Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • “I do not like Home School and Ham…”

    Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien  trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong.  He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist.  He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007.  Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat.  It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion).

    Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity.  He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood.  The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise.

    In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling.   There are multiple ironies in this, especially since, on the face of it, Ham and these particular homeschoolers would seem to be sympatico on the issues.

    Be that as it may, it prompted me to make a couple of observations regarding this whole phenomenon.  According to the Home School Legal Defense Fund,  homeschooling is a growing practice.

    it is estimated that the annual rate of growth of the number of children being homeschooled in the U.S. is between 7% to 15%. Reports from 1999 determined that approximately 850,000 American children were being home schooled by at least one parent. This number increased again in 2003, to over one million children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics National Household Education (NHES). NHES compiled data showing that in 2007, over 1.5 million children in the U.S. were home schooled.

    There are several reasons for this, but the most stated are:

    Religious or moral instruction 36%

    School environment 21%

    Academic instruction 17%

    Other 26%

    Questions of violence, socialization, academic standards, and related issues play into these decisions.  Not all homeschooling is, as is popularly thought, conducted for religious reasons, but certainly religious homeschooling gets the lion’s share of the publicity.

    I have the same reservations about homeschooling as I have with special private schools that seek to isolate students from the wider community.  Despite the problems with “the world” to put an informational barrier between a child and that world can put that child at a disadvantage later.  But I can’t argue with the sentiment that many public schools are dysfunctional and do a disservice to students.  The 17% of the sample opting for homeschooling for academic reasons probably have concerns with which I’d agree.

    The more people pull their children out of public education, though, the less incentive there is to fix that system.

    I’m torn on this.  I’m largely self-educated.  But the foundation of my education was laid in public schools (K through 4th in public school, second half of 4th through 8th in parochial school, 9 through 12 in public high school).  I had many problems with school when I was in it, and later, upon review, some of those issues I decided were justified.  I certainly felt at the time better read than my English teachers.  (This was a false impression based entirely on the syllabus they were allowed to teach.  I was certainly better read than the syllabus.)  There were distortions in all my history classes, some of which I took issue with at the time.  The administrative side was annoying and the classes I would have desired to take were either truncated or unavailable.  I got most of my education from books read on my own initiative.

    But that doesn’t mean this is in any way a recommended program for most students.  Part of the academic experience is and must be socialization (although I firmly believe most of the problems we have with public education today stem from the fact that in America the primary purpose of school has always been socialization, often at the expense of academics, and we’re paying for this unacknowledged fact today).

    What profoundly disturbs me about the 36% of those who homeschool for religious reasons is precisely the problem presented by people like Ken Ham.  Parents who reject science as an enemy to their religious beliefs do neither their children nor this country any good by isolating their children and inculcating the distorted views presented in the name of some sort of spiritual decontamination.  What these parents wish to tell their kids at home is their business—but there is also a vast pool of legitimate knowledge about the world which needs to be taught if these kids are to have any chance at being able as adults to make reasoned and rational choices, for themselves and for their own children and for the society in which they live and work.  Few parents have either the time or the training to do this, at least in my opinion, whether they are certified or not, simply because they are only one voice.  Much education happens in the crossfire of ideas under examination by many.  The debate that happens in a vibrant classroom setting is vital to the growth of one’s ability to think, to analyze, and to reason.  The by-play that will likely not happen between dissenting viewpoints or between different apprehensions of a topic won’t happen in isolation.

    Ken Ham tends to bar outside viewpoints when he can.  He has a history of banning people from the Creation Museum when he knows they are antagonistic to his viewpoint.  In the face of overwhelming evidence, he tries to assert a reality that has long since been shown to be inaccurate.  That he was barred from a conference of folks who will then educate their children in those same inaccuracies is an irony of epic proportions.  But, as they say, what goes around, comes around.

  • Epithets

    This will be fairly brief. I found myself once again disappointed in a fellow critter. I don’t know his name so I can’t “out” him, nor would I even if I did. Up until last week, I rather enjoyed encountering him when I walked Coffey—he was always smiling and always had a treat for her. But I am now taking routes at times designed to avoid him.

    I thought I’d heard all the racial epithets going around, but he had a new one and as we walked about two blocks together he used it and complained about the people to whom he referred in a general “Them” rant that turned me off.

    I grew up in South St. Louis at a time when the city was struggling to come to terms with its racial mix. We had some violence here in the late Sixties and I remember after Dr. King’s assassination that several of our neighbors “stood guard” by sitting on their porches with rifles, shotguns, and pistols, “just in case.” Just in case never happened, so no one got shot, but the black-white tension was palpable and even today you can feel it despite the fact that St. Louis is becoming a fairly integrated city. It has been a long time since I’ve heard certain terms out of doors, in mixed groups and I certainly never expected (perhaps naively) to hear a brand new one.

    Somehow I never really internalized the bigotry, but I have to confess that at times I felt it, more from those around me than anything from within (although I experienced the first waves of public school integration in the early Sixties and had an event that could very easily have set a pattern of discrimination). My grandmother was a self-righteous racist who talked about a slave-owning branch of the family with a weird kind of nostalgia, but I grew up and got over it and by the time I left high school I simply didn’t think that way anymore.

    It helps being an outsider from the major groups and cliques.

    So when I encounter it now, I am usually startled. I have to shift mental gears to accommodate what I’m hearing and it’s always disagreeable at best, often repulsive.

    Here’s how I think—people can be assholes. Leave it at that. Your ethnic origins have nothing to do with it. White assholes, black assholes, brown, yellow, what have you, assholes are assholes. It is both pointless and ignorant to identify an entire group on the basis of one or two assholes, especially when the salient feature of disregard is a behavioral trait shared by all—an asshole is an asshole. I treat people as individuals. Granted, in certain conversations, general statements of certain groups about common group characteristics can be valid, but none of that is genetic and to conflate race into the mix for the purposes of discrimination or the venting of animosity is childish, crude, and flat wrong.

    The thing is—and perhaps this is a generalization, but I’m speaking now of the long list of personal encounters I’ve had with people who indulge this kind of thing—people who feel compelled to belittle others through the use of epithets are often themselves failures in one way or another and all they’re doing is trying to make themselves have value by comparison with those they regard as their natural inferiors.

    There are no “natural” inferiors.

    I just wanted to say something about this. I find it sad that we still—still—haven’t gotten over this, and maybe we never will completely, but damn.

  • The Debate: part seven

    In an earlier post on this topic I made the claim that the thing which changed everything in this country was the rise of capitalism as the dominant economic model.  It’s time to make good on that claim.

    Firstly, we need to understand, once and for all, just what Capitalism is and how it is misunderstood in these sorts of discussions.

    Capitalism is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of practices under one general heading, practices like mercantilism, industrialization, and interest-based lending.  But to be precise, all these different practices overlap but are not themselves capitalism.

    Capitalism is the strategic use of money to determine the value of money and thereby transfer latent wealth from one sector of an economy to another.

    This simple distinction does much to explain the animosity throughout the 19th Century toward any kind of centralized bank, including the Jacksonian war on the United States Bank, and Jeffersonian suspicion of corporate power.  It is nothing less than the ability of a small group to determine the value of local currency and the buying power of a community, all through the manipulation of currency exchange markets (like Wall Street), regardless of intrinsic values of manufactures and production.

    But we have so conflated this with all other aspects of our much-vaunted “free” enterprise system that to criticize capitalism is seen as an attack on the American Way of Life.  It is not.  Although many Left attacks on it become hopelessly mired in broad attacks on wealth, it is not so much an attack on wealth per se—that is, wealth based on the prosperity of a community—but wealth derived at the expense of the community.

    Which is what we are seeing take place today.  Which has taken place often in our history.

    The difficulty is, this has been one of the most successful economic systems ever for creating prosperity, especially for the individual who understands it and works it, and, if properly regulated, has been the foundation of American achievement, at least materially.  So any critique can be made to seem like a critique of America itself.  This fact has been useful to plutocrats defending their practices against attempts to rein in and control abuses.  The coupling of what in extremes are parasitic practices of economic pillage with grass roots patriotism has been the most difficult combination to deal with in our history.  In its contemporary guise, it couches itself in an argument that socially responsible community-based efforts to address economic and resource inequality are Socialist and therefore fundamentally un-American.  This is historically inaccurate and strategically manipulative, but the bounds between the anti-federalist sentiments that began even before the revolution and became quasi-religious among certain groups in the aftermath of the Civil War are many and strange and need teasing apart to understand.

    The central myth of our national ethos is this: an American is self-made, independent, capable all on his own of creating his life and success and by virtue of a unique freedom from government interference has made a success not only of his personal life but of the country as a whole, being a nation comprised of millions of separate, vital, omnicompetent, self-motivated, natural-born geniuses.  The fact that the frontiers have generally been initially settled by independent people who faced the challenges with little or not help from a central government, and that many if not most of them succeeded in creating viable homesteads that eventually melded into vital and prosperous communities feeds this myth with the substance of reality, although never a reality consistent with the myth.  Through successive waves of redefintion as each frontier became “back east” how the myth played out in the popular imagination changed while leaving intact the core idea that an American builds his life all on his own and the worst thing that could happen was for a government to interfere with that process.

    The reality was always different.  We could examine the process of frontier community building in detail and find variations, but a constant has always been the call for military aid in confronting Indians and the second generation establishment of courts of law enforcement as quickly as possible once something resembling a town emerged.  The “independence” was in force only until such time as a community identity developed that could collectively request all the services these settlers were presumably fleeing in their westward quest.

    Because the fact was, what these people overwhelmingly were doing was going in search of independent wealth—not here defined as a capacity to own their own leisure but rather the ability to provide a dependable source of provender and security.  They came for the land.  They came to be free of eastern industrial wage-penury.  They came to own something outright.  But most recognized they could not be secure in that ownership without the body of law and the structure of government to defend it, maintain it, and make it viable over many generations.  While it may be true that some groups fled the east to get away from certain government practices, the fact remained that as soon as they could they erected a government, taking those elements they thought workable and, hopefully, leaving out what they disliked.  Eventually, it emerged that they needed much more of what they left behind than perhaps they originally thought—but the whole purpose of petitioning for statehood, which was a popular movement, was to secure the benefit of federal laws that sometimes restricted the abuses of territorial governments but brought the benefits of a national law system that was seen as superior to local, often improvised, systems.

    Perhaps the epitome of the independent American in popular myth is the Mountain Man.  But even here, a close examination shows that the most prominent and successful of these apparent hermits were anything but social self-exiles.  Many were educated businessmen.  They hazarded extreme hardship and risk to bring to market products they expected would bring high prices.  They depended absolutely on the communities popular fiction suggests they had no use for.

    This is not to say there were no such men of lore, but they were singular examples and not an example of the norm.  To suggest that our national economy and politics should be constructed to accommodate their example is absurd, but it seems that is often what the Right is suggesting.

    However, despite the trend, there were and are pockets of entrenched resentment to any and all government.  I have identified sources of these strains—political, religious, and economic.  They feed into a river of anti-federal thinking that is often simply contrarian, but not to be lightly dismissed. Many of these can be loosely described as Libertarian, but even that can be deceptive.

    The threads are these:

    Because of British law that forbade westward settlement and then imposed taxes on unrepresented colonists, a strain of resentment toward government that seemed to favor external concerns over citizen’s concerns fed into the break with England.

    Because of Alexander Hamilton’s experiment in internal taxes and community engineering to establish a national industrial base at the expense of subsistence enterprise, there developed a suspicion of all central government and taxes.

    Because of the Millennarian nature of many of the religious movements in America, parallel ethics developed—one that tied Christian probity and salvation to hard work and disinterested success, the other that elevated moral prerogatives above secular law and rejected interference from the larger community in matters of law, behavior, and individual rights.

    Because of the perceived imposition of modes of living and commerce by the North on the South after the Civil War, a pool of entrenched resentment toward federal governments was created that worked continually against the hegemony of Washington D.C.

    These threads, combined with the myth of the American, created a large, often disparate, and usually unorganized base of people poised to resist anything that smacked of a national paradigm emerging from the federal government.  Along with this you can add intransigent tax rebels, racists, and a vein of self-educated conspiracy theorists, all of which adds up to an ill-defined but persistent Right at the grass roots level.

    The recent element is organization.  From the mid Seventies on we have seen a growing coalition of all these disparate groups into a unified block that has consistently voted Republican.  Since the mid Sixties and Johnson’s revolutionary civil rights activism drove the Southern Democrats to join and become a large part of a diminished Republican Party, the core of of the Right have sought a base from which to attack liberalism in general, social reconstruction in particular, and a little more than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act they found their core constituency in the Moral Majority, which combined most of the religious components of a revitalized conservatism.  Under Reagan, who successfully rallied the anti-federal sentiments—government is the problem—these religious reactionaries joined the fiscal conservatives and the anti-federalists to become the foundation of our contemporary, ever-more reactionary Right.

    What has happened since Reagan, however, is even more troubling.  What began in many instances as a grass roots reaction to government and social change has been manipulated by the moneyed interests to target government regulation and tax structures that barred corporate pillage.  By feeding an angry voter block with the idea that their causes are one with the top two percent, they have successfully distorted the national dialogue to their advantage to undo decades of financial regulation and now are mounting a growing and evermore successful attack on all manner of collective activism that traditionally protects and promotes the interests of working class and middle class people.

    The historical roots beneath all these different conservative groups extend back to the beginnings of our history, but never before have they all been so successfully merged into a solid block of voters.  But any legitimacy these ideas may have had has been corrupted by the usurpation of corporate manipulation.

    The question needs to be asked—if, as it is believed by these groups, big government is a fundamental problem, how is it any different in the case of big corporations?  It would seem obvious that the operative word is Big.  Some corporations, multinationals all, have achieved such a size as to function as de facto nation-states.  Except for the fact that they have no national boundaries, they meet all other criteria.  Yet no one seems to be addressing this reality.

    Another question—if it is the desire of the Right that government be stripped of its ability to address equity issues, who then will do that work?  Because the government stepped in initially because no one else could.  Arguments over the ethics of states’ rights fall when it is remembered that states did not address civil liberties issues.  It required federal intervention to assert what should have been recognized as not only the law of the land but common decency in matters of race, gender, and economic disparity.

    A final question for this present essay—why is it that people who are losing ground economically, socially, and institutionally seem so willing to vote against their own interests in support of a false representation of what America is?  That is a more difficult question to answer and I will not here attempt to do so.  In this and the last six posts I have laid out the historical threads of the Right’s current manifestation.  Conclusions may be drawn from there.

    I will address one thing here.  I said corporate pillage.  We have been witnessing since the Eighties large and growing transfers of wealth from the community to private hands.  We have been told that these transfers have been necessary to keep our private institutions from collapsing and causing even more havoc.  In a case by case analysis, there may be some truth in certain instances, but overall this has been a con.  I say this because the transfers came largely with no conditions on the recipients and practices which produced and exacerbated the calamities of 2008.  To pay for these transfers, the Republicans have waged a persistent and successful battle to defund and end programs which they claim we cannot afford.  Here, however, is a chart that shows the dollar-for-dollar transfers.  However one may feel about the nature of the programs affected, it is obvious that this is in no way to the general taxpayer benefit.  This is all special interest, corporate plunder, and in return programs that enable the possibility of social equity and potential upward mobility among struggling Americans are put in jeopardy.  When the Right bleats about class warfare, here is where it is actually being waged.

    The issue of tax fairness is a constant in this country.  In the last few decades, the rhetoric has been added about who is benefiting and why certain people have the right to benefit from “my” taxes.  It sounds like an equity issue.  But the way it plays out is an excuse to extract wealth from the community.

    Let me explain.  It has to do with a concept called latent value.

    Latent value can best be understood as the wealth held in reserve, stored, if you will, after periods of labor to build.  “Unmarketed” value, so to speak.  We tap into this each time we take out a home equity loan.  The assumed value of your property is used as collateral to guarantee the fungible manifestation of the loan.  We have paid into the property over years.  More than that, we have maintained it, added on, upgraded, taken care of it to maintain or improve that value.

    The same is true for entire communities and a business taps into that latent value when it opens its doors.  It hires people from the community, relies on the roads, the electricity, water, sewer services.  It utilizes local government offices for licensing, inspection, zoning.  It depends on the laws of that community to protect it from arbitrary attack, it uses the banks to underwrite its operations, and on and on.  The community as a whole is a resource and it “lends” part of its latent value to the business.

    In return, that business owes it to that community to add to its latent value.  This is done in a variety of ways, including taxes that can be used to maintain or add services and infrastructure for public use.  If all works as it should, the business gets to generate a profit from what it does and the community gets value added from the new activity.  Both benefit.

    That has in many instances changed.  At a certain level, there has been a de facto repudiation of this relationship on the part of business.  Some of this has always been the case, but it has not reached such criminal levels since before the Great Depression.

    What is happening now is that business is extracting wealth from the community.  It is leaching the latent value out of the community.  This is sometimes known as “WalMart Syndrome.”

    Let me describe it as it happens in business.  Say Company A comes in and buys Company B.  Company B has existed for decades, it has a successful product, employs a few hundred people, but has recently been struggling (or, what is ever more common, it has gone public and the shareholders are not happy with their returns).  Company A is in a position to acquire it.  This could be a good thing—with the greater resources of Company A, Company B could once more become healthy, and continue on.  That is, if Company A is at all interested in continuing Company B for the profits is generates as a going concern.  (Please note—there are many Company A’s who do just that, take a struggling smaller firm, fix it, and make it profitable again.  I stress this point because I want it clear that this system can work.  What more often happens is not necessary!)

    However, the aim of Company A is to extract the latent value out of Company B as quickly as possible.  The operations are reorganized.  Maintenance is cut back to the bare minimum and in some instances eliminated completely.  Staff is laid off.  Production is increased.  The cost of manufacturing is drastically lowered per unit.  As things break, they are not replaced.  The good name of Company B continues to sell the product on the open market until it becomes clear that all the cuts have resulted in an inferior product.  When gross sales dip below a certain level, the company is shut down, everyone laid off, and the remaining stock sold as salvage.  Company B is destroyed, but before it is gone the wealth is has built up, latent in its very substance, has been extracted in short order by Company A and added to its bottom line.

    All this is driven by shareholder and corporate greed.  No investment is made in Company B at all and in the process a great many workers lose employment, and, depending on the size of the community in which Company B exists, the local town may be terribly crippled.

    The continual assault on taxes with the concomitant bribery by communities to attract businesses that then fail repeatedly to invest in that community even while they use the resources—the latent value—of that community is exactly the same process and it is tearing this country down.

    It is not Socialism that we expect investment that seeks to raise the standards and expectations of the people in general, and the payment of taxes, horribly distorted because of the special deals made to a small number of extremely rich entities, is not punishment but a way to raise the value of the whole.  We are no longer a frontier country.  That mythology is being used to convince people to vote in such a way that the latent wealth embedded in our national fabric can be more easily converted into transferable funds and extracted by those with no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves and their own class.  (And not even each other—at this level, they will pillage and ruin one of their own just as readily as an essentially defenseless middle class or poor community.)

    Because the strains of historical animosity and intransigence that have existed throughout the two plus centuries of our existence, the Right has managed to codify and effective propaganda campaign to destroy essentially progressive, socially responsible government, all to the benefit of a class that may well establish themselves as a new aristocracy, with feudal powers.  The only thing that is enabling all this is superior organization and obsessiveness.

    It should be obvious by now that all this Right wing activism has nothing to do with anyone’s rights.  Everything that functionally protects the rights of people who do not own their own wealth—in other word, the ninety-five percent of us who work for a living because we can’t live on the interest from our holdings—is under attack.

    But the one thing that needs to be understood in all this is that to push back is not to repudiate the idea of American success.  Making money, succeeding, is not at issue.  What is at issue is a resurgent capitalism that no longer has a country.

  • The Debate: part six

    We need to make one more side trip into the 19th Century.  The Civil War.

    No other event so defines us.  I would argue that not even the Revolution is as important to who we are today as the Civil War is.  This event, along with World War II, established the national identity in ways with which we still struggle to accommodate today.

    Shelby Foote, in his majestic narrative about the Civil War, pointed out the central change of the aftermath.  “Before the war, we said ‘the United States are.’  After, we said ‘the United States is.’”  A simple enough thing to say, but to comprehend the meaning is to understand that the country underwent a fundamental realignment of perspective.  It was a shock, a stunning blow to what had been an assumed association of separate nations in a voluntary coalition.  The most prominent of the Virginia Founders spoke often of their country, by which they meant Virginia.  When Jefferson Davis asked Robert E. Lee to assume overall command of all the Confederate armies, Lee refused, saying that he was willing only to defend his country—Virginia.

    This separateness went without saying until the Civil War.  When South Carolina seceded and fired upon Fort Sumter, they assumed the position of a separate country at war with another one.  All the states that seceded took it as given that they could leave the Union any time they chose.  Lincoln decided that ratification of the Constitution and all that went with the establishment of a federal government that represented all the states as one nation argued against that presumption.

    The opinions over the issues of the War continue to be debated.  Was it over slavery?  Was it over the presumed right to be free of federal interference?  Certainly for most of the foot soldiers of the South, slavery was hardly and issue, but the idea that federal troops could march into their states and tell them what to do was.  These men were ill-served by the people who instigated secession, who knew very well what the issue was about, and often cloaked their defense of an economic system in the rhetoric of liberty and revolutionary politics.

    We need not rehash the Civil War here except to point out that the issue was slavery, though in most ways it was not about the slaves.  This is perhaps a slippery point to grasp.  The institution of slavery was crippling the ability of congress to function across national lines.  The five-eighths rule gave southern plantation owners an unwarranted electoral advantage even while they denied the rights they were exercising to the people they used.  But it was the increasing rancor over the admission of states to the union, whether they would be free or slave, that drove the South finally to break with the United States.  The way of life of the major propertied citizens of the southern states was directly threatened by northern industrialization and the westward expansion of free state settlers.  Eventually, their ability to maintain a useful majority in congress would be eroded to nothing and domination by free state politics would start undoing them financially and socially.  The sticking point was slavery.  It had to go.  The north was beginning to “carry” the south.  Things had to change.

    The moral issues coincided this time.

    But what concerns us here is what happened afterward.  Functionally, the United States of America assumed prominence across all state and territorially borders and, at least implicitly, federal law trumped state law.  Reconstruction was intended to rebuild the South, both materially and politically.  The program, however, involved military governorships in charge of vast areas of the South—the so-called Satraps—and much that occurred was arbitrary, experimental, and occasionally capricious, fueling the resentments left over from defeat.  It is within this time frame that we first see the sentiments of “taking our country back” expressed by embittered southerners who hated the federal government and the north for essentially destroying their way of life.

    The Ku Klux Klan and other clandestine groups notoriously struck back locally to nullify many of the emancipation measures, but what concerns us here is the political action taken by southern politicians who carried out a propaganda campaign over several years that tied federal programs to corruption.

    This was certainly nothing new.  There had always been a degree of mistrust over Washington’s handling of money and public programs.  But the southern Democrats did such a thorough job of connecting the two things in the public mind that “government project” automatically meant “corruption!”  There was, by the time they finished, no way for there to be a federal program that wasn’t corrupt—the idea became an oxymoron in the public mind, especially in the south and subsequently in the west.  It was one of the most successful campaigns of its sort ever and it has lingered with us to this day.  In the wake of that, the issue of State’s Rights became bigger and bigger.

    This was almost wiped away during the Great Depression.  FDR became a savior to many people and “government aid” lost much of its former opprobrium during a decade of extreme need and effective federal aid.  World War II cashed in on some of that new-made good will and, along with the other patriotic sentiments of the war years, brought this country together in ways it never was before and has drifted from since.

    In the wake of both the Great Depression and World War II, federal activism increased as never before.  The ability of the central government to address problems of national concern achieved an almost unquestioned dominance.  The failure of traditional approaches to economic downturns, periods of recession and depression that had plagued our economy throughout in boom and bust cycles, was finally demonstrated sufficiently and laws passed that it became a given that some control over what had been regarded as “natural” cycles could be exerted to the benefit of the entire country.  With the economic boom and world dominance that came in the wake of World War II, America entered a long period of federal triumphalism which finally broke with the high inflation and interest rates in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the effective challenges to American global hegemony demonstrated by the OPEC oil embargo.

    But the pool of resentment left over from the Civil War never disappeared.  It found purchase in the Cold War and expressed itself as skepticism of government in general, using the example of Soviet-style dictatorship as the gold standard for the inevitable result of excess federal control.  The mania of the McCarthy Era was only one, very prominent example of the push back against the federal government, with its continued accusations of deep infiltration by the politically suspect in the Washington bureaucracy.  With each new wave of federal override of local prerogative—in education, in voting, in civil rights, in race equality, in First Amendment issues over free speech and religion—the assertion that these actions were part and parcel of a worldwide communist conspiracy informed the frantic reaction on the part of people who had inherited the cultural resentment of government in general.

    It came to a head under President Johnson when he pushed through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the southern Democrats as a block deserted him and became the core of a revitalized Republican Party.  From that point on, their strategy has been simple—to seize on any issue that can be made to look like federal usurpation of local or even individual rights.  What this amounted to was a culture war, because the resentments all were directed at social legislation and court decisions that seemed to run counter to common values.  But as the movement continued, it was clear that much more was at stake than simply drawing a line against a changing culture that no longer approved racism, gender discrimination, or arbitrary censorship.  As the Seventies became the Eighties, the Right included in their list of “corrections” any economic measures that could be seen as “leveling” measures—anti-unionism increased, attacks against federal financial rules increased, news organizations that did not appear to support a conservative, business-friendly program were attacked or purchased.  The role of money became dominant.

    What had happened clearly was that the financial sector had found a useful foil in the social reactionaries who were attacking the dominant federalism on cultural grounds.  Corporate strategists found they could easily usurp social anger and make it one with a desire to roll back fiscal controls in place since the Great Depression, by aligning the rights of the wealthy with the rage of social conservatives.

    All of which goes back to the post-Civil War resentment of disempowered elites who felt they had been stripped of their natural rights to dictate community norms.  It was not until the massive union movements that sprang up during and after the Gilded Age, coupled with Theodore Roosevelts activist trust busting, that the wealthy of the north and east found common cause with this reservoir of anti-federal resentments.  They were derailed by the Great Depression and it took a couple of generations and the mischaracterization and fear brought about by the Cold War before an effective momentum could be achieved to regain traditional patrician privileges and strip the middle class and the poor of any ability to redress social and economic inequities.  The success of the movement can be seen in the numbers of disenfranchised blue collar, middle, and lower middle class people who vote the programs of this group in complete rejection of their own best interests.  Somehow The Enemy has become anyone who advocates higher education for all people, economic controls, and great personal liberties, including a free press not dominated by corporate interests.

    I’ll see if I can’t wrap this up next time.

  • The Debate: part five

    The fervor with which assaults on liberalism are launched of late possess a zealotry difficult to understand in any reasonable sense.  There is a religious element to it, a battle of ideologies that seem to leave the precincts of fact, data, and logic very quickly, often on both sides.  The inability of Left to talk to Right is the equivalent of the sectarian babbling between any two apparently irreconcilable religious groups, both of whom insist on their point of view being not only correct but the only one.

    After decades of more or less rational political discourse in this country, many people have been caught completely by surprise at the level of bitterness that, upon examination, seem unsupportable by the issues (with the possible exception of abortion—but even that is ramped up far more than it ought to be given the middle ground of contraceptive use).

    Where did this come from?

    Once more, we look back to the early republic.

    When claims are made that this was established as a Christian Nation, such claims are both right and wrong. Wrong in that the structure of law and institutions created in the aftermath of the revolutionary war are the most secular such governmental constructs ever created. The establishment of the United States as a nation is not Christian or any other religion, and this was done very intentionally. More, perhaps, as break with all European traditions in which religion was politicized and churches were arms of the government, conjoining common faith with political hegemony, but nevertheless those who claim that the United States, in the form of the Constitution and the subsequent offices and conduct, was established as a Christian edifice are flat wrong.

    However, the fact that this was a country of Christians is undeniable and the fervor of religious embrace was profound.

    The old grade school lesson that the first colonists came here to escape religious persecution is mostly true.  It doesn’t go quite far enough, though, and explain that these religious exiles were themselves probably more religious than the states from which they fled, states where religious observance was akin to a loyalty oath.

    Which is, of course, how you get debacles like the Salem Witch Trials where you might expect a more rational approach.  The Enlightenment veneer that overlay the revolutionary period and informed the political philosophy that manifested in the Constitution was pretty much just that—a veneer.  City-bound for the most part, once you got out into the hinterland, on the frontiers, religious sentiment was a living, breathing reality that was as if not more important than any political principles in currency at the time.  For many Americans of that generation, Liberty meant the freedom to worship God without a bishop or priest telling you where, when, or how.

    Coming to North America must have been a surreal experience for these people.  They had come from a crowded, dirty place—just about any city in Europe at that time—where they had constantly to worry about the next upheaval that would require a realignment of political (and sometimes religious) affiliations.  Disease, high mortality, sometimes opulent wealth within walking distance of soul-crushing squalor.  But for the most part a world that had become and was becoming more urbanized.  Making landfall in the New World must have been like time travel, taking them back to a primeval land of myth.  No buildings, no roads, nothing to indicate human beings had ever been there, huge, dense forests undisturbed by the axe.

    Many brought with them a full suite of superstitions about old forests and just trying to live here must have required unbelievable courage—or unimaginable desperation.  But they made a go of it, cut some trees down, built the first villages, and after a hundred years the east coast was beginning to look a bit like the world they had left.

    But in pushing back that frightening forest they had clung to their faiths and relied on it hourly.  Many early colonists believed Satan lived in those forests, and certainly many of the encounters with the near-naked natives who didn’t seem to know the first thing about God or Jesus did nothing to dissuade them of that idea.  Pushing that forest back was not only consistent with their belief in Improvement but necessary to keep the devil a little further away.

    By the mid 18th Century, The Great Awakening gripped the colonies, a series of revival movements spurred by open-air preaching based on emotional reactions to arminian accommodations embraced by the seaport cities that were becoming comfortable with material success.  In a way it was a repeat of the movement that caused early pilgrims of Presbyterian and Calvinist theologies to cross the Atlantic in the first place.  The daily struggle against the unknown happening in the rural frontiers was poorly served by churches that preached a moderate, calming theology with a God that seemed less and less concerned with sin in the face of worldly success.  What happened in the hinterland evoked comparisons to the “heretical” movements of the Middle Ages which the Catholic Church worked to subdue and ended up with in the massive splits of the Reformation.

    In his examination of the market phenomena that defined much of the early Republic, The Market Revolution,  Charles Sellers writes:

    “Our secular mythology renders almost incomprehensible the religious mythology that organized experience for early rural America.  The gnostic cosmology and stoic resignation of peasant forebears, who likewise lived at the mercy of nature and invoked its fertility with daily labor, sacralized the behavioral norms demanded by the subsistence mode of production…for centuries peasant animism had magicalized the patriarchal Christian God who reconciled Europeans to hazards of weather, terrors of plague, and exactions of fathers and rulers.  The Protestant Reformation revitalized this magical patriarchalism to cope with the Old World market’s initial surge.  The awesome Jehovah proclaimed by Geneva’s Protestant theologian John Calvin was brought to the New World by uprooted emigrants and preached from Congregational meetinghouses of New England Puritans, the Presbyterian kirks of the Scotch-Irish, and the Reformed churches of Germans, Dutch, and French Huguenots.  Calvinism’s thrilling promise of divine encounter sacralized deep springs of animistic magic and mystery to arm rural Euro/Americans with invidious power against capricious fate.  The more vividly they felt Jehovah’s omnipotence, the safer they felt in a hazardous world.”

    Preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards took the Message to the wilderness, creating a surge of revivalist meetings that poured from New England southward, sweeping rural populations into the fold of highly emotional religious experiences, complete with swooning, ecstasies, visions, possibly glossolalia, all of which offended the stabilizing, order-hungry seaboard churches which reacted both from the pulpit and legislatively, fueling the growing political embrace of strict separations of church and state.

    By the time of the revolution, although the revivalist movements had fractured and splintered into numerous disputatious denominations, a basic sympathy existed informing all of them with the idea that God was not the property of the government, that in fact God disapproved of governments that interposed law between individuals and what they perceived as the natural right to encounter creation without intermediary or interpretation.  (This latter sentiment came to inform the idea that the government should, in fact, say nothing whatever, pro or con, regarding religion, and ought to remove even the appearance of favoritism toward either specific faiths or religious experience in general.)  A tremendous pool of resentment toward the government on this issue rippled beneath the surface of all other resentments that combined to cause the break with England.  The colonial governments were often seen as collusive with the King’s government in this regard and there was no doubt an expectation that this would be redressed once independence was achieved.  (It took a while—direct state sponsorship of certain churches did not end for some time, although the federal government had removed itself from such connections.)

    It was the Second Great Awakening, which began after the establishment of the United States and ratification of the Constitution that created the odd coupling of capitalist zeal and religious fervor.  Competing traditions, old and new, sought to achieve dominance in a rapidly expanding nation that quite obviously embraced worldly success as a natural right, one of the chief goals of the revolution.  In Europe, the established churches, as arms of the state, muffled themes of denouncing the world and its attributes, a trend that could be trace all the way back to the first establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of Rome.  Governments did not wish to discourage wealth-building because this was a source of political power.  The older churches had long since found accommodation with attention to money and rarely preached against self-improvement, at least among the merchant classes.  This same trend was taking place in America where seaboard financial dynasties were emerging and the class-free society that had been in place in practice if not legally for a long time promoted wealth-building across all social lines.  Interest in salvation appeared to wane with the rise of temporal comfort.

    The successors of Edwards, Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight in particular, wrestled with the fact that mercantile growth was inevitable and followed the frontier like a wave, and with it a, to them, diluted religious apprehension known as Deism.  Deism was an Enlightenment accommodation which greatly diffused religious experience, rendering it almost a wholly philosophical matter rather than one of spiritual rebirth.  It was Deism that permitted the Founders to avoid the question of a national religion in drafting the Constitution—a movement hard to argue with given the antipathy of the rural settlers to any state sponsored church—but which the inheritors of Calvin found spiritually troubling.  They feared an abandonment of Christianity as worldly success and comfort grew.  The Second Great Awakening restarted the revivals, took them further west, and south, as a firebreak to a perceived ambivalence to spiritual matters in the east.

    The central difficulty of keeping religious ethics in the face of successful nation-building affected both traditions and the older churches, in New York and Boston, adopted some of the rhetoric of what was called the New Light, and took advantage of the new printing technologies to create the first wide-spread Bible and Tract Societies.  For a time, Bibles were the largest selling book throughout America because they were the cheapest, along with the tracts accompanying them.  Mass printing drove the price per copy down drastically and endangered all other forms of popular publishing except newspapers.

    The battle was between Enlightenment rationalism—which was concerned with man’s rights in this world, now—and the emotionalism of Millennarian religious experience, which proclaimed that the concern must be on the state of the soul for the next world.  In Europe a similar confrontation was occurring which would result in the rise of Romanticism—a more or less secular embrace of emotionalism over rationality—while here is resulted in an entrenched Evangelicalism, centered not on the primacy of sentiment and emotionalism concerning the self and the world but on the emotionalism found in a rebirth in God.

    The accommodation that emerged was one that coupled all the driving ambition of worldly success with a strict self-abnegation—temperance, chastity, and a severe scrupulousness in business—that made the only sanctified outlet of worldly ambition the very success in business that had a generation before been seen as the biggest threat to spiritual matters.

    This engendered a reversal of certain themes—for instance, the Millennium, the return of Christ to Earth, now became something that had to happen before Jesus came back, not when—but the success of this led to half a century of expanding church attendance and the growing influence of religion in political movements, i.e. abolition and temperance.

    What this meant for our present examination is that a pool of religious sentiment tied to Millennarian anticipation, rejection of rationalism, and an embrace of antinomianism (the belief that one can be so possessed of grace/salvation that manmade laws no longer apply) became a popularly maintained constant.  The antipathy against government is fed by this select exceptionalism to give this group a belief in the rightness of their cause from a source irredressable in secular institutions.

    The 19th Century is littered with small groups of religious isolates who chose westward migration rather than life under a growing secular government.  Most failed, but some became notable successes—the Mormons for one—but by and large all these groups have been partially absorbed into mainstream American life.  They bring these traditions with them, of course, just as any other self-identified group does.

    What effect this has in practice is a manifestation in the belief in a higher law that overrides the legislative, judicial, and common law and seeks to challenge institutions on the basis of what could be seen as a “natural law” position.  At almost every turn, with a few prominent exceptions, this has been a defense of status quo not politically so much as culturally.  (On both sides of the slavery issue we find strong, entrenched religious sentiment dictating moral positions.  While abolition can be seen as revolutionary, at base it was very much a defense of the doctrine of voluntary salvation and the denigration of “worldliness” by people from a Congregationalist-Puritan-Quaker tradition.  However, the net effect was revolutionary.)

    I’ll go over what this means to us today in the next part.

  • The Debate, part three

    There are two aspects of the whole Colonial/Post Colonial period of American history which most people either pay no attention to or flat know nothing about.  Among those who are acquainted with these events, many misunderstand their meaning or discount that meaning, preferring to talk about the years in between which make up the actual revolution.  Both of these things I’m about to talk about are vital to any understanding of where we come from and why we seem to be where we are today.  Anyone who tells you that events that occurred two hundred plus years ago don’t matter to the present have no real grasp of history.  There’s a reason the Right likes to keep harking back to the Founders and why they so often mischaracterize what happened.

    The first event—or really set of events—took place before, during, and after the Seven Years War.  We like to call this war the French and Indian War, making it nicely central to our history, and indeed it was because it led almost inevitably, given the personalities and finances involved, to the revolution.  But in fact is in many respects the first world war.  As far as England and France were concerned, events on the Continent, across the oceans, in the Caribbean, and in the Indian subcontinent were just as important as the North American theater.  This was a contest between them, the two great powers of the day, and the outcome would determine who called the shots for the next several decades.  As it turned out, with a hiccup for the Napoleonic Wars, the winner called the shots for more than a century afterward.

    But it began here.  And George Washington, childless father of our country, was right in the thick of it.

    Trans Appalachia was a demarcation of considerable interest both to England and to France.  It led to both Kentucky and to the Ohio Valley, regions both countries saw as part of their future.  The only problem, of course, was all the Indians still living there, among them tribes that had already migrated from the east coast to escape the burgeoning population of Europeans and their slaves.  The French, from Canada in the north and New Orleans in the south, already had entree to the interior of North America, but they were small in numbers compared to the British, Scottish, and Irish colonials rapidly building up the coasts from Maine down to the southern end of Georgia.  Florida was claimed by Spain.

    The Colonials had their own interests.  Land.  The thing that brought more people here in the 18th Century than anything else was the prospect of cheap land, land an individual could actually own, the cheapest land on the globe, and for all intents and purposes not a king or duke or count in sight to tell the commoners that it couldn’t be theirs.  This is vitally important to everything that follows, unto the present.  At a time when owning land was the privilege of the elites—aristocrats and their immediate supporters—the idea that some peasant from Northumbria or County Cork or anywhere else could own his land and do with it what he wanted was the holy grail.  It was surreal.  It was unheard of at least since the height of the Roman Empire and even then there were conditions.  This is the single biggest attractor of immigration the 18th Century and well into the 19th and the idea of personal ownership, free of any by-your-leave from the local nobleman still drew people from the rest of the world here through a good part of the 20th Century.  Ownership.

    For the wealthier colonials whose families had already been here a while, this meant something further—more wealth.  Land speculation companies sprung up like mushrooms after rain before the Seven Years War and resumed after it was over.

    The Ohio Company was one of these.  This company had a royal grant to lands in the Ohio Valley, to survey, parcel, and sell to settlers.  The problem was, the French were moving into the area and fomenting discord among the Indians living there against the English settlers.  Washington was appointed Lt. Colonel and put in charge of 300 militia by Virginia to go out and enforce the royal grant on behalf of the Ohio Company.  In the course of the endeavor he had his hat handed to him in the debacle of Fort Necessity and the wars were triggered.

    Washington later was part of another land speculation company with interests in the same area.  Many of the Founders had a piece of land speculation companies.  They invested in this land, hired surveyors with the intent of parceling it for sale, and they fully expected to make a lot of money.  Many of them used their public offices and military careers to further these efforts.  There was no illegality in this as the idea of conflict of interest was then nebulous at best.  What was illegal was pursuit of settlement after the Treaty of Paris that ended the conflict.  Britain had treaties with the Indian tribes in the region and the deal was that this land, so coveted by the colonists, was off limits.

    Many of these men had a lot of money invested in land deals that were now not going to happen because of a treaty signed between England and France.  Worse still, England intended to tax the colonies for the privilege of “defending” them during the war and, as far as the colonists were concerned, preventing them from pursuing the one thing that made coming to America worth while—getting rich.

    Speculation companies continued to be formed, surveyors sent over the mountains, and deals struck despite the law and the more the British tried to enforce the barrier and relieve their debt burden by taxing the colonists.  It might be argued that one (minor, but important) reason Britain was loathe to grant the colonists seats in Parliament was the obvious consequence that these new M.P.s would work to undo the Treaty of Paris so these speculators could reap the profits of their investments.  In any case, it should never be forgotten that while the Founders risked much—in fact, everything—in pursuing independence, one of the things they fought for was the freedom to make money.  And after the revolution, make it they did.

    Which brings us to the next event that ties all this together.

    The Whiskey Rebellion is often characterized as settlers in western Pennsylvania rising up in arms to protest a tax laid on them by the federal government without their consent.  The tax is characterized as the first internal tax and a tax on a luxury—whiskey.

    This misrepresents the entire affair.

    In the wake of the revolution, two completely incompatible views of what the new nation should look like emerged and famously fought it out.  What is bandied about as Jeffersonian Republicanism is the one that lost the fight.  Basically, this was the view that America should be a nation of independent stakeholders, largely agrarian, with subsistence economies at work.  The idea was that each family, however it was defined, would own the land, the equipment, and the means to support itself and perhaps produce enough extra to sell at local markets.  Decentralization was key and concentrations of wealth and political power the antithesis.  Jefferson’s “yeoman farmers” were to be the freeborn ideal of this system, which would deny the possibility of powerful central governments through diffusion and the independence of its citizens.  (Interesting such an idea should come from a slaveholding plantation owner.  Still…)

    Federalism countered this.  One of its strongest advocates was Alexander Hamilton, who was the brilliant mind behind our economic system, our first treasurer, close adviser to President Washington, and staunch enemy of Thomas Jefferson.  (Interestingly enough, Adams didn’t like Hamilton much, either, and Adams supported Federalism, at least more than the Jeffersonian idea.)

    Hamilton from the beginning advocated a strong central government that would not only establish the law of the land but, most significantly, would take on the debt of the states. (This would give us credibility in dealing with foreign banks and potentates, among other things.)  Hamilton wanted a stable currency and he argued—correctly—this was unachievable if every state set its own currency and exchange rates.  That work had to be centralized.  Hamilton wanted a central bank.  Hamilton wanted the infant United States to build its industrial might as quickly as possible because, he argued, we were vulnerable to the depredations of the world at large without the kind of unity of purpose and finance and industry that can only be brought to bear under centralized authority.

    To the man in the street (or on the farm), centralized authority was everything they had just finished fighting and bleeding to be rid of.

    But the politicking was being done in the well-settled east and businessmen recognized the utility in all these proposals.  The more agrarian south, as usual, disliked much of Hamilton’s plans, but they lacked the votes to carry the day in congress.

    The Whiskey Tax was Hamilton’s first venture in large scale nation-building with a view toward subjugating Jefferson’s “yeomanry.”  The Frontier was a problem for Hamilton because it frayed away from control.  People on the frontier set themselves up any way that made sense for them in their location and rarely did these new institutions conform to establish business models in the east, which for Hamilton was the preferred template.  Remember, he wanted to build a strong, unified nation, able to forge cannon, float warships, raise armies, and compete with Europe.  All through the war there had been problems keeping soldiers fed, clothed, and armed and in the army.  Farmers would leave when they felt they needed to tend their steads.  It was difficult getting states to pay up to support the men in the field.  They weren’t plagued by desertions so much as an inability to maintain something to which to remain committed.  Hamilton looked at the more disciplined and usually better-supplied British troops and understood what needed to be in place to duplicate it.  And duplicate it he believed we must just to survive.

    Convincing individual freeholders of this necessary was another matter.  What he intended to do, then, was bring them all under control through economics and the best tool for this was a tax.  Or so he thought.  Even in England, internal taxes were difficult, fey things that failed as often as they succeeded.  But for this first one he thought he had one no one could object to.  A tax on a luxury—whiskey.

    None of the distillers in the cities of the east objected.  They passed the tax on to their customers and ended up out of pocket nothing.  But in Western Pennsylvania, it was a completely different matter.  There, whiskey was not a luxury.  It was currency.

    Here’s what Hamilton did.  He based his tax on capacity, basically a tax on the volume a given still could produce.  That made it simple to estimate.  For a distiller who was in business to bottle whiskey and wholesale it to distributors, this offered little burden, and they sold everything they produced and they produced usually to capacity.

    But that was their business.  For a farmer outside Pittsburgh in 1790, whiskey was the way he put aside excess grain production.  For him, that still was a way to offset losses because it was so far from major markets.  Rather than store the grain as harvested and see it rot, he would convert unsold quantities to whiskey, which had no shelf life, and then use it as liquid money.  He sold some retail, sure, but a lot of it was used to pay debts to merchants.  Moreover, it was rare that his still produced to capacity.  To tax him on what his still could produce overlooked the fact that he rarely produced that much and that what production he did have was erratic at best.  So this tax on a so-called luxury was for him a huge imposition.

    Hamilton claimed later not to understand their complaint.  He kept telling them, through their representatives, that all they had to do was pass to expense on to their customers.  What he seemed not to understand was that these people were not distillers.  They were subsistence farmers.  This was not a business expense for them, it was an attack on their livelihood at its base.  When the first tax collectors showed up to start assessing and collecting, the uprising began.

    Hamilton urged Washington to act and act massively.  Washington raised one of the largest armies to date of Americans, over 13,000, and marched on Pittsburgh.  The rebellion was over before he got there, but Hamilton held trials anyway.  The tax was suspended afterward.

    In fact, Hamilton knew very well what he was doing.  He was crushing individual entrepreneurs to establish a pattern in which only those who could afford to play were allowed to play.  It was the first American war on mom-and-pop enterprises.  Hamilton wanted these people under the umbrella of industrial concerns so he could pool the collective resources into the building of his mighty nation.  Taxes structured to benefit a particular model of business and destroy competing forms, especially forms that served exclusively individual, familial, or even village needs, as such forms were inefficient and could be too easily kept from serving the national interest.

    These two aspects of colonial and post-colonial America are important to understanding how we got here, today, and what it is the Right is trying to do.  Almost at the outset, this country has tacitly recognized that there are citizens and there is everybody else.  Citizens have money, have power, have the capacity to generate wealth.  Everybody else is, well, everybody else.  The Revolution was fought on the principle of self-determination.  But once the shooting stopped and constitution-building began, it emerged quickly that these Founders were deeply suspicious of democracy, of “the people” and formed a republic instead in which the franchise was limited to white males with property.  Certainly many of the Founders wrote warnings about the growth of corporate power and certainly provisions were built into the Constitution to enable people to fight the encroaching feudalism that might potentially dominate, but it was still there from the beginning—this country was founded for people who wanted to be rich and the rich were the ones everyone expected to call the tune.

    Everyone can mull this over for a while.  Stayed tuned for part four.

  • The Debate, part two

    We left off with the Right wing idea that creative individuals owe the community nothing.  By creative here, I refer to builders—industrialists, bankers, corporate giants, what in an earlier age might have been called Robber Barons.  (I said in the first post that I have a point of view and a critique, that this would not be an unbiased set of posts.)  I characterized this as sophomoric.  It is, in fact, best codified by the writings of Ayn Rand, who wrote some interesting novels and a great deal of philosophical defense of greed.  Rand is a hero to those who wish to see themselves as above it all, apart from the masses, a singular individual with gifts and abilities far beyond those of mortal men…

    Forgive me, the temptation to hyperbole was irresistible.  I have no illusions, however, that very many people on the Right will bother to read this.  If they read the first one, they will likely have decided where my leanings are and that reading further would be a waste of their valuable time.  They would be wrong, on both counts.  They really would not know what my leanings are and I suspect anything that even by a smidgen opens someone to the possibility of a new point of view is a total waste of time.

    Please note, I have been using the term Right in discussing certain folks, because I genuinely believe that there is a conservative viewpoint that is perfectly valid and important to the political discourse.  We need both voices.  But the voice on the Right of late has not been the voice of conservatism except by accident.  I’ll get back to that, probably in a later post.

    The basic argument of autonomy in these instances runs this way: “I took it upon myself to develop, create, and build something which did not exist before and which has been found useful by others.  Had I not built it, it would not exist.  The community did not build it, did not hire me to build it, did not even suggest it.  I built it, therefore I can claim sole authorship and the benefits to be derived from what use the community makes of it morally devolve to me.  Having built it, I offered it to others for a price.  If they did not want it, found it not worthwhile, they had the freedom to ignore it, to not pay me, and I would have had to go elsewhere or do something else for compensation.  I owe them no more than the work itself, for which they compensate me in an arrangement devised to our mutual benefit.  Beyond the price of my services, and the requirement that I provide said service/product at that price, I owe nothing further.”

    In this way, the individual entrepreneur justifies his or her anger and displeasure over taxation or other community “interferences” with his or her business.  In this view, the individual and the community are like two separate island-states, negotiating over a specific resource, the one providing it, the other paying for it.  In this scenario, it is absurd for the community island to lay a burden on the individual island for anything not having to do directly with the product being offered, i.e. a widget.

    Simple.  Actually, simplistic.  It ignores everything to do with how the entrepreneur reached the point of being able to create the widget and offer it for sale and it ignores everything that happens after the widget becomes part of the daily life of both the community and the individual.  It treats the construction of the business—a notable achievement, not to be undervalued—as an event which occurs in isolation from the world in which it seeks to exist.

    Functionally, this description of the entrepreneur is closer to Robinson Crusoe than Bill Gates.  If you go off to a spot of land all by yourself and with your own hands build your home, grow your food, make your own clothes, and take care of your own needs with what is available to hand, then you can make a decent argument that you are the sole creator of your life’s work.  But that requires you to be a bit of hermit and that’s where the similarities break down altogether.

    We don’t do anything without the work of other people being involved, to greater or lesser degrees.  But more importantly, we have no possibility of doing something like building a business without work already in place done by thousands if not millions of people we don’t know but on whom we will depend for any kind of success we might desire.  And I am not talking about the simple metric of The Market.

    At its most basic, the community has provided the builder with a place and a circumstance in which what has been built has meaning.  The community allows it to exist, makes use of it after its built, probably provides assistance in the building, and then guarantees that you may benefit from what you’ve built in ways that make it worth while.  I’m not talking about money, although that’s part of it.  What good is the most beautiful bridge in the world if no one wants to cross it?  Or there’s nowhere to go once you do cross it?  Without that community, be it a neighborhood, a village, town, city, or country, what Robinson Crusoe might want to build has no meaning other than to himself and even that, probably, not for very long.

    The Right seems to be trying to assert the Robinson Crusoe argument of entrepreneurship, as if that community is irrelevant.  More precisely, they act as if everyone in a community is just another Robinson Crusoe, doing their own thing for their own reasons, regardless of any connections to anyone else.  By making the argument that “What I’ve built is mine!  Just like whatever you build is yours!  You have no right to what’s mine!” they are trying to put forward a model of human relations that would make everyone their own little state and everything they do is subject to contract negotiations with everyone else around them.  It reduces responsibility to a matter of terms rather than a dynamic and strips everyone of any moral connection with anyone else.

    This is not to claim that individuals cannot be abused and overburdened by the community.  An obverse claim that the individual does nothing and can claim nothing of his or her own has many examples throughout history and can extend so far as to claim that there is no such thing as The Individual.  This is idiocy in the other direction, but I hesitate to say it is to the Left, at least not anymore.

    The shifting context of what we label Left or Right can be baffling when the history is examined.  At a time when “conservative” or Right Wing politics rested squarely with The State, Leftist ideology was squarely in support of the individual in opposition to the status quo—which makes the American Revolution appear to be a Leftist event.  Individual freedoms were part of the goal sought by the rebels and the cause for the drafting of the Bill of Rights.   It needs to be remembered that during the Constitutional Convention, a vote of ten to zero defeated a proposal to appoint a committee to draft exactly such a bill.  Federalists opposed specifying individual rights and it emerged that this action became the single largest barrier to ratification.  Federalists maintained that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the only powers delegated to the federal government would not threaten liberties.  They further argued that an incomplete Bill of Rights would be dangerous because it would imply the abandonment of liberties not listed. (Hence the inclusion of the Ninth Amendment, which is often troublesome, often ignored.)  Despite their opposition, in order to achieve ratification a promise that the first congress would take up the matter was made.

    Most Federalists ran for office in opposition to a Bill of Rights.  The pattern was therefore set early on that the national government tended to be oppressive of individual liberties, even though by the mid 20th Century this was clearly not the case as the federal government became the guarantor of personal freedoms in the face of local violations and oppressions.

    However, the Federalist opposition to a Bill of Rights sheds light on another trend in our history that is today manifesting itself mightily, and that is the arrogation of privilege to a select group of self-appointed “true” citizens.  We can see this most clearly in an event that almost toppled President Washington’s image and nearly split the country.  The Whiskey Rebellion is one of the first and most often misunderstood challenges to aggregate authority and underscores everything that followed pertaining to individual liberties versus collective power—but furthermore anchors the trend toward separating out people who “mattered” from those who don’t.  I’ll get to that next time.

  • People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing

    I’m a tad upset.  The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

    Why?

    Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception.  Jail.  Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.

    Again, why?  This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives.  Privacy.  The ability to control your own person.  The responsible management of your own life.  But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality.  I have said this before, but I think it bears repeating, that the right wing jeremiad against abortion has little to do with abortion—it is a war on sex.

    Planned Parenthood is the number one provider of gynecological services for poor women, under and uninsured women, women with few other options if any.  The fact is that no federal dollars have been spent on abortion since the Hyde amendment was passed in 1976, and yet—and yet—this persecution continues.  It only makes sense if we stop thinking that this has anything to do with fetuses.

    There is a very silly movie from 1964 called Kisses For My President.  It starred Polly Bergen as the first woman president of the United States and Fred MacMurray as her hapless husband.  You can imagine what the bulk of it is about—he has to fill the role of First Lady.  It’s a comedy.  Ostensibly.  As the frustrations of his position mount (I choose my words carefully) he clearly resents his position and decides to do something about it.  His solution?  He gets his wife pregnant.

    Now, for some reason which today would be head-scratchable, she has to resign as president.  On this occasion, she yields to the inevitable and MacMurray is beaming like a man once more in charge.

    Does anyone not see the horror in that scenario?

    In 1964 businesses were still firing women who became pregnant.  There were no laws to prevent this.  The idea that a woman might want some say over her own life was still bizarre.  The sexual revolution was just underway and most Americans didn’t like it so much—not because they minded the idea of more sex so much as they hated the idea that their kids would be doing it.  Once it was well underway, though, it became far clearer that underlying all the cheesy jokes and Playboy aesthetics was the very serious issue of providing half the population with the ability to manage their own lives, their own dreams, their own futures.  Roe v. Wade was the capstone of this movement because—

    This must be stressed today because we have generations that have grown up not knowing this history, not having to live under these conditions.

    —because the inability of women to say no in matters of personal sexuality and to control their own fertility trapped many of them in cycles of dependence and poverty.  The fruits of the sexual revolution were not that boys got to get laid a lot more but that women have the final say in whether, when, if, how, and with whom any laying was going to take place.

    For women who yearn for a baby and live in circumstances in which such an advent is welcome, wanted, and cherished and is not a crushing weight and a drain on small resources, it may be difficult to understand what a calamity an unwanted pregnancy might be.  But for any woman who wants to have a say in her own procreative decisions, there should be no question today that the Right, through the instrument of the Republican Party, is trying to turn this country back to a time when the movie cited above makes perfect sense and offers a welcome message.

    What it really means is that if you don’t have the means in hand, and you’re a woman, these people want you to be silent, subservient, and second-class.

    The reality is that women with money have always had access to abortion.  The euphemistic “time in the country” mentioned in so many mauve novels meant just that.  If you were poor, you went to a butcher in a dirty room and took your chances whether it was successful or you ended up with an infection that would kill you or a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.

    The Republican Party is tied to a constituency of moneyed interests and moral morons who care nothing for average people.  Why we continue to vote them into power is a testament to a propaganda machine that has worked tirelessly to convince us that our interests are best served by having all protections stripped from us if we live below a certain income level.  They are marching us forward in our goal to become the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.

  • Wake Up! We Are Not Parts!

    I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here.  There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head.

    Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake?

    Oh, come on, Tiedemann, how can you make a comparison!  I grant you, it’s a stretch.  But on principles, not so much.  We’re talking about who has the right to speak to power and over what.  The protesters in Madison aren’t having their internet access and phone service pulled and it’s doubtful the military will be called in, but on the other hand the Wisconsin state police are being asked to go get the now-labeled Wisconsin 14 and bring them back to the state capitol to vote on something that is clearly a stripping of the right of petition and assembly.  So this can become very quickly a constitutional issue and that’s scary, because right now the Supreme Court has been decidedly against workers’ rights.

    Governor Scott is at least being clear.  I’ll give him credit, he’s not ducking questions about what he’s trying to do.  Wisconsin, like many states, has a budget crisis.  He’s already gotten concessions from the unions, a lot of money.  The unions have not balked at doing their civic duty in terms of agreeing to pay cuts, freezes on raises, and some concessions on benefits to help the state meet its budgetary responsibilities.  But he’s going further and asking that all these unions be stripped of their collective bargaining abilities in order to make sure they never again demand something from the state that the legislature or the governor believes they don’t deserve.  In other words, Governor Scott doesn’t ever want to have to sit down and ask them for concessions ever again—he wants to be able to just take what he wants.

    No one can argue that the budget problems are a fabrication.  In the past, unions have flexed their muscle over similar problems and occasionally been their own worst enemies, resulting in lay-offs, closing down of programs, and so forth.  I myself can certainly see how unions abuse their power.  They have a position to maintain, which is to stand in opposition to management.  Management is concerned with bottom lines, not people, so unions are the enemy. For their part, unions could care less about individual needs and will jettison, ostracize, or bully individuals who aren’t acting in lock-step with unions policies.  A union will roll over an individual in pursuit of its collective agenda just as readily as management will.  Neither side has a lock on enlightened behavior.

    This is one of those times when management has the more ethical argument over the money matters.  States are facing bankruptcy.  They don’t have the money to maintain status quo.  In this, the dreams of the Grover Norquist’s have been realized—the beast, government, is being starved.

    But that’s not what is currently at stake.  The unions have met with the governor and agreed to help.  But Scott wants to end the practice of having to sit down with unions and negotiate over this.  He’s made some Right To Work noises as well—individuals should not be “forced” to pay union dues if they don’t want to.  On an abstract moral level, I can even agree with that, but we don’t live in an abstract world where moral principle trumps bottom line thinking and the practice of power.  We live in a world of zero-sum games and abusive relationships between management and labor.  The reality is that the rights everyone, union or otherwise, have come to enjoy since the end of the Great Depression have been won by unions who stood up to management and said “We are not parts.”

    I mention constitutional issues.  What I mean by that is that we have, under the Constitution, the right to peaceably assemble and we have the right of redress of grievances.  Those are the key components of all union organization.  The Constitution does not say how we are to exercise those freedoms, only that we have them.  Stripping unions of the right of collective bargaining is an assault on both those freedoms and Scott knows very well what it is he’s handing future administrations, which is a muzzled work force.

    Like other freedoms people take for granted today, working conditions and fair pay scales were wrested from those in power, often in bloody contests argued in the streets with axe handles and sometimes bullets.  We are in a period of retrenchment by those who have never been pleased with that loss of authority.  It’s not just in this instance, but in every instances.  Those who rail against womens rights, affirmative action, students’ rights, health care, and any and all regulation of industry, be it financial or manufacturing, are people who either do not understand what came before or are working hand-in-glove with those who wish to take those rights away and establish a plutocracy in which money is all that matters and access to a middle class is a prize to be won by being a good servant.

    The unions conceded to Scott’s demands to help balance his budget.  Taking away their ability to bargain collectively is an attempt to set those concessions in stone and prevent workers from ever again petitioning for progress in the treatment of employees.  This is over and above anything he should have a right to ask. Money right now is being used as a boogeyman to scare people into obeisance.

    This is not the way to solve these problems.  And if anyone believes it will stop there, all you have to do is look around at the renewed Right To Work efforts across the country.  These are union-busting efforts and will result in workers losing pay and benefits in the long run.

    I feel like slapping people who vote Republican and shouting  “Wake up!  They are not on your side!  They’re trying to fuck you and your children!”  The only things they want to spend money on are weapons and corporate welfare.  The only reason to continually cut education funding is to procure a populace too stupid to look out for its own good.  Everything else follows from there.

    Wake up, people!

  • Dust Motes

    Cleaning my office, which serves double duty as a guest room.  We have company coming in this weekend and that’s always a good excuse to clean up.

    So while I’m moving things around, listening to very loud music (Deep Purple, Who Do We Think We Are? which I think is one of the great underappreciated rock’n’roll albums of all time), thoughts are buzzing around my head.

    Already this morning I posted a response to someone on a group discussing Science vs Religion—a topic fraught with the potential for all kinds of angsty in-your-face defensiveness—wherein I once more found myself in the position of turning an argument around on someone who had decided that I had insulted him by insisting on evidence and common sense and the practice of looking at alternative explanations that might undercut a cherished experience.  In this case, we were discussing ghosts.  When I pointed out that the described experience fit well with what is known as hypnogogic hallucination, I was summarily told that if I said that to the experiencer’s face, I’d likely get a kick in the groin.  Hardly a mature response.

    But then it went on to question why someone like me—a materialist—can’t just stop being insulting by insisting that what people experience is explicable in material terms.  It never seems to occur to some people that every time they tell me that I need Jesus or that I’m bound for hell or that my life must be empty and meaningless because I don’t believe in god, that they are being insulting to me.  Built into this level of religiosity is the automatic assumption that they’re right and I’m wrong and that’s the end of it.  They don’t see this as hubris or arrogance because it comes from, they believe, an outside source—god or whatever—and that all they’re doing is conveying the message.

    Well, sorry.  We can all be arrogant on someone else’s behalf and beg off the charge of arrogance because we’re just the messenger.  Displacing responsibility for being rude and offensive is a handy dodge—oh, it’s not me, it’s The Lord’s word!—but the fact remains, you choose to hand out the insult.  That you don’t see it that way is forgivable until it has been pointed out to you how it’s insulting.  After that, you’re just being an ass about it.

    This is not to say people can’t discuss this without being insulting.  I have a few friends who are devout believers and we often bandy the philosophy without ever getting personal or insulting.  I have to say, though, that without those few people who are demonstrably intelligent about the subject, I would probably categorize all such folks as raving loonies with poor social skills.

    To be fair, I know some atheists who are just as offensive.  And while I can understand where it comes from, it never wins any points.

    I try—and I’m only human, so lapses occur—ardently to deal with the subject, not the individual.  There does come a point when the question arises “Why do you believe this stuff?” and it does veer off into the personal.  But it’s the ideas I criticize, not the people.

    Unless by acting upon their beliefs they cause harm.  Then I get personal.  Boy, do I get personal!

    Insulated religious communities, such as some of the splinter Mormon sects who practice polygamy, as far as I’m concerned, are deluded.  Not because they believe in god, but because they feel that belief gives them leave to treat certain people like shit.  Mainly women, whom they view as property.  These little pockets are, for all intents and purposes, little feudal kingdoms with one or a few men at the top dictating to the rest.  I understand the leaders well enough—no matter how they couch their justifications, they are power-hungry bigots who’ve figured out how to feed their addictions.  What I fail repeatedly to understand are all the others who follow them.  What drives someone to surrender their conscience, their will, their choices to be ruled over by a self-serving tyrant?  Unless they like the arrangement they have within the hierarchy, which then makes it just as self-serving to follow, and becomes collusive.  Because it’s a top down, tiered society, and there always seems to be somebody lower down, ending finally with the women and the children, who end up having no say.  The ties that bind are like electrical lines dispersing power.

    We’re watching a wonderful thing happen in Egypt.  Democracy might break out in one of the most populous countries on the planet.  They have validated the dictum that people allow themselves to be ruled, that all the power a tyrant has is only what the people give him.  Ultimately, this is true.  The question is always, how abusive do things have to get before the people have had enough.

    It’s the next stage that’s worrisome.  The Muslim Brotherhood is waiting in the wings, no doubt, for an opportunity to establish Sha’ria law.  Once that happens, democracy is done.  Sha’ria is autocratic, brooks no debate, and is not amenable to differences of opinion that stray too far—like, for instance, equal rights for women.

    Yet to oppress the Muslim Brotherhood is also wrong.  That’s part of what has ultimately undone Mubarak.  It’s hard.  Even here we have to relearn that lesson periodically, that just because we disagree with someone and that someone is disagreeable, we don’t have the right to suppress or oppress them.  It’s more detrimental in the long run to force someone to shut up than any damage they can do by speaking their piece.

    If Egypt transforms in the next year into a genuine secular democracy, then we may begin to see the entire Middle East take the same steps.  Iran would likely be the next one, and in that instance it would be a transformation 30 years overdue, since after ousting the Shah that’s where they were heading.  Within a year, the clerics assumed full authority and democracy in any practical sense was gone.  They were able to do this because no one wanted to defy people speaking for god.  Once you hoist that banner, people get chary of challenging your authority, because they might be challenging god.

    That is the harm in such beliefs.  I won’t deny much good comes from religion, but in so many instances the tenets of religions have predisposed people to support autocracy, tyranny, and act counter to their own best interests.  The assumption that a given leader is speaking for god and therefore must be telling the truth or could not do anything against the good is naive.  By the time everyone figures out that he’s just using the people’s credulity to gain power, it can be too late.

    None of which has any bearing on the truth of the basic assertions.  Whether there is a god or not has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m describing.  What it does have to do with is whether or not one is willing to set that aside in matters of public policy, wherein any use of religion often ends up being a cynical ploy to obtain power or enact laws that may not be for the best.

    Anyway, such are the kinds of things that flit through my mind while I’m cleaning up.  Dust motes dancing over synapses. Time for another side of rock’n’roll.