with my computer, mostly loving every minute of it. (I’m lucky, I know, to experience bliss in the act of writing, even when the results fail to induce the same state in readers.) In between, I take to the road for work. I’m glad to have had quite a few speaking and consulting engagements this spring, mostly journeying to that corner of the universe known as “the arts,” where I am surrounded by women (roughly two-thirds of the people who work in that field, by my informal estimate) and gay men, with a sprinkling of married men in the crowd.

Wherever I go, I’ve been driving my friends a little crazy with this topic, and their response has been to urge me to register with an online dating site. Yesterday, I let myself be persuaded, which entailed answering a long list of questions about my background and personal tastes and habits. The idea is that on the basis of some algorithm, I will be matched with compatible men (although the first batch of matches has left me feeling skeptical).

Still, it’s good practice, friends say, recounting all the happy couples they know who met online. So I am practicing, and as I practice, I wonder if anyone is paying attention to the politics of mature romance, a subject ripe for exploration.

The 1969 essay that introduced “the personal is political” focused on women’s experience in newly formed consciousness-raising groups, on understanding that talking about personal life and feelings was in itself a form of political action.

When the feminist movement popularized the slogan, the focus was most often ways that matters seen as purely personal—who does the dishes?—had political significance, upholding a hierarchy of value in which “women’s work” enhanced men’s social power at women’s expense.

But before long, “the personal is political” expressed a way of seeing the world in general. It recognized something that now seems so true I can’t quite remember why it was ever contested. From the far right of the political spectrum to its opposite, it is now generally understood that putatively personal matters such as views of sexual identity and reproductive choice, of racial differences and same-sex marriage, make loud and clear political statements.

But there are things we still don’t bring into the conversation, because they conform to our even older and deeper proclivity to treat public issues as private troubles (to borrow C. Wright Mills’ words). The classic example is the common tendency to regard unemployment as a personal failing, even when mere statistics inarguably demonstrate its public dimension. When businesses fail or flee, jobs are lost without regard to the merits of personal performance; but the impersonality of the experience doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Too often, the odor of blame still clings to those whose jobs have been lost.

Love’s many varieties of failure are treated as purely personal, but they too are shaped by social values. When I think of my parents’ generation, my mind fills with images of stoic spouses, sticking it out in marriages grounded in cold calculation or hot desperation: I’ll trade the fact that you see me as furniture for the houseful of overstuffed accoutrements your salary buys; I’ll trade the fact that you feel no desire for me for the way you make me look like a successful family man for the boss, the church, the neighbors.

Then as now, we see happy couples, determined to stay awake and alive, to welcome change in themselves and in their partners, to meet in the sanctuary of loving relationship. Now as then, we see spouses who put parts of themselves away in the interests of coexistence, sleepwalking through the years, shadows of their possible selves.

In my generation, many more of us lately seem to be single, in part due to having finally refused the bad old bargain, trading ourselves away in exchange for some version of security. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster, and like most human beings, that is our desire. The newer systems devised to connect potential mates may work well for the young, and even for those members of our own generation who evaded the great awakening that imprinted so many in the sixties. But from what I hear, they do not seem to be serving us—the ones who heard “the personal is political” as a newly minted mantra and still hear its echo—because they can’t get past what we do and what we like to the only question that finally matters, who we are.

It’s been a long time since I was last single, and everything has changed.

I was fortunate to be young when sex and danger were not keeping quite such close company as in the age of AIDS. It seemed to me then that the attraction of appearance was a tremendous power source, one I could wield without much care, just for the pleasure of it. I’m not making any claims of superiority for a cultural moment in which people looked at each other, liked what they saw, and leapt into bed without exchanging names. You’d have to be blind not to see the downside. But I was lucky: nothing really bad happened to me; I learned something; and I delighted in the dance of instant attraction and its aftermath.

Now I am a woman of a certain age. I don’t think I have anything new to say about our society’s equation of youth and beauty, of the way it treats women no longer young as less than they were, invisible, and surplus to requirements. Awareness is growing, and with awareness, women can sever their inner sense of value from those social distortions, can remember who they are and not allow a contingent idea of worth to take root in their own minds.

But I have also changed. The intrepid among the young perceive identity as wide-open to question and influence. Part of such a youthful relationship is playing with identity: Who am I in this relationship? Who are you? What about now, and now, and now? Decades ago, I was drawn to men with a fluid, unformed sense of self, learning themselves through adventure and misadventure. I still prize openness to learning, but much more so when it is grounded in the self-awareness that can come through experience and reflection, making identity far richer and far less conditional.

When I was young and time was infinite, relationships could be specialized, like reading different chapters in a big book. I could learn politics from one man, and music or silence or cooking or the names of wildflowers from another. I could spend time with a man I couldn’t really talk to, but who had ways of communicating. I practiced dumbing myself down, or amping up my defenses to get through a passage of not being fully received. But now, I recognize the erotic character of brain-power. The quip that the brain is the largest sex organ has been around for ages; but now that science has given us the capacity to observe brains in action, we know it is true. For a woman like myself, who delights in playing with her brain, no compensation would suffice to trade away the delicious meeting of open and active minds, which is not an easy thing to find.

I don’t mean to repudiate the past. There is no denying the power of youthful animal attraction, the erotic equivalent of the impulse to sink one’s teeth into a ripe peach.

But it doesn’t take long after devouring the peach to feel the need for another. The long-simmered quality of mature erotic energy is something else. My attention is drawn to a beautiful young man as to an object of art, but there is something in a lived-in look, the mature face and body of a man who resides comfortably inside his own skin, that moves me much more deeply. It’s the knowing look that made George Clooney wait so long to morph from minor soap-star to national heartthrob; the tactile sensation of watching Gary Cooper or Denzel Washington in middle age, in contrast to the fragile beauty of their youth; the swooning crowds that fill concert halls to hear the 70-something Leonard Cohen sing “I’m Your Man.”

“The lineaments of gratified desire,” wrote William Blake, capturing it exactly.

Our culture is distorted by ideas about aging ungrounded in physical reality. Sixty-five is still considered the boundary of old age (of course, for some North Americans, 65 equals decrepitude, but not so very many). At birth, the life-expectancy of a white woman who is now close to that age would have been in the high 60s; today, if she has survived past 60, that same woman’s life expectancy would give her another 20-odd years of life. (For white men and both men and women of color, the numbers are a little lower.)

There is a pervasive expectation that after a certain age, we will start to go quietly, deflating as life force leaks away. The young naturally want to move up. The French have an expression: “Pousse-toi de là que je m’y mette“—basically, “Shove off so I can take your place.” Economic concerns exacerbate the trend. In my brief exposure to the online dating site, I’ve already read a dozen profiles of men a few years older than myself whose own words paint a picture of withdrawal into a half-life of vicarious experience and board games. With diminished hopes, it appears to be relatively easy to strike the bad old bargain online: companionate marriage, someone to watch TV with, insurance against finding oneself ill and alone. It is human to want these things; and human to hope they provide the desired satisfaction for those who choose them.

But what about those who were unable to find sanctuary in an earlier relationship, and who now eschew the bad bargain, even at the risk of isolation? The politics of mature romance are intensely personal, but they are still politics, shaped by social distortions concerning age, eros (and Psyche). The generation experiencing them may be gamely treading the paths to relationship now on offer, but I think something different is not only possible, it is required. I want to volunteer for it, but I don’t know where to sign up.

In the meantime, if you meet a highly intelligent, self-aware, comfortable-in-his-own skin single man of a certain age (give or take), point him to my Website, where a lot more than my favorite color is revealed.

I love the song “But Beautiful” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke:

Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall,
And I’m thinking,
I wouldn’t mind at all.

I’ve asked for it in more piano bars than I can remember, enough to know that those who can play it by heart can really play. I wanted to share Betty Carter’s version with you, but I couldn’t find it online. Never mind, this sublime rendition by Billie Holiday will do very nicely, a theme song for our cohort.