Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Let Us Not Snicker In Complacency

    Rick Santorum won the three primary-type elections yesterday.  Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado.  A sweep.  But really, I should put that Won in quotes.  He “won” by virtue of garnering more votes than the others, which I admit is the traditional way in which winning is established.

    But, really, did he?  The largest voter turn-out was Missouri, with 6% of eligible, registered voters going to the polls.  Out of that he took somewhere around 40%, which means he got less than 3% of Missouri’s potential vote.  It was worse in the other two states, Minnesota with 1% and Colorado with 2%.

    And yes, these are caucuses, nonbinding, no delegates are assigned based on these, it was more a moral support effort.

    But still.  In the past, it has been the Republican base that has been the most energized in these things, and this time their showing was pathetic. Less than.

    So, what exactly did Santorum win?

    Not much, but please, let us not make assumptions.  It’s a long way to August, much less November, and all kinds of bizarreness can happen before then.  The idea that Rick Santorum could be the GOP nominee for president fills me with both glee and trepidation.  Glee because the only candidate the GOP has fielded that has a chance of challenging Obama is Romney, no matter what the Party faithful might wish to believe.  Trepidation because I tend to hedge my mental bets these days concerning the political landscape and the thought that Santorum might actually unseat Obama scares the bejeezus out of me.  In his own way, he is as polarizing as George Wallace in 1968.  (Gingrich less so, for two reasons—he is inconsistent in his message and he is far too intellectual.  He’s the closest thing the GOP has right now to an Egghead, something they have tended to vote against for a very long time due to a nebulous perception that “average” Americans won’t vote for someone who is too smart.)  The positions he has taken on privacy issues troubles me no end.  Even if he couldn’t get his program through Congress on these matters, the fact that enough of my fellow citizens would put him in office would frighten me.  It wouldn’t be Santorum who would concern me so much as my next door neighbor.

    Hence, my admonition that we should not feel smug, we who would rather see Obama get a second term than any Republican who has the remotest chance of winning.  National politics is a fey and fickle creature and has surprised people before.

    But more than that, if I read this correctly, we are seeing the self-dismantling of a major political party.  For the first time in decades, the Democrats are showing more solidarity and cohesion than the Republicans, and may end up being the remaining “super power” when this is over, the GOP having splintered into factions that will eventually recombine into something else.

    There is a danger here that comes with all such victories, that of self-satisfied, uncritical assumption of Being Right.

    Being Right is the disease to which the Republicans are succumbing.  Not that they have been—right, that is—but that they have built their entire strategy on the assumption that (a) this is what people vote for and (b) that they in fact are right.  It has led to a number of unfortunate distortions of the political process in the name of saving the country that, I think, have also led to their current malaise.  It has pushed the Republicans into more and more strident and restricted positions from which they have become ineffective in the actual job they’ve been hired to do—namely, govern the country.  (I mean, seriously—who gives a damn about who is or is not allowed to get married when there are 58 million adults without jobs?  And given the ranking of American schools in math, science, history, and reading, does anyone think allowing prayer in the class—which as a silent practice is not now prohibited—is really the issue we need to focus on?)

    Americans as individuals can make the call as to what is right.  That’s not what we send representatives to Washington do establish.  We send them there to conduct the people’s business, a phrase I haven’t seen in general use for a very long time.  Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, but this is a tactical question.  I do not look to Washington to tell me what my morals should be.  Nor do I want Washington telling my neighbor why I am not to be trusted because I have ideas that might run counter to the current rhetorical postures on offer.

    Democrats have no better claim than Republicans on that.  While much lip service is given to America’s pluralism, at the end of the day, when the campaign ads run, and the blood flows in the primaries, both parties indulge in the politics of false unity.  They both paint Americans as this or that and our differences are minimized to the point that if someone actual has a distinct need or identity, we either ignore it or try to force him or her into a mold that conforms to current prejudice.

    A political party that feels it has a mandate as representing True Americans is a dangerous thing, because it can forget to represent All Americans.  Cycles of rapid turn-over in congressional seats are indicative of the kind of blunt messaging an ill-served electorate sends when they elect someone who then goes to Washington and doesn’t do what they were sent to do, but instead takes winning that seat as a ticket to try to make the government conform to his or her vision of True America.  (I sent you there to rein in spending, not gut the SEC.  I sent you there to fix Social Security, not blame the Democrats for pursuing socialism.  I sent you there to do something about education, not shoehorn in your pet projects.)

    The Democratic Party has its share of blindnesses and prejudices and we should all be wary of seeing them burgeon into the kind of bombastic over-confidence that the Republicans are now paying for in their own party.  Since the Depression, the Democrats have more and more become the party of the One Solution To Fix It All, blithely ignoring local conditions and the very uniquenesses both parties like to brag about but neither really knows how to deal with.  If there is a problem, a federal agency must be created to fix it, and while that has certainly been effective in some things, in other matters it has been an irritant if not downright destructive.

    (The model for federal agencies, it seems to me, should be NASA.  No, seriously.  When you look at NASA and how it is structured and what it is actually supposed to do, it’s a terrific idea.  It hasn’t, of course, stuck to its original concept, but close enough for an example.  NASA is publicly seen as a government space program that is supposed to do all of our off-earth exploring and so forth.  This is a mischaracterization.  NASA was established as a federally-funded research-and-development organ that would create the technology to be used in space exploration, with the idea that, once developed and tested, this technology would be available to the private sector or to universities to do with as they will.  NASA was supposed to continually develop solutions that we could then take off the shelf and use.  It was never intended to set priorities and dictate the direction we would take, although by default it has done so.  This would be an effective model if deployed more as it was intended.  Other agencies do exhibit these protocols—OSHA, for example—but many are imperial, dictating rather than assisting.  This is a product of the kind of arrogance we have yet to figure out how to be rid of in government.)

    Starting now, with what is so evidently happening to the Republican Party, all of us should be more aware of what the Democrats do.  I shy away from predictions with too much specificity—the more detailed you get the farther off target you fall—but if not this year then by the next election cycle I would not be surprised to see the rise of an effective third party and the eventual obliteration of the Republican Party as we have known it.  I don’t think this would in itself be a bad thing—in 1976 they courted and in 1980 brought in an infection that has transformed it into something its own leadership is uncomfortable with and cannot effectively control—but I don’t think it would be automatically a good thing, either.   We have seen what happens in countries with only one political party and we should fear it.

     

  • Stepping Up

    I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco.  Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out.  Here is a handy overview of the series of events.  The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning.

    One aspect, however, strikes me as significant.  That response.  It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash.  I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights.  One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges.  It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty.  It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once.

    It would be even better if this were the harbinger of the rediscovery of our collective spine.  The Religious Right has been canvassing, politicking, and buying politicians for a long time now, absolutely dedicated to their position, over which it has been clear for over three decades that what they want is not negotiable.  What hasn’t been so clear till the last few years has been the full extent of what they want and finally—finally—progressives are beginning to understand that this is not a disagreement but a war.

    Thanks to people like Rick Santorum the full program of the antichoice movement is impossible to ignore.  If they were interested in eliminating abortion only, there would have been several points along the way over this long and acrimonious struggle where common cause could have been made.  But the fact is they wish to eliminate what they see as inexcusable permissiveness, sexual license, and immorality, and they would do this by eliminating access to all forms of birth control.  What they doubtless assume is that if pregnancy once more regained its power to scare women into celibacy then the United States would become the country they prefer to live in and their version of morality would hold sway.  They have a number of reasons for pursuing this, some less plausible than others, but at the end of the day they very much want people to stop having safe sex.

    Safe, that is, in terms of pregnancy.

    Rick Santorum has gone on record believing that even within marriage sex for pleasure is a no-no.  Probably most people think that’s just an eccentricity of his and that he would be unable to actually turn the clock back to try to make such a condition a general reality.  More and more people, I think, are beginning to realize that there is a rather large and loud segment of the population that would support him in this.  Not a majority, not by any means a majority, but the political Right acts like it speaks for the majority all the time, so it might be understandable if people in general had the idea that the majority of their fellow citizens were like this.

    They also don’t realize, probably, that the foundational Supreme Court case establishing a right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—was over a married couple’s right to control their reproductive life.

    I also don’t think a lot of people, especially young women, have given much thought to the kinds of opportunities that would close up in their faces in such a regime.  They do in some states.  Whether or not abortion is  legal and a right nationally, there are some states where the anti-choice movement has made it so difficult for clinics to remain open—often using extra-legal means—that this is a right in name only.

    I’ve been wondering how much more would have to happen before the actual majority finally said enough and acted.  Planned Parenthood lost a grant of roughly $640,000 from Komen.  They’ve received over three million as replacement.  The outcry of protest has been loud enough that Komen is trying to backtrack.  They’ve made noises about reinstating the grant, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.

    In the meantime I have had some exchanges with people who think what Komen did was absolutely correct and a moral victory and the troubling thing about these was the mendacity attached to the arguments.  One response to me was that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to non-abortion services, while in fact the reverse is true.  As argument continued, I responded with actual numbers.  Planned Parenthood performed around 325,ooo abortions last year.  They provided contraceptive services to nearly five million women.  And contraceptive services do not account for even half of what they do.  The rest are services for STDs, counseling, and related health services.  The counterargument ended there.

    These are publicly available figures and the number of abortions is a mandated report.

    Komen handled this badly.  They have suffered resignations within their own organization over it.  Brinker herself tends to the Right politically, but she hired a vice president who is on record as having run on an anti-abortion, anti-choice platform—unsuccessfully—and from appearances seems to have used her position to strike a blow against Planned Parenthood.

    Again, what I found most encouraging in all this was the sudden and clear reaction on the part of people who may finally be reaching their limit over the hypocrisy of this conflict.

    Hypocrisy?  One of the more interesting facts about the whole anti-choice movement has been the numbers of women who end up in the very clinics they have been protesting when they come up pregnant.  Some even sit in the waiting room preaching at the others there how they will all go to hell for killing their babies, and then go in and have a D and C to rid themselves of their own “inconvenience.”  I’m not particularly surprised or shocked by this.  People compartmentalize.  What seems to be the case here is a desire for the law to change to prevent them from doing what they know they’ll do if something they detest is legal.  They can’t face up to their own responsibilities so they want the rest of society to make them do it.  But for that to happen, everyone else has to be under the same restrictions.  “Somebody stop me!”

    What may finally be changing is the forebearance of all the other people whose lives would be negatively affected by the changes being demanded.  We can tolerate easily the hypocrisy in our neighbor—until such hypocrisy becomes a national movement and threatens our freedoms.

    I know there is a genuine disagreement over the basic question here—not so much when does life begin but when is such life Human?  If you believe that it is from the moment sperm fertilizes egg, well and good.  But if, like me, you believe “human” is more than a biological definition and requires a personality, then we’re talking about a progression from nonhuman to human that takes nine months and then some.

    That leaves the decision up to each individual, though, and I can even understand the argument that collectively we cannot endorse murder.  And yet we have numerous legal distinctions to qualify the taking of life that is not murder.  We all understand what constitutes murder and we all understand what constitutes self defense and all the shades in between.  As a practical matter, to me, abortion is self defense.  In very real terms, an unwanted pregnancy is a life-threatening condition.  Perhaps the mother will not die from it, but that does not mean her life will not be threatened with profound and in many instances unwanted and detrimental change.  In the case of the poor, this is a materially significant fact.  If you can’t feed yourself, how to you feed another that you didn’t even invite into your home?

    And the Komen decision to end that grant went straight to poor women, because that’s who received the benefit of that money.

    Let’s be clear—abortion has always been available to people with means.  It did not become an issue until the poor came into the equation.  And if it is once more rendered illegal, women with money will still have access.  Only the poor will suffer.  This is reality.

    In combination with Occupy Wall Street, there is a groundswell of populist anger directed toward the basic inequities in our society.  We will never be rid of certain inequities—that is human nature, and let’s face it, our success, at least economically, is based on such inequities and the promise of “rising above”—but we should at least strive to eliminate the grosser aspects that serve only to rub the less fortunate’s collective face in the mud of failure.  People do not have to be rich in order to be safe and comfortable and feel secure and invested in their society.  They only have to feel that in certain fundamental ways they are treated fairly and have the same rights as any one else, rights that are not exclusive to the wealthy, the privileged, or the hypocritical.

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    As a coda to all this, here is a report on one of the items offered as part of Komen’s awareness outreach.  In conjunction with a weapons distributor, a pink Walther P-22 is available for purchase to support Komen’s program.

    It has always struck me how often the aggressive advocacy of 2nd Amendment rights, support of the death penalty, and a kind of libertarian default to the power of the gun seem to be expressed by the very same people most vocal about the “immorality” of abortion.  The horror, it sometimes seems, of  taking human life is very categorical.  The apparent contradiction evaporates when seen from a religious viewpoint that centers on spiritual concepts of innocence and an oft unspoken assumption that this is a determining factor in deciding the appropriateness of killing.  Adults are not innocent by definition and fall automatically into a different category than a fetus which has never had a chance to “sin.”

    Even so, the apparent hypocrisy is even less difficult to understand when seen from the viewpoint of people determined that their ideas of public morality should trump all personal rights that fall outside of a tightly-defined range of so-called “decency”—a view advanced and backed up by the implicit threat of violence demonstrated by a political posture that sees no contradiction between a “right to life” stance on the one hand and a willingness to mete out death to the deserving on the other.

     

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    One more addendum in a story that I am sure will continue to repercuss for months if not years to come, the person at the center of the policy flap at Susan G. Komen has resigned.   Of course she is trying to spin the situation, but where there is smoke, as the saying goes.  I suspect at the core of this was a ploy of some orchestration between Ms. Handel and certain politicians—enactment of the “policy” then the move to investigate Planned Parenthood—or maybe not.  Maybe this was all just a confluence of unlikely coincidence and no one had an ulterior motive.  What’s that about pigs and air travel?

  • Equality Means Just That

    Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. I’ve seen him on other occasions and he is articulate and, from what I’ve seen, fearless, a rare combination today in politics. In this excerpt he’s talking about gay marriage.

    No, that’s not right. He’s talking about equality. And that’s what is at the heart of so much today. Listen:

    He says what I believe. Being an American, to me, means something very basic and unequivocal. Equality is not a commodity, available for a price, which some folks can afford more of than others. it comes with the territory and the idea that we still, after all this time, have to have special legislation to defend various aspects of what should be presumed without question irritates me.

    His remark about the utility of popular votes is also spot on. We like to assume democracy is applicable in all cases, but it is not. This is one reason we have a republic rather than a full-blown democracy. A democratically empowered republic, yes, but in a republic the passions of the moment do not hold sway, or should not. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, for a vast portion of this country slavery existed by dint of popular mandate. So did the chattel condition of women. While it may be true that these things would have (and did) erode in time, that is not the same as saying democracy worked. Other factors were involved, but in the case of slavery a war had to be fought in order to enforce what ought to have been recognized as a fundamental right.

    Americans are no different in many ways than any other person on the planet. We have our foibles, our prejudices, our blindnesses. Many of us really don’t think through the meaning of our convictions and in some uncomfortable areas we would rather the issue never come up than have to deal with it. And doubtless a great many of us want to feel special if not superior in relation to others. We have many euphemisms for those with whom we wish to have no association, and most of them are class-based, some are race-based, others are behavior-based. None of them should be permitted to dictate legal status.

    Equal means equal. Until we internalize that, breathe it like the very air we take for granted, we will continue to suffer the kind of strife that often renders our politics abusive and fruitless.

    Just sayin’.

  • Just So You Know…

    Recently I’ve received a spate of those nasty politically-naive, rather insipid yet clever emails that go round and round, forwarded from one to another to hundreds, spouting off about the woes of the country, the supposed sins of the Left, and all containing a germ of truth wrapped in misinformation, outrights lies, and substanceless assertion.  Mostly I delete them without a second thought.  They are noise, distraction, mud thrown into the waters of discourse where above all clarity should be our goal.

    All of them have to do with what liberalism has done to our country.  All of them are concerned with telling anyone who will listen what the Right is trying to “save us” from.  And all of them are pretty thoughtless.  It would be funny if there wasn’t so much at stake.

    Below is a post from Lawrence O’Donnell, a newscaster and polemicist who I have listened to occasionally.  I don’t follow such people, on either side.  From time to time I listen to someone from both camps.  I’ve found Mr. O’Donnell more reasonable than most.  But I thought he really captured something with this, so I’m borrowing it to express my own views.

     

     

     

    For the record, I am very tired of the attempt to make me feel guilty for the progress I support.  The only charge I ever heard that had any traction with me about the problems with liberals was the “tax-and-spend” one, but that doesn’t even hold water anymore with me.  Conservatism these days seems—may I stress seems—to be all about preventing people from doing things, about taking rights away from those deemed undeserving.  Liberalism has always, even traditional free market liberalism (which, yes, free market enterprise is a liberal  invention), been about letting people do more, have more rights.  I don’t see much wrong with that as a fundamental principle.

    So, just to let anyone interested know…

  • What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

    I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains.

    Romney has won the New Hampshire primary. All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.” There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination. And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative.

    I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic. Stodgy, stuffy, proper. But mainly pennypinching. A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing.

    I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important. I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait.

    That doesn’t square with the recent past. The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance. Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses. But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were. (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations. Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget. You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.)

    What they seem adamantly opposed to is spending on people. By that I mean, social spending. Welfare, MedicAid, unemployment relief, housing subsidies, minimum wage supports, education, and so forth. With a few exceptions, we have seen conservatism take on the mantle of Scrooge and move to cut people off. This has been in the name of States Rights as often as not or welfare reform, but in the last ten years it has come out from its various nom de guerre’s and stood on its own as an attack on Entitlements.

    When you look at all the things, say, Ron Paul wants to eliminate from government, you can’t help but thinking that he believes government should do nothing for anyone. If the factory up the road dumps toxic waste that gets into the water table and poisons your farmland, government should have no brief to take that factory to task and see to it you’re made whole again. I assume the thinking is, well, you can take the factory to court, just like anyone else. By “anyone” I take it they mean anyone with the means to mount a protracted legal battle. Why isn’t it better to enforce laws to prevent the pollution in the first place? If your boss pays you less for the same or more work based on your gender, according to this thinking there would be no governmental recourse to making your boss either explain the situation or do anything to rectify it. Likewise, I suppose, in matters of race. The assumption, I suppose, is that if you feel unfairly treated in one job, you have the right to go get another one. This ignores the possibility (indeed, the fact) that this situation is systemic. That’s something no one in the GOP seems to want to address—systemic dysfunction—unless of course they’re talking about all the aspects of government of which they disapprove.

    Of course, this is not just Ron Paul. Most of them, with the notable exception of the two candidates who haven’t a chance in hell of the nomination, seem to have some variation of the “smaller government” mantra as part of their platform. Taken with the chart linked above, you have to wonder what they mean by “smaller” when it seems they spend as much if not more than the Democrats. Obviously, Republican administrations have never cost us less money—it’s just that the money gets spent in ways that make it appear they’re focusing their attention on what is “important.”

    Debating what is or is not important is certainly legitimate and we’ve been doing that for over two centuries. And certainly intractability has never been absent from our political discourse—such intransigence led, most famously, to the Civil War. But we have also grown accustomed to such stances being in the distant past, not part of our present reality. Meanness in politics has always been around, but it seems the GOP has, at least in some of its members, embraced it in particularly pernicious ways. The gridlock of the last couple of decades is indicative of the quasi-religious fervor with which members of a major political party have adopted as a tactic.

    Newt Gingrich oversaw a government shut-down by instigating an intransigent position. It can only be seen in hindsight as a power play, since the fiscal policies of the Clinton Administration saw one of the last periods of general economic well-being that reached a majority of citizens. We wonder now what that was all about. Gingrich’s “contract with America” was billed as a way to return control and prosperity to the average American, but that happened to a large degree without the hyperbolic posturing he indulged, so it’s a question now what happened.

    I’m not going to review the politics of the time here, only point out that what was on the GOP’s collective conscience then and continued to be was their goal to disassemble the apparatus of government that militated against vast accumulations of wealth. Again, in hindsight it is obvious, and Clinton himself was seduced into the program by signing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, which has led directly to the current economic situation.

    Now here lies the peculiarity of our modern times. You can lay out the causal chain of Republican collusion with the economic catastrophes of the last three decades and find general agreement, even among Republicans. But when asked if they will continue to vote Republican, well, of course.

    Why?

    Anyone with a smidgen of historical memory cannot but see Obama as a right center president. He has done virtually nothing that Reagan would not have been proud of (with the single exception of the Affordable Health Care Act). Yet you would think he is the devil incarnate if you listen to the Right. Hatred of Obama has grown to phobic proportions, coupled with more and more strident positions among the suite of Republican contenders for some kind of new rapprochement with Americans to establish—

    What? I’m not altogether sure they understand the kind of country they’re advocating.

    Now John Huntsman has bowed out of the race, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney, who is still being viewed with suspicion by the far right of the party—hence the conference in Texas mentioned above. Not that Huntsman would have had a chance with the evangelicals. Not only was he reasonable about many issues, he was two things the Right cannot abide: one, he is an advocate for science, supporting both climate change science and evolution, and two, he actually worked for Obama as ambassador to China. He is, therefore, tainted.

    From the few things he has said about them, Romney is fuzzy on climate change and evolution. One suspects he tends to accept the science but he’s been careful not to come right out and say it, which is tiresome. But the fact that he has felt it necessary to soft-pedal his positions on these is a telling clue as to what the Right wants.

    What they want, briefly, is an America as they always thought it should be. The strongest, the richest, the least controversial, the purist, and able to do what it has always done in order to stay that way.

    If this sounds like a fantasy, well, it is. It’s Camelot, the City on the Hill, the New York That Never Was. It is greatness without cost, freedom without dissent, progress without change.

    It is also elitism without earning it.

    Just as one example, the continued harangue for deregulation. The case is made—or, rather, asserted—that growth, including jobs, depend on less regulation, that regaining our standard of living and reinvigorating American enterprise requires less government oversight. How this can be said with a straight face after three decades of deregulation have brought commensurate declines in all those factors, leading finally to near-Depression level unemployment, astounds. This is surely a sign of psychosis. From 1981 on there has been a constant move to deregulate and in its wake we have seen devastation. The airlines were deregulated and within less than two decades most of them had been through bankruptcy, many of them no longer exist (TWA, Pan Am?), and service has suffered. Oil was deregulated with the promise of holding prices and increasing production, but we have had regular if staggered rises in price, chokes in supply, and an environmentally worse record of accidents. The savings and loan industry was deregulated which resulted in a major default and rampant fraud, the loss of billions of depositors money and a housing crisis, and we then watched the same thing happen with the deregulation of banking. How much more evidence is required before that mantra of “deregulation will lead to more jobs and better service” be seen for what it is—a lie.

    The Far Right of the GOP is living in a fantasy. The problem with that is they have a profound influence on the Party mainstream, which is exactly why reasonable candidates like Huntsman and Johnson have no chance of garnering Party support and people like Romney have to waffle on positions in order to woo the tail that is trying to wag the dog.

    What I do not understand is how those who make up the mainstream of the Party can continue to support policies that make no sense. Momentum is one thing, but this has gone on far too long to be attributed to that.

    I do not here claim that the Democrats have legitimate and sensible alternatives. They have their own set of problems. But Democrats have generally been willing to abandon a policy that is shown not to be effective. Right now that says a lot. It’s not much of a choice, but frankly it is more in line with the country I grew up understanding us to live in.

     

     

     

     

  • President Santorum

    I’ve always wondered about people in Iowa.  Only a little less than those in Idaho, specifically the northern part.  Why, I wonder, should this state be our early warning system, our barometer of coming political shitstorms?

    Just as a historical note, the caucus is concerned mainly with choosing state electoral delegates.  In 1972, it was altered slightly to become a bellwether process in early presidential showings. Altered by the Democrats, who sponsored the first early January caucus there.  By 1976, the Republicans opted for the same model, and it’s been rumbling along that way ever since.

    Interestingly, though both parties participate, national attention is almost entirely on the Republicans.

    This year’s caucus may tell us why.

    I admit, before today I knew very little about Rick Santorum’s stands on issues unrelated to sex.  So I Googled him.  There’s a link to Where I Stand/Rick Santorum.  When you click it, you are taken immediately to a donation page.  Right up front, before you find out one more thing about him, his hand is out.  I suppose this is all right, since I frankly can’t imagine anyone but those who have already decided that he’s the one will go there, so why not get the business out of the way first?

    Click the next link and you get to his main campaign page and then you can click on the Where I Stand button.  Here’s the page.   As you go down this list, you find almost nothing overtly related to the topic that has become the chief identifier for Santorum since he was thrown out of his Pennsylvania senate seat, namely his attitude toward sex.  Instead we find a list that could be found on almost any mainstream politician’s roster of important talking points.

    At the bottom, though, is a final section, 10 Steps to Promote Our Interests Around the World.  Here it gets interesting.  The first two are typically Republican—a call for broader “free markets” and the promotion of religious liberty.  That one is worth quoting:  “… religious pluralism where people of faith have the right to pursue their beliefs and not be abused by either their government or a majority. This is the only ground upon which we can truly live in peace with our differences and also advance the moral teachings which are essential for freedom to thrive.”

    This sounds almost mainstream, doesn’t it?  Nowhere on his site does he expound upon the basis of such religious egalitarianism, but he does advocate the traditional conservative backing of Israel (even though he states in another section that “housing” issues there should be on equal footing between Israel and Hammas.  Not sure what that means).  But you must also keep in mind that christian conservatives have for years been claiming that they are “under assault” by a godless government and majority, and that this is Santorum’s constituency.

    You have to go to his public speeches to realize that his moral universe is driven by an almost Old Testament view of morality, which requires the rolling back of personal liberties that do not fit within such a framework.  He’s a vocal opponent not just of abortion but of birth control and on more than one occasion he has claimed that he opposes birth control because it promotes multi-partner sex, which is a guaranteed path to horrible diseases.  He is a forceful opponent of gay marriage, something that has already become a fact in this country, though not federally.  So right there he has stated his moral position, which will require him to strip rights from people.

    As you continue down his list of proposals, his focus is clearly on the Middle East and a little bit on China.  There’s a strong whiff of the Cold War in his specifics—missile bases, increased intelligence operations, and a pronounced suspicion of Iran.

    In short, most of this is mainstream Republican.  He’s opposed to Obamacare, but that’s no distinction, they all are—even though as the law works its way into practice it is becoming increasingly clear that much of it will be popular, and possibly even radical enough to work to the nation’s benefit.

    There is something that bothers me, but it bothers me about all of them, not just Santorum.  One of his proposals states:  “…we need to change our information operations abroad to promote our core values of freedom, equality, and democracy — just as we did with the Soviet Empire in the 1980s.”

    That in itself doesn’t trouble me so much—it’s a debatable bit of propaganda, since we always maintained as part of our efforts against communism an information component—but when combined with this:

    1. Finally, we need to have a national effort to restore the teaching of American history in our nation’s schools. It is our children’s worst subject — they simply do not know their own story and thus when they are told ours is a history of aggression and immorality, they have no counter-narrative to refute it. It is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan’s final wish in his farewell address was to ask America to instill in our youth a renewed “informed patriotism.” Unfortunately, we ignored this lesson, and we are reaping the consequences.

    If you are going to advocate a deeper understanding of our history as a core principle, then you should also present that history accurately throughout your platform.  The implication of the information quote is that it was our strong advocacy of core ideas that brought the Soviet Union down, and this is simply not true.  Reagan did not crush them by showing them the error of their ideas.  The United States spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and it collapsed under its own unsustainability.

    Of course, that’s not sexy.  But it’s true and consistent with historical accuracy.

    But this is a charge that can be leveled equally at all presidential candidates of either party.

    On the face of it, Rick Santorum’s proposed policies are not that different from any other candidate currently making a viable bid for the Republican nomination.  Ron Paul is distinct on his foreign policy positions and his economic ideas, but not so much on anything else.  It appears that Rick Perry is about to go back to Texas to lick his wounds and Michele Bachman has finally become the mediocrity she has always been.  (She’s been one of the worst offenders of historical accuracy in this campaign.)  John Huntsman is about to become a footnote.  (Which is a shame, as he seemed to have been the only one of the bunch who had the most traditional conservative viewpoint.)

    What is there to say about Newt Gingrich?  He will still run, but he will talk his way out of more and more victories.

    So we have Romney, Santorum, and Paul going into New Hampshire.  You could probably mix and match among them and come up with one pretty good candidate, but—

    Santorum has made his reputation as an advocate for marriage, absolute monogamy, and a repudiation of homosexuality as a legitimate state of being.  He has made a political fetish out of sex and abortion.  And his pronouncement upon the results of the Iowa Caucus that the cohesion of the family is the source of economic progress is a pompous oversimplification and distraction about the nature of economies and the variety of human experience and potential.  He makes a big deal about supporting religious pluralism, but has been clear about his aversion to human pluralism.

    Why am I harping on this?  Is it just about the sex?

    Well, no.  But the sex is a marker for the problem.  It’s about freedom of association.

    The personal liberty movements of the 20th Century—civil rights, racial equality, gender equality, gay rights—all share one common feature: they are all concerned with the freedom of association.  With whom may we associate…and how?

    To say to people that their choices concerning with whom and in what way they will spend their lives must be limited by a particular social convention is perhaps an underappreciated cost of this conservative war on gays and women.  It is in a very real sense telling people that they may have only certain kinds of conversations with only certain kinds of people.

    Santorum might be very surprised by this notion.  In his view, and the view of the GOP lo these last few decades, barring gays from marriage and women from full equality is supposed to free people from being forced to make choices they don’t wish to make.  I’ve never understood how that works—by expanding rights, how is it that we therefore limit them?—but it really was never about controlling one’s own life, but about controlling the choices of others.  If people are kept in neat, distinct boxes—husband, wife, toddler, preteen, teen, and young adult, christian, working-middle-upper middle class—business can operate more confidently, predict trends, guarantee profits.  If everyone is running around messing with the categories, who knows what the future will bring?

    (You think I jest?  Expanded freedoms bring expanded expectations, which takes control from one group and gives it to another.  Why do you think business is so keen on busting unions and shipping jobs overseas?)

    I didn’t see anything on Santorum’s site about energy policy or, beyond his pledge to end Obamacare, anything about public health—except a safe commitment to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and a concern for fraud in MediCare.  I didn’t see anything there about his commitment to science, but given the distortions he has indulged in his war on abortion I doubt he has much use for it—that and his vocal advocacy of a religious temperament.

    I would like to know how any of these people think they can enlarge and advance the cause of freedom by taking it away from groups they don’t like.

    It’s no secret that I won’t be voting for any of these people next November.  I rather doubt that, in the unlikely event that he somehow snags the nomination, I’d vote for John Huntsman.  The problem is not so much them as candidates as the fact that they are tied to a political party that has gone completely off the rails in my view.  Since 2010 the GOP in congress has managed to be on the wrong side of almost every issue, simply in their blind hatred of Obama.  They have repudiated programs that originated with them simply because Obama advocated support for them.  I haven’t respected their social agenda for decades and now their unwavering and idiotic support of tax cuts and regulation rollbacks in the face of one of the worst failures of laissez-faire policy since 1929 doesn’t show so much their love of the rich as it does their complete lack of common sense.

    But I had to go look, since the good Republicans of Iowa have elevated Mr. Santorum up to the status of a real contender, because I really didn’t know.  His reputation has been so colored by his pathological obsession with other people’s sex lives that I knew nothing about his other positions.  Now I do.

    I think I can confidently predict that Obama will be reelected.  I don’t say that’s a good thing.  But the thought of Rick Santorum in the White House is a very sobering thought.

     

  • Books, 2011

    It seems unlikely I’ll finish another book before this Sunday—if I do it will probably be Stefanie Pintoff‘s second Simon Ziele mystery, A Curtain Falls.  I read the first in the series, In The Shadow of Gotham, not too long ago and enjoyed it.  It’s a period mystery, set in 1905, and features a progressive police detective from New York—Ziele—who teams up with an amateur criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who is attempting to construct a science of criminal behavior.  Ms. Pintoff avoids many pitfalls by keeping the level of expertise firmly locked in 1905 and Sinclair makes as many if not more wrong conclusions as right, but it was an entertaining piece of work and the evocation of 1905 New York was excellent.  Somewhat more engaging than a similarly period series by Rhys Bowen, the Molly Murphy mysteries, which are also rich in period detail, but a bit more of a stretch about an Irish immigrant who falls into the detective business rather by accident and then tries to make a go of it. These are set during and after the McKinley presidency and one book even deals directly with his assassination.  For a peek into the more bohemian parts of New York, they are wonderful.  Ms Bowen sells the conceit well, but once you put one of them down you have to wonder just how likely it would be.

    I found myself reading a lot of mysteries this past year.  As I’ve been moving into that genre—two of the novels in the hands of my new agent are mysteries, one a historical, the other contemporary, and I have every intention of continuing them as series (and even the alternate history is largely a mystery thriller)—I decided I needed to become better acquainted with what’s being done.  I read a couple of the more obvious ones—Laura Lippmann and Tess Gerritsen made the list, as did a couple of Michael Connelly’s and one James Patterson—but I also found some less obvious ones (at least to me).

    One series I’ve become quite taken with is Margaret Maron‘s Deborah Knott series, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter.  I’ve read eleven of these, all this past year.  They are charming.  Deborah Knott is the only daughter of a man who was once the biggest bootlegger in North Carolina and adjoining states.  He’s out of the business—sort of—and she has become an attorney.  By the end of the first novel she’s decided to run for a local judgeship and through the rest of the series she is a judge.  This is of the “stumble into murders” kind of cozy mystery writing.  It’s as much about the people of the area and the history as it is about solving a murder and the first-person narrative is comfortable and evocative.  I found myself devouring one of these over a weekend like popcorn.

    I also continued reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell books, ending this year with The Pirate King, which is a comedy.  Not quite as successful as the rest of the series, but not bad.  I caught up on her Kate Martinelli novels, too.

    Among the other mysteries this past year I read another of Cara Black‘s Paris mysteries featuring Aimee LeDuc, private investigator.  This one was set on the Ile St. Louis and I read it as much for that as for the mystery, since I have upcoming scenes in one of my novels set there.  If you like Paris and you like tough female detectives of the Honey West pedigree, these are worth the time.  (I recall the first one of these I read annoyed me because it involved a WWII Occupation mystery.  Some of this is becoming a stretch by now—these people are getting ancient and dying and I have to wonder how credible contemporary plots concerning survivors from 1942 can continue to be, but…)

    I mentioned I read a James Patterson.  I’ve been hearing so much about this guy that I decided I had to read one.  I won’t even mention which one, it was terrible from the first chapter.  Cliched writing, facile plotting, and predictable…everything.  I put it down wondering, what is supposed to be so great about this guy?  But he comes out of a marketing background and the sheer volume he produces—much of it now with other writers—must simply overwhelm the public.

    However, both Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly did not disappoint, although in Lehane’s case the level of mayhem seemed borderline cartoonish.  Nevertheless, he held my attention, quickened my pulse a couple of times.  Connelly proved solid, at least in the one I read, Blood Work.  In Lehane’s case, I found a curiosity, a historical novel, The Given Day, which is on my list for next year.  So as this is about what I read in 2011, you’ll have to wait.

    I also continued my Ross McDonald reading with The Drowning Pool.  I have a bunch more of these to read, but they are so far all gems.  Ross McDonald is I think underappreciated.  He was a master of the noirish and hardboiled style.  Which segues into a classic I read which I’d never read before, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.  I don’t know exactly what I expected, based on The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but it wasn’t this, and it was a surprise.  It’s not a mystery—at least not in the detective sense—and yet you can fully feel the noirish elements come through in this story of a woman during the Depression who boots out her philandering husband and then has to make a go of it on her own.  She subsequently becomes a very successful restaurateur, but her attempts to live up to the standards her daughter—a true enfant terrible—thinks she should embrace end up bringing her down, even as the daughter grows up to get just about everything she wants.  At the end Mildred is back with the husband and you get the sense that she’s going to build it all up again—and this time make it stick, since the daughter has finally been banished.  I put it down with a “Jaysus” reaction.

    I can also recommend new writer Rebecca Cantrell‘s series, beginning with A Trace of Smoke about a female reporter in pre-war Berlin.  This would be a decent companion piece to Philip Kerr’s  Bernie Gunther series.

    I read my first Val McDermid novel, A Distant Echo, which I highly recommend.  It details the consequences of a false police accusation on four friends over the years.  They find the corpse of a barmaid in a cemetery, but as the police have no leads going anywhere else these four become the prime suspects.  Of course, nothing connects them to her murder, either.  But the press gets ahold of it and their lives all take unexpected turns.  Then, years later, someone starts killing them and two of them work to solve the crime.

    Among the non-mysteries I read this past year were also a couple that I ought to have but never got around to.  I read Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, which is a kind of tour-de-force of kitchen sink writing that ties Bach’s music into the unraveling of the genetic code, all through the lens of a woman trying to solve the puzzle of a scientist who should have been one of the luminaries of the discovery of DNA but instead suffered the end of his career and ignominy.  Tight, colorful writing, bizarre connections.  It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, only more controlled and with a readily-discernible plot.

    I also read Charlotte’s Web for the first time ever.  I am woefully under-read in childrens and YA literature.  During the time of my life I should have been reading this, I was deep into comics and then my mother’s book-of-the-month club books, which were all adult.  At the same time I discovered science fiction and, well, that’s one category of Jeopardy I always fail.  Along with that one I also read—for the first time ever—The Phantom Tollbooth.  I doubt this is going to signal a spree of children-and-YA reading, but both of those books were well worth the read, especially the Juster.

    I only read one Dickens this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, which has to be one of the most maudlin of his novels.  I kept thinking about Little Nell “Will you bloody die already!”  But I can see how this would have been a show-stopper when it came out.  It may be one of the best treatments from the period of addictive behavior, especially of gambling addiction.

    I finally read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, which has been on my shelf for a decade at least.  It’s not an easy one to get into, but once you realize what’s going on—a trio of telepaths who don’t quite realize that this is what they are finding solace with each other through the changing landscape of wartime and post-war London—it is marvelous.  Moorcock is deceptive in that he has written some real crap (The Blood Red Game should be avoided).  But he is a truly fine stylist and a first-rate imaginative intellect when he chooses to be and Mother London is a fine novel that should be considered a classic.

    And speaking of London during the war, I read Connie Willis’s massive opus, both volumes—Blackout and All Clear—and can recommend it to anyone who is seriously into WWII history.  She has clearly done her homework and her decision to write about the Blitz from the viewpoint of the residents, albeit using her time traveling historians as vehicles, has produced a fascinating take on London at the time.  (I must say, though, that one of Willis’s hallmark plot devices—the continual miscommunication and near misses of people trying to find each other—which has worked effectively in the past, is growing wearisome by now.  We get it, reality does not follow a neat plot logic, people fail, messages don’t get delivered, etc etc—but enough is enough already.)  This may be the end of the Mr. Dunworthy stories, though.  May be.  This is time travel, after all.

    I read a couple of newer novels that I want to recommend, both more or less science fiction.  The first is The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.  This is a steampunk take on The Tempest.  Sort of.  I don’t wish to get into it too deeply, but I was taken with it primarily because it is steampunk without zombies!  I am growing tired of the monster-of-the-week in genre fiction.  Vampires, now zombies.  Dead things that move around do not fascinate me and too often they entail grue for the sake of grue.  Enough already!  (I put aside two steampunk novels that looked otherwise intriguing because, within 10 pages, there are zombies.)  To me, good steampunk is in the vein of The Difference Engine.  And Palmer delivers.  The writing is elegant, the world evocative, the symbolism and metaphors nicely deployed.  Not the best it could be, but high up on my scale.

    The other is by a good friend of mine, Carolyn Ives Gilman.  Isles of the Forsaken is a novel with which I’ve been familiar for a long time.  It was the first manuscript Carolyn gave me for a critique.  It has finally come out—though this is but the first half—and it is wonderful.  Set on a world that is like but not like ours, during a period much like the hegemony of Great Britain in the 19th Century, it is about the clash of cultures.  Bear in mind, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is pretty much dependent on the reader’s expectations.  This is fine stuff.

    I didn’t read much science fiction this past year.  Out of the 79 I read cover to cover, only 16 were definitely SF.  I can recommend Leviathan Wakes by James S. Correy—a very good thriller, a shitkicker, well-written and realized.  First one of a series (of course—I miss they dominance of the stand-alone anymore).  I also read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a classic alternate history, and a fine, fine piece of writing it is.

    The other SF novel I’m recommending is Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires.  It’s been a while since Gene has done a straightfoward science fiction novel (if any of his work can ever be called straightforward!) and this one is a subtle study of mismatched personalities and desires that will not be thwarted.  It’s love story with a relativistic time-dilation element complicating it.  Now, I tend to like almost anything Gene does, so take this recommendation in that context, but I think it may be one of his best.  He has pulled back from the epic vistas of some of his earlier SFnal efforts, like The Book of the Long Sun and such and centered this through one viewpoint character and closely-controlled scenario that is almost claustrophobic compared to his other work.  But it works.

    I read some flops, but I won’t go into them here—except for the comments on Patterson above—because I’m not sure if the books were really bad or if they just bounced off.  (One of them I thought a derivative bit of schlock, phoned in by an author who has done excellent work in the past, but just took a stroll on this one.)  There was another that was a convoluted bit of experimental strain that couldn’t decide if it was a mystery, Kafkaesque, Pynchonesque, or an exercise in abstruse symbolism.

    I will read less next year.  I already know that.  I have several bricks on the pile that will require long hours and extra attention.  At least, it is my plan to get through some of them, but we’ll see how that works out.

    Among the others that I enjoyed and can recommend I offer: Counting Heads by David Marusek,  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, On Mozart by Anthony Burgess, and Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.  Allen Steele has a new one out, Hex, set in his Coyote universe and well worth the read.  Scott Philips also has a new one out, The Adjustment, which is a fine example of Scott’s idiosyncratic noir style.

    Notice that the book links included all go to Left Bank Books.  I’m going to be doing that from now on, at least where I don’t link directly to an author’s page.  Support your local bookstore.  You’ll miss them when they’re gone, so don’t let them be gone.  Believe me, there really isn’t much Amazon can offer you that a good independent bookstore can’t, and that sucking sound of local tax revenue leaving your community and your state is the sound that accompanies our current fiscal woes.

    End of sales pitch.  I’ll talk about the other things in 2011 later.

     

  • Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

    Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

    I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

    He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

    Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

    Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

    He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

    Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

    Unless he felt he was being played.

    Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

    I’ll miss him.

  • Speech, Money, Personhood

    Senator Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a Constitutional Amendment to deny corporations the right to be considered persons. His speech is worth a listen.

    What amazes me is that this needs to be explained at all. This is one of those no-brainers that anyone on the street ought to be able to understand without much thought. Obviously a corporation is not a person.

    But in the esoteric realm of political philosophy, we entertain all manner of chimera for the purposes of achieving certain ends. What we have demonstrated in the Citizens United case and previous court pronouncements regarding money as speech is that when yo break something down far enough, you find you can reassemble it just about any way you want.

    Among the many factors that have gone into this debate, the one that seems the slipperiest is the idea that money is speech. This is actually a tricky argument and in many ways very persuasive, since money is the means by which we conduct our lives. On its most basic level, with regards to speech, without money there is no publishing, therefore the dissemination of speech is sorely hampered.

    Yet no one mistakes a printing press for the words it reproduces.

    I said that very carefully. A printing press produces no words at all. A writer—a human being—does that and the press merely reproduces them. It is a significant distinction. Without the press, the words still exist. Somewhere.

    Here’s the thing. Money is not speech. It is a tool. Period. Speech transcends money. For one thing, you can’t horde speech. You can’t stockpile and then dump it in such a way that it will buy something. Speech is not traded in stock markets.

    You can suppress speech, but it doesn’t go away. You can withhold it, but then it does nothing, serves no purpose. You can’t exchange one set of words for another and derive greater value. Speech does not have the structure or limitations of money, nor is it susceptible to vagaries of finance.

    Speech transmits ideas—all ideas—while money simply is an idea, one idea, which not everyone shares. Speech in its purest form cannot be owned. Yes, you can copyright a particular form of speech, but the fact is anyone can do that for their particular forms, and those forms are the expressions of individuals. You can’t prevent someone from using speech by keeping it from them. No one is homeless or hungry because they don’t have enough speech*.

    To assert that money is speech is to cheapen actual speech and turn it into a market commodity. A democracy cannot function that way.

    Which is, of course, the whole point. Those most ardently in support of money-as-speech don’t trust democracy, for all the reasons that separate them from those who have no money. The CEO in the board room can’t abide the fact that some homeless person’s speech has the same fundamental value as his, that in terms of rights and freedoms they are equals simply because speech as a freedom is not bankable.

    On the other hand, I recognize the appeal of being able to define personhood any old way you choose—because if you can do that, you can later take that definition away from whoever you want.

    *Of course, you may be ignored and your speech overlooked because you’re homeless and hungry. It is not the speech that determines your condition, but the other barriers and circumstances, most of which have to do with money.

  • Destabilizing The Family

    This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim.  Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle.

    We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back.  Ever since Gay Pride.  Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin.

    So….okay.  How?

    If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors?

    I’ll tell you what destablilizes families.  And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit.

    Families are destabilized over money.  Mainly lack of it, but sometimes too much will do it, too.  But lack of it will do a number on a family worse than almost anything else.  We’ve all grown up hearing the “love is all you need” line that never seems to run out of gas that a lot of people find out fairly quickly once they start living on their own is patent bullshit.  It is true that in order to have a fulfilling life, you need love.  But in order for love to last, you need everything else.  Housing, food, clothing, some degree of security, a smidgen of leisure activity.  Without money—someone’s—you don’t have all that.

    And that love thing, heterosexually?  Children tend to result from one of the basic activities, and they cost a lot of money.  A lot.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, and the more you have, the more money you need to maintain a level standard of living, and believe me, this is not cynicism, this is the way of human nature, when your standard of living erodes, this is not the source of great joy.  It becomes a grinding, frustrating daily chore to make due with less.

    Love has a very difficult time surviving such stress.  It can be done, it is done, millions of people probably manage it, but one should envy them their devotion rather than assume something is broken inside all those who can’t manage it.

    Money aside, children will destabilize a family.  Let’s be real for minute, not everyone is constitutionally able to be a parent.  Living day in day out with one other person can be a challenge, even if that person is an adult.  If you find that hard, then adding more to the mix, especially if they are not adults, is probably a recipe for craziness.  While lack of material resource exacerbates this condition, it is not necessary for it to be the case.  Some of us are fortunate that we recognized early on our own unsuitability to be parents, for many people, riding on the promises of the romantic fairytale we grew up with, this fact is not discovered until it is too late and there are children who, while perhaps fine people in and of themselves, nevertheless drive the insanity meter up and up and up.

    Was a time it didn’t matter.  We had no choice.  People got married and no matter what their circumstances, they didn’t have the option of divorcing and starting over, they were stuck.  We have in many ways romanticized this fact as some indication that modern people lack values.  Nonsense.  If they could have, our forebears likely would have divorced at as high a rate as we do.

    Why?  Because like it or not, people change.  We are not the same today as we were ten or twenty years ago.  It is the height of unreasonableness to think we could or should be.

    But that doesn’t mean the changes automatically drive us apart.  What it means is that when we get together in the first place we didn’t pay enough attention to who we were then to realize that in five or ten years certain traits were going to drive us or our partners nuts.

    Which brings us to one of the most fundamental reasons families fail.  Basic incompatibility.  Let’s be honest—that is what we’re trying for here—there are, have been, and will be many people who pass through our lives with whom we want to spend time with.  Some of those people, the time spent will be intense.  That doesn’t mean they will be lifelong arrangements.  Shall I be blunt?  Okay.  There will be many people with whom we  will want to have sex with, but that doesn’t mean we’d make good longterm partners.  Too many people confuse lust with love.

    Worse—too many people confuse love with like.  Longterm is not sustained by love—love is a peak experience and the high is not sustainable.  It may come in waves.  We may “fall in love” with our partner time and time again, but there will be troughs, and in those periods it is not love that carries us but like.  Friendship.  Too often no one tells us this.  Your life partner, if you’re going to have one, has to be your best friend.  You have to like them.  A lot.  It’s different than love.  Love is great, but the fires die down.  The embers rest in how much we like each other.

    Finally, though, some relationships have a natural lifespan and it is silly to expect them to shamble on past their demise.  Yes, it hurts.  Yes, it’s usually only one not both who realize this.  But it’s true and it would be wrong to insist on maintaining something that has died.

    If you have built a family on the basis of eternally staying together, you may find that all these factors will bring about a lot of hurt and destabilization.  What destabilizes beyond a fundamental lack of the resources to maintain is a violation of expectation.

    Now.  In all that, where’s this bullshit that allowing gay people to marry will impact your marriage?  How does that work?  I get the impression that Mr. Santorum thinks that expanding the marriage franchise will somehow debase it and make it something worth too little for people to want to participate in.

    But if that’s true, then it is already worthless.  If the idea of it is that fragile, then preventing gays from marrying will make no difference, it’s already trashed.

    But if it was worthless, then why would gays want to do it?

    Mr. Santorum most likely wants to see people forced to remain married.  He likely wants to see the end of divorce.  In order to do that, he has to wage war on freedom of choice.

    Everyone’s freedom of choice.

    The fact is, factors that have little to do with venerable institutions and traditions work to destabilize relationships.  Making the claims he does shows that he doesn’t want to talk about those things.  Because talking about the realities opens the door to all the other things he has come out against to be discussed openly.  People aren’t getting divorced now because gays live the way they do.  They get divorced because they can’t sustain their marriage—because there’s no money or they should not have become parents or the dreams of one or both partners have changed or they frankly should never have gotten married in the first place.  It’s what is between them that is at fault, if fault there is, and the circumstances in which they live.

    On the other hand, what exactly does he mean by destabilize?  Because there are many families that have suffered divorce that continued to be families.  The new mates were added in, a larger pool of siblings was created, Christmas cards and birthday wishes go out to a bigger list, and while mom and dad may not be together anymore, no one is fighting and everyone talks and sustains each other.  The family changed shape, it didn’t collapse.  Families survive, albeit in different configurations.  Divorce doesn’t destroy the family, it causes it to evolve.

    Oops.  That’s another thing Santorum doesn’t believe in.  Evolution.  No wonder he doesn’t recognize what I’ve just described.