That 70s Oil Crisis is Baaack!

We Americans, who collectively have memories no longer than the average television commercial, are forced regularly to do. Helping recall the oil crises of the 1970s is the memory of televised long lines at gas stations summoned by the recent experience of paying hundredths of a cent over $4 per gallon of gasoline at the pump for the first time (granted, I buy premium).

Back in 1973, the first crisis, such things were irrelevant to me: I did not own or drive a car. Moreover, for most of the cold season I lived as a student in Canada where, thanks to the tar sands of Alberta, OPEC's oil embargo had no practical effect.

Let's backtrack.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had declared an embargo on all Western allies of Israel on Oct. 16, 1973, smack dab in the middle of the Yom Kippur (or, depending on your perspective, Ramadan) War started by Egypt and Syria. The Arab belligerents haled the initiative for the first two days but, as might have been expected, the Israeli army began to sweep them back. OPEC intervened.

On the whole, my feelings about the Middle East can be summed up in the notion that those Arabs and Israelis deserve one another. We should let them blow each other up to smithereens, if that's what they want.

A funny thing happened to an inveterate neutral like myself: I found that when oil was scarce the price of everything rose. Coming back to the USA in the spring, I found galloping inflation.

Why? Because, if you think of the economy as a complex organism (within which we're all microbes), oil is its blood. (Note the interaction between blood and oxygen and you'll find good imagery for the interaction of oil-produced hydrocarbons and air pollution.)

Note the items involved, because they come up again: steady U.S. oil consumption, trouble in the Middle East, sharp crude oil price increases (to about half what they are now), inflation.

In 1979, I was similarly uninvolved at a personal level, as I lived in London, England, where no sane person would drive.

Once again: oil consumption remained unabated, leading President Carter to preach about "malaise" in the middle of the "Me Decade," when no one was listening; Iran had its revolution and oil supply became unstable; prices rose to well above $80 for a barrel of crude, inflation (then stagnation) ensued.

Now we have another crises: a decade of U.S. gasoline gluttony leading to SUVs and Hummers, Iraq-Afghanistan-Iran plus unstable Lebanon, crude oil prices at over $100, inflation, coupled with a slowing economy.

This time we have three new factors: India and China have become big consumers; some believe the world supply is nearing known limits; and the short-term sustainability of an oil-based economy has been called into question by climate change predictions.

Perhaps this time we can learn that among those factors that we can influence, it's perhaps time to change the roles of oil producers and consumers.

We were warned about this by Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruíz de Santayana y Borrás (aka George Santayana) in his the following passage, whose third sentence is oft-quoted remark that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."¹

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1. "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience." (The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905)

Time for a Hillary Holiday

Here comes an instance of the unthinkable. This essay will focus on a substantive electoral issue, demonstrating at long last why Hillary Clinton and John McCain are unpresidential panderers at best and should not be nominated as candidates for their parties, nor much less elected.

All right, yes, McCain is at least in sync with his party's demagogic spiel: he can spin big lies into oversimplistic packages at least as well as George W. Bush could, perhaps even better. We'll leave the details for later.

Clinton, however, had me doubting.

In 1992 I would have voted for her, over her husband -- in a heartbeat. She was articulate, obviously intelligent, seemed focused on important issues -- including poverty -- and seemed (I did not know of her past as a Goldwater Girl) a truer exponent of the Democratic progressive tradition than William Jefferson Clinton.

You remember President Clinton? The guy who gave us big business' job-exporting NAFTA over the objections of unions and Newton Leroy Gingrich's pauperizing 1996 welfare reform bill over the objections of a half-dozen key advisers in his own cabinet agencies, but failed to deliver on the signature issue of his campaign, health care reform? That Clinton.

So, this election, I was looking forward to a seasoned version of the Hillary Clinton I thought I knew. A Democratic candidate willing to undo three decades years of GOP Thatcherist class war against the middle and poorer classes, in other words, the majority of this country.

The first tingle in my stomach was when I saw the rogues gallery of Clinton Administration expediency wizards pop up in her team. One of my friends had worked with Hillary Clinton in the White House and I had a pretty good idea of that inner circle; they were not my concern.

Rather, I worried about the expert advisers, the less-well-known crowd associated with high-profile substantive thinkers, such as Gene Sperling and Robert Rubin. I'd seen many of them in action and I knew they were brilliant. Yet, at heart, in my experience they have proven themselves arrogant pragmatists capable of anything to get a short-term win.

Winning in politics is important, but you win in order to accomplish something -- not the other way around.

Slowly, layer after layer of Hillary Clinton's Democratic skin began to peel off, like those of an onion. You know how onions make you cry? That was my response.

She'd been for Goldwater? She voted for the war in Iraq and still thought that was the correct vote? She was proud of what she'd done during the Clinton Administration?

She sure wasn't seeking my vote.

Now comes a real actual crisis -- a fuel price spike that hurts everybody's pocketbook (another post) -- and what does Hillary Clinton do but steal a play right out of the Republican book: let's have a gas tax "holiday."

In a nutshell: this would increase demand and raise prices further. It's the Exxon-BP plan. And, oh -- surprise, surprise -- it's also the McCain plan. It's the immediate gratification many people want.

It's what Barry Goldwater told Meet the Press in 1973, during that other oil crisis. I was watching that day and I remember him saying: "I want what every American wants: to go up the pump and say 'fill 'er up.' "

That's not what a great president says.

Great leaders are capable of offering "blood, sweat, toil and tears" (Winston Churchill) and proposing that we ask what we can do for our country (John Kennedy) or remind us that it's "fear itself" that we must fear (Franklin Roosevelt) -- and still have people eager to follow.

Leadership is the capacity to step ahead of the crowd and take it to new places, to become better people. Leaders help us abolish slavery, embrace the 8-hour day, end racial discrimination and feed the hungry among us.

Hillary Clinton has met her first real life challenge as a presidential leader -- escalating gas prices in an economic slowdown -- and has failed abysmally by setting aside sound economic policy to pander shamelessly to the crowd with the opposing party's all-purpose solution: cut taxes.

This is not a matter of what she wears on her lapel or what church she goes to or with whom she has sex -- all utterly irrelevant to the task of choosing a suitable president. At last we have a substantive question about which -- miracle of miracles! -- almost all Americans care.

Hillary Clinton had an opportunity to show the stuff of which she is made. She has failed. She is wrong on the policy substance. She is unpresidential in her response. She is a poll-follower, not a leader. She has failed to show that she is, in the one phrase of Dennis Kucinich's that I loved, "a Democrat from the Democratic wing of the party."

Therefore, to borrow from her prescription on gasoline, I propose that we all take a holiday from the Hillary Clinton candidacy.

Amen

The American echo chamber is so focused on selling everything from cars and cereal, to political sound bites and Bible verses, that a complex discourse underlying our society, such as that hinted at by the emergence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, gets drowned out in the din, and the time needed to digest it overtaken by our rush to nowhere.

At the heart of Wright's affirmations lies one part of the American mosaic: a faith that developed in a quest to squeeze out meaning out of a lifetime of misery. Let's parse that for a moment.

Faith, quest, meaning, misery.

Faith is, of course, if not the opposite, at least the very distant cousin of knowledge. We believe there will be a tomorrow based on the experience of our yesterdays, but we do not know for a fact that tomorrow is really a day a way. Indeed, the Orphan Annie song is about the perennial American belief that if we can only hold on to the next morning, things will be better.

That's the American quest. In one version, it was to go beyond the ocean, to go beyond the Appalachians to the plains and beyond that, past the Rockies, where the pot of gold was once thought to be found. To leave Europe's prejudices, hatreds, injustices and perennially warring kings behind and instead claim the Promised Land.

Of course, the Indians -- ideological purists note: Indians call themselves "Indian" these days -- had done it before, crossing the Bering Strait about 25,000 years ago for reasons less well known, but happily settling in hunting grounds full of Buffalo.

Also, of course, the westward march of the northwest Europeans was met by Indians and the descendants of Spaniards who had reached the pot of gold at least a century before the English at Jamestown and the Puritans at Plymouth.

Then there's peculiar kidnapping and transport by American, British and Portuguese merchants of African men, women and children for generations of enslaved labor in concentration camps throughout the American South.

This gave birth to a quest directly in conflict with the ambitions of the Europeans, which raises the question of the meaning of all this questing. Why seek out a new life across a land bridge or an ocean? Why lay claim to freedom?

Perhaps because in Asia, Europe and the euphemistically named plantations there was misery and death. In America we dislike the d-word. People among us do not die, they "pass away." Yet ask any anthropologist and you will learn that we learn about the religions of the past through their burial grounds.

Less well known than Karl Marx's famous "opium of the masses" is his dictum that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation."

The Rev. Wright is defending his people's sigh, much as immigrants did sacramentally in their Catholic ghettoes and the Calvinist unestablished denominations developed their individualistic, capitalist commonwealths -- and Indians mourned the destruction of the dwelling place of many spirits.

In the same vein, the sons and daughters of Abraham came to these shores reassured by George Washington's promise that "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens."

To the Jewish people, faith is the conviction that the world is ordered by the laws of a covenant given to their forebears. To the Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and now Latin American immigrants, faith is the assertion that hope can become fleshed in community. To the Anglo-Saxon former colonists faith has seemed to be the Calvinist claim that God helps those who help themselves.

To the black culture, faith is saying "amen" to the claim that freedom is God-given, therefore inalienable. Amen.

"I must not intervene in other countries"

It's a lesson that comes home to anyone who has observed U.S. foreign policy for long enough to see patterns, be it Asia, Latin America or even Europe: in every country our government has intervened politics have become hopelessly polarized. A blogger I've added to my regular reading, An Arab Woman Blues, tells it succinctly in a recent post on Iraq.

Layla, of whom I only know that she is "an Arab woman," that she is educated, multilingual, sometimes a tad frothy, a woman with anger to bristling to be "blues," as she titles them. I found her recent post, offering snippets of commentary from obviously middle or middle-upper class Iraqis in Baghdad full of items worth remembering about Iraq.

In particular, I was amused by the following:

Overall, most Baghdadis he met, both Sunnis and Shias are totally fed up with the Mullahs and their doctrines. Most Iraqis really want a "secular country" and a "secular government." (Well they had a secular country before their "liberation" - bunch of Idiots!)

According to my understanding, the Baathist Party (which flourished in Syria as well as Iraq), has been a pan-Arabist, secular, anti-Communist, social democratic and modernizing movement. This explains why Saddam Hussein brought about one of the most modern public-health systems in the Middle East, which earned him a UNESCO award.

However, if you examine Layla's admittedly unscientific sampling of opinions, you clearly get the idea that Iraq has gone from a strongman who was laying the foundational ground for progress, admittedly at some civic cost, to bands of extremist traditionalists.

In other words, all the U.S. invasion has achieved is the decapitation of a regime and its replacement with ... nothing. The middle class is fleeing, fled, or -- as Layla's relative found -- merely keeping their head down.

Nature, and politics, abhor a vacuum. Yet the U.S. diplomatic-military establishment keeps creating vacuums that suck in the worst of the worst. It was done in El Salvador, Vietnam, attempted in Chad and now in Iraq.

There are literally hundreds of other examples, which I pointed out before here and here in posts with themes depressingly similar to this one. So, Uncle Sam, you get to stay in detention this afternoon and write the title of this post on the blackboard 100 times.

Homer Simpson's Brazil, Capital of Buenos Aires

What's most bothersome to me, an Argentine-American, about the controversial dialogue among Homer Simpson's bar buddies regarding Juan Perón that has caused a stir in Argentina is what it says about how little each of my cultures grasps the other.

If you've missed the news, an episode of "The Simpsons" that mangles recent Argentine history has caused apoplexy in that nation's Congress and public opinion. The dialogue in question is the following:

Moe: "Who wants to abolish democracy forever? Show a hands!"
Carl: "I could really go for some kind of military dictator, like Juan Peron. When he 'disappeared' you, you stayed 'disappeared!' "
Lenny: "Plus his wife was Madonna."

To Argentine ears, the dialogue sounds something like this:

Marcelo: "Who wants to bring back slavery? Show of hands!"
Carlos: "I could really go for some kind of slaver, like Abraham Lincoln. When he enslaved you, you stayed a slave!"
Leonardo: "Plus, he was married to Vivien Leigh."

You remember, I trust, that Honest Abe was the author of the Emancipation Declaration and that Vivien Leigh was the English actress who played Civil War-era Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Similarly, Juan Domingo Perón was a general who was cleanly elected to the presidency by landslides three times (1946, 1952 and 1973). He stood for unions, voting rights for women, the 8-hour day and almost every major social advance in Argentina in the 20th century.

The folks who, between 1976 and 1983, brought about a government campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder leading to the disappearance of an estimated 30,000 Argentines were rabidly right-wing military men who overthrew Perón's third wife, Isabel, from the presidency.

Madonna (born Madonna Louise Ciccone) played Peron's charismatic and still-revered second wife in the eponymous film musical Evita.

Sure, The Simpson's Moe, Carl and Lenny represent classic Average Joes you find in small-town or neighborhood bars anywhere venting hot air about things they know nothing about. The American me knows that these characters' mixups are supposed to be humorous.

Attributing the disappearances to the twice-widowed Perón is tantamount to blaming globalization on Karl Marx or saying that Adolf Hitler founded the State of Israel. Yet the Argentine me, who actually knew at least one disappeared person, finds the joke distasteful, perhaps as difficult as a Shoah victim's friend might find humor about Auschwitz.

The problem is not humor itself. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's memoirs of his stay in the death camp "as a guest of the German government," as he facetiously put it, is full of humanizing humor that is perhaps the most effective testament to the absurdity of the Nazis.

Rather, the issue is how could one culture to which I belong know so little and be so callous about another culture to which I also belong?

I would be a billionaire by now if I had a dime for every time people who theoretically studied U.S. high school geography place Latin American countries within cities, as in "Brazil, capital of Buenos Aires." (Note to dropouts, or people whose diplomas should be recalled: Brazil is a country, Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina.)

How can we Americans have the audacity to claim economic and military global leadership of a world about which we know so pitifully little?

Granted, we are not alone.

When I was in secondary school in Buenos Aires I delighted in responding to queries about the United States with tall stories, such as the one that all city buses had soda vending machines. No one ever became the wiser -- until they eventually came to visit me here in adulthood.

Therefore, I might conversely ask how Latin Americans can bear to hold as deep a grudge against the abuses of American power when there is so much about the United States that reflects their deepest dreams and aspirations.

These are the questions that bedevil a Hispanic man trapped between two cultures whenever the two collide, as they do all too often.

Argentina's "Farmers" Are Not Exactly Old MacDonald

Despite a 30-day "truce" in their "strike" involving roadblocks around the country, the "farmers" of Argentina have decided not to deny their fellow-citizens their daily beef -- not that they've ceased airing their own absurd and unpalatable beefs. Witness an open letter to President Cristina Fernández de Kirschner being circulated on the Internet by the daughter of one such "farmer."

In part, one Victoria Guazzone di Passalacqua, 22, from the town of Azul, province of Buenos Aires (about 150 miles south of the nation's capital, Buenos Aires), writes the following:

I am the daughter of an agricultural producer who has worked like a horse all his on the countryside. I am a daughter of a father who, to this day, rises every morning at 6 to be the first to go and talk to the peons working in the paddocks. I am a daughter of a father who had to go and live in Azul to be able to give my brothers and me life he wanted for us. I am a daughter of a producer who lost 75% of his crop to the storms last year. I am a daughter of a producer who had to give half the remaining 25% to the government and use the other half deal to pay taxes, in addition to fending for his family's decent living. Despite all this, I am as daughter of the land like any Argentine.

I did not live under the military governments that sickened our country in the 1970s. I do not have missing relatives nor do I have military men in my escutcheon. But I understand that yesterday [reference to a speech by the president, date unknown], instead of continuing to perpetuate the ideological conflicts into which our country plunged more than 30 years ago, it might have been better take inventory of the situation and appease the spirits of everyone. In a history book I once read that "if there is no balance on all the parties involved in a particular chapter of history, justice will be read as revenge" Don't you think, Madam President, that it might be time for you to honor the whip with which you rule on behalf of the interests of all of us and to stop dividing the country into the pitiful dichotomy of the oligarchy and the people?

Only in the Alice-in-Wonderland sociology of the Argentine Republic can one find a landowner's daughter who came of age in the 21st century speaking of her father's farm hands as "peons" (peones in Spanish). Yes, Virginia, it does have the serf-like connotation that you thought it did.

Not only that. Only in such a neo-feudal social structure could the daughter of the landowner, who is obviously not performing his serfs' backbreaking work, no matter how equine his labor, complain that a democratically elected labor-backed president is somehow effecting a social division between "oligarchs" and "people."

Might it not occur to Miss Victoria that any society in which a young woman feels perfectly comfortable referring to her father's employees as "peons" in a public, open letter to her president, already has the social divisions -- nay, canyons -- to which President Cristina Kirchner has merely alluded in response to the landowners absurd and false populism?

To be sure, to any Western eye the 45% levy (up from 35%) on certain agricultural exports will seem a tad high in a country known for its beef, its grains and in more recent years its fine Malbec wines, as well as its leather goods and woolens. But there's a story and a sound purpose behind the tax.

Argentina was once wealthy country (in 1908, its economy was the seventh in the world). Now a quarter of the population lives in poverty -- a proportion brought down from nearly half of the country as recently as 2003, by the policies of Kirchner's predecessor, her husband Nestor. Overwhelmingly, Argentines in the educated class evade personal income taxes massively and park assets overseas.

The levy on exports is one of the few iron-clad mechanisms the government has to raise revenue from wealthy landowners, in order to distribute it through public services to the less fortunate.

Indeed, one of the chief reasons this nation of 40 million overwhelmingly Catholic people of predominantly Spanish and Italian ancestry, whose its capital is at about the latitude of Cape Town, became impoverished was the lack of vision of the traditional landowning class.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, agricultural interests fought tooth and nail to saddle the nascent industrial sector with a taxation that guaranteed that the nation would always sell cattle and buy machinery. At a time when Canada, the United States and Europe were becoming industrial powerhouses, this amounted to national economic suicide.

The industrial entrepreneurs, moreover, took their economic model from the vast estates of the pampas. The greed of the landed elites and the industrialists brought about the revolt of the middle class in the 1920s and the arousal of an immigrant-led labor movement in the 1930s, which was quashed with military rule and fraudulent government through the early 1980s.

Only from 1946 to 1955, under the presidency of a labor-minded general of corporatist leanings, Juan Domingo Perón, did most of the social and economic advances we take for granted take place in Argentina: the women's right to vote, the 8-hour workday, the abolition of child labor and so on.

Cristina and Nestor Kirschner are modern, social democratic heirs of the Peronist tradition. In Argentina's political economy, the "farmers" who are "striking" really are the oligarchy (the ruling elite, from the Greek oligon, the few, and arko, rule), the few who live off the fat of the very rich, bountiful land worked upon by the underpaid and underworked peones.

Kirschner is no doubt far from perfect. Conversely, the landowners are probably not all wishing the generals would come back to torture la chusma, the rabble, into submission, as Kirschner has suggested -- but I'd wager that more than a few wouldn't mind a seeing some military boots goose-stepping once again.

Papa Nazinger Comes to Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respect the Boundary

Returning to my earlier ethical themes, I now turn to my VIth godless commandment: thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows.

Biblical adultery, which was the object of the item at this location in Mosaic law, was ultimately about forbidding a woman's sexual liaisons in circumstances that might lead to questioned lineage of her children -- significant for the purposes of inheritance. The ancient biblical point was not about sexual morality, as in the dualist, Jansenist view of sex, but about property and the control of women.

In my new iteration of a decalogue based not on a supposed divine revelation, or inspiration, but on the ethical principle of human survival I transmuted the notion of control, a hierarchical view suitable for a theist conception into respect and the object of the verb into universally what sustains us.

Survival -- mine or yours -- is a cosmic thing, but also individual. Barring the spirit and afterlife, when my world ceases to exist, from were I sit, everything ends. My world begins with a sudden blurry light and ends in darkness. Inside that world I am me (and you, you), slowly distinguished from everything until the blurring toward death begins.

My existence and survival then, is rooted with the shifting, uncertain and largely imaginary lines between me and thee. Here I end, there you -- your personhood and identity -- begin.

The imperative here is to respect the line, keep it as a buffer, pull back if by chance or mistake we trespass it. To respect is to pause, to bow reverentially and utter India's Sanskrit greeting "Namaste" (I bow to you), to genuflect, to step back and behold the beauty of the other and the world.

Believing and Doing

In writing about the importance of upholding one's convictions (see February 22), I neglected to mention those who, perhaps simply bored by the curlicues of creeds and ideologies, lead quiet kindly lives for seemingly no good reason, or for reasons they find obvious.

Always a philosophical Torquemada, I'm not one of them. In fact, I instantly suspect anyone who seems to be one. ("Hmm ... I wonder what she meant by 'Have a good day!' ")

My assumption, my philosophy, my observation, my life have all led me to conclude that the homo sapiens is quintessentially selfish. Spiro Agnew worked for bribes, GIs go to Iraq for lack of better job prospects and even Mother Theresa worked with the poor and sick of Calcutta just to get her own cloud and harp up by the Pearly Gates.

We're a "what's in it for me?" species. Beliefs are usually little more than idealized versions of who we might like to be if it were only convenient enough. Or a justification for the way we are.

Think of the wars of religion. Think, if you are familiar with the religious world, of the continuing strife between fellow believers in almost any tradition.

On the other hand, consider the attentive person who notices that the host's dishes need doing or that the young mother needs someone to look after her two-year-old for a while or that the unique blood type needs to be shared.

Simple things, all -- perhaps worth focusing on to a greater extent than the reasons that might justify them.

Kick the Dog

Following a harangue by a school superintendent about the damage to families wrought by sexually explicit media and rock-and-roll, I once heard a very eloquent retort: "You could run pornography on television 24 hours a day without inflicting the damage to families of a 1 point increase in the unemployment rate."

On this very day we're a third of the way there: national unemployment jumped 0.3 percentage point to 5.1 percent -- the highest it's been in two-and-a-half years. That's low by most standards -- unless you happen to be one of the 7.8 million people looking for a job.

Imagine a scene in millions of families.

He comes back from work, worried about making a living, terrified of being laid off, angry at his boss, hoping to find solace in his home, his castle. She has either been at a paid job as well -- similar worries and doubts, plus guilt about leaving children at day care -- or she has been home all day handling children.

Then the spillover of work and home takes place with an argument, a fight, a dismissal of children. The kids go out to the yard and spot the dog. One of them vents his frustration by kicking the animal.

That's the kick-the-dog game.

It's inspired by a system and a society that thrives on anxiety, pressure, competition -- note the canine motif: dog eat dog. The sweat greases the gears of business, spurs innovation ("necessity is the mother of invention"), expansion, consumption, profits.

The perspiration comes from fear, annoyance, anger, hatred. It spreads to homes, schools, little league games and ultimately to armies and "contractors" hired to torture perceived enemies.

This is not the "natural" way. It's the purposely contrived way called capitalism.

If we could, for a moment, all lay down our offensive weapons -- our arrogance, our edge, whatever we use to one-up our colleagues, neighbors and those with whom we are close -- all in unison -- 1, 2, 3, now! -- couldn't we envision a society based on cooperation, solidarity with one another, mutual helpfulness, voluntarism ... even love?

This would require a revolution. Not the taking up of arms against a government, of course, but a laying down of fears and apprehensions, an abandonment of seriousness for laughter, a loosening of desire for things for which we do not really hunger.

It would require the flowering of compassion for the pathetic figures in board rooms who are enmeshed in their own greed and for the politicians and yes-men in government palaces caught in their machinations for more power and even for the angry, often bearded visionaries in guerrilla camps seeking to terrify those in power through destruction.

We need to pet the dog, let the dog lick us, go embrace our moms and dads, let them kiss one another and bring enough joy to the workplace to plant the seed of a smile on the boss' lips.

Then companies would pay fair shares in taxes to build schools and libraries and vehicles with clean renewable energy. Then our country could counter Al Qaeda by dropping food and books and blankets and construction materials from our Air Force planes.

Then everybody would love us and we would love everyone. And the dog would wag its tail.

Damnation

[Blogger's note: This post disappeared, without explanation, from my blog. I don't know whether this is the effect of censorship or malicious hacking. I have contacted Google about this.]

Saying "God damn America" from a Christian pulpit in a black church is not even remotely expletive on a level with the secular Jew's derisive "Jesus H. Christ," nor is it a malediction on a par with the fanatic jihadists' "Death to America!" Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Because of the appalling state of religious literacy.

Anyone who has given even a cursory glance to the prophetic books of the Bible would know that damnation is a common literary form used by those who came to believe they were God's spokesperson at a given critical juncture, as were Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example.

Isaiah cries out in God's voice

Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious children: they have forsaken the Lord, they have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel, they are gone away backwards. ... And the daughter of Zion shall be left as a covert in a vineyard, and as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, and as a city that is laid waste. (Isaiah 1:4,8)

Should Israeli voters reconsider divine leadership because a prophet has cursed them? No?

Why then should Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) even have to explain the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's biblical curse on the United States for enslavement and discrimination of his congregation's forebears and for the exploitation still heaped on the ethnic community to which its members belong?

Blogs such as Feministing, Latinopundit and The Assimilated Negro have in common that they offer comment from the perspective of, for, by and about a particular group of people, the group to which the authors belong. I am not black and I am not advocating on my own people's behalf.

Nor, as an agnostic, am I very intensely a believer.

Advocacy on one's own behalf threatens the birth of a new progressive era (yes, I'm referring to Barack vs. Hillary) and I want no part of it.

What I would like to make clear is that pseudo-leftist secular humanist Democrats and conservative Republican pseudo-Christians alike need to take more seriously the actual language of religion before they advocate for a theocracy or against it and the language of various cultures, before they advocate measures against one group or for another.

This new episode of rent garments only speaks to the paucity of understanding of the languages of conviction and culture.

7 Random Factoids

Savia has tagged me to

#1 Link to the person who tagged me (see above)
#2 Post the rules on my blog (to wit, this list).
#3 Share seven random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.
#4 Tag seven random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
#5 Leave a comment on their blogs so that they know they have been tagged.

I don't know if I even cyberknow seven bloggers. Will try. Meanwhile, let me unearth the facts:

1. I am colorblind. This does not mean that I see in black and white, as some people think, but that I confuse certain colors (red-green, green-brown, blue-violet) in certain shades and indeed see through certain kinds of camouflage. (The lore among colorblind people is that during the Korean War the air force discovered that colorblind aerial spotters did very good reconnaissance.)

2. In my right index finger I am double-jointed. My half-sister is double-jointed in all her fingers. My father's genes at work.

3. I didn't get a driver's license until my 30s. I was overseas and too young according to local laws when everyone was getting licenses here; by the time I returned everybody had already gone through driver's education. Not having a car helps you meet people, as you always need a ride.

4. I didn't own a television from 1977 to 2003. It was a rude awakening to discover how low television had fallen. Then again, the bonus for about a couple of years is that there was no such thing as a repeat for me.

5. I hate mint, spicy food (and any condiment spicier than pepper, including pepper), beets, celery and onions. Forget Mexican or Indian restaurants with me.

6. I have never been to Asia and Africa and I never want to go.

7. The first computer I ever used was an Osborne II, back when the dinosaurs roamed.

OK, that takes care of items 1 through 3 of the meme rules. I have to come up with seven bloggers I know well enough to tag. This may take a while.

Spitzer, the Mann Act and neo-Puritanism

Never having been elected governor of New York by a landslide on the strength of my character and intellect, I never sat on so tantalizing and grandiose an edge of hubris as Eliot Spitzer's, so who am I to judge this obviously unhappy man? Such a thought does not seem to bother today's garment-rending neo-Puritans -- nor does the fact that the allegedly violated Mann Act is the federal statute most flagrantly misused to bring down celebrities of color.

The online Huffington Post, for example, has no biography of moralist Chris Kelly (author of Eliot Spitzer Disappoints Wife / Commits Federal Offense), so we don't know the details of Kelly's glass house.

But how about the publisher, Arianna Huffington? Shall we forget that Arianna was a conservative who went after Bill Clinton when it was salacious, making a name for herself, and now styles herself a liberal, when the wind is blowing that way.

Shall we forget that her millions come not from journalistic talent but from sleeping with a millionaire, ex-husband Michael Huffington, whose proclivities toward men she reportedly knew well before she divorced him, allegedly for his bisexuality? By my reckoning¹ Arianna's per-hour sex rate during this gold-digging marriage comes out to nearly $175,000, not the paltry $4,600 Spitzer's Kristen got -- which she had to split with the prostitution ring managers.

So Arianna Huffington is in a position to sponsor moral lectures now?

Let's also consider the Mann Act, technically the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910.

The law was most egregiously used against boxer Jack Johnson, who in 1910 defeated a white contender and later had to flee the United States after marrying a white woman, Lucille Cameron, as Southern ministers called for his lynching. In 1920, Johnson was prosecuted for allegedly violating the Mann Act by sending his white girlfriend, Belle Schreiber, a railroad ticket to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago. His life was the inspiration for the 1970s film "The Great White Hope."

The Mann Act was also used against rock musician Chuck Berry and Rex Ingram, a 1940s film and stage actor, both African American, in dubious circumstances.

The law wasn't just used against blacks. Charlie Chaplin was accused; he was acquitted, but the charge eventually became the basis for his blacklisting in the 1950s.

Think about it: might you (or, if you are a woman, your boyfriend) have violated the Mann Act? According to a 1917 Supreme Court ruling that has never been challenged, the statute's prohibition against "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes" applies to noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons.

How many millions of Americans should sit in jail next to Eliot Spitzer?

Perhaps the answer should come from an ancient tradition. It is said that 2,000 years ago there was once a woodworker who became an itinerant preacher in the hills of Galilee. The story goes that he was brought a woman caught in the act of adultery and was asked whether she should be put to death by stoning, as Mosaic law prescribed.

He replied: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

------
1. Arianna Stassinopoulos married Michael Huffington in 1986 and divorced him in 1997. The settlement was not divulged; however, Huffington spent $29 million of his own money on a senate race against Diane Feinstein, so let's assume she got $100 million. Assume sexual encounters that, on average, lasted an hour once a week on average over roughly 11 years, that's 572 times. Dividing $100 million by 572 yields $174,875 an hour.

Killer Pretzel Strikes Again

Remember the January 2002 "killer pretzel" that left George W. Bush bruised after he choked on a pretzel and fainted? This goes against every political bone in my body, but I now have reason to think that maybe he told the truth for a change.

True personal experience this week: I was at my desk, racing to get work done, unable to go to lunch. I got up at about 3 or 4 pm and grabbed some pretzel sticks and a Diet Coke.

Sat down, popped one in and took a sip. Somehow, either the pretzel went down the wrong way or the Coke flooded my throat or ... I don't know. Next thing I knew I propelled myself out of my chair noisily attempting to breathe.

Like Bush said, "I hit the deck." I fell, throwing a paper basket out of the way and even shoving a bookcase against the wall so hard that the phone jack was twisted in such a way that the phone became inoperable.

I'm not sure what happened then. I blacked out. I came to in pain, lying on the chair mat and attempting to catch my breath. I could not speak, just make signals that I needed a moment.

I felt myself sweat profusely. It was a cold, panicked sweat. Slowly breath returned to me and from shallow gasps I went to deeper, more moderate breathing.

Then I noticed I had hit my left leg badly. My big toe was swollen and, upon inspection later, at home, it was bruised -- just like Bush's face.

CNN called it a "vasovagal syncope" at the time. I'd come across that term once before, when someone I know had a horrible, humiliating loss of bodily function. According to the Wikipedia, a syncope is

a sudden, and generally momentary, loss of consciousness, or blacking out caused by the Central Ischaemic Response, because of a lack of sufficient blood and oxygen in the brain. The first symptoms a person feels before fainting are dizziness; a dimming of vision, or brownout; tinnitus; and feeling hot. Moments later, the person's vision turns black, and he or she drops to the floor (or slumps if seated in a chair). If the person is unable to slump from the position to a near horizontal position, he or she risks dying of the Suspension trauma effect.

This approximates in many ways my own experience, and possibly Bush's.

Uncannily, Bush was almost exactly my age in 2002, when he had his episode. Perhaps it's a middle-aged-man thing. The killer pretzel attacked me, too.

The Hidden Norms in Religious Flux

Being part of a survey team conducting a survey of active and lapsed Catholics in the early 1980s prepared me to deal with a today's news stories about a Pew study on religious change in the United States. Let me deal with two things I learned back then that make sense now.

Keep in mind that most of these surveys can only measure affiliation through a tangible behavior that is deemed to denote an inner disposition. While scientologists claim to have machines that can measure advancement in their religion, social scientists do not have a soulmeter of any kind.

So, for the most part, the sociology of religion describes behavior of churchgoers, often in rations that are not doctrinally correct. For example, for the study of Catholics we called someone "active" if they went to church on Sunday at least four times a year, not counting major holidays or family occasions.

This is well below the canonical obligation of Sunday Mass, but it is a behavior indication of a certain degree of engagement. Indeed, in most predominantly Catholic countries perhaps a tenth of all Catholics go to Mass on a regular Sunday; in the United States, a survey in the 1990s found attendance as high as 45 to 55%, depending on how you counted it.

OK, my insights now.

First, it is statistically normal for people between the ages of 15 to 30 to "drop out" of the organized religion in which they were raised. This I learned from sociologist Dean Hoge, who led the research teams and wrote the book, long out of print, about the study.

"Normal" to a sociologist only means that a behavior does not deviate significantly from the social average. It doesn't mean it is good or bad. There are many reasons why disaffiliation during adolescence and early adulthood might occur in societies in which this period involves a prolonged crisis.

The various Anabaptist denominations (Amish, Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) developed a detour around this by decreeing that they would not baptize or affiliate infants. Indeed, most Anabaptists don't formally join their churches before marriage.

This leads to the second interesting insight: most people's religious affiliation has very little to do with philosophy or theology.

Most plainly, I learned from interviewing people who had returned to the faith, the pattern was that once they got married, or even more importantly had children, many drifted back to churchgoing. It was almost as if they wanted to give their children something similar to rebel against.

Significantly, also, very, very few people referred to conversion or returning to faith as a process involving study and thought, or the reading of certain works. Most converts wanted to marry a Catholic.

At the time, I found this profoundly disappointing. I had been involved in the conversion of two people who had wrestled with ideas, read and discussed books with me, written lengthy letters with questions and concerns. They were modern St. Augustines, turning from one view to another with thoughtful deliberation.

Even in my questioning of religious faith, I have always felt the theological and philosophical issues were important. The idea of changing to get married or to pass on certain conventions to children seemed and still seems very hollow.

This is why I find the Pew study less than interesting. Yes, 28% of U.S. adults have changed from the church of their fathers (or mothers), more in the younger years. Given the pattern of social research, I doubt they were asked too deeply why.

Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus

Is it wrongheaded to hold that those who assert ideas contrary to your own are mistaken and that, ideally, they should see the error of their ways? Much as I bitterly disagree with the pope I call "Nazinger," overlooked in the brouhaha over the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews, to my mind, is a philosophical debate about conviction and tolerance.

In speaking of conviction, let's agree that we're talking about tested ideas about which you have a certainty that is, perhaps, not absolute, but sufficient to convince you of their validity or truth. Similarly, by tolerance I mean the amicable and peaceful acceptance of those who hold differing convictions.

Take the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun. When Galileo affirmed it, there was no empirical way to verify whether this was true; we now have been able to "see" the orbit in motion from satellites and spaceships to the point that this is a fact. It wasn't in Galileo's time.

Was Galileo wrong to insist that his heliocentric scientific theory was right and that the views of his church inquisitors were mistaken? Assuming Galileo prayed on this matter, would it have been wrong for Galileo to ask God to help convince Cardinal Bellarmine?

Is it wrong for Democrats to seek to convince Republicans? For Obamans to woo Clinonites? For Keynesians to wish to persuade Adamsmithians that they're off the mark by a few points?

After all, not absolutely everything a Republican president does is without some redeeming value, and there isn't a huge policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Keynesian economics can be just as fallible as orthodox free market capitalism.

Yet wouldn't Democrats have a point or three in noting that Republicans presidents brought us the Great Depression, the stagnation of wages beginning in 1973, the de-industrialization of the United States in the 1980s and I'd run out of space cataloging the current prez's disasters?

Wouldn't Obamaniacs have some bragging rights when it comes to their candidate's ability to sway and mobilize?

And didn't those who deficit-spent us out of World War II (and the Depression) and eliminated hunger for two decades through food subsidies show that pure-accounting balanced budgets and minimalist governance, such as propounded by McCain when he isn't squiring a blonde lobbyist, are not particularly useful policy recipes?

That's what conviction is all about: being sufficiently convinced of something to assert that it is the truth, even without total and absolute proof. Most of what we "know" is really a matter of reasonable conviction and/or trust in a given source, rather than actual, factually verified knowledge of our own.

A confusion arises in our day that mixes up syncretism, the attempted reconciliation of different or opposing principles, and relativism, the deeming of all ideas to be validity or truthful relative to a variety of factors, with tolerance.

In Western culture this is a debate that has as its center the classic ecclesiastical Latin phrase in my heading, which literally means "outside the Church there is no health." This was the conviction of Cyprian of Carthage, a third-century bishop who made the idea famous. (Personal note: Cyprian was converted from paganism by St. Caecilius, a North African presbyter who may be the source of my name.)

Cyprian faced two crucial issues for the Church of his time: whether the baptisms performed by heretics were valid and whether the Christians who defected to paganism and renounced their faith during the Decian persecution, a majority, should be welcomed back.

The Carthaginian prelate argued that the baptisms were invalid and refused absolution to the apostates without long and public penitence unless they were facing death. In the first he went against the consensus of his time and all the way up to the present. In the latter, a council supported his view.

One need not be a believer to see logic in Cyprian's arguments.

If you do not believe or do not believe "rightly," no matter what words you use and what actions you take, the meaning of what you do cannot possibly go beyond your own convictions. If you betray your beliefs publicly to save your skin, while others are dying for the same beliefs, returning to fellowship with other believers might reasonably entail some action showing remorse before being accepted in fellowship.

Do note that in both controversies Cyprian, while intolerant of dissension and defection within his group, had nothing to say about the world outside, other than that it lacked "health," later translated as "salvation." Why would Cyprian have gone peacefully to his beheading, rather than publicly state he believed otherwise, if he didn't think that his way was the healthful one?

My point is that, even as I look in from the outside and disagree with the substance of Cyprian's conviction, I still admire and agree with the notion that one should stand for one's convictions.

People of conviction A are entitled to believe that A would be better for people of conviction B. Catholics are entitled to pray for the conversion of Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and even me, since they believe that believing in Catholicism is the best thing since sliced bread. Democrats are entitled to hope for a change of heart in Republicans.

Rethinking "Terrorism"

A friend's philosophy course assignment prompts me to reconsider the term "terrorism," particularly in light of its recurrent invocation abuse by the Bush Administration. Who is a terrorist and what is terrorism?

The specter of "terrorism" was applied with such a broad brush by the Argentine military in the dictatorship of 1976-83, at the cost of the lives of people I knew, among them a close friend, that it has long lost any meaning to me.

Terror? Maybe the White House aides whom I saw scrambling out like rats on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, were frightened by the 18 fanatically misguided Muslims who in suicide attacks flew planes straight into several buildings.

Although I was well within the White House security perimeter, I only stopped working because the FBI kicked me out of my office -- allegedly to protect the president, who was hiding his own very brave hide in Nebraska at the time, as I recall.

People aren't terrorists just because we don't like 'em and would like to lock 'em up. They have to wilfully inspire terror.

Yet that is not, insofar as I can tell, the aim of Al Qaeda. Osama and his buddies want to destroy the United States, scared or not. "Death to America" is not the same as "Terror to America."

Terror means intense fear throughout a large population. Neither the original Spanish guerrillas who fought Napoleonic troops in the early 19th century nor the admittedly effective French Maquis of World War II nor, arguably, even the Viet Cong managed to hold whole populations in the thrall of fear.

Indeed, the repeated failure of Ernesto Che Guevara is a testament to the inadequacy of insurgency as an instrument of terror. Even in suicide-bomber-rife Israel, the likelihood that alleged terrorists will get you is a crap shoot; you're just as likely to get hit by a crazy Israeli driver.

Historically, political terror has been the weapon of rulers intent on scaring large numbers of subjects into submission. Public drawing, quartering and hangings of Jesuits in England or the recurrent whacking of guillotine blades on the French nobility were both instances of terror. Most people feared being thought Catholic in Elizabethan England or a blue-blood in Revolutionary France.

Under Joseph Stalin terror was evident in speech applause sessions that lasted sometimes as long as an hour, because no one wanted NKVD agents to see them stop applauding first. McCarthy-era blacklisting was a form of economic terror: if some people thought you were a Communist, they felt entitled to deprive you of your livelihood without trial -- even though it was never illegal to be a Communist.

Who wields terror today? Think about it.

Al Qaeda doesn't care what Americans feel. These fanatically theocratic Muslims believe in wiping out Western liberal (and illiberal) democracy, along with Western humanistic mores that go back to the Renaissance, off the face of the Earth.

The only people who stand to gain from terror, politically and economically, are George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and their associates. Oh, yes, and the cops everywhere who act like they're rushing to smoldering Downtown Manhattan seven years ago every time someone doesn't halt quite long enough at a stop sign.

Those folks really scare me. Bush and Cheney have already launched two wars. The cops -- and every thick-necked wannabe vigilante -- are notorious bullies. That's terror.

Yes we can vote for a Black man

In a vapid attempt either to rescue sagging circulations or pander to Hillary Clinton or merely expose to the world how little they know about Hispanics, major American newspapers have trumpeted a Brown vs. Black rift that has never really existed.

Supposedly, Latinos despise African-Americans and for that reason are flocking to Clinton.

As proof, major papers from East to West have rediscovered Dolores Huerta, who otherwise never graces their pages. Huerta has been a great labor organizer whose claim to fame, per the Anglo press, is to have worked alongside Cesar Chavez (note to broadcast journalists: please pronounce that SAY-czar CHA-vase, not Caesar ChaVEZ).

Huerta has cast her political hat in the ring for Clinton and threw her political influence to win the senator representing New York a sizable portion of the Latino vote in California.

Enter the "West Side Story" narrative. Reporters and editors who are always searching for the oversimplification that will sell papers have fallen back on a script right out of the musical that was made into a hit movie in 1961.

Surely you remember the Romeo and Juliet saga of "impossible" love between the all-American clean-cut Anglo boy Tony (played by Richard Beymer) and the beautiful Puerto Rican señorita (played by Natalie Wood). Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, the actress who played Latina was not exactly of Hispanic origin; then again, in those days señorita, mispronounced, was about all the Spanish most American non-Hispanics knew.

Fast-forward to the presidential election of 2008 and you have an African-American candidate and a Latina labor leader backing the woman candidate running against him. What do reporters see? Rumble!

You can almost see the Obama campaign singing for the Jets the Anglo gang's side of Stephen Sondheim's "Tonight" Quintet:

The Puerto Ricans grumble: "Fair fight."
But if they start a rumble,
We'll rumble 'em right.

And the Clintonistas, with Huerta at the lead belting out the war cry of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks:

We're gonna rock it tonight!
They're gonna get it tonight,
The began it.
We'll stop 'em once and for all.
The Sharks are gonna have their day,
We're gonna rock it tonight.
Tonight!

But, oh, did I forget that most Hispanics in California are of Mexican, not Puerto Rican, origin? You think it matters to the major Anglo press?

And, no, stop salivating, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans do not hate each other. If anything, Mexicans remember the 1848 theft of half their country by the Anglos, much as Puerto Rican children to this day are told that El Drako (the Anglo pirate Francis Drake) will come get them if they do not go to bed.

Hispanics vs. Blacks, Mexicans vs, Puerto Ricans are all part of the Anglo wet-dream, one in which the minorities keep each other down by fighting one another and the WASPs, who numerically are no longer the majority, get to divide, conquer and rule, laughing all the way to the bank.

This election isn't about ethnicity -- "race" is an unscientific term with no basis in fact -- or about sex -- "gender" is a grammatical, not biological term. It's not a choice between a Black man and an Anglo white woman.

Rather, there is a choice between two very solid Democratic candidates with positions and views that will likely, and at last, turn the ship of state away from the iceberg toward which George W. Bush is blithely steaming.

Frankly, I don't see how Hispanics could lose with either one. In fact, the election is not the endgame for Hispanics.

The late Willie Velázquez, founder of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, whose biting oratory reminded me of a mixture of comedian Lenny Bruce and community organizer Saul Alinsky, once put it very succinctly almost three decades ago at an event I attended.

"Do you want to know why Hispanos don't vote?" he asked an audience in Albuquerque, N.M., back in 1982. "Because nothing happens, that's why. The national organizers come by every four years to pick the ripe, fresh Mexican vote. And the streets of the barrio stay just as dusty and the schools just as bad."

That's the real key to the Hispanic vote. Not who you are, but whether you'll respect me the morning after -- by putting in place solid programs and policies that benefit my community.

Today, when I vote in the primary in my area, that's what I, a Hispanic, will keep in mind.

Meme 123

Still uncertain as to what exactly is a meme, I have been tagged by Alex at Abandon All Fear, a British Christian I often annoy with my unbelief.

The game is to

• Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
• Open the book to page 123.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the next three sentences.
• Tag five people.

Never do this in your office, even if it is after hours. The book at hand happened to be a multidisciplinary collection of papers titled Women Immigrants in the United States. Page 123 happened to fall in the paper titled "Detention of Women Asylum Seekers in the United States" by Marleine Bastien, founder and executive director of Haitian Women of Miami, and the recipient of a 2000 human rights award from Amnesty International.

Starting on the fifth sentence on p. 123, Bastien writes:

Women detainees at TGK and other facilities around the United States lack access to basic recreational facilities. The outdoor recreation at TGK consists of a small concrete wall space exposed to the elements. The women supposedly have access to it from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. but actually do not because of frequent lockdowns and other unexplained emergencies.

Now I have to tag five people, presumably fellow bloggers:

Genevieve
Jen
Savia
Schmutzie
The Palinode

See, I can play blogger games, too!

No-Cojones Congress

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (P-Calif.) perpetuates the myth that women are terrible at math: she can't count noses in the House of Representatives, where Democrats have a comfortable -- let's spell it -- m-a-j-o-r-i-t-y. That's why she handed Sen. Harry Reid (P-Nev.) a "stimulus" bill that smelled like three-day-old fish left in the sun because it does nothing for the unemployed, who could do the most for the economy.

The "P" in the identification tags is not a mistake: it stands for Pseudo-Democrats. As in showing every sign of being outside what one presidential candidate called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." That's the wing that puts workers and general well-being first.

Pelosi blew it by inexplicably failing to stop the House Republicans, who are in the minority (Nancy, check the House roll, will ya?), from constructing a monstruosity of a tax-rebate and business tax-cut bill. Reid failed by caving in and accepting Pelosi's stupid done deal with only a token gesture for the elderly and veterans.

Bad policy and terrible politics. This legislative work lacks what in very colloquial Spanish is called cojones (balls).

In the face of a recession, the most stimulative disbursements would be in the form of money going to people with the least disposable income -- that is, people for whom a dollar in hand is a means to fulfilling an immediate need by spending the dough. These are the folks most likely to generate consumer demand and boost the economy.

Giving money to wealthier people risks having the funds go into savings or investments with little or no demand effect at all.

An early appraisal of the principles for an economic stimulus, prepared before Pelosi even had a bill to deal with, two major economic analysts were cited as specifically locating the highest stimulative effect in expenditures such as unemployment compensation and food stamps.

Economist Mark Zandi is quoted as demonstrating that for every dollar spent in the form of unemployment checks, the economy receives an economic consumer demand boost of $1.73. In contrast, the Republicans' much-vaunted increase in tax breaks for small business investment would yield only 25¢.

The Republicans, along with Pelosi and Reid, chose a 25¢ stimulus over a $1.73 boost. Oh, yes, and a lot of pandering in an election year to folks to whom $300 won't mean very much. Certainly not more than it did in early 2001. Remember the Bush rebate (and the recession that followed it)?

One might accept that Reid, who was blocked by a single vote in a very tightly divided Senate couldn't do otherwise. But what's Pelosi's excuse? Democrats have a comfortable, if not veto-proof, majority in the House. Doesn't Pelosi know that when you have a majority you can get things you want done?

What do I hear? Bush would have vetoed help for the neediest citizens that would help all of us the most? I would have replied "Make our day, Georgie! Let's make sure every American hears that the leader of the Republican Party would rather give money to the richest taxpayers than fight recession by aiding those who will spend the cash assistance."

Now Bush can say that the Dems are in the pockets of the rich just about as much as the Repubs.

And the unemployed? The poor? They don't count to either one.

On Compromising

By the time you get to middle age the life you have is very different from the life you planned -- unless you're the odd geek who started Microsoft or the poverty-inspired boy from a town called Hope who wanted to be in JFK's shoes one day. Is the answer to dream doable dreams? To work harder? To accept fate?

These questions will one day dog you, too, younger readers. Trust me on this. My favorite description of life is "life is what happens when you had other plans." (Anyone know this phrase's author?)

The answer depends in part on your philosophical system. The ancient Greeks subscribed to the invincibility of Fate.

On the other hand, core Judaism, Christianity and Shi'ite Islam all teach that we have free will, that the deity may well know the future, or rather be outside time, but that nothing is preordained. That is, unless you area Calvinist, one of a small band within the Lubavitcher school of Hasidism or a Sunni Muslim.

By the time we become adults, most of us subscribe to some middle road. We have some power to alter the course of our lives, we think, but there are limits.

Some limits are givens: we are born rich or poor, male or female, a perceived member of the majority in our society or of a minority; our genes, science tell us, carry many predispositions. What little science I know and what experience I have tend to tell me that my individuality amounts to little more than a certain mix of chemicals that one day we will know how to completely control and manage.

Still I persist in thinking that by sheer willpower I can achieve a few things. Years ago, when I first learned the game, I spent weeks losing at backgammon consistently until I went to the library, borrowed a book about the game and evened my odds.

Why can't I do the same when it comes to becoming president of the United States, winning the Nobel Peace Prize or enticing Penélope Cruz to my lair? Where's the how-to book for dreams?

Even if I know that I will never be president nor be invited to the prize ceremony by the Swedish Academy nor spend a night with Penélope ... what would I really feel if I embarked on a campaign to achieve any of these things and actually succeeded?

Does John Updike wake up every morning thinking "Gee, how wonderful, I'm John Updike"? Or does he get depressed from time to time that he is not, say, Gustave Flaubert or Albert Schweitzer or Neil Armstrong?

I'm probably not the first to muse on why we conceive of dreams. They're archetypally human. Heaven and salvation, wealth and power and sexual satisfaction, the admiration of others and the feeling of conquest over oneself -- these are some of the things to which many of us aspire.

The story was once told to me of a saint who, upon applying to enter a monastery was asked what job he would like. He said "abbot." He was placed as porter and later laughed that if he had said anything less he wouldn't have been admitted at all.

The paradox seems to be that attaining goals by sheer effort is illusory or happenstance and probably impossible. It's not true that the poor are lazy; most work more than the rich and at harder, more grueling jobs. Yet we would not be human if we didn't aspire to a reality beyond our present one.

So what do we do once we know that the big dreams won't come true? Three things.

• We realize how unrealistic it was to believe that by our own single-minded, individual efforts we could succeed. Most success involves help from others and sheer luck. (Balzac put it another way: all wealth come from a crime, he said.)
  
• We gratefully accept the wisdom that falling short imparts.
• We adjust our dreams to things that still stretch us but are no longer obviously unattainable.

I have more or less attained the presidency in my little world. I still am continually looking for the opportunity to build my own little Lambaréné, realizing that the real prize comes not from the Swedish Academy, but from the smiles of those you manage, by chance, to influence for the better.

Finally, I'm not sure that Penélope and I would actually get along or have much of a passionate night, but I'm daring to hope that, as Daniel Berrigan once wrote, there is "love, love in the end."

Death as a Way of Life

Having anticipated spending the weekend engaged in tea-leaf reading with harbingers of Mr. Death, I was surprised to discover instead living as a way of dying, in a way that applies to all of us. We treat death as Benjamin Franklin's joke, something unpleasant and unmentionable, rather than as the useful nudge to live, just as taxes are a necessary means to share.

Perhaps it helps that I am a mere four years away from the age at which my father died, although I am a comfortable 35 years from my father's father's age of demise.

My father died "young," or so his contemporaries said. I was just about to become a father for the first time and my middle-aged father did not seem young at all. Now it he seems to have been too young to go; at nearly his age of death, I still have some living in me. I think.

My grandfather, on the other hand, voluntarily decided not to undergo a third operation that might -- or might not -- have extended his life an uncertain span of time. He knew it was his time to die and given his advanced age nearly everyone, save for those of us who loved him and still miss him, would agree.

Most people I have known who were aware of death's impending arrival at old age were ready, almost anxious for it come, to be done with physical decline and pain, to end resistance to nature's course. This past weekend, however, I came across what seemed to me an entirely new, Zen-like approach.

A sick person within range of a reasonable age for a man to die -- no matter how unreasoning death will always feel to those who have loved him -- had given his family, and perhaps himself, a few scares. The fear and shock was perhaps enough that he seemed to embrace his fate -- one that's not imminent, yet feels closer than the demise of his youngest child -- with a joy and matter-of-fact calm that seemed to imbue his household with a way of living that is very much in the moment.

Because I am closer in age to the person who is ill than I am to my grandfather's age of death, the picture I took in seemed a reality not to be ignored: this is more or less how I will be when I get closer to my turn.

Then I was struck by how the healthier living, those whose dying seemed likely to stretch out for decades beyond even my time, were living day to day, even with an awareness of Mr. Death they had not had before.

There were tears and laughter and worry, of course, but fundamentally, as a grounding of all that was going on there was an air of letting go, of living to the fullest in tiny ways, of a normalcy that might have seemed unnatural were it not so wise.

Why not? We are all dying. If only we were more forcefully aware of it!

I could walk out and get hit by the proverbial truck. I might have a deadly disease incubating in me as I write. My body might just tire out inexplicably one night.

Am I ready for that? Have I let go of my resentments and angers and worries and fears, my navel gazing and self-pity, to replace them with a serious but not humorless sense of purpose and focus on the things that, to the best of my knowledge, are important?

It seemed, and perhaps I idealize, that the household of the man I went to see was trying to let go and live. Or rather, to take on dying as a way of life.

If I were on my deathbed -- or my death computer chair -- that is how I would like life around me to be. Indeed, I am in death computer chair and I feel a greater urgency to focus on what is important.

Excuse me, then, I have to go do some work.

Children or Dogs?

Perhaps it is the bruising cold that sharpens the critical faculty, but I see around me a depressing lack of discriminating judgment in distinctions that aren't so fine or difficult to make. Let me offer two instances.

Case #1 -- Surgery for Pets

It seems the past few weeks have been the time for pets to get expensive surgery that society does not feel fit to grant to the 40 million Americans (many of them children) who simply cannot get any kind of preventive health care because they are uninsured.

One person is spending $1,400 on a cat's operation. Fellow-blogger Julie has had a dog diagnosed with cancer undergo surgery. Ever heard of putting an animal out of its misery with a shotgun? (Truth in advertising: I have never even touched a shotgun. But you get the idea.)

When I raised the question of a hierarchy of values -- among them, people before pets -- in a comment in Julie's blog, mommyblogger Dharmamama weighed in with an out-of-context biblical quote to propose that no one is facing a choice between pets and children. (This amid an ocean of there-theres and poor-yous.)

Julie, for her part, threatened to censor me. Never mind that child homelessness has not quite been eradicated driving distance from her cancer-operated dog. To Julie's credit, the next day she aptly called the dog-cancer post a "pity party."

We all feel our hangnails are worse than a famine in India. But they're not in fact, in truth and in reality.

Case #2 "He Crossed the Line"

Heard from a blonde, white capped pedestrian commuter on her cell phone: "Brian, he f*cking crossed the line."

A man other than the patient Brian, whom she "f*cking" did not know well at all, had apparently invited this pretty, well-dressed but potty-mouthed cell-phone-toting young woman to a "f*cking" strip club. Then, some prodigious (and presumably expensive) amount of "f*cking" drinking had taken place. All ending up at his or her "f*cking" place in the middle of the "f*cking" night, where alcoholic intoxication lowered inhibitions to the point that clothes were discarded amid "f*cking" amorous activities (which, one imagines, were headed toward f*cking). Finally, some "f*cking" Maginot Line was crossed.

And all downtown, or at least everyone within the radius of a city block, heard about it.

The cognitive dissonance in this conversation begins with the understanding that in 2008 everyone knows that yelling into cell phones does not improve communication, any more than loud, slow diction and adding an "o" at the end of every word translates English into Italian. Certainly, yelling out one's angst at a line "crossed" when one is crossing so many socially accepted lines concerning public comportment is internally self-contradicting.

As is almost everything else in this overheard conversation. What delicate sensibility belongs to a young woman who has to f*cking cuss every other word? Where's the common sense in going with a little-known man anywhere, let alone a strip club and a private residence where intimate behavior may ensue?

If one can be held legally liable for driving drunk, can't one be held at least morally responsible for drinking to the point that one disregards the normal inhibitions about placing oneself in a situation of nudity with a stranger?

None of this suggests that the male stranger was therefore authorized to treat the unnamed bodily territory in question the way Germany twice treated Belgium in the 20th century. However, it does suggest that the frontier crossing was a folie à deux, as in the number of people it takes to tango.

So, what's more important: children or dogs, morning-after rescuing of self-respect or circumspect civility the evening before leading to a better morning after? Some people seem not to know the difference.

Unblocking the Writer

If you've noticed, I have been a bit blog blocked. Everything I considered writing about seemed trite, or said, or a clichè. So now I'm taking a new tack in hopes that the blogging juices will once again flow freely.

Beginning on Monday, Jan. 21, and through the rest of the year, I will do my version of the Times 365 blog meme. This is a project started by a blogger to mark his 40th year by remembering 365 people who left an impression, one day per person.

My fellow blogger Schmutzie has been doing this with startling results. She posts 50 words every day. She has joined x365. Being a less than compulsive individualist you would not want to have on your team, I'm making up my own rules for my own people project.

I will post one 30-word note on a real person I have met, from Monday through Friday each week, for 250 days, which I calculate will take me to the end of this year. Moreover, I will attempt to recall people in order of appearance in my life. (Got my numbers wrong, think I met you before I did? Sue me.)

I will, however, make every attempt to keep appropriately private the actual identities of those about whom I write.

To Want, To Need, Perchance To Love

With only 14 shopping days until Christmas, a correspondent inquired as to the difference between needing, wanting and loving anything from a PC game to a trip to the Bahamas to true love and to a peaceful world. The season of shopping and greed ... um ... peace and love ... is over, but not the question.

As I see it, we need very little. Water, air, food, shelter from the elements and clothing. If we do not wish to survive, we do not even need these.

My correspondent, who is French, of course, says we need sex. I'd question that. I'd agree to the stipulation that we probably need some form of affection in our lives.

Mais, oui, we often want sex and want sex often. But need? What will happen without sex? We'll be a little irritable? We'll squirm? We'll soil our bedsheets? That's about all I can think will happen. Not exactly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

We want everything under the sun, but especially what we see others enjoying (in commercials). We want convenience and well-being and ease, but we also want the things that will make us feel so much more powerful, handsomer, desirable. Hence the market for sports cars.

Want is our problem. We desire much we do not need for our survival or even our well-being, whereas necessity, true need, is the mother of invention. The less we need, the more we merely want, the less creative and more consuming we become.

Is it absolutely necessary to leave so many office buildings lit up at night, sucking in energy for no one to enjoy? Of course not.

Do we need purified water in bottles? Are purifiers? Do we need meat every day, three full square meals, ample desserts? Do we need a closet with umpteen pairs of shoes (OK, women do), suits, shirts, jackets and coats? Do we need a home with several regularly unused bathrooms, a yard, a two-car garage?

Of course not. Yet that's the normal North American dream.

I spent the bulk of my adulthood in a two-bedroom apartment that was at maximum legal occupancy (two adults, two children), without television or a car. I may have taken the odd vacation here and there, but I spent many of them on my balcony, reading detective novels in long summer days.

I was the "poorest" in my leafy neighborhood of million-dollar homes of Washington wonks and journalists. In the global village, however, I was undoubtedly a potentate, what with running water and electricity (not to mention a computer). About four-fifths of humanity do not have any version of these "necessities."

At the risk of sounding self-satisfied (I now have a TV, a car and an under-occupied apartment), the way of life into which I once stumbled was modest enough that the world -- and I mean every citizen in the globe -- could conceivably aspire to live as I did without a huge drain on resources. A (much needed) redistribution would have done the trick.

Sell one CEO's Gulfstream Jet (about $57 million) and you could get four-bedroom apartments for several African villages. Hell, several U.S. towns.

But -- aha! -- who's going to be the first to step forward? How do we let go of our wants and focus more precisely on our real needs?

For that we need love. The love we all want, the love we all want to give and are sometimes too scared to part with, the love others need and deserve.

Pornographic or Risqué?

Savia's recent post on the joys of a toy for gals and related matters has set off an e-mail controversy: is the Savia Bella blog pornographic or merely risqué?

I only cyberknow Savia through Schmutzie, another cyber-acquaintance. They both strike me as charming women too old to be my daughters, but too young to date, who are articulate about some poignant experiences -- and occasionally a little edgy, saucy and, yeah, not quite what you would read out loud to your great-aunt Julia.

They are articulate and funny and painfully honest and Saskatchewanian -- I've never met anyone like them in real life. For all I know, they may be one 45-year-old overweight, beer delivery guy in Yonkers. But I doubt it.

I found Schmutzie's Milkmoney ... goodness, I don't remember how! Someone's blog roll, I'm sure. I was amazed to discover someone blogging about such serious setbacks as being diagnosed with cancer (and beating it!) with compassion-evoking lightness. This is how I would like to get cancer (knock on wood) if I had to.

Then Savia guest-posted on Milkmoney about her incestuous-but-not-quite adventures with her hunky Italian cousins. She revealed to me the female side of sexual temptation and limits in a way I had never quite encountered before, in a language franker than any woman I know uses, or has used, at least since college.

Part of the allure is hearing the in-your-face raw sexuality of the younger generation, of course. But another part is that it is literate, delicate and well short of raunchy.

I would argue that it is not pornographic. To me pornography aims to titillate, to profit, to manipulate the hormonal imagination. Savia seems merely to speak her mind (and body) in a "just us girls" tone that makes all of it very natural.

We all like sex. Want some. Know that some people are off limits. Would rather focus on just one, but are maybe less virginal than the nuns said we should be.

To my mind, Savia (occasionally) holds up this aspect of life for all to titter a little but ultimately enjoy in a good, clean sense. And besides, she writes about any number of things, such as the death of a loved one's parent or getting soaked in a London afternoon rain, in ways that are memorable and even moving.

Schmutzie, for her part, may prefer to have the first syllable of her blogging handle pronounced like "smut," but she is delightfully child-like and heart-warmingly adoring of her mate. Even when she's edgy. Sorry, Schmuts.

USA Number One?

Few recent political events have stayed with me as totalitarian emblems as the sight of a young Republican throng chanting "USA! USA! USA!" Now comes a foreigner questioning how the United States could possibly be no. 1 given an allegedly inferior educational system, which prompts me to ask how the United States got here and what it means for the future of the world.

Of course, it's almost un-American to be as "patriotic" as the young people at the last Republican convention. The USA is historically and essentially a nation of oddballs ornery enough to be embarrassed by orchestrated cheering. True American patriotism has always been best represented by dissenters.

The notion of American empire, at last openly acknowledged by those in power, is also at odds with democracy. All empires have been autocratic and the imperial behavior of Americans abroad is often grossly at odds with the national democratic vocation: our diplomats and soldiers have repeatedly shown they want to force others to adopt what we think is best for them, like it or not.

Part of the reason for this is the mistaken belief that the ascendancy of the United States is an inevitable result of a superior culture or form of government, when in fact it is a major historical accident. Had the European powers -- in what Churchill aptly described as a thirty years' total war with a long truce -- avoided reducing each other to sheer rubble by 1945, the United States would have remained the ungainly, greedy older child of the British Empire and no more.

U.S. hegemony is merely the result of a large, untouched industrial base filling a global vacuum half a century ago. I have already pointed out that American military prowess was of as dubious value in the 20th century as it is in this one (see here).

The real source of U.S. power has always been primarily economic.

This has involved huge foreign inputs, in terms of labor, investment and creativity -- rather than the much ballyhooed "know how." We tend to forget, for example, that without a Scottish inventor, immigrants from Ireland and China, and hefty British investment in the 19th century, there would never have been a continental U.S. railroad network, the dominant interstate form of transportation until Eisenhower's highway program. The same could be said about any number of major U.S. economic projects.

Moreover -- and this foreigners often miss -- U.S. economic strength lies primarily in its dynamic and large internal market, rather than external trade. This is how the United States remains much more powerful economically than China, which is several times larger in many senses.

Indeed, this is why, should the United States decline, as is historically inevitable, I think China is unlikely to fill the gap -- the People's Republic is a vast underdeveloped heartland that faces the world with the mask of its glittering coastal regions.

What the U.S. ascendancy has meant for the world and still can be its enduring legacy, is the leveling effect of a relatively transparent economy and a stable but adversarial political system.

In sum, the United States is not no. 1 in brains, brawn or brass. The U.S. originality is an economic and political constitution for "men who disagree," as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, one that is potentially open to improvement.