May 3, 2005

Times Columnist Bob Herbert Views the American Dream: But Can It Still Be Found?

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

I don’t think this is a right-wing nation. I don’t think the public in general is in favor of most of the policies and priorities of the Bush Administration. I think that, if the other side fights a little harder and a little smarter, there may be a chance to reverse what have been some significant losses over the past few years.

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Bob Herbert goes to work every day at the 10th floor of The New York Times. As an op-ed columnist for the Times, he writes about race relations, criminal justice, politics and the problems of Everyman. In fact, much like another well-known reporter whose idealism and super-human feats captured our nation's imagination -- he has very effectively battled for truth, justice and the American way. But Bob Herbert sees trouble in Metropolis and across America. His reports, collected in a new book called Promises Betrayed, reveal the serious roadblocks encountered by real people in their pursuit of the American dream. He talks with BuzzFlash here about America's values and our dreams. Go ahead and picture him in black-framed glasses.

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BuzzFlash:  Promises Betrayed: Waking Up From the American Dream consists of many of your wonderful, compassionate columns woven together into a story of American injustice today, revealing how far we are from something called the American dream. But I want to ask you specifically about the concept of "the American dream." It has tremendous resonance and power to it. In your mind, what is the American dream?

Bob Herbert: When I think about it, I go back to my own experience growing up, which was in suburban New Jersey in the fifties and sixties. That was a time when you heard people speak more frequently about the American dream than they do now. In that context, it tended to mean a dream of opportunity and fairness and justice. It was the post-World War II period when the sky seemed to be the limit for the United States, and things were going really well in the sense that jobs were easy to find. It was becoming easier for kids to go to college. There was a boom in home ownership. The country was on a real high. But in addition to those sort of economic-related factors, there was also the civil rights movement going on then. And then we would see the women’s movement and the environmental movement. We saw, from the Warren Court, a shoring up of civil liberties in this country. There was really a sense that the United States was moving in the right direction, even though there still was a tremendous amount of injustice going on.

I’m not trying to say that life was better in the United States then than it is now. I don’t think it was; I think it’s better now. The difference is that there was the belief that the United States was moving in the right direction, and that is not the feeling I get now. I get the feeling now that we’re either static or sliding backwards. And I think that you don’t hear people talking that much about the American dream now, because there isn’t the confidence that, let’s say, the children of this generation would do better than the Baby Boomers. I think that’s a real setback for the United States, and that’s one of the reasons that we put this book together.

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about one word which we often struggle with at BuzzFlash in trying to understand the pickle we’re in in the United States now politically --  and that word is “community.” If you look back at World War II, we had a sense of community as a nation.

Bob Herbert: Very much so.

BuzzFlash: It was a war of the people. We felt as one nation, fighting a common enemy. Americans of all different backgrounds were thrown together in the military, although the armed forces were still segregated until Korea. Now we have a war in Iraq about which there’s really no sense of community involvement. There’s approval or disapproval ratings, but it’s hardly on the radar of everyone’s daily life here. It’s almost like  the U.S. is running a business overseas or something.

Bob Herbert: I think that’s an extremely important point because it’s the opposite to the idea of a sense of community. If you talk to ordinary citizens about this, to people who are doing well financially and who are pretty well educated, say, to kids on college campuses who are looking ahead to a career, they might have a feeling pro or con about the war. But if you ask them if they would ever consider joining the service and fighting in that war, the answer is invariably no. If you ask parents who are reasonably well off whether they would allow their children to go and fight in Iraq, the answer is absolutely no. That’s one of the reasons the military is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals. Parents are saying, hey, my kid might go to Iraq and get killed in this thing. No, we’re not going to encourage the kid to sign up for the military.

A lot of the young people who are off fighting in Iraq, some doing two or three tours over there, are people who joined the service or maybe the reserves or the National Guard to get an education, to get a little bit of extra income – that sort of thing. They did not join up with the idea that they would actually have to go off to the Middle East and fight in a war like this. So you lose the sense of community. You have a split between the people who are actually doing the hard work of fighting the war, and then the people back home for whom, as you point out, the war is just a peripheral issue at best.

BuzzFlash: One of the things that certainly gets our goat is the young Republicans on campuses who tend to be rather militant and radical, and will disrupt people who are anti-war, yet do not seem to be volunteering to serve in Iraq.

Bob Herbert: They’re not volunteering to serve in Iraq, and neither did many of our public officials who promoted this war. They had an opportunity to fight for their country in Vietnam. They didn’t do that either. And it sort of gets my goat. I’m a veteran. I got drafted during the big build-up to the war in Vietnam. Luckily, I did not get sent to Vietnam. I went to Korea. But I lost a lot of friends in that war. I saw the split, then, between the people who were drafted or enlisted and had to fight the war, and the people who were able to get deferments. I had friends on both sides of that divide.

War is something that is not just dangerous wherever you’re fighting and dangerous for the troops involved. War is something that wounds the spirit of the country here at home, and creates splits that take an awful long time to heal. We saw that in Vietnam and I’m afraid we’re going to see that again in Iraq.

BuzzFlash: Your book really brings home the fact that we’ve become increasingly fragmented. The Republicans now are weighing whether they should try to suppress the filibuster in the Senate. In Louisville, the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, addressed a group of religious fanatics who want the federal courts to adopt a Biblical world view. That community believes it has a right to assert its very doctrinaire, fundamentalist, Biblical vision of the American dream on the rest of the country. To a certain extent, we’ve already seen the fundamentalist Biblical vision creeping in through the Bush Administration.

Bob Herbert: Well, I don’t see that as a variation on the American dream. I see it as an attack on the American dream. Whenever I think of the American dream, I think in terms of tolerance. I think in terms of making an attempt, even if it’s not always successful, to reach out to disparate groups, and try to find a common ground and bring them together. And it’s obviously not just on matters of race, but also a matter of religion. This is a country that was founded because people were fleeing religious oppression. It’s supposed to be a nation that stands for religious tolerance.

The exploitation of religion by politicians and others flies in the face of that, and I see that as a potential long-running tragedy for the United States. If that kind of thing prevailed, it would be an indication to me that the United States was losing its soul. That is something that we just should not tolerate.

BuzzFlash: In Part 1 of your book there's a chapter called “Change the Channel,” where you talk about how we’ve become an entertainment society. Have we become such an entertainment society that we can’t stop being entertained long enough to recognize the reality, which is sometimes a very sobering, difficult and sad one to deal with?

Bob Herbert: It’s a big problem. It’s impossible to deal with solutions in terms of sound bites. What you need is bright people of good will coming together and spending time attempting to fashion a solution. But it’s like the viewers expect you to pop an aspirin that can make the solution just magically appear, or the problems go away, like a headache is supposed to go away. But it doesn’t work like that. I think one reason so many people have succumbed to this thinking is because of an absence of leadership, and that goes for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the different groups in this country. I don’t think there’s been good political leadership for several years, and people have been sold a bill of goods that there is a quick solution to these very difficult problems. That’s extremely dangerous.

Another problem is the vast ignorance that is afoot in the land. Many Americans just do not understand the issues that affect them directly, that affect them and their families. And so they’re prone to follow leaders who are frankly going to hoodwink them, who are going to sell them a bill of goods and exploit them for whatever their reasons. I’ve just been watching this go on for many years now. It’s one of the reasons we have these awful tax policies that result in the transfer of wealth away from working people.

BuzzFlash: One of your colleagues at The New York Times, David Cay Johnston, has written a book called Perfectly Legal about how the income gap in this country has continued to widen over thirty years into what is now basically a Grand Canyon.

Bob Herbert: It's like a return to the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th Century. If I have this figure correct, and I think it’s correct, the top 1% in this country now have as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

BuzzFlash: And yet Bush is still claiming that the wealthy are overburdened by taxes.

Bob Herbert: But I’ll tell you something. And here’s where you can get to a sense of reality. Just think about the situation of working people in this country a bit. And by working people, I include middle-class families that have to go to work every day -- in most cases, husbands and wives both. They are now mortgaged up to their ears. Their credit cards are maxed out. They don’t have much in the way of savings. And because they’ve taken out so many mortgages with a low interest rate, they don’t have a lot of equity in their homes. So what’s the next step? How are they prepared for any kind of a downturn in the economy or some unfortunate event in their family? A lot of American families are really traveling right along the edge.

BuzzFlash: In a series of your columns, which are included in Promises Betrayed, you championed the cause of a group of mostly African American citizens in Tulia, Texas, who were rounded up by a white sheriff and then railroaded into prison on drug trafficking charges. You were the person who turned that around and helped expose the truth and attain justice. But you also write about many other injustices in our justice system. We still have, in some states, "three strikes you’re out," which means you can be sent to prison for life for writing three bad ten-dollar checks. But if you’re Ken Lay, you’re out on bail and living the life of Riley. Corporate executives tend to get off. But if you’re poor and you steal a candy bar three times, you go to jail for life. Is there some sort of imbalance here?

Bob Herbert: There’s extreme inequality at the hands of the criminal justice system, just as we’re getting increasing economic inequality. That’s something that seemed to have been turning around back in the fifties and sixties, especially as a result of the Warren Court. Those days are long gone, I believe.

I'll give you a quick example of some of the problems here. In New York a few years ago, when Rudy Guiliani was Mayor, a Broadway actor got arrested in the lobby of his apartment building during a "crime crackdown." The cops just came in and swept up everybody in the lobby and arrested them and took them downtown. But he hadn’t done anything. So, when I was doing a column, I called the spokesperson for the Police Commissioner and asked why this guy was arrested? He hadn’t done anything. Did the police make a mistake or what? What went on? She said, “Well, we went in there and we decided we weren’t sure what was going on. We believed a crime had been committed, so we decided to arrest everybody and sort it out later.”

Well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work in the United States. They sorted it out later, and eventually the charges were dropped against this guy. But if you fast-forward a few years, you’ll see that in terms of the detainees in the so-called terror cases we're doing the same thing – we're making these vast sweeps, with the idea that we’ll sort it out later. But in the meantime, if you’re innocent and caught in those sweeps, you’re locked up. You don’t have access to an attorney. You can’t appeal the charges. You can’t confront your accuser. It’s really a terrible thing. And we found out that at Abu Ghraib, a majority of the prisoners had not done anything wrong. Many of the people at Guantanamo were not guilty of anything. So these things that may seem unimportant, initially, lead to much bigger problems when you backslide on principles. We really need to be more careful about these things.

BuzzFlash: Recently in New York it was revealed the police arrested more than 400 people who didn’t commit any crime. The police said they had committed crimes, but the videotapes showed they didn’t. The police said, well, they were planning on it. They were intending to.

Bob Herbert: Isn’t that something? Is that a little bit frightening? And that’s New York, supposedly one of the most liberal cities in this country. What’s happened to us? Videotapes catch a number of these things, but obviously not nearly enough. One of the things I’ve learned from covering the criminal justice system over the years is the extent to which police and prosecutors just flat-out lie about what went on. People have been convicted and sent to prison who are just absolutely innocent. And when people have been falsely imprisoned, the prosecutors don't do anything about it.

BuzzFlash: I just want to mention the case of all the activists who have been prevented from attending taxpayer-funded events where Bush has been trying to sell Social Security.

Bob Herbert: Truly outrageous.

BuzzFlash: This goes back to the campaign of 2000, when the events weren’t taxpayer-funded, but they were public, and people were arrested and excluded. One of the White House spokesmen is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, well, we aren’t going to let people in who intend to protest and make this a disrespectful event. And the White House blames it on "volunteers," although there’s just too much of a pattern here for volunteers to keep making the same mistake. All the White House has to do is ...

Bob Herbert: Oh, they could stop it easily.

BuzzFlash: Easily, but one of the so-called "Denver Three" was excluded from an event apparently because someone spotted a "No War For Oil" bumper sticker in the parking lot. He had done nothing. And the White House said they have a right to exclude people who intend to protest – like they can read their minds.

Bob Herbert: It’s incredible. You have a right to protest in the United States, so you should not be precluded from political functions just simply because you are protesting. But this administration is actually going beyond that. They’re not only complaining about and attempting to silence protesters. They’re complaining about anyone who’s in opposition. If you just hold a different view, even if it’s not a formal or active protest, they would like to exclude you from the process. That is not what the United States is supposed to be. If you follow this pattern to its logical end, we become an absolutely different kind of country. We’re allegedly fighting these wars around the world in the name of freedom, and at the same time, we are rolling back freedom right here at home in the United States. We need to take care of what’s happening in terms of freedom and democracy here.

BuzzFlash: Republican Senator Johnny Isakson (Georgia), speaking on the floor of the Senate, said that he wasn’t concerned about the majority Shiites overrunning the Kurds in the Iraqi government Iraq because a Kurdish leader had assured him that in their Parliament, they had one tool that would ensure democracy -- “a filibuster.” And he was a Republican Senator, of course, who was going to vote for breaking down our filibuster rule. 

Bob Herbert: I had missed that. That’s great. By the way, on the filibuster issue, what’s really at stake in the filibuster battle is the whole idea of retaining this concept of checks and balances in the United States. It’s been a crucial aspect of the U.S. system established by the forefathers. This Administration has tried to run roughshod over the whole idea of checks and balances. I never thought that I’d become a champion of the filibuster, which was used to thwart civil rights legislation back in the fifties and sixties. But the loss of the filibuster is emblematic of the loss of the protections enshrined in the whole idea of checks and balances.

BuzzFlash: Well, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist have indicated they want a one-party state for at least four years. And we do have a one-party national government.

Bob Herbert: It’s so clear that they want a one-party state. I’m surprised that has not gotten much attention. It’s not like that’s been a secret.

BuzzFlash: Getting back to this issue of the American dream and community, to quote George Clooney in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," we’re in rather a tight spot here.

Bob Herbert: We are in a tight spot.

BuzzFlash: At BuzzFlash, for instance, we feel we are the patriots and the real Constitutionalists. We view Antonin Scalia as a right-wing activist who hopes to impose a narrow Christian view on a constitution that guarantees the governed the right to form their own government, in direct contrast to European governments which emanated from divine right monarchies. How do you reconcile these divergent viewpoints and rebuild our American community?

Bob Herbert: It seems to me that what’s happened is that the people who are calling themselves conservative have actually become the radicals in this society. Antonin Scalia is a good example. The Bush Administration in general is a better example. It’s amazing to me that folks at an organization like BuzzFlash are really standing up for far more conservative principles – principles that are truly the cornerstone of what this nation is.

BuzzFlash: Ain’t it ironic?

Bob Herbert: Exactly. Just for a faint bit of hope -- and this may be wishful thinking on my part, but I hope it’s true -- I think maybe the right wingers, who I do not think are anywhere near a majority in this country -- I think that their influence may have peaked sometime soon after George Bush’s reelection. They seem to have been on somewhat of a downward slope since then. The Terri Schiavo case was a political disaster. The President has not gotten traction on his Social Security proposal – these so-called personal accounts. You see the President’s approval numbers going down. You see people dissatisfied with the way the economy is going.

I think there’s an opportunity for the other side to make hay. Now, whether the Democrats -- which seem to be a terminally timid party to me – whether they can take advantage of that, I don’t know. But I do think that the opportunity is there. I don’t think this is a right-wing nation. I don’t think the public in general is in favor of most of the policies and priorities of the Bush Administration. I think that, if the other side fights a little harder and a little smarter, there may be a chance to reverse what have been some significant losses over the past few years.

BuzzFlash: Bob Herbert, thank you very much.

Bob Herbert: Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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Resources

Promises Betrayed: Waking Up from the American Dream by Bob Herbert
http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/05/04/pre05046.html

http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/bobherbert/