Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

To Care Or Not To Care

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments for and against the Affordable Healthcare Act, specifically the individual mandate. At issue is whether or not the Constitution allows Congress to require people to pay for something they do not want. Commercially, that is.

At least, that’s the stated issue. Depending on the group you listen to, the real issues range across the board, from “death panels” to socialism to Big Brother government intrusion to contraception.

There are some paradoxes. Without getting into precise numbers—because, really, which ones are correct?—I’d like to review some of the inherent curiosities in this debate.

Health care costs are going up. This fact is not disputed, I think, by anyone. (Just taking this from a purely personal viewpoint, I’m one, maybe two rate increases away from having to give up my own insurance.) There are a number of reasons for this—aging population, more and better technology available, slicker, more sophisticated pharmaceuticals, malpractice insurance, etc. One factor, of course, is fewer people in the health insurance pool. Common sense tells us that the more people you have participating in something, sharing the cost, the price per person goes down even while the overall pool of available money increases. This is simple logic, basic math, economics 101. Health insurance has gone up in large part because a great many people have dropped out of the load sharing.

Yet any attempt to make all those people participate is characterized as a bad thing.

Freedom of choice, you say. Fair enough.

It would be fair if those people did not receive any health care they could not pay for out of pocket.

But they do. We won’t let hospitals turn them away when they show up at emergency rooms. Fair would be to tell them “you don’t have coverage, go home and die.” Then live with it. But we won’t do that. Which means the load sharing increases on all the rest of us who do participate.

Hm.

Paradox number two. Everyone—well, everyone who seems opposed to the AHCA—is terrified of rationing. Of not being able to see a doctor when they want and then being refused treatment.

But that happens now. Except it happens within the private health care system. Insurance companies deny coverage, hospitals in turn do not deliver certain levels of care, and if you’re really poor you don’t get to see a doctor when you want for checkups. The only time you usually see a doctor is when you absolutely have to and then it’s an emergency room doctor you may never see again for follow-up.

So…what’s the complaint? That the rationing that happens now is acceptable and the rationing that might come from the AHCA is not?

Why?

Back to costs. The worry is (stated worry) that we will have to pay for something we don’t want. I, being a healthy twenty-something who has never had more than a bad cold (aside from the usual list of childhood diseases, many of which I didn’t suffer because I received vaccinations, which I got because health care was both available and paid for by someone else), can’t justify laying out a hundred bucks a month for an insurance policy I think I don’t need, and resent the idea that the government is going to make me pay for it. Besides, this cool job I just got offers health care as part of the package.

But next year I’m going to be required to pay a higher percentage of my employer health care because costs are rising. Hell, I don’t need it, so just cut me from it. But that means everyone else in the company will end up paying more because I’m not chipping in. At some point, the raise I expect will be delayed because the company has to meet rising expenses, which is a rip because I’m healthy and I’m being penalized now because other people aren’t.

So…what was that about being forced to pay for something I don’t want? Just because there’s no check written that I send to someone for it does not mean I don’t pay for it. There are many other ways in which the costs get levied.

Of course, I always intended to buy a policy when I reached my forties or fifties and maybe start having a few more problems…

By then, it’s not a hundred a month, it’s more like four hundred a month. Why is it so high? Because the costs are spread over a smaller and smaller pool of buyers. (And, to be strictly fair, we have more and more care available to pay for—technology has handed us a veritable cornucopia of options these days.) How come they don’t do something to make all those self-centered smart asses pay their fair share so my up front costs aren’t so high?

Paradox the fourth. No one, I’m reasonably sure, thinks pre-existing conditions are fair excuses to be denied the right to buy something you do want—namely, health insurance.

But somehow the government forcing insurance companies to provide such coverage—to people who want to buy it—is an infringement of personal choice? That the rights of the insurance company are being violated?

Okay, so let’s have a public option. Oh, wait, that opens the door to government control and rationing and private companies won’t be able to compete…

So if that’s not an option, what are people with these conditions supposed to do? Wait till a crisis and go to the emergency room.

Either way, you’re telling them that whether they’re willing to pay or not, they can’t have what they want because…?

Other problems. “Everyone knows” that preventive care saves a lot of money. Catching problems before they get big means a healthier life, lower risks, lower costs, and so on. “Everyone” knows this but no one thinks the government should mandate it. We should rely on private insurers to offer the policies.

“Everyone” forgets that there was a hell of a fight back in the Nineties when the government did finally require insurers to offer things like Well Baby Care. Insurers didn’t want to do it. Mainly because a lot of doctors didn’t want to do it—it’s a low profit practice.

But maybe I’m misunderstanding things here. Maybe I’m missing the whole point. I can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that a lot of people seem to believe that private enterprise will do something it has been consistently reluctant to do unless the government makes it, that in order to preserve some construction of liberty we should be willing to just suffer from a range of treatable ailments and force fewer and fewer people to pay more and more, privately, for less and less available care.

Don’t get me wrong. American medical care is probably the best in the world—if you can afford it.

If you can’t, well, it’s still not bad, but it’s lurching along, bleeding from open wounds, and one of these days the rationing everyone thinks will occur with government involvement will become very real without government involvement. Maybe one of these days we’ll get over our objections to just turning people with no money away and sending them home to suffer and die.

I don’t really think people have thought this through. But I could be wrong.

But I do know that, human nature being what it is, people will generally try to avoid doing anything, even if it will benefit them, if they don’t have to. The problem is that “don’t have to” part. It’s like that old auto repair commercial—“You can pay me now…or pay me later.”

March 28, 2012
The Other Side

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn.

Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution. History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal.

Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it. Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently. A couple of later territories parlayed an “escape clause”—Texas was a big one, but the Texas “right to secede” had a limiting condition: Texas could only leave as long as it never took up arms against the Union, which, much to Sam Houston’s consternation, it did during the Civil War and forever lost that right, despite what Governor Perry might wish people to believe—but by and large, joining the Union was a binding act that could not be reversed other than by armed rebellion. The South was in the wrong, legally speaking.

Another bit of modern revisionism that has become popular is that the South did not secede over slavery but over “states rights.” This is patent nonsense and any cursory perusal of the declarations of secession shows that issue number one for all of them was slavery. They were not going to let Abraham Lincoln and his Republicans take away their property.

It’s difficult to imagine how it must have felt to be caught between the two sides. Philosophically, I mean. And where you lived didn’t make much difference. There were riots in New York and other places in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many Northerners who had supported Lincoln in the war effort turned on him when the issue changed from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves. Poor whites were no more enamored of the idea of free blacks than were Southern plantation owners. As far as they were concerned, it was more competition for already depressed wages.

And the fact is many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, even among those who didn’t support slavery as such, did not regard Africans as fully human—at least not the equal of white people.

Try as we might to spin it otherwise, the many-faceted nature of the War Between The States turned on questions of what it meant to be human.

We still have not settled that question. It may be that for many people it is simply not settleable.

I want to be very careful here. My purpose in laying out the nature of the conflict during the Civil War is to establish a base for what may end up being another civil war if we’re not very careful. The conduct—philosophically, politically, legally, morally—on both sides of the slave/emancipation divide illuminates aspects of our culture and our nature that are difficult.

There may have been many white people at the time who truly believe blacks were fully human and fully equal by nature to whites. Most of them did not hold much authority and given subsequent history they did not win the public debate. African Americans remained second or third class citizens for well over a century after the end of the war and in some ways today still face an uphill struggle for equity. The bases of the discrimination mutated over time and it might be fair to say problems shifted from nature to nurture and took on sociological contours rather than biological, but the fact remains people do not treat each other as fully human in all circumstances.

It is a salient fact of our history that during the heated debates of the Emancipation and Reconstruction Eras over equal rights, equal status, and equal abilities, one group was not even considered as relevant. Women.

Certainly the Women’s Suffrage Movement put forth arguments for equality, but the country was not likely to go to war over what people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony asserted—that one half the population lived in conditions of chattel bondage and servitude based on gender.

The list of inarguable facts speaks for itself. Women did not have the right to vote (federally, that is—some states granted it, here and there, from time to time, in limited fashion) until 1920.

Throughout the 19th Century, a divorced woman lost everything. As a married woman, all her property belonged to her husband, including the children, and in the instance of a divorce the law said her ex-husband owed her nothing. She left with the clothes on her back, which was all she was legally entitled to. Variations existed here and there, but generally this was the case.

A woman was denied entree into the professions whenever possible. The first woman to graduate with a medical degree in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849. She was barred residency in a hospital due to her sex. The struggle continued, but by 1920 women represented only 5% of the entire medical profession as doctors. Elizabeth Bragg graduated from Berkely in 1876 as a civil engineer, but it was not until 1965 that a woman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 1869, Arabella Mansfield graduated law school and applied to the bar in Iowa. Iowa law forbade any but white males from taking the bar, but an exception was made. She passed. (A year later the law was repealed, suggesting that she was allowed to take the bar examination with an expectation that she would fail.)

You get my meaning. The numbers were low, the exceptions more or less famous. Most women in the professions generally had to give them up when they married and there was no social space for a career woman to live her life with the same expectations of free conduct as her male counterparts. The professions for women were very much like taking vows.

The Civil War seemed to settle the question as to the humanity of slaves, but did nothing for women.

Of course, had you phrased it that way at the time, many people, including many women, would have looked at you like you had just stepped off a spaceship speaking High Arcturan. Of course women are human, they might answer. But, good heavens, they’re women.

As if that explained anything.

At the time, it sort of did, though. Women had a clearly-defined function as far as society—and most people—were concerned. They were to be wives and mothers. Anything else was vanity at best, offensive at worst. Women should be what they were “made to be” and aspire to nothing more.

It didn’t seem to occur to most people that the prohibition on aspiring to be more implied that women did aspire and aspiration was a wholly human trait.

But I digress. The fact is, any attempt to question this basic assumption was met with disdain and often the full force of the law. The Suffrage Movement itself split over the nature of female aspiration—most thought it enough to simply get the vote, while others intended that women be granted the full rank and privilege of being human as expressed by the lives of their male counterparts, with all that entailed. It might be that this was more a tactical issue, but I don’t doubt that for many it was philosophical as well. In an instance of political expedience, the Suffrage Movement repudiated the ambition to make women wholly their own agents and decided to stick to the more “sanitary” program of achieving the vote. They didn’t want to frighten potential male supporters by arguing for their right to be anything other than what they had always been—wives and mothers—only with the right to vote.

Of course, even after gaining suffrage in 1920, women remained second-class citizens because society treated them that way. Educational opportunities were harder to gain, access to jobs and careers more difficult (and when gained, advancement and recognition delayed or denied), and economic shackles remained. Up till the 1990s, a woman’s credit history belonged to her husband, and often, even after a divorce, she would find it very difficult to establish any credit on her own without her (former) husband’s history making it awkward. As the 20th Century progressed, it became clear that the vote simply wasn’t enough, that equality was made up of much more than the franchise—it entails respect, agency, and an assumption of individual worth and merit, none of which can be gained by casting a ballot but only by being allowed to live as one chooses.

I think it came to a real head after the Second World War, when all those women, who had been working in industry, building the machinery with which we waged that war, were told to go home and forget all about self-sufficiency, because the men were coming home and they needed not only jobs but pliant females who wouldn’t compete with them. It wasn’t just the jobs, but a massive change in the educational system—classes that had opened up to women in the 20s and 30s were suddenly closing down again, women who wanted to pursue careers were castigated as unnatural, the whole weight of cultural expectation that characterized women as essential sex toys and brood mares fell on them in the 1950s and turned that decade into one of the strangest periods of American history and set the stage for all the emancipatory movements of the Sixties and Seventies. June Cleaver was the cultural icon women were supposed to aspire to. This to women who had been and whose mothers had been building tanks, airplanes, and ships in the 1940s, running assembly lines, driving trucks, farming, and so much more. They were expected to just forget all that and return to a condition of simple-minded obeisance all for the boys coming home.

As patriotic as this sounded, this was an instance where sacrifice becomes a form of slavery.

Yes, there were many women who were probably perfectly happy with this state of affairs. But their happiness was built on the shattered dreams of women for whom this was simply unacceptable. The one cannot be justified by the desire for the other.

By now, it may be obvious where I’m going with this. We are facing the possibility of another civil war, one I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn, but one that could be brutally destructive. We joked about the War Between the Sexes back in the day, but that’s not what this is. This is going to be a war over the exact nature of agency. The flags have now gone up the poles on the one side and I think it has taken a lot of people by surprise. The blowback is coming.

Here is how I feel about this. One side in this conflict wishes to privilege potential life in such a way as to deny self-determination and agency to half the population, the half that still has a solid argument that it has not yet been granted full equality with the other half. That for the sake of what may be they will have to surrender themselves to conditions of servitude that the other side simply does not have to suffer, purely by dint of biology.

It is not sufficient to argue that all the one side wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be. The way things used to be was not acceptable—that’s why we changed it. The way things used to be was built on hypocrisies and legal fictions that privileged a status quo which, as long as certain people exhibited no aspirations at odds with the publicly accepted norms, everyone pretended was equal and fair and just.

Well, we all know how often that is actually the case.

What disturbs me—appalls me, really—is how little the Other Side really knows, not only about our history, but about any history, and how they are so easily manipulated by the agents of regress. There are certain arguments we should have been done with that we’re having to have all over again because people—many people—don’t have a clue what has gone before.

They’re the sorts who believe the revisionists who tell us that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but states rights or that the South really did have the right to secede.

They’re the sort that believes that any woman who has the temerity to talk publicly about her right to have sex is a slut.

A word to the wise—it’s not temerity; it’s self confidence.

See you on the barricades.

March 23, 2012
Bunk

One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before. It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet. All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.

Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.

Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E. 37 to 68, emperor of Rome from 54 to his death by suicide in 68) became emperor after his uncle, Claudius, died. He has been portrayed in popular fiction and some histories as a self-indulgent libertine. The great fire that destroyed huge sections of the city in July of 64 has been laid at his doorstep for many reasons. He was, in fact, a big urban renewal guy and one of the few theories circulating at the time that has any traction of being real was that he was doing some rather brutal slum clearance in preparation for a new construction project. Even this seems unlikely, since the fire began very near to the Circus Maximus, which would be stupid if it were intentional, and also it began in a commercial area. No one knows how it began. It is much like the great Chicago Fire for which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has been forever blamed, an assertion invented by a reporter that has become such a staple of the popular folklore that even people who “know” it isn’t true still cite it.

In the case of Nero, however, it appears that he wasn’t even in Rome when it began and when he heard he returned and immediately began organizing relief efforts. The source of the “fiddled while Rome burned” is Suetonius and others who hated Nero. Apparently it never happened and in this instance the exact opposite seems to be the case—he worked hard to save Rome and do what was possible after the fact.

But such is the power of bunk that people still talk about the callous and depraved Nero playing his lyre and singing The Sack of Illium in costume while the city burned. It is a baseless piece of folklore, an urban myth of the first order.

There are two important things to take away from this. The first is, of course, the power of images to fix the imagination in such a way that fact and truth have no chance of getting around the preferred myth. The second is, such myths serve as distractions from genuine problems and redirect our attention from what is truly important onto fabulations that are easily manipulated and manipulative—because people who buy into them are more easily directed by such bunk in the hands of spinmeisters who would rather they didn’t pay attention to reality.

Because there was plenty about Nero that deserves serious ignominy. Just not this.

The other thing such bunk does is paint a figure wholly one thing or the other. There is no gray in such portrayals, no room for the ambiguities that are the way people really are. I said Nero was a big urban renewal emperor, and this is true. He was something of a reformer in this early reign and he did many public works that made him quite popular. He successively extended the Empire and established rules over certain abuses by the Senate, and so forth. Rome did not materially suffer under Nero.

But he had inherited the trend in Roman imperial life toward assassination as a means to consolidate power and even acquire it and apparently had his mother killed, who herself may have killed Claudius in order to secure the throne for her son. As his reign progressed, an evident paranoia took hold and he became more and more erratic until finally there was an uprising in Iberia and he read the writing on the wall and took his own life.

He left a mixed legacy.

But all we remember him for now is Rome burning, bad singing, and orgies (which were more evidenced in his Uncle Caligula’s reign than Nero’s). All the nuance is leached out and any lessons of value from understanding his reign are absent.

The other problem with bunk—you can’t learn anything from it.

I took some time with this business of Nero in order to lay the groundwork for my more contemporary point. See, we can all of us pretty much talk about things that happened two thousand years ago with some dispassion. (No one, I think, has a stake in falsely portraying Nero anymore.) We can step back and look at the false picture and see where it came from and how it happened and understand something about how popular animosities have always given rise to distortions and outright falsehoods.

The reason we should always be aware of bunk like this is so we are not distracted from what may be far more important. Bunk is noise, it is in a perverse way camouflage. Not only does bunk mask what may be good about someone or something, but it works just as well as a mask for what may be significantly worse. And for the one buying the bunk, it seriously erodes credibility, so that any valid criticisms he or she may have are suddenly given the same weight as the bunk—which is to say, none at all. Bunk cheapens everything.

But there has always been bunk. We love it. Often we prefer the legend to the truth. Legends are more colorful and certainly have the distinction of offering explanations that validate prejudices— but they do so without adding one worthwhile bit to any serious discussion. Often just the opposite happens. People who maintain the bunk version of events often impede constructive understanding and, if pressed, may actually turn on those trying to educate them out of the bunk. Bunk can be very hurtful. At the very least by taking up space where something useful might exist. But also by providing a convenient test for determining who is or is not a friend or enemy.

I don’t think I need list the various manifestations of bunk that currently make the rounds of the internet and fill people with rationales for their displeasure and explain absolutely nothing. We’ve all seen it. Worthless allegations, unsubstantiated accusations, constructions of arguments that miss the real point, false comparisons, and outright slander. We can recognize bunk because it always fails two major tests—logic and Occam’s Razor. I suppose, though, that those tests are really different sides of the same one. To put it simply, if something requires too many parts and demands the silent participation of too many people, or is simply far more complicated than seems reasonable, it is likely bunk. (It’s best not to attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by oversight or incompetence. History, after all, shows us that, with very few exceptions, most conspirators are incompetent—and they usually always overlook something.)

Anyway, I wish you all a bunk-free day. It’s too much to hope for a bunk free year.

March 15, 2012
Any Time They Want

I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in. I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine. (Remember him? No? Well, there’s hope after all.)

In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible. No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake. Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See? This is what we’re talking about!”

Here’s a conversation. I’ve scripted it, but it is based on reality, and if we’re honest we have all heard something like this.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a fundraiser for an NGO. We operate in twelve developing nations trying to implement grass roots reforms in education.”

“Wow, that sounds really interesting. How do you get work like that?”

“Well, after I earned my Masters from Stanford, I went into private sector work for a big agro firm. Part of what I did there was coordinate large scale testing of new cultivation methods in order to improve yield per acre in a variety of conditions. At first I was pretty hands-on with the researchers, but more and more I took over the actual negotiations, which meant a lot of PR work.”

“You traveled a lot?”

“Oh, I’ve been to China, Japan, Indonesia, India, plus a good part of the EU.”

“Must have been a lot of language barriers.”

“Some, but I speak Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and a bit of Urdu.”

“Sounds like a full-time job. Do you do anything for fun?”

“Oh, sure. I really like climbing and whenever I get the chance I do whitewater canoeing. I also play piano, but to really unwind I cook. I did a semester at a culinary institute, so…”

“Your husband must like that.”

“Oh, I’m not married.”

“Too bad.”

“Not really. Maybe someday, but right now I just don’t have time for a full-time relationship.”

(Significant pause.) “Is there anyone special in your life?”

“There are a couple of men I see fairly often, but most of the time it’s just casual dating.”

“Hmm.” Goes away thinking: slut.

A joke? Unfortunately not. Seems sometimes no matter what a woman does professionally or otherwise, no matter what her achievements might be, if she is in any way nonmonogamous, for many people that’s the only thing that matters. Whore, slut, garbage, trash, scum. More than one penis gets in there by her choice, everything else is worthless.

But with a man? The more successful professionally, the more it seems expected that he has had a string of “conquests.” It’s part of the perks that come with virile masculinity.

Yes, I know this is not a universally held attitude, but it is the majority default reaction, so the more thoughtful “good for the goose, good for the gander” attitude does not hold sway. We pander to the concept of the Man Who Lays Many. It’s cool, whether we like to admit it or not. We feel sorry for the male virgin and we have a variety of labels for him that are not particularly nice, the number one being Loser. (Yes, Loser appends to many other traits, but even the millionaire computer geek who can’t get laid is seen as pathetic. Money’s nice, but come on! And then there’s the second-tier attitudes toward men who use prostitutes: “You have to buy it? Jees!”)

The double standard, in other words, is not only alive and well, it’s stormed into the party and is wrecking the buffet.

There are many causes of this, it does not emerge from any one source—if it did, we might be able to do something about it more effectively—but all sources have one thing in common—fear. It’s not that men fear women as such. They fear being irrelevant, and at the end of the day success with women, especially passive, noncompetitive women, is balm to the savaged ego of many men. To have women compete directly or even (gasp!) exercise the right to indulge their sexuality the way men do (or are supposed to) is an intolerable threat.

This is sexual politics 101 and why we have to go over this again after the Sixties and Seventies baffles me. Unless the lesson simply didn’t matter.

There has been a growing tsunami of reaction since the Women’s Movement broke down the walls into what had been seen as an exclusively male domain. It has washed up on the beach now and into the halls of power where it is being made a Cause by men who, try as they might to spin it some other way, just can’t stand having women live independent lives.

So, yes, this whole nonsense over contraception is nothing less than an attempt to put women back in “their place” and people like Rush Limbaugh seem to think there is traction and resonance in labeling women sluts because they have sex “any time they want.” Of course, what is implicit in that “any time they want” is that they can say No any time they want.

And that’s probably what bothers the Rush Limbaughs the most.

March 4, 2012
Meltdown

I considered writing something about the recent primaries in Michigan and Arizona, in advance of Super Tuesday, but things have become so mind-numbingly bizarre I’m not sure I’d have anything relevant to say, at least not about this particular election cycle. As a personal observation, I’d like to say that any of the Republican candidates still vying for the nomination disturb me. Romney is the least noxious, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for someone (and yet, we often do). I don’t find him as objectionable as the other three, and in another era he would probably be a half-way decent president. But he would be a creature of his party and right now the GOP is in the process of a major meltdown.

Whether you agree with their policies or not, this is simply a fact that cannot be denied. Of course, many Republicans are very good at denial, which is one of the reasons their party is in the shape it’s in. Climate change, bailouts, evolution, birth control…their favorite word has become No and unfortunately for them you can’t run a government that way, much less a country. With the addition of the small but inordinately vocal and strident Tea Party contingent in 2010, the internal workings of the GOP have become untenable. If you don’t believe me, just look at John Boehner sometimes when he’s not being interviewed. The man is, I think, reasonable, but he’s saddled with an unruly bunch of pseudo-libertarians who think the best way to fix things is to do a complete tear-down and start all over. Combine them with the contingent that seems to believe the only citizens in the country are in the seven-figure income club and you have a recipe for doing virtually nothing for ordinary citizens. Boehner is not just trying to herd cats, he trying to guide a creature that is a cross between a honey badger and a burro. (I know, I know, that’s supposed to be the Other Party’s symbol.)

It has been so long since the sides in this war were formed, most people can be forgiven if they don’t really know what the fighting is all about. Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the battle lines that were drawn up way back in the Sixties and had concretized by the Nineties.

Republicans have traditionally been the party of the individual. This is the party that supports the self-made man, the entrepreneur, but there was a time that did not always mean the millionaire. They believe that America is made strong by encouraging and even occasionally forcing individuals to strive, on their own, to Make It. That interference from government hinders that potential, therefore as little control from above as possible should be applied. Let people go out and struggle and then reap the rewards of their efforts.

As quaint as that may sound, it’s a good philosophy, and it’s based on sound principles borne out by experience.

Democrats have traditionally been the party of factions. Large groups are their natural constituency, often groups made up of those who have been unable to compete in the individual struggle and ended up at the bottom of the heap. Consequently, they have been the advocates of trade unions, minorities, and various organizations that claim to speak for the voiceless.

You can see how this played out during the Great Depression. Few of the programs that FDR pushed in his first years were in any way original—or Democratic. Hoover started most of them. But Hoover did so with such penny-pinching trepidation, bolstered by his belief that direct government aid would damage the American worker and make him hopelessly dependent, that none of them did a bit of good. Still, he might have sold it had not the Bonus Marchers been met with the same pecuniary stinginess and, when they refused to go home, tanks. As soon as General Douglas MacArthur finished burning the shanty town of impoverished veterans out than Hoover told his staff that they had just handed the election to Roosevelt.

FDR funded Hoover’s programs to the hilt and started the slow process of digging the country out. He wasn’t much interested in the effect government aid might have on individuals, all he knew was that one-in-four American workers were unemployed, and that 25% made a big group that had to be dealt with, individuals be damned.

The philosophical differences could not have been more manifest.

And FDR was right. This was not a crisis of ordinary proportions, it called for something more. Hoover and the Republicans worried over the effects of big government and were willing to let people starve to preserve the principle. (Not really, but they kept insisting private charity should take up the slack, ignoring the growing evidence that private charity was as overwhelmed as everyone else. They didn’t really want anyone to starve, they just thought it should be compensated for privately, not through government. Sometimes, size matters.)

Now we come down to the present. Since Reagan came to power, these traditional lines have hardened. There are problems with the Democratic insistence that groups matter more than individuals. People cannot be dealt with in cookie-cutter fashion. Democrats have long been blinded by the unstated but implicit assumption that individuals who can take care of themselves (A) don’t need anything from government and (B) are dangerous to programs aimed at groups. This has led to some disastrous legislation from time to time, as in the Welfare Act of 1965 and Department of Education policies that ride roughshod over local school districts. Their one-size-fits-all approach has caused damage, just as unintended, I’m sure, as Republican’s inability to recognize when individuals just can’t get out of a hole on their own.

In times when there was an equitable distribution of reasonableness across both parties, these differences offset each other. Not perfectly, but things got done that actually did the country good. Sometimes you have to treat problems from a group perspective. Other times, you have to stand up for individuals.

But in both instances, these are policy problems, not something for which you go to the mat as though your soul depended on it. As the prime motive of an ideology, they are dangerous, and we’re seeing the results of just such an embrace now.

An underlying part of the disparity of viewpoint between the two, related to their fundamental differences, is their respective attitudes toward systems.

Let me explain. As people mingle, communicate, build, etc, they inevitably build systems. Infrastructure, certainly, like roads, railways, canals, telephones, and the like, but also social systems, which are like the deltas of great rivers—channels dug by long use that are difficult not to use, that direct the flow of people and sometimes ideas along lines that become preset. We sometimes call this culture, but culture is more than just a social system.

It seems—and my own interaction with Republicans over the years tends to support this—that Republicans don’t care to credit systems very much. Their traditional insistence on the hegemony of the individual underplays and often rejects the idea that systems matter much. An individual genuinely self-motivated can circumvent or even ignore systems. Which suggest that for those who don’t, can’t, or won’t do so choose not to. Hence you get the belief that poverty is indicative of the person’s will or character rather than a consequence of systems.

Democrats for their part tend to fall to the other side and place an overemphasis on the effect of systems, that in fact they are all that matter, and those individuals who can effectively ignore them are aberrations.

Now, I don’t suggest that each individual Republican or Democrat consciously thinks along these lines—but taken in aggregate the trends are obvious. (In a curious way, it’s almost a Nature vs Nurture argument, and when you look at the rhetoric of the extremists on both sides this emerges quite clearly—American exceptionalism on the one hand, American Imperialism on the other.)

What has also been clear historically—and I am speaking now of all history, not just American—is that those who grasp the fundamental operation and importance of such systems usually end up acquiring the power. (As a dramatic example, consider the French and the Germans of 1870. The French believed in elan, the courage of the individual French soldier, that as long as one had elan, nothing could defeat him. The Germans believed in training and logistics. The Germans won.)

The GOP has gone through a curious metamorphosis, though, over the last 30 years. While still operating from their basic premise that individuals matter most—and I have actually not heard any of them state this as a principle in a long, long time—they have fought the Democratic Party for control in order to save the country from an overburden of systems, which the Democrats consistently advocate as solutions to all sorts of problems, often to the detriment of the very people they seek to serve. In order to do this, they have honed their tactics and policies to the point where in order to deprive the enemy of the ability to conduct the war they have focused on funding and, paradoxically, on a kind of intellectual eugenics. While the individual matters most, they seem to advocate, only a certain kind of individual is really meant. This has led them to abandon the progressivism that once made up a significant part of their party philosophy—because progressivism was becoming more and more a matter of systems, vis a vis the so-called Safety Net and through federal education initiatives and so forth. Now, to take the extremist view, only True Americans are important, and they are defined by—

Well, that’s a problem. What constitutes a “true” American?

No matter. Someone will do that along the way, in fact the very individuals they are defending and encouraging will do the defining, and that has led them into a cul-de-sac wherein the members of the club are setting the admission standards and they get stricter and stricter every year.

This year, whether they intended it or not, they seem to have defined women out of the club. Along with gays and along with certain economic minorities and along with anyone who might otherwise qualify for membership who supports the aforementioned groups.

What I fear is they have defined themselves out of a viable constituency, because the definitions are narrower even as in the general population the definitions are broadening. The Democrats are better able to make political gains in this situation, if they so choose, because this is how social systems operate, and they are all about systems.

I’m not optimistic about this in the long run. As usual, both parties are missing certain fundamental realities. The Democrats have always bothered me the way trade unions bother me. I think we need more unions, but I don’t like them. I see them as necessary monsters, because, as unitary systems, they have little room for individuals with needs that aren’t part of the whole. I think we need them because the people who own the businesses are not kind and gentle souls, but single-minded, acquisitive wolves. It is not that such people don’t care about people but that people to them are simply components. Components in a system under their control.

And paradoxically these are the people that Republicans tend to support as examples of individuals.

I do not want to see the destruction of an organized conservative party. Unbridled progress can be as destructive as the utter suppression of progress. We need both in order to have a viable community. The worst aspects of the Democratic Party have not manifested for a long time simply because the Republicans waged a somewhat successful campaign against liberalism and the Democrats, in order to hang onto some power, moved to the right, and are now almost as centrist as Republicans of the Sixties and Seventies were. Systems, remember? They followed the runnels of the systems. But if the GOP melts down and fragments completely, we may see a different sort of Democratic Party emerge.

Right now, though, it appears to me that meltdown is on its way. The GOP has lost touch with the average American in a big way. They are becoming marginalized and if not this year then by the midterms of 2014 we will see them grappling with the death throes of becoming irrelevant. They have bent their ear to individuals, true, but only the individuals who still seem to talk to them, and they are a rarefied group indeed.

On the other hand, I may be overstating it. Whatever the case may be, something has to change within the GOP. They cannot survive as a party of extremists.

March 1, 2012
Narratives and the American Landscape

I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American. Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines. And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit. For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

We can go down the list. Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst. Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit. And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them. But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are. In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative. I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side. In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge. You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans. I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it. It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

But nuance, as I say, gets lost. I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment. And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs. If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

But I don’t want to continue the excuse making. The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps. Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent. I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984. (Admission time. I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980. In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term. Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election. I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements. Until Obama. He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans. There are still Conservative Democrats. But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean. The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical. On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical, concerned only with power and wealth. On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore. I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it. He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital. When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past. When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future. We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own. We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think. For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified. For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies. This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo. Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there. Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well. Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled. By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time. For now I think I want to do without labels. But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.

February 24, 2012
New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement

I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…

So, here’s a new look. I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well. I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.

I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.

I promised a post on the content of the Moyers-Haidt video and that’s still coming. I’ve been working steadily on finishing a novel and I’m within striking distance of the complete first draft. Oculus is the sequel to Orleans, which is currently in the hands of my estimably cool agent, Jen Udden. Once I finish this, I will hand it to my wonderful partner and first-reader, Donna, who will take a red pen and scrawl viciously all over it so that I may take the shredded remains and build from them a better book. While she’s doing that, I will be doing a number of things, among which include cleaning my office (which is a shattered and broken No Man’s Land, unfit for human habitation), doing some more work for Left Bank Books (link on the sidebar, go visit), working on more writing (surprise!) and penning more annoying commentary to post here on matters political, philosophical, personal…

Speaking of which, I recently endured one of the pitfalls of having strong opinions and the ability to voice them that, when it involves relative strangers, usually scrapes no skin off any body parts. I hope I’m wrong, but I seem to have lost a friend as a consequence of one such post. Politically, we were quite far apart, but managed what I thought was a fairly solid relationship—based on music, good food, good wine, things like that. After a few political conversations, we had, I thought, opted for detente and simply didn’t discuss it. But when you have a public face, that becomes a bit difficult to manage. What do you say to people? Don’t read this if you know we disagree fundamentally?

My attitude is caveat emptor. You come into my online home, feel free to froth and fret or even agree wholeheartedly. Feel free to take umbrage, throw money, tell me I’m wonderful or the scum of the earth. It is a public forum. I won’t back down from my principles or beliefs. If such offend to the extent that you feel compelled to collect your marbles and never visit again, so be it.

I will say this, regarding the broader arena of public discourse: I can become furious over a stated position and manage to regard someone as a friend. I’m willing to talk about anything, with just about anyone, as long as the dialogue is honest and honestly engaged. I may go away wondering how such opinions over this or that can possibly be held by a thinking human being, but I promptly caution myself that I am no judge of absolute right or wrong and no doubt some react the way to me. But I will ask that my writings be read completely and taken for what they say and judged according to their content. Factual mis-statements, hyperbolic distortions, and hissy fits do nothing to further anything and I will call anyone on them.

As I would expect them to call me on the same.

So. If you know in advance that your sensibilities may get rubbed raw by what you may find here, and you come anyway, react as you will, but know it’s on you. There are plenty other places on the intraweebs to go visit, many of which may offer solace rather than sandpaper.

That said, all are welcome. I have a FaceBook page with over four thousand “friends,” many of whom I doubtless disagree with on some topic. I do not unfriend anyone who disagrees with me. That’s childish. I believe we should engage other viewpoints. The polemical in-group isolation that has arisen from the self-selection of media has caused enormous damage to our public discourse. It has become far too easy to avoid opinions and beliefs and even facts that make us uncomfortable or that we wish were not true. I try not to do that. It is limiting and potentially destructive. What we are doing thereby is creating entirely separate languages. Words that mean one thing to one group mean something entirely different to another and because they no longer converse with each other on any regular basis, such meanings concretize and become barriers.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look. The mission, however, remains the same.

February 23, 2012
Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology

I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.

February 20, 2012
Where The Rubber Meets The Road (Womb)

Congress is holdings hearings on President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies cover contraception for employees of religious institutions. His earlier initiative, that such institutions pay for it themselves through their employee insurance plans, was met with outrage over a presumed infringement of religious liberty. He made what I, at least, consider an admirable compromise, sidestepping the primary complaint by mandating that the insurance companies pick up the costs. However, that didn’t satisfy congressional Republicans and religious conservatives.

Hearings were held.

Representative Issa of California held a panel to discuss the issue comprised entirely of men. All his witnesses were men. When challenged about why there were no women testifying, the reply was that the issue was not about contraception but about federal infringement of religion.

Women don’t have an opinion on that?

This is simple: the hullabaloo is over contraception coverage. The counterargument is that forcing religious institutions to provide for it, even by association, is a violation of their First Amendment rights, that if something violates religious conscience that religion has the right to refuse to participate.

I could concoct any number of scenarios in which that position is questionable at best. But for our Congress then to accept not only that proposition but to accept the further condition that even discussion of the fulcrum issue is out of order is absurd and not what we’re paying them for.

It is about birth control. State supercession over religious privileges happens all the time. Santeria animal sacrifice practices are regulated and in many areas prohibited because they violate secular health laws. Christian Scientists may not deny their children medical care unto death. Peyote use among certain Native American tribes is proscribed, regardless of the ceremonial claims and religious liberty arguments. And here’s the thing—outside of the group affected these are not controversial. So it must be asked, what is it about this that makes it different?

Contraception. Religious conservatives claim Obama is waging war on religion. As John Stewart has pointed out, “don’t confuse war with not getting everything you want.”

What is clear is that religious conservatives are conducting an extreme campaign to roll back contraceptive liberties, which ought to have no religious test. This is very much about women and civil liberties and health care costs and the sensitivities of groups who hold archaic views of “a woman’s place” and traditional values. For Congress to hold hearings that tacitly ignore this aspect is politically irresponsible at best, campaign year posturing at a minimum, and socially negligent at worst.

But the most aggravating aspect is the pretense that they aren’t talking about birth control. Of course they are. The religious position is that birth control violates religious conscience. Since when do we let religious conscience that does not reflect the views of even a majority of adherents to those institutions dictate secular policy? This is a breech of the wall of separation in the other direction. If I go to work for a Catholic hospital, I do not take that job to support Catholicism but to support myself and my family. If they’re going to offer me health coverage, then they should offer it in parity with what any other comparable facility offers, because as my employer they do not represent my convictions and have no right to dictate conscience to me through essentially punitive economic policies. (I shouldn’t even have to say that in this employment environment, to tell me that if I don’t like it I should get another job would border on criminal. What other job?)

I will be tremendously disappointed if Obama backs down from this. I am tired to having my conscience violated simply because I have no religion. I do not wish to live in a country run according to theocratic principles.

Yes. It is about birth control. Also about control. Period.

February 17, 2012
Trust In Your Message?

There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing. All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant. For one, it’s not. For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.

But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops. Namely, a complete lack of confidence in their message. What it comes down to is a denial that people have not only the right but the ability to make decisions for themselves based on good information.

It’s simple. The Gag Rule assumed that if people never found out about certain options, then they wouldn’t use those options, but that if they did learn about them, they would. It represented a complete lack of confidence that people could both hear all the options and then make decisions in their own best interest, some of which would be consistent with the policy Bush’s administration was backing. Likewise here. Just because birth control is covered by an insurance policy purchased for the benefit of employees does not automatically mean that all these people will start using birth control. If the Catholic message is sound, if it has merit, that option will never be exercised.

But no. Safer, they must think, to restrict access, to keep it off the table, to ban the pamphlet, and remove the service than to trust that people will do what the Catholic Church wants them to do.

For all the posturing about what is or is not “American,” this is as unAmerican as it gets. Honored more in rhetoric than practice, the right of the individual to decide for him or herself is supposed to be at the heart of what makes us who we are. So how does barring choice square with that?

Granted, we do it all the time. We do it in drug use, we have age-specific restrictions dealing with movies, bars, driving, we have all manner of qualifying rules and regulations that keep people away from certain options, and a lot of it makes perfect sense.

But this is not one of them. If we were going to ban coverage of birth control from all insurance policies, then there would be no controversy over religious issues. It would be controversial for a different reason, but since the ban would be universal it would not be liable to the kind of ideological argumentation we’re now seeing. But if you’re going to offer it to some and not others based on where they work, then you have a basic civil rights question.

Look, this isn’t even about making churches provide birth control. It’s about church-affiliated institutions with large employee payrolls that are not denomination-exclusive—like universities and hospitals—being required to serve that employee base in accord with the standards every other employer must meet. Despite the association with a religious institution, what we’re talking about is workplace rules where the institution and the community interface on the level of employment.

But that argument will be made in court, no doubt. What strikes me about this is the so far unremarked tendency in this country to not trust in our own messages. We do this all the time, suppressing certain ideas, barring certain speakers from addressing certain audiences, criticizing open discourse over things which we fear—it’s arguable that most Americans had no idea what communism actual was back during the Cold War, debatable whether we do now, but we so feared it that we wouldn’t even talk about it—and frankly that’s not us. It’s not who we claim to be, not who we’d like to be, but there it is.

Of course, in this instance the Catholic bishops have a real concern. According to studies, 98% of Catholic women use or have used birth control. Obviously, the message the Church wants delivered doesn’t have as much traction as they’d like. By that token, taking a stand on this is clearly in response to evident failure.

But it’s still a matter of personal choice, something the Catholic Church—or, for that matter, any church—has never been comfortable with. Trusting an individual to make a decision like this for herself has always been fraught with the likelihood that they will make the right choice—but not the one desired.

This is vestigial moralizing. If we accept as a concept that all people should be considered equal, then it follows that the opportunities and privileges available to everyone should be equal. At one time, that equality was meted out based on the notion of a family unit. The family, represented by the man, enjoyed the rights and privileges of the community. With changes in technology and the economy, the focus has shifted more narrowly on the individual, which has eroded the primacy of the male as women have become more and more able to act independently*. If we are serious about equality, then it should come as no surprise that we have to make adjustments for those things that enable the expression of equality. That is the American message and all this political posturing over birth control is exactly apposite that message.

In the wake of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfluffle, it seems finally enough people are waking up to the fact that if we do not assert the primacy of that message, we could lose what equality we’ve gained since—

Well, since the 1920s when you could receive a prison sentence for distributing pamphlets about birth control. Or since the 1940s when women were forced out of jobs they had held all during WWII and were told they were incapable of doing those jobs by virtue of their sex. Or since 1965, when finally the Supreme Court declared that couples had a basic right to contraception. Or—

The Catholic Church obvious doesn’t trust its people to heed its message. It may be that the message is flawed. Or maybe Americans are beginning to trust their own message.

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*I am talking here about the way society was structured, not the right or wrong of the distribution of rights and privileges. It is an unfortunate fact that the basic biological reality concerning reproduction has placed women in a vulnerable position in regards to power relations. My belief is that there has never been a excuse for the disenfranchisement of women, but until effective birth control and the subsequent changes in economic life that resulted, the initiative has been with men to set the rules. Even so, it took a long time for men as a group to accept equality as a reality, never mind as a principle, and I do not for a minute believe that the majority of men who now take it as given are of sufficient numbers to guarantee we would never return to a culture of female subjugation. The attack on reproductive rights strikes at the main foundation of contemporary political freedoms for women.

February 10, 2012