Category: Politics
The Final Solution
No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.
Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis. He was convicted of killing a cop. There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.
I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty. You can’t take it back.
Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973. From the late 80s on, DNA has become an important factor, but it is a relatively minor one. Chief factors include witness recantation, capture of the “real” perpetrator, or review of the trial and findings that the State had done a shabby job.
I do not have a problem with the idea that some people may deserve to die. Life, in and of itself, is not sacred to me. It simply is. And we make choices, some of them bad, and decisions get made that have consequences, and people should be held accountable for their actions.
If I walk into my home and find someone there, uninvited, who is raping my wife, has killed my dog, and will likely kill my wife when he’s finished, and I can do so, I will kill him. I have no moral qualms about that, nor any question about my right to do so. (Yes, I will probably have to go to counseling afterward, because the taking of a life under any circumstances is a Big Deal.)
But if I come home and find my dog and wife dead already and a month later someone is arrested for it, tried, and convicted of the crime, I do not want him to receive the death penalty. Maybe that sounds perverse, but it comes down to two simple caveats: the State tries and convicts innocent people all the time and I do not have 100% confidence that they can do better and if I can’t be 100% sure, I don’t want someone being sure on my behalf, not in something as final as this.
But secondly, I don’t want the State to wield that power. Certainly it can be argued that certain crimes are so bad that only death may be proper, but laws change and the crimes under which death is dealt can be determined by politics as much as by justice. I want the State barred from applying that penalty in all cases because I do not trust that only those crimes with which I may have sympathy will receive it.
In short, basically, if I catch the son-of-a-bitch doing the crime and put him down, that’s fine. After the fact, I will settle for incarceration because I do not want the State to have the power of life and death, especially since they do not use it fairly, nor is the system sufficient to guarantee they kill only the criminal. Obviously they do not.
By the same token, I do not have the right to go on my own hunt for someone with the view to exact vengeance. If the State can’t get it right, how can I? If I miss the chance by not being there when it is done, I can’t recover it and acting on my own is as bad as the State screwing up.
There are countries where the death penalty is used for adultery or blasphemy. No, we don’t do that here. But we do have it for treason, and that, it seems to me, is rife for misapplication. Society changes, politics is fickle. We don’t kill people for having sex out of wedlock or cursing or suggesting certain ideas aren’t true. Today. I’d rather we begin to accept as a principle that the death penalty is never appropriate and find some other way to deal with our urge for vengeance—because that’s all it really is. We’ve killed a lot of innocent people with it because we were angry. Not just. Angry.
And you can’t take it back if you find out you had the wrong guy.
Paying For It
I just finished listening to a round table of pundits talking about Obama’s new jobs bill and going over the implications and possibilities. What occurred to me, not ten minutes ago, was that critics of these stimulus packages are not all wrong, nor are they necessarily doctrinaire.
It’s a natural thing to compare the current situation to the Great Depression (which was a lot worse, but pain is relative) and of course the Progressives are saying that we need federal spending to get out of it. After all, that’s what we did back then.
Everyone keeps forgetting a significant difference. The aftermath of World War II.
Look: the problem with FDR’s solutions was that they wouldn’t “take.” He kept pumping money into the economy, one innovative program after another, and as long as the money flowed, people worked, it looked like recovery was on its way. No one wants to remember (or acknowledge) except perhaps the naysayers that every time Washington cut back, the country slid into higher unemployment and fiscal stagnation. If the idea was to “prime the pump” and get business moving again, it wasn’t working, at least not fast enough to matter much. From all appearances, any recovery that looked like what everyone wanted was still going to take a very long time and would require mountains of federal dollars to achieve.
The War ended the Great Depression. Spending to fight it, to sustain allies, lifted the unemployment rate from record highs to record lows. Money flowed like water and the country was back at work.
That was still federal money.
Most of it was paid for through War Bonds. (We forget that, too—WWII was a pay-as-you-go war, which is amazing when you stop to think about it.)
Now, the question is, why did the recovery “take” in the aftermath?
Very simple. The United States was one of the only countries that still had a totally intact industrial machine. Russia had a big one, but they’d suffered damage. Also they lacked the transportation and banking systems to do what we did. Almost no one else could mount the kind of manufacturing effort we could and sustain it the way we did.
What did we sustain it doing?
Rebuilding half the world’s industrial base.
This is not hyperbole. Through a number of programs, the machinery that built the military might was turned to restoring the productive capacity of most of Europe, Japan, and some of the subcontinent. We made the boom times of the Fifties and Sixties on the money spent to do that.
Now the part everyone forgets. Our banks made the loans to all the countries that we aided for them to turn around and buy all that necessary stuff from us. The money flowed out and came back with interest in long-term notes. Yes, many of them defaulted, but it didn’t matter, because the flow of capital had resumed from the time it had stopped in the late Twenties, and a good chunk of that money was flowing into our coffers and paid for the American Golden Age.
The trouble with the current situation is that we are no longer in a position to do anything like that. Europe doesn’t need us. We’ve been getting along selling our debt, and China owns most of that. Stimulus spending therefore does not go into the kinds of instruments that will send it back to us from other countries that need what we have because they have cheaper sources or their own capacity.
So the recovery now is going to be the long, slow one that will require changes in our fiscal institutions before we see anything sustainable. The wars we’re fighting now are not the kind that will result in long-term loans to rebuild those countries and thus allow us to recoup expenditures—they’re just drains. We are no longer the Last Man Standing after a slugfest, so what we do and what we have no one needs to get back on their feet.
Nevertheless, we are in a situation where we have to face the fact that the decisions we make in the next decade will decide whether we remain a vital, civilized, progressive nation or will descend into the kind of wallowing third world morass that China was in during the heyday of Mao and the Gangs, a helpless giant. Whether the Tea Party or John Boehner wants to admit it, the only thing that will get us out of the current doldrums is spending—a lot of it. So you can either do something to require it from those who still have it or you will have to suck up your ideology and erect that quasi-socialist machine everyone is so terrified of and figure out how to make it work without losing us our essential freedoms.
What I hear coming from the GOP are plans that will make us strong based on the well-being of a minority. What I hear coming from Obama is finger-in-the-dyke delay tactics, treating symptoms without addressing causes. The actual solution is likely to be something neither side wants to consider.
The world is different. Time to stop looking to the lessons of the Great Depression for solutions.
9/12
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I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration. Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal. My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us. Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.
Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context. One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?
Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives.
The simple answer is also the most complex:Â they were following a leader.
I’m going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point.
Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier’s oath to defend the constitution. There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral. There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up. The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation.
To underline this a bit more, a bit of history. The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state. German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws. Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer. (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.)
Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it. (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion. Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well. People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person. The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.) Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people. (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.)
Next example. Many years ago, when I was still a teenager looking for a job, I answered an ad for a salesman position. When I arrived for the interview I found myself in a large room with a group of people all of whom were receiving a sales pitch for the product by one man, who was doing a first-rate job of boosterism for it. It was a reference book, maybe even an encyclopedia, I don’t clearly remember. But his pitch was to our potential to make a lot of money selling this product, that it required dedication and belief in ourselves and what we were selling. He was a good speaker, he got people fired up.
But he didn’t say much about the product. My questions concerned that and what it would mean for the consumer, but except for the most cursory description, he talked very little about it. He summed up his twenty minute pep talk by asking if there was anyone still not convinced this would be a good job. I and a couple others raised our hands. When I did so, I expected to be given an opportunity to ask about the product.
Instead, he gave us a sad look and said “Well, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
I was stunned and, by the expressions on the faces of the others who’d raised their hands, so were my fellow skeptics. I said, “You’re not going to ask why?”
“Please leave,” was all he said.
Dazed, we left. I realized much later that what he—his company—were looking for were people who, for their own self-betterment, would be willing to sell anything to anyone. They did not want skeptics. It might have been the greatest encyclopedia on the planet, but that didn’t matter.
The Joyce Meyer Ministries are in town this week, apparently. This is an institution that makes an overt connection between religious fealty and material success. People give great amounts of money to it to “spread the word” and some of them achieve a certain amount of success.  As with other grandstanding televangelists, the claim is certainly true for herself, her family, and closest associates, but many people have given everything to her and ended up with nothing. The deeper question, though, is why would anyone continue to give to her institution if, as she claims, it is faith that actually pays off? Can’t that be handled privately? Or in another church or institution?
Which of course leads one to wonder at the elasticity of the faithful with regards to those ministers who have been exposed as frauds. I have no real question as to the motives of people like Jim Bakker or Ted Haggerty or Jimmy Swaggart or even Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson. I do have deep questions about those who continue to follow them despite revelations of impropriety and fiscal deceit and self-aggrandizement.
I had a customer once who was part of the Democratic Party machine in St. Louis and as long as you weren’t talking about politics he was a good guy. But when elections were upon us, he would come in an just go on about this candidate or that, and always with the same “We’ve got to see him elected!” One year he was working on behalf of someone who had obvious credibility problems (and later was indicted), but his dedication was absolute. When I pointed out the problems with the candidate, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind. “But the alternative is a Republican!” So what? I said. Better an honest Republican than a crook. The subsequent harangue I received made it clear that it did not matter who the candidate was or what he or she did, as long as they were Democratic there was simply no question of his support.
I watched people I knew become absolutely enamored of Ronald Reagan, almost from the start. As his presidency went on and problems emerged, some simply would not abandon him. They had dedicated themselves to the man and it didn’t matter what he did. He made them feel “like a real American.” There are people still who think Nixon was framed and those still who, despite detailed information about his personal life and his presidential decisions think that Kennedy walked on water. No doubt there will be those who think Bush was one of the greatest presidents ever.
When we ask ourselves about the motives behind 911, this all-t00-human flaw must be at the top of the list. The men who hi-jacked those planes and wreaked all that havoc had been living here. They saw the people in their neighborhoods, they spoke to us, they breathed our air—and while I am not one of those who sycophantically hold the United States up as the shining model of political perfection and social maturity, by comparison this is a free country, a good country (which makes our failings and shortcomings all the more painful, because we have fewer excuses)—and yet they did that. It is legitimate to ask “where were their consciences? Where was their skepticism? Where was their ability to make valid judgments?”
Many would like to believe that such men are so different that they cannot be understood. They weren’t rational, they weren’t “normal,” they weren’t Like Us.
No? How many of us questioned Bush’s program? How many of us on this day ten years ago would not have backed his program? Even in Congress, very few stood up to say “Wait a minute, what are we doing?”
Yes, I know, it’s more complicated than that. And it is. But then, it’s more complicated for the other guy, too. And yet, it comes down to something very similar—go where the leader tells you to, do what the leader orders. Ask no questions, after all the leader knows best.
Cults work because people want to follow a leader. They have little trust in their own decision-making abilities, little confidence in their own ideas, even their own personalities. On some level, the need for validation from a guru is essential for their ability to even get out of bed in the morning. And I’m not talking about Moonies or Krishna or even the Sword and the Arm of the Lord or Aryan Nation, I’m talking about ordinary people with normal lives who dedicate a part of their psyches to an external source of affirmation. It can be anything from a favorite musical group to a politician to a preacher, or even something as intimate as a lover or a friend, or something both intimate and impersonal, like AA or Alanon or a survivor’s support group. What makes this hard is that the tendency is not always bad but sometimes is very positive, very necessary.
It is all-too-easy to hand over too much of yourself to someone else because it is easier than doing the necessary work for yourself. Most of us do something like this at one time or another, probably a lot of us transfer our dedication from one thing (or person) to another regularly, in a kind of psychic load-sharing routine. But some of us simply invest everything in one place, one person, and surrender our ability, even our right, to withdraw, to question, to say no when a demand becomes unreasonable or the relationship toxic.
I don’t believe in people that way. I don’t believe in anything that way. I don’t draw my validation from a blind commitment to a guru. I did at one time but I grew out of it and now I find it bizarre when I encounter someone who does that to the point of being unable to accept criticism of the little god at the center of their being.
Which has led me to understand a reaction I’ve had for a long time. Maybe we’ve all felt this. When someone comes up to you and starts going on about how so-and-so or this-and-that saved their life, is the greatest thing ever, is the reason they function, I—and probably most everyone—automatically pull back, suspicious and a bit uncomfortable at the protestations of fealty. I get uncomfortable around the hyper-patriotic and the extremely religious who insist on telling you how much they love their country or their god. I wrote a little about that here. I feel, justifiably or not, that they aren’t quite rational about this and maybe not quite reliable. If the choice came between doing what was right and following their guru into hell, what would they do?
I don’t like that feeling, but I think I understand it now. That level of dedication to something external suggests to me that they aren’t all there, that they’re using that dedication to make up for an absence of Self, and not just any self, but the self that can act independently of blind faith. I find I don’t entirely trust them.
And it could be a lack of trust about almost anything. When faced with that kind of dedication, I find myself almost automatically shutting down certain lines of communication, self-censoring, placing certain topics off-limits. I don’t know what kind of reaction I’ll get if I say certain things. I don’t know what this person will do if they feel I threaten their guru. Most likely cut off similar lines of communications with me.
But that apparent inability to separate out a personal zone of skeptical self-awareness from the object of their obsession tells me that they will not always act on rational premises. Actions may take the form of insisting certain books be removed from library shelves all the way to…flying planes into skyscrapers.
The 911 hijackers had to indulge a kind of interpretive censorship about everything they saw or heard in this country during their stay. But it was an interpretation based not on their personal standards of right and wrong, their own skeptical assessment, but on what they had been told they would see by their guru. Their guru used their culture to reinforce his vision and they had surrendered enough of themselves to his vision that they committed an atrocity.
The difficulty in all this is that we all interpret things based on who we listen to and what we’ve heard. What the hijackers did, up until the moment they boarded those planes, was not particularly different from what any group does that is dedicated to a cause that seems to run counter to the larger culture. Eco-terrorists go through the same processes.
I have always held myself apart from the influence of gurus. Or tried to. I will use my own judgment, thank you, and often it puts me at odds with momentary protestations of fealty for ideas or persons that I might even agree with, at least in part.   It’s hard work, continually reassessing—which part is me and which is them—and I can understand the impulse of hermits to extract themselves entirely from a culture in order to try to find which is which. But that doesn’t work, either, because we need feedback in order to perfect judgment.
The lesson of 911 for me was not new but came with added force: it is never good to follow a guru. You may agree with someone, work with someone, associate yourself with their ideas, even like them, but trailing along after them like children after the Piper is never good. Because you must always be able, when they one day turn to you and say “You have go do X for the cause,” to tell them no. You have to be able to do so even if you don’t. You may judge that what they’ve told you to do is a good idea—but you must make your own judgment. It’s a pretty safe bet that if they tell you to go kill a bunch of people in the name of X, they do not have your or anyone else’s best interests at heart.
That goes for gurus, cults, churches, and governments.
A Few Questions For the GOP
President Obama is making his big speech tonight to a joint session of Congress to put forth his new jobs ideas. Naturally, the Republicans have responded ahead of time and have all but said they’re not interested. This is really helpful.
I have a few questions, though, for the Republicans ahead of time, some things that have been bugging me for a while.
According to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “we need to stop doing what we’ve been doing.” He goes on to enumerate those things. Stop spending, stop threatening tax increases, and roll back the “big wet blanket of this explosion of regulation” on the private sector. Nothing new here, it’s standard by now. Pull the string on a Republican’s back and you hear the same litany.
Cut spending, reduce taxes, eliminate regulation. Yadda yadda yadda.
Here’s my first question.
If you’re running a business and you’re faced with shrinking revenues, does it make sense to cut the price of your product?
Okay, I know there’s an answer to this that makes sense. If you see a trend toward reduced revenues, cutting the price can make the product more attractive and theoretically increase the volume of sales. You can make up the difference then by quantity.
That only works if the slide isn’t too severe. If you cut the price below your costs and volume doesn’t increase, then to continue that policy is a guarantee of bankruptcy.
So…?
Hm. Okay, regulation. Is everyone’s memory so short that we can’t remember back in 2008 when the financial markets crashed and burned and everyone knew it was because we had deregulated the industry so much that bubbles were allowed to grow uncontrolled and firms were pillaging their customers’ accounts on risky ventures that ought to have been illegal? It was the consistent roll back of regulations that put us in that position. So how is deregulating further supposed to be good for us?
Oh, they mentioned environmental regulations, right. Like it makes sense to use the environment as a toilet just to increase jobs. I forget, the GOP keeps expecting industry to behave morally if they take off the regulations. I would like to see evidence of that ever having worked.
What’s that? No answer?
Okay, then, tax cuts. Here we go again. We have to lower taxes on business in order to get them to…
What? Spend more money on reinvestment and hire more people?
We have been cutting taxes on business and wealth since Reagan was in office. There has been a steady decline in the corporate income tax rate for 30 years. The result has been the wholesale shipping of jobs overseas. Why? Because it’s cheaper and taxes have nothing to do with it. There is no quid pro quo. We have cut their taxes, they have promised to do more for the country, and less has been done.
I would like to know what you intend to do to make sure that the increased revenues business will enjoy as a result of those cuts will be spent here. How are you going to guarantee that cutting the taxes on, say, Exxon or Monsanto or GM or any of them will become reinvestment in this country and not simply go to increase the dividend payments of shareholders while the companies themselves build another new plant in Indonesia or India or somewhere else where labor goes for a dollar a day and no money is set aside for pensions or health care?
My simple questions are essentially the same ones Mitch McConnell is asking the president. Why are you still beating these dead horses and expecting a different outcome? There is clearly a disconnect. You’ve been passing legislation for 30 years now to benefit business and America has been gradually stripped of middle class jobs and the capacity to renew itself. But you keep harping on that same theme.
Not that what Obama has been proposing is much better, but at least his spending is aimed at Americans and not corporate entities. Well, some of it anyway, and it just seems that all GOP efforts are aimed at helping out business.
Excuse me? The Republicans are talking about citizens, too? Sorry, then explain to me the reversal of someone like Senator Lugar, who nine months ago was a big supporter of the payroll tax rollback but now is condemning is as a short term do nothing solution? Perhaps I am jaded, but when I hear that it sounds like he’s saying “But this tax cut doesn’t benefit the people who put me in office, it’s just…just…people.”
The Great Depression ended because of massively increased federal spending. There are no two ways about it. FDR spent and spent and spent and the economy sluggishly responded. It didn’t end until WWII started—but hey, all that money was federal spending. We were at war, we organized to win it, and the Depression ended. The sluggish recovery got supercharged. But it was still federal spending.
Because here’s the reality—there is a lot of money in the accounts of large businesses. They’ve pretty much recovered and we have helped them do that. Right or wrong, we bailed them out and now they’re whole. But they’re not spending any of it! So my last question.
If you take off all the regulations and end all the taxes on these entities, what makes you think they’ll spend that money here? There’s no law demanding that they do. What makes you think they won’t continue to do what they’ve been doing?
I’m just curious.
The Wrong People
The federal government is currently requiring Fannie May and Freddy Mac to sue their business partners—the banks—over the mess they’ve all made together. This is awkward, because while they do that they are also being required to cooperate to untangle the mess.
Presumably, when all this is done, what it basically means is the government will know who to fine. And at what level.
Which is basically bogus. This situation requires major surgery, months in full body traction, and possibly a mercy killing. All this move does is put another band-aid on it.
They’re still worrying about the wrong people. Investment bankers, mortgage brokers, and such like are not the victims of the current debacle. Many of them, not all, are the perpetrators of it and once more we’re letting the government run around trying to fix their situation while ignoring the people who are really taking one up the ol’ backdoor, namely the Homeowner.
Something began in the 80s that has done huge damage to the so-called American dream. We even had a dress rehearsal for the crash in 2008 back then with the Savings & Loan Crisis (remember that one? Charles Keating and others, including some peripheral involvement of the Bush clan. Anyway…) What began to happen was a systematic turnover of housing in a game of Bubble Bubble, Let’s Make A Bubble. In the heyday of the Yuppie (another old term—remember them? Young and Upwardly Mobile) it became the thing to do to buy a house, live in it for a while, do a little upgrading, then sell it at a higher price within a year or two and use that money to buy a better house in a nicer neighborhood and so one up the ladder until, from a relatively modest initial purchase, you find yourself in a six-figure house with a lot of extra cash from all your shrewd escalations. Banks loved it because the turn-over in loans looked good on their ledgers and the price of housing kept going up in these deals. This came hot on the heels, of course, of the late 70s rehab boom, so for a time the intrinsic value of the properties actually did go up.
But it became a game and the end result was to always inflate the price of the house so you could make a quick profit and lever your way into a “better” home. This had a couple of unintended consequences, one of which we know about because it’s all over the news, the other not so much because its impact was spread all over the place.
The banks got into this in a Big Way and as the Bubble grew they found they could sell their loan bundles into investment portfolios that were backed up by the increasing large mortgage payments. But there was a problem. By law, the side of the bank dealing in consumer home loans was kept separate from the side of the bank dealing in investment banking. A little law called the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) kept these two things from mingling.
The whole point of Glass-Steagall was to control speculation, which had created the huge bubble which burst in October of 1929 and brought on the Great Depression. Bankers and financiers have been trying to repeal the act ever since and they’ve whittled away at it over time. In 1980, the provision that allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates on savings accounts was repealed and the provision that prohibited a bank holding company to own other financial institutions was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That opened the flood gates and it took less than ten years to sink the economy. Why we simply didn’t bring Glass-Steagall back in 2008 or 2009, I do not know.
(Yes, I do, I’m being facetious. The financial world still thinks they can build a perpetual motion machine if only regulation didn’t stand in their way, so they keep paying large sums of money to politicians to scuttle efforts to enact real regulation.)
Enough of the bubble has been based on housing that we are still fretting over what to do with all those mortgages that should never have been written.
Which brings me to the part of this that doesn’t get a lot of press. All the people who have been put at jeopardy to lose their homes because the economy is in the tank. I’m not talking about people who had no business buying the houses they were in, but those who till 2008 were managing to pay their mortgages on time and could have continued to do so had the bubble not collapsed along with everything else. And that’s where the whole practice of flipping homes comes into range of my ire.
Consider: the cost of housing has risen far more than wages. It takes a much larger chunk of your income to pay your mortgage than it did in the 70s or the 60s, and I’m talking ratios now. Between 1950 and 1990, average Real income for a working class or middle class family has gone up by a factor of three. In that same period, the cost of a house has gone up by a factor of eight. All this because the phenomenon known as “gentrification” and the financial games played to support it, which has inflated the cost of housing to insane levels.
(Personal anecdote. The costs have continued to rise since the 90s, of course. The house that Donna and I bought in 1992 we could no longer afford today. It’s value has doubled, but our income has not. In fact, our income has been fairly stable over the last 20 years, which I actually think is the case for far more people than polls suggest.)
You want a home. You have no intention of playing this game, you just want a nice house in which to live and raise your family. The cost of that house has already been distorted because you neighbors—not all, but it only takes a few—have played this game long enough that the cost of living in a given neighborhood has gone up artificially. It’s not the intrinsic value of the bricks and frame and floors and appliances, but the balance sheet of mortgages and tax assessments that have done this, because a few people are parlaying housing into fat bank accounts. If it only affected the cost of the houses they were buying and selling, it would be different, the risk would all be on them, but that’s not how housing works. You don’t buy A House, you buy a neighborhood.
So the initial cost of that house is already high but you can handle it. However, your ability to handle it is based on a growing economy that can pay you a wage that will cover it. That economy is based on the continual inflation of property values PLUS the value of investment instruments you know nothing about and have very little to do with the physical property, only on the theoretical return on continued mortgage payments on housing sold at inflated prices.
When the bubble bursts, it immediately degrades the resale value of your house, which in current euphemism, puts you underwater. You now owe more on your house than you can sell it for.
Then the dominoes fall. Because investments take a hit, the stock market plummets, spending seizes up, banks stop issuing loans, the movement of currency slows to a crawl, and the company you work for contracts. You lose your job. Through absolutely no fault of your own, you are about to be foreclosed on because you can’t make the payments.
The economy is in crisis. The government steps in to save—
The Banks.
Foreclosures proceed apace, but the banks don’t have to worry about eating the bad loans because they’re receiving money from the government to keep them afloat. Of course, the whole point from the public’s standpoint to keep them afloat is so they will resume making loans so the economy will start growing again and you can get a new job.
But that doesn’t happen. The bailouts cover the losses of investors, not homeowners, who are pretty much screwed.
Why?
Here’s a thought. Let’s use the authority of the FHA and FHFA to direct the banks to write all those mortgages off. I mean it. Tomorrow, if you’re in a house and still owe on it, the day after, it’s yours.
Lunacy? The banks are drowning in unsalable housing right now. They are forced to foreclose because that’s what the rules say, but they can’t resell the properties. By the time they can, the cost on their ledgers will be enormous what with taxes and maintenance—unless they’re not maintaining them or paying taxes, which means local communities take a double hit in decaying housing and loss of tax revenue. By the time the economy turns around, the banks will have an impossible burden in vacant housing, which they will likely sell off in auctions for pennies on the dollar. It would make more sense to just write them off.
You then stay in your house. Without a mortgage, you can afford to take a lower paying job to meet the balance of your needs. More importantly, once your employed again, you can resume paying property taxes, which your local community can use to maintain streets, schools, etc. You lose your house, not only will you be a nontaxpaying homeless person, your credit is besmirched and you will have a very hard time getting another loan for another house, job or no job. The long term consequences of doing otherwise will cost us billions.
But we don’t consider long term. The banks will scream “but all those mortgage payments!” So what? Clean ledgers, the surviving banks can go back into making home loans to the next generation.
None of which will do any good if the same bubble is allowed to grow again.
We keep listening to the wrong people. Bankers at that level will never miss a meal. Homeowners, however, generally do not conduct their finances on that level. It is grossly unfair that responsible people should lose their homes because someone else has played a financial shell game with housing prices that has now put everyone at risk.
But the banks would go under? Some of them. New ones will spring up. I think we have made a huge mistake buying into the idea of Too Big To Fail. No such thing. Size shouldn’t automatically come with special protections against the consequences of greed.
For once, I think private institutions ought to be bypassed. They broke it once (well, several times) and should not be trusted to fix it this time. When the savings and loan collapse occurred in the 80s, thousands of people lost their homes. A couple of financiers went to jail. Big deal. Maybe if the investors in those companies were made to take a hit, they would require more rational—and moral—management from their boards.
Not to worry. This won’t happen. Obama is proposing we find ways of allowing all those people underwater to refinance. Heaven forbid average people get a bailout from their government that might actually do the entire economy some good!
No Longer Surprised
President Obama is withdrawing proposed tighter regulations on smog that had been part of his initial energetic approach to reform early in his presidency. No jobs have been created in the last month and congressional Republicans are shouting about regulations and the burden to business as the major reason.  I think they’re running out of excuses. I mean, we’ve rolled back taxes, rolled back regulations, given them money…and still no one is hiring. I don’t think anyone is going to.
Big business, including the banks, are sitting on huge piles of cash right now. Yet they won’t make loans. Not at levels sufficient to boost job growth. So the next step is make businesses even less accountable to the commonweal. When the Republicans run out of things to hand over to business as incentive and there is still no hiring going on, what will they say? Who will they blame?
The thing that disturbs me is that Obama is backing down so much. He even rescheduled his speech to congress because Speaker Boehner said it would be an imposition on returning members. Instead of standing by his decision, Obama reschedules—opposite the first game of the NFL season.
Does anyone think for a minute Bush would have done that? Or Clinton? I approve of the spirit of compromise and cooperation, but it’s getting ridiculous. We have a president who seems incapable of backing up his own positions and all he’s doing is yielding to the screaming meemies of the Republican Party.
Right now, with a couple of exceptions, it is clear that the Republican Party wants to undo everything the government does and hand it all over to private enterprise. Cut taxes, deregulate, suspend oversight.
And right now we are getting report after report how that is simply a stupid thing to do.
If I had to characterize the GOP theme right now, basing it entirely on Rick Perry and Michele Bachman and somewhat on Mitt Romney, it is this: “We will give the government back to the people where we think it belongs—when we’re done, the federal government will do nothing but maybe run the armed forces. Everything else you’ll have to buy from a private contractor. And to make it even sweeter, we won’t even see to it that you’re treated fairly by those contractors, because, you know, regulation stifles growth.”
There are a couple of GOP presidential candidates who aren’t that bad, but they aren’t getting much press, and it doesn’t matter just now because I’m not talking about 2012, I’m talking about right now. I’m not even talking about the Republican Party, I’m talking about our president’s response to this.
Which is to accommodate, accommodate, yield, cave, bend over…
I’m not longer surprised. I voted for someone I thought had the nerve and the principle to stand up to this. This is more of the same nonsense we were getting under Bush, which caused huge problems. Does anyone after a minute’s thought really believe the financial industry took a nose dive because it was over regulated? They’d been getting progressively less regulation for 20 years, even to the point of declawing the very agencies that might have stopped the bleeding before it took the patient with it, all in the name of growth. I have no doubt you could find any number of boneheaded regulations that do no good, but that’s not the same as saying regulation is bad.
I’m no longer surprised. I will likely write in a candidate at the next election.
Hmm? What’s that? What would I have him do? After all, he wants to get re-elected…?
He’s not a shoe-in. If he keeps doing this, there might even be a coup in the Democratic Party. Every poll in the nation in the last year has suggested that the majority of citizens support tax increases, especially on the wealthy, yet it’s as if he’s playing exclusively to the Tea Party.
It’s simple. The situation is all fucked up anyway, you might as well go down as a tiger rather than as a set of changing stripes. Use the bully pulpit. Veto the shit out this GOP nonsense. Start issuing executive orders for works programs and when the challenges come up take ’em on. Get this shit in the courts and instruct the Justice Department to defend your preferred programs to the death. You’re the fucking president, you don’t change your schedule because John Boehner whines. Jobs aren’t being created anyway, so go ahead and try to clean up the air. Use your authority. Fucking stand up for…something.
There are two conceptions at work, in my opinion, in GOP thinking about deregulation and they are at odds with each other. I think that most Republican voters, when they think about this issue, are thinking about small business. They think the burden and the benefit will accrue to companies with a 100 employees or less and that may well be partly true. But all this deregulation nonsense is not going to benefit small business nearly so significantly as it will line the pockets of the huge multinationals. I don’t think most GOP voters conceive of the difference in kind between the local mom and pop manufacturer and, say, Boeing or Monsanto. The environmental regulations are burdensome to a small business, sure, but those small businesses are not dumping kilotons of waste and pumping millions of pounds of carbon into the air. Also, small local business is not skimming their profits and investing them overseas, which is what is happening at the upper levels, and, you know, gravity works—shit flows downhill. ADM creates thousands of tons of waste and the run-off affects family farms, the destruction of which leads to the consolidation of the agribusiness into an entity that controls pricing and then distorts the monetary markets. There are orders of magnitude of difference between a local bakery and Nabisco and the regulations that used to keep these monsters in check are going away and it will end up screwing that local baker and all the rest of us.
But we have a president who swore he was going to make things different and somehow has misplaced his cohones.
If by a miracle either Gary Johnson or Jon Huntsman get the nod for the GOP for 2012, I will seriously consider voting for either of them. There are things I do not like about the GOP philosophy, but on balance, if you’re talking about traditional, Eisenhower Republicans, there are just as many things about the Democrats I don’t like. But these two seem to have a grasp. I honestly don’t think they have a chance, because they are, in fact, too rational for the current crop of GOP delegates. So if, as seems more likely, the top three idiots prove to be too much to beat, I will likely vote for Obama again—I cannot abide the GOP social agenda and I see no point is saving the financial side of this country if the cost is in the freedoms that I think are what make this place worth living in.
But I’m no longer surprised at Obama’s pathetic abandonment of almost everything he said he stood for. Sad and disappointed, but not surprised.
Revenge Porn
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There is probably no way for me to write this without tripping over some bloodthirsty reactionary’s sensibilities, but you know, I don’t really give a damn.
In my home town, too.
A St. Louis publishing company has released a 9/11 coloring book. There is a reaction to it here. Wonderful cover.
Very patriotic. Nothing violent on the cover itself, but there are the twin towers and, I think, the proposed memorial tower.
Oh yes, and a cross. This is, after all, commemorating the assault by Muslims against Christians.
The subtitle is interesting: A Graphic Coloring Novel on the Events of September 11, 2001.
A novel.
Hmm.
Well, it is rated PG, I suppose that’s something.
One of the inside images has been getting a great deal of press as an example of what can be found inside.
Yes, indeed. A depiction of a SEAL shooting Osama Bin Laden, through one of his wives. They even made sure you could see the bullet. They have also depicted Bin Laden as something of a coward—he’s clearly cringing behind the brave woman set to take the shot for him.
This is about as bad as the Easter Baskets Walmart offered one year full of missiles and bombs.
Let me be clear here: I do not mourn Osama Bin Laden. I feel he was a hateful man who did terrible things and has left the world a much more dangerous place than it was before. I might have certain moral quibbles about the manner of his demise, but one of my overwhelming feelings is that this is how it ought to have been done back in 2001 and 2002. The excessive eruption of American military response that has left us with depleted moral force in a world that was already ambivalent about us, mired in two wars that should have been over long ago had they not been disastrously mishandled (and which, according to a recent study, has cost us close to 60 billion in funds stolen by contractors in Iraq alone), and with a hair-trigger police-state mentality that has crippled us in actual problem-solving, much higher energy costs, and a political landscape that will require a combination of Solomon, George Washington, and Albert Einstein to untangle was the most egregious example of vengeance-seeking since Johnson’s refusal to get out of Vietnam. Had we concentrated on finding Bin Laden and sending special teams to go get him, we would have accomplished much m0re.
But that would have meant a trial, probably, and a stage on which he might have aired his complaints. And after all we had a president with something to prove and a vice president whose lust for power is rarely found outside of a bad novel.
So we now have a coloring book to do more damage by covering up the farce that the last decade has been in the eyes of children who will come of age learning the official version, reinforced by the simple activity of filling in between the lines the pictures in a novel that is basically about revenge.
I suppose it would be a hard thing to sell if it told the truth, which is that basically in the aftermath of 9/11 America enjoyed more absolute global sympathy than at any time since WWII and we squandered it by acting stupidly. All this know-how—and we have a lot of that, really—ignored, misused, pissed away.
It’s possible to characterize almost every war, especially since the end of the 19th Century, as a means by which industry has made more money. There’s a component of that to every conflict, even WWII, which really was about evil in the world. But I can’t think of one that has been more nakedly so than Iraq. With the revelation of the graft and corruption and the outright theft and the complete lack of accountability, it is impossible not to see it as having been instigated for the sole benefit of multinationals, Halliburton being first and foremost.
But we can’t tell kids that. Can’t have them grow up thinking the people who run their country can ever be stupid, or greedy, or vain, or misguided, or duped, or simply wrong. Can’t have that.
So let’s dress it up like another excusable example of John Wayne diplomacy.
Shit.
On Symbols and Fair Use
When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about. Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page. This one, in fact:
My caption for it was “What more is there to say?” Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion. As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.
It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity. I won’t reproduce the exchange here, because as far as I’m concerned the question that it prompted for me was one of the idea of “sacredness” and the appropriate use of symbols.
Which immediately sent me down a rabbit hole about the private versus public use of symbols.
Essentially, we all have proprietary relationships with certain symbols. Since I already posted the image, the sign of the cross is one, and not just for Christians. As a symbol it has achieved that universality advertisers dream of. It is instantly recognizable as the sign for a faith movement just about everywhere. It’s possible some aboriginal tribes in the beclouded valleys of New Zealand don’t know what it is, but on the level of international discourse it carries across all lines.
The public meaning is also fairly clear—it represents an idea and an institution. The entire apparatus of the Christian faith is symbolized by it, the buildings, the books, the robes, the songs, the defining mythologies, and the philosophical ideas. Publicly it is by and large regarded as a force for good. Publicly, the ideas embodied suggest if not entirely represent a fundamental tendency toward morality and a stated ambition to achieve peace, love, and the concomitant positives associated with a redemptive philosophy.
But the private meanings are wildly divergent and stem from both personal experience and long intellectual examination. In some instances it is difficult to see how certain conclusions can possibly be based on the same thing.
So the question in my mind is, which is more valid? Which should be protected? The public meaning or the private? And should they be kept separate?
In other words, in relation to the photograph above, does the “sacredness” of the symbol allow for not only a condemnation of the obvious vandalism that broke the stone cross in the first place but also a refusal to countenance sympathetic commentary for the breakage? For those who find the symbol personally important, such assaults are seen as insensitive. A violation. Such sympathetic comments also yield a judgment of the person making the comments. Obviously, this an antagonistic situation. But what concerns me here is not so much the antagonism but the mutual rights of the antagonists to use that symbol each in their own way.
Let’s take something more secular. Flag burning. Obviously the symbol of the flag is a potent one, and with powerful public meaning. Just as clearly, there is powerful private meaning and again this personal meaning can be wildly divergent. And again, the question is, which meaning takes precedence?
More to the point, which meaning should take precedence?
If as some believe the image of the flag should be protected, rendering its use subject to specific prohibitions and allowable uses, does it still have utility as a symbol or have we reduced its capacity to represent ideas? Or have we simply declared certain ideas related to it illegitimate?
Which goes directly to the question, can an idea ever be “illegitimate” as an idea?
Historically it’s clear that when a state attempts to bar the public dissemination of an idea, depending on the idea in question, an underground almost automatically springs up and suddenly the state has a problem it may not have had before—namely, a resistance movement. One of the things that made early Christianity so powerful was its official banning by Rome. The state drove it underground where it could not be observed or tracked and it grew on its own until the movement was so powerful that one day it emerged and became the state.
Like all such movements, it was then faced with exactly the same problem its predecessor faced—ideas it could not tolerate that needed banning. And like most such movements, it fell right into the trap of political expedience and suppressed the free exchange of ideas.
It didn’t even keep the same symbol. Originally the fish, the Ichthys, was the primary symbol, and we’ve seen it resurgence today as an alternative to the cross. (The other prominent symbol came under Constantine, the Chi Rho, which includes a cross as an X overlain on a P, and enjoyed almost continual use as a subordinate Christian symbol up the present.) But by the early 3rd Century, the cross had become so identified with Christianity that Clement of Alexandria could call it the Lord’s Sign.
As such, it was the banner for the emergent and often militant quasi-secular institution that was the Roman Church. The fact that it was a Roman form of execution is possibly relevant for this aspect as early on it would have had dual meanings—for many as a sign of punishment more than of sacrifice. (Interestingly, there is a historical quibble with the cross as symbol based on Jesus’ execution as the Greek word in scripture is stauros, meaning an upright stake, without the cross-beam. This is a quibble, since it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and the term was crucifixion. But even in this we see the process of abstracting out meanings for different uses, since the emphasis is placed by Christians on sacrifice and, later, resurrection through the same symbol.)
The symbol has been retasked over the centuries. As such it demonstrates the natural process by which the free use of symbols serves preferred purposes. Once the meaning becomes fixed and institutional protections are put in place to guarantee one and only one meaning (publicly) you begin to see a gradual loss of vitality once you step outside the precincts of an agreed-upon iconographic definition. It is then that institutional problems creep in and a breakdown of original meaning can occur. If one is using the symbol to define something into existence without regard for what it may mean to others, then you produce a situation in which only two responses to the symbol are possible. Complete acceptance or complete rejection.
To make arguments of fine distinction becomes a sisyphean task. To say, for instance, that practices defended by the symbol are not really consistent with that symbol, to those on the outside take on the appearance of special pleading and even self-selected blindness.
Easier to dismiss the symbols and talk about the thing itself. It is possible for a symbol to obstruct this kind of discourse by insisting on its own unity and, if you will, sacredness. To criticize the point of contention is then to criticize the entire edifice, good and bad, and this is counterproductive. For example, return to the whole flag burning question. When the United States is engaging is actions that citizens regard as antithetical to their idea of “America”, wrapping these actions in the cloak of the flag binds them in with everything that is acceptable, even admirable, about America and makes it difficult to argue that the actions in question are not American—or, as happened during Vietnam, that the people leveling criticism are themselves patriots when they are seen to be criticizing the entirety of America rather than just one set of bad choices, since the choices have been “blessed” by the symbol of the country. At some point it became necessary to shove aside the symbol since its use in the debate had become obfuscatory and divisive. The dialogue that needed to happen was hamstrung because instead of being about an immoral war it became about the morality of the whole country, as symbolized by the flag. Because the flag was held by many to be “inviolate” it became almost impossible for the opposition to use it to effect. It had been taken out of its own utility because the public meaning had become fixed and ran counter to the private meaning of many of the citizens.
If this sounds like a great deal of abstract nonsense, take another example of the misuse of a protected symbol.
The Swastika, as symbol of the Nazis, was given legal protection by the Nazi regime. It became illegal to desecrate it in any fashion. It was applied to all official documents. It was applied to published speeches, laws, passports, even scientific papers. it became the absolute public identity of the German people and any dissent or attempts to set aside Naziism and its symbols in a debate over private meaning and public policy was prosecutable. True, once an outlaw, the law didn’t apply to you, but in order to argue with the symbol and what it stood for, you had to become an outlaw. It fixed the meaning of Naziism and rendered all dissent illegal. Documents lacking the symbol were designated illicit.
There is, you see, great danger in “sacrilizing” symbols.
So what has this to do with an argument over sensitivities and judgments? Since private meaning is exactly that, private, it would seem incumbent upon us to respect that each of us may have experiences and come to conclusions that are entirely at odds with public meanings. If an expression of that dissension can be labeled insensitive, it can only be valid in the matter of other private meanings. To claim the public symbol as one and the same with your private meaning as a way of preventing or invalidating critical remarks of the public symbol and its public meaning—by leveling the charge that the critic is being insensitive—can be seen as an attempt to remove the public symbol from the free exchange of ideas, to “fix” its meaning as inviolate even for those who see it as wholly otherwise. This is hardly fair use since so often a return conclusion is offered about the nature of the critic—a conclusion which may be accurate or may be completely beside the point. In either case, it is not an invitation to dialogue but a wall built to protect against the possible erosion of private meaning by means of critical examination of public symbols—and their public meanings.
My apologies if this has become a bit abstruse, but it’s a difficult topic to deal with in less than precise language. The ideal is to always keep in mind the distinction between an idea and the holder of the idea. Since many people, on both sides of any issue, insist on identifying themselves personally with an idea, this can be a problematic stance. As many Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” depending on how closely the sinner identifies with the sin in question this may simply not be possible. But it’s a start at acknowledging that experience is important and may not be invalidated by simple recourse to symbols—especially symbols that enjoy special protection from criticism.
Anyway, this is offered as a basis for discussion. It would be interesting to see what comes of it.
Republicans, Rent Boys, and Rhetoric
Another outspoken advocate of Public Morals has been caught with a hand slipping into the cookie jar of Craig’s List sex. Yes, he’s loudly anti-gay and, yes, he’s a Republican.
Now, I don’t for a second believe being a Republican has anything to do with this, any more than I believe being Catholic has anything to do with pedophilic priests. I think we largely have the cart turned ’round the wrong way. I think there is something about both organizations that attract such people, and while you can lay full blame on the Catholic Church for coddling these criminals, you can’t really blame them for creating them. They came pre-flawed, as it were, and merely found a place to flourish.
There are theories. Heavens, there are theories!
In this particular instance, I’ll go along with a combination of two. One is the self-loathing of the deeply-closeted gay. Publicly declaring it perversion, privately unable to keep it under control, and then doing the dumb bit of soliciting for sex via venues that have in the past proved their potential for public exposure. It’s as if subconsciously they’re crying out “Help me! Catch me so I can be humiliated into a cure!” Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but who ever credited one’s subconscious with logic?
The other part is more sinister and has thousands of years of history to back it up and that has to do with the privileges of power. The assumption that high status comes, automatically, with perks denied ordinary mortals.
Or should be denied them. Which brings the perversion into it. Not sexual perversion, but the perversion of presumed status.
See, the powerful have always had access to whatever they wanted, regardless of what the law says. (Margaret Atwood chronicled this in The Handmaid’s Tale with the visit to the private party where the high mucky-mucks of Gilead get to party down with all the vices they have publicly denied everyone else. Privilege.
Now I can get with the idea that status confers perks. I can. You work your ass off to achieve position, there should be some things open to you that ordinarily wouldn’t be.
But not of the illegal variety. I’m talking about no waiting at the best restaurants, preferred seating at theaters, powerful people willing to take your call with no fuss, that sort of stuff.
Not crazy sex with rent boys or call girls, which (a) shouldn’t be illegal to begin with and (b) shouldn’t be denied as illicit and perverse.
But I think one of the things about power is this whole “access to the forbidden” aspect that makes what ought to be available to all something to be denied the general public, put in a box of legislative occlusion, and then indulged behind the most closed of doors, because getting away with it is half the thrill.
It seems the loudest proponents of so-called Family Values are the ones most often caught in such hypocrisies. But if you look at it from the angle of privilege seeking to maintain something solely for itself, then you can look at all of history to make sense of it. Popes and priests with mistresses, even while condemning the whole notion of adultery and fornication for the unwashed masses. Aristocrats indulging their every whim, kings keeping courtesans, and let’s not even get into the misuse of young boys.
I do not say that such things never and do not continue to happen at every level of society, but no one pays attention to someone making minimum wage when they bitch about immorality even while they’re fucking their best friend’s wife or diddling their brother’s kids. Except to put them in jail when they’re caught, at least in the latter instance. Such people have no ability to effectively shield their behavior.
What to make of all these Republicans who keep getting caught in blatant hypocrisies? Is it a Republican disease? Surely not. Democrats get outed in pecadilloes. There is a significant difference, though, in the ideologies. The Republicans have allied themselves to this whole puritanical anti-sex faction and it is often the worst of them in terms of oppressive legislation and rhetoric that get caught doing almost exactly what they condemn. Not so much with the Democrats. I don’t necessarily excuse the behavior, but there’s a considerable difference in the level of hypocrisy.
I think there is a fundamental pathology involved with people who so publicly seek to condemn sexual activities and an even deeper one in those who condemn what they themselves indulge. There’s an obsession with sex that, contrary to the rhetoric, is far deeper than any norm one might acknowledge. People who condemn it with such stridency are probably so obsessed with it that their public stance can only be seen as that of an addict who wants everyone else to take care of his problem for him. If it is rendered unavailable to everyone, removed from access, then he (or she, but it seems a condition more of males than females—that may be just an aberration of reporting or maybe the women are more careful, and possibly less hypocritical) won’t be able to indulge, temptation removed.
This is making one’s incapacity to control one’s self everyone else’s problem.
Which is particularly annoying when it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
What I suspect some of these loudmouthed moralists would be should they be propositioned by a mature, healthy person who just wants a roll in the sack, is rendered impotent. Normal consensual sex? How dare you suggest such a thing! I think without the flavor of the illicit (and how much better if it were also illegal) it would be…threatening. There’s no power to wield, this person is here willingly, there’s no way to guarantee control. And it would be done with a presumption that it’s—gasp!—okay.
I’m remembering Jim Bakker, whose impropriety now is fading into the mists of ancient history, but as head of the PTL indulged himself regularly, but (apparently, and at least in one instance) through the use of ruffies or their equivalent. When Jessica Hahn, one of his parishioners, dropped the dime on him with the full story, two things happened that I found interesting. First, all Bakker’s followers blamed Hahn, even though she had been drugged. Secondly, Hahn apparently discovered that she couldn’t live with the hypocrisy—she liked sex and doing it under the cloak of sinful, illicit ignominy just didn’t play. (What she subsequently did with her career may be of questionable taste, but she never apologized for it or tried to make herself out to be anything other than herself.) But as a by-product of the first thing, Bakker was able to receive a public “cleansing” by admitting his sins and “being forgiven”, which I now believe added a layer of thrill. You can’t experience that thrill if you don’t do anything wrong, so…
Run down the line of such preachers and you see the same pathology as I described with these moralizing politicians. The ultimate was Jimmy Swaggart, whose weeping performance before his followers was disturbing on so many levels—but if seen as part of the thrill may make perfect sense.
I’m not sure the genie will ever be put back in the bottle, and for that I’m glad. But these folks keep trying. Unless sex is dirty, I’m guessing, it just isn’t as much fun.
Nor is it a perk. If everyone can do it, without guilt, freely and consensually, where’s the special privileges for becoming powerful?
I think we would all do well to stop voting for people who run for office on any kind of sexual morality platform. Public health is different, but these folks aren’t combining the two. If anything they’re making it worse, with their jihad against contraception and this nonsensical abstinence only education, which has been repeatedly shown to not work. They are doing the country a disservice.
Besides, it’s getting boring. Utterly predictable, and as boring as the evolution/creationism debate. Which, oddly enough, the same people seem to be involved in…