It’s a damn fascinating time for the social art of protest. We’re living in an era when coordinated protest is arguably more effective than it has ever been. Even in cases much smaller and less drastic than the instantly legendary Arab Spring, the speed and power of mass demonstration is pretty staggering. Consider the outcry over the proposed debit card fees the likes of Bank of America attempted to institute toward the end of 2011. The protest was so quick, so well coordinated and so plugged into the media stream that it actually compelled change almost immediately. The mass exodus of customers to credit unions and small, local banks helped, but even that direct action wouldn’t have been as vast without the mass communication available to the millions of little guys and girls affected by the fees.

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act is a similar, though not identical, case. Those two pieces of legislation have been fuel to the fire of Internet activism from the moment they hit newsfeeds, but the blaze burned especially hot this week as the debates in the Senate and House over the bills drew near. It wasn’t just the little folks protesting a perceived injustice this time. Big organizations like Wikipedia, WordPress and Google made sure to put their displeasure in the headlines, some with more drastic action than others. The end result? Both bills have been shelved.

That’s great for the opponents of SOPA and PIPA, but it’s not the end and they know it. The protests aren’t ending because the bills haven’t been killed yet. The few supporters they still have in Congress may try to revive them when the furor has died down. Of course, that’s assuming it will die down.

This gets at the core of why SOPA and PIPA are poorly constructed bits of legislation. The people who wrote and sponsored them simply don’t understand the Internet. Folks on the Web don’t… let things go very easily. It’s not like the mainstream news cycle. Trending stories, however ephemeral they seem, don’t vanish from the docket when they’re no longer fresh. Websites stay live, forums keep fomenting debate and the protest stays active, if even in a semi-dormant form. Right now the lion’s share of the independent video games industry (the fastest growing segment of the games industry as a whole) is coordinating a boycott of E3, the most important and profitable gaming convention of the year. They’re doing so because the lobbyists for most AAA game publishers haven’t withdrawn their support for the now torpid copyright bills. They’re keeping the discussion rolling, which is all it takes to launch an entirely new campaign of protest should SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation rise again.

Even as the federal government cracks down symbolically on Megaupload, one of countless streaming services on the Internet, there’s a sense that the interests behind Internet censorship are fighting a force that’s too large and well organized to overcome. In America, our legislators don’t know how the deepest parts of Internet culture work, so they don’t anticipate the backlash they’ll receive whenever a corporate body tries to make bank on a new set of laws to the detriment of everything the current Internet stands for. Since it’s not likely the politicians who hop aboard the bad-ideas-on-wheels that are SOPA, PIPA and other such misinformed bills are going to become more Web-savvy any time soon, it seems like we’ll be stuck in the cycle of lobbying and protest for the foreseeable future. The protesters certainly aren’t hanging up their hats yet, or possibly ever.

Finally, some voting! (Well, some caucusing, really, but it’s practically the same thing.) Tuesday’s evening of Republican politicking in Iowa told us little to nothing we didn’t already know about the GOP field, but it did leave a distinct impression about the party’s base – a distinct odor, really. It’s the whiff of desperation, the stench of a mob that has worked itself into a sweat railing against all the stuff it doesn’t want … but can’t begin to agree on what it does want.

And how is a party that can’t answer a simple question – what, exactly, are you for? – supposed to run a country?

The issues that divided the Iowans who voted variously for Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are not small ones, and my guess is that they won’t be resolved quickly or easily. That’s not to say the GOP nominating contest will drag on terribly long, or be particularly suspenseful; my guess is that Romney, coming out of next week’s big win in New Hampshire, will simply out-organize and outspend the poorly funded (and that’s being generous) Santorum into submission by the end of the month. Romney may not win South Carolina – who will win it is anybody’s guess, and doesn’t really matter — but once Floridians vote in late January Romney will be able to coast into the summer, with Paul serving as little more than the belligerent schnauzer nipping at his heels.

That’s the way Republicans do things, organizationally speaking – they coalesce early, and move on to the bigger fight. But that’s the easy part – the establishment settling on a frontrunner and clearing his path. The trouble is that the frontrunner isn’t really the man for his moment. Has there ever been such a disconnect between the obvious passions of a party’s base and the wishy-washy lethargy of its likely standard-bearer? Even John Kerry had more of a purchase on his party’s ideals than does poor Mitt — who, according to a healthy majority of Republicans, may as well be John Kerry.

Iowa did the party no favors by spending six months sifting through one non-Mitt after another before finding a wingnut who couldn’t be grounded before caucus night. Really, it’s just Santorum’s dumb luck that he was the last bit of fetid, right-wing cream to rise to the top after Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich had all been skimmed. (What other metaphors can I offer – musical chairs, perhaps?) It’s not that Santorum is any more electable than the others¸ or less anachronistic in linking tired and failed ideas to bizarre bellicosity. It’s just that Iowans ran out of time while he was taking his turn atop the leader board. My guess is that Santorum’s social-conservative extremism won’t survive a week of media scrutiny or super-PAC bludgeoning – not that it matters, since Santorum is practically penniless and couldn’t begin to staff up in time to take advantage of his moment in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul sits atop his bizarre human pyramid of cranks and contrarians, assured of a steady 20 percent of the GOP electorate … but with no hope of expanding on that rabid base to become a real factor in the national race. Paul is attracting, in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, the kind of devotion that President Obama did back in 2008 – becoming a magnet for young people and anti-establishment types who are (in many cases) simply looking for an alternative to the people and ideas that have been spoon-fed to them. Of course, that’s where the similarities end between Obama’s appeal and Paul’s – not least because, while the power of Obama’s charisma and the mainstream appeal of his ideas enabled him to build a level of support that could beat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, Paul has all the personal appeal of a dungeness crab, not to mention foreign-policy ideas that are only attractive until one spends five seconds considering their consequences. And then, of course, there’s Paul’s history of racism and the other enormous character flaws that those 20 percent of Republicans can choose to ignore, but no one else will. (Not that Randian selfishness isn’t a character flaw in itself, but I digress.)

Still, Paul’s staunch libertarianism – aside from his hypocritical stance on abortion – represents the id of contemporary wild-eyed conservatism, at least in terms of his domestic-policy ideas. End the Fed! Slash a trillion from the budget indiscriminately on Day One! Delete all regulations from the books! And you can bet that for every Republican who does support him, there are two or three who would love to do so, if only he would throttle back the isolationism and cheer up a little. (Or shave 20 years off his age, or grow a head of hair like Mitt’s, or lose that screech-owl voice. The racism, they can live with.)

As for Senator Holier-Than-Thou, it’s actually surprising that Iowa’s multitudinous social conservatives took so long to come around to him – or at least it’s surprising that they bothered kicking the tires on Cain and Gingrich for four months instead of moving directly from Perry to Santorum as the anti-Romney. Once Perry disqualified himself with his cowboy-Mr. Magoo act during the debates, Santorum became the obvious heir to Mike Huckabee – except, of course, for the fact that Santorum is a far less charismatic (though far more doctrinaire) bearer of the Falwell flame than the Huck was in ’08.

The person for whom I feel the most sympathy this week is, surprisingly, Bachmann, who saw the writing on the wall Wednesday morning and dropped out. Alone among the discarded anti-Mitts, the winner of the August straw poll didn’t really do anything to render herself unelectable (among Republicans, I mean – she’s horrifyingly unelectable in the real world). She merely was rendered an afterthought when the Perry campaign supernova’d, and she never regained her footing. She was perhaps the only candidate who might have found the sweet spot between Paul and Santorum’s constituencies, but this may not be the year when that particular twain shall meet.

So instead we have Paul inspiring the rabidly anti-government, Remember-Waco! set, and we have Santorum (for now) clutching the barely-beating hearts of his fellow fundamentalist scolds. Where does that leave Romney? The last two “movement conservatives” to win the White House, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, succeeded in tying the GOP’s small-government and social-conservative wings into a tidy bow of shared support – but so far in 2012 both those wings eye Mitt with the sort of suspicion and distaste with which a cotton farmer regards the season’s first boll weevil. As I said earlier, it seems pretty clear that Romney will be able to super-PAC his way to the nomination with little more messaging than “I alone can beat Obama.” But that will leave a key question for the general election: Can a man who inspires no passion – and who instead instills a sort of dread among those who should be a Republican nominee’s most ardent followers – actually pull enough voters to the polls to defeat an incumbent president?

Under fairly similar circumstances – facing presidents who were broadly loathed by the opposition’s base – both Bob Dole (in 1996) and Romney’s Democratic doppelganger, Kerry, discovered that the answer was “no.” (Of course, neither Bill Clinton nor W. was facing the kind of economic doldrums Obama faces, but that’s a topic for another day.) As for this column, I have one more tortured metaphor to offer: As Republicans have finally begun casting ballots this winter, Romney finds himself in the position of an animal trainer at the circus, locked in the ring with a pair of ravenous tigers just captured from the wild. One of two things is going to happen by November: Either Romney is going to figure out how to ride those tigers, or they’re going to eat him alive. At the moment I wouldn’t bet on either outcome, but it would help if Romney had a whip.

One more bit of information worth noting: In a year in which Republicans are supposed to be ginned up beyond belief to flock to the polls and swamp Obama, turnout on Tuesday was very close to what it was for Republicans in 2008 — which was about half the size of the Democratic turnout that year. Is that a reflection on the candidates, or evidence that Republicans are simply far louder than they are numerous?

I’ve had a good life, and if you’re reading this, chances are you have too. I mean, we’re literate and we can afford electricity, at the very least, which puts us up on most of the human race throughout recorded history. But complaining about things is human nature — and it can also be pretty funny in the bargain — so we tend to let our many advantages fade into the context of our ordinary lives while we rail against problems both meaningless (goddamn piece of shit iPhone won’t work) and not (like, you know, war).

So yeah, we’ve got it pretty good. Great, even. But we also all have our individual crosses to bear — the imprints left on us by the hands we’ve been dealt, the lingering bitterness of traumas real or imagined, the cumulative weight of what life has done to make us who we are. Sometimes, we feel it; hopefully, more often than not, we don’t — but it always affects the sway and shuffle of our gait, and it has a fundamental effect on how we deal with the world around us.

Me, I’ve always been a little preoccupied with death and loneliness. I lost my father when I was five, both of us the victims of a heroin deal gone bad: he felt his heart give out as his panicked drug buddies left him in a grocery store parking lot in upstate New Jersey, while I grew up shrouded with a lingering ache and the hard-to-shake notion that I would never marry, never have children, and die, like my father did, before the age of 30. When I developed a heart tremor in my 20s, I just assumed I was rounding the final bend. It was a relief, in a way.

I met my wife when I was 26. My oldest child, our daughter Sophie, was born when I was 31. And as I close in on 40, I’ve learned to let myself peek out from that shroud, and although the ache never really goes away, I think it’s only deepened the poignancy of fatherhood for me. She’s six now — already older than I was when I had to start trying to figure out how to make sense of a world where anything could happen at any given moment — and because I still have faint memories of a time when it seemed like a sane, safe place, I deeply treasure every moment I’m here to help protect my kids from the darkness. They drive me crazy every day, but I do.

I’m writing this tonight because yesterday, a man in a neighboring town was killed in a horrible freak accident. He left behind three children whose mother is legally prevented from caring for them and no assets to speak of. Right now, those kids are trying to cope with insurmountable grief and a terrible reminder that the universe is vast and senseless, capable of doling out horror and beauty in random increments.

I don’t know this family personally, but these are small towns and nobody’s business is truly private. I do know that this man’s youngest child is a nine-year-old girl — nine! — who’s had to deal with loss after shitty loss (although none as terrible as this) for most of her short life. I know that even before yesterday, her belief in love — her faith in its permanence when it’s true — had been badly damaged. What can anyone tell her? What can anyone do now? Over time — I hope — she’ll come to understand that even when it does last, it can be a mixed blessing; that sometimes, we have to choose what to take from that love, and whether to let it consume us or carry us forward. Tonight, I hope she and her siblings can just stay sane. Stay together. Stay warm.

We’re all brushed by experiences like these from time to time, and if we’re lucky, that’s as close as we get to the razor’s edge between our carefully constructed lives and the pain of having them shattered. We shudder at the slobbering rictus behind our paper-thin walls, we count our blessings, we button up, and we carry on. Any other way leads to madness; we cope by surrounding ourselves with minutiae, aiming our anger at safe and distant targets, and forgetting that the universe is not our friend.

But here’s the thing. We do have it good, you and I, and that simple fact is a glorious, nut-kicking victory against the endless night. Every layer of protection we’ve acquired, every happy moment, every golden memory, every second foolishly wasted on clicks and texts and status updates — that’s a precious gift that we’ve carved from life’s stubborn hide with sheer strength of will or good fortune. They’re ours and we own them. We earn the dirt and blood under our fingernails just by breathing.

This is the time of year when tradition holds that we bring our friends and families close, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to do so, then celebrate that victory with every cell of your being. And if you can’t, start celebrating the fact that you’re reading words on a screen and work your way out from there. Not because things can always be worse and our problems are mostly pretty lame — although they can and they probably are — but because these moments are yours, and they’re good, and you took them with your own two hands, and you should be proud of that.

I know I am. And although I’m sure I’ll get bogged down in petty crap again soon enough, tonight I’m going to be still for awhile. I’m going to watch the lights blinking on the tree in the living room, and watch my children sleeping, and lie down next to my wife. And I’m going to count my blessings — which include every one of you reading these words — and I’m going to think of anything I can do to help those kids, no matter how clumsy or trivial. I’m going to sharpen my rage against the monster behind the door and I’m going to keep clawing at its hide until I can’t claw anymore.

Its hunger is rapacious, but we remain, and that’s what I’m going to celebrate this season: Our capacity for tenderness, our stubborn persistence, and — yes — our hunger, for the greatest of these, love, which we fumble and struggle with and curse even as we draw upon it for sustenance and inspiration. We can no more control it than we can turn away from its ruthless beauty.

Last weekend I had dinner with a friend who recently has been surprised to find the ideological ground shifting beneath his feet. A libertarian at heart – fiscally conservative, socially liberal, somewhat obsessed with “freedom” (whatever that is) – he has voted Republican far more often than Democratic. Two years ago he became enamored of the burgeoning tea-party movement because he reviled President Obama and Congress’s plans to spend untold billions on stimulus and healthcare, and especially because he loathed the collusion between politicians and the banks that had tanked the economy in 2008.

More recently, though, he has watched as the tea party’s initial focus has been diluted by religious-right social activism and endless I-hate-Obama partisanship, and as its objectives have been co-opted by the business interests that dominate the Republican Party. While Ron Paul remains his favorite Republican candidate, he finds that his biggest complaint about Obama these days is that the president is too much of a “corporatist” to rise to our current challenges – language that belongs more to Ralph Nader than to the eyebrow-enhanced Paul. And, perhaps most surprising, over the last few weeks he has become an ardent cheerleader for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He likes its focus on corporate misbehavior, an emphasis he wishes the tea party hadn’t abandoned, and says he hopes OWS might somehow break business’ stranglehold over policymaking.

My friend, in all his mixed-up glory, is on to something. When you listen to the mainstream media, you don’t hear much sympathy from tea party supporters for Occupy Wall Street, or vice versa. But ever since OWS began a month ago as a few dozen people refusing to leave a downtown park, I’ve found myself wondering, why not? Might these two groups find areas of common interest on which they can work together? And if they could do that, how much might they accomplish that neither side can hope to achieve alone?

On the surface, the goals of the tea party (such as they have become) and Occupy Wall Street (amorphous as they remain) couldn’t be more different. Tea partiers, after sublimating their early anti-bailouts focus, have targeted their furor in a more traditional, anti-Washington direction — albeit with newfangled “constitutional” trappings and an amped-up concern for deficits and debt. OWS, on the other hand, is chiefly concerned with those Americans (middle class and otherwise) who are left out of the tea party’s calculus: The millions whose ambitions and earning potential are being thwarted by a system that demands a smarter workforce, but doesn’t create enough (or good-enough) jobs to enable college graduates to pay off their student loans. The homeowners who were pushed into suspect mortgages during the go-go ’00s, then weren’t bailed out when the banks were. And the millions whose livelihoods have been threatened by corporations that enrich executives and shareholders while cutting “head count” and benefits, sending jobs overseas, and gaming the government to minimize their tax burdens and avoid accountability for their screw-ups.

The vague outcomes sought by OWS – a more equitable carving up of the economic pie, and a society that values the well-being of the 99 as well as the 1 – would doubtless require a slew of new taxes on the wealthy, new spending to alleviate poverty, new policies aimed at improving the lots of everyone from illegal immigrants to folks whose mortgages are under water, and new regulations that limit corporations’ ability to (generally speaking) forsake the public interest in pursuit of grotesque profits. All of which are anathema to the tea party, of course.

Let’s face one important fact: In the previous two paragraphs, you could replace every instance of the phrases “tea party” and “Occupy Wall Street” with the words “conservative” and “liberal,” and you’d have a fair summation of the ideological chasm that has driven American debate since 1932. Considering the polarization that bogs down our politics, and the near death of compromise as an acceptable policy outcome, it’s difficult to imagine that a tea party-OWS coalition might agree on solutions to the policy issues that vex us.

However, there’s one key trait that links the two movements – one that just might extract us from our corporate/banking/political quagmire — and that is their anti-establishment roots. Tea partiers haven’t been afraid to challenge moderate politicians favored by the GOP poobahs, and tea party congressmen have been giving John Boehner fits all year. Meanwhile, OWS has emerged from the populist left, and the Obama administration has no clue how to harness it – not after turning healthcare reform into an insurance-lobby giveaway, turning the SEC and Justice Department’s attention away from dozens of Wall Street criminals, and giving away most of the store on Dodd-Frank in order to appease the banking interests who funded Obama in ’08. (New York Fed alum Timothy Geithner doesn’t have a populist bone in his body, anyway.)

The GOP establishment may have succeeded recently in distracting tea partiers’ ire away from the banks, but that movement’s “big bang” remains the TARP legislation of 2008, which revealed the unholy alliance between the government and financial institutions – a cesspool of lobbying and shady deals, with execs lining up to pass through an incestuous revolving door linking Wall Street, K Street, and the Treasury Department. The bank bust and TARP — plus three years of watching Congress fail to make economic progress with its lame half-measures, watching business rake in record profits while refusing to re-invest, and watching the nation’s income disparity grow more and more obscene – have now served as the “big bang” for OWS, as well.

The root of all those evils – and the issue on which the anti-establishment twain just might meet – is the confluence of money and politics. It’s time to recognize that the damage done to American democracy by our pay-to-play system of campaign financing and interest-group lobbying, which first exploded during Watergate, is at a similar crisis point now – exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s absurd, plutocratic decision in the Citizens United case. We actually may be in an even worse place than Watergate, because it’s not simply an administration that’s on the verge of going down. It’s our entire economy.

We The People occasionally rise up on Election Day and believe we have overturned the political order — in fact, it’s happened twice in the last five years — but then we watch helplessly as our politicians and business leaders resume their mutual lap dance. It’s an arrangement that benefits incumbents in both parties who have elections to win, sweetheart deals and earmarks to offer, and little time to make up their own minds on the issues of the day … much less write their own bills to police the financial and industrial sectors. It benefits the banking and corporate elites – and occasionally, depending on who holds power, the labor unions and various interest groups — who have money to burn on campaign contributions and lobbyists, and who are constantly in search of ways to leverage that cash to manipulate lawmakers. And it benefits … just about nobody else. Not the working class, certainly. And, these days, not even the middle-class families once so fetishized by politicians from Reagan to Clinton.

Just as, two years ago, the more conservative among those middle-class voters gravitated toward the tea party, right now the more progressive ones are getting ginned up over OWS. Each group wants a profoundly different outcome – but neither is going to get anywhere near it as long as Washington and Wall Street continue to 69 on the other side of a very pricey peephole.

Considering the current Supreme Court’s antagonism toward middle-class interests, even a broad-based alliance between tea partiers and OWS types is unlikely to forge real campaign-finance reform – at least not without a constitutional amendment that bans large donations and institutes strict public-financing rules. (As anyone who watched Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary knows, fomenting support for such an amendment from the grass roots is possible, but can require decades of struggle.) In the meantime, though, both sides working together might use their populist strength – and the power of the primary election — to force lawmakers into implementing outright bans on gifts, junkets, plane rides and other goodies provided by lobbyists, and also into disbanding their own political action committees and unilaterally rejecting campaign funds from corporations and special-interest PACS, if not big checks entirely.

Getting big money out of politics certainly appeals to OWS activists, who seek to deny corporations their current kung-fu grip over our legislative process. It should also appeal to tea partiers, who repeatedly express interest in curbing the power of incumbency and who insist that politicians “listen to the American people.” If these two groups could recognize this shared interest, perhaps their joined forces could remake American campaigns and governance, and restore a modicum of political power to the masses. Then they could go back to ideological war, and let the most convincing arguments (rather than the most cash-infused candidates) win.

Will it ever happen? Probably not. Too many Americans have their ideological blinders too firmly attached to find common ground on even this one issue. And asking the voting multitudes to see through the Matrix of money and power in Washington is like asking the entire nation to subscribe to the Utne Reader. It’s one thing for the tea party base to push back so instinctively against the corporatist Mitt Romney that even Herman Cain can lead the polls; it’s another thing to imagine them joining forces with folks they’re currently mocking with calls to “put down the bongo drums and get a job.” And those crowds in Lower Manhattan might relocate en masse to Denmark before they’d make a deal with that rabble who get off on depicting their president with a bone through his nose.

What’s more likely is that, just as the tea party is slowly but surely being subsumed within the GOP, Occupy Wall Street eventually will become the activist arm of the Democratic Party. Lawmakers will pay increased lip service to the populism on both sides, while continuing to rake in dollars and watered-down drinks from the corporations, banks and special interests who really control our politics. In exchange, we’ll continue to get watered-down domestic legislation that can’t break a filibuster, and wouldn’t really change anything if it did. And the rich will get richer, and the middle class will shrivel like Barry Bonds’ balls.

Somebody, please, prove me wrong.

The worlds of technology and popular culture lost a true visionary yesterday with the death of Steve Jobs at age 56 due to complications from pancreatic cancer. We remember the man’s countless contributions to our daily lives through everything from phones to iPods, from click wheels to talking fish.

More Popdose coverage:

Steve Jobs, The Winningest Loser
Political Culture: Why We Care About Steve Jobs

Matt Springer:

There’s something to the idea that Steve Jobs died just a day after the first product announcement from Apple since his departure as CEO, the reveal of the iPhone 4S.

Many column inches and pixels were spilled on how “disappointing” the announcement was. This iPhone 4S wasn’t a revolutionary device. It didn’t deliver a new and unexpected form factor destined to influence consumer electronic design for months.

Instead, the iPhone 4S represents perhaps Jobs’ greatest gift to the world, and especially to technology: A constant evolution forward, sometimes in giant leaps and other times by inches, toward the ideal experience for the users of his products.

I’m watching Leo Laporte on TWiT.TV right now, and his words seem so apt: “I really felt as though Steve represented us, the users.” All of Jobs’ innovations and inventions, whether ideas that transformed our culture or these iterative evolutionary steps forward in existing products, were focused entirely on how they would impact the users of his technologies. Where other hardware and software seemed almost to work at odds with the user, Apple’s products always elegantly guided the user toward accomplishing whatever task they could imagine–write a term paper, carry a jukebox in a pocket, instantly view family and friends across the world.

And yes, he did not invent the telephone or the mp3 player or even the tablet computer. He just created versions of these devices that managed to capture the imaginations of people around the world with their beauty, simplicity, and power. It happens all too rarely outside of Apple’s campus in Cupertino, CA, but wherever there is an attempt to improve the lives of others through technology, a sincere effort that priortizes quality and beauty alongside profits, Steve Jobs’ spirit will live on.

Ken Shane:

I was a PC user for my entire life…well, at least since PCs became available. Then I ordered my first iPod. When it arrived in the mail I was anxious to get at it, but my first impression of the product was from the box it came in. It was so beautifully designed and executed that it took me awhile to even look at the iPod within. It was at that moment, when I realized that Apple was a company that would put that kind of imagination into the mere box that their product came in, that things began to change for me. Soon an iMac followed, then a MacBook Air, iPhone, more iPods, Airport Extreme, and Airport Express.

Rest in peace Steve. You certainly changed my life, and the world.

>>Sent from my MacBook Air<<

Dan Wiencek:

I never met Steve Jobs. But I know enough about him to know that he accepted only the best, every time, from himself and from everyone who worked for him. Like many a dedicated Apple user — OK, let’s be honest here and just say “fanboy” — I would occasionally imagine myself working at Apple, and wonder how I would measure up to those exacting, unremitting standards. What might have happened if I’d had the opportunity to lay some freshly written copy into Steve Jobs’ hands? The truth to which I have resigned myself is that, on most occasions, the response would have been, “That’s not good enough,” or more likely, simply “That’s shit.” And he would be right to say it. It takes tremendous reserves of energy, and an unstoppable belief in yourself, to pour everything you have into every effort — to swing for the fences every time. I know I don’t do that. Steve could and did — he couldn’t do anything else. Because anything else was shit.

But occasionally, I complete a piece of writing that exceeds even my best expectations, something that I marvel at with the perfectly innocent wonder that all creative people know: the quiet voice that says I did that. And at those rare times, I allow myself to think, That was even good enough for Steve Jobs.

Steve will live in on in Apple, and in the minds and hearts of all of us who measure our best efforts against his example.

Farewell, Steve.

I’m not going to launch into an elaborate introduction about Steve Jobs’ death. You know it happened; you can consume facts and opinion about it, and share your own thoughts, here at Popdose and all over every communications medium around the globe. What I’m interested in, for the purpose of this column, is: Why have we invested so much (figuratively, though also literally) in this guy? And why does his loss resonate so deeply among us?

The easy answer is, because he made our lives better. Here was a guy who basically invented personal computing as we know it, then 15 years later transformed the way we listen to music — and then, within a decade after that, gave us a pair of devices whose functions expand infinitely upon those two previous innovations, and whose implications we’re only beginning to figure out. (Of course, he also practically invented “planned obsolescence,” but that’s another story.)

OK, simple enough. But some questions remain: Why have we attached such importance to the loss of this one individual, when we know that Apple will continue as a multinational conglomerate that dominates the field of hand-held communication and personal entertainment? Why, at a time when Americans’ default position is to suspect the worst of practically every prominent institution and powerful person, do we lionize Jobs to the degree that we do? And why does the timing of his death only seem to magnify the profound meaning of his life?

The cynical, yet indubitably correct, answer to the first two questions is: marketing. Steve Jobs was Apple, in the public’s mind – and that’s precisely the way he and Apple’s marketers planned it, over more than a quarter century of invention, manufacturing and selling. Intuitively, we all know that Jobs didn’t spend his days donning that white spacesuit folks wear when they head into the clean room to play around with computer chips. Yet, thanks in large part to a cadre of marketing geniuses (and his willingness to attach his own face and reputation to his products), he will go down in history with the greatest of American inventors, with Benjamin Franklin and Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Nobody knows the names of the R&D guys at Sony who invented the Walkman or the Trinitron; Bill Gates, household name though he is, has an altogether more complicated legacy. But Jobs will live on in our hearts, as well as our earbuds.

As for that third question … I find it profoundly interesting that at the moment of Jobs’ death, the news media are abuzz over a nascent movement that is calling into serious question the efficacy, and indeed the morality, of American business. Sure, Occupy Wall Street is primarily about the banks and bankers who have enriched themselves through risky and fraudulent ventures while bringing the economy to the brink of ruin. And it’s about the politicians who have allowed this to happen, through deregulation and fiscal policies that for three decades have benefited the few at the expense of the many.

But it’s also about every large, faceless corporation that has spent the last decade downsizing, moving jobs overseas, slashing worker benefits, and otherwise gearing its operations to enrich shareholders and top executives rather than to keep American employees working and thriving. It’s about every corporation that’s currently hoarding giant wads of cash that it should be investing in new plants and equipment, and new hires that might help get this nation’s economy moving rather than stagnating. It’s about overpaid CEOs whining about “uncertainty,” which is code for “we’re holding the economy hostage until somebody in Washington guts our industries’ regulations and guarantees our taxes won’t go up, ever.”

Occupy Wall Street somehow doesn’t feel like it’s about Apple, though, and it isn’t about Steve Jobs. (It is about Gates and Microsoft, and our long memories of that company’s attempts to monopolize the market for operating systems and internet browsers, and otherwise thwart competition in the Silicon Valley.) No one has ever gained much traction painting Apple as a poster child for bad corporate behavior. We have tended to forget, or ignore, the fact that iPods and iPhones and iPads are made in China, just like so many other all-American products. We ignore the reports of terrible conditions at the factory that manufactures those gadgets – workers earning 51 cents an hour, even below normal Chinese standards, and guards carrying machine guns. Those conditions are so bad that last year more than a dozen workers took their own lives by jumping off the roof. (So many others attempted to do so that management strung netting between buildings to catch the jumpers.) Now the company is planning to put all those malcontents out of work … and move its plant to another part of China where employees will accept even less than 51 cents.

We largely ignored Teamsters president James Hoffa, just last month, when he noted that Apple has been sitting on cash reserves of $76 billion while investing practically nothing in the U.S. (those sleek and absurdly busy stores in every major shopping mall notwithstanding). And we certainly didn’t begrudge Jobs his personal fortune of $6 billion or so, which will now be distributed by his estate – rather little of it to the government through “death taxes,” no doubt.

Somehow it seems painful, blasphemous, disrespectful of the dead, just to mention this stuff. Nevertheless, it’s all there in the public record. But we won’t pay much mind to it as we memorialize Steve Jobs in the coming days. Perhaps Apple’s long standing as the underdog in the computing industry, with sales lagging far behind PCs even as everybody acknowledged the higher quality of Apple’s products, inoculated the company against the ill will we’re happy to heap upon Microsoft. (Or upon Dell and Hewlett Packard, which share that Chinese factory complex with Apple.) Perhaps Jobs’ long and public illness gave him a halo that extended to his entire company.

More likely, we’ll forgive Jobs his sins – heck, we don’t have to forgive them; we’ve rarely even noticed them – because he gave us what we want. Every year or so, we could count on him strolling out on a stage and introducing some new (or newly revamped) gadget that would become our national obsession, and that would conquer all competitors via its intuitive design and sheer ease of use. He did this better than anyone else ever has, really – and, more than we do with any other product on the market, we have associated our enjoyment of (and increasing reliance on) our Apple toys with Jobs himself. Because of him, Apple has not been a faceless corporation whose Up in the Air outsourcing we impugn or whose anonymous machinations we suspect; because we are so devoted to the products of his invention, we’ve never been inclined to look our (pricey) gifts in the mouth anyway.

So what do we do with ourselves now? It’s somehow fitting that, the day before Jobs’ death, Apple executed a product rollout that seemed anticlimactic, if not disappointing. Who wants an iPhone 4S for Christmas when we all thought an iPhone 5 was coming? Perhaps Jobs might have put it across more effectively, if he rather than some other guy had strolled out onstage to introduce it Tuesday afternoon. But now that Jobs is gone, we have already begun to suspect that Apple’s innovation is bound to lag – and if our fears prove correct, perhaps the time will come to look into that Chinese factory and $76 billion bank account a bit more closely.

For now, though, rest in peace, Steve. From this day forward, I dedicate my every game of Angry Birds to your memory.

2011 gets a pass, but only a minimal pass. It has been ten years since that which was considered unthinkable happened. I certainly would never want to see it again, nor wish it on anyone else, and yet I know there are some who would…and they are not enemies of the country. September 11, 2001 was a tragedy, a travesty, and a diagnosis all at once.

Before we unpack that however, I do need to say that even though reflection is warranted, especially at this anniversary date, much of the media has behaved shamefully this week. I’m not going to say that attention shouldn’t have been paid to the arrival of this particular date, or that such a dreaded occurrence shouldn’t be identified and ruminated upon, but for some news outlets the “reflections” began last Sunday and have been almost non-stop since. I listen to NPR’s Morning Edition Monday through Friday but found myself switching off a lot this week. How did old people react to 9/11? How about young people? How about kids who weren’t even born yet and live in a world where they never knew a time before 9/11 (yes, we are talking about nine-year-olds here)?

There is a time for everything, so I’ve been told, so too there is a time for facing the gruesome after effect of a horror. It should not be accompanied by a marathon of testimonies, non-testimonies, and disconnected bloviation punctuated by raspy, near-whispering commentators because “this is our serious, mournful radio host voice.” It shouldn’t be an opportunity for other news organizations, let’s say right-leaning news organizations, to crow about how President George W. Bush “got it right” in the aftermath because “we’ve been ten years terror-free.”

Oh really?

There can be no War on Terror just as there can be no War on Guns, Bombs, Bullets, or Misinformation. They are all weapons and, upsettingly, they all work and, thus, will never truly be out of any government or organization’s toolbox. Terror creates the tune you must dance to whether you like it or not. Witness the reports that al Qaeda is plotting an anniversary attack on New York and Washington. It may be paranoia. It may be the government working the panic nerve like a trigger on a Playstation game controller. Or it may actually be something to occupy our attention; it may be the real deal. We are not in the position to discount it because if we worry and nothing happens, we look like frightened lemmings. If we don’t worry, knowing of a possible threat, and something does happen then we were negligent, even complicit, in more bloodshed. Terror as a tool works because you can’t discount the awfulness of its results and, therefore, other forces call a tune. We haven’t much choice but to dance.

But getting back to the media morgue this week, how we deal with our response to terror is our choice in degrees. It isn’t picking at the National Scab for a week. It is a day of national mourning, not one day and seven-to-eight more of wringing out the crying towel for the cameras because the pain of loved ones and survivors is so magnetic. I am reminded of something someone said a couple years back when the 9/11 frenzy shouldn’t have been so belabored, and yet was. She said, “How would you feel if you had a family member die in a car crash, hit by a drunk driver. Then every year, everyone talks about the car crash, the intersection it happened at, the cars that were being driven, the drunk driver and, oh by the way, do you miss your loved one?You have relatives of 9/11 victims, of first-responders and all, who every year are reminded of how their relations died, with cameras and microphones jammed in their faces, and the last thing they seem to want to know from you is anything of consequence about the person that you lost.”

She added, “And God forbid you say that you’re getting by, or it doesn’t hurt like it used to even though it will always hurt a little. Other people get to move on, but in the public eye, 9/11 mourners have to stay in perpetual mourning or they’re terrible people. How dare they say they’re getting by and they have days where they don’t even think about it! This is 9/11! They must be terrorist sympathizers at heart!”

“At least you get to cry over your mom or your grandparents in your own time, when it sincerely affects you,” she said. “The 9/11 families are forced to cry on cue or else they’re evil. They expect us to die a little all the time and, and this is how ignorant they are, we already do. They could at least give us the dignity of turning off the camera when it gets too hard.”

About that diagnosis: 9/11 taught one hard lesson that we should never forget, and it is not the one you might think. For generations the country was the island of The Untouchables. Wars waged all over the world, terror was wrought upon them, but not us. We were too powerful, too big, to mess with, until we were messed with. The residual lesson of 9/11, that we are citizens of this world, not the rulers of it, should be applied to everything we do. It is fine to feel that the USA is exceptional, but we ought not rule like we are. Pride comes before a fall, and we were so proud for so long, we ourselves wandered every corner of our country, painting red and white concentric circles across it, daring the world to make a move on the target we created. As one of the biggest economies it was always going to be us on the stage, but the stage is bigger now than we. Can’t we still be exceptional yet also be magnanimous and, I don’t know, just a bit humble? We built this country with timber we cut down with our own hands. We shouldn’t be hiding them under white linen gloves.

But I still think 2011 gets a pass. We have survived ten years, not died. Yes, things have changed, some things drastically. Yes, there is a brand new spanner in the wrench box that a crafty politician can jam in the gears whenever they want to. There are new prejudices that keep people apart, our people, Americans of many complexions and beliefs but nonetheless American. There are new ideologies which we may never understand fully, but we have survived to say we made it to ten years. We should reflect upon what happened a decade ago because, this time, it is appropriate. Next year, we should try to tone it down and allow families the breathing room to cry off-camera. We should try to remember that lives, beyond the buildings, the fire and ashes, the attack vehicles and all, ended both for those trapped and those who attempted to find and free the trapped. We should try to leave the National Scab be and maybe, who knows, it might heal a little more.

And yet, I know we won’t.

Like others, I questioned whether the tickets running out signified that the fringe festival founded on renegade principles had at last staked a claim on the global mainstream consciousness. I’m not convinced that it means anything at all really, other than giving truth to the notion that most really cool things end up getting really popular eventually. Does the fact that major media outlets like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have published numerous articles about Burning Man mean it’s truly become a cultural phenomenon? When any niche event gets that large, does it inevitably lead to a collective fear in the degradation of the event’s quality?

Does the rise in attendance symbolize a shift in the public embrace of counterculture, and could it be at all politically motivated in these years of growing national discontent? Does it signify emerging popularity in electronic music, innovations in camping equipment, greater ease and affordability of travel, or suggest anything about our ability to impact one another with increasingly better and cheaper digital cameras and greater volumes of blog posts?

Does it mean anything other than the world is filling up with people and pain, and Black Rock City represents a bastion of well-intended (and open-armed) hedonism?

Who knows. Who really cares. But I’m compelled to ask these questions because more than ever, I’m finding it impossible to ignore the ubiquity of the Burning Man culture, especially as a resident of San Francisco. The event was started at Baker Beach in 1986, and the city noticeably deflates more and more each year during the festival, when high-powered Google execs and tech wunderkinds, hard partiers and local artists, famously make the pilgrimage to Black Rock City only to come back and marvel to their friends and coworkers about the crazy shit they saw out there under a glowing moon in the depths of the desert.

So yeah, the Burning Man lore lures many of us out there eventually. But allow me to make this disclaimer: I am no expert or hardcore Burner. I barely knew anything about the thing until I moved out to the Bay Area seven years ago, and even then it took me until 2009 to get there.

I loved (and very slightly loathed) my first experience. It’s hard in the desert. I was intimidated by the elements and discouraged by some of the rules. But I was deeply moved by those days I spent in Black Rock City. I was confronted and challenged and had fun beyond words. I knew I needed to go back, beyond the scope of novelty, to really study and celebrate the human creativity and community that takes shape out there in a vast and shifting landscape—a landscape that I initially cursed and foreswore but now, having just gotten back for my second time, appreciate and actually kind of love.

Now I understand the necessity of the Burn being held nowhere other than the Black Rock desert. Without that open space and gigantic sky, lending itself to soft twilights over an expansive cracked floor, it wouldn’t feel so… surreal. It feels like 50,000 humans have colonized on Mars or the Moon, the celestial matter of the setting changing with the light of day.

So here I am now, two years later, sitting on the couch in my apartment in San Francisco, looking at my pile of dust covered clothes and camping equipment and still finding it difficult to articulate the Burning Man experience. I could probably write 20,000 words before midnight strikes, and I still couldn’t capture it appropriately.

If there is one singular thing that everyone seems to agree on, it’s that Burning Man is impossible to explain in words.

Sure, any sentiment is fairly impossible to describe to someone who’s never shared in said sentiment firsthand, especially when it’s as visceral as this one. But it’s also difficult to articulate because Burning Man is an individual experience—it is disparate lone souls that make up a community that fosters and celebrates self-expression. Let’s face it: The communities in which most of us find ourselves do not generally grant us the space or right or time to express ourselves in such a blatant and radical manner. Using Burning Man as the lens and the organized vehicle to bring together people from all over the globe, the week-long festival enables those who let it explore new and novel ways of considering the art, community, and creativity that surrounds them—and all while being responsible for his or her own survival in Black Rock City. “Radical self-reliance,” they call it. You’re reveling with 50,000 other people, but to get the most out of the dust, you have to conquer it alone.

For all its glory, I find Burning Man to be immensely polarizing, and it carries a stigma of drugs/bad music/indulgence/overexposure/pretension. And I bet nowhere is that divisiveness more apparent than it is in the Bay Area. With the most concentrated Burner culture and largest population of attendees, San Francisco is a land of extreme localities and divergent neighborhood culture; what one demographic loves, the same one hates. San Francisco taught me that Burning Man is definitely not for everyone.

I can understand why young artists might be unsure of how to approach politics. Since the ideological battles of the 1980s, the whole distinction between left and right has disappeared under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Even I have trouble making sense of it all – does anybody know what Tony Blair really stood for?

But making political pop should not be a matter of setting Karl Marx to music. I’ve heard that stuff and it never sounds right. Pop becomes political when it stops being self-pitying and self-aggrandising and starts to speak truth to power.

The Popdose staff mulled over Billy’s words. Our discussion follows.

Dw. Dunphy: I respectfully disagree.

Jack Feerick: Care to unpack that? Are you saying that starting a band *isn’t* a better outlet for boredom and frustration than, say, throwing a trash can through the window of the Apple store?

Dunphy: The Clash came up at the great and fortunate time when people would listen to The Clash. As a matter of fact, there were certain cultural channels in place at that time where, if you were of a particular generation, you weren’t going to be able to avoid The Clash. Those channels don’t exist now.

What we have now is an ignorance fed by selectivity, and a reality that can be custom tailored to fit how you want to see things, not how they really are, where rebellion and “taking a stand” happen for all the wrong reasons and are yet rewarded.

For instance, Texas has been in a severe drought all summer, one of the worst in history. Yet the governor of that state does not believe that human activity has played a damaging role in the ecosystem and weather. How is this position, running headlong into science like a linebacker with a nose full of wacky-chalk, rewarded? He’s the new frontrunner for the Republican party and, in some polls, running neck-and-neck with the president. He may be ignorant, but thank God he’s not black.

Who’s to blame? Him or his supporters? Into this comes the idea that a politically-minded individual with three chords and the truth will make an impact. I don’t see it. Unless this person is wearing a meat bikini and sporting Kool Aid purple hair this week, there are no channels to direct that message to the masses, if the masses are even inclined to consider these details if they heard them.

I think the idea of venting versus causing damage and hurting people is a good one, and Bragg is to be commended for his belief (especially in accord with what he was seeing with the London riots), but I don’t see it making a difference. I’ve been telling everyone I’ve seen this weekend that the storm that is two times the size of the state I live in will not harm them. It’s a positive statement and I feel it is highly appropriate, but I don’t for a minute believe my words will physically diminish the storm itself.

Or like I said to a friend a few days ago: sometimes anxiety is the appropriate response to a scary situation.

Ted Asregadoo: Music certainly has the power to reinforce political views, but as an explainer as to why events like the riots in the UK happened, or the Arab Spring uprisings, or even the Tea Party in the U.S., it’s doubtful that someone “with a computer and some beats” can really tell us what’s going on. Sure, they can tell us what they are feeling politically, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a reflection of the wider movement(s).

Annie Logue: I get your point, Dw. I am a big Billy Bragg fan, but it’s not like he had any influence on Margaret Thatcher. Socialism is dying out just about everywhere, and often for very good reasons.

Maybe I’ve read too much Chomsky, but I sometimes wonder if the wear a t-shirt – listen to the Clash – like a Facebook group brand of political activism is designed to be a distraction from real political work. My husband and I are reasonably active in reform Democratic circles here (there are two Democratic parties in Chicago), and passing petitions and trying to get people to come out for candidate forums is hard work. I’ve made calls and knocked on doors for several presidential candidates over the years, and it is not fun, not at all. But it matters. My husband talked to a woman in Indiana who thought that you had to reregister to vote for every single election, and so she thought she could not vote for Obama. But how much work went into getting that one vote? Rik spent an entire afternoon of walking around some subdivision and having a few people slam doors in his face.

I would like to see more political activism for what I consider to be the cause of good, but it will take a lot more than just new music.

Ken Shane: Annie, your comments remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s much-discussed article in the New Yorker last year.

Jon Cummings: Unfortunately, right now practically all the activist energy is on the side of the selfish, the racists and the paranoid. Meanwhile, despite the hype surrounding “organizing for America,” since election 2008 the primary message out of Obama’s Democratic Party seems to be, “Just send money, and trust us.”

And a slightly less glib comment, taking Gladwell as inspiration: the fragmentation of popular music broadcasting into narrow niches, and the simultaneous commodification and devaluation of the music business created by digitization and file sharing, have left the industry and its artists in no position to foment effective protest, much less revolution.

David Lifton: It doesn’t help when ClearChannel won’t let anything overtly leftist on their stations.

David Medsker: Music exec: Sorry, but political isn’t in right now. Try again in a couple of years.

Chris Holmes: Is there even an audience receptive to politically charged music anymore? Rage Against the Machine was popular, but how many of their fans even cared about their message?

Dan Wiencek: Music can only reflect the times it’s made in. That’s all it has ever done. The instances in which the cart starts pulling the horse — when art engenders true political change — are sufficiently rare that we can look on them as the exceptions that prove the rule. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle (though I’d consider that more a work of journalism than a novel) … I can’t think of many others. “Blowin’ in the Wind” didn’t start the civil rights movement. “Imagine” didn’t end the Vietnam war, to put it mildly. I’m pretty willing to bet that no one ever changed their intended vote in an election based on anything Pete Seeger ever sang.

So am I saying it’s a waste of time for artists to “be political” or to address political concerns? Of course not. Artists of any medium will express what they feel, political or otherwise, and so contribute to the ongoing dialogue within our culture. Just because it doesn’t change anyone’s mind is no basis for dismissing political art as futile. No honest work of art is futile, because no honest work of art has any real “function” other than to express what its creator thinks and feels.

That said, Bragg’s piece was pretty incoherent. “Nothing beats the thrill of making an audience of 50 people cheer a line in a song that you’ve just written that hits on something that they feel strongly about.” Fuck, any band can do that. I’m sure Kiss gets a lot of cheers when they sing “I want to rock ‘n roll all night, and party every day.” And isn’t that a narrow and self-satisfying reason anyway? Is that why artists should be political, so the people who already agree with them will agree that much more?

One of the most common tropes in the action-adventure film – particularly the comic actioner – is the car (or train, or bus) that careens toward the cliff/riverbank/unfinished bridge and screeches to a stop just before it’s too late. As the vehicle dangles on the precipice, the passengers scramble out the back to safety, then turn around to contemplate the disaster that might have been. Sometimes their ride home stays put … and sometimes it tumbles into the abyss.

Teafoxlicans were gambling on that first outcome this summer as they played out their scenario over the debt ceiling, putting the pedal to the metal on the nation’s financial well-being and demanding a ransom in the trillions (spending cuts only!) before they would hit the brakes and avoid a devastating default. Early last week they finally got their deal, left the car teetering on the brink, and climbed out the back, fully expecting that they’d be able to drive home later. Instead, it now seems clear that the car has gone over the cliff – with your 401k and mine inside.

Of course, there are other action-pic metaphors I could have chosen – the bitter climax of the atrocious Perfect Storm, perhaps, when the sun comes out briefly but then disappears, and Clooney turns to Wahlberg and grimly intones, “She’s not gonna let us out.” (Those of us peering into the bleak future might quote John C. Reilly’s so-bad-they’re-horrible final words before being swallowed up by the drink: “This is gonna be hard on my little boy.”)

Right wingers have lashed out in fury this past week at those who have taken to calling them “hostage takers” and “economic terrorists.” Still, to beat the action-flick metaphor just a bit more firmly into the ground, I might suggest that when GOP leaders famously showed their House colleagues a clip from The Town to gird them for the final debt-ceiling battle, they might have been better off showing the climax of The Dark Knight. After all, the Joker’s amoral brilliance in pitting two ferryboats against one another, and daring each to blow up the other before he sends both to oblivion, is a nice metaphor for the Teafoxlicans’ play here: pitting the full faith and credit of the United States against recovery-killing spending cuts.

Sadly, in this case, it seems that both boats have now exploded. But I can guarantee you that Democrats will never stoop to creating Photoshop images that morph John Boehner or Eric Cantor’s face with the Joker’s. That’s not how progressives roll; frankly, we don’t have the balls.

OK, so I stand corrected. Anyway … and I promise I’m finished with the film references … one can’t help but wish that a middle-of-the-road alternative had been found to this latest fiasco. Imagine that cooler heads had prevailed all the way around, and that in a couple years — after the 2012 election, and after an economist-approved second effort at stimulus that focused on job-creating measures such as infrastructure banks and/or Tom Friedman’s pipe dream of green-tech manufacturing – Democrats and Republicans had agreed to implement a debt-reduction plan modeled on Simpson-Bowles. That plan might have bent the entitlement cost curve via retirement-age adjustments, means testing and an end to caps on payroll taxes, while also bringing spending down from its current historic highs (25 percent of GDP) and taxes up from their current historic lows (just over 15 percent of GDP), to an equivalent share of GDP set at approximately 19 percent. There’s no guarantee that the economy would have sprung back to life under such a scenario – we had all better get used to the likelihood that times will never again be as good, nor the help-wanted listings ever again as voluminous, as they were in the late 1990s – but at least the world’s political and financial systems would have more confidence in our nation’s ability to solve problems than we currently deserve.

Unfortunately, the politics and the economics of our current fiscal meltdown are nowadays so intertwined that they cannot be analyzed separately, even by Standard & Poor’s or our creditors in China. It has already been documented that the Tea Party Caucus and the House GOP leadership spent at least eight months strategizing how they were going to use brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as a catalyst for their agenda. You would think that in all that time they might have, at some point, entertained the possibility that acting like lunatics right up to the last minute might somehow shake the confidence of both Wall Street and the multitudinous Main Streets in the U.S. and abroad. Apparently not – and instead they did such a bang-up job carrying out their half-assed plan that they’ve exposed themselves as entirely too irrational to participate in governing a country. What’s more – and what’s worse – they’ve managed to convince the markets, our creditors, and at least one rating agency that any government with Teafoxlicans grasping one of the reins of power cannot be trusted to maintain even a minimum baseline of economic stability. Even Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolutionaries didn’t screw the pooch this badly, or this quickly in their brief reign of (t)error.

It didn’t have to be this way. There has rightfully been a lot of discussion the last few weeks about the lost art of compromise, in the wake of the Tea Partiers’ utter recalcitrance in refusing a “grand bargain” on debt reduction. They had the opportunity, weeks before the deadline was reached, to accept a deal that would have enacted big spending cuts, and even instituted entitlement reform, in exchange for a minimal amount in “revenue enhancements” – i.e., tax hikes on the rich, or even (eventually, as Democrats did their best to negotiate away the store) merely a few loophole closures. They might have been able to portray themselves as shrewd bargainers who took a very small hit to their own anti-tax “values” in order to achieve a major push forward for their agenda, all while keeping the markets calm and our creditors happy.

But, of course, the House GOP blew it. They had to hew to their no-new-taxes orthodoxy, and they had to drive all the way to the edge of that cliff to see how much booty they could extort before they slammed on the brakes. And what did they wind up with? A smaller deal than they could have gotten otherwise, a “super-committee” with practically no chance of success, and a “trigger” mechanism likely to blow gaping, and indiscriminate, holes in both the entitlement and defense budgets. Not to mention a resounding no-confidence vote from Wall Street and the Chinese that seems to have put us right back where we were in September 2008, with hundreds of billions of dollars of lost wealth in the marketplace and millions more Americans losing job opportunities, postponing retirements yet again, or otherwise being forced once more to adjust their standards of living downward.

But this time, of course, there will be no attempt to stimulate the economy from Washington. Another key element of Teafoxlican orthodoxy holds that the half-hearted, nearly half-tax-cuts 2009 stimulus “didn’t work,” and that job-creating investments in infrastructure, clean-energy manufacturing, or new technologies represent foolish attempts to “spend our way out of recession.” Government must be shrunk further and further, the “thinking” goes, no matter what the circumstances or the impact on the broader economy. Never mind the historical precedent of 1937, when a contraction of government spending turned a recovery into a double-dip depression. And never mind the opinion shared by every smart economist that now is the time for government to fill the role abdicated by a business community that simply will not hire, not to pull the rug (or, rather, the safety net) out from under tens of millions who are in danger of falling into poverty if they have not already done so. That argument is rarely heard anymore, consumed in a conflagration of Teafoxlican harping on debts and deficits.

That harping represents their one clear success – their ability to transform the political narrative from what it should be (a slow-but-steady effort to clean up the financial and political messes of the last decade, and make sure they won’t be repeated) to what they want it to be (an endless rant about debts that supposedly have only spiraled out of control over the past 2½ years). The right wing have moved the entire conversation in their desired direction, thanks in part to the loudness of their voices and in part to the fact that they, and they alone, were willing to put a gun to the nation’s head and threaten to shoot.

Please note that nowhere in the above sentence did I write “because they have a point.” They don’t. Yes, deficits will need to be brought under control eventually, and yes, both discretionary spending cuts and entitlement reform (along with tax increases) are absolutely necessary to put our financial house in order. But putting a stopper on government spending shouldn’t have happened now, in the midst of a continuing recession marked by a singular unwillingness of the nation’s businesses to contribute to recovery. And deficit reduction should never have been attached to a game of Russian Roulette with the debt ceiling.

The refusal to make these points, and to fight valiantly for some measure of sanity over the last seven months, is the signature failure of Barack Obama’s presidency. On Sunday the author and psych professor Drew Weston detailed, in a brilliant New York Times op-ed, the ways in which Obama – who had been, up until the day before his inauguration, the new century’s greatest orator – failed to use his prodigious skills to create a narrative for his presidency that might have withstood the Teafoxlican revolt. By identifying (early and specifically) the sources of the nation’s troubles, by describing how he was going to act to bring those responsible to account and how he was going to repair our broken financial and political systems – and then by making every one of his initiatives (healthcare included) fit within that narrative – Obama could, and should, have driven the public dialogue the way Ronald Reagan did, no matter how effective the Gipper’s zig-zagging policies turned out to be.

Instead, Obama has turned too much policy-making over to the congressional sausage-grinder, and his far-too-frequent abdication of the bully pulpit has allowed right-wing nutjobs to fill the vacuum created by his silence. Too often, as well, he has pursued bipartisanship in the face of unrelenting evidence that he had no partner in his efforts at conciliation – most recently in his willingness to give up tax hikes far too early in the debt-ceiling negotiations, and in his unwillingness to use the 14th amendment to defuse the Teafoxlicans’ threats to plunge the nation into default.

While watching Obama give away entirely too much of the store in recent months, I have often thought of the deal Jackie Robinson cut with Branch Rickey back in 1945: Robinson would turn the other cheek in the face of insults and intolerance for three seasons in the majors, but would be turned loose to fight back and retaliate after that. Is it possible, now that this utter disaster has exposed the Teafoxlicans’ inability to participate rationally in our governance, that Obama will finally take off the kid gloves and destroy them rhetorically the way he should have two summers ago? Will he now, at long last, grab the reins of leadership fully and finally from a Congress that is universally distrusted and clearly at its wit’s end? Is Obama even capable of being that kind of guy? Does he want to be?

If not, we need to find a leader who does. And here’s where I break my earlier promise, and conclude with one more film reference – paraphrasing a line delivered repeatedly by Dan Hedaya’s character in the lackluster Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano. We know Obama was impressive enough to get the job. We know he’ll probably be able to keep the job. But can he do the job? The jury’s still out on that one, and unless he proves himself up to the task of truly seizing control of this mess, America may still have a way to go before we hit bottom.