If Barack Obama is as smart as they say he is, he’s fighting off an urge to go somewhere hard to find and hide. Deep inside, maybe, but somewhere that’s gut honest—that’s what he should be wanting to do in those moments when he can afford just to stop and think.
He has to be reading at least some of the same media articles I am: Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Network TV, newspapers, and so forth. I read them and I’m genuinely concerned—for him and for the nation. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
I remember observing the run-ups to the presidencies of Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the first Bush, Clinton, the second Bush—and even the coming of Kennedy’s Camelot. I cannot remember a level of expectation like the present.
It’s as if they are expecting Obama to walk on water, turn the water into enormous amounts of cash, and raise all the debtor banks and corporations from the dead. The Media rave over his every appointment as if the appointees represent the second coming of the Twelve Apostles.
I can’t say Obama is feeding this frenzy. He seems to have a good enough grasp of reality to keep murmuring disclaimers and warning of difficulties ahead. Those who expect him to work miracles just don’t seem to be listening either to him or to the facts.
From the Mediterranean coast to the Indian subcontinent, we seem to be caught in deep quick sand with no obvious or easy way out. Whatever we do, however we extricate ourselves, something’s going to be worse than it was before.
Perhaps it’s like the people who fixed my wife’s laptop computer lately. They had to replace the speakers and that required a new mother board. Putting in the mother board broke the hard drive. (This all worked out well for my wife; she had a good warranty. But there never were guarantees for Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan/India—or Iran, or the fragile regime in Saudi Arabia.)
The best suggestion I’ve heard for that area (Newsweek) is that we pull out all bases—to cut down Muslim resentment at our physical presence—and maintain a balance of power by projecting our influence from outside the region. Great idea—very like Britain’s Nineteenth Century foreign policy, but we’ve already got our feet and hands stuck in the tar baby. It’s one mad tar baby to boot.
In some ways our military/foreign policy situation hasn’t looked this bleak since the combination we faced in early 1942: the fall of the Philippines, a row of sunken battleships, a massive German U-boat assault in the Atlantic, the fall of Tobruk in North Africa, the apparently unstoppable German attack into the Crimea in Russia. And we’re only looking at the top of the ice berg.
It could be pulled out, but it’s going to require all the ducks agreeing to sit in a row perfectly still. (Ask a duck hunter just how easy that is.) In other words, an enormous combination of luck and potentially unpopular moves that may be seen here as defeat. (Who lost China? Remember?)
Then there’s our economic situation. Oh boy. Bottom line is that everything Obama needs to do, everything he has promised to do, everything he is being advised to do is totally, finally, and utterly dependent on China continuing to buy US bonds (debt).
What if China stops? Not because it’s trying to hurt us, necessarily (after all, we’re their biggest market!), but because it is having enough economic and political problems at home—already there is serious unrest among the Chinese because of rising unemployment—so that spending any more cash on American treasuries (funding our national debt) just isn’t feasible? They already have a huge reserve of dollars.
Then where do we find the billions and trillions for bailouts and guarantees? The Japanese have finally stopped buying treasuries; only China is left as a high roller. If the Chinese cash stopped flowing, where would we find the money for better health care, repairs on infrastructure, and 21st Century education that Obama promised last fall?
China’s willingness to go on funding our debt is a slim thread to be hanging by. It’s a little like an NFL team whose only hope for the playoff is for a team that hasn’t been beaten all season to lose its next two games. Talk about needing a little help from your friends! Obama and company really, really do.
What if Obama doesn’t come through on the Messiah like expectations built up around him? Lyndon Johnson got a strong dose of the bile a constituency scorned can spew. I’ve an awful feeling that just as our expectations for Obama are higher and more unrealistic than they were for LBJ, so the bile will burn hotter when it comes.
He may live to wish someone found out he was actually born abroad and thus ineligible for the Presidency.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Never Mind Who--WHERE Was Your Mama?
Rumors are flying again: is Barack Obama a natural born American citizen or isn’t he? If he isn’t that makes him ineligible under the Constitution to be president. His Kenyan grandmother says he was born in Kenya. Hawaii supposedly refuses to affirm that he was born there.
I cannot remember this issue being raised since George Romney ran for the Republican nomination in 1968. It was rumored that his parents had been members of an heretical Mormon sect that took refuge in Mexico about the time of his birth.
Before this became a serious question, Romney’s campaign flamed out in late winter. It hasn’t been an issue since then, and I can’t recall if it ever was before then. It’s certainly never been brought up AFTER a candidate was elected!
The Constitution is unambiguously clear on the point. The American electorate was unambiguously clear on its majority vote for candidate Obama. There is an unusual emotional quotient to his election—the young, the blacks and even a lot of other minorities feel they have a personal stake in Obama.
Many members of these groups, especially the young, have never before been politically active. A lot of them may not be politically sophisticated. Were they to feel that a two hundred year old legal technicality had deprived them of their victory, they are not likely to take it calmly.
In the highly unlikely case that Obama is not legally a natural born American, that’s going to raise Constitutional questions no one ever thought of. Not when Nixon resigned. Not when George W. Bush won the presidency in court. Obama’s ticket won—does that mean that Joe Biden automatically gets sworn in on January 20? (Under the Twelfth Amendment.)
Does the whole ticket get tossed out? (Remember the Supreme Court still has a Republican majority.) Or does the Electoral College get its chance to do something new and original—as is their actual right under the Constitution? Or does it get tossed into the House of Representatives?
Oh, the possibilities! It dazzles the mind. We won’t have seen such engrossing politics since the Watergate Hearings—or the McCarthy Army Hearings. It may also shake the living daylights out of the American political process. Think how happy Wall Street and the banking community will be with new waves of uncertainly washing over them.
Throw in a few likely mass demonstrations, not impossibly a riot or two, and you have a really unstable situation. After the immediate reaction calms down, will most of the new voters go back into their shells never to believe—or vote—again?
Internationally, the leaders and populations who are so excited about a new beginning under Obama, are simply not going to believe it. (The Chinese couldn’t believe it when we squeezed Nixon out for what they saw as a very minor infraction. Almost no one abroad could.)
Many will be sure the real reason was racial. Others will think there was some kind of hidden conspiracy to protect the status quo nationally or internationally. They’ll believe “somebody” powerful just didn’t want Obama’s notion of change.
Today things are merely at the point of a rumor with all the staying power of snow in Puerto Rico. But there is always the outside chance that someone, somewhere will come up with enough evidence to convince enough of the right (or wrong) people to bring things to a head,
The people who are alleging this are serious. Presidents have survived nutty rumors throughout our history. But that, maybe, two percent chance that Obama’s place of birth could be cast into real doubt is one to give everyone a moment’s pause.
I cannot remember this issue being raised since George Romney ran for the Republican nomination in 1968. It was rumored that his parents had been members of an heretical Mormon sect that took refuge in Mexico about the time of his birth.
Before this became a serious question, Romney’s campaign flamed out in late winter. It hasn’t been an issue since then, and I can’t recall if it ever was before then. It’s certainly never been brought up AFTER a candidate was elected!
The Constitution is unambiguously clear on the point. The American electorate was unambiguously clear on its majority vote for candidate Obama. There is an unusual emotional quotient to his election—the young, the blacks and even a lot of other minorities feel they have a personal stake in Obama.
Many members of these groups, especially the young, have never before been politically active. A lot of them may not be politically sophisticated. Were they to feel that a two hundred year old legal technicality had deprived them of their victory, they are not likely to take it calmly.
In the highly unlikely case that Obama is not legally a natural born American, that’s going to raise Constitutional questions no one ever thought of. Not when Nixon resigned. Not when George W. Bush won the presidency in court. Obama’s ticket won—does that mean that Joe Biden automatically gets sworn in on January 20? (Under the Twelfth Amendment.)
Does the whole ticket get tossed out? (Remember the Supreme Court still has a Republican majority.) Or does the Electoral College get its chance to do something new and original—as is their actual right under the Constitution? Or does it get tossed into the House of Representatives?
Oh, the possibilities! It dazzles the mind. We won’t have seen such engrossing politics since the Watergate Hearings—or the McCarthy Army Hearings. It may also shake the living daylights out of the American political process. Think how happy Wall Street and the banking community will be with new waves of uncertainly washing over them.
Throw in a few likely mass demonstrations, not impossibly a riot or two, and you have a really unstable situation. After the immediate reaction calms down, will most of the new voters go back into their shells never to believe—or vote—again?
Internationally, the leaders and populations who are so excited about a new beginning under Obama, are simply not going to believe it. (The Chinese couldn’t believe it when we squeezed Nixon out for what they saw as a very minor infraction. Almost no one abroad could.)
Many will be sure the real reason was racial. Others will think there was some kind of hidden conspiracy to protect the status quo nationally or internationally. They’ll believe “somebody” powerful just didn’t want Obama’s notion of change.
Today things are merely at the point of a rumor with all the staying power of snow in Puerto Rico. But there is always the outside chance that someone, somewhere will come up with enough evidence to convince enough of the right (or wrong) people to bring things to a head,
The people who are alleging this are serious. Presidents have survived nutty rumors throughout our history. But that, maybe, two percent chance that Obama’s place of birth could be cast into real doubt is one to give everyone a moment’s pause.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Recovering From Thanksgiving
On Black Friday (so named because retailers are supposed to break into the black that day), a door guard at a Wal-Mart on Long Island was trampled to death by 2000 anxious customers. They broke the door down just before opening time and went right over top of him. Anyone who tried to help was also trampled—and hospitalized.
After all, only 50 of this or that item on sale—only for as long as they last. There’s something about a limited sale that seems to bring out a truly savage lust in us. We’ll get one of those fifty if we have to sit out all night, and we’re perfectly happy to kill doing it.
What an exquisite commentary on the modern American Thanksgiving. Forget the Pilgrims—fifty percent of whom had died of hunger and disease the winter before—who were just grateful to be alive. Forget the Indians who brought five deer for the feast and stayed for days.
We pack it all into one day now. We have to: tomorrow has the best sales of the year and we have to be up by three or four. Stuff the turkey, stuff ourselves, watch the hapless Detroit Lions play middle school football against pros, and stampede for the gold. Whatever is fifty or more percent off.
I’ve talked to people who managed to hit four or five stores on Black Friday morning. I’m sure that’s nowhere near a record. (If you need to grocery shop that day, go about five o’clock in the evening. Most shoppers have collapsed in exhaustion by then and the store is reasonably empty.)
Is there any correlation between this lust for a bargain—at any human cost—and what’s going on over at the stock exchange these days? Do Wall Street and Wal-Mart have anything in common? Are the people who shop for that 50% off TV anything like the people who madly bought leveraged bundles of highly questionable mortgage papers?
As I’ve said in previous blogs, the problem scarcely began on Wall Street. Those are our kids down there. We taught them how to fudge, how to grasp and how to be completely ruthless in getting what they want. They just took the lessons they learned at home—and Wal-Mart—and applied them to those good jobs they got just out of B-school.
You can be appalled at what went on in the financial markets, but just remember where they first learned greed—at the Mall. In company with mommy and daddy and, later, in company only with mom and dad’s credit card. They didn’t come by it, as if newly sprung from Minerva’s brow, once they hit the Street.
Is there ever a day of actual thanksgiving for them? Do they know the meaning? (I admit, my son complains bitterly because he “hates” turkey.) Do any of us know the meaning? When was the last time most of us were hungry like the Pilgrims?
When was the last time we lay, staring death in the face, surrounded by those who had already died? The Pilgrims, scratching out a living on a strange new continent, months from the closest help, felt they had something to be truly thankful for.
They had plenty to be scared of, but they didn’t concentrate on it. They were thankful for survival. We’re scared because we might lose a bonus, a job, or a vastly overpriced house (remember when what sells for about $250-300 thousand today sold for $35 to $50 thousand? I remember when an $80K house was one whale of a house!). That’s all we can think about.
Take a moment to feel sorry for the door guard on Long Island. He died to make retail profitable—in some executives’ minds that’s as worthy a cause as dying to keep democracy safe. (After all, it was our own president who told us the best and most patriotic response to the 911 assault would be to go out and shop!) So feel as sorry for his family as you might for any dead soldier’s.
Then wonder—just as you wonder what kind of person flies a plane into the World Trade Center—what kind of shopper tramples a man to death and then rushes on to keep shopping.
God help us, they’re not all that different.
After all, only 50 of this or that item on sale—only for as long as they last. There’s something about a limited sale that seems to bring out a truly savage lust in us. We’ll get one of those fifty if we have to sit out all night, and we’re perfectly happy to kill doing it.
What an exquisite commentary on the modern American Thanksgiving. Forget the Pilgrims—fifty percent of whom had died of hunger and disease the winter before—who were just grateful to be alive. Forget the Indians who brought five deer for the feast and stayed for days.
We pack it all into one day now. We have to: tomorrow has the best sales of the year and we have to be up by three or four. Stuff the turkey, stuff ourselves, watch the hapless Detroit Lions play middle school football against pros, and stampede for the gold. Whatever is fifty or more percent off.
I’ve talked to people who managed to hit four or five stores on Black Friday morning. I’m sure that’s nowhere near a record. (If you need to grocery shop that day, go about five o’clock in the evening. Most shoppers have collapsed in exhaustion by then and the store is reasonably empty.)
Is there any correlation between this lust for a bargain—at any human cost—and what’s going on over at the stock exchange these days? Do Wall Street and Wal-Mart have anything in common? Are the people who shop for that 50% off TV anything like the people who madly bought leveraged bundles of highly questionable mortgage papers?
As I’ve said in previous blogs, the problem scarcely began on Wall Street. Those are our kids down there. We taught them how to fudge, how to grasp and how to be completely ruthless in getting what they want. They just took the lessons they learned at home—and Wal-Mart—and applied them to those good jobs they got just out of B-school.
You can be appalled at what went on in the financial markets, but just remember where they first learned greed—at the Mall. In company with mommy and daddy and, later, in company only with mom and dad’s credit card. They didn’t come by it, as if newly sprung from Minerva’s brow, once they hit the Street.
Is there ever a day of actual thanksgiving for them? Do they know the meaning? (I admit, my son complains bitterly because he “hates” turkey.) Do any of us know the meaning? When was the last time most of us were hungry like the Pilgrims?
When was the last time we lay, staring death in the face, surrounded by those who had already died? The Pilgrims, scratching out a living on a strange new continent, months from the closest help, felt they had something to be truly thankful for.
They had plenty to be scared of, but they didn’t concentrate on it. They were thankful for survival. We’re scared because we might lose a bonus, a job, or a vastly overpriced house (remember when what sells for about $250-300 thousand today sold for $35 to $50 thousand? I remember when an $80K house was one whale of a house!). That’s all we can think about.
Take a moment to feel sorry for the door guard on Long Island. He died to make retail profitable—in some executives’ minds that’s as worthy a cause as dying to keep democracy safe. (After all, it was our own president who told us the best and most patriotic response to the 911 assault would be to go out and shop!) So feel as sorry for his family as you might for any dead soldier’s.
Then wonder—just as you wonder what kind of person flies a plane into the World Trade Center—what kind of shopper tramples a man to death and then rushes on to keep shopping.
God help us, they’re not all that different.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Other Problems, Other Places
Would that all we had to worry about were trivial matters like the financial meltdown, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran—or Detroit and a nearly bankrupt California. Alas, President-elect Obama is going to have more on his plate than that. He is probably going to wind up feeling like a clipped Boxer trying to chase its own tail.
India just had what some there are calling “our 911”. Survivors kept pointing out on the news that the perpetrators went to great lengths to identify Americans. Also, it is noted, that the shootings took place in bars and hotels that catered to Westerners, especially Americans.
Among the groups intelligence folk feel are well enough funded and staffed to pull something this well organized off are Al Quida and a Muslim group peevish over the fact that Kashmir isn’t part of Pakistan yet. (And, of course, both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.)
Here’s a major center, where a lot of American business gets done, prone to violent attack. One commentator suggested that outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, India may suffer the most terrorist attacks in the world. Whether we like it or not, this involves significant American interests.
Then there was the picture on the front page of Investor’s Business Daily this week that showed a Russian warship receiving a 21 gun salute from Venezuela as it entered a harbor there. The Russian Navy is holding its first war games off South American shores since the Cold War.
Venezuela’s Chavez assures us this is not in any way meant as a provocation. (No more than I intended a provocation when I punched a kid in the mouth back in the Eighth Grade.) No immediate threat here; just a reminder that lots of places aren’t friendly toward us—right at our back door.
You really cannot blame these two things on George Bush. Kashmir has been a simmering problem since I was in Third Grade. I remember my Sixth Grade history book talking about it. Latin America has a long list of perceived or real grievances against us.
Mexico lost half of its territory to us in 1948 and has never entirely forgotten that California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and so forth are really part of Mexico. (They have a mantra in Mexico: “Poor Mexico, so far from God; so close to the United States.” Poland may have something like that about Russia and Germany. Who knows?)
I suspect a lot of Columbians are fully aware that it was an American gunboat that forced Columbia to give up Panama and its canal rights to effective American control in 1903. Argentina has to feel a bit of resentment over the fact that we ignored the Monroe Doctrine in 1982 and backed Britain over the Falklands.
Speaking of the Monroe Doctrine—how many of you have ever studied what Secretary of State John Q. Adams actually said in that communication? Back in those days the only way to transport cargo from the Midwest to the East Coast was by ship through the Florida straits.
In 1803 we bought Louisiana over top of Spain’s “first right of refusal.” In 1810 we grabbed Mobile from Spain. In 1819 we invaded Florida and took it from Spain. Britain knew that the two remaining threats to our Florida straits sea route were Cuba and Texas—and that it was only a matter of time before we moved on them.
So Britain—the planet’s mightiest super power-- sent us (with all the military muscle of Lichtenstein today) a communiqué offering to go halvsies on those two territories. With all the nerve in the world, Adam’s wrote back that we would take either or both territories as soon as we could, unilaterally.
We have Texas today and we still have a naval base in Cuba, protecting the Florida straits. Mr. Adam’s “Monroe Doctrine” still follows the rubric laid out by Franklin in 1755, “We shall be an empire of liberty from pole to pole and sea to sea”. Latin America is very aware of this imperial attitude.
They haven’t called us the “Colossus of the North” over the past century for nothing. Back in the 1890s, Cuban poet and revolutionary (against Spain that time) Jose Marti put it more starkly. Someone asked him if he’d been in the US. “I have lived in the belly of the Beast,” he replied. It took Castro (who repealed the American imposed Platt Amendment) finally to free Cuba from American control. He has his disciples—like Chavez.
In 1945, the Soviets demanded three votes in the United Nations. Why? “To make up for the twenty you control in Latin America.” (True at the time.) But now, Latin America is our powder keg. We haven’t even talked about narcotics!
Then there are pirates off the east coast of Africa –taking down whole oil tankers. (If that continues, do you have any idea what piracy will do to the price of your gas!?! It will drive insurance rates out of sight.) There are Chinese and Russian hackers draining space and military secrets out of NASA like water out of leaky tub. (Business Week, Dec.1)
The French have listening posts all over the world tapping into our industrial and military computers. The Chinese aren’t upgrading their military out of fear they will be attacked by any of their Asian neighbors! They see the Western Pacific as validly a Chinese sphere of influence as we see the Caribbean. They plan to have the muscle to make it so.
What would we do if Israel really did launch a strike at Iran? What if the corrupt Saudi government (where so much of our oil comes from) collapsed and a completely unfriendly regime took over? What if terrorist attacks in Europe made several governments there feel that it was unsafe to allow American bases to remain? (As improbable, no doubt, as someone daring to blow up the World Trade Center.)
What if—what if—what if? The world felt a lot more predictable and reliable when I was growing up. All we had to worry about was Russian bombs, and that was essentially a stalemate. The “What ifs” of today have so many uncontrollable variables.
Good on you,Mr. Obama, good on you.
India just had what some there are calling “our 911”. Survivors kept pointing out on the news that the perpetrators went to great lengths to identify Americans. Also, it is noted, that the shootings took place in bars and hotels that catered to Westerners, especially Americans.
Among the groups intelligence folk feel are well enough funded and staffed to pull something this well organized off are Al Quida and a Muslim group peevish over the fact that Kashmir isn’t part of Pakistan yet. (And, of course, both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.)
Here’s a major center, where a lot of American business gets done, prone to violent attack. One commentator suggested that outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, India may suffer the most terrorist attacks in the world. Whether we like it or not, this involves significant American interests.
Then there was the picture on the front page of Investor’s Business Daily this week that showed a Russian warship receiving a 21 gun salute from Venezuela as it entered a harbor there. The Russian Navy is holding its first war games off South American shores since the Cold War.
Venezuela’s Chavez assures us this is not in any way meant as a provocation. (No more than I intended a provocation when I punched a kid in the mouth back in the Eighth Grade.) No immediate threat here; just a reminder that lots of places aren’t friendly toward us—right at our back door.
You really cannot blame these two things on George Bush. Kashmir has been a simmering problem since I was in Third Grade. I remember my Sixth Grade history book talking about it. Latin America has a long list of perceived or real grievances against us.
Mexico lost half of its territory to us in 1948 and has never entirely forgotten that California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and so forth are really part of Mexico. (They have a mantra in Mexico: “Poor Mexico, so far from God; so close to the United States.” Poland may have something like that about Russia and Germany. Who knows?)
I suspect a lot of Columbians are fully aware that it was an American gunboat that forced Columbia to give up Panama and its canal rights to effective American control in 1903. Argentina has to feel a bit of resentment over the fact that we ignored the Monroe Doctrine in 1982 and backed Britain over the Falklands.
Speaking of the Monroe Doctrine—how many of you have ever studied what Secretary of State John Q. Adams actually said in that communication? Back in those days the only way to transport cargo from the Midwest to the East Coast was by ship through the Florida straits.
In 1803 we bought Louisiana over top of Spain’s “first right of refusal.” In 1810 we grabbed Mobile from Spain. In 1819 we invaded Florida and took it from Spain. Britain knew that the two remaining threats to our Florida straits sea route were Cuba and Texas—and that it was only a matter of time before we moved on them.
So Britain—the planet’s mightiest super power-- sent us (with all the military muscle of Lichtenstein today) a communiqué offering to go halvsies on those two territories. With all the nerve in the world, Adam’s wrote back that we would take either or both territories as soon as we could, unilaterally.
We have Texas today and we still have a naval base in Cuba, protecting the Florida straits. Mr. Adam’s “Monroe Doctrine” still follows the rubric laid out by Franklin in 1755, “We shall be an empire of liberty from pole to pole and sea to sea”. Latin America is very aware of this imperial attitude.
They haven’t called us the “Colossus of the North” over the past century for nothing. Back in the 1890s, Cuban poet and revolutionary (against Spain that time) Jose Marti put it more starkly. Someone asked him if he’d been in the US. “I have lived in the belly of the Beast,” he replied. It took Castro (who repealed the American imposed Platt Amendment) finally to free Cuba from American control. He has his disciples—like Chavez.
In 1945, the Soviets demanded three votes in the United Nations. Why? “To make up for the twenty you control in Latin America.” (True at the time.) But now, Latin America is our powder keg. We haven’t even talked about narcotics!
Then there are pirates off the east coast of Africa –taking down whole oil tankers. (If that continues, do you have any idea what piracy will do to the price of your gas!?! It will drive insurance rates out of sight.) There are Chinese and Russian hackers draining space and military secrets out of NASA like water out of leaky tub. (Business Week, Dec.1)
The French have listening posts all over the world tapping into our industrial and military computers. The Chinese aren’t upgrading their military out of fear they will be attacked by any of their Asian neighbors! They see the Western Pacific as validly a Chinese sphere of influence as we see the Caribbean. They plan to have the muscle to make it so.
What would we do if Israel really did launch a strike at Iran? What if the corrupt Saudi government (where so much of our oil comes from) collapsed and a completely unfriendly regime took over? What if terrorist attacks in Europe made several governments there feel that it was unsafe to allow American bases to remain? (As improbable, no doubt, as someone daring to blow up the World Trade Center.)
What if—what if—what if? The world felt a lot more predictable and reliable when I was growing up. All we had to worry about was Russian bombs, and that was essentially a stalemate. The “What ifs” of today have so many uncontrollable variables.
Good on you,Mr. Obama, good on you.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The Gentle Ones
This is a postscript to yesterday’s blog. I spoke of the rudeness and shamelessness I have come to expect from today’s high school kids. Today I had a reverse experience while substitute teaching. It’s worth commenting on.
I took the place of the regular teacher in a room full of courteous, gentle, kindly high school kids that remembered me from my past visits. They went out of their way to let me know they were happy to see me again (that’s odd in the life of a substitute!). They obeyed almost instantly when asked to do something.
They were so unbelievably polite. A quick, smiling thank you or thanks for anything I did for them—including passing out work they had to do. That’s what really stood out. I turned to the teacher’s aide for the room and noted how strange I found it that these special kids could be so much more polite and nice to me than so-called “normal” kids.
I spent the day with a room full of intellectually challenged high schoolers. One was in a wheel chair, barely able to sit upright; he also had difficulty speaking clearly. Another one would only answer in mono-syllables. There was at least one Down’s syndrome child. There was a young lady whose arms didn’t quite move synchronomously with her legs, but she had the most dazzling smile.
Everyone present had a real problem. But that didn’t keep them from having a wonderful time today. It was the last school day before Thanksgiving. For years and years this particular suburban district has had a tradition among its special students.
All the high school students and their high school teachers get on the bus and ride over to the middle school where they have a party with their old teachers. Suddenly it’s a group of twenty or special needs kids – delighted to be with each other. They watched a movie (Wall-E) with slapstick comedy that had them howling with laughter.
They ate a hot lunch specially prepared for them by their teachers. (My room brought over the pumpkin and apple pies with whipped cream.) They played in the gym together—grades six through twelve—and they played board games together. I was amazed: there was no quarreling.
Oh, I’ve had these kids on other days when there were lessons to go through. They can squabble with each other like any other roomful of kids, but it doesn’t last or ever get really nasty.
I admit; I sit here puzzled. The “normal” kids who are going on to colleges or other careers so often seem to hate being in school. They seem so much less happy. They are much cruder and nastier to each other. I rarely if ever enjoy a room with “normal” kids the way I enjoy days with these kids.
Or is it something Christ said two thousand years ago. “Unless you become like a little child you shall in no way enter in.” Are these special needs kids more like little children in ways “normal” people have forgotten to be?
Are they too limited to fully understand that life is meant to be crude and miserable? Are the ones some people call “dummies” too dumb to know that the proper response to adults is either to ignore them or to be as insulting and arch as you possibly dare?
They certainly aren’t perfect, but there is a way the kids I was with today are more alive than many groups I’ve subbed for other days. They haven’t yet shut something down deep in their souls. Their minds may be limited, even very limited, but their spirits are still alive.
That sets them apart from so many “normals”. Sometimes you have to be where I was today to realize how sad the lives of so many “normal” kids are.
In some real way, the horrific diagnoses of these kids was a blessing.
I took the place of the regular teacher in a room full of courteous, gentle, kindly high school kids that remembered me from my past visits. They went out of their way to let me know they were happy to see me again (that’s odd in the life of a substitute!). They obeyed almost instantly when asked to do something.
They were so unbelievably polite. A quick, smiling thank you or thanks for anything I did for them—including passing out work they had to do. That’s what really stood out. I turned to the teacher’s aide for the room and noted how strange I found it that these special kids could be so much more polite and nice to me than so-called “normal” kids.
I spent the day with a room full of intellectually challenged high schoolers. One was in a wheel chair, barely able to sit upright; he also had difficulty speaking clearly. Another one would only answer in mono-syllables. There was at least one Down’s syndrome child. There was a young lady whose arms didn’t quite move synchronomously with her legs, but she had the most dazzling smile.
Everyone present had a real problem. But that didn’t keep them from having a wonderful time today. It was the last school day before Thanksgiving. For years and years this particular suburban district has had a tradition among its special students.
All the high school students and their high school teachers get on the bus and ride over to the middle school where they have a party with their old teachers. Suddenly it’s a group of twenty or special needs kids – delighted to be with each other. They watched a movie (Wall-E) with slapstick comedy that had them howling with laughter.
They ate a hot lunch specially prepared for them by their teachers. (My room brought over the pumpkin and apple pies with whipped cream.) They played in the gym together—grades six through twelve—and they played board games together. I was amazed: there was no quarreling.
Oh, I’ve had these kids on other days when there were lessons to go through. They can squabble with each other like any other roomful of kids, but it doesn’t last or ever get really nasty.
I admit; I sit here puzzled. The “normal” kids who are going on to colleges or other careers so often seem to hate being in school. They seem so much less happy. They are much cruder and nastier to each other. I rarely if ever enjoy a room with “normal” kids the way I enjoy days with these kids.
Or is it something Christ said two thousand years ago. “Unless you become like a little child you shall in no way enter in.” Are these special needs kids more like little children in ways “normal” people have forgotten to be?
Are they too limited to fully understand that life is meant to be crude and miserable? Are the ones some people call “dummies” too dumb to know that the proper response to adults is either to ignore them or to be as insulting and arch as you possibly dare?
They certainly aren’t perfect, but there is a way the kids I was with today are more alive than many groups I’ve subbed for other days. They haven’t yet shut something down deep in their souls. Their minds may be limited, even very limited, but their spirits are still alive.
That sets them apart from so many “normals”. Sometimes you have to be where I was today to realize how sad the lives of so many “normal” kids are.
In some real way, the horrific diagnoses of these kids was a blessing.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Whatever Happened to Shame?
“Hey, look,” the kid said to me. He was grinning as he pulled up his pant leg, “I got fleas. This,” he pointed to the band around his shin, “kills fleas.” He was utterly unembarrassed, unchagrinned.
I didn’t bother to ask why he had the tether. That would, to his mind, have been completely irrelevant. It would have been. I’ve seen so many tethers on high school kids, called so many names for attendance, only to have somebody call out, “He’s in court.” Or “he’s in jail.”
No shame attaches to it. Occasionally I will overhear older boys impressing younger students with descriptions of what it is like “inside”—or how to survive it. Very often a prison record is a badge of honor. I hear the pride in a younger brother’s voice as he explains that his older sibling is doing time.
Pregnant girls feel no disgrace either. Nor does the boy or girl who explains why the assignment isn’t done or the test cannot be taken. “I was kicked out last week.” Or there’s the student I find casually rifling through a teacher’s desk. He or she is merely annoyed at being asked to stop.
There’s the thirteen year old girl whose mother tells her to go out and get pregnant—“We need the welfare cheque.” After you’ve been subbing in a dozen districts in over fifty schools—suburban and inner city—these things no longer faze you.
It’s like living in New York and learning to step over the drunk lying prostrate on the sidewalk without looking down. (If you try to help or question him, he will merely curse you.) So you let these comments and discussions go right on past you.
Occasionally a student will leer at you and ask, “Did you hear what he [or she] said?” I plead deafness or pretend not to have heard the question. Just the way I recently ignored the dope deal going down in a suburban high school, right out in the parking lot—next to my car.
But I can’t help overhearing some of it. The things young men and young women freely say to each other—and the vocabulary they use to say it—stun me. (I’ve known what most four-letter words mean since I was in middle school—but we didn’t suggest that someone actually do it, right in class.)
Then there’s the way they dress. Sagging pants, with the belt line barely above mid thigh is no longer limited to inner city schools. I’ve seen all the underpants (or buttock cleavage above low cut jeans) I ever want to, male and female.
When a young lady in a middle class school comes up to my desk and leans over to ask a question, it can be distracting to look at her. Very little more is hidden than was in a 1950s Playboy. It was been suggested to me that middle class mothers are proud that their daughters make such appealing bait.
We have become a society completely devoid of shame or embarrassment. That may explain why some of the same people that made millions fraudulently selling overleveraged mortgages have changed company names and gone right back into business pressing the FHA to take on equally fraudulent government guaranteed mortgages.
(Businessweek reports that the Federal Housing Authority has only three people who check up on the backgrounds of these reincarnated mortgage brokers—with the same previously indicted officers. Nobody’s taking it too seriously, but BW suggests that the FHA may become your next Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Nobody’s embarrassed.)
If they were never taught that there are actions to be ashamed of as kids, why would we ever expect them to know it as adults?
Shame is like the burn mechanism in our skins. It teaches us that certain things should be left alone—that some things should not be touched. Medical research will tell you what kinds of horrible things can happen to someone who has lost his or her sense of pain. He literally doesn’t realize when he’s burning up.
Horrible things can happen to a society in which the shame mechanism has been lost, too. We’ve been seeing that on Wall Street lately. They hurt because they’ve lost money (or a job), but they’re not embarrassed or ashamed.
That makes the rest of us hurt.
I didn’t bother to ask why he had the tether. That would, to his mind, have been completely irrelevant. It would have been. I’ve seen so many tethers on high school kids, called so many names for attendance, only to have somebody call out, “He’s in court.” Or “he’s in jail.”
No shame attaches to it. Occasionally I will overhear older boys impressing younger students with descriptions of what it is like “inside”—or how to survive it. Very often a prison record is a badge of honor. I hear the pride in a younger brother’s voice as he explains that his older sibling is doing time.
Pregnant girls feel no disgrace either. Nor does the boy or girl who explains why the assignment isn’t done or the test cannot be taken. “I was kicked out last week.” Or there’s the student I find casually rifling through a teacher’s desk. He or she is merely annoyed at being asked to stop.
There’s the thirteen year old girl whose mother tells her to go out and get pregnant—“We need the welfare cheque.” After you’ve been subbing in a dozen districts in over fifty schools—suburban and inner city—these things no longer faze you.
It’s like living in New York and learning to step over the drunk lying prostrate on the sidewalk without looking down. (If you try to help or question him, he will merely curse you.) So you let these comments and discussions go right on past you.
Occasionally a student will leer at you and ask, “Did you hear what he [or she] said?” I plead deafness or pretend not to have heard the question. Just the way I recently ignored the dope deal going down in a suburban high school, right out in the parking lot—next to my car.
But I can’t help overhearing some of it. The things young men and young women freely say to each other—and the vocabulary they use to say it—stun me. (I’ve known what most four-letter words mean since I was in middle school—but we didn’t suggest that someone actually do it, right in class.)
Then there’s the way they dress. Sagging pants, with the belt line barely above mid thigh is no longer limited to inner city schools. I’ve seen all the underpants (or buttock cleavage above low cut jeans) I ever want to, male and female.
When a young lady in a middle class school comes up to my desk and leans over to ask a question, it can be distracting to look at her. Very little more is hidden than was in a 1950s Playboy. It was been suggested to me that middle class mothers are proud that their daughters make such appealing bait.
We have become a society completely devoid of shame or embarrassment. That may explain why some of the same people that made millions fraudulently selling overleveraged mortgages have changed company names and gone right back into business pressing the FHA to take on equally fraudulent government guaranteed mortgages.
(Businessweek reports that the Federal Housing Authority has only three people who check up on the backgrounds of these reincarnated mortgage brokers—with the same previously indicted officers. Nobody’s taking it too seriously, but BW suggests that the FHA may become your next Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Nobody’s embarrassed.)
If they were never taught that there are actions to be ashamed of as kids, why would we ever expect them to know it as adults?
Shame is like the burn mechanism in our skins. It teaches us that certain things should be left alone—that some things should not be touched. Medical research will tell you what kinds of horrible things can happen to someone who has lost his or her sense of pain. He literally doesn’t realize when he’s burning up.
Horrible things can happen to a society in which the shame mechanism has been lost, too. We’ve been seeing that on Wall Street lately. They hurt because they’ve lost money (or a job), but they’re not embarrassed or ashamed.
That makes the rest of us hurt.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Have All The Bells Tolled Yet?
As a magazine, I have often heard BusinessWeek Magazine called “too bullish”, a “Chamber of Commerce” booster and a few other things that suggested it was not reliable on the downside. Well, you can take that all back this week. (Dec. 1, 2008)
Headlines ran from “Toxic Assets: Still No Takers” (housing securities) and “Cruel Christmas: How Many [retailers] Will Fall?” to “A [government] `Guarantee’ May Not Be Worth Much” and “America’s Lifeline – Exports—Is Fraying Fast”. On the cover is the caption to a picture of a wolf: “The Subprime Wolves Are Back and they’re feeding off the bailout.”
Jack and Suzy Welch spend their back of book column suggesting that the best thing General Motors and Chrysler can do is go bankrupt and combine. That’s definitely not too bullish, and none of it sounds like a Chamber of Commerce puff piece.
I caught a blurb on National Public Radio Friday morning when they were interviewing Senator Dodd about the bailout—specifically the $300,000 that’s already been handed out to various financial institutions. The idea was—and Congresses’—mandate to the Treasury was to kick start the lending process. Get banks to start putting out more loans.
Dodd said Congress (on both sides of the aisle) is very frustrated. Loans are not being made. Credit is as dead as it was last month before the bailout. What Dodd said he believes is happening is that instead of using the cash they’ve received from Uncle Sam to make loans, banks are sitting on to tide themselves over the rough patches they see ahead.
He strongly hinted that some banks have not yet been altogether candid in reporting how badly they’ve been stung by huge investments in subprime loans. These banks are using bailout cash to postpone the evil day when they have to give a full report and take their lumps.
They are doing this in the desperate hope that before the dies irae comes, things will return to “normal” and they will be able to unload their subprime holding to some other investor, bank, governmental entity somewhere and never have to take a loss on it.
That is, in all likelihood, absurdly wishful thinking—but it is doing two bad things. One, it is tying up the bailout money that was meant to give the economy a nice start. Two, it is just putting off a major day of reckoning that will have to hit with all of its negative force sometime. A good argument could be made, “Better sooner than later”, but these institutions intend to hold out as long as possible.
You could argue that Paulson and his bailout, however unwittingly, have just been enablers for a bunch of fiscal drunks who don’t want to sober up. That’s going to be bad for us. It looks like we’re going to take a major double whammy early in the New Year as it is.
Several retail chains look like they will be holding their final “After Christmas Sale” in January, and it looks like very nasty things are going to happen in the automotive sector at about the same time. The way the banks are playing it, we could get hit hard in the financial sector soon after.
Supposedly Paulson’s bailout package was going to get the credit/financial mess cleared up before the end of this year. Not if Dodd’s right. And from everything I’m reading, no one has any clear idea how much anybody owes to anyone else right now. That, as much as any Soviet threat in the 1960s is a genuine cause for concern!
(Oh well, maybe George Bush can do what he did after 911. He can go on the air and urge all Americans to support their economy by going out and spending. It seemed to work then. Or, is that partly why we are in such a pickle now?)
The poet John Donne wrote: “…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." By coincidence he wrote that in 1624 just as the first English colony in America was finding its way out of a very nearly lethal depression (they had resorted to cannibalism to survive).
If he wrote today, Mr. Donne might better put it: Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, just find out if it’s the LAST bell.
Headlines ran from “Toxic Assets: Still No Takers” (housing securities) and “Cruel Christmas: How Many [retailers] Will Fall?” to “A [government] `Guarantee’ May Not Be Worth Much” and “America’s Lifeline – Exports—Is Fraying Fast”. On the cover is the caption to a picture of a wolf: “The Subprime Wolves Are Back and they’re feeding off the bailout.”
Jack and Suzy Welch spend their back of book column suggesting that the best thing General Motors and Chrysler can do is go bankrupt and combine. That’s definitely not too bullish, and none of it sounds like a Chamber of Commerce puff piece.
I caught a blurb on National Public Radio Friday morning when they were interviewing Senator Dodd about the bailout—specifically the $300,000 that’s already been handed out to various financial institutions. The idea was—and Congresses’—mandate to the Treasury was to kick start the lending process. Get banks to start putting out more loans.
Dodd said Congress (on both sides of the aisle) is very frustrated. Loans are not being made. Credit is as dead as it was last month before the bailout. What Dodd said he believes is happening is that instead of using the cash they’ve received from Uncle Sam to make loans, banks are sitting on to tide themselves over the rough patches they see ahead.
He strongly hinted that some banks have not yet been altogether candid in reporting how badly they’ve been stung by huge investments in subprime loans. These banks are using bailout cash to postpone the evil day when they have to give a full report and take their lumps.
They are doing this in the desperate hope that before the dies irae comes, things will return to “normal” and they will be able to unload their subprime holding to some other investor, bank, governmental entity somewhere and never have to take a loss on it.
That is, in all likelihood, absurdly wishful thinking—but it is doing two bad things. One, it is tying up the bailout money that was meant to give the economy a nice start. Two, it is just putting off a major day of reckoning that will have to hit with all of its negative force sometime. A good argument could be made, “Better sooner than later”, but these institutions intend to hold out as long as possible.
You could argue that Paulson and his bailout, however unwittingly, have just been enablers for a bunch of fiscal drunks who don’t want to sober up. That’s going to be bad for us. It looks like we’re going to take a major double whammy early in the New Year as it is.
Several retail chains look like they will be holding their final “After Christmas Sale” in January, and it looks like very nasty things are going to happen in the automotive sector at about the same time. The way the banks are playing it, we could get hit hard in the financial sector soon after.
Supposedly Paulson’s bailout package was going to get the credit/financial mess cleared up before the end of this year. Not if Dodd’s right. And from everything I’m reading, no one has any clear idea how much anybody owes to anyone else right now. That, as much as any Soviet threat in the 1960s is a genuine cause for concern!
(Oh well, maybe George Bush can do what he did after 911. He can go on the air and urge all Americans to support their economy by going out and spending. It seemed to work then. Or, is that partly why we are in such a pickle now?)
The poet John Donne wrote: “…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." By coincidence he wrote that in 1624 just as the first English colony in America was finding its way out of a very nearly lethal depression (they had resorted to cannibalism to survive).
If he wrote today, Mr. Donne might better put it: Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, just find out if it’s the LAST bell.
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