In one response to my last post, a friend wrote that my arguments against the “Da Vinci Code” work because I know more than the average person, but that surely some other equally informed person could demolish my points.
Whenever we enter the realm of religion it seems that way largely because religion, at the core, is not about facts.
Most religions begin with one or several charismatic figures, historical or mythological: Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. These figures utter delphic words about what life is, where we come from and to where we are going after death, and provide some cryptic guidelines for living.
Then come a class of imams, lamas, rabbis, priests or whatever else they may call themselves. These people -- traditionally male only -- wear certain special ceremonial or occupational clothes, perform or lead in certain ritual actions. The scholarly among them codify, interpret, canonize certain sayings of the religion's founder(s) along with words attributed to divinity and ultimately the code or interpretation or book -- the Bible, Talmud, Quran, Vedas -- becomes the object of veneration.
Moreover, the overwheling majority of people use religion for fairly simple things: propitiation, social discipline, self-satisfaction and a sense of security in a troubling world. They want pain removed, if they have pain; they like ritual acts that make them feel good about themselves; they want doctrines, teachings or holy writings that assure them that they are right. Very few people actually believe there is someone other than themselves in charge or seek enlightenment or submit to a whole-hearted life conversion -- especially if that endeavor might disturb them from continuing along they way they are.
The reason arguing about religion seems endless is not because people really care about religion, but because the facts are never really quite clear -- inevitably, but also conveniently, so. Does God exist? Did Jesus or Abraham? The evidence for a historical person named Mohammed who wrote the Quran is overwhelming, but obviously not for his divine inspiration. Gautama Buddha's tomb can be located, although we don't know for certain whether what we know about his life is accurate.
Even if we accept God, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed as reality, what did they actually mean to tell us?
There are literally hundreds of Christian churches, each proclaiming themselves to be somehow the "bestest." There are at least a half dozen forms of Judaism. There are about as many variants of Islam and Buddhism. Can all of these be equally true and right and, indeed, bestest?
The quest is on ... endlessly.
You could not, however, easily find a lot of people who would tear down what I have said in my last post. Indeed, yesterday NBC aired an impressive documentary piece on its Dateline NBC show in which viewers were shown that the storyline of the DaVinci Code (click here to read the NBC story) is just what author Dan Brown said it was: fictional. Most historians agree that the facts are just not there.
Let's examine critically the notion of fact, just as we did with religion.
The idea of a fact is a relatively new, 18th century development from empiricism, the proposition that truth can be grasped through objective and verifiable observation. Western societies worship at the altar of facticity, yet facts aren't necessarily true.
You slap a table and decide that it is solid. But actually it isn't. There's a proportionally huge space between the electrons and the nucleus of atoms, so that the actual hard matter is really much less solid than our touch suggests. The actual pure mass of a transatlantic ship, say the Titanic, would be about the size of a baseball, if you managed to eliminate the subatomic empty space.
Even more, at the quantum level the physical laws that objective and verifiable facts confirm otherwise no longer apply, which is why modern physics has become the modern philosophy. Truth is a bit of a Russian matrioshka doll.
An image of that sort is what a charismatic religious leader would have conveyed in a pre-scientific world. In such a milieu it was accepted that demons and angels pulled us this way and that. It was also understood that we really don't know very much, that the storyteller is not as important as the story, and that some wholly invented stories teach truth.
Religion, in its theistic and atheistic forms, has never been about facts, but about what we intuitively find to be true. It takes wisdom to tell them apart.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Da Vinci Code Syndrome
All of a sudden, people who can't tell a cardinal from a monsignor, or a gospel from an epistle, feel perfectly comfortable pontificating about the Catholic Church's alleged conspiracy to suppress the story of Jesus' supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Mothering and Fathering
The Mothers' Day just passed and the impending Fathers' Day turns my mind to the notion of mothering and fathering, so essential to all of us at some points in our lives.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Do you love me?
Spring makes even an old coot's thoughts turn to love, to the meaning of love, to what love really is. We need not even consider love for a child or a parent, a friend, or even humanity in general, all of which are self-evident, so let's focus on love of and for one person, romantic love.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Assimilate to what?
Given that bringing up immigration summons the cry for assimilation, let's consider a pertinent question I don't often hear answered: to what should immigrants assimilate?
The verb to assimilate has five meanings. Physiologically, it refers to consuming and incorporating nutrients into the body after digestion and the process of anabolism. Figuratively, it refers to incorporating and absorbing knowledge into the mind. The word also means to cause something to resemble another. In linguistics, it refers to altering a sound by assimilation, as happens when a language adopts foreign words (for example, the Spanish lazo and the English lasso).
The fifth meaning, also figurative, is what people have in mind in the immigration debate: to absorb immigrants, or a culturally distinct group, into the prevailing culture. Yet in all the meanings of "assimilate" something is consumed, absorbed, incorporated (literally, to become part of a body), after some process of digestion and alteration.
All of this, means B becomes somehow enmeshed in A.
In the case of a country, for example the United States, the question is: What is that A and why does it deserve pre-eminence? The answer is more complicated than it sounds.
History tells us that the first U.S. inhabitants were the Indians. The European colonists did not assimilate into Indian society. Are anti-immigrant advocates suggesting that we at last show some respect for the native inhabitants? Somehow, I think not.
History also tells us that what is today the United States became the colonial territory of three European powers: England, France and Spain. Which one of these countries' cultures deserve predominant respect? On what grounds?
Let's try history again. In thirteen of the North American English colonies, a civil war broke out in the 1770s, with the population so divided that an estimated 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at the end of the conflict. Moreover, cultural roots among whites were about evenly divided at that time between England and Germany, to the point that the issue of a national language for the United States was deferred in all the foundational discussions as too divisive.
(We might be singing "O, sagt, könnt ihr sehen" on the Fourth of July had the Deutsch, or "Dutch" prevailed, but then we're forgetting the "other Persons" of the Constitution, who were African and spoke multiple languages.)
So the English of the 1780s had deferred the language issue knowing they might not win; half of them wanted King George, anyway, the Germans didn't want to learn English (some of them still don't speak English at home).
Then they purchased land from France (the Louisiana territory) and Spain (Florida). By the 1840s and '50s, the third major European group of the early United States arrived: the Irish. They were certainly not English. They fled a famine induced by the British, the inventors of genocidal germ warfare, to dispossess the native Irish Catholic farmers of Ireland.
Remind me, in this mix of Africans, English, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish ... by what reason was only the culture and language of the English to be accorded legal supremacy, when even the English dared not debate it for fear they would lose a vote?
But wait, then there's the entire Southwest and West. That was stolen outright by war and conquest. The predominant language and culture there was not English. Why should the territory from Texas to California have to assimilate the culture and language of the last and most unlawful newcomers, the Anglos?
Much the same question could be raised about almost any corner of the Earth.
Take Israel. Jewish scripture says God gave them the land thousands of years ago. But those lands weren't uninhabited. If Jews can leave for 1,900 years and still lay a territorial claim upon their return almost two millenia later, what about the ancient Caananites and their descendants, who didn't leave at all? Who should assimilate to whose culture and language?
This is what 50 years of war in Palestine has been all about, proving once again the irrational, tribal and nonsensical nature of all the notions that one culture has an inherent right to dominate.
People have the inalienable right to their own language and culture. Asserting that right is in the best tradition of the United States (even though in many chapters of the nation's history it was not observed), as it is of the United Nations and of Lady Liberty, whose powerful gaze watches over both from her island.
The verb to assimilate has five meanings. Physiologically, it refers to consuming and incorporating nutrients into the body after digestion and the process of anabolism. Figuratively, it refers to incorporating and absorbing knowledge into the mind. The word also means to cause something to resemble another. In linguistics, it refers to altering a sound by assimilation, as happens when a language adopts foreign words (for example, the Spanish lazo and the English lasso).
The fifth meaning, also figurative, is what people have in mind in the immigration debate: to absorb immigrants, or a culturally distinct group, into the prevailing culture. Yet in all the meanings of "assimilate" something is consumed, absorbed, incorporated (literally, to become part of a body), after some process of digestion and alteration.
All of this, means B becomes somehow enmeshed in A.
In the case of a country, for example the United States, the question is: What is that A and why does it deserve pre-eminence? The answer is more complicated than it sounds.
History tells us that the first U.S. inhabitants were the Indians. The European colonists did not assimilate into Indian society. Are anti-immigrant advocates suggesting that we at last show some respect for the native inhabitants? Somehow, I think not.
History also tells us that what is today the United States became the colonial territory of three European powers: England, France and Spain. Which one of these countries' cultures deserve predominant respect? On what grounds?
Let's try history again. In thirteen of the North American English colonies, a civil war broke out in the 1770s, with the population so divided that an estimated 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at the end of the conflict. Moreover, cultural roots among whites were about evenly divided at that time between England and Germany, to the point that the issue of a national language for the United States was deferred in all the foundational discussions as too divisive.
(We might be singing "O, sagt, könnt ihr sehen" on the Fourth of July had the Deutsch, or "Dutch" prevailed, but then we're forgetting the "other Persons" of the Constitution, who were African and spoke multiple languages.)
So the English of the 1780s had deferred the language issue knowing they might not win; half of them wanted King George, anyway, the Germans didn't want to learn English (some of them still don't speak English at home).
Then they purchased land from France (the Louisiana territory) and Spain (Florida). By the 1840s and '50s, the third major European group of the early United States arrived: the Irish. They were certainly not English. They fled a famine induced by the British, the inventors of genocidal germ warfare, to dispossess the native Irish Catholic farmers of Ireland.
Remind me, in this mix of Africans, English, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish ... by what reason was only the culture and language of the English to be accorded legal supremacy, when even the English dared not debate it for fear they would lose a vote?
But wait, then there's the entire Southwest and West. That was stolen outright by war and conquest. The predominant language and culture there was not English. Why should the territory from Texas to California have to assimilate the culture and language of the last and most unlawful newcomers, the Anglos?
Much the same question could be raised about almost any corner of the Earth.
Take Israel. Jewish scripture says God gave them the land thousands of years ago. But those lands weren't uninhabited. If Jews can leave for 1,900 years and still lay a territorial claim upon their return almost two millenia later, what about the ancient Caananites and their descendants, who didn't leave at all? Who should assimilate to whose culture and language?
This is what 50 years of war in Palestine has been all about, proving once again the irrational, tribal and nonsensical nature of all the notions that one culture has an inherent right to dominate.
People have the inalienable right to their own language and culture. Asserting that right is in the best tradition of the United States (even though in many chapters of the nation's history it was not observed), as it is of the United Nations and of Lady Liberty, whose powerful gaze watches over both from her island.
Monday, May 01, 2006
A Dream of Lady Liberty
At the cutting edge of the debate impelling millions of immigrants in the United States to wrestle with staying home or going to work today, often a choice between a full stomach or dignity, is the question of what kind of society we want -- indeed what kind of world in the future. Yet it is also an argument about the past and who we are now.
This is why this is so emotional. At the core of the immigration debate lie images awash in our emotional freight about who we citizens of wealthy countries are as societies and our place in the world. This is not just a U.S. argument: in France they resent Arabic immigrants, in Germany it's the Turks, and even Italy, a net population loser for more than a century until the 1990s, now frets about Lybians and Albanians.
We nurture fond fantasies of who we are, the heirs of Napoleon and Goethe and Jefferson (but we don't claim Paisley, Stalin or Attila). Yet the G-8 countries have in common a history of expansionism, violence, enslavement of and disdain for people of other cultures. All immigration laws are everywhere, at heart, racist and xenophobic.
For example, the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted to keep out the Chinese, later darker nationalities who were not from Northwest Europe. Even U.S. humanitarian policy has always had the stench of selfishness and right-wing ideology. The USA would not admit the Nazi-fleeing Jewish passengers of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis in 1939; in 1980, the USA admitted 900 refugees from Communist Poland but only 1 from El Salvador, where murder and dislocation, at a rate of 300 dead a week, was U.S.-funded.
Not only are the myths misleading about the past, they do not contemplate a future in which the torch of power might pass to to another land, nor one in which the white northwestern European peoples of Europe and North America, no longer reproducing at replacement levels, become an imperiled minority.
Perhaps this is why this is such a hot button issue in Berlin, Germany as it it in Berlin, New York, because it summons our tribal instincts, our fears and preconceptions of ourselves.
It is also why the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, deserves a second read:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
We are so accustomed to thinking of the poor huddled masses that we forget the major paradigm shift Lazarus was proposing, in an age when it was still preposterous. Lady Liberty, more than 10 times taller than the Colossus of Rhodes to whom the poet compares her, is not merely one more male conquering giant, but a mighty woman who commands with her eyes while she sheds light in the world.
The USA, at whose eastern door she commands and gives light, is not merely a tribal extension of Europe, it is the first country formed as a state, without ever before having been a people, an ethnos, a nation. Its name is a concept: unity among various territories. How fitting that the locus of a dream of unity at a global level, the United Nations, is headquarters well within the gaze of Lady Liberty.
The United States and the United Nations stand as yet unrealized ideals of common human unity, the globalization of the altruistic impulse to rejoice, revel and develop resources together, thanks to our differences.
Are we ready for such a dream? Lady Liberty commands it from her serene perch.
This is why this is so emotional. At the core of the immigration debate lie images awash in our emotional freight about who we citizens of wealthy countries are as societies and our place in the world. This is not just a U.S. argument: in France they resent Arabic immigrants, in Germany it's the Turks, and even Italy, a net population loser for more than a century until the 1990s, now frets about Lybians and Albanians.
We nurture fond fantasies of who we are, the heirs of Napoleon and Goethe and Jefferson (but we don't claim Paisley, Stalin or Attila). Yet the G-8 countries have in common a history of expansionism, violence, enslavement of and disdain for people of other cultures. All immigration laws are everywhere, at heart, racist and xenophobic.
For example, the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted to keep out the Chinese, later darker nationalities who were not from Northwest Europe. Even U.S. humanitarian policy has always had the stench of selfishness and right-wing ideology. The USA would not admit the Nazi-fleeing Jewish passengers of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis in 1939; in 1980, the USA admitted 900 refugees from Communist Poland but only 1 from El Salvador, where murder and dislocation, at a rate of 300 dead a week, was U.S.-funded.
Not only are the myths misleading about the past, they do not contemplate a future in which the torch of power might pass to to another land, nor one in which the white northwestern European peoples of Europe and North America, no longer reproducing at replacement levels, become an imperiled minority.
Perhaps this is why this is such a hot button issue in Berlin, Germany as it it in Berlin, New York, because it summons our tribal instincts, our fears and preconceptions of ourselves.
It is also why the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, deserves a second read:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
We are so accustomed to thinking of the poor huddled masses that we forget the major paradigm shift Lazarus was proposing, in an age when it was still preposterous. Lady Liberty, more than 10 times taller than the Colossus of Rhodes to whom the poet compares her, is not merely one more male conquering giant, but a mighty woman who commands with her eyes while she sheds light in the world.
The USA, at whose eastern door she commands and gives light, is not merely a tribal extension of Europe, it is the first country formed as a state, without ever before having been a people, an ethnos, a nation. Its name is a concept: unity among various territories. How fitting that the locus of a dream of unity at a global level, the United Nations, is headquarters well within the gaze of Lady Liberty.
The United States and the United Nations stand as yet unrealized ideals of common human unity, the globalization of the altruistic impulse to rejoice, revel and develop resources together, thanks to our differences.
Are we ready for such a dream? Lady Liberty commands it from her serene perch.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Re-Uniting the States
Hope is rising that happy days will soon be here again, as the rule of Republican right-wing ideologues and cronies wanes inexorably, yet the reality remains that the nation is divided and in need of social glue.
The fact of division can be gleaned superficially from the elections of 2000 and 2004 in which, despite a conservative judicial fiat in one instance and Republican ballot box mischief in the other, razor thin majorities voted for the Democratic candidate. Clearly, there remained a large minority of Americans willing to vote against their own best interests for a variety of reasons.
The phenomenon has been long known as "American exceptionalism."
It includes the baffling spectacle of the underpaid, overworked Southern blue-collar worker voting for the party dedicated to enriching American plutocrats further at the expense of schools, old age retirement, layoff assistance, safety and health regulatory protections, not to mention the growth of working wages on a par with inflation and prosperity.
In exchange for progressively greater impoverishment, job insecurity and a vanishing social security for the majority of Americans, this "red state" worker gets the pretense that he is somehow advancing "family values" or a crusade to abolish abortion or defending the primacy of (Protestant) Christianity. Oh, yes, somewhere unspoken, signalled discretely through winks and nods, he gets to advance white supremacy.
This swindled American isn't fazed by the facts that the family values of his political heroes have been long unmasked as false, that the anti-abortion campaign is a ruse and that active Protestantism is a minority religion in a secular society committed long ago to pluralism. If he can wear an American flag on his jacket and nurture his biases, the Exceptional American looks the other way at the mischief carried out in his name and at his expense.
Tempting as it is to make fun of the poor yokels picked clean like cotton by the Republicans with their clever demagoguery, it is now time to find compassion in one's heart and think of ways to build bridges to these fellow citizens of ours. The indignities they suffer are not the ones they imagine, but they are indignities none the less.
The numerous minority of "red state" voters see the same thing the rest of us do.
Community values that briefly bound the wealthy and the working to the same social contract are nowhere to be seen. There is a callous disregard for life in our wars, the poverty to which we acquiesce and, yes, abortion. It is also true that with the social demise of Christendom we have lost a common language in which to approach the great questions of human existence. Finally, with respect to minority rights, those who were born White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant might want to embrace them, as they are already a minority; notably, the disproportionate privilege of the group does not accrue to the majority of WASPs.
What we need is a new and unifiying language that allows the majority of Americans, of any color or political party, red state or blue state, to unite in defense of the common good.
The wealth held in common needs to include education for careers, jobs paid at living wages, with the security that allows families to plan and grow; it also needs to include help for those who can't care for themselves, those whom society can't or won't employ gainfully. A commonwealth devoted to the well-being of all would include, of course, care to avoid wasting our most precious human resource, our youth, in wars that serve the very limited interests of a few. Similarly, a caring society will enable means to support the choice of bringing new life and prevent abortion.
As to our common understanding and language, I would point to the U.S. Constitution. By design the Constitution prevents the establishment of a religion. Yet in the constitutional values, which are not taught as widely and deeply as they should be, there are values that should unite us as Americans. They are, uniquely, the values that historically have held the nation together as the oldest self-governing people on Earth.
The true new patriotism must be a dogged advocacy for the return to the democratic experiment begun in 1787 and for its expansion to all dimensions of human living.
The fact of division can be gleaned superficially from the elections of 2000 and 2004 in which, despite a conservative judicial fiat in one instance and Republican ballot box mischief in the other, razor thin majorities voted for the Democratic candidate. Clearly, there remained a large minority of Americans willing to vote against their own best interests for a variety of reasons.
The phenomenon has been long known as "American exceptionalism."
It includes the baffling spectacle of the underpaid, overworked Southern blue-collar worker voting for the party dedicated to enriching American plutocrats further at the expense of schools, old age retirement, layoff assistance, safety and health regulatory protections, not to mention the growth of working wages on a par with inflation and prosperity.
In exchange for progressively greater impoverishment, job insecurity and a vanishing social security for the majority of Americans, this "red state" worker gets the pretense that he is somehow advancing "family values" or a crusade to abolish abortion or defending the primacy of (Protestant) Christianity. Oh, yes, somewhere unspoken, signalled discretely through winks and nods, he gets to advance white supremacy.
This swindled American isn't fazed by the facts that the family values of his political heroes have been long unmasked as false, that the anti-abortion campaign is a ruse and that active Protestantism is a minority religion in a secular society committed long ago to pluralism. If he can wear an American flag on his jacket and nurture his biases, the Exceptional American looks the other way at the mischief carried out in his name and at his expense.
Tempting as it is to make fun of the poor yokels picked clean like cotton by the Republicans with their clever demagoguery, it is now time to find compassion in one's heart and think of ways to build bridges to these fellow citizens of ours. The indignities they suffer are not the ones they imagine, but they are indignities none the less.
The numerous minority of "red state" voters see the same thing the rest of us do.
Community values that briefly bound the wealthy and the working to the same social contract are nowhere to be seen. There is a callous disregard for life in our wars, the poverty to which we acquiesce and, yes, abortion. It is also true that with the social demise of Christendom we have lost a common language in which to approach the great questions of human existence. Finally, with respect to minority rights, those who were born White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant might want to embrace them, as they are already a minority; notably, the disproportionate privilege of the group does not accrue to the majority of WASPs.
What we need is a new and unifiying language that allows the majority of Americans, of any color or political party, red state or blue state, to unite in defense of the common good.
The wealth held in common needs to include education for careers, jobs paid at living wages, with the security that allows families to plan and grow; it also needs to include help for those who can't care for themselves, those whom society can't or won't employ gainfully. A commonwealth devoted to the well-being of all would include, of course, care to avoid wasting our most precious human resource, our youth, in wars that serve the very limited interests of a few. Similarly, a caring society will enable means to support the choice of bringing new life and prevent abortion.
As to our common understanding and language, I would point to the U.S. Constitution. By design the Constitution prevents the establishment of a religion. Yet in the constitutional values, which are not taught as widely and deeply as they should be, there are values that should unite us as Americans. They are, uniquely, the values that historically have held the nation together as the oldest self-governing people on Earth.
The true new patriotism must be a dogged advocacy for the return to the democratic experiment begun in 1787 and for its expansion to all dimensions of human living.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Real Plame Leak
Now that we know that George W. Bush is the Plame affair's leaker-in-chief, he can drop his homespun village dunce act right now and start talking like the scheming New England Brahmin WASP Yalie he really is.
The news that Bush de-classified the information that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative so he could legally order the release of that fact in the guise of a leak, all to deflect criticism that he lied about not knowing that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, has put to rest any claim that Bush was been misled or misinformed in any policy of any importance. This applies to the war in Iraq, what he knew before 9/11 and anything else for which Bush has been claiming simply not to be in the know.
One certainly wonders, of course, how the CIA will ever be able to recruit anyone for hazardous work again. Think about it: you join covert action, go overseas and do exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, then -- wham! -- your cover is blown by a U.S. president who wants to evade political responsibility for the war disaster du jour. That bummer is merely collateral damage.
The main show is that Bush is no Ronald Reagan, a man we all know by now was unquestionably senile during a large part of his presidency and "disengaged" during the remainder. Quite the contrary, Bush is devious enough to lie, to know how to scare and smear his opposition and to create the legal pretext so that what appears to be a leak is not a leak at all in case anyone gets caught.
We knew this, of course, about Bush's father. George Herbert Waker Bush, former CIA director, made a career out attempting to hide who he was: a pinched-nose scion of a New England Brahmin family pretending to be a macho Texas oil man. We also know that Bush's values -- if one cares to demean the word by calling them that -- come from his mother, Barbara "rhymes with witch" Pierce Bush, an acid-tongued elitist and racist, and lately alleged money-launderer.
Yet until now we had some ground to give Bush the occasional benefit of the doubt by concluding that the man in the Oval Office was merely a worthless knave of noble sire.
Seemingly, Dubya cannot pronounce the word "nuclear," nor maintain subject-verb agreement within a sentence of any length, nor even end sentences sometimes. Allegedly a former alcoholic, he chokes on killer pretzels. Purporting to be a successful businessman, he got set up by his Daddy, who even had to buy him partners. All this screams: failure, failure, failure.
Even the Internet knows it: go to Google, type "miserable failure," then click on the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You'll see what I mean ...
But the real story is that Bush is a Machiavellian dissembler. He pretends to be stupid, he even goes to the Gridiron dinners to poke fun at his own alleged gaffes. All the while the last laugh is his. He is laughing at us: ha, ha, I ginned up WMDs to get into Iraq and I even took care of all the details of the political fallout ...
Remember when he said that those who outed the CIA spy would be "taken care of"? We thought that "taken care of" meant "punished." We didn't see his crossed fingers, when he really meant they would be taken care of by avoiding jail through an alibi prefabricated by none other than the prez himself.
So, Mr. Bush, if we didn't go to war because of WMDs, and we certainly didn't go to lower oil prices, and we certainly couldn't have gone to bring democracy to a country invented by the British Foreign Office (1931, check that out) that only a dictator could rule, why did we go to Iraq?
Don't lie, Mr. President, we're on to you.
The news that Bush de-classified the information that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative so he could legally order the release of that fact in the guise of a leak, all to deflect criticism that he lied about not knowing that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, has put to rest any claim that Bush was been misled or misinformed in any policy of any importance. This applies to the war in Iraq, what he knew before 9/11 and anything else for which Bush has been claiming simply not to be in the know.
One certainly wonders, of course, how the CIA will ever be able to recruit anyone for hazardous work again. Think about it: you join covert action, go overseas and do exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, then -- wham! -- your cover is blown by a U.S. president who wants to evade political responsibility for the war disaster du jour. That bummer is merely collateral damage.
The main show is that Bush is no Ronald Reagan, a man we all know by now was unquestionably senile during a large part of his presidency and "disengaged" during the remainder. Quite the contrary, Bush is devious enough to lie, to know how to scare and smear his opposition and to create the legal pretext so that what appears to be a leak is not a leak at all in case anyone gets caught.
We knew this, of course, about Bush's father. George Herbert Waker Bush, former CIA director, made a career out attempting to hide who he was: a pinched-nose scion of a New England Brahmin family pretending to be a macho Texas oil man. We also know that Bush's values -- if one cares to demean the word by calling them that -- come from his mother, Barbara "rhymes with witch" Pierce Bush, an acid-tongued elitist and racist, and lately alleged money-launderer.
Yet until now we had some ground to give Bush the occasional benefit of the doubt by concluding that the man in the Oval Office was merely a worthless knave of noble sire.
Seemingly, Dubya cannot pronounce the word "nuclear," nor maintain subject-verb agreement within a sentence of any length, nor even end sentences sometimes. Allegedly a former alcoholic, he chokes on killer pretzels. Purporting to be a successful businessman, he got set up by his Daddy, who even had to buy him partners. All this screams: failure, failure, failure.
Even the Internet knows it: go to Google, type "miserable failure," then click on the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You'll see what I mean ...
But the real story is that Bush is a Machiavellian dissembler. He pretends to be stupid, he even goes to the Gridiron dinners to poke fun at his own alleged gaffes. All the while the last laugh is his. He is laughing at us: ha, ha, I ginned up WMDs to get into Iraq and I even took care of all the details of the political fallout ...
Remember when he said that those who outed the CIA spy would be "taken care of"? We thought that "taken care of" meant "punished." We didn't see his crossed fingers, when he really meant they would be taken care of by avoiding jail through an alibi prefabricated by none other than the prez himself.
So, Mr. Bush, if we didn't go to war because of WMDs, and we certainly didn't go to lower oil prices, and we certainly couldn't have gone to bring democracy to a country invented by the British Foreign Office (1931, check that out) that only a dictator could rule, why did we go to Iraq?
Don't lie, Mr. President, we're on to you.
Friday, April 07, 2006
No News Is Bad News
In a world without news there would be no common knowledge and no possibility of real democratic debate, yet that seems to be the Orwellian direction in which 21st century economics are taking all of us.
Indeed, one of the rarely sung stories of the Soviet Union's Glasnost is the rise of Argumenty i Facty, a Moscow-based weekly newspaper put together by activists to provide a source of facts that were then hard to find (read: hidden). This was, of course, in a society in which even a telephone directory was available only to those in the Party nomenklatura.
Today in the West, however, little political censorship is needed. I know: I have worked in the business for three decades. All the powers that be need to do is to lure masses to "infotainment" and "infomercials" and away from reading and critical thinking, then sit back and watch the marketplace do the rest. Since 2001, according to conservative estimates, as many as 75,000 jobs in journalism have disappeared in the United States alone.
Consider the following:
"Will we call this the year journalism in print began to die?" asks journalism.org's The State of the New Media 2006 (read the full report here).
You will be forgiven if you seize on the word "print" and say that you get your news online, or on TV. In fact, however, whatever hard news there is originates in print.
As the report I have just cited shows, the different in the kind of news you get from print and other sources, is not merely a matter of format, but of substance. Television, we all know, only conveys headlines. The Internet originates little or no hard fact, but masses and masses of rumor, innuendo and opinion (you're reading one).
The difference isn't merely the length of the material. It's the reliability and facticity. Newspapers usually get three or more sources for a story; other news outlets rely on considerably less, often second hand and unidentified, without much fact-checking.
There's also a difference is what is covered. Newspapers cover elections and government less than I would like, but TV hardly covers it substantively at all, concentrating instead on crime. And where is there critical and incisive coverage of big business, which influences our lives much more than crime or politics? Hardly anywhere at all.
If you wonder why all this is happening, think two words: the public. People don't read, therefore know less and less about the world around us. The consequences are dire.
Is it any wonder that the collapse of publications began in the first of the George W. Bush presidency, itself ushered in by voters who, inexplicably, could not make up their minds between Bush and Al Gore? Four years later the same thing repeated itself between Bush and Kerry.
To any of us armed with the facts, there was no question what the difference was -- and it was wide -- no matter which one we preferred. A squeaker between the erstwhile center-right Democratic senator Scoop Jackson and the liberal Republican New York governor Nelson Rockefeller might have made some sense: there would have been little choice.
Give Bush credit for hiding just how conservative he was in 2000 with codewords, nods and winks minted by Reaganite neocons. But by 2004, what American could rightfully claim that there was no information about Bush's desire to gut and bankrupt social programs to fund the Pentagon and its ancillary agencies, now fully owned subsidiaries of Halliburton, and prosecute clumsily the struggle against Al Qaeda and manufacturing a war out of whole cloth?
Only those Americans, the increasing majority, who don't read the news. That's why no news is bad news.
Indeed, one of the rarely sung stories of the Soviet Union's Glasnost is the rise of Argumenty i Facty, a Moscow-based weekly newspaper put together by activists to provide a source of facts that were then hard to find (read: hidden). This was, of course, in a society in which even a telephone directory was available only to those in the Party nomenklatura.
Today in the West, however, little political censorship is needed. I know: I have worked in the business for three decades. All the powers that be need to do is to lure masses to "infotainment" and "infomercials" and away from reading and critical thinking, then sit back and watch the marketplace do the rest. Since 2001, according to conservative estimates, as many as 75,000 jobs in journalism have disappeared in the United States alone.
Consider the following:
- The New York Times has lost 60 reporting jobs.
- The Washington Post is cutting 80 reporting positions.
- On March 14, the McClatchy Company, which owns The Sacramento Bee, bought out for $4 billion the Knight-Ridder newspapers, a chain of 32 newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury. The company plans to close 12.
"Will we call this the year journalism in print began to die?" asks journalism.org's The State of the New Media 2006 (read the full report here).
You will be forgiven if you seize on the word "print" and say that you get your news online, or on TV. In fact, however, whatever hard news there is originates in print.
As the report I have just cited shows, the different in the kind of news you get from print and other sources, is not merely a matter of format, but of substance. Television, we all know, only conveys headlines. The Internet originates little or no hard fact, but masses and masses of rumor, innuendo and opinion (you're reading one).
The difference isn't merely the length of the material. It's the reliability and facticity. Newspapers usually get three or more sources for a story; other news outlets rely on considerably less, often second hand and unidentified, without much fact-checking.
There's also a difference is what is covered. Newspapers cover elections and government less than I would like, but TV hardly covers it substantively at all, concentrating instead on crime. And where is there critical and incisive coverage of big business, which influences our lives much more than crime or politics? Hardly anywhere at all.
If you wonder why all this is happening, think two words: the public. People don't read, therefore know less and less about the world around us. The consequences are dire.
Is it any wonder that the collapse of publications began in the first of the George W. Bush presidency, itself ushered in by voters who, inexplicably, could not make up their minds between Bush and Al Gore? Four years later the same thing repeated itself between Bush and Kerry.
To any of us armed with the facts, there was no question what the difference was -- and it was wide -- no matter which one we preferred. A squeaker between the erstwhile center-right Democratic senator Scoop Jackson and the liberal Republican New York governor Nelson Rockefeller might have made some sense: there would have been little choice.
Give Bush credit for hiding just how conservative he was in 2000 with codewords, nods and winks minted by Reaganite neocons. But by 2004, what American could rightfully claim that there was no information about Bush's desire to gut and bankrupt social programs to fund the Pentagon and its ancillary agencies, now fully owned subsidiaries of Halliburton, and prosecute clumsily the struggle against Al Qaeda and manufacturing a war out of whole cloth?
Only those Americans, the increasing majority, who don't read the news. That's why no news is bad news.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
A Path of My Own
Recent debates and personal discussions bring home to me how hard it is to try to forge one's own unusual, if not necessarily unique, path.
It's not that I want to be different.
From childhood I yearned to be in a family like the Andersons in TV's Father Knows Best. In my youth I aspired to have a normal name and a normal place of origin, to be, say, Douglas, a Methodist from Lincoln, Nebraska. In my adult life, I tried to work in a regular newspaper, in a regular newsroom where rudeness and stupidity got you ahead. At some point I wanted a station wagon, a house and a dog.
I wondered what it would be like to see Paris for the first time at 25 or 35. To speak one language and only one. To have so fixed a sense of identity that I could not fathom Italian humor or Swedish epithets. What if I had grown up a Republican and inherited a seat at the local Rotary Club? Or married someone who grew up in more or less the same way I did and shared ethnicity and religion?
By now you've guessed -- I am and have been none of these.
There isn't a label for me and I won't try to invent one. To give you an idea, without getting tedious, until 2003 I had spent 25 years in a household without a car or a television: people of whom the same could be said represent less than 1 percent of the American population. And I'm only scratching the surface.
This gets expressed in ideas, beliefs, styles of life. I find myself at odds with the flavors available and I want to make myself a double-dip philosophy in a little sugar cone all my own.
Take the economic ideas of the day. In France they're protesting the first timid step toward dismantling a cradle-to-grave system of labor and social security. The step itself is a no-brainer in the USA: under a new French law young workers can be laid off more easily than experienced, proven workers.
My Menshevik instincts -- which I certanily did not get from my monarchist mother or similarly traditionalist father -- tell me the protesting Europeans are on the right track: give up one benefit and the entire house of social protections comes tumbling down. On the other hand, my American entrepreneurial experience tells me that in the world of work no good deed goes unpunished: employees treated generously cheat you and laugh at you behind your back.
The more I consider the great questions, the less certain I am that the major Answers are right. Socialism and capitalism both have flaws.
The same applies to the God questions.
In March 2002 I finally reached the conclusion that the vast majority of Catholics, among whom I counted myself, did not really believe -- a circumstance in which I included a fellow by the name of Karol Wojtyla, who was then pope, and another named Joseph Ratzinger, elected (was it the distribution of hallucinogens at the conclave of 2005?) to succeed him. Had any of these august men or their fellow bishops, let alone all the Joe and Jane Pews sitting in the churches, really believed in God and really taken the gospels the least bit seriously, they would have been quaking in their boots.
Yet there they were, appearing on television with mealymouthed press releases after U.S. courts forced them to acknowledge they had conspired to cover up the massive rape of children. And here we laypeople were trying to pretend that we didn't notice, after witnessing decades of every kind of equivocation and hypocrisy available. It wasn't just that scandal. Really.
In the accumulation of unthinkable and improbable developments, I decided I'd had enough: I would at least proclaim my unbelief openly. So sue me Papa Ratzinger. The pope is naked.
And yet ... I can't discount the notion that truth is more likely than not absolute. Truth, if it is A, cannot also be X, merely because I like A and my neighbor Emily likes X. (Note: I am right, no? Of course, I am right! Why would I believe she is right? If I did, I'd have to believe what she believes, right?)
Or, rubber hit the road, I do believe that guilt is good. Not the kind of guilt that immobilizes you and keeps you from doing the right or the wrong thing. Just the kind of guilt that makes you say, "Whoa, Nelly! I really screwed someone over here." Guilt when you've done something wrong is like pain when you're sick; it tells you that you need to get involved in some healing. Then after you're healed (and you've healed the one you screwed over), then, sure, get rid of that guilt.
These are Catholic answers right out of the textbook. But I'm an atheist, remember? I even wrote a whole godless ethic (see my blogs here and here).
Then there's the love question (I mean, besides "What do women really want?").
Is love a relationship bound by a set of rules and laws, such as I often feel should be avoided like the plague? (See my blog here.)
If so, why am I not satisfied with the Latin gentleman's lifestyle? You don't know the Latin gentleman? Here's how my father, who was a Latin gentleman, described him:
The Latin gentleman had seven sons.
The first was lawyer,
the second was a thief, too.
The third was a doctor,
and the fourth was a butcher, too.
The fifth was a priest,
and the sixth was a drunk, too.
The seventh, like their father,
was a bachelor.
Ha, ha! Isn't that a knee-slapper? No. It isn't. A priapic man devoted to fooling women is merely a waste, not to mention a scoundrel to his seven sons.
So here's the thing: I would rather find a path that's neither socialist nor capitalist, that's neither Catholic nor atheist, that's neither priapic nor hidebound. A path of my own.
It's not that I want to be different.
From childhood I yearned to be in a family like the Andersons in TV's Father Knows Best. In my youth I aspired to have a normal name and a normal place of origin, to be, say, Douglas, a Methodist from Lincoln, Nebraska. In my adult life, I tried to work in a regular newspaper, in a regular newsroom where rudeness and stupidity got you ahead. At some point I wanted a station wagon, a house and a dog.
I wondered what it would be like to see Paris for the first time at 25 or 35. To speak one language and only one. To have so fixed a sense of identity that I could not fathom Italian humor or Swedish epithets. What if I had grown up a Republican and inherited a seat at the local Rotary Club? Or married someone who grew up in more or less the same way I did and shared ethnicity and religion?
By now you've guessed -- I am and have been none of these.
There isn't a label for me and I won't try to invent one. To give you an idea, without getting tedious, until 2003 I had spent 25 years in a household without a car or a television: people of whom the same could be said represent less than 1 percent of the American population. And I'm only scratching the surface.
This gets expressed in ideas, beliefs, styles of life. I find myself at odds with the flavors available and I want to make myself a double-dip philosophy in a little sugar cone all my own.
Take the economic ideas of the day. In France they're protesting the first timid step toward dismantling a cradle-to-grave system of labor and social security. The step itself is a no-brainer in the USA: under a new French law young workers can be laid off more easily than experienced, proven workers.
My Menshevik instincts -- which I certanily did not get from my monarchist mother or similarly traditionalist father -- tell me the protesting Europeans are on the right track: give up one benefit and the entire house of social protections comes tumbling down. On the other hand, my American entrepreneurial experience tells me that in the world of work no good deed goes unpunished: employees treated generously cheat you and laugh at you behind your back.
The more I consider the great questions, the less certain I am that the major Answers are right. Socialism and capitalism both have flaws.
The same applies to the God questions.
In March 2002 I finally reached the conclusion that the vast majority of Catholics, among whom I counted myself, did not really believe -- a circumstance in which I included a fellow by the name of Karol Wojtyla, who was then pope, and another named Joseph Ratzinger, elected (was it the distribution of hallucinogens at the conclave of 2005?) to succeed him. Had any of these august men or their fellow bishops, let alone all the Joe and Jane Pews sitting in the churches, really believed in God and really taken the gospels the least bit seriously, they would have been quaking in their boots.
Yet there they were, appearing on television with mealymouthed press releases after U.S. courts forced them to acknowledge they had conspired to cover up the massive rape of children. And here we laypeople were trying to pretend that we didn't notice, after witnessing decades of every kind of equivocation and hypocrisy available. It wasn't just that scandal. Really.
In the accumulation of unthinkable and improbable developments, I decided I'd had enough: I would at least proclaim my unbelief openly. So sue me Papa Ratzinger. The pope is naked.
And yet ... I can't discount the notion that truth is more likely than not absolute. Truth, if it is A, cannot also be X, merely because I like A and my neighbor Emily likes X. (Note: I am right, no? Of course, I am right! Why would I believe she is right? If I did, I'd have to believe what she believes, right?)
Or, rubber hit the road, I do believe that guilt is good. Not the kind of guilt that immobilizes you and keeps you from doing the right or the wrong thing. Just the kind of guilt that makes you say, "Whoa, Nelly! I really screwed someone over here." Guilt when you've done something wrong is like pain when you're sick; it tells you that you need to get involved in some healing. Then after you're healed (and you've healed the one you screwed over), then, sure, get rid of that guilt.
These are Catholic answers right out of the textbook. But I'm an atheist, remember? I even wrote a whole godless ethic (see my blogs here and here).
Then there's the love question (I mean, besides "What do women really want?").
Is love a relationship bound by a set of rules and laws, such as I often feel should be avoided like the plague? (See my blog here.)
If so, why am I not satisfied with the Latin gentleman's lifestyle? You don't know the Latin gentleman? Here's how my father, who was a Latin gentleman, described him:
The Latin gentleman had seven sons.
The first was lawyer,
the second was a thief, too.
The third was a doctor,
and the fourth was a butcher, too.
The fifth was a priest,
and the sixth was a drunk, too.
The seventh, like their father,
was a bachelor.
Ha, ha! Isn't that a knee-slapper? No. It isn't. A priapic man devoted to fooling women is merely a waste, not to mention a scoundrel to his seven sons.
So here's the thing: I would rather find a path that's neither socialist nor capitalist, that's neither Catholic nor atheist, that's neither priapic nor hidebound. A path of my own.
Monday, March 20, 2006
On the hit parade
To judge by the reaction to my exercise in critical thinking about Osama, I am in the good company of many doubters -- but also on some people's hit lists.
One person warned me that to people who had no experience of the world abroad I'd be "a Communist." As if to prove that acquaintance's point, private e-mail warned me that I was on the wrong side of the fence.
Imagine them in Anti-Terrorism Central, somewhere in the third basement of the White House (only a stone's throw from my office). "Aha! We spotted one," says a clean cut agent, "shall we set the heat-seeking missiles on kill?" His boss chuckles and shakes his head, "Naw, let's just send Dick Cheney with his hunting rifle."
No, seriously folks ... the reaction reminds me of the warden in Cool Hand Luke. You remember the 1967 film set in a Southern prison, with chain gang and all?
Even if you don't remember the movie, you have surely heard about the chastising of the protagonist, prisoner Luke Jackson (Paul Newman), by the sadistic warden Boss Paul (Luke Askew) in the finest drawl that Askew, a native Georgian, could muster: "What we have he-ah ... is a fail-y-ah to communicate!"
Indeed, what we have here is most definitely a communication failure.
Acknowledging that the Arab World might have a legitimate gripe or two does not amount to conferring the Good Lefty Seal of Approval on suicide bombing targeted on Americans. Rather, it merely raises a few sorely needed questions concerning our assumptions.
There are many, many questions that need be raised and I can't promise to raise them all in one post.
Some of them stem from President Bush lying so spectacularly without being called to account that it becomes easy to doubt everything. For example, how the hell do we, the citizens of the United States, really know that al Qaeda actually was behind the September 11 attacks? Because Dubya said so? Hmm ... let me tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn I can get you at a bargain price.
Another set of queries arise from our overly literal belief in our national fairy tales. Does anyone out there still believe we Americans possess all we do merely by dint of hard work and "know-how" that somehow made this country "great"? No one else worked hard? How come our know-how can't extricate us from our worsening problems right now?
My sense of history tells me that the United States was handed leadership on a platter by a collapsed world in 1945; our country was the sole major industrial nation whose infrastructure was intact. And that was merely because it was too far from its enemies to be bombed.
This is all happenstance. Just as the sheer chance of being born here. Did any of us do anything to be born in New York or Poughkeepsie or Peoria? So what are we doing crowing about being "proud to be American"? We might as well be proud of the color of our eyes.
But there's more. Having been handed the crown of laurels, we acceded collectively to privilege beyond what any people has ever seen before. The overwhelming majority of humanity does not take for granted the embarrassment of riches and resources that we do.
Privilege carries obligations: noblesse oblige -- or as the Bible puts it " ... unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required ... " (Luke 12:48). This is something that the Patrician class of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and even that of George Herbert Walker Bush, for all their shortcomings, used to understand and live out to a mildly heroic measure.
Today's ruling class separates itself ever more from civic responsibility, shouldering a declining share of the burdens of citizenship, in taxes, in effort and in blood. Their poster boy is a sitting president who, unlike his father, cowardly evaded the battle he claimed to support, then shamelessly suckered the poorest, most disadvantaged youths to go die for his lies.
The world is not fooled. The world was with us on September 12. Then our government behaved like a petulant schoolyard bully and lost the respect and trust a leader needs.
In my criticism, I am still hoping there is a way to reverse course and live up to our national vocation, to continue to expand the democratic experiment and to lead world peacefully, by example rather than by force.
One person warned me that to people who had no experience of the world abroad I'd be "a Communist." As if to prove that acquaintance's point, private e-mail warned me that I was on the wrong side of the fence.
Imagine them in Anti-Terrorism Central, somewhere in the third basement of the White House (only a stone's throw from my office). "Aha! We spotted one," says a clean cut agent, "shall we set the heat-seeking missiles on kill?" His boss chuckles and shakes his head, "Naw, let's just send Dick Cheney with his hunting rifle."
No, seriously folks ... the reaction reminds me of the warden in Cool Hand Luke. You remember the 1967 film set in a Southern prison, with chain gang and all?
Even if you don't remember the movie, you have surely heard about the chastising of the protagonist, prisoner Luke Jackson (Paul Newman), by the sadistic warden Boss Paul (Luke Askew) in the finest drawl that Askew, a native Georgian, could muster: "What we have he-ah ... is a fail-y-ah to communicate!"
Indeed, what we have here is most definitely a communication failure.
Acknowledging that the Arab World might have a legitimate gripe or two does not amount to conferring the Good Lefty Seal of Approval on suicide bombing targeted on Americans. Rather, it merely raises a few sorely needed questions concerning our assumptions.
There are many, many questions that need be raised and I can't promise to raise them all in one post.
Some of them stem from President Bush lying so spectacularly without being called to account that it becomes easy to doubt everything. For example, how the hell do we, the citizens of the United States, really know that al Qaeda actually was behind the September 11 attacks? Because Dubya said so? Hmm ... let me tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn I can get you at a bargain price.
Another set of queries arise from our overly literal belief in our national fairy tales. Does anyone out there still believe we Americans possess all we do merely by dint of hard work and "know-how" that somehow made this country "great"? No one else worked hard? How come our know-how can't extricate us from our worsening problems right now?
My sense of history tells me that the United States was handed leadership on a platter by a collapsed world in 1945; our country was the sole major industrial nation whose infrastructure was intact. And that was merely because it was too far from its enemies to be bombed.
This is all happenstance. Just as the sheer chance of being born here. Did any of us do anything to be born in New York or Poughkeepsie or Peoria? So what are we doing crowing about being "proud to be American"? We might as well be proud of the color of our eyes.
But there's more. Having been handed the crown of laurels, we acceded collectively to privilege beyond what any people has ever seen before. The overwhelming majority of humanity does not take for granted the embarrassment of riches and resources that we do.
Privilege carries obligations: noblesse oblige -- or as the Bible puts it " ... unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required ... " (Luke 12:48). This is something that the Patrician class of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and even that of George Herbert Walker Bush, for all their shortcomings, used to understand and live out to a mildly heroic measure.
Today's ruling class separates itself ever more from civic responsibility, shouldering a declining share of the burdens of citizenship, in taxes, in effort and in blood. Their poster boy is a sitting president who, unlike his father, cowardly evaded the battle he claimed to support, then shamelessly suckered the poorest, most disadvantaged youths to go die for his lies.
The world is not fooled. The world was with us on September 12. Then our government behaved like a petulant schoolyard bully and lost the respect and trust a leader needs.
In my criticism, I am still hoping there is a way to reverse course and live up to our national vocation, to continue to expand the democratic experiment and to lead world peacefully, by example rather than by force.
Friday, March 17, 2006
The Real Secret of September 11
Even the families of Americans fallen in the suicide attacks of September 11 are wondering out loud what is really being hidden behind the smokescreen of Carla Martin, 51, the Transportation Security Administration attorney who has come close -- on purpose? -- to torpedoing the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th conspirator in the tragic events.
That's not the real secret of September 11. Of course, the government knew. Of course, Bush became giddy enough in September 2001 at the prospect of uncontested political war power to joke to Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels like a college boy, "Lucky me. I hit the trifecta." (See Daniels' White House statement.)
We know this.
The real secret of September 11 is that Osama bin Laden has a point or three -- regardless of the obviously wrongheaded way he's gone about advancing them.
By "Osama," I mean to represent not merely one man, but the broad stream of Arab opinion that supports, in at least some vague fashion, what the man is to them.
A 2004 Pew Charitable Trust survey found that Osama is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%). In Turkey as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable, and that's a third of the public in a wannabe member of the European Union.
Let's be clear about this. These people are not stupid. They have reasons for feeling the way they do that make sense to them.
They see the effects of Western culture as it corrupts their societies. The poverty of the Palestinians next to the relative wealth of the Israelis who displaced them. The impunity with which U.S. troops sexually harass Arab women (and even men).
Osama bin Laden's famous 1998 fatwa against Americans fell on deaf ears in the West, but it made perfect sense to his audience. The charge?
"... [F]or over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples."
The fatwa goes on to cite the effects of bombing on Iraq -- when we were supposedly no longer at war -- in a tally it gives of 1 million lives. This may be inflated, but even half is ten times all the U.S. casualties n Vietnam. Finally, it cites the U.S. alliance with Israel and its support of the "occupation" of Jerusalem.
Turn it around for a moment. Imagine the Fedayeen in Rome, Canterbury or Jerusalem riding around as conquerors and setting up bases to attack London and New York, killing 500,000 in "collateral" effects of air raids, while remaining allied to the most hated enemy, Osama.
It takes a little imagination because we are so secularized that nothing is "holy" or sacred to us anymore. OK, so imagine the roughest, most dust-covered, bearded Arab ruffian -- a ruffian just as the U.S. Army has had in every war -- setting upon your daughter or your son. Close to home enough?
What doesn't make sense is not their perspective, but ours.
In a recent discussion with a professional who has lived in several continents abroad, I fell into a classic North-South debate -- "North" representing the industrialized First and Second Worlds and "South" the industrializing Third and Fourth. My friend was arguing that Western overseas development assistance makes life "better" abroad.
I countered that "better" is in the eye of the beholder. To Osama's buddies, I added, U.S. plumbing and automobiles comes with the baggage of U.S. culture -- to them, notably the proliferation of pornography, immorality, secularism, homosexuality.
Then my interlocutor, a woman, drew a line in the sand: their oppression of women is unjustifiable.
This reminded me of Vietnam War escalation architect Robert McNamara when, in his role as World Bank president in the late 1960s, he tried to sell the Latin American public on a subsidized birth control campaign. From the U.S. perspective, this seems like bringing "progress." (It's also cheaper than aid.)
But McNamara succeeded as no politician has since, in uniting the Brazilian Catholic bishops with the Communist Party in sheer outrage. The American was seen as proposing genocide.
Similarly, what a professional U.S. woman sees as "oppression" in the Arab World is a way of life whose evolution is best left in the hands of the societies in which it occurs, rather than the arrogant control of Western paternalism. I would not choose that way of life myself, but I am Western.
Also, it's not as if the West is oppression-free or does not exploit women in other areas of the world.
Let's look at the women who pick oranges in Florida and California before we get too outraged at the Arabs. Let's examine the "sex tours" and "foreign bride" businesses, the drug "mules." Let's examine just how many millions of women in the world have seen their families destroyed by Western weapons and greed.
My point is that, precisely because we are empirical-minded and supposedly more democratic, it does not make sense for us to determine a priori that everyone must embrace this or that non-negotiable item of our way of life. Especially when we don't show the guts to stop our own governments from waging war indiscriminately and unjustifiably against their populations.
Until we learn this, we will be stuck in a clash of civilizations that threatens both the West and the Arab World, with the same perversity of the Mutual Assured Destruction equation of the Cold War. The more each of us insists we are correct beyond discussion, the less a chance there is that either will survive.
Let's face it. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda will wipe out half a U.S. city with a dirty bomb or a virus or something even simpler of which no one has thought. And sooner rather than later, the White House will drop The Bomb somewhere in the Arab World in response. Then all bets are off.
As Albert Einstein famously remarked: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Is there a way out? Only if we take a good look at the real secret of September 11.
That's not the real secret of September 11. Of course, the government knew. Of course, Bush became giddy enough in September 2001 at the prospect of uncontested political war power to joke to Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels like a college boy, "Lucky me. I hit the trifecta." (See Daniels' White House statement.)
We know this.
The real secret of September 11 is that Osama bin Laden has a point or three -- regardless of the obviously wrongheaded way he's gone about advancing them.
By "Osama," I mean to represent not merely one man, but the broad stream of Arab opinion that supports, in at least some vague fashion, what the man is to them.
A 2004 Pew Charitable Trust survey found that Osama is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%). In Turkey as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable, and that's a third of the public in a wannabe member of the European Union.
Let's be clear about this. These people are not stupid. They have reasons for feeling the way they do that make sense to them.
They see the effects of Western culture as it corrupts their societies. The poverty of the Palestinians next to the relative wealth of the Israelis who displaced them. The impunity with which U.S. troops sexually harass Arab women (and even men).
Osama bin Laden's famous 1998 fatwa against Americans fell on deaf ears in the West, but it made perfect sense to his audience. The charge?
"... [F]or over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples."
The fatwa goes on to cite the effects of bombing on Iraq -- when we were supposedly no longer at war -- in a tally it gives of 1 million lives. This may be inflated, but even half is ten times all the U.S. casualties n Vietnam. Finally, it cites the U.S. alliance with Israel and its support of the "occupation" of Jerusalem.
Turn it around for a moment. Imagine the Fedayeen in Rome, Canterbury or Jerusalem riding around as conquerors and setting up bases to attack London and New York, killing 500,000 in "collateral" effects of air raids, while remaining allied to the most hated enemy, Osama.
It takes a little imagination because we are so secularized that nothing is "holy" or sacred to us anymore. OK, so imagine the roughest, most dust-covered, bearded Arab ruffian -- a ruffian just as the U.S. Army has had in every war -- setting upon your daughter or your son. Close to home enough?
What doesn't make sense is not their perspective, but ours.
In a recent discussion with a professional who has lived in several continents abroad, I fell into a classic North-South debate -- "North" representing the industrialized First and Second Worlds and "South" the industrializing Third and Fourth. My friend was arguing that Western overseas development assistance makes life "better" abroad.
I countered that "better" is in the eye of the beholder. To Osama's buddies, I added, U.S. plumbing and automobiles comes with the baggage of U.S. culture -- to them, notably the proliferation of pornography, immorality, secularism, homosexuality.
Then my interlocutor, a woman, drew a line in the sand: their oppression of women is unjustifiable.
This reminded me of Vietnam War escalation architect Robert McNamara when, in his role as World Bank president in the late 1960s, he tried to sell the Latin American public on a subsidized birth control campaign. From the U.S. perspective, this seems like bringing "progress." (It's also cheaper than aid.)
But McNamara succeeded as no politician has since, in uniting the Brazilian Catholic bishops with the Communist Party in sheer outrage. The American was seen as proposing genocide.
Similarly, what a professional U.S. woman sees as "oppression" in the Arab World is a way of life whose evolution is best left in the hands of the societies in which it occurs, rather than the arrogant control of Western paternalism. I would not choose that way of life myself, but I am Western.
Also, it's not as if the West is oppression-free or does not exploit women in other areas of the world.
Let's look at the women who pick oranges in Florida and California before we get too outraged at the Arabs. Let's examine the "sex tours" and "foreign bride" businesses, the drug "mules." Let's examine just how many millions of women in the world have seen their families destroyed by Western weapons and greed.
My point is that, precisely because we are empirical-minded and supposedly more democratic, it does not make sense for us to determine a priori that everyone must embrace this or that non-negotiable item of our way of life. Especially when we don't show the guts to stop our own governments from waging war indiscriminately and unjustifiably against their populations.
Until we learn this, we will be stuck in a clash of civilizations that threatens both the West and the Arab World, with the same perversity of the Mutual Assured Destruction equation of the Cold War. The more each of us insists we are correct beyond discussion, the less a chance there is that either will survive.
Let's face it. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda will wipe out half a U.S. city with a dirty bomb or a virus or something even simpler of which no one has thought. And sooner rather than later, the White House will drop The Bomb somewhere in the Arab World in response. Then all bets are off.
As Albert Einstein famously remarked: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Is there a way out? Only if we take a good look at the real secret of September 11.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Customer Disservice: The Solution
My struggles with Apple, as we have seen, are only part of a very large and growing American folklore of customer disservice. One need not be obsessive about it, but this is no longer the country in which the customer is always right.
This isn't just Apple. It's Corporate America. As a business executive, albeit in a small company, I have a pretty good idea what has been going on. Let me blow the whistle from my corporate perch.
It's scarcely a secret that during the Cllinton Era boom the public became accustomed to prices of manufactured goods that went down or stayed the same. The Bush Era recession extended that through 2004.
What have companies done to squeeze those humongous profits?
Consumers know executives have tweaked the contents of products and played shell games with the terms of sale. Less visibly, they also cut costs. Products are shoddier, less well-made; hence the popularity of imports. Detroit hasn't made the best car in decades.
Lastly, they've increased productivity. Human labor is always the most expensive ingredient (although, as we shall see, not always reasonably so). Management has two choices: find some way to make it possible for workers to produce more in the same number of hours, or distribute more work among fewer workers. American companies have done both.
The result is a collective suicide of American business. GM, Ford, IBM, the airlines and more are filing for bankruptcy to avoid pay hikes and pension costs, while laying off employees by the tens of thousands week after week.
The problemo with the boardrooms, however, is that they're led by folks making 431 times what employees make. Yes, you read that right. The CEO-worker pay ratio reported last September went up from 301:1 to 431:1 (see my source here).
Executive pay has grown exponentially just as their companies have become ever bigger failures. To be fair, there are perverse economic mechanisms that actually force some companies into that juncture. Some companies produce more book value earnings when they are going down than when they are rising and profits are in the future.
But let's think the unthinkable for an instant, especially for publicly held corporations. Maybe if corporations fired one of these 431-ers, they could hire 431 customer service people.
Or, say, hire 215 workers paid enough that they'd care about a customer's problem; or 107 better paid customer service reps and 107 better paid manufacturing workers to make better made goods.
The possible permutations are endless. But maybe if we invested more in workers, more of them would care about what they make and more would care about keeping the customer satisfied. Maybe more of them could afford to be customers themselves.
This isn't just Apple. It's Corporate America. As a business executive, albeit in a small company, I have a pretty good idea what has been going on. Let me blow the whistle from my corporate perch.
It's scarcely a secret that during the Cllinton Era boom the public became accustomed to prices of manufactured goods that went down or stayed the same. The Bush Era recession extended that through 2004.
What have companies done to squeeze those humongous profits?
Consumers know executives have tweaked the contents of products and played shell games with the terms of sale. Less visibly, they also cut costs. Products are shoddier, less well-made; hence the popularity of imports. Detroit hasn't made the best car in decades.
Lastly, they've increased productivity. Human labor is always the most expensive ingredient (although, as we shall see, not always reasonably so). Management has two choices: find some way to make it possible for workers to produce more in the same number of hours, or distribute more work among fewer workers. American companies have done both.
The result is a collective suicide of American business. GM, Ford, IBM, the airlines and more are filing for bankruptcy to avoid pay hikes and pension costs, while laying off employees by the tens of thousands week after week.
The problemo with the boardrooms, however, is that they're led by folks making 431 times what employees make. Yes, you read that right. The CEO-worker pay ratio reported last September went up from 301:1 to 431:1 (see my source here).
Executive pay has grown exponentially just as their companies have become ever bigger failures. To be fair, there are perverse economic mechanisms that actually force some companies into that juncture. Some companies produce more book value earnings when they are going down than when they are rising and profits are in the future.
But let's think the unthinkable for an instant, especially for publicly held corporations. Maybe if corporations fired one of these 431-ers, they could hire 431 customer service people.
Or, say, hire 215 workers paid enough that they'd care about a customer's problem; or 107 better paid customer service reps and 107 better paid manufacturing workers to make better made goods.
The possible permutations are endless. But maybe if we invested more in workers, more of them would care about what they make and more would care about keeping the customer satisfied. Maybe more of them could afford to be customers themselves.
Monday, March 13, 2006
No Problemo
My experiences with Apple illustrate a situation that has become commonplace in the 21st century.
You go to a store and buy gadget X. You go home and try to get it working and it fails to turn on. Or it works for a week, then it dies.
You go back to the store, where a twentysomething with a goatee smiles idiotically and shrugs, saying, "No problemo."
No problemo?
Let's first start by informing the public that "problemo" is not a word in any language. The English word problem, meaning "a difficult question proposed for solution," comes from the Old French problème, which in turn comes from the Latin problema (from which Italian and Spanish get problema).
The Latin came from Greek problema (transliterated from the Greek alphabet), which itself derived from proballein "to propose," from the combination of pro "forward" and ballein "to throw."
So we have tossed the kid a hot potato and he smugly proclaims it's no biggy, we can get it fixed or get another.
Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here!
You paid the store good money. If you used a credit card, they checked and got the payment authorized.
The money was good the instant they got it. They didn't go to a restaurant get told that, "Sorry, those dollars just aren't working." They didn't have to take those malfunctioning dollars to the U.S. Treasury where some young thing named Tracy said "No problemo!"
Nope. So why is it not a problem that you had to go back to the store to repair or replace the shoddy machine even though you bought it with perfectly good legal tender?
You go to a store and buy gadget X. You go home and try to get it working and it fails to turn on. Or it works for a week, then it dies.
You go back to the store, where a twentysomething with a goatee smiles idiotically and shrugs, saying, "No problemo."
No problemo?
Let's first start by informing the public that "problemo" is not a word in any language. The English word problem, meaning "a difficult question proposed for solution," comes from the Old French problème, which in turn comes from the Latin problema (from which Italian and Spanish get problema).
The Latin came from Greek problema (transliterated from the Greek alphabet), which itself derived from proballein "to propose," from the combination of pro "forward" and ballein "to throw."
So we have tossed the kid a hot potato and he smugly proclaims it's no biggy, we can get it fixed or get another.
Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here!
You paid the store good money. If you used a credit card, they checked and got the payment authorized.
The money was good the instant they got it. They didn't go to a restaurant get told that, "Sorry, those dollars just aren't working." They didn't have to take those malfunctioning dollars to the U.S. Treasury where some young thing named Tracy said "No problemo!"
Nope. So why is it not a problem that you had to go back to the store to repair or replace the shoddy machine even though you bought it with perfectly good legal tender?
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Customer Unfriendly
Apple Computer, with its kindergarten sugarcoating of everything technical, popularized the term "user friendly," but don't be fooled. Apple products are no easier or effective, work no better, than any others.
As a matter of fact, Apple didn't invent the term "user friendly"; that was the work of the late architect and industrial designer, Ronald L. Mace (1941-1998), who pioneered buildings and devices accessible to disabled people.
More to the point of this essay, Apple customer service is decidedly unfriendly. Take my iPod. Please!
I was given the gadget as a present in the latter half of last year but have only been able to actually enjoy it for a few weeks.
First problem: you have to have a Mac (cough, sputter, spit) or Windows XP to load it. I had Windows 98. One of my sons had to format it and load my music on his laptop. Eventually I downgraded to XP.
Second: a couple of weeks into using it the thing simply stopped working. Wouldn't turn on no matter what I did.
I spent weeks trying everything imaginable. I even bought a new USB port card for my computer and downloaded, installed and uninstalled their software for, oh, a dozen times. I thought it was my fault somehow or that, as with most computing things, it was something I could fix.
I can fix most computer things -- short of a hard drive dying or a power supply melting down, in other words, things that you really need a factory to repair.
On the Apple Web site I put the problem and they sent a cute little box with foam in it to put the thing and have their messenger vendor take it back to Apple's Mecca in California's silicon valley. A couple of weeks later, they sent it back -- allegedly repaired.
Third: the iPod worked for a few days until it got a "sad icon." A computer with a frown on its monitor appears and points you to the support Web site, where they give you a list of things to try -- none of which worked.
So once again I played the cute-box game with Apple, this time with two or three of those oh-so-unhelpful corporate public relations e-mails in between, each saying essentially that very little was wrong their machine but they fixed it. The iPod came back in a about a week.
Fourth ... are you getting tired of counting? Me too, except that I'm living through the litany. So let's press on.
The "fixed" iPod worked for less then a day, sputtering between songs until it stopped and got "sad" again.
!@#$%^&* iPod!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I decided to call. (Stop laughing.)
I got someone who would not apologize, would not offer the slightest empathy. They got Bethany from Autism Casting Central -- zero emotion and totally wrapped up in her point of view of things. Bethany unhelpfully pointed me to the Web site, where they would send me a box and ...
I asked if she could actually help me. "I can fill out the Web form for you."
Sigh! Ok, so I answered her questions as she did. I spoke slowly, giving her time to type but she seemed baffled that there would be so many data elements.
"Does your address usually have all that in it?"
Bethany had been absent from school the day they explained that addresses may consist of name, organization, street address, city, state and zip (and, yes, country, continent, galaxy, ending with "The Universe").
Then she would lapse into silence without telling me what was going for two or three minutes at a time.
At the end of it she game me a "case number" ("Doctor, what do you make of this case of Sadiconitis?" "Oh, my, we'll have to fly in a transplant specialist.")
Fifth: My experience left me unconvinced that Bethany had solved matters. So I called their corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
I said I was a very dissatisfied customer who actually wanted to talk to somebody who would resolve my problem with some assurance that the person would understand and actually solve it.
I got Jackie. She was kind, said "oh, dear!" at appropriate moments, and generally seemed puzzled that the thing had been sent in twice and still didn't work. She suggested that I go to an Apple store and talk to a "Genius," which is what Apple calls its face-to-face tech support people.
Sounded like a plan. Jackie cancelled the cute box, which was probably already flying over Arizona coming my way.
Sixth: I looked up Apple stores. They have none in that remote, unknown little hamlet I live in called Washington, D.C., where there's a rumor of a village idiot named George B-something. Hmm ... but they have several stores in the suburbs.
The white suburbs, let's make that plain. Washington is 80 percent black -- no Apple store. Washington suburbs are 80 percent white -- 3 Apple stores. You do the math.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Apple store. You have to make an appointment on the same day and they will tell you when there are Geniuses available. I clicked on the Apple store closest to me and it went to a colorful Concierge page, then asked for my name and e-mail, then finished with a notice that they couldn't help me. Then it went back to the page with the store's address and phone number.
What? They won't serve me because they know by Web that I'm a Spic?
Seventh: I called the store. Taylor told me to "calm down." I couldn't be helped because the Bethesda facility is a "ministore" with only 1 Genius. (Somehow, I was not surprised that genius is in short supply at Apple.)
So here I am ... dreading the whole thing. I have to get up early one morning, log in, get an appointment for a time of their choosing, as if I have nothing to do, no work to do, no life to lead.
I don't even know whether the Apple Genius will turn out to be as genial as the iPod they sold and "repaired" twice or whether I will be forever trapped in the quest for the Holy Grail of iPod Repair.
No, that won't happen. One of these days, after my 17th cute box, 103rd telephone customer disservice representative and my 54th Genius, they'll say "The warranty has expired, sorry."
As a matter of fact, Apple didn't invent the term "user friendly"; that was the work of the late architect and industrial designer, Ronald L. Mace (1941-1998), who pioneered buildings and devices accessible to disabled people.
More to the point of this essay, Apple customer service is decidedly unfriendly. Take my iPod. Please!
I was given the gadget as a present in the latter half of last year but have only been able to actually enjoy it for a few weeks.
First problem: you have to have a Mac (cough, sputter, spit) or Windows XP to load it. I had Windows 98. One of my sons had to format it and load my music on his laptop. Eventually I downgraded to XP.
Second: a couple of weeks into using it the thing simply stopped working. Wouldn't turn on no matter what I did.
I spent weeks trying everything imaginable. I even bought a new USB port card for my computer and downloaded, installed and uninstalled their software for, oh, a dozen times. I thought it was my fault somehow or that, as with most computing things, it was something I could fix.
I can fix most computer things -- short of a hard drive dying or a power supply melting down, in other words, things that you really need a factory to repair.
On the Apple Web site I put the problem and they sent a cute little box with foam in it to put the thing and have their messenger vendor take it back to Apple's Mecca in California's silicon valley. A couple of weeks later, they sent it back -- allegedly repaired.
Third: the iPod worked for a few days until it got a "sad icon." A computer with a frown on its monitor appears and points you to the support Web site, where they give you a list of things to try -- none of which worked.
So once again I played the cute-box game with Apple, this time with two or three of those oh-so-unhelpful corporate public relations e-mails in between, each saying essentially that very little was wrong their machine but they fixed it. The iPod came back in a about a week.
Fourth ... are you getting tired of counting? Me too, except that I'm living through the litany. So let's press on.
The "fixed" iPod worked for less then a day, sputtering between songs until it stopped and got "sad" again.
!@#$%^&* iPod!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I decided to call. (Stop laughing.)
I got someone who would not apologize, would not offer the slightest empathy. They got Bethany from Autism Casting Central -- zero emotion and totally wrapped up in her point of view of things. Bethany unhelpfully pointed me to the Web site, where they would send me a box and ...
I asked if she could actually help me. "I can fill out the Web form for you."
Sigh! Ok, so I answered her questions as she did. I spoke slowly, giving her time to type but she seemed baffled that there would be so many data elements.
"Does your address usually have all that in it?"
Bethany had been absent from school the day they explained that addresses may consist of name, organization, street address, city, state and zip (and, yes, country, continent, galaxy, ending with "The Universe").
Then she would lapse into silence without telling me what was going for two or three minutes at a time.
At the end of it she game me a "case number" ("Doctor, what do you make of this case of Sadiconitis?" "Oh, my, we'll have to fly in a transplant specialist.")
Fifth: My experience left me unconvinced that Bethany had solved matters. So I called their corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
I said I was a very dissatisfied customer who actually wanted to talk to somebody who would resolve my problem with some assurance that the person would understand and actually solve it.
I got Jackie. She was kind, said "oh, dear!" at appropriate moments, and generally seemed puzzled that the thing had been sent in twice and still didn't work. She suggested that I go to an Apple store and talk to a "Genius," which is what Apple calls its face-to-face tech support people.
Sounded like a plan. Jackie cancelled the cute box, which was probably already flying over Arizona coming my way.
Sixth: I looked up Apple stores. They have none in that remote, unknown little hamlet I live in called Washington, D.C., where there's a rumor of a village idiot named George B-something. Hmm ... but they have several stores in the suburbs.
The white suburbs, let's make that plain. Washington is 80 percent black -- no Apple store. Washington suburbs are 80 percent white -- 3 Apple stores. You do the math.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Apple store. You have to make an appointment on the same day and they will tell you when there are Geniuses available. I clicked on the Apple store closest to me and it went to a colorful Concierge page, then asked for my name and e-mail, then finished with a notice that they couldn't help me. Then it went back to the page with the store's address and phone number.
What? They won't serve me because they know by Web that I'm a Spic?
Seventh: I called the store. Taylor told me to "calm down." I couldn't be helped because the Bethesda facility is a "ministore" with only 1 Genius. (Somehow, I was not surprised that genius is in short supply at Apple.)
So here I am ... dreading the whole thing. I have to get up early one morning, log in, get an appointment for a time of their choosing, as if I have nothing to do, no work to do, no life to lead.
I don't even know whether the Apple Genius will turn out to be as genial as the iPod they sold and "repaired" twice or whether I will be forever trapped in the quest for the Holy Grail of iPod Repair.
No, that won't happen. One of these days, after my 17th cute box, 103rd telephone customer disservice representative and my 54th Genius, they'll say "The warranty has expired, sorry."
Monday, February 27, 2006
Pirate's Second Cup
Too bad
the work week's
grim reality
spills its thick dark
coffee headlines
on the weekend's
back page.
Why can't we
endlessly continue
in expectation
whimsy
abandon
just one moment longer
one more game level, ma ...?
Because
in Monday's high seas
privateers plunder
waves wash decks clear
of good deeds
freely paid
with just one squeeze
of the hand.
the work week's
grim reality
spills its thick dark
coffee headlines
on the weekend's
back page.
Why can't we
endlessly continue
in expectation
whimsy
abandon
just one moment longer
one more game level, ma ...?
Because
in Monday's high seas
privateers plunder
waves wash decks clear
of good deeds
freely paid
with just one squeeze
of the hand.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Lapwing's Landing
Are you set for a landing
or a crash? A bird
never knows,
flying in defiance
of the laws
of aerodynamics.
Lava, lavender,
lapwing.
A temporal trinity
imparting life,
liberty, the pursuit of
unity.
Are you a seagull
seeking shelter, a vulture
circling doom, or a dove
bearing a reed
that announces
the end
of the deluge?
or a crash? A bird
never knows,
flying in defiance
of the laws
of aerodynamics.
Lava, lavender,
lapwing.
A temporal trinity
imparting life,
liberty, the pursuit of
unity.
Are you a seagull
seeking shelter, a vulture
circling doom, or a dove
bearing a reed
that announces
the end
of the deluge?
Friday, February 17, 2006
Liberation?
Several women in a Latin American e-mail list that I run (see Cara y Ceca) have raised the complaint that the liberation of women hasn't turned out to be such a great freedom after all and this has left me wondering. One of them went so far as to declare:
We'd be better off back in the age of the caves, when women only had to feed and look after the family. Now we have to be the one who supports it as well and that has consequences.
This is a professional who travels and lives what seems to be a comfortable middle class life. Another adds:
Due to the supposed "liberation," we are more enslaved than before.
A third offers a class analysis:
My experience shows me that the complaints come without doubt first from women of the upper classes, who generally have two maids, about whom they protest that "they are lazybones" as they themselves indulge in navel gazing. Middle class women are more evenhanded. They complain less and have more responsibilities. Lower class women, who don't complain at all, have the worst lot because they work at home and work outside the home while their men spend the day getting drunk. The strangest thing is that if the men leave them, they quickly search (and find) a substitute. What for? To support lazy slugs?
Asked whether the answer is for women to go back to kinder, küche, kirche, they demur. No, that's not it.
So I wonder whether the problem is merely that we've been a little too optimistic. We thought, circa 1972, when it was said that "sisterhood is powerful," that a few good slogans and a few laws and regulations and even a few good magazine articles and movies would change things radically.
But, let's face it, the setup between men and women that existed then had been in place since men left the caves to go hunt and women stayed behind cooking, mending and caring for the young. What are three decades of the second wave of feminism against 100 millenia or so?
In the prevailing pattern, moreover, women have a biological role that is irreplaceable and an emotional and developmental role that I deem essential and also next to impossible to replace.
So long as human reproduction involves gestation within a woman's womb for nine months, I don't see too many ways out of the conundrums that a woman working outside the home inevitably faces: mothering is just a huge responsibility that only a mother can fully discharge. Can a mother do anything else?
The Republicans seem to think so. They're willing to force poor women with infants to drop off the children with day care providers the GOP is unwilling to subsidize and attend "work activities" in order to receive federal aid that fails to lift them out of poverty.
Another exponent of right-wing ideology, none other than Generalissimo Francisco Franco, paid mothers and housewives who stayed home a small State stipend (I think it was a few hundred pesetas monthly) back in the 1950s.
More liberal views in our Western society, and I include Latin America as Western, seem to prescribe women engaging in a balancing act and men occasionally trading places. In the USA, we have the Family and Medical Leave Act, which at least holds a job slot, albeit without pay, for an employee attending to pregnancy or family illness. The house-husband and "Mr. Mom" arose in the 1970s, largely exceptional instances of this option. And, of course, day care.
Let me say something unpopular right up front. I think day care stinks. Care providers are mostly foreign or poor and uneducated women with the same fairly rough and tumble manner in which they were brought up.
I see them in downtown Washington, taking them to Laffayette Park in little carts that remind me of those ridden by prisoners on their ride to the guillotine; there's a cookie-cutter response to every child's question or problem and on the whole an evident desire on the part of the women, to let the little creatures play so they can talk about their dates. The university educated woman who leaves a child in such care is gambling with her child's sanity.
My younger son would have wilted in such care. He was an unusual boy of very inventive ideas that would strained the uncaring adult. For example, at one point he had a very complex set of substitute names for colors: blue was red, red was green, green was turquoise, etc. This changed every week, then every two days, then every day, until it stopped and he adopted the conventional vocabulary.
But I can imagine what would have happened at a day care center. Some young woman with an IQ to match her low pay would have exclaimed, "Speak right! This is blue!" Slap! And he would have gone off to be in a corner. Terrified.
He attends Harvard today. Would he have without university educated parents willing to do without a second income to make sure he was cared for by the person who loved and understood him most? And I have no idea what a single mother in that spot would have done!
But day care isn't the only problem. We simply need to come to grips, as a society, with the reality that motherhood and fatherhood are important roles that can't be delegated and should be supported.
Think about it. We all know that U.S. wages have pretty much stagnated in real terms since 1973. In fact, the average wage in 2004 was 22 percent below what it was in 1973. Is it merely a coincidence that in the intervening three decades the half of the population that used to stay home entered the labor market?
Why is it that our parents were able to support a family on one income and our children barely can on two? We, as a society, simply don't value the unique, unpaid labor of women and don't make it possible for men to share in it more.
I'm far from having "the" answer to such a problem.
Once again, I harken back to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the 1932 vision of a future in which human reproduction took place in industrial laboratories in which society was genetically engineered for harmony and sex was merely a pleasure without consequences. Men and women were precise equals, yet Huxley could not overcome his 1932 prejudices in sketching his characters.
It's a possible future. Otherwise, we're a long way, baby, however long we've already gone.
We'd be better off back in the age of the caves, when women only had to feed and look after the family. Now we have to be the one who supports it as well and that has consequences.
This is a professional who travels and lives what seems to be a comfortable middle class life. Another adds:
Due to the supposed "liberation," we are more enslaved than before.
A third offers a class analysis:
My experience shows me that the complaints come without doubt first from women of the upper classes, who generally have two maids, about whom they protest that "they are lazybones" as they themselves indulge in navel gazing. Middle class women are more evenhanded. They complain less and have more responsibilities. Lower class women, who don't complain at all, have the worst lot because they work at home and work outside the home while their men spend the day getting drunk. The strangest thing is that if the men leave them, they quickly search (and find) a substitute. What for? To support lazy slugs?
Asked whether the answer is for women to go back to kinder, küche, kirche, they demur. No, that's not it.
So I wonder whether the problem is merely that we've been a little too optimistic. We thought, circa 1972, when it was said that "sisterhood is powerful," that a few good slogans and a few laws and regulations and even a few good magazine articles and movies would change things radically.
But, let's face it, the setup between men and women that existed then had been in place since men left the caves to go hunt and women stayed behind cooking, mending and caring for the young. What are three decades of the second wave of feminism against 100 millenia or so?
In the prevailing pattern, moreover, women have a biological role that is irreplaceable and an emotional and developmental role that I deem essential and also next to impossible to replace.
So long as human reproduction involves gestation within a woman's womb for nine months, I don't see too many ways out of the conundrums that a woman working outside the home inevitably faces: mothering is just a huge responsibility that only a mother can fully discharge. Can a mother do anything else?
The Republicans seem to think so. They're willing to force poor women with infants to drop off the children with day care providers the GOP is unwilling to subsidize and attend "work activities" in order to receive federal aid that fails to lift them out of poverty.
Another exponent of right-wing ideology, none other than Generalissimo Francisco Franco, paid mothers and housewives who stayed home a small State stipend (I think it was a few hundred pesetas monthly) back in the 1950s.
More liberal views in our Western society, and I include Latin America as Western, seem to prescribe women engaging in a balancing act and men occasionally trading places. In the USA, we have the Family and Medical Leave Act, which at least holds a job slot, albeit without pay, for an employee attending to pregnancy or family illness. The house-husband and "Mr. Mom" arose in the 1970s, largely exceptional instances of this option. And, of course, day care.
Let me say something unpopular right up front. I think day care stinks. Care providers are mostly foreign or poor and uneducated women with the same fairly rough and tumble manner in which they were brought up.
I see them in downtown Washington, taking them to Laffayette Park in little carts that remind me of those ridden by prisoners on their ride to the guillotine; there's a cookie-cutter response to every child's question or problem and on the whole an evident desire on the part of the women, to let the little creatures play so they can talk about their dates. The university educated woman who leaves a child in such care is gambling with her child's sanity.
My younger son would have wilted in such care. He was an unusual boy of very inventive ideas that would strained the uncaring adult. For example, at one point he had a very complex set of substitute names for colors: blue was red, red was green, green was turquoise, etc. This changed every week, then every two days, then every day, until it stopped and he adopted the conventional vocabulary.
But I can imagine what would have happened at a day care center. Some young woman with an IQ to match her low pay would have exclaimed, "Speak right! This is blue!" Slap! And he would have gone off to be in a corner. Terrified.
He attends Harvard today. Would he have without university educated parents willing to do without a second income to make sure he was cared for by the person who loved and understood him most? And I have no idea what a single mother in that spot would have done!
But day care isn't the only problem. We simply need to come to grips, as a society, with the reality that motherhood and fatherhood are important roles that can't be delegated and should be supported.
Think about it. We all know that U.S. wages have pretty much stagnated in real terms since 1973. In fact, the average wage in 2004 was 22 percent below what it was in 1973. Is it merely a coincidence that in the intervening three decades the half of the population that used to stay home entered the labor market?
Why is it that our parents were able to support a family on one income and our children barely can on two? We, as a society, simply don't value the unique, unpaid labor of women and don't make it possible for men to share in it more.
I'm far from having "the" answer to such a problem.
Once again, I harken back to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the 1932 vision of a future in which human reproduction took place in industrial laboratories in which society was genetically engineered for harmony and sex was merely a pleasure without consequences. Men and women were precise equals, yet Huxley could not overcome his 1932 prejudices in sketching his characters.
It's a possible future. Otherwise, we're a long way, baby, however long we've already gone.
Friday, February 10, 2006
The Way Things Weren't
Seductive as it may be to look back upon a supposed golden age of extended families and traditional marriage, once we examine the way things actually were, the story is quite different.
This comes to mind as I recall the words of my maternal grandmother Ercilia in one of the series of notebooks that she came to title her Home Encyclopedia. Writing in in May 1959, at the age of 82, she had this to say about old age and, implicitly as we shall see, extended families:
Old age is the most unfortunate stage of life: you become clumsy and unpleasant, your face wrinkled and ugly, you suffer hearing loss, you bother others with constant repetition. In such circumstances, it would be most sensible for there to be a "Retreat for the Elderly."
These words were penned three years before she died. Ercilia had gone to live with my uncle Firo and aunt Lila, who were devoted to her.
You might have thought of their house as an impromptu artist colony. Lila, a pianist, still had students and their manglings of Beethoven's Für Elise on one of her pianos will echo forever in my brain. Firo was an artist in retirement who turned his imagination to his garden and to telling endless stories to his nephew.
My grandmother was a reclusive writer, leaving behind a dozen or so notebooks of poems, recollections and famous epigrams. Firo, who himself had his share of ailments, famously brought his mother-in-law a whole variety of healthful teas.
Yet the bedridden Ercilia, my family's last 19th century grand dame, was a ghost of the lady who would never step out into the street unless she was dressed to the nines, in her stole and flamboyant black hat. She understood her decline and she obviously detested her state, wishing for her own version of an ice floe.
The same can be said about the marriages of friends and relatives of my parents' generation, whom I shall allow the safe haven of anonymity and privacy. Only now as they age and die are the torturous and closeted secrets of even the most "perfect" unions coming to light.
The newly deceased Betty Friedan described the woman's side in her localized and pointed description of "the problem that has no name" in her acclaimed 1963 work The Feminine Mystique:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
And the men? Who could forget John Cheever's story The Country Husband, in which protagonist Francis Weed experiences a crash landing outside Philadelphia yet can barely get a word in edgewise at home, between his bickering children and impassively efficient wife's serving dinner. It is the kind of scene that might have inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
It isn't mere happenstance that once men and women were allowed to voice their despair, 50% of all first marriages and 75% of all second marriages came to end in divorce.
When I think of appeals to a better time in the past when the aged were supposedly at peace in a Waltonesque family network of love or an age in which men were men and women were mothers in hallowed structures supposedly protected by law, I am wont to recall the title of Simone Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be.
This comes to mind as I recall the words of my maternal grandmother Ercilia in one of the series of notebooks that she came to title her Home Encyclopedia. Writing in in May 1959, at the age of 82, she had this to say about old age and, implicitly as we shall see, extended families:
Old age is the most unfortunate stage of life: you become clumsy and unpleasant, your face wrinkled and ugly, you suffer hearing loss, you bother others with constant repetition. In such circumstances, it would be most sensible for there to be a "Retreat for the Elderly."
These words were penned three years before she died. Ercilia had gone to live with my uncle Firo and aunt Lila, who were devoted to her.
You might have thought of their house as an impromptu artist colony. Lila, a pianist, still had students and their manglings of Beethoven's Für Elise on one of her pianos will echo forever in my brain. Firo was an artist in retirement who turned his imagination to his garden and to telling endless stories to his nephew.
My grandmother was a reclusive writer, leaving behind a dozen or so notebooks of poems, recollections and famous epigrams. Firo, who himself had his share of ailments, famously brought his mother-in-law a whole variety of healthful teas.
Yet the bedridden Ercilia, my family's last 19th century grand dame, was a ghost of the lady who would never step out into the street unless she was dressed to the nines, in her stole and flamboyant black hat. She understood her decline and she obviously detested her state, wishing for her own version of an ice floe.
The same can be said about the marriages of friends and relatives of my parents' generation, whom I shall allow the safe haven of anonymity and privacy. Only now as they age and die are the torturous and closeted secrets of even the most "perfect" unions coming to light.
The newly deceased Betty Friedan described the woman's side in her localized and pointed description of "the problem that has no name" in her acclaimed 1963 work The Feminine Mystique:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
And the men? Who could forget John Cheever's story The Country Husband, in which protagonist Francis Weed experiences a crash landing outside Philadelphia yet can barely get a word in edgewise at home, between his bickering children and impassively efficient wife's serving dinner. It is the kind of scene that might have inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
It isn't mere happenstance that once men and women were allowed to voice their despair, 50% of all first marriages and 75% of all second marriages came to end in divorce.
When I think of appeals to a better time in the past when the aged were supposedly at peace in a Waltonesque family network of love or an age in which men were men and women were mothers in hallowed structures supposedly protected by law, I am wont to recall the title of Simone Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Where's My Ice Floe?
Although the senilicide attributed to Eskimos was never actually a generalized custom, but rather an exceptional emergency response to famine in the 18th century, the idea captures my imagination.
It's not that I have elders to dispose of, as my parents and grandparents have been all dead for years. Rather, I find calm in the idea of climbing on an ice floe with the intention of drifting away in arctic seas without food or covering until death comes.
It seems a humane way of ending what at a certain age -- mine -- begins to become a useless repetition of failures and missteps that will only worsen. Instead of steady impoverishment, physical decline, probable dementia and an eventual long descent onerous to relatives and society at large -- not to mention supremely boring to myself -- the idea of drifting off leaves me in a supreme peace.
From my years in Canada I have learned that freezing to death is, among ways to die, relatively pleasant. Cold overcomes consciousness, one drifts into a sleep from which one never awakes. All in a matter of hours.
Let's face it, death isn't going to be easy or painless. A few hours of drifting away in subzero temperatures might entail a bit of initial discomfort, but it seems bearable to me.
No more waiting through useless decades of "golden age" ... just a quiet drift into silence. Where's my ice floe?
It's not that I have elders to dispose of, as my parents and grandparents have been all dead for years. Rather, I find calm in the idea of climbing on an ice floe with the intention of drifting away in arctic seas without food or covering until death comes.
It seems a humane way of ending what at a certain age -- mine -- begins to become a useless repetition of failures and missteps that will only worsen. Instead of steady impoverishment, physical decline, probable dementia and an eventual long descent onerous to relatives and society at large -- not to mention supremely boring to myself -- the idea of drifting off leaves me in a supreme peace.
From my years in Canada I have learned that freezing to death is, among ways to die, relatively pleasant. Cold overcomes consciousness, one drifts into a sleep from which one never awakes. All in a matter of hours.
Let's face it, death isn't going to be easy or painless. A few hours of drifting away in subzero temperatures might entail a bit of initial discomfort, but it seems bearable to me.
No more waiting through useless decades of "golden age" ... just a quiet drift into silence. Where's my ice floe?
Sunday, February 05, 2006
The Worst Thing You Can Do To Your Lover
What's the worst thing you can do to the person you love?
You date someone, you kiss passionately, call each other at all hours, can barely spend a moment without thinking or talking about the other person. You decide you like the same books, generally support the same political party, go to the same church. You have ideas and goals that are similar. You want to have kids. Or you want to travel the world together.
You get married. Suddenly, the other person is there effortlessly. Out come the curlers and the creams, out come the streaked briefs and burps. One person wants the bedroom window open, the other wants it closed. One person's libido is stronger than the other's, eventually it all becomes mechanical: oh, it's Friday night, time honey (which sounds like "time, referee!") or even, oh, it's been a month.
Marriage is the worst thing you could do to someone you love.
Joni Mitchell sings it well:
We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
In fact, the piece of paper fails to keep 50% of all marriages from divorce -- let alone prevent physical and emotional forms of adultery and domestic violence.
Why marry at all? Absent children, what possible reason would anyone have to remove well-known and proven incentives for two people to continue trying to be attractive, interesting, respectful of and alluring to the other?
Why not have a romance that continues forever as the perfect third date?
OK, children. Here Aldous Huxley's Brave New World struck me as more sensible than our own.
In Huxley's futuristic world children were genetically engineered massively, with talents and proclivities suitable to the proportional needs of society for manual laborers, intellectuals, artists, engineers, etc. By design everyone was made for the tasks to which they would drift naturally. Childbirth and copulation for reproduction were banned and the imperative for birth control reinforced by nightly suggestion over the course of childhood.
You may think this is a long way off -- and what do I do in the meantime?
Fair enough. Coupling to serve as parents is a human imperative that perhaps requires the presence of two parents, at least for bonding and modeling -- even though most of us aren't such great models to begin with.
There are alternatives to the nuclear family. The Kibbutz, for example. And who says that outside the Israeli communal farm a married couple can't commit to be parents without committing to living together, to seeing each other at each other's worst, or without forswearing other people if the romantic interest wanes?
Whatever. I'm not a social engineer.
My point stands. Marriage is absurd.
Companionship, romance, sex, emotional closeness -- all these things can be shared between two people who legally remain entirely unbound and physically live apart. Or ... people can live together without the tie, so that when it stops working, when it stops being the way you want to live, all you have to do is call the movers, not lawyers and accountants.
What we have right now -- marriage, children, divorce -- is a pain! And remarriage ... well, how many times can you say "till death do us part" before you know you're a consummate liar, or a fool?
Sure, breaking up hurts and dating takes effort. But there's tons of poetry about it, movies, novels, and friends can really help for free and in a fun way. And you usually learn something from the romantic skirmishes of men and women.
You date someone, you kiss passionately, call each other at all hours, can barely spend a moment without thinking or talking about the other person. You decide you like the same books, generally support the same political party, go to the same church. You have ideas and goals that are similar. You want to have kids. Or you want to travel the world together.
You get married. Suddenly, the other person is there effortlessly. Out come the curlers and the creams, out come the streaked briefs and burps. One person wants the bedroom window open, the other wants it closed. One person's libido is stronger than the other's, eventually it all becomes mechanical: oh, it's Friday night, time honey (which sounds like "time, referee!") or even, oh, it's been a month.
Marriage is the worst thing you could do to someone you love.
Joni Mitchell sings it well:
We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
In fact, the piece of paper fails to keep 50% of all marriages from divorce -- let alone prevent physical and emotional forms of adultery and domestic violence.
Why marry at all? Absent children, what possible reason would anyone have to remove well-known and proven incentives for two people to continue trying to be attractive, interesting, respectful of and alluring to the other?
Why not have a romance that continues forever as the perfect third date?
OK, children. Here Aldous Huxley's Brave New World struck me as more sensible than our own.
In Huxley's futuristic world children were genetically engineered massively, with talents and proclivities suitable to the proportional needs of society for manual laborers, intellectuals, artists, engineers, etc. By design everyone was made for the tasks to which they would drift naturally. Childbirth and copulation for reproduction were banned and the imperative for birth control reinforced by nightly suggestion over the course of childhood.
You may think this is a long way off -- and what do I do in the meantime?
Fair enough. Coupling to serve as parents is a human imperative that perhaps requires the presence of two parents, at least for bonding and modeling -- even though most of us aren't such great models to begin with.
There are alternatives to the nuclear family. The Kibbutz, for example. And who says that outside the Israeli communal farm a married couple can't commit to be parents without committing to living together, to seeing each other at each other's worst, or without forswearing other people if the romantic interest wanes?
Whatever. I'm not a social engineer.
My point stands. Marriage is absurd.
Companionship, romance, sex, emotional closeness -- all these things can be shared between two people who legally remain entirely unbound and physically live apart. Or ... people can live together without the tie, so that when it stops working, when it stops being the way you want to live, all you have to do is call the movers, not lawyers and accountants.
What we have right now -- marriage, children, divorce -- is a pain! And remarriage ... well, how many times can you say "till death do us part" before you know you're a consummate liar, or a fool?
Sure, breaking up hurts and dating takes effort. But there's tons of poetry about it, movies, novels, and friends can really help for free and in a fun way. And you usually learn something from the romantic skirmishes of men and women.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Passion meets a Pope
The topic of this pope's first encyclical letter Deus est caritas, reminded a friend of the 1931 song by Jean Lenoir, which has recently been sung memorably by Quebecois chanteuse Renee Claude.
Parlez-moi d'amour,
Redites-moi des choses tendres.
Votre beau discours,
Mon coeur n'est pas las de l'entendre.
Pourvu que toujours
Vous répétiez ces mots suprêmes:
Je vous aime.
(Speak to me of love / Tell me again tender things / Your beautiful colors, / My heart won't tire of them. / As long as you always / repeat these majestic words: /I love you.)
Only the French could sing so bold a declaration without blushing. Yet I fear they are right: every woman wishes to hear entreaties of love, however purple. Every man shakes and quivers at the consequences. All of us still like to be liked and love to be loved.
So it's cleverly seductive of Papa Ratzinger to chose love as the subject of his first lecture.
Predictably, the pope spends the bulk of his letter urging upon his church a greater sense of charity (caritas), the love he deems best, but he begins -- and catches my eye -- in his attempt to tame Eros, the Greek god of love, the form he likes least. In outlining the various forms of love, of course, the pope lags by decades behind the Anglican C.S. Lewis ' work The Four Loves which explores family love, love among friends, erotic or romantic love, and altruistic or self-giving love -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape, respectively.
In the Greek conception, it was not God who was love (or the image of love) as Ratzinger states in his opening, but loving that was divine. Divinity meant freedom from the chains of Fate and mastery of one's own destiny. What modern psychiatrists call the break of ego boundaries at the point of orgasm, from which bursts forth a torrent of sensations, feelings and thoughts that convey a sense of freedom, unity with another, pleasure and more, is what the Eros myth is all about.
"In the [pre-Christian] religions," Ratzinger asserts, "this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the 'sacred' prostitution which flourished in many temples ... this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing 'divine madness': far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited."
Ratzinger cleverly elides the fact that cultic sex -- which is inappropriately called "prostitution" given the modern connotations of the term -- was often understood as a god-human sexual encounter conceptually similar to that implicit in the story of the Catholic Church's own divinely impregnated Virgin Mary. To top it off, Ratzinger, has the temerity to adopt an ersatz "feminist" stance -- Women's Ordination Conference, take note! -- in stating that "the prostitutes in the temple ... were human persons being exploited."
Need we note that Ratzinger is the very man who tried to infallibilize Pope John Paul II's letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (On Reserving Priestly Ordination To Men Alone) -- which Papa Wojtyla pointedly declined to do himself? Oh, the crocodile tears Ratzinger sheds for the exploitation of the priestesses of the very same female sex he does not deem worthy of ordination in his own religion!
To critics of the Church's anti-sex catechetics and teaching, Ratzinger offers another deceptive admission: "Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed."
You think that's an admission? Think again. He's pointing to manicheism and other views that he can safely distance himself from because august church bodies of the past have declared them "heretical."
In sum, Ratzinger would have you believe that the same religion that burned witches and insists on denying that women can serve as priests has fought sex in the name of concern for the dignity of women. This is true, so long as you understand that implicit in the bargain of Ratzinger-minded Catholics is that women abide with the confines of, as the German slogan had it, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Ratzinger the pope doesn't quite come out and say it.
Ratzinger does make a stab at connecting his domesticated eros with the somewhat different notion of agape. That's another excursion for another day.
At the core of everything Ratzinger is saying about eros, it seems, is the fear that strikes the heart of a powerful white septuagenarian upon coming across the unfettered passion in the words "Je t'aime" (I love you).
Parlez-moi d'amour,
Redites-moi des choses tendres.
Votre beau discours,
Mon coeur n'est pas las de l'entendre.
Pourvu que toujours
Vous répétiez ces mots suprêmes:
Je vous aime.
(Speak to me of love / Tell me again tender things / Your beautiful colors, / My heart won't tire of them. / As long as you always / repeat these majestic words: /I love you.)
Only the French could sing so bold a declaration without blushing. Yet I fear they are right: every woman wishes to hear entreaties of love, however purple. Every man shakes and quivers at the consequences. All of us still like to be liked and love to be loved.
So it's cleverly seductive of Papa Ratzinger to chose love as the subject of his first lecture.
Predictably, the pope spends the bulk of his letter urging upon his church a greater sense of charity (caritas), the love he deems best, but he begins -- and catches my eye -- in his attempt to tame Eros, the Greek god of love, the form he likes least. In outlining the various forms of love, of course, the pope lags by decades behind the Anglican C.S. Lewis ' work The Four Loves which explores family love, love among friends, erotic or romantic love, and altruistic or self-giving love -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape, respectively.
In the Greek conception, it was not God who was love (or the image of love) as Ratzinger states in his opening, but loving that was divine. Divinity meant freedom from the chains of Fate and mastery of one's own destiny. What modern psychiatrists call the break of ego boundaries at the point of orgasm, from which bursts forth a torrent of sensations, feelings and thoughts that convey a sense of freedom, unity with another, pleasure and more, is what the Eros myth is all about.
"In the [pre-Christian] religions," Ratzinger asserts, "this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the 'sacred' prostitution which flourished in many temples ... this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing 'divine madness': far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited."
Ratzinger cleverly elides the fact that cultic sex -- which is inappropriately called "prostitution" given the modern connotations of the term -- was often understood as a god-human sexual encounter conceptually similar to that implicit in the story of the Catholic Church's own divinely impregnated Virgin Mary. To top it off, Ratzinger, has the temerity to adopt an ersatz "feminist" stance -- Women's Ordination Conference, take note! -- in stating that "the prostitutes in the temple ... were human persons being exploited."
Need we note that Ratzinger is the very man who tried to infallibilize Pope John Paul II's letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (On Reserving Priestly Ordination To Men Alone) -- which Papa Wojtyla pointedly declined to do himself? Oh, the crocodile tears Ratzinger sheds for the exploitation of the priestesses of the very same female sex he does not deem worthy of ordination in his own religion!
To critics of the Church's anti-sex catechetics and teaching, Ratzinger offers another deceptive admission: "Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed."
You think that's an admission? Think again. He's pointing to manicheism and other views that he can safely distance himself from because august church bodies of the past have declared them "heretical."
In sum, Ratzinger would have you believe that the same religion that burned witches and insists on denying that women can serve as priests has fought sex in the name of concern for the dignity of women. This is true, so long as you understand that implicit in the bargain of Ratzinger-minded Catholics is that women abide with the confines of, as the German slogan had it, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Ratzinger the pope doesn't quite come out and say it.
Ratzinger does make a stab at connecting his domesticated eros with the somewhat different notion of agape. That's another excursion for another day.
At the core of everything Ratzinger is saying about eros, it seems, is the fear that strikes the heart of a powerful white septuagenarian upon coming across the unfettered passion in the words "Je t'aime" (I love you).
Friday, January 20, 2006
Hispania, Historia
A recurring set of personal struggles that touch upon who I am ethnically prompts a meditation on these two Roman words, which lie at the roots of the Hispanic identity.
Hispania because the common characteristics of all who are imbued with this identity are linked in some way to the peoples, the peninsula and the variegated parlance of Spain. Historia because hispanidad (or "Hispanicity") is a collective story that goes as far back as the caves of Altamira.
Let's dwell on these two thoughts.
Although both these words are in Latin, the people themselves are not really "Latin" or Latino, as dubbed by the American newspapers whose ranks of reporters are kept well shy of any proportional number of people who could be identified as such.
President Bush Sr.'s vice president, Dan Quayle, was hilariously wrong, of course: speaking Latin would not really help in Latin America. Indeed, Hispanic America is Latin America only to the usurpers of the name America, the Anglo-Americans and those who have subsumed their own very different identities into that of the Anglos. To them, any other part of the continent named America long before the first Englishman set sail westward, must be "Something-else America" ... 'cuz we all know 'murrica is the USA, right?
So, no. Hispanics.
Of course, this does not mean that Hispanics are Spaniards from Madrid. Just look at us. Hispanic skin comes in a veritable ice-cream bazaar's palette of hues, from the pale pink called "white," to various shades of brown through the sepia "yellow." However, the commonality goes back to Hispania, itself another mosaic including the Celts from Galicia, the Lusitanians or Portuguese, the Basques and Catalonians, in addition to the Baetic, or central, Spaniards, whose Castillian tongue is the third most widely spoken language in the world, behind Chinese and Hindi.
At the heart of the story of Hispanics is the dazzling historical intermingling of Africans, Asians and Europeans -- a development that was never again matched -- in the world's first empire upon which the sun never set. In America -- the small U.S. of A. America of the Anglos -- such a thing remains what Martin Luther King, Jr., called a "dream," but what many in power today regard a nightmare.
The history of Hispania suggests that the peninsula's people were uniquely prepared to carry out the first global fusion of the long parted branches of the human family. Hispania was always a crossroads and a shelter, beginning with the first post-Neanderthal humans who had reached Europe from the steppes of Central Asia and sought refuge from the last ice age in the mountainous peninsula, in whose caves they left some of the world's oldest art works. Celts, Phoenicians, Israelites, Egyptians and Carthaginians followed, then the Romans, Visigoths and Moors. (Incidentally, the first Arab Muslim attack on a Western society took place in Spain.) Finally, under the Hapsburg dynasty, Hispania set sail around the world all the way to islands named after King Philip II, the Philippines.
There are, to be sure, shameful episodes as well as heroic and noble in this lengthy Historia. No Spaniard relishes a return of the Inquisition (although they know that it started in France). No Hispanic today wears the expulsion of Jews as a badge of pride (although we know that England preceeded Spain in the very same legislation and policy by two centuries). Colonization, the process named after the adoptive Spaniard Cristóbal Colón, involved tragedy and irretrievable loss (although without the deep ethnic strife that every single former English colony has known even in recent memory).
Why does all this matter? After all, ethnicity is not an inherent trait. Even Osama bin Laden was human and male before he was Arab and Muslim. Ethnicity is one of many sets of identities available to us. Incidentally, this term "identity," which we use to distinguish ourselves from one another, comes from the Latin idem, "the same"; all of which means that we set ourselves apart from some when we find commonality with others.
Yet living in the USA, as a USA-American, the paradox seem lost to the society around me. I keep witnessing the Orwellian erasure of my distinctive people and their history, as if Hispanics were cultural blank slates and counted for nothing.
(This post is retroactively part of Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)
Hispania because the common characteristics of all who are imbued with this identity are linked in some way to the peoples, the peninsula and the variegated parlance of Spain. Historia because hispanidad (or "Hispanicity") is a collective story that goes as far back as the caves of Altamira.
Let's dwell on these two thoughts.
Although both these words are in Latin, the people themselves are not really "Latin" or Latino, as dubbed by the American newspapers whose ranks of reporters are kept well shy of any proportional number of people who could be identified as such.
President Bush Sr.'s vice president, Dan Quayle, was hilariously wrong, of course: speaking Latin would not really help in Latin America. Indeed, Hispanic America is Latin America only to the usurpers of the name America, the Anglo-Americans and those who have subsumed their own very different identities into that of the Anglos. To them, any other part of the continent named America long before the first Englishman set sail westward, must be "Something-else America" ... 'cuz we all know 'murrica is the USA, right?
So, no. Hispanics.
Of course, this does not mean that Hispanics are Spaniards from Madrid. Just look at us. Hispanic skin comes in a veritable ice-cream bazaar's palette of hues, from the pale pink called "white," to various shades of brown through the sepia "yellow." However, the commonality goes back to Hispania, itself another mosaic including the Celts from Galicia, the Lusitanians or Portuguese, the Basques and Catalonians, in addition to the Baetic, or central, Spaniards, whose Castillian tongue is the third most widely spoken language in the world, behind Chinese and Hindi.
At the heart of the story of Hispanics is the dazzling historical intermingling of Africans, Asians and Europeans -- a development that was never again matched -- in the world's first empire upon which the sun never set. In America -- the small U.S. of A. America of the Anglos -- such a thing remains what Martin Luther King, Jr., called a "dream," but what many in power today regard a nightmare.
The history of Hispania suggests that the peninsula's people were uniquely prepared to carry out the first global fusion of the long parted branches of the human family. Hispania was always a crossroads and a shelter, beginning with the first post-Neanderthal humans who had reached Europe from the steppes of Central Asia and sought refuge from the last ice age in the mountainous peninsula, in whose caves they left some of the world's oldest art works. Celts, Phoenicians, Israelites, Egyptians and Carthaginians followed, then the Romans, Visigoths and Moors. (Incidentally, the first Arab Muslim attack on a Western society took place in Spain.) Finally, under the Hapsburg dynasty, Hispania set sail around the world all the way to islands named after King Philip II, the Philippines.
There are, to be sure, shameful episodes as well as heroic and noble in this lengthy Historia. No Spaniard relishes a return of the Inquisition (although they know that it started in France). No Hispanic today wears the expulsion of Jews as a badge of pride (although we know that England preceeded Spain in the very same legislation and policy by two centuries). Colonization, the process named after the adoptive Spaniard Cristóbal Colón, involved tragedy and irretrievable loss (although without the deep ethnic strife that every single former English colony has known even in recent memory).
Why does all this matter? After all, ethnicity is not an inherent trait. Even Osama bin Laden was human and male before he was Arab and Muslim. Ethnicity is one of many sets of identities available to us. Incidentally, this term "identity," which we use to distinguish ourselves from one another, comes from the Latin idem, "the same"; all of which means that we set ourselves apart from some when we find commonality with others.
Yet living in the USA, as a USA-American, the paradox seem lost to the society around me. I keep witnessing the Orwellian erasure of my distinctive people and their history, as if Hispanics were cultural blank slates and counted for nothing.
(This post is retroactively part of Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)
Saturday, January 14, 2006
On Becoming a Woman
"I miss Lapwing," some folks have written to me. I miss Lapwing, too, even though I was (am?) that insouciante young woman inside the skin of a much crankier middle-aged man.
Who was Lapwing and who is Lapwing? I've already explained the origins of the name and it's author (see here), and when people say they miss Lapwing they don't mean either. They mean they miss the distinctly female personality of Lapwing.
I didn't set out to create a female Lapwing. Indeed, I never came out and told anyone Lapwing was female. When some curious souls asked whether Lapwing's relationship with Cecilieaux included bed, I adopted a Sphinx-like silence.
It was men, men who wanted to know whether the author of Lapwing's e-mail and Lapwing's blog was a man or a woman, men who wrote to meet Lapwing, men who began referring to "her" while Lapwing made strenous efforts to write without using personal pronouns ... they were the ones who made Lapwing feminine. Then there were some women who believed the men or to whom Lapwing sounded female.
Truth in labelling: I belong to the male persuasion with no interest in changing. I am heterosexual.
And yet, and yet ... Lapwing seemed to be female. She was a 30-something know-it-all young woman. A bit biting at times, yet a softie in the end: a pacifist, a person concerned for children. Stop the presses: I have those qualities.
Lapwing, however, had a lighter touch than I and when she was insulted or hurt she would not let the sun go down on her wrath. She did not return rudeness in kind. Lapwing ended up, by acclamation, becoming a woman.
It was quite an experience. I never lied. I never invented things to trick people. These were my honest feelings, the honest facts (with a small genital omission).
Is there such a thing as a female personality? I used to think not. But I think now that there is. Or rather, that we assign to certain behavior the label feminine and to other the label masculine.
It was fun trying out being a woman without any messy biological work or serious legal complications.
Women can speak up gently, can embarrass, can call rowdy behavior to a stop with a figurative wagging of their finger. A woman never gets into a fight. She wins by raising her eyebrows. No one dares outright challenge a woman to go mano a mano.
There are, of course, a whole lot of troglodytes out there -- you know who you are -- who think nothing of belittling a woman in a way they'd be afraid to do so with a man. Yes, I learned that if you are a woman on the Net, at least the other women will always stick up for you. They won't pick up your cudgel and beat the brutes' brains out, as they deserve. No, they'll quietly send a little message of support.
At last, I had a sense of what women do among themselves. I experienced a little bit of the sorority, so healing, so supportive, so helpful, that binds women in a way that is not echoed in the male bond of fraternity.
Who was Lapwing and who is Lapwing? I've already explained the origins of the name and it's author (see here), and when people say they miss Lapwing they don't mean either. They mean they miss the distinctly female personality of Lapwing.
I didn't set out to create a female Lapwing. Indeed, I never came out and told anyone Lapwing was female. When some curious souls asked whether Lapwing's relationship with Cecilieaux included bed, I adopted a Sphinx-like silence.
It was men, men who wanted to know whether the author of Lapwing's e-mail and Lapwing's blog was a man or a woman, men who wrote to meet Lapwing, men who began referring to "her" while Lapwing made strenous efforts to write without using personal pronouns ... they were the ones who made Lapwing feminine. Then there were some women who believed the men or to whom Lapwing sounded female.
Truth in labelling: I belong to the male persuasion with no interest in changing. I am heterosexual.
And yet, and yet ... Lapwing seemed to be female. She was a 30-something know-it-all young woman. A bit biting at times, yet a softie in the end: a pacifist, a person concerned for children. Stop the presses: I have those qualities.
Lapwing, however, had a lighter touch than I and when she was insulted or hurt she would not let the sun go down on her wrath. She did not return rudeness in kind. Lapwing ended up, by acclamation, becoming a woman.
It was quite an experience. I never lied. I never invented things to trick people. These were my honest feelings, the honest facts (with a small genital omission).
Is there such a thing as a female personality? I used to think not. But I think now that there is. Or rather, that we assign to certain behavior the label feminine and to other the label masculine.
It was fun trying out being a woman without any messy biological work or serious legal complications.
Women can speak up gently, can embarrass, can call rowdy behavior to a stop with a figurative wagging of their finger. A woman never gets into a fight. She wins by raising her eyebrows. No one dares outright challenge a woman to go mano a mano.
There are, of course, a whole lot of troglodytes out there -- you know who you are -- who think nothing of belittling a woman in a way they'd be afraid to do so with a man. Yes, I learned that if you are a woman on the Net, at least the other women will always stick up for you. They won't pick up your cudgel and beat the brutes' brains out, as they deserve. No, they'll quietly send a little message of support.
At last, I had a sense of what women do among themselves. I experienced a little bit of the sorority, so healing, so supportive, so helpful, that binds women in a way that is not echoed in the male bond of fraternity.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Economic Insight
There must be a chemical in the brain that reacts to an enlightening presentation the way pleasure suffuses over the entire body when one takes refuge in an English country inn for the absolutely perfect cup of tea on a wet and miserable afternoon.
There's a similar chemistry in my brain connected to the "aha!" moment that occurs when some august theory can be applied to my entirely all too ordinary daily life.
This was what occurred to me this week as I was hearing Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard professor of economics, speak about his new book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which -- in brief -- argues that economic growth brings greater social mobility, tolerance of diversity, fairness and robust democratic institutions, or what he calls "moral positives."
Challenged on that point, Friedman went on to explain that “what matters for happiness, or ‘satisfaction’ as pollsters put it, is not the absolute level of living, but the living standard relative to something else.” Research points to two powerful benchmarks of material well-being.
“Imagine that you were in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where everyone is better off than everyone else,” Friedman said. “Then imagine a world in which everybody has a sense of being better off than in the past. Then they would experience less urgency for economic growth personally and be willing, as some have suggested here, to let other people come along for the ride.”
It doesn't really matter if I make X amount of money by itself. What matters is the psychic reward of knowing that it's more than amount Y made by certain people with whom I compare myself. Then there's the final Oedipal victory in discovering that not only is this Not Your Father's Car, he couldn't have afforded anything this good -- or it wasn't invented back then.
This certainly explains why, living comfortably in the richest country in the world, my peers so often feel poor. John D. Rockefeller was once asked what was his ultimate financial goal. "To have just a little more," he replied.
So what do I do with this? I'm not sure. Perhaps this is one of these moments in which an insight simply needs to simmer before we know what is to be done.
There's a similar chemistry in my brain connected to the "aha!" moment that occurs when some august theory can be applied to my entirely all too ordinary daily life.
This was what occurred to me this week as I was hearing Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard professor of economics, speak about his new book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which -- in brief -- argues that economic growth brings greater social mobility, tolerance of diversity, fairness and robust democratic institutions, or what he calls "moral positives."
Challenged on that point, Friedman went on to explain that “what matters for happiness, or ‘satisfaction’ as pollsters put it, is not the absolute level of living, but the living standard relative to something else.” Research points to two powerful benchmarks of material well-being.
“Imagine that you were in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where everyone is better off than everyone else,” Friedman said. “Then imagine a world in which everybody has a sense of being better off than in the past. Then they would experience less urgency for economic growth personally and be willing, as some have suggested here, to let other people come along for the ride.”
It doesn't really matter if I make X amount of money by itself. What matters is the psychic reward of knowing that it's more than amount Y made by certain people with whom I compare myself. Then there's the final Oedipal victory in discovering that not only is this Not Your Father's Car, he couldn't have afforded anything this good -- or it wasn't invented back then.
This certainly explains why, living comfortably in the richest country in the world, my peers so often feel poor. John D. Rockefeller was once asked what was his ultimate financial goal. "To have just a little more," he replied.
So what do I do with this? I'm not sure. Perhaps this is one of these moments in which an insight simply needs to simmer before we know what is to be done.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Ralph Reed's Wages of Sin
Now we know, the wages of sin are $57,000. Or so it would seem from what the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed was willing to take from Jack Abramoff.
Yet where is the Christian moral outrage? Why aren't the preachers who rend their garments at the thought of gay marriage or a Democratic president not having sex with that woman concerned about bribes?
An answer may be found in an article a neighbor passed on to me. In Harper's December issue , the piece titled "Jesus Without the Miracles," starts with an appreciation of Jefferson's editing of the gospels, extracting birth narratives, miracles and resurrection accounts into what is now published as "Jefferson's Bible."
A telling three sentences from the article struck me:
To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. But to read Jefferson's version ... is to face a relentless demand that we be better people -- inside and out -- than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to most Americans -- then and now -- has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.
Now I realize that propitiation is not exclusively an American phenomenon, but I find myself paying increasing attention to a divide between Jesus and Christianity, on which I mused some blog eons ago.
On one hand, you have essentially commercial self-serving churches, whose doctrines stress "pie in the sky, by and by," providing the illusion of divine favor to their customers ... ah ... members, and maybe a social club. Christianity has been responsible for wars, persecutions, mass murders, justification of slavery and racism, and in 20 centuries has served every miscreant in power.
On the other, you have an itinerant preacher of long ago, whose claims to divinity and Messiahship were ambiguous, to say the least, insisting on a conversion of life to which Christians never quite seem to get around.
In the itinerant preacher's grand vision, the order we know in everyday life is upturned:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As to the likes of Abramoff and his unctuous Christian buddies:
But woe to you that are rich: for you have your consolation.
Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger.
Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep.
Yet where is the Christian moral outrage? Why aren't the preachers who rend their garments at the thought of gay marriage or a Democratic president not having sex with that woman concerned about bribes?
An answer may be found in an article a neighbor passed on to me. In Harper's December issue , the piece titled "Jesus Without the Miracles," starts with an appreciation of Jefferson's editing of the gospels, extracting birth narratives, miracles and resurrection accounts into what is now published as "Jefferson's Bible."
A telling three sentences from the article struck me:
To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. But to read Jefferson's version ... is to face a relentless demand that we be better people -- inside and out -- than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to most Americans -- then and now -- has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.
Now I realize that propitiation is not exclusively an American phenomenon, but I find myself paying increasing attention to a divide between Jesus and Christianity, on which I mused some blog eons ago.
On one hand, you have essentially commercial self-serving churches, whose doctrines stress "pie in the sky, by and by," providing the illusion of divine favor to their customers ... ah ... members, and maybe a social club. Christianity has been responsible for wars, persecutions, mass murders, justification of slavery and racism, and in 20 centuries has served every miscreant in power.
On the other, you have an itinerant preacher of long ago, whose claims to divinity and Messiahship were ambiguous, to say the least, insisting on a conversion of life to which Christians never quite seem to get around.
In the itinerant preacher's grand vision, the order we know in everyday life is upturned:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As to the likes of Abramoff and his unctuous Christian buddies:
But woe to you that are rich: for you have your consolation.
Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger.
Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep.
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