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From the left we are so used to disappointment that we almost need it, but let's not indulge in sheer masochism. Politics isn't always about the bottom line, and for me, President Obama's invisible victories are immensely heartening. He has cleansed the Presidency, reinstated America's status in the world, championed ideals on every front, and spoken truth to power, whether that means calling both the Israelis and Muslims to account or facing down racism in this country.

We cannot shortchange the shift in consciousness that Obama's election stands for and that his Presidency continues to inspire in millions of people. For the first time in American history, more than a quarter of the electorate in 2008 was non-white. For Hispanics and blacks, who are grossly underrepresented in state and national legislatures, there's been a psychological turning point. For the first time, they can say "He's my President" in the same way the white majority takes for granted.

The left isn't famous for ideological compromise, and if Obama followed that example, he would be awash in failure. Instead, he has steered through Congress more stimulus for education than Bill Clinton managed in eight years. He has revamped the bailout to make it more democratic. I find myself agreeing with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said on one of the Sunday news shows that Pres. Obama may not walk on water, but he's turned into the best swimmer in politics. If his ambitions for health care reform turn out to come anywhere near his stated goals, that will prove the point beyond a doubt.

Finally, the left is forever caught between a sense of vaunted moral righteousness and the reality that such an attitude will never win votes or pass legislation. FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton are considerable heroes to realists and grave disappointments to arch idealists. I'm glad that idealism exists and keeps the pressure on Obama, as Hans Morgenthau did on FDR and Adlai Stevenson on JFK (there were many others, of course). Yet does he really need prompting on this front? I can't imagine a President with a clearer moral sense, a higher standard of policy, or a broader perspective about the direction of the country's future.

So let's settle back and enjoy the fruits of the most idealistic election since 1932, or if you prefer, 1960. A dose of calm and a little perspective are the right prescription, even if the anxious neurosis of being a leftist is incurable.

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It would be difficult to imagine a more eloquent and timely case for health care reform than the one being made by Barack Obama. He has staked his early presidency on fulfilling one of his major campaign promises. Everyone agrees -- not counting extremists -- that his recent address to Congress was masterful. Yet an ABC poll quickly showed that 78% of respondents don't believe the President's proposed reforms will help them personally, and over 80% don't believe it will lower their costs.

This fix-it President, who also has the gift of eloquence and an electoral mandate, has hit a wall. That wall has more to do with the future than just health care.

The wall has been put up by all kinds of people. Fear mongers on the right spoil for Obama to fail at anything and everything. Idealists on the left want far-reaching reform rather than a compromise plan. The indifferent middle doesn't want to be bothered. There are a dozen rationales to hide behind: The government is intruding too much into the private sector, the cost of the new plan is too high, cost-cutting won't happen, the deficit is already staggering, nobody wants to pay more for their medical care, and besides, we have two wars to contend with. I'm sure you can add more objections to the list, and we haven't even arrived at what would be a good or bad plan yet.

Let's say that all these objections have merit, since in fact they do. Even the extremists on the far right are trying to find a pulse in the moribund Republican party, and hating has worked well for them in the past. Whatever the merits for opposing health care reform, two points can't be overlooked. First, the system is broken and needs fixing. We elected a fix-it president at exactly the right time, and the adult in each of us knows that he's right to tackle this huge looming problem.

The second point is more dismaying. If the wall doesn't give and Obama's plan is watered down to the point that it turns into a giveaway for the insurance companies, what will that say about America? It will say that lobbyists own the government, that democracy has been sold down river. It will say that extremists, however absurd with their death panels and " the government can't run anything" have poisoned reasonable discussion. A double flaw in the national character was brought out during the Bush years: blind selfishness and moral indifference. That's what Obama is trying to reverse.

Will he succeed? There's no doubt that health care reform, in no small part, requires sacrifice. It also requires compassion, because the vast majority who already have health insurance are being asked to help cover the minority who don't. Obama has rightly pointed out that this isn't a subsidy. If you have medical insurance, you are already paying in boosted premiums for the uninsured. If a procedure costs $1,000 but some people get it for free (the indigent, the uninsured who rush to the ER, illegal immigrants, and the young, who have yet to think about insurance), then the extra cost gets passed along. To extend a compassionate hand is also to ask for justice. More people will be paying for their own health rather than depending on somebody else to foot the bill.

I hope these considerations of character and compassion make an impression. If reform fails, the presidency will survive. If reform is half-hearted, a victory will be claimed and everyone, except for a few harsh critics, will go back to the status quo. The economics will work itself out eventually, probably in a worse way than if we handled the problem today. But the failure of reform will prove that the era of fear-mongering, selfishness, extremist poison, and political hypocrisy is far from over. Let's hope that the opposite happens. It might be just the kind of turn-around we hoped for when this President was elected.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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The rise of incivility in this country is a symptom of mass psychopathology. Groups of people see other groups of people behaving badly, and this gives them permission to behave badly themselves. The same thing happens in families. If one child is allowed to throw tantrum, refuse to pick up his toys, or talk back, the other children watch and imitate. Which doesn't mean that everyone in the family automatically loses control. The key is that boundaries have been crossed, and once that happens, it's hard to go back again. (This accounts in part for why abused children grow up to abuse their own children. They were raised not to recognize the boundary that protects a child from physical or emotional mistreatment.)

The abuse delivered by right-wing Christians is such an old story that we are long past irony. The Rev.Rick Warren has a record for trying to smooth the waters, but he also flirts with intolerance -- toward gay marriage, for instance -- and since his rationale is that a "loving" God shares the same prejudices, what's to stop others with worse tempers from following the same logic? When your God hates, you have permission to hate.

Since Jehovah is an expert hater in the Old Testament, urging his people to countless wars, the greatest attempt to recross that boundary comes in the New Testament, where Jesus preaches love and peace. His success, shall we say, has been limited. Christian violence is as old as the persecution of heretics, which began immediately after Constantine's conversion in 313 A.D. The impulse toward aggression, which is present in everyone, found a way to turn even the Prince of Peace into a hater.

If the story is old and universal, then the rise of incivility in our time displays behavior that cannot be eradicated. At best it is controlled. Sane, civil people have always been the gatekeepers of mature behavior and the teachers of morality. Sometimes their efforts go terribly astray, and the worst in human nature is allowed to have its way (these are the times described by Yeats as when "the center cannot hold"). Barack Obama's behavior comes from the center, and I don't mean just politically. He's a sane, civil adult who knows where his center is. We see our own maturity mirrored in him, but for a long time his predecessor was willful, petulant, arbitrary, and unchecked in his mistakes -- all the marks of serious immaturity, which is especially dangerous in a leader. It breeds not only incivility but wars.

At the same time, reactionary politics is rooted in incivility, having found its first success in the Seventies and Eighties by welcoming bigots, haters, the religious right, and the psychologically damaged to enter the arena of power brokers. The ultra-right fringe had long been excluded, and rightly so, from the central core of either party, being tolerated because a democracy must learn to tolerate the intolerant. Now the intolerant were told that their anger and repression were good things. Pres. Nixon had shown the way with his Southern strategy, a code name for racism, intolerance of hippies, and hatred of the anti-Vietnam movement.

The tactic didn't backfire, which struck a blow to any hope of civility in public discourse afterwards, and once a smooth talker like Ronald Reagan appeared, a shameful policy like allowing AIDS patients to die because, ultimately, they deserved it for their ungodly behavior, could be instituted. The result was that the right-wing base became used to promoting social injustice as a good thing. Fortunately, the outrageousness of Reagan's AIDS indifference led to strong, vocal opposition. Sane, civil adults do keep watch over misbehavior; they have done so during the entire reactionary shift in American politics.

What closed the circle of incivility is that the vociferous intolerance that continues to spew from the religious right and cultural conservatives set a tone that tempted their opponents to scream back. The hectoring left is much smaller than the hectoring right, which has thousands of radio stations at its beck and call, but it feels just as justified. What will stop this vicious circle of name-calling and invective? Not the arrival of a civil President. We already see stories about fringe preachers asking God for Obama's death.

To heal the ills of mass psychology, a shift in consciousness is needed. The problem exists at the level of human aggression. The solution exists at the level of human ideals. There are many ways to remind us of our ideals -- through families, churches, the political pulpit, and by example in public behavior. When more people realize that peace is better than war for everyone, the war of words will begin to end. It's happened before in America's history of inflammatory politics. The sane and civil among us will try to make it happen again.

Published in the Washington Post

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If you hear someone softly crying "I'm melting, I'm melting" in the distance, it's not the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz but Fox News. One must listen through the din of hysteria that dominates almost every program. The shrinking credibility of the right wing, like the shrinking of a defeated witch, will be very good for innocent children everywhere. When Fox News tried to strike fear into the public heart by claiming that President Obama's televised speech to schoolchildren was secret indoctrination, the wind whistled down the empty canyons of Mediaville.

They turned up the volume with cries that Obama was the same as Kim Jong Il, that he was brainwashing a future generation of liberals, that his tactics were identical to those used in Stalin's Russia. Common sense contradicted these delusions -- not that anyone at Fox News believed them for a second -- and such socialist Presidents as the first George Bush and Ronald Reagan had delivered the same sort of benign address to the nation's schools. One had to smile at the lengths the right has to go to in order to evoke a quiver of nervousness, much less the full-blown seizure of anxiety and fear they used to trigger.

Why, then, not admit victory and smile? The deathers and birthers aren't making an impact, with the former trotting out the specter of bureaucratic death panels to end Grandma's life, the latter wandering about in a daze as they hold Barack Obama's birth certificate up to the light, certain that they will spot a counterfeit. It's an amusing -- and sad -- spectacle but not a dangerous one. Therefore, it's time to stop fearing this shadow play that was once so real.

Step by step Barack Obama is returning the country to its senses. Rational adults are in charge. Enormous challenges are being met with moderation, honesty, and candor. That's the real victory, which goes far beyond politics to the very character of America. By embodying those same qualities, all of us mount the best defense against the haunting memory of the reactionary decades when every form of unreason turned this nation into a surreal circus of wrong-doing. In other words, it's just as important to change your response to Fox News as it is to undo the social damage of the Reagan-to-Bush era. Without a new attitude, the same futile tug-of-war will continue.

I am not suggesting that the fate of a Van Jones, driven from his advisory role at the White House by an old-fashioned witch hunt, is anything to smile at. At its most venal, the far right will contract until only the Glenn Becks remain. Sincere, rational conservatives know that this is happening. They cringe when Rep. Joe Wilson shames the entire Republican Party by calling the President a liar in public. They shake their heads when Fox News trumpets toxic nonsense about mandatory abortions under the Obama health plan. When a piece of furniture sits on a base that's too small, it topples over. As the Republican base dwindles to Southern white males and various credulous hangers on, the whole party is set to topple just as inevitably.

But this isn't a post about gloating. A vigorous two-party system is necessary to the body politic. The rights of the minority need protecting, which means not just ethnic minorities but the far right minority. The whiners and grumblers at Fox News will find an audience, just as auto wrecks find rubbernecks on the highway. In place of gloating, we need to exhibit the confidence and good humor of people who have stood on the outside for a long time while protecting the truth, who have spoken truth despite the ethos of lying in Bush's Washington, who understood that the essence of America is and always will be progressive, tolerant, and accepting.

Isn't that reason enough to give Fox News a smile once in a while?

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Here's my favorite celebrity encounter story. As residents of LA, on average we see one or two recognizable celebrities a week, most often in the Wholefoods down the street or the Starbucks a few blocks from our house. There are certain A-listers who if you time it right, you can catch them dropping their kids off at the school down the street or picking up their dry-cleaining at the same place we go.

As I also work in the "industry," I also collaborate or have worked/met with some of the biggest of the big. I mean the guys who draw $20 million a film. My wife and I get invited to big movie premieres and the occasional after-party where we talk shop with the aforementioned movie star. But here's the truth, my wife and I don't really get starstruck. Not sure if it's we're just used to it, or know some of these people too well to idolize them, or are immune to it because of the way so many people go gaga over my dad. Whatever.

Still there was one time i'll never forget when my wife abasolutely swooned in the presence of a movie star. I mean knees buckling, voice stammering, eyes-batting, could not hold her @#$% together starstruck. Not Brad Pitt, not George Clooney, not Tom Cruise, Denzel, Bruce Wayne, Gladiator, or any of the other usual suspects. No we're talking the BIGGEST movie star in the world ladies and gents, Bollywood sensation SHAH RUKH KHAN.

Yeah, the same guy Newark New Jersey Customs officials detained yesterday for several hours on account of Shah Rukh having the same last name as some dude on a terror watchlist somewhere.

Quickly, first the story.

Continue Reading SHAH RUKH SHAME on Intent.com

Gotham Chopra blogs regularly at Intent.com