Category: Politics

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A Romney Review

Over the last few years I have written a great deal on presidential politics and politics in general.  With the first debate this cycle coming up tomorrow night, I thought instead of rehashing what I’ve already said, I would simply link to what I’ve already said, specifically about Mitt Romney.  I was surprised to see how far back I wrote my first post about him, 2007, when he made his bid then.

Romney’s Testament

This was about Romney’s statement that he intended to put his religion in second place as president.  As it has turned out, he has not said a great deal about religion this time around.  His one stab against Obama on that basis—Obama’s supposed “war on religion” —apparently backfired.  Since then, he’s stepped quietly around the issue, ostensibly because he is still viewed with suspicion by evangelicals.  Romney’s a Mormon. Where that fits in the hierarchy of American religious advocacy is problematic, since it is to many barely recognized as christian.

Thoughts On the End of 2010

This was more of an overview on the heels of the mid-terms that put the Tea Party arguably in the driver’s seat of the GOP, a context Romney will have to work with, deal with, should he win—one which has been a problem for him during the past year.

Will ‘E Or Won’t ‘E?

Just after Romney officially declared his candidacy in 2011 and some of the contradictions and conflicts his campaign might face.

No Longer Surprised

This is more a critique of Obama.  It has become apparent to me that I am more partisan this year than I like.  Perhaps I’ve been forced to it, and somewhat reluctantly, but it’s true.  I just can’t see Obama as the big demon the Republican Party is trying to make him out to be.  Still, partisanship, while it has its place, bothers me.  I don’t believe in being on someone’s side just because they wear a particular label.  Partisanship to ideas and ideals, that’s different, but in that vein I have some significant problems with Mr. Obama, some of which I detail here.  I have greater problems with the current GOP.

Poll Positions

I discussed my views on the GOP slate prior to the emergence of Romney as their candidate.  It’s useful, I think, to remember all this because much of it has gone into the GOP Platform.

What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

I got testy here, true enough.  I come from an attitude that says basically “What good is fixing the economy if prosperity flowers in a country wherein the rights and privileges I believe are fundamental to what being an American is are curtailed or gone?”

Here’s A Fact

Most recently, obviously, this is about Romney’s 47% comments.  Which were not, I might add, the most controversial statements in that video, but certainly indicative of a mindset I find troubling, to say the least.

You can scroll back to my latest remarks on Paul Ryan, who may have been Romney’s biggest tactical mistake in the entire year.  I have considered Ryan a policy idiot since his election to congress—and so, apparently, have many of his colleagues in the GOP, so this is not just someone on the Left beating up on him, you know, just because.  I suspect Romney made this choice for three reasons.  Ryan is certainly “conservative enough” for the Tea Partiers and the envangelicals.  He’s not afraid to be an attack dog and say all the outrageous things that Romney likely has sympathy for if not an outright belief in (which also means Romney can take a rhetorical high road and come across gentler and more humane than his running mate).  And he has (presumably) the connections in Congress Romney lacks.

But it seems like every time Ryan opens his mouth, he makes us long for the days of Dan Quayle.

However the debates come out, the thing that I find the most important aspect of this election year is not the presidential campaigning, but the Congressional.  Unless that contingent of intransigent ideologues are removed, we will have four more years of the kind of motionless sturm und drang we’ve been seeing for the last two at least.  The Tea Party representatives did not “sweep into office” with a mandate.  The 2010 elections were some of the lowest voter turnouts in recent memory and none of those elections were landslides, they were all close, marginal victories.  If twice the voters had turned out then, it is my belief not one of those people would have taken office.  I can’t prove that, of course, but I have some small confidence that the majority of Americans are not actually that dumb.

Of course, they may be.

For the record, I’ll restate my major reason for not voting for Romney.  He is on record as an advocate of trickle-down economics.  He hasn’t called it that, but when you look at his stated policies it is obvious.  Basically, we have had over three decades now of supply-side economics and it has left us in a shambles.  It does not do what it has been purported to do.  Why would anyone vote for someone advancing a policy with a demonstrated track record of failure?

Of course there are secondary reasons I won’t vote for him, the number two being that he represents a Party which embraces a whole raft of positions I simply cannot support.  No matter what Romney might think personally, he has the albatross of the current GOP hanging around his neck.

But I also do not think this is a slam-dunk for Obama, regardless what the polls may suggest.  Presidential elections are historically fraught with surprises and upsets.  I think it is therefore incumbent on voters to express their views and to show up on November 7th.  Show up.  Vote.  Because we have a history of ambivalence and, often, apathy in this country when it comes to politics (people love to argue about it, but when it comes to actually participating, that’s another matter altogether), we have often endured government by minority veto rather than majority rule.  Vote.

If you don’t vote, you don’t get to bitch afterward.

culture

Rights

A couple of posts back I made a claim that seems to have upset a few people, namely that Rights (as we generally use the term) are legal constructs, not something inherent in nature, even though we talk about them as if they were.  One criticism, quite correctly, pointed out that one of the bases of the Enlightenment was a recognition that human rights emerged out of a clear understanding of Natural Law, and that civil law was necessarily grounded in that understanding.

True, that is how we formulate it.  And it may well be that there is, somewhere, a fundamental natural basis on which we build our moral and legal houses.  But it is not nature from which it is derived in the sense of the physical universe in which we exist—clearly we order our social systems more often in contravention of nature than in imitation—but Nature in the sense that Spinoza and possibly others like Kant and Hegel understood the term, namely reality as we perceive it in respect to our condition.  This is in some ways an abstruse and complex concept and contrary to popular usage it is not common sensical or self-evidently apparent.

Why do I say that?  Because we are still arguing over what it is we’re trying to describe.

One of the elements of criticism leveled at me was a spirited defense of the manifest truth of such things as the Declaration of Independence.  My own argument was only that, while we seem to have accepted the moral injunctions of the Declaration, we are still trying to put those concepts into practice through law because we can’t agree on a common meaning.  This has been the case since Day One of our Republic.

…all men are created equal…

Great.  Wonderful.  But what does that mean in practice?

It’s one of those phrases that would seem to be so self-evidently true that it requires no further explanation and should automatically be regarded by all as obvious and put into immediate practice.  Never mind the obvious failures to prevent avaricious and corrupt people to flout such a principle, it has been the case that even people of good will and social conscience have simply not agreed on the supposed self-evident meaning of that phrase.

Simply put, which men?  All men?  What about women?  Or, at the time it was written, slaves?  What about people in other countries?  What does this mean in terms of resources?  Equal how?  Does this make it incumbent on us to guarantee equality, even for those who apparently are incapable of the unstated but quite real consequent responsibilities?  Should some be held back in order not to tip the scales of social justice unfairly?  And what about those who simply reject that formulation?

If you think this is an academic issue, remember that in the early Republic, not only were slaves and women held to be inferior to “men” but men of property were implicitly and in practice accorded greater rights than those with nothing—like the vote.  Nor did this begin to change until Jacksonian Democracy start the erosion of social privilege in matters of politics.

Kant, among others, claimed that liberty was based on the free will and its unimpeded exercise and that free will was a product of Reason.  Reason, however, as a necessary aspect of nature, that all humans possessed.  I am not indulging hyperbole when I point out that Reason is a rare commodity, exercised seldom, and usually poorly, and needs nurturing in order to be of benefit to the individual.  Humans possess a cleverness, a proclivity for pattern-seeking and its concomitant capacities for problem-solving at possibly the highest level of any creature on the planet.  But I think it fair to say that this is not what Kant meant by Reason.  He meant the ability to indulge abstraction and thereby project imagination onto a landscape and formulate conceptions not immediate evident.

Sorry, but I do not believe that is a skill people are born with.  It is a potential, a latent capacity which must be seeded, cared for, fed, and grown.  It is not, by definition, “natural” in the way I think many people conceive the term.  It is only natural in that it is something humans as a species have a potential ability to practice, but we do not necessarily grow up with it.  The pattern-seeking which seems to be hardwired into our brains is generally taken as reason, especially when it produces useful results in environmental manipulation and social construction.  But it ultimately lacks the purely abstract aspect that leads to what we can honestly call ratiocination.  It does not lead to philosophy.

And it is out of philosophy that any concept of Rights emerges.

I confess here that this is a rather scary proposition.  Historically, humans base their law on a concept of Higher Order Morality, the assumption that there is an authority above our own which requires certain normative standards.  God, in other words.  A Law Giver.  It is presumed that human law is a reflection of this higher law.  Over time that higher law has morphed into what, during the Enlightenment, became codified as Natural Law.  It is reassuring to believe that we aren’t actually all on our own.

But even Kant, intuitively or otherwise, seems to have sensed that we are, ultimately, on our own.  In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? he states in the first paragraph:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.  Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”

In other words, maturity, as pertains to the ability to reason, is the point at which we stand on our own, without the crutches of dependency on authority-qua-authority.  By definition, this would include assumed Higher Order sources of law.

Given the diverse and ever-conflicting nature of civil discourse and the constant disagreement over what is morally defensible within a liberal framework (and by liberal I do not mean its current defamed definition, but the traditional meaning of Liberty of the individual to act as he or she will free of arbitrary constraint) obviously we have no clear, definitive explication of what that Higher Order Law might be.

We’ve been creating it on our own all along.

Before I am accused of claiming that a concept of individual rights has no basis in moral reasoning, it is equally obvious that it does.  Common human needs and aspirations are clearly universal and the consequences of oppression are equally obvious across all systems.  This much can be seen and understood and that pattern-seeking creature that is the common condition of all humans can here demonstrate a universal sense of good and evil, right and wrong, beneficial and destructive.  We learn, over time, what will or will not secure a beneficial social environment, at least in its basics.

Abstractions can clarify as well as obfuscate this, which too-often is diminished by such terms as common sense or natural law.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote and what the Enlightenment-besotted Founders then tried to put into place is an abstraction intended to guarantee freedom of action by barring arbitrary restrictions.

You will note, please, that in the initial draft of the Constitution, there is no mention of these ideals.  The Articles that form the principle body of our Constitution is a legal framework and no more.  The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, a demand by those opposed to Federalism and fence-sitters without whom ratification would have been impossible.  And even in the Bill of Rights there is no reference to the kind of natural law argument on which many people assume the legitimacy of said system of rights.

Which all begs the question as I originally phrased it—if “natural law” is so obvious and so “right” why has there been any need to continually wrestle with meaning and intent?  Why would there ever have been the need for a Civil War, 13th and 14th Amendments, and for the purposes of my prior essay, a 19th Amendment?

Because it is neither obvious nor is it an inevitable recognition that “all men are created equal.”

In the 1970s, an Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification and was defeated by people who, without the need to demonize them, simply disagreed with its stated principles.  Many, while willing to admit the core principle of the amendment as valid, worried over the legal ramifications of its enactment.  Ultimately, two things can be said about its defeat.  One, that we do not all agree on what Equality means or to whom it applies.  And Two, that if you can deny a right through legal mechanisms, obviously you can only grant it through the same mechanisms.

So when I said that, contrary to our cherished prejudices, Rights are legal constructs, this is what I meant.  Each of us, individually, can choose to act according to our own conception of rights and this need not be based on legal constructs, but as a society it is absurd to talk about self-evident rights outside a legal framework.  Rights, on that level, are consequent upon law, and we say what that is.

Which means we should be a bit more alert about them than we usually are.  Rights are gained and lost all the time and often, if they don’t affect us directly, we don’t even notice.  We rely too much on this idea that our rights are based on some vague Higher Order—Natural—Law and therefore are self-evident and, in the phrasing of Jefferson, “unalienable”, but this prized chestnut means little in the face of a determined effort by some to rewrite the codes for the rest of us.

Thank you for your attention.

Absurdity

Ryanism

Paul Ryan, in a little-noticed interview, said the other day—talking about abortion—that rape is simply another “method of conception.”

This is very much in line with Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, although it contradicts Akin’s point—which was, somehow, that the reproductive system of a woman being raped (really raped, not sort of raped or falsely raped, by which I infer he means things like date rape or marital rape or being rufied, or anything less than being threatened with death, beaten to a pulp, or gang banged) “shuts down” to prevent pregnancy.  Ryan seems not to be aware of this bit of folksy biology and considers rape as a vector for reproduction.

It’s ironic.  He is also an antievolutionist, but in this he has lent inadvertent support to one of the basic ideas of evolution—that Nature only cares about producing the next generation and will take advantage of any vector to get there.

It’s a confused message, to be sure, and based just as solidly on a categorical denial of women as full citizens.

I say citizen rather than human because the term human brings into this all the distraction about what is human, which people like Ryan have used to completely obscure the downside to their unblinking support of fetuses over women.

Citizens have rights.  You have to be a citizen to be accorded rights and for that to be the case, you have to be here.  Technically, you also have to be able to participate in the polity—vote, work, etc.

We have so geared the idea that citizenship is a given, like breathing, that we forget that citizenship is a membership issue.  It is a legal definition, one which accords rights but also requires that we meet certain criteria.

The argument over illegal immigrants should, if nothing else, give us all a clear lesson in this.  It doesn’t matter to many people that they are humans—they do not have the same rights as Citizens.  There are certain legal standards that must be met and they have to meet them before we grant them citizenship.

(I know, we like to pretend that rights are somehow drawn from nature, or for some “god given”, but it is simply not true.  Claiming it doesn’t make it so.  Rights are legal conditions.  Even our boldest and most eloquent statements about rights—like the Declaration of Independence—required further legal guarantees to have any real force.  We have the rights we claim and make common through law. If it were otherwise, we would never have required the 13th and 14th or a 19th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, nor would we need a Supreme Court.)

The same folks who are unequivocal and clear about that are considerably less so in the case of women’s rights and the question of so-called unborn rights.

Unborn rights are dependent on the rights of those gestating them.

I phrase it that way to strip it of the kind of sentiment that obfuscates the issue and turns it into an impassioned exercise in guilt-driven irrationality.

We have a long history of what it means to grants rights to some by taking them away from others.

Mr. Ryan’s formulation of rape as another “method of conception” cuts right to the center of the problem.  Stating it that way, he implicitly reduces women to what used to be so “charmingly” and euphemistically referred to as A Vessel.  (And, depending on the period, a weak vessel or a filthy vessel or a corrupt vessel—almost never a strong vessel or beautiful vessel or vessel of great value.) We have almost two thousand years of this kind of reduction of half the population to nothing more than a means to an end.

If that doesn’t tell us all we need to know about how he thinks and why he should not be holding political office, I don’t know what would.

But I do wonder how he intends to square himself with his apparently latent Darwinist inclinations…

culture

When Gaffes Become Pathologies

Everyone misspeaks in public from time to time.  It really is unfair to pick on politicians for the occasional gaffe.  But it is fair to ask at what point such gaffes are valid signs of a fundamental problem.  I think Dan Quayle simply needed to stick to the prepared statements—he did not “wing it” very well, but he kept trying, and slipped repeatedly on his inherent inability to compose cogent remarks on the fly.

But Romney is beginning to show some serious problems.  Never mind his 47% statement, he was arguably playing to his crowd. But his recent remarks about being unable to open the windows in an airliner are very troubling.

This is the kind of basic factoid stuff we all should know even if we only learned it from movies.  There is a reason the windows on an airliner can’t be opened and most of us know this.

Two things: either he skipped that part of childhood and adolescence when the rest of us learned this or he’s cracking under campaign pressure and just letting his mouth run without his brain in gear.

It’s a question.  This isn’t like George H.W. Bush’s ignorance over the laser scanner at the grocery store check-out counter—that was new technology and I think he was unfairly beat up about that—but more in line with basic ignorance coming from a man with a lot of education (of a particular sort) and a lot of time spent on planes.

But let me leave off.  As far as I’m concerned, Romney is a clever man but not a smart one.  Hegel talked about such people, the clever ones who seem intelligent because they can fake it, but really have no depth or true understanding.  This is not necessarily a detriment for a president depending on who his handlers are.  I don’t think Calvin Coolidge was smart, just clever (and clever enough to say very little).  Go back over the list of past presidents and there are a number you could identify like that.  (I think Nixon was an interesting case of a smart man who relied too much on cleverness.)  But we don’t usually see this until after they’re in office.  Campaigning is generally an exercise of cleverness, but there’s usually a modicum of intelligence in charge.

In the case of people like Todd Akin, there’s no question.  He is a genuinely unintelligent man.  Certainly not very reflective and possibly one of the most incurious politicians in recent memory.  He’s clever enough to have maintained a career in politics for a couple of decades now.  But when you listen to his pronouncements, even if you agree with them (if you do), and break them down, you see he’s only parroting a kind of semi-urban folk wisdom without any obvious comprehension what some of the words mean.  He seems to have no idea what “socialism” is (this isn’t unique, I wonder how many people do know what it is, especially in politics) and his grasp of anything relevant to women is positively 19th Century.  He gets away with it because he reifies the prejudices of his constituents, which is politically expedient and morally vacuous.  Sometimes, it seems to me, it is the duty of a politician to tell his constituents when they have it all wrong.  (Yes, I realize this could get said politician voted out of office, but I said duty not CYA.)

Still, I don’t know why anyone in this state, at least, is surprised. Akin has been spouting stuff like that for years.  I was only surprised that he said what he said about “legitimate rape” quite so candidly, but I’m not surprised that he believes that nonsense.

I can understand why the GOP began pressuring him to step down, but really, they have only reaped what they’ve sown.  Implicitly, they’ve been backing some version of this for years, and it has become wired into their politics.  They likely, many of them, believe something similar to what Akin said, but they are generally more clever than Akin and know not to say it right out like that.  He has exposed them, though, for anyone willing to look.

Now Newt Gingrich, the Party shill, has come to Akin’s defense, and what is his defense?  “Anyone can make a stupid remark. It’s unfair to castigate him for it.  If we went by that standard, Joe Biden would never be vice president.”

Except.  Except.

When Dan Quayle made his famous gaffe about minds being terrible wastes, everyone made fun of him for the tongue-twisted way he said it, but I think most people knew what he meant.  When Joe Biden makes a bone-headed remark, we can step back and recognize that he didn’t mean that but this other thing.  That’s the nature of gaffes.

The problem here is, if you look at Akin’s record, it’s clear that he did mean what he said.  It wasn’t a gaffe.  He’s sorry that people were offended, but he hasn’t retracted or clarified his statement.  He believes that.

This is different.

And, if you look at the legislative record of the GOP over the last couple of decades, it seems likely many of them believe something like it, too.  That wasn’t a gaffe.

Pathology?

culture

The Other Side

I have a confession to make.  While I’m going to vote for Obama again, I do not like everything he has done and, even more, am disappointed by some of what he has not done.

That’s not the confession.  I promised some folks months back that I would write a post wherein I take Obama to task the same way I’ve been going to town on the Republicans.  I was sincere when I made the promise, because I had, in fact, winced often these past four years when Mr. Obama has let me down.  Or not me specifically, but my expectations.  And this is a question of spin.

All candidates run on a mixture of core issues and hyperbole.  The nature of the race requires sound-byte, slash-and-burn rhetoric, sweeping generalizations, and occasionally over-the-top characterizations of the opponent and promises too big to keep.  We as voters must walk through all this to determine how much of the hyperbole is simple exaggeration and how much of it is outright lying, slander, or total b.s.  As I say, all candidates do this.  Even after they leave office.  (George W. Bush’s acerbic “Do you miss me yet?” is an example of that, to which my response at the time and still is “You’re kidding, right?”)

Obama campaigned in 2008 on a wide range of issues and made a LOT of promises.  In fact, I believe he holds the record on the number of promises made by a presidential candidate, by a significant factor.  Depending on where he was at the time, he adroitly tailored his message, made the kinds of specific pledges that are ordinarily suicide for a candidate, and won by the biggest landslide since Reagan

In all those promises, inevitably some were going to go by the wayside, some were going to simply stall, others were going to stand as reminders of betrayal when exactly the opposite happened.

But in looking back over the last four years—especially in light of what he came into office having to deal with—I can’t find very much to complain about.

What there is, though, is pretty bad.

Implicitly and otherwise, Obama promised that business as usual in D.C. was going to change.  Of course, anyone who believed this was naive at best, but there were a few things that he could have done something about.  One is lobbyists.  He promised to close the revolving door, that people in government would not be permitted to leave for jobs as lobbyists and come right back.  Well, he sort of tried that, but then proceeded to issue waivers for certain people.

The biggest betrayal to my mind at the time was the selection of his economic team.  One may quibble about this, but I think it fair to say that he had something of a mandate to change the way government dealt with the financial sector.  The appointment of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, both of whom had been instrumental in the years of deregulation that had led almost directly to the 2007-08 meltdown, signaled a marked turn-around from expectations.  At the time I looked at that and thought “What the hell?”  Talk about putting the fox in charge of the chickens.  (Certainly an argument could be made that these people understood the problem better than anybody else, but you also can’t tell me that there weren’t equally qualified and talented people with no ties to the last 20 years of fiscal irresponsibility and with a vision consistent with what we’d been led to believe was going to happen.  Elizabeth Warren was certainly such a person, but then he didn’t stand by her when she had Congress running scared that she meant business.)

Obama fell down, in my view, by the simple omission of demanding a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.  Clinton had foolishly signed its repeal, it had worked for 60 years, its destruction allowed everything that followed to happen, and yet we heard nothing.  Instead we have an overly complex mess of rules that form a Rube-Goldberg assemblage of fingers-in-leaks that overburden everyone, Wall Street and regulators alike.  And while I came to support the auto industry bailout, his administration has made a hash of the housing recovery.

But the worst thing is the national security betrayals.  I do not approve of the drone program and I certainly do not like the indefinite detention aspect of the NDAA, which we were led to believe he also felt was a bad law.  Yet he signed the reauthorization and now his justice department is trying to overturn a judge’s ruling that indefinite detention is unConstitutional.  I grant you, this is all inherited from Bush, this is a Cheney construct, but that would seem to me all the more reason to do away with it.  Obama needed to nothing but sit back and let the ruling from bench hold sway, but instead he’s arguing for retention of powers I believed he ran opposed to.

He’s pulled some other stunts.  While I’m not a fan of Big Oil, I actually think the Canadian pipeline should have gone through.  It would have allowed him to stop issuing so many off-shore permits, which have greater possibilities of failure and environmental damage.  For myself, I wanted to see the end of the faith-based initiatives—this is a clear violation of the separation clause and the only thing that might have made it more palatable over what Bush had done would be its expansion to non-christian institutions.  And I’m still waiting for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, which was one of the worst things done on the federal level in education since…I don’t know.

But for all that, I have to confess that I still find him far more acceptable than what is being offered by his opponents, whose only solutions seem to be slash-and-burn spending cuts—except to the military.

So while this post is a complaint, an attempt at fair play, I have to apologize to those to whom I pledge a thorough drubbing.  Even when they make mistakes, I can’t seem to get as pissed at the Democrats right now as I do at the Republicans.  I know that sounds like excuse-making, but there it is.

I’ll try to do better.

culture

Here’s a Fact

Mitt Romney let it be known that he believes 47% of Americans are freeloaders.  Entitled, he says.  They pay no income tax whatsoever and will therefore vote for Obama no matter what, because they get their support from the government.

Now, this is how spin works.  Saying it the way he did makes it sound like that 47% are sitting on their entitled butts, drawing stipends from the government and doing nothing with their lives.  This is the myth of the welfare queen, writ large.  He makes it sound as if these are entirely worthless people.

Somewhere To Lay My Head

There is much that is wrong with that, not least the irresponsible use of statistics.  47% of all Americans, Mitt?  Hm.  That would include children and the retired.  It would, I assume, also include those who live in one-income households who are not themselves earners.  So, really, all of them?  Those preadolescents sucking off mom and dad should be cut off and forced to go to work?

But we may assume (maybe) that he is referring to 47% of people between 18 and 65 that he thinks ought to be paying federal income taxes.

The other false assumption is that, by inference, none of these people pay any taxes whatsoever.  We tend to talk about federal income tax as the sine qua non, the only game in town, and in the heat of political posturing, we tend to make the assumption that if someone doesn’t pay it, then they pay nothing at any level.

At least half of the number he cited constitute what we know as the working poor.  They work.  They have jobs.  They struggle and earn. They do not make enough to pay federal income tax.

But they pay payroll taxes, state income taxes, personal property taxs (if they have cars) real estate taxes (if they own a house, however small and inadequate), and everybody pays sales taxes.  They pay.  They work.  Many do get subsidies of some kind—foodstamps (recently we learned that more than half of WalMart employees do not make enough money and need foodstamps, but if they’re working for WalMart, they’re working), MedicAid, things like that.  But here’s the thing.

We all get something from the government!

Whether we see it this way or not, all of us get some kind of assistance from the government, either directly or indirectly.  Quite famously (and in some instance hypocritically) most so-called Red States, those with state governments, congressional members, and we assume local populations who do the most bitching about this sort of thing, draw the largest shares of federal aid.  And unless you’ve had your head in a small hole somewhere, we all know about federal subsidies to big businesses.  The record profits from investments are a direct result of government enabling and the way folks who derive their income from speculation talk, they sure sound entitled to me.

So either Mitt Romney does not actually understand what it is he’s criticizing or he’s just feeding bullshit to his base because that’s what they want to hear and he’s pandering.

Either way, he’s playing politics with people many of whom, if the Tea Party got all its wishes and all those programs were shut down tomorrow, would in fact die if the political wet dreams of the Rabid Right came about.

It is the oldest bit of political sordidness in the book to characterize people you don’t like as lazy, incompetent, entitled, useless burdens.  (Oh, and also “they breed like rabbits”, but as the Right seems to be trying to guarantee that I’m not so sure they see that as the insult it used to be.)  It only plays well because people tend not to see reality that causes them dyspeptic pangs of conscience.

blog

Maturity

I’ll keep this brief. Maybe. We’ll see.

Our ambassador to Libya has been killed in an assault on the consulate in Benghazi.  The attack was in response to a video that aired throughout northern Africa, a satire (I use the term loosely, as apparently it does not deserve so elevated a label) by an amateur filmmaker in California that allegedly mocks Mohammed.  A similar attack occurred in Cairo, but no deaths resulted as security there proved more effective.

This is my opinion.  This kind of crap is a consequence of a profound lack of maturity on the part of religious extremists.  Of all denominations and philosophies.  I do not here single out any one religion or culture.  The idiot who gunned down the people at the Sikh temple here is of the same infantile level of literal-minded incapacity to see past the end of a wrongheaded embrace of religion-as-substitute-for-mature-thought.

Partly this the result of a peculiar kind of insularity that does not allow for exposure to diverse ideas.  Like disease, you cannot develop tolerance if you keep those things to which you are susceptible always at bay.  Information, the daily encounter with differences, with ideas, with modes of thinking, all these things act like vaccines and you learn over time to put matters in context and acquire perspective.  Religious extremism relies on the absence of such exposure, the cordoning-off of experience.  People overreact to that which seems threatening of which they have little direct experience.

Poking fun at things, mocking things—I don’t care what they are—do not justify killing.  If you insult or mock the things I hold important, I might get a bit testy, but ultimately I know you speak from lack of knowledge, from prejudice, and from a similar dearth of maturity.  More importantly, I have to consider that you might have a point, that what you say may demand some consideration on my part.  At the end of the day, my discomfort over your words, however intended, that have no merit leaves no scars; what you say does not hurt me.

Until this becomes internalized, misunderstanding across cultural lines is inevitable.  Tragic, stupid, and an impediment to any future rapprochement.

Besides—idiots—someone in California made that video, not the people in our embassy, and it did not represent anything more than the views of one person, not the official position of the United States.  Maybe you pretend to be a monolith and if one speaks you are all represented, but not here, and you should know that.  You should know by now that we value the individual right to self-expression.  Just as some believe they have a right to issue blanket condemnations of America and the values we embody, we likewise have a right to express our opinions.  On anything.

All such violence does is provide further evidence of a thin-skinned immaturity, the kind of adolescent pique that is only important to the one indulging what is essentially a feckless hissy-fit.  It is my fervent hope that one day we will all grow up and get over ourselves.

Thank you for your patience.

________________________________________________

As an addendum, apparently a serious look at Islam by Tom Holland has been pulled from screenings by the BBC because of a wave of protest.  The film that prompted the assaults that resulted in the death of our ambassador, as it turns out, involves Terry Jones, the infamous pastor who made news burning Qu’rans in Florida and is a piece of execrable slander.  Comparing the treatment of the two events, however, points up my thesis—the Holland film is supposed to be a serious historical look at Islam, an objective analysis and this is viewed as unacceptable by a segment of the Muslim community.  While no deaths resulted from the BBC boycott, intellectually and morally they are on par.  We’ve been seeing this since at least the unsupportable treatment of Salman Rushdie (and I have spoken to Muslims who thought he should be condemned verbally if not killed who never read the book) and to my mind is part and parcel of the same cultural pathology.

culture

Where It Comes Down For Me

I grew up in a sexist culture.

No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…

It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was. Women couldn’t do anything without a man.

Except they usually took care of the family finances, maintained the house, made most of the health care decisions, and, oh yeah, raised the next generation of males who thought women were helpless.

Women who insisted on their own sexual needs were characterized charmingly as sluts, whores, trash, “mannish”, or some variation that included unnatural in the mix. Much to the consternation of everyone, Playboy changed all that, for better or worse, by basically putting it Out There that women were pretty much like men in that they liked sex and, oh yeah, had a right to it, just like men. (All the academic and political activism in the world didn’t move the culture half so much as Playboy did, which has caused another kind of push-back, but that’s another story.)

By the time I was in my twenties I’d watched my culture turn itself inside out over this and come to a place where it seemed any sane, rational person would be repulsed by the standards of that quaint and rather scary prior era. I thought—mistakenly—that the debate was settled.

Debate? Women are people.

Again, to some this might sound silly so simply stated, but that’s what it came down to and where it comes down for me. Women are people. First. They have dreams, aspirations, ambitions, hopes, talents, traits, expectations, and rights just like any man. That seems perfectly natural to me. I like that idea, I like the kind of world it implies.

But it seems some folks can’t seem to accept that. The first time I was aware of any counterargument was Phyllis Schlafly, who seemed intent on convincing women that there was something wrong with them if they wanted careers in lieu of families, that they were defying some natural order by refusing to get down on their knees and worship men the way women had been made to do for millennia. The more I found out about her, the more I found her position not only unpalatable but also hypocritical, since she herself never gave up any of her goals or ambitions for motherhood. After a while I realized that this was a perverse form of noblesse oblige, the aristocrat telling the peasant what to do and why they couldn’t have what the aristocrat had.

Still, this was a mere ripple. Things were improving.

And then something really unexpected happened. An argument was found that made the whole issue seem to have nothing to do with women’s civil rights or status as people, but with the entire culture’s responsibility to something that had never heretofore been an issue in this particular way. The argument made it seem like any woman insisting on her rights was in danger of being a murderer.

Well. It became clear after a while that although the rhetoric seemed to be focused on questions of what constituted a human life, the tactics and strategy demonstrated that it was just the same old bunch of ancient, tired arguments from privilege that women ought to have no such rights, that they ought to be little more than incubators and sex slaves.

Here is a video which pretty much sums the issue up for me and afterward I’ll tell you why.

For me, the issue comes down to this. I am a person first, a man coincidentally. Odds were pretty much even up that I might have been a woman—but I would still be a person. And by that token, I have to say that if you tried to treat me the way some people are trying to treat women, I would absolutely be in your face about it. It would be my decision to reproduce, to use my body for that purpose, no one else’s, and anyone else’s qualms about how I conduct my personal life matter not at all. This should not be a political issue. No one has a right to live off the body of another. That would be a gift. Gifts only count if they’re given willingly.

Those who would deny women the right to live as they choose have themselves decided—by proxy, on behalf of people they don’t even know—that history means nothing, that rights are conditional, and that their, for wont of a better term, sense of modesty trumps everyone else’s freedoms. They have shown time and again that what they say is the issue really is not and in the last year have made it absolutely clear that their priorities have nothing to do with the “sanctity” of life but rather with an idealized aesthetic of what they consider “appropriate” behavior.

I just wanted to be clear.

culture

The Vital Gore Is Gone

Gore Vidal has died.

Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was.  My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television.  At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.

Points which I later found myself in agreement with, by and large.

At other times I’ve found myself frustratingly at odds with Vidal, particularly in some of his reframings of American policies.

But I was right there with him during the Bush years when he told us what Bush-Cheney were doing to the Bill of Rights and what a fix we were all about to be in.

Vidal is one side of the spectrum of political essence that makes up who we are.  If you read Buckley, you must read Vidal for the other side (which most people don’t, on either side: we pick one or the other and stick to it without ever giving the opposing voice a chance, which is why we are in the cultural nightmare in which we are presently trapped), because between the two you can get some sense of the totality.

For my part, I would like to say that Vidal was one of those writers whose ability I admire.  He was a first-class stylist and his historical knowledge was enviable.  When he chose a historical subject—like Lincoln or Aaron Burr or a year, like 1876—he described what happened and what people said if reliable sources were available and added in the connective tissue with a fine eye for detail and sense of place.  His essays, often maddening, never bored, and usually revealed a vein of thought or fact hitherto unremarked that could prove absolutely trenchant.

Many on the Right hated him because he identified, generally quite accurately, the foundation of their politics (money or power, or both) and aimed his barbs at their historical amnesia, cultural ignorance, and always at their political hypocrisy.

Many on the Left were uncomfortable with him because he wouldn’t let them off the hook.  If they pandered, compromised their values, paid lip-service and then voted otherwise, he called them on it.

He once commented that he thought we had lost our chance to “have a civilization” here, that it looked for a time “like we were going to have one” but apparently not.  He said it with a deep sadness and while I took it as hyperbole, I can understand what he meant.  We’ve been arguing in the Forum about who we’re going to be as a nation and while the argument rages on we’re squandering our resources.  We have all the components of a really fine civilization but by and large they don’t seem to matter to most people, so they atrophy from lack of proper attention.

I stress though that a steady diet of Mr. Vidal’s writings, with nothing to balance it, can be as bad as a steady diet of William F. Buckley (or William Safire or George Will).  He represented an important aspect, one side, that must be respected and engaged as an equal part of all the other sides.  (Put Will and Buckley on one end and Chomsky and Vidal on the other and in the mix you find the substance of what it means to be a free people of serious intent.)

He was on Dick Cavett’s old talk show, often, and on one of them they were playing anagrams with names, and Vidal asked Cavett what his should be.  Without missing a beat, Cavett said “You’re the Vital Gore.”  Vidal smiled, apparently pleased.

Some of our essential vitality is gone.

culture

Red Queen’s Race

I was amused this morning listening to the Market Report on NPR when I heard a commentator suggest that it “may be time to dust off the Glass-Steagall Act” to deal with the ongoing banking fiascoes which have caused us naught but grief since…

Well, this time around since 2008, but frankly since about 1982 when the first of a long series of financial sector deregulatory actions began under the misguided assumptions of Reaganomics and the hypnotic appeal of the Laffer Curve.

Don’t know what the Laffer Curve is?  Well, it was the brainchild of a man named Arthur Laffer, an economist, who came up with it and presented originally to President Ford.  Basically, he made a graph that showed a line of tax rates between 0 and 100 and how revenues would rise on the left side of the curve as tax rates were lowered in descending order toward zero and would likewise diminish on the right side as tax rates increased.  We’re talking tax revenue, now.  This was the basis for the whole “cut taxes and increase tax revenue” faith that has been the core of conservative policy ever since Reagan adopted it with a convert’s enthusiasm.  This is also what Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, called “Voodoo Economics.”

Bush Sr. was right.  There is a certain short term applicability to the Curve, but it fails to take into consideration many factors which have all subsequently made it, er, laughable.  After 32 years we can just look at the numbers and see that it flat out does not do what was promised and it has cost us.

But my word it was appealing!  What politician doesn’t want to be able to run on a lower taxes platform?  And to then assert that lowering taxes will automatically increase government revenues?  Why, that’s just icing on the cake!

Very simply, in combination with the fervor for deregulation, supply side has cost the working and middle class dearly.  Trickle down economics does not benefit those who cannot afford to play in the big leagues.

And frankly, I don’t think it works at the top level, either, because, clearly, if it did, the big banks would not have needed bailing out.

Glass-Steagall was a suite of four laws put in place in the 1930s that, among other things, separated the functions of banking and put a firewall between investment banking and regular, pedestrian commercial banking.  The reasoning was very simple.  Investment banking, no matter how you dress it up, is gambling.  It’s placing a bet on the success of markets and industries.  When things go well, the pay off is huge.  But when they don’t, the cost is equally large.  Glass-Steagall, among other things, said that a bank could gamble, but not with regular client money.  Namely, yours and mine, in a savings or checking account.  They can’t use our money to back their bets.

That’s how the great stock market crash of ’29 happened which ushered in the Great Depression.  Banks and other institutions gambled with everybody’s money, they had too little in reserve, and there was no safety net to stop their fall.  Everyone paid.

In the fever to increase profits in the 80s and 90s, Glass-Steagall was repealed, the firewall was taken down, and 2008 happened.

Except this time the federal government was there to catch the falling banks before they crashed on the pavement.  Everyone is bitching about Obama spending a lot of money, but this is where a lot of it went, and frankly if he had not, we’d be in a worse fix than we are.

Reinstating Glass-Steagall should have been the first thing Congress proposed.  Instead we have the rather awkward and not nearly as effective Dodd-Frank Bill.  The reason no one proposed reinstating Glass-Steagall is simple—big money doesn’t want it and they’ve spent a lot of money to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Why? Because they’re high-rollers and the only way for them to sustain themselves is by continuing to play.  Glass-Steagall would remove from their access a huge pool of capital with which to gamble.

Our capital.

It amazes me that so many people seem not to grasp this.  We have tried supply-side economics for three decades, both Republican and Democrat (Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall) and the result has been a tremendous boon to people with a lot of money and a slow disaster for everyone else.  We have somehow been convinced that reinstating regulations that worked very well for 60 years will result in people who have lost losing even more.  They’re willing to back the supposed “rights” of people who have been leaching off the common wealth of the United States for thirty years at the expense of workers, the middle class, and the common good, because they’ve been traumatized by slogans which explain nothing.

I was surprised to hear someone actually say the words, “reinstate Glass-Steagall.”  I agree, it should have been done in 2009 or 2010.  I doubt it will be, at least not in the near future.

I propose a new slogan.  Back in the 1960s and ’70s there was a popular phrase, a bumper sticker slogan, that declared “Federal Aid Hell, It’s Our Money!”  How about  “Private Capital Hell, It’s Our Money!”

The banks are too big.  They cannot sustain themselves.  The only way they can is by pillaging the general wealth.  They need to be broken up and the quite different functions of investment and commercial banking need to be separate again.  We’re running faster and faster in a Red Queen’s Race and soon our legs are going to give out.  Stop voting to give all our money to those who have shown repeatedly that they have no interest in the well-being of this country.  Looking out for the needs and desires of shareholders is not the same as looking out for the security of all the people.