American education (K-12) is looking at a truly terrifying future. One of the largest (and probably the most affluent) districts in my area just announced it is planning to save 50% of custodial costs by “privatizing” the function.
The people who will be cleaning the schools next year will get substantially lower wages, much poorer benefits and won’t be enrolled in the state’s retirement program. That’s about twenty more people who will not be contributing as much to the consumer spending we are depending on to pull us out of the recession.
Savaging the janitors’ pay won’t begin to solve the district’s problems, however. Last year, declining enrollment (people are moving out of Michigan in droves, taking kids with them) and reduced state aid forced that district to cut over a million dollars from its budget.
The $600,000 it will save by getting rid of the current custodial staff isn’t really going to solve this year’s $1.5 million dollar deficit. Nor will it help much at all in dealing with next year’s projected $4.7 million shortfall.
Other districts in the area are looking forward to absolutely huge deficits next year as well. The state will likely not be able to help. At what point does this start really cutting to the bone?
If I thought a handful of districts in Michigan—that I am personally familiar with—were part of a tiny minority in this country, I wouldn’t bother writing. But they’re not. For the first time since before I was alive, before World War II, we honestly don’t have the money.
It doesn’t help that a panicked Federal Government is adding to the pressure. We’ve known for years that vast numbers of American students have been passed on to the next grade completely unable to read, write or cipher.
Now the government is leaning on school districts to do vastly more just when they have less to do it with. Look at the tiny little (one mile square) district of Central Falls in Rhode Island. It’s not only tiny, it’s also poor and under-educated.
If the suburban kids I see when I substitute teach are increasingly unmotivated—leaving assignment sheets untouched on their desks—imagine the motivation in impoverished districts where the parents don’t care at all. (Sometimes I see the grade sheets—two or three As, a few Bs, a few more Cs, and as many as ten Fs. The kids don’t care.)
Over in Rhode Island, Central Falls is one of the lowest performing districts in the state. Under new Federal standards, the district was given four choices: Shut down, become a charter school, follow special guidelines that demand much longer days and deny teachers almost all planning or lunch time (they eat with the kids). Or the district could fire them all.
So they did. (This is somehow going to motivate the kids? Long experience has taught me and a lot of other teachers that if the parents don’t care, the kids aren’t going to either.) So at the end of the year, approximately 90 teachers will be out of a job.
Can you imagine how much money that will save the district? Teachers with twenty or more years of experience (and salary increases) replaced by an entire staff starting out at the bottom salary rung! That is one real way to save the 85% of a school budget that goes into wages!
I suspect boards all over the nation are looking at Central Falls with sharp pecuniary interest. (They are already begging long-term teachers around here to please, please, please retire.) Under the new fiscal restraints, it isn’t just custodians who are expendable.
How tempted might a district facing a multi-million dollar shortfall be to “privatize” those expensive items called “teachers” as well as ancillary staff? I fear we may see a lot of interesting things in American education over the coming years.
None of them are likely to make students learn more.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
No Sanity In Sight For Health Care
Suppose you found yourself at the mercy of two care givers who had power over you. One said you needed water, but would allow you no food. The other said you needed food, but would allow you no water. Eventually you would die.
It seems to me this is precisely the situation that American health care finds itself in right now. The Democrats will give it no food; Republicans will give it no water. Unless somebody resolves something—quite soon, the entire system will die.
The Republicans will give it no “food”—they propose to leave up to 50 million Americans with no medical care at all. (That’s what being uninsured basically means—no health care at all.) As more and more voting Americans get laid off, and lose their insurance, that’s going to become a politically explosive situation. Bernanke at the Fed has just said he expects high unemployment to continue through at least 2012.
It’s also going to drag down the entire system as more and more of the uninsured are forced to become “charity” patients because untreated symptoms turn into catastrophic disease. Emergency rooms and hospitals are forced to treat these for “free”—and then pass the cost on to paying patients and their insurance companies.
Everyone loses as rates and costs keep skyrocketing. “Free” ain’t free in a hospital. That’s why you hear stories about a box of tissues costing twenty bucks—that’s how they bill you or your insurance for all those “free”/charity cases.
Democrats will give the system no “water”. They will push for nothing that will cut the horrendous (and rising) costs of our tottering system. Pile on fifty million more patients into our present system and bankruptcy will come all the faster.
But, the Republicans protest, if we insure the uninsured we will need to ration medical care in order to cut costs. To that the first answer is: show us a more vicious system of rationing than the present one where we RATION by eliminating those without insurance from the system.
There is something absolutely pernicious about refusing to give up steak in order to give a little gruel to a man on the verge of death by starvation. And that IS the attitude of many of the tea party goers who are so afraid someone may tamper with “MY Medicare” they are willing to let millions suffer and thousands die rather than have any limits imposed on themselves.
(That kind of supreme indifference to the well-being of one’s fellow man goes so far beyond the pale of charity as it is enjoined by Christianity, Judaism or Islam that it is absolutely breath-taking. And so much of the indifference is justified in the name of “religion”!)
Democrats and Republicans glare at one another over what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf. Neither will give in. More importantly neither will acknowledge that without action on both fronts—cutting costs AND caring for the uninsured—our present system WILL collapse.
Can it be done? Are “water” and “food” mutually exclusive, like having one’s cake and eating it too? No, not at all. It’s perfectly doable. You do two things. One) you throw all Americans into ONE insurance pool. That’s spreads the risk as equitably as it possibly can be.
That means, two) a single insurer. Just one, for the whole country. Since that will be the only buyer in the entire US for all drugs and medical supplies, it will have a lot of clout when it comes to holding the line on fees and prices. That will cut costs. (Think how many people in hospitals and doctors’ offices currently draw salaries for trying to meet the different requirements of fifty or more different insurance companies, all with different rules!)
Having no more “charity” cases (that all of us with insurance pay for now) will also cut fees and costs enormously. With a “single payer”, costs will be cut, no one will be uninsured and efficiencies will be forced out of our currently grossly inefficient system.
Whatever rationing this might result in will be far less than the rationing we have now. No single payer could be more subject to fraud or more lethargic about guaranteeing the best care for the buck than what we have now.
But Republicans and Democrats go on glaring. That status quo wins again.
It seems to me this is precisely the situation that American health care finds itself in right now. The Democrats will give it no food; Republicans will give it no water. Unless somebody resolves something—quite soon, the entire system will die.
The Republicans will give it no “food”—they propose to leave up to 50 million Americans with no medical care at all. (That’s what being uninsured basically means—no health care at all.) As more and more voting Americans get laid off, and lose their insurance, that’s going to become a politically explosive situation. Bernanke at the Fed has just said he expects high unemployment to continue through at least 2012.
It’s also going to drag down the entire system as more and more of the uninsured are forced to become “charity” patients because untreated symptoms turn into catastrophic disease. Emergency rooms and hospitals are forced to treat these for “free”—and then pass the cost on to paying patients and their insurance companies.
Everyone loses as rates and costs keep skyrocketing. “Free” ain’t free in a hospital. That’s why you hear stories about a box of tissues costing twenty bucks—that’s how they bill you or your insurance for all those “free”/charity cases.
Democrats will give the system no “water”. They will push for nothing that will cut the horrendous (and rising) costs of our tottering system. Pile on fifty million more patients into our present system and bankruptcy will come all the faster.
But, the Republicans protest, if we insure the uninsured we will need to ration medical care in order to cut costs. To that the first answer is: show us a more vicious system of rationing than the present one where we RATION by eliminating those without insurance from the system.
There is something absolutely pernicious about refusing to give up steak in order to give a little gruel to a man on the verge of death by starvation. And that IS the attitude of many of the tea party goers who are so afraid someone may tamper with “MY Medicare” they are willing to let millions suffer and thousands die rather than have any limits imposed on themselves.
(That kind of supreme indifference to the well-being of one’s fellow man goes so far beyond the pale of charity as it is enjoined by Christianity, Judaism or Islam that it is absolutely breath-taking. And so much of the indifference is justified in the name of “religion”!)
Democrats and Republicans glare at one another over what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf. Neither will give in. More importantly neither will acknowledge that without action on both fronts—cutting costs AND caring for the uninsured—our present system WILL collapse.
Can it be done? Are “water” and “food” mutually exclusive, like having one’s cake and eating it too? No, not at all. It’s perfectly doable. You do two things. One) you throw all Americans into ONE insurance pool. That’s spreads the risk as equitably as it possibly can be.
That means, two) a single insurer. Just one, for the whole country. Since that will be the only buyer in the entire US for all drugs and medical supplies, it will have a lot of clout when it comes to holding the line on fees and prices. That will cut costs. (Think how many people in hospitals and doctors’ offices currently draw salaries for trying to meet the different requirements of fifty or more different insurance companies, all with different rules!)
Having no more “charity” cases (that all of us with insurance pay for now) will also cut fees and costs enormously. With a “single payer”, costs will be cut, no one will be uninsured and efficiencies will be forced out of our currently grossly inefficient system.
Whatever rationing this might result in will be far less than the rationing we have now. No single payer could be more subject to fraud or more lethargic about guaranteeing the best care for the buck than what we have now.
But Republicans and Democrats go on glaring. That status quo wins again.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Washington--A Forgotten Giant
Forty years ago, today was Washington’s Birthday. It still is—he was actually born on February 22—but now we celebrate “President’s Day” on any Monday that falls between February 15 and February 21. So the holiday will never again fall on Washington’s actual birth date.
That’s too bad. Washington deserves his own holiday—certainly if Columbus and Martin Luther King rate their own holidays! He stands preeminent among both our founding fathers and our presidents. No one will ever, no matter how great or how many Nobel Prizes or what victories or policies he or she may have pushed through, replace Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first [he should be] in the hearts of his countrymen.”
I suspect most Americans really don’t have a handle on what makes him Great, what makes him “First”. Yes, he commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. No, he was not a Napoleonic military genius—he lost most of his battles.
But he hung in. By sheer force of character he not only hung in himself he induced a starving, badly equipped and sometimes trouser-less army to hang in with him. He did it by sheer force of character and by feeding his desperately hungry troops out of his own pocket.
He became, by sheer force of character and persistence, one of our first international celebrities. Prussia’s Frederick The Great (a real military genius) addressed Washington, “From the world’s oldest soldier to the world’s greatest soldier.”
The French government unhesitatingly, made him Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in the American hemisphere. No imaginable way could we have won the Revolution—or even hoped to have stayed in the war—without General Washington.
Then he went home to his plantation, happily. They called him back four years later to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He didn’t bring the bright ideas or forge the brilliant compromises—he just sat in the Chair and made very, very certain they came to pass. All he had to do was look at you—and you became a whole lot more cooperative. Without Washington, most likely no Constitution.
He went back to his plantation—and they elected him first president under the new Constitution. Only time a man was ever elected and re-elected without an opponent. He walked into a single executive office with no cabinet, no judiciary and no rules of order.
Just as he had held the army together and held the Constitutional Convention in order, he presided over the Judiciary Act that created the Supreme Courts, the Federal Court system and the Attorney General’s office. When he left office, the Government of the United States—as we know it today—was pretty much in place. And the man in the Chair was still capable of wringing cooperation out of all sorts of people, with all sorts of points of view.
The point is—HE DID NOT HAVE TO LEAVE OFFICE. EVER. This is what makes him a giant without peer in human history. He was a victorious revolutionary, a world renowned general whose countrymen would have re-elected him for life. He probably could have become “king”, certainly like Simon Bolivar, “President for Life”.
He served two terms and went home to his plantation. Ships from all over the world sailed up the Potomac and fired their guns in salute. He would go to his little signal gun and fire a salute in return. But he was very content to be a farmer—rather than a ruler.
Shall we talk about other victorious revolutionaries? Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Henry Christophe, Cromwell, Stalin, Robespierre, Simon Bolivar , San Martin and Trotsky (who were thrown out by fellow revolutionaries), Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe—and I could go on.
Power is as hard to give up as liquor or narcotics for many people. Washington simply walked away from it—establishing the most important American tradition of them all. For this, alone, we owe a debt we cannot pay—and Washington deserves his own Day.
That’s too bad. Washington deserves his own holiday—certainly if Columbus and Martin Luther King rate their own holidays! He stands preeminent among both our founding fathers and our presidents. No one will ever, no matter how great or how many Nobel Prizes or what victories or policies he or she may have pushed through, replace Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first [he should be] in the hearts of his countrymen.”
I suspect most Americans really don’t have a handle on what makes him Great, what makes him “First”. Yes, he commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. No, he was not a Napoleonic military genius—he lost most of his battles.
But he hung in. By sheer force of character he not only hung in himself he induced a starving, badly equipped and sometimes trouser-less army to hang in with him. He did it by sheer force of character and by feeding his desperately hungry troops out of his own pocket.
He became, by sheer force of character and persistence, one of our first international celebrities. Prussia’s Frederick The Great (a real military genius) addressed Washington, “From the world’s oldest soldier to the world’s greatest soldier.”
The French government unhesitatingly, made him Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in the American hemisphere. No imaginable way could we have won the Revolution—or even hoped to have stayed in the war—without General Washington.
Then he went home to his plantation, happily. They called him back four years later to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He didn’t bring the bright ideas or forge the brilliant compromises—he just sat in the Chair and made very, very certain they came to pass. All he had to do was look at you—and you became a whole lot more cooperative. Without Washington, most likely no Constitution.
He went back to his plantation—and they elected him first president under the new Constitution. Only time a man was ever elected and re-elected without an opponent. He walked into a single executive office with no cabinet, no judiciary and no rules of order.
Just as he had held the army together and held the Constitutional Convention in order, he presided over the Judiciary Act that created the Supreme Courts, the Federal Court system and the Attorney General’s office. When he left office, the Government of the United States—as we know it today—was pretty much in place. And the man in the Chair was still capable of wringing cooperation out of all sorts of people, with all sorts of points of view.
The point is—HE DID NOT HAVE TO LEAVE OFFICE. EVER. This is what makes him a giant without peer in human history. He was a victorious revolutionary, a world renowned general whose countrymen would have re-elected him for life. He probably could have become “king”, certainly like Simon Bolivar, “President for Life”.
He served two terms and went home to his plantation. Ships from all over the world sailed up the Potomac and fired their guns in salute. He would go to his little signal gun and fire a salute in return. But he was very content to be a farmer—rather than a ruler.
Shall we talk about other victorious revolutionaries? Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Henry Christophe, Cromwell, Stalin, Robespierre, Simon Bolivar , San Martin and Trotsky (who were thrown out by fellow revolutionaries), Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe—and I could go on.
Power is as hard to give up as liquor or narcotics for many people. Washington simply walked away from it—establishing the most important American tradition of them all. For this, alone, we owe a debt we cannot pay—and Washington deserves his own Day.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Water, Water, ... Not a Drop To Drink
This morning a blog flickered across AOL so quickly I didn’t get its name down—but I managed to print out its text. It’s news I’ve waited and hoped for ever since I spent the winter of 1973-4 in Los Angeles and its dry, dry environs.
I was raised in Michigan where there are rivers, lakes or streams every couple of miles. Water is as much a part of life as air. When I moved to LA, the first thing I found myself looking for was water. Not the ocean, but potable water. There wasn’t any in sight.
This quickly made me uneasy. I was surrounded by millions of people with no visible means of slaking their thirst. Nothing. Nada. Nowhere. What came out of the tap wasn’t drinkable so I followed the fashion of ordering in purified drinking water by the jug—mounted on a rented stand in the corner of the kitchen.
Water trucks were as common as mailpersons. Existing tap water came via pipe through the mountains from northern California or from faraway sources like the Colorado River. (What happens if an earthquake cuts those pipelines? A lot of people die.)
That’s the whole American southwest. Air so dry it chaps your lips in summer. No serious supply of fresh water anywhere. Millions and millions of human beings dependent on water that simply is not there. Water sucking lawns, parks and golf courses everywhere.
I concluded that we were setting ourselves up for a disaster that will make the Chinese and Haitian earthquakes or the Indian Ocean Tsunami look like traffic fender benders. After all, the whole southwest (and many other deserts on this planet) is dotted with the remains of past civilizations that simply dried up and blew away when the water stopped.
What’s going to happen in LA and the southwest won’t be at all historically unusual. No matter what we do, in a thousand years archaeologists will wander through the ruins of the Mt. Palomar observatory wondering what forgotten god this temple was built for. (Movie lots will probably baffle them completely.) But we don’t have to hurry the inevitable.
So much of the water that DOES get to LA—or Phoenix or San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara—is wasted on growing the sort of green grass that was meant for well watered places like Kentucky and Michigan! It is distributed by sprinklers that allow much of the water intended for lawns to evaporate before it even reaches the ground! This is DESERT, guys, DESERT!
Today’s blog offered the best news I’ve heard out of southern California since Clint Eastwood rescued the western movie genre. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in a fit of inspired sanity, is paying customers to rip up their lawns!
You can get as much as two grand if you tear out the grass and replace it with the kind of plants God meant to grow in desert and semi-desert climates, stuff that doesn’t need tons of water. Or you can put in flag stones, gravel and brick walkways.
You can even lay down synthetic turf—if you absolutely have to keep up the illusion that you really never left Ohio. For those who cannot bear to accept the fact that they actually do live in arid Southern California, there are rebates for water efficient appliances, lower pressure sprinkler nozzles and timers on those sprinklers.
This is necessary—vital—throughout the American southwest if humans are going to keep crowding in to lands meant for few people and less greenery. It won’t prevent the inevitable collapse of an overstressed water system, but it might significantly delay the evil day.
How about a slogan for the folks at the waterworks? “Rip up your lawn, Los Angelinos, the life you prolong could be your own.”
I was raised in Michigan where there are rivers, lakes or streams every couple of miles. Water is as much a part of life as air. When I moved to LA, the first thing I found myself looking for was water. Not the ocean, but potable water. There wasn’t any in sight.
This quickly made me uneasy. I was surrounded by millions of people with no visible means of slaking their thirst. Nothing. Nada. Nowhere. What came out of the tap wasn’t drinkable so I followed the fashion of ordering in purified drinking water by the jug—mounted on a rented stand in the corner of the kitchen.
Water trucks were as common as mailpersons. Existing tap water came via pipe through the mountains from northern California or from faraway sources like the Colorado River. (What happens if an earthquake cuts those pipelines? A lot of people die.)
That’s the whole American southwest. Air so dry it chaps your lips in summer. No serious supply of fresh water anywhere. Millions and millions of human beings dependent on water that simply is not there. Water sucking lawns, parks and golf courses everywhere.
I concluded that we were setting ourselves up for a disaster that will make the Chinese and Haitian earthquakes or the Indian Ocean Tsunami look like traffic fender benders. After all, the whole southwest (and many other deserts on this planet) is dotted with the remains of past civilizations that simply dried up and blew away when the water stopped.
What’s going to happen in LA and the southwest won’t be at all historically unusual. No matter what we do, in a thousand years archaeologists will wander through the ruins of the Mt. Palomar observatory wondering what forgotten god this temple was built for. (Movie lots will probably baffle them completely.) But we don’t have to hurry the inevitable.
So much of the water that DOES get to LA—or Phoenix or San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara—is wasted on growing the sort of green grass that was meant for well watered places like Kentucky and Michigan! It is distributed by sprinklers that allow much of the water intended for lawns to evaporate before it even reaches the ground! This is DESERT, guys, DESERT!
Today’s blog offered the best news I’ve heard out of southern California since Clint Eastwood rescued the western movie genre. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in a fit of inspired sanity, is paying customers to rip up their lawns!
You can get as much as two grand if you tear out the grass and replace it with the kind of plants God meant to grow in desert and semi-desert climates, stuff that doesn’t need tons of water. Or you can put in flag stones, gravel and brick walkways.
You can even lay down synthetic turf—if you absolutely have to keep up the illusion that you really never left Ohio. For those who cannot bear to accept the fact that they actually do live in arid Southern California, there are rebates for water efficient appliances, lower pressure sprinkler nozzles and timers on those sprinklers.
This is necessary—vital—throughout the American southwest if humans are going to keep crowding in to lands meant for few people and less greenery. It won’t prevent the inevitable collapse of an overstressed water system, but it might significantly delay the evil day.
How about a slogan for the folks at the waterworks? “Rip up your lawn, Los Angelinos, the life you prolong could be your own.”
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Unemployed--The Invisible Ones
Several million Americans are surviving on Unemployment Insurance; they are listed. Thousands more are registered with State employment agencies for news of job openings; they are listed. Thousands/millions (?) more have been reduced to part time status; they are the estimated under-employed. Then there are many, many more who have run out of benefits and given up looking; no one quite knows their number.
In the past few weeks I’ve run into a new class of under/unemployed who aren’t included in the 9.7% unemployment figures—the forcibly retired. They certainly aren’t listed when anybody counts the casualties of this recession.
Let me offer two examples. My casualty insurance agent technically represented one company, but he owns his own office building and hired his own staff. I’ve known him for over thirty years and been with him as a client for many of those years. He’s in his early sixties.
A year or two ago I kidded him about retiring. Very sincerely he replied, “Next year I’ll have two kids in college, one just starting. I can’t afford to retire!” Early this year the company he has represented for decades cut back.
They closed the local offices, forced “early retirement” to the people old enough to be vested and left us with an eight hundred number in Detroit. My friend’s building is empty (who’s renting business space in this economic climate?); whether he wanted it or not, he is retired.
Who else realizes that his pension pays a lot less college tuition, books and fees than his income from running a full time agency did? He was in good health; he enjoyed what he did—he is definitely among the unlisted unemployed, a real casualty of the recession. What can he do around here?
Then there is the lady at our bank. She’s been there about as long as we’ve been banking there. She, too, has to be about sixty. She’s in excellent health, enjoys her work, and makes an excellent job of it. She’s single, divorced, completely dependent upon her own resources.
She has been for years our go-to banker. Any problems, we called her. She’d make phone calls, check her computer files and come with any answer we needed—or be able to refer us to precisely the person who could help us. She even got some banking charges reversed for us.
The other day my wife stopped to see her, and our favorite banker told her that next week is her last week. Her bank got bought out by a larger, eastern bank. (Too many “irrationally exuberant” loans, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.)
The big thing about combining two companies or banks is all the duplicate people you can lay off. The logical thing was to look at her and say, “She’s been here long enough for her pension to vest; we can call her retired without having to pay for unemployment insurance.”
The first of March—she’s gone. We are certainly going to miss her—but nobody asked us. I don’t think anybody asked her, either. She’s on no list in any labor department—but she’s as unemployed as any guy who once worked in a now closed factory.
That’s just two people in my limited circle of acquaintances in a small town in western Michigan. With all of the business retrenchment, consolidation and take-overs that have gone on during this economic down turn, I scarcely believe they are unique.
I suspect there are a whole lot of them—tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly more—a whole category of the unemployed, the underemployed, certainly those with greatly reduced incomes that do not show up on anybody’s list.
They are, I suspect, in permanently reduced circumstances. No matter how booming the long delayed job recovery, these folk are unlikely ever to find employment that earns what they made when they were fully and happily employed.
They will not be contributing significantly to the consumer buying boom we are all depending on to lift us out of this mess. That could be bad news—for all of us.
In the past few weeks I’ve run into a new class of under/unemployed who aren’t included in the 9.7% unemployment figures—the forcibly retired. They certainly aren’t listed when anybody counts the casualties of this recession.
Let me offer two examples. My casualty insurance agent technically represented one company, but he owns his own office building and hired his own staff. I’ve known him for over thirty years and been with him as a client for many of those years. He’s in his early sixties.
A year or two ago I kidded him about retiring. Very sincerely he replied, “Next year I’ll have two kids in college, one just starting. I can’t afford to retire!” Early this year the company he has represented for decades cut back.
They closed the local offices, forced “early retirement” to the people old enough to be vested and left us with an eight hundred number in Detroit. My friend’s building is empty (who’s renting business space in this economic climate?); whether he wanted it or not, he is retired.
Who else realizes that his pension pays a lot less college tuition, books and fees than his income from running a full time agency did? He was in good health; he enjoyed what he did—he is definitely among the unlisted unemployed, a real casualty of the recession. What can he do around here?
Then there is the lady at our bank. She’s been there about as long as we’ve been banking there. She, too, has to be about sixty. She’s in excellent health, enjoys her work, and makes an excellent job of it. She’s single, divorced, completely dependent upon her own resources.
She has been for years our go-to banker. Any problems, we called her. She’d make phone calls, check her computer files and come with any answer we needed—or be able to refer us to precisely the person who could help us. She even got some banking charges reversed for us.
The other day my wife stopped to see her, and our favorite banker told her that next week is her last week. Her bank got bought out by a larger, eastern bank. (Too many “irrationally exuberant” loans, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.)
The big thing about combining two companies or banks is all the duplicate people you can lay off. The logical thing was to look at her and say, “She’s been here long enough for her pension to vest; we can call her retired without having to pay for unemployment insurance.”
The first of March—she’s gone. We are certainly going to miss her—but nobody asked us. I don’t think anybody asked her, either. She’s on no list in any labor department—but she’s as unemployed as any guy who once worked in a now closed factory.
That’s just two people in my limited circle of acquaintances in a small town in western Michigan. With all of the business retrenchment, consolidation and take-overs that have gone on during this economic down turn, I scarcely believe they are unique.
I suspect there are a whole lot of them—tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly more—a whole category of the unemployed, the underemployed, certainly those with greatly reduced incomes that do not show up on anybody’s list.
They are, I suspect, in permanently reduced circumstances. No matter how booming the long delayed job recovery, these folk are unlikely ever to find employment that earns what they made when they were fully and happily employed.
They will not be contributing significantly to the consumer buying boom we are all depending on to lift us out of this mess. That could be bad news—for all of us.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Iraq--A War is a War is a War
They’re going to rename the Iraq War. Defense Secretary Gates insists this sends a “strong message” about what the war is all about. (I wish we’d known what it was all about back in 2003, don’t you?) Instead of calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (did you remember it was ever called that? I did not.), we’re going to call it “Operation New Dawn”.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Job Loss--No One's In Charge
In the hue and cry over lost jobs—especially those that have departed for foreign parts—one very real problem is being overlooked. It’s a problem that the United States faced before, and it took us the better part of a century to get a handle on it the first time.
True, a lot of the difficulty with jobs going overseas and major corporate misbehavior is greed, desire to avoid taxes political ineptitude, etc. But there is a significant factor that is merely a consequence of continued growth, almost an evolutionary thing.
Let’s look at the first time we faced this situation. Back when the Constitution was written, in 1787, the United States had almost no industry whatsoever. The largest business in the country may well have been no bigger than a general store or an independent hardware store.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that there might EVER be a need for federal interference with or regulation of a business behavior. About all the Constitution says about regulating business is that no state may charge tariffs or tolls on goods from another state. Any regulation of business itself was left to the state it was in. That worked for a few years.
Then Jefferson embargoed goods from France and England, and we were forced to build our own factories. Shortly after that someone invented something called a railroad and it became possible to ship goods from a business in one state to outlets in a dozen others.
The railroads themselves quickly became too big for any one state to control. How could the state of Indiana, for instance, exercise effective control over the behavior of a railroad that originated in New York and ran through it to Illinois? It couldn’t.
American business entered a period of more than half-a-century in which literally no one exercised any control over its behavior. (Nelson Rockefeller was once asked if his grandfather, Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, ever broke any laws.
Nelson, himself a governor and a Vice President, thought for a moment. “No,” he said, “grampa didn’t BREAK any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws BECAUSE of him.” John D. enforced his oil monopoly with, among other things, sticks of dynamite applied none to gingerly to a competitor’s stocks of crude oil.
“Commodore” Vanderbilt created his monopoly over ferry boats in New York harbor by dynamiting any competitor who wouldn’t sell out to him. He pretty much ran his railroads the same way, making the famous comment, “My God, John, you don’t think you can run a railroad according to laws of the State of New York, do you?” He didn’t bother.
Banker Pierpont Morgan could contemptuously dismiss a presidential complaint by suggesting, “You send your man (the Secretary of Treasury) to see my man (his personal secretary), and they can work it out.” He saw a president as merely an equal, if that.)
It took decades of creating commissions (like that Interstate Commerce Commission—which for years was completely powerless), passing laws, and finally stocking the Supreme Court with men who thought it might be okay for the Federal Government to exercise some control over business and banking. It was a long, bitter political fight.
Finally, it took the collapse of the markets in 1929, and a loss of half the national product over the next four years, to give Washington real powers of regulation over business coast to coast. But business has continued to grow. Now it doesn’t just run through Indiana unregulated, it spans foreign continents with no state or national power having the jurisdiction to make it behave.
It can send jobs where it likes, where they are cheapest; it can move its plants to places that have the lowest tax rates—across oceans. Once again, we have “railroads”, “banks” and “oil monopolies” too big and too wide spread for any one governmental entity to control them.
No one tax code applies, no set of regulations. They can be a law unto themselves.
So how do we get them back under control? The United Nations? A single World Government? An absolutely appalling thought. But come up with another one that works. Until then, just hope some Commodore Vanderbilt isn’t mad at the ferry you happen to be riding. At the very least, he might ship your job to China.
True, a lot of the difficulty with jobs going overseas and major corporate misbehavior is greed, desire to avoid taxes political ineptitude, etc. But there is a significant factor that is merely a consequence of continued growth, almost an evolutionary thing.
Let’s look at the first time we faced this situation. Back when the Constitution was written, in 1787, the United States had almost no industry whatsoever. The largest business in the country may well have been no bigger than a general store or an independent hardware store.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that there might EVER be a need for federal interference with or regulation of a business behavior. About all the Constitution says about regulating business is that no state may charge tariffs or tolls on goods from another state. Any regulation of business itself was left to the state it was in. That worked for a few years.
Then Jefferson embargoed goods from France and England, and we were forced to build our own factories. Shortly after that someone invented something called a railroad and it became possible to ship goods from a business in one state to outlets in a dozen others.
The railroads themselves quickly became too big for any one state to control. How could the state of Indiana, for instance, exercise effective control over the behavior of a railroad that originated in New York and ran through it to Illinois? It couldn’t.
American business entered a period of more than half-a-century in which literally no one exercised any control over its behavior. (Nelson Rockefeller was once asked if his grandfather, Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, ever broke any laws.
Nelson, himself a governor and a Vice President, thought for a moment. “No,” he said, “grampa didn’t BREAK any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws BECAUSE of him.” John D. enforced his oil monopoly with, among other things, sticks of dynamite applied none to gingerly to a competitor’s stocks of crude oil.
“Commodore” Vanderbilt created his monopoly over ferry boats in New York harbor by dynamiting any competitor who wouldn’t sell out to him. He pretty much ran his railroads the same way, making the famous comment, “My God, John, you don’t think you can run a railroad according to laws of the State of New York, do you?” He didn’t bother.
Banker Pierpont Morgan could contemptuously dismiss a presidential complaint by suggesting, “You send your man (the Secretary of Treasury) to see my man (his personal secretary), and they can work it out.” He saw a president as merely an equal, if that.)
It took decades of creating commissions (like that Interstate Commerce Commission—which for years was completely powerless), passing laws, and finally stocking the Supreme Court with men who thought it might be okay for the Federal Government to exercise some control over business and banking. It was a long, bitter political fight.
Finally, it took the collapse of the markets in 1929, and a loss of half the national product over the next four years, to give Washington real powers of regulation over business coast to coast. But business has continued to grow. Now it doesn’t just run through Indiana unregulated, it spans foreign continents with no state or national power having the jurisdiction to make it behave.
It can send jobs where it likes, where they are cheapest; it can move its plants to places that have the lowest tax rates—across oceans. Once again, we have “railroads”, “banks” and “oil monopolies” too big and too wide spread for any one governmental entity to control them.
No one tax code applies, no set of regulations. They can be a law unto themselves.
So how do we get them back under control? The United Nations? A single World Government? An absolutely appalling thought. But come up with another one that works. Until then, just hope some Commodore Vanderbilt isn’t mad at the ferry you happen to be riding. At the very least, he might ship your job to China.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Health Care? What Health Care?
Whatever happened to health care reform? We’re capturing Taliban big shots in Pakistan; we’re all watching the Olympics (are we?); sitting Senators are dropping like flies; Republicans are beginning to salivate—especially if they’re to the right of Goldwater.
I didn’t vote for Obama; I didn’t care much for most of his positions but I did think he might actually do something to upgrade our healthcare system. That got me momentarily excited. I’ve been waiting for that ever since my dad told me that the medical profession forced most bankruptcies in this country—way back in the 1950s.
It’s still true. And when it comes to the great squeaks and squawks from the Right about how I would lose my choice and we’d lose medical efficiency if the government got involved (single payer) in our health care—whooooo hah!
Oh my. There is no imaginable way my medical care could be less efficient if the government were involved than my private insurance has proven to be in the past few weeks. Oh me. It seems that the retirement people who service my account decided to change prescription plans on me at the beginning of this year.
It has taken me six weeks to get all my prescriptions straightened out. There are some that I now cannot order for more than a month (more co-pays, goodie, goodie). Others will require “prior authorization” with the new company.
But, I am assured, if we had a single payer that went on handling my prescriptions on the same basis, year after year, things would be vastly more inefficient (and aggravating). Nuts. It couldn’t possibly be. My wife has found a discount store where she can get her one prescription for about the equivalent of one of my co-pays. She doesn’t plan to involve insurance at all.
The present system is madness. Each medical practice has to have several people in a back office madly sorting out fifty or sixty different insurance plans. Tell me that doesn’t cost the patient money. And my pharmacy has a huge list of prescription plans—and they just spent long minutes on the phone for me trying to straighten my new one out.
My former prescription plan was dropped because it was deemed too expensive. The new one costs less and is far more hassle. And far more co-pays. For me there is no perceivable benefit. There is no single payer saying to the enormously profitable pharmaceutical companies, “This is all you can charge.”
Or to the medical equipment suppliers, “You cannot charge patients over one hundred dollars for a device that costs you under ten.” Oh, what a bill of goods the American people have been sold by those who make money off their health care!
The Democrats, looking forward to this fall’s elections, shuddering at the angry tea party rants (held by people who seem not to realize that Medicare is basically a single payer governmental program that seems to make Right Wingers very happy), are backing off the whole issue of health care reform.
Let’s admit they screwed it up from the outset. The Bible, with all its ruels, only comes in at a few pages over a thousand—and it took over a thousand years to write—about a page a year. In a single year, Democrats—and Obama—created a monstrosity with over 2,000 pages.
And now they’re walking away from it. Pretending it isn’t there. I guess I can’t blame them—it’s hard to find another job with as many perks as a Congressman gets. I’ve waited for sane health care for over half a century. Guess I’ll have to keep waiting.
Now I have no reason left for liking Obama. Honestly.
I didn’t vote for Obama; I didn’t care much for most of his positions but I did think he might actually do something to upgrade our healthcare system. That got me momentarily excited. I’ve been waiting for that ever since my dad told me that the medical profession forced most bankruptcies in this country—way back in the 1950s.
It’s still true. And when it comes to the great squeaks and squawks from the Right about how I would lose my choice and we’d lose medical efficiency if the government got involved (single payer) in our health care—whooooo hah!
Oh my. There is no imaginable way my medical care could be less efficient if the government were involved than my private insurance has proven to be in the past few weeks. Oh me. It seems that the retirement people who service my account decided to change prescription plans on me at the beginning of this year.
It has taken me six weeks to get all my prescriptions straightened out. There are some that I now cannot order for more than a month (more co-pays, goodie, goodie). Others will require “prior authorization” with the new company.
But, I am assured, if we had a single payer that went on handling my prescriptions on the same basis, year after year, things would be vastly more inefficient (and aggravating). Nuts. It couldn’t possibly be. My wife has found a discount store where she can get her one prescription for about the equivalent of one of my co-pays. She doesn’t plan to involve insurance at all.
The present system is madness. Each medical practice has to have several people in a back office madly sorting out fifty or sixty different insurance plans. Tell me that doesn’t cost the patient money. And my pharmacy has a huge list of prescription plans—and they just spent long minutes on the phone for me trying to straighten my new one out.
My former prescription plan was dropped because it was deemed too expensive. The new one costs less and is far more hassle. And far more co-pays. For me there is no perceivable benefit. There is no single payer saying to the enormously profitable pharmaceutical companies, “This is all you can charge.”
Or to the medical equipment suppliers, “You cannot charge patients over one hundred dollars for a device that costs you under ten.” Oh, what a bill of goods the American people have been sold by those who make money off their health care!
The Democrats, looking forward to this fall’s elections, shuddering at the angry tea party rants (held by people who seem not to realize that Medicare is basically a single payer governmental program that seems to make Right Wingers very happy), are backing off the whole issue of health care reform.
Let’s admit they screwed it up from the outset. The Bible, with all its ruels, only comes in at a few pages over a thousand—and it took over a thousand years to write—about a page a year. In a single year, Democrats—and Obama—created a monstrosity with over 2,000 pages.
And now they’re walking away from it. Pretending it isn’t there. I guess I can’t blame them—it’s hard to find another job with as many perks as a Congressman gets. I’ve waited for sane health care for over half a century. Guess I’ll have to keep waiting.
Now I have no reason left for liking Obama. Honestly.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Gay Marriage--Just Business
The other day I was sent an invitation to militate for the right of homosexuals and lesbians to marry. For an instant I was tempted to send a blistering reply—you know, all about marriage being for the procreation, nurture and protection of human young.
Then I got to thinking—is that still true? It has been historically true. Back in the days before welfare (only about my lifetime) a woman alone with children to raise could find herself in a pretty grim fix. It didn’t matter a lot if she were widowed or perpetually unwed.
In some cultures (India, for instance) women opted not to outlive their dead husbands. Throwing herself on his funeral pyre and burning with him seemed a better choice. Even in the Christian west her opportunities were often limited to prostitution or starvation wages in a sweat shop.
Only in marriage did a woman hope to find some sort of security and protection for herself and her young. A man was required to raise and protect only those children he conceived within the bounds of marriage. Illegitimate children, his or hers, were outside the pale. Thus marriage served a socially useful and necessary function—and it was strictly heterosexual because it very much built around conception.
Even in societies where homosexuality (or lesbianism) was accepted or practiced widely, the notion of marriage as an heterosexual function specifically aimed at producing offspring and heirs remained an historical constant. I cannot think of a society in which homosexual liaisons were accorded the legal status of a marriage contract.
But life has changed in the past fifty years. At least in the western, post-Christian, industrialized world, it has. The weapons of war no longer depend upon brute strength (not, certainly, since the M-16 replaced the M-1 rifle in the 1960s). Women can defend themselves with as much lethal effect as men can. They routinely serve in the military.
More women are getting higher educations than men. For all of the “gender gap”, more and more women are earning professional grade salaries—and are perfectly capable of providing for themselves and their offspring by themselves.
If a man leaves a dependent wife, the law will usually step in and force him to continue supporting his young. Or there is welfare. Women are no longer solely dependent on being in a marriage to feed themselves and their children. This rationale for keeping marriage solely on a heterosexual basis is slipping away.
So is the rationale for maintaining the legitimacy of an heir. There are fewer and fewer entitled estates that require a blood relative to inherit. But something even more drastic has happened during the last half century. The stigma of illegitimacy that was meant to keep child production largely within the confines of a traditional marriage has been largely lost.
“Shotgun marriages” were common when I was young. Today many women feel free and unembarrassed to carry the child without a designated father. So one can no longer say that homosexual marriage will destroy the institution of marriage—it is already essentially destroyed among heterosexuals.
All that seems to be left, in many cases, is a legal status—“married”, vs divorced, single, never married and so forth—that confers legal benefits (inheritance, privacy waivers, tax status and so forth) and has increasingly less relevance to the historic usages of marriage—rearing the child and establishing his legitimacy before the law.
Very true, marriage has been for thousands of years a contract between one man and one woman (in non-polygamous societies) for the purpose of begetting young. Even without homosexuality factored into the equation, what is it today?
If it is threatened with destruction, in a traditional, religious sense of the word, homosexuals honestly cannot be blamed. The “destruction” of traditional marriage began to occur back when being a homosexual wasn’t even legal. “They” aren’t doing it. Marriage has been becoming a less and less socially necessary institution for decades.
It is increasingly hard to find logic with which to deny “Gays” the right to the legal benefits of the “married” status—shared medical benefits, rights of inheritance, so forth.
Valid objections to homosexual marriage exist only in the realm of theology and religious practice—not in secular law or social norms. I have to face that. But I will not accept any invitations to work for the day when “Gay” marriage has the same status as my own.
Then I got to thinking—is that still true? It has been historically true. Back in the days before welfare (only about my lifetime) a woman alone with children to raise could find herself in a pretty grim fix. It didn’t matter a lot if she were widowed or perpetually unwed.
In some cultures (India, for instance) women opted not to outlive their dead husbands. Throwing herself on his funeral pyre and burning with him seemed a better choice. Even in the Christian west her opportunities were often limited to prostitution or starvation wages in a sweat shop.
Only in marriage did a woman hope to find some sort of security and protection for herself and her young. A man was required to raise and protect only those children he conceived within the bounds of marriage. Illegitimate children, his or hers, were outside the pale. Thus marriage served a socially useful and necessary function—and it was strictly heterosexual because it very much built around conception.
Even in societies where homosexuality (or lesbianism) was accepted or practiced widely, the notion of marriage as an heterosexual function specifically aimed at producing offspring and heirs remained an historical constant. I cannot think of a society in which homosexual liaisons were accorded the legal status of a marriage contract.
But life has changed in the past fifty years. At least in the western, post-Christian, industrialized world, it has. The weapons of war no longer depend upon brute strength (not, certainly, since the M-16 replaced the M-1 rifle in the 1960s). Women can defend themselves with as much lethal effect as men can. They routinely serve in the military.
More women are getting higher educations than men. For all of the “gender gap”, more and more women are earning professional grade salaries—and are perfectly capable of providing for themselves and their offspring by themselves.
If a man leaves a dependent wife, the law will usually step in and force him to continue supporting his young. Or there is welfare. Women are no longer solely dependent on being in a marriage to feed themselves and their children. This rationale for keeping marriage solely on a heterosexual basis is slipping away.
So is the rationale for maintaining the legitimacy of an heir. There are fewer and fewer entitled estates that require a blood relative to inherit. But something even more drastic has happened during the last half century. The stigma of illegitimacy that was meant to keep child production largely within the confines of a traditional marriage has been largely lost.
“Shotgun marriages” were common when I was young. Today many women feel free and unembarrassed to carry the child without a designated father. So one can no longer say that homosexual marriage will destroy the institution of marriage—it is already essentially destroyed among heterosexuals.
All that seems to be left, in many cases, is a legal status—“married”, vs divorced, single, never married and so forth—that confers legal benefits (inheritance, privacy waivers, tax status and so forth) and has increasingly less relevance to the historic usages of marriage—rearing the child and establishing his legitimacy before the law.
Very true, marriage has been for thousands of years a contract between one man and one woman (in non-polygamous societies) for the purpose of begetting young. Even without homosexuality factored into the equation, what is it today?
If it is threatened with destruction, in a traditional, religious sense of the word, homosexuals honestly cannot be blamed. The “destruction” of traditional marriage began to occur back when being a homosexual wasn’t even legal. “They” aren’t doing it. Marriage has been becoming a less and less socially necessary institution for decades.
It is increasingly hard to find logic with which to deny “Gays” the right to the legal benefits of the “married” status—shared medical benefits, rights of inheritance, so forth.
Valid objections to homosexual marriage exist only in the realm of theology and religious practice—not in secular law or social norms. I have to face that. But I will not accept any invitations to work for the day when “Gay” marriage has the same status as my own.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Lincoln--The Legend
Some legends are true. “The Legend of Davy Crocket” was partly contrived by his political party to make him look like a Man of the People. Lincoln’s legend grew out of a persona forged in brilliant and terrible tragedy—of which he was both victim and maker.
Of some women it is said, “Her face is her fortune”. It’s also true of Abraham Lincoln. His was, as detractors said, an ugly face. Looking at photos of him, without a beard, at the time he was first elected, you are struck by just how ugly.
But go down to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. See it at night (I used to drive every guest down to see it after dark when I lived there.) Other presidents affect me with strong emotion—Lincoln has, up to this writing, stricken me with a mute awe. Look at the face.
There is the face that has known hatred and war. Of a man who has stood in the trenches inside Washington, D.C. and seen the faces of attacking enemy soldiers. Of a man who lost battle after battle and sent the troops back into what seemed pointless slaughter, over and over again. This is the face of the man who wordlessly walked the streets of burned out Richmond until he stood, alone, before the former home of his enemy, President Jefferson Davis. And stood silent.
This is the man who invented modern total war. He sent his troops and his cavalry to burn, loot and destroy civilian holdings until no food was left for the enemy. When Lee quit, his troops had not eaten for days. (The victorious Yankees, reflecting their Commander-in-Chief, immediately turned up the cooking fires and fed them.) Lincoln ordered that even the Confederate marching song, “Dixie”, be struck up by a Union band and become, again, a Northern marching song.
No wonder the South hated his memory. They did not fully recover from the depredations of Mr. Lincoln’s armies for a century. They experienced the sheer ruthlessness of that face. In battle, that face showed no pity for the enemy. (In peace, complete pity.)
The North sensed it, too. Habeas Corpus was suspended. His Secretary of War could brag to a British ambassador that with a stroke of a telegraph key he could imprison any man in America. “Can your Queen Victoria do that?” he asked.
There is a terrible resolve, masked by sorrow and compassion, in that face. You see it all at night under the lights. The Union troops kept coming, kept coming and kept coming—until in Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, Lincoln found generals as pitiless as he was.
His is a face that knew sorrow. Like Churchill, the black dog of depression followed him all of his life. At one time, as a younger man, his friends had to make sure he had no means at hand for killing himself. It is said he wept as battles were lost by incompetent generals.
(He could be tart. He wrote one general who called himself, “Headquarters in the Saddle” and said his headquarters were where his hind quarters ought to be. They claimed Grant was a drunk. Find his brand, Lincoln said, and send a barrel of it to all my other generals!)
Withal, he was somewhat like Christ in that he could legitimately be called, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. And, Christ like, the thing you see most in that face is compassion. Deep, deep compassion. This is a man who nearly gave himself writer’s cramp scribbling out pardons for soldiers sentenced to death for derelictions of duty.
In his First Inaugural Address he warned, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’”
He piled the cemeteries thick with dead until a terrible poetic justice had been served. As many soldiers died during the war as there had been people enslaved when the Constitution was written. Then, having kept the oath, he concluded his Second Inaugural Address.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” He makes no distinction between blue and gray.
That’s the inscription on the wall—and that’s the face of the Legend who today stares out across the Mall toward the Capitol Building and toward the statue of his best general. The face has become the Legend.
Of some women it is said, “Her face is her fortune”. It’s also true of Abraham Lincoln. His was, as detractors said, an ugly face. Looking at photos of him, without a beard, at the time he was first elected, you are struck by just how ugly.
But go down to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. See it at night (I used to drive every guest down to see it after dark when I lived there.) Other presidents affect me with strong emotion—Lincoln has, up to this writing, stricken me with a mute awe. Look at the face.
There is the face that has known hatred and war. Of a man who has stood in the trenches inside Washington, D.C. and seen the faces of attacking enemy soldiers. Of a man who lost battle after battle and sent the troops back into what seemed pointless slaughter, over and over again. This is the face of the man who wordlessly walked the streets of burned out Richmond until he stood, alone, before the former home of his enemy, President Jefferson Davis. And stood silent.
This is the man who invented modern total war. He sent his troops and his cavalry to burn, loot and destroy civilian holdings until no food was left for the enemy. When Lee quit, his troops had not eaten for days. (The victorious Yankees, reflecting their Commander-in-Chief, immediately turned up the cooking fires and fed them.) Lincoln ordered that even the Confederate marching song, “Dixie”, be struck up by a Union band and become, again, a Northern marching song.
No wonder the South hated his memory. They did not fully recover from the depredations of Mr. Lincoln’s armies for a century. They experienced the sheer ruthlessness of that face. In battle, that face showed no pity for the enemy. (In peace, complete pity.)
The North sensed it, too. Habeas Corpus was suspended. His Secretary of War could brag to a British ambassador that with a stroke of a telegraph key he could imprison any man in America. “Can your Queen Victoria do that?” he asked.
There is a terrible resolve, masked by sorrow and compassion, in that face. You see it all at night under the lights. The Union troops kept coming, kept coming and kept coming—until in Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, Lincoln found generals as pitiless as he was.
His is a face that knew sorrow. Like Churchill, the black dog of depression followed him all of his life. At one time, as a younger man, his friends had to make sure he had no means at hand for killing himself. It is said he wept as battles were lost by incompetent generals.
(He could be tart. He wrote one general who called himself, “Headquarters in the Saddle” and said his headquarters were where his hind quarters ought to be. They claimed Grant was a drunk. Find his brand, Lincoln said, and send a barrel of it to all my other generals!)
Withal, he was somewhat like Christ in that he could legitimately be called, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. And, Christ like, the thing you see most in that face is compassion. Deep, deep compassion. This is a man who nearly gave himself writer’s cramp scribbling out pardons for soldiers sentenced to death for derelictions of duty.
In his First Inaugural Address he warned, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’”
He piled the cemeteries thick with dead until a terrible poetic justice had been served. As many soldiers died during the war as there had been people enslaved when the Constitution was written. Then, having kept the oath, he concluded his Second Inaugural Address.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” He makes no distinction between blue and gray.
That’s the inscription on the wall—and that’s the face of the Legend who today stares out across the Mall toward the Capitol Building and toward the statue of his best general. The face has become the Legend.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Lincoln--We Are Still Coming, Father Abraham
Today is Lincoln’s birthday. It used to be a holiday—until the old Confederacy made it clear that celebrating it would be like asking Jews to celebrate Waffen SS Day. So we’ve combined it with Washington’s Birthday, and now we have “President’s Day”.
Lincoln is still worthy of his own day. Even if most of us honor—or loath—him for all the wrong reasons. He preserved the Union, yet he was as much a sectionalist as Robert E. Lee. In this government hating era, we must remember that he was—above all—a brilliant politician.
He “emancipated” the slaves, almost literally over his own dead body. He told us in his First Inaugural Address that his primary interest was to preserve the Union—to that end he would free “some of the slaves, all of the slaves or none of the slaves”.
He fully understood that ending slavery was high on the list of very, very few Northerners. His famed Emancipation Proclamation was strictly an appeal to the anti-slavery sentiments of the British electorate—to keep England from entering the war on the Confederacy’s side. It was carefully crafted to free no actual slaves whatsoever.
Throughout much of the war he had to calculate every move based on keeping Europe at bay while imposing what they felt was an illegal blockade on an independent Confederacy. England remained a serious threat until the Russian Navy arrived and parked itself in New York harbor throughout the winter of 1863-4. By late winter we were strong enough to make a serious threat of war ourselves—and England backed off.
But Britain and the Confederacy were only two of Lincoln’s major problems. New York—and its big banks—may have been his biggest. A very good argument can be made that, for both North and South, the largest war issue may have been New York’s desire to impose financial hegemony over the entire federal union.
From the outset, the outsider from the western farm states, had to battle to keep the New Yorkers in his cabinet at bay. His war aims and their war aims were quite different. In the end it can be argued that the New York banking and business interests won the war—and Wall Street became the dominant American power base (don’t forget, during the Cold War, the Communist block always spoke of the enemy as being—not America or Washington—but Wall Street).
Lincoln steadfastly rejected Seward’s appeal for open war with our chief commercial rival, Great Britain, but he was forced to move toward Seward’s radical abolitionism when he lost most other support for the war. It was a constant see-saw.
He never forgot that Prairie states like Illinois had historically depended on their uneasy political alliance with the Plantation South to defend their interests against the eastern banks. In a last desperate move to protect western farmers, Lincoln offered the South an opportunity to lay down its arms, re-enter Congress and vote down the 13th Amendment.
A secret conference was held, no agreement was reached—and a month later Lee surrendered. A week after that Lincoln was dead, and with him went the last obstacle to New York control over American finance. (The South, incidentally, had no sane reason to kill Lincoln—he was their last hope in defeat, and many southerners at the time recognized it.)
So much for the political Lincoln—who accomplished his primary goal to pass on to his successor a United States with as many stars in its flag as it had when he took office. Despite Britain, despite the Confederacy; even despite New York City. His primary monument is a flag with fifty stars on it.
(Think of World War I or II with two mutually hostile Americas carrying on their animosity by taking different sides. Life would be unimaginably different for the entire planet without Lincoln.)
But it is as a symbol—as he had already become during the Civil War—that Lincoln is most remembered and loved or hated. The Northern Armies marched singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”. That can be more important than reality. Let’s look at the symbol, the iconic Lincoln tomorrow.
Lincoln is still worthy of his own day. Even if most of us honor—or loath—him for all the wrong reasons. He preserved the Union, yet he was as much a sectionalist as Robert E. Lee. In this government hating era, we must remember that he was—above all—a brilliant politician.
He “emancipated” the slaves, almost literally over his own dead body. He told us in his First Inaugural Address that his primary interest was to preserve the Union—to that end he would free “some of the slaves, all of the slaves or none of the slaves”.
He fully understood that ending slavery was high on the list of very, very few Northerners. His famed Emancipation Proclamation was strictly an appeal to the anti-slavery sentiments of the British electorate—to keep England from entering the war on the Confederacy’s side. It was carefully crafted to free no actual slaves whatsoever.
Throughout much of the war he had to calculate every move based on keeping Europe at bay while imposing what they felt was an illegal blockade on an independent Confederacy. England remained a serious threat until the Russian Navy arrived and parked itself in New York harbor throughout the winter of 1863-4. By late winter we were strong enough to make a serious threat of war ourselves—and England backed off.
But Britain and the Confederacy were only two of Lincoln’s major problems. New York—and its big banks—may have been his biggest. A very good argument can be made that, for both North and South, the largest war issue may have been New York’s desire to impose financial hegemony over the entire federal union.
From the outset, the outsider from the western farm states, had to battle to keep the New Yorkers in his cabinet at bay. His war aims and their war aims were quite different. In the end it can be argued that the New York banking and business interests won the war—and Wall Street became the dominant American power base (don’t forget, during the Cold War, the Communist block always spoke of the enemy as being—not America or Washington—but Wall Street).
Lincoln steadfastly rejected Seward’s appeal for open war with our chief commercial rival, Great Britain, but he was forced to move toward Seward’s radical abolitionism when he lost most other support for the war. It was a constant see-saw.
He never forgot that Prairie states like Illinois had historically depended on their uneasy political alliance with the Plantation South to defend their interests against the eastern banks. In a last desperate move to protect western farmers, Lincoln offered the South an opportunity to lay down its arms, re-enter Congress and vote down the 13th Amendment.
A secret conference was held, no agreement was reached—and a month later Lee surrendered. A week after that Lincoln was dead, and with him went the last obstacle to New York control over American finance. (The South, incidentally, had no sane reason to kill Lincoln—he was their last hope in defeat, and many southerners at the time recognized it.)
So much for the political Lincoln—who accomplished his primary goal to pass on to his successor a United States with as many stars in its flag as it had when he took office. Despite Britain, despite the Confederacy; even despite New York City. His primary monument is a flag with fifty stars on it.
(Think of World War I or II with two mutually hostile Americas carrying on their animosity by taking different sides. Life would be unimaginably different for the entire planet without Lincoln.)
But it is as a symbol—as he had already become during the Civil War—that Lincoln is most remembered and loved or hated. The Northern Armies marched singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”. That can be more important than reality. Let’s look at the symbol, the iconic Lincoln tomorrow.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Inflation--Making the Deficit Go Away
A year ago I was saying that the only possible way America could cover its massive debts was by employing massive inflation. After all, a trillion doesn’t look so huge when its value is only about the equivalent of a million or so today.
A government can pay that off relatively easily—in fact it can pay off several trillions at that rate. It’s the only imaginable way that we can pay off the foreseeable government shortfalls without crippling tax increases or Draconian cuts in programs like Social Security.
Enough inflation to bring the debt down to manageable repayment schedules involves, of course, what we call hyper inflation. We saw a real life example of that in Austria and Germany after World War I. They paid workers in wheelbarrows full of cash that could barely cover a week’s groceries. People raced to the stores before more inflation became less food.
This kind of inflation gets rid of debt—like bankruptcy—but it has other pernicious consequences. For one thing, it cannot be controlled, however much officials may fool themselves into thinking they can turn it on and turn it off.
It also wipes out the middle class. You’ve worked hard and saved diligently all your life. You’ve accumulated a comfortable retirement nest egg of say, a million. Good on you. Except that with the kind of inflation our government is going to need, suddenly that million barely represents a single year’s expenses.
With serious (hyper) inflation, that million drops to a point where it covers little more than a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread and some eggs. A lifetime of sensible saving and investing will now feed you for a few days. Period.
Inflation frightens (or outrages) creditors. To keep the Chinese, for instance, buying and holding dollar based treasury bonds, initially you need to raise interest rates. Huge tax increases become immediately necessary in order to pay the new rate of interest.
The need to use government revenues for interest payments stops or cripples all sorts of programs. The taxes needed cripple business investment and hiring. We see an example of this in England between the two world wars.
She came out of World War I so burdened with debt that it took nearly half of all government revenues just to service the debt. One reason she did not arm to stop Hitler in the 1930s is that she couldn’t afford to. (What happens to our “war on terror” or defense against it?)
Finally an international panic sets in and foreign banks, investors and governments began to dump the dollar—hoping to get a few more cents today than a dollar might bring tomorrow. With its credibility destroyed, the dollar becomes the paper it really is.
That’s when hyper inflation sets in—no one knows how long it will run or how low it will go. It takes on a life of its own, fueled by panic. The effects of German inflation were only eased when Hitler came to power and put people to work building munitions. He put a lot of the unemployed in the Wehrmacht and gave them jobs in Poland, France and Russia.
This week Bloomberg “Business Week” quotes a group of economists out in California who just wrote a research paper titled, “Using Inflation to Erode the U.S. Public Debt”.
“Business Week” warns, “As the [2008] financial crisis demonstrated, things can go to hell in a hurry” if, for example, calculated inflation doesn’t work out quite as planned. The magazine doesn’t say the notion is impossible, just that it might be worrisome. (Feb. 15, p 16)
But try to think of an alternative.
A government can pay that off relatively easily—in fact it can pay off several trillions at that rate. It’s the only imaginable way that we can pay off the foreseeable government shortfalls without crippling tax increases or Draconian cuts in programs like Social Security.
Enough inflation to bring the debt down to manageable repayment schedules involves, of course, what we call hyper inflation. We saw a real life example of that in Austria and Germany after World War I. They paid workers in wheelbarrows full of cash that could barely cover a week’s groceries. People raced to the stores before more inflation became less food.
This kind of inflation gets rid of debt—like bankruptcy—but it has other pernicious consequences. For one thing, it cannot be controlled, however much officials may fool themselves into thinking they can turn it on and turn it off.
It also wipes out the middle class. You’ve worked hard and saved diligently all your life. You’ve accumulated a comfortable retirement nest egg of say, a million. Good on you. Except that with the kind of inflation our government is going to need, suddenly that million barely represents a single year’s expenses.
With serious (hyper) inflation, that million drops to a point where it covers little more than a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread and some eggs. A lifetime of sensible saving and investing will now feed you for a few days. Period.
Inflation frightens (or outrages) creditors. To keep the Chinese, for instance, buying and holding dollar based treasury bonds, initially you need to raise interest rates. Huge tax increases become immediately necessary in order to pay the new rate of interest.
The need to use government revenues for interest payments stops or cripples all sorts of programs. The taxes needed cripple business investment and hiring. We see an example of this in England between the two world wars.
She came out of World War I so burdened with debt that it took nearly half of all government revenues just to service the debt. One reason she did not arm to stop Hitler in the 1930s is that she couldn’t afford to. (What happens to our “war on terror” or defense against it?)
Finally an international panic sets in and foreign banks, investors and governments began to dump the dollar—hoping to get a few more cents today than a dollar might bring tomorrow. With its credibility destroyed, the dollar becomes the paper it really is.
That’s when hyper inflation sets in—no one knows how long it will run or how low it will go. It takes on a life of its own, fueled by panic. The effects of German inflation were only eased when Hitler came to power and put people to work building munitions. He put a lot of the unemployed in the Wehrmacht and gave them jobs in Poland, France and Russia.
This week Bloomberg “Business Week” quotes a group of economists out in California who just wrote a research paper titled, “Using Inflation to Erode the U.S. Public Debt”.
“Business Week” warns, “As the [2008] financial crisis demonstrated, things can go to hell in a hurry” if, for example, calculated inflation doesn’t work out quite as planned. The magazine doesn’t say the notion is impossible, just that it might be worrisome. (Feb. 15, p 16)
But try to think of an alternative.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
War On Terror And Bad History
It seems to be dawning on the Pentagon, the White House and at least a few Americans who pay attention that, in our war on terrorism, we are in for the long haul. AOL’s news blog recently ran a story headed, “War Without End?”
It happens. Especially it happens when you have an intractable enemy. The Pentagon is beginning to do its planning and its future weapons purchases based on a “war on terror” that is going to last a long, long time.
Americans are used to wars in which you go fight for five or fewer years, pound the other guy into the ground—and everybody goes home to cheers and parades. That’s one reason Vietnam has left such a scar on our national psyche. It went on and on and on and we couldn’t win it—not at least at a cost that was worth paying. (Obama owes much of his election momentum in 2008 to an instinctive American recoil at the thought of an endless war.)
Vietnam was just one small nation. Imagine a series of wars that stretch from the Atlantic, all across North Africa and the Middle East—take a break in India, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam—and pick up again when you reach Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Even if we conquered all that territory—do we have the manpower and resources to occupy it? Do we have the political will and stomach to do what Genghis Khan would have done in the face of too many people to hold down—kill them all?
A major reason why the prospect of a “war on terror” that might go on for decades and even centuries shocks Americans is that we really do not study history. Not even the people in our State Department waste their time on such things.
(I used to say that if you are a bad engineer and a building falls down, you may kill hundreds. If you rule a nation and are a bad historian, millions or even billions may die in the world—and with the weapons--of today. Americans are decent engineers, dreadful historians.)
As a result of not knowing any history we Americans find ourselves baffled at finding our troops still engaged in Iraq, ramping up their combat capabilities in Afghanistan and finding out that new Al Qaida training camps keep popping up all over. No end in sight.
What lack of historical knowledge prevents us from understanding is that this “war on terror” has gone on for 1300 years, basically non-stop. It took us over five centuries to push them back out of Spain. It took six centuries to push them out of the Balkans—leaving behind Muslim groups like the Bosnians and Albanians. It took over three centuries to stamp out piracy along the North African coast. We had warships in the Mediterranean for forty years, 1800-1840.
The reason we are so unaware of this very long war is that it wasn’t waged for most of the last century. In 1897 British troops crushed the last of the independent Muslim slave traders in Africa—and for the next sixty years or more nearly every Muslim nation on Earth was controlled by a European or American power. They could not attack us—as they had without surcease since the late Seventh Century-- because we had troops on the ground to prevent it.
When the European Empires fell apart in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the Muslim nations were suddenly free again. It took them until 1979 when Iran turned out the Shah to revert to their old practices and attitudes against the “Christian” West.
A war that has its roots in a millennium of past conflict isn’t likely to stop because we send 30,000 more troops to one Muslim country. It is, as the Pentagon is realizing, highly likely to go on for decades and even centuries more. The deep religious/ideological divide between East and West that sparked the original war is still there. They always knew it; we’re learning.
We may have to remember back to the Indian wars. We fought them, tribe by tribe, for nearly 300 years—non-stop, 1622 to 1890. Frontiersmen would have called those a “war on terror”. Welcome to our next edition.
It happens. Especially it happens when you have an intractable enemy. The Pentagon is beginning to do its planning and its future weapons purchases based on a “war on terror” that is going to last a long, long time.
Americans are used to wars in which you go fight for five or fewer years, pound the other guy into the ground—and everybody goes home to cheers and parades. That’s one reason Vietnam has left such a scar on our national psyche. It went on and on and on and we couldn’t win it—not at least at a cost that was worth paying. (Obama owes much of his election momentum in 2008 to an instinctive American recoil at the thought of an endless war.)
Vietnam was just one small nation. Imagine a series of wars that stretch from the Atlantic, all across North Africa and the Middle East—take a break in India, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam—and pick up again when you reach Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Even if we conquered all that territory—do we have the manpower and resources to occupy it? Do we have the political will and stomach to do what Genghis Khan would have done in the face of too many people to hold down—kill them all?
A major reason why the prospect of a “war on terror” that might go on for decades and even centuries shocks Americans is that we really do not study history. Not even the people in our State Department waste their time on such things.
(I used to say that if you are a bad engineer and a building falls down, you may kill hundreds. If you rule a nation and are a bad historian, millions or even billions may die in the world—and with the weapons--of today. Americans are decent engineers, dreadful historians.)
As a result of not knowing any history we Americans find ourselves baffled at finding our troops still engaged in Iraq, ramping up their combat capabilities in Afghanistan and finding out that new Al Qaida training camps keep popping up all over. No end in sight.
What lack of historical knowledge prevents us from understanding is that this “war on terror” has gone on for 1300 years, basically non-stop. It took us over five centuries to push them back out of Spain. It took six centuries to push them out of the Balkans—leaving behind Muslim groups like the Bosnians and Albanians. It took over three centuries to stamp out piracy along the North African coast. We had warships in the Mediterranean for forty years, 1800-1840.
The reason we are so unaware of this very long war is that it wasn’t waged for most of the last century. In 1897 British troops crushed the last of the independent Muslim slave traders in Africa—and for the next sixty years or more nearly every Muslim nation on Earth was controlled by a European or American power. They could not attack us—as they had without surcease since the late Seventh Century-- because we had troops on the ground to prevent it.
When the European Empires fell apart in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the Muslim nations were suddenly free again. It took them until 1979 when Iran turned out the Shah to revert to their old practices and attitudes against the “Christian” West.
A war that has its roots in a millennium of past conflict isn’t likely to stop because we send 30,000 more troops to one Muslim country. It is, as the Pentagon is realizing, highly likely to go on for decades and even centuries more. The deep religious/ideological divide between East and West that sparked the original war is still there. They always knew it; we’re learning.
We may have to remember back to the Indian wars. We fought them, tribe by tribe, for nearly 300 years—non-stop, 1622 to 1890. Frontiersmen would have called those a “war on terror”. Welcome to our next edition.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A Skritch In The Night
We finally got rid of a house guest last night. He was about two inches long, had beady eyes and a long tail. My older son, who has his private digs in the basement, heard him skritching about for several days and finally set a trap.
The trap, however, neither killed nor seriously injured him. (He was annoyed. He tried to bite my gloved son when the trap was removed.) So we had a highly emotional mouse on our hands—and my son was adamant that we were going to let him live.
My son went out in the garage and located an old terrarium that he’s used in the past for pet snakes and the like. He gave the mouse an old sock and part of an egg crate for housing and put him on the floor of his room where, we were assured, the mouse could not escape through the mesh lid on his new glass house. We fed him table scraps. (He seemed to really like pancakes.)
Throughout his stay we didn’t see much of him. The mouse pretty much remained in his sock and under the egg crate. I said, “Squee?” to him a couple of times, but he never answered. (I may have been using the wrong dialect—this was a field mouse.)
Then, again, “Mouse” may be a highly inflected language, something like Chinese. You can get all the words right to say, “Good morning, you’re looking lovely” and come out actually saying, “Your nose is red and your breath stinks”. It can be difficult to communicate with either the Chinese or mice.
Who knows how dreadfully I may have insulted that poor mouse. My son tells us he only came out at night—and didn’t speak to him either. Things continued in this fashion for about a week.
I must add here that the reason this field mouse was visiting us at all was that a major ecological disruption occurred in his old neighborhood. For years the mice lived in the woods across the street and we lived in houses on our side of the street. There was no undue interaction; we pretty much left each other alone.
Six years ago the bulldozers came. Woods and fields were swept away in a welter of roads, sewers and new homes. No more peaceful co-existence between man and mouse. (In Arizona they have the same problem with snakes; in California with mountain lions.)
The mice found new homes across the street—in my basement and a few of my neighbors’. Every fall seems to bring another venturesome mouse with the intent to stay warm for the winter. One year we had a whole family.
We trapped mama and baby mice in a large butterfly net and sent them into the woods BEHIND our house. Other mice died in traps or by poison. You begin to feel like, “It’s them or us”. I’m sure they feel the same way.
A full détente would probably call for vastly improved communication, but they don’t talk to me and I am completely unable to talk to them. And last night we had a total failure of communication.
My son’s idea was to keep the mouse in his warm terrarium, well supplied with peanut butter and pancakes until it got warm outside. Unfortunately no one was able to explain this to the mouse. Last evening we found him at the top of his glass house on the verge of successfully wriggling his way out. No! He was not again to have free run of the house.
We all agreed he’d overstayed his welcome. My wife and son loaded Mr. Mouse into the van and drove him to a wooded spot about a mile away. Here he was released near a hole in a tree stump—into which he dragged his sock and there he was left to survive winter as best he might.
I hope he does. Surely he remembers about hawks, cats and coyotes—and how to gather wild food. If he does he will have stories to tell his grandchildren that they will hardly believe.
The trap, however, neither killed nor seriously injured him. (He was annoyed. He tried to bite my gloved son when the trap was removed.) So we had a highly emotional mouse on our hands—and my son was adamant that we were going to let him live.
My son went out in the garage and located an old terrarium that he’s used in the past for pet snakes and the like. He gave the mouse an old sock and part of an egg crate for housing and put him on the floor of his room where, we were assured, the mouse could not escape through the mesh lid on his new glass house. We fed him table scraps. (He seemed to really like pancakes.)
Throughout his stay we didn’t see much of him. The mouse pretty much remained in his sock and under the egg crate. I said, “Squee?” to him a couple of times, but he never answered. (I may have been using the wrong dialect—this was a field mouse.)
Then, again, “Mouse” may be a highly inflected language, something like Chinese. You can get all the words right to say, “Good morning, you’re looking lovely” and come out actually saying, “Your nose is red and your breath stinks”. It can be difficult to communicate with either the Chinese or mice.
Who knows how dreadfully I may have insulted that poor mouse. My son tells us he only came out at night—and didn’t speak to him either. Things continued in this fashion for about a week.
I must add here that the reason this field mouse was visiting us at all was that a major ecological disruption occurred in his old neighborhood. For years the mice lived in the woods across the street and we lived in houses on our side of the street. There was no undue interaction; we pretty much left each other alone.
Six years ago the bulldozers came. Woods and fields were swept away in a welter of roads, sewers and new homes. No more peaceful co-existence between man and mouse. (In Arizona they have the same problem with snakes; in California with mountain lions.)
The mice found new homes across the street—in my basement and a few of my neighbors’. Every fall seems to bring another venturesome mouse with the intent to stay warm for the winter. One year we had a whole family.
We trapped mama and baby mice in a large butterfly net and sent them into the woods BEHIND our house. Other mice died in traps or by poison. You begin to feel like, “It’s them or us”. I’m sure they feel the same way.
A full détente would probably call for vastly improved communication, but they don’t talk to me and I am completely unable to talk to them. And last night we had a total failure of communication.
My son’s idea was to keep the mouse in his warm terrarium, well supplied with peanut butter and pancakes until it got warm outside. Unfortunately no one was able to explain this to the mouse. Last evening we found him at the top of his glass house on the verge of successfully wriggling his way out. No! He was not again to have free run of the house.
We all agreed he’d overstayed his welcome. My wife and son loaded Mr. Mouse into the van and drove him to a wooded spot about a mile away. Here he was released near a hole in a tree stump—into which he dragged his sock and there he was left to survive winter as best he might.
I hope he does. Surely he remembers about hawks, cats and coyotes—and how to gather wild food. If he does he will have stories to tell his grandchildren that they will hardly believe.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
No Child Left Behind--A Fantasy
One of the things Obama recently suggested doing is making major revisions to the “No Child Left Behind” act that Bush and Kennedy put through early in Bush’s presidency. Not a bad idea. The bill was flawed in many ways.
For one thing it assumed that a teacher, no matter how good at teaching he or she may be, is actually capable of motivating children. In many cases this is false. First of all, a child’s primary motivation—or lack thereof—comes from parents. Peers come in second and the teacher is, at best, a poor third.
I can tell you from bitter experience that if the parents don’t see any value in school and they communicate that notion to the kid, there is very rarely any way you can reach him or her. Parental indifference—or hostility—is often an insurmountable barrier to an education. If you’re in a school where a substantial number of parents feel that way, you’re dead.
I’ve sat in too many classes where the kids look at an assignment, sneer, and leave it untouched on their desk. Ask them to pick it up and they will agree—and then put it down on the other side of the backpack. Federal laws aren’t going to make him or her pick it up.
Remember, you may no longer paddle a child or threaten him in such a way as to make him feel humiliated—so what do you have to work with? Nothing. Throw the kid out of the room because he is disrupting everyone else and he’s happy to leave.
Hard core recalcitrants do not respond to positive motivation, promises of a brighter future or appeals to the better nature. Ask the prison guards who will one day superintend them—and there are, year by year, more and more of this kind of kid.
There’s another issue. “No Child Left Behind” demanded that all teachers have class hours or certificates to prove their competence in a field. That has its dicey aspects as well. I’m thinking of a very good middle school history teacher I knew.
He’d majored in music, but he’d switched to history years ago. He was very, very good at it (I enjoyed talking history with him when I was in that school.) Under “No Child”, he was booted from history and sent back to find a music job—where he had academic credits but hadn’t worked in decades. “No Child” allowed no exceptions, not even sane ones.
The worst example I knew of concerned a man who spent twenty-three years developing a course in video editing. He bought cameras and equipment himself; he spent hours and years setting up a huge lab, and he mastered—and taught—all manner of arcane software. His class was hugely popular; kids almost stood in line to get in.
But back when he was in college, there were no courses for teachers in this subject. He had no academic background. “No Child” declared him unfit to teach video editing or filming or anything else to do with cameras and computers.
He was sent to the middle school to teach a subject he had once taken courses in. (He took his own equipment home with him.) They hired a young woman who had taken a course or two in video; her major was art.
She had no idea what he did or what the stuff in his lab did. They eventually broke up the lab; she went back to Detroit to teach art the next year—and the course is no longer offered at that high school. No one else had any idea how.
To bring “No Child Left Behind” into the real world will require a lot more than a glance at some transcripts. We’ll have to look at what a teacher can actually DO—and we’ll have to figure out how to motivate an awful lot of indifferent parents.
Baring that, you might as well burn the dollars as waste them on schools—which were never designed to do what we’re asking of them. And cannot.
For one thing it assumed that a teacher, no matter how good at teaching he or she may be, is actually capable of motivating children. In many cases this is false. First of all, a child’s primary motivation—or lack thereof—comes from parents. Peers come in second and the teacher is, at best, a poor third.
I can tell you from bitter experience that if the parents don’t see any value in school and they communicate that notion to the kid, there is very rarely any way you can reach him or her. Parental indifference—or hostility—is often an insurmountable barrier to an education. If you’re in a school where a substantial number of parents feel that way, you’re dead.
I’ve sat in too many classes where the kids look at an assignment, sneer, and leave it untouched on their desk. Ask them to pick it up and they will agree—and then put it down on the other side of the backpack. Federal laws aren’t going to make him or her pick it up.
Remember, you may no longer paddle a child or threaten him in such a way as to make him feel humiliated—so what do you have to work with? Nothing. Throw the kid out of the room because he is disrupting everyone else and he’s happy to leave.
Hard core recalcitrants do not respond to positive motivation, promises of a brighter future or appeals to the better nature. Ask the prison guards who will one day superintend them—and there are, year by year, more and more of this kind of kid.
There’s another issue. “No Child Left Behind” demanded that all teachers have class hours or certificates to prove their competence in a field. That has its dicey aspects as well. I’m thinking of a very good middle school history teacher I knew.
He’d majored in music, but he’d switched to history years ago. He was very, very good at it (I enjoyed talking history with him when I was in that school.) Under “No Child”, he was booted from history and sent back to find a music job—where he had academic credits but hadn’t worked in decades. “No Child” allowed no exceptions, not even sane ones.
The worst example I knew of concerned a man who spent twenty-three years developing a course in video editing. He bought cameras and equipment himself; he spent hours and years setting up a huge lab, and he mastered—and taught—all manner of arcane software. His class was hugely popular; kids almost stood in line to get in.
But back when he was in college, there were no courses for teachers in this subject. He had no academic background. “No Child” declared him unfit to teach video editing or filming or anything else to do with cameras and computers.
He was sent to the middle school to teach a subject he had once taken courses in. (He took his own equipment home with him.) They hired a young woman who had taken a course or two in video; her major was art.
She had no idea what he did or what the stuff in his lab did. They eventually broke up the lab; she went back to Detroit to teach art the next year—and the course is no longer offered at that high school. No one else had any idea how.
To bring “No Child Left Behind” into the real world will require a lot more than a glance at some transcripts. We’ll have to look at what a teacher can actually DO—and we’ll have to figure out how to motivate an awful lot of indifferent parents.
Baring that, you might as well burn the dollars as waste them on schools—which were never designed to do what we’re asking of them. And cannot.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Obama--Was Sarah Palin Right?
You know what Barak Obama needs most? A Dick Cheney. Even I don’t believe I said that. I was no fan of Vice President Cheney for the last eight years; I’m not really a fan now. But he’s exactly what Obama needs to be a successful president.
George W. Bush may have shown a paucity of intellect from time to time, but he had the wit to get out of Cheney’s way at crucial moments and let the old master get things done. (If Obama had a Cheney, I’m not sure he’d know to do that, but he should.) There was a reason why papa—George W.H. Bush—recommended Cheney in the first place.
GWH Bush, the placator, the diplomat, understood something about the presidency—that Obama does not. You can play the presidency in one of two ways to be successful. Be charming and stubbornly determined (think FDR or Reagan) or nasty and determined (think L.B.J.)
Johnson got more legislation through in four years than just about any other president I can think of. He didn’t do it by looking for consensus or by letting the House and Senate do their own things. He’d threaten a recalcitrant Congressman with anything from no goodies for his district—ever—to public exposure of all his peccadilloes (nice to have J. Edgar Hoover as a buddy).
Johnson could be brutally convincing—he got his votes and his laws, from both sides of the aisle. There’s not a hint of this in Obama’s measured, cool, law school brief style. Not passion, no fire, no fight. You can’t even imagine it.
Even the charming presidents had ways and means of turning on the heat. Somebody, somewhere knew how to combine Reagan and Roosevelt’s charm with the ability to break political bones and spill political guts and blood when needed. Or there’d be no New Deal and no such thing as Reaganomics.
Sarah Palin’s speech writer said something about Obama that has turned out to be terribly true. He has all the smoothness and deferential manner required of a good community organizer—where you have to try to get people to do things with very little carrot and absolutely no stick. But you, yourself, don’t actually ever do anything.
(Obama carried that tactic into his role as a senator. Senators don’t really DO anything except pass legislation—and I know of no major legislation that carries Obama’s signature, or even a couple of his finger-prints.)
As Palin’s speechwriter had her point out, “I’ve been a governor; we have to DO things.” It got a big, appreciative laugh at the Convention, but it has proven to be dreadfully right on. You can imagine Palin deciding she wants something and going out to twist a few arms out of their sockets until she got it. Can you see Obama doing that? He certainly hasn’t yet.
Obama begins to remind us of Warren G. Harding—the man who LOOKED presidential and, for that reason and only that reason, was nominated and elected in 1920. Harding’s own dad once said to him, “Warren, it’s a good thing you’re not a girl. You’d be pregnant all the time.”
If you can’t twist arms, DO things and make other people do things they might rather prefer not to—you’re not going to walk out of the Oval Office labeled a success. You may not even get invited back into it for a second term.
As a Republican, I probably should be happy that Obama is shaping up to be a second Harding; as an American I’m nervous about it. If you have a man who knows how to get what he wants, he may get it right some of the time.
If he doesn’t know how to get what he wants at all—if he isn’t even clear about wanting anything—you’re likely to wind up going nowhere. That’s wrong all the time.
George W. Bush may have shown a paucity of intellect from time to time, but he had the wit to get out of Cheney’s way at crucial moments and let the old master get things done. (If Obama had a Cheney, I’m not sure he’d know to do that, but he should.) There was a reason why papa—George W.H. Bush—recommended Cheney in the first place.
GWH Bush, the placator, the diplomat, understood something about the presidency—that Obama does not. You can play the presidency in one of two ways to be successful. Be charming and stubbornly determined (think FDR or Reagan) or nasty and determined (think L.B.J.)
Johnson got more legislation through in four years than just about any other president I can think of. He didn’t do it by looking for consensus or by letting the House and Senate do their own things. He’d threaten a recalcitrant Congressman with anything from no goodies for his district—ever—to public exposure of all his peccadilloes (nice to have J. Edgar Hoover as a buddy).
Johnson could be brutally convincing—he got his votes and his laws, from both sides of the aisle. There’s not a hint of this in Obama’s measured, cool, law school brief style. Not passion, no fire, no fight. You can’t even imagine it.
Even the charming presidents had ways and means of turning on the heat. Somebody, somewhere knew how to combine Reagan and Roosevelt’s charm with the ability to break political bones and spill political guts and blood when needed. Or there’d be no New Deal and no such thing as Reaganomics.
Sarah Palin’s speech writer said something about Obama that has turned out to be terribly true. He has all the smoothness and deferential manner required of a good community organizer—where you have to try to get people to do things with very little carrot and absolutely no stick. But you, yourself, don’t actually ever do anything.
(Obama carried that tactic into his role as a senator. Senators don’t really DO anything except pass legislation—and I know of no major legislation that carries Obama’s signature, or even a couple of his finger-prints.)
As Palin’s speechwriter had her point out, “I’ve been a governor; we have to DO things.” It got a big, appreciative laugh at the Convention, but it has proven to be dreadfully right on. You can imagine Palin deciding she wants something and going out to twist a few arms out of their sockets until she got it. Can you see Obama doing that? He certainly hasn’t yet.
Obama begins to remind us of Warren G. Harding—the man who LOOKED presidential and, for that reason and only that reason, was nominated and elected in 1920. Harding’s own dad once said to him, “Warren, it’s a good thing you’re not a girl. You’d be pregnant all the time.”
If you can’t twist arms, DO things and make other people do things they might rather prefer not to—you’re not going to walk out of the Oval Office labeled a success. You may not even get invited back into it for a second term.
As a Republican, I probably should be happy that Obama is shaping up to be a second Harding; as an American I’m nervous about it. If you have a man who knows how to get what he wants, he may get it right some of the time.
If he doesn’t know how to get what he wants at all—if he isn’t even clear about wanting anything—you’re likely to wind up going nowhere. That’s wrong all the time.
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