Sunday Funnies & Arts

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Twenty-six years after the release of "Born in the USA," Glenn (Mr. Cool) Beck has discovered that the Bruce Springsteen epic is not the patriotic anthem he had supposed it to be for over half of his life. A stunned Beck has awakened to the cold reality that BUSA criticizes the treatment of young men used as cannon fodder and then cast aside when they return home from war. After revealing that "This Land Is Your Land" is also unpatriotic, a dazed and disillusioned Beck robotically recites the lyrics to BUSA, then shakes his head sorrowfully over the solace they must bring to Cuba and the "Soviet bloc."

All of which begs the following questions:

• Mr. Beck, is it untrue that some young men from dead end towns enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam?
• Mr. Beck, is it also untrue that some young men chose the military as an alternative to jail?
• Mr. Beck, is it untrue that many of them lost buddies in battle, and that said buddies often had Vietnamese girlfriends?
• Mr. Beck, is it untrue that these men returned home to a country that largely turned its back on them?
• Mr. Beck, is it unpatriotic of Mr. Springsteen to point out these realities and lament them? Put another way, is it wrong to say that we can do better by the young people we ask to die for us? If so, why?
• Mr. Beck, why is it unpatriotic of Mr. Springsteen to point out national flaws, but o.k. for you and the teabaggers to do the same?

Texas Board of Education Blues: I read this and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I love Texas. The music is sensational. All of the people are like no one you'll ever meet in your life, and that's true in a positive sense for many of them. I have lifelong friends there. I identify with it more than any place I've lived. But if my kids were in Texas schools, I'd feel obligated to go over every assigned reading with them and point out the errors: "That's wrong. That's wrong. That's misleading. That's sort of right but incomplete. The correct term is 'capitalism,' not 'the free enterprise system.' And God is a matter of faith, not of fact, but don't tell anyone at school that I said so."

Board member David Bradley, who apparently derives his expertise in the Constitution from his work selling insurance and real estate, rides tall in the saddle and bravely asserts that

I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state. I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.

Well, no one has ever said that words "separation of church and state" are in the Constitution. But the establishment clause of the First Amendment states plainly that "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." Thomas Jefferson, a reasonably intelligent if not especially religious man, wrote that establishment clause created "a wall of separation between church and State." James Madison also referred to the "total separation between church and state." In 1947, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black used Jefferson's words to argue that the

establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church.

In other words, the plain wording of the establishment clause and over 200 years of commentary, scholarship, and court opinions say that the Constitution means exactly what David Bradley says it does not: That there is a wall of separation between church and state.

Meanwhile, board member Don McLeroy insists that textbooks include vote tallies for 1960s civil rights legislation, smugly claiming that "Republicans need a little credit for that. I think it’s going to surprise some students." Now, it's true that many Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. It's also true that no southern Republican supported either bill, and that the '64 bill was weakened to attract Republican support. As for the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson introduced it within a week after the first Selma march, when few non-southern politicians of any stripe cared to be identified with fire hoses and police dogs loosed on peaceful marchers.

Moreover, inclusion of the vote tallies without interpretation implies that the Republican party of today is the same as it was 45 years ago, when it actually had room for social moderates and even out-and-out liberals. The vote for civil rights legislation legislation fell largely along ideological lines, with liberals and moderates of either party supporting it and conservatives of either party opposing it. Today's conservatives would deride the Republicans who voted for the civil rights bills as RINOs. You think that will make it into the textbooks?...

When you think the night has seen your mind...

Peter Tibbles on Patsy Cline...

Long abandoned...

Danny Westneat discovers that health insurance premiums are skyrocketing more and faster than the MSM has reported. And that's in shadow of health care reform. What do you think would happen if the Republicans were ever to get their way and allow insurance companies to sell from the most poorly regulated states?...

Starbucks, which side are you on?...




Concerned that his bitter critique had been co-opted, Springsteen often performs a slashing, deconstructed acoustic arrangement that stressed the anger of the lyrics:

We Shall Overcome

SONG We Shall Overcome

WRITTEN BY  Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, Zilphia Horton, Pete Seeger

PEFORMED BY Joan Baez, Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, SNCC Freedom Singers, many others.


APPEARS ON Joan Baez in Concert Part 2 (1963); We Shall Overcome (Mahalia Jackson, 1999); We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert (Pete Seeger, 1989 release of 1963 performance); many others.

Perhaps no anthem of the Civil Rights movement resonated as acutely with white liberals as "We Shall Overcome." While the reason remains elusive, a relatively easy transition from spiritual to the folk idiom surely helped, as did the song's early identification with the post-War labor movement. At any rate, the melding of an inspirational melody with a trenchant articulation of the tactics, values, and aims of the Civil Rights movement also expressed the values of liberalism at large. The song lives still, translated into languages around the world and recorded by such prominent artists as Bruce Springsteen.

It isn't exactly know when "We Shall Overcome" began its hundred-year tortuous trek from the bitter cotton fields of the slave holding South to bellwether song of the Civil Rights movement and centerpiece of a memorable presidential address. In 1867, The Atlantic's Thomas Wentworth Higgenson wrote about a spiritual called "Many Thousands Gone" (also known as "No More Auction Block For Me") that is now thought to have supplied the melody of "We Shall Overcome." This began a complex time line that looks something like this:

• 1900: Charles Albert Tindley writes "I'll Overcome Someday," which becomes the template for the lyrics to "We Shall Overcome." Tindley uses a different tune.
• Stock religious music phrases like "deep in my heart" are absorbed into Tindley's lyrics.
• 1900-45: Tindley's lyrics are melded to "Many Thousands Gone" and the new song becomes a labor movement standard.
• 1930s: Tobacco workers bring "I Shall Overcome" to the Highlander Folk School, which trains labor activists and later Civil Rights movement activists.
• 1945-56: Highlander music director Zilphia Horton hears the song either from students or while marching in a picket line.
• 1947: Pete Seeger, a founder of Highlander changed, changes the chorus from "I'll overcome" to "We shall overcome" ("I think I liked a more open sound") and adds new verses.
• 1959: New Highlander Musical director Guy Carawan makes the song a standard part the school's new focus, that of training students in techniques of nonviolent resistance.
• 1959-60: Police raids on Highlander results in jail time for many students. They sing "We Shall Overcome" as way of boosting morale, and in doing so add the final touches of lyrics and rhythms.
• 1960: Carawan leads a performance of the song at the initial meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From there, it disperses throughout the Civil Rights movement and becomes the movement's most well-known song.
• 1963: Joan Baez sings "We Shall Overcome" before hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington.
• 1965: In the  violent wake of the Selma-to-Birmingham march, a determined President Lyndon Johnson uses "We Shall Overcome" as the rhetorical fulcrum of an address to Congress calling for Voting Rights legislation:

Civil Rights movements around the world adapted "We Shall Overcome," including movements in Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. As recently as 2009,  Joan Baez recorded a version for the Iran protesters, with lyrics in Farsi. It has also been translated into Bengali, Hindi, and Malayalm.

How does one account for the international success of a hybrid song that combines a field spiritual melody with lyrics written by a turn-of-the-century hymn composer and a radical white folk singer?

For one thing, there is the nature of the song itself, which struck a note of liberation from its very beginnings in those brutal fields. Lindley's lyrics added key elements of faith and transcendence and Seeger's adjustments returned the song to its roots of freedom and justice. He also introduced a critical element of community by changing "I will" to "We shall." The melody itself is irresistibly hypnotic and lends itself to circumstances as intimate and frightening as a jail cell to the comfort and solidarity of a mass gathering. Tragically, one South African prisoner sang it on the gallows.

Moreover, each verse iterates a tactic and value of the movement and of core liberal values at large. "We shall overcome" speaks to the conviction that injustice will be defeated and the world made better. "We'll walk hand in hand," "we are not alone," and "the whole wide world around reflect the belief that solidarity of action will encourage sympathizers outside of the movement and eventually everyone else to join the cause. And "we shall all be free" of course identifies the ultimate aim of the movement.

Taken as a whole, the the lyrics of "We of Shall Overcome" offer a world in which persistence, solidarity, freedom, courage, compassion and human love, unity across color and class defeat injustice, poverty, bigotry, and despair. It is the fundamental liberal vision in which society, country, and law exist to advance the welfare and equality of a community of all, regardless of race, religion, or political belief. Or, as President Johnson put it in the speech above, "to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man." In this sense, "We Shall Overcome" reflects core liberal values in a way that no other song does, or is ever likely to.

LYRICS
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

CHORUS
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
That we shall overcome some day

We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand some day

CHORUS

We shall all be free
We shall all be free
We shall all be free some day

CHORUS

We are not afraid
We are not afraid
We are not afraid today

CHORUS

We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone today

CHORUS

The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around some day

CHORUS

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

CHORUS

Joan Baez sings to audience of rapt British young people in the BBC studios:



Pete Seeger brough this version with him from the Highlander School:



Martin Luther King, who credited "We Shall Overcome" with helping unify the movement, incorporated it into a 1968 speech, one of his last:



Mahalia Jackson, from the late 60s:



The SNCC Freedom Singers reprise "We Shall Overcome" at Chicago's Woodson Regional Library in 2007:



Joan Baez again, dedicated to the Tehran protesters and with some verses in Farsi:

Bricks and Bats

NBC's Mark Murray explains why the difference in abortion language the Senate and House health care bills is so thin that you couldn't fit a piece of paper between the two. Naturally, Michigan "Democrat" Bart Stupid begs to differ. It's become obvious that Stupak and his henchman want to kill health care reform and are looking for a way to do it that won't make them party outcasts. They've seized upon a position that is anathema to most in the party and hope to make a clean getaway by claiming that their stance is a matter of principle. Bart, Joe Lieberman has already poisoned that well for you...

Riding on the City of New Orleans...

Heard on the Edd Schultz Show: A caller said that if bankers had to return their bonuses (not that any of them have), trial lawyers should have to return their fees, arguing that making $5 million for a month's work was ridiculous. Hmm. Here's the thing: A trial lawyer getting a $5M fee won the case and got $10M for the client. Unlike a banking exec, the hypothetical lawyer did not fail dismally, help crater the international economy, and get paid a seven-figure bonus in bargain. Plus, the case big enough and easy enough for a lawyer to make $5 million in a month hasn't yet happened and likely never will happen: Any case with the potential for that kind of judgment takes years of preparation, argument, and appeal. I'm not losing any sleep over the tribulations of litigators, but how about at least paying some passing attention to reality?...

Chief Justice John Roberts has a thin skin. I'm so upset for him..

Quote of the Day: "I could see the care everyone was taking not to overstate the case or exaggerate the danger" from Iraq. --Karl Rove, in All in Good Fun, his new book about himself (aka Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. What a noble guy.)...

Eric Massa: All in Good Fun II...

Pope Benedict: All in Good Fun III at the German choir where "severe beatings were normal."...

The Devil Went Down to Amarillo

Thanks to Foxessa for calling my attention to this piece of work:



Read the Texas Observer article on this bad bunch here. If you can stomach it, here's their website,which proves that "religious right" and "depraved" can go hand-in-hand.

The Warfare Map is especially illustrative. Apparently, the Wildcat Bluff Nature Center, "a place for people to embrace the spirit of the land by exploring the natural magic of the Texas Panhandle," is also the demonic center of occult witchcraft in Amarillo. Who'd a thunk it? Then there's that other harlot of the occult, the Peace Farm, whose black sin is to "work for the abolition of all nuclear weapons by moral and political persuasion." Lubbock, watch out: You're a mere 200 miles away from the decay of ancient Rome, Panhandle style, with only the pious offices of Repent Amarillo between you and perdition...

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded room...

Michael Moore volunteers to replace Rahm Emmanuel and kick ass in the bargain...

Liz Cheney says terrorists have no rights. And you are a terrorist. I guess we know what Liz thinks Uncle Sam means when he's pointing his finger...

Sunday Funnies & Arts

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The Ghost Writer. D Roman Polanski. Ewan MacGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, John Bernthal, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach, Tom Wilkison. A new movie by a major director opens when a world weary and preternaturally detached young man boards a ferry and heads to a windswept island on a job that he really doesn't want. On the island, rain falls like bullets, and he takes refuge in a menacing dwelling that raises his level of foreboding and paranoia. Slowly, he realizes that nothing there is as it seems and begins to look for help from sources once close to the inhabitants of the home.

How could Martin Scorsese go so wrong with this premise in Shutter Island while Roman Polanski goes so right with it in The Ghost Writer?

The Ghost Writer is one of the most disciplined and aesthetically exacting movies that I've seen. Polanski had a vision for it, knew exactly what he wanted, and followed through to the letter. The interiors are incredibly striking, all hard angles and grays, silvers, and faded colors that give a steely precision to every scene. The screenplay is literate and witty, filled with quips. ("I've never understood the purpose of white wine.") The pacing and rhythm are so precise that not only does each scene have a purpose, the length of each scene is exactly right in terms of its role in propelling the narrative. Abstract art lends unsettling undercurrent of looming violence as the ghost writer draws close to the mystery at the heart of the story.

The story is simple enough. After the suicide of the ghost writer of the memoir of former British Prime Minister Andrew Lang (Brosnan), The Ghost (MacGregor) accepts a one-month contract to finish the job. When he arrives at the Lang home on Martha's Vineyard, he's greeted by Lang's assistant, the prim, repressed, and archly named Amelia Bly (Cattrall, cast against type) who displays reluctance for The Ghost to even look at the draft of the memoir. When Lang's unblinking, cold-blooded wife Ruth (Williams, who is outstanding) enters, the tension between her and Amelia is palpable. Once Lang arrives, writer and politician commence work immediately.

But nothing goes smoothly. Lang interrupts work to take a phone call that dissolves into a furious argument (unheard by us, since we witness it from The Ghost's perspective through a picture window). The Ghost finds materials hidden by his predecessor, but they seem innocuous. Even the lie they expose appears unimportant. An acerbic local (the 94-year old Wallach, as vital as ever) assures The Ghost that the suicide had unexplained and covered up circumstances. Ruth wife befriends The Ghost for reasons he can't determine, seeking emotional shelter from him when her husband is accused of war crimes. A sinister Wilkinson shrugs his shoulders at any connection between him and Lang, a connection that seems apparent until Lang convincingly denies it. Throughout, details and suspense accumulate imperceptibly until they burst forth in a flood the carries Lang and The Ghost along with it, leading to a convincing twist that only a writer could (literally) decipher.

You don't see movies like this any more. These days, it takes a certain courage and confidence to make a suspense movie without thrill rides and explosions, that's instead driven instead by plot, character, screenplay, and artistic vision. Hitchcock did it all the time, of course, and The Ghost Writer stands with the master's best work. It's that good...

Prior to the film, we saw a trailer for Michael Douglas' new movie, which is a sequel to Wall Street. I couldn't help but think of his father Kirk and that actor's unique presence. Has there ever been an actor as at ease in front of a camera as Kirk Douglas? He was subtle and convincing, and one could never see him act. With an indescribable intelligence and character that belied the matinee-idol looks, Kirk Douglas was a one-of-kind actor who could be inspiring, agonized, troubled, doubtful, and even cynical. He performed with grace and integrity and invariably essayed performances that any aspiring actor could learn from...


Regular readers of Citizen K. know that I've often referenced the magazine Offbeat as one of my primary guides to New Orleans music. Like many Offbeat fans, I was dismayed to see the above cover on its March issue. Young people may not know that "Strange Fruit" is a Billie Holiday classic about lynching, sung in an especially mournful and despairing tone even for her. The magazine cover is at best insensitive and is arguably a racist act. Readers responded predictably, and the magazine answered with one of those patronizing non-apologetic apologies that only fan the flames:

We didn't realize the phrase "strange fruit" has the same power in 2010 that it did when lynching was a more contemporary threat...We believed that in 2010, the phrase "strange fruit" could be used without automatically evoking the Billie Holiday song and its subject matter.

The problem here is that they are simply not being credible. It's virtually impossible for a southern music magazine to not know that the phrase "strange fruit" evokes the Holiday song. Readers responded with predictable renewed fury; the editors became defensive, calling its detractors racist and -- yes -- blaming the media (another magazine wrote about the cover). The continued publication of Offbeat is very likely in question.

As near as I can tell in the two years that I've been reading it, Offbeat does not show any bias against black musicians. They've turned me on to artists as disparate as Glen David Andrews, Big Sam, John Boutte, and Cedric Watson. But sometimes you've just got be standup, admit that you did something that is part of the problem, ask for forgiveness, promise not to do it again, and hope to move on. And if you have to absorb a few licks in the process, well, you created the problem in the first place.

I would really miss Offbeat if this controversy does it in. The publication is an unflagging yet honestly critical champion of NOLA music. It's demise would leave a gap. But the way they are handling this is likely driving away readers in droves. They've got to quit being defensive and listen to what people are saying or pay the price...

The Fascist Element

Political labels can be useful and they can be grossly misused. We all know how, back in the 50s, the mere whisper of the word "Communist" could induce paranoia, hysteria, and suspicion. Today, the likes of Rush Limbaugh cobble together "Fascist-Nazi-Socialist-Communist" as a contradictory one-size-fits-all epithet that also inoculates them from similar accusations. They throw the words around so recklessly as to deprive them of any meaning at all except as fearmongering hot buttons. So, I want to be judicious and discerning in my use of the word "fascist" and avoid using it as an indiscriminate shotgun blast.

Back in 1992, a colleague who had doubts about voting for then-candidate Bill Clinton asked me as a Texan what I thought about Ross Perot. Perot was the closest thing to a fascist that I'd seen in American politics, I replied. He was a right-wing businessman who relied on personality to spread a single-minded message that America was in danger of losing its greatness and that only he could retrieve it. I've since backed off that assessment and view Perot as well-meaning, patriotic man who attracted a fascist element that wanted to vent, turn the country's problems over to a charismatic leader, and not worry about them after that. This element imposed a view of Perot on him that he may well not have held of himself.

Eighteen years later, the element finds expression in the Tea Party movement. Oddly, it found its closest ally to date in Dick Cheney, a truly unappealing man who, I believe, is a genuine fascist apparatchik. While Cheney trained his energies on foreign policy, he concentrated his domestic focus on legalizing the concept of sweeping executive power to the detriment of the legislative and judicial branches. He overtly and covertly endorsed militarism and labored ceaselessly for the primacy of American military power as a means to dominate global politics. Domestically, Cheney is infamous for his commitment to expanded and often secret police powers ranging from the right of the state to torture prisoners and hold them without trial to warrantless phone surveillance.

Cheney may not have wanted to dirty his hands with other such domestic matters as immigration, although he was ever ready to toss a bone to the rabid right. Even given that, Cheney's positions are illustrative: He supported the "prompt deportation" of illegal immigrants who had "engaged in unlawful or disorderly" conduct while supporting "preferential treatment in the admission of certain children of US Armed Forces personnel." In other words, we don't want you if you get drunk in a bar on Saturday night, unless of course you have something to do with the military.

The teabaggers claim to not want a leader, but leaderless fascism is an oxymoron. That archfiend Dick Armey has urged them to remain independent, but that's only because he and his henchman at Freedom Works haven't found anyone credible whom they can manipulate from behind the scenes. (No doubt he finds Sarah Palin as eminently manipulable as she is incredible. Plus, he probably resists having a woman even nominally in charge.) Believe it: The bulk of the 'baggers want someone to emerge as their Fearless Leader. A charismatic leader who reflects and validates their assumptions is something that they simply can't resist.

The Pulitizer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges wrote convincingly about the links between religious right and fascism in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007). At the beginning of the book, he listed fourteen characteristics of fascism, based on an analysis by Umberto Eco, that included The Cult of Tradition, The Rejection of Modernism, Disagreement Is Treason, Fear of Difference, The Main Privilege Is to Be Born in the Same Country, The Followers Must Be Humiliated by the Wealth and Force of Their Enemies, Contempt for the Weak, Respect for the Majority and Disdain for Individualism, and Respect for Impoverished Vocabulary and Elementary Syntax in Order to Limit Complex and Critical Reasoning. Each of these apply to the Tea Party movement as well as the Religious Right, and I'll write more about them in the coming months.

If the two movements are not exactly the same, they certainly intersect at key junctions. And the teabaggers are edging toward a tactic employed by most fanatical members of the religious right, that being violence. (Ironically, Hedges was criticized for his apocalyptic warnings of widespread violence on the part of the religious right, warnings that now seem prophetic in light of the physical threats and mob tactics of the teabaggers.)

Maybe the threats of lynching and civil war are loud, cheap talk no different from the Religious Right's prediction that most of us are going to hell and perdition. I hope so. In 1848, Karl Marx wrote that the specter of Communism haunted Europe. Today, the specter of fascism haunts America. We fail to resist it at our peril.

Teabagger Philosophy

It's easy to know what the teabaggers are against.

They hate what they call Big Government.

They hate Big Business.

They hate the political establishment represented by both parties.

They hate Barack Obama and don't think much of John McCain either.

They hate urban elites.

They hate health care reform, TARP, and the economic stimulus package.

They hate a lot.

What's less clear is what they're for. According to this must-read New York Times article by David Barstow, the teabaggers have developed a ramshackle political philosophy -- if that's the word -- based on the Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand, states' rights, a uniquely individual reading of the Constitution, and what must surely be a fragile grasp of George Orwell.

The surface appeal of Orwell echoes throughout teabagger meetings when they invoke the specter of Big Brother as represented by all of the above. But Orwell, although an anti-Stalinist, was a lifelong Socialist, an avowed leftist with a deep commitment to social justice. Although critical of the British political establishment, he remained well within its bounds. If Orwell would have had anything to say about the current health care legislation that the teabaggers so despise, he would almost certainly argue that it did not go far enough. So, it's more than a bit odd that the teabaggers would anoint a man whose diamond-hard intellect and belief in the necessity of a benevolent welfare state are at complete odds with their distrust of elites and government.

Moreover, Orwell would have little truck with Rand's Social Darwinism. Rand, who pretty much rejected everything except hero worship (especially of Ayn Rand -- she once famously compared herself to Aristotle and Aquinas, and presided over an inner circle whose membership depended on adulation of her), espoused the primacy of both property and individual rights without seeming to grasp that the two are finally separate interests that inevitably clash. An atheist who claimed to worship no god other than reason, Rand pursued a curious logic that eliminated altruism and social justice as legitimate cultural values and that argued instead for the moral primacy of laissez-faire capitalism.

That we had eight years of this under the Bush Administration and that it drove the country into a ditch appears to have escaped the teabaggers, although they would no doubt argue that Bush did not go far enough in terms of deregulation, and that that caused the problems we face. And, of course, there's always the question of who would want to live in a society that paid lip service to individual rights while offering no guarantor of them and that paid no heed to the welfare of its citizens as a group.

In Barstow's article, a teabagger looks somewhat regretfully at an all-white teabagger gathering and says unconvincingly that they are not racist. Maybe. But Orwell, who had an unparalleled grasp of language, meaning, and code words, would be quick to point out the racial implications of the talk and signs advocating lynching and gelding, not to mention the emphasis on states' rights. Perhaps a teabagger group in the Pacific Northwest is removed enough from history that it can't internalize the meaning of states' rights to African-Americans. But no group in the south can claim that and pass the laugh test. As long as the 'baggers insist on states rights as a core philosophy, they won't attract minority groups of any kind, as minorities historically have had to look to the federal government for whatever justice they can get. And the naked hatred of President Obama won't be attracting minorities any time soon, either. Leonard Pitts has a thoughtful column on teabaggers and race here.

The teabaggers claim to worship the Constitution; Barstow profiles one who carries a copy with her and reads from it daily. It's strange, then, that they would find common cause with the Austin man who crashed his plane into an IRS office, killing himself and family man father of six who was simply doing his best to make a living. After all, the Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to create the IRS, so the attack on the building was literally an attack on the Constitution itself.

OK. so maybe I'm engaging in a semantic game typical of the liberal elite, although I don't think so. What's inarguable, it seems to me, is that the Constitution is a complex document open to interpretation. It's impossible to know the mind of the Founders because the document evolved over time and was the product of compromise. We know that it isn't perfect because it allowed slavery, was silent on universal manhood suffrage, and denied women the right to vote. It has also been amended 27 times. Moreover, the Constitution has been subject to court cases, academic study, and judicial debate for over 200 years. Of the two great Chief Justices, one (John Marshall) was a conservative whose rulings established the Court as a defender of property and business rights. The other (Earl Warren) was a liberal who interpreted the Constitution as a protector of the individual against corporate and state power.

Legal experts from the reactionary right to the radical left and all points in between have argued for particular interpretations of the Constitution. Historically, it has a latitude wide enough to accommodate both liberal and conservative perspectives. The most an individual can do is find the arguments that most reflects his or her personal and political values and understand the Constitution through that prism. What no one can claim the absolute correctness of an interpretation since no historically established a single perspective. Whether the teabaggers like it or not, objectively speaking the Constitution is an organic document whose meaning adapts to the times and the judicial philosophies of the men and women sitting on the Supreme Court.

And yet, the teabaggers claim to know the one true meaning of the Constitution, which is to them a document that seems to end at the Second Amendment. They're so sure of this that anyone who disagrees with them is not a true American and has committed borderline treason. Hence, the dark hints about a pending civil war between, presumably, those who revere the Constitution and those who defile it. That's what lets them rationalize the undisguised atmosphere of violence, take pride in mob tactics, and shrug off the racist imagery: We're the only ones worth listening to, and if we have to shout you down and make threats to call attention to ourselves, we will. We have to be ready, they believe. If civil war comes, it won't be us who starts it, but you'd better know that we are prepared to fight and die for our country.

It's sad, really. These are people who with some justification feel betrayed by the nation's institutions, aggravating an already deep-seated sense of right-wing aggrievement. Heck, Wall Street and the government let everybody down, except for a few executives who collect fat bonuses no matter what. But the solution must be better than turning the country into an armed camp with every man for himself, fanning the flames of race hatred while waiting for a Randian savior like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck to lead us all to some Libertarian promised land. It's really nothing more than a children's story, a version of Snow White in which the good (white) people are awakened by a kiss from Princess Charming who then vanquishes the evil queens around them. Whatever the Founding Fathers envisioned for the country, surely it wasn't that...

It can happen here, writes David Sirota...