This past week I have encountered more proof that anti-unionism is now part of the arsenal of ideological assumptions that the mass media makes on our behalf. I saw two examples of an anti-union subtext in articles by two writers whose work I generally admire: James Surowieki, who writes The New Yorker’s “Financial Page, and Len Boselovic, a business writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Now I’m not saying that either of these writers consciously tried to deliver carefully hidden slams to unions, only that slamming unions is so accepted now, that it has become second nature to do so in mainstream news stories.

First Surowieki:  In a thoroughly disgraceful article titled “Living by Default” in the latest New Yorker, Surowieki joins the line of economic reporters advocating that people whose houses are worth less than their mortgage should walk away, even if they can afford to pay the monthly tab.  As so many of these articles do, Surowieki begins by talking about the advantages of bankruptcy to a business, in this case, American Airlines: “Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load and allow it to break its union contracts, so that it can slim down and cut costs.” Note that he assumes that it is an admirable thing to break union contracts.  It’s not that he advocates breaking union contracts; he just assumes that it’s a great thing to do and assumes that the reader agrees with him.

Boselevic’s anti-union subtext is subtler.  Here is the beginning of an article about a think tank report on public pensions that was the lead in the Sunday, December 18 business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Nothing elevates the blood pressure of taxpayers like dipping into their pockets to make good on pension promises made to government employees by the very local and state government officials they voted into office.”

First note that it’s a completely inaccurate statement, at least if we are to believe every study that has polled U.S. voters on tax issues over the past six months.  These studies all find that about two thirds of us want the wealthy to pay more in taxes. The only study of attitudes toward public pensions I have found was of Californians, 40% of whom were pissed off by public pensions.   In most circles 67 beats 40 in a landslide. My conclusion is that nothing elevates the blood pressure of most tax payers as much as contemplating how little millionaires now pay compared to 10 and 35 years ago.

But behind the inaccurate hyperbole, why do I perceive an anti-union bias in the article?  As I have written before, the current media campaign against public pensions is an extension of the war against unions started by Ronald Reagan because most government workers with pensions are in unions.  Bemoaning public pensions internalizes anti-unionism.  That the article plugs “public pensions” into the blank of a standard rhetorical device, i.e., “nothing boils the blood as much as ____” turns it into a throwaway line, like a quick one-line joke in a crime drama. Such throwaways are one of the many ways that writers communicate ideology without stating it overtly.  In this case, the ideology is anti-unionism.

Speaking of hidden messages, ABC news did a great job earlier this week of gently reminding the American people that they should care more about lowering taxes than creating jobs or helping the unemployed, hungry and poor.  At the end of ABC’s long analysis Thursday of the temporary House Republican blockage of a temporary extension of the payroll tax cut, ABC is the latest media outlet or pundit to quote what the Wall Street Journal recently wrote: “Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter…” ABC and The Journal spin the corner into which the House Republicans have painted themselves  in right wing terms.  These media could have said that Obama is winning the job creation debate, or that he’s winning the 99% versus 1% debate.  But both media defined Obama’s win in terms of the ideological premise that lowering taxes is always good.

One hidden message that the news media never seems to take a break from beaming at us is the denigration of intellectual striving and knowledge. Yesterday a New York Times headline writer employed a tried-and-true, decades-old rhetorical device to denigrate intellectualism: “math is hard.” The “math is hard” myth is one of the corollaries of the “school isn’t fun” myth, a pillar of the American anti-intellectual ideology.  The Times story in question was an “animal research can be cute” story about pigeons having enough abstract reasoning ability to learn to count to 9.  The headline delivers the anti-intellectual message: “Stumped by Math? Ask a Pigeon for Help.” But what kind of math is the headline writer talking about?  Counting to 9. Talk about an intellectual challenge! (LOL)

I’m certain that if we would started actively looking in the top 10 or 15 national mainstream media outlets, we would find dozens of examples every week of reporters assuming an ideological imperative or placing little nuggets of ideology in the details of what they write.

The Obama Administration is once again displaying its conservative feathers as proudly as any peacock might.  The same group of pseudo-progressives who overruled distribution of Plan B birth control without an I.D. and executed an about-face to gut proposed higher pollution emission standards now plans to make another assault on freedom of speech.

Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to overturn its longstanding rule that limits companies from owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same local market.

This rule will surely lead to greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies. The same thing happened after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens.  We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel and other companies owned by rightwingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations.  Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

The FCC is arguing that it’s absurd not to let companies own both broadcast and print properties in one market since every TV and radio station is printing on the Internet and most newspapers run video on their websites.  That argument doesn’t answer the objections to consolidation because the issue is not the distribution of news, but the sourcing of it.  With fewer collective owners, there are fewer opinions and fewer definitions of what is newsworthy.  With consolidation, the owners will tend to resemble each other even more than they do now, so that the articles and opinions will come to be similar across the various media.

Freedom of speech is useless unless there is a pulpit for every opinion.  Each owner represents one possible pulpit for a variety of notions regarding our economy, political system, distribution of wealth, cultural ideas and belief systems, but each pulpit will be available to only one of each type—one set of views on the economy and politics, one idea about wealth distribution, one set of social priorities.  We need many owners to ensure that we have many pulpits for every facet of economic, political and social interaction.  Right now, a handful of companies already control most of the TV and radio stations, newspapers, movie studios and publishing houses in the country and around the world.  The Internet does offer free access to the marketplace of ideas, but successful websites that are not affiliated with big companies draw in the hundreds of thousands, a drop in the bucket.  The pulpit is there, but the tent is small compared to The Wall Street Journal or ABC-TV news.

The long suffering newspaper, as a recent Pew study showed, is the whole game, since newspapers originate 50% of all news, and a much higher percentage if we discount celebrity and local crime news and focus on political, economic, social trend and breaking news.  As newspapers decline, they are covering less news and presenting fewer opinions, so less news and fewer opinions are getting out to people. 

It may be that the FCC is thinking that revenues from TV will enable companies to keep the newspaper viable, something that seems less and less possible under current operating assumptions.  But isn’t it just as likely that television advertising and programming departments could begin to dictate the terms of coverage in newspapers, leading to a rapid debasement of content.

If the Obama Administration and the FCC really want to help newspapers survive, a better approach might be to put a limit on the number of media properties one company can own.  Make the large media conglomerates divest for the good of the country, like federal law and regulation once made oil conglomerates divest for the good of the country. The more companies there are controlling the media, the freer we will be as a people and as a society, and the less possible it will be for one group to steer the country in the wrong direction by controlling the news and opinion.  Each of these smaller media companies after divestiture might be more fragile, but the industry itself would be stronger and more diverse.

Greater government support for the news operations of local public broadcasting stations would also help to create a freer marketplace of ideas.

Finally, government could subsidize newspapers that report original news and are making the transition to the Internet model, perhaps with a tax on Internet news aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google News that make so many stories of local and national newspapers available to the public free of charge.

I urge all readers to go to the FCC website and make a comment. Tell the Obama Administration that you do not want it to concentrate media ownership further.  Instead, ask the Obama Administration to develop new laws and regulations that will break up the big media companies and diversify ownership.

House Republicans persist in stonewalling an agreement to extend and expand the temporary cut in Social Security and Medicare taxes (AKA payroll taxes). After holding the U.S. economy hostage time and again to maintain temporary tax cuts for the wealthy and paying for them by gutting programs for everyone else, the Republicans are now opposing a little more help for the other 99%.

This move should convince any doubters that there is a class war going on in the United States, and it’s being waged by the wealthy against the middle class and poor. The foot soldiers are conservative pundits and politicians, primarily Republicans. The House Republicans, led by the nose by its Tea Party wing, remind me of the small Greek army led by Spartans that held the Persian Army at the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, recently fictionalized as the movie 300.

The analogy to the Spartans, who sacrificed their lives for the greater cause (Sparta was a proto-fascist state), fits like a glove: The Republicans are taking heat for stonewalling the continuation of this tax cut. Virtually all reputable economists agree that consumers have spent almost all of the extra money in their pockets from the payroll tax cut. This temporary tax cut has thus served as a boost to the struggling economy. Take that boost away, and we will slip back into recession and the Republicans will be blamed. The House Republicans know that they’re putting their jobs and political lives on the line, but I imagine they are “just following orders:” like good soldiers always do.

The reluctance of Republicans in general to extend this tax cut unless we pay for it with cuts in benefits to other poor or middle class people demonstrates clearly that class war is the appropriate term to describe not only the current Republican agenda, but the agenda of conservatives for the past 30 years.

One of the most powerful tools of warfare has always been to cut off the enemy’s supply lines. Information and facts are perhaps the most vital supplies in this violent class war (unless you consider it nonviolent to cause deaths from inadequate medical care or children going to bed hungry).  Speaker of the House John Boehner tried to cut that valuable resource the other day when he had someone from his office order C-SPAN to stop videotaping the live battle on the House Floor after he and other Republicans walked out of the chamber. At the time, Maryland Democratic Representative Stenny Hoyer was lambasting the House Republicans for walking away from their responsibility to the unemployed, the middle class, the poor and those on Medicare.

This obnoxious censorship demonstrates that the Republicans are willing to do anything to preserve and exacerbate the current inequality of wealth in this country.

The war analogy illuminates many conservative actions over the past three decades, and especially since the ascendancy of Bush II:

• Pulling C-SPAN’s plug was a minor skirmish, but Republicans have been trying to reduce supplies of another precious resource—votes—for the past few years by proposing bills in virtually all states to make it harder both to register to vote and to vote.
• Warfare often shows a complete disregard for innocent bystanders, and who can be more innocent than the millions of children who have seen funds cut for public schools, early childhood education and children’s healthcare?
• Victors in war claim booty, and the booty in the case of the 30-year war against the middle class and poor is increased corporate profits from gutted regulations and government contracts that privatize traditional government services such as data processing, schools, prisons and military support services, replacing good-paying government jobs with low-paying private sector jobs.
• What else is the constant denigration of unions and unionized public workers than guerilla warfare? Taking pot shots at unions, impeding their ability to organize and feeding the public a steady stream of anti-union cant can all be compared to the attack-and-run strategies of guerilla warfare. And just as Viet Cong guerilla war divided the U.S. ruling elite and just as American guerilla war divided British ruling elite, so the right wing has managed to divide the middle class against itself with its constant sniping at unions.

We can only hope that the House Republican’s reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae has the same effect that the original battle did: Although the Greek army held off the Persians for a few days, the Persians overran much of Greece and captured Athens, that ancient democracy for rich white men. Let’s hope the Republicans lose both the battle and the war, although I wouldn’t compare America’s other 99% to the Persians. No, after 30 years of unmitigated class warfare, we’re more like shell-shocked victims of massive bombing.

A number of times over the past few years I have made derogatory references to video or electronic games, always as substantiation of my theory that our mass culture encourages adults to hold onto childish entertainments and habits.

But I was only partially right about computer games.  As it turns out, only certain types of computer games are implicated in the infantilization of Americans.  To have blamed all computer games was an error on my part.

What started me thinking more about video games was a thorough but unexciting section on the current state of the electronic games industry in a recent issue of the Economist.  Consumers now spend more on electronic games than books, records, or any other type of entertainment except movies.  The Economist article categorized games in several ways: type of device on which they’re played; broad topic of game; demographic of players.

Starting with a few ideas from one of the articles, I began to categorize games by the way they engage the player and found that I could fit every computer games into six categories (if I missed a category, dear readers, let me know), each of which is an extension of a pre-computer, pre-digital chip type of game:

• Traditional games of intellectual skill, such as chess, Scrabble or trivia games.
• Games of luck, such as most roulette or slot machines, or where luck plays a larger part than skill, such as poker.
• Fitness or sports activity, such as the Wii sports games, which are extensions of bowling, golf, aerobics and other physical activities.
• Fantasy life games, such as Alternative Life, which resemble Renaissance Faire (sic) jousting, war reenacting. Dungeons and Dragons and doll play.
• Building games, like Sim City or Farm Life, which take ship- and airplane-model building into fantastic new worlds.
• Joystick games, in which the primary human activity is manipulating a joy stick, mouse or keyboard; joystick games carry on the spirit of pinballs, but add characters, storylines and a whole lot of violence.

(Note that games based on other experiences will reduce to one of these six types; for example a virtual horse race or football game combines fantasy life with games of luck, with a little skill built in, much as the old Stratomatic baseball with its spinners and pie charts did.)

It goes without saying that playing any of these types of games obsessively at any age signals that the player may suffer from an emotional problem. That’s true of electronic games now, and it was true of the non-electronic versions people played years ago.

But running down this list, what I see is that by type, the electronic games that do not infantilize adults build on non-electronic ancestors that did not infantilize adults in prior epochs.  Chess, checkers, Scrabble, trivia, Sudoku and any of the dozens of their electronic variations help people to keep their brains healthy. While I might prefer using an exercise bike or hitting a couple dozen balls at a batting cage, I can see that exercise games help people and families stay healthy. And I can understand why many people enjoy building both a model ship from matchsticks and a virtual city.

On the other hand, in former times, we considered adults (males) who gambled all day or hung out playing pin balls as immature, which means, retaining the traits of childhood.  They were immature back then, and so are the millions of adults today who regularly gamble online or play Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft or any other of the games that use fantasy themes to decorate what are really sophisticated joy stick games.   These games are inherently infantilizing, as opposed to the other types of electronic games which will infantilize only if pursued too many hours of the day.  As it turns out, these joystick games typically outsell all the other types of electronic games.

The categorization works well in theory, but in the real world, we also have to consider content. When we think of content as production values—realism of the motion, vividness of the colors and sophistication of the special effects—electronic games represent a stunning improvement over former versions of these game types.  But if we define content as complexity of thought process and character, discussion of issues, ambiguity of human situations, use of symbolism and realism of narrative, then we can see that all of the joy stick and many fantasy games operate on a  child’s level (even a child’s version of violence).  These games infantilize.

Reading, too, can infantilize, if the adult is reading a Harry Potter story instead of a good history book, Catch 22 or the latest Richard Powers or Don DeLillo novel.  I was wrong to blame computer games across the board for infantilization.  More precisely, then: That so many adults play electronic games of chance, joy stick computer games and fantasy games with childish qualities indicates that Americans are developing an infantilized culture, one in which we retain our childhood predilections and thought processes into adulthood. The danger resides, of course, in the fact that the immature child is more open to manipulation, control and exploitation than is a thinking adult.

The best advertising attempts to evoke an emotion in the viewer or listener and then link that emotion to the product or service for sale.  Budweiser has a series of ads meant to make you feel patriotic that it runs on July 4. McDonald’s ads for its coffee drinks are meant to make the viewer feel cool and hip. A current Viagra ad with cowboy music and a rugged looking guy in a pickup truck wants to make men feel in control and experienced.  Many food ads are based on making people feel love towards their children or families.  The current Best Buy “Game On, Santa” Christmas ad series wants people to feel victorious in a competition.

What then can we make of Target’s TV ads for this Christmas shopping session?  The ads are bright and chipper, but the only emotion they can possible evoke is the relief felt after performing an onerous task.  And that’s not what a retail business wants its shoppers thinking at Christmas.

The Target ad unrolls as a series of people completing actions associated with preparing for Christmas: stamping letters, packing gifts, adjusting a decorated tree.  There must be six or seven people in total, representing all ages and races, all completing the very last step of some action related to Christmas.  And all say the same word, triumphantly but with a serious, not a gleeful tone, “Done.” The result is that the sound track for almost the entire spot is the repetition, in different voices, of the word “done.” “Done, done, done, done, done, done,  done.”

I understand that Target is trying to communicate that its stores have everything needed to complete every Christmas holiday task, but it comes off as a tedious checklist, or maybe the tail end of a conversation between a mother and her disinterested teenage son: Did you do your homework? Done. Did you make your bed? Done. Did you fix your brother’s computer? Done. Did you call your Aunt? Done, done, done, done, done!

Target has turned all of Christmas into a chore. The ad doesn’t mention that Target helps you buy the gifts that say I love you. There are no reminders that Christmas is a time to get spiritual.  Nor is Target saying it will help you keep up with the neighbor’s lighting display.  No, Target helps you get your chores done.

It’s another version of this year’s post-modern approach to the holidays.  The ad is not about buying something to celebrate the holiday or express the emotions you feel on the holiday to others. The ad is about helping you get through your chores.  Since your chores all have to do with buying something, the Target ad becomes an ad about shopping for the sake of shopping as opposed to shopping for a reason.

The Target ads display an important characteristic of post-modern art.  The subject of post-modern art is often the process of making art.

In the same way that post-modern art focuses on art itself, the themes of this year’s advertising and news media Christmas season seem to focus on shopping as an end to itself, and not as a means to celebrate the holiday.  The media treated Black Friday Weekend as a holiday dedicated to shopping, forgetting to mention that the shopping is in preparation for a holiday that’s a month away.  The Best Buy ad turns shopping into a competition.  Finally, the Target ad turns shopping into a chore.  In all cases, the idea of Christmas–even in its debased current version as an occasion for massive gift-giving–becomes peripheral to the main concern of shopping until dropping.

Tim Tebow has every right to do his little public prayer at football games. His drop to one knee is protected speech under the Constitution of the United States.

And I have every right to tell the world how much I despise everything that tebowing represents to me and many others.

Let’s start with the fact that Tebow has publicly supported positions with which I disagree and for which his stand derives from his religious beliefs, for example, his opposition to a woman’s right to an abortion.

Then there’s the political context of the action. I see the Tebow knee drop as the latest action in an aggressive campaign by evangelical and ultra-Orthodox Catholic groups to Christianize our public places and public institutions. The Tebow knee drop is one small piece of this puzzle. There are many others, including the bogus claims of a secular war on Christmas, the attempt to proselytize in the Air Force, the proliferation of Christian radio and TV programming, the fight against evolution and the frequent stunts, such as the rural Florida preacher burning a Koran. The fad of tebowing on Youtube or in a non-religious public place, as opposed to the lone act of one athlete, is the most recent manifestation of the campaign to turn a secular nation into a Christian one. Of course, the religious right has received a lot of help from the mainstream news media and many pandering politicians.

But beyond Tebow’s belief system and the assault it has made on science and the concept of a secular society, is the sports part of the story. The news media, and especially the non-sports media, for the most part are giving Tebow credit for his team’s victory.

The real story is that the Denver offensive line and defense are so good that they can win despite having a bad quarterback. In most professional football games nowadays, the defenses start to break down during the fourth quarter and suddenly both offenses are able to march the ball down the field for quick scores. Everyone’s getting tired and it naturally has a larger impact on those who have to react, i.e., the defense.  It looks as if Denver’s defense doesn’t get tired, or gets less tired than other defenses. (Mr. October, Reggie Jackson, famously denied that he got better in late September and early October; he averred that he merely got less tired than other baseball players after the long grueling season.)

Behind the story of a good team dragging a bad quarterback to victory is another real story: a coach who, when faced with no good choice at quarterback, took about a week to recreate an old-timey offense that modern football strategies had made obsolete in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And behind the coaching story may be yet another story: the inherent edge in conditioning of a team used to playing in a high-altitude environment in which the body adapts to getting less oxygen per breath.

But instead of taking a look at why the Denver team is on a roll, the news media has created a celebrity who happens to be tied to the irrational. The fact that the media established and treats Tebow as a celebrity says more about the American ideology than the fact that he is Christian.

The Tebow preoccupation displays all the characteristics of celebrity culture:

• Like the Kardashians and other reality stars, Tebow doesn’t deserve the publicity he gets.
• Discussions of the Tebow phenomenon has driven out other sports and news reporting, just like celebrity news drives out serious economic and other reporting.
• The celebrity, Tebow, has come to represent the issue, public faith.  In the United States, charitable causes and social trends are often advanced or retarded based on their relationship to celebrities; e.g., when Angelina Jolie gets involved in a cause, that cause suddenly becomes news. And when a wide range of publications, including Parade, Cosmopolitan, AARP, People and even The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal cover a trend, cause or nonprofit organization, they often do so through the eyes of the celebrities who have become involved.

When I see Tebow tebowing, I think of these things–his political stands, the campaign to Christianize America, the fact that he’s getting credit for the great work of others, and the pernicious influence on American life of celebrity worship.

The Tebow gesture therefore irritates me, even as I applaud his right to do it and bemoan that a Long Island high school suspended four students for being part of a group that staged an impromptu mass tebowing in a school hallway. Organized prayer before the school day is illegal and so should be the practice of allowing religious youth groups to hold meetings in public schools. I find it disgraceful that certain public school districts must be responsible for providing bus service to children going to private religious schools. But if a kid wants to drop to one knee for a second, that’s his or her right.

I imagine that virtually no OpEdge reader could beat Kobe Bryant at one-on-one basketball. And none of you could outrun Usain Bolt, current world record holder in the 100 meter dash. You couldn’t sneak a fast ball by Alex Rodriguez. Women’s golf champ Yanni Tseng would give you 5 strokes and still beat you. Hikaru Nakamura, currently the best U.S. chess player, would give you a pawn and demolish you in 30 moves or less. You’d be eating a tennis ball on every serve from Raphael Nadal.

But there is one world-renowned titan who you can beat at his own game. And all it takes is money or a credit card that hasn’t reached its limit.

The game is shopping and the titan is Santa Claus.

Or at least that’s what Best Buy is proposing in its Christmas-shopping television commercials this year, unified by the theme line, “Game on, Santa.”

All three of the Best Buy Christmas shopping spots I have seen pose a competition between you, the viewer, and Santa Claus. Whether it’s a giving competition or a shopping competition is moot, since the commercial seems to equate the two. The three scenarios I have seen just about complete the stations of Santa’s mythical annual visit (not to be confused with Christ’s Stations of the Cross):

1. A mother stops Santa on the roof at the chimney and warns him that she’s been to Best Buy.
2. A mother shows Santa the new widescreen TV she got for the family, making Santa gulp down his cookie with an expression that says that the news has shocked him as a “Hail Mary” pass that wins a football game might.
3. A mother is at the hung stockings, which are stuffed to the cuffs, taunting Santa with the fact that there is no room for what he has brought.

Note that in all three commercials the house is upscale and the competitive shopper is an attractive, but not beautiful, white woman who looks to be in her late 30s. 

The commercial is as packed with unspoken ideological imperatives as the stockings are stuffed with junk in the one Best Buy spot. The most obvious ideological subtext is the reduction of all emotions or emotional manifestations to the act of buying something. A history of this centerpiece of 21st century American ideology would begin with the commercialization of Christmas and the gradual replacement of the custom of making gifts with the new custom of shopping for them.

Like the advertisements for and media coverage of Black Friday, the “Game On, Santa” commercials take a subtle post-modern step in the evolution of the consumerist ideology because what is being hyped is shopping in and of itself, and not as a way to celebrate a holiday. One characteristic of post-modern art is for the art to be about the process of making art, and not about something else. 

The commercial sinks a deeper ideological hook into viewers, though, and that is the premise that competition is good. The act of arranging Christmas according to the modern traditions has become a game which produces winners and losers. Instead of the more obvious choice of a loser—that snooty next-door neighbor, the sister who always wins, that obnoxious shopper who wants to grab the last Xbox or the mother-in-law, the upscale mom is beating Santa, which means she’s winning big-time.   

We know that the consumerist ideology connects every emotion to the act of buying.  The Best Buy “Game On, Santa” commercials also connect the act of buying to winning and losing, that is, competition, and by implication, to market competition. The free market ideology says an unencumbered market in which everyone pursues his or her own best interests will result in the greatest good for everyone. The hidden message is that the free market in which people are allowed to compete is a good thing. A twist to the message is that by buying things, you can be a winner in the free market. The “Game On, Santa” theme proposes that the greatest good in our mythical free market world is to shop.

The irony of the Best Buy series is that Santa Claus, like the advantages of the free market, is a mythical figure, a folk hero about whom we create stories for small children. Someone competing with Santa Claus is really competing with him/herself.  It’s the ultimate potlatch, but instead of showing your neighbors how much you’re worth by destroying piles of your own possessions, you demonstrate your worth to yourself by being the smartest buyer of gifts, the “Sultan of Shopping” (“Sultan of Swat” was one of Babe Ruth’s many nicknames). 

How does the self win against the self, that is, transcend the self and become a better self, a winning self? Is it through prayer, chant, right living, death, ritual, acts of kindness, study or group action, as a multitude of philosophers and religious figures have proposed through the ages?

No, in the American ideology, the redemption that “winning against the self” brings comes from being the best shopper you can be.

I’m betting that Mitt Romney gave his campaign for the Republican nomination a deadly wound in last night’s umpteenth debate between the Republican candidates to face President Obama in November 2012.

It doesn’t matter if Mitt or Texas Rick was right in their latest little spat over facts. What matters is that by so smugly offering to put $10,000 on the line to back up his assertion, Mitt Romney reminded us in a shockingly brutal manner of the very thing we hate and fear about him: that he was born a one-percenter and then got richer.

In my experience and the experience of most Americans, when most people are so certain of their assertion that they are willing to bet on it, they throw out an amount like ten bucks, twenty bucks, fifty bucks.

But only a child, someone who has a major gambling problem or someone who is really rich would say $10,000 and mean it as Mitt did last night.

Survey after survey is now showing that people are fed up with the current economic regime under which, in good times and bad, the richest one percent get richer and everyone else loses ground.  Romney is a one-percenter and he looks like the archetype of a one-percenter.  He earned his impressive fortune by doing Wall Street deals that often led to massive layoffs.  He often raided good companies for fees, sold them off and sat counting his money while his former corporate wards went into bankruptcy.  All if this will surely go through the minds of many people every time they think of Romney’s proposed bet.

The fact that Perry handled it so perfectly only made matters worse for Romney.  “I’m not in the betting business” was the right thing to say, the only sane thing to say.  And it came from good old country boy Texas Rick.  The contrast between Perry and Romney’s rich boy’s bankerly prep boy manner is so obvious on every level because we have seen this kind of behavior from these two archetypes in hundreds of movies and TV shows about the old west and small towns.  One version has them at a poker table and Mitt is trying to buy the pot.  In another, Mitt wants to hire the socially awkward straight shooter to run people off their farms. In these movie, the Perry character always plays the hero.  It was Perry’s finest moment in the campaign by virtue of it being his only fine moment.

As to Romney, I am convinced that he cooked his campaign’s goose in one arrogant and grandiose gesture.  I predict that the groundswell of disgust over Romney’s comment will outlive the news day and define his campaign. Seeing that his competition is the corrupt and hypocritical Newt Gingrich, it’s still possible that Romney could win the nomination.  I just don’t see it, though.  Unless Jon Huntsman’s dad manages to buy the New Hampshire primary, it looks like the Newt.  But even if Mitt does win the nomination, I can’t see independents or conservative Democrats voting for a guy who would intimidate his opponent with money during a debate.  And I believe that a large horde of poor and rural Republicans will sit on their hands rather than vote for the rich boy.

It’s very possible that “You wanna bet” will be the quote of the campaign, similar to Reagan’s “Are you better off than four years ago?” quote of 1980 or Lloyd Bentson’s zing of Dan Quayle in 1988, “I knew Jack Kennedy and you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

My favorite quote that defined a campaign came in 1968, when Mitt’s Dad, George Romney, went from front runner to nobody in the Republican campaign in a matter of days for saying that he previously supported the Viet Nam War because he had been “brainwashed” during his trips over there. Nobody wants a brainwashed President.

Now the American people (if I may be so bold as to speak for them) don’t mind having a rich man serve as president and often elect them—both Bushes, Jimmy Carter, Jack Kennedy, FDR, we can go back to Washington, Adams and Jefferson, three of the wealthiest men of their time.  We just don’t like the rich to rub our noses in it, especially now when it seems that every day brings greater proof that the economic and tax policies of the past 30 years have led to the largest transfer of wealth in recorded history, the money flowing from the poor and the middle class directly into the pockets of the richest one percent of the population.

So at the end of the day, Mitt is following in his father’s tracks. Both men were among the most successful corporate leaders in the dominant industry of the time.  Both served as governor of a big northern state.  And now it looks as if both will be failed presidential candidates remembered for ruining his big chance with one foolish comment.

Yes, I’m betting that Romney will lose now.  But I’m not going to put any money on it.

Just before and during the 1960 presidential election cycle, there appeared an epidemic of media stories that posed the question, “Can a Catholic be president?”  The answer in most cases was why not, assuming that he (since the thought of a female president in those days would have been considered science fiction) follows the constitution and not the dictates of the Vatican. The conclusion was not surprising since the father (Joe Kennedy) of the candidate in question (JFK) controlled a company that at the time was one of the largest media advertisers in the country (Cutty Sark).

What’s interesting is the assumption back then that to participate as a candidate in a national election, the candidate couldn’t be too religious. A quick trip to church every few Sundays would do. In a sense, religion didn’t matter. The 1960’s of course represented the high point of secular humanism in the United States.  Wikipedia has a great working definition of secular humanism: a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment. It specifically rejects religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience or superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.

We can see just how far we have veered into allowing religion to affect our politics in two news stories today. The first is Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to overrule the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and not allow a perfectly safe birth control method to be sold over the counter to anyone as the dangerous acetaminophen is. This obvious sop to the religious right needs no further comment.

The second story revolved around a new television ad Rick Perry’s campaign is running. Here is the complete text of the ad, pulled from the Reuters report:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian. But you don’t have to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers wrote in 1996, as long as there are tests in schools, there will be prayers there also. As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion and I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I’m Rick Perry and I approved this message.”

In 30 seconds, Perry comes out in favor of public school prayer and the celebration of the rites of one religion in schools.  He implies that his opposition to gays serving openly in the military is a religious matter.  While he ends with a call to the amorphous concept of “faith,” all his examples have to do with but one faith.

That the Obama administration has not declared war on religion was made painfully clear by the decision to shoot down the FDA plan to make Plan B more accessible.  It’s ironic that the announcement came out on the same day as the news about the new Perry ad: the religious right believes that both Plan B and the Perry-supported vaccine that prevents cervical and other cancers will make more teenage girls break with fundamentalist Christian religious views and want to have sex (and here I thought that hormones and young men sealed that deal).  Of course, it’s possible that Perry would have supported Plan B, too, if Teva Pharmaceuticals had given his campaign enough money.

But Texas Rick Perry is little more than a footnote to history.  What’s disturbing is that someone who had a viable shot at the presidency, even for just a few short weeks,  should make wearing his religion on his sleeve central to his campaign.

What’s even more disturbing is that he’s not the only one: A majority of the Republican presidential candidates have openly declared the centrality of Christianity to their political views.  The rest of the list of fanatics includes Santorum, Bachmann, Gingrich and former candidate Cain.

The fact that about two-thirds of the country practices or affiliates with the religion in question does not excuse the professions of faith that seem increasingly de rigueur for candidates. We may have a large Christian majority, but we are not a Christian country. We don’t have a King who was crowned by a Pope or Archbishop. Nowhere is there a reference to one specific religion in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.  In fact, the first amendment explicitly prevents government favoring one religion over any other. Although many Americans have deep, often Christian, faith, we are not by definition a nation whose government or governance is faith-based.

Call me a cranky old man, but I miss the good old secular humanist days when religious candidates were marginalized and the country was dedicated to creating a more equitable distribution of wealth. Today, in our era of rich and poor, the religious fanatics are taken ever more seriously by the mainstream media.

The connection of the growth of religion in politics and the growing inequitable distribution of wealth is important to note. The final ascension to political power by the right, consummated by Newt and Bush II, came only through the marriage of right-wing free market, low-tax economics with the social agenda of right-wing Christians. It is only now, in the throes of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, that evangelicals are beginning to realize that the deal they forged has economically left behind millions of their number.