Now, accusations of liberal bias in the media (always excepting FoxNews) have a long history in America. Accusers will point to statistics like the disproportionately high percentage of media folk with liberal political orientations and what they often claim is unfairly rosy coverage of anyone who swears allegiance to the Blue Donkey.

During this election cycle, accusations rose to an unprecedented high. Perhaps it was just that conservatives were angry that the Democrats’ candidate (for once) was actually cooler than that of the Republicans’, but the level of vitriol directed toward the MSM could be measured from space. After the election, one prominent Republican blowhard, John Ziegler, even put forward his own cash to conduct a poll of people who voted for Obama, seeking to determine once and for all that they had been led astray by the ever-heinous MSM. The results? Only that cleverly-written questions can always skew the data in your favor.

I don’t quite understand why people are always so quick to point out political bias in the media. To be sure, it happens occasionally, but far less often than it would seem that most people believe. The major networks aren’t stupid: They know that any actual favoritism on their part would lead to disastrous consequences. I don’t really mind it though, because at least it prompts people to actively question the information they receive—although I fear that it also has the adverse corresponding effect of making those people trust the actually slanted news outlet of their choice (Fox, NPR, etc.) unconditionally.

However, the endless accusations of political bias do irk me for one specific reason: They blind people to the one true bias of all forms of media, the greatest bias known to man: money. Is there any doubt that the possibility of having more green in their wallets takes precedence over any petty issues of politics? Media is a business, one of the biggest businesses around, and don’t you forget it.

While conservatives cried foul at the media’s treatment of Sarah Palin (which hilariously came packaged with Republicans suddenly becoming the bastions of feminism), they missed the real reason behind all of the coverage: Americans couldn’t get enough of Sarah Palin. She was like a reality TV show! She hit the stage when we knew nothing about her and proceeded to kick ass and take names like nobody’s business. But then, just when she seemed poised to (almost literally) take over the world, she began to crack under pressure and thus began a smoky spiral in an explosion of self-defeat. American politics or the next MTV beach-based reality show? You decide—either way, it sells.

This doesn’t just crop up during election season, of course. As the networks have discovered the selling power of violence, the expression “if it bleeds, it leads” has only become more true. Stories of gang shootings, etc., get more people to watch the news, which in turn gets the media more dollars from those always-scrupulous advertisers. How else can you explain the fact that media coverage of murder has steadily risen even while the actual number of murders has fallen year after year?

But I’m on a bit of a digression. The point is: No one seems to trust the MSM, although it is the source for 90 percent of our national news. Sometimes the reasons are a bit overblown, while other times they are dead on, but regardless, no one trusts the media. Does this bother anyone else? Our entire country cannot bring itself to trust our major information networks and one of the fundamental building blocks of democracy.

I suppose this is the point where I would tell you all to go out there and actually make a difference in the media to shake things up, but I can’t really bring myself to do that. Maybe my own pessimism about the media is just too great; maybe the fact all of our news comes from corporations so large they should just be called Conglamo! has got me down; maybe it’s just that I find myself also a part of that group that just can’t trust the media. If, however, despite my pessimism, you manage to go out there and actually improve things in the news industry, then rest assured that you will have both my most heartfelt thanks and also my most astonished look.

As for me? Well, I’ve decided to get my news from the BBC…

But Proposition 8 was different. Its passage was more than a rebuke of homosexuality by the state many people consider to be the most liberal in the union; it was the first time that the right of gays to marry, previously found in California to be constitutionally protected, was explicitly taken away. For this reason among others, it has garnered a multitude of responses from those on both sides of the issue. Keith Olbermann, a man whom I normally find almost as repulsive as Bill O’Reilly, deserves particular credit for a highly emotional commentary he made which has been circulating on YouTube as of late.

These commentators are doing the right thing, and I hope that they will help to swing the tide of public opinion toward gay rights. But in the mean time, I have an additional analysis of the situation: The passage of Proposition 8 was wrong not just on moral grounds, but also because Americans do not have the right to stop gays from getting married.

This is quite a statement, so please let me explain. America is a democracy founded on the notion of liberty. The fundamental notion of liberty is what is called the “no harm” principle, which essentially states that one has a right to do anything which does not bring harm to anyone else. At the point at which harm would be done to someone else, they have the right to put a stop to it—a practical example of this is self-defense. To determine whether the prevention of gay marriage is allowed, it must be looked at through this lens.

The critical question then becomes: Does gay marriage cause harm to those who would seek to prevent it? If so, then they are justified in doing so. Many of these people would likely say yes, claiming that gay marriage presents a verifiable threat to their society, and that governmental acceptance of gay marriage would mean acknowledging as legitimate a relationship which they consider sinful.

The first argument is difficult to make, because the notion of “society” as one unified mass is obviously false. Rather, “society” as a whole is a shifting, undulating composite of many different groups of people with many different opinions. Why do opponents of gay marriage get to be the spokesmen for all of society? Certainly gay marriage would cause the makeup of society to change, but it would be almost impossible to determine whether that change constituted “harm.” For everyone who would oppose the change, there is likely another who would approve. “Harm” is pretty hard to ascertain here.

The second argument is also false because governmental acceptance of gay marriage does not necessitate an imposition of opinion upon those who oppose gay marriage. To allow gay marriage is not the same thing as to approve of it. The anti-gays are under no obligation to change their minds and can go on believing whatever they want to for however long they want to. Thus, in this case as well, it seems impossible to establish the “harm” prerequisite for preventing gays from marrying.

Now, it’s important to stop here and note that there is a very big difference between holding opinions and acting upon them. Because opinions do not present a clear “harm,” the right to eliminate Freedom of Thought cannot be given. Thus, though those who oppose gay marriage do not have the right to prevent gays from marrying, they are perfectly free to continue holding opinions against gay marriage. It is my hope that they will change their minds; but they cannot be forced into it.

You might say that this is all well and good, but that obviously the anti-gay forces have the right to prevent gay marriage, because of the fact that they did. This is false. Just because they voted against gay marriage does not mean that they had the right to do so, in the same way that one who murders someone else did not have the right to do so.

You might also say that this does not matter, because I’m arguing from the perspective of classical liberty, and most of the anti-gay zealots are arguing from a religious standpoint, which can toss liberty out the window if it so pleases. But America was founded on liberty, and that is what its laws are supposed to represent. Naturally, this is quite often not the case, but that doesn’t mean that the ideal should vanish. Therefore, I conclude: Those who would seek to prevent gay marriage in this country have absolutely no right to do so, and votes in favor of items like Proposition 8 reject the very idea of America. This is an argument not from constitutionality, not from legality, not even from morality but from liberty, the foundational spirit of our country.

The postmodern emphasis on relativism came out of many varied sources, and it would be disingenuous to imply that any one was wholly and solely responsible. Some larger sources can still be identified, however. In general, postmodernism was a revolt against absolutism, and so remembrances of the terrors of Nazism and fascism echoed painfully through the halls of its formation.

But the largest contemporary source was none other than Marx-ism, particularly as exemplified by the glorification of the state in the Soviet Union but also in the way
that it tries to construct a narrative out of history in which every event has an objective, absolute purpose toward some higher goal. Rejecting such absolutism, the postmodernists found their values not on the universal level but rather on the local.

In contrast to the philosophies that spawned it, postmodernism is a decided breath of fresh air. If there’s one thing—philosophically, that is—that truly scares the snot out of me, it’s absolute certainty. At the point when one becomes absolutely convinced of his own rightness, and therefore of the absence of any need to heed the thoughts of others, a narcissism of incredible potency is born. At this point, the self becomes the absolute good and nothing is forbidden, for anything is allowed when one becomes absolutely certain.

Yet what about the other extreme, the oxymoronic extreme of relativism? Although the core values of relativism include respect for others and their own thoughts, leaning too far in this direction produces an inability to oppose the actions of others. For example, multiculturalism teaches that we should respect those of other religions. Well, what if extremists from that religion teach that women, for example, are so entirely unequal to men that they don’t even count as humans (and please don’t think I’m only speaking of Islam—this is a common element of many religious fringe groups)? Postmodernism would say that we are fine to oppose such treatment within our own society, but once we come to another, we have no right to impose our values upon them. At this point, the self becomes almost negated, and nothing is forbidden to anyone else, for anything is allowed when one becomes absolutely uncertain

Both philosophies, when taken to the extreme, arrive at the same place.

The problem is that postmodernism is an imperfect solution to absolutism because it only works for that person who adopts it. For everyone else, the postmodernist just becomes one less person to offer opposition. And so most of us, even those (like myself) who find themselves somewhat endeared to relativism, acknowledge that there are certain situations in which we must put our respective feet down and declare an action to be wrong.

But when does this become okay? The postmodernist becomes caught in a paradox: to allow the other to act unopposed is to allow the existence of absolutism, the sworn philosophical enemy. But to oppose such an act is an exercise in absolutism itself and thus transforms the postmodernist into precisely what the movement is designed to stop. Even for reformed postmodernists, this nagging thought hovers nearby at all times, boring discreetly into their justifications.

And so, contemporary intellectualism remains the hazy victim of postmodern excesses: able to comprehend the problem, yet un-able to extricate itself enough to bring about the solution.

In order to break this stalemate, then, I propose a compromise: limited absolutism. Or limited relativism, if you like—both imply finding a medium in the dialectic. In order to maintain the possibility of morality, we must declare a few values to be absolute goods; things like the right to life, equality of opportunity and traditional liberty. If we have no values, then we have no morality. But in deference to postmodernism, the pool ought to remain small, so that we never become certain of too much. Such a solution counters the narcissism of absolutism, while still avoiding the crippling inaction of postmodernism.

Discussion of which values ought to be included in this small pool is far beyond the scope of this article; it would likely take a sizable book to do so appropriately. But I think the general idea is vital: A few core values are a necessity; everything else is negotiable. As Oscar Wilde said, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” The trick, of course, is to find out where…

The Arizona senator, at that time at least, was quite true to his “maverick” image. He was against Bush’s tax cuts, and he was against repealing Roe v. Wade. After he lost the primary due mostly to a series of shockingly underhanded smears, McCain continued to support issues that tended to be primarily against the Republican base. Even as someone who would probably be judged an extreme liberal, I doubt that I have ever felt prouder for my country than when the then-courageous John McCain stood up to that Current Occupant and wrote a bill for an unqualified condemnation of torture.

Naturally, an accompanying low point in my national pride was the debate which followed. Shouldn’t this be a common sense issue? Do the fundamental human rights which we claim to support suddenly become extinguished when the human in question is no longer a citizen of the United States? John McCain held his position with grace, dignity and a fiery reservation that indicated that he quite knew that he was in the right.

As I have said, I am an unreserved liberal. Yet, McCain’s leadership at this time two years ago was so exemplary that I wrote many of my college admittance essays around the philosophical importance of the stand which he took against torture. If I would have been asked to name my favorite figure in the Senate two years ago, the answer would have come quite readily and easily: John McCain, who seemed to epitomize everything that was right (little though there was!) about American politics.

How much two years can change things. I’m quite sure that I would ultimately still be voting for Obama even if the John McCain of two years ago were still running for president. But my choice would be immensely more difficult. Fortunately for Obama, the once honorable “maverick” has been dead for at least two years.

We should have known that this was a problem when John McCain hired the very same people who had so shamelessly smeared him in North Carolina in 2000 to run his campaign. We should have realized the issue when McCain, a former opponent of the “agents of [religious] intolerance” on both the right and the left, gave a graduation address at Jerry Falwell’s “Liberty” University. Alarms should have been raised when McCain, a once valiant supporter of immigration rights, suddenly declared that he would not even vote for his own Senate bill on immigration.

Think John Kerry was a flip-flopper? This John makes Kerry look positively rigid.

Now, in such a time as Americans are in today, any Republican candidate is bound to face long odds. That’s just the way politics works. And it also helps that the Democrats, after eight (very) long years of political impotency, have finally found a vivacious candidate who exudes both optimism and a wonderful doctrine, who can appeal to the blue half of the nation, but also to a surprisingly large portion of the red states.

But if anyone is truly to blame for the massive deficit which John McCain has been seeing in the polls lately, the answer can be none other than John McCain. The man whom I once admired, whom I held up as a politician who earned my respect via his fundamental decency, though I might not always agree with him, has turned his back on everything for which he once stood.

It’s really quite ironic that John McCain is suddenly owning up to his maverick image so completely, because there’s never been a point in his history when he’s more completely abandoned it.

The John McCain of eight years ago, or even two years ago, is dead and gone. The final nail in the coffin should have been his nomination of Sarah Palin, a choice of a fiendishly partisan nature. But I suppose we needed the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” language of the economic meltdown to really drive everything home.

With a scant two weeks left until the election, there is little doubt in my mind that Barack Obama will win the presidency, and for that I am truly glad. But I quite honestly wish that his opponent had not helped him out so much. John McCain used to be that rarest of figures, the Washington politician who you could disagree with but still respect; however, this is true no longer.

If anything should be an indication of just how bad our electoral process has become in the last 50 years, I can think of no better symbol than the tragic metamorphosis of John McCain. The “maverick” used to be right, but now he’s just right-wing.

We have heard plenty over the past few weeks about the various credentials (or lack thereof) of the vice presidential candidates. Although vice presidents are important, I would like to take the focus back to the names at the top of the campaigns, if I may. Specifically, I would like to explore what these vice presidential picks tell us about Obama and McCain, respectively. A candidate’s choice of running mate speaks volumes about who he is and what is important to him—and, lest we forget, whom he wants to vote for him. Analysis of a vice presidential pick, therefore, should not stop at political viability; we must discover what it tells us about the candidate himself and what kind of leader he would be.

First up: Delaware Sen. Joe Biden. Politically, he does a fair amount for Obama, but he isn’t a knockout. His solid working-class credentials will help Obama combat some of the arugula-flavored charges of elitism that have been thrown his way. Although it is more difficult to sell a campaign of change when your running mate has been a senator for almost 36 years, what Obama loses on the “change” front is more than made up for by Biden’s staggering foreign policy experience—bolstering what is often thought to be Obama’s weakest point. Although Delaware only has three electoral votes, and would almost certainly have gone blue anyway, Biden was born and raised in the battleground state of Pennsylvania and could manage to tip the balance there.

But Biden is a bit boring, perhaps, and the media attention given him so far has mostly amounted to a collective, “Oh, okay.” Certainly, he hasn’t been the headline-grabber that Sarah Palin has been. Palin has lit a veritable fire under a Republican base that was all too weary of John McCain. To quote Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, speaking of his approval of the Palin pick, “We haven’t had any excitement in the party for four years!” Sarah Palin is a creationist and pro-life advocate of traditional marriage from a small town and opposes bans on assault rifles. If McCain wanted a social conservative, well, that is certainly what he got. Who wouldn’t be excited?

But what does this pick tell us about John McCain? For a man who has spent most of his political career branding himself as a “maverick” who isn’t afraid to cross party lines in search of the truth and what is right, the Palin pick shows a staggering amount of pandering. Simply put, Republicans weren’t happy with John McCain’s position on social issues, and rather than sticking to what he’s always believed in, McCain retreated and dove head-first into an Alaska-sized vat of red paint.

Now, some might consider it offensive for McCain to give in so blatantly to the social conservatives, but this is the sort of political maneuvering that we Americans have grown used to. However, this former cancer patient and torture victim would place an inexperienced two-year governor of a state with a smaller population than my hometown of Tulsa, Okla. within a 72-year-old heartbeat of the presidency. The pick of Sarah Palin, an American so ignorant of the rest of world that she never bothered to get a passport until July of 2007, is more than offensive pandering—it is critically poor leadership.

It might seem odd for the Democrats to level the charge of inexperience against McCain-Palin when Obama is lacking in this category himself. Such an argument ignores the fact that Obama has more experience than that other great Illinois legislator did when he was elected president—I am speaking of Abraham Lincoln. Sarah Palin does not. But the number of years served do not tell us everything: we must look at the quality of leadership shown by actions taken in that time, and at the quality of the candidate himself. The Biden pick shows us that Obama, apparently quite cognizant of his deficiencies, took steps to correct them by picking one of the single most experienced and knowledgeable politicians in the field today. In an Obama White House, Joe Biden will be among the most important advisers to the president.

With this action, Obama has demonstrated the single most important aspect of leadership: the ability to listen. No one can know everything, be an expert in everything, and so a true leader is identified by his awareness of his own shortcomings and his ability to listen to those who are strong where he is weak. More than anything else, Abraham Lincoln was a great leader because he was willing to listen to his advisers. The Biden pick gives us critical evidence that Obama will lead using the same set of skills.

And the Palin pick? Well, it’s just more evidence that the John McCain of the last two years happily places politics in front of all else, even America’s wellbeing—business as usual from the GOP. Still, I suppose McCain won’t get the opportunity to be even a poor leader if he can’t win the election, huh?

For example, many Americans tend to categorize everyone from China, Japan and Korea jointly as “Asian,” but ask any of them, and they’ll likely tell you that all three constitute separate races. Hispanics are often spoken of as though they were of a different race than whites, but according to the U.S. Census, they’re really pretty much the same people. In fact, it’s not so much that Mexicans are “not white” as that whites are “Caucasian (Non-Hispanic).”

People coming from such divergent locations as Africa, the Caribbean and aboriginal Australia are all referred to as though they were of the same race. Looking into history just compounds these inconsistencies further. The decision of what does and does not constitute a race is clearly so haphazardly and inconsistently applied that it can only be a product of human society.

Because of this, I assert that “race,” as we conceive of it today, is nothing more than what we commonly call a “culture,” writ large and made particularly visually apparent. In an intellectual comparison, there should be no qualitative difference between the labels “black” and “Irish”: Both carry with them the idea of certain cultures and histories—as well as stereotypes, unfortunately. But in practical matters, that visual component ends up mattering quite a bit—it makes it easier for us to identify someone as coming out of a certain culture and to apply the appropriate stereotypes.

This is oftentimes completely unintentional, but I believe it is largely the reason why any given Irish person might only have to put up with a few jokes about drunkenness while any given black person can even to this day have his credentials seriously questioned merely because of what he looks like. To paraphrase Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Of course, we all know that race is a social construct, but that’s not going to help me flag down a cab. ‘No, wait! You don’t understand! We made it all up!’”

Obviously, race continues to be a monumental issue in America, and for a time, the most popular solution seemed to be to pretend that race simply didn’t exist. This resulted in people claiming to be “color-blind” and awkwardly proclaiming phrases such as “Oh, is O.J. Simpson black? I didn’t notice—I don’t see race.” Although this has the noble intention to allow people to be whomever they want to be, the truth is that it just tries to make everybody the same—and more than trying to make everybody the same, in reality, it subtly tries to make everybody white. Many of the people who espouse these ideals are the sort of racists who will most emphatically assert that they are “absolutely not” racists—rather than try to subjugate the “lower races,” they instead must be content with simply trying to imagine them away. Therefore, acknowledgement of any culture rooted in a “race,” like the notion that black literature should be included in the standard canon, are particularly offensive to people such as these, because they are forced to acknowledge that, social construction or not, race does exist.

Such an approach dead-ends us into a world of increasing blandness and rejection of unique cultures. The attempt to make everyone the same will, ultimately, only do race relations harm. Instead of trying to blot out cultural differences, such traditions ought to be honored because we are not all the same. Ignoring the ways in which we might, or might not, look different, Americans all come from different places, different families, different histories. Cultural differences between people of different “races” should be frankly acknowledged, celebrated and learned about. Although too strong of an approach here leads to stereotyping, an assertion of general trends and traditions, from which anyone is free to break and with which anyone is free to join, promotes interracial and thus intercultural understanding—and understanding leads to the humanization which all people so desperately need.

I have never quite understood why “tolerance” is now held up to be among the cardinal virtues we are supposed to espouse in the modern era. “Tolerance” just means “begrudging acceptance.” I can “tolerate” ridiculously hot weather—this doesn’t mean that I want to keep it around. To be sure, tolerance is much better than that which came before – outright hatred. But why should our virtues, the moral goals to which we aspire, stop at the mid-way point? Tolerance is not enough; to progress in this country and this world, we need true celebration of diversity: A black person ought to be able to be just as proud of his blackness as an Irishman could be of his Irishness; moreover, he should be equally proud of the way in which the other attends to his culture. If we do not set our goals at the highest level, then we will have no motive to further ourselves as a nation, as a community and as people.

I am aware that issues of race are oftentimes a touchy subject, and I hope quite sincerely that I have not offended anyone with this article. If that has happened, it was not my goal, and I apologize. However, I feel that race relations in America oftentimes suffer because people are afraid to talk about this understandably complex and emotional issue. What is printed above are just the thoughts of one student as he tries to wade through a very deep issue. I feel that if I can advance the public discourse in any way on this subject, then I have succeeded.

You might have heard of the Amethyst Initiative—it’s been making the rounds of all of the big corporate news outlet lately. I first read about it last Wednesday in an Internet article from the Baltimore Inquirer, but scarcely 24 hours had passed before ABC, NBC and CNN were all echoing the story, as well as any other network which three otherwise unassuming letters could get their hands upon. The issue: alcohol.

The Amethyst Initiative is a petition signed exclusively by university presidents and chancellors who wish to express their support for lowering the drinking age to 18. There are many good reasons why the drinking age should be lowered. Some have previously been expounded by this writer, and others have been elaborated much more convincingly by others. This article does not set out to convince the reader that the drinking age ought to be lowered; rather, it assumes that this viewpoint has already been reached, and it hopes to assure the proponent of such a change that the Amethyst Initiative is the beginning of our eventual success.

Allow me to explain: The Amethyst Initiative, in the present day, is almost certainly and inexorably doomed to fail. This is no mere prediction, but rather a fact of life. The simple truth is this: 95 percent of the people in America would find it hard to give even two lowly darns about what more than 100 presidents of the most esteemed colleges in America have to say. This is the sort of country we live in, and I would hope that, at this point, such an observation takes no one by surprise. So when Harvard and Yale say to lower the drinking age, the rest of the country is lucky if it manages to sober up long enough to grab the message.  If anyone thinks that this current effort will yield results, then they must be an optimist of such strong credentials that they think that Ron Paul might still take the presidency. But I digress.

As I said, the Amethyst Initiative is doomed to failure. This is cold hard fact, with which I will never disagree. But here is the beauty of the movement: Failed political initiatives, when founded on at least vaguely populist notions, have the wondrous tendency to give birth to buoyant new sentiments, aflame with the desire for magnificent change to finally occur. Even as the Amethyst Initiative is buried prematurely in a shallow grave, a magnificent phoenix of public opinion may yet soar above the realm of MADD-enforced highway funding. The students of the future will think to themselves: “Why, yes, efforts to lower the drinking age may have failed in the past, but look who supported the last attempt! All of the official smartest people in America! If they can try and fail, then perhaps this new generation can try and succeed.”

And it is for such a reason, my dear and fellow students of Washington University in St. Louis, that I must bring to your attention a very notable absence from the Amethyst Initiative signers: one Mark S. Wrighton, Chancellor of our supposedly noble university, has yet to lend his John Hancock to this piece of revolutionary parchment. I don’t quite know about you, my readers, but I have yet to find a university with a more realistic and successful alcohol policy than our own. The fact that the de facto leader of this university has not joined the ranks of the rest of the nation’s brightest and signed the Amethyst Initiative is despicable, and we should direct all of the scorn we can muster toward our Chancellor, in the hopes that he might one day see the light—for a single signature can inspire a thousand voices, and one day, a thousand voices might just allow for one legal 18-year-old brewski.