Are Democrats Really the New Republicans?

I didn't want to believe Bill Maher when he offered as a "new rule" that "Democrats are the new Republicans." But reading the votes against the health reform public option in the Senate Finance Committee, it's now difficult to argue with Maher's insight several months ago.

My understanding is that corporate lobbyists are collectively spending $1.4 million a day to get this result. Yet, as the late California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, a Democrat, reputedly said, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and still vote against them, you have no business being up here."

If a Democratic president, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, cannot pass even the timid, tip-toe "public option" reform, it's clear that the Democrats no longer deserve the support of liberals or progressives. Hell, they don't belong in politics.

We need a second political party.

The Anti-soundbite and its Uses to Officials

Do all officials answer reporters questions these days with a questions? No.  But does it help those who do wiggle out of a tight spot? Sure. Why do they do that? Have I said they do?

Do you get my drift here or do I have to explain? Just in case, here goes an explanation.

To my knowledge, the anti-soundbite question was originated by one Donald Rumsfeld, Republican muckety muck and master obfuscator since 1962. Last seen as George W, Bush's secretary of defense. In that position one could see him at Pentagon press briefings responding to reporters' questions by asking himself a question.

Typically, the question was aimed at only a portion of the issue, the more convenient part. The answer, or non-answer, was usually a few words that lent themselves to multiple interpretations.

The advantage of this rhetorical device is that it up-ended the soundbite, which is a piece of speech taken from longer statement. In television and radio time is money and, in any case, the viewers' and listeners' attention has been trained to fit 30-second commercials.

Imagine the following broadcast:

President Lincoln at Gettysburg said yesterday that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Asked about this comment, following a battle involving close to 50,000 casualties, the CEO of War Widows of America called Lincoln's remarks "insensitive."

The quote would have been a soundbite. It's the exact words of Lincoln at Gettysburg. Not all the words, but the ones this particular reporter -- from an early version of Fox News? -- deemed "newsworthy."

Now imagine Lincoln at a Rumsfeldian briefing:

REPORTER -- Did our forefathers mean for this civil war to happen?

LINCOLN -- Well, now, son, did they bring forth a new nation four score and seven years ago? Yes. But did they conceive it in liberty? One would think so. Didn't they state in the Declaration of Independence that they believed it as self-evident that "all men are created equal"? Sure, but notice the word "men." Are women mentioned there? I don't think so.

PRESS POOL (all male): [laughter]

See how the anti-soundbite question pulverizes the sounbdbite. What words are you going to select to quote? You have the statements "Yes," "One would think so," "Sure, but notice the word 'men'," and "I don't think so." The rest were arguably questions, not answers.

Even in paraphrase, what did the Rumsfeldian Lincoln actually affirm? Only that a new nation had been brought forth four score and seven years ago. Not much of a story.

Yet listen to the next broadcast and watch how many times officials of all kinds pretend to answer questions using this device. Examine what is said and notice how little the official has committed himself to any opinion or position and how easily, if questioned further, he can weasel out.

Himym's "Aunt Robin"

With the second new season episode of himym (google it!) coming up tonight, all bets are off Robin Sherbatsky being the second m, except ...

... if "future" Ted at some point begins a story by telling his kids, "You know how we always call Mom 'Aunt Robin,' let me tell you how that got started ...?"

Iran: The Other Side

The news is everywhere that Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon and is deceiving the West (meaning the USA mainly) about this. But why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons and why should Iran be accountable to the USA or anyone else on this matter?

I mean -- and I say this in the first entry of a new blog topic: antipode* -- isn't Iran a sovereign nation? Don't all sovereign nations enjoy ... um ... sovereignty over their government and what their government decides to do within its borders?

Sovereignty is, after all, a nation-state's supreme power within its borders. The United Nations charter explicitly states that "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members" (article 2, para 1).

So where does President Obama get off telling Iranian President Ahmadinejad what to do with his country's nuclear facilities. Isn't that a matter for the Iranians to decide? You might say the Iranians decided when Iran ratified the Non Proliferation Treaty in 1970.

But wait a minute ... who was in power in Iran in 1970? Wasn't it none other than the Shah Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi, installed by a CIA-run coup in 1954, the one whom Amnesty International identified as holding and torturing 2,200 political prisoners, the one whose secularization and modernization plan gave rise to the Shi'ite rebel movement of one Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979?

To say that Iran should be held accountable to treaties signed by a dictatorial monarch, who was opposed to everything mainstream Iranian society today stands for, is tantamount to saying that the United States should respect slave tenure in Virginia, since it was once sanctioned by the Confederacy.

Why shouldn't a contemporary Iran, which repudiates everything the Shah stood for, not be able to repudiate a treaty ratification by that long-deposed monarch?

Besides, who says the United States government has the moral authority to tell any other governments whether they should build nuclear weapons? What makes the USA special? Not its restraint.

Not only did the United States bomb two Japanese cities, killing millions in a flash, with nuclear weapons. At least one presidential candidate -- Barry Goldwater -- advocated doing the same in Vietnam.

What makes the nuclear club -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- so virtuous? They haven't had empires and enslaved millions and been brutal and arbitrary? What reason do we have to believe that if they had had a nuclear monopoly, as the United States had for three years, they would not have bombed their own Hiroshima and Nagasakis?

OK, so Ahmadinejad rigged the elections. Didn't George W. Bush get "elected" in 200 and 2004 by fraud? Wasn't it alleged that Mayor Daley's deceased voters had put John F. Kennedy over the top in 1960?

Let the politician who has never made an unsavory deal, never taken money from companies opposed to every item of his public agenda, never arrived to power thoroughly sullied and compromised stand up and throw the first stone.

The Iranians are wild and crazy? Look at the other nuclear nations that might be at one time or another deemed "crazy" and "wild": India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea. Why pick on Iran?

Why not ask all of them to stop?

Indeed, why not follow the South African example -- it disassembled its nuclear arsenal -- and have the United States government provide an example of peaceful behavior in the hope Iran might rise to the occasion?

---

* Antipode is a new topic on this blog in which I will attempt to pay attention to the opposite of the prevailing conventional wisdom.

Missing in Health Care: Common Sense

When I was a boy of roughly 10 or 11, I came across a phrase spoken by teachers and other similar role-modeling adults that baffled me: common sense. It's only now, decades later, that the undefinable, ineffable "common sense" rears up its head again, this time to cover everything that's missing in U.S. health care -- not to mention the debate about its reform.

Let me paint a picture that is a composite of several experiences, my own and those of others.

You go to a doctor because you feel pain -- or a growth, or something that makes you feel uncomfortable about the state of your health, all of which, in the end, is pain. Yet the first thing that happens when you present yourself at a place designated to dispense healing is you get barraged with questions which you are usually in no mood to answer, or if you are, often cannot quite come up with one. Why? Because you are in pain.

I once tried yelling out "I am in pain." No one moved, everything proceeded as usual. So, you're in pain but they're there first and foremost to CYA and M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E you to death.

You're not important. The doctors are important; if not the doctors, then the stockholders, the managers or their aunts in Timbuctu -- anyone but you. Their time is money and their employees know better than to waste it. In this economy finding a new job is tough.

Assume you get treatment before your great grandchildren go to college -- a big assumption in most emergency rooms. Seriously ... the only time I ever got immediate assistance was when I literally collapsed on the desk of the receiving nurse.

Then they ask you what is wrong with you, yet saying "X hurts" -- where X is the part you are clutching like you'll fall into the Grand Canyon if you let go -- is never good enough. They want "I have an episomataspermoanthrodosis that has just trifulcated endomatically." What is wrong with these people? Do you look like you went to Harvard Medical School?

Then come forms of torture that the Inquisition abandoned sometime in the 1840s -- called "tests" -- to determine why that severed foot is bleeding. "Aha, your foot is disconnected from your leg hence the blood vessels have nowhere to go and the blood ... "

They can't say that. So they invent something that sounds good. Shrinks diagnose anything they don't really know what it is as "borderline." Physicians call anything to do with skin "dermatitis" (essentially skin+itis). Borderline dermatitis should just about cover anything.

There's a whole slew of scientific sounding terms for "Hmm ... I don't know what the hell is wrong with you, but since I'm going to charge you at least a few hundred dollars, I might as well make up something." If you don't know what the term means and they can't explain it in simple terms, you've got that Don'tknowwhatitis Syndrome.

Then you don't quite trust what they say, in part because no doctors look like Marcus Welby any more. Did they ever? I mean, Welby was a TV character. Old doctors can't afford the litigation insurance, young Welby-like people are making money on Wall Street securitizing insurance against unknown diseases, or starring in TV shows.

The doctors can never be bothered to explain anything from a normal person's perspective. Nurses dig into your duodenum while they chirp happily, "how are we feeling today?"

Everybody robotically follows some list of tasks written up by the MBA who runs everything from an office tower in Chicago. Even nurse cheer, probably quantified under Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence, is prescribed precisely.

U.S. health care, after all, is designed to imitate the assembly line of a Ford Model T automobile. Put an insured patient with the proper documentation at one end and spew out a much poorer, somewhat healed, not healed at all or even dead person, at the other end. All very efficiently, you understand.

If you're tempted to say it's the profit motive -- which in part it is -- you're missing the entire point. Profit is part of the problem, but it's not the essential problem.

The basic problem is a deficit of common sense.

That's a social problem. As we develop into an ever more individualistic society, we are losing our sense of commonality and the ability to trust in our own judgment as adults. That's what common sense was.

"Common sense," growled by exasperated teachers and adults, was what we children lacked when we did something dangerous or foolish or simply without thought. We failed to rely on the accumulated social wisdom concerning some basic basics.

Patients must be ask what they are allergic to, because that way, if we goof, it's their fault. Medical people can't trust their senses because they will be sued. Besides, they make more money testing.

It's a bother to apprentice and train people to use some horse sense about the degree of cheeriness a patient can take while you are rearranging the duodenum; so just give them a clipboard and a checklist: "Item 7: rearrange duodenum while proffering a toothy smile and Baldridge level 4.7 cheer."

The common sense of what is really needed to apply a modest amount of healing -- pain, after all is what keeps us alive -- has gone out the window.

Delusions and Consequences

Is it your fault if a relative you drove to a hospital doesn't like your choice of venue or somehow gets sicker, even though you didn't choose the equivalent of a refugee camp clinic in Chad over a peer of the Mayo Clinic? You had two apples, a red delicious and a granny smith and with the best intentions you chose one over the other.

Is it your moral, philosophical or psychological fault if the person you gave the apple to gets an indigestion or just plain doesn't like the taste? There are people -- often enough they are women taught to apologize for their mere existence -- who would beat themselves up, who would engage for hours in exploration of the chain events that any small and largely apparent choice brings on.

You decided to major in English literature and not accounting, so you failed as a novelist and live in a garret in East St. Louis, but your accounting-major classmates have already retired to mansions in Provence. You turned left rather than right at a certain intersection and a truck laden with hundreds of pounds of bananas backed into your car three blocks later.

Remember, we're not talking legal here. Lawyers could argue that a matricidal maniac should not be punished harshly because he is an orphan, but that's not the kind of issue on which I want to dwell.

Responsibility, to my mind, turns on whether we actually have choices. I would argue that most of us have extremely few meaningful choices and it's a delusion of grandeur -- or Calvinism, depending on your mileage -- to think otherwise.

If I were given the choice of being 15 again to relive it all, given what I know now, I would like to think I would make choices that would make me either rich as Donald Trump or famous as Albert Schweitzer or, at a minimum, irresistibly handsome to women ranging from Heidi Klum to Janet Reno. But it's just not so.

Let's take Heidi Kulm and Janet Reno. Attractiveness to the opposite sex is based on a wide range of biological factors that pair certain groups of men and women with each other and the results ... are happenstance. An actress once told George Bernard Shaw that if they had a child it would be beautiful and brilliant, only to hear from Shaw that the reverse would be true if the child inherited her brains and his beauty.

Social norms have tended to accentuate some aspects over another. Indeed, in its pursuit of study, the Jewish tradition has historically pushed its most intelligent people to marry. A rabbi's son was once the dream husband. Conversely, the rule of priestly celibacy in Catholicism assured that, at least during the long medieval night, the era's most educated and talented men of western Europe either did not reproduce or spawned children born into social disadvantage.

I belabor birth, because one's birthplace and parentage remain the most meaningful and decisive factors in lifetime social and economic outcomes -- democracy and everyting else notwithstanding. Unlike many Americans, I did not get to choose mine, which is why I am not particularly proud of being American -- or of occupying a given quintile in U.S. income distribution or hailing anciently from a particular corner of the world.

It's simply not true that being superior makes you white or being smart makes you rich or being chosen by Uncle Sam makes you number one. Even if it were, what did you have to do with any of those?

So what makes you think that you had a real choice in the hospital for your relative? You didn't have a choice between the Chad and Mayo clinics. At worst you had a choice between equally mediocre hospitals operating in the midst of a collapsing system.

We all do our best -- and, yes, we can choose not to -- and consequences spring whether we like them or not. I'm not even sure that doing one's best makes a difference, except to ourselves.

Values vs. Interests

Dinner with a friend occasionally allows one to plunge into the foundational philosophical issues, disregarding the day's din. In this case, it was the longstanding discussion between materialism and metaphysics -- although he protested that it was not. The crucible in which these views were tested was the basis for human conduct, social convention, law.

My friend held to the traditional, majoritarian view that humans respond to certain essential values that they develop or absorb from childhood on. In other words, we have a nonmaterial, psychological machine, so to speak, that processes certain thoughts and yields certain abstractions called ideas -- in this case they are ideas about what ought to be done.

The ancient Hebrews asked for a king anointed by God and the Romans claimed the Emperor was divine, hence ordained to rule.

Bossuet, court clergyman to Louis XIV, christianized the idea with his theory of the divine right of kings. This echoed Charlemagne's own ecclesiastical scholar court jester, Alcuin of York, who argued that "the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."

Alcuin, I'd guess, would have seen his opinion confirmed in this summer's town halls.

It took 13 centuries for a very chastened Christianity, in the voices of Jacques Maritain and the postwar Christian Democratic parties of western Europe, to adopt democracy, under the motto vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). Too late; that was two centuries after the seizure of the Bastille.

Not only has power traditionally been seen as flowing from godhead to crown and scepter, but also to all morals, laws, socially sanctioned customs and so forth. Or, among philosophers in a theist ocean, ideas spring from the psyche and its archetypes, whence spring philosophies, legal systems and the ordering of what Hegel called "civil society."

Karl Marx was not the first one to dethrone this idea, but he was among the most articulate of early, rationalist critics. In a view he summarized in the much-debated 1858 Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he wrote:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

These words, which essentially state that the struggle for survival is the basis for everything deemed holy and sacrosanct, or at least, legal and enshrined by custom, struck me like lightening when I belatedly first came across them, while working, oddity of oddities, for the U.S. Catholic bishops, several decades ago. Until then, I had been a modern Thomist.

I never came to embrace the mechanistic view of historical materialism as expressed by the Leninist parties, but I will freely admit that my more recent, post-Christian ethic of survival bears some debt to old Karli.

The fundamental human striving is to survive. As a friend undergoing cancer treatment reminded me recently, we live pretty much like the man who, having flung himself from the top of a tower of Notre Dame, thinks to himself as he falls, "I hope this lasts a while."

To my mind, having rejected the existence of a soul, the metaphysical or spiritual world, all of which puts the existence of any god into serious doubt, it no longer seems plausible that a reality other than the material actually exists.

We have material interests, sure. We canonize these interests in our customs, our laws, even our religions and philosophies. But we do not have values founded in any "higher," nonmaterial source, simply because such a source does not exist.

Last Chance for Change

President Obama, who seems genuine in his desire for carrying the American democratic experiment to its full fruition, represents to me the last chance in a lifetime to show that capitalism's ills can be reformed. And the last chance's decisive moment is here.

If Congress passes a health care "reform" bill that does not include a vigorous and workable public option, then the lesson is that greed is too powerful, too intractable to stop merely with debate and deliberation. Mentally, if this happens, I will begin to pack my bags for some other planet.

From what I have seen, I can't imagine any corner of the Earth suitable for me other than the United States.

Canada is too cold and Britain is heading into another dark night of Thatcherism -- as are France and Germany, whose languages I can't speak well enough to work there. Australia is rife with prejudice. Spain is mildly prosperous, but expensive since its entry to the EU. Spanish-speaking Latin America is too poor, too unjust.

The USA has been slouching toward Brazil over decades of conservative misrule; now phones no longer work, domestic cars that are a wretched disaster and the heartland is in thrall to methamphetamine. The favelas, or shantytowns, of Rio de Janeiro have notably improved over the past 30 years, while New York and Los Angeles is developing uniquely American versions of the vast Brazilian citadels of poverty.

There is one last chance. Now. Press Congress to enact a public health care option worthy of the name in order to prevent a financial and health catastrophy and to show us that our government cares for all of us, not just the wealthy and their lobbyists.

The Missing Hecklers

Rather than some Republican nut yelling "you lie!" when President Obama said health care would not be offered to immigrants without visas, there should have been hundreds of humanitarians standing up for care for all people, immigrants, native, fat, thin, whatever. Yet no one stood up for the obvious good cause. So much for Congress representing human beings.

Corporations are NOT People

The Supreme Court is about to re-hear a case involving the use corporate money in political campaigns. The plaintiffs claim corporations have a right to free speech. If the court changes its views and allows corporate contributions, there is no sliver of a chance in hell that elections will ever mean anything.

Republicans Really Are Assholes

Why does a White House aide renown as an environmental policy expert without peer have to resign quietly with a middle of the night announcement because some Republican smear-queens on Fox "news" decided to focus on some off-duty remarks quite some time ago? Everyone knows that one of those comments -- that Republicans are "assholes" -- is true; and if we didn't know it the smear campaign has proved it beyond doubt.

Van Jones, author of the 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy, resigned Saturday night, with a near midnight press announcement on a holiday weekend, to avoid distracting attention from President Obama's so smoothly running campaign for health "reform." That's the official story -- retold, OK, with a little sarcasm.

Half the nation at least agrees that the Bushies knew 9/11 was coming and knew it would create the "emergency" that would free them to do whatever they pleased with the Constitution. It is a documented fact that Bush called getting a recession, the attacks and the war he started a "trifecta," in that oh-so-appropriate humor that reminds one of nothing so much as his grinning campaign admission in 2000 that he had killed more inmates than any other contemporary governor ... heh-heh.

So, why does Van Jones have to apologize for signing a petition endorsing the idea that Bushies, well, did what they did?

And has Fox "news" smearmeister Glenn Beck repealed the First Amendment? It is not legal to think and associate with people of any opinion or religion any more? Having had something to do with an organization whose founders at one time held some Marxist -- gasp! the salts! -- views disqualifies anyone from work for which they have more than the necessary skills?

If that's true, then Glenn Beck should apologize for being an asshole and quit. I don't like assholery and no one on television should practice it.

This is the ridiculous logic to which we are driven if we let three nuts on right-wing propaganda shows dictate what's right and wrong. The time has come to tell the jerks to go beat off somewhere else.

Scam Nation's Great Recession

Washington Post headline: "Redskins Fans Waited While Brokers Got Tickets." Don't get me wrong. I'm no football fan. But do the i-bankers always have to get zillions in bonuses, while the rubes they fleeced get foreclosed and evicted?

John Steinbeck described the age-old story in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath like in this car lot conversation: "Watch the woman’s face," one salesman tells another. "If the woman likes it we can screw the old man. Start 'em on that Cad'. Then you can work 'em down to that '26 Buick. 'F you start on the Buick, they'll go for a Ford."

Now it's done on TV. Sell your gold to us, we're so trustworthy. Get fast cash for a car lien. Slim down with [insert gadget here]. Sickening.

September 1

Hoary date 70 years ago. Franco marches into Madrid, ending the three-year Spanish Civil War. Hitler marches into Poland. The "Concierto de Aranjuez" by Joaquín Rodrigo premieres in Paris, where hordes of Spanish exiles had fled. Oddly enough, Rodrigo's music is so redolent of Spanish tradition than even a nationalist could -- many did -- love the piece.

The End of Liberalism?

The fanfare around Ted Kennedy's death is linked to the demise of U.S. political liberalism, even though liberalism died between the presidential elections of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Liberalism could be declared dead by 1973, when the doubling of worker incomes since 1946 turned into a wage stagnation that has yet to end. On Saturday, August 29, 2009, liberalism was merely given its long overdue burial.

"Liberalism" was an American weasel term to avoid being called -- the salts! -- Red. In Europe, "liberalism" was understood as the ideology of the wealthy class spawned by the industrial revolution. They believed free markets should be unfettered, or liberated (hence "liberal"), from government intervention. We in the United States call that view "conservatism."

U.S. liberalism was originally an unorthodox alliance between the political machine of a New York governor from a patrician family of extremely deep pockets and the unions, the Catholic sons of immigrants and even "the Negroes" (where allowed to vote). I'm talking, of course, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man praiseworthy -- as Ted Kennedy is not -- for having transcended his upbringing and class destiny. His New Deal wove a threadbare safety net for the average citizen, without risk to a single mansion or trust fund.

President Kennedy drew on that coalition, which mistrusted him for good reason, to win election in 1960. Accidental President Lyndon Johnson, himself from a background close to those lifted from poverty by the New Deal but still without an upward socioeconomic ladder by the 1960s, expanded the New Deal into some, but not all, of its logical consequences.

The War on Poverty was a resounding success: poverty dropped in Johnson's one term from 19.0 percent to 12.1 percent -- nearly 7 percentage points down between 1964 and 1968, a record never equalled since (the 2007 poverty rate was 12.5 percent).

All the political battles since 1929 have been about whether to distribute the fruits of labor among the many who work or among the few who live off the profits. Liberalism had been moderately on the side of the many, while conservatism remains quite rabidly for the few.

Conservatism, of course, has successfully cultivated smokescreen "social issues" such as identity politics (whites vs. blacks vs. gays vs. women, etc.) and fundamentalist-leaning morality (abortion, family values, heterosexual marriage, etc.) to hide the elite's real economic agenda. But that's a whole other post.

The problem with U.S. liberalism is that it ultimately amounted to little more than noblesse oblige, political charity dispensed from limousines. The unions were co-opted -- and forcibly purged of "Reds" -- by the pressure and deals of the big oligopolies of the 1940s and 50s, which turned union leaders into domesticated members of the American managerial class.

The liberals purportedly believed that workers could get their fair share under their moderate reforms of the rapacious system we know as capitalism. But their gradualism led to gradual deterioration. In 2006 the average workers' inflation-adjusted wages were 22 percent below that of their peers in 1973. As noted at the outset, in 1973, they had been 200 percent (or double) what they were in 1946 -- same wages, same inflation adjustments.

The debacle occurred on the watch of Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd and all the old liberal dinosaurs who still think it's 1965 and thought it was 1965 when Reagan won and still thought it was 1965 when the Republicans took Congress, thanks to liberal spinelessness, in 1994.

Liberalism is dead. Is the new, still unveiling, Obama paradigm up to the task the dying liberal elders flubbed? Or is it merely the same old liberal Kool-Aid with different food colors?

Three Headlines on Ted Kennedy

No wonder folks are awash in Kennedy bathos. Washington Post Aug. 27 front page headline: "End of an American Epoch." Washington Times: "End of Camelot." New York Times: "Senator Kennedy, Battle Lost, Is Hailed as Leader." Respectively, self-referential pop history, Camelot amnesia and, finally, from the Gray Lady, a measured, dignified and even poetic banner that declined to canonize.

The important point made by the Times -- the real Times not the Moonie rag -- is that journalism is about what others say and do, not what journalists think. Ted Kennedy said a lot, but toting up his record, he accomplished extremely little, particularly if balanced against what he received.

It is appropriate to report that others -- mostly politicians desperate for a sound bite -- are the ones drooling about the younger Kennedy. Notice the absence of hard facts in all the praise? No? Well, The New York Times' headline reports it. Take note.

Fast Eddie Kicks the Bucket

Faster than you can say "Chappaquiddick," President Obama has called the newly dead Edward M. Kennedy "the greatest United States Senator of our time.” I stood silent during the absurd, post-mortem lionization of Michael Jackson and fond memories of fluffed hair queen Farrah Fawcett. But I won't stand for the second Kennedy apotheosis in a month -- this one completely undeserved.

I am not a Kennedy hater and I agree with most of the positions adopted by the dead senator. I revered Jack and Bobby. But Teddy, whose life amply demonstrates he should have been nicknamed Fast Eddie, was unquestionably the "bad seed."

Unlike Eunice Kennedy Shriver, kindly rich lady that she was, her brother Edward disappointed only those who expected him to deliver at least as much as he received. After all, Ted Kennedy was born with a silver spoon and delivered a life of dishonest posturing. Then again, that silver spoon had been forged from the Wall Street and Prohibition Era shenanigans of his none-too-saintly father.

The storied double dealing of patriarch Joe Kennedy wasn't Ted Kennedy's fault. Not like his cheating on a Spanish exam at Harvard. Not like Chappaquiddick.

The man now being eulogized as a great liberal allowed the minimum wage to sink below the poverty line. He failed to join forces with Jimmy Carter to prevent the election of Ronald Reagan and to help pass health reform in the 1990s.

Kennedy claimed to be a Catholic, yet after driving a good woman to drink and divorce, he emulated the darkest side of Camelot, finally squiring another divorced Catholic.

Is there anything for which Edward M. Kennedy said he stood that he didn't betray? Is there anything he actually achieved?

Sebelius Is Not Essential

If Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius really meant that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element," then what is reform for? Is President Obama really going to choose between abandoning either 17 million people (House bill) or 36 million people (Senate bill)? Given that the president has plainly agreed that a single-payer plan is the only way to cover everyone: why isn't he simply upping the ante and putting that on the table?

Because, for all the huffing and puffing and all the misspent millions by insurance, pharma and "health care providers" (that's a good one!), all the town hall meeting disruptions put together don't amount to a hill of beans. Just because some cranky, ignoramuses let themselves be fooled by the first snake-oil sales pitch the gougers lobby can throw at them, it doesn't mean they've won.

Democracy isn't about who screams the loudest nonsense.

Indeed, the health gougers have been using every anti-democratic tactic in the totalitarian playbook, contrary to the blathering of Big Lie artists on wacko right-wing radio and Fox television. Go back and look at how the dictators of the 1930s climbed to power and you'll see screaming white young men with short haircuts chanting "USA! USA! USA!" (only back then it was "Sieg Heil!").

All right, maybe Sebelius can be excused her weak knees because she was not on the campaign trail with Obama in 2008, when I distinctly remember being promised "change." Maybe she's the "fall guy," to use Chicago Mafioso talk, which seems appropriate given the high level of corruption involved in this whole pseudo-debate.

Let's not weasel out of campaign promises and go for the most expedient route, the one that helps people the least. Let's show some guts here and call the bluff of the Republicans and the health-industrial complex.

Don't want a moderate reform plan? Fine, let's create the U.S. National Health Service. Something modern and serviceable, such as I observed while living in Canada and the United Kingdom, that replaces everything that exists now.

What for?

An endless avenue of years
stretch before me:
bus, coffee, newspaper,
do, done, plan to do again
lunch on diet, lunch on wine
work and wonder
bus, kids, wife
then a book to curl around
at day's end; at week's end
books and movies,
baseball games and dinner feasts,
a trip when there's an itch.
Dear me, what for?

It will happen over and again:
Christmas tree and Lenten ashes
fireworks and All Hallows' masks,
sunshine or rain; house, office, and bus
fend off my lust,
my fear of nakedness, of pain ...
to be poor, lonely, old,
to grow weak and hear my body ceasing
to obey
all that can happen, all I dread,
some of it will come before I am dead.
Then I will ask my inner self: whatever for?

Once I thought
I was made so love could shine in winter
so God could be man again
to bless the creatures;
but that feature played to mixed reviews
that coin's been wasted on the beggarwoman
the preacherman's "Jeezus" is a broken record
and the creatures do not tell me what they want
nor can I guess, were I able to fulfill their dreams ...


Before all pleasure turns to rust
my desire pilfered from some others
as theirs is drawn from me till ennui,
I may yet ask the beggarwoman
what have I to give a life
simply to die each day,
to lie undead ...
or what else, and what for?

Writer's Blog

Rummaging through drawers I never go into, I found a couple of short stories I wrote in the 1980s that -- if I say so my fictionally unpublished self -- aren't bad. Why could I never convince a fiction editor to publish anything I wrote? I've had "faction" published in major newspapers all over the world -- well, in a few countries.

Recently I submitted a short story I had posted here. Had to take it down for that reason. Nothing. Maybe I misclassified it as a short, rather than a short story. Maybe I didn't sleep with the right people. Maybe it was lousy.

At one point long ago, when my writing was still unforgivably juvenile, I did send out a whole rafter of stories out. I had a file full of rejection letters, which I think I've since thrown out. I even composed a "form" rejection reply: "I regret that I am not able to reply to your rejection letter personally, but given the volume I receive, it is impractical. Thanks anyway for the opportunity to review yours."

By that time, I had given up submitting stories and thrown away two "novels," an act that probably did the most that was ever done in the 20th century to rescue western civilization -- which, as Gandhi noted, would have been a genial idea.

Socrates in Chicago Debating Health Care

(The following is an dialogue written in the style of Xenophon, between a wonkish Washingtonian, whom I'll call Socrates, and a citizen from the U.S. heartland, whom I will call Critobulus, after the dialogue figure in the famous work Oeconomicus, regarded as one of the earliest works on economics. The proper title for this dialogue should be Oeconomicus Sanitatis, but I thought the Latin would scare people away.)

INTERLOCUTORS: Socrates and Critobulus

PLACE: Grant Park, Chicago

CRITOBULUS: Ah, so it goes, my friend: politics as usual. I don’t know why a person would continue to fight a losing battle. Money is what makes things happen not altruism.

SOCRATES: That's right. Abdicate. We can use fewer nay-sayers in the fight.

CRITOBULUS: Well, food, shelter, and clothing are more important than health care. One can get along for substantial periods of time without health care services, but one cannot survive for long without food, shelter, and clothing. Given this plain fact, why don’t the proponents of "free" universal health care demand "free" food, shelter and clothing?

In other words, if a citizen, just in virtue of being a citizen, has a right to health care, why doesn’t the same citizen have the right to what is more fundamental, namely, food, shelter and clothing?”

SOCRATES: You think human beings don't have an inherent right to these? Is it all right if I take them away from you, then?

CRITOBULUS: You have no more right to take them away from me than you have a requirement to give them to me. But "inherent right"? As in, because I’m a human being others are required to see that I have these things?

SOCRATES: Inherent right. If you don't have an inherent right to food, shelter and clothing, then no one has a right to exist. Everyone may be killed, tortured, stolen from, raped, anything you want.

What did you think was meant by "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"?

CRITOBULUS: Right. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but not free food, free shelter, free health care and whatever else the government comes up with. Food, shelter and health care is not the responsibility of the federal government.

SOCRATES: What do you think sustains "life"? People can live without food and shelter and other essentials? Can you?

CRITOBULUS: What am I supposed to answer? That, no, I don’t need food to live? I wish that it were so. But does that mean than someone has the responsibility to feed me?

SOCRATES: Well, if you need these things to live and you have a right to life, then there is an inherent right to food, shelter and other essentials of life, isn't there? Are we agreed on this?

CRITOBULUS: We are in agreement that it is essential to have food and shelter in order to live.

SOCRATES: The proposition is "There is an inherent right to food, shelter and other essentials of life." Agree or disagree?

CRITOBULUS: Oh, all right. Agree.

SOCRATES: So, then, do children procure their own food, shelter and essentials, say, when they are one year old?

CRITOBULUS: No.

SOCRATES: So, if they have an inherent right to the essentials of life, someone must procure that for them. Right?

CRITOBULUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: Who should that someone be?

CRITOBULUS: His or her parents.

SOCRATES: What if the parents are unemployed, disabled, sick or dead?

CRITOBULUS: Then grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins.

SOCRATES: What if things are so bad that none of them has any time or resources to spare?

CRITOBULUS: Well, the community.

SOCRATES: What if the community is poor or unable or even unwilling?

CRITOBULUS: Then the State.

SOCRATES: OK, so assuming that by "the State" you do not mean Montana or Maryland, but government in general, you will also agree that a similar chain of responsibility exists with respect to the elderly and the infirm, right?

CRITOBULUS: By “State” I did mean Montana. Montana takes care of their residents; Maryland takes care of theirs.

SOCRATES: Conceptually there is no difference. They are simply different levels of government. Distinctions between states and the federal government are almost entirely artificial.

Functionally, it is very difficult to separate the states and the federal government or distinguish between them. All states have tripartite government, agencies modeled after the federal, constitutions similar to the federal, etc., etc. If you had a Kingdom of Montana and a Grand Duchy of Wyoming and a Soviet Republic of Idaho, well, that might be somewhat different. But they all function on basically the same Lockean theory of government.

CRITOBULUS: OK. The state, in general. And I see the same chain of responsibility for the elderly and infirm.

SOCRATES: So what about people who are laid off? Or towns in which a plant that is the main industry, after the plant closes? Should government help them make sure they have the necessities of life?

CRITOBULUS: I think the idea of unemployment insurance is good if it’s used as it was intended. In other words: a means of seeing someone thru an in-between-jobs length of time. I don’t think a differentiation should be made between layoffs of large employers and small employers.

At the same time, people have to get back in touch with the idea that you don’t spend everything you make as soon as you make it. I don’t know how that can be accomplished if they always have someone to bail them out. I know this isn’t an option for people making minimum wage but it is an option for more people than seem to be using it.

SOCRATES: OK, but in principle, you've agreed that a rather large proportion of the population should get government for the necessities of life. Is there any reason this should not be extended to all citizens who need such help?

CRITOBULUS: It would be ideal if everyone who needed help received it and received it in the amount that they truly needed and in a manner that didn’t undermine their self worth.

SOCRATES: OK, then, we have agreed that, provided it is financially feasible and done well, there ought to be a system of social insurance and health to make sure that everyone has the necessities of life.

CRITOBULUS: I don’t think I would go that far. Health care doesn’t have to be insurance, does it? In other words, I don’t think the heath care business would be in the shape it’s in, if insurance hadn’t been involved. Insurance was supposed to be a "gamble." They gamble that you won’t need it, you gamble that you will. It wasn’t supposed to be they win if you don’t use it and they win if you do, because they get to jack up the premium.

SOCRATES: In this context, "social insurance" not insurance in its everyday sense.

I'm speaking of a system, or set of programs. In this framework, the risks that one might not be able to obtain the essentials of life are transferred from the individual or household to society. The resources needed to face the risk is pooled by society, though the government. After all, in a republic, the government is the holder of public goods and resources.

The result is that, when any person faces circumstances that prevent him or her from obtaining the essentials of life, society would rush in to the rescue. A single-payer health plan, for example, might be one component. Unemployment compensation would be another, and so on.

CRITOBULUS: That sounds good. Until the end-of-life decisions need to be made. Who says when? Who says this much treatment and no more? Would I rather have the government make that decision or make it myself within whatever means I can finagle? And I guess it boils down to how much trust do I want to place in the government.

SOCRATES: The question in political philosophy is what the proper role of government is. We've agreed, with the framers of the U.S. Constitution, that government is properly involved in the general welfare of the people, particularly when people can't do so themselves. No one should have to face the choice between good health and food or rent.

Ferragosto

For several years now, I've been noticing a phenomenon in the United States that didn't exist 30 years ago, when the purportedly work-ethic conservatives first got naked power. It's something called Ferragosto in Italy, or the closing down of nearly everything, traditionally in the middle of August, now extended throughout western Europe to the whole month.

One notices it in Washington when Congress gets ready to leave town for the month-long vacation no one else in the USA gets. No one, except the W Administration, of all the administrations I've watched clearly the laziest by far; they were major ferragostans.

Ferragosto comes from Feriae Augusti, or Feast of Augustus, as a fertility season of revelry and rest. It later was christianized to the 15th of August, feast of the Assumption of Mary (Catholic) or Dormition of the Theotokos (Orthodox), a religious holiday celebrated in the Early Church.

This is not merely a Mediterranean custom any more. Germans, the French and the Brits slow down to a crawl and, if they can afford it, fly off to Mayorca and the Spanish Costa del Sol.

Americans always used to work year-round, especially in the cities. New York City not only never sleeps, it never used to stop even in the genteel days without air-conditioning in which John Cheever wrote about life in the city.

No longer. Those who are not busy making or consuming methamphetamine in the once-great breadbasket of the central states -- and there aren't too many left who aren't -- are lazing in the sun or the mountains or in Europe or even unscrewing fire hydrants in the inner city.

Decline, like death, doesn't come with trumpets and the clanging of cymbals but with sopor in summer.

Abolish Private Medicine

Why aren't the "pro-lifers" protesting the denial of life to the living in a medical system run by the profit motive? Why isn't health care a family value, conservatives?

How come some people prefer to be ripped off by insurance companies than to have always-available care, no matter what, as they have in outrageously "extremist" countries such as Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Denmark, Sweden and Norway?

Why are we debating how much we'll "compromise" so the insurance companies, pharma and, yes, the medical mafia known as the AMA can keep sodomizing the nation?

The real issue is not whether to have a "public option," pretty please with sugar on it, Don Medico Corleone.

The real question is how long will we tolerate money deciding whether children get essential and timely care. The real issue is how much more will we accept the notion that the bulk of a lifetime's medical expense is in the last 5 years, when there is the least likelihood of recovery.

The real problem is not, in brief, whether there should be a public system of health available to all regardless of ability to pay, but why we haven't abolished medicine for profit.

The First American Profile

My good friend Tom Head has posted a history of racial profiling in the United States in the wake of the unwarranted arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Unfortunately, my good friend misses the point. Profiling is not the same as enslaving or discriminating against a group; it is assigning moral traits to certain shared physical characteristics.

A history of profiling might thus start not with emperor Charles V of Spain and Germany, whose mandates never held sway in the United States, as Tom's historical sketch suggests, but perhaps with the curse of Ham. The biblical story (Gen. 9:20-27) goes that Ham had "seen the nakedness" (which scholars read as a euphemism for sodomy) of his father, Noah, causing the latter to exclaim: "Cursed be Canaan [Ham's son]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."

How the descendants of Ham came to be identified with Africans is a twisted marriage of, on the one hand, prejudice convenient to English elites who in the 17th century saw profits in the slave trade, and on the other, murky Protestant readings of a text that in itself has no racial or ethnic content, tacit or explicit.

Note the two elements and their order.

First, there arose the economic need for slaves in the English colonies, as improved economic conditions in Britain diminished the supply of white indentured servants and a shift to the African slave trade as a source of labor.

Only in a second instance, after commercial and legal changes had institutionalized the trade, did the profile arise. The slaver would have told himself that "These Africans do not wear European clothes nor speak a European language, therefore they are savage, lesser beings fit only to serve whites."

The colonials whose society began to depend on the slavers' human cargo then needed to assuage their consciences in the face of the "peculiar institution." Wielding their Bibles, they seized on the Africans' dark skin, reasoning that it was a sign that their souls were "blackened" with Ham's sin and they were condemned to be the lowest caste of servants.

Thus was born the first American ethnic profile.

Walter Cronkite was a bore

Since when are people who read news on television deserving of posthumous panegyrics befitting a Nobel Prize winner? What did Cronkite do, other than deliver in the same flat bass the most trivial, intellectually deadened factoids, such as the alleged precise time President Kennedy died?

A trained monkey could have done better.

One of the reasons television is one of the worst sources of information is precisely because of individuals such as Cronkite, who devoted his life to perpetuating the stultifying deception that they were delivering news, when all they were doing was reading headlines.

It's the broadcast pretense of seriousness, conveyed merely through a particular ton of voice, that allowed millions to be deceived into voting, against their own best interests, for people who sounded and looked as smooth as Cronkite. It was Cronkite who taught Americans that TV form outweighs substance: how else could Ronald Reagan, a man who at best play acted the roles of governor and president, ever have been elected?

Reading is today a kindergarten skill. Reading clearly and audibly can be learned by the end of elementary school. A male bass voice develops in junior high school without any particular training. So, where's the achievement of using these abilities in front of a camera?

Awake to Glory, Children of France!

With the words of the title, today we remember the signature event of their revolution, the storming of a prison fortress 220 years ago. Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! So what is a revolution and how can we tell one has occurred?

Two centuries ago, France was organized politically, economically and socially as the private estate of a very small hereditary elite. In that France lived the fattened clergy that blessed all the king did, the merchants and bankers who greased the wheels of the nobility's carriages, the courtiers and courtesans who tried to eke a living on the leavings of the privileged few and the very, very many who were the hereditary human beasts of burden.

Today the nobility is largely gone. The merchants and bankers have supplanted them. But the very many have unions and public schools and vacations and cars. Today only 6.2 percent of the French population lives under their official poverty threshold, which is higher than that of the United States.

Less than a century ago, Russia was a vast plantation in the hands of the Romanov family and their favorites. Not counting the papacy, which was not a nation-state at the time, in 1917 the czarist regime was the last remaining absolute monarchy of Europe.

Imperial Russia's elected legislative body, the Duma, was merely an advisory body with little effective power except to complain; from 1907 on, the leftist parties, which had won significant pluralities in the first two elections elections, were almost completely suppressed as electoral law was changed to favor propertied, land-holding voters. The nation was still not industrialized and its agriculture was primitive and in the hands of newly liberated serfs who had effectively become, as in the American South, penniless sharecroppers. The educated middle class was miniscule.

Today, with all its troubles, Russia's income inequality is lower than that of the United States -- the Russian Gini coefficient index stood at 40 in 2005, compared to 46.9 in the USA, albeit both higher than for most European Union member states.

In 1776, what is today the United States was divided into a vast territory held by native tribes and secondarily a set of European colonies comprising a string of small seaboard settlements held (in order of size) by Spain, France and England. In the English colony, a relatively small elite of freeholders and wealthy merchants decided not to pay taxes used to finance their defense from neighbors tired of their predatory behavior.

Their revolt was led by a few high-minded slaveowners and by merchants and bankers who proceeded to make enormous war profits by lending and supplying materiel to the fledgling government. In the new nation's eventual compact, proclamations of freedom did not apply to natives, African slaves nor indentured English servants, who were not even counted as full human beings for the purposes of electoral apportionment. In a process of roughly two centuries, still unfinished, each one had to shed blood to gain a semblance of fairness.

Today, 12.5 percent of all U.S. inhabitants -- or about 36 million people -- live below the poverty threshhold ($10,830 for an individual; $22,050 for a family of four). That's double the proportion in France, living at a lower threshold.

"In the French Revolution, when laborers' wives were mud-splattered by a passing carriage, they yelled at the marquise studiously ignoring them in her cabin, saying "One day we will all be marquises,' " a literature professor once remarked, adding, "while in the Russian Revolution they cried, 'One day you will be a peasant just like us.' "

We in the United States like to think our people are historically like the French. But that is not quite true.

On the American carriage rode a slaveowner who called out to the rabble, "Go die for me so I can avoid paying British taxes, go till my land and work my factories and build roads for my goods, go work, work work, and God will make you rich like me!"

And as the fools followed their pied piper, the gentleman's gales of laughter were drowned out by the cobblestone clopping of his hastening horses.

The Freedom Delusion

Today is Argentina's Independence Day. On July 9, 1816, delegates from the United Provinces of the South, voted to sever political ties with the Spanish monarch. It's an odd holiday because the event was almost an afterthought: the revolt against Spanish rule began on May 25, 1810, all of which reminds me, even more oddly, of a story about Ghana's independence.

First, a little context.

For six long years Gen. José de San Martín kept demanding that the congress of provincial delegates -- similar to the U.S. Continental Congress -- declare a rupture. In 1810, news had arrived of Napoleon having marched into Spain and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII. The locals, lacking an army, deposed the viceroy and seized power in name of the imprisoned monarch.

This was a legal technicality, built on the colonial legal technicality that the territories in the American continent belonged not to Spain, but to the Spanish crown, technically equal in sovereignty to Spain. (I believe Britain held to a similar conceit as a way to deprive its colonies of a seat in Parliament.)

By 1816, with Napoleon long gone, San Martín was growing tired of the charade of claiming allegiance to the same monarch as the Spanish troops with whom he did battle.

Independence and freedom were never the same thing, as the slaves of all the colonies well knew.

Indeed, the notion was put most succinctly by a classmate of mine -- Monica G. -- in a university short story seminar in Montreal. She had written a short story set in her native Ghana. (Imagine how hard it must have been for a citizen of an African country so near the Equator to weather the blizzards of Canada!)

The protagonist was a poor old woman going home from work as a domestic on the eve of Ghana's independence. I forget what happened in the story, but I recall one of the woman's hopes for the great event of which everybody talked.

Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.

We have all shared in the disappointment of realizing that the realization of our highest, fondest and noblest hopes never quite turns out as we imagined, if it ever does. Our ideals, like our lives, turn to dust, like the soil of Ghana's deforested savannah.

Why do the heathen rage?

Taking a leaf from Chani's Sacred Life Sunday series, our text this morning is Psalm 2:1. In the words of the King James translation, it runs "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"

There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.

Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.

O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."

The thought came to me when Dubya could come to power unelected, order wiretapping on Americans, out his own country's intelligence officer and imprison people indefinitely without trial, all in defiance of his oath of office to the Constitution ... all with utter impunity.

Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.

Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.

To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.

We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.

The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.  Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.  Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

The Psalms have this thing with a king who will reign forever and "smite" anyone who even looked at us the wrong way. So? I want my smiting done right now!

Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.

Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?

How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?

Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.

Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following

But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.
Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine ears ...

This reminds me of a T-shirt I bought one summer at Rehoboth Beach. On a black background it features a silver skull engulfed in golden flames. Over the years I came to call this image the picture of my inner, raging daemon.

It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.

There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.

That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.

The Former Permanent Majority Party

Paul Krugman is a better mortal than I am -- he even has a major platform, an actual specialty and Nobel Prize in his field -- so he may be willing to resist wasting "precious column inches on the former Permanent Majority Party." However, he does have this world-famous blog to feed.

As I did with neoconservatism, I would like to explain why the recurrent Republican zipper, hate-radio and other problems should not be all that surprising. After all, it's not like at any time after Abraham Lincoln the Republicans ever stood for anything noble capable of evoking self-sacrifice.

It is true that some GIs were uneducated enough to have written in 2003 to relatives that they were happy to be fighting in Iraq so their families could pay lower prices at the gas pump. However, "I died so you could save 10 cents at the pump" falls somewhat flat as a line for a stirring patriotic anthem. Never mind that prices never got that low anyway.

Nor will we find too many dreamy eyed policy visionaries desirous to devote their lifetime to government service to ensure that the richest 2 percent pay no taxes.

As for the party's traditions, until Richard Nixon, the Grant's Administration held the record for most corrupt and until the latest President Bush, the Hoover Administration took the gold medal for most blasé in the face of economic crisis.

Besides, what was the pool of potential "cadres" for the Reagan "revolution" other than folks whose fondest dreams was cooking up some highly leveraged financial derivative that would make them millionaires -- excuse me, billionaires? I have a very fine bridge in Brooklyn to sell to anyone who would expect loyalty, let alone fidelity to a political platform from such people.

And while we're talking about fidelity, let's now recall the fine "family values" of divorced Ronald Reagan whose children were estranged from him, of Newt Gingrich who served his wife with divorce papers at her cancer deathbed, of Bob Livingston who tried to crucify Bill Clinton for playing with cigars while in his own case a cigar really was not a cigar. And since then Craig and Ensign and Sanford and surely others I'm forgetting.

Did anyone really expect that the piano players at the GOP bordello were going to hang around after the party?

Happy Real Independence Day

Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!

Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.

The brief document read:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more

Now, 233 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.

In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.

Anti-Chavez Rabies Shows Up in Honduras Mixup

Hither and yon one gets a glimpse on the 'net of people who seem morbidly rabid about anything connected to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. One does not have to carry water to notice it.

He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.

People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.

And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?

Les Scandales Politiques Américains

In the manner of Art Buchwald's famous column explaining Thanksgiving's Day to the French, which was reprinted every year for decades after its 1953 debut, I would like to explain to readers of Le Monde why Mark Sanford is news in the USA.

Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):

Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)

A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)

Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!

"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.

Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?

Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).


Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.

Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!

Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)

Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.

Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.

Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).

Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?

Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.

Time to Push Back for Health Change

These days it seems the only folks pushing back are the health insurance-pharma-medical mafia, the banks and the auto executives. It's time to push back and show President Obama that those of us on the popular side of the spectrum really do want the change for which we voted.

Indeed, many more of us than public polls reveal would gladly take over the banks, get rid of the insurance companies and put the pharmaceutical and medical industry at the service of society.

Health care, as long as it is available for one, is a human right for all. To be healthy is an essential condition for human dignity. To force someone to live with pain and indignity merely because we are too selfish to share resources is inhumane and cruel.

Yet this is what is proposed by those "moderates" in Congress who are willing to jettison even a very modest "public option" for the sake of "bipartisan" bribery. For the richest country in the world to deny health care to about 50 million of its people, when the next 20 richest countries manage to care for all just fine is inexcusable, wrong and foolhardy.

If I had my druthers, we would have a national health service (see the presentation on H.R. 676, a bill by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.) much as there is in in those benighted, backward isles of Britain and that technologically primitive Germany and those Third World economies of France and Japan. Or our oft-forgotten neighbor, Canada. All of which work. I've lived in Britain and Canada and occasionally received medical care there just fine.

In no other advanced industrialized nation is health an economic burden on the average individual. You can change jobs, get sick, grow old, anything, secure in the knowledge that society will take care of you.

Don't cave in, Democrats. In fact, put a single-payer system on the table.

Why Is Racism Not Over?

Of course, racism didn't end on Jan. 20, 2009. There even was a (currently dormant) blog mocking the idea called, natch, Racism is Over. Yet this past weekend, lunching and dining with fellow educated Americans of European origin whom I would have thought knew better, I was brought face to face with the persistence of racism.

Don't believe it? Here are two instances in one day.

Item one: Lunch. A government lawyer complained to me about the admittedly absurd absence notes from one colleague (e.g., "my cat has a headache") and the administrative assistant who apparently manages to work all day without turning on the computer on her desk. His girlfriend proceeded to generalize about how people of the ethnicity of the two goldbrickers (whisper: "black") tend to be like that.

So I try reason: President Obama is African-American and he seems pretty hard working to me. The reply? "That's the exception."

Then I begin to make a list in my mind of black intellectuals, artists, legal scholars, biblical scholars -- and I stop. It's no use: everything has been prejudged. The only sane response is given by my companion, who insists that these comments are simply wrong.

Item two:  Dinner. I express concern for my younger son's exposure to mortal danger given his choice of career (law enforcement) and a fellow diner who is a health care consultant with umpteen degrees blurts out, "Especially in D.C., which has a 70 percent black population." The implication, of course, is that the murder rate has something to do with blacks, because as we all know, whites never kill anyone.

For the second time in one day, I am dumbfounded.

I genuinely liked these people who, admittedly, were recent acquaintances. The lawyer was less of a surprise. He had admitted to being Republican -- and I'd wondered how and why -- but I gave this attorney the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was a harmless, traditional Republican, of the sort who bemoaned the loss of the gold standard, but was otherwise enlightened. There are a scant few.

The consultant, however, was utterly baffling. An active Presbyterian who had argued with me on matters of principle ... how could an informed Christian hold such obviously racist views?

This is where I am stuck. There's an almost unconscious prevalence of views that can't be called anything else but racist.

I admit I am biased -- not on the basis of color -- against certain kinds of people. I lampoon the Southern good ol' boy with gusto (and I figure the heirs of the Confederacy deserve a taste of their own medicine). But I would readily admit to anyone that what I really know about the South and Southerners fits in a thimble. This is merely satire of a stereotype, not sociology.

But the people with whom I was speaking were, in contrast, pretty sure they were right, that the facts backed them. They were almost surprised that anyone would question such opinions.

Here we are in 2009 and one still hears outrageous things about ethnicity from Americans who have distinguished academic and professional careers, people who profess in every other respect to be civilized and open-minded.

When I try to find a reason why, I am stuck.

The Worst Is Over?

Hand it to the economists, business reporters and Wall Street talking heads to heave up a massive sigh of relief that "only" 345,000 people lost their jobs last month. The average Josephine on the street doesn't share the feeling because neither she nor her mate, Joe, ever see the money from profits during the booms and they always feel the pinch in the busts.

They only see the unemployment line, the cutoff notices when money begins to get tight and eventually more and more losses. Is it getting better at the home of J&J?

Let's see ... there are 14.5 million Americans unemployed. That's double the number of people who were jobless before the recession started.

This just like saying that in 2004 there was a great recovery, or that it was "morning in America" under Ronald Reagan, whose sharp rightward economic shift in 1981 brought us 9.4% unemployment precisely 27 years ago last month.

So, no, the gross domestic product may be poised to post a positive growth number. To you and me, that means nothing.

The Biochemical Soul

When I was a child I used to wish I had been born in ancient Greece, so my ideas would be new. Every time I made some novel observation, Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates had been there.

This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.

A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.

I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).

Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.

Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.

So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.

The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.

Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.

And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?

Papa Heinz

Papa's age is past now fifty-seven,
his years the multiplicity of Heinz
spacing his work with lunchtime vino:
a siesta-less career, now come to call,
an unholy ghost he willed once lost travails.

They say he's traded secrets with the Pope
on microphonic olives in martinis;
we children know his record past reproof:
he's shown he loves his native country truly,
the one he left a life ago.

Papa wasn't always fifty-seven,
grandma's grainy pictures had him twenty:
all meant to force me down her fettuccini
to make pasta stretch me to a pole,
adroit and tall as papa's six foot two.

Now he plays America's true end-game:
his friend's been killed by men on Soviet pay,
his world has shed more blood beyond wars cold,
and lent him robes to rend in horror hate
of spilling ketchup on his beef tartare.



(Blogger's note: I wrote this in June 1978
when my father turned 57, my age today.)

The Right to be Sad and Jobless

Deep in the American social psyche is the Calvinist notion that setbacks in health and finances are always the fault of the sufferer. Wealth is seen to be the sign of divine approval not as Balzac's evidence of a crime. Similarly, ever since the New England Reader we have believed that cleanliness (and healthy living) is next to godliness.

One of the most difficult things about bouts of depression is hearing the well-meaning exhortations to be happy, exercise, meditate, as if the person had set out to defy the 11th American Commandment: thou shalt be cheerful. It echoes the chorus of Wall Street traders who jeered "losers" in response to aid for laid off people who were unable to pay their mortgages.

Rationalist-minded 21st century denizens might want to revise the social norm. We might want to be cheerful about having jobs (90.6 percent of us still do) while respecting the reasonable right to a little gloom and doom when others are so moved.

Between the medieval vale of tears and the 19th century delight in progress, lies another path, still unnamed and figuratively undescribed.

June 6, 1944

Sixty five years ago, roughly 160,000 U.S., British and Canadian infantry landed in Normandy, supported by 195,000 navy men in 7,000 vessels, to drill a breach in Hitler's Atlantic Wall and liberate Europe, in what I believe remains the largest amphibious military landing in history.

Canadians landing at a beach code-named Juno faced the second highest rate of attrition on the beat (a 50% casualty rate in the first hour), but ended up the only unit to reach its military objectives by the end of the day. The highest loss of life, 60%, befell Americans at Point du Hoc. The British landed in two beaches, facing stiff resistance near Caen, which was not taken until August. Two small French contingents landed that day, one with the British in the Caen thrust, and another parachuting into Brittany attached to a British SAS commando unit.

Let us remember these men today and their awesome struggle.

Busy

I am alive. I am thinking. Material is gathering. But, I'm ...

... busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy ...

Tired of seeing the same old thing on the blog, but too busy to write a new post.

Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

Carry on.

Faithful? Progressive?

Blogs that wear religion on their sleeves tend to be, like churches, full of hypocrisy. I've already blogged on the Methodist preacher who, the nun who, and my latest find is Faithful Progressive, the title of which, after a little following, prompts the headline question.

The answer is "neither."

The blogger presents himself as theologically a liberal Protestant and politically as loosely left-of-center. The blogger claims to be "faithful" to Christianity and "progressive" aka "afraid to call myself socialist" but really willing to fly the flag of moral indignation.

In roughly a month or so of following the blog, FP has managed to:

-- pick the mote in the Catholic eye as regards the Nazis (without, of course, having anything new to say), while refusing to even look at the Protestant beam: the churches that allowed themselves to be merged by the Nazis into the Reich Church under Reich bishop Ludwig Muller;

-- flagrantly repeat and proudly use the schoolyard bully term "Ditchkins" (a conflation of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) as the moniker for atheists of whom the writer is obvious afraid an in awe of; and

-- flaunt the blogger's vision of the language of Cervantes as a wetback language not deserving proper use by obviously translating "Congratulations Judge Sonia Sotomayor" through a computer translator, with the result "Congratulations have judged Sonia Sotomayor," which doesn't make sense in Spanish, any more than it does in English.

When I pointed out the incredibly stupid error -- clearly the machine interpreted "judge" to be a verb ("juzgan"), not a noun ("juez") -- the blogger changed it and pretended to have intended a "pun."

The blogger, who is apparently obviously angry at afraid of atheist critics, insists the originator of "Ditchkins" has written a "great read."

On the Nazi point, he pretended not to even hear the criticism.

And to my pointing that his blog, which has far too many quotes from other sources and exceedingly little original material, violated the Associated Press' copyright, he replies that "You[r] toady sucking up to the AP is also reflective of the tendency of the new atheists to be a reactionary cultural force."

So, there it is: faithful to Christian charity? No. Progressive? Only in the weasel sense.
 The guy doesn't have a clue.

It’s not a boy!

When is it good news that it's not a boy? When it's a woman. That, at least, is my take on the handsome Puerto Rico-born Cuban-American young Catholic priest photographed in an amorous embrace on the beach with ... wait for it ... an attractive, bikini-clad young woman.

The pictures of the priest, Alberto Cutié, also nicknamed Miami's “Padre Oprah,” for his Spanish language television and radio talk shows, appeared in a Spanish gossip magazine called TV Notas, leading to his suspension from parish work by the Archdiocese of Miami.

What the major Anglo press — or the Catholic hierarchy for that matter — doesn't get is the persistent cultural message underlying this kind of incident.

“If only it were the worst thing that a Roman Catholic priest has been caught doing,” Time's Tim Padgett took time out from the earthshaking news to editorialize in his lead. Meanwhile, to The New York Times' reporter Damien Cave, Cutié's problem is that he works in “South Beach, where even the mannequins have extra-large breasts.”

They're missing the point and it's not like they didn't have warning, either. Do you remember the last time a Hispanic clergyman got famously caught swimming in forbidden sexual waters?

It was Bobby Sánchez, the former archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who in the 1980s had more than a dozen angry women after him, once they all found out he was cheating on them with holy mother church.

Truth in commentary: Sánchez headed the U.S. Catholic bishops' Hispanic Affairs Committee, for which I once worked and I'd heard the stories about Sánchez and his womanizing long before it was headline news.

Yet precisely because the Sánchez and Cutié cases lie at the intersection of the two most misreported areas of news —` Hispanics and religion — no one has yet stumbled onto the most notable and historically consistent point that might be made about traditionally Catholic Hispanic men.

They like women.

They love to have a passel of kids with women, occasionally even with more than one woman at a time. Latin American literature, which is the informal sociology about things one does not bring up at the dinner table en familia, is replete with examples of such men – and they all ring true.

Moreover, they absolutely despise the notion of celibacy.

Want homegrown proof right here and now? The number of married Hispanic Catholic permanent deacons in the United States, who carry out some ministerial functions, albeit well short of a priest's, is very many times higher than that of U.S. Hispanic priests.

There are, too, Hispanics with vocations, my esteemed bishops. They just don't want to be celibate.

In Latin America, which has the world's largest Catholic population -- or about 350 million out of the nearly 1 billion Catholics in the world – there are fewer Catholic priests than the number serving the 60 million U.S. Catholics.

Until the very late 20th century, Bolivia, a country to which Spanish missionaries first went in the 1500s, had never had a native-born bishop. As with most of the Latin American Catholic clergy, they had all been imported.

And here's the one point Time and The New York Times should have been able to dig up all on their own: according to a well-known FBI criminal profile, 80 percent of all pedophiles are non-Hispanic white males. Hispanic males comprised a tiny sliver of the remaining 20 percent.

Look at the rogue's gallery of child-raping U.S. priests made infamous in the past decade or so: almost all of them are Irish-American, not Hispanic.

Ready to get an inkling about Hispanics in religion, major news media? Let me beat the horse just one bit deader than a doornail.

Time magazine headline writers had fun with the episode, dubbing the South Beach paparazzi shots "The Father Cutie Scandal." Get it? Alberto Cutié is a “cutie.”

But guess what? Cutié is pronounced coo-tea-EH, not as the Valley-Girl-speak word for handsome. That's OK, when it comes to Hispanics, major media journalists might as well all be Valley Girls.

A Model for Pelosi

On one of my favorite blogs I recently caught the headline

Speaker quits 'for sake of unity'

then I realized it was not what I thought. But what a great idea for Nancy Pelosi!!!!!

Frankly, I don't care what the CIA told her or what she heard, but she has been such a spinelessly rotten vote counter, such a roll-over-and-play-dead Repub Democratic House follower leader that she really should quit while she's behind.