Glenn W. Smith

It’s a presidential primary as docu-comedy. Some talking jumping beans mount the debate stages and the talk shows and tell us, one after the other, that he or she must be out next president if the Republic is to be saved. Begging the question, from what exactly?

The horrors of the Penn State rape scandal should remind us of a truth too easily lost in this era of corporate personhood: institutions of all kinds and sizes are by their nature morally empty.

I suppose our culture’s general sexual ineptitude is one reason this fact is easier to see in instances of violent brutality involving organs of sex. But ugly institutional moral failures of many kinds happen all around us every hour, every day.

Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Makana didn’t exactly put his life on the line when he sang his protest song, “We are the Many,” to President Obama and other leaders at the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference dinner. But he did pull off a gutsy, well-meaning public relations coup on behalf of the global Occupy movement.

What social or psychological dysfunctions led UC-Davis police lieutenant John Pike to brutally assault some sitting, non-threatening protestors with chemical pepper spray?

I was in Nashville last night for a speech today, and lucky for me it was a night that Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and Vince Gill were playing a benefit concert for the Epilepsy Foundation. I took a cab to the Mercy Lounge, bought a ticket, and listened as America poured itself into our soul.

As public opinion begins – just begins, mind you – to turn against America’s ruling oligarchy, it seems like a good time to raise questions about a convention that contributes to what is now one of the most rigid class systems in the West: the dubious habit of awarding elected officials with the honorific, “Honorable” and other superlative indicators of their privilege.

Whenever conservatives get caught with their hands in the till they shout, “Class Warfare!” at those of us who would like to stop their looting. Thinking this a negative, they forget, I guess, that the American democratic experiment was and is just that: a class war.

It has always been about equality vs. aristocracy. It was in the beginning, is now, and will always be.

The headline above summarizes the message strategy of the Republican field running for president of the United States: “I speak with universal and infinite paternal love for all of you, but must warn half of you that the other half are leeches and misfits who are destroying your lives.” Then, to top it off, they [...]

I am greatly heartened and moved by all that’s happening in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I salute everyone participating or even watching hopefully as events unfold. I think its future – its methods, its messages, its achievements – will grow organically.

But something George Will wrote recently about Elizabeth Warren, combined with the right-wing propagandists’ ludicrous efforts to label it as something it’s not, make me want to contribute just a bit and clarify very simply the beliefs behind my support for the movement.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has long been engaged in a stealth campaign against the discoveries of science – especially neuroscience – that validate a more egalitarian and humanistic political order.

Brooks has skillfully branded himself as the Pundit Who Will Tell You About New Findings in the Human Sciences. But in Brooks’ hands all the new science somehow becomes justification for top-down, conservative and even authoritarian government. It’s all just a magical confirmation of Hobbes.