TAP WATER OF LIFE

As I write this I am sipping on a glass of unfiltered tap water. And I am not keeling over and dying. This may come as a shock to you if, like most Americans, you would sooner drink warm, flat, diet caffeine free RC cola from your deceased grandmother’s attic than tap water, and consider it the healthier choice to boot. Drinking tap water is to the twenty-first century what bloodletting was to the twentieth century, a previously mainstream practice that everyone now recognizes as hazardous and, if taken too far, potentially fatal. Our enlightenment as to the dangers of tap water has coincided with the meteoric rise of bottled water. Since the breakthrough in plastics technology in the mid 1980’s that allowed the safe, convenient distribution of the single-serving translucent water-baring vessel, bottled water has saved millions of American lives from the silent killer lurking in our kitchen sinks and garden hoses. How else to account for the fact that in 2004 Americans purchased 26 billion liters of a liquid that they can get virtually free nearly everywhere they go? But since we all know that tap water will not really kill or even harm you, at least in America, the obvious question is why. Why, when we are willing to risk running out of gas to drive across town to save 2 cents per gallon, will we then go into the gas station quik-mart and pay a buck-fifty for something we can get for free from the sink in the quik-mart bathroom about twenty feet away?

Of course, another obvious question is why bother asking the first question this late in the game? Bottled water is now so visible it has attained the invisibility of the taken-for-granted; the average American now drinks an eight ounce “glass” of bottled water every day. We do not even see bottled water as bottled water anymore, we just see it as water. It no longer occurs to us that we are paying for something that we can still get for free. Bottled water’s transformation into water reflects a shift in American consciousness that dates back to the emergence of mainstream bottled water in the ‘80’s, but in twenty-five years is already so deep-rooted that it has made our consumption of bottled water nothing less than automatic. We would rather buy water than get it for free because we now automatically believe we are getting something when we buy bottled water that we don’t get out of the tap. The question of why we line up to pay 10,000 times more for a bottle of water than a glass of tap (according to Wikipedia) is important only if it is a springboard to understanding what we think we are getting in those plastic bottles. The new American consciousness desires to pay for what is free; how did this genie get out of, or should I say in, the bottle?

To understand what Americans are really buying when they pay for their bottled water one must first apprehend the central place that water holds in the western psyche. Water is used for purifying and cleansing rituals in two of the four major western religions, Judaism and Islam. But for those two western religions that shape the American consciousness, Christianity and Empiricism, the potency of water is revealed by both faiths’ vision of a “water of life.” Water is, symbolically, life itself. For Christians, water even exceeds life as Eternal Life (which I translate as living in God’s Kingdom in this moment here on Earth): “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water which I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14) The Christian journey into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom “right here, right now”, to quote early ‘90’s one-hit-wonders Jesus Jones, begins, of course, with baptismal immersion into water. To be born into the eternal life of Christianity is literally to be dipped into the water of life.

There is no greater challenge, and nothing more important in a Christian life than taking up the Gospel admonition to “love thine enemy.” But this Gospel teaching obtains because God’s love, symbolized as the light of the sun and the water of rain (which is a blessing in the sense of rain for your crops, and not, as often misinterpreted, a curse in the sense of “rain, rain, go away”) reaches all, even one’s enemies: “You have heard that it was said ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) To live is to bathe in the blessing of God’s rain. Every act of hate, even against a deserving enemy (and there are no shortage of those in this world), is one step further into an arid dessert while God’s Kingdom is a rain forest. If God Is Love, and all life is a product of God’s love, then to drink from the water of life is to draw sustenance from the very source of life, eternal or otherwise.

But if water is central to the symbolic universe of the Christian religion, it is equally important for its rival claimant to the American consciousness. I place Empiricism, that soulless offspring of the western “Enlightenment”, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as the fourth major western religion because it’s scientific discoveries are a distant second to its primary function as a culture-bound belief system. The recent “Intelligent Design” debate illustrates how incompatible the dueling belief systems of Empiricism and Christianity have become as now predominately practiced, which is to say that they have both mutated into closed, fundamentalist belief systems. As such, they are both useless to a would-be Good Society, and have reduced us all to bickering over whose reductionist, fundamentalist worldview gets to be taught in our rag-tag public schools. The boundary between healthy religion and empiricism is blurry, and a Good Society would encourage its students to engage with the shades of gray rather than build a Berlin Wall between the two. Albert Einstein, our greatest scientist, perceived this blur: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.”

Welcome to uninspired empiricism. And just as the water of life feeds the spiritual beings of Christianity, it likewise nourishes the biological beings of empirical science. Water is, if anything, even more central to the empirical view of life than its spiritual counterpart. Biological beings don’t just drink from the water of life, they are the water of life. We have all heard the statistic about how the human body is approximately 180% water in composition, with the corollary injunction to drink 39 eight ounce glasses of water per day (it was not until I began my current job in a hospital that I learned that drinking water by the gallon could actually kill you; we watch our heavy water drinkers like hawks so that they don’t dilute their bodies’ sodium levels to fatal levels- think about that the next time you are on your fifth one-liter bottle of Evian of the day). But as the empiricists adore nothing more than facts, I found this rather succinct passage that nicely captures the fact that we are basically walking water balloons:

“Water is of major importance to all living things; in some organisms, up to 90 percent of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water, blood is 82 percent water, and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. The unique qualities and properties of water are what make it so important and basic to life. The cells in our bodies are full of water. The excellent ability of water to dissolve so many substances allows our cells to use valuable nutrients, minerals, and chemicals in biological processes. Water's ‘stickiness’ (from surface tension) plays a part in our body's ability to transport these elements all through ourselves. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolised and transported by water in the bloodstream. No less important is the ability of water to transport waste material out of our bodies.” (Interestingly, I found this passage at www.reiki.nu, a website devoted to the practice of reiki. Reiki is a healing tradition which straddles the boundaries between science, as evidenced by its empirical take on water, and spirituality, as its therapy is basically a “laying on of hands” as we would call it in the Episcopal Church. Although, as I understand it, there is no actual touching in reiki, but the healing does transpire between the healer’s hands and the patient’s body. I have no firsthand knowledge of the “empirical” benefits of reiki, unlike my straight teeth, which were incontrovertibly courtesy of my halitosis-plagued orthodontist. But the idea of reiki as I understand it, the blending of empirical scientific knowledge with a recognition of humans as spiritual beings, is exactly the kind of marriage between Science and Religion that is unimaginable to everyday, mainstream America. In our current climate your full buffet of choices is between being either a practicing religious nutball who, if you don’t shoot abortion clinic doctors yourself, regularly lunches with them, or being Mr. Spock, only without his gift for mind-melding or neck-pinching prowess, i.e. all the logic and none of the sex appeal. So even if reiki is as empirically therapeutic as a tanning salon, the reiki people are definitely on to something, which is basically the possibility that the human race lives out the 21st century.)

Water also has a key secondary meaning in the symbolic world of empiricism. This identity reached full bloom with the broadcast on NBC in 1983 of the science fiction Miniseries V. V was your basic aliens-invade-Earth-to-eat-the-humans sci-fi fare, but with a twist. In addition to dining on Earth’s multiethnic population cum cuisine, the “visitors” also wanted our water, to be hauled away in their super-sized flying saucers. V, in addition to offering grade-A network TV entertainment (how I long for the days of network mini-series as cultural event amidst the current TV dessert of the real(ity)), cemented water’s status as Precious Resource. With this move, the empirical worldview, having laid the foundation of the body, or the internal, as water, now linked the “environment”, or the external, to water in similarly concrete fashion. The biological future of our bodies as water, i.e. the future of our very selves, became intrinsically connected to the future of the Precious Resource.

Salvation is just as real for the empirical worldview as it is for the Christian worldview. But unlike Christians, who would save us by saving our souls, empiricists will save us by saving our water (just to spell it out, remember, we are made from water- saving our water is literally saving us). Of course, empiricists must keep their need for salvation hidden from themselves (much like how as a Carolina fan I bury my need for Duke beneath a mountain of hate for Duke; Carolina fans all acknowledge that we can’t live with Duke, but we are all in denial of the fact that we can’t live without Duke). Empiricists hide their thirst for salvation in the best hiding place of all, the English language. On its website the United Nations preaches a little of the empirical Gospel: “Water is essential for life. Water is crucial for sustainable development, including the preservation of our natural environment and the alleviation of poverty and hunger. Water is indispensable for human health and well being.” The last line is invisible, but you can see it nonetheless. It reads “water will save us all”. Codewords like “sustainable development” and “the alleviation of poverty and hunger” are the empiricist’s equivalent of God’s Kingdom realized here on Earth (and with the way things are going they are as realistic as Jesus’ second coming).

Apparently, like the Millenarians, the Empiricists at the UN believe the time for salvation is already here, as they have declared the “International Decade for Action: Water For Life, 2005 to 2015.” But just as the year 2000 came and went for the Millenarians without the anticipated Rapture, the Decade for Action will leave the Empiricists struggling with a world still very much in crisis. Fundamentalist Christians and Empiricists are, ironically, in the same boat together. This boat sits on a lake of symbolic water, and, with passengers unable to compromise, it is taking on that water at an alarming rate. Perhaps if we all drink enough bottled water we can bail the boat out.

We are, indeed, up to something with all of this bottled water, and it does have something to do with salvation. Only it is a kind of salvation that neither the Christians nor the Empiricists had planned for us. Which, having sounded water’s depths for both Christianity and Empiricism, brings us back to the question of what we think we are getting in the bottle that does not flow from the tap. If one understands that Christianity and Empiricism, the bickering fraternal twins that divide the American mind, both regard water as life, then the necessary conclusion is that the act of purchasing a bottle of water is, symbolically, the attempt to purchase life.

This unsettling conclusion relates similarly to both the empirical and spiritual worldviews, as long as we remember that the Empiricists are every bit as on about salvation as the Christians. In order to streamline the discussion I am going to collapse the Christians and the Empiricists into one camp, a move that rests on my argument that the “saved” condition that the UN’s water-smitten Empiricists describe above is also a de facto state of grace. Just as Marx’s classless society was always just religion for atheists, the Empiricists’ vision of the salvation of and, implicitly, by water is a messianic movement for the secular (It is a testament to the potency of Jewish spiritual thinking that, try as we might, westerners are unable to get over the Messiah thing; it matters not whether the messiah is Jesus Christ, classless society, or H2O, we all just need to be saved.).

To get a better sense of the public act of bottled water consumption requires that we go behind closed doors. Bottled water’s first cousin, filtered water, is every bit as prominent inside the American home as bottled water is in the public square (To give a sense of how my home functions, my wife purchased a water-filter/water-pitcher, the kind any normal person never changes the filter on, at some point in the last eighteen months. I have not seen it since the day she brought it home from Target. It may be in that secret part of the house I have no access to where my wife also keeps all of my socks.) The act of filtering water in the home is the most important clue to solving the mystery of bottled water (and yes, I do fancy Miss Scarlet). Since American tap water, by and large, does not need to be filtered to be safely consumed, the act of filtering water is almost entirely symbolic. The water we get out of our taps at home or out of drinking fountains or sinks in public is not physically unhealthy. But it is, as all of our filtered and bottled water attests, truly repulsive. Tap water, 99% of which has no discoloration or aftertaste issues (in fact, according to Wikipedia, “a lot of the bottled water is actually very close to, or in fact is, tap water”), is repulsive because of the very fact that it is free. This interpretation comes into focus with our handy clue, filtered water.

Filtering water is a ritual of purification. Again, since American tap water does not need to be purified of any physically harmful content, the question remains as to what is being filtered out. The water of life that flows out of our taps is free, the equivalent of a gift. Quenching our thirst from the tap-water of life is drinking life as a gift, as a blessing, as grace that can be granted but never earned. Drinking free, healthy tap water is a powerful symbolic act. It links us directly to the source from which it flows, sans intermediary, and it links us to one another, as we all drink from the same source when we drink tap water. The act of drinking tap water is, symbolically, accepting that life is a gift of love, and is, at the same time, the choice to receive this gift in humble gratitude. The act of filtering tap water is symbolically the act of purifying the water by removing the state of grace.

I have said more than once that Christianity and Empiricism are dueling for the hearts and minds of America. This is, actually, abundantly false. They are both pretenders to a throne already buckling under the fat ass of American Consumerism, the fifth and final major western religion. It is America’s fundamentalist faith in Consumerism that makes the purification of tap water, via the filtration of any trace of grace, an act of salvation. The act of choosing to receive the freely given gift of grace is, by the logic of Consumerism, sinful, impure. We still like to believe the Beatles when we hear their anachronistic lyrics: “money can’t buy me love”. Consumerism knows differently, that love can only be bought. Love freely given and received has been made into an impure love. This type of love, the kind symbolized by the water flowing from our taps, must be purified. You don’t do anything chemically significant to water when you run it through your twelve dollar Target charcoal filter/pitcher. But, by running your tap water through that cheap plastic merchandise, you are processing your water through the marketplace. Like Holy Communion which symbolically transforms wine into the Blood of Christ, the filtration of tap water is a transfiguration of a free, i.e. repulsive, tap- water of life into a potable, i.e. commodified, form. Water that has been purified is water that has been Saved.

The salvation of water that begins with the sacrament of filtration is completed by the sacrament of bottling. Processing water through the marketplace, as one does with the variety of store-bought filters (someone who hooks up one of those expensive gadget filters directly to the tap displays more religious fervor than your cheap charcoal filter/pitcher type, but they are praying to the same God) is not enough. The water of life must not only be purified, it must be contained, which is literally accomplished every time a plastic screw-top tightens down on a bottle of water. Even better, bottling water for sale irrevocably marks the water of life as property that can be bought and sold. Bottling, then, is actually the final step in the filtration process. The water of life is completely purified of repulsive grace once it is bottled and tagged with a price. Bottled water says, yes, you can buy me love. In fact, bottled water tells us that in 21st century America, true, or pure love can only be bought.

It turns out the Millenerians may have been on to something after all. Bottled water consumption grew steadily since the mid-1980’s, but in the years bracketing the turn of the millennium, from 1994 to 2004, bottled water sales shot through the roof with a 75% increase (according to data available at www.wcponline.com). The sheer tonnage of bottled water, in addition to the billions of gallons filtered in the home, indicate that a cultural tipping point has been passed. The Millenerians may have expected the end of the material world, but they unwittingly witnessed the end of the world as we know it. The Beatles’ world has given way to REM’s, who saw the end of the world coming in 1987, right when bottled water began to seep up all around us. The world has come to an end, but like REM, we all seem to feel fine. Perhaps because we are all so well hydrated. Or maybe because we really believe that true love in a bottle is only ever $1.50 away.

I would like to think that the glass of tap water I drank at the beginning of this essay was an act of rebellion. Maybe it was no accident that my wife brought home the water filter, and that it sits unused, but lurking, somewhere (beneath my socks). This tenuous situation symbolizes how close we are at all times to being seduced by the belief that you get (only) what you pay for. But every glass of tap water is a testament to the old-timey religion that this “intermarried” Jewish/Christian couple can agree on: the best things in life are free.

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WELCOME TO THE BIG HOUSE

If Alexis de Tocqueville were allowed to time travel to 21st Century America to get a sense of how things turned out, but was only allowed to observe us via the four major broadcast networks’ primetime offerings, his initial impression might be that the number of professions in America had shrunk to four. The blacksmiths, printers, innkeepers, farmers, canal operators, stay-at-home moms and slaves that dotted the 19th Century American landscape are nowhere to be seen on NBC, ABC, Fox, or CBS. de Tocqueville would be left to conclude that a significant minority of Americans are various and sundry medical professionals (which he would certainly see the irony of if allowed to tour actual America and discover 45 million Americans without access to health care), and that a privileged few hundred Americans earn their keep as reality TV contestants. But de Tocqueville would surely surmise that the vast bulk of Americans make a living on opposite sides of the same coin, either solving or committing crime.

de Tocqueville, however, is both dead and French, and even if Michael J. Fox pulled up in my driveway with a Flux Capaciter-equipped Delorean, I am honor bound as an American not to enable French time travel until either Lance Armstrong is elected President of France or a Pepe LePew documentary wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Merci beaucoup Alexis, but on with the discussion.

A quick scan of the primetime listings for said networks this week reveals that 21 different crime dramas filled 26 of the available primetime slots. This total does not even include the primetime news-magazine fare, which this week includes Dateline NBC’s investigation of a mother charged with the murder of her daughter, 60 Minutes’ take on American drug laws and (unrelated) possible terrorist attacks, another Dateline NBC episode dedicated to police pursuit of online predators, and 48 Hours Mystery’s look at a teenage baby-sitter charged with murder (the other newsmagazines, e.g. 20/20 {which should have closed shop when Barbara Walters stepped down; no Mr. Rogers means no Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the same logic applies here}, did not have their topics listed on the Yahoo TV listings, but I would bet my wife’s dowry that they each bravely creep into hitherto unreported back alleys of American crime).

Here are the current crime dramas available to all Americans (not having a TV disqualifies one as an American), even those too poor to afford cable (although, if you believe what you see on TV, such folks are as likely to appear as subjects on the crown jewel of crime drama TV, Cops, as they are to watch it):

Ø On Sundays catch Cold Case on CBS at 8, about unsolved crimes which are no longer so by the time you tune in Law & Order: Criminal Intent on NBC at 9. L&O:CI establishes Rule One of hit crime dramas: franchise them. There is no such thing as overkill when it’s about killing people, be it by criminals or the state (you can say one thing about America’s death penalty-it sure adds to the suspense in a good crime drama).

Ø Monday kicks off with 24 on Fox, the whole appeal of which is that its star crime fighter is a former big-screen actor; Kiefer Sutherland puts everything into his role as agent Jack Bauer because he must in every scene prove that he is better than a TV actor. The suspense of this high wire act carries the show; if Sutherland blinks, the whole thing crumbles. The fact that Sutherland is on season 5 of this show and shows no sign of letting up on the Gary-Wiliams-during-a-Terps-game-intensity leads me to conclude that he is either on drugs or a robot sent back from the future. At 10, Tivo Medium, an obscure NBC offering whose central conceit is psychic crime fighting (and is, inevitably, billed as based on a real life psychic crime fighter- you could not have a serious crime drama based on psychic powers without linking it to reality- NBC should just turn it into the comedy it is aching to be and they might have a hit on their hands), while you watch CSI:Miami, another example of Rule One in which David Caruso, after a miserable go of it on the big screen, is like Rick Pitino comfortably returning to the college sidelines after flopping with the Celtics. Keifer Sutherland is USC’s Pete Carrol, somewhat successful in the big leagues, dominant after demotion to the minors, and obviously conflicted about the simultaneous urges to continue dominance and to bet the house on a triumphant return to the bigs.

Ø Tuesday opens with CBS’ NCIS at 8, which appears to exist solely to attract confused viewers who thought they were tuning in to CSI. CBS follows up with Criminal Minds at 9, featuring FBI agents who attempt to stop crime before it occurs, which (like the Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report of 2002), exists to support the twin post 9/11 American practices of profiling and pre-emptive war to prevent terrorism before it occurs. Another version of NBC’s ubiquitous franchise, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, cashes in again for NBC at 10. And who can resist the holy trinity of James Spader, Candice Bergen, and William Shatner at 10 on ABC’s Boston Legal. Shatner alone, as ever, is worth the price of admission.

Ø Wednesday plays fast and loose with the crime drama rules, opening with NBC’s E-Ring at 8, which styles itself as a military drama, but is actually a cop show in soldier’s clothing featuring those world police also known as the US military. Fox’s tired take on forensic science, Bones, airs at 9. Ten o’clock on Wednesday is crime drama’s witching hour, as three out of four networks bring the heat. The original, legendary Law&Order, which out of respect for its gravitas should only be watched in syndication after aging like a fine wine, airs on NBC (you just know there was a moment after Friends finally gave up the ghost that NBC considered filling its entire prime-time lineup with versions of Law&Order; perhaps an episode of Law&Order could be devoted to uncovering what stopped them, as the rest of NBC’s lineup is nothing short of criminal). Counterpunching with their own heavyweight franchise, CBS offers CSI:NY, whose psychological underpinning is investigating the crime scene that is New York after 9/11. Knowing they are toast, ABC throws Invasion to the lions at 10. Invasion features a park ranger fighting crime committed by aliens of the outer space variety. Like NBA coaches, Invasion was clearly hired to be fired. If only they had the park ranger busting aliens from Latin America….

Ø Thursday brings us to CSI on CBS at 9, which has the dual distinction of launching a franchise and, even more impressively, founding an entire sub-genre, the forensic crime drama. Set in Las Vegas, CSI, like its cousin CSI:NY, plays off of its home city’s status as crime scene; this time the crime is the emptying of American wallets into the coffers of the gambling industry. Without A Trace, at 10 on CBS, expands the forensic investigation theme to include FBI psychological profiling to track missing persons; its legitimacy as programming sanctions the government’s attempts to identify terrorists via profiling.

Ø Friday opens with inJustice on ABC at 9, which shall be discussed at length below. CBS counters with Close To Home at 9, a legal drama interested in suburban crime whose take-home message is surely that crime is everywhere. CBS follows up with Numb3rs at 10, another take on forensics, as police use mathematics to solve crime. Much like Medium, Numb3rs should have been a half-hour sitcom, perhaps starring John Larroquette and definitely set in Cleveland. Math, done right, could be funny. But it will never be sexy.

Ø As if all that was not enough, Saturday is generally a reprise of the week in crime. NBC offers reruns-cum-grand-finale, dishing out a two hour Law & Order: Criminal Intent as main course with an hour of Law & Order as dessert. At 9, CBS counters with a rerun from its own franchise, as CSI:NY clocks overtime. All the while Fox is busy stirring a potion of reality, crime, law enforcement, and sub-cultural lifestyles to bring you that sad documentary of America’s desperate underbelly known as Cops at 8 and 8:30. Finally, at 9 on Fox, we close the week with America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back, which distills the logic of the crime drama to its forced choice essence: fight or commit crime. Join McGruff’s pack or he will take a bite out of you.

This guided tour of the major broadcast networks’ primetime offerings does not include syndicated programming, TV news, movies, newspapers, internet etc., each of which flood the information superhighway with equal measures of crime content. The manageable size of network primetime allows the suffocating sprawl of crime based programming, which covers primetime like kudzu on a Carolina pine, to act as microcosmic representative of a macrocosm obsessed with crime. The American obsession with crime, as displayed in all of our various media, might simply make for passable escapist entertainment if it was not paired with a compulsion (in clinical language compulsions = actions, obsessions = thoughts) of equal proportions. America has a collective Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when it comes to crime, and it is the compulsive component of American OCD that puts the bite in McGruff’s bark.

Americans have been compulsively locking one another behind bars for the last twenty-five years in a process some have termed the criminalization of America. But before cataloguing this process, a close reading of two new primetime network programs reveals that the criminalization of America, much like Francis Fukuyama’s history, has come to an end. History has ended for Fukuyama because history’s evolution has reached what he deems its end-point, liberal democracy (of course, Fukuyama forgot to tell the Muslims). The criminalization of America has reached its own end-point, America-as-prison. Fortunately, you don’t have to read Fukuyama to receive this wisdom, you just have to turn on your TV and tune in Prison Break or inJustice.

Fox is in the final year of an eight year contract for the right to broadcast National Football League games of the NFC variety. For this right Fox paid the NFL $4.4 billion (a figure roughly equivalent to the 2004 gross domestic product of Madagascar). The NFL’s rates continue to rise, as Fox will shell out $4.2 billion to broadcast games for the next 6 years (it doesn’t take the math experts at Numb3rs to realize that the NFL is accumulating Serious Money, putting the NFL, after you include the fees from 3 other networks, on par with Harvard, whose endowment topped $25 billion in September ’05, slotting Harvard between the GDP for Bulgaria and Guatemala; if Harvard doesn’t cure cancer or land on Venus by 2050 they should have to give the money to Yale). There is no way that Fox can make a profit from the advertising money they receive for running commercials during NFL games. $4.4 billion is just too big a number to match with the limited amount of NFL programming that Fox can air (6 hours per Sunday, 16 weeks per year, plus 3 more weeks for playoffs, and, every 3 years, the Super Bowl- that’s the sum total). But Fox is in the business of making money. Fox, unlike the US government, does not specialize in corporate welfare (which Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) estimates at $125 billion annually), so you can bet the bean counters at Fox have calculated down to the cent what they can expect to profit from broadcasting the NFL.

All of which brings us, at last, to Prison Break (whose absence from the list above is due to a current brief hiatus-it is due back on 3-20-06). Fox pays the NFL its pound of flesh because the NFL delivers the demographic Fox desires most, young affluent males. Chevy and Budweiser buy ad time on NFL games to access this demographic, which is nice for Fox, but Fox’s real agenda is the promotion of its own primetime lineup. I spent Sunday afternoons this fall as I have since the second grade. After a brief, ultimately unsatisfying early flirtation with the Minnesota Vikings, autumn Sundays have been devoted to watching my Washington Redskins (and I know the mascot is racist, but like a gay Catholic who refuses to leave the church he loves in the hopes of reforming it from within, I stick with the Redskins in the hope that someday they will proudly sport a redskin potato on the side of their helmet; which idea I swear my college roommate had years before I heard it voiced by Tony Kornheiser). As an NFC squad, the Skins are almost always on Fox, which is how I first became aware of Prison Break. From the promo’s on Fox alone I learned that Prison Break was about a young man choosing to be sent to prison (via a crime, which I learned from the show’s web site was robbing a bank-which was a great choice for audience sympathy because we all aspire to bank robbing in a way that we don’t aspire to, say, carjacking) in order to break out his unjustly imprisoned brother.

While I am usually foaming at the mouth and throwing things at the television during Skins games (my wife has rightly banished me to the basement during games to keep me away from our daughter, lest I frighten her. During the 2004 season when our daughter was a newborn we could never figure out why she was up crying every Sunday night, until the Skins bye week when she was her usual, delightful self. It has been the basement ever since.), Prison Break was such an anomaly that it penetrated my ninja-like focus on the product of Joe Gibbs’ genius (which competitive genius puts Gibbs on my all-time genius Mt. Rushmore with Einstein, Freud, and Lao Tzu). Prison Break pierced my consciousness during a Skins game like nothing has since Joe Theissman’s compound fracture pierced his leg, courtesy of a possibly high Lawrence Taylor, in 1985.

Prison Break shocked me out of my immediate concerns, i.e. the Skins’ lack of a reliable second wide receiver and their inability to generate a pass rush with their defensive front four, by flouting the logic of American crime drama. According to this immutable logic, justice is upheld by putting people in prison. By pursuing justice through the act of breaking people out of prison, Prison Break flips the crime drama script. Prison Break is as radical as the idea of Joe Gibbs allowing all of his opponents to score at will, and winning his fourth Super Bowl as a result (although Joe Gibbs is a born-again Christian, I doubt his faith extends to a belief that the last shall ever be first to hoist the Lombardy Trophy).

As provocative as Prison Break’s emergence onto the primetime scene was, it appeared to be the exception that proves the crime drama rule. Then, it must have been during Monday Night Football, I saw a promo for the new ABC crime drama inJustice, which is about lawyers springing the unjustly imprisoned by overturning their wrongful convictions. inJustice throws traditional crime drama a bone by tacking on a conviction of the real criminals (it certainly could not air on network TV without this addendum), but it is just window dressing. inJustice works not because it locks up criminals, which would make it like every other crime drama and therefore irrelevant, but because its logic of restoring justice by liberating the unjustly imprisoned rests on a fundamental shift in the American experience.

The American experience has heretofore been the game of cops and robbers. To live in America is to play one of the two roles. The game’s twist is that, regardless of what it says in the Declaration of Independence, all robbers are not born equal. The cops actually work for one set of “fortunate” robbers, who employ them to arrest and generally intimidate the “less fortunate” robbers. This game went on for decades, and could have gone on indefinitely if the game’s equilibrium had not been disturbed. For decades the fortunate robbers had the cops imprison just enough of the less fortunate robbers to keep things under control (i.e. to the fortunate robbers’ liking), as reflected by the relatively stable number of imprisoned Americans. In 1980, this all began to change, as the fortunate robbers began to have their cops imprison more and more of the less fortunate robbers. As more and more of us have been imprisoned, we have become obsessed with crime and the legal machinations that pump out prisoners with all of the efficiency of Henry Ford’s assembly line.

This obsession with the new high stakes version of cops and robbers is written all over our primetime lineup. But Prison Break and inJustice announce that America has passed a tipping point, beyond which our roles as cops and robbers are null and void. Prepare to hand over your black hat in exchange for prison stripes, as we are now all prisoners and prison guards. (My cops and robbers metaphor is obviously cribbed from Marxist theory. I am certainly not a proponent of the miserable results born from the attempt to actualize Marxist theory in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. But in a world where the only alternative to extreme global capitalism is extreme Islamic fundamentalism, and in which the confrontation between the two threatens to engulf us in flames, a Marxist critique suddenly feels like a fresh breeze. Certainly, when Jihad and McWorld {to borrow Benjamin Barber’s delightful turn of phrase} are about to blow each other up, and with Stalin now 50+ years in his grave, a Marxist critique is not only less threatening, it has the clear ring of sanity to it amidst our deepening madness. Marx’s greatest gift to society was not his vision of a classless society, as clearly we are centuries, at least, from that dream. Instead, it was his critique of capitalism, which remains the gold standard, and should be applied liberally and rigorously to our current mess.)

A brief look at the numbers tells the story of what some have called the Criminalization of America. But if we are all already robbers, some of us just better connected, then America, much as the sausage biscuits in my fridge come pre-cooked, comes pre-criminalized. In recognition of this along with the fundamental shift from cops and robbers to prisoners and prison guards, I prefer to call it the Incarceration of America. While reviewing the data that tell this tale, keep in mind the Benjamin Disraeli line made famous by Mark Twain, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The use of statistics is akin to connecting the dots, which offers infinite possibilities if you forget that there is a pattern to be rigidly followed. This is both liberating, because you may discover something lurking in those dots that you were not supposed to see, and dangerous, as you may be reading into those dots like a Rorschach test. But this danger is preferable to the danger of following the dots as prescribed, which is to effectively put your life on autopilot. With these caveats in mind, it is time to connect the dots freestyle. Just don’t be surprised if the picture that emerges is of you or your neighbor behind bars.

According to the US Bureau of Justice statistics, the number of incarcerated felons (essentially those sentenced to a year or more) remained relatively stable from 1920 to 1980. In 1925 there were approximately 100,000 sentenced felons in the United States. By 1980 this number had only grown to 315,974, a fairly reasonable increase over fifty-five years given the growth in the American population during this period. By the end of 2003, less than twenty-five years later, the number of sentenced felons had increased to 1,470,045. This over four-fold increase in imprisoned Americans since 1980 is even more striking in graphic form, when you can see the prison rate spike like Bush I’s approval rating after Operation Desert Storm. When you include the number of Americans locked up in local jails the number jumps again, to 2,212,475. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does the math and finds that “as of 12/31/03, one in every 140 US residents was confined in a state or federal prison or a local jail.”

To put the Incarceration of America into perspective, consider that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but now has 25% of the world’s prisoners. In raw numbers, the US now has 2.2 million out of the world’s 9 million prisoners, putting us a comfortable 700,000 prisoners ahead of second place China at 1.5 million, and a solid 1.4 million prisoners ahead of third place Russia’s 820,000. Even more impressively, if this were a World’s Strongest Man competition the US would not only win the honor of lifting more total prisoners than any other nation, the US would also out-lift China and Russia pound-per-pound. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the United States incarcerates 724 per every 100,000 citizens. Russia lags well behind at 577 per 100,000, and China looks like a 98 pound weakling at 118 per 100,000. With every American incarceration we kick sand in China’s face.

When you add the 4,073,987 Americans on probation and the 774,588 Americans on parole to the 2.2 million Americans incarcerated, you get the staggering sum of 6,934,200 Americans under the control of the US judicial system, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Switzerland (and that’s as of 2003; the numbers only keep rising). And just to get a taste of how the incarceration of America weighs even heavier on people of color (which would take another whole essay to tackle in depth), consider that 12% of all Black males in their 20’s were incarcerated in 2003, and one out of every three (32%) Black males in this age group were under control of the judicial system by 1995.

The origin of the incarceration of America is no great mystery. It is not as if the Soviets managed to contaminate our water supply in 1980, turning us all into lawless thugs. The moral fabric of America did not somehow spontaneously combust in 1980, sending us all out into the streets to commit 400% more crime. But Ronald Reagan did enter office in 1981. There has long been a so-called War-On-Drugs in America, but it went nuclear under President Reagan. Reagan promised morning in America, but here are the cold, hard facts of nuclear winter in America:

Ø According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), American drug arrests tripled from 1980 to 1997.

Ø CJCJ reports that “fully 76% of the increase in admissions to America’s prisons from 1978 to 1996 was attributable to non-violent offenders, much of that to persons incarcerated for drug offenses.”

Ø Continuing with the theme of non-violent prisoners, CJCJ found that “in 1997, 4 out of 5 drug arrests (79.5%) were for possession, with 44% of those arrests for marijuana offenses.”

Ø “While the number of persons imprisoned in state institutions for violent offenders nearly doubled from 1980 to 1997, the number of non-violent offenders has tripled, and the number of persons imprisoned for drug offenses has INCREASED ELEVEN-FOLD.” (CJCJ, but with my italics and caps for emphasis)

Ø “Nearly one in four persons imprisoned in the US is imprisoned for a drug offense. The number of persons behind bars for drug offenses is roughly the same as the entire prison and jail population in 1980.” (CJCJ, but again my emphasis)

No reasonable thinker could deny the correlation between the War-On-Drugs and incarceration rates in the United States. Asserting this correlation is powerful in and of itself, but stopping at such an assertion leaves even more fertile ground untilled. The War-On-Drugs is actually a War-On-Us, making incarcerated non-violent drug offenders prisoners of war. To end this war and liberate incarcerated America requires an understanding of the origins of this war on Americans, why it has flourished for twenty-five years, and how it is allowed to continue today. To get the whole sordid picture there yet remain a few dots to connect.

The incarceration of America and the War-On-Drugs triangulate with a simultaneous, third phenomena, an upsurge in the Concentration of American Wealth. Together they form a Bermuda Triangle into which American sanity has vanished. But before setting a direct course into the middle of this triangle, with the hope of locating our collective sanity and hauling it back to the mainland (I would sooner cheer for the Dallas Cowboys than utter the slightly creepy “Homeland”), here are the facts on the concentration of American wealth:

Ø “In the twenty-two years between 1976 and 1998, the share of the nation’s private wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, going from 22% to 38%.” (Office of Social Justice, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minnesota {OSJASPM})

Ø “In 1982 the wealthiest 400 individuals in the Forbes 400 owned $92 billion. By 2000 their wealth increased to over $4.2 trillion.” (OSJASPM)

Ø According to United For a Fair Economy, the change in average household net worth for the top 1% of Americans was +42.2%, while the change for the bottom 40% was -76.3%.

Ø “The richest 1% of Americans now own more than the bottom 90% of Americans.” (OSJASPM)

Ø Against the canard that the great number of Americans invested in the stock market insures a fair distribution of wealth, “over 86% of the value of all stocks and mutual funds, including pensions, was held by the top 10% of households. In 1998, the top 1% of Americans owned 47.7% of all stock.” (OSJASPM)

Ø “Among the industrialized nations, the US has the highest concentration of individual wealth- roughly three times that of the number two nation, Germany.” (UN Human Development Report-1998)

Ø “The top 5% own more than half of all wealth….The top 20% own over 80% of all wealth.” (Edward Wolff- New York University professor of economics)

Ø And, to add a dose of perspective, “Bill Gates alone has as much wealth as the bottom 40% of US households.” (OSJASPM)

You might argue that the Concentration of Wealth is just the American Way, where to the victor goes the spoils. The acceleration of the Concentration of Wealth might seem but a more efficient distribution of the rewards of meritocracy. By this line of reasoning the Concentration of Wealth is the equivalent of infusing the carrot that has spurred American ingenuity and entrepreneurship with healthy growth hormone. Concentration of Wealth thereby ensures a steadily growing economy for all. But the United States economy grew at a fantastic rate for much of the twentieth century, with no correlating rise in the Concentration of Wealth until the late 70’s. History, as told here by Edward Wolff, puts the lie to trickle-down economics:

“We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976. Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970’s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970’s…. Up until the early 1970’s, the US actually had lower wealth inequality than Great Britain, and even than a country like Sweden. But things have really turned around over the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a lot of countries have experienced lessening wealth inequality over time. The US is atypical in that inequality has risen so sharply over the last 25 or 30 years.”

The Concentration of Wealth in the hands of the few has nothing to do with extending benefits to all Americans via a healthy economy, and everything to do with concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. It is what it is, you might say. But the Concentration of Wealth’s being is not the result of Zen not doing. The concentrator’s of wealth have been ever so active, building foundation and walls out of the Incarceration of America and the War-On-Drugs, atop which rests their inestimable wealth like a roof. (But if you must have some Zen imagery: The Incarceration of America is the Concentration of Wealth’s meditative breath, and the War-On-Drugs is the very air it breathes.)

But I am getting ahead of myself, so first to connect those dots. Going back to the Cops and Robbers metaphor for America, I have a deeply cynical view of the relatively stable rate of incarceration and the downward trend in the Concentration of Wealth that obtained from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. While it is tempting to believe that certain crimes, like rape or murder, inherently equal incarceration (or, in America, the death penalty) the truth is that you could have a society in which there was no incarceration, even for rapists and murderers. Not that rapists and murderers would go unpunished, or that society would not protect itself from them, but that incarceration is but one answer among many to these problems. (I remember an episode of The Twilight Zone, I think it was the more recent version of the show, in which a man found guilty of a crime was punished with a brand on his forehead which directed all others to completely ignore his existence; the punishment was nothing less than soul crushing.)

Incarceration is not a given. However, once you institute incarceration as the default punishment for crime, you can incarcerate either all, some, or none of your citizenry according to how you define crime. For example, you could incarcerate everyone who speeds in their car, as speed does indeed kill; since everyone speeds, everyone would be in jail. Of course this would not work, because someone has to guard the prisoners, but you get the idea. There is no Platonic Form of incarceration floating out in the ether to which we should be aspiring.

The fundamental question in play here is whether incarceration is primarily an instrument of social control, or an instrument of justice. The understanding that incarceration is not a given, that its default status as punishment for crime is, at its core, strictly arbitrary, informs my stance. But the nefarious possibilities that open, like Pandora’s Box, the moment you give one set of homo sapiens the keys to lock up the others, is, for me, the deciding factor. These possibilities, e.g. the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, or e.g. the legal bridling of one in three young Black males, are exactly what makes incarceration, and its cousins probation and parole, such an effective tool for social control. If justice is blind, then a hypothetically just system of incarceration would necessarily be blind to differences of class and race. Here in the real world, incarceration makes an extravagant living as a growth industry by exploiting class and race. I have no doubts: Incarceration is first and foremost, or as our friends down under (who were originally a penal colony) would say, well and truly an instrument of social control.

With incarceration unmasked as an instrument of social control, the remaining task is to apply this understanding to the period of American history here under scrutiny. Acknowledging incarceration’s true function Re. social control underscores my earlier argument that the relatively flat rate of incarceration from 1920 to 1980 reflected a delicate balancing point. The rate at which the powers-that-be in America incarcerated their fellow citizenry was just enough to secure their grasp on the levers of power. Incarcerating significantly fewer Americans would have been to lift the foot off of the neck of the man pinned to the ground, in which case he might fight back. Incarcerating significantly more Americans would be to crush your foot into the man’s neck and cut off his air. With his life in the balance the man on the ground might find the strength of the truly desperate and go berzerker. The delicate point of balance was incarcerating just enough Americans to keep them on the ground underfoot, but not so many that they would revolt out of desperation. From 1920 until1980 the balance point held, and the powers-that-be kept their hands firmly on the levers of control.

But by the mid-1970’s the steadily decreasing concentration of American wealth, certainly the result of federal social programs such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, must have had the powers-that-be gripping their levers ever tighter in fear that they might be about to lose their grasp. Something had to be done, something to stem the flow of wealth to the other 90% of America, and, if possible, redirect the flow of wealth back to its accustomed home. Most importantly, something had to be done to keep the levers in the right hands. Enter, stage right, the War-On-Drugs and the Incarceration of America.

I want to be very explicit about what I am not saying as I complete the picture. There are those who argue that in the 1980’s the US Government, courtesy of the CIA, allowed crack cocaine to be brought to the streets of urban America by Nicaragua’s Contras, in order to raise money for the Contras’ war in Nicaragua. This basic story, which is not all that surprising if you recall what Ollie North was up to in the Middle East to fund the very same Contras (in an age when we are so sensitive to terrorism it is important to note that the US-funded Contras were basically a terrorist operation, but that is a subject for another day), has been spun into a conspiracy theory which holds that the US Government proactively introduced and distributed crack cocaine onto the streets of urban America.

The problem with such grand conspiracy theories is not only that they are inaccurate (although, again, the original story of a limited CIA-Contra-Crack connection appears to be true), but that they serve to distract attention from the far subtler but equally effective methods used by those in power to bend circumstances to their will. Those who hope to uncover a smoking gun which proves that the US Government actively spread crack in urban America are chasing a pie in the sky. Efforts to understand the abuse of power in America are not as simple as going from point A to point B, for example believing that since in one case the CIA allowed crack into America than the US government must therefore be a drug dealer. The tactics used by the powers-that-be to secure their privileges are slightly more complex. Their basic logic, as we shall see, is to mask the protection of their privileges in the sheep’s clothing of protecting everyone else’s best interests. These tactics are in the best hiding place ever conceived, right in front of our noses. Decoding the logic of these tactics is the Lasik eye surgery necessary to see what is staring you right in the face.

Having established that the US Government does not peddle street drugs, it is time to unpack the insidious methods it does use to promote the interests of the few over the many. When crack cocaine hit the streets of urban America in the early 1980’s the US Government had many choices in confronting the crisis; the War-On Drugs, like incarceration, is not a given. The primary decision to be made was whether to approach the problem from a public health or a criminal justice paradigm. There are no magic bullets, but the appropriate choice to mitigate the effects of substance abuse was obvious then, and even more obvious now after twenty-five years of the War-On-Drugs with nary a dent in the problem. So, if the obvious choice to confront America’s drug problem was ignored, then the obvious question is who benefits from the choice that was made?

Let’s go back to the metaphor of the Man with his foot on our necks. Recall the Man’s quandary, he can not press his foot any harder on our neck without risking our revolt. In the late 1970’s the powers-that-be were not in a position to press harder, to take the risk of reversing the slow decline in wealth concentration. In fact, it looked like they might finally be slipping off of the foothold of our necks. The powers-that-be, like ticket-less Deadheads, were in need of a miracle. The choice to frame drugs as an enemy rather than illness, and the ensuing declaration of War-On-Drugs, was like pulling Excalibur from its stone for the powers-that-be. They have had a sword to our neck ever since.

The War-On-Drugs is, like a light saber, an elegant weapon. This light saber resembles Darth Maul’s double-bladed piece (which light saber was the only cool element in the entire disastrous prequel trilogy). One blade of the saber cuts passively. The War-On-Drugs does nothing to heal the societal wounds of drug addiction, so all the symptoms of the plague of drug abuse remain untreated. Great swaths of urban America lie in virtual ruins from the ravages of drugs and the drug trade. These are the very communities which, if they had been helped rather than criminalized, would have remained whole. But in their wholeness this “bottom 40%” would never have stood by while their share of the American pie shrunk 76% while the “top 1%”’s share ballooned another 42%. After drugs, and especially after the War-On-Drugs, a once vital urban America is now too shattered and broken to put up a substantial fight, even as the blade now punctures its windpipe. The social safety net that directly benefited the “bottom 40%” has been largely dismantled in their greatest hour of need. (If you doubt that much of urban America resembles a bombed out war zone, you are welcome to drive with me through west Baltimore; I assure you it will end such doubts.)

As if that was not enough, the saber’s other blade cuts actively. If anyone appears threatening to the powers-that-be, it is angry young Black males. Filled with righteous anger, these Black males might rise up with their conscience-plagued White allies, just as they did in the Jim Crow south, and thwart the re-concentration of American wealth. (Martin Luther King Jr. may have been allowed to end Jim Crow, but is it any coincidence he was assassinated on the eve of his Poor People’s Campaign? I am not immune to all conspiracy theories.) With one in three young Black males under the control of the criminal justice system, courtesy of the War-On-Drugs, it is safe to say that this threat has been sufficiently blunted.

A versatile weapon, the War-On-Drugs also resembles Captain America’s shield, offering, amidst the carnage, the cover that the US Government is doing something about the drug problem. But blood from said carnage drips from the patriotically engraved shield; the blade-edged shield can be flung (like James Bond’s enemy Odd Job’s bowler hat) to maim all in its path before returning to Captain America like a boomerang.

The dots connect to form a triangle, one suspiciously like the pyramid depicted on our one dollar bill. The War-On-Drugs and the resulting Incarceration of America form the base angles of this pyramid. At the peak, separated by a never-to-be breached gap, rests the Top 1% and their concentration of wealth. A gigantic, disembodied eye looks ever outward in all directions, as the Top 1% has been entirely consumed by the hyper-vigilant guarding of their wealth.

Think all of this is impossible in a democracy? It now takes on average in excess of $800,000 to run a race for the US House of Representatives. The cost of a 2006 US Senate campaign will run about $10 million, and if you hope to unseat an incumbent you will have to outspend your opponent by double (both facts courtesy of the University of Washington’s communications department; the House number was drawn from MSN Encarta). And, according to The Washington Post, over 34,785 registered lobbyists now haunt Washington, DC, spending $2.1 billion in lobbying money to influence the votes of our elected decision-makers. To whose interests are these decision-makers responding? Chances are the 0.2% of American wealth that the “bottom 40%” controls does not buy them very much access on Capitol Hill.

I can not but also note that the Incarceration of America has only deepened with our response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001. President Bush famously stated that we were attacked because the enemy hates our freedoms. If this is so, then one devastating terrorist attack has already won the day for the enemy. It must be satisfying for the enemy to sit back and watch us dismantle the very freedoms which President Bush asserts they so passionately despise. To wit, there can be no more fundamental right in a democracy than the right to a fair trial. Post 9/11 America has witnessed the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” without trial, some of them US citizens. And nothing is more anathema to a free and open society than a Secret Police. With the recent revelation that the National Security Agency, per President Bush directive, has begun spying directly on US citizens on US soil, this slippery slope has now been greased. That these developments do not shock the population (I have heard no mention of them outside of the news media, i.e. from my fellow citizens- I have heard plenty about Dancing With the Stars; it appears they allow TV in prison), is testimony to how quickly we have grown accustomed to life behind bars.

Just so I am clear, I do not pretend that the defense of our country from those who would strike us is a matter to be taken lightly. But if we believe that freedom is at risk, we should do everything we can to preserve and strengthen the civil liberties and constitutional rights that make up the bulk of these freedoms. Sacrificing our civil liberties and constitutional rights to save our freedom is like cutting off our foot to save our toe. Perhaps we will be safer from terrorist attack if we do so, but in securing our safety from the enemy by these methods, the terrorists’ very goal of crushing freedom will become what deTocqueville would call a fait accompli. By the bye, it is very safe in solitary confinement. Perhaps that is where we are all headed.

This has been a lot to glean from the primetime lineup. Perhaps Prison Break and inJustice are just television shows, and nothing else. But my hope is that these two TV shows are the first glimmer of light on the horizon after a twenty-five year nightmare. These otherwise forgettable crime dramas may signal that America is at last waking up to the fact that we are all behind bars, together. In that case, the Incarceration of America could be the long dark night of the soul necessary prior to a collective spiritual awakening that will see not just a reversal of the concentration of wealth, but the birth of a deep seated Democratic Spirit that could shine forth to the world as a genuine example of democracy in action. At such a time I could embrace the goal of “spreading democracy”, as presumably it would not involve dropping bombs on the people to whom democracy was being spread.

I hope I am not reading too much into these TV shows. But just in case I am, I think I will learn to play the harmonica.

NOTHING IS THE NEW EVERYTHING

Americans do not believe that there can be too much of a good thing. We are, despite this belief, still subject to Newton’s third law. For the time being, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But our best scientists are busy liberating our actions from the chains of their equal and opposite reactions. Progress to this end is proceeding apace, as evidenced by the emergence of three meticulously engineered products on the market in recent years. Low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s and Viagra are here to empower the American consumer to get drunk, burn rubber, get laid and still wake up with rock hard abs, a clean conscious, and a rock hard (if not clean) cock. Americans are through paying the piper. But as the story goes, the spurned Pied Piper of Hamelin reacted to the people’s failure to pay for his rat-removal services by subsequently escorting the children of Hamelin to an early demise. Americans would do well to note this cautionary tale before chugging too much of the Budweiser Select. I have a feeling Sir Isaac has a thing or two on the brewmaster down at Anheuser-Busch.

Isaac Newton may have founded modern physics, but the wisdom expressed in his third law, that everything comes with a price, is, to quote the immortal John Denver, “older than the trees”. America’s beef with the wisdom contained in Newton’s third law is really a rejection of something much older than physics, namely the concept of sin.

America, for better or worse, has been soaked in religion since the day the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. By and large, we are still a church-going people, and most of us still voice a belief in God. But the bridle of religion has never rested easily on this prodigal folk, and almost 400 years post-Pilgrim we finally have secretly spit out the bit, gambling that our master at the reigns won’t notice. We still believe in God, and are interested in remaining in His good graces. What we have lost interest in are all the tedious rules handed down from on high. Ever practical, and always ingenious, Americans have solved the problem by remaking their relationship to the Almighty in the image of Diet Coke; all of God’s love and forgiveness but none of his rules. Just as Diet Coke replaced sugar with Nutrasweet, America has replaced sin with low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s, and Viagra. Each of these three products flushes one of the seven deadly sins down the toilet. Surely, four more products shall emerge that will complete the purging. For now it will suffice to review the extant elimination, keeping in mind that everything, even and especially the end of sin, comes at a price.

Low-carb beer, first introduced to the public in the form of Michelob Ultra and now joined in the Anheuser-Busch stable of beers by Budweiser Select, is the ultimate expression of the low-carb diet. Low-carb beer stands at the pinnacle of the low-carb lifestyle as the only available low-carb intoxicant, at least until someone cooks up some low-carb pot brownies. Low-carb beer not only gives you a buzz, it enhances that buzz with the frisson of getting away with it scot-free. Perhaps, liberated from its homely partner the beer belly, the beer belch could even prove seductive. With low-carb beer, the possibilities beckon, in a way that even the comeliest plate of low-carb fare can never approach. There is too much history to a plate of filet mignon and caviar, it is too wrapped up in the human drama of power and prestige to ever serve as a capable instrument in the American war on sin. Certainly, a plate of salisbury steak, scrambled eggs and Velveeta isn’t up to the task.

No, it is the newly crowned King of Low-Carb Beers, Budweiser Select, that must lead the charge to topple the signature American deadly sin, gluttony. The size of people shopping at Super-Walmart grows out of our super-sized fries and Super-Big Gulps. We are a land of Super-Gluttons. Budweiser Select, as champion of all that is low-carb, is here to tell America one thing: you do not need to change. Continue consuming mass quantities. Despite all the Michelob Ultra ads featuring sculpted twentysomethings slavishly pursuing physical fitness, raising a glass of low-carb beer is to reject the very discipline these ads so deceitfully glamorize. A finely tuned athlete may occasionally indulge in the odd pint of lager, but it is an indulgence precisely because beer is the opposite of physical fitness. Linking beer to physical fitness is like linking marijuana to studying for your final exam (there is a theory that if you study for an exam on a drug you will do better if you also use the drug during the exam- this may apply to caffeine, but until someone volunteers to take their organic chemistry final stoned I stand by my argument).

And yet, Anheuser-Busch profits surged the year they introduced Michelob Ultra. Kudos to Anheuser-Busch for tapping into America’s rejection of gluttony as sin by tapping a keg of Michelob Ultra. Through its portrayal of low-carb beer drinkers as quasi ancient Olympians, Anheuser-Busch has enabled a turning point in the war on gluttony as sin. For the sin of gluttony, the introduction of Michelob Ultra was like Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. The die is now cast. The sin of gluttony will continue to fight the good fight as it always has, offering the lesson for those who listen that overindulgence has its price. But Appomatox, the time when sin must surrender its old ally gluttony, looms. Like the southern warrior turning in his guns at Lee’s request, gluttony’s footsoldiers, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, must soon lay down their arms in the face of Budweiser Select’s overwhelming force.

Tucked in a pocket just below the expanding American waistline rests the expanding American wallet. Our gluttony is matched by its kindred spirit among the seven deadly sins, greed. You pay a stiff price for telling the truth in America, and in 1986 Ivan Boesky told the truth of America’s relationship to greed in an infamous speech at the commencement ceremony of the University of California, Berkeley (of all places!): “Greed is all right by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Later that year Boesky paid a 100 million dollar fine to the SEC, purportedly for the misdeed of insider trading. Boesky was really paying for his speech. The second Boesky made the speech, he had to pay, and the insider trading stuff was just the mechanism facilitating a public flogging of Boesky for blowing America’s cover.

But Boesky’s ultimate penalty came in the 1987 Hollywood film Wall Street. Hollywood, whose mythmakers exist to provide cover for America (the greatest example is 1986’s Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise, with lockstep cooperation from the United States Navy, glamorized America’s cold war campaign so brilliantly that Navy recruitment numbers immediately spiked. Six years later Hollywood, with uncanny foresight, cast Cruise in A Few Good Men, in which Cruise establishes that the military court system is more than capable of meting out justice should any instances of abuse arise in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Clearly more is at stake when Cruise wears a uniform than just ticket sales; when cruise plays soldier, or cop, as he did in 2002’s Minority Report, prepare to read the tea leaves. Minority Report, in which psychics predict crime so that it can be stopped before it happens, endorses the twin post-9/11 American tactics of profiling and pre-emptive war to stop terrorism before it happens.) cast Michael Douglas to play the Boesky role in Wall Street as a villain. We were so eager to embrace the idea of Boesky as villain that we thanked Douglas with an Oscar for so skillfully enabling us to do so. I don’t know Ivan Boesky, and he may be a greedy bastard, but all he did when he gave his speech was tell it like it is in America. In fact, until he slipped up by giving that speech, Ivan Boesky was a real American hero precisely because he was a greedy bastard.

So, as Douglas put it in his version of the speech in Wall Street, greed is good. Which brings us to the SUV. By now the SUV needs no introduction. We have even had an SUV backlash, but it has had only marginal impact on sales of the ubiquitous thirsty behemoths. The SUV’s bulletproof popularity is firmly rooted in its role as proud, if coded symbol of American greed. The code reads that Americans are rugged individuals who like big, rugged trucks for our big, rugged lives. The secret decoder comes in the form of a popular bumper sticker which depicts a Calvin-from-Calvin&Hobbes look-alike wearing a Ford logo and pissing on a Chevy logo (or vice versa). This bumper sticker sells partly because of its adolescent vulgarity, but largely because it understands that to be on top in America is to piss on those beneath you. SUV’s are just the translation of this bumper sticker into Detroit (and Asian, and European) iron. When the Worldwatch Institute website reports the fact that “the United States, with less than 5% of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources-burning up nearly 25% of the coal, 26% of the oil, and 27% of the world’s natural gas,” it is just as much a fact that to drive an SUV is to piss on the rest of the world. SUV sales remain solid in the face of rising prices at the pump precisely because spending 100 bucks to fill up your tank only to get 12 miles to the gallon is like stomping your boot into the chest of the guy you’re pissing on, i.e. it feels really, really good.

The problem with all of this, like Boesky’s speech, is that it threatens to blow our cover. Greed is good in America, as long as it is covered in a veneer of, if not generosity, at least innovative entrepreneurship. SUV’s are too obvious; America has been caught urinating in public when we are usually content to flush our waste into the river and let the currents carry it downstream, safely past our borders (see the American export of acid rain to Canada). Enter the hybrid SUV. Hybrids are a new class of vehicle that combine a traditional gas-burning engine with an electric engine, with the effect of cleaner emissions and improved fuel efficiency. Hybrids have been available on the US market in car form since 1999, expanding the significant, if niche segment of the car market devoted to extreme fuel efficiency (automakers, while obviously not devoted to extreme fuel efficiency as a rule, do recognize the potential profits of catering to a real niche market). But the kind of person who would buy a hybrid car would never buy a hybrid SUV, because SUV’s, regardless of the engine underneath the hood, stand for everything that a hybrid car buyer loathes. It would be like a vegan wearing a leather jacket because the leather was tanned with natural products that had never been tested on animals. Vegans and leather do not mix, and neither do tree huggers and SUV’s.

Hybrid SUV’s, then, are on about something other than clean air and sustainable growth. To understand their purpose one need look no further than the advertising for the three hybrid SUV’s currently on the market, the Ford Escape Hybrid, the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and the Toyota-built Lexus RX 400 Hybrid. Ford’s website boasts of “the no compromise Escape Hybrid.” Lexus television ads intone “you can drive two cars, or one without compromise,” the RX 400 Hybrid, natch. Compromise, apparently, is an indignity the American consumer must no longer bear (the Budweiser Select slogan is “Expect Everything”). Compromise is born of a world where you can not have your cake and eat it too. Hybrid SUV’s have performed gene therapy on the world’s DNA, evidenced by the Toyota Highlander website which announces that “now you can have your SUV and MPG too.”

Toyota’s ad wizards are really saying you can be greedy and virtuous at the same time. Which is exactly what Ivan Boesky said. Boesky had the misfortune of being ahead of his time, a prophet of 21st Century America, a time and place when “you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Boesky symbolically met the fate of most prophets, although in America to forfeit $100 million is a fate worse than death.

The sin of greed can be understood as an overdose of yes, for which the antidote is a healthy diet of no. Human morality as it relates to greed exists on the continuum between yes and no. Too much yes swerves off towards greed, and too much no veers towards asceticism. As the Buddha discovered, extreme greed and extreme asceticism are equal in folly, leading him down his Middle Path. The Buddha’s wisdom obtains as long as the human dimension is bounded by both yes and no. Hybrid SUV’s present a world that says yes and yes.

Our relationship to greed and gluttony is rather simple and is captured by an SUV at a fast-food drive-thru, where we simultaneously consume food and oil as fast as we can. Our relationship to the third deadly sin in question, lust, is more complex. This complexity is evident in our commingling of sexual repression and lust. On the surface, the two conditions seem contradictory. At first glance it feels odd to maintain that a people who spend anywhere from three to ten billion dollars annually on porn (porn revenues are notoriously fuzzy) can still be called sexually repressed. It is tempting to accept that Jon Holmes long since pounded the sexual repression out of America. Odd as it may seem, however, our addiction to porn is but a symptom of our ongoing sexual repression.

This is all rooted in very basic Freudian stuff, and begins with the fundamental importance of the human sex drive, which, along with aggression, comprises much of that primal force, the Id. The Id must be tamed by civilizing factors, internalized as the Superego, for the individual to join human society. This is all covered in the first week of Freud 101, which is to say that it does not take ten years of psychoanalytical training to grasp that there is something amiss in our culture’s version of this process. The American sex drive is like a horse only half broken to the saddle. Americans mount their sex drives (pardon the pun) only to get bucked off unceremoniously. Unable to ride their sex drives into the sunset, Americans retire to porn, which, at best, is like riding the animatronic bull in a country-western bar, and is more often akin to shoveling out the horse’s stall.

Americans are as close to being comfortable with our sexuality as porn is to being a celebration of human sexuality. Porn is what is left of American sexuality after it bursts forth from the American unconscious like steam from a cracked pressure cooker. Being American I do not know what the cultural landscape of a people with a well integrated sexuality would look like. But I know that the pinnacle of their sexuality would not resemble the sexual act that stands as ours, as documented by porn. This act’s status is authenticated by its title, the “money shot”, as our almighty sexual act is linked to the almighty dollar. Although porn sex scenes do not vary greatly in content, in America every hetero porn scene must end with a “money shot”, because a facial cumshot, which when its aim is true is a shot of jiz in the eye, is the only sexual act that captures the twisted dynamics undergirding all straight American sex. The facial cumshot closes every hetero porn scene with a warning: Attend to your repressed sexuality, or it will assuredly blind you.

Like this figurative blindness, literal impotence is a byproduct of American sexual repression. When repressed sexuality erupts as lust, Nature has its mechanisms to stem the flow. As body and mind are one, the dysfunctional psychology of American sexuality is matched by 30 million dysfunctional American genitals (according to Wrongdiagnosis.com). One out of every nine Americans struggles with impotence. Porn is the open wound of sexual repression, and impotent loins are the scars. Lust, like gluttony, is written across the body. While obesity, gluttony’s pound of flesh, sits out in the open, impotence has long been lust’s dirty little secret. At least it was until the pharmaceutical industry realized the gold mine idling in America’s pants.

Viagra, and its siblings Levitra and Cialis, are strip mining American impotency to the tune of $2 billion annually. Viagra comes to the party dressed as the redeemer of American sexuality. The consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing, Viagra profits are in fact dependent on the very sexual repression Viagra purports to overcome. The day when Americans heal the wounds of sexual repression is the day the American cock will rise again. The day of this resurrection is also the day that Viagra goes out of business. For now, Viagra is doing everything it can to maintain the sexual status quo. This is most evident in the porn industry, the engine room of American sexual repression. Theage.com reports that porn industry “insiders say up to 90% of new actors now use (Viagra) to perform.” Viagra inflates the loins of the porn industry to gird up its own loins for the job of Prison Warden. Viagra is now the Warden who keeps American sexuality repressed under lock and key, and porn is its prison guard.

Viagra’s black magic is its ability to mine already scarred land. Encrypted in this black magic is the code of a new logic. This new logic, in the form of Viagra, declares that one can be concurrently impotent and virile. Much like Viagra, low-carb beer mines the scars of obesity, casting a spell that conjoins gluttony and health. And hybrid SUV’s mine our scarred land: Presto-Change-O, you are now greedy and green.

Americans consume this black magic because it promises the quick fix. But, like the viewer of porn, the more we consume the more we grow blind to the consequences. Which brings us back to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It may have been momentarily convenient for the adults of Hamelin to stiff the Piper on his rat-removal bill. But the eventual toll, the lives of Hamelin’s children, was a grim reminder of the logic found in Newton’s third law: Everything has a price. As America increasingly buys into its new logic in the hopes of stiffing the Piper, we are, ironically, running up an inestimable tab with said Piper.

The surge of this new logic delivers the collapse of meaning. I am not interested in sin in a fire-and brimstone, you-will-burn-in-hell kind of way. Instead, I am interested in sin as the guarantor of meaning. Sin draws boundaries around human experience. Encountering these boundaries, as gluttons do through obesity, as the greedy do in their loneliness and isolation, and as the lascivious do when their equipment no longer works, can be quite painful. It is this pain that Americans wish to cancel, but it is also this pain that steers us, like the Buddha, to the Middle Path. Sin, when attended to, delivers us to that place where health is occasionally spiced by indulgence, where wealth is equaled by generosity, and where sex is matched by love. Ignored, sin startles you with obesity, loneliness, and impotence. These are sin’s gifts, and their price.

No longer willing to pay this price, America has raised the stakes. Sin will not just be ignored, it will be erased. We attempt to erase sin with every sip of Budweiser Select, every mile driven behind the wheel of a Ford Escape Hybrid, and every swallow of Viagra. But with every sip, mile, and swallow we expand our existential vacuum. It means something, perhaps everything, to be healthy but occasionally indulgent, to receive but to know how to give, to touch and to care. And, while unpleasant, it means something to be fat, greedy, and limp. It means absolutely nothing to be simultaneously gluttonous and healthy, greedy and gracious, impotent and virile. To attempt to be both at once is to succeed at being neither. Americans want everything, thus we get nothing. In fact, we get nothing-plus. We pay all of sin’s price, and get none of its gifts. The depth of our self-delusion is bottomless; we really believe that Budweiser Select will vanquish obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. But sin’s muscle is here to stay. All of our machinations have estranged us from only one of sin’s muscles, its heart. But if prodigal America comes back home from its far-flung madness, sin will throw open the doors to the Middle Path’s banquet hall and have a celebration on the spot.