Hispanics and Obama

Bloguera's headline "Latino artists who can't vote support Obama" raises one obvious issue with regard to the Hispanic vote -- while nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic, we make up only 8 percent of eligible voters -- but not the much touchier question of whether the browns will vote for a black (which Hillary Clinton answered "no").

Logic would suggest that la güera Clinton is wrong, as I have argued. The spunky Bloguera, however, did point to a fact worth underlining: Hispanics are not all alike.

Clinton won a majority of Hispanic votes in Texas and trounced Obama in Puerto Rico. Yet there you have a video of Hispanic artists who sing praises of Obama.

How to explain this?

First, Clinton and her husband had good advice and years of building bridges into the Hispanic community thanks to that advice. However, some of that bridge building was largely symbolic and opportunistic.

I will never forget the stupid dog trick of a Clinton White House adviser who tried to wow a group of Hispanic journalists by having his pager buzz so he could excuse himself at about quitting time by saying he had to go to the Oval Office. The contempt had been visible from the first moment.

Secondly, the Hispanics who vote are largely union members. We do know that the union leaders on the ground went all out for Hillary, despite her husband's North American Free Trade Agreement betrayal. (Is it any wonder that AFL-CIO unions are shrinking?)

OK, so you knew this.

Thirdly, and what we do not often admit, despite Virgilio Elizondo's multiracial, multicultural theology of mestizaje (or blending or races), is that, yes, Virginia, some Hispanics are racist.

For example, I will never forget the embarrassing Cuban minstrel show to which I was treated in the presence of a Cuban-born bishop whom I was visiting in Miami. This was not in the Al Jolson era but in the 1980s, when the very white Cuban exiles looked down their noses at the darker, more newly arrived Marielitos -- to say nothing of their disregard for the Negros of the Liberty City slum.

In my parents' country of origin, Argentina, I heard university professors joke about how they trimmed points off the score of certain students' work, merely because they were Jewish.

Sotto voce, some of the darkest Dominicans in new York City still have hatred for anyone of African origin, due to the 19th century invasion of their country by the first black-ruled nation in the world, Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.

Are these obstacles insurmountable for Obama insofar as the Hispanic vote? Why should he care?

Like Hillary, Obama will learn, sooner or later, that there are differing Hispanic constituencies. He probably won't win the Cubans, but he can probably win the Mexican-American vote and the Neorican.

Some of the Hillary connections can be transferred through the party. Certainly, the unions, are unlikely to oppose the anointed Democratic nominee and likely to see common cause in someone who as recently as last spring was defending the notion of an accelerated union certification process in the halls of the Senate.

As for the racists, they're not really American in the finest tradition of America, and they are not the majority by a long shot. The majority of Hispanics have good reason to see common cause with the son of an immigrant than with someone who courts the border-wall party.

The question that remains open, to my lights, is whether the Hispanic vote will matter. Those in the business of promoting Hispanics have been crowing that this vote is "pivotal" since 1980 -- to little discernible effect.

Hispanics make up 8 percent of all U.S. voters. However, if their turnout follows the pattern of past elections some studies estimate that they will make up only about 6.5 percent of those who actually vote next November.

Of course, Hispanics are not distributed evenly and made up more than a tenth of the electorate in the past primary season only in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Texas.

Recipe for New Politics

Jim Johnson, who recently resigned from assignment as Barack Obama's VP-vetter-in-chief, is memorable to me not for his insider influence, but for his inside-the-Beltway humor, including one of his favorite recipes: "Palm Steak."

Back when Johnson was Walter Mondale's campaign chief, he made his recipe public, which as I recall went like this: go to Palm Restaurant, get seated, order steak. The Palm, as people with wallets much fatter than mine call it, is a swanky Washington eatery at which I have partaken of the Johnson recipe only when someone else was footing the bill.

His resignation saddened me partly because I knew he was probably an asset to Obama (even though in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro was not such a hot choice), but mostly because it highlights a stupid and annoying political truism that, slogans notwithstanding, is completely off the mark: Washington is the problem.

By "Washington," the unseen people John McCain likes to address as "friends" are said to mean not the actual capital city, not its African American majority which they hardly even realize exists, nor much less the federal employees who stream in from Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

No, the Washington routinely accused in the hustings of being the core problem of the American body politic is an echo-system (pun intended) populated by congresscritters and White House rats, along with slithering lobby larvae and pontificating wonki illuminati, all of whom seek to engage with celebrity media figures in a mating ritual of mutual pandering and preening.

Of course, what most people outside the Beltway rarely realize is that this fauna lives on only due to its parasitical relationship to the worker bees of the capital: the network of professionals touched in some way on a daily basis by the capital's chief sacrament, policy.

This includes the phalanx of lawyers and editorial professionals who make sure the text of laws and regulations is precisely as intended and no more, the army of specialists who explain to the decision-makers the complexities of a million branches of human knowledge, and the participant observation of hundreds of off-camera print journalists of little renown, such as myself, who often spread within the policy hive the information that brings about necessary self-correction.

Let's face it: elected officials haven't run the truly necessary parts of government for years. If they did, things would be immensely worse. There would be no bean counters to remind the Bushies that they do need some taxes, if only to pay their own salaries at a minimum. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers might be running around in Iraq naked, not merely with deficient armor. And pollution standards, such as they are, would never have become practicable.

Crazy things occur to politicians, lobbyists, wonks and even the occasional TV newsreader. Remember Star Wars and the flat tax?

In Britain, the use of thalidomide in the early 1960s as a sedative prescribed to pregnant women to combat the effects of morning sickness led to the birth of children with birth defects such as missing or shortened limbs. That drug was never approved for similar use in the United States thanks to a brave physician I once met, a middle level bureaucrat who fought pharmaceutical companies tooth and nail. (The drug is now used successfully in the USA for treating leprosy.)

What prevented such crazy things was Washington, too.

It's the denizens of that Washington who will have to tell President McCain (cough, sputter) that tax cuts for the rich just have to be rolled back or explain to President Obama that not everything in his program can be accomplished at once.

The recipe for new politics may well involve some of the "old" Washington, that part of Washington that has always worked in the boiler room of the ship of state.

Meet Depress

As much as I liked newly deceased Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert, NBC's hour-long farewell Friday night and "celebration" on Sunday went so far over the top with bathos as to make me want to join a choir of Munchkins for a rousing chorus of "Ding, dong, Tim Russert's dead" (to the tune of The Wizard Oz's "The Witch Is Dead").

The Friday special ran out of original material about 10 minutes into the program and by Sunday so much had been printed, posted and broadcast about Saint Russert that only some Afghan villager hiding in the Tora Bora caves would not have heard every last possible cliché available.

Yet anchor Tom Brokaw continued the death march into banality with his demand for "no tears,"a decree he telegenically broke in a transparent -- and desperate -- play for ratings.

The two "tributes" struck me as tasteless as the tons of unwrapped flowers piled on the Buckingham Palace mound of mush after the death of Princess Diana, a woman far more celebrated for far fewer accomplishments than Russert's.

The best tribute to Russert would have been to get on with the show.

Brokaw, or someone who could interview without a script, should have faced some policymaker who had something substantive and mildly original to say about some topic other than the personal trivia of a newscaster who had barely missed becoming a twinkie, just as he was dangerously en route to becoming one. (In case you don't know, "twinkie" is print journalese for on-camera broadcast news figures: blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside.)

Let's be clear: I have nothing against Russert.

Russert was entertaining and had some pointed questions (though I found his quizzing of Condoleeza Rice on running for president a bit of dead-horse beating). He did his job reasonably well for one of the few people in journalism with a multi-million-dollar salary. So?

Also, my goodness, he died pretty much at his desk, at 58, of a heart attack. Is it that so surprising for a man as obviously overweight as he was? My own father, whose figure matched Russert's, died at 59 three decades ago. I myself am only two years younger than Russert was, and I have struggled to lose 35 pounds in the past year -- with hope for more -- precisely to avoid a similar fate. Yet ... who knows?

In the end, where was the news here? Someone, tell me, please!

Besides, what was so startling about Russert, after all? Russert was a lawyer, a former aide to powerful politicians, then one of the suits in the NBC corporate suites. Only someone with that combination of connections could have parlayed just a few years of back room "journalism" experience into a 17-year gig in a prime public affairs television slot.

Sorry, but I don't see material for sainthood there.

Russert's Sunday television cortege was also pathetic. Led by a man whose chief talent is being able to read on camera, accompanied by an alleged historian accused of plagiarism whose first splash in publishing was the gossip she heard as a White House intern (remind you of someone?), along with a Washington "power couple" no one has bet a plugged nickel on for years, and yes, the obligatory token black face to pretend that Washington's white elite establishment isn't.

What wisdom did these individuals have to impart?

Then again, who were we mourning? A great man of letters, a jurist who had defined complex issues, an engineer who had built a new marvel, a scientist who had found a cure? No, just an overweight, middle aged guy who parlayed influence into TV celebrity. Period.

Tim Russert was probably a nice guy to his dog, if he had one. I'm sure his family will miss him. Still, in a world with serious problems (which, admittedly, his work sometimes helped illuminate), was his death worth endless repetition of mediocre quotes?

I'd like to think he would say no. Except ... I did note that the Sunday show billed Tim Russert as managing editor. Did he script his own televised obituary? I don't know and I would rather not find out. I've had my fill of Tim Russert for a while.

Just One Word: Plastics

Who does not recall the title's words as the quintessence of sage advice of the 1960s, from the film The Graduate? What would we tell the graduates of today, among them my son, who is getting his bachelor's degree from Harvard this morning? Computers? Homeland security? A young man wants the answer, but he wants to find it on his own.

My recollection of this period of my life involves a healthy dose of anxiety. The first lesson I learned in the job market was that everyone wanted someone experienced. How the hell was I going to get experience unless someone hired me?

Besides, what was wrong with these people? They were merely interested in making money, when I brought the wisdom of the ages.

Yes, what one is going to do with one's future -- asked of The Graduate's Ben as of everyone at that stage -- seems the important question, but it really isn't. Much more important than a job and a future, it seems to me, is learning and the present.

What have you learned? I toted up 17 years between kindergarten and my university graduation and, at the time, I asked my good friend Michael what I had learned.

"Never to do it again," was his reply. Three decades later, my son laughed at the words, as I tried to help him make sense of his moment.

One hopes a university graduate has learned how to learn. Perhaps a graduate has a rough map of stored human knowledge and where it is to be found.

A few graduates have particular, occupationally specific skills. Yet in a world in which most people can expect to change careers, not just jobs, several times in a lifetime, this is not all that meaningful.

Besides, making a living is predictably easier than it seems at first blush. Anxious graduates remind me of fretful mothers who worried whether their babies would ever walk and talk. After all, how many people never learn how to walk and talk?

Even at the depths of the Great Depression 78 percent of all able-bodied available U.S. workers were employed. That wasn't good news for the 23 percent that weren't, but it meant that you had a 4 in 5 chance of having a job. Today U.S. national unemployment stands at 5 percent. This means that 95 percent of all people able and willing to work hold jobs. You have more than 9 out of 10 chances of being employed.

My son and his peers will get jobs, likely get married, have kids, "the full catastrophe" as Zorba put it. Anthony Quinn, who played the Nikos Kazantzakis character, rendered the adjective with a faux Greek accent that lent the phrase delicious ambiguity. In his mouth it sounded as "the fool catastrophe."

So the first concern is what one learns, not what one can do with it. The wise and honest answer is perhaps that of Socrates: that one knows nothing.

The second is like it: who one is. A young man or woman at the age of graduating from university is most clearly no longer a child. Graduation is the modern bar mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony for the educated classes in the Western world.

My son's grandfather was given $100 in 1923 and told to make his way after he came out of Princeton and set out for business in New York. According to the inflation calculator, that's $1,227.31 in 2007 dollars.

So, who are you at this moment in which parents watch you fly off the nest for the last time? There's a different answer for everyone.

I would like to suggest that we are all, at any given point in our lives, somewhat more than what you look like, how much you earn, the kind of work you do or the kind of mate you attract. In some ways we are all less unusual and unique than we would like to think, less free to be individual; in others, we have made choices that define us -- rarely irrevocably.

If you or someone you know is graduating this season, take a moment to take stock, an unhurried pause, without thinking about a job and the future. Just revel in what you understand and who you are this moment.

Before you know it ... it will be gone.

Blogging vs. Journalism

This week Alex Fear won a round of beer from me when someone made the 250th comment on my post concerning a catfight two barmy¹ Englishwomen decided embark upon in the blogosphere. In all the British verbal diarrhea, one recurring theme is the mistaken view that this blog -- or any other, for that matter -- amount to journalism.

This is now espoused by one of those immensely tiresome British commenters who asserts that she is a "journalist" and how dare I blog without reference to the canons of the trade to express compassion for Felicity Jane Lowde, a woman who obviously could use some. I strongly suspect the alleged journalist is none other than Rachel Whatszername, a celebrity victim du jour in Britain back in 2005, but that's neither here nor there.

No one who has actually earned money reporting facts in print or broadcast -- as I and my journalism colleagues do in our respective news journals and bulletins -- would confuse such work with blogging, essentially an unpaid hobby in which people "log" their thoughts in essays of varying length on matters large and small. Essayists are not journalists, any more than entomologists who write multiple scholarly volumes about insects are journalists.

Journalists who blog are not doing journalism when they blog; they are blogging. This is much the same as with entomologists, who are not engaged in entomology when they are bugged by bloggers.

Now it's easy to see how a Brit might be confused about this.

The British press treats facticity with a fair amount of latitude. Having had the temporary misfortune a number of years ago to work as a journalist in Britain, I discovered this the hard way. As in most of Europe -- Brits don't know they are European, so keep this on the Q.T. -- the British press is first and foremost opinionated.

The Times is conservative, The Guardian is liberal. The tabloids are mostly fascistoid, sexist and mostly devoid of truly useful or significant information -- like the telly².

Much as with our own public lack of information in North America, the British public is grossly misinformed, but their disinformation arises out of corporate policy harkening back to forever (read Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" for a time-tested sendup). Most newsrooms in Britain have a creature unknown in these shores, known as a "sub-editor" whose job is to make sure not merely that the syntax is correct, punctuation clear and word usage consistent with style, but also that the "editorial line" is reflected in the set of factoids conveyed.

As if this were not enough, since 1912 the Ministry of Defence [sic] has routinely issued something called a "D notice" to any journalistic scribe the bureaucrats want, without accountability or reason, let alone rhyme. Upon receipt of the "request" not to publish whatever it is officialdom wants not published for reasons of "national security" (no one has ever abused that phrase, of course), reporting ceases instantly.

Not only that. The British legal system is so tilted in favor of money that courts notoriously reward the most inane nuisance suits to the point that most British journalists are not allowed to mention a traffic accident without a police report to source it on -- no matter what they or other witnesses saw with their own eyes!

In brief, freedom of the press as we know it is nonexistent in Britain. The D-notice exerts what we in the USA regard as unconstitutional prior restraint, to which the practice of libel law adds an economic muzzle.

So, to the average Brit, your run of the mill blog is a veritable font of journalism. All you need is a typeface and -- presto! -- you're a journalist!

But wait! We haven't even examined the difference between opinion and reporting of fact. Of course not! The average Brit is utterly unable to distinguish between the two, given that he has been served up opinion as reportage all his life.

In sum, to all you Brits agog about Rachel and Felicity, stay after class and write on the blackboard 100 times: Blogging is just a hobby.

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¹ Britishism for "nutty."
² 'nother one, television.

Heart Market News: SLTR Dips on CZX Surge

Turns out that, as with Microsoft and Yahoo stock, relationships with folk of the male persuasion are really vehicles of investment. So, at least, says a consensus of women, often expressed in a sentence such as "I'm investing in the relationship."

That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.

From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).

In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.

Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.

Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)

To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.

Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.

What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?

Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.

Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.

Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.

It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.

On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.

To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).

Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.

Love is its own reward.

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* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.

Oh, Those Gay and Lesbian Sinners!

A couple of weeks ago I visited Foundry Methodist Church (aka Hillary's church) and got into an argument over 2008 United Methodist General Conference resolutions reaffirming the incompatibility of homosexual behavior with Christianity to the point of exclusion from church membership and ordained ministry.

Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.

On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.

Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)

In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)

Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.

Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.

This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.

Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)

Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.

This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.

Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)

The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.

"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)

Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.

There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.

To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.

First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).

Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."

Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.

On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."

I see problems with both. Now you know why.

That 70s Oil Crisis is Baaack!

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

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

Let's backtrack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for a Hillary Holiday

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

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

Clinton, however, had me doubting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sure wasn't seeking my vote.

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

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

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

That's not what a great president says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

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

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

Faith, quest, meaning, misery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I must not intervene in other countries"

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

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

In particular, I was amused by the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homer Simpson's Brazil, Capital of Buenos Aires

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

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

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

To Argentine ears, the dialogue sounds something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granted, we are not alone.

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

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

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

Argentina's "Farmers" Are Not Exactly Old MacDonald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papa Nazinger Comes to Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respect the Boundary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing and Doing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kick the Dog

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

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

Imagine a scene in millions of families.

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

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

That's the kick-the-dog game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damnation

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

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

Because of the appalling state of religious literacy.

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

Isaiah cries out in God's voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 Random Factoids

Savia has tagged me to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spitzer, the Mann Act and neo-Puritanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer Pretzel Strikes Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Norms in Religious Flux

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

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

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

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

OK, my insights now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking "Terrorism"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who wields terror today? Think about it.

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

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

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