As poverty month approaches -- the poverty rate is released at the end of August -- I am drawn to considering how rarely, despite the American myth, anyone really pulls themselves up by one's own bootstraps. Most of us owe who we become as adults, occupationally, financially, socially and, of course, psychologically, to someone else.
The phrase "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps," which prompted the computer term bootstrapping, or simply booting, arises from the tall tales of adventure told of Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen. The derring-do was satirized in 1785 by one Rudolf Erich Raspe in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. In that work, Munchhausen pulls himself out of a swamp by his shoe laces, without help.
In reality, almost anyone who is not poor today had considerable help, even if it wasn't from a formal public assistance program. There's such a thing as what I would call Middle Class Welfare, much as there is simply naked, decadent and obscene privilege for the rich.
Most likely you know MCW. Set aside your rhetorical preparation for the oppression olympics and you'll recognize the decent schooling you received, the food and clothing, the vacations, the parents with sufficient education and intellectual interests to spur you to inquire.
Maybe, like my father, yours worked in the public sector and actually was supported by taxpayers. That goes for everyone from mail carried to president, from U.S. bureaucrat to U.N. envoy. The taxpayers of the world have long -- for millenia, even -- supported a class of scribes and experts to aid the king or ruler.
Even if your father worked in the private sector ... you never heard of corporate subsidies? Think of employment during the Depression and employment after: what made the difference, if not massive war spending and later the military-industrial complex as described by that wild-eyed radical Dwight David Eisenhower.
Every generation in your family who went to a university was partially subsidized. You didn't really think your tuition actually pays for 100% of the costs of a college education, did you?
Indeed, here's my proposition. Society is not a business and is not intended to make a profit, nor much less to be efficient (which even the very profitable businesses aren't).
Moreover, human beings make thoroughly inefficient, wasteful investments. You have to spend about 20-30 years feeding and clothing them to get 30-40 years of middling, complaining output, then you have to spend a fortune for 20 years more postponing their inevitable breakdown and demise. All in all, a losing proposition.
That is why welfare for everyone, that is, a social support for the basic needs and dignity of everyone, is an essential requirement for a sound, functioning and vibrant society.
Yes, you too, get and need welfare.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Sunday, August 03, 2008
British Victim Olympics Come to the USA
Imagine that a taxicab rider in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 had parlayed minor injuries into an interview on "60 Minutes," a blog, a book and an occasional column in The New York Times, taking on the role of poster child and blaring loudspeaker of 9/11 victimhood. Imagine then, that an apparently unbalanced woman challenged her role on her own blog and Ms. Victim managed to have the challenger imprisoned for doing so.
Change the country to Britain and the event to the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and you'd be imaging someone like Rachel North, of whom apparently the Brits must now be so tired that just yesterday she was now bottom-feeding on a lazy Saturday U.S. public radio show that specializes in weird slices of life.
I heard it yesterday, having been apprised of her radio appearance by an alert reader of this blog.
North, which I understand is a pseudonym, was interviewed by an entirely sympathetic English-sounding voice concerning her apparent encounter with British conspiracy theorists who believe she is part of some British coverup concerning the London bombing.
Did she have anything new to say about her experience? No.
Did North have anything to comment concerning her egregious moves to censor another blogger under medieval British laws that allow trial in absentia (!) and jail for the expression of opinion? No.
The show was merely devoted to how teddibly, teddibly difficult life is for poor, forlorn Rachel North who, apparently is pursued by all sorts of British online nutcases, who claim -- obviously irrationally -- that she is part of a government conspiracy to blame Muslims for the attack.
Rachel North is not that important, chaps!
No mention of her publicity-seeking "diary" of her experiences during the bombing on the BBC, her endless blogging on her own tragedy and her continuing nitpicking of the Labour Party government's official investigation. Nor much mention of the money she made off the tragedy with her book and column in ultraconservative news magnate Rupert Murdock's The Times of London.
There was no mention of one Felicity Jane Lowde, against whom North and others campaigned to have jailed for her admittedly questionable opinions concerning North in comment sections on North's blog and posts on Lowde's own. Lowde was imprisoned last summer. So much for Britain's right to free speech.
As I have written here earlier (see here and here) a pox on both their houses. Insofar as I am concerned it's just an online catfight of no significance -- except that it has rattled the cages of the inmates in that asylum called the United Kingdom and she now is trying to bring the circus here. (There's more money to be made in the USA, isn't there?)
Indeed, also not mentioned in the radio show, the behavior displayed by North's own supporters -- see the 250 comments on the first link cited above -- amply demonstrated that they are no lilting, longsuffering wallflowers. Whatever is wrong with Lowde, the "Northsquad" as my cyberfriend Alex Fear calls them, and perhaps anonymously North herself, are as "antisocial" online (this was their charge concerning Lowde) as their bête noir.
Why do I, who am usually more interested in politics, economics, ethics, etc., even care? Because in National Public Radio's one-sided, semi-prurient infotainment about North, I found a saddening blur of lines between blogging and journalism, between right and wrong, between what is important and what should be laughed out of the court of public opinion.
On WAMU, the station I heard her on, they didn't bother to inquire enough to uncover the free speech scandal of a blogger jailed for airing opinion, the travesty of shameless publicity-seeking that surrounds explosive incidents (pun intended) or the silliness of an English-accent-only broadcast segment on a show for American audiences about events and people of no consequence here.
Change the country to Britain and the event to the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and you'd be imaging someone like Rachel North, of whom apparently the Brits must now be so tired that just yesterday she was now bottom-feeding on a lazy Saturday U.S. public radio show that specializes in weird slices of life.
I heard it yesterday, having been apprised of her radio appearance by an alert reader of this blog.
North, which I understand is a pseudonym, was interviewed by an entirely sympathetic English-sounding voice concerning her apparent encounter with British conspiracy theorists who believe she is part of some British coverup concerning the London bombing.
Did she have anything new to say about her experience? No.
Did North have anything to comment concerning her egregious moves to censor another blogger under medieval British laws that allow trial in absentia (!) and jail for the expression of opinion? No.
The show was merely devoted to how teddibly, teddibly difficult life is for poor, forlorn Rachel North who, apparently is pursued by all sorts of British online nutcases, who claim -- obviously irrationally -- that she is part of a government conspiracy to blame Muslims for the attack.
Rachel North is not that important, chaps!
No mention of her publicity-seeking "diary" of her experiences during the bombing on the BBC, her endless blogging on her own tragedy and her continuing nitpicking of the Labour Party government's official investigation. Nor much mention of the money she made off the tragedy with her book and column in ultraconservative news magnate Rupert Murdock's The Times of London.
There was no mention of one Felicity Jane Lowde, against whom North and others campaigned to have jailed for her admittedly questionable opinions concerning North in comment sections on North's blog and posts on Lowde's own. Lowde was imprisoned last summer. So much for Britain's right to free speech.
As I have written here earlier (see here and here) a pox on both their houses. Insofar as I am concerned it's just an online catfight of no significance -- except that it has rattled the cages of the inmates in that asylum called the United Kingdom and she now is trying to bring the circus here. (There's more money to be made in the USA, isn't there?)
Indeed, also not mentioned in the radio show, the behavior displayed by North's own supporters -- see the 250 comments on the first link cited above -- amply demonstrated that they are no lilting, longsuffering wallflowers. Whatever is wrong with Lowde, the "Northsquad" as my cyberfriend Alex Fear calls them, and perhaps anonymously North herself, are as "antisocial" online (this was their charge concerning Lowde) as their bête noir.
Why do I, who am usually more interested in politics, economics, ethics, etc., even care? Because in National Public Radio's one-sided, semi-prurient infotainment about North, I found a saddening blur of lines between blogging and journalism, between right and wrong, between what is important and what should be laughed out of the court of public opinion.
On WAMU, the station I heard her on, they didn't bother to inquire enough to uncover the free speech scandal of a blogger jailed for airing opinion, the travesty of shameless publicity-seeking that surrounds explosive incidents (pun intended) or the silliness of an English-accent-only broadcast segment on a show for American audiences about events and people of no consequence here.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Not "Bitter"? American Exceptionalism at Work
Remember when everyone jumped on Barack Obama for saying that blue-collar workers were "bitter"? Now here's one "bitter" unemployed man who's gone on a rampage in Tennessee that proves precisely Obama's point.
The Illinois senator and presumed Democratic presidential nominee said the following in April:
He is also the poster boy for American Exceptionalism, the notion that somehow the rules of life that apply everywhere else, don't apply to the United States. One version is a "my country right or wrong" kind of nationalism.
A more complex U.S. exception is the self-defeating, self-hating bitterness at economic injustices that -- inexplicably and illogically -- drives a certain kind of working class American to vote or and support, precisely the ethos and the leaders who would do him the most harm. The classics are blue-collar Republican voters who loved Reagan even though he gave them a 10% unemployment rate (1982) and a complete wipe out in a huge number of smokestack industries.
The exceptional American is the Southern white who hates unions -- hey, who wants to work for better pay and benefits, that's sissy stuff! -- and hates blacks and hates liberals -- hey, who wants social insurance, anyway? -- and loves the GOP.
The Republican has played with his religion by promising to abolish abortion but never once in 30 years really trying, got him riled up about gay marriage and 9/11, then picked his pocket clean and sent his kid to Iraq with inadequate armor and a ridiculous plan. Yet who does he hate? The liberals! The gays!
Can't say I understand this exceptional American guy. He's been suckered so many ways, so many times, by so many hate-radio talk-show hosts, televangelists and huckster politicians.
No wonder he's bitter.
The Illinois senator and presumed Democratic presidential nominee said the following in April:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.Now there's Jim David Adkisson, 58, who shot eight people, killing two, in a Unitarian Universalist Church, stating as his reason his hatred of liberals and homosexuals. Except for the fact that he's in Tennessee, Adkisson could be the poster boy for Obama's statement: he is an unemployed, luckless, bitter man.
He is also the poster boy for American Exceptionalism, the notion that somehow the rules of life that apply everywhere else, don't apply to the United States. One version is a "my country right or wrong" kind of nationalism.
A more complex U.S. exception is the self-defeating, self-hating bitterness at economic injustices that -- inexplicably and illogically -- drives a certain kind of working class American to vote or and support, precisely the ethos and the leaders who would do him the most harm. The classics are blue-collar Republican voters who loved Reagan even though he gave them a 10% unemployment rate (1982) and a complete wipe out in a huge number of smokestack industries.
The exceptional American is the Southern white who hates unions -- hey, who wants to work for better pay and benefits, that's sissy stuff! -- and hates blacks and hates liberals -- hey, who wants social insurance, anyway? -- and loves the GOP.
The Republican has played with his religion by promising to abolish abortion but never once in 30 years really trying, got him riled up about gay marriage and 9/11, then picked his pocket clean and sent his kid to Iraq with inadequate armor and a ridiculous plan. Yet who does he hate? The liberals! The gays!
Can't say I understand this exceptional American guy. He's been suckered so many ways, so many times, by so many hate-radio talk-show hosts, televangelists and huckster politicians.
No wonder he's bitter.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Disparity
Someone who knows that I follow U.S. policy on poverty and unemployment asked me for a number that is not those typically reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: What proportion of the unemployed are African American?
The answer is not as simple as looking up a ready made official figure.
In June, the African-American labor force totaled 16 million, or 57.8 percent of the total African-American civilian, noninstitutional population (27.8 million). I offer these figures to highlight that "labor force" essentially means civilians out of jail who are able and willing to work.
Of that group, 1.6 million people were unemployed (for a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, compared 4.9 percent for whites). See this Bureau of Labor Statistics table.
Now, in response to the question, the total number of people unemployed in June was 8.4 million (see this other table). Thus, that the 1.6 million who were black represented about 19 percent of all unemployed.
Let's put this in context.
The 37,051,483 people who are black are roughly 12.3 percent of the total population of 299,398,485 (see these 2006 Census Bureau figures). Given that they make up 19 percent of the unemployed, blacks are overrepresented among the unemployed and roughly 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than the overall population.
The answer is not as simple as looking up a ready made official figure.
In June, the African-American labor force totaled 16 million, or 57.8 percent of the total African-American civilian, noninstitutional population (27.8 million). I offer these figures to highlight that "labor force" essentially means civilians out of jail who are able and willing to work.
Of that group, 1.6 million people were unemployed (for a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, compared 4.9 percent for whites). See this Bureau of Labor Statistics table.
Now, in response to the question, the total number of people unemployed in June was 8.4 million (see this other table). Thus, that the 1.6 million who were black represented about 19 percent of all unemployed.
Let's put this in context.
The 37,051,483 people who are black are roughly 12.3 percent of the total population of 299,398,485 (see these 2006 Census Bureau figures). Given that they make up 19 percent of the unemployed, blacks are overrepresented among the unemployed and roughly 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than the overall population.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
The Correct Use of "No Problem"
You may recall my pet peeve with "no problem." Typically, some half-unshaven twentysomething hooked up to a music player uses the phrase to respond to a customer complaint, as if to say that he will tolerate the effrontery of interrupting his mp3 listening to handle a refund or a replacement request. Right, I was so worried about your entertainment at work, kid!
Yet there is a right way to use of the phrase and I came across it this week. On my way to work I thought I inadvertently inconvenienced a young woman and immediately offered an apology, to which she replied with a smile, "No problem." Exactly!
I had wronged her and she was being gracious, offering that it was no problem to her, speaking purely out of courtesy. In French, de rien (it's nothing) is offered, although usually it's in response to merci (thank you).
The sentiment is similar. I am really in your debt, but you offer graciously to relieve me of the burden by saying it was nothing, though we both know it was something.
Yet there is a right way to use of the phrase and I came across it this week. On my way to work I thought I inadvertently inconvenienced a young woman and immediately offered an apology, to which she replied with a smile, "No problem." Exactly!
I had wronged her and she was being gracious, offering that it was no problem to her, speaking purely out of courtesy. In French, de rien (it's nothing) is offered, although usually it's in response to merci (thank you).
The sentiment is similar. I am really in your debt, but you offer graciously to relieve me of the burden by saying it was nothing, though we both know it was something.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Advocacy on One's Own Behalf
During the four years in which I was paid to advocate on behalf of my own diffuse ethnic group, I occasionally referred to my work as "the Hispanic biz," from which I was grateful to depart. Decades later, as a blogger who happens to be Hispanic, I am watching a blogosphere in which identity is almost a profession entitled to disrespect everyone else for shock or sympathy value.
Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?
Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?
Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?
- In Fernham, a wannabe feminist literary analyst, devotes a post to a paper she heard about Jorge Luis Borges' translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own, parroting the notion that the version is "fatally muted," despite her mangling of Spanish because she doesn't speak the language!
- My adored Bloguera posted a funny but somewhat excessive slam on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, admittedly an unrivalled collection of blowhards, because they called the chairman "presidente" in the Spanish version of their Web page -- even though presidente happens to be an accurate translation of the title for the head of a committee.
- Then there's Gawker's dizzying spin on the New Yorker cover caricature of Barack Obama: early in the morning they were outraged, by noon they recognized satire and in the afternoon they talked their way out of it by pretending that they were undergoing the five steps of "how you were supposed to respond."
Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Greenness Is Next to Godliness
It always struck me as very odd that U.S. churches, charged in part with good stewardship of their acre, do everything they can, through their parking lots, to encourage the use of cars on Sunday. That is why, for my sixth ethical imperative, you will recall, I expanded the biblical encomium about adultery -- which was really about maintaining a pure lineage for the purposes of inheritance -- to apply to preserving the environment, our common inheritance.
In these days of high gasoline prices, of course, everyone is "green." Yet you still see those parking lots overflowing with SUVs. I have never heard a word ever preached against these gargantuan monuments to selfishness, lest they go elsewhere and affect the pastor's bottom line.
The Bible, of course, is the very opposite of environment friendly. One more reason to question it. In Genesis, God tells the first humans "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth." (Gen. 1:28)
This view influenced the Puritans and their spiritual descendants in the United States. Cities, railroads, highways, smokestacks, mines, vineyards, dams and canals were strung out from East to West like ornaments on a Christmas tree, pretty much without regard to what these human works did to plants and animals of North America, nor to the air, the water or the soil.
The U.S. Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s was part nature, part human carelessness. Bad weather came on the heels of the Depression's outbreak. It happened upon poorly tended, overworked soil with cultivated few of the modern agricultural precautions.
Today, as we face the environmental apocalypse of climate change, a commandment calling for "green" behavior seems oddly missing in the Mosaic original. So here goes my own godless ethical norm: "Thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows."
In these days of high gasoline prices, of course, everyone is "green." Yet you still see those parking lots overflowing with SUVs. I have never heard a word ever preached against these gargantuan monuments to selfishness, lest they go elsewhere and affect the pastor's bottom line.
The Bible, of course, is the very opposite of environment friendly. One more reason to question it. In Genesis, God tells the first humans "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth." (Gen. 1:28)
This view influenced the Puritans and their spiritual descendants in the United States. Cities, railroads, highways, smokestacks, mines, vineyards, dams and canals were strung out from East to West like ornaments on a Christmas tree, pretty much without regard to what these human works did to plants and animals of North America, nor to the air, the water or the soil.
The U.S. Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s was part nature, part human carelessness. Bad weather came on the heels of the Depression's outbreak. It happened upon poorly tended, overworked soil with cultivated few of the modern agricultural precautions.
Today, as we face the environmental apocalypse of climate change, a commandment calling for "green" behavior seems oddly missing in the Mosaic original. So here goes my own godless ethical norm: "Thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows."
Friday, July 18, 2008
Le Socialisme Americain
When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America.
-- Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky) at the Senate Banking Committee
Heavens, no! Not socialism! Not a yearly month-long vacation for everyone, a 35-hour work week and freedom from worry about affording health care or old age. Can't have that!
Bunning's remark on Wednesday concerning the possible bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was, ostensibly, hyperbole. Yet it reflects the tenacious grip on a refusal among many Americans to be rational about any idea that might be even timidly left of center.
Many people, including a correspondent of mine, assume that the minute one criticizes the richly flawed system of capitalism, one is advocating the Gulag Soviet prison system with Joe Stalin on top. The ghost of Joe McCarthy seemingly inhabits a good share of the American psyche: anything even suggestively pinko, lefty, Commie is totalitarian trash and utterly unthinkable.
Yet not just France has dabbled quite nicely in socialism, without Gulag, without bread lines. Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Sweden have all had substantively socialist governments that have put in place a system of womb-to-tomb state-supported social and economic insurance.
Even capitalist Canada has socialized medicine; I've tried it and it's good.
Only the United States insists on the archaic avoirdupoids system of weights and measures to go along with its antiquated dog-eat-dog economics.
Yet, if you're wealthy or a corporation, there's U.S. socialism for you in the form of gargantuan subsidies. Why not capitalism for them, Mr. Bunning? Or, indeed, why not socialism for wage earners and those unlucky enough not to earn wages at all?
Bunning's remark on Wednesday concerning the possible bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was, ostensibly, hyperbole. Yet it reflects the tenacious grip on a refusal among many Americans to be rational about any idea that might be even timidly left of center.
Many people, including a correspondent of mine, assume that the minute one criticizes the richly flawed system of capitalism, one is advocating the Gulag Soviet prison system with Joe Stalin on top. The ghost of Joe McCarthy seemingly inhabits a good share of the American psyche: anything even suggestively pinko, lefty, Commie is totalitarian trash and utterly unthinkable.
Yet not just France has dabbled quite nicely in socialism, without Gulag, without bread lines. Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Sweden have all had substantively socialist governments that have put in place a system of womb-to-tomb state-supported social and economic insurance.
Even capitalist Canada has socialized medicine; I've tried it and it's good.
Only the United States insists on the archaic avoirdupoids system of weights and measures to go along with its antiquated dog-eat-dog economics.
Yet, if you're wealthy or a corporation, there's U.S. socialism for you in the form of gargantuan subsidies. Why not capitalism for them, Mr. Bunning? Or, indeed, why not socialism for wage earners and those unlucky enough not to earn wages at all?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Prejudice That's Still OK
Picture this: a young man goes into a synagogue and attempts to walk out with the scrolls of the Torah in the middle of the service; a controversy ensues, an spokeswoman for the rabbis decry the hate crime; then a Methodist minister pops up to say that's ridiculous, he knows hate crime and these silly Jews don't know what they're are talking about.
Didn't read about it anywhere? Of course not. There would be outrage everywhere.
The real story is that a University of Central Florida student at a campus Mass went up to receive communion then took the consecrated host home. He was asked to ingest it, but he put it in his mouth, then spit it out so he could take it home. The local diocesan spokeswoman called the event a "hate crime" and the local bishop asked for the host back.
That's not all.
Then came a "cool" Methodist preacher, one Rev. Jeremy Smith, who blogged all about it to say that it's not a hate crime. He completely dismissed the Catholics' complaints. So I pointed out that he really missed the sensibilities of Catholics and the history of host stealing because of his Protestant biases. Yet, so far, the guy has attempted to completely brush it off.
That's what 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda in the English-speaking world will do. Even "cool," techie, hip ministers feel free to take a swipe when Catholics -- whose theological point of view I do not share -- feel something they regard as sacred has been disrespected, intentionally so.
But, hey, after all, they're just silly Catholics. You know: fish-eaters, wafer-chewers, minions to the head of the whore of Rome, inquisitors, crusaders, horrible deluded people -- not enlightened Protestants. It seems that Methodist ministers can still publicly vent prejudices about Catholics in the United States without social consequences.
Didn't read about it anywhere? Of course not. There would be outrage everywhere.
The real story is that a University of Central Florida student at a campus Mass went up to receive communion then took the consecrated host home. He was asked to ingest it, but he put it in his mouth, then spit it out so he could take it home. The local diocesan spokeswoman called the event a "hate crime" and the local bishop asked for the host back.
That's not all.
Then came a "cool" Methodist preacher, one Rev. Jeremy Smith, who blogged all about it to say that it's not a hate crime. He completely dismissed the Catholics' complaints. So I pointed out that he really missed the sensibilities of Catholics and the history of host stealing because of his Protestant biases. Yet, so far, the guy has attempted to completely brush it off.
That's what 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda in the English-speaking world will do. Even "cool," techie, hip ministers feel free to take a swipe when Catholics -- whose theological point of view I do not share -- feel something they regard as sacred has been disrespected, intentionally so.
But, hey, after all, they're just silly Catholics. You know: fish-eaters, wafer-chewers, minions to the head of the whore of Rome, inquisitors, crusaders, horrible deluded people -- not enlightened Protestants. It seems that Methodist ministers can still publicly vent prejudices about Catholics in the United States without social consequences.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Two Boomer Final Solutions
Given that the programs likely to suck the fiscal air out of government, just when we need money to repair the damage done by 30 years of Republican ascendancy, are retirement and health assistance for the elderly, how about if we consider euthanasia and means-testing?
One sounds a lot worse than the other, but they really amount to the same thing. The programs should help those who actually need help, not all who would like it.
Few will disagree that an elderly widow with $1 million in the bank, a paid home, ample clothing and furnishing needs to get a check from the government to pay for the remaining necessary expenses -- excluding health care, next on the agenda. Therefore, limiting social security benefits to people without the money to support themselves eminent makes sense and would extend the retirement safety net to the Boomers' children.
Medicare is far trickier. Here the problem is escalating health costs. None of the solutions I've heard, from HillaryCare to ObamaTweaks to McCain's you're-on-your-own, really address the problem, namely that our health care system has a hugely expensive testing and heartbeat-preserving component that is unnecessary and in real, practical terms, useless.
We're spending ourselves to the poorhouse giving people six last months of bedridden misery -- that time over which 80 percent of all medical expenses occur -- and in the process abandoning poor children with decades ahead of them, whose disorder and illness health care ends up costing tenfold what prevention would have.
Unplug us, please!
One sounds a lot worse than the other, but they really amount to the same thing. The programs should help those who actually need help, not all who would like it.
Few will disagree that an elderly widow with $1 million in the bank, a paid home, ample clothing and furnishing needs to get a check from the government to pay for the remaining necessary expenses -- excluding health care, next on the agenda. Therefore, limiting social security benefits to people without the money to support themselves eminent makes sense and would extend the retirement safety net to the Boomers' children.
Medicare is far trickier. Here the problem is escalating health costs. None of the solutions I've heard, from HillaryCare to ObamaTweaks to McCain's you're-on-your-own, really address the problem, namely that our health care system has a hugely expensive testing and heartbeat-preserving component that is unnecessary and in real, practical terms, useless.
We're spending ourselves to the poorhouse giving people six last months of bedridden misery -- that time over which 80 percent of all medical expenses occur -- and in the process abandoning poor children with decades ahead of them, whose disorder and illness health care ends up costing tenfold what prevention would have.
Unplug us, please!
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Beast Drops the Second Shoe
No one outside the policy loop ever believed me when I said that the Republicans were amassing federal deficits on purpose to, as Reagan budget David Stockman director said, "starve the beast" of government spending on social programs. Now there's a debate on how to cut social spending even when Bush is gone!
If you don't believe me, just go to the Brookings Institution's Taking Back our Fiscal Future page and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' A Balanced Approach to Restoring Fiscal Responsibility page, just up this week. You'll see a debate by the wonkiest wonks on how totrim slash every social program currently funded by the federal government, especially Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Reagan ran up more debt than all his predecessors put together and his spiritual son Dubya gave money to rich people who didn't need it with a purpose in mind: to make sure that if you face illness, old age, job loss and related risks that predictably all of us are likely to face in a lifetime, and you are not rich, you're on your own, baby, no matter how much you contributed.
Need proof Reagan and Bush actually knew what they were doing?
Now you know and you can't say no one told you.
If you don't believe me, just go to the Brookings Institution's Taking Back our Fiscal Future page and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' A Balanced Approach to Restoring Fiscal Responsibility page, just up this week. You'll see a debate by the wonkiest wonks on how to
Reagan ran up more debt than all his predecessors put together and his spiritual son Dubya gave money to rich people who didn't need it with a purpose in mind: to make sure that if you face illness, old age, job loss and related risks that predictably all of us are likely to face in a lifetime, and you are not rich, you're on your own, baby, no matter how much you contributed.
Need proof Reagan and Bush actually knew what they were doing?
- "So we have the tax relief plan [...] that now provides a new kind -- a fiscal straightjacket for Congress. And that's good for the taxpayers, and it's incredibly positive news if you're worried about a federal government that has been growing at a dramatic pace over the past eight years and it has been." (President Bush, August 24, 2001)
- "John Anderson tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker." (Candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980)
Now you know and you can't say no one told you.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
A Survey of My Political Opinions
Continuing my top 10 influential books, I turn now to my politics and three emblematic books that informed the views I have developed: 2. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; 3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell; 6. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.
I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.
From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.
My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.
A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.
Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.
This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.
Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.
How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!
He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?
Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.
This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.
There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.
Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.
Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.
That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.
Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.
All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.
All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.
I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.
From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.
My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.
A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.
Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.
This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.
Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.
How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!
He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?
Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.
This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.
There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.
Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.
Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.
That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.
Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.
All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
A Survey of My Religious Opinions
Prompted by Lifehacker's list of books people proposed as life-changing (which, yes, was disappointing), I began to compose a similar list. That four of them were religious works surprised me, yet even in my present free fall to agnosticism, they provide markers of thinking as devoid of superstition as of cultural conformity.
My top-ten influential books included 1. A Religion for Our Time by Louis Evely; 4. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman; 5. The Lord by Romano Guardini; 8. A Marginal Jew by John Meier.
Louis Evely was a Belgian Catholic priest and spiritual writer whose 1969 book I began to tackle one night in a small town of the province of La Pampa, from which my travel companions and I would journey the next day through ruts to a particular spot in the open land.
Evely's writings were in the vein of the much better-known Henri Nouwen (to whom I was never particularly drawn). Writings that are meant to inspire in a lively way, taking the teachings and scripture of Christian faith at face value, rather than analytically, to help believing people make sense of their lives in light of faith.
In an adaptation of talks delivered in 1962 at a religious retreat for people who were about to set on volunteer aid missions in the Third World, he laughs at a religion of white souls in which salvation is an individual matter, let everyone save himself. Instead he speaks of a world that does not believe, does not hope and does not love, yet one which suffers for it.
The world, he concludes, will belong to whomever gives it the greatest hope. In his view, the greatest hope was to be placed in the God who became a poor Galilean woodworker, like the majority of the people of the world, to the point of being able to affirm, without crossed-fingers, without disclaimers, "Blessed are the poor."
To Evely the task of the Christian is not so much a matter of going to church as it is of becoming poor. That became the cornerstone of my modern religion. It explains why I chose a life that was frugal and had, long before such things were talked about, a low carbon footprint.
John Henry Newman was a significant name in my life before I ever read his writings. My secondary school was named after the founder of the 19th-century Oxford Movement in Anglicanism, who eventually converted to Catholicism.
His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, literally meaning "in defense of his own life") was a collection of essays he published as pamphlets in the 1860s in response to the accusation of a detractor. Charles Kingsley had written that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy."
Newman provides "a history of my religious opinions" (a subtitle which I have twisted for my purpose in this post), directed at the academic circles in which he lived all his life, and skewers Kingsley squarely, demonstrating not merely his sincerity, but the reasonableness of his views.
This book became the sourcebook of my discussions with an older Anglican lady who was on the brink, yet in great trouble wavering on the notion of becoming accepted into the Catholic Church. My second "convert."
Romano Guardini, despite his name, was German theologian and philosopher who taught in the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign by the Nazis. His writing is primarily philosophical and extremely dense. One reads a Guardini paragraph and must stop to consider it for a day.
Nonetheless, his popular work The Lord has been a long-time bestseller since the 1940s. Modern scholars regard his methodology outdated, but he still manages to tackle for the nonspecialist the crucial meanings of the story of the gospels in a critical, thoughtful manner.
I recall being stunned by the way that, merely in his careful examination of the genealogies of Jesus, he manages to provide wonderful insights. He transforms the usually tiresome begats into a gem of a little historical treatise.
John P. Meier, the only living author in the quaternity, is a renown biblical scholar who collaborated with the late Raymond Brown, co-author of the groundbreaking Jerome Biblical Commentary, whose ongoing work A Marginal Jew runs three volumes so far, with a "final" fourth in the works since at least 2001.
Meier approaches Jesus as a historian, rather than a theologian or a believer, and attempts to distill a synthesis of what Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars locked up in a room in, say, Princeton, might come to agree could factually be asserted about the much-talked about Galilean woodworker.
I'm partial to his very funny footnotes, of which there are many. But I'm struck by the way in which he rationally limits the power of belief and nonbelief in attempting to leapfrog past the information available and the methods of historiography. For example, while he admits that the believer's grounds to affirm that Jesus performed "miracles" are circumscribed, he similarly points out that there is no scientific method to conclude they were not: there is no scientific divine-intervention meter.
These four books, by men of whom I became fond (I composed most of the Wikipedia entry on Evely to which the link above points), are markers in my journey toward, first, a post-Vatican II faith that insisted on the here and now; second, the development of a conviction of the reasonableness of faith; third, repeated retooling and reconsideration at different levels of understanding, concerning the meaning of substantially the same story; fourth, a dialogue concerning the believability of the story.
It would be erroneous to conclude from the preceding that I lost my faith thanks to Meier. Rather, his work delayed the falling of the scales for quite some time. In the end, my faith tottered not on Meier's writings, but on my own poor witness.
All four works are emblematic of many others read before and after or in tandem. I usually read several books at a time.
They were influential in different ways. Evely inspired an adolescent to dream of becoming an apostle, but the terms of faith or even doubt, remain those set in that first evening with a borrowed copy of the book.
Newman bolstered a young man in the defense of the ideal in the world once I was sent out at the end of my formation. Guardini provided critical grist for an adult professional busy with the concerns of a supporting a family.
In middle age, Meier has encouraged me to begin the work of integration, at least intellectually, of all those aspects of self that Carl Gustaf Jung says all of us embark upon before we die. Even though I have changed chairs in his imaginary team of critics, I look forward to his next volume.
In sum, a religion for our time might be to me a faith grounded in a profound relationship involving release from want and a conviction buttressed by fearless critical inquiry and the integration of experience, received wisdom and insight.
My top-ten influential books included 1. A Religion for Our Time by Louis Evely; 4. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman; 5. The Lord by Romano Guardini; 8. A Marginal Jew by John Meier.
Louis Evely was a Belgian Catholic priest and spiritual writer whose 1969 book I began to tackle one night in a small town of the province of La Pampa, from which my travel companions and I would journey the next day through ruts to a particular spot in the open land.
Evely's writings were in the vein of the much better-known Henri Nouwen (to whom I was never particularly drawn). Writings that are meant to inspire in a lively way, taking the teachings and scripture of Christian faith at face value, rather than analytically, to help believing people make sense of their lives in light of faith.
In an adaptation of talks delivered in 1962 at a religious retreat for people who were about to set on volunteer aid missions in the Third World, he laughs at a religion of white souls in which salvation is an individual matter, let everyone save himself. Instead he speaks of a world that does not believe, does not hope and does not love, yet one which suffers for it.
The world, he concludes, will belong to whomever gives it the greatest hope. In his view, the greatest hope was to be placed in the God who became a poor Galilean woodworker, like the majority of the people of the world, to the point of being able to affirm, without crossed-fingers, without disclaimers, "Blessed are the poor."
To Evely the task of the Christian is not so much a matter of going to church as it is of becoming poor. That became the cornerstone of my modern religion. It explains why I chose a life that was frugal and had, long before such things were talked about, a low carbon footprint.
John Henry Newman was a significant name in my life before I ever read his writings. My secondary school was named after the founder of the 19th-century Oxford Movement in Anglicanism, who eventually converted to Catholicism.
His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, literally meaning "in defense of his own life") was a collection of essays he published as pamphlets in the 1860s in response to the accusation of a detractor. Charles Kingsley had written that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy."
Newman provides "a history of my religious opinions" (a subtitle which I have twisted for my purpose in this post), directed at the academic circles in which he lived all his life, and skewers Kingsley squarely, demonstrating not merely his sincerity, but the reasonableness of his views.
This book became the sourcebook of my discussions with an older Anglican lady who was on the brink, yet in great trouble wavering on the notion of becoming accepted into the Catholic Church. My second "convert."
Romano Guardini, despite his name, was German theologian and philosopher who taught in the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign by the Nazis. His writing is primarily philosophical and extremely dense. One reads a Guardini paragraph and must stop to consider it for a day.
Nonetheless, his popular work The Lord has been a long-time bestseller since the 1940s. Modern scholars regard his methodology outdated, but he still manages to tackle for the nonspecialist the crucial meanings of the story of the gospels in a critical, thoughtful manner.
I recall being stunned by the way that, merely in his careful examination of the genealogies of Jesus, he manages to provide wonderful insights. He transforms the usually tiresome begats into a gem of a little historical treatise.
John P. Meier, the only living author in the quaternity, is a renown biblical scholar who collaborated with the late Raymond Brown, co-author of the groundbreaking Jerome Biblical Commentary, whose ongoing work A Marginal Jew runs three volumes so far, with a "final" fourth in the works since at least 2001.
Meier approaches Jesus as a historian, rather than a theologian or a believer, and attempts to distill a synthesis of what Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars locked up in a room in, say, Princeton, might come to agree could factually be asserted about the much-talked about Galilean woodworker.
I'm partial to his very funny footnotes, of which there are many. But I'm struck by the way in which he rationally limits the power of belief and nonbelief in attempting to leapfrog past the information available and the methods of historiography. For example, while he admits that the believer's grounds to affirm that Jesus performed "miracles" are circumscribed, he similarly points out that there is no scientific method to conclude they were not: there is no scientific divine-intervention meter.
These four books, by men of whom I became fond (I composed most of the Wikipedia entry on Evely to which the link above points), are markers in my journey toward, first, a post-Vatican II faith that insisted on the here and now; second, the development of a conviction of the reasonableness of faith; third, repeated retooling and reconsideration at different levels of understanding, concerning the meaning of substantially the same story; fourth, a dialogue concerning the believability of the story.
It would be erroneous to conclude from the preceding that I lost my faith thanks to Meier. Rather, his work delayed the falling of the scales for quite some time. In the end, my faith tottered not on Meier's writings, but on my own poor witness.
All four works are emblematic of many others read before and after or in tandem. I usually read several books at a time.
They were influential in different ways. Evely inspired an adolescent to dream of becoming an apostle, but the terms of faith or even doubt, remain those set in that first evening with a borrowed copy of the book.
Newman bolstered a young man in the defense of the ideal in the world once I was sent out at the end of my formation. Guardini provided critical grist for an adult professional busy with the concerns of a supporting a family.
In middle age, Meier has encouraged me to begin the work of integration, at least intellectually, of all those aspects of self that Carl Gustaf Jung says all of us embark upon before we die. Even though I have changed chairs in his imaginary team of critics, I look forward to his next volume.
In sum, a religion for our time might be to me a faith grounded in a profound relationship involving release from want and a conviction buttressed by fearless critical inquiry and the integration of experience, received wisdom and insight.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Armageddon or a Bump?
Having predicted ten of the last three recessions, my reputation for being a curmudgeon who is ready to predict disaster is entrenched. Yet on impending doom at the present time, color me agnostic.
In the face of those who call agnosticism a cowardly position, I rise to assert that in most cases it is the only sane position.
After all, do we have proof that God does not exist? Is there any certainty that, as happened in 1993-94, economic gloom will not begin to be replaced by the largest boom and fiscal surplus in history?
In the midst of a bearish stock market, l see reason to take the longer, mid-range view that everything will not collapse. High gas prices provide a needed incentive to curb and replace consumption of fossil fuels. Inflation is part of the set of pressures that will lead to restoring the purchasing power of working people. The Iraq quagmire may yet spare us more dangerous adventurism.
Silver linings aside, change will likely involve discomfort, shock and surprise -- it always has. Yet to insist dogmatically on atheism or on the end of civilization as we know it makes no sense.
Let's be clear about the sources of current anxiety.
A fair amount of doomsaying comes from my very large and noisy generation, the Boomers. It is not uncommon for people reaching retirement and the eventual end of life to have an apres moi le deluge (let disaster follow after me) attitude. My life is ending, such a view proclaims, so the world must be.
Another bit comes from the young, who have never seen a similar historical juncture. As Mark Twain put it, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The Devil knows more because he is old, says a Spanish saying, than because he is the Devil. So if you've seen this before, as I have, this moment is not so unique.
Yet another source of belief that society as we know it is at an end comes from some who would like to see, at a minimum, profound change, in the present social, political, economic order, or a combination of the three. One need not be an extremist to believe that a good, all-sweeping socioeconomic twister would give us a chance to make a clean start on the road to whatever utopia one favors.
In my experience, however, worsening conditions do not create "revolutionary conditions," or an alternative equivalent, but merely misery.
Give me hope. Give me patience. I am tired of saviors and quick fixes.
In the face of those who call agnosticism a cowardly position, I rise to assert that in most cases it is the only sane position.
After all, do we have proof that God does not exist? Is there any certainty that, as happened in 1993-94, economic gloom will not begin to be replaced by the largest boom and fiscal surplus in history?
In the midst of a bearish stock market, l see reason to take the longer, mid-range view that everything will not collapse. High gas prices provide a needed incentive to curb and replace consumption of fossil fuels. Inflation is part of the set of pressures that will lead to restoring the purchasing power of working people. The Iraq quagmire may yet spare us more dangerous adventurism.
Silver linings aside, change will likely involve discomfort, shock and surprise -- it always has. Yet to insist dogmatically on atheism or on the end of civilization as we know it makes no sense.
Let's be clear about the sources of current anxiety.
A fair amount of doomsaying comes from my very large and noisy generation, the Boomers. It is not uncommon for people reaching retirement and the eventual end of life to have an apres moi le deluge (let disaster follow after me) attitude. My life is ending, such a view proclaims, so the world must be.
Another bit comes from the young, who have never seen a similar historical juncture. As Mark Twain put it, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The Devil knows more because he is old, says a Spanish saying, than because he is the Devil. So if you've seen this before, as I have, this moment is not so unique.
Yet another source of belief that society as we know it is at an end comes from some who would like to see, at a minimum, profound change, in the present social, political, economic order, or a combination of the three. One need not be an extremist to believe that a good, all-sweeping socioeconomic twister would give us a chance to make a clean start on the road to whatever utopia one favors.
In my experience, however, worsening conditions do not create "revolutionary conditions," or an alternative equivalent, but merely misery.
- In the U.S. 1980s, Ronald Reagan broke the back of unions, presided over double-digit unemployment, cut aid to pregnant women and children, created a whole generation of homeless and spawned an economy in which working people could be forced to accept declining wages and benefits while profits soared. In 2000, far from rebelling, the populace meekly submitted to massive electoral fraud by Reagan's heir, George W. Bush.
- In the South American 1970s, a variety of military governments under the doctrine of "national security" coined by one Cesar Augusto Pinochet, used the pretext of leftist-inspired agitation or turmoil to torture, murder and banish hundreds of thousands throughout the continent. In the 1990s, freed from the military boot, various electorates brought to office presidential administrations that privatized even parks and introduced beggar-thy-neighbor social policies under the aegis of Milton Friedman.
- In Eastern Europe there is a wry joke to describe a similar historic parabola in that region: What is worse than Communism? Post-Communism.
Give me hope. Give me patience. I am tired of saviors and quick fixes.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Why Patriotism is Nonsense
Barack Obama and John McCain have forced me into declaring my own stance on patriotism once again. Patriotism is for the birds and there's no better day to say so than the Fourth of July. The only reasonable stance is to be not merely unpatriotic, but antipatriotic.
Countries don't really exist.
There is no such thing as the United States of America. Or France. Or Thailand. Or Canada. Or Argentina. All of these are mental constructs.
Sure, there are lands where certain languages and customs tend to prevail among their inhabitants. But these are fluid things.
According to patriotic theory, the United States is a nation of laws, founded on the Constitution, with definable borders and territory and citizens. In fact, the United States is not a nation, its laws are widely flouted (even by the lawgivers), most of its citizenry do not have a clue what the Constitution actually says, our borders are as porous as any others as the boundaries themselves are imaginary and citizenship is concept that is up for grabs.
Pace patriots. Most of this applies to France, Thailand, Canada, Argentina or almost any country. (I say "almost" because there's nearly always, as John Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile crisis, "some sonofabitch who didn't get the word.") Let's examine each of these items in turn.
A nation is best understood as human community that shares an identity, history, ancestry and extends back generations. The best known example is the Jewish people, who as a nation were stateless, from the time of the Maccabees to 1948, demonstrating that a nation is not the same thing as a state or nation-state.
The United States is most notably not a nation in that its population is entirely composed of immigrants. Yes, Virginia, even the Indians, who came to the American continent through over the Behring Strait, are immigrants, not native inhabitants.
We do not share a common ancestry, nor even a common history and certainly not a common identity.
This is equally true of every country in the American continent, from Canada to Chile. It may seem less true of European countries such as France (although ask the Flemish or the Bretons), but the wars in the former Yugoslavia amply attest to the notion that most European nation-states do not represent nations.
When the civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Galicia and Catalonia declared themselves independent and Generalissimo Francisco Franco had to suppress their languages for four decades to hold them in his tight fist from 1939 onwards.
As to our country, the United States doesn't even have a name that is a name, like Morocco or Poland, but a legal description of a particular legal agreement, which brings us to the mishmash of British custom, court precedent when it has proven convenient and sheer invention on the spot when it has not, that we call "law."
All of it, in the USA, is supposedly grounded in a document few understand. Lawmakers in Congress routinely flout the law -- in matters small and large -- and so do nearly all U.S. inhabitants. Moreover, there are abundant theories that say that states' laws supersede federal laws and do not bind across state lines. Good luck to you with "a nation of laws."
When I call our borders "porous," I do not mean that the Mexicans and Canadians (let's not forget whitebread Canadian illegal immigration to the USA) cross the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel without visas. I mean that the population, customs, climate of San Diego and Tijuana, as well as that of Bellingham, Wash., and Vancouver are very similar and that there has always been easy and close transit between the two.
The same is true between the bordering French Basque country and the Spanish Basque country, in which they speak Basque first and foremost and consider themselves of a common ancestry distinct from French or Spanish citizenship.
And think of it, how much more imaginary do things get than a boundary line drawn along a parallel, such as that which separates most of the western United States from Canada? How do you tell a Canadian tree from a U.S. American tree? Does one yield maple syrup and the other peanut butter?
Even legal citizenship is a fluid concept. Anyone born in the USA is a citizen, unless he is not. For example, the children of diplomats. The 14th Amendment calls for birth in the territory and under the jurisdiction of the United States.
But what about the nondiplomatic children of U.S. citizens born abroad? Many are "registered" in the local consulate and considered U.S. citizens, even though there is no tenable claim for jurisdiction or territory. Again, citizenship is a fluid thing nearly everywhere.
Patriotism, to round things up, was intended to refer to the love of one's patria, Latin for "land of the father." My father was not born, nor did he own land here -- or anywhere else -- which is not all that uncommon in these modern days. Where is the patria for me?
Sure, one can adopt an imaginary human community in which one feels more or less comfortable. One can decide that a certain piece of cloth with certain colors stands for this imagined social grouping and a certain piece of music speaks for everyone in the land the group has most likely stolen from someone else.
But let's not call these series of acts of maudlin convenience a noble thing, a reason to justify murder and mayhem -- let alone land and resource grabbing.
Before he was mercifully stopped, John McCain murdered Vietnamese by the dozens from the comfort of his cockpit. That's not noble. Nor is it particularly wonderful of Obama to wear a flag lapel pin, which he did not customarily wear before being a presidential candidate, just to show that he is "patriotic."
A pox on patriots and patriotism.
Countries don't really exist.
There is no such thing as the United States of America. Or France. Or Thailand. Or Canada. Or Argentina. All of these are mental constructs.
Sure, there are lands where certain languages and customs tend to prevail among their inhabitants. But these are fluid things.
According to patriotic theory, the United States is a nation of laws, founded on the Constitution, with definable borders and territory and citizens. In fact, the United States is not a nation, its laws are widely flouted (even by the lawgivers), most of its citizenry do not have a clue what the Constitution actually says, our borders are as porous as any others as the boundaries themselves are imaginary and citizenship is concept that is up for grabs.
Pace patriots. Most of this applies to France, Thailand, Canada, Argentina or almost any country. (I say "almost" because there's nearly always, as John Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile crisis, "some sonofabitch who didn't get the word.") Let's examine each of these items in turn.
A nation is best understood as human community that shares an identity, history, ancestry and extends back generations. The best known example is the Jewish people, who as a nation were stateless, from the time of the Maccabees to 1948, demonstrating that a nation is not the same thing as a state or nation-state.
The United States is most notably not a nation in that its population is entirely composed of immigrants. Yes, Virginia, even the Indians, who came to the American continent through over the Behring Strait, are immigrants, not native inhabitants.
We do not share a common ancestry, nor even a common history and certainly not a common identity.
This is equally true of every country in the American continent, from Canada to Chile. It may seem less true of European countries such as France (although ask the Flemish or the Bretons), but the wars in the former Yugoslavia amply attest to the notion that most European nation-states do not represent nations.
When the civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Galicia and Catalonia declared themselves independent and Generalissimo Francisco Franco had to suppress their languages for four decades to hold them in his tight fist from 1939 onwards.
As to our country, the United States doesn't even have a name that is a name, like Morocco or Poland, but a legal description of a particular legal agreement, which brings us to the mishmash of British custom, court precedent when it has proven convenient and sheer invention on the spot when it has not, that we call "law."
All of it, in the USA, is supposedly grounded in a document few understand. Lawmakers in Congress routinely flout the law -- in matters small and large -- and so do nearly all U.S. inhabitants. Moreover, there are abundant theories that say that states' laws supersede federal laws and do not bind across state lines. Good luck to you with "a nation of laws."
When I call our borders "porous," I do not mean that the Mexicans and Canadians (let's not forget whitebread Canadian illegal immigration to the USA) cross the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel without visas. I mean that the population, customs, climate of San Diego and Tijuana, as well as that of Bellingham, Wash., and Vancouver are very similar and that there has always been easy and close transit between the two.
The same is true between the bordering French Basque country and the Spanish Basque country, in which they speak Basque first and foremost and consider themselves of a common ancestry distinct from French or Spanish citizenship.
And think of it, how much more imaginary do things get than a boundary line drawn along a parallel, such as that which separates most of the western United States from Canada? How do you tell a Canadian tree from a U.S. American tree? Does one yield maple syrup and the other peanut butter?
Even legal citizenship is a fluid concept. Anyone born in the USA is a citizen, unless he is not. For example, the children of diplomats. The 14th Amendment calls for birth in the territory and under the jurisdiction of the United States.
But what about the nondiplomatic children of U.S. citizens born abroad? Many are "registered" in the local consulate and considered U.S. citizens, even though there is no tenable claim for jurisdiction or territory. Again, citizenship is a fluid thing nearly everywhere.
Patriotism, to round things up, was intended to refer to the love of one's patria, Latin for "land of the father." My father was not born, nor did he own land here -- or anywhere else -- which is not all that uncommon in these modern days. Where is the patria for me?
Sure, one can adopt an imaginary human community in which one feels more or less comfortable. One can decide that a certain piece of cloth with certain colors stands for this imagined social grouping and a certain piece of music speaks for everyone in the land the group has most likely stolen from someone else.
But let's not call these series of acts of maudlin convenience a noble thing, a reason to justify murder and mayhem -- let alone land and resource grabbing.
Before he was mercifully stopped, John McCain murdered Vietnamese by the dozens from the comfort of his cockpit. That's not noble. Nor is it particularly wonderful of Obama to wear a flag lapel pin, which he did not customarily wear before being a presidential candidate, just to show that he is "patriotic."
A pox on patriots and patriotism.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
The Real Independence Day
Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.
The brief document read:
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
The brief document read:
The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever moreNow, 232 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
Monday, June 30, 2008
On Taking a Deep Breath about the Economy
Some years ago a sermon I heard from a priest trying to buddy up to the congregation began with the words, "we all cheat on our taxes." What better moment to thread back to my series on a nonreligious ethical decalogue, and its economic morals, than right after a stock market low and an oil price peak.
Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.
This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.
Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.
In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string ofwrite downs reports of losses that are likely to continue for a year or so. The fluctuations come with people who rush in at each low, buy cheap, then sell quickly. Thursday, it seems, there were fewer buyers, perhaps because people are running scared.
OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?
But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):
Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.
OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)
In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.
We have a choice here:
We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.
Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.
This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.
It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.
Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?
At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.
We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.
I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.
Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.
This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.
Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.
In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string of
OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?
But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):
a man as any:That's us, right? We reach for happiness with our cars and our homes and our fast, faster, fastest computers -- a lifestyle that daily guzzles down in minutes fuel formed over millions of years from prehistoric plankton and algae.
ignored,
disoriented,
contaminated as any,
bored, yet a little daring
when you least expect it
Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.
OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)
In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.
We have a choice here:
We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.
Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.
This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.
It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.
Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?
At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.
We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.
I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Cliché Criticisms Cripple Themselves
Discussing the role of the United States in World War II with a cyberfriend, I found myself sighing with the exasperation of one who could make her case ten times better, yet would never choose her terms. This happens whenever someone ventures into an area in which I feel comfortable about facts my interlocutor treats much like a bull amid eminently breakable china.
Say a European spouts clichés about the USA. "You Americans are, how do you say ... [insert cliché here]."
Or how about your gringo out of central casting who spouts something like "Well, [Latin American country here] is so backward because those people just don't know how to [insert Ugly American truism here]."
Then there's the bloody Prod who repeats some 500-year-old false canard such as "the Jesuits [add heinous act here]."
Critics often think that my reaction means they've touched a nerve. They decide that I am "emotional" (goodness, let's not spill emotion on the clean carpet, shall we?) in much the same way there-thererer men dismiss women who get legitimately annoyed.
My problem is not always that I disagree.
Americans have customs and habits of mind that may seem quaint or unusual to Europeans or even Canadians. Latin American countries are socioeconomically behind the United States by almost any conceivable measure. And even one Catholic joke has it that not even the Holy Spirit knows what the Jesuits are up to.
Nor is it that my feelings of attachment to the country of my birth, the region in which my ancestors lived or the the religion in which I was brought up (to which I no longer assent) prevent me from accepting their blemishes, scars or even fatal flaws.
Actually, the problem is that most Europeans have no effing idea of the depth of criticism to which I am capable of subjecting America. Nor do average Americans know enough to understand my exasperation with Latin American societies. Nor, finally, does the average Protestant even begin to plumb the faultlines I see in Catholicism.
To the contrary, pseudo-savants such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, the recent author of an essay on the United States, which was expanded into a book, are exasperating for the little they understand. They richly deserve every kick in the pants they get precisely because they provide the best rationale for the Republicans' idiotic renaming of French fries as "freedom fries."
That's the problem. But how does one convey this to those who feel they already know the truth and even know what I am thinking? Moreover, I am not exactly incapable of provoking a similar reaction.
Sometimes, men and women are the worst discussants in the world. I wish I could talk to my dog -- if I only had one.
Say a European spouts clichés about the USA. "You Americans are, how do you say ... [insert cliché here]."
Or how about your gringo out of central casting who spouts something like "Well, [Latin American country here] is so backward because those people just don't know how to [insert Ugly American truism here]."
Then there's the bloody Prod who repeats some 500-year-old false canard such as "the Jesuits [add heinous act here]."
Critics often think that my reaction means they've touched a nerve. They decide that I am "emotional" (goodness, let's not spill emotion on the clean carpet, shall we?) in much the same way there-thererer men dismiss women who get legitimately annoyed.
My problem is not always that I disagree.
Americans have customs and habits of mind that may seem quaint or unusual to Europeans or even Canadians. Latin American countries are socioeconomically behind the United States by almost any conceivable measure. And even one Catholic joke has it that not even the Holy Spirit knows what the Jesuits are up to.
Nor is it that my feelings of attachment to the country of my birth, the region in which my ancestors lived or the the religion in which I was brought up (to which I no longer assent) prevent me from accepting their blemishes, scars or even fatal flaws.
Actually, the problem is that most Europeans have no effing idea of the depth of criticism to which I am capable of subjecting America. Nor do average Americans know enough to understand my exasperation with Latin American societies. Nor, finally, does the average Protestant even begin to plumb the faultlines I see in Catholicism.
To the contrary, pseudo-savants such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, the recent author of an essay on the United States, which was expanded into a book, are exasperating for the little they understand. They richly deserve every kick in the pants they get precisely because they provide the best rationale for the Republicans' idiotic renaming of French fries as "freedom fries."
That's the problem. But how does one convey this to those who feel they already know the truth and even know what I am thinking? Moreover, I am not exactly incapable of provoking a similar reaction.
Sometimes, men and women are the worst discussants in the world. I wish I could talk to my dog -- if I only had one.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
On Being Angry
The hullaballoo over Michelle Obama's alleged anger points to an American problem no one ever wants to acknowledge: our society's inability to deal with anger. As a reformed "angry" person who has acknowledged personal problems with anger, I still believe that becoming angry doesn't make anyone wrong.
Yet that's the way society decrees life must be. It's even a trick some extremely malicious people use: drive someone to distraction until they "lose it," so everything they say or do can be disregarded as words and deeds of a lunatic.
Let's be clear that I am not talking about irrational, unmeasured, violent anger of the kind that suppressed anger will sometimes become. I am talking about what the Bible calls "wrath." This is something that can even be divine. Jesus was enraged at the vendors at the Temple.
Granted, we all like to think we are Jesus and Isaiah. Our anger is righteous. But the true prophet is not merely someone who points at others but someone who includes himself and all those dear to him in the condemnation. That said, there is something far more evil and pervasive than raising one's voice in indignation or frustration at not being heard. It is the smugness of a modulated, uncaring voice.
In U.S. society, this is one of the chief legacies of Britain, the conceit that all reasonable and true discourse is subtle and indirect, all of its conclusions carefully balanced compromises. Never show pain or rage; don't give your adversary the pleasure.
This may be fine for a culture of fat dogs and scrawny children, such as England's, in which a shy people from a dim clime has always lived so uncertain of its own worth as to need the boost of calling some others -- the wogs of every stipe and color -- its lessers.
Is it suitable, however, in a land in which the Anglo-Saxon, himself a mongrel of uncertain pedigree, is a minority in a sea immigrants from as far back as 10,000 years ago across the Behring Strait or barely yesterday across the Rio Grande?
Timbre and gesture are, after all, the language of culture.
There is nothing as culturally relative as the difference in demeanor between legendary Baghdad bazaar rug merchants and the equally paradigmatic thin-lipped New England bankers. Why should one be deemed coarse and the other refined, when in the end both go at their customers' wallets with equal zeal and trickery?
As Woody Guthrie sang, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." Similarly, a mystery writer once remarked that there are two kinds of murder.
There's the murder in a manor in the English Midlands, in which the disinherited younger son gives his rich uncle drink laden with poison that cumulatively does its work. Then there's the Sunday dinner in Naples where a soccer argument heats to the point that an enraged young man seizes the carving knife and plunges it 18 times into his cousin's chest.
It took me years to realize that women's tears are shed more often in rage than in sorrow or joy.
Often, as with Michelle Obama's reputed anger at injustice in U.S. past and contemporary history, it is anger that should be heard, not dismissed.
Yet that's the way society decrees life must be. It's even a trick some extremely malicious people use: drive someone to distraction until they "lose it," so everything they say or do can be disregarded as words and deeds of a lunatic.
Let's be clear that I am not talking about irrational, unmeasured, violent anger of the kind that suppressed anger will sometimes become. I am talking about what the Bible calls "wrath." This is something that can even be divine. Jesus was enraged at the vendors at the Temple.
Granted, we all like to think we are Jesus and Isaiah. Our anger is righteous. But the true prophet is not merely someone who points at others but someone who includes himself and all those dear to him in the condemnation. That said, there is something far more evil and pervasive than raising one's voice in indignation or frustration at not being heard. It is the smugness of a modulated, uncaring voice.
In U.S. society, this is one of the chief legacies of Britain, the conceit that all reasonable and true discourse is subtle and indirect, all of its conclusions carefully balanced compromises. Never show pain or rage; don't give your adversary the pleasure.
This may be fine for a culture of fat dogs and scrawny children, such as England's, in which a shy people from a dim clime has always lived so uncertain of its own worth as to need the boost of calling some others -- the wogs of every stipe and color -- its lessers.
Is it suitable, however, in a land in which the Anglo-Saxon, himself a mongrel of uncertain pedigree, is a minority in a sea immigrants from as far back as 10,000 years ago across the Behring Strait or barely yesterday across the Rio Grande?
Timbre and gesture are, after all, the language of culture.
There is nothing as culturally relative as the difference in demeanor between legendary Baghdad bazaar rug merchants and the equally paradigmatic thin-lipped New England bankers. Why should one be deemed coarse and the other refined, when in the end both go at their customers' wallets with equal zeal and trickery?
As Woody Guthrie sang, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." Similarly, a mystery writer once remarked that there are two kinds of murder.
There's the murder in a manor in the English Midlands, in which the disinherited younger son gives his rich uncle drink laden with poison that cumulatively does its work. Then there's the Sunday dinner in Naples where a soccer argument heats to the point that an enraged young man seizes the carving knife and plunges it 18 times into his cousin's chest.
It took me years to realize that women's tears are shed more often in rage than in sorrow or joy.
Often, as with Michelle Obama's reputed anger at injustice in U.S. past and contemporary history, it is anger that should be heard, not dismissed.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Hispanics and Obama
Bloguera's headline "Latino artists who can't vote support Obama" raises one obvious issue with regard to the Hispanic vote -- while nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic, we make up only 8 percent of eligible voters -- but not the much touchier question of whether the browns will vote for a black (which Hillary Clinton answered "no").
Logic would suggest that la güera Clinton is wrong, as I have argued. The spunky Bloguera, however, did point to a fact worth underlining: Hispanics are not all alike.
Clinton won a majority of Hispanic votes in Texas and trounced Obama in Puerto Rico. Yet there you have a video of Hispanic artists who sing praises of Obama.
How to explain this?
First, Clinton and her husband had good advice and years of building bridges into the Hispanic community thanks to that advice. However, some of that bridge building was largely symbolic and opportunistic.
I will never forget the stupid dog trick of a Clinton White House adviser who tried to wow a group of Hispanic journalists by having his pager buzz so he could excuse himself at about quitting time by saying he had to go to the Oval Office. The contempt had been visible from the first moment.
Secondly, the Hispanics who vote are largely union members. We do know that the union leaders on the ground went all out for Hillary, despite her husband's North American Free Trade Agreement betrayal. (Is it any wonder that AFL-CIO unions are shrinking?)
OK, so you knew this.
Thirdly, and what we do not often admit, despite Virgilio Elizondo's multiracial, multicultural theology of mestizaje (or blending or races), is that, yes, Virginia, some Hispanics are racist.
For example, I will never forget the embarrassing Cuban minstrel show to which I was treated in the presence of a Cuban-born bishop whom I was visiting in Miami. This was not in the Al Jolson era but in the 1980s, when the very white Cuban exiles looked down their noses at the darker, more newly arrived Marielitos -- to say nothing of their disregard for the Negros of the Liberty City slum.
In my parents' country of origin, Argentina, I heard university professors joke about how they trimmed points off the score of certain students' work, merely because they were Jewish.
Sotto voce, some of the darkest Dominicans in new York City still have hatred for anyone of African origin, due to the 19th century invasion of their country by the first black-ruled nation in the world, Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.
Are these obstacles insurmountable for Obama insofar as the Hispanic vote? Why should he care?
Like Hillary, Obama will learn, sooner or later, that there are differing Hispanic constituencies. He probably won't win the Cubans, but he can probably win the Mexican-American vote and the Neorican.
Some of the Hillary connections can be transferred through the party. Certainly, the unions, are unlikely to oppose the anointed Democratic nominee and likely to see common cause in someone who as recently as last spring was defending the notion of an accelerated union certification process in the halls of the Senate.
As for the racists, they're not really American in the finest tradition of America, and they are not the majority by a long shot. The majority of Hispanics have good reason to see common cause with the son of an immigrant than with someone who courts the border-wall party.
The question that remains open, to my lights, is whether the Hispanic vote will matter. Those in the business of promoting Hispanics have been crowing that this vote is "pivotal" since 1980 -- to little discernible effect.
Hispanics make up 8 percent of all U.S. voters. However, if their turnout follows the pattern of past elections some studies estimate that they will make up only about 6.5 percent of those who actually vote next November.
Of course, Hispanics are not distributed evenly and made up more than a tenth of the electorate in the past primary season only in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Texas.
Logic would suggest that la güera Clinton is wrong, as I have argued. The spunky Bloguera, however, did point to a fact worth underlining: Hispanics are not all alike.
Clinton won a majority of Hispanic votes in Texas and trounced Obama in Puerto Rico. Yet there you have a video of Hispanic artists who sing praises of Obama.
How to explain this?
First, Clinton and her husband had good advice and years of building bridges into the Hispanic community thanks to that advice. However, some of that bridge building was largely symbolic and opportunistic.
I will never forget the stupid dog trick of a Clinton White House adviser who tried to wow a group of Hispanic journalists by having his pager buzz so he could excuse himself at about quitting time by saying he had to go to the Oval Office. The contempt had been visible from the first moment.
Secondly, the Hispanics who vote are largely union members. We do know that the union leaders on the ground went all out for Hillary, despite her husband's North American Free Trade Agreement betrayal. (Is it any wonder that AFL-CIO unions are shrinking?)
OK, so you knew this.
Thirdly, and what we do not often admit, despite Virgilio Elizondo's multiracial, multicultural theology of mestizaje (or blending or races), is that, yes, Virginia, some Hispanics are racist.
For example, I will never forget the embarrassing Cuban minstrel show to which I was treated in the presence of a Cuban-born bishop whom I was visiting in Miami. This was not in the Al Jolson era but in the 1980s, when the very white Cuban exiles looked down their noses at the darker, more newly arrived Marielitos -- to say nothing of their disregard for the Negros of the Liberty City slum.
In my parents' country of origin, Argentina, I heard university professors joke about how they trimmed points off the score of certain students' work, merely because they were Jewish.
Sotto voce, some of the darkest Dominicans in new York City still have hatred for anyone of African origin, due to the 19th century invasion of their country by the first black-ruled nation in the world, Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.
Are these obstacles insurmountable for Obama insofar as the Hispanic vote? Why should he care?
Like Hillary, Obama will learn, sooner or later, that there are differing Hispanic constituencies. He probably won't win the Cubans, but he can probably win the Mexican-American vote and the Neorican.
Some of the Hillary connections can be transferred through the party. Certainly, the unions, are unlikely to oppose the anointed Democratic nominee and likely to see common cause in someone who as recently as last spring was defending the notion of an accelerated union certification process in the halls of the Senate.
As for the racists, they're not really American in the finest tradition of America, and they are not the majority by a long shot. The majority of Hispanics have good reason to see common cause with the son of an immigrant than with someone who courts the border-wall party.
The question that remains open, to my lights, is whether the Hispanic vote will matter. Those in the business of promoting Hispanics have been crowing that this vote is "pivotal" since 1980 -- to little discernible effect.
Hispanics make up 8 percent of all U.S. voters. However, if their turnout follows the pattern of past elections some studies estimate that they will make up only about 6.5 percent of those who actually vote next November.
Of course, Hispanics are not distributed evenly and made up more than a tenth of the electorate in the past primary season only in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Texas.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Recipe for New Politics
Jim Johnson, who recently resigned from assignment as Barack Obama's VP-vetter-in-chief, is memorable to me not for his insider influence, but for his inside-the-Beltway humor, including one of his favorite recipes: "Palm Steak."
Back when Johnson was Walter Mondale's campaign chief, he made his recipe public, which as I recall went like this: go to Palm Restaurant, get seated, order steak. The Palm, as people with wallets much fatter than mine call it, is a swanky Washington eatery at which I have partaken of the Johnson recipe only when someone else was footing the bill.
His resignation saddened me partly because I knew he was probably an asset to Obama (even though in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro was not such a hot choice), but mostly because it highlights a stupid and annoying political truism that, slogans notwithstanding, is completely off the mark: Washington is the problem.
By "Washington," the unseen people John McCain likes to address as "friends" are said to mean not the actual capital city, not its African American majority which they hardly even realize exists, nor much less the federal employees who stream in from Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
No, the Washington routinely accused in the hustings of being the core problem of the American body politic is an echo-system (pun intended) populated by congresscritters and White House rats, along with slithering lobby larvae and pontificating wonki illuminati, all of whom seek to engage with celebrity media figures in a mating ritual of mutual pandering and preening.
Of course, what most people outside the Beltway rarely realize is that this fauna lives on only due to its parasitical relationship to the worker bees of the capital: the network of professionals touched in some way on a daily basis by the capital's chief sacrament, policy.
This includes the phalanx of lawyers and editorial professionals who make sure the text of laws and regulations is precisely as intended and no more, the army of specialists who explain to the decision-makers the complexities of a million branches of human knowledge, and the participant observation of hundreds of off-camera print journalists of little renown, such as myself, who often spread within the policy hive the information that brings about necessary self-correction.
Let's face it: elected officials haven't run the truly necessary parts of government for years. If they did, things would be immensely worse. There would be no bean counters to remind the Bushies that they do need some taxes, if only to pay their own salaries at a minimum. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers might be running around in Iraq naked, not merely with deficient armor. And pollution standards, such as they are, would never have become practicable.
Crazy things occur to politicians, lobbyists, wonks and even the occasional TV newsreader. Remember Star Wars and the flat tax?
In Britain, the use of thalidomide in the early 1960s as a sedative prescribed to pregnant women to combat the effects of morning sickness led to the birth of children with birth defects such as missing or shortened limbs. That drug was never approved for similar use in the United States thanks to a brave physician I once met, a middle level bureaucrat who fought pharmaceutical companies tooth and nail. (The drug is now used successfully in the USA for treating leprosy.)
What prevented such crazy things was Washington, too.
It's the denizens of that Washington who will have to tell President McCain (cough, sputter) that tax cuts for the rich just have to be rolled back or explain to President Obama that not everything in his program can be accomplished at once.
The recipe for new politics may well involve some of the "old" Washington, that part of Washington that has always worked in the boiler room of the ship of state.
Back when Johnson was Walter Mondale's campaign chief, he made his recipe public, which as I recall went like this: go to Palm Restaurant, get seated, order steak. The Palm, as people with wallets much fatter than mine call it, is a swanky Washington eatery at which I have partaken of the Johnson recipe only when someone else was footing the bill.
His resignation saddened me partly because I knew he was probably an asset to Obama (even though in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro was not such a hot choice), but mostly because it highlights a stupid and annoying political truism that, slogans notwithstanding, is completely off the mark: Washington is the problem.
By "Washington," the unseen people John McCain likes to address as "friends" are said to mean not the actual capital city, not its African American majority which they hardly even realize exists, nor much less the federal employees who stream in from Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
No, the Washington routinely accused in the hustings of being the core problem of the American body politic is an echo-system (pun intended) populated by congresscritters and White House rats, along with slithering lobby larvae and pontificating wonki illuminati, all of whom seek to engage with celebrity media figures in a mating ritual of mutual pandering and preening.
Of course, what most people outside the Beltway rarely realize is that this fauna lives on only due to its parasitical relationship to the worker bees of the capital: the network of professionals touched in some way on a daily basis by the capital's chief sacrament, policy.
This includes the phalanx of lawyers and editorial professionals who make sure the text of laws and regulations is precisely as intended and no more, the army of specialists who explain to the decision-makers the complexities of a million branches of human knowledge, and the participant observation of hundreds of off-camera print journalists of little renown, such as myself, who often spread within the policy hive the information that brings about necessary self-correction.
Let's face it: elected officials haven't run the truly necessary parts of government for years. If they did, things would be immensely worse. There would be no bean counters to remind the Bushies that they do need some taxes, if only to pay their own salaries at a minimum. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers might be running around in Iraq naked, not merely with deficient armor. And pollution standards, such as they are, would never have become practicable.
Crazy things occur to politicians, lobbyists, wonks and even the occasional TV newsreader. Remember Star Wars and the flat tax?
In Britain, the use of thalidomide in the early 1960s as a sedative prescribed to pregnant women to combat the effects of morning sickness led to the birth of children with birth defects such as missing or shortened limbs. That drug was never approved for similar use in the United States thanks to a brave physician I once met, a middle level bureaucrat who fought pharmaceutical companies tooth and nail. (The drug is now used successfully in the USA for treating leprosy.)
What prevented such crazy things was Washington, too.
It's the denizens of that Washington who will have to tell President McCain (cough, sputter) that tax cuts for the rich just have to be rolled back or explain to President Obama that not everything in his program can be accomplished at once.
The recipe for new politics may well involve some of the "old" Washington, that part of Washington that has always worked in the boiler room of the ship of state.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Meet Depress
As much as I liked newly deceased Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert, NBC's hour-long farewell Friday night and "celebration" on Sunday went so far over the top with bathos as to make me want to join a choir of Munchkins for a rousing chorus of "Ding, dong, Tim Russert's dead" (to the tune of The Wizard Oz's "The Witch Is Dead").
The Friday special ran out of original material about 10 minutes into the program and by Sunday so much had been printed, posted and broadcast about Saint Russert that only some Afghan villager hiding in the Tora Bora caves would not have heard every last possible cliché available.
Yet anchor Tom Brokaw continued the death march into banality with his demand for "no tears,"a decree he telegenically broke in a transparent -- and desperate -- play for ratings.
The two "tributes" struck me as tasteless as the tons of unwrapped flowers piled on the Buckingham Palace mound of mush after the death of Princess Diana, a woman far more celebrated for far fewer accomplishments than Russert's.
The best tribute to Russert would have been to get on with the show.
Brokaw, or someone who could interview without a script, should have faced some policymaker who had something substantive and mildly original to say about some topic other than the personal trivia of a newscaster who had barely missed becoming a twinkie, just as he was dangerously en route to becoming one. (In case you don't know, "twinkie" is print journalese for on-camera broadcast news figures: blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside.)
Let's be clear: I have nothing against Russert.
Russert was entertaining and had some pointed questions (though I found his quizzing of Condoleeza Rice on running for president a bit of dead-horse beating). He did his job reasonably well for one of the few people in journalism with a multi-million-dollar salary. So?
Also, my goodness, he died pretty much at his desk, at 58, of a heart attack. Is it that so surprising for a man as obviously overweight as he was? My own father, whose figure matched Russert's, died at 59 three decades ago. I myself am only two years younger than Russert was, and I have struggled to lose 35 pounds in the past year -- with hope for more -- precisely to avoid a similar fate. Yet ... who knows?
In the end, where was the news here? Someone, tell me, please!
Besides, what was so startling about Russert, after all? Russert was a lawyer, a former aide to powerful politicians, then one of the suits in the NBC corporate suites. Only someone with that combination of connections could have parlayed just a few years of back room "journalism" experience into a 17-year gig in a prime public affairs television slot.
Sorry, but I don't see material for sainthood there.
Russert's Sunday television cortege was also pathetic. Led by a man whose chief talent is being able to read on camera, accompanied by an alleged historian accused of plagiarism whose first splash in publishing was the gossip she heard as a White House intern (remind you of someone?), along with a Washington "power couple" no one has bet a plugged nickel on for years, and yes, the obligatory token black face to pretend that Washington's white elite establishment isn't.
What wisdom did these individuals have to impart?
Then again, who were we mourning? A great man of letters, a jurist who had defined complex issues, an engineer who had built a new marvel, a scientist who had found a cure? No, just an overweight, middle aged guy who parlayed influence into TV celebrity. Period.
Tim Russert was probably a nice guy to his dog, if he had one. I'm sure his family will miss him. Still, in a world with serious problems (which, admittedly, his work sometimes helped illuminate), was his death worth endless repetition of mediocre quotes?
I'd like to think he would say no. Except ... I did note that the Sunday show billed Tim Russert as managing editor. Did he script his own televised obituary? I don't know and I would rather not find out. I've had my fill of Tim Russert for a while.
The Friday special ran out of original material about 10 minutes into the program and by Sunday so much had been printed, posted and broadcast about Saint Russert that only some Afghan villager hiding in the Tora Bora caves would not have heard every last possible cliché available.
Yet anchor Tom Brokaw continued the death march into banality with his demand for "no tears,"a decree he telegenically broke in a transparent -- and desperate -- play for ratings.
The two "tributes" struck me as tasteless as the tons of unwrapped flowers piled on the Buckingham Palace mound of mush after the death of Princess Diana, a woman far more celebrated for far fewer accomplishments than Russert's.
The best tribute to Russert would have been to get on with the show.
Brokaw, or someone who could interview without a script, should have faced some policymaker who had something substantive and mildly original to say about some topic other than the personal trivia of a newscaster who had barely missed becoming a twinkie, just as he was dangerously en route to becoming one. (In case you don't know, "twinkie" is print journalese for on-camera broadcast news figures: blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside.)
Let's be clear: I have nothing against Russert.
Russert was entertaining and had some pointed questions (though I found his quizzing of Condoleeza Rice on running for president a bit of dead-horse beating). He did his job reasonably well for one of the few people in journalism with a multi-million-dollar salary. So?
Also, my goodness, he died pretty much at his desk, at 58, of a heart attack. Is it that so surprising for a man as obviously overweight as he was? My own father, whose figure matched Russert's, died at 59 three decades ago. I myself am only two years younger than Russert was, and I have struggled to lose 35 pounds in the past year -- with hope for more -- precisely to avoid a similar fate. Yet ... who knows?
In the end, where was the news here? Someone, tell me, please!
Besides, what was so startling about Russert, after all? Russert was a lawyer, a former aide to powerful politicians, then one of the suits in the NBC corporate suites. Only someone with that combination of connections could have parlayed just a few years of back room "journalism" experience into a 17-year gig in a prime public affairs television slot.
Sorry, but I don't see material for sainthood there.
Russert's Sunday television cortege was also pathetic. Led by a man whose chief talent is being able to read on camera, accompanied by an alleged historian accused of plagiarism whose first splash in publishing was the gossip she heard as a White House intern (remind you of someone?), along with a Washington "power couple" no one has bet a plugged nickel on for years, and yes, the obligatory token black face to pretend that Washington's white elite establishment isn't.
What wisdom did these individuals have to impart?
Then again, who were we mourning? A great man of letters, a jurist who had defined complex issues, an engineer who had built a new marvel, a scientist who had found a cure? No, just an overweight, middle aged guy who parlayed influence into TV celebrity. Period.
Tim Russert was probably a nice guy to his dog, if he had one. I'm sure his family will miss him. Still, in a world with serious problems (which, admittedly, his work sometimes helped illuminate), was his death worth endless repetition of mediocre quotes?
I'd like to think he would say no. Except ... I did note that the Sunday show billed Tim Russert as managing editor. Did he script his own televised obituary? I don't know and I would rather not find out. I've had my fill of Tim Russert for a while.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Just One Word: Plastics
Who does not recall the title's words as the quintessence of sage advice of the 1960s, from the film The Graduate? What would we tell the graduates of today, among them my son, who is getting his bachelor's degree from Harvard this morning? Computers? Homeland security? A young man wants the answer, but he wants to find it on his own.
My recollection of this period of my life involves a healthy dose of anxiety. The first lesson I learned in the job market was that everyone wanted someone experienced. How the hell was I going to get experience unless someone hired me?
Besides, what was wrong with these people? They were merely interested in making money, when I brought the wisdom of the ages.
Yes, what one is going to do with one's future -- asked of The Graduate's Ben as of everyone at that stage -- seems the important question, but it really isn't. Much more important than a job and a future, it seems to me, is learning and the present.
What have you learned? I toted up 17 years between kindergarten and my university graduation and, at the time, I asked my good friend Michael what I had learned.
"Never to do it again," was his reply. Three decades later, my son laughed at the words, as I tried to help him make sense of his moment.
One hopes a university graduate has learned how to learn. Perhaps a graduate has a rough map of stored human knowledge and where it is to be found.
A few graduates have particular, occupationally specific skills. Yet in a world in which most people can expect to change careers, not just jobs, several times in a lifetime, this is not all that meaningful.
Besides, making a living is predictably easier than it seems at first blush. Anxious graduates remind me of fretful mothers who worried whether their babies would ever walk and talk. After all, how many people never learn how to walk and talk?
Even at the depths of the Great Depression 78 percent of all able-bodied available U.S. workers were employed. That wasn't good news for the 23 percent that weren't, but it meant that you had a 4 in 5 chance of having a job. Today U.S. national unemployment stands at 5 percent. This means that 95 percent of all people able and willing to work hold jobs. You have more than 9 out of 10 chances of being employed.
My son and his peers will get jobs, likely get married, have kids, "the full catastrophe" as Zorba put it. Anthony Quinn, who played the Nikos Kazantzakis character, rendered the adjective with a faux Greek accent that lent the phrase delicious ambiguity. In his mouth it sounded as "the fool catastrophe."
So the first concern is what one learns, not what one can do with it. The wise and honest answer is perhaps that of Socrates: that one knows nothing.
The second is like it: who one is. A young man or woman at the age of graduating from university is most clearly no longer a child. Graduation is the modern bar mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony for the educated classes in the Western world.
My son's grandfather was given $100 in 1923 and told to make his way after he came out of Princeton and set out for business in New York. According to the inflation calculator, that's $1,227.31 in 2007 dollars.
So, who are you at this moment in which parents watch you fly off the nest for the last time? There's a different answer for everyone.
I would like to suggest that we are all, at any given point in our lives, somewhat more than what you look like, how much you earn, the kind of work you do or the kind of mate you attract. In some ways we are all less unusual and unique than we would like to think, less free to be individual; in others, we have made choices that define us -- rarely irrevocably.
If you or someone you know is graduating this season, take a moment to take stock, an unhurried pause, without thinking about a job and the future. Just revel in what you understand and who you are this moment.
Before you know it ... it will be gone.
My recollection of this period of my life involves a healthy dose of anxiety. The first lesson I learned in the job market was that everyone wanted someone experienced. How the hell was I going to get experience unless someone hired me?
Besides, what was wrong with these people? They were merely interested in making money, when I brought the wisdom of the ages.
Yes, what one is going to do with one's future -- asked of The Graduate's Ben as of everyone at that stage -- seems the important question, but it really isn't. Much more important than a job and a future, it seems to me, is learning and the present.
What have you learned? I toted up 17 years between kindergarten and my university graduation and, at the time, I asked my good friend Michael what I had learned.
"Never to do it again," was his reply. Three decades later, my son laughed at the words, as I tried to help him make sense of his moment.
One hopes a university graduate has learned how to learn. Perhaps a graduate has a rough map of stored human knowledge and where it is to be found.
A few graduates have particular, occupationally specific skills. Yet in a world in which most people can expect to change careers, not just jobs, several times in a lifetime, this is not all that meaningful.
Besides, making a living is predictably easier than it seems at first blush. Anxious graduates remind me of fretful mothers who worried whether their babies would ever walk and talk. After all, how many people never learn how to walk and talk?
Even at the depths of the Great Depression 78 percent of all able-bodied available U.S. workers were employed. That wasn't good news for the 23 percent that weren't, but it meant that you had a 4 in 5 chance of having a job. Today U.S. national unemployment stands at 5 percent. This means that 95 percent of all people able and willing to work hold jobs. You have more than 9 out of 10 chances of being employed.
My son and his peers will get jobs, likely get married, have kids, "the full catastrophe" as Zorba put it. Anthony Quinn, who played the Nikos Kazantzakis character, rendered the adjective with a faux Greek accent that lent the phrase delicious ambiguity. In his mouth it sounded as "the fool catastrophe."
So the first concern is what one learns, not what one can do with it. The wise and honest answer is perhaps that of Socrates: that one knows nothing.
The second is like it: who one is. A young man or woman at the age of graduating from university is most clearly no longer a child. Graduation is the modern bar mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony for the educated classes in the Western world.
My son's grandfather was given $100 in 1923 and told to make his way after he came out of Princeton and set out for business in New York. According to the inflation calculator, that's $1,227.31 in 2007 dollars.
So, who are you at this moment in which parents watch you fly off the nest for the last time? There's a different answer for everyone.
I would like to suggest that we are all, at any given point in our lives, somewhat more than what you look like, how much you earn, the kind of work you do or the kind of mate you attract. In some ways we are all less unusual and unique than we would like to think, less free to be individual; in others, we have made choices that define us -- rarely irrevocably.
If you or someone you know is graduating this season, take a moment to take stock, an unhurried pause, without thinking about a job and the future. Just revel in what you understand and who you are this moment.
Before you know it ... it will be gone.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Blogging vs. Journalism
This week Alex Fear won a round of beer from me when someone made the 250th comment on my post concerning a catfight two barmy1 Englishwomen decided embark upon in the blogosphere. In all the British verbal diarrhea, one recurring theme is the mistaken view that this blog -- or any other, for that matter -- amount to journalism.
This is now espoused by one of those immensely tiresome British commenters who asserts that she is a "journalist" and how dare I blog without reference to the canons of the trade to express compassion for Felicity Jane Lowde, a woman who obviously could use some. I strongly suspect the alleged journalist is none other than Rachel Whatszername, a celebrity victim du jour in Britain back in 2005, but that's neither here nor there.
No one who has actually earned money reporting facts in print or broadcast -- as I and my journalism colleagues do in our respective news journals and bulletins -- would confuse such work with blogging, essentially an unpaid hobby in which people "log" their thoughts in essays of varying length on matters large and small. Essayists are not journalists, any more than entomologists who write multiple scholarly volumes about insects are journalists.
Journalists who blog are not doing journalism when they blog; they are blogging. This is much the same as with entomologists, who are not engaged in entomology when they are bugged by bloggers.
Now it's easy to see how a Brit might be confused about this.
The British press treats facticity with a fair amount of latitude. Having had the temporary misfortune a number of years ago to work as a journalist in Britain, I discovered this the hard way. As in most of Europe -- Brits don't know they are European, so keep this on the Q.T. -- the British press is first and foremost opinionated.
The Times is conservative, The Guardian is liberal. The tabloids are mostly fascistoid, sexist and mostly devoid of truly useful or significant information -- like the telly2.
Much as with our own public lack of information in North America, the British public is grossly misinformed, but their disinformation arises out of corporate policy harkening back to forever (read Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" for a time-tested sendup). Most newsrooms in Britain have a creature unknown in these shores, known as a "sub-editor" whose job is to make sure not merely that the syntax is correct, punctuation clear and word usage consistent with style, but also that the "editorial line" is reflected in the set of factoids conveyed.
As if this were not enough, since 1912 the Ministry of Defence [sic] has routinely issued something called a "D notice" to any journalistic scribe the bureaucrats want, without accountability or reason, let alone rhyme. Upon receipt of the "request" not to publish whatever it is officialdom wants not published for reasons of "national security" (no one has ever abused that phrase, of course), reporting ceases instantly.
Not only that. The British legal system is so tilted in favor of money that courts notoriously reward the most inane nuisance suits to the point that most British journalists are not allowed to mention a traffic accident without a police report to source it on -- no matter what they or other witnesses saw with their own eyes!
In brief, freedom of the press as we know it is nonexistent in Britain. The D-notice exerts what we in the USA regard as unconstitutional prior restraint, to which the practice of libel law adds an economic muzzle.
So, to the average Brit, your run of the mill blog is a veritable font of journalism. All you need is a typeface and -- presto! -- you're a journalist!
But wait! We haven't even examined the difference between opinion and reporting of fact. Of course not! The average Brit is utterly unable to distinguish between the two, given that he has been served up opinion as reportage all his life.
In sum, to all you Brits agog about Rachel and Felicity, stay after class and write on the blackboard 100 times: Blogging is just a hobby.
1 Britishism for "nutty."
2 'nother one, television.
This is now espoused by one of those immensely tiresome British commenters who asserts that she is a "journalist" and how dare I blog without reference to the canons of the trade to express compassion for Felicity Jane Lowde, a woman who obviously could use some. I strongly suspect the alleged journalist is none other than Rachel Whatszername, a celebrity victim du jour in Britain back in 2005, but that's neither here nor there.
No one who has actually earned money reporting facts in print or broadcast -- as I and my journalism colleagues do in our respective news journals and bulletins -- would confuse such work with blogging, essentially an unpaid hobby in which people "log" their thoughts in essays of varying length on matters large and small. Essayists are not journalists, any more than entomologists who write multiple scholarly volumes about insects are journalists.
Journalists who blog are not doing journalism when they blog; they are blogging. This is much the same as with entomologists, who are not engaged in entomology when they are bugged by bloggers.
Now it's easy to see how a Brit might be confused about this.
The British press treats facticity with a fair amount of latitude. Having had the temporary misfortune a number of years ago to work as a journalist in Britain, I discovered this the hard way. As in most of Europe -- Brits don't know they are European, so keep this on the Q.T. -- the British press is first and foremost opinionated.
The Times is conservative, The Guardian is liberal. The tabloids are mostly fascistoid, sexist and mostly devoid of truly useful or significant information -- like the telly2.
Much as with our own public lack of information in North America, the British public is grossly misinformed, but their disinformation arises out of corporate policy harkening back to forever (read Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" for a time-tested sendup). Most newsrooms in Britain have a creature unknown in these shores, known as a "sub-editor" whose job is to make sure not merely that the syntax is correct, punctuation clear and word usage consistent with style, but also that the "editorial line" is reflected in the set of factoids conveyed.
As if this were not enough, since 1912 the Ministry of Defence [sic] has routinely issued something called a "D notice" to any journalistic scribe the bureaucrats want, without accountability or reason, let alone rhyme. Upon receipt of the "request" not to publish whatever it is officialdom wants not published for reasons of "national security" (no one has ever abused that phrase, of course), reporting ceases instantly.
Not only that. The British legal system is so tilted in favor of money that courts notoriously reward the most inane nuisance suits to the point that most British journalists are not allowed to mention a traffic accident without a police report to source it on -- no matter what they or other witnesses saw with their own eyes!
In brief, freedom of the press as we know it is nonexistent in Britain. The D-notice exerts what we in the USA regard as unconstitutional prior restraint, to which the practice of libel law adds an economic muzzle.
So, to the average Brit, your run of the mill blog is a veritable font of journalism. All you need is a typeface and -- presto! -- you're a journalist!
But wait! We haven't even examined the difference between opinion and reporting of fact. Of course not! The average Brit is utterly unable to distinguish between the two, given that he has been served up opinion as reportage all his life.
In sum, to all you Brits agog about Rachel and Felicity, stay after class and write on the blackboard 100 times: Blogging is just a hobby.
1 Britishism for "nutty."
2 'nother one, television.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Heart Market News: SLTR Dips on CZX Surge
Turns out that, as with Microsoft and Yahoo stock, relationships with folk of the male persuasion are really vehicles of investment. So, at least, says a consensus of women, often expressed in a sentence such as "I'm investing in the relationship."
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Oh, Those Gay and Lesbian Sinners!
A couple of weeks ago I visited Foundry Methodist Church (aka Hillary's church) and got into an argument over 2008 United Methodist General Conference resolutions reaffirming the incompatibility of homosexual behavior with Christianity to the point of exclusion from church membership and ordained ministry.
Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.
On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.
Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)
In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)
Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.
Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.
This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.
Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)
Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.
This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.
Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)
The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.
"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)
Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.
There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.
To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.
First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).
Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."
Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.
On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."
I see problems with both. Now you know why.
Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.
On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.
Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)
In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)
Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.
Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.
This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.
Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)
Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.
This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.
Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)
The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.
"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)
Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.
There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.
To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.
First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).
Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."
Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.
On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."
I see problems with both. Now you know why.
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