Every now and then I come face-to-face with a contradiction. Usually, I look at it and do something else. Contradictions are difficult things, in that they force us to confront errors in our thinking. Since none of us ever admits to error except Sarge in Beetle Bailey (“I thought I was wrong about something once. Turns out I wasn’t.”), we have these protracted debates where we continually butt the same heads with the same points. It’s time for some new sauce.

I am writing here not to set others straight. I am more interested in straightening out my own mind.

I came to butt heads with Carol at Missoulapolis over a problem that liberals of old were loathe to admit, and that modern liberals simply don’t care about: The underclass. It’s mostly black. There doesn’t seem to be much progress. There seems to be mobility in the other minorities – Chinese and Vietnamese and Koreans come here and make new lives and commerce percolates among them. The blacks don’t much change, generation generation, except on TV where they are erudite, brilliant, insightful, and often own chains of laundries.

At Carol’s blog, I tried to address the problem as best I was able at that time, as I was hesitant to say what I just said above. It’s a touchy area, as racist attitudes which exist in all of us often surface and have to be quashed again. But I let go with a private thought:

I believe in the basic equality of people – not the lovey-dovey stuff that liberals preach, but rather in our basic equality of abilities. We’re pretty much of the same basic package. There are exceptional people on the far edges of the Bell Curve, but the curve itself is only as steep as it is because of our early-life experiences, in my opinion.

Our brain is comprised of switches that get turned on at various times during our development. The early years are critical. In a loving supporting and stern environment, children develop their talents and become mature and functioning adults.

But too many home environments are harsh places where kids learn early on defensive survival skills. The ones they need to survive in our world don’t develop. It passes on generation to generation, and goes all the way back to the days of slavery. Instead these kids develop street skills, and get subsumed into the underground economy you talked about.

As I said, I have no answer for this. I only want to make the point that we white guys who discuss this stuff, in their environment, would be them. It takes smarts to survive there too. We’re not that special. We’re just more fortunate.

Truthfully, the thing that was swirling in my head as I wrote this was the TV series I am watching, The Wire, and an interview I listened to with one of its creators, David Simon. That was mixing up with a movie that Denzel Washington directed in 2002, Antwone Fisher. I am all about popular culture.

The Wire is about street life in Baltimore, and that portion of the population that we have no use for, the black street people. “The Wire” itself is a wiretap where other people are employed in trying to convict the street people of crimes so they can imprison them. The weapon of choice for imprisonment are our onerous drug laws. They are enforced against minorities, and that’s about it.

The Wire shows the futility of the ongoing battle. Drugs are not interdicted, addicts are not cured, and for every one imprisoned, at least one other takes his place. The cops are cynical, trying to “juke” the numbers of arrests to get a promotion and better pay.

It’s all pointless. Shut out of the white economy, blacks have their own – the drug culture. Black kids go through school, some finish, but their real education is on the street. They look at white society and realize there is no place for them. They take their place on “the corners”, replacing their parents.Their kids will replace them.

The movie Antwone Fisher attacks the problem from another angle – a young man raised by a brutal aunt who knows nothing of kindness. He enters the military as damaged goods, and doesn’t play well. He is on his way out, but instead is interdicted by a kind counselor who leads him, by means of subtle prodding, to confront his past. It’s a little maudlin, as Antwone finds his real family, and they are right out of Little House on the Prairie. But in the process of moving from brutal aunt to kind family, Antwone learns about “slave behavior,” and that is the message in the movie.

Slaves were subject to abuse by masters, and had no way to pay it back. So they paid it downward, and abuse within families created a whole society so dysfunctional that they could in no way survive in white society. Families were broken, hope was a joke, cruelty was part of everyday existence. Then we set them free.

Patterns repeat from generation to generation. Parents that abuse their kids raise kids who abuse their kids. The dysfunction wrought by slavery is still apparent all around us. And rather than attack the problem head-on, our answer has been to make certain drugs that blacks are likely to use, like coke and heroin, illegal. We then attach monstrous jail sentences to their use as a means of putting them away and out of sight. Pot laws are another manifestation of this phenomenon. It’s about control of the underclasses.

I remember the words of John Taylor Gatto, the New York City school teacher who quit in utter frustration shortly after winning Teacher of the Year award. I can’t cite him other than a vague memory. He talked about New York police routinely swooping down through the neighborhoods and arresting the fathers for drug violations. That’s business as usual. They are juking the numbers. It’s a game, nothing more.

So what’s the solution? Other than taking all of the money we throw at drug enforcement and use it instead for rehab and job training and education, which is David Simon’s solution, I don’t have one.

What’s the contradiction? It’s the two faces of government – the iron fist, and the nurturing hand.

That contradiction surfaces in every debate I have -the government that kills millions in the Middle East and sends my mother her Social Security check. Right wingers are generally so fearful of that government that they insist that the Social Security check is a trap, and yet say that imprisonment of minorities for illusory offenses is a legitimate function.

In answer to my comment to Carol at Missouapolis, she went right to the lazy whites she encounters at the Post Office and the problems of people getting something for nothing. That’s indeed a problem. But the problem of the blacks goes so much deeper.

We’re all wrong about something. I’m trying to do my part here, and embrace my own internal contradictions. It’s part of a general revulsion I am having against Democrats. Major changes are rumbling deep inside. I’m about to go rogue. As if …

More later. I’m grappling and ask anyone reading this to carry forward with this.

I’m getting an oppressive sense of encirclement with the Democrats now in power. There’s a famous scene at the end of Orwell’s Animal House where the farm animals look in the window of the farm house and realize that the humans and the pigs were actually the same:

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which.

Our republic is a fragile thing – that is, the powerful forces that govern are well-kept, but the democratic freedoms we enjoy are fragile. The only thing that keeps power in check is public awareness. The American public is actually the first enemy of the concentrated centers of private wealth that rule behind the scenes of elected government. And while we may be crude and uneducated, susceptible to superstition and easy to manipulate by means of fear, there is power out here. It’s just not focused.

When Barack Obama first assumed power, he made an unusual gesture, one that set me back a bit. He appointed Mike Lux “progressive liaison.” That was a clear message – progressives would be on the outside looking in. Lux only lasted a couple of months, and there is no liaison now, no pretense. The administration has dropped any progressive cloaking, and is aggressively pursuing Bush policies in every area, from monstrous deficits to aggressive war to subsidizing of favored industries. Citizens are still held in indefinite detention, secret prisons still exist, torture goes on as before. It has just gone underground again, as before 9/11.

Perhaps he will become a focal point of resistance, but political prisoner Don Siegelman, former governor or Alabama, will go back to jail for the crime of dissing Karl Rove. In the meantime, Ted Stevens walked.

It’s a dangerous time, more so than under Bush and the Republicans, as so many people who might oppose Bush policies have gone into the house with the pigs and humans to wait tables and serve drinks. Liberals are a malleable bunch, oblivious to much of what goes on under their noses. Take the health care bill: it is a crushing defeat at the hands of AHIP and PhRMA, and yet they are embracing it.

I have said to the point of obnoxious annoyance that “Democrats are the problem,” and people thought I was being hyperbolic or demonic. Those words say exactly what I mean. They are not clever. In a forced two-party state where both parties have essentially the same financiers, it is the job of the ‘soft’ party to absorb discontent and render it impotent. Obama has been harsher than Clinton in 1992 in slamming the door on us. He’s taken no quarter.

And that’s where my feeling of encirclement comes from. The pigs and the humans, they are all looking like pigs at this point.

It’s interesting to watch activities on capitol hill right now. The Democrats are lockstep behind their leader, and whatever resistance there is will be crushed. The House “Progressive Caucus” is a cruel joke, so impotent that Nancy Pelosi laughed when she heard that they would vote against a health care bill that did not have a public option. There’s no resistance there of any note.

But there’s some quibbling among Republicans. It’s not a threat to power, but is nonetheless interesting to watch. In the recent pro forma committee hearings to publicly approve Ben Bernancke for another term as head of the Fed, only one Democrat objected, and probably at great cost. But seven Republicans did.

Before we take refuge in that party, however, remember that this is minority behavior. These were genuine and honest votes, but also an exhibition of the freedom that senators have when they are out of power. They can freely speak their minds. Were the tables turned, were the Republicans in power, immense pressure would be brought to bear on these men, and their votes would have turned.

So we will see, in the coming years, who are honest men and women, and who are swine. Montana’s Tester and Baucus have already shown their little docked tails. Colorado’s Udall is an interesting man, and his family has a long and noble history of independence, but he’s shown no inclination to buck Obama. New Colorado Senator Michael Bennett was, like every appointed replacement senator after the election except Roland Burris, carefully vetted to be sure that he had no progressive leanings. He’s a dock-tailed tool.

Is this depressing? Not really. It’s kind of exciting. It’s a time for people to bolt, hopefully into activism, though many will simply go back to sleep. It was eight years of Clinton that produced the Nader surge, and I will never forget the ugly seething contempt for Nader that liberal Democrats exhibited. I never feel that kind of hatred from Republicans. It was intense. It could be that only four years of Obama will produce a new surge of resistance and threaten his presidency. There’s always hope.

Who will lead? I do not know. It will not be Nader. He doesn’t even like running. He just does it because no one else will. That’s kind of sad – not that he runs. He’s a courageous man. It’s that no one else will.

In the meantime, I’m quoting someone – I don’t remember who and don’t feel like looking it up. No linky-think today. It goes like this:

We must embrace pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the spirit.

The most dangerous times for our fragile liberties are times like these, when ordinarily vigilant people are lured to sleep by the soft lullaby of Democrats, who rock us to sleep while holding a gun behind their back. Some say that Democrats act merely as a ratchet – that they exist to prevent backsliding after a Republican Administration. There’s something to that. But keep in mind, this awful health care bill that is going to pass and be signed could not have happened under Republican rule. There would have been too much resistance.

And remember that before the 2005 Bush attempt, the last serious attempt to destroy Social Security was set to be from … Bill Clinton. Only the chubby little tart Monica saved us.

Democrats are the problem.