A number of years ago (how many doesn't matter) I knew someone in Honolulu who was dating a salesman for one of the radio stations. His job was to go around convincing business people that their lives and profits would be infinitely improved if they were to buy advertising time on the air. He was a bumptious type, loud, arrogant, full of himself. Probably he was just young and insecure, but his bravado offended me, particularly when he patronizingly referred to his empoying radio station, the largest and most prestigious in the Islands and at which he was the most junior of sales people, as "a nice little station." It put my teeth on edge.
I was thinking of him the other day as I followed the Goldman Sachs executives trying to tell Congress that they are too ignorant to understand the ways of Wall Street. I already had my prejudicial views of the young turks I imagined to be responsible for the financial manipulations, so I can't say that I was shocked, but it did confirm for me why I dislike (and always have) the testosterone-driven adolescent cant of a certain type of self-centered swinger. I use the latter word because I can't think of anything better to describe the kind of irresponsible, almost gleeful, kicking to the side of any responsibility. It's Kenneth Lay and Bernie Madoff except this time skipping along just inside the law and saying aren't we clever, catch us if you can, and we've stolen granny's savings but look at the bonuses we got.
The only thing I dislike more than them is the lawyer's chorus. I can say the words now before the lawyers can: "My client absolutely denies any wrong doing. He has operated completely within the law." I think the reason I dislike the lawyers is that they also fall into the pattern of adolescent rule-bending. It's as if these guys didn't have any limits put on them as children and don't have any ethics. Some of them needed to go over somebody's knee.
The only good thing about arrogance is that it's consistent. I've never seen anyone I'd describe as arrogant (and on a university campus they abound) who wasn't so consistently. This means they do not see any reason not to let their innate superiority demonstrate itself on every possible occasion. This provides amazing comic relief, as in the testimony before Congress. Who in their right mind, knowing that Congress is considering legislation to curtain their trading, goes to Congress and blows them off. It would be wonderful, if it wasn't our money, our housing, and our jobs they have destroyed so they can retire early.
Frankly, I hope Congress gets it act together and pins Wall Street's ears back. Or if not that, takes them out to the woodshed and teaches them some humility.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Greater and Lesser Utopias
The world is a crazy place these days. For example, there’s Pope Benedict looking like the ghost of Tiger Woods, going around dressed as the spirit of confessions past. Then there are the Tea Partiers, who held a convention down here in Phoenix (July 2010), revealing once and for all they are the party of whites. No diversity there to distract them from their dreams of Utopia—small government, health care to the deserving, longevity to those who can afford it, and success to those who impose their economic imperatives untrammeled on the world.
Utopia’s an interesting concept. The first one I read, Sir Thomas More’s version of the same name, talked about an ideal world that had never existed and, given human nature, never could. It was a paean to a golden time when human beings might get beyond their greed (gold and precious stones were treated with contempt) and lack of care for one other. In fact, Utopia was an ideal society based on Christian principles—and, gasp, it turned out to be Christian socialism. There’s that dirty word—socialism. Self-proclaimed Christians hate to hear it yet fail to realize it is a logical extension of their own professed beliefs. In America these days, Christianity is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere with kicking the crap out of illegals, doing away with social security so the elderly poor can starve or freeze because they failed to save enough for their old age, and leaving all social programs up to charities (as long as the half-way houses and shelters aren’t in “respectable” back yards).
The Arizona Statesman reported on the Tea Part rally in today’s paper and commented that most loose organizations of enthusiasts seldom last for very long. I’d love to believe so, but this group, if one may call it that, has revealed an American underpinning of self-delusion and unkindness that may lead to some longevity. For one thing, they have an amazing tolerance for hypocrisy.
They wish government out of people’s lives, yet want legislation to ban abortions: the government it seems should look into other people’s lives just not the Tea Partiers’. They want individual liberty yet want to give long prison sentences for relatively minor failures to conform and God help the Gays who don’t conform to their assumptions about marriage and sex. They want to believe in the perfectability of human beings, rather like the 19th Century idea of the Noble Savage who has been damaged by the polluting laws of civilization and who can rise again to his old glory if only freed of the chains that hold him back. (I wonder if any one of them has read “The Lord of the Flies.”)
They want to pick and choose what they are willing to pay taxes for without understanding that wherever the money is spent it drives the same number of jobs. John Ruskin once commented that complaining about the rich buying luxury goods was senseless because the luxury trade provided livelihoods for just as many people as if the rich had spent their money only on basic necessities. Government spending provides jobs. They don’t consider that many more people will be out of work if they shrink government. Who will pick up the slack? Will corporate America come rushing forward to provide new jobs—we know where they stand on sending jobs abroad. For this, the Partiers have no answer beyond platitudes. Sometimes I think there will be no peace until the country is either on the breadlines or involved in another Civil War.
It has always been my understanding that government’s job is not to protect our guilty bastions of self-interest but, like wiser parents, to prevent us from killing one another—plenty of which has happened in the past, and not just in the incessant wars that government involves us in. Now there’s my gripe—where you have a government, can war be far behind? This is a government of the people, not of Churches, not of corporations, and not of special interests, no matter how flattering these interests may be to who we think we are or could be.
Sir Thomas made neither the error of mistaking self-righteousness for morality nor believing that Utopias could ever be reality. A Christian life is a communal life, he said. Wow. This coming from someone who gave his life for his religion—executed because he would not put his king above his conscience. Let’s see some of these Tea Partiers give up something of theirs for their beliefs instead of just hitting the rest of us over the head with them. If this is indeed a nation under God, just where is all the other, inconvenient stuff such as loving others instead of promoting calculated self-interest as the way of the world?
Utopia’s an interesting concept. The first one I read, Sir Thomas More’s version of the same name, talked about an ideal world that had never existed and, given human nature, never could. It was a paean to a golden time when human beings might get beyond their greed (gold and precious stones were treated with contempt) and lack of care for one other. In fact, Utopia was an ideal society based on Christian principles—and, gasp, it turned out to be Christian socialism. There’s that dirty word—socialism. Self-proclaimed Christians hate to hear it yet fail to realize it is a logical extension of their own professed beliefs. In America these days, Christianity is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere with kicking the crap out of illegals, doing away with social security so the elderly poor can starve or freeze because they failed to save enough for their old age, and leaving all social programs up to charities (as long as the half-way houses and shelters aren’t in “respectable” back yards).
The Arizona Statesman reported on the Tea Part rally in today’s paper and commented that most loose organizations of enthusiasts seldom last for very long. I’d love to believe so, but this group, if one may call it that, has revealed an American underpinning of self-delusion and unkindness that may lead to some longevity. For one thing, they have an amazing tolerance for hypocrisy.
They wish government out of people’s lives, yet want legislation to ban abortions: the government it seems should look into other people’s lives just not the Tea Partiers’. They want individual liberty yet want to give long prison sentences for relatively minor failures to conform and God help the Gays who don’t conform to their assumptions about marriage and sex. They want to believe in the perfectability of human beings, rather like the 19th Century idea of the Noble Savage who has been damaged by the polluting laws of civilization and who can rise again to his old glory if only freed of the chains that hold him back. (I wonder if any one of them has read “The Lord of the Flies.”)
They want to pick and choose what they are willing to pay taxes for without understanding that wherever the money is spent it drives the same number of jobs. John Ruskin once commented that complaining about the rich buying luxury goods was senseless because the luxury trade provided livelihoods for just as many people as if the rich had spent their money only on basic necessities. Government spending provides jobs. They don’t consider that many more people will be out of work if they shrink government. Who will pick up the slack? Will corporate America come rushing forward to provide new jobs—we know where they stand on sending jobs abroad. For this, the Partiers have no answer beyond platitudes. Sometimes I think there will be no peace until the country is either on the breadlines or involved in another Civil War.
It has always been my understanding that government’s job is not to protect our guilty bastions of self-interest but, like wiser parents, to prevent us from killing one another—plenty of which has happened in the past, and not just in the incessant wars that government involves us in. Now there’s my gripe—where you have a government, can war be far behind? This is a government of the people, not of Churches, not of corporations, and not of special interests, no matter how flattering these interests may be to who we think we are or could be.
Sir Thomas made neither the error of mistaking self-righteousness for morality nor believing that Utopias could ever be reality. A Christian life is a communal life, he said. Wow. This coming from someone who gave his life for his religion—executed because he would not put his king above his conscience. Let’s see some of these Tea Partiers give up something of theirs for their beliefs instead of just hitting the rest of us over the head with them. If this is indeed a nation under God, just where is all the other, inconvenient stuff such as loving others instead of promoting calculated self-interest as the way of the world?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Master of the Dung Heap
I was listening the other evening to Our Lady of Wasilla screaming her message to her tea-baggers and found myself reminded of Aristophanes’ definition of a popular politician: “a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.”
Aristophanes, of course, lived roughly 2500 years ago, in politically charged and fractious Greece, the cradle of our political system, so I suppose one can say that politics was ever so, or more pointedly, two thousand years hasn’t seen much change in human beings as they relate to the avenues of power. I think he would recognize us and probably satirize us as he did his contemporaries. He would have much subject matter.
One thing has changed, though, and I have to point to this to us as our unique, modern contribution. We now have the means to broadcast the voice, breeding, and manner over the country and around the world. Not only that, we have created a new form of pundit who fits the definition of popular politician just as well. That idea is both depressing and amusing (in a rather horrible way).
I can picture what Aristophanes would make of Olberman and Limbaugh. He’d probably have recognized the type and written a play about them: Orwell’s barnyard where the animals are equal but the pigs a little more equal, and a raft of other animals, such as the cock of the barnyard, the influential master of the dung heap, try to work around the pigs. The point would be to introduce some levity as well as some perspective into people who take themselves far too seriously.
When I was an instructor in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I remember one of my fellow instructors (we were very junior and slightly mutinous) having a cartoon pasted on her door. It showed a very large shaggy dog with a dialog balloon coming from the depths of the fur on its back. Inside the balloon were the words, “We junior fleas demand a greater voice in the running of this dog.”
Now that Ms. Palin has become a corporate juggernaut (it was reported tonight that she’s earned $12 million this year), she may be seeing herself as a rather large flea these days. I wouldn’t blame her actually. But she needs to keep in mind that a flea is still a flea. Real power is silent and secret. It operates behind the scenes. The powerbrokers are never seen, not even in the backrooms, certainly not out on the Boston commons carrying a placard.
Loud denunciations and easy slogans are not where the real power is. Such efforts are useful to someone, but not to the person using them. Ms Palin will be well rewarded for her efforts—as indeed she has been—but the real power will continue on the way it always has, in dark places where the principals are known only by accident now and then.
This is the way it was 2500 years ago and it is the way, it seems, it will always be as long as we fleas believe we are running the planet.
Aristophanes, of course, lived roughly 2500 years ago, in politically charged and fractious Greece, the cradle of our political system, so I suppose one can say that politics was ever so, or more pointedly, two thousand years hasn’t seen much change in human beings as they relate to the avenues of power. I think he would recognize us and probably satirize us as he did his contemporaries. He would have much subject matter.
One thing has changed, though, and I have to point to this to us as our unique, modern contribution. We now have the means to broadcast the voice, breeding, and manner over the country and around the world. Not only that, we have created a new form of pundit who fits the definition of popular politician just as well. That idea is both depressing and amusing (in a rather horrible way).
I can picture what Aristophanes would make of Olberman and Limbaugh. He’d probably have recognized the type and written a play about them: Orwell’s barnyard where the animals are equal but the pigs a little more equal, and a raft of other animals, such as the cock of the barnyard, the influential master of the dung heap, try to work around the pigs. The point would be to introduce some levity as well as some perspective into people who take themselves far too seriously.
When I was an instructor in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I remember one of my fellow instructors (we were very junior and slightly mutinous) having a cartoon pasted on her door. It showed a very large shaggy dog with a dialog balloon coming from the depths of the fur on its back. Inside the balloon were the words, “We junior fleas demand a greater voice in the running of this dog.”
Now that Ms. Palin has become a corporate juggernaut (it was reported tonight that she’s earned $12 million this year), she may be seeing herself as a rather large flea these days. I wouldn’t blame her actually. But she needs to keep in mind that a flea is still a flea. Real power is silent and secret. It operates behind the scenes. The powerbrokers are never seen, not even in the backrooms, certainly not out on the Boston commons carrying a placard.
Loud denunciations and easy slogans are not where the real power is. Such efforts are useful to someone, but not to the person using them. Ms Palin will be well rewarded for her efforts—as indeed she has been—but the real power will continue on the way it always has, in dark places where the principals are known only by accident now and then.
This is the way it was 2500 years ago and it is the way, it seems, it will always be as long as we fleas believe we are running the planet.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Words That Don't Stay in Place
It seems these days that we are in some sort of a lull. As George in Colorado Springs says, these halcyon days make him wonder if the political opposition (right wing) is merely regrouping.
Personally, I think it's just that it's hard for them to maintain a level of alarmist high dudgeon when there is so little reward for it. The politics of no require a regular infusion of indignation, and that's hard to maintain in the face of repeated defeat. People like the idea of health coverage and many wanted the public option; insurance companies will continue to shoot themselves in their feet over the need for profit, so it's only a matter of time--which is pretty much what the right understands and is so angry about.
Anyway, Sid and I are between culture wars right now. We are here back in the RV resort in Apache Junction after a relatively (for us) smooth trip down from Denver. The weather this time was good--no complaints there, but we opted to come through a canyon from Show Low to Globe, which, while it was spectacular, was also rather sobering. About every mile there was a marker saying "in the memory of . . ." In one area there was a gap in the guard rail marked by three crosses and wreaths. It seems that our highways are rapidly becoming cemeteries, or at least memorial chapels.
Pretty much can be said about Congress these days with the announced decisions not to seek office again. Don't get me wrong there. I think a good changing of the guard is not only a good thing but something necessary. Some time ago, I wrote a blog about Obama, wondering if he was the bitter medicine we needed to take if we were to get back on track. It seems I was right, except he has been more polished than I expected--or perhaps more than I deserved in my president. He has been quietly moving forward on the things we need to do while all manner of shrill fallout has harmlessly fallen to ground about him. The extremes on both sides--left and right, but particularly the right--are actually becoming boring. One wishes they would get beyond their one-note diatribes and get a life.
One thing about being set down in the midst of a group of people who disagree completely with me is the opportunity it provides for reflection. I find myself wondering to what extent there is a generational war going on. I heard that a lot during the 60's, but I wonder if Right and Left aren't clashing over control of America's past. I hear people throwing around the Constitution as if the document were capable of easy interpretation. Hundreds of years of intricate case law and precedent should disabuse them of the idea that language can be pinned down to one meaning, but that point seems to be eluding them. Words are slippery, as T.S.Eliot once said: they do not stay in place.
So much has to depend on good will if there is to be any resolution of anything, let alone something as substantial and our future. That's what we're lacking since it seems more important to the frantic among us to simply howl at the moon and be damned to doing anything worthwhile. I for one would like something better.
Personally, I think it's just that it's hard for them to maintain a level of alarmist high dudgeon when there is so little reward for it. The politics of no require a regular infusion of indignation, and that's hard to maintain in the face of repeated defeat. People like the idea of health coverage and many wanted the public option; insurance companies will continue to shoot themselves in their feet over the need for profit, so it's only a matter of time--which is pretty much what the right understands and is so angry about.
Anyway, Sid and I are between culture wars right now. We are here back in the RV resort in Apache Junction after a relatively (for us) smooth trip down from Denver. The weather this time was good--no complaints there, but we opted to come through a canyon from Show Low to Globe, which, while it was spectacular, was also rather sobering. About every mile there was a marker saying "in the memory of . . ." In one area there was a gap in the guard rail marked by three crosses and wreaths. It seems that our highways are rapidly becoming cemeteries, or at least memorial chapels.
Pretty much can be said about Congress these days with the announced decisions not to seek office again. Don't get me wrong there. I think a good changing of the guard is not only a good thing but something necessary. Some time ago, I wrote a blog about Obama, wondering if he was the bitter medicine we needed to take if we were to get back on track. It seems I was right, except he has been more polished than I expected--or perhaps more than I deserved in my president. He has been quietly moving forward on the things we need to do while all manner of shrill fallout has harmlessly fallen to ground about him. The extremes on both sides--left and right, but particularly the right--are actually becoming boring. One wishes they would get beyond their one-note diatribes and get a life.
One thing about being set down in the midst of a group of people who disagree completely with me is the opportunity it provides for reflection. I find myself wondering to what extent there is a generational war going on. I heard that a lot during the 60's, but I wonder if Right and Left aren't clashing over control of America's past. I hear people throwing around the Constitution as if the document were capable of easy interpretation. Hundreds of years of intricate case law and precedent should disabuse them of the idea that language can be pinned down to one meaning, but that point seems to be eluding them. Words are slippery, as T.S.Eliot once said: they do not stay in place.
So much has to depend on good will if there is to be any resolution of anything, let alone something as substantial and our future. That's what we're lacking since it seems more important to the frantic among us to simply howl at the moon and be damned to doing anything worthwhile. I for one would like something better.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Obama's Census Choice
I must admit I was surprised when the White House announced that President Obama identified himself solely as African-American on the census form. He could have checked White as well or written in Mixed Race, but he didn't, so the statement he's making is clear about where he feels he belongs.
Don't get me wrong. This is his absolute right. It's his life and his family and these issues are never easy. I can imagine he wanted to be the same as his wife, his two daughters, and his mother in law. I used much the same reasoning when I became an American citizen, but I was never asked to renounce being British (or at least the Brits said I was still was and that was enough)so I could keep what I was born with and celebrate both parts of me.
But even allowing for understanding the difficulties, I can't help a niggling discomfort wondering how I would feel if my half-Hispanic grandson should decide he is solely Hispanic and blows off the rest of his ancestry. Actually, I know I'd be hurt. I've done everything I can to help make him proud of his Native American roots but I also want him to be proud of the generations of hard-headed, hard-scrabble, farmers, soldiers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, that are my direct contribution to his father. Whether I like or even approve of them, they contributed their genes and deserve to be in the picture. I'd hope he could embrace us, warts and all.
Obviously, I feel forcing people to choose just doesn't make sense anymore. In my own case, while the choice might be obvious, I'd still want to insert footnotes probably because I lived most of my adult life in Hawaii. There one is more likely to describe ancestry by nationality rather than race, mainly because things are so mixed up that multi-racial is about the only possible label. A young person might list, for example, Hawaiian, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, German, Scottish, and English (or more) as ancestry and be proud of it because it reflects the history of migrants to the Islands.
Even the label "Caucasian" suggests multi-racial. It binds together the products of milennia of migrations and intermarriages, even though people use it as if it refers to a genetically and culturally cohesive group of people. It doesn't--anymore than the term African-American can encompass the African sub-continent and the spread of its people across Europe and through Asia and into and through the Middle East. If our DNA testing is right and we take the long view, we should all check the box for African-American.
I look foward to the day when this nonsense of race fades into the past and it no longer matters. About forty years ago, Time Magazine ran a cover story on what Americans would look like in a hundred years. I remember the cover well. It showed the various possible combinations of very handsome people, all of them a golden-honey color. This is where we are headed, I believe. It's certainly true of my husband's family: three out of four grandchildren have to be described as mixed race.
I think it will be a very good thing for this country once we get there.
Still, I can't help feeling sad how Obama's choice has effectively cut away his late mother and grandmother. And for that matter--not that it makes much difference to him I'm sure--how he has pushed people like me away as well.
Don't get me wrong. This is his absolute right. It's his life and his family and these issues are never easy. I can imagine he wanted to be the same as his wife, his two daughters, and his mother in law. I used much the same reasoning when I became an American citizen, but I was never asked to renounce being British (or at least the Brits said I was still was and that was enough)so I could keep what I was born with and celebrate both parts of me.
But even allowing for understanding the difficulties, I can't help a niggling discomfort wondering how I would feel if my half-Hispanic grandson should decide he is solely Hispanic and blows off the rest of his ancestry. Actually, I know I'd be hurt. I've done everything I can to help make him proud of his Native American roots but I also want him to be proud of the generations of hard-headed, hard-scrabble, farmers, soldiers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, that are my direct contribution to his father. Whether I like or even approve of them, they contributed their genes and deserve to be in the picture. I'd hope he could embrace us, warts and all.
Obviously, I feel forcing people to choose just doesn't make sense anymore. In my own case, while the choice might be obvious, I'd still want to insert footnotes probably because I lived most of my adult life in Hawaii. There one is more likely to describe ancestry by nationality rather than race, mainly because things are so mixed up that multi-racial is about the only possible label. A young person might list, for example, Hawaiian, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, German, Scottish, and English (or more) as ancestry and be proud of it because it reflects the history of migrants to the Islands.
Even the label "Caucasian" suggests multi-racial. It binds together the products of milennia of migrations and intermarriages, even though people use it as if it refers to a genetically and culturally cohesive group of people. It doesn't--anymore than the term African-American can encompass the African sub-continent and the spread of its people across Europe and through Asia and into and through the Middle East. If our DNA testing is right and we take the long view, we should all check the box for African-American.
I look foward to the day when this nonsense of race fades into the past and it no longer matters. About forty years ago, Time Magazine ran a cover story on what Americans would look like in a hundred years. I remember the cover well. It showed the various possible combinations of very handsome people, all of them a golden-honey color. This is where we are headed, I believe. It's certainly true of my husband's family: three out of four grandchildren have to be described as mixed race.
I think it will be a very good thing for this country once we get there.
Still, I can't help feeling sad how Obama's choice has effectively cut away his late mother and grandmother. And for that matter--not that it makes much difference to him I'm sure--how he has pushed people like me away as well.
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