I was paging through a college Philosophy text the other day, and I came to the section on logical fallacies. As I was skimming, I realized something was missing. Where had my old favorite – Reducto ad Absurdum – gone off to? Where was Argumentum ad Baculum or Argumentum ad Hominum? They were all written in English.
It seemed like a good idea when John XXIII tossed Latin out of the Catholic Church back in the early 1960s – but I miss it. Reciting, “I believe in God the Father almighty” will never have the solemnity and awesomeness of “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotatem” sung by a cleric with a good voice. But that’s no doubt gone forever.
With it has gone Latin phraseology in all sorts of places – text books, legal terminology, off-hand comments. It’s no longer recognized by students; it’s no longer used.
Do you remember the “Tonight Show” when Truman Capote called Johnny Carson, “Sui generus”? Has a nicer feel than “one of a kind”, doesn’t it? Or, when a playwright cheats and gets his plot moving again with something that just doesn’t fit – would you call what he used a “Deus ex Machina”? Then again it could just be a “god from the box” (or machine), couldn’t it?
Do you remember when almost any school kid could translate Caesar’s summation of his wars: “Veni, vidi, vici”? “I came, I saw, I conquered.” How many kids talking American history can translate the national motto: “e pluribus unum”? Can you?
How about one of your most precious legal rights – the right not to be thrown into prison and left there without a charge or a trial? “Habeas corpus” (“let’s have the body!”) sounds better in Latin. Ever since I sat through some law school courses, “Res ipse loquitur” (“the thing speaks for itself”) has been a favorite expression of mine.
There is so much Latin that became part of everyday English – “ad hoc”, “et cetera”, “non sequitur”, “vox populi, vox dei”, “de facto”, and “vice versa”, to name a few. I’d hate to see them go the way of the Latin Mass. “Ita Missa est”? (“Go it is the dismissal”, or the end of the mass)
When William Shakespeare’s competitors wanted to insult him, they would sneer that the Bard was a man of “little Latin and less Greek”. In terms of the Sixteenth Century, he was considered uneducated. Perhaps we can say of modern American students they have “little English and less Latin”. The two may very well go together.
They wouldn’t let me out of high school without taking a year or two of Latin.
(I got sick of commenting on Wall Street and the floundering bail out. Everything has been said about that silliness that can possibly be said – until more consequences become apparent. As to the political campaign, that passed mere tedium long ago. Again, we must wait for consequences.)
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
To Fear or Not to Fear: Is that the Question?
The House voted No. All hell broke loose at the New York Stock Exchange. As one pundit put it, the House refused to pony up $700 billion; the market lost $1.1 trillion. This, we are told, endangers pension funds, money market funds and business in general.
It is certainly being presented as an all but unparalleled crisis. Is it? I confess I have no feeling one way or the other. Are we in a real crisis – or is this an effort to scare us enough so that we are finally willing to cover a lot of bad loans?
It’s a fair question, actually. Even if the market (the world’s largest gossip mill) tumbles again tomorrow, is it a true crisis – or are we hearing a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy? Again, I have no feeling one way or the other; I’m merely aware that there are two ways to view this mess.
All the media say this is the real thing, a real live disaster. So say the President, the candidates, the Street, Congressional leaders, and everyone who claims to speak for someone else. Can all these people be wrong? More to the point, could all these people be in collusion, wittingly or no?
Something that happened when I was a youngster working at the Newsweek Magazine editorial make-up desk keeps nibbling at my mind. At the time the John Birch Society was all over the media with its allegations that we were being sold out to the Communists.
The Society was getting all kinds of ink, all kinds of exposure. One Monday when we were putting together the magazine’s Periscope section, the editorial assistant offered the editor yet another story about the machinations of the John Birch Society. He declined it. “We’ve been told,” he said, “not to run any more stories about them.”
I assumed that was just a Newsweek policy. But over the next few months – starting from that very week, I suddenly realized there was nothing about the Society in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the television networks or any other paper I could check out. (We got them all at Newsweek.)
So whose policy was it? All those editors and news bureau chiefs met at the same club and voted unanimously? I find it hard to believe.
Then there’s the infamous or famous NSC-68. National Security Council study sixty eight. Back in early 1950. Now that World War II was past and gone, the American economy was tanking with no more war production. It almost seemed as if we were going back to 1938 and the Depression.
This top secret document – later declassified – talked at length about the need to revitalize our defense industries to counter the imminent Russian threat. (Now Joe Stalin was possibly nastier than Hitler, but his country was in ruins in the late 1940s. He had a few atomic bombs but no way to deliver them. He had kept his Yalta agreements and backed down more than once to American force.
NSC-68 was beating a nearly dead horse. But within months, a five year old Korean civil war escalated into a crusade for Democracy (after Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State advertently or inadvertently drew the North Koreans offside by making a speech (Feb 1950) in which he told the world South Korea was not included in our defense perimeter.)
Feeling they had a free hand, the North Korean decided to end the civil war once and for all that June. This led to the Korean War – which effectively frightened Congress and the media into authorizing huge new defense expenditures. No more 1938.
You may call that all a huge Communist plot, but the paper trail simply does not lead that way. Or how about my German Jewish friend who took a job in Voice of America, broadcasting to Germany during WWII? Having grown up under Hitler, he had a suspicion of government.
He began to notice that American troops and bases were popping up all over the world, far from any theatre of war. He made a map, putting dots on it for all these new American bases. One day his supervisor saw that map. My friend was fired the next day.
Why such fear of a map of American bases? Michael Crichton wrote a novel a few years ago called A State of Fear. His whole thesis was that it has been a deliberate policy of American officials and opinion makers to keep this nation in a state of fear so that this or that policy could be implemented.
So, it isn’t entirely ridiculous to stop a moment and ask, “Okay, how real is the need for a multi-billion dollar bailout on Wall Street?” As I say, I have not real feeling on this. I do know the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do feel a nagging doubt, a question or two.
I’m left wondering if Franklin Roosevelt was more right than he knew when he warned that “All we have to fear is fear itself.” He said that during a major financial crisis – the one this one is being compared to.
It is certainly being presented as an all but unparalleled crisis. Is it? I confess I have no feeling one way or the other. Are we in a real crisis – or is this an effort to scare us enough so that we are finally willing to cover a lot of bad loans?
It’s a fair question, actually. Even if the market (the world’s largest gossip mill) tumbles again tomorrow, is it a true crisis – or are we hearing a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy? Again, I have no feeling one way or the other; I’m merely aware that there are two ways to view this mess.
All the media say this is the real thing, a real live disaster. So say the President, the candidates, the Street, Congressional leaders, and everyone who claims to speak for someone else. Can all these people be wrong? More to the point, could all these people be in collusion, wittingly or no?
Something that happened when I was a youngster working at the Newsweek Magazine editorial make-up desk keeps nibbling at my mind. At the time the John Birch Society was all over the media with its allegations that we were being sold out to the Communists.
The Society was getting all kinds of ink, all kinds of exposure. One Monday when we were putting together the magazine’s Periscope section, the editorial assistant offered the editor yet another story about the machinations of the John Birch Society. He declined it. “We’ve been told,” he said, “not to run any more stories about them.”
I assumed that was just a Newsweek policy. But over the next few months – starting from that very week, I suddenly realized there was nothing about the Society in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the television networks or any other paper I could check out. (We got them all at Newsweek.)
So whose policy was it? All those editors and news bureau chiefs met at the same club and voted unanimously? I find it hard to believe.
Then there’s the infamous or famous NSC-68. National Security Council study sixty eight. Back in early 1950. Now that World War II was past and gone, the American economy was tanking with no more war production. It almost seemed as if we were going back to 1938 and the Depression.
This top secret document – later declassified – talked at length about the need to revitalize our defense industries to counter the imminent Russian threat. (Now Joe Stalin was possibly nastier than Hitler, but his country was in ruins in the late 1940s. He had a few atomic bombs but no way to deliver them. He had kept his Yalta agreements and backed down more than once to American force.
NSC-68 was beating a nearly dead horse. But within months, a five year old Korean civil war escalated into a crusade for Democracy (after Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State advertently or inadvertently drew the North Koreans offside by making a speech (Feb 1950) in which he told the world South Korea was not included in our defense perimeter.)
Feeling they had a free hand, the North Korean decided to end the civil war once and for all that June. This led to the Korean War – which effectively frightened Congress and the media into authorizing huge new defense expenditures. No more 1938.
You may call that all a huge Communist plot, but the paper trail simply does not lead that way. Or how about my German Jewish friend who took a job in Voice of America, broadcasting to Germany during WWII? Having grown up under Hitler, he had a suspicion of government.
He began to notice that American troops and bases were popping up all over the world, far from any theatre of war. He made a map, putting dots on it for all these new American bases. One day his supervisor saw that map. My friend was fired the next day.
Why such fear of a map of American bases? Michael Crichton wrote a novel a few years ago called A State of Fear. His whole thesis was that it has been a deliberate policy of American officials and opinion makers to keep this nation in a state of fear so that this or that policy could be implemented.
So, it isn’t entirely ridiculous to stop a moment and ask, “Okay, how real is the need for a multi-billion dollar bailout on Wall Street?” As I say, I have not real feeling on this. I do know the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do feel a nagging doubt, a question or two.
I’m left wondering if Franklin Roosevelt was more right than he knew when he warned that “All we have to fear is fear itself.” He said that during a major financial crisis – the one this one is being compared to.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Where This Christian Stands
So where do I stand? As a Christian, at a time when Governor Palin has brought the issue of Christianity as a belief system that affects political life to the forefront, that’s a valid question. So I’ll risk being a bore by trying to answer it.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
Where one Christian stands
So where do I stand? As a Christian, at a time when Governor Palin has brought the issue of Christianity as a belief system that affects political life to the forefront, that’s a valid question. So I’ll risk being a bore by trying to answer it.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Pogo: "We've met the Enemy and He's Us"
The media are trumpeting the news that Main Street is angry with Wall Street and wants someone punished. The folk on Wall Street are from a different planet? They live differently from the folk on Main Street? They’re alien invaders who have inflicted great pain on innocent victims?
Excuse me, who buys stocks and bonds? Who rushes from one hot tip to the next? Just the people who work along the old Dutch Wall? There’s a totally different society in downtown Manhattan that in no way resembles the one on Main Street?
Oh phooey. Wall Street sinned by over leveraging, by not being liquid enough, by taking wildly optimistic views of future prospects? By being greedy? By speculating? Too much exuberance -- taking on unrealistic amounts of debt?
Again, phooey. The young men waving their fingers and wildly bidding down on the floors of our exchanges are our own kids. They grew up in American homes that were leveraged to the hilt, hadn’t enough liquidity to keep a bank open, and where wildly optimistic views of the future were the norm.
These kids grew up greedy – they absorbed it in their mother’s milk and their dad’s speculation. They watched the exuberance with which televisions, appliances, automobiles, homes, clothes and groceries were all bought on credit. Their lives were leveraged at birth.
When a $90 field trip came up in high school, there was never any question like, “Can we afford this; ought we to afford it?” Out came the credit card or the cash advance. This was true of all of life. They were raised as if each home were a small government with its own printing press churning out money in the basement.
When these kid left Main Street (and borrowed their way through college and graduate school – leveraged education), what made you think they would suddenly become models of fiscal probity and discretion? Why would a lifetime of engrained habit change just because they were working for Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch?
If they didn’t know restraint and good sense before they went to work on the Street, what in Heaven’s name made you think they would learn it there?
Isn’t there any difference between Wall Street and Main Street? You bet your life there is. The misfeasance that takes place on Main Street is too small to bother with for most regulatory or taxing agencies. So the consequences are minimal to none.
I recall a friend of mine who owned his own store. One day he had to go to a wedding. He reached into the cash register and pulled out $20 to buy a shirt. That is so illegal under IRS regulations. But to put an agent in every store in America to watch for that kind of misappropriation just wouldn’t be cost effective – so it goes on all the time.
The IRS will tell you that one of its biggest problems is convincing a small businessman that the cash in his cash drawer isn’t his until it is duly recorded and issued as a paycheck. Until then, he is misappropriating just as much as any embezzler or thief.
When the same shenanigan happens involving millions or more dollars – then the IRS takes note and spends the money to get it back. Same thing goes on with regulation. Miniscule kinds of misbehavior on Main Street aren’t worth the trouble. But when its billions – or trillions – on Wall Street?
Yell all you like at Wall Street. Comfort yourself with the belief that “they” did this to you. But before you opt for big time punishment, ask yourself where this kind of behavior was learned. Look in the mirror.
Excuse me, who buys stocks and bonds? Who rushes from one hot tip to the next? Just the people who work along the old Dutch Wall? There’s a totally different society in downtown Manhattan that in no way resembles the one on Main Street?
Oh phooey. Wall Street sinned by over leveraging, by not being liquid enough, by taking wildly optimistic views of future prospects? By being greedy? By speculating? Too much exuberance -- taking on unrealistic amounts of debt?
Again, phooey. The young men waving their fingers and wildly bidding down on the floors of our exchanges are our own kids. They grew up in American homes that were leveraged to the hilt, hadn’t enough liquidity to keep a bank open, and where wildly optimistic views of the future were the norm.
These kids grew up greedy – they absorbed it in their mother’s milk and their dad’s speculation. They watched the exuberance with which televisions, appliances, automobiles, homes, clothes and groceries were all bought on credit. Their lives were leveraged at birth.
When a $90 field trip came up in high school, there was never any question like, “Can we afford this; ought we to afford it?” Out came the credit card or the cash advance. This was true of all of life. They were raised as if each home were a small government with its own printing press churning out money in the basement.
When these kid left Main Street (and borrowed their way through college and graduate school – leveraged education), what made you think they would suddenly become models of fiscal probity and discretion? Why would a lifetime of engrained habit change just because they were working for Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch?
If they didn’t know restraint and good sense before they went to work on the Street, what in Heaven’s name made you think they would learn it there?
Isn’t there any difference between Wall Street and Main Street? You bet your life there is. The misfeasance that takes place on Main Street is too small to bother with for most regulatory or taxing agencies. So the consequences are minimal to none.
I recall a friend of mine who owned his own store. One day he had to go to a wedding. He reached into the cash register and pulled out $20 to buy a shirt. That is so illegal under IRS regulations. But to put an agent in every store in America to watch for that kind of misappropriation just wouldn’t be cost effective – so it goes on all the time.
The IRS will tell you that one of its biggest problems is convincing a small businessman that the cash in his cash drawer isn’t his until it is duly recorded and issued as a paycheck. Until then, he is misappropriating just as much as any embezzler or thief.
When the same shenanigan happens involving millions or more dollars – then the IRS takes note and spends the money to get it back. Same thing goes on with regulation. Miniscule kinds of misbehavior on Main Street aren’t worth the trouble. But when its billions – or trillions – on Wall Street?
Yell all you like at Wall Street. Comfort yourself with the belief that “they” did this to you. But before you opt for big time punishment, ask yourself where this kind of behavior was learned. Look in the mirror.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Not Trippingly on the Tongue
I cannot say who won the debate tonight. In 1960, I thought Nixon had won. Of course, I was judging on content not style. (Radio listeners thought Nixon won, too. TV gave the more handsome Kennedy his edge.) When it comes to style, I do have some things to say about Obama.
Like Kennedy, he looks young, handsome and he articulates some impressive generalities that , again like Kennedy, give him a strong superficial appeal. I keep hearing and reading people who say that Senator Obama is such a good speech maker.
I don’t see it. I didn’t see it tonight. He stammers, he persists in dropping all “g”s from his present participles. While I will listen and learn from people who do that, I will not call them excellent speakers. Picky, picky, picky – but all I hear from the media is what an orator he is.
An orator? A first class public speaker? Hardly. Not in my book.
McCain is no Churchill or Kennedy – but at least he spoke as if he knew the subject he was talking about. There were moments of real passion in his voice.
Obama, on the other hand, speaks as if he were reciting from an only partially memorized speech. He shoots out a few words, without a lot of feeling, and then he hesitates as if he were looking for the next words on a paper or a teleprompter.
It feels like a ride over a bumpy road in a vehicle with bad shock absorbers. I honestly do not enjoy listening to him – just his manner of speaking – one bit. He even says things I think I may agree with, but his delivery is so poor that I am left unimpressed and unmoved. I’ve felt that way about him since the first time a saw a news clip of one of his speeches, long ago.
So does that make him a poor choice for president? I admit that right now I am judging him on his style of speaking. And that I profoundly dislike that style. That leaves me unqualified to judge who actually won. Even if I tried, would I know? I was wrong about Kennedy/Nixon.
I fear there’s a disconnect between me and many if not most American listeners. My father unwittingly turned me into a bit of a freak when it comes to spoken English. He had trained to be an actor, done graduate work in speech, and was determined to pass it along to his only son.
Some of his efforts were enjoyable. I have fond memories of listening to my father read Shakespeare to me on a Sunday afternoons. I was seven or eight. I’ve read research that says that’s the best age to enjoy the comedies – pure slapstick. He read them all.
Other parts were not such fun. There was discipline and strong disapproval if I dipped into slang or careless speech patterns. “You will learn to speak the King’s English!” he would bellow. (In Grand Rapids? I quickly became the fat kid with glasses and a funny accent. People still ask me, 60 years later, where I came from.)
He made a point of taking me to movies where English was well spoken – Olivier, Laughton, Niven, Hepburn -- and Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas on radio. I remember when I was young being taken to the radio to hear a speech by a man named Winston Churchill. I believe that was the Fulton, Missouri, speech when he spoke of the “iron curtain”.
On Christmas Eve I would listen to Lionel Barrymore read “The Christmas Carol” – and haven’t liked any other version better ever since.
My father never missed an opportunity to point out to me someone who spoke English well – or badly.
So I’m in no position to accurately gauge the quality of an American political speaker. Or who won an American political debate. But, I have to admit, I do not like Obama’s speaking style.
Like Kennedy, he looks young, handsome and he articulates some impressive generalities that , again like Kennedy, give him a strong superficial appeal. I keep hearing and reading people who say that Senator Obama is such a good speech maker.
I don’t see it. I didn’t see it tonight. He stammers, he persists in dropping all “g”s from his present participles. While I will listen and learn from people who do that, I will not call them excellent speakers. Picky, picky, picky – but all I hear from the media is what an orator he is.
An orator? A first class public speaker? Hardly. Not in my book.
McCain is no Churchill or Kennedy – but at least he spoke as if he knew the subject he was talking about. There were moments of real passion in his voice.
Obama, on the other hand, speaks as if he were reciting from an only partially memorized speech. He shoots out a few words, without a lot of feeling, and then he hesitates as if he were looking for the next words on a paper or a teleprompter.
It feels like a ride over a bumpy road in a vehicle with bad shock absorbers. I honestly do not enjoy listening to him – just his manner of speaking – one bit. He even says things I think I may agree with, but his delivery is so poor that I am left unimpressed and unmoved. I’ve felt that way about him since the first time a saw a news clip of one of his speeches, long ago.
So does that make him a poor choice for president? I admit that right now I am judging him on his style of speaking. And that I profoundly dislike that style. That leaves me unqualified to judge who actually won. Even if I tried, would I know? I was wrong about Kennedy/Nixon.
I fear there’s a disconnect between me and many if not most American listeners. My father unwittingly turned me into a bit of a freak when it comes to spoken English. He had trained to be an actor, done graduate work in speech, and was determined to pass it along to his only son.
Some of his efforts were enjoyable. I have fond memories of listening to my father read Shakespeare to me on a Sunday afternoons. I was seven or eight. I’ve read research that says that’s the best age to enjoy the comedies – pure slapstick. He read them all.
Other parts were not such fun. There was discipline and strong disapproval if I dipped into slang or careless speech patterns. “You will learn to speak the King’s English!” he would bellow. (In Grand Rapids? I quickly became the fat kid with glasses and a funny accent. People still ask me, 60 years later, where I came from.)
He made a point of taking me to movies where English was well spoken – Olivier, Laughton, Niven, Hepburn -- and Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas on radio. I remember when I was young being taken to the radio to hear a speech by a man named Winston Churchill. I believe that was the Fulton, Missouri, speech when he spoke of the “iron curtain”.
On Christmas Eve I would listen to Lionel Barrymore read “The Christmas Carol” – and haven’t liked any other version better ever since.
My father never missed an opportunity to point out to me someone who spoke English well – or badly.
So I’m in no position to accurately gauge the quality of an American political speaker. Or who won an American political debate. But, I have to admit, I do not like Obama’s speaking style.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Hell Hath no Fury like an Electorate Scorned
An acquaintance of mine who works for a public college in New England plans to take November 4 off from work and drive students to the polls. She’s in her forties, and Obama has her and the students around her really, really excited.
The news media – mainly written by people too young to remember 1960 very well – are agog with enthusiasm about how Senator Obama has inspired young voters. That may well be as wonderful a thing as they say it is.
But I do remember 1960 – and its aftermath. Jack Kennedy had the kids rooting for him, too. I recall that even fourteen and fifteen year old youngsters were sporting Kennedy buttons and pictures and talking up the dynamic young candidate that year.
Their enthusiasm – and the machinations of some political bosses in Illinois and Texas – got the Kennedy Johnson ticket elected. The nation waited breathlessly to see what this new generation would bring to Washington and create in that city.
What a spate of Earth-shattering legislation poured out over the next ten years! We got Medicaid, Medicare, the Peace Corps, domestic volunteer programs, huge urban renewal programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, programs to end poverty in Appalachia and throughout the United States. Federal aid to education grew exponentially, there were Food Stamps for the hungry, stronger environmental protection, student loans and grants, The President’s Council for Physical Fitness -- a veritable cornucopia of benefits.
It is doubtful that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave us anything like as much. It was a heady time to be in Washington. We were going to end poverty and cure all the nation’s ills. We really believed. I, a life-long Republican, got carried along – with rare enthusiasm.
I voted for LBJ in 1964. There were large groups of Republicans for Johnson. Everett Dirksen, the hoary spokesman for a Conservative Republican Party would declaim of the once anathema civil rights legislation that it was, “an idea whose time has come!”
I was, I admit, a true believer. I brought charges against factories that would not integrate. I published photos of hospital waiting rooms that no longer had “white” and “black” signs, but they had carefully positioned potted plants to divide the races. We got rid of the plants. We were bringing in the Millennium.
Events and circumstances reared their ugly heads.
Seven, eight years after that fateful election (three, four years after LBJ’s landslide re-election in 1964) the nation was burning, American cities were surrounded by tanks and checkpoints, students were facing bayonets and screaming their rage. Some of the same kids who had been so enthusiastic in 1960 were now shrieking imprecations at the administration they had elected.
We marched on the Pentagon. (I marched, too.) Some of the placards that described the administration that had brought us Civil Rights, Medicare and anti-poverty programs were positively obscene.
Kids pulled back from politics. They dropped out and turned on in a wave of drug use that bedevils us today. (I have sat in high school parking lots recently and watched the drug deals go down between white, middle class kids. When I went to school, we didn’t know what the stuff was.)
Civil Rights didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. The Black Panthers carried guns. Cities burned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered – by whites. Malcolm X was gunned down – by blacks. Our black allies in the Civil Rights movement showed us the door.
Students, armed with Peace Corps experience and student aid, showed only contempt and loathing for the colleges they were supposed to benefit from.
An army came home from Vietnam confused and embittered. No cheers – just derisive chants of “How many babies did you kill?” It took decades to restore their morale.
Raging students shrieked, “Peace Now!!” with hate contorted faces in the exact, angry cadence of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. “Sieg Heil” and “Peace Now” became indistinguishable. I withdrew from a peace movement I had once supported.
The kids – the nation – felt betrayed. All these wonderful goodies the Kennedy/Johnson years gave us – and the Millennium was somehow delayed. Poverty, death, discrimination went right on. Kennedy’s mellifluous promises had not solved all our woes, assuaged all our grief. The electorate of 1960 did not forgive.
No matter who is elected this year, no matter what he promises; his administration won’t solve much either. I just don’t want to go through another spasm of outrage when these enthusiastic kids my acquaintance is driving to the polls figure that out.
Progress, social and political, is a long, slow process. As you vote, remember that.
The news media – mainly written by people too young to remember 1960 very well – are agog with enthusiasm about how Senator Obama has inspired young voters. That may well be as wonderful a thing as they say it is.
But I do remember 1960 – and its aftermath. Jack Kennedy had the kids rooting for him, too. I recall that even fourteen and fifteen year old youngsters were sporting Kennedy buttons and pictures and talking up the dynamic young candidate that year.
Their enthusiasm – and the machinations of some political bosses in Illinois and Texas – got the Kennedy Johnson ticket elected. The nation waited breathlessly to see what this new generation would bring to Washington and create in that city.
What a spate of Earth-shattering legislation poured out over the next ten years! We got Medicaid, Medicare, the Peace Corps, domestic volunteer programs, huge urban renewal programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, programs to end poverty in Appalachia and throughout the United States. Federal aid to education grew exponentially, there were Food Stamps for the hungry, stronger environmental protection, student loans and grants, The President’s Council for Physical Fitness -- a veritable cornucopia of benefits.
It is doubtful that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave us anything like as much. It was a heady time to be in Washington. We were going to end poverty and cure all the nation’s ills. We really believed. I, a life-long Republican, got carried along – with rare enthusiasm.
I voted for LBJ in 1964. There were large groups of Republicans for Johnson. Everett Dirksen, the hoary spokesman for a Conservative Republican Party would declaim of the once anathema civil rights legislation that it was, “an idea whose time has come!”
I was, I admit, a true believer. I brought charges against factories that would not integrate. I published photos of hospital waiting rooms that no longer had “white” and “black” signs, but they had carefully positioned potted plants to divide the races. We got rid of the plants. We were bringing in the Millennium.
Events and circumstances reared their ugly heads.
Seven, eight years after that fateful election (three, four years after LBJ’s landslide re-election in 1964) the nation was burning, American cities were surrounded by tanks and checkpoints, students were facing bayonets and screaming their rage. Some of the same kids who had been so enthusiastic in 1960 were now shrieking imprecations at the administration they had elected.
We marched on the Pentagon. (I marched, too.) Some of the placards that described the administration that had brought us Civil Rights, Medicare and anti-poverty programs were positively obscene.
Kids pulled back from politics. They dropped out and turned on in a wave of drug use that bedevils us today. (I have sat in high school parking lots recently and watched the drug deals go down between white, middle class kids. When I went to school, we didn’t know what the stuff was.)
Civil Rights didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. The Black Panthers carried guns. Cities burned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered – by whites. Malcolm X was gunned down – by blacks. Our black allies in the Civil Rights movement showed us the door.
Students, armed with Peace Corps experience and student aid, showed only contempt and loathing for the colleges they were supposed to benefit from.
An army came home from Vietnam confused and embittered. No cheers – just derisive chants of “How many babies did you kill?” It took decades to restore their morale.
Raging students shrieked, “Peace Now!!” with hate contorted faces in the exact, angry cadence of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. “Sieg Heil” and “Peace Now” became indistinguishable. I withdrew from a peace movement I had once supported.
The kids – the nation – felt betrayed. All these wonderful goodies the Kennedy/Johnson years gave us – and the Millennium was somehow delayed. Poverty, death, discrimination went right on. Kennedy’s mellifluous promises had not solved all our woes, assuaged all our grief. The electorate of 1960 did not forgive.
No matter who is elected this year, no matter what he promises; his administration won’t solve much either. I just don’t want to go through another spasm of outrage when these enthusiastic kids my acquaintance is driving to the polls figure that out.
Progress, social and political, is a long, slow process. As you vote, remember that.
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