One of the things that I find most interesting about public life in America is the way that people just fall in line when it comes to who we love and who we hate. During the lead up to the Iraq War, the American people got a great big hate on about France because it wouldn’t allow us to use its airspace for a war that Americans now agree was at best really, really stupid. But that doesn’t stop Americans from widely disliking France to this day. In fact, there is the totally unreasonable belief that France is some kind of weak peacenik country. (I wish!)

It’s reminiscent of the Two Minute Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The people hate and fear Emmanuel Goldstein because they are told to. As far as we can tell in the novel, if Goldstein is a real person, he’s a high ranking party official, glad to be used as a tool for oppressing the bourgeoisie. But the main thing about it is that for the vast majority of people, it is all so real. People don’t watch Fox News because they like being misinformed; they watch it because they know they are getting the truth. We can laugh at them, but a far more pernicious kind of propaganda is the way all of the mainstream media just treat some countries as bad and others as good.

It’s not hard to see how this works. No country is all good or all bad. So for official government enemies, our media reports almost exclusively the bad things. For official government friends, our media reports almost exclusively the good things. I’ve discussed this before with respect to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, American Double Standard Regarding Democracy. That’s a case where it isn’t even close. Venezuela has lots of problems, but it is a bastion of goodness and light compared to Saudi Arabia. But few Americans are aware of this. They just know that Saudi Arabia is “good” and Venezuela is “bad” — because they’ve been manipulated to believe that.

A better comparison is between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They are both Muslim theocracies. And yet we hate Iran and if we don’t love Saudi Arabia, we tend to apologize for it and say that it is moving in the right direction. What exactly that means for a country that officially kills its own citizens via beheading with sword and stoning, I can’t say. But Martin Longman brought up a very interesting fact the other day: Iran is a far better place to be Jewish than Saudi Arabia.

Actually, that kind of under-states it. The truth is that in Saudi Arabia, “Jewish (as well as Christian and other non-Muslim) religious services are prohibited from being held on Saudi Arabian soil.” What’s more, “Persons with an Israeli government stamp in their passport or who are openly Jewish are generally not permitted into the Kingdom.”

Meanwhile, in Iran, things are not so bad for Jews. “Iran’s Jewish community is officially recognized as a religious minority group by the government, and, like the Zoroastrians and Christians, they are allocated one seat in the Iranian Parliament.” There appear to be about 25,000 Jews in Iran. I’m sure that doesn’t make Iran a great place to be Jewish — or anything else, for that matter. But why is it that a government like Iran’s that has at least a modicum of respect for Judaism is the one that we assume can’t possibly get along with Israel. But the government that won’t allow Jews (Or Israelis!) into its country is a great ally of Israel?

What’s really going on is that it is all about power politics. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are all bound together by similar strategic interests. Yet right now, our supposed greatest threat in the region is the Islamic State. And it is Sunni — like Saudi Arabia. In fact, wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia (Of course!) were funding the Islamic State for years. Meanwhile, Iran has at war with the Islamic State for years.

None of this is to say that Iran is some great country. But it is just to highlight that our attitudes toward Iran and Saudi Arabia have nothing whatsoever to do with the common American propaganda about freedom and democracy. Saudi Arabia is a terrible country, but if we just made a nuclear deal with it, there would be no complaining.

Over the weekend, Dean Baker wrote, Will Hillary Clinton Have a Serious Plan to Persuade Companies to Invest in Workers? It seems that Clinton is calling for companies to invest in their workers, and Baker would like to know if she has any plans to cause that to happen, or whether she is just expecting that her pretty words will convince them. It isn’t surprising that the mainstream media is not interested in the question. After all, they too are in the pretty but anemic words business.

Baker noted, “It actually is not hard to give companies more incentive to invest in their workers, we can just make it harder for them to fire them.” This is something that is very big in Europe. But in America, we have done nothing over the past 60 years but move away from this. The argument is that businesses must have total flexibility or we won’t have acceptable growth. What workers might need doesn’t matter. But it is interesting that allowing businesses to lay off workers at the first sign of an economic downturn just plays into the paradox of thrift.

If a business sees a recession is coming on and lays off half its employees, there will be a all those employees who are not buying things. This will cause the recession to get even worse — even faster. Now, this is a fine strategy for any specific business. But in the aggregate, it is bad for all businesses — because there will be fewer people around to buy their products. So legislation that stopped businesses from doing something that will ultimately be bad for them is a good idea. Or at least it is if the concern really is economic growth.

Of course, I don’t think that is why conservatives want to give businesses the most flexibility and workers the least flexibility. More and more, I look back to Edmund Burke when thinking about conservatism. The great concern is that if you allow the workers to get comfortable, they will revolt. And by “revolt,” they mean “ask for anything at all.” So I think the whole idea here is to make workers as insecure as possible. But all that ultimately does is put off the day when workers demand some kind of equal share of the resources of this country. But I guess the conservatives figure that they’ve been able to finesse it this long, and now with Fox News, it is a good bet that they can continue on indefinitely.

I like Hillary Clinton. But I have no illusions that she isn’t part of the power elite. She will not do anything that taxes her class. But even if she did do something, it would be changed over time to help the business community. Dean Baker discussed how a Carter administration program to allow workers to become part owners has been instead little more than a “tax break for creative owners.” To me, it is all about this: it isn’t enough to elect a president. Unless we can keep a liberal government in power for a decade, we are going to get relatively little reform. And given that a large section of the liberal coalition has something better to do during off-year elections, we have a problem.

David McCullough was on The Daily Show Monday night. Earlier this year, he wrote, The Wright Brothers. He was a last minute replacement for Ted Cruz who suddenly found out there were some kittens that he needed to drown. And McCullough was certainly better than listening to Ted Cruz spit out a stream of talking points about how Mexicans are destroying America and the Iran deal is the worst foreign policy ever known to man — Neville Chamberlain blah, blah, blah. But that hardly means the segment was good. I wanted to retch.

Stewart started off by noting that we don’t know that much about the Wright brothers — just what we learned on the children’s place mats we got at family restaurants. So here comes McCullough to tell us about the real Wright brothers — to give us just a taste of his 336 pages of wisdom on the subject. The man will dispel the myth and create instead a real story of these men — not the children’s book narrative of the rugged individuals or the Romantic heroes. But that was not to be.

This is how he begins to “enlighten” us on the true nature of the Wright brothers:

And he continues on in the same vein. He finally gets around to telling the story of the Wright’s 82 year old father who goes flying for the first time, “Orville took him up… And the whole time he was sitting beside Orville on this plane — no seat belts or anything… He kept saying, ‘Higher, Orville! Higher!’ That was the spirit of the family.” There’s a word for this: pathetic.

I don’t have a problem with hagiography. People like to make heroes out of humans. I’m fine with that. But don’t give me this garbage about telling the real story of the Wright brothers and then just provide the same old story with ever more hero worship. Back in 1968, The Archie Show produced an episode about the Wright brothers that contained more information about the subject — and a song!

As the voice of so many Ken Burns documentaries, David McCullough sort of speaks to a quaint Americana. But he also presents himself as a serious historian — complaining about the state of education. But the kind of history that he peddles is not what I recognize as history. It is more or less apologetics — the “We’re number one!” argument presented quietly, seriously, eloquently — but with no more cogency.