Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Politics

  • Legacies

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

    It was a binding experience.

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

    And I remember wanting to strike back.

    But at who?

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

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

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

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

    Not so after 9/11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Quote of the Day

    It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

    from Federalist # 41, by James Madison

  • Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

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

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

    Everyone needs a hobby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We do live in interesting times.

  • John Adams and the Efforts of Time

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

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

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

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

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

    Or was it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It was a mess.

    The myth prevails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But look at what they managed to build.

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

  • Hating the Government: An American Tradition.

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

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

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

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

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

    So why do we distrust it so much?

    Well, because we distrust each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • A Question…or Two…or More…

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

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

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

    Hmm.  The government?

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

    The government?

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

    So what is being asked for here?

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

    So how will that work exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

    Who might that be?

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

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

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

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

    So how is anything is going to change otherwise?

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

  • The Madman In The Auditorium

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Where does this shit come from?

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

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

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

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

    Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Simple problem.  Where do you start to address it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why?  What is it they think will happen?

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

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

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

  • The My Factor

    Listening to the harangue over the health care reform squabble, I can’t help thinking—even I saw a few episodes of West Wing, I who do not watch television, so of all the  Lefties out there who probably hung on every second of that show, why is it so hard to grasp how things don’t get accomplished in D.C. ?  Yeah, it was fiction, but it was, in my opinion, pretty accurate in terms of the culture.

    But people complain and wonder why Obama doesn’t just “ram his reforms through.”

    Well.  The man is a consensus builder.  We just got done with a president who wasn’t.  Obama has not yet been in office a year and already people are ready to jump ship because he’s not the second coming of FDR.

    How thoughtless, ill-informed, and shallow supposedly intelligent people can be.  It should not be surprising, yet…

    First off, instead of presenting his reform package, he handed it to Congress—which is where all the arguing was going to happen anyway.  Suppose he had presented a package.  What is happening now would have happened anyway, and then he would be directly blamed for having drafted a lame plan.  His plan would have been eviscerated and Congress would then proceed to draft something possibly worse than what is emerging now since Obama’s plan would have been discredited through failure.   As it is, the plan being touted is All Congress’s.  Anything wrong with it, it’s on them.   Obama has been arguing that regardless what happens, things have to change—which is frightening to many people.  With the stimulus package, things were already broken.  With health care they are merely on the verge.

    Secondly, he’s got lots of balls in the air just now.  A lot.  Most of them are disasters he inherited.

    Now, the metaphor has been used before, but that doesn’t make it any less true—this country is a Big Ship and you don’t turn it around on a dime.  If you do that, you break more than you fix.  Maybe that’s what needs to happen, and sometimes we’ve had leaders who did that when there was but one maybe two major things that needed to be tended to.  But that’s not the case just now.

    Everything is in a mess.

    I’m not going to fault the man for failing to meet impossible expectations.   Let’s assume he did just start “ramming things through” and taking a dump all over Congress in the process, and things would inevitably get worse.  For the ideologues who are displeased with what they perceive as half-measures just now, he might be a hero.  Maybe, but quite certainly he would be a one-term hero.  The Republicans could make good book on a spectacular failure and be right back in power, at least in Congress, and then what?

    So I think it a stupid thing to start bailing on him this soon into his term when he is possibly the most unifying, certainly the most intelligent and well educated president we’ve had since…hm.

    Here’s what’s likely going to happen.  Congress will put together a lame package.  It will pass.  Then likely as not it will fail.  The system will collapse.  On its own.

    Then the big fix will come in.  Congress will be discredited and Obama will be able to present a plan with legs and the  public will back it because they will already have seen what happens when the really necessary steps are not taken.

    Right now, the reality is that health care costs too damn much.  The public option was designed to force the industry to charge less.  The way it’s set up, they can’t.  Too many people making too much buck are too dependent on it.  When that system breaks down, then you can fix it.  As long as it is seen to work by those who can afford to hire lobbyists, it will remain in place.

    And it’s true, Obama doesn’t have a way to pay for it.  He’s playing a dangerous game right now.  He’s banking on you and me and the next door neighbor fomenting rebellion.  He’s hoping we unilaterally strike (as in labor strike, just so my meaning is clear) and tell the insurance industry that enough is enough.  That we’re not prepared to allow them to hike our premiums whenever we have medical needs or cancel us if we really get sick.  The fact is, the insurance industry is a business, it is designed to make profit, and if it can do that by taking care of people, it will—but if it can’t, then it won’t help anyone it can figure out how cut out.  The basic principles need to shift, but that won’t happen in a system built on conflicting benefits.

    It’s ironic, you know, that people are terrified of a government bureaucrat dictating health benefits, but they don’t have the same reaction when a corporate bureaucrat does the same damn thing—-or have we all forgotten HMOs?

    It’s not so hard to understand, though.  It’s a mindset and it is basic to the American psyche.

    Here’s the mindset that has to be overcome.  “Keep the government out of my medicare.”  I heard that actually said.  Oxymoronic, yeah?  But it expresses a bone-deep sentiment that is fundamental to the American psyche and it is expressed by one word in that phrase—My.

    Reality aside, people do not view government services as “theirs”.  They pay their taxes, in this view, to benefit Other People.  Not them.  Yes, yes, I know, it’s ludicrous, but tell me it isn’t true?  The public option would be seen as Not Ours.  If it goes through the government it passes out of private hands—my hands—and becomes something that no longer belongs to me.  Private insurance, private health care, bad as it may be, is Mine.  That’s the key word, that’s the core of the fear.

    Tally the complaints we hear daily, often as a joke, about dealing with City Hall.  The Department of Motor Vehicles is a case in point.  Complaint after complaint.  Not all of it invalid, but far far more than is warranted.  Get someone, anyone, over fifty-five talking about vehicle inspections and the more recent emissions tests, and you can get a visceral reaction all to the negative.  People do not see the government as Theirs.  It is an institution with which they must deal, but it is a nuisance, a thing that gets in the way, a burden, an obstacle, not like the local retail store or the private contractor.

    Further, though, that resounding My goes to the heart of another sensitive issue in American culture that is connected to merit.  Because, so this reasoning goes, when you support something through the government, when you pay taxes for it, people who don’t deserve it will get it.  You lose all control.  And then you get the same level of attention as “those people over there” who don’t work.

    That most of us do not fall into anything like that category, and government programs are pathologically geared to preventing the so-called undeserving from getting anything they shouldn’t have matters not at all.  I will not argue the perversity of the mindset, but that’s where it lies.  Single payer, to take it further, means it is no longer Yours.  Your money goes out the door to the government and is diffused through a population of folks, many of whom you don’t want to pay for.  Never mind that improvement in general public health redounds to all our benefit.  Never mind that dealing with poverty-related disease protects us all.  Never mind that decent health care is fundamental to beginning the eradication of the cycle of poverty.  Never mind that so much would cost much less in the long run.  The question in the average mind is, “Why should I be made to pay for someone else’s health care?”

    Now, it doesn’t matter that basically this is the way insurance works now.  We’re talking psychology here, not reason.  The fact is, you can cancel your insurance if you don’t like how it’s operating—stupid maybe, but it’s the illusion of control, the fiction of private property.

    And just now, we are still living under the aegis of Reagan-speak, which cast the government as the Other, the Alien, the Tyrant.

    It’s a form of classism.  Never mind that it might work better.  The sad fact is, it will work for people many of us may feel don’t deserve it.  And that is part of what America is all about.  Ownership, control of personal destiny, the ability to deny on the basis of merit.  It’s the dark side of the very system that has also provided a great deal of good to a great many people.  It’s a holdover from the age of self-reliance and is reinforced through our romantic connection to Manifest Destiny and the City on the Hill, the latter image most recently invoked by Reagan and referred to obliquely by George W. Bush.  Only the Elect may live there, and that doesn’t include those who can’t (or, in this characterization, won’t) support themselves.

    The fact is, we haven’t found a way to effectively argue with this.  Two reasons—it is largely unstated, and it’s hard to debate something that is not even cogently recognized; and when it is challenged, the challenger sounds like a Socialist.

    Remember.  It’s all about the My.

  • Life Sometimes Takes You…

    Mind you, I am not defending Governor Sanford, not really.  But I have to admit to be pleasantly surprised at his current stance, vis a vis his affair.

    “I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate,” he said in an interview.

    So many public figures indulge in affairs, get caught, and then drag the whole thing out in a back yard lot, pour gasoline on it, and set it ablaze in a spasm of self-loathing apologetics.  I suppose the most dramatic was Jimmy Swaggart, weeping openly on television, going through a self-flagellation of Medieval proportions, at least psychologically.

    And he was “forgiven” by his followers.

    It seemed for a time that Sanford’s supporters were getting set to forgive him.  “Okay,” they seemed to say, “you have a fling, it could happen to anybody, but now you’re back, you’ve abased yourself, your wife is going to forgive you, we can go on.”

    But wait.  Now he has come out a gone off-script.  He was in love with  Maria Belen Chapur, and still is.  They met in 2001, at the onset of our eight-year-long Republican convulsion over public morality and national meltdown in global politics.  The Republican Party named for itself the “high ground” of moral probity, condemning liberalism as somehow not only fiscal irresponbsible but the ideology of license and promiscuity.

    Democrats have been caught in extramarital affairs, no question.  But most of them did not sign on to any puritanical anti-sex purgation program.  The Republicans, who stand foursquare in opposition to gay marriage, sex education, pre-marital sex, contraception, divorce, pornography, and just about anything that suggests an embrace of physical pleasure outside the narrow parameters of a biblical prescription for wedded bliss (all without obviously understanding just what biblical standards actually are) seem to be having more than their share of revelatory faux pas in this area.  They are the party now of “Do What I Say Not What I Do”—a parenting stance that has long since lost any credibility.

    Polls and surveys and studies suggest that conservatives generally have a bigger problem with pornography than do liberals.  Likewise, it seems conservative men of power screw around a lot more than do liberals in similar positions.

    I think this is because there is an unspoken assumption among conservatives in power having to do with “perks.”  You can see this extending all the way back in history.  The man with the power gets to play more.  In fact, they might suggest to colleagues in the know that a little “extracurricular action” is necessary to keep things sane.

    John Edwards, for all his faults, is more typical of liberals/democrats.  He screwed up.  But he didn’t go out in public crying his eyes out about how he’d lost his way.  He said he intended to try to patch things up with his wife, sorry if the public is disappointed, and I’m outta here.  Crass as it seems, his wife has been very ill.  Say what you want about marital commitment, the stress cancer puts on a relationship is not something most people understand and if the man indulged inadvisedly in sex outside his marriage, well, that’s between him and his wife.  End of story.  We can condemn, understand, forget, forgive, or deal with it as we will, it is no longer any of our business.

    It’s not like Newt Gingrich, who (planned or not) had his sick wife served with divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.

    But Sanford now…he’s gone off-script as I say.  He’s owning up.  He’s not really apologizing for the affair.  He’s sorry it came out, he’s sorry the situation is what it is, but frankly, he isn’t sorry it happened.

    And honestly?  That’s a bit refreshing.

    We indulge a myth in this culture about True Love that’s pretty unsupportable in real life.  It happens.  But it’s almost never—almost—the way we tell ourselves it’s supposed to be.  Falling in love with your high school sweetheart, marrying, and being happy in that relationship till we die…it does happen.  But it is not the norm and it’s not fair to hold it up as the Gold Standard, because you just can’t know where life will sometimes take you.

    Besides, a big part of that myth is that we can only ever fall in love with one other person.  An ancillary part of that is that we can only ever be in love with one person at a time.  It’s not true.  Maybe it would be better if it were.

    But standing up acting like a victim—which is what most of these people like Sanford and Swaggert and the rest do—and throwing themselves on the mercy of the public, a public that can have no real idea what was going on in these people’s lives, is worse in my opinion than the initial indiscretion.  Because when you do that, you throw your lover on a bonfire and make him or her out to be a terrible thing.

    Sanford’s not doing that.  Sanford is basically saying “You know, I don’t like it that my life is about to explode over this, but I met someone and we have a connection, and I’m not sorry about it.”

    What?!?  How can you say that?

    Because—out of everything else he might have said or done—it’s the truth.  And for that, I applaud the man.

    The dirty secret about the Republican mindset regarding this, with a few exceptions, is that they’re not nearly so angry with him for having done it as they are for getting caught.

    And he didn’t actually get caught.  He took a week off to go see someone he loves.  Very publicly.  Maybe the press was sniffing around, maybe not, but if so he stole their thunder.

    Molly Ivans,who was such a breath of fresh air and common sense in a realm where neither is in any great supply, once responded to a question about sexual misconduct and the performance of civic duty more or less this way.  I’m paraphrasing.

    “It would be nice to think there’s a connection between private sexual conduct and the ability to do your duty in public office, but there just isn’t.  Some of the most lecherous men have been great politicians.”

    Should Sanford resign over this?   If it were me, I’d fight it.  I’d look at my detractors and say “How dare you judge me for something a significant number of you would either like to do, have done, or are doing.”  But it seems unlikely he’ll be allowed to be effective now.

    It’s a small thing, perhaps, this one spot of honesty in all this mess, but I think it’s an important one because for once it’s not feeding into the self-deceptive self righteousness that is our national myth about True Love.

    There is True Love.  But it doesn’t always come along at a convenient time and it doesn’t only happen just once.  And—this is the most important thing—it is not reducable to a consumer package to be paraded and auctioned for Air Time and Ratings.

    Just sayin’, you know?

  • Nazification

    I watched a family friend turn into a Nazi.

    Back when I was a kid and didn’t know very much about the world or people or anything, really, except what was in front of me that I thought was cool or what was around me that hurt, my father owned a business.  A number of his customers became friends.  One in particular I remember because he was a Character.

    Let’s call him Jonah.  That wasn’t his name, but he did get swallowed.

    You read about these sorts of fellows, amiable, not well-educated folks with mischievous streaks.  Jonah was like a great big teddy bear.  He stood over six feet, spoke with what might be called a hillbilly drawl.  I don’t know what he did for a living, exactly.  At ten, eleven, twelve years old that didn’t seem important.  He was an avid hunter and that more or less formed the basis of his relationship with my dad.

    Jonah was always quick with a joke.  He was the first man I ever met who could do sound effects:  bird calls, train whistles, animal sounds, machinery.  He had a gift for vocal acrobatics that brought to mind commedians on tv.  He could get me laughing uncontrollably.  I suppose a lot of his humor, while outrageous, could be considered dry because he had a marvelously unstereoptypic deadpan delivery.

    Jonah came to our house regularly for a few years, mostly on the weekends.  He ate at our table, helped dad with projects occasionally.

    He had a wife and a couple of kids.  The kids were way younger than me, so I didn’t really have much to do with them.  I remember his wife being very quiet.  I would say now that she was long-suffering, but I didn’t know what that meant then.  She was a rather pretty woman, a bit darker than Jonah with brown hair so dark it was almost black.  She wore glasses and tended to plumpness, what we used to call Pleasantly Plump.  They lived in a shotgun house with a big backyard.

    Which Jonah needed.  He collected junk cars.  This is what made him rather stereotypic.  There were always three or four cars in various stages of deconstruction in his yard, various makes and models.  He’d find them.  Fifty dollars here, a hundred there.  He himself drove a vehicle that probably wouldn’t pass inspection today and he was always fixing on it.  He found these cars and would proceed to develop grand plans to cannibalize them and out of the three or four, sometimes five, heaps and he intended to build one magnificent vehicle that would run better than Detroit assembly-line best and last forever.  He would get energetic, tearing into them, and according to my dad he exhibited an almost instinctive ability to mix and match parts and actually do engineering on the fly.  He came up with some first-rate gizmos out of all this, and from time to time an actual vehicle would begin to take shape.

    I can only assume he applied much the same philosophy to the rest of his life.  He owned one decent hunting rifle, which my dad managed to improve, but also owned several “clunkers” which he was always bringing in to my dad’s shop to fiddle with.

    Jonah never seemed to finish anything.

    I didn’t perceive this as a big deal then.  I always assumed as a kid that the adults I knew always lived pretty much the kind of life they wanted to.  Jonah wore off-the-shelf factory worker clothes all the time, some of them quite old, and big work boots.  He seemed always ready to dive into an engine or something else that required getting smeared with grease and oil, knuckles scraped, clothes dirty.

    I liked him.

    But he never finished anything.  My dad joked that if he would just save the money he spent on all those heaps he kept buying and trying to cannibalize, in short order he’d have enough to buy a pretty nice automobile.  That wasn’t Jonah’s way, though.  Maybe he thought he could do better.  He often complained about the way factory-made this or that was inferior.  He complained about the laziness of union laborers, especially the UAW.

    But he didn’t complain much.

    Until one day I heard him and my dad arguing.  I went into the living room and found that Jonah had brought over some pamphlets.  One of them, I remember, had ornate artwork on the cover and strident, bold lettering, declaring  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Dad was getting heated.  I recognized the trajectory.  He was genuinely miffed.  Jonah sat there, tapping one thick finger on the pamphlets, and kept repeating  “You need to read these, Hank.  There’s shit goin’ on we don’t know nothin’ about.”

    “Bullshit,” was my dad’s curt response.  They saw me, Jonah gathered up his pamphlets, and the conversation took a different direction.  But dad remained disturbed.

    There were a few more visits from Jonah.  I was not told to leave the room.  I sat and listened to a couple of the arguments.  I guess I was about 14 or 15 by then and had begun to do a lot of reading in history.  I knew about the Holocaust because of an incident in my seventh year of grade school, when something I said triggered my dad to shout and lecture and thrust books into my hand and instruct me to learn something about Hitler and what he did.  I frankly couldn’t get my head around it.  The numbers overwhelmed, ran beyond easy comprehension.  I’m not sure what I thought war was all about before then, but there was suddenly now an ugliness to WWII that unsettled me in a way I’d never experienced before.

    So when I finally understood what he was saying and why my dad was so angry, it really shocked me.  I knew this man.  How could he believe this stuff?  We’d gone hunting together, he made me laugh, he always seemed so…so…

    He was in the grip of becoming a Nazi.  I confess to being incapable at the time of grasping the full fury of the pathology that was in the process of overwhelming him, but it was clear to me that it was a disease.  Jonah was changing, distorting, growing warts and open sores on his personality.

    My dad finally barred him from the house.  He was not welcome anymore.  I’d never seen that happen before.  But dad was emphatic.  “You’ve got a head full of shit, Jonah.  I don’t want that poison in my home.”

    “I never thought the Jews owned you, Hank,” Jonah said.  That was the last thing he said.

    A year or so later we learned that his wife had left him.  The house with the junkers was sold, the cars disappeared.  Some time after that I saw him outside a Steak’n’Shake handing out pamphlets, wearing a swastika armband.  I don’t think he recognized me.

    I have no way of knowing all the components of Jonah’s life.  But what I did see, what I heard, what I knew about, eventually came to paint a picture for me of a man who never really got a handle on his own life.  This in no way made him unique.  I said he never finished anything.  All his plans came to nothing.  He would start on something, draw up the designs in his head, spin great dreams about how this would do this and that would happen.  He would work for a while.  And then do something else, the Great Scheme unfinished.  In memory I see now that he never had much money.  He didn’t save for a good car because he didn’t have the experience of saving, nothing to tell him that it would ever be worthwhile, that the only way to “get ahead” was to acquire success all in one big lump.  That’s how the fat cats do it.  The rich people.  Plodding, consistent work, day in and day out, didn’t lead there.  Whatever job or jobs he held, it must have been clear that he would never climb out of where he was through them.

    Nothing unusual about that, many people find themselves in such ruts.  Sometimes it’s lack of education, other times it’s a character flaw, or perhaps they simply don’t have the level of intelligence needed to do better than they’ve ever done.  Sometimes they just don’t have the inclination.  They do what they can, they live their lives, they get by, and we assume they find a way to be all right with that, or at least make it acceptable.

    A few blame someone for it.

    Not even that is remarkable and sometimes it’s even true.  It’s possible for blame to be legitimately cast on a parent who makes life so miserable and difficult that a child’s schooling cannot overcome the deficits of environment.  Tough to do homework in a house with a loud drunk or an abuser or any number of other circumstances that destroys any kind of sense of safety and security.  True, people overcome this kind of situation all the time, but it’s much harder, and a little blame is reasonable.

    But for some the blaming takes on the added component of persecution, like the universe is somehow against them.  If not the universe, then, maybe, well….Those People.

    It is a pathology, hating.  Hating that looks to be fed.  Most people perhaps have hated in their lives, but hate is a fire that burns hot and fast and for the sane person it consumes itself and becomes something less volatile.  But some hating is like a fusion reactor, taking matter in and combining it with the stuff of the hate, and thereby establishing a feed line that provides fuel so it never burns out.  Like cancer that creates its own blood source to feed.

    People who cannot accept that what may have gone wrong in their lives is their fault.  But more than that, it is not only not their fault, it is very much someone else’s fault, there are people who act against them.  What possible control can you exercise when hidden forces counter your efforts at every turn?  How can you succeed when the very ground upon which that success might be built is stolen by people who want to keep you from succeeding?  How can you be anything more when the world is permeated with those who take advantage of the strong to perpetuate their existence at our expense?

    And suddenly the full flower of your own self-forgiveness opens.  Nothing is your fault.  It is Them.  Without Them, you could do great things, but They prevent you.  Why?  Because you and not One Of Them.  You’re different.

    You’re not a Jew.

    I watched this pathology overtake and destroy a man who I thought of as a friend.  He was a Good Guy. And then one day he decided being a Good Guy meant hating people he thought were plotting against all Good Guys.

    And he was just smart enough to follow the trail laid down by those like him who survive on hate.

    You can create systems that seem to explain things that actually don’t support fact or truth.  It’s done all the time.  Selecting details, combining them in enticing ways… just look at The DaVinci Code as an example.  The historical details the underlie that book’s premise are there.  The way Brown, and earlier the two men who wrote the “nonfiction” source, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, merely strung these details together in such a way as to point to a conclusion that…

    Well, it is more or less the same process by which the centuries long litany of charges leveled against the Jewish people has been cobbled together to form what seems to be a consistent and damning chain of evidence of plots and secret societies.

    Oh, and you need to leave certain details out to make sure only the parts that support your conclusion are presented.  Anything that might undermine the central argument, well, that needn’t be there.

    People like Jonah are not equipped to do the research to find out the truth.  Not that they would anyway.  They seem to be predisposed to accept the conclusions of the haters.

    It’s easier than actually fixing their own lives.

    Here is the Washington Post story of the man who opened fire at the Holocaust Museum.   His name is James W. van Brunn and he is 88 years old.  Here is an article about his background.  He is one of those who has kept alive the nonsense allegations about Obama’s supposedly “questionable” birth certificate.

    He is a full time hater.

    Personally, I don’t believe it much matters what such people hate.  They hate.  It’s what drives them.  They center their lives on it, it gives them purpose, it forms something by which they can feel important.  It feeds.

    Endlessly countering their lousy grasp of history, the errors in their statements, the false premises upon which they base their attacks is important only insofar as it offers those around them—and us—alternatives to simply accepting the fever dream confabulations of their imagined causes.  I doubt it will change them.

    Years ago I read an interview with a man who was a former White Supremacist.  He left them not because he realized they were wrong about their history, that their arguments were tight-looped tautologies, that collectively they were destructive to anything good in the world.  No.  He left because his child was born handicapped and these people were all about racial “purity” and one day they came to him and told him it was time for  him to “do something” about his mutant.  It struck home then, with an icy precision, that this was not just an exercise in intellectual (or anti-intellectual) culture war, but personal, with personal consequences that were…unacceptable.

    Yet he had joined them.  He had at some point decided to accept the Us or Them nonthink of the haters, because he could not see a way to live in the world without blaming everyone else for how he was.

    Because ultimately, that’s where it begins.