Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Celebration 2009

    Here’s a picture from our just past Celebration of the Book, at Stephens College, Columbia, MO, October 10th.  Shown is our special guest, Margaret Sayers Peden, who lives in Columbia and is a Spanish language translator.  If you are a fan of Isabelle Allende or Arturo Perez-Reverte, you may have read some of her work.  She’s something of a phenom and we were pleased to present her with a special award honoring her literature contributions.  Missouri First Lady Georgann Nixon presented it on our and the state’s behalf.  It was all very emotional and wonderful.

    Also pictured, to the right, is Tom Dillingham, estimable member of the board, designer and Atlas of the Celebration (having in many ways lifted it onto his own shoulders and held it up).  The guy in the middle in the hat is me.

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    photo by Eric Watkins

  • Rude Behavior Redux

    What follows is an old post from my original website, back in 2005.  I’m reposting it because of a revisitation.  Yesterday I had a knock on the door and there were a couple of people from some small church, spreading the good news.

    Now, there is irony here, because I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  I didn’t read it when it first came out because it received so much attention and there was an enormous quantity of posturing, both pro and con, regarding it, that I decided to wait till the furor died down.  Besides, it’s not like I needed convincing on this point.  But I appreciate well-reasoned arguments and in the last couple of years I’ve become acquainted with Bart Ehrman’s work on textual criticism, so last month I spotted both the new paperback edition of The God Delusion as well as Dawkins’ new hardcover on evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth.

    So 150 pages into The God Delusion, my Saturday is briefly interrupted by two well-meaning folks wanting to save my soul.  I did not let them linger.  “I’m an atheist,” I said.  Their faces fell and I smiled.  “Don’t worry, it’s not catching.  Unless you have a functioning brain with more than a smidgen of education.”

    The man frowned, the woman continued to look alarmed.

    “I have one question,” I said.  “I see you have a Bible with you.  Have either of you actually read it?”

    “Of course,” the man said.

    “Really?  The whole thing?  All the way through?”

    “Well…” she waffled.

    “In that case would you please tell me why Jesus has two contradictory genealogies?”

    They both looked baffled.

    “Matthew and Luke,” I said.  “You have read them?  Matthew One has a genealogy and Luke Three has a genealogy, tracing Jesus’ lineage back to David.  They contradict.  I was wondering why.”

    “No, they don’t,” he said, flipping open his Bible.  This was too good to be true.  He found the one in Matthew and skimmed it.  “Okay.  Luke…?”

    “Three.”

    He flipped to that.  Found it.  Read it.  Looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

    “They aren’t the same.  How come?  I mean, if this is supposed to be inerrant—I assume you believe it is?—then how come they don’t match?  Just curious.  And one other thing, while we’re on that point.  If Jesus was supposed to be the son of god, how come both genealogies trace him back through Joseph?  Because Joseph is only his step-dad.  How come they don’t go through Mary?  I’m just curious, I’ve never heard a good answer to that.”

    The man started to look angry, but the woman actually asked, “What do you think that means?”

    “Well,” I said, “it means someone got something wrong.  Either that book is not inerrant like you think it is, or it’s just a bunch of bullshit.  Have a nice day.”

    I shut the door.  Rude?  Perhaps.  But as I explained in the following essay, I feel the rudeness is first manifest on their part.  So without further ado, I will proceed to my thoughts on the occasion of a visit from some Jehovah’s Witnesses back in 2005…

    *******************************************************************
    The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door.  This was, in fact, their third visit.  On the previous two, they had spoken with Donna, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here.  They had left literature and apparently decided to return.  This time, they got me.

    I don’t like proselytes.  I don’t like telemarketers either.  I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying.  I don’t like aggressive salesmen.  If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay?  My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…”  That’s fine.  If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask.  If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave.  He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned.  Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.

    Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan.  In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.

    If I walk into a church to hear the services, maybe some of this assumption has some basis–if I weren’t looking for something, I wouldn’t have walked into the church.  But I’m in my home, minding my own business, and there comes a knock on the door.  They have come to find me, to tell me I should be in church–theirs–and that they have brought with them the Good News.  They have interrupted my time, intruded on my day, and have insulted me besides.

    I realize most people may not feel this way–the insulted part.  For most people, such visits are just an annoyance.  Something about it bothers them, maybe, but it’s an ill-defined unease, and they’d just as soon forget about it after the missionaries leave.  If they had wanted to ponder the ultimate questions, they’d be doing it somewhere else–like a library or, even, a church.

    Proselytes, however, never assume you have done this.  And if you have, and your conclusions are other than what they have to offer, why, then, you have slid into error.  You must be saved.

    When they showed up, I recognized them from their two prior visits.  Donna was napping, so I decided to deal with them.  I really didn’t want them coming back, and neither did Donna, so I decided to take the time to convince them they weren’t going to find receptive minds here–in fact, they would find active minds that had already dismissed their message as more of the same old rubbish.

    Rubbish.  Dare I call it that?  Why be polite?  It’s rubbish.

    In specific, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in 1878 by Congregationalist minister Charles T. Russell announced that Christ had already returned–invisibly, four years earlier–and that the world would end in 1914, when the Final Battle of Armageddon will occur, after which only 144,000 people of all those who have ever lived with reappear in heaven.  (In 1884 he started the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to spread this message.)  Russell died in 1916.  He might have thought Armageddon was taking a long time to be fought, as Europe had turned into the bloodiest battle ground in memory.  He was succeeded by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who officially called the movement Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, in 1931, declared in a fit of prophecy that “millions now alive will never die.”

    The original date of Armageddon and the End of the World passed 17 years earlier, but the difficulty of getting the date wrong has never bothered proselytes of apocalyptic faiths.  They just move the date forward, with each new prophet, each new error.

    The whole emphasis of apocalyptic groups is on death and destruction.  Everything is about to go up in flames, come crashing down, blow up, dissolve, melt, disappear, perish with requisite rivers of blood and torment.  All this comes from the Book of Revelation, which is the centerpiece of such movements.  I guess they really like all that metaphysically and symbolically bizarre imagery.  The rest of Scripture seems so tame in comparison.

    So while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a specific example, in general there are dozens if not hundreds of these little sects, all preaching that the end time is nigh and we’ve got to get right with the lord.  Rubbish?

    Indeed.

    But I wanted to make a larger observation about insult here.  They come to your door and insult you.  You should be insulted.  You should take offence.  Because at base they are flat out telling you that your life has no meaning.  Never did, never will–unless you accept their version of reality.  Even then, everything you’ve done up to that point is irrelevant and error-filled.  Empty.  Devoid of meaning, pointless.

    It’s insulting.

    They asked me if I had ever been a church-goer, and I explained that, yes, one time I was a Lutheran, but that had been dissatisfying, so I went on a search for a different faith.  I went through a short list of all the different religions I’d visited or given a try–Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahai, Krishna, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal–after which I came away satisfied that they were all incomplete, wrong, or, more fundamentally, based on the same misapprehension of the universe.

    (You might ask, have I not just insulted them by suggesting that what they do is pointless?  No, because I don’t go door to door trying to convince people they’re wrong.  There is more than one reason to practice a religion, more to faith than doctrinal purity, and who am I to judge someone else’s method for coping with the world?  I may write my opinion down and even publish it, but no one is forced to read it.  My conclusion is all mine and if someone asks, I’ll express it.  The insult is in the intrusion.)

    One of the ladies asked “Don’t you think you were searching for something?  Why else would you have gone looking like that?”

    Good question.  And at the time I was searching.  But I don’t believe I failed to find it.  I did find it.  I found an answer.  But the impulse to search is more mundane.  “We’re raised that way,” I said.  “We live in a culture where not to believe in something is unacceptable.  From the time we’re old enough to understand English, we’re told about Jesus and that it’s a good thing to go to church.  Just to fit in, one feels the need to belong to some kind of congregation.”

    I don’t think they expected that answer, because they had no come back.  Besides, it has the virtue of being true.  Most people, I think, attend a religion for social reasons.  They were raised that way, and really, what harm does it do?  You can see this when Big Issues shake up a congregation, like over the question of ministering to gays or something, and the less doctrinaire manage to accommodate the change while the real fire breathers pick up their toys and go somewhere else.

    This is not to say that all those people don’t really believe in god–but you don’t need an organized framework to have faith.  You can believe in all manner of thing without attending a church based on it.  The church part is social.

    We got into the specifics of biblical prophecy.  They showed me passages they thought referred to present days.  Of course, they were so vague they could refer to any period at any time in history.  I pointed this out repeatedly.  I asked why they thought these passages meant now rather than a thousand years ago.  “Today, it is a global civilization.  Then, it was just one small area of the world.”  Well, that was a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of.

    But “The World” is an adaptable phrase, and for each generation has a slightly different meaning.  Back when the bible’s books were being written, “the World” was that local slice.

    The vagueness of the passages did not impress them.  When I told them that the battle of Armageddon had been fought long ago, at a place in the Levant called Megiddo, they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I explained that the infamous battle took place in 609 B.C.E. between King Josiah of Judah and the Egyptian King Necho II.  It was said to have been the bloodiest battle ever fought up to that time.

    (Now, the British under Allenby starting their final offensive in 1918 at Tel Megiddo against elements of a retreating and regrouping Turkish army.  It hardly qualifies as the Last Battle–the British took 36,000 prisoners at a loss of only 853 dead.)

    Armageddon, then, was already a historical event when Revelations was written.  It was in the past, not something yet to come.  Now, King Josiah had been one of the last great reforming kings of Judah–his death at this battle was symbolic of ultimate calamity among the Hebrew.  It is difficult to explain to people who don’t bother to learn about biblical history that Time is fluid in prophetic literature–the past and future easily swap ends, what happened will happen, and just referring to an event that has happened in the past is intended as part and parcel of an æsthetic tradition (rather like quoting an old piece of music in a new composition to underscore a connection, make a point).  What the writer of Revelation was talking about was the fall of Rome, which was at that time very much The Beast, and the calamity to befall Rome was on a scale with the calamity of Josiah’s death.  Of course, this being a Hebrew prophecy, Israel would come out on top–not unscathed, though, as only 144,000 Jews would survive to inhabit what was left.  We can assume the number is so low because of the cabalistic tradition of assigning mystic significance to numbers.  Twelve is such a number.  There are 12 tribes of Israel, 12 X 12,000 = 144,000.  What always seems forgotten by contemporary christian sects like the Witnesses is that this refers to Hebrew survivors, nothing else.  The number is low in real terms, probably as a nasty judgement on the part of John of Patmos that only 144,000 of the Chosen were doctrinally fit to be saved.  In any case, its significance is probably lost to the current politics of the days in which it was written.

    To take Revelations as anything other than the political and mystical polemic of a dissatisfied Hebrew living under Roman rule (specifically under Nero) is to assign it importance all out of bounds with its original intention.

    Neither of these ladies knew or accepted that John the Divine, composer of Revelations, was not John the Apostle, putative brother of Jesus.  Neither of them had the least grasp of biblical scholarship, nor did they care.

    They continued showing me passages.  They asked what I relied on.  “Reason,” I replied.

    “And what does that give you?”

    “It gives me a basis for understanding what I can control and what I can’t.”

    More passages.  I wasn’t giving them answers to which they had set responses.  I dismissed each passage and finally the older of the two asked, “We’ve shown you our proof.  Show us yours.”

    “Certainly.  What kind of proof would you accept?”

    “Nothing you have can possibly contradict the word of god.”

    “Then why should I bring it out?  You’ve already made up your mind.”

    And so it went.

    They finally left, I hope more than a little befuddled.

    They had shown up on my doorstep with the best intentions.  They were going to try to save my soul.

    Why is this insulting?

    Because it makes a whole raft of assumptions about me–or anyone they approach–that they can neither know or have a right to meddle with.  They have to assume that I am ignorant, that my life is empty (or just naggingly incomplete), that I thirst for something I have never tasted before.

    I could turn it around and start discussing physics, or biology, or neuroscience.  I’m quite sure they’ve never brushed up against the more intriguing wonders of nature.  On the contrary, they’ve shut themselves up in a room bounded on all sides by a dogged certainty that nothing outside can possibly be of any relevance or interest.  The certainty of the closed mind.

    When I showed them the contradictory genealogies in Matthew and Luke, that describe completely different lines of descent for Jesus, they dismissed it as a “Jewish thing, tracing from both lines.”  That didn’t make any sense to me.  I pointed out that both genealogies ended at Joseph and that if taken literally, this meant that Joseph had two fathers.  Would they accept a genealogist’s report that suggested they had two different fathers?  That point seemed to shoot right by them.  I didn’t even bother to make the larger point, that if this was the word of god, and literal, then the lineage should have been traced through Mary, not Joseph.  That would indeed have been revolutionary in its day, running counter to tradition, and leaving future generations to ponder the significance of this one instance where a lineage was traced through the woman.

    As I said, closed minds.

    The desperation of the proselyte is sad.  There is so much in this world, so many wonderful things, that to turn one’s back on it all in order to hawk a third-class ticket to an afterlife that is doubtless nothing like anything imagined, if there is one at all (which I very much doubt) is pathetic.  We know we have this life.  Why waste it on pursuing the salvation of those who probably don’t need it?  Why waste it on the pretzel logic of religious interpretations that leave you in no position to grow?

    But I won’t start knocking on doors to ask this question and offer an alternative.  I believe we all have choices and that they should not be coerced.  I believe the salesman should leave you alone until you have a question.  I believe telemarketers should leave you alone in the evenings.  I believe proselytes should stop assuming we’re all idiots.  They should understand that their seeking me out that way is really offensive.  I would never presume.

    But, as they say, this is all preaching to the converted.

    At least I didn’t force anyone to hear the sermon.  I may not believe in god, but I’m polite.

  • Events and Events

    Hard to believe it’s mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I’ve talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I’ll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

    Turnout was another matter.  It wasn’t embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn’t up where I’d hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next year, which will be—

    MISSOURI GENRE.

    I sort of grabbed the title out of the air at the last board meeting, just so we could all start thinking about it and working toward it, and to make sure everyone understood that we have a program (even though we don’t, exactly).  I’ve already enlisted three writers to appear.  Katie Estill, who has two novels to her credit, the most recent one, Dahlia’s Gone, is quite a bravura piece of writing.  Not genre, not exactly, although it does involve a murder.  But in a way, mainstream is a genre insofar as it is recognized as distinct from all other “genres” like mystery or romance or science fiction.  John Lutz, a local mystery writer of considerable reputation, who wrote the novel on which the movie Single White Female was based.  And Robin Bailey, talented fantasy author and former president of SFWA.  I figured having them on the bill would be a good, solid foundation on which to construct the rest of the program.

    This will be the last Celebration in which I’m directly involved as a member of the board of the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come April of ’11 I shall be leaving the MCB, per the by-laws.  So I hope this one will nail it up good.

    I really enjoy being on panels and doing presentations.  I can’t claim to be exactly comfortable in front of an audience, but I like it, and occasionally I even do well.  So in future I hope to be doing more of that and less planning.

    Assuming, of course, I also have some new novels to promote.  I’m still waiting to hear.

    I’ve got another month or two of regular unemployment, then there seems to be some kind of extra rigomarole to go through to get the extensions.  I have a prospect that won’t come in till January.  We’ll see how that all works out.

    I must say that all the presenters we had at this last Celebration were excellent.  The talks were first-rate.  We must solve this attendance problem, because people are missing out on some really great stuff.  Tenacity.  I’ve already put some things in place that I have to follow up on next year in terms of radio presence and such.

    Meantime, I have one more major gig for the MCB this year—the book-to-film panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival.  I have obtained a copy of the novel in question—Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell, which is out of print—and I need to read it beforehand and make up my list of questions.  We’ll have Scott Phillips on stage to talk about converting novels to screenplays and a Civil War historian, Louis Gerteis, to do a little commentary on the subject of the novel, which is the Civil War in Missouri (which was particularly nasty).  Ought to be a great event.  The film is Ride With The Devil, of which a new director’s cut is being released in a couple of months.  Early Toby MacGuire work.  This will be on November 15th, probably at Washington University.

    Then I will be immersed in my own work for the rest of the winter.

    Oh, boy.

  • More Doors

    (Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin’.)

    I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

    Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called “revenooers” (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate.  So they assume.  Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas…a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov’ment so much as notices their existence.  They’d have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don’t, and hypocrisy is the least amenable vice to reason.  At one time it was bootlegging, today it’s drugs, either marijuana or meth.  They don’t seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the “right” to be left alone.  I really believe they don’t understand this simple equation.

    But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over politic hegemony?  No.  He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol’ boys killed him.  Scrawling “Fed” on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written “Cop” or “Fag” or “Stranger.”  Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute.

    I would point to this and say that anyone who thinks America is free of its terrorists, its fundamentalist jihadists, its unreconstructed semi-literate hate-mongers, its pockets of intolerance where just walking down the street wearing the wrong clothes can get one hurt or killed, then a closer look is necessary.  Like such groups and people in foreign climes, the motivations for these folks are many and varied, from religion and political purity to money or sex or just bitter resentments.  The binding characteristic is that they hate—not with a red-hot, spikey, enraged hate, but with the harsher, tamped-ash, slow-burn deep hatred of constant gauging, you to them, ranking those who belong against those who don’t, an ever-present, seething, low-grade fever of hate that informs every single thought and action.  It’s not so much that something triggers it at the moment, causing an aberrant act of outrage as that they start from a coal-bed of resentment and rejection that they take as “normal.”  That makes them harder to understand for most people.  The default position for these folks is to despise you because you aren’t like them, and may the ‘verse help you if you have any education, erudition, any sense of a larger civic ecology, and grasp that reality is more than the pathetic network of familial connections that hoards sentiment and incubates the drowning phobias of in-group solidarity and guarantees a cyclic affirmation of hopelessness.

    From this, though, I would point out one thing that we tend to forget in America, in the West, that open-mindedness is always based on resources.  There must be enough, more than enough, to make people comfortable.  Apocalyptic fiction is frightening not so much because the physical world crumbles, but because everyone accepts in the absence of Enough that the small bits and pieces, an apple, a loaf of bread, a piece of sheeting to cover your from rain, a drink of water, is always sufficient reason to throw Plato on the fire and give up on solving problems.  People, it suggests, lose morality, even love, when they’re hungry and frightened enough.

    I have a house-full of books.  I just got a few more yesterday.  The pile of unread tomes grows, and it makes me feel rich.

    Many years ago, a cousin of mine had to live upstairs from us, with my grandparents, because his mother and father had moved to a county where this cousin did not meet the local school standards.  He would have entered their high school a grade behind instead of graduating that year.  So he lived upstairs and attended his alma mater so he could graduate.

    I ended up having to look out for him.  He was stupid.  Not in that he lacked intelligence, but he had no concept of how to apply it.  He reacted.  He did things without forethought.  He got in trouble.  Consequently, he got me into some trouble.  I was not stupid, so the degree of trouble for me was minimized, confined to the problem of what to do with this kid.  I quickly reached a point of wanting him out of the house.  Which meant that sometimes I did his homework.

    I hadn’t had much contact with my cousins for years.  There were many reasons for this I won’t go into, but basically they were strangers to me.  They were cousins.  Fine.  Big deal.  So what?  This is perhaps a blindspot with me, but frankly family as a concept doesn’t mean much to me.  I was raised to earn friendship, regardless, and I expected it to be earned in turn.  The conditions are immaterial and vary wildly, but just laying a claim on one’s affections simply because you happen to be related is not an idea I subscribe to.

    So this kid was, while I “knew” him, pretty much a stranger.  One evening we’re conversing about this and that and we got onto the topic of sacrifice.  He proudly declared that he’d risk his life for me.

    “Why?” I asked.

    “You’re my cousin.  You’re family.”

    “So?”  He looked puzzled so I elaborated.  “Okay, say you find out that I’m a drug dealer.  The police get onto me and it looks like I might be arrested or killed by a rival.  You’d fight both for me because we’re family?”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’d stand between me and the police.”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’re an idiot,” I said.

    He looked hurt.  After a couple minutes, he asked,  “You wouldn’t do it for me?”

    “If you were a drug dealer and I found out, I’d turn your ass in.”

    “But I’m family!”

    “And if I’d never met you before?  You grew up on the east coast and you’ve just come here and looked me up for the first time.  We don’t know each other from Adam.”

    “We’d be family.”

    “That’s nuts.  You don’t know me.  I could be the worst person on the planet and you’re telling me you’d risk your life for me.  Would you do it for____?”  I named someone we both knew, unrelated.

    “No.”

    “What if he was the one who’d become the scientist who cured cancer?”

    He shrugged.  This was getting beyond his personal calculus.

    No, I don’t actually think consanguinity is sufficient reason to extend any more consideration than you would to a casual acquaintance, certainly not to someone who has become a close friend.  One of the reasons, I suppose, I have no children.  Blood is probably an evolutionary trait to guarantee the success of a given DNA, but in society it is often turned to abuse, an excuse to overlook all sorts of shortfalls.  I might have felt different had I had brothers and sisters, but I hope not.

    I recently read a novel called Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  It’s a harsh, unpleasant story of Ozark backwoods familial tyranny.  I understand it’s about to be released as a film.  It portrays the kind of chains family imposes under the most obscene kind of filial blackmail, the way it is used as an excuse to not only forgive but defend criminality, brutality, ignorance, and the perpetuation of a siege mentality that cannot afford to embrace anything genuinely moral.  It is at core an argument against a concept of family that holds sway over so much of the human race.

    But it also shows what I mean when I say all moral behavior rests on resource.  Having enough.  Having, perhaps, more than enough.  The irony, of course, is that the mindset that such entrenched poverty and the oppressive familial code that seems to emerge in its depths pretty much guarantees that those so trapped will never step outside to find a way to cure their condition.  Entropy.  Energy always ebbs in a closed system.  For growth you need outside energy.

    Sometimes the best way to help a situation is to leave it.  Perhaps what the world needs are more doors.  Open.  We have, perhaps, enough rooms.  We need more doors.

  • Legacies

    Comparisons of the disaster of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor break down in the aftermath.  What I remember is getting a phone call from my wife to turn on the news, any news, and then seeing the images on CNN.  I then called several people, including some on the west coast, early as it was.

    It was a binding experience.

    Then the silence of the skies for next few days.  All planes grounded.  We don’t pay attention to all that background noise until it disappears.

    And I remember wanting to strike back.

    But at who?

    I am not a reflex pacifist.  I do not believe in turning the other cheek as an automatic gesture.  The world, in aggregate, does not yield to such gestures until much blood is spent, and disgust comes to the aid of the peaceful intent.  Strike at me,  hurt my family and friends, threaten my home, I have no compunction about the use of violence.

    But not thoughtless lashing out, flailing, blind retaliation.  That does less good than the habitual use of peaceful surrender.  If we were to find these people, we needed to be smart about it, and move carefully.  When caught, punishment must be determined accordingly.

    That was not to be.  I watched our so-called leaders turn this event into a justification for major abuse globally.  The sympathy we had from the entire world evaporated as the United States began stomping around acting like a pissed off child whose lunch money had been taken by a bully.  But we were not small and weak, so embracing the automatic response of schoolyard tactics resulted in calamity.  I was horrified by the unfolding nightmare of the Bush years, all done supposedly in my name as a citizen.

    The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was horrible but not cause for self-loathing and shame.  We rose to an occasion that demanded sacrifice and we came to the aid of a  world gone mad.  The enemy was clear, the stakes enormous, the calculations easy enough.  Ugly as WWII was, our response was as close to noble as war can bestow, and we have carried ourselves with pride born out of that period for going on 70 years now.

    Not so after 9/11.

    We were struck in 1941 by a nation that officially declared war upon us.  We knew who they were, what they stood for, and where to find them.  It was a conflict of clear adversaries fighting as nations.

    The 9/11 aggressors were a band of people more like the mafia, with no nation, no formal declaration of war, and no clear face.  We had a few names, a few associations.  We didn’t know how to deal with this, so we pretended it was just like any other war, shoved the awkward details into the box called War, and attacked as if nations could be blamed.

    After WWII we could expect and received formal surrenders from nations authorized to sign such instruments.  Rebuilding began, and it could be argued that THAT was the real victory.

    Who will sign a surrender in this conflict?  Who can?  What would it look like?  And how do you rebuild something these very same enemies keep knocking down and by so doing make us knock them down as well, along with all the innocent people who just get in the way?

    There was a time hatred could not act on its own in such a vast theater—it required nations to enable it and give it reach.  That’s changed.

    It seems to me we need to start figuring out how to rid ourselves of hate.  We can’t do that if we keep hurting the very people we need to help.

    Our job has been made infinitely harder because of the schoolyard bully mentality of the administration that dragged us into this fray in the aftermath of national tragedy.  We may never regain the credibility needed to address the real issues.  That is the loss I continue to mourn on this day.

    The dead cannot be blamed for the acts of the living, and revenge is a cold legacy for the sacrifice of the honorable.

  • Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

    Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time.  There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things.

    I don’t care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications.  The sky is falling, yes it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling?  Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people’s day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history.  Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom.

    Everyone needs a hobby.

    Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion.  I wish them good times playing with their toys.

    But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they’re trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

    A grand master of New Spin is Pat Buchanan.  He’s been misinterpreting reality since before his failed bid for the presidency.  In retrospect he is the ideal speech writer for Richard Nixon, for he must have shared Nixon’s conviction that the game is rigged and the Lefties are out to get us all from the beginning.  Do right by all those bleeding heart liberals and all they do is spit on you.  Open up China, establish the EPA, expand health care, and what do you get for all your efforts?  They pillory you for a little wire tap and the construction of a shadow government that could do end runs around Congress.  Ingrates!

    Pat has become more strident and marginalized since Reagan took office.  The tough American school of foreign diplomacy combined with the Minute Man ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged independence came to the fore, nurtured by an age that declared that all victims were just whiners and the only difference between a rich man and a poor man is plain hard work.  Pat blossomed.

    What fruit has this mutant liberty tree borne?  Well, he’s now ready to revisit Hitler and tell us how Adolph was just misunderstood after all, that he didn’t want world conquest (which is possible—he mainly wanted Europe and Russia) but peace and a strong Germany.  He makes his argument here.

    It is one of those things which one reads with  awe at the sheer balls of the premise. Clearly, Pat has taken Mein Kampf to heart as the heart-warming, desperate revelation of a tortured peacemaker who has been maligned and misunderstood by any and all.

    He claims in this article that Hitler sued for peace with Britain two years before the first trains rolled toward the concentration camps.  This is a deceptive claim.  But the specifics are less important than the overall argument.  Pat claims Germany invaded Poland in a dispute over Danzig.  One must then ask why one of the first acts after Poland fell was the construction of the camps.

    But the actual problem here is a complete and utterly ridiculous misreading of Hitler himself.  Hitler made it clear in many speeches, and in Mein Kampf, that his aims were for a militantly ascendent Germany.  The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935.  People were already leaving the country because they understood what Hitler was.  Berlin in 1936 had to be “made over” for the Olympics—antisemitic posters taken down, the presence of brown shirts and their ilk removed, and the camps placed off-limits for even official visits.  Oh, yes, there were camps them, around the major cities, but they had not quite yet become the exclusive depository of Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs of various ethnic backgrounds, and certainly politically questionable types filled them in stinking, horrid conditions that only foretold of what was to come.

    Hitler’s Reich in fact violated every single treaty it signed but one: its treaty with Japan that demanded it declare war on the United States in the event of war between the U.S. and Japan.

    I don’t follow the logic behind Buchanan’s reinterpretation.  I don’t know what he’s doing here unless there’s a latent holocaust denier lurking beneath all the other reactionary dross he’s acquired over the years.

    There is, however, an interesting point brought out in some of the comments appended to Buchanan’s post—that of Stalin’s somewhat “lighter” treatment at the hands of posterity.  As if by claiming that we don’t hold Stalin to the same standard of denunciation of revulsion, that somehow the opprobrium heaped upon Herr Hitler is, well, unfair.

    Well.  Stalin was as big a monster, perhaps bigger, than Hitler.  The only thing that makes them different is their nationalist aims.  Stalin seemed content to remain within the borders of the Soviet Union.  He slaughtered his own people, and he played no favorites in that regard—he was an equal opportunity murderer.  He did not invade Poland.  He did not start a world war.  Considering the wall of silence placed around his regime, without that war we might still not know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.  Stalin’s sociopathology was constrained, methodical, even in some sense rational insofar as he recognized limits.  Hitler was different.  Hitler was more than just a sociopath and as the war progressed it became more obvious.  It is appropriate that Hitler’s favorite composer was Wagner, for what do most of Wagner’s operas end with?  Gotterdammerung!  The end of everything.

    We’re catching up with regards to Uncle Joe, as Truman called him.  We’re finding out.  His atrocities were on such a scale, though, as to almost dwarf what the Nazis did.  But that’s a deceptive way to look at it as well.  What difference the numbers?  Eleven or eleven million?

    Even so, I don’t quite grasp the point of trying to rehabilitate Hitler.  Is Buchanan trying to lay blame on the Brits for jumping the gun?  Is he trying to point out the flaws in systems and networks of treaties that seem to draw us into disaster time and again?  Is he practicing moral relativism?  That would be a first for him.

    Whatever is going on, I think it behooves us to pay attention to the Nut Jobbery going on in our midst.

    We do live in interesting times.

  • John Adams and the Efforts of Time

    We just watched the last episode of John Adams.  I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments.  I have to admit, the last episode brought tears.  The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving.  The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners.  I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

    The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.
    What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson.  I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

    Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism.  In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries.  The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries.  Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused.  He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched.  He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice.  He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive.  Adams shared that belief.

    Jefferson, and those like him believed that the rightness of the cause would win out.

    Neither Jefferson or Adams had served in the military, but it appears that Adams at least had seen a bit of bloodshed.  He grasped an essential reality—that ideals do not win battles.  And yet, politically, he clung to his ideals in the face of an enemy who seemed capable of indulging any tactic in the cause of winning, namely Jefferson.  Almost a complete reversal of roles, at least in appearances.

    Or was it?

    Adams seems to have had a grasp of the long-term in a way that Jefferson, with his mercurial fixation on posterity, did not.  Adams grasped that the fields in which ideals must be left unsullied by pragmatism are different than those in which an immediate fight for survival is waged.  He would not interject himself where his loyalty to the Constitution said he ought not, even when it might win him another term as president.  Jefferson seemed willing to do work-arounds whenever his vision demanded.

    I’m simplifying, of course.  Adams blundered in terms of ideals badly with the Alien and Sedition Act.  He knew he would be remembered more for that—and not well—than for having steered the country through the shoals of potential disaster by refusing to take sides in the squabble between England and France.  And the Alien and Sedition Act is a nasty, unAmerican piece of political offal.  Patently unConstitutional.

    And yet Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory was also patently unConstitutional, a violation of due process, and in many ways unleashed nastiness and ugliness by opening up all that land to American incursion, wiping out more Native American nations and people, bringing us into direct conflict with Spain and then Mexico, lent opportunity for future presidents to exercise the worst aspects of imperial ambition all in the name of the United States and in contradiction to the Founding Intent of the republic….and for that he is praised.

    The essential element of the American Revolution, as it was happening at the time, is simply a group of talented men scrambling around trying desperately to make something workable out of a deadly situation.  They didn’t want a king anymore, they wanted to run their own affairs, but they were also terrified of their neighbors, so some legal wall had to be built to keep New York or Pennsylvania or Virginia from dictating to the smaller states.  The southern colonies operated as agrarian economies based on slave labor, and they wanted to maintain that, so something had to be done to make sure the abolitionists in the north couldn’t strip them of millions of dollars worth of property and labor.  In the tumult of ongoing war, they were working at a fever pitch to make sure they came out the other side with what they wanted, even at the expense of the unity that was to guarantee a victory, and they had no idea how it was all going to look.  It was bedlam.  It was panic-stricken intellectual jerrymandering.

    And somehow out of this a framework evolved that, not then and not for a long time to come, but eventually emerged as a marvelous machine.

    But there was little solidarity of invention, little conformity of vision.  They all knew that they had to fight to be severed from Great Britain.  That afterward they needed to erect a coherent government that wouldn’t take from them what they saw Britain trying to take from them.  How they were going to do all this, on that there was little agreement.

    It was a mess.

    The myth prevails.

    But not so much that sound research and a little patient thought can’t recover what might actually have been going on, and sometimes the results are something wonderfully poignant, insightful, and honest as this miniseries.  It ought to be shown in grade school.  It ought to be part of any American history course.

    At a book festival a few years ago, I attended a discussion by a historian who had just published a biography of Aaron Burr.  She’d taken the trouble to go back to primary sources and look at the man through the lens of his times rather than our modern, prejudiced view of a murderer and traitor.  She talked about the humanness of these people, who were an amalgam—hero and villain, coward and genius, self-serving and patriotic, publicly strong and privately weak—when someone stood up to condemn her for her scholarship.  His argument was that it wasn’t right to denigrate these people who had given us so much.

    “I’m not denigrating anyone, sir,” the historian said.  “I’m simply showing them as they actually were.”

    “What good does that do?  I don’t want to know that they were assholes.  I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

    I don’t want to know that they were assholes.

    Understandable sentiment, perhaps, but without realizing how utterly human they were we risk deifying them.  And we’ve seen that process at work through most of our history, to greater or lesser degrees.  The temptation to cast the revolutionary era in bronze and hold it up as some ideal age is great because it seems so simple and honest and straight-forward compared to our present age of almost fractal complexity.  We can see the desire for that kind of simplicity and, we believe, dependability in the constant purges against politicians who prove themselves frail or hypocritical or simply too human.  We want paragons, walking talking ideals who never stray from the Philosopher’s Gold of which we think the Founding Fathers were composed.  We sacrifice a lot of talent this way.  Brilliant economists, diplomats, orators, legislators get harried out of office because they slept with someone out of wedlock or smoked pot in college or eschew a religious point-of-view.  The examination of private lives in search of the unstained, pure of heart, consistently noble character drives the best and brightest away from even putting themselves forward to serve.  As if any of these factors relate to competence or civic virtue or ability to lead.

    Any examination of the Founding Fathers shows such a catalogue of human frailty that likely none of them today could get elected as small-town councilman much less to the highest offices of the land.  Among them were speculators, slave owners, philanderers, alcoholics, bigots, gamblers, and all manner of personal hypocrisy.

    But look at what they managed to build.

    I think more such dramatizations ought to be made.  We should know very well how human these people were.  We should know that, really, they weren’t so very different than we were, beyond those differences that time and circumstance inevitably produce.  It would do us good to get the idea that if these—uncertain, petty, churlish, hypocritical, frightened men—could do what they did when the opportunity presented itself, what can we not aspire to accomplish with all the benefits of their histories and our present abilities?  Knowing that we are more like them than not would be a good thing, I think.

  • Hating the Government: An American Tradition.

    G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele made a few remarkably in-your-face comments recently about the health care debate.  Here, in his own words, is pretty much where he thinks the nation is going, why it shouldn’t go there, and what the Republican Party stands for.

    This morning on NPR  he tangled with Steve Inskeep, in particular over this.

    One quote in particular caught my eye:  ” Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.”

    When you listen to the NPR interview it’s clear that we’re hearing another in the now decades-long tirades against the government which has become the hallmark of Right Wing politics in this country.

    In this country, in theory, the government is supposed to be us, the people.  We elect our representatives, we tell them how we want them to vote, we change our minds, we are supposed to be in charge.  In theory.  Obviously, the reality is far from that.  For one, we are not a full-fledged democracy, we are a republic, and while we elect those who operate the machinery of the republic on our behalf, we do not have a direct say in the running.  Nor could we, really.  it is simply too complex.  We send our representatives to the various points of departure—state capitols, Washington D.C., county seats, city halls—to do that for us because it is a big, complex, often indecipherable melange of conflicting goals, viewpoints, and problems.  We do not have the time to pay the necessary attention to do that work ourselves, so we pay people to do it for us.

    So why do we distrust it so much?

    Well, because we distrust each other.

    No, really, let’s be honest for a few minutes here.  We make certain assumptions going into a polling booth that the results will lead to some kind of cohesive approach to the enterprise we view as Our Country.  It’s rather surprising how often that turns out to be the case, but it’s not at all what we may actually intend.  This country is a collection of competing factions, down to the faction of the individual in confrontation with everyone else, and up to the factions of whole states in conflict with other states.  We vote for people who will represent our desire to be safe from our next door neighbor.

    If that’s stating it too strongly, consider the reality.  Zoning laws are in place to prevent our next door neighbor from building something we don’t want next to us, be a bar, an art studio, a bordello, or just an odd-looking house.  I know, it’s supposed to regulate the conflict between residential and business, but in practice it’s a way to keep people out of our neighborhoods.  Used to be it applied directly to people, but that was determined to be unConstitutional.  Nevertheless, there are ways of manipulating housing costs, taxes, and other things to more or less accomplish the same thing—if we can’t keep people of different ethnic varieties out, at least we can make sure they have money, right?

    Of course, it’s a contest, and these ordinances are challenged all the time—it’s a see-saw, or a tug-of-rope.  My point is, the basis of it is the very American value of being free from your neighbor’s values.

    Go on up the ladder of issues.  The entire edifice of American self-image is based on the notion that a true American can—and must—fend for himself and that, in order to do so, he must be free from encumbrances wherever possible.  If you carry this idea to its extreme, you begin to see why there is such profound distrust of government, especially since the Sixties.

    To put it as bluntly as possible, the fear of Socialism is a hatred of being forced to be responsible for your next door neighbor.  The anger fueling the antipathy for most single-payer or universal health care programs in this country comes from a sense that these ideas by-pass self-sufficiency and limit the individual’s ability to be separate from people he or she dislikes.

    Now, I hasten to add that Americans do show a tremendous capacity for generosity.  We are sociable, we more often than not will turn out to help people in need, we have a history of spontaneous charity and rescue work.  The money we spend yearly on aid and relief through various nongovernmental agencies and even as individuals is enormous and makes my previous statement seem paradoxical.

    It is not a paradox.  It has to do with what we perceive as choice.  See, if I decide to help the family down the street, who have fallen on hard times, I will do so.  I may even corral a number of my friends and neighbors into pitching in.  And if we succeed in helping them out of a tough spot and they get back on their feet, we—at least I—won’t even self-administer a back-pat of congratulations.  Success is its own reward.

    But if it turns out, in whatever estimation you care to use, that the family we’re helping is beyond help for whatever reason, that perhaps dad is an alcoholic or they have a different problem that cannot be met or any of a thousand circumstances that make it appear they will never get out of their tough spot, I—and my neighbors—have the option to drop them as a cause.

    If we are administering that aid via the government, we can’t do that.

    We now must all remember the chorus of welfare stereotypes we have heard all our lives.

    Perhaps a little more telling, we must bear in mind the misapplication of the public weal in exactly those circumstances which have resulted in people doing worse.  Many a state welfare agency—it varies—had, at one time or another, qualifications for aid that did often leave people in worse condition.  In New York throughout the Seventies and much of the Eighties, to qualify for assistance, you had to have lost everything.  There was no assistance for someone who just need a little help to keep them in their house or their decent apartment until they could find a job.  No, you come back when you’ve been foreclosed on or the sheriff has dumped all your belongings on the curb, then we’ll give you assistance.

    This didn’t happen with Federal aid, but state.  Other things, usually the minority of instances where a bureaucratic glitch ended up costing a citizen dearly, that grew in the telling until it was a horror story.

    But it wouldn’t matter.  Because we have a fundamental problem with being responsible for people for whom we have no affection, to whom we feel we owe nothing, we fight against public programs that even remotely seem like Socialism.

    We have also been fed a steady diet since Vietnam of governments that run black ops on their own citizens.  The government is the enemy.  We can’t walk away or opt out.  It’s the government, what can you do?

    And sometimes it’s true.  I lived through a period during which our phones were tapped and I was followed home from school for a time by FBI agents, all because it was 1969 and my dad owned a gun shop.  Nothing ever came of it, everything my dad did was legal and above board, but the presence of the government was palpable.

    Americans want none of that.  We’re independent, self-sufficient, we don’t need your damn help or your damn interference.

    Look at the difficulties with education.  Parents resent state requirements to teach subjects of which they disapprove.  Never mind that it might be for the longterm best interest of everyone that their kids know something about real history, real science, or even just about their own bodies, “we don’t want the government teaching our kids things we don’t like.”

    But if the government moves against people we don’t like, we’re all for it.  We want the government to do something about drug dealers, pornographers, Ponzi schemers, toxic waste dumpers…

    Unless that happens to be our business that’s involved in the investigation and the new requirements…

    But basically we just don’t want the government telling us we have to pay for people we don’t like.  And never mind the reality.  never mind that our perception of certain people is skewed.  Fine, if that’s true, then eventually we’ll figure it out and fix it, but we’ll do the figuring out, thank you, and we’ll do the fixing.

    Never mind that it doesn’t usually work that way—if left to collective individual sentiment, we might still have slavery, the vote still wouldn’t be universal, segregation would still be legal, and you still wouldn’t be able to buy certain books in a book store.

    The danger here is that in arguing against a mindset that is in many ways systemically pathological, we overlook genuine concerns and embrace an all or nothing posture that will as readily dismiss workable solutions because they seem to appease a point of view we find ridiculous.  As in many such issues, the rational may be abandoned by both sides in the heat of ideological confrontations.  There is no question that many major institutions, erected at various times to meet problems that seemed about to overwhelm us, might have been done differently, more even-handedly, more sensibly if only the confrontation with the solution’s critics had not taken on an all-or-nothing extremism.

    Somehow, along the spectrum of The People to The Government, a disconnect has happened that will not yield to simple common sense.  Yet the same skepticism doesn’t seem to apply to corporations.  People hate individual corporations, cast them as evil, but somehow fail to see the corporate system as a problem.  The idea seems to be that if only XYZ Corporation were run more ethically everything would be all right—we never quite make the leap to seeing that the way corporations are is at the heart of the problem and that XYZ Corporation can’t run any differently by the very nature of its make-up.  Yet that is the suspicion we carry bone-deep about the government—that it doesn’t matter who is in office now, the government by its very make-up is evil.

    The result ends up being an abandonment of rational problem solving.  We’re presented with a false choice—a government solution or freedom.

    Back in the Sixties, Ronald Reagan made his political bones running for governor of California, and he took on a proposed national health care bill then being debated.  He called it Socialism and that if we allowed it then “one day you’ll be telling your grandchildren about the time when we were free.”

    The only thing you would lose, it seems to me, by using government as pathway to addressing certain social problems, is the freedom to turn your back on someone just because he or she doesn’t appeal to you.  You won’t be able to walk away from your neighbor.

    But then, your neighbor won’t be able to turn his back on you.

    Yeah, I’m idealizing.  But isn’t that what the G.O.P. is doing?  Stating cases that by their extreme ideological tone are caricatures of reality?

    I’ll leave you with this thought:  it may be perfectly natural to want to separate yourself and your family from poverty, even if that means pretending it’s not your problem.  Maybe it’s not, directly.  But we don’t live in a world where we have the luxury of letting the poor remain unaddressed.  Poverty and disease are linked.  Tuberculosis is making a comeback, and it’s the poor neighborhoods where it’s taking hold first, and some strains are now drug resistent.  TB itself recognizes no class.  Money won’t stop it.  Withold services from them and the kids in rich counties are increasingly liable to come into contact with it.  Poverty is an incubator.

    I don’t want universal health care because I’m such a great humanitarian.  I want it to protect myself and my family and friends from the epidemics history shows us germinate through the poor first.  Untreated diseases don’t just go away because they live in bad neighborhoods and effect people we don’t hang with.  Let that get started, then we’ll all find out just how self-sufficient we really are.

  • A Question…or Two…or More…

    Just a couple of what seem to me like obvious questions.  (I know, I’ve been writing a bit on the health care debate, and I’ll try to do some other things after this, don’t want to bore anyone, especially myself.)

    I see a lot of protesters waving signs that contain something like this:  HEALTHCARE REFORM YES, GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER NO.  TORT REFORM NOW!

    Something about that doesn’t quite add up.  If health care is to be reformed, who is going to do it?  The industry isn’t without that there is a threat.  Which means there will have to be something outside the industry doing the threatening.  What might that be?

    Hmm.  The government?

    And the nature of the reform, if it isn’t to be entirely self-serving on the part of the industry, will have to be devised by a somewhat disinterested party.  Who might that be?

    The government?

    And tort law…well, that’s, as it says, Law.  Which is legislation.  Which is—wait for it!— the government!

    So what is being asked for here?

    That the government enact reforms that do not involve the government, do not make use of government authority, do not engage government offices, and will not grant the government any power to enforce.

    So how will that work exactly?

    Or is there some third party out there we haven’t been told about capable of doing all this reforming?

    Oh, the market!  Which basically is consumers, which is, well, all of us.  The people.

    But wait…isn’t the government supposed to be the duly elected voice of the people?  So if the people are demanding reform, how are the people supposed to both express such a desire and then implement said reforms?

    I guess, through their duly elected voice—the government.

    But if the government is not to be trusted, I guess that means the people aren’t to be trusted.  The people don’t know what they want, what is good for them, or how to go about managing the reforms they’ve demanded and, somehow, achieved.  So there will have to be an appointed body of presumed experts who do know how to manage all this to act on the people’s behalf…

    Who might that be?

    The industry?  Hmm.  Well, since it’s the industry that needs reforming and the people who have demanded reform, handing management of the reform over to the very thing that needs the reform would seem, well, not to put to fine a point on it, stupid.

    So I guess we’d have to elect a representative body to manage the reforms.

    Oh, wait, don’t we already have such a body?

    Yeah, it’s the government.  So by demanding reform of an industry, it would seem reasonable that we not trust the industry (that already doesn’t do what we want it to do) to reform itself.  It would be silly to create a whole other body to oversee all this when one already exists that has over two centuries of expertise in doing exactly this sort of thing.

    So how is anything is going to change otherwise?

    Just wondering, you know, because some of the demands sort of don’t make any sense.

  • The Madman In The Auditorium

    I like Barney Frank.  He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better.  But it’s almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week.  I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it’s a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler?

    A woman carrying a poster with Obama’s image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy.

    There are so many things wrong with this it boggles the mind where to begin.  Frank’s response was probably the most effective.

    “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” he asked.  Then:  “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”

    He then commented that her freedom to carry that poster and make such lamebrained statements was a tribute to the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech.  I salute his restraint.

    To  compare any president of the United States to Hitler is a stretch, even with the likes of Obama’s predecessor.  (I might consider it for Cheney, but even he does not match the level of malignancy achieved by Adolph, nor does our system allow for such people to act with unrestrained impunity, hard as that might be for some to accept.)  But to compare Barack Obama to the mad man of the 20th Century is such a profoundly ignorant mischaracterization that it is tempting to write off this whole experiment in potential civilization as a failure.

    Where does this shit come from?

    The Republican Party, what is left of it, is grasping at straws, sinking in the quicksand of its own inanity.  We must take care to not be pulled into the quagmire in some misguided attempt to rescue it through well-intentioned but doomed bipartisan sentiments.  The Republican Party has devolved into a nasty cadre of ideologues, a shrinking room of hydrophobic screechers who claw and scratch at anyone who tries to do this country a service by bringing it back to some semblance of decency.  They have fed on their own conspiracy-fevered viscera for so long that they cannot even hear the words much less the sentences of opposing viewpoints.  We should perhaps let them sink and drown.  It would be a kindness.

    The fear-mongering is reminiscent of everything we’ve seen since 2000.  Rachel Maddow, who is one of the most able of contemporary analysts on television, shows the process and the connections here.

    Shouting, screaming, inane blather—noise filling the spaces in which rational discourse might take place if only the decibel level could be reduced.  Platitudes, sloganeering, slander, and lies are flooding these so-called town hall meetings and shoving aside reason and discovery and thought.  These are not people who are interested in understanding anything, they are people bent on stopping something they’ve been told—been told—they should not allow.

    Why?  because for the last almost three decades we have been regularly told that the government is bad.  That anything the government touches turns to dross.  Because when the government tells you it is there to help, you should run away.

    Why?

    Because corporate America is a competing government and will not surrender power.

    There is a scene in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locusts where the head of the movie studio talks about the demands of the writer’s union.  They want control over their scripts, input int he process of filmmaking, a say in what gets cut, rewritten, changed.  The mogul tells his crony “Uh uh.  I’ll give them money, but I’ll never give them control.”

    I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the book in front of me.  What has this to do with the current debate?  (And I ask in all seriousness, What debate?)  It’s the same thing:  corporate America will give discounts, new services, it will spend money through lobbyists on politicians, it will spend money shipping professional protesters around the country, but it will never give up control.

    Well, if only it worked that way.  If corporate America got together and and actually did something about the health care issue, then all this might be worth it.

    There are simple facts that need to be addressed.  We all know what they are.

    Health care is pricing itself out of the the reach of the lower middle class.  It has already done so with the working poor.  It’s becoming too expensive for the middle class.

    Ah, the critic says, those people do have access!  Yes, emergency room care, which is not the best and not a fix.  It’s a maintenance system whereby band-aids get applied that keep people going but do not give them health.

    Costs.  Technologically, we have the best medical system in the world.  The problem is, we can’t afford to use it on everyone.

    Simple problem.  Where do you start to address it?

    The publicly owned insurance companies posted profits of between three and five percent in the last few years.  On volumes in the tens to hundreds of billions, that can add up to a lot of money, but direct redistribution of those profits toward cutting costs will do very, very little.  We can assume the privately held companies are making about the same profit.  Sorry, but stripping away three percent profit margins isn’t going to lower overall premiums at all.

    Hospitals scramble to make ends meet because the insurance companies can bargain down the prices hospitals charge.  I witnessed that personally a few years ago and was amazed at the size of the bill initially written and the amount the insurance company actually paid.  I was not billed the difference.  The shortfall had to be made up somewhere, you’d think, and it is—through Medicare.

    The government already subsidizes the system.  And Medicare works pretty well, but in terms of lowering the overall cost of national health care, its hands are tied.

    The fact remains, our tax dollars are already paying a good part of the freight.  How come no one is complaining about that?

    Probably because most people don’t make the connection.  And because the government appears to have little say in how the system operates.  (This isn’t true, but no one has bothered to find out.)  What the government does not have any say in is how much all this actually costs.  Supposedly the market takes care of that and it is assumed—generally by people who have health insurance and good care—that the price paid is just what it costs.

    It’s like a room into which all the stuff we’d rather not pay attention gets tossed.  Like Fibber McGee’s closet, we can’t afford to open it lest all that stuff explode all over us.

    The system is headed for a breakdown, and I imagine that some in the industry are likely trying to figure out how to fix it before it does become like the automobile industry and collapses.

    None of which has anything to do with those people comparing Barack Obama to Hitler.  They had internalized the faith that the government must be kept out at all costs, that the government will hurt us, that the government will destroy, that the government cannot do anything right.

    They hold these views even while they depend on that same government for all the things they’re not complaining about.  This is very much a religious psychology, which holds two conflicting viewpoints in the mind simultaneously and sees no contradiction.  These folks are incapable of rational discourse because they’ve accepted a premise which is false from the start but which they cannot abandon because it is the foundation of their patriotism.

    Yes, I said patriotism.  For they see themselves that way.  They are “saving America” from the Socialists, the Communists, the Liberals.  If universal health care comes to pass, they will have lost their country, because….

    Why?  What is it they think will happen?

    I do not know.  I can guess, but even that may be off-base.

    But one thing I do know—if they win, they will have damaged the political process once again.  They will have made it impossible to hold a rational conversation on a national level.  They will have proved one more time that rather than argue, reasonable people will go home and say nothing.  Because reasonable people usually have difficulty acknowledging irrationality in individuals—functional insanity.  We have a hard time seeing someone as being utterly devoid of a single worthwhile thing to say on a given topic.  We are reasonable, we know they can be if only given a chance, and we have such faith in reason that we won’t accept its opposite in others.  We can’t understand why reason won’t win.

    Barney Frank doesn’t seem to have much trouble with that, though.  He nailed it.  The woman with the poster, to him, had no more intelligence than the dining room table.  It would be a good thing right now if all the rational people would start getting a little more impatient, a little less tolerant of idiocy, and little louder.  We’re supposed to be smarter than them, but we are loathe to pick up a cudgel even when the madman is running around with scissors and hurting people.  Time maybe to get over that.