Where Do We Go From Here?

Where do we stand? It’s the last day of Trinity (the Christian season that begins in June with Pentecost Sunday, celebrating specifically the coming of the Holy Spirit); tomorrow begins the season of Advent—looking forward to Christmas. Macys feels that the Christmas shopping season has begun well; “Black Friday” will last two days this season.
Do your patriotic duty—spend! (Didn’t George W. Bush say that?) England has begun a Parliamentary inquiry into how British troops somehow wound up in Iraq back in 2003. Tony Blair, who got England there, is not likely ever going to be head of the European Union.
House foreclosures are expected to rise well into next year—but prices are stabilizing and some newly built homes are beginning to sell. Warren Buffet thinks Ben Bernanke at the Fed deserves an “A”, but Congress is mumbling about clipping the agency’s wings.
The agency has been independent of both Congress and the President since its founding in 1913, but Congress feels it is at least a bit at fault for last year’s financial debacle and wants to be able to stick its own thumb in the pie. Bernanke says, “Please, no”.
Next Tuesday, the first of December, Obama promises to give us some firm numbers about how many more troops he will airlift into landlocked Afghanistan. It costs a million dollars to keep one man there for one year. Everything, from his toilet paper to his bullets and fuel, has to come in by air transport. That’s expensive.
Every time a look at a map of Afghanistan, I still get a nervous feeling. I look at maps ever since I wrote a high school impassioned letter to the five star diplomat who was pretty much in charge during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Why, I demanded to know, had we done nothing to help the Hungarians against the Soviets?!?
He wrote a nice letter back. It boiled down to, “Look at a map”. I got one out. There was absolutely no feasible way we could have assisted them without walking over somebody else’s property—and probably starting World War III right there.
That’s why we didn’t help. We couldn’t. Now look at Afghanistan. The long western border is with Iran. Not likely any American supplies are going through there. The eastern border is with Pakistan. Are you willing to guarantee me there will still be a remotely friendly Pakistani government in power a year or two or three from now? That would cut off that route.
To the north lie two former Soviet republics, now nominally independent. We fly much of our stuff through there. What if the political winds shift there—perhaps a little Russian pressure or, since they are Muslim states, some radical pressure.
It isn’t fantasy to think these reverses could occur. In that part of the globe we are pretty much at the farthest reach of our influence. If our avenues got shut down, the boys in Afghanistan would face a similar situation to that of the boys on Bataan in 1942.
They could surrender or we could send a few hundred thousand more troops and try to blast our way through nuclear armed Pakistan. We’d have to draft and train them first.
Health Care Reform looks like it’s about shut down for this calendar year. I just don’t see them reconciling the two bills between now and Christmas Vacation. Next year is an election year, and that brings a whole new set of political calculations. Then, the year after, comes a whole new Congress with possibly different priorities. Ah well … .
Promises, promises, promises—all through the election season. Then comes reality. I don’t really know where we can or will go from here, but I can tell you where we are right now—smack dab in the middle of the world as it really is.
Machiavelli wrote: There are two ways to deal with the world—as though it were as it ought to be or as though it were as it really is. Those who choose to deal with the world as though it were as it ought to be do so to their own destruction.
Christ would not have argued with that.

Thanksgiving Retrospective

Thanksgiving (A.K.A. Turkey Day) has come and is fast slipping away. A thirty mile trip to an in-law’s home, surrounded by half-remembered (“Whose kid is that?” “Did she used to have red hair?” Is that the one who moved to Denver?”) In-laws, relatives and acquaintances.
Dry turkey breast (what else can it be when it was force-fed to the point where it could not take a step?), two kinds of stuffing, three kinds of potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce and a more than decent pumpkin pie baked by a niece. Then on to football.
WHY do they allow the Lions to dominate the fourth Thursday in November? They set an NFL record last year by winning NO games at all. This year they’ve actually won two—the last by a single point. But today was not one of their better performances. Sheer on field ineptitude led to the usual spate of comparisons between how the Lions are managed and how Ford Motor Company is run— the same people own both. Someone remembered that the Lions had actually won championships before the Ford people bought them.
Which led, of course, to general commentary on the condition of the auto industry and the State of Michigan. A Republican expressed pity for Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm who walked into the state house just when the roof fell in.
Our host pointed out that even though he was receiving neither a free turkey nor a bonus this year (from an auto parts manufacturer), the pay cuts seemed to have stopped and it looked like the company was stabilizing. “A lot of that,” he suggested, “was due to the ‘Cash for clunkers’ program’”. He admitted to trepidation as to how long this uptick might last.
He was, he told us, doing twice the work now for less money—replacing a lot of other engineers who were no longer among the employed. His sister who works in the medical field said the same was true for her—both were thankful just to have a steady paycheck.
Home again to a television that was streaming every James Bond and Godfather flick ever made. So the boys turned to “Myth Busters” whose mission this evening seemed to be to prove that we really did land on the moon forty years ago. (The myth being that all the landings were actually filmed in a terrestrial studio—20% of Americans supposedly believe this.)
We did catch a few moments of the Macy’s Parade before we left this morning. It’s nice to be reassured that Herald Square is still there, that there still is a Santa Claus on 34th Street. Hannah Montana had the wit to stay home; she sent her co-star who warbled manfully.
At some point this past afternoon I related the experience my wife had when she went to Sam’s Club to buy a turkey of our own. She went on Monday before the holiday. Sam’s was out. Not a bird in the store. She asked a clerk what had happened.
“We were out by Saturday,” he told her. “All kinds of business ordered turkeys for their employees. Some orders were so large we had to special order turkeys from the warehouse. By Saturday there simply weren’t any more to sell.”
My host and I agreed that this meant there were a whole lot of West Michigan employees who were getting a turkey this year in lieu of a raise or a bonus. Consolation prize? Or a subtle hint that they should be happy to still be working?
Christian writ commands followers of Christ to be “thankful in all things”. Sometimes it is difficult to keep a touch of the sardonic out of one’s voice when being so. We’ve been spoiled in this state (it was so rich it don’t bother to tax most pensions, for instance). Now the party seems to be breaking up—if it isn’t completely over yet.
The words of an ancient prayer come to mind, “Give us this day our daily bread”. In other words all we can reasonably ask for is today’s food. Not tomorrow’s or next month’s. Just today’s. And we should be thankful to have it.

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow—Thanksgiving. To whom? Ah, now there’s a politically incorrect question. Anyway it’s the day that supposedly dates all the way back to the Pilgrims. Two hundred and forty years later Lincoln called for a national day of Thanksgiving (he had no doubt as to whom).
During the Depression, FDR moved the day backward to the fourth Thursday in November to give retailers more time to sell their wares. But his pronouncements, both here and during the war, left one in no doubt as to whom he was thanking.
Virginia may well have held a “thanksgiving” a year or so before, but the one at Plymouth Colony gets the credit for being the remembered one.
An interesting colony, Plymouth, and an interesting sequence of events that kept it alive to celebrate.
First of all, Pilgrims are not Puritans. Puritans—who arrived in Boston ten years after the Pilgrims—believed the Church of England could be purified. They came to America with the idea of practicing up and returning to England to purify the Anglican Church.
Pilgrims felt it was too far gone to be purified, and the only thing to do was go far away—thus the name “pilgrim”. They first went to Holland—but when Holland threatened to end their twenty year truce with Spain and go back to war—the Pilgrims got out of Holland. They were looking for a place to stay.
They planned to join the new colony in Virginia, founded thirteen years before. They were blown off course and wound up at Cape Cod. It was a hellish first winter. Half of them died. The only reason any survived was that the captain of the Mayflower stayed with them until spring, supplying them with what food he could. That couldn't last.
In spring, he had to sail back to England—leaving behind a sickly little band of city folk with no idea how to make food or what there was in this weird new world fit to eat. At that point a Wampanoag Indian walked into their camp.
To their astonishment he spoke perfect English. Not only that but he had grown up on the site they now occupied. He could tell them when the fish would run in the spring—and how to catch them. He showed them what to hunt and how. He taught them how to plant corn. In short, he kept them alive—along with any hope for future New England colonial development.
He also explained that the tribe he came from had been wiped out by a plague (probably small pox) a few years earlier. By dumb luck—providence if you will—the Pilgrims had landed on the one piece of real estate for a thousand miles in either direction that no one else claimed. No enemy would try to wrest it from them.
And just how had that Indian—Squanto we call him—come to rescue them? Years before he had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and shipped to Europe to be sold as a slave. Some monks had rescued him and helped him get to England. But he missed the plague.
He had worked there for years, mastering the language and customs. Finally he had made passage back to his home world—only to find everyone dead of the pox. He had a complete nervous breakdown, and a neighboring tribe took pity on him and cared for him.
As he recovered, the Pilgrims arrived. Scouts reported they were starving and dying like flies. The chief who had pitied him suggested Squanto return to his old home, now Plymouth, and help out these poor helpless newcomers. So he did.
So the Pilgrims weren’t just being thankful for a decent harvest. They were out of Holland; they had survived a starving winter; they were on free and clear land; they had been taught how to make food by someone who knew the terrain.
Just incidentally, their survival had ensured the creation of something called the United States—and its governmental forms. That they survived at all we can be thankful for.

A Whack Job's Sppeculation--What If?

What if—it’s an interesting game to play. A variant of it came to mind today when I happened to listen to a conservative televangelist this morning who preached that America was facing judgment. Such pronouncements lead to one of two reactions: a “whack job religion” as “Newsweek” put it this week or “what if?”
What if a Christian took his faith as seriously as a Muslim is expected to—or the Dalai Lama? That would, of course, be reprehensible conduct—ranging from politically incorrect to downright illegal. But suppose someone did?
That would presuppose a deity who 1) believes in absolute good and evil, 2) who hates evil so much he had to allow his enemy to inflict a hideous death on his own son in order to satisfy the terms of a contract under which evil will eventually be banished from this universe.
3) And who pours his anger out on evil and those who refuse to choose the good—as he sees it—and judges evil far more ruthlessly than any human criminal court judge. That’s pretty much the core of Christianity.
Now, if you go further and accept the notion that this deity views abortion and homosexual behavior as evil—and takes personal offense at being tossed out of American schools, courts and politics—then why, under Christian rules shouldn’t he judge America?
We have told him to go away, that he’s not welcome. Those who talk about him too publicly or claim to believe what is found written very clearly in Judeo-Christian scriptures are labeled “whack jobs” and even sued or faced with criminal action.
What if he really exists? What if he really is annoyed at some of the “post Christian” shenanigans he sees going on in this nation? Might he violate all rules of civilized conduct and become judgmental? Is there any evidence that such a thing could happen?
Would he rain down thunderbolts and hail stones like cannon balls? He wouldn’t have to, would he? He could just withdraw some of the favor he has showed this nation since its inception and allow our own foolishness to run its course. After all, we’ve asked him to butt out—and he is a gentleman. He won’t stay where he is not wanted.
Recent studies (of tree rings and other measurable phenomena) suggest that the Twentieth Century has been the wettest century on this continent over the past thousand years or so. What if water flow and rain fall merely went back to normal?
Where would Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, a half dozen other southwestern cities and farms get their water? We’ve packed millions of people into deserts. Just a few inches less rain and you have catastrophe beyond measure or imagination on your hands all over the high plains and deserts of the American southwest—which, just incidentally, are dotted with the remains of previous civilizations that disintegrated in the face of prolonged drought.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? Have we really won in Iraq? Have those who actively plot to blow our cities up stopped plotting? Would a Divine Hand need do more than step back an inch or two to let a tactical nuke through?
Has our banking system really been restored? Is the rising stock market another bubble? What is holding many of our states and cities out of bankruptcy? Will we really see enough growth in our economy to pay back the multi-trillion dollar debt we owe?
Where are the workers that will support Social Security and Medicare for the aging Boomers? (Did we abort 40 million of them?) It wouldn’t take bolts of divine thunder to bring things down. Just a bit less of this or a step back there would do terribly well.
What if? --No! No! Only a whack job could think such things. Right?

Obesity--Sometimes a Function of Money

Nearly twenty years ago I sat in a young physician’s office and listened to him lecture me on my obesity. (I’m no way as slim as was when I smoked and made higher salaries.) I also no longer enjoy the higher salary I once did.
My mouth watered as he described the foods I ought to be eating. After a few moments, I stopped him and asked if he had any idea what the diet he advocated would cost—fresh meat, fresh fruits, fresh veggies. He looked startled for a moment. Then he thought.
No, he admitted. He had no idea. “My wife,” he said, “never considers costs when she shops. I never thought about it before, either.” Nice to be an affluent young doc, in a thriving medical practice—where you don’t have to check your wallet before you shop.
Not so nice to assume your patients are as affluent as you are—and make recommendations that take no account of cost. The pre-printed diets from large and reputable medical organizations also seemed to take no account of the cost of groceries either.
It matters when you’ve got two young kids to feed. It matters when they are in college or senior high school, still eating at home. (The money they get does not toward food at home; try auto insurance, maintenance—one commutes miles to a university—gas, tuition and text books, and so forth, and so forth.)
When it comes to food, they are the farthest thing from revenue neutral. When we can (rarely) afford food that’s not cooked at home, it’s pretty much pizza and burgers. Food for four adult sized appetites at a real restaurant can knock an awful hole in a century note.
I got a heads up on this back in 1968. I was living in Washington and working a couple of weeks in New York City. I figured out that the cheapest and nearly fastest way to go was either by train or Gray Hound—both of which had terminals near my home.
On one bus trip I got to chatting with an admittedly chubby young British girl. She had, she told me taken off for a year-long trip around the world. She had come through Europe, the Near and Middle East. She’d stayed in then peaceful Kabul and floated down the Mekong River. She had arrived in this country only a month or two before.
“Look at me,” she gestured at her extra poundage, “I didn’t gain a pound until I landed in San Francisco. The only thing I can afford to eat in this country is your fast foods—and they are FATTENING!” She was both puzzled and unhappy at this phenomenon.
She described the luscious fruits and fresh meat she had consumed on all the rest of her trip. It had all been well within her limited budget. But in no way could her budget stretch to eat as healthily in America as she had on a large raft in the Mekong River.
My wife is desperate to lose weight—but the high protein, fresh food diet that works for her is way too expensive for all four of us to eat. Pasta, rice, bread, cereal—not sugared ones!), potatoes, peanut butter and cheese have to fill in some of the gap. We almost never eat desert—but, in warm weather we bring half-gallons of ice cream home.
It’s fattening, I admit. But it’s affordable. (Yes, we could give up fast food—but when all four of us have spent hours raking the lawn and winterizing the place and darkness comes, no one really wants to go into the kitchen and make a nice healthy meal. Someone goes out to McDonald’s or Burger King and no one has to cook or wash up. That’s just exhaustion.)
Obesity is no doubt going to prove a very expensive medical problem for this country. Serious consideration might also be given to making all the things that might prevent obesity more affordable. NO ONE is going to want to think about that.

Obama, War and Trust

Last night ABC News itemized some ludicrous items in the White House data about the stimulus money. Two more items reported tonight: Nine pairs of shoes were counted as nine jobs in one real District. A onetime raise for 300 employees scored as 300 new jobs. The local people said the White House ordered them to report this way.
This doesn’t terribly surprise me. In 1964, as a government peon, I was pulled off my regular duties and told to start going through all the magazine reprints and publications in the Diabetes Program of the US Public Health Service. Anything we hadn’t used, sent out or was more than fifteen years old was to be tossed—and the throwaways counted and listed with the ORIGINAL COST.
I came up with about 300 for perhaps the same amount of dollars and gave the total to my boss. He passed it on up the chain. Apparently there were lots of peons doing just what I had done. About a month later the White House issued a press release proclaiming that the President had just saved tax payers huge bucks by eliminating unnecessary publications.
It is a source of wry satisfaction to me that I contributed to that fictitious savings. So why shouldn’t Obama do the same? But here’s something else to think about.
THREE TIMES in the Twentieth Century Democratic candidates found themselves running for president with a war looming over them. Each candidate proclaimed his Republican competitor to be a war monger and promised HE would keep up out of war.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran under the slogan, “He kept us out of war!” (WWI) and accused Republican Charles Evans Hughes of wanting to join the fighting. Wilson won, was sworn in on March 4, 1917, and in April declared war on Germany.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt ran the same line against Republican Wendell Wilkie. When people pointed out that he had just created our first peace time draft, he vowed NEVER to send those boys overseas to fight. He won his third term on a “peace plank”.
He was inaugurated on January, 20, 1941. Within months he had declared most of the Atlantic to be a killing zone where US ships were authorized to open up on German U-boats. He had B-17 bombers flying bombing missions over Germany to test their capabilities.
He was giving England all sorts of war materials—at no cost. He had moved the Pacific Fleet out from its home base at San Diego to Pearl Harbor to attack the Japanese Fleet. He denied Japan any fuel, steel, iron, copper and a full list of one hundred items needed to maintain a society above the level of a Stone Age society. He also froze all their assets in New York.
He refused to meet with the Japanese emperor to negotiate some sort of truce and finally goaded the hot heads in Tokyo (who recognized they had only eighteen months of oil left) to attack us later that same year—which took care of any need to declare war on the Axis, since they obliged by declaring war on us. Never mind that he had been working with the British on joint war plans since the fall of 1939 while he promised to keep the peace in 1940.
Then came 1964—while I was in Washington. Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater, whom he depicted as a thoroughly scary and irresponsible pro-war militant. His peace plank worked so well he won by the largest land-slide in American history.
Never mind that in August of that year he tricked Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—which gave him carte blanch for nine more years of war. He was sworn in on January 20, 1965, and two months later American combat troops were in action in Vietnam.
Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson—and now Obama? Last year Mr. Obama made pacific enough noises about our wars in the Middle East to convince most of his supporters that he planned to cut back those wars (unlike that war monger McCain).
Want to place a side bet?

Obama--TwoToo Many Tall Tales

What in the world is going on here? I think anyone who has read my blog over the past year knows, that as much as any Republican can, I have tried to give Obama the benefit of the doubt—and even to defend him against what seemed to be rabid assaults from my party’s conservative right wing. But I have seen two things recently that make me ready to quit playing nice.
One—a week or two ago I saw Obama at a press conference vow that he would veto any health bill that was not “revenue neutral”. Whoa. Any decent health bill that does the job that needs to be done in this nation will be like going from a stripped down Chevy to a Cadillac.
You can’t do that without spending more money. A Caddy simply costs more than a Chevy. It costs more to license it, to buy tires for it, to service and repair it. Health care for an additional 40 to 50 million UNINSURED Americans is just plain GOING to cost more than insuring the number we are insuring now.
It’s like auto insurance. It costs more to insure four cars than it does to insure three. There’s no way you can expand your car insurance coverage and come out “revenue neutral”. Unless of course, you cut the coverage for everybody (Medicare, Medicaid) way, way back.
Medicare doesn’t do all that adequate a job now. George Bush admitted as much by creating a prescription drug plan three years ago. Anyone who has Medicare and can afford supplemental insurance, BUYS IT!
Then let’s talk about bringing decent coverage to many thousands or millions of Americans who are covered minimally by very inadequate private health insurance plans—with ludicrously high co-pays and ridiculously low maximums.
That’s increasing coverage on the existing three cars. (Try doing without casualty—accident—insurance on a car a bank holds a mortgage on! You’ll put casualty insurance on that vehicle very quickly!)
So we’re going to improve wretched coverage and increase the population covered by a third—and Obama says he won’t do it unless it’s revenue neutral. One is left with very little choice but to think the man is a fool or a liar. Or he thinks we are all fools.
Today I heard something fascinating about the Stimulus Money. The White House has finally released a list of places where good things happened and jobs were created. (The exit polls at the elections two weeks ago seem to have made an impression on Obama’s people.)
ABC network news read some tidbits off that list tonight. Included were such claims to beneficence as forty-two jobs created in Arizona’s 43rd Congressional District. Another item raved about several more jobs created in Arizona’s 99th District.
Oh, oops. Arizona only has EIGHT Congressional Districts. Connecticut was credited with a couple dozen more Districts than it has, as well. Charlie Gibson explained that the White House had responded with some petulance that these were minor clerical errors.
After all, it suggested to ABC, it is possible that many recipients of stimulus largesse had no idea in which Congressional District they actually lived. It might seem churlish of me, but shouldn’t somebody who is receiving Federal gift money take the time to figure out where he lives, in which district, before anybody signs off on a cheque?
Either there has been gross carelessness in the distribution of this money or there’s been considerable fraud or somebody’s lying about something. And somebody thinks that most of us are remarkably thick witted.
We have a President who touted himself as an agent of CHANGE who is following the policies of George Bush in war, and the laissez faire policies of the most conservative Republicans on Wall Street, and now he’s going to insure millions more Americans—while being “revenue neutral”.
Maybe “liar” wasn’t polite—how about “Nuts”.