1000 Readers

Call it sour grapes, dyspepsia or mere grumpiness, but I was flabbergasted to learn that a blog whose name itself is a bit edgy has 1,000 Google Reader subscribers (actually it's 1,136). This one has a mere 10.

OK, so there are other forms of subscribing to my blog, but even if I add up all those, this blog is still woefully out of the ballpark. That's not the point.

Here I go, offering insights into the way our politics and economics work and intertwine, trying to sort out philosophical questions, attempting the odd poem. I am offering pensées. My friends and a few new cyberacquaintances pop in now and then. Maybe 2 leave a comment.

But "Black Hockey Jesus," the blogger of the site noted above, posts an invitation to join his "cult" and posts something titled Suicidal Jesus, which -- yes, yes, yes -- is wickedly funny, and he gets 60 comments.

What's wrong with this picture?

After the Revolution: FAQ

Here are answers to a few frequently asked questions concerning the views I've been presenting regarding the need for a revolution.

1. Your agenda sounds like you're proposing Soviet Communism.

No. I propose neither a violent overthrow of the government, which I don't see as the problem, nor an end to any of our civil liberties. I don't think a command economy such as that of the USSR could work here. Although Sweden or Israel offer intriguing examples.

2. Didn't Communism fail?

That depends on what you expected Communism to accomplish. Politically, the Leninist theory of the state and the ruling political party, eliminated any possibility of an open society. This has been roundly criticized from the Left, a criticism in which I happily join. However, Communist revolutions achieved quite a lot in social and economic terms, when one takes into account that they took place in very backward, pre-industrial and politically neo-feudal countries.

 3. So if you are not a Communist, what are you?

I'm unhappy with the political parties available to us in the United States. The only viable political parties, Democratic and Republican, accept the same economic dogmas, myths and taboos. There is no political party of the left that is particularly worthy: the socialists are tiny, the trotskyists are a tad too doctrinaire and the Communists carry the monkey of Stalin on their backs. I see myself as someone who advocates for a social and economic democracy that is at least as sturdy and open to popular influence as our political democracy is, particularly since January 2009.

The Lemon Named Excess

Much as the play and film "A Streetcar Named Desire" was a eulogy of a bygone U.S. class and ethnic social structure, the decline of Detroit automakers and the culture they spawned perhaps deserves a new work of art, one titled "The Lemon Named Excess."

In his 1948 play, Tennessee Williams pit Blanche DuBois, a faded lady of the Old South that was really a stand-in for the entire WASP Brahmin class, against the vigorous rough-and-tumble Stanley Kowalski, emblematic of the rising industrial, urban and white "ethnic" immigrant class. Today, we might pit Walt Kowalski (a coincidence?) from Clint Eastwood's recent film Gran Torino and its evocation of the pollutemobile, the umpteen-lane highway and the sprawling smogopolises with their white-flight suburbs, against what ... a figure and lifestyle yet to come.

Behind every fortune lies a crime, remarked Balzac, and behind the apogee of the combustion-engine vehicle lies a seldom recounted scandal.

Between 1936 and 1950, for example, Federal Engineering Corporation, Firestone Tire, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum, Mack and Standard Oil of California, and acting through a cutout holding company called National City Lines, conspired to destroy 100 electric streetcar transit systems in 45 cities. The cities include Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. (All this was once brought out in court.)

Add to that the gargantuan federal and state subsidies to highways and oil production over the past decades.

Now, at long last, the rapacious auto companies are on their knees and big oil is at last seen as a threat to our security and even our future existence. This is not the time to help them. This is the time to nationalize the car industry and transform it into the engine of new, pollution-free vehicles produced by a public enterprise devoted to serving the general public.

Don't Salvage, Nationalize!

The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of this crisis is that it exposes for all to see the moral faultlines of the capitalist way of life. This is not the time to rescue the wage-slave system, along with its banks and stock and commodities exchanges, as the latest Geithner/Paulsen plan to aid banks proposes, but to strip out the ill-gotten, wastefully spent gains.

Don't rescue the banks, nationalize them. Don't shore up Wall Street, close it once and for all. These are no more than the casinos of and for the rich, who essentially play with our hard-earned money.

You think banks are merely safe places to put money at a tidy return? You wish! Banks are constantly gambling that enough people will keep their money in so they can lend out most of what they've got -- if everybody withdraws at once, banks fail. Moreover, compare the interest rate you can get paid with the rate you're likely to be charged to borrow.

You think stock exchanges are merely places where the "invisible hand" of the quasi-divine "market" arrives at fair values for a whole range of assets? That textbook description has never taken into account the speculation, almost entirely divorced from the actual workings of businesses, that actually fuels upward runs by "bulls" and downward falls by "bears."

When their gambles prove wrong, who loses the jobs and the homes? Not the top 20 percent of assetholders, who own 80 percent of all assets in the United States. So let's seize the moment to make this land our land, as Woody Guthrie sang, from California to New York Island. "This land was made for you and me ..."

Abolish the Corporation*

Let's not first "kill all the lawyers," as Shakespeare's Henry VI suggested. First thing we do, instead, let's slaughter the legal "persons" that choke off any attempt to put blame where blame is due for the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few: the corporation.

Through the magic of corporate law, there exists an entity that is separate from the people that form it, own it, direct it and are responsible for what it does -- such as spilling tons of crude oil into the ocean, hiding information showing that cigarettes are addictive and cancer-producing, buying up public urban transit systems to destroy them and eliminate competition for the car.

If these actions ever come under scrutiny of the authorities, veritable armies of lawyers can be counted upon to spar for years. In the end, the corporations in question pay for the damage -- if they lose, which is not often. None of the actual people involved -- not the CEO, not the managers, not the stockholders, not the directors -- pay for their misdeeds. The corporation -- a thing that is not alive and does not actually exist in any real sense -- did it.

Moreover, the decisions that led to these actions are never made within earshot of the customers and citizens and workers who are most affected. We, the people, have no say as to whether the corporations will bilk us, poison us or get our children killed -- before it happens. It's only long after the damage is done that, maybe, with fingers crossed and lots of luck, a few hapless victims get something back.

It's time to end the charade. Let's stop pretending the corporations exist -- they don't; instead, let's take names and kick butt. Let's assume the power to control the crucial economic activity that defines whether we survive and how.

---

*(In response to private comments concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which is not wholly original, I would like to clarify at least what I mean by the planks I put forth. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)

Dictatorship and Other Hazards of Capitalism

The great thing about this depression recession is that a lot of people are finally paying attention to this thing called capitalism as it really is, not as fabled. Indeed, we're all discovering that, for a small-d democratic country, we sure have and encourage a lot of capitalist dictatorship in our society.

We go through these slick marketing political campaigns every four years in which we wonder whether we like the preacher of a man who, come down to it, can't really feed our family, any more than he can stop teenagers from getting pregnant or help us reach our healthiest BMI level. Yet we surrender every personal right to an unelected individual who can tell us in precise detail what we must and must not do for most of our waking hours: our boss.

Who is our boss answerable to? Ultimately, some "chief executive officer." And the CEO? To a board of directors. And the board? To the stockholders. And all of them together? To a misty legal fog designed, essentially, to make sure that them who've got keep getting more.

You have free speech in the public park, but not at the business meeting or in the lunch room (try organizing a union there). Your boss doesn't legally have to give you a vacation or paid sick leave. Or a raise. Or pay you more than $6.15 an hour. If you don't like it, you can starve.

We don't elect these people. We have no say in how they run things. They have power just because.

Revolution?

My teenage years took place in a time and place in which the word "revolution" was as alluring to the young as it was forbidden by the elders. Decades later, I wonder what all that mouthing the r-word accomplished. Yet, as I watch a pauperizing worldwide crisis unroll before my eyes, I wonder ... isn't it time for revolution, a worldwide revolution?

Don't get me wrong. Millions of tortured, imprisoned, dead and "disappeared" people have convinced me that merely overthrowing a government accomplishes nothing. Indeed, most governments are not really the problem.

At the source of the economic crisis is a system of money power that serves the greediest few and corrupts the many. That's what needs overthrowing. Let's democratize economic decision-making and take it out of the hands of the tailor-suited financial elite. Profits generated by efficiencies and collective labor should be shared throughout the complex society that makes such profits even possible.

Could ordinary folks do any worse than these MBA geniuses have done? Let's try a few revolutionary steps:

• Turn for-profit corporations into sectorally organized publicly owned and controlled enterprises, run by specialists serving councils of elected workers and citizens;
• nationalize Chrysler and GM and turn them into producers of public, low-energy-consuming light and heavy rail and other systems of transportation, eventually making the car unnecessary, to be replaced by bicycles and light motorcycles.
  
• Re-establish progressivity of taxation and higher tax brackets;
• tax all inheritance 100% and put the proceeds into a fund for the education and support of all children and the support of those unable to work;
• expropriate all capital fleeing the country to avoid revolutionary rules;
• nationalize the banking system;
• close all stock exchanges and other markets of speculation, compensating account holders up to $5,000,000 per household;
  
• replace insurance companies with public trust funds;
• merge private and public education into a national free system incentivized through vouchers;
• abolish private medicine and private health institutions, creating a single health care system open to all.

What do you think?

The Loser Goes to the Press

Details now leaking out suggest that, at the heart of the Tim Geithner-AIG bonus story, lies a political stratagem explained to me years ago by a master news manipulator when I was a very green journalist: never go to the press, unless you lose behind closed doors.

AIG paid the bonuses on Friday. News leaked out during the weekend, with The Washington Post apparently breaking the story. Now we know that Geithner was on the horn to New York all week trying to stop the bonuses.

Why not announce an outrage that was about to happen rather than a fait accompli? Because if you're a wheeler dealer you're most powerful behind closed doors, when you and those in the room are the only ones with the knowledge to act. Information is, after all, power.

If Geithner had gone public and pointed his finger, and à la Èmile Zola cried out "j'accuse," his power of persuasion over AIG would have vanished instantly. Naturally, once that power had been lost behind closed doors, Geithner -- and President Obama -- were free rend their garments in public.

This is how the power game is played. Reporters know to look for the disgruntled for their leaks. Never ask why the news was leaked, merely ask who the leaker was in order to understand what happened in a power struggle waged behind closed doors.

It's our AIG, isn't it?

The real AIG bonus scandal is that a majority stockholder cannot prevent nonsense set in motion before the stocks were eagerly tossed like confetti at the federal government by management begging on its knees for cash.

We, the people, now own 80 percent (!!!) of AIG at a cost of about $170 billion of our money; about $165 million in bonuses was scheduled to be paid by March 15; some of the individual bonuses range between $1.5 to $3 million, but most are merely in the thousands; the government-appointed overseer was told by lawyers that the bonuses must be paid under pre-existing employee-retention contracts.

The single fact that stands out to me is that March 15 is the deadline for filing corporate taxes. Typically, corporate expenses booked as 2008 prior-year accruals (in English: owed, but not paid, in 2008) must be actually paid out before that date. So the overriding urgency to make the payments is a tax filing.

Well, hell, Tim Geithner, let's have our AIG accountant file for an extension of the deadline while we figure out why these bonuses are being paid at all. There's still time: extension applications can still be filed today.

But what about the alleged top talent AIG stands to lose? Let's challenge them to go get another job with "AIG" on their résumés.

Why Does Wrongdoing Persist?

Bernard Madoff is probably the most egregious example, but let's not kid ourselves, wrongdoing large and small is pervasive. This fact rubs against the grain of my notion that the basis of all ethics is survival: are we all that self-destructive?

Now, granted, I never said that human beings were ethical. I merely suggested that if, out of curiosity, we wished to consider what we ought to do, human survival was as universal a principle available for discerning right from wrong.

On that basis I developed a decalogue, as if it made any difference, only to find myself waking up in this new era of deception and plunder to the reality that no one -- or very few -- takes ethics seriously. Unless they run the risk of getting caught and punished.

Frankly, I can't say that, when rubber hits the road, I'm any better. Boiling down l'éthique cecilieuse to its boy-scout-manual essentials, am I confident, sincere, joyful, respectful, nurturing, trustworthy, truthful, giving, loving, content? Not by a long shot.

Bless me, father, for I have been wracked with self-doubt, layered in pretenses, miserable, callous, lustful after what belongs to others, deceitful, grasping, selfishly licentious and chained to my artificial needs. This is why I will not survive.

Indeed, this is what dooms all humanity to a life that is, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.

Is it a D-word yet?

Signs abound that the economy is slumping deeper and faster than anyone expected. At about 6,500 last week, the Dow will reach what I -- a nonexpert, noneconomist journalist -- think is the infamous "bottom" before the summer. That's too soon, as the economic stimulus effects won't begin to be felt at least until the fall.

Could it go lower than "Dr. Doom" predicted? Don't panic, but the D-word may soon aptly describe prevailing economic conditions.

In fact, I understand that Japan's much-feared "lost decade" was less severe, at an average 5.5 unemployment, than our current much higher jobless rate. The Japanese tanked and stayed tanked for a decade, but at much higher levels of well-being than the United States is at right now.

And they kept up their cradle-to-grave universal national health system, which we don't have.

It's no reason to cheer, but even in the depths of the Great Depression -- and we're not even remotely going there -- 77 percent of the workforce was employed. At worst we'll hit maybe 90 percent. That's bad if you're one of the unemployed, but ... you'll still have 9 in 10 chances of keeping your job -- and even better chances right now.

You're going to live through the fourth economic depression the United States has ever experienced. It's OK, we can all make it if we stick together.

The Next Power

One of my favorite speculations since the end of what Walter Lippmann famously called the American Century concerns the country that will "own" the 21st century. In my last post I proposed the European Union.

Naturally, a European was the first to doubt it. China worried her, as she gave voice to the terror of yore concerning what my parents' generation called the "yellow peril." At the beginning of this decade I thought this would be the Chinese century, too. After all, even now the Chinese are upset their GDP growth slowed to a positive 9 percent last year, poor darlings.

Yet, in the end, modern China is really a bustling coastal shell with a huge very underdeveloped, very poor, very backward inland core. Good luck with that.

And let's not worry about Inja, shall we? India will undo itself. How long can a modernizing country sustain a socioeconomic canyon bolstered by ancient prejudices before it all explodes or the country enters what Marx eurocentrically called "the Asiatic mode of production"?

That leaves the EU, with a landmass about half the size of the United States and a population about one and a half as large, composed almost entirely of skilled workers. Their natural resources include arable land, bauxite, coal, copper, fish, hydropower, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, potash, salt, timber, uranium and zinc.

Who can beat Italian shoes, French wines, German engineering, Spanish olives, skilled and cheap Eastern European labor and British bullshit?

Moreover, because of their 20th century experience of self-annihilation (and their similar history in the 19th and 18th and ...), the Europeans have finally learned the wisdom of nonpower and the prowess of nonmilitary leadership. Who but the Europeans to usher in the eventual EU to end all EUs, the Earth Union?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the 21st century, the European Century.

On Unemployment Rate's Eve

Today I bet 25 cents that the national unemployment rate -- announced tomorrow at 8:30 am -- will hit 8 percent and another 25 cents that the month's job loss will near 700,000. I wrote an imaginary lede for such a story and then played with headlines starting with P until someone called out "Peak Reached." We all laughed: we won't know the peak until long after this recession depression.

Are we at the end of the United States' ascendancy, as many people abroad think? Will the next power be the European Union, which as a nonpower will transcend power?

Every moment feels like a crisis to those who live it, as we do not know the outcome of what we are undergoing. What we know seems static and necessarily the state of things. Did an American slave in 1840 guess at a Mr. Lincoln drawing up the Emancipation Declaration? Who during the Cold War expected the Soviet Union to dissolve without a shot fired?

How odd that we only know the meaning of what we are experiencing long after it has happened, long after our power to change events has faded. Who knows? Maybe the rate will go down and it is a recession, after all.

The Lost Art of Conversation

Monday evening I had the rare pleasure of engaging in a wide-ranging discussion with a friend who shares with me the craft of journalism and experiences of Europe, Latin America and North America that make us both culturally displaced people. We also share a love of discussing the economic and political fundamentals of our time from a variety of perspectives.

Not since university, back when the dinosaurs roamed, had I done this. He is retired in Central America, where he sacrifices his time to wine, women and song, but we have a remarkably similar professional trajectory and shared memories of the same news wars.

Also, as we both explained to a non-journalist with us, we have in common the reality that journalists can rarely hold an open, wide-ranging conversation about topics in which they become well versed. People who know enough are always peering over our shoulders at cocktail parties, in search of the network connection that will advance them to the next career rung. Reporters are rarely reliable stepping stones.

Thus we found ourselves reconstructing the political and economic history of the last 30 years through the prism of thousands of interviews and fact-chases, throwing in Keynes, Marx, Freud and Dostoevsky as our unnamed sources well into the wee hours of Tuesday ...

Moral Hazards of a Coarser Time

Roughly three years ago, I stumbled upon an economist who, in the measured tones of a Harvard academic, proposed before an audience what some described as the "Voltairean" idea that economic growth brings "moral positives." Today, with only my own observation to guide me, I would argue that the reverse is equally true.

In the 12 months ended last December the gross domestic product declined a staggering 6.2 percent and now everywhere you go there is the language of the hustle. The phone company, the banks, the major corporations, they're all chiseling, double-dealing and outright lying at every turn, as if they were bookies, drug dealers and pimps.

What does it all remind me of? That used-car dealership portrayed toward the beginning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In other words, what's come down to us from the 1930s: the unrelenting flim-flammery oozing from every pore of a society in decay.

What happened then, besides poverty? Lynching. The rise of the Mafia. Father Coughlan, the antisemitic radio priest from Detroit. In Europe there were black shirts and brown shirts and blue shirts marching all about; and millions of bullets expended on the back of someone's head.

That is why we must risk everything to pull ourselves out of this economic disaster. We humans are a selfish, materialist species that becomes meaner when times are leaner.

Washington Ins and Outs

Every January 1, The Washington Post's  Style section runs a silly, light page of what in the new year is "in" and what is "out." Every January an administration changes reporters in Washington get weeks of another bit of silliness: who is "in" and "out" of the power loop.

Everyone knows by then who has been elected. But I'm thinking of the folks who emerged last December from eight-year hibernation to play musical chairs for one of the 3,000 to 5,000 top noncareer, nonelected appointed staff posts. They come in one of five varieties:

• The Early Birds -- They vanished into the Obama bubble in December or early January and unless you have official business to conduct with them, fuhgeddaboudit!
  
  
• The Puffinbirds -- They have literally 15 seconds of fame and hint at what they would tell you if they could, but they're just performing their one-shot emergency deed so the Early Birds can carry out new policy "X." They know where some bodies are buried, but they're utterly dispensable technocratic Mr. Fix-Its with no real power and no real secrets.
  
  
• The Screechers -- They're quotable and talk in vivid terms about issues from a perspective compatible with that of the Obama Administration, but they weren't invited to the party and they haven't heard from any of their longtime friends who now work in the White House.
  
  
• The Hangdogs -- The loyal supporters who slaved in other Democratic administrations but since settled into comfortable lobbying, academic or even -- gasp! -- out-of-the-Beltway activities. No one is talking to them, even though they know countless fascinating background details.
   
• The Cheshires -- They sometimes look similar to the Hangdogs but are really late-developing Early Birds. They're sitting quietly biding their time, sure their turn is coming. If you don't know who they are, no one will tell you.
  

Barack Blair or Tony Obama?

A contrarian blog by my cyberfriend Alex Fear raises the issue, as seen from Britain, that perhaps the canonization of St. Obama the Elephant Slayer has gone a bit too far. Alex, who is politically much too far to my right, goes so far as to suggest that Obama is our Tony Blair.

Funny, but I thought Blair was a British Bill Clinton, someone willing to draw on union support during elections, without batting an eyelash as he subsequently stabbed them in the back (need I spell out NAFTA and New Labour for you?).

Obama, in contrast, is probably the first president on record to win an election on the shoulders of millions of donors of no more than a few $30 checks -- rather than corporate and special interest "bundles" worth lots more. He agrees with labor, but doesn't owe them.

As for the many Clintonites in the new administration, the folks who in the past gave us no health reform, a regressive and pauperizing diminishment of public aid, without any real checks on corporate power, I am glad that they are ultimately not in charge. Obama appears to be unusually his own man.

An eloquent orator, he's also aware of the dire need to lower expectations, which is my explanation for his relatively flat inaugural speech. In sum, I see Obama as a very cool and controlled individual with a few very clear goals in mind who is a virtuoso in the art of persuasion and leadership.

Goodbye to Peter and Paul

The German film Goodbye to Lenin, a sensitive and humorous look at an end of an era, recently summoned to mind not the end of Communism, but the end of Christianity as I once knew it.

In the film, a committed East German Communist woman goes into a coma just as the Berlin Wall is falling in 1989. She wakes up during German reunification. Her doctor tells advises that she should be kept calm. The hitch: she thinks her beloved Honecker regime is still in power.

In my life, there was once a boy who once experienced ecstasy upon having the eucharist placed on his tongue, a young man who -- absent celibacy -- might have become a priest, an adult catechist who told quibbling pre-teens they would be excused from the Sunday Mass obligation if they found themselves literally in the bind of the guy on the classroom crucifix.

But, yes, that boy sinned, that young man doubted and that adult ultimately gave up a lifetime of pretending to be committed to what he wasn't. Committed Christians, like committed Communists, were always rare, indeed probably nonexistent.

At this thought I stumble upon the always aged Br. O'Connor, whom we boys called "the mummy" in the Irish Christian Brothers school I attended. He was unchanged in the 1990s, last I saw him.

If he lived through the recent years of shame and a Nazi pope, what did he think, after all those years of loyal service to his order, going from Ireland to Argentina to teach rich ranchers' sons? How did that life end up squaring with the man from Galilee? Was it a failure to watch a world turn its back on everything to which his life was devoted?

Fare well, Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus! It was all for naught.

Episcopal Symptoms

Sunday, as a favor to a friend, I went to an Episcopal church I had attended in the 1980s, located about ten blocks north of the White House. To my great disappointment, its peculiarly Episcopal symptoms of the terminal illness affecting Christianity convinced me of the relative wisdom of my current apostasy and agnosticism.

First, of course, the church was near empty at the mid-morning second service of the day, typically the best attended. They'd disguised it with the oldest church trick in the book: removal of pews. But the church still looked empty.

Second, the black female homilist was a walking, talking Republican advertisement against affirmative action. It wasn't bad enough that she read her flat, uninspiring and derivative sermon. She simply could not read! I'm not kidding. The words and their pronunciation were entirely foreign to her, although she spoke with an accent as American as apple pie.

Third, there were a slew of announcements by church committee heads. All expressed that false American Protestant cheer ("ha, ha") to signal the good, clean fun of a book and CD sale or the fulfillment of hearing teens' "profound" questions to the church's seminarian about his trip to the Military Republic of Kumbaya, where distressing things are happening. They all made a pitch for more volunteers since, from the look of things, they were the only members of their activities -- and no wonder.

The rector (not the homilist) was the parish's second female in that position, not the elegant former actress I had had a hand in selecting, but one who made an earnest Episcopal try to sound horsey and look dowdy, all reinforced by robust bursts of entirely forced laughter.

Let's not leave out the after-service coffee and its swarm of men with bejewelled ears and tones borrowed from their mothers.

No wonder the Episcopal Church is falling apart.

Geithner: Too Many Zeroes

A better idea than the Tim Geithner plan to lend trillions to the financial sector would be to make the financiers pay. I mean, really pay. From  their banks, their companies and their pockets. For once.

The very same bank that on this very day would charge you more than 5% interest on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage for a home (assuming you offer your first-born child as collateral) can borrow the money from the Federal Reserve -- that's you and me -- for 0.5%. You knew that, right?

They've been making a killing all our lives off our tax money.

So why not sell their houses, cars, offices, fancy office furniture and office bars, yachts and jets,  golf courses, the jewelry they've given their wives and mistresses, and so on and on and on? Then, why not throw them in jail and toss the key when it turns out that selling everything is not nearly enough to repay us?

After that, let's nationalize the business of lending and borrowing and never let any financial shark play with our money ever again.

Bama Got Spine

Did you miss President Barack Obama's swat at the Republican gnats at the press conference last night?

I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some, and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that's the lesson I learned.

The message I get is: No more Mr. Nice Guy, Repubs. I gave you what you wanted and you threw it in my face. See if I do that again.

It's so refreshing to see a Democratic Party leader who has a spine.

Now if only Congress would get rid of Majority "Leader" Harry (Jellyfish) Reid and Speaker Nancy (Can't Count Votes) Pelosi ...

Neither Rude nor Wrong

Pit good manners against a thought-out moral standard and I'll always choose the latter.

In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:

DUKE OF NORFOLK: But damn it, Thomas, look at those names.... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

THOMAS MORE: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?

Something like this arose when, in the context of a conversation about the upbringing of boys as opposed to that of girls, I mentioned a teenage boy who, on principle, had declined girls' invitations to bed. My interlocutors, two middle class American women, cringed at my allegedly "inappropriate" talk of sex, without ever quite citing a principle.

Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."

In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.

I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.

Manners be damned.

Efficiency vs. Well-being

Should society be primarily an efficient arrangement or should it aim to promote the well-being of its members? If it's efficiency you favor, then go ahead, lay off as many workers as you wish so long as you can still provide the goods and services demanded by paying consumers. However, if it's the general welfare you're concerned with, get ready to accept some inefficiencies.

This is the fundamental debate underlying key policy decisions: Should we stimulate the economy? Should we subsidize arts, education or public transportation? Should we spend resource on people unlikely to produce something of equivalent value?

I'd argue that, at heart, human beings are fundamentally inefficient. Let's do the return on investment (ROI) math.

1. Most human beings take about 22-23 years of utter subsidization -- infancy, parenting and schooling -- at a cost of $125,000 to $250,000, depending on household income level, not counting college.
   
2.  Add college: from about $40,000 to $200,000 for a 4-year undergraduate degree.
3. So society has invested between $125,000 and $450,000 on each person before they have produced a single widget or service of any economic value.
   
4. Then, let's assume that for about 40-45 years this person works. 
5. Subtract from this person's income his or her living expenses, then ask, at age 65, has society recovered $125,000-$450,000, adjusted for inflation?
6. Wait! From age 65 to whatever (100?), as a norm human beings go back to being non-productive resource consumers; in most cases, they end up being subsidized by someone else. So subtract what is spent in those years. Do we still have a profitable ROI?
   

So, you see, human beings are inherently inefficient. Let's get rid of them, shall we?

Toothaches, famines and other minor mishaps

The paradox of which I am fondest is the notion that my toothache is always worse than a famine in India. In that spirit, I'm also aware this week that my cold is much more severe than the illness that has gripped the economy. Still as events flutter past me I want to put my own corrective stamp.

OK, so Daschle is thankfully out, but what's with cabinet appointees who can't do their taxes? (And I blame Daschle because he was asked about taxes and he said there were no problems.)

And Repubs, hey, the stimulus bill is not perfect (I would put 100% into food stamps and unemployment compensation), but without a stimulus package ... we're in deep, deep, deep (did I say deep?) trouble.

Interesting how Papa Nazinger listens to Angela Merkel. The Vatican is now demanding that the British flake whose excommunication was revoked recant his Holocaust denial. (Tidbit learned from Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me: Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies Jews were gassed, also hates The Sound of Music.)

Oh, and great going Kadima and Labour governing coalition of Israel! Looks like Likud will bring a conservative sweep in the coming elections and even Tony Blair is talking of Hamas at the negotiation table (which was not on the horizon before the latest adventure) !!!!

Lastly, turning to local matters, the recurrent motorcades in and out of the White House seem lots less annoying now, even though they are as noisy and flashy and cumbersome as ever.

And that's the news from Cecilieaux's Cave.

"goddacode"

William Henry Harrison, the ninth U.S. president, served for the shortest period of time, 32 days. Like me, he caught a bad cold on inauguration day.

Harrison was sworn in on March 4, 1841, facing an extremely cold and wet day. without an overcoat or hat. He also delivered the longest inaugural address in American history: it lasted two hours. In an era without penicillin, he died by April 4.

Now you know why I have been silent. I think I will live to blog again.

Jesse Jackson Encounters Change

As President-elect Barack Obama was probably going over his speech in his head while having his morning coffee with then-President Bush, I found myself entangled in an exchange about egalitarianism with none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who showed me that not much had changed yet.

The scene was 1st and D Streets Northwest, Washington, D.C., about 9 am or so, on Jan. 20, 2009. This was the second presidential inauguration I have attended.

The first was the swearing in of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when I was a child of privilege whose diplomatic father snagged tickets to a historic, if cold, perch. Fast-forward 48 years and there I was in a crowd accompanied by two very close friends, one of whom long ago was also a child of privilege with Kennedy inauguration seats.

This time, we were all just plain citizens, without strings to pull. Well, not entirely.

My friend had worked very hard to elect a new congresswoman, who had given us tickets such as the one shown here. If you knew my friend, however, you'd now that she's as regular citizen as they come.

In fact, just to prove it, let me relate that later in the day, when my friend befriended her 1,000th stranger, we had to drive this unknown woman to a very fancy mansion in the upper Northwest so she would not miss an inaugural ball. Next morning my friend confessed that her first thought upon leaving the mansion-dweller was why she was not taking her household staff to the ball.

That's the kind of egalitarianism that came into question on Tuesday at 1st and D, when a bunch of burly cops began to push and shove their way through a standing-room-only crowd. We were all waiting patiently to be admitted to the standing area facing the Capitol.

What was the purpose of this fascistoid human bulldozer? To allow the His Excellency Grand Poobah Jesse Jackson to make his way to some better spot.

"This is the ultimate in elitism," I shouted at Jackson the minute he neared where I was.

To me it was outrageous that -- precisely on a day set aside to enshrine the equality of all in the eyes of the law, through the swearing-in of the first black president -- this supposed standard-bearer of the banner of equality should make use of police power to push his way through a crowd.

Jackson turned to me and saw my anger. I like to think that for a moment the awkwardness of the moment struck him. He said, "Hey, I'm working here."

I said it was still elitist what he was doing. So he put his hand on my left shoulder and said, "It's OK, it's our day."

His voice seemed to be attempting to reach me. My friends say they felt moved.

I'll admit that Jackson was clever. He temporarily pacified me with a phrase that was deliciously ambiguous in its meaning and was delivered in the practiced tone of a preacher expressing sympathy to a bereaved family.

I still feel that Jesse Jackson did not quite get it.

Yes, January 20 was "our day." Yet, to paraphrase George Orwell, it was more "ours" to those who had phalanxes of policemen at their command, than it was the day of the rest of us.

Let's Make the Next 8 Years about Now

Let's put an end to the political clichè that education is the panacea for all that ails our society. It's mistaken: education can leverage the human resources student bring to school, but educators can't reverse inequalities and injustices.

Eliminating poverty in the still-richest country in the world can't be pushed forward to the fabled day in which schools make the current generation of slum kids into self-made entrepreneurs of the future.

That's the trick all politicians play during electoral campaigns -- Obama played it, too. The game gets repeated every four years in four easy moves:

1. Campaigns are occasionally made to face up to social problems, profound radical socioeconomic inequality, hell, the ongoing class war (which is waged by the rich on the rest of us, not by selected interest groups the GOP picks on).

2. The press interrupts the circus around nonissues governments have no business in and no real power over, such as sexual morality, and tosses a cream-puff economic question.

3. The politicians respond in wise-sounding tones that what we need are schools that will help raise up every child, no matter his or her background.

4. The elected politicians proceed to forget no. 3 and leave education, training and public aid programs that support work as underfunded as before -- at least after the first year, when the TV twinkies have turned their attention to the pressing issue of Britney's weight.

So everything stays the same. After all, politicians are bought and kept bought for the purpose of keeping things the same.

In reality, although funding schools instead of torture "contractors" would be a better use of our tax money, what really needs to happen is to throw money at the parents of the children who go to school.

Make sure every parent has the skills and work support to get, keep and advance in jobs that pay family sustaining wages. Inspire more parents to read to their children, to enjoy learning for its own sake.

Throw money at family food baskets so every parent and child is well fed,  at nutrition programs that teach what food to buy, at rent and home buying.

Throw money at adult literacy and job skills training for adults.

Throw money around so that no child ends up coming to school from a home run by uncles and grandparents, where food and clothes and good, clean fun are scarce and books and reading even scarcer. Throw money around so all children will feel safe in the homes of well-paid, secure working parents.

Then the children will be able to learn, yes, in well stocked schools that have roof leaks repaired and heating or air-conditioning working and windows pristine and clean, with teachers motivated by real leaders, not educationese speakers, to inspire learning.

But that costs money, political will and commitment to see change through. Now, not when the kids grow up.

Partisan or Critic?

Barack Obama's presidency will undoubtedly change the way current events feel to me -- perhaps to all of us --introducing to my analyses the perennial problem of objectivity. Obama is a bright, appealing man who has yet to disappoint, whereas I mistakenly took Bush for a wrongheaded fool before I realized that, for reasons unknown, he is a skilled and malevolent dissembler.

This blog is not an exercise in journalism, as I have said. I already do that at work.

Yet even as a philo sophos ¹-- Greek for "lover of truth" -- who is epistemologically agnostic, I am perfectly able to see a difference between partisanship and criticism.

Political parties being what they are in the United States -- largely capitalist cheerleaders who are either centrist to mildly reformist (Democratic) or center-rightist to economically darwinian (Republican) -- partisanship takes the form of dogmatic sycophancy. Everything the party leaders, especially if it includes a president, say or do is defended; everything the other side says or does, especially their president, is attacked.

That, at least, is what the political attack dogs and spinners do. Inside the no longer smoke-filled rooms where real decisions are made, there is a great deal of winking and nodding among accomplices in the conspiracy to keep things as they are for the benefit of those who profit most. They call it the art of "compromise."

A true critic (from the Greek kritikos, or "one who is able to make judgments") renders a truer, or at least less partial, version of events and policies. The origin of kritikos, after all, is the verb krinein, "to separate" or decide.

Besides, I have never been able to be a lockstep member of any political or religious organization. My partisanship, if any, runs further to the left than most of the Democratic Party, toward a peaceable and mild anarchism that questions the very foundations of human association -- much as we humans need social links to survive.

This is a long way to warn everyone that the gloves are off insofar as Obama and the incoming administration and the Democratic blowhards in Congress. Yes, potentially Obama represents change; but the present social and economic status quo has swallowed changers whole before.

---

¹ I'd like to call attention to the fact that in categorizing posts, I draw on a pseudo-Aristotelian typology of ideas. Thus "philosophy" is the search for ultimate truths, "ethics" the moral branch of philosophy (with "decalogue" a particular subset of my own). This is why I have separated "politics" meaning political theory or political philosophy, from "current events" meaning comments on the headlines and "political economy" meaning, with what I deem charming anachronism, analyses of the social and economic relations within nation-states. And, yes, if you have read this far, you spend way too much time on the 'net.

Geithner Should 'Fess Up

So Timothy Geithner knows where the bodies are buried in the sham "rescue" of banks, brokerages and insurance companies -- that's obviously why Barack Obama picked him for secretary of the treasury. That still does not excuse Democrats and Republicans in Congress bending over as if for a prostate exam in the face of the fact that the guy knowingly failed to pay taxes for several years.

Tax Cheating?

And he didn't discover the "error" himself. He even tried to get away with it until the IRS audited him.

I had a summer job at the IMF eons ago. Without his level of expertise, every U.S. citizen I knew who worked for the IMF knew full well they had to take care of their own taxes because the IMF is an international organization and is exempt from U.S. tax laws as they affect employers.

In fact, the Senate Finance Committee released this week a piece of paper Geithner signed at the time, acknowledging that he knew his obligations. Moreover, after the IRS audited him on three years in 2006, the Obama Transition Team found in December 2008 the same irregularities in the previous two years that the IRS had not found.

It was then that Geithner "voluntarily amended his tax returns," as the release states.

Tell Us All Where the Bodies Are

But there's another reason Geithner should withdraw: he knows where the bodies are buried and he's not ratting out who put them there.

The fact of the matter is that we're on the verge of seeing yet another banking debacle -- if it hasn't broken by the time I finish this -- and there are many months of debacles to come. The truly knowledgeable people have predicted a much, much lower Dow by the time it's all revealed to the public and a number of officials have been hinting at one coming up.

They knew. Some guys in Congress know. Probably Bush knows. Geithner surely knows this in full orchestration and four-part harmony. We the public are the only ones who don't know.

It's just like during the Cold War when the CIA and the KGB knew exactly what each other's government was doing, but they let "surprises" pop up so they could justify their existence and go on asking for ever bigger budgets for themselves and the purveyors of the arms race. We were the dupes.

Geithner has been an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence of the Bush Administration concerning the culprits and the size of the financial swindle.

He's been one of the guys who allowed, nay, made possible the use of $350 billion -- just think of the schools and food assistance and social security stability we could have bought for all that! -- for dividends to stockholders and bonuses to executives and business as usual for the 1 percent that has sucked up most of the gains and profits produced by 90 percent of all Americans.

Appoint him? Even after there's egregious evidence on tax cheating? He should be punished.

If, because he knows where the bodies are and can guide the hapless Democrats to them, he needs to be kept in the tent, he ought to apologize and profusely. He ought to be made to stand up in front of all of us and 'fess up -- and I don't mean just about the tax cheating.

Missing in the Stimulus Talk

Absent from almost all the discussion about stimulating the economy is any mention of the poorest Americans and the unemployed, even though the stimulus bang for the buck is highest for food stamps (aka SNAP) and unemployment compensation and the lowest for tax cuts.

Take today's discussion on NBC's Meet the Press. Only former congressman David Bonior (D-Mich) brought up the notion that the essential problem of the American economy is the growing disparity between the rich and the rest of us.

Bonior mentioned something I have come across at least once a week for the past few years: that 90 percent of all the income gains since the last recession went to the top 10 percent of all income earners. I've mentioned this disparity before (see here).

Yet everyone else was worried about the debt, the deficit, whether infrastructure projects would happen fast enough and whether there were enough tax cuts.

Yet the most effective way to get money circulating out there is to put federal dollars into food aid and unemployment checks. Why? Because the folks who get that aid aren't going to bank the money, they'll spend it right away on necessities. That spending will get consumption back up, build confidence and generate jobs.

The infrastructure projects are great for the skilled middle class, which is fine -- we need a robust middle class. But it's slower and most low-skill, low-wage workers won't benefit.

Tax cuts don't help at all. To owe taxes you have to have income, remember? If you have income, at a time like this you'll likely bank any more money you get. That's right: it will sit in the vaults of the same banks that aren't lending to anyone any more.

See an excellent explanation of how this works here.

Yet instead of the important things that ought to be discussed, Meet the Press host David Gregory did not ask a single question about disparity or about suffering, as if the whole world was composed of comfortable Washington policy gnats like himself and his guests.

Thinking from the Gut

In the plethora of responses, on-blog and off, concerning Israel and Gaza, I keep coming across instances of visceral, rather than cerebral, thinking. To some people, anything having to do with that troubled area of the world is so tied up with who they are that anything "their side" does must necessarily be defended and anything the "other side" does must be attacked.

Bystanders who are neither Arab nor Jewish are regarded as either neo-Nazis or neo-colonialists if they dare question the moral and political infallibility of either the government of Israel or the various movements and governments of the Arab world. Yet -- in actual fact -- the Israeli government, as well as Hamas and the many others on the other side, are both composed of quite fallible human beings.

As a Gentile in the West, I am most exposed to Jews who take personal offense at any criticism of Israel. (I am sure, and in different occasions I have experienced it, pro-Palestinian Arabs can be just as obdurate.)

Yet I am an American who criticizes the U.S. government often and hard, a former Catholic who has put the Catholic philosophical system through the shredder and excoriated the leadership of the Catholic Church, a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are ineffectual wimps, a man who believes in the rights of women and the wrongs of many men, including myself, and so forth.

We will never make progress as human beings until we can all step back and look at our own pet ideas, nations, cultures or groups with detachment. At least when we engage in discourse.

On Equality

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts prompted by a discussion I've been having on the subject of equality. Defining equality, its source, whether it is desirable or achievable is a little harder at first blush than it might seem.

There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.

Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.

Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.

We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.

It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."

We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?

In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?

Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?

Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?

Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.

Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.

Zionism and the Diaspora

The Israeli lobby has learned to play the Jewish diaspora in the West with a virtuosity rivaling Isaac Stern on the violin. The phenomenon is reminiscent of the way the Republican Party successfully snowed Catholics and the evangelical right on the issue of abortion.

An instance of unthinking, knee-jerk support for Israel was on display in comments posted on my blog this week by individuals I know to be Jewish. It reminds me of the pro-lifers who chose to vote for right-wing politicians who show contempt for life outside the womb..

The issue is not whether Israel should exist or whether abortion should be legal.

The question is whether it makes sense to support a politician or a country unconditionally -- no matter what they do -- simply because they claim to represent a single position or identity about which one feels strongly.

There's a slippery slope once one goes down that route. For reasons of common identity Italian-Americans would be duty bound to support the Mafia and non-smoker Adolf Hitler would be a suitable poster boy for anti-cigarette campaigns.


One need not be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic to conclude that the present government of Israel is engaging in a transparent ploy to look tough to its electorate just as the hard-line Likud Party is making gains in the polls.

Israel is plainly in the wrong in its military adventure in Gaza on any number of counts and stands to lose -- once again in a very short time -- in the court of world public opinion. That's not just me speaking: you can read a similar assessment from Shmuel Rosner in the Jerusalem Post.

Yet the diaspora -- meaning the Jewish communities outside the traditional Jewish homeland -- embraces unquestioning, unstinting, uncritical support for Israel no matter what. Go to the Anti-Defamation League's website and you'll find one link after another pointing to the wrongdoing of others and to the support that Israel supposedly deserves.

That kind of blind support, especially when it involves killing by the hundreds, is unconscionable and reprehensible.

There's a difference between the Israeli cabinet and any random spiritual descendant of Abraham. Folly -- or worse -- on the part of the former should not command blind, goosestepping loyalty from the other.

Consequences

"What is a sin in your decalogue?" asks a regular reader of this blog, "Something that makes me unhappy?"

In outlining the ethics of survival I have never mentioned "sin," a religious term for deeds, words or even thoughts that violate a moral code. My purpose was to concentrate on what one ought to do, rather than on what one ought not to do, assuming in that Kantian, categorical imperative way that good is worth doing for its own self.

It is true, however, that most historical moral codes have been linked to what I'd call the Santa-Claus threat: he's checking his list to see who's been naughty or nice. Heaven, Nirvana, 70 Virgins, toys or whatever for the nice; hell, samsara, coal in stockings or whatever for the naughty.

That never did much for me.

Even when I was a believer, doing good for the reward seemed cheap. In Catholic morality there was always the distinction between imperfect contrition (being sorry you sinned because you deserved punishment) and perfect contrition (sorrow for sin out of regret for having offended one's loving and dear God). I always thought the reverse would hold as well: you could be good, literally for goodness' sake.

In the grand philosophical edifice of the ethics of survival, a distinctly godless set of propositions, there's an additional issue. The whole raison d'être of these ethics is the universal esteem in which survival is held, coupled with the logic that since ethics are about human behavior an essential requisite of any ethical system would have to be that there be humans alive to behave.

In this light, there are only wrongdoings, not "sin," and the punishment comes in the form of inexorable consequences. Violating these ethics is wrong because it imperils one's survival.

Of course, this is where the survival system diverges from religious systems of ethical compulsion: there is no no possible "pardon" nor "remission of sins." You live or you die.

You pollute, you cause conflict, you bomb, you start wars, you steal from the poor and you get the present mess humanity finds itself in. Will we survive? Individually, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, "we're all dead in the long term."

How about collectively? The jury is out on that one, but at the outset of 2009 I am not uproariously optimistic.

Reality "pardons" to the extent that we are, mercifully, quite resilient and, in cosmic terms, insignificant. Smoking cigarettes is not an automatic ticket to the oncology ward and despite our depredations the planet continues to sustain us.

The law of the jungle is never as absolute and fierce as we think. Jungle species have ample resources to survive.

Sure, these ethics assume that we are, at best, intelligent animals with material needs. Our first concern is our own survival. We are a bit wild, still.

We have the capacity to destroy ourselves and our kin. We ought to avoid that.

Cut Off Israel Now!

We in the United States have been giving more government aid to Israel, an advanced industrial nation, than to all of Africa combined. In return, Israel goes on sporadic bombing binges -- this time to the south of its borders -- whenever it seems like good electoral politics.

The claim that Israel is acting in retaliation to rockets hurled by Hamas is

• disproportionately absurd -- there's currently a 100 to 1 ratio between Palestinians killed by Israel and Israelis killed by rocket fire; and
  

• false -- the four rockets were not hurled by Hamas but by the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The distinction that Hamas has is that the group won power in Gaza by election. That's a thorn in its side that the Israeli government can't abide.

The old argument that Israel was democratic and the Palestinians were not doesn't work here. No argument works except for a complete and immediate halt to this outrage.

We have the means to make it happen. Pull the plug on the billions the U.S. government gives Israel until Israel stops its military adventure.

Borges' Book Life

Struck by a reference by the prodigious Maud Newton to a scholarly study attempting to work out (of all things!) the literary math of the late Jorge Luis Borges, I wondered whether there wasn't a simpler explanation for his 1944 short story The Library of Babel (La biblioteca de Babel).

Like much of Borges' surreal writing, the story occurs in a "universal library" representing iterations of every possible idea ever written, a variation that one William Goldbloom Bloch, a math professor at Wheaton College estimates to yield 10^33,013,740, an "unimaginably large" number. To certain mathematically masturbatory intellects reflections such as these is what Borges was all about.

In fact, however, to anyone who knows about Borges' physical relationship with books, from his early librarian assistant's job in the 1930s to his post as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires where Borges worked in the 1950s and 1960s, the point of the story is not mathematical at all.

Borges spent his life physically surrounded, and involved in the sisyphean task of overcoming the endless output of the publishing industry. In 1936, Borges' colleagues forbade him to catalogue books, as he could sort 100 per hour, making everybody else look bad. Wander through the claustrophobic aisles of the National Library and the short story that has fascinated many intellectually acquires a visceral reality.

Borges lived awash in books, a writer who went blind, lived much of his life with his mother and, despite two relatively utilitarian marriages, maintained distance from people. This story, as so many others, is a mental flight of fancy entirely devoid of emotions -- except his own.

One can see the librarian at work in this story, the man of paper and carton and wood shelves, used to a dry, somewhat stale environment and endless quietude.

Yes, there is math and brilliance and he was aware of such things. Yet the person, the experience at the bottom is the sense of living a universe made almost entirely of books. There is, perhaps, just a little claustrophobia in the aisles of his mind.

The Last Commandment

Let's have a drum roll for the last of my godless commandments, albeit not the last of my ethical ruminations, and introduce it with a story about its origins.

As with the Psalms in the Bible, the numbering of the Ten Commandments is not uniform.

Catholics merge the first three biblical injunctions -- I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make for yourself an idol -- into one first commandment. Anglicans consider the first injunction to be a preface, leaving the other two separate. Talmudic Judaism and Orthodox Christianity opt for two commandments, the first being the first injunction and the second containing the other two.

This is followed by seven parallel but differently numbered commandments. For example, Thou shalt not kill is the 5th commandment to Catholics, but the 6th to everyone else.

Then at the end, the Catholics catch up by drawing a distinction regarding the prohibition concerning coveting. The Douay-Rheims English translation, produced in France by exiled English Catholics during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, renders the commands as follows:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife: nor his house, nor his field, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his. (Deut. 5:21)

Obviously, the Catholics saw the colon as an important distinction, but others do not.

Catholic seminarians used to joke that to Protestants, evidently, wife and "ass" was pretty much the same thing. Ba-da-bing!

When I was constructing my norms founded in the notion of survival, I sought to focus on what might mitigate against my (one's) survival. Hence I promulgated the dictum that

Thou shalt rein in desires that give rise to hate, theft, disrespect of others, despoiling of the earth that sustains thee, and the diminishment of life.

The notion of coveting -- in dictionary definition, to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others -- has been the source of much mischief. Wrongfully? Inordinately? What is wrong? Is there an order, who defines it and what sets the order off kilter as to be "inordinate"?

No one argues much about the rights of others, any more than anyone credibly argues about "thou shalt not kill" (other than to say it doesn't apply to war, execution, abortion and few sundry other things).

The rights of others are pretty obvious; when we want to trample on them, we generally just ignore them and leave the sheriffs and deputies to argue about them.

Survival being so essential to the notion of ethics, I wanted to cover much broader, uncontested territory. I thought that any unbridled desire that could give rise to disrespect of another human being or the natural environment that sustains us, would be detrimental.

These would include envy, greed, prejudice. In action, I specified razing a forest merely to make more money, wishing an accident on someone who has a better car than ours, deriving one's own self-respect from a dim view of entire classes of people.

Let's face it: envy, greed and prejudice are toxic. They corrode inside us.

Often a home, a way of living, a job, looks, possesions or social standing that have served us perfectly well, become puny and embarrassing, simply because we see a mirage. We suddenly see in an imaginary lake the image of someone else richer or more beautiful, wealth beyond our normal imagining, a difference in appearance that we can make into something of to make ourselves look better.

Then we begin the mindless chase that disregards even our own well-being. Most of the time, if we manage to grasp the object of our desire for an instant, its gleam vanishes and we then seek it again and again, in hopes of retaining the glitter.

John D. Rockefeller was once asked how much money would be enough. His reply was, "A little more."

This rule of life is about enough being enough. We can survive perfectly well with a lot less wealth, fewer possessions and a lower level of esteem than we think. We need not worry on this account.

It's a Madoff, Madoff, Madoff, Madoff World

Agence France Presse quotes Dominque Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, saying the following of the latest financial scandal, "The surprise is not that there are some thieves in the system, the question is where were the police?"

I beg to differ.

Financier Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion global pyramid investment scheme involved such gigantic servings of greed, stupidity and fraud so as to make one wonder about the moral fiber of humanity.

As in the 1963 Stanley Kramer all-star film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World about a wild goose chase for buried loot, nobody comes out unsullied in the Madoff affair:

• not Madoff;
• not the middlemen who solicited investments;
• not the wealthy who put all their eggs in one rotten basket;
• not the law enforcers who had the problem pointed to them and ignored it nonetheless;
• not the policymakers who advocated total freedom for the "invisible hand" of the market; and certainly
  
• not the whole lot of us who, in some measure, find ourselves able, from time to time, to tap our capacity for mendacity, greed, disregard for others, stupidity, laziness and cupidity.

This is an equal opportunity moral paradigm in which the issue is not who went wrong but why aren't we all in some sort of jail or at least sitting on a small chair facing a corner?

Sometime in my early childhood, at about the age of five, my obsession was to find the answer to the question, "Are people good or bad?"

My mother said people were essentially good, although in my recollection one could have said her motto was "trust but verify." She was always reserved about information that could give rise to envy, greed or pity; in some important ways, no one really knew her.

My father and many other relatives said the opposite, but their behavior was as careless as Madoff's customer list. They lived as if no one would ever fleece them; indeed, no one did, whereas my mother lived through some rank injustices.

Is that the way of the world?

Why should I care? Why does the fleecing of rich retirees in an exclusive country club evoke even the slightest sympathy in a world in which thousands of auto workers will be idled without pay for two weeks or more, and in which more than a 1,000 people have died of hunger in the last hour?

Perhaps because they are part and parcel of the same human condition.

For the first time in history, we have the means and resources for everyone, we just don't have enough of a will to share, to be fair, to be compassionate -- collectively or individually -- to eradicate extreme poverty, or extreme wealth.

Solstice is a-comin'

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man's hat
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do
If you haven't got a ha'penny, a farthing will do,
If you haven't got a farthing, then God bless you!

This traditional English carol, frequently sung as a round, came to mind shortly after the first snow flurry here in Washington several weeks ago, then again upon reading Heartinsanfrancisco's blog post on the season, Oh come all ye spendful.

She is tired of the season already and no wonder.

In this economic-trough Christmas, with retail sales expectations crashing through the floor, Madison Avenue has unleashed advertising with full orchestration and four-part harmony weeks before Thanksgiving. Let's face it, in these times no one feels like shopping for anyone but children -- and then only to buy them practical things, like mittens.

In yet another piece of Christmas vitriol, 'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous by Christopher Hitchens restates, once again, his core objection to the holiday:

for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

Replace Jesus with "the Dear Leader," as Hitchens does, and you'll get the idea of Christmas, North Korean style, which is a novel and humorous way of looking at it.

Sure, Christmas, from late Old English Cristes Maesse ("Mass of Christ"), is not, Heart correctly states, a particularly early Christian holiday. Still, I am unable to confirm the papal declaration from the year 320 of our era, which Heart cites, and would stay with the better known integration of the feast into the church Roman calendar around the 7th century.

Similarly, the December 25 Christmas feast coincides with the Roman sun-worship festival Natalis Invicti ("birthday of the unconquered"), which is believed to have roots in Mithraism. Still, direct links between the two are difficult to prove.

Finally, gift giving is traditionally linked to the largesse to children of St. Nicholas of Myra, located in today's Turkey, whose remains were taken to Italy, where he is known as St. Nicholas of Bari.

Thus, there is some support for the idea that Christmas is a religious feast of specifically Christian origin and content, even if some early Christian writers thought the birth of Jesus -- assuming it happened -- took place in April or May. Of course, it is hard to find the original idea behind the tree-worship of the Tannenbaum, the Druidic mistletoe and, of course, the commercial and cultural totalitarianism of shopping malls' piped-in carols.

Still, to this unbeliever, there seems little wrong with a holiday that is essentially an attempt to whistle in the dark and gloom of wintry nights. The solstice is when we are furthest from the life-enhancing and light-giving sun.

Why not wassail with some abandon? Why not hurl invectives at the night and cold and deadly bareness of the season? Why not purloin cheer and hope from whatever stories are closest at hand, without worrying whether the events they recount ever happened?

Have a happy solstice, everyone!

Detroit Is Dead, Long Live Detroit!

Having had the misfortune of dealing with the United Auto Workers, I feel it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of hacks to be blamed for the auto bailout that wasn't. Aiding the merriment were the Republicans handing pretty decent political cover to Democratic leaders Nancy "Can't Count Votes" Pelosi and Harry "Spineless" Reid.

The next president can pretty much write his ticket in the face of this bunch of losers. And, yes, Motor City has pretty much had it now -- except that bankruptcy in 2008 is a far cry from bankruptcy in 1929. The Big Three, or Big Two, or maybe just Ford, will still be making those made-to-fall-apart pollutemobiles no one wants to buy for years to come.

Let's face it. If Brooke Shields were doing a commercial campaign for U.S. automakers her script couldn't credibly have women dying to get American engineering.

The quality of American cars has never been all that great. They've been big. They've been mass-produced. They've been marketed and mythologized.

Sure, up to 1970, somewhat more than two-thirds of all cars worldwide were American. But that was because the Europeans had committed continental suicide by the hundreds of millions in two, count 'em, world wars.

Remember those blue-gray Citroën 2CVs of the late 1940s, the "umbrella on four wheels," that were France's anticipation of big-wheel tricycles? And, of course, everyone remembers the postwar VW bug! And what about the East German sputtering Trabant, an engineering miracle in a country in which even machinery bolted down was taken home to Uncle Joe Stalin?

All of those European cars were ridiculously simple, toy vehicles that lasted and lasted and lasted well after the Berlin Wall fell.

And Japan, we'd dropped the bomb on them -- no wonder they were making those tinny scooters in the 1960s. Today Honda is laughing all the way to the bank.

Yet talk about historic irony! What undid the U.S. auto industry was the same military-industrial complex that gave it a near monopoly after World War II.

This came home to me reading Robert Reich's Supercapitalism. The economist relates, almost as an aside, how the curious confluence of shipping related to the Vietnam War created a natural pathway for the entry of Japanese cars into the U.S. market in the 1960s and 70s.

The Vietnam War came back to bite the USA.

Now the auto union that created Michigan's much vaunted "little Sweden" of high pay, good benefits and pensions, by refusing a wage concession, has probably helped create a job hemorrhage. Not that they should have conceded.

I certainly would have asked that management take pay cuts first. Pay cuts? Pink slips! They're the culprits, after all.

But the UAW deserves a little blame, too. This is the union that, if you find out their press office's phone number demands to know who told you. They shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get.

So do the Repubs, and Pelosi and Reid and the whole crew. It's Christmas. How else would you get so many blowhards felled in one big stroke?

Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, Republican, Green

In a political version of American political eeny, meeny miney, moe, my headline attempts, in response to recent comment to my recent essay about conservative ideas, to count some of the possible varieties.

Individuals, of course, do not come in pure unalloyed laboratory state. We can be, as one commenter wrote, conservative in social customs and liberal politically. Or, as some (gold-digging?) Washington women claim, Democrats are fiscally liberal about the public purse, but not on a date when it's their dime.

But, careful! "Liberal" and "Conservative" have checkered histories when it comes to a social, economic and political worldview, for short, a political economy.

Conservatism, as I failed to mention, usually arises after the alleged thing to be conserved is gone or has been changed. The Counter-Reformation attempted belatedly to get rid of Protestantism ... too long after Luther had let the cat out of the bag.

Indeed, this is where it gets tricky.

In the 17th and 18th century Europe, all countries -- except Switzerland -- were monarchies of one sort or another, interrupted by occasional upstarts, such as Cromwell. The challenge came from the promoters of the industrial revolution and the new form of banking based on money traded as capital.

These were skilled, educated, city-dwelling and mercantile-minded burghers, the future bourgeoisie, who had neither land nor title but aspired to a place in society. The monarchist nobility, based on agrarian wealth, fiercely opposed the budding industrial capitalists.

The Cromwellian civil war in England might be deemed an expression of that conflict.

But note: the capitalists were the liberalizers of trade, the "Liberals," while the monarchists and agrarians were mercantilist and protectionist "Conservatives." In Continental Europe, this is still the prevailing nomenclature.

Liberal democracy is, hence, capitalist democracy, in which the government is a committee of the capitalist class -- the men of Philadelphia in 1776, the ones who penned the words "we, the people," were all male, white gentry who owned vast estates with slaves or urban industrial enterprises founded on indentured servitude.

The Whig, Federalist, Democratic and Republican parties, the only ones ever allowed to compete to win in electoral contests to see who has the biggest bankroll and the craftiest lawyers, were all only teams -- call them Harvard and Yale -- with a common ideology even to this day.

Today's conservatives, as we saw, seek a status quo ante that never existed.

Contemporary liberals, in contrast, are really social democrats, seeking to extend the democratic experiment begun for the privileged few to all classes and races, to economic power as well as civil power.

We are about to see how this plays out.

Thou Shalt Partake of Sex

What if, instead of mortification of the flesh, abstinence, avoidance, belts and locks and scarlet letters, our religions and reigning ethics had an imperative principle to seek to slake fleshly desires, to engage in carnal pleasure, to seek out every lickerishness, to open the doors of every bedroom and heap praise on the randy hearted?

You'll say that's why they invented the Internet and its seemingly endless parade of porn.

But, no, I mean an imperative: something like "remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day," yet for sex. Certainly our bodies drive us to extremely silly and oft-reckless behavior in response to the stimuli that cause sexual arousal.

To provide an example of a philosophical version of the drive was my intent in penning the ninth of my godless commandments four years ago:

Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof.

Today these words feel as unsatisfactory as they day I wrote them, especially since the underlying notion behind this set of ethics I have proposed, is the universally agreed notion that prizes human survival.

From the point of view of survival, sex is principally reproductive. We spawn ... for what? It's not the oft-cited notion that our children are there to have someone to care for us in old age -- ha!

To my mind, the biological point of reproduction is to replace each individual within a species after death, and to provide sufficient replacements to withstand environmental pressures against the species continued existence. If we spawn in large enough numbers, the worst catastrophe won't wipe us all out.

Not for nothing individuals in some species die after reproductively successful sex. The praying mantis female bites off the male’s head immediately after, sometimes during, sexual intercourse. Perhaps it was in a related sense that the dualistic, sex-conflicted English Victorians called orgasm "the little death."

Certainly, also, reproduction was what Pope Paul VI was thinking about in 1968 when he issued the immensely imprudent encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming Catholic docrtine's opposition to artifical means of contraception.

Still, then and now critics in and outside scientific circles have noted that even animals don't engage in sex merely to reproduce. Sex also serves to cement social bonds.

Regular sex with a caring partner, or three, is also recognized among humans as a significant factor in one's happiness, one's degree of patience and tolerance toward others. Doesn't the world seem rosy when one walks out into the street from the arms of a good lover?

Remember, then, to partake, now and then, prudently, with willing and able partners of an appropriate age and suitable health.

Remember, also, that sex has consequences, from irretrievable affection to parenthood to death. Clicking sex into operation, as with software, carries with an implied end-user license agreement. Read his or hers carefully because, even if you don't, the other person's EULA kicks in immediately -- as does yours.

All this notwithstanding, dare to give yourself to another in one of life's most pleasant endeavors.

Why Conservatism Was Always Doomed

In the future, when Dubya is known as the Hoover of the 21st century, it will seem obvious: the wave of conservatism from Reagan to the second Bush was sheer folly. What may not seem as obvious is the philosophical truth that all conservatism is always untenable.

The human impulse to conserve arises primarily out of illusion. We imagine that something we know or believe is either worthy of preserving or will actually last forever.

Yet if we know only one thing it's that the central characteristic of reality is change -- growth, decay and renewal, over and over and over again.

In a wide-ranging discussion of his philosophical worldview, education innovator A. S. Neill once confessed his profound doubt concerning God. People point to Christianity's two millenia, he argued, yet the cult of Isis lasted longer and where are her followers today?

Where is Rome, Athens and Sparta, the Persian Empire, the Ming dynastry?

Indeed, where are the absolute monarchs? Montesquieu, who lived under the last of them in France, was a precursor of the French Revolution and the ideas behind American independence.

He compared monarchy to a galleon capable of sailing the seven seas yet vulnerable to sinking like a rock if hit by a single well-placed cannonball. Democracy, Montesquieu also wrote, is more like a raft in rapids: it sometimes gets flipped over yet ultimately always floats, seeking equilibrium ... like reality itself, I would add.

Perennially seeking equilibrium in which to float, however, is not the same as achieving it. That ideal floating equilibrium is elusive precisely because it is ideal -- it is an abstraction, what could or might be, but not what is.

But surely some things must be there at the eternal point of equilibrium, you say?

Moral principles are eternal and universal, some argue. I believe that our desire to survive creates moral imperatives, but these differ markedly from the ethics of most religions.

Also, our survival, individual or as a species, is not a sure thing by a long shot. Not eternal. We're really johnny-come-latelies in our planet. Current science places our collective origin some 200,000 years ago in Africa. Contrast this with our planet's 4.5 billion years.

If you wanted to pay the Earth and humans $1 per 100,000 years of existence, the Earth would get $4.5 million and humans just $2.00. A mansion versus a fancy cup of latte.

Has the temporal insignificance of everything we hold dear dawned yet?

In such a state of reality, the only sane public policy, the only survival approach to life, is to adapt to change. To conserve is not merely foolish, it is a falsehood. Nothing is conserved, nothing stays the same.

Even change is almost never absolute and irreversible. Until it is. Mark Twain put it another way: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Moreover, modern conservatism, political or religious, isn't really that conservative.

In the 1950s the Republicans demonized Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson because, among other things, he was divorced. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the "moral majority" adored divorced, lapsed Catholic Ronald Reagan.

Funny how those immutable morals changed, even among the most rabidly fundamentalist Protestants in the country.

For the most part, neo-conservatives want to preserve a past that never existed.

It's a Disneyfied 1908, when everyone was white and polite and Christian. Men with handlebar moustaches concerned themselves with important matters such as business and machines, while women read poetry at their sewing circles.

Conservatism is about the illusion that time and life can be somehow jarred and pickled, or made into a never rancid jam. It's an idea that is doomed from the moment it is spoken.

Facing Hard Times

In early 1981 I purchased my co-op apartment from an older lady who had moved in with her husband in 1931. She had remodeled very little: the claw-foot bathtub that a few apartments in the building still have is gone, but I still have the kitchen cabinet piece then known as a "hoosier," which I knew only from the TV show "The Waltons."

Nostalgia, grainy photographs were almost all I knew about the Great Depression. The stories of people jumping off buildings after the crash are mostly apocryphal, I have recently learned.

From time to time, I wondered how the couple that had lived those years in my apartment had coped. Were they happy living in simplicity? Did they fight over the dollars that had to be stretched for their needs and those of the daughter brought up in this place?
I never found out.

Mr. G. was handy or knew someone who was. There's a manual can opener (still works!) screwed to the wall. When I moved in a brass plaque with their family name had been screwed onto the door. I also found a toolbox with a sturdy heavy metal wrench and hammer -- conveyed with the hoosier.

The only calamity I feared for most of my life was nuclear war. Of all the disasters that were predicted as a result, the one that seized my imagination were the electromagnetic impulses that would render all electronic gadgets useless instantly.

What would work? Technology from the 1930s, which was mostly mechanical.

Thus, I still hold onto a Smith-Corona manual typewriter (although I haven't figured out where I'll find ribbons after nuclear war) and for years I harbored the illusion that most of my life could go on more or less unchanged if technology from after the 1930s were wiped out. Indeed, back then my carbon footprint was tiny: I had no car or television. By choice.

These thoughts have come back as the prospect of a second Depression looms large on the horizon.

The adjustments we face are each very small. It is only when we account for it in the aggregate -- when we have pictured giving up our Internet connection to buy cat food for our dinner -- that we realize that we face losing a way of life that so recently seemed destined to be the future of humanity.

Interestingly enough, life goes on no matter what, in soup kitchen lines and even in concentration camps. We all cling even to what is obviously a miserable life. Even in the camps, as Primo Levi wrote in his Holocaust memoir, there was humor and inmates played practical jokes on each other.

After all, hard times are just like good times, without the pleasure.

"Thank You" to GIs?

Heartinsanfrancisco's blog has provoked me again and this time, I won't cogitate, write and rewrite endlessly before responding. She proposes sending thankyou cards to the U.S. troops in Iraq.

No. I disagree. For a million reasons, none of them intending the slightest disrespect to Heart, whose posts force me to think out my views.

First of all, there's the matter of soldiering and moral responsibility: following orders is not an excuse. I already explained my views in detail in the post titled On Armistice Day.

Second, these folks weren't even drafted. They volunteered. They're being paid. When they come home they will get medical and educational benefits that Americans who have not trained to commit homicide on order can only dream of ... on our dime. We've all said and will continue to say "thank you" any number of ways, many of them against my will.

Third, the whole American love affair with veterans and the supposed patriotism of war (Dulce et Decorum Est?) is a rank falsehood, designed to con the least educated, the poorest to be used as cannon fodder for the bond traders, the jetsetting CEOs and the glitterati.

Fourth, and this goes to the specifics of Heart's post (but, again, not the author personally), the whole notion of a company paying for thankyou cards is PR. Xerox wants everyone to know how good they are, how "patriotic" -- and to keep buying Xerox products.

To say "thank you" allays our complicity in the con and the merchandising of war as good.

Yet how can we possibly take pride that our society is capable of producing amoral men and women capable of aiding and abetting atrocity committed in our name, such as Lynndie England and Charles Graner at Abu Ghraib. Their explanation? They did not know it was wrong.

Thank you? More like "you make me sick and ashamed."

Where is the military person of principle who resisted the invasion and participation in the occupation of a country that did nothing to us? Where is the soldier with courage of conviction?

Insofar as I am concerned, they are all cowardly mercenaries -- killers for hire -- and I sure as hell never wanted them hired. Not for Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic ... shall I go on?

Yes, I did say "cowardly." When the one superpower with an intact nuclear arsenal, possessing a military that is larger than the next ten armed forces put together, takes on -- unprovoked -- a 50th-rate ragtag army of a poor country, that's called cowardly bullying.

So, no thank you from me. Yes, I am sorry for the mothers who lost their children in an insane war project that I opposed from beginning to end. I don't know how Bush can even sleep knowing he wasted thousands of lives for ... what?

But if these mothers' children had stood up for decency and principles with courage, and refused to go, they would all most likely be alive today. The ones who went and survived are no heroes to me.