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.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Obama and the Usages of Power IV
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.
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.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Obama and the Usages of Power II
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.
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.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Obama and the Usages of Power
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.
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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Gay Marriage--Just Business
The other day I was sent an invitation to militate for the right of homosexuals and lesbians to marry. For an instant I was tempted to send a blistering reply—you know, all about marriage being for the procreation, nurture and protection of human young.
Then I got to thinking—is that still true? It has been historically true. Back in the days before welfare (only about my lifetime) a woman alone with children to raise could find herself in a pretty grim fix. It didn’t matter a lot if she were widowed or perpetually unwed.
In some cultures (India, for instance) women opted not to outlive their dead husbands. Throwing herself on his funeral pyre and burning with him seemed a better choice. Even in the Christian west her opportunities were often limited to prostitution or starvation wages in a sweat shop.
Only in marriage did a woman hope to find some sort of security and protection for herself and her young. A man was required to raise and protect only those children he conceived within the bounds of marriage. Illegitimate children, his or hers, were outside the pale. Thus marriage served a socially useful and necessary function—and it was strictly heterosexual because it very much built around conception.
Even in societies where homosexuality (or lesbianism) was accepted or practiced widely, the notion of marriage as an heterosexual function specifically aimed at producing offspring and heirs remained an historical constant. I cannot think of a society in which homosexual liaisons were accorded the legal status of a marriage contract.
But life has changed in the past fifty years. At least in the western, post-Christian, industrialized world, it has. The weapons of war no longer depend upon brute strength (not, certainly, since the M-16 replaced the M-1 rifle in the 1960s). Women can defend themselves with as much lethal effect as men can. They routinely serve in the military.
More women are getting higher educations than men. For all of the “gender gap”, more and more women are earning professional grade salaries—and are perfectly capable of providing for themselves and their offspring by themselves.
If a man leaves a dependent wife, the law will usually step in and force him to continue supporting his young. Or there is welfare. Women are no longer solely dependent on being in a marriage to feed themselves and their children. This rationale for keeping marriage solely on a heterosexual basis is slipping away.
So is the rationale for maintaining the legitimacy of an heir. There are fewer and fewer entitled estates that require a blood relative to inherit. But something even more drastic has happened during the last half century. The stigma of illegitimacy that was meant to keep child production largely within the confines of a traditional marriage has been largely lost.
“Shotgun marriages” were common when I was young. Today many women feel free and unembarrassed to carry the child without a designated father. So one can no longer say that homosexual marriage will destroy the institution of marriage—it is already essentially destroyed among heterosexuals.
All that seems to be left, in many cases, is a legal status—“married”, vs divorced, single, never married and so forth—that confers legal benefits (inheritance, privacy waivers, tax status and so forth) and has increasingly less relevance to the historic usages of marriage—rearing the child and establishing his legitimacy before the law.
Very true, marriage has been for thousands of years a contract between one man and one woman (in non-polygamous societies) for the purpose of begetting young. Even without homosexuality factored into the equation, what is it today?
If it is threatened with destruction, in a traditional, religious sense of the word, homosexuals honestly cannot be blamed. The “destruction” of traditional marriage began to occur back when being a homosexual wasn’t even legal. “They” aren’t doing it. Marriage has been becoming a less and less socially necessary institution for decades.
It is increasingly hard to find logic with which to deny “Gays” the right to the legal benefits of the “married” status—shared medical benefits, rights of inheritance, so forth.
Valid objections to homosexual marriage exist only in the realm of theology and religious practice—not in secular law or social norms. I have to face that. But I will not accept any invitations to work for the day when “Gay” marriage has the same status as my own.
Then I got to thinking—is that still true? It has been historically true. Back in the days before welfare (only about my lifetime) a woman alone with children to raise could find herself in a pretty grim fix. It didn’t matter a lot if she were widowed or perpetually unwed.
In some cultures (India, for instance) women opted not to outlive their dead husbands. Throwing herself on his funeral pyre and burning with him seemed a better choice. Even in the Christian west her opportunities were often limited to prostitution or starvation wages in a sweat shop.
Only in marriage did a woman hope to find some sort of security and protection for herself and her young. A man was required to raise and protect only those children he conceived within the bounds of marriage. Illegitimate children, his or hers, were outside the pale. Thus marriage served a socially useful and necessary function—and it was strictly heterosexual because it very much built around conception.
Even in societies where homosexuality (or lesbianism) was accepted or practiced widely, the notion of marriage as an heterosexual function specifically aimed at producing offspring and heirs remained an historical constant. I cannot think of a society in which homosexual liaisons were accorded the legal status of a marriage contract.
But life has changed in the past fifty years. At least in the western, post-Christian, industrialized world, it has. The weapons of war no longer depend upon brute strength (not, certainly, since the M-16 replaced the M-1 rifle in the 1960s). Women can defend themselves with as much lethal effect as men can. They routinely serve in the military.
More women are getting higher educations than men. For all of the “gender gap”, more and more women are earning professional grade salaries—and are perfectly capable of providing for themselves and their offspring by themselves.
If a man leaves a dependent wife, the law will usually step in and force him to continue supporting his young. Or there is welfare. Women are no longer solely dependent on being in a marriage to feed themselves and their children. This rationale for keeping marriage solely on a heterosexual basis is slipping away.
So is the rationale for maintaining the legitimacy of an heir. There are fewer and fewer entitled estates that require a blood relative to inherit. But something even more drastic has happened during the last half century. The stigma of illegitimacy that was meant to keep child production largely within the confines of a traditional marriage has been largely lost.
“Shotgun marriages” were common when I was young. Today many women feel free and unembarrassed to carry the child without a designated father. So one can no longer say that homosexual marriage will destroy the institution of marriage—it is already essentially destroyed among heterosexuals.
All that seems to be left, in many cases, is a legal status—“married”, vs divorced, single, never married and so forth—that confers legal benefits (inheritance, privacy waivers, tax status and so forth) and has increasingly less relevance to the historic usages of marriage—rearing the child and establishing his legitimacy before the law.
Very true, marriage has been for thousands of years a contract between one man and one woman (in non-polygamous societies) for the purpose of begetting young. Even without homosexuality factored into the equation, what is it today?
If it is threatened with destruction, in a traditional, religious sense of the word, homosexuals honestly cannot be blamed. The “destruction” of traditional marriage began to occur back when being a homosexual wasn’t even legal. “They” aren’t doing it. Marriage has been becoming a less and less socially necessary institution for decades.
It is increasingly hard to find logic with which to deny “Gays” the right to the legal benefits of the “married” status—shared medical benefits, rights of inheritance, so forth.
Valid objections to homosexual marriage exist only in the realm of theology and religious practice—not in secular law or social norms. I have to face that. But I will not accept any invitations to work for the day when “Gay” marriage has the same status as my own.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Lincoln--We Are Still Coming, Father Abraham
Today is Lincoln’s birthday. It used to be a holiday—until the old Confederacy made it clear that celebrating it would be like asking Jews to celebrate Waffen SS Day. So we’ve combined it with Washington’s Birthday, and now we have “President’s Day”.
Lincoln is still worthy of his own day. Even if most of us honor—or loath—him for all the wrong reasons. He preserved the Union, yet he was as much a sectionalist as Robert E. Lee. In this government hating era, we must remember that he was—above all—a brilliant politician.
He “emancipated” the slaves, almost literally over his own dead body. He told us in his First Inaugural Address that his primary interest was to preserve the Union—to that end he would free “some of the slaves, all of the slaves or none of the slaves”.
He fully understood that ending slavery was high on the list of very, very few Northerners. His famed Emancipation Proclamation was strictly an appeal to the anti-slavery sentiments of the British electorate—to keep England from entering the war on the Confederacy’s side. It was carefully crafted to free no actual slaves whatsoever.
Throughout much of the war he had to calculate every move based on keeping Europe at bay while imposing what they felt was an illegal blockade on an independent Confederacy. England remained a serious threat until the Russian Navy arrived and parked itself in New York harbor throughout the winter of 1863-4. By late winter we were strong enough to make a serious threat of war ourselves—and England backed off.
But Britain and the Confederacy were only two of Lincoln’s major problems. New York—and its big banks—may have been his biggest. A very good argument can be made that, for both North and South, the largest war issue may have been New York’s desire to impose financial hegemony over the entire federal union.
From the outset, the outsider from the western farm states, had to battle to keep the New Yorkers in his cabinet at bay. His war aims and their war aims were quite different. In the end it can be argued that the New York banking and business interests won the war—and Wall Street became the dominant American power base (don’t forget, during the Cold War, the Communist block always spoke of the enemy as being—not America or Washington—but Wall Street).
Lincoln steadfastly rejected Seward’s appeal for open war with our chief commercial rival, Great Britain, but he was forced to move toward Seward’s radical abolitionism when he lost most other support for the war. It was a constant see-saw.
He never forgot that Prairie states like Illinois had historically depended on their uneasy political alliance with the Plantation South to defend their interests against the eastern banks. In a last desperate move to protect western farmers, Lincoln offered the South an opportunity to lay down its arms, re-enter Congress and vote down the 13th Amendment.
A secret conference was held, no agreement was reached—and a month later Lee surrendered. A week after that Lincoln was dead, and with him went the last obstacle to New York control over American finance. (The South, incidentally, had no sane reason to kill Lincoln—he was their last hope in defeat, and many southerners at the time recognized it.)
So much for the political Lincoln—who accomplished his primary goal to pass on to his successor a United States with as many stars in its flag as it had when he took office. Despite Britain, despite the Confederacy; even despite New York City. His primary monument is a flag with fifty stars on it.
(Think of World War I or II with two mutually hostile Americas carrying on their animosity by taking different sides. Life would be unimaginably different for the entire planet without Lincoln.)
But it is as a symbol—as he had already become during the Civil War—that Lincoln is most remembered and loved or hated. The Northern Armies marched singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”. That can be more important than reality. Let’s look at the symbol, the iconic Lincoln tomorrow.
Lincoln is still worthy of his own day. Even if most of us honor—or loath—him for all the wrong reasons. He preserved the Union, yet he was as much a sectionalist as Robert E. Lee. In this government hating era, we must remember that he was—above all—a brilliant politician.
He “emancipated” the slaves, almost literally over his own dead body. He told us in his First Inaugural Address that his primary interest was to preserve the Union—to that end he would free “some of the slaves, all of the slaves or none of the slaves”.
He fully understood that ending slavery was high on the list of very, very few Northerners. His famed Emancipation Proclamation was strictly an appeal to the anti-slavery sentiments of the British electorate—to keep England from entering the war on the Confederacy’s side. It was carefully crafted to free no actual slaves whatsoever.
Throughout much of the war he had to calculate every move based on keeping Europe at bay while imposing what they felt was an illegal blockade on an independent Confederacy. England remained a serious threat until the Russian Navy arrived and parked itself in New York harbor throughout the winter of 1863-4. By late winter we were strong enough to make a serious threat of war ourselves—and England backed off.
But Britain and the Confederacy were only two of Lincoln’s major problems. New York—and its big banks—may have been his biggest. A very good argument can be made that, for both North and South, the largest war issue may have been New York’s desire to impose financial hegemony over the entire federal union.
From the outset, the outsider from the western farm states, had to battle to keep the New Yorkers in his cabinet at bay. His war aims and their war aims were quite different. In the end it can be argued that the New York banking and business interests won the war—and Wall Street became the dominant American power base (don’t forget, during the Cold War, the Communist block always spoke of the enemy as being—not America or Washington—but Wall Street).
Lincoln steadfastly rejected Seward’s appeal for open war with our chief commercial rival, Great Britain, but he was forced to move toward Seward’s radical abolitionism when he lost most other support for the war. It was a constant see-saw.
He never forgot that Prairie states like Illinois had historically depended on their uneasy political alliance with the Plantation South to defend their interests against the eastern banks. In a last desperate move to protect western farmers, Lincoln offered the South an opportunity to lay down its arms, re-enter Congress and vote down the 13th Amendment.
A secret conference was held, no agreement was reached—and a month later Lee surrendered. A week after that Lincoln was dead, and with him went the last obstacle to New York control over American finance. (The South, incidentally, had no sane reason to kill Lincoln—he was their last hope in defeat, and many southerners at the time recognized it.)
So much for the political Lincoln—who accomplished his primary goal to pass on to his successor a United States with as many stars in its flag as it had when he took office. Despite Britain, despite the Confederacy; even despite New York City. His primary monument is a flag with fifty stars on it.
(Think of World War I or II with two mutually hostile Americas carrying on their animosity by taking different sides. Life would be unimaginably different for the entire planet without Lincoln.)
But it is as a symbol—as he had already become during the Civil War—that Lincoln is most remembered and loved or hated. The Northern Armies marched singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”. That can be more important than reality. Let’s look at the symbol, the iconic Lincoln tomorrow.
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