Earl, the hard-hat–wearing father-figure, supports his family as a tree-pusher, knocking down ancient forests for his rapacious corporate masters. It was the best political satire I’ve seen on American TV, complete with newsbreaks from deep-voiced talking-head Howard Handupme, who issued regular soothing bulletins even as the Ice Age dawned, ending both the series and the known world. At the time, I marveled at how fully this allegory encapsulated the contemporary scene under President Bush the first: climate change, environmental despoliation, unsafe working conditions, corporate indifference to workers and consumers, commercial media serving that agenda, and all of it wrapped in a lighthearted look at growing up in the Cretaceous.

It came to mind this morning as I watched a clip of Glenn Beck’s recent attempt to hijack the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., in service of his remarkably well-funded and stunningly deranged campaign to colonize white Americans’ minds. Beck, as you must have heard, has claimed that Tea Partiers deserve Dr. King’s mantle:

We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.

Twenty years ago, I realized this morning, you would have needed a time machine to foresee the precise cocktail of sugarcoated racism, religiosity, and bald-facing lying that infuses our national media artifact, the real, live anti-Muppet, Glenn Beck.

If you’ve caught even a glimpse of Beck, you know what comedian Lewis Black meant when he said Beck had “Nazi Tourette’s,” comparing anyone or anything he dislikes to the Third Reich. “This is a guy who uses more swastika props and pictures of the Nuremberg Rallies than The History Channel,” said Black.

But those are only outward trappings. Clearly, Beck has also learned a great deal from Nazi propaganda techniques, and he is putting it to work right here and now. The tactic that interests me most is “the big lie.” Now, the Nazis didn’t lay claim to that concept. In fact, they attributed it to the Jews and the British. And this, too, is classic: accuse your opponent of the misdeeds you have committed (Beck accused President Obama of racism, for instance, an assertion he has recently tried to soften), to insulate yourself from the same charge. Hitler laid out the concept in Mein Kampf, expressing the contempt for ordinary people in which his own grandiosity was rooted:

[B]ecause the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

In a psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the wartime Office of Strategic Services, Dr. Walter Langer summed it up thusly:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sound familiar? For the big lie to work, certain factors have to be in place.

First, there are the facts of human cognitive function. It is in our nature as human beings to construct reasons for the things we do (often our reasons are invented long after the action has been initiated). Of course, we like reasons that put us in a good light. Between the choice to see oneself as a hero in the mold of MLK, or as a person who is distorted by the fear of losing privilege and by resentment at all who seem to be taking it away, there’s not much of a contest. To eschew the easy, self-aggrandizing option, you have to know that humans are susceptible to such delusions, you have to make a conscious choice to guard against them, you have to be willing to regard yourself in the cold light of truth stripped of narcissism. Exploiting the nearly universal proclivity for self-justification, Glenn Beck has made a career out of providing shiny self-deluding rationales for deeply repugnant attitudes.

I’d like to say there is an easy remedy, but I’m afraid there is only one remedy, self-awareness. Knowing that we humans—even you and I and all the right-on people surrounding us—have this inbuilt tendency, that it is hardwired into our brains, is just about the only ally we have in noticing and correcting for it. The Tea Party people aren’t stupider or more gullible than the rest of us; it’s just that nothing has as yet disturbed the trance of self-justification that masks their awareness of the big lies they’ve been swallowing.

Second, there is the way that, in being adopted as a media icon of nobility, Martin Luther King the symbol has been stripped of much that made MLK the man such a brilliant, brave, and inspiring figure. As the years passed, Dr. King’s understanding of the integral relationship of racism and other oppressions grew deeper and more powerful. In a stirring speech delivered a year to the day before his death, Dr. King laid it out:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies…. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth…. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.”

Glenn Beck’s ability to impersonate entitlement to MLK’s legacy depends on people not knowing what Dr. King really stood for. We need to strip off the padding Beck and his ilk have glued onto the rough edges of Dr. King’s righteous anger and fearless love. Sharing this information will make the big lie harder to swallow.

Finally, in the inflationary atmosphere that nurtures the big lie, it is very hard for people to see how they are being lied to by those they trust most. Of course, we want to trust someone. If everyone is lying, the world starts to tilt, and vertigo sets in. Frank Rich has a good column today about the billionaires cynically bankrolling the Tea Party movement to advance their own interests. Through Fox, Beck is able to blast his big lies nearly twenty-four/seven. Populist rage might be real—certainly, we all have good reasons to revile some of the ways our taxes are being spent, to resent government’s preferential treatment of the rich while the ranks of the unemployed balloon—but what the people who are underwriting this movement have in mind will do nothing to reverse those trends. Quite the contrary.

One of the things I loved about that old TV show “Dinosaurs” is how forthright it was about the bought-and-sold relationships between mega-corporations, government, and the commercial media. All the family names (Earl Sinclair, Ethyl Phillips) were based on oil companies, a rather nice reference to the fact that our petroleum-based world owes its existence to the great catastrophe underfoot that resulted from dinosaurs’ extinction. The corporation that owned everything in Pangaea was called “Wesayso.” Would it help if Tea Partiers and their fans knew who was benefitting from Glenn Beck’s casting as Howard Handupme? It couldn’t hurt.

This bone-chilling antiracist song, “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, was written by Abe Meerpol, who later adopted the two boys orphaned by the government’s execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When Holiday approached her label, Columbia, about recording the song in the late 30s, they refused on the grounds it might hurt sales in the South. She was finally granted a one-time release to record it for the Commodore label. This is merely a single facet of the reality Martin Luther King’s words illuminated for the world.

Next time you hear Glenn Beck tell an all-white Tea Party group that “we are the inheritors of the civil rights movement,” think of this song, and know that the big lie has been told again.

Returning to dating after many years, I am compelled to state the obvious: things have changed. Those changes shine a light on the key challenge of our increasingly virtual world, namely: as we relate more and more through computerized text and images, how do we capture, notice, integrate, allow, and enable the forms of information and interaction that can’t be conveyed in bits and bytes?

When I shared a little of my experience with a friend recently, he told me to “Be careful.” With my heart, I think he meant, but of course, the boatload of cautionary evidence now being launched against online interaction has more to do with other dangers. We are warned against revealing too much to strangers, against making ourselves vulnerable to predators. (And yes, my lovely friends who are reading this, I am indeed being careful; no need to worry.)

But as more and more of the human interaction we are used to experiencing in real, flesh-and-blood encounters is being moved online, it is the opposite truth that strikes me. I find myself touched by the extent to which men and women who have loved and lost are willing to open themselves anew to hope and opportunity, by how much vulnerability they are willing to risk by exposing their yearning for connection. Human vulnerability is timeless, of course, but if memory serves, I think there is even more exposure entailed in posting an online profile than in standing hopefully at the perimeter of a party, impersonating cheerful indifference to the fact that everyone else seems to be part of a couple.

I borrowed the title of this essay from a very nice man I met online. He works in the computer industry. When I asked him to describe his specialty, he answered with one word: “Virtuality,” which refers to achieving the feeling of reality, distinct from actual physical reality. My iPhone gives me the experience of typing on a keyboard without actually having one, for instance.

In online dating, the time-honored steps are reversed. Back in the day, I would meet someone at a party, or on line at the bank, or at work. Whatever information was exchanged in first glances, handshakes, and tentative conversations would suffice to determine whether the encounter would be brief and forgotten, or a first step in the pursuit of possible intimacy. Certain mysteries were immediately revealed: scent, the exchange of pheromones, how someone moves, the quality of someone’s gaze, the sound of someone’s voice.

Online, none of that is available. You look at snapshots, read a few paragraphs of self-description, take in answers to questions about height, age, profession, religion, and so on. If your profiles interest each other, you email. If that goes well, you talk by phone (although video Skype is my new communication obsession, providing gesture, inflection, expression, and other useful information to supplement the human voice). If that seems promising, you meet, usually in some bounded setting—a coffee shop set up for quick getaways seems to be the favorite.

All those steps now precede the moment that used to tell us whether interest would be sparked. And of course—humans being such complex yet carnal creatures—often as not that first encounter lets the air out of whatever fantasies those who meet online may have piped into the vast space that snapshots and email open for speculation and projection.

It’s the opposite of virtuality: a fully crafted experience that feels—that seems—quite unlike the real thing it replaces.

Extrapolate this to the internet-based political discourse that has substantially replaced face-to-face civic debate. In reality, many threads weave the social fabric that clothes the body politic. Other than online, it isn’t that each of us can be reduced to a series of discrete political positions, a set of toggle switches: yes/no to this war, yes/no to that healthcare program, yes/no to financial reform, offshore drilling, immigration. In the fully dimensional world, all these considerations interact, and each one has economic, cultural, environmental, and other implications. Weighing them, we craft our compromises. The more they are grounded in the dialogue of diverse human beings coming to terms with how each initiative may affect their bodies, emotions, minds, and spirits, the better those compromises will be.

While it may be true that we developed our senses of smell, taste, touch, and hearing (not to mention intuition) out of the survival-based need for acuity in a world that contained saber-toothed tigers, we continue to risk our survival if we underestimate their importance today, privileging only what can be learned through sight. How do we take advantage of the increased capacities offered by the virtual world, yet somehow correct for the imbalances it creates? In particular, how do we keep from being culled into pockets of likemindedness, corralled into the limited menu of yes or no choices? How do we support and sustain interaction, even with those very different from ourselves, long enough to create relationship, including a strong social fabric and a civic spirit of give-and-take?

As with online dating, I am glad that internet activism exists. Both things increase our exposure to opportunity, widen our sense of the possible, and invite us to engage. I have been impressed by the ability of groups like MoveOn.org, ColorofChange.org and TrueMajority.org to mobilize great numbers to act in defense of democracy and equity.

Online dating has a trajectory that moves toward a face-to-face encounter (or the decision to forego one), at which point all the elements that create any real—as opposed to virtual—experience come into play. Online activism, despite the addition of meet-ups and demonstrations, has not yet found a way to focus toward the face-to-face dialogue, the real, embodied interaction, that create a vibrant political discourse leading to sustained, meaningful action.

When there is a single focal point—a particular candidate or piece of legislation, a campaign against Glenn Beck or anything else where action consists of clicking to sign a petition or send an email—internet activism works best. When nuance, interpretation, and questioning of assumptions are needed, however, like online dating, online activism becomes the opposite of virtuality, because it can never grant us the type of civic experience possible when two flesh-and-blood people remain in dialogue, face-to-face, until they have reached understanding (even if it is only the agreement to disagree).

I’ve learned something about both men and my own toggle switches from a few weeks of online dating. I surmise that certain factors must be very attractive to a great many women (or else why would they appear so frequently?)—although, sadly, they do not appeal to me. I would estimate that a quarter of the men in my demographic post pictures of their vehicles: motorcycles, sports cars, boats, and occasionally bicycles—just the boat or car, often, without the man anywhere in the frame. Most of the men in the boat subset provide pinups of huge fish they have caught. Easily another quarter are costumed in elaborate golfing, hunting, or skiing regalia. Almost invariably, the first sentence of text accompanying these photos contains the word “still,” as in “I am still very active.” That “still” gives me a sinking feeling: in between the letters, I can hear the articulate silence of another shoe waiting to drop.

I don’t reply to men who post nearly nude photos of themselves or make mention of particular sexual tastes, nor to the polyamorous ones who provide reassurance of their spouses’ understanding. Nor to the men who are seeking women far younger than themselves, and not only because I surpass the age limit. I’m guessing there must be forty-something women out there who want to practice tantra with sixty-something men, or why would the men keep advertising their availability to that particular cohort? But I can’t imagine who those women are.

I’ve discovered that I’m a literacy snob. When someone misspells every multisyllabic word, I skip to the next email or profile. I recognize that some men may be dyslexic or may simply have become over-reliant on a spellcheck utility that dating sites lack, but somehow, that doesn’t matter. I just click and go.

In my own profile, my aim was to be forthright and true to myself. When someone contacts me (or vice versa), I usually send a link to my Website, encouraging my correspondent to click around for a minute before replying. I’ve gotten enough replies that say, “You’re kind of political (or brainy, or passionate about things) aren’t you?” to know that is a good strategy for culling out people who wouldn’t like me anyway (or vice versa). But I am also reminded that in pre-internet dating, that kind of indicator would have been evident before a few sentences had been exchanged.

By definition, virtuality—seeming rather than being—is superficial. It is hard to pin down precisely what is lost by taking the search for companionship and political activism online, but two words come to mind: depth and complexity. In online activism, we miss the same embodied qualities as in online dating, the things that can lead us to pursue engagement in a face-to-face encounter even if the other person hasn’t hit all the right keywords: what we learn from looking someone in the eye while we disagree; the enlarging experience of holding difference in a way that honors the other; the ah-ha moment when a mysterious connection is made with someone who would have been culled out by an algorithm prioritizing likemindedness.

What is gained is immediately evident: opportunity. I am glad to be doing this. In a short time, I’ve had many interesting conversations with men who would never have crossed my path any other way. I’ve enjoyed being pursued. I’ve been offered a glimpse of contemporary manners and mores, of world-views different from my own. Every man has his grief and disappointment—the women too, no doubt—but so far, only a few seem overwhelmed or embittered by it, and often, that seems a symptom of moving forward too quickly after a loss. I don’t know if this will be the path to true love, but as a friend of mine said, it is a good way to signal my entry into launch mode, to achieve escape velocity.

While I find out, I paddle around in the virtual lagoon of longing, so many people expressing their desire in the currency of favorite songs, movies, foods, and vacation spots. It’s not so different from spending time on any of the progressive political sites, where the desire for justice and equity carries a wistful heat not unlike the longing for love, and where exiting the virtual world for the real is a prerequisite for satisfaction.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Jeff Buckley this week. The classic tragedy of his story—his father, Tim Buckley, died at 28 from an overdose, and Jeff, the son, drowned at 31—adds poignancy, to be sure. But the music has a power separate from the artist’s fate. This song, an artifact of pure yearning, definitely achieves virtuality:

I spoke in aid of self-awakening: forget the prince and just get on with it.

Even then, there were many ways to set out on the self-directed path of art. I’ve written about artists who place their gifts at the service of a community or a cause, about public service jobs for artists and all they can accomplish. The internet has opened up vast new vistas of creative work, from new forms of publishing and distribution to the new crowd-sourced philanthropy that entirely avoids the art market and its gatekeepers. Even some of the educators whose institutions continue to amass tuition revenues by enticing young artists with the fantasy of Madison Avenue, Broadway, or Hollywood have begun to doubt the sustainability of graduating thousands who serve out their apprenticeships (many of which never end) by tending bar and waiting on tables, and have begun to offer preparation for alternate routes to artistic livelihood.

And then there is the path of self-actualization, which the words of Spanish poet Antonio Machado describe perfectly: “Traveler, there is no road. We make the road by walking.”

The profoundly wonderful jazz singer/songwriter Abbey Lincoln is dead at 80, and the world has lost a great artist who walked that path.

That phrase—”great artist”—gets bandied about. Read on for my responses to a recent TV series that makes use of it. But first, I will stipulate what it means to me. A great artist is one who has achieved alignment with his or her expressive powers, such that the experience of that person’s art cracks the shell hiding our essence from the world, and our minds, senses, and spirits are flooded with beauty or meaning, usually both.

Abbey Lincoln was also a great artist because her art was a way of being as well as doing: her life-experience nourished and sustained a creative light that burned fiercely until the end of her days. Along the way, she was drawn toward a lodestone of integrity, choosing creative depth and freedom over enticements and distractions that would have diverted her from her true path.

I love so many of her interpretations of other’s songs—”You Must Believe in Spring and Love,” “Nature Boy,” “Come Sunday”…. But today deserves “Down Here Below,” one of her own deeply spiritual compositions:

Down here below,
It’s not so easy,
Just to be.

When I heard about Abbey Lincoln’s passing, I had just finished watching my first-ever reality show, “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” Fourteen visual artists were chosen to compete for a large cash prize and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. Sarah Jessica Parker is a coproducer, showing her face at the vernissage preceding the final judgment section of every episode, and art-world glitter is generously strewn about.

I tuned in initially because I had some slight acquaintance with a couple of the competitors—no more than appearing at the same artists’ meeting or having a shared friend, but enough to pique my curiosity. I kept watching out of appalled fascination with the art world the series depicted, albeit far more powerfully through what was not said than through what was made explicit.

The series confirms that the Sleeping Beauty story has continued to unfold. It is no longer the dominant archetype of the artist, perhaps, but holds a powerful attraction for many young artists, rather as the path to basketball stardom continues to beckon like a yellow brick road to so many young men who choose to ignore the odds against attaining their destination. This TV series should have been entitled “Fourteen Sleeping Beauties: Whose Prince Will Come?”

In each segment, the artists are given some type of challenge—to team up and create a public art installation, to use children’s art materials to create a work evoking their own earliest involvement in art-making, to make a piece incorporating elements of nature gleaned from a park, and so on.

A ticking clock and other devices add to the tension. Competitors are eliminated in each episode. There are private-seeming talking head segments in which individual competitors recount their own hopes and anxieties, and also air their complaints about each other. There are glimpses of the contestants in their arty shared housing in New York City. Every conflict, no matter how minuscule, is magnified for full video value.

The part I couldn’t resist was the last few minutes of each episode, the judging. A visiting artist joined the judges most weeks, but the permanent team included Jeanne Greenberg Rohaytn and China Chow, who appeared in every episode in full evening regalia, the advanced couture for which they are best-known and most-photographed. It made an interesting statement. These high-gloss women, both of whom seemed to relish the power to pronounce and dismiss the way a gourmand rolls a particularly delicious morsel around on the tongue, were always decked out in something in which it would have been impossible to sit.

Even before they opened their mouths, they made a sharp statement, the flesh-and-blood equivalent of neon signs proclaiming “Even A Cat Can Look at A Queen.” They were the human signifiers of the art world’s association with privilege, of the unquestioned entitlement of gatekeepers. The only thing in the entire ten hours of broadcast that questioned that balance of power was the unhappiness of some of the contestants who were eliminated, and that could be easily dismissed.

The glamorous female judges were joined by art critic Jerry Saltz, gallery owner and art writer Bill Powers, and—although he did not take part in pronouncing judgment, he offered much advice and criticism foreshadowing verdicts along the way—art auction-house star Simon de Pury.

A set-piece in each episode was a conversation among the judges, critiquing the works in competition as preparation for the decrees they would deliver, telling one artist, “Your work of art didn’t work for us,” and offering a carefully calibrated balance of chastisement and praise to the others. The banality of these conversations was fascinating. Novelty was assumed to be art’s chief virtue, and most of the judges’ comments could have been replaced by “I like it” or “I don’t like it” without loss of meaning. I kept wondering if they would later be embarrassed to hear themselves, but it seems the romance of their own casting insulated them from self-consciousness: the art world, c’est moi.

At the outset, the artists ranged in age from their early 60s (Judith Braun, a New York-based feminist artist) to 22 year-old Abdi Farah, the winner of the competition. Every contestant had ability and drive, but not every one displayed a winning attitude. The older artists were eliminated early: although it was never expressed outright, it was instantly clear that a non-negotiable requirement for staying in the game was an attitude of stunned deference toward the judges. The strongest shared characteristic of the three finalists was a tendency to drop their chins and gaze with big, wet eyes while inhaling every syllable the judges uttered, exhibiting canine gratitude even for the most vacuous comments about their work.

Reality shows succeed by getting you caught up in the contest, engaging your hope that the right prince bestows the right kiss on the right hopeful lips. The young artists who remained in competition the longest were extremely sweet and earnest, each in different ways. Like other viewers, I wanted someone to win. Their desire was intense, expressed repeatedly in the grateful embrace of all criticism, their tearful self-punishing expressions as they took it into themselves and pushed themselves to be better next time. The contestants who had the best chance of winning were skilled artists, to be sure, but their chances were immeasurably enhanced by a shared will to submit that permeated every moment on camera.

It took me back to my old rap about Sleeping Beauty. I thought of myself as an organizer in those days. My passionate interest was in self-determination in all forms. The most exciting thing for me was to stand before a group of people, speaking the words that could ignite change. In any roomful of artists, there would be dozens who responded to my portrayal of the passivity they were expected to adopt, their stereotyping as overgrown children who play instead of work, the prospect of choosing their own liberation from a powerlessness that had been accepted as much as imposed. But there would also be one or two who rose to defend the princes, expressing hope and faith that the art-world system always allowed those with special merit to rise. They would often be angry with me for expressing a contrary view. Their eyes would search the room for the critics, gallery owners, and agents certain to be present, hoping to be rewarded for their faithfulness.

They wanted to be chosen, but the life and work of a great artist like Abbey Lincoln express the will to choose for oneself. This is from Abbey Lincoln’s song, “Throw It Away,” a simple sentiment, perhaps, but fitting:

Throw it away
Throw it away
Give your love, live our life
Each and every day

And keep your hand wide open
Let the sun shine through
‘Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you

There was a great commotion, the President’s compassionate conservatism was vigorously asserted, West was condemned for incivility. Now, five years later, take a look at New Orleans—at all of its grassroots creativity and determination and all the official indifference and moral constipation that have transpired—and tell me with a straight face that West was wrong.

David Stockman isn’t Kanye West, to be sure, but it’s worth giving a little attention to what this Reagan-era Director of the Office of Management and Budget, closely identified with “trickle-down economics,” wrote in The New York Times:

It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.

The day of national reckoning has arrived.

In recent weeks, a great heap of political detritus has been accumulating: piled atop BP’s display of corporate self-regard and ineptitude are new revelations about white-collar predators (such as the Wyly brothers of Dallas, lavish Swift Boat campaign donors, charged with massive security fraud and insider trading); the unconscionably long time Congress took to pass an extension of unemployment benefits (while so many members blithely supported tax cuts for the rich) and the unprecedented numbers who are not helped even by that legislation; the government’s absolute failure to pass new job-creation legislation, the President’s refusal to even propose it….

The stench is so high, it cannot be ignored. Within the last week, for instance, The New York Times carried these three articles:

• David Stockman’s op-ed, in which he said “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing,” and blamed Republican policies for “the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.”
• a column by Bob Herbert, more or less Stockman’s ideological opposite, describing findings by economics professor Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Sum explains that corporations “threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output. Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.” Herbert’s column is well worth reading in its entirety. It explains that corporations’ cash position is at an all-time high, and still they are cutting jobs, salaries, and benefits. “Worker productivity has increased dramatically,” writes Herbert, “but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong.”
• a column by Paul Krugman, citing “growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal,” and condemning Congress for “sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.” “I’d like to imagine,” Krugman concludes, “that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn’t all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.”

When the social fabric becomes tattered from neglect, fragments and threads begin to break off and tumble through the Zeitgeist. The appalled fury that infuses the recent writings of Stockman, Herbert, and Krugman—hardly wild-eyed radicals—is popping up everywhere.

Three times this past week, people I know have made reference to the Buddhist concept of “hungry ghosts.” We have an epidemic of people in high places who fit this elegant and succinct description by Mark Epstein, from his book Thoughts Without A Thinker:

The Hungry Ghosts are probably the most vividly drawn metaphors in the Wheel of Life. Phantomlike creatures with withered limbs, grossly bloated bellies, and long thin necks, the Hungry Ghosts in many ways represent a fusion of rage and desire. Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed. They are beings who have uncovered a terrible emptiness within themselves, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting something that has already happened.

I think of these men who have more money than needed for a hundred lifetimes—indeed, the scale of whose wealth attests to the fact that their hungers cannot be satisfied by material possessions—and whose desire for more, channeled into business aggression, has obliterated the simple human compassion they would otherwise feel for those who’ve been made destitute and miserable by their decisions.

But even more than them, I think of the elected officials who do their bidding, promulgating the policies that allow, encourage, and underwrite this drain on the body politic. They are hungry ghosts too, craving the approval of those to whom they have surrendered the power of office.

Many individuals who rise to power in these systems are in possession of formidable drive, talent, and energy. Some switch has been flipped, and the deep desire that accompanies such abilities gets channeled into a type of wanting marinated in surplus aggression: more money, position, the power to dominate others. They may carry tremendous latent capacity to express and experience other types of desire—to be seen and see truly, to be loved for oneself, to experience the satisfactions that only come if one is willing to stand unmasked, risking extreme vulnerability. If they accept that those capacities cannot be expressed in the world they inhabit, everything is channeled into acquisition and dominance until it becomes second nature. And instead of benefiting from the remarkable gifts such individuals could bring to public and private relationship, everyone affected by their actions suffers the consequences of their distortions.

If wealth (or the approval of those who have it) really satisfied these men, they would stop when they had enough to buy whatever they wanted. But without understanding that the source of their appetite is something broken in themselves, some past betrayal or deformity of character fed and bloated by a corporate culture that welcomes and creates hungry ghosts, they will not stop.

With increasing regularity, Facebook friends have been posting links to this starkly profane and obscene (be forewarned) video clip by the late George Carlin called “The American Dream.” In the 3-minute clip, Carlin asserts with devastating simplicity that the nation is owned by oligarchs who “want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.”

I know (I was going to write “I believe,” but that is too weak to carry the experiential basis of my conviction)—I know that every human being is capable of conscious awareness. I know that it is never too late, never too far, never impossible to choose redemption by turning away from bad acts and investing the same energy in acts that heal the harm you have done. Almost always, I write into that possibility, hoping to contribute in some small way to the awakening that remains possible even for those gripped by terrible distortions of character. But just this minute, I am with Carlin: there really isn’t any way around the horror, outrage, and disgust I feel at the spectacle of insatiable wanting now being exposed daily to the American public.

Working on my new book has been engaging me with these questions. From my perch outside the halls of economic and political power, it is clear that something is very wrong, something much more significant than the usual dance of interests and agendas.

But I also think the brokenness is becoming clear to some people within those worlds, who see that the short-term gains redounding to the multinationals and oligarchs cannot go on forever, that ultimately, they will not be immune from the consequences of their own actions. I wrote a few weeks ago about IBM’s biennial CEO study, acknowledging in executives’ own words that “Most CEOs seriously doubt their ability to cope with rapidly escalating complexity.” Meanwhile, righteous anger is bursting through here and there: I recommend a viewing of New York Representative Andrew Weiner’s obdurate anger at his fellow officials’ prevarication on support for 9/11 responders’ healthcare.

Yet the countervailing movement to enlarge liberty and possibility advances. The extension of full civil rights to sexual minorities still has many hurdles to go following yesterday’s ruling that California’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the Constitution, for example. But the trajectory is clear and—where I depart from Carlin’s certainty—I don’t think even the people he sees as owners of this nation can stop it.

I will never lose sight of the possibility of redemption, never stop pointing to it with all the energy at my disposal. But right this minute, when things seem to be hardening into a breaking-point as crisp as a dry twig, the most important thing to remember is that there are many, many more people who are not benefiting from this system than those who are, and that it is time to awaken that force for good. There are so many opportunities to take healing action right now. But I want to speak up for baby steps that can really help: for the power of direct human relationship to counter the falsehoods that gush through the media.

What if every day this week, you and I parted the veil of denial and had one entirely real conversation about this with someone new? What if we started by expressing our shock and outrage at the gap between corporate profits and hiring policies? Or Congressional votes on unemployment benefits versus tax cuts?

What if we came out and said that the governing elite’s utter indifference to suffering shamed and contaminated all of us? What if we asked our friends or neighbors how that felt to them, what that churned up in their stomachs? What if we asked them to consider what has been broken in the hearts, heads, bodies, and spirits of these men possessed by insatiable hungers, and how they might be stopped from harming others with their brokenness?

What if we dropped the conventional language and inside-baseball that passes for political discourse in the media, and spoke openly of hungry ghosts?

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people,” said Martin Luther King. It feels like we are very close to a breaking-point. Best to repent while there’s still time to heal.

I don’t think of myself as a patriotic person: I descend from a long line of nomads and immigrants, never quite home. But the truth is, I love the hope of liberty, the promise of democracy, the latent truth that may yet emerge in this country; and when I visit other places, I learn just how American I truly am. Otis Redding’s version of this song is inarguably definitive, and you can find it on YouTube. But somehow the exhaustion of Cat Power’s version suits the mood: “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).”

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.