Banner day for common sense. The Supremes declined — for the umpteenth time — to take the Schiavo case. Also, Jeb Bush got shot down in his latest attempt to overrule the state court system in Florida.

Moral: Don’t pick a fight with judges unless you bring some game.

No telling what kind of shenanigans Jeb will pull next in his presidential campaign — uh, I mean his selfless drive to keep “the culture of life” alive — but for now, right this minute, sanity has prevailed. Allelujah, indeed.

Sliding under the radar — and to me the happiest news of the day — was the decision by the IMAX theatre in Fort Worth, Texas, to go ahead and show a new IMAX film about volcanoes. Yes, an IMAX film about volcanoes that — shudder — mentioned evolution. Oh, I mean Evil-lution.

Last week the Fort Worth theatre, along with the ones in Charlotte and Charleston, decided to preempt possible protests by the Bible-thumping torch-and-pitchfork crowd by just not showing the damn movie at all.

Here’s hoping that Fort Worth’s attack of common sense will spread to Charlotte and Charleston. I’m not holding my breath, but a fool can dream.

Isn’t it wonderfully ironic that the backward creationist science-haters, by refusing to evolve as thinking, rational humans, will eventually prove Darwin’s theory right by making themselves extinct?

God knew what she was doing when she invented evolution.

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Like many of you, I’ve tried my best to stay out of the whole Terri Schiavo thing. But also like many of you, the sheer nastiness and stupidity of the fundamentalist lynch mob has angered me in a deeply visceral way that I haven’t quite got a handle on yet.

What exactly am I so enraged at? What about the Schiavo story has me so thoroughly embarrassed to be an American at this point in time?

Is it the shameful spectacle of the U.S. Congress in “emergency session” — at great taxpayer expense — to concoct a one-off “law” applying to a single politically charged situation, overruling years of court rulings on the same situation?

Is it the incredible hypocrisy of conservatives who just a few months ago were foaming at the mouth about “the sanctity of marriage” now doing their best to completely destroy one marriage’s sanctity?

Is it the sorry example of a president who refuses to cut a single hour of his vacation when there’s a warning of an imminent Bin Laden attack in the U.S. or for a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands, but gladly rushes back to D.C. to sign a law allowing the most egregious possible invasion of one family’s personal life by the federal government?

Is it the jaw-dropping hubris of a narrow band of radical right-wing extremists in Congress who are so arrogant, so scornful of public opinion that they would defy the overwhelming poll results against their actions? And do you get the idea that they really, really like defying overwhelming poll results against their actions?

Is it the cheap viciousness of politicians in front of the CSPAN cameras systematically insulting and attacking a private American citizen, Michael Schiavo?

Think how you’d feel if the Congress of the United States of America held a special session to denounce your character and integrity for hours on end on national TV. They pass trillion-dollar budgets, they can declare war, they have their own bomb-proof bunkers in case of nuclear holocaust — and now they’re coming after you!

What chance would you have? What chance would anyone have?

I can imagine few things more un-American than an entire government focusing its energies on the personal destruction of one of its own citizens — a citizen that almost two dozen judges have previously said is right in this case, by the way — yet that kind of petty cruelty is what now characterizes our nation, both abroad, and thanks to the Schiavo case, now at home.

Then it dawned on me why the Schiavo thing makes me so damn mad: It’s the face of tyranny.

When Congress feels so bold as to defy years of court precedent to insert itself into the personal life of a single American family, employing its vast power to destroy one of that family’s members — that means the effective end of rule of law in this country.

If Tom DeLay & company prevail in the Schiavo case, it means the end of any guarantee you may have once had that you and your loved ones would be safe from humiliation and devastatation by your own elected government — the end of any guarantee that an aggrieved citizen can seek redress through the courts.

As I write this, a federal appeals court in Atlanta — the last step before the U.S. Supreme Court — has turned down Schiavo’s parents plea for a reinsertion of the feeding tube.

There’s a word for a place where federal judges fear for their lives. Where they must rule on controversial cases wearing body armor and accompanied by massive security, as the judges in the Schiavo case have.

That word is “Colombia.”

That’s just about where we live now. In Colombia. Except with less beautiful women.

Should the Supreme Court take the case and rule in favor of Schiavo’s parents, they will not only be defying their own precedent. They will be active participants in their own demise, and in the demise of the rule of law in the United States of America — a once-great nation that becomes more like a banana republic every day.

Or would that be Banana Republican?

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I’m pretty brain-dead from putting together this week’s St. Patrick’s Day issue, which is always one of our biggest issues of the year.

So in the spirit of a column I wrote in December 2003, I’m going to write an entry about one of my favorite hobbies: collecting Nigerian Scam letters.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of decades, the Nigerian Scam is a twenty-year-old hustle involving mass e-mails — actually, faxes back in the day — promising the pigeon a hefty cash allotment if said pigeon will just help smuggle funds out of a beleaguered African nation (though recently the scammers have begun branching out to other locales).

The Nigerian Scam is unique among scams for two reasons: 1) According to the FBI, it is the largest and most profitable con in history; and 2) the writers of the scam letters betray in their individualistic writing styles an inherent sensitivity to human nature which I find genuinely inspiring in this age of corporate cookie-cutter marketing.

Though the overall writing talent of the scammers has declined in the past couple of years, some real gems still show up in my e-mail box — most of them courtesy of my long-standing “pusher” of fine, uptown Nigerian Scam Letters, Mr. Gerald Schantz of Aurora Stained Glass and Gerald’s Chuckwagon fame.

The best way to enjoy Nigerian Scam Letters is just to dive right in. So here goes, with an excerpt from the most recent letter:

Good day,

As you read this, I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me because, I
believe everyone will die someday.

My name is Bill Owens, a Real Estate developer in Toronto, Canada. I have
been diagnosed with lung cancer, which has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according
to medical experts.

This, of course, is the “salutation” portion of the Scam Letter, wherein the writer hooks the pigeon with a formal introduction and brief character sketch of themselves, crafted with the two-fold aim of eliciting sympathy while establishing credibility.

I think Mr. Owens comes on a little strong in this salutation. The terminal illness approach seems too obvious — though I confess I do love the charming and possibly deliberate misuse of the word “defiled.”

Is it possible that the writer, though pretending to be Canadian, made the mistake on purpose as a sort of clue, a subtle signature of his individuality as an artist? An artistic individuality so driven as to transcend even the necessity of pulling off the scam? I think yes!

Mr. Owens’ letter is an example of a recent and most unfortunate trend in Nigerian Scam letters, i.e., making the sender an Anglo rather than an African. Me, I’m a purist. I prefer a scam letter with an exotic African or Middle Eastern tinge. We have enough native huckster Bubbas stateside as it is.

However, I do give Mr. Owens props for his next paragraph:

I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone (not even myself) but my business. Though I am very rich, I was never generous; I was always hostile to people and only focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared for. Now I regret all this as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world.

Again, a little strong for my taste, but this paragraph fulfills an essential characteristic of the Nigerian Scam Letter: The writer must come across as basically honorable, but less than perfect. Good effort here.

Alas, the rest of Mr. Owens’ letter is not worth going over, ignoring such basics of a good scam letter as a clear relationship to specific high government officials. So we’ll move on to this “Business Offer”:

I am Prince Fayad W. Bolkiah, the eldest son of Prince Jefri Bolkiah,former
Finance Minister of Brunei, the tiny oil-rich sultanate on the Gulf Island. Will save your time by not amplifying my extended royal family history,which has already been disseminated by the international media during the controversial dispute that erupted between my father and his step brother,the sultan of Brunei Sheik Muda Hassanal Bolkiah.

Well done! A return to old-school salutation, this epistle from the prince has all the hits: A reference to obscure royalty, a bitter family dispute, and a clear source of funding.

Note the thespian genius of the writer, staying in character throughout the salutation. Wouldn’t it be just like a prince to brush aside a detailed explanation by referring to international media reports? And doesn’t this make us feel more important, more in-the-know, since the prince blithely assumes we already know this?

Good stuff. Let’s continue:

As you may know from the international media,the sultan had accused my
father of financial mismanagement and impropriety of US$14.8 Billion
dollars. This was as a result of the Asian financial crisis that made my
father company Amedeo Development Company and government owned Brunei
Investment Company to be declared bankrupt during his tenure in
office.However my father was kept under house arrest, his bank accounts and
private properties including a crude oil export refinery were later
confiscated by the sultanate.

This, as I’ve written before, is the “habeas corpus” segment of a Nigerian Scam Letter, wherein the writer reveals the exact source and amount of the funds to be smuggled out of the country. The more detailed, the more credible. There is literally no way to overdo the habeas corpus, and attention to detail in this segment is what separates an outstanding Nigerian Scam Letter writer from a merely competent one.

While the prince’s habeas corpus does not carry the evocative overtones of civil war and political unrest that I find personally so rewarding in a scam letter, this is a solid A minus habeas corpus here.

However, the prince does a really poor job at closing the deal. After a great set-up, all we get is this weak effort to finalize the transaction:

Hence I seek your good assistance to invest these funds into profitable
investment in your country to facilitate future survival for my family
abroad.I have decided to offer 10% of these funds to you as compensation for
your strong cooperation.

Booooo. Get off the stage, Prince, and make room for this:

<i>I know that this message will come to you as a surprise since we don

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I don’t watch much cable TV news these days — I get the scoop I need mostly from blogs — but I wanted to call your attention to this recent report in the trade publication Variety.

Long story short, CNN continues to suffer dramatic double-digit ratings declines while Fox News continues to increase ratings almost as dramatically.

No point flogging a dead horse — Fox is a success because of, not in spite of, its clearly-spoken political agenda (which in a minute I will attempt to describe not as a true conservative agenda but as a populist one). There is obviously a huge market for this stuff, and there is no point whining about the “red staters” or the “knuckle-draggers,” as many of the lefty blogs do whenever Fox News comes up.

Like the old saying goes, you can’t argue with success, and I don’t intend to here.

CNN’s ratings decline is its own fault. By deliberately running in Fox’s shadow — embedded reporters having near orgasms over “Shock and Awe,” American-flag themed graphics packages for anything having to do with foreign policy, etc. — they abdicated the great middle ground and fought the competition on his own turf. (Hmmm… sounds like a certain American political party I could name….) Fox could not help but win that battle and win it handily.

I have learned over the years that conservatives are not impressed by token attempts to appeal to them. They want all-conservative, all-the-time, and they don’t mess with Mr. In-Between. I say that not sarcastically or condescendingly; if lefties had that kind of tenacity and singleness of purpose, the country — and indeed the world — would be a much different place.

I don’t know where CNN needs to go from here. Obviously, trying to confuse viewers into thinking they’re Fox News is not going to work. I’m not sure the cable news universe even holds a place for liberals anymore; liberals watch Jon Stewart for news nowadays anyway.

My sadness over CNN’s decline has to do with the fact that they are the only cable news network that consistently spends serious money on foreign bureaus. They don’t do this entirely out of journalistic conviction; CNN International is an important revenue stream for them.

But if you want real, on the ground reporting from foreign countries, CNN is the only way to go. I suspect if the ratings continue to crater, they will continue on the downward spiral towards 24/7 “opinion” programming, like Fox News, shedding foreign bureaus like lice.

In other words, they will continue to get the pants beat off them by Fox News. Frankly, I would not be surprised if in 5-8 years Rupert Murdoch ends up buying CNN in the final trumpet call of the Apocalypse. (There’s your stock tip of the day, gang, and it’s worth every penny you paid for it.)

So is Fox News really as rabidly right-wing and conservative as lefties swear it is? Fox News certainly wants you to think it is, what with the constant parade of current and former GOP spokespeople in the pundit ranks (Gingrich, North, Snow, etc.). And they certainly want you to see more Republican guests than Democrats (a measured 70/30 split by one survey).

But to me, Fox News couldn’t be less Republican. Real Republicans seek to rise above class resentment by investing capital wisely and with as little government regulation as possible. They want to be monopolists if they can get away with it, but if not, they at least aspire to be real cracker-jack capitalists who don’t need to seek anyone else’s approval.

The Fox News Channel, however, serves purely as a vehicle to make angry white people even angrier. When I watch Fox News, all I see is a constant litany of reasons why poor whites should be resentful of successful people — whether they be rap stars, the “Hollywood Elite,” trial lawyers, “secularists,” or the Clintons.

A constant hallmark of Fox News is this idea that the Great White Christian Heartland is being persecuted and victimized by the coastal leftist elites. Hours of programming on Fox’s nighttime lineup are predicated on this self-victimization. Never a positive message about how great it is to be in the dominant political party in this country; just constant woe-is-us, circle-the-wagons paranoia.

Never mind that a born-again Christian just got re-elected to the White House with historic numbers. Never mind that social conservatives in the Republican Party control both houses of Congress. Never mind that the Supreme Court has a 5-4 conservative majority. Never mind that a majority of governor’s mansions and state legislatures are controlled by Republicans. Never mind that The Passion of the Christ made way more money than Fahrenheit 9/11.

No, never mind all that — you must pity the poor white masses. They got it so bad.

Resentment, not conservatism, is the currency Fox News trades in. And apparently, there’s a lot of money in resentment these days.

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I just got back from a media leader’s meeting of Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative. You’ve probably never heard of it, and actually it’s probably good that you haven’t.

The Initiative is a new, joint effort by business and community leaders and elected officials here to lower the disastrous poverty rate in the city of Savannah. While any number of anti-poverty plans over the years have been funded, designed and ultimately put on a shelf to be ignored, I have to say this one seems different.

The biggest difference is that the local business community is taking the lead on it, operating from the simple premise that poverty is bad for business. This is a really, really big deal. I can’t tell you how huge that is. A clear recognition that a rising tide lifts all boats may seem obvious, but a more radical point of view could hardly be imagined in today’s America, where in popular culture and in public policy, poor people are increasingly seen as some kind of defective lesser subspecies.

This is true even in inner-city communities nowadays. In many parts of Savannah’s inner city, you’re considered a sucker if you’re not selling drugs. White suburbanites have their own self-destructive equivalents; if you’re not deeply in debt so you can have an SUV and a McMansion to park it in front of, there is something obviously wrong with you. These are cliches, but cliches get that way because they contain some truth.

Jim Stevenson of Savannah Electric, one of the main corporate sponsors of the Initiative, is frank about his company’s interest in reducing poverty. Not only is reducing poverty the right thing to do, he says, but when so many people can’t afford to pay their electric bills, that hurts his company’s bottom line.

He doesn’t say it in that crass a way, of course, but even if he did I wouldn’t mind. It’s just common horse sense. Reducing poverty is a win/win situation for everybody, including the Coastal Empire’s suburban and gated community white-flighters who generally would prefer not to think about or even see these things.

The Initiative is concentrating less on getting PR brownie points than in actually putting the plan together and implementing it. Stevenson was frank this morning when he told the media gathered there that he was less interested in actual coverage of the initiative than he was in getting us to simply be a part of the initiative. In other words, reporting on poverty, not on the Initiative.

We ran a cover story on the subject late last year, specifically my first-person account of a “Poverty Simulation” role-playing game designed to drive home the downward spiral that is poverty in America. (It’s called “You Don’t Want To Go There”; find it by typing “poverty” into the search engine of this site.)

The reaction to the piece was interesting. Less affluent people who read it considered it patronizing and shallow. They said, “you can’t know what’s it’s like to be in poverty unless you really live it” — as if anyone would voluntarily quit their job and default on their home mortgage in order to write an article about poverty. It seemed a particularly cynical and self-defeating response that frankly I didn’t expect. It disappointed me in a lot ways.

More comfortable people, however, just wanted the story to go away. They did not want to learn about poverty, or discuss it, or hear about it, or even acknowledge its existence.

Some of this is simple racism, of course, the convenient and completely false notion of poverty as a strictly minority phenomenon, a black thing. Despite massive welfare reform in the mid-’90s, many white Americans still think there are generations of “Welfare Queens” out there buying Cadillacs and mink coats with welfare money — despite the fact that no American can get welfare now for more than a few years, total, and despite the fact that sixty percent of all Savannahians under the poverty line have a job.

But I have to say that racism seems to play less a role than the enormous stigma that poverty in general has in America. We still, after all these years, hew to the idea that to be poor in America is impossible unless you really want to be poor. We still, deep down inside, blame the victim.

As if someone making minimum wage can afford rent, medical bills, gas for their car, a nurse for their sick grandparent, food and clothes for their children, and — yes, I have to say it — Savannah Electric’s constant rate hikes.

It’s impossible to pay for even basic living expenses on the wage that many, many Savannahians are paid. The math just doesn’t work.

As for the chicken and egg question of what needs to come first — good jobs or a work force that can fill them — I confess I don’t have the answers. My guess is that a group effort is needed to do both at the same time. What do you think?

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