[Note from Christopher:  Sometimes I look back at things I’ve written and think, “Hmmm, well, that was a bit prophetic. Or at least good guess work. Maybe I’m not so dumb, after all.” Given the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, this column hits me that way. It was published in 2006 in The Progressive Populist, a biweekly political journal based in the U.S.]

THE ANSWER MAY SURPRISE YOU…

PRAGUE, Czech Republic—March 1, 2006

A prediction for the 21st century: Globally, the definition of “democracy” will change so dramatically you’ll no longer recognize it.

Propaganda aside, most Americans know that democracy in the USA is broken. Rarely do even half the citizens vote. Those who vote choose between two candidates (a Democrat, a Republican) who each represent institutional (corporate) interests. The highest bidder (most expensive campaign) invariably wins. It’s a money transaction.

Is that democracy? Well, sort of. If people define it that way. Technically, we do have a choice. And if the choice sucks, it’s our own damn fault. People get what they have coming, or will accept. Right? At least that’s the prevalent view.

But what about democracy elsewhere?

Most Americans do believe democracy should be spread globally. It’s a noble goal… until Islamic fundamentalists start winning elections. In Iran, for instance. And Palestine. So do we want a truly democratic Egypt? American liberals and conservatives alike confess no, if they are honest. Democracy suddenly appears insufficient on its own. Other issues matter, too, such as the separation of church and state. So we support a fake democracy in Egypt and feel relieved (if guilty) when the Egyptian government jails its fundamentalists.

Then there’s the faux democracies in some post-Soviet nations. Under the influence of Russia, these countries with one-party rule (often a group of thugs) now imprison and kill dissidents, and fix elections, yet boast about their democratic character. Americans (meaning the U.S. Government, the average American being completely ignorant on this matter) accept the pretense. After all, we want Russia as a friend. Our economy needs, or at least wants, access to Russian oil and gas.

Indeed, the greater our economic dependence on a country, the greater our tolerance for stretching the definition of democracy—especially if the dependence concerns energy resources. Saudi Arabia, ruled by a family oligarchy, elects a few local city councilmen (no women allowed), and we celebrate its burgeoning democracy. Not that we require such dissembling from an oil supplier. We only ask that it remain “politically stable” and keep the pipelines flowing.

On the other hand, an energy supplier that embraces democracy while opposing U.S. policies does pose a problem. Venezuela, for instance. The U.S. Government is highly interested in seeing its populist president, Hugo Chávez, removed from office, and you can bet it’s hard at work trying to accomplish that end. The same with energy-rich Bolivia, where Evo Morales, a populist and socialist, just won the presidency.

In short, it appears that Americans believe (1) democracy is universally good and should exist everywhere, (2) democracy is bad is some countries where it does exist, and (3) democracy would be bad in some countries where it doesn’t exist. About nations that merely pretend to be democracies, Americans are ambivalent (i.e., confused), especially if oil and gas supplies are concerned.

If all that seems contradictory, then welcome to the cognitive dissonance thriving in the minds of many if not most Americans. Also, welcome to the world of American foreign policy. And should you protest that I’m wrong to equate “Americans” with “U.S. Government,” then I offer this reply: We’re a democracy, right? And in a democracy, the government is of the people; it is the people.

Still, if this entire state of affairs seems bewildering, then consider the view of Plato, who more than 2,000 years ago warned us against even attempting democracy. It would result, he assured us, in disaster. But then, Plato was an idealist. He didn’t foresee our ability to stretch the definition of democracy to include almost anything we want it to be.

Iraq is now a democracy, because we say it is. The same for Egypt and Afghanistan and Nigeria, and Russia and Guatemala, and… well, it’s a long list. And diverse, too. In fact, you might have trouble identifying what all the nations on the list have in common other than the official claim, “We are democratic.”

Just like the USA.

*****

[Note from Christopher:  For several years I held a titular post as Central European Correspondent for The Progressive Populist, a biweekly political news journal based in the U.S. It helped that I coincidentally was living in the Central European city of Prague. I believe this effectively held down expenses for the Populist and may have played a role in me getting the position. Also, there was no salary. But I did get press credentials. And I only had to file a report when I felt like it—my favorite kind of job. The founder and editor of the Populist is Jim Cullen, a fine journalist and longtime friend. Jim and I met years ago when we were both toiling for the same daily newspaper. He was a political junkie then and still is. He’s also dedicated to reforming the U.S. political system and creating more economic justice, no small task.

The following piece about the controversial—and illegal—naming of Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. agent by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was published by the The Progressive Populist. It also appeared in the English language Prague Post in the Czech Republic.]

September 1, 2005

Back in a previous lifetime, as a young reporter working for small daily and weekly newspapers, I suffered editors and publishers who routinely practiced easy self-censorship, killed controversial stories, and otherwise surrendered press freedoms with alarming frequency. I consoled myself with the notion that someday, in the “big time,” I’d no longer suffer such indignities.

By “big time,” of course, I meant large daily newspapers and national publications like The New York Times. Or Time magazine. Or even the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

So much for my youthful naivete. As recent events show—I mean the events surrounding the public outing of the C.I.A.’s Valerie Plame and who is at fault—the main difference between an editor at a small newspaper caving in to local pressures and a large national publication (such as Time) caving in to larger pressures is a matter of scale. A supermarket pulling its advertising threatens a small-town weekly as surely as fear of a stock value drop threatens Time Inc.

My first experience along these lines occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980. I’d just been hired by the Birmingham Post-Herald to cover the police beat when Richard Arrington was elected the city’s first black mayor. The cops had two unions, one white and one black, and I soon earned the ire of the white union by giving the black union equal news coverage. Then the city’s white police chief made some highly imprudent remarks about having a black man—meaning Arrington, the new mayor—as his boss. The chief used the “n” word. He was angry (and surprised) when my subsequent story quoting him verbatim appeared in the newspaper. A fire storm broke out. The city’s powers-that-be feared a return to those days when Birmingham was full of racial unrest and violence. The police chief was forced to resign. A few days later, the newspaper fired me. Everyone “in the know” presumed the two events were connected, that a backroom deal had been made. Maybe so. But the newspaper claimed the legal right to fire me without cause, so that was that.

I moved on, briefly became a bartender, then a carpenter. I turned down offers for reporting jobs elsewhere. Editors at several newspapers thought the treatment I’d received in Birmingham was unfair. The job offers did not placate me. I was angry that “freedom of the press” seemed so tenuous. But I eventually returned to journalism, taking a reporting job for a small daily newspaper in Georgia.

After several months there, I wrote stories on the judicial records of two local judges vying for a higher court position. As it turned out, both judges had been routinely letting off friends and “important people” on drunk driving charges while sticking it to everyone else. The two stories (one on each judge) were set to run over two days. On the morning the first story appeared, the publisher appeared in the newsroom shouting angrily. The judge was his good country club friend. We mentioned the second story on the second judge, due to run the next day. But that judge, too, was the publisher’s friend. So he killed the story.

“But we ran the first story already,” the editor suggested, “it’s a matter of balance.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right!” the publisher yelled.

And that was that. Almost.

Because I was not only a reporter but also the newspaper’s weekend editor. And I printed the “killed” story the following weekend. On page one with a big headline. This act was not well received by the publisher.

So I moved on to a medium-size daily newspaper in Texas, my native state. After several months, I was assigned to write a thrice-weekly feature column. In addition, I’d write news stories that I happened across in my work. One of those stories concerned a county sheriff who was stopped in another county for driving drunk. While in his official car, he led sheriff deputies and state highway patrol on a wild high-speed chase before being apprehended. Being a brother law officer, he wasn’t officially charged. But other cops were unhappy with his behavior and gave me the story, which I verified (with much legwork).

So I put the story together. And contacted the sheriff, who refused to comment. But as the story went to press, he called my editor, who killed the story. I protested, to no avail. Then the editor killed an unrelated feature column I wrote, calling it controversial, and demoted me from columnist to general assignments. The publisher agreed it was a fine compromise. So I quit. And that was that once again. (Except for this: When I belatedly received a journalism award for my feature columns, the editor showed up at the banquet to accept it. I wasn’t invited.)

By this time in my journalism career, still nowhere near the “big time,” I was feeling a tad jaded. Freedom of the press? Reporters fervently believed in it. Most publishers did not. Editors were stuck in the middle, an uncomfortable position. And the average reader never heard a word about the matter—about the internal tensions at a newspaper, about reporters fired or quit, and certainly not about the stories not covered or killed.

So the intense, recent coverage by the media of the internal mechanisms of a free press, coverage prompted by the Plame affair, is somewhat refreshing. But not terribly reassuring. The New York Times has stood its ground, a commendable act. Time magazine has not, and its reputation will suffer for it, at least among journalists. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the newspaper editor has announced he is withholding important investigative stories based on anonymous sources because he fears legal repercussions. That seems awfully wishy-washy, as if he expects the general public to rise up in the newspaper’s defense (it hasn’t).

So it goes. All I can say is—and this is garnered from personal experience—freedom of the press isn’t free. It costs something. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a seen as high principle; it’d simply be a routine business practice.

I bailed out of the profession long ago and now write fiction. But I still care deeply about whether journalists cover stories that are inevitably controversial, and whether those stories are printed and broadcast for the benefit of me, a concerned citizen. If they aren’t, we all suffer. Everyone. Not just the journalists.

*****

[Note from Christopher:  I grew up in the oil and petrochemical belt along the Upper Texas Coast. We lived right next door to several such industrial plants. So I may have been in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 23, 2005, when the BP oil refinery at Texas City, Texas, exploded, but it caught my attention. Explosions like that are something I grew up thinking about. Because you just never know when they’ll occur. And a disaster of that kind kills people. And usually injures many more. So I put my thoughts to paper and wrote this column, which was published in the Houston Chronicle newspaper on April 24, 2005. It was subsequently reprinted elsewhere, too. I suppose what it has to say resonated with folks.]

April 24, 2005

When we were children, we begged our mother to drive down Sarah Jane Road so we could cross the bridge and see the rainbow-colored water. The water—dark red, bright orange, a sulfurous yellow—gushed down a canal from a local refinery and dumped directly into the Neches River. A chemical mist rose from its surface, as did a pungent, nose-wrinkling stench.

Unlike us, my mother was not entranced by this witch’s brew. Like most residents of the Texas Gulf Coast near Louisiana, a region densely teeming with oil refineries and petrochemical plants, she preferred not to think about the dark side of the industry forming the backbone of our local economy—indeed, an entire nation’s economy.

But occasionally it became impossible to avoid, as when a plant blew up. Then the TV news crews arrived, along with newspaper reporters from as far away as New York, to report the number of casualties, corporate safety records, the possible effect on gasoline prices at the pump. The media frenzy would last a week, offering tragic “personal accounts” as corporate fault and innocence was assessed… and then the journalists disappeared, and life returned to normal. Out on Sarah Jane Road, beneath a low, paved bridge in the marsh, the rainbow water flowed on.

These memories recently returned like Hamlet’s ghost when, on March 23, the BP oil refinery at Texas City exploded. The news reached me by radio here in Prague, Czech Republic, within hours. The numbers were duly reported: BP’s largest refinery in the U.S., processing 460,000 barrels of Saudi and Venezuelan crude daily, producing 3 percent of the nation’s gasoline, with 1,800 employees. At least 15 dead, more than a 100 injured. Oil and gasoline prices would probably rise.

But in the community of Texas City, I knew, the story would be different. In the wake of the explosion, after the sirens and helicopters and chaos, each resident would know someone killed, or someone who did, as well as survivors who lost legs, or eyesight, or were burned in the fire—human beings whose lives were now irreparably changed.

And in the local cafes and taverns, there would be discussions about how the disaster occurred after a maintenance “turnaround” performed by a non-union contractor offering the lowest, cost-saving bid. There would be hushed conversations about the lack of safety in the refinery—about corners cut, rules routinely broken, poorly trained contract workers—and the inevitable cover-up from federal regulators in bed with the industry.

And they would be right, of course, though circumspect in saying so too loud, or too publicly. After all, as a condition of employment, company workers have signed a document forbidding them to talk to the media. Their jobs are at stake. Why forfeit one’s livelihood for a cause—strict but “costly” enforcement of industrial safety standards—that every corporate and government official loudly embraces but habitually rationalizes away?

Because it does come down to that, in the end: jobs. The jobs of the refinery workers, the jobs of the corporate executives, the jobs of the regulators, the job of every American who works for an employer where “affordable” energy prices mean economic success or failure in this “new global marketplace”.

So I was not surprised to learn that the BP refinery in Texas City, like BP facilities elsewhere, has a history of safety violations. Nor was I surprised to learn that federal regulators in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have assessed large fines in the past, then quietly dropped or reduced them later. That’s how the game is played.

And those who work in the refineries and plants along the Texas Gulf Coast know it. For them, it’s an unhappy but accepted fact of life, as inevitable as corporate greed and crooked politicians and the occasional brief media frenzy that follows an industrial catastrophe.

By now, the dead from this latest calamity are buried. The injured are receiving medical care. Industry spokespersons have duly called it “a very serious accident”. Federal regulators are investigating. The media has moved on, having discovered the latest big story.

And down in Texas City, and all along the Gulf Coast where the giant cauldrons cook oil for the nation, residents are returning to an uneasy truce with their economic sustenance. Many are recollecting the good old days “before Reagan” when trained union workers operated the refineries and chemical plants, when union craftsmen maintained them. Some are consulting lawyers.

As for me—faraway here on the banks of the Vltava River in this Central European city—I am remembering the gas flares of my youth, the acrid air, the rainbow-colored water. I am curious if it’s still there. I am wondering if anything changes.

*****