Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Anti-Chavez Rabies Shows Up in Honduras Mixup

Hither and yon one gets a glimpse on the 'net of people who seem morbidly rabid about anything connected to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. One does not have to carry water to notice it.

He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.

People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.

And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Les Scandales Politiques Américains

In the manner of Art Buchwald's famous column explaining Thanksgiving's Day to the French, which was reprinted every year for decades after its 1953 debut, I would like to explain to readers of Le Monde why Mark Sanford is news in the USA.

Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):

Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)

A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)

Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!

"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.

Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?

Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).


Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.

Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!

Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)

Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.

Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.

Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).

Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?

Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Time to Push Back for Health Change

These days it seems the only folks pushing back are the health insurance-pharma-medical mafia, the banks and the auto executives. It's time to push back and show President Obama that those of us on the popular side of the spectrum really do want the change for which we voted.

Indeed, many more of us than public polls reveal would gladly take over the banks, get rid of the insurance companies and put the pharmaceutical and medical industry at the service of society.

Health care, as long as it is available for one, is a human right for all. To be healthy is an essential condition for human dignity. To force someone to live with pain and indignity merely because we are too selfish to share resources is inhumane and cruel.

Yet this is what is proposed by those "moderates" in Congress who are willing to jettison even a very modest "public option" for the sake of "bipartisan" bribery. For the richest country in the world to deny health care to about 50 million of its people, when the next 20 richest countries manage to care for all just fine is inexcusable, wrong and foolhardy.

If I had my druthers, we would have a national health service (see the presentation on H.R. 676, a bill by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.) much as there is in in those benighted, backward isles of Britain and that technologically primitive Germany and those Third World economies of France and Japan. Or our oft-forgotten neighbor, Canada. All of which work. I've lived in Britain and Canada and occasionally received medical care there just fine.

In no other advanced industrialized nation is health an economic burden on the average individual. You can change jobs, get sick, grow old, anything, secure in the knowledge that society will take care of you.

Don't cave in, Democrats. In fact, put a single-payer system on the table.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Why Is Racism Not Over?

Of course, racism didn't end on Jan. 20, 2009. There even was a (currently dormant) blog mocking the idea called, natch, Racism is Over. Yet this past weekend, lunching and dining with fellow educated Americans of European origin whom I would have thought knew better, I was brought face to face with the persistence of racism.

Don't believe it? Here are two instances in one day.

Item one: Lunch. A government lawyer complained to me about the admittedly absurd absence notes from one colleague (e.g., "my cat has a headache") and the administrative assistant who apparently manages to work all day without turning on the computer on her desk. His girlfriend proceeded to generalize about how people of the ethnicity of the two goldbrickers (whisper: "black") tend to be like that.

So I try reason: President Obama is African-American and he seems pretty hard working to me. The reply? "That's the exception."

Then I begin to make a list in my mind of black intellectuals, artists, legal scholars, biblical scholars -- and I stop. It's no use: everything has been prejudged. The only sane response is given by my companion, who insists that these comments are simply wrong.

Item two:  Dinner. I express concern for my younger son's exposure to mortal danger given his choice of career (law enforcement) and a fellow diner who is a health care consultant with umpteen degrees blurts out, "Especially in D.C., which has a 70 percent black population." The implication, of course, is that the murder rate has something to do with blacks, because as we all know, whites never kill anyone.

For the second time in one day, I am dumbfounded.

I genuinely liked these people who, admittedly, were recent acquaintances. The lawyer was less of a surprise. He had admitted to being Republican -- and I'd wondered how and why -- but I gave this attorney the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was a harmless, traditional Republican, of the sort who bemoaned the loss of the gold standard, but was otherwise enlightened. There are a scant few.

The consultant, however, was utterly baffling. An active Presbyterian who had argued with me on matters of principle ... how could an informed Christian hold such obviously racist views?

This is where I am stuck. There's an almost unconscious prevalence of views that can't be called anything else but racist.

I admit I am biased -- not on the basis of color -- against certain kinds of people. I lampoon the Southern good ol' boy with gusto (and I figure the heirs of the Confederacy deserve a taste of their own medicine). But I would readily admit to anyone that what I really know about the South and Southerners fits in a thimble. This is merely satire of a stereotype, not sociology.

But the people with whom I was speaking were, in contrast, pretty sure they were right, that the facts backed them. They were almost surprised that anyone would question such opinions.

Here we are in 2009 and one still hears outrageous things about ethnicity from Americans who have distinguished academic and professional careers, people who profess in every other respect to be civilized and open-minded.

When I try to find a reason why, I am stuck.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Worst Is Over?

Hand it to the economists, business reporters and Wall Street talking heads to heave up a massive sigh of relief that "only" 345,000 people lost their jobs last month. The average Josephine on the street doesn't share the feeling because neither she nor her mate, Joe, ever see the money from profits during the booms and they always feel the pinch in the busts.

They only see the unemployment line, the cutoff notices when money begins to get tight and eventually more and more losses. Is it getting better at the home of J&J?

Let's see ... there are 14.5 million Americans unemployed. That's double the number of people who were jobless before the recession started.

This just like saying that in 2004 there was a great recovery, or that it was "morning in America" under Ronald Reagan, whose sharp rightward economic shift in 1981 brought us 9.4% unemployment precisely 27 years ago last month.

So, no, the gross domestic product may be poised to post a positive growth number. To you and me, that means nothing.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Biochemical Soul

When I was a child I used to wish I had been born in ancient Greece, so my ideas would be new. Every time I made some novel observation, Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates had been there.

This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.

A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.

I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).

Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.

Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.

So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.

The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.

Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.

And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Papa Heinz

Papa's age is past now fifty-seven,
his years the multiplicity of Heinz
spacing his work with lunchtime vino:
a siesta-less career, now come to call,
an unholy ghost he willed once lost travails.

They say he's traded secrets with the Pope
on microphonic olives in martinis;
we children know his record past reproof:
he's shown he loves his native country truly,
the one he left a life ago.

Papa wasn't always fifty-seven,
grandma's grainy pictures had him twenty:
all meant to force me down her fettuccini
to make pasta stretch me to a pole,
adroit and tall as papa's six foot two.

Now he plays America's true end-game:
his friend's been killed by men on Soviet pay,
his world has shed more blood beyond wars cold,
and lent him robes to rend in horror hate
of spilling ketchup on his beef tartare.



(Blogger's note: I wrote this in June 1978
when my father turned 57, my age today.)

Sunday, June 07, 2009

The Right to be Sad and Jobless

Deep in the American social psyche is the Calvinist notion that setbacks in health and finances are always the fault of the sufferer. Wealth is seen to be the sign of divine approval not as Balzac's evidence of a crime. Similarly, ever since the New England Reader we have believed that cleanliness (and healthy living) is next to godliness.

One of the most difficult things about bouts of depression is hearing the well-meaning exhortations to be happy, exercise, meditate, as if the person had set out to defy the 11th American Commandment: thou shalt be cheerful. It echoes the chorus of Wall Street traders who jeered "losers" in response to aid for laid off people who were unable to pay their mortgages.

Rationalist-minded 21st century denizens might want to revise the social norm. We might want to be cheerful about having jobs (90.6 percent of us still do) while respecting the reasonable right to a little gloom and doom when others are so moved.

Between the medieval vale of tears and the 19th century delight in progress, lies another path, still unnamed and figuratively undescribed.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

June 6, 1944

Sixty five years ago, roughly 160,000 U.S., British and Canadian infantry landed in Normandy, supported by 195,000 navy men in 7,000 vessels, to drill a breach in Hitler's Atlantic Wall and liberate Europe, in what I believe remains the largest amphibious military landing in history.




Canadians landing at a beach code-named Juno faced the second highest rate of attrition on the beat (a 50% casualty rate in the first hour), but ended up the only unit to reach its military objectives by the end of the day. The highest loss of life, 60%, befell Americans at Point du Hoc. The British landed in two beaches, facing stiff resistance near Caen, which was not taken until August. Two small French contingents landed that day, one with the British in the Caen thrust, and another parachuting into Brittany attached to a British SAS commando unit.

Let us remember these men today and their awesome struggle.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Busy

I am alive. I am thinking. Material is gathering. But, I'm ...

... busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy ...

Tired of seeing the same old thing on the blog, but too busy to write a new post.

Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

Carry on.