culture

So It Begins

This is a charming little story.

Priest dumps all over his parishioners.

Now, I was never a Catholic, but I once considered marrying a Catholic girl and went through some of the obligatory classes at her church.  We got to the part about promising to raise the children Catholic and I said no, that wouldn’t happen, and he (the priest) said then we couldn’t be married in the church and I said fine, then we’d continue living in sin and there wouldn’t be any children.

Kind of brought the whole relationship to a screeching halt, if you take my meaning.  Probably the best thing for everyone concerned.

I tell you this to give you some idea how I feel about priests (of any religious persuasion) threatening their audience.

culture

Quotes

A few of these seem particularly poignant given current events.

They say Mitterand has 100 lovers.  One has AIDS but he doesn’t know which one.  Bushg has 100 bodyguards.  One is a terrorist, but he doesn’t know which one.  Gorbachev has 100 economic advisers.  One is smart, but he doesn’t know which one.                  Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990

I’m Vanilli because Milli is in the White House.           Ted Kennedy at a Christmas PArt, dressed as Milli Vanilli,1990

I believed in [Jim] Morrison’s incantation.  Break on through.  Kill the pigs.  Destroy.  Loot…All that shit.  Anything goes.  Anything.  I tried anything in that state.                                                   Oliver Stone, 1991

culture

Maybe We Will

I did not stay up for the speeches.  I waited.  I just now watched Obama’s acceptance speech.

Not a victory speech.  An acceptance speech.  There is a difference.  He hasn’t really won anything.  Yet.

I cannot remember the last time I felt a tingle run through me at the words of someone with a vision.  I always listen with a salt shaker at hand.  But my word, I felt it this time.  I am cautious, but just maybe we will see something new.

To all those who have already declared themselves ready to oppose Obama and all he stands for, to the Limbaughs, the Ingrahams, and the Hannitys:  you are small souls, stunted in imagination, and cynical in disposition.  You have lost the ability to imagine.  You cannot set aside your aversion to change, or your denials of hope for the time it takes to find out if someone may be honest and honestly intended.  You are the Ellsworth Tooheys, the James Taggarts, the Joseph McCarthys, the Pat Buchanans, and your role models are Timothy McVeigh and Oliver North and, iconographically, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick.  You so cherish your power to sway people with charred words and bullying bombast that you cannot do the one thing that an Obama quite legitimately asks—set aside differences, come together, work for a future.  You have decided in advance that you do not wish to live in that future, that its shape and size and the decor of its rooms will not suit your taste.  And if it turns out to be a fine future, well-furnished and abundant, you ahve already decided that the people who will live in it do not deserve it.  The maggots of cynicism have shredded your minds and there is no redemption for you from without.  You must save yourselves, but please, don’t do it at our expense.

I wonder truly just what it is you fear.  What is it you think you will lose?

Maybe you’ll figure that out as time goes on.  Or maybe we will, and learn to live without you.  You are, in the words of Milton, Blind Mouths.

Kindly stay out of our way.

culture

The Morning After

I didn’t sleep well last night.  I do not usually watch the election night circus.  Generally, I have an attitude of “It will be what it turns out to be” and either read a book or do some work, going to bed early.  Last night I started watching, though.

I would never have believed how anxious I’d become over this.  I really did harbor the sinking fear that McCain, somehow, would win.  That the majority of my fellow citizens would actually vote another Republican into the White House, with all that such a move implied.

I couldn’t stand it.  I saw that early lead, flipped from station to station, watched the South started rolling over for the Republicans once more, and just couldn’t stand to watch.  It wasn’t the kind of popular landslide I wished for.

What did I hope?  I’d hoped people would wake up and realize that, no matter what their aspirations, fantasies, private dreams, or desires might be, most of us are not wealthy and never will be.  And with that realization the fact that voting for the best interests of the CEOs of GM, Ford, Exxon Mobile, ADM, et al is not the same as voting in your own best interest.  Those folks did not grow rich by extending their largesse to the Common Folk.  They got that way by maximizing the flow of cash into their own pockets.  That’s not a stereotype, it’s a business model.  And to suggest that recognizing that fact is somehow Class Warfare is to misunderstand the nature of Class.  They are not a Class, they are an aberration.  They will cut each other’s hearts out and eat them just as readily as sacrificing the best interests of the general public if it served their individual need.  There is little solidarity among them, other than the kind one might find among a group of Mafiosi, who join forces when expedient, but turn on each other in moments of weakness.

I’d hoped people would realize this, and that they really didn’t have to worry about their own futures by denying the existence of common cause with such people.  (The classic canard that higher taxes and regulations on wealth act as disinventives for entrepreneurial aspirations needs to be debunked once and for all—the highest period of economic growth of the 20th Century was the Fifties, a time when taxes on wealth were so high trhe jokes were common currency high and low, yet people still struggled mightily to “make it big” and created a land of prosperity unparalelled in history.  If you make so much money that you slide into a higher tax bracket, you have still nonetheless made a lot more money!  And for the most part, you get to keep it!)

Clearly that didn’t happen.

The Republicans have since the Seventies managed to convince us that when someone says he’ll raise taxes on people making over $250,000 a year, he means we’ll all pay such taxes.  As if we all make that kind of money.

Let’s be real for a moment.  Donna and I do all right—we’ve done better, we’ve done worse—but we’ve never been anywhere close to six figure incomes, singly or together.  We’ve never even been in the upper five figures.  Most of the people we know live in the middle five figure, and of those most are below 50K.  That’s the reality for most of the country, I think.  When I listen to politicians bandying figures around about what constitutes Middle America (where is that I wonder?) I scratch my head and puzzle about who it is they’re talking about.

To be fair to voters, once you make your way up into those higher income brackets, a kind of amnesia takes hold and you forget from whence you came.  When some of our more well-to-do friends complained about their taxes going up under Clinton, they spoke with us as if it happened to us as well.  They were utterly dismayed to hear that we’d gotten tax cuts.  How’d we manage that? they asked, as if there were some kind of trick to it.

We don’t make as much as you do.

Anyway, we turned off the tv and went to bed.  And failed to sleep well.  Donna got up at three, wandered into the living room, and turned on the radio.  I lay there for a minute or so, then followed her.

She looked at me with encircled eyes, perched on the edge of the couch.  “I think maybe,” she said, “just maybe…”

Then we heard it:  President-elect Barack Obama.

A switch opened in my head and a flood of tension seemed to flow away.  I went back to bed and slept deeply.  Overslept.

This morning I checked the news services for the statistics and saw the national map, red and blue states marked.  Missouri is still too close to call, as are one or two others.

340 plus electoral votes, to McCain’s 160.  More than 2-to-1.  Not to mention the gains in the Senate and House.  Yes.

But I look at that map and damned if the stereotype just doesn’t hold still.  I live in a part of the country that, according to that map, is still Republican.  The exceptions are striking.  Obama took New Mexico and Colorado.  He took Florida and, to my utter dismay, Virginia.  Florida isn’t really a “southern state” as such and the rest of The South went for McCain.  Why?  Because he’s Republican or because he’s white?  Who knows?  I can guess, but it would be an opinion that could only be confirmed piecemeal, and inaccurately.

Some of the poorest states went with McCain.  I do not understand.

It’s curious that I felt such concern, because in a way Bush’s eight years touched me very little.  My life hasn’t changed much in any way that I could attribute to his policies (or lack thereof).  I have no relatives in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’ve never been censored, I have not been directly impacted by anything but the sharp rise in gasoline prices (which could have happened under any president, though his economic policies certainly did nothing to ameliorate the problem).  I’ve been able to go where I want to, say what I want to, pretty much buy what I want to, read what I want to.  It has largely been an intellectual problem for me.  I chafe at the attitudes.

My point is, that in many ways we are natural subscribers to Republican policy.  We’ve been responsible, kept our personal debt very low, in fact we own our home, and until last week had no car payment, we’ve saved whenever possible, and lived within our means.  I do have problems with people who blithely live as if consequences never adhere to ill-considered actions.  We have no children, though, a conscious CHOICE which does run counter to Republican rhetoric (though I wonder how many of those red-staters who vote to overturn Roe-v-Wade and ban sex education from the schools themselves have more than one-point-six children and use contraception as if it were a natural-born god-given right).  I believe entitlements are poorly-conceived and ill-managed…but that’s not the same as condemning them outright as somehow morally evil.

Point being that on the surface, we look like Republicans.  It’s so profoundly superficial as to be laughable.

Yet clearly my sense of moral outrage has turned me into an anxiety-ridden anti-Republican, no question.  It is the outrage aimed at those who actually don’t seem to Get It.  They don’t see why we should extend considerations to foreigners, or rights we take for granted to those who don’t meet our model for ideal citizens.  They don’t see why Being Strong is not the same as being a bully.  They don’t understand the nature of problems, only want to call an exterminator when one crops up.

I feel that the country has been on a bender in a bad part of town and now we’ve all woken up on the morning after and in the full light of day have a chance to see just what it is we’ve gone to bed with.  We have a choice, now, to see it as having been a really bad idea.

But it seems a lot of people woke up and thought “Hey, it don’t look so good, but the screwing was awesome!  Let’s do it again!”

Fortunately, they can’t stay for breakfast.

Oh, and it might be a good idea to make a doctor’s appointment and make sure we didn’t catch anything, you know, fatal?

culture

A Few Thoughts On Election Day

This morning we got up at four so we had time to drink coffee, wake up, and get to the polls early.  I thought the lines would be long and neither of us have patience for standing around waiting.

Our poll is within easy walking distance.  Often, in local elections, we take Coffey, and she can get all enthused and friendly greeting people coming and going.  Not this morning.  We arrived at St. John’s Catholic Church and entered the basement of the school.  Six others had beaten us there and they all sat on a pew outside the actual cafeteria space where the voting machines were still being set up and adjusted.

The first gentleman in line was elderly and had till this year been one of the poll workers.  “But they kicked me out this year,” he said.  He didn’t seem bitter about it and maybe there was good reason—he wasn’t getting around too well—and proceed to tell us some stories about back in the day.

More people arrived, including a young woman with two small children, one in a carrier.  Conversation was friendly and quiet.

No one talked about the election.

This was the first year Donna had not received her voter card in the mail.  I checked with the Secretary of State’s office on the web to confirm that she was still registered (I thought she was, even though I’ve heard all the rumors of purges and so forth—this was just a mailing snafu) and everything went fine.

By the time we left the line was at least a hundred and fifty people long, shortly after six.

I complain about the politics of this country a great deal.  I complain about the people I know who express occasionally absurd opinions.  I worry that we won’t get our collective act together until too late, whatever “too late” actually means.  I don’t like us being a laughing-stock in much of the rest of the world.  I am as incensed over the policies of the last eight years as I have ever been in my adult life about politics.  I have found myself able to say the good word or two about Reagan, Bush Sr., even Nixon, but I have found no redeeming qualities in the present resident of the office.

But I do love this country.

Anyone who has the temerity to question someone’s patriotism because they disagree with a course of action either has no grasp of what it is they’re defending or is commited to a vision of this country that runs counter to everything good about it.

Bold words?  Perhaps.  But think about it.  The characteristic trait that marks our national policies since 1789 is that we can change our direction.  We can rethink and then act to alter a course.  We can try something out and if it doesn’t work discard it and try something new.  We can remake ourselves as a nation.

That is what is happening today.

Things have gone wrong with our home.  Termites have gotten into the wood work, and it’s time to clear them out and rebuild the damaged parts.  And we will do it without bloodshed.  We will do it without throwing out the parts that still work.  We will do it out of the stuff that truly informs our identity.

Americans confuse people elsewhere.  We seem at times to have no standards, no principles, no sense of commitment.  We are fickle, reactionary, often foolishly adolescent in our choices of what to do next or where to go.  We adhere, it seems, to no single idea of right.  We make claims for being committed to freedom and then from time to time do things that demonstrably contradict that claim.

And yet.

And yet when we go wrong, we right ourselves.  We went wrong in 1787 by not dealing with slavery.  In 1863 we corrected that.  In 1832, we erred in the person Andrew Jackson by declining to pursue economic policies that would unify currency and stabilize the internal money system.  It resulted in years of instability, fast-moving currency decimations, and laid the ground (partially) for the Secessions of the 1860s.  We corrected this.  By the end of the 19th Century, we were a nation dominated by monopolies.  We dismantled them and began the long battle to end the virtual servitude of American labor.  Ther 20th Century is marked by a series of innovations aimed at establishing the kind of egalitarian society envisioned by Jefferson and others, culminating in the correction of race relations encapsulated in the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act of the Johnson Administration.

We could go on.  These back-and-forths came out conflict between interests that, while having certain broad characteristics in common with their predecessors, quite often sprung from disparate groups that seemed to have little in common.

Except the will to do better.

What is better, though?  Is it the same thing today as it was a hundred years ago?  Hard to say.  It’s an ongoing discovery, with the added complication that “Better” for one person may not be for another.  We end up, then, in constant dialogue.  Things get bad when we tire of the debate.  We had a massive debate in the Thirties about what had gotten us into a Depression.  While it took a world war to get us out of it, the scaffolding we built during ten years of constant dialogue remained and proved what we’ve come to call the Safety Net—and it worked.  In the Sixties we had a bitter argument with ourselves over the limits of power and the morality of labels.  We exhausted ourselves by the Seventies, and a tired nation stopped paying attention while the forces of retrenchment and privilege undid much of what we thought we’d won.  We’ve been in the midst of another debate since the mid-Nineties, the shape of which was tragically bent by 9/11 and the hysteria that followed.  We seem to be getting back to it now and today may mark a turning point in our quest to determine what it is we mean by Better.

There is no single label for the core principles of Americans.  Nor, really, should there be.  BY definition, it will mean something slightly different for everyone.  We have managed in over two centuries to—not without difficulty, sometimes ugliness—learn to accommodate that diversity.

Tomorrow, regardless who wins the election, we will once more be neighbors.  Some will be very disappointed and they will no doubt express it, be angry, and some will try to work to change it.  After all, when you get right down to it, what is a president?  He’s an employee.  He works for us.  Later.  Meantime, we are friends.  There are other things that bind us more thoroughly than elections.  We will laugh and love and try harder to do better.

We’ll talk.

Mostly.

I look forward to it.  That’s why I like it here.  That’s why I can say, without a splinter of embarrassment, that I love my country.

culture

The Age of Euphemism

I’d like to do a bit here on language.  Primarily on how we have seen it distorted over the last few decades.  According to George Lakoff and Geoff Nunberg, the Right has seized the rhetorical high-ground and driven Liberals into defensive postures by altering or subverting the meanings of certain words and phrases.  I tend to think that, yes, they’ve done that, but that also the people who are swayed by such verbal gymnastics are by and large pre-sold on the message.  Many of us out here never did buy into it.

But the effect of making those the Democratic Party has fielded to oppose them look weak did happen, even for those of us who could see through the bull shit.  Once you get someone to start backing up and apologizing for what he or she believes in, the game is over.  This happened to Kerry.  It’s happened to many others.  Republicans have manage to turn “Liberal” into a dirty word, which is bad enough, but the fact that Liberals respond guiltily by admitting, well, yeah, I am, or used to be, but I’m not really anymore, I’m more of a Centrist…

Bull shit.

The problem is that people tolerate euphemism in place of truth and after long enough it gets difficult to cut through it.

For instance, when Obama becomes president, I would like to see a reinforced Truth In Advertising policy.  It has escaped no one’s attention that we are having a bit of a problem with the economy.  Have been a long time now, ever since we realized that consuming happens faster when things are cheaper and cheaper things usually aren’t made here.  We have gradually become more of a service economy than a manufacturing power and this has frankly hurt.  Look at the automobile industry.  Good heavens.  (Let’s not even talk about shipping!)

I think it would be useful to start calling certain things by what they really are.  Chiefly, I am tired of financial institutions referring to things like loans and so forth as Products.  You hear it all the time on television and radio.  “We at the First Institutional Savings and Loan have many new and exciting products for our customers.”

No, they don’t.  A product is something you make.  A refrigerator or a stove are products.  A car is a product.  The computer I’m writing this on is a product.  (You could stretch the point and argue that the words I’m writing are a product, but I think that’s stretching things too far.  My thoughts are not products insofar as they don’t actually do anything anyone else can buy and use until they are translated into an Object you can take home and use.  Ergo, a book is a product, but the ideas therein are not.  Maybe that, too, is stretch, but we’re talking about the economy here, not philosophy.)

Shuffling paper around in different arrangements is not a product.  All they do is take something that has already been “made”—other people’s money—and package it for other to people to spend.  They have not made anything that is intrinsically useful by itself in the way that a can opener or a television or a barbecue pit is useful.

I bring this up because by misusing the term Product in such a way, it kinda sorta looks like banks are on some level manufacturers.  Instead of a service.  You might ask what real difference is makes, and that would be a good question.  Here’s a good answer:  when enough people begin to think and act as if those shuffled bits of paper possess the same kind of intrinsic value that a real Product has, they start swapping them around as if they were cars or lawnmowers, as if profit were something attached to these pieces of paper in the same way.  It leads to an economy of pure motion of money with nothing to base the presumed value of the money on—i.e. Products—and at some point the emperor’s nakedness becomes too evident to ignore and we have an economic meltdown.

Hmm.  Sounds familiar.

So enough of that, already.

I would also like to strike the term “He/she failed to disclose/report/act etc.” from legal language.  It gives the wrong impression.  So we don’t want to say “The Senator lied” because that’s rude.  But altering the phrase to “The Senator failed to disclose his tax returns (or the new house a contributor gave him)” makes it sound like the Senator tried to do the right thing, but just somehow couldn’t manage to do it.  It makes it sounds like it wasn’t really his fault, just, well, he had a bad day.

Bull shit.  The Senator lied.  He didn’t fail to do anything except not get caught.  He tried to not get caught and, gosh, here he is testifying, so I guess he failed at that.  But what he is accused of?  No, he didn’t fail to do the right thing, he didn’t even try.

Such euphemism debases the public discourse.  That’s a fancy way of saying that it erodes public trust.  Gradually.  Slowly.  Which is worse than a quick shock, because slow erosion might not be noticeable until the whole system starts sliding into the swamp.

Centrist is another term I’d like to do away with.  By however one defines the issues, anyone can be tagged as a Centrist.  What does that mean?  It means you’re so afraid of pissing people off that you waffle on important issues.  It means that if a problem requires a fix that is either very rightwing or very leftwing, you won’t talk about it unless you can leach out all it’s vitality.

How does this hurt?  Just look at some of the big pieces of legislation passed in the last 20 years in, say, education.  The problem is that we abandoned (or never had) the ability to offer education to prepare students according to their abilities in favor of a system that slots everyone into a college track, whether it’s right for them or not, and rewarding those who get through college with job opportunites they may still be unprepared for and casting those who either didn’t go to college or didn’t get in to begin with into the neverland of dead-end service jobs.  (Essentially, it is a paper shuffle, like the aforementioned banking practice of offering “products”.) The entire system needs to be revamped and probably more federalized than it is now.  Certainly local school board have become in some cases nothing but ideological battlegrounds…it doesn’t work except for those who are already predisposed to learn and needs to be trashed.  What do we do instead of telling the parents of the land that, in at least half the cases, your darling son or daughter ain’t never gonna be no Einstein no matter what school we put them in and acknowledging that some students, no matter what their I.Q., just ain’t never gonna give a damn about certain curricula and might be better off in shop classes learning to (wait for it) Make Products!  (What? Blue collar education for my little genius?  How dare you!)?  We make the teachers give endless tests to try to get total average scores up and pretend that those scores actually reflect what the kids actually know.  (Paper shuffle!)
Centrist bull shit.

(Likewise I think we should do away with Right and Left in all such debates, because these labels do nothing.  Once we allow that labeling is somehow constructive, actual constructive discourse is in danger of fleeing.)

Also in advertising I would like to see the use of the claim that “You can save money by buying this today!”  This is one we’ve been living with since television came around and it has always annoyed me.  Let’s be clear—you do not “save money” when you buy something.  You may spend less this week on the same thing than you would have last week, but you’re still spending.  This is ad-speak nonsense that twists things around to convince you to part with your dollars.  You may get a good bargain, but you  haven’t saved anything, they didn’t deposit the difference in your bank account, and you probably didn’t put it in the bank either.  This is perhaps a minor quibble, but it is part and parcel of American’s lack of understanding about the dynamics of market-based economies.

Which leads me to…

I would like to see the phrase “Let the Market decide” stricken from the language entirely.  I know this will never happen, because language doesn’t work that way, but really, what a load of horse hockey.

The Market decides nothing.  Never did, never will.  The Market does not have an intellect.  The Market is an effect pool, wherein the decisions of individuals vying for competitive advantage cumulatively result in an outcome.  But like the weather, these outcomes are feral, sporadically predictable, and never—NEVER—altruistic.  Letting the Market decide is like letting your car go where it wants without putting your hands on the wheel or taking your foot off the gas.  Occasionally it actually might get somewhere you want to go without killing someone in the process.  No one bothers to ask where the Market got its education.  No one bothers to ask who pays for “adjustments.”

This is a phrase used by people who want very much to be allowed to screw over anyone they think they have to in order to secure their presumed slice of the pie.  The assumption is that such avarice will be checked by competitors who will stop them because that would limit the competitor’s ability to get his slice of the pie.

Few ever really triumph in this game, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that those few are the ones who decide what the Market will do—it is not a natural phenomenon, is very hands-on manipulation by private citizens for their own benefit and to the detriment of those who can’t compete.

I don’t actually have a problem with that as such.  It does drive many of the plus-direction economic benefits of our economy.

But it leads to excesses and abuses against people who have absolutely no way of defending themselves from the consequences of market collapses—which happen cyclically and occasionally catastrophically, like hurricanes.  It is absurd to argue that something that is essentially brainless has the right to be left alone by regulatory entities.

Damn, people, the government is part of the Market, if for no other reason than by virtue of being a Customer.  To argue that it should stay out of it and let it run free is absurd.  (The free enterprise fans don’t let it run free—they do everything they can to manipulate it.)  And since the government ostensibly represents us, then it follows that such regulations as it may apply to this wild and mindless beast in order to protect our interest are not only prudent but essential.  We don’t let wild tigers roam free in city streets, do we?  Why would we be so gullible as to believe the Market, left alone, will look after our interests?

But the phrase gives full voice to the nonsense notion that there is a master plan, an overmind, a naturalistic intelligence that we must not cage, that the Market is somehow alive and should have rights.  It dumbs us down with a false image and lulls us into a false state of helplessness.

Controlling the Market is not Socialism, it’s common sense.  People who make a lot of money do not have a right to so at everyone else’s expense.

In that vein, I would like to do away with the term “CEO Compensation Package.”  I have no problem with the older term “Bonus” because they imply different things.  A bonus is by definition a reward for success.  A compensation package is a negotiated arrangement that is completely independent of performance, and judging by the way things have been going for some time now, clearly there is no relation between reward and success anymore.  I would prefer to call it Pillage.  In many instances, it is simply theft.  Calling it a Compensation Package renders it innocuous, with no real causal links to the destruction of a company.  It is a lie of effect.

I’m looking forward to a change in the way things are talked about.  I would like to limit the attempts of the corrupt in politics and business to hide what they do behind phrases that have legalistic or pseudo scientific auras about them that make them somehow less nasty than what they really are.  We don’t fully appreciate what language does to us when we accept it uncritically.  And it certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone to have things called what they are.

Well, it would hurt some I suppose.

culture

Some Thoughts On Our Next President

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.  I am not enthused about the coming election.  I hope Obama wins, but only because I have had enough of the Republicans and their wistful, “wish it were 1952 again” attitudes, and the ideological leech they’ve been carrying around since 1980 that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.  The fact that the Constitution actually does permit us to successfully fight that possibility doesn’t mean we can’t grow very, very tired of the effort.

But I’m not a huge Obama supporter.  I like a lot of what I see and hear, but I’ve learned to discount that.  Politicians, even when they tell the truth, are seldom capable of delivering on promises—the system is too complex and fluid—and I’m never sure where the gravy will go anyway.  What I have admired is Obama’s refusal to be pinned to the wall.  He seems to know that the most important thing is to keep one’s options open, because as much as he thinks he knows now about what’s going on, it has been clear to me that once someone wins the election, the subsequent “orientation” sessions coming into the White House must be hair-raising.  They hear things they had no idea were going on, things which doubtless change whatever they thought they were going to do.

Whoever wins will have three big foreign policy problems to deal with, as well as the ones that have become fixtures.  Pakistan, Iran, and China.  (Yes yes yes, Palestine, Russia, and the chaos that is Africa—but those are constant, always there issues.)

Pakistan is a problem because, despite the fact that it is a democracy, the ruling class has never—NEVER—considered “the people” worth considering.  They act like most such quasi-dictatorships and relegate the public to some category of irritant that must from time to time be molified.  This had led to a severe gap in aspiration between the two elements, which is why Pakistan can’t do much about the Taliban camped out in its western provinces.  They have been on the brink of an Islamic revolution for 20 years and unless something is done to rectify the dysjunction between The People and The Government, it will happen and it will cause us no end of grief.  Never mind Iran, Pakistan already is a nuclear power.

Iran is the biggest bully in the Middle East right now, but they are fragile.  We keep paying attention to Akmadinijad (sp?) and his rants, but he actually doesn’t run the country.  It may be possible to cut a deal with those who do, but it must be done carefully because they had pushed their people to the brink of another revolution, albeit one which may be less volatile than Pakistan’s.  Iran has a very modern-thinking population of young people who chafe under the Islamic rules imposed from above.  With this global financial collapse, Iran is actually teetering on the brink of insolvency—despite having huge oil reserves, they have no refineries to speak of (they buy gasoline from abroad) and their budget is stretched thin on any number of fronts.  They depend a lot on China for revenue.

Speaking of China, they have been buying debt.  Which for a while made them look like they were poised to start gobbling up markets and becoming some sort of financial superpower.  The problem is, debt is solvency.  If the debtors can’t pay, you have nothing but a promise.  And if we can’t service our debt and cut back on imports, well, China will find itself in a very difficult position.

But they are also flexing their aspirational muscles in other directions.  China is building its first aircraft carrier.  Very expensive and one must ask Why?  They have never been able to sustain foreign military adventures.  They do not have the logistical know-how to extend themselves militarily past their own borders.  We’ve seen this time and time again.  Vietnam, Korea, Russia.  So why an aircraft carrier?  Prestige?  Who would they target?  Or defend?

Taiwan, of course.  Stay tuned.

But getting back to the financial issues for a moment.  China has been attempting to buy its way into international markets for a long time now and has been filling in the gaps left by other financial powers, especially in Africa, but also int he Middle East.  Given the way the markets have been going, we have to ask what happens to all those new money roads they’ve been building if they suffer a collapse.  Whole economies are becoming dependent on Chinese investiment.  Chinese fragility is coupled with an absolutist self-serving protectionist viewpoint (much more severe than ours) and in times of crisis, they’d just abandon their commitments.  Where does that leave those parts of the world?

I have no answers, but I believe these will be the biggies for whoever inherits the Presidency this time, and they will have to be dealt with sooner than later.

Domestically?  Well.  Health care is, I think, primary, for many reasons, and it’s clear that McCain wants to get the government out of the health care business.  It’s going to implode and he doesn’t want government involvement at any level.  But that’s not realistic.

The problem neither candidate has addressed yet is the shortage in G.P.s, which is accute.  It won’t matter what you do to shift payments around if the price keeps going up because doctors over-specialize.  So-called primary care physicians are getting scarce on the ground because (a) medical school debt is HUGE and general practitioners don’t make the coin to pay for it and (b) malpractice insurance is distorting all other costs.  Both factors need to be addressed before costs start coming down.  Preventative medicine is the way to go, but saying that doesn’t help anything if there aren’t enough consulting physicians  at the lowest level to counsel well care.

CEO compensation packages must be addressed.  I am loathe to see any kind of legislation limiting how much money a person can be paid, but it’s not the actual sums that are at issue.  It’s what those sums are paid out for.  If CEO pay was tied exclusively to improved performance, then the problem might correct itself, but if you pay someone that much just because the company didn’t do as badly as expected, then you have a fundamental disconnect.  That disconnect is exacerbated if while slowing the failure of a company is done while paying stockholders higher dividends from increased revenue from monkeying with the books, then you have a recipe for total collapse.  CEOs should only get bonuses while their companies are in the black and improving that way.

Alternative energy sources.  Another biggie and this one has probably the thorniest public relations problem.  The first thing we need to do is start telling people the truth about bio fuels and energy expectations—but that ties into education, which also needs reparing.  No Child Left Behind must be scrapped.

Just a few things that occurred to me while I was sitting here this morning.  And why I am not enthused about Obama.  He may well be the one to handle these issues, but I’m not going to put money on him being able to.  If anything, he has my sympathy.  No, I’m much more concerned about the congressional elections.  That’s where the power of this country really is.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of these thoughts.  Have a good day.

Whimsy

MCB in D.C.

Below is a shot from the recently-completed National Book Festival, featuring Yours Truly at the Missouri table in the Pavilion of States.  The chaos behind us is typical of the day.  Seated is fellow board member Barri Bumgarner and the third person is from the Junior League (forgive me, I forget her name) without whom we would have been certifiably goofy by the end of the day. The one with the facial hair, of course, is me.
MCB in D.C.