I was paging through a college Philosophy text the other day, and I came to the section on logical fallacies. As I was skimming, I realized something was missing. Where had my old favorite – Reducto ad Absurdum – gone off to? Where was Argumentum ad Baculum or Argumentum ad Hominum? They were all written in English.
It seemed like a good idea when John XXIII tossed Latin out of the Catholic Church back in the early 1960s – but I miss it. Reciting, “I believe in God the Father almighty” will never have the solemnity and awesomeness of “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotatem” sung by a cleric with a good voice. But that’s no doubt gone forever.
With it has gone Latin phraseology in all sorts of places – text books, legal terminology, off-hand comments. It’s no longer recognized by students; it’s no longer used.
Do you remember the “Tonight Show” when Truman Capote called Johnny Carson, “Sui generus”? Has a nicer feel than “one of a kind”, doesn’t it? Or, when a playwright cheats and gets his plot moving again with something that just doesn’t fit – would you call what he used a “Deus ex Machina”? Then again it could just be a “god from the box” (or machine), couldn’t it?
Do you remember when almost any school kid could translate Caesar’s summation of his wars: “Veni, vidi, vici”? “I came, I saw, I conquered.” How many kids talking American history can translate the national motto: “e pluribus unum”? Can you?
How about one of your most precious legal rights – the right not to be thrown into prison and left there without a charge or a trial? “Habeas corpus” (“let’s have the body!”) sounds better in Latin. Ever since I sat through some law school courses, “Res ipse loquitur” (“the thing speaks for itself”) has been a favorite expression of mine.
There is so much Latin that became part of everyday English – “ad hoc”, “et cetera”, “non sequitur”, “vox populi, vox dei”, “de facto”, and “vice versa”, to name a few. I’d hate to see them go the way of the Latin Mass. “Ita Missa est”? (“Go it is the dismissal”, or the end of the mass)
When William Shakespeare’s competitors wanted to insult him, they would sneer that the Bard was a man of “little Latin and less Greek”. In terms of the Sixteenth Century, he was considered uneducated. Perhaps we can say of modern American students they have “little English and less Latin”. The two may very well go together.
They wouldn’t let me out of high school without taking a year or two of Latin.
(I got sick of commenting on Wall Street and the floundering bail out. Everything has been said about that silliness that can possibly be said – until more consequences become apparent. As to the political campaign, that passed mere tedium long ago. Again, we must wait for consequences.)
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
To Fear or Not to Fear: Is that the Question?
The House voted No. All hell broke loose at the New York Stock Exchange. As one pundit put it, the House refused to pony up $700 billion; the market lost $1.1 trillion. This, we are told, endangers pension funds, money market funds and business in general.
It is certainly being presented as an all but unparalleled crisis. Is it? I confess I have no feeling one way or the other. Are we in a real crisis – or is this an effort to scare us enough so that we are finally willing to cover a lot of bad loans?
It’s a fair question, actually. Even if the market (the world’s largest gossip mill) tumbles again tomorrow, is it a true crisis – or are we hearing a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy? Again, I have no feeling one way or the other; I’m merely aware that there are two ways to view this mess.
All the media say this is the real thing, a real live disaster. So say the President, the candidates, the Street, Congressional leaders, and everyone who claims to speak for someone else. Can all these people be wrong? More to the point, could all these people be in collusion, wittingly or no?
Something that happened when I was a youngster working at the Newsweek Magazine editorial make-up desk keeps nibbling at my mind. At the time the John Birch Society was all over the media with its allegations that we were being sold out to the Communists.
The Society was getting all kinds of ink, all kinds of exposure. One Monday when we were putting together the magazine’s Periscope section, the editorial assistant offered the editor yet another story about the machinations of the John Birch Society. He declined it. “We’ve been told,” he said, “not to run any more stories about them.”
I assumed that was just a Newsweek policy. But over the next few months – starting from that very week, I suddenly realized there was nothing about the Society in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the television networks or any other paper I could check out. (We got them all at Newsweek.)
So whose policy was it? All those editors and news bureau chiefs met at the same club and voted unanimously? I find it hard to believe.
Then there’s the infamous or famous NSC-68. National Security Council study sixty eight. Back in early 1950. Now that World War II was past and gone, the American economy was tanking with no more war production. It almost seemed as if we were going back to 1938 and the Depression.
This top secret document – later declassified – talked at length about the need to revitalize our defense industries to counter the imminent Russian threat. (Now Joe Stalin was possibly nastier than Hitler, but his country was in ruins in the late 1940s. He had a few atomic bombs but no way to deliver them. He had kept his Yalta agreements and backed down more than once to American force.
NSC-68 was beating a nearly dead horse. But within months, a five year old Korean civil war escalated into a crusade for Democracy (after Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State advertently or inadvertently drew the North Koreans offside by making a speech (Feb 1950) in which he told the world South Korea was not included in our defense perimeter.)
Feeling they had a free hand, the North Korean decided to end the civil war once and for all that June. This led to the Korean War – which effectively frightened Congress and the media into authorizing huge new defense expenditures. No more 1938.
You may call that all a huge Communist plot, but the paper trail simply does not lead that way. Or how about my German Jewish friend who took a job in Voice of America, broadcasting to Germany during WWII? Having grown up under Hitler, he had a suspicion of government.
He began to notice that American troops and bases were popping up all over the world, far from any theatre of war. He made a map, putting dots on it for all these new American bases. One day his supervisor saw that map. My friend was fired the next day.
Why such fear of a map of American bases? Michael Crichton wrote a novel a few years ago called A State of Fear. His whole thesis was that it has been a deliberate policy of American officials and opinion makers to keep this nation in a state of fear so that this or that policy could be implemented.
So, it isn’t entirely ridiculous to stop a moment and ask, “Okay, how real is the need for a multi-billion dollar bailout on Wall Street?” As I say, I have not real feeling on this. I do know the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do feel a nagging doubt, a question or two.
I’m left wondering if Franklin Roosevelt was more right than he knew when he warned that “All we have to fear is fear itself.” He said that during a major financial crisis – the one this one is being compared to.
It is certainly being presented as an all but unparalleled crisis. Is it? I confess I have no feeling one way or the other. Are we in a real crisis – or is this an effort to scare us enough so that we are finally willing to cover a lot of bad loans?
It’s a fair question, actually. Even if the market (the world’s largest gossip mill) tumbles again tomorrow, is it a true crisis – or are we hearing a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy? Again, I have no feeling one way or the other; I’m merely aware that there are two ways to view this mess.
All the media say this is the real thing, a real live disaster. So say the President, the candidates, the Street, Congressional leaders, and everyone who claims to speak for someone else. Can all these people be wrong? More to the point, could all these people be in collusion, wittingly or no?
Something that happened when I was a youngster working at the Newsweek Magazine editorial make-up desk keeps nibbling at my mind. At the time the John Birch Society was all over the media with its allegations that we were being sold out to the Communists.
The Society was getting all kinds of ink, all kinds of exposure. One Monday when we were putting together the magazine’s Periscope section, the editorial assistant offered the editor yet another story about the machinations of the John Birch Society. He declined it. “We’ve been told,” he said, “not to run any more stories about them.”
I assumed that was just a Newsweek policy. But over the next few months – starting from that very week, I suddenly realized there was nothing about the Society in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the television networks or any other paper I could check out. (We got them all at Newsweek.)
So whose policy was it? All those editors and news bureau chiefs met at the same club and voted unanimously? I find it hard to believe.
Then there’s the infamous or famous NSC-68. National Security Council study sixty eight. Back in early 1950. Now that World War II was past and gone, the American economy was tanking with no more war production. It almost seemed as if we were going back to 1938 and the Depression.
This top secret document – later declassified – talked at length about the need to revitalize our defense industries to counter the imminent Russian threat. (Now Joe Stalin was possibly nastier than Hitler, but his country was in ruins in the late 1940s. He had a few atomic bombs but no way to deliver them. He had kept his Yalta agreements and backed down more than once to American force.
NSC-68 was beating a nearly dead horse. But within months, a five year old Korean civil war escalated into a crusade for Democracy (after Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State advertently or inadvertently drew the North Koreans offside by making a speech (Feb 1950) in which he told the world South Korea was not included in our defense perimeter.)
Feeling they had a free hand, the North Korean decided to end the civil war once and for all that June. This led to the Korean War – which effectively frightened Congress and the media into authorizing huge new defense expenditures. No more 1938.
You may call that all a huge Communist plot, but the paper trail simply does not lead that way. Or how about my German Jewish friend who took a job in Voice of America, broadcasting to Germany during WWII? Having grown up under Hitler, he had a suspicion of government.
He began to notice that American troops and bases were popping up all over the world, far from any theatre of war. He made a map, putting dots on it for all these new American bases. One day his supervisor saw that map. My friend was fired the next day.
Why such fear of a map of American bases? Michael Crichton wrote a novel a few years ago called A State of Fear. His whole thesis was that it has been a deliberate policy of American officials and opinion makers to keep this nation in a state of fear so that this or that policy could be implemented.
So, it isn’t entirely ridiculous to stop a moment and ask, “Okay, how real is the need for a multi-billion dollar bailout on Wall Street?” As I say, I have not real feeling on this. I do know the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do feel a nagging doubt, a question or two.
I’m left wondering if Franklin Roosevelt was more right than he knew when he warned that “All we have to fear is fear itself.” He said that during a major financial crisis – the one this one is being compared to.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Where This Christian Stands
So where do I stand? As a Christian, at a time when Governor Palin has brought the issue of Christianity as a belief system that affects political life to the forefront, that’s a valid question. So I’ll risk being a bore by trying to answer it.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
Where one Christian stands
So where do I stand? As a Christian, at a time when Governor Palin has brought the issue of Christianity as a belief system that affects political life to the forefront, that’s a valid question. So I’ll risk being a bore by trying to answer it.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Pogo: "We've met the Enemy and He's Us"
The media are trumpeting the news that Main Street is angry with Wall Street and wants someone punished. The folk on Wall Street are from a different planet? They live differently from the folk on Main Street? They’re alien invaders who have inflicted great pain on innocent victims?
Excuse me, who buys stocks and bonds? Who rushes from one hot tip to the next? Just the people who work along the old Dutch Wall? There’s a totally different society in downtown Manhattan that in no way resembles the one on Main Street?
Oh phooey. Wall Street sinned by over leveraging, by not being liquid enough, by taking wildly optimistic views of future prospects? By being greedy? By speculating? Too much exuberance -- taking on unrealistic amounts of debt?
Again, phooey. The young men waving their fingers and wildly bidding down on the floors of our exchanges are our own kids. They grew up in American homes that were leveraged to the hilt, hadn’t enough liquidity to keep a bank open, and where wildly optimistic views of the future were the norm.
These kids grew up greedy – they absorbed it in their mother’s milk and their dad’s speculation. They watched the exuberance with which televisions, appliances, automobiles, homes, clothes and groceries were all bought on credit. Their lives were leveraged at birth.
When a $90 field trip came up in high school, there was never any question like, “Can we afford this; ought we to afford it?” Out came the credit card or the cash advance. This was true of all of life. They were raised as if each home were a small government with its own printing press churning out money in the basement.
When these kid left Main Street (and borrowed their way through college and graduate school – leveraged education), what made you think they would suddenly become models of fiscal probity and discretion? Why would a lifetime of engrained habit change just because they were working for Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch?
If they didn’t know restraint and good sense before they went to work on the Street, what in Heaven’s name made you think they would learn it there?
Isn’t there any difference between Wall Street and Main Street? You bet your life there is. The misfeasance that takes place on Main Street is too small to bother with for most regulatory or taxing agencies. So the consequences are minimal to none.
I recall a friend of mine who owned his own store. One day he had to go to a wedding. He reached into the cash register and pulled out $20 to buy a shirt. That is so illegal under IRS regulations. But to put an agent in every store in America to watch for that kind of misappropriation just wouldn’t be cost effective – so it goes on all the time.
The IRS will tell you that one of its biggest problems is convincing a small businessman that the cash in his cash drawer isn’t his until it is duly recorded and issued as a paycheck. Until then, he is misappropriating just as much as any embezzler or thief.
When the same shenanigan happens involving millions or more dollars – then the IRS takes note and spends the money to get it back. Same thing goes on with regulation. Miniscule kinds of misbehavior on Main Street aren’t worth the trouble. But when its billions – or trillions – on Wall Street?
Yell all you like at Wall Street. Comfort yourself with the belief that “they” did this to you. But before you opt for big time punishment, ask yourself where this kind of behavior was learned. Look in the mirror.
Excuse me, who buys stocks and bonds? Who rushes from one hot tip to the next? Just the people who work along the old Dutch Wall? There’s a totally different society in downtown Manhattan that in no way resembles the one on Main Street?
Oh phooey. Wall Street sinned by over leveraging, by not being liquid enough, by taking wildly optimistic views of future prospects? By being greedy? By speculating? Too much exuberance -- taking on unrealistic amounts of debt?
Again, phooey. The young men waving their fingers and wildly bidding down on the floors of our exchanges are our own kids. They grew up in American homes that were leveraged to the hilt, hadn’t enough liquidity to keep a bank open, and where wildly optimistic views of the future were the norm.
These kids grew up greedy – they absorbed it in their mother’s milk and their dad’s speculation. They watched the exuberance with which televisions, appliances, automobiles, homes, clothes and groceries were all bought on credit. Their lives were leveraged at birth.
When a $90 field trip came up in high school, there was never any question like, “Can we afford this; ought we to afford it?” Out came the credit card or the cash advance. This was true of all of life. They were raised as if each home were a small government with its own printing press churning out money in the basement.
When these kid left Main Street (and borrowed their way through college and graduate school – leveraged education), what made you think they would suddenly become models of fiscal probity and discretion? Why would a lifetime of engrained habit change just because they were working for Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch?
If they didn’t know restraint and good sense before they went to work on the Street, what in Heaven’s name made you think they would learn it there?
Isn’t there any difference between Wall Street and Main Street? You bet your life there is. The misfeasance that takes place on Main Street is too small to bother with for most regulatory or taxing agencies. So the consequences are minimal to none.
I recall a friend of mine who owned his own store. One day he had to go to a wedding. He reached into the cash register and pulled out $20 to buy a shirt. That is so illegal under IRS regulations. But to put an agent in every store in America to watch for that kind of misappropriation just wouldn’t be cost effective – so it goes on all the time.
The IRS will tell you that one of its biggest problems is convincing a small businessman that the cash in his cash drawer isn’t his until it is duly recorded and issued as a paycheck. Until then, he is misappropriating just as much as any embezzler or thief.
When the same shenanigan happens involving millions or more dollars – then the IRS takes note and spends the money to get it back. Same thing goes on with regulation. Miniscule kinds of misbehavior on Main Street aren’t worth the trouble. But when its billions – or trillions – on Wall Street?
Yell all you like at Wall Street. Comfort yourself with the belief that “they” did this to you. But before you opt for big time punishment, ask yourself where this kind of behavior was learned. Look in the mirror.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Not Trippingly on the Tongue
I cannot say who won the debate tonight. In 1960, I thought Nixon had won. Of course, I was judging on content not style. (Radio listeners thought Nixon won, too. TV gave the more handsome Kennedy his edge.) When it comes to style, I do have some things to say about Obama.
Like Kennedy, he looks young, handsome and he articulates some impressive generalities that , again like Kennedy, give him a strong superficial appeal. I keep hearing and reading people who say that Senator Obama is such a good speech maker.
I don’t see it. I didn’t see it tonight. He stammers, he persists in dropping all “g”s from his present participles. While I will listen and learn from people who do that, I will not call them excellent speakers. Picky, picky, picky – but all I hear from the media is what an orator he is.
An orator? A first class public speaker? Hardly. Not in my book.
McCain is no Churchill or Kennedy – but at least he spoke as if he knew the subject he was talking about. There were moments of real passion in his voice.
Obama, on the other hand, speaks as if he were reciting from an only partially memorized speech. He shoots out a few words, without a lot of feeling, and then he hesitates as if he were looking for the next words on a paper or a teleprompter.
It feels like a ride over a bumpy road in a vehicle with bad shock absorbers. I honestly do not enjoy listening to him – just his manner of speaking – one bit. He even says things I think I may agree with, but his delivery is so poor that I am left unimpressed and unmoved. I’ve felt that way about him since the first time a saw a news clip of one of his speeches, long ago.
So does that make him a poor choice for president? I admit that right now I am judging him on his style of speaking. And that I profoundly dislike that style. That leaves me unqualified to judge who actually won. Even if I tried, would I know? I was wrong about Kennedy/Nixon.
I fear there’s a disconnect between me and many if not most American listeners. My father unwittingly turned me into a bit of a freak when it comes to spoken English. He had trained to be an actor, done graduate work in speech, and was determined to pass it along to his only son.
Some of his efforts were enjoyable. I have fond memories of listening to my father read Shakespeare to me on a Sunday afternoons. I was seven or eight. I’ve read research that says that’s the best age to enjoy the comedies – pure slapstick. He read them all.
Other parts were not such fun. There was discipline and strong disapproval if I dipped into slang or careless speech patterns. “You will learn to speak the King’s English!” he would bellow. (In Grand Rapids? I quickly became the fat kid with glasses and a funny accent. People still ask me, 60 years later, where I came from.)
He made a point of taking me to movies where English was well spoken – Olivier, Laughton, Niven, Hepburn -- and Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas on radio. I remember when I was young being taken to the radio to hear a speech by a man named Winston Churchill. I believe that was the Fulton, Missouri, speech when he spoke of the “iron curtain”.
On Christmas Eve I would listen to Lionel Barrymore read “The Christmas Carol” – and haven’t liked any other version better ever since.
My father never missed an opportunity to point out to me someone who spoke English well – or badly.
So I’m in no position to accurately gauge the quality of an American political speaker. Or who won an American political debate. But, I have to admit, I do not like Obama’s speaking style.
Like Kennedy, he looks young, handsome and he articulates some impressive generalities that , again like Kennedy, give him a strong superficial appeal. I keep hearing and reading people who say that Senator Obama is such a good speech maker.
I don’t see it. I didn’t see it tonight. He stammers, he persists in dropping all “g”s from his present participles. While I will listen and learn from people who do that, I will not call them excellent speakers. Picky, picky, picky – but all I hear from the media is what an orator he is.
An orator? A first class public speaker? Hardly. Not in my book.
McCain is no Churchill or Kennedy – but at least he spoke as if he knew the subject he was talking about. There were moments of real passion in his voice.
Obama, on the other hand, speaks as if he were reciting from an only partially memorized speech. He shoots out a few words, without a lot of feeling, and then he hesitates as if he were looking for the next words on a paper or a teleprompter.
It feels like a ride over a bumpy road in a vehicle with bad shock absorbers. I honestly do not enjoy listening to him – just his manner of speaking – one bit. He even says things I think I may agree with, but his delivery is so poor that I am left unimpressed and unmoved. I’ve felt that way about him since the first time a saw a news clip of one of his speeches, long ago.
So does that make him a poor choice for president? I admit that right now I am judging him on his style of speaking. And that I profoundly dislike that style. That leaves me unqualified to judge who actually won. Even if I tried, would I know? I was wrong about Kennedy/Nixon.
I fear there’s a disconnect between me and many if not most American listeners. My father unwittingly turned me into a bit of a freak when it comes to spoken English. He had trained to be an actor, done graduate work in speech, and was determined to pass it along to his only son.
Some of his efforts were enjoyable. I have fond memories of listening to my father read Shakespeare to me on a Sunday afternoons. I was seven or eight. I’ve read research that says that’s the best age to enjoy the comedies – pure slapstick. He read them all.
Other parts were not such fun. There was discipline and strong disapproval if I dipped into slang or careless speech patterns. “You will learn to speak the King’s English!” he would bellow. (In Grand Rapids? I quickly became the fat kid with glasses and a funny accent. People still ask me, 60 years later, where I came from.)
He made a point of taking me to movies where English was well spoken – Olivier, Laughton, Niven, Hepburn -- and Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas on radio. I remember when I was young being taken to the radio to hear a speech by a man named Winston Churchill. I believe that was the Fulton, Missouri, speech when he spoke of the “iron curtain”.
On Christmas Eve I would listen to Lionel Barrymore read “The Christmas Carol” – and haven’t liked any other version better ever since.
My father never missed an opportunity to point out to me someone who spoke English well – or badly.
So I’m in no position to accurately gauge the quality of an American political speaker. Or who won an American political debate. But, I have to admit, I do not like Obama’s speaking style.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Hell Hath no Fury like an Electorate Scorned
An acquaintance of mine who works for a public college in New England plans to take November 4 off from work and drive students to the polls. She’s in her forties, and Obama has her and the students around her really, really excited.
The news media – mainly written by people too young to remember 1960 very well – are agog with enthusiasm about how Senator Obama has inspired young voters. That may well be as wonderful a thing as they say it is.
But I do remember 1960 – and its aftermath. Jack Kennedy had the kids rooting for him, too. I recall that even fourteen and fifteen year old youngsters were sporting Kennedy buttons and pictures and talking up the dynamic young candidate that year.
Their enthusiasm – and the machinations of some political bosses in Illinois and Texas – got the Kennedy Johnson ticket elected. The nation waited breathlessly to see what this new generation would bring to Washington and create in that city.
What a spate of Earth-shattering legislation poured out over the next ten years! We got Medicaid, Medicare, the Peace Corps, domestic volunteer programs, huge urban renewal programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, programs to end poverty in Appalachia and throughout the United States. Federal aid to education grew exponentially, there were Food Stamps for the hungry, stronger environmental protection, student loans and grants, The President’s Council for Physical Fitness -- a veritable cornucopia of benefits.
It is doubtful that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave us anything like as much. It was a heady time to be in Washington. We were going to end poverty and cure all the nation’s ills. We really believed. I, a life-long Republican, got carried along – with rare enthusiasm.
I voted for LBJ in 1964. There were large groups of Republicans for Johnson. Everett Dirksen, the hoary spokesman for a Conservative Republican Party would declaim of the once anathema civil rights legislation that it was, “an idea whose time has come!”
I was, I admit, a true believer. I brought charges against factories that would not integrate. I published photos of hospital waiting rooms that no longer had “white” and “black” signs, but they had carefully positioned potted plants to divide the races. We got rid of the plants. We were bringing in the Millennium.
Events and circumstances reared their ugly heads.
Seven, eight years after that fateful election (three, four years after LBJ’s landslide re-election in 1964) the nation was burning, American cities were surrounded by tanks and checkpoints, students were facing bayonets and screaming their rage. Some of the same kids who had been so enthusiastic in 1960 were now shrieking imprecations at the administration they had elected.
We marched on the Pentagon. (I marched, too.) Some of the placards that described the administration that had brought us Civil Rights, Medicare and anti-poverty programs were positively obscene.
Kids pulled back from politics. They dropped out and turned on in a wave of drug use that bedevils us today. (I have sat in high school parking lots recently and watched the drug deals go down between white, middle class kids. When I went to school, we didn’t know what the stuff was.)
Civil Rights didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. The Black Panthers carried guns. Cities burned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered – by whites. Malcolm X was gunned down – by blacks. Our black allies in the Civil Rights movement showed us the door.
Students, armed with Peace Corps experience and student aid, showed only contempt and loathing for the colleges they were supposed to benefit from.
An army came home from Vietnam confused and embittered. No cheers – just derisive chants of “How many babies did you kill?” It took decades to restore their morale.
Raging students shrieked, “Peace Now!!” with hate contorted faces in the exact, angry cadence of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. “Sieg Heil” and “Peace Now” became indistinguishable. I withdrew from a peace movement I had once supported.
The kids – the nation – felt betrayed. All these wonderful goodies the Kennedy/Johnson years gave us – and the Millennium was somehow delayed. Poverty, death, discrimination went right on. Kennedy’s mellifluous promises had not solved all our woes, assuaged all our grief. The electorate of 1960 did not forgive.
No matter who is elected this year, no matter what he promises; his administration won’t solve much either. I just don’t want to go through another spasm of outrage when these enthusiastic kids my acquaintance is driving to the polls figure that out.
Progress, social and political, is a long, slow process. As you vote, remember that.
The news media – mainly written by people too young to remember 1960 very well – are agog with enthusiasm about how Senator Obama has inspired young voters. That may well be as wonderful a thing as they say it is.
But I do remember 1960 – and its aftermath. Jack Kennedy had the kids rooting for him, too. I recall that even fourteen and fifteen year old youngsters were sporting Kennedy buttons and pictures and talking up the dynamic young candidate that year.
Their enthusiasm – and the machinations of some political bosses in Illinois and Texas – got the Kennedy Johnson ticket elected. The nation waited breathlessly to see what this new generation would bring to Washington and create in that city.
What a spate of Earth-shattering legislation poured out over the next ten years! We got Medicaid, Medicare, the Peace Corps, domestic volunteer programs, huge urban renewal programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, programs to end poverty in Appalachia and throughout the United States. Federal aid to education grew exponentially, there were Food Stamps for the hungry, stronger environmental protection, student loans and grants, The President’s Council for Physical Fitness -- a veritable cornucopia of benefits.
It is doubtful that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave us anything like as much. It was a heady time to be in Washington. We were going to end poverty and cure all the nation’s ills. We really believed. I, a life-long Republican, got carried along – with rare enthusiasm.
I voted for LBJ in 1964. There were large groups of Republicans for Johnson. Everett Dirksen, the hoary spokesman for a Conservative Republican Party would declaim of the once anathema civil rights legislation that it was, “an idea whose time has come!”
I was, I admit, a true believer. I brought charges against factories that would not integrate. I published photos of hospital waiting rooms that no longer had “white” and “black” signs, but they had carefully positioned potted plants to divide the races. We got rid of the plants. We were bringing in the Millennium.
Events and circumstances reared their ugly heads.
Seven, eight years after that fateful election (three, four years after LBJ’s landslide re-election in 1964) the nation was burning, American cities were surrounded by tanks and checkpoints, students were facing bayonets and screaming their rage. Some of the same kids who had been so enthusiastic in 1960 were now shrieking imprecations at the administration they had elected.
We marched on the Pentagon. (I marched, too.) Some of the placards that described the administration that had brought us Civil Rights, Medicare and anti-poverty programs were positively obscene.
Kids pulled back from politics. They dropped out and turned on in a wave of drug use that bedevils us today. (I have sat in high school parking lots recently and watched the drug deals go down between white, middle class kids. When I went to school, we didn’t know what the stuff was.)
Civil Rights didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. The Black Panthers carried guns. Cities burned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered – by whites. Malcolm X was gunned down – by blacks. Our black allies in the Civil Rights movement showed us the door.
Students, armed with Peace Corps experience and student aid, showed only contempt and loathing for the colleges they were supposed to benefit from.
An army came home from Vietnam confused and embittered. No cheers – just derisive chants of “How many babies did you kill?” It took decades to restore their morale.
Raging students shrieked, “Peace Now!!” with hate contorted faces in the exact, angry cadence of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. “Sieg Heil” and “Peace Now” became indistinguishable. I withdrew from a peace movement I had once supported.
The kids – the nation – felt betrayed. All these wonderful goodies the Kennedy/Johnson years gave us – and the Millennium was somehow delayed. Poverty, death, discrimination went right on. Kennedy’s mellifluous promises had not solved all our woes, assuaged all our grief. The electorate of 1960 did not forgive.
No matter who is elected this year, no matter what he promises; his administration won’t solve much either. I just don’t want to go through another spasm of outrage when these enthusiastic kids my acquaintance is driving to the polls figure that out.
Progress, social and political, is a long, slow process. As you vote, remember that.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Economy -- With Beer Bottles Poised.
Staring into the abyss that was once Wall Street, pundits are asking the presidential candidates what their recipes might be for getting us out of this mess. They talk of prescriptions, clear plans, strategies for prevention, and make demands normally reserved for prophets and oracles.
What’s your cure, John? Barrack, how will you keep this from ever happening again? The media express frustration and disappointment that no such clear trail has yet been blazed. It appears that a major qualification for president has become knowing the unknowable.
Good night! The whole situation reminds me of being in a canoe on a lake when a large power boat zoomed past us. You are caught rocking madly in its wake and for one sickening instant you are not at all sure if you’re going to stay upright or you and all your gear are going for a swim.
Like the Feds’ Bernanke and Treasury’s Paulson – the guys actually in the canoe – you lean this way, you lean that way, hoping you are leaning the right way, hoping you are both leaning the same way. Maybe you stay afloat, maybe you don’t.
In any case, you’re the guys in the canoe – and all the shouting and advising from watchers on shore is not going to do a bit of good. You can’t tell me that both Bernanke and Paulson don’t have the same feeling I’ve had in a canoe riding a wake or some rapids. (And if there’s a guy in the middle of the canoe with his own ideas – Congress – all the more exciting.)
Paulson is basically asking Congress for more authority and power to act instantly than anybody has been given since FDR’s First Hundred Days. Are we in as much trouble as we were in 1933? A lot of people seem to think so. Should Paulson (with Bernanke) be given that much power? Fewer people seem to think that.
So what will happen?
Most of the times I’ve been in a rocking canoe, it has righted itself as the waters calmed down. We can reasonably hope that will happen this time. (I have gotten wet also, but let’s not think about that.) It may do it by itself.
After all, no one really wants the American canoe to tip over. A lot of countries and groups that consider themselves to be our enemies still measure their own wealth in dollars and benefit by selling their goods to us for those dollars. No one will escape unscathed if all the American gear is lost or ruined by a fall in the water.
Will either McCain or Obama be able to chart a course to calm water and safety, assuring us the boat will not tip in the rough waters ahead? I doubt it. Roosevelt couldn’t get us out of the Depression with seven years of innovation and trying.
He could not have foreseen that a nasty little Austrian with a black mustache would, in the end, be his only hope of restoring American prosperity. Hitler was not his choice, but Hitler it was. Neither McCain nor Obama can be expected to have the foresight to know what may do the trick now.
We are in the same situation that Churchill was in the summer of 1940. The Germans had driven the British Army into the sea, weaponless. They were training with broomsticks; they had no rifles. The Germans were massing along the channel for what looked like an invasion.
Churchill could not foresee that the Russian Army would occupy two thirds of Hitler’s army for the entire war. He could not foresee the Lend Lease Act that sent England unimaginable quantities of munitions and supplies. Nor could he foresee an island full to the point of sinking with American troops, planes, tanks and trucks.
He could only see a very few Royal Air Force fighters struggling to hold the air space over the channel, with unarmed troops below. So he went on the air – as Bernanke, Paulson, Bush, Obama and McCain should – and made an inspiring, if nonspecific speech.
“We shall fight them on the beaches,” he promised, “we shall fight them in the hills, in the fields … .” At the end of the speech, he put his hand over the microphone and muttered, “We’ll hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we’ve left to work with.”
What’s your cure, John? Barrack, how will you keep this from ever happening again? The media express frustration and disappointment that no such clear trail has yet been blazed. It appears that a major qualification for president has become knowing the unknowable.
Good night! The whole situation reminds me of being in a canoe on a lake when a large power boat zoomed past us. You are caught rocking madly in its wake and for one sickening instant you are not at all sure if you’re going to stay upright or you and all your gear are going for a swim.
Like the Feds’ Bernanke and Treasury’s Paulson – the guys actually in the canoe – you lean this way, you lean that way, hoping you are leaning the right way, hoping you are both leaning the same way. Maybe you stay afloat, maybe you don’t.
In any case, you’re the guys in the canoe – and all the shouting and advising from watchers on shore is not going to do a bit of good. You can’t tell me that both Bernanke and Paulson don’t have the same feeling I’ve had in a canoe riding a wake or some rapids. (And if there’s a guy in the middle of the canoe with his own ideas – Congress – all the more exciting.)
Paulson is basically asking Congress for more authority and power to act instantly than anybody has been given since FDR’s First Hundred Days. Are we in as much trouble as we were in 1933? A lot of people seem to think so. Should Paulson (with Bernanke) be given that much power? Fewer people seem to think that.
So what will happen?
Most of the times I’ve been in a rocking canoe, it has righted itself as the waters calmed down. We can reasonably hope that will happen this time. (I have gotten wet also, but let’s not think about that.) It may do it by itself.
After all, no one really wants the American canoe to tip over. A lot of countries and groups that consider themselves to be our enemies still measure their own wealth in dollars and benefit by selling their goods to us for those dollars. No one will escape unscathed if all the American gear is lost or ruined by a fall in the water.
Will either McCain or Obama be able to chart a course to calm water and safety, assuring us the boat will not tip in the rough waters ahead? I doubt it. Roosevelt couldn’t get us out of the Depression with seven years of innovation and trying.
He could not have foreseen that a nasty little Austrian with a black mustache would, in the end, be his only hope of restoring American prosperity. Hitler was not his choice, but Hitler it was. Neither McCain nor Obama can be expected to have the foresight to know what may do the trick now.
We are in the same situation that Churchill was in the summer of 1940. The Germans had driven the British Army into the sea, weaponless. They were training with broomsticks; they had no rifles. The Germans were massing along the channel for what looked like an invasion.
Churchill could not foresee that the Russian Army would occupy two thirds of Hitler’s army for the entire war. He could not foresee the Lend Lease Act that sent England unimaginable quantities of munitions and supplies. Nor could he foresee an island full to the point of sinking with American troops, planes, tanks and trucks.
He could only see a very few Royal Air Force fighters struggling to hold the air space over the channel, with unarmed troops below. So he went on the air – as Bernanke, Paulson, Bush, Obama and McCain should – and made an inspiring, if nonspecific speech.
“We shall fight them on the beaches,” he promised, “we shall fight them in the hills, in the fields … .” At the end of the speech, he put his hand over the microphone and muttered, “We’ll hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we’ve left to work with.”
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Wall Street Bust -- The Real Culprit
The blame game is in full cry in the stock exchanges and on Main Street. The Republicans did it. The Democrats did it. Greedy CEOs did it. Overleveraged banks did it. Absentee regulators did it. Alan Greenspan did it – or little green men from Mars did it.
Somebody did it. One thing we all know is that IT was done to US by THEM. They should all be punitively regulated. McCain suggested no CEO should earn more than $400,000 a year. Of one thing we are all sure: THEY did it. To US. Shame on THEM.
I keep remembering my aunt’s house. In the walkway between the dining room and the living room, there was a carpet runner. That’s a strip of carpet that hopefully matches the carpet on the floor. It is laid down to cover the worn spot in the original carpet.
I haven’t seen a runner in years. She had hers in the 50s and 60s, about when the original carpet was twenty years old. (The rest of the carpet was perfectly fine – they bought quality in those days.) She saw no reason to replace a whole houseful of carpet because one spot was worn. I believe that same carpet and runner were there when she sold the house in the 1970s.
Most people today don’t keep carpet long enough to see any worn spots. But my aunt came up through the Depression. Her first year of teaching she got paid $300 for the year. She took the bus (for a nickel) in the cold mornings, but she walked home after school to save the second nickel. It was needed for fripperies like food.
Auntie eventually took several trips to Europe; she got to see the pyramids that an uncle had told her about when she was a little girl. She drove a Buick and moved from her nice home to an equally nice two bedroom, two bath apartment in her sixties. She gave to charities and was active in church work until her death at almost ninety.
When she died, she had over $160,000, just in cash – she had distrusted stocks and bonds ever since her father got wiped out in 1929. As we cleaned out her apartment we found that her TV was twenty years old and her mix master dated to the 40s. But they both worked just fine.
There are those – in Washington, on Wall Street and along Main Street who would seriously suggest that the slaughter in the markets would be the fault of too many people like her. Had she lived long enough, that it was her fault.
After all, what did President Bush urgently recommend Americans do when the markets tanked after the World Trade Center was blown up? He asked us to do our patriotic duty and go out and shop. This is a consumer society – go forth and consume, restore economic health by spending.
Buy new carpet whether you need it or not. I am surrounded by neighbors who do just that. They’ll tell you how sick they are of the old carpet – “I’ve had it for five years.” And after a couple of more seasons, they’ll throw out all the living room furniture and start over.
So the mainstay of our consumer economy has become individual consumption. The latest TVs, the newest kitchen gadgets, new laundry machines to match the new paint job in the laundry room. New dining room furniture because the old shade of wood is out of fashion.
Years ago, I had an argument with a neighbor. She bought a new coat every year at a discount store for about $70. I suggested she go to a better department store and buy a coat for $150 that might last for five or ten years. She looked at me in horror. Who would wear a coat for five years?!?
When the markets fell last year, once again Republicans and Democrats alike united to send us cheques for hundreds of dollars. We were expected to spend this stimulus on new carpets, new coats and new TVs immediately to jump start the economy.
Most of my neighbors are as leveraged as any deal done on Wall Street. This card is maxed so we use the next. It’s the American way of doing business – leveraged buyouts at Sears, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Costco, and Macy’s. Why should Wall Street be any more rational?
I’ll bet there are no runners on the carpets in the offices of the New York Stock Exchange. Now they’re coming to us and asking us to buy their “new carpets” for them. And we’re going to do it. We have, we are told, no choice.
My poor subversive auntie, she was positively un-American. Imagine having that kind of cash left when you’re ninety! On a school teacher’s pension. Just think of all the leveraged economic growth she denied the rest of us. That’s where the blame really belongs. Shame on you, auntie!
Somebody did it. One thing we all know is that IT was done to US by THEM. They should all be punitively regulated. McCain suggested no CEO should earn more than $400,000 a year. Of one thing we are all sure: THEY did it. To US. Shame on THEM.
I keep remembering my aunt’s house. In the walkway between the dining room and the living room, there was a carpet runner. That’s a strip of carpet that hopefully matches the carpet on the floor. It is laid down to cover the worn spot in the original carpet.
I haven’t seen a runner in years. She had hers in the 50s and 60s, about when the original carpet was twenty years old. (The rest of the carpet was perfectly fine – they bought quality in those days.) She saw no reason to replace a whole houseful of carpet because one spot was worn. I believe that same carpet and runner were there when she sold the house in the 1970s.
Most people today don’t keep carpet long enough to see any worn spots. But my aunt came up through the Depression. Her first year of teaching she got paid $300 for the year. She took the bus (for a nickel) in the cold mornings, but she walked home after school to save the second nickel. It was needed for fripperies like food.
Auntie eventually took several trips to Europe; she got to see the pyramids that an uncle had told her about when she was a little girl. She drove a Buick and moved from her nice home to an equally nice two bedroom, two bath apartment in her sixties. She gave to charities and was active in church work until her death at almost ninety.
When she died, she had over $160,000, just in cash – she had distrusted stocks and bonds ever since her father got wiped out in 1929. As we cleaned out her apartment we found that her TV was twenty years old and her mix master dated to the 40s. But they both worked just fine.
There are those – in Washington, on Wall Street and along Main Street who would seriously suggest that the slaughter in the markets would be the fault of too many people like her. Had she lived long enough, that it was her fault.
After all, what did President Bush urgently recommend Americans do when the markets tanked after the World Trade Center was blown up? He asked us to do our patriotic duty and go out and shop. This is a consumer society – go forth and consume, restore economic health by spending.
Buy new carpet whether you need it or not. I am surrounded by neighbors who do just that. They’ll tell you how sick they are of the old carpet – “I’ve had it for five years.” And after a couple of more seasons, they’ll throw out all the living room furniture and start over.
So the mainstay of our consumer economy has become individual consumption. The latest TVs, the newest kitchen gadgets, new laundry machines to match the new paint job in the laundry room. New dining room furniture because the old shade of wood is out of fashion.
Years ago, I had an argument with a neighbor. She bought a new coat every year at a discount store for about $70. I suggested she go to a better department store and buy a coat for $150 that might last for five or ten years. She looked at me in horror. Who would wear a coat for five years?!?
When the markets fell last year, once again Republicans and Democrats alike united to send us cheques for hundreds of dollars. We were expected to spend this stimulus on new carpets, new coats and new TVs immediately to jump start the economy.
Most of my neighbors are as leveraged as any deal done on Wall Street. This card is maxed so we use the next. It’s the American way of doing business – leveraged buyouts at Sears, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Costco, and Macy’s. Why should Wall Street be any more rational?
I’ll bet there are no runners on the carpets in the offices of the New York Stock Exchange. Now they’re coming to us and asking us to buy their “new carpets” for them. And we’re going to do it. We have, we are told, no choice.
My poor subversive auntie, she was positively un-American. Imagine having that kind of cash left when you’re ninety! On a school teacher’s pension. Just think of all the leveraged economic growth she denied the rest of us. That’s where the blame really belongs. Shame on you, auntie!
Monday, September 22, 2008
Ground Zero in Islamabad
It’s become a truism to say that it isn’t safe to be seen in American company in parts of the Muslim world. Even truisms can be true. This weekend a luxury hotel where the top government officials of Pakistan planned to dine blew up in Islamabad.
The officials had changed plans, but one has to believe they are left with a nasty case of nerves. The other day the Pakistanis opened fire on a couple of American helicopters. Who’s a friend? Who’s a foe?
It might be a good idea to take a look at the world – and the history of European/Muslim relations – from the Muslim point of view. So here goes an abbreviated version that will, hopefully, offer some explanation for the seemingly intractable hostility we face.
George Bush didn’t cause the problem. Neither did any other American, living or dead. The situation goes back centuries – from the moment Muslim armies boiled out of Arabia, overwhelming Christian armies and conquering over half of all Christian territories – in the 700s.
A thousand years ago, the highest culture and leading technological advances belonged to Islam. The attitude toward the primitive Christian states was, at best, condescending. Christians could be beaten in battle, their civilization was only too hungry to borrow and learn from Islam.
In short, by the Eleventh Century, Islam was the top of the heap. Then Islam made a bad PR move. It cut off western European pilgrims from visiting Christian holy sites in Palestine. The pilgrims were unarmed and harmless. There was no good reason to shut them out.
This provoked a wave of European religious fanaticism. The knights and footmen who poured into the Holy Land to reopen the holy places were unwashed and illiterate. Eastern Christians in Constantinople, who were prepared to welcome them as allies and liberators, to one look at the grimy western knights and wouldn’t let them in the city.
But these grubby, unlettered knights brought with them a technology that was to turn Muslim/Christian relations on its head. The knights wore armor and rode horses the size of Budweiser Clydesdales. A handful of these “tanks” were the equal or better of a legion of Arab horsemen.
A few hundred of these armored monstrosities were able to keep the tiny Christian states the Crusaders established intact in the face of thousands upon thousands of Muslim soldiery for two centuries. In that time, Western Europe regained the use of money and acquired a lot of expertise.
Islam won the battle, by 1295 the last Christian enclave was taken and lands belonging to Allah were again free of the infidel. They won the next few battles, too. It seemed nothing much had changed as Muslim warriors rode up the Balkans as far as Vienna itself.
Constantinople – the last Christian fortress in the once totally Christian Near East fell in 1453. (As the Christian scholars fled west, they sparked something called the Renaissance.) But only 40 years later, after six centuries of battling Muslim invaders, Spain conquered their last fort in Spain in 1492 – and set out to challenge Muslim power in the Mediterranean.
In 1571, the Battle of Lepanto, near Greece, ended Muslim domination in the Mediterranean. The Russians, having freed themselves from Muslim rule, began their drive south toward the Black Sea, eventually making a host of Muslim states into Russian colonies.
In the 1700s, the British defeated the Mogul (Muslim) empire in India, finally crushing them in 1857. “Christians” – please understand that “Christian” and “Muslim” are herein cultural or ideological terms – having nothing to do with faith or belief—seemed militarily unstoppable.
In the 1840s, the French went into North Africa ending the Barbary Pirate threat to Christian shipping. In the 1870s, the British found themselves pushed by the possibly mad general, Chinese Gordon, into East Africa to end the thousand year old Muslim slave trade in black Africans.
A last Muslim holy man/war lord – the Mahdi – was killed after he besieged Khartoum and killed Gordon. By the 1890s, Muslim resistance to Christian armies was everywhere crushed. By 1920, nearly every single inch of Muslim territory from the Atlantic to Indonesia and the southern Philippines was under a Christian flag—in the Dutch, British, French, Italian and American empires.
Only interior Arabia – Saudi’s Arabia – and Afghanistan escaped this fate. It was a time of unbearable humiliation for a group whose culture was once the highest on the planet, whose arms ruled everything from Southern France and North Africa to the gates of China.
Not until 1979 – a century after the death of the Mahdi – did Islam find a new hero. The Ayatollah Khomeini seized control of Iran from a man seen as an American puppet, the Shah. It was as if a fire were lit in the entire Muslim world.
Once again, Muslim arms and Muslim culture had victories to report. The new Christian enemy, the greatest Christian power, was of course, the United States. Muslims who dream of past glory amid their present poverty see it as an infidel state to be attacked at any point that can be reached.
When will we have peace with those who remember the glory days of Islam with such fervor? When we acknowledge the supremacy of Allah, stop backing the infidel State of Israel, pull our “Christian” troops out of Islamic lands – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, to name a few, and when we cease to be any sort of military threat (actual or potential) to Islamic lands.
In other words, when we stop being who we are. Only then. Spain fought them for six centuries, Constantinople held out for seven. Russia has fought to survive them for five or more. We – and our occasional friends of convenience in the Muslim world -- may have a long struggle ahead of us. There are lots of Mahdi’s now.
The officials had changed plans, but one has to believe they are left with a nasty case of nerves. The other day the Pakistanis opened fire on a couple of American helicopters. Who’s a friend? Who’s a foe?
It might be a good idea to take a look at the world – and the history of European/Muslim relations – from the Muslim point of view. So here goes an abbreviated version that will, hopefully, offer some explanation for the seemingly intractable hostility we face.
George Bush didn’t cause the problem. Neither did any other American, living or dead. The situation goes back centuries – from the moment Muslim armies boiled out of Arabia, overwhelming Christian armies and conquering over half of all Christian territories – in the 700s.
A thousand years ago, the highest culture and leading technological advances belonged to Islam. The attitude toward the primitive Christian states was, at best, condescending. Christians could be beaten in battle, their civilization was only too hungry to borrow and learn from Islam.
In short, by the Eleventh Century, Islam was the top of the heap. Then Islam made a bad PR move. It cut off western European pilgrims from visiting Christian holy sites in Palestine. The pilgrims were unarmed and harmless. There was no good reason to shut them out.
This provoked a wave of European religious fanaticism. The knights and footmen who poured into the Holy Land to reopen the holy places were unwashed and illiterate. Eastern Christians in Constantinople, who were prepared to welcome them as allies and liberators, to one look at the grimy western knights and wouldn’t let them in the city.
But these grubby, unlettered knights brought with them a technology that was to turn Muslim/Christian relations on its head. The knights wore armor and rode horses the size of Budweiser Clydesdales. A handful of these “tanks” were the equal or better of a legion of Arab horsemen.
A few hundred of these armored monstrosities were able to keep the tiny Christian states the Crusaders established intact in the face of thousands upon thousands of Muslim soldiery for two centuries. In that time, Western Europe regained the use of money and acquired a lot of expertise.
Islam won the battle, by 1295 the last Christian enclave was taken and lands belonging to Allah were again free of the infidel. They won the next few battles, too. It seemed nothing much had changed as Muslim warriors rode up the Balkans as far as Vienna itself.
Constantinople – the last Christian fortress in the once totally Christian Near East fell in 1453. (As the Christian scholars fled west, they sparked something called the Renaissance.) But only 40 years later, after six centuries of battling Muslim invaders, Spain conquered their last fort in Spain in 1492 – and set out to challenge Muslim power in the Mediterranean.
In 1571, the Battle of Lepanto, near Greece, ended Muslim domination in the Mediterranean. The Russians, having freed themselves from Muslim rule, began their drive south toward the Black Sea, eventually making a host of Muslim states into Russian colonies.
In the 1700s, the British defeated the Mogul (Muslim) empire in India, finally crushing them in 1857. “Christians” – please understand that “Christian” and “Muslim” are herein cultural or ideological terms – having nothing to do with faith or belief—seemed militarily unstoppable.
In the 1840s, the French went into North Africa ending the Barbary Pirate threat to Christian shipping. In the 1870s, the British found themselves pushed by the possibly mad general, Chinese Gordon, into East Africa to end the thousand year old Muslim slave trade in black Africans.
A last Muslim holy man/war lord – the Mahdi – was killed after he besieged Khartoum and killed Gordon. By the 1890s, Muslim resistance to Christian armies was everywhere crushed. By 1920, nearly every single inch of Muslim territory from the Atlantic to Indonesia and the southern Philippines was under a Christian flag—in the Dutch, British, French, Italian and American empires.
Only interior Arabia – Saudi’s Arabia – and Afghanistan escaped this fate. It was a time of unbearable humiliation for a group whose culture was once the highest on the planet, whose arms ruled everything from Southern France and North Africa to the gates of China.
Not until 1979 – a century after the death of the Mahdi – did Islam find a new hero. The Ayatollah Khomeini seized control of Iran from a man seen as an American puppet, the Shah. It was as if a fire were lit in the entire Muslim world.
Once again, Muslim arms and Muslim culture had victories to report. The new Christian enemy, the greatest Christian power, was of course, the United States. Muslims who dream of past glory amid their present poverty see it as an infidel state to be attacked at any point that can be reached.
When will we have peace with those who remember the glory days of Islam with such fervor? When we acknowledge the supremacy of Allah, stop backing the infidel State of Israel, pull our “Christian” troops out of Islamic lands – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, to name a few, and when we cease to be any sort of military threat (actual or potential) to Islamic lands.
In other words, when we stop being who we are. Only then. Spain fought them for six centuries, Constantinople held out for seven. Russia has fought to survive them for five or more. We – and our occasional friends of convenience in the Muslim world -- may have a long struggle ahead of us. There are lots of Mahdi’s now.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Palin and Her God
It’s often interesting to find out what a person believes or thinks by reading either his own words or the words he chooses to stand by. I remember when a translation of De Gaulle’s Memoirs came out in the 1960s. I bought it and read it.
A couple of years later, De Gaulle threw NATO and the United States out of Paris, began his own atomic weapons program and announced France would go it alone. The State Department went into shock. The Washington Post and The New York Times were reduced to sputtering.
I did some checking and learned that almost no one in the State Department had bothered to read the Memoirs when they were published. Had they done so, they would by no means have been surprised at De Gaulle’s action – or his hostility.
Sidebar: the French have a much different view of World War II than we do. They see the British as happily gobbling up parts of the French Empire after the debacle of 1940, and they see the Americans as then devouring pieces of both the British and the French Empires. After the war, they see the British as becoming a cat’s paw for American aggrandizement.
In other words, both England and the USA are as much enemies of France as Nazi Germany was. Taking this view into account, the actions of a man who would order NATO (American led) out of Paris become completely explicable if not agreeable.
I could give other examples, but suffice it to say, a person’s words – believed and written – matter.
Sarah Palin, who seems to be frightening everyone to pieces with her affirmations of Christianity, sent out an Email to several churches this morning. In it she asked the churches to pray for her using the word of an ancient Jewish “psalm” or hymn.
When you ask a person to pray using certain words, one has to assume that those words are meaningful to you. So I quote some of the words Governor Palin chose this morning. They are from the 27th Psalm in the Old Testament or Jewish Bible. The words were written by the ancient Hebrew warrior/king, David, who faced some political difficulties of his own.
It begins with David’s affirmation: “The LORD [Jehovah] is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” Then it gets darker.
“When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident.”
David, the warrior, was called “The Lion”. Governor Palin is called a “Shark” or “Barracuda”. None are thought to be afraid of their enemies; all three are known for ripping and tearing.
She continues with his words, “One thing I have desired of the LORD, … that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, … .
“For in the time of trouble he shall hide me …, he shall set me upon a rock. And now shall my head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; …
“… have mercy also upon me, and answer me. … Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation. …
“Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait on the LORD, be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” (King James Version)
I would suggest these words offer an interesting insight into the governor’s character and beliefs. It suggests what her attitude toward life and political warfare might be. In short, it may give a little more insight into this mysterious, moose-hunting person from the far north.
Incidentally, moose are very dangerous animals.
A couple of years later, De Gaulle threw NATO and the United States out of Paris, began his own atomic weapons program and announced France would go it alone. The State Department went into shock. The Washington Post and The New York Times were reduced to sputtering.
I did some checking and learned that almost no one in the State Department had bothered to read the Memoirs when they were published. Had they done so, they would by no means have been surprised at De Gaulle’s action – or his hostility.
Sidebar: the French have a much different view of World War II than we do. They see the British as happily gobbling up parts of the French Empire after the debacle of 1940, and they see the Americans as then devouring pieces of both the British and the French Empires. After the war, they see the British as becoming a cat’s paw for American aggrandizement.
In other words, both England and the USA are as much enemies of France as Nazi Germany was. Taking this view into account, the actions of a man who would order NATO (American led) out of Paris become completely explicable if not agreeable.
I could give other examples, but suffice it to say, a person’s words – believed and written – matter.
Sarah Palin, who seems to be frightening everyone to pieces with her affirmations of Christianity, sent out an Email to several churches this morning. In it she asked the churches to pray for her using the word of an ancient Jewish “psalm” or hymn.
When you ask a person to pray using certain words, one has to assume that those words are meaningful to you. So I quote some of the words Governor Palin chose this morning. They are from the 27th Psalm in the Old Testament or Jewish Bible. The words were written by the ancient Hebrew warrior/king, David, who faced some political difficulties of his own.
It begins with David’s affirmation: “The LORD [Jehovah] is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” Then it gets darker.
“When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident.”
David, the warrior, was called “The Lion”. Governor Palin is called a “Shark” or “Barracuda”. None are thought to be afraid of their enemies; all three are known for ripping and tearing.
She continues with his words, “One thing I have desired of the LORD, … that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, … .
“For in the time of trouble he shall hide me …, he shall set me upon a rock. And now shall my head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; …
“… have mercy also upon me, and answer me. … Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation. …
“Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait on the LORD, be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” (King James Version)
I would suggest these words offer an interesting insight into the governor’s character and beliefs. It suggests what her attitude toward life and political warfare might be. In short, it may give a little more insight into this mysterious, moose-hunting person from the far north.
Incidentally, moose are very dangerous animals.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Empowerment on Wall Street and beyond
I have come to hate the word, “empowerment”. I encounter it just about every time I walk down the hall of a school building. I read it constantly. The function of school is to “empower” students. The function of government is to “empower” citizens. To be adequate parents, we must “empower” our children.
Everyone, it seems, to be whole and healthy must have a sense of empowerment. So we are told, taught and retold again.
Oh. Why?
Children are born with an all too vigorous sense of empowerment. “Daddy” and “Mommy” may be the first words they learn, but “Mine!” certainly comes soon after. It’s a rare child that doesn’t instinctively push others aside to get his own.
Look at the un-grown-ups on Wall Street that – left unregulated and uncontrolled – just pushed us into a trillion dollar debt to bail them out of the mess their sense of empowerment got us into in the first place. Our bankers could certainly use less feeling of being empowered.
Oh, but I will be told, empowerment is a basic American right. It’s part of our heritage.
Find that notion anywhere in the Constitution. Quite the contrary! The writers of that document full well realized that what a citizen needs to function in a democracy is less empowerment and more sense of responsibility. The government created in 1787 was designed to restrain and restrict empowerment, not foment it. The Bill of Rights grants specific freedoms – not empowerment.
In fact the framers of our government were so uncertain about citizen empowerment that they gave citizens the right only to vote for members of the House. Citizens were not deemed responsible enough to vote for members of the Senate – whose job it was to delay and deliberate on what the peoples’ representatives might have rushed to enact.
Nor could citizens vote for the president. A college of what it was hoped would be the wisest men in the country were to be elected to choose the chief executive. Citizens were (and are) given no say what-so-ever in the selection of the judiciary.
That shows no concern for empowerment. The men who wrote the Constitution had just lived through a revolution. They saw first hand what groups of greedy citizens could do to each other when overcome with a sense of empowerment. Some of those men may have stood guard over their neighbors’ houses to prevent gangs of “patriots” from looting them in a frenzy of wealth redistribution.
(History books don’t stress that side of the revolution.) The Constitutionists efforts to restrain empowerment run rampant produced an amazing document that has kept us on track for over two centuries. It works – splendidly.
Other nations whose concern actually was “empowerment” – notably France – have seen governments collapse in riot after riot. Study the history of France since 1789.
Nor is the proper function of either school or parent to inculcate any sense of empowerment. The infant comes with that built in. When you allow him or her to get out of the house, through school and all the way to Wall Street without being reined in, you wind up owing a trillion or more.
Home is the place where the little ball of greed and selfishness you birthed is to learn restraint. A major function of the home is to civilize the newborn barbarian. You teach him the art of the knife and fork, you keep him from bashing his little friends. You even have to convince him that he must drive on this side of the road and not that.
He must pick up after himself. She cannot be permitted to say “No” to certain directives – for the safety of society. Chores must be done or the home, like society at large, collapses. Certain behaviors – violence, narcotics use, self-destructive acts – may not be tolerated.
This is not empowerment. This is regulation. This is enforced restraint. They are designed to teach self-control. Without it, democracy cannot function. Without it, a system of total control becomes necessary and is demanded by the citizens.
Schools must recognize the same reality. Schoolwork must be done. Rules of mathematics and chemistry must be followed. Rules of behavior must be enforced. A child may not be permitted to look you in the eye and say, “You can’t make me.”
Otherwise he will believe there is nothing he can be made to do when he gets to Wall Street or to the streets of any city. Then, sadly, sometimes empowerment stops with a set of handcuffs.
Everyone, it seems, to be whole and healthy must have a sense of empowerment. So we are told, taught and retold again.
Oh. Why?
Children are born with an all too vigorous sense of empowerment. “Daddy” and “Mommy” may be the first words they learn, but “Mine!” certainly comes soon after. It’s a rare child that doesn’t instinctively push others aside to get his own.
Look at the un-grown-ups on Wall Street that – left unregulated and uncontrolled – just pushed us into a trillion dollar debt to bail them out of the mess their sense of empowerment got us into in the first place. Our bankers could certainly use less feeling of being empowered.
Oh, but I will be told, empowerment is a basic American right. It’s part of our heritage.
Find that notion anywhere in the Constitution. Quite the contrary! The writers of that document full well realized that what a citizen needs to function in a democracy is less empowerment and more sense of responsibility. The government created in 1787 was designed to restrain and restrict empowerment, not foment it. The Bill of Rights grants specific freedoms – not empowerment.
In fact the framers of our government were so uncertain about citizen empowerment that they gave citizens the right only to vote for members of the House. Citizens were not deemed responsible enough to vote for members of the Senate – whose job it was to delay and deliberate on what the peoples’ representatives might have rushed to enact.
Nor could citizens vote for the president. A college of what it was hoped would be the wisest men in the country were to be elected to choose the chief executive. Citizens were (and are) given no say what-so-ever in the selection of the judiciary.
That shows no concern for empowerment. The men who wrote the Constitution had just lived through a revolution. They saw first hand what groups of greedy citizens could do to each other when overcome with a sense of empowerment. Some of those men may have stood guard over their neighbors’ houses to prevent gangs of “patriots” from looting them in a frenzy of wealth redistribution.
(History books don’t stress that side of the revolution.) The Constitutionists efforts to restrain empowerment run rampant produced an amazing document that has kept us on track for over two centuries. It works – splendidly.
Other nations whose concern actually was “empowerment” – notably France – have seen governments collapse in riot after riot. Study the history of France since 1789.
Nor is the proper function of either school or parent to inculcate any sense of empowerment. The infant comes with that built in. When you allow him or her to get out of the house, through school and all the way to Wall Street without being reined in, you wind up owing a trillion or more.
Home is the place where the little ball of greed and selfishness you birthed is to learn restraint. A major function of the home is to civilize the newborn barbarian. You teach him the art of the knife and fork, you keep him from bashing his little friends. You even have to convince him that he must drive on this side of the road and not that.
He must pick up after himself. She cannot be permitted to say “No” to certain directives – for the safety of society. Chores must be done or the home, like society at large, collapses. Certain behaviors – violence, narcotics use, self-destructive acts – may not be tolerated.
This is not empowerment. This is regulation. This is enforced restraint. They are designed to teach self-control. Without it, democracy cannot function. Without it, a system of total control becomes necessary and is demanded by the citizens.
Schools must recognize the same reality. Schoolwork must be done. Rules of mathematics and chemistry must be followed. Rules of behavior must be enforced. A child may not be permitted to look you in the eye and say, “You can’t make me.”
Otherwise he will believe there is nothing he can be made to do when he gets to Wall Street or to the streets of any city. Then, sadly, sometimes empowerment stops with a set of handcuffs.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Dead Babies and Capitalists
Chinese babies are dying. There’s a chemical that a Chinese baby food manufacturer put in their formula powder that raises the protein levels in the milk. That can makes the formula a premium product that can be sold for more money than regular formula.
Unfortunately that chemical also tends to kill the baby. It’s the same chemical that they sent to us in pet foods last year. Sick and dying dogs, sick and dying cats – now sick and dying babies. The least it does is cause kidney stones in infants. Hundreds of babies. Want to watch a tiny baby pass a stone?
The offending chemical is called Melamine. It’s meant to be used in plastics and glues – but it does raise the protein count in milk. Maybe you can say it’s nine grams of protein per glass instead of eight or seven. Premium stuff. Unfortunately, …
It’s kind of a neat trick. The company, called Sanlu, waters the milk down to make a gallon stretch farther – and then adds Melamine to jack the protein count back up. Snake oil salesmen have been pulling that kind of trick for millennia. Unfortunately, this time they picked a chemical with nasty side effects.
I am not China bashing. Like every other home in America, we have a fair amount of stuff around that is made in China. A few years ago a Chinese firm bought up IBM desktop computers. Remember when Microsoft based computers were called “the IBM standard”? I guess we can now call our Hewlett Packards and Dells “the Chinese Standard” --?
You’d practically have to shut down K-Mart and Walmart if you pulled all the Chinese goods. And – it would shatter a lot of American household budgets if we pulled Chinese goods. An even bigger consequence might be that the Chinese got mad and stopped loaning us the money we need to bail out our banking industry.
We’re kind of stuck. But we should remember that Chinese capitalists are no different from American capitalists. Unless they are carefully watched, good capitalists will always water some form of “milk” to enhance profits.
We need them. Chinese capitalists, European capitalists, Japanese capitalists, and American capitalists. Ever since John Calvin freed businessmen from the strictures of the Medieval Church and convinced men that they might glorify God by making large profits, we have depended on them.
Our whole lifestyle requires their existence. But they must be watched. Like small children with large metal toys in a sandbox, they must be supervised and regulated. Otherwise they are likely to bash one another and break things.
We know this. In America we’ve had a Food and Drug Administration for a century. We continually fault the agency for being too strict, not watchful enough, too lax and too fussy. But only imagine what sorts of things our manufacturers would be adding to our food and drugs if the FDA weren’t there!
So we supervise. We regulate – trying to strike the balance between protecting the consumer and stifling creativity. China just isn’t there yet. And, especially with foodstuffs and medicines, we should be very alert to that fact. China is only beginning this balancing act.
So is India. We should be aware, as a recent Business Week (Sept 15, 2008, “Outsourcing the Drug Industry”, p 049) article pointed out, we are on the verge of letting the Indians do a lot of our drug research for us. This is still a third world country, with lots of unbridled capitalism.
These are the same people you try to talk to when you call customer service over a credit card or a computer glitch. They come cheap. They’re smart. They do good computers and cars and lots of other products. How good is their version of the FDA?
Cuss the FDA and the federal government as much as you want, you don’t really want to live without it. Over the past few decades we’ve busily de-regulated Wall Street and the banks. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea either.
Come to think of it, is there really much difference between watering the milk and watering the stock? In any case the consumer gets an awful bellyache.
Unfortunately that chemical also tends to kill the baby. It’s the same chemical that they sent to us in pet foods last year. Sick and dying dogs, sick and dying cats – now sick and dying babies. The least it does is cause kidney stones in infants. Hundreds of babies. Want to watch a tiny baby pass a stone?
The offending chemical is called Melamine. It’s meant to be used in plastics and glues – but it does raise the protein count in milk. Maybe you can say it’s nine grams of protein per glass instead of eight or seven. Premium stuff. Unfortunately, …
It’s kind of a neat trick. The company, called Sanlu, waters the milk down to make a gallon stretch farther – and then adds Melamine to jack the protein count back up. Snake oil salesmen have been pulling that kind of trick for millennia. Unfortunately, this time they picked a chemical with nasty side effects.
I am not China bashing. Like every other home in America, we have a fair amount of stuff around that is made in China. A few years ago a Chinese firm bought up IBM desktop computers. Remember when Microsoft based computers were called “the IBM standard”? I guess we can now call our Hewlett Packards and Dells “the Chinese Standard” --?
You’d practically have to shut down K-Mart and Walmart if you pulled all the Chinese goods. And – it would shatter a lot of American household budgets if we pulled Chinese goods. An even bigger consequence might be that the Chinese got mad and stopped loaning us the money we need to bail out our banking industry.
We’re kind of stuck. But we should remember that Chinese capitalists are no different from American capitalists. Unless they are carefully watched, good capitalists will always water some form of “milk” to enhance profits.
We need them. Chinese capitalists, European capitalists, Japanese capitalists, and American capitalists. Ever since John Calvin freed businessmen from the strictures of the Medieval Church and convinced men that they might glorify God by making large profits, we have depended on them.
Our whole lifestyle requires their existence. But they must be watched. Like small children with large metal toys in a sandbox, they must be supervised and regulated. Otherwise they are likely to bash one another and break things.
We know this. In America we’ve had a Food and Drug Administration for a century. We continually fault the agency for being too strict, not watchful enough, too lax and too fussy. But only imagine what sorts of things our manufacturers would be adding to our food and drugs if the FDA weren’t there!
So we supervise. We regulate – trying to strike the balance between protecting the consumer and stifling creativity. China just isn’t there yet. And, especially with foodstuffs and medicines, we should be very alert to that fact. China is only beginning this balancing act.
So is India. We should be aware, as a recent Business Week (Sept 15, 2008, “Outsourcing the Drug Industry”, p 049) article pointed out, we are on the verge of letting the Indians do a lot of our drug research for us. This is still a third world country, with lots of unbridled capitalism.
These are the same people you try to talk to when you call customer service over a credit card or a computer glitch. They come cheap. They’re smart. They do good computers and cars and lots of other products. How good is their version of the FDA?
Cuss the FDA and the federal government as much as you want, you don’t really want to live without it. Over the past few decades we’ve busily de-regulated Wall Street and the banks. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea either.
Come to think of it, is there really much difference between watering the milk and watering the stock? In any case the consumer gets an awful bellyache.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Let's Cut Medical Costs the Sane Way
It’s a position anathema to true conservatives – but I’ve been in favor of “socialized Medicine” since the 1950s. That’s when my father mentioned to me that more bankruptcies were caused by medical bills than anything else in the country.
About ten years later, I got a good idea of just how some of those bankruptcies come about. I met an old high school friend for coffee. He was managing one of those loan institutions that were quite common forty years ago.
My friend told me, “I’m going to Bankruptcy Court tomorrow.” Why? “A good client of ours, borrows a bit, pays it back on time, is going bankrupt. He has no choice. A couple of months ago his mother died in the hospital.
“As he stood crying over her body, a hospital official shoved a packet of papers under his nose and asked him to sign them as next of kin. ‘It’s just to witness her death,’ the man lied. So our client signed them and went on grieving.
“A week later he discovered he had signed for her complete hospital and doctor costs. He owed over eight thousand bucks. He can’t pay that. It’s more than he earns in a year – and he’s got a wife and kid to support.
“So, we – all his utility companies, the department store where he has a credit card, and I – are showing up in court to tell the judge we do not contest the bankruptcy. We know he’ll pay us, just like he always has. But he’ll be out from under the medical bills.”
Since that time I’ve seen other cases of hardworking people struck by catastrophic illness, driven into bankruptcy. Pay what you cannot hope to pay – or die or lose everything else seems to be the mantra of our present medical system.
I’m not so foolish to blame the hospitals or even the MDs. They have their businesses to run, their staffs to pay and their overhead to cover. (Yes, medicine is a business – have a social chat with any physician or dentist, they’ll make that clear. Your doctor’s office is as much a business operation as your hardware store. Never forget that.)
I’ve had good conservatives, who were really decent folk in their way, tell me seriously, “If you cannot afford to pay for medicine, you should go ahead and die.”
In the world’s richest nation? In the only developed country in the world that doesn’t have universal health coverage – that has nearly 50 million uninsured people. That is truly vicious.
How do they talk us out of universal health coverage?
They ask questions. “Would you want the government handling your medical affairs?” (Oh, ghastly thought!) Why not? It handles my Medicare very nicely. It handles my Social Security. People on Medicaid really get pretty decent care.
So, what’s the problem with a single payer? Send one bill – for everything – to a single source that handles it all – MD, dentist, hospital, drugs, X-rays, blood tests … . Why not?
Have you looked at the backrooms of your physician’s office lately? All those ladies aren’t doing medical tests – they’re figuring out which of potentially one hundred or more insurance plans to bill for this or that patient. Think how much a single payer (Uncle Sam) could save us in billing costs.
Next question: Do you want the government to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship? What relationship? When was the last time your physician came to your house? (In my case, 1953.) He rushes into your cubicle, stares at your file and then asks you what you’re there for. He really has little time to listen – there are seven other cubicles full to be seen.
You’re sick outside of office hours? “Please dial 911 or go to the Emergency Room”. If the office is open but he’s not in this afternoon or his cubicles are full, “please dial 911 or go to the Emergency Room”. What’s worth saving about that relationship?
Next question: Do you want the government telling you which doctor you may go to? Ever have an insurance company or HMO tell you that this or that physician or specialist is not a member? Ha.
Or they warn you: The government would be inefficient. How much more inefficient could the government possibly be than our present medical system where files are lost and one specialist has no idea what the other is doing? Certainly, no more so.
How about a single payer who could force prices down – like single payers (governments) do in Europe? Oh, they warn you, that would mean medical research might stop!
I doubt it. Companies are doing their research in offshore laboratories right now to save a buck. Big Pharma has made sinful profits over the years. Research would go on. A few competitive government grants would make certain of that.
We’ve been fools. Now that company after company is dropping absurdly expensive private medical insurance and more and more folk are uninsured, hopefully we realize that. Next time somebody wants to offer us single payer (government) medical insurance, let’s ignore the silly questions and scare tactics that come over the TV – and let’s vote for medical sanity.
Who do you think pays for those scary commercials? The big insurance companies and the drug companies. They like things the way they are.
About ten years later, I got a good idea of just how some of those bankruptcies come about. I met an old high school friend for coffee. He was managing one of those loan institutions that were quite common forty years ago.
My friend told me, “I’m going to Bankruptcy Court tomorrow.” Why? “A good client of ours, borrows a bit, pays it back on time, is going bankrupt. He has no choice. A couple of months ago his mother died in the hospital.
“As he stood crying over her body, a hospital official shoved a packet of papers under his nose and asked him to sign them as next of kin. ‘It’s just to witness her death,’ the man lied. So our client signed them and went on grieving.
“A week later he discovered he had signed for her complete hospital and doctor costs. He owed over eight thousand bucks. He can’t pay that. It’s more than he earns in a year – and he’s got a wife and kid to support.
“So, we – all his utility companies, the department store where he has a credit card, and I – are showing up in court to tell the judge we do not contest the bankruptcy. We know he’ll pay us, just like he always has. But he’ll be out from under the medical bills.”
Since that time I’ve seen other cases of hardworking people struck by catastrophic illness, driven into bankruptcy. Pay what you cannot hope to pay – or die or lose everything else seems to be the mantra of our present medical system.
I’m not so foolish to blame the hospitals or even the MDs. They have their businesses to run, their staffs to pay and their overhead to cover. (Yes, medicine is a business – have a social chat with any physician or dentist, they’ll make that clear. Your doctor’s office is as much a business operation as your hardware store. Never forget that.)
I’ve had good conservatives, who were really decent folk in their way, tell me seriously, “If you cannot afford to pay for medicine, you should go ahead and die.”
In the world’s richest nation? In the only developed country in the world that doesn’t have universal health coverage – that has nearly 50 million uninsured people. That is truly vicious.
How do they talk us out of universal health coverage?
They ask questions. “Would you want the government handling your medical affairs?” (Oh, ghastly thought!) Why not? It handles my Medicare very nicely. It handles my Social Security. People on Medicaid really get pretty decent care.
So, what’s the problem with a single payer? Send one bill – for everything – to a single source that handles it all – MD, dentist, hospital, drugs, X-rays, blood tests … . Why not?
Have you looked at the backrooms of your physician’s office lately? All those ladies aren’t doing medical tests – they’re figuring out which of potentially one hundred or more insurance plans to bill for this or that patient. Think how much a single payer (Uncle Sam) could save us in billing costs.
Next question: Do you want the government to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship? What relationship? When was the last time your physician came to your house? (In my case, 1953.) He rushes into your cubicle, stares at your file and then asks you what you’re there for. He really has little time to listen – there are seven other cubicles full to be seen.
You’re sick outside of office hours? “Please dial 911 or go to the Emergency Room”. If the office is open but he’s not in this afternoon or his cubicles are full, “please dial 911 or go to the Emergency Room”. What’s worth saving about that relationship?
Next question: Do you want the government telling you which doctor you may go to? Ever have an insurance company or HMO tell you that this or that physician or specialist is not a member? Ha.
Or they warn you: The government would be inefficient. How much more inefficient could the government possibly be than our present medical system where files are lost and one specialist has no idea what the other is doing? Certainly, no more so.
How about a single payer who could force prices down – like single payers (governments) do in Europe? Oh, they warn you, that would mean medical research might stop!
I doubt it. Companies are doing their research in offshore laboratories right now to save a buck. Big Pharma has made sinful profits over the years. Research would go on. A few competitive government grants would make certain of that.
We’ve been fools. Now that company after company is dropping absurdly expensive private medical insurance and more and more folk are uninsured, hopefully we realize that. Next time somebody wants to offer us single payer (government) medical insurance, let’s ignore the silly questions and scare tactics that come over the TV – and let’s vote for medical sanity.
Who do you think pays for those scary commercials? The big insurance companies and the drug companies. They like things the way they are.
Business Regulation -- the new Mantra
Government regulation of business is back as a political mantra. For the first time since Democrat Jimmy Carter began deregulating everything in sight in the 1970s, both sides are talking regulation. Since Carter, both parties have at least paid lip service to the virtues of deregulation.
Now, suddenly, with Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch all in the tank, it is fashionable for politicians to talk about [re]regulation again. Obama sounds as if he wants to re-regulate just about everything. Even McCain, Mr. Deregulation, speaks of being a Teddy Roosevelt Republican.
Of course that brings up visions of Trust Busting, muck raking, “malefactors of great wealth” (Teddy was talking about Wall Street) and the creation of regulating agencies like the FDA. All in all, the new talk represents a sea-change in attitude from the days of Carter, Reagan and Thatcher.
Interesting – and in my view some re-regulation is essential. Wall Street stock sellers definitely need watching over (regulation) just as much as any normal group of three-year-olds. Three-year-olds try to get away with as much as they can; stock sellers – and most commercial businesses – will sell as much snake oil and watered whiskey as they can get away with.
A frightening current example of a very much unregulated economy is China. Tainted milk, tainted dog food, lead in the paint, product piracy – need we go on?
Look, for instance, at what deregulation has done for television viewing. We went from a limit of about six minutes a program of commercials in the mid-70s to today’s programming in which the show takes up barely 40 minutes of the hour. A small example, but one I find annoying.
Okay, we absolutely need regulation. Heaven knows what they’d put in your gas tank, grocery bag or medicine cabinet without it.
But before we get too carried away, especially those in the largely unregulated field of privatized retirement funds and failing mortgages (who are probably the most scared and angry), let’s hold on a moment. Government regulation is very much like cancer chemotherapy.
Absolutely necessary to keep the patient alive – but if the physician allows too much of it, it can in many cases kill the patient before the cancer does. Any physician will tell you how delicate the balance has to be in administering chemo. Some of that stuff is lethal. Just enough to knock back or kill the cancer without killing the patient.
Same thing with government regulation. You try to keep business orderly. You try to keep it as reasonably honest as possible. But you have to be very careful not kill the patient – not to destroy the innovating and inventive spirit that has characterized American business.
Another analogy might be – you want to break the horse just enough so that he can be safely ridden. You don’t want to destroy the spirited feistiness that made you want to mount him in the first place.
Right now everyone is terrified and angry. (Investors should force themselves to remember how they cheered when Carter, Reagan and “W” slackened the regulations or took them completely away. In some ways you are getting your own back, unfortunately.)
Don’t let this fear and anger turn into destructive retribution. I would be much happier if our presidential candidates were calling themselves Hamiltonians. Alexander Hamilton was our first Secretary of the Treasury – and he had a clear grasp of one reality that is often forgotten on both sides of the modern American political fence.
Hamilton understood the business and government need each other. That for a nation to prosper, they must collaborate. Government funding development and restraining excess; business innovating and creating wealth. The necessity of that partnership is what Carter and Reagan seem to have forgotten – as do the most violent proponents of regulation.
We have many examples of the fruits of such a partnership to look back on. Personal computers, automobiles and highways, aircraft manufacturers and airports, government funded medical research, the vast steel company created at government behest to build the navy, etc. etc.
History also provides us with many examples of economic collapse, when government control/regulation choked off growth. A classic example is the Spanish Empire of the 1500s or that of the Soviet Union which folded under the weight of its own central planning.
Regulate, yes – but gently. Don’t kill the horse; it’s given us a good ride.
Now, suddenly, with Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch all in the tank, it is fashionable for politicians to talk about [re]regulation again. Obama sounds as if he wants to re-regulate just about everything. Even McCain, Mr. Deregulation, speaks of being a Teddy Roosevelt Republican.
Of course that brings up visions of Trust Busting, muck raking, “malefactors of great wealth” (Teddy was talking about Wall Street) and the creation of regulating agencies like the FDA. All in all, the new talk represents a sea-change in attitude from the days of Carter, Reagan and Thatcher.
Interesting – and in my view some re-regulation is essential. Wall Street stock sellers definitely need watching over (regulation) just as much as any normal group of three-year-olds. Three-year-olds try to get away with as much as they can; stock sellers – and most commercial businesses – will sell as much snake oil and watered whiskey as they can get away with.
A frightening current example of a very much unregulated economy is China. Tainted milk, tainted dog food, lead in the paint, product piracy – need we go on?
Look, for instance, at what deregulation has done for television viewing. We went from a limit of about six minutes a program of commercials in the mid-70s to today’s programming in which the show takes up barely 40 minutes of the hour. A small example, but one I find annoying.
Okay, we absolutely need regulation. Heaven knows what they’d put in your gas tank, grocery bag or medicine cabinet without it.
But before we get too carried away, especially those in the largely unregulated field of privatized retirement funds and failing mortgages (who are probably the most scared and angry), let’s hold on a moment. Government regulation is very much like cancer chemotherapy.
Absolutely necessary to keep the patient alive – but if the physician allows too much of it, it can in many cases kill the patient before the cancer does. Any physician will tell you how delicate the balance has to be in administering chemo. Some of that stuff is lethal. Just enough to knock back or kill the cancer without killing the patient.
Same thing with government regulation. You try to keep business orderly. You try to keep it as reasonably honest as possible. But you have to be very careful not kill the patient – not to destroy the innovating and inventive spirit that has characterized American business.
Another analogy might be – you want to break the horse just enough so that he can be safely ridden. You don’t want to destroy the spirited feistiness that made you want to mount him in the first place.
Right now everyone is terrified and angry. (Investors should force themselves to remember how they cheered when Carter, Reagan and “W” slackened the regulations or took them completely away. In some ways you are getting your own back, unfortunately.)
Don’t let this fear and anger turn into destructive retribution. I would be much happier if our presidential candidates were calling themselves Hamiltonians. Alexander Hamilton was our first Secretary of the Treasury – and he had a clear grasp of one reality that is often forgotten on both sides of the modern American political fence.
Hamilton understood the business and government need each other. That for a nation to prosper, they must collaborate. Government funding development and restraining excess; business innovating and creating wealth. The necessity of that partnership is what Carter and Reagan seem to have forgotten – as do the most violent proponents of regulation.
We have many examples of the fruits of such a partnership to look back on. Personal computers, automobiles and highways, aircraft manufacturers and airports, government funded medical research, the vast steel company created at government behest to build the navy, etc. etc.
History also provides us with many examples of economic collapse, when government control/regulation choked off growth. A classic example is the Spanish Empire of the 1500s or that of the Soviet Union which folded under the weight of its own central planning.
Regulate, yes – but gently. Don’t kill the horse; it’s given us a good ride.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Who's a Kennedy?
Yesterday I caught a clip of Obama calling John McCain’s campaign “sleazy”. Other than bend and twist statements and records, which is normal foreplay in any political campaign, the thing that Obama must find most sleazy about McCain’s campaign is his choice of running mate.
During the Democratic convention, commentators were saying to one another that in picking Joe Biden for his Veep, Obama had found a real scrapper. I think that’s the word one of them used. They went on to say that McCain’s campaign would find Biden hard to deal with because he was such an experienced and tough political fighter.
Here, they said, was a man who could do all of Obama’s dirty work for him, leaving the main candidate free to take the high road. Watch out, Republicans!
Then McCain went out and found his own scrapper. A commentator who professed to know said recently that in Alaska they don’t consider Palin to be a Barracuda, they think of her as a great white shark circling in the water.
He went on to insist that people were afraid of her. A friend of mine sent me a blog today from a woman who took her kids to school with Palin (and knows her) that listed all the situations she has bitten and clawed her way through.
She apparently isn’t nice if you get on her bad side. She keeps a list, like Santa Claus, of who deserves toys and who gets coal in his sock. They say she delivers on that hit list.
All along they’ve been saying that Obama reminds us of Jack Kennedy. Right now, McCain reminds me more of the former president, at least in his campaign style.
Kennedy could be a dirty fighter. He didn’t get the nomination by universal acclamation during the primaries. His tactics in West Virginia were so low that Hubert Humphrey was reduced to tears of frustration. But it’s what JFK did at the convention that stands out.
His toughest, meanest, nastiest opponent that year had been Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a man who knew how to get the US Supreme Court to throw out 20,000 anti-Johnson votes so that he could take his Senate seat by fewer than 70 votes. He knew how to win – by any means.
As soon as JFK had the nomination in Los Angeles, he, Bobby and some aides went straight to Johnson’s hotel room and informed him he was going to be on the ticket. LBJ wasn’t very interested. No matter. Kennedy put him on the ticket.
Kennedy knew that Johnson had run the Senate – as no man ever has before or since – by coercion, intimidation and raw fear. LBJ, too, was a great white shark circling in the water – with a long, long list of who was naughty and who was nice.
A bit like Sarah Palin? Could be.
Obama could have put a shark on his ticket. Hilary’s people say he didn’t even bother to vet her. Was he scared of her? (I wouldn’t trust her any farther than Kennedy probably trusted Johnson; you need her to win votes, not be your best friend and advisor.)
So he picked Joe (Who?). He felt more comfortable with him. And he felt Biden could do all the heavy lifting that would be needed. Until McCain picked a shark of his own.
Maybe it’s time somebody should look at Obama and repeat the famous words, “You’re no Kennedy.”
During the Democratic convention, commentators were saying to one another that in picking Joe Biden for his Veep, Obama had found a real scrapper. I think that’s the word one of them used. They went on to say that McCain’s campaign would find Biden hard to deal with because he was such an experienced and tough political fighter.
Here, they said, was a man who could do all of Obama’s dirty work for him, leaving the main candidate free to take the high road. Watch out, Republicans!
Then McCain went out and found his own scrapper. A commentator who professed to know said recently that in Alaska they don’t consider Palin to be a Barracuda, they think of her as a great white shark circling in the water.
He went on to insist that people were afraid of her. A friend of mine sent me a blog today from a woman who took her kids to school with Palin (and knows her) that listed all the situations she has bitten and clawed her way through.
She apparently isn’t nice if you get on her bad side. She keeps a list, like Santa Claus, of who deserves toys and who gets coal in his sock. They say she delivers on that hit list.
All along they’ve been saying that Obama reminds us of Jack Kennedy. Right now, McCain reminds me more of the former president, at least in his campaign style.
Kennedy could be a dirty fighter. He didn’t get the nomination by universal acclamation during the primaries. His tactics in West Virginia were so low that Hubert Humphrey was reduced to tears of frustration. But it’s what JFK did at the convention that stands out.
His toughest, meanest, nastiest opponent that year had been Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a man who knew how to get the US Supreme Court to throw out 20,000 anti-Johnson votes so that he could take his Senate seat by fewer than 70 votes. He knew how to win – by any means.
As soon as JFK had the nomination in Los Angeles, he, Bobby and some aides went straight to Johnson’s hotel room and informed him he was going to be on the ticket. LBJ wasn’t very interested. No matter. Kennedy put him on the ticket.
Kennedy knew that Johnson had run the Senate – as no man ever has before or since – by coercion, intimidation and raw fear. LBJ, too, was a great white shark circling in the water – with a long, long list of who was naughty and who was nice.
A bit like Sarah Palin? Could be.
Obama could have put a shark on his ticket. Hilary’s people say he didn’t even bother to vet her. Was he scared of her? (I wouldn’t trust her any farther than Kennedy probably trusted Johnson; you need her to win votes, not be your best friend and advisor.)
So he picked Joe (Who?). He felt more comfortable with him. And he felt Biden could do all the heavy lifting that would be needed. Until McCain picked a shark of his own.
Maybe it’s time somebody should look at Obama and repeat the famous words, “You’re no Kennedy.”
Monday, September 15, 2008
America, Land of the Free -- Lunch
It appears that what the elder George Bush once called the “Voodoo Economy” has hit a bump in the road – or, more appropriately, somebody poked one of the zombies and it fell over. Imagine, a world without Merrill Lynch! Without Lehman Brothers.
Let’s see, last month it was who? Bear Stearns? And who will it be next month? AIG? Washington Mutual? Somebody we haven’t heard of yet?
And, yes, I believe that the American economy is likely to totter on. Too many foreign banks and nations have too much invested in us. Owe a thousand and you have a creditor. Owe a few billion or trillion and you have a partner. This does not seem like the moment of economic Armageddon – yet.
After all, too many privatized American workers have nowhere to go with their pension monies (IRAs, Keogh accounts, etc.) but into the stock market, so the DOW will come back from its 500 point loss. The Wall Street Ponzi scheme hasn’t yet run its course.
But it might be a moment to look at some of the underlying fundamentals of the American economy that Senator McCain just called “fundamentally sound” today.
We are and remain historically the land of the “free lunch”. (It’s wonderfully ironic that we coined the fatuous phrase, “There is no free lunch.” I suspect that the phrase was coined as a message to the lower classes who might get too eager to get on the same gravy train corporations and wealthy investors enjoy.)
Examples of free lunch? Anyone who has been on Social Security for over two years is eating a free lunch. There is no way I put as much into the system as I have now drawn out of it. How about a nothing down, 1% interest home? How about a bidding war for tax incentives to build a new factory in this state or that?
How about the home you bought that you can only afford because the government doesn’t tax the interest on your mortgage?
I often ask students, What’s the most subsidized industry in the United States? They venture this or that – none has ever said, Autos. How many cars would GM or Toyota sell if the government didn’t build and maintain endless miles of roads and highways? Most of them are driven on without fee or cost to the driver. Or the auto industry.
We started as a “free lunch” nation in 1776. That’s really what the Revolution is all about. We cloaked it behind some high sounding principles, but, when you come down to it, the colonists did not want to pay for their own defense.
One moment they were screaming for more British regulars to defend them against marauding French and Indians – five years later they were screaming their heads off at having to share the burden of paying for those troops.
So they went to the French, got 90% percent of their munitions paid for – just about their entire navy and artillery arm, plus thousands of French troops and fought a war with England on French money. When the French asked for some help in return, Washington cheerfully abrogated the treaty and the Americans joined the British and started shooting at the French.
How many times did we sucker European investors into buying American stocks and then have the whole business go to smash, ruining the Europeans? 1821, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1877, 1891 … .
We’ve been good at keeping the free lunches coming. Some social scientists profess to wonder why Americans arranged to have Democrats control one branch of the government and Republicans the other for so much of the 20th Century. Boy what an easy answer!
The American voter was well aware that the one party would never take away the goodies (Pell Grants, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, oil depletion allowances, et cetera, et cetera), and the other party would never raise taxes and make them pay for those goodies.
Notice that both parties today are essentially promising further tax cuts for the American voter. One slants toward the “haves”, the other more toward the “have lesses”. But both are promised to cut taxes – at a time when we are incurring trillions in debt.
Oh, we’re sound. Fundamentally sound – have been since 1776. But what if it ever stopped?
Let’s see, last month it was who? Bear Stearns? And who will it be next month? AIG? Washington Mutual? Somebody we haven’t heard of yet?
And, yes, I believe that the American economy is likely to totter on. Too many foreign banks and nations have too much invested in us. Owe a thousand and you have a creditor. Owe a few billion or trillion and you have a partner. This does not seem like the moment of economic Armageddon – yet.
After all, too many privatized American workers have nowhere to go with their pension monies (IRAs, Keogh accounts, etc.) but into the stock market, so the DOW will come back from its 500 point loss. The Wall Street Ponzi scheme hasn’t yet run its course.
But it might be a moment to look at some of the underlying fundamentals of the American economy that Senator McCain just called “fundamentally sound” today.
We are and remain historically the land of the “free lunch”. (It’s wonderfully ironic that we coined the fatuous phrase, “There is no free lunch.” I suspect that the phrase was coined as a message to the lower classes who might get too eager to get on the same gravy train corporations and wealthy investors enjoy.)
Examples of free lunch? Anyone who has been on Social Security for over two years is eating a free lunch. There is no way I put as much into the system as I have now drawn out of it. How about a nothing down, 1% interest home? How about a bidding war for tax incentives to build a new factory in this state or that?
How about the home you bought that you can only afford because the government doesn’t tax the interest on your mortgage?
I often ask students, What’s the most subsidized industry in the United States? They venture this or that – none has ever said, Autos. How many cars would GM or Toyota sell if the government didn’t build and maintain endless miles of roads and highways? Most of them are driven on without fee or cost to the driver. Or the auto industry.
We started as a “free lunch” nation in 1776. That’s really what the Revolution is all about. We cloaked it behind some high sounding principles, but, when you come down to it, the colonists did not want to pay for their own defense.
One moment they were screaming for more British regulars to defend them against marauding French and Indians – five years later they were screaming their heads off at having to share the burden of paying for those troops.
So they went to the French, got 90% percent of their munitions paid for – just about their entire navy and artillery arm, plus thousands of French troops and fought a war with England on French money. When the French asked for some help in return, Washington cheerfully abrogated the treaty and the Americans joined the British and started shooting at the French.
How many times did we sucker European investors into buying American stocks and then have the whole business go to smash, ruining the Europeans? 1821, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1877, 1891 … .
We’ve been good at keeping the free lunches coming. Some social scientists profess to wonder why Americans arranged to have Democrats control one branch of the government and Republicans the other for so much of the 20th Century. Boy what an easy answer!
The American voter was well aware that the one party would never take away the goodies (Pell Grants, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, oil depletion allowances, et cetera, et cetera), and the other party would never raise taxes and make them pay for those goodies.
Notice that both parties today are essentially promising further tax cuts for the American voter. One slants toward the “haves”, the other more toward the “have lesses”. But both are promised to cut taxes – at a time when we are incurring trillions in debt.
Oh, we’re sound. Fundamentally sound – have been since 1776. But what if it ever stopped?
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Deliver Us from Those Who Believe
This week, I had the chance to sit down with some old friends, many of whom I’d known since the Eisenhower years. A goodly number of them would label themselves as orthodox or evangelical Christians.
The area of the country I was in leans Republicans, but boasts its share of Obama partisans. The woman I happened to be seated next to was, by nature, reasonable conservative and firmly Christian. She has spent her life teaching in private religious grade schools and colleges.
As we chatted, the subject of Nominee Palin eventually came up. “Her conservative religious beliefs scare me”, announced my friend.
Now, why would a conservative Christian be frightened by the conservative nature of Palin’s beliefs?
That set me thinking. They fear her – even fellow Christians – because she believes. That fact has interesting ramifications. We are now in an age in which believing what one professes (or says) is deemed a vice. One is only thought to be safe if he or she makes it obvious that whatever is professed is not taken seriously.
That has perfectly wonderful ramifications. Shall we hold politicians to a similar standard about whatever they profess to believe in politically? Sounds good, if it’s not taken too seriously. At what point does any form of integrity become vicious?
There was a time in this nation when Governor Palin might have been held in esteem for the firmness with which she seems to hold her political and religious beliefs. Now she inspires fear.
And, I suppose, there is some understandable reason for the fear. Recent news has been full of stories of one religious group violently attacking members of another. Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians have all contributed their quota of violence.
Understandably if Sarah Palin showed any tendency toward flying a hijacked plane into a building or tossing grenades into someone else’s church or mosque, we would do well to fear her. We certainly would not want her on a political slate.
But does concern over a fanatical fringe justify rejecting anyone who holds religious beliefs firmly? Are the only respectable Muslims secular? Are the only trustworthy Christians those who attend Church very casually – or, like Obama, show no signs of understanding any of the finer points of the faith?
Some prominent politicians have said in the past few years that “religion should be a private matter.” Why? Shall we believe that James Madison’s Calvinistic beliefs had no impact on the draft of a constitution he brought to Philadelphia in 1787?
How could we possibly trust a man like Franklin Roosevelt who said that he did not want a Day of Prayer for the war effort, but rather asked for a “continuum of prayer”. That’s not very private. How about a Lincoln who stated publicly that he didn’t care if “God is on our side,” but rather hoped “we are on God’s side.”
These same evangelical Christians – like my old friend – are so quick to say on one hand that they believe the Bible is infallible and inerrant. These are fancy words that mean that it is true and accurate. Sarah Palin would no doubt agree.
Where they part company with Palin – I’ve seen this in conversations with evangelicals over the past fifty years – is whether any particular verse is true. How quick the evangelical is to tell you that this isn’t literally true or that is merely a figure of speech.
That makes them more trustworthy and less fearsome than Palin? Maybe more lawyerlike, but not necessarily more reliable.
The reactions to Governor Palin’s nomination are more and more interesting.
The area of the country I was in leans Republicans, but boasts its share of Obama partisans. The woman I happened to be seated next to was, by nature, reasonable conservative and firmly Christian. She has spent her life teaching in private religious grade schools and colleges.
As we chatted, the subject of Nominee Palin eventually came up. “Her conservative religious beliefs scare me”, announced my friend.
Now, why would a conservative Christian be frightened by the conservative nature of Palin’s beliefs?
That set me thinking. They fear her – even fellow Christians – because she believes. That fact has interesting ramifications. We are now in an age in which believing what one professes (or says) is deemed a vice. One is only thought to be safe if he or she makes it obvious that whatever is professed is not taken seriously.
That has perfectly wonderful ramifications. Shall we hold politicians to a similar standard about whatever they profess to believe in politically? Sounds good, if it’s not taken too seriously. At what point does any form of integrity become vicious?
There was a time in this nation when Governor Palin might have been held in esteem for the firmness with which she seems to hold her political and religious beliefs. Now she inspires fear.
And, I suppose, there is some understandable reason for the fear. Recent news has been full of stories of one religious group violently attacking members of another. Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians have all contributed their quota of violence.
Understandably if Sarah Palin showed any tendency toward flying a hijacked plane into a building or tossing grenades into someone else’s church or mosque, we would do well to fear her. We certainly would not want her on a political slate.
But does concern over a fanatical fringe justify rejecting anyone who holds religious beliefs firmly? Are the only respectable Muslims secular? Are the only trustworthy Christians those who attend Church very casually – or, like Obama, show no signs of understanding any of the finer points of the faith?
Some prominent politicians have said in the past few years that “religion should be a private matter.” Why? Shall we believe that James Madison’s Calvinistic beliefs had no impact on the draft of a constitution he brought to Philadelphia in 1787?
How could we possibly trust a man like Franklin Roosevelt who said that he did not want a Day of Prayer for the war effort, but rather asked for a “continuum of prayer”. That’s not very private. How about a Lincoln who stated publicly that he didn’t care if “God is on our side,” but rather hoped “we are on God’s side.”
These same evangelical Christians – like my old friend – are so quick to say on one hand that they believe the Bible is infallible and inerrant. These are fancy words that mean that it is true and accurate. Sarah Palin would no doubt agree.
Where they part company with Palin – I’ve seen this in conversations with evangelicals over the past fifty years – is whether any particular verse is true. How quick the evangelical is to tell you that this isn’t literally true or that is merely a figure of speech.
That makes them more trustworthy and less fearsome than Palin? Maybe more lawyerlike, but not necessarily more reliable.
The reactions to Governor Palin’s nomination are more and more interesting.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Lehman Brothers -- Just Another Domino?
There seems to be great concern that Lehman Brothers might go the way of Humpty Dumpty. This, aghast pundits warn us, may be a sign that our credit structure, our very economy may be in trouble.
Yeah, it might be.
But that didn’t just start today. It didn’t start last year or even seven years ago when the dot coms and the World Trade Center all went to smash. It didn’t start with Reaganomics (Voodoo economics, anyone?) or with the stagflation of the 1970s.
It didn’t start with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and 1973, when we went completely off the gold standard and allowed Americans to start buying the stuff. It didn’t even start in 1968 when I was leaving for Europe and fellow staffers in the Office of the White House warned me that the dollar was likely to stumble badly while I was abroad. (It didn’t.)
It didn’t even start in 1960 when I first looked at the dollar as a college kid and concluded that its “fundamentals” were long ago flushed down the toilet. (I felt at the time that that only real issue before the Kennedy Nixon campaigns was the health of the dollar – as opposed to the specious issues that were raised in that election.)
The dollar, like the British pound before it, was our chief source of economic and military power. Not our missiles, our carriers or our Green Berets. The dollar was our serious muscle. And it looked about as healthy back then as an old man with pneumonia.
No, the dollar and the economy have been in trouble since long before I was ever born.
A simplistic way of putting it might be that in 1938 – after government New Deal spending stimuli were withdrawn by an essentially conservative FDR – we had over ten million unemployed men. Out of a nation of 135 million people.
We had no hope of putting them back to productive work. Not a glimmer. Hitler and Tojo rescued us. By 1945 we had those same men in uniform and millions more working in war production. That same year, the war being over, we disbanded our military with almost reckless speed.
By 1949, we were back to stagnation and recession. It took the Cold War to put enough people back in uniform and back to work to give us our enormous postwar prosperity. Initially we could afford this kind of spending – we were using the incredible proceeds of our victory.
By any economic standard, World War II was a “good war” for us. We stripped Japan, France, Britain and Holland of nearly everything – and then allowed the juicier parts of their empires to fall into our lap. It was like winning the lottery. We invested about a third of a trillion and won back many times that amount.
Then, in a stroke of inspired brilliance, we used some of those winnings to rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan and get more customers. For a time, the dollar replaced gold. European governments literally kept stacks of American bills in their vaults as backing for their own currencies. They were called “Euro-dollars”.
But that couldn’t last. Eventually we spent our lottery winnings, and we began to live off the cuff. Somewhere around 1960 or so. We should have fallen back to 1938, with huge unemployment and little production. But we didn’t. Why?
I spent a lot of time after 1968 wondering why the dollar hadn’t crashed as predicted. Then the obvious hit me: because of our highways and vast retail chains, we had become the only place on the planet where a foreign firm could dump anything it overproduced.
It was worrisomely apparent, already by then, that the American dollar – standard of the world though it might have been – had little intrinsic strength. There was quite a bit of smoke and mirrors involved.
To keep their own economies humming, foreign producers were willing to fund any amount of deficit the American consumer might run up. They were addicted to the American market – even though the money we spent to buy their products was theirs in the first place.
That kind of circle cannot go on forever. As Mr. Ponzi found out. As Lehman Brothers is learning. Eventually somebody runs out of money, gets scared and pulls the plug, or simply has to stop buying.
That question the Lehman debacle raises is: how many more Christmases does the American consumer have left in him? What happens when all those foreign producers, bereft of their markets here, decide they need their money back?
You think things are tough now!
Yeah, it might be.
But that didn’t just start today. It didn’t start last year or even seven years ago when the dot coms and the World Trade Center all went to smash. It didn’t start with Reaganomics (Voodoo economics, anyone?) or with the stagflation of the 1970s.
It didn’t start with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and 1973, when we went completely off the gold standard and allowed Americans to start buying the stuff. It didn’t even start in 1968 when I was leaving for Europe and fellow staffers in the Office of the White House warned me that the dollar was likely to stumble badly while I was abroad. (It didn’t.)
It didn’t even start in 1960 when I first looked at the dollar as a college kid and concluded that its “fundamentals” were long ago flushed down the toilet. (I felt at the time that that only real issue before the Kennedy Nixon campaigns was the health of the dollar – as opposed to the specious issues that were raised in that election.)
The dollar, like the British pound before it, was our chief source of economic and military power. Not our missiles, our carriers or our Green Berets. The dollar was our serious muscle. And it looked about as healthy back then as an old man with pneumonia.
No, the dollar and the economy have been in trouble since long before I was ever born.
A simplistic way of putting it might be that in 1938 – after government New Deal spending stimuli were withdrawn by an essentially conservative FDR – we had over ten million unemployed men. Out of a nation of 135 million people.
We had no hope of putting them back to productive work. Not a glimmer. Hitler and Tojo rescued us. By 1945 we had those same men in uniform and millions more working in war production. That same year, the war being over, we disbanded our military with almost reckless speed.
By 1949, we were back to stagnation and recession. It took the Cold War to put enough people back in uniform and back to work to give us our enormous postwar prosperity. Initially we could afford this kind of spending – we were using the incredible proceeds of our victory.
By any economic standard, World War II was a “good war” for us. We stripped Japan, France, Britain and Holland of nearly everything – and then allowed the juicier parts of their empires to fall into our lap. It was like winning the lottery. We invested about a third of a trillion and won back many times that amount.
Then, in a stroke of inspired brilliance, we used some of those winnings to rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan and get more customers. For a time, the dollar replaced gold. European governments literally kept stacks of American bills in their vaults as backing for their own currencies. They were called “Euro-dollars”.
But that couldn’t last. Eventually we spent our lottery winnings, and we began to live off the cuff. Somewhere around 1960 or so. We should have fallen back to 1938, with huge unemployment and little production. But we didn’t. Why?
I spent a lot of time after 1968 wondering why the dollar hadn’t crashed as predicted. Then the obvious hit me: because of our highways and vast retail chains, we had become the only place on the planet where a foreign firm could dump anything it overproduced.
It was worrisomely apparent, already by then, that the American dollar – standard of the world though it might have been – had little intrinsic strength. There was quite a bit of smoke and mirrors involved.
To keep their own economies humming, foreign producers were willing to fund any amount of deficit the American consumer might run up. They were addicted to the American market – even though the money we spent to buy their products was theirs in the first place.
That kind of circle cannot go on forever. As Mr. Ponzi found out. As Lehman Brothers is learning. Eventually somebody runs out of money, gets scared and pulls the plug, or simply has to stop buying.
That question the Lehman debacle raises is: how many more Christmases does the American consumer have left in him? What happens when all those foreign producers, bereft of their markets here, decide they need their money back?
You think things are tough now!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Energy -- and the Slow Death of Cities
At the risk of being a bore, I have another thought on energy usage. In 1903, with his invention of a car for the masses, Henry Ford proved an old adage false. There really was something new under the sun.
Throughout human history, all forms of transport – people or goods – were essentially gravitational in the effect they had on human communities. They pulled people, factories and houses in toward a central market place or manufacturing center.
Ships came to a dock – and you had to deal with whatever was on those ships within walking distance or as far as horses could conveniently pull a cart. That tugged workers and merchants alike in, toward the docks.
Camel caravans basically had the same impact. Everything came in to a central market place that your buyers could walk to. Same was true of a horse wagon full of farm produce. Canals and railroads had the same impact.
American cities were originally built around ports, canal barge docks or railroad yards. The railroad especially pulled American cities in toward a central point. Those central points got crowded, stinky, full of horse manure – reeking with the occasional odor of a dead horse that hadn’t been removed. And then they got more crowded and messy.
Along came some Germans who invented an internal combustion engine. It would eventually pull people and goods anywhere they wanted to go – whether going there was wise or not. But we weren’t in trouble yet. The German cars cost too much. They weren’t meant for the masses. It took three people to push us over the edge toward true ecological disaster.
Odd trio. Henry Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. Henry Ford created a vehicle everyone could afford – and then he raised wages so that even his factory workers could buy them! That was 1914, the seed of the disaster. Water and fertilizer came in 1920.
The Army was curious. Trucks had proved their worth in World War I. But was there any way you could put goods in a truck (military or otherwise) and move them across country? Could internal combustion do that?
They picked two young officers to give it a try, Ike and Patton. With a dozen or so enlisted men, they loaded up the primitive trucks of 1920 and set them off from the East Coast to go West – where only railroads and horses had gone before. They crossed fields, they forded creeks, they broke down, they pushed out of mud – roads? What roads? But they made it to the Pacific!
National Defense! We had to have roads. In 1922, the National Highway Act was signed into law, and we began to build the incredible network of two lane highways that knit every town and future suburb together. (Of course Ike and Patton would get to Germany in 1945 and see those terrific divided highways that tanks could whiz right down and, well, one of the first things President Eisenhower did was to build the interstate system – so tanks could whiz down them, too.)
Unfortunately for us, other things than tanks could whiz down them as well. How long do you think it took some business owner to figure out that he could get completely away from downtown traffic by building his store on some road farther out in the country? All it took is a few of those things that Ike and George Patton had proved could haul goods as capably as trains. Trucks.
How long did it take for his executives and workers to figure out that they, too, could escape from the grimy center cities and move to a suburb just minutes – by auto – from the job?
No longer was transportation gravitational. It was now centrifugal. It was pushing the city out, ever farther from its core. In fact you could abandon the core. Let it rot. Shut the stores down and build malls. Who needs mass transit – you have cars. Delivery trucks.
The centrifugal effect on our cities is destroying them like some ghastly wasting disease. If we had had to stay working downtown, we’d have had to fix downtown. No need, now.
Fifty years ago I could stand at an intersection inside the corporate limits of New York City, with a farm field stretching in every direction. At the same time, I could drive through an intersection on the fringe of Grand Rapids and see three fields and a golf course.
Today, houses, malls, churches, schools, industrial buildings stretch for miles and miles from both intersections. Farther and farther out. Little country hamlets that were far from any city are now swallowed up in suburbs.
All the people that live and work there are now totally, totally, totally dependent on the internal combustion engine, truck or car. And petroleum.
There might have been a wiser solution to the horse manure.
Throughout human history, all forms of transport – people or goods – were essentially gravitational in the effect they had on human communities. They pulled people, factories and houses in toward a central market place or manufacturing center.
Ships came to a dock – and you had to deal with whatever was on those ships within walking distance or as far as horses could conveniently pull a cart. That tugged workers and merchants alike in, toward the docks.
Camel caravans basically had the same impact. Everything came in to a central market place that your buyers could walk to. Same was true of a horse wagon full of farm produce. Canals and railroads had the same impact.
American cities were originally built around ports, canal barge docks or railroad yards. The railroad especially pulled American cities in toward a central point. Those central points got crowded, stinky, full of horse manure – reeking with the occasional odor of a dead horse that hadn’t been removed. And then they got more crowded and messy.
Along came some Germans who invented an internal combustion engine. It would eventually pull people and goods anywhere they wanted to go – whether going there was wise or not. But we weren’t in trouble yet. The German cars cost too much. They weren’t meant for the masses. It took three people to push us over the edge toward true ecological disaster.
Odd trio. Henry Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. Henry Ford created a vehicle everyone could afford – and then he raised wages so that even his factory workers could buy them! That was 1914, the seed of the disaster. Water and fertilizer came in 1920.
The Army was curious. Trucks had proved their worth in World War I. But was there any way you could put goods in a truck (military or otherwise) and move them across country? Could internal combustion do that?
They picked two young officers to give it a try, Ike and Patton. With a dozen or so enlisted men, they loaded up the primitive trucks of 1920 and set them off from the East Coast to go West – where only railroads and horses had gone before. They crossed fields, they forded creeks, they broke down, they pushed out of mud – roads? What roads? But they made it to the Pacific!
National Defense! We had to have roads. In 1922, the National Highway Act was signed into law, and we began to build the incredible network of two lane highways that knit every town and future suburb together. (Of course Ike and Patton would get to Germany in 1945 and see those terrific divided highways that tanks could whiz right down and, well, one of the first things President Eisenhower did was to build the interstate system – so tanks could whiz down them, too.)
Unfortunately for us, other things than tanks could whiz down them as well. How long do you think it took some business owner to figure out that he could get completely away from downtown traffic by building his store on some road farther out in the country? All it took is a few of those things that Ike and George Patton had proved could haul goods as capably as trains. Trucks.
How long did it take for his executives and workers to figure out that they, too, could escape from the grimy center cities and move to a suburb just minutes – by auto – from the job?
No longer was transportation gravitational. It was now centrifugal. It was pushing the city out, ever farther from its core. In fact you could abandon the core. Let it rot. Shut the stores down and build malls. Who needs mass transit – you have cars. Delivery trucks.
The centrifugal effect on our cities is destroying them like some ghastly wasting disease. If we had had to stay working downtown, we’d have had to fix downtown. No need, now.
Fifty years ago I could stand at an intersection inside the corporate limits of New York City, with a farm field stretching in every direction. At the same time, I could drive through an intersection on the fringe of Grand Rapids and see three fields and a golf course.
Today, houses, malls, churches, schools, industrial buildings stretch for miles and miles from both intersections. Farther and farther out. Little country hamlets that were far from any city are now swallowed up in suburbs.
All the people that live and work there are now totally, totally, totally dependent on the internal combustion engine, truck or car. And petroleum.
There might have been a wiser solution to the horse manure.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Teaching -- Dreaming the Impossible Dream
I substitute teach. I’ve been in over 50 buildings, a dozen districts, Catholic, private and public. Everything from schools in open country to the inner city, from greatly affluent districts to those in abject poverty.
I’ve sat in teachers’ lounges and listened, I’ve chatted with principals, I’ve talked to parents and have had several conversations with their student offspring. In short the last few years have given me a pretty comprehensive overview of American elementary and secondary education in this part of Michigan. (Oh yes, I’ve taught several community college courses, too.)
Want my straight up evaluation?
We’re wasting a whale of a lot of money on public education, and we’re getting shockingly little back for it. Oh, don’ t, don’t, don’t try to tell me that it’s all just bad teaching and if we would just hold those incompetent and lazy teachers accountable, everything would be beautiful. If you try, I will throw up on you.
No doubt there are a few who fall into that category – you’ll find them in Congress and General Electric, in every human endeavor. But the real problem in Michigan/American education is that the system is broke. It may even have been put together wrong in the first place.
You can flog teachers, you can offer them bribes, but until you fix the basic system, you are going to accomplish very little. In all probability the school down the block – where you ship your kids every weekday morning, where you volunteer and attend PTO, probably stinks as an educational institution.
Big reasons? The kids don’t care; they don’t have to care. The administration is probably going to find a way to squeeze them through anyway. Often the parents don’t care. This is accepted as a hard reality in ghetto schools but, in many subtle ways, it can be equally true in wealthy suburban schools.
If the parents don’t care or are too busy to notice, the old adage about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink applies. I don’t care how accountable the exasperated teacher, if the student won’t absorb the material – that takes time and work on the kid’s part as well as some pushing from his folks – you can’t tamp it down his throat.
I can identify several high schools in which the only subjects that could awaken student interest would be drugs, booze, rap music and sex. This has changed significantly in just the past few years. Five years ago I could sub in an American history class and tell them about things I saw going on in Washington during the Vietnam War (that aren’t in their texts) and I’d get some real response and interest.
The last time I tried it, a year ago, I very nicely put together young high school girl – college bound, I’ll wager – raised her hand and asked in the most bored voice, “Why are you telling us all this?” I will bother her and her ilk no more.
I listen to teachers in the lounge at a suburban school, with lots of college bound. This one has a third failing her class, that one admits to half flunking. They haven’t the faintest hint of a solution.
That’s not quite true. Many have murmured under their breath, “Bring back the paddle”. Give the kids some consequence to actually fear. They’re not afraid of being kicked out for a week – they get to lie about and watch TV all day. “Go ahead, kick me out” I’ve had more than one student sneer at me.”
A kid can heap obscenities and all manner of insults at you. Consequence: a session with the school counselor and the recommendation that he make better choices. He can launch his body at you in a full frontal attack and the most he’ll get is a time-out in a separate room. If it comes to the attention of his parents, they’re liable to be solidly on his side.
You can’t teach in that kind of environment, I don’t care what kind of bonuses they offer.
Bring back the paddle. No we’re not going to send you home to your TV. We’re not going to make you write an essay on good choices, we’re going to make your bottom sting. (I suspect that one of the reasons we’re seeing more workplace shootings is that today’s kids are suddenly facing their first real consequence for bad behavior. They get fired. They don’t know how to handle it so they go home and load a weapon to avenge something they’ve never had to experience before. Punishment.)
It might not be a bad idea to teach kids that consequences, real consequences, are a part of life. That you can actually flunk a job, just like a course.
This isn’t going to go over well. Neither is my next and final suggestion. IMPOSE A MONETARY COST ON PUBLIC EDUCATION. Charge them. Jehovah’s Witnesses know you’ll probably toss a free tract, so they used to charge people a dime for each leaflet. Put a value on it.
“You flunked a course, junior, and I’m out the fifty bucks I paid in September? They’re going to make you take it over for another fifty bucks?!? They’re going to tack it onto my property taxes and if I don’t pay it they’ll attach my house?!!?”
That kid is likely to get all kinds of motivational attention from his parents.
Once that happens, then teachers can be held as accountable as you want.
I’ve sat in teachers’ lounges and listened, I’ve chatted with principals, I’ve talked to parents and have had several conversations with their student offspring. In short the last few years have given me a pretty comprehensive overview of American elementary and secondary education in this part of Michigan. (Oh yes, I’ve taught several community college courses, too.)
Want my straight up evaluation?
We’re wasting a whale of a lot of money on public education, and we’re getting shockingly little back for it. Oh, don’ t, don’t, don’t try to tell me that it’s all just bad teaching and if we would just hold those incompetent and lazy teachers accountable, everything would be beautiful. If you try, I will throw up on you.
No doubt there are a few who fall into that category – you’ll find them in Congress and General Electric, in every human endeavor. But the real problem in Michigan/American education is that the system is broke. It may even have been put together wrong in the first place.
You can flog teachers, you can offer them bribes, but until you fix the basic system, you are going to accomplish very little. In all probability the school down the block – where you ship your kids every weekday morning, where you volunteer and attend PTO, probably stinks as an educational institution.
Big reasons? The kids don’t care; they don’t have to care. The administration is probably going to find a way to squeeze them through anyway. Often the parents don’t care. This is accepted as a hard reality in ghetto schools but, in many subtle ways, it can be equally true in wealthy suburban schools.
If the parents don’t care or are too busy to notice, the old adage about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink applies. I don’t care how accountable the exasperated teacher, if the student won’t absorb the material – that takes time and work on the kid’s part as well as some pushing from his folks – you can’t tamp it down his throat.
I can identify several high schools in which the only subjects that could awaken student interest would be drugs, booze, rap music and sex. This has changed significantly in just the past few years. Five years ago I could sub in an American history class and tell them about things I saw going on in Washington during the Vietnam War (that aren’t in their texts) and I’d get some real response and interest.
The last time I tried it, a year ago, I very nicely put together young high school girl – college bound, I’ll wager – raised her hand and asked in the most bored voice, “Why are you telling us all this?” I will bother her and her ilk no more.
I listen to teachers in the lounge at a suburban school, with lots of college bound. This one has a third failing her class, that one admits to half flunking. They haven’t the faintest hint of a solution.
That’s not quite true. Many have murmured under their breath, “Bring back the paddle”. Give the kids some consequence to actually fear. They’re not afraid of being kicked out for a week – they get to lie about and watch TV all day. “Go ahead, kick me out” I’ve had more than one student sneer at me.”
A kid can heap obscenities and all manner of insults at you. Consequence: a session with the school counselor and the recommendation that he make better choices. He can launch his body at you in a full frontal attack and the most he’ll get is a time-out in a separate room. If it comes to the attention of his parents, they’re liable to be solidly on his side.
You can’t teach in that kind of environment, I don’t care what kind of bonuses they offer.
Bring back the paddle. No we’re not going to send you home to your TV. We’re not going to make you write an essay on good choices, we’re going to make your bottom sting. (I suspect that one of the reasons we’re seeing more workplace shootings is that today’s kids are suddenly facing their first real consequence for bad behavior. They get fired. They don’t know how to handle it so they go home and load a weapon to avenge something they’ve never had to experience before. Punishment.)
It might not be a bad idea to teach kids that consequences, real consequences, are a part of life. That you can actually flunk a job, just like a course.
This isn’t going to go over well. Neither is my next and final suggestion. IMPOSE A MONETARY COST ON PUBLIC EDUCATION. Charge them. Jehovah’s Witnesses know you’ll probably toss a free tract, so they used to charge people a dime for each leaflet. Put a value on it.
“You flunked a course, junior, and I’m out the fifty bucks I paid in September? They’re going to make you take it over for another fifty bucks?!? They’re going to tack it onto my property taxes and if I don’t pay it they’ll attach my house?!!?”
That kid is likely to get all kinds of motivational attention from his parents.
Once that happens, then teachers can be held as accountable as you want.
Teaching: To Dream the Impossible Dream
I substitute teach. I’ve been in over 50 buildings, a dozen districts, Catholic, private and public. Everything from schools in open country to the inner city, from greatly affluent districts to those in abject poverty.
I’ve sat in teachers’ lounges and listened, I’ve chatted with principals, I’ve talked to parents and have had several conversations with their student offspring. In short the last few years have given me a pretty comprehensive overview of American elementary and secondary education in this part of Michigan. (Oh yes, I’ve taught several community college courses, too.)
Want my straight up evaluation?
We’re wasting a whale of a lot of money on public education, and we’re getting shockingly little back for it. Oh, don’ t, don’t, don’t try to tell me that it’s all just bad teaching and if we would just hold those incompetent and lazy teachers accountable, everything would be beautiful. If you try, I will throw up on you.
No doubt there are a few who fall into that category – you’ll find them in Congress and General Electric, in every human endeavor. But the real problem in Michigan/American education is that the system is broke. It may even have been put together wrong in the first place.
You can flog teachers, you can offer them bribes, but until you fix the basic system, you are going to accomplish very little. In all probability the school down the block – where you ship your kids every weekday morning, where you volunteer and attend PTO, probably stinks as an educational institution.
Big reasons? The kids don’t care; they don’t have to care. The administration is probably going to find a way to squeeze them through anyway. Often the parents don’t care. This is accepted as a hard reality in ghetto schools but, in many subtle ways, it can be equally true in wealthy suburban schools.
If the parents don’t care or are too busy to notice, the old adage about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink applies. I don’t care how accountable the exasperated teacher, if the student won’t absorb the material – that takes time and work on the kid’s part as well as some pushing from his folks – you can’t tamp it down his throat.
I can identify several high schools in which the only subjects that could awaken student interest would be drugs, booze, rap music and sex. This has changed significantly in just the past few years. Five years ago I could sub in an American history class and tell them about things I saw going on in Washington during the Vietnam War (that aren’t in their texts) and I’d get some real response and interest.
The last time I tried it, a year ago, I very nicely put together young high school girl – college bound, I’ll wager – raised her hand and asked in the most bored voice, “Why are you telling us all this?” I will bother her and her ilk no more.
I listen to teachers in the lounge at a suburban school, with lots of college bound. This one has a third failing her class, that one admits to half flunking. They haven’t the faintest hint of a solution.
That’s not quite true. Many have murmured under their breath, “Bring back the paddle”. Give the kids some consequence to actually fear. They’re not afraid of being kicked out for a week – they get to lie about and watch TV all day. “Go ahead, kick me out” I’ve had more than one student sneer at me.”
A kid can heap obscenities and all manner of insults at you. Consequence: a session with the school counselor and the recommendation that he make better choices. He can launch his body at you in a full frontal attack and the most he’ll get is a time-out in a separate room. If it comes to the attention of his parents, they’re liable to be solidly on his side.
You can’t teach in that kind of environment, I don’t care what kind of bonuses they offer.
Bring back the paddle. No we’re not going to send you home to your TV. We’re not going to make you write an essay on good choices, we’re going to make your bottom sting. (I suspect that one of the reasons we’re seeing more workplace shootings is that today’s kids are suddenly facing their first real consequence for bad behavior. They get fired. They don’t know how to handle it so they go home and load a weapon to avenge something they’ve never had to experience before. Punishment.)
It might not be a bad idea to teach kids that consequences, real consequences, are a part of life. That you can actually flunk a job, just like a course.
This isn’t going to go over well. Neither is my next and final suggestion. IMPOSE A MONETARY COST ON PUBLIC EDUCATION. Charge them. Jehovah’s Witnesses know you’ll probably toss a free tract, so they used to charge people a dime for each leaflet. Put a value on it.
“You flunked a course, junior, and I’m out the fifty bucks I paid in September? They’re going to make you take it over for another fifty bucks?!? They’re going to tack it onto my property taxes and if I don’t pay it they’ll attach my house?!!?”
That kid is likely to get all kinds of motivational attention from his parents.
Once that happens, then teachers can be held as accountable as you want.
I’ve sat in teachers’ lounges and listened, I’ve chatted with principals, I’ve talked to parents and have had several conversations with their student offspring. In short the last few years have given me a pretty comprehensive overview of American elementary and secondary education in this part of Michigan. (Oh yes, I’ve taught several community college courses, too.)
Want my straight up evaluation?
We’re wasting a whale of a lot of money on public education, and we’re getting shockingly little back for it. Oh, don’ t, don’t, don’t try to tell me that it’s all just bad teaching and if we would just hold those incompetent and lazy teachers accountable, everything would be beautiful. If you try, I will throw up on you.
No doubt there are a few who fall into that category – you’ll find them in Congress and General Electric, in every human endeavor. But the real problem in Michigan/American education is that the system is broke. It may even have been put together wrong in the first place.
You can flog teachers, you can offer them bribes, but until you fix the basic system, you are going to accomplish very little. In all probability the school down the block – where you ship your kids every weekday morning, where you volunteer and attend PTO, probably stinks as an educational institution.
Big reasons? The kids don’t care; they don’t have to care. The administration is probably going to find a way to squeeze them through anyway. Often the parents don’t care. This is accepted as a hard reality in ghetto schools but, in many subtle ways, it can be equally true in wealthy suburban schools.
If the parents don’t care or are too busy to notice, the old adage about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink applies. I don’t care how accountable the exasperated teacher, if the student won’t absorb the material – that takes time and work on the kid’s part as well as some pushing from his folks – you can’t tamp it down his throat.
I can identify several high schools in which the only subjects that could awaken student interest would be drugs, booze, rap music and sex. This has changed significantly in just the past few years. Five years ago I could sub in an American history class and tell them about things I saw going on in Washington during the Vietnam War (that aren’t in their texts) and I’d get some real response and interest.
The last time I tried it, a year ago, I very nicely put together young high school girl – college bound, I’ll wager – raised her hand and asked in the most bored voice, “Why are you telling us all this?” I will bother her and her ilk no more.
I listen to teachers in the lounge at a suburban school, with lots of college bound. This one has a third failing her class, that one admits to half flunking. They haven’t the faintest hint of a solution.
That’s not quite true. Many have murmured under their breath, “Bring back the paddle”. Give the kids some consequence to actually fear. They’re not afraid of being kicked out for a week – they get to lie about and watch TV all day. “Go ahead, kick me out” I’ve had more than one student sneer at me.”
A kid can heap obscenities and all manner of insults at you. Consequence: a session with the school counselor and the recommendation that he make better choices. He can launch his body at you in a full frontal attack and the most he’ll get is a time-out in a separate room. If it comes to the attention of his parents, they’re liable to be solidly on his side.
You can’t teach in that kind of environment, I don’t care what kind of bonuses they offer.
Bring back the paddle. No we’re not going to send you home to your TV. We’re not going to make you write an essay on good choices, we’re going to make your bottom sting. (I suspect that one of the reasons we’re seeing more workplace shootings is that today’s kids are suddenly facing their first real consequence for bad behavior. They get fired. They don’t know how to handle it so they go home and load a weapon to avenge something they’ve never had to experience before. Punishment.)
It might not be a bad idea to teach kids that consequences, real consequences, are a part of life. That you can actually flunk a job, just like a course.
This isn’t going to go over well. Neither is my next and final suggestion. IMPOSE A MONETARY COST ON PUBLIC EDUCATION. Charge them. Jehovah’s Witnesses know you’ll probably toss a free tract, so they used to charge people a dime for each leaflet. Put a value on it.
“You flunked a course, junior, and I’m out the fifty bucks I paid in September? They’re going to make you take it over for another fifty bucks?!? They’re going to tack it onto my property taxes and if I don’t pay it they’ll attach my house?!!?”
That kid is likely to get all kinds of motivational attention from his parents.
Once that happens, then teachers can be held as accountable as you want.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Energy -- who dunnit?
We seem to be facing an energy crisis. So I’m told. Today gasoline popped back up to $3.95 a gallon. I drove down a familiar high way yesterday, one I’ve driven hundreds of times at all hours over the past 30 years. It seemed almost empty. Vistas where there are always three or four cars in view, day or night, showed nothing but bare pavement.
For years the rivers near us have been clogged with pleasure boats running out to Lake Michigan on weekend afternoons. This year the channels seemed almost empty some Saturdays and Sundays.
I accept it. We are facing an energy crisis. The fascinating thing to me is that it seems to have come as an almost total surprise to the people around me.
Okay, we’ve selectively forgotten 1974 when the gas station on my corner was open one hour a day – and it only sold to regular customers and only eight gallons apiece. Then came the big love-in at Camp David and the Arabs all remembered that the US, after all, was their biggest and richest customer. So the good times rolled – with gasoline up to 50 cents from 30 or 35.
Then came 1979 when the Iranians dumped the Shah and (perhaps rightfully) blamed us for all his sins and shortcomings. Gas jumped to a dollar, to a dollar and thirty five cents around here. Once again the Saudi’s and Kuwaiti’s – who then were as addicted to dollars as we are to oil – ramped up production and off we sped.
(To put that $1.35 in perspective, you could buy a Buick that year for around $8,000 bucks. So triple or quadruple that amount in today’s dollars.)
The recessions that followed those petroleum speed bumps were nasty. The one that came in 1981 was rated the worst since the Great Depression.
It was only after these warning shots that we became a society in which everyone had to have an SUV, a pickup or a minivan. T. Boone Pickins tells us that in those days we imported only about 39% of our oil; today it’s around 75%.
The driveways on either side of me are chock-a-block with pick-ups, motor boats, SUVs and even a huge mobile camper. We’ve got a minivan. We joke that we should be a car lot. (Let’s not forget the snow mobiles.)
The last bus that picked up passengers anywhere around us stopped running by 1982. You want groceries? You take a car or pull a large wagon for miles. A man without a motor vehicle around here is as helpless as a man without a horse in the desert.
Sidewalks? Walk? Walking in America is as subversive has carrying explosive toothpaste on an air liner. It flies against our deepest belief: God meant people to drive cars for any distance over two hundred feet. Obesity, anyone?
I recall having a hilarious conversation with a Soviet diplomat once. He was briefly stationed in Phoenix. He loved to take walks in the cool of the evening, just through normal suburban neighborhoods. Once a police car accosted him. What was he doing on foot? At nine o’clock in the evening? Did he have identification? When he displayed his Soviet papers deep in Goldwater country, the cops went bananas.
Forget communism; he was a walker.
Come on. If I figured out there was an energy crunch coming by 1950, a lot of other people should have also. All my dad had to tell me was, “We are six percent of the world’s population. We use 50% of its energy.”
I’m not even especially good at math. But I figured out very quickly that that situation was not going to last. Someday they’d rebuild the bombed homes, roads and factories in Europe and Japan. Someday our choke hold on planetary oil supplies would falter. Someday some totally new customers would show up at the pump. (India, China.)
Where were our statesmen? Even our military leaders? And who were the idiots who zoned everything out of walking distance and then cut the bus service? Who allowed the cities of 1950 to spread miles and miles and miles into the countryside?
We’ve done a number on ourselves. (I’d rather concentrate on solving global warming than on how to get us out of this mess, myself. Much easier to talk about.) How much do we have to reverse? Just to survive.
For years the rivers near us have been clogged with pleasure boats running out to Lake Michigan on weekend afternoons. This year the channels seemed almost empty some Saturdays and Sundays.
I accept it. We are facing an energy crisis. The fascinating thing to me is that it seems to have come as an almost total surprise to the people around me.
Okay, we’ve selectively forgotten 1974 when the gas station on my corner was open one hour a day – and it only sold to regular customers and only eight gallons apiece. Then came the big love-in at Camp David and the Arabs all remembered that the US, after all, was their biggest and richest customer. So the good times rolled – with gasoline up to 50 cents from 30 or 35.
Then came 1979 when the Iranians dumped the Shah and (perhaps rightfully) blamed us for all his sins and shortcomings. Gas jumped to a dollar, to a dollar and thirty five cents around here. Once again the Saudi’s and Kuwaiti’s – who then were as addicted to dollars as we are to oil – ramped up production and off we sped.
(To put that $1.35 in perspective, you could buy a Buick that year for around $8,000 bucks. So triple or quadruple that amount in today’s dollars.)
The recessions that followed those petroleum speed bumps were nasty. The one that came in 1981 was rated the worst since the Great Depression.
It was only after these warning shots that we became a society in which everyone had to have an SUV, a pickup or a minivan. T. Boone Pickins tells us that in those days we imported only about 39% of our oil; today it’s around 75%.
The driveways on either side of me are chock-a-block with pick-ups, motor boats, SUVs and even a huge mobile camper. We’ve got a minivan. We joke that we should be a car lot. (Let’s not forget the snow mobiles.)
The last bus that picked up passengers anywhere around us stopped running by 1982. You want groceries? You take a car or pull a large wagon for miles. A man without a motor vehicle around here is as helpless as a man without a horse in the desert.
Sidewalks? Walk? Walking in America is as subversive has carrying explosive toothpaste on an air liner. It flies against our deepest belief: God meant people to drive cars for any distance over two hundred feet. Obesity, anyone?
I recall having a hilarious conversation with a Soviet diplomat once. He was briefly stationed in Phoenix. He loved to take walks in the cool of the evening, just through normal suburban neighborhoods. Once a police car accosted him. What was he doing on foot? At nine o’clock in the evening? Did he have identification? When he displayed his Soviet papers deep in Goldwater country, the cops went bananas.
Forget communism; he was a walker.
Come on. If I figured out there was an energy crunch coming by 1950, a lot of other people should have also. All my dad had to tell me was, “We are six percent of the world’s population. We use 50% of its energy.”
I’m not even especially good at math. But I figured out very quickly that that situation was not going to last. Someday they’d rebuild the bombed homes, roads and factories in Europe and Japan. Someday our choke hold on planetary oil supplies would falter. Someday some totally new customers would show up at the pump. (India, China.)
Where were our statesmen? Even our military leaders? And who were the idiots who zoned everything out of walking distance and then cut the bus service? Who allowed the cities of 1950 to spread miles and miles and miles into the countryside?
We’ve done a number on ourselves. (I’d rather concentrate on solving global warming than on how to get us out of this mess, myself. Much easier to talk about.) How much do we have to reverse? Just to survive.
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