sams politics & religion

Obama, Oil and The Deep Blue Sea

2010-05-30T00:08:00.002-04:00

You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.

Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?

2010-05-28T00:49:00.002-04:00

Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.

Trinity Sunday--And the Price of Oil

2010-05-23T18:25:00.002-04:00

Today is Trinity Sunday. That’s not a Protestant term and most conventional Catholics don’t pay a great deal of attention to it either. But it opens the longest season in the ancient liturgical year. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and runs about four weeks. Christmas Season runs twelve days. Epiphany goes approximately six or seven weeks until Lent which lasts 40 days. Easter Season runs for seven weeks until somewhere around June 1st.
Trinity lasts about six months—from now until next November 26, this year. It is a far more significant liturgical moment than it is recognized as being. It commemorates the day, described in the second chapter of The Acts of The Apostles when the entire Trinity was revealed.
We meet God The Father in the Old Testament (Jewish Bible). This is the person of the Trinity who delivers the Ten Commandments, parts the Red Sea, punishes Israel by allowing the destruction of the Temple and takes vengeance on those who destroyed it.
We meet God The Son at Bethlehem. He is the Jesus who walks around Judea and Galilee (and makes a single foray into Lebanon), healing, teaching and generally annoying conventional religious leaders. He is crucified on Good Friday, raised on Easter—and promises to send a “comforter who will guide the church into all truth”.
Forty days after Easter (or Passover as it was then celebrated), Jesus leaves the Earth and tells his followers to wait in Jerusalem until “The Holy Spirit” comes upon them. Ten days later, on the Jewish Feast of Shavout—which celebrates harvest and the fiftieth day after the Exodus when, Jews believe, God The Father gave the Ten Commandments, the Holy Spirit arrives. Here, on this day, the Church is to get its spiritual and, even, physical power.
Thus we are introduced to the Holy Spirit (or Ghost) and the Christian Trinity is complete. The Trinity is, of course, the foundation upon which orthodox Christianity rests. Christians who did NOT accept the notion of a Triune God became Muslims in the Eighth Century; Trinitarians remained Christians—and that quarrel goes on to this day. That alone makes this a significant day, if only because it affects oil supplies for both believers and non-believers.
The very notion of a Holy Spirit who gives the church both power and authority has proven bitterly divisive—far beyond the quarrels between Christians and Muslims. During the Reformation (beginning 1517), Protestants objected so strenuously to certain church practices—like selling the powers and gifts of the Spirit for cash—that they overreacted.
Out with the bathwater went the baby—to this day conventional Protestants are very, very uncomfortable talking about the Third Person of the Trinity. They don’t call the day “Trinity Sunday”; they prefer the term “Pentecost”, which is safely more Jewish—since the Jewish feast comes 50 days after Passover (in the Christian—solar—calendar, after Easter).
I’ve actually been told by a Protestant Sunday School teacher that, after the people present in Jerusalem on Shavout in approximately AD 30 died off, the Holy Spirit went back up to Heaven and no longer bothers us.
So, most Protestants will make a quick mention of the fact that some strange things happened nearly two thousand years ago, and move on. Catholics, legitimately embarrassed by some of the corruption associated with Holy Spirit power, don’t dwell on the matter.
The phenomenon known as Pentecostalism (or as the Charismatic movement) attempts to bring back the wonders and the powers of the Spirit. But Pentecostals often get lost in the confusion over the meaning and manifestation of the charisms, the powers, the gifts--and often sinks back into standard, no-nonsense Protestantism.
So Trinity Sunday passes and Christians move on. For many of them, the only significance of the day is reflected in the price they pay at the gas pump. But Trinity Sunday should be so, so, so much more—for those who call themselves Christians.

Reading Skills--Where Have They Gone?

2010-05-22T23:13:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I substituted for a series of high school AP English classes. These are the advanced classes for upper classmen that supposedly earn the student college credit. I can tell you from personal observation they are more difficult than regular English classes.
I was in the same classroom exactly one week previous to yesterday. What I observed, comparing both days, stunned me. The class was reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. It’s a short book—just over 200 pages in a small page format.
A week ago the classes were reading a chapter that ended at approximately page 40. In a week’s time, these advanced students had gotten all the way to page 95. I repeat, these were advanced students, receiving college credit for their work.
This is typical of all the AP classes I have watched over the past few years.
When I was in high school, they would have handed me a book this size on a Friday, told me to have it finished within the week—and expected I would have a three to five page report ready within the same week. Those weren’t AP classes (they didn’t exist where I was in high school); they were just standard college prep courses.
Every day I substitute I am surprised by some way in which the same courses I took in the 1950s have been “dumbed down”. Can you imagine giving a present day high school student a seven to eight hundred page book to read and report on—as just one additional assignment, on top of the chapters in the text book?
The kid would probably require the services of a defibrillator. I wrote several reports like that in high school—it just came with the territory. But today, the high school classes at the highest degree of difficulty require forty or fifty pages a week. Easy pages—“Fahrenheit 451” is not a hard book to read. It’s short and the vocabulary really should be in reach of a college bound senior.
But this isn’t the most troubling thing. In class after class, the kids finish the assignments I’ve been instructed to give them and, then, many of them tell me they have nothing else to do. So I suggest that they read a book (I always carried one when I was in school).
Some of you might be amazed at how many high school students (smart ones, suburban schools) tell me they never read. They hate reading. They never carry a book with them. I’ll catch them trying to text on their Ipods or sneak a call on their phones. Read, never?
It is a trial for them to wade through 50 whole pages in a week. A two hundred page book that is essentially an “easy read” is a violation of the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution. The reading situation is not getting better; it isn’t even stabilizing. I just read a report that indicates reading ability has dropped substantially SINCE the passage of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.
Something we’re doing isn’t working—in fact it seems to be working backward. When I was a kid and we had some free time, I remember that even the poorer students grabbed a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and paged through it. Such a scene would be unimaginable today.
I snicker at the thought. A room full of teenagers peering through volumes of an encyclopedia when they have nothing else to read. Forget it!
But if you don’t read, school becomes pretty meaningless to you—no matter how large or small the budget or how good or bad the teaching skills. I stumbled on a book the other day that gave me some real insights into what has happened to reading in America.
It’s called “Readacide”. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.

Times Square Bomber--Ineptitude vs Luck

2010-05-21T15:23:00.001-04:00

Over and over again I’ve been hearing how lucky we were that the “Times Square bomber” didn’t know how to build a bomb. Just lots of smoke and a big scare. And some credit to the former GIs who run concessions in the area and watch out for the rest of us.
Yes, we were lucky. There’s a reason for that luck—and it won’t last forever. I remember very vividly sitting at a sidewalk café in Beirut in the late ‘60s, watching two men in Bedouin robes trying to run an air hammer during some street repairs.
They seemed so clumsy. I concentrated on their hands. They were the hands of men with desert and riding skills—generations of them. They were not the hands of people raised to run modern machinery, be it a dishwasher or an electric drill. They had no feeling for it.
Holding the jackhammer put them in an alien world. In their own element they wouldn’t have looked a bit clumsy—but in my world, they were completely out of sync (yeah, as a kid I ran an air hammer on a summer job. Picking it up was instinctive and natural.)
The generation of Arabs I watched that day would never, every master the machinery of a modern, industrialized society. I thought of the great warrior king, Charlemagne (c.a. AD 800). He could carve an empire in central Europe. You wouldn’t have wanted to face him, sword in hand.
He learned to appreciate education. He created the first “university” in Europe after the fall of Rome. He mastered the art of reading—rare for a Dark Ages warrior; it was even considered unmanly. But he never learned how to hold a pen and write.
His sword hardened hands just wouldn’t grip the thing. It wasn’t his milieu. He was like the Arabs I was watching. They would have understood Charlemagne’s frustration at trying to master a pen; he would have seen their problem trying to direct the jackhammer.
I thought of World War II—where one of the “secret weapons” we had against the Germans was the fact that a lot of GIs came from rural or suburban settings where they learned early how to fix the engines of their cars and tractors.
When their army trucks broke down in the desert, a lot of these drivers just got out and, using bailing wire and bobby pins, got the thing running again. German drivers were, by and large, raised on farms that depended on horse drawn conveyances.
The whole German army simply was not mechanized. (In a speech, Churchill reminded the world that the German troops invading Russia were walking the thousand miles—they had so few vehicles.) If a German truck broke down, the driver had to send back to a motor pool to get a trained mechanic to the front and fix things, no matter how simple. He had no idea how himself.
The Germans have learned how to drive and maintain cars and trucks. In a war between us now, I doubt if there’d be a material difference in capabilities. My jackhammer friends will learn how to use their equipment, too. They may already have.
Right now, some people in the Arab world seem inept at bomb making. Again, it involves a sort of technology many of them are not comfortable with. They too will learn.
They too will finally learn how to build bombs that go BOOM effectively. Then we won’t be so lucky any more.
Then the last thing a concession stand operator ever sees may be a bright flash. Eventually people in Charlemagne’s court learned how to write. Making a bomb is probably simpler.

Earth--Fixing The Unfixable?

2010-05-17T21:23:00.002-04:00

We live on a planet that acts more like a mortally wounded creature than a home for living beings. Its waters, its winds and the violent movement of its tectonic plates, and the sudden up thrusts of its volcanoes are more like death throes than natural phenomena.
They are all dangerous to human and animal life; they all kill. Coming out of the Christian tradition, I am struck by the fact that Christian prophecy makes no pretense that this earth will long endure. Biblical prophecy predicts that it will be destroyed.
Many traditions and myths talk about a destructive past in Earth’s ancient history—battle and war between gods and Titans, angels and demons, aliens and terrestrial life forms. Genesis states that after these battles the planet is reduced to a formless void with no habitable surfaces left at all.
Many religious traditions hold that man can look forward to leaving this planet—most notably our Muslim friends who hold that believers will enjoy an extra-terrestrial Heavenly Paradise. Jewish tradition has held that man leaves earth and goes to a place called Sheol.
Hindu tradition holds that man reincarnates until he has finally reached a level of goodness that takes him out of the reality entirely. In any case, off the planet. Buddhism basically denies the existence of person hood entirely and sees salvation as a form of non-being, again, off the planet.
Christianity is unique in that it holds not merely to the concept of resurrected beings—but of a completely resurrected planet (the “new Earth” of the Apocalypse of John—that descends from a renewed Heaven.
The entire cosmos is remade (Revelation 21). There is a new Heaven and a new Earth. None of the world’s religions hold that the Earth is salvageable. Only Christianity suggests that it will be completely renewed.
That it needs to be completely renewed suggests strongly that it could not be put back together—the damage that was done in the eon’s before man appeared on Earth finally proves fatal.
Totally non-scientific, I grant you—but does science offer a better explanation for all the things that go wrong on this planet. Above all, does science offer ANY sort of solution to earth quakes, shifting plates, ice ages, violent storms, weather shifts that result in drought and destruction?
The only thing scientists seem able to suggest is that driving cars and generating electricity causes all the woes on this planet.
Let’s admit: we do a wonderful job of making bad situations worse. We built shoddy buildings on fault lines, we drill for highly pressurized oil deposits so far under the oceans we cannot easily get at them to correct mistakes or fix accidents.
We use poisons to increase the yield of our farm fields—without reminding ourselves that what kills boll weevils and corn borers may not be healthy for us either. We log off forests and over cultivate fertile plains and valleys—and wonder why they erode and become arid.
But, fundamentally, what’s dangerously wrong with this planet is not a result of any human activity. It so far has shown no sign of being fixable by human actions.
That’s like looking up at the stars—on the one hand it is humbling; on the other—when you realize one of those lights may be an asteroid racing toward us—it is scary. Looking at the Earth—and all the things we cannot fix—is also humbling and scary.
Walter Hoving, when he ran Tiffany’s, may have had a point—even in the area of global warming and natural catastrophes. Remember the little pins he created and sold? What was it they said? “Try God.”
Likely to be more effective than another round of Kyoto Protocols.

Earth--Unfixable?

2010-05-15T22:10:00.000-04:00

Science gives us our first clues to what may have reduced this planet to the chaos described in the first few verses of Genesis. Something wiped out the dinosaurs all at once—we suspect it may have been a direct hit by an asteroid or something else extraterrestrial.
Something that wiped out so many life forms must have done horrendous damage to the entire planet—possibly to its magnetic field, the positioning of its continents, its gravitational field. If an individual took that big a hit, it might well prove fatal.
Earth has suffered ice age after ice age. At points air was so super chilled that it could descend on a tranquil field and freeze the mastodons grazing their quickly enough that, thousands of years later, their steaks can be eaten today. The mastodons at the outskirts of these freeze zones are shredded the way only a super tornado could possible manage.
We find the remains of cities underneath sea floors. Afghanistan, for one, contains a gigantic urban complex that was abandoned millennia ago—due to … lack of water? We don’t even know what its name was. We know the Sahara was once verdant.
There were living things on Antarctica. Could a Kyoto Protocol have saved them? Had a group met in Copenhagen back then, could it have saved the dinosaurs? Or kept the water flowing to the Pueblos in the American desert? Or to the abandoned cities in Yemen?
At Genesis 1:2, we have a description of a very badly damaged planet. In anthropomorphic terms, a very possibly fatally wounded planet. “Formless and void.” There was no life left. Mist had been blasted into the atmosphere so thickly that you could not distinguish light from dark.
The first thing that had to be done—for anything to grow or live—was to let some light in. So the mist thinned out enough that you could detect light in the day and darkness at night. This is a perfect picture of what would need to happened after a very destructive bombardment of the planet.
Next the watery chaos is separated into seas below and clouds above.. But verse 7 makes it clear an awful lot of water was still up in the air, but there is finally a living space between them.. On what Genesis calls “the Third Day” the water below the clouds is separated into seas and dry land.
Now we have light, land and watery mist—and seeds begin to grow, very possibly left over from before the cataclysm that created the chaos. The land part of the planet is now covered with vegetation—as befits a greenhouse environment.
More mist continues to fall. On the “Fourth Day” you can finally distinguish individual lights from somewhere above the atmosphere. Visible now is a bright light by day and a lesser light by night. You can even see some of the brighter stars and planets.
At the beginning of a “Fifth Day”, the seas begin to teem with animal life. Next come winged creatures that can fly in the ever more air-like atmosphere. With a “Sixth Day” comes animal life on land and, finally, a protected garden is created in which mankind can be placed—safely.
He needed the protection—Genesis 3:14 makes it clear human beings were not the only people on earth—and humans had reason to fear the “others”. When man got himself thrown out of the garden, he became a killer and a destroyer—and had to live in fear of others who might kill him.
So, after chaos, the earth is—according to the Biblical account--recreated. Human beings are then introduced to the planet—at first to “dress, till and keep it”. But then to fight for every grain and morsel of food, killing and eroding as he went.
But did human beings somehow make the planet so unstable, so prone to violent storms and quakes that nothing can stand before them? Neither science, nor Biblical writ nor any other creation myth known throughout human history suggests such a thing.
That, if we think about it, probably happened before we ever got here—before the first humanoid ever walked the Rift Valley. If you look at the scientific record of the history of this planet, our hopes of staving off catastrophe with Kyoto Protocols or any other accords are minimal. We live on a wounded planet, one knocked permanently off kilter. This we probably cannot change. This lies at the core of our problem with living on Earth.
More later.

Earth--Something We Can Fix?

2010-05-13T19:50:00.001-04:00

This year marked our fortieth “Earth Day”. I rather agree that it is a good idea to remind ourselves—especially if we are of the Christian Faith—that our Bible tells us we were put on this planet to “dress, till and keep” it.
That means we should be conscientious conservators and observant environmentalists. After all, you cannot keep (preserve) what you haven’t bothered to understand. As far as “Earth Day” goes in agreeing with that, I have no problem.
The problem I have with “Earth Day” and Environmentalism as it is practiced today is that it goes beyond this. It almost becomes a kind of worship of the Earth itself, for its own sake. Implicit in that attitude is the belief that man, by himself, both knows enough about the Earth to know what it needs and that he has the power to do something about it, again, by himself.
No. I don’t think so. I disagree profoundly with some very basic assumptions made by “Earth Day” adherents.
The first of these assumptions is that whatever may be wrong with our planet we caused it. The second is that we can fix it, using means and technologies we have at hand right here and now. I doubt both very, very much.
We are not powerful enough—our destructive capabilities not great enough—to produce all the problems this planet is having now or has had in the past. To think so is to indulge in an absurd kind of arrogance. We are saying that not only are we captains of our souls and masters of our fates, but we are masters of the workings of this planet.
Stop a tornado. Turn a hurricane aside. Tell a volcano to cease spewing ash or a forest fire to turn back the way it came. Halt or deflect a Tsunami. Break up El Nino and bring the rains back to our continent—or direct the Monsoon rains to fall, or make them stop. We can neither cause nor prevent any one of these natural phenomena.
We couldn’t stop the last ice age; we haven’t the faintest idea what we might do to halt the next. We have no idea how to stop hot and cold masses of air from crashing into each other and producing violent storms. We can’t keep a sand dune from eroding.
We assume that our power plants and carbon emissions are the cause of global temperature change. This is a comforting assumption indeed. It implies that we had the power to do this—and, as an obvious corollary, we have the power to stop it from happening.
The alternative is to horrible to contemplate. What if we didn’t do it? What if we have no control at all of the natural forces at work here—forces that may have whipsawed the planet a thousand times since it was formed out primordial space dust?
What if we are no more masters of the fate of the planet than we are of our own selves? We cannot guarantee we will not be stricken with a fatal disease or mishap—or Christopher Reeves would be making “Superman VII” as I write.
Equally we cannot guarantee that we caused the climate changes we all sense occurring around us—or that we, by some action of our own, can change them back. That’s a far more scary thought than believing that if we just cut back auto emissions all will be well.
So what happened to the planet that the Biblical writer, Isaiah, says was not created as a “chaos”, but was formed “to be inhabited”? (Isaiah 45:18) The present planet—with no help from humans at all—is closer to chaos than we like to think.
Ask people who’ve faced unexpected Tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or sudden sink holes that swallow whole houses. Or mudslides, forest fires, killer floods, drought, vicious predators (by land or sea), lightning, hail, sand storms, giant seas (vertical walls of water 50 or more feet high that defy all survival rules on the high seas), blinding, freezing blizzards—I doubt if many of them would call this planet “fit to be inhabited” or the least bit benign.
So if our power plants and automobiles didn’t do it—what happened? What reduced the planet to the shattered chaos described in Genesis one. Not carbon emissions. Let’s look at a few clues tomorrow.

Bombs, Oil Spills, Stocks and Prayer

2010-05-09T22:08:00.003-04:00

The past few weeks have not been good for the ulcers of anyone trying to run this country. Stocks, for instance, plunged a thousand points in a single day—and no one knows why. Computers becoming peevish with other computers? Mindless panic?
Who knows? No one. They went down a thousand and then came back up a few hundred points—losing all the gains they’ve made so far this year. Which way will they go next. Again, no one really knows.
The Staten Island Ferry loses it and piles into the landing slip. (I remember all the times I stood at the bow and watched this controlled collision as we piled into the slips, bouncing from side to side as we finally settled in. But this one was for real.) Several people actually got hurt. The engine seems to have raced, Toyota style, out of control. (I used to imagine this happening years ago—this time it really did. Again, why?)
Then, again, there’s the little present the Pakistani Taliban left for us in Times Square. We can all heave a great sigh of relief that the bomb didn’t go off—the perpetrators were inept, the disable vets who sell souvenirs in the area were alert, we were lucky.
We were lucky in 1993 when some inept bombers tried to blow up a World Trade Center tower with a van full of explosives. It went boom; the building stayed up. We heaved a great sign of relief and congratulated ourselves, just like now.
Eight years later the same folk came back with a better plan—hijack airplanes full of fuel. Both towers came down. Our congratulations were premature. Yes, boys and girls, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have the ability to learn.
Oh, and Afghanistan is beginning to remind us more and more of Vietnam. The generals in Kabul are sounding ever more optimistic. The surge is working; we are winning against the Taliban. Of course, those generals are ignoring the fact that a counter surge of Taliban fighters is pouring in every night from Pakistani recruitment centers.
The top brass in Saigon remained optimistic about the course of the war right up until North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City. Then, finally, everybody scrambled to put his Vietnamese mistress on a plane and get out.
Kabul seems to be living in the same dream world. The troops on the ground in dangerous rural areas don’t see quite as many signs of victory as the generals do. But the generals aren’t facing the same waves of incoming Taliban fighters. A Brit in Kabul has opened a bar and grill named after the hill where Afghani guerillas slaughtered an entire British army in 1842. Maybe the top echelon should go have dinner there.
The fancy cap BP Oil built to contain the spill in the Gulf didn’t work. They are down to their last hope—drilling a new well to relieve the pressure and capping the old with cement. This is all going to happen a mile down in the water under unbelievable pressures.
We hope. And if it does, it will take another couple months or so. Meanwhile gallons and gallons of crude oil are spilling into some of the finest fishing grounds in the world. The Icelandic volcano is still shutting down flights all over Europe.
That ash can play hell with jet engines—it can pit aircraft windows so badly you can’t see out of them. Nature keeps reminding us that she is NOT our friend—at best, she is indifferent or neutral. But she has no intent to benefit us.
And, of course, it is becoming less and less legal to pray to the divinity we have, historically, believed could control nature. So, prayerless, ignorant of basic causes, unable to control natural forces, we find ourselves completely at their mercy.
The White House, the Street and our troops can only ask, “What next?”
If we suggested that everyone pray—which we have done throughout our history—we would have whole cadres of federal judges and civil libertarians telling us we are violating the Constitution itself. So, “what next?”

BP This Time--Another Oil Spill

2010-05-02T21:00:00.001-04:00

We need oil. Anyone who thinks we can slip out of this fact by adding vegetable oil to the mix or building trucks that run tons of produce on electricity isn’t with us in real space and time. All the conservation in the world isn’t going to get everybody who lives in suburbia to work tomorrow. Windmills are great; they won’t power New York and Chicago. We have trapped ourselves into NEEDING oil.
On April 20, BP became the latest oil company to cast its oil upon the waters. As approximately 200,000 or more gallon pump themselves into Gulf waters from a leak that’s a mile straight down, we have the makings of a serious disaster.
The oil has already created a slick about 130 miles wide. It is threatening some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet and some of the finest shoreline wetlands and beaches. BP is already facing at least a dozen law suits.
There is no guarantee we can turn this thing off anytime in the next three months. By then it will have become the largest spill ever in American waters. So we shouldn’t have been drilling so deep down; we shouldn’t have been drilling in water at all. But we still NEED oil.
Continuing dependence on Arab oil could start limiting all sorts of our options. Can you guarantee that the Saud family will still rule Saudi Arabia in ten years? Will the successors be any more friendly than Iran? Can we rely on Iraqi or Iranian oil? For how long?
Increasingly, they don’t need us as a market. There’s always China, India and Japan to sell to. American oil that could cut back this reliance is increasingly found under water—leaving us exposed to more spills like this one.
My adult years have spanned the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979, the rise of the Third World as an oil drinking industrial power house and escalation of American trade deficits. I’ve heard lots of discussion on conservation, alternative energies and new oil drilling.
One subject that has completely eluded my awareness—and that I’ve been thinking about since 1973—is the question of completely synthetic oil. Have you heard anyone talk about it? I’ve not heard a mention. Nary a peep.
Before you say, “That’s impossible”, let me refresh our memories with a few historical facts. We were totally dependent on RUBBER tires to run our cars, trucks and military vehicles before World War II. We lost ALL our rubber at the start of that war.
We came up with a substitute—synthetic—substance that makes perfectly fine tires that we use to this day. (Whoever thinks of Vietnam and rubber in the same breath anymore?)
We found ourselves in a deadly race with both German and Japanese scientists during World War II to build a super bomb using a technique that had never been tried, never even been attempted, and we put together a program that delivered an atomic bomb—from pencil notes on an envelope to a major “boom”—in about four years.
The Germans were cut off from most sources of oil during World War II. They came up with a synthetic gasoline that could deliver 100 octane fuel to top-notch fighter aircraft as well as trucks and cars. We captured their notes and took them to Washington.
Big Oil screamed “Foul!” We never even translated the recipe. (Does anyone have any idea if it still exists today—or where?) Even if we destroyed the files, if it could be done once, it could be done again. If a Los Alamos Project could deliver a bomb, a similar project today could reasonably be expected to deliver something that would run my Buick, your Toyota, the trucks on the road and all those big airplanes—that didn’t have to come out of the ground in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf waters. How great would that be?
It would also be PRACTICAL in a nation that has painted itself into a corner where there is no feasible alternative to the gasoline engines that deliver our food, our power, our workers to the office and keep our lawns mowed.
We need oil—like we needed rubber. We found a substitute for the one; why not for the other? We just aren’t talking about it. No one has the political will to order it done. BP will eventually wind up paying a few million in fines and move on.
Somebody’s got to start talking about it.

Immigrantion--Arizona On The Firing Line

2010-04-30T21:40:00.002-04:00

I’m not sure I’d want to live on the Arizona border. On one side you’ve got the vast sucking vacuum coming from employers in the United States desperate to hire illegal immigrants to harvest their crops or work their meat packing plants.
It’s an ideal labor source. They can be paid less than minimum wage, they have no legal rights, if they make any sort of fuss they can be packed back to Mexico. Some form of slavery has been necessary to maintain every advanced society since ancient Egypt. Illegals are ours.
In the mid-1800s, a flood of induced immigration from southern and eastern Europe kept our factory wages at a dollar a day, year after year after year. Now the Latino immigrants provide us with cheap food and meat.
That’s almost as much suction drawing immigrants in as you have from a Black Hole in space. Then there’s the pressure on the Mexican side of the border coming from people to whom American peonage looks like riches beyond belief.
Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California are caught smack dab in the middle. They didn’t create either pressure source, but the consequences of both pass across Arizona desert by the hundreds and thousands nearly every day.
(Growing up in Michigan, amidst some of the richest vegetable growing muck land in the world, I was always aware that migrant Mexicans came and went with each harvest season. Things have changed today—that irreplaceable muck is now covered over with houses and parking lots. No one harvests celery or veggies any more.
(Fewer and fewer migrants come; more and more stay. Now whole communities—and whole neighborhoods in cities—are Hispanic. They vote; they demonstrate—and they vote instinctively in favor of the migrants they once were.
(They have no love for the majority white/black communities around them and very little concern for what the concerns of those communities might be. Emotion and ancestral memory of crossing the deserts and rivers of the American frontier guide them.)
So Arizona enacted a law like those in nearly every other nation on earth. A police officer in that state can walk up to anyone and ask to see identification to prove he or she has a legal right to be in the United States.
You would think they had been granted the right to strip search them in the public square. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate against Arizona’s new law tomorrow. There was a time when objection to such a police power might have been justified.
After all, many of the native born white Americans who settled our frontiers had excellent reason not to be identified as they walked the streets of Dodge City or Yuma. Outstanding warrants or bankruptcy service in Ohio, New Jersey or Alabama were best forgotten.
Hopefully that’s not true of quite so many Americans today. I, for one, would have no problem showing an officer my picture I.D. at any point. I carry it with me almost always anyway. Frankly I’m a bit suspicious of the motives of those who protest.
It seems to me to be eminently reasonable to ask people who look like they might come from Mexico, Haiti, Central America or the Caribbean to show some valid American identification. (Since that designation can cover nearly all colors, including my own, I would expect to be asked from time to time myself.) It’s a first step to getting our borders back under control.
No one has come up with a better idea. I understand the emotion of those who protest—just as I would understand the emotion of a man who fled to Texas one step ahead of Illinois law—but sometimes you just have to pull a weaving driver over and test for alcohol—for the safety of all. For the safety of all, it may be necessary to check the validity of someone’s—or my--presence on the street. I’m content to share my identity with you or anyone else.
Sorry, the days of Doc Holiday and Jesse James are over. These champions of the fabled American right to total privacy are gone. We’re none-the-worse for it.

Schools--Are Our Kids REALLY Worth It?

2010-04-29T23:09:00.002-04:00

The other day I was subbing in a nice, safe suburban school. When I could let my eyes wander from keeping things from flying through the air or people from slipping in or out of the door, I looked up at a sign I’ve seen on many classroom walls.”
“Our kids,” it says, “are worth whatever it takes”. A lovely sentiment. Repeated over and over in classroom after classroom. Whatever it takes—our kids are worth it. The question crossed my mind—Is there any truth to that sign?
(No! I’m not talking about budgetary woes or millage shortfalls. I’m talking about the emotional and intellectual exertion, the sheer mental effort it takes to get kids to understand, question, learn and grow. Are we putting THAT into them?)
Do we really care? Are “our kids” worth the effort it would take to make serious, growing student s out of them? Let’s ask what would be really “worth it”.
Are our kids worth HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE? Are they worth going through all the hassle and complaining involved in telling them that they have work due tomorrow—and it MUST be done? Are they worth telling them there will be no retests?
Are they worth letting them fall flat on their faces if they have spent sixteen years refusing to listen or respond? Are they worth letting them flunk if they do not do the work? Are our kids really worth that much—or would we really prefer to go on shielding them from reality until it is too late to escape it?
Are our kids worth DISCIPLINING? Sometimes discipline has to be downright unpleasant to be effective. It may even have to hurt. Losing a job, smashing up a marriage or getting arrested can be seriously hurtful. Discipline that might prevent such experiences can in no way hurt more.
The Bible, interestingly enough, doesn’t say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It says something much stronger and more thought provoking: “He that spares the rod HATES his son; he that loves his son punishes him when necessary.” [Proverbs 13:24]
Ask yourself, what’s more loving, more caring. Letting the kid careen into flunking and failure, or getting his attention by making him hurt—and preventing the disaster?
Are our kids worth allowing them to reap CONSEQUENCES of really bad choices and actions. Some day you won’t be able to shield the kid from things that really happen. There’ll be no more retests or forgetting about it. Better a few consequences should land on them now than when they are legal adults with real responsibilities.
Are our kids worth INSISTING THAT THEY DO THEIR SCHOOLWORK and not keep sloughing it off? (it is a horrible pain to go through all the excuses, whining and bellowing that kids can throw in the path of a determined parent or teacher.)
That would be really caring enough—showing that the kids are “worth whatever it takes”. You’d have to give the teacher some tools to work with—including punitive ones. I’m sure this is definitely not what the “educator” who composed the sign had in mind. He or she was going for something far more saccharin and feel-good at the moment.
But fear is, after all, one of the impelling reasons people come to work on time and turn their projects in on time as adults. Fear keeps our speed down to fairly reasonable limits. Fear of the sergeant keeps the raw recruits jogging with their backpacks on. (It eventually keeps them alive when live ammunition is flying around.)
It’s sometimes necessary in the home and at school. It is—as any employer or military leader will tell you—a necessary component of leadership and of getting positive results.
Believe it or not, making certain you are at least a little bit feared is a necessary part of showing that your kids are really “worth whatever it takes”. It shows you care enough to go to the trouble to make sure they succeed. That’s real caring.
Just don’t expect to be thanked—now.

Obama and NASA

2010-04-28T20:41:00.001-04:00

Obama has slashed the space program budget. This will offend people of my age who remember the Glory Days when we beat the Russians to the moon (“Rah, rah, rah—go team”) as well as those who profess a love of knowledge for its own sake.
Neither are adequate reasons for maintaining the space program in its present form. Were I in Obama’s place, I would probably have cut NASA way back too. Years ago I began looking at the space program through the eyes of historical precedent. I didn’t like what I saw.
Compare NASA today to the court of Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. Henry knew there was land (planets) out there; he knew there was MONEY to be made from those lands. He invested on a century long program of exploration that eventually paid off in billions if not trillions.
We can’t say that about NASA or any aspect of the space program today. (Yes, to paraphrase “Cabaret”, “Money, money, money is what makes exploration go around”.) Columbus was sent to make money. When he didn’t find it, they tossed him in jail.
Cortes found it—and began a long chain of successful exploration that brought back vast fortunes in gold, silver, spices, tobacco, sugar, furs, cotton, coffee, bananas, diamonds, rare metals and oil. To merit serious funding, the space program has to pay for itself the same way.
NASA has to begin working on four things, right here on earth, before we buy it any new, big toys. ONE) Ships with bigger payloads. Right now over 90% of the space on our space rockets is wasted on fuel. The payload (cargo) is limited to a few hundred pounds.
It’s going to be hard to build mining and living stations on other planets transporting materials in such tiny increments. We won’t be able to bring the goodies back in large enough amounts to pay for the huge number of flights needed.
We’ve got to get past gravity. Fantastic? No more so than taking building blocks of the universe that we cannot even see and creating atomic energy. We don’t even understand electricity, but it seems to make my computer and my refrigerator work just fine. In the 1940s, we had to build an atomic bomb; today we have to get past gravity. Improbable—but we did it then.
TWO) We have to start working on locating stuff we need. We have to make plans (and equipment) for how exploratory teams are going to look for it once we get to this stuff on other planets. How are we going to get it on the ships? How are we going to get it onto the planet?
If our spectrometers locate an unknown substance on Mars even now (like sugar, oil or potatoes in the new world), we have to be figuring out possible uses of it even at this stage. No one in Henry’s court could have told you what they were going to find in Montezuma’s back yard.
THREE) We’ve got to work on speed. Admittedly, the entire “age of exploration” took place in times when it took weeks and months to cross from one land mass to another. But the industrial age, which eventually produced a slave-free modern society, didn’t really get rolling until we could cross oceans in a few days.
Just like atomic energy and gravity, we have to get past the speed of light. Trickier, no doubt. Not an immediate need—but our imaginations are already nibbling at it. We’ll certainly never get to the age of Kirk and Spock without doing so. We should work on it, beginning now.
FOUR) We have to come up with “shields” of some sort to protect our ships and space stations. Space is full of nasty little projectiles that hurtle about at dangerous speeds and smash into things. Our atmosphere mostly protects us from them. Ships in space don’t have protective atmosphere.
Scientists tell us that our current space station has just been lucky so far. A fleet of ships that travel regularly from one planet to another will probably need more than luck. When we put people and equipment up there we will need to protect them from meteorites, asteroids and who knows what all else may be whizzing about.
Tell NASA, stay home and worry about basic things like these. When you’re on your way to solving them, we can talk about big budgets and voyages of exploration. We should still dream of “boldly going where no one has gone before”, we just aren’t ready yet.

Black/White Distrust II

2010-04-27T20:35:00.001-04:00

Over the past decade I’ve had the interesting experience of substitute teaching in over 50 different buildings, ranging from inner city to completely rural, from less than 10% black to better than 90%. It has been an education.
I cannot say that I have particularly enjoyed my time in schools that were mostly black. Interestingly, the district wouldn’t let me sign up for the blackest schools. “They don’t want you, and you don’t want to be there.”
When I took an assignment in a middle school that was only about 90% black, a black teacher’s aide who seems to have pitied me warned, “You are an older white male. When you walk around here, you have a target on your back. Don’t forget it.”
She was so right. In that school—and only in that school—I had my briefcase rifled. Some days I had to break up two fights before the bell even rang. There were non-stop accusations that I was racist—try telling a black student that he has to do the same assignment anyone else has to do. He is almost certain to try to back you off with that charge.
I came up at a time when whites were being forcefully re-educated about using the term “black” rather than “Negro”. (W.E.B. DuBois had forced us to switch from “black” to “Negro” fifty years before—it gets confusing.) One day an angry young student vituperatively corrected me again, “We are called ‘African-Americans’!” she snapped at me.
I asked her what in the world THAT term meant—pointing out that I have a French neighbor who was born in Africa and is now an American. John Kerry’s wife qualifies—she is Portuguese, born in Africa, now a naturalized American. I admit my frustration resulting from accusation after accusation of being “prejudiced” or “bigoted” came to the fore.
My oldest friend, I went on, is married to a lovely French woman born in Africa, now American. I’ve known Dutchmen and Englishmen who qualified. I could have pointed out that my two lily-white sons could qualify—descendent as they are from a Swede who was born in Africa in 1635. For good measure, he was probably a slave trader.
The young lady marched to the principal’s office and declared me racist. The principal, a black man who had grown up in the neighborhood and even gotten himself expelled from that very school—and who knew me quite well—took her to his computer and showed her the history of “black” nomenclature. Then he sent her on her way.
Then there’s the line, “I ain’t your slave!” (I was citing a school rule.) Or, “You’re only telling me to be quiet because I’m black!” (No, because you are the loudest most disruptive fellow in the room—he had to grace to shut up.)
Walk into a largely white school at 7;00am. There will be smiles, occasional greetings. If they know you, they will call you by name and even ask how you are. Walk into a black school. They will studiously avoid looking at you. If accidentally they do meet your eye, you will see raw animosity. Eventually you feel like an idiot for smiling yourself. I definitely felt like I was a prison guard coming on duty—with the need to watch my back constantly.
The hostility is rooted in the absolute certainty that I am not there to do any of them any good. They trust no white person. It has to come from things their families inculcate in them—rather than any experiences they have yet had in their young lives.
And, if I’m in my right mind, I’d better no trust any of them. One time I left my reading glasses on the desk as I walked to the door to excuse the class. They were deliberately broken when I got back to the desk. (The school eventually replaced them—but they dragged their feet for months and, shortly after, dropped me from their list of available subs. I don’t miss it.)
Mendela showed us the way. After 27 years in prison, he dropped his own animosity and proclaimed everyone, black and white, to be a South African. If we can’t do that here—and make it stick—we are in for a long, rough future.

Black/White Distrust I

2010-04-26T20:50:00.001-04:00

We are talking about black/white distrust. About why it is so much easier to befriend an African or Caribbean black person—about why I instinctively distrust even Barack Obama and his wife—just because he is an American born black man. I am certain that if we ever met, the feeling would be entirely mutual. Because of who and what we are.
I’ve seen the insides of a hurting white person more than once in my life—whether it was pain from death, betrayal, loss of a job, loss of a hope or dream. Only once have I been permitted to look beyond the grinning face of a black human being and observe the real person.
Let’s call him J.J. He was about my age, in his late twenties. I had grown up in a reasonably tony area of Grand Rapids; he had grown up in the bowels of segregated Washington, D.C. He would look at his very dark skin and reminisce, “I was so black even the niggers discriminated against me. When I talked college, my counselors advised trade school.”
He made it through college (and, later, law school). He served four years in the army. His colonel was a southerner who hadn’t adapted to Truman’s integration of the military a decade before—but because of his sheer competence he advanced J.J. to captain in less than four years.
(He just didn’t let J.J. actively command troops.) By the time I knew him, he was a Special Assistant to the President of the United States. I’ve known few men I respected more. We met while we were both working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the fall of 1967, a year before the 1968 election, LBJ and his advisors took a look at the explosive political situation (rife with civil rights riots all over the nation) and realized he wasn’t going to get re-elected without a lot of help from angry white voters.
So he began to dial back the activities of agencies like the EEOC. He placed a very wealthy black man from “Strivers’ Row” in Harlem as Chairman of the EEOC and had him bring in a lot of his white Harvard buddies to help run the agency—more circumspectly.
The new white guys didn’t know diddly squat. Someone had to break them in. The agency chief gave J.J. the job of taking these clueless white folk on a intimate tour of the Washington ghetto. So he took them out and showed them.
I was the person who sat with him after he returned from these tours and unwound. All the humiliation, pent up memories, frustration in the man poured out as I listened and watched.
Some of it was funny. He would walk past a couple of kids, reach down inside a bag they were carrying—and show the burglary tool to the newbie. Or he would walk up to a group of young black men standing on a corner, start a conversation and bring the white man into it.
At the next corner where there was a group of young men, he would turn to him and say, “Now you do it.” Easier, far easier, for that man to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. But no humiliation of his clueless white charge could quite measure up to his own.
He told me how, at a White House reception with all manner of hors d’oeuvres on display, conspicuous at one side of the table would be a platter of fried chicken for him and any other blacks present. He learned to live with it.
I mistook our relationship for actual friendship. One weekend I was throwing a party—I casually invited him to bring his wife and come. He looked at me. “A lot of invitations I can’t turn down—but yours I can. I’m sorry; I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.” Ouch. How stupid of me. But some mistakes you simply cannot take back.
We went on working together. We covered each other’s back in an increasingly treacherous environment—but nothing was ever quite the same between us. I had foolishly presumed. My education in racial distrust was continuing.
But he had let me—wittingly or no—see into his real self. I had seen at least some of his insides. I never forgot that—I never stopped respecting him.
But we could never have been friends.
More next time.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

2010-04-25T21:42:00.001-04:00

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Distrust in Detroit

2010-04-24T21:53:00.003-04:00

Last time I wrote about the desolation we still call Detroit. I referred everyone to the blog posted by Jeremy Korzeniewski on “autoblog”. It showed appalling pictures of what has become of vast tracts of the city of Detroit: falling down ruins, streets with no buildings left standing, something that looks a lot like Hiroshima after the big blast.
I conceded his point that the factories and auto industry that made Detroit a powerhouse have declined and even gone away. But I also pointed out that Detroit is a city known for its racial hatreds. Riots, military blockades and open hostility have marked its 20th Century history.
This history—and its ongoing aftermath—has made salvaging what’s left of Detroit much more difficult. It would be hard, indeed, to talk a middle class (both white and black) into coming back into a city so manifestly without services and unsafe.
They have fled—and taken their ability to pay the taxes necessary to maintain services and create new ones with them. What’s left cannot support itself. Detroit’s big problem right now is money—there isn’t any. Nada. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
The big companies (big tax payers) are limping badly. The age of the automobile and truck has made it possible to move businesses out into suburbs, abandoning the inner city. The sheer distrust and hatred that exists between black and white segments of the population.
That last one made me look at myself in the mirror of reality. I must confess that, way down deep inside, I find it hard to trust Barack Obama and his wife. (NOT because I think he was born in Africa, is a socialist or a Muslim, for crying out loud!!!)
My distrust is based solely on the fact that he is an American born black man. (I’ve known and been at ease with several AFRICAN and CARIBBEAN blacks—they somehow don’t carry with them the innate paranoia I’ve seen in too many American blacks. And also, American blacks do not trust me—it is often wise not to trust a man who will not trust you.)
Let me tell you a story. In the 1960s, I was blue eyed soul. I worked for blacks, I fought for blacks, I marched for blacks. They accepted me and I was permitted to call them “nigger” (as they called me) in the intimacy of friendship. I was too naïve to sense the distrust.
Washington, D.C. was just being integrated. One year they suddenly “integrated” a section of my all-white apartment complex. That meant they moved a group of black people in (did not screen them as they did whites—so some prostitutes set up business in that section) and stopped maintaining those areas.
I wanted the same standards maintained for black tenants that had always been there for white tenants--and the same maintenance. I met some of the black tenants, professionals like myself, and found we all agreed.
Working for the White House, I had access they lacked. I brought to bear upon the management of that complex the Americans for Democratic Action (a power in those years), the law firm of Nolan and Porter (the most influential in Washington then) and the “Washington Post”.
Then I located a white liberal pastor who had long worked to integrate the neighborhood and knew it well. I helped him call a community meeting. Hundreds came. Foolishly I turned the meeting over to him. He drew round after round of applause and, just when the iron was hot, he failed to strike. To use salesmen’s parlance, he didn’t ask for the sale.
He had no one sign anything, join anything or do anything. He just sent them all home with a promise of another meeting in a few days. I was horrified. I left with a very bad feeling. This would not be good.
But the next week I created a steering committee and we met several times. One man there proved to be a tower of strength, knowledge and wisdom. He was an elderly black preacher—who could fill me in on more neighborhood details than I had ever dreamt of.
I leaned on him. When the next meeting came, I had him sit right up next to me. Only fifty or sixty people showed up. Even the white preacher wasn’t there. But my friend was. I called us to order—when suddenly the door flew open.
In marched a drunken, retired white deputy sheriff with a club in his hands. Behind him were four or five more white bully boys. They advanced toward me, breathing threatening and slaughter. I have probably never felt more like an endangered species.
Let’s continue next time.

Detroit--Michigan's Hiroshima

2010-04-23T23:45:00.002-04:00

I grew up in a Michigan where Detroit was the engine that pulled the rest of us along. Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second city, lived to make parts for the auto industry (which still included Studebaker, Packard, Hudson and Nash—as well as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and DeSoto.) If Detroit sneezed, West Michigan collapsed with pneumonia.
Today Grand Rapids looks fairly vibrant. Last week my wife and I took a stroll down Division Avenue—long a haunt of prostitutes and gangs. There were lots of couples and single women out walking. Construction cranes are all over downtown.
Detroit has eight supermarkets left within its 140 square miles—at least 40 square miles of which look like downtown Hiroshima right after the blast. Empty spaces, collapsing factories, streets that have no buildings on them.
A lot of this catastrophe can indeed be blamed on the collapsing auto market. GM’s market share is down from over 50% to around 20%; it has shed two out of five of its core brands. Chrysler looks a great deal like a dead company walking.
Ford is doing better but that is a very relative term for a company that once put a nation on wheels and created the largest auto market in the world. (China has that honor now.) If Huxley wrote “Brave New World” today, he would not refer to the “year of our Ford”.
The aerial photos of Detroit that were released online today were appalling. A chap named Jeremy Korzeniewski posted them on something called “autoblog”. If you didn’t get enough pictures of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, downtown Rotterdam or London after World War II, these are well worth looking at. These are taken right here.
It’s a city that died—without the help of an enemy air force. One of things they are thinking of doing there is clearing everything manmade out of whole sections of Detroit—and bringing back farming, for instance. After all, the city has lost nearly a million residents since 1950.
It would be much cheaper not to have to plow streets or maintain water lines and sewers that don’t service anyone any more. Fewer police and firemen would be needed—in numbers more in line with the present tax base.
But it isn’t just the car companies that did this. I remember walking through bustling business districts in the 1950s and turning off to walk through neat, prosperous urban homes to visit friends. No boarded up buildings, no thought of danger, no trash to kick my way through.
You wouldn’t do that today. Race relations played a big role. It wasn’t just bigoted whites fleeing. I was part of “white flight” out of a once lovely urban neighborhood in Grand Rapids. It was once chock full of college professors, business owners, MDs, dentists, teachers, executives and other professionals. If you are white, don’t walk those streets after dark today.
I’ve been mugged there twice, once in front of a 3,000 sq ft home, the second time in front of what was once one of the best men’s clothing stores in the city. I don’t recollect how many times a car pulled up along side of me or my wife and we were told, “You’re in the wrong neighborhood, white man, get out of here or we’ll kill you.”
When live ammunition started flying, our entire family moved out of the neighborhood my mother and then I grew up in. (Much “white flight” occurs for similar reasons.) The head of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission agreed with me that this was part of a deliberate strategy of terror to drive whites out.
Detroit went through the same thing. In schools, on sidewalks, with bricks through windows. And the tax base ran for its life. I watched a downtown mall die in Muskegon for similar reasons—mommies with money to spend would no longer go there.
If the hatred—not just of whites for blacks, but of blacks for whites—is not assuaged (and we can’t all wait for “them” to stop hating “us”—they may never), then we are going to have more and more Detroits and boarded up homes in places like Grand Rapids and Muskegon.
Mandela of South Africa, who spent nearly 30 years in a white prison for being black, understood this. We need a lot more people—on both sides of the color line—like him. Mr. Korzeniewski’s pictures are a good reminder.

Simple Arithmatic That Tea Partys Miss

2010-04-22T21:26:00.001-04:00

Last time I talked about what I consider to be the absurdity of the Tea Party position—however mainstream American it may be. Now let’s talk about some valid concerns Americans do have about our present governmental activities.
Last evening I stopped to chat with a neighbor who has run his own construction business for several decades, does good enough work to be prospering in recession, and is much too busy to take time off for tea parties of any kind.
He just evaluates the fiscal policies in Washington from the standpoint of the simple arithmetic that has to govern his own business decisions. If you earn $1,000 a week and you continually spend twelve or thirteen hundred, at some point something bad is going to happen.
Very basic—a well educated third grader could probably walk you through it. Neither he nor I are refuting Keynes—but Keynes in his wildest imagination probably didn’t contemplate a level of governmental spending in GOOD TIMES and BAD that led to consistent and often huge deficits on a regular basis.
We haven’t just spent our way out of recessions and depressions. If bad years were the only time we had run deficits, our national debt would be infinitely smaller. Keynes’s idea was to ramp up government spending when everybody else was flat—and, hopefully, to PAY IT OFF IN GOOD YEARS. Like a nearby power plant works in Michigan.
At night when demand for electricity is low, it expends energy pumping Lake Michigan water into a huge reservoir. When day comes and homes and factories turn on the juice, the water flows back out, turns the turbines and generates power.
This is the backup plant that is used to restart electrical plants all over Michigan in cases of major power failure. It’s precisely the sort of thing Keynes had in mind in government finances. Unfortunately the United States has been running the water out without pumping much in for decades.
My neighbor’s concern is that at some point the fiscal reservoir is likely to run dry—even if he doesn’t say it in those terms.
He’s right. The American lust for a free lunch—first noted when we refused to pay our fair share of defense taxes during and after the wars with France—is eventually going to catch up with us. Since the 1960s (the game began long before Reagan) we’ve been cutting taxes (water being pumped into the reservoir) and piling on new programs, Medicaid, college aid and grants, Medicare, Social Security entitlements, enhanced welfare and fighting wars (water flowing out), without paying for it.
Had we been regularly replenishing the reservoir, we might well have afforded a few trillion here, a few trillion there to bail out our economy in 2008. (Then again, if we had always been the kind of people willing to PAY for government services, we might never have gotten into the mess we were in a year ago.)
At some point, as Greece found out, the reservoir really will run dry. Then there will be no more juice generated—and nothing with which to restart the plant. But the problem isn’t a “socialist Obama” who is the first president ever to run us into debt.
The problem is us. WE stood at Bunker Hill or at Boston Harbor and shouted that we wouldn’t pay for the services we demanded from government. WE voted for what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics” back in 1980 when we elected Reagan.
WE cheered as Lyndon Johnson slashed taxes, created vast new programs and launched a very expensive war all at once. WE loved George W. Bush as he cut taxes and launched his world wide war on terror.
Someday we definitely are going to get a notice: “Your credit limit has been exceeded”. That’s when the tea party people will really have something to be mad about.

Tea Parties--The Ultimate American Party

2010-04-21T21:28:00.002-04:00

Americans have always loathed being asked to pay their fair share of anything. This is, after all, the “land of the free—lunch”. If they can’t get it free, they want it cheap—quality be hanged.
I’ve talked about how an American secretary will go to a discount store and buy a dozen cheap outfits that last only months—whereas a European secretary, specifically the French, may buy only three or four outfits—but they will last (and look good) for years.
American car manufacturers understood their market for years—making cars designed to go only about three or four years and then be replaced. Only when cars started to cost as much as small houses did Japanese and European cars that run longer appeal to the American buyer.
GM and Chrysler’s troubles aren’t all of their own making. They have for decades given the American consumer exactly what he wanted (as K-Mart and Walmart did with clothes); they were blindsided by the change in consumer sentiment brought on by high prices.
And—have you noticed?—American voters have made an art of keeping both parties in enough power to ensure that no one will take their government freebies (Social Security, Pell grants, etc.) away and no one will make them pay the full cost for them.
That has gone on for so long that both voter and government seem to assume that it can go on forever—after all, who says that what goes up must absolutely come down? It hasn’t happened in American politics; why should it start now?
Now the people who object to making health care available for all Americans are rallying their troops with “tea parties”. If you don’t have health insurance, the attitude seems to be, “Go out and get a job”--ignoring the fact that fewer and fewer jobs come with benefits.
The hostile attitude toward government comes with a horrific fear of government. The government that we trust to build roads, highways, airports, water mains, sewers—to protect us from the outbreak of strange new diseases, to fund medical research, to fight to keep our oil supplies coming—that government would suddenly be a monster if it took over health care.
By building roads and highways, government has made the auto industry the most heavily subsidized industry in human history. And where would Boeing be if government didn’t build airports and maintain safe air routes? But subsidize health care for the poor and sickly, the under-insured, those in jobs without benefits? God forbid!
It’s a bit like the situation back in the 1760s when the British government asked Americans to pay their fair share of the costs of a war that protected them from the French and Indians. We rioted, we burned houses, we boycotted—until London gave up.
Or in the 1770s when London—admittedly to save some British investors—subsidized a tea company (no American government would EVER subsidize a company, right?) and allowed tea prices to fall far enough that it became cheaper to buy legal tea than the stuff brought in by American smugglers like John Hancock, we held the “Tea Party” to end all tea parties right there in Boston harbor. A huge amount of money was lost.
The British government reacted by defending the investors (again, no American government would act to defend investors over the desires of price-driven consumers, right?)—and we had a shooting war on our hands.
We would have been in serious trouble if the French, our old enemy, hadn’t taken the opportunity to get revenge on Britain by supplying us with 90% of our munitions, cannon, warships and troops. We repaid them by signing a separate treaty with England that left France in the lurch. She went broke, her government collapsed—and we didn’t have to pay.
Yes, indeedy, tea party time is definitely American. Especially when someone has the nerve to ask us to pay for something. We’ll take it free when we can, cheap from the lowest bidder when we absolutely can’t get it for nothing. Ah, piffle.

The New Discrimination--Freedom of Religion

2010-04-18T22:25:00.001-04:00

Here we go again. The University of California’s Hastings College of Law has skewered itself on the horns of dilemma it never needed to have created or to have faced. The whole matter goes before the Supreme Court tomorrow.
It seems that Hastings College of Law has a rigid policy that no organization that uses school property, enrolls students or advertises its meetings on campus may discriminate on the grounds of religious or sexual orientation.
Which immediately spelled trouble for the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society—a reasonably innocent group (no militia members here)of future lawyers of the Christian persuasion who want to meet with fellow Christian law students.
Christianity—like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism—is by its nature exclusionary. Most Christian organizations expect members to believe that Christ is God, part of a divine trinity, that he died in place of men for their misbehaviors, and so forth.
Voting members and officers of the society are expected to adhere to these basic principles. One of the principles that most annoys Hastings is the Christian attitude about homosexuality. Like theft, cheating on one’s spouse or blasphemy it is considered unacceptable.
In fact, conservative Christians go so far as to agree with the majority of the American Psychological Association membership who held that homosexuality was a perverse form of personality disorder. This was their belief back in the early 1970s when a minority group of APA members rammed through the position that it was merely a life style choice.
So the Christian Legal Society, in the mind of Hastings College of Law, joins a select group of student organizations deemed unfit for future lawyers. It will not be allowed to use campus facilities for its meetings. (No one said, incidentally, that non-Christians could not attend; merely that they could not be voting members or officers.)
The Supreme Court must now decide (again—and again and again, no doubt) whether the position of the college violates the First Amendment or whether Christians are truly discriminatory when they limit membership in a Christian organization to Christians.
The First Amendment’s “freedom of religion” clause reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …”. That says two things.
One) Congress shall NOT establish a national state church (like the Episcopal Church in England, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands or the Presbyterian Church in Scotland)—especially not one that would SUPERCEDE the established STATE churches that existed in several of the states at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified.
In other words, all it PREVENTS is the creation of a federal government run/funded national denomination. It doesn’t even contemplate the new notion of keeping Christian groups off public college campuses because this might discriminate against non-Christians or atheists.
Two) In absolutely no way can CONGRESS pass any kind of law that would keep the Christian Legal Society from “the free exercise” of its religion—even if that keeps non-Christians from becoming voting members or officers.
Once again the Justices must put on their spectacles and see if they can still read the clear wording of that wonderful old 18th Century document, the Bill of Rights. They should remember that the entire basis of their legal and political power rests on their willingness/ability to interpret the Constitution and its amendments.
Why should Hastings College of Law be permitted to do what Congress itself is expressly forbidden to do? Will the court decide it has the clear power to ignore or overrule a fundamental principle of the American Democracy and its Constitution?
If the Court chooses to step beyond the protection that the Constitution provides them, then more Presidents may feel free to disregard their decisions—as Andrew Jackson did when he said, “John Marshall [chief justice] has made his law; let him enforce it.” They might take the defiance Obama has already shown more seriously. Future Chief Executives more do more than waggle a finger at them during a State of the Union Address.

Goldman Sachs Gets A "Good Smack"

2010-04-17T23:09:00.001-04:00

That’s what mothers used to say—as in, “You need a … .” So now it’s Goldman Sachs turn to take one. Whether it will ever come to more than that, whether anyone will ever succeed in proving that this was the naughty kid who started the mess-- or not-- is yet to be seen.
After all this is an election year. There are a lot of peevish folk out there who lost chunks of retirement funds and other investments. There are a passel of poor souls who blame their unemployed status on the financial collapse of 2008. You have to be able to say, “Look, this was all done to you by wicked people, and we are punishing them.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has brought a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, a hither-to untouched sacred cow of Wall Street. It made tons and tons of money last year and paid tons of money to the employees who took the wild risks and made the company’s profits.
“Some of those risks were too risky for the investor and not risky enough for Goldman Sachs,” the SEC is suggesting. When you sell somebody else a really risky investment—and then bet it will fail, thus betting against your own trusting customers, that can be fraud. So says the SEC.
Those were the “derivatives” that Goldman Sachs and several other major firms spent the last several years selling—to pension funds, foreign banks, each other, mutual funds and private investors. Everybody took a bath—except Goldman Sachs.
Congress voted to allow unregulated derivative trading ten years ago—and the market has grown to over 600 trillion of those little items scattered all over the place, all unregulated. They were a big part of the collapse a year ago last fall.
Of course, a having a lawsuit filed against you doesn’t mean you’re going to lose a lot (other than very major legal fees, which Goldman Sachs can probably afford—but it will put a dent in profits). But, up until now, derivatives have been left totally alone. Congress hasn’t even been willing to talk about regulating them. There has been no legal action or threat thereof. Until now.
So the SEC, which largely sat on its hands as speculations and deceptive financial instruments went wildly out of control over the past few years has finally taken action. I asked myself what this reminded me of—and came up with the following allegory.
A man robs a bank. He shoots someone. The police (government, SEC, Congress, White House) comes in to investigate. They find the bank tellers at fault for having too much money on hand—and thus tempting the robber. They say nothing to the shooter.
They find the bank guard at fault because he allowed himself to be hit over the head and disarmed. They find the bank’s customers at fault because they deposited so much money in that bank. The shot person is at fault because he visited the bank at the wrong hour.
Oh, and there was blame for the bank manager. If he had just had procedures in place to hand the money to the robber without fuss, no one would have been hurt. But no one says anything to or about the shooter. He goes free—to invest the money he got and make himself an ever larger fortune. After all, he was just being a good capitalist.
And now they are actually going to sue the shooter. Of course there is a great hue and cry among his fellow bank robbers—I mean other Wall Street investment bankers—that business will be greatly impaired if the shooter is penalized in any way, and this way of raising capital is curtailed.
I don’t know how it will all play out. A judge could throw the case out; Congress could make an unpredictable move; the White House could offer to mediate in such a way the keeps Goldman Sachs safe from all harm; juries in cases like this can be about as predictable as the path of a tornado—our national history is replete with such eventualities.
But, for the moment, some guys who caused a lot of misery with their recklessness—and, very possibly, chicanery—are having a bad evening. However briefly it lasts, that at least is some satisfaction for the folks who trusted Goldman Sachs—and its ilk—to have their backs.

Empathy ("Justice") and Law at The HIgh Court

2010-04-16T23:24:00.001-04:00

Back during the election campaign of 1960, I got caught in a rainstorm in the middle of Manhattan. I took shelter under the flap of a newspaper kiosk somewhere around 23rd Street. It was pouring; there were no customers; so we talked.
We started talking about Kennedy. Then we segued into American attitudes toward a Catholic President (a major issue in 1960!). I was astonished to learn that he and his Italian-American compatriots had little use for Irish Catholics in general, Kennedy specifically.
From there we somehow got on the subject of the Mafia. I expressed the attitude of a mid-western WASP that the Mafia was an evil organization. He took no offense; he merely set out to explain what to him were patently obvious facts to a callow youth.
“In Sicily my uncle was a ‘capo’”—a Mafia chieftain. “A poor man came to my uncle. He said a wealthy neighbor had stolen two of his few sheep. Yes, he had gone to the Carabinieri. They had dismissed him—‘What can we do about two sheep?’
“So he came to my uncle. My uncle went to the hall or records and went through all the recorded sheep transactions of the past several years. Then he went and counted the rich man’s sheep. Two too many.
“He told the rich man, ‘Return the sheep or they will find your head in the woods’. The sheep were immediately returned. Justice was done. I can still remember the way he waggled his finger at me. “Now I tell a story about here, in New York.”
“I used to be a barber. The most valuable things I own are my old barber tools. They cost hundreds of dollars. One day I came home and found that I had been robbed—all my pants were taken and my barber tools.
“I got to thinking. At the back I share a fire escape with the apartment next door. A welfare family lives there. They are always home. One day I felt sorry for one of the older kids and I gave him one of my suits. He gave me back the coat; only the pants fit him.
“So I went to the police—explaining how easy it would be to get from their apartment to mine, about the pants. They told me there was nothing they could do.” (Police in New York limit their concern over petty robberies to filling out insurance forms so the robbed can collect on their policies. They do nothing else.)
“I went across the street to the candy store and went in the back room where the bookie was. I told him my story. He said, ‘I can’t do everything for you. What do you need to have back?’ I told him I wanted my barber tools. He nodded.
“Next day I came home and my tools are lying on my kitchen table.” He looked at me with disdain, “So, who do you think I vote for? The police—or the Mafia?” (He was speaking of the old, italian Mafia—which made its own streets the safest, quietest in New York.)
The rule of law failed him. It failed the poor man in Sicily. So they came to the local “king” for Justice. He dispensed pure, equitable Justice—with no reference to precedent or legal jurisdiction. Several of the more liberal members of the Senate are calling for what is really the same thing is they contemplate appointing a new Supreme Court Justice.
They want empathy. Admittedly the Carabinieri showed none. They want emotional considerations taken into account. The bookie did that. Failure at law—as it did when the original Equity Courts were created—has left the door open for this kind of appeal.
But what do we want? The bookie or an improved police force? How do we improve it—or the courts? These are the questions the Senate is actually facing. President Obama—a black man from our most prestigious law school—is looking at the same questions.
The problem is ancient. The solution is, at best, imperfect. But let us understand what we are really deciding. As a Democracy we have the power to choose whichever one we want; let’s just understand what the choices really are.
I think my little news vendor still has lots of company.

Justice or Law at the Supreme Court?

2010-04-15T17:42:00.001-04:00

Many years ago I entered law school, glowing with visions of doing justice and rescuing fair damsels and other wronged souls from distress. I maintained that view for about a year. Then one evening I found myself in company with two older men, both experienced lawyers.
One was a White House counsel; the other, his friend, a Duke University law professor. Over a bottle of bourbon we began to argue. We went at it until well into the wee hours. I had made the mistake of expressing my desire to “do justice”.
They were horrified. By three or four o’clock they were yelling. “Law,” I remember the professor shouting, “has NOTHING to do with justice!! Justice is a fascist concept. Law is PROCESS!” It took me years to fully understand what he meant.
Other lawyers have called it “system”. You build it, point by point, case by case, on precedent. If you concern yourself exclusively with avenging poor widows and making everything “fair”, you run the risk of creating “bad law” as Justice Holmes put it.
I think the best lesson I ever got in what law actually is and does came from a wealthy man who bought and sold real estate. He explained what he expected from his lawyer at a closing. “I want someone there who doesn’t care a snap whether or not the deal goes through or whether it’s a good deal or a bad one.
“I want someone with me whose ONLY concern is whether all the “I’s” are dotted and all the “t’s” crossed. I’m the one who’s all excited about the deal and the purchase. I want him to be completely indifferent.”
THAT, it can be validly argued, is the proper function and behavior of LAW—a sublime indifference to the situation of any individual, a concern only that the procedure runs its proper course—based on past decisions and experience.
Anything else is in fact EQUITY. (Equity was tossed out of the American legal system around 1876.) The best example of Equity is found in the Jewish Bible, in the story of King Solomon who determines just which woman is the real mother of the living child by taking a sword and offering to cut it in half, giving each woman a share.
It set no precedent (we know of no other case where a judge/king resorted to a similar measure), it changed no law, it had no effect on “Stare decisis”—it simply got the real mother to identify herself when she begged Solomon to keep the child alive and give him to the other woman.
That is how “justice” gets done. It really has no place in law. My drinking friends were correct. The best legal decisions ignore questions of who’s right, who’s wrong—and simply try to satisfy both sides enough so that there is no rioting or assassination in the streets.
They take vengeance completely out of the hands of the aggrieved party and, as impersonally as possible, inflict it in the name of process and the state. Anything else could risk dropping back into darker times when a victim’s family was expected to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
As a result, we have “unjust” verdicts where the wrong man is sent to prison or when a really heinous act by a human or a corporation does not seem to draw sufficient punishment. Law’s only concern, historically, is to maintain the “king’s peace”—to do just fair enough a job to keep the injured parties from taking things into their own hands.
It’s NOT to “do justice”—it’s to “keep the peace”. And it IS more peaceful when judges deal with murderers rather than private individuals. I don’t know if the alternative is properly called “fascism” or not, but it would be a lot less tranquil. (Drive by shootings by peevish gang members are a perfect example of some peoples’ notion of “justice”. The Mafia is legendary for exacting “justice”. Do they do a better job than the courts?)
We’re picking a new Supreme Court Justice this summer. What much of the arguing will be about is the question: Is his interest scrupulously and only the law and its precedents—or does he allow considerations of equity and “justice” to sway him? Will he create “bad law” by settling Holmes’ “hard cases” with too much empathy and fairness?
So what will we have on the Supreme Court this time? Law or Justice? Impartial process or emotion ridden empathy? Do you suppose a bottle or two of bourbon might help?
(My two mentors and I parted friends. Foolishly, I now think, I quit law school. With more patience and a better understanding I might have made a decent lawyer. Who knows?)

Public Schools--Why They Were Created

2010-04-14T20:44:00.001-04:00

Few would argue that the American educational system—for all the billions spent on it—suffers from some serious glitches. Too many kids squeeze through with skills far too minimal to make them employable in today’s world.
It worked when a kid could walk out of school at sixteen, go into a factory and pull the handle on a punch press for several decades, and then retire on some kind of pension. It worked really well in the 1950s and ‘60s when wages for unskilled labor soared along with their pensions.
Except for a relatively few scientists and scholars—who tended to get their learning from private, parochial are public schools located in affluent districts filled with motivated—and motivating—educated parents, we did all right with the semi-literate punch press pullers.
Now the underlying problems with the system—that were always there, but of no real significance—are showing up. Brutal fact is the average public school was never designed to teach people the skills they need to live in a technologically challenging world.
Let’s go back to the beginning—1837, when Massachusetts’ Horace Mann became the first State Secretary of (Public) Education in history. The way we tell the story now, both Mann (who may well have been, personally) and the tax payers of Massachusetts were motivated by an altruistic desire to see all the little children properly educated.
Something doesn’t ring true here. Massachusetts basically invented the American (UNSKILLED) factory system—at this period in time. Kids went to work there at ages as young as eight and nine—and got no education at all.
So what got the same voting tax payers who owned the factories and employed the children at lovely low wages fired up to create a public school system? Blame the unwashed, illiterate, unwashed, Catholic Irish for that.
The factory owners were protestants—at a time when the nation was militantly protestant. Catholics were at best heretical, at worst treacherous and evil. The factory owners were largely from the Island of Great Britain, where contempt for the Irish has been epidemic for centuries.
After all the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England were all English protestants. Scotch Irishmen (also protestant, originally from Great Britain) gained great respect during the Revolution for their ability to shoot British sentries at vast distances—and they kept largely to the frontier areas of the new nation.
There were Germans in Pennsylvania—protestant. (New York City was always suspiciously diverse—14 languages were spoken in the city by 1660.) The rest of the new nation was largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for a few hundred thousand black slaves).
But, by 1830, Ireland had begun a century-long process of emigration, in which two out of every five living Irishmen fled the island—five million coming to America alone. The most Irish city in America became that once bastion of Puritan probity, Boston.
The Anglo-Saxons were shocked, to say the least, at the unwashed and illiterate condition of the new immigrants—the first of subsequent wave upon wave of non-English, Welsh or Scots folk. These “new” immigrants simply weren’t at all like the old Puritans and Virginians.
It became necessary to teach these barbarians how to be proper Americans. Teach them how to write and speak proper English, to wash their hands and bodies, to forego some of their most offensive Catholic superstitions. What better way than to fund a “non-sectarian” public school system that would teach all children to be good, clean, protestant Americans? As more immigrants flooded in, more “public” schools were created.
(Some of that kind of instruction was still found in our schools when I attended in the 1940s.) The Irish reacted, not really surprisingly, by creating parochial Catholic schools so that they could hang onto their own traditions.
But the real point is: can a public school system originally structured to teach cleanliness and protestantism and English values do an effective job of teaching math, the sciences or other purely academic disciplines? Or do we have to go way back to the beginning and construct a completely new system designed to meet the needs of our post industrial, knowledge oriented society?
Might problems with the purposes for which and ways the system was originally structured be part of the reason it isn’t working today? If so, we have bigger problems than can be solved simply by increasing or cutting teachers’ pay.

Teaching--Too Tough a Job for a Lifetime?

2010-04-13T20:25:00.000-04:00

I’ve met a lot of teachers—from perky little blonds right out of school who just love children—to grumpy old men (and women) of forty who’ve been on the job way, way too long. Other than lawyers, teachers are the most cynical professionals I’ve ever met. Like lawyers, teachers have seen enough guilty go free and enough innocent hang.
Young teachers tend to agonize over failing students. They allow students to retake and retake tests until somehow they achieve a passing grade (don’t you wish your boss was as nice?). Experienced teachers can sound so bland when they mention that half the kids in this or that class are flunking.
A teacher I really liked, who taught honors, senior English classes and adjunct courses at college, was sitting in his classroom during that magic week in June when seniors are already gone. His feet were up on the desk; he was watching television. He grinned when I stuck my head in his door, “School wouldn’t be such a bad place if it weren’t for the students.”
Every time I tell that story to a teacher—at least to one who has taught more than five years--I get anything from a cynical snicker to a weary nod. None have ever expressed surprise or dismay. It is a shared feeling.
Listening to a principal, a superintendent, or an “educator” who is far removed from the classroom is like listening to a Congressman opine about the glories and sacrifices of war. Do you want facts? Talk to the guys in the trenches—privately, off the record.
I quit teaching in the 1960s and didn’t return for decades. I saw 129 students a day. I concluded that I had approximately three minutes a day for each kid. I.Q.s ranged from 85 to over 150. I defy man or angel to devise a single lesson plan that can cover that spread.
Some of my kids (I was in Junior High—then 7, 8 and 9th grade students) were simply waiting for the magic age of sixteen so they could walk. They were my real discipline problems. It was a rural district so some of my kids could look forward to taking over acres of rich muck land and making an excellent income out of it. They could imagine no reason why English, history or algebra was going to help them in any way. Neither could their parents.
Except for a precious few who had college aspirations, motivation was nil. When they would defiantly ask me why they needed English, I could only answer, “Someday you may visit a foreign country, like the United States, where it is spoken.” (We were in Michigan.)
I got tired of forcing the unwanted upon the unwilling. That is stressful (I gained fifty pounds in a year), and it is hopelessly discouraging. You feel like your life is such a waste. Even the occasional kid who tells you you matter isn’t enough to re-invigorate you.
(One of those kids, incidentally, whose I.Q. was over 150 and whose father really cared, is now president of the college I attended. He’s a rare case. A tour in Vietnam where he was a forward artillery spotter may have provided additional motivation.)
Maybe asking people to teach for thirty or more years is just too much. I recall reading something about Inca civilization. They divided life into three stages. From birth to 20, you were a learner. From 20 to 50 you were a producer/worker. At 50 you began to teach the learners whatever you had done all your life as a producer (men and women).
I know our society is far more sophisticated and technologically demanding than theirs was—but I wonder if the idea of NOT having “professional/life time teachers” isn’t a good one. Who can do a better job of teaching algebra, or economics, history or English—a 20 something fresh out of school or someone who worked with it all of his or her life?
There’s logic to the answer to that question. It doesn’t hurt that research shows people of grandparent age relate better to kids than do people in their twenties and thirties. Something has got to work better than the present system does.
Even beyond motivating parents to care (yesterday’s thought).

Education--Who's Really Responsible?

2010-04-12T15:18:00.003-04:00

Our scores aren’t matching up. Japanese kids do science better than ours; New Zealand kids read better—and on and on and on. It’s somebody’s fault—somebody must be MADE to do it better. Who else should that be but the people who are paid to do it?
Wonderful story—kid comes home with a dreadful mark in Algebra. Father looks at the report card and says, “I’m really disappointed with your teacher.” Kid nods, “So am I.” Yeah. Do you suppose that’s one of the same kids that I handed an assignment to today and he said, “I ain’t gonna do this” and threw the paper on the floor? Sounds like it.
There’s no way to make him. You can send him to the Counseling Office where he’ll get a lugubrious talk on responsibility and respect for his teacher. You can kick him out of school, and that same dad in the story will stay too busy to notice. The kid’ll watch TV for a week.
There is simply no way to make those young men or women PICK UP that paper and do the assignment if they decide not to. Many teachers I talk to wish mightily (and privately) that they would bring the paddle back in school. That certainly would motivate some students.
I’m not against it. I can pull the faces to mind right now of a dozen or so high schoolers that I KNOW would react positively to that sort of stimulus and, as I sit here, I can imagine nothing else that would get them to pick up the paper and work.
But the rumble out of Washington and from more and more states is: we’re going to peg teachers’ pay to how well their students perform on the standardized tests. In other words, if those kids will not pick up his paper and work, we’ll dock the teacher’s pay.
On the face of it, that’s stupid—and it shows a kind of mindless desperation, suggesting the sort of floundering that one expects from a panicked, drowning person. (At least the life guard is sllowed to use physical force to subdue a potentially dangerous flounderer.)
Our whole system is panicked. We are graduating schools full of kids who can neither read nor write nor do sums. Each year whole faculties are trained in some new system to better teach math or reading. Nobody tells them how to get the kids to pick up the papers.
I remember reading several books on teaching experiences in inner city schools during the 1960s. The bottom line in each one of them was that there was no motivation from home. I found that to be true when I taught in 1963. The parents didn’t care—they got angry if you flunked a kid for cheating on his test, yes, indeedy. But they saw little enough use for education themselves. Why hassle their kids about it?
Illiterate immigrant families on New York’s lower East Side produced untold numbers of doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, teachers and scholars during the last century. Why? Parents believed that the classroom was the only way out of the sweat shops—and if the teacher even hinted that the kid was a problem? Boom! I know I never wanted my Grand Rapids parents to hear about problems at school. They didn’t do a lot of teaching, but they motivated me! So did a lot of my friends’ moms and dads.
Parents have got to get involved again—and not automatically side with their child when there’s a problem. The paddle may have to come back for kids who have no parents who care enough to motivate them.
The teacher cannot do it alone. He or she has been left with nothing in his or her educational arsenal with which to deal with the kid who doesn’t care—and the parents who don’t care. Cutting teacher pay will not motivate parents or students.
This is the emphasis that must come out of Washington. Teachers CANNOT do it alone. There must be books in the home, parents willing to take the time to read to young children, to turn the TV off and have quiet times for study. (Pull the cable out, deny internet access during certain hours.)
(But the parent wants to watch too—and play computer games. He often doesn’t care enough for his kids to deny himself. Kids who do care often come to school exhausted because they didn’t start studying until after midnight.)
Education doesn’t take place at home—but it MUST begin there. The motivation must start there. No child must be allowed to enjoy the security that comes from knowing he can drop his paper on the floor, refuse to work, and there will be no consequences.
Cutting salaries because we parents have allowed that to happen is simply vicious.

Student Loans--The Next Bubble?

2010-04-10T17:06:00.001-04:00

Last week a friend of ours was looking over some application forms for college when she looked up and said, “We’ve had a ‘Tech Bubble’; we’ve had a ‘Housing Bubble’—the next bubble will be the student loan bubble.”
She’s thinking of going back to school and finishing the art degree she never quite got back in the 1970s. Along with sticker shock at tuition prices, she’s been both astonished and horrified at the nonchalance with which colleges assume she will be taking out thousands of dollars in student loans. It’s simply expected.
These loans are expected because, today, books alone cost more than tuition did when she started college in 1972. Parking fees alone at several area colleges equal what I paid in tuition when I started college in 1957. (My youngest son’s high school even charges for parking this year.)
College after college says, you get so much in direct scholarships (over the years this friend has maintained a 3.96 GPA), so much in work study, and the other ten, or fifteen or even twenty thousand a year will come in the form of loans.
This morning I had occasion to visit a local college campus. I overheard some students talking—very casually—about the thousands of dollars they had accumulated in loans. (This was at a relatively inexpensive state college.) I joined the conversation.
I mentioned my son who has gone back to graduate school. When he started three years ago, his job prospects looked very bright. Now, as he finishes his course, those prospects have dried up. There isn’t a job in his field this side of the Arab oil states—if there’s one there.
He’s slated to be done in June. He owes thousands—which, three years ago, he assumed he could nicely pay back with the job he was expecting. Six months after his last class, job or no job, the clock runs out and he must start paying back those loans—with substantial interest.
His best option seems to be to take out another loan, return to school in the fall, and put off the evil day of repayment for another year. I mentioned this situation to the students I was chatting with. “Yes,” one of them said, “my brother is in his seventh years at the University of Michigan.
“He’s caught In the same bind.” The only problem with his temporary solution of taking more classes to avoid repayment is that this just accumulates more debt. When the clock does run out, he will have far more to repay than he ever planned on.
Just like in the real estate boom days, people took out big mortgages imagining that raises would come automatically and paying off the mortgage would be easy. When the bottom dropped out, that assumption proved to be grievously faulty.
How many kids are in the same bind my son is—or the brother of the student I talked to this morning? What happens if many of them stay in school for another year, racking up more debt, and then NEVER find the expected, high paying job with which to repay.
What happens when they need to buy transportation, pay high rent and start supporting themselves—all after servicing that huge student loan debt? What happens if enough of them simply cannot do it?
What do the banks do that cannot collect on all of these lovely student loans they so willingly (just like mortgages) pushed on tens of thousands of kids all over the country? Do we have another debt/credit crunch? Who bails out this one?
My acquaintance may or may not be proven correct—but it is certainly something worth watching out for over the next few years.
It’s nothing I hear them worrying—or even talking—about in Washington or on the financial pages. But they were telling us before the last two bubbles popped that something fundamental had changed in the market. It hadn’t then—has it now?

Democracy In Iraq--BOOM!

2010-04-08T21:50:00.000-04:00

Was it five car bombs—or was it seven—that went off in Baghdad the other day? I guess it depends on whether you count in Arabic or English. The locals say one thing; what’s left of the American military presence says the other.
We sponsored an election. It was apparently a reasonably fair election; it was also a dreadfully close election. We take close elections to the Supreme Court or the loser simply quits and lets the other guy have it. In simpler societies, recounts can get bloody.
So far, just in April, 100 Iraqi’s have died in the process. This comes just as we are preparing to cut the 96,000 GIs remaining in Iraq down to under 50,000. That should be completed by September; everybody is scheduled to leave by next year.
Why does this remind me of 1921?
What happened then, you ask. Read on—and see if it sounds familiar. There was a once a province of the brutal Turkish Empire that was maintained by force of arms, not by democratic mandate or agreement of the mutually hostile tribal and religious groups.
The Turkish Empire went away in a cloud of gun smoke back in 1918 and the British decided to take this province over. Mesopotamia, as it was then called, had NEVER been a unified country. Already by the end of World War I, people were beginning to sense just how much oil this piece of earth contained. Britain was quite willing to take on that burden.
Britain, however, was short on cash, and there was not a lot of political sentiment back in England for another foreign war—even for oil. In fact there was none. World War I had left England broke and sick of war—she wanted her boys home.
So young Winston Churchill, who was Colonial Secretary in 1921, held a meeting in Cairo where he came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea—to him. He would 1) combine three hostile tribal areas in Mesopotamia—that of the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni’s into one brand new country, called Iraq.
Two, he installed one of the characters out of “Lawrence of Arabia” as king—thus creating a unified national government. (This chap, by the way was from Arabia and had already been tossed out of Syria for trying to make himself king there.) Then, 3) Churchill decided to create an Iraqi national army under this new government so that the British troops could go home.
Cheaper, fewer British casualties, instead of three areas to pacify—one nation state with its own army. Absolutely brilliant plan. Rather like the plan Churchill had as a boy when he sought to gain entrance to a “haunted house” by blowing up a home-made bomb in the outside well. He blew himself high in the air and never found the “secret passage” into the house.
His plan for Iraq didn’t work either. The three Mesopotamian tribes went right on hating each other. The new government was powerless to stop them from killing each other. Without sufficient British troops on the ground to pacify things, everything just go worse.
In 1930, Britain quit and went home. They left Iraq to its new king (whose entire family was finally wiped out in 1958—by a group that included Saddam Hussein). Churchill’s grand design exists today only in the name on the map—where the three groups that still hate each other live to this day.
Now it’s America’s turn to try to create a nation state out of these three groups. (Like the British, we’ve already given up on the oil.) Like the British we are only too willing to pull our own troops out and leave the mess to the Iraqi national army.
One can almost see Mr. Churchill, sitting on a back bench in heaven, shaking his head as he looks down and murmurs, “Good luck”.

Afghanistan--Show Me The Way To Go Home!

2010-04-07T20:17:00.001-04:00

I dislike very much when something I have thought about threatens to come to pass. Several months ago I wrote about the very tenuous supply line we have for troops and materiel coming into (and out of) Afghanistan.
I repeat again: the country is landlocked. To the west lies Iran—somehow I don’t see them letting our supply or troop delivery planes fly through their airspace any time soon. To the east lies Pakistan—a dubious ally with very good reasons not to let large amounts of American equipment or troops traverse its territory.
These two nations meet south of Afghanistan—blocking access to the sea. To the north lie a series of former Soviet Republics—from west to east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—all primarily Muslim, all still in the Russia sphere of influence.
Just north of Tajikistan lies the smallest and poorest of the former Soviet Republics, Kyrgyzstan—which also borders Russia and China. Over half the country is situated 10,000 feet up, which does nothing to add to its wealth .
One way the tiny nation (five million souls) thought to make a little spare cash was to allow the United States to build a major airbase there. The US Transit Center at Manas International Airport just outside of the capital city of Biskek has become a crucial link in our supply chain.
That worked wonderfully as long as the regime that granted us the rights to that base remained in power. Last week that regime came to an end. It seems that the populace became peevish over things like a 200% raise in utility rates—and major corruption by the pro-US government.
Riots broke out and people tossed the old regime out. The apparent victors are calling for closing down the American base.
So far the base reports it is operating normally. The shooting seems to be limited to the capital city for now. Even if the base is shut down, that will not immediately choke us to death in Afghanistan. But it should sound a whole lot of alarm bells in both the Pentagon and Kabul.
What happened in Kyrgyzstan could very well happen in other Muslim states north of Afghanistan and even in Pakistan. We should start—if we haven’t already—thinking very seriously about how we are going to get a whole lot of Americans and NATO types home again if the not-too-unthinkable happens sometime in the future.
Russia has influence there. She is not our friend. She may, for the moment prefer that neighboring Muslim radicals spend their time shooting at Americans rather than Russians—or she may decide to propitiate a few Muslims by inducing her former republics to shut down our northern supply line. I dislike the thought that we are in anyway at the mercy of the former home of the KGB.
Is China our friend? She, too, may not mind us shooting up a few Islamic extremists at the moment. But what if her western Muslim tribesmen become fractious and she starts looking for ways of making them happier?
The world north of Afghanistan could turn upside down at any moment—and we have no real control over the situation. Were I a general in Afghanistan that reality would not make me a happy man.
In Iraq, at least, we have access to the sea. We can come and go—right now—pretty much as we please. In Afghanistan we remain dependent upon a little help from some very dubious friends.
And we think we’ve got troubles NOW. Oh my.

Obama--Cutting Back The Nukes: Good Idea?

2010-04-06T23:04:00.001-04:00

The Obama Administration just announced that it is going to change certain aspects of American nuclear war policy. Specifically it is going to list situations in which it would NOT resort to nuclear weaponry. That reverses policy that has been in place most of my life.
The idea makes me nervous. I understand that there has always been pressure to take nukes out of the military equation because they scare the liver out of everybody. But, I remind you, that’s the whole point of nuclear deterrence.
Let’s not forget that it has worked. It’s been sixty-five years since the last major war. There were only twenty-one years between World War I and World War II. There were 99 years between World War I and the previous world war (the Napoleonic wars). That century without major war lasted only so long as one nation maintained an absolute preponderance of naval power.
So long as no would could sneeze or speak without British concurrence you had peace. When Germany built a fleet to rival England’s, war became as inevitable as a fallen soufflé in a fireworks display. The atomic/hydrogen bomb eliminated the need for any one nation to have absolute military superiority. You didn’t mess with anybody who had nukes and a credible willingness to use them.
When I was in graduate school, former President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was a thing of contempt and distain among modern young (and liberal) professors. Eisenhower was a major architect of the policy of massive nuclear retaliation.
Kennedy won the election of 1960 in part because he demanded that we limit our dependence on nukes and come up with more conventional options. Like Obama, he worked to limit situations under which we would use nuclear or hydrogen weapons.
In a seminar course, a professor of mine sneeringly asked if anyone wanted to try to defend Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. (It was also an article of faith among liberal scholars that Ike was merely a puppet for John Foster Dulles.) I agreed to try.
I did lots of reading. I soon could demonstrate that, if anyone was the puppet, it was Dulles. I came up with a lot of other facts that definitely indicated Eisenhower’s methods of preserving the stalemate peace between the Soviets and the US had a lot to be said for it.
I summed up what I had learned in a simple allegory with which I began my presentation. I created the verbal image of an old western bar room (pre-atomic Europe, if you will). Every Saturday night there was a shooting (The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, The Seven Years War, etc.). and every Sunday bodies were buried.
A new sheriff was elected—who had seen enough gun fights and didn’t like them (Ike). The first Saturday night he was on duty, he carried a beaker of liquid into the bar. “This,” he announced, ” is a jar full of nitro-glycerin.” He sat down, set the jar on the edge of his table and ordered his dinner. “Golly,” he said, “I hope no one knocks this glass over.”
No shooting that night, or the next or the next. Things went on for a few years until a young fellow (named Kennedy) ran for sheriff. “How awful,” he proclaimed, “to have such dangerous stuff as nitro in a bar full of people!!! Let’s get rid of it!”
He got elected. He removed the jar of liquid that scared people so much and came into the bar with the latest model Colt pistols on his hips (remember McNamara and the Whiz Kids at the Pentagon?). A couple of Saturday nights later there was a shooting, and then another. The undertaker was back in business.
My instructor was enraged. He ranted at me for a full hour after class was supposed to end. He walked out muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done” and gave me an “A”. Today, of course, most historians think better of Eisenhower than they did in 1966.
Let’s not forget WHY he had that bottle of nitro sitting on the table.

Geography--What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

2010-04-05T22:09:00.000-04:00

Years ago when I was in graduate school, I opted for a survey course covering Chinese history. As the course went into its third week or so I became terribly confused. This baffled me—no history course of any kind had befuddled me since I was ten years old.
Why now? What was the problem? It struck me: I had no concept whatsoever of interior Chinese GEOGRAPHY. I spent several hours one afternoon poring over maps of China—and my confusion was gone. I enjoyed the course.
Americans are notoriously bad at history. Most can’t tell you within several decades when either the Civil War or the Revolution occurred. Most also have zero notion of geography, American or world.
Harvard University’s admissions office has sent applications back to residents of New Mexico, telling them they needed to apply on forms for foreign students. Credit card companies and ticket venders for the last American Olympics (1996) have made the same mistake.
Ask a kid on the East Coast to locate Idaho or Arkansas; ask a child on the West Coast to find Rhode Island or Delaware. Many will fail. Then there was the hotel clerk in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) who remembers American tourists asking her where the Polar Bears were.
The other day I subbed in a room where three of the World History classes were taking an open book test that involved knowing world geography. It was fun—and appalling; these were sixteen year old eleventh graders—to listen to their questions.
No one seemed to know where the Andes Mountains were. Very few could locate Russia on a world map and no one that I saw could tell which nation in Europe had the largest population. When asked which language is used in the most countries in Asia, a lot of them ventured that it might be English. None seemed to know that there are a raft of new nations in Asia that speak Russian.
They might have a cousin fighting there, but very few could locate Afghanistan—and the question of which national capital was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers floored a majority. Again, some might even have relatives serving in Baghdad.
Bahrain may as well have been located on the moon—reading maps with latitude and longitude clearly demarcated was a forgotten art. Locating the arctic circle was beyond most, and the whereabouts of Australia was a complete mystery.
And so it went, around the globe in blithering befuddlement. This isn’t new. When Vietnam turned hot in the early 1960s, most Americans hadn’t the foggiest where it was. It was in World War II that our lack of geographic knowledge turned truly deadly.
The British kept trying to tell Eisenhower and the Americans to land NORTH of the Monte Casino pass in 1943. They had been taught in grade school that the pass there blocks the passage from northern to southern Italy. They wanted to bypass it by landing north.
Ike wouldn’t listen. South of Monte Casino seemed closer and safer. So he landed at Salerno. It took him until September, 1944, to fight his way up the peninsula. The Germans were able to hold out a year and kill thousands of allied troops.
We now know that the German commander was prepared to concede the entire peninsula to us if we had landed north of Casino. We’d have gotten to the Po River by September, 1943, not September, 1944, had we known our geography.
I still remember the day I spent mastering the rudiments of interior Chinese geography—and I recall vividly the confusion I felt BEFORE I mastered it. A tad more emphasis on geography—especially as it applies to politics, war and diplomacy wouldn’t hurt any of us—in school or in the Pentagon.

Easter--When It All Comes Together

2010-04-04T13:49:00.001-04:00

Easter Sunday—everything I wrote about Maundy Thursday and Good Friday would be meaningless twaddle if it weren’t for today. This is the day when it all began to make sense. This is the day when the Twelve Apostles, finally, began to get what Christ was talking about.
Up until Easter Sunday (Paskha, or Passover, they call it in most European countries, after the original Jewish celebration), Christ looks like a somewhat suicidally dumb schmuck. He was told not to go near Jerusalem. He had so thoroughly annoyed (and FRIGHTENED) the political and religious leaders of his time that it was dangerous for him to go.
One of his own followers, after they could not dissuade him from going, turned to the others and shrugged, “Let’s go with him—and die with him”. They were under no illusions. He insisted on going and what everyone expected happened. They killed him.
Not just suicidal, but he sounds like a deluded schmuck who thought he was on some kind of mission for God. He said, “I must go to Jerusalem because that’s where all prophets get killed”. He wanted to put himself in the same category as Isaiah, who got sawed in half by an ancient Jewish king who was under as much pressure as the current Jewish leaders.
He had appalled these same leaders by claiming to be one with God—“Before Abraham was, I am”, he had proclaimed. No one missed the reference to the day God identified himself to Moses by telling him—“I am who I am.” “I am”—the unspeakable name of the non-contingent God—and, in a day when blasphemy was taken seriously, to claim to BE “I am” was the ultimate blasphemy, for which the only punishment must be death.
Besides this Christ was stirring up large crowds, dangerous to do under the nose of a Roman garrison on the edge of an Empire that faced a dangerous foreign enemy (Parthia). Jewish leaders lived in fear that some local firebrand would stir things up enough that a Roman army would move in on them and wipe out their nation and their temple. (It happened forty years later.)
So they maneuvered to get Christ killed—by the same Roman authorities they feared. They warned the Roman governor that Christ had said he would rise again; unlike the Apostles, they had at least listened to what he was saying. The Romans posted a guard so no overzealous follower could sneak into the tomb, spirit the body away, and claim he came back to life.
The Roman guard was found unconscious. They babbled about some space men in shiny suits who rolled away the huge stone at the entrance and knocked them all out. (Matthew’s account) They were bribed to shut up and the horrified leaders claimed the body was stolen.
The Apostles refused to believe anybody’s story about a resurrection until Christ walked through a locked door and identified himself. (They were so intent in hiding, it is most unlikely that they took on any Roman guards!)
Good Friday suddenly has meaning. Not only did God sacrifice his son for men—he raised him back up from the dead—the Christian Bible suggests that, unlike merely creating the cosmos, the defeat of death itself took serious exertion of divine power.
Not only does the Christian God raise Christ from death and Hell itself, but now the promise can be made to all men—“Oh death, where is thy sting; Oh grave, where is thy victory?” The Christian message becomes—“We live because He lives”. The keys to Death and Hell are now in the hands of the Son of God who sacrificed himself to save men from them.
It is an astonishing proclamation. Death does not win. What we bury will live again. Body, soul and Spirit—all because of Good Friday AND Easter morning. The last great horror of men, dying, has now had its fangs pulled.
Believe it or disbelieve it—it is an astonishing claim. Take it as truth, and it is the best news you will ever hear. Deny it—and run the risk (Pascal’s Wager) of facing an offended deity who takes a dim view of ingratitude—of whom it is written “Fear Him who, when he has killed, can kill again”.

Where Have All The Jobs Gone? Redux

2010-04-03T20:53:00.001-04:00

The stock market is doing well; banks are profitable; companies are paying back the government what it loaned them; consumer confidence is up; there is upward pressure on home prices; some suggest jobs are getting easier to find.
All I have is anecdotal evidence from one small area in West Michigan. Maybe it’s real; maybe it’s a blip; maybe it’s an aberration—I can’t say. But it sticks in my mind.
A neighbor of mine is foreman for a defense contractor in the area. A year ago I asked him how his plant was doing, and he told me that they had five years of contracts lined up. After all, there’s a war on isn’t there? Not to worry.
He has several family members working in his plant—they’re all hard workers. One of them is a son who just bought a new home and has a new baby. This Christmas my neighbor had to lay everybody at the plant off for two weeks because it was so slow.
Last week, he had to lay off 40 workers. Included among the casualties was his own son. His guts hurt; he even shed private tears—but he had no choice. Some of the survivors are now working three and four day weeks. The guys who were laid off were told not to expect to come back, certainly not for a year or more.
This morning my wife stopped at the local community college. She’s thinking about taking some art courses there. She sat down to talk to an old friend who works there. Another, mutual friend, who worked there isn’t there anymore.
What happened? On orders from the capital the college was told to tell anyone near retirement to take it and go—or face having their benefits slashed. The college must reduce its workforce by 83 additional people by next fall. This lady knows her benefits will be cut, but she’s divorced and cannot afford to retire right now.
Five art and theater full time faculty members have retired in the past few years. So far they have been replaced by one full time instructor—and lots of low paid, benefit-less adjuncts. College tuition has climbed from $35 a credit hour to $150 in the past dozen years.
I overheard the principal at one of the high schools I substitute teach in responding to a faculty member’s question (“What are we going to do?”) with, “We’re going to privatize, privatize and privatize.” Already the bus drivers, custodians and subs have been privatized. So, who or what is next?
It saves bushels of money to privatize people. Lower, or no, benefits. Less pay. No company paid retirement plan—they can buy into 401K’s on their very low pay. Another member of a high school administration put it to me bluntly, “Next year we’re going to have to lay off teachers”. Have you ever taught in a room with 35 kids? Ha.
Incidentally, substitute teachers are still working at 20th century wages—there are so many people desperate to work as subs that there is no need to raise the pay. Oh yes, and there are a lot fewer conferences scheduled that require subs—fewer jobs, more workers.
I took my car in to get my oil changed today. The establishment, decades old—and located in an affluent neighborhood—had only one customer. Me. I commented on how slow things were, and the proprietor said, “I’ve had a lot of days like this.”
He told me the story of a friend of his who owns a business. Last year the man laid off 80 people. This year—minus all those workers and their benefits—he is making more money than ever before. He has no plans to hire anybody.
I’ve just totaled up a lot of people who have less money to shop in a society that depends on consumer consumption to maintain the economy. That can’t be good. Is this the only place that is happening? I somehow doubt it.

Good Friday Stands Alone and Unique

2010-04-02T22:04:00.001-04:00

It’s Good Friday. It celebrates the day on which Jesus Christ was sentenced to death and executed by crucifixion—a uniquely cruel form of death, which the Romans probably borrowed from our friends the ancient Iraqi’s (the Assyrians).
It also celebrates the single event that absolutely and totally separates the Christian faith from ALL other religions. No one who understands Good Friday can possibly suggest that Christianity stands as just “another road to the same god.”
There is nothing like the events and theology of Good Friday in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism or any of the modern animist or ancient pagan religions. If nowhere else, on Good Friday Christianity stands unique and alone.
In all these religions, man is left to seek God. It is humanity that does the seeking. It is the human being who must propitiate any offended or angry deity. It is his problem to deal with if he commits a malfeasance that threatens to deny a good reincarnation or a happy hereafter.
Allah may be merciful, but it is up to those who follow Islam to earn that mercy—by following all the requirements of Sharia law. Even orthodox Judaism holds that man must earn the good will of God by keeping the laws found in the Torah, the Talmud, the Mishnah and a host of other legal compilations. God may have sought Abraham, but after that it’s up to men.
Christianity—through Good Friday—says “No” to all of the above. God seeks man—not just one man, like Abraham or Muhammad, but ALL men. He does this, on Good Friday, because men are totally incapable of saving themselves, atoning for their own misdeeds, pleasing God or winning his favor in any regard.
Total incapacity. We betrayed and wrecked the contract he made with the very first humans and the only acceptable payment for treason is death. In the eyes of the Christian God, we are all traitors, all hopelessly tainted with the stench of high treason.
(Benedict Arnold could not have paid enough to win back the good graces of his countrymen. The only thing that would have happened to him had he ever been captured would have been death. In the eyes of the Christian God, all of us are Benedict Arnolds.)
But, according to Jewish and Christian scriptures, God made man for his own company—to enjoy his company, to raise as children and to delight in our growth and achievements. He is not inclined to just walk away and say, “Well, I lost this one”.
To understand Good Friday, it helps to understand what C.S.Lewis was saying in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe”. Aslan, Christ, cared enough about the human Edmundd—who had betrayed him—to pay the blood debt for him, He died in Edmund’s place.
On Christmas God sent his only begotten son to die in our place. On Good Friday, he accomplished his mission and died for us. No other faith has a God willing to sacrifice so much for human beings. We don’t sacrifice, HE sacrifices in our place.
When Christianity proselytizes, it talks explicitly about one thing and implicitly about another. Explicitly it calls upon men to admit to their treason and accept the sacrifice made for them. Implicitly the question is raised—how will a God, who sent his own son to die for you, finally react if you refuse his offer and distain his sacrifice?
How would you react if you sent your kid to die for someone and he despised your offer? (That’s where and why “Hellfire and Damnation” preaching originates. It is, as Christian scripture says, “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God”. How angry would you be?)
No other faith makes such an offer—or adds such a warning. Good Friday stands unique and alone. It is a humiliating faith. It says, bluntly, “You’re helpless”. And there’s not a thing you are able to do about it. People like Christmas and Easter; Good Friday isn’t popular.

Christian Militias--Enough Already

2010-04-01T21:53:00.002-04:00

It’s Maundy Thursday. This celebrates the night Christ ate his last Seder and proclaimed himself to be the new Passover Lamb. He also instituted the Christian sacrament of the Mass (or communion) in which Christians celebrate his sacrifice by ceremonially eating his body (bread) and drinking his blood (wine).
Another Christian tradition that comes from the night of the “Last Supper” is the ceremonial washing of feet. Even the Pope is expected to kneel and wash the feet of those around him, like a servant, as Christ washed his followers’ feet.
So it’s a significant day on the Christian calendar—celebrating sacrificial blood, death, humility and obedience. It celebrates the day God tried to make it clear to men that he was coming after them, since they no longer knew how to reach out to him.
He failed. In the midst of the Seder, while he was trying to explain that his kingdom was essentially a peaceful kingdom, his followers interrupted and asked, “Is this the day that you restore the kingdom to Israel?” They meant the violent overthrow of Roman government.
They have imitators today. Last weekend the FBI arrested nine “Christian Militia” types in southern Michigan, Indiana and Ohio for plotting to violently overthrow the American government. Their scheme started with the plan to kill one, or a few, police officers.
Then, when hundreds of cops bunched up for a funeral procession, they would set off more bombs to kill those hundreds. This, the Christian Militia—calling themselves “Hutaree”—believed would set off a vast bloodbath in which they would help Christ overthrow the anti-Christ and violently establish his kingdom on earth.
This is only a two thousand year old misunderstanding. Militiamen quote Christ who told his followers to carry swords and money now that he was leaving, forgetting that when the apostles, all too eagerly, showed him they had their swords, he said, “Enough, enough already.” They had missed his point entirely, like the militiamen did.
One of his over eager followers took a miserably aimed whack at the high priest’s servant, merely cutting off his ear. Christ stopped, already under arrest, and healed the poor man. Christians go on eagerly showing him that they have swords and are ready to wield them.
Entirely too many Christians have showed the attitude throughout the centuries—“Do we restore the kingdom now?!? Whoopee, where’s my sword, my AK-47 and my M-16? Where’s the rack and iron maiden? Wheeeeee!”
No, Christians do not restore the kingdom. HE does. He says clearly he doesn’t do it with bombs and automatic rifles (or swords and lances). He does it with his WORD. The same Word that John 1:1 says created the entire cosmos.
Christian writ and doctrine clearly states that when anti-Christ finally is destroyed, it will be done with the “sword of his MOUTH”—his “word”. We’ll just be along for the ride, sans swords, guns, bombs or any other implement of violence.
But, how do we go out and evangelize after an event like this weekend? Accept Christ as your savior—and pick up your assault rifle on the way out? Nothing more negatively affects Christian evangelism that foolish people like the Hutaree Militia.
The very rafters of Hell must echo with diabolical laughter as these misguided “Christian soldiers” try to wage physical rather than spiritual warfare—and succeed only in gutting the true message of Christianity, reducing it to a malicious joke and telling the world that our God is so feeble he couldn’t possibly manage without our AK-47s..
Shakespeare—who may just possibly have edited the King James Bible—probably said it all in the words he wrote for Puck in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “What fools these mortals be”.

Obama--A Salubrious Cynicism Indeed

2010-03-31T19:32:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago I wrote that Obama probably does not have “the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to [the] sort of hubris” that makes him forget power in Washington is not so much held as derived from others. I added that I sensed “a salubrious cynicism in him.”
He wrought brilliantly to resurrect health care reform from the dead and get it through the House. Even those who don’t like him or the bill have to hand him that! Getting the bill passed required a masterpiece of political statesmanship.
George Bush demonstrated it when he got his tax cuts through; Reagan displayed it when he pushed Reaganomics through a Democratic Senate; Clinton flaunted it time after time with both Democratic and Republican Congresses. LBJ and Nixon both had the knack.
Now, for the first time in his presidency, Obama shows us that he, too, can run something—specifically, he can push a program hugely unpopular with large segments of the American population and the opposing party right into law. Give him credit.
Then, as soon as Congress folds its tents and sneaks out of town for its own version of Spring Break, Obama displays a wonderful version of Chicago ward boss politics. (Run against the King of England; get them to vote early, vote often.)
He slipped fifteen major appointments—that require Senate approval—through as “Recess appointments”. The rules say that if you use a recess appointment, the guy (or gal) can serve a year or more without being confirmed by anybody.
Whooosh, they’re in. I know I should be properly peeved as my fellow Republicans all profess to be, but I can’t help but grin a bit. Apparently wandering around Chicago as a community organizer, watching how politics is played in that grand old town, taught Obama something.
The Republicans used to procedural grounds to hold up these appoints for nearly eight months; that does smack of pure politics. (Then again, if they really didn’t like some of the people—and they did not—what other choice did they have against an overwhelming Democratic majority?) So everybody was playing politics—and Obama end played them.
Republicans went through the motions—John McCain pleaded with Obama not to use Recess Appointments—and Obama paid as much attention to them as he did during the 2008 campaign. Obama has been a bit rough on McCain lately, true enough.
During the bi-partisan summit on health care reform, he tartly reminded a pontificating McCain that “the election is over”. He just gave him another reminder last weekend. “The election is over; I make the Recess Appointments; you don’t.”
Obama looked like a patsy last year. He allowed the international community and BOTH parties in Congress to walk all over him. Last weekend he showed, finally, that he can be a political “son-of-a-bitch”.
Democrats—who are sweating fall re-election—can maybe start to smile just a bit and repeat the rest of the old adage, “but he’s OUR son-of-a-bitch.”
As a Republican I’m not necessarily pleased. As a detached observer of the American political scene, I’m grinning a bit.

Obama and the Usages of Power IV

2010-03-30T18:59:00.002-04:00

Obama has won the Battle of Health Care Reform. His perceived ability to have exercised effective political power will create an aura—an illusion, if you will--of a politically savvy and powerful president. The hardest thing for him to do now will be to remember—as he did NOT in 2008/9—that much of this aura is a normal Washington illusion.
He must now act in a way to conserve that illusion. Conserving AND using the illusion of power is a bit like having one’s cake and eating it, too, I admit. It is part of the necessary and health destroying tight rope act of exercising power in Washington.
The Illusion of Power, as long as he can maintain it, will be the most important weapon in his political arsenal for as long as he holds office. The instant he allows it to fall apart, he will cease to be effective and the nation will be fundamentally leaderless—as it was under Bush in 2008 or under Hoover in 1932.
Let’s look a bit more at political illusion as it applies to the presidency. Sometimes it’s easier to see in matters of foreign policy so I’ll mostly talk about that. Domestic maneuverings are usually done more quietly and don’t make major headlines.
Look at the difference between Eisenhower and Kennedy during the late fifties and early sixties. Ike could afford to let our national defense deteriorate to a degree that might have been criminal under any other president. Pilots lacked fuel to practice flying, GIs were still carrying World War II weapons and the navy was floating boats from the 1930s and 40s.
How could he get away with it. Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. The Russians knew him. They remembered that with a nod of his head he could unemotionally sentence half-a-million German civilians to death in a single day’s raid.
He embodied the horror and destruction of total war. They occupied the ruins our bombers had left of the neighborhoods of Berlin. He scared them. He didn’t need to spend billions on new toys. Just the myth of Eisenhower was sufficient. Smoke and mirrors.
From 1958 on the Russians had wanted to build a wall across Berlin like the Iron Curtain across the rest of Germany. They didn’t dare. Kennedy took office with his green berets, all the new ships and planes for the armed services—and they built the wall during his first year.
Khrushchev summoned Kennedy to Vienna in June, 1961, took his measure, saw no illusion of power, and built his wall a month later. He tried to put missiles in Cuba. Finally Kennedy stood up—and nearly extinguished all life on this planet. Creating no illusions can be dangerously costly.
LBJ was the “Master of the Senate” in the 1950s. He lost all real power when he became Veep in 1961; but he had left enough of an imprint on Congress and such an illusion of being dangerous that he passed more social legislation in two years than almost any four or five previous presidents had in their entire combined terms.
One last illusion that we are living with today. THE INVINCIBLE AMERICAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER. It was, in 1945. We could launch a thousand carrier planes in a single strike. We owned the skies over Japan and occupied China.
If an American carrier shows up today in foreign waters, it inspires great trepidation in those who live adjacent to those waters. (An Arab leader pointing out at the Persian Gulf and screaming, “Do you think those carriers are there on vacation?’)
One lucky missile hit—and that illusion will be forever gone. We won’t just lose a ship, its 5,000 men and its eighty or ninety planes—we will lose three-quarters of a century of myth that has served and protected us well. Be careful where you send them. Stay at red alert—the way we didn’t in December, 1941.
One missile—and the illusion goes the way of the B-29 bomber.
Illusion of Power. It is the indispensible ingredient for successful politics and diplomacy. It is so easily and quickly broken and lost. Obama—in Afghanistan and Washington—must now walk a very, very careful (without seeming to be cautious) tight rope.
Let’s all wish him Good Luck.

Obama and the Usages of Power III

2010-03-29T19:51:00.002-04:00

We’re talking about how much Obama showed us he has learned about the usage of power last week—when he got at least part of his health care reform through Congress after a year of abject failures. In earlier blogs I talked about how Obama’s biggest problem last year was believing his own press.
It’s hard to stay balanced when everyone from Vienna to Honolulu is cheering madly for you, calling you the culmination of the entire civil rights movement and proclaiming that the new millennium begins now with you.
Perhaps today he senses that power—whether it arrives from office, public adulation or military force—is essentially an illusion. And that nothing is easier to lose than the illusion of power—because it never had any reality in the first place.
On the other hand, nothing is more powerful, more frightening than illusory power because, unlike actual power, it has no limits in other people’s mind. It assumes a life of its own and seems more dangerous than a hundred hydrogen bombs.
Used properly and sparingly, it can accomplish more, prevent more problems and win more bloodless victories than all the armies of World War II. But you must have a monumentally acute sense of just how far you dare push it, how unreal, how unstable it truly is.
Let’s give a couple of practical examples. One has come and gone—poofed away in the wind. THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC BOMBER. The B-17, B-24, B-29, B-47, B-52. The world literally trembled at the mere thought of having such horror unleashed on it.
Everyone “knew” that the American bomber had won World War II. Photographs of German and Japanese cities in flames or covered with the puffs of exploding bombs, all falling in a deadly row, were seared into world consciousness.
Except that they—and unfortunately we—knew wrong. Bombers were frightening; they killed an awful lot of civilians—but they had a very limited impact on German and Japanese war making potential. All those photo-news shots of falling bombs were militarily an illusion.
(Caveat—we did cut German oil production to the point that German troops jumped off in the Battle of the Bulge (December, 1944—five months before it was all over) with only five days of fuel. They were expected to capture allied fuel dumps to resupply. People like Patton prevented that.)
But as long as the world THOUGHT that the American bomber was invincible—it was. Every so often in the 1950s and 60s, Russia’s fractious ally, the Chinese Communists (who had fought us to a draw in Korea) got feisty and threatened to take on the US again.
They kept calling us the “paper tiger”. Russia’s Khrushchev would publicly remind the Chinese that the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had “nuclear teeth”, and ask the Chinese to shut up. But China knew something.
In Korea her troops had taken the brunt of World War II style mass bombing raids by B-29s and B-50s. They had endured terrible casualties. Enough, however, had survived to force the war to a stalemate. But the myth went on.
What was worse, we believed the myth. In Vietnam we destroyed it forever, like a shattered glass vase. We bombed and bombed and bombed. Our generals assured the White House that, just as they had defeated Germany and Japan, they would destroy the Viet Cong.
They killed lots and lots of human beings, true. But they only thing they destroyed with their own myth of invincibility. That was possibly the biggest loss we endured in Vietnam. Never again would a Russian leader publicly credit American bombers with mythological powers.
It can be expensive to shatter one’s own myth. We did it—by not recognizing that, at bottom, an illusion is an illusion is an illusion. It can protect you while it endures; when it falls apart, it can leave you terribly naked.
A bit more next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power II

2010-03-28T17:26:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I talked about what Obama has learned about the nature and usage of power. I also talked about my own experience in learning that all political power is in some sense derivative—derived from someone or something outside of one’s own self and office.
Learn that, live and succeed. Forget it and someone will cut you off from behind before you ever know you’ve been hit. I don’t think Obama has the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to that sort of hubris. I sense a salubrious cynicism in him. No one in Washington ever achieves much without it. I think he may have that.
I question whether he will demonstrate the appetite for health breaking kind of work it requires to continue to exercise real control in Washington. He is, after all, a man for whom family is very important. The pursuit of political power will permit you to have no other gods before it; it is more jealous than the proverbial “bitch goddess of success”.
But he did what needed to be done to get his health care plan through Congress last week. That shows tremendous growth in aptitude over last year. Now we shall see if he knows some other things about power that I learned while watching, doing and meditating in Washington decades ago.
Briefly, my own tale. I allowed overweening ambition to propel me into a job in the Office of the White House before I was ready or capable. I had reached my then limit by rising to a job in the Office of the US Surgeon General that allowed me pretty effective access and, to a slight degree, control over the vast (international in scope) US Public Health Service.
People answered my phone calls; they had a car waiting for me at the airport, I had friends and allies. Where I needed to be feared, I was feared. The intensity of working more immediately for the President (my boss’s boss’s boss was Lyndon Johnson) was something I wasn’t ready to handle.
They chewed me up and spat me out. When they laid off or reassigned over half the staff or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1968, I was one of those called in and told to go away. (The Democrats did not need the stigma of being too pro-Civil Rights in that year’s election.) Perhaps foolishly—I was offered a higher pay grade in another agency—I resigned and left Washington.
My success—and my failure—had cost me a marriage, a career and a mental breakdown. Playing with political power is a bit like holding a 400 amp electrical cable in each hand and trying to attach them while they are live. It can fry you.
From my standpoint of having experienced both success and failure in wielding the Washington game—and years of meditation—I pass along the following thoughts on the nature of power. Obama will learn these things if he succeeds.
One) Power is a matter of propinquity. You have to BE there. After five o’clock, when the bottles of scotch come out, the feet are up on the desk and you talk (and LEARN) about what’s going on. You have to get off your chair and walk around, all day, late into the evening.
Talk even to failures—some will know someone who can help you. (My best sources of power came from people who had failed themselves, but still could place a helpful phone call.) Forget family, forget other activities. Be there, be there, be there.
Two) Power is persistence far more than it is the exertion of brute force!!! (Any insurance agent can tell you this.) It is the gentle pressure of the star fish rather than the bite of the shark. The latter will scare others into retaliating against you. Eventually that will get you.
Be friendly, be understanding of the other fellow’s problems, keep yourself in his memory banks, hang onto ALL phone numbers you are given—and call them now and then. Somebody, somewhere, is going to need something that can benefit you—and you want them to remember your name. Favorably.
Three) Power is mostly ILLUSION. This is the biggie. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power

2010-03-27T12:27:00.001-04:00

It’s still too early to say whether or not Obama will grow to be a successful president—but he took a significant step in that direction last week. He put his nose to the political grindstone and made some of his health care initiative finally happen.
Whether he can articulate it or not, he’s learned some important lessons about the nature, usages and limitations of Power. A year ago he made the mistakes most people make when they think about power—that if you have a title like “president” all you have to do is stand there and “be” powerful.
Nope. Do that and Congress, Wall Street and the folks who decide where the next Olympics will be held will walk all over you. Throughout Obama’s first year in office, they walked at will. He discovered that the presidential seal and fifty cents will get you a phone call every time.
This is not really Obama’s fault. He has had no experience wielding power. A Senator, a community activist and a recent Harvard Law School graduate have no power to wield. There was no way he could have learned before last year.
First of all, to be effectively powerful—to make things happen—requires a voracious appetite for an appalling amount of desperately hard work and a stomach for unimaginable stress. I believe it can be safely said that most men who have served as CEO of, say, General Motors (or Exxon, Nescafe, General Electric—it doesn’t really matter) have done so without ever seriously affecting how or what was done at General Motors.
In other words, they’ve never ran General Motors. The same thing can be said of most presidents. They have served their four or eight year terms without ever having run the United States government—or having gotten a real idea of what’s going on in Washington.
Obama’s misfortune—and possible future good luck—is that he landed in Washington during one of those rare occasions when it was necessary for a president to 1)know what was going on, 2)make things happen, and 3)exert real and effective power.
Roosevelt did. Lincoln did. George W. Bush did. It is instructive to look at photos of these men taken on the day they assumed office and taken during their last year in the office. The job aged the life right out of some of them. It killed Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It left people like Bush and Buchanan covered with opprobrium.
Most presidents, more than we like to think, have glided through their terms without having to go much beyond Cal Coolidge’s famed question (when he woke up from a nap), “Is the country still there?” It usually was and it survived them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the nature of power ever since I was a twenty-five year old kid in Washington with the equivalent civilian rank of first lieutenant or captain in the army. I would periodically step back and observe myself and be fascinated by a couple of things I saw around me.
I could call a multi-billion dollar federal agency like the CDC in Atlanta and make it hop, skip and jump. The man next to me, with the equivalent rank of a colonel or general couldn’t make it budge. Why? What was the difference?
For one thing, I possessed something that is true of almost anyone in Washington who can exercise any real power—I had DERIVATIVE power. I spoke in the name of someone who had power, in this case the Surgeon General of the United States. The other man did not.
I quickly realized that much of the Surgeon General’s power was also derivative—as was the power of his boss, the Secretary of HEW. ALL of us were working on derived power—not anything that was actually real. (Forget that, even for an instant, and you suffer a nasty political death.) So all power is actually merely derived. It isn’t really yours. Push beyond the limits of that derivation, and you fail.
I learned a few more things about power during that time—I’ll continue next time.

War and Myth XIII

2010-03-23T19:20:00.001-04:00

The American public tends to reserve its most savage reprisals for politicians who tell it the truth. When candidate George Romney (Mitt’s dad) admitted in 1968 that the Pentagon had lied to him (“brainwashed” was the term he used), his run for the presidency was over.
When Carter spoke some hard truths about energy, he was reduced to an object of public derision. When Mondale pointed out some harsh economic truths in 1984, his candidacy sank without a bubble. George H.W. Bush called Reaganomics “Voodoo economics” and lost to Reagan in the 1980 primaries.
In 1990 he admitted his promise of no new taxes was insupportable and signed the increase that laid the foundation for the Clinton surpluses. Disabused and unforgiving Republican constituents abandoned him in droves in 1992. He lost.
A wise maxim for a political candidate in this country might be, “Never, never, never tell people the truth—they will kill you for it.” Instead we insist on living in a world enshrouded with myth.
One of the biggest we’ve insisted on living with over the past half century is the notion that we can have all manner of middle class subsidies—tax free interest on ever bigger houses, pennies to pay for Social Security, Medicare and, in extremis, Medicaid before dying.
Ever smaller tax rates—from 90% in the 1950s down to 36% today--and ever newer toll free high ways, bigger airports, and fancier new high schools with state of the art theatres, swimming pools, art rooms, free bussing and the newest technology.
And nobody needs to pay for it. Ever. Want to get killed at the polls? Tell the citizenry that either the schools have to reduce programs or taxes have to go UP. Or that they may have to start paying tolls on Michigan freeways. You can sneak it in—but don’t tell them.
We’ve gone into our wars the same way. Iraq wasn’t going to cost anything because rebuilding the nation would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. We were fighting in World War II to save democracy—not by any chance to settle some imperial scores.
(The cynical battle front G.I., when asked what HE was actually fighting for, typically answered, “ A piece of mom’s apple pie.” LBJ got briefly honest about why he thought he was in Vietnam and said bluntly, “They want what we got.” What happened to saving Vietnam from communism? LBJ’s public fantasy world fell apart before he even tried to run again in 1968.)
Today we’re being told we can have universal health care (something I believe in), but that it won’t cost us a dime—in fact it will SAVE us money. True, it doesn’t have to cost what this bill will make it cost, but it won’t cost LESS! But, again, try to tell people the truth about health care in this country—and you get wrathful tea parties like last summer’s—attended by people so blinded by their own mythology that they didn’t realize Medicare IS a government program!
(Remember the original Boston Tea Party occurred when the British cut rates on legal tea so far that it was cheaper to buy the legal stuff than the tea American smugglers were sneaking in. So the smugglers banded together and dumped the legal leaf over the side.)
Going to war—or fighting a crisis in the economy or the health care system—blinded by myth, lied to by politicians who tell us what we insist on hearing, isn’t a sound or sane way to make policy. It really isn’t. I suggest to the American voter that he stop yammering about lying politicos and develop within himself a tolerance for truth.
How about evaluating policy by whether or not it is real, whether or not it is honest (I didn’t say “nice” or that it will make the Susie’s of the world like us, I said honest and true)? How about evaluating a war or a policy in the same cold bloodedly rational way we should evaluate our investments—will they benefit us? Will they accomplish the mission? Can we afford them? Will we make enough back to justify the investment in blood, treasure and materiel?
The cataracts of myth merely make US blind; they don’t change the realities of the world we must deal with. Or the real costs. Or the likely consequences.
Applied reality will enable us to shift positions and alter our approaches more quickly as situations become clearer or changes occur. Investors who make big money—and hang on to it—hold to very, very few myths.
Nations that wish to succeed and survive need to be as wise—and as unswervingly honest.
Again, I didn’t say “nice” or “likeable” or “fanciful”.

Health Care--Alive Again

2010-03-22T16:00:00.002-04:00

Let’s break into our discussion of American mythology with a comment on the passage of the Senate’s 2,000 page health care reform bill (which may contain a few myths itself). Pelosi got her five votes (possibly by denying the members any potty breaks).
That she got it at all is the real surprise. Back in December that looked about as likely as snow in July on the capital mall. I would have bet money that it was dead—and I am much too conservative a Hollander to be much of a betting man.
I prognosticated that it was dead. I was so sure. But Obama, Pelosi and the Democrats found as unlikely an ally as Churchill making a pact with the Bolsheviks—the American health insurance companies rode full tilt to the rescue of health care reform.
After spending millions of dollars and spreading amazing amounts of lies, half-truths and obfuscations to sink reform, in the end they pulled a bone headed stunt that brought it back to life. Who passed health care? The insurance companies!
Pelosi and Obama were given a gift that they could not have imagined. The health care industry decided to raise nearly everybody’s rates at the turn of the year. It happened all across America to millions of people—people with health insurance, people who vote.
I can’t speak for all of them—but I can tell you what happened to me. For years retired teachers in Michigan had had Blue Cross/Blue Shield as primary insurance, Medicare as secondary. Part D—pharmaceutical insurance was also covered by the Blues. They covered every drug I’ve ever been prescribed in whatever the form my physician wanted.
It was great insurance, and it wasn’t very expensive. In the fall, I began to read that the Blues were raising their rates. I didn’t think too much about it. On January 2nd, I went to my regular pharmacy to refill some of my normal prescriptions.
Holy Toledo!!! The co-pays had doubled, in some cases tripled. I left them at the counter and went home to make some calls. A couple of drugs were no longer available at any price. Who was this strange new company? (It has taken me weeks and hours to get it all figured out—not just money but time, hours of it!)
It seems that rates had gone so high that the teacher’s union felt the only thing it could do was switch us to another medical plan—Medicare primary; a different, inferior Blues plan secondary. Even though it’s inferior, the new plan still costs more than the old plan did last year.
This also meant I had to go to ALL of my physicians, blood labs, etc. etc. etc. and show them my new cards so they could get my new insurance right and not get rejected when they submitted a claim. I haven’t finished all of that yet.
I opted out of the union’s prescription drug provider and found one myself. The co-pays are less than that other plan but, unlike last year, I cannot get most of my drugs on a three-month, one co-pay basis, The same co-pay three times in a quarter is a significant increase over that co-pay once in a quarter.
All the way around, it costs me more. It costs millions of us more. I’ll lay you odds there are a whole lot of folks out there whose anti-health-care reform bill fervor cooled quite a bit this January. I can just see some of those tea party folks staring with dismay at their new rates and co-pays and suddenly losing steam in their opposition.
The Republicans in the House may call the Senate bill “Armageddon”, but the real Armageddon in health care reform was brought by some mind-bogglingly stupid insurance executives.
I’ll bet when they get alone by themselves even Obama and Pelosi can’t believe just how stupid those people were.
Of course, the additions to the bill still have to go back to the Senate where any Republican can add an amendment. Should Democrats be silly enough to let one pass, the whole business is back up in the air (and back to the House for another long weekend).
Let’s see if the Senate can avoid being as foolish as the health insurance industry. Well finish up War and Myth next time.

War and Myth XII

2010-03-21T20:55:00.001-04:00

One huge American myth—that most of seem to believe with all of our being—is that we all have hundreds if not thousands of friends. (Check Face book.) Everybody’s a friend. If you met him once, last year, he’s a friend.
I very deliberately try to use the word “acquaintance”. I have very few friends. My neighbor and I have known and cooperated with each other for twenty years. We are just reaching the point where we might become actual friends.
But “everybody’s a “friend”—remains a fervently held myth among many, many Americans. It’s something they seem to NEED to believe. I remember substituting in one of the lower grades a few years ago. A little girl came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, “Susie says she does not like me!”
She obviously expected me to deal with Susie—make Susie like her. Most teachers would have pulled Susie aside and had a long, soulful discussion on the necessity of liking one another. I startled the little girl very much by saying something quite other.
“It is Susie’s democratic right not to like you. She doesn’t have to like anyone. You don’t have to like anyone. She may not hurt you. She may not say bad things about you or damage your property, but there is no reason why she must like you.”
She went back to her seat. (Fifteen minutes later she and Susie were chattering together like magpies.) She typifies much of what is and has been wrong with American foreign policy. We want to get our own way (completely understandable in a great power), and we go into paroxysms of self-recrimination if some nation says it doesn’t like us.
We view Britain’s Prime Minister Palmerston as a cynic because he made the sensible observation that “Great Powers have no friends, only interests”. But I doubt very much that he would have wept if “Susie” had told him she didn’t like him. He ran a very successful foreign policy.
It goes deep into the heart of American mythology to believe that we must be liked by everyone we meet—and that, ideally, we must like them.
Why?
This need to be liked reached the height of silliness in the last Presidential Election. We were actually judging our candidates on which one of them was better liked by the Susie’s of the world! Obama won a pot full of votes by appearing—as a CANDIDATE!!—with crowds of cheering Europeans. (Do they vote?)
(We saw what that was worth when he tried to move the Olympics to Chicago and when he tried to paste together an agreement in Copenhagen. His outreach to the Muslim world from Cairo didn’t amount to all that much, either. Susie has to respect—and even fear—you before she gets cooperative. Lord Palmerston understood that.)
A comedian has to worry whether audiences like him enough to laugh; a politician has to worry whether or not his constituents like him enough to keep him in office—but someone making foreign policy and deciding on peace and war should not have likeability as his highest priority.
As any salesman can tell you, once you’ve got the prospective buyer concerned over whether or not you like him—whether or not the buyer is concerned about the salesman’s good will and friendship, he’s GOT him. The poor chap can be manipulated by his own needs into buying almost anything. It’s an effective tool, playing on someone’s need to be liked.
Let’s let neither our friends nor our enemies play us like that. It’s nice if you do—it’s perfectly all right if you choose not to. We can live without Susie’s friendship when necessary. We don’t have, and we don’t need to have, a thousand friends. None of us do.

War and Myth XI

2010-03-20T20:48:00.001-04:00

The world we remembered from before 1939 had just seemed so much safer and reliable. The French controlled those North African Berbers who used to send pirates after our ships. British ships kept Malay pirates at bay.
Africa and the Middle East gave no one any problems because various European Colonial Affairs offices kept things quiet there. Central Americans picked bananas peacefully and sent the receipts to either London or Washington. From Suez to Hanoi, the underbelly of Asia was safely in the reliable hands of people like the French, the British, the Dutch and even the Portuguese. No problems there to speak of.
We could and did make preachments about the evils of imperialism (ignoring our own) and watch breathlessly to see if the next hunger strike might really kill Gandhi (I’m old enough to recall his last one). But it was a quiet, safe neighborhood. You could walk down the street with minimal fear of getting mugged.
The planet got a lot rowdier when the imperialists went home. It was fashionable to say that we had somehow “lost” all those places—that the Communists were doing this all, with no serious help from the native populations, just to spite us.
Who lost China? Silly question. An indigenous group of Chinese Communists who allied themselves very momentarily with the Soviet Union won it. The strength of their appeal was that they were not seen to be allied with ANY of the former imperialist powers who had dabble in Chinese affairs and claimed zones of interest for over a century.
Memories of imperialism, memories of days when China stood alone as the technology giant whose goods were coveted all over the Asian, European, African land mass, unhappy memories of a weakened giant being bullied by half a dozen European powers all much smaller than she was—that’s what cost us China.
Throw into the mix the fact that China’s basically pro-Western “Democratic” government between 1911 and 1949 became hopelessly corrupt and ineffective and I can imagine no way we could possibly have hung on to China.
But the myth that we had lost it—that something illegitimate, something that didn’t really speak for China, had taken it away from us would haunt our policies for decades. We wouldn’t even recognize the fact that Mao’s government existed for over twenty years.
Experiences like we had in China, Indo-China (Vietnam/Cambodia /Laos), the southern Philippines, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (I’m talking the 1950s), or Egypt all worked to convince us that any revolutionary, anywhere—anyone who wanted economic, military or political independence for his nation was de facto a very bad person.
This assurance, rising out of the myth that we had lost all of these places, led to our belief that it was our mission to wage war against any uprising of any sort. This became a reflex. We were no longer capable of sitting down rationally and deciding: What are our true interests here? What’s best for the US in the long run?
(We came a horrible cropper in Vietnam when we failed to take into account that Ho Chi Minh LIKED America. He based his whole revolution on our Declaration of Independence. In any case, he hated China far more than he did us!
We had to bomb the living daylights out of him to make an enemy out of him. If we had played our hand more sanely, the worst that might have happened is that we would have had an Asian Tito to annoy and worry the Chinese. And no dead G.I.s.)
Myth is a dreadful thing to build a foreign policy on. Especially if you are trying to hold down the potentially bloodthirsty exuberance of a newly liberated planet.
A few more words on myth next.

War and Myth X

2010-03-19T21:28:00.000-04:00

Another huge postwar myth is that somebody in Washington “lost” China. It was just one step further in the line of myths that began with the idea that Roosevelt deliberately attacked Japan to disable Russia’s main Pacific adversary.
Communism had as powerful a capacity to unsettle the “decent sort of folk” in the 20th Century as Democracy had had in the 19th. Both were seen as totally detrimental to the natural and Christian order of things; it was the firm conviction of most Western governments that, first Democracy and, later, Communism ought to be stamped out.
Democracy’s 19th Century champion was England; Russia took on that role for Communism in the 20th. It was a firm conviction that no rational citizenry chose Democracy—they were “lost” to it and needed to be rescued. Ditto for Communism in the 20th.
So, when France, Britain, Germany and Russia had all dropped out of the race to take over China, when we had militarily defeated Japan—our only remaining rival—it seemed incomprehensible to most Americans when, only four years after the war, China went Communist.
Somebody must have cheated. There was treason somewhere. This was a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs—if you were willing to blind yourself to a couple of realities. The first reality was something few Americans were willing to admit out loud until the last couple of decades—we had become a world empire.
That’s what “super power” is all about. To be super, a power most control the areas from which she gains her raw materials, to which she sells her own wares and the sea and land lanes by which these goods travel. That’s called an empire.
If Britain was an empire in 1900, we certainly have been one since 1945. (Actually our move to become one began long, long before that. It was, after all, Benjamin Franklin who predicted, “We shall be an empire of liberty, from sea to sea and pole to pole.”)
In the minds of every other nation on earth, our being an empire put us in the same class as England, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Japan—all empire builders. Take a look at a 1939 world map.
Those countries controlled everything on the planet except Russia, Eastern Europe, the US, Antarctica, Liberia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Iceland. (Latin America was still sort of divied up between Britain and the US. By 1945, US control would be pretty absolute there.)
By 1945 the European imperialists had been so badly knocked about by World War II that their grip was loosening on their imperial holdings all over the globe. All sorts of colonies just wanted to be free. Gandhi’s India, for one. Ho Chi Minh’s Indo-China for another. Nasser’s Egypt. Mossadegh’s iran, Kenya’s Mau Mau, Castro’s Cuba—the list could go on forever.
All colonies. (Yes, Cuba and Iran were colonies; let’s not kid ourselves.) If you wanted to start a revolution to make your country independent, you had two choices to go to for support. (Remember when we fought in 1776, 90% of our bullets came from a foreign power that hated England.)
There was the United States and there was the Soviet Union. The US had an instinctive rapport with its fellow imperialists (especially since they were no longer a threat to us). They were fellow Europeans; they were mostly anti-Communist (that designation covered a host of sins in our minds)—so very few would-be revolutionaries found comfort—or weapons—from us.
That left only one other place for a pro-independence minded revolutionary to turn—Russia. She was happy to destabilize any of our allies (and sometimes us) at the low risk and cost of a few boatloads of guns.
We didn’t “lose” China. China had long and bitter memories of European incursions—with a US flag always among the others. If we “lost” China, we probably did so in the 1800s. Let’s look some more myths next time.

War and Myth IX

2010-03-18T22:20:00.001-04:00

We are looking at five major myths (or unrealities) that shaped American policy and perception of the World after World War II. The first is the notion that Russians, and Russians alone, cheated at and after Yalta—that we got hosed at the conference.
First of all let’s look at the differences in philosophy that guided the three Yalta participants (Britain’s Churchill, who headed a washed up empire and was essentially out of the picture; America’s Roosevelt and Russia’s Stalin). What matters is how the Americans and the Russians viewed the world.
The Americans came to Yalta in February, 1945, as capitalists. A capitalist understands a world in which 51 to 60% control of any corporate entity means TOTAL control. We saw the world as a corporation in which we held a majority interest.
The Russians conceded our majority interest without question. They just weren’t working from a capitalistic blue print. They thought more in terms (as did the British) of 18th and 19th Century diplomacy. Whoever holds 60% of the territory governs THAT 60%. The other party, who holds 40%, governs that much of the area.
See a problem? We felt, instinctively that we should control the planet—the way a majority interest controls ALL of General Motors or Exxon Oil. The Russians conceded the Americas, all of the Pacific rim except Siberia, Africa, most of the Middle East and much of Western Europe.
Those were under American control. However, Eastern Europe, where the Russians had large armies on the ground—and through which invaders had cost Russia tens of millions of dead in the 20th Century alone--was THEIRS.
We cried foul (it should ALL be ours); they thought we were mindbogglingly greedy.
While Stalin could be viciously evil and duplicitous, he was neither a fool nor insane. He was perfectly aware of our nuclear monopoly; he knew our homeland was untouched—and he knew how weak Russia was.
Had the US suffered losses comparable to Russia’s in WWII, everything east of the Mississippi would be burned flat. Shattered, destroyed, unusable. All of European Russia looked a lot like the down town blocks of Hiroshima—one vast fixer-upper.
Historically it takes Russia fifteen years to recover from a war. (Right on schedule, in 1960, a Russian missile reached up into the sky and clawed down an American U-2 spy plane; next year they dared build the Berlin Wall. By the end of the 60s, they could match our ability to deliver thermonuclear war heads on target.) Russia was in no shape to argue in 1945—except where she had the Red Army physically present.
She kept the Yalta terms in Greece (1947) by closing off supplies to Greek Communist insurgents—she had promised control of Greece to the West. She kept Yalta terms in China by being the last major power to withdraw support from the Kuomintang government on the mainland in 1949.
Russia had ceded China to us—our boy simply was too corrupt to hang on. Mao pretty much won on his own—the only help Russia gave him was to allow him to pick up guns from the defeated Japanese he’d been fighting for eight years. Russia kept her word.
But she kept Eastern Europe. (Asking her to give it up would have been the equivalent of asking the US to give up Manhattan Island, New Orleans and San Francisco Bay.) Good capitalists we, we never forgave her.
We even insisted that only by incompetence or treachery had Roosevelt allowed her to hang on to that one corner of the globe. This was a myth that became a bedrock of American foreign (and even domestic policy) for the next several decades.
The Soviets were far, far from being nice people—but there was no truth to the myth. Next time, the myth that somebody in Washington treacherously gave away China.

War and Myth VIII

2010-03-17T22:23:00.001-04:00

Several myths came out of the post-war world. 1) That the Russians (alone) cheated at Yalta, 2) That somebody in Washington mislaid or lost China. 3) That Roosevelt was a closet Communist who conspired to defeat Russia’s primary Asian enemy, Japan. 4) That anybody, anywhere, who wanted his independence was an active Communist agent. 5) That the Russians had the means of dropping atomic bombs on us by the early 1950s.
To understand the thinking in the United States immediately after World War II, I use the following analogy. Imagine a human being, with fully developed mental and emotional capabilities who never was born—who somehow stayed right in the warm, snug, dark womb.
He’s fed by umbilical cord. There are soft walls to hold him up and to allow him to nap against. There are few loud noises and no glaring lights. He feels totally safe.
Suddenly, by Caesarian section, this totally unprepared creature is pitched into the outside world. There are blinding lights. He is surrounded by strange persons whose intentions he cannot know, of whose existence he never dreamt.
He must feed himself—somehow. There are no walls to hold him up when he tries to walk and trips. There is a cacophony of incomprehensible noise. People are saying things to him he cannot understand—insisting he wear strange new clothing … .
This is a very fair estimate of how the world of 1945, 46, 47 and on seemed to most Americans. Since the founding of Jamestown, we had lived in a womb made up of two vast oceans and the British Empire. We were safe, we were snug, we were totally protected—without realizing either that fact or being forced to accept the reality of a hostile world beyond.
Did someone wish to invade us (the “Holy Alliance” in the 1820s)? The British navy prevented it. (Not out of any real love for us—but because London profits were too great for England to permit Europe to regain her American colonies.)
Except for the brief exception of the Civil War, our 19th Century army consisted of a handful of cavalry regiments to fight Indians, a few harbor guards (what did Fort Sumter have in 1861? About 90 men?) and a Corps of Engineers to build piers and light houses.
As late as 1916, a French general could sneer at an American delegation, “We lose more men before breakfast (WWI) than you have in your entire army.” Even as Hitler rose to power, we could sit back and voice our opinions without fear of having to take action—because the British Navy stood between us and the Nazis.
In 1945, Britain was gone. NOTHING stood between us and any horror, any aggressor, any threat, any where on the planet. Call a cop? We were the world’s only remaining police force. Dazzling light, strange voices, threatening sounds—all at once.
(We wanted to disarm. We sent millions of troops back to factories and colleges. We expected the world to return to the status we had known since 1783. It didn’t happen. By 1948, we were drafting soldiers again; we faced a foreign threat armed with atomic bombs.)
Is it any wonder that the entire United States, government and all, had what can only be explained as a nervous collapse? Hiss, Huac, McCarthy…all symptoms of a functional breakdown in American society.
Somebody did this to us, right? Now came the long night of looking for a scapegoat—the ones who did it to us. It was these Communists, right?
And first of all, you gotta believe that Yalta was a rip off. Roosevelt was incompetent (maybe even a traitor). Us poor, innocent Americans taken to the cleaners by those shyster Russians.
Let’s look at that myth tomorrow.

War and Myth VII

2010-03-16T20:37:00.001-04:00

The biggest myth about World War II is that the American fighting man won it, almost single handed. Europeans are, at best, bemused when they encounter American accounts of the war—that play up America’s role to the exclusion of everyone else.
The G.I. certainly quitted himself well on several fighting fronts. Individually he was as brave as any other allied or Axis soldier—but he simply didn’t do that much of the fighting. Death tolls tell the story. The British Empire lost over 600,000 military dead.
The French (who surrendered in 1940—but then went on fighting under General de Gaulle) took another 217,000 military fatalities. The Chinese lost up to four million dead. Poland—some of whose forces escaped the fall of Poland and went on fighting from Britain lost nearly a quarter of a million dead. The Russians lost an awesome ten million soldiers and another fifteen million civilians.
That’s a rounded figure of about fifteen million allied war dead. It doesn’t count the Yugoslav Serbs, who held down as many as forty German divisions (Ike faced sixty at D Day) and lost 450,000 dead plus another half million civilians rounded up by Muslim SS troops from Bosnia.
Nor are we including 60,000 dead troops from the Philippines, over 20,000 Dutch dead, thirty thousand-plus dead each from Greece and Czechoslovakia, and a host of other small nations, many overrun by the Axis, who went on fighting underground.
Against these millions upon millions of dead, American losses total around 416,000 dead—about the same number as the much smaller Island of Great Britain lost by itself. We didn’t get our factories and homes bombed; our land was untouched, and we came out of the war vastly richer and more powerful than we went into it. Our investment was minimal; our return huge.
Our factories won the war. We kept everybody ELSE fighting. We supplied everybody on earth who was willing to pick up a gun and shoot at Germans, Italians, Japanese and their allies. We sent food, we sent munitions and weapons, whatever was needed.
We took all the unemployed from the Depression and put them in uniform. We pulled share-croppers off the cotton fields and put them in war plants. We put millions of women to work building ships, planes, tanks, trucks, uniforms, boots, backpacks, rifles, ammunition and bombs.
We didn’t even get into the war until it had been going on over two years. The European war was well over three years old before we got our first armies into action. (We fought for two and a half years out of just under six years that the war lasted.) We didn’t have more troops facing the Axis than the British Empire had until a year before the war ended in Tokyo Bay.
Our biggest losses in Europe came from our strategic bombing, which we insisted on carrying out in broad daylight. (We made wonderful targets; the British and Germans bombed at night.) The effects of that bombing became another American myth.
It led us to assume we could defeat the Vietnamese with high level bombing attacks. Somebody in the Pentagon should have taken a second look at their own reports from World War II. The only two industries negatively impacted by our bombing raids were: oil refineries and railroads. Not surprising since both are right on top of the ground and the former, hit just once, tend to burn like the very fires of hell itself. (Vietnam has neither.)
The more we bombed, the more German war production went up. (Bombing was very effective against retail stores and restaurants. Germans put all the unemployed back to work in war factories—which were increasingly underground and hidden.)
We were also capable of killing as many as half-a-million women and children in a single raid, but this did not impact the German war effort. The Japanese had similar civilian casualty rates and were still prepared to inflict appalling American losses had we invaded.
The myths of 1) the effectiveness of bombing (the Germans learned better when bombing did not make the British surrender at Dunkirk in 1940), and 2) the American belief we had almost single-handedly won the war would impact our postwar thinking hugely—and dangerously.
Let’s look at some more post war myths next.

War and Myth VI

2010-03-15T19:30:00.000-04:00

To most Americans on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor came totally out of the blue. We were suddenly, unexpectedly—and for no good reason—assaulted by an enemy that sank our Pacific Fleet.
(No one stopped to ask WHY the Pacific Fleet was anchored permanently in Hawaii rather than at its home base in California. When FDR went on the air over the PA system in Grand Central Station and they played the “Star Spangled Banner”, all the outraged commuters stood at attention as their trains rushed out of the station empty. [It is now illegal to play the National Anthem in that venue.]) No one asked, “How/why did this happen?”)
American Ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew wasn’t shocked. He came home for a visit two years before and was horrified at American ignorance of what was going on in the Pacific—and the uninformed hostility of Americans toward Japan.
American officials in Washington weren’t shocked either. SURPRISED, yes. We never imagined a bunch of little yellow people would dare to strike at our majestic fleet—or that they had the capacity to build carriers that could sail that far.
Two weeks before the attack, American Secretary of State Cordell Hull was asked by another cabinet member how the negotiations with Japan were going. It’s no longer my job, he replied—it’s now in the hands of the Secretaries of War and Navy.
Tokyo had, by their lights, done its best to avoid war. America, the pro-de Gaulle French Empire, the Dutch government in exile (which controlled the oil in Indonesia), the entire British Empire and American controlled Latin America had all agreed to sell Japan NO raw materials. That was, effectively, the entire commodity producing planet—except for China.
New York had frozen Japan’s financial assets in American banks. The only materiel Japan could lay its hands on were domestically raised rice, wood, fish, water and rock. You can’t run a society much advanced beyond the Stone Age with those materials.
Japan had pleaded with us. The “god-emperor” had made the unprecedented offer to travel to America to negotiate a lifting of the embargo. We said NO. Not unless Japan pulled completely out of China—the last source of raw materials available to them anywhere on earth.
We had built our whole foreign policy—since the landing at Jamestown—on someday owning and controlling China ourselves. Now that Britain, France, Germany and Russia were no longer in the picture, we were outraged that the Japanese threatened to thwart us.
It was a good old fashioned imperialist struggle—the Empire of Japan vs the American Empire. The Japanese were well aware that we were building a huge new fleet to destroy them. They knew of our ambitions toward China. They also knew they had another year, year-and-half, to settle affairs with America before Japan ran out of fuel and our fleet was too big to hope to defeat.
They sent the Nomura delegation to Washington to negotiate a resolution BEFORE the end of 1941 (and the beginning of Typhoon season in the Pacific) or “things are going to happen automatically. We knew this. We knew that the Japanese fleet was at sea. We thought they’d go directly for Indonesian oil—and our fleet had been moved out to Pearl Harbor to strike them from behind.
We never imagined they’d be smart enough to hit us first and then move on to the oil. Roosevelt may have felt a good bit of a fool as, voice shaking, he began, “Yesterday, a Day that will live in Infamy … .”
And so the myth of America’s total innocence was created. Next time let’s look at the myths that grew out of the German War.

War and Myth V

2010-03-14T21:16:00.001-04:00

When we talk about the 1920s, the Depression and World War II, we resolutely live in a land of almost total myth. We were on the make—our statesmen as much as any businessman. We had been quarreling over who would control the British Empire since the 1750s when Franklin wrote, “in one century, the center of English speaking power will be North America”.
Britain tried desperately to prevent this—at places like Bunker Hill and Saratoga. She lost. She tried to hang onto the Great Lakes after the Revolution; she lost again. She tried to keep us out of Oregon and Washington—she gave up and ceded them.
She tried to keep us out of Texas and Cuba; we told her we would take either or both whenever we were able (Monroe Doctrine). We did. She tied to limit our control over a Central American transcontinental canal. She failed. She finally conceded the Caribbean to us in 1903.
When France and Russia made an alliance—and Germany, Italy and Austria allied, all in the 1890s—England realized she could no longer govern the planet from a position of splendid isolation. She turned to allies. She began talking to France; she allied with Japan and, very much, she turned her eyes toward her feistiest commercial rival, the North American colossus.
(When Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US he predicted, “I have created a colossus on the North American continent that will one day bring England to her knees.” In World War II we carried out the prophecy.)
We waited until England (and France) were nearly on their knees (and Russia was destroyed) before coming in and rescuing England in 1917. England was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; we were fabulously rich.
We allowed Britain to go on spending money she did not have, keeping the Muslims quiescent, preventing the slave trade in Africa, and holding the line against our most formidable planetary rival, the new Soviet Union. We stayed home, needed to spend almost nothing for defense, and concentrated on making money.
At Versailles (1919) and after we helped force central Europe into bankruptcy and near starvation. Our markets went up and up and up. We paid no attention while the supposedly democratic (and even Christian) new government of revolutionary China became more and more corrupt, turning even to the Nazis for training and support.
With withering contempt we thwarted every aspiration of the newly prominent Asiatic power, Japan. We forced her to sink a large part of her navy to keep at only 60% of our fleet. We denied her access to funds and raw materials. We forced England to end her treaty with her.
We were a bit like an obliviously drunken man staggering through a room full of delicate china, crystal and bric-a-brac. We refused to acknowledge our own strength—or the responsibility that came with it. We kept up the myth that we were just a little fellow (like the United States of the early 19th Century) and there was nothing we could do or were obligated to do about anyone else.
This lay at the core of American economic, political and military isolationism. We firmly refused to accept that we had become the biggest kid on the block—that whatever we did affected everyone else. We hid behind the British Empire as we always had done—pretending it had not become an empty shell that a single blast would completely blow away.
Finally the whole rest of the planet went into economic heart failure. This brought us down too—although we refused again to acknowledge a correlation. We ignored Hitler. We ignored Stalin. One thing we could not ignore—and we owe FDR for this.
He came out of that small group of East Coast Imperialist who saw clearly we were an Empire—and must act like one. He recognized that our historic interest in controlling China (going back before Jamestown) was at risk because of the new Japanese power.
In 1934, he began a ten year navel building program—a fleet that could and would crush Japan. At long last the American giant was stirring—but still not seeing clearly through the fog of myth. But at least it was stirring a bit.

War and Myth IV

2010-03-13T20:06:00.000-05:00

Twentieth Century history, uniquely for Americans, is shrouded in myth. (Europeans and Asians tend to be more realistic.) Walk into an American Legion bar on a Saturday night and try to disabuse a former GI of his most precious myths—and you take your life in your hands.
However, working exclusively from myths is a lousy way to make foreign policy. We’ve done it for decades—and our track record is getting to be about as good as General Motor’s over the same period of time.
We’ve gone from absolute market dominance (in 1945—when we controlled over half the world’s resources and surface) to a point where militarily, politically and economically the prospect of future bankruptcy is no longer unthinkable.
Blinding ourselves with our own myths has been part of the reason. We began the century with the myth that we entered World War I to save democracy and end war. Phooey.
The ultimate reality of the first half of the Twentieth Century was summed up by German Chancellor von Bismarck in the 1880s. Britain and America, he said, speak the same language. Bitter as our rivalry with England always was, we fundamentally had the same interests. Two points:
In 1820, the British fleet defended us from the “Holy Alliance” (Spain, Russia, France and Prussia) who planned to invade us and destroy the democracy they regarded as a disease. In 1898, when we grabbed Manila Bay, the British navy swung into line and protected us from the German fleet that was on its way to take over the Philippines.
American and British mutual interests would dominate the entire Twentieth Century. After World War II, we stepped in and took over the Cold War Britain had been waging against Russia since 1815. Seamlessly—our troops for British troops, our ships for British ships. Look at the 19th Century lines; look at the 20th Century lines. Just a different uniform.
Let’s go back to World War I. We hold a lot of mini-myths about that war—the Germans did NOT sink the Lusitania, willy-nilly, just for the joy of killing American civilians. It was a British munitions ship with passengers loaded on top as human shields.
The German consulate published warnings in American papers that it would be fired upon as any other munitions ship. The British, on the other hand, worked feverishly to load the boat with American passengers for shock value. It worked. The myth goes on.
A relevant figure—by 1917, the Allies were in hock to us for over three billion dollars. That was serious money in those days, more than our whole national debt had been seven years earlier. If the Allies lost we were in big trouble.
The Central Powers (Germany, Austria and Turkey) only owed us thirty million. Figure out which we could afford to lose more. At the end of the war, we jumped in—sent two million men to Europe, launched the final offensive that broke the back of the exhausted German army, and “won” the war.
We did not save democracy; we did not end war. In fact, with our ignorant meddling at Versailles, we helped create all the conditions that led to the next big war. Who, us?
At the end we were the only uninjured modern economy in the world; everyone owed us money—and our horrifying mismanagement of our creditor status led to an international collapse of the planetary economy in the 1920s.
We are not taught to look at the Great Depression (and the rise of both Communism and Nazism) in that light. Nor are we taught to look at our relations with Japan outside of the realm of myth.
Next time let’s take a look at the myths surrounding the last “Good War”, World War II.

War and Myth III

2010-03-12T21:32:00.001-05:00

I grew up as a history buff. When I was in middle school read such tomes as a British critique of “Stonewall Jackson and The American Civil War” as well as the official evaluation of American/British strategic bombing in World War II. All I saw were the waving flags, the power and the glory. In the mid-1960s as a young man, I saw something else.
Queen Elizabeth awarded the Beetles with the Order of The British Empire—a military decoration and a high honor. Outraged veterans of Dunkirk, El Alamein, Singapore, Tobruk, the Blitz, Burma, the North Atlantic and D-Day sent their medals back, horrified and disgusted that four unkempt singers could be given the same medal they risked life and limb to win.
I thought about this, hard. Why? What was the Queen thinking? How do you equate being crippled for life with singing, “Love Me, Do”? Then I realized something. From the point of view of a government—the Queen’s or anyone else’s-- the Beetles and the man who spent four years in a Japanese POW camp had accomplished the same thing.
During World War II, England was threatened with near total destruction—political, military and ECONOMIC. The man who lost a limb in Burma was fighting to prevent such a defeat—and such a bleak future.
Fifteen years after the war, the Empire had imploded, Britain’s economy was in shambles and her future looked nearly as bleak as it had twenty years before. The first export England developed that all the world wanted—that put the crown and the nation back on an economically successful track-- was the four moptops. They made huge amounts of money for the crown.
That, I realized, is the proper function of war. Soldiers serve fundamentally to make or salvage money for the “crown”. One who does it especially well deserves a medal. The Beetles made lots and lots of money for the “crown”—they did it especially well. They too deserved a decoration.
I began to rethink my entire view of war—its causes, its purposes, its consequences, its usages and its liabilities. I thought of the two kinds of wars. There is the first kind—the VOLUNTARY kind, the kind you actually have the option not to fight.
Every American war since the French and Indian War in 1754 has been of this variety. Honor, loss of face or assets, determination to hang on to what had or (as the Biblical book “James” puts it) a war fought because we wanted something we did not have, these were all reasons we fought.
But, at whatever cost in face, treasure or future prospect, we could in fact have walked away. The South would not have invaded us; we could have stopped Pearl Harbor by simply selling Japan the fuel it needed to keep factories running and people from freezing; they had no compelling wish to attack us.
If we hadn’t flown bombers over Germany and fired on German subs in mid-Atlantic Hitler would not have voluntarily declared war. Not immediately, at least. The Revolution was completely unnecessary—if all we were really after was more freedom. Before we allowed people to vote for Senators, Britain passed most of the reforms we demanded. And so forth, and so forth.
We chose the wars we entered—just as we chose to fight in Iraq. (We had greater necessity in Afghanistan, rather like the French in Algeria, but we bungled it so horribly.) I’m not saying we shouldn’t have. I like the consequences of living in a huge—and hugely profitable—American Empire.
I’m not talking about involuntary wars—like Poland invaded by Germany or Mexico invaded by the United States. These are sometimes true tragedies. You fight simply to survive, like Israel in an Arab sea—and the profitability of the war doesn’t figure in. But these are actually somewhat rare—certainly in American history they have been.
Let’s look honestly at our wars. We did what we did because we wanted to—and we could. We may have found ourselves on the side of the angels from time to time (be careful about claiming that—it’s safer simply to be honest).
Let’s not let our own myths leave us confused. We wind up lying to ourselves that way—and that is the most dangerous person to lie to!
Let’s take another look at myth tomorrow—about the “Good Wars” of the Twentieth Century

War and Myth II

2010-03-11T21:14:00.001-05:00

Every school child in America accepts the myth that we fought the American Revolution to be free and untaxed. Well, we did fight it to be untaxed. Americans were absolutely outraged when England suggested that we contribute our share to pay for the armies and ships Britain sent to this continent to defend us against the French and their Indian allies.
We immediately turned to our old enemy, France (as the French very well knew we would), for help in not paying our taxes to England. (Poetic justice was served when we broke our treaty with France and left her, bankrupt and ripe for her own rather ghastly revolution, to fight England alone—while we made a separate peace on excellent terms.)
But taxes weren’t really the major issue. Certainly not for the New Englanders who basically started the whole thing. The completely non-mythological question was: who will control the Trade Routes To China? That question bedeviled Europeans ever since the Pope ran his Line of Demarcation across the hemisphere back in the 1490s.
The British tried to block us from the Pacific by turning the eastern Mississippi Valley over to Quebec in 1767. (That one act alone made war inevitable.) The Spanish could see it coming and began to settle Northern California with urgency the same decade.
But we fought. We got everybody who hated England to fight. France and Spain tried to invade England herself—only bad winds stopped them. Gibraltar was besieged for years. The League of Armed Neutrality made life miserable for England all over the globe—Holland, Prussia, Sweden and Russia. England quickly found herself up to her naval in alligators.
Finally the British quit—having lost another army to Washington and his French troops, artillery, and fleet (remember Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World?). They gave us most of what we wanted and backed out of the war.
(The one major war aim we failed to achieve was Canada. We had invaded in 1775—you can still see American cannon balls in old Quebec. We would invade again in 1812, but we would never succeed in getting it.)
But as soon as the British blockade of Boston harbor was lifted in 1783, the American ship, Star of India, set sail for China. By 1790, an American captain was plying the west coast of Spanish/British/Russian America identifying which ports we would need to control the Pacific. As we achieved our fiscal aims, we kept teaching the myths to our kids.
(We have the ports we identified today—San Diego and San Francisco , and Seattle (all obtained in the 1840s)—as a result of a successful war in which we stripped Mexico of half its territory and a near war with Britain that cost her half the Oregon territory. Two obviously victorious wars for us—when you think of all the resources in the territories involved and how much money having ports on the Pacific has made us, very victorious indeed.)
Those wars—the Revolution, 1812 (which got us everything we were promised in1783 but the British reneged on), the Mexican War and the dispute over Oregon were victorious wars or near wars indeed. Each made us money. Each is shrouded in myth.
Most of our 19th Century wars cost a relatively minimal investment in men, materiel and money—and won us almost immediately a substantial profit.
(In the Civil War we invested risked and lost much more. It was a unique war—issues of future growth and national policy failed to be settled any other way than with “blood and iron”. It caused real damage—but in the end we made more than it cost us. It too has to be rated as a won war.)
We have become so enamored of our own mythology—“No taxation without representation”, “free the impressed seamen”, “remember the Alamo”—in which pro-slavery Texans fought fiercely to overturn the Mexican constitution and make Texas a slave state—“Fifty-four forty or fight” and “His truth is Marching on”—that we have forgotten how to evaluate war in any rational way.
That has hurt us in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has made the question of whether or not we “won” in either case almost completely meaningless. Like the people who watched the value of their 401Ks plummet like a rock, we may well have to pay for that failure to see clearly.
More tomorrow on the myths that blinker us.

War and Myth I

2010-03-10T19:33:00.003-05:00

People need to believe that wars are fought for some noble, even spiritual, cause. This is especially true if you are dealing with someone who has invested a son, a husband or some other relative or friend in the war in question.
The French with their wonderful, if somewhat cynical acuity, understood this perfectly when they created the Foreign Legion back in the 1840s. They were about to embark on a series of colonial wars in North Africa.
They had good and sufficient reason to do so—Algerian pirates, “Barbary pirates—named after the red bearded Muslim admiral who created them in the Sixteenth Century—had made shipping along the southern coast of France a misery for centuries.
Fleet units of several “Christian” nations had been stationed along North African shores for almost as long. We had a squadron there from 1800 to the 1840s ourselves. The French were finally ready to end it—and pick up any goodies lying around at the same time.
But the French knew that “colonial wars” (like Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) are a hard sell to the mothers of dead soldiers. It gets very messy when parents of maimed and wounded troops can vote. So the French created a foreign force with no mothers in France to grieve. Very, very smart.
American mothers are no different. During the Civil War, can you imagine how many American moms would have urged their sons to go down and fight to help New York bankers gain financial hegemony over the rest of the United States?
No, no, no, it would never work. So we created the mythology that we were fighting to free the slaves, a much more noble cause to die for. Problem: only a tiny percentage of northerners had ANY interest in that happening at all). When reality hit myth after the war, we backed out in a hurry and allowed southerners to impose Jim Crow laws that more accurately reflected what the nation felt.
But the myth worked for recruitment purposes.
It was more true that we were fighting to preserve the Union. After all, how could we compete with Britain and other industrialized nations if we split in two? But it still sounded better to sing, “As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free … .”
The Civil War made us money. Up until that war, we were basically a commodity producing economy—our biggest national source of income in 1860 was cotton. The war allowed industry and banking to develop. By the 1870s we were one of the largest industrial producers and exporters in the world—flooding European markets with admittedly shoddy goods.
(Both Japan and China would take a page out of that book in the Twentieth Century. Vietnam and Korea are coming on fast. At a dollar a day wages in the 1800s, we made ‘em cheap and dirty.)
So—we invested in the Civil War, and we WON it. The agricultural South and West would never have an effective veto over the economy again. At least if you’re from the industrialized part of the US, you won it.
But our history books prefer Julia War Howe’s version of events. It was all about “grapes of wrath”, “trampling”, and “terrible swift swords”—fighting to make men free. Certainly sounds better. But it flies in the face of a century of actual history.
Let’s look at a few more myths tomorrow.

Iraq, Afghanistan--Are We Winning?

2010-03-09T16:39:00.002-05:00

Once again the question is upon us: when is a won war a lost war? When is a lost war a won war? Or when is a won war really a won war; when is a lost war really, really a lost war? They’re even trotting out the old “Mission Accomplished” banner that Bush had the Navy fly seven years ago when he proclaimed Iraq a won war.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we winning in Iraq? Do you remember how people wanted to know if we won in Korea and Vietnam? What constitutes actually winning a war?
Let’s get something straight. Many of know the old saying, “War is diplomacy by other means”. That is partially true—certainly coming out with a diplomatic advantage goes some of the way toward deciding who a won and who lost.
But more importantly—war is an INVESTMENT like any other investment. You invest money, materiel, human lives—and you look for a return. You “win” by getting a decent to good return on your investment. Ghoulish sounding—but true.
Let’s go back over an instance in which the winners and losers are very clearly indicated—World War II. When the shooting stopped, British, French, Russian and American troops were all waving bottles of vodka, German beer and Saki, cheering madly, and the Germans and Japanese were standing around looking very dejected. Obviously the first four won, right?
Wrong. Let’s look at how it actually played out.
There was one big winner—the United States. For us the war was like walking into a casino, putting a dollar in the slot and finding ourselves up to our shoulders in money. We’ve lived off the proceeds of the Japanese, British, French, Belgium and Dutch empires ever since. Nobody in history ever won a war like we did in 1945.
There were two nations for whom the war was essentially a wash—Japan and Germany. In the end, they rebuilt their factories and are possibly better off today than they would have been if the war had never been fought. In the category of “winners”, they may come in a decent second to the United States.
There were two participants who really didn’t do all that well for several decades after the war and may or may not possibly be coming out of their economic funk today. Maybe. Russia and China.
Then come the major losers. Britain, France, Holland and Belgium. The biggest loser of all was, of course, Britain. Immediately after that comes France. They ruled most of the globe in 1939. Twenty years later they had about the international clout of Portugal or Rwanda. Their economies were far behind Japan’s or Germany’s.
Skip the flag waving and the cheering. Who really won is whoever got a decent return on the investment.

It’s all about the money. Just like your 401K. It’s about the money. If you made money, you won; if you lost money, you lost the war.
One of the reasons we lose sight of this reality is that—politically—you cannot say this to the people who go to the front to do the fighting and dying. So government propaganda—in all warring nations—has to obfuscate the actual causes and aims of the war.
Everybody’s national history books follow the national line on the war and reality gets lost. This is nice for the vets and the bereaved mothers—but it makes it all but impossible to take a dispassionate look at a prospective war (such as Iraq in early 2003) and weigh its pro’s and con’s as if it were any other investment. Which we should do.
Tomorrow let’s look at how we lose sight of reality when looking at the possibility of war.

Earthquakes, Logic and Science

2010-03-08T21:47:00.001-05:00

Logic—and probably logic alone, no “scientific” evidence—might suggest that the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Turkey may be related. After all it seems to make sense that a quake large enough to make the entire planet wobble and to cost us all an instant of time might be part of a general shake up of the tectonic plates that make up this globule of rock and earth.
But there’s no hard evidence, so, so far, no one is suggesting out loud that there might be a correlation. So what if the Nazca, South American, Caribbean, African and European plates all touch each other—show us the irrefutable evidence. Isn’t any. So it didn’t happen.
Einstein sensed the deficiencies of this approach. He once suggested that imagination (which logic can be part of) is more important than knowledge (which rises out of evidence and proof). But, then again, he died the subject of mockery and rejection by most of his scientific peers.
And he came up with his theories of relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy under the most primitive conditions—not in a scientific laboratory but as a bureaucrat sitting in an office reviewing patent applications. Lousy science to say the least.
Where was his proof? It took decades to finally prove that the Einsteinian universe he imagined in his mind actually existed. That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen.
Perhaps Einstein intuited that this is the way science OUGHT to be done. Imagine it first—working within the mind, mulling “what if’s”, scribbling on yellow sheets of paper—and finally come up with an entire theory that hangs together out of pure logic—no scientific proof.
When the logic is wrong—or misses something important—the empirical evidence will provide the necessary course correction. But we made a misstep, scientifically—two missteps, actually: one was about two thousand years ago; the other about two centuries ago.
Two men are at the root of our scientific methodology. Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that scientific truth should be arrived at exclusively in the mind. Aristotle believed in arriving at it through experimentation.
Already in those days, back in ancient Athens 2300 years ago, the argument had begun. Aristotle left Athens and, for the next two millennium science was done Plato’s way, exclusively. Which left science a one-armed man. Mind only, no experimentation to back it up.
The problem was that, with no experimentation at all to back it up, logic can and does go astray. It took Galileo in approximately 1600 to reintroduce observation into science. Unfortunately he all too thoroughly discredited imaginative science.
The story may be apocryphal—but it illustrates what Galileo did for AND TO science. It had been argued for centuries—logically—that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. He is said to have climbed the leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two unequal cannon balls. They fell equally fast—upending centuries of scientific dogma, based purely on logic.
But Galileo had an effect he may not have intended. He rendered Einstein’s “imaginative, intuitive”, kind of science completely unacceptable in correct scientific society. To be merely logical, rational, Platonic is to incur the greatest modern curse: “unscientific”.
So we mustn’t use logic. What seems to possibly make sense must be proven by costly machinery found only in laboratories. Knowledge (proof) trumps imagination.
No one seems to know how to make them work together. Since Galileo—with the possible exception of Immanuel Kant—no one has really wanted to. Science is left like a man with one arm—he loses something by not having both.
No proper scientist would ever suggest a theory based on logic and/or imagination. Not since Einstein did. What might happen if the tectonic plates really started slipping all over the planet?

As Yoda Sees Politics, the Economy and War

2010-03-06T22:37:00.001-05:00

The nation feels to me like the clutch is in. Do any of you remember the old stick shift cars—where you disengaged the engine from the wheels by putting in the clutch with your left foot? There was that moment when you felt like nothing was happening.
More frightening were the old propeller driven passenger aircraft. At about what seemed like 50 feet off the ground, the pilot changed the pitch of the propellers. In effect, he put the clutch in. It felt for a second like you were hanging motionless in mid air—until the propellers re-engaged and pulled the airship forward.
Each time that happened I’d remember all the headlines I’d read about planes that got “about 50 feet off the ground” and crashed. That was always the white knuckle moment for me in flying. (Jets never quite did that.)
That’s how Washington, Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, health care reform, the currency problems in Europe, our relations with China (and nearly everyone else) all feel to me. The clutch seems to be in. It doesn’t feel like anything is moving in any definite way.
Perhaps Yoda from Star Wars put it best: “The future, clouded it is.” One article says the economy is showing lots of silver around the linings—the next says we can count on a wave of foreclosures this year and major unemployment for three more years.
Each cites its expert sources. One says we are winning in Afghanistan; the next suggests that the ancient Afghan will to wreak vengeance isn’t going to go away just because we send in more troops and make nice to some village elders.
A single kid with explosives in his underwear makes flying an almost unendurable experience for many Americans. We are warned that international terror is as real a danger today as it ever was in 2001. But when was the last plane actually brought down?
On health care, we are told Obama has found the magic bullet. He will use an old Republican trick of getting the bill passed under the Reconciliation Process where only 51 votes are needed—instead of the filibuster busting sixty.
How many Democrats are looking at the polls (measuring how Americans feel about this particular 2000 page monstrosity of a porked out reform bill) and allowing the urge to survive move them toward a negative vote? Or just an abstention?
Nobody’s counting publicly. Pelosi has a margin of five votes to play with—are they all still with her? What are the chances for success if Congress does what a lot of people are calling for and starts all over again, with something people can understand?
What’s really going on in Iraq? Last week’s “Newsweek” reran the picture of Bush on the carrier with the sign, “Mission Accomplished”. Is it, finally—after seven bitter years? Or is there another joker or two in the deck like there was in 2003?
The DOW seems to be content to jiggle around in the mid-10,000 point range. A little up, a little down, even a bit sideways. Somebody says, “Boo” and down she goes; somebody shouts, “Hurrah” and up she jumps. What’s real?
I’m just sitting in my seat—like in the old airplanes—waiting for the props to start pulling air again. Even the Olympics didn’t seem as much fun as they used to. Does anybody have a clear idea whether we’re headed up or down?
“The future, clouded it is.”

Customers--What's Loyalty Worth?

2010-03-05T21:10:00.002-05:00

A couple of years ago Hewlett-Packard offered my college age son what seemed like a good deal. The warranty on his laptop was expiring (if you’ve EVER owned a laptop without a warranty, I’m sure you have cursed yourself for that oversight) and for the nominal fee of $250 they would sell him a warranty for two more years.
Trust me, on a laptop that’s a decent deal. So he sent in $250 of his limited funds and got the extended company warranty good through October, 2010. At least that’s what the paperwork in his hand says. A few days ago he was having trouble with his mouse pad and decided to invoke the warranty.
He called Hewlett-Packard. They denied all knowledge of such a warranty. Said it couldn’t possibly be. He brought out his credit card record showing that Hewlett-Packard accepted his money. They passed him on to someone else.
He went through the explanation again. He got passed on to someone else. This person passed him back to the first person—who passed him on to yet someone else. Each time he was put on hold for as much as ten or fifteen minutes before being passed on.
After three hours they gave him yet another number to call. It was dinner time and he gave up for the day. But he and his mother did check out a blog site on Hewlett-Packard. It seems a whole lot of people who bought similar extended warrantees from HP are having the same problems.
Interminable waits on hold, being passed back and forth, denial of all knowledge, a purported “supervisor” who obviously is not—and so forth.
Sometimes a problem with customer service is obviously—even on this end of the phone—a problem of too many people having been laid off, leaving survivors overwhelmed. (I’ve talked about the local grocery manager who transferred to a different department—“They doubled my product and cut my staff in half”.)
Sometimes a company is so frantic to save money that it appears to repent of its own foolishness in making promises (or selling warranties) that now, in more straitened circumstances, it has no plans to keep. So it ducks, dodges and weaves.
Hewlett-Packard makes an excellent machine. It sells, by far, the most computers of any company in the world. Perhaps they feel the quality of their product trumps any need for good customer relations—or even merely honest ones?
(General Motors thought that way once—when it had over 50% of the American market. Seemingly, Toyota has come to think that way in the past decade or so. My wife worked part time at a major retail chain a few years back. She recalls that the company attitude went from “Anything to make the customer happy” to “forget service—get them out of the door”. Associates who didn’t make that transition fast enough were penalized.)
I recall an elderly man I met years ago. During the Depression, when no building supplier in his right mind was giving contractors any credit, he offered credit to his good customers. He carried them for months, even for years. When I met him, decades after the Depression was over, he was a very rich man with a stable of loyal customers.
Just read a piece on Singapore Airlines. When carriers all over the world are charging you for luggage, cutting back on food, drinks and amenities, Singapore is not. Service remains full. Luxury remains luxury. They—in contrast to lot of other airlines, are doing nicely.
There is a passage in the Bible that says, “Do unto others as you wish they would do to you.” It will no doubt make you virtuous and well liked. It just might also make you rich.
Next time we look at computers, do you suppose we just might look at somebody else’s line? What about all those other bloggers out there—who can’t seem to locate anyone who knows anything about their extended warranties?

Jerusalem--Dwelling Place Of Peace

2010-03-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem. The unending continues. Muslim kids took refuge in a Muslim holy site right above the Wailing Wall after pitching rocks at Jews praying at the wall. Israeli cops entered the site in search of the stone throwers and the disturbance became general.
And somehow we live in a fantasy world where the “peace process” can be restarted just like an automobile—just turn the key and push the gas pedal. Away we go; peace at last. Lasting peace. Thousands of years of hatred gone, just like that.
More likely that Chile or Haiti will be able to abort their next major earthquake. Just turn the key … . The pent up forces in Jerusalem are about as powerful as the pent up forces when one tectonic plate slides under another, gets stuck and jerks loose.
Reality in Jerusalem (and Israel and its neighbors) is about as cruel as it was on the American frontier—no peace between “cowboys and Indians” until one side was thoroughly defeated and driven off the range.
Same thing was true in western Europe at the end of the Roman period. Peace only came after the invading Germanic tribes whipped the Roman legions and settled down in Imperial territories. Some conflicts simply don’t lend themselves to a negotiated peace.
You can call a truce—some can last almost a century as the truce between Parthia and Rome that prevailed when Parthian Magi could find their way to Bethlehem into Roman space without a fight. But the war went on for six more centuries—didn’t stop until a third party (Islam) conquered both sides. Truces, as the French and British could tell you, looking back over their own history from 1066 to 1914, are only temporary.
The Great Wall of China is a monument to a war between herdsmen and farmers that simply would not end, century after century. Jerusalem—“dwelling place of peace”—is a similar monument. Arabs have been fighting over it for 1,300 years. Before that, Jews fought to get it, hang on to it or get it back, for a previous couple of thousand years.
It’s the City of David; it’s the city Saladin took back from the Crusaders; it’s the city Nebuchadnezzar burned down; it’s the city Pompey walked through, it’s the city where Christ died; it’s the city Allenby took back from the Muslims in 1917; it’s the city where Roman legions burned down Herod’s temple; it’s the city the Arab legion denied Israel in 1948—it’s the city of which Jews have spoken for thousands of years at Passover—“Next year, Jerusalem”.
It’s THE most sacred place to Jews and Christians; it’s the third most sacred to Muslims. The sacred component is what makes the struggle so intractable. Muslims have planted their third most sacred mosque smack on top of King Solomon’s temple site.
On this mountain, the Bible story tells us, Abraham was asked to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. That’s when the division occurred—about 4,000 years ago. Jews claim their descent through Isaac (who survived the near sacrifice); Arabs claim their descent through Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. Both claim God’s blessing came through THEIR ancestor.
The land around Jerusalem had turned into desert by the 1870s when Jews began to return to Israel to escape Russian pogroms. Arabs were happy to sell such worthless real estate to them. The refugees re-dug ancient wells and made the desert bloom.
Arabs wanted the revitalized land back—thus began the modern quarrel. Five Arab armies tried to exterminate Israel and its Jews in 1948. All five were defeated. The defeats went on—until Jews took back the ancient City of David in 1967.
To imagine that they will give it up for any price is to imagine that all earthquakes and tsunamis will cease. To imagine that Arabs will give it up for any price is to imagine that all hurricanes and tornadoes will cease. Either, like the cowboys and Indians, one side has to win with brutal decisiveness—or, like ancient Byzantium and Persia, some third party has to whips both.
It’ll be easier to make Congress work together or to make the Taliban our friends than to “restart the peace process” over Israel and Jerusalem. It might be more sensible to get out of the way and let them settle it—by themselves.

Stretching The Education Dollar

2010-02-28T19:16:00.002-05:00

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.

No Sanity In Sight For Health Care

2010-02-24T16:38:00.001-05:00

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.

Washington--A Forgotten Giant

2010-02-22T20:19:00.000-05:00

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.

Water, Water, ... Not a Drop To Drink

2010-02-21T19:31:00.001-05:00

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.”

The Unemployed--The Invisible Ones

2010-02-20T23:41:00.000-05:00

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.

Iraq--A War is a War is a War

2010-02-19T17:31:00.002-05:00

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.

Job Loss--No One's In Charge

2010-02-18T20:30:00.000-05:00

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.

Health Care? What Health Care?

2010-02-16T18:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Gay Marriage--Just Business

2010-02-14T19:50:00.001-05:00

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.

Lincoln--The Legend

2010-02-13T23:12:00.000-05:00

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.

Lincoln--We Are Still Coming, Father Abraham

2010-02-12T23:46:00.002-05:00

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.

Inflation--Making the Deficit Go Away

2010-02-10T20:12:00.000-05:00

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.

War On Terror And Bad History

2010-02-06T20:41:00.001-05:00

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.

A Skritch In The Night

2010-02-03T21:37:00.000-05:00

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.

No Child Left Behind--A Fantasy

2010-02-02T21:33:00.001-05:00

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.

Obama--Was Sarah Palin Right?

2010-02-01T20:45:00.002-05:00

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.

Supreme Court--l'etat c'est moi!

2010-01-31T20:45:00.001-05:00

A few days ago Obama gave his first State of the Union address. I’ve spent the days since trying to figure out if there was anything worth responding to. I suppose you could have listened to that speech and said, “Well, he’s finally started to fight”.
Yea-ah, but when you compare his rhetoric to the parliamentary ripostes of a master orator like Churchill, or the emotion chocked response of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, to the hectoring style of Joe McCarthy, Barack Obama still hits “like a girl”.
But he did do one thing that commentators tell us has only been done a very few times in the history of the Republic—he publicly, face to face, faulted the Supreme Court on a ruling (the one that allows corporations to give as much money to politicians as they wish). I’ll say Good On You for that!
The shocked justices sat stonily silent, except for Alito who actually shook his head back at the President. After all, the Supreme Court is sacrosanct, isn’t it? When it speaks, that’s the last word, isn’t it? Who would dare raise an issue after the Court has settled it?
Who is this Obama fellow, a mere President, to publicly suggest the Supreme Court made a bad call? It just isn’t done—not by Congress, not by ordinary people, not by presidents. And exactly why not?
However glancingly, even timorously, Obama made his point it’s one that’s worth looking at and thinking about. The court has been allowed to assume unto itself over the past two centuries a position not unlike that taken by Louis XIV when he declared that he, and he alone, constituted all the governmental powers of the state—“l’ etat c’est moi!”
It certainly didn’t start out this way. The job of supreme court justice had such low prestige when the country started it was hard to find men to take it. Those that did tended to resign rather quickly and go do something useful.
It doubt very much whether the Constitutional Convention ever intended this to happen. They were so concerned with too much power gravitating to the Executive (the King), that they really never gave much thought to reigning in the judiciary.
The President can veto a Congressional Bill. Congress can override the President’s veto. But where is there a right for anyone in any branch of our government to veto or override the Court? (Yes, we can pass a Constitutional Amendment, but that takes years and would often be impractical, cluttering up the Constitution with single case amendments. Congress can impeach—but what a mess that is—what if all Congress could do to stop a President was to impeach him?)
The Court stands alone with an unchallengeable power that would not doubt have horrified Franklin, Madison or even Washington. Obama is considered (validly so) daring and bold because he dares hint in public that a Court decision will do damage to the nation.
The mere fact that he’s right is irrelevant. He is guilty of lese-majestie—against a court of nine un-elected men empowered for life. Whoa.
Andy Jackson dared to react to a Court decision he considered wrong by saying, “John Marshall (Chief Justice) has made his law; let him enforce it.” That decision never was carried out.
After all, the right to overturn any law or regulation without question is a power only granted to the court BY THE COURT ITSELF (Marbury v Madison—1804). Maybe it’s time for another branch of the government to step in and say, “You’ve played with that long enough now”.
Jackson felt he could ignore it. (If either Congress or the President had the nerve to set aside a Supreme Court decision today, you’d be amazed at how circumspect the court would become in its future promulgations.) If the Court can proclaim it HAS absolute power—why can’t one of the other branches proclaim it DOES NOT?
Something to think about.

Art--Creating Worlds Beyond Sight

2010-01-30T21:47:00.000-05:00

I substitute taught in a high school art room yesterday. I like artists. I’m not one—but I’ve worked with artists, writers and photographers for much of my life. They seem to like and work well with me. I once had the pleasure of reading a letter a top flight commercial artist had written about working with me—he was positively glowing in his comments.
So artists and I feel like a natural fit. My wife is an artist and, whatever disputes we have are rarely if ever over matters artistic. I enjoyed a whole day among budding artists, many of whom at sixteen or seventeen are already quite serious about it.
I’ve also been called a “philistine”—most notably one time when I argued that Aristotle would have been a footnote in history were it not for his physically active and bellicose student, Alexander The Great—who spread Aristotle’s teachings over the known world.
But that’s another issue. (I prefer Daumier’s drawings to Matisse; Kandinsky leaves me ice cold while I thoroughly enjoy Picasso and Modigliani. I quite willingly accept being faulted for lacking an appreciation for ALL art. )
Sitting at the teacher’s desk, I spotted a quote she had posted. It went something like, “Nature has made her world, art must create its own.” I sat and thought about it for awhile. The quote was attributed to Sir Thomas Browne. (I assume the Browne in question was the Seventeenth Century English writer.)
I don’t know if that was terribly true before the Nineteenth Century—when many artists were hired to or seemed essentially interested in DEPICTING nature—but it certainly became true once the camera was invented.
Painters who had made their living painting portraits and displaying landscapes were suddenly out of a job. In the hands of a truly skilled photographer, the camera essentially does both things better. It takes a bit of snobbery to insist on a painted portrait today.
Artists began to try to paint what lies behind the realistic depiction of a person, a river or a meadow. I don’t know if they were actually creating a world so much as trying to explain it, to make you see a reality invisible to human sight or even the conscious mind.
I love cubism, for example. It often shows me what I was sensing, what I was glimpsing in the periphery of my field of vision. That is probably validly called a creation of the artist’s own world. I might never have seen what I only glimpsed had an artist not showed it to me. No camera could do that.
But creating one’s own world can be a licentious, dangerous or even silly thing. It can be a form of narcissistic self-absorption which manufactures a world that is all too close to what many ancient Greeks called our world—the defecation of the gods.
I saw a bit of that today. Perhaps all young artists go through such a stage. I’ve seen much more of it in student art shows at art institutes here and in bigger cities. I’ve seen a bit too much of it in museum staged shows of established artists.
Create your own world—be sure that it relates even to philistine viewers like myself (as Modigliani, Picasso, and Gauguin did). Startle, amuse or bemuse me as Dali did. But don’t set a broken chair in a corner, cover it with dirty clothes and sneakers and call it a world of art created by an artist.
That cannot be what Browne meant. It cannot be what the camera has driven art to. A colorful splotch on a canvas can, sometimes, be merely a colorful splotch on a canvas. There may be no insight, no true creativity, no newly fashioned world. Just meaningless self-indulgence.
Art must indeed create its own world. I would ask of some artists (and students), Be careful that this is what you are actually doing.

Wall Street--Call A Casino A Casino

2010-01-29T20:18:00.001-05:00

A further comment on Wall Street. I am by no means advocating a lack of regulation—in fact I think the Street should be far more rigorously regulated than it is today. Falsified figures should be dealt with as the crimes they are; arcane instruments created for investors—who have no way of understanding or validating them should be ferociously banned.
Banks should not be allowed to speculate like crazed slot machine players in a casino. The Depression Era dividing lines should be re-imposed. I’m talking very specifically about the act of buying a stock on an exchange floor.
If we don’t regulate casinos—any fool is allowed to go in and spend his entire paycheck on the spin of a roulette wheel or the flip of a card—we should not impose criminal penalties on people who take advantage of the natural “house odds” on the street.
The Street began as a gathering place for speculators, and I think it should stay that way. Then, at least, people know what they are getting into if they want to play. Criminal activity like breaking into a safe and stealing someone’s data should be punished, but not rational acts like dumping a stock if you learn it’s going to flat line through an overheard or confidential source.
Punishing that is like punishing a poker player who is better at reading “tells”. Years ago I had a friend who was born rich and did a lot of investing. He worked for a government agency, doing good works. His investing consisted mainly in doing precisely what his well connected daddy told him to do.
I once asked him if he had any advice on how a novice should invest in the market. He thought a moment. “If you don’t have connections, start with about [modern dollars] half-a-million and diversify widely. You can hope something will go up.
“Better,” he said, “have somebody like my dad call you—as mine did a month ago—and tell you to buy an IPO coming out tomorrow at about six dollars. (He should also have the connections so you can get in at that price.)
“Hold the stock until dad calls again—when it’s up to seventeen—and says, ‘Sell’. I sold. Next day it was down to nine and falling.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where my dad gets his information, and I don’t ask.”
He obviously didn’t think the market was anyplace for someone unconnected and underfunded. I had another friend, a wealthy man from the Midwest. His family had most of its money by having the good sense each generation to buy lots of land where their city was likely to expand.
But he also played the market. I saw him a lot because his broker was NOT in his Midwestern city. He picked a broker in New York who had good sources on the street and used them effectively for affluent clients. He told me, “I don’t want a broker who only knows what they know in Peoria or Louisville. I can read the ticker tape in the newspaper.”
He regularly flew to New York to have a face to face with his broker. That’s how it’s done. That’s reality. I would no more try to pick stocks with my assets and in my location than I would challenge a serious poker pro to a “friendly game”.
To pretend that all of our laws—like the stupid one that caught Martha Stewart off guard—are going to change things among big time and serious investors is silly. Let casinos be casinos, and for you and me, Wall Street is a casino—the stock market should be regulated accordingly.
Caveat Emptor. You’re on your own. (Warren Buffet may be a special case—he seems to have had a special sense of what products the American people were going to go on liking and using into the future. But even he got clobbered in a major downturn. Sometimes the best poker players have to hock their watches to get out of town. Even for him, house odds can be stacked.)
Just remember, unless you have connections, it’s a casino. If you want to take your retirement money to Vegas, hey—why not the Stock Market? Otherwise, find some connections. (And you will never convince me that Buffet doesn’t have any—just shop talk, of course.)

Wall Street--Let's Not Regulate The Impossible

2010-01-28T21:19:00.001-05:00

Do you remember a few years ago when everyone was telling us that putting our Social Security money in the stock market would assure us of a bigger, better return? Or that brokers and analysts would do better for us than a government run Social Security Administration?
Let’s pause to reconsider one more time. Recently a chimp was allowed to pick stocks at random and his performance was measured against skilled money managers on Wall Street. Guess what—the chimp got better results.
I suspect he would have done reasonably well at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. After all, the stock market—since its inception under a butternut tree on Wall Street in 1792—is now and always has been essentially a crap shoot, a roulette play or a game of black jack.
People do win at the gaming tables. They also lose. Ditto Wall Street. Nobody talks about it any more, but in 1960 or so, Merrill Lynch took all the listings on the Big Board before the Crash of 1929 and took the names off them.
Referees gave all the data available at that time—annual reports, financial statements—on those stocks to a team of analysts. Pick stock A or F or Q. They then took a large round dart board and gave each stock a narrow pie shaped piece and glued all of them to it.
Analysts working with data (not knowing the names or having any clue as to subsequent, real life history of those stocks) vs people throwing darts (the actual name of the stock known only to the referees). Merrill Lynch was betting on the analysts.
Bad bet. You would have done better with the darts. (That’s why you don’t ever hear about that little project.) If chimps and darts can do better than the trained analysts you depend on when investing or buying a mutual fund, it should give you pause.
Especially as Congress is looking to reform the Street yet another time. One more effort will be made to make it fairer, more sure, safer. The idea that this can even be done rises out of a wholly absurd notion of what the Street is all about.
For one thing, it is and always has been a venue for rich men to get their hands on other peoples’ money so that they can gamble—and leave the risk to others. It has not been a bad system for those who understood it. Those who invest with their eyes open to what’s really going on can supplement their retirement income quite nicely.
But so can people who use the casino as an instrument for investment. Winston Churchill used to pay for his French vacations by judiciously applying himself at the roulette wheel. I knew people who would pay their own way to the Caribbean and then earn plane fare back to New York at the casinos. That’s not all that different.
But neither the casino nor the Street are about fairness or retirement safety. Trying to legislate these qualities into either is a form of silliness. The Market wasn’t “fair” in Jay Gould’s day. It isn’t “fair” today, and we cannot make it so. Anymore than the Volstead Act stopped people from drinking. All Congress has ever been able to do is impose a form of “prohibition” on Wall Street.
There are all sorts of laws to prohibit Wall Street brokers from talking shop. When they play poker on a Saturday night in the Hamptons, they may chat about opera or compare Chinese and Russian ballet troops—but they may not talk shop.
Teachers may, factory workers may, physicians may, salesmen may—but brokers and analysts are forbidden to gossip about work. (Not too long ago, they even charged some brokers for talking shop over a poker game one night.) It’s called “insider information”. It’s a big no no. But trying to imagine any one making serious money on Wall Street without it is like trying to imagine Al Capone swearing off booze.
The laws don’t stop it. They just make it riskier—like going to a speakeasy during Prohibition. I could probably give other examples, but let’s stick with this one—it’s a good example of what’s wrong with how we PERCEIVE Wall Street today. More tomorrow.

Haiti--Why God Sometimes Doesn't Help

2010-01-27T22:10:00.001-05:00

I pointed out yesterday that Pat Robertson was merely citing basic Christian theology when he suggested that Haiti’s rejection of an exclusive relationship with the God of the Christian Bible may have brought her to grief two weeks ago.
I suspect that Mr. Robertson would be quick to agree that we Americans, so near and so rich, have an absolute obligation to help. Just as you would work to save the life of a drunken driver who had wrapped himself around a tree. You’d withhold any suggestion that he was at fault, and you’d work like a dog to keep him alive.
That’s another core tenet of Christianity: you work to retrieve a situation that may have been caused by folly or wickedness without a hint of recrimination. Christ said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” No matter that they had chosen to get themselves lost.
The fact is, as Christianity understands God and his relationship to men, Haiti wasn’t smacked by God for worshipping other deities (Voodoo); Haiti smacked herself. God needed to have nothing to do with it. He caused no hurt, and he was contractually UNABLE to prevent.
An example of God’s inability to help is found in one of the New Testament stories of Christ. We are told he went around healing the sick and the blind. But he came to one town where the people stubbornly refused to believe he could do it.
Christ said himself that he could not do any miraculous healings in that city because of the sheer power of its unbelief. Nothing. They were quite able, as human beings, to exercise their ancient contractual rights and prevent God from acting. That can still be true today.
If our Haitian brothers have chosen to be half Christian (part of the “bride of Christ”) and half something else (Voodoo), they are neither in his eyes. They have committed spiritual adultery. Until they say they are sorry)—and mean it—God will leave them to the mercies of their adulterous partner. He will tie his own hands.
Christians recognize this planet as a hostile place. Since Adam put it under new management—in the hands of someone who hates both God and mankind—it has become dangerous indeed. It is full of unpredictable volcanoes, storms, ice age cycles, earthquakes, viruses, tornadoes, hurricanes, Tsunami’s, poisonous snakes and dangerous beasts. How about disease bearing mosquitoes and other lethal pests?
(The Bible suggests over and over that this present, dangerous world is not the world that God made—it is a world that is now run by spiritual beings totally hostile to humans. This is one reason the Bible suggests man needs the constant protection of God.)
If Haitians truly chose to walk away from the Christian God in order to follow Voodoo, pact or no pact, then they are no longer under his protection. He doesn’t need to punish them—the planet and its new owner will do that all on its own.
This brings up another interesting point. What insurance companies are pleased to call, “Acts of God” are in most cases not his ACTIONS but rather his INACTION. He stands back, bound by his own contractual obligation to give humans free will.
Many Christians don’t like to think about that aspect of their faith. It would require them to have a much more intense and personal relationship with their God than they are comfortable with. Easier to believe he’s just a slightly senile, doting grandpa who defines love as “never having to say you’re sorry”. Or even to say anything at all.
This seems harsh. But it is basic Christianity. It was what Robertson was, however clumsily, trying to get across. (If you choose to walk away from a body guard on your own, bad things may well happen—but don’t blame the guard.) Biblically, Pat Robertson was not entirely wrong about Haiti, even if he got the wrong Napoleon.
God always weeps for those who die; sometimes he cannot help them.

Haiti--A Harsh Christian Answer

2010-01-26T21:38:00.001-05:00

When disaster and death strike, Christians often ask, “Where was God?” Isn’t Haiti, for instance, a Catholic (Christian) country? How could a loving God let such things happen? Christian clergy with Haitian congregations are being inundated by such questions now.
Pat Robertson has made himself an object of loathing and contempt for suggesting that part of Haiti’s problem may be an ancient compact with the devil himself. But anyone who is aware of the Judeo-Christian concept of God—as he is defined in Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) Bibles cannot dismiss Robertson’s statement out of hand.
Robertson may be out of line with modern Christians, but he is NOT out of line with Biblical Christianity. Christians only like to talk about half the things their Bible says about their God. The Biblical God defines himself as a “jealous God”—and as a God who has deliberately limited his own freedom to act in order to protect the right of humans to make choices.
God is portrayed as proprietary. He made humans. He describes his church as his “bride” and the Israelites as his people. In both instances he compares those who worship anything other than himself as adulterers, as cheating spouses, and sometimes he is blunt enough to call them “whores”. He takes a dim view of infidelity.
On the other hand, he has made a contractual agreement with humans. He made them to have some- one to talk to. He gave them the recreated earth to live in and on. It was humankind’s. Adam was to “dress, till and keep it”.
According to the Bible, Adam chose to violate that compact. He had the freedom to do so—to wrest earth from the protective hand of his God and give it to God’s great and ancient enemy, the devil. In turn, God stepped back and honored the new contract. (I present this as basic Christian theology, not as scientific reality.) He continued to love what he had created, but under the contract mankind had made with the devil thousands of years ago, God set limits upon himself.
For a brilliantly clear explanation of this, I refer anyone to either the book or the film, “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe”. Aslan (Christ) keeps his contract with the Witch (devil). She has ownership over that which she has claimed.
Many Christians prefer to talk about a God who “is love”. He is, but he is also a God who keeps whatever contract he has made. Or whatever contract man has chosen to make. There is a significant rub when you are referring to Haiti.
Christians don’t like to talk about that part of their theology. They prefer the novel’s definition of love as being—“never having to say you’re sorry”. That’s not the love of God as defined in both Christian and Jewish scriptures. The Biblical God loves—but he allows you the freedom to screw up. Do it often and willfully enough and he also punishes.
A core tenet of Christianity is allowing you screw up royally—having you say, “I’m sorry”—and then trying very hard not to do it again.

Punishment often consists of nothing more than having the consequences of your actions come home to roost. (Rather like a drunk who chooses to drive and wipes out his entire family. He cannot validly ask, “Where was God?” “If he’s so loving, why is my wife dead?”)
Whether Haitians actually made some sort of “pact with the devil” back in the 1790s is actually irrelevant. (Adam did that for them and for us all long before). No one question the fact that Haiti is and has been a nation (as they admit) that is “100% Catholic—Christian—and 90% Voodoo”. In the eyes of the Christian God that is infidelity, pure and simple. (Ask Tiger Woods’ wife what she thinks of a situation like this.)
Does this mean the Biblical God smacked Haiti with an earthquake? Probably not. He didn’t need to. Haiti is on a fault line—no doubt Haitians needed someone to PREVENT earthquakes. From a Biblical standpoint, they shook off their protector. They cheated on them. He stood back. Their Voodoo gods had neither interest nor power to protect.
Let’s talk tomorrow about the Christian God when he is UNABLE to help.

Haiti--The Maelstrom

2010-01-25T21:20:00.000-05:00

So graphic was Haiti’s economic collapse, its unending race hatreds, and its grinding poverty, one can understand how a Pat Robertson—working from a religious point of view—could suggest that these multiple disasters must have risen out of some pact with the devil.
It may have seemed that way to many Haitians. On the other hand, American troops must have seemed like a blessing. American army engineers built almost 200 bridges, hundreds of miles of roads, schools and public buildings. No Europeans were allowed to forcibly collect on debts.
Agriculture became viable. Sugar, cotton and other crops were making money again. The Americans settled several boundary issues with the Dominican Republic—the larger half of the island. Land was given back to Haiti.
Then, in 1934, President Roosevelt gave Haiti a new constitution and pulled the troops out. Angry Dominicans struck back, retaking their old borders. As many as 20,000 Haitians were slaughtered in less than a week.
Two more coups, a resignation in the face of a general strike and finally came the election of 1957. Francoise Duvalier, who instituted one of the most racist regimes ever seen on earth, was voted in as president.
“Papa Doc”, as he was known, was from the lowest class in Haiti—the former slaves, the black underclass. He came with—and violently represented—all of the hatred Haitian blacks felt for the “gentlemen of color”—the Creoles, the Mulattoes.
He and his private army of bully boys—the Ton ton Macoutes—set out to either kill or drive the Mulatto class out of Haiti. Thousands of Haiti’s most educated citizens fled to places like the newly free French colonies in Africa where their expertise could be of benefit and they could make a living.
(Back in 1961, I had a good friend in New York City who worked as an executive for a large retailer. He was a refugee from Papa Doc who took his abilities and education with him. His family had been among the Haitian elite. His sin was his light color. He was often amused at the racial prejudice he faced in New York because of his DARK color, especially being married to a Parisian.)
Papa’s son, “Bebe Doc”, succeeded Papa in 1971 and continued the anti-mulatto program until he was thrown out in 1986. He took refuse, ironically, not in Africa among his fellow blacks—but in Paris. A new constitution was put in place the next year.
Elections scheduled for 1987 didn’t happen because the Ton ton Macoutes, aided by the Haitian army, shot dozens of people around the country. Bereft of much of its educated class, the nation sank further into chaos.
Finally the American military stepped in in 1994—to restore a very corrupt Jean Bertrand Aristide to power. He abolished the Haitian army and, by 2000, he was rigging elections and using his new “police force” to intimidate the opposition.
This time a United Nations peace keeping force stepped in to create and maintain order of some sort. They stayed until their headquarters fell down around their ears in the recent earthquake.
You are left with a desperately poor nation, dominated by descendents of ex-slaves who never had proper opportunity for education or improvement. The educated class has been driven out. The military does not exist. Infrastructure has been allowed to decay for the past seventy-five years. There is no real economy.
One can almost ask, what is there to rebuild? We may have to start from the very beginning—and do all of the educating and building that should have been done back in 1804. That’s what we face in Haiti. Sending in the Red Cross for a few months isn’t going to fix it. It will take far more than the Corps of Engineers. More tomorrow.

Haiti--Paradise Lost

2010-01-24T17:32:00.000-05:00

What happens when the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean kills off its educated and financially competent leadership (the white planters), gains its independence and is dominated by previously uneducated former slaves—who have never been given the chance to learn or to govern?
“Hell in a handbasket” is a phrase that comes to mind. L’Ouverture was betrayed (and killed) by the French. Jasques Dessaline was assassinated three years later. That left things to a former stable hand, waiter and mason—Henri Christophe.
He had been a winning general against Napoleon’s troops; his menial jobs had given him real skill in dealing with the wealthy whites who still controlled much of Haiti’s economy. He was also nuts. He proclaimed himself “King Henri”.
He created a noble class, aping the “ancient regime” of France. He built himself six chateaus, eight palaces, and the gigantic Citadelle Laferriere that was once considered such a wonder of the world people traveled just to see it.
To prove how loyal his troops were to him, he would occasionally have a unit of infantry march off the top of the citadel and fall to their deaths. Like the ancient Pharaohs he put much of the populace of Haiti to work building his monuments.
It was still a fabulously rich country. Some say that during his fourteen year reign people from New York would sail down to Port au Prince to see the “big town”. Revolt finally came in 1820. Rather than lose power, Christophe put a silver bullet in his head.
His body was hidden in a block of wet cement. People carrying loads to build more monuments to him dropped their loads on the spot where they heard the news. Visitors a century later claimed to be able to still see these piles of construction materials along the trails.
The rule of a man like Christophe would be enough to poison the future of any nation, but the tragedy of Haiti was by no means done. Sugar slowly declined in value as more and more nations began to produce it (notably colonial Cuba)—no one had thought to use the sugar money to create a more varied economy, or any economy at all.
It was a slow, tortuous downhill slide for a nation rich enough in 1815 to take in South American revolutionary hero, Simon Boliver, resupply him with men, money and weapons and send him back to defeat Spain. There are those who say Venezuela and several other nations owe their independence to Haitian help.
By the 1830s, Haitian economy had declined so much that the Haitian government (under a dictator almost as cruel as Christophe) passed a law denying any “free” peasant who worked on a sugar plantation the right to leave that land—for any reason.
During the 1820s, thousands of free blacks from the United States migrated to Haiti, a black nation. Most returned home—Haitian poverty had already become so bitter. A fleet of French warships showed up in 1825 and made Haiti promise to repay them 150,000,000 Francs as indemnity for the value of the lost slaves and slave trade that once centered in colonial Haiti. (It would be like making penniless freed slaves in the south pay for the Civil War and their own market value.)
Even though that amount was eventually reduced to ninety million, the rest of the century saw many incursions from European forces claiming Haiti owed them money—and helping themselves to it. Expatriates and other foreigners bankrolled dissident groups who fought each other within Haiti.
Coups, assassinations and violence became commonplace in a nation where the bulk of the populace was uneducated and desperately poor. It is estimated that between 1820 and today, Haiti has had at least 32 coups.
Finally, in 1915, appalled at the chaos so near our shores, we sent in the marines. More later.

Haiti, The Devil and Pat Robertson

2010-01-23T19:33:00.001-05:00

Pat Robertson has shown a knack for publicly stating the injudicious. His latest comments on Haiti’s possible bond with the devil were rendered suspect if only because Mr. Robertson did no fact checking and alluded to the wrong Napoleon.
There is no question that Haiti defeated a Napoleon (or at least one of his armies), but it was the FIRST Emperor Napoleon (1804-1815), not the Third (1852-1870). Haiti has certainly had a checkered history, both before and after Napoleon.
It began as a pirate haven, and as late as the 1780s, pirate Jean Lafitte, who loaned his cannon to Andrew Jackson to ensure the American victory at New Orleans, was born there. But its early wealth came as perhaps the richest of the Caribbean sugar colonies. (Sugar was the petroleum of the 17th and 18th centuries, creating huge fortunes, using slave labor—and the French colony of St. Dominique [Haiti] was probably the richest source of sugar in the world.)
Slaves in the Caribbean died like flies. The first slaves had been imported to the Island of Hispaniola in 1517—and in the 1780s they had to keep importing them, so many died so fast. Sugar in the tropics was a brutally labor intensive crop.
Mulattoes—resulting from liaisons between French men and slave women—were given a much higher status, and were often freed, creating a Creole class of “gentlemen of color”, who could own land and serve as officers in the French Army.
This racial distinction created a form of black vs Mulatto racism that bedevils Haiti to this day. At the top were the white Frenchmen who poured into Haiti from France—there were half as many French in tiny St. Dominique when the French gave up Canada (1763) as there were in all of North America.
In 1789, the French world turned upside down. The Bastille, symbol of oppression everywhere, was stormed and destroyed. A month later, in August, 1789, the revolutionary French government issued its “Declaration of the Rights of Man”—proclaiming that all men, everywhere were free and equal.
Two years later, the black slaves of Haiti claimed that promise for themselves. Over three hundred thousand slaves rose up against 40,000 whites, and 28,000 “gens de couleur” were caught in the middle. (A fair number of those refugeed out to places like New Orleans.)
Thirteen years of very bloody warfare followed. France sent thousands of troops (when they could slip them past the British blockade during the War of the French Revolution). Haitian leaders proved themselves a match for the finest France could send.
Toussaint L’Ouverture proved he could lick his weight in French armies—as did generals like Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Napoleon returned from Egypt and Syria 1799 and he sent more troops under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc asked for a parlay with L’Ouverture. He kidnapped him and sent him to France where the Haitian “George Washington” died in 1803. But the Haitians fought on. They proved they could defeat Napoleon’s battle hardened veterans in a stand up, face to face fight.
Napoleon gave up. He put his dreams for a new French Empire in the Caribbean and North America on hold, sold Louisiana to the Americans and granted Haiti its independence.
Fifty thousand French troops had to died—to disease and wounds. Twenty-four thousand French planters had died and over 100,000 black slaves. In some ways it makes the American Revolution look like a Sunday School picnic.
Haiti was free—the first nation in Latin America to gain its independence. Hers was also the first successful slave revolt in human history. Whither now the richest sugar island in the Caribbean—source of nearly half the world’s sugar?
More on that tragic story tomorrow.

The Court--We're All Equal Now

2010-01-22T21:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the Supreme Court took a step backward into the Nineteenth Century—the bad part of the 19th Century, at that. It abolished limits on how much corporations, unions and other large givers could contribute to election campaigns.
It said these limits were a violation of free speech. (One cannot help wondering how these conservative justices would react to a suit demanding total free speech for child pornography.) According to the court, a multi-billion dollar corporation now has exactly the same right to buy political influence as any individual citizen, no matter how limited his means.
There is a certain constitutional logic to this point of view. After all, to be “incorporated” means to be given a legal body (“corpus”) like that of any being who is actually human. In the eyes of the law, General Electric and I are both bodies equal before that law.
Then we run, smack dab, into the same problem we did back in the 1800s. For more than a century, American workers were forbidden to organize in unions to negotiate with their employers. It was constitutional doctrine that the individual workman and the corporation he worked for were absolutely equal in power and influence in law.
In other words, I—the individual workman—and Standard Oil, then the largest and richest corporation in the world, were expected to sit down in a room together, me with my dollar a day wage and Standard Oil with all of its hundreds of millions were deemed to be absolutely identical in negotiating capabilities.
On more than one occasion the U.S. Army was sent out to enforce that legal view. Those who tried to argue that Standard Oil and I were NOT equal in negotiating power could and did, on occasion, face rifle fire.
So for decades “the iron law of wages” prevailed. Daily pay for men stayed at a dollar a day (twelve to fourteen hours), for women it could be $1.75 a week, kids rarely earned more than a dollar a week. But the court held that these wages were fairly negotiated between equals. After all, as they read the Constitution, it would violate the rights of the corporation to have it any other way.
Using their vast resources, the billionaires who ran the corporations—in a day when a single billion made you the richest man on earth—added to the fairness issue by buying up nearly the entire U.S. Senate.
Rockefeller might own twenty senators; Morgan another twenty. Gould might own five or six. Vanderbilt might have fifteen in his pocket and so forth. When they needed a bill passed or blocked, the owners traded senators back and forth like properties in the game of “Monopoly”. There was no help for the individual in the courts or in Congress.
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution required the popular election of senators—cutting down the degree of control large corporations could buy. In 1935 the Wagner Act recognized that an individual worker was NOT equal to General Motors and granted labor the right to organize in unions and negotiate better wages and conditions collectively.
In the early 1970s, recognizing that my fifty dollar contribution to an election campaign does not make me equal in influence to a large union or corporation that can contribute thousands, Congress began to demand public disclosure of where campaign contributions came from—and to limit their size.
Suddenly, the fifty dollars an individual might contribute—combined with thousands more contributions from citizens like him--might just count. Candidates began to show this was true, especially with today’s internet. You could call it the voters’ version of collective bargaining. Thousands of Davids equaling a Goliath.
But the Supreme Court yesterday was having none of THIS kind of equality. After their ruling, I’m at liberty to contribute as much as I can; a multi-billion dollar corporation has the same freedom. That makes us equal, right? Its unlimited contribution, thousands upon thousands, versus my fifty bucks. Fully equal, right?
Money does talk. It once bought the entire Senate—now it can buy whole elections. As a commentator said yesterday, every Congressman and Senator is going to think long and hard about whether that money is going to talk for or against him—before he votes on anything.

Obama--Timeless and Clueless

2010-01-21T21:21:00.000-05:00

In boxing, comedy and on Wall Street, timing is everything. Whatever else Barack Obama has shown us this past year, it hasn’t been timing. As a political fighter, he’s been flat-footed, several moments behind and unbelievably clumsy.
Timing he ain’t got. If you’re going to ring in change—of any kind—you’ve got to stay conscious at least to the end of the round. Right now he doesn’t look like he’s going to go that far. Tell the trainers to get ready to carry him out of the ring.
LAST YEAR was the year to get Health Care Reform through Congress. His presidency was young; he had all the “cred” of a major election victory. He diddled. He fuddled. He backed off and let Congress do its thing—while he went off and fought windmills in Copenhagen and made a thoroughly aborted try to get the Olympics to Chicago.
Oh yes, he had to take time to prepare a speech reaching out to Muslims in Cairo and accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. All the while Health Care was left an orphan to slowly starve to death for lack of action and votes in Congress.
Finally, today, Nancy Pelosi admitted that she hasn’t got the votes to put all the things the Senate wants through her House of Representatives. (She only got the House version passed by about five votes—and now the Senate has lost its filibuster proof 60 Democratic votes—and how long will Byrd be able to make it to the floor?) She suggested putting the bill on indefinite hold.
If health care isn’t dead, it’s gasping for breath. You can imagine all the Congressional pages and aides dashing about as the cry, “Code Blue, Code Blue” echoes through the halls. Obama has probably killed it the same way Clinton did in 1973/4.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed the bill to sit while the opposition gathered its strength for a lethal counterattack. (Remember ANY form of health care reform is going to cost some well healed persons and organizations MONEY. They won’t like it.)
(Note for future presidents who may want to improve American health care: 1)Make it SIMPLE. 2) Use your early days clout to force Congress to keep it simple. 3) Get it on the Congressional calendar NO LATER than February. 4) Pull out all the stops to get a fast vote.
These won’t absolutely guarantee passage—but the lack of any one of them will surely guarantee that it will NOT pass. Obama managed to score zero out of four—as did the Clintons. Those who stood to lose money if it became law massed their forces, lied and won.
Now it seems to have dawned on Obama that while he was busy making war and foreign policy speeches, he has apparently missed the boat on another domestic issue. Just now, today, the same day Nancy Pelosi called off the hounds, Obama recollected that Americans are very unhappy about the big firms on Wall Street that 1)nearly collapsed the financial system and 2)are collecting huge bonuses for doing it.
Oh oops. Maybe we should create new regulatory measures to reign in big banks and prevent them from getting “too big to fail.” This could have been a winner LAST winter. Now things seem to be bouncing back and the urgency is completely gone.
Obama can try to hide the fact he’s about to take a licking on health care by making angry noises about Wall Street, but it isn’t likely to accomplish anything. Not any more. Timing, baby, timing. The last time he showed any was on inaugural night when he danced with Michelle.
He has tripped over his instinct to delay, ignore and create complications. He was content to follow the Bush program on Wall Street until it simply won’t fly any more. Now it is doubtful if he can make any program of his own fly at all.
Timing matters in the boxing ring, comedy central and investing—it also matters in the political arena.

Strivers Row

2010-01-18T14:41:00.001-05:00

There was—or is—in Harlem a few blocks of brownstone homes called “Strivers’ Row”. It was (and perhaps is) a term laced with irony and contempt. For here lived the black millionaires and successful businessmen who had tried to make it in the white world.
Fellow blacks, embittered by long centuries of discrimination and white distain, jeered at the strivers as men who lived in a fantasy world. Equality with whites would never, they firmly believed, be granted to black men, no matter what their wealth or achievements.
Sammy Davis Jr. (the black member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack), in his autobiography, “Yes I Can”, tells the story of being in a barracks adjacent to a white barracks during World War II. One large white Texan kept making snide remarks about “niggers” who did not belong.
Finally, Davis—a physically small man—had had enough. He assaulted the sneering , much bigger white man and beat him until he could not get back up. Bloodied and floored, the Texan looked up at Davis and spoke a terrible truth, “You’re still a nigger”.
The larger black population of Harlem—who had either striven and failed or not bothered to attempt what they saw as impossible by striving at all—lived and believed the Texan’s line all their lives. They poured out their contempt on those who did strive—and whom they saw as deluded fools.
Unfortunately that belief remains strong in our black ghettoes today. If I were asked to identify the single greatest curse besetting American black men and women, it would say it was the pervasive belief on the part of so many that they could not succeed. There was no point in trying.
Centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws (Grand Rapids, where I was raised had its “realty covenants” and kept blacks penned up on Henry, James and Charles streets for decades) had done their work well. Call it “Stockholm Syndrome” or whatever, blacks had made themselves believe the cant of the most racist of their white oppressors.
I have substitute taught in a variety of predominantly black schools—K through 12. The kids do under-perform their white contemporaries. No doubt. But there is something much worse going on. So many of them have a completely cynical attitude toward education.
“Why should we do this assignment? What’s it going to get us? What has this white man to tell us that is going to benefit us in any way?” They sneer. They leave assignments lying unfinished on their desks. They laugh out loud.
There are always a few strivers. They keep their heads down and try not to let anyone else know they are actually doing their school work. It’s not a pleasant life for them. (I remember a small eighth grade girl whom I noticed was always working, no matter what chaos was going on around her. After seeing her several times, I asked her what she planned on doing.
“I want to be a cardiologist”, she replied instantly. I would have given anything to be able to move her out of that school. All I can do is pray she keeps her head down, keeps working and makes it to medical school.)
Most of the rest of that room had given up by the time they were old enough to drink from a sippy cup. Now, what scares me very much, is that I see more and more of the same cynicism and hopelessness in our predominantly white schools as well.
The malaise seems to be spreading. Things seem to bear out what I was told back in the 1960s—“What you see in black neighborhoods/schools today will be true of white schools tomorrow.” That would be a terrible vengeance on all of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr., his father and mother, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were (and are) all strivers—the way so many white Americans have been. They did not fight through Birmingham, Selma and prison for what I see today.
We can change laws; we may even change bad attitudes—but how do we remove centuries of hopeless cynicism? And, if we don’t, God help us. That is my message for The Reverend Mr. King’s birthday.