A few days ago Obama gave his first State of the Union address. I’ve spent the days since trying to figure out if there was anything worth responding to. I suppose you could have listened to that speech and said, “Well, he’s finally started to fight”.
Yea-ah, but when you compare his rhetoric to the parliamentary ripostes of a master orator like Churchill, or the emotion chocked response of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, to the hectoring style of Joe McCarthy, Barack Obama still hits “like a girl”.
But he did do one thing that commentators tell us has only been done a very few times in the history of the Republic—he publicly, face to face, faulted the Supreme Court on a ruling (the one that allows corporations to give as much money to politicians as they wish). I’ll say Good On You for that!
The shocked justices sat stonily silent, except for Alito who actually shook his head back at the President. After all, the Supreme Court is sacrosanct, isn’t it? When it speaks, that’s the last word, isn’t it? Who would dare raise an issue after the Court has settled it?
Who is this Obama fellow, a mere President, to publicly suggest the Supreme Court made a bad call? It just isn’t done—not by Congress, not by ordinary people, not by presidents. And exactly why not?
However glancingly, even timorously, Obama made his point it’s one that’s worth looking at and thinking about. The court has been allowed to assume unto itself over the past two centuries a position not unlike that taken by Louis XIV when he declared that he, and he alone, constituted all the governmental powers of the state—“l’ etat c’est moi!”
It certainly didn’t start out this way. The job of supreme court justice had such low prestige when the country started it was hard to find men to take it. Those that did tended to resign rather quickly and go do something useful.
It doubt very much whether the Constitutional Convention ever intended this to happen. They were so concerned with too much power gravitating to the Executive (the King), that they really never gave much thought to reigning in the judiciary.
The President can veto a Congressional Bill. Congress can override the President’s veto. But where is there a right for anyone in any branch of our government to veto or override the Court? (Yes, we can pass a Constitutional Amendment, but that takes years and would often be impractical, cluttering up the Constitution with single case amendments. Congress can impeach—but what a mess that is—what if all Congress could do to stop a President was to impeach him?)
The Court stands alone with an unchallengeable power that would not doubt have horrified Franklin, Madison or even Washington. Obama is considered (validly so) daring and bold because he dares hint in public that a Court decision will do damage to the nation.
The mere fact that he’s right is irrelevant. He is guilty of lese-majestie—against a court of nine un-elected men empowered for life. Whoa.
Andy Jackson dared to react to a Court decision he considered wrong by saying, “John Marshall (Chief Justice) has made his law; let him enforce it.” That decision never was carried out.
After all, the right to overturn any law or regulation without question is a power only granted to the court BY THE COURT ITSELF (Marbury v Madison—1804). Maybe it’s time for another branch of the government to step in and say, “You’ve played with that long enough now”.
Jackson felt he could ignore it. (If either Congress or the President had the nerve to set aside a Supreme Court decision today, you’d be amazed at how circumspect the court would become in its future promulgations.) If the Court can proclaim it HAS absolute power—why can’t one of the other branches proclaim it DOES NOT?
Something to think about.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Art--Creating Worlds Beyond Sight
I substitute taught in a high school art room yesterday. I like artists. I’m not one—but I’ve worked with artists, writers and photographers for much of my life. They seem to like and work well with me. I once had the pleasure of reading a letter a top flight commercial artist had written about working with me—he was positively glowing in his comments.
So artists and I feel like a natural fit. My wife is an artist and, whatever disputes we have are rarely if ever over matters artistic. I enjoyed a whole day among budding artists, many of whom at sixteen or seventeen are already quite serious about it.
I’ve also been called a “philistine”—most notably one time when I argued that Aristotle would have been a footnote in history were it not for his physically active and bellicose student, Alexander The Great—who spread Aristotle’s teachings over the known world.
But that’s another issue. (I prefer Daumier’s drawings to Matisse; Kandinsky leaves me ice cold while I thoroughly enjoy Picasso and Modigliani. I quite willingly accept being faulted for lacking an appreciation for ALL art. )
Sitting at the teacher’s desk, I spotted a quote she had posted. It went something like, “Nature has made her world, art must create its own.” I sat and thought about it for awhile. The quote was attributed to Sir Thomas Browne. (I assume the Browne in question was the Seventeenth Century English writer.)
I don’t know if that was terribly true before the Nineteenth Century—when many artists were hired to or seemed essentially interested in DEPICTING nature—but it certainly became true once the camera was invented.
Painters who had made their living painting portraits and displaying landscapes were suddenly out of a job. In the hands of a truly skilled photographer, the camera essentially does both things better. It takes a bit of snobbery to insist on a painted portrait today.
Artists began to try to paint what lies behind the realistic depiction of a person, a river or a meadow. I don’t know if they were actually creating a world so much as trying to explain it, to make you see a reality invisible to human sight or even the conscious mind.
I love cubism, for example. It often shows me what I was sensing, what I was glimpsing in the periphery of my field of vision. That is probably validly called a creation of the artist’s own world. I might never have seen what I only glimpsed had an artist not showed it to me. No camera could do that.
But creating one’s own world can be a licentious, dangerous or even silly thing. It can be a form of narcissistic self-absorption which manufactures a world that is all too close to what many ancient Greeks called our world—the defecation of the gods.
I saw a bit of that today. Perhaps all young artists go through such a stage. I’ve seen much more of it in student art shows at art institutes here and in bigger cities. I’ve seen a bit too much of it in museum staged shows of established artists.
Create your own world—be sure that it relates even to philistine viewers like myself (as Modigliani, Picasso, and Gauguin did). Startle, amuse or bemuse me as Dali did. But don’t set a broken chair in a corner, cover it with dirty clothes and sneakers and call it a world of art created by an artist.
That cannot be what Browne meant. It cannot be what the camera has driven art to. A colorful splotch on a canvas can, sometimes, be merely a colorful splotch on a canvas. There may be no insight, no true creativity, no newly fashioned world. Just meaningless self-indulgence.
Art must indeed create its own world. I would ask of some artists (and students), Be careful that this is what you are actually doing.
So artists and I feel like a natural fit. My wife is an artist and, whatever disputes we have are rarely if ever over matters artistic. I enjoyed a whole day among budding artists, many of whom at sixteen or seventeen are already quite serious about it.
I’ve also been called a “philistine”—most notably one time when I argued that Aristotle would have been a footnote in history were it not for his physically active and bellicose student, Alexander The Great—who spread Aristotle’s teachings over the known world.
But that’s another issue. (I prefer Daumier’s drawings to Matisse; Kandinsky leaves me ice cold while I thoroughly enjoy Picasso and Modigliani. I quite willingly accept being faulted for lacking an appreciation for ALL art. )
Sitting at the teacher’s desk, I spotted a quote she had posted. It went something like, “Nature has made her world, art must create its own.” I sat and thought about it for awhile. The quote was attributed to Sir Thomas Browne. (I assume the Browne in question was the Seventeenth Century English writer.)
I don’t know if that was terribly true before the Nineteenth Century—when many artists were hired to or seemed essentially interested in DEPICTING nature—but it certainly became true once the camera was invented.
Painters who had made their living painting portraits and displaying landscapes were suddenly out of a job. In the hands of a truly skilled photographer, the camera essentially does both things better. It takes a bit of snobbery to insist on a painted portrait today.
Artists began to try to paint what lies behind the realistic depiction of a person, a river or a meadow. I don’t know if they were actually creating a world so much as trying to explain it, to make you see a reality invisible to human sight or even the conscious mind.
I love cubism, for example. It often shows me what I was sensing, what I was glimpsing in the periphery of my field of vision. That is probably validly called a creation of the artist’s own world. I might never have seen what I only glimpsed had an artist not showed it to me. No camera could do that.
But creating one’s own world can be a licentious, dangerous or even silly thing. It can be a form of narcissistic self-absorption which manufactures a world that is all too close to what many ancient Greeks called our world—the defecation of the gods.
I saw a bit of that today. Perhaps all young artists go through such a stage. I’ve seen much more of it in student art shows at art institutes here and in bigger cities. I’ve seen a bit too much of it in museum staged shows of established artists.
Create your own world—be sure that it relates even to philistine viewers like myself (as Modigliani, Picasso, and Gauguin did). Startle, amuse or bemuse me as Dali did. But don’t set a broken chair in a corner, cover it with dirty clothes and sneakers and call it a world of art created by an artist.
That cannot be what Browne meant. It cannot be what the camera has driven art to. A colorful splotch on a canvas can, sometimes, be merely a colorful splotch on a canvas. There may be no insight, no true creativity, no newly fashioned world. Just meaningless self-indulgence.
Art must indeed create its own world. I would ask of some artists (and students), Be careful that this is what you are actually doing.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wall Street--Call A Casino A Casino
A further comment on Wall Street. I am by no means advocating a lack of regulation—in fact I think the Street should be far more rigorously regulated than it is today. Falsified figures should be dealt with as the crimes they are; arcane instruments created for investors—who have no way of understanding or validating them should be ferociously banned.
Banks should not be allowed to speculate like crazed slot machine players in a casino. The Depression Era dividing lines should be re-imposed. I’m talking very specifically about the act of buying a stock on an exchange floor.
If we don’t regulate casinos—any fool is allowed to go in and spend his entire paycheck on the spin of a roulette wheel or the flip of a card—we should not impose criminal penalties on people who take advantage of the natural “house odds” on the street.
The Street began as a gathering place for speculators, and I think it should stay that way. Then, at least, people know what they are getting into if they want to play. Criminal activity like breaking into a safe and stealing someone’s data should be punished, but not rational acts like dumping a stock if you learn it’s going to flat line through an overheard or confidential source.
Punishing that is like punishing a poker player who is better at reading “tells”. Years ago I had a friend who was born rich and did a lot of investing. He worked for a government agency, doing good works. His investing consisted mainly in doing precisely what his well connected daddy told him to do.
I once asked him if he had any advice on how a novice should invest in the market. He thought a moment. “If you don’t have connections, start with about [modern dollars] half-a-million and diversify widely. You can hope something will go up.
“Better,” he said, “have somebody like my dad call you—as mine did a month ago—and tell you to buy an IPO coming out tomorrow at about six dollars. (He should also have the connections so you can get in at that price.)
“Hold the stock until dad calls again—when it’s up to seventeen—and says, ‘Sell’. I sold. Next day it was down to nine and falling.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where my dad gets his information, and I don’t ask.”
He obviously didn’t think the market was anyplace for someone unconnected and underfunded. I had another friend, a wealthy man from the Midwest. His family had most of its money by having the good sense each generation to buy lots of land where their city was likely to expand.
But he also played the market. I saw him a lot because his broker was NOT in his Midwestern city. He picked a broker in New York who had good sources on the street and used them effectively for affluent clients. He told me, “I don’t want a broker who only knows what they know in Peoria or Louisville. I can read the ticker tape in the newspaper.”
He regularly flew to New York to have a face to face with his broker. That’s how it’s done. That’s reality. I would no more try to pick stocks with my assets and in my location than I would challenge a serious poker pro to a “friendly game”.
To pretend that all of our laws—like the stupid one that caught Martha Stewart off guard—are going to change things among big time and serious investors is silly. Let casinos be casinos, and for you and me, Wall Street is a casino—the stock market should be regulated accordingly.
Caveat Emptor. You’re on your own. (Warren Buffet may be a special case—he seems to have had a special sense of what products the American people were going to go on liking and using into the future. But even he got clobbered in a major downturn. Sometimes the best poker players have to hock their watches to get out of town. Even for him, house odds can be stacked.)
Just remember, unless you have connections, it’s a casino. If you want to take your retirement money to Vegas, hey—why not the Stock Market? Otherwise, find some connections. (And you will never convince me that Buffet doesn’t have any—just shop talk, of course.)
Banks should not be allowed to speculate like crazed slot machine players in a casino. The Depression Era dividing lines should be re-imposed. I’m talking very specifically about the act of buying a stock on an exchange floor.
If we don’t regulate casinos—any fool is allowed to go in and spend his entire paycheck on the spin of a roulette wheel or the flip of a card—we should not impose criminal penalties on people who take advantage of the natural “house odds” on the street.
The Street began as a gathering place for speculators, and I think it should stay that way. Then, at least, people know what they are getting into if they want to play. Criminal activity like breaking into a safe and stealing someone’s data should be punished, but not rational acts like dumping a stock if you learn it’s going to flat line through an overheard or confidential source.
Punishing that is like punishing a poker player who is better at reading “tells”. Years ago I had a friend who was born rich and did a lot of investing. He worked for a government agency, doing good works. His investing consisted mainly in doing precisely what his well connected daddy told him to do.
I once asked him if he had any advice on how a novice should invest in the market. He thought a moment. “If you don’t have connections, start with about [modern dollars] half-a-million and diversify widely. You can hope something will go up.
“Better,” he said, “have somebody like my dad call you—as mine did a month ago—and tell you to buy an IPO coming out tomorrow at about six dollars. (He should also have the connections so you can get in at that price.)
“Hold the stock until dad calls again—when it’s up to seventeen—and says, ‘Sell’. I sold. Next day it was down to nine and falling.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where my dad gets his information, and I don’t ask.”
He obviously didn’t think the market was anyplace for someone unconnected and underfunded. I had another friend, a wealthy man from the Midwest. His family had most of its money by having the good sense each generation to buy lots of land where their city was likely to expand.
But he also played the market. I saw him a lot because his broker was NOT in his Midwestern city. He picked a broker in New York who had good sources on the street and used them effectively for affluent clients. He told me, “I don’t want a broker who only knows what they know in Peoria or Louisville. I can read the ticker tape in the newspaper.”
He regularly flew to New York to have a face to face with his broker. That’s how it’s done. That’s reality. I would no more try to pick stocks with my assets and in my location than I would challenge a serious poker pro to a “friendly game”.
To pretend that all of our laws—like the stupid one that caught Martha Stewart off guard—are going to change things among big time and serious investors is silly. Let casinos be casinos, and for you and me, Wall Street is a casino—the stock market should be regulated accordingly.
Caveat Emptor. You’re on your own. (Warren Buffet may be a special case—he seems to have had a special sense of what products the American people were going to go on liking and using into the future. But even he got clobbered in a major downturn. Sometimes the best poker players have to hock their watches to get out of town. Even for him, house odds can be stacked.)
Just remember, unless you have connections, it’s a casino. If you want to take your retirement money to Vegas, hey—why not the Stock Market? Otherwise, find some connections. (And you will never convince me that Buffet doesn’t have any—just shop talk, of course.)
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wall Street--Let's Not Regulate The Impossible
Do you remember a few years ago when everyone was telling us that putting our Social Security money in the stock market would assure us of a bigger, better return? Or that brokers and analysts would do better for us than a government run Social Security Administration?
Let’s pause to reconsider one more time. Recently a chimp was allowed to pick stocks at random and his performance was measured against skilled money managers on Wall Street. Guess what—the chimp got better results.
I suspect he would have done reasonably well at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. After all, the stock market—since its inception under a butternut tree on Wall Street in 1792—is now and always has been essentially a crap shoot, a roulette play or a game of black jack.
People do win at the gaming tables. They also lose. Ditto Wall Street. Nobody talks about it any more, but in 1960 or so, Merrill Lynch took all the listings on the Big Board before the Crash of 1929 and took the names off them.
Referees gave all the data available at that time—annual reports, financial statements—on those stocks to a team of analysts. Pick stock A or F or Q. They then took a large round dart board and gave each stock a narrow pie shaped piece and glued all of them to it.
Analysts working with data (not knowing the names or having any clue as to subsequent, real life history of those stocks) vs people throwing darts (the actual name of the stock known only to the referees). Merrill Lynch was betting on the analysts.
Bad bet. You would have done better with the darts. (That’s why you don’t ever hear about that little project.) If chimps and darts can do better than the trained analysts you depend on when investing or buying a mutual fund, it should give you pause.
Especially as Congress is looking to reform the Street yet another time. One more effort will be made to make it fairer, more sure, safer. The idea that this can even be done rises out of a wholly absurd notion of what the Street is all about.
For one thing, it is and always has been a venue for rich men to get their hands on other peoples’ money so that they can gamble—and leave the risk to others. It has not been a bad system for those who understood it. Those who invest with their eyes open to what’s really going on can supplement their retirement income quite nicely.
But so can people who use the casino as an instrument for investment. Winston Churchill used to pay for his French vacations by judiciously applying himself at the roulette wheel. I knew people who would pay their own way to the Caribbean and then earn plane fare back to New York at the casinos. That’s not all that different.
But neither the casino nor the Street are about fairness or retirement safety. Trying to legislate these qualities into either is a form of silliness. The Market wasn’t “fair” in Jay Gould’s day. It isn’t “fair” today, and we cannot make it so. Anymore than the Volstead Act stopped people from drinking. All Congress has ever been able to do is impose a form of “prohibition” on Wall Street.
There are all sorts of laws to prohibit Wall Street brokers from talking shop. When they play poker on a Saturday night in the Hamptons, they may chat about opera or compare Chinese and Russian ballet troops—but they may not talk shop.
Teachers may, factory workers may, physicians may, salesmen may—but brokers and analysts are forbidden to gossip about work. (Not too long ago, they even charged some brokers for talking shop over a poker game one night.) It’s called “insider information”. It’s a big no no. But trying to imagine any one making serious money on Wall Street without it is like trying to imagine Al Capone swearing off booze.
The laws don’t stop it. They just make it riskier—like going to a speakeasy during Prohibition. I could probably give other examples, but let’s stick with this one—it’s a good example of what’s wrong with how we PERCEIVE Wall Street today. More tomorrow.
Let’s pause to reconsider one more time. Recently a chimp was allowed to pick stocks at random and his performance was measured against skilled money managers on Wall Street. Guess what—the chimp got better results.
I suspect he would have done reasonably well at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. After all, the stock market—since its inception under a butternut tree on Wall Street in 1792—is now and always has been essentially a crap shoot, a roulette play or a game of black jack.
People do win at the gaming tables. They also lose. Ditto Wall Street. Nobody talks about it any more, but in 1960 or so, Merrill Lynch took all the listings on the Big Board before the Crash of 1929 and took the names off them.
Referees gave all the data available at that time—annual reports, financial statements—on those stocks to a team of analysts. Pick stock A or F or Q. They then took a large round dart board and gave each stock a narrow pie shaped piece and glued all of them to it.
Analysts working with data (not knowing the names or having any clue as to subsequent, real life history of those stocks) vs people throwing darts (the actual name of the stock known only to the referees). Merrill Lynch was betting on the analysts.
Bad bet. You would have done better with the darts. (That’s why you don’t ever hear about that little project.) If chimps and darts can do better than the trained analysts you depend on when investing or buying a mutual fund, it should give you pause.
Especially as Congress is looking to reform the Street yet another time. One more effort will be made to make it fairer, more sure, safer. The idea that this can even be done rises out of a wholly absurd notion of what the Street is all about.
For one thing, it is and always has been a venue for rich men to get their hands on other peoples’ money so that they can gamble—and leave the risk to others. It has not been a bad system for those who understood it. Those who invest with their eyes open to what’s really going on can supplement their retirement income quite nicely.
But so can people who use the casino as an instrument for investment. Winston Churchill used to pay for his French vacations by judiciously applying himself at the roulette wheel. I knew people who would pay their own way to the Caribbean and then earn plane fare back to New York at the casinos. That’s not all that different.
But neither the casino nor the Street are about fairness or retirement safety. Trying to legislate these qualities into either is a form of silliness. The Market wasn’t “fair” in Jay Gould’s day. It isn’t “fair” today, and we cannot make it so. Anymore than the Volstead Act stopped people from drinking. All Congress has ever been able to do is impose a form of “prohibition” on Wall Street.
There are all sorts of laws to prohibit Wall Street brokers from talking shop. When they play poker on a Saturday night in the Hamptons, they may chat about opera or compare Chinese and Russian ballet troops—but they may not talk shop.
Teachers may, factory workers may, physicians may, salesmen may—but brokers and analysts are forbidden to gossip about work. (Not too long ago, they even charged some brokers for talking shop over a poker game one night.) It’s called “insider information”. It’s a big no no. But trying to imagine any one making serious money on Wall Street without it is like trying to imagine Al Capone swearing off booze.
The laws don’t stop it. They just make it riskier—like going to a speakeasy during Prohibition. I could probably give other examples, but let’s stick with this one—it’s a good example of what’s wrong with how we PERCEIVE Wall Street today. More tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Haiti--Why God Sometimes Doesn't Help
I pointed out yesterday that Pat Robertson was merely citing basic Christian theology when he suggested that Haiti’s rejection of an exclusive relationship with the God of the Christian Bible may have brought her to grief two weeks ago.
I suspect that Mr. Robertson would be quick to agree that we Americans, so near and so rich, have an absolute obligation to help. Just as you would work to save the life of a drunken driver who had wrapped himself around a tree. You’d withhold any suggestion that he was at fault, and you’d work like a dog to keep him alive.
That’s another core tenet of Christianity: you work to retrieve a situation that may have been caused by folly or wickedness without a hint of recrimination. Christ said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” No matter that they had chosen to get themselves lost.
The fact is, as Christianity understands God and his relationship to men, Haiti wasn’t smacked by God for worshipping other deities (Voodoo); Haiti smacked herself. God needed to have nothing to do with it. He caused no hurt, and he was contractually UNABLE to prevent.
An example of God’s inability to help is found in one of the New Testament stories of Christ. We are told he went around healing the sick and the blind. But he came to one town where the people stubbornly refused to believe he could do it.
Christ said himself that he could not do any miraculous healings in that city because of the sheer power of its unbelief. Nothing. They were quite able, as human beings, to exercise their ancient contractual rights and prevent God from acting. That can still be true today.
If our Haitian brothers have chosen to be half Christian (part of the “bride of Christ”) and half something else (Voodoo), they are neither in his eyes. They have committed spiritual adultery. Until they say they are sorry)—and mean it—God will leave them to the mercies of their adulterous partner. He will tie his own hands.
Christians recognize this planet as a hostile place. Since Adam put it under new management—in the hands of someone who hates both God and mankind—it has become dangerous indeed. It is full of unpredictable volcanoes, storms, ice age cycles, earthquakes, viruses, tornadoes, hurricanes, Tsunami’s, poisonous snakes and dangerous beasts. How about disease bearing mosquitoes and other lethal pests?
(The Bible suggests over and over that this present, dangerous world is not the world that God made—it is a world that is now run by spiritual beings totally hostile to humans. This is one reason the Bible suggests man needs the constant protection of God.)
If Haitians truly chose to walk away from the Christian God in order to follow Voodoo, pact or no pact, then they are no longer under his protection. He doesn’t need to punish them—the planet and its new owner will do that all on its own.
This brings up another interesting point. What insurance companies are pleased to call, “Acts of God” are in most cases not his ACTIONS but rather his INACTION. He stands back, bound by his own contractual obligation to give humans free will.
Many Christians don’t like to think about that aspect of their faith. It would require them to have a much more intense and personal relationship with their God than they are comfortable with. Easier to believe he’s just a slightly senile, doting grandpa who defines love as “never having to say you’re sorry”. Or even to say anything at all.
This seems harsh. But it is basic Christianity. It was what Robertson was, however clumsily, trying to get across. (If you choose to walk away from a body guard on your own, bad things may well happen—but don’t blame the guard.) Biblically, Pat Robertson was not entirely wrong about Haiti, even if he got the wrong Napoleon.
God always weeps for those who die; sometimes he cannot help them.
I suspect that Mr. Robertson would be quick to agree that we Americans, so near and so rich, have an absolute obligation to help. Just as you would work to save the life of a drunken driver who had wrapped himself around a tree. You’d withhold any suggestion that he was at fault, and you’d work like a dog to keep him alive.
That’s another core tenet of Christianity: you work to retrieve a situation that may have been caused by folly or wickedness without a hint of recrimination. Christ said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” No matter that they had chosen to get themselves lost.
The fact is, as Christianity understands God and his relationship to men, Haiti wasn’t smacked by God for worshipping other deities (Voodoo); Haiti smacked herself. God needed to have nothing to do with it. He caused no hurt, and he was contractually UNABLE to prevent.
An example of God’s inability to help is found in one of the New Testament stories of Christ. We are told he went around healing the sick and the blind. But he came to one town where the people stubbornly refused to believe he could do it.
Christ said himself that he could not do any miraculous healings in that city because of the sheer power of its unbelief. Nothing. They were quite able, as human beings, to exercise their ancient contractual rights and prevent God from acting. That can still be true today.
If our Haitian brothers have chosen to be half Christian (part of the “bride of Christ”) and half something else (Voodoo), they are neither in his eyes. They have committed spiritual adultery. Until they say they are sorry)—and mean it—God will leave them to the mercies of their adulterous partner. He will tie his own hands.
Christians recognize this planet as a hostile place. Since Adam put it under new management—in the hands of someone who hates both God and mankind—it has become dangerous indeed. It is full of unpredictable volcanoes, storms, ice age cycles, earthquakes, viruses, tornadoes, hurricanes, Tsunami’s, poisonous snakes and dangerous beasts. How about disease bearing mosquitoes and other lethal pests?
(The Bible suggests over and over that this present, dangerous world is not the world that God made—it is a world that is now run by spiritual beings totally hostile to humans. This is one reason the Bible suggests man needs the constant protection of God.)
If Haitians truly chose to walk away from the Christian God in order to follow Voodoo, pact or no pact, then they are no longer under his protection. He doesn’t need to punish them—the planet and its new owner will do that all on its own.
This brings up another interesting point. What insurance companies are pleased to call, “Acts of God” are in most cases not his ACTIONS but rather his INACTION. He stands back, bound by his own contractual obligation to give humans free will.
Many Christians don’t like to think about that aspect of their faith. It would require them to have a much more intense and personal relationship with their God than they are comfortable with. Easier to believe he’s just a slightly senile, doting grandpa who defines love as “never having to say you’re sorry”. Or even to say anything at all.
This seems harsh. But it is basic Christianity. It was what Robertson was, however clumsily, trying to get across. (If you choose to walk away from a body guard on your own, bad things may well happen—but don’t blame the guard.) Biblically, Pat Robertson was not entirely wrong about Haiti, even if he got the wrong Napoleon.
God always weeps for those who die; sometimes he cannot help them.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Haiti--A Harsh Christian Answer
When disaster and death strike, Christians often ask, “Where was God?” Isn’t Haiti, for instance, a Catholic (Christian) country? How could a loving God let such things happen? Christian clergy with Haitian congregations are being inundated by such questions now.
Pat Robertson has made himself an object of loathing and contempt for suggesting that part of Haiti’s problem may be an ancient compact with the devil himself. But anyone who is aware of the Judeo-Christian concept of God—as he is defined in Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) Bibles cannot dismiss Robertson’s statement out of hand.
Robertson may be out of line with modern Christians, but he is NOT out of line with Biblical Christianity. Christians only like to talk about half the things their Bible says about their God. The Biblical God defines himself as a “jealous God”—and as a God who has deliberately limited his own freedom to act in order to protect the right of humans to make choices.
God is portrayed as proprietary. He made humans. He describes his church as his “bride” and the Israelites as his people. In both instances he compares those who worship anything other than himself as adulterers, as cheating spouses, and sometimes he is blunt enough to call them “whores”. He takes a dim view of infidelity.
On the other hand, he has made a contractual agreement with humans. He made them to have some- one to talk to. He gave them the recreated earth to live in and on. It was humankind’s. Adam was to “dress, till and keep it”.
According to the Bible, Adam chose to violate that compact. He had the freedom to do so—to wrest earth from the protective hand of his God and give it to God’s great and ancient enemy, the devil. In turn, God stepped back and honored the new contract. (I present this as basic Christian theology, not as scientific reality.) He continued to love what he had created, but under the contract mankind had made with the devil thousands of years ago, God set limits upon himself.
For a brilliantly clear explanation of this, I refer anyone to either the book or the film, “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe”. Aslan (Christ) keeps his contract with the Witch (devil). She has ownership over that which she has claimed.
Many Christians prefer to talk about a God who “is love”. He is, but he is also a God who keeps whatever contract he has made. Or whatever contract man has chosen to make. There is a significant rub when you are referring to Haiti.
Christians don’t like to talk about that part of their theology. They prefer the novel’s definition of love as being—“never having to say you’re sorry”. That’s not the love of God as defined in both Christian and Jewish scriptures. The Biblical God loves—but he allows you the freedom to screw up. Do it often and willfully enough and he also punishes.
A core tenet of Christianity is allowing you screw up royally—having you say, “I’m sorry”—and then trying very hard not to do it again.
Punishment often consists of nothing more than having the consequences of your actions come home to roost. (Rather like a drunk who chooses to drive and wipes out his entire family. He cannot validly ask, “Where was God?” “If he’s so loving, why is my wife dead?”)
Whether Haitians actually made some sort of “pact with the devil” back in the 1790s is actually irrelevant. (Adam did that for them and for us all long before). No one question the fact that Haiti is and has been a nation (as they admit) that is “100% Catholic—Christian—and 90% Voodoo”. In the eyes of the Christian God that is infidelity, pure and simple. (Ask Tiger Woods’ wife what she thinks of a situation like this.)
Does this mean the Biblical God smacked Haiti with an earthquake? Probably not. He didn’t need to. Haiti is on a fault line—no doubt Haitians needed someone to PREVENT earthquakes. From a Biblical standpoint, they shook off their protector. They cheated on them. He stood back. Their Voodoo gods had neither interest nor power to protect.
Let’s talk tomorrow about the Christian God when he is UNABLE to help.
Pat Robertson has made himself an object of loathing and contempt for suggesting that part of Haiti’s problem may be an ancient compact with the devil himself. But anyone who is aware of the Judeo-Christian concept of God—as he is defined in Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) Bibles cannot dismiss Robertson’s statement out of hand.
Robertson may be out of line with modern Christians, but he is NOT out of line with Biblical Christianity. Christians only like to talk about half the things their Bible says about their God. The Biblical God defines himself as a “jealous God”—and as a God who has deliberately limited his own freedom to act in order to protect the right of humans to make choices.
God is portrayed as proprietary. He made humans. He describes his church as his “bride” and the Israelites as his people. In both instances he compares those who worship anything other than himself as adulterers, as cheating spouses, and sometimes he is blunt enough to call them “whores”. He takes a dim view of infidelity.
On the other hand, he has made a contractual agreement with humans. He made them to have some- one to talk to. He gave them the recreated earth to live in and on. It was humankind’s. Adam was to “dress, till and keep it”.
According to the Bible, Adam chose to violate that compact. He had the freedom to do so—to wrest earth from the protective hand of his God and give it to God’s great and ancient enemy, the devil. In turn, God stepped back and honored the new contract. (I present this as basic Christian theology, not as scientific reality.) He continued to love what he had created, but under the contract mankind had made with the devil thousands of years ago, God set limits upon himself.
For a brilliantly clear explanation of this, I refer anyone to either the book or the film, “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe”. Aslan (Christ) keeps his contract with the Witch (devil). She has ownership over that which she has claimed.
Many Christians prefer to talk about a God who “is love”. He is, but he is also a God who keeps whatever contract he has made. Or whatever contract man has chosen to make. There is a significant rub when you are referring to Haiti.
Christians don’t like to talk about that part of their theology. They prefer the novel’s definition of love as being—“never having to say you’re sorry”. That’s not the love of God as defined in both Christian and Jewish scriptures. The Biblical God loves—but he allows you the freedom to screw up. Do it often and willfully enough and he also punishes.
A core tenet of Christianity is allowing you screw up royally—having you say, “I’m sorry”—and then trying very hard not to do it again.
Punishment often consists of nothing more than having the consequences of your actions come home to roost. (Rather like a drunk who chooses to drive and wipes out his entire family. He cannot validly ask, “Where was God?” “If he’s so loving, why is my wife dead?”)
Whether Haitians actually made some sort of “pact with the devil” back in the 1790s is actually irrelevant. (Adam did that for them and for us all long before). No one question the fact that Haiti is and has been a nation (as they admit) that is “100% Catholic—Christian—and 90% Voodoo”. In the eyes of the Christian God that is infidelity, pure and simple. (Ask Tiger Woods’ wife what she thinks of a situation like this.)
Does this mean the Biblical God smacked Haiti with an earthquake? Probably not. He didn’t need to. Haiti is on a fault line—no doubt Haitians needed someone to PREVENT earthquakes. From a Biblical standpoint, they shook off their protector. They cheated on them. He stood back. Their Voodoo gods had neither interest nor power to protect.
Let’s talk tomorrow about the Christian God when he is UNABLE to help.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Haiti--The Maelstrom
So graphic was Haiti’s economic collapse, its unending race hatreds, and its grinding poverty, one can understand how a Pat Robertson—working from a religious point of view—could suggest that these multiple disasters must have risen out of some pact with the devil.
It may have seemed that way to many Haitians. On the other hand, American troops must have seemed like a blessing. American army engineers built almost 200 bridges, hundreds of miles of roads, schools and public buildings. No Europeans were allowed to forcibly collect on debts.
Agriculture became viable. Sugar, cotton and other crops were making money again. The Americans settled several boundary issues with the Dominican Republic—the larger half of the island. Land was given back to Haiti.
Then, in 1934, President Roosevelt gave Haiti a new constitution and pulled the troops out. Angry Dominicans struck back, retaking their old borders. As many as 20,000 Haitians were slaughtered in less than a week.
Two more coups, a resignation in the face of a general strike and finally came the election of 1957. Francoise Duvalier, who instituted one of the most racist regimes ever seen on earth, was voted in as president.
“Papa Doc”, as he was known, was from the lowest class in Haiti—the former slaves, the black underclass. He came with—and violently represented—all of the hatred Haitian blacks felt for the “gentlemen of color”—the Creoles, the Mulattoes.
He and his private army of bully boys—the Ton ton Macoutes—set out to either kill or drive the Mulatto class out of Haiti. Thousands of Haiti’s most educated citizens fled to places like the newly free French colonies in Africa where their expertise could be of benefit and they could make a living.
(Back in 1961, I had a good friend in New York City who worked as an executive for a large retailer. He was a refugee from Papa Doc who took his abilities and education with him. His family had been among the Haitian elite. His sin was his light color. He was often amused at the racial prejudice he faced in New York because of his DARK color, especially being married to a Parisian.)
Papa’s son, “Bebe Doc”, succeeded Papa in 1971 and continued the anti-mulatto program until he was thrown out in 1986. He took refuse, ironically, not in Africa among his fellow blacks—but in Paris. A new constitution was put in place the next year.
Elections scheduled for 1987 didn’t happen because the Ton ton Macoutes, aided by the Haitian army, shot dozens of people around the country. Bereft of much of its educated class, the nation sank further into chaos.
Finally the American military stepped in in 1994—to restore a very corrupt Jean Bertrand Aristide to power. He abolished the Haitian army and, by 2000, he was rigging elections and using his new “police force” to intimidate the opposition.
This time a United Nations peace keeping force stepped in to create and maintain order of some sort. They stayed until their headquarters fell down around their ears in the recent earthquake.
You are left with a desperately poor nation, dominated by descendents of ex-slaves who never had proper opportunity for education or improvement. The educated class has been driven out. The military does not exist. Infrastructure has been allowed to decay for the past seventy-five years. There is no real economy.
One can almost ask, what is there to rebuild? We may have to start from the very beginning—and do all of the educating and building that should have been done back in 1804. That’s what we face in Haiti. Sending in the Red Cross for a few months isn’t going to fix it. It will take far more than the Corps of Engineers. More tomorrow.
It may have seemed that way to many Haitians. On the other hand, American troops must have seemed like a blessing. American army engineers built almost 200 bridges, hundreds of miles of roads, schools and public buildings. No Europeans were allowed to forcibly collect on debts.
Agriculture became viable. Sugar, cotton and other crops were making money again. The Americans settled several boundary issues with the Dominican Republic—the larger half of the island. Land was given back to Haiti.
Then, in 1934, President Roosevelt gave Haiti a new constitution and pulled the troops out. Angry Dominicans struck back, retaking their old borders. As many as 20,000 Haitians were slaughtered in less than a week.
Two more coups, a resignation in the face of a general strike and finally came the election of 1957. Francoise Duvalier, who instituted one of the most racist regimes ever seen on earth, was voted in as president.
“Papa Doc”, as he was known, was from the lowest class in Haiti—the former slaves, the black underclass. He came with—and violently represented—all of the hatred Haitian blacks felt for the “gentlemen of color”—the Creoles, the Mulattoes.
He and his private army of bully boys—the Ton ton Macoutes—set out to either kill or drive the Mulatto class out of Haiti. Thousands of Haiti’s most educated citizens fled to places like the newly free French colonies in Africa where their expertise could be of benefit and they could make a living.
(Back in 1961, I had a good friend in New York City who worked as an executive for a large retailer. He was a refugee from Papa Doc who took his abilities and education with him. His family had been among the Haitian elite. His sin was his light color. He was often amused at the racial prejudice he faced in New York because of his DARK color, especially being married to a Parisian.)
Papa’s son, “Bebe Doc”, succeeded Papa in 1971 and continued the anti-mulatto program until he was thrown out in 1986. He took refuse, ironically, not in Africa among his fellow blacks—but in Paris. A new constitution was put in place the next year.
Elections scheduled for 1987 didn’t happen because the Ton ton Macoutes, aided by the Haitian army, shot dozens of people around the country. Bereft of much of its educated class, the nation sank further into chaos.
Finally the American military stepped in in 1994—to restore a very corrupt Jean Bertrand Aristide to power. He abolished the Haitian army and, by 2000, he was rigging elections and using his new “police force” to intimidate the opposition.
This time a United Nations peace keeping force stepped in to create and maintain order of some sort. They stayed until their headquarters fell down around their ears in the recent earthquake.
You are left with a desperately poor nation, dominated by descendents of ex-slaves who never had proper opportunity for education or improvement. The educated class has been driven out. The military does not exist. Infrastructure has been allowed to decay for the past seventy-five years. There is no real economy.
One can almost ask, what is there to rebuild? We may have to start from the very beginning—and do all of the educating and building that should have been done back in 1804. That’s what we face in Haiti. Sending in the Red Cross for a few months isn’t going to fix it. It will take far more than the Corps of Engineers. More tomorrow.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Haiti--Paradise Lost
What happens when the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean kills off its educated and financially competent leadership (the white planters), gains its independence and is dominated by previously uneducated former slaves—who have never been given the chance to learn or to govern?
“Hell in a handbasket” is a phrase that comes to mind. L’Ouverture was betrayed (and killed) by the French. Jasques Dessaline was assassinated three years later. That left things to a former stable hand, waiter and mason—Henri Christophe.
He had been a winning general against Napoleon’s troops; his menial jobs had given him real skill in dealing with the wealthy whites who still controlled much of Haiti’s economy. He was also nuts. He proclaimed himself “King Henri”.
He created a noble class, aping the “ancient regime” of France. He built himself six chateaus, eight palaces, and the gigantic Citadelle Laferriere that was once considered such a wonder of the world people traveled just to see it.
To prove how loyal his troops were to him, he would occasionally have a unit of infantry march off the top of the citadel and fall to their deaths. Like the ancient Pharaohs he put much of the populace of Haiti to work building his monuments.
It was still a fabulously rich country. Some say that during his fourteen year reign people from New York would sail down to Port au Prince to see the “big town”. Revolt finally came in 1820. Rather than lose power, Christophe put a silver bullet in his head.
His body was hidden in a block of wet cement. People carrying loads to build more monuments to him dropped their loads on the spot where they heard the news. Visitors a century later claimed to be able to still see these piles of construction materials along the trails.
The rule of a man like Christophe would be enough to poison the future of any nation, but the tragedy of Haiti was by no means done. Sugar slowly declined in value as more and more nations began to produce it (notably colonial Cuba)—no one had thought to use the sugar money to create a more varied economy, or any economy at all.
It was a slow, tortuous downhill slide for a nation rich enough in 1815 to take in South American revolutionary hero, Simon Boliver, resupply him with men, money and weapons and send him back to defeat Spain. There are those who say Venezuela and several other nations owe their independence to Haitian help.
By the 1830s, Haitian economy had declined so much that the Haitian government (under a dictator almost as cruel as Christophe) passed a law denying any “free” peasant who worked on a sugar plantation the right to leave that land—for any reason.
During the 1820s, thousands of free blacks from the United States migrated to Haiti, a black nation. Most returned home—Haitian poverty had already become so bitter. A fleet of French warships showed up in 1825 and made Haiti promise to repay them 150,000,000 Francs as indemnity for the value of the lost slaves and slave trade that once centered in colonial Haiti. (It would be like making penniless freed slaves in the south pay for the Civil War and their own market value.)
Even though that amount was eventually reduced to ninety million, the rest of the century saw many incursions from European forces claiming Haiti owed them money—and helping themselves to it. Expatriates and other foreigners bankrolled dissident groups who fought each other within Haiti.
Coups, assassinations and violence became commonplace in a nation where the bulk of the populace was uneducated and desperately poor. It is estimated that between 1820 and today, Haiti has had at least 32 coups.
Finally, in 1915, appalled at the chaos so near our shores, we sent in the marines. More later.
“Hell in a handbasket” is a phrase that comes to mind. L’Ouverture was betrayed (and killed) by the French. Jasques Dessaline was assassinated three years later. That left things to a former stable hand, waiter and mason—Henri Christophe.
He had been a winning general against Napoleon’s troops; his menial jobs had given him real skill in dealing with the wealthy whites who still controlled much of Haiti’s economy. He was also nuts. He proclaimed himself “King Henri”.
He created a noble class, aping the “ancient regime” of France. He built himself six chateaus, eight palaces, and the gigantic Citadelle Laferriere that was once considered such a wonder of the world people traveled just to see it.
To prove how loyal his troops were to him, he would occasionally have a unit of infantry march off the top of the citadel and fall to their deaths. Like the ancient Pharaohs he put much of the populace of Haiti to work building his monuments.
It was still a fabulously rich country. Some say that during his fourteen year reign people from New York would sail down to Port au Prince to see the “big town”. Revolt finally came in 1820. Rather than lose power, Christophe put a silver bullet in his head.
His body was hidden in a block of wet cement. People carrying loads to build more monuments to him dropped their loads on the spot where they heard the news. Visitors a century later claimed to be able to still see these piles of construction materials along the trails.
The rule of a man like Christophe would be enough to poison the future of any nation, but the tragedy of Haiti was by no means done. Sugar slowly declined in value as more and more nations began to produce it (notably colonial Cuba)—no one had thought to use the sugar money to create a more varied economy, or any economy at all.
It was a slow, tortuous downhill slide for a nation rich enough in 1815 to take in South American revolutionary hero, Simon Boliver, resupply him with men, money and weapons and send him back to defeat Spain. There are those who say Venezuela and several other nations owe their independence to Haitian help.
By the 1830s, Haitian economy had declined so much that the Haitian government (under a dictator almost as cruel as Christophe) passed a law denying any “free” peasant who worked on a sugar plantation the right to leave that land—for any reason.
During the 1820s, thousands of free blacks from the United States migrated to Haiti, a black nation. Most returned home—Haitian poverty had already become so bitter. A fleet of French warships showed up in 1825 and made Haiti promise to repay them 150,000,000 Francs as indemnity for the value of the lost slaves and slave trade that once centered in colonial Haiti. (It would be like making penniless freed slaves in the south pay for the Civil War and their own market value.)
Even though that amount was eventually reduced to ninety million, the rest of the century saw many incursions from European forces claiming Haiti owed them money—and helping themselves to it. Expatriates and other foreigners bankrolled dissident groups who fought each other within Haiti.
Coups, assassinations and violence became commonplace in a nation where the bulk of the populace was uneducated and desperately poor. It is estimated that between 1820 and today, Haiti has had at least 32 coups.
Finally, in 1915, appalled at the chaos so near our shores, we sent in the marines. More later.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Haiti, The Devil and Pat Robertson
Pat Robertson has shown a knack for publicly stating the injudicious. His latest comments on Haiti’s possible bond with the devil were rendered suspect if only because Mr. Robertson did no fact checking and alluded to the wrong Napoleon.
There is no question that Haiti defeated a Napoleon (or at least one of his armies), but it was the FIRST Emperor Napoleon (1804-1815), not the Third (1852-1870). Haiti has certainly had a checkered history, both before and after Napoleon.
It began as a pirate haven, and as late as the 1780s, pirate Jean Lafitte, who loaned his cannon to Andrew Jackson to ensure the American victory at New Orleans, was born there. But its early wealth came as perhaps the richest of the Caribbean sugar colonies. (Sugar was the petroleum of the 17th and 18th centuries, creating huge fortunes, using slave labor—and the French colony of St. Dominique [Haiti] was probably the richest source of sugar in the world.)
Slaves in the Caribbean died like flies. The first slaves had been imported to the Island of Hispaniola in 1517—and in the 1780s they had to keep importing them, so many died so fast. Sugar in the tropics was a brutally labor intensive crop.
Mulattoes—resulting from liaisons between French men and slave women—were given a much higher status, and were often freed, creating a Creole class of “gentlemen of color”, who could own land and serve as officers in the French Army.
This racial distinction created a form of black vs Mulatto racism that bedevils Haiti to this day. At the top were the white Frenchmen who poured into Haiti from France—there were half as many French in tiny St. Dominique when the French gave up Canada (1763) as there were in all of North America.
In 1789, the French world turned upside down. The Bastille, symbol of oppression everywhere, was stormed and destroyed. A month later, in August, 1789, the revolutionary French government issued its “Declaration of the Rights of Man”—proclaiming that all men, everywhere were free and equal.
Two years later, the black slaves of Haiti claimed that promise for themselves. Over three hundred thousand slaves rose up against 40,000 whites, and 28,000 “gens de couleur” were caught in the middle. (A fair number of those refugeed out to places like New Orleans.)
Thirteen years of very bloody warfare followed. France sent thousands of troops (when they could slip them past the British blockade during the War of the French Revolution). Haitian leaders proved themselves a match for the finest France could send.
Toussaint L’Ouverture proved he could lick his weight in French armies—as did generals like Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Napoleon returned from Egypt and Syria 1799 and he sent more troops under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc asked for a parlay with L’Ouverture. He kidnapped him and sent him to France where the Haitian “George Washington” died in 1803. But the Haitians fought on. They proved they could defeat Napoleon’s battle hardened veterans in a stand up, face to face fight.
Napoleon gave up. He put his dreams for a new French Empire in the Caribbean and North America on hold, sold Louisiana to the Americans and granted Haiti its independence.
Fifty thousand French troops had to died—to disease and wounds. Twenty-four thousand French planters had died and over 100,000 black slaves. In some ways it makes the American Revolution look like a Sunday School picnic.
Haiti was free—the first nation in Latin America to gain its independence. Hers was also the first successful slave revolt in human history. Whither now the richest sugar island in the Caribbean—source of nearly half the world’s sugar?
More on that tragic story tomorrow.
There is no question that Haiti defeated a Napoleon (or at least one of his armies), but it was the FIRST Emperor Napoleon (1804-1815), not the Third (1852-1870). Haiti has certainly had a checkered history, both before and after Napoleon.
It began as a pirate haven, and as late as the 1780s, pirate Jean Lafitte, who loaned his cannon to Andrew Jackson to ensure the American victory at New Orleans, was born there. But its early wealth came as perhaps the richest of the Caribbean sugar colonies. (Sugar was the petroleum of the 17th and 18th centuries, creating huge fortunes, using slave labor—and the French colony of St. Dominique [Haiti] was probably the richest source of sugar in the world.)
Slaves in the Caribbean died like flies. The first slaves had been imported to the Island of Hispaniola in 1517—and in the 1780s they had to keep importing them, so many died so fast. Sugar in the tropics was a brutally labor intensive crop.
Mulattoes—resulting from liaisons between French men and slave women—were given a much higher status, and were often freed, creating a Creole class of “gentlemen of color”, who could own land and serve as officers in the French Army.
This racial distinction created a form of black vs Mulatto racism that bedevils Haiti to this day. At the top were the white Frenchmen who poured into Haiti from France—there were half as many French in tiny St. Dominique when the French gave up Canada (1763) as there were in all of North America.
In 1789, the French world turned upside down. The Bastille, symbol of oppression everywhere, was stormed and destroyed. A month later, in August, 1789, the revolutionary French government issued its “Declaration of the Rights of Man”—proclaiming that all men, everywhere were free and equal.
Two years later, the black slaves of Haiti claimed that promise for themselves. Over three hundred thousand slaves rose up against 40,000 whites, and 28,000 “gens de couleur” were caught in the middle. (A fair number of those refugeed out to places like New Orleans.)
Thirteen years of very bloody warfare followed. France sent thousands of troops (when they could slip them past the British blockade during the War of the French Revolution). Haitian leaders proved themselves a match for the finest France could send.
Toussaint L’Ouverture proved he could lick his weight in French armies—as did generals like Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Napoleon returned from Egypt and Syria 1799 and he sent more troops under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc asked for a parlay with L’Ouverture. He kidnapped him and sent him to France where the Haitian “George Washington” died in 1803. But the Haitians fought on. They proved they could defeat Napoleon’s battle hardened veterans in a stand up, face to face fight.
Napoleon gave up. He put his dreams for a new French Empire in the Caribbean and North America on hold, sold Louisiana to the Americans and granted Haiti its independence.
Fifty thousand French troops had to died—to disease and wounds. Twenty-four thousand French planters had died and over 100,000 black slaves. In some ways it makes the American Revolution look like a Sunday School picnic.
Haiti was free—the first nation in Latin America to gain its independence. Hers was also the first successful slave revolt in human history. Whither now the richest sugar island in the Caribbean—source of nearly half the world’s sugar?
More on that tragic story tomorrow.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Court--We're All Equal Now
Yesterday the Supreme Court took a step backward into the Nineteenth Century—the bad part of the 19th Century, at that. It abolished limits on how much corporations, unions and other large givers could contribute to election campaigns.
It said these limits were a violation of free speech. (One cannot help wondering how these conservative justices would react to a suit demanding total free speech for child pornography.) According to the court, a multi-billion dollar corporation now has exactly the same right to buy political influence as any individual citizen, no matter how limited his means.
There is a certain constitutional logic to this point of view. After all, to be “incorporated” means to be given a legal body (“corpus”) like that of any being who is actually human. In the eyes of the law, General Electric and I are both bodies equal before that law.
Then we run, smack dab, into the same problem we did back in the 1800s. For more than a century, American workers were forbidden to organize in unions to negotiate with their employers. It was constitutional doctrine that the individual workman and the corporation he worked for were absolutely equal in power and influence in law.
In other words, I—the individual workman—and Standard Oil, then the largest and richest corporation in the world, were expected to sit down in a room together, me with my dollar a day wage and Standard Oil with all of its hundreds of millions were deemed to be absolutely identical in negotiating capabilities.
On more than one occasion the U.S. Army was sent out to enforce that legal view. Those who tried to argue that Standard Oil and I were NOT equal in negotiating power could and did, on occasion, face rifle fire.
So for decades “the iron law of wages” prevailed. Daily pay for men stayed at a dollar a day (twelve to fourteen hours), for women it could be $1.75 a week, kids rarely earned more than a dollar a week. But the court held that these wages were fairly negotiated between equals. After all, as they read the Constitution, it would violate the rights of the corporation to have it any other way.
Using their vast resources, the billionaires who ran the corporations—in a day when a single billion made you the richest man on earth—added to the fairness issue by buying up nearly the entire U.S. Senate.
Rockefeller might own twenty senators; Morgan another twenty. Gould might own five or six. Vanderbilt might have fifteen in his pocket and so forth. When they needed a bill passed or blocked, the owners traded senators back and forth like properties in the game of “Monopoly”. There was no help for the individual in the courts or in Congress.
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution required the popular election of senators—cutting down the degree of control large corporations could buy. In 1935 the Wagner Act recognized that an individual worker was NOT equal to General Motors and granted labor the right to organize in unions and negotiate better wages and conditions collectively.
In the early 1970s, recognizing that my fifty dollar contribution to an election campaign does not make me equal in influence to a large union or corporation that can contribute thousands, Congress began to demand public disclosure of where campaign contributions came from—and to limit their size.
Suddenly, the fifty dollars an individual might contribute—combined with thousands more contributions from citizens like him--might just count. Candidates began to show this was true, especially with today’s internet. You could call it the voters’ version of collective bargaining. Thousands of Davids equaling a Goliath.
But the Supreme Court yesterday was having none of THIS kind of equality. After their ruling, I’m at liberty to contribute as much as I can; a multi-billion dollar corporation has the same freedom. That makes us equal, right? Its unlimited contribution, thousands upon thousands, versus my fifty bucks. Fully equal, right?
Money does talk. It once bought the entire Senate—now it can buy whole elections. As a commentator said yesterday, every Congressman and Senator is going to think long and hard about whether that money is going to talk for or against him—before he votes on anything.
It said these limits were a violation of free speech. (One cannot help wondering how these conservative justices would react to a suit demanding total free speech for child pornography.) According to the court, a multi-billion dollar corporation now has exactly the same right to buy political influence as any individual citizen, no matter how limited his means.
There is a certain constitutional logic to this point of view. After all, to be “incorporated” means to be given a legal body (“corpus”) like that of any being who is actually human. In the eyes of the law, General Electric and I are both bodies equal before that law.
Then we run, smack dab, into the same problem we did back in the 1800s. For more than a century, American workers were forbidden to organize in unions to negotiate with their employers. It was constitutional doctrine that the individual workman and the corporation he worked for were absolutely equal in power and influence in law.
In other words, I—the individual workman—and Standard Oil, then the largest and richest corporation in the world, were expected to sit down in a room together, me with my dollar a day wage and Standard Oil with all of its hundreds of millions were deemed to be absolutely identical in negotiating capabilities.
On more than one occasion the U.S. Army was sent out to enforce that legal view. Those who tried to argue that Standard Oil and I were NOT equal in negotiating power could and did, on occasion, face rifle fire.
So for decades “the iron law of wages” prevailed. Daily pay for men stayed at a dollar a day (twelve to fourteen hours), for women it could be $1.75 a week, kids rarely earned more than a dollar a week. But the court held that these wages were fairly negotiated between equals. After all, as they read the Constitution, it would violate the rights of the corporation to have it any other way.
Using their vast resources, the billionaires who ran the corporations—in a day when a single billion made you the richest man on earth—added to the fairness issue by buying up nearly the entire U.S. Senate.
Rockefeller might own twenty senators; Morgan another twenty. Gould might own five or six. Vanderbilt might have fifteen in his pocket and so forth. When they needed a bill passed or blocked, the owners traded senators back and forth like properties in the game of “Monopoly”. There was no help for the individual in the courts or in Congress.
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution required the popular election of senators—cutting down the degree of control large corporations could buy. In 1935 the Wagner Act recognized that an individual worker was NOT equal to General Motors and granted labor the right to organize in unions and negotiate better wages and conditions collectively.
In the early 1970s, recognizing that my fifty dollar contribution to an election campaign does not make me equal in influence to a large union or corporation that can contribute thousands, Congress began to demand public disclosure of where campaign contributions came from—and to limit their size.
Suddenly, the fifty dollars an individual might contribute—combined with thousands more contributions from citizens like him--might just count. Candidates began to show this was true, especially with today’s internet. You could call it the voters’ version of collective bargaining. Thousands of Davids equaling a Goliath.
But the Supreme Court yesterday was having none of THIS kind of equality. After their ruling, I’m at liberty to contribute as much as I can; a multi-billion dollar corporation has the same freedom. That makes us equal, right? Its unlimited contribution, thousands upon thousands, versus my fifty bucks. Fully equal, right?
Money does talk. It once bought the entire Senate—now it can buy whole elections. As a commentator said yesterday, every Congressman and Senator is going to think long and hard about whether that money is going to talk for or against him—before he votes on anything.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Obama--Timeless and Clueless
In boxing, comedy and on Wall Street, timing is everything. Whatever else Barack Obama has shown us this past year, it hasn’t been timing. As a political fighter, he’s been flat-footed, several moments behind and unbelievably clumsy.
Timing he ain’t got. If you’re going to ring in change—of any kind—you’ve got to stay conscious at least to the end of the round. Right now he doesn’t look like he’s going to go that far. Tell the trainers to get ready to carry him out of the ring.
LAST YEAR was the year to get Health Care Reform through Congress. His presidency was young; he had all the “cred” of a major election victory. He diddled. He fuddled. He backed off and let Congress do its thing—while he went off and fought windmills in Copenhagen and made a thoroughly aborted try to get the Olympics to Chicago.
Oh yes, he had to take time to prepare a speech reaching out to Muslims in Cairo and accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. All the while Health Care was left an orphan to slowly starve to death for lack of action and votes in Congress.
Finally, today, Nancy Pelosi admitted that she hasn’t got the votes to put all the things the Senate wants through her House of Representatives. (She only got the House version passed by about five votes—and now the Senate has lost its filibuster proof 60 Democratic votes—and how long will Byrd be able to make it to the floor?) She suggested putting the bill on indefinite hold.
If health care isn’t dead, it’s gasping for breath. You can imagine all the Congressional pages and aides dashing about as the cry, “Code Blue, Code Blue” echoes through the halls. Obama has probably killed it the same way Clinton did in 1973/4.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed the bill to sit while the opposition gathered its strength for a lethal counterattack. (Remember ANY form of health care reform is going to cost some well healed persons and organizations MONEY. They won’t like it.)
(Note for future presidents who may want to improve American health care: 1)Make it SIMPLE. 2) Use your early days clout to force Congress to keep it simple. 3) Get it on the Congressional calendar NO LATER than February. 4) Pull out all the stops to get a fast vote.
These won’t absolutely guarantee passage—but the lack of any one of them will surely guarantee that it will NOT pass. Obama managed to score zero out of four—as did the Clintons. Those who stood to lose money if it became law massed their forces, lied and won.
Now it seems to have dawned on Obama that while he was busy making war and foreign policy speeches, he has apparently missed the boat on another domestic issue. Just now, today, the same day Nancy Pelosi called off the hounds, Obama recollected that Americans are very unhappy about the big firms on Wall Street that 1)nearly collapsed the financial system and 2)are collecting huge bonuses for doing it.
Oh oops. Maybe we should create new regulatory measures to reign in big banks and prevent them from getting “too big to fail.” This could have been a winner LAST winter. Now things seem to be bouncing back and the urgency is completely gone.
Obama can try to hide the fact he’s about to take a licking on health care by making angry noises about Wall Street, but it isn’t likely to accomplish anything. Not any more. Timing, baby, timing. The last time he showed any was on inaugural night when he danced with Michelle.
He has tripped over his instinct to delay, ignore and create complications. He was content to follow the Bush program on Wall Street until it simply won’t fly any more. Now it is doubtful if he can make any program of his own fly at all.
Timing matters in the boxing ring, comedy central and investing—it also matters in the political arena.
Timing he ain’t got. If you’re going to ring in change—of any kind—you’ve got to stay conscious at least to the end of the round. Right now he doesn’t look like he’s going to go that far. Tell the trainers to get ready to carry him out of the ring.
LAST YEAR was the year to get Health Care Reform through Congress. His presidency was young; he had all the “cred” of a major election victory. He diddled. He fuddled. He backed off and let Congress do its thing—while he went off and fought windmills in Copenhagen and made a thoroughly aborted try to get the Olympics to Chicago.
Oh yes, he had to take time to prepare a speech reaching out to Muslims in Cairo and accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. All the while Health Care was left an orphan to slowly starve to death for lack of action and votes in Congress.
Finally, today, Nancy Pelosi admitted that she hasn’t got the votes to put all the things the Senate wants through her House of Representatives. (She only got the House version passed by about five votes—and now the Senate has lost its filibuster proof 60 Democratic votes—and how long will Byrd be able to make it to the floor?) She suggested putting the bill on indefinite hold.
If health care isn’t dead, it’s gasping for breath. You can imagine all the Congressional pages and aides dashing about as the cry, “Code Blue, Code Blue” echoes through the halls. Obama has probably killed it the same way Clinton did in 1973/4.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed the bill to sit while the opposition gathered its strength for a lethal counterattack. (Remember ANY form of health care reform is going to cost some well healed persons and organizations MONEY. They won’t like it.)
(Note for future presidents who may want to improve American health care: 1)Make it SIMPLE. 2) Use your early days clout to force Congress to keep it simple. 3) Get it on the Congressional calendar NO LATER than February. 4) Pull out all the stops to get a fast vote.
These won’t absolutely guarantee passage—but the lack of any one of them will surely guarantee that it will NOT pass. Obama managed to score zero out of four—as did the Clintons. Those who stood to lose money if it became law massed their forces, lied and won.
Now it seems to have dawned on Obama that while he was busy making war and foreign policy speeches, he has apparently missed the boat on another domestic issue. Just now, today, the same day Nancy Pelosi called off the hounds, Obama recollected that Americans are very unhappy about the big firms on Wall Street that 1)nearly collapsed the financial system and 2)are collecting huge bonuses for doing it.
Oh oops. Maybe we should create new regulatory measures to reign in big banks and prevent them from getting “too big to fail.” This could have been a winner LAST winter. Now things seem to be bouncing back and the urgency is completely gone.
Obama can try to hide the fact he’s about to take a licking on health care by making angry noises about Wall Street, but it isn’t likely to accomplish anything. Not any more. Timing, baby, timing. The last time he showed any was on inaugural night when he danced with Michelle.
He has tripped over his instinct to delay, ignore and create complications. He was content to follow the Bush program on Wall Street until it simply won’t fly any more. Now it is doubtful if he can make any program of his own fly at all.
Timing matters in the boxing ring, comedy central and investing—it also matters in the political arena.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Strivers Row
There was—or is—in Harlem a few blocks of brownstone homes called “Strivers’ Row”. It was (and perhaps is) a term laced with irony and contempt. For here lived the black millionaires and successful businessmen who had tried to make it in the white world.
Fellow blacks, embittered by long centuries of discrimination and white distain, jeered at the strivers as men who lived in a fantasy world. Equality with whites would never, they firmly believed, be granted to black men, no matter what their wealth or achievements.
Sammy Davis Jr. (the black member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack), in his autobiography, “Yes I Can”, tells the story of being in a barracks adjacent to a white barracks during World War II. One large white Texan kept making snide remarks about “niggers” who did not belong.
Finally, Davis—a physically small man—had had enough. He assaulted the sneering , much bigger white man and beat him until he could not get back up. Bloodied and floored, the Texan looked up at Davis and spoke a terrible truth, “You’re still a nigger”.
The larger black population of Harlem—who had either striven and failed or not bothered to attempt what they saw as impossible by striving at all—lived and believed the Texan’s line all their lives. They poured out their contempt on those who did strive—and whom they saw as deluded fools.
Unfortunately that belief remains strong in our black ghettoes today. If I were asked to identify the single greatest curse besetting American black men and women, it would say it was the pervasive belief on the part of so many that they could not succeed. There was no point in trying.
Centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws (Grand Rapids, where I was raised had its “realty covenants” and kept blacks penned up on Henry, James and Charles streets for decades) had done their work well. Call it “Stockholm Syndrome” or whatever, blacks had made themselves believe the cant of the most racist of their white oppressors.
I have substitute taught in a variety of predominantly black schools—K through 12. The kids do under-perform their white contemporaries. No doubt. But there is something much worse going on. So many of them have a completely cynical attitude toward education.
“Why should we do this assignment? What’s it going to get us? What has this white man to tell us that is going to benefit us in any way?” They sneer. They leave assignments lying unfinished on their desks. They laugh out loud.
There are always a few strivers. They keep their heads down and try not to let anyone else know they are actually doing their school work. It’s not a pleasant life for them. (I remember a small eighth grade girl whom I noticed was always working, no matter what chaos was going on around her. After seeing her several times, I asked her what she planned on doing.
“I want to be a cardiologist”, she replied instantly. I would have given anything to be able to move her out of that school. All I can do is pray she keeps her head down, keeps working and makes it to medical school.)
Most of the rest of that room had given up by the time they were old enough to drink from a sippy cup. Now, what scares me very much, is that I see more and more of the same cynicism and hopelessness in our predominantly white schools as well.
The malaise seems to be spreading. Things seem to bear out what I was told back in the 1960s—“What you see in black neighborhoods/schools today will be true of white schools tomorrow.” That would be a terrible vengeance on all of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr., his father and mother, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were (and are) all strivers—the way so many white Americans have been. They did not fight through Birmingham, Selma and prison for what I see today.
We can change laws; we may even change bad attitudes—but how do we remove centuries of hopeless cynicism? And, if we don’t, God help us. That is my message for The Reverend Mr. King’s birthday.
Fellow blacks, embittered by long centuries of discrimination and white distain, jeered at the strivers as men who lived in a fantasy world. Equality with whites would never, they firmly believed, be granted to black men, no matter what their wealth or achievements.
Sammy Davis Jr. (the black member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack), in his autobiography, “Yes I Can”, tells the story of being in a barracks adjacent to a white barracks during World War II. One large white Texan kept making snide remarks about “niggers” who did not belong.
Finally, Davis—a physically small man—had had enough. He assaulted the sneering , much bigger white man and beat him until he could not get back up. Bloodied and floored, the Texan looked up at Davis and spoke a terrible truth, “You’re still a nigger”.
The larger black population of Harlem—who had either striven and failed or not bothered to attempt what they saw as impossible by striving at all—lived and believed the Texan’s line all their lives. They poured out their contempt on those who did strive—and whom they saw as deluded fools.
Unfortunately that belief remains strong in our black ghettoes today. If I were asked to identify the single greatest curse besetting American black men and women, it would say it was the pervasive belief on the part of so many that they could not succeed. There was no point in trying.
Centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws (Grand Rapids, where I was raised had its “realty covenants” and kept blacks penned up on Henry, James and Charles streets for decades) had done their work well. Call it “Stockholm Syndrome” or whatever, blacks had made themselves believe the cant of the most racist of their white oppressors.
I have substitute taught in a variety of predominantly black schools—K through 12. The kids do under-perform their white contemporaries. No doubt. But there is something much worse going on. So many of them have a completely cynical attitude toward education.
“Why should we do this assignment? What’s it going to get us? What has this white man to tell us that is going to benefit us in any way?” They sneer. They leave assignments lying unfinished on their desks. They laugh out loud.
There are always a few strivers. They keep their heads down and try not to let anyone else know they are actually doing their school work. It’s not a pleasant life for them. (I remember a small eighth grade girl whom I noticed was always working, no matter what chaos was going on around her. After seeing her several times, I asked her what she planned on doing.
“I want to be a cardiologist”, she replied instantly. I would have given anything to be able to move her out of that school. All I can do is pray she keeps her head down, keeps working and makes it to medical school.)
Most of the rest of that room had given up by the time they were old enough to drink from a sippy cup. Now, what scares me very much, is that I see more and more of the same cynicism and hopelessness in our predominantly white schools as well.
The malaise seems to be spreading. Things seem to bear out what I was told back in the 1960s—“What you see in black neighborhoods/schools today will be true of white schools tomorrow.” That would be a terrible vengeance on all of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr., his father and mother, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were (and are) all strivers—the way so many white Americans have been. They did not fight through Birmingham, Selma and prison for what I see today.
We can change laws; we may even change bad attitudes—but how do we remove centuries of hopeless cynicism? And, if we don’t, God help us. That is my message for The Reverend Mr. King’s birthday.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Luddites and Bombs
If one says anything against a machine these days, one risks being called a Luddite—a labor movement two centuries ago that featured workmen smashing machinery that they felt would replace them on the job market.
Over the years, the term “Luddite” has come to describe anyone who is against technology. It is often used, sneeringly, to describe anyone who might protest against the increasingly dominant role machines like computers play in our lives.
The Christmas bomber (would be bomber) story raises a valid point in this ancient argument. We are very, very lucky that all the young man did was burn his own underwear and private parts. He meant to do far worse—and might well have.
The other day I listened to an interview on public radio with the man who used to be head of security at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv in Israel. These people have been facing terrorist threats for decades—they have become very effective at handling them.
The retired security chief said that our problem with people like the young would-be bomber from Nigeria was that we were too dependent on our security machines at airports. He said that if a trained human had spent a moment or two looking at the young man, and then asked him a few pertinent questions, the bomber would have been stopped on the spot.
But, he pointed out, you don’t have experienced, skilled and trained observers at your airports—you depend on skilled MACHINES to check for bombs and bombers. The people, with very little real training, are merely there to operate the machines.
It takes a PERSON to recognize body language, to think through the fact that the young man paid cash, had no luggage, and was acting nervously. (When you want to solve a murder, you don’t send a machine, you send a trained detective. He may USE mechanical devices, but nothing replaces his eyes, his instincts, his experience.)
The former security head said machines should merely be there to serve the security people. The mechanical screeners and X-rays should only assist the trained eye of the human observer. That’s backward to how our airports do it now—except in places like Israel.
We have come to have supreme faith in our machinery—yet how many of us (me, for one) have stood at the reception window in a physician’s office, listening to the receptionist explain that she can schedule nothing today, the computer is down.
We live in a world where a computer may, at any moment, charge us the wrong amount, order the wrong item, give us the incorrect date or time. Yet we choose to depend upon them for our very lives in airports and other screening points.
Remember—a computer is the ultimate idiot savant. It can say “Yes” or “No” very, very rapidly. It can do nothing else. Many of the devices we use to screen for bombs, guns and knives are no brighter. The bombers and shooters are aware of this. They work long and hard to find new ways to confuse the machinery we’ve come to depend on.
They succeed from time to time because machinery, computer or body scanner, has no instincts, no memory of past incidents, no ability to profile, no gut hunches. And the people standing next to these devices are not expected—or even permitted—to use their own hunches.
We got very lucky Christmas day—and we’re going to have to go on depending on luck unless we bring back a human element in the security equation. The guy who used to do security at Ben Gurion now runs his own consulting company. He’s not a Luddite. He just understands what machines can and cannot do—and the dangers of over dependence on them.
Maybe we should hire him.
Over the years, the term “Luddite” has come to describe anyone who is against technology. It is often used, sneeringly, to describe anyone who might protest against the increasingly dominant role machines like computers play in our lives.
The Christmas bomber (would be bomber) story raises a valid point in this ancient argument. We are very, very lucky that all the young man did was burn his own underwear and private parts. He meant to do far worse—and might well have.
The other day I listened to an interview on public radio with the man who used to be head of security at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv in Israel. These people have been facing terrorist threats for decades—they have become very effective at handling them.
The retired security chief said that our problem with people like the young would-be bomber from Nigeria was that we were too dependent on our security machines at airports. He said that if a trained human had spent a moment or two looking at the young man, and then asked him a few pertinent questions, the bomber would have been stopped on the spot.
But, he pointed out, you don’t have experienced, skilled and trained observers at your airports—you depend on skilled MACHINES to check for bombs and bombers. The people, with very little real training, are merely there to operate the machines.
It takes a PERSON to recognize body language, to think through the fact that the young man paid cash, had no luggage, and was acting nervously. (When you want to solve a murder, you don’t send a machine, you send a trained detective. He may USE mechanical devices, but nothing replaces his eyes, his instincts, his experience.)
The former security head said machines should merely be there to serve the security people. The mechanical screeners and X-rays should only assist the trained eye of the human observer. That’s backward to how our airports do it now—except in places like Israel.
We have come to have supreme faith in our machinery—yet how many of us (me, for one) have stood at the reception window in a physician’s office, listening to the receptionist explain that she can schedule nothing today, the computer is down.
We live in a world where a computer may, at any moment, charge us the wrong amount, order the wrong item, give us the incorrect date or time. Yet we choose to depend upon them for our very lives in airports and other screening points.
Remember—a computer is the ultimate idiot savant. It can say “Yes” or “No” very, very rapidly. It can do nothing else. Many of the devices we use to screen for bombs, guns and knives are no brighter. The bombers and shooters are aware of this. They work long and hard to find new ways to confuse the machinery we’ve come to depend on.
They succeed from time to time because machinery, computer or body scanner, has no instincts, no memory of past incidents, no ability to profile, no gut hunches. And the people standing next to these devices are not expected—or even permitted—to use their own hunches.
We got very lucky Christmas day—and we’re going to have to go on depending on luck unless we bring back a human element in the security equation. The guy who used to do security at Ben Gurion now runs his own consulting company. He’s not a Luddite. He just understands what machines can and cannot do—and the dangers of over dependence on them.
Maybe we should hire him.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Congress In The Closet
What does a parent do when the children all go into a room together and lock the door? A sensible parent immediately wonders what on earth is going on. If these particular kids have shown a propensity for mischief in the past, he or she goes and finds out.
The kiddies are in their locked room. They are playing with our health care. They are gluing things together; they are tearing things apart. They may even have matches with them. And we have no way of getting the door open.
Don’t tell me I’m “insulting” Congress by equating them with secretive children who have locked themselves in a closet with lots of sharp implements hanging on the wall! That is a very fitting description indeed.
We already know that they will do nothing to put pressure on hospitals and other malefactors in rising health care costs. Rising, no. Exploding is the better word. As this week’s “Businessweek” points out—in an article everyone should read—in many Congressional Districts the largest single employer may well be a hospital.
They’re not going to bite the hand that elects them. “Businessweek” (p.40, 1/18) has a wonderful article on a hospital in northern Washington State that has found a way to cut costs to the point that they can do the job on what Medicare pays them—AND win all sorts of awards for superior health care. That’s as close to walking on water as humans get.
So it IS possible to reduce medical costs—there simply is no will to do it. And, trust me, none of it will get done inside a locked room where we who elect Congress have no idea what is going on. It is a safe bet that very little good is happening.
Logs are being rolled; backs are being scratched; nobody who contributes money is getting gored—and we are not privy to any of it. So much for Obama’s campaign promises, over and over, that the entire process would be transparent and public.
Nancy Pelosi has proclaimed that this is one of the most transparent legislative processes in history. (I suppose if she is comparing it to the inner deliberations of the Spanish Inquisition she may have a point.) What bald faced hypocrisy.
They have twisted and turned the legislative process inside out, upside down and tied it into knots—all to avoid the legal requirements for open and public debate. What will come out will not be the health care reform we have been promised.
It will be nothing like that which presidents for most of a century have pushed and pleaded for. It may do little more than give us a faster road to bankruptcy for our already tottering system. It could have done so much more than that.
All we “parents” can do is stand at the locked door and listen to the giggles, rustling and crashing going on inside the room. We can wonder: when the door finally opens, what on earth will finally emerge?
The kiddies are in their locked room. They are playing with our health care. They are gluing things together; they are tearing things apart. They may even have matches with them. And we have no way of getting the door open.
Don’t tell me I’m “insulting” Congress by equating them with secretive children who have locked themselves in a closet with lots of sharp implements hanging on the wall! That is a very fitting description indeed.
We already know that they will do nothing to put pressure on hospitals and other malefactors in rising health care costs. Rising, no. Exploding is the better word. As this week’s “Businessweek” points out—in an article everyone should read—in many Congressional Districts the largest single employer may well be a hospital.
They’re not going to bite the hand that elects them. “Businessweek” (p.40, 1/18) has a wonderful article on a hospital in northern Washington State that has found a way to cut costs to the point that they can do the job on what Medicare pays them—AND win all sorts of awards for superior health care. That’s as close to walking on water as humans get.
So it IS possible to reduce medical costs—there simply is no will to do it. And, trust me, none of it will get done inside a locked room where we who elect Congress have no idea what is going on. It is a safe bet that very little good is happening.
Logs are being rolled; backs are being scratched; nobody who contributes money is getting gored—and we are not privy to any of it. So much for Obama’s campaign promises, over and over, that the entire process would be transparent and public.
Nancy Pelosi has proclaimed that this is one of the most transparent legislative processes in history. (I suppose if she is comparing it to the inner deliberations of the Spanish Inquisition she may have a point.) What bald faced hypocrisy.
They have twisted and turned the legislative process inside out, upside down and tied it into knots—all to avoid the legal requirements for open and public debate. What will come out will not be the health care reform we have been promised.
It will be nothing like that which presidents for most of a century have pushed and pleaded for. It may do little more than give us a faster road to bankruptcy for our already tottering system. It could have done so much more than that.
All we “parents” can do is stand at the locked door and listen to the giggles, rustling and crashing going on inside the room. We can wonder: when the door finally opens, what on earth will finally emerge?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Understanding The Muslim World
I remember the first time I made a couple of really close Muslim friends. One was Egyptian; the other was Algerian. Both were educated and lived in America; both were totally, totally Muslim/Arab/Near Eastern in outlook.
In many ways we found we viewed life in similar fashion—which they found surprising in an American. One day I remember them looking at me and asking, puzzled, “HOW ARE YOU SO LIKE US?” They manifestly did not feel this about the vast majority of Americans.
Why DID I so easily and naturally understand them? It still happens—not so long ago I spotted some Near Eastern families on a beach at Lake Michigan. Effortlessly I engaged them in a conversation that went on for hours. Men from Syria, Jordan and Egypt—paranoid about how other Americans might react to them, at ease with me.
I still remember how I was almost sick to my stomach after I listened to Bush and Cheney talk about going into Iraq in 2003—realizing utterly that they had zero/zip/zed knowledge of the people or situation they were about to deal with. (I’m not necessarily saying we should not have gone in; I’m just suggesting we might have taken the trouble to know what we were doing. I’m afraid we still haven’t done that.)
Do I have some magic trick that Bush/Cheny didn’t have—or our government now doesn’t possess? No, nothing “magic”—but, yes, there is something I have that most people in Washington do not have. It’s a religious background—a specific kind of religious background.
I was raised on the Jewish Bible—the Christian Old Testament. I mean I was really raised on it—I was perfectly familiar with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before I ever learned who Snow White or Cinderella were.
My father would read those stories to me—and then he would ask me questions about what kind of men they were, what was going on inside of their heads. I learned to look at (study, if you will) the great bandit warrior who became King David.
Study how he killed. Understand his view of loyalty—you wouldn’t want to work for the man! Get inside his head. Look at what Abraham feared—and look at what he did not fear. Read the sometimes appalling stories you find in Judges. A man’s girl friend is raped and killed. He cuts her in twelve parts and sends them out as a mute call for an army to avenge his loss. It works—who ARE these people?
Jacob’s daughter is raped. Her brothers demand that the entire village of the man that raped her circumcise themselves (no anesthesia) and then have the rapist marry her. While everyone is too sore to walk, the boys kill everyone in the village, man, woman and child.
Study Joshua’s military campaigns—the utter ruthlessness with which they are carried out. These are interesting people. They weep, they sing songs, they feast, they worship, they accumulate wives, they write poetry and they wage war with cold blooded ferocity.
Without realizing it, I got inside their heads. They haven’t changed in millennia, (rewatch “Lawrence of Arabia” just to check that out—Anthony Quinn comes as close to depicting Abraham as anyone ever has. No change in 4,000 years).
Do you really want to understand the people that blew up the World Trade Center and are now killing our boys in Afghanistan? You couldn’t do better than to immerse yourself in chapters 12-25 of Genesis. Scan the rest of the Pentateuch. Read Joshua, Judges, Ruth and the first half of Samuel. (Even a savant like David Petraeus might benefit.) Watch Lawrence of Arabia again. Maybe twice.
When you have understood Abraham (as well as Joshua and David), you will be a long way toward understanding all of Araby. When you have learned their roots you will, as accidentally as I did, become enough like them to understand them.
In many ways we found we viewed life in similar fashion—which they found surprising in an American. One day I remember them looking at me and asking, puzzled, “HOW ARE YOU SO LIKE US?” They manifestly did not feel this about the vast majority of Americans.
Why DID I so easily and naturally understand them? It still happens—not so long ago I spotted some Near Eastern families on a beach at Lake Michigan. Effortlessly I engaged them in a conversation that went on for hours. Men from Syria, Jordan and Egypt—paranoid about how other Americans might react to them, at ease with me.
I still remember how I was almost sick to my stomach after I listened to Bush and Cheney talk about going into Iraq in 2003—realizing utterly that they had zero/zip/zed knowledge of the people or situation they were about to deal with. (I’m not necessarily saying we should not have gone in; I’m just suggesting we might have taken the trouble to know what we were doing. I’m afraid we still haven’t done that.)
Do I have some magic trick that Bush/Cheny didn’t have—or our government now doesn’t possess? No, nothing “magic”—but, yes, there is something I have that most people in Washington do not have. It’s a religious background—a specific kind of religious background.
I was raised on the Jewish Bible—the Christian Old Testament. I mean I was really raised on it—I was perfectly familiar with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before I ever learned who Snow White or Cinderella were.
My father would read those stories to me—and then he would ask me questions about what kind of men they were, what was going on inside of their heads. I learned to look at (study, if you will) the great bandit warrior who became King David.
Study how he killed. Understand his view of loyalty—you wouldn’t want to work for the man! Get inside his head. Look at what Abraham feared—and look at what he did not fear. Read the sometimes appalling stories you find in Judges. A man’s girl friend is raped and killed. He cuts her in twelve parts and sends them out as a mute call for an army to avenge his loss. It works—who ARE these people?
Jacob’s daughter is raped. Her brothers demand that the entire village of the man that raped her circumcise themselves (no anesthesia) and then have the rapist marry her. While everyone is too sore to walk, the boys kill everyone in the village, man, woman and child.
Study Joshua’s military campaigns—the utter ruthlessness with which they are carried out. These are interesting people. They weep, they sing songs, they feast, they worship, they accumulate wives, they write poetry and they wage war with cold blooded ferocity.
Without realizing it, I got inside their heads. They haven’t changed in millennia, (rewatch “Lawrence of Arabia” just to check that out—Anthony Quinn comes as close to depicting Abraham as anyone ever has. No change in 4,000 years).
Do you really want to understand the people that blew up the World Trade Center and are now killing our boys in Afghanistan? You couldn’t do better than to immerse yourself in chapters 12-25 of Genesis. Scan the rest of the Pentateuch. Read Joshua, Judges, Ruth and the first half of Samuel. (Even a savant like David Petraeus might benefit.) Watch Lawrence of Arabia again. Maybe twice.
When you have understood Abraham (as well as Joshua and David), you will be a long way toward understanding all of Araby. When you have learned their roots you will, as accidentally as I did, become enough like them to understand them.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Health Care--Backing Into The Future
Pundits are beginning to suggest that one reason Obama doesn’t have a lot of achievement to show for his first year in office is that he spent so much time on health care reform. Yeah … . All I can say is that if he spent a lot of time and energy on health care it wasn’t easy to notice.
He certainly didn’t spend EFFECTIVE time and energy. LBJ got all kinds of Republican votes for Civil Rights, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama hasn’t gotten one Red senator to go with him. LBJ was a master at the art of compromise and trade-off—but the finished bills that came to his desk were pretty much what he wanted in their essentials.
What Obama has, so far, is a thousand or more pages that no one fully understands (it would be interesting to find out if ANYONE in Congress has actually read either of the whole bills through). He has allowed Congress to create a big target that any disaffected soul can shoot verbal arrows at—whether Republican or Democrat.
I don’t pretend to understand either the Senate or the House bill and I’m sure I won’t understand the reconciled bill that finally emerges from closed door sessions. (So much for Obama’s promise of open deliberations—back to Chicago style politics?) It’s unlikely that most of the members who eventually vote for or against the final bill will understand it any better than I.
One thing I do know, as do most people who have any kind of a handle on the situation, the cart has been firmly positioned in front of the horse.
Going in, there were two major problems with American health care—too many millions had no health care at all (incidentally the new bill will NOT include all of these). Second, health care cost too much, and costs were rising without any attempt at restraint.
It was as if every health care provider were allowed to act like a defense contractor in an emergency situation—what’s a few billion here or there in cost overruns? My grandfather worked as a receiving clerk in a major Grand Rapids hospital fifty years ago. He used to regale us with stories of how much sheer waste and misuse he saw from his small vantage point.
It truly offended his Dutch soul to see all the goods that hospital ordered and either never used or tossed out. He could see lots of ways in which the system could be changed—to deliver the same care for considerably less cost. This was fifty and sixty years ago.
So, it is obvious that before you can overload a crashing system with millions of more patients (like piling more debt on Chrysler), you have to figure out ways to effectively cut costs. (No, boys and girls, this does not mean more health care rationing than exists now—very possibly LESS. Just better use of what is there.)
Get rid of the waste that my grandpa saw—after all many of these institutions are “non-profit”, which means they have little motivation to beef up a bottom line by cutting costs. Consolidate the dozens of health care providers who order this or that test without talking to each other—I shouldn’t have to walk into a specialist’s office and find out that his computer knows nothing about me or my condition. He should immediately know everything my GP and any other specialist knows, what tests I had, what medicines have been tried, et cetera.
And, above all, above all, there should be a single payer. If we went our medical system to survive, private insurance companies—except as supplements to Medicare for the wealthy, if they want them—should be obsolete. They are a luxury we cannot afford.
Correcting a glitch in my health insurance shouldn’t require five hours on the phone, as it did me. It should be like a single or call to Social Security. Bingo! The problem is fixed. Not with private insurance. Having one payer will allow it to force cost savings on the whole industry.
We won’t have that. There will be no real means of controlling rising—and potentially bankrupting—costs. The Republicans are right—as it stands, costs will just go up more. And we won’t even cover everybody who needs it.
If Obama does as good a job in Afghanistan as he’s done on health, we may as well surrender now. Nothing he promised has come to pass. Should we vote for this mess? If you truly believe that nothing else is possible, I guess you hold your nose and say, Yes. But after all these decades, it’s a pity to think that this mess is all we’ve accompolished.
He certainly didn’t spend EFFECTIVE time and energy. LBJ got all kinds of Republican votes for Civil Rights, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama hasn’t gotten one Red senator to go with him. LBJ was a master at the art of compromise and trade-off—but the finished bills that came to his desk were pretty much what he wanted in their essentials.
What Obama has, so far, is a thousand or more pages that no one fully understands (it would be interesting to find out if ANYONE in Congress has actually read either of the whole bills through). He has allowed Congress to create a big target that any disaffected soul can shoot verbal arrows at—whether Republican or Democrat.
I don’t pretend to understand either the Senate or the House bill and I’m sure I won’t understand the reconciled bill that finally emerges from closed door sessions. (So much for Obama’s promise of open deliberations—back to Chicago style politics?) It’s unlikely that most of the members who eventually vote for or against the final bill will understand it any better than I.
One thing I do know, as do most people who have any kind of a handle on the situation, the cart has been firmly positioned in front of the horse.
Going in, there were two major problems with American health care—too many millions had no health care at all (incidentally the new bill will NOT include all of these). Second, health care cost too much, and costs were rising without any attempt at restraint.
It was as if every health care provider were allowed to act like a defense contractor in an emergency situation—what’s a few billion here or there in cost overruns? My grandfather worked as a receiving clerk in a major Grand Rapids hospital fifty years ago. He used to regale us with stories of how much sheer waste and misuse he saw from his small vantage point.
It truly offended his Dutch soul to see all the goods that hospital ordered and either never used or tossed out. He could see lots of ways in which the system could be changed—to deliver the same care for considerably less cost. This was fifty and sixty years ago.
So, it is obvious that before you can overload a crashing system with millions of more patients (like piling more debt on Chrysler), you have to figure out ways to effectively cut costs. (No, boys and girls, this does not mean more health care rationing than exists now—very possibly LESS. Just better use of what is there.)
Get rid of the waste that my grandpa saw—after all many of these institutions are “non-profit”, which means they have little motivation to beef up a bottom line by cutting costs. Consolidate the dozens of health care providers who order this or that test without talking to each other—I shouldn’t have to walk into a specialist’s office and find out that his computer knows nothing about me or my condition. He should immediately know everything my GP and any other specialist knows, what tests I had, what medicines have been tried, et cetera.
And, above all, above all, there should be a single payer. If we went our medical system to survive, private insurance companies—except as supplements to Medicare for the wealthy, if they want them—should be obsolete. They are a luxury we cannot afford.
Correcting a glitch in my health insurance shouldn’t require five hours on the phone, as it did me. It should be like a single or call to Social Security. Bingo! The problem is fixed. Not with private insurance. Having one payer will allow it to force cost savings on the whole industry.
We won’t have that. There will be no real means of controlling rising—and potentially bankrupting—costs. The Republicans are right—as it stands, costs will just go up more. And we won’t even cover everybody who needs it.
If Obama does as good a job in Afghanistan as he’s done on health, we may as well surrender now. Nothing he promised has come to pass. Should we vote for this mess? If you truly believe that nothing else is possible, I guess you hold your nose and say, Yes. But after all these decades, it’s a pity to think that this mess is all we’ve accompolished.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Heritage Lost IV
Nothing I have written so far should be seen as an evaluation of the comparative worth of any particular culture. Or a denigration of any. I merely say that we Americans are a product of a particular culture and, in order to understand who we are, it is vital that we know and understand that culture. Otherwise we risk becoming confused and ineffective.
The culture we are a product of is that of 2,000 years of British/Anglo Saxon (English) history. Our democracy, our habits of governance, the words we speak, the common illusions we make all rise out of an English/American past.
This is true whether we are white, black or yellow, European, Asiatic or African. We all come here—some to escape hanging, some from debtors’ prison, others to flee religious or political persecution, still others chained to the hold of a slave ship, yet others to avoid starvation. Almost none of us came by choice.
Millions of us share tales of misery and privation leaving our homes, of relatives that died on Atlantic voyages, of nativist persecution as we came ashore. We all faced harsh prejudice—because of an Irish brogue, a dark skin, a Catholic or Jewish faith.
Somehow we stopped being Zulu, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Bantu, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, French, Finnish, Korean, or English—and became Americans. I am a student of names—but it is more and more common to meet an American who hasn’t the faintest notion where his ancestors came from or what his name might mean.
THAT is why this country works. Benjamin Franklin expressed concern about the nation holding together as more and more non-English folk crowded ashore even in his day. Not to worry; they BECAME English /Americans. They adopted enough of the culture of the founding fathers to rub the rough and potentially violent edges off their diversity.
Whether the person sitting next to you had a Polish grandfather or had an ancestor on the Mayflower, the language he speaks is as much a product of Shakespeare and the King James Bible as that of any Londoner or Yorkshireman.
He believes in—and more importantly UNDERSTANDS—how this thing called democracy works. He has, without knowing it, absorbed a thousand years of English experimentation and experience (some of it quite bloody) in our unique form of self-government. It is HIS culture.
He is no longer European, African or Asian—he is this unique thing called “American” that began with the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Mayflower Compact. A past that builds upon Milton, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the English Civil War, the rise of Parliament to a co-equal position with that of the king, the defense of democracy on battlefields in Europe and America (at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, both sides were fighting to defend democracy as they saw it), and throws in Kit Marlowe, Dunne, Swift, Addison, Edmund Burke, Hobbes, John Locke and Walpole—this is now HIS past. It forms him as much as it does any WASP.
No. He should not forget or be ignorant of the heritage he came from, be it Dutch, Chinese or West African. But, above all, he should know and understand his AMERICAN heritage. I will go so far as to say that he is not fully an American who does not know its past and its tradition.
For one thing, Democracy is actually a delicate flower. It only seems to grow well in certain soils—it doesn’t even do that well in many parts of Europe. To keep it, we must understand how it grows and what it needs to nourish it. Other cultures will not, cannot do this.
A common language binds a nation together like no other glue can. Diversity in language can be as dangerous as a load of nitro-glycerin. I can think of few things in history that have torn a nation apart faster. The Cold War, for instance, grew out of a two thousand year old split between the Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire and the Greek speaking half. The two halves spent most of those millennia at war or in a state of near war.
Study other cultures, well and good. Necessary, even. But jolly well learn your own first. It’s not necessarily better than any other—but it is most necessary to know it. That’s what we’re drifting away from in our schools today.
The culture we are a product of is that of 2,000 years of British/Anglo Saxon (English) history. Our democracy, our habits of governance, the words we speak, the common illusions we make all rise out of an English/American past.
This is true whether we are white, black or yellow, European, Asiatic or African. We all come here—some to escape hanging, some from debtors’ prison, others to flee religious or political persecution, still others chained to the hold of a slave ship, yet others to avoid starvation. Almost none of us came by choice.
Millions of us share tales of misery and privation leaving our homes, of relatives that died on Atlantic voyages, of nativist persecution as we came ashore. We all faced harsh prejudice—because of an Irish brogue, a dark skin, a Catholic or Jewish faith.
Somehow we stopped being Zulu, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Bantu, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, French, Finnish, Korean, or English—and became Americans. I am a student of names—but it is more and more common to meet an American who hasn’t the faintest notion where his ancestors came from or what his name might mean.
THAT is why this country works. Benjamin Franklin expressed concern about the nation holding together as more and more non-English folk crowded ashore even in his day. Not to worry; they BECAME English /Americans. They adopted enough of the culture of the founding fathers to rub the rough and potentially violent edges off their diversity.
Whether the person sitting next to you had a Polish grandfather or had an ancestor on the Mayflower, the language he speaks is as much a product of Shakespeare and the King James Bible as that of any Londoner or Yorkshireman.
He believes in—and more importantly UNDERSTANDS—how this thing called democracy works. He has, without knowing it, absorbed a thousand years of English experimentation and experience (some of it quite bloody) in our unique form of self-government. It is HIS culture.
He is no longer European, African or Asian—he is this unique thing called “American” that began with the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Mayflower Compact. A past that builds upon Milton, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the English Civil War, the rise of Parliament to a co-equal position with that of the king, the defense of democracy on battlefields in Europe and America (at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, both sides were fighting to defend democracy as they saw it), and throws in Kit Marlowe, Dunne, Swift, Addison, Edmund Burke, Hobbes, John Locke and Walpole—this is now HIS past. It forms him as much as it does any WASP.
No. He should not forget or be ignorant of the heritage he came from, be it Dutch, Chinese or West African. But, above all, he should know and understand his AMERICAN heritage. I will go so far as to say that he is not fully an American who does not know its past and its tradition.
For one thing, Democracy is actually a delicate flower. It only seems to grow well in certain soils—it doesn’t even do that well in many parts of Europe. To keep it, we must understand how it grows and what it needs to nourish it. Other cultures will not, cannot do this.
A common language binds a nation together like no other glue can. Diversity in language can be as dangerous as a load of nitro-glycerin. I can think of few things in history that have torn a nation apart faster. The Cold War, for instance, grew out of a two thousand year old split between the Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire and the Greek speaking half. The two halves spent most of those millennia at war or in a state of near war.
Study other cultures, well and good. Necessary, even. But jolly well learn your own first. It’s not necessarily better than any other—but it is most necessary to know it. That’s what we’re drifting away from in our schools today.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Heritage Lost III
Historically, what happens when a nation becomes truly diverse—multi-lingual, made up of widely different cultures and religions? Historically? They, more often than not, start shooting at one another. A classic case is the early United States.
One section of the nation remained resolutely medieval. It was championed by men like Jefferson and Calhoun—who viewed common folk as “dogs”. Its foundation was essentially agricultural, with an upper class that lived on large estates serviced by peasants/slaves.
Land and the peasants/slaves attached to it was the basis of wealth. It was a slow paced often elegant way of life in which gentlemen, like their English upper class equivalents, did not dirty their hands by doing any money making work.
Factories, and the accoutrements of an industrial society, were considered—at best—déclassé. Education was deemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the “better sort”. Whites in that society dreamed of a day when they too might rise—like Andrew Jackson—to the level of society that rode to hounds and lived in substantial manor houses.
North of the Pennsylvania border was a wholly different nation—as diverse as a country could be from the antebellum South. It was something new, unlike almost anything the world had ever seen before. It had become one of the first societies on earth to figure out a way to create a middle class without the necessity of slave labor to maintain it.
The basis of its wealth was industrial production, railroads, increasingly mechanized farms and great clipper ships that bought and sold in every quarter of the globe. It was perhaps the first society on earth in which real wealth was counted in cash money.
In its newness, reveling in the produce of its factories and businesses—or of its sole proprietor farms—it looked with distain on its Southern half, imagining itself to be morally superior because its labor force (slaving at a dollar a day for six twelve hour days a week without benefits) was nominally “free”. The contempt was richly returned by the South.
The diversity became so total that by mid-century they became utterly unable to communicate with one another. While the British and French empires were able to work out the slavery issue without firing a shot, Americans couldn’t even talk about it.
Post Masters in the South were forbidden to deliver mail from addresses in the North suspected of having abolitionist leanings. Not even in the throes of the McCarthy witch hunts was free speech so limited.
As early as 1775, a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress (Joseph Galloway) remained loyal to England, explaining that the differences between North and South were so great, that if the British Army were withdrawn, civil war would be inevitable. He was right.
Oh, but you, say—that’s an extreme example. Has no French Canadian ever sent a mail bomb to some one in Canada whose chief crime was that he spoke English? Have Spanish Basques ever tried to kill Spaniards who speak Spanish? Ever notice how well the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium get along? Or the Frisians and Hollanders of the Netherlands?
How about the tribes of Sri Lanka? Or the warring tribes of Nigeria. What of the Muslim and Hindu sections of India—now divided into two separate nations? To celebrate the initial division, a Hindu radical assassinated Gandhi. Now they merely threaten one another with nuclear weapons. Or there is always Rwanda.
Diverse human tribes have a long history—oh, they’re starting to make hostile noises in Northern Ireland again and little love is lost between Israel and the Palestinians—of not getting along too well. They just should not be made to share the same sandbox.
Now let’s look at why this country—uniquely—has worked. Up to now.
One section of the nation remained resolutely medieval. It was championed by men like Jefferson and Calhoun—who viewed common folk as “dogs”. Its foundation was essentially agricultural, with an upper class that lived on large estates serviced by peasants/slaves.
Land and the peasants/slaves attached to it was the basis of wealth. It was a slow paced often elegant way of life in which gentlemen, like their English upper class equivalents, did not dirty their hands by doing any money making work.
Factories, and the accoutrements of an industrial society, were considered—at best—déclassé. Education was deemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the “better sort”. Whites in that society dreamed of a day when they too might rise—like Andrew Jackson—to the level of society that rode to hounds and lived in substantial manor houses.
North of the Pennsylvania border was a wholly different nation—as diverse as a country could be from the antebellum South. It was something new, unlike almost anything the world had ever seen before. It had become one of the first societies on earth to figure out a way to create a middle class without the necessity of slave labor to maintain it.
The basis of its wealth was industrial production, railroads, increasingly mechanized farms and great clipper ships that bought and sold in every quarter of the globe. It was perhaps the first society on earth in which real wealth was counted in cash money.
In its newness, reveling in the produce of its factories and businesses—or of its sole proprietor farms—it looked with distain on its Southern half, imagining itself to be morally superior because its labor force (slaving at a dollar a day for six twelve hour days a week without benefits) was nominally “free”. The contempt was richly returned by the South.
The diversity became so total that by mid-century they became utterly unable to communicate with one another. While the British and French empires were able to work out the slavery issue without firing a shot, Americans couldn’t even talk about it.
Post Masters in the South were forbidden to deliver mail from addresses in the North suspected of having abolitionist leanings. Not even in the throes of the McCarthy witch hunts was free speech so limited.
As early as 1775, a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress (Joseph Galloway) remained loyal to England, explaining that the differences between North and South were so great, that if the British Army were withdrawn, civil war would be inevitable. He was right.
Oh, but you, say—that’s an extreme example. Has no French Canadian ever sent a mail bomb to some one in Canada whose chief crime was that he spoke English? Have Spanish Basques ever tried to kill Spaniards who speak Spanish? Ever notice how well the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium get along? Or the Frisians and Hollanders of the Netherlands?
How about the tribes of Sri Lanka? Or the warring tribes of Nigeria. What of the Muslim and Hindu sections of India—now divided into two separate nations? To celebrate the initial division, a Hindu radical assassinated Gandhi. Now they merely threaten one another with nuclear weapons. Or there is always Rwanda.
Diverse human tribes have a long history—oh, they’re starting to make hostile noises in Northern Ireland again and little love is lost between Israel and the Palestinians—of not getting along too well. They just should not be made to share the same sandbox.
Now let’s look at why this country—uniquely—has worked. Up to now.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Heritage Lost II
I may have misstated things in my last blog. We aren’t losing our literary and cultural heritage; in many cases it is long gone. I substituted again today—this time in an English class. They were all diligently reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.
Let’s pass over the fact that they were being assigned a single twenty-eight page chapter for a weekend’s work—which the teacher called a “very long” assignment. (My high school English teachers would probably have given us the whole 105 page book for a single weekend.)
Out of curiosity, I asked each class if they had any idea where Steinbeck got the title from. Tilt. So I told them about Bobby Burn’s poem, “To a Mouse”. I quoted the relevant line, “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
One young man, very sarcastically, observed, “We’re all much smarter now.” I plowed on. None had any idea that “East of Eden” is a Biblical reference or that “The Grapes of Wrath” comes from the Bible through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Since none of them knew, I doubt very, very much that the teacher had any idea (she could easily be my daughter). No one in any room I’ve ever subbed in knew that “Lord of the Flies” comes from an old Biblical reference (albeit satirical) to the devil.
Authors rarely use references like these for titles without making a point. You can miss part of what the whole book or story is about if the title means nothing to you. Neither this teacher nor her students knew or cared.
But how could you fully understand Hemingway’s intent in “The Sun Also Rises” if you didn’t understand the reference to the life-weary writer of the Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, who uses the endless, mindless rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the pointlessness of life.
If you don’t know there is a background—or a metaphor—why bother to read this or any book at all? (I remember how excited I was, back in elementary school, when I suddenly realized that Jack London was doing more than tell a story in his “Sea Wolf”.
He was telling me—he was trying to proselytize—his moral view of the universe in the words of his main character. But without the background I already had in literature and the Bible, I doubt if I would have gotten it.) If Steinbeck has something to say beyond the immediate tragedy of Lennie getting shot, these kids are unlikely to notice.
The kids I saw today—bright, decently affluent, many college bound—have no cultural foundation that can help them see beyond the story at hand. Allusion, reference, metaphor are lost on them. This is what was so upsetting to the college teacher I wrote of last time—who found that her students had no knowledge of the most common Biblical/cultural figures and stories.
How would you teach about computers to a primitive tribesman who’s never seen written language or symbols, never seen an electronic device, never even seen a metal box or a glass screen? That’s pretty much the predicament we’ve placed ourselves in--for history and literature.
To have a frame of reference or a context requires having some basic background information. We’re raising a generation that has largely been deprived of just the raw information needed to understand the stories—in newspapers or in books—going on around them.
We expect these virginally ignorant youngsters to maintain a functioning democracy, to hold a society together, to pass on a culture and way of life to future generations.
Just how likely? More on this later.
Let’s pass over the fact that they were being assigned a single twenty-eight page chapter for a weekend’s work—which the teacher called a “very long” assignment. (My high school English teachers would probably have given us the whole 105 page book for a single weekend.)
Out of curiosity, I asked each class if they had any idea where Steinbeck got the title from. Tilt. So I told them about Bobby Burn’s poem, “To a Mouse”. I quoted the relevant line, “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
One young man, very sarcastically, observed, “We’re all much smarter now.” I plowed on. None had any idea that “East of Eden” is a Biblical reference or that “The Grapes of Wrath” comes from the Bible through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Since none of them knew, I doubt very, very much that the teacher had any idea (she could easily be my daughter). No one in any room I’ve ever subbed in knew that “Lord of the Flies” comes from an old Biblical reference (albeit satirical) to the devil.
Authors rarely use references like these for titles without making a point. You can miss part of what the whole book or story is about if the title means nothing to you. Neither this teacher nor her students knew or cared.
But how could you fully understand Hemingway’s intent in “The Sun Also Rises” if you didn’t understand the reference to the life-weary writer of the Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, who uses the endless, mindless rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the pointlessness of life.
If you don’t know there is a background—or a metaphor—why bother to read this or any book at all? (I remember how excited I was, back in elementary school, when I suddenly realized that Jack London was doing more than tell a story in his “Sea Wolf”.
He was telling me—he was trying to proselytize—his moral view of the universe in the words of his main character. But without the background I already had in literature and the Bible, I doubt if I would have gotten it.) If Steinbeck has something to say beyond the immediate tragedy of Lennie getting shot, these kids are unlikely to notice.
The kids I saw today—bright, decently affluent, many college bound—have no cultural foundation that can help them see beyond the story at hand. Allusion, reference, metaphor are lost on them. This is what was so upsetting to the college teacher I wrote of last time—who found that her students had no knowledge of the most common Biblical/cultural figures and stories.
How would you teach about computers to a primitive tribesman who’s never seen written language or symbols, never seen an electronic device, never even seen a metal box or a glass screen? That’s pretty much the predicament we’ve placed ourselves in--for history and literature.
To have a frame of reference or a context requires having some basic background information. We’re raising a generation that has largely been deprived of just the raw information needed to understand the stories—in newspapers or in books—going on around them.
We expect these virginally ignorant youngsters to maintain a functioning democracy, to hold a society together, to pass on a culture and way of life to future generations.
Just how likely? More on this later.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Heritage Lost
We are losing our heritage—everything that made us uniquely American, uniquely democratic and gave us the most flexible and utilitarian language in the world. We’re just letting it drift away—and that should give us pause.
I subbed again today—in a well appointed suburban school with lots of students headed for college and a bright faculty. I greeted one of those faculty members with a “Merry Christmas”, which momentarily baffled her until I explained that today was the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Feast of The Three Kings or Russian Christmas.
She smiled through her blank look. I couldn’t resist adding that yesterday was “Twelfth Night”, at which she batted my arm and admitted, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I enjoy doing that sort of thing now and then.
(On St. Patrick’s Day I, a good and Protestant Hollander, try to wear orange. No one gets it or even notices it—although most of them wear something green. No doubt a white carnation—symbol of the House of Orange--would leave them even more oblivious.)
Today in one of my classes I showed part of the film, “Schindler’s List”. The kids didn’t get it. At all. One, with a confused look on his face, turned to me and asked if those were German uniforms on the soldiers.
The Hebrew Shabbat prayers at the beginning reduced them to snickering giggles, with no idea what they might be watching. When they saw people herded onto cattle cars, no one had any idea what was happening. Any and all undercurrents in the film passed them by with neither understanding nor impact. (Only the explicit sex scene evoked any interest.)
I realized it would take hours to give these seventeen year olds any idea of what was going on in the film, what it was all about. I didn’t have the time and, speaking from experience, these kids would not have hung in for the explanation.
Occasionally I will give an historical or Biblical reference when giving an assignment in an English or history class. Blank, bored looks. The backgrounds of historical figures—whose actions dramatically affect the lives of these kids now—are of zero interest.
Something as esoteric as Genghis Khan (whose conquest of Asia made the Marco Polo trip possible and began the quest that sent Columbus to America) or Napoleon leaves them totally clueless—a cluelessness utterly without curiosity.
Make a Biblical reference today—forget the religious aspect—and see how many kids can recognize names like “Judas”, “David and Goliath” or “Samson and Delilah”. A college English instructor of my acquaintance got so frustrated at the inability of her students to recognize Biblical allusions in literature that she taught a whole section on common Biblical names and terms.
She was as irreligious as a human can get, but she understood that a huge amount of our cultural heritage goes out the window of the reference points are lost. It isn’t just the Bible. When I was in high school we covered Bobby Burns.
See how many students reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” can tell you that the title comes from a Burn’s poem—let alone which poem! Go through a modern literature anthology and see how many of the short stories and poems come out of the English/American past. Very few.
THAT’S our heritage. Kids go through school never exposed to Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, let alone Bronte, Chaucer, Milton or Jane Austen. What about Jack London or A. Conan Doyle. THAT’S our tradition—that one that formulated our language and our American heritage.
The books have lovely stories from Africa, South America and Asia. I do not denigrate them. But they are NOT the building blocks of THIS nation—and OUR language.
Next time, let’s take a quick look at what happens when a culture loses—or never gains—its own distinctive characteristics and traditions.
I subbed again today—in a well appointed suburban school with lots of students headed for college and a bright faculty. I greeted one of those faculty members with a “Merry Christmas”, which momentarily baffled her until I explained that today was the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Feast of The Three Kings or Russian Christmas.
She smiled through her blank look. I couldn’t resist adding that yesterday was “Twelfth Night”, at which she batted my arm and admitted, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I enjoy doing that sort of thing now and then.
(On St. Patrick’s Day I, a good and Protestant Hollander, try to wear orange. No one gets it or even notices it—although most of them wear something green. No doubt a white carnation—symbol of the House of Orange--would leave them even more oblivious.)
Today in one of my classes I showed part of the film, “Schindler’s List”. The kids didn’t get it. At all. One, with a confused look on his face, turned to me and asked if those were German uniforms on the soldiers.
The Hebrew Shabbat prayers at the beginning reduced them to snickering giggles, with no idea what they might be watching. When they saw people herded onto cattle cars, no one had any idea what was happening. Any and all undercurrents in the film passed them by with neither understanding nor impact. (Only the explicit sex scene evoked any interest.)
I realized it would take hours to give these seventeen year olds any idea of what was going on in the film, what it was all about. I didn’t have the time and, speaking from experience, these kids would not have hung in for the explanation.
Occasionally I will give an historical or Biblical reference when giving an assignment in an English or history class. Blank, bored looks. The backgrounds of historical figures—whose actions dramatically affect the lives of these kids now—are of zero interest.
Something as esoteric as Genghis Khan (whose conquest of Asia made the Marco Polo trip possible and began the quest that sent Columbus to America) or Napoleon leaves them totally clueless—a cluelessness utterly without curiosity.
Make a Biblical reference today—forget the religious aspect—and see how many kids can recognize names like “Judas”, “David and Goliath” or “Samson and Delilah”. A college English instructor of my acquaintance got so frustrated at the inability of her students to recognize Biblical allusions in literature that she taught a whole section on common Biblical names and terms.
She was as irreligious as a human can get, but she understood that a huge amount of our cultural heritage goes out the window of the reference points are lost. It isn’t just the Bible. When I was in high school we covered Bobby Burns.
See how many students reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” can tell you that the title comes from a Burn’s poem—let alone which poem! Go through a modern literature anthology and see how many of the short stories and poems come out of the English/American past. Very few.
THAT’S our heritage. Kids go through school never exposed to Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, let alone Bronte, Chaucer, Milton or Jane Austen. What about Jack London or A. Conan Doyle. THAT’S our tradition—that one that formulated our language and our American heritage.
The books have lovely stories from Africa, South America and Asia. I do not denigrate them. But they are NOT the building blocks of THIS nation—and OUR language.
Next time, let’s take a quick look at what happens when a culture loses—or never gains—its own distinctive characteristics and traditions.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Tiger Woods And Forgiveness
Brit Hume caused a stir the other night by suggesting that Tiger Woods might find the forgiveness, the restoration, the emotional and spiritual healing in Christianity rather than in the Buddhism he has supposedly embraced.
Hume suggested that Woods leave his chosen faith and return to Christianity. People went into shock over this statement for a couple of reasons. 1) Christianity has a reputation for being a noxious set of beliefs and behaviors among many decent people.
Unfortunately some of its adherents do a great deal to earn Christianity its bad rap by their actions (sniping abortion providers), their sometimes intemperate words, and the appearance many give of being opposed to any program that benefits the poor—happily ignoring the Biblical suggestion that “he who gives to the poor lends to the Lord” (and can expect payback).
2) Most folk have absolutely no idea what Christianity actually teaches (I didn’t say how it behaves in all too many cases, but the ideal it promulgates, however fitfully.) Christ gives us a clue in the term he uses to identify his own teachings.
He calls his message the “good news”. Good news about what? Specifically the good news that he has come to reconcile humans to their estranged deity. In other words, the whole movement begins with a story of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Having reconciliation at the core of the faith is unique to Christianity. A) man betrays God and earns a traitor’s penalty. B) God takes the initiative and sends Christ to pay that penalty and to effect a reconciliation between the offended and the offender.
That notion is not found in any other faith or religion. Not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Islam or Shintoism, or any other form of religion. That one point is unique to the teachings of Christ. It is brilliantly depicted in Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Here God reaches out to man to reconcile.
Often in the New Testament, before healing a sick person, Christ first tells him that his “sins are forgiven”. This, more than mere healing from disease or even death, is the real “good news” he came to bring.
Mr. Hume has rightly chosen to ignore all the ways in which Christians show intractability in behavior and a very human unwillingness to forgive anyone for anything they object to—and he has taken us back to the most basic tenet of his own faith.
He is suggesting that possibly Mr. Woods greatest need right now is to realize that all of his blunders, foolishness and damaging behavior can be forgiven. He can be reconciled with his God, with the better side of himself, with his public and, possibly, with his own family.
It is not a concept Woods will find in Buddhism. Hume is saying that this reconciliation—and the path to it—just might be Tiger Woods’ greatest need at the moment. There is no question that at this moment Mr. Woods appears to be staggering about like an ox that has just been struck with a hammer blow right between the eyes.
He clearly needs to reconcile something in his life, if only to put things back in perspective. It starts with saying something like, “I’m sorry; I really messed up.” Then you go on from there. “Forgive me; I shall amend … .”
“I know it was wrong; I know it was stupid.” What more can anyone say after he’s said that? Especially if it has the ring of sincerity. Hume was trying to his best to suggest a way back for Tiger—one that many fans would understand and be forced by their own beliefs to accept.
It might be a good strategy as well as good theology.
Hume suggested that Woods leave his chosen faith and return to Christianity. People went into shock over this statement for a couple of reasons. 1) Christianity has a reputation for being a noxious set of beliefs and behaviors among many decent people.
Unfortunately some of its adherents do a great deal to earn Christianity its bad rap by their actions (sniping abortion providers), their sometimes intemperate words, and the appearance many give of being opposed to any program that benefits the poor—happily ignoring the Biblical suggestion that “he who gives to the poor lends to the Lord” (and can expect payback).
2) Most folk have absolutely no idea what Christianity actually teaches (I didn’t say how it behaves in all too many cases, but the ideal it promulgates, however fitfully.) Christ gives us a clue in the term he uses to identify his own teachings.
He calls his message the “good news”. Good news about what? Specifically the good news that he has come to reconcile humans to their estranged deity. In other words, the whole movement begins with a story of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Having reconciliation at the core of the faith is unique to Christianity. A) man betrays God and earns a traitor’s penalty. B) God takes the initiative and sends Christ to pay that penalty and to effect a reconciliation between the offended and the offender.
That notion is not found in any other faith or religion. Not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Islam or Shintoism, or any other form of religion. That one point is unique to the teachings of Christ. It is brilliantly depicted in Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Here God reaches out to man to reconcile.
Often in the New Testament, before healing a sick person, Christ first tells him that his “sins are forgiven”. This, more than mere healing from disease or even death, is the real “good news” he came to bring.
Mr. Hume has rightly chosen to ignore all the ways in which Christians show intractability in behavior and a very human unwillingness to forgive anyone for anything they object to—and he has taken us back to the most basic tenet of his own faith.
He is suggesting that possibly Mr. Woods greatest need right now is to realize that all of his blunders, foolishness and damaging behavior can be forgiven. He can be reconciled with his God, with the better side of himself, with his public and, possibly, with his own family.
It is not a concept Woods will find in Buddhism. Hume is saying that this reconciliation—and the path to it—just might be Tiger Woods’ greatest need at the moment. There is no question that at this moment Mr. Woods appears to be staggering about like an ox that has just been struck with a hammer blow right between the eyes.
He clearly needs to reconcile something in his life, if only to put things back in perspective. It starts with saying something like, “I’m sorry; I really messed up.” Then you go on from there. “Forgive me; I shall amend … .”
“I know it was wrong; I know it was stupid.” What more can anyone say after he’s said that? Especially if it has the ring of sincerity. Hume was trying to his best to suggest a way back for Tiger—one that many fans would understand and be forced by their own beliefs to accept.
It might be a good strategy as well as good theology.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
It's Them Damn' Pitchers
The final issue of “Newsweek” every year has been a double issue. I’ve always looked forward to it—because it has always had a large section at the back of the book that is filled with best editorial cartoons of that year.
I set this year’s issue aside until I had a nice relaxed day to open it and peruse the cartoons. This year, there was a single page with a grand total of six editorial cartoons. Why?
I fell in love with editorial cartooning back in the late 1940s when I whiled away summer days in the stacks of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Over the years I came upon all sorts of fascinating things—Civil War diaries, official evaluations on the effectiveness of American Strategic bombing during World War II (which, obviously, no one in the Pentagon had read by the 1960s), but my greatest delight came in reading the editorial cartoonists.
My immediate favorite was David Lowe of the “London Times”. He skewed the rising Nazis, British policy before the war, and American foolishness throughout it all with delicious ease. He helped form my historical images of Stalin, Hitler, Colonel Blimp and the American Congress as no one else ever has.
My second favorite was, immediately, the young corporal William Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons of World War II. (I got my hands on a memorial edition last year—they’re just as good now as they were then.) Willie and Joe shambling past a bombed French farm house with the housewife glaring at them, “Don’t blame us, lady.”
(To my mind, Mauldin was never as good when he went on to draw civilian cartoons for the St. Louis “Post-Dispatch” after the war, second Pulitzer Prize or no. I gather Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” agrees with me.)
There were more modern cartoonists that I thoroughly enjoyed—internationally syndicated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant created a little penguin, Punk, to stand at the bottom of his cartoons and make wonderfully sarcastic comments. (Did Punk share Oliphant’s Pulitzer?)
The “Washington Post’s” Herblock did perfectly dreadful—and deserved—things to people like Joe McCarthy and Nixon. He drew from 1929 to 2001, pulling down three Pulitzer prizes, probably deserving more. Want a fast overview of Twentieth Century American history? You couldn’t do better than scan an anthology of Herblock’s cartoons.
I could go on. Did anyone ever do a better job at political satire than Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”? Every example of human behavior—and foibles—is represented in at least one of his animal characters. V.T. Hamlin created the wonderfully satiric “Alley Oop” in 1932, threw in a time machine the year I was born and went on poking holes in social pretenses for decades.
So I’ve always enjoyed looking at “Newsweek’s” annual review of what editorial cartoonists are saying now. They denied me that pleasure this year. I’m not happy. They substituted the review with printed interviews with Hillary and Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Geithner, Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos. I got half-way through them and realized I was bored to tears (I don’t trust was Karzai SAYS; I want to hear what he DOES. Capice?)
News is going away—not just in “Newsweek”. So is pungent commentary, as it has been so vividly illustrated for the past century or more on editorial pages by brilliant cartoonists.
Perhaps the highest accolade given to an American political cartoonist came in 1876 when Spanish police recognized fugitive political Boss Tweed from a Thomas Nast cartoon in “Harper’s Weekly”. The man had stolen around five billion (in modern dollars), he’d escaped prison, but an editorial cartoon finally brought him down.
As Tweed put it, “It was them damn’ pitchers”. Apparently the editor of “Newsweek” felt the same way about them.
I set this year’s issue aside until I had a nice relaxed day to open it and peruse the cartoons. This year, there was a single page with a grand total of six editorial cartoons. Why?
I fell in love with editorial cartooning back in the late 1940s when I whiled away summer days in the stacks of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Over the years I came upon all sorts of fascinating things—Civil War diaries, official evaluations on the effectiveness of American Strategic bombing during World War II (which, obviously, no one in the Pentagon had read by the 1960s), but my greatest delight came in reading the editorial cartoonists.
My immediate favorite was David Lowe of the “London Times”. He skewed the rising Nazis, British policy before the war, and American foolishness throughout it all with delicious ease. He helped form my historical images of Stalin, Hitler, Colonel Blimp and the American Congress as no one else ever has.
My second favorite was, immediately, the young corporal William Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons of World War II. (I got my hands on a memorial edition last year—they’re just as good now as they were then.) Willie and Joe shambling past a bombed French farm house with the housewife glaring at them, “Don’t blame us, lady.”
(To my mind, Mauldin was never as good when he went on to draw civilian cartoons for the St. Louis “Post-Dispatch” after the war, second Pulitzer Prize or no. I gather Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” agrees with me.)
There were more modern cartoonists that I thoroughly enjoyed—internationally syndicated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant created a little penguin, Punk, to stand at the bottom of his cartoons and make wonderfully sarcastic comments. (Did Punk share Oliphant’s Pulitzer?)
The “Washington Post’s” Herblock did perfectly dreadful—and deserved—things to people like Joe McCarthy and Nixon. He drew from 1929 to 2001, pulling down three Pulitzer prizes, probably deserving more. Want a fast overview of Twentieth Century American history? You couldn’t do better than scan an anthology of Herblock’s cartoons.
I could go on. Did anyone ever do a better job at political satire than Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”? Every example of human behavior—and foibles—is represented in at least one of his animal characters. V.T. Hamlin created the wonderfully satiric “Alley Oop” in 1932, threw in a time machine the year I was born and went on poking holes in social pretenses for decades.
So I’ve always enjoyed looking at “Newsweek’s” annual review of what editorial cartoonists are saying now. They denied me that pleasure this year. I’m not happy. They substituted the review with printed interviews with Hillary and Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Geithner, Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos. I got half-way through them and realized I was bored to tears (I don’t trust was Karzai SAYS; I want to hear what he DOES. Capice?)
News is going away—not just in “Newsweek”. So is pungent commentary, as it has been so vividly illustrated for the past century or more on editorial pages by brilliant cartoonists.
Perhaps the highest accolade given to an American political cartoonist came in 1876 when Spanish police recognized fugitive political Boss Tweed from a Thomas Nast cartoon in “Harper’s Weekly”. The man had stolen around five billion (in modern dollars), he’d escaped prison, but an editorial cartoon finally brought him down.
As Tweed put it, “It was them damn’ pitchers”. Apparently the editor of “Newsweek” felt the same way about them.
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