I have to admit that the thing I would hate most if I woke up and found myself stuck in the White House would be the sense of imprisonment. I’m a walker. I’ve walked all over Rome, New York, Beirut, Boston, Los Angeles, Athens, Grand Rapids, et cetera. That’s my exercise.
I walk. The last president who did that was Harry Truman—and he drove the secret service nuts. In this era, if a president wants to go for a walk—let alone out for pizza and a movie—it takes advance notice and planning like the D-Day Invasion. I would hate that dreadfully.
So I perfectly understand the impulse that sent the Obamas to New York for dinner in the Village and a show. I really do. But, in politics—and for a president every sneeze, sniffle and tickle becomes a political act—appearance is everything.
However limiting the need to keep up appearances may feel, it is a stark necessity for a man who is both the sovereign head of state and the national symbol to do. He or she has no choice in the matter. Before Watergate blew the lid off things, a president could serve four terms in a wheelchair (or have several mistresses) and his secret was safe.
Today’s presidents are allowed to have no secrets. There are no quiet diversions, licit or illicit. When Bill and Hillary Clinton had a few knockdown, drag out fights early in his administration, it got reported. We even know now that Richard Nixon wouldn’t take off his shoes to walk the beach.
Jimmy Carter is still held up to derision because he rowed hastily away from what may well have been a rabid rabbit—a real danger that a citified reporter probably wouldn’t have known anything about. So forth and so on.
We insist on knowing whether or not our Hollywood celebrities are wearing underwear; we go nearly as far with our presidents. We demand to know—and, on top of that, we guard them so zealously that it becomes a significant budget item if they move at all.
For President Obama to take his wife to dinner in New York—I’ve made the trip by car, plane and train many times; for a private citizen it’s not a big deal—it required flying two huge airplanes (one of them carrying his armored limousine) and scrambling some escorting air force jets.
You or I could probably make the roundtrip nearly every week for a year for the cost of his one night out. (And he really isn’t given the choice to use public transportation or his own car.) That’s a lot of tax payers’ dollars for one dinner, one show.
He also picked an unfortunate weekend. General Motors is poised to enter bankruptcy just this following Monday morning. Tens of thousands—to millions—of American wage-earners are caught in a sudden, so recently, unimaginable limbo by this.
Vast wage pools, huge tax bases, all up in the air. No one can say for certain where it will all come down or in what form or on whose back. Fifty years ago GM was featured on the cover of TIME magazine as the ultimate corporation—twice the size of any other in the world.
Now, in a development that Ralph Nader concedes would have been beyond his “wildest imagination”, GM is going broke. It will shed nameplates; it will close factories and dealerships; it will shed workers and cut wages and/or benefits for the survivors.
As people with experience with bankrupt corporations will tell you, even among those companies who come out the other side of Chapter 11 still alive, many often don’t last another five years. For a nation that won the last World War simply by outproducing everyone else, the fall of General Motors is not a small thing! We have no idea what the ultimate consequences may be.
It is a truly ghastly moment in American corporate history. As a catastrophe it probably outstrips Pearl Harbor. June 1st may well become another infamous day to remember.
In short, the thought of the president and his lady spending huge amounts of money to go out for a single evening just before this bankruptcy suggests a “tin ear” in a politician. Surprising in a man who won so skillfully last year.
There is almost the feeling of a Nero fiddling while Rome crashes and burns around him. That is not a wise image for a politician to cultivate. It just might come back to haunt Mr. Obama.
Some other evening when the news is not so dire. Or, drive the secret service nuts—take a walk. Have a pizza in Georgetown. Take in a movie there or a show in Washington. Do what a smart businessman does—find a business reason to travel to New York. Then go to a show.
Much as I’m sympathetic with the desire to escape 1600 Pennsylvania, this was a misstep.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
More Auto Woes
I recently talked to a friend of mine who is a plant engineer at an auto parts supplier in this area. His shop laid off a large part of its workforce last January. He tells me that the lights are turned out in half the plant; the machines stand idle.
“How are you surviving?” I asked.
“A couple of major office furniture manufacturers in the area have decided that they are going to see a huge demand for new office chairs. So the wing of our plant that makes office furniture is keeping us going.” He shrugged, “I don’t know where they are going to find bottoms to fill those chairs, but it pays the bills for now.”
“How long do you think that will last?”
He squinted his eyes. “I kind of think reality will set in sometime next fall. But, until then … .”
It came as no big surprise to me when I read through this week’s issue of “BusinessWeek” and learned that the lack on sales in the auto business is squeezing parts suppliers toward bankruptcy. This could leave restructured auto companies left with too few parts to build cars with.
The suggestion was raised that as soon as the government is finished bailing out what’s left of General Motors and Chrysler, it may have to go bail out some major parts makers. Compared to the banks, that’s just a few billions—but, as the old saying goes, “a billion dollars here; a billion dollars there—that can add up to real money.”
General Motors is braced to enter bankruptcy proceedings in a day or two. Even though all sorts of creditors, unions and bond holders are agreeing to major losses, it looks like Chapter 11 will be inevitable.
And now the heavy hitters are at the plate trying to turn an amalgam of Chrysler, Fiat and Opel into a single entity. Chrysler I know about—it’s been teetering at death’s door for half a century. Fiat has always had problems building cars that ran better than the Italian Army.
But Opel? They’ve been making cars since 1898; they were once the largest auto maker in Germany (back in 1913). General Motors bought them out in 1929-31. As a GM brand they’ve competed successfully against the likes of Volkswagen, Audi, and BMW for decades. At one point, in the 1980s, they were the biggest GM brand in Japan.
They came back from the rubble of World War II (Hitler once decorated a GM vice president for his contributions to the mechanized Wehrmacht) and again competed throughout Europe very successfully. In some countries Chevrolet models were sold as Opels.
How did GM let this brand go to the point that it needs to be sold? This will certainly cut back on General Motor’s presence as an international brand! Can people who have let Saturn, Opel, Oldsmobile and (soon) Pontiac go to smash be trusted to run anything?
The people who are trying to meld Opel into a Chrysler/Fiat merger feel that only if the three are together can any one of them survive. You need to be huge to survive in today’s auto market. Remember when General Motors was the hugest of all?
For now, whole factories (and their towns) in Germany are left as desolate as Detroit. My friend, here in Michigan, goes on setting up machines to build furniture for new offices that may never materialize.
Americans all over the map are deciding not to afford cars that easily cost as much as a nice house did only a few decades ago. We may not have seen the end of the auto shakeout yet.
We can only hope that when GM comes out of bankruptcy it can find a way to see lots and lots of the brands it still has left—and find the parts companies to build them with. Ditto for FiatOpelChrysler—and Ford--and, for that matter, all those Japanese auto factories in Tennessee and Alabama.
I just don’t think the “fat lady” has sung yet.
“How are you surviving?” I asked.
“A couple of major office furniture manufacturers in the area have decided that they are going to see a huge demand for new office chairs. So the wing of our plant that makes office furniture is keeping us going.” He shrugged, “I don’t know where they are going to find bottoms to fill those chairs, but it pays the bills for now.”
“How long do you think that will last?”
He squinted his eyes. “I kind of think reality will set in sometime next fall. But, until then … .”
It came as no big surprise to me when I read through this week’s issue of “BusinessWeek” and learned that the lack on sales in the auto business is squeezing parts suppliers toward bankruptcy. This could leave restructured auto companies left with too few parts to build cars with.
The suggestion was raised that as soon as the government is finished bailing out what’s left of General Motors and Chrysler, it may have to go bail out some major parts makers. Compared to the banks, that’s just a few billions—but, as the old saying goes, “a billion dollars here; a billion dollars there—that can add up to real money.”
General Motors is braced to enter bankruptcy proceedings in a day or two. Even though all sorts of creditors, unions and bond holders are agreeing to major losses, it looks like Chapter 11 will be inevitable.
And now the heavy hitters are at the plate trying to turn an amalgam of Chrysler, Fiat and Opel into a single entity. Chrysler I know about—it’s been teetering at death’s door for half a century. Fiat has always had problems building cars that ran better than the Italian Army.
But Opel? They’ve been making cars since 1898; they were once the largest auto maker in Germany (back in 1913). General Motors bought them out in 1929-31. As a GM brand they’ve competed successfully against the likes of Volkswagen, Audi, and BMW for decades. At one point, in the 1980s, they were the biggest GM brand in Japan.
They came back from the rubble of World War II (Hitler once decorated a GM vice president for his contributions to the mechanized Wehrmacht) and again competed throughout Europe very successfully. In some countries Chevrolet models were sold as Opels.
How did GM let this brand go to the point that it needs to be sold? This will certainly cut back on General Motor’s presence as an international brand! Can people who have let Saturn, Opel, Oldsmobile and (soon) Pontiac go to smash be trusted to run anything?
The people who are trying to meld Opel into a Chrysler/Fiat merger feel that only if the three are together can any one of them survive. You need to be huge to survive in today’s auto market. Remember when General Motors was the hugest of all?
For now, whole factories (and their towns) in Germany are left as desolate as Detroit. My friend, here in Michigan, goes on setting up machines to build furniture for new offices that may never materialize.
Americans all over the map are deciding not to afford cars that easily cost as much as a nice house did only a few decades ago. We may not have seen the end of the auto shakeout yet.
We can only hope that when GM comes out of bankruptcy it can find a way to see lots and lots of the brands it still has left—and find the parts companies to build them with. Ditto for FiatOpelChrysler—and Ford--and, for that matter, all those Japanese auto factories in Tennessee and Alabama.
I just don’t think the “fat lady” has sung yet.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Law, Equity and Sonia Sotomayer
Barack Obama has finally done and said something that scares me. He has even pushed me into a corner where I find myself agreeing with two men I never thought I’d EVER agree with. Forty-five years ago I sat up all night arguing with two lawyers.
We got drunk as skunks as we battled back and forth. I was a first year law school student eager to take up my lance and rush forth to do justice. One of the other two gentlemen was chief legal counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the other—his best friend—was a Duke Law School Professor.
I prattled of justice, fairness and equity; they kept bringing the discussion back to LAW. By four a.m., we probably weren’t as coherent as a jury might have liked, but they had thoroughly disabused me of my naïve view of the legal profession.
“Justice, as a concept, has no place in LAW,” they kept repeating. It is an absolutely alien notion. Horrified—and not understanding them (for decades after)—I dropped law school and went back to writing in one form or another.
But I never forgot the night, and I kept replaying their words in my head. Charlie Markham, the EEOC counsel was a trusted mentor, and I had learned to take his ideas seriously. It has required a long, long time to see the wisdom and truth in what he and his friend were saying.
It all came back to me, with brutal clarity, when I read in the “Washington Post” that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayer for the Supreme Court. He did so very much because Judge Sotomayer has stated (I quote the Post) that “legal decisions [must be] informed by life experiences as well as legal research.”
(What DO they teach them at Harvard Law?)
“Life experience” by its very nature leads one to an emotional response. What my two legal acquaintances were trying to tell me is that LAW, by its very nature, MUST be dispassionate. It allows no place for decisions based on passion or even pity.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned of cases that enflame passions or arouse an excess of compassion, “Hard cases make bad law”. This is because law is built (like Legos) block by block on previous cases. If an impassioned desire to do “justice” for an aggrieved widow opens the precedent door to a rampage by large banks and corporations, justice may have been done, but the nation and the law have been effectively raped.
Admittedly judges are human. They can get as angry as the next man. But to an unusual degree they must strive to take an impartial, balanced and unemotional view of each case. Ideally, at its core, law works very much like a computer.
Did X defraud his investors? Yes/No. Did X commit murder? Yes/No. Did X violate the 14th Amendment rights of Y? Yes/No. Is X entitled to such and such a judgment? Yes/No.
The decisions may go on for pages, but the nub of the decision is that computer processor like answer to the Yes/No question. That Yes or No has NOTHING to do with “life experience”. No question, having been raised white, anglo-saxon protestant will mean that certain opinions will have been hard wired into me that will be different from someone who was raised poor in Harlem.
But if I were a judge, I would be obliged to look at the law, the cases presented as precedent and then make as unemotional decision—based on the Yes/No answer to the facts—as I could possibly muster.
If I were to go into the case predisposed to let my background opinions and feelings govern the out-come of the legal decision, I would do a dangerous disservice to my nation, to the court, and to the law itself. I wish I could bring Charlie and his friend back (both liberal Democrats) and let her and Obama spend a night getting drunk with them.
I believe the mistake that both Obama and Sotomayer are making is to confuse the ancient concept of EQUITY with LAW. They are NOT the same. Law is simply the question: Did you or did you not exceed the speed limit? Yes or No. (It matters not if the judge has had a long life experience getting tickets she felt she did not deserve.)
Equity, in its most egregious form, is the story of King Solomon faced with two women arguing over whose baby was dead and whose was alive. He ordered a sword to be brought in and suggested that the living baby be cut in half, one half for each woman.
He concluded that the woman who begged him to spare the child and give it to the other claimant was the real mother. He gave the infant to her. That was a simple form of “justice”. It established no precedent, opened the doors to no depredations by large corporations or financiers. It was simply an isolated incident in which the king’s justice was done—completely apart from law.
Medieval kings established Equity Courts along side of Legal Courts just for that purpose. The king, moved by anger, compassion, pity—emotions all—could dole out what he saw as justice without any law being involved. Here life experience may play a valid role.
(Presidents still have the power to pardon—completely outside of law or legal constraint. That is a carryover from Equity. The United States recognized Equity as a form of law until it was abolished in the 1870s. We have had it here.)
If President Obama wishes to drop back a century and establish an Equity Court under his Executive Wing, that might be acceptable. He could appoint Sonia Sotomayer to such a panel along with other like minded jurists who weigh their own life experiences when making a decision.
The executive branch is where such a court would belong. It is something kings—executives—did, not legal judges.
But, finally sober—and understanding my mentor and his friend—I am uncomfortable with mixing something that so clearly resembles equity with law at the bar of the Supreme Court. Do you really want a court with the motto: “If it feels good, do it”?
It could remove a lot of legal restraint in court decisions. Over time, a whole lot of us might find we didn’t like the result. Charlie’s friend from North Carolina said something to me that night I never forgot—“That kind of law leads to Fascism.” I hope he’s wrong.
We got drunk as skunks as we battled back and forth. I was a first year law school student eager to take up my lance and rush forth to do justice. One of the other two gentlemen was chief legal counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the other—his best friend—was a Duke Law School Professor.
I prattled of justice, fairness and equity; they kept bringing the discussion back to LAW. By four a.m., we probably weren’t as coherent as a jury might have liked, but they had thoroughly disabused me of my naïve view of the legal profession.
“Justice, as a concept, has no place in LAW,” they kept repeating. It is an absolutely alien notion. Horrified—and not understanding them (for decades after)—I dropped law school and went back to writing in one form or another.
But I never forgot the night, and I kept replaying their words in my head. Charlie Markham, the EEOC counsel was a trusted mentor, and I had learned to take his ideas seriously. It has required a long, long time to see the wisdom and truth in what he and his friend were saying.
It all came back to me, with brutal clarity, when I read in the “Washington Post” that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayer for the Supreme Court. He did so very much because Judge Sotomayer has stated (I quote the Post) that “legal decisions [must be] informed by life experiences as well as legal research.”
(What DO they teach them at Harvard Law?)
“Life experience” by its very nature leads one to an emotional response. What my two legal acquaintances were trying to tell me is that LAW, by its very nature, MUST be dispassionate. It allows no place for decisions based on passion or even pity.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned of cases that enflame passions or arouse an excess of compassion, “Hard cases make bad law”. This is because law is built (like Legos) block by block on previous cases. If an impassioned desire to do “justice” for an aggrieved widow opens the precedent door to a rampage by large banks and corporations, justice may have been done, but the nation and the law have been effectively raped.
Admittedly judges are human. They can get as angry as the next man. But to an unusual degree they must strive to take an impartial, balanced and unemotional view of each case. Ideally, at its core, law works very much like a computer.
Did X defraud his investors? Yes/No. Did X commit murder? Yes/No. Did X violate the 14th Amendment rights of Y? Yes/No. Is X entitled to such and such a judgment? Yes/No.
The decisions may go on for pages, but the nub of the decision is that computer processor like answer to the Yes/No question. That Yes or No has NOTHING to do with “life experience”. No question, having been raised white, anglo-saxon protestant will mean that certain opinions will have been hard wired into me that will be different from someone who was raised poor in Harlem.
But if I were a judge, I would be obliged to look at the law, the cases presented as precedent and then make as unemotional decision—based on the Yes/No answer to the facts—as I could possibly muster.
If I were to go into the case predisposed to let my background opinions and feelings govern the out-come of the legal decision, I would do a dangerous disservice to my nation, to the court, and to the law itself. I wish I could bring Charlie and his friend back (both liberal Democrats) and let her and Obama spend a night getting drunk with them.
I believe the mistake that both Obama and Sotomayer are making is to confuse the ancient concept of EQUITY with LAW. They are NOT the same. Law is simply the question: Did you or did you not exceed the speed limit? Yes or No. (It matters not if the judge has had a long life experience getting tickets she felt she did not deserve.)
Equity, in its most egregious form, is the story of King Solomon faced with two women arguing over whose baby was dead and whose was alive. He ordered a sword to be brought in and suggested that the living baby be cut in half, one half for each woman.
He concluded that the woman who begged him to spare the child and give it to the other claimant was the real mother. He gave the infant to her. That was a simple form of “justice”. It established no precedent, opened the doors to no depredations by large corporations or financiers. It was simply an isolated incident in which the king’s justice was done—completely apart from law.
Medieval kings established Equity Courts along side of Legal Courts just for that purpose. The king, moved by anger, compassion, pity—emotions all—could dole out what he saw as justice without any law being involved. Here life experience may play a valid role.
(Presidents still have the power to pardon—completely outside of law or legal constraint. That is a carryover from Equity. The United States recognized Equity as a form of law until it was abolished in the 1870s. We have had it here.)
If President Obama wishes to drop back a century and establish an Equity Court under his Executive Wing, that might be acceptable. He could appoint Sonia Sotomayer to such a panel along with other like minded jurists who weigh their own life experiences when making a decision.
The executive branch is where such a court would belong. It is something kings—executives—did, not legal judges.
But, finally sober—and understanding my mentor and his friend—I am uncomfortable with mixing something that so clearly resembles equity with law at the bar of the Supreme Court. Do you really want a court with the motto: “If it feels good, do it”?
It could remove a lot of legal restraint in court decisions. Over time, a whole lot of us might find we didn’t like the result. Charlie’s friend from North Carolina said something to me that night I never forgot—“That kind of law leads to Fascism.” I hope he’s wrong.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I Miss NEWSWEEK
“The first issue of the reinvented NEWSWEEK” finally came. I read through it page by page: four sections, about 30 individual pieces, at least half written by Big Name columnists like Tina Brown, Jacob Weisberg and George Will. The other one to four page articles were written by by-lined editors.
As NEWSWEEK editor, Jon Meacham writes: “What is displaced by the [new] categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know.”
But that’s what I valued about news magazines. I live in an area where the local newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy and has eliminated nearly all news pieces other than local weddings and funerals. Like my busy father before me, I used to rely on NEWSWEEK (or TIME) to recap inside a single cover all the facts and news I might have missed.
I know—I’m supposed to read all the real news online. But I’m an atavist. I ENJOY reading real news papers and real news magazines. I don’t mind getting a little ink on my hands as I imbibe my daily quota of news. I shall miss NEWSWEEK.
This was the magazine that started coming into my family home the year I was born. It still comes in the name of my favorite aunt who subscribed to it back in 1939. I never wanted to remove her name from the address label. It’s a memorial.
Every weekend I looked forward to the new issue. As I hurried back from the mailbox, I would flip through the catalogs and bills to look at the cover and see what the featured stories were. If my wife or my kids went out to get the mail first, they would drop the magazine on my chair.
Now, it saddens me to admit it, I really don’t care if next week’s issue comes or doesn’t. Many last week’s page long editorials and essays seemed slightly tedious. I’m not sure if I finished the entire magazine or not. I have no real desire to look through it again.
I can’t believe I wrote that. But I did. And, what’s really sad, I meant it.
It doesn’t sound like working there would be as much fun as it was in 1960-61 when I enjoyed a stint on the editorial make-up desk. It was kind of like being a fireman. When there was nothing to do, you freely read your own book (I read the entire “Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, among others, on that desk) combed through the morgue, read the tickertapes or watched the Kentucky Derby in the TV room—I scored my only office pool victory on the 1961 Derby.
When it got busy, oh boy. The editors and writers tended to approach us in a somewhat defensive and grouchy mood. Once the copy was written, all the power was ours. We need a bold subhead here; you cannot have a page break between paragraphs—kill a line in this paragraph; add one in that. Sense be hanged.
They’d sweat, snarl and steal my cigarettes. There was one writer in the “International Section” that I really enjoyed—Fillmore Calhoun, as much a southerner as his name sounded. He was a grizzled old veteran who could type better copy drunk and two-fingered than most others could sober.
I liked hearing Fillmore tell his stories. So to make sure he chose my desk, I bought a bottle of excellent Bourbon and kept it in my drawer. Whenever we passed midnight, I would open the bottle-- “Mr. Calhoun, it is time for our evening oblation.” He would ceremoniously agree. I poured our shots and we went back to work.
Is there anybody like Fillmore Calhoun still there today? Or the chief international editor, a chap from London, who passed around the Christmas booze like candy and told alternately ribald and politically incorrect jokes about African revolutionaries (straight out of Evelyn Waugh).
Christmas Eve, 1960, I remember realizing that I was in no condition to lay out a page. So I took the elevator down to Madison Avenue, walked across the street to a drug counter (whose chief claim to fame seemed to be that Jack Kennedy would wait there for Jackie while she shopped) and ordered four cups of coffee—carried them back to my desk and helped put the New Year’s issue to bed.
There was Walt Rundle, editor of the international book, who was full of fascinating stories about covering news during World War II. There was Dick Schaap, sports editor, who ALWAYS took one of my cigarettes when he flashed by.
There were all the wealthy female editorial assistants whose rich daddies subsidized them so that could have a prestigious job working for a major magazine at almost zero pay. They could look really smashing as they finished the night’s work at one a.m. in an evening gown, ready to party.
Speaking of attractive editorial assistants, I’ll never forget one Monday morning when I spent three or four hours squeezing, cutting, fitting and filling a book review into the back of the book. The books editor was an extremely fastidious man, always in a suit, tie and vest, who never, ever raised his voice or became noticeably upset.
I must have tried him to the utmost that morning with my insistence on stylistic rules. He never showed a hint of annoyance, quietly writing and rewriting to fit. When we were done, he got up, very quietly, deliberately gathered his materials, wished me a good day and walked away, rigid in posture and mood.
He passed a well endowed young lady in a summer smock. Without missing a step or even looking down, he placed his pencil between her breasts and waggled it for an instant. As he walked on, never looking back, she looked up at me, bemused, shook her head and went back to work.
I had tried him to the utmost. There were writers I played chess with. One chap always whipped me. He quit while I was there and went off to New England to write novels. There was a senior editor who always asked when he returned from lunch, “Did anything happen? Did the pope get married?”
Of course there was the Monday morning when we threw away hundreds of thousands of copies of the magazine and rewrote one paragraph. A feature article had stated dogmatically that we would not invade Cuba. That was the morning we went in to the Bay of Pigs. It was a memorable morning.
All in all, editorial make-up at NEWSWEEK was a fun job. I doubt if I’ve ever had one I enjoyed more. But I’m not at all sure the present magazine and staff would be nearly as much fun. What came the other day simply isn’t the same magazine.
I have to say it: I miss NEWSWEEK.
As NEWSWEEK editor, Jon Meacham writes: “What is displaced by the [new] categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know.”
But that’s what I valued about news magazines. I live in an area where the local newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy and has eliminated nearly all news pieces other than local weddings and funerals. Like my busy father before me, I used to rely on NEWSWEEK (or TIME) to recap inside a single cover all the facts and news I might have missed.
I know—I’m supposed to read all the real news online. But I’m an atavist. I ENJOY reading real news papers and real news magazines. I don’t mind getting a little ink on my hands as I imbibe my daily quota of news. I shall miss NEWSWEEK.
This was the magazine that started coming into my family home the year I was born. It still comes in the name of my favorite aunt who subscribed to it back in 1939. I never wanted to remove her name from the address label. It’s a memorial.
Every weekend I looked forward to the new issue. As I hurried back from the mailbox, I would flip through the catalogs and bills to look at the cover and see what the featured stories were. If my wife or my kids went out to get the mail first, they would drop the magazine on my chair.
Now, it saddens me to admit it, I really don’t care if next week’s issue comes or doesn’t. Many last week’s page long editorials and essays seemed slightly tedious. I’m not sure if I finished the entire magazine or not. I have no real desire to look through it again.
I can’t believe I wrote that. But I did. And, what’s really sad, I meant it.
It doesn’t sound like working there would be as much fun as it was in 1960-61 when I enjoyed a stint on the editorial make-up desk. It was kind of like being a fireman. When there was nothing to do, you freely read your own book (I read the entire “Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, among others, on that desk) combed through the morgue, read the tickertapes or watched the Kentucky Derby in the TV room—I scored my only office pool victory on the 1961 Derby.
When it got busy, oh boy. The editors and writers tended to approach us in a somewhat defensive and grouchy mood. Once the copy was written, all the power was ours. We need a bold subhead here; you cannot have a page break between paragraphs—kill a line in this paragraph; add one in that. Sense be hanged.
They’d sweat, snarl and steal my cigarettes. There was one writer in the “International Section” that I really enjoyed—Fillmore Calhoun, as much a southerner as his name sounded. He was a grizzled old veteran who could type better copy drunk and two-fingered than most others could sober.
I liked hearing Fillmore tell his stories. So to make sure he chose my desk, I bought a bottle of excellent Bourbon and kept it in my drawer. Whenever we passed midnight, I would open the bottle-- “Mr. Calhoun, it is time for our evening oblation.” He would ceremoniously agree. I poured our shots and we went back to work.
Is there anybody like Fillmore Calhoun still there today? Or the chief international editor, a chap from London, who passed around the Christmas booze like candy and told alternately ribald and politically incorrect jokes about African revolutionaries (straight out of Evelyn Waugh).
Christmas Eve, 1960, I remember realizing that I was in no condition to lay out a page. So I took the elevator down to Madison Avenue, walked across the street to a drug counter (whose chief claim to fame seemed to be that Jack Kennedy would wait there for Jackie while she shopped) and ordered four cups of coffee—carried them back to my desk and helped put the New Year’s issue to bed.
There was Walt Rundle, editor of the international book, who was full of fascinating stories about covering news during World War II. There was Dick Schaap, sports editor, who ALWAYS took one of my cigarettes when he flashed by.
There were all the wealthy female editorial assistants whose rich daddies subsidized them so that could have a prestigious job working for a major magazine at almost zero pay. They could look really smashing as they finished the night’s work at one a.m. in an evening gown, ready to party.
Speaking of attractive editorial assistants, I’ll never forget one Monday morning when I spent three or four hours squeezing, cutting, fitting and filling a book review into the back of the book. The books editor was an extremely fastidious man, always in a suit, tie and vest, who never, ever raised his voice or became noticeably upset.
I must have tried him to the utmost that morning with my insistence on stylistic rules. He never showed a hint of annoyance, quietly writing and rewriting to fit. When we were done, he got up, very quietly, deliberately gathered his materials, wished me a good day and walked away, rigid in posture and mood.
He passed a well endowed young lady in a summer smock. Without missing a step or even looking down, he placed his pencil between her breasts and waggled it for an instant. As he walked on, never looking back, she looked up at me, bemused, shook her head and went back to work.
I had tried him to the utmost. There were writers I played chess with. One chap always whipped me. He quit while I was there and went off to New England to write novels. There was a senior editor who always asked when he returned from lunch, “Did anything happen? Did the pope get married?”
Of course there was the Monday morning when we threw away hundreds of thousands of copies of the magazine and rewrote one paragraph. A feature article had stated dogmatically that we would not invade Cuba. That was the morning we went in to the Bay of Pigs. It was a memorable morning.
All in all, editorial make-up at NEWSWEEK was a fun job. I doubt if I’ve ever had one I enjoyed more. But I’m not at all sure the present magazine and staff would be nearly as much fun. What came the other day simply isn’t the same magazine.
I have to say it: I miss NEWSWEEK.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Time For Republican Silence
I have been stunned the past few months at all the opportunities my fellow Republicans in Washington have missed to shut up. Isn’t anybody up there thinking? Right now you are up against an enormously popular president who is seen as the new Messiah.
Vast numbers of Americans believe that Obama is leading us into the new promised land. He does a masterful job of looking purposely busy. He speaks with a reassuring logic that just conveys calm. To carp at Obama right now is only to make you look vindictively partisan.
Americans say they hate that. Not actually—but they hate the appearance of partisanship. Especially when it is directed at their hero of the moment. Obama is just that. So do the sane thing and hold your peace. Be quiet. Shhhhhh. Let Obama have his day—he will anyway.
Why let him roll over top of you? Why let him make you look mean spirited and, frankly, stupid? With his current popularity that’s all you can appear to be. Don’t do his work for him. Sit back, acknowledge his victory and let him have his day—he will anyway.
If you can’t stand to vote for one of his programs, abstain. En masse. Tell the media you do not agree with him but that you feel he should have his chance to carry out his own policies. After all, he and his party won overwhelmingly. “As the loyal opposition we will do our job and suggest alternatives, but we will not seek to oppose merely for the sake of opposition.”
Look noble. The only other choice you have is to look pig-headed and obstructive. Why should you let him paint that label on you? Back off. Show that rare form of political sportsmanship that makes you look good and doesn’t actually affect the outcome of the game one bit.
Obama isn’t going to be sitting on top of the world forever. He has committed himself in so many directions and has made so many promises that there is no possible way he’s going to stay up there with 60 and 70% approval ratings.
History shows that when a demigod fails to deliver on his promises, his once cheering fans turn on him with mindboggling viciousness. That is very likely to happen to President Obama during the next two or three years.
It will happen in some cases because he tries to do too much; in others, it will happen because he gets exactly what he wants out of Congress and the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for”, comes into play. There is no way the curse of the toxic assets has been defanged. At some point it will come back to bite us.
If he’s really going to create a national health plan without a single payer, he will construct an expensive and unworkable Rube Goldberg contraption that will let all the little steel balls fall on his head. He’s going to solve our educational problems—from Washington? Good luck.
Wait until Afghanistan gets really messy and he’s still got thousands of troops in Iraq, still getting blown up. What if the Chinese pull the rug out from under us and the dollar? What if housing doesn’t come back enough to give everybody enough equity so that they can afford to sell?
What if the plans to reconstitute GM and Chrysler don’t fly? Need I go on with all the possibilities for Obama to get his political fingers badly burned? Nancy Pelosi has an agenda of her own—she’s going to get bolder as the years go by.
Whether she outright obstructs Obama or merely makes herself look foolish (as she did over her charges about CIA lying), she is not going to be the joy of his life.
Obama talks a lot. He’s liable at some point to say something he shouldn’t have. Let him flounder—instead of the Republican Party. We simply don’t have the manpower or the opening now. Let Obama make that opening for us. Given enough time and his own head, he will—all presidents eventually do.
Letting him have things easily right now invites future hubris on his part. That will wreck him far more surely than any Republican opposition could in the present situation. Meanwhile, stand back and take the advice I used to give my soccer playing sons.
Always be there to help the other guy up when he falls—even if you tripped him. It will look good to the referee and leave the opponent without obvious justification for a “get back”. It costs you nothing to stand back and look as if you really were nice people.
The president will go off sides—or get caught holding or roughing the passer. It’ll happen. Just be patient and, for the nonce—while he’s on a roll, just be quiet and let him roll. Then you won’t have destroyed the opportunity he gives you by looking silly and sounding sillier.
That will hurt us worse than anything Obama can do to us. Wait. By next year or certainly the year after, we’ll have our day
Let’s just not ruin it before it even starts!.
Vast numbers of Americans believe that Obama is leading us into the new promised land. He does a masterful job of looking purposely busy. He speaks with a reassuring logic that just conveys calm. To carp at Obama right now is only to make you look vindictively partisan.
Americans say they hate that. Not actually—but they hate the appearance of partisanship. Especially when it is directed at their hero of the moment. Obama is just that. So do the sane thing and hold your peace. Be quiet. Shhhhhh. Let Obama have his day—he will anyway.
Why let him roll over top of you? Why let him make you look mean spirited and, frankly, stupid? With his current popularity that’s all you can appear to be. Don’t do his work for him. Sit back, acknowledge his victory and let him have his day—he will anyway.
If you can’t stand to vote for one of his programs, abstain. En masse. Tell the media you do not agree with him but that you feel he should have his chance to carry out his own policies. After all, he and his party won overwhelmingly. “As the loyal opposition we will do our job and suggest alternatives, but we will not seek to oppose merely for the sake of opposition.”
Look noble. The only other choice you have is to look pig-headed and obstructive. Why should you let him paint that label on you? Back off. Show that rare form of political sportsmanship that makes you look good and doesn’t actually affect the outcome of the game one bit.
Obama isn’t going to be sitting on top of the world forever. He has committed himself in so many directions and has made so many promises that there is no possible way he’s going to stay up there with 60 and 70% approval ratings.
History shows that when a demigod fails to deliver on his promises, his once cheering fans turn on him with mindboggling viciousness. That is very likely to happen to President Obama during the next two or three years.
It will happen in some cases because he tries to do too much; in others, it will happen because he gets exactly what he wants out of Congress and the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for”, comes into play. There is no way the curse of the toxic assets has been defanged. At some point it will come back to bite us.
If he’s really going to create a national health plan without a single payer, he will construct an expensive and unworkable Rube Goldberg contraption that will let all the little steel balls fall on his head. He’s going to solve our educational problems—from Washington? Good luck.
Wait until Afghanistan gets really messy and he’s still got thousands of troops in Iraq, still getting blown up. What if the Chinese pull the rug out from under us and the dollar? What if housing doesn’t come back enough to give everybody enough equity so that they can afford to sell?
What if the plans to reconstitute GM and Chrysler don’t fly? Need I go on with all the possibilities for Obama to get his political fingers badly burned? Nancy Pelosi has an agenda of her own—she’s going to get bolder as the years go by.
Whether she outright obstructs Obama or merely makes herself look foolish (as she did over her charges about CIA lying), she is not going to be the joy of his life.
Obama talks a lot. He’s liable at some point to say something he shouldn’t have. Let him flounder—instead of the Republican Party. We simply don’t have the manpower or the opening now. Let Obama make that opening for us. Given enough time and his own head, he will—all presidents eventually do.
Letting him have things easily right now invites future hubris on his part. That will wreck him far more surely than any Republican opposition could in the present situation. Meanwhile, stand back and take the advice I used to give my soccer playing sons.
Always be there to help the other guy up when he falls—even if you tripped him. It will look good to the referee and leave the opponent without obvious justification for a “get back”. It costs you nothing to stand back and look as if you really were nice people.
The president will go off sides—or get caught holding or roughing the passer. It’ll happen. Just be patient and, for the nonce—while he’s on a roll, just be quiet and let him roll. Then you won’t have destroyed the opportunity he gives you by looking silly and sounding sillier.
That will hurt us worse than anything Obama can do to us. Wait. By next year or certainly the year after, we’ll have our day
Let’s just not ruin it before it even starts!.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Obama At Notre Dame -- Why?
President Obama flew to Notre Dame University and pleaded for common ground between pro-lifers and free-choicers. Why did he bother? He might as well have gone to Kansas in 1855 and asked the pro-slavers and anti-slavers to be civil with each other.
It didn’t happen in “dark and bloody Kansas”; it’s highly unlikely to happen in the debate between those who see abortion as the murder of a human being and those who see it as merely the termination of an unwanted, non-human growth to be done at the mother’s convenience.
More to the point, actually, he might as well have gone to a Jewish synagogue in the 1930s and pleaded for common ground between Polish Jews and Hitler. That’s how the anti-abortionists see it, and the pro-choice people actually aren’t that far from Hitler’s theory on human life, convenience and the merits of disposing unwanted sub or non-humans.
It’s a gulf you are not going to bridge. (I am aware that pro-choice activists are liable to scream bloody murder at my equating them in any way with Nazi theory. But if they were to look dispassionately at the Nazi rationale for exterminating sub human races, I think they would see similarities.
On the one hand, Nazi Eugenics saw their program as improving the human race by getting rid of unwanted and inferior strains. Abortion-on-demand theory sees their program as improving human life by getting rid of an entire class of unwanted and inconvenient life forms.
Like the Nazis, the abortionist and his backers deny the humanity of the life forms they are eliminating. Many go as far as to insist that the non-humans they have aborted would probably grow up to join the criminal class and be a danger to or burden for society, another common Nazi claim.
If this somehow is not an accurate depiction of those who support abortion on demand, then it is certainly how they are seen by those who disagree. The likelihood of “common ground” becomes a hopeless fantasy. Some conflicts really are irrepressible.)
Possibly if President Obama thought in terms of reaching common ground with those who advocated keeping his wife’s ancestors in slavery, he might see the impossibility of what he seeks now.
People on one side of the divide truly see the death of a million aborted fetuses a year as genocide on a scale the Nazis could only envy. On the other side, supporters of abortion truly see the right to lifers as supporters of a system that keeps women in cruel bondage, with no choice over her own destiny.
I’ve known several women who’ve had abortions. I rack my brains to no useful effect when I try to come up with an alternative solution for these specific women in a society structured as this one is. I will be the first to admit that those who most vociferously oppose abortion should be first in line to offer protection, shelter, medical care and child care to women with unwanted pregnancies.
As I’ve written before, I don’t see that happening. This raises the question of at least a bit of hypocrisy on the part of those who merely condemn her for her choice—rather than taking a personal interest in her alternative solutions.
One thing the religious right/conservative Christians have to realize is that many of the women seeking abortions were raised in a post-Christian society. The mores and morality that one associates with tradition Christianity simply weren’t and aren’t part of their make-up.
These people simply aren’t going to respond the way a traditional Christian at Notre Dame or anywhere else might expect. Christians have got to learn that there is an entire stratum of American society that simply does not speak the same language or share the same values as Christians do.
They are never going to communicate all that well with Christians. It’s like people shouting at each other in different languages. It’s as if Simon Legree and William Lloyd Garrison tried to convince one another about the virtue or vice of slavery.
Even if the president were to go barefoot to Notre Dame and stand three days in winter snow, he can’t make it happen. (This may hard for a very rational, lawyer-trained man like Obama to understand.)
What can be done? Both sides have to step back and realize that THERE IS NO COMMON GROUND. Accepting reality is a first step on the road to sanity.
Christians, especially—as I have written before—have got to accept the fact that the United States is indeed a democracy (technically a republic, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it a democracy). The majority rules.
As Obama and Pelosi said to the Republicans this winter, “We won”. We have the votes; you don’t.
The right to life people simply don’t have the votes right now. Too many people really want abortions available. For whatever reason. (Yes there is such a thing as John C. Calhoun’s “tyranny of the majority”.) Those of us who oppose abortion on demand simply lack the votes.
So, my fellow Christians, do what the Christians in the first centuries of this era had to do in Rome—back off. Don’t preach against (idolatry, slavery, infanticide, gladiator combat) what you can’t change. People who are not Christian—in Rome or the USA—simply are not going to share your moral viewpoint.
Accept it. Pray against it. Proselytize. Argue gently if at all. No shouting, no anger, no hostile words. Fall back on that old bromide preached by Christ and almost always honored in the breach—love them.
Love abortionists, women who get abortions, politicians who advocate abortion on demand. Be courteous, be loving and, above all, be quiet.
President Obama went on what could almost be called a Fool’s Errand to Notre Dame. He shouldn’t do it again—and we Christians shouldn’t become so strident that he feels it necessary to do so.
We don’t have the votes to do anything but love them and accept present reality. Just as in ancient Rome.
It didn’t happen in “dark and bloody Kansas”; it’s highly unlikely to happen in the debate between those who see abortion as the murder of a human being and those who see it as merely the termination of an unwanted, non-human growth to be done at the mother’s convenience.
More to the point, actually, he might as well have gone to a Jewish synagogue in the 1930s and pleaded for common ground between Polish Jews and Hitler. That’s how the anti-abortionists see it, and the pro-choice people actually aren’t that far from Hitler’s theory on human life, convenience and the merits of disposing unwanted sub or non-humans.
It’s a gulf you are not going to bridge. (I am aware that pro-choice activists are liable to scream bloody murder at my equating them in any way with Nazi theory. But if they were to look dispassionately at the Nazi rationale for exterminating sub human races, I think they would see similarities.
On the one hand, Nazi Eugenics saw their program as improving the human race by getting rid of unwanted and inferior strains. Abortion-on-demand theory sees their program as improving human life by getting rid of an entire class of unwanted and inconvenient life forms.
Like the Nazis, the abortionist and his backers deny the humanity of the life forms they are eliminating. Many go as far as to insist that the non-humans they have aborted would probably grow up to join the criminal class and be a danger to or burden for society, another common Nazi claim.
If this somehow is not an accurate depiction of those who support abortion on demand, then it is certainly how they are seen by those who disagree. The likelihood of “common ground” becomes a hopeless fantasy. Some conflicts really are irrepressible.)
Possibly if President Obama thought in terms of reaching common ground with those who advocated keeping his wife’s ancestors in slavery, he might see the impossibility of what he seeks now.
People on one side of the divide truly see the death of a million aborted fetuses a year as genocide on a scale the Nazis could only envy. On the other side, supporters of abortion truly see the right to lifers as supporters of a system that keeps women in cruel bondage, with no choice over her own destiny.
I’ve known several women who’ve had abortions. I rack my brains to no useful effect when I try to come up with an alternative solution for these specific women in a society structured as this one is. I will be the first to admit that those who most vociferously oppose abortion should be first in line to offer protection, shelter, medical care and child care to women with unwanted pregnancies.
As I’ve written before, I don’t see that happening. This raises the question of at least a bit of hypocrisy on the part of those who merely condemn her for her choice—rather than taking a personal interest in her alternative solutions.
One thing the religious right/conservative Christians have to realize is that many of the women seeking abortions were raised in a post-Christian society. The mores and morality that one associates with tradition Christianity simply weren’t and aren’t part of their make-up.
These people simply aren’t going to respond the way a traditional Christian at Notre Dame or anywhere else might expect. Christians have got to learn that there is an entire stratum of American society that simply does not speak the same language or share the same values as Christians do.
They are never going to communicate all that well with Christians. It’s like people shouting at each other in different languages. It’s as if Simon Legree and William Lloyd Garrison tried to convince one another about the virtue or vice of slavery.
Even if the president were to go barefoot to Notre Dame and stand three days in winter snow, he can’t make it happen. (This may hard for a very rational, lawyer-trained man like Obama to understand.)
What can be done? Both sides have to step back and realize that THERE IS NO COMMON GROUND. Accepting reality is a first step on the road to sanity.
Christians, especially—as I have written before—have got to accept the fact that the United States is indeed a democracy (technically a republic, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it a democracy). The majority rules.
As Obama and Pelosi said to the Republicans this winter, “We won”. We have the votes; you don’t.
The right to life people simply don’t have the votes right now. Too many people really want abortions available. For whatever reason. (Yes there is such a thing as John C. Calhoun’s “tyranny of the majority”.) Those of us who oppose abortion on demand simply lack the votes.
So, my fellow Christians, do what the Christians in the first centuries of this era had to do in Rome—back off. Don’t preach against (idolatry, slavery, infanticide, gladiator combat) what you can’t change. People who are not Christian—in Rome or the USA—simply are not going to share your moral viewpoint.
Accept it. Pray against it. Proselytize. Argue gently if at all. No shouting, no anger, no hostile words. Fall back on that old bromide preached by Christ and almost always honored in the breach—love them.
Love abortionists, women who get abortions, politicians who advocate abortion on demand. Be courteous, be loving and, above all, be quiet.
President Obama went on what could almost be called a Fool’s Errand to Notre Dame. He shouldn’t do it again—and we Christians shouldn’t become so strident that he feels it necessary to do so.
We don’t have the votes to do anything but love them and accept present reality. Just as in ancient Rome.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Israel: American Albatross or Blessing?
Today, as it turns out, is Christians United For Israel Sunday http://www.cufi.org/site/PageServer. I didn’t know that until I turned on the internet this morning and came upon an evangelical church in Texas that helps spearhead this movement. It claims over 1000 churches in 50 countries.
In July the Cufi movement will send thousands of members to Washington to meet with Israeli officials and lobby for strengthening ties between the US and Israel. I had completely overlooked the entire matter because I forgot that May 15 (Friday) is Israeli Independence Day.
I am old enough to remember the excitement we evangelical Christians felt in May, 1948, when a Jewish state was established on the western shores of the Mediterranean for the first time in over 2,000 years. From the beginning America—and its Christian population—were midwife and godfather to the process.
Harry Truman was running way behind his Republican opponent that year—who happened to be governor of New York, the state with the largest number of electoral votes. Truman needed help to get New York back. He found a way to lock in New York’s large Jewish population.
The United States staunchly backed Israel’s bid to become independent. Truman won his election and Israel became a nation. The war that broke out on May 15, 1948, was as tight as the election Truman won in November (remember the headlines: “Dewey Wins”?)
Five Muslim nations bordered the new, nearly defenseless Jewish state. Five armies poured into Israel. All Israel had for a military were the discharged veterans of the single Jewish Brigade the British would allow to serve in her army during World War II.
Weapons and supplies flowed in from all over the world. The Arab armies were thrown back and Israel wound up with an area nearly twice the size originally allocated by the United Nations. A series of foreign policies were put in play that continue to this day.
Muslim policy continues to be what it has been since that day in 1948—Destroy Israel (not just defeat it, destroy it. Israeli policy continues to be what it has been ever since then—Survive. By whatever means; at whatever cost.
American policy remains what it has been since then. Essentially ambivalent. We support Israel with foreign aid, supply it with weaponry, and work feverishly to force it to make an accommodation with those whose only goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.
Here—have a nice slice of foreign aid; now, in return, kill yourselves. This, truly, is the height of ambivalence.
Our double-mindedness is built on the same factor that made the British adopt essentially the same policy before they left Palestine in 1948. OIL. The Muslims have it. Lots and lots of it. We burn lots and lots of it—and need to import it from them.
As they’ve shown us in 1973 and 1979, they can strangle us by simply turning off the spigot. From a purely economic point of view, Israel is an obstruction in our path to prosperity. On the other hand, Israel is the only truly democratic nation in the entire Muslim world.
Jewish voting blocks in New York and a couple of other states are still formidable—as are Christians who tend, like the Christians United For Israel, to vote for Israel. Added to that is a continuing moral imperative rising from World War II—when the United States did nothing to help Jews slated for death in Hitler’s camps, and there were things we could have done.
(A Nazi chieftain in the Balkans offered to trade a million Jews for medical supplies; we let them die. We never bombed the crematoria when we had the chance. We sent boatloads of Jewish refugee children who got as far as New York back to the Nazi death camps. We felt guilty.)
Why are large groups of Christians—who often are individually anti-Semitic (like my own late father)—so firmly pro-Israel? A few reasons.
They tend to be evangelicals who take both the Jewish and the Christian Bible seriously. They believe that Christ will not return until a Jewish State exists around Jerusalem. They take Christ seriously when he calls Jews “my brethren”.
They take the original Abramic covenant between God and Abram (later Abraham). “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:3 KJV)
And, of course—while some “Christians” choke on the notion—by any rabbinical or Israeli standard, the founder of the Christian Faith, Jesus Christ, is himself Jewish. He would legally qualify instantly for Israeli citizenship—his mother was Jewish.
In the New Testament (Christian Bible), the Pharisee writer, Saul of Tarsus, states bluntly that Gentile Christians are merely grafted into the vine; Jews are the true branches on the Christian tree. Christ tells a Samaritan woman very directly, “Salvation is from the Jews.”
So, these Christians United For Israel will gather in their churches today and, in July, send their emissaries to Washington to show their solidarity. And the entire American family can pray indeed that in the seed of Abraham that lives in Israel “shall all families of the earth be blessed”, including the United States.
We can certainly use a blessing these days.
In July the Cufi movement will send thousands of members to Washington to meet with Israeli officials and lobby for strengthening ties between the US and Israel. I had completely overlooked the entire matter because I forgot that May 15 (Friday) is Israeli Independence Day.
I am old enough to remember the excitement we evangelical Christians felt in May, 1948, when a Jewish state was established on the western shores of the Mediterranean for the first time in over 2,000 years. From the beginning America—and its Christian population—were midwife and godfather to the process.
Harry Truman was running way behind his Republican opponent that year—who happened to be governor of New York, the state with the largest number of electoral votes. Truman needed help to get New York back. He found a way to lock in New York’s large Jewish population.
The United States staunchly backed Israel’s bid to become independent. Truman won his election and Israel became a nation. The war that broke out on May 15, 1948, was as tight as the election Truman won in November (remember the headlines: “Dewey Wins”?)
Five Muslim nations bordered the new, nearly defenseless Jewish state. Five armies poured into Israel. All Israel had for a military were the discharged veterans of the single Jewish Brigade the British would allow to serve in her army during World War II.
Weapons and supplies flowed in from all over the world. The Arab armies were thrown back and Israel wound up with an area nearly twice the size originally allocated by the United Nations. A series of foreign policies were put in play that continue to this day.
Muslim policy continues to be what it has been since that day in 1948—Destroy Israel (not just defeat it, destroy it. Israeli policy continues to be what it has been ever since then—Survive. By whatever means; at whatever cost.
American policy remains what it has been since then. Essentially ambivalent. We support Israel with foreign aid, supply it with weaponry, and work feverishly to force it to make an accommodation with those whose only goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.
Here—have a nice slice of foreign aid; now, in return, kill yourselves. This, truly, is the height of ambivalence.
Our double-mindedness is built on the same factor that made the British adopt essentially the same policy before they left Palestine in 1948. OIL. The Muslims have it. Lots and lots of it. We burn lots and lots of it—and need to import it from them.
As they’ve shown us in 1973 and 1979, they can strangle us by simply turning off the spigot. From a purely economic point of view, Israel is an obstruction in our path to prosperity. On the other hand, Israel is the only truly democratic nation in the entire Muslim world.
Jewish voting blocks in New York and a couple of other states are still formidable—as are Christians who tend, like the Christians United For Israel, to vote for Israel. Added to that is a continuing moral imperative rising from World War II—when the United States did nothing to help Jews slated for death in Hitler’s camps, and there were things we could have done.
(A Nazi chieftain in the Balkans offered to trade a million Jews for medical supplies; we let them die. We never bombed the crematoria when we had the chance. We sent boatloads of Jewish refugee children who got as far as New York back to the Nazi death camps. We felt guilty.)
Why are large groups of Christians—who often are individually anti-Semitic (like my own late father)—so firmly pro-Israel? A few reasons.
They tend to be evangelicals who take both the Jewish and the Christian Bible seriously. They believe that Christ will not return until a Jewish State exists around Jerusalem. They take Christ seriously when he calls Jews “my brethren”.
They take the original Abramic covenant between God and Abram (later Abraham). “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:3 KJV)
And, of course—while some “Christians” choke on the notion—by any rabbinical or Israeli standard, the founder of the Christian Faith, Jesus Christ, is himself Jewish. He would legally qualify instantly for Israeli citizenship—his mother was Jewish.
In the New Testament (Christian Bible), the Pharisee writer, Saul of Tarsus, states bluntly that Gentile Christians are merely grafted into the vine; Jews are the true branches on the Christian tree. Christ tells a Samaritan woman very directly, “Salvation is from the Jews.”
So, these Christians United For Israel will gather in their churches today and, in July, send their emissaries to Washington to show their solidarity. And the entire American family can pray indeed that in the seed of Abraham that lives in Israel “shall all families of the earth be blessed”, including the United States.
We can certainly use a blessing these days.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
TYPE HIGH !!!
I’m not against unions. No way. I am acutely aware that some employers out there would happily take us back to the Nineteenth Century: 60 or 70 hour weeks (on “salary”), 40 hours pay, no breaks or health insurance, and lots of take home work.
One of the only things that stops them is their fear of unionization. Like the notion of a “fleet in being” (for instance, Hitler’s battleships which kept the British Navy pinned down throughout World War II without firing a shot) the mere fact that unions exist protects all of us.
It’s just that, unfortunately, the long “cold—and sometimes hot—war” between employer and union sometimes damages employee welfare more than it helps. This becomes especially true when technology changes or a new source of competition arises.
The union becomes rigid in its protectiveness, deaf to all pleas and explanations of new circumstances from management. The union hierarchy and its membership eventually reach the point where they will admit to no truth in any statement by the company. (Companies may have given them reason.)
This locked-in attitude that brooks no change can drive a company right off the cliff, and often, until it is too late, the union seems completely unconcerned with management’s problems. It sometimes seems as if unions forget where the money comes from that goes into a paycheck.
Somehow there doesn’t seem to be straight line in union minds running from healthy and profitable corporations to fatter paychecks, sweeter benefits and longer vacations. The idea of a related cause and effect seems to be lost on many union leaders and members.
My father got a taste of that in 1946. He was one of thousands of returning vets who worked for a large, national company. The company invited all the vets to a free week at New York City headquarters (with their families) for a reorientation to the civilian world. We went.
The company was unionized in three eastern states, but not here in Michigan. A union spokesman was given the opportunity to address all the vets, unionized or not. Dad listened to him go on and on about all the new benefits the union was going to get from the company.
“Where is the company going to get the money?” asked my stolidly Dutch father.
The man looked at my dad as if he were mentally unhinged. “We don’t care.”
Unfortunately true. Unions have for too long viewed companies as big money trees to be shaken at will. One thinks immediately of the shrinking masses of once envied auto workers who are now justly concerned that it could all go away.
For years the UAW cared as little as the fellow my dad questioned in New York. Now as GM and Chrysler veer toward the hottest circle in corporate Hell, it is almost too late for union concern to matter. There have been harbingers and hints for decades—ignored, by both management and union.
It brings to mind an experience I had back in 1960. I took a brief job in the photo morgue of the long departed “New York World, Telegram & Sun”. It was part of my job to take stock photos of politicians and celebrities downstairs to the composing room so they could be etched in lead and inserted in the newspaper.
I vividly remember the first time I walked into the composing room. First the noise: row upon row of linotype machines clattering away like machine guns as they spat out lines of lead print. Then there were the stones—the benches manned by the hugely muscled compositors.
Imagine a vast cathedral filled with newspaper page sized benches, called “stones”. Each had its own workman armed with a huge wooden mallet with which he pounded the lead type into place and then locked up the steel page frame. Then the man effortless lifted this incredibly heavy lead page and carried it to the printing presses.
This was Beowulf country. As I passed through it saw something interesting on the floor and picked it up. Oh woe. Everything stopped. One hundred angry pairs of eyes fastened upon me. One hundred mallets began to pound on the stone in wrathful rhythm. BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!!”
I froze like a rabbit surrounded by howling wolves, transfixed. An editor in a suit and tie ran up to me and knocked the offending piece of lead from my hand. Everything stopped; everyone went back to work.
The editor explained, “You were holding a piece of lead that was type high—it was cast to go into a page and make an impression in the printer. Only a member of the compositors union may touch type high lead. Even I have to ask one of them to move a line if I want it changed.
Needless to say I never again picked up a piece of lead in that room. I found many of these incredibly strong men to be perfectly congenial as long as I behaved myself. I even went out to lunch with some and enjoyed it.
Two years later—1962—the unions struck every newspaper in New York. The cause was largely technological improvements available to newspapers that could save them large amounts of money. The unions said, NO—especially to innovations like printing without the cumbersome lead type and forms.
When the strike ended, four of New York’s “big seven” newspapers were out of print, period. The Herald Tribune was gone, so was the tabloid Daily Mirror, the Journal American and The World-Telegram & Sun. So were all the editors, writers, ad salesmen, deliverymen—and compositors.
At the surviving New York Times, Daily News and Post, there were no compositors left. Printing was done by other processes now—faster, cheaper. I have often wondered what those hundreds of compositors went on to do. They had only one skill, and it was as gone as buggy whip manufacture.
The unions had lost—by a massacre. Oh, the union in my dad’s company? It got lots of people like my dad several more benefits, more vacation, increased pay. The company is still there, worth billions and profitable. But there are very few people working for the company who hold jobs like my dad held for over thirty years. They are as gone as compositors.
Today it behooves unions to be as flexible and as nimble as the companies whose workers they represent need to be—in order to survive. (Before the specter of bankruptcy arises, well before.) Else in the words of “Romeo and Juliet’s” prince, “ALL are punished.”
As for me—as I scan today’s headlines—I hear the ghostly echo of a forgotten chant, reverberating through abandoned composing rooms, “Type high, bam, type high, bam, type high … .”
One of the only things that stops them is their fear of unionization. Like the notion of a “fleet in being” (for instance, Hitler’s battleships which kept the British Navy pinned down throughout World War II without firing a shot) the mere fact that unions exist protects all of us.
It’s just that, unfortunately, the long “cold—and sometimes hot—war” between employer and union sometimes damages employee welfare more than it helps. This becomes especially true when technology changes or a new source of competition arises.
The union becomes rigid in its protectiveness, deaf to all pleas and explanations of new circumstances from management. The union hierarchy and its membership eventually reach the point where they will admit to no truth in any statement by the company. (Companies may have given them reason.)
This locked-in attitude that brooks no change can drive a company right off the cliff, and often, until it is too late, the union seems completely unconcerned with management’s problems. It sometimes seems as if unions forget where the money comes from that goes into a paycheck.
Somehow there doesn’t seem to be straight line in union minds running from healthy and profitable corporations to fatter paychecks, sweeter benefits and longer vacations. The idea of a related cause and effect seems to be lost on many union leaders and members.
My father got a taste of that in 1946. He was one of thousands of returning vets who worked for a large, national company. The company invited all the vets to a free week at New York City headquarters (with their families) for a reorientation to the civilian world. We went.
The company was unionized in three eastern states, but not here in Michigan. A union spokesman was given the opportunity to address all the vets, unionized or not. Dad listened to him go on and on about all the new benefits the union was going to get from the company.
“Where is the company going to get the money?” asked my stolidly Dutch father.
The man looked at my dad as if he were mentally unhinged. “We don’t care.”
Unfortunately true. Unions have for too long viewed companies as big money trees to be shaken at will. One thinks immediately of the shrinking masses of once envied auto workers who are now justly concerned that it could all go away.
For years the UAW cared as little as the fellow my dad questioned in New York. Now as GM and Chrysler veer toward the hottest circle in corporate Hell, it is almost too late for union concern to matter. There have been harbingers and hints for decades—ignored, by both management and union.
It brings to mind an experience I had back in 1960. I took a brief job in the photo morgue of the long departed “New York World, Telegram & Sun”. It was part of my job to take stock photos of politicians and celebrities downstairs to the composing room so they could be etched in lead and inserted in the newspaper.
I vividly remember the first time I walked into the composing room. First the noise: row upon row of linotype machines clattering away like machine guns as they spat out lines of lead print. Then there were the stones—the benches manned by the hugely muscled compositors.
Imagine a vast cathedral filled with newspaper page sized benches, called “stones”. Each had its own workman armed with a huge wooden mallet with which he pounded the lead type into place and then locked up the steel page frame. Then the man effortless lifted this incredibly heavy lead page and carried it to the printing presses.
This was Beowulf country. As I passed through it saw something interesting on the floor and picked it up. Oh woe. Everything stopped. One hundred angry pairs of eyes fastened upon me. One hundred mallets began to pound on the stone in wrathful rhythm. BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!!”
I froze like a rabbit surrounded by howling wolves, transfixed. An editor in a suit and tie ran up to me and knocked the offending piece of lead from my hand. Everything stopped; everyone went back to work.
The editor explained, “You were holding a piece of lead that was type high—it was cast to go into a page and make an impression in the printer. Only a member of the compositors union may touch type high lead. Even I have to ask one of them to move a line if I want it changed.
Needless to say I never again picked up a piece of lead in that room. I found many of these incredibly strong men to be perfectly congenial as long as I behaved myself. I even went out to lunch with some and enjoyed it.
Two years later—1962—the unions struck every newspaper in New York. The cause was largely technological improvements available to newspapers that could save them large amounts of money. The unions said, NO—especially to innovations like printing without the cumbersome lead type and forms.
When the strike ended, four of New York’s “big seven” newspapers were out of print, period. The Herald Tribune was gone, so was the tabloid Daily Mirror, the Journal American and The World-Telegram & Sun. So were all the editors, writers, ad salesmen, deliverymen—and compositors.
At the surviving New York Times, Daily News and Post, there were no compositors left. Printing was done by other processes now—faster, cheaper. I have often wondered what those hundreds of compositors went on to do. They had only one skill, and it was as gone as buggy whip manufacture.
The unions had lost—by a massacre. Oh, the union in my dad’s company? It got lots of people like my dad several more benefits, more vacation, increased pay. The company is still there, worth billions and profitable. But there are very few people working for the company who hold jobs like my dad held for over thirty years. They are as gone as compositors.
Today it behooves unions to be as flexible and as nimble as the companies whose workers they represent need to be—in order to survive. (Before the specter of bankruptcy arises, well before.) Else in the words of “Romeo and Juliet’s” prince, “ALL are punished.”
As for me—as I scan today’s headlines—I hear the ghostly echo of a forgotten chant, reverberating through abandoned composing rooms, “Type high, bam, type high, bam, type high … .”
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Even More This And That
Now there’s a fuss because too much of the Berlin Wall has been destroyed. There’s too little of it left for those who feel sentimental about it to see. Oh my. I remember so vividly the day it went up. The East Germans had been trying to stop the hemorrhaging of talented citizens who fled west once they got into Berlin.
They tried in 1958, and we stopped them. In 1959, and they couldn’t build it. The issue was muted during the American elections in 1960 and then it burst upon us with a vengeance in 1961. The East Germans and Russians finally had an American President they knew could not and would not stop them. In August they built their wall.
It was a prison wall. It was a wall to create segregation. It was reinforced with machine guns and blood. Celebrating it would be like putting a little plaque in each southern restaurant, hospital and bus—saying “Beyond this point no colored were allowed.” Or “You are now in ‘White Only’ territory.”
Like the Jim Crow signs, the wall is nothing to celebrate. Ninety miles of prison wall, dividing neighborhood from neighborhood, family member from family member—let it be as gone as the “White Only” signs.
Build a museum and let people come and look at pictures and see blood spattered casualties who tried to tunnel under, fly over or jump the wall. Put a few pieces of the wall up (like they have in a museum in Grand Rapids) so the next generation can visualize political madness run rampant.
But wipe the ninety miles it ran through the city clean—like the walls of a southern hospital or hamburger stand. The citizens of Berlin are blessed without need for any mixture by having it gone—without a trace.
HAPPY DAYS AT GENERAL MOTORS
One of GMs big strategy for survival is to get their creditors to swap bonds for shares of GMs common stock. This needs to happen for the big car maker to stay out of bankruptcy court. But some news came in last weekend that makes this less and less likely.
Six top executives at GM unloaded about 200,000 of their personally owned shares of General Motors Stock between Friday and Monday. They weren’t doing this because they were cashing in on profits! The stock share prices ran between $1.40 and $1.60.
This was unloading at yard sale prices—and lower. You only do this when you feel the nickel on the dollar you can get now beats nothing a month down the road. It reminds you of Russian Jewish pogrom victims who were given three days to sell all their goods and move out of the area.
With a three day deadline, you take whatever few rubles a greedy Gentile neighbor will give you. Only with GM, it obviously wasn’t a law that was ordering them to get out of GM stocks—for whatever anyone will pay. Apparently it was their own sense of what was ahead for the company.
If you were a creditor, would you take stock certificates in payment for anything?
It is a safe bet that the executives—including two vice-chairmen—were letting us know their opinion of GM’s chances to avoid bankruptcy. One is tempted to say something mean-spirited about rats and sinking ships, but I shall forebear.
I’m not sure I would buy a Pontiac tomorrow either.
MORE GOOD NEWS
Consumer spending is down for the second month in a row. This sent the Dow Jones diving for 180 points today. More and more warnings are coming out about the toxic assets held in vast quantities by a slew of banks. These have not been dealt with. Nobody wants to do the math.
They’re warning us that oil prices might take an upward bound as usage increases a bit along with production cut backs. This, we are told, could delay the recovery. I just saw an online ad today telling me that I should only invest in companies likely to receive huge infusions of government spending—not to trust in Wall Street or any private investments.
Somebody pointed out to President Obama that releasing pictures of GIs torturing Muslim prisoners might very well put pictured Americans in real danger. Someone else pointed out that when we last released photos of GIs tormenting Iraqi prisoners, there was a tremendous PR backlash in the Arab world. Wheels within wheels within wheels.
“Businessweek” tells us that private equity investors are sitting on a one trillion dollar war chest—waiting for the true bottom to be reached—then they’ll pounce on distressed targets. These are the same guys who bought up Chrysler a few years ago and couldn’t make it run.
They basically have refined a business technique developed by Al Capone nearly eighty years ago. You buy up a legitimate company, strip it of real assets and cash; then you sell it to another sucker who inherits lots of debt and a non-functional company.
Funny thing. In nearly every past national crisis, someone, somewhere, in some prominent private or governmental position would call for prayer. (Nobody’s come up with a better idea for this one.) I haven’t anyone but a few preachers doing that this time.
So we potter on—throwing money we don’t have at problems we don’t really understand, sending more troops into areas Alexander The Great wouldn’t enter. There’s an old phrase that comes to mind: “They haven’t got a prayer”.
And they don’t seem to want any.
They tried in 1958, and we stopped them. In 1959, and they couldn’t build it. The issue was muted during the American elections in 1960 and then it burst upon us with a vengeance in 1961. The East Germans and Russians finally had an American President they knew could not and would not stop them. In August they built their wall.
It was a prison wall. It was a wall to create segregation. It was reinforced with machine guns and blood. Celebrating it would be like putting a little plaque in each southern restaurant, hospital and bus—saying “Beyond this point no colored were allowed.” Or “You are now in ‘White Only’ territory.”
Like the Jim Crow signs, the wall is nothing to celebrate. Ninety miles of prison wall, dividing neighborhood from neighborhood, family member from family member—let it be as gone as the “White Only” signs.
Build a museum and let people come and look at pictures and see blood spattered casualties who tried to tunnel under, fly over or jump the wall. Put a few pieces of the wall up (like they have in a museum in Grand Rapids) so the next generation can visualize political madness run rampant.
But wipe the ninety miles it ran through the city clean—like the walls of a southern hospital or hamburger stand. The citizens of Berlin are blessed without need for any mixture by having it gone—without a trace.
HAPPY DAYS AT GENERAL MOTORS
One of GMs big strategy for survival is to get their creditors to swap bonds for shares of GMs common stock. This needs to happen for the big car maker to stay out of bankruptcy court. But some news came in last weekend that makes this less and less likely.
Six top executives at GM unloaded about 200,000 of their personally owned shares of General Motors Stock between Friday and Monday. They weren’t doing this because they were cashing in on profits! The stock share prices ran between $1.40 and $1.60.
This was unloading at yard sale prices—and lower. You only do this when you feel the nickel on the dollar you can get now beats nothing a month down the road. It reminds you of Russian Jewish pogrom victims who were given three days to sell all their goods and move out of the area.
With a three day deadline, you take whatever few rubles a greedy Gentile neighbor will give you. Only with GM, it obviously wasn’t a law that was ordering them to get out of GM stocks—for whatever anyone will pay. Apparently it was their own sense of what was ahead for the company.
If you were a creditor, would you take stock certificates in payment for anything?
It is a safe bet that the executives—including two vice-chairmen—were letting us know their opinion of GM’s chances to avoid bankruptcy. One is tempted to say something mean-spirited about rats and sinking ships, but I shall forebear.
I’m not sure I would buy a Pontiac tomorrow either.
MORE GOOD NEWS
Consumer spending is down for the second month in a row. This sent the Dow Jones diving for 180 points today. More and more warnings are coming out about the toxic assets held in vast quantities by a slew of banks. These have not been dealt with. Nobody wants to do the math.
They’re warning us that oil prices might take an upward bound as usage increases a bit along with production cut backs. This, we are told, could delay the recovery. I just saw an online ad today telling me that I should only invest in companies likely to receive huge infusions of government spending—not to trust in Wall Street or any private investments.
Somebody pointed out to President Obama that releasing pictures of GIs torturing Muslim prisoners might very well put pictured Americans in real danger. Someone else pointed out that when we last released photos of GIs tormenting Iraqi prisoners, there was a tremendous PR backlash in the Arab world. Wheels within wheels within wheels.
“Businessweek” tells us that private equity investors are sitting on a one trillion dollar war chest—waiting for the true bottom to be reached—then they’ll pounce on distressed targets. These are the same guys who bought up Chrysler a few years ago and couldn’t make it run.
They basically have refined a business technique developed by Al Capone nearly eighty years ago. You buy up a legitimate company, strip it of real assets and cash; then you sell it to another sucker who inherits lots of debt and a non-functional company.
Funny thing. In nearly every past national crisis, someone, somewhere, in some prominent private or governmental position would call for prayer. (Nobody’s come up with a better idea for this one.) I haven’t anyone but a few preachers doing that this time.
So we potter on—throwing money we don’t have at problems we don’t really understand, sending more troops into areas Alexander The Great wouldn’t enter. There’s an old phrase that comes to mind: “They haven’t got a prayer”.
And they don’t seem to want any.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Newsweek Redux
I am waiting breathlessly for my next issue of “Newsweek”. It often gets here by Tuesday (today); but sometimes gets here as late as Wednesday or Thursday. Here in the boonies they don’t really care if it gets here until Friday. But I really want to see this week’s issue.
The editors have been hinting that there were going to be big changes when the May 18 issue came out, and last week they wrote a two page article explaining how “Newsweek” is going to reinvent itself. I’m not entirely happy with the way it has been reinventing itself over the past four decades.
Will I like this new style better? I’m skeptical. I rather liked the model Henry Luce set forth in 1925 when he created “Time Magazine”. It was a NEWS magazine. It was specifically designed to give busy but curious people and overview of what was going on all over the world and all over the country in short, quickly absorbed articles.
“Newsweek” imitated that format when it began to publish in 1933. In the 1940s and 50s I was happy with both magazines. I could pick up either one and find out what was happening In Peru, on Wall Street, in medicine, movies, art, education, the Cold War and politics. I came away from each issue feeling I had at least a superficial grasp of what most parts of our planet were up to.
They began to deviate from this model in the 1960s. “Newsweek”, especially, began publishing in-depth articles of the kind I would prefer to read in “Harpers”, “Atlantic” or even “The New Yorker”—or a newspaper like the “Wall Street Journal,” “The Washington Post” or the “New York Times”.
Then the long, in-depth articles came faster and faster. There were fewer and fewer one column takes on the more obscure places on earth. Fewer and fewer articles (but longer and longer), much less universal coverage.
Over the past few years, “Newsweek” has come to read more like a publication from Rodale Press with its incessant emphasis on Boomer health problems. Several times I almost wrote the editor to complain about this—could we get back to NEWS?—but I felt it would make to no difference. Editors know what sells their magazine, and they could safely ignore an atavistic crank like myself.
Now this model isn’t working. “Newsweek” is losing money. Staff has been cut back about 30%--is there still a Beirut office where I stood reading the ticker about the riots here after King was shot? They’re blaming it on the internet and the immediacy of news coming by blog and on-line new service.
But will more essays help? Will readers really be happy that “We will no longer reflexively cover the week’s events if we don’t have something original to say.” Translation: reasonably objective coverage of informative news from around the world is now totally a thing of the past.
Their new chief executive, a Tom Ascheim, who arrived two years ago from Nickelodeon, promises that his new model “Newsweek” will again be profitable in a few years. But should they perhaps put some other word on the cover in front of “….week”?
I read the news online. Who doesn’t? I watch it on TV—but nothing quite takes the place of holding a paper and ink news source. When that finally goes away, I will miss it.
It’s going. Look at what’s happening to newspapers. “Newsweek” admits that one of the problems is that advertisers no longer care about the mass market that a news magazine could bring them. They want smaller, demographic specific audiences.
“Newsweek” writes that it is going to upgrade its paper stock—to be classier—and dump up to a million subscribers who don’t fit the desired demographic. “We will focus on a smaller, more devoted, slightly more affluent audience.” Subscription prices will go up. Why does the image of an “Architectural Digest” for news junkies come to mind?
There will also be an overhaul of Newsweek.com where, we are told, more people read “Newsweek” on line than read it in paper. On the site, they will refer you to other media sources on the same topic (that could be good) and allow you to twitter a response.
Much of this all will be in imitation of “Newsweek’s” foreign editions—where, they tell us, “profits and ad pages” went up in 2008. And, I have to admit, that is the name of the game. Without profits and ad pages, no magazine or paper can exist.
I think I first realized how important ads and revenue were to the news business many years ago when I heard an editor refer to the “news hole”. In other words, between the ads, you have a hole in which to stick the news. No doubt Ben Franklin would agree.
I’m not angry with “Newsweek”. It has to do what a magazine has to do to survive. It is going to aim at what it calls “a large domestic audience—17 million strong—of smart, educated readers who are looking for a publication that can help them put the flood of news into perspective.”
Whoa. That’s precisely what Henry Luce—and his imitators—did. Allow the full flood and put it into perspective. What the new media are doing is channeling the flood into just those areas that they feel the non-reflective reader will stand still for, and then give him long essays to tell him what to think about the few topics he’s aware of.
They have no choice. The news hole simply cannot stand by itself. I have the feeling that the new news magazines will tell more about their readers than the news. The editor makes it very clear that these changes are reader/advertiser inspired.
Maybe my first reinvented copy will come tomorrow.
The editors have been hinting that there were going to be big changes when the May 18 issue came out, and last week they wrote a two page article explaining how “Newsweek” is going to reinvent itself. I’m not entirely happy with the way it has been reinventing itself over the past four decades.
Will I like this new style better? I’m skeptical. I rather liked the model Henry Luce set forth in 1925 when he created “Time Magazine”. It was a NEWS magazine. It was specifically designed to give busy but curious people and overview of what was going on all over the world and all over the country in short, quickly absorbed articles.
“Newsweek” imitated that format when it began to publish in 1933. In the 1940s and 50s I was happy with both magazines. I could pick up either one and find out what was happening In Peru, on Wall Street, in medicine, movies, art, education, the Cold War and politics. I came away from each issue feeling I had at least a superficial grasp of what most parts of our planet were up to.
They began to deviate from this model in the 1960s. “Newsweek”, especially, began publishing in-depth articles of the kind I would prefer to read in “Harpers”, “Atlantic” or even “The New Yorker”—or a newspaper like the “Wall Street Journal,” “The Washington Post” or the “New York Times”.
Then the long, in-depth articles came faster and faster. There were fewer and fewer one column takes on the more obscure places on earth. Fewer and fewer articles (but longer and longer), much less universal coverage.
Over the past few years, “Newsweek” has come to read more like a publication from Rodale Press with its incessant emphasis on Boomer health problems. Several times I almost wrote the editor to complain about this—could we get back to NEWS?—but I felt it would make to no difference. Editors know what sells their magazine, and they could safely ignore an atavistic crank like myself.
Now this model isn’t working. “Newsweek” is losing money. Staff has been cut back about 30%--is there still a Beirut office where I stood reading the ticker about the riots here after King was shot? They’re blaming it on the internet and the immediacy of news coming by blog and on-line new service.
But will more essays help? Will readers really be happy that “We will no longer reflexively cover the week’s events if we don’t have something original to say.” Translation: reasonably objective coverage of informative news from around the world is now totally a thing of the past.
Their new chief executive, a Tom Ascheim, who arrived two years ago from Nickelodeon, promises that his new model “Newsweek” will again be profitable in a few years. But should they perhaps put some other word on the cover in front of “….week”?
I read the news online. Who doesn’t? I watch it on TV—but nothing quite takes the place of holding a paper and ink news source. When that finally goes away, I will miss it.
It’s going. Look at what’s happening to newspapers. “Newsweek” admits that one of the problems is that advertisers no longer care about the mass market that a news magazine could bring them. They want smaller, demographic specific audiences.
“Newsweek” writes that it is going to upgrade its paper stock—to be classier—and dump up to a million subscribers who don’t fit the desired demographic. “We will focus on a smaller, more devoted, slightly more affluent audience.” Subscription prices will go up. Why does the image of an “Architectural Digest” for news junkies come to mind?
There will also be an overhaul of Newsweek.com where, we are told, more people read “Newsweek” on line than read it in paper. On the site, they will refer you to other media sources on the same topic (that could be good) and allow you to twitter a response.
Much of this all will be in imitation of “Newsweek’s” foreign editions—where, they tell us, “profits and ad pages” went up in 2008. And, I have to admit, that is the name of the game. Without profits and ad pages, no magazine or paper can exist.
I think I first realized how important ads and revenue were to the news business many years ago when I heard an editor refer to the “news hole”. In other words, between the ads, you have a hole in which to stick the news. No doubt Ben Franklin would agree.
I’m not angry with “Newsweek”. It has to do what a magazine has to do to survive. It is going to aim at what it calls “a large domestic audience—17 million strong—of smart, educated readers who are looking for a publication that can help them put the flood of news into perspective.”
Whoa. That’s precisely what Henry Luce—and his imitators—did. Allow the full flood and put it into perspective. What the new media are doing is channeling the flood into just those areas that they feel the non-reflective reader will stand still for, and then give him long essays to tell him what to think about the few topics he’s aware of.
They have no choice. The news hole simply cannot stand by itself. I have the feeling that the new news magazines will tell more about their readers than the news. The editor makes it very clear that these changes are reader/advertiser inspired.
Maybe my first reinvented copy will come tomorrow.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Smart Women--Smart Men
American Online’s Health feature recently ran an interesting interview with Drs. Daniela Drake and Elizabeth Ford, authors of “Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream—And How They’re Paying For It.”
The title has apparently caused a bit of a flap—but these two ladies are on to something terribly important. The “Romantic Dream”, the modern notion of Romantic Love is indeed a trap—but women have not been duped into it alone. Our entire society is victimized by this very silly fantasy.
Dr. Drake quotes a biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher from the University of California, San Francisco, who has done a lot of research on “falling in love”—or romantic love. Being in love, says Ms Fisher, doesn’t last more than 18 to 24 months. By this she refers to that rush of emotions, the state of intense desire—the state that causes people to go “loopy”.
Then comes reality. He or she is just another person. Babies need diapers changed, dishes need washing, lawns need mowing, houses need vacuuming—as well as to be paid for. Someone else in the office or down the block can suddenly look much more attractive, interesting and romantic.
At home, there’s only the same old, same old. Other researchers have discovered that when you see someone who excites and attracts you, a chemical is released into the brain that keeps you fired up for only a matter of months—long enough to get divorced and wreck your life, but not long enough to build anything solid.
“Romance” as a basis for marriage (it has for millennia been a reason for an affair, a fling or a new mistress) has only been an acceptable notion since the first hippies hit the road after 1815. That was after the terribly long and painful Napoleonic Wars—just like the period toward the end of the Vietnam War.
Suddenly, in music, art, poetry and life, the mind became suspect; feelings were all that mattered. We call it the “Romantic Period” in literature and art. Never allow anything as tawdry as reason to interfere with a beautiful feeling. If it feels good, do it; do it in the road. People began to marry that way, somehow imaging that an enduring relationship could be built that way.
Thus everyone, male and female, was “duped into the Romantic Dream”—and many would up having to pay for it!
The problem was that a lot of people didn’t pay attention to something the ancient Greeks understood. There is more than one kind of love. (The Greeks differentiated six kinds; we’ll deal with three.) There was “erotic love”—which is still best translated as feeling simple lust.
This lies at the root of “Romantic Love”. It is a transitory impulse that has no lasting power—but is extremely, irrationally powerful when one is under the impact of the feeling. This feeling—without thought—is what dupes so many people. This kind of “love” can cost people jobs, political offices and marriages—or lock them mindlessly into marriages that have no other real basis.
This is the love that Helen Fisher said lasts, at most, about two years. Then there is the love called “Philia” or brotherly. (Think Philadelphia.) It may involve feelings, but it is essentially non-sexual. It often has a real component of duty involved—this is my family, I MUST love them.
Last, and the highest form of love to the Greeks, is “Agape” love. This, too, should involve feelings—but when the feelings go away or hide behind a cloud, there is still something left. Agape love continues even after someone feels he has fallen out of Romantic love. Without some form of it, no good marriage lasts.
Smart women—and men—marry because of it. Agape love involves the mind—very, very much, because to contract an enduring relationship there needs to be THOUGHT and CALCULATION. Does this person drag me down, leave me discouraged from my dreams, or does he/she inspire me to go on. That’s a calculation, a vital one.
Are we going in the same direction? Is he/she going to drive me nuts with his/her habits, behaviors, attitudes, thoughtlessness, ways of handling money, religion and problems? Can I really stand the thought of him/her staring blindly into the TV for a few decades? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Agape is fundamentally not a feeling. In fact it isn’t at all. It is ultimately an act of the will. Marriage is a CONTRACT. You are a fool indeed if you enter into a contract only based on feelings. (If you buy a house on nothing but feeling, you can fall out of love with it in that same two years—and you’re stuck with a mortgage you cannot divorce.)
No should enter marriage (or any other legal contract) with the caveat that I’m here only as long as the feeling lasts. Then you might as well lease instead of buy.
If the feeling goes, the contract still stands. Many couples have looked at “loveless” situation and been able to regenerate a much more enduring feeling. In any case, you still have kids to raise; debts to pay and promises to keep.
Finally, when necessary, agape—lasting—love must involve a spirit of self-sacrifice (it obviously has to go both ways) and, above all, COMMITMENT.
Irrespective of whether or not I get a thrill of sexual excitement when I look at you, I am committed to stay with you “for better or worse, in sickness and in health”.
That’s scary. So is signing a thirty year mortgage or business contract that hocks all you own and commits you to succeeding whatever it takes.
That’s what Drake and Ford are coming to understand. Smart women—and men—take their interests and needs into account before committing, not just their raging libidos. (That can include financial needs and desires.) That’s what makes them smart.
The title has apparently caused a bit of a flap—but these two ladies are on to something terribly important. The “Romantic Dream”, the modern notion of Romantic Love is indeed a trap—but women have not been duped into it alone. Our entire society is victimized by this very silly fantasy.
Dr. Drake quotes a biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher from the University of California, San Francisco, who has done a lot of research on “falling in love”—or romantic love. Being in love, says Ms Fisher, doesn’t last more than 18 to 24 months. By this she refers to that rush of emotions, the state of intense desire—the state that causes people to go “loopy”.
Then comes reality. He or she is just another person. Babies need diapers changed, dishes need washing, lawns need mowing, houses need vacuuming—as well as to be paid for. Someone else in the office or down the block can suddenly look much more attractive, interesting and romantic.
At home, there’s only the same old, same old. Other researchers have discovered that when you see someone who excites and attracts you, a chemical is released into the brain that keeps you fired up for only a matter of months—long enough to get divorced and wreck your life, but not long enough to build anything solid.
“Romance” as a basis for marriage (it has for millennia been a reason for an affair, a fling or a new mistress) has only been an acceptable notion since the first hippies hit the road after 1815. That was after the terribly long and painful Napoleonic Wars—just like the period toward the end of the Vietnam War.
Suddenly, in music, art, poetry and life, the mind became suspect; feelings were all that mattered. We call it the “Romantic Period” in literature and art. Never allow anything as tawdry as reason to interfere with a beautiful feeling. If it feels good, do it; do it in the road. People began to marry that way, somehow imaging that an enduring relationship could be built that way.
Thus everyone, male and female, was “duped into the Romantic Dream”—and many would up having to pay for it!
The problem was that a lot of people didn’t pay attention to something the ancient Greeks understood. There is more than one kind of love. (The Greeks differentiated six kinds; we’ll deal with three.) There was “erotic love”—which is still best translated as feeling simple lust.
This lies at the root of “Romantic Love”. It is a transitory impulse that has no lasting power—but is extremely, irrationally powerful when one is under the impact of the feeling. This feeling—without thought—is what dupes so many people. This kind of “love” can cost people jobs, political offices and marriages—or lock them mindlessly into marriages that have no other real basis.
This is the love that Helen Fisher said lasts, at most, about two years. Then there is the love called “Philia” or brotherly. (Think Philadelphia.) It may involve feelings, but it is essentially non-sexual. It often has a real component of duty involved—this is my family, I MUST love them.
Last, and the highest form of love to the Greeks, is “Agape” love. This, too, should involve feelings—but when the feelings go away or hide behind a cloud, there is still something left. Agape love continues even after someone feels he has fallen out of Romantic love. Without some form of it, no good marriage lasts.
Smart women—and men—marry because of it. Agape love involves the mind—very, very much, because to contract an enduring relationship there needs to be THOUGHT and CALCULATION. Does this person drag me down, leave me discouraged from my dreams, or does he/she inspire me to go on. That’s a calculation, a vital one.
Are we going in the same direction? Is he/she going to drive me nuts with his/her habits, behaviors, attitudes, thoughtlessness, ways of handling money, religion and problems? Can I really stand the thought of him/her staring blindly into the TV for a few decades? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Agape is fundamentally not a feeling. In fact it isn’t at all. It is ultimately an act of the will. Marriage is a CONTRACT. You are a fool indeed if you enter into a contract only based on feelings. (If you buy a house on nothing but feeling, you can fall out of love with it in that same two years—and you’re stuck with a mortgage you cannot divorce.)
No should enter marriage (or any other legal contract) with the caveat that I’m here only as long as the feeling lasts. Then you might as well lease instead of buy.
If the feeling goes, the contract still stands. Many couples have looked at “loveless” situation and been able to regenerate a much more enduring feeling. In any case, you still have kids to raise; debts to pay and promises to keep.
Finally, when necessary, agape—lasting—love must involve a spirit of self-sacrifice (it obviously has to go both ways) and, above all, COMMITMENT.
Irrespective of whether or not I get a thrill of sexual excitement when I look at you, I am committed to stay with you “for better or worse, in sickness and in health”.
That’s scary. So is signing a thirty year mortgage or business contract that hocks all you own and commits you to succeeding whatever it takes.
That’s what Drake and Ford are coming to understand. Smart women—and men—take their interests and needs into account before committing, not just their raging libidos. (That can include financial needs and desires.) That’s what makes them smart.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Reflections on Facebook
I really don’t like Facebook. It’s too exposed. If I am going to tell you something personal, I really have no interest in just anyone who cares to stumble through the Internet being able to share. If it’s not at all personal (and private), why bother to write it?
I’m old enough to think that a lot of things actually are private. Even my illnesses, my problems with neighbors or creditors, or—for heaven’s sakes—news of my sexual partners. I might choose to share with one or two people close to me, but not with all of you!
This is a day and age where everything is public—even if it costs a job or causes terminal embarrassment. I occasionally hear of someone clucking because naked pictures of him or her are being broadcast around the world wide web. Does it not occur to them that there was—at a much earlier point—an easy solution to this problem?
If I want to send my wife a naked picture of myself (why?), I’ll hand deliver it, thank you. There will be no other copies, no surviving negatives and, for crying out loud, no uploads on the web! In the days of the internet, the old story has more application than ever!
Someone once asked a lawyer if it were a good maxim to live by: Do right and fear no man. The lawyer gasped and corrected his interrogator. “DON’T write and fear no man.” I had a friend who spent several years as legal counsel for a national magazine.
He told me that in all that time he never, EVER put anything in writing. If he felt an editor needed a heads up on a certain piece, he walked up to the editor privately and gave his views orally. No witnesses, no paper trail. No record at all.
Dave is today (still) a very competent litigator, benefiting hugely from all those lovely people who never took advice like his. Whatever happened to the sense that things publicly recorded can have consequences? Drastic consequences!
Is it a general feeling I seem to detect among kids today that there are no consequences—for anything? Ask a student why he didn’t finish a course, or take the last test that would qualify him for a job. It seemed of no moment to him at the time.
Why, when you pass out an assignment to a class of twenty-five, will there be as many as ten papers left on the desks, untouched? So if flunking or not finishing course work cannot in any way impact your future life, why should a naked picture or a criminal admission on the web?
If two sixteen year old girls can sit in a classroom describing their first sexual encounters (one line I found memorable was: “I hated him but I loved the sex”—did I need to know this?), why shouldn’t they hang it all out there on Facebook?
I told someone the other day that I had had an invitation to attend the original Woodstock concert In 1969. I passed. I’m not at all sorry today. There’s something about naked people sitting and walking in mud, with no toilet facilities, that wouldn’t have appealed to me then—or now.
Yesterday an old friend wrote and asked me to be a “friend” on Facebook. (In a fit of madness, I opened a page a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve heard from three old school chums, a long ago former lover, my oldest son’s fiance’, and a couple we used to attend church with.) I said “yes” to the friendship part and then I wrote back briefly.
I will discuss many things on Email (that have no legal ramifications), I will keep in touch on Email, but I will not “keep in touch” on anything as public as my face page. Let’s chat—but give me your Email address.
I hope he sends the address. I liked him very much. But he will hear very little from me on Email. My son’s fiance’ has gotten the point and both he and she communicate by Email. We even do old fashioned things like telephone each other.
There was a time when “mooning” someone was seen as an almost daring aberration. Now it or its emotional equivalent on the internet seems to be the norm.
The root of the matter seems to be that feeling that it is a God-given, democratic right to live without consequences, without embarrassment, without shame—no matter how heinous the act—and, frankly, without any forethought.
Every so often, living like that snaps back and bites someone. But the kids on their right and their left go on oblivious. The only reaction anyone seems to express is horror that anybody would take a naked picture off the web and spread it around.
Never the thought that the idiot who put it there should have known better (there is no longer any such thing as knowing better that I can tell); it’s more a question of how anyone could be so nosey and evil as to listen in to a public (and LOUD) conversation.
Talk softer, write less publicly and I, for one, promise not to listen or read. In the meantime, I shall go on avoiding Facebook as much as I can.
What I did or did not do last night is absolutely none of your business. Thank you very much. I only hope you are wise enough to feel the same way.
I’m old enough to think that a lot of things actually are private. Even my illnesses, my problems with neighbors or creditors, or—for heaven’s sakes—news of my sexual partners. I might choose to share with one or two people close to me, but not with all of you!
This is a day and age where everything is public—even if it costs a job or causes terminal embarrassment. I occasionally hear of someone clucking because naked pictures of him or her are being broadcast around the world wide web. Does it not occur to them that there was—at a much earlier point—an easy solution to this problem?
If I want to send my wife a naked picture of myself (why?), I’ll hand deliver it, thank you. There will be no other copies, no surviving negatives and, for crying out loud, no uploads on the web! In the days of the internet, the old story has more application than ever!
Someone once asked a lawyer if it were a good maxim to live by: Do right and fear no man. The lawyer gasped and corrected his interrogator. “DON’T write and fear no man.” I had a friend who spent several years as legal counsel for a national magazine.
He told me that in all that time he never, EVER put anything in writing. If he felt an editor needed a heads up on a certain piece, he walked up to the editor privately and gave his views orally. No witnesses, no paper trail. No record at all.
Dave is today (still) a very competent litigator, benefiting hugely from all those lovely people who never took advice like his. Whatever happened to the sense that things publicly recorded can have consequences? Drastic consequences!
Is it a general feeling I seem to detect among kids today that there are no consequences—for anything? Ask a student why he didn’t finish a course, or take the last test that would qualify him for a job. It seemed of no moment to him at the time.
Why, when you pass out an assignment to a class of twenty-five, will there be as many as ten papers left on the desks, untouched? So if flunking or not finishing course work cannot in any way impact your future life, why should a naked picture or a criminal admission on the web?
If two sixteen year old girls can sit in a classroom describing their first sexual encounters (one line I found memorable was: “I hated him but I loved the sex”—did I need to know this?), why shouldn’t they hang it all out there on Facebook?
I told someone the other day that I had had an invitation to attend the original Woodstock concert In 1969. I passed. I’m not at all sorry today. There’s something about naked people sitting and walking in mud, with no toilet facilities, that wouldn’t have appealed to me then—or now.
Yesterday an old friend wrote and asked me to be a “friend” on Facebook. (In a fit of madness, I opened a page a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve heard from three old school chums, a long ago former lover, my oldest son’s fiance’, and a couple we used to attend church with.) I said “yes” to the friendship part and then I wrote back briefly.
I will discuss many things on Email (that have no legal ramifications), I will keep in touch on Email, but I will not “keep in touch” on anything as public as my face page. Let’s chat—but give me your Email address.
I hope he sends the address. I liked him very much. But he will hear very little from me on Email. My son’s fiance’ has gotten the point and both he and she communicate by Email. We even do old fashioned things like telephone each other.
There was a time when “mooning” someone was seen as an almost daring aberration. Now it or its emotional equivalent on the internet seems to be the norm.
The root of the matter seems to be that feeling that it is a God-given, democratic right to live without consequences, without embarrassment, without shame—no matter how heinous the act—and, frankly, without any forethought.
Every so often, living like that snaps back and bites someone. But the kids on their right and their left go on oblivious. The only reaction anyone seems to express is horror that anybody would take a naked picture off the web and spread it around.
Never the thought that the idiot who put it there should have known better (there is no longer any such thing as knowing better that I can tell); it’s more a question of how anyone could be so nosey and evil as to listen in to a public (and LOUD) conversation.
Talk softer, write less publicly and I, for one, promise not to listen or read. In the meantime, I shall go on avoiding Facebook as much as I can.
What I did or did not do last night is absolutely none of your business. Thank you very much. I only hope you are wise enough to feel the same way.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Jobs, Jobs Everywhere; Not a Day of Work
“Businessweek Magazine” ran an interesting article this week. It seems we have about three million job openings we cannot fill. That runs in the teeth of eight or nine point unemployment. How come? Because the skill sets of the laid off do not match what’s needed for other jobs.
I know that here in my part of Western Michigan—economically a suburb of the Detroit Auto Industry— the life goal of generations has been, out of school at sixteen, into an auto parts plant for thirty years, and then an affluent retirement after thirty years.
Several thousands of lucky ones got to go into a General Motors plant itself. Fabulous pay and benefits and, after thirty years, Florida. Many of these people got where they were without a day of schooling past tenth grade.
For the generation a decade or two behind me, it was a matter of getting a high school diploma and then going into the plant. But what were they really trained to do? At first just to run the equivalent of a punch press—or do spot welding on the assembly line.
A neighbor of mine just turned fifty; he works in a defense plant. He makes good money; he has years and years of seniority; he holds a job that would require at least an associates degree in much of the country.
What if defense cuts back? What if the current owner of his plant who’s in his eighties should die and the business be sold? My neighbor could no more duplicate his job and income anywhere else than he could fly.
A chap down the block made it to retirement. For years he was a high school educated “plant engineer”. No one else in the continental United States would hire him at the equivalent job level and salary! He spent more than a few moments in the past decades praying to make it to his pension.
Another friend of mine near here holds a job as a full-fledged company engineer. He’s a brilliant man, but he has no degree. His family needs to move in a few months—how will he replace his automotive industry brevet?
Just from where I sit in the state with the highest unemployment rate in the union, I can see why anybody who has a technical job that requires a degree or specialized training isn’t likely going to find it in this part of Michigan.
Another thing that strikes me about this area is the paucity of books in homes around here. I’m talking about expensive lake front homes (somebody’s doing something to earn that kind of money!) I’ve visited a few and found zero books or magazines—not even a family Bible in sight.
My neighbors next door—who have snowmobiles, winter and summer cars, land a hundred miles north of here with living quarters on it, oh yes, and own a computer and a humongous screen TV—have few to none when it comes to books. When their kids were in high school and needed to do a project, they came to us to borrow resource materials. I doubt if they ever owned a library card.
These are salt of the earth, taxpaying Americans. When I substitute teach, I have their kids in my classes. Are things improving at that generation level?
Let me tell you about today. Their assignment was to open a history text book, pick up a sheet full of questions (right out of the book, word for word) on the Cold War and answer them. I watched sheet after sheet, hurriedly done, come to my desk with errors that ran the gamut from egregious to ridiculous.
I started telling the kids that they had some wrong answers. Would they like some help in correcting them? One young man spoke for the entire four classes: “Naw,” he said, “the teacher will go over them tomorrow and we’ll have all the right answers.”
No curiosity. Not even a hint of desire to get it right. It will be spoon fed to us tomorrow; why should we trouble ourselves? This is true in math classes, chemistry, language arts, Spanish or any other subject you care to mention. AP classes (you get college credit for these) are the tiniest bit better.
What jobs—that don’t involve a punch press—are they going to be ready for? Not to fill any of the three million jobs “Businessweek” mentioned.
My wife took a photography course at a nearby community college this spring. She was surrounded by recent high school graduates who were totally lost in an environment where they had to fend for themselves. Many didn’t even start their assignments until they were weeks into the semester.
They were stunned when they learned that in college they would be forced to mix their own chemicals, set their own timers—basically do all the work necessary to develop photos themselves. In high school it had all been done for them.
“No Child Left Behind” seems to mean, dumb everyone down to the same non-functional level. That will get everyone through high school. Will it prepare them to do the jobs that are left after the auto plants go away?
As “BusinessWeek” put it on its cover, Three million jobs available—“why that isn’t necessarily good for the economy”.
Nope, it isn’t. We aren’t training; we aren’t retraining.
I know that here in my part of Western Michigan—economically a suburb of the Detroit Auto Industry— the life goal of generations has been, out of school at sixteen, into an auto parts plant for thirty years, and then an affluent retirement after thirty years.
Several thousands of lucky ones got to go into a General Motors plant itself. Fabulous pay and benefits and, after thirty years, Florida. Many of these people got where they were without a day of schooling past tenth grade.
For the generation a decade or two behind me, it was a matter of getting a high school diploma and then going into the plant. But what were they really trained to do? At first just to run the equivalent of a punch press—or do spot welding on the assembly line.
A neighbor of mine just turned fifty; he works in a defense plant. He makes good money; he has years and years of seniority; he holds a job that would require at least an associates degree in much of the country.
What if defense cuts back? What if the current owner of his plant who’s in his eighties should die and the business be sold? My neighbor could no more duplicate his job and income anywhere else than he could fly.
A chap down the block made it to retirement. For years he was a high school educated “plant engineer”. No one else in the continental United States would hire him at the equivalent job level and salary! He spent more than a few moments in the past decades praying to make it to his pension.
Another friend of mine near here holds a job as a full-fledged company engineer. He’s a brilliant man, but he has no degree. His family needs to move in a few months—how will he replace his automotive industry brevet?
Just from where I sit in the state with the highest unemployment rate in the union, I can see why anybody who has a technical job that requires a degree or specialized training isn’t likely going to find it in this part of Michigan.
Another thing that strikes me about this area is the paucity of books in homes around here. I’m talking about expensive lake front homes (somebody’s doing something to earn that kind of money!) I’ve visited a few and found zero books or magazines—not even a family Bible in sight.
My neighbors next door—who have snowmobiles, winter and summer cars, land a hundred miles north of here with living quarters on it, oh yes, and own a computer and a humongous screen TV—have few to none when it comes to books. When their kids were in high school and needed to do a project, they came to us to borrow resource materials. I doubt if they ever owned a library card.
These are salt of the earth, taxpaying Americans. When I substitute teach, I have their kids in my classes. Are things improving at that generation level?
Let me tell you about today. Their assignment was to open a history text book, pick up a sheet full of questions (right out of the book, word for word) on the Cold War and answer them. I watched sheet after sheet, hurriedly done, come to my desk with errors that ran the gamut from egregious to ridiculous.
I started telling the kids that they had some wrong answers. Would they like some help in correcting them? One young man spoke for the entire four classes: “Naw,” he said, “the teacher will go over them tomorrow and we’ll have all the right answers.”
No curiosity. Not even a hint of desire to get it right. It will be spoon fed to us tomorrow; why should we trouble ourselves? This is true in math classes, chemistry, language arts, Spanish or any other subject you care to mention. AP classes (you get college credit for these) are the tiniest bit better.
What jobs—that don’t involve a punch press—are they going to be ready for? Not to fill any of the three million jobs “Businessweek” mentioned.
My wife took a photography course at a nearby community college this spring. She was surrounded by recent high school graduates who were totally lost in an environment where they had to fend for themselves. Many didn’t even start their assignments until they were weeks into the semester.
They were stunned when they learned that in college they would be forced to mix their own chemicals, set their own timers—basically do all the work necessary to develop photos themselves. In high school it had all been done for them.
“No Child Left Behind” seems to mean, dumb everyone down to the same non-functional level. That will get everyone through high school. Will it prepare them to do the jobs that are left after the auto plants go away?
As “BusinessWeek” put it on its cover, Three million jobs available—“why that isn’t necessarily good for the economy”.
Nope, it isn’t. We aren’t training; we aren’t retraining.
Monday, May 4, 2009
That Was Yesterday, Wasn't It?
I hit the big seven-oh today. I remember waking up on my sixteenth birthday (“Hey! I’m old enough to drive”) and on my twenty-first (“Hey, I’m old enough to drink legally”) and wondering why I didn’t feel any different.
Actually I don’t feel any different today than I did yesterday when I was a much younger sixty-nine. But one really should take note of a biblical birthday like three score and ten. That was supposed to be the length of a man’s life—but actually, during most human epochs, 35 to 40 was more like it.
Bismarck and Franklin Roosevelt picked age sixty-five for retirement because they could be reasonably sure most people wouldn’t live long enough to collect. I can honestly say, that without modern drugs and surgical methods, my wife and I both would have been dead a decade or two ago.
Now people are fairly routinely living on into their eighties and nineties. That’s starting to play havoc with the actuarial tables the government and private companies us to compute pension and Social Security payouts.
The bigger fear today is not whether or not you will live through the next winter but whether or not you will be lucky enough to die before your savings run out. If the genetics of my immediate forbearers run true, I could be around to sponge off the rest of you for another twenty years or so.
These kinds of thoughts hang out in the further recesses of most peoples’ minds, but they come forward into plain view on days like today. I can now legitimately call myself an “old crock”. Even though most people are kind enough to say, “Gee, you don’t look seventy”.
I resist the urge to blush modestly and reply, “You really should have seen me at forty”. However youthful I may look to some, there is no question that another Biblical phrase has become meaningful to me. When I was in my twenties, the phrase “the infirmities of age” had no meaning to me. Today, I could write you a book.
Talking to other people my age, I find the same thing has sneaked up on them. Oftener than I like I go to my physician only to have him or her say, “That’s just something that happens as people get older.” Easy for them to be complacent about it—some of those kids could be my grandchildren.
Another thing I understand now—when my parents and their siblings reached their seventies, they kept remarking on how they didn’t feel old, didn’t think of themselves as old. I’d look at them and think, “But you are”. Now I understand what they were saying.
Looking in the mirror is almost a shock. That old fellow with gray hair and a face that more and more looks like my dad’s can’t be me. We used to sound alike; now we look alike. There’s just some very basic part of my brain where that just doesn’t compute.
What’s astonishing is how quickly it has all happened. I can still hear my secretary screaming, “The President has been shot!” and that whole afternoon while Kennedy died replays vividly in my mind. I recall conversations I had with a girlfriend in 1956. I remember what I wore.
I remember being so upset the noon I found out that Truman had really won and the Dewey we had all cheered for lost. The radio broadcasts of the Army McCarthy hearings of 1954 remain vivid to me. And, of course, it was only a couple of years ago when somebody took a shot at Reagan. How about the year when Mantle and Maris raced each other to a record 61 homers in a season.
It was so recently that I watched Bill, Hillary and Chelsea walk out of Madison Square Garden with the nomination—or watched the CNN broadcasts of explosions over Baghdad as General Schwarzkopf drove triumphantly north into Kuwait Wasn’t it just last season that my favorite shows were “Alias” and “Jag”?
Reality check: It’s been almost two years since I went to my 50th high school reunion. Lots of very healthy, tennis playing contemporaries were there—but there also accounts of how this one or that had died. The kids in the 1957 Yearbook sure dressed funny. And we all wore nametags because the sponsors were aware that we were unlikely to recognize old friends.
I did once, when preparing for a lecture on World War II, find out that something significant had actually happened on the day I was born—May 4, 1939. Stalin, faced with endless rebuffs, had give up all hope of forming an alliance with France and Britain to stop Hitler.
On the day I was born, he reversed his policy and decided to make a pact with Hitler that would buy him a hundred kilometers or more space that the Nazis would have to cross before reaching Russia. He dropped Maxim Litvinov, who had good relations with the West, from the Politburo on May 4 and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who could deal with the Germans.
The Pact Molotov signed with Ribbentrop on August 24, 1939, did as much as any one thing to win World War II for the Allies, us included! It bought Stalin his hundred kilometers, it left Churchill cheering: “Thank God the Russians are there” (in Poland). It left the German general staff fuming at Hitler, realizing he might have cost them the war.
How important were the hundred kilometers that resulted from events on my birthday? I have personally spoken to a panzer commander who ran out of fuel in the suburbs of Moscow. He could stand on his panzer turret and see the Kremlin with his binoculars. What if he had had a hundred fewer kilometers to cover?
So much for my day of birth. So much, as the sun goes down, for my birthday. Tomorrow I shall go pottering on, not thinking too much about how old I am. (Until one of those “infirmities of age” gives me a good twinge.)
It was appropriate to think about mine today. With God’s blessing and a few pills that didn’t exist sixty years ago, we’ll all see one.
Actually I don’t feel any different today than I did yesterday when I was a much younger sixty-nine. But one really should take note of a biblical birthday like three score and ten. That was supposed to be the length of a man’s life—but actually, during most human epochs, 35 to 40 was more like it.
Bismarck and Franklin Roosevelt picked age sixty-five for retirement because they could be reasonably sure most people wouldn’t live long enough to collect. I can honestly say, that without modern drugs and surgical methods, my wife and I both would have been dead a decade or two ago.
Now people are fairly routinely living on into their eighties and nineties. That’s starting to play havoc with the actuarial tables the government and private companies us to compute pension and Social Security payouts.
The bigger fear today is not whether or not you will live through the next winter but whether or not you will be lucky enough to die before your savings run out. If the genetics of my immediate forbearers run true, I could be around to sponge off the rest of you for another twenty years or so.
These kinds of thoughts hang out in the further recesses of most peoples’ minds, but they come forward into plain view on days like today. I can now legitimately call myself an “old crock”. Even though most people are kind enough to say, “Gee, you don’t look seventy”.
I resist the urge to blush modestly and reply, “You really should have seen me at forty”. However youthful I may look to some, there is no question that another Biblical phrase has become meaningful to me. When I was in my twenties, the phrase “the infirmities of age” had no meaning to me. Today, I could write you a book.
Talking to other people my age, I find the same thing has sneaked up on them. Oftener than I like I go to my physician only to have him or her say, “That’s just something that happens as people get older.” Easy for them to be complacent about it—some of those kids could be my grandchildren.
Another thing I understand now—when my parents and their siblings reached their seventies, they kept remarking on how they didn’t feel old, didn’t think of themselves as old. I’d look at them and think, “But you are”. Now I understand what they were saying.
Looking in the mirror is almost a shock. That old fellow with gray hair and a face that more and more looks like my dad’s can’t be me. We used to sound alike; now we look alike. There’s just some very basic part of my brain where that just doesn’t compute.
What’s astonishing is how quickly it has all happened. I can still hear my secretary screaming, “The President has been shot!” and that whole afternoon while Kennedy died replays vividly in my mind. I recall conversations I had with a girlfriend in 1956. I remember what I wore.
I remember being so upset the noon I found out that Truman had really won and the Dewey we had all cheered for lost. The radio broadcasts of the Army McCarthy hearings of 1954 remain vivid to me. And, of course, it was only a couple of years ago when somebody took a shot at Reagan. How about the year when Mantle and Maris raced each other to a record 61 homers in a season.
It was so recently that I watched Bill, Hillary and Chelsea walk out of Madison Square Garden with the nomination—or watched the CNN broadcasts of explosions over Baghdad as General Schwarzkopf drove triumphantly north into Kuwait Wasn’t it just last season that my favorite shows were “Alias” and “Jag”?
Reality check: It’s been almost two years since I went to my 50th high school reunion. Lots of very healthy, tennis playing contemporaries were there—but there also accounts of how this one or that had died. The kids in the 1957 Yearbook sure dressed funny. And we all wore nametags because the sponsors were aware that we were unlikely to recognize old friends.
I did once, when preparing for a lecture on World War II, find out that something significant had actually happened on the day I was born—May 4, 1939. Stalin, faced with endless rebuffs, had give up all hope of forming an alliance with France and Britain to stop Hitler.
On the day I was born, he reversed his policy and decided to make a pact with Hitler that would buy him a hundred kilometers or more space that the Nazis would have to cross before reaching Russia. He dropped Maxim Litvinov, who had good relations with the West, from the Politburo on May 4 and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who could deal with the Germans.
The Pact Molotov signed with Ribbentrop on August 24, 1939, did as much as any one thing to win World War II for the Allies, us included! It bought Stalin his hundred kilometers, it left Churchill cheering: “Thank God the Russians are there” (in Poland). It left the German general staff fuming at Hitler, realizing he might have cost them the war.
How important were the hundred kilometers that resulted from events on my birthday? I have personally spoken to a panzer commander who ran out of fuel in the suburbs of Moscow. He could stand on his panzer turret and see the Kremlin with his binoculars. What if he had had a hundred fewer kilometers to cover?
So much for my day of birth. So much, as the sun goes down, for my birthday. Tomorrow I shall go pottering on, not thinking too much about how old I am. (Until one of those “infirmities of age” gives me a good twinge.)
It was appropriate to think about mine today. With God’s blessing and a few pills that didn’t exist sixty years ago, we’ll all see one.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Obama and The Tax Cut Gremlin
Next year at about this time we’re going to learn something about Barrack Obama. Some presidents are “lucky”, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and nothing bad ever sticks to them. Some presidents can’t sit in Airforce One without getting mud all over their shoes—like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, the ones we call “unlucky”.
Which one will O’bama prove to be? Onto every administration little screw ups are going to fall—like pattering rain drops. A big one just took aim at him. This new stimulating tax cut—the one where everybody got money off on his taxes and us retirees get $250 checks--?
Ahem. The Internal Revenue Service, with its incomparable gift for conveying bad news in the worst possible light, just admitted to miscalculating the new withholdings. If their revised calculations are correct, lots and lots of people are going to have to give money back next April.
As near as I can figure it, I’m going to get $250 this month and then have to give most or all of it back next tax time. The same is likely to be true for people with two jobs or in families with two working parents—the hit there can be around $400. And a few thousand or million other folk.
How happy we are all going to be. What stimulates this spring looks like it is going to be a lot like driving with the emergency brake on next spring. Some unforgiving souls are going to be certain that O’bama did this to them on purpose, that it was all a plot.
The crucial question in an election year is: How many? How many are going to think it was sleight of hand; how many are going to laugh it off as they take a smaller return or write out a cheque for $250 or $400 bucks? The answer will absolutely tell us whether the president falls into the lucky or the unlucky category.
If he’s lucky and as smart as he seems to be, he will find some painless way to fix everything before the end of the year so that nobody has to give anything back at all. Going through Congress to raise the stimulus to the higher levels reflected in current withholding will be a messy chore.
Telling everybody that, oh oops, starting in August you get a whopping increase in this year’s withholding (and maybe a deduction from Social Security cheques) kind of defeats the whole idea of a stimulus. It could be even messier.
Going through Congress might be easier—but it will play havoc with the already unconscionable budget deficit. It may work. After all, much of Congress faces election next year. They don’t need everybody mad at them come next spring and summer.
Then, again, maybe somebody can come up with a relatively painless third alternative—it escapes my limited mind at the moment. But the budget people in the White House can be as crafty as a New York banker when needed. Now’s the time.
This tax hit next spring will come at about the same moment when we begin to have a clear fix on how well O’bama’s draw down strategy in Iraq is working. We’ll have a notion of whether or not 21,000 more GIs can solve Afghanistan’s problems. Will Pakistan survive?
All sorts of program report cards will be coming through voter mail slots next year at this time—too late to blame all the problems on George Bush. Will we have universal health coverage? Will we ever get it? Are people being hired again? At decent wages? If things are working out, we should have a pretty good idea when next year’s tulips start blooming. Or if not.
The tax miscalculation could be felt as a last straw (especially for somebody who loses his job between now and then) or it could be passed over as a minor blip on the road to renewed prosperity.
If your house isn’t in foreclosure and your payments are makeable, losing a few hundred off your tax return can be far more endurable than if the notice has already been nailed to your door.
By spring and summer of 2010, we will be in a much better position to decide if O’bama is one of the lucky ones—or not.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. When the Emperor Napoleon wanted to hire an official for his government, he always only had one final question before choosing: “Is he lucky?”
Which one will O’bama prove to be? Onto every administration little screw ups are going to fall—like pattering rain drops. A big one just took aim at him. This new stimulating tax cut—the one where everybody got money off on his taxes and us retirees get $250 checks--?
Ahem. The Internal Revenue Service, with its incomparable gift for conveying bad news in the worst possible light, just admitted to miscalculating the new withholdings. If their revised calculations are correct, lots and lots of people are going to have to give money back next April.
As near as I can figure it, I’m going to get $250 this month and then have to give most or all of it back next tax time. The same is likely to be true for people with two jobs or in families with two working parents—the hit there can be around $400. And a few thousand or million other folk.
How happy we are all going to be. What stimulates this spring looks like it is going to be a lot like driving with the emergency brake on next spring. Some unforgiving souls are going to be certain that O’bama did this to them on purpose, that it was all a plot.
The crucial question in an election year is: How many? How many are going to think it was sleight of hand; how many are going to laugh it off as they take a smaller return or write out a cheque for $250 or $400 bucks? The answer will absolutely tell us whether the president falls into the lucky or the unlucky category.
If he’s lucky and as smart as he seems to be, he will find some painless way to fix everything before the end of the year so that nobody has to give anything back at all. Going through Congress to raise the stimulus to the higher levels reflected in current withholding will be a messy chore.
Telling everybody that, oh oops, starting in August you get a whopping increase in this year’s withholding (and maybe a deduction from Social Security cheques) kind of defeats the whole idea of a stimulus. It could be even messier.
Going through Congress might be easier—but it will play havoc with the already unconscionable budget deficit. It may work. After all, much of Congress faces election next year. They don’t need everybody mad at them come next spring and summer.
Then, again, maybe somebody can come up with a relatively painless third alternative—it escapes my limited mind at the moment. But the budget people in the White House can be as crafty as a New York banker when needed. Now’s the time.
This tax hit next spring will come at about the same moment when we begin to have a clear fix on how well O’bama’s draw down strategy in Iraq is working. We’ll have a notion of whether or not 21,000 more GIs can solve Afghanistan’s problems. Will Pakistan survive?
All sorts of program report cards will be coming through voter mail slots next year at this time—too late to blame all the problems on George Bush. Will we have universal health coverage? Will we ever get it? Are people being hired again? At decent wages? If things are working out, we should have a pretty good idea when next year’s tulips start blooming. Or if not.
The tax miscalculation could be felt as a last straw (especially for somebody who loses his job between now and then) or it could be passed over as a minor blip on the road to renewed prosperity.
If your house isn’t in foreclosure and your payments are makeable, losing a few hundred off your tax return can be far more endurable than if the notice has already been nailed to your door.
By spring and summer of 2010, we will be in a much better position to decide if O’bama is one of the lucky ones—or not.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. When the Emperor Napoleon wanted to hire an official for his government, he always only had one final question before choosing: “Is he lucky?”
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Replacing Souter
Within the next few months, Barrack Obama will get to exercise the greatest domestic power any president ever has—the power to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. The greatness of that particular presidential power is, of course, merely a reflection of the awesome power of the Court itself. The moment of nomination is the ONLY time any other governmental agency has any impact whatsoever on the court or how it rules.
Nine men, appointed for life, who cannot be overruled, vetoed or set aside by any other branch of the federal government. The only other people to have had that kind of political power were the absolute monarchs of ancient Egypt and Babylon—or Eighteenth Century France and Russia.
Justice David Souter, by his four or five line letter of resignation, has set the nomination process in motion again. First, the President will nominate and then the Democratic Senate will either confirm the nomination—or reject it, which will start the process all over again.
Because the nomination and confirmation procedure is the ONLY moment when either Congress or the President can have any impact on the court or its future decisions, it will be taken very, very seriously by Republicans, Democrats, Senators and President. Because the stakes are so very high, it will probably be an acrimonious moment in our history. It often is.
How did nine justices get so much unchallenged power? It certainly wasn’t always this way. When the country started out in the 1790s, the court had so little respect that it was hard to find someone to sit. Those who did tended to resign after a few years and go do something useful. We had four Chief Justices in ten years.
John Adams, in one of his last acts as president, changed that forever. He got a fellow Federalist, John Marshall, approved as Chief Justice. The Federalists never held the Presidency again; they were cooked after 1812. But they had an enormous impact on the nation until John Marshall died in 1835, after 34 years on the bench.
(This alone, proves that the Supreme Court was, is and will continue to be fully as political a branch of government as Congress, the White House or a Chicago ward boss. If anyone ever tries to tell you otherwise, laugh.)
How did they get this power? It all started during the last 24 hours of the Adam’s presidency, during the night of March 3 and 4, 1801. Adams sat up all through the night madly scribbling appointments for Federalist Party federal judges.
At noon, on the 4th, Jefferson—a Democratic Republican—was president. He wasn’t happy at the prospect of an entire batch of judges from the opposition. The law at the time required that a judicial nomination be confirmed by the Secretary of State. Now there was a new Sec. State. He, James Madison, dumped all of Adam’s nominations in the round file.
One sore head sued. A fellow named William Marbury, who had been appointed Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia, wanted his job—and he sued Madison to make him confirm it. The case wound its way through the federal courts until it reached Marshall’s bench in 1804. This gave Marshall a dilemma.
He really wanted to see fellow Federalist, Marbury, confirmed. He was also fully aware that the court had so little respect that Jefferson would probably have ignored him if he had demanded it. This might well have been a fatal blow to the court itself.
So Marshall wrote a very, very clever opinion. In brief: The court agrees that Mr. Marbury is fully entitled to be Justice of the Peace. Alas, the court has no power to satisfy his plea BECAUSE doing so would require the court to issue a “Writ of Mandamus”.
(If you are a parent you issue such writs several times a day: You will wash the dishes, you will go to bed on time, you will eat your beans, and so forth. They are demands that someone somewhere DO some specific act.)
And, added Marshall, for the court to issue a “Writ of Mandamus” would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Jefferson won, Marshall saved the court from humiliation. What no one noticed was that the original Judiciary Act of 1789—which created the Supreme Court—had EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED the Supreme Court to issue such writs.
Marshall had asserted the right of the high court to declare any and all acts of Congress to be unconstitutional! Completely under the radar. This, very possibly, was the most important decision ever issued by the court. It established it as a political power with teeth.
It wasn’t totally smooth sailing from then on. As late as Andrew Jackson (1828-1836), a president could get away with sneering, “John Marshall has made his law; let him enforce it.” Jackson tended to shoot people who disagreed with him—so he got away with that.
But even Jackson recognized the new and irresistible power of the Supreme Court. To replace Marshall, he nominated Roger B.Taney as Chief Justice, a slave owning southerner, who spent twenty-eight years further expanding the power of the court—and became an articulate defender of slavery.
(Taney’s decisions—especially Dred Scott, where he wrote that Negroes had no rights the United States was bound to respect—are perhaps the last Supreme Court decisions to be overruled by an outside agency. It took an army and four horrific years of Civil War.)
From Appomattox on, only the court has dared overrule a previous decision of the court. FDR tried to pack the court (up to six more justices who would vote his way) in 1937. He failed on the issue—very much because nine smart, mostly Republican politicians on the bench began ruling in his favor. (Called by historians “The switch in time that saved nine”.)
Even absolute monarchs have to listen once in awhile. But Mr. Obama will soon begin the process that is the only sure way to influence the court. It should be interesting to watch.
Nine men, appointed for life, who cannot be overruled, vetoed or set aside by any other branch of the federal government. The only other people to have had that kind of political power were the absolute monarchs of ancient Egypt and Babylon—or Eighteenth Century France and Russia.
Justice David Souter, by his four or five line letter of resignation, has set the nomination process in motion again. First, the President will nominate and then the Democratic Senate will either confirm the nomination—or reject it, which will start the process all over again.
Because the nomination and confirmation procedure is the ONLY moment when either Congress or the President can have any impact on the court or its future decisions, it will be taken very, very seriously by Republicans, Democrats, Senators and President. Because the stakes are so very high, it will probably be an acrimonious moment in our history. It often is.
How did nine justices get so much unchallenged power? It certainly wasn’t always this way. When the country started out in the 1790s, the court had so little respect that it was hard to find someone to sit. Those who did tended to resign after a few years and go do something useful. We had four Chief Justices in ten years.
John Adams, in one of his last acts as president, changed that forever. He got a fellow Federalist, John Marshall, approved as Chief Justice. The Federalists never held the Presidency again; they were cooked after 1812. But they had an enormous impact on the nation until John Marshall died in 1835, after 34 years on the bench.
(This alone, proves that the Supreme Court was, is and will continue to be fully as political a branch of government as Congress, the White House or a Chicago ward boss. If anyone ever tries to tell you otherwise, laugh.)
How did they get this power? It all started during the last 24 hours of the Adam’s presidency, during the night of March 3 and 4, 1801. Adams sat up all through the night madly scribbling appointments for Federalist Party federal judges.
At noon, on the 4th, Jefferson—a Democratic Republican—was president. He wasn’t happy at the prospect of an entire batch of judges from the opposition. The law at the time required that a judicial nomination be confirmed by the Secretary of State. Now there was a new Sec. State. He, James Madison, dumped all of Adam’s nominations in the round file.
One sore head sued. A fellow named William Marbury, who had been appointed Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia, wanted his job—and he sued Madison to make him confirm it. The case wound its way through the federal courts until it reached Marshall’s bench in 1804. This gave Marshall a dilemma.
He really wanted to see fellow Federalist, Marbury, confirmed. He was also fully aware that the court had so little respect that Jefferson would probably have ignored him if he had demanded it. This might well have been a fatal blow to the court itself.
So Marshall wrote a very, very clever opinion. In brief: The court agrees that Mr. Marbury is fully entitled to be Justice of the Peace. Alas, the court has no power to satisfy his plea BECAUSE doing so would require the court to issue a “Writ of Mandamus”.
(If you are a parent you issue such writs several times a day: You will wash the dishes, you will go to bed on time, you will eat your beans, and so forth. They are demands that someone somewhere DO some specific act.)
And, added Marshall, for the court to issue a “Writ of Mandamus” would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Jefferson won, Marshall saved the court from humiliation. What no one noticed was that the original Judiciary Act of 1789—which created the Supreme Court—had EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED the Supreme Court to issue such writs.
Marshall had asserted the right of the high court to declare any and all acts of Congress to be unconstitutional! Completely under the radar. This, very possibly, was the most important decision ever issued by the court. It established it as a political power with teeth.
It wasn’t totally smooth sailing from then on. As late as Andrew Jackson (1828-1836), a president could get away with sneering, “John Marshall has made his law; let him enforce it.” Jackson tended to shoot people who disagreed with him—so he got away with that.
But even Jackson recognized the new and irresistible power of the Supreme Court. To replace Marshall, he nominated Roger B.Taney as Chief Justice, a slave owning southerner, who spent twenty-eight years further expanding the power of the court—and became an articulate defender of slavery.
(Taney’s decisions—especially Dred Scott, where he wrote that Negroes had no rights the United States was bound to respect—are perhaps the last Supreme Court decisions to be overruled by an outside agency. It took an army and four horrific years of Civil War.)
From Appomattox on, only the court has dared overrule a previous decision of the court. FDR tried to pack the court (up to six more justices who would vote his way) in 1937. He failed on the issue—very much because nine smart, mostly Republican politicians on the bench began ruling in his favor. (Called by historians “The switch in time that saved nine”.)
Even absolute monarchs have to listen once in awhile. But Mr. Obama will soon begin the process that is the only sure way to influence the court. It should be interesting to watch.
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