The Biggest Loser

The great majority of my friends – both in real life and on social media – vote Democratic.  In the wake of the midterm elections – which went so badly for Democratic candidates – most of these folks are looking for someone to blame.

Many blame the unlimited availability of money – much of it supplied by organizations which need not report their sources – to flood the media with attack ads and other nonsense.   I share their indignation.

Many blame the voters – especially young and non-white voters – who stayed away by the millions, allowing a minority of older and middle-aged whites to control dozens of closely contested elections.  I understand their concern, while admitting that I had to drag myself to the polls this year.

Many blame institutional purveyors of mendacity, such as Fox News and the AM talk jocks, who have done so much to lower the political IQ of the nation over the past twenty years.  Again, I share their indignation, but I don’t think a majority of the nation can be blamed because a minority chooses to self-propagandize – if not self-lobotomize – by listening to non-stop nonsense.

But for all the blame-throwing, few of my Democratic-leaning friends have begun to admit what has been, up until now, unspeakable.  The one person most responsible for the Democrats’ defeat is the man who had the most to lose – President Barack Obama.

Six years ago, many in this country – and seemingly everyone overseas – hailed Mr. Obama’s election as the dawn of a new era.  It was hardly that, though the President started off fairly well.

After all, the American economy was trembling on the brink of a second Great Depression – brought about by years of deregulation under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

The reasons for this crisis are too complicated for most of us to understand – involving, as they do, new kinds of theft made possible by the migration to Wall Street of hundreds of highly-trained mathematicians for whom our society seems to have no better use. 

But it’s not so complicated that most of us can’t grasp this fact:  The outgoing Republican President, George W. Bush, and his incoming Democratic successor, Mr. Obama, managed to coordinate their efforts in order to avert the worst. 

I have little doubt that future generations of historians will rank Mr. Bush far down the list of American presidents, but his efforts in those final months probably saved him from reaching the abyss inhabited by James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding.

Similarly, no matter how badly things go in the next two years, Mr. Obama’s role in salvaging the economy will almost certainly keep him out of the historical basement. 

But not, perhaps, by much.

Mr. Obama’s problem is that he never figured out how to leverage the incredible potential of his office.  Never having actually run anything – other than the Harvard Law Review – he has consistently demonstrated an incomprehension regarding the uses of power.

On the one hand, Mr. Obama has over-estimated his ability to make things happen simply by expressing his opinion.  True to his law review background, he has never hesitated to editorialize about situations at home or overseas. 

Now, because he is president, his words have always gained immediate, global circulation.  The problem is that a presidential editorial is news for twenty-four hours.  If the president then shifts his attention to some other issue, instead of hammering away at one, important point, his words – however well-written and well-spoken – quickly fade away.    

A president of the United States can – absolutely – focus the attention of the world on almost anything he chooses.  But unless he stays on that issue – preaching, explaining, educating, mobilizing and motivating – he will not realize the true power of the “bully pulpit”.

And this is the curious thing about Mr. Obama.  A President’s single, greatest power is his ability to educate the American people to the existence of a problem, set forth the solution he proposes – and rally millions to his support.

Yet, for all his gifts as a public speaker – for all his background as a college teacher – this President has been an abysmal failure as America’s educator-in-chief.  Time and again, he has opened a new policy initiative with a brilliant speech – only to move immediately behind closed doors, seeking to formulate a compromise with people who have no desire to meet him halfway.

Where Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, JFK, Reagan – or many presidents of lesser historical stature – would have rallied public support sufficient to compel their opponents to deal, Mr. Obama has allowed his opponents to dominate the political debate for his entire term.

He has, simply stated, failed to make the case for any of his policies – in most cases, leaving the floor to his opponents, who have not hesitated to make the most of their opportunities.

Thus, this gifted communicator has lost control of both houses of Congress, lost the initiative for rest of his term – and probably lost his chance at an honored place in history.

Broken

This year, I failed to do my civic duty. 

I voted, of course.   I always vote. 

But I’ve never regarded the mere act of voting as sufficient. 

Since the Golden Age of Athens, in the fifth century BCE, the whole idea of democracy has rested on the assumption that most citizens will be reasonably well-informed; willing to engage in public discourse; and strongly inclined to think for themselves.

Ideally, these citizens will also attempt to balance their natural self-interest with an equally powerful commitment to the common good – what our Founders called the commonwealth. 

Citizenship in a democracy, or a democratic republic, involves active engagement.  A citizen should speak out – at least among his or her neighbors.  And speaking out should involve some courage – some risk:  the risk of offending family, friends or neighbors; the risk of being corrected on the facts or challenged on one’s reasoning; the risk of being proved wrong.

American democracy once involved a robust – even rowdy – exchange of views.  In big cities, small towns, and isolated villages, the issues which divided the great deliberative bodies at our national and state capitals were also debated, with equal fervor, among people who knew each other well. 

Out of those local controversies, citizens gained a clearer understanding of the issues.   Sometimes, they were also able to spot rising young leaders who saw things with unique clarity or expressed themselves particularly well.

Today, in most communities, Americans seem to prefer not getting involved.  Except in presidential years, most of us don’t even vote.  And, for those who do, voting has come to be regarded as sufficient.

It’s not.

Among the commentariat – the media pundits and political scientists – this lack of public engagement is often deemed apathy.  Personally, I’ve never seen apathy as being the problem.  Indeed, from what I can tell – from personal conversations and on social media – interest in national and global affairs has been on the rise for some time. 

Certainly, that has been true since 9/11.  The trend became even more pronounced after the banking crisis which precipitated the so-called Great Recession.

But this growing public interest has yet to translate itself into public involvement – and therein lies the problem of our times.

In a functional democracy, citizens believe that they can make a difference.  They take action.  When citizens are convinced that they wield no actual power – that their votes and opinions don’t matter; that there’s no point in volunteering for a campaign, or displaying a bumper sticker or yard sign; that sending a modest contribution to a preferred candidate will have no impact – when that situation obtains, democracy is broken. 

And when a great nation – long accustomed to the blessings of liberty and self-government – loses confidence in its democracy, one of two things will happen:  reform, or revolution.

Personally, like most people, I prefer reform.  But our political system, as presently constituted, seems to have become incapable of reforming itself.  The system of campaign finance regulation – never robust – has been gutted by a Supreme Court which is far too politicized to serve its proper constitutional functions.

Political advertising and partisan shouting have replaced virtually all other forms of public discourse – reducing debate to simple-minded slogans, empty symbolism, and the worst sorts of defamation of character.

With only two major political parties – both utterly dependent on unregulated, and often secret, contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions – no mechanism of reform appears to exist.

Meanwhile, with two-party political warfare confined to sensational – but often unimportant – issues, efforts to meet the great and serious challenges that face us continue to be ignored, postponed, filibustered, or mired in partisan gridlock. 

Little wonder that so many citizens feel alienated from the entire political process.  Yet, given our history, it’s impossible to believe that the American people will long remain willing to live under a system which pretends to be “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – but which is actually none of those things.

An explosion is coming. 

May it come soon!

If this explosion is to be peaceful and political – if it’s to be an explosion of reform, rather than revolution – the majority of Americans need a mechanism with which to wrest power from institutions which no longer work. 

I have long thought that the proper mechanism is a third party – committed to complete reform of our political process, and to other issues which are regularly ignored by the two-party duopoly. 

For years, now, I’ve tried to think of an alternative scenario – a scenario in which one or both of the existing parties initiates the reforms we need to restore American democracy.

But I can envision no such scenario, and no one else has suggested anything that seems workable.    

Last Tuesday, I voted.  But that was hardly enough to claim that I’d done my civic duty.

Does anyone out there share the sense that citizenship in this once-great democratic republic demands more than casting a ballot?

Is anyone else willing to act? 

The Fall'll Probably Kill Ya!

I read recently of a decision by New York State’s Board of Regents eliminating the requirement that high school students complete a year’s study of both US History and Global History in order to graduate.

Apparently, this decision is related to the so-called “Common Core” movement which – unlike Ebola – has reached epidemic proportions in this country.

As an old history teacher, I was, of course, dismayed.  But on reflection, the Regents’ decision struck me as a matter of little significance – something akin to the moment when Butch and Sundance are about to jump off an absurdly high cliff into the river below.  Sundance worries that he can’t swim, and Butch laughs:  “Why, you crazy – the fall’ll probably kill ya!”

This country’s educational system does such a poor job of teaching history that – unless we dramatically change things – we’re already doomed as a free society.  Of all the subjects which citizens can study, the only one which offers any preparation for meeting the challenges of the future is the study of the past.

For, if history doesn’t precisely repeat itself, there are patterns.  An understanding of history is, for a society, analogous to the wisdom an individual gains over the course of a long life.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Those who survive those mistakes – and learn from them – have a shot at wisdom.

History is a society’s collective wisdom. 

America’s educational system gave up on History during the Vietnam era, when colleges and universities expanded rapidly to profit from the tuitions of hundreds of thousands of young men who didn’t want to go to war.  Arriving in unprecedented numbers, this influx of students – whose interest in college had far more to do with survival than learning – demanded all sorts of absurd “reforms”.

Among these was the elimination of general education requirements.  Before 1960, most American colleges and universities required that all students take a set of core subjects – American History, Western Civ, English and American Lit, Composition, a couple of science courses, one foreign language to the level of basic fluency – even physical education.

Your prospective major made no difference.  Future lawyers took calculus.  Future rocket scientists studied poetry.  Everyone grumbled through calisthenics and ran laps.  And everyone learned a respectable smattering of the history of their country and the civilization from which it sprang.    

Which – in terms of the survival American democracy – was the most important part of this common curriculum.  Because History – along with its allied subjects, biography and geography – is the absolute prerequisite for intelligent, active citizenship in a democracy. 

It was probably a good thing, in those days, that future lawyers and politicians had to sweat through elementary calculus.  Higher math teaches humility – something today’s lawyers and politicians clearly lack. 

It was probably good, too, that future scientists, physicians, and engineers learned a little literature.  The more we push back the frontiers of knowledge – the more we find ourselves able to do – the more we need some basis for thinking about what it all means.  Those are the questions which poets and playwrights have been wrestling with for millennia. 

But what was indispensable was that all college-educated Americans – those whose educational attainments would make them the natural leaders of their future communities – learned something about history. 

History is the essential study of the leader.  Always has been.  Always will be.

Read up on any great leader, of any nation, from any period, and you will find that he or she not only studied history as a young person – but continued to read and study it as an adult. 

History teaches us many things.  Above all, because the patterns within and among human societies tend to repeat themselves, history teaches us to recognize dangers before they become obvious – or before it’s too late.

Some years ago, when reasonable people could still question the dangers of anthropogenic global climate change, I wrote a piece comparing Al Gore’s efforts to alert Americans to this danger with Winston Churchill’s efforts to alert Britain to the dangers of Adolf Hitler.

One angry reader responded, furiously insisting that Gore was no Churchill.  He missed the point, which was that democratic societies – confronted with a threat calling for self-discipline, sacrifice, and years of unrelenting effort – will go through all sorts of contortions to deny that a threat is real.

Democracies are fortunate if they have prominent leaders willing to risk telling citizens things they don’t want to hear. 

History teaches leaders how to lead – by adopting the successful methods, and avoiding the mistakes, of those who have gone before.

Lincoln was a lifelong student of George Washington – and, before taking office, he read up on the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who had faced an earlier secession crisis.

Theodore Roosevelt was a devoted student of Lincoln, and actually wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton.

As wartime leader of Great Britain, Winston Churchill faced the necessity of pulling together a coalition of incompatible partners to prevent Hitler’s Germany from conquering the world.  In the decade before he took power, Churchill wrote a six-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a brilliant diplomat and soldier of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries.

Serving William III and Queen Anne, Marlborough had pulled together a coalition of incompatible partners to prevent Louis XIV’s France from conquering Europe.

Churchill, you might say, spent the 1930s doing his homework.

A country led by serious students of history can achieve remarkable things.  A country led by those ignorant of history risks disaster.

Because America no longer teaches its citizens history, it must soon either cease to be a great country, or cease to be a democracy – ceding power to an educated elite who have taken the trouble to learn it.

By far the safer course is to teach our children the history they will need to govern themselves.

But to do so, we will need to overrule an educational elite which does not understand history because – having attended college since 1970 – they never learned it.

Fear and Stupidity

I don’t own a television.  I do listen to public radio – and, during baseball season, some sports radio – but, since neither normally carries political advertising, I’m largely spared the annual flood of nonsense through which American political campaigns are conducted.

I’m glad to miss out on the political ad wars.  The issues which politicians believe voters care about are sometimes trivial, sometimes important.  But the solutions which candidates offer – when they bother to offer any – would embarrass the folks who air late-night infomercials for “miracle” products.

And politicians don’t even offer a money-back guarantee.

Occasionally, between elections, you hear an elected leader offering actual, practical solutions.  During a campaign, all you hear is dumb – and dumber.

Still, not listening to the political ads, I sometimes miss things.  Recently, I was astounded to learn – via posts on social media – that some of my friends have become convinced that our government should ban international flights in order to prevent an Ebola epidemic here. 

The source of these panicky posts appears to be a coordinated campaign by Republican candidates for the House and Senate – though some terrified Democrats have apparently climbed aboard the bandwagon.

Now, I’m used to the inevitability of candidates offering up stupid policy ideas during political campaigns.  But an international flight ban isn’t just stupid – it could be suicidal.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped a majority of Americans telling pollsters they support a ban.  

No surprise there.  Americans will fall for anything – for a little while.  The good news is that most Americans – given time – will get back in touch with their native common sense.

That will have to happen soon, if we aren’t to end up electing a bunch if irresponsible fear-mongers to office.  But in an election campaign, two weeks is an eternity.  I’m betting the Republicans created their Ebola panic a couple of weeks too soon.

We’ll see.

It might be a little early for common sense to reassert itself, but – since I’m not running for anything – let’s give it a try.

In the first place, let’s understand that there are basically no direct flights from West Africa to the United States.  To get from Monrovia, Liberia, to JFK, Dulles or Hartsfield, you normally fly through Europe.

So right there, banning flights from West Africa to the US is nonsense.  There are no flights to ban.

But maybe the idea is to prevent anyone flying from West Africa from entering the US.  How would that work?

Well, clearly, US authorities could monitor passenger manifests and prevent the entry of passengers from West Africa who had taken connecting flights through Europe.

But suppose someone in West Africa really needs to get to the US – on business, for school, to visit family – and there’s a travel ban.  The obvious solution would be to take two non-connecting flights.  Fly to Rome or Paris; spend a day or two dining well; then fly into the US as a passenger from that European city.

Or you book connecting flights from West Africa to Toronto Pearson – and cross into the US by land transport.

Now, understand, anyone doing this would be violating the proposed travel ban.  But assume you’re in West Africa; you’re absolutely certain you don’t have Ebola; and you have important reasons for getting to America.

Is a travel ban going to stop you?

Consider our record of success at preventing illegal immigration – or the importation of marijuana and cocaine. 

Guess what?  In today’s world, you can’t keep people from crossing borders.

Not even North Korea can do that – and North Korea is a police state with two short, militarized borders.

Common sense says a flight ban would be unworkable.  But at the beginning of this piece, I suggested it might also be suicidal.

Here’s why.

At present, US authorities automatically screen everyone flying into the country from nations in which Ebola has erupted.  These passengers are asked several key questions.  Their temperatures are taken.  They are instructed on what to do if they begin to develop symptoms.

Thus far, passengers from West Africa have been cooperative with these sensible screening procedures.  They’re not intrusive, and – really – no one wants to bring Ebola into this country, or pass it on to his loved ones or business associates.

But suppose we imposed a flight ban – and passengers from West Africa started avoiding that ban by taking non-connecting flights or by flying into Canada.

People sneaking in via ­an indirect route could hardly be expected to present themselves to US authorities for screening once they arrived.  They’d be here – among us – but we wouldn’t know anything about them. 

And that’s where things get scary.

Because, sooner or later, someone will enter this country who has been infected – and doesn’t know it.  Under our present screening regime, there’s every chance a symptomatic person would promptly contact proper authorities for treatment.

But if he had sneaked in to avoid a travel ban, there’s a fair chance he’d delay doing so.  And that delay is where the proposed travel ban becomes dangerous.

Fear-based political campaigns are nothing new.  But when politicians propose stupid, dangerous policies in order to win elections, they demonstrate their unworthiness to hold public office.

Let’s hope common sense kicks in soon enough to punish this fear-mongering nonsense.

Thinking Clearly about ISIS

This week, while America’s media obsess over Roger Goodell’s increasingly shaky tenure as NFL Commissioner, President Obama is preparing - with the superficial support of a gun-shy Congress - to involve this country in yet another misadventure in the Middle East.

Having finally woken to the fact that ISIS – or ISIL, or IS, or CIS – represents a clear and present danger to the U.S, Mr. Obama has reluctantly decided to act.  The pity is that it took him so long.   

Not only is ISIS dangerous, it’s almost certainly Mr. Obama’s fault that it has become so.  In the spring of 2011, when Syria’s civil war began, it quickly became apparent that the rebels America preferred to deal with – the “good guys” – lacked what it took to overthrow the ruthless Assad regime.  

Good guys seldom win revolutions.  Moderate, educated, democratically-inclined people – nice, middle-class types – too often lack the passion, the grit, and, let’s face it, the willingness to kill or die in a righteous cause.  Revolutions are often started by moderates, but when they succeed, it is usually because they fall into the hands of fiery-eyed, ruthless extremists.

Study the great revolutions – French, Bolshevik, Chinese, etc.   Or just read Les Miserables.  The lesson appears again and again.  Nice guys make poor revolutionaries.  Bloodthirsty fanatics do rather better - at least, in the near term.

The problem is that Mr. Obama, like most Americans, doesn’t know much about history.  In Syria, he tried an ineffectual strategy of arming and providing advice to moderates, while rejecting, absolutely, the one strategy which would have toppled Assad without allowing power to shift to a group such as ISIS.

He refused to put American “boots on the ground.”

Inevitably, the Syrian revolution passed into the hands of fanatical warriors, willing to die for their cause – ISIS.

Now that ISIS has overrun large parts of northern, Sunni-majority Mesopotamia – “Iraq,” for those who still believe in that fiction – Mr. Obama has decided to act.  But once again, he has instinctively decided against the one thing that might succeed – American “boots on the ground.”

Instead, the President wants to combine a few hundred military advisors with the liberal use of American air power.

Our advisors are supposed to reorganize and put some spine into the Iraqi army, whose initial reaction to a few thousand lightly-armed ISIS warriors was, as Monty Python would put it, “Run away!”

Other American advisors are supposed to do the same thing for the moderate Syrian rebels – the “nice” folks whose ineffectual efforts made ISIS possible in the first place.

The President’s plan is that – aided by American air power – a revived, moderate rebel force will defeat both ISIS and Assad in Syria, while a revived Iraqi Army, aided by Kurdish militia and anti-ISIS, Sunni tribal chiefs, will do the same in “Iraq”.  

Talk about the audacity of hope.

For thirteen years, now, American policy in the Middle East has suffered from a complete lack of rational thinking.  Mr. Bush’s faith-based approach has yielded to Mr. Obama’s hope-based alternative, but the shift has not represented an improvement.

Americans must insist that those who govern us start looking at the Middle East clearly, coolly, and rationally.  Such an approach might begin by recognizing one basic reality:  “Iraq” does not exist.

“Iraq” was an artificial, post-World War I creation of British politicians, who gathered Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs and tossed in a substantial population of Muslim, non-Arab Kurds, in order to create a kingdom worthy of a favored Arab ally.  

“Iraq” was initially held together by British force – later, by ruthless Ba’athist dictators, the last of whom was Saddam Hussein,

When President Bush decided to topple Saddam, “Iraq” shattered into its component pieces.  Most of the American lives – and nearly all of the American billions – expended since our relatively bloodless invasion were devoted to reconstructing the fiction of “Iraq.”

As soon as Mr. Obama withdrew our last significant forces, “Iraq” began falling apart again.  ISIS merely accelerated the process.

As of now, the Kurds have largely withstood ISIS.  A relatively progressive, warlike people, the Kurds regard the U.S. with favor.  With U.S. support, they could create a tidy, independent, pro-American nation – perhaps even one which would welcome permanent American military bases, thus transforming the balance of power in that part of the world.  

But the Kurds cannot liberate ISIS-held portions of “Iraq.”  The Sunnis who live there fear and loathe ISIS, but they have a long-term rivalry with the Kurds over key cities and oil fields located along their common population boundary.  A Kurdish “liberation” would inevitably appear, to Sunni Arabs, as an act of aggression.

Nor can the Iraqi Army liberate ISIS-held territory.  The post-Saddam central government – and its army – have been dominated by “Iraq’s” Shi’ite majority.  Local Sunni tribal and religious leaders might fear ISIS, but its fanatics are, at least, Sunni – and therefore, preferable to the tyranny of their sectarian enemies.

Thus, the inevitable reality that no in-country forces are in a position to rally the local support essential to defeating ISIS at an acceptable cost.  The only power capable of pulling that off would be American “boots on the ground” – and even a substantial American army would be insufficient without a coordinated diplomatic strategy.

To defeat ISIS, Mr. Obama must offer the local Sunni leadership the only thing ISIS cannot – their own, independent state - without the terrors of religious extremism.  

But this would require Mr. Obama to acknowledge that “Iraq” no longer exists.  

By adopting this view, Mr. Obama might actually achieve something like victory.  But it would require him to admit to over five years of chasing a phantom - something our President, intent on creating an historical "legacy", is unlikely to do.

The alternative - continuing to pretend that "Iraq" is real - can only lead to futility, frustration, and horror.  Almost certainly, over time, we will witness the beheading of downed American pilots and captured American military advisors.

It's not impossible that we will even suffer the sort of 9-11 style retribution which only a terrorist group, securely in control of its own territory, can plan and launch.

For certain, we will not see victory.

“Iraq” is a myth.  A sane policy in Mesopotamia can only be built on reality.  

What a shame no one will tell the President.

Not This Year

This week, my local NPR station - WMRA - has been conducting its spring membership drive.  And this time around, I'm ignoring it.

Even the most casual reader of this column might suspect that NPR's news coverage would suit my "informed" - not to say "liberal" - predilections.  Long-time readers of this column will know that I've long been an advocate of public radio.

Which is why I find myself surprised that I feel absolutely no inclination to make a contribution this year.

Now, to be sure, I've had to tighten my belt in recent years.   Gone, for now, are the days when I could support my public radio station at the dollar-a-day level. 

But this year, I can't even bring myself to cough up a nominal sum.  I'm that fed up with what once passed for "must-listen" radio.

Here's my problem.

Like most public media, NPR started out as the indirect beneficiary of generous public funding.  Taxpayer dollars subsidized local stations, which, in turn, subscribed to news and other programming from NPR and other content providers.

Over the years, public funding for has been reduced - forcing public radio stations to seek additional support from individual listeners, non-profits, and - here's the kicker - corporate sponsors.

This last fact has been unfortunate.  Whenever any entity - educational, artistic, or otherwise - becomes dependent on substantial corporate funding, it quickly learns that this funding comes with strings.

For public radio, the result has manifested itself in many ways.  From my personal perspective, the two most egregious have been an almost total disregard of two issues:  AGW (anthropomorphic global warming) and the increasingly disturbing ways in which our food supply is produced.

To be sure, the former issue is of far greater concern.  If even the more moderate expert forecasts are true, our children and grandchildren will be living in a world drastically different - in ever more unpleasant ways - from the world we have known in our times, or indeed, since our ancestors climbed down out of the trees. 

Our food supply would be of greater personal concern if I hadn't made the decision, some years back, to do a lot more actual cooking - increasingly using ingredients which are natural, and (when the price permits) organic.

Still, I wish more of my friends and fellow citizens were aware of the degree to which the things they consume introduce hormones, antibiotics, and actual toxins into their diets.

Sadly, nobody's going to learn much about climate change or the food supply from NPR news.  In recent years, it seems, these issues have simply disappeared - and one can only conclude that this has come about as the result of public media's dependence on corporate dollars.

Which is not to say that NPR and other content providers have moved entirely into the conservative camp.  For most public radio stations, listener dollars are more important than corporate support. 

But liberally-minded listeners - like their conservative opposite numbers - can generally be contented with non-stop coverage of social issues.  Thus, NPR's almost obsessive coverage of demographic issues - the politics and sociology of race, gender, gender preference, and immigration status.

Because the public radio audience contains a large number of aging Baby Boomers - members of a generation which refuses to grow old - recent years have also featured an increasing emphasis on pop culture and the latest technological gadgets.

On any given day, in morning or afternoon drive-time, you can be sure of hearing a story about some manifestation of inequality in our society; about some new gadget, app, or website; and about some up-and coming band, singer, or other entertainer.

But you'll drive a lot of commuter miles between stories about AGW, much less - say - what your latest meal might be doing to your body.

Now look, no rational observer would question that Big Business - far more than Big Government - runs this country.  

Moreover, most of the media - newspapers, radio and television stations, and online service providers - are owned by huge corporations.

As are nearly all of their advertisers. 

Our elected officials are, especially since the abominable - and intellectually indefensible - Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC , almost entirely dependent on essentially unlimited campaign contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate sources.

With public radio, the strategy has been a bit more subtle.  Deprive the stations of public funds - on the argument that they shouldn't be supported by taxpayer money - and then substitute corporate funding, on condition that these stations and their content providers "dummy up" on the issues most important to Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and our other corporate masters.

That strategy has worked.  Perhaps I'm only playing into our corporate masters' hands by withdrawing my personal support.  If others followed my example, public radio might gradually be transformed into another FOX News.

But I'm sorry.  My heart just isn't in it this year.