Time will eventually what all the facts are, and perhaps Obama will be proven guilty of this charge and dozens of other perfidious deeds. But it doesn’t seem like this will be the case. Let me ask you: when it was first alleged in 1973 or 1974 that Nixon had committed this misdeed, did it seem plausible? Hell, yeah, it did. Tricky Dick? Sure. Now, does it seem Obama could be guilty? Not really. Just watching him, he seems entirely too indulgent of his enemies. He’s got one move: drone ‘em. If he can’t do that, he assumes his holier-than-thou pose, and goes play basketball or something.

It does seem that the IRS may be guilty of anything, it is guilty of using profiling. Forced to make some expedient sense of some 70,000 applications for 50©4 tax status, it seems that the IRS used some kind of filter that puled the applications of people using “Tea Party’’ or “Patriot’’ in their title. Later they broadened the key word search to include progressive and other words. Still, the damage was done.

Profiling, let’s face it, is an act more politically incorrect than criminal. It casts an eye of suspicion over a large group whose members, mostly, have done nothing to merit that kind of attention. It’s a blunt instrument, and like a lot of blunt instruments, it is occasionally effective. But it’s really just not a smart enough way to do things, and should be eliminated as a tool.

At this point, do I think that the IRS has done something morally wrong? The Tea Party is avowedly low-tax. The Tea Party has not distinguished itself by its ability to understand the details of legislation. This law mostly affects political consultants and fat cat donors, not citizens engaged in grass roots politics. As far as I can tell, the IRS was mostly making sure applicants fit the criteria of the law.

So far, my outrage has been mostly contained. What I’m really getting angry about is the tax code itself. It’s not new that there is favoritism in the tax code; now it seems like the whole thing is just a structure of subsidies to special interests. And the poor, despised IRS is like the Internal Affairs division of a politically corrupt police force; all it’s trying to do is enforce the laws other people have passed, among a population that regards you as an enemy.

“It’s hard to have a conversation today with any worker, teacher, student or boss who doesn’t tell you some version of this: More things seem to be changing in my world than ever before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it, let alone know how to adapt. So let me try to put my finger on it: We now live in a 401(k) world — a world of defined contributions, not defined benefits — where everyone needs to pass the bar exam and no one can escape the most e-mailed list.

“Here is what I mean: Something really big happened in the world’s wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago when I wrote a book called The World Is Flat. All of that came since then, and the combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.
“What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.

“If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say “it is a 401(k) world.” Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it. ‘’

There is so much about this column that struck me at the core. I do feel that the world is changing far beyond my understanding. It is astonishing that the i-Phone and Facebook and so on have become so amazingly significant in so short a time. I find it bewildering that Twitter has been enthusiastically adopted by so many people; to me, it is like a newfangled dance whose steps I cannot master, choreographed to music I just can’t stand. By extension, it is also amazing that so many things that were once significant are fading away. I’m talking about books, and newspapers, and cinema, but more generally, the idea of cooperation—-cooperation in government, yes, but cooperation in the workplace. The idea that “we’re all in this together’’ seems to mean less, and less, and less.

More now rests on you. This is a frightening thought. The major reason is that I know how very limited I am. However good my best is, I know I am not at my best every day. And however good my average performance is, I know I am not average every day. In the world I lived in most of my life, I was confident that if I hit for a high average, my company would carry me through the rest. If I was in a slump, or ill, or on vacation (there’s a long-gone idea), somebody else at my magazine would be brilliant that week or month, and I would be supportive, and encouraging, and find some other way to contribute as I concentrated on the next cycle. Working in a group, valuing the group—that was important. Apparently that’s not so today.

Think about this quote from Friedman: “What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online.’’ Does it allow someone to just work? I’m not so sure; I don’t think Friedman is sure. But not everyone wants to live the thrillingly unstable world of the freelancer—going from gig to gig, bobbing along in the current, flush when the money is in and scrimping when it stops. Most people don’t want that. They want a job, a house, health insurance, reasonable security. We’re seeing a world that is being divided between the secure and the insecure, and between those who are insecure and are fine with it, and those who are not. Friedman, a man who is personally very secure, thinks the insecurity is great. I don’t. I see people buying guns and gold, and getting it while they can.

Friedman finds the “more rests on you’’ society exciting. I think it’s scary. It’s a return to Hobbes’ state of nature. It is a return to where there is a war of all against all. “”In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hyperbolic on my part? The Tsarnaev brothers were recently empowered to access learning online. How exciting was that?

There is a fast-moving kleptopoly that is taking over the world, taking ownership of things that we don’t even necessarily think of as ownable. It’s like when the European colonists came to America and took ownership of a continent whose inhabitants never thought of ownability. Napster just stole the ability of artists to control the sale of their music. Google now controls vast amounts of the world’s public domain books. Some drug company is trying to patent the human genome! When people talk about the exciting world of driverless cars and trucks that just around the corner, well, Brother and Sister Teamster, say goodbye to your job. When people talk about the exciting world of online education, they are actually talking about eliminating and/or cheapening teachers’ jobs.

It’s not that I begrudge the rulers of the universe their cut. Hardly; as Jesus might have said, the rich with you. But for most of my life, the rich took their cut and allowed the rest to dribble down, sustaining the poor and rewarding the rest of us for our industry and bidability. But then came Reagan and Greenspan, and the dogma of the free market. Then came Milken and the takeover artists, who forced business owners to squeeze labor and cut excess and maximize the shareholders’ end. So the rich can keep becoming richer. In April, the Pew Research Center found that from 2009 to 2011, the richest 7% of Americans saw their net worth climb an average $697,651 — equal to a 28% gain—while the rest of the country saw their net worth drop an average $6,079, the equivalent of a 4% loss. The share of wealth held by the top 7% rose to 63% in 2011, up from 56% in 2009. Pew said this disparity is a result of stocks and bonds rallying over these years, while the housing market remained flat.

You have to believe that years from now, this period may be perceived as The Great Digital Con, when fortunes were yanked away, and the moral basis of society was fundamentally altered for the worse. And Thomas Friedman stands to be remembered as its visionary apologist.

I’d be happier with the Leviathan.

Apparently on Friday, before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended, Sen. Lindsey Graham was already torquing up the hysteria by taking the position that Tsarnaev not receive his Miranda warning before being interrogated. Graham—who, not to imply anything from this, is one of those lucky men who can go into any barbershop and the get the exact look he wants simply by saying, “I’d like the Adolf Hitler haircut”—tweeted “If captured I hope [the] Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as [an] enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.” He then added “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to ‘remain silent.’”

The Brothers Tsarnaev will never be known as anything but terrorists, but Boston certainly doesn’t look a town that has been terrorized to me. Defiant? Sure. Inspired? Definitely. There’s a kind of a civic euphoria arising from the realization that town came through this blow with strength and intelligence and courage. From the first responders on Monday, to the individuals who opened their homes to stranded runners, to the full-throated expression of patriotism that infused the way Bruins fans sang the national anthem, to an exemplary performance by the law enforcement authorities, Boston has a lot to be proud of. “This is our fucking city, and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom,” said David Ortiz, the Red Sox’s Big Papi, before a roaring crowd at Fenway Park. They didn’t look terrorized to me.

It’s the Lindsey Grahams who are terrorizing people by suggesting that this threat maybe might possibly be so enormous that we have to deny Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights as an American citizen. This is a page straight out of the Bush-Cheney playbook, the idea that we have to start throwing away our most important values and traditions in order to be secure.

It’s nonsense. Denying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights won’t improve my safety. Let’s face it: if I really wanted to improve my safety, I would lose twenty pounds.

“I don’t want a biography,’’ Levon Helm told Jacob Hatley in 2007 when the young director came to Helm’s Woodstock home and broached the idea of making a film about the venerable singer and drummer’s life. Helm had no interest in exploring the past, and neither, really, did Hatley, who felt less like investigating than sitting back, fly-style, and creating a portrait of a vibrant, ailing, cranky, authentic rock-and-roll lion in winter. As we see in the resultant film Ain’t in It For My Health, which opened in New York on April 19 (on the first anniversary of Helm’s death) and later throughout the country, Hatley got all that he hoped for, and more.

Unexpected events drift in to fill Helm’s days and Hatley’s picture: the birth of Helm’s first grandchild, the opportunity to complete an unfinished Hank Williams song, a Grammy nomination for the first album he’d recorded in two decades, and a serious health scare. There is a wide array of privileged moments shown in this film: the sheer sweetness of Helm playing “In the Pines’’ for his tiny grandson, tension as Helm waits on a cold steel stool in a hospital examining room, a “who’da thunk it?” teaching moment when Helm holds forth on the venomous spurs on the legs of the duck-billed platypus, and the excruciating scene in which Helm twists in pain as a doctor inserts a tube into his nostril in order to examine his inflamed vocal chords. And there’s sheer awe whenever he sings, and that amazing voice, now banged-up and frayed, connects to the heart of an authentic America that lies buried somewhere under a million tons of junk culture.

But while biography may not have been what Helm wanted, and while biography may not have been what Hatley sought to serve, biography in the end would not be denied, and it’s the way the injured feelings from Helm’s past seep like the goo from a malfunctioning septic tank that gives the film its bite.

For those who don’t know, Helm was the drummer and one of the lead singers of The Band, a popular and influential group of the late sixties and early seventies. They leaped to legendary status when Martin Scorsese decided to tell their nearly unbelievable story (Canadian bar band to Bob Dylan backing band to critically acclaimed innovators and international arena headliners) against the backdrop of their brilliant final concert.

That film, The Last Waltz, is widely considered the best rock-and-roll film ever made. But what that film does not document is Helm’s great anger at the break up of The Band; he didn’t want The Band to end, resented participating in the movie, and hated that lead guitarist Robbie Robertson was pulling out. Over time his feelings intensified, particularly as money became an issue; he felt he didn’t get fair compensation for his participation in The Last Waltz, and he felt that Robertson unfairly took sole songwriting credit, along with the royalties that flowed from those credits, for songs that The Band wrote collaboratively. In the ensuing decades, as money troubles and more tragic events seemed to afflict all the members of the band except Robertson, Helm’s feelings hardened.

Helm, by all accounts, was one of the world’s great spirits. He was a generous, gregarious, upbeat person whose bottomless ability to express congeniality and remember names and share the spotlight earned him affection so warmly expressed that one starts to think people are speaking not of a human but of a beloved and recently deceased family dog. And Hatley’s film captures plenty of moments of Helm’s joie de vivre: gracefully obliging his doctor’s borderline inappropriate request for an autograph, joy-riding on his neighbor’s tractor, and taking the same delight in talking to a bus driver about interstate highway connections as he does in chatting with Billy Bob Thornton about sushi restaurants and Hawaiian pot.

But as the opening line from the Hank Williams song he’s working on says, “I’m living with days that forever are gone.’’ His “unresolved feelings’’ about The Band, as Helm’s longtime friend and collaborator Larry Campbell calls them, manifest in different ways. Sometimes he battles to contain them. Asked by Billy Bob Thornton about what happened to The Band, Helm half groans. “It was a goddam screw job,’’ he says, hoping that the fog of vagueness will discourage Thornton from tapping further against the thin crust covering thirty years of acid.

At other times, they erupt. Told about the Grammy committee’s offer, Helm sneers at “that Lifetime Achievement bullshit’’ with the disdainful eloquence that could only come from one who had studied real bullshit at a tender age. “What good’s it gonna do Rick or Richard?’’ he asks, invoking the names of his late bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. And sometimes he’s just inscrutable: he displays a moment of excitement when he announces to the friends and employees in his kitchen that his album has just won a Grammy. But as the hugs and back-slaps ripple around the room, a shadow falls across Helm’s face. What’s he thinking about? Absent friends? Missed opportunities? The venomous spurs of the duck-billed platypus? Whatever it is, it isn’t victory.

There are no answers in Hatley’s film, but why should there be, if Helm himself didn’t want to find them? Instead, he gives us a portrait of a man in full, a great artist and an ordinary person who understands that he is being cornered, and who is still fighting for the best of whatever life still offers him.

This is a true story. Thirty years ago, my wife and I visited her family at their home in Sundance, Wyoming. Ginny’s brother Rick and his wife Sue took us out for a drink at what passed for the young person’s bar. In the process of catching up, we began talking about their grandfather, who was about 90 years old, and whose longtime partner, whose name I forget, but let’s call her Joan, had recently died in the local hospital. “Yeah, Grandpop’s real upset,” my brother-in-law confided. “Last week he got drunk and took his shotgun and went over to the hospital and demanded to see Joan. When they told him she was dead, he began to shoot up the waiting room. They had to call the sheriff to come take him home.” No charges were preferred.

That was Round One. When Round Two arrived, we were joined by another young couple, Tom and Patty. The four locals began talking about a recent incident in the neighboring town of Belle Fourche, South Dakota (neighboring—as in forty miles away) where a young man had walked into a Hardee’s fast food restaurant and tried to hold up the place at gunpoint. “Fifteen guys went out to their trucks and got their rifles,” Tom said, “and came back and blew him away.” (I’m not vouching for the accuracy of the story, only Tom’s telling of it. But Rick and Sue and Patty supported his account.)

At that point another customer walked past, a man with a badly disfigured face. “That’s Don,” Sue explained. “One night he got depressed and decided to kill himself, but his gun slipped, and he only blew off his jaw.”

At that point, Patty thought to try to bring the out-of-towners more into the conversation. “Where are you folks from?” she asked.

“New York,” we said.

“New York?” she responded with astonishment. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

Priceless, right? The story came to mind this morning when I heard about this pinheaded Arkansas State Senator named Nate Bell, who tweeted “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”

Bell’s inexcusably snide, ignorant tone aside, it’s a fair question. It’s also fair to wonder how many senators would have changed their votes on gun control had the Tsarnaev brothers set off their bombs and killed one cop and wounded another on Sunday instead of Monday. It’s also a fair question to wonder how many dogs, cats, racoons, guys sneaking a smoke on their patios and police officers involved in the manhunt would have been shot if everybody in Watertown had an AR-15 by his bedroom window.

Well, not really revise, but let me go on for a minute about the pro-minority biases that affect our democracy. We were all schooled about the genius our Founding Fathers exhibited when they loaded up the Constitution with checks and balances, but when you stop and think about the sheer number of non-democratic institutions and rules that are central to our government, it’s clear why we get so little done. The states, of course, are inherently unequal. So is the senate and the electoral college. Throw in congressional redistricting, the filibuster, closed primaries, the disappearance of the open rule—and we’re not even talking about twisted, Lewis Carroll type formulations like `money is speech’ and `corporations are people.’ Sure, I’m unhappy that the Senate did not pass the gun registration provision, but what everybody should be screaming about is how in the hell is it that you can’t pass legislation when you have 54 votes? In last February’s exciting Super Bowl, the Ravens beat the 49ers 34-31. How would it have gone over if at the end of the game, the ref said “Sorry, but in order to win, the Ravens needed 39 points, or three-fifths of the points scored. No decision.” Kind of ridiculous. Fundamentally unfair. What’s wrong with that nincompoop Harry Reid that he has allowed this suicide rule to continue to undermine democratic government and Democratic policies?

In the aftermath of the gun control vote, Joe Scarborough and others who favored the measure could be heard maintaining with steely resolve, “This issue is going to backfire on the opponents in the 2014 election.” Well, maybe. I hope so. I hope Michael Bloomberg’s money has an effect. I hope Jim Messina’s Organizing for Action makes an impact. But what I really hope is that somebody takes a very pessimistic long term view and concludes that maybe very little legislative progress can be made until we begin to make the world safe for moderate Republicans. What does that mean? Simply that money and organizational muscle and educational intelligence needs to be invested now in the long, hard process of working state-by-state to adopt non-partisan redistricting processes. We need to maximize the number of politically competitive districts in each state, and to minimize the number of safe seats that are over once the dominant party chooses its general election candidate. It’s all about Free Market politics. Unless elections are actually competitive, majorities don’t rule, minorities do, and we’re going to beat our heads stupid until we change the fundamental structures that block progress. It’s good to work for the 2014 elections; it might be better to work for the 2020 census and redistricting.