Back in the 1950s the McCarthyists came up with a great euphemism for the Reds of the 1930s who attacked the rise of the radical right in Europe long before mainstream America came to see the threat: they were labeled with the unintentionally complimentary moniker of "premature antifascists."

The Cassandra Left always seems to find itself in this position: they make the right call on the major of issues of the day -- segregation, war, economics -- but usually 5 to 15 to 25 years before it will be acceptable on a mass scale. Take the example of this article in the Washington Post: "U.S. official resigns over Afghan war." Ex-marine and Foreign Service official Matthew Hoh has turned into a war protestor, resigning because he has lost confidence in "why and to what end" this war is being waged.

Funny, a bunch of people had that worry eight years ago. Hoh waves around his testicular bona fides when he asserts, "I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love....There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed."

And why would you have listened to those unmanly peaceniks eight years ago, when they warned that extreme violence and technological superiority in Afghanistan had consistently, repeatedly failed every major power from Alexander the Great, to the British Raj, to the Soviet juggernaut? Only men in camo are allowed to come to that conclusion in U.S. press, and only long after it would make a significant difference. Long after it would have saved the nation's blood and treasure.

Another revealing quote: "Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because 'I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.''" I love that the millions of people in New York, California, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, or Illinois who had reasonable objections don't matter. The urban majority that overwhelmingly opposes needless war is not part of The Washington Post's acceptable conversation, only the suburban or rural minority that is vocal and overempowered in the U.S. Senate. It's the ignorant minority in the less populated, less educated states that matter, thanks to our non-representative system of "representative democracy."

Last month I was in an office in Conroe, Texas, birthplace of the Lone Star Flag. A woman who swore loudly that the only news she consumed came from FOX and forwarded e-mails had just "joked" that she couldn't wait until Obama would be shot and killed. She waited many long seconds before claiming she was joking. I engaged her for a while, mentioning that Texas rightists had already successfully murdered one slightly liberal president.

She eventually took the conversation to George W. Bush, who she compared negatively to his father and blamed for a lot of our current troubles. She also said the Iraq war was an unnecessary, harmful extravagance. And I believe that might be what a lot of FOX viewers are thinking these days, if I understand the polls I've seen. To which I want to scream, "There were ten million of us in the streets screaming, marching, being clubbed and shot with pepper balls, trying to tell you that when it mattered. Where was your common sense then?"

We remain eternally premature.

Last Friday I put on a suit jacket, a white shirt, and black slacks, printed out a couple hundred business cards, and went to the city's big journalism awards dinner. I was there to do the vile, the unspeakable, the horrid: I was there to network. [May anyone who utters that word as a verb have their tongue turn to stone. Oh wait, that means I'm going to utthhtuuthtth uuttth tutthtuthh!]

( Adventures in a Declining Industry )

The first two paragraphs from a recent Paul Krugman op-ed hearken back to a time when bankers were gods:

Ten years ago the cover of Time magazine featured Robert Rubin, then Treasury secretary, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary. Time dubbed the three “the committee to save the world,” crediting them with leading the global financial system through a crisis that seemed terrifying at the time, although it was a small blip compared with what we’re going through now.

All the men on that cover were Americans, but nobody considered that odd. ... The United States, everyone thought, was the country that knew how to do finance right.

It's tempting to do a "See, I told you so dance" by saying "That's why the only magazine subscription I had in the late 1990s was to Thomas Frank's The Baffler Magazine and not to stinky old Time! Neener neener neener!"


But it is true: only one of those two magazines was actually informative about the real American economy and the realities of American political culture. And guess which one is still being published today?

Unfortunately, my subscription lasted only four issues and I never even got the last two issues because they never came out.

Sometimes it seems there's no real joy in reading the Cassandra segment of the press, yet I've been doing it for over a decade now. I even worked a little in its lowest ranks. The Amy Goodmans, Tom Franks, Doug Henwoods, Chuck Collinses, Pacifica Radio, Dave Sirotas, they often (not always, but often) seem to have a pretty good idea of what's coming down the track, but never seem to have enough of an audience to make their work worthwhile. "Hey guys, this war is not going to work out well for us." "Hey guys, the concentration of wealth in top tiers of society is going to result in a second great depression." "Hey guys, half-assing the stimulus plan and national health care is going to be about as big a failure as doing nothing at all." "Hey guys, um, oh fuck it, never mind."

As Mad Uncle Carlos sort of said, the essayists have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it. And the magazines that last, that get read, do not care to be a part of that change.

Ugh, The Washington Post's timidity knows know nadir. Besides maintaining a pro-evil editorial stance, they apparently can't even print letters that might suggest the vaguest hint of dirty wordery.

From today's article about rich pro-Obamans bitching about lax security during the inauguration:

"Chris Sacca...posted a message on the social messaging Web site Twitter at 6:45 a.m. after passing through the checkpoint. 'We were thoroughly X-rayed, then walked across a public street in the open,' Sacca wrote, adding an acronym for an expletive to convey disbelief."

Translated, that means the pristine and virginal Washington Post can print as many pro-war-in-the-Middle-East op-eds as it wants, as many anti-democracy-in-Latin-America pieces as it wants, but the letters "WTF" -- "an acronym for an expletive" -- would apparently send their readership into paroxysms of Brain Rape Trauma.

What the fuck?

Right now I feel pretty damn special about one of my stories in this week's bulletin: "BOLIVIA: COURT ORDERS ARREST OF TOP CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY MEMBERS".

As far as I can tell (after having done multiple searches on Google and Lexis-Nexis), it seems no one has written about this story in English. That is, no one except me, biotches!

Maybe it's just not a story worth writing about in the minds of most sensible editors, that could be the case. I didn't see any stories about it in La Razon, one of the capital city's most important papers. Even the Spanish news wire EFE, which writes an article every time a Latin American politician farts, has a pretty short write-up on it. But it's not often I do anything of note, so I'm tooting my horn while I can. Most weeks I feel like a hack plagiarist, but with this one I know I did something original, or at least unavailable to English-language readers.

Photo by Fernando Molina Cortes. Right to left: Constituent Assembly president Silvia Lazarte with Bolivian President Evo Morales and Vice President Alvaro Linera Garcia.

Here's the lead paragraph and subheadlines of my story, in case you don't have access to sites (usually university libraries) with a subscription the the Latin America Database:

BOLIVIA: COURT ORDERS ARREST OF TOP CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY MEMBERS

* Capital-city controversy leads to institutional conflict
* Assembly members allege political persecution
* Assembly members seek trial against prosecutors

A Bolivian court has ordered the arrest of the president of the Asamblea Constituyente and six other assembly officials who wrote the country's draft Constitucion Politico del Estado (CPE), accusing them of disobeying court orders and leveling a contempt charge against them. The assembly members have rejected the court's authority over them in a case where courts ordered the assembly--elected to rewrite the nation's Constitution--to consider the issue of moving the national capital from La Paz to Sucre, in the department of Chuquisaca. The accused assembly members say they did not appear before the court because they would not get a fair hearing in Chuquisaca, and they have called for the prosecutors pushing for their arrest to be prosecuted.

Sometimes I wonder if the electorate wouldn't be any better off if Matt Taibbi's columns were involuntary read into speakers implanted at the back of their brain stems twice a day. Like the man says, maybe we are dumb enough to deserve to be ripped off by Bush's billionaires.

I've been depressed since getting in to work this morning when I read that
Ryszard Kapuscinski had died at 74 years old.

He was a foreign correspondent for the Polish Associated Press who covered approximately three billion coups, revolutions and wars around Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He was friends with leaders like Julius Nyere (or was it Nkrumah?) and Patrice Lumumba during the era of the African nationalist independence movements and wrote books that I wished would never end. They were the sort of deeply felt and profoundly well-thought-out books that make you believe that journalism might still be a worthwhile humanitarian and literary pursuit, even in an age of 24-hour news channels and hyper-corporatism.

It's stupid, I know, but one of my goals had been to meet him and shake his hand before he died, as if his talents and career might somehow magically transfer to me. It's a very greedy and egocentric sort of grief, certainly one unworthy of a world-class writer like him.