First I voted Republican in a municipal election, now I'm about to say "maybe Michele Bachmann is right." There. I've said it. OMG, what have I done? I've just sat back and accepted that the Republicans will hold their breath, stamp their feet and churlishly say, "No, Daddy, I don't wanna raise the debt ceiling!" And on August 2 ...
... what? At first, nothing.
On Tuesday, August 2, Uncle Sam won't be able pay all his bills and at some point that day, either President Obama or Secretary of the Treasury Geithner will make a statement concerning the plans of the U.S. government. I assume that someone in the White House or Treasury or Pentagon, or all three, is already developing plans of action.
Here are a few possibilities for that first week.
The stock markets will probably dip quite a bit: 500 to 1,000 points of the Dow index in the first morning. The face value of U.S. treasuries will likely drop dramatically. Investors will flee the U.S. dollar ... but to what in a world in which almost every currency in the world has some dollar in it? Any future borrowing by the USA will probably become very expensive -- deepening the national debt. Prices will begin to shoot up. Riots in the streets? Doubt it. Where have American rioters been these past three years?
Then there's the ripple effect. If the exports-driven German boom faces a U.S. market with devalued dollars that can't afford Mercedeses and BMWs and Braun shavers ... there goes Germany. Then France, then England. Then the rest of Europe and Japan. Most of the rest of the world is, unhappily, already there. Many countries have defaulted and quite a few are on the brink. Like us.
But let's not forget China, the prime holder of U.S. debt. What if China decides to come grab some collateral it has coming ... say, New York City or Los Angeles? China's standing army is somewhat larger than that of the USA. But grab a hold of this fact: China has 385 million men and 363 million women potentially available for military service. That's twice the U.S. population and then some. And they have nuclear weapons. But, OK, even China can't invade instantaneously.
So, what happens in a world in which the full faith and credit of the U.S. government no longer means much of anything certain?
It's a good time to pick up asceticism as a way of life, Franciscan or Buddhist or whatever flavor you like. Give all you have to your fellow poor. It's worthless, anyway.
Then fast and begin chanting your Hail Marys or merely "Ommmmm ..."
Friday, July 15, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
What if Jesus had been a woman?
Responses to my blog yesterday hinged mostly on my use of the feminine pronoun for God. I can explain that1, but this is not the point of this post. Here I am using the magic wand of the imagination to propose that instead of Jesus, or Joshua, of Nazareth, there was once a Jocelyn of Nazareth.2
This fun experiment is suggested by one commenter who, unasked, offered apologetics about why Jesus was a man. The assertion that Jesus was male, assuming he was a historical person, which I often doubt, has not been seriously questioned insofar as I know. But let's question it.
Let's say that Myriam (Mary) had a girl whom she named Jocelyn.
Joss would not have been presented at the Temple, nor circumcised. She most certainly would not have had occasion to befuddle the rabbis one Passover in Jerusalem as a child; such men would not admit a girl into their presence.
The Lady (I'm going for a parallel for "Lord") would not have been trained in woodwork by Joseph. No sirree, Bob! She would have been taught to keep a kosher home by Mary.
Assuming she had been passed over, so to speak, by marriageable young men until she was 30, she would have deemed been a mature spinster woman in her society when she began her ministry. She would never have had the occasion of preaching in her synagogue in Nazareth. Women in traditional synagogues, which they all were then, were never asked to read from the scrolls of Scripture, much less allowed to comment on them.
However, Joss would have been accepted easily as a miracle worker, or healer, given the traditional nurturing role of women, and this role would have drawn a following.
It's the gospel discourses that are problematic. Would a Jewish woman be even allowed to speak in public in first century Palestine? Doubtful.
The passion and death, however, might be plausible. Instead of being crucified by Romans, she would have been stoned to death by (male) fellow Jews for breaking any one of the countless taboos within which women were imprisoned in her society. Her stopping the stoning of the adulteress would be seen as prefiguring her own stoning.
Instead of a cross on top of church spires, there would be a stone. There might not have been male priests at all, of course, until recent times. Christianity would have been a decidedly feminist matriarchal religion until these enlightened days.
The Eucharist elements of bread and wine (the latter, as a stand-in for blood, is far too problematic for words), might be replaced by latkes and water, symbolizing a woman's nurture and perhaps the breaking of a woman's waters before giving birth.Of course, the creed would go, "We believe in God the Mother ... and in Her only Daughter ..."
Hmm ... altogether a not unpleasant upending of the world as we know it.
1. God, if God exists, is obviously neither male nor female. However, for the past 5,000 to 10,000 years God has been anthropomorphized as male. In my small way, I'm attempting to balance that error. I promise I'll stop in about 10,000 years.
2. Some people suggest that in English Jocelyn might be the female for Joshua, which is likely the name of the woodworker from Nazareth, Yeshua in Hebrew, rather than the Latin Jesus. Spanish, of course, has Jesusa, a name I have only known to be given to women born in Spain.
This fun experiment is suggested by one commenter who, unasked, offered apologetics about why Jesus was a man. The assertion that Jesus was male, assuming he was a historical person, which I often doubt, has not been seriously questioned insofar as I know. But let's question it.
Let's say that Myriam (Mary) had a girl whom she named Jocelyn.
Joss would not have been presented at the Temple, nor circumcised. She most certainly would not have had occasion to befuddle the rabbis one Passover in Jerusalem as a child; such men would not admit a girl into their presence.
The Lady (I'm going for a parallel for "Lord") would not have been trained in woodwork by Joseph. No sirree, Bob! She would have been taught to keep a kosher home by Mary.
Assuming she had been passed over, so to speak, by marriageable young men until she was 30, she would have deemed been a mature spinster woman in her society when she began her ministry. She would never have had the occasion of preaching in her synagogue in Nazareth. Women in traditional synagogues, which they all were then, were never asked to read from the scrolls of Scripture, much less allowed to comment on them.
However, Joss would have been accepted easily as a miracle worker, or healer, given the traditional nurturing role of women, and this role would have drawn a following.
It's the gospel discourses that are problematic. Would a Jewish woman be even allowed to speak in public in first century Palestine? Doubtful.
The passion and death, however, might be plausible. Instead of being crucified by Romans, she would have been stoned to death by (male) fellow Jews for breaking any one of the countless taboos within which women were imprisoned in her society. Her stopping the stoning of the adulteress would be seen as prefiguring her own stoning.
Instead of a cross on top of church spires, there would be a stone. There might not have been male priests at all, of course, until recent times. Christianity would have been a decidedly feminist matriarchal religion until these enlightened days.
The Eucharist elements of bread and wine (the latter, as a stand-in for blood, is far too problematic for words), might be replaced by latkes and water, symbolizing a woman's nurture and perhaps the breaking of a woman's waters before giving birth.Of course, the creed would go, "We believe in God the Mother ... and in Her only Daughter ..."
Hmm ... altogether a not unpleasant upending of the world as we know it.
1. God, if God exists, is obviously neither male nor female. However, for the past 5,000 to 10,000 years God has been anthropomorphized as male. In my small way, I'm attempting to balance that error. I promise I'll stop in about 10,000 years.
2. Some people suggest that in English Jocelyn might be the female for Joshua, which is likely the name of the woodworker from Nazareth, Yeshua in Hebrew, rather than the Latin Jesus. Spanish, of course, has Jesusa, a name I have only known to be given to women born in Spain.
Monday, July 11, 2011
How the Christian God came to clash with the Universal Echo
It takes going to a Sunday Eucharist after years of absence to notice with an unaccustomed clarity that the Christian God, by belief, is so particular so clearly "out there" and distinct from us, that this divinity could not easily fold into my admittedly diffuse notion of the Universal Echo (see here).
The Christian God does not easily submit to the idea of being a figment of our imagination. No, She insists on being triune, transcendent, incarnated, the giver of specified promises, the forger of everything. Her only Son insists on being a first-century Palestinian Jew from a small, nay insignificant, little town that was not even part of Judea, the then-existing vassal-kingdom of the Jews.
Jesus, or Joshua, as the name more likely was, insists on having been born of the Virgin Mary and executed by Pontius Pilate. This is by whom, in whom and to whom Christians pray.
I'm no longer sure this divinity can be conflated into the Universal Echo. The Christian God demands to be accepted on Her own terms.
The Christian God does not easily submit to the idea of being a figment of our imagination. No, She insists on being triune, transcendent, incarnated, the giver of specified promises, the forger of everything. Her only Son insists on being a first-century Palestinian Jew from a small, nay insignificant, little town that was not even part of Judea, the then-existing vassal-kingdom of the Jews.
Jesus, or Joshua, as the name more likely was, insists on having been born of the Virgin Mary and executed by Pontius Pilate. This is by whom, in whom and to whom Christians pray.
I'm no longer sure this divinity can be conflated into the Universal Echo. The Christian God demands to be accepted on Her own terms.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
What if we really did cut out the tax "loopholes"?
Republicans in the default or no-default negotiations are now making noises that they're willing to contemplate getting rid of "loopholes" in the tax code to achieve what they will accept as deficit reduction. Of course, my loophole is your sacred cow and there ain't no such thing as deficit reduction. But let's dream ... and consider a modest proposal.
I'll call it the Simple Tax Act, because that's what it is: a tax code that is nothing more than a schedule of tax rates and a few simple definitions. Ten pages, max.
No mortgage deductions, no housing tax credit, but no oil depletion allowance and no fancy depreciation. Just levy X taxes on Y income (or Z profit).
Keep progressivity: lower brackets should pay smaller proportions than higher brackets. Keep the grand givaway of taxing corporate profits rather than income (define allowable "expenses" only as cash and carry items, no fancy deeming of anything that is not an actual exchange of goods, services and money ... bye-bye, Ken Lay). Even keep low (but not zero) inheritance and capital gains taxes.
Because that's the little secret: if everyone pays a fair share, each one of us can get to pay little less to balance the budget and get our goodies, like the occasional chest-thumping war or three, Medicaid and Medicare, federal student loans, etc.
What's more: eliminate all the deductions, credits and allowances and you don't have to file a tax declaration at the end of the year. What gets deducted is what you owe! Period. Bye-bye April 15 deadline. Let's have a tax parade and cookout, instead ... I'll bring the hot dogs.
I'll call it the Simple Tax Act, because that's what it is: a tax code that is nothing more than a schedule of tax rates and a few simple definitions. Ten pages, max.
No mortgage deductions, no housing tax credit, but no oil depletion allowance and no fancy depreciation. Just levy X taxes on Y income (or Z profit).
Keep progressivity: lower brackets should pay smaller proportions than higher brackets. Keep the grand givaway of taxing corporate profits rather than income (define allowable "expenses" only as cash and carry items, no fancy deeming of anything that is not an actual exchange of goods, services and money ... bye-bye, Ken Lay). Even keep low (but not zero) inheritance and capital gains taxes.
Because that's the little secret: if everyone pays a fair share, each one of us can get to pay little less to balance the budget and get our goodies, like the occasional chest-thumping war or three, Medicaid and Medicare, federal student loans, etc.
What's more: eliminate all the deductions, credits and allowances and you don't have to file a tax declaration at the end of the year. What gets deducted is what you owe! Period. Bye-bye April 15 deadline. Let's have a tax parade and cookout, instead ... I'll bring the hot dogs.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
So a House is not a Home, what now ... ?
Stardate 64935.8
Am clearing out my place so it can be renovated. I was persuaded to post something I thought trite and self-referential on this matter by Carol of Carol's Vault, a fantastic blog site on freeware and open source software (plus occasional excursions to other regions of the mind). Blame her. But, heck, this is a web log, right?
Now that my home is virtually empty I realize that the old trope "a house is not a home" is true. I've lived 30 years there. Now I'm finally getting rid of the museum of a family that no longer exists, which has surrounded me for a about a decade, I realize that the real charm of the place lay in those absent people.
Two boys jumping on a trampoline (yes, a trampoline!) in the middle of a living room.
A Mom pasting a verse from Proverbs on the back of the cubpoard door.
Two boys reading, or playing or working (ha!) on their laptops, next to each other on a sofa, without speaking.
A Dad spending a reading vacation on the balcony, devouring neo-Father Brown detective novels set in Detroit.
One boy building a fort in the living room (the trampoline gone); another in their bedroom. playing "music" capable of drowning out street-repair drills.
And on and on and on ...
Now only the Dad lives here. It's not so spectacular a place without posters and books and bunk beds and religious images and all that gone. Still, he's committed to moving out in a pine box. Where else could he live?
Am clearing out my place so it can be renovated. I was persuaded to post something I thought trite and self-referential on this matter by Carol of Carol's Vault, a fantastic blog site on freeware and open source software (plus occasional excursions to other regions of the mind). Blame her. But, heck, this is a web log, right?
Now that my home is virtually empty I realize that the old trope "a house is not a home" is true. I've lived 30 years there. Now I'm finally getting rid of the museum of a family that no longer exists, which has surrounded me for a about a decade, I realize that the real charm of the place lay in those absent people.
Two boys jumping on a trampoline (yes, a trampoline!) in the middle of a living room.
A Mom pasting a verse from Proverbs on the back of the cubpoard door.
Two boys reading, or playing or working (ha!) on their laptops, next to each other on a sofa, without speaking.
A Dad spending a reading vacation on the balcony, devouring neo-Father Brown detective novels set in Detroit.
One boy building a fort in the living room (the trampoline gone); another in their bedroom. playing "music" capable of drowning out street-repair drills.
And on and on and on ...
Now only the Dad lives here. It's not so spectacular a place without posters and books and bunk beds and religious images and all that gone. Still, he's committed to moving out in a pine box. Where else could he live?
Friday, June 10, 2011
What did Papa Heinz feel when he turned 59?
When my father turned 57, two years before he died, I composed a poem although there was no reason, other than my own inexperienced youth, to suppose his death was anywhere near. I laughed when people said "he died so young" two years later, yet surely he had no idea.
I said for years that I would welcome going at the same age. As I got closer, however, my tune began to change: I like being alive, warts and all.
Upon turning 59 today, I have already thought and rethought this. When I turn 60, next year, I'll heave a sigh of relief. Then keel over. Just kidding! (Or perhaps the joke will be on me.)
It would be worthwhile to know when one will die. A friend was diagnosed with a terminal disease, given a few years and spent all his savings before dragging on in poverty for a decade longer than predicted.
Doctors know nothing! My plan is to stay away from the medical money extraction machine as long as possible, to age in place to avoid feeding tubes and the like, and generally to go gently into that night. The plans of mice men men, right?
Still, if I die this year, say six months from now to match the exact life span of my father, I can't say I'll go with much too much fight. Barring some unforeseen development, of which life is admittedly chock full, I have done just about all I'm going to do and I'm plum out of new ideas.
Oh, last thing: I called my father Papa Heinz drawing on the fabled 57 varieties of ketchup in an old slogan. Thank your stars I speared you the poem.
I said for years that I would welcome going at the same age. As I got closer, however, my tune began to change: I like being alive, warts and all.
Upon turning 59 today, I have already thought and rethought this. When I turn 60, next year, I'll heave a sigh of relief. Then keel over. Just kidding! (Or perhaps the joke will be on me.)
It would be worthwhile to know when one will die. A friend was diagnosed with a terminal disease, given a few years and spent all his savings before dragging on in poverty for a decade longer than predicted.
Doctors know nothing! My plan is to stay away from the medical money extraction machine as long as possible, to age in place to avoid feeding tubes and the like, and generally to go gently into that night. The plans of mice men men, right?
Still, if I die this year, say six months from now to match the exact life span of my father, I can't say I'll go with much too much fight. Barring some unforeseen development, of which life is admittedly chock full, I have done just about all I'm going to do and I'm plum out of new ideas.
Oh, last thing: I called my father Papa Heinz drawing on the fabled 57 varieties of ketchup in an old slogan. Thank your stars I speared you the poem.
Monday, June 06, 2011
Why change-hopers should join the GOP
Sarah Palin was right. That changey-hopey thing didn't really work out for us on the Left, after all. Of course not. To get the kind of destruction fierce enough to pull out capitalism by its very roots we needed a Republican, and not just any mild-mannered, Amtrak-hating former POW, but a Tea Partier.
After all, it takes a Republican to really ruin things, not just merely mess them up.
Herbert Hoover gave us the Great Depression. A little more Republican inaction could just have thrown capitalism overboard for good in the 1930s. If only that fast-talking Franklin Delano Roosevelt hadn't come along!
Indeed, in the mid-1930s as the economy began to sprout its first buds of recovery, the Republicans in Congress started rending their garments over deficit spending (sound familiar?). They put the brakes on the New Deal and prolonged the Depression by five years.
As Archie Bunker used to sing, we sure could a man like Herbert Hoover today.
Then there's Ronald Reagan, who gave us more national debt than all his predecessors combined, preached morality and dealt drugs (remember Iran-Contra?) and, for all his bravado, didn't stop a single solitary abortion. Now there's a man who understood the Vietnam War notion of destroying a village to save it!
And Dubya ... George W. Bush deserves a unique altar in the pantheon of Republican gods. He started two wars. Allowed a major U.S. city to be wiped out. Got the United States in the dock for torture. Plus he turned surpluses that ran as far as the eye could see into debt that made Reagan's look puny.
One more term of Dubya and there would be nothing left standing.
Think all that glorious maleficence is in the past? Think again. The Tea Party stands ready to get the United States to default on all its debts and get us all placed in the same deadbeat dock as Argentina.
So here's the choice, my fellow Good Lefties, are we just going to keep letting the Democrats take us for a ride? Or will we let the Republicans run this capitalist system into the ground as only they can do?
Lefties for Republicans, unite! We have nothing to lose but our votes.
After all, it takes a Republican to really ruin things, not just merely mess them up.
Herbert Hoover gave us the Great Depression. A little more Republican inaction could just have thrown capitalism overboard for good in the 1930s. If only that fast-talking Franklin Delano Roosevelt hadn't come along!
Indeed, in the mid-1930s as the economy began to sprout its first buds of recovery, the Republicans in Congress started rending their garments over deficit spending (sound familiar?). They put the brakes on the New Deal and prolonged the Depression by five years.
As Archie Bunker used to sing, we sure could a man like Herbert Hoover today.
Then there's Ronald Reagan, who gave us more national debt than all his predecessors combined, preached morality and dealt drugs (remember Iran-Contra?) and, for all his bravado, didn't stop a single solitary abortion. Now there's a man who understood the Vietnam War notion of destroying a village to save it!
And Dubya ... George W. Bush deserves a unique altar in the pantheon of Republican gods. He started two wars. Allowed a major U.S. city to be wiped out. Got the United States in the dock for torture. Plus he turned surpluses that ran as far as the eye could see into debt that made Reagan's look puny.
One more term of Dubya and there would be nothing left standing.
Think all that glorious maleficence is in the past? Think again. The Tea Party stands ready to get the United States to default on all its debts and get us all placed in the same deadbeat dock as Argentina.
So here's the choice, my fellow Good Lefties, are we just going to keep letting the Democrats take us for a ride? Or will we let the Republicans run this capitalist system into the ground as only they can do?
Lefties for Republicans, unite! We have nothing to lose but our votes.
Friday, June 03, 2011
Yayy! Champagne! Obama is selling Chrysler at a loss
We interrupt the planned blogging with a question ...
What part of "buy low, sell high" does the Obama Administration not understand? An NPR "Morning Edition" announcer mused about White House cheering at the sale of the U.S. government's 8% stake in Chrysler. This is at a loss of $1.3 billion; or about 10%.
What are they celebrating?
If you'll recall, in March 2009 Obama announced that the U.S. government bought an 8% stake in Chrysler (in large, publicly held corporations a 5% stake usually gets you a seat on the board) as part of a deal involving the United Auto Workers, Canada, an "alliance" with Fiat, and writeoffs on the part of Chrysler creditors.
Now, Obama is selling that stake at a loss to Fiat — which already has plenty to lose if it walks away. What are "We, the People" getting for all of this subsidizing of U.S. and foreign megacorporations? Zip, zilch, zero, nada.
We're losing $1.3 billion. Rest assured that some politician will make up that by eliminating nutrition for infants or some such.
If this is such a great deal, why aren't the federal government of Canada and the Province of Ontario selling their combined 2% stake, acquired in 2009 as part of the same deal?
“We’ve never believed the government of Canada should be in the automotive business,” said Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty at a news conference in Toronto. “But we have to look out for good value for Canadian taxpayers.”
Flaherty is a Tory, a cabinet member in a majority Progressive Conservative government. This is no flaming pinko member of the New Democratic Party, the socialist party that overtook the Liberals in the last election.
Why doesn't Obama care about "good value" for U.S. taxpayers?
Hello! The unemployment rate just went up this past month for the second month in a row. This is a smokescreen for predicted bad economic news. It's just as fake as "change you can believe in."
Here's the real Obama motto: soft, subsidized, all-expenses-paid socialism for corporations and the wealthy; hard-scrabble, you're-on-your-own capitalism for the rest of us.
What part of "buy low, sell high" does the Obama Administration not understand? An NPR "Morning Edition" announcer mused about White House cheering at the sale of the U.S. government's 8% stake in Chrysler. This is at a loss of $1.3 billion; or about 10%.
What are they celebrating?
If you'll recall, in March 2009 Obama announced that the U.S. government bought an 8% stake in Chrysler (in large, publicly held corporations a 5% stake usually gets you a seat on the board) as part of a deal involving the United Auto Workers, Canada, an "alliance" with Fiat, and writeoffs on the part of Chrysler creditors.
Now, Obama is selling that stake at a loss to Fiat — which already has plenty to lose if it walks away. What are "We, the People" getting for all of this subsidizing of U.S. and foreign megacorporations? Zip, zilch, zero, nada.
We're losing $1.3 billion. Rest assured that some politician will make up that by eliminating nutrition for infants or some such.
If this is such a great deal, why aren't the federal government of Canada and the Province of Ontario selling their combined 2% stake, acquired in 2009 as part of the same deal?
“We’ve never believed the government of Canada should be in the automotive business,” said Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty at a news conference in Toronto. “But we have to look out for good value for Canadian taxpayers.”
Flaherty is a Tory, a cabinet member in a majority Progressive Conservative government. This is no flaming pinko member of the New Democratic Party, the socialist party that overtook the Liberals in the last election.
Why doesn't Obama care about "good value" for U.S. taxpayers?
Hello! The unemployment rate just went up this past month for the second month in a row. This is a smokescreen for predicted bad economic news. It's just as fake as "change you can believe in."
Here's the real Obama motto: soft, subsidized, all-expenses-paid socialism for corporations and the wealthy; hard-scrabble, you're-on-your-own capitalism for the rest of us.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
All good lefties should dump the Democratic Party
Yes, you read that right. I mean it. Presidential timidity in the face of an arrogant plutocracy convinces me that the only way to bring "change you can believe in" to capitalism is to destroy it. The Grand Old Party, not the Democratic Party, is the last best hope to achieve that goal, given that revolution has never happened in the United States and never will.
To be sure, Obama had many golden opportunities to show he meant his promises.
One handed to him on a silver platter was the collapse of the auto industry, the very emblem of U.S. capitalism's so-called "American Way." He was effectively asked to nationalize the industry -- everything but Ford. Indeed, the entire industry had behaved no better than a heroin dealer, addicting Americans to the car, its pollution, the garbage-producing waste of "planned obsolescence" and dependence on foreign oil.
In the name of capitalism, Obama decided to make government a silent partner.
Next came the much awaited health care reform. Yet universal health care was never even the avowed goal of Obama. Sure enough, the mafia of the American Medical Association, Big Pharmas and Slick Insurance -- everybody who wants to get their hands in the pockets of healthy and wealthy people in the name of "health care" -- made Swiss cheese of Obama's proposals.
They essentially won a continuation of the status quo, or even its worsening, for Citizen Average -- that's you and me.
Financial reform was the obvious next move, right? Anyone who watched policy from Reagan-era deregulation to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, knows that what happened in 2008 was a planned heist by the titans of the financial industry. So far, they've resisted any significant change.
Then let's not forget never ending, always expanding war and Guantanamo. All of which Obama vowed to end.
Now I can hear Obama and his surrogates whining that none of this is this administration's fault and change just can't be done because of the present political circumstances. That's precisely my point.
The Democratic Party saved capitalism in the 1930s and saved it again and again, all the way to 2009 and beyond. Even the union hacks have woken up and are withholding their money at long last.
The Democrats are just not up to do the job. Next post: why the GOP is.
To be sure, Obama had many golden opportunities to show he meant his promises.
One handed to him on a silver platter was the collapse of the auto industry, the very emblem of U.S. capitalism's so-called "American Way." He was effectively asked to nationalize the industry -- everything but Ford. Indeed, the entire industry had behaved no better than a heroin dealer, addicting Americans to the car, its pollution, the garbage-producing waste of "planned obsolescence" and dependence on foreign oil.
In the name of capitalism, Obama decided to make government a silent partner.
Next came the much awaited health care reform. Yet universal health care was never even the avowed goal of Obama. Sure enough, the mafia of the American Medical Association, Big Pharmas and Slick Insurance -- everybody who wants to get their hands in the pockets of healthy and wealthy people in the name of "health care" -- made Swiss cheese of Obama's proposals.
They essentially won a continuation of the status quo, or even its worsening, for Citizen Average -- that's you and me.
Financial reform was the obvious next move, right? Anyone who watched policy from Reagan-era deregulation to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, knows that what happened in 2008 was a planned heist by the titans of the financial industry. So far, they've resisted any significant change.
Then let's not forget never ending, always expanding war and Guantanamo. All of which Obama vowed to end.
Now I can hear Obama and his surrogates whining that none of this is this administration's fault and change just can't be done because of the present political circumstances. That's precisely my point.
The Democratic Party saved capitalism in the 1930s and saved it again and again, all the way to 2009 and beyond. Even the union hacks have woken up and are withholding their money at long last.
The Democrats are just not up to do the job. Next post: why the GOP is.
Monday, May 30, 2011
What did they mean by "Jesus Is Lord"?
The first Christian statement of faith was simply "Jesus is Lord." One modern hearer gathered from this the meaning that "Jesus will care for me," much in the vein of the 23rd Psalm's "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." Perhaps. But what did the ancients, the first century Christians, mean?
Let's examine the three words.
Jesus. Not Christ (really a title, meaning Messiah). Not just anyone who occupies a particular office. Not some spiritual or celestial being. A particular person that some of them said they had met and talked to just like you and me in the flesh-and-blood here and now. Yeshua bar Josif, some postulate as his full historical name.
Is. Not was when he was alive. Not was long ago when the dinosaurs roamed. Not was at all. Is. Exists today.
"But how can that be? We saw him executed by the Romans!" The Roman officials themselves, asked who this "Chrestus" was, reported to superiors that he was an executed Jewish woodworker whose followers said he had risen from the dead. That was what spread like wildfire in the Roman Empire. This one, it was said, cheated the Emperor's executioner!!!
The Christians believed it.
Finally, Lord. In our Eurocentric conception, to us lords are medieval landowners, some of whom built castles. In some European countries, their heirs hold legal title to the lion's share of the land. But to the ancients an ordinary lord was a master or guardian, the head of household, the landowner, the king, the emperor -- all of whom had power of life and death over their subjects (by divine right, Paul wrote). "Lord" was also a substitute for "God" and in that world the Caesar was a god.
When Christians held "Jesus is Lord," the Romans knew they had to kill them.
All Christian statements of belief have always arisen by the "via negativa" or denial of an assertion of its time. Hail, Caesar! No, Jesus is Lord.
Let's examine the three words.
Jesus. Not Christ (really a title, meaning Messiah). Not just anyone who occupies a particular office. Not some spiritual or celestial being. A particular person that some of them said they had met and talked to just like you and me in the flesh-and-blood here and now. Yeshua bar Josif, some postulate as his full historical name.
Is. Not was when he was alive. Not was long ago when the dinosaurs roamed. Not was at all. Is. Exists today.
"But how can that be? We saw him executed by the Romans!" The Roman officials themselves, asked who this "Chrestus" was, reported to superiors that he was an executed Jewish woodworker whose followers said he had risen from the dead. That was what spread like wildfire in the Roman Empire. This one, it was said, cheated the Emperor's executioner!!!
The Christians believed it.
Finally, Lord. In our Eurocentric conception, to us lords are medieval landowners, some of whom built castles. In some European countries, their heirs hold legal title to the lion's share of the land. But to the ancients an ordinary lord was a master or guardian, the head of household, the landowner, the king, the emperor -- all of whom had power of life and death over their subjects (by divine right, Paul wrote). "Lord" was also a substitute for "God" and in that world the Caesar was a god.
When Christians held "Jesus is Lord," the Romans knew they had to kill them.
All Christian statements of belief have always arisen by the "via negativa" or denial of an assertion of its time. Hail, Caesar! No, Jesus is Lord.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Closing a museum of a life that no longer exists
All the shelves are empty, as are the kitchen cupboards. I realize I've taken on something monumental. In short, I'm transforming the museum of a life that no longer exists into my own abode.
Redo the kitchen, floors, paint. The place is not for sale, but the process is almost as I were moving.
I tried emptying a desk on my own and a 30 minute job turned into three hours.
Did I really need that software game for DOS? Remember the day my son and a friend "played" a baseball game that was on the radio ... ? The computer version, set to play itself, came out pretty close to the real game being played by real human beings out in the stadium.
Then there's the anxiety about getting rid of furniture that is way past its prime. And the comic strip she left taped inside a cupboard door.
When all this comes at me I have to go lie down. Breathe deeply.
In the end, I gave in and hired someone to pack. I'm getting someone to take the old furniture away. I'm getting someone to store the boxes for the month or so work will be in progress.
As a result, I have only what I had at hand when the packing took place. Where is ...? I don't know. I had too many things, anyway.
This brings to mind Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone, young man who in 1204 publicly disavowed his wealthy father, returning his money but also his clothes, down to his underwear, and walked off naked out of his native town of Assisi to start a new life.
I imagine that first day walking naked amid the brambles in the valley outside the town. Given that I am blogging, I am far from naked, light years away from that. I am getting a glimpse of the loss, but not the new life of Francis' marriage to Lady Poverty.
In any case, I am a much older and insecure 21st century agnostic. I am not sure there is a transcendent point to any of this travail.
Redo the kitchen, floors, paint. The place is not for sale, but the process is almost as I were moving.
I tried emptying a desk on my own and a 30 minute job turned into three hours.
Did I really need that software game for DOS? Remember the day my son and a friend "played" a baseball game that was on the radio ... ? The computer version, set to play itself, came out pretty close to the real game being played by real human beings out in the stadium.
Then there's the anxiety about getting rid of furniture that is way past its prime. And the comic strip she left taped inside a cupboard door.
When all this comes at me I have to go lie down. Breathe deeply.
In the end, I gave in and hired someone to pack. I'm getting someone to take the old furniture away. I'm getting someone to store the boxes for the month or so work will be in progress.
As a result, I have only what I had at hand when the packing took place. Where is ...? I don't know. I had too many things, anyway.
This brings to mind Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone, young man who in 1204 publicly disavowed his wealthy father, returning his money but also his clothes, down to his underwear, and walked off naked out of his native town of Assisi to start a new life.
I imagine that first day walking naked amid the brambles in the valley outside the town. Given that I am blogging, I am far from naked, light years away from that. I am getting a glimpse of the loss, but not the new life of Francis' marriage to Lady Poverty.
In any case, I am a much older and insecure 21st century agnostic. I am not sure there is a transcendent point to any of this travail.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Friendship-making epigram: "I voted for Obama and all I got was an American president like any other"
The beauty of the statement is its detachment. The author, my friend K, said he'd spent most elections voting for anyone but the two main parties' candidates: Nader, etc. Then he got drawn in by Obama.
But by now he's as disillusioned as so many of us (most of us?) who voted for change. And what did we get?
We didn't get, as some White House blowhard said recently, "universal health care." Far from it! We got, at most, a health insurance reform bill that the insurance lobby is busy bringing to a death of a thousand papercuts. In the end, nothing.
We didn't get finance reform. As my friend said, we paid the bank robbers and then let them write the rules from the government. Or don't you know that the Obama Administration's economic policy-making machine is a fully owned subsidiary of Goldman, Sachs?
And we surely didn't get an end to war, torture and illegal detention without trial in Guantanamo.
"Well," my friend said of the reforms, "you can't blame Obama. He did what he could and Congress stopped him."
That's what Obama wants you to think in November 2012. In reality, Obama went to the Republicans and the lobbyists hat in hand giving the candy store away from the get go. He wrestled with himself so much, that the disloyal opposition just had to sit back and watch with amusement. He fooled us into thinking he had more spine than Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. As if.
As to war, my friend agreed, "Obama could have ended that."
So here comes Obama, finally asserting something that has been bipartisan U.S. policy forever and a day: Israel should return to pre-1967 borders. Why couldn't he have done the same with health and finance reform and Guantanamo and war?
Because he's not about change. He's an American president just like all the others.
But by now he's as disillusioned as so many of us (most of us?) who voted for change. And what did we get?
We didn't get, as some White House blowhard said recently, "universal health care." Far from it! We got, at most, a health insurance reform bill that the insurance lobby is busy bringing to a death of a thousand papercuts. In the end, nothing.
We didn't get finance reform. As my friend said, we paid the bank robbers and then let them write the rules from the government. Or don't you know that the Obama Administration's economic policy-making machine is a fully owned subsidiary of Goldman, Sachs?
And we surely didn't get an end to war, torture and illegal detention without trial in Guantanamo.
"Well," my friend said of the reforms, "you can't blame Obama. He did what he could and Congress stopped him."
That's what Obama wants you to think in November 2012. In reality, Obama went to the Republicans and the lobbyists hat in hand giving the candy store away from the get go. He wrestled with himself so much, that the disloyal opposition just had to sit back and watch with amusement. He fooled us into thinking he had more spine than Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. As if.
As to war, my friend agreed, "Obama could have ended that."
So here comes Obama, finally asserting something that has been bipartisan U.S. policy forever and a day: Israel should return to pre-1967 borders. Why couldn't he have done the same with health and finance reform and Guantanamo and war?
Because he's not about change. He's an American president just like all the others.
Monday, May 23, 2011
What if DSK didn't do it?
Since I've already offered a plausible scenario showing that Dominique Strauss-Kahn could have raped the maid in the hotel (see here), it's only fair to consider the opposite. Again, this is speculation: I have no "inside" information and I have read the story mainly in The New York Times and a few snippets elsewhere.
The odd thing here is that innocence is harder to imagine.
The only scenario that leaves DSK completely innocent would presume that the maid was actually attracted to an unknown, portly, late-middle-aged man of whom she must see dozens every day and actually asked to give him oral sex. There is one woman I know who finds DSK irresistible and, if the maid is from francophone Guinea, perhaps she recognized him from some French celebrity magazine and made a play to become a mistress — or wife no. 4. A maid can dream, no?
Not likely. See Maureen Dowd on that here.
I'm sure there are many inconsistencies in the police evidence, probably minor details, but the defense is prudently keeping its information until trial; or perhaps they are negotiating with what they have. We don't know.
In France, as I understand it, many suspect that Nicholas Sarkozy, or someone acting on his behalf, had something to do with this. However, that's a tough row to hoe. How did the Sarkozista conspirators know that DSK would go to New York? Was the mystery woman whom he wanted to impress with his suite (see my previous post) in on the conspiracy? How did they locate the precise maid who would clean the precise room and convince her?
Assuming unlimited resources and a few magic wands, yes, it could be a conspiracy. But it's not likely.
Everything we in the public know is that something of a sexual nature happened involving DSK and the maid. The only plausible exculpating story, with variant endings, is still a bit unsavory. Here goes.
Let's imagine that DSK asked the maid for oral sex in exchange of $1,000-plus, or some other sum impressive to us ordinary mortals. He probably had a roll of Benjamins with him. They agreed. This is still illegal sex for money, but in New York City it's probably not worth dragging someone off a plane, the perp walk, etc., and whatever one thinks of the practice — it's not legally rape.
This is plausible. The idea of a man forcing his penis into an unwilling woman's mouth — just one good bite away from serious, perhaps irreparable, damage — strikes me as highly implausible. That part has to have been legally consensual.
But then, as often happens among accomplices, a disagreement occurred. Perhaps she was not proficient at oral sex or perhaps she demanded more for continued sex in bed. "I will scream rape!" she threatened.
He laughed at her. "No one will believe a tramp like you." A scuffle ensued.
Or ... ending no. 2:
She felt humiliated, even with the money, and she decided play her trump card. We know from the NY Post, that Rupert Murdoch rag, that the maid may have AIDS. "I have AIDS and I have just passed it on to you with that little 'love bite' you liked so much," she says with a madwoman's laugh.
Faced with a death sentence that only could be called poetic justice, he was stunned, terrified, then angry and the Wrath of Strauss-Kahn (my phrase!) emerged. A scuffle ensued.
This could be plea-bargained out of court and prison. At least, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
The odd thing here is that innocence is harder to imagine.
The only scenario that leaves DSK completely innocent would presume that the maid was actually attracted to an unknown, portly, late-middle-aged man of whom she must see dozens every day and actually asked to give him oral sex. There is one woman I know who finds DSK irresistible and, if the maid is from francophone Guinea, perhaps she recognized him from some French celebrity magazine and made a play to become a mistress — or wife no. 4. A maid can dream, no?
Not likely. See Maureen Dowd on that here.
I'm sure there are many inconsistencies in the police evidence, probably minor details, but the defense is prudently keeping its information until trial; or perhaps they are negotiating with what they have. We don't know.
In France, as I understand it, many suspect that Nicholas Sarkozy, or someone acting on his behalf, had something to do with this. However, that's a tough row to hoe. How did the Sarkozista conspirators know that DSK would go to New York? Was the mystery woman whom he wanted to impress with his suite (see my previous post) in on the conspiracy? How did they locate the precise maid who would clean the precise room and convince her?
Assuming unlimited resources and a few magic wands, yes, it could be a conspiracy. But it's not likely.
Everything we in the public know is that something of a sexual nature happened involving DSK and the maid. The only plausible exculpating story, with variant endings, is still a bit unsavory. Here goes.
Let's imagine that DSK asked the maid for oral sex in exchange of $1,000-plus, or some other sum impressive to us ordinary mortals. He probably had a roll of Benjamins with him. They agreed. This is still illegal sex for money, but in New York City it's probably not worth dragging someone off a plane, the perp walk, etc., and whatever one thinks of the practice — it's not legally rape.
This is plausible. The idea of a man forcing his penis into an unwilling woman's mouth — just one good bite away from serious, perhaps irreparable, damage — strikes me as highly implausible. That part has to have been legally consensual.
But then, as often happens among accomplices, a disagreement occurred. Perhaps she was not proficient at oral sex or perhaps she demanded more for continued sex in bed. "I will scream rape!" she threatened.
He laughed at her. "No one will believe a tramp like you." A scuffle ensued.
Or ... ending no. 2:
She felt humiliated, even with the money, and she decided play her trump card. We know from the NY Post, that Rupert Murdoch rag, that the maid may have AIDS. "I have AIDS and I have just passed it on to you with that little 'love bite' you liked so much," she says with a madwoman's laugh.
Faced with a death sentence that only could be called poetic justice, he was stunned, terrified, then angry and the Wrath of Strauss-Kahn (my phrase!) emerged. A scuffle ensued.
This could be plea-bargained out of court and prison. At least, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why would Strauss-Kahn have done such a stupid thing? A plausible explanation for one man's folly
Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest and arraignment for allegedly raping a hotel maid, if based on fact, raise the ultimate question: Why? Here's a fact-free, but plausible, scenario that may explain it all, based on having grown up around people like DSK.
The United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and many other organizations some of you may never have heard of, are multinational, taxpayer-supported bureaucracies that largely serve as repositories for cabinet ministers and presidents in waiting, such as DSK. They have their own country clubs, their own pension systems, their own little social and political tax-free bubble, distinct from the coarsely jostling rabble in Congress, Parliament or the National Assembly.
So now think, a crown prince from one of these bureaucratic principalities gets a $3,000-a-night suite at a top hotel in New York. What for? He's only staying one night. What does he need several rooms for? OK, so he has finagled to pay only $525 for the room, which isn't bad for New York City.
But still, why was he there at all? Enter the scenario.
Let's suppose that DSK had someone to impress. Given the man, let's imagine it was a woman. Again, given the kind of man, it was not a bimbo. He likes high-grade, spirited women of accomplishment. His affair of 2008 was with a 50-year-old economist who was unquestionably top notch; attractive, yes, but no Gennifer Flowers.
DSK goes to NYC, gets an impressive suite: the appropriate priapic accoutrement for his tryst. But then ... then, this woman of accomplishment calls saying that she has a meeting that she cannot miss for professional reasons.
"Sorry, mon cheri, kiss, kiss, kiss ... I shall miss you," she murmurs into the phone.
Then imagine the Wrath of Strauss-Kahn! Hear his internal rant: I am the Managing Director of the IMF, the future president France and (whatever else) ... ! How dare this bitch do this to me!
He goes about his business, just one more among a million lonely men in New York City. He doesn't want to pay for a prostitute. To pay? They should be paying him for sleeping with the great Strauss-Kahn!!!
Eventually, as he comes out of his bath, a deus ex machina character appears on the stage: a youngish, presumably attractive woman who is in a position of servitude with respect to the great DSK.
I'll show them all what the Great Strauss-Kahn can do when he is insulted by bitches (which to him all women are at this point).
From there it is a short step to grabbing his club and attempting to drag a woman to his cave.
This is all merely my imagination and I do not claim that any of it is factual or true. But wouldn't it just begin to make sense, assuming what I am assuming?
The United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and many other organizations some of you may never have heard of, are multinational, taxpayer-supported bureaucracies that largely serve as repositories for cabinet ministers and presidents in waiting, such as DSK. They have their own country clubs, their own pension systems, their own little social and political tax-free bubble, distinct from the coarsely jostling rabble in Congress, Parliament or the National Assembly.
So now think, a crown prince from one of these bureaucratic principalities gets a $3,000-a-night suite at a top hotel in New York. What for? He's only staying one night. What does he need several rooms for? OK, so he has finagled to pay only $525 for the room, which isn't bad for New York City.
But still, why was he there at all? Enter the scenario.
Let's suppose that DSK had someone to impress. Given the man, let's imagine it was a woman. Again, given the kind of man, it was not a bimbo. He likes high-grade, spirited women of accomplishment. His affair of 2008 was with a 50-year-old economist who was unquestionably top notch; attractive, yes, but no Gennifer Flowers.
DSK goes to NYC, gets an impressive suite: the appropriate priapic accoutrement for his tryst. But then ... then, this woman of accomplishment calls saying that she has a meeting that she cannot miss for professional reasons.
"Sorry, mon cheri, kiss, kiss, kiss ... I shall miss you," she murmurs into the phone.
Then imagine the Wrath of Strauss-Kahn! Hear his internal rant: I am the Managing Director of the IMF, the future president France and (whatever else) ... ! How dare this bitch do this to me!
He goes about his business, just one more among a million lonely men in New York City. He doesn't want to pay for a prostitute. To pay? They should be paying him for sleeping with the great Strauss-Kahn!!!
Eventually, as he comes out of his bath, a deus ex machina character appears on the stage: a youngish, presumably attractive woman who is in a position of servitude with respect to the great DSK.
I'll show them all what the Great Strauss-Kahn can do when he is insulted by bitches (which to him all women are at this point).
From there it is a short step to grabbing his club and attempting to drag a woman to his cave.
This is all merely my imagination and I do not claim that any of it is factual or true. But wouldn't it just begin to make sense, assuming what I am assuming?
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Why $7,000 for a dog to be in an ICU is silly, wasteful and not at all principled
A Facebook "friend" I thought was a sensible good lefty, reacted with the most petty bourgeois matron's bogus sentimentality when I suggested a better solution than spending thousands on a very sick dog: a shotgun. Of course, the coterie of "good girls" who think commenting consists only of saying insipid niceties were outraged.
Let's think this through, shall we?
At a time that millions of people cannot get medical care for lack of money (leading to an overuse of intensive care units to make up for good preventive or palliative care), it is a rather bizarre use of resources to spend thousands on a dog.
Is that cruelty? Not, it's a sense of priorities. Humans should show kindness to individuals of their own species, before venturing to solve all of nature's problems.
Anyone who has spent more than a day in a farm will recognize that the slaughter of animals that are ill is a kindness.
Of course, I suppose all the animal lovers have never eaten hamburgers, hot dogs or steak, let alone chicken, kidneys, salmon, crab, etc. For those who will reply haughtily that they are vegetarians: don't you have to kill a plant or steal its eggs (fruit) to subsist on a vegetarian diet?
Finally, let's face it, having a slave animal cooped up in a city dwelling designed for humans may feel very sentimental and motherly and kind. But it isn't. As found in nature, animals run free, without collars or owners.
How is sentimentalizing one's "love" of a pet any different than Antebellum slaveowners saying they treated their slaves "like family"?
Let's think this through, shall we?
At a time that millions of people cannot get medical care for lack of money (leading to an overuse of intensive care units to make up for good preventive or palliative care), it is a rather bizarre use of resources to spend thousands on a dog.
Is that cruelty? Not, it's a sense of priorities. Humans should show kindness to individuals of their own species, before venturing to solve all of nature's problems.
Anyone who has spent more than a day in a farm will recognize that the slaughter of animals that are ill is a kindness.
Of course, I suppose all the animal lovers have never eaten hamburgers, hot dogs or steak, let alone chicken, kidneys, salmon, crab, etc. For those who will reply haughtily that they are vegetarians: don't you have to kill a plant or steal its eggs (fruit) to subsist on a vegetarian diet?
Finally, let's face it, having a slave animal cooped up in a city dwelling designed for humans may feel very sentimental and motherly and kind. But it isn't. As found in nature, animals run free, without collars or owners.
How is sentimentalizing one's "love" of a pet any different than Antebellum slaveowners saying they treated their slaves "like family"?
Monday, May 09, 2011
Does love come from above or Hollywood? Does it even exist?
In the 1970s there was an awful song "Caught Between Two Lovers" about a love triangle. More commonly there is a triangle, or many sided figure of loves that encompass the complex of feelings, thoughts, words and deeds between two people in a romantic couple.
From the time in which I genuinely believed that babies appeared miraculously when mommies and daddies loved (or felt gooey feelings toward) each other, I developed a view of love that was traditional among the celibate men and women who were my role models.
Love, as I came to conceive of it in my monastic and overeducated way, was the enmeshment of the physicality of sex into the gospel's agape of Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmic Omega.* It was a pseudo-trinitarian thing, in which the love of two persons was so real that it became an actual third person.
Hence procreation, meaning the human collaboration in the continuing divine act of creation, that is, the making of something from nothing. The carnal partnership in creation was always directed to a kind of love that had a moral and other-oriented dimension: an aspect of that oh, so difficult "love your neighbor as yourself."
One loved to see the other person happy on their own terms. If you truly loved someone else, you were happy for that person's happiness even if it came with someone other than you.
I only began to grasp what loving another as much as, or even more than, oneself was about when I had children, the first human beings for whom I would have given my life without question or hesitation. The human beings to whom I gave a sizable portion of my life and what I earned, without question or conditions, until I knew they could take care of themselves and lead their lives without giving much thought to Old Dad. The human beings who despite all I have given truly owe me nothing.
I haven't really loved that way in any other context. If I had, I might have done more for many others. Given more of myself and my belongings, and so forth.
When I fell in love there was always the dimension of caring and responsibility, of giving. I did not fool myself that I loved every woman to whom I was ever attracted; nor did I fool myself that I was the most unselfish of lovers in the real love. There was lust, pure and simple; even in marriage, especially in marriage up to the late 19th century, there has always been a measure of social pressure plus convenience mixed in with the dash of romantic, other-caring love.
All these get mixed up. Toward the end in Hermann Hesse's novel "Narcissus and Goldmund," two childhood friends are reunited after having spent, on one hand a life of prayer and total giving, and on the other one of pleasure-seeking wanderlust. The monk does not shrink back when he recognizes that his friend has carved a statue of the Virgin Mary in the likeness of the first girl with whom the wanderer fell in passionate love.
In the world outside the monastery it is different.
Absent gods or a moral structure from above, knowledge or trust in anything or anyone but myself, I am an animal seeking to survive. Sex is good: it makes the heart race, the circulation improve, the attitude rise, the species continue. I have been hungry for it from every flower that offered it to me.
Wandering this world one lives are amoral little animals to whom everything is possible if it feels good. Indeed, if it feels good, it must be love. Or perhaps love is a potion to draw spouses who fit shopping lists, so that they satisfy all wants and all self-seeking.
People have an entrenched love of coupling. They have second, third and fourth spouses if they live long enough or are rich enough. Yet perhaps there is a different kind of love possible.
One that goes through lust and glückenfreude into a kind of cinematic love that is carnal yet kind, polite, educated and capable of uniting reciprocally two little bubbles into one. A love that has its element of selfishness in its survival seeking with someone who at core grasps me, my sense of being lost, of not belonging anywhere, of wanting desperately someone to clutch and witness my life and pleasure and despair.
That's very fine and good, but it is not the love conceived of in the monastery. It can't be. Love dreamed of in Hollywood is mostly makeup and sets and special effects — such as fadeouts.
After the credit rolls and the score is reprised, real life begins in the full glare of sunlight, where love is so elusive you will be forgiven for thinking it doesn't exist at all.
* Google it.
From the time in which I genuinely believed that babies appeared miraculously when mommies and daddies loved (or felt gooey feelings toward) each other, I developed a view of love that was traditional among the celibate men and women who were my role models.
Love, as I came to conceive of it in my monastic and overeducated way, was the enmeshment of the physicality of sex into the gospel's agape of Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmic Omega.* It was a pseudo-trinitarian thing, in which the love of two persons was so real that it became an actual third person.
Hence procreation, meaning the human collaboration in the continuing divine act of creation, that is, the making of something from nothing. The carnal partnership in creation was always directed to a kind of love that had a moral and other-oriented dimension: an aspect of that oh, so difficult "love your neighbor as yourself."
One loved to see the other person happy on their own terms. If you truly loved someone else, you were happy for that person's happiness even if it came with someone other than you.
I only began to grasp what loving another as much as, or even more than, oneself was about when I had children, the first human beings for whom I would have given my life without question or hesitation. The human beings to whom I gave a sizable portion of my life and what I earned, without question or conditions, until I knew they could take care of themselves and lead their lives without giving much thought to Old Dad. The human beings who despite all I have given truly owe me nothing.
I haven't really loved that way in any other context. If I had, I might have done more for many others. Given more of myself and my belongings, and so forth.
When I fell in love there was always the dimension of caring and responsibility, of giving. I did not fool myself that I loved every woman to whom I was ever attracted; nor did I fool myself that I was the most unselfish of lovers in the real love. There was lust, pure and simple; even in marriage, especially in marriage up to the late 19th century, there has always been a measure of social pressure plus convenience mixed in with the dash of romantic, other-caring love.
All these get mixed up. Toward the end in Hermann Hesse's novel "Narcissus and Goldmund," two childhood friends are reunited after having spent, on one hand a life of prayer and total giving, and on the other one of pleasure-seeking wanderlust. The monk does not shrink back when he recognizes that his friend has carved a statue of the Virgin Mary in the likeness of the first girl with whom the wanderer fell in passionate love.
In the world outside the monastery it is different.
Absent gods or a moral structure from above, knowledge or trust in anything or anyone but myself, I am an animal seeking to survive. Sex is good: it makes the heart race, the circulation improve, the attitude rise, the species continue. I have been hungry for it from every flower that offered it to me.
Wandering this world one lives are amoral little animals to whom everything is possible if it feels good. Indeed, if it feels good, it must be love. Or perhaps love is a potion to draw spouses who fit shopping lists, so that they satisfy all wants and all self-seeking.
People have an entrenched love of coupling. They have second, third and fourth spouses if they live long enough or are rich enough. Yet perhaps there is a different kind of love possible.
One that goes through lust and glückenfreude into a kind of cinematic love that is carnal yet kind, polite, educated and capable of uniting reciprocally two little bubbles into one. A love that has its element of selfishness in its survival seeking with someone who at core grasps me, my sense of being lost, of not belonging anywhere, of wanting desperately someone to clutch and witness my life and pleasure and despair.
That's very fine and good, but it is not the love conceived of in the monastery. It can't be. Love dreamed of in Hollywood is mostly makeup and sets and special effects — such as fadeouts.
After the credit rolls and the score is reprised, real life begins in the full glare of sunlight, where love is so elusive you will be forgiven for thinking it doesn't exist at all.
* Google it.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
The unasked question: Why do they hate us?
What's truly amazing about the response to the death of Osama bin Laden in the USA is the total absence of even a wisp of American self-appraisal in the face of the reality that people abroad hate the United States and everything they think we stand for. There's a total lack of intellectual curiosity and a total lack of honesty from those who should know better.
Nowhere have I heard or seen a reporter ask -- and I say so as a journalist who knows what real reporters should ask -- "Why did Osama hate us?" or "Why do his followers, sympathizers and distant fellow travelers hate us?"
In Latin America, the entire Osama episode is a funny joke.
Seen from their perspective, ten years ago the invulnerable, all-powerful Pentagon let two people armed with box cutters cut a hole in the headquarters of the U.S. armed forces. Now our public is angry at Pakistan for not realizing that Osama was among them? As if our government hadn't sent approved student visas to the 9/11 suicide attackers weeks after the attacks!
Ever heard of incompetence, fellow Americans? And I mean our own.
But back to the central issue here: Why are we as a nation so stupidly, stubbornly, embarrassingly incapable of demonstrating the slightest capacity to look at things from any point of view other than our own? How can such a narcissistic nation possibly aspire to lead the world?
Honestly, I wonder if there is anyone out there -- it's not on the radio, TV, in the newspapers, or in the blogosphere -- wonders why they, people other than Americans, hate us so much. I do.
Nowhere have I heard or seen a reporter ask -- and I say so as a journalist who knows what real reporters should ask -- "Why did Osama hate us?" or "Why do his followers, sympathizers and distant fellow travelers hate us?"
In Latin America, the entire Osama episode is a funny joke.
Seen from their perspective, ten years ago the invulnerable, all-powerful Pentagon let two people armed with box cutters cut a hole in the headquarters of the U.S. armed forces. Now our public is angry at Pakistan for not realizing that Osama was among them? As if our government hadn't sent approved student visas to the 9/11 suicide attackers weeks after the attacks!
Ever heard of incompetence, fellow Americans? And I mean our own.
But back to the central issue here: Why are we as a nation so stupidly, stubbornly, embarrassingly incapable of demonstrating the slightest capacity to look at things from any point of view other than our own? How can such a narcissistic nation possibly aspire to lead the world?
Honestly, I wonder if there is anyone out there -- it's not on the radio, TV, in the newspapers, or in the blogosphere -- wonders why they, people other than Americans, hate us so much. I do.
Monday, May 02, 2011
Let's not forget: Osama had a point
Before we bury the memory of Osama bin Laden, let's stop to recall that his 1996 and 1998 fatwas, or condemnatory curses, against America referred to grievances that had resonance. The average Arab and Muslim, from North Africa to Indonesia, has legitimate grievances against the rapacious West, its materialism and hedonism.
About a third of the public opinion in Turkey, the most Westernized and secularized nation in the Muslim orbit, still approves of suicide bombings even as it seeks entrance into the European Union.
This is not because they are all crazy out there.
Instead, it is because of the collective memory of all that happened to their region since the mid-19th century, when oil and the combustion engine made their appearance on the geopolitical map. Western control of key resources, first by the British Empire then by the United States, was maintained at the expense of many lives and livelihoods of the peoples of the Middle East.
Before our 9/11 were many 9/11s inflicted on the Arab and Muslim worlds. Massacres and torture and theft by Western forces and hired despots alike, events that never made it into our history books or our news reports because the dead and the losers were neither American nor European, inform the public opinion of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Those who died on September 11, 2001, were without doubt personally innocent of the chain of murder, cruelty, theft and corruption brought on by the West in the Middle East. Still, they as well as all of us who survived personally reaped the benefits in the form of comforts and ease of travel sold to us by those who have extracted the required resources at a high human cost.
In its original meaning, the principle of an eye for an eye was meant to curb revenge by justifying rightful restitution: you may take an eye, if an eye was taken, but not two limbs as well. Yet what may work for individuals is extremely difficult to apply to the behavior of entire societies over a century or so.
Thus, an eye for an eye is not a solution for resolving the problems of the West and the Middle East. This applies to the actions of 2001 by Osama and his associates as to those of 2011 by Obama and his associates.
Osama bin Laden should have been brought to justice and tried. His argument should have been given its day in court and alongside the prosecution's, both set forth side by side, in an honest and courageous search for truth, understanding and lasting peace.
The grotesque celebration of murder outside the White House last night failed to take note that the historical moral imbalance at the core of this conflict has not been set right by the taking of one more human life.
About a third of the public opinion in Turkey, the most Westernized and secularized nation in the Muslim orbit, still approves of suicide bombings even as it seeks entrance into the European Union.
This is not because they are all crazy out there.
Instead, it is because of the collective memory of all that happened to their region since the mid-19th century, when oil and the combustion engine made their appearance on the geopolitical map. Western control of key resources, first by the British Empire then by the United States, was maintained at the expense of many lives and livelihoods of the peoples of the Middle East.
Before our 9/11 were many 9/11s inflicted on the Arab and Muslim worlds. Massacres and torture and theft by Western forces and hired despots alike, events that never made it into our history books or our news reports because the dead and the losers were neither American nor European, inform the public opinion of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Those who died on September 11, 2001, were without doubt personally innocent of the chain of murder, cruelty, theft and corruption brought on by the West in the Middle East. Still, they as well as all of us who survived personally reaped the benefits in the form of comforts and ease of travel sold to us by those who have extracted the required resources at a high human cost.
In its original meaning, the principle of an eye for an eye was meant to curb revenge by justifying rightful restitution: you may take an eye, if an eye was taken, but not two limbs as well. Yet what may work for individuals is extremely difficult to apply to the behavior of entire societies over a century or so.
Thus, an eye for an eye is not a solution for resolving the problems of the West and the Middle East. This applies to the actions of 2001 by Osama and his associates as to those of 2011 by Obama and his associates.
Osama bin Laden should have been brought to justice and tried. His argument should have been given its day in court and alongside the prosecution's, both set forth side by side, in an honest and courageous search for truth, understanding and lasting peace.
The grotesque celebration of murder outside the White House last night failed to take note that the historical moral imbalance at the core of this conflict has not been set right by the taking of one more human life.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Why I Voted Republican Yesterday
The words "I voted Republican" sputter from my fingers with trepidation. I killed my mother. I lost my virginity. I gave away my dog. That's how it feels. But I was driven to it by the Democrats' penchant for disaster when mere setbacks can be had -- and I feel I'm not alone. Watch out, Barack Obama, I may do it again in 2012.
The election I voted in was insignificant. In my Democratic-dominated city, there was a special election to fill a seat on the council and I was sick of voting for the same bunch of corrupt, unimaginative bumblers. "My" candidate lost, anyway.
Yet beware: Obama campaign analysts should see in my naughty yet harmless municipal voting the butterfly's wings aflutter that could set in motion an electoral tsunami in 2012.
I didn't expect too much better from the set of cronies who run City Hall. But I had developed dreams about Obama, with his seductive "yes we can" and his smooth palaver about "change you can believe in." Yet after a health bill without a public option, financial "reform" written in bank boardrooms, and the largest single-year set of cuts in federal spending in history along with the continuation of historic tax cuts, I feel like the voter who's woken up alone in a strange bedroom the morning after election night.
I won't say that Obama is corrupt -- although he got to the Oval Office with a suspiciously large amount of Wall Street money. But his White House could be mistaken for functioning unimaginatively, sometimes to the point that one thinks it's Bush still in charge. As for bumblers, what else should I call an administration that keeps bargaining against itself?
Even the unions, which are not the havens of the most saintly people ever known, have woken up. The International Association of Fire Fighters announced it was cutting off the campaign money spigot for Democrats given their failure to respond to the wave of labor policy rollbacks Republicans are pushing across the nation.
Hispanics and Asians sat out the 2010 elections, according to the latest news. As a Hispanic, I agree with Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) that Obama's immigration policy failures have a lot to do with it. Obama didn't even dare put forth a reform bill, sat on his hands during the DREAM Act debacle and then, to cap insult with injury launched the most intensive deportation sweeps since the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.
For me, the path to convincing myself to vote Republican in 2012, win or lose, begins with the notion that Obama has turned out to be very little better than Bush, if that. Yes, we now have a president who can pronounce the word "nuclear" and who isn't a sheer embarrassment to me in front of my foreign friends.
As with John F. Kennedy in 1960, we broke a prejudice barrier at the ballot box. Although, take note, African-Americans: no Catholic was ever elected to the White House since.
Beyond that, those of us who enthusiastically voted for Obama, who put pro-Obama bumper-stickers on our car (and not the Obama logo one, either), those of us who would like an America that is progressively better, more generous and more kind, we got extremely little.
Would McCain have let the country go to the dogs? Perhaps. This is what scares me about the Libertarian-leaning Tea Party. They're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just watch what happens. We already know what happens when there's nothing standing between ordinary people and those with money: it's called the Middle Ages.
But there's another path to voting Republican in 2012.
Who united the whole world against U.S. imperialism best but George W. Bush? Who convinced people who gave up on the Democrats 30 years ago to do anything to prevent more Republican economic misrule, but George W. Bush? Who convinced everyone most potently of the utter failure of savage, untaxed capitalism, but George W. Bush?
The answer is clear: to radically change the United States we need two, three or more George W. Bush presidencies, driving at least half the country to live in trailer parks and work in gated compounds as maids and security guards (if they're lucky enough to be spared the sweatshops and the unsafe mines). In the 1960s this approach was thought of as intensifying the contradictions of capitalism to create revolutionary conditions, or as others put it, breaking eggs to make an omelet.
Maybe when most Americans live in Brazilian favela-like slums they will wake up. And get out of the way when angry Americans arise.
It's up to Obama. Show me what you've done to earn my vote by November 2012. You haven't yet.
The election I voted in was insignificant. In my Democratic-dominated city, there was a special election to fill a seat on the council and I was sick of voting for the same bunch of corrupt, unimaginative bumblers. "My" candidate lost, anyway.
Yet beware: Obama campaign analysts should see in my naughty yet harmless municipal voting the butterfly's wings aflutter that could set in motion an electoral tsunami in 2012.
I didn't expect too much better from the set of cronies who run City Hall. But I had developed dreams about Obama, with his seductive "yes we can" and his smooth palaver about "change you can believe in." Yet after a health bill without a public option, financial "reform" written in bank boardrooms, and the largest single-year set of cuts in federal spending in history along with the continuation of historic tax cuts, I feel like the voter who's woken up alone in a strange bedroom the morning after election night.
I won't say that Obama is corrupt -- although he got to the Oval Office with a suspiciously large amount of Wall Street money. But his White House could be mistaken for functioning unimaginatively, sometimes to the point that one thinks it's Bush still in charge. As for bumblers, what else should I call an administration that keeps bargaining against itself?
Even the unions, which are not the havens of the most saintly people ever known, have woken up. The International Association of Fire Fighters announced it was cutting off the campaign money spigot for Democrats given their failure to respond to the wave of labor policy rollbacks Republicans are pushing across the nation.
Hispanics and Asians sat out the 2010 elections, according to the latest news. As a Hispanic, I agree with Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) that Obama's immigration policy failures have a lot to do with it. Obama didn't even dare put forth a reform bill, sat on his hands during the DREAM Act debacle and then, to cap insult with injury launched the most intensive deportation sweeps since the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.
For me, the path to convincing myself to vote Republican in 2012, win or lose, begins with the notion that Obama has turned out to be very little better than Bush, if that. Yes, we now have a president who can pronounce the word "nuclear" and who isn't a sheer embarrassment to me in front of my foreign friends.
As with John F. Kennedy in 1960, we broke a prejudice barrier at the ballot box. Although, take note, African-Americans: no Catholic was ever elected to the White House since.
Beyond that, those of us who enthusiastically voted for Obama, who put pro-Obama bumper-stickers on our car (and not the Obama logo one, either), those of us who would like an America that is progressively better, more generous and more kind, we got extremely little.
Would McCain have let the country go to the dogs? Perhaps. This is what scares me about the Libertarian-leaning Tea Party. They're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just watch what happens. We already know what happens when there's nothing standing between ordinary people and those with money: it's called the Middle Ages.
But there's another path to voting Republican in 2012.
Who united the whole world against U.S. imperialism best but George W. Bush? Who convinced people who gave up on the Democrats 30 years ago to do anything to prevent more Republican economic misrule, but George W. Bush? Who convinced everyone most potently of the utter failure of savage, untaxed capitalism, but George W. Bush?
The answer is clear: to radically change the United States we need two, three or more George W. Bush presidencies, driving at least half the country to live in trailer parks and work in gated compounds as maids and security guards (if they're lucky enough to be spared the sweatshops and the unsafe mines). In the 1960s this approach was thought of as intensifying the contradictions of capitalism to create revolutionary conditions, or as others put it, breaking eggs to make an omelet.
Maybe when most Americans live in Brazilian favela-like slums they will wake up. And get out of the way when angry Americans arise.
It's up to Obama. Show me what you've done to earn my vote by November 2012. You haven't yet.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Great American Myth ... Is It False?
After all the debunking of the posts last week, perhaps it's time to take a good look at the spark that has set people dreaming for centuries: the myth of the United States, some call it the American Dream.
Myths, like dreams, are neither true nor false, but simply wishful thinking.
Some are necessary for sanity and survival. If we didn't have ways to mentally soothe our aches and worries or to assure us of a golden horizon somewhere ahead, we would surely commit suicide, cease our labors, give up the struggle of living, we'd lose hope.
Of course, the best-known myths are religious. The cavorting Greek and Roman gods, the powerful Egyptian goddess Isis, Noah and the flood, the Jehovah and Moses of Exodus are all mythical. In my opinion, even the Galilean woodworker the Romans called Jesus was a mythical figure.
These myths all attempt to answer primal archetypal questions of human beings: What am I here for? Who is in charge? What am I supposed to do? How do I seek help against disaster? Who's to thank for my good fortune? And so on.
The lore about these gods and prophets and heroes is all of our own making. We find ways to explain things to ourselves that are soothing and, at least at first blush, satisfying. The reality that God or gods are profoundly unobservable doesn't stand in the way of elaborate systems of thought based on one version or another of the cult of the divine.
I like the take of Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: "If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Much the same can be said about 'murrica. Most of what Americans learn as children about their country is patently false, as I have modestly shown. This is true of almost any country in the world.
The 19th and 20th century nationalist idea invented the myth that the Earth is populated by people who are distinct by virtue of somehow belonging to a certain territory, speaking a certain language, idolizing the colors of a certain piece of cloth and singing a certain ancient hymn that is almost always literally absurd. Americans, Frenchmen, Australians, Germans, Russians, Brazilians, Chinese.
The peculiarity of the American Myth is its the way the United States is cast in roles soaked in bibliolatry: Messiah and beacon of the world, Promised Land, Land of Milk and Honey. It's the dream image of wishful immigrants who braved a perilous journey and years of sacrifice to reach the American Dream, which most never saw.
In "Sail Away," Randy Newman has even composed a slaver's myth for Africans about to be enslaved:
Sure it's all bunk. But why else would we get up every morning, rush through coffee, drive to a cubicle, then reverse it after 8 hours, if there wasn't a rainbow there somewhere?
Why would the least favored Americans leave their hollows and their slums to bleed and lose limbs for reasons no one since December 1941 has had the decency to explain in terms that make plain sense, if there wasn't the red, white and blue to cover up recruiters' lies?
When I read the august words of Thomas Jefferson, I don't read a slaveowners' yen to be his own king in a society where everything was trick-sprung to keep only his own ilk on top. No, when I read words, sometimes entire paragraphs, that he borrowed without attribution from John Locke, I don't see the work of a plagiarist.
That's the beguiling myth of America calling.
Myths, like dreams, are neither true nor false, but simply wishful thinking.
Some are necessary for sanity and survival. If we didn't have ways to mentally soothe our aches and worries or to assure us of a golden horizon somewhere ahead, we would surely commit suicide, cease our labors, give up the struggle of living, we'd lose hope.
Of course, the best-known myths are religious. The cavorting Greek and Roman gods, the powerful Egyptian goddess Isis, Noah and the flood, the Jehovah and Moses of Exodus are all mythical. In my opinion, even the Galilean woodworker the Romans called Jesus was a mythical figure.
These myths all attempt to answer primal archetypal questions of human beings: What am I here for? Who is in charge? What am I supposed to do? How do I seek help against disaster? Who's to thank for my good fortune? And so on.
The lore about these gods and prophets and heroes is all of our own making. We find ways to explain things to ourselves that are soothing and, at least at first blush, satisfying. The reality that God or gods are profoundly unobservable doesn't stand in the way of elaborate systems of thought based on one version or another of the cult of the divine.
I like the take of Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: "If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Much the same can be said about 'murrica. Most of what Americans learn as children about their country is patently false, as I have modestly shown. This is true of almost any country in the world.
The 19th and 20th century nationalist idea invented the myth that the Earth is populated by people who are distinct by virtue of somehow belonging to a certain territory, speaking a certain language, idolizing the colors of a certain piece of cloth and singing a certain ancient hymn that is almost always literally absurd. Americans, Frenchmen, Australians, Germans, Russians, Brazilians, Chinese.
The peculiarity of the American Myth is its the way the United States is cast in roles soaked in bibliolatry: Messiah and beacon of the world, Promised Land, Land of Milk and Honey. It's the dream image of wishful immigrants who braved a perilous journey and years of sacrifice to reach the American Dream, which most never saw.
In "Sail Away," Randy Newman has even composed a slaver's myth for Africans about to be enslaved:
In America you'll get food to eatIsn't that just the way of that hussy Lady Liberty? She swings her hips seductively and with a wink she makes us think the fire in her torch is made of gold. Just like the cobblestones on the streets from California to Staten Island.
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American
Sure it's all bunk. But why else would we get up every morning, rush through coffee, drive to a cubicle, then reverse it after 8 hours, if there wasn't a rainbow there somewhere?
Why would the least favored Americans leave their hollows and their slums to bleed and lose limbs for reasons no one since December 1941 has had the decency to explain in terms that make plain sense, if there wasn't the red, white and blue to cover up recruiters' lies?
When I read the august words of Thomas Jefferson, I don't read a slaveowners' yen to be his own king in a society where everything was trick-sprung to keep only his own ilk on top. No, when I read words, sometimes entire paragraphs, that he borrowed without attribution from John Locke, I don't see the work of a plagiarist.
"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 ..."Hear the brass and the flute and the cymbals? Hear Aaron Copland and Jerry Goldsmith's musical paean to America?
That's the beguiling myth of America calling.
Friday, April 15, 2011
English? Male? Christian?
See spot run. Run spot run. See the neighbors, store owners and policemen. They're all white, square jawed men, some have blue eyes, a few have freckles. They go to (Protestant-looking) church. They work. Let's parse this.
The archetypal image of significant Americans as transplanted English, Protestant men goes back to the Constitution (read the whole thing, Tea Party fans!), which defined nonwhites as a fraction of a person, even though whites at the time were the minority in the United States.
English was never adopted as an official language; indeed, no vote was taken — English likely would have lost to German. In fact, the notion that Americans come from English stock is a myth.
Even among the U.S. white settlers who were English speakers by family tradition, most flew that false-flag nationality known as "Scotch-Irish," that is to say, they were from Ulster —not English at all. They sure as hell weren't Irish (ask the IRA). They were the descendants of the Scots sent to vie for the English throne, then left there.
The ones who came to America were the ne'er-do-wells who hadn't made it a century or two after landing as conquerors. They won the Battle of the Boyne and nothing else. That's why they hated the Irish who came during the Potato Famine in the 1840s: the real Irish knew what riffraff they really were.
And men ... Haven't men, in almost all societies, been somewhat less than the majority of the population? Why, then, did laws and custom presume that only men could work for pay, lead, vote, own property and so forth?
Lastly, there's the claim to being Christian.
When in history has U.S. society prized the poor, those who mourn, those who thirst for justice and those who make peace? When have we, collectively or individually in some significant way, turned the other cheek: is that what was done at Fort McHenry, at the Alamo, Fort Sumter, on the Maine, in the fields of Flanders, at Iwo Jima, after 9/11?
Thomas Jefferson, believed in a Creator — more or less. George Washington told the truth (but not in his expense accounts to the Continental Congress). Benjamin Franklin was a decidedly avaricious and pleasure-seeking man.
The reality is that the United States believes in money, was built by Africans, Spaniards, the Dutch, Germans, Irish and Chinese of a variety of religions; most Americans were and are women. That's the real America.
The archetypal image of significant Americans as transplanted English, Protestant men goes back to the Constitution (read the whole thing, Tea Party fans!), which defined nonwhites as a fraction of a person, even though whites at the time were the minority in the United States.
English was never adopted as an official language; indeed, no vote was taken — English likely would have lost to German. In fact, the notion that Americans come from English stock is a myth.
Even among the U.S. white settlers who were English speakers by family tradition, most flew that false-flag nationality known as "Scotch-Irish," that is to say, they were from Ulster —not English at all. They sure as hell weren't Irish (ask the IRA). They were the descendants of the Scots sent to vie for the English throne, then left there.
The ones who came to America were the ne'er-do-wells who hadn't made it a century or two after landing as conquerors. They won the Battle of the Boyne and nothing else. That's why they hated the Irish who came during the Potato Famine in the 1840s: the real Irish knew what riffraff they really were.
And men ... Haven't men, in almost all societies, been somewhat less than the majority of the population? Why, then, did laws and custom presume that only men could work for pay, lead, vote, own property and so forth?
Lastly, there's the claim to being Christian.
When in history has U.S. society prized the poor, those who mourn, those who thirst for justice and those who make peace? When have we, collectively or individually in some significant way, turned the other cheek: is that what was done at Fort McHenry, at the Alamo, Fort Sumter, on the Maine, in the fields of Flanders, at Iwo Jima, after 9/11?
Thomas Jefferson, believed in a Creator — more or less. George Washington told the truth (but not in his expense accounts to the Continental Congress). Benjamin Franklin was a decidedly avaricious and pleasure-seeking man.
The reality is that the United States believes in money, was built by Africans, Spaniards, the Dutch, Germans, Irish and Chinese of a variety of religions; most Americans were and are women. That's the real America.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Home of the Chumps Who Got Sent to War
Ever since the first propaganda films in the 1940s, we all learned that American GIs are originals who always win and their enemies, who often enough wore more finely tailored uniforms and had better manners, were stodgy and dull and dropped dead like flies.
The Germans could never hear an American approaching. The French all wore berets and brought their liberators wine. The Italians were cowardly. The Brits were whimsical. Dinkum Aussies and Kiwis cursed using colorful, but never profane, vocabulary. But the (white, Anglo) Yank got the girl.
In fact, proportionally very few Americans fought in the Second World War. Far fewer Americans died in that war than any other ally save France, which was defeated in less than a year. Several times more Americans died in the Civil War.
The myth of American invincibility — unchallenged until Vietnam — was so pervasive and the pride so misplaced that even a B-list actor who became president proudly told an Israeli foreign minister visiting the White House that he had liberated a Nazi concentration camp as a soldier. Which he had — in a fiction film.
To tell the truth, however, the United States didn't emerge as one of the victors of World War II, with unparalleled logistical power to deploy troops anywhere in the world, merely because the nation was, supposedly, the home of the free and the brave.
The USA won because while every German soldier was supported by three people in reserves, supply and manufacturing, every American soldier was supported by 32. The USA won because the nation was building 11 Liberty ships a day to supply Russia and Britain with war materiel.
Rosie the Riveter won the war.
Concentrated attacks on conventional installations and armies involving massive and overwhelming numbers of American soldiers, ships and warplanes won the war.
But the adversaries of the United States eventually figured out what mice know about terrifying elephants. None but the most lunatic of tin-pot dictators will ever challenge the U.S. armed forces to open battle again. The U.S. military is physically larger than the next 11 smaller armed forces combined.
World War II can never be won again.
The day of the big bomber, the giant aircraft carrier and even of the Marines is long gone. Nuclear and bacteriological weapons (which the United States has, despite all denials) are still worth keeping as deterrents. The rest of the war toys are useless against men with determination and simple tools.
That's why the flower of American youth refuse to fight. The Pentagon has to scour for dropouts and poor kids coming out of high school with skills two or three grades below their grade level. That's why Abu-Ghraib happened.
Want to wave the flag and talk about power? Slash military spending to the point that the nation has a reliable cadre of men (and women) determined to win with the simplest of tools in the roughest of conditions — without computers and PXs and the 1,001 toys that have kept U.S. armed forces from a decisive victory since World War II.
Better still. Give the Pentagon's budget to the U.S. Institute of Peace, to figure out how to avoid and defuse conflict in the first place.
The Germans could never hear an American approaching. The French all wore berets and brought their liberators wine. The Italians were cowardly. The Brits were whimsical. Dinkum Aussies and Kiwis cursed using colorful, but never profane, vocabulary. But the (white, Anglo) Yank got the girl.
In fact, proportionally very few Americans fought in the Second World War. Far fewer Americans died in that war than any other ally save France, which was defeated in less than a year. Several times more Americans died in the Civil War.
The myth of American invincibility — unchallenged until Vietnam — was so pervasive and the pride so misplaced that even a B-list actor who became president proudly told an Israeli foreign minister visiting the White House that he had liberated a Nazi concentration camp as a soldier. Which he had — in a fiction film.
To tell the truth, however, the United States didn't emerge as one of the victors of World War II, with unparalleled logistical power to deploy troops anywhere in the world, merely because the nation was, supposedly, the home of the free and the brave.
The USA won because while every German soldier was supported by three people in reserves, supply and manufacturing, every American soldier was supported by 32. The USA won because the nation was building 11 Liberty ships a day to supply Russia and Britain with war materiel.
Rosie the Riveter won the war.
Concentrated attacks on conventional installations and armies involving massive and overwhelming numbers of American soldiers, ships and warplanes won the war.
But the adversaries of the United States eventually figured out what mice know about terrifying elephants. None but the most lunatic of tin-pot dictators will ever challenge the U.S. armed forces to open battle again. The U.S. military is physically larger than the next 11 smaller armed forces combined.
World War II can never be won again.
The day of the big bomber, the giant aircraft carrier and even of the Marines is long gone. Nuclear and bacteriological weapons (which the United States has, despite all denials) are still worth keeping as deterrents. The rest of the war toys are useless against men with determination and simple tools.
That's why the flower of American youth refuse to fight. The Pentagon has to scour for dropouts and poor kids coming out of high school with skills two or three grades below their grade level. That's why Abu-Ghraib happened.
Want to wave the flag and talk about power? Slash military spending to the point that the nation has a reliable cadre of men (and women) determined to win with the simplest of tools in the roughest of conditions — without computers and PXs and the 1,001 toys that have kept U.S. armed forces from a decisive victory since World War II.
Better still. Give the Pentagon's budget to the U.S. Institute of Peace, to figure out how to avoid and defuse conflict in the first place.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Johnny Never Knew How
Almost any discussion of what to do about the United States (or any number of similarly placed countries) ultimately devolves into education, with almost every national candidate claiming to want to become the "education president." Let's stop spinning our wheels.
Behind all that lies the notion that the good ol' U.S. of A. was once a nation of inventive tinkerers from whose "know how" came the horn of plenty we came to know after World War II, from about 1945 to 1973. Hear that buzzer? Wrong answer. False history.
Average Americans were never great geniuses, never particularly well educated. Ask any European who came to these shores in the 1930s, 40s, or 50s. The fabled "greatest generation" did not know encyclopedias from footwear, their forks from one another, or Brazil from Peru.
Sophistication, or its approximate appearance, came in the 1960s, with a handsome young couple in the White House.
Before that, the United States imported genius: Einstein, Fermi and Bohr had more to do with the supposed "American know how" that gave the USA a nuclear monopoly in 1945 than any educational system.
The steam engine was a Scotsman's idea, James Watt. Electricity was invented by the Italians Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta. The internal combustion engine came from Alphonse Beau de Rochas. All of them were Europeans.
What did Americans excel at? Swindling (aka "investment banking"), selling used cars (to other Americans) and faking their way to apparent success ("fake 'till you make it").
That Johnny can't read, compute or write is nothing new. The wealthy get the necessary tutoring, the poor get pushed into jail or war, the rest muddle through. That's been true for a very long time.
Want a more educated American?
Pay his or her parents a family-sustaining wage, a college-affording salary, a house-buying income. Almost all alleged "failures" of education are traceable to socioeconomics. The level of general knowledge broadened somewhat after the children of GI Bill university graduates went to college on their parents' income.
Caring for each individual child as a person is more effective a tool to raise confidence in the ability to learn and a thirst for knowledge than anything else. Testing, teaching to tests, and attempting to quantify knowledge as if it came in conveniently measurable units won't and hasn't worked.
Let's stop having undereducated and incurious automatons dispensing widgets of knowledge in classrooms in which you can hear a pin drop. Show some imagination!
In the end, even that may not change things. Because Americans did not succeed at becoming a wealthy nation: our country was the sole industrial nation left standing after two World Wars. We filled an unrepeatable historical vacuum.
Behind all that lies the notion that the good ol' U.S. of A. was once a nation of inventive tinkerers from whose "know how" came the horn of plenty we came to know after World War II, from about 1945 to 1973. Hear that buzzer? Wrong answer. False history.
Average Americans were never great geniuses, never particularly well educated. Ask any European who came to these shores in the 1930s, 40s, or 50s. The fabled "greatest generation" did not know encyclopedias from footwear, their forks from one another, or Brazil from Peru.
Sophistication, or its approximate appearance, came in the 1960s, with a handsome young couple in the White House.
Before that, the United States imported genius: Einstein, Fermi and Bohr had more to do with the supposed "American know how" that gave the USA a nuclear monopoly in 1945 than any educational system.
The steam engine was a Scotsman's idea, James Watt. Electricity was invented by the Italians Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta. The internal combustion engine came from Alphonse Beau de Rochas. All of them were Europeans.
What did Americans excel at? Swindling (aka "investment banking"), selling used cars (to other Americans) and faking their way to apparent success ("fake 'till you make it").
That Johnny can't read, compute or write is nothing new. The wealthy get the necessary tutoring, the poor get pushed into jail or war, the rest muddle through. That's been true for a very long time.
Want a more educated American?
Pay his or her parents a family-sustaining wage, a college-affording salary, a house-buying income. Almost all alleged "failures" of education are traceable to socioeconomics. The level of general knowledge broadened somewhat after the children of GI Bill university graduates went to college on their parents' income.
Caring for each individual child as a person is more effective a tool to raise confidence in the ability to learn and a thirst for knowledge than anything else. Testing, teaching to tests, and attempting to quantify knowledge as if it came in conveniently measurable units won't and hasn't worked.
Let's stop having undereducated and incurious automatons dispensing widgets of knowledge in classrooms in which you can hear a pin drop. Show some imagination!
In the end, even that may not change things. Because Americans did not succeed at becoming a wealthy nation: our country was the sole industrial nation left standing after two World Wars. We filled an unrepeatable historical vacuum.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The American Revolution Wasn't
A number of House lawmakers and misguided ordinary American citizens argue that their "Tea Party" represents a contemporary effort to re-awaken the spirit of the so-called American Revolution. It is, but not the way they think.
As during the American Revolution, ordinary people are being led by their noses to stage a false revolt for the benefit of the very few and the continued and even increased burdens of the many — especially the majority of the well-intended folks who have fallen for the public relations snow job.
Back then, the few were a handful of slave owners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, bankers such as Alexander Hamilton and wealthy businessmen such as Benjamin Franklin. Today, most people don't even know the names of the wealthiest people, save for celebrities such as monopolist marketer Bill Gates, but there is a 1 percent getting richer as the rest of the country gets poorer and there are giant corporations that pay nothing in taxes.
Back then, the revolution did not change anything in American society. Slavery remained intact, as did indentured servitude for whites. In 1794, ordinary farmer took up arms to protest taxes being levied on their backs to pay off Hamilton and his friends who held the government hostage to loans they had made during the war of independence.
But here comes the lesson of this post: Hamilton had them put down harshly and there was never another rebellion like it ever again. Scour the history of the United States of America and you will not find any widespread challenge of the social order.
Americans have never revolted and they are way too busy watching television to be bothered to be awakened by anything any Tea, Coffee, or Pretty Please Sugar Party may bring about.
Americans went through more than twice today's level of unemployment during the Great Depression without a whimper. Wages have been dropping — and I do mean actually dropping — since 1973 without the slightest public awareness.
Indeed, Americans have repeatedly elected those who are most obviously at the service of those few who profit off their progressively more poorly paid work — Reagan, the two Bushes (admittedly these two came from among the rich few).
And, I hate to say this, those of us who voted for Barack Obama were misled to believe that his campaign could be banked by Wall Street without selling out the candidates' principles. Obama serves the rich and the few, let's not fool ourselves.
Let us remember today — the 150th anniversary of the first shots fired in the Civil War — that Americans were led like lambs to the slaughter to defend slaveholders against industrialists. Did anything change for the common man after the Civil War?
Even emancipation was quicky turned into a merely symbolic legal fiction as the descendants of slaves were blocked from every path to enjoying "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Almost 50 years from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., prisons and jails are filled to the brim with the flower of African American youth.
What was King doing the day he was murdered? He was linking the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for economic democracy, supporting sanitation workers on strike.
The wealthy elite didn't care who sat at the Woolworth lunch counters they would never visit — except maybe to slum around in as college students. They cared about and feared the activism of civil rights spreading to the bread and butter issues. That's why King was killed.
The American Revolution was not revolutionary in that it didn't change anything but the names of the masters. Americans have never revolted in any significant way against their masters and I don't see any evidence they ever will.
Indeed, last week the rank and file supporters of the Tea Party begged their leaders to demolish anything that might one day save them from poverty. That day that is not too distant for most of us, as economic inequality widens in America.
As during the American Revolution, ordinary people are being led by their noses to stage a false revolt for the benefit of the very few and the continued and even increased burdens of the many — especially the majority of the well-intended folks who have fallen for the public relations snow job.
Back then, the few were a handful of slave owners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, bankers such as Alexander Hamilton and wealthy businessmen such as Benjamin Franklin. Today, most people don't even know the names of the wealthiest people, save for celebrities such as monopolist marketer Bill Gates, but there is a 1 percent getting richer as the rest of the country gets poorer and there are giant corporations that pay nothing in taxes.
Back then, the revolution did not change anything in American society. Slavery remained intact, as did indentured servitude for whites. In 1794, ordinary farmer took up arms to protest taxes being levied on their backs to pay off Hamilton and his friends who held the government hostage to loans they had made during the war of independence.
But here comes the lesson of this post: Hamilton had them put down harshly and there was never another rebellion like it ever again. Scour the history of the United States of America and you will not find any widespread challenge of the social order.
Americans have never revolted and they are way too busy watching television to be bothered to be awakened by anything any Tea, Coffee, or Pretty Please Sugar Party may bring about.
Americans went through more than twice today's level of unemployment during the Great Depression without a whimper. Wages have been dropping — and I do mean actually dropping — since 1973 without the slightest public awareness.
Indeed, Americans have repeatedly elected those who are most obviously at the service of those few who profit off their progressively more poorly paid work — Reagan, the two Bushes (admittedly these two came from among the rich few).
And, I hate to say this, those of us who voted for Barack Obama were misled to believe that his campaign could be banked by Wall Street without selling out the candidates' principles. Obama serves the rich and the few, let's not fool ourselves.
Let us remember today — the 150th anniversary of the first shots fired in the Civil War — that Americans were led like lambs to the slaughter to defend slaveholders against industrialists. Did anything change for the common man after the Civil War?
Even emancipation was quicky turned into a merely symbolic legal fiction as the descendants of slaves were blocked from every path to enjoying "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Almost 50 years from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., prisons and jails are filled to the brim with the flower of African American youth.
What was King doing the day he was murdered? He was linking the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for economic democracy, supporting sanitation workers on strike.
The wealthy elite didn't care who sat at the Woolworth lunch counters they would never visit — except maybe to slum around in as college students. They cared about and feared the activism of civil rights spreading to the bread and butter issues. That's why King was killed.
The American Revolution was not revolutionary in that it didn't change anything but the names of the masters. Americans have never revolted in any significant way against their masters and I don't see any evidence they ever will.
Indeed, last week the rank and file supporters of the Tea Party begged their leaders to demolish anything that might one day save them from poverty. That day that is not too distant for most of us, as economic inequality widens in America.
Monday, April 11, 2011
The nation as a dysfunctional family
Last week the Republican House pouted, stamped its feet and held its breath until the Democratic Senate and White House agreed to serve a federal meal made mostly of ice cream. Who is to blame? The citizens are: we are in one of those moments in which the government comes close to representing a vectorial sum of the political forces in play.
Allow me to explain.
One of the first things I learned in physics was the idea of forces and how they interact. Say we're pushing a big, human-size ball: you're pushing east and I'm pushing west; the ball will either stay put from equally opposing forces or it will veer northwest or southwest if my force is stronger or northeast or southeast if yours is. This is the sum of our vectors.
Right now the U.S. government comes close to representing the variety of political forces at play. Most people, who were sick of George W. Bush's misrule, elected Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities. The few people who are rich and have corporate power (who, not being stupid, recognized Bush was a colossal failure) made sure Obama and his pals were bought men incapable of doing them any harm. The elderly voted to protect their Social Security and Medicare. The white lower middle class threw away their votes on a former fly boy who really didn't want to win, then got mesmerized by an invention of millionaires and K Street consultants called the "Tea Party." The poor, as always, didn't vote.
Voilà! The politics of 2010. The nation is a dysfunctional family and the government reflects it in miniature. Misbehaving and unruly children in the House. A neurotic, narcissistic wife on the verge of a breakdown in the Senate. A pusillanimous peace-at-any-price husband in the White House.
That's the "royal family" that governs us.
It reflects our own national childishness, our unrestrained and irrational greed, the sheer illogic of wanting the mansion and the swimming pool but not the work, our thinking we are somehow entitled and have earned our privileges. It reflects our collective inability to lose weight, to make things that work, to be as young as we once were without huge infusions of foreigners, coupled with our pathological depressive, fearful and phobic state about our situation. Finally, it reflects the willingness to play whatever theatrical roles are required to keep the farce going that this is a reasonable, can-do, high-minded national family whose house is a beacon to the world.
The first step in any kind of redirection in thinking is to face facts. Awareness. We need to come to grips with the following facts:
1. The "American Revolution" was not a revolution in any sense of the word and Americans are not now, nor have ever been, a revolutionary people.
2. American prosperity did not come about by dint of effort or "know-how" and no amount of wheel spinning and education reform will solve the problems that appear to afflict us.
3. American power did not come as a result of brilliant military strategy or the most effective soldiers, but because of an outmoded military doctrine that will likely never work again.
4. Americans were never primarily English, male and Christian but always an uneasy demographic mix uncomfortable with religious beliefs.
5. The United States is for the moment wealthy, among the largest countries, in diminishing measure a remarkably open and flexible society, an awesome nation of superlatives, yet one whose myth of greatness is often glaringly blinding to those who most believe in it.
Think about and comment on these themes, please. In coming posts, I will try to expand on each of them, perhaps pointing to some of the national therapy we need.
Allow me to explain.
One of the first things I learned in physics was the idea of forces and how they interact. Say we're pushing a big, human-size ball: you're pushing east and I'm pushing west; the ball will either stay put from equally opposing forces or it will veer northwest or southwest if my force is stronger or northeast or southeast if yours is. This is the sum of our vectors.
Right now the U.S. government comes close to representing the variety of political forces at play. Most people, who were sick of George W. Bush's misrule, elected Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities. The few people who are rich and have corporate power (who, not being stupid, recognized Bush was a colossal failure) made sure Obama and his pals were bought men incapable of doing them any harm. The elderly voted to protect their Social Security and Medicare. The white lower middle class threw away their votes on a former fly boy who really didn't want to win, then got mesmerized by an invention of millionaires and K Street consultants called the "Tea Party." The poor, as always, didn't vote.
Voilà! The politics of 2010. The nation is a dysfunctional family and the government reflects it in miniature. Misbehaving and unruly children in the House. A neurotic, narcissistic wife on the verge of a breakdown in the Senate. A pusillanimous peace-at-any-price husband in the White House.
That's the "royal family" that governs us.
It reflects our own national childishness, our unrestrained and irrational greed, the sheer illogic of wanting the mansion and the swimming pool but not the work, our thinking we are somehow entitled and have earned our privileges. It reflects our collective inability to lose weight, to make things that work, to be as young as we once were without huge infusions of foreigners, coupled with our pathological depressive, fearful and phobic state about our situation. Finally, it reflects the willingness to play whatever theatrical roles are required to keep the farce going that this is a reasonable, can-do, high-minded national family whose house is a beacon to the world.
The first step in any kind of redirection in thinking is to face facts. Awareness. We need to come to grips with the following facts:
1. The "American Revolution" was not a revolution in any sense of the word and Americans are not now, nor have ever been, a revolutionary people.
2. American prosperity did not come about by dint of effort or "know-how" and no amount of wheel spinning and education reform will solve the problems that appear to afflict us.
3. American power did not come as a result of brilliant military strategy or the most effective soldiers, but because of an outmoded military doctrine that will likely never work again.
4. Americans were never primarily English, male and Christian but always an uneasy demographic mix uncomfortable with religious beliefs.
5. The United States is for the moment wealthy, among the largest countries, in diminishing measure a remarkably open and flexible society, an awesome nation of superlatives, yet one whose myth of greatness is often glaringly blinding to those who most believe in it.
Think about and comment on these themes, please. In coming posts, I will try to expand on each of them, perhaps pointing to some of the national therapy we need.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
News about jobs unveils America´s real religion
Every month at about this time, just a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils what it calls "The Employment Situation," we have a friendly office pool (we each bet 25 cents) on the unemployment rate and the net employment gain or loss figure. As a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I won a few of these bets when we were in what Paul Krugman calls the "oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period" of the recession, but I've been losing steadily as things get better.
I thought we'd hear 9.3 percent unemployment last Friday (March 4). It was 8.9 percent.
I didn't reveal any of this in my professional reporting (my job is to write "just the facts, ma'am"), but I did note how folks were cheering a 0.1 percentage point decline from 9.0 percent -- which most people don't know is not statistically significant.
A whoop also went up for the net 192,000 jobs added to the economy in February 2011 (I'd bet 50,000) -- even though one group calculated that even at that lofty rate the labor force won't get back to pre-recession levels until 2019 .
Never mind the details. The net job gain was announced with the words "job creation" in the press. These words go to the heart of this post.
If you believe the economic mythology of most major newspapers -- even the Wall Street Journal, which knows better, indulges in it -- new jobs are "created" every time this sort of things happens.
Way back when John F. Kennedy was a senator running for president, Sister Catherine Agnes had something to say about this -- and it still resonates with me today, even as an agnostic: the only being who makes something out of nothing (e.g., creates) is the one we humans call God, Allah, etc., whose existence I, of course, seriously question. Yet here are the major newspapers telling us that someone -- "employers" -- creates jobs, not in heaven, but right here in our own back yard.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints and angels! (Sister's curse.)
This lauded economic Creator is also called an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, an investor ... whatever. He (it's usually still a he) inhabits the pantheon of the real religion of the United States, which is not Christianity (sorry, Religious Right), but ... drum roll ... the worship of Money, Wealth, and all the Power and Sex it can get you.
Just a thought to ponder as you rush to encourage the Creator by spending your cash as fast as you get it to fuel the economy.
I thought we'd hear 9.3 percent unemployment last Friday (March 4). It was 8.9 percent.
I didn't reveal any of this in my professional reporting (my job is to write "just the facts, ma'am"), but I did note how folks were cheering a 0.1 percentage point decline from 9.0 percent -- which most people don't know is not statistically significant.
A whoop also went up for the net 192,000 jobs added to the economy in February 2011 (I'd bet 50,000) -- even though one group calculated that even at that lofty rate the labor force won't get back to pre-recession levels until 2019 .
Never mind the details. The net job gain was announced with the words "job creation" in the press. These words go to the heart of this post.
If you believe the economic mythology of most major newspapers -- even the Wall Street Journal, which knows better, indulges in it -- new jobs are "created" every time this sort of things happens.
Way back when John F. Kennedy was a senator running for president, Sister Catherine Agnes had something to say about this -- and it still resonates with me today, even as an agnostic: the only being who makes something out of nothing (e.g., creates) is the one we humans call God, Allah, etc., whose existence I, of course, seriously question. Yet here are the major newspapers telling us that someone -- "employers" -- creates jobs, not in heaven, but right here in our own back yard.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints and angels! (Sister's curse.)
This lauded economic Creator is also called an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, an investor ... whatever. He (it's usually still a he) inhabits the pantheon of the real religion of the United States, which is not Christianity (sorry, Religious Right), but ... drum roll ... the worship of Money, Wealth, and all the Power and Sex it can get you.
Just a thought to ponder as you rush to encourage the Creator by spending your cash as fast as you get it to fuel the economy.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
People march (or revolt) on their stomachs, too!
The Muslim world's dictators, kings, sheiks and other potentates are falling like dominoes not because of some CIA plot by Western infidels (as Libya's unspellable tyrant alleges), but because food prices have risen dramatically. In countries in which food is a large part of the consumer basket of goods, such as in the Arab world, this spells hunger.
We all know that “Let them eat cakes!” is a recipe for a bad end. The last person reputed to have said such a thing of her starving subjects, French Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, was executed in 1793.
The reality today is that people in poorer countries today are facing acute hunger and starvation. According to the World Bank, global food prices have risen an average 29 percent between January 2010 and January 2011. Before that, prices were just 3 percent down from a historical peak in 2008.
“Based on a very rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick declared recently. “This is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are; this is ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price too.”
Food prices leading to inability to satisfy hunger is the phantom at the barricades in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Teheran and Amman — not Thomas Jefferson, not Osama bin Laden and certainly not CIA Director Leon Panetta.
We all know that “Let them eat cakes!” is a recipe for a bad end. The last person reputed to have said such a thing of her starving subjects, French Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, was executed in 1793.
The reality today is that people in poorer countries today are facing acute hunger and starvation. According to the World Bank, global food prices have risen an average 29 percent between January 2010 and January 2011. Before that, prices were just 3 percent down from a historical peak in 2008.
“Based on a very rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick declared recently. “This is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are; this is ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price too.”
Food prices leading to inability to satisfy hunger is the phantom at the barricades in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Teheran and Amman — not Thomas Jefferson, not Osama bin Laden and certainly not CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Why History Is Not About Lara Logan
The fluid developments in Libya remind one that political history runs on wheels bigger than the latest gossip about one telegenic American. History — and Machiavelli — teaches us that every ruler, democratic or otherwise, has a relationship with the ruled and faces a critical decision when discontent sets in and an angry mob arises: kill them all and rule from fear or quell discontent subtly without changing the order of things.
The problem usually comes when the ruler changes horses in the middle of the river — which sometimes can't be avoided.
In my view of the French Revolution, for example, Louis XVI's appointment of Necker and the end of repression, marked the king fit for his eventual decapitation. Every subsequent show of force was only a demonstration of a lack of real power.
That's because every people form a compact with every ruler, whether it is written or implicit.
Stalin could kill millions, but he had to put offer secure jobs and stable wages and prices (e.g., Russian rents in the 1920s were the same as they were in the 1980s). The demise of stability under Gorbachev and later is what gave the post-Communism Stalinists the gumption to attempt a coup and even to praise the "good old days" of Uncle Joe.
Of course, sometimes the compact is itself finite: lead us to a defined "Promise Land" (the development of a modern technocratic class, for example). When such an intelligentsya finally takes consciousness of itself, the compact ends and the ruler must step down.
For Egypt, for example, simplifying much, one could argue that Nasser promised national pride, Sadat offered peace and Mubarak offered continuity amid turmoil — until society Egyptian stabilized, didn't need a hallway monitor any more and people were willing to forge some new balance of power based (we think) on elections.
As to the ballot box, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that democracy abroad — we in the United States really have a republic in which the elected officials are representatives primarily of the already powerful — is either a panacea or the only way in which people and ruler can communicate and make the necessary deals.
There are a variety of imperfections that can invalidate electoral results.
In the United States, most major party candidates of the last century easily represented 40 percent of the electorate, at a minimum. What does that mean, though? Ronald Reagan's "landslides" were predicated on the votes of no more than a third of those eligible to vote.
By and large, a rather broad majority goes unrepresented in Congress, or much less the White House. Indeed, the disunity, anger and frustration of Americans with all politicians is rooted in this fact — which the chattering class of Washington (which I mostly observe for a living) refuses to acknowledge, for good reason.
Real democratic revolutions yield results that none of us who are riding the applecart want to see.
In Iran, it was the Ayahtollah Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the mujaheddin CIA-armed rebels became the Taliban, riding on the shoulder of enthusiastic crowds; let'snot forget that the Taliban was (is?) very popular.
There is no guarantee that modern revolutions will automatically lead to Western liberal "democracy." Should there be? History renders the question moot.
The problem usually comes when the ruler changes horses in the middle of the river — which sometimes can't be avoided.
In my view of the French Revolution, for example, Louis XVI's appointment of Necker and the end of repression, marked the king fit for his eventual decapitation. Every subsequent show of force was only a demonstration of a lack of real power.
That's because every people form a compact with every ruler, whether it is written or implicit.
Stalin could kill millions, but he had to put offer secure jobs and stable wages and prices (e.g., Russian rents in the 1920s were the same as they were in the 1980s). The demise of stability under Gorbachev and later is what gave the post-Communism Stalinists the gumption to attempt a coup and even to praise the "good old days" of Uncle Joe.
Of course, sometimes the compact is itself finite: lead us to a defined "Promise Land" (the development of a modern technocratic class, for example). When such an intelligentsya finally takes consciousness of itself, the compact ends and the ruler must step down.
For Egypt, for example, simplifying much, one could argue that Nasser promised national pride, Sadat offered peace and Mubarak offered continuity amid turmoil — until society Egyptian stabilized, didn't need a hallway monitor any more and people were willing to forge some new balance of power based (we think) on elections.
As to the ballot box, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that democracy abroad — we in the United States really have a republic in which the elected officials are representatives primarily of the already powerful — is either a panacea or the only way in which people and ruler can communicate and make the necessary deals.
There are a variety of imperfections that can invalidate electoral results.
In the United States, most major party candidates of the last century easily represented 40 percent of the electorate, at a minimum. What does that mean, though? Ronald Reagan's "landslides" were predicated on the votes of no more than a third of those eligible to vote.
By and large, a rather broad majority goes unrepresented in Congress, or much less the White House. Indeed, the disunity, anger and frustration of Americans with all politicians is rooted in this fact — which the chattering class of Washington (which I mostly observe for a living) refuses to acknowledge, for good reason.
Real democratic revolutions yield results that none of us who are riding the applecart want to see.
In Iran, it was the Ayahtollah Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the mujaheddin CIA-armed rebels became the Taliban, riding on the shoulder of enthusiastic crowds; let'snot forget that the Taliban was (is?) very popular.
There is no guarantee that modern revolutions will automatically lead to Western liberal "democracy." Should there be? History renders the question moot.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Living at 33 rpm
Lazybones that I always was, I cursed my luck when the city bus on which I was on was suddenly diverted from its familiar route barely two blocks before my stop. Then, as the bus actually made its 90-degree turn, I caught sight of a long line of tanks heading downtown. That night the government was overthrown.
This is a true experience of mine in Buenos Aires many years ago when, as a teenager coming home from school, I first came face to face to with the everyday details of a government overthrow. The events of Egypt and its region bring it to mind.
Back then, some people joked that Argentina's politics were like a long-play record because it had 33 revolutions per minute.*
They weren't real revolutions; no systemic change was ever brought about by these events. They didn't occur quite as frequently in Argentina as elsewhere (at the time Bolivia held the frequency record, with more revoluciones than years of independence). They were not spontaneous, popular overthrow, as in Egypt.
Yet they bore a number of similarities. There were war vehicles in the streets and soldiers in fatigues. People liked them or didn't like them, but life temporarily stopped.
Schools closed. Many places of work closed. Groceries were available but in short supply because deliveries halted. For an average person, it was a time of uncertainty.
In the Latin American pronunciamiento (pronouncement) ballet, some generals sided with the president, some with the rebels. Both sides seized radios and began to broadcast communiques.
Who was really winning? Were the two sides going to shoot at one another? Was it safe to be on the streets at night? Would they -- the "they" who were at the moment in charge, whoever they were -- turn off electricity or shut off the water supply? Who knew!
When students and workers took to the streets against the army a few years later, there were sharpshooters. From both sides. Anyone could get hit by a stray bullet.
This is what I imagine life was recently like in Tunisia and Egypt and is still much that way elsewhere in the Arabic World.
More to the point of the moment, in countries where revolt has succeeded in toppling a ruler, there's still that terrible, terrible uncertainty of not knowing what comes next. As the Hungarians joked in the 1990s: What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism.
Toppling is always the easy part. Putting something better in its place ... that's tough. Many average people in those countries are now wondering what comes next.
* The joke made more sense in the 20th century, before cassettes or CDs, when the LP -- a vinyl record roughly comparable to the contemporary commercial music CD today -- replaced the single, which usually spun at a speed of 45 rpms on the turntable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record for details).
This is a true experience of mine in Buenos Aires many years ago when, as a teenager coming home from school, I first came face to face to with the everyday details of a government overthrow. The events of Egypt and its region bring it to mind.
Back then, some people joked that Argentina's politics were like a long-play record because it had 33 revolutions per minute.*
They weren't real revolutions; no systemic change was ever brought about by these events. They didn't occur quite as frequently in Argentina as elsewhere (at the time Bolivia held the frequency record, with more revoluciones than years of independence). They were not spontaneous, popular overthrow, as in Egypt.
Yet they bore a number of similarities. There were war vehicles in the streets and soldiers in fatigues. People liked them or didn't like them, but life temporarily stopped.
Schools closed. Many places of work closed. Groceries were available but in short supply because deliveries halted. For an average person, it was a time of uncertainty.
In the Latin American pronunciamiento (pronouncement) ballet, some generals sided with the president, some with the rebels. Both sides seized radios and began to broadcast communiques.
Who was really winning? Were the two sides going to shoot at one another? Was it safe to be on the streets at night? Would they -- the "they" who were at the moment in charge, whoever they were -- turn off electricity or shut off the water supply? Who knew!
When students and workers took to the streets against the army a few years later, there were sharpshooters. From both sides. Anyone could get hit by a stray bullet.
This is what I imagine life was recently like in Tunisia and Egypt and is still much that way elsewhere in the Arabic World.
More to the point of the moment, in countries where revolt has succeeded in toppling a ruler, there's still that terrible, terrible uncertainty of not knowing what comes next. As the Hungarians joked in the 1990s: What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism.
Toppling is always the easy part. Putting something better in its place ... that's tough. Many average people in those countries are now wondering what comes next.
* The joke made more sense in the 20th century, before cassettes or CDs, when the LP -- a vinyl record roughly comparable to the contemporary commercial music CD today -- replaced the single, which usually spun at a speed of 45 rpms on the turntable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record for details).
Monday, February 14, 2011
The Cecilieauxist Manifesto
Events have overtaken a variety of comments and posts. In lieu of outdated piecemeal commentary, I hereby offer a grand positive vision of what ought to be ...
A specter is haunting the globe and it is the model of economic growth driven by consumption demand at prices, levels of production and wages dictated by a market that is falsely said to operate unfettered in its allocation of goods, services and capital.
This system has unrivaled global reach. Having destroyed its prime challenger in the past century, Soviet Communism, the system is now devouring secondary challengers, such as the western European welfare state and islets of experimentation elsewhere. The system has swallowed post-Communist Russia whole and is in the process of digesting China. It has also laid waste to American power and influence and used the government of the United States has its gendarme and its enabling institution.
The system is a hydra-headed combination of multinational corporations and plutocratic elites that, because they are locked in dynamic competition with one another, is invisible and omnipresent at once. No political party, government or group has shown itself capable of fending off its insidious and seductive power. No individual escapes the pathology of greed that it spreads. Unless it is stopped, the planet will be despoiled by its byproducts and civilization as we have known it will disappear from the face of the Earth.
We Cecilieauxists believe, however, that the current trend is not yet irreversible, that the overall mass of human beings will ultimately arise to change the course of history, if it awakens from the systems somniferous distractions.
We conceive of a political economy in which the art of decisionmaking lends itself to the apportionment of the world's resources in such a way as to extend the well-being of the many balanced by careful regard for the healthful development of every individual.
We believe that, for the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge to equitably distribute all the essentials needed for survival to all human beings and that disparities are only the result of willful maldistribution that needs to be remedied. Given this situation, we believe it is possible that many assumptions heretofore held by the vast majority of economists and policymakers can and should be transcended. The human economics of the future must be a non-zero-sum game in which all actors aggregate and multiply the resources for all.
In the process of developing a new human economy, we believe that economic power and economic results trump all other powers and factors. A hungry army will fail. An arbitrary project will collapse of its own. It is in such a pragmatic approach that Cecilieuxism has nothing to say beyond the material goal of a globally equitable society.
The cause will not succeed until success is global. Equitable need not mean a perfect, mathematical material equality, so long as everyone's essential needs are satisfied and differentials do not enshrine an unbridgeable gap. The social aim is inextricably linked to the social necessities of human beings to survive and does not mean a disregard for differences between people and their individuality, the common good and the well-being of the individual.
As initial steps toward such a world, we propose:
1. The permanent and worldwide abolition of hereditary classes through a 100% tax that devolves all assets of a deceased to government, in trust for society -- with the understanding that society undertakes to safeguard the well-being of the family left behind, especially children and adults unable to care for themselves.
2. The gradual abolition, through attrition and education reform, of involuntary work. Individuals working only out of economic need should be replaced by individuals who choose occupations and terms of work that give them the greatest joy. The change is to be brought about by a student-centered education system directed to help individuals discover the talents, abilities and capacities they most enjoy giving to society. Work in the future should be a privilege in which those who toil fulfill their potential and their desires through an activity of their choosing.
3. A gradual reform of the labor market to reduce the workforce to the minimum necessary to satisfy all the human needs of society. This would be achieved by automating the least desirable occupations, eliminating jobs that serve no useful purpose or tasks within jobs that serve no useful purpose and the establishment of a universal conscription of all men and women at age 18 to a Social Service Corps for a period of three years to perform tasks of service to society.
4. A gradual de-linking of income from work or occupation and individuals and a gradual elimination of individual earnings differentials, focusing instead on household income necessary to fulfill the human needs of its members.
5. A redefinition of human needs to include minimal material survival, but also, to the extent that equitably allocated resources allow, cultural and intellectual needs. However, no human need beyond immediate survival should be served before all human beings are satisfied in this regard.
6. Along with guarantees toward household incomes necessary to fulfill human needs, a revolutionized global society should set maximum standards of income and creature comforts, devolving any excesses to society for common use.
7. All weaponry and means of inflicting pain, wounding or death should be destroyed and the industries that produce them redirected to peaceful technological innovation.
8. Government should be limited to regulating and policing the equitable allocation of resources, fostering private initiative to fulfill public needs, the resolution of disputes and the maintenance of public order necessary to assure public safety and survival of all. All punitive measures shall aim to repair the damage of wrongdoing to the extent reasonably possible as well as to rehabilitate the wrongdoer to just behavior. Government policy should be decided through legislation and plebiscites, with elections and campaigning at public expense.
9. Private enterprises should be transformed into nonprofit social enterprises, with excess revenues directed only to expansion, innovation and, in lieu of these, the capitalization of society through government. Existing nonprofit organizations, churches and other similar organizations should be incorporated into a similar regime.
10. The right to property of fixed assets or machinery should be limited to socially beneficial uses (i.e., to provide housing, produce goods needed, etc.), but not as a source of income from rents or sale. Owners unable to use such property for socially beneficial purposes should relinquish their property to other proposing the best possible use.
In sum, we envision a peaceful world in which the fulfillment of human potential is a reasonable expectation and economic crime is eliminated through guaranteed survival and equitable access to human requirements. We believe that the path to the necessary changes must be persuasion and participatory democratic decisionmaking, as the veritable revolution needed will not take place without the enthusiastic support of all sectors of society.
A specter is haunting the globe and it is the model of economic growth driven by consumption demand at prices, levels of production and wages dictated by a market that is falsely said to operate unfettered in its allocation of goods, services and capital.
This system has unrivaled global reach. Having destroyed its prime challenger in the past century, Soviet Communism, the system is now devouring secondary challengers, such as the western European welfare state and islets of experimentation elsewhere. The system has swallowed post-Communist Russia whole and is in the process of digesting China. It has also laid waste to American power and influence and used the government of the United States has its gendarme and its enabling institution.
The system is a hydra-headed combination of multinational corporations and plutocratic elites that, because they are locked in dynamic competition with one another, is invisible and omnipresent at once. No political party, government or group has shown itself capable of fending off its insidious and seductive power. No individual escapes the pathology of greed that it spreads. Unless it is stopped, the planet will be despoiled by its byproducts and civilization as we have known it will disappear from the face of the Earth.
We Cecilieauxists believe, however, that the current trend is not yet irreversible, that the overall mass of human beings will ultimately arise to change the course of history, if it awakens from the systems somniferous distractions.
We conceive of a political economy in which the art of decisionmaking lends itself to the apportionment of the world's resources in such a way as to extend the well-being of the many balanced by careful regard for the healthful development of every individual.
We believe that, for the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge to equitably distribute all the essentials needed for survival to all human beings and that disparities are only the result of willful maldistribution that needs to be remedied. Given this situation, we believe it is possible that many assumptions heretofore held by the vast majority of economists and policymakers can and should be transcended. The human economics of the future must be a non-zero-sum game in which all actors aggregate and multiply the resources for all.
In the process of developing a new human economy, we believe that economic power and economic results trump all other powers and factors. A hungry army will fail. An arbitrary project will collapse of its own. It is in such a pragmatic approach that Cecilieuxism has nothing to say beyond the material goal of a globally equitable society.
The cause will not succeed until success is global. Equitable need not mean a perfect, mathematical material equality, so long as everyone's essential needs are satisfied and differentials do not enshrine an unbridgeable gap. The social aim is inextricably linked to the social necessities of human beings to survive and does not mean a disregard for differences between people and their individuality, the common good and the well-being of the individual.
As initial steps toward such a world, we propose:
1. The permanent and worldwide abolition of hereditary classes through a 100% tax that devolves all assets of a deceased to government, in trust for society -- with the understanding that society undertakes to safeguard the well-being of the family left behind, especially children and adults unable to care for themselves.
2. The gradual abolition, through attrition and education reform, of involuntary work. Individuals working only out of economic need should be replaced by individuals who choose occupations and terms of work that give them the greatest joy. The change is to be brought about by a student-centered education system directed to help individuals discover the talents, abilities and capacities they most enjoy giving to society. Work in the future should be a privilege in which those who toil fulfill their potential and their desires through an activity of their choosing.
3. A gradual reform of the labor market to reduce the workforce to the minimum necessary to satisfy all the human needs of society. This would be achieved by automating the least desirable occupations, eliminating jobs that serve no useful purpose or tasks within jobs that serve no useful purpose and the establishment of a universal conscription of all men and women at age 18 to a Social Service Corps for a period of three years to perform tasks of service to society.
4. A gradual de-linking of income from work or occupation and individuals and a gradual elimination of individual earnings differentials, focusing instead on household income necessary to fulfill the human needs of its members.
5. A redefinition of human needs to include minimal material survival, but also, to the extent that equitably allocated resources allow, cultural and intellectual needs. However, no human need beyond immediate survival should be served before all human beings are satisfied in this regard.
6. Along with guarantees toward household incomes necessary to fulfill human needs, a revolutionized global society should set maximum standards of income and creature comforts, devolving any excesses to society for common use.
7. All weaponry and means of inflicting pain, wounding or death should be destroyed and the industries that produce them redirected to peaceful technological innovation.
8. Government should be limited to regulating and policing the equitable allocation of resources, fostering private initiative to fulfill public needs, the resolution of disputes and the maintenance of public order necessary to assure public safety and survival of all. All punitive measures shall aim to repair the damage of wrongdoing to the extent reasonably possible as well as to rehabilitate the wrongdoer to just behavior. Government policy should be decided through legislation and plebiscites, with elections and campaigning at public expense.
9. Private enterprises should be transformed into nonprofit social enterprises, with excess revenues directed only to expansion, innovation and, in lieu of these, the capitalization of society through government. Existing nonprofit organizations, churches and other similar organizations should be incorporated into a similar regime.
10. The right to property of fixed assets or machinery should be limited to socially beneficial uses (i.e., to provide housing, produce goods needed, etc.), but not as a source of income from rents or sale. Owners unable to use such property for socially beneficial purposes should relinquish their property to other proposing the best possible use.
In sum, we envision a peaceful world in which the fulfillment of human potential is a reasonable expectation and economic crime is eliminated through guaranteed survival and equitable access to human requirements. We believe that the path to the necessary changes must be persuasion and participatory democratic decisionmaking, as the veritable revolution needed will not take place without the enthusiastic support of all sectors of society.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Bring Back Partisanship!
Just because Nancy Pelosi can't count votes and Harry Reid lacks the stomach to put the nutwing in its place and a part of the electorate thinks Glenn Beck is the new Aristotle, it doesn't mean that it's wrong to be partisan as an adherent to a cause.
Granted, the Republicrats in Congress don't much cotton to causes, beliefs or allegiances of any substance. Their goal in life is to get re-elected and protect the gravy train for wealthy people like themselves.
Conservatives say they are for principles. But let's look at the record. Being red-meat macho about war didn't prevent George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from running away from Vietnam like pansies. Nor did the much vaunted family values keep Newt Gingrich from adultery with a choirsinger while his wife was dying of cancer. Larry (men's room staller) Craig became the poster child for closeted homosexuality, against homophobic speech he's ever delivered.
And all Republicans claim they're all against abortion, but they never passed a ban while they were in the majority in both houses of Congress.
The liberals are not much better. They're for the common man, except when they're making zillions off tort litigation at his expense (John Edwards) or being unable to find a health insurance lobby they didn't like (Max Baucus). They promise change, except when they don't (Barack Obama).
Most, like famous drunken driver Ted Kennedy, were born with a silver spoon and if all their posturing doesn't help anybody, well that's no skin off their noses.
So let's stop pretending to make nice by avoiding the word "kill" in figurative senses, such as the poorly named Repealing the Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act, which they knew damn well would not repeal a damn thing.
Americans disagree profoundly about important things. We have a constitutional right to disagree and to express that disagreement, even in tasteless or hyperbolic terms.
We also have a right to be represented. I don't want the people's representatives pretending we all love each other, when we really don't. There's an good fight to be fought. They're wrong and we're right. Bring it on!
Granted, the Republicrats in Congress don't much cotton to causes, beliefs or allegiances of any substance. Their goal in life is to get re-elected and protect the gravy train for wealthy people like themselves.
Conservatives say they are for principles. But let's look at the record. Being red-meat macho about war didn't prevent George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from running away from Vietnam like pansies. Nor did the much vaunted family values keep Newt Gingrich from adultery with a choirsinger while his wife was dying of cancer. Larry (men's room staller) Craig became the poster child for closeted homosexuality, against homophobic speech he's ever delivered.
And all Republicans claim they're all against abortion, but they never passed a ban while they were in the majority in both houses of Congress.
The liberals are not much better. They're for the common man, except when they're making zillions off tort litigation at his expense (John Edwards) or being unable to find a health insurance lobby they didn't like (Max Baucus). They promise change, except when they don't (Barack Obama).
Most, like famous drunken driver Ted Kennedy, were born with a silver spoon and if all their posturing doesn't help anybody, well that's no skin off their noses.
So let's stop pretending to make nice by avoiding the word "kill" in figurative senses, such as the poorly named Repealing the Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act, which they knew damn well would not repeal a damn thing.
Americans disagree profoundly about important things. We have a constitutional right to disagree and to express that disagreement, even in tasteless or hyperbolic terms.
We also have a right to be represented. I don't want the people's representatives pretending we all love each other, when we really don't. There's an good fight to be fought. They're wrong and we're right. Bring it on!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Good ol' Kafka University tells me I never graduated
Imagine that you're an established professional of many years. You get nostalgic for the days of yore and go to your alma mater's Web site, find that unlike every other school, they don't sell bumperstickers and other alum stuff. Then you see an offer of a free alum card ...
I can't resist a freebie. With this card I can go use the gym for free. Of course, the trip there would cost a bit, what with the two-hour flight (or was it three?) from my present lair to the haunts where I wrote faux-beat poetry.
But then, a kindly soul in the alumni office tells me that there doesn't seem to be a record of my graduation. I knew there was a reason they wouldn't admit me to MIT's PhD program in rocket science!
All these years I thought I was at least a university graduate. Do note: in Canada, my spiritual homeland, we go to "university," not merely "college." And in Montreal they have (had?) something called Collège d'Enseignement Général Et Professionnel, that everyone calls merely CEGEP (say-JEHP), so that a B.A. or B.S. takes five years, not four.
That's one way to keep youth unemployment down, eh?
Anyway, by now we've exchanged the requisite correspondence and thanks to VG and AR (you know who you are) I have just had my Dustin Hoffman moment: I'm a graduate!
OK, so it's 35 years later, but who's counting when you're having fun.
Kafka University prepared me well for life. I've had my identity stolen years before anyone knew of such a thing (try to imagine a Social Security Administration staffer showing you your record, then asking, "Are you sure that's not your mother?").
I am a walking, talking opposite profile of The Unknown Citizen, of whom W.H. Auden wrote
I can't resist a freebie. With this card I can go use the gym for free. Of course, the trip there would cost a bit, what with the two-hour flight (or was it three?) from my present lair to the haunts where I wrote faux-beat poetry.
But then, a kindly soul in the alumni office tells me that there doesn't seem to be a record of my graduation. I knew there was a reason they wouldn't admit me to MIT's PhD program in rocket science!
All these years I thought I was at least a university graduate. Do note: in Canada, my spiritual homeland, we go to "university," not merely "college." And in Montreal they have (had?) something called Collège d'Enseignement Général Et Professionnel, that everyone calls merely CEGEP (say-JEHP), so that a B.A. or B.S. takes five years, not four.
That's one way to keep youth unemployment down, eh?
Anyway, by now we've exchanged the requisite correspondence and thanks to VG and AR (you know who you are) I have just had my Dustin Hoffman moment: I'm a graduate!
OK, so it's 35 years later, but who's counting when you're having fun.
Kafka University prepared me well for life. I've had my identity stolen years before anyone knew of such a thing (try to imagine a Social Security Administration staffer showing you your record, then asking, "Are you sure that's not your mother?").
I am a walking, talking opposite profile of The Unknown Citizen, of whom W.H. Auden wrote
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beYet my record keepers at Kafka University, along with the denizens of various bureaucracies through which I have traversed, unwillingly likely share the view Auden's citizen-keepers
One against whom there was no official complaint
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
A headline's echo of 1963
For years grizzled old journalists bored cub reporters with the tale of the wire correspondent who became nearly incoherent one November Friday afternoon in Dallas. Yesterday, the French paper Le Monde offered an echo of what happens when the media megaphone tries to react to unexpected tragedy.
You could find it in the feed* hours later.
As news flashed around the world of the shooting of Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz), some editor in Paris stuck with the Saturday morning shift assumed the worst and dashed off this headline for the Web:
Indeed, the first graf of the initial story said: Une parlementaire américaine et six autres personnes ont été tuées samedi dans l'Arizona par un tireur qui a ouvert le feu au cours d'un meeting. (U.S. congresswoman and six others were killed Saturday in Arizona by a gunman who opened fire during a rally.)
It's an easy mistake to make. Indeed, that was initial assumption. Who survives a gunshot to the head?
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the middle of breaking news knows the initial cacophony right after a startling, shocking and unexpected event. I witnessed the oh-so-macho George W. Bush White House employees skitter out in what was an obvious panic attack in the first hour of the Sept. 11, 2001, events. Even chicken hawk Georgie Porgie himself scrambled to a bunker in Nebraska.
Of course, some people simply act in disregard of their own well-being. Such as the now-dubbed "hero intern" Daniel Hernandez whose quick moves essentially saved Gifford's life.
In journalism, such adrenalin-pumped responses are not uncommon among war correspondents. One reporter whose family I knew got himself blown up as he tinkered in fascination with an improvised Viet Cong grenade.
Then there's the surviving film by a Swedish-Argentine video journalist Leonardo Henrichsen in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet 1973 coup. He was manning the camera.
You see the images keeps rolling as soldiers approach to shut his filming (for Swedish television), it tumbles and shows the lens-eye's last skaky views, then it goes black. Henrichsen was killed on the spot.
Now if you click on LeMonde's feed on the Gifford shooting you still get the dramatic, but more accurate
By the Orwellian magic of the Web, the newspaper goof never happened. Except it did.
* http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/01/08/une-parlementaire-americaine-tuee-dans-une-fusillade_1463036_3222.html#xtor=RSS-3208
You could find it in the feed* hours later.
As news flashed around the world of the shooting of Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz), some editor in Paris stuck with the Saturday morning shift assumed the worst and dashed off this headline for the Web:
Une parlementaire américaine tuée dans une fusillade
Translation — An American legislator killed amid gunfire.Indeed, the first graf of the initial story said: Une parlementaire américaine et six autres personnes ont été tuées samedi dans l'Arizona par un tireur qui a ouvert le feu au cours d'un meeting. (U.S. congresswoman and six others were killed Saturday in Arizona by a gunman who opened fire during a rally.)
It's an easy mistake to make. Indeed, that was initial assumption. Who survives a gunshot to the head?
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the middle of breaking news knows the initial cacophony right after a startling, shocking and unexpected event. I witnessed the oh-so-macho George W. Bush White House employees skitter out in what was an obvious panic attack in the first hour of the Sept. 11, 2001, events. Even chicken hawk Georgie Porgie himself scrambled to a bunker in Nebraska.
Of course, some people simply act in disregard of their own well-being. Such as the now-dubbed "hero intern" Daniel Hernandez whose quick moves essentially saved Gifford's life.
In journalism, such adrenalin-pumped responses are not uncommon among war correspondents. One reporter whose family I knew got himself blown up as he tinkered in fascination with an improvised Viet Cong grenade.
Then there's the surviving film by a Swedish-Argentine video journalist Leonardo Henrichsen in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet 1973 coup. He was manning the camera.
You see the images keeps rolling as soldiers approach to shut his filming (for Swedish television), it tumbles and shows the lens-eye's last skaky views, then it goes black. Henrichsen was killed on the spot.
Now if you click on LeMonde's feed on the Gifford shooting you still get the dramatic, but more accurate
Etats-Unis : une députée entre la vie et la mort après une fusillade
Translation — United States: a congresswoman between life and death after a fusillade.By the Orwellian magic of the Web, the newspaper goof never happened. Except it did.
* http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/01/08/une-parlementaire-americaine-tuee-dans-une-fusillade_1463036_3222.html#xtor=RSS-3208
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Pound foolish about welfare fraud
A new year's clean slate and little happening forces the journalist to end up burrowing through piles of audits to find news. Here's my perennial beef about almost all of the investigating: it's all focused on penny-ante small-time pilfering by individuals, not the big money corporate ripoffs.
An appointee steers contracts to favored consulting firms? The fine tooth comb is used to qualify everything until the misdeed is found either negligible or not subject to proof.
But let someone, usually someone none too smart, chisel a dime here or there to feed his or her family and the Marines get called in. There was even a Republican president who lied and slandered and racially stereotyped people with a claim about an alleged "welfare queen" that turned out to be false.
We could give away public assistance to everyone who said they needed it (frankly, it's not much to begin with), without verifying their papers and we'd save tons on paperwork and bureaucracy, to which a substantial portion of the money goes.
All told the real and significant corruption is corporate, not individual.They get contracts for millions for services they perform poorly, at very low cost or not at all. In contrast, the average individual gets, at most, a below-poverty income. Time to refocus accountability on the private sector's use of the public dime.
An appointee steers contracts to favored consulting firms? The fine tooth comb is used to qualify everything until the misdeed is found either negligible or not subject to proof.
But let someone, usually someone none too smart, chisel a dime here or there to feed his or her family and the Marines get called in. There was even a Republican president who lied and slandered and racially stereotyped people with a claim about an alleged "welfare queen" that turned out to be false.
We could give away public assistance to everyone who said they needed it (frankly, it's not much to begin with), without verifying their papers and we'd save tons on paperwork and bureaucracy, to which a substantial portion of the money goes.
All told the real and significant corruption is corporate, not individual.They get contracts for millions for services they perform poorly, at very low cost or not at all. In contrast, the average individual gets, at most, a below-poverty income. Time to refocus accountability on the private sector's use of the public dime.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Consumer Rights in a Corporate Internet
Now that the Internet is about to be swallowed up by governments and giant multinational corporations, let's assert some basic rights as consumers. After all, if it's just going to be a service we pay for, let's get our money's worth, at a minimum.
If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:
If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:
- no more tweeting and status-updating involving the trivia of everyday life (we don't care what you're cooking for dinner);
- no more endless comments by people who obviously have never read the words they're attempting to write (we do so need edyucashun);
- no more scams, by Nigerians or European software companies alike; and
- no more spam.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
2011: the year without heroes
Call me naïve, but for most of my life I have had heroes, seemingly immutable principles, beliefs and hopes and even faith. Each has peeled off me like the skins of an onion until coming to believe in nothing much, eschew hope, deem most principles self-serving and finding malleable clay at the feet of all my heroic statuary.
My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.
Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.
There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.
By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.
To say he has disappointed is an understatement.
We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.
My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.
Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.
There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.
By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.
To say he has disappointed is an understatement.
We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.
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