“Vanity Fair” never seems to learn. It got into the polling business many decades ago and predicted noisesomely that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. (Landon did carry two states.) Even my Republican dad admitted to voting for FDR that year.
So “Vanity Fair” went out of business—a rare instance of something actually dying of embarrassment. It came back a few years ago and now it’s back in the polling business—and is expressing shock at its own poll results. It seems that just about half the people who took the poll think Walmart “symbolizes American today”.
“Vanity Fair” sputtered that “only a cynic would really THINK that.” “Vanity Fair’s” problem is that doesn’t get off Manhattan Island (located far off the coast of the United States somewhere). I’ve lived on Manhattan for years—loved it. But I tried never to lose sight of reality.
Periodically I would find myself looking for a particularly American product, not available on that island. I would apologize for my persistence, explaining, “I was raised in a foreign country.” To the inevitable question, which one?, I would answer, “The United States.”
What the editors and poll takers at “Vanity Fair” don’t really understand about this nation is that its culture and life style are built on LOW PRICES. This precludes a lot of shopping at places like Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s, Gucchi’s, Georg Jenson and the like.
Long before Walmart, there were discount stores on Fifth Avenue—E.J.Korvette’s was just a couple of blocks down from Saks in the 1960s. The America we know and live in was built on stores like Korvette’s, K-Mart, Costco and Walmart, to name a few.
They enable us to own luxuries, look prosperous and faintly stylish with an outlay that leaves us enough for groceries. A comparison between French female secretaries and their American counterparts that I read years ago makes a good point about this country.
The Parisian women owned three or four outfits—all stylish, well made and enduring. They thought nothing of wearing the same outfit twice in a week, knowing it bespoke quality. The New York secretaries wouldn’t have been caught dead in the same outfit twice in a week—even twice in two weeks.
They bought much cheaper outfits and lots of them. Their closets were FULL of variety without undue quality. Reminds me of a young woman I knew years ago. She went to Kmart and bought a new winter coat nearly every year—for about $69.00 each.
I suggested to her that if she went to a better store in this area and bought a coat for, say, $175, it would last her for five, even ten years—a clear savings. She was horrified. She lived for the variety, the change. Walmart, when it came along, was designed for her.
Lee Iacocca, an icon in America for style and dash in his automobiles, was never accused of building QUALITY into his machines. No one ever mistook a K-car or a Mustang for a Mercedes. The buyer just wanted something that might look a bit like a European equivalent. And cost less.
They are right. Walmart symbolizes America. It’s not cynicism; it’s reality. Walmart above all allows us to be what we like to imagine we actually are (I doubt if the French girls are under nearly as many illusions about themselves).
However that may be, Walmart R Us.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Iran, Missiles and Pride
Iran is scaring the daylights out of lots of people these days. Rockets that could hold nuclear missiles and reach Israel and/or American troops in the neighborhood—ouch. The more we protest and issue threats the faster their nuclear program seems to go.
Hardly a man is still alive who can remember when the Iranians were our pet allies in the Middle East, no threat to Israel, a reliable source of fuel oil (after all, Iranian wells were where it all began about a century ago), governed by a pliant Shah.
During World War II, we and the British took over the southern third of Iran, the Russians took over the northern third, and the middle third was left to the Iranians. It became a vast highway for us to pump Lend Lease supplies into Russia to use against Germany.
When the Shah held a celebration of Iran’s first twenty-five hundred years as a world power in 1972, everyone else snickered. His leash was too obvious. But Iran HAS been around for thousands of years. Its people are terribly proud of their history.
They are aware that it was Persia that helped bring down the Assyrian Empire, squashed Neo-Babylonia and drove Marc Anthony into the sea and scared Cleopatra witless. They took Jerusalem and nearly wiped out Herod’s family a few years before Christ was born.
When Iranian Magi (high priests/astronomers/astrologers ) showed up for Christ’s birth, even the Bible admits they scared the wits out of their old enemy, Herod, and came with a large enough army to block his secret police from traveling six miles to Bethlehem.
Then there was a seven century cold/hot war with Rome, fought on respectably equal terms. During Europe’s Dark and Middle ages, great empires rose and fell in what is now Iran.
I’ve watched an Iranian embassy employee nearly spit over the term, “Gifts of the Greeks”. Iranians feel that what Greece gave to the West was largely what came to them from Persia—what they didn’t vandalize and destroy. Agree or disagree, that’s pride.
In fact the blond, blue-eyed Greeks of antiquity sprang from the same blood stock—as did the tribes who went north and destroyed the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Just change the Iranian tribal name, “Kerman,” through a lingual shift to “German” and you’ve got it.
Iranian becomes Aryan—“the noble”—or the “master race”. When Hebrews and Christians cast around for a way to describe their deity, they couldn’t come up with much better than the ancient name for Persian/Iranian kings: Shah an Shah (king of kings) and Aryan of the Aryans (lord of lords).
In case you’re missing my point, this is a PROUD people, even arrogant. Now that they are out from under the Western thumb, it would be silly to think that they would accept a world in which some other nations held monopolies on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Such weapons, in their minds, BELONG to a people that ground Roman legions underfoot as well as a whole lot of other first class troops. How annoying they find it when other nations who already have atomic arsenals tell them to be good world citizens and renounce their rights.
Iranians are no more likely to listen to such preachments from American officials than the United States would have listened to anybody who tried to limit us from our destiny back in our history. Remember when London tried to take away our dream of a coast-to-coast empire back in 1767? We took on the whole British Empire to make it happen. We were ready in 1821, 1846, 1864 and 1895.
Whatever we want to DO about Iran, we better figure we’re dealing with a people a lot like us. They have our kind of pride and they’re not easily going to be persuaded to quit. Nasty thought—Britain backed down in all four years listed above. Did they know something we refuse to see?
In any case, we’d be wise to take a better look at what and whom we are dealing with.
Hardly a man is still alive who can remember when the Iranians were our pet allies in the Middle East, no threat to Israel, a reliable source of fuel oil (after all, Iranian wells were where it all began about a century ago), governed by a pliant Shah.
During World War II, we and the British took over the southern third of Iran, the Russians took over the northern third, and the middle third was left to the Iranians. It became a vast highway for us to pump Lend Lease supplies into Russia to use against Germany.
When the Shah held a celebration of Iran’s first twenty-five hundred years as a world power in 1972, everyone else snickered. His leash was too obvious. But Iran HAS been around for thousands of years. Its people are terribly proud of their history.
They are aware that it was Persia that helped bring down the Assyrian Empire, squashed Neo-Babylonia and drove Marc Anthony into the sea and scared Cleopatra witless. They took Jerusalem and nearly wiped out Herod’s family a few years before Christ was born.
When Iranian Magi (high priests/astronomers/astrologers ) showed up for Christ’s birth, even the Bible admits they scared the wits out of their old enemy, Herod, and came with a large enough army to block his secret police from traveling six miles to Bethlehem.
Then there was a seven century cold/hot war with Rome, fought on respectably equal terms. During Europe’s Dark and Middle ages, great empires rose and fell in what is now Iran.
I’ve watched an Iranian embassy employee nearly spit over the term, “Gifts of the Greeks”. Iranians feel that what Greece gave to the West was largely what came to them from Persia—what they didn’t vandalize and destroy. Agree or disagree, that’s pride.
In fact the blond, blue-eyed Greeks of antiquity sprang from the same blood stock—as did the tribes who went north and destroyed the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Just change the Iranian tribal name, “Kerman,” through a lingual shift to “German” and you’ve got it.
Iranian becomes Aryan—“the noble”—or the “master race”. When Hebrews and Christians cast around for a way to describe their deity, they couldn’t come up with much better than the ancient name for Persian/Iranian kings: Shah an Shah (king of kings) and Aryan of the Aryans (lord of lords).
In case you’re missing my point, this is a PROUD people, even arrogant. Now that they are out from under the Western thumb, it would be silly to think that they would accept a world in which some other nations held monopolies on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Such weapons, in their minds, BELONG to a people that ground Roman legions underfoot as well as a whole lot of other first class troops. How annoying they find it when other nations who already have atomic arsenals tell them to be good world citizens and renounce their rights.
Iranians are no more likely to listen to such preachments from American officials than the United States would have listened to anybody who tried to limit us from our destiny back in our history. Remember when London tried to take away our dream of a coast-to-coast empire back in 1767? We took on the whole British Empire to make it happen. We were ready in 1821, 1846, 1864 and 1895.
Whatever we want to DO about Iran, we better figure we’re dealing with a people a lot like us. They have our kind of pride and they’re not easily going to be persuaded to quit. Nasty thought—Britain backed down in all four years listed above. Did they know something we refuse to see?
In any case, we’d be wise to take a better look at what and whom we are dealing with.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Longer School Year? First Stop Boring Us!
Rumor has it that President Obama is thinking about substantially lengthening the school year. It’s not a new idea. Every since the Russians beat us into space in 1957, we’ve been trying to think of new ways to crank out more and better engineers.
Some countries have longer school weeks and years. Charter schools hold summer and Saturday sessions. Obama points out that our current school year was essentially designed around the farm schedule so boys could be home to help with the crops.
That, admittedly, is not a particularly valid reason for keeping the present school year—since the majority of Americans (and kids) have been urban since the 1920 census. In west Michigan, which depends heavily on the tourist trade, it is useful to have the kids available to work the resorts between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Losing them would hurt.
It might be helpful in the inner city to have a place for kids to go during the long, hot summers, far from any beaches or middle class summer vacations and activities. Increasingly, Americans of all classes depend on school as a baby sitting service while they work.
It would cut back on day care expenses if school were held on more days. The lady next door to me runs a day care center; she sees how frantic parents become when there are unscheduled days off from school for weather—and she cannot legally take more children during school hours.
It is also quite true that kids can forget a lot of algebra if they are away from it for three solid months. In Europe they shorten the summer vacation and give longer vacations in the spring and winter. This helps to avoid the problem we have here where teachers often complain about the amount of time they spend each fall reviewing what was taught in the spring.
There are good arguments for lengthening the school year; good arguments for not. Possibly it is a matter that should be considered district by district—so that the kids in west Michigan can work to keep the resorts open—and the kids in Detroit can have some place to go in the summer where there are meals, activities and academic reinforcement.
Some people are going to object to that, saying it’s undemocratic or discriminatory. But there really are different situations in this country and, possibly, we are going to have to react to them differently.
A lot of kids in inner cities don’t have the chance to go to Yellowstone or Europe in the summer—or to gain useful work experience. They don’t go to soccer camp, basketball camp or baseball camp. They don’t do family camping trips or spend summers at a cottage.
Around here they do. It seems a shame to deprive them. But I have another issue. Before we decide to shorten summer vacation, let’s make sure “more school” isn’t “more of the same school.” We’re boring the living daylights out of our kids.
When I substitute I watch the boredom on their faces. I remember when I graduated from high school—and reflected on the previous twelve years I’d spent in school. I suddenly became very angry—realizing that I had wasted six out of the last twelve years.
They could have taught me everything they taught me from K through 12 in no more than six years. I could easily have been in college by age fourteen or so. So could most of my friends. The school system wasted YEARS of my time. Trying to imagine several more weeks a year of the same repetitious and almost pointless drivel leaves me aghast even now!
If and when we open schools for additional weeks, let’s make sure we have something that captures the imagination of the captive students. Maybe we could give teachers acting lessons. It’s all well and good to know the subject—but also make it INTERESTING!
My field is history. Most kids who hate it have never been taught it well. I suspect that’s true in nearly every field. Kids stay interested in computer classes, art classes and even music classes—they could be induced to stay interested in math or English literature. If we just taught it as something exciting and interesting.
If you’re going to bore me, stick to 39 weeks. Even less. Above all, Mr. Obama, make sure the new and longer classes are INTERESTING. Enough methodology. Enough droning. Reread Hamlet’s advice to the actors—teach like that!!
Some countries have longer school weeks and years. Charter schools hold summer and Saturday sessions. Obama points out that our current school year was essentially designed around the farm schedule so boys could be home to help with the crops.
That, admittedly, is not a particularly valid reason for keeping the present school year—since the majority of Americans (and kids) have been urban since the 1920 census. In west Michigan, which depends heavily on the tourist trade, it is useful to have the kids available to work the resorts between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Losing them would hurt.
It might be helpful in the inner city to have a place for kids to go during the long, hot summers, far from any beaches or middle class summer vacations and activities. Increasingly, Americans of all classes depend on school as a baby sitting service while they work.
It would cut back on day care expenses if school were held on more days. The lady next door to me runs a day care center; she sees how frantic parents become when there are unscheduled days off from school for weather—and she cannot legally take more children during school hours.
It is also quite true that kids can forget a lot of algebra if they are away from it for three solid months. In Europe they shorten the summer vacation and give longer vacations in the spring and winter. This helps to avoid the problem we have here where teachers often complain about the amount of time they spend each fall reviewing what was taught in the spring.
There are good arguments for lengthening the school year; good arguments for not. Possibly it is a matter that should be considered district by district—so that the kids in west Michigan can work to keep the resorts open—and the kids in Detroit can have some place to go in the summer where there are meals, activities and academic reinforcement.
Some people are going to object to that, saying it’s undemocratic or discriminatory. But there really are different situations in this country and, possibly, we are going to have to react to them differently.
A lot of kids in inner cities don’t have the chance to go to Yellowstone or Europe in the summer—or to gain useful work experience. They don’t go to soccer camp, basketball camp or baseball camp. They don’t do family camping trips or spend summers at a cottage.
Around here they do. It seems a shame to deprive them. But I have another issue. Before we decide to shorten summer vacation, let’s make sure “more school” isn’t “more of the same school.” We’re boring the living daylights out of our kids.
When I substitute I watch the boredom on their faces. I remember when I graduated from high school—and reflected on the previous twelve years I’d spent in school. I suddenly became very angry—realizing that I had wasted six out of the last twelve years.
They could have taught me everything they taught me from K through 12 in no more than six years. I could easily have been in college by age fourteen or so. So could most of my friends. The school system wasted YEARS of my time. Trying to imagine several more weeks a year of the same repetitious and almost pointless drivel leaves me aghast even now!
If and when we open schools for additional weeks, let’s make sure we have something that captures the imagination of the captive students. Maybe we could give teachers acting lessons. It’s all well and good to know the subject—but also make it INTERESTING!
My field is history. Most kids who hate it have never been taught it well. I suspect that’s true in nearly every field. Kids stay interested in computer classes, art classes and even music classes—they could be induced to stay interested in math or English literature. If we just taught it as something exciting and interesting.
If you’re going to bore me, stick to 39 weeks. Even less. Above all, Mr. Obama, make sure the new and longer classes are INTERESTING. Enough methodology. Enough droning. Reread Hamlet’s advice to the actors—teach like that!!
Friday, September 25, 2009
Afghanistan -- Crunch Time
Boy, would I hate to be the chap who makes the decision on Afghanistan. Go or stay? More troops; fewer troops? Back Kharzai, shoot Kharzai (ala Diem in South Vietnam), abandon Kharzai? Very likely the decision maker will find he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
First of all we’re talking about a nasty piece of landlocked real estate. To get so much as a single cup of water or a single bullet to our troops there, we are dependent entirely on the kindness of “friends”. Like Pakistan, Turkmenistan or Tajikistan. (The latter two require an interesting over flight near Iran and Russia).
So, hoping that everyone stays friendly enough that we can get our troops back out is a small but actual consideration. We’re also dependent on the willingness of NATO to send its troops into harm’s way. This hasn’t always worked so well in the past.
We’re up against a nation of Hatfields and McCoys. For centuries the inhabitants of that prohibitively mountainous land have made a habit of shooting at anybody on the road in the valleys. Al Qaida found a home here partly because its world view isn’t all that different from that of the Afghanis over the past centuries.
The ancient Silk Road (running from Damascus to northern China) often veered north of Afghanistan to avoid the larcenous tribesmen. Alexander the Great briefly conquered the area, then he pulled back to a string of forts designed to pen the Afghani in. This was safer.
The British lost a whole army to the Afghans in the 1840s (Kabul still has buildings pock marked with bullet holes from that battle). It became a no-man’s land during the long cold war that went on between Britain and Russia in the Nineteenth Century.
The British got nominal control over Afghani foreign policy during a second war with Afghanistan in the 1870s. In 1919 a third Afghani war cost Britain all control over Afghanistan and left it, again, an independent group of tribesmen feuding with each other.
The British built enduring governments and nations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They had no such success in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the Russians had their go at controlling Pakistan. We supplied people like bin Laden with modern weapons, the Russians conceded defeat and, somewhat as a consequence, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The only man who ever made a serious impact on Afghanistan was Genghis Khan. He depopulated whole areas of Afghanistan—rarely in history has there ever been a man who was so whole-heartedly into mass slaughter. Nasty, but it worked.
This was a language Afghanis understood—and the whole area was well behaved for nearly a century—allowing Marco Polo to travel all the way to China! But that’s what it took to bring peace to the area. Depopulation. Nation building? Good luck.
These historical precedents are not encouraging. The British, Macedonians and Russians couldn’t cut it militarily. Can we? In those mountains? Do we have the political stomach to do it Genghis Khan’s way?
I doubt it. I rather hope not. Is this, as it was for Russia twenty years ago, another Vietnam sucking in whole units of troops?
What horror if we walk out and al Quida walks back in with a vengeful Taliban? Will any building in New York be safe? Have we tried so much and only grabbed the tail of the tiger? If we go, if we stay—the question isn’t “which will be better?” but only “which will be worse?” Find a good option if you can. Ask Alexander or the British or the Russians. Talk to the Great Khan.
How much do we want to spend? In blood and cash? I’m so glad I don’t have to make that decision. Cuss out Obama if you will—but find a solution first.
First of all we’re talking about a nasty piece of landlocked real estate. To get so much as a single cup of water or a single bullet to our troops there, we are dependent entirely on the kindness of “friends”. Like Pakistan, Turkmenistan or Tajikistan. (The latter two require an interesting over flight near Iran and Russia).
So, hoping that everyone stays friendly enough that we can get our troops back out is a small but actual consideration. We’re also dependent on the willingness of NATO to send its troops into harm’s way. This hasn’t always worked so well in the past.
We’re up against a nation of Hatfields and McCoys. For centuries the inhabitants of that prohibitively mountainous land have made a habit of shooting at anybody on the road in the valleys. Al Qaida found a home here partly because its world view isn’t all that different from that of the Afghanis over the past centuries.
The ancient Silk Road (running from Damascus to northern China) often veered north of Afghanistan to avoid the larcenous tribesmen. Alexander the Great briefly conquered the area, then he pulled back to a string of forts designed to pen the Afghani in. This was safer.
The British lost a whole army to the Afghans in the 1840s (Kabul still has buildings pock marked with bullet holes from that battle). It became a no-man’s land during the long cold war that went on between Britain and Russia in the Nineteenth Century.
The British got nominal control over Afghani foreign policy during a second war with Afghanistan in the 1870s. In 1919 a third Afghani war cost Britain all control over Afghanistan and left it, again, an independent group of tribesmen feuding with each other.
The British built enduring governments and nations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They had no such success in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the Russians had their go at controlling Pakistan. We supplied people like bin Laden with modern weapons, the Russians conceded defeat and, somewhat as a consequence, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The only man who ever made a serious impact on Afghanistan was Genghis Khan. He depopulated whole areas of Afghanistan—rarely in history has there ever been a man who was so whole-heartedly into mass slaughter. Nasty, but it worked.
This was a language Afghanis understood—and the whole area was well behaved for nearly a century—allowing Marco Polo to travel all the way to China! But that’s what it took to bring peace to the area. Depopulation. Nation building? Good luck.
These historical precedents are not encouraging. The British, Macedonians and Russians couldn’t cut it militarily. Can we? In those mountains? Do we have the political stomach to do it Genghis Khan’s way?
I doubt it. I rather hope not. Is this, as it was for Russia twenty years ago, another Vietnam sucking in whole units of troops?
What horror if we walk out and al Quida walks back in with a vengeful Taliban? Will any building in New York be safe? Have we tried so much and only grabbed the tail of the tiger? If we go, if we stay—the question isn’t “which will be better?” but only “which will be worse?” Find a good option if you can. Ask Alexander or the British or the Russians. Talk to the Great Khan.
How much do we want to spend? In blood and cash? I’m so glad I don’t have to make that decision. Cuss out Obama if you will—but find a solution first.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Obama -- A Fallen Messiah?
Last November, I remember warning that Obama was coming to office with way higher expectations than he could ever hope to fulfill. I warned that when the crowd hails someone as a “Messiah” he can go from Palm Sunday (“Crown him!”) to Good Friday (“Crucify him!”) in a trice.
People expected Obama to walk on water, heal the sick and raise the dead. Well…, Afghanistan looks more dead today than it did last fall; a sensible health care bill looks beyond healing, and while Obama may not have fully fallen into the water with his Wall Street reforms, he is certainly up to his knees—and sinking.
The Independents have abandoned him; the Democrats are growing restive; and the Republican Right with its non-stop, drum fire of hatred has pulled itself up to the point of being a real threat in 2010. Obama doesn’t have a lot of reliable friends beside his dog and his kids.
Obama is limping from wounds that came from both sides. He allowed—partially in response to Republican complaints—his own health care bill to reach a thousand pages in length. That’s reading “War and Peace” just to get a hospital bill paid. Isn’t going to fly well.
Then his Democratic friends (very much acting on Obama’s own beliefs) larded the bill with provisions guaranteeing federal funds for elective abortions (killing the kid because he or she is inconvenient rather than because he’s a medical threat to mom), hitherto for illegal.
That motivated the daylights out of the Republican and Christian right—who, admittedly, would rather see a thousand babies die of medical neglect than one be aborted. This one provision is making the whole bill anathema to all sorts of people who might otherwise favor health care reform.
A sensible politician would have recognized that just to get health care reform passed initially, you leave things like elective abortions for later. You get the do-able done. Then you try for the moon. Watching Obama stumble on health care has encouraged banks and other institutions facing new regulations to start pushing back.
Nothing is going terribly well for Obama right now. Friends and foes are starting to call him “wishy-washy” as he backs and fills in the face of new objections and realities. I don’t think he’s so much a waffler as I think he’s a product of an elite law school.
That’s where they train you to argue all day and, like reasonable men, go out with your opponent for a drink in the evening. That’s how lawyers work. It may breed cynicism, but it keeps life sane. But it is no training for a man who must face uncompromising hatred from his opponents. That’s what’s permeating our political life right now. Obama wasn’t prepared for it.
Political hostility hasn’t been this bad since Joe McCarthy ran amok. It comes out of a basic flaw in the American character. We have a tendency to see our opponents not as someone to be convinced or compromised with but rather as persons SINFUL and to be DAMNED. Right or left.
I’ve used this historical comparison before but here goes again. When the British abolished slavery in their empire (c.a. 1830s), not a shot was fired. They recognized that, for all its moral undertones, slavery was primarily an economic and political issue.
The slave owner was simply a businessman caught in a changing economy. So they paid him for his slaves, educated the free men, and got on with new kinds of business. In America, slavery became a SIN, a “covenant with Hell”, and the owners were SINFUL beyond redemption.
The attitude cost us over 700,000 dead and left sections of the nation ruined to this day. The hatreds that came out of that war are with us yet. (Some of those are directed at Obama personally.) They don’t train you at Harvard Law to deal with such. Or how to gracefully slip from the role of “Messiah” to mere human being without getting nailed to something.
It’s poisonous out there.
People expected Obama to walk on water, heal the sick and raise the dead. Well…, Afghanistan looks more dead today than it did last fall; a sensible health care bill looks beyond healing, and while Obama may not have fully fallen into the water with his Wall Street reforms, he is certainly up to his knees—and sinking.
The Independents have abandoned him; the Democrats are growing restive; and the Republican Right with its non-stop, drum fire of hatred has pulled itself up to the point of being a real threat in 2010. Obama doesn’t have a lot of reliable friends beside his dog and his kids.
Obama is limping from wounds that came from both sides. He allowed—partially in response to Republican complaints—his own health care bill to reach a thousand pages in length. That’s reading “War and Peace” just to get a hospital bill paid. Isn’t going to fly well.
Then his Democratic friends (very much acting on Obama’s own beliefs) larded the bill with provisions guaranteeing federal funds for elective abortions (killing the kid because he or she is inconvenient rather than because he’s a medical threat to mom), hitherto for illegal.
That motivated the daylights out of the Republican and Christian right—who, admittedly, would rather see a thousand babies die of medical neglect than one be aborted. This one provision is making the whole bill anathema to all sorts of people who might otherwise favor health care reform.
A sensible politician would have recognized that just to get health care reform passed initially, you leave things like elective abortions for later. You get the do-able done. Then you try for the moon. Watching Obama stumble on health care has encouraged banks and other institutions facing new regulations to start pushing back.
Nothing is going terribly well for Obama right now. Friends and foes are starting to call him “wishy-washy” as he backs and fills in the face of new objections and realities. I don’t think he’s so much a waffler as I think he’s a product of an elite law school.
That’s where they train you to argue all day and, like reasonable men, go out with your opponent for a drink in the evening. That’s how lawyers work. It may breed cynicism, but it keeps life sane. But it is no training for a man who must face uncompromising hatred from his opponents. That’s what’s permeating our political life right now. Obama wasn’t prepared for it.
Political hostility hasn’t been this bad since Joe McCarthy ran amok. It comes out of a basic flaw in the American character. We have a tendency to see our opponents not as someone to be convinced or compromised with but rather as persons SINFUL and to be DAMNED. Right or left.
I’ve used this historical comparison before but here goes again. When the British abolished slavery in their empire (c.a. 1830s), not a shot was fired. They recognized that, for all its moral undertones, slavery was primarily an economic and political issue.
The slave owner was simply a businessman caught in a changing economy. So they paid him for his slaves, educated the free men, and got on with new kinds of business. In America, slavery became a SIN, a “covenant with Hell”, and the owners were SINFUL beyond redemption.
The attitude cost us over 700,000 dead and left sections of the nation ruined to this day. The hatreds that came out of that war are with us yet. (Some of those are directed at Obama personally.) They don’t train you at Harvard Law to deal with such. Or how to gracefully slip from the role of “Messiah” to mere human being without getting nailed to something.
It’s poisonous out there.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
What Price Respectability?
Nothing corrupts like Respectability. We will do anything to gain it; we will do anything to keep it. There’s an old saw that “every man has his price”. Some people who couldn’t be bought for any amount of money will all but sell their souls for a place at the table with the “adults” and the opportunity to look like they belong there.
It’s at the core of what went wrong with the revolution in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Revolutionaries the world over, once they have gained power, seem to have no further ambition but to become respectable heads of state with all the appropriate trappings.
Take a guerrilla fighter out of the jungle and he will work like a dog to become as close to being the people he fought against as possible. He will put on a uniform or a suit he would not have been caught dead in during revolutionary days just to fit in.
The same thing, I was reminded, seems to have happened to American union organizers. I tuned in to Bill Moyers this morning. He had as guests two union gurus in their middle or late years talking about what happened to unions in America.
They did rather offer something of an answer to the question my wife has been asking ever since she worked a couple of years at JC Penney’s early this decade. She watched employee after employee get cut from full time with benefits and vacation days to part time with no insurance, no sick days, no paid time off.
Zip. You come in one day and your $8.00 an hour job has been cut from 40 to 29 or 24 hours, just under the limit for benefits. Now you work four hour shifts, so you use the same amount of gas to get to work, and you get fewer paid breaks. You still have two kids to support and are expected to dress nicely. (it’s not just the military that’s eligible for food stamps while working.)
Why, my wife has often asked, don’t the unions come in and sign these people up? I’ve often felt that the people who staff our retail establishments are not all that different from the factory workers who fought to raise their pay above a dollar a day.
The difference, Mr. Moyer’s guests made clear, was that the factory workers eighty and more years ago had dedicated union leaders who fought for them. They were NOT respectable. They got arrested. (Cops in Detroit used to marvel about Jimmy Hoffa. You could take rubber hoses and beat him half to death and he never made a sound. He remained contemptuous of respectability until someone finally had to kill him.)
During the late forties and early fifties, the union guru’s made clear, we were able to gut American unions of their willingness to fight for serious social issues. On one hand, the stick. We threatened to label them as Communists if they didn’t stop being obnoxious.
No more big causes like Social Security or forty hour weeks—an occasional strike at a steel mill or an auto company might be okay—but let’s not have any talk about “classes” in America. They got scared and started to behave (a little bit like Obama backing down on health care).
(Anyone who thinks there aren’t social classes in America has never dealt with the very wealthy. I have. They are very polite, but you come away knowing you are nowhere in the same social class that they inhabit. The president of General Motors is as different from an hourly laborer on the floor as a peasant was from a duke.)
Then, the carrot. As in “Animal Farm”, the top union men got invited to sit at the management table—with the guys in the really expensive suits. For behaving, they even got to wear pretty nice suits themselves. They were as respectable as a corporate executive vice president. They loved it.
The lady with 29 hours and two kids to feed is on her own. Union organizers and leaders wouldn’t like to lose their respectability by getting down in the muck and becoming obnoxious in their fight to give her a living wage. The paneled doors in the executive suite might swing shut on them again.
So what if union membership has gone down by 50% in the past decade or two? The union leaders are still at the “adult” table. They like it there—and nobody shouts, “Communist!”.
It’s at the core of what went wrong with the revolution in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Revolutionaries the world over, once they have gained power, seem to have no further ambition but to become respectable heads of state with all the appropriate trappings.
Take a guerrilla fighter out of the jungle and he will work like a dog to become as close to being the people he fought against as possible. He will put on a uniform or a suit he would not have been caught dead in during revolutionary days just to fit in.
The same thing, I was reminded, seems to have happened to American union organizers. I tuned in to Bill Moyers this morning. He had as guests two union gurus in their middle or late years talking about what happened to unions in America.
They did rather offer something of an answer to the question my wife has been asking ever since she worked a couple of years at JC Penney’s early this decade. She watched employee after employee get cut from full time with benefits and vacation days to part time with no insurance, no sick days, no paid time off.
Zip. You come in one day and your $8.00 an hour job has been cut from 40 to 29 or 24 hours, just under the limit for benefits. Now you work four hour shifts, so you use the same amount of gas to get to work, and you get fewer paid breaks. You still have two kids to support and are expected to dress nicely. (it’s not just the military that’s eligible for food stamps while working.)
Why, my wife has often asked, don’t the unions come in and sign these people up? I’ve often felt that the people who staff our retail establishments are not all that different from the factory workers who fought to raise their pay above a dollar a day.
The difference, Mr. Moyer’s guests made clear, was that the factory workers eighty and more years ago had dedicated union leaders who fought for them. They were NOT respectable. They got arrested. (Cops in Detroit used to marvel about Jimmy Hoffa. You could take rubber hoses and beat him half to death and he never made a sound. He remained contemptuous of respectability until someone finally had to kill him.)
During the late forties and early fifties, the union guru’s made clear, we were able to gut American unions of their willingness to fight for serious social issues. On one hand, the stick. We threatened to label them as Communists if they didn’t stop being obnoxious.
No more big causes like Social Security or forty hour weeks—an occasional strike at a steel mill or an auto company might be okay—but let’s not have any talk about “classes” in America. They got scared and started to behave (a little bit like Obama backing down on health care).
(Anyone who thinks there aren’t social classes in America has never dealt with the very wealthy. I have. They are very polite, but you come away knowing you are nowhere in the same social class that they inhabit. The president of General Motors is as different from an hourly laborer on the floor as a peasant was from a duke.)
Then, the carrot. As in “Animal Farm”, the top union men got invited to sit at the management table—with the guys in the really expensive suits. For behaving, they even got to wear pretty nice suits themselves. They were as respectable as a corporate executive vice president. They loved it.
The lady with 29 hours and two kids to feed is on her own. Union organizers and leaders wouldn’t like to lose their respectability by getting down in the muck and becoming obnoxious in their fight to give her a living wage. The paneled doors in the executive suite might swing shut on them again.
So what if union membership has gone down by 50% in the past decade or two? The union leaders are still at the “adult” table. They like it there—and nobody shouts, “Communist!”.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
America The Baffling
Americans baffle me. (And I was born one, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve lived here all my life.) I have understood Arabs, many tribes of Europeans, black Africans, some Orientals and a few Australians. I’ve even met a few Frenchwomen I liked. (Moderately.)
I confess I do not understand Americans. There is something about our society that has always left me feeling like an outsider looking in—in total bemusement. It may have something to do with my inherent Calvinism—and the fact that this nation has not only tried to expunge its Calvinist roots but now lives with the guilt of feeling there’s something back there we’re forgetting.
I often sense, for example, that I understand the Constitution better than our Supreme Court justices do simply because I was raised as much a Calvinist as most of the writers were. (Don’t be fooled by labels such as “Deist” or even Anglican—the former were all raised Calvinists and the latter was shot through [since Elizabeth I] with Calvinism—and the guy who came up with the Virginia Plan that was mostly followed was educated as a Presbyterian Divine.)
But , if the Constitution doesn’t baffle me, Americans do. Two instances come to mind, both having to do with our attitude toward government. One has to do with health care, the other with the new electric light bulbs.
We’ve known for years that fluorescent lights are not optimum for eyestrain and health. We tolerate them in schools and offices because they are cheap. But we all know that if one breaks, poisonous gases flood the air—and you’d better not get cut by the broken glass.
We use incandescent bulbs at home because they are far safer and more eye-user friendly. Yet when the government mandates that we MUST all switch to fluorescents in every light socket in the country, we don’t even peep.
Europeans were stuck with the same regulations, and they practically rioted in protest. Stores sold out of the last stocks of incandescent light bulbs in days. People stocked up for years to come. (I’m stocking up, too.) Cost trumps safety and health every time.
(Remember how auto manufacturers screamed and whined at the cost of putting in seat belts and air bags? They might save a few thousand lives—we lose more on the road each year than we’ve lost in most of our wars. But, the cost! Oh, my, the cost! Better a cheaper Chevy than a live driver, such seems to be the accepted reasoning.)
Then there’s health care. Unlike Europeans who accept health care as a government cost of doing business—just as we accept unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly as government costs and responsibilities—we shriek at the very thought of having that same government involved in health insurance.
Government runs our schools, our state colleges and universities, plows and paves our roads, provides the police and public health services that protect us, keeps our libraries open, and determines whether we shall have digital or analog TV, etc. etc. etc., and we don’t protest.
But, oh woe, oh dearie me, let government suggest ways of cutting our medical costs and insuring even the unemployed, and how we bellow! (If I were Obama I’d be tempted to say, Okay we’ll pull government out of your health care.
We’ll delete Medicare as a government cost. You pay your own premium. That way government will “keep its hands off [your] Medicare”, just as you asked. Want to watch an entire major strata of voters do an about face with bone shattering suddenness?}
No one would dare suggest THAT!!. (It’s such a good thing I’m not president!) So we’ll continue in our own bizarre version of double think. The amazing thing is that it didn’t take a Big Brother to make us this way. We got here by ourselves.
I confess I do not understand Americans. There is something about our society that has always left me feeling like an outsider looking in—in total bemusement. It may have something to do with my inherent Calvinism—and the fact that this nation has not only tried to expunge its Calvinist roots but now lives with the guilt of feeling there’s something back there we’re forgetting.
I often sense, for example, that I understand the Constitution better than our Supreme Court justices do simply because I was raised as much a Calvinist as most of the writers were. (Don’t be fooled by labels such as “Deist” or even Anglican—the former were all raised Calvinists and the latter was shot through [since Elizabeth I] with Calvinism—and the guy who came up with the Virginia Plan that was mostly followed was educated as a Presbyterian Divine.)
But , if the Constitution doesn’t baffle me, Americans do. Two instances come to mind, both having to do with our attitude toward government. One has to do with health care, the other with the new electric light bulbs.
We’ve known for years that fluorescent lights are not optimum for eyestrain and health. We tolerate them in schools and offices because they are cheap. But we all know that if one breaks, poisonous gases flood the air—and you’d better not get cut by the broken glass.
We use incandescent bulbs at home because they are far safer and more eye-user friendly. Yet when the government mandates that we MUST all switch to fluorescents in every light socket in the country, we don’t even peep.
Europeans were stuck with the same regulations, and they practically rioted in protest. Stores sold out of the last stocks of incandescent light bulbs in days. People stocked up for years to come. (I’m stocking up, too.) Cost trumps safety and health every time.
(Remember how auto manufacturers screamed and whined at the cost of putting in seat belts and air bags? They might save a few thousand lives—we lose more on the road each year than we’ve lost in most of our wars. But, the cost! Oh, my, the cost! Better a cheaper Chevy than a live driver, such seems to be the accepted reasoning.)
Then there’s health care. Unlike Europeans who accept health care as a government cost of doing business—just as we accept unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly as government costs and responsibilities—we shriek at the very thought of having that same government involved in health insurance.
Government runs our schools, our state colleges and universities, plows and paves our roads, provides the police and public health services that protect us, keeps our libraries open, and determines whether we shall have digital or analog TV, etc. etc. etc., and we don’t protest.
But, oh woe, oh dearie me, let government suggest ways of cutting our medical costs and insuring even the unemployed, and how we bellow! (If I were Obama I’d be tempted to say, Okay we’ll pull government out of your health care.
We’ll delete Medicare as a government cost. You pay your own premium. That way government will “keep its hands off [your] Medicare”, just as you asked. Want to watch an entire major strata of voters do an about face with bone shattering suddenness?}
No one would dare suggest THAT!!. (It’s such a good thing I’m not president!) So we’ll continue in our own bizarre version of double think. The amazing thing is that it didn’t take a Big Brother to make us this way. We got here by ourselves.
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