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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the hypocrisy, stupid

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

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

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

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

Second, Palin parades herself as Christian.

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

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

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

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

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

"The Laptop Rule" vs What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The E-mail Peace Pipe

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

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

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

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

No one should appeal to

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

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

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

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

Truth Telling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conventional Conventions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whither Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

Save your gasps for the comment box.

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

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

Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.

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

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

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

If not, why then, marriage?

250x30 #56 Brother Steele

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

Rick Warren and the Evangelical Life Project

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

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

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

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

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

It's the same old pap.

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

Tomorrow, 40 Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Atheism a Religion? What is?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contra Feministe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to the Baby Boom's Echo

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

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

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

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

But what about the entitlement thing?

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

Really? Life will take care of that.

Why Neo-Conservatism Deserved to Fail

As the veritable Thermidorian Reaction that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan winds to a close with the failed presidency of George W. Bush, the failure of neo-conservatism seems to have been pre-ordained. Some analysts are concerned with why, wondering -- by way of the overdone "brand" cliché -- it is no longer "selling," but I'm more interested in why it never deserved to succeed, so we collectively learn the lesson once and for all.

Setting aside right-wing intramural disputes concerning the term, for my purposes "neoconservatism" is the generally new brand of U.S. conservatism that emerged from the first Reagan electoral campaign onward. Earlier U.S. conservatives had been elitist and roundly unpopular advocates of a puny misanthropy consisting of balanced budgets and neutrality in world wars, along with a dash of racialism.

Enter the Boomers of 1980-2008, a swarm of opportunists and demagogic ideologues who wrapped themselves in the flag, their professed love of (unborn) human "life," their avowed family values and their Christian faith.

Never mind that they became the most corrupt profiteers since the Grant Administration. Forget that they killed life for many infants and children who depended on public aid. Let's also overlook the many foreign and U.S. people killed in unprovoked military aggression from Grenada to Iraq. Nor shall we mention that their faithless, divorced Ronald Reagan papered over their cynicism about values and that his poll-reading henchmen manipulated religious opponents of abortion with empty promises. We shall turn eyes otherwise concerning the none-too-devout myriad sexual exploits of folks from Newton Leroy Gingrich to Larry Craig.

These inherent hypocrisies are only part of why neoconservatism richly deserves its grave. Consider the following qualities of neoconservatism:

1. Anti-democratic: propounds a hierarchically ordered society, along the sex and ethnic lines that have traditionally divided American society (when "men were men" and "the colored weren't uppity"), with white males of northwest European origin at the top.
2. Socioeconomically Darwinist: embraces beggar-thy-neighbor policies of extreme individualism and privilege for the asset-owning few, deemed under Calvinist ideas to be divinely rewarded with riches for their efforts;
3. Authoritarian: touts notions of "natural law" and religious values, rather than unfettered inquiry, as bases for public policy (eg., stem cell policy);
   
4. Anti-American: emerged aided, abetted and allied to foreign fascistoid movements alien to the ethos of the American democratic experiment, such as the right-wing axis of The Washington Times and the Unification Church, the more secretive Franco-era Spanish Catholic Opus Dei movement (in which Justice Antonin Scalia participates), and the even less well-known Tradition, Family and Property international movement;
5. Aggressively lawless internationally: holds the United States unaccountable to U.S. ratified international law whenever convenient, such as in the peacetime mining of Nicaraguan ports, bombing of Iraq, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic (to name just a few) and also in a similar roster of abuses in international trade;
6. Anti-intellectual: in a bid to appear "populist" the elitist neocons have bound themselves in a straitjacket of doctrines that fly in the face of the best that modern, current study teaches and, as a result, have failed to deliver broad-based prosperity (admittedly not their goal) or even its semblance (a propaganda necessity).

In sum, for these and manifold other problems in the very nature of neoconservatism, once they are kicked out of power, please, please ... never let them back in!

FDR, not JFK

In the very well known picture shown below, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for the presidency this year, is visualized as a new John F. Kennedy even though the most likely model is the candidate I wanted, but could not get, in 1976: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Sure, Obama is reminiscent of Kennedy, who was 43 when he was sworn in and deemed "young" (a notion that puzzled me at the time). Obama also shares with Kennedy the mastery of a personal style of oratory, his identity as a member of an "outsider" group in terms of the levers of American society and, of course, charisma.

Yet Obama will be 47 years old if he wins the election and is sworn in, closer to Franklin Roosevelt's 51. (I now regard both ages as relatively "young.") Although he is neither patrician nor disabled and thus superficially a very different kind of man, Obama's time and challenge resemble FDR's more closely than Kennedy's.

JFK was elected at the peak of American prosperity, power and self-confidence. Obama, if elected, will preside over a time in which -- as with 1932 -- fear is the nation's major enemy. Indeed, the government calls the people it uses as excuses for military adventures, "terrorists," that is, inspirers of fear (although, franky, I am not particularly terrorized).

Like FDR, a putative President Obama (what a fine ring that has!) will face:

• reconstructing confidence in the nation's financial sector through thoroughgoing reform;
• rescuing thousands of Americans from bankruptcy and potential homelessness (as in the Depression, I'm told there are tent cities in the Southwest, where people who lost their homes are beginning to squat);
• reversing the economic decline of the wage-earning majority who on average today earn less than their parents earned in 1973.

That's not mentioning uniquely contemporary problems, such as:

• the erosion of respect for the United States following unprovoked aggression against Iraq;
• successful pursuit of those responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001;
• committing to eradicate extreme poverty from the face of the earth;
  
• finding a way to revamp the health system so every U.S. inhabitant has a realistic opportunity to get care as basic human dignity requires;
• overhauling Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and other social programs to prevent their financial ruin and assure a sturdy safety net for future generations;
  
• the restoration of the nation's infrastructure, neglected over the past 30 years; and
• encouraging the development of renewable sources of energy to replace our current overuse of hydrocarbons such as petroleum.
  

These are all Roosevelt-scale, foundational projects. These are not dazzling new programs, such as JFK's NASA and Peace Corps, which although worthy of continuation, were extensions of the national purpose. They are essentials without which the republic is at peril.

The Other Kind of Welfare

As poverty month approaches -- the poverty rate is released at the end of August -- I am drawn to considering how rarely, despite the American myth, anyone really pulls themselves up by one's own bootstraps. Most of us owe who we become as adults, occupationally, financially, socially and, of course, psychologically, to someone else.

The phrase "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps," which prompted the computer term bootstrapping, or simply booting, arises from the tall tales of adventure told of Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen. The derring-do was satirized in 1785 by one Rudolf Erich Raspe in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. In that work, Munchhausen pulls himself out of a swamp by his shoe laces, without help.

In reality, almost anyone who is not poor today had considerable help, even if it wasn't from a formal public assistance program. There's such a thing as what I would call Middle Class Welfare, much as there is simply naked, decadent and obscene privilege for the rich.

Most likely you know MCW. Set aside your rhetorical preparation for the oppression olympics and you'll recognize the decent schooling you received, the food and clothing, the vacations, the parents with sufficient education and intellectual interests to spur you to inquire.

Maybe, like my father, yours worked in the public sector and actually was supported by taxpayers. That goes for everyone from mail carried to president, from U.S. bureaucrat to U.N. envoy. The taxpayers of the world have long -- for millenia, even -- supported a class of scribes and experts to aid the king or ruler.

Even if your father worked in the private sector ... you never heard of corporate subsidies? Think of employment during the Depression and employment after: what made the difference, if not massive war spending and later the military-industrial complex as described by that wild-eyed radical Dwight David Eisenhower.

Every generation in your family who went to a university was partially subsidized. You didn't really think your tuition actually pays for 100% of the costs of a college education, did you?

Indeed, here's my proposition. Society is not a business and is not intended to make a profit, nor much less to be efficient (which even the very profitable businesses aren't).

Moreover, human beings make thoroughly inefficient, wasteful investments. You have to spend about 20-30 years feeding and clothing them to get 30-40 years of middling, complaining output, then you have to spend a fortune for 20 years more postponing their inevitable breakdown and demise. All in all, a losing proposition.

That is why welfare for everyone, that is, a social support for the basic needs and dignity of everyone, is an essential requirement for a sound, functioning and vibrant society.

Yes, you too, get and need welfare.

British Victim Olympics Come to the USA

Imagine that a taxicab rider in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 had parlayed minor injuries into an interview on "60 Minutes," a blog, a book and an occasional column in The New York Times, taking on the role of poster child and blaring loudspeaker of 9/11 victimhood. Imagine then, that an apparently unbalanced woman challenged her role on her own blog and Ms. Victim managed to have the challenger imprisoned for doing so.

Change the country to Britain and the event to the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and you'd be imaging someone like Rachel North, of whom apparently the Brits must now be so tired that just yesterday she was now bottom-feeding on a lazy Saturday U.S. public radio show that specializes in weird slices of life.

I heard it yesterday, having been apprised of her radio appearance by an alert reader of this blog.

North, which I understand is a pseudonym, was interviewed by an entirely sympathetic English-sounding voice concerning her apparent encounter with British conspiracy theorists who believe she is part of some British coverup concerning the London bombing.

Did she have anything new to say about her experience? No.

Did North have anything to comment concerning her egregious moves to censor another blogger under medieval British laws that allow trial in absentia (!) and jail for the expression of opinion? No.

The show was merely devoted to how teddibly, teddibly difficult life is for poor, forlorn Rachel North who, apparently is pursued by all sorts of British online nutcases, who claim -- obviously irrationally -- that she is part of a government conspiracy to blame Muslims for the attack.

Rachel North is not that important, chaps!

No mention of her publicity-seeking "diary" of her experiences during the bombing on the BBC, her endless blogging on her own tragedy and her continuing nitpicking of the Labour Party government's official investigation. Nor much mention of the money she made off the tragedy with her book and column in ultraconservative news magnate Rupert Murdock's The Times of London.

There was no mention of one Felicity Jane Lowde, against whom North and others campaigned to have jailed for her admittedly questionable opinions concerning North in comment sections on North's blog and posts on Lowde's own. Lowde was imprisoned last summer. So much for Britain's right to free speech.

As I have written here earlier (see here and here) a pox on both their houses. Insofar as I am concerned it's just an online catfight of no significance -- except that it has rattled the cages of the inmates in that asylum called the United Kingdom and she now is trying to bring the circus here. (There's more money to be made in the USA, isn't there?)

Indeed, also not mentioned in the radio show, the behavior displayed by North's own supporters -- see the 250 comments on the first link cited above -- amply demonstrated that they are no lilting, longsuffering wallflowers. Whatever is wrong with Lowde, the "Northsquad" as my cyberfriend Alex Fear calls them, and perhaps anonymously North herself, are as "antisocial" online (this was their charge concerning Lowde) as their bête noir.

Why do I, who am usually more interested in politics, economics, ethics, etc., even care? Because in National Public Radio's one-sided, semi-prurient infotainment about North, I found a saddening blur of lines between blogging and journalism, between right and wrong, between what is important and what should be laughed out of the court of public opinion.

On WAMU, the station I heard her on, they didn't bother to inquire enough to uncover the free speech scandal of a blogger jailed for airing opinion, the travesty of shameless publicity-seeking that surrounds explosive incidents (pun intended) or the silliness of an English-accent-only broadcast segment on a show for American audiences about events and people of no consequence here.

Not "Bitter"? American Exceptionalism at Work

Remember when everyone jumped on Barack Obama for saying that blue-collar workers were "bitter"? Now here's one "bitter" unemployed man who's gone on a rampage in Tennessee that proves precisely Obama's point.

The Illinois senator and presumed Democratic presidential nominee said the following in April:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Now there's Jim David Adkisson, 58, who shot eight people, killing two, in a Unitarian Universalist Church, stating as his reason his hatred of liberals and homosexuals. Except for the fact that he's in Tennessee, Adkisson could be the poster boy for Obama's statement: he is an unemployed, luckless, bitter man.

He is also the poster boy for American Exceptionalism, the notion that somehow the rules of life that apply everywhere else, don't apply to the United States. One version is a "my country right or wrong" kind of nationalism.

A more complex U.S. exception is the self-defeating, self-hating bitterness at economic injustices that -- inexplicably and illogically -- drives a certain kind of working class American to vote or and support, precisely the ethos and the leaders who would do him the most harm. The classics are blue-collar Republican voters who loved Reagan even though he gave them a 10% unemployment rate (1982) and a complete wipe out in a huge number of smokestack industries.

The exceptional American is the Southern white who hates unions -- hey, who wants to work for better pay and benefits, that's sissy stuff! -- and hates blacks and hates liberals -- hey, who wants social insurance, anyway? -- and loves the GOP.

The Republican has played with his religion by promising to abolish abortion but never once in 30 years really trying, got him riled up about gay marriage and 9/11, then picked his pocket clean and sent his kid to Iraq with inadequate armor and a ridiculous plan. Yet who does he hate? The liberals! The gays!

Can't say I understand this exceptional American guy. He's been suckered so many ways, so many times, by so many hate-radio talk-show hosts, televangelists and huckster politicians.

No wonder he's bitter.

Disparity

Someone who knows that I follow U.S. policy on poverty and unemployment asked me for a number that is not those typically reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: What proportion of the unemployed are African American?

The answer is not as simple as looking up a ready made official figure.

In June, the African-American labor force totaled 16 million, or 57.8 percent of the total African-American civilian, noninstitutional population (27.8 million). I offer these figures to highlight that "labor force" essentially means civilians out of jail who are able and willing to work.

Of that group, 1.6 million people were unemployed (for a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, compared 4.9 percent for whites). See this Bureau of Labor Statistics table.

Now, in response to the question, the total number of people unemployed in June was 8.4 million (see this other table). Thus, that the 1.6 million who were black represented about 19 percent of all unemployed.

Let's put this in context.

The 37,051,483 people who are black are roughly 12.3 percent of the total population of 299,398,485 (see these 2006 Census Bureau figures). Given that they make up 19 percent of the unemployed, blacks are overrepresented among the unemployed and roughly 1.5 times more likely to be unemployed than the overall population.

The Correct Use of "No Problem"

You may recall my pet peeve with "no problem." Typically, some half-unshaven twentysomething hooked up to a music player uses the phrase to respond to a customer complaint, as if to say that he will tolerate the effrontery of interrupting his mp3 listening to handle a refund or a replacement request. Right, I was so worried about your entertainment at work, kid!

Yet there is a right way to use of the phrase and I came across it this week. On my way to work I thought I inadvertently inconvenienced a young woman and immediately offered an apology, to which she replied with a smile, "No problem." Exactly!

I had wronged her and she was being gracious, offering that it was no problem to her, speaking purely out of courtesy. In French, de rien (it's nothing) is offered, although usually it's in response to merci (thank you).

The sentiment is similar. I am really in your debt, but you offer graciously to relieve me of the burden by saying it was nothing, though we both know it was something.

Advocacy on One's Own Behalf

During the four years in which I was paid to advocate on behalf of my own diffuse ethnic group, I occasionally referred to my work as "the Hispanic biz," from which I was grateful to depart. Decades later, as a blogger who happens to be Hispanic, I am watching a blogosphere in which identity is almost a profession entitled to disrespect everyone else for shock or sympathy value.

Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?

• In Fernham, a wannabe feminist literary analyst, devotes a post to a paper she heard about Jorge Luis Borges' translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own, parroting the notion that the version is "fatally muted," despite her mangling of Spanish because she doesn't speak the language!
  
  
• My adored Bloguera posted a funny but somewhat excessive slam on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, admittedly an unrivalled collection of blowhards, because they called the chairman "presidente" in the Spanish version of their Web page -- even though presidente happens to be an accurate translation of the title for the head of a committee.
  
  
• Then there's Gawker's dizzying spin on the New Yorker cover caricature of Barack Obama: early in the morning they were outraged, by noon they recognized satire and in the afternoon they talked their way out of it by pretending that they were undergoing the five steps of "how you were supposed to respond."
  

OK, so it's only blogging, not neuroscience. And, pace regular readers, yours truly deeply resembles these remarks.

Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?

Greenness Is Next to Godliness

It always struck me as very odd that U.S. churches, charged in part with good stewardship of their acre, do everything they can, through their parking lots, to encourage the use of cars on Sunday. That is why, for my sixth ethical imperative, you will recall, I expanded the biblical encomium about adultery -- which was really about maintaining a pure lineage for the purposes of inheritance -- to apply to preserving the environment, our common inheritance.

In these days of high gasoline prices, of course, everyone is "green." Yet you still see those parking lots overflowing with SUVs. I have never heard a word ever preached against these gargantuan monuments to selfishness, lest they go elsewhere and affect the pastor's bottom line.

The Bible, of course, is the very opposite of environment friendly. One more reason to question it. In Genesis, God tells the first humans "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth." (Gen. 1:28)

This view influenced the Puritans and their spiritual descendants in the United States. Cities, railroads, highways, smokestacks, mines, vineyards, dams and canals were strung out from East to West like ornaments on a Christmas tree, pretty much without regard to what these human works did to plants and animals of North America, nor to the air, the water or the soil.

The U.S. Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s was part nature, part human carelessness. Bad weather came on the heels of the Depression's outbreak. It happened upon poorly tended, overworked soil with cultivated few of the modern agricultural precautions.

Today, as we face the environmental apocalypse of climate change, a commandment calling for "green" behavior seems oddly missing in the Mosaic original. So here goes my own godless ethical norm: "Thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows."

Le Socialisme Americain

When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America.

-- Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky) at the Senate Banking Committee

Heavens, no! Not socialism! Not a yearly month-long vacation for everyone, a 35-hour work week and freedom from worry about affording health care or old age. Can't have that!

Bunning's remark on Wednesday concerning the possible bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was, ostensibly, hyperbole. Yet it reflects the tenacious grip on a refusal among many Americans to be rational about any idea that might be even timidly left of center.

Many people, including a correspondent of mine, assume that the minute one criticizes the richly flawed system of capitalism, one is advocating the Gulag Soviet prison system with Joe Stalin on top. The ghost of Joe McCarthy seemingly inhabits a good share of the American psyche: anything even suggestively pinko, lefty, Commie is totalitarian trash and utterly unthinkable.

Yet not just France has dabbled quite nicely in socialism, without Gulag, without bread lines. Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Sweden have all had substantively socialist governments that have put in place a system of womb-to-tomb state-supported social and economic insurance.

Even capitalist Canada has socialized medicine; I've tried it and it's good.

Only the United States insists on the archaic avoirdupoids system of weights and measures to go along with its antiquated dog-eat-dog economics.

Yet, if you're wealthy or a corporation, there's U.S. socialism for you in the form of gargantuan subsidies. Why not capitalism for them, Mr. Bunning? Or, indeed, why not socialism for wage earners and those unlucky enough not to earn wages at all?

The Prejudice That's Still OK

Picture this: a young man goes into a synagogue and attempts to walk out with the scrolls of the Torah in the middle of the service; a controversy ensues, an spokeswoman for the rabbis decry the hate crime; then a Methodist minister pops up to say that's ridiculous, he knows hate crime and these silly Jews don't know what they're are talking about.

Didn't read about it anywhere? Of course not. There would be outrage everywhere.

The real story is that a University of Central Florida student at a campus Mass went up to receive communion then took the consecrated host home. He was asked to ingest it, but he put it in his mouth, then spit it out so he could take it home. The local diocesan spokeswoman called the event a "hate crime" and the local bishop asked for the host back.

That's not all.

Then came a "cool" Methodist preacher, one Rev. Jeremy Smith, who blogged all about it to say that it's not a hate crime. He completely dismissed the Catholics' complaints. So I pointed out that he really missed the sensibilities of Catholics and the history of host stealing because of his Protestant biases. Yet, so far, the guy has attempted to completely brush it off.

That's what 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda in the English-speaking world will do. Even "cool," techie, hip ministers feel free to take a swipe when Catholics -- whose theological point of view I do not share -- feel something they regard as sacred has been disrespected, intentionally so.

But, hey, after all, they're just silly Catholics. You know: fish-eaters, wafer-chewers, minions to the head of the whore of Rome, inquisitors, crusaders, horrible deluded people -- not enlightened Protestants. It seems that Methodist ministers can still publicly vent prejudices about Catholics in the United States without social consequences.

Two Boomer Final Solutions

Given that the programs likely to suck the fiscal air out of government, just when we need money to repair the damage done by 30 years of Republican ascendancy, are retirement and health assistance for the elderly, how about if we consider euthanasia and means-testing?

One sounds a lot worse than the other, but they really amount to the same thing. The programs should help those who actually need help, not all who would like it.

Few will disagree that an elderly widow with $1 million in the bank, a paid home, ample clothing and furnishing needs to get a check from the government to pay for the remaining necessary expenses -- excluding health care, next on the agenda. Therefore, limiting social security benefits to people without the money to support themselves eminent makes sense and would extend the retirement safety net to the Boomers' children.

Medicare is far trickier. Here the problem is escalating health costs. None of the solutions I've heard, from HillaryCare to ObamaTweaks to McCain's you're-on-your-own, really address the problem, namely that our health care system has a hugely expensive testing and heartbeat-preserving component that is unnecessary and in real, practical terms, useless.

We're spending ourselves to the poorhouse giving people six last months of bedridden misery -- that time over which 80 percent of all medical expenses occur -- and in the process abandoning poor children with decades ahead of them, whose disorder and illness health care ends up costing tenfold what prevention would have.

Unplug us, please!

The Beast Drops the Second Shoe

No one outside the policy loop ever believed me when I said that the Republicans were amassing federal deficits on purpose to, as Reagan budget David Stockman director said, "starve the beast" of government spending on social programs. Now there's a debate on how to cut social spending even when Bush is gone!

If you don't believe me, just go to the Brookings Institution's Taking Back our Fiscal Future page and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' A Balanced Approach to Restoring Fiscal Responsibility page, just up this week. You'll see a debate by the wonkiest wonks on how to trim slash every social program currently funded by the federal government, especially Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Reagan ran up more debt than all his predecessors put together and his spiritual son Dubya gave money to rich people who didn't need it with a purpose in mind: to make sure that if you face illness, old age, job loss and related risks that predictably all of us are likely to face in a lifetime, and you are not rich, you're on your own, baby, no matter how much you contributed.

Need proof Reagan and Bush actually knew what they were doing?

• "So we have the tax relief plan [...] that now provides a new kind -- a fiscal straightjacket for Congress. And that's good for the taxpayers, and it's incredibly positive news if you're worried about a federal government that has been growing at a dramatic pace over the past eight years and it has been." (President Bush, August 24, 2001)
  
  
• "John Anderson tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker." (Candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980)

The "extravagance" is never military spending or subsidies to corporations or giveaways to rich farmers and stockmarket magnates. No, it's taking food out of infants and pregnant women abandoned to survive on their own.

Now you know and you can't say no one told you.

A Survey of My Political Opinions

Continuing my top 10 influential books, I turn now to my politics and three emblematic books that informed the views I have developed: 2. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; 3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell; 6. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.

I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.

From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.

My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.

A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.

Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.

This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.

Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.

How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!

He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?

Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.

This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.

There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.

Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.

Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.

That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.

Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.

All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.

A Survey of My Religious Opinions

Prompted by Lifehacker's list of books people proposed as life-changing (which, yes, was disappointing), I began to compose a similar list. That four of them were religious works surprised me, yet even in my present free fall to agnosticism, they provide markers of thinking as devoid of superstition as of cultural conformity.

My top-ten influential books included 1. A Religion for Our Time by Louis Evely; 4. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman; 5. The Lord by Romano Guardini; 8. A Marginal Jew by John Meier.

Louis Evely was a Belgian Catholic priest and spiritual writer whose 1969 book I began to tackle one night in a small town of the province of La Pampa, from which my travel companions and I would journey the next day through ruts to a particular spot in the open land.

Evely's writings were in the vein of the much better-known Henri Nouwen (to whom I was never particularly drawn). Writings that are meant to inspire in a lively way, taking the teachings and scripture of Christian faith at face value, rather than analytically, to help believing people make sense of their lives in light of faith.

In an adaptation of talks delivered in 1962 at a religious retreat for people who were about to set on volunteer aid missions in the Third World, he laughs at a religion of white souls in which salvation is an individual matter, let everyone save himself. Instead he speaks of a world that does not believe, does not hope and does not love, yet one which suffers for it.

The world, he concludes, will belong to whomever gives it the greatest hope. In his view, the greatest hope was to be placed in the God who became a poor Galilean woodworker, like the majority of the people of the world, to the point of being able to affirm, without crossed-fingers, without disclaimers, "Blessed are the poor."

To Evely the task of the Christian is not so much a matter of going to church as it is of becoming poor. That became the cornerstone of my modern religion. It explains why I chose a life that was frugal and had, long before such things were talked about, a low carbon footprint.

John Henry Newman was a significant name in my life before I ever read his writings. My secondary school was named after the founder of the 19th-century Oxford Movement in Anglicanism, who eventually converted to Catholicism.

His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, literally meaning "in defense of his own life") was a collection of essays he published as pamphlets in the 1860s in response to the accusation of a detractor. Charles Kingsley had written that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy."

Newman provides "a history of my religious opinions" (a subtitle which I have twisted for my purpose in this post), directed at the academic circles in which he lived all his life, and skewers Kingsley squarely, demonstrating not merely his sincerity, but the reasonableness of his views.

This book became the sourcebook of my discussions with an older Anglican lady who was on the brink, yet in great trouble wavering on the notion of becoming accepted into the Catholic Church. My second "convert."

Romano Guardini, despite his name, was German theologian and philosopher who taught in the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign by the Nazis. His writing is primarily philosophical and extremely dense. One reads a Guardini paragraph and must stop to consider it for a day.

Nonetheless, his popular work The Lord has been a long-time bestseller since the 1940s. Modern scholars regard his methodology outdated, but he still manages to tackle for the nonspecialist the crucial meanings of the story of the gospels in a critical, thoughtful manner.

I recall being stunned by the way that, merely in his careful examination of the genealogies of Jesus, he manages to provide wonderful insights. He transforms the usually tiresome begats into a gem of a little historical treatise.

John P. Meier, the only living author in the quaternity, is a renown biblical scholar who collaborated with the late Raymond Brown, co-author of the groundbreaking Jerome Biblical Commentary, whose ongoing work A Marginal Jew runs three volumes so far, with a "final" fourth in the works since at least 2001.

Meier approaches Jesus as a historian, rather than a theologian or a believer, and attempts to distill a synthesis of what Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars locked up in a room in, say, Princeton, might come to agree could factually be asserted about the much-talked about Galilean woodworker.

I'm partial to his very funny footnotes, of which there are many. But I'm struck by the way in which he rationally limits the power of belief and nonbelief in attempting to leapfrog past the information available and the methods of historiography. For example, while he admits that the believer's grounds to affirm that Jesus performed "miracles" are circumscribed, he similarly points out that there is no scientific method to conclude they were not: there is no scientific divine-intervention meter.

These four books, by men of whom I became fond (I composed most of the Wikipedia entry on Evely to which the link above points), are markers in my journey toward, first, a post-Vatican II faith that insisted on the here and now; second, the development of a conviction of the reasonableness of faith; third, repeated retooling and reconsideration at different levels of understanding, concerning the meaning of substantially the same story; fourth, a dialogue concerning the believability of the story.

It would be erroneous to conclude from the preceding that I lost my faith thanks to Meier. Rather, his work delayed the falling of the scales for quite some time. In the end, my faith tottered not on Meier's writings, but on my own poor witness.

All four works are emblematic of many others read before and after or in tandem. I usually read several books at a time.

They were influential in different ways. Evely inspired an adolescent to dream of becoming an apostle, but the terms of faith or even doubt, remain those set in that first evening with a borrowed copy of the book.

Newman bolstered a young man in the defense of the ideal in the world once I was sent out at the end of my formation. Guardini provided critical grist for an adult professional busy with the concerns of a supporting a family.

In middle age, Meier has encouraged me to begin the work of integration, at least intellectually, of all those aspects of self that Carl Gustaf Jung says all of us embark upon before we die. Even though I have changed chairs in his imaginary team of critics, I look forward to his next volume.

In sum, a religion for our time might be to me a faith grounded in a profound relationship involving release from want and a conviction buttressed by fearless critical inquiry and the integration of experience, received wisdom and insight.

Armageddon or a Bump?

Having predicted ten of the last three recessions, my reputation for being a curmudgeon who is ready to predict disaster is entrenched. Yet on impending doom at the present time, color me agnostic.

In the face of those who call agnosticism a cowardly position, I rise to assert that in most cases it is the only sane position.

After all, do we have proof that God does not exist? Is there any certainty that, as happened in 1993-94, economic gloom will not begin to be replaced by the largest boom and fiscal surplus in history?

In the midst of a bearish stock market, l see reason to take the longer, mid-range view that everything will not collapse. High gas prices provide a needed incentive to curb and replace consumption of fossil fuels. Inflation is part of the set of pressures that will lead to restoring the purchasing power of working people. The Iraq quagmire may yet spare us more dangerous adventurism.

Silver linings aside, change will likely involve discomfort, shock and surprise -- it always has. Yet to insist dogmatically on atheism or on the end of civilization as we know it makes no sense.

Let's be clear about the sources of current anxiety.

A fair amount of doomsaying comes from my very large and noisy generation, the Boomers. It is not uncommon for people reaching retirement and the eventual end of life to have an apres moi le deluge (let disaster follow after me) attitude. My life is ending, such a view proclaims, so the world must be.

Another bit comes from the young, who have never seen a similar historical juncture. As Mark Twain put it, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The Devil knows more because he is old, says a Spanish saying, than because he is the Devil. So if you've seen this before, as I have, this moment is not so unique.

Yet another source of belief that society as we know it is at an end comes from some who would like to see, at a minimum, profound change, in the present social, political, economic order, or a combination of the three. One need not be an extremist to believe that a good, all-sweeping socioeconomic twister would give us a chance to make a clean start on the road to whatever utopia one favors.

In my experience, however, worsening conditions do not create "revolutionary conditions," or an alternative equivalent, but merely misery.

• In the U.S. 1980s, Ronald Reagan broke the back of unions, presided over double-digit unemployment, cut aid to pregnant women and children, created a whole generation of homeless and spawned an economy in which working people could be forced to accept declining wages and benefits while profits soared. In 2000, far from rebelling, the populace meekly submitted to massive electoral fraud by Reagan's heir, George W. Bush.
  
  
• In the South American 1970s, a variety of military governments under the doctrine of "national security" coined by one Cesar Augusto Pinochet, used the pretext of leftist-inspired agitation or turmoil to torture, murder and banish hundreds of thousands throughout the continent. In the 1990s, freed from the military boot, various electorates brought to office presidential administrations that privatized even parks and introduced beggar-thy-neighbor social policies under the aegis of Milton Friedman.
  
  
• In Eastern Europe there is a wry joke to describe a similar historic parabola in that region: What is worse than Communism? Post-Communism.

In brief, give me thoughtful, complex, measured, surgical action that makes for ripples of lasting change that spread benefits across a broad base.

Give me hope. Give me patience. I am tired of saviors and quick fixes.

Why Patriotism is Nonsense

Barack Obama and John McCain have forced me into declaring my own stance on patriotism once again. Patriotism is for the birds and there's no better day to say so than the Fourth of July. The only reasonable stance is to be not merely unpatriotic, but antipatriotic.

Countries don't really exist.

There is no such thing as the United States of America. Or France. Or Thailand. Or Canada. Or Argentina. All of these are mental constructs.

Sure, there are lands where certain languages and customs tend to prevail among their inhabitants. But these are fluid things.

According to patriotic theory, the United States is a nation of laws, founded on the Constitution, with definable borders and territory and citizens. In fact, the United States is not a nation, its laws are widely flouted (even by the lawgivers), most of its citizenry do not have a clue what the Constitution actually says, our borders are as porous as any others as the boundaries themselves are imaginary and citizenship is concept that is up for grabs.

Pace patriots. Most of this applies to France, Thailand, Canada, Argentina or almost any country. (I say "almost" because there's nearly always, as John Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile crisis, "some sonofabitch who didn't get the word.") Let's examine each of these items in turn.

A nation is best understood as human community that shares an identity, history, ancestry and extends back generations. The best known example is the Jewish people, who as a nation were stateless, from the time of the Maccabees to 1948, demonstrating that a nation is not the same thing as a state or nation-state.

The United States is most notably not a nation in that its population is entirely composed of immigrants. Yes, Virginia, even the Indians, who came to the American continent through over the Behring Strait, are immigrants, not native inhabitants.

We do not share a common ancestry, nor even a common history and certainly not a common identity.

This is equally true of every country in the American continent, from Canada to Chile. It may seem less true of European countries such as France (although ask the Flemish or the Bretons), but the wars in the former Yugoslavia amply attest to the notion that most European nation-states do not represent nations.

When the civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Galicia and Catalonia declared themselves independent and Generalissimo Francisco Franco had to suppress their languages for four decades to hold them in his tight fist from 1939 onwards.

As to our country, the United States doesn't even have a name that is a name, like Morocco or Poland, but a legal description of a particular legal agreement, which brings us to the mishmash of British custom, court precedent when it has proven convenient and sheer invention on the spot when it has not, that we call "law."

All of it, in the USA, is supposedly grounded in a document few understand. Lawmakers in Congress routinely flout the law -- in matters small and large -- and so do nearly all U.S. inhabitants. Moreover, there are abundant theories that say that states' laws supersede federal laws and do not bind across state lines. Good luck to you with "a nation of laws."

When I call our borders "porous," I do not mean that the Mexicans and Canadians (let's not forget whitebread Canadian illegal immigration to the USA) cross the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel without visas. I mean that the population, customs, climate of San Diego and Tijuana, as well as that of Bellingham, Wash., and Vancouver are very similar and that there has always been easy and close transit between the two.

The same is true between the bordering French Basque country and the Spanish Basque country, in which they speak Basque first and foremost and consider themselves of a common ancestry distinct from French or Spanish citizenship.

And think of it, how much more imaginary do things get than a boundary line drawn along a parallel, such as that which separates most of the western United States from Canada? How do you tell a Canadian tree from a U.S. American tree? Does one yield maple syrup and the other peanut butter?

Even legal citizenship is a fluid concept. Anyone born in the USA is a citizen, unless he is not. For example, the children of diplomats. The 14th Amendment calls for birth in the territory and under the jurisdiction of the United States.

But what about the nondiplomatic children of U.S. citizens born abroad? Many are "registered" in the local consulate and considered U.S. citizens, even though there is no tenable claim for jurisdiction or territory. Again, citizenship is a fluid thing nearly everywhere.

Patriotism, to round things up, was intended to refer to the love of one's patria, Latin for "land of the father." My father was not born, nor did he own land here -- or anywhere else -- which is not all that uncommon in these modern days. Where is the patria for me?

Sure, one can adopt an imaginary human community in which one feels more or less comfortable. One can decide that a certain piece of cloth with certain colors stands for this imagined social grouping and a certain piece of music speaks for everyone in the land the group has most likely stolen from someone else.

But let's not call these series of acts of maudlin convenience a noble thing, a reason to justify murder and mayhem -- let alone land and resource grabbing.

Before he was mercifully stopped, John McCain murdered Vietnamese by the dozens from the comfort of his cockpit. That's not noble. Nor is it particularly wonderful of Obama to wear a flag lapel pin, which he did not customarily wear before being a presidential candidate, just to show that he is "patriotic."

A pox on patriots and patriotism.

The Real Independence Day

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

The brief document read:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

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

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

Now, 232 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.

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

On Taking a Deep Breath about the Economy

Some years ago a sermon I heard from a priest trying to buddy up to the congregation began with the words, "we all cheat on our taxes." What better moment to thread back to my series on a nonreligious ethical decalogue, and its economic morals, than right after a stock market low and an oil price peak.

Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.

This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.

Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.

In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string of write downs reports of losses that are likely to continue for a year or so. The fluctuations come with people who rush in at each low, buy cheap, then sell quickly. Thursday, it seems, there were fewer buyers, perhaps because people are running scared.

OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?

But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):

a man as any:
ignored,
disoriented,
contaminated as any,
bored, yet a little daring
when you least expect it

That's us, right? We reach for happiness with our cars and our homes and our fast, faster, fastest computers -- a lifestyle that daily guzzles down in minutes fuel formed over millions of years from prehistoric plankton and algae.

Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.

OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)

In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.

We have a choice here:

We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.

Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.

This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.

It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.

Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?

At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.

We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.

I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.

Cliché Criticisms Cripple Themselves

Discussing the role of the United States in World War II with a cyberfriend, I found myself sighing with the exasperation of one who could make her case ten times better, yet would never choose her terms. This happens whenever someone ventures into an area in which I feel comfortable about facts my interlocutor treats much like a bull amid eminently breakable china.

Say a European spouts clichés about the USA. "You Americans are, how do you say ... [insert cliché here]."

Or how about your gringo out of central casting who spouts something like "Well, [Latin American country here] is so backward because those people just don't know how to [insert Ugly American truism here]."

Then there's the bloody Prod who repeats some 500-year-old false canard such as "the Jesuits [add heinous act here]."

Critics often think that my reaction means they've touched a nerve. They decide that I am "emotional" (goodness, let's not spill emotion on the clean carpet, shall we?) in much the same way there-thererer men dismiss women who get legitimately annoyed.

My problem is not always that I disagree.

Americans have customs and habits of mind that may seem quaint or unusual to Europeans or even Canadians. Latin American countries are socioeconomically behind the United States by almost any conceivable measure. And even one Catholic joke has it that not even the Holy Spirit knows what the Jesuits are up to.

Nor is it that my feelings of attachment to the country of my birth, the region in which my ancestors lived or the the religion in which I was brought up (to which I no longer assent) prevent me from accepting their blemishes, scars or even fatal flaws.

Actually, the problem is that most Europeans have no effing idea of the depth of criticism to which I am capable of subjecting America. Nor do average Americans know enough to understand my exasperation with Latin American societies. Nor, finally, does the average Protestant even begin to plumb the faultlines I see in Catholicism.

To the contrary, pseudo-savants such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, the recent author of an essay on the United States, which was expanded into a book, are exasperating for the little they understand. They richly deserve every kick in the pants they get precisely because they provide the best rationale for the Republicans' idiotic renaming of French fries as "freedom fries."

That's the problem. But how does one convey this to those who feel they already know the truth and even know what I am thinking? Moreover, I am not exactly incapable of provoking a similar reaction.

Sometimes, men and women are the worst discussants in the world. I wish I could talk to my dog -- if I only had one.

On Being Angry

The hullaballoo over Michelle Obama's alleged anger points to an American problem no one ever wants to acknowledge: our society's inability to deal with anger. As a reformed "angry" person who has acknowledged personal problems with anger, I still believe that becoming angry doesn't make anyone wrong.

Yet that's the way society decrees life must be. It's even a trick some extremely malicious people use: drive someone to distraction until they "lose it," so everything they say or do can be disregarded as words and deeds of a lunatic.

Let's be clear that I am not talking about irrational, unmeasured, violent anger of the kind that suppressed anger will sometimes become. I am talking about what the Bible calls "wrath." This is something that can even be divine. Jesus was enraged at the vendors at the Temple.

Granted, we all like to think we are Jesus and Isaiah. Our anger is righteous. But the true prophet is not merely someone who points at others but someone who includes himself and all those dear to him in the condemnation. That said, there is something far more evil and pervasive than raising one's voice in indignation or frustration at not being heard. It is the smugness of a modulated, uncaring voice.

In U.S. society, this is one of the chief legacies of Britain, the conceit that all reasonable and true discourse is subtle and indirect, all of its conclusions carefully balanced compromises. Never show pain or rage; don't give your adversary the pleasure.

This may be fine for a culture of fat dogs and scrawny children, such as England's, in which a shy people from a dim clime has always lived so uncertain of its own worth as to need the boost of calling some others -- the wogs of every stipe and color -- its lessers.

Is it suitable, however, in a land in which the Anglo-Saxon, himself a mongrel of uncertain pedigree, is a minority in a sea immigrants from as far back as 10,000 years ago across the Behring Strait or barely yesterday across the Rio Grande?

Timbre and gesture are, after all, the language of culture.

There is nothing as culturally relative as the difference in demeanor between legendary Baghdad bazaar rug merchants and the equally paradigmatic thin-lipped New England bankers. Why should one be deemed coarse and the other refined, when in the end both go at their customers' wallets with equal zeal and trickery?

As Woody Guthrie sang, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." Similarly, a mystery writer once remarked that there are two kinds of murder.

There's the murder in a manor in the English Midlands, in which the disinherited younger son gives his rich uncle drink laden with poison that cumulatively does its work. Then there's the Sunday dinner in Naples where a soccer argument heats to the point that an enraged young man seizes the carving knife and plunges it 18 times into his cousin's chest.

It took me years to realize that women's tears are shed more often in rage than in sorrow or joy.

Often, as with Michelle Obama's reputed anger at injustice in U.S. past and contemporary history, it is anger that should be heard, not dismissed.