Why Conservatism Was Always Doomed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing Hard Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank You" to GIs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christian Ecology

In the end, if the teachings of the Christian gospels were fully lived out, history would be replaced by a life of universal Zen-like, other-directed detachment. Humanity would be kind, simple, chaste and ultimately extinct, like the Shakers.

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
                                                               (Shaker hymn)

Then war and misery and pollution would cease. Species of plants and animals would retake the space we once occupied. The world might then be a place of natural entropy.

45 Years Ago

I thought I would never recover from that afternoon on November 22, 1963. Even a year later I cried watching the USIA film "John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums." Everybody who was alive remembers where they were when they heard about the shots in Dallas.

In fact, the whole idea of remembering where you were when ... that started then.

I was on a 5th grade field trip to the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, also known as the Pink House because its exterior walls are painted in an amalgam of the fighting colors of each side in a long civil war in the 19th century -- red and white.

It was the one place sure to hear about the events in Dallas almost instantaneously. And so it happened. We were waiting to go into one of the ceremonial rooms when a man walked up to another saying, "We have to tell the president that Kennedy's been shot."

The tour ended sometime later in a blur. One of the teachers had our school bus stop by a news kiosk and bought a tabloid with the start headline that confirmed that something had happened.

The headline hedged and the paper was, from what I knew, hugely disreputable and purchased only for fun. Someone had once called to my attention a photo of a pugilist it ran with the caption "Here is [boxer I can't recall] as he will look when he climbs down from his plane from Europe tomorrow."

So, of course, it wasn't true. Right? It couldn't have happened. Right? In the United States ... then, wait ... Abraham Lincoln came into focus.

The bus stopped again at another kiosk where a teacher bought a second edition of a more reputable evening paper.

Not only had he been shot, he was dead!

"It was the Russians!" said my grandmother.

"It was the Cubans!" said another relative.

"It was the Germans!" exclaimed my mother's foot doctor, a European Jew with some reason to mistrust Germans.

We still don't know who it was and at this point it no longer matters.

The event changed all of us. A significant part of the hopeful, optimistic, can-do, largely admired, at worst envied land, verging on fulfilling its promise to do better by humanity, that USA died that day. If I ever believed in a happy ending for history, that stopped that day.

I had no inkling of what it would feel like 45 years later. At the ripe old age of 11, I wrote a letter to the pope, asking that Kennedy be canonized as a martyr. How oddly funny it seems today!

Yet my own childish sentiment was very little different from those of poor and simple people living in huts in Latin America and slums of Brooklyn where they keep their pictures or statuettes of the Virgin Mary next to their picture of Kennedy, decades later still smiling, still inspiring hope.

Even this past year, we flea-bitten, media-savvy, Watergated and Vietnamed and Bushwacked Americans saw in a black senator from Illinois something "Kennedyesque" that moved us all.

The Human Loneliness

When Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, settled on a title for her autobiography, it was "The Long Loneliness," in part a reference to the lover she lost for her faith, in part a reflection on the human condition. We all endure the long loneliness.

This came to me last weekend when the company of a special friend was denied me and I realized that I do not have many friends at all, despite living in the same city now for roughly 30 years.

Speaking with friends and mulling this over, I also realize that part of the reason is that I am overly critical. The vast majority of people are tedious: they talk about themselves, their possessions, their trips, their lifestyle and their work.

The friends one knew in college, those with whom one could talk about politics and philosophy until the wee hours while nursing beers warm, they are all gone. Maybe they never existed.

Deep in the human heart there is instead a gaping gnawing, living hole. A black hole that tells us that, in the end, we're all on our own.

Friends will call you when they want something, want to tell you something. We know that humanity is essentially self-interested.

Lovers may assuage the loneliness, but they will never fill it. I have a broken marriage as witness.

In the absence of a God, there is nothing to fill that void that is felt most acutely when we are alone and in need. As in the story of Jesus, we will all know the experience of being deserted by everyone.

The human loneliness explains a multitude of endeavors -- religion, love, literature and art, the search of riches and power and sex -- yet none of them ever overcome that sense of living without rhyme or reason, loveless, artless, without any real wealth or security in the end, questionably or temporarily attractive, in a word, alone.

The Blog Post of Laughter and Forgetting

As I forget my identification at home, or my wallet, or my head when it is not attached, I am reminded of the title of Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It occurs to me that we Boomers are entering a stage in which the Orwellian destruction of memory against which Kundera protests is inevitable.

I was always an absent-minded professor, someone who has known me since my 20s reminds me. Even I recall that I always fought against my forgetting and perennial messiness, with decidedly mixed results.

So?

About a decade ago my printer's rep died and what his colleagues most remembered with laughter was his tendency to forget to turn off his cell phone before a meeting. That was when cellular phones were new.

As I near the completion of the second edition of a family history on which I have been laboring almost all my life, it occurred to me that I didn't scan in pictures at the optimum resolution. Thank goodness I kept the photos rather than discarding them. Some grandchild will have to scan them more accurately in using the precursor of 22nd century technology.

For myself, I'm done as soon as the editing, writing and layout is finished. There are a number of projects that I now begin to realize I am unlikely ever to complete to my satisfaction.

Similarly, there are a number of achievements I will never attain. I won't grow up to be President of the United States nor managing editor of The New York Times.

So? Can't I simply laugh it off and forget these silly yearnings? Kundera wrote with a similar irony of the air-brushing-out in official photos of politicians purged from the Czech Communist Party.

Granted, in Soviet forced forgetting there was a tacit and symbolic death brought about that Kundera understandably rebelled against. Death by murder always feels like a violation.

Yet doesn't nature murder us all? Don't I face an explicit and actual death?

Oddly enough, I become less rebellious against my murder by nature's hand with every day that passes. I am getting old enough to laugh at it, to gain an indifference to whether it occurs  next week or 30 years from now.

It is almost as if life has excised a bad tooth and given me laughing gas to avoid the pain.

Having lived in a dictatorship with relative everyday ease, I wonder now whether living in a totalitarian regime was all that different from the dictatorship of nature: laughter and forgetting to ease whatever ails us, instead of the futile struggle to remember.

Soviets were paying rent at 1920s rates in the 1990s. Sure, the ruble wasn't a freely convertible currency, but I doubt it made a difference for the majority of Russians. Would it have changed things that much in America?

As one who lives and breathes politics, it might be difficult to forgo certain kind of arguments in cafes or on the Internet, but in the end, have I ever really solved any social problem with my discussions?

Most people want a few simple things. A full belly, some affection or facsimile thereof, clothes appropriate to the season, a decent place to live, something to keep us occupied. Oh, and something to complain about.

Was there a richer, more compassionate humor anywhere outside of Soviet Russia in our lifetime? Remember "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"? I doubt there was anything like it amid the stationwagons and color TV sets of Levittown.

Sure, I could to without the wanton murder of some 30 million people under Stalin. But even people who lived through the Red Terror are wistful about it today.

In the end, it is all laughter and forgetting.

Agnostic Via Media

Anglicans like to call their faith a via media, or middle way, between Rome and Wittenberg. Much the same is the place of the agnostic, I have found.

I am not talking of those who are religionless by default but fearful of the cosmic spanking they might get in the afterlife. Those who call themselves "agnostic" to avoid the stares and frowns prompted by "atheist."

No, I am talking as someone who once believed with conviction. Not just in childhood, either. Not just as a matter of good manners or custom. Not as a cultural expression (well, perhaps a little).

I had faith and now all I have is doubt I cannot overcome. I offer this mindful of Romano Guardini's definition of faith as the capacity to overcome doubt.

The terrible thing is that I am reasonably well educated about religion. I am conversant with the salient issues in theology, biblical research and ecclesiology and the gallons of ink spilled attempting to resolve them.

Indeed, I enjoy a good discussion on these themes. I can articulate with very reasonable fidelity the prevailing consensus concerning the basic teachings of Christianity, the Catholic Church and some branches of Protestantism -- even though I do not believe in any of it.

To my mind, the question isn't even whether God exists, but whether Jesus of Nazareth ever really walked the face of the earth, which I highly doubt.

There ought to be a church in which people who do not believe can go and discuss these things. I'm not interested in socials, bake sales, services or the like. Just a good discussion in which I can speak with like minded people and broaden my understanding with the comforting knowledge that none of these questions can ever be definitively answered.

Give me the church of St. John Dominic Crossan, please.

What Good Are the Churches?

Two issues, two days, two wrongheaded political interventions by churches: Mormons fund a proposal to ban gay marriage, Catholic bishops begin murmuring about opposing Obama on their micro-issues. Maybe it's time to take away the tax exemptions of churches, see if they have time to screw around with the rest of us then.

Note that they're never out in front for peace or for poverty reduction. Only exceptionally, and usually for the self-interest of their congregations, do they come out in favor of ethnic tolerance.

I won't even bother with whether their beliefs make sense. Let's look at their actions, which principally amount to wanting to carve into the stone of the civil, religiously neutral law of a pluralistic society minor quirks of their moral codes.

Let's start with the Mormons. The Church of Latter-Day Sainst opposes gay marriage; fine, no judge will force a church to perform a marriage that violates the churches teachings.

Certainly, no Catholic priest is legally obligated to marry a divorced Catholic who does not have an canon law annulment: Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of the bond created by the sacrament of matrimony trumps secular law under the U.S. Constitution.

On the issue of marriage, Mormons have their own unusual history.

In 1890, then-LDS President Wilford Woodruff claimed he received a revelation that polygamy, previously taught as consistent with "God's law," should be banned. The oracular event was instrumental in Utah's admission into the USA in 1896. Yet even then the first Mormon elected to the House in 1898 was denied a seat because he practiced polygamy.

Should the Mormons be allowed polygamy? Why not? The Catholics are allowed not to recognize divorce decrees that are perfectly legal in civil courts.

But it doesn't end there. The Mormons also banned blacks from the priesthood or their temples in 1849, a doctrine that was not altered until 1978. Note that government did not interfere in the application of this doctrine.

Much the same can be said of Catholicism, which as a matter of practice in the United States upheld separate seating, and in some places separate churches, for blacks and whites. The practice was still known to occur in 1949, I am aware, when Washington Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle banned it in his diocese and swiftly unseated several pastors who defied him.

But, you might say that the Catholic Church gives plenty to the poor through Catholic Charities, no? Actually, no. Between 45 and 65 percent (depending on the source) of Catholic Charities' funding comes from contracts with the government.

Catholic Charities heyday as a private beneficence was when its charges were white and Irish. Once the Irish moved to the suburbs and clients began to be primarily black or Hispanic, the organization needed government money to continue.

Now comes Archbishop Francis George of Chicago, arguing that bishops should express opposition to the rumored regulatory changes that the Obama administration will make in the areas of abortion counseling and stem-cell research.

Why haven't the bishops been as vocal on other issues as they have on this? Isn't it a fact that the bishops want a law on abortion because their preaching has failed so abysmally that Catholics are statistically as likely to divorce or get an abortion as non-Catholics?

Why should we taxpayers subsidize this nonsense? The LDS and Catholic churches have plenty of money -- witness the millions paid out in damages in response to lawsuits from pedophile priests' victims.

Traditional religion is, indeed, the only wholly untaxed business in the USA. Whatever social purpose they may have been deemed to perform in the past, that role is long gone. In a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state, religion should be taxed, like pornography, cigarettes and liquor.

The Hem of His Garment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

To Be President One Day

The festivities in the streets on Tuesday and yesterday's elation in what I'll call "Smiling Wednesday" call to mind my feelings in November 1960, as a Catholic schoolboy, when the country elected a Catholic and my coreligionists instantly ceased being second-class citizens.

 * photo origin unknown; will credit or take down if requested

Although the "No Irish Need Apply" signs are part of myth rather than history, this country was distinctly Protestant and anti-Catholic for most of its history. Bigotry against Catholics is still socially acceptable 48 years after the 1960 election.

Evidence of past prejudice is amply in evidence in the city I live, Washington, D.C., on 16th Street, the boulevard that starts from smack in the middle of the White House. The street is also known as "the street of churches." However, when the Shrine of the Sacred Heart was built in the 1920s, it had to be placed on a spur off 16th Street because neighboring Protestant leaders found a Catholic church fronting on 16th offensive.

It is evident in the things even "cool" Protestant ministers today feel entitled to say.

I am no longer a practicing Catholic for philosophical reasons, but I still bristle at the abiding prejudice that John F. Kennedy helped, if not erase, at least mitigate. This broke the spell cast on Alfred E. Smith, the Irish Catholic four-times-elected governor of New York, only to lose to Herbert Hoover in 1928 due to what a contemporary journalist described as "the three P's: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity."

A Catholic could grow up to be president starting in 1960, just as an African American can grow up to be president starting now.

It's a wonderful feeling when something that characterizes you or your family, something not easily changed, something incidental to character, no longer stands as a bar to your dreams.

This week that happened again.

President-elect Obama

What a fine ring those words have! Otherwise, I am speechless, basking in the moment's glow.

Why I am voting for Obama

Time to make the last ditch push with anyone who is still undecided. This is probably the most important election of my lifetime, which spans a bit more than half a century. It's time to decide.

Why Obama?

I originally came to Obama by process of elimination among the Democratic candidates.

The Clinton coterie bothered me. Biden didn't strike me as quite right. I liked the insouciance of Dennis Kucinich (and, yes, his wife), but i didn't thnk he had a snowball's chance in hell.

Then, I found myself watching Obama speak shortly after winning South Carolina and I knew I was in the presence of someone Kennedyesque for the first time since the Boston-accented, first and only Catholic president, whose inauguration I had lived to witness. Whatever might be said about Kennedy today, after we know more than we ever wanted about the darker side of Camelot, his gift was an oratory that mobilized and first set me dreaming.

Obama had that.

Then I began to examine his positions and what his aides said and I came to the conclusion that this was a man who acted with deliberation. There was nothing improvised about him.

When gas prices went up and McCain and Hillary Clinton launched their demagogic call for a gas tax holiday, Obama said the sober "no." He was right. Gas prices woke the country up.

When he had to choose a running mate, Obama displayed the wisdom and humility to choose someone who had criticized him sharply, but was, without question, experienced in policy and statesmanship.

When the bottom fell out of the economy, Obama laid out four crisp principles and they are embodied in the legislation authorizing the $700 billion bailout of the finance sector.

That's three for three.

Hillary's health plan was more generous and innovative, but it probably would never pass. Biden wanted to withdraw too quickly from Iraq (although his trial balloon on partition -- which worked for Yugoslavia, a country similarly artificial and divided -- was very good).

Yet every policy proposal of Obama's that I have heard -- and I have listened to his economic advisers at length -- has a crispness, sobriety and focus on the majority that is sound and actionable. When he says we can recover, I trust that he will use the proper tools to get there.

In sum, I have confidence that Obama will be not just a president I can agree with, but one who will be great and may convince me to change my views in a number of areas. That's a leader.

Why not McCain?

It's perhaps a sign of how far to the right the United States shifted since 1981 that John McCain was even a viable candidate. Yet, like his fellow Arizonian Barry Goldwater, I long knew McCain to be an extremist.

Here is a man so besotted with private enterprise as to disdain the environmental and urban traffic benefits of Amtrak, which he has repeatedly attempted simply to abolish.

Why not privatize rivers and mountains? (Oops, in a reality-trumps-satire turn of events, they've just announced from the Bush White House that they're considering opening federal lands in Utah for mining.)

McCain is not merely conservative; he's almost to the right of the libertarians. Study his record and you will discover a man who saw Ronald Reagan as failing to damage government enough and George W. Bush as a patsy.

While I think Obama might be a tad too critical of some programs I like, and Hillary's people too uninformed about them, given a free hand McCain would simply abolish every domestic program that was not connected to law enforcement and security, starting with social security.

Imagine what would have happened to the retirement of millions this year if policymakers had listened to McCain and social security had been turned into privately held stock market investment accounts!

McCain is simply unthinkable for anyone who is honest about electing the head of state of a 21st century, complex society such as the United States.

But, What is Art?

The cliché in the title most often refers to the ultra-precious art critic who superciliously hides behind posturing to avoid the risk of a definitive stance. It is also a phrase that evokes effete wine and cheese gallery show openings, with competing artists' and patrons' bitchy gossip about each other. All of these have recoiled in horror whenever I have made the philistine suggestion that the art of our time is commercial.

Think of it for a moment.

Recall three or four posters on buses or billboards, selling whatever it was. Couldn't you connect immediately with what the images were about, with the thousand subtle messages in every detail? Couldn't you do that without Sister Wendy explaining what each item meant?

That was how the contemporaries of Leonardo or Giotto reacted to the paintings that today are in museums. The contextual message was obvious.

In the Italian Renaissance, the established (though weakening) worldview was European medieval Christianity, a world of Christs and Madonnas and of ferocious biblical events. That view was propagated in a largely illiterate society through artifacts sponsored (as in paid for, just like modern commercial sponsorships) by the Church.

The maecena, or patron of the arts, shared this worldview. The world had been created by God, who had called certain patriarchs and prophets until Jesus Christ, who had then called upon certain saints to give witness to the truth. All art illustrated the commonly held narrative.

But that's not all.

Renaissance art rarely attempted to be historically realistic. People from antiquity are dressed as Florentines or Parisians dressed in the 1300s, 1400s and 1500s. There's some interpretation, often veiled for fear of the Holy Office of the Inquisition: Michelangelo painted on Hell's denizens the faces of some cardinals he found obnoxious.

What's the difference? Our narrative is about our god, money, and the power, pleasure and freedom it promises to give us all. Every commercial poster, every TV commercial is really selling the uniquely American mythology that everyone can be and have all they want.

Get X (a BMW, a certain deodorant, a certain credit card) and you will be a beautiful woman or be surrounded by them, on a beach near crystalline waters and be envied and admired by all. Note that I used "BMW." Does any reader not know what a BMW is?

And the technique!

The modern, sophisticated television commercial conveys a whole contextual storyline in seconds: we know immediately she's his wife or he's her father. There are emotions: women fall in love with their cellular telephones, or think that their "chocolate" color is appetizing.

Andy Warhol, perhaps one of the first people to recognize commercial art, where he started, as art, and put the message in the following way:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

That is why you can go to some foresaken village in the Peruvian Andes of the mountains of Afghanistan and find, somewhere in or outside the general store that red circle with 1890s lettering that reminds everyone in whatever language that the product offered is "the pause that refreshes."

Sure, in our current economic crisis, those who did not realize that mythologies are, well, myths, are suddenly discovering that, just as God and theist religions have their shibboleths, inadequacies and downright fantasies, Mammon will not, in reality, solve all your problems, or even be there when you're in trouble -- any more than God will.

My point is not about money or religion, but about art. When archeologists of the future come upon your skull or mine and mutter, "ah, primitive man!" they will find ubiquitous among our artifacts a circular red metal emblem.They will thereafter write endless papers on the meaning of the words "Coca Cola" in the art of the ancient past.

Joe the Plumber -- the economics

A correspondent has asked me a question about the assumptions underlying the whole Joe the Plumber discussion in the last debate between Barack Obama and John McCain: how much must a company take in before the owner takes home $250,000?

Keep in mind that companies, unlike individuals, are taxed on profits, not on income (unless it's capital gains from investments). From everything a company receives as revenue for the goods or services it sells, one must first subtract the legitimate business expenses (materials, labor, overhead, etc.) that for the purposes of the tax code are deductions.

What's left is profit. Since Obama said he is exempting businesses with taxable income (profit) of $250,000, that means, assuming a low profit margin of 10%, that the company had to have revenue of $2.5 million. That profit can be plowed back into the company, after it is taxed, or distributed before taxes as a dividend to the owner(s), then taxed as the owner's income.

But wait! The owner can still have made $250,000 from the business with a smaller revenue.

Say Joe's business makes $1.25 million, or half of what we just said. If 10% was profit, that would be $125,000 the company could pay him as a dividend, assuming he's the sole owner. Joe could, in addition, have paid himself $125,000 in salary throughout the year.

This is not typical for a plumbing business of that size and I understand that the real Joe makes about $40,000 a year.

Moreover, at that level, the business would not pay additional taxes, according to what Sen. Obama said, because the profits were not $250,000. If Joe took $124,000, he would still be below the $250,000 at which his personal taxes will not be raised.

Last thing. The real median household income in the United States was $50,233 in 2007, the last year for which data are available. This means that half the households made more and half made less.

Want to know what percentage of households earned $250,000? About 5%.

The great myth that John McCain is selling is that Obama raises your taxes. If you are like 95% of all Americans, including me, that's just not true.

Sure, Obama will raise taxes on 7-home households like those of John McCain and his buddies. People at that level will not go hungry.

The Shivers

Ever since my late teens I experienced for many years a psychosomatic phenomenon I dubbed "the shivers," for lack of a better term. An unbidden unpleasant memory would pop and I'd shiver to shake it off.

The memories were not necessarily the stuff of novels and melodrama. Most of them were tiny, tiny embarrassing moments.

It was the sort of thing that, had it referred to wrongdoing, people brought up in Catholicism might have called "scrupulosity," in the old traditional language: an obsessive concern with one's personal sins, including "sinful" acts or thoughts usually considered minor or trivial.

A few typical ones of mine:

• As a teenager my mind used to drift during the Gloria at the point when the congregation says "Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father." While my mouth said the words, my brain would rebel and say to me "son of a bitch." It bothered me. The thought was sacrilegious.
• Another one that haunted me for years was when I finally earned my Second Class badge in the scouts. I was a Tenderfoot, in some countries Third Class, for the longest time of anyone in my scout troop and, who knows, maybe in the history of scouting. At the ceremony I was given the prized neckerchief and clasp. Being awkward and perhaps unprepared, I didn know what to do with the clasp and kept it in my hand as I attempted to shake hands with the dignitaries present at the podium. I still remember the look of disgust on the face of Father Jean, the stern French-born pastor, as I attempted to shake hands with the clasp awkwardly between our hands, almost like one of those practical joke joy buzzers.
• Then there are the innumerable times at which I have given answers to superiors that have left me looking either stupid, or plain uninteresting or simply unimaginative. Three seconds outside their door the brilliant response would flood into my brain. Too late. Years of too-lates, I suspect, kept me from becoming James Reston.

OK, so I beat myself up a tad too much. I know. I hated the shivers. I taught those who knew about them to ignore them and let them pass; eventually I learned to hide them.

Several years ago, the shivers finally went away. Well, not exactly. I reasoned them away.

I relaxed and told myself that the moments were not that shameful, or if they were, no one was going to arrest me for them; in fact, no one knew about them but me. I bet Father Jean would not have known what I was talking about if I shared my recollection the scout ceremony.

The point is I haven had them for years.

Then, yesterday at lunch, I found myself running through one after another after another, almost like an uncontainable multiple orgasm of shame, embarrassment and regret.

Save Our Souls

The soul, known in antiquity as anima (Latin) or psyche (Greek), is an imaginary abstraction meant to enfold all that the ancients did not know about human behavior and the psychosomatic functioning of the body. The international nautical distress call, SOS (Save Our Souls), is a modern figurative expression of traditional thinking on something that does not exist.

This, I have realized, is much more important and far easier to demonstrate, than whether there is a god.

While I do not know the science in any technical sense, I have had enough experience with pharmaceutical end-products to convince me that everything I have always thought as uniquely individual and metaphysical within me simply does not exist. I am merely an animated biochemical object that has developed certain properties, such as speech and "thinking," as a result of evolutionary pressures and random happenstance.

That human beings cannot replicate me, cannot fully control the psyche -- indeed, cannot offer me or anyone else the definitive psychological silver bullet in a pill -- is merely a reflection of the limitations, imperfections and underdevelopment of human properties.

The soul does not exist.

Everything you and I feel is, the ancient Greeks put it, a "state of the liver." Everything you and I want and desire is the result of a mixture of genetic coding and social influences.

All thought, all religion, all philosophy, even this blog, amounts to nothing more than the output of a complex biochemical mechanism we do not yet fully understand, but we are learning to influence biochemically.

The will is not free, it is a set of impulses directed by the double influence of nature and nurture. I have wasted my time with ethics: at the core, we are not moral agents.

The soul does not exist.

The music we like and the films we enjoy, the prayers we have uttered with fervor, the love we have soaked in and the utter, weightless, immaterial happiness we have experienced from time to time, all these are mirages, shadows in the cave. Nonexistent.

Of course, the same is true of our dislikes and fears and even loathing. One day there will be a pill to cure them. One day there will be a pill to make us all behave in a way that is best for us collectively -- at least according to those who have power.

The soul does not exist.

We have no need to save what doesn't exist. We will cease to exist, to have consciousness once our animating biochemical processes -- longhand for "life" -- grind to a halt.

Once you begin to look at the world from this perspective, the inanities and stupidities, the sheer greed and cruelty and selfishness of human beings, their destructiveness of everything around them, especially our own kind, makes eminent sense.

We are little different from dogs and cats. In reality. We are not intelligent and feeling and potentially moral. We are merely sentient in a somewhat more complex way.

The soul, if you insist, is merely a convention, a way of talking about seemingly ineffable things that appear to move us and within us, things that are really atoms and protons mating with one another.

Socrates to the Rescue

I made a huge mistake at work, involving a misunderstanding of economic research. I've been covering this for decades now and I still make beginner's mistakes. All I know is that I know nothing. Thank you, Socrates.

I feel I should stop blogging about grand things like the economy and foreign policy. No one cares, anyway, and who am I to say anything?

So instead I'll crawl back into my personal philosphical corner. No one cares about that, either, but I can at least clarify things to myself. I don't talk out loud; I write.

Don't Believe It's Over

Monday's "rally" bargain hunt on Wall Street is not the end of the economic crisis nor of the downturn, by any means, given that we are living in times of records beaten only in 1933.

Thinking Toward a New Economy

We're accustomed to thinking of money and possession as real, tangible things, when in reality both are imaginary. Until we face up to this and reconsider the implications, we will never be free of the lazy habits of mind that trap us all in our present economic predicament.

Money simply does not exist in and of itself. It doesn't have a fixed value. It doesn't represent anything.

Until 1971, true, all convertible currencies were ultimately backed by an international monetary system that rested on the U.S. dollar, which in turn was theoretically backed by 35 ounces of gold bullion. When Richard Nixon devalued the dollar, the international system put in its place a parallel purely symbolic unit, the Special Drawing Right, which was initially supposed to represent the theoretical value of US$ 1,00 = 0.888671 grams of fine gold.

Of course, the dollar value of gold (and conversely the gold value of dollars), is a moving target in actual living experience. There is no such thing as an SDR.

In brief, in and of itself, money is a fiction. We all work for and dream of and believe in (our national religion is really the worship of the dollar) something that, in reality, doesn't exist.

The second customary thought we must abandon is the notion of the right to possess. No one really owns anything.

Sure, if I go into your house and take your computer, you can call the cops, have me tried and put in jail. In theory, society gives you have the power of coercion to your computer as yours and not mine.

Note, however, that in some less safe neighborhoods, where cops are not in evidence, your chance to exercise your property claim is highly suspect. Everything belongs to whoever can seize it first and hold onto it by brute force.

The reality is that those who possess the most have access to the most powerful forms of coercion, from thugs to cops to the atomic bomb. They gain that access by convincing the thugs and cops and military to accept the fictional item known as money, in exchange for protection of their right to possess.

In fact, all of this is always temporary. Even the rich get feeble and die. We possess nothing, not even our bodies.

Everything that has happened in recent weeks on Wall Street and in the financial sector is merely the dawning of these two truths: money does not really exist and no one really owns anything.

Time to Rethink the Economic System

"We're all socialists now, comrade," blared the star columnist of Britain's Telegraph newspaper yesterday, mocking the precipitous fall of major banking institutions into government tutelage. Perhaps this is the way capitalism was destined to synthesize its contradictions into socialism, rather than what happened in 1917.

Here in the United States, as in Iceland and elsewhere, de facto nationalizations became the prevailing response to the present economic emergency -- with more apparently to come. Karl Marx certainly believed socialism would be the outgrowth of developed forms of capitalism.

The Leninist state need never have occurred, save for two things: the obduracy of Russian monarchic despotism and its industrialized Western capitalist backers, on one hand; and the backwardness of the nations that adopted it, on the other.

Much more natural is the bloodless, so far seamless movement this autumn with Fannie, Freddie and several European banks: a simple takeover by the only social institution financially able -- knock on wood -- to do so, the government.

Was the historic slump in Wall Street trading last week the plutocrats' reaction? Do they still think, despite their egregious failures that, as one trader put it, "capitalism ought to be allowed to work things out"?

Does anyone? Does anyone really expect that the "free market" (which is free only some) can resolve the allocation of resources needed to fulfill all of society's basic needs?

Think of a few of the most urgent needs looming in the United States alone: the retirement and aging of the huge baby boom generation, the growing underclass without access to health care, and the deteriorating physical infrastructure. Consider, in global terms, the pervasive conflicts abroad fed in large part by gross economic inequality and unimaginable suffering.

Can anyone really pretend that the free market on Wall Street is no more than a select garden club for a very tiny few, entirely disconnected from the real needs that exist in the nation and abroad?

Isn't it time to begin thinking of democratizing the economy, of enshrining economic rights on a par with the civic rights already in the U.S. Constitution? Shouldn't it be that just as every citizen is entitled to political equality in the eyes of the law, that every human being is entitled to the basic material conditions that make for a dignified life?

Americans are accustomed to dreaming of being rich, without bothering to think much of those outside their immediate family. Isn't it time we dreamed of living in a society where no one is poor?

Couldn't the Human Dream become the hope of shared freedom from want?

Deserve?

In a random remark at a recent dinner, one person was being offered support for deciding not to work for a while with the justification that "you deserve time off." Ever since McDonald's told us via Barry Manilow, that "you deserve a break today," the American penchant for claiming right to care for No. 1 has taken off. But is it justified?

To deserve is to be worthy of, qualified for, or have a claim to a reward or punishment. Most of us eagerly claim rewards and just as enthusiastically decline punishment. What do we really deserve?

We cannot claim very much of who or what we are as our own individual merit. We did not choose, despite the pseudopatriots who are "proud to be American," to be born in the United States. We did not elect to be born to households with running water and electricity, a given educational and income level.

Much of who we are or have become is an accident of birth.

Then there's luck. Happening on an idea when a society was ready for it -- or not. Imagine being Nelson Mandela in 1964 and having the idea that apartheid should end. Yes, in the end (in the 1990s) he triumphed. But he could be forgiven for wondering where he had gone wrong as he languished in his prison cell in the interim. So should we ponder where luck has helped or hindered.

Finally, there is the matter of free will. Are we really free, or are we a mass of socially and genetically determined impulses that predictably propel us down a course marked for us before we were born?

Sure, as humans we claim "inalienable rights," meaning that our fellows may not deprive us of a fair share of resources and social "bandwidth." Yet, how do we really know that humans are inherently endowed with such rights and not, say, cats or bees or rocks?

In the end, it is very difficult to claim we deserve anything, good or bad.

Palin's WinKKK to AmeriKKKa

Remember where Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election presidential campaign? Philadelphia, Mississippi. Odd place to start, unless you were trying to wink to Southern racists that you were one of them, just as Sarah Palin is doing, to judge by the performance reported during her appearance at a Clearwater, Fla., rally.

There, while she launched a red-baiting false accusation against Barack Obama, and blamed "the media" for the fact that her campaign is losing traction, an African-American cameraman had racial epithets shouted at him, concluding with the order to "sit down, boy."

At another moment, as Palin declaimed her falsehoods, the crowd booed and someone called out "kill him," unquestionaby meaning to encourage an old-time lynching of Obama.

Palin did not criticize such taunts, any more than Reagan took time to honor the three civil rights workers murdered there by white supremacists in 1964. The murders were recalled in the film Mississippi Burning.

Indeed, just as Palin threw the red meat of political slurs at a black political candidate, Reagan told his audience in 1980 that "I believe in states' rights ... [I] believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment ...," promising to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."

We all know that "states rights" is Southern white racist code for bringing back the Confederacy and keeping out federal troops and the FBI from efforts to keep the South racially segregated and unequal.

Is there any mistaking Palin's egging on an ugly crowd representing the un-American worst and failing to curb enthusiasm for political murder for the lowest-common-denomination, hate-filled demogoguery it is?

I wish there were a way to strip Palin of U.S. citizenship. I wish there way a way to expel the South from the Union, or at a minimum, to reoccupy militarily the miscreant region again, back to the status it richly deserved in 1865 and from which it has yet to show recovery.

Palin and the South represents everything that is embarrassing and horrible in this country.

Let's hope it can be driven to a well-deserved, ignominious defeat in next month's presidential election. In the coming bad times, an administration of right-wing hatemongers could easily rip up what's left of the Bush-disregarded Constitution that represents the greatness of the United States.

The Palin Con

Someone I met on a train told me that Sarah Palin was up to something: the Katie Couric interview and all her other flubs were just a way to lower expectations for her debate against Joe Biden. When the time came, my conspiracy theorist proposed, Palin would spout Hillaryesque wonkery the likes of which we had never seen. Palin didn't quite manage to catch up to Hillary Clinton last night, but she showed herself to be a bit of a con artist: will the real Sarah Palin please stand up?

Despite her terminally cute act with Couric and her "aw, shucks" approach last night, Palin is not "average."

The Palins had a 2007 household income of $166,000, which put them in the top earning 10 % of all households. This year she is expected to make very close to $200,000 and we don't know what her husband will bring in.

She was a beauty queen, meaning that she was willing to exhibit her physical wares in exchange for money; but she is also a moralist, meaning that she has very definite opinions about what you and I should do behind closed doors. This puts her in a self-contradictory category best described in Slate as "sexy puritan."

But most of all, like George Bush, she is a dissembler. Like, Bush, a man born with a silver spoon and a keen mind who likes to pretend he is a hick, Palin likes to pretend to be a simpleminded "hockey mom" as part of her demagoguery.

In sum, Palin salvaged her political career by not behaving like a total idiot on national television in a controlled format that allowed her considerable latitude. However, the achievement is pyrrhic, as we now know that she is smarter, and probably a lot meaner, than she lets on.

Wing Nuts are Right -- and Left

The House failure to pass the bailout plan has evoked images of lunatics in charge of the asylum. Yet there is one sense in which the wing nuts, most of whom are right-wing, are right and, ironically, also left: a traditional bailout of financiers by the committee of capitalists we call the government is certainly not the answer to what ails the United States -- or the world.

Any solution to the problem of a burst bubble of snake oil mortgages has to begin where the problem began. One cannot perennially expect that an economy whose ever greater productivity is relentlessly squeezed out of service and production-line workers, but whose rewards flow only to the top, to be based on a firm grounding.

Why is there a credit crisis? Because Americans have overborrowed. Why have Americans overborrowed? Because the nation's vast economic engine depends on consumption and, since the incomes of average Americans have stagnated for the last five years in a row, purchasing has had to occur on credit.

Don't believe this? Consider that between 2005 and 2006, the top 1 percent of households (with incomes above $375,000) added $73,000 to their incomes, the next 9 percent gained $16,000 and the bottom 90 percent (below $105,000 a year) increased their incomes by just $20.

That's a finding that is consistent with data for all of the current decade, as examined by two economists who also found that income disparity is the largest it has ever been in the United States since ... wait for it ... 1929. (See a paper based on the research, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States by Emmanuel Saez.)

And who is finding themselves unable to pay their mortgages? The stagnating majority, who have reaped only a quarter of the wealth generated by their labor in the past economic expansion.

Unless we collectively make it possible for the 90 percent to increase their incomes, no amount of lending to financiers will solve the problem. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this calls for answers remarkably similar to -- gasp! the salts! -- socialism.

Americans hear "socialism" and their McCarthyist muscle makes them see Soviet Gulag prison systems. Yet socialism has been very successful in Sweden, Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, where not everything is government owned, as in the old Soviet Union, but the society as a whole guarantees everyone's basic well-being.

Indeed, the capitalist class in this country has always believed in socialism for corporations and the rich, of which the proposed bailout plan was a perfect example. I am just suggesting that all of us get a bit of that socialism, instead of their doling out capitalism for the middle class and the poor, while taking our tax money to subsidize themselves.

Specifically, this moment in history calls for a top-down revision of the American economic system, for a vast democratization of the economy similar to the democratization of civic life begun in 1776. I can think of two basic principles that would undergird such a new society:

1. All people have the inalienable right to the basic necessities of life, including food, clothing, shelter, schooling, work and life itself.
2. Beyond what is needed for the bare necessities, all earnings must bear a direct relationship to work making something or delivering a service.

With those principles in mind, housing becomes an essential that no one in a country with the resources of the United States should ever lack, rather than a luxury which a hardy few can obtain, and, on the other hand, investment, inheritance and manipulation of assets does not amount to work.

This priority-reordering scale of values would mean that any bailout plan would seek first to perform the tasks the failing institutions are performing.

In the case of AIG, for example, instead of securing the firm itself, the goal would have been to secure the insurance policies while seizing the money and firing the entire management. When IndyMac was seized, regulators first froze all foreclosures, then began an analysis of the outstanding loans, one by one.

This may take trillions and many years. But only a framework to deliver help first at the bottom and only secondarily to the top, a framework that would be gradual, one that recognizes that the current structures simply don't work, will ultimately solve the many problems facing the United States and the world.

So the obstructionists of George W. Bush's 9/11-style call for a blank check were right. We all need to sit down and think our way out with a little deliberation. Perhaps we need to wait to after the presidential election, so we can start from scratch to build a new economic democracy from scratch.

Death Comes to the Comic Character

This picture appears to have gone viral (origin unknown). Enjoy!

A Suit for the American Psyche

In every era the United States has chosen a leader that represented some key aspect of the national psyche, or else the nation has stumbled until one could be found. In 2008, we have already tried on three -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin -- in the political dressing room. Although I see the excitement about the third fading as beachwear after Labor Day, I'd like to stop and dwell about what these choices say about our favorite topic -- ourselves.
Palin, the candidate we now know as the hypocrite who ... is really an apt reflection of the inherent contradictions Americans collectively embrace.
We want a green planet, but we also want our very many, often enough hugely unnecessary cars. We claim equality but, deep down, we're all a little racist (or even a lot, as Palin's cover for white women who can't abide a black man amply shows). We want to think of ourselves as law-abiding and church-going, but we cheat on our taxes, jaywalk, commit adultery and ultimately want everyone else to be barred from doing certain things, so long as we can secretly sneak in a poach after hunting season is over.
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton I would have voted for in 1992 had I been given the chance, represents the spirit of generosity that we Americans are so capable of individually and yet so pigheadedly averse to as a society. The contradiction kills us, undoes us, paralyzes us and keeps our society looking like an industrial museum piece from the 1940s.
Clinton dropped the ball on her own presidential campaign, just as she did on health care reform in 1994. My gut sense is that she thought having her heart in the right place and the genius to conceive of grand ideas was enough to make it happen -- just as the American Dream is for the majority of us.
This leaves us Barack Obama.
In the 1950s, the United States was in the middle of a baby boom and predictably chose a president who looked like the Gerber logo's baby, Dwight David Eisenhower. Ike was likable and he had been the referee-commander of a global military coalition by virtue of that quality, rather than because of military genius.
Next decade we tried John F. Kennedy, who looked the very picture of health, youth and American altruism, but we now know he was physically very ill, aging all-too-rapidly and capable of breathtaking selfishness.
There has been a lot of myth and falsehood, but there were also some home truths in those experiences.
Obama cannot possibly be the Olympian figure captured delivering a photogenic Berlin speech even before the formality of an election. He will surely disappoint those who think so. But we don't need to have a crush on Obama.
In this most serious season in the history of U.S. political economy, we just need to decide just what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to rise to the challenges or satisfy our complacencies?

I

The following is my shameless adaptation of a post by Savia, "Do Re Me me." Consider it belated beach reading.

I am ... me.
I think ... slowly, ponderously, systemically.
I know ... the instant of peace at life's apex.
I have ... Liesl, my beloved C230.
I wish ... I had a million dollars (or should that be a billion?).
I hate ... unfair criticism.
I miss ... what might have been.
I fear ... ending up poor and homeless in a Third World country.
I hear ... the bells on Christmas morn.
I smell ... like aftershave in the morning.
I crave ... salt.
I search ... for my glasses when I don't have my glasses on.
I wonder ... what will happen to my remains after I am dead.
I regret ... I can't do it all over again knowing what I now know.
I love ... you!
I ache ... to become Albert Schweitzer.
I am not ... who I am.
I believe ... in no one.
I dance ... with angels on the head of a pin.
I sing ... the song of the three young men, who ran down streets naked in estival frenzy.
I cry ... when I am very sad.
I fight ... with words.
I win ... with history questions in Trivial Pursuits.
I lose ... angrily, ready to bring down everything with me.
I never ... open other people's mail.
I always ... forget something when I am going out the door in the morning.
I confuse ... colors -- that's because I'm colorblind, silly, not because I didn't learn my colors.
I listen ...to women intently.
I can usually be found ... at the computer.
I am scared ... of a million things going wrong.
I need ... about a million U.S. dollars, in unmarked, non-sequentially numbered $100 bills.
I am happy about ... my sons.
I imagine ... introducing my grandfather to my sons.

Have Sex

Our text today is, yet again, one of my godless commandments⁽¹⁾ namely: Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof. Some people may argue that we don't need a philosophical imperative to have sex, but I would argue that we humans could use a positive and universal imperative about sex.

Let's face it: without sex we're very likely to end up screwing someone else in any number of unpleasant, non-sexual ways. Ever wondered whether the history of Iraq might have been different in the last four years if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten laid, but good? Besides, none of us would even be here without sex!

All right so the matter of principle is not so much whether, but how one should have sex. The commandment puts forth two conditions that I suspect are universally necessary for ethical purposes:

1. We must engage in mutual pleasure giving as well as receiving.
2. We must take responsibility for the consequences, such as pregnancy and disease.

These two exhaust the totality of ethical requirements that apply universally to all men and women of all religions or degrees of non-belief.

In the first, your pleasure is equated to the pleasure of another. You have a legitimate claim to receive pleasure and there is nothing wrong with desiring sexual pleasure and obtaining it; but the consequence of that is the duty to be concerned with and desirous of giving pleasure -- which is a pleasure all its own.

In other words, sex is not just for you: it's for you and the other person -- who is a person, not a toy (except, obviously, in the case of masturbation with toys, about which ... later). This also excludes all forms of sex for power (this is the definition of rape), money, or anything other than giving and receiving of pleasure.

There's something about us mammals that is relieved and assuaged in the feeling of full frontal nudity, skin to skin, with someone we chose to so so voluntarily -- nay, eagerly. This is why masturbation with toys falls short, except in times of necessity, other than to provide temporary release -- in a sense, it's not really sex.

Secondly, sex is a path to reproduction and a way to get diseases and even a way to express particular feelings about another, to the point of sometimes being called "making love." When we have sex we risk becoming parents, becoming ill and even dying, or becoming sentimentally entangled with another person.

We can be called upon to give a response -- in other words, responsibility -- for our action, by stepping up to motherhood or fatherhood, which is usually a role that lasts a lifetime. We can be faced with giving or receiving a terrible disease -- and telling all others who may be or have been exposed to us in similar ways, "get checked for X because I have it."

Last but not least, I've been told there are hormones similar to those that induce bonding between parents and children. These are stimulated with sex to the point that all sex has some emotional and psychological consequence.

None of this draws a straight line to the altar, nor to deciding whether to have or abort a child, nor does it cure a single disease or broken heart. The point of responsibility is not some formal piece of paper or law nor a textbook answer. Responsibility is needed because, precisely, we live in an uncertain world.

In such a world we must answer to ourselves and our fellows, especially those with whom we have sex, for our actions.

------------
⁽¹⁾ PS to George, this is the ninth (there are ten).

If American Voters Aren't Stupid, What Are They?

All the while I was having a laugh over bumperstickers proclaiming that some village in Texas was missing its idiot, George W. Bush was having his Machiavellian laugh on me: he's not an idiot, he's simply a consummate dissembler. A similar lesson dawned on me upon reading Rick Shenkman's piece in The Washington Post, 5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters.

OK, so if the American public isn't stupid, what are they?

I mean, a society in which half of the population makes about $50,000 or less voted twice for Reagan and three times for a Bush, despite the fact that these men abundantly showed in their policies that they only cared about the top 5 percent of all earners, those who make about $175,000 a year -- or much, much more. Something's wrong, no?

How can Americans consistently support the pauperization of single mothers and children? War? Greed? Sucking oil and other resources from other countries at exploitative and polluting rates?

Far fetched, you think?  How about the many instances in which bystanders in America did nothing to help someone being victimized? How about the cities in which ignored beggars have become the norm? How about a public that is always keen to see the rights and the suffering of white Americans and oblivious to their trampling on those of everyone else?

American history is, when you think of it, one rape and pillage and looting after another: from the swindled Indians to the kidnapped Africans to the conquered Mexicans to the abused women to the exploited and overworked working majority. Who stole the land and enslaved and stole again and put down and underpaid? Martians? Who was complicit in all this? Venusians?

If American voters really aren't stupid. If the Rush Limbaugh dittoheads score unassailably high on intelligence and general knowledge tests, as Shenkman credibly proposes, then the venom they endorse is really in their hearts of hearts.

Now there's a scary thought. Close to half the population, or enough to make up a convincing show of being a majority, are mean enough to actually want truly bad stuff to happen.

It's the hypocrisy, stupid

Sarah Palin didn't sell the jet on eBay, didn't oppose earmarks (in fact, got $1,000 per capita for her town and more for her state) and did not oppose the bridge for nowhere. But that's just starters for what is so profoundly wrong with this politician.

Let's be clear about this: Palin may invoke God and call herself a Christian all she wants, but the message of her words and her life is everything but. Palin appeals to the kind of person who is insecure enough to pursue a comforting smugness.

First of all, Palin and her cohorts all declare their pride in being American.

In Christianity, pride is one of the seven capital sins. In the biblical account of the Garde of Eden, the first human couple eats forbidden fruit (no apple is mentioned) in a bid to become as God. (And I have already noted the silliness of deriving luster from the place of one's birth.)

Second, Palin parades herself as Christian.

What did Jesus say about pride in one's religiosity? Here's a sample of what seems a refrain in the gospels:

And when you fast, be not as the hypocrites, sad. For they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Amen I say to you, they have received their reward. But thou, when thou fastest anoint thy head, and wash thy face;  That thou appear not to men to fast, but to thy Father who is in secret: and thy Father who seeth in secret, will repay thee. (Matthew 6:16-18)

Thirdly, as a Republican, she proclaims an agenda of wealth creation, bluster and pride, deprecating humor and utter disinterest and even disbelief in the notion that the world is not rife with injustice. To Palin every one similar to the people in that convention hall had a God-given entitlement to power and wealth and happiness at the expense of everyone else in the planet, or even the planet itself.

All of this is antithetical to Jesus "constitution" for his new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), in which he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; and reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.

Palin may be a good Republican, but she has not shown the slightest inclination to live out the faith she claims.

"The Laptop Rule" vs What?

A young man I know has passed on to me what some in his generation regard as a humorous epigram called "the laptop rule." This is supposedly a rule by which a male is supposed to choose girlfriends. I searched high and low for the opposite equivalent: a pithy, crassly facetious expression of how a young woman might select a boyfriend. I confess that I have failed.

Here's where the sexes fail totally to even connect! OK, by this point you're probably wondering what the laptop rule states. Here it is in its full glory:

Every three years get one that is thinner, faster and does more things.

That's more or less an apt description of the march of laptop technology. Of course, that's because laptops are built with obsolescence in mind. 

Personally, I hate laptops. I bought a desktop PC in 1991 that I managed to keep in operation until about 2001 -- by which time only the actual box and the floppy drive was original.

Similarly, my most significant relationships have tended never to end. I retain some contact with friends from infancy, second grade, high school and university, even though they are spread out through three continents.

The laptop rule might be a way to describe retrospectively a sowing-wild-oats period, but as a rule of thumb for life, it thumbsucks, if you will.

Never mind that. "Don't women have a similarly pithy rule?" I asked of several female friends. Like what, they wanted to know. 

Oh, say, like the Loco Rule: never get close to a locomotive unless it hitches up. Too 20th (or 19th?) century.

Or how about the ATM Rule: get a new one when money stops being dispensed. That's a guy talking.

Or ... I give up. Anyone know one?

The E-mail Peace Pipe

"We, the cyberassembled people of this correspondence, gathered by the Internet for the purpose of improving the terms of intercommunication, and sustaining a long and viable friendship, do hereby establish the following Treaty ..." Thus, with a bow to the Constitution, begins my peace pact in a quarrelsome exchange of mails. Is it a model?

Let's see. I'll translate the pseudo-legalese into a few rules of the road for e-mail peace.

To communicate we must first assume that everyone is, in principle, equally deserving of being heard. Just because some have areas of expertise by way of schooling, work, location and so forth, it doesn't mean that others lack standing to raise factual and logical challenges.

Truth or validity should rest on verifiable, sourced evidence or sound reasoning, rather than biases, feelings or opinions.

No one should appeal to

• force, sentimentality, pity, inexpert third parties not in the discussion, vanity or snobbery;
• arguments against the other person, abuse, circumstantial incrimination or dismissal;
• claims that two wrongs make a right; 
• picking apart and/or attacking a "straw" argument that has not been made;
• raising red herrings or baiting; 
• weak induction, including appeal to unqualified authority, ignorance or lack of evidence;
• overgeneralization, false cause, compounded exaggeration; 
• weak analogy, presumption, ambiguity, grammatical analogy;
• questions with built-in assumptions, false dichotomies, suppressed evidence.

No one has to assent to a statement merely on someone's say-so, but you are always free to take someone else's word. If you assert something, you bear the burden of proof; without it, what you say is just an opinion.

Whenever someone takes offense, the matter should be dropped without further question, regardless of whether the reaction seem reasonable. Conversely, however, just because someone takes offense it doesn't mean that offense was intended or warranted.

Take what is said at face value unless humor, irony, sarcasm or figurative meanings are expressly communicated. This is especially necessary in international communication.

Truth Telling

Our text this morning is "Thou shalt honor thine own reputation by being a teller of truth as best thou seest it." This is from, you guessed it, my godless decalogue. Let's parse it.

Reputation, etymologically involves a rethinking. Perhaps it is a matter of sitting thinking about another, much as a 14-year-old girl who moons by her phone willing it to be rung by the boy she is (re- putare, Latin) thinking about, again, for the 33rd time this afternoon.

"I hear he ..." she has heard.

We can't create our own reputation, but we can regard it well, or disregard it. Maybe, if it is worthy, we can honor it.

As to truth, is it so if it is merely what we can best see? Might it be something well beyond the horizon, which we cannot see?

The God-ists say so, I suppose, but that is not what I have in mind. Rather, I am thinking of what you think is true, even if it isn't.

Such things aren't true by virtue of thinking they are. But they aren't quite lies, unless one knows them to be or experiences them as false. Then you dishonor yourself.

Conventional Conventions

The Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama. Yawn. The Republican Party will nominate John McCain next. Longer Yawn. Wake me up when the Orwellian splurge is over.

In a world in which 17 people will die of hunger within the next minute, what justifies the $4 billion political orgy we call a presidential election?

If the political discourse had some depth, if the pseudoevents had some real mystery to them, if the electorate took the time to learn what's involved in being a citizen of a self-governing nation, then perhaps, some expenditure to work out the world's longest-running political experiment might be worthwhile.

As it is, we're stuck with a barrage of non-issue advertising. Every moment is a scripted appeal to emotion. One candidate claims to care for the country merely because he failed at war and was taken prisoner, all the while hiding that he really stands for the privilege of the few. The other wants to offer change yet cannot risk exposing the details to his adversary's demagoguery.

In the end we have a very expensive political circus put on by the plutocracy, in the name of an alleged democracy, all aimed at the deluded, defrauded, abused majority of the electorate.

This is true in all the Western democracies, not just the United States. Yet few countries spend waste as much time and money on the project with, to judge by the last two elections alone, as paltry a result to show for it.

Whither Marriage

The Edwards affair once again brings social notions of marriage and its obligations to the fore, all of which leave me uncomfortable and intellectually unsatisfied. People mean different, disparate and often contradictory notions while using the same word.

Ask the average man or woman on the street about marriage and you'll get answers such as "a sacrament," "a commitment," and "a contract." What do these mean?

I still have the actual illustrated Baltimore Catechism no. 1 from way back when the dinosaurs roamed, which Sister Catherine Agnes used to teach us in second grade that "Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and woman bind themselves for life in lawful marriage."

Sister also used one of her classic and mildly scary illustrative stories -- which I later learned had not been her own invention, but part and parcel of a U.S. catechetical teaching method devised in the 1930s -- to drive home the point. Here's how I remember it:

There was once a little girl who was very sick. Her family and the parish and everyone prayed and prayed and prayed so she would not die. She lived. Years later, she died in a car crash. She had been married three times and went straight to hell. Better that she had died when she was young and pure.

Save your gasps for the comment box.

One need not have been a child in a pre-Vatican II American Catholic school to agree that, traditionally in the West, marriage has meant that a man and a woman publicly committed to mutual and exclusive sexual congress, with childbearing and rearing in mind, along with a series of social and economic obligations that flowed from parenthood, for as long as both would live.

Social mores have amended that commitment in almost every respect. A man and woman? To have sex? Exclusively? To have children? To rear children properly? For life? No, no, no, perhaps (say some economic studies), and ha-ha!

Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.

Traditionally, again, in marriage a propertyless woman was conveyed to a man for the purpose of bearing an heir and keeping house, in exchange for economic benefit. In the Cinderella scenario, the aspiring, talented, voluptuous woman provided sexual, childbearing and house-managing services to the handsome, well-heeled man, a prince of a fellow.

Some view marriage, then, as the sole surviving universally legal and respectable form of prostitution. In exchange for unnecessary, ephemeral promises in ceremonies whose luster barely survive the very day they take place, a man gets sex and a woman gets money -- even though in contemporary society, marriage is utterly unnecessary for either.

I mean, if it is a contract: who is selling and buying what, why and how do the terms make sense?

If not, why then, marriage?

250x30 #56 Brother Steele

Ireland somewhere has a crook-nosed, vehement, passionate man who, if he has dropped his vows as many did, probably became a politician. You insisted we leave footprints in our wake.

Rick Warren and the Evangelical Life Project

News that John McCain and Barack Obama were interviewed on their moral stances by the Rev. Rick Warren's Saddleback Church made me wince. Despite my roots in the historical churches that still claim apostolic succession, I am an agnostic. So what's my beef? Let me count the gristle.

Theologically, Warren is a midget. He subscribes to the plainest, simplest, most literal interpretation of the English translation of the Bahble. Period.

Granted, he doesn't pretend to be Teilhard de Chardin. He's more of a religiously inclined Willy Loman. Therein lies my complaint with Warren and evangelicalism: the project of life they propose.

Both embrace the American Dream, seek popularity before truth and propose a life based on ultimately superficial, uncritical and magical thinking.

What can one possibly glean from asking what three people a candidate would ask advice from or what an itinerant woodworker of 2,000 years ago means to him or -- hell's bells! -- what he thinks about abortion?

It's the same old pap.

Call yourself a salesman, Warren, and make sure you publicize that your god is Mammon. Then go leave the rest of us alone.

Tomorrow, 40 Years Ago

Tomorrow, 40 years ago, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and Alexander Dubček, architect of the liberalizing "Prague Spring," was hustled to Moscow for what I imagine must have been some very high intensity conversations. The world of 2008 was unimaginable then.

The snake-shaped Czechoslovakia has recently been in the news thanks to John McCain, who apparently doesn't know its two ethnic and linguistic regions split up peacefully in 1992. To be fair, what I know about the country is just enough for this one post.

For example, years ending in 8 were fateful for Czechoslovakia:

• 1918, foreign powers gathered in Versailles carved it out as an independent republic from the carcass of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;
  
• 1938, Neville Chamberlain famously handed over the Sudetenland and Bohemia (aka, the head of the snake) to one Adolf Hitler, who proceeded to invade it;
• 1948, the Communist Party staged a coup d'etat in February and took over the government; and
  
• 1968, Dubček, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion.
  

These last three were the last events of the Cold War era that I observed through my parents' anticommunist lenses with the thought of crafting some of my own.

It was my last year of secondary school, the year of the French student-worker general strike in May, the year they killed the dreams of a Martin and a Bobbie, the year of Khe Sahn and the Tet Offensive when the possibility of the first military defeat of the United States in history became possible.

It was the year that, in my unending quest to define historical periods, I decided that the World War II postwar era -- that epoch, the heyday of my parents', always recalled in grainy black-and-white celluloid -- had ended in front of my very eyes.

I lived the Prague Spring in the movie houses of Buenos Aires, which were modern Plato's caves for me as I watched the still highly redarded majestic Czech film Closely Watched Trains and it's much less well-known Loves Of a Blonde.

Could socialism have a human face, after all, Mr. Dubček? Why were the students and workers of Paris troublemakers while youths throwing stones at Soviet tanks in Prague were heroes?

These were the questions I could no longer avoid 40 years ago tomorrow, when near midnight Soviet tanks slipped into Prague.

Is Atheism a Religion? What is?

In an e-mail list I briefly joined I found myself landing into a long-running debate concerning the nature of religion in which the Christian argued that a federal appeals court had declared atheism a religion.

In Kaufman v. McCaughtry, a case about the rights of atheists to form a religious club in prison, the U.S.Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in 2005 that

Atheism is, among other things, a school of thought that takes a position on religion, the existence and importance of a supreme being, and a code of ethics. As such, we are satisfied that it qualifies as Kaufman’s religion for purposes of the First Amendment claims he is attempting to raise.

Does this mean atheism is a religion? For legal purposes it has been for some time. In 1985 (in Wallace v. Jaffree) the Supreme Court explained the thinking this way

At one time it was thought that this right [to choose one’s own creed] merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.

Mechanistic right-wing Christians have used these decisions to argue triumphalistically that atheism is a religion, much in the vein of the World War II saw that "there are no atheists in the foxholes." Hell, foxholes were hard to find in World War II, which was essentially a war of movement, with tactics designed to avoid the foxhole altogether.

Moreover, legal isn't moral or philosophical. Or slimming, as I like to add.

In trying to define in a speculative discussion what "religion" means and really is, we are drawing on sociology and social psychology, along with religion and theology themselves, not to mention, ultimately, philosophy.

The Wikipedia, everyman's reference albeit fraught with problems, offers this:

A religion is a set of beliefs and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.

To my mind, the deal breaker for an atheist, or even an agnostic, is the word "supernatural." Once you affirm something beyond what can be observed and verified, youŕe not involved in human inquiry any more.

Contra Feministe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to the Baby Boom's Echo

It's almost a reflex for someone of a certain age to deride young people as somehow wanting in comparison to one's own, so I routinely resist my generation's tendency to bemoan my sons' Gen-Y peers as "entitled." So imagine my surprise when I found my older son nodding at the notion.

He was being too polite, I thought, when he described his childhood as cosseted. Where were the claims, I wondered, that I had caused every last neurosis he will ever have? Someone call Doktor Freud!

Yet, indeed, he laid out a very plausible scenario for peers born in the echo of the post-World War II baby boom, in the last century's last two decades. A group now come of age, beginning to pop up in the workplace, to marry, in brief, to launch adult lives, they pose to the boomer a number of questions.

Their aesthetics are decidedly different. Melody went out with hip-hop and only now returns with the tantalizing alternative genre. They claim to be more techie, but deep down, matched up with someone reasonably geeky of an older generation, a lot of it  can be blown off as just froth.

But what about the entitlement thing?

"They had so much as children that they expected life to keep giving them everything when they grew up," said my son, as I recall his words.

Really? Life will take care of that.