We Come, We Occupy, We Wonder

I used to advise the president I worked for to always "bump it up," when he was faced with something controversial. By this I meant (and he understood me to say) don't get caught in the grubby little details where you will be attacked by grubby little people. Rise above the swamp and look at the larger picture, the one that matters over time--or over centuries for that matter.

Very fortunately, I worked then for a man who was capable of doing this and who, thereby, earned my loyalty.

Today, I look around for anyone who can understand the concept of "bump it up" let alone put it into play. Where are the leaders who, in the words of Isaac Newton, "stood on the shoulders of giants" and looked far into the future? Or--given that we live in an addled, self-focused world--can at least look beyond just getting elected, reelected, or rich.

If such a person were to emerge, I have my own ideas of what the vista would look like.

First, I would think someone wise and aware of history (instead of trying to rewrite it) would conclude that we are in disarray. Our various protest movements are disjointed efforts to say that something is seriously wrong with the world. And while it might be tempting to think that this unrest might mean that people are becoming more aware, what it really means is that self-interest is riding supreme: the rich have grown attached to their money; the poor can't find work, and the middle class is afraid of losing its creature comforts. No one wants to be the first to give up anything.

Second, I think that the wise person would see that the fixes being proposed are just as self-serving as the irresponsible actions that got us into this mess, not to mention that they are all short-term. Long-term, futuristic solutions evade us because people want to wake up and find the problems solved so they can get back to watching Hoarders or some other reality show--and feel superior to the disturbed people among us.

Personally, I long ago concluded that as a species we have built-in handicaps. We're tribal, meaning that we long for a great leader to emerge who will make decisions we agree with and allow us to continue in our indolence and lack of personal accountability. We are also competitive and rather nasty if we think someone is beating the system in a way that affects us directly. We like to scapegoat and snoop on other people's lives and pay lip servive to morals we don't practice. We also like spectacles, particularly taking public figures apart in the media. It's just who we are and we have a media that panders to it.

If we really think about it, at least as a modern species in the West, we have known only two economic systems (I don't count the hunter-gatherers here). The first was feudalism. It made slaves out of those working the land and produced an aristocratic class fit only to wage war. No one in their right mind would want to go back to that, although there are many in the world living that system right now. The second has been the growth of Capitalism, sprung from the early enterpreneurial merchants in the newly emerging cities (I count Communism and Fascism as bizarre reactions to or distortions of Capitalism).  We seldom question those things that seem self-evidently true because we are used to them as we are now used to two hundred years of Capitalist thinking.

One of the things people don't seem to undestand about Capitalism is that it requires continual growth. The stockholders must be fed, the CEOs don't get their bonuses without growth, and competition cannot be sustained without the continual move forward. When people rhapsodize about a time when people had integrity and pride in their work, they forget that it was during the time of the small city merchants who met a need without the continual striving to be bigger and better and opening branches everywhere. There was time for craftsmanship and customer service then. When capital was removed from the artisan, there was no time left for anything that did not provide a profit. Few people today mention corporate America and integrity in the same breath.

Please let's talk about this.

Capitalism will not be satisfied until the last mineral has been fracted out of the earth, the last animal has been slaughtered in the name of profit, and people have been returned to serving the needs of the aristocracy among us who are fit only to war with one another over what is left of the planet. Is this really what we want?

Who the Hell Are We?

Today, the news media (corporate) reports that an executive with a German car manufacturer made the mistake of driving in Alabama (where the company had built a plant) without his passport. He was arrested. When one of his associates brought his passport, he was released, but still has to appear in court.

The reactions to this are both predicable and informative of the great divide among us. Some people said it was a pity to have done this to a legitimate visitor on visa given the fact that the states are trying so hard to attract foreign investment (millions of dollars in incentives for this company). Others are saying, serves him right for not carrying his passport at all times; they cite experiences in Europe where they had to produce theirs.

I've been in Europe, little dogies, I AM European (to the extent the British will admit it) and I thought we were better than them over there. If they want to have police states, deity bless em, but that's not the home of the brave and free. Except I guess some of us want to be nasty and impose the police state over here. I'm left wondering why when so many of us have been trying to escape it.

So who the hell are we?

My answer: we are two different sets of people. One set of us is hell bent on applying the rules--goddam, I conformed, so can you. I was raised on a set of values and I'm going to apply them, because by golly they were applied to me. I listened to those old-time preachers and they sounded good to me, so you'd better go my way or I'll call you unAmerican, and I don't care if the rich keep their money as long as the poor, whom I disapprove of, don't get any of my hard earned dollars.

Before you throw me to the curb here--this has pretty much been the attitude of the Catholic Church through the ages, but also, to be fair, of the protestant evangelical sects that replaced but did not depose the varieties of spiritual experience.

Then there's the group that resonate to the idea of class warfare and raising the banner for the poor and downtrodden. It's easier to sympathize with this group because--well--the poor are the poor. But let's admit it, many of these guys know how to play the system. I've seen it myself. I've also seen companies die from union efforts at creating utopia.

So, who the hell am I?

Like so many of fellow independents, I chose from both sides. This, I think, is the great distinguishing characteristic between us in the middle and the dream-ons who populate both extremes. Increasingly, there will be more of us because we will refuse to be forced into choosing between two equally stupid options that don't fit in the twenty-first century.

To our current political wantabes, who are among the nuttiest I have ever had the misfortune to have rammed down my throat on TV, I want to say this:  back up on the phony religion (there's a whole bunch of us who see it for the manipulation it is); quit with the ideologies (they're boring us); figure out what's going to work with what most of want: a stable workable approach to life; quit with your theories in favor of what works; and spare us your pretenses and hypocrisy.

If the American tradition is hard work and speaking straight--here I am. Catch up with me if you can.

The Season of Our Discontent: The Occupy Movement, or am I just being Cassandra?

I am getting sick to tears of people saying the Occupy movements have no "goals" and no "platform" so there's no way to tell "what they want."  I gnash my teeth when I hear this--and I hear it from people close to me. They are completely missing the point.

The goals of the occupy movement are two:  first: finding a way to let people have a say in decisions currently being made far above their heads by big money; and, two, allowing the expression of massive disgust with our political structures. Right now, approval of Congress stands at 9%. Where is the 91% going to find an outlet beyond sterile polls in the media that elected officials ignore at will?

Obviously, some of the disgusted among us joined the Tea Party. Others took their tents to city squares and plazas. It's the same impulse, but with entirely different targets. The Tea Partiers want to dismantle government as the answer to everything. The Occupiers want reins on corporations and the wealthy.

And let's be clear about it: there are anarchists in both groups.

The problem with dismantling government is the dog-eat-dog culture that's left. Without regulation, we get tainted food, predatory business, and a culture of cheating. Human beings are not very nice to one another--and a good read of the Bible shows it has always been so. To people who want to hit me over the head with the Bible: please read all of it first.

The problem with curtailing business is the possible discouragement of innovation and new products. No one wants to do that.

But we are blind fools if we don't recognize the corruption and greed in our system of capital investment and stockholders. One small example:  Our local toll road (state supported by bonds) is raising its prices. When  their books were looked into, it turns out they have been paying multimillion dollar bonuses and perks to the employees and board. When called on it, they said, essentially, "Everyone's doing it." They're probably right.

And where is this all headed?

The problem for the nation is that the Tea Partiers are older, richer, and white and believe in the mantra of arming themselves under the rubric of "Law and Order," which is largely enforced by the local police. The Occupy movement is younger, many of whom have little to lose anymore, and willing to use their bodies as a form of political protest.

Hello---does anyone else beside me see a looming problem? Meanwhile, locked in ideological debate over trivial crap and playing at being ideologically pure rather than protecting the country, Congress plays Nero's fiddle for the coming onflagration.

So, yes, the Occupy movement grew up out of frustration and it prides itself on being disorganized. It leaves to us how we implement it, but it tells us we are not alone in our discontent.

So what can we do?

In my case, I will no longer drive on our toll road. I will also try to punish manipulation by withholding my patronage. Today, Sid bought a jar of Heinz gravy. The label said $1 off. The implication was clear: behind the label was a coupon for the gravy. When he looked behind the label, it was a dollar off something else entirely. If I ever buy anything made by Heinz again, I am complicit in their cheat.

Admittedly, Ketchup is not difficult to make and is hardly likely to hit Heinz very hard. So, in my own small way I shall go further to support my local small business.  I'm going to drive to a local egg coop and look at how they treat the poultry. If I'm satisfied, I'll join and buy my eggs from them in preference to the inhumane treatment in large processing plants. I've been to one. They stink from the carcasses of dead birds and not just the guano.

For me, the Occupy movement is a call to look at myself. Who am I? What do I believe? What is my ethical responsibility to the planet, to human beings, and to our fellow travelers.  Sorry--I do not include corporations or the wealthy among those for whom I should feel responsible. Neither did Christ--for you Bible thumpers.

If some of the the rest of us go through this same process, I would say that the Occupy movement has already achieved one of its goals. We all ought to be out there with them because it's the only thing on the horizon with at least a glimmer of hope for the future. We could use some right about now.

Revisionist Politics and the Bible

Just when I think I've heard it all, something comes along to remind me that we probably will never find bottom for human willful stupidity.  I lived (somewhat) through Sarah Palin's rewriting of American history--after all, I have some degree of familial interest in the ride of Paul Revere since my grandfather's family were redcoats and probably there--but Republican hopeful Cain leaves me in tears wondering if that party can field a candidate on this side of ignorant.

For those who don't know what I am talking about, Mr. Cain pronounced Jesus Christ a conservative. Has he read the gospels?  Or is he just spouting the Christian brand and hoping that someone salutes without looking too far into things.

Jesus Christ a conservative. Please! I am no religionist. I think all religions are dangerous, none less so that the Christian. However, I do this on the basis of knowledge. I know the enemy. I have actually read the Bible, not just listened to the cherry pickings and pretty sayings (King James version) spouted as homilies on Sundays before a fidgeting congregation already looking at their watches. In particular, I have read (and studied) the gospels, which are the purported history of the Christ.

So what do I learn. Christ does not like bankers. In fact, he hates them and drives them out of the temple. He also doesn't like rich people. They have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. In other words, zippo. A young man came to Christ as asked what he had to do to earn heaven. "Give away all your stuff to the poor," he was told. The young man went away "troubled." I'll bet he did. Why should he give away his ipod, his car, his flatscreen to undeserving illegals here to drain his tax money. Christ's minstry was to the poor, the undertrodden, the disinfranchised, and we're not talking about people earning less than $200,000. Christ would tell us that any of us with anything to our name should give all way and embrace a life of poverty.

Compare this with the Puritan ideas (those nasty little folk that England threw out because they were obnoxious) that wealth means that god approves of you. Not in the New Testament he doesn't. The Old Testament is a different cup of tea. But that's where it says people can own slaves, turn their daughters into prostitutes, and stone people to death. Hello, anyone. If you are following the Old Testament, you are not Christian (logic: you have to follow Christ to be Christian). Christ apparently negotiated a deal for humans; he got god to back off, but notice that hell isn't there in the OT. It shows up in the NT with the Christian era, thus allowing the born-again movement and thunder and brimstone preachers.

The bible and its supporters are neither consistent nor even particularly informed about the document they like to hit us over the head with.

No, Mr. Cain, you claimed Christ as so many have before you--to justify wars, to justify killing those you don't like, to justify persecuting others, to justify slavery in the South. But this man was no con servative. In fact, he would have been the first to tell you that your job was your fellow man, not supporting those who make money off his misery.  Mr. Cain, please accept my wishes for you :  pffffft (the sound of your deflation.)

Our Corporate Masters

A couple of days ago, I listened to an interview on Public Radio. A fellow from some free enterprise institute was asked if he thought there was corporate responsibility for creating jobs in this country. His reply was predictable but unusually chilling in the coldness of his certainty.

Personnel are a just an entry in the expenses column, he said. Asking a corpotation to hire more people is the same as asking them to raise their expenses. Providing jobs is not their responsibility. Corporations owe nothing beyond making profit. They aren't the same as the government, he said.

Beyond the fact that I made that same argument in a previous blog--corporations are not governments--I find his easy dismissal of any responsibility beyong lining the pockets of the wealthy to be repulsive.

If I had been interviewing this cold fish, I would have asked him why, given that corporations exist only to generate profit, they insist on doing their best to prevent the government from governing the people it has sworn to serve. Instead of demanding greater and greater profit squeezed from public resources, why aren't they out there being businesses instead of buying our legislators and lobbying for laws to the own advantage.?If they are not governments, what are they doing on Capitol Hill in the first place. That, supposedly, is where governing goes on, not in the boardrooms and the CEO bathrooms.

Instead of demanding concessions from us taxpayers, they should be paying us for the privilege of having access to our markets.

By any measure, our largest corporations have done well in this country except when their own greed has pulled them down. Economists now look on them as small nations in their own right. Walmart Stores, for example, ranks twenty-second in GDP revenues when compared with the economic resources of the world's nations. That's right--in comparison with national GDPs, Royal Dutch Shell ranks thirty-fourth, Exxon Mobile is thirty-fifth, and Toyota ranks forty-fourth. The only things larger than these corporations are countries such as the US (still the world's largest economy) and other nations including (in order) Japan, China, Germany, France, and the UK.

Looked at another way, of the top 100 economies in the world, 44 are corporations. The figures are not mine. I borrow them from the work of Tracy Keyes, Director of Strategy Dynames Global Limited and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management.

Figures such as these make it very difficult to feel sympathy for pathetic bleats regarding the need for ever yet more concessions and the continuance of subsidies that serve only to enrich the bonus checks of higher management. It doesn't make for compelling reading when what jobs remain in this country (free trade ventures seemingly only free to the extent that our jobs are freed to other countries) are held hostage to the corporate desire to wring yet more profits as the expense of this nation.

I'm not surprised that we are seeing the start of a grassroots movement that is spreading across the country. People are staring to recognize how much we are at the mercy of our corporate masters.

Just in the food industry, they centralize production for efficiency, destroy our local businesses by undercutting costs, and then feed us foods laced with chemicals to preserve them while they are shipped across the country to us. They claim lucrative farm subsidies and then drive out the smaller farms who are unable to compete. All this is justified by giving us more "choice" and lower prices. The logical end place for this is very hard to comtemplate. They will utterly control our food.

In the face of this, I have resolved to buy local wherever I can, although how much can one do in the face of oil companies with incomes larger than most of the nations of the world?

I, for one, hope this occupy Wall Street movement continues because the stakes are very high. I read somewhere that we have 300 million guns in this country. Let's hope we can bring about peaceful change and have our voices heard. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

The Two Questions to Ask of Politics

Like much of the rest of the world, the US is in the middle of a social revolution that none of us likes, mostly because it is launching us into the unknown. We stand helplessly watching as our banks, governments--and even the manufacturers we once trusted--almost casually break their bonds with us.

Many now long for a more familiar world. It's not that life in the past was so wonderfully simple. It was just more predictable. People knew the rules, and there was comfort knowing they were in place and could be seen working. Today, it seems that the people who get rewarded are the ones who not only don't follow the rules but act as if they never existed.

Yesterday, the BBC reported yet another trader scandal in Switzerland where one man has cost his employing bank two billion Euros. The reporter commented that not only had the bank obviously not learned anything from the last round of losses in 2008, but that the trader had no motive to care since he was being paid anyway and not working with his own money. In other words, there was nothing in place to prevent him gambling with other people's money--probably because there's a fifty-fifty chance that the gamble might make a lot of money (and grow bonuses). We wouldn't hear about the gains except on the bank's annual statement; the losses, however, make the front page. It will probably cost the trader's job as a public penance. But it's really the fault of the bank's policy that permitted it.  Money conquers all.

Given all the self-interested scrambling for money at all costs, it's rare to come across someone who asks who in the hell we are as a people and what makes us "us." Yet, this is exactly what we need to be doing.

The problem is that rather than self-evaluation, it's much easier to look around for others to blame. It can't be us, people say, we are still the good, solid people we always were: it's the poor, the minorities, the people who have children they can't support, the sick, the "illegals" who take handouts, and those who won't take responsibility for themselves--they're the reasons things aren't going well. We do that, of course, without looking at our roles in such things as the housing crisis--"investing" in houses we couldn't afford and planned to flip for a profit, until of course, that couldn't be done anymore because so many people had been doing their own get-rich scheming.

As I see it, the most frightening part of all this is how this country's anger is being turned into an ugly emotional bloodbath. People are voting race and class rather than looking to the future. Unfortunately, the inevitable outcome of all the hate will be a civil war fought along racial and class lines. Is this what we really want? Wasn't one civil war enough? And won't those screaming about big government now be among the first to demand its intervention when riots hit suburbia as in London--just when the government has been emasculated and the states aren't strong enough to respond?

This gloom and doom is all well and good, you may be saying, but so what? If it's going to happen it's going to happen. Anyway, what can one voice and one vote do? Aren't I better off just buying a gun and living out in the country?
 
Well, I guess one can indeed buy a shotgun (the arms manufacturers would love that), but civil wars have a nasty habit of finding even the hidden and no one will be safe if the money collapses and the economy tanks.
 
Instead, I would argue the most important thing we can do is make sure we know what it is we are casting that one vote for. That starts with us really taking responsibility for ourselves and beginning to think about politics rather than emotionally reacting to what the corporate media chooses to feed us (and if you trust the media, remember the influence peddling, corruption, and fall of the Murdoch news empire). 

The other day I read a commentary that suggested it was hard to understand politics unless one had participated directly or been on the front lines. Well, I've been on the front lines. For a year, I worked the university's lobbying team at a state legislature. I came away with an eye-opening education and a deep cynicism that led me to ask two questions of everything proposed or passed. These questions are 1) Who is paying?  and 2) Who is benefiting? In the case of the latter, if there was any benefit to the person supposedly being served, it was incidental. The real beneficiaries were often hidden and silent.

I found that the best way to get to the bottom of political will and motivation was to step aside from the distractions. For us, that means forget about minorities and whether they are showing poverty fat when they shop at Walmart; forget about who is paying what in taxes; forget about whether undeserving people are getting medical care; forget about whether one group seems to get more breaks than another. These are the manipulations that prevent us from looking at the far more serious issues. Our attention is being deliberately drawn away from what matters.

Instead, ask the questions.

1) Who is paying? In the case of the current political upheaval, who is funding it? Answer: You have a political pressure group on the Right paid for by corporate interests. You also have a Congress on both sides that has been bought and sold by corporate interests.

2) Who is benefiting? Answer: corporate interests who gain from war, gain from tax benefits and advantages, and gain from being designated "people" by the US Supreme Court. All we gain is the emotional excitement of fighting with one another while the economic riches of this country are quietly moved to off-shore subsidiaries.


It's not a question of "big, bad corporations," but you have to look at them objectively. Our "reliable" US brands have been sold to the cheapest labor markets. We are now just expected to serve them as silent, "reliable" consumers, although how much longer we can afford to buy any of their products is questionable with so many of us now living in poverty. Many corporations, however, are enjoying record profits.

In fact, our corporations are now becoming our shadow government, wielding social power through the jobs they offer (those that still remain in this country) since many of them don't pay taxes. Of course they wouldn't hire during a presidency they don't approve of. They'll sabotage any effort made during this administration.

With the right poltical leadership, our corporations will open up minimum-wage jobs by the score, with no benefits of course (they'll leave that the US health care plan). By then, the long-term unemployed will be so glad to get any job they won't complain. All responsibility for healthcare benefits will be abdicated to what's left of the US Government (just as they did with pension plans). They will also support privatizing Social Security (not because it's bankrupt--it's absolutely not) because there is a large sum of money that could be "managed" into high corporate salaries and potential profits, once they figure out how to pare payments to the people who bought this insurance and paid for it all their lives.

When this all plays out, it will be a charade. Congress will "bend" to the will of the Tea Party all the while serving corporate interests because "of the jobs they provide." In fact, I'm prepared to believe that the entire economic crisis is entirely artificial. Some may say I am being unduly harsh on our corporations--but our memories are short and I find myself doubtful of their ability to control themselves. Remember Enron, anyone? The BP shortcuts? Countrywide?

Biscotti Jars and China

I went out shopping today. It's one of life's pleasures, as long, that is, that I can find things that I want to have in my life. It didn't take long, however, before I began questioning whether the things on offer would really meet that criteria. In other words, were the things being offered for me to buy really the things I wanted to have?

There's a bit of a story here. A few weeks ago, I met Kimi in Las Vegas to celebrate our August birthdays. Beides the slots, one of my favorite things is to go see the garden display at the Bellaggio Hotel. It's always artistic and dramatic and once we've taken pictures, I like to browse the shops around it. This time, I went into one that specializes in Italian imports. I fell in love with a biscotti jar. It was terra cotta and showed the Tuscan countryside with a villa, cypresse (cypress trees), and farm implements--very traditional. I debated for a long time and the only thing that prevented me from buying it was the problem of getting it home on the plane. If I'd had my car there, it would have been a done deal.

Back home in Denver, I regretted my decision. So, I trekked off to Park Meadowns Mall (one of our upscale shopping centers) today, looking for a biscotti jar made in Italy or Portugal. I couldn't find one. Oh there were biscotti or comparable jars all right, but invariably, they were what I consider to be fakes. They were made in China. There was no way I would buy one of them. And I'm not talking about Penneys or Sears here. I'm talking about Dillards and Sonoma-Williams. The latter did have things from Portugal and France, for which I commend them, but there were all too many things that were mere imitations, and not always the best.

This led me to consider the larger meaninng of my quest to find something authentic.What does it mean to us as a society? All I can conclude is that for every thing we buy made in China, we deprive someone in Europe and the US of their jobs just so we can buy cheap imitiations. I suppose I should say someones plural because it takes a lot more than one person to make something of lasting value. I can see cheap-o stuff flooding the discount shops like WalMart and Kmart and even Target, but when it invades even our upper scale shops it means that these store also condone peddling this stuff to us. I have to wonder not only about them but also about the corporations supplying them.  Have we become so addicted to accumulation that we don't even care what we collect?

The corporations with their bottom line of squeezing every penny are no small part of this. They slap their names on things they have made outside the country, claiming they need a sweatshop workforce to be competitive. What they are really doing is sending our jobs overseas to get things made more cheaply, and I do put the emphasis on cheap. In going offshore, I think they underestimate us seriously and they run the risk of us boycotting them, which they will deserve.

Today, I went out looking for beauty and quality. I found mere imitations, a cynical assumption of the style of another country to be paraded as real because our corporations have equally cynically assumed we will satisfied by it. From what I can gather, imitation has been China's method--copy the work and design of some other county and sell it cheaper. I, for one, do not see buying cheap stuff as satisfying anymore. In the future, I will look for where something is made and choose accordingly.

I can't be the only one feeling this way. I have to believe there might even be room for a new set of stores called Made in the USA or Not Made in China. Maybe the choices in them would not be as numerous. But I would feel much better knowing where my money is going.

In the meantime, I guess I will just have to go back to Las Vegas and hope they still have the biscotti jar.

In the Congressional Sand Box

Well, they raised the national debt ceiling and agreed to some sort of budget reduction and everyone is running around with the usual posturing: both sides claim not to be happy with the outcome and both say they will send the most intractible politicians to the joint reduction committee. The result: they've kicked the budget wars down the road to where they will simply recur in stalemate in this committee. We raised the debt ceiling, which most people agreed had to be done, and scored very little in political gain or common good for the country.

And all this so the super rich don't have to pay their share of the taxes?  Please--those of you who argue that letting the rich keep their money creates jobs--where are they? The rich have kept their money in unprecedented amounts, so where's the employment?

If anyone wants to see the result of this so-called budget trimming, they should look at the FAA budget which Congress failed to authorize. Did we save money by freezing the FAA budget as the most naive Tea Baggers believe? Hell no! The Federal government has lost $250 million in fees so far that would ordinarily go into the public coffer. This money is going into the hands of the delighted airlines as windfall profit. This is exactly what is going to happen with all these efforts to reduce the national debt because these people are short-sighted and trying to apply the rules of microeconomics, such things as the home and business budget, onto macroeconimcs, finances written large as in national budgets and multinational corporate funds, some of which are larger than the entire funding base of the U.S.

I'm sorry Tea Baggers, but the rules of macroeconomics are vastly different from those of microeconomics. If you cut household spending you can save a few dollars and the benefit is personal. If you cut government spending, you cut jobs, contracts, and services. Most Tea Bagger objections seem to be based on spending money for the services sector. But which services are they talking about? the inspection of our food? the operation of our air lanes? the protection of our coasts? the provision of meals to disabled seniors? school lunches for the neediest children? the regulation of our businesses and the professional services we provide to one another? the inspectors who try to ensure that our houses don't collapse if we slam the front doors?

I would ask them to keep in mind that every onerous rule and regulation is there because someone cheated. It's like the TSA: we all pay the price for one idiot who tried to blow up an aircraft by lighting his shoe laces. There's a reason for them all and they may seem silly, but they exist because of us.

Which brings me to the purpose of this blog. If there is to be credible, careful pruning of our national investment in this country--and that's what government spending is, an investment--we need to pare the choices carefully with an eye to getting the most service for our money. 

Looked on this way, Planned Parenthood, for example, provides care to womem who otherwise lack medical services--cutting it out because it also provides abortions (less than 10% of what they do) is counterproductive because it costs relatively little, prevents expensive hospitalizations, and saves women's lives. The FAA makes possible the entire airtraffic lanes that crisscross the country and permit flights into and out of this nation. Why on earth would Congress want to have FAA officials working without pay right now and on their own time out of a sense of the importance of their work. Does Congress really want to see airtraffic shut down?

We need a Congress that wields a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.

And what have we got?  We have children throwing sand at one another and complaining that daddy hasn't come out to the sandbox to save them from one another.

Why on earth don't we go back to the work of the committee that previously prepared a series of proposed budget reductions. That work has been ignored. Why reinvent everything? Why don't we have some basic economic courses taught on Capitol Hill? Just because someone gets elected doesn't mean they have any sense. They've proved that.

I'm going to hope that the wiser, more experienced heads on Capitol Hill, people like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, can pound some sense into these others. Because when it comes to the budget, and as Shakespeare says, "We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it."

The Media Are Us

It used to be fashionable to ask Miss America contestants if they thought the media was to blame mounting violence in society. The young woman's reply was always no, she didn't think so, and she came up with some alternative indictment of parents, or schools, or even a crisis in faith.

I was thinking about this the other day as I watched the Murdoch debacle and the demise of the News of the World, and I realized that if I were to turn back the clock and suddenly become nubile while still keeping my experience of years of living, I would beg to differ. Yes, Mr. Parks (that's how far back I go), I would say, the media have a good-sized share of the blame, but so do we all who lapped up squidgy-gate and the rather vulgar conversations between Prince Charles and Camilla.  Wherever did we think they got this stuff? We didn't ask because we wanted to know and, after all, they were the wealthy and privileged and it's their duty in life to entertain us. It only counts when the media do it to "ordinary people" like us.

But I'm going to go further and also say that the media have a good sized chunk of the responsibility for the roiling anger consuming this country. The media does not come out (usually) to promote political agendas on the front page. Such opinions are supposedly by-lined and put on the editorial pages, where people can pick and choose which op ed pieces confirm their own prejudices.

But there are  subtle ways that the news on the front page can appear to be objective while still presenting a politically slanted view. Let me explain. When I taught college English, I used to tell my students the story of a car accident that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the campus. One car broadsided another. At first I told them that one of the drivers was in his late 80s, just returning from a visit to the doctor's office. The other car was driven by a man in his twenties. Speed was not considered a fctor.

Who might they think was to blame? The wisest ones, onto my ploy, said they didn't know enough. I caught a good number of them assuming that the senior driver was "probably" to blame because everyone "knows" that serniors have declining driving skills.

All right, I'd say, here's some more: the 20 year old driver had a suspended license, there were three other men in the car with him, one of them was partially undresssed, and there were beer cans on the back floor.
My students looked a bit ashamed but then went on to do the same thing. Now, it looked like the younger folk were to blame.

The devil was in the details provided and withheld.  And it happens to us all the time if we rely on the media for our information instead of looking more deeply ourselves.

On Tuesday, July 12, The Denver Post ran a front page story with the headline "Draft Ramps Up Kid Rules: The Child-care Lincensing Plan's Focus on Quality Meets Quikc Skepticism."  The lead paragraph stressed that the proposed (note: only proposed) rules would "impose (notice that word) sweeping changes on Colorado Licensed child-care centers." The second paragraph quoted "some" child care operators as saying the proposed changes were a "vast overreach." The next paragraph named the operator of three centers who didn't say anything about the overreach business but commented that health and safety needed to be balanced with quality and that there be some flexibility.

By then, all those opposed to government intervention in anything were probably thumping their chair arms and yelling about damned government sticking its nose into everything.  This would probably produce a very nice rant if the reader was a tea-bagger, meaning that he or she was probably not going to read the rest of the story on 7A buried inside.  Now, on  that equivalent of a back page, we learned that the proposals are a draft to be negotiated by the parties involved and that many of the suggested policies were recommended by childcare operators themselves because Colorado is one of bottom states when it comes to regulating early child-care providers.

Looks different doesn't it? The devil was in the order of the details in this account and since the "balance" didn't come until the end, one must conclude that the writer intended to stir things up. In other words, we were snookered and it was a non-story. However, the next day, the Post ran an editorial no less saying that the draft policies went too far as if the story had been credible and only the media reporting had "saved" the day.

Having actually served on some of these committees to propose anything, I know how they work. You throw everything in but the kitchen sink so it can all be negotiated and people can work together as a team to discard anything really unreasonable. That is how democracy and consensus work. In this case, though, the media picked out the controversy, played it up irresponsibly to sell papers, and by doing so fanned the flames of division.  Who needs enemies when you have media fighting for readership?

But let's be honest. We get the media we deserve. If we aren't willing to educate ourselves to look skeptically at what is presented to us as fact and if we aren't willing to embrace even a rudimentary form of intellectual engagement with the world--and we're seeing mounting evidence that many of us are not--then we are going to continue being presented with gossip masquerading as truth. Shame on us for settling for this.

What Manner of Insanity?

I find myself more than discouraged these days--I am actually sickened by the sight of small minds and petty unkindness trying to force itself upon humanity. I am left to wonder what manner of insanity has fallen on this country that urges people to force their will on others in the name of pesonal and repressive theocracies which all too often take the form of repression against women.

Why women? In many societites women are property. They are hidden under veils to prevent men other than their husbands coveting them, mutilated so they are not tempted to enjoy sex, stoned to death when they violate any male-created taboos, uneducated so they are not tempted into independence, and made to understand that their only value is in producing children. If men could have their own children, women would probably be killed at birth. 

Let anyone believe I am talking only about the Middle East, which is only the most obvious example of this, we need only to take a look at our own southern and midwestern states, the bastion of political repression and the glorious old Righty values thrust at us by the moral arbiters of "American Values."

Yes, the Righties want a balanced budget--how moral. Yet they plan to have this budget balance by cutting programs for the poor, most of which serve women--those rogues who have been abandoned by their husbands (must have been for cause) and those whom they want to believe are in the country illegally (they  creep across the border, dodging the cacti, just so they can go to US emergency rooms to have anchor babies and rack up our national debt.) 

 Now--I don't mind paying my 18% even if it does go to these "undesirables" but I resent like hell watching super-rich Richties calling for a balanced budget where they are not even on the seesaw. That makes their idea of a balanced budget something theoretical, something to be done by others while they defend paying not a cent and claiming that they "deserve" their money. When they divorce, their settlements run in the millions. When the poor divorce, the women head down into poverty.

Wanting to cut the programs that serve the poor and women shows the real motivation of the Right. They just don't like the poor and they positively froth over women who produce children in poverty, all the while wanting to deny them abortions even in the case of rape. They do this without even trying to recognize that not every woman served by the programs they want to cut is minority, trying to play the system, or popping out welfare babies (remember Reagan?). A whole lot of these women have been abandoned and not by other women. Yet, the Righties want to cut the education that might make these women independent and they want to deny them information about reproduction that might limit unwanted pregnancies.

Anyone? Does this make sense?

Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the Right is nothing new. Every society has beaten up on its women. So why am I so discouraged by something that predicatably recurs? I have to say it's political and it has to do with the matter of will. Right now I have no trust in our political leadership to do the right thing.

Governing a nation as diverse as this one requires leadership to do what is right, not what is ideologically pure. We aren't on the frontier any more. The values that allowed people to fight off bears is not what's needed in an overpopulated world.  I want a president who takes a stand. I want to see leadership into the 21 Century not into the 19th.

We have a problem with illegal immigration. Instead of building walls that keep no one out, drop the judgmental nonsense and fix the problem once and for all. If it means issuing work visas, be pragmatic and do it. Quit the self-righteous pontificating. So a lot of people don't like abortion--they also don't like supporting unwanted children. Get over it. No one is forcing anyone to have one and the decision to have one is tragic--leave the woman alone. So people don't like gay marriage. We no longer live in a society that encourages people to have 15 children to populate the country. We don't need more families. The gays are doing us a favor. When they want families, they adopt the neediest children among. Let them have whatever they need to raise these children and if it's marriage to protect their families, so be it.

I want a president who understands the world has changed and doesn't try to conciliate these idiots who still want to live back in the 1800s.  President Obama: please stop trying to be a community organizer. These people are too dangerous to deal with. Please start looking at what this country needs to be a civilized nation in the 21st Century. And please stop pandering to the worst among us.

What Would Shakespeare Blog

Recently, I accept the challenge to imagine what Shakespeare, the greatest writer in our language that ever was, would blog about if he were alive today. I found the experience both amusing and profound. I'm sure he would have laughed at the same pretensions and lunacy as we do, just as I am sure he would be just as depressed at how little we have learned from those before us. We are still the same people, just in different times and settings and, unfortunately, armed with better and more destructive technology.

Here is what I wrote:

One thing about William Shakespeare, he never met a human being he couldn’t bump up into an archetype. His characters were never just people. That’s not how his brain worked. He looked for meaning and played with life by asking questions. What if Aristotle’s idea of the tragic hero could be tweaked, maybe turned upside down, and used to show how we grubby human beings fall short of anything like true heroism? What if a sociopath were to be dropped into the middle of unreflective, morally complacent people—who would win? What if an ambitious man were suddenly shown a short-cut to real power, how would he handle it? Shakespeare populated his world with people faced with moral, ethical, and emotional problems and moved them on his chessboard while he worked out his answers.


In the end, his “answers” had to be partial because unknowable things can be resolved only in the acceptance that “the rest is silence.” But what a journey he took us on.

Shakespeare took his characters where he found them: from history books, from the ranks of the royal courtiers, from everyday people around him. He turned every one into a moral or intellectual lesson. He found no shortage of material in sixteenth-century England, just as he would find no shortage now. The world is still populated by the same greedy, unaware, willfully ignorant, morally complacent, and unreflective types. He would understand modern politics because he had seen it all before.

For example, he wrote about a king who confused the power of his position with his personal authority. “A dog’s obeyed in office,” was the sad lesson that king had to learn. He could have been writing about George Bush. But the lesson he might have drawn from the Bush administration is that just because one has the power to do something (like invade another country) does not mean one should. At the end of the Shakespeare play, the stage is littered with the bodies of the king’s family (you can never just remove a targeted piece of evil like Saddam Hussein, Shakespeare told us, everyone must suffer in the process). The stage at the end of the Bush drama is littered with the deaths of thousands of people who gave their lives abroad and the near death of our economy. A dram of evil, indeed.

What would he have made of Bill Clinton? Here was a man capable of doing good and admirable in so many ways, yet brought down by his own weaknesses. The tragic flaw, Shakespeare might have pointed out, just as Aristotle described it. The rueful Clinton, apparently having learned his lesson, now says he indulged in a sordid affair “because he could.” Prime Shakespeare material. He might have said the same about Representative Weiner.

Or how about the swath of Tea Party candidates? “A flag upon the waters,” Shakespeare would have said. He never liked popular movements anyway. He didn’t trust the people not to be ignorant and just go for popularity.

All in all, Shakespeare wrote about power. His subjects were courtiers, hangers-on become pawns to those in power, women who encouraged murder but wanted to be blameless, parents who destroyed their children, and psychopaths who ruined others just for the experience. Today he easily could find comparable if not exact duplicates. With the internet, he would only need to read the headlines.

Shakespeare was fascinated by the getting, the keeping, the abusing, and the losing of political advantage. Politics and history were his natural milieu. He showed us the truth of Santayana’s comment that those unaware of the past are doomed to repeat it. So, as we head into yet another election cycle, it would behoove us to remember this cynical and yet hopeful observer of humanity, who would advise us that nothing is new under the sun. We could do a lot worse than to go back and and reread his plays.

Growing Old Graciously

Growing old is something of a conundrum: for something we are told exists only in our minds, people seem to spend every waking hour thinking about it. The problem is that no one quite knows what to do. Even our media is hopelessly conflicted on the subject.

On the one hand, the media hits us with ads for every manner of potion, lotion, hair dye, viagra, and other chemical known to humankind, all designed to prevent or reverse time. We're shown admiring portraits of people who have surgically tightened, smoothed, and sucked away their age, the implication being that if we look like "before" pictures it must mean we are lazy or cheap. Into this category fall those "raging against the light" (to quote Dylan Thomas) and those older men and women who pursue youth by literally pursuing youths, using the mantra, "if I can get away with/afford it, why not?" No one HAS to look old is the mantra that keeps plastic surgeons in their Ferraris.

On the other hand, we are given unctious sermons on accepting ourselves as we are and growing old "gracefully," which seems to mean not whining about getting old, accepting whatever stereotype of age our culture decides to imnpose on us, and showing up on time to babysit the grandchildren. Usually, though, it's tied to appearance as few overweights (even the mild forms) are said to be aging "well."

If we take all this nonsense seriously--which I can't--what, then, are we left with? The apparent choice seems either to take action against a sea of sags ( the solution approved by a society that links appearance to success) or get off the boat and sink beneath the waves (a solution not favored by people who still have alert minds).

Well, I neither desire nor wish to pay for growing old "well," nor do I wish to recede into a rocking chair waiting for the ultimate call. Instead, I propose to grow old "graciously." Allow me to explain.

You are at a busy airport with heavy luggage and someone you don't know offers to help. What do you do?

a.  Say you are perfectly capable of handling your things. You're not a cripple, thank you very much. You've got enough money to pay for a porter if you want one.
b.  Agree to the help but complain about how things are so rushed these days and warn the person not to damage your suitcase.
c. Although perfectly capable, accept the help with a smile and thanks.

If you chose a), you're still trying to compete with the big dogs in the world of power. If b) you have sunk into self-pity. If c) you are gracious.  The person who offered help to a) will walk away muttering about old farts. If b) the person will feel used and manipulated. If c) the person will feel they have done a good deed and, who knows, maybe they'll be a little bit kinder to other people for the rest of the day. The younger folk are so unkind to one another these days, a little genuine humanity and concern for others might go a long way.

Little acts of kindness--the pat on the shoulder I got from the waiter at lunch today, the unexpected offer to open a water bottle with a stuck cap, doors held open a little extra long for me, help pulling my suitcase off the airport carousel--can only be done for children and seniors because we are believed safe to show kindness to. They don't think we're still competing or slighting others--frankly, because we're supposed to be mature and grown beyond egocentrism and greedily grasping for a world that is no longer ours. Some of us anyway.

I believe growing old graciously means providing a model of maturity and compassion for those behind us still locked in the rat race. We don't have to be rich, looking fifteen years younger, and flattening and shaping our aging bodies to compete with the people to whom youth really belongs. We carry with us the marks life has put on us, but we have one thing youth doesn't: we have experience and instead of spouting about the good old days, it would behoove us to behave as a model of them.

Fortunately, experience is one thing that's safe from botox.

To Be Human Is To Lie

Let me state up front here what I am  talking about when I talk about lying. I believe to lie  is to be human. I'm not talking about being political. In the case of the latter, I think the case has already been made by far more clever and intellectual thinkers than I. Given the prospect of the next ballot, politicians look no further. They lie because their purpose is to be reelected and getting voted in means accommodating the majority. The cleverest thing successful politicians do is hold a wet thumb to the prevailing winds. I'm not talking about them. I don't feel them worth it.

I'm more concerned with us--the overpopulated population where every person is narcissitic enough to beleive their casual inattention to politics entitles them to an equal vote in its administration, These are the people who hear the slogans, the appeals to prejudice, and the attempts to convince them of their (vastly overblown) superiority. These are the ignorant who flaunt their lack of knowledge as a virtue and claim that obvious disparities in education and understanding are mere intellectual prejudice. Unfortunately, these people, lulled into compacency by the rhetoric of those in power, are the least likley to accept the need for humility. My own bias, which I freely admit, is against these people, many of whom thunp the bible as the answer to all things and --worse, much worse-- preserve their own importance by trying to force others to follow the prescriptive paths they themselves do not follow.

These are the people who, when caught out (as in indiscretions with multiple women), delight in providing a moral twist to their selfish agendas.  "I'm only human," they usually bleat, begging for the understanding and forgiveness they deny to others. Their hypocrisy plays as dismally on the national scene. Please, they say, let's not end billions in public subsidies to the oil companies, they're looking for oil for us, they're keeping the prices down at the fuel pumps, they are serving us all.  Except, they fail to talk about the corporate self interest: the millions in corporate bonuses that might be threatened by a decrease in public support and the potential drop in the stock value, not to mention the commensurate decrease in fund flowing to the politicians tasked with maintaining all of the above. If they're not directly benefiting from corporate lobbying, they are enthralled with an idea of--you name it--some drummed up idea of America's past,  over which they can't or won't exercise the skepticism that is as part of America as apple pie.

I lament the loss of native cynicsim regarding human behavior, greed, and complete selfishness that has marked most of the history of this country. The Founding Fathers got it. Go read Tom Payne on the abuses of power and see how carefully Jefferson and Hamilton balanced competing interests. Give me a break, I want to yell at these people (and maybe some of you say I already do). Instead of looking at these so-called ideals (which never existed), do a group examination of people's motives. See all the rhetoric and see all the backpedaling. We are a bunch of people who lie for our own advantage. Hell, we're not even the only species who does it. We learned at one of my university conferences that even apes will lie to get out of trouble.

Now let me address a miconception here. Some of you may say I am a Democrat because I have opposed so much of the Republical agenda. I did so because it is illogical, uneducated, and stupid. But that does NOT mean I am a Democrat. I am a common-senser. It's just that the Republicans have given me so much more to write about. For example, the world will not end on May 21. Take it from here. Those who spent their savings in anticipation of the world ending are not wise--just broke. The self-deluded Rapturists will still be among us on the 22nd, annoying those of us who see beyond their millennial delusions, paricularly when they try to reset the date by arguing their calculations must have been incorrect.

I have news for rapturists. No one could be so lucky to have things end like that--tied up in a bow by some deity stepping out of the sky. Not a chance. chums.

No, it's just business as usual down here on earth. We will still be the same grubby, selfish little creatures we always have been, trying to put up with the craziness of those who believe they have the answers when most of the rest of us are still trying to find the questions.

Bin Laden--The Fall Out

Judging from the reactions starting to come in from around the world, I was not the only one with questions about the recent death of Osma bin Laden. Some European nations question the legality of the operation that finally found him, others point to what they see as U.S. violation of its own claim to be a nation of laws--unless inconvenient they are saying--in not bringing the man back for trial. Justice is justice, they say, until the U.S. wants revenge. 

But the point for me is not whether there was confusion and wild shots, or whether the U.S. was justified in executing what was obviously a long-planned operation (CIA agents had the house under observation), or whether Pakistan "knew" about what was going to happen (if they didn't "know" bin Laden was there, I suppose they might not "know" about the U.S.) although they certainly know about the billions they are taking from us in aid and for this reason alone their efforts to have it both ways are at best disingenuous.

The point for me is what it means about the U.S. as a nation and as a people.

I was disturbed when I saw the celebrations reported in the media: open-mouthed roars of approval and chants of USA, as if we had just won a medal at the Olympics. We killed a man in his home--and now we celebrate in a surge of mob chanting? It's not whether he was evil--he was. It's about who have we become?

In a way, I understand why the young people chanted. There is so little in our lives where we can feel part of someting larger than we are, something of which we can be proud. The elite branches of our military have some of that pride. Some may still linger with the Space Program. But that's about all I can think of. Sports and athletes used to be a source before all the strikes and lockouts and suspensions tarnished the image. Only sports writers can generate any enthusiasm for athletes paid in the millions and even then it's mostly about the charities that some of them support outside of their day jobs. Religion has become just one more thing to justify killing others, and mega-churches just convince us that it was all about money after all. Capitalism--while still the best system in theory--has devolved into greed and cheating: who can be proud of corporations who illegally foreclosed on active-duty military thus saving billions and are now offering only millions in restitution, all the while offering bonuses to the executives responsible? Even the Olympics has become merely a medal chase. And our media and literature seldom call us to become our better selves.

So I get it: for one brief moment, capturing bin Laden appeared to be something that could give young people the feeling of being part of something beautiful and something meaningful. The last times we had that feeling was when WWII was over and when we landed on the Moon. Those were jubilant moments of which to be proud.

But where is the pride now? My Tea Party  acquaintance has found some in the bin Laden raid. "See," he says, "torture works."  Is that really the message he wishes to draw from this? I find it very difficult to be proud to be part of a nation that promotes torture. I don't wake in the morning feeling good about human beings being water boarded. I was raised to believe that the US represented good things and that it was enemy who did things like that. I also don't feel good about being part of a country that values and rewards selfishness and cheating.

I had hoped that President Obama might build on the swell of community that got him elected because it was a mighty gathering of young people who opened the office to him, united to defeat the status quo and the ugly posturing of many politicians. But it was only a dream. No one person could stand against so many entrenched interests although he has tried his best.

So where do I end up? I feel strongly that we as a nation must decide what we want to be known for. Are we a people who cheat, let our elderly freeze to the floor in their unheated apartments, let children starve because we don't like their parents, deny education to the next generation because we want to go on our cruises, destroy the planet because it's there to make us money, and loot from one another after a disaster because we can?  Will we go into the history books as a nation of dog-eat-dog?

I'm sorry. But it will take a lot more than assassinating a man to get me feeling proud of being alive.

Bin Laden

Am I the only one disturbed by the open-mouthed glee shown in the media at the news of Osama bin Laden's death? Is no one else reminded of the tasteless rubbing of the US flag in the face of the statue of Saddam during the Iraq war? Am I alone in the finding the display almost adolescent and lacking in good manners? Surely we are more mature than this as a country?

No one denies the horror of 9/11 nor the provocations provided by bin Laden's terror group. But he'd been silent of late, showing up in videotape every once in a while like Marley's ghost to shake his chains and threaten death and damnation. I considered the Taliban, with its murderous treatment of women, its diffused terror cells, and its appeal to religious fanaticism to be far more relevant. In this new world of horror, bin Laden had become a side issue, a non sequitur, at best a mere symbol while the real damage was being done elsewhere.

My reaction to his death? No jubilance, I assure you. My thoughts go to the 6000 lives, the billions of dollars, and the political posturing we had to endure to catch this one man. I also think about how little this is going to mean in terms of the terror. The killing won't stop. The flow of our national resources out of the country won't stop. Our armies will not come home any sooner. Other, smaller terror units will take up the slack of violence, like the Greek myth of the multi-headed hydra: you cut off one head and two more grow. So we caught and killed Osama bin Laden--so what is different today than it was yesterday?

Instead of such jubilance and glee, surely we would have been better off bowing our heads for the lives lost on 9/11 and the thousands since. What we see in the media is mere revenge. I would like to think we were more thoughtful and self-aware than that.

The New Republicans

Once upon a time, the Republican Party was something I could and did vote for. It stood for a set of principles that made sense from a particular, kind of old frontier point of view. There was a rallying call for independence, self-reliance, and a thoughtful Buckleyesque take on politics. William Buckley was persuasive, honorable, arrogant (of course) but above all rational. The man thought. While I didn't agree with him on all things, I felt I could go to him for intelligent engagement with the issues. I felt I had a choice between Democrat and Republican on the basis of two sincere but different approaches to the common goal of building and sustaining the US.

My god--what a difference fifty years makes.

What does the Republican party stand for now? Is Donald Trump the best they can do? What happened to intellect? What even has happened to seeking the good of the country? We elected a Republican government and they proceeded to pillage the country and enrich themselves. John Boehner now says they are willing to let the US default They throw around threats like they know what they're doing.

Let the US default? Here we go: over time, our money tanks, food heads for the stratosphere because we import so much of it. Oil? with our valueless money, consider how much welfare BP and the others will extend us. Plan to stay wherever the oil crisis finds you. Our houses become worthless because no one can afford one. Imports will zoom in cost, hence causing massive layoffs among industries relying on them.  Our businesses and corporations will immediately leave the country as the money flows into more stable currencies--hence more unemployment. Inflation will run rampant as people fight over what little food and supplies there are left. If you think the US has a problem with gangs, wait until there's no food. So, my Canadian friends, if this happens, I'd advise you to get your money out while you can.

In other words, the anarchists will have won. And if the Republicans wanted to destroy governmemnt, they've done it and taken us along with them. But why doesn't that surprise me? They've been planning for this: busy feathering their own nests to protect themselves--it's the poor and the minorites and the elderly--the drains on the economy in their eyes, who will bear it. The very people they've fulminated against from pulpits and stumps. I guess these new republicans really do believe in the rapture and that starving half the country to death is just part of the prophecy.

And now Obama has released his birth certificate. Too bad for the birthers.  Obama WAS born in Hawaii--just as I for one said--and at Kapiolani Hospital--just as I said--I SAW his mother, for god's sake. But now birthing has gone--the harassment won't stop. It never does with bullies--and that's what the Republicans have become. Trump is implying that Obama got into Harvard (thereby denying some white good old boy --like Bush I suppose) because he was an undeserving  minority. Obama came from the most prestigious, expensive, and storied private school in the State of Hawaii, Punahou School. Punahou graudates GO to Harvard. It's expected. The fact that Obama graduated from Harvard with highest honors doesn't count. Trump himself went to business school at the University of Pennsylvania--was he denied a place at Harvard by some undeserving minority? He'll demand Obama's school records so he can play admissions officer. Come on, you idiot. Let's have something useful rather than the rallying of the National Enquirer-addled.

And if you are going down that silly path--and it looks like you are--then as someone who WAS involved with universities and their admissions policies, let me tell you that applicants with high scores are turned down everyday in favor of others who show the potential to grow. If high scores were all that was asked for, Cal-Berkeley would be 100% Asian. Plus many students have a rotten first year in university (if the university is any good). Things haven't settled down for them yet. The transition hasn't been made from high school to college. I earned less than a 2.0 (C) for my first semester average. Next semester I earned a 3.5 (B plus) then some semesters earned straight As after that. I graduated with honors but did not make Phi Beta Kappa because of that first semester. I earned a 3.8 for my Master's work and straight As on my Ph.D. coursework. It's called giving people a chance and it's supposed to be an American virtue.

I can keep on shouting these things till the cows come home, but I have little chance of persuading anyone any more than my one voice could on the birth certificate. I want these clowns in D.C. to get off this posturing, understand that Tea Party yelling is only one political force among many others, and take a long look at who has bought Congress. But no--it won't happen. These people want to fritter their time believing the worst necause they just don't like Obama. In fact, let's be honest, they just don't like us.

The Budget According to Faith

If ever we needed proof of the political power of money, we have only to look at the latest craziness in Washington D.C. From watching the posturing and the namecalling, one can easily see it's not about the budget--it never was--it's about cramming social and economic philosophy down the gullets of everyone else. It's budget by a series of  faiths and beliefs offered without a shred of evidence beyond mere enthusiam. You can't debate this nonsense rationally because people are entrenched in what they think they "know" about economics--without ever having studied it--and about human behavior--without ever having examined their own.

Does this sound like religion anyone? I think so. We now have budget built by enthusiasm and faith.

On the one hand, we have those with "faith" in the free enterprise system. They don't know much about it really except that they think they'll get jobs from it and it fits in with their illusions about what it means to be the type of personality they think they approve of (while not living up to the standards they want to impose on others). Notice--most of these types are over 55 and they aren't calling for changes for that age demographic. Who do they think they are: Congress?  These folk are paid for by corporate leaders (notice who's funding the Tea Party), a fact they ignore because they are too busy trying to legislate punishment for people who a) don't have much money--how dare they exist? b) women who want to control reproduction--they should be practicing abstinence, and c) anyone who wants an education--if their parents couldn't afford to send them to decent schools they shouldn't have had them.

Primitive, Old Testament stuff--but how satisfying to the rich who can feel morally superior.

On the other hand, we have those with "faith" in the economic theory of spending ourselves rich. If we have to thank Reagan for the trickle down theory which turned out to have dams, we can thank Keynesian economics for the idea of government manipulation in the economy.

Now, I have NO problem with government presence in the economy and financial markets because the equation is simple--down goes policy up goes greed. Think back to Enron. The California legislator who pushed for deregulation of the California power grid didn't even bother to run again as his promises of benefit sank amidst the rolling black-outs. There are things the government should control in the public interest.

But, government is hampered by too many competing interests. Every one of the regulations put on industry and investment is there because someone gamed the system. If nobody cheated, we wouldn't need regulations. However, believing that we can anticipate every single way that people can cheat one another or screw the system just leads to a mares nest of regulations that ultimately protect no one. And it's not just business who cheats--there are plenty of the unrich who are gaming the entitlement programs too. We live in a climate of cheating--but that's something we need to address rather than just pointing fingers at the other side while ignoring our own responsibility.

We need common sense--not slogans, not winks, not private conflicts of interest, not legislators whose only purpose is reelection and lining up a cushy job later. We need rational heads and a national debate over where in the heck we are headed as a country.  I really wish our current administration would cease trying to moderate and conciliate amidst this very ugly climate; let's cease the name-calling and have that unpleasant conversation in which everyone (including the rich) are both part of the problem and part of the solution.

In the meantime, save me from the enthusiastic--please.

Speaking of Clowns

I was wondering who was going to jump out as another clown from Commedia dell'Arte (sorry, I misspelled it last blog--it's been some time since I was in graduate school studying the Italian theatre) when abricadabra, there he was.

He of the "You're fired" fame. Donald Trump. All of a sudden he's raising the birther theories again but this time also accusing Obama of plagiarism. The first charge has been disputed by the State of Hawaii so many times that the courts have ruled law suits over the matter frivolous and refused to hear them. Tiresome.

Re the second charge: No one has ever come forward to claim any authorship of Obama's work, and even with confidentiality clauses (trust me, I'm a writer) little words slip out here and there that lay hints. I've never heard a thing about Obama's work. Until I see proof rather than speculation, I'm not going to fall for this one.

What I can't figure out is why Trump and why now?

Since I love conspiracy theories--almost as good as millennium theories about the end of the world--let me try second guessing possible reasons. My first thought was that by taking the Tea Party rhetoric to its ultimate extreme, he was setting himself up to divert attention from Ms. Palin. Here would be someone unhinged enough to make her look reasonable. I have noticed lately that she's been keeping a low profile, even going over to Israel and trying to look informed. Could he be trying to help her? After all, she said recently that Obama's birth should be off the political table. That won't go down well with the radical fringe, but might sell a bit better to the more moderate (and much larger) block of voters.

But then I wondered if that was too obvious. What if there is something more devious? What if he was really wanting to run for president? What if his sudden attack on Obama is also an attack on Ms. Palin? Does he think she's gone soft? Does he think he can pick up her fringe and parlay his business background and his television exposure into a legitimate run? But then, why has he joined Fox when there are campaign laws against media exposure that gives unfair advantage?

I wish I could see some sort of strategy that might make me respect him. I weep for some intelligence rather than namecalling and lies among our political leaders, but I suppose that's asking too much is this world of dumbed down. We have no public intellectuals anymore--no William Buckleys for example--who can make sense of the political quagmire this country wallows in. We have only media "personalities", many of whom make their living by outdoing one another in attacking and yelling.

But then--on the other hand, maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe Trump has joined Fox because that's where he belongs. If that's the case, Mr. Trump has done one honest thing.

In the words of Stephen Sondheim, "So send in the clowns/ there have to be clowns/ don't worry they're here."

Commedia del'arte and US Politics

We're just back from a cruise to the Mexican Riviera (Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas) and packing up, getting ready to turn the RV over to its new owner and transport ourselves back home. The RV experience has been informative, but it turns out that we are bricks and mortar people after all. With the end now in view, we are barn sour, in the way of horses that really don't want to be out on the trail and are longing for home. Yes, definitely barn sour.

Admittedly, this feeling of wanting to get everything over may be impulsive, but it is entirely human. When there's an end to something, we all tend to look forward and want to be on our way to the next part of our lives. In many cases, though, there's rather more at work. It certainly is so in my case. I want to get on the road because I am tired of being the only one around here willing to disagree with everyone.

I felt somewhat the same way on the cruise as I have in the park. Mostly, the people on the cruise were the same (white, middle class, comfortable, tending to Tea Party) or else were reluctant to admit they had other ideas until they were alone. I, of course, being me, twitted some of them, only to be met with awkward expressions of "Well, eveyone has an opinion." That this was a euphemism became clear when several told me later that they fully agreed with me. 

I am now of the conclusion that many US citizens have been silenced by the posturings of the noisiest among us and have retreated into a type of resignation to avoid trouble. Only privately are they are willing to tell me that Ms. Palin, one of my previous targets in this blog, scares them. Indeed she should, since our lady of the plattitudes and the barmaid's wink, represents the dumbing down of our education, political, and cultural lives.

Now, I am not really into destroying dinner conversations--although on occasion I have managed this extremely well--but I am getting really tired of maintaining polite silence so no one is offended. For heaven's sake, how long have we been so politicially delicate that we have to consider every opinion or crackpot idea as equally valid? Am I really supposed to be silent and agreeable when I get e-mails presenting me with a new "game" whereby I can earn points for shooting illegals running across the border, one of them a pregnant woman pulling two children behind her?

I'm sorry, World, there are opinions and arguments based on junk science, historically incorrect facts, prejudice, and just plain ignorance.  Not all opinions are equally valid. Many, in fact, should be exposed post haste because they are dangerous, ill-intended, and mean. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The word god does not appear in the US Constitution--not even once--and that was deliberate.

2. Recent claims that the southern states seceded in order to protect states' rights ignore the fact that the rights the states were protecting were to keep slaves, something the southern states said quite clearly at the time.

3. The link between illegal immigration and crime isn't proved. Here in Arizona, the controversial sherrif Joe Arpaio, ran for office on cracking down on illegal immigrants to reduce crime; in fact, his county is the only one where crime actually increased depite detaining record  numbers of illegals. No one seems to care, which suggests the voters like his message rather than his results.

4. Slashing education budgets does not assure efficiency and effectiveness. Also here in Arizona, legislators believe there is "administrative waste" with schools paying "exorbitant" salaries to administrators. The newspaper did a careful analysis this week and found that the schools here pay less in administrative costs than in other states and, in the wake of budget cuts, have been using whatever extra money might have gone into the classroom on such basic needs as building maintenance.

I could go on.

It's all very well to talk about having wrong-headed ideas aired so there can be a collision of truth and error and thereby some education, but I'm not seeing the second part of this process happen. Everyone is being so polite that the errors are never exposed. What happens then is that by sheer repetition, people believe something to be true because they've heard it over and over and it's never been challenged.

Me being me, I have my own theories about how to challenge the foolishness. Henceforth, I intend not to dignify ignorance by trying to argue with it and point out its errors. I intend to use humor.

So let me begin by saying that I consider Ms. Palin (let me start with her since she's such an obvious target) to be a great comic character. She belongs in the Italian Commedia del'arte as one of the clowns. Let's call her the harlequiness and describe her as a mischevous practical joker. She's known by her costume, a diamond design in bright, fashionable colors and a dunce cap on her head. On stage, she gets into foolish scrapes by trying to meddle in other people's business, and when she is caught, she simpers and tries to get out of trouble by using her charm and glamor. She is paired with an equally foolish grandfatherly figure who rubs her arm in a comic attempt at seduction. She is basically just silly until she or some of the others take her seriously; then she becomes pompous and self-important and things become confused and mixed up until she is exposed amidst audience laughter. In the end, she's just one of the clowns Shakespeare used to bring some levity to the happenings of the important people in his plays, sort of a female Bottom from Midsummer's Night's Dream.

This is how I am going to look at her from her on, along with the other clowns like the Tea Party media voices. I invite you to join me in laughing at the clowns, along with the preoverbial emperor, for their lack of clothing.

I am the Planet: Hear Me

For the last thousand years, the occupants of this planet have been pursuing a weird form of self-adulation. They have created gods in their own image, imagined these gods to be benevolent parents conferring the goods and benefitrs of the planet upon them, and believed that their own self-generated impulses to be absolute truth. The planet begs to differ.

Today, we see the planet start to reassert itself. Our religions may tell us we are a god's special creation, and we may be egotistic enough to want to believe it, but in fact this god we have created did not create us. The planet did. If a god created anything, it was the conditions out there in the universal void that allowed a round piece of rock to develop an atmosphere and water and top soil enough to generate some form of what we call life. In other words, us. We are no special creation. We are just as subject to weather, earthquake, fire and famine as any other living form.

If I look at us from the planet's point of view, we--and the economic theory of endless consumption we promote--are the most dangerous thing that the planet has created. In terms of nuisance value, we reign supreme. Ungrateful, polluting, greedy, hell bent on overpopulating and stressing this planet, talking about space travel so we can do it to other planets, why ever would this planet want to put up with us?

When we were fewer, nomadic, and technologically ignorant, we could be tolerated because we did little harm and the earlier people at least made some show of being grateful for the life the planet sustained. Now we are inflated with our egos, grateful only when we are given the funds to consume more of the planet's resources. Money is not the root of all as wits like to say, it's us believing we are entitled to it that is.

Well, the planet is telling us several things: resources are  not endlessly renewable and there are consquences to our greediness. We are already starting to see food shortages, and these will continue. The  Middle East uprisings are not the glorious push for freedom that Americans (particularly conservatives) like to believe; they are a push for food and the other basic necessities of life. When these are not forthcoming, all the fancy constitutions in the world will be worth nothing.

Down in Arizona, people wear guns on their hips in the grocery stores. There is something profound about this, even if the gun bearer doesn't look as if he has pondered the meaning of what he is doing beyond exercising his rights, because the next civil war in this country will be over food and the unequal distribution of the nation's resources. The wealthy one percent will hire guards to protect their food supply. The rest of us will be left to flight over scraps until we too have a revolution.

Special creation indeed. This planet gives and takes. Right now, it is restless and probably quite sick of us. It got rid of the dinosaurs. It can get rid of us. Yet, we go around flattering one another that whatever we do to the planet is fine as long as there is money to be made.

Money means nothing to the planet. It couldn't care less if we have the latest i-pad or cheap airline tickets. It also couldn't care less if we kill eachother over food and oil. It would, in fact, be happier with the human species gone. A million years from now, who will be left to care if we annhilate ourselves? If there is anyone, we will be a mere footnote in their history telling a cautionary tale about a barbaric time when politics and religion conspired to overpopulate the planet, exhaust the resources, and nearly wipe out the human race.

We ought to be directing our thanks to the planet for what it has given us instead of filling the coffers of some church that merely flatters us and some politician who appeals to our ignorance because that is all we have and want to hear about.

Leaders of the War and Peace

As a species, we tend to glorify the creative forces among us--those people who initiate new things like internets, cures for diseases, new government structures, and wondrous works of technology and art. You know, the big stuff that gets an age named after it. The bronze age, the age of steam, the age of electricity. Schools teach the famous names of these movements, well, maybe not the bronze age, but we all know about the Curies, Salk, Whitney, Edison, Crick, and Gates et al. The pioneers of each new field are lauded and feted with prizes of various value and prestige, well deserved, of course, but perhaps inclined to blind us to what happens next. I'm thinking here of the classifiers, statesmen, and philosophers who follow behind, looking beyond the joy of creating something that did not exist before and on to the question of what such discoveries really mean and how they interact with one another.

I found myself thinking about this process the other day by recalling a poignant scene in the David Lean film, "Lawrence of Arabia." It occurs toward the end. One of the sheikhs, played as I recall by Alec Guiuness, tells Lawrence that young men fought the war but must now leave it to old men to negotiate the peace. In that moment, Lawrence's role in the war he has so passionately fought is over and he knows he is no longer wanted. The world is now in the hands of others.

It's not hard to imagine a similar thing happening in regard to the protests in Egypt. The revolution is over, thank you very much, and now the politicians, and the military, and the business-as-usual-men, will take over. The protestors will undoubtedly fight their marginalization and they may earn a few up-front concessions, but eventually their own protests will turn on themselves and become ugly. 'Twas ever so with mass revolutions--they are difficult to control because of the varying purposes and motives within them. Undoubtedly, the idealistic and ethical among the protestors will be indignant about being lumped together with a criminal element, but it will be inevitable. Attacking a CNN female reporter in the square is one example; it smacks of hysteria and thuggism and will be used to show the unfitness of any protestors to play a role in building a new constitution and country.

Yet one cannot be too judgmental on this process. The qualities that build enduring nations are not the same as those that defeat armies and tear down walls and barriers. With few exceptions, revolutionary leaders capable of inspiring men in desperate battle seldom make effective leaders of the peace. It's rather like the current political process in the US these days--I wonder if it isn't easier to be part of the minority party snapping at the heels of those in power rather than being in power and trying to make sensible decisions for our future.

A Little Revolution Now and Then

I haven't felt much like writing of late. Partly it's being strung between two homes--one the 27 foot RV down in Phoenix and the other our main home, both of which require attention when left to their own devices. When we came home this time, the hot tub blew a freeze plug, emptied itself, and fountained water at us. Fortunately, this happened with us on premises or who knows what further mischief it might have done. But I'm fully aware that the RV is lying awake at night without us there, plotting what to do to us when we go back.

It's not as if there hasn't been a lot to write about. Floods and weather everywhere, political upheavals, economic misery--it seems that Sid may be right when he commented the other day that Mother Nature dodesn't like ugly. Since we've been ugly all right, I guess we are being served  the results of our polluting, uncaring, and insensitive behavior.

But there's something more in the air that speaks of unrest. In particular, I've been watching the events unfold in the Middle East with very conflicted emotions. Anyone British with any sense of history has to look at the world's trouble spots and recognize the heavy hand of Victorian empire. India, Pakistan, Palestine, Africa--Britain was right there. And while a case might be made for the advantages of the British raj--language, legal system. education et al, I sense in that argument an echo of Kipling's "taking up the white man's burden" of bringing civilization to those deemed to be in need of it. The native populations seldom took the same view of the garrisons among them.

But quite apart from that, history tells us that empires cannot hold for long. Greece, Rome, France, and Britain--not to mention the German Reich--have been among those to learn that lesson. There are always barbarians at the gate, not to mention local populations who object to seeing their goods and treasure take a one-way journey into the coffers of their conquerors.

History also tells us that when these empires crumble, it is am ugly process. Seldom are fuindamental changes brought about through moderate transition. Telling Tom Payne that he should negotiate a transitional process with King George would hardly be persuasive. The colonial rebels wanted action and wanted it now. It's a given that those in power never yield authority willingly. There must be force or the threat of it to effect change. We might wish that things were different, that everyone behaved in rational ways, but that is not the way of the human species.

But there is more than Egypt. In my opinion, we have two revolutions going on right now--the physical uprising in Egypt and an unrecognized one in this country.

Egypt's is the most obvious since our media is in love with it. One can only shake one's head at the current Egyptian premier who had only to look at his country's demographics to predict the unrest. When a country has a predominance of educated people under 40 who have no prospects for employment and careers, it is only a matter of time before they spill into the streets. This is their version of the tea in the harbor in Boston. There will be change in Egypt. It is inevitable. But it is very unclear whether the change will address the issues of the young or will prove to be yet another corrupt regime that started out idealistically but was coopted by special interests.

The US is on the opposite end of the spectrum, but we have just as many discontents. One look at US demographics tells the story. In this case, the population is an aging one. People over 55 are in the ascendancy. If younger people may be (stereotypically) expected to be passionate and looking for opportunity, our aging population may be expected (stereotypically) to behave like a querulous octagenarian, opposed to change, mired somewhere in a familiar past, self-involved, and dedicated to its own comfort.  The octagenerian will not take to the streets but certainly takes to the airwaves and the ballot box. Given the passion for the status quo, it remains to be seen whether the weapon arsenal built up in this country will be used against its citizens. If it is, it may be the well-armed over 55s against the younger minority population.

I don't mean to be unduly pessimistic. As the captain of Red October said in the novel, The Hunt for Red October, "a little revolution is a good thing now and then." I wish Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and the other countries with oppressive leadership all the best in their search for a brighter future. I just hope that the passion pouring into the streets translates into wise and humanitiarian decisions further down the line.

No, I Don't Blame Sarah Palin

Fate seems to play strange things with my life. I was in Denver for the trial of Timothy McVeigh and now find myself in Arizona for the recent assassination attempt on the life of Representative Gifford, gunned down by a disturbed man whose motive is unclear but tied somehow to personal delusions and demons.  It is hard to see how shooting a nine-year old child, senior citizens, and a legislative aide serves a satisfying political purpose, but no one ever said the mentally ill needed to make sense.

Now, mental illness is something with which I have had some slight connection. My mother was a psychiatric nurse, first in the UK, then in Canada, whose career ended with service in a high-security prison facilty for the criminally insane in Matsqui, British Columbia. My own grandmother suffered from dementia caused by a stroke for all of the time her life overlapped mine. I grew up knowing my mother's patients and visiting the facilities where she worked, even including the prison at Matsqui. While not a trained psychiatric professional, I still have more personal insight into mental illness than many others who are busily arguing over responsibility for this last terrible event in Tuscon.

This morning's Phoenix paper is full of finger pointing, particularly at Sarah Palin. I think all this is completely useless and a mere continuation of the very things that have brought us to this point; this country is enduring national division, as significant as the one during those terrible months and days leading up to America's Civil War. We are divided with both sides locked into positions as securely and morally smugly as those who went to war to impose their versions of truth..

Nevertheless, I believe that blaming Sarah Palin, as various members of the media are trying to,  is both disingenuous and a copout. Now, as every reader of this blog knows, I am no great fan of Ms. Palin's simplistic self-promotion nor her pandering to the worst among us. I must admit a grim satisfaction to watching her get bitten on her butt by the tiger she attempted to ride. Yet I do not link her to the shooting-- except for her complicity in the general mood that has swept the country.

One thing I quickly realized about mental patients is that their pathology is a distortion of the culture around them, a parallel universe but not one that is completely unrecognizable. For example, I once saw a disturbed man in Italy attempting to pinch someone's rear in a train station. He was no threat, but it seemed to me that he was desperately trying to be part of a culture from which he was excluded and in which his disability did not allow him to participate.

Only someone who interviews the shooter may be able to explain the desperate motives that led him to kill. But my guess is that somewhere inside his brain he had a crippled vision of the culture around him. America is a culture that is easily misperceived, particularly by those whose brains can see only the shadows of the culture around them. Partisans on both sides of every issue have villified one another and expressed their positions absolutely--there is no grey, only black and white. This verbal assault is not supposed to lead to actual murder. If such happens, those who have spoken harsh words publicly are the first to deny any responsibility--this, of course, is a given since accountability is uncomfortable. Nevertheless, there have been historical precedents when political thought led to assassination, and one has to wonder how someone can deny any responsibility when faced with the murders of Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy.  There IS precedent and as Representative Gifford said herself, there is an effect when people indulge their prejudices.

So, I do not blame Ms. Palin. Hers is only one voice. There is enough blame to go around. I do believe, however, and very strongly, that the beloved Constitution of this country did not and should not merely be one-way, with the conferring of freedoms and benefits. Those who choose to exercise their rights need to understand that the right of free speech comes with the price tag of responsibility for what is being said. I would think a great deal more of Ms. Palin and the media that supports her and the other pundits, if instead of reloading and having her staff defend her, she looked in the mirror and shuddered. I might also think that the US was maturing if it stopped the pernicious practice of finding scapegoats rather than taking responsibility for itself.