Civility War

If you say so, Sahib.

I frequently find myself driving through an industrial part of the world on my way to places-- a landscape of bus and truck depots, a self storage facility or two, a vintage bottling plant,  a cobbled together complex of ancient service stations, car washes and body shops that are now something like an automotive graveyard, a stockyard for aggregate with a side interest in pallets, a storage dome for road salt nestled alongside a reedy marsh. Truthfully, I place myself in this setting because it's magical, especially when the shortening of days and the lengthening of shadows goes into overdrive and the temperature teeters between almost too hot in the sun and frickin cold in the shadows of highway overpasses-- but the other seasons have their own charming effects on the scene.  The natural terrain of the setting, the leafy banks of a tributary that abides in spite of its exploitation for commercial purposes has an insistent beauty that bestows a patina of timeless elegance even on the aging utilitarian structures in its midst.

At one point, the service road I take feeds a State Route which has heavy traffic particularly at the crepuscular parts of the day, and for this reason there are billboards to ignore along the way.  My favorite part of the route is a cloverleaf exit ramp from the state highway that leads down to another state route from which I access a byway that skirts the river, but lately this highlight of the route is marred by a billboard sitting across from it that its funders would be delighted to know is hard for me to ignore.  It will sound innocuous enough: on a plain white background a gigantic black and white portrait of Abraham Lincoln, his name spelled out for those who somehow don't recognize him-- the most familiar image with an abridged version of some of his most familiar words: "A house divided ... cannot stand".  Beneath in a white capital font within a red block is the single word "CIVILITY", the subject of a sentence trailed in lower case in smaller black italic font outside the block by the predicate "is in you". At the base, the impresarios of this wisdom: PassItOn.Com.

Something about this plug for Civility enrages me.

When Abraham Lincoln spoke those biblical words in accepting his nomination for the Illinois Senatorial campaign of 1858 he was attempting to project a hope that the Union would survive the cataclysm it was headed for in order to resolve the question of slavery, regardless of the outcome.  As much as the Southern slave owning gentry would have preferred it, he was not advocating that abolitionists take a chill pill for the sake of CIVILITY.  How much simpler that would have been for the slave owning minority, if not for their slaves!

I had a suspicion about the origin of this bleaching of history on a billboard and it turned out to be true.  As it happens, PassItOn.com is the project of one family, the Anschutz family of Denver Colorado, among the largest landowning families in the country with over 10 million acres in Colorado alone.  It's a family whose wealth originated generations ago in banking and oil and whose interests have expanded to rail, agriculture, sports, wholesome entertainment (a.k.a. pablum) and communication. while they continue to pursue the exploitation of the planet for fossil fuel reserves.  The current patriarch Philip Anschutz's telecommunications-slash-financial company Qwest ended in 2002 with the exposure of Enron like accounting practices used to inflate its worth with the bursting of the internet bubble at the turn of the millennium. The company failed but Anschutz made off very well, selling his interests while the getting was good and before buyers and shareholders could catch wind of it.   Anschutz's business practices earned him the title of America's "greediest executive" from that bastion of politically radical journalism Fortune magazine in 2002.  From his Wikipedia entry:

In May 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer reached a settlement with Anschutz after filing a civil complaint accusing Anschutz of accepting IPO shares from Salomon Smith Barney in exchange for Qwest's investment banking business. Anschutz denied any wrongdoing but volunteered to donate a total of $4.4 million to settle the case as long as he selected the recipient organizations in advance.

To give an appearance of atonement for their aggressive pursuit of business, The Anschutzes avoid taxes and promote their brand of Christian, conservative, pro-business causes through the well established vehicle of a Family Foundation, which gives (as is their right and privilege thanks to accommodating tax codes and statutes) to organizations and politicians such as James Dobson's Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute that are anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, anti-labor,  anti-immigrant, anti-public education (the public education siphoning, unaccountable, corporate boondoggle and segregation loophole of charter schools is a pet project of theirs), and as could be predicted based on their fossil fuel connections, engaged in the promotion of climate change denial.  When publicity of their support of reactionary causes and legislation threatens their reputation and their profits, they have been known to throw a million now and then  at say the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

An article at Inside Philanthropy on their activities gives an indication of the family's approach to social issues:

Anschutz has said that "food banks, charter schools, and homeless shelters are a good way to help people, but in the long run, people grounded in solid values will be better situated to prosper on their own." By "values," Anschutz often means an emphasis on faith and family, and he's a big backer of religious work. But his foundation also promotes such values as empathy and respect for others.

Take it from a born wealthy, tax shirking, planet destroying greediest man: wealth inequality could be eliminated if the less fortunate had empathy and respect for other people.  Contrast The Anschutz Foundation's facile morality with this from Bernie Sanders' recent rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queens:

I want you all to take a look around and find someone you don’t know, maybe somebody who doesn’t look kind of like you, who might be of a different religion, maybe who come from a different country… My question now to you, is are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself? Are you willing to stand together and fight for those people who are struggling economically in this country? Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt, even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care as a human right, even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors, even if you are native born? Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people who have not yet even been born, but are entitled to live on a planet that is healthy and habitable?

This is a challenge to everyone with the responsibility of casting a vote in the upcoming primary season.  And it couldn't provide a more stark contrast to the cheap talk of Anschutz's billboards.  For his vision of a more just, inclusive America, Sanders gets called a crabby old loudmouth.   For his roadside eyesore vapidity, Anschutz gets to shirk paying taxes and call himself a Philanthropist.

Let us be perfectly clear, Phillip Anschutz's agenda is not Civility.  Civility is a lecture at you, it's not a social movement meant to inspire and involve you.  Anschutz's lecture at you is in front of your face (there are no billboards in his neighborhood); his true agenda-- welfare for the rich, freedom to use his obscenely outsize slice of the pie to rape the earth for profit, control of the global political agenda to suit his narrow and frankly provincial worldview without contributing a dime of his wealth to the sustaining of a public good-- is hidden from view.

If Philip Anschutz wins, the planet loses, women lose, free creative expression loses, we lose.  Philip Anschutz wins.  If we win, Anschutz will be forced to live in a world where health care is a universal right, where the planet starts to be healed by the end of fossil fuel consumption and the mitigation of carbon emissions and the development of an economy based on renewable energy and resources.  Where the failed intrusion of private interests in public education is ended, public schools are funded equitably and no longer based on zip code, and a college education is free for all.

If we win, Philip Anschutz still wins, but LGBTQ people win, women win, immigrants win, education wins, labor wins, the planet doesn't lose, and Philip Anschutz doesn't lose anything but capital that only a greedy greedy man would miss.  It's a win-win situation, but unlike the Win-Win wind that capitalists and neoliberals insist that corporate charity is all about, the winning in Bernie Sanders' model of society is actually real for everybody.