Sowing and Reaping

Mindful of a question that was asked of me in response to my recent minimalist post, I have been attempting to assess what exactly I have sowed, but this farm image has this city boy mightily confused.

My reader wrote "Et toi, qu'as-tu semé que tu puisses récolter?" (And you, what did you sow that you can harvest?).

We get this notion about cause and effect from a biblical phrase "For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap." Is this pastoral image true for humans as it might be for crops? What would the biblical writer have written in the 21st century? What might we write in the "bible" of our hearts?

Humans just might not seed in their lives, other than literally, in their farms and gardens.

The seeding image for human sex, for example, dates back to a biological era in which the ovum, undiscovered until the 19th century, was unknown. In the absence of the ovum, moralists, philosophers and scientists -- all men -- concluded that each sperm was a homunculus, or "little man," implanted in the soil of woman, who played an entirely passive role in reproduction. We now know better.

Similarly, it's not immediately evident that we reap what we sow in other respects. Over the past year, for example, the top 20% of U.S. earners got half of all money income and the bottom 20% got just a little past 3%. Moreover, the richest got richer, while the poorest got poorer.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told an audience of reporters in which I found myself this week that his daughters had gone to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Yet he also spoke of the poor of his city, for whom he announced a new initiative imported from Mexico, as people "who weren't dealt as good a hand of cards."

Whomever you deem the cosmic Card-dealer to be -- and I vote for humanity collectively -- it's evident that all we are and have springs largely from happenstance. We neither sow nor reap, to turn biblical again, we are like the lilies of the field.

I cannot be proud to be an American as I did not choose to be born in New York City. Any more than I chose to have parents with the means and the aspirations to see me attend university.

Nor did I choose to have linguistic abilities, nor to have the opportunity to develop them as a child, nor any number of particulars that started me off on an immeasurably higher socioeconomic plane than a child born from parents who lived in Harlem rather than Sutton Place.

I reap what has been sowed for me to reap. Gratefully. I do not deserve my good fortune. Noblesse oblige. Whatever I have suffered is, in the grand scheme of things, no more than life's hangnail.

All Hail St. Karol Wojtyla, Patron Saint of Priestly Pedophiles!

Jorge Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, has sold out. For the 30 (million?) pieces of silver from tourism and holy trinkets that the Vatican is surely to reap, he has put on a spectacle sainting two popes in an unscrupulous and totally unnecessary way.

The Roncalli-Wojtyla compromise—meaning the balancing of the canonization as saints of John XXIII, the "good pope" beloved by many reform-minded people, with John Paul II, every conservative Catholic's favorite ecclesiastical fascist—has been in the works for some time. It's one of those deals favored by politicians, union leaders and the Mafia: a little bit for everyone, not enough for any one constituency and, most importantly, no power base gets rolled.

It's the sort of thing I would have expected from his predecessor, Pope Nazinger, the bemoaner at Auschwitz of how the poor Germans suffered (see here).

To be fair, Guiseppe Roncalli, aka John XXIII, could be called a good man. During the Holocaust, while he was a Vatican diplomat in Turkey, he personally forged hundreds of baptismal certificates to put under the protection of the pope a boatload of children being shipped to certain death by the Nazis. Years later, at the outset of the Second Vatican Council, he gathered the periti, or experts, in his office (one of them was Nazinger) giving them the warning: "the Church is not a museum."

Roncalli was an astute man of faith. He wanted to a faith that was alive. His view meshed with that of historian of religion Yaroslav Pelikan: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." Still, was he a saint?

No such doubt arises with the Polish pope, Karol Wojtyla, who was from the outset the false John Paul. The original one, John Paul I, died in still suspicious circumstances at the onset of a money laundering scandal affecting the Vatican Bank. He had adopted the papal name John Paul as a way of signalling that he would steer a middle course between the openness of John XXIII and the retrenchment of successor Paul VI. Instead, JP1 died, and Wojtyla was elected, after which he effectively closed every window Vatican II had opened.

Back came the enormous rugs under which to sweep the corruption of the clergy. Wojtyla was especially protective of one Marcial Maciel, founder of a religious order called the Legionnaires of Christ (tip: mistrust religious groups with military or monarchical names). Maciel was found to have operated what was essentially a seminarian man-on-boy rape mill.

As John Paul II's press secretary, an Opus Dei operative in the Vatican, put it, Wojtyla could not imagine such a thing because of "the purity of his thought." Right! A man who lived through World War II, precisely where some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust took place, could not imagine pedophile or sex-abusing priests.

I know for a fact altar boys knew about "funny priests" for at least the past half century. Also that particular U.S. bishops knew such a thing was going. One of them thought he was making a joke when he remarked behind closed doors and in my presence, "We have to make sure seminary rectors don't screw the Hispanic seminarians." That double meaning was intended was shown by his own laughter and that of his peers.

You're going to tell me the pope at that time did not know? I have nice bridge for you in Brooklyn at a bargain price.

The Vatican may not care about raped altar boys and the Roman Curia may not give a damn about Pope Francis' the blessed poor, but they sure care about tourism to Rome. So I learned when I received the one direct contact from the Vatican while I worked for the U.S. conference of bishops quite some time ago.

They sent an officious little man to see if I could help organize a "pilgrimage." Johann Tetzel, the infamous seller of indulgences who enraged Martin Luther, put the religious marketing in slightly different but no less mercenary terms: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

They're still selling indulgences of a sort in Rome. This week it has been the massive orgy of tourism and saint swag selling brought on by the canonization, or sainting, of Roncalli and Wojtyla.

This is not good Christian leadership. It's a bad imitation of Elmer Gantry: put on a show for the fools who will always go for one (and sell them travel and baubles). All "for God." Because God needs your pilgrimages and your shopping for saint cards.


Referencing the Vatican's own purported beliefs, sainthood merely means that a dead person is living in the presence of God. Add to that the theology in the Nicene Creed and you get "the communion of saints," in which those in heaven are believed (at least by Catholics) to be able to hear from and intercede for the living here on Earth.

This is what the whole Catholic saint shtick is all about. Johnny is incurably sick, they pray to St. Holyguy. So St. H goes to God, "Hey, Creator of All, Johnny's sick, how about you slip him one of those superduper aspirins of yours and make him better?" Presto! A miracle through the influence of St. H!

The notion of revering certain Christians goes back to when they were killed for their beliefs during the Roman Empire. To be a martyr meant to be a witness to the faith to heroic proportions. Vatican press releases to the contrary, neither Roncalli nor Wojtyla quite qualify. OK, but not all saints on the church calendar were martyrs.

Indeed, my favorite children's hymn in the Episcopal Hymn Book begins "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God":

I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.

Then it goes on to say that "one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green" and later "one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast." But my favorite part comes in the third verse:

You can meet them in school,
on the street, in the store,
in church, by the sea, in the house next door;
they are saints of God, whether rich or poor,
and I mean to be one too.

And here's where Saints Roncalli and Woytyla make absolutely no sense as models. Who in this day and age can realistically draw for personal moral example from the deeds and circumstances of the chief gerontocrat of a worldwide religion of about 1 billion lemmings?

I mean, I'm not planning to issue an encyclical letter any time soon. Or ride around a 500-year-old piazza in a converted golf cart. O wear white dresses and a white yarmulke. What does a pope have to do with the problems and moral dilemmas facing thee and me?

Here's where Francis the rock-star pope has tripped up in his marketing of a faith we all now know he completely lacks. Pity. He had me fooled.

Revolution (1963-74)

The countries of the New World prospered after World War II because they were never attacked on the continent. In this entry* we shall see how the United States began to feel a grassroots new cultural, social and political current brought about by the first postwar generation.

The decade that in the United States is still remembered as simply "the Sixties" began with three symbolic starting points.

In late August 1963, an African-American civil rights march on Washington was led by Martin Luther King, Jr. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. Then in February 1964, on the very widely watched Ed Sullivan Show, a group of long-haired English musicians called The Beatles played their electric guitars amid deafening cheering from teenage girls.

John F. Kennedy, for a time regarded as almost an informal saint and martyr (until his rampant sexuality became known), was said to have advocated reforms the "liberal" wing (in the U.S. and non-European sense) of the Democratic Party sought to carry. To "honor Kennedy's memory," Lyndon Johnson, a Southern political genius, succeeded getting a broad range of socio-economic legislation approved.

The first triumph was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which remains the basis of all protections and guarantees of equal rights for minorities and women. As for women, conservative Southerners proposed adding "sex" as a joke, to the prohibition of discrimination by "color, creed or national origin"; the liberals took them at their word, knowing that their adversaries had made a tactical error. (U.S. liberals are not the European liberals who advocate a hands-free market and laissez faire policies, but reformers favoring substantial government intervention in the economy, albeit less so than the European left.)

Johnson also launched, the following year, when he won by a really overwhelming margin never seen again, the "War on Poverty. In less than 10 years, poverty was reduced from 19% to 11% (today it is 15%, to be explained later). LBJ also bequeathed a very broad socio-economic legislation, such as federal health insurance for the elderly and the poor, assistance for families and children in need, expansion of access to food stamps, subsidies for housing, etc.

The disadvantage for liberals, one from which the Democratic Party does has yet to recover, is that the South became Republican when the Democrats ended racial segregation. Nixon in 1968 called it "the southern strategy" to reverse the geographical alignment of the two parties.**

In economic terms, it was a moment of enormous prosperity. The average salary doubled between 1945 and 1965. African-Americans entered  supervisory and professional occupations. By the end of 1970 women would join them (and soon surpass them).

There was also new music, a Dionysian sound of rock-and-roll that broke with the apolitical restraint of earlier popular music. To rock was added the rediscovery of British and Irish folk music, and its traditional forms of popular protest. Popular music stopped being so much about romantic love as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others, sang about rights, peace, humanity and, as Che Guevara put it, a deeper love of people.

The important topic of the era was freedom. Why more freedom? Looking back half a century later, I would say that prosperity made society more expansive and tolerant. There were protests (and I say this in the broad sense of the Latin protestare, which is "witnessing") of love, racial integration and peace. It all came from the conviction that the time had come to share prosperity, well-being, and happiness (often expressed as sexuality) as widely as possible. It began with the March in Washington singing "We Shall Overcome" reached its climax in Woodstock with the song of Country Joe & the Fish against the Vietnam war.

I left the United States in 1961 and returned in 1970. I left a country that thought itself essentially white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon and orderly, whose average people showed little interest in the rest of the world. I returned to a country where people drank French wine with their meals, had been in Europe or planned to do so even if it was backpacking, had experimented with some recreational drug, was open (in theory at least) to sexual variety and racial integration, and talked about breaking with conventions an awful lot.

That was my generation, embedded in "the movement," which was a fuzzy mixture that had a hint of hippie, a bit of leftism and stylized anarchism, a general tendency to accept radical changes towards a new country where the important thing was to love a great love for all.

We launched a cultural revolution that expanded job opportunity for African-Americans and other minority groups, such as Hispanics, and the oppressed majority, women. It was done through changes in the way of thinking, dressing and talking; and without violence.

This was especially evident in what is now called the "second wave" of feminism, which began with the publication in 1970 of an anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, the emergence of Ms. magazine and the song I Am Woman in 1973. Two words suddenly disappeared from everyday vocabulary: "boy" for black workers vanished overnight after the 1964, 1967 and 1968 riots, as did "girl," somewhat more slowly and reluctantly, for a woman.

Finally, there is the question of attire and the length of men's hair. The consensus of all with whom I have talked about it is that until about 1968 the Beatles haircut was only for the musicians and a few adventurers who were the real hippies of 1967. However, by 1971 or 1972, even adults, like presidential candidate George McGovern, had at least sideburns and no male under the age of 30 had hair that did not reach at least the bottom of the neck.

Adults, corporations and the de facto powers, that is, all those who felt threatened, opposed this amorphous movement.

Unlike the worker-student coalitions in Europe, working-class whites resisted the changes, resentful of new competition in employment and housing from blacks, whom some of these workers still hated; for the white worker, racial prejudice was like coming home and kicking the dog in lieu of kicking the unassailable boss. There was a long history on the part of the wealthy of skillfully using ethnic hatreds to divide workers. Yet it takes taking a good look at those who opposed the youthful rebellion carefully to understand.

Americans of the generation that had gone to fight in World War II and Korea, were shocked that their children chanted against going to Vietnam "Hell no, we will not go!" and even burned the stars and stripes. Those who married in church, had children and formed families now saw their offspring join in free love, which was possible first thanks to contraceptives then abortion, legalized in 1970. Older women felt mocked for being mere housewives without paid jobs or preofessions.

That generation felt ridiculed for being "squares" and "useful idiots" of the "system." As a political force, all these people who longed for the United States from "before" ( the black and white of the 1950s) became invisible after Barry Goldwater's wipeout defeat in the 1964 presidential election, and were briefly appeased by Nixon's Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who coined the phrase "the silent majority," a mass that resurfaced politically for revenge in 1980.

Notably, just as this era began with the unfinished presidency of Kennedy, it ended with another truncated presidency, Nixon's, which ended with his resignation in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal.

---

* This is the third in a short series of posts that attempt to sketch contemporary U.S.cultural and social history. I intend to present how the time and place felt from a personal perspective, and only in the background, the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers. All this comes from an exchange with a French correspondent that I thought might be of interest to readers of my Spanish blog.

** The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1792, while the Republican Party was launched in 1854 by Abraham Lincoln. U.S. political parties do not represent distinct ideologies, but interests and opinions, rather than theories. Since the Civil War, Republicans represented industrial anti-slave interests (it's cheaper to pay a wage and let the worker figure out how to provide for himself with it, than to assume life-long responsibility for a slave's housing, food and clothing, however meager). The South became staunchly Democrat because it was unpalatable for whites to vote for "Lincoln's party" (former slaves in the South were effectively denied the vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which conservatives are currently trying to undo). In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a personalist leader much like Argentina's Juan Perón or Brazil's Getulio Vargas, forged a unique coalition that comprised unions, white ethnics (meaning not of English origin) Blacks, liberals (including the tiny left and intellectuals) and Southerners for the historical reasons cited. This is how FDR became the only president elected four times (which led to a constitutional amendment, proposed by Republicans, to limit the presidency to two terms). That coalition was mortally wounded in the 1960s, as became clear in the 1970s and 1980s.

Contra Feministe

One of my newer favorite feminist feeds, Feministe, has been doing a series of numbers on traditional religious positions in an uninformed way that I, as an agnostic and former believer, find profoundly embarrassing.

Yes, Feministe folks, I agree that abortion should remain legal in the United States, the claim of the virgin birth of Jesus raises some pretty thorny questions and biblical dicta on homosexuality are ... um ... not au courant, to say the least. But that does not necessarily mean that

• ipso facto, it is illogical and beyond comprehension that someone would be "politically opposed to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health services," as KaeLyn wrote;
• the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth hinges on a mistranslation of Isaiah, as Sam wrote; or
• the biblical injunctions against homosexual sex are inherently outdated, as Sam, somewhat more trenchantly than above, wrote.

Kaelyn's straw-man and ad hominem approach to abortion, a topic I hate to discuss (because all reasonable discussion has long ago become impossible), Sam's rabbinicocentric interpretation of Christian doctrine and her historical optimism have common limitations.

Central to all three is the their limited point of view.

Because she is "pro-choice" -- yet another abortion debate weasel word, but don't get me going -- is her position, Kaelyn seemingly cannot imagine that people whose religion makes abortion a very grave immorality would hold that the ideal law would ban such a thing.

Yet one need not revisit the hoariest theocracies to find explicit links between religious and political views -- John of Leiden, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi -- among folks with whom I imagine Kaelyn might find some common ground.

Similarly, Sam made a somewhat more forgivable mistake in hanging her intellectual hat regarding the virgin birth on a particular set of passages in Isaiah, which she deems "mistranslated." The birth narratives in the gospels owe as much to pagan sources as to Judaic; it was simply inconceivable to the ancient mind that a great personage would not have been born amid all manner of miraculous portents.

In her more recent and even more measured posts, Sam's even more forgivable limitation is that she does not seem to be able to see beyond her own time. Weighing whether to chuck biblical rejection of homosexuality or modernity it is clear that her dogma is the modern age. I have never been certain that being modern was always best and a solid reading of history supports that view.

In sum, my criticism is not about the opinions but rather the way they are delivered, which tend to make contrary opinion look more reasonable.

The Hem of His Garment

Just as walking the streets of Washington besieged by beggars I occasionally wonder if this is what it might feel like to be God (imagine 6 billion supplicants), reading the post-election punditry makes me think of President-elect Obama in the role of Jesus followed by a mob seeking miracles every which way.

And they besought him that they might touch but the hem of his garment. And as many as touched, were made whole. (Matthew 14:36).

The pundits and politicians from the right are insisting that this is a "center-right" country and that the economy, meaning the plutocrats, not the uninsured, unemployed, or those simply struggling, comes first. Not to be outdone, the liberal-left insists that the 8-million-vote margin is a mandate and that President-elect Obama should beware of the Clintonite wolves in sheep's clothing who gave us NAFTA, no health care reform and the Gringrich version of welfare.

So, the magic of the Obama victory is already fading as the urgency of the problems ahead make themselves felt. We are now all supplicants with a yen to be healed.

Heal us, Obama, from the calamity of being the only leading industrial nation that fails to aid individuals in need -- those who are sick, unemployed, disabled, young, or in old age; give us a womb-to-tomb system of social insurance.

Heal us, Obama, from the scourge of war that has blighted nearly every American generation; make us a nation of peace.

Heal us, Obama, from the arrogance of thinking that we are "Number One" by right rather than happenstance; instill in us the humility necessary to accept the global responsibilities bestowed on us by fate.

Heal us, Obama, from our smugness and false pride, from thinking that our ethnicity or sex or particular manners or beliefs are the best; help us become tolerant of one another and of all others.

Amen

Fools on the Hill No More

Ever since Newton Leroy Gingrich brought his schoolyard bully tactics to Congress in 1994, I had been calling the folks there the "fools on the Hill," after the eponymous Beatles song. I was building up steam to do some bipartisan clobbering in and post a scathing attack on the Democratic majority when, in the last few weeks before heading off to their recess this month, they finally got some important things passed.

Day after day,
alone on the hill
The man with the foolish grin
is keeping perfectly still

Unlike the "Nowhere Man" -- about whom the Beatles asked "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" -- the fool of the song never gives an answer and no one really likes him. A bit like Congress throughout the decades.

Part of it is that it's pretty hard to follow the antics of 535 mostly older guys who know their way around the arcane rules that allow them to do pretty much whatever they want. They can't do that? Sure they can, they make the laws; if they don't like 'em, they can tweak 'em to their liking.

This year the Democratic majority came in like gangbusters with their 100 hours of introduced placeholder bills which, in the tradition invented by Gingrich's fellow bullies, consisted mainly of catchy titles and bill numbers -- for the most part, no legislative language.

It's a trick they learned from the Republicans. You run a blank sheet through all the hoops with your majority until the "bill" gets to the floor; then you dump 400 pages at the clerk's office the night before and let the opposition burn the midnight oil, while you strategize on how to block their amendments anyway.

That's how Congress ran under the GOP majority and that's part of the source of the much storied and truly distasteful acrimony -- I always felt I left Capitol Hill with bile all over my clothes. It wasn't that the politicians were being childish, it was that the GOP ran circles around the constitutional process in order to govern as a one-party state, as every party that has come to power through a coup (remember the 2000 election?) has always done.

The Democrats have changed the feel of things. They are holding themselves to at least the letter of fiscal discipline under "PayGo" rules that require that every new expenditure be offset with either a cut or new taxes. No more Reagan and Bush deficits of hundreds of billions; you want a balanced budget, vote Democratic.

They are also being pretty reasonable about debate. When the Repubs held the majority, every hearing was stacked with witnesses who were each more right-wing than the next, and you didn't see anyone goose-step into a hearing chamber just because it's not the American style. The Democrats are smarter; sure they hold the majority, so most of the witnesses are their hand-picked folks, but they allow the minority a voice or two.

It's a debate that the Democratic majority will win push come to shove, but it's one in which liberals aren't afraid to let the conservatives shoot themselves in the foot with the facts -- because face it, it's not just that I don't like conservatives, it's that on the facts they're wrong, wrong, wrong. And they know it (which is why they didn't like debate when they held the reins).

The feel of Congress has been better. The Democrats get the coveted "can play well with others" in their report card.

But what about substance? Bush has essentially stonewalled them on the attorneys and Gonzales (see a cute column about his name here); the Democrats have gotten nowhere with Iraq.

Of course, some supporters' want presidential impeachment proceedings on reasonable grounds. After all, which presidential lie has had more dire consequences: "I did not have sex with that woman" or "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant"? Yet the wisdom of the Democrats' course of inaction becomes obvious about as fast as you can say "President Cheney."

When I was beginning to get steamed even the federal minimum wage hike -- the first in 10 years, count 'em -- was stalled.

What were these Democrats elected for, if not to show some spine?

I am mildly pleased to report now that they finally got the minimum wage through -- veto threat notwithstanding -- and the raise became effective last month. Indeed, the recurrent and fatuous warnings of the restaurant industry didn't pan out: employment in their very own food and beverage sector increased after the wage hike went into effect.

There's more, just this month they renewed the food stamp program -- OK, so they gave it a silly new name, the "Secure Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program," and paid pork to some big agribusiness interests to get it through.

Just this past week they fought off Bush and the insurance lobby and expanded the state-run Children’s Health Insurance Program, which will provide free health care to an added 4.1 million poor children -- albeit using an extremely tortuous legislative method in the Senate.

This is clearly B+ work. Anyone who can't abide the moral ambiguities should not, as Bismarck recommended, watch sausages or legislation being made.

Now if they can fix some of the spending bills in September and override Bush vetoes (he wants to veto CHIP expansion, for example), I'd say these folks are no longer merely fools. They might just earn an A.

"Tea Party" folks, I hear ya ...

Somewhere between 1959 and 1979, the world changed for people who kept their noses clean and did what they were told. They were going to be Daddies and Mommies, make a living in some way similar to old Dad, buy a house, have two kids, a dog, a white picket fence and two cars, hopefully send the kids to college. Then came 1968.

The year that Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, that the Tet Offensive proved the Vietnam war was unwinnable, that segregationist and Goldwater-sympathizing George Wallace lost and election alongside "Clean Gene" McCarthy's children's crusade, that Czechoslovakia showed Soviet Europe was faltering, that ... so on and so forth.

An emblematic year of much more than the year, containing developments that came before it and after. Those who lived through it were never the same, just as those who lived through 1945 weren't and perhaps those who lived through 2001 may have been irrevocably changed.

For many of us it was the gateway to experimentation with hallucinogens and sex and philosophies that the Jesuits didn't teach.

For others it was a hugely confusing and disappointing time. This latter group, which includes some of the nicest people I have ever met, found that the factory and the church closed and Mom ran off to find herself and with other men have children named Granola and Sunshine.

They got angry.

Nothing they had learned fit. Dating wasn't as expected. Marriage wasn't even common for a while, until eventually it became the place for a minority of children to be born. Forget about the white picket fence. And God sure didn't rain thunderbolts on the bad people!

Not even Reagan and the two Bushes could set things aright. So that's why they think they're the "Tea Party."

I don't blame them. I just wish they could accept my sincere sense of pained understanding. Nothing turned out quite the same for anyone else, either. Neither Carter, nor Clinton nor Obama could take us back to Camelot. I hear ya.

Republicans Really Are Different

Before I get angry about poverty -- the new rate comes out today -- I want to make quick point about the difference between Republicans and Democrats inspired by the recent departures from government.

Yes, the rats like Karl Rove are leaving the sinking ship. Yes, aside from wanting to hire only Bushies, Alberto Gonzales had trouble recruiting top quality lawyers for the Justice Department.

There's an easy explanation. Republicans, who are now overwhelmingly and monochromatically mostly neo-conservatives of some sort, actually despise government and work to wreck it.

That's been essentially the deficit tactic since Reagan: create enough fiscal imbalance that the thing breaks down and all the programs are cut because "defense" (shouldn't the Pentagon be renamed "offense" or back to Department of War, at least?) is sacrosanct.

So, what honest "government is best which governs least" Republican is going to choose voluntarily to work for the gummint? Here are a few:

-- opportunists who need a job and are willing to call themselves Republican if that's what it takes;

-- crazy ideologues who convince themselves that if the gummint could persuade kids to say no to sex and drugs (bureaucrats, unlike parents, teachers and ministers are the best role models, right?) or some such project of evangelical social engineering, then ... it would be morning in America again (in the rose-tinted Elvis Presley history of the GOP);

In general, these are people who are dishonest with themselves and therefore dishonest with everyone else. You hate government? Stay out of it and let competent, interested people do the job.

This explains easily why the Repubs having, hands down, all the majority they needed in both houses last November and December, merely packed their bags after the election and did nothing.

Contrast that with Bill Clinton signing regulations until the last second before Dubya put his hand on the Bahble on that fateful January 20, 2001. Not the congressional Repubs of late 2006 ... thank Zeus!

This should explain why, for the next year or so, government will be unable to do much of anything. At this point, there's so much wreckage -- from Iraq, to a looming deficit, to the mess of post-Katrina, to (your issue here) -- that there's no more room for more.

We're not looking at the pristine surpluses Clinton left or the booming economy or peace breaking out in Ireland and even Bosnia. We're looking at sheer disaster in the face.

Hell, if there's no wrecking allowed, the Repubs just don't find governing fun.

On Misanthropy and Friendship

One learns who is a friend in times of trial, but also who is not. Few people are friends and even friends have their own agendas. This is not about heroes and villains, but about how friendship, and the gratitude one feels toward friends, manages to dull the sharp truth that the more one knows humanity, more one loves one's (imaginary) dog.

My paternal grandfather was very fond of the latter saying, which I recall him voicing one morning while walking his dog. He attributed it to a Latin aphorist I have failed to come across. At the time my grandfather said it, I was a child in the quest for an answer to the question, "Are people mostly good or mostly bad?"

My mother pushed aside my grandfather's cynicism, deeming it perhaps a little too early for me to be soured on life and people. Thus steeped in an invincible optimism regarding the ever reformable character of all human beings, I have crashed repeatedly against the shoals of hearts so stone cold as to be chilling. This is so with those individuals who, deep down, are simply too painfully twisted to be able to cry out their own humanity.

To be sure, I myself carry within me my share of glacial cruelty and sorrow turned into pathology -- woe betide those who become exposed to the dark side of my moon, the lunatic I manage to talk into behaving in public ... most of the time. To an extent all of us are a bit like this: if people only knew who we really were!

Thankfully, people don't. Most people don't care enough to find out who we really are; they are busy enough with their own demons.

You learn this when a mishap strikes. You lose your job. Your marriage breaks up. Someone very dear to you dies.

People say trite meaningless things. They avoid you. (Or worse, in breakups some space cadets will call you for your former partner's new number.) You get the merest cold and it feels as if it is cancerous AIDS, because you are without a friend.

Your mailbox is empty of anything but bills and promotions. People want your money. Eventually some people want your sex. Or your humor. Or some quality that's on their shopping list.

Carry these minor toothaches to a grander scale and you have famines and genocides and the general unrelenting injustice of nearly everything in life -- especially that which makes you privileged enough to be within reach of air-conditioning, a computer, running water and enough money to inspire the funniest of Nigerian e-mail scams.

Let's face it: we humans stink. This is why I feel -- at least in the past few days -- as if I have come across a dandelion sticking out of a crack in a sidewalk.

No surprise that no one will ever love the netherman I hide in the innards of my soul. Yet what a delight that some people mildly like the man who clothes his mind in genteel language!

It happened like this. For some time now, I have been sending e-mail notifications of posts to my (mostly low-tech) acquaintances. The first paragraph and the permanent link. Then the blog got so heated that it vexed some people. The only solution was to end the notifications or turn to the opt-in method.

Predictably, I have not heard from the miscreants. Only from some who "live for your posts" or ask to "keep 'em coming."

My friends. The few and hardy ones who asked to be notified by e-mail whenever I post. One I have known since childhood, several I have only cybermet, most are somewhere in between.

For decades now, those who know me know, my guide on friendship has been Aristotle. The summer of my junior year in college I decided to go to take a few philosophy courses at a university near my father's house. I had not taken philosophy for several years, when I had thought I would become a priest.

Nixon was on the verge of impeachment. My girlfriend at the time took a trip to France. I think she was trying to decide how to break up. And none of this mattered in the long and meandering bus ride I had chosen to take, in the spirit of simplicity, from home to the campus and back every day.

Instead, I heard in the voice of Alexander the Great's childhood tutor (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 8, ch. 3) the following words:

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing. And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant; for the good are pleasant both without qualification and to each other, since to each his own activities and others like them are pleasurable, and the actions of the good are the same or like. And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have. For all friendship is for the sake of good or of pleasure-good or pleasure either in the abstract or such as will be enjoyed by him who has the friendly feeling-and is based on a certain resemblance; and to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men.

Not to worry. I am old enough now to know not to test friendships. In my heart of hearts, however, this is what I hoped for with that girlfriend who went to France.

These days, any semblance of that, over coffee or sherry, in a cafe, a pub or in someone's home, even a shadow of it in an e-mail, a phone call, a letter, is icing on the cake.

Ethics and Values

Someone who may cease regarding me as a friend was offended by my admittedly imprudent comment concerning what I observed was this person's lack of ethics, which I expressed -- with some imprecision -- as "values." Because I think this is a crucial issue of our times, I'd like to review this, as a self-clarification and an exposition that I think is missing in our society.

First, I need to distinguish between value, values and ethics.

A value is the result of a comparison: X is more worthy than Y. There are economic values (thing X is worth Y amount of work, represented as money), aesthetic values (the looks of blonde X are more valuable than those of brunette Y), behavioral values (I like doing action X more than action Y) and so forth. These are all largely subjective, arbitrary, malleable and impermanent. Values lend themselves to collective persuasion, either through coercion or through seduction of various levels and degrees, as is the case in dictatorships, advertising and fashions enforced by peer pressure.

Everyone has values. They represent some of the limits we place on behavior due to social convention, ranging from manners to law.

Ethics, on the other hand, is the branch of philosophy that studies human behavior, its concepts, its norms and its application. At one level, we explain what ethics are. At another we propose what is virtuous and what is not. At yet another level we attempt to apply or derive principles from questions about certain human behavior: Is abortion moral? What are human rights and how do we determine them?

In our society, the majority is not ethical. Many people derive ethical values from their inherited religion. Some people merely observe group behavior and christen what is conventional as ethical. Most people, in the end, rely on their own will to decide what is ethical.

It is this latter point that concerns me today. We have gotten to the point that most folks think that they must canonize whatever they do as moral and good, regardless of its consistency with any other kind of thinking. In this, my friend is like the majority. This is not ethical thinking, this is self-indulgence disguised as "ethical" by way of setting oneself up as one's own judge and jury -- without an external or internal code to which the court must hew.

In the last half century, it seems, we went from inherited, external and absolute systems of ethics to their displacement by allegedly higher internal, situational ethics that in the end became one long paean to the self -- anything goes if I feel good about it and since I should be good to myself and my precious self-esteem, it turns out that anything can be made to feel good.

No one is ever guilty of anything; even politicians who claim "family values" (but divorce often or are caught in flagrante delicto) will go so far as to assert responsibility but avoid having to give the required response, the payment due for the wrong done.

I find this problematic, yet when I assert it I get in trouble. I am called self-righteous, priggish.

People don't like to be asked to consider what ethical standards there, much less to weigh submitting to them, whether it feels good or not, whether it is legal, fashionable or acceptable.

Let's examine an example that is close enough without being uncomfortable for too many people today.

There was a time in living memory in which certain prejudices were acceptable, some forms of it were enforced by law, in some circles some form of prejudice was acceptable. Jews called African Americans Schwartze with disdain; the Irish called Italian Americans "wops"; people knew of lifelong bachelors who never married or lived with roommates of the same sex and whispered about them; a woman's place was in the kitchen; and, of course, no white Southerner wanted his daughter to marry a Negro or a Catholic.

All these ideas could be expressed more or less openly -- although the politest people did it behind the backs of the victims. Now they can't. Conservatives call the change in norms "political correctness"; they would like to go back, to "conserve" the ethos of prejudice.

In fact, prejudice hasn't disappeared. Jews whisper Schwartze and it has been reported that a black actor on the set of television's Grey's Anatomy called another actor, who is apparently homosexual, a "faggot."

Now, to ethics. Is prejudice wrong? Why? Was it always wrong or is it merely wrong since 1964? Are most of us guilty of this wrongdoing (in thought, word or deed)? Do we deceive ourselves by thinking that we are not, only to surprise ourselves when we blurt out something not quite as ridiculous as "macaca," but close? What ought we to do to assume reponsibility and give the required response for our actions?

Or is it that if I feel it's OK, I'm entitled to act, speak and think in a prejudiced way?

True confession here: I am prejudiced. One of my prejudices is against British people. I deplore so much of what the British Empire did and find the British so obnoxiously arrogant, that I rarely cut Brits much slack even though I admire many things that are of British origin. It's just the people I can't stand.

Granted, I tell myself that a large part of British arrogance, imperialism and general obnoxiousness is compensation for living in a small island with terrible weather, for being stripped of humanity in childhood by parents who care for pets more than for their children (go to England and you'll see plenty of fat pets and plenty of underfed children). It's a sense of inferiority disguised as somethings else.

Pity the poor Brits. They are racists because deep down they hate themselves. They are obnoxious because they are shy. They conquered everywhere because who the hell wants to stay somewhere you get soaked every day of the year. They started the slave trade from Africa because they knew their own workers were whiny shirkers whose skin was too sallow and bodies too infirm from their benighted climate to be any good at sturdy physical work.

So it's not really fair of me to prejudge every Brit I come across. Not really kind not to look for explanations and excuse. I should think of them as I think of the Spaniards: valiant, stubbornly principled, religious to a fault, life loving. Or is that a prejudice, too?

How does one confront the ethical wrong of prejudice? How does one, having admitted (with a little fun) that one is wrong, take a different course?

It seems to me that merely passing a law (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and adopting a new fashion (political correctness) hasn't worked. Prejudice abounds. Racism abounds: witness the Bush Administration on Katrina.

Here is the core of ethics: a principle that makes us all uncomfortable because it describes ways in which all of us could improve. Whether we like it or not.

An ethical principle survives the excuse of upbringing, suffering, anything other than lack of awareness -- which ends when we've named and recognized our behavior in the damning principle.

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.

Why Neo-Conservatism Deserved to Fail

As the veritable Thermidorian Reaction that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan winds to a close with the failed presidency of George W. Bush, the failure of neo-conservatism seems to have been pre-ordained. Some analysts are concerned with why, wondering -- by way of the overdone "brand" cliché -- it is no longer "selling," but I'm more interested in why it never deserved to succeed, so we collectively learn the lesson once and for all.

Setting aside right-wing intramural disputes concerning the term, for my purposes "neoconservatism" is the generally new brand of U.S. conservatism that emerged from the first Reagan electoral campaign onward. Earlier U.S. conservatives had been elitist and roundly unpopular advocates of a puny misanthropy consisting of balanced budgets and neutrality in world wars, along with a dash of racialism.

Enter the Boomers of 1980-2008, a swarm of opportunists and demagogic ideologues who wrapped themselves in the flag, their professed love of (unborn) human "life," their avowed family values and their Christian faith.

Never mind that they became the most corrupt profiteers since the Grant Administration. Forget that they killed life for many infants and children who depended on public aid. Let's also overlook the many foreign and U.S. people killed in unprovoked military aggression from Grenada to Iraq. Nor shall we mention that their faithless, divorced Ronald Reagan papered over their cynicism about values and that his poll-reading henchmen manipulated religious opponents of abortion with empty promises. We shall turn eyes otherwise concerning the none-too-devout myriad sexual exploits of folks from Newton Leroy Gingrich to Larry Craig.

These inherent hypocrisies are only part of why neoconservatism richly deserves its grave. Consider the following qualities of neoconservatism:

1. Anti-democratic: propounds a hierarchically ordered society, along the sex and ethnic lines that have traditionally divided American society (when "men were men" and "the colored weren't uppity"), with white males of northwest European origin at the top.
2. Socioeconomically Darwinist: embraces beggar-thy-neighbor policies of extreme individualism and privilege for the asset-owning few, deemed under Calvinist ideas to be divinely rewarded with riches for their efforts;
3. Authoritarian: touts notions of "natural law" and religious values, rather than unfettered inquiry, as bases for public policy (eg., stem cell policy);
   
4. Anti-American: emerged aided, abetted and allied to foreign fascistoid movements alien to the ethos of the American democratic experiment, such as the right-wing axis of The Washington Times and the Unification Church, the more secretive Franco-era Spanish Catholic Opus Dei movement (in which Justice Antonin Scalia participates), and the even less well-known Tradition, Family and Property international movement;
5. Aggressively lawless internationally: holds the United States unaccountable to U.S. ratified international law whenever convenient, such as in the peacetime mining of Nicaraguan ports, bombing of Iraq, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic (to name just a few) and also in a similar roster of abuses in international trade;
6. Anti-intellectual: in a bid to appear "populist" the elitist neocons have bound themselves in a straitjacket of doctrines that fly in the face of the best that modern, current study teaches and, as a result, have failed to deliver broad-based prosperity (admittedly not their goal) or even its semblance (a propaganda necessity).

In sum, for these and manifold other problems in the very nature of neoconservatism, once they are kicked out of power, please, please ... never let them back in!

I seek to honor the inexpressible

Everyone who has heard of my change of mind concerning God is waiting to see what church I will start attending. Yet accepting the idea of God is not, in all honesty, identical to induction into religion.

If I take a step toward religion, it will likely involve the Christian metaphors and stories with which I am familiar. But it might not involve a new baptism, a being "born again."

After all, God is a vastly incomprehensible being who propelled into existence, and conceivably sustains, a universe about which we know barely a smidgen.

If neutrinos can indeed travel faster than light, as recent scientific news seemed to propose, then perhaps Einstein is wrong and physicists, the philosophers of our day, face searing soul-searching about the fundamentals of their field. We scarcely know anything is the genuine scientific outlook.

The adherents and professionals of religion make a crass error when they think they've got God in their pockets, just as atheists who rely on science err in proposing that we know enough to put God in the dustbin of history.

God is someone so outside our experience, so profoundly unobservable that all we are ever likely to know about her* is an intuition of a light that shines through many, many veils.

It's not like even Christians know God through Jesus.

The Galilean woodworker of the gospels was not recognizably divine to all and sundry when he walked the Earth like you and me. People were surprised when he performed wonders that we think humans cannot do. And who knows what Jesus was thinking 2,000 years ago, much less what he might be thinking now, if he is thinking at all?

In a similar vein, Islam and Judaism are attempts at approximation. Mohammed's angel and Moses' burning bush are at best literary images of inexpressible and intuitive experiences in these men's psyches. Not false images necessarily, but not likely what an empirically minded modern would accept as factual.

Christians may think Christianity is better than either one, but do Christians know definitively? No, faith is not knowledge.

This is why I was struck several days ago by words attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite: "With a wise silence we do honor to the inexpressible."

---

* I do not contend that God has a sex, for reasons best discussed elsewhere. To offset the use of capitalized masculine pronouns for God for the past 20,000 years or so, I propose to use uncapitalized feminine ones for the next 20,000 years or so, just for balance.

Good Girl, Bad Girl

Would it surprise you that I once believed, even as recently as five years ago, that women were congenitally unselfish? The scales have come off: women are no more selfish than men, but no less. Yet even after the women's movement the "good girl" myth (with its underside, the lore about the "bad girl") seems to shape accepted perceptions.

This came home to me in discussing recent posts, in particular one in which the blogger, a young married woman, wrote eloquently and with humor about the hazards of multitasking as a wife and mother on a day she had a motorist court date. In the asides about her husband, she made me wonder just how inconsiderate we men are.

It took the comment of a woman to open my eyes: she said that women, in general, take on the role of complaining about motherhood and housework as a kind of badge of honor. If I understood her right, it's a bit like New Yorkers who proudly boast that "da city's got da worst subways in da world!"

Now I'm not saying that all this fits Julie or her blog post. The blog just triggered a set of thoughts and e-mails that led to the notion that women sometimes push the "poor me" envelope.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," says Queen Gertrude to Hamlet (Hamlet, III, ii, 239), much as my female correspondent commenting about the blog post. In the play, Gertrude's remark is offered as pride before the fall, as Hamlet has set a trap in describing a woman whose behavior he will unveil to have been just like the queen's.

I set no such similar trap for my correspondent, a woman as susceptible to poorme-ism as any other, but I wondered at yet another discovery: women are as competitive with one another as men, perhaps even more fiercely so.

Perhaps I am extremely naive, or lucky, or too self-critical, or something else, or all of the preceding, but it hasn't been my experience, or at least my observation, of women until very recently. I suppose this led me to believe in the Good Girl.

You know her. She does all her homework, her room is as neat as a pin, she feeds stray cats, she looks forward to make everyone happy. (Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless.")

When she grows up she joins the Junior League, has a dignified but not cutthroat career advancing good values and community welfare, and her three dark blond, green eyed children win genuine prizes at school for academics and athletics.

Then there's the Bad Girl. You don't know her, but you may have had sex with her.

She's raunchy from the moment she becomes an adolescent, maybe at 10. She loves chocolate and moderates her consumption only to keep her figure (and appeal for the guys). She's ditzy and unaccomplished, sometimes cruel and cliquish, occasionally becomes the queen bee among other Bad Girls.

When she grows up, she either hitches her fortune to a man who regales her with wealth or she trolls for one until she is too old to find one. That's if she has not gotten married with the high school football star when she got pregnant and spent the remainder of her days in low-rent suburbs bringing him beer when he comes home from selling used cars.

OK, I got a little carried away. But you guessed: neither quite exist. And, yes, I've long been aware of the Eve-Mary archetypes and that what I have written is merely a (cheap) Americanization.

Yet I thought I knew mostly Good Girls. Or women who aspired to and often enough succeeded at being a Good Girl. Or people who could not help but worry about others more than themselves and give their all unstintingly to whatever and whomever they trusted.

Then I learned, through bitter experience that, as Rex Harrison sang in My Fair Lady,

Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through,
she'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome,
and then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling you...

Or rather, less comically and much less in the Victorian mode, I experienced the rude awakening that even Good Girls were not as selfless as I thought.

In long-term relationships women often enough take on the role of victim, having arranged things as to preserve for themselves the privilege of being experts in their domains, to the exclusion of men, while reserving the right to go poach in the men's traditional preserves. Then watch out: to a degree you never expected, out come the competitive, self-preserving, bulldozing characteristics you never knew lay there, dormant.

In casual or shorter-term relationships, when a man tells a woman that he doesn't want to commit, it's normal for her to "forget" he said it. Then she'll complain that all she has given is unrequited.

In sum, women are selfish, at least as selfish as men.

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.

As of December 29

"As of Dec. 29, 2017, I will no longer be working for [publishing company] or [specialized economic publication]. If you wish to reach me with a personal message, please email me at [email]."

When you're setting up something like that up it's almost like writing your own obituary. If you're retiring and letting go of a company you headed for decades and a publication you wrote for longer, it might as well be.

On my last week, a think tank sent me a canned email in name of a wonk I knew -- how my inbox used to bulge with press releases and urgent messages from advocates! I had picked her brain about technical matters that I was writing about. She'd done well taking over the duties of a famed economist, I wrote her, and later in a high-level federal position. She replied thanking me and wished me well even though she probably did not really remember me.

As for me, not one professional who actually knew me remarked on my departure.

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men," said Charles DeGaulle, himself having laid claim to the title once or three times. Truman said it best about my city: "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog."

Frankly, my kind of journalism was never glamorous. No Kardashians. No sex. No violence. No rock and roll. The company continues, the publication goes on. My "battleship of a desk" as one editor put it -- emptied of my ephemera -- remains in use.

Me? I'm just an dispensable man, writing for my pleasure on my laptop, in the public library.

Why do we have to work, anyway?

The answer to a declining need for workers is, of course, not to work so much. Or, seen another way, who says work has to be punishing drudgery performed 40 hours a week for 40-plus years?

We in America are such Puritans that we are constantly in dread that someone somewhere is having fun. We live by the biblical curse: “By the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:19).

Europeans are no better. Sure, there's the French month-long vacation and Italy’s ferragosto (or, literally closed August), which have spread all over the Old World. The British worker seems to love striking and habitually appears at the workplace following his own unscheduled notion of a short workday, often intoxicated. This behavior actually upholds the very same Puritan work ethic—through transgression.

Effectively, the European welfare states (and American unemployment) have produced masses of people to whom life without work is one long stretch of daytime television watching while drunk or high, with the occasional sex break during commercials or the news. That’s no answer to work; it’s an inhumane wasting of the most precious non-renewable resource we have: life itself.

There has to be a better way. Indeed, there is. It’s called the society of leisure.

The idea has been around at least since British sociologist Kenneth Roberts’ original work The Society of Leisure, published in the 1970s. Sadly it's out of print and I was not able to find it anywhere on the Internet, although there are copious references.

However, I did find Roberts himself and a later work of his, Leisure in Contemporary Society. If you are as fond of social science theory as I am, you will recognize it as a positive and upside-down spin on Thorstein Veblen’s ideas.

“Say what,” you ask? Allow me to explain.

Restated for the era of the Internet and incipient robot-controlled machines, from which the 1970s were very far, the underlying premise is that a society that can produce enough food and consumer goods for all using diminishing inputs of human work—defined as toil for wages—will reach the point at which workers as we know them will, on the whole, become unnecessary.

All that will eventually be needed are a few specialists to check on the systems now and then; there’s no reason they could not be volunteers who simply love to check the running of systems. There will always be someone who does.

This might be something as imagined by Richard Brautigan in his poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace," which in part says

I like to think (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Next Roberts stipulates that all of us enjoy applying our innate talents in a way that provides structure to our lives. If we could wave a magic wand, we would all choose to do something productive with our brains, our hands, our eye-hand coordination, etc.

I should have been a lawyer and that gene was passed on to the son who became one. I could also have been a programmer and that gene was passed on to the son who became one.

The point is that we all enjoy some quantity and form of what is known as work today. What we don’t like are bosses, or generically, people who tell us to work at their convenience rather than ours. We don’t like the compulsion, mind-numbing tasks (except if we are obsessive-compulsive or temporarily upset), unhealthy work conditions or hours and so on and so forth.

Of course, right now no one is prepared for world without work. Unemployment or retirement are unmitigated human disasters. But what if things changed? What if we didn’t have to bear with work as we know it?

Next: Why society has failed to change.

News about jobs unveils America´s real religion

Every month at about this time, just a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils what it calls "The Employment Situation," we have a friendly office pool (we each bet 25 cents) on the unemployment rate and the net employment gain or loss figure. As a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I won a few of these bets when we were in what Paul Krugman calls the "oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period" of the recession, but I've been losing steadily as things get better.

I thought we'd hear 9.3 percent unemployment last Friday (March 4). It was 8.9 percent.

I didn't reveal any of this in my professional reporting (my job is to write "just the facts, ma'am"), but I did note how folks were cheering a 0.1 percentage point decline from 9.0 percent -- which most people don't know is not statistically significant.

A whoop also went up for the net 192,000 jobs added to the economy in February 2011 (I'd bet 50,000) -- even though one group calculated that even at that lofty rate the labor force won't get back to pre-recession levels until 2019 .

Never mind the details. The net job gain was announced with the words "job creation" in the press. These words go to the heart of this post.

If you believe the economic mythology of most major newspapers -- even the Wall Street Journal, which knows better, indulges in it -- new jobs are "created" every time this sort of things happens.

Way back when John F. Kennedy was a senator running for president, Sister Catherine Agnes had something to say about this -- and it still resonates with me today, even as an agnostic: the only being who makes something out of nothing (e.g., creates) is the one we humans call God, Allah, etc., whose existence I, of course, seriously question. Yet here are the major newspapers telling us that someone -- "employers" -- creates jobs, not in heaven, but right here in our own back yard.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints and angels! (Sister's curse.)

This lauded economic Creator is also called an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, an investor ... whatever. He (it's usually still a he) inhabits the pantheon of the real religion of the United States, which is not Christianity (sorry, Religious Right), but ... drum roll ... the worship of Money, Wealth, and all the Power and Sex it can get you.

Just a thought to ponder as you rush to encourage the Creator by spending your cash as fast as you get it to fuel the economy.

Why the pseudo-religious website Patheos should be really called Atheos

The Tldr (too long, didn't read): truth in advertising. Patheos (dubbed in its header as "hosting the conversation about faith") promotes itself as "the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality," when in reality it is all about promoting atheism and anti-religious bias.

Atheos uses three tools of intellectual dishonesty to accomplish this:

1. Postings attempt to present U.S. Protestant Evangelicals as mainstream Christianity instead of a minuscule set of U.S. sectoids made up of undereducated people who confuse memorizing Bible verses with knowledge and Christian faith. Yes, Evangelicals are a wet dream for people who like to wield straw-man arguments against Christianity; but they're not widely representative.
   
   
2. Atheos prefers its bloggers to be either fringe people who are marginal even in their own tiny denominations, non-denominational, Unitarian (not Christian) and occasionally rabbis (to whom Christianity is, understandably, apostasy). Their pieces, time and time again, reflect a bias in favor of anything that makes adherents of Christian religion, specifically a Bible-belt caricature of Christianity, look like lunatic haters.
   
   
3. The message is always that, if you strip the layers of (alleged or Evangelical) Christian belief, you come up empty. The truth always lies elsewhere. Some of the remembered fragments of Christianity from childhood may be comfort food for the soul — but never anything approximating truth.

You think I'm kidding. I'm not and I can show you this is what Atheos is really all about.

In fact, in an online discussion I challenged my good friend Peter Kirkwood, who thought I was being a little too harsh on the website, to come up with "an article in Atheos that has a positive faith-inspiring piece, that is not about how so-and-so (absurdly unknown evangelical pastoroid) hates gays, sex and secularism."

He came up with 7 examples. I put the links and my response to each one immediately after.

• What I Learned in Seminary: Doubt is Overrated. Here is a minister of a marginal Protestant church (the Church of Christ has about 2 million members) admitting he doesn't have any answers and his faith does not speak to the concerns of people. Not great advertising for his church, his ministry or his faith; nor inspiring.
  
  
• The Church Is Political, But How?. An evangelical admits that all [evangelical] "voter guides" are pro-Republican. Stop the presses! The evangelicals are a collection of miniscule churchlets (the biggest of which is the two or three Baptist groups, which are about 13 million) that have no common policy and have, by their own admission, a very narrow point of view. This is not Christianity, this is Evangelical World, an amusement park where some preachers get very rich selling "Bahbles."
  
  
• The Strange Task of Preaching: Isaiah 55:10-13. This  can be summarized as "God is dead." However, let's pretend otherwise and keep on praying anyway so the author, a professor of preaching, can keep his day job. You don't believe, say so; don't hide behind Charlie Brown's favorite verses.
  
  
• Rosenzweig and Weil Are Dead. At last, Diogenes, we have an honest man: a rabbi. Franz Rosenzweig and Simone Weil were two 20th century Jews who dabbled in Christianity. R became every Hillel club's the poster boy for why youthful modern Jews should not convert to Christianity; W became the poster girl who couldn't bring herself to convert for a number of neurotic reasons. (I happen to like both R and W and have read a fair share of their writings, but they are not exactly on anyone's road to Damascus.) Again, Atheos posts models of not becoming Christian.
  
  
• Wonder Woman and Pinchas: The Persistent Appeal of Zealotry Here another rabbi, a convert from Christianity, effectively equates faith with "zealotry." He whimsically, but ineffectively in my view, taps Wonder Woman (no doubt to appeal to hipsters), then copies Richard Dawkins' argument (see my post Going to the Atheist Church) about violence in the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament). Thank you, Atheos, for the propaganda from someone who left Christianity (a fact omitted on the site, of course).
  
  
• A Timeless Winning Trifecta for Every Age. I was willing to give this one a few points, but its Methodist author spends most of his time talking about being old. Eventually he wends his way to St. Paul and love, hope and faith, concluding they are worth it even for new generations (even though Boomers have it all wrong). What? Come again? Half a point for not saying anything overtly hostile to the faith; but Atheos gets subtle here: when it is a believer, make sure it is someone too distracted with himself to stay on topic.
  
  
• Christian: You Are Upset About the Wrong Things. In the final example of uplifting faith-inspiring propaganda from Atheos, we get a Baptist, but one who left ministry to make money, citing pseudo-sociology to remind us — stop the presses, again! — that Evangelicals care more about the evils of saying "shit" than 30,000 children dying. Cleverly, the author says "Christian," not "bigots who like to think the 'Bahble' makes them right."
  
  

Peter's examples did make me aware of one thing. Atheos is really an anti-evangelical site. Of course, Evangelicals' religious illiteracy (aside from their memorized Bible verses) make them very much like the kid who walks around high school unaware that someone has taped a sign that reads "kick me" on the back of his shirt.

They are supremely mockable pseudo-Christians, whose faith derives from an originally well-intentioned movement (see from my other blog the post Awakenings). Admittedly, so are almost all of us who believe in Jesus the Christ, hope for improving and try, often failing miserably, to love.

The subtlety and disingenuous approach of Atheos, however, demonstrates malicious and malevolent intent. They should change their name and let their atheist colors fly.

Papa Nazinger Comes to Town

Journalists who have never sat in a room full of boozed up bishops trading off-color humor about deans sodomizing seminarians have cast the pope’s arrival to Washington in terms of pseudo-ecclesiastical agendas, when in fact, it is subtly about something entirely different.

The liberal Washington Post and the conservative Washington Times played true to the script.

The Post has long fixated on ecclesiastical politics within the Catholic Church that none of its editors have ever mastered, the opening salvo in the coverage of the papal visit focused on whether the local archbishop is an “ally” of the pontiff.

In my opinion, Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, is more open to dialogue than the pope. But let’s face it: the Vatican does not make a habit of selecting Luthers as bishops.

Memo to Post editors: pretty much all bishops can be presumed to be papal allies. No story there.

The Times, whose ownership is tied to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has carefully avoided any overt reference to the denomination’s unusual theological hodgepodge of ideas, but staunchly sided with the Catholic right-wingers such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Not surprisingly, its curtain raiser, viewed the papal visit in terms of the institutional agenda of traditional-minded Catholics: please, Holy Father, save the Catholic schools!

Yet the history of Irish-American racial animosity towards African Americans and Hispanics even at the highest levels of the Catholic Church shows perfectly well that Catholic schools’ agony is the result of white flight to suburbs. When a traditional Catholic wants to save Catholic schools, the message is really: save the white schools.

Wuerl’s predecessor James Hickey, fought white suburban fellow Irish Catholics tooth and nail to keep subsidizing Catholic schools in the inner city, which in Washington, as in many other cities, essentially serve black non-Catholics. Such schools can claim successes such as Washington’s own former mayor Anthony Williams.

The real story of the papal visit is that it is nothing more than a quiet wink and nod to those who favor a certain mode of Catholicism.

When he was merely Joseph Ratzinger, theologian, the pope's view was that Christianity had lost relevancy in the Western world.

As pope he believes Christianity has all but vanished from the marketplace. He is right.

Keep in mind that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, unequivocally stated that the invasion of Iraq failed to meet the criteria of a “just war.” Recall also that for the last century vigorous Church teaching on social justice has repeatedly criticized capitalism as unjust.

The world, and in particular, predominantly Protestant but unchurched, capitalist United States, does as it pleases without more than a few pious words in church, which have no weight once outside the door.

Yet rather than change the way the message is conveyed so it might be heard -- as the Second Vatican Council recommended in the early 1960s -- Ratzinger, who served the council as a junior adviser, has long given up on what in Church parlance was once called “renewal.”

In serving as John Paul II’s theological hatchet man, Ratzinger opted to cut off all modernizing tendencies. He cut his student the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff at the knees and humiliated the Church’s foremost moral theologian, Bernard Häring, in petty proceedings entirely devoid of due process.

Now that he is pope, he is hunkering down in the catacombs in hopes of better times. He has patched up petty quarrels to his right flank, by re-opening up the use of Latin in church services, while remaining otherwise inflexible. His first encyclical letter was a rant against sex.

Significantly, he has kept the view of history that he likely learned in his Hitler Youth days. When he went to Auschwitz in 2006, he spoke of the “6 million Poles” and the “suffering” Germans and only finally, as an afterthought, oh yes, the Jews.

When the pope complains that Europe is the most secular continent on Earth, he is quietly bemoaning the demographic demise of whites in the cradle of the Caucasians.

Long ago, a prelate explained to me that Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical against birth control was designed to prevent “the suicide of the white race,” a thought I am certain was far from Papa Montini’s mind, but was and is not unthinkable in the hierarchy.

To whom will Papa Nazinger be addressing his message in the United States? To the white, conservative, most obedient Catholic “remnant.”

This is the other side of the coin. With 30 years of bishops appointed by John Paul II and the desertion of liberal or free thinking Catholics to the Episcopal Church and agnosticism, the U.S. Catholic Church offers a bride made in heaven for this pope.

American young women who yearn for the pre-Vatican II Church they never knew often go to church wearing mantilla, while young men who weigh whether to become priests speak boldly of the “ontological difference” that by right prevents the ordination of women.

Justice Scalia is a frequent attendee at events hosted by the ultrasecretive and ultraconservative group Opus Dei (Work of God) and forms with the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts, the visible peak of a phalanx of Catholics who have distinctive philosophical transformations in mind for the United States.

Scalia and Roberts belong to the growing school of “natural law” scholars, who define almost anything they dislike (think abortion and homosexuality, for starters) as against nature and therefore in principle unlawful.

Catholics make up 29 percent of Congress and are now about evenly split between Democrats who are heirs of the New Deal coalition and Republicans of the Scalia bent.

This is the pope’s base. This is the base that is willing to wage crusades against Muslims (note to militant Christian soldiers: the West lost the last crusades, consider using another term).

When Pope Benedict lands, he will be coming as the apostle to the most obedient of white Catholics. All others beware.