Ferragosto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abolish Private Medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First American Profile

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

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

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

Note the two elements and their order.

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

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

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

Thus was born the first American ethnic profile.

Walter Cronkite was a bore

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

A trained monkey could have done better.

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

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

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

Awake to Glory, Children of France!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freedom Delusion

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

First, a little context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.

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

Why do the heathen rage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Former Permanent Majority Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Real Independence Day

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

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

The brief document read:

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Chavez Rabies Shows Up in Honduras Mixup

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

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

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

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

Les Scandales Politiques Américains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to Push Back for Health Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Is Racism Not Over?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst Is Over?

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

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

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

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

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

The Biochemical Soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papa Heinz

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

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

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

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



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

The Right to be Sad and Jobless

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

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

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

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

June 6, 1944

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

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

Let us remember these men today and their awesome struggle.

Busy

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

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

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

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

Carry on.

Faithful? Progressive?

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

The answer is "neither."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a boy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They like women.

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

Moreover, they absolutely despise the notion of celibacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Model for Pelosi

On one of my favorite blogs I recently caught the headline

Speaker quits 'for sake of unity'

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

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

The Problem with Being Kennedyesque

President Obama has turned out to be more Kennedyesque than some of his fans expected. One does not have to be an opponent of Obama, or of the once-young Boston-accented politician of the past, to mean "Kennedyesque" in the realpolitik and less than idealistic sense.

I was once told that when the beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was shown where, as archbishop of Chicago, he would be buried, he learned that his spot was to the left of his predecessor, John Cody, who died just before the feds could indict him of misusing church funds.

"I was always a bit to his left," Bernardin is said to have quipped.

John F. Kennedy, since the 1964 Democratic Convention the icon of liberals, stood in many respects to the liberals' right. Barack Obama, in trying to reverse course on the Bush Administration's campaign of state-sponsored terror, has revealed himself more pragmatic about Guantánamo and torture evidence than his supporters from, say, Code Pink or Move On would like.

If Obama can compromise on Nuremberg-scale inhumanity, some worry, what will he give away to get something through in health, consumer protections and workers' rights to collective bargaining? To my mind, that's the wrong question.

Obama doesn't want to say the right things for eight years, as Bill Clinton did, so some Republican can come, like Bush did, and turn peace in Ireland and Yugoslavia into unending war throughout the entire Arab world. He doesn't want to tidy up the books, turning Republican deficits into surpluses as far as the eye can see, just so some crass successor can undo it with a sea of red ink and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

That would not be good for the country, any more than it would burnish Obama's legacy. As a man of extraordinary intelligence, Obama knows this. The man knows what he is doing.

Three Deaths

George, Lew, my father. Two generational contemporaries dead within days, one dead almost 30 years ago recalled by fluke in the same week.

George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.

Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.

My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.

Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.

Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.

Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.

A Gift for TANF Mothers

The term "welfare mother" has been so loaded that I chose for the heading the bureaucratic abbreviation of the current program. After all, ever since Ronald Reagan invented out of whole cloth a public aid cheater in Chicago, some people deem a welfare mom as practically a criminal -- all to justify sending poor mothers with infants to work outside the home.

Indeed, I found myself nodding when, during a visit to Washington a few years ago, the head of the United Kingdom's social programs under Tony Blair made clear that, forcing a mother with children under six to leave home to perform mindless low-skill work was so horrifying to the British public, that it had never been even suggested in Parliament.

What we have done since 1996 to poor women heading households with children in the United States is unspeakable. What we did before wasn't much better.

Now we tell them to go out get the first menial job they can, or else we'll cut them off the cash from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the TANF in the heading) -- and amount ranging from about $230 a month in Mississippi to about $950 in New York.That's below poverty? Add SNAP (the new name for food stamps) and public housing subsidies. It comes close to the poverty line. Not much more.

Since when is making sure a child is fed, loved, cared for -- in a word, mothering -- less important than flipping burgers or sitting at a cash register?

Conservatives argue that these women make lousy mothers, since they are all on [add drug of the day here] and work as [insert sexual occupations serving conservative customers here]. Or they're lazy and uneducated and [add whisper] black.

In fact, most welfare mothers are white. Let's factually adjust the picture just enough to conjure up an image to which most Americans, even the stupidest, will react to with a smidgen of compassion. A poor white woman is a WPA work of art, no?

But even if we think the worst of welfare mothers, isn't the drugs, prostitution, compulsive TV watching, etc., largely a result of nurture rather than nature? Couldn't this behavior be changed?

Imagine a modern equivalent of a "sewing circle": a daily, neighborhood gathering of TANF moms with non-TANF peers and an older, motherly role model who had raised children of her own.There would be opportunities for peer-to-peer problem solving, career exploration, even eventual job search or home-brewed microenterprises (yes, I know all the lingo).

Wouldn't that be much, much better than merely throwing them out into the labor market with no skills? Wouldn't that be better than denying cash, food, housing? Throwing them and their children out like garbage?

Some brave people are attempting things like this, but it's far from being national policy with serious resources. That should be our Mother's Day's gift to all TANF moms.

Gay Style?

I am going to get killed here, but Andy of V and A in Milan prompted me to finally give vent to an idea I have had for many years when he wrote, in what seemed like a bit of exasperation, "I have been called the straightest of gay men."

The topic of our sermon, boys and girls, is: Is there a gay style and if so what should it be? This could also be: Is there a "straight" style and what should that be?

This is interesting to me, someone who is often taken in cyberspace to be a woman (see latest in the comments section here), even though I am of the male persuasion (although I have expressed an interest in becoming lesbian, for which I have been told I have an aptitude). Perhaps the confusion arises because I don't punctuate every sentence with "eff'in A!"?

This is also interesting because I was there when a college roommate declared himself gay at 3 am, after an evening at the local gay alliance; unfortunately, I had a final exam the next morning and really needed the sleep, so that discussion was postponed, much to his drunken chagrin.

CR, as I'll call him, had been up to that point a normal, average ... um, what am I saying? He liked opera, fer cryin' out loud! (OK, so my father loved opera -- his Italian heritage -- and that's why I hate it, but that's a whole other story).

All right, what I mean is that CR didn't have any noticeable mannerisms in his gesture or voice. He wasn't "affeminate."

Fast forward to a few years ago, when I hired him at what was his fast-approaching middle age (he is a few years older than I am). All of a sudden, he behaved like a typical 40-ish female secretary of the 1950s.

You know, the kind that has her hair up in a bouffant and whose fingers taper into painted claws and whose mouth and cheeks are rouged and powdered and whose perfume can be smelled a mile away. One day she quits in a huff and her desk drawers are found to be filled to the rafters with tissue paper and various female cosmetic and medical supplies. Gary Larson used to draw her to great effect (see here).

No, CR didn't look like one. He just talked like one, freaked out like one (you won't believe his antics on 9/11 ... OK, so we were a block from the White House, but honestly!) and generally behaved in a way that completely belied his physical appearance as a tall, lean, Brahmin WASP man.

What is it about a man's sexual preference for other men that demands behavior that apes the worst stereotypes of a traditional woman? I mean, most women today are more "macho" than that!

Give me a woman who knows how to handle a power drill any day.

Frankly, I have no answer. I am relieved to learn that Andy, a gay man, doesn't seem to have an answer, either. It shows that it's a not just me, a straight guy, asking an unreasonable question.

End of the American Façade

Most of us have been disappointed with some essentials of American culture, mostly because they were never any deeper, any more solid than a Hollywood set, since at least 1968. This is one of those moments in which such myths can be recreated or be superseded -- and this little essay aims to aid the latter.

Let's look at the year 1968 for a moment. That is the time when, to hear candidate Barack Obama tell it last year, one group of Boomers pit itself against another in a hatred that has lasted a generation.

The year 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, when the fortress myth of American invincibility was first breached in the war that would deal the nation its first defeat. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and the notion of successful nonviolent change suffered a deadly blow. That was the year the last great white hope, Robert F. Kennedy, perished -- he was consumed, I still think, by the self-destructive forces of the power of money from which, ironically, he sprang.

The news media told us of students in Paris accused of instigating a deep crisis and later of peers in Prague hailed, from the West, as heroes -- yet all of them (us, it was my generation) were in the same dionysian revolt against our apollonian elders. And what did we achieve?

The cult of youth, too, turned out to be a false god, especially evident now that we are no longer young. The only surefire result of the Democratic Convention riots was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- if only it could have been foreseen and prevented!

But it couldn't. At heart we Americans are much too fond of our essential self-delusion that we can overcome everything and anything.

Everything about an American and the degree of his or her success is fake. Fake it 'till you make it, runs what seems to be the quintessential American nursery rhyme. We spend lifetimes telling one another that "everything is great."

Happiness is a constitutional right, we believe (and no, it's not there). And it is a duty. If you are sick or you are poor, it's your damned fault.

Yet none of it is true. Indeed, not only is America the land of the false optimism, it's also the land of the scam.

Go back to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and even to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Our Protestant, Calvinist, capitalist ethos and its anxiety inspiring lies are writ large in our literature and culture.

Yet at times such as these, when the wages of our collective prevarication come due, we have the remarkable opportunity to tell ourselves the truth: perhaps we have just muddled through with a bit of luck and perhaps we could recognize that not all that glitters is gold. Or is that too Catholic, medieval and fatalistically feudal?

Preparing for Living

In advance of the coming economic bad news -- bank "stress test" results on Monday, unemployment on Friday -- allow me to ponder what is really happening at a level that affects all of us: a profound job insecurity that won't get better even when the so-called "macro" numbers look better.

Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."

In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.

Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:

... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

This is what today's children -- who will be young adults in 2030 -- should be learning: the art of life itself. This is education not merely to have a skill to make a living, but education to learn how to learn and live and grow, in harmony and fairness.

The Ugly American as a Nunny Bunny

You know how when you notice something it's suddenly all around you? This is happening to me with international do-gooder women and their irretrievably imperious Ugly American attitudes.

One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.

She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.

Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."

Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.

All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.

Education for the Future

As I continue to outline details of my "revolutionary manifesto," this time I'll focus on education policy. If you're a regular reader  have written some of the basics about this before (see here).

What is there to do, in addition to federalizing education, consolidating bureaucracies, connecting  educational schools to work preparation, putting all university students in education service for at least a year and coordinating education with public assistance programs? Lots.

Let's merge private and public education so that everybody has the same stake in the same system. And let's fund schools by population, not political clout or wealth.

Let's establish one national curriculum designed for a world power, not a county fair. It's incredible that Americans who have supposedly been educated cannot place a substantial number of countries on the map, nor recognize an amendment of the Constitution, nor speak a foreign language with at least passable fluency!

To rid the system of its deadwood, let's establish an exit career track for educators at 5, 10, 15, 20 years of service. Most teachers who can't teach won't leave because there is nowhere to go with a teaching credential.

Similarly, let's liberalize credentialling to allow people who actually know and have experience at something useful to share their expertise with young people, even if they don't speak pedagoguese.

Let's replace unions, which are more suitable for industrial settings, with professional societies that promote excellence in exchange for salary and job security.

Reversal as a Path to Understanding

In e-mail discussions with a correspondent in another country, I have hit upon a method of bridging deeply embedded biases of largely cultural origin that I thought I would share with the world. It's very simple: switch sides.

What if people were able to do this, gaining similar insights as we did, along a whole variety of issues? What if we held a debate at some hallowed hall of Harvard or Yale in which

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued for the illegitimacy of the State of Israel and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the right of Israel to exist?
• Barack Obama were to spout the anti-liberal rhetoric, while Rush Limbaugh took up the defense of every position of the Obama Administration?
• Richard Dawkins were to be an apologist for Catholicism and Joseph Ratzinger, the pope, to rant about the likely nonexistence of any deity?
• Gloria Steinem were to defend the traditional roles of women, while Phyllis Schlafly were to defend feminist single moms having everything including a cracked job ceiling?

I really think this is a kind of solution to handle disagreements. You learn that everything the other guy is saying is not complete and absolute bunk, but also that your own position has its weaknesses. You also see how you might espouse the other view given a different personal history and culture.

Role reversal is a technique I intend to continue to use in all my interactions whenever conflict arises. I really believe in it.

1001 Airheads

Left over from my post with a notable lack of glückenfreude (see 1000 Readers) is the still broiling issue of why our culture is awash with semi-literate nonsense. It wasn't so much that so many are craven enough to click elsewhere, but that elsewhere is so low brow.

One would prefer to be bested by Paul Krugman or Robert Reich or Maureen Dowd.

One of my favorite professors in college, a Canadian author of short fiction whom the fickle goddess Pheme has so far undeservedly passed over, was fond of regaling the dozen of us in his short story seminar with a wide range of intensely memorable stories and vignettes from his life. It was, I suppose, a way of teaching us how to tell a story.

This included the one about the former student who, dropping by his office, declared that he was "into a new kind of reading." Intrigued, my prof asked what, assuming perhaps that the young man had discovered the then-hot Donald Barthelme. The answer, my prof said, amid gales of laughter that forced him to repeat himself so we could make out the words, was TV Guide.

Indeed, I later learned, when circulation and subscription figures became of professional interest, that TV Guide used to have tens of millions of readers and still garners 3.2 million. In contrast, Newsweek has a circulation of 2.7 million and the magazine I would have died to see my byline in, The New Yorker, only 164,000.

So, what's with that?

Tax All Inheritance 100%

This is my all-time favorite show-stopping plank. Everybody thinks of their darling orphaned children, little realizing that even in the land of Horatio Alger, it still takes on average five generations for someone who is poor to become rich or the less-desirable reverse.

American economic mobility is not what most people think. The streets of America aren't paved with gold. Indeed, they never were.

As we all, know, the United States arose because a group of wealthy bewigged landowners and businessmen was too cheap to pay taxes for the defense of their holdings from Indians. Just as they and their heirs have been to cheap to pay for slaves, indentured servants, industrial workers and everyone else who made their fortunes possible.

Why not, then, abolish all inheritance, plow it into a common pot from which the biblical widow and orphan shall be provided for generously and well? What we could fund with the fortunes of the 400 richest Americans, who had a combined net worth of $1.57 trillion in 2004 (or $3.9 billion on average)! And that's just the tippy top.

Imagine a wisely husbanded fund of several trillions devoted to care for all parentless children and all surviving companions unable to work. Imagine returning the 80 percent of all assets, owned by only 20 percent of the people, to 100 percent of the people. Imagine sharing.

What's Progressive About it?

The comments on my last post about progressive taxation suggest that I should have made myself a lot clearer about what was I proposing -- and spelled out what other options there are. In brief, I suggested we return to a graduated set of tax rates that levy a higher proportion of income from those who earn more and a lesser share from those who earn less.

This is "progressive" in a very simple, mechanical way: the rates progressively get higher, according to income. This has been the basic framework of U.S. taxation of income since the Supreme Court declared such levies constitutional in 1913.

Taxes became ever more progressive and leaned ever heavier on the upper income strata from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt to Carter, then reversed under Reagan and under the second Bush -- both of whom cut the upper tax rates sizably (to benefit the wealthy), as I mentioned in my post.

There have also been "regressive" forms of taxation. The most common one is the sales tax: everybody who buys X pays a certain percentage of the price. This is regressive because it ignores the disparity in ability to pay. Rich people buying X pay a smaller proportion of their income in sales taxes, while poor people pay a higher proportion -- so even both pay the same amount of money, it hurts richer consumers less than it hurts poorer one.

In the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, Steve Forbes proposed a modified version of the "flat tax," a levy of 17% on all personal and corporate earned income above $33,000. This is the sales tax principle applied to income.

Like sales tax, it is regressive -- otherwise you can bet your sweet patooties that Forbes, now publisher of the eponymous business magazine, would not have proposed it. This would have meant that folks paying the lowest tax rate at the time, 15%, would have experienced a tax increase, while those paying at the highest rate, then 39.6%, would have had their taxes cut by more than half!

And it would have bankrupt the government faster than you can say "George W. Bush" or "Ronald Reagan." Guess who wins there? Those who have big incomes and don't need anything from government, except the occasional war on which to make profits.

Let's Return to Progressive Taxation

People who hate taxes and hate government must hate roads and schools and libraries and police and courts, not to mention certified foods and medicines and a whole host of other hallmarks of a civilized society today. The issue is not whither taxes, but whither unfair taxes.

From the 1930s until the 1980s, the United States had a progressive tax system that did a mildly good job of undoing the vast shift toward income and wealth inequality of the late 19th century through the 1920s. Under that great red revolutionary, Dwight David Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 92%.

So why does the political marketplace of ideas accept as dogma that anything worse than Reagan and Bush rates of 28% and 35% are sacrosanct? Why should there be just three rates topping at little more than a third, when the revenue they produce simply fails to pay for a good health care and retirement system for all (not to mention the odd war our country must somehow always be fighting)?

Given that 20% of the people own 80% of the nation's assets, shouldn't they who are more able, contribute substantially more to a society that has made their riches possible?

These are rhetorical questions. President Obama (how nice that still sounds ...!) is being overly timid in suggesting that rates merely return to President Clinton's 39.6%. That's not how a changed America will come about.

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(By popular acclaim, I am returning to my clarifications concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which I admit was never my wholly original idea. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)

The Tabloidization of Michelle Obama

Just as Condoleezza Rice made a splash in Europe with her boots, MIchelle Obama is making a news with bare arms and -- gasp! the salts! -- hugging a queen. Obviously, Rice had fun amid her prevarications about Iraq and Obama decided to play with the hand she was dealt.

Does anyone remember what Rice, no dummy by any standard, had substantively to say and how she fell short of her oath of office? Has anyone remembered that Obama -- who did not run and was not elected -- is a lawyer with training and experience every bit as rigorous as her husband?

Why are people discussing Obama's looks and manners when the world is beyond the brink of disaster?

Perhaps it is that the powers that be, who own the "news" media, don't want anyone to be thinking, lest they realize how badly they have been shafted. Perhaps we are all too lazy or lobotomized to rub those two brain cells we've got left.

The G-20 meeting was important but essentially secret. Why was there no questioning of how come those democratically elected heads of governments were keeping secrets from their electorates?

We, the public, owe it to ourselves not to feed on lazy, tabloid journalism.

Snowball in April

A friend suggested that it would begin to happen more frequently now. My parents died more than a decade ago and surely they would have been dead by now if they hadn't. A very close friend's older sister just died. Now a school classmate has cancer and is undergoing chemo.

For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?

I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.

Getting No Better Than Anyone Else

One of my favorite Beatles songs was always "Getting Better All the Time." You remember the song? No? Well here are my favorite verses:

I've got to admit it's getting better, better
A little better all the time, it can't get no worse
I have to admit it's getting better, better
It's getting better since you've been mine

Me used to be angry young man
Me hiding me head in the sand
You gave me the word, I finally heard
I'm doing the best that I can

Let me do a little twist on that.

In the manner of Dante, I spent years consigning my deceased father to the deepest circles of hell for having abandoning my mother and me when I was a child. In the end, although I haven't copied the history and I am a distinct person, I realize I'm not much better than my father.

And that's what I really call getting better.

1000 Readers

Call it sour grapes, dyspepsia or mere grumpiness, but I was flabbergasted to learn that a blog whose name itself is a bit edgy has 1,000 Google Reader subscribers (actually it's 1,136). This one has a mere 10.

OK, so there are other forms of subscribing to my blog, but even if I add up all those, this blog is still woefully out of the ballpark. That's not the point.

Here I go, offering insights into the way our politics and economics work and intertwine, trying to sort out philosophical questions, attempting the odd poem. I am offering pensées. My friends and a few new cyberacquaintances pop in now and then. Maybe 2 leave a comment.

But "Black Hockey Jesus," the blogger of the site noted above, posts an invitation to join his "cult" and posts something titled Suicidal Jesus, which -- yes, yes, yes -- is wickedly funny, and he gets 60 comments.

What's wrong with this picture?

After the Revolution: FAQ

Here are answers to a few frequently asked questions concerning the views I've been presenting regarding the need for a revolution.

1. Your agenda sounds like you're proposing Soviet Communism.

No. I propose neither a violent overthrow of the government, which I don't see as the problem, nor an end to any of our civil liberties. I don't think a command economy such as that of the USSR could work here. Although Sweden or Israel offer intriguing examples.

2. Didn't Communism fail?

That depends on what you expected Communism to accomplish. Politically, the Leninist theory of the state and the ruling political party, eliminated any possibility of an open society. This has been roundly criticized from the Left, a criticism in which I happily join. However, Communist revolutions achieved quite a lot in social and economic terms, when one takes into account that they took place in very backward, pre-industrial and politically neo-feudal countries.

 3. So if you are not a Communist, what are you?

I'm unhappy with the political parties available to us in the United States. The only viable political parties, Democratic and Republican, accept the same economic dogmas, myths and taboos. There is no political party of the left that is particularly worthy: the socialists are tiny, the trotskyists are a tad too doctrinaire and the Communists carry the monkey of Stalin on their backs. I see myself as someone who advocates for a social and economic democracy that is at least as sturdy and open to popular influence as our political democracy is, particularly since January 2009.

The Lemon Named Excess

Much as the play and film "A Streetcar Named Desire" was a eulogy of a bygone U.S. class and ethnic social structure, the decline of Detroit automakers and the culture they spawned perhaps deserves a new work of art, one titled "The Lemon Named Excess."

In his 1948 play, Tennessee Williams pit Blanche DuBois, a faded lady of the Old South that was really a stand-in for the entire WASP Brahmin class, against the vigorous rough-and-tumble Stanley Kowalski, emblematic of the rising industrial, urban and white "ethnic" immigrant class. Today, we might pit Walt Kowalski (a coincidence?) from Clint Eastwood's recent film Gran Torino and its evocation of the pollutemobile, the umpteen-lane highway and the sprawling smogopolises with their white-flight suburbs, against what ... a figure and lifestyle yet to come.

Behind every fortune lies a crime, remarked Balzac, and behind the apogee of the combustion-engine vehicle lies a seldom recounted scandal.

Between 1936 and 1950, for example, Federal Engineering Corporation, Firestone Tire, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum, Mack and Standard Oil of California, and acting through a cutout holding company called National City Lines, conspired to destroy 100 electric streetcar transit systems in 45 cities. The cities include Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. (All this was once brought out in court.)

Add to that the gargantuan federal and state subsidies to highways and oil production over the past decades.

Now, at long last, the rapacious auto companies are on their knees and big oil is at last seen as a threat to our security and even our future existence. This is not the time to help them. This is the time to nationalize the car industry and transform it into the engine of new, pollution-free vehicles produced by a public enterprise devoted to serving the general public.

Don't Salvage, Nationalize!

The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of this crisis is that it exposes for all to see the moral faultlines of the capitalist way of life. This is not the time to rescue the wage-slave system, along with its banks and stock and commodities exchanges, as the latest Geithner/Paulsen plan to aid banks proposes, but to strip out the ill-gotten, wastefully spent gains.

Don't rescue the banks, nationalize them. Don't shore up Wall Street, close it once and for all. These are no more than the casinos of and for the rich, who essentially play with our hard-earned money.

You think banks are merely safe places to put money at a tidy return? You wish! Banks are constantly gambling that enough people will keep their money in so they can lend out most of what they've got -- if everybody withdraws at once, banks fail. Moreover, compare the interest rate you can get paid with the rate you're likely to be charged to borrow.

You think stock exchanges are merely places where the "invisible hand" of the quasi-divine "market" arrives at fair values for a whole range of assets? That textbook description has never taken into account the speculation, almost entirely divorced from the actual workings of businesses, that actually fuels upward runs by "bulls" and downward falls by "bears."

When their gambles prove wrong, who loses the jobs and the homes? Not the top 20 percent of assetholders, who own 80 percent of all assets in the United States. So let's seize the moment to make this land our land, as Woody Guthrie sang, from California to New York Island. "This land was made for you and me ..."

Abolish the Corporation*

Let's not first "kill all the lawyers," as Shakespeare's Henry VI suggested. First thing we do, instead, let's slaughter the legal "persons" that choke off any attempt to put blame where blame is due for the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few: the corporation.

Through the magic of corporate law, there exists an entity that is separate from the people that form it, own it, direct it and are responsible for what it does -- such as spilling tons of crude oil into the ocean, hiding information showing that cigarettes are addictive and cancer-producing, buying up public urban transit systems to destroy them and eliminate competition for the car.

If these actions ever come under scrutiny of the authorities, veritable armies of lawyers can be counted upon to spar for years. In the end, the corporations in question pay for the damage -- if they lose, which is not often. None of the actual people involved -- not the CEO, not the managers, not the stockholders, not the directors -- pay for their misdeeds. The corporation -- a thing that is not alive and does not actually exist in any real sense -- did it.

Moreover, the decisions that led to these actions are never made within earshot of the customers and citizens and workers who are most affected. We, the people, have no say as to whether the corporations will bilk us, poison us or get our children killed -- before it happens. It's only long after the damage is done that, maybe, with fingers crossed and lots of luck, a few hapless victims get something back.

It's time to end the charade. Let's stop pretending the corporations exist -- they don't; instead, let's take names and kick butt. Let's assume the power to control the crucial economic activity that defines whether we survive and how.

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*(In response to private comments concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which is not wholly original, I would like to clarify at least what I mean by the planks I put forth. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)

Dictatorship and Other Hazards of Capitalism

The great thing about this depression recession is that a lot of people are finally paying attention to this thing called capitalism as it really is, not as fabled. Indeed, we're all discovering that, for a small-d democratic country, we sure have and encourage a lot of capitalist dictatorship in our society.

We go through these slick marketing political campaigns every four years in which we wonder whether we like the preacher of a man who, come down to it, can't really feed our family, any more than he can stop teenagers from getting pregnant or help us reach our healthiest BMI level. Yet we surrender every personal right to an unelected individual who can tell us in precise detail what we must and must not do for most of our waking hours: our boss.

Who is our boss answerable to? Ultimately, some "chief executive officer." And the CEO? To a board of directors. And the board? To the stockholders. And all of them together? To a misty legal fog designed, essentially, to make sure that them who've got keep getting more.

You have free speech in the public park, but not at the business meeting or in the lunch room (try organizing a union there). Your boss doesn't legally have to give you a vacation or paid sick leave. Or a raise. Or pay you more than $6.15 an hour. If you don't like it, you can starve.

We don't elect these people. We have no say in how they run things. They have power just because.

Revolution?

My teenage years took place in a time and place in which the word "revolution" was as alluring to the young as it was forbidden by the elders. Decades later, I wonder what all that mouthing the r-word accomplished. Yet, as I watch a pauperizing worldwide crisis unroll before my eyes, I wonder ... isn't it time for revolution, a worldwide revolution?

Don't get me wrong. Millions of tortured, imprisoned, dead and "disappeared" people have convinced me that merely overthrowing a government accomplishes nothing. Indeed, most governments are not really the problem.

At the source of the economic crisis is a system of money power that serves the greediest few and corrupts the many. That's what needs overthrowing. Let's democratize economic decision-making and take it out of the hands of the tailor-suited financial elite. Profits generated by efficiencies and collective labor should be shared throughout the complex society that makes such profits even possible.

Could ordinary folks do any worse than these MBA geniuses have done? Let's try a few revolutionary steps:

• Turn for-profit corporations into sectorally organized publicly owned and controlled enterprises, run by specialists serving councils of elected workers and citizens;
• nationalize Chrysler and GM and turn them into producers of public, low-energy-consuming light and heavy rail and other systems of transportation, eventually making the car unnecessary, to be replaced by bicycles and light motorcycles.
  
• Re-establish progressivity of taxation and higher tax brackets;
• tax all inheritance 100% and put the proceeds into a fund for the education and support of all children and the support of those unable to work;
• expropriate all capital fleeing the country to avoid revolutionary rules;
• nationalize the banking system;
• close all stock exchanges and other markets of speculation, compensating account holders up to $5,000,000 per household;
  
• replace insurance companies with public trust funds;
• merge private and public education into a national free system incentivized through vouchers;
• abolish private medicine and private health institutions, creating a single health care system open to all.

What do you think?

The Loser Goes to the Press

Details now leaking out suggest that, at the heart of the Tim Geithner-AIG bonus story, lies a political stratagem explained to me years ago by a master news manipulator when I was a very green journalist: never go to the press, unless you lose behind closed doors.

AIG paid the bonuses on Friday. News leaked out during the weekend, with The Washington Post apparently breaking the story. Now we know that Geithner was on the horn to New York all week trying to stop the bonuses.

Why not announce an outrage that was about to happen rather than a fait accompli? Because if you're a wheeler dealer you're most powerful behind closed doors, when you and those in the room are the only ones with the knowledge to act. Information is, after all, power.

If Geithner had gone public and pointed his finger, and à la Èmile Zola cried out "j'accuse," his power of persuasion over AIG would have vanished instantly. Naturally, once that power had been lost behind closed doors, Geithner -- and President Obama -- were free rend their garments in public.

This is how the power game is played. Reporters know to look for the disgruntled for their leaks. Never ask why the news was leaked, merely ask who the leaker was in order to understand what happened in a power struggle waged behind closed doors.

It's our AIG, isn't it?

The real AIG bonus scandal is that a majority stockholder cannot prevent nonsense set in motion before the stocks were eagerly tossed like confetti at the federal government by management begging on its knees for cash.

We, the people, now own 80 percent (!!!) of AIG at a cost of about $170 billion of our money; about $165 million in bonuses was scheduled to be paid by March 15; some of the individual bonuses range between $1.5 to $3 million, but most are merely in the thousands; the government-appointed overseer was told by lawyers that the bonuses must be paid under pre-existing employee-retention contracts.

The single fact that stands out to me is that March 15 is the deadline for filing corporate taxes. Typically, corporate expenses booked as 2008 prior-year accruals (in English: owed, but not paid, in 2008) must be actually paid out before that date. So the overriding urgency to make the payments is a tax filing.

Well, hell, Tim Geithner, let's have our AIG accountant file for an extension of the deadline while we figure out why these bonuses are being paid at all. There's still time: extension applications can still be filed today.

But what about the alleged top talent AIG stands to lose? Let's challenge them to go get another job with "AIG" on their résumés.

Why Does Wrongdoing Persist?

Bernard Madoff is probably the most egregious example, but let's not kid ourselves, wrongdoing large and small is pervasive. This fact rubs against the grain of my notion that the basis of all ethics is survival: are we all that self-destructive?

Now, granted, I never said that human beings were ethical. I merely suggested that if, out of curiosity, we wished to consider what we ought to do, human survival was as universal a principle available for discerning right from wrong.

On that basis I developed a decalogue, as if it made any difference, only to find myself waking up in this new era of deception and plunder to the reality that no one -- or very few -- takes ethics seriously. Unless they run the risk of getting caught and punished.

Frankly, I can't say that, when rubber hits the road, I'm any better. Boiling down l'éthique cecilieuse to its boy-scout-manual essentials, am I confident, sincere, joyful, respectful, nurturing, trustworthy, truthful, giving, loving, content? Not by a long shot.

Bless me, father, for I have been wracked with self-doubt, layered in pretenses, miserable, callous, lustful after what belongs to others, deceitful, grasping, selfishly licentious and chained to my artificial needs. This is why I will not survive.

Indeed, this is what dooms all humanity to a life that is, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.

Is it a D-word yet?

Signs abound that the economy is slumping deeper and faster than anyone expected. At about 6,500 last week, the Dow will reach what I -- a nonexpert, noneconomist journalist -- think is the infamous "bottom" before the summer. That's too soon, as the economic stimulus effects won't begin to be felt at least until the fall.

Could it go lower than "Dr. Doom" predicted? Don't panic, but the D-word may soon aptly describe prevailing economic conditions.

In fact, I understand that Japan's much-feared "lost decade" was less severe, at an average 5.5 unemployment, than our current much higher jobless rate. The Japanese tanked and stayed tanked for a decade, but at much higher levels of well-being than the United States is at right now.

And they kept up their cradle-to-grave universal national health system, which we don't have.

It's no reason to cheer, but even in the depths of the Great Depression -- and we're not even remotely going there -- 77 percent of the workforce was employed. At worst we'll hit maybe 90 percent. That's bad if you're one of the unemployed, but ... you'll still have 9 in 10 chances of keeping your job -- and even better chances right now.

You're going to live through the fourth economic depression the United States has ever experienced. It's OK, we can all make it if we stick together.