In and Out

Occupy

2011-11-11T08:20:00.000-05:00

Understand the wait for what
it is. There will be no great leap
forward. That debate is over.
The throng does not march toward

ordained fate. There is simply each
meandering face, longing for common
flow, and the hard places along the way.

So, it behooves us to wish
each other well, to mourn the dead,
to fight like hell
for the rest. Occupy.

Debt Ceiling Blues

2011-08-01T09:10:00.005-04:00

But all praise to memory

While we're all trying to decide how much we hate Obama's debt ceiling deal and whether or not the man has crossed our own individual political line-in-the-sand, I offer my own reflections on memory (probably, but not certainly, irrelevant to the current fiscal crisis and equally irrelevant to the lives of all but a tiny few of the admittedly small number of readers of this blog). Got that?

Last night Marrianne and I watched the 3rd episode of Falling Skies, some cable channel's 13-episode, alien-invasion series. (And, no, I am not going to get into some side discussion on what and why we were watching.) At one point, a father tries to console his son over the son's loss of his girlfriend during the struggle against alien invaders. Into the bargain, the human population of Earth has been decimated, so everybody is essentially an individual variation on a shell-shocked survivor.

"At least you have memories of her," the father comforts.

"Mom was better at this, Dad," the kid responds, both wryly and sadly.

"Yeah, that was pretty lame," says Dad.

NOTE: Do not rely on these quotes for authenticity. They are constructed from memory.

The viewer sort of nods and agrees with Dad and Son that the comforting advice is lame. That, I suspect is what we all think; that memories of a person or a pet or a place or an event are but pale shadows of the real deal and without the power to comfort especially when the loss is recent and raw.

Most of the time it may be nearly indisputable that memory is not enough, but the truth is that sometimes memory is more than loving recall of something that cannot be recreated. Sometimes memory is vividly real and as familiar as the air. I am 64 years old (or nearly so) and past my prime in, oh, so many things. But I remember prime in those many things, and remember in detail.

I'll admit straight up that what I remember may never have happened as I remember it, but that is a mere bagatelle (French, I think, for a gossipy bagel). Memory, however flawed, is the best we got for building and maintaining individual identity, so while we need to have it, we might as well tap some of its great power, e.g., the ability to hold a lover or a pet or a great moment in our lives so close to the core of our being that they come alive, tangible as a warm breeze or cool water, releasing a flow of endorphins that cleanses us and brings us close to what we most desire.

One is favored by such moments only rarely. If they happened too often, the number of square-peg people in a round-hole world would overwhelm the capacity of our institutions. As, in fact, is happening now with the tribal fantasies of the Tea Party seriously testing our political capacity to understand each other and cooperate.

Yesterday morning, while out with my middle-sized dog, Jetta, traipsing through a dry-season wetland, I stumbled upon a series of memories of myself at 12 and the games I would play with my neighborhood friends. One game, in particular, seemed perfect for our block of brick three-flats and apartment buildings. "Ditch," as we called it, was played entirely outdoors, except for the warrens of basement tunnels running under the three-story apartment buildings that squatted on three or four lots along the street. If you could get into a basement, more power to you. Just don't get caught by your pursuers on the other team or by a building janitor.

Evolved out of the almost casual inclination of any group of two or three or four or more kids to hide from, flee or "ditch" a subset of that same group, into Ditch, in which half of us pursued the other half everywhere on the block--though tunnels, over fences, off garage roofs--until we had captured and held every member of the other team. It was an adrenalin-soaked, terror-producing, entirely exhilirating after-school and weekend activity. We played it compulsively, like rats ignoring food and water in favor of the button that releases another dose of cocaine or some such drug.

I think we played Ditch often enough and hard enough and long enough to force our bodies to adapt productively. For all that fitness has always mattered to me, I don't think that my body and its capabilities were ever again so well matched. I was a wiry, agile, relentless, Ditch-playing machine.

And now, I'm 64. I can still go hard when I have to, but I can't keep it up with the same ease I used to have, and I don't recover from going hard at anywhere near the old rate. One thing I am plainly not is twelve years old. But Saturday morning, out with Jetta, I was.

We had gotten kicked off a portion of the back acreage of the Howard University Seminary and I was morose. I knew Jetta and I would be okay out on the wetland (quite dry at this time of year), but I was feeling furtive and anxious. I sat down and wrote a poem that I'll post on Outdoor Poetry Season, but the effort did not empower or invigorate me.

Moping my way off the property, I recalled myself at 10 or 11 walking across the lawn of some 10- or 12-unit apartment building and being suddenly confronted by the building janitor, who was waving a rake and ordering me off his lawn. None of us knew his name, but he was a big guy, putting us in mind of a bear, so we called him Andy Panda; a cuddly sort of label that I suppose we applied in order to diminish the fear he inspired in us.

I ran around him and when I got a safe distance, I yelled. "I'm not afraid of you, Andy Panda."

The memory stimulated additional memories and all the sights and sounds of Ditch flooded my mind. It was definitely a WWJD-moment ("J" meaning a 12-year old Jeff). Trying to caution Jetta to stealth, I made my way along the wooded fringe of the Howard property, suddenly determined to get across the three-block landscape from which I'd previously been banned, not by Andy Panda but, by a guy with a gun and sergeant's stripes.

Jetta was having difficulty inhabiting my vision, but I was all in. I was 12 and my heart was pumping and I was alert and tingling and ready and finally confident that no guy with a gun and sergeant's stripes was a match for me. I can't say what proportion of the journey involved stealth and slinking through the shadows and what part was sprinting and dashing ahead, but it felt a good mix. I could feel the sweep of dozens of prying eyes, but I was nearly invisible. I could sense when my pursuers got close, or when I passed near a surveillance point, but I zigged and darted and sped beyond their awareness.

At the other end of property I paused and coaxed Jetta into the shadow by the trees and looked back at where I'd been. I was safe, I was victorious and looking ahead to where I was going with fresh anticipation. All praise to memory.

And what was it we were talking about?

Definitely a Midsummer's Outdoor Poetry Season

2011-07-19T12:19:00.002-04:00

Seasoned by climate change

Went for a walk with Jetta this morning. Out for an hour, lingered in the seasonal wetland (now, very dry) behind Howard University's School of Religion. Swung by the largely unmaintained hilltop ruins around the site of an old Civil War-era fort. It really is amazing what's only a minute away on foot around here.

In any case, I was dripping sweat by the time I got home, even though it wasn't even 9 a.m. And the streets were deserted, people already hunkered down against the heat.

What ever are they going to do by the middle of the century when the average temperature will probably be 7 degrees higher than it is now, maybe 10 degrees? Imagine, 80s when it used to be 70. 90s when it used to be 80. And a day like today would be what temperature by mid-afternoon? By 2040, maybe 110 degrees.

It wasn't like I was exercising vigorously, though I was preparing to go with Marrianne to Bus Boys and Poets for open-mike night, tonight. So I was throwing myself around imaginary stages and gesturing emphatically. It is well and truly Outdoor Poetry Season.

I'm going to recite The Unfolding first. And then The Last Night.

Matt Damon speaks,

2011-07-03T12:39:00.004-04:00

I reshape the message just for me.

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon, speaks to a crowd of adoring supporters after a tough election loss. He tells them that even though he is widely regarded as a natural, down-to-earth guy, as a candidate he has been no such thing. Holding up his shoe, he talks about the influence of consultants on him and his campaign and how unnatural he really is.

We paid this one guy, he says, to figure out the right amount of "scuff" on his shoes. If the shoes are perfect, voters will think you are a lawyer or a banker, some kind of snob, not one of them. If your shoes are scuffed like some kind of working class guy, the Damon character says, you won't get support from big money contributors. So, the right amount of scuff is a big deal.

This I have known personally all my life. My dad was a dominating, charismatic figure. He was also meticulous about his appearance, even fastidious. And he always went for maximum shine on his expensive shoes. He loved me, and wanted me to achieve great success in life, but the plan was never mine, always his.

I reacted to him, I think, so strongly that I've spent a portion of my time on this good earth trying to figure out the right amount of scuff for me. This is not so easy as it sounds. Knowing that you are not Bernie Epton is not the same as having the right footwear in the right condition for every occasion in life.

Correct me, if I'm wrong about homophobic rant

2011-06-22T09:16:00.005-04:00

So comedian Tracy Morgan (a Saturday Night Live alumnus) recently unloaded a darker part of his soul with a line at one of his comedy shows, claiming, apparently, that "he'd 'stab' his son if he were gay (Washington Post)." Chastised by activists, Morgan recanted (as opposed to "reranting") his remarks and apologized. I'm pretty certain that his apology is sincere and his understanding of human rights and shared humanity has been upgraded. I'm also certain that he's no more tainted than the rest of us--we are all only (and uniquely) human.

But beyond that, what would it mean for any man to stab his son upon discovering that his son was gay? Lots of possible interpretations, to be sure. Here's my take on the psychology underlying the threatened homicide:

A man, a particular man, say, stabs his son when he discovers that his son is gay for two purposes.

One, though he may never have had (knowingly) a homosexual desire, let alone encounter, this particular man stabs (penetrates) in the wild hope that he could have his son before any other man might take him. This is the return of the repressed.

And two, this particular man wishes to be the sole possessor of whoever it is that he finds himself lusting after. Does stabbing guarantee that he would be the only man (or, at least, the last one) to have his son?

This is a detailed acting out of jealous sexual rage. It makes no difference what gender or sexual orientation we are speaking of here. We are all only (and uniquely) human.

But we'd also better hurry up the expansion of our collective understanding of our shared humanity. Worse is coming.

The Spirit of Phyllis Hall

2011-04-18T09:09:00.004-04:00

Rich and Forever Giving

When my mom died last fall, she was ready to go, though she nevertheless regretted that she had reached the point where death might be welcome. She didn’t want to linger in her dying, nor did she laze about much in life. Loving always, but not particularly interested in showing it. She had friends, people who loved her, but she still lived her life in a kind of isolated splendor. She wasn’t much for passing out compliments, either, though she celebrated each of us for the virtues she believed we possessed. But she loved us. Gift aplenty.

Now Perry Hall’s mom has died. It has taken me a day or two of thinking about it to fully grasp what Phyllis Hall gave me that no one else did. And in understanding what she did for me, I know I feel a portion of the loss that the Hall family must feel.

Perry’s been a friend my whole adult life. We don’t see each other much anymore, but if I needed him and I told him so, he would come. As I believe I would come for him. A friendship with a man like Perry would be gift enough from Phyllis Hall, but it’s only a fraction of what Phyllis gave me.

In 1970 I spent a good portion of the summer living at Perry’s mom’s house on Hobart, a street one block from Trumbull Street in Detroit. Perry lived there, too, of course. A whole lot of others, brothers, sisters, grandchildren and cousins, lived there, too. And if they didn’t live there, they were around daytime, or nighttime, or mealtime, or bedtime, or maybe all the time; there was no roster or schedule.

During the day Perry and I worked at Ed Bowyer’s Insight Magazine. The magazine was an exemplary editorial vision, but Ed didn’t have the resources to execute that vision. The first issue, showing the statue, Spirit of Detroit, tying off an arm and shooting up, created quite a stir. Insight lasted, two, maybe, three, issues. But it was beyond doubt an important place to work and Detroit was a fine place to engage in struggle.

We ran one feature, an interview of a group of black Detroit-area Vietnam vets, over a couple of issues. The interview was raw, poignant, portentous; full of the anger and frustration of African American men in America in the ‘60s and’70s.

At night Perry and I would return to the Hall homestead, share food and drink, socialize, visit neighbors; a group of autoworkers, members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) lived across the street, sharing space with grassroots activists who worked for radical Detroit city councilman Ken Cockrell. Life that summer felt relevant and rich. But the key to it all was Phyllis Hall.

She worked a swing shift as a matron at the Detroit House of Corrections, in my mind’s eye a large, dark, forbidding place. But I knew it was a place Phyllis could handle, even as I was sure that I would barely survive there.

Sometimes on her way home from work, Phyllis shopped for groceries and cooked at midnight. Whoever was awake would gather at the table. Others would rouse themselves from sleep. There were never enough beds, so on occasion, waking for midnight dinner, I would find one or two of Perry’s nieces or nephews sleeping on top of me. That always felt like a kind of loving comfort that I did not experience again until my own infant children slept soundly (and with a profound weight) on my chest.

It didn't matter how many people were at the house during those late night dinners, who was sleeping or who was awake, because there was always enough food. Maybe because there was always plenty of love.

I never figured out when Phyllis slept. I’d guess that since she was so busy taking care of everyone else she probably wasn’t getting enough sleep herself. But she lived through Hobart Street and so much else in her life, and lived well for eight decades, so maybe it was caring for others that kept her whole and thriving.

I didn’t see Phyllis much after that summer, but I knew I’d get a warm welcome anytime I came by. I never told her how loved she made me feel, I don’t think she needed to hear such things. But now that she’s gone, I feel the need to note some of the gifts I received from her, gifts I’ve been unwrapping my whole life.

Some time in high school, I lost my innocence about race. By college I knew that equality and meaningful integration and shared understanding were, without struggle and pain, beyond our collective reach in the United States. And I knew that whiteness was both a privilege and a sort of stupidity about the world. And I thought these things with a kind of sorrow I couldn’t evade despite varied and creative efforts to do so; especially after Martin Luther King, Jr., the most enduring heroic figure in my life, was killed. But Phyllis’s house was the place where my whiteness mattered least, and where I did not have to evade the sorrow because I could briefly set it aside. All that counted, so far as I could tell, was the content of my character and that every other person coming into Phylli’s home.

In Phyllis’s house, we were all affirmed.

And, thinking of those late night meals, I am aware that what we all dined on together may not have what we wanted, but it was all that we needed.

Phyllis Hall was the exemplar of the kind of person Sweet Baby James advises us to be:

“Shower the people you love with love,
show them the way that you feel.”

I'm happy to have known her.

Ambivalence

2011-03-30T09:34:00.005-04:00

To fight or not to fight in Libya or anywhere else?

That is, or ought to be, the eternal question. Whether the cost in human lives and national treasure is worth the outcome. And whether the outcome is clearly and transparently defined or is oblique and misdefined. For Americans, after all, it has never been simply a question of whether we support or oppose the clear goals of war, but also whether we have been lied to and mislead. There is a dissonance within ourselves and our country that sometimes cannot be resolved.

In my lifetime, that has been the case in Iran in 1950, in Guatemala in 1954, in Vietnam in 1956 and beyond, in Cambodia, in Chile, in Panama, in Granada, in Nicaragua, and so on and so forth. The same questions do not arise in every instance.

Most often, I am persuaded that American goals are not on the side of justice. When the U.S. intervened in Kosovo in the early '90s, many on the Left supported that intervention. The Serbian Slobadan Milosevic seemed bent on the destruction of Albanian Kosovars. But I didn't support that intervention, despite the fact that Milosevic was almost certainly a war criminal. Earlier the U.S. had left Rwandans to their fate. And been indifferent to the plight of civilians in the Horn of Africa suffering from war, expulsion and famine. How could the same country that did not trouble itself over Rwandans, Congolese, Somalians and Ethiopians be judged guileless and innocent of ulterior motives when it rode to the rescue of Albanians?

But we are another decade along now, and are led by a president whom I genuinely believe wishes to solve conflicts and ameliorate suffering, perhaps even in the case of Palestinians. And I am persuaded that many lives have been saved in Libya by the recent U.S.-led intervention. Still, I am remain troubled by the notion that the among the few certainties here is that weapons manufacturers will get reorders and that even humanitarian interventions serve the interests of some who don't give a hoot about Libyans or about Palestinians, or whom humanitarian intervention may never come, or about the millions of recent dead for whom humanitarian intervention never came. But how could abstention be the answer?

The Libyan War is...

2011-03-23T08:49:00.008-04:00

A. a bad idea.
B. a necessary evil. Innocent people are dying. U.S. intervention will keep Gaddafi from murdering his people.
C. not the outcome of constitutional deliberation and process.
D. a sign of Obama's weak leadership
E. a good idea.
F. What kind of phony discussion is this? The war in Libya is another undeclared war based on a (probably incorrect calculation of) national interests that will cost the United States much more than it delivers and will fall far short of any reasonable humanitarian goal.

There is an G, of course, namely that the whole idea of intervention in Libya is confusing and difficult to assess. The probabilities seem fairly high that, if Americans were to respond to a poll asking such a question and offering A through G as possible responses, a plurality would likely admit confusion and choose G. A good number might also support the idea that some sort of humanitarian intervention is necessary. A relative few would be likely to choose A, a bad idea.

On Tuesday, March 22, the Washington Post op-ed page featured five pieces offering some sort of counsel in regard to the choice. The five opinion writers, Anne Applebaum, George Will, Michael Gerson, Richard Cohen and Eugene Robinson, arguably came down on the side of B, C (with a leaning toward A), D & B, D & B, and F (or at least, A), respectively.

Only Applebaum, in "Aim low on Libya," expresses strong support for intervention and excuses the week-long delay in getting there, arguing that quicker or more enthusiastic intervention would have resulted in a widespread perception of American war-mongering. It made sense in this case, she says, to wait for the British and the French to take the lead.

Will doesn't believe that Obama's reasons for intervening were constitutional, persuasive or grounded in a reasonable grasp of history. He calls Obama's observation that Gaddafi has lost all credibility with the Libyan people "meretricious boilerplate [apparently] designed to anesthetize thought." Will helpfully brings history into the discussion, citing the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War as experiences that could teach valuable lessons. His use of history would be even more effective here had he previously bothered to vigorously play the unconstitutional card in regard to the two wars against Iraq launched by the Bushes, father and son.

Michael Gerson, a speech writer for Bush II before he got his job as a Post columnist, endorses the attacks on Libya upfront in "Obama's late arrival," but then spends an additional 800 or so words complaining that Senators Kerry, McClain and Lieberman were quicker to arrive at the public conclusion that intervention was necessary. This appears to be so, but significance ought to be a criterion for the Post's op-ed pages.

Bombing Gadaffi might get us to the end of the "old order in the Middle East" and lead to the "stability and prosperity [that] are powerful antitodes to the violent urges of nihlism and extremism," as Gerson writes. Then, again, maybe bombing, which the United States has engaged in from time to time these last many years, provides some sort of evidence that stability and prosperity are not always antidotes to violent urges.

Richard Cohen, who plays an establishment liberal to Gerson's establishment conservative in the pages of the Post, doesn't like the way Obama governs, either, but makes the case with a little bit more humor than Gerson. In "Uncle Miltie's plan," Cohen does make the helpful point that "the search for a Unified Theory of What Is Happening [in the Middle East] is futile" and details why. All the same, Cohen's chief criticism of Obama appears to be that the president lacks a unified theory. The administration, Cohen concludes, "could have made an argument for staying out [of Libya] or a more forceful argument for going in. Instead it made both. "Milton Berle now plays the White House," he writes. And, no doubt, also haunts Cohen's ambivalent dreams.

Way below the bottom of the fold comes Eugene Robinson's "The dictators we need." Perhaps placement on the page reflects the Post's assessment of the merits of Robinson's argument, but it does have the virtue of clarity. After noting that Gadaffi is a genuine villain, threatening to "turn all of Libya into a charnel house," a blunt description of the allied intevention "clearly intended to cripple the government and boost the revolt's chances of success," Robinson offers a real-politik survey of U.S. relations with other autocrats in the Middle East. He concludes with the observation that the world would be better off without Gaddafi, "but war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standards we set for defiant ones. If not, please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We'll know this isn't about justice, it's about power."

Perhaps Robinson's observation explains why, amidst all the opinions, pro, con and in between, we aren't hearing from Republican budget hawks about the cost of war. We never do.

But surely, in a country where state governments are moving to outlaw collective bargaining rights for public employees, and public school teachers are being pink-slipped for budgetary reasons, some strong right-wing voice could be heard shouting above the din that we are already spent more than one trillion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (see Costofwar.com) and can ill-afford another engagement that will raise the cost by billions of dollars (Tomahawk missles cost $570,000 each, the F-15 that crashed a couple of days ago cost $30 million, the first day of combat in Libya coast an estimated $100 million). Alas, no such voice is to be heard.

Is it reasonable, to follow Robinson, to observe that most weapons manufacturers are Republicans, frequently generous campaign contributors, and huge fans of reorders for expensive weapons and expended munitions? I mean, in what other business does a reorder for a single item gross upwards of one-half million dollars?

On his Nation blog, in "Ten calls from Congress for a debate about war," John Nichols appears clear (oxymoron?) on one point: If it is to happen, Congress should authorize military action in Libya. The point is legalistic, perhaps necessary, historically venerated, and insufficient.

If Libya is a humanitarian tragedy about to happen, then any war effort mounted in response ought to be congressionally authorized. But if action is necessary, congressional authorization is not enough. And if Congress does not authorize, and tragedy occurs, what would be America's share of the blame? Further, by how much would a Congressional vote to authorize be delayed as a consequence of behind-the-scenes jockeying to put off such a vote? So, no, Nichol's apparent position lacks gravity and, hopefully, does the Nation an injustice.

But the Nation did editorialize on March 18 in response to the prospect of U.S. intervention. The editors have much to say and make many useful points about the sorry history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East (Libya's in North Africa, but who's counting?) and in Arab countries. I think the piece is a must-read, but I really can't tell if they mean to endorse no-fly zones or other intervention.

Here's the thing, G (the whole Libya-thing is confusing and difficult to assess) is the most understandable answer, but I keep thinking that if I were to remain mindful of the lies and misrepresentations that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that preceded the first Gulf War, that justified the embargo of Iraq (which may have caused the deaths of 1,000,000 Iraqis, including 500,000 children), that accompany U.S. aid to Israel and support the continuing oppression, dislocation and disenfranchisement of Palestinians, that excuse or obscure the human rights violations of a dozen key American allies, that hide the profits of war to a select few and shed theatrical tears for the losses of many, if I keep all those things in mind, then the only honest and reasonable answer for me to make is F (What kind of phony discussion is this? The war in Libya is another undeclared war based on a (probably incorrect calculation of) national interests that will cost the United States much more than it delivers and will fall far short of any reasonable humanitarian goal.)

Regardless, having gone to war (again), let us conclude with a prayer, Mark Twain's War Prayer, which includes this (among its many lines):

"help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
help us to drown the thunder of the guns
with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;"

and so on.

There But For Fortune

2011-03-21T08:51:00.006-04:00

Phil Ochs story shines with the promise of the '60s and teaches lessons about the failures of the time

Marrianne and I went to see There But For Fortune this past weekend. I did not fall asleep during the documentary, which I expected to do, because I ended up feeling almost inside the movie and was carried along by the events that were so pivotal in Ochs' short and dramatic life. One thing seems clear, Ochs is among the best songwriters ever at writing melodic and lyrically powerful songs about political realities.

His songs were important to me at the time, and though I never heard him in live performance, his songs reliably expressed my own feelings about the Vietnam War, about the overthrow of a democratically elected Socialist government in Chile, about Civil Rights, about the lives of working people, and about the nearly anonymous lives of the victims of capitalism and institutional power. Sometimes, such as at the Democratic convention in 1968, Ochs and I were in the same places, on the same streets, sharing community and shouting to be heard. At one point in the documentary, Ochs' daughter, Meegan, applauds the documentary effort, noting that her father would be thrilled to be remembered, but saddened that so many of the important struggles of the '60s were yet to be won.

Ochs struggled with manic-depression, which was likely partially inherited from his father, who was himself hobbled and institutionalized by the condition. Ochs' mania may very well have been one of the most important factors in his consistent ability to mobilize for protest and organizing. His mental illness may also have been inseparable from his creative power. By 1976, when Ochs killed himself, his depression and self-medicating alcoholism were likely the most important factors. Both his strengths and weaknesses may have been to a substantial degree the gifts of his manic-depression. But another factor in his suicide, a factor which must have undermined his previously impressive resilience, his ability to engage the fight for peace and justice, was a feeling that the promise of the '60s was dissipated, that the movement had lost too many struggles, had been defeated, compromised or had turned to violence.

Ochs was only a few years older than me, and he's been gone for almost 35 years. But watching There But For Fortune I felt both the joy of comradeship, bafflement at the ebbs and flows of creativity, and the sorrow of loss. Ultimately, I can't say whether Ochs' early death makes his life more quintessentially a '60s life, or less so. But he was vulnerable in a way that most of us are not because of the severity of his mental illness.

This morning before she left for work, Marrianne told me about a colleague of hers at the Department of Health and Human Services who as a boy was a refugee. At one point in his childhood, he walked hundreds of miles across an African desert to escape war and starvation. The story got me to thinking about the size of the struggle for peace and justice that we face now and how a person tempered by a childhood journey across deserts might tackle the challenge. This issue very much matters to me because I can't easily answer strategic questions about how to rebuild the peace and justice movement and restore faith in this country about the good that government can do. It is clearly a struggle for a longer haul than ever reckoned by Phil Ochs or by me. So I guess I'd have to start with the acknowledgement that if one is planning a long walk across a vast desert, one should begin in the knowledge that water and food might be frequently unavailable, but there is a promised land, of sorts, on the other side. And, of course, when food and water are available, it will seem like a banquet.

What Is To Be Done?

2011-03-12T12:40:00.005-05:00

A blogger without a clue

Things are bad, very bad ...

1. Natural disaster in Japan could begin a series of cascading events that includes additional earthquakes on other (potentially more dangerous) faultlines near Japan, failure of Japanese infrastructure (e.g. explosions at nuclear reactors and dramatically diminished electrical supply), and severe damage to the Japanese economy with downstream damage to the already weakened global economy while

2. Gaddafi reasserts control in Libya, Libyans suffer mortal punishment and repression, and anxiety over the global oil supply causes another spike in oil prices delivering another blow to the national economies of oil importers while

3. Billionaire capitalists in the United States finance a reactionary populist attack on government and

4. Republicans in Congress block spending for economic recovery, deconstruct healthcare reform, defund social programs, whittle away at Social Security, investigate Muslim Americans, deny responsibility for climate change while

5. Republican governors Scott Walker and John Kasich win a perhaps temporary but decimating victory over unions in Wisconsin and Ohio, and

6. State legislatures with conservative majorities begin a systematic attack on women's reproductive rights, minority set-asides and Latinos born in the United States and

7. Democratic state legislators in Maryland, politically intimidated by socially conservative, church-going African Americans from Prince Georges County, defeat a bill to legalize same-sex marriage while

8. District of Columbia Mayor Vince Gray, elected as a reformer to a term that began in January, finds himself hobbled by nepotism, cronyism and corruption scandals, severely wounding optimism for a DC city government run by grownups while

9. "No HIV testing" signs pop up on storefront clinics in the District and homeless people burst into tears of gratitude for eye contact and

10. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about the engorged deer tick I found on my back.

So, assuming other issues not mentioned in the foregoing list, like war and peace and military spending are included and leaving aside the deer tick, what is to be done? I suggest three possibilities: one, throw a massive end of the world party and/or legalize marijuana; two, choose denial, in general, or join the Tea Party and pretend none of this is actually happening; or, three, join a diverse, multi-racial multi-cultural organization in your community and live, work and organize like our lives together depend on doing so. Any preferences?

Egyptian democracy is a challenge to Israel

2011-02-11T15:00:00.003-05:00

Watching the celebration in Tahrir Square moves me to tears. The Egyptian people have managed the peaceful overthrow of a tyrant who ruled them for 30 years. This staggers me. Imagine the possibilities.

And it suddenly occurs to me why Israel lives in mortal dread of democratic change in Egypt. It is not because the Egyptian people will suddenly turn on Israel. It is because an Egypt peacefully liberated by its own people will be a clarion call for Palestinians.

There is also this: the possibility of a democratic state in Egypt side-by-side with a Jewish theocratic state in Israel. That is the mortal threat to Israel--that its dispossession of the Palestinian people will become much clearer to Americans.

The Right Attacks Planned Parenthood

2011-02-09T21:22:00.005-05:00

When Acorn came under attack by the Right, I underestimated the depth and seriousness of the assault. The videos produced by young, right-wing zealots conveyed the impression (to some audiences) that ACORN was an edgy organization with a fraudulent social agenda whose employees stood ready to assist underworld-types how best to game the system. In truth, ACORN was edgy and hard-charging and and populist.

At the time the videos surfaced, I thought ACORN might get in a mild bit of trouble, but that it would matter little. ACORN, as I thought of it, was an over-the-hill organization with a stale agenda. I may have been right in some respects--that ACORN was tired (and undernourished)--but it turned out that the organization was indeed in deep trouble. And I entirely ignored the possibility that if a group working at the grassroots for affordable housing and a living wage, and against predatory lending, was erased, neither justice nor a movement that believed in justice would be well-served.

Now ACORN is gone. It took less than a year from the time the organization came under fire until it went under. And now, Planned Parenthood is under a similar attack.

When it happened to ACORN, the right did not know it could destroy a center/left organization. It took awhile for most right-wing organizations to recognize the opportunity that was presenting itself. That's not the case this time. The Right knows what is possible. The Right is mobilized. The Right has learned lessons about how to pursue and amplify the attack. The Right knew another attack was coming.

Of course, Planned Parenthood isn't ACORN. Planned Parenthood is a bigger organization with a better foundation, a larger constituency, more resources and more access to resources. All to the good, because Planned Parenthood may be facing a fight for survival here. And if there's still a Left out there, it better show up for this fight.

Gun Control According To Harvey Wasserman

2011-02-07T09:06:00.003-05:00

Or Harvey Gives Us Hope

I used to believe that the left ought to make a loud and constant racket about banning automatic weapons, banning concealed-carry and limiting gun rights, in general. As a member of the Ann Arbor City Council in the '80s, I even sponsored an ordinance that would ban all hand guns from the city. The ordinance created great consternation statewide and commanded the attention of all manner of gun owners, hunters and self-styled militia-types from around the country. Several statewide organizations mobilized members and supporters to participate in lobbying campaigns against the ordinance and attend Council hearings in Ann Arbor.

I got one (pink) postcard from an anonymous source to the effect of "we have our sights on you, Comrade Epton." Several others left similar messages on my home answering machine or corresponded to the same effect.

I didn't return such phone calls, but in instances where people included their own address, I took the opportunity to disagree in writing. I also spoke to several groups, including opposition ones. Despite frequent and furious hostility, the general tone of the discussion was reasonably civilized and frequent focused on larger questions about violence in America and its causes. Many participants seemed to feel that there were larger philosophical questions about justice at stake. The ordinance lost--the Ann Arbor City Council was not so liberal as people imagined and at least one member of the council voted against the ordinance because it would "disarm" African-Americans.

But the discussion of gun control seems to have moved much further to the right since then, and has made writing about gun violence not worth the agony of an increasingly confrontational political environment. Into the bargain, the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision appears to greatly enhance the lobbying strength of the National Rifle Association and other anti-gun control groups.

Ultimately, the simple assertion that the 2nd Amendment confers broad rights to own and carry guns of all descriptions seems to occupy the middle ground in the current debate about gun control, successfully stifling initiatives to reestablish significant limits on handguns and automatic weapons. But here comes Harvey Wasserman making the argument that the 2nd Amendment demands gun control. If the left wants to reengage the question, Wasserman's simple formulation is the place to start.

Obama's State of the Union

2011-01-26T12:03:00.004-05:00

Can the left live with it?

President Obama's speech last night was definitely not a leftist call to arms. But in the wake of a stinging electoral defeat for Democrats in November, it was, by and large, the speech Obama needed to give; and a speech well within his strike zone. One might have expected progressives to condemn Obama's caution, his willingness to concede space to Republicans with commitments to freeze discretionary spending, take on tort reform and and control Medicare spending, but attacks from the left, so far, are muted and seasoned with approval for some of the things he did say.

Nation writer John Nichols adopted a balanced tone in assessing the State of the Union speech. While noting Obama's declared intention to soften some regulations, continue supporting free-trade agreements, in general, and accommodate other Republican interests, Nichols also applauded Obama's forthright defense of Social Security and government investment in infrastructure.

"Obama has more political capital than he did in the weeks after the election .And he used it to defend Social Security -- rather then embrace calls for slashing benefits or experimenting with privatization – and to renew commitments to classic infrastructure investments in roads, bridges and transit, as well as 21st century projects such as high-speed rail and the development of national wireless networks," Nichols wrote.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), noted that Obama's call for further controlling healthcare costs should be perceived as a way to defend, not attack Medicare. "In reference to Medicare and Medicaid, President Obama stuck to the facts and pointed out that the problem is the broken U.S. health care system, not inefficiencies in these programs. He noted the progress made in controlling health care costs in the Affordable Care Act, but acknowledged the need to go much further in containing costs," Baker said in a written statement released by CEPR today.

The statement also credits Obama with resisting "...the immense pressure from the financial industry and other opponents of Social Security and Medicare by refusing to call for large cuts in these programs in his State of the Union Address. Given the power of these groups, this would have been the easiest path for him to take. However, he instead insisted on the need to protect Social Security and to ensure that future generations of workers can also depend on it."

But Baker was clear about the speech's shortcomings: "The most disappointing aspect of the speech is that it largely skipped over the current economic crisis. This may reflect a view that there is little that Congress will agree to do to at this point. But it still is unconscionable to accept the idea that 25 million workers will go unemployed or under-employed, with millions more losing their home, because of the economic mismanagement by the country’s leaders."

He also took exception to Obama's continuing support for free trade, arguing that an over-valued dollar is the fundamental cause of the continuing U.S. trade deficits, "the largest imbalance in the economy today."

Robert Scheer's critique of the speech must rank among the best expressions of left-wing frustration with Obama's centrism. Scheer's post today on The Smirking Chimp dismisses the speech as "platitudinous hogwash." Obama ignored "... the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible—understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration," Scheer wrote. "The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole."

Scheer's points are well-taken and only occasionally hyperbolic (the government spent $1 trillion on the Wall Street bailout, not "trillions"). Indeed, there are certainly more bankers and brokers in the Obama administration than there ought to be, but it won't be the presence of Wall Street big shots in the administration that will undermine any moves Obama makes to increase investment in infrastructure and high tech. Nor will they force Obama to compromise his defense of Social Security and Medicaid.

Republican opposition, of course, will be the first cause compromising Obama's ability to move forward with domestic infrastructure investments, with further action to control health care costs, with effective follow-up on Sec. of Defense Robert Gates proposed cuts in the military budget and other initiatives progressives wish to see. But a left that cannot refrain from unnuanced and relentlessly hostile critiques of Obama's performance and agenda could pose a further problem.

Right now most observers on the left seem willing to give Obama the benefit if the doubt. That comes as a little bit of a surprise, given the widespread perception that Obama and Congressional Democrats didn't go far enough with health care or squeeze out a bigger stimulus bill. But the odds are that the left was as chastened by the November election results as was Obama. If so, would it be too much to ask that a progressive follow-up include electing a few more progressives to Congress and organizing to take back a few Congressional districts from the Tea Party?

Michelle Rhee's achievement

2011-01-24T09:33:00.006-05:00

It says here: DC schools are not the very worst

Check out the most recent edition of Lapham's Quarterly. In his preamble,"Dancing with the Stars", Lapham sketches out the anatomy and history of celebrity, associating it with earlier manifestations like, "the vanity of princes" or the "wish for kings" or the "pretension to divinity " found in some leaders in all societies, including ours, especially "since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort [to manufacture fame]--nearly fifty years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street..."

There is always, always, a hot new thing, and always a new niche opening. For the moment, former DC public school chancellor Michelle Rhee occupies a celebrity niche in education; type Michelle into a search engine and Rhee will pop up before Obama.

But her moment is likely passing. Rhee has moved on to her own nonprofit organization, Students First, and to Sacramento where she will live. The Students First website promotes the organization as the agent of a national movement that will influence educational policies down to the state and local level. The website features glowing generalities about great teachers, informed parents and motivated students, but little about the Rhee's confrontational attitude toward teachers unions, the ultimate basis for her celebrity. Rhee and Students First, according to Washington Post writer Valerie Strauss, "are attempting to raise $1 billion for her new effort to take on the teachers unions." Rhee, it appears, still prizes confrontation with teachers unions above all else.

In her short turn as chancellor, a little over three calendar years on the job (but likely less than that in real time), Rhee crafted her own image as a teachers union nemesis. And the media responded. See, for example, Time magazine's 2008 take on Rhee, who posed on their cover holding a broom with which she would presumably sweep out the "bad" from America's schools as a way to get on the right track, or Fast Company's 2008 cover story, "The Iron Chancellor," which applauded Rhee's serve-the-children-damn-the-adults rhetoric, or the same magazine's 2010 follow-up on Rhee, which included her off-with-their-heads explanation for the firing of some 250 teachers, "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school," Rhee says. "Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?"

Standardized test scores improved after Rhee's first year on the job, but the results from the next two years were mixed. Nevertheless, Rhee gets lots of credit for "fixing" a disastrously bad school system. "When Rhee took over in 2007, D.C. schools were tied with Los Angeles for worst-in-the-nation status," writes Richard Whitmire (author of The Bee-Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District), in "Rhee's necessary toughness." Her achievement, Whitmire, observes, "boosted the District off the cellar floor." Such an improvement hardly seems worth celebrating, but Whitmire is pleased with it and pronounces his disappointment at being unable to "identify one state poised to make Rhee-style academic gains."

So in the wake of Rhee's scorched-earth march through DC, we are now looking for other leaders who will, at a minimum, literally decimate the teachers unions in various school districts, abandon her post in three years or so, and leave behind minimal gains on standardized tests that cannot be correlated with specific, sustainable reforms. Such are the gifts of celebrity.

The Power of Our Grief

2011-01-20T08:24:00.004-05:00

There was a time when nobody cared what I did. That is a time to which I am fast returning.

The difference is that the first time around I was unaware of anyone else's active interest in me (or lack thereof), but this time around I am clear that nobody cares.

But why should anybody do so? We all ply this dark river in our one-woman or one-man canoes, and it is too fast a river, and too turbulent. Under those circumstances active caring for another person is an act of grace. The pains and the aches and the memories of wounds and losses are personal burdens that can't easily be shared.

That is one of the things that sex is for--to bridge the gap, to greet the world naked and to share it, to love and be loved, to touch the sky. But one cannot ask too much of lovers, nor grab for too much sky.

It's a funny thing (and a blessing, I guess) when you, and maybe others around, believe that what you do next might make a difference. Might save some lives, or parts of lives. Might help set some people free.

That's where the promise of who we are comes in to play, the promise of who we are willing to try to be. Do we dream across the threshold of ourselves, a person who maybe makes the world a vanishingly small bit better? If ever we are to become that person, it will be love more than skill, openness rather than dedication, the power of kindness, of naked touching, of ecstatic longing and deliberate vulnerability; feelings that first come to us at birth, at sleeping deeply and with each loving encounter.

We can be awesome in our grief for the world. And we can be restored by our shared grief, and wonder that we might always have been okay.

The Franciscan Monastery and Later That Night

2010-10-28T11:06:00.003-04:00

Almost noon. On the grounds of the Franciscan monastery in Northeast DC. About 100 years old, the monastery, designed with a Jerusalem aesthetic, intends to convey the Franciscan’s historic duty as Christian stewards of the Holy Land. With little training or instinct for the visual arts, I can only guess at how well the architecture accomplishes that goal. But it works for me, non-Christian that I am.

The grounds and building include all manner of replicas of grottoes and catacombs venerated in Catholic tradition. The Stations of the Cross are here, of course. I am not moved by the power of these images, I think, but I am affected by my awareness of the impact that the stories of Jesus and the early Christians have on many believers.

That awareness leads to some sympathetic vibration with the faith of others, a contact high, perhaps. I am awed by the stories that humans tell; awed by the storytelling ability that must be one of our first collective cultural achievements. When did people first tell stories that move audiences to weeping, to earnest devotion, to heroic sacrifice, to stoicism and, even, to voluntary suffering?

There are plenty of stories in Jewish tradition that accomplish these things, but none that I know of that feature a being who is both man and god. Feeling receptive, but in no way reverent, Under a low, overcast sky, on the exuberantly lush and landscaped grounds, I begin walking the stations. By the time I reach the second station, I succumb to the urge to memorize them, and I do, more easily than I expected.

Jesus is condemned to death. And I am the sole witness.

Jesus takes up the cross. It is a strikingly cruel and unusual prelude to crucifixion, a Roman form of execution reserved, I think, for troublemakers, thieves and rebels—enemies of the state.

Jesus falls the first time. An emotional response actually begins to well up in me, but a couple, carrying a child and trailing others in their wake disrupts the solitude and I move on.

Jesus meets his Holy Mother. Simon helps carry the cross, an act of courage and human devotion. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face and will be remembered forever. Jesus falls the second time. Jesus exhorts the pious women.

Jesus falls the third time. Gazing at the scene, I feel the brutal impatience of the man who is urging Jesus up the hill.

Jesus is stripped of his garments. This is truly the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Jesus is nailed to the cross. I am not prepared for the ache I feel. Jesus dies on the cross. Jesus is taken from the cross. Jesus is carried to the sepulcher.

It’s over. I have surprised myself and felt some part of what I imagine faithful others must sometimes feel. This story of a Jewish priest who suffers and dies and rises to become something else is a most potent story, the foundation story of a kingdom on earth. Jesus suffers, consoles, forgives and transcends, but is rooted in the earthly and, even, the profane (if you buy into Nikos Kazantzakis’ version of The Last Temptation of Christ).

And then I think of Marge Piercy’s He, She and It. To protect the Jews of Prague in the 16th Century, Piercy’s version of Rabbi Judah Loew creates a being of great power, who is neither a man nor a god. The Golem of Prague, like Jesus, suffers from the burden of his mission and his difference from others; suffering is his fate. But there is great power in this story, too, magic.

At the risk of proposing something that sounds like “two guys walk into a bar…” I wonder what counsel Jesus and the Golem of Prague might offer each other. Humans might evade their obligations to each other and to their communities, but they don’t do so with easy consciences, one might say to the other. And so they create us to lift the burden from themselves.

And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut, would add, were he drinking at the same bar at the time and overhearing Jesus and the Golem as they consoled each other and teetered at the brink of overindulgence.

Oddly, Pope Benedict XVI drinks here, as well, but he only comes in for a single shot of schnapps late in the evening. One can see him stiffen at the very sight of Jesus and the Golem drinking together. Benedict barely acknowledges Jesus with a nod and takes a stool at the end of the bar.

It is obvious that he can’t stand Vonnegut, either, though Vonnegut loves to ask him how he’s doing. Benedict sniffs shortly, as though in the presence of a bad smell. I want to say, loosen up, man, but I don’t want to sour my relationship with him.

This is not a guy who will easily give up the habits of a lifetime. After all, before he was pope, Benedict was Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. A couple of centuries ago, the Prefect would have been known as the Grand Inquisitor, and would have had the responsibility for prosecuting people like Galileo for various heresies and, in many cases, torturing and executing heretics. I don’t think Benedict is that dangerous, but it’s still possible that Vonnegut, if he weren’t already dead, harbors a death wish. But that’s another story.

Mary Oliver's Flare

2010-09-29T16:52:00.002-04:00

Nourishing, rich and wise

Mary Oliver’s poem, Flare, invites us in with a modest greeting:

“Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.” Flare thus declares itself to be a particular type of poem, and one, probably, of limited virtues.

The misdirected reader can therefore be forgiven if she fails to notice right away that Oliver’s long poem, which kicks off her collection The Leaf and the Cloud (Da Capo Press, 2000), is wiser and carries a load much heavier than whimsy can bear.

In Oliver’s world “the finely hinged wings…” of the green moth, even one caught by a crow “…has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop of self-pity.”

Anything but silly, Flare rolls on:

“My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable.”

Yet the unforgettable lies deep within the forgettable, which Oliver knows and shares with us. She writes about her father:

“Listen,
this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.”

So matter of fact. But why not? Oliver has made her peace. A proud declaration, actually, a tribute to her parents; time to move on with the business of living:

“I give them—one, two, three, four—the kiss of courtesy,
of sweet thanks,
of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.

“But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them responsibility for my life.”

What parents ask for from their children is not the issue here. But what parent, seriously, could ask for more than Oliver gives here. And when she is done with her prayers for the dead, with courtesy, sweet thanks, anger and good wishes, she moves on with living, and with her poetry. The ant has a tongue, primarily, Oliver tells us, “…to gather all it can of sweetness.”

And so the poem, which is less “…than the world…” not even “…the first page of the world..." flows on, making its way in a manner that defies Oliver's modest opening declaration:

“Live with the beetle, and the wind.

“This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the nourishing dark bread of the poem.”

I should be so silly.

A Flawed Call to Action

2010-09-23T09:30:00.003-04:00

The ironically titled documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” deftly portrays the nation’s longing for a high-quality, universally accessible public school system and some of the obstacles to achieving substantial reform. Along the way, the film celebrates some reformers and mounts a counterproductive campaign to cast teachers and teachers’ unions as significant obstacles to change.

Early in the film, Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, describes the devastation he felt as a child living in a dangerous neighborhood after his mother told him that Superman was not a real person. The news pushed Canada to the shattering realization that no hero was coming to rescue him from the widespread poverty and violence that characterized the area he grew up in. Canada’s tale of his awakening provides the underlying metaphor driving the film; if we as a nation want an educational system that prepares all our children for the world they will inherit, we cannot wait for a hero, we must perform that rescue ourselves, and together.

Overall, this is an easy notion to sell. Our system of public education has been failing for more than 40 years. Test scores in both reading and math have flatlined since the 1960s. Mid-20th century schools were mostly adequate to the challenge of preparing 20 percent of their students to move on to college, and another 20 percent to begin working as bookkeepers, stenographers and in other semi-skilled positions, while the remaining young people headed for the kind of work that would teach them the necessary skills on the job, or became homemakers in households with one parent at work earning a family wage.

But work life and the global economy have changed dramatically since then. If young people are to find a job in the modern economy, most need a college degree, but with high school dropout rates of 30 percent or more in most public school systems and only a tiny percentage of graduates going on to college, many leave school with no viable alternatives.

Through the dramatic personal stories of children and their adult caretakers desperate to find alternatives to the manifold inadequacies of their neighborhood elementary and high schools, “Waiting for Superman” outlines the collapse of public education and some of the consequent injustices. In the process, the filmmakers follow the work of a number of innovative and creative school reformers, including Canada.

Michelle Rhee, the young chancellor of the Washington, DC, public schools, has several strong scenes in the film, which portrays her as a frank, even confrontational, take-no-prisoners sort of leader. Rhee has been the head of the 45,000-student DC school system since 2007. She has repeatedly characterized entrenched teachers and their unions as one of the most significant obstacles to school improvement. She has fired or forced out more than 600 of DC’s 3,800 teachers since she arrived and has created a series of controversies as she proceeded with the terminations and closed neighborhood schools.

Many of Rhee’s admirers (and they are numerous, both locally and nationally) argue that she could not have moved so effectively against bad teachers and in eliminating underutilized and deteriorating buildings without offending some of the school system’s stakeholders. But the arguments in Rhee’s favor fade when considered along with her provocative assault on the city’s teachers. Virtually all observers agree that some percentage of teachers are extremely ineffective and cannot be coached or retrained to effectiveness, but this consensus cannot justify a reform strategy that appears to rely on sustained combat with teachers. The argument against partnership with teachers’ unions comes almost exclusively from young zealots like Rhee and historically anti-union groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Unfortunately, the documentary pays little notice to the efforts of education reformers, including Steve Barr, the founder of the Green Dot charter school network based in Los Angeles, and the Gates Foundation, who work with teachers’ unions in pursuit of fundamental change.

Though “Waiting for Superman” portrays teachers’ unions as a, perhaps the, major obstacle to change, the Washington teacher union was not a major problem for Rhee while she fired, released or forced out some 600+ teachers and hired almost 1,000 new teachers. Rhee’s confrontational approach has even obscured other positive changes she has made, including a tenfold increase in the number of teaching coaches working for the system and the establishment of a master teacher program that uses demonstrably effective and experienced teachers to perform ongoing classroom evaluations.

“Waiting for Superman” makes the case that dramatic improvement in the schools will require significant changes in the way teachers are trained and educated. The documentary cites research that pinpoints substantial differences in the results obtained by teachers classified as highly effective or highly ineffective. Those teachers identified as top performers get through 150 percent of the standard curriculum during a school year, while the most ineffective teachers complete only 50 percent of the curriculum.

Ultimately, the film does a thorough job sounding the alarm about the sorry performance of public education in the United States and the dire implications for the country and for millions of children, But while it seems to be warning that we cannot “wait for superman,” its focus on Rhee seems problematic.

Just two days before the recent decent mayoral primary, in which the incumbent mayor, Adrian Fenty, who hired Rhee, was defeated, she appeared at a special invitation-only DC premier of “Waiting for Superman.” At the conclusion of a Q & A following the showing, Rhee made a final statement to the audience. There were still enemies of school reform out there, she said, and they would do whatever they could do undermine school reform and, presumably, force Rhee out. After overpowering the teachers’ union and terminating or otherwise eliminating more than 600 teachers in the last three years, Rhee’s continuing verbal assault is pure scorched earth.

If the claim is true that eliminating the six or seven percent of teachers who are the worst-performing in a district will lead to dramatic improvements in schools and significant increases in test scores, then some of the bloodiest steps toward school improvement have already taken place in Washington. Under the circumstances, it is time for peace with the remaining teachers. The worst are gone and the good efforts of the rest are key to any long-term improvements.

It is unfortunate for “Waiting for Superman” that Rhee turns out to have been such a flawed hero. The larger, more important point that the documentary highlights so well is that failure in school reform is no option; rarely have so many young people and their families required so much from the rest of us.

Eulogy for Audrey

2010-09-06T10:40:00.002-04:00

May 24, 1925 – September 2, 2010

There are a lot of things to say about Audrey Epton, and it’s likely that some of those things will stimulate some of you to think, yes, that sounds like Mom, that sounds like Grandmother, that sounds like Audrey, but other items on the list won’t resonate hardly, at all. That shouldn’t surprise us; the truth is, Audrey didn’t share herself fully with most people.

A few of her friends, Hazel, Audrey, Jackie, Virginia, knew her well and long and, in some ways more fully than anybody else did, so maybe some of you can tell me later what I missed, what parts of Audrey I need to think harder about, and let me tell you, I will welcome that help. But here is my list about Mom, the things I knew or felt all along, the things I barely glimpsed, the things I am just beginning to understand:

First, she loved Bernie with a devotion that most people don’t experience in their own lives and he loved her back with that same devotion.

Second, in their lives together, Bernie was the show and Audrey was the rock. And because Bernie was the show--aggressive, charismatic, adventurous--most people never saw Audrey for who she was, because Bernie came first.

Third, Audrey never for a moment minded that Bernie came first. She was fully satisfied with her life. She had Bernie. She had children she loved. She had friends and she had excitement to fill a lifetime. And she would tell you all this, if you asked and she was in a mood to talk, but mostly she didn’t talk about such things. More than anything else, Mom, Audrey, was always of a mind to move on to whatever came next.

Everybody thought Mom was beautiful. And she was. And she was extremely careful about every detail of her appearance. But it seemed to me that she wasn’t vain about it. It was almost as if being beautiful was something she did for Dad. Of course, at the end of her life she was physically worn out and not feeling particularly pretty. But she was still Mom, focused on the family that would be left behind when she died and reminding us that we had to remain loyal to each other.

Mom wasn’t a great storyteller, mostly she left the stories to others, to Bernie, to brother Pete. But she told a few.

She was a brat when she was a kid, she said. And delighted in her own physical abilities—how fast she could run and how high she could jump. And those characteristics came together in a childhood she remembered fondly, the times when she teased and even tortured her older brothers, Doug and Pete, both of whom she could outrun by the time she was six or seven.

She’d tease them to distraction and then dash off; Pete, in particular, was relentless in his pursuit, but he couldn’t catch her, though there came a time when they dashed through the kitchen and he pulled a fork from a drawer as he ran by and threw it at Audrey, sticking it in the wall as she ran off. I always wondered what Grandma in England said about the fork sticking in the wall of her kitchen, but somehow we never got to that part of the story.

When Mom was 14, the Germans started bombing London and so she slipped from childhood into war with nothing in between. I don’t think that those of us who were born and raised here can fully grasp what it means to have your childhood go up in smoke and fire, but that was what happened to Mom’s childhood.

At 16, after a couple of years of air raids and blackouts, Audrey’s sister Eileen, pregnant at the time, moved back into the family’s home, to live with Mom and Grandma and Grandpa. Eileen’s husband, Arthur Sanders, and Pete and Doug were then fighting a losing battle in France.

One night, while Grandpa was on duty as an air raid warden, Eileen went into labor. Unfortunately, the Issett home was situated in a fairly isolated part of London. Because of the blackout, Eileen and her mom had to make their way on foot over a long bridge to get to the women’s hospital. There was no light other than that provided by bursts of flak, exploding bombs and burning buildings. Audrey watched Eilene and her mom cross the bridge, disappearing in moments of sudden darkness, reappearing in the light of sudden gouts of flame. Eventually, they made it off the bridge and disappeared from sight.

When I think of what I was doing when I was 16, knowing nothing but peacetime, thoughtless about my options, taking casual strides toward adulthood, I wonder what it means to have the world around you become so relentlessly unsafe and to wonder whether or not you will ever see your mother or sister again. Mom did see them, again, and they brought home baby Roger, who brightened the war years and whom Mom once called, “the love of our lives.”

But childhood was definitely over by then and, soon, Audrey was enlisted in the British Army’s Women’s Auxiliary, stationed on the channel coast as a plane spotter assigned to anti-aircraft crews. Audrey met Bernie in 1945, at a dance that brought her auxiliary company together with a squadron of American airmen. Bernie served as liaison between the two groups and, in the process, warned his fellow officers that he would be escorting the beautiful Brit.

In a matter of months they were married, and Mom was pregnant with Teri, while Dad was rotated back to the states without her, to train for the invasion of Japan. But by the time Mom, twenty years old and pregnant, managed to squeeze onto a US Air Force flight to the states, Dad was back in Chicago. This was the point when she met more Eptons, all of them, in fact; an event which she obviously survived, but I’m guessing had the potential to be at least as traumatic, if physically less dangerous, than the bombing of London. Eptons, as many of you know, manufacture their own special brand of fireworks.

Uncle Jerry and Aunt Marilyn are the survivors of that generation of Eptons and knew Mom longer than anyone else. And, perhaps, when we get back to 1110 later today, Uncle Jerry, the greatest Epton story teller of all, can tell us what really happened when Audrey met them all.

Now, remember, this summary of Mom’s life from when Pete threw the fork until she came to the United States and, in 1946, had Teri, appears in the middle of a list of things that seem to me to be true about Audrey. And there are several more things to add to the list.

Over the next few years she and Dad had three more kids, me and Mark and Dale. During the years of our growing up, Dad was the extravagant one, treating all of us, Mom especially, with a great deal of generosity. Mom accepted everything Dad gave her with the grace with which she accepted all the events of her life. But while Dad liked to demonstrate his love with gifts, Mom never actually required that, at all.

She never doubted Dad’s love and never asked for much. She got used to living well, of course—who wouldn’t—but she stayed attached to the simple things, her family, raising her children, living in partnership with Bernie, who was always off to the next big thing, which often was running for political office, for Congress, for the state legislature, eventually for mayor of Chicago. Audrey never shrank from any of it, and never complained about the demands.

If you include Dad’s years as president of innumerable civic and professional groups, as a founder and member of national organizations and political committees, you’re talking 40 years of political days and nights, of networking and campaigning, of schmoozing and making nice. As an actual reformed politician myself, let me say that imagining four decades of that sort of activity is as difficult for me as imagining being bombed at home when you’re supposed to be in bed. But Mom remained Mom despite the relentless demands, never complaining and always moving forward.

It was after Dad died that we all got to see how ingrained those characteristics were in her. She never stopped mourning Bernie, but mostly she mourned in private and somehow, though the only man she ever loved died twenty-three years ago, she learned to love another, Bob Bentley.

I think it took Teri, Mark, Dale and I a little time to catch up with Mom and to understand that her embrace of Bob and his family said nothing about her love for Dad, but was simply her moving on with life. She loved traveling with Bob and she loved spending summers at Bob’s place in Michigan where there were always a mix of Bentleys and Eptons hanging out together and enjoying the process by which families grow, rather than shrink.

And families do grow, at least this one has—let me count the ways—the grandchildren, Doug, Nate, Amanda, Julie, Stacee, Abraham, Mike, Jori, Gordon, Claire, Brendan and the great grandchildren, Manu, Ollie and Ethan. First to last, Audrey was thrilled by their very existence. Their youth, their love and their potential gave her both comfort and hope.

And there is one more family group, sons and daughters, also, who shared Audrey’s moments of joy and sadness—Owen Pulver, Marrianne McMullen, Ella Epton and David and Linda Bentley.

There were some profoundly sad moments for Mom these last couple of years, no Bernie, no Bob and her own cancer diagnosis, but by and large she remained the young Audrey, always on the run, only with fewer people to tease. She had her cranky moments, to be sure, she and Hazel, Elaine, Audrey, Vi and Jackie would gather for cards and, often as not, complain to each other that they were getting too old for real fun and sometimes, tragically, too old to share a cocktail. But to the end, they all gave it the old college try, drinking more often than they should and looking forward, not behind.

Ultimately, Mom had one other love—the White Sox and all last week while Mom lay in bed, breathing slowly, lying quiet, the White Sox were winning. This did her a great deal of good, we know.

How do we know? Because for Audrey, the athlete, winning was the point and we know she heard us, even if she wasn’t saying much. Last Tuesday, Teri, Mark, Dale and I were gathered around her bedside, talking casually. At one point, Dale said to her, “we know you’re uncomfortable, Mom,” and though she had said very little for hours, she responded, “I’m not uncomfortable.”

That was Mom, self-contained and private, but sharing what needed to be shared. She died exactly the way she lived, with her grace, dignity and extraordinary sense of privacy intact and evident. Audrey’s was a good life and a fine death.

When Mom died

When Mom died
there was a moment
when I thought
my eyes would run with tears forever.

But though her dying will never stop,
eyes do run dry,
and mind and focus drift.
When the grief slipped away,

I dreamed instead of Mom
the way she dreamed herself;
fleet and sure-footed,
a goddess in full stride.

Audrey Epton

2010-09-03T21:46:00.001-04:00

May 24, 1925 - Sept. 2, 2010

At 14 years old, Audrey Issett was a typical English schoolgirl, albeit a faster runner and fiercer competitor than most. But she grew up quickly after the bombing of London began in 1939. Though the school days she barely tolerated continued, the track competitions she loved were gone instantly, while nights became a welter of black outs and exploding bombs.

Four years later, Audrey was enlisted in the British Army’s Women’s Auxilary, serving on the English coast as a plane spotter for anti-aircraft gunners. Regular dances with U.S. Army Air personnel provided occasional diversion for Audrey and her comrades. At one such event Audrey met American airman Bernard Epton, who had served as the liason with Audrey’s unit in setting up the dance. In the process, Capt. Epton made it definitively clear to his fellow officers that he would be the escort for the beautiful Brit named Audrey.

Though the war certainly accelerated what came next, Audrey and Bernie always seemed made for each other. Their impetuous and, perhaps, reckless decision in 1945 to marry and start a family turned out to be the best of many decisions they would make together.

After less than a year of marriage, Bernie rotated back to the states to begin training for the invasion of Japan. Audrey, still only 20 years old and pregnant with daughter Teri was left behind until she wrangled a spot on an Air Force transport to New York and made her way to Chicago. There she finally met her new in-laws and, after overcoming the language barrier created by Chicagoans trying to speak the king’s English, she joined Bernie in a life-long love affair in and with the city.

After Teri’s birth came Jeff, Mark and Dale in reasonably quick succession. And for the next 40 years, Audrey thrived as mother of four, friend of many, and as the wife of a politician who could be both charming and controversial. The highly charged Chicago mayoral election in 1983, which Bernie barely lost to Harold Washington, came near the end of their life together, but for Audrey and Bernie it was just one more episode in an eventful life. Though it was not the life she imagined growing up, Audrey was always quick to acknowledge that it was a life rich in love, excitement and beauty.

Together she and Bernie had seven grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, one great grandchild and two step-great grandchildren. Though she never remarried after Bernie’s death in 1987, Audrey found love and a long partnership with Robert Bentley, who passed away in 2007. Since Bob’s death, she has maintained a loving relationship with Bob’s son, David, his wife, Linda, and their two children.

“People should listen to their mothers more,” reflected older daughter, Teri, as the family gathered at Audrey’s bedside. And, it was evident from Mom’s expression as she lay there that she agreed—Teri should have listened to her mother more.

In death, Audrey is survived by her still growing extended family in the United States, brother Pete, nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces in England, and numerous loving friends everywhere.

Monotheism and the Accidental God

2010-06-15T11:43:00.006-04:00

Jehovah worshippers got lucky, but what if Elijah the Prophet got it wrong and Jezebel was not so bad, after all?

This isn't going to be a thorough (or, even, reliable) exposition of how we in the West ended up with the one god with whom we live now; it is merely preamble for my poem Jezebel, which can be found posted at Outdoor Poetry Season, my other blog. Behind Jezebel is the idea that history is a story told by victors or, at least, a story told by survivors with a definite point of view.

We live in a world substantially shaped by the bible, variously interpreted as it is by Jews, Christians and Moslems. Never mind that there is no archaeological or trustworthy historical evidence for many biblical tales. The foundational story of the Exodus is fiction, however much it might pain me to say so. The Exodus story, and, particularly, the commandment to remember when we were slaves in Egypt, with its implied obligation to side with the oppressed, has been the rock on which I've constructed my (mostly secularized) commitment to social justice. The human capacity for self-deception being what it is, the Exodus story doesn't actually need to be true in order that it might feel like some sort of inherited memory to me. But it can't hurt, I don't think, to seek a better and richer understanding of how the Bible came to be the book that it is, and how and why it came to tell the stories that it tells.

Through out the 19th Century and a good portion of the 20th, the relatively young science of archaeology was actually focused on proving that much of the biblical account of early history, since about 1500 BCE (BC, for all you traditionalists), was accurate. But as the science grew up, archaeologists have discovered that there is no factual basis for the story of the flight of thousands of Jews from Egypt. There is very little evidence of the existence of Jews, at all, before about 1000 BCE, when they begin to turn up in some Egyptian and, later, Assyrian accounts of a tribal people living in the Galilee and the hills around present day Jerusalem.

There is evidence that there were, briefly, two Jewish states, Israel and Judah, but the northern state of Israel, larger, more prosperous and more cosmopolitan than Judah, was smashed by Assyrian conquerers around 800 BCE. Subsequent to the disappearance of Israel, scribes in Judah, in the service of a likely real-life Judean king by the name of Josiah, wrote what would become the Book of Kings, a story attributing the destruction of Israel to the failure of the Jews there to properly honor the god, Jehovah, a particularly intolerant and demanding god who found himself unable to abide the proximity of other gods. However vexing the worship of other gods was to Jehovah, it was a common practice in the polytheistic Middle East, and a practice tolerated by the kings of the northern state of Israel, who ruled over a kingdom much more diverse than that of Judah.

Theologians can argue the ways in which monotheism is superior to polytheism (and they do), but the Judean scribes had a much more practical interest in attributing the downfall of Israel to the worship of other gods and to the creation of graven images; they were primarily concerned with creating a rationale to support the reconquest of the Galilee by Judah, the home of the true and devout worshippers of the one god, the one who had promised the land to the children of Israel. Telling a story about how Israel broke faith with Jehovah, with the added implication that Judah had kept faith, made good propaganda.

The story made little difference at the time. And for the Jews, further complications followed. There are difficulties with other Middle Eastern powers, the Babylonians, to be sure, Romans, followed, and so did the Jewish sect known as Christians, who come to believe that they have a new covenant with the one God. Later come the followers of Muhammad, who develop a new understanding of the true intent of the same one God. Then there are the crusades, further wanderings around Europe and western Asia, expulsions, pogroms and finally the Holocaust. But that discussion is best left to another time and, probably, to others more qualified to pursue it. This piece is merely a look at some of the thinking that contributed came to writing Jezebel.

One important character in Kings is the prophet Elijah, and his relentless denunciations of Ahab, king of the northern state, and of Jezebel, the Phoenician princess who married Ahab in what was certainly a political marriage cementing an alliance between Phoenicia and Israel. Needless to say, Elijah and the one god did not approve of Ahab's marriage outside the faith.

Elijah blamed Jezebel for bringing the cult of Baal to Israel and to Samaria, the capital of the northern state. According to Kings, the prophet was persuasive enough to rouse the bad conscience of the Jews of Israel, who at one point rise up and slaughter 450 priests of Baal. This event enrages Jezebel who persuades Ahab to bring Elijah to justice or, maybe, just slaughter him in return. Elijah flees to the desert, as so many Jewish prophets are wont to do and escapes Jezebel's wrath. He does, however, prophesy (see, somewhere, Elijah Prophesys a Prophecy) that she will die in the streets and that her body will be torn to pieces by wild dogs. This, Kings tells us, comes to pass. But however satisfying the slaughter of the priests of Baal and the dismembering of Jezebel may be to the one god, it is not sufficient to spare Israel, which is itself dismembered and scattered to the winds.

But the historically more likely story is that Israel, a far larger and more prosperous Jewish state than Judah, was governed by rulers who had to tolerate the customs and rituals of a far more diverse population, including Moabites, Ammonites and other Middle Eastern peoples. The wealth and fertile lands of the northern state also attracted the interest of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Romans. In the to-the-victor-go-the-spoils world of the ancient Near East, Israel was more likely doomed to suffer at the hands of greedy, powerful neighbors than by its failure to follow Jehovah's commandments.

Judah was rockier and hillier. Producing little in the way of surplus, the place was of minimal interest to conquerors. In any case, when Judean scribes wrote the story, there were no Israelites left to argue the point. But what if Jezebel had not been the evil, devil worshipper denounced by Elijah? What if Elijah had himself had an earlier and more positive experience of Jezebel? What if his subsequent fury was, at least in part, the product of repressed desire and visions and, maybe, too much desert sun? What if someone other than Judean scribes, someone like myself, told a different story about Jezebel?

So Lincoln Won, Now What?

2010-06-11T10:00:00.003-04:00

Has progressive zeal gone awry?

Yes, Blanche Lincoln, the Democratic senator from Arkansas, opposed the public option and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), but that sort of thing from an Arkansas senator shouldn't come as a big surprise. Bill Clinton, our emeritus president, also from Arkansas, did worse. He pushed through a welfare reform that further impoverished millions of families, single mothers and their children, in particular. Clinton also made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and other pro-business trade agreements, the law of the land. But somehow, most progressives went along, sourly perhaps, but voted for him for reelection, anyhow. The alternative in the era of Newt Gingerich was much worse.

But Lincoln got no such break from labor unions, the Daily Kos and moveon.org. Unions spent more than $10 million in an effort to defeat Lincoln and elect Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in the Democratic primary. From the start it was clear that Halter was no liberal. He simply allowed himself to be framed as a politician to the left of Lincoln. Only true believers practiced in self-deception could pretend that Halter would be an improvement.

Arguably, a better health care bill might have passed if Lincoln had been a supporter of the public option. But had she voted for the public option, she would have faced a true right-wing opponent, more formidable than Halter. And who is willing to claim that Lincoln was the principal obstacle? How about Joe Lieberman, who progressives haven't been able to get rid of either, even though he comes from Connecticut, where it ought to be far easier to elect a liberal? But progressives haven't been able to manage that trick, and even supported Ned Lamont, a multi-millionaire businessman with a thin record of opposition to the Iraq War and no other credentials, in a futile and disheartening effort to dislodge Lieberman in 2008.

"Political movements tend to unravel gradually, but on Tuesday [progressives] seemed to be imploding in real time," wrote the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, an off-again, on-again liberal himself, in "Liberals gather, and yell." A bit hyperbolic, given that Milbank was merely observing a "gathering of progressive activists organized by the Campaign for America's Future," rather than, say, tens of thousands assembled in some amphitheatre at a critical moment for change. But Milbank was writing about the angry demonstrations that continually disrupted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech at the event. Hopefully, the rudeness was therapeutic and activists aren't also considering Pelosi a problem that leftists need to tackle electorally.

Milbank quotes Robert Borosage, organizer of the event, outlining the disappointments stacked up since Barack Obama's election:

"Progressives have grown ever more dissatisfied, and for good reason...Our hopes or illusions were shattered:escalation in Afghanistan, retreat on Guantanamo, no movement on workers rights or comprehensive immigration reform, dithering on 'don't ask, don't tell,' reverses on choice, delay on climate change and new energy."

Borosage isn't sniping from the sidelines. He co-founded the Campaign for America's Future and is a prolific writer and commentator. A piece he wrote for the Huffington Post prior to Obama's 2008 victory, "A New Progressive Era?" provides a helpful comparison between the political reality facing Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time of his 1932 reelection and political reality as it looked to a smart leftist in the fall of 2008.

But how things looked in 2008 seems a far cry from how things are in 2010. There is probably not a single Republican senator who needs to protect himself or herself from a political attack from moderates within their own party. Substantial minority though they are, the rules of the Senate work absolutely in their favor, and vulnerable Republican incumbents face bigger problems from Tea Party activists and the extreme right than they do from Democrats. And for more than a year, since the passage of the stimulus bill in early 2009, Senate Republicans have recognized that recession and widespread economic distress have created a volatile and emotional electorate just as likely to take out their anger on incumbent Democrats as on Republicans. It is this development, and the decision by Republicans to rejigger themselves as the "party of no," that has led to dashing our progressive "hopes or illusions." The hopeless, reactionary mood that characterizes a considerable part of the electorate is part of the wall against which progressive illusions have been shattered.

But why would anyone wish otherwise? Illusions, after all, do not provide a sound base on which to begin building strategy? It was far easier for the Republican minority to develop an effective legislative stance in the chaos created by the worst recession since 1929 than it was for Democrats. Borosage's Huffington Post piece makes clear that, even under ideal conditions, there never was going to be unity among Democrats: "For Obama, the greatest obstacles to pursuing progressive reform are likely to come from his party's conservative Blue Dogs and Wall Street DLC New Democrats." Perhaps, he should also have taken pains to point out that Obama, himself, is no progressive, only a breath of fresh air; a smart leader willing to do the right thing in cooperation with a cohesive progressive movement able to focus effective political power.

It is still less than two years since Obama's election victory. It is barely 18 months since Obama took office with the country headed toward double digit unemployment. Arguably, the labor movement has less political power to focus now than it had a mere 10 years ago, just before Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and president Andy Stern led several other unions out of the AFL-CIO, in an ill-fated attempt to reverse labor's decline. The fact that AFSCME and SEIU could scrape together $10 million to oppose Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas primary tells us very little about what the labor movement is capable of doing or what it ought to do next. But it looks somewhat like a tactical indulgence, spending money and lashing out becoming a sort of consolation for strategic failure.

Labor, and all progressives, ought to take a closer look at the political realities of this moment. No, we are not out of Iraq, but we are going to be. We are escalating in Afghanistan, but I see no sign that we are really hunkering down for an even longer war there. A higher likelihood is that we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan over the next two to three years because we cannot afford to be there any longer. Yes, that point begs the question of whether or not we could ever afford to be either place. Worse, we will be leaving chaos behind in both countries, the forseeable result of a warlike, confrontational and theatrical foreign policy, but a policy that the Obama administration did not create. More problematically for progressive Democrats is that a specific plan does not exist for reengaging parts of the world which have been long neglected or exploited by U.S. policies.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, perhaps, the biggest foreign policy challenge of all to progressives. Israel has no secure future as an occupying power. But many Jewish progressives believe firmly that Israel should be supported as a Jewish state within pre-1967 borders. Talk about illusions from which we all must one day awaken. A country cannot be both a theocratic state and a democratic state. Even if it is founded by, or on behalf of, Holocaust survivors. That may help make Israel a sentimental favorite for many, but in the modern world, it is not possible to play fast and loose with the rights of other peoples, no matter the gloss put on the act. If there is to be peace, Israel must give something on many points, forcibly evacuating settlements, returning to pre-1967 borders, acknowledging right of return on some basis, if only for compensation purposes.

And the United States is Israel's principal enabler. Without U.S. foreign and military aid, Israel would be bankrupt. And its weapons industry, now an exporter to all sorts of governments with dubious human rights records, has been built and sustained by U.S. aid. The American administration that finally reduces, ideally cuts off, such aid will help Israel to recognize some part of the injustices that have been perpetrated by the Jewish state, and create a more realistic basis for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, Israel will even have to choose between being a Jewish state, privileging some, and being a democratic state. But that crisis comes later.

We are facing an environmental disaster in the Gulf that highlights the limits to which corporations can act in a broader interest. The BP oil spill will help build support for climate change legislation, but whatever does pass, it will fall far short of what we wish for. So, obviously, will Wall Street regulation. Most members of Congress, in both the House and the Senate, will fight fiercely against efforts to raise taxes on the rich, and to raise the ceiling on social security taxes to cover more of the salaries of higher-income people. But some modest form of that could happen, especially if progressives let go of dreams and focus a little more on realpolitik.

It is somewhat surprising that so soon after Obama's apparently game-changing victory in 2008, so many Democratic incumbents turn out to be facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2008. And the idea that Illinois Democrats may turn out to be too weak to hold Obama's Senate seat is a major shocker. But the Republican party does not have the stature or the policy proposals to take real advantage of the national bad mood. Any rightward shift by Republican candidates sufficient to satisfy Tea Party activists during primaries will undermine those candidates in general elections. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, looked like a goner in Nevada, until Republicans nominated the extremely right-wing Sharon Angle. The smart money now is on Reid's reelection.

But the survival of moderate Democratic incumbents in difficult races does little for progressives. It simply seems vastly superior to challenging those incumbents in Democratic primaries. It is true that a frightened and panicky electorate is hardly a good audience for complicated progressive policy campaigns. But it should be obvious that expensive campaigns aimed at punishing Democratic incumbents for apostasy are counter-productive, if not also the desperate act of a movement with few, or no, ideas.

What's left then? In "Progessive Strategy in the Obama Era," posted on the Huffington Post website, activist Deepak Bhargava argues that there are no shortcuts. The progressive challenge in a deeply divided country is to admit "that we have a long way to go to win hearts and minds" and to "put the emphasis on organizing and recruitment, and social movements."

Right now the only viable progressive movement, Bhargava says, is the immigration movement. This ignores, I think, an environmental movement that has never stopped educating and organizing on college campuses and in communities. It also glosses over the domestic and international peace mobilizations in 2002 and 2003 that delayed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The related experience of millions of young Americans who took to the streets to oppose war at that time remains important, but it must be conceded that the peace movement proved unable to capitalize on those mobilizations. It is painful to think that most Americans still do not see the logic of peace and justice arguments, and are easily persuaded that government is the problem.

I am no particular fan of organizing efforts like, say, Organizing for America, the substantially web-based effort to keep supporters engaged that grew out of the Obama campaign. But it has kept a million people engaged in political action in some form and connected to each other. This is no small accomplishment. I don't know the numbers for Robert Borosage's Campaign for America, but it, also, aspires to overcome the isolation that demobilizes progressives and to focus them on a longer-term agenda. This is key.

Unless we understand what long-term progress would look like and develop strategies and tactics that teach us patience and allow us to pursue half-a-loaf outcomes, we will founder on frustration and anger with the difficult political reality that challenges us. We will dither away millions opposing Blanche Lincoln. And we will duck the hardest issues, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for which Americans will not admit responsibility. And we will drown in a sea of crude oil, and languish in a stagnant, poorly regulated economy, and bemoan our individual fates.

Octavia Butlers' Parable of the Sower

2010-06-09T11:04:00.006-04:00

I'm returning Parable of the Sower to the library today (DC Public)

but I don't want to do so without acknowledging just how effectively Butler is able to tell an optimistic story, while framing it within a dystopian future that seems only a degree or two off from the world we live in now. In a postscript to Parable of the Sower, Butler said she based her dystopic view of the future on what the United States seemed to be at the time (Sower was first published in 1993):

"It is to look at where we are now, and to consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us. I considered drugs and the effects of drugs on the children of drug addicts. I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools and libraries, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it's likely to change things for us...I considered spreading hunger as a reason for increased vulnerability to disease. And there would be less money for inoculations or treatment. Also, thanks to rising temperatures, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would move north. I considered loss of coastline as the level of the sea rises. I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country."

But Butler's world, however crushing and grinding, is only background to her story of Lauren Olamina, a precocious, empathic, visionary teenager who leads a small group of fellow travelers out of harm's way and to a shared vision of the future that is motivating and optimistic. Just prior to a calamitous incident that will destroy the community in which she lives and scatter its survivors, Lauren begins a journal that will become the foundation document for Earthseed: The Books of the Living.

Essentially, Earthseed is a new holy book for a faith that has no supreme being, only a profound and Buddhalike understanding of the world that humans must embrace, sharp points and sharp edges, notwithstanding. "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change." In other words, there is nothing for it but to live in the world, and to see oneself as both responsible for what the world becomes and subject to its conditions at any given time. People are most present in the world when they are growing and changing.

I assume that Butler was partly motivated to tell this particular story by a perception that the religious faiths and traditions people use to interpret the world and hold it at bay are part of the problem, one of the reasons why we do not effectively address problems like climate change, poverty and the gap between rich and poor. There are, after all, a great number of ways in which prevailing cultural beliefs and attitudes seem to hamper our ability to solve critical problems. The monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), in particular, seem to have created a mania in the West, and certain other parts of the world, for interpreting the modern world based on the experience of others, mostly men, mostly white and long dead, who would be even more baffled by modernity than we are. A riot of folks, ranging from Moses, the prophets, Jesus and Mohammed, all the way to the Founding Fathers, whose inability to address and resolve the question of slavery would lead to a fraternal war that would nearly destroy the United States less than 100 years after the country's founding.

In an ironic end point to her story, Butler quotes a verse from the bible: "A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside;and it was trodden down and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it sprang up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And others fell on the good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold. (The Bible, Authorized King James Version, St. Luke 8:5-8)"

I've wanted to write a book something like Sower, myself, and have even outlined one (but not pursued it to completion); so when I read Butler's very effective go at the same problem, I feel a little bit awed and very aware of my weaknesses. All the more surprising then to discover that Butler's diagnosis of her own character bears some resemblance to my self-diagnosis: [I'm] an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

Well, so what? Butler's combination seems to include a little bit more drive than mine, which turns out to reward me well.

War Heroes, Wannabes and Dissenters

2010-05-30T14:51:00.004-04:00

My war hero dad and my anti-war hero friend were cut from similar cloth

I came back to DC from Chicago last week with a new treasure, one of Dad’s World War II medals. In all, he earned probably a baker’s dozen medals, the most important of which are his five Air Medals and three Distinguished Flying Crosses. I don’t think often about Bernie’s record as a war hero, but he was the real deal.

He served in the Army Air Force as a navigator and rose to the rank of captain. In the pantheon of heroes, navigators are generally ranked lower than army grunts and fighter pilots, but there’s little question that Dad belongs on the big list. He flew somewhere between 25 and 50 bombing missions over Germany and Eastern Europe, and was the lead navigator on many of those missions, which sometimes involved hundreds of planes. Clearly, and with only a little effort, I could come up with a more precise number, but the total would only reflect the fact that he showed up on time and ready to go every time Bomber Command called.

It was the lead navigator’s job to get the flight safely to target and home afterwards. Dad’s comparative record in that respect was sterling; as a consequence he was chosen again and again to lead, though he did have one story to tell about an apparent mission failure for which he ended up with a medal, anyhow. He told me the story after he found out I was reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a strikingly vivid anti-war novel featuring the Army Air Force during WW II.

Heller’s protagonist, Yossarian, receives a medal after leading a huge bombing mission on an apparently disastrous run over southern Europe. Forced by stiff German air force resistance and anti-aircraft fire over known targets, the bombers use up huge quantities of fuel with extensive evasive measures. The maneuvers force them to skip their primary and secondary targets; in consequence, safe return to home base becomes the highest priority.

Lead navigator Yossarian’s goal becomes finding an unpopulated area to drop their bombs. Later, after the remnants of the squadron return to base, more detailed charts show that they have bombed a remote village. Military intelligence reports received later made the village, the location of a manufacturing facility critical to the Axis war effort, a target.

Originally picked by his superiors to be the fall guy for a possible war crime, Yossarian becomes the principal hero in the revised story of a successful attack on a military objective. By the time the “good” news comes in, Yossarian, tormented by constant preoccupation with the deaths of numerous airmen on a mission he led, and dreaming vivid dreams about innocent villagers waking to horrific explosions and certain death, has lived through many dark nights of the soul. He eventually shows up naked at a formal award ceremony to accept his medal.

The catch is that no matter how crazy Yossarian appears to be, his Army shrink believes that the navigator’s bizarre behavior is a sane response to the insanity of war. He gets no excused absence from his shrink. This particular contradiction, one of many on a long list, is “Catch-22.”

The novel captured Dad’s imagination and conscience in a way that other war stories had not. His disturbingly parallel experience led to the award of one of his three Distinguished Flying Crosses. As lead navigator on a mission involving planes from multiple English air bases he ended up with the Yossarian problem—finding an unpopulated area to dump bomb loads so that the remnant of his squadron, broken apart by heavy German air resistance and ground fire, could return safely to their bases. Unhappily, the spot in the Carpathian Mountains where they dumped their load turned out to be the village of Eagre, Czechoslovakia, not uninhabited territory.

In Catch-22 fashion, Dad was first suspended from duty pending an official investigation and later was awarded a medal when follow-up intelligence identified Eagre as the location of a war products factory. Though Dad never won an individual Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest armed forces award for valor, he was selected to receive the medal on behalf of his unit when his bomber group was awarded the Medal of Honor, Unit Citation for its overall record.

In light of recent news about Connecticut Attorney General (and Democratic senatorial candidate) Richard Blumenthal’s outing as a Vietnam-era vet who has erroneously claimed to have seen combat in Vietnam, Dad’s story, among others, seems especially relevant. So, too, is the story told by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (“A right to not fight,” May 25, 2010), in which Cohen discusses his choice to enlist in the National Guard so that he might avoid being drafted and, ultimately, serving in Vietnam.

Cohen feared a Guard mobilization that might land him in the middle of the war, anyway. But that never happened. Cohen notes that there was no particular dishonor attached to most ways men used to avoid service in Vietnam. Arguably, no war in American history, even the deceptively packaged invasion of Iraq, was more seriously and vigorously challenged by the men who were tapped to fight it. The allegation that some international “Communist monolith” had invaded Vietnam was demonstrably false, Cohen writes.

“The South Vietnamese government was corrupt. Why should I fight for it? What, exactly, was I supposed to die for anyway? I thought I had the right to know.”

But now, the “zeitgeist” of the time has changed, Cohen says. As a result, political candidates like Blumenthal pad their resumes with allusions, if not fraudulent claims, to actual combat service in ‘Nam. “But his most appalling lie was to turn a complex truth of that era into a simple matter of shame. It was obscene to send young men into a war that had lost its purpose… Opposition to the war was not merely a matter of avoiding duty but an agonized grappling with a hideous moral dilemma…”

In deceiving others and aggrandizing himself, Blumenthal makes it appear that avoiding service during the Vietnam War was a shameful, dishonorable act. Cohen ends his piece on this note: “I keep reading about how Blumenthal betrayed a generation of young men who actually fought. Maybe. He certainly betrayed those who would not.”

The problem with Cohen’s piece, for me, is that it does not do enough to survey the political universe of the time and the range of perceived moral choices that the Vietnam War created for others. The suggestion that enlisting in the National Guard was a way of “grappling with a hideous moral dilemma” seems problematic to me, though I can acknowledge that others who choose the Guard might have also seriously considered that they were choosing a path of resistance despite feelings that they also had a patriotic duty to serve.

I thought otherwise—that my patriotic duty was not merely to refuse to serve, but to resist. There was not simply a war, there was a war machine, spawned by a military industrial complex that survives to this day, profiteering on war and on preparations for war. Enlisting in the National Guard, the choice made by George W. Bush, hardly seemed like a moral response to the duty to oppose an unjust war and the system that prosecuted that war. To address that issue, I offer my own story—and the story of Fred Chase, an old friend, whom I regard as a hero on the same basis that my father was a hero; he saw his duty and he did it.

The simple version of my story is that I didn’t serve in the military of the time and enlisted, instead, in the anti-war movement, an enlistment that turns out to have been a lifetime commitment. Ironically, I entered college in 1965 with a burning desire to fight and die for my country. College, of course, was not the place to go on such a mission, but middle-class kids who lived in their parents’ home did not enlist out of high school, they went to higher school. This, it turns out, would not be a long stay for me.

My first day at the University of Michigan included attendance at an ROTC class where I found out that my poor vision ruled out the possibility that I might one day be commissioned as an infantry officer. This development instantly obliterated my fighting-and-dying ambition and left me without a coherent goal of any sort to guide me through the years of college that loomed ahead. It also shortly became clear that the academic indifference that had characterized my high school years would persist in college. As it happens, being out of my parents’ home and away from their scrutiny left me free to embrace the life of a dropout in a college town.

Though Dad was a loving man, he was also authoritarian and exact. In high school, I conformed as much as possible to the letter of his law, all the while breaking them in spirit as often as I thought I could get away with it. My new found, away-from-home freedom created exciting opportunities for self-indulgence, but it also led me to the discovery that I could be genuinely interested in ideas and issues when I encountered and explored them on my own, beyond the influence of convention or of my very patriarchal father. The Vietnam War, hotly debated everywhere, became just such an issue for me.

I don’t claim to have appropriately resolved the vexing question of how best to express my opposition to the war and fulfill my desire to impede the war machine. The arc of my life from 1965, my first year in Ann Arbor, until the end of the war in 1976 makes clear that I did not “show up on time and ready to go every time” anti-war duty called. Like Blumenthal and Cohen, I was no hero.

But Fred Chase was. As a teenager, Fred developed a real admiration for the Catholic Worker movement, the left-wing group founded by Dorothy Day as a way for progressive Catholics to express their commitment as Catholics to peace and justice issues. By the late ‘60s, Fred’s conscience had focused him on anti-Vietnam War activities. But the relentless expansion of the American military presence in Southeast Asia, the consequent increase in casualties for both Vietnamese civilians and U.S. servicemen, and the strain the war put on the domestic economy and social programs, persuaded Fred and others that more direct action aimed at stopping it was required. Fred and his colleagues planned and conducted a break-in at a Selective Service office in Chicago where they pulled files of draft-eligible young men and poured red paint on some files, and dragged more into an alley, where they doused them with gasoline and burned them, hopeful that by doing so they would damage the war effort and create a memorable image that would persuade a public increasingly skeptical about the war, that the break-in and destruction in Chicago to stop the war was far better than further bloodshed in Vietnam.

"We intended that our action have a practical aspect beyond the symbolic efforts of the Berrigans and others," Fred told me. "We destroyed some 20,000 files and delayed a lot of inductions in the disproportionately impacted black community on Chicago's south side. But it was just a delay and I'm sure the SSS didn't have any problem finding replacements elsewhere. In some ways it's like all the anti-war actions were just symbolic; and it's only when all of those just symbolic actions created a wall too tall to ignore that the war started winding down.

"They're talking about Afghanistan as being longer than Vietnam, and no end in sight," he added. "That's based on a Vietnam timeline from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat troops in '75. But the first U.S. "advisor" died 8 years before Tonkin in '56... longest or second longest, Afghanistan has been too god damned long from its first day. It's a damned shame we don't have a movement effectively building that wall of symbolic actions that could bring its end."

Fred spent several years in federal prison for his act. When he was finally released, he came out of prison with his zeal for social justice and change entirely intact. Most of his adult life since has been spent working for nonprofits, raising his children, and organizing union locals on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, whose members, committed to One Big Union, were known as Wobblies).

Never in the mainstream, Fred’s forty-year commitment to and membership in the IWW is a measure of his dedication to fundamental principles, including democracy in the workplace and worker-based governance. The IWW’s heyday, its membership high-water mark, was almost 100 years ago. But the One Big Union was decimated and permanently damaged by the Red Scare of 1919 and the Palmer raids, when the Justice Department swept both left-wing citizens and immigrants, mostly European-born, off the streets and deported them.

But for Fred, it was always first a question of what his principles were, and second a question of finding the best possible vehicle for carrying those principles into the everyday world, waging the best possible fight with the tools at hand. For Fred, the Wobblies were the best possible vehicle; for Dad, the best possible vehicle for a man who wished to give his country all he had was the Army Air Force. There’s no question that Dad’s vehicle was better suited for the task ahead of him than Fred’s. But the two men share a singular quality, they both showed up on time and every time their duty called them. Heroes, both.

Failing to Speak Out Against the War

2010-05-01T13:39:00.007-04:00

Change we can believe in has not come to Iraq and Afghanistan

Of course, there never was a universal expectation that Barack Obama's election would end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq very quickly. But it seems likely that a good percentage of those who consider themselves fundamentally anti-war did expect that both wars would end sooner rather than later as Obama pursued a more realistic and internationalist foreign policy. I know I hoped for such things, but in the meantime, I've paid little attention to the details, like who's killing whom, who is dying, how much the wars are costing

Where is my anger over this dragging on of war? Perhaps part of the taming of my peace-movement ardor is that it has been so long since we had a president with an interest in some of the issues that are absolute priorities for me. Or at least a president with a commitment to discussion of policy. Are my appreciations of this guy simply self-deception?

We do have an apparent winding down of the war in Iraq. We do have a modest health care reform bill, better than most progressives are willing to admit, albeit far short of what it would take to get U.S. health care costs and life-expectancies in line with all other industrialized countries. The stimulus package that passed Congress in 2009 without Republican support blunted the effects of an economic meltdown that could have been even worse. The bill saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of highway construction workers and state and local government employees. It extended and increased unemployment benefits, and increased government spending on green jobs. Without the bill the current unemployment rate would be markedly higher.

But the Obama administration has been plenty disappointing, as well. The war in Afghanistan is ending, it is ramping up. And U.S. and allied forces there are likely responsible for 40 percent or more of the thousands of civilian casualties over the last two years. U.S. aid to Afghanistan seems anything but stabilizing. In 2011, the U.S. will give Afghanistan more than $11 billion for its army and police. The amount is about 80 percent of the Afghan GDP. "It's obvious that Afghanistan is not going to be able to afford [to maintain] what we are building for them," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), quoted in "Senators Call for Changes to Troubled, Costly Afghan Police Training Program."

The Obama administration has also missed chances to help working people with mortgage cramdowns, preferring to push apparently ineffective measures that subsidize banks willing to forgive a portion of mortgage principle. The administration has shown a similar willingness to avoid confrontation with or, even, accommodate powerful interests in regard to oil and coal production, credit card regulation, climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All this is very disappointing, but two considerations make me hesitate to blast an administration that I campaigned and voted for. First, it's hard to imagine a political climate more likely to give a moderate and cerebral president pause. I would have counseled a far more aggressive approach to passing health care, challenging unions to give their full support to a tax on "cadillac" health plans and blue dog Democrats to back off opposition to a public option before Ted Kennedy died. But it would be presumptuous for me to assume that strategy would have succeeded. More likely it would have killed any chance of a bill passing this year. and Kennedy would still be gone and Scott Brown would still be the senator from Massachusetts.

Second, there has been a Democratic president in only 14 of the 42 years since 1968. Jimmy Carter, who has made a far better ex-president than president, held the office for four of those 14 years, and Bill Clinton was president for 8 of them. But Carter was a graduate of the Naval Academy, a nuclear engineer and a Southerner, someone from whom I expected neither progressivism nor peace.

During the 1992 Presidential primary, Clinton very publicly left the campaign trail to return to Arkansas where, as governor, he would figuratively preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded murderer, who was reputed to have asked if he could save the dessert from his last meal until after the execution. In refusing to spare the wholly incompetent Rector, Clinton manufactured proof that he could be tough enough on crime to be president. Oddly, Clinton, who failed utterly on health care reform and worked with Republicans to "reform" welfare, led the country into a war over Kosovo that turned out to be generally popular with a good portion of the Left.

But not with me. As the political writer for the Dayton Voice, I wrote a lot about who we were killing and what (and whom) we were bombing, what it all cost in absolute dollars and what we might otherwise be doing with those billions, and who (read weapons manufacturers and military contractors) was profiting. For the Left, and even for some of my colleagues at the Voice, the situation was made more ambiguous by repeated Serbian attacks on civilian populations in Kosovo. For many, saving lives trumped the usual anti-war objections and they supported the U.S. intervention. But I didn't. And I couldn't be silent.

So, now, on the question of continuing American intervention in Iraq & Afghanistan, in the face of hundreds of billions of dollars (the total for both wars is approaching $1 trillion) worth of spending in those places, on the occasion of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for weapons manufacturers and military contractors, why am I silent?

Iraqi and Afghani civilians are still suffering tens of thousands of casualties annually. Hundreds of Americans who enlisted because they were poor or had no work or were looking for a way to help pay for college are dying in the Iraq and Afghanistan. Why do I remain silent?

Achenbach for fun, Baker for the facts

2010-04-27T09:23:00.004-04:00

Really, the debt is not a big problem

Joel Achenbach, author of a lot of "Why Things Are" and, sometimes, "Why Things Aren't" books, is generally great fun. Informative and humorous, he can tell funny, riveting stories about things that are generally neither fun or riveting. A recent example, "The Wow Factor: Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images," which ran last December in the Washington Post, reads quick and easy and shares just enough science to make casual readers dangerous at dinner parties.

The Post frequently uses Achenbach to cover complex topical stories that need more than a little explaining, but his most recent story, "Will the debt break Washington?" tramples all over familiar ground, leaving behind little steaming piles of opinion valuable, perhaps, to farmers.

For primary source, Achenbach uses Bill Gross, founder of a large investment company, to pound what appears to be his main point, namely the national debt is "awful" and "hideous" and, in the worst case, either a Ponzi scheme or doomsday for future generations. None of this is actually true, but more to the point, none of it is helpful. If successfully reducing the debt becomes the highest immediate priority for Washington then several things happen along the way, including immediate and major tax increases, dramatic cuts in social programs, likely throwing the economy back into recession. If the hysteria around this issue should continue to grow, it seems plausible that banks and brokerage houses could even get their holy grail, the privatization of at least a portion of Social Security.

Achenbach also relies heavily on William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, his source for the notion that large deficits now shift the cost of problem-solving onto future generations. But ultimately, Achenbach relies on himself. The new health care bill, which Achenbach admits will pay for itself, actually makes things worse "because its spending cuts and new taxes could have been used to reduce the deficit ... instead of being an offset for an entitlement expansion." In view of the prevailing notion that Congress routinely creates new programs without paying for them, the point is bizarre. After all, a program that pays for itself is, according to Brookings, most Republicans, and a host of pundits, a thing of beauty and the very definition of fiscal responsibility. In this case, the program that paid for itself also extends health coverage to another 25 million Americans, which ought to be celebrated as a tiny bit of social justice rather than disparaged as mere "entitlement."

Achenbach gives a little ground in his debt-is-coming, sky-is-falling assessment. "The latest news from the Treasury is hopeful: Tax revenues are slightly higher than anticipated so far this year. The TARP program to bail out financial firms has proved far less costly than expected. Investors from around the world still eagerly bid on Treasury notes at auction," he writes. And Achenbach does quote the far from panicky Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Orszag tells him that he believes the Obama administration can balance the budget, excluding interest payments, by 2015. Orszag concedes that reducing the debt will require political action in the future, presumably some combination of tax increases and spending cuts, but his comments do not support Achenbach's next point, which establishes parallels between Greece, Iceland and the United States. In the upshot, should the largest economy in the world go the way of a tiny tax haven and one of Europe's weakest economies then, yes, I suppose Achenbach will have been proven right.

But how different his piece would have been had he asked Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) for his opinion. Fortunately, we can go directly to Dean for a progressive economist's view of the story Achenbach tells. Here's Dean's opinion, in its entirety from his "Beat the Press" blog:

"More Debt Fearmongering at the Washington Post

This piece includes the information that the national debt "totaled $8,370,635,856,604.98 as of a few days ago." Boys and girls are you impressed by that big number? Are you scared yet? This is Fox on 15th here -- they'll keep trying.

This sentence continues by telling readers that this number is not "even counting the trillions owed by the government to Social Security and other pilfered trust funds." How did the author determine that the trust funds were "pilfered." The government didn't do what he wanted it to with the money? Wow, that gives a reporter the right to say the money was "pilfered." Apparently it does at the Post.

The article does not include the views of any experts who do not view the debt as a serious problem. It presents an inaccurate assertion (in the context presented) from Brookings economist Bill Gale that the debt: "This [running up the debt] is all an exercise in current generations shifting burdens on future generations." Actually, the debt being run up at present is helping future generations by keeping their parents employed, improving the infrastructure and providing them with a better education. There is little or no real burden associated with this debt since much of the debt being issued is held by the Fed. The interest on these bonds is therefore paid to the Fed, which in turn refunds the money to the government.

Last week, the NYT reported that the Fed paid more than $47 billion in interest to the government. So, where is the burden on our children? If we do get the economy back to normal levels of output the deficit will be at a manageable level. Over the long-term, if we don't fix the health care system, we will face serious budget problems, but this is an argument about the need to fix our health care system, not about the deficit."

I probably could have confined my response to Achenbach to quoting Dean's opinion alone, but where's the fun in that? Joel Achenbach's got opinions, I got opinions, too.

What Do Progressives Want?

2010-04-09T08:50:00.003-04:00

OK, it wasn't the health care bill we got

Marrianne's cousin Kevin sent a link to a piece by blogger Ian Welsh. In his piece, "Kos Calls For Progressive Civil War," Welsh shreds Kos. "It's time for Kos's 15 minutes to end. The man's stupidity, hubris and willingness to be used by a president who is objectively a conservative means he is now doing more damage to the Left than good." Oh, my. We are angry, aren't we.

Admittedly, Kos's call to campaign against Kucinich in a primary seems blockheaded. Whatever the Left's problems may be, a Kucinich in Congress isn't one of them. It ought to be equally clear that Obama isn't standing in the way of a resurgence on the Left, either, but Welsh thinks so: "Those who want to go after Kucinich are acting as Obama's and Rahm's heavies. acting as enforcers for a president who believes in indefinite detention without trial, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan, gutted civil rights and who wants to force every American to buy health insurance from private companies," wrote Welsh.

Maybe I'm dense, but this seems a little hyperbolic. Obama doesn't appear to believe in "indefinite detention without trial," he just seems to be unwilling to take the issue on. Such a stance may be morally weak, but it isn't equivalent to gutting civil rights, either, though Welsh may have more in mind than the way the Obama administration is dragging its feet on Guantanamo and criminal investigation of torture. Certainly there is a critical Left perspective to bring to bear on Obama's strategies regarding health care, Afghanistan and a host of other issues, but that doesn't make Obama a conservative or suggest that Obama considers Kucinich a major obstacle to his agenda, whatever it may be.

Arguably Obama's agenda is a lot clearer than the Left's. We may want universal, single-payer, and, if we were expecting to get it this year, then our failure to achieve it would be bitter, indeed. On the other hand, if our goal was simply the bill that actually passed, there'd be no need for a Left, at all. The problem lies in defining political and legislative goals for the Left that keep progressives in the discussion and push the boundaries of the possible.

Single-payer is, in that regard, an important ultimate goal for progressives and ought to be a defined part of every health care discussion. But we are not defeated just because we don't achieve it. More people will be insured as a result of this legislation. Insurance companies will have more customers, it's true, but being barred from excluding preexisting conditions will cut into profit margins, as well. And state health insurance exchanges offer potential for further government involvement in health care cost control and, even, the direct provision of health care.

Given the political climate in which this was all fought out, a global economic collapse, a vastly expanded federal debt and hysteria on the right, it's hard to see how a better bill could have been passed. Passing the bill last summer, instead of this spring, would have been better, of course, but it didn't happen. Progressives and labor unions might have been able to accomplish it, if there had been a greater willingness to tax "cadillac" health care plans, but too many people couldn't see a way to do that and protect union members, too. In the upshot, a weaker plan passed nine-months later when progressive members of Congress finally decided not to oppose the bill on that basis. Regardless, this bill was always going to be the step before the next bill, which will take more unity on the Left and among Democrats than either Kos or Welsh appear willing to acknowledge.

Tom Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On?

2010-04-08T08:56:00.003-04:00

A book about labor and justice

I just finished reading Which Side Are You On?, published originally in 1991. Written by a labor lawyer in Chicago, Tom Geoghegan, a man who knows too much--about how badly the union movement has been screwed by government and bolixed up by its own leadership and left to die a lingering death by the rest of us--knows too much for his own moral comfort. But Geoghegan's honest and important book should earn him a break from his angst about failing the cause.

Who knows, it has been 20 years since the book came out, maybe he has let some of the guilt and pain go. But last I heard, he was still a labor lawyer in Chicago, still wishing and hoping for the legal case that would break the pattern of rulings against workers organizing to form a union, however improbable such a case would be.

It's hard to say exactly when Geoghegan himself came to the conclusion that such hopes were nowhere near realistic, but sometime during his career, after losing cases that he felt the courts were morally obligated to decide in favor of his clients, he came to the conclusion that labor's decline was directly traceable to the passage "in 1947, over the veto of Harry Truman" of Taft-Hartley, the law that "outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit-downs; in short, everything that [John L. Lewis and the Mineworkers] did in the 1930s."

Geoghegan writes that it was years before the damage from Taft-Hartley was obvious; the labor movement would grow quickly for ten more years, and even after the industrial unions began losing ground, rapidly growing public employee unions would hide the fact of decline. Geoghegan's nor whining here, but he's not the only one to point out that the history of American labor would be a different history if not for Taft-Hartley.

"The CIO, in 1946, was planning a big organizing drive in the South...this drive, Operation Dixie, was pulled back at the last moment to avoid alienating Southern Democrats. and the Republicans, meanwhile [with majorities in both houses of Congress], went on to pass Taft-Hartley, to stop just this kind of mass organizing. If the CIO had organized the South, American history would have been different, because labor would have been a truly national force, and not a regional one, trapped in the Northeast and Midwest."

I'd like to quote so much from the book I'd end up reprinting most of it here, but Geoghegan is also a wonderful writer. Anyone who merely read my excerpted version would be missing the real thing, an intimate view of workers and their families struggling with and for their unions, and of their leaderships, the good, the bad and the ugly, from an informed observer who chose labor's side a long time ago, but knows himself to be an outsider.

I wrote a letter to the Washington Post a while ago, extolling charter schools and asserting that the best practices of charter schools and public school reform efforts needed to be regarded as complementary activities aimed at the shared goal of rebuilding quality public education. In response, a friend, another Chicago lawyer, wrote me arguing that the charter schools were actually part of a systematic attack on the union movement. We exchanged several e-mails on the subject, but she remained convinced that I was inadvertently stooging for a right-wing attack on labor and I came to the conclusion that she saw charter schools as a for-profit conspiracy to privatize education. Had we continued our discussion, I'm pretty sure that we would have found common ground, but I am more certain that our whole discussion would have been broadened substantially had we first read Which Side Are You On?.

Broadened theoretically, at least. After all, nothing in Which Side suggests a practical course of action, especially 20 years later and immediately after the sustained and tortured fight to pass health care reform. Perhaps not so ironically, it is the current day coalition of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, not unlike the coalition that passed Taft-Hartley over Truman's veto 60 years ago, that made prompt passage of a better health care bill impossible. Sixty years ago, before Taft-Hartley, unions organized by card check--getting the signatures of a minimum of 30 percent of workers at a plant in order to form a bargaining unit that the employer had to recognize. Today AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions have prioritized the Employee Free Choice Act, which would once again allow for card check, instead of the NLRB regulated elections that employers have learned how to win with regularity simply by firing leaders on the shop floor and intimidating workers.

Lots of questions arise. In many ways progressives are lost without a viable union movement. A few years ago, writing in In These Times and attempting to bridge a perceived gap between labor and other progressives, I wrote this: "Corporate America and the Republican Party have forged a partnership that ... decrees the contours of our economic and cultural life. If progressives ever want to counter this corporate hegemony, they must learn from the past and embrace the strength and potential of the union movement (from "Labor's Future Is Ours," In These Times, January 21, 2005).

It's difficult for me to say now that I still believe firmly in what I wrote in In These Times just five years ago. A better health care bill could have been passed and sooner, if labor leaders had not opposed a provision taxing "Cadillac" health care plans last summer. It would have been a better bill that would have taken a bigger step toward universal, single-payer health care. But after reading Geoghegan's book describing the deck stacked against the union movement for half a century, it seems silly to blame labor for something all of us, unions, the Democratic party, progressives, a vast coalition of non-profits, couldn't accomplish.

But what then are we to do if we can't blame labor or save it? The answers, of course, are complicated. We should certainly support the Employee Free Choice Act, even if it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. There is a long list of other things to tackle, including the demilitarization of our economy and foreign policy, underwater mortgages, financial regulatory reform, the restoration of urban public education, action on climate change, and more. All of this would help, were we able to accomplish it. But labor's decline has made progressives much weaker. Perhaps, we've lost clarity about what matters most. Tom Geoghegan's book, written 20 years ago, is still profoundly relevant.

"Lately, I've been writing this book. I've been writing it on weekends and in the mornings before I go to work, and now that I've reached the end of it, I hate to let it go. Because in writing it, I come closer to solidarity with ... well, not the workers, but other people ... than I do in the day-to-day living of my life.

"Here's a depressing thought. Maybe in a book, and only in a book, is solidarity 'forever.'

"But there's a great danger in writing a book. I can already see what's happening. I keep some steelworker waiting on a corner, walking up and down. What kind of solidarity is that?

"That's where the aesthetic view of politics leads. That's why it's dangerous.

"That's why when you shut the door and begin to write, someone should ask you, right then,

"Which side are you on?"

The Blogger Returns

2010-04-06T11:37:00.004-04:00

No posts since March 26, but life happened anyway

Brendan flew unaccompanied to Detroit on March 27. Older sister Julie met him at Detroit Metro where they laid over for some six hours before catching a plane to Seattle. It must have been about midnight, maybe 1 a.m., east coast time when they finally landed. Older brother Nate met them at the airport and wisked them to the Seattle home he shares with partner Nikki. Cousin Abraham and partner Irina where there, also, having flown up from San Francisco to spend 48 hours or so in cousin adventures.

While Brendan was away, Marrianne and I planned to play. But sisters Dale and Teri, brother Mark and various nieces and nephews planned for a Pesach seder at Mom's house; given that this might be Mom's last Passover, it made sense to go, even if it would tear a chunk out of the time available for Marrianne and I to do fun and loving things. So, at Julie's instruction, I went to Priceline to seek an affordable roundtrip ticket to Chicago and back. It worked--going early Monday a.m., returning mid-day Wednesday would cost just over $200, a deal at today's prices.

Marrianne and I did squeeze in a date on Sunday night, but I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Monday to catch the Super Shuttle to the airport for my six o'clock flight (Metro trains don't start running until 5:00 a.m., that wouldn't get me to the airport and through security in time for my flight). Everything worked pretty decently except for discovering after I reached the airport dreadfully early that my flight wasn't Monday at six, it was Tuesday at six. My bad.

There was a time in Chicago when people would ride the Blue Line out to O'Hare to sit in the observation lounge and watch planes taking off and landing. The golden age of aviation, you know. Pan American Airways to the Orient. Good stuff. Brother Mark used to take son Abraham out there for a visual fix on wide open airport spaces and the wild blue yonder. It wasn't so much like that last Monday at Washington National. More like sleepy, droopy people, closed kiosks and stores and the dark before dawn. There was a Starbuck's open to kill a little time until the Metro opened and provided a cheaper way home. And there was the astonished looks and dropped jaws of those around me who shared in the news that I had arrived at the airport the day before my flight. He looks normal, they were thinking, but maybe he's dangerous, or bad luck, anyhow.

When I got home, I put in a little time on a longer poem I'm working on, but mostly I was a sleepy, droopy shell of a man. A sleepy, droopy shell who knew he needed to get up at 3:00 a.m. the next day, also, so that he might get to the airport on time. I really wanted to get to the airport on time. And, after a quiet evening at home on Monday night, arrived on time.

Passover is the most universal of Jewish holidays, I think. It involves eating, it involves ritual that honors those who gather around the table, it reminds us of captivity and celebrates both liberation and fidelity to an ethical understanding of the world. It also teaches us a complete disregard for a fact-based understanding of history in favor of stories and legends that evolved to serve the institutional goals of a religious faith with which I have a complicated relationship.

Personally, my preference, above all, is for the commandment to remember when we were slaves in Egypt. In light of that memory, the Jewish declaration of "never again" after the Holocaust, should more appropriately be "never again to anyone, anywhere, including Palestinians. I recognize, though, that among American Jews there is a decided bias towards "next year in Jerusalem," rather than the remembering when we were slaves in Egypt thing. It is with some satisfaction that I note that African-Americans, by and large, see the Exodus story as having little to do with Jerusalem and more to do with slavery, which is one of the reasons for the universal appeal of Passover--that, and the fact that Jesus' last party with his posse was a Passover seder.

Anyway, since about 200-300 AD, the real underlying motivation for the seder, at least according to the learned rabbis of the period, is the commandment that the story of the Exodus and the rescue by God, working through Moses, of the Jewish people must be told every year to the children. This commandment was honored in detail by brother Mark, who planned and conducted a 45-minute seder which captured and maintained the interest of the very youngest cousins (going on 4- and 5-years-old) in attendance. Manu and Ollie, the sons of niece Stacy (mark's stepdaughter), knew their own parts (the Four Questions, as well as other bits of info Mark had rehearsed with them, visibly and actively anticipated the moments for direct participation, and hurled themselves in the most full-bodied way into the ceremony, delivering both questions and answers with awesomely good timing.

It should be noted that while Manu and Ollie participated with great maturity, most Epton family seders, at least since Dad's death and even before, border on chaos because of the behavior of Teri, Dale and I. OK, maybe, mostly me. All I know is, they get really loud and Mark, who always leads the seders because he's the serious one, obstinately soldiers on. Julie called during the seder because she and Brendan and Nate were thinking about Mom (Grandmother, as she is always called). I put the phone down next to Mom so they could hear what Grandmother was hearing. For her part, Mom was pretty much ignoring the chaos, smiling benignly at Mark and radiating affection for the better behaved, especially Manu and Ollie and Ethan, her one and, to date, only great-grandchild. I don't know how long the Seattle connection stayed open, but they probably heard Mark patiently leading and me bellowing. (Mom always used to say things like, "Jeffrey, stop bellowing," which, of course, I always saw as unfair until one day in San Francisco, during a champagne breakfast following the San Francisco Marathon, someone at another table turned to me to ask, "would you please stop bellowing?" at which point I yelled out "Mom!" and things deteriorated from there--but that's another story.)

Of course, there was an extra wine poured for Elijah, that stiff-necked prophet-warrior from about 700 BCE, the time of stiffest competition between polytheism and the monotheistic God of the children of Israel. I had hoped to be on the seder agenda, so I could do my pedantic best to remind everyone that we were slaves in Egypt and ought to recognize the aspirations of the Palestinian people, as well as tweak Elijah for his awful intolerance in regard to Jezebel who, as Phoenician princesses married to kings of Israel go, was not really so bad. At least not compared to Elijah, that rabblerouser who stirred up the Jewish hoi polloi, inciting them to murder 450 priests of Baal, the god of rain and sweet water, and a personal favorite of Jezebel's. Sure Jez was hot for Elijah's blood after that incident, but her murderous rage arguably paled next to Elijah's (and the one God's) hatred of polytheists. The longer poem I've been working on incidentally, is an attempt to resurrect Jezebel and cast a critical eye on Elijah.

Regardless, I probably could have injected myself into the seder anyway, but I was so impressed with what Mark had done, I restrained myself. It was a grand seder. Mark led with grace and competence and Dale cooked everything and did a wonderful job. Unfortunately, most Eptons don't care much about food--Audrey (Mom), Teri, Mark and I, at least--so Dale's efforts had to be appreciated more by in-laws who have a more balanced understanding of the role food plays in life than by her own siblings. Still, most of the rest of us do clean up after meals decently well.

Left Chicago on Wednesday. Brendan returned to DC on Thursday and Marrianne's mom (Audrey M., as opposed to my mom, Audrey E.) arrived the same day to spend the long Easter weekend with us. Between picking up everyone at their various arrival points and making other preparations, I didn't get back to the business of blogging, at all. And not for the next four days (through yesterday).

On Saturday, I called Mom (Audrey E.) to see how she was doing. Not so good, she seemed incoherent. On Sunday, she was suffering a lot of headache pain, so Teri took her to the hospital where they tested her for everything, but suspected a stroke or bleeding on the brain. As it turned out, it was neither one. She had a bladder infection, which frequently causes disorientation and temporary memory loss in other women. Though we all recognize that Mom may not have a lot of time left, it was very scary to talk to her and not have the conversation make any sense. But Monday she was better, released from the hospital with the infection under control, even though there's still no explanation for her severe headache pain.

Monday afternoon, I drove Audrey M. to meet one of her nieces living in the area, who would later get her on the bus back to Pittsburgh. It was a good visit, full of meal preparation and eating and easy conversation. And by the time I got home, the word from Chicago was that Mom was home and watching the White Sox Opening Day game. Mark Buerhle threw seven shut out innings, Paul Knoerko homered in the first and the White Sox won.

Mom says she's getting a lot of lunch and dinner invitations from friends. She jokes that they all think she's going to die soon and want to see her before she gets too weak. But she's not going anywhere, she claims, as long at the White Sox have a shot at winning it all. Most years that fantasy is pretty much finished by mid-July, but White Sox pitching is looking pretty strong. If the hitters come through, I think this is going to be a good year in Chicago.

The Banshee Wail

2010-03-26T11:39:00.003-04:00

The oldwomanshuffle—no speed
to write of, really...

The rest of the poem here on Outdoor Poetry Season

Jackson Diehl's mother wears combat boots

2010-03-26T11:22:00.003-04:00

Sorry, I shouldn't have said that, but

this is my umpteenth letter to the Washington Post about how often their columnists ignore the basic truths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--like the fact that Israel is an occupying power and, under international law, is barred from appropriating occupied territory, which is an actual war crime--and Jackson Diehl is a decision maker at the Post, routinely deciding what should run and what shouldn't, and he should know better than to pretend that the problem here is the Palestinian leadership or the Obama administration.

Assuming that the U.S. really wants to midwife worthwhile negotiations between the two parties, rather than merely give the appearance of working hard, the Obama administration ought to be far more concerned with naming Israeli transgressions (subsidized by U.S. aid) than with affirming Israeli-U.S. friendship. No true friend would spend so much time enabling dysfunctional behavior. Anyway, here's the letter:

Editor,

President Obama has made “flagrant mistakes” in dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, says Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl (“A Mideast obstacle, ignored,” Mar. 22). Diehl asserts that the Bush administration’s handling of Israel would be a better model for managing the many obstacles that crop up on the path to a negotiated settlement, a claim that has me scratching my head.

Outside of Diehl, AIPAC and partisan Republican observers, I’m hard put to identify another source for such a high opinion of Bush administration statecraft in the Middle East. This should not be surprising considering that there were no negotiations, at all, between Israel and the Palestinians for seven years after the end of peace talks in 2001. At the time Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice managed to restart talks, the Israeli government was led by the relatively moderate Ehud Olmert, not by the likes of hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu, a distinction that Diehl acknowledges while dismissing its significance.

Historically, the United States has been the most important guarantor of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. The U.S. has also subsidized Israel with almost $1 trillion since the founding of the state. Accordingly, the Obama administration reacted critically to the recent announcement that Israel would build an additional 1,600 housing units in Arab East Jerusalem. That criticism was leavened, as all U.S. criticism has been, by repeated affirmations of the unique and “special” relationship between the two countries. Diehl, however, says the current White House “went ballistic.” I think “ballistic” would be a better description of what Israel “went” last year in Gaza.

Columnist Kathleen Parker Says Stupak Was Betrayed

2010-03-25T09:38:00.003-04:00

A bad column concludes with a loaded image

Bart Stupak, the pro-life congressman from Michigan's Upper Peninsula is taking a lot of fire for his role in passing the healthcare reform bill on Sunday. A Catholic, Stupak has been a hardliner in his opposition to the use of federal funds to pay for abortion. But, "when all the power of the moment was in his frail human hands, he dropped the baby," wrote Parker in a Washington Post column, "Stupak's original sin."

Parker goes on to argue that in becoming one of the few Democrats who originally voted against the bill to change his vote and enable passage, Stupak proved to be "weak and overwhelmed by raw political power." Worse, perhaps, he was deceived by the obvious fraud of an "utterly useless" executive order, which falsely promised "that no federal funds will be used for abortion."

Stupak, Parker says, knew he was being deceived; after all "the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explained to him...the only way to prevent public funding for abortion was for his amendment to be added to the Senate bill." Besides, even Obama "is well aware of the uselessness of his promise," wrote the apparently omniscient Parker.

Of course, all this is actually contested terrain and Parker, a usually more reasonable, if also right-wing, observer of Washington politics, should know this. Yes, the Catholic bishops claimed that the bill would expand federal funding for abortion, but a very influential association of catholic hospitals said that the bill would not do so.

Further, executive orders do matter, as Parker likely also knows. They may not be a matter of law, but they guide how federal employees interpret and implement laws. And, in this particular instance, Obama's executive order has been blasted by pro-choice groups who feel betrayed by the president's action. In "Order on abortion angers core backers," Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights is quoted blasting the executive order, which has created a new "obstacle to abortion," she said.

But Parker may very well think that Northrup is crying crocodile tears, pretending to disappointment in order to further the liberal conspiracy advancing the cause of big government against the wishes of the American people. Indeed, Parker has caught the symbolism of a gesture that the rest of us may have missed--Stupak has been betrayed.

"After the Sunday vote, a group of Democrats, including Stupak, gathered in a pub to celebrate. In a biblical moment, New York Rep. Anthony Weiner was spotted planting a big kiss on Stupak's cheek.

"To a Catholic man well versed in the Gospel, this is not a comforting gesture," Parker wrote.

Though the metaphor resists linear interpretation, Parker's meaning is clear. Though Stupak is hardly the Christ, his act of betrayal is more properly understood if one recognizes that Weiner is the Judas figure, the betrayer in Parker's passion play. Parker has chosen here to speak directly to the good Christian commie-hunters mobilized in tea parties. Talk about original sin.

Today's Healthcare Reform Is Not Enough

2010-03-24T08:59:00.004-04:00

The right-wing wants change to come hard, or not at all

Yesterday, 14 Republican state attorneys general sued the federal government to block implementation of the healthcare reform law that President Obama had signed just minutes earlier. Though their legal arguments against the law are unlikely to prevail, the attorneys general, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, in particular, have found an expensive, time-consuming way to mainstream the anti-government grievances of the extreme right. This is one of the many Catch-22s of democracy; one or many can access numerous institutional forums designed to facilitate democratic expression and use those forums to broadcast an ideology that opposes the funding and efficient operation of those forums.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. After all, up to 1952 the platform of the Republican party called for the repeal of Social Security. The initial Republican argument against Social Security was based on the frame that it taxed younger workers in order to pay older ones not to work, ignoring the obvious point that until older workers got out of the way, younger workers couldn't find employment. When they did finally get jobs, the social security tax was an initial condition for young workers, a relatively light tax shared across the board.

Now, more than 70 years later, the original premise of social security, tweaked occasionally to maintain the viability of the fund, still works. It would work better, however, if social security payments were more generous and healthcare was more comprehensive, more universally accessible and more affordable for retired workers. If these conditions were met, more good-paying jobs would open up for younger workers.

But we have not yet arrived at that happy state. The political struggle to make small improvements in healthcare, social security and other important social programs must continue in the face of tactics that stall implementation of good social policy (e.g., filibusters by Republican senators), and impose higher costs on government (e.g., lawsuits by Republican state attorneys general).

While Ken Cuccinelli's deputies were filing his lawsuit against healthcare reform, a friend of mine was combing the phone directory, looking for a D.C.-area dentist who would pull the two impacted wisdom teeth that were causing her great pain. She was doing her searching and her phone calling while she worked her job as a cashier at a local health food store. She has no regular dentist because she has no health coverage of any kind. She has lived, for years, in the constant hope that she would continue her lucky streak of no major health problems.

Of course, all lucky streaks come to an end and, in the case of postponed health and dental care, generally with severe consequences. Unfortunately for Lakeisa, she couldn't just walk into an emergency room and get her teeth pulled. And, though she could pay several hundred dollars in cash if that was what it would cost her, no dentist would take her. I hung around the store for over an hour trying to encourage her, but I should have gone home to get my car and offered to drive her anywhere she needed to go. When I left, she was near tears and feeling desperate, but still working. As far as I could tell, most people she waited on had no idea that she was in pain.

It strikes me that Lakeisa is one of millions of Americans who can legitimately hope that one day the government will expand the effort to make health and dental care so accessible and so affordable that she won't have to suffer through a day like yesterday. But nothing in the healthcare bill President Obama signed into law is going to help her anytime soon. The thing is, if Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has his way, the government of the United States will never help her.

Political Courage

2010-03-23T10:36:00.004-04:00

I received an e-mail from nephew Abraham about Sunday's historic vote on health reform. I think it bears repeating, so here it is.

Hi friends and family,

Last night, Congress made history by passing the most comprehensive health care reform in nearly 50 years. For some representatives, a "yes" vote meant they were standing up for 32 million uninsured Americans in the face of a tough re-election fight. Health Care Reform was passed with only 3 votes to spare, which means every single one of those votes was essential - but it could cost these representatives their jobs.

They did the right thing anyway, and that's exactly why they need to be sent back to Congress for another term. We can help make that happen, by giving just a few dollars to any or all of them - they're going to need every penny. No matter how little you can afford to give, it'll make a difference by showing them, their constituents and the media that this was the right thing to do. Their opponents are going to make literally millions of dollars in contributions off of these gutsy votes. Let's get their backs, like they just got ours.

Here's the list of the most vulnerable Democrats to vote yes, from FiveThirtyEight.com (list was compiled before the vote; Space voted no). And here's the roll call vote from last night.

Donation pages for the 20 most vulnerable Democrats voting Yes on Health Care Reform:

Betsy Markey - CO 4th
Suzanne Kosmas - FL 24th
Earl Pomeroy - ND At Large
Brad Ellsworth - IN 5th
Tom Perriello - VA 5th
Baron Hill - IN 9th
John Spratt - SC 5th
Mark Schauer - MI 7th
Chris Carney - PA 10th
John Boccieri - OH 16th
Alan Grayson - FL 8th
Kendrick Meek - FL 17th, running for Senate
Mary Jo Kilroy - OH 15th
Paul Hodes - NH 2nd, running for Senate
Harry Mitchell - AZ 5th
Carol Shea-Porter - NH 1st
Allen Boyd - FL 2nd
Joe Sestak - PA 7th, running for Senate
John Salazar - CO 3rd, running for Senate
Bill Foster - IL 14th

Thanks for reading this far. Even if you can only spare a dollar, pick a candidate (from the top, ideally) and show your support!

Abe

***********************************************************************************
Of course, this is my blog, so I get to add a postscript. There's two more members of the House of Representatives who aren't on this list who ought to get a serious nod. They are Nancy Pelosi and Bart Stupak. Though a vote in which 219 people vote on the winning side is clearly a collective process during which many had to vote principles rather than politics, some individuals seem more heroic than others.

Pelosi's leadership was indispensable to the outcome. She was clear all along that Democratic members of the House could not simply pass the Senate version of healthcare reform. She led the way to Sunday's two-part vote, and she led with grace and persistence. It seems likely that most of the speakers who preceded her could not have won passage of the bill.

It's not often that I praise pro-life politicians, Stupak is perhaps the first. In general, I distrust pro-life politicians. Sure, opposition to abortion may be a personal choice consistent with individual religious beliefs, but I don't believe that makes a pro-life position an appropriate political choice; pro-life politicians seem to me to be doing a politically expedient thing. That's my bias and I'm sticking to it. All the more surprising then that Stupak's choice, to bargain for a presidential order maintaining the status quo prohibition against federal funding of abortions in exchange for his vote for healthcare reform, struck me as profile in courage.

For Stupak, sticking to his pro-life position would have been the politically expedient thing. It probably would not have hurt him in his district, at all. Bargaining with the president, who is also the leader of the pro-choice party, was a nervy decision, also. And as the author of an amendment that would have forbidden any interpretation of the bill that would have relaxed the ban against federal funding of abortion, Stupak's vote for healthcare reform carried much more weight than the votes of other pro-life Democrats. Arguably, the bill would not have passed without Stupak.

Jeff

Memories of What Will Matter Most

2010-03-19T11:00:00.003-04:00

Brendan’s short sleeve school shirts...

More here on Outdoor Poetry Season

Ultimately, credit is due to health care reformers who stayed in the fight

2010-03-19T10:02:00.005-04:00

Now, the political fight that matters is the next one.

Steven Pearlstein's column in today's Washington Post ("Finally in reach, health-care reform could help mend Washington, too") speaks my mind. The column also outlines some things that had not occurred to me, as well, but Pearlstein's central argument, that the imminent passage of the health care bill in Congress is both a positive, important step and nowhere near the frightening government takeover depicted by opponents, is a point worth echoing.

Passage of the bill, Pearlstein says, "would finally have the United States join the rest of the industrialized world in offering health insurance to all its citizens." The qualifiers implicit in his statement, like health insurance, not health care, and offering, not providing, are a good, if inexact, indication of how far health care reform in this country has to go, but this baby-step compromise is huge, nonetheless.

But regarding that point, Pearlstein makes a further helpful, albeit, disputable observation:

"Over the past year, anyone following the health-care drama has been tempted to question the judgment and leadership of President Obama, his staff and the Democratic leaders in Congress. Should they succeed this weekend, however, there is no disputing that it will be a remarkable political achievement, the result of a combination of focus, determination and flexibility not seen since the early Reagan years."

Of course, there is more than one way to frame what has happened so far. So, yes, Steven, there might be some "disputing." But Pearlstein's perspective is useful. Close up, and even at a distance, the whole process has been ugly. But Republicans in Congress did deliberately set out to sabotage the process. At no time did they seem to be proceeding as though they believed that all Americans should be covered and that there is a way to get to that goal.

In such an environment, it was easy for conservative hunters to harass the pack, picking out the lame and the old and the weak. It was savage politics, but when Democrats explained that Republicans were simply the "party of no," Democrats looked like whiners and, with a little bit of this for Louisiana and a little bit of that for Nebraska, also looked like opportunists. Sometimes Obama looked weak, sometimes he looked like he was merely stylin,' but there was no way to pass this bill without some Democratic cleverness, without some presidential resolve, without solidarity among the vast majority of Democrats. The fact of the bill's passage will demonstrate that those qualities were also a factor in the long process, even if it will take a team of historians a generation to identify precisely who brought those characteristics to the fight.

There is also this to say about the fights that come next: The bill's passing will come as a relief to many who are not prepared at this time to acknowledge that feeling. But they are voters who will show up at the polls in November and will not punish Democrats for the long legislative agony. They will care much more about the economy and who is working and who is not. And they will want to know, what their representative did with his or her summer. Did they roll up their sleeves and get back to work on other pressing matters, like education and financial reform? Or did they slink away to lick wounds from a battle that's over, leaving the field to others?

Now is the time for all good legislators to press forward.

Wake-Up Call

2010-03-18T08:34:00.003-04:00

On the way from one spot to another,
walking briskly on a fine, fine day,
I added this little loop-around...
(more at Wake-Up Call on Outdoor Poetry Season)

Writing for a Reason

2010-03-17T08:50:00.005-04:00

Is this transparent, or is it as opaque as the darkness at midnight?

I don't really have an explicit agenda to guide what I write, today. But for some reason, it seems getting something, anything, written right now is very important. Why should that be? Marrianne has a good job, I'm collecting Social Security. I don't have to work. I don't even have to pretend to look for a job. By some standards that would make doing nothing, at all, make sense.

But where does that set of facts place me in our society? Without a way of making a meaningful contribution to our collective effort?

Whoa. I'm pursuing a tangent here. Maybe, I should explore that point, too, but the question with which I began--why should I feel like I must write something--that's the topic that needs the first look.

And here's part of the answer: Writing is sometimes a very rewarding thing to do, it's almost as if the activity releases endorphins, soothing the brain, like running, steady, easy, far, doses the brain and body with a biochemical bath that comforts and arouses.

But it can't be the whole answer, because sometimes writing is pure torture. I'm not going to go into detail about the way that feels because, you know, mostly I don't tough those moments out. It's too painful to suffer when you're only trying to do the thing that you've wanted to do most in your life. Does that sound sad? Or, merely melodramatic? No matter, it is what I feel and I can almost bring myself to tears thinking about it.

But not quite. The way I can move myself that much, that far, is not by thinking about how I feel, but by writing about how I feel. And that brings me back to the thought that I need to write something, today, anything, because today, writing will give me more than it takes away. Don't ask me how I know that, I just do.

I wish I felt that way every day. If I did, I would write and write and write.

But you can also write yourself into a spot that you would have been better off not going to, at all. I think I may have done just that during an e-mail correspondence with a friend about charter schools.

She's passionately opposed to them, and though I do think I understand and even viscerally resonate with the notion that charter schools are a weapon to undermine teacher's unions and throw one more group of professionals into the ever-expanding swamp of permanently underemployed people, I don't agree.

I'm not going to detail our opposing opinions (though I suppose there is a very good chance that I may blog about that later). I'll just say that throughout our exchange, I probably wrote 10 words for every one she wrote. That's not bragging; I have the time, she doesn't. She works.

No, I'm saying that writing run-on sentences, and pounding the same point over and over, and piling on facts, real or imagined, isn't communicating. It's turning an exchange into a swordfight.

I know, I know. The pen is mightier than the sword, words can liberate, and that's a good thing. But it's also always been true that words can be worse than sticks and stones. Words can bruise and words can bully, and writing 10 words for every one your friend has the time to write is writing yourself into a spot that you shouldn't have gone to in the first place.

So, I'm sorry.

But I'm writing here, now, because, I guess, through all the ups and downs, today I am a writer. And though writers should have readers to share the thought, to bear a share of the load of the thought, writing is where I'll start today, writing is the way I'll go today.

And I can't bully anybody, because nobody has to read this. And, if I write hard enough and long enough I might write myself an answer to that other question: How do I make a meaningful contribution to our collective effort?

Pass the Health Care Bill and Move On

2010-03-15T09:11:00.003-04:00

Time's a-wasting and the economy, education reform and other action that could help the Democrats in November are hanging fire.

The health-care bill before Congress now will have to be approved in the Senate by reconciliation, the process that requires only 51 votes. Of course, Democrats are running scared in the House, also; finding 216 votes there to approve President Obama's health care plan is apparently no sure thing, says majority whip James Clyburn (see the Washington Post story, "Democrats upbeat on health-care bill," here).

The urgency and anxiety Democratic members of Congress feel about voting for the health care bill are provoked by fears that voters will punish them at the polls in November. Republicans, says House minority leader John Boehner are doing "everything we can to make it difficult, if not impossible, to pass the bill." Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has an opinion piece in today's Post that excoriates Democrats for using reconciliation to "achieve political victory" by passing legislation that will drive up insurance premiums, federalize "the regulation of insurance, [narrow] consumer options and [reduce]competition among providers."

Ryan uses Congressional Budget Office estimates to support his claim that insurance premiums will rise. But, he fails to mention that the CBO also estimates that the CBO also estimates that the bill will reduce the budget deficit by an amount somewhere between $920 billion and $1.7 trillion between now and 2030. Given the projected escalation of the deficit over the period, the estimated reduction is a tiny piece of the puzzle, but a critique that uses CBO estimates without acknowledging that the proposed reform does begin to reduce the deficit undermines Ryan's claim to objectivity in the matter. Further, when Ryan, as part of a House majority, had an opportunity in 2003 to control health care costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, he voted with the majority in the House to pass the Medicare Modernization Act, which blocked Medicare from doing so. That action has already added billions to the deficit. Of course Republicans argued at the time that the act was aimed at controlling the expansion of government, but its real consequences were to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson also says that the health-care bill is a cost-control illusion, but his piece depends on the false hypothesis that the bill is only about covering the uninsured. On his way to pointing out that covering more people is hardly a cost-control effort, Samuelson completely ignores the many features of the bill, like state insurance exchanges, policing of medicare overpayments and initiating movement towards value-based Medicare payments rather than fee for service that are aimed at controlling and reducing health care costs.

In a column in the Wall Street Journal, "Health Reform Passes the Cost Test," Harvard professor David Cutler, an Obama health care advisor, reviews ten potential cost-control measures and scores the health-care bill based on the degree to which the bill relies on each measure. Cutler concludes that the potential savings over the next 20 years from passing this bill now are 10 times greater than CBO estimates.

Rounding up votes for the bill in the House is also made more difficult by resistance from anti-abortion Democrats, but even the Catholic Health Association, a group representing Catholic hospitals that do not provide abortion, has indicated support for the bill. At this point it should be obvious that controlling health care costs is perhaps the most critical long-term variable in reducing the deficit to manageable levels. It should also be clear that no single bill will ever achieve that goal and that passing this bill now is a defensible part of a sustained effort to establish health care justice in this country and avoid ruinous deficits in the future. Democrats frightened by the prospect of facing angry voters in November should recognize three things:

1. Failing to pass this health care bill will not soothe angry voters, either, but it will help to define a Republican attack on timid, ineffectual Democrats.

2. Passing this health care bill now will create a space in which Democrats can force Republicans to vote against financial regulation and confront the failures of the No Child Left Behind Act. Let Republicans defend the indefensible.

Finally, the notion that political life should somehow be made risk-free is the real illusion, the equivalent of staying home and barring the door against all dangers, only to starve to death. The true glory of politics is that it sometimes requires courage.

Israel "embarrasses" Biden

2010-03-12T08:06:00.005-05:00

The truth is that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is an American occupation

"After spending most of Tuesday celebrating what he called the "unshakable" bond between the United States and Israel, Vice President Biden ended the day strongly condemning the longtime U.S. ally for approving 1,600 new housing units in disputed east Jerusalem -- an awkwardly timed move that threatened to kill a new push for Mideast peace by the Obama administration," wrote Washington Post reprorter Janine Zacharia, yesterday (find the story here). Reportedly, Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu,were "embarassed" by the timing of the announcement, occurring during Biden's visit.

But the drama implied here is mere kabuki. The notion that Israel is a free and independent actor that must be assiduously courted as part of a peace process brokered by an earnest U.S. is part of the make-believe that thwarts peace.

In substantial ways, beginning with economic and military aid, the U.S. has established itself as Israel's godfather. Barring U.S. foreign aid to Israel, which by conservative estimates totaled almost $120 billion from 1948, the year of Israel's founding, through 2009, the Israeli economy would be bankrupt. A portion of U.S. aid has been invested each year in the development of an Israeli defense industry, which sells arms worth more than $4 billion annually to foreign countries. The sales account for 2.5 percent of Israel's gross domestic product. It is very likely that private American Jewish charitable giving to Israel exceeds $1 billion annually.

Further, U.S. government and private aid played a key role in resettling Soviet Jews in Israel, providing the largest number of Jewish immigrants to Israel since its founding, and replacing Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza, who have largely been barred from employment in Israel. Thus, Vice-President Biden reaffirms "U.S. support for Israel's security," while plaintively urging Israeli concessions to advance a "peace" process. The terrible truth is that calls for concessions from Israel while the United States is also subsidizing the Israeli economy and the occupation of Palestinian territory are part of the play that hides the reality; the United States is directly responsible for Palestinian suffering.

Outdoor Poetry Season Begins

2010-03-11T20:05:00.004-05:00

There are rhythms to life--rhythms of effort, periods of inspiration, patterns of accident. I know mine are there. I just don't understand them as well as I'd like. But it's still a relief to know that what goes away comes back again.

It has been spring here in D.C. for awhile. There's been a lot more sun, on the average, and the days have been growing longer and warmer. I haven't noticed much of anything budding, but I might notice tomorrow. Today, at least, I noticed it was spring. It was also the first day since sometime last fall that I walked over to Otis and Georgia Ave. to pick Brendan up at school.

On the way, I'm thinking it's about time for outdoor poetry season to begin. And then, I stopped, sat down on the concrete capstone of a low brick wall and wrote my first poem since I don't know when. I don't usually post poems right after I write them, they need too much work--not that I'm claiming that my revisions actually make them passable--but I'm going to post this one here, on In and Out, now.

And then I'm going to post it on another blog I'm starting up called Outdoor Poetry Season. And after this other poems will go on Outdoor Poetry Season. Posting them here on In and Out is too confusing. I mean, what is In and Out about? Cutting military spending? Railing against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? It doesn't matter, really. It's just that from now on I'm going to put poetry on OPS and I'm going to put everything else on I & O.

There, I'm glad that's settled.

The Rush of Life

Thinking like rivers
meander, I can say
there will be no further
stunning breakthroughs

There once were, you know,
the river, young and raving,
tumbled boulders, leapt recklessly,
pushed ahead

But there will be progress—
not so it would show—
but you could still feel it,
the rush of blood

Arteries, veins pulsing potent remains
of original intentions, or,
as Alan has put it, the rush of life
through the universe. Bang.

The Budget Deficit and the National Debt Are Not the Problem

2010-03-11T08:44:00.005-05:00

We all need more schooling on economic issues

and I say it ought to happen outside the classroom. My professors of choice? Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, the estimable co-directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). But I begin today's self-taught lesson with a quick look at "Smart Debt, Dumb Debt -- There's a Difference," a column by E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post.

"Because we never face up to how much we need government to do, there is a pathetic quality to our discussion of big deficits," writes Dionne. I have no particular quarrel with this statement or most of the rest of his column. But I am acutely aware that any discussion of the federal budget, the national debt and huge and vital programs like Social Security are extremely contested terrain. And when we get on that ground, most of us get quite emotional.

The debt, we hear, is a direct squandering of our children's future. Similarly, extended unemployment benefits, deficit spending, even social security, are transfers of wealth from hardworking people to irresponsible spendthrifts. Universal health coverage under Obama, it is said, is a trojan horse that will expand the socialist takeover of the country. Of course, most readers of this blog do not share such extreme perspectives, but they have their doubts, I am sure. These doubts are more often expressed in the form of a belief that social security will not be there when the gen-x and millenial generations need it. Or expressed as a belief that maybe the stimulus package didn't work or, perhaps, the amount of debt held by foreign investors is dangerously high.

Such doubts make a thorough discussion of federal spending difficult at any level. They may not move moderate Democrats and independents to sign up for tea parties, but they do undermine faith in a liberal understanding of government activism, and that uncertainty is channelled by Blue Dog Democrats who turn resistance to government initiatives into a political program, which in turn contributes to the apparent futility of Congress. So when E.J. Dionne calls us to a more rational discussion of government economics, I start looking for ways to ground the debate in a broader understanding of economic reality and government alternatives; I start looking at what Dean, Mark and CEPR can tell us. Here's some of what I found during today's search:

In "America's Public Debt: The Least of Our Worries," Weisbrot observes that the 2009 stimulus package (about $1 trillion) was far too small. Even the best estimates suggest that it has saved less than one-quarter of the 8.5 million jobs we've lost since the Great Recession began. Under the circumstances, deficit spending shouldn't be an issue, he writes:

"It is clear that there is no short-term problem with running large deficits in a weak economy: investors are buying up even long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at remarkably low real interest rates. Clearly the markets do not perceive that our government is heading into risky territory with its debt. Interest payments on the debt are currently just 1.4 percent of GDP."

In fact, more deficit spending is necessary, says Baker, in "The Budget Deficit Crisis Puzzle." More aggressive government action is the only way to create the jobs we need and stabilize the economy, Baker writes, putting to rest the notion that huge current deficits will permanently cripple the economy:

"...larger deficits will put many of our children's parents back to work. Larger deficits will increase the likelihood that parents can keep their homes and provide their children with the health care, clothing, and other necessities for a decent upbringing...
In spite of the deficit hawks' whining, history and financial markets tell us that the deficit and debt levels that we are currently seeing are not a serious problem. The current projections show that, even ten years out on our current course, the ratio of debt to GDP will be just over 90 percent. The ratio of debt to GDP was over 110 percent after World War II. Instead of impoverishing the children of that era, the three decades following World War II saw the most rapid increase in living standards in the country's history."

Elsewhere, Baker argues that the millenial generation will not be harmed by paying higher taxes to support baby boomer retirees. They face other problems, he writes:

"The projections from the Congressional Budget Office, the Fed and all other standard sources show that before-tax compensation will rise on average at the rate of about 1.4 percent a year. This means that after 20 years their compensation will be more than 30 percent higher than what workers get today. This means that even if they pay substantially higher taxes than workers today, they will still have substantially higher living standards.

The retirement of the baby boomers is likely to help millennials. It will reduce the supply of labor -- creating opening higher up on career ladders -- thereby allowing millennials to get better jobs with higher pay.

The real threat to millennial living standards are:

1) inequality -- the continuation of the recent trend where more money goes to the top of the income distribution;
2) a broken health care system -- protectionists in control of policy want workers to give all their money to insurers, drug companies, medical supply companies and highly paid specialists;
3) ecological problems -- if the people in Bangladesh can make our children pay for the damage we have done to their land and lives through global warming, then our kids may be in trouble;
4) incompetent economic policy -- if geniuses like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke continue to control economic policy, then they may be able to create poverty even in a world of enormous potential affluence."

I could go on, but that likely would be a cruelty to those of you who have actually read this far. But I will end by suggesting that a full discussion of how to restructure federal spending is impossible without putting military spending on the table. I've written about militarism and military spending quite a lot. The dollars involved are huge, highly wasteful in terms of job creation, and encourage destructive interventions and even more wasteful expenditures to support those interventions. In the next decade the U.S. will spend at least $1.5 to $2 trillion to pay interest on that portion of the national debt that is directly caused by past military spending. Only those people who actually believe that the North Vietnamese attacked U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf with gunboats, or that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or that billions of dollars in military subsidies to Israel have enhanced national security, can sincerely argue that we ought to keep spending more than $1 trillion on our military every year.

Climate Change and Political Will

2010-03-09T09:09:00.002-05:00

Abe and Jeff debate the need to act and how to do it

My nephew Abraham and I recently exchanged a few e-mails about climate change. How bad is it going to be? Where will the political power and courage to do the right thing come from? The result is the post below. It's over 4,000 words, so maybe readers should consider other ways to kill time. However, Abe and I would certainly like to hear other opinions. We've all got a big stake in this stuff.

Dear Abe,

As you know well, I sometimes get frustrated when you seem to casually dismiss my feelings that unless political change happens profoundly and soon, your generation and the ones that follow will live in some sort of post-apocalyptic future that I will avoid on account of shuffling off this mortal coil before the sky falls. I'm not actually accusing you of something here. It's just when I say that absent a progressive mass movement realities like an inequitable and inadequate global economic system and catastrophic climate change will permanently and adversely alter the world you will inherit, you sometimes respond with a sort of confidence that your generation will successfully address the issues that previous generations wouldn't even tackle, let alone fix.

Now, along comes a Pew Research Center survey of "millennials," your cohort of 18 to 29 year olds, that shows you guys are the best educated Americans yet, trust people over 30, but see yourselves as more tolerant, more open to change and more likely to see government as part of the solution than the generations that came before you. There's also a lot of you, more millennials than baby boomers; combining that with what appears to be a deeply rooted optimism suggests that maybe you think realistic things about the problem-solving ability of your generation that elude me.

In this morning's Washington Post, there's a story about Maryland AG Douglas Gansler issuing an opinion about gay marriage that will certainly advance that struggle for equal rights a good bit, and, perhaps, also shows a public official going beyond the usual political limits to accomplish real change. Gansler may be a little old for a millennial, but it seems possible that he is displaying individually a sort of political optimism that is widespread in your generation. There's lots of AGs who could have done what Gansler did, but what he did first may be characteristic of what we can expect to happen more frequently as your generation moves into political leadership.

I'd sure like to think so; but finding progressive politicians who have the courage of their convictions has not been an easy task this last decade or two. If they are going to come along more frequently in the future than in the past, I will be celebrating. But we also know that charismatic leaders aren't enough to get some of the most difficult jobs done. Obama, who admittedly is more smart-guy, let's-do-what-makes-sense than he is progressive, is still a very good example of how disappointing it can be to rely on individuals to make change we can believe in.

That's why I'm always going on about building a progressive movement. The tea party phenomenon isn't progressive, of course, but it's also not really a movement. It is, I think, a genuine expression of populist anger that has been amplified by institutional forces, the Republican party, for instance, which seek to tap tea party energy to advance different agendas. Widespread anger and disillusion can create a populist upsurge, but it isn't enough for a movement because it isn't for anything; aspirations, like peace or equal rights, are fundamental for movement-building.

Of course, if I really knew how to build a progressive movement for the 21st Century, I would have shared that information widely already. But I don't, which fact may also hurt my credibility with you and your cohort. But here's the thing: the 21st Century belongs to you guys and whoever comes next, and if the world blows away in high seas and big storms, or withers in hunger and drought, there will be little point in figuring out which generations gets most of the blame. But if the future blossoms in some sort of golden age of stability, equality, stewardship and creativity, it will be because you millennials figured out how to convert your optimism into a movement with an agenda for change that will knock my socks off.

So, what are you waiting for?

Fondly,
Uncle Jeff

Dear Jeff,

Let's do this!

I'm having trouble deciding where to start, but I think it's first important to define the world in which my generation is growing up:

We've never fought any of the battles you describe as so disheartening above. In many ways, my generation is now engaging for the first time with politics, and generations are defined by the leaders of their early days: The 60s (it could be argued) by Kennedy, the 70s by Nixon, the 80s by Reagan, the 90s by Clinton, the 00s by Bush, the 10s by Obama. Bush was absolutely despised by so many of us - I have met only a glancing number of people my age who didn't think he was the devil or worse, and most of those folks were in College Republicans - that he has turned my generation away from Republicans. Obama, by contrast, was and is beloved, actually beloved, and so it's hard to imagine my generation taking power and not moving dramatically left of what is currently considered the center.

The young never turn out. We may make a lot of noise, but our true electoral effect always waits for us to hit 30, and we're only now starting to do that. And we've already elected a black President! Our confidence is high.

It's easy for us to wave away past defeats as irrelevant. Perhaps this is always easy, but the world pre-Internet looks so different from this one that we can't help but think that the same rules no longer apply.

Finally, you note that the world may be destroyed before we can inherit it. Well, yeah. But of course this prediction too can be ignored if one chooses - in the 1910s they thought that another war like they had just seen would either be the end of humanity or utterly impossible; in the 40s we saw even worse atrocities at mass scale, and then we capped it all off with nuclear war, so the world looked pretty bleak; for the next 50 years the world could have ended at any minute if a weather satellite was launched at the wrong time (this almost happened, more than once); in the 70s they thought there wasn't going to be enough food to feed the world. Recently it appears that we've fucked up our climate beyond repair, but we've thought the world would end so many times in our history, and always with a righteous conviction, so who's to say the scientists are right today? I believe they probably are, but I don't feel like they are...

You say we need to build a movement, and you're absolutely right. Today, it's easier than ever to mass large groups of people behind a given cause, but this has resulted in a proliferation of superficial attempts to do exactly that - witness the flash mob phenomenon (briefly died out and now resurgent, somewhat). The currency of the mass of people behind a given idea has been devalued, both by the ease of generating it (Oh look, another Facebook announcement for a rally on the quad about saving hamsters from grade-school classrooms) and by the difficulty of spending it meaningfully (many of my generation marched against invading Iraq, and look how well that worked out.)

I don't quite know where this gets us. And it's important to point out that my lived experience is wildly atypical, so any observations I make based on that experience ought to be regarded skeptically. I've been incredibly fortunate, but one of the other defining characteristics of this generation is that it's entering the workforce during the worst economy since the Great Depression, so how that will impact our future is an important and totally unanswered question.

Abraham

Dear Abe,

I'm not sure what battles I described as disheartening, though I do describe the global political challenges ahead as daunting; I will get to back to those challenges below; but first I'd like to suggest that some of the historical references you make don't mean to me what they mean to you.

In many ways it is convenient to use presidents to symbolize eras, or at least to convey something fundamental about past decades. But I don't think of the '60s and '70s as the Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon decades. They didn't tower over those eras as Reagan towered over the '80s, I think. Martin Luther King, for instance, makes a far better symbol of the '60s and, used for that purpose, provokes a whole different set of ideas and images. The '60s, in fact, were contested terrain in a way that no decade since has been. That's why the '60s are also the decade of the Civil Rights movement, and the Peace movement, and the decline of McCarthyism.

It's true that author Rick Perlstein's Nixonland uses Nixon in his title to suggest that Nixon more profoundly shaped the period from virtually the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s than others did, but the title is misleading, I think. Perlstein's book is interesting and helpful, but like the period it covers, it is about much more than Nixon. The period beginning in the early '60s is much more usefully understood, I think, as the time when various popular movements--civil rights, peace, feminist, labor and others (Native American and gay pride, for instance)--dramatically advanced their causes or positioned themselves on the political map.

Nixon and Ford, though not necessarily the architects of the establishment counterattack aimed at rolling back some of those democratic gains, certainly led the charge. Ronald Reagan works as metaphor for the '80s works decently well, primarily because he turned out to be a great leader of those reactionary forces, was able to define a set of values that defined the argument against those popular movements, and helped reestablish the political and cultural hegemony of large corporations and the wealthy (which, I would argue, was a comfortable outcome so far as he was concerned, never mind his deification as a man of the people).

The '90s, essentially, were a floundering search for a new democratic direction for a country and a government suffering from a tax burden that had been significantly transferred onto the backs of working people; a country suffering also from reduced investment in public education, mass transit and other public goods; from rapidly disappearing union and manufacturing jobs; from shrinking real wages and dramatic increases in the number of households with two parents working because they had to (and the social upheaval that accompanied that change), and marginalized progressive ideals. Thinking of that decade in terms of Bush the First and Clinton only works if it is understood that their limited successes and limited efforts reasonably symbolize our collective national futility. The high tech bubble and the real estate bubble are about the only things of consequence that got built during the period, and look where those achievements got us.

This brings us to the current decade, a mixed bag if there ever was one: The virtual theft of a presidential election and the anti-democratic intervention of the Supreme Court (a series of events that we would call a coup if something like it happened in, say, a Latin American country other than Honduras), then came September 11, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the unprecedented mobilization of worldwide opposition to war in Iraq, the deceitful campaign to go to war, anyhow, and the launching of the invasion of Iraq, the pivotal fraud in a second presidential election, the collapse of the American and global economy, and the uplifting election of Barack Obama. Certainly, a hard period to define.

But let me also quarrel with the use of history to suggest that a focus on the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change is about as credible as the apocalyptic fears of earlier generations. Certainly the fears of a great war to surpass all previous wars were finally realized with World War II. That event may have come 40 or even 50 years later than predicted, but when it did arrive an estimated 50 to 70 million people died, enough in some instances to decimate countries and wipe out communities. Some countries were wiped off the map. Arguably, some communities and nations are still recovering, some might never recover.

But the fear of a war to end all wars was a political, not a scientific, projection. And though World War II was a "world" war, it was not so global as climate change will be and, indeed, already is. In other words, in 1939 a war something like the worst imaginable did in fact begin.

It may be hysteria on my part to claim that in the case of climate change the sky really is falling, but it accomplishes little to assure me that my fears put one in mind of Malthus or other doomsayers. What comes next may not be an apocalypse, but it seems likely that Bangladesh and certain island countries will disappear, and Katrina-like events with New Orleans-like consequences will become more frequent.

Only a few things will actually reassure me, and they are related: What is being done now that will actually mitigate, perhaps even roll back, the worst effects of climate change? We do know that there are people hard at work developing alternative energy sources and renewable energy technologies, but how many is that and what will it take to get more people involved (a mass movement forcing government action)? And what is being done, overall, to organize larger numbers of people to support those initiatives? I'm not actually suggesting that it's up to you to provide answers. I'm just saying those are three of the questions we both need to understand better.

You suggest that another really important question is what's going to happen to the millenials, your generation, the largest generation in American history, who will bear the brunt of the Great Recession. That's actually something I feel more sanguine about. Easy for me to talk, isn't it? I'm not starting a career here. But here's my thinking:

First, your generation (see the earlier referenced Pew survey) is the most optimistic, tolerant and flexible cohort to come along in quite a while, perhaps ever. Millenials will respond to the sustained national economic crisis with creativity and initiative. A higher percentage of new jobs will be created in small businesses and new businesses than in the past. Millenials will find a way to maintain, maybe even improve, quality of life by establishing new cultural institutions and expanding employment for cultural workers.

This, incidentally, has always been a good, if underutilized idea. Employing more people in work doing what they would prefer to do increases job satisfaction and overall health, and increases the likelihood that people will find their quality of life improved, even if their income is lower. These benefits will multiply in the neighborhoods and communities in which they live and do their work.

How widespread would these alternative employment opportunities and lifestyles need to be in order to build a stable economy that creates good jobs at a reasonable pace? I probably should make an effort to quantify my argument, but whatever the numbers say, obviously more cultural workers making decent wages won't be enough. Cities need to become better places to live in the process; there needs to be more neighborhood-based employment and more neighborhood services, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. And government will have to do a better job maintaining and expanding the infrastructure of quality schools and mass transit that people ought to be able to depend on. These, of course, are political questions, but they won't be adequately addressed without the progressive movement I keep wishing for.

Of course, if you Millennials do address some of these issues--redefine what matters most in life; spread culture and creativity, not war; strengthen neighborhoods and improve public education and mass transit; boost the green economy--you will also be improving the national response to climate change. Talk about win-win.

I ended my earlier letter to you this way:

"But if the future blossoms in some sort of golden age of stability, equality, stewardship and creativity, it will be because you millennials figured out how to convert your optimism into a movement with an agenda for change that will knock my socks off.

So, what are you waiting for?"

Maybe, I need to rephrase that to be something like this: Do you and your friends and colleagues recognize how much of what you are already doing is part of the solution we both wish to see?

There is also the Gandhi formulation of that thought: You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Personally, if it were easy to do that, I might already have done so, but I prefer to leave the hard work to you millenials.

Best,
Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I've mentioned before my basic optimism surrounding climate change. I don't mean to deny in any way the magnitude of the challenges this phenomenon will pose; perhaps my overall attitude is more a function of something innate in my personality that prevents me from being pessimistic about anything, than it is a sober assessment of the road ahead.

But I do think the climate problem is basically tractable. First, because I hear in the alarmed words of our best scientists echoes of Malthus, and of every preacher or visionary of the last several thousand years. (At some point, of course, one of these predictions will be right; maybe it's this one.) Second, because the problem we face is one of political will only. We have the technology to produce potable water from seawater, to power the grid without emitting much pollution at all, to drive to work without emitting any CO2. We can cool the Earth if we need to, and hack the planet in a thousand different ways to reverse the worst effects of climate change.

The only reason we don't do these things is because the cost of doing them currently outweighs the cost of inaction. But as my generation, the most ecologically-aware in human history (not that I have any data for that whatsoever), takes over, we'll start to move in that direction. And if the seas rise, the ice caps melt and the world warms, we'll eventually reach a point at which we decide OK, yes, put reflective particles in the atmosphere, build massive solar arrays in New Mexico and charge $50 for a gallon of gasoline.

The great problem with all this is that climate change is a global issue. And while the millenial generation in America may be ready to make these sacrifices, our counterparts in India and China may not be. And if they don't change their behavior, it won't matter so much what we do. I think once the effects of climate change make themselves felt more fully, attitudes across the planet will change, but such effects imply the death of thousands, at least, and that's a high price to pay. And China and India both have been reasonably comfortable with a level of environmental devastation that we find appalling: my snot was black after one day in New Delhi. So it may take more to motivate them to act.

I have less to say concerning your interpretation of history. You seem to be right, and I think I have more productive and interesting things to say about the present and the future, so I'll be quiet there, with your blessing.

I wonder more broadly about this notion of a movement. I'm not sure that one unified progressive movement is necessary, likely or even desirable. The linkages between "civil" rights, women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the poor, the Black and the planet exist, sure, but they're increasingly tenuous. And on each issue, a different group of people agree.

Every segment of American life is becoming more fragmented and personalized, and I think the same thing will happen to our politics. Advocacy groups working on each of these issues can partner, share data and pool resources as needed, and achieve most of the benefits of one central "movement" without the slowness, inflexibility and baggage that would come from being lumped together under the same banner.

I think this means that the already-outmoded 2-party system will become even more creaky and strained in the near future, as well. And this is to me the biggest and most puzzling obstacle facing progressive change: how will our governments get better? Will we reform or abolish the Senate? Create meaningful restraints on campaign spending? Create actual accountability at every level? Allow for the existence of a more nimble, intelligent, cacophonous political class composed of multiple parties representing sane district boundaries? And etc.

Unusually for me, I'm rather pessimistic about all of the above. And I think the inability of our governance to improve during the coming tumult could become our biggest problem, holding us back in every conceivable area of human endeavor. I hope I'm wrong about this.

Abraham

Dear Abraham,

I do appreciate your efforts to calm me down, even as I find myself arguing with much of what you have to say. Your list of technological developments that might end up part of a strategy to address climate change is reassuring. It’s just that it is not enough.

I think it is a reasonable observation, not myth-making, to suggest that climate change already underway will kill hundreds of thousands, not “mere” thousands. And, yes, as you say, addressing climate change is more a political question than it is a scientific challenge. That means India and China will be such important players, ultimately, that others might rationalize sitting on their hands until those two countries, who will be the largest generators of greenhouse gasses going forward, take a more important leadership role.

But this can’t be a question of simultaneity. The US is historically the largest generator of human-made greenhouse gasses, which suggests that climate change already underway is a major US responsibility. So it follows, I think, that leadership on climate change ought to begin here.

Unfortunately, as you note, the American political system seems so damaged and so dysfunctional that progress on anything remotely controversial appears almost unachievable. There is no better example, of course, than a political climate in which a bad health care bill might not even pass comes only a year after a better bill seemed a genuine possibility.

But that is not what matters most. If a compromise health care bill that leaves out a public option and leaves private insurers in substantial control is difficult to pass, how much harder would it be to change the two-party system we think is to blame for much of the dysfunction? Impossible? Maybe, but here’s the thing:

It doesn’t matter. It’s what we’ve got to work with at the moment. And it won’t do to sit back and wait for changes. Young people like you really don’t have time to wait on others to act. Like you, a number of millenials are already experienced in local, state and national campaigns. Personally, I think you guys, anticipating that the Obama administration would have an easier go at getting things done, were sitting back waiting for the fun to begin.

But the fun, in the form of progressive legislative action, hasn’t happened, at all. It’s time for the millenials to step forward and claim leadership. It may be early for such a generational claim, but personally I think it’s getting late. Absent the involvement of your generation progressive changes will come later than they should. It’s time for the movement of the millenials, time for a permanent populist campaign focused on something big: like justice and peace.
Jeff

P.S. Yes, we should keep this exchange going, but how about a new focus? Say, militarism and military spending or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How about Social Security, realities and myths? Maybe something about new lifestyles for the 21st Century and more equitable distribution of wealth and resources? What do you think?

Painful Truth: Israeli Apartheid

2010-03-03T09:42:00.005-05:00

This isn't 20th century South Africa; it's 21st century Israel, and it's worse

than South Africa. After all, globally, we are much more sensitized to human rights abuses and collective punishment than we were just a few decades ago. Though a thoroughgoing and explicit system of racial domination in South Africa was not imposed until after World War II, apartheid was rooted in the racist policies and attitudes of the British colonial regime and white settlers. It can be argued, therefore, that the global argument in favor of human rights and against genocide, colonialism and racism (articulated by, for example, the United Nations, the Nuremburg Trials, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) was not potent enough by 1950 to prevent the establishment of the apartheid regime in South Africa or, for that matter, to stop the creation of a theocratic Jewish state in Palestine.

But the Holocaust made a settler state in Palestine possible. After World War II no people in the world, other than European Jews, would have been endorsed by the United Nations in their desire to establish a national state on territory already occupied by an indigenous community. There are those who argue that there was a Jewish presence in Palestine that was at least as continuous as that of the Arabs. There may be some truth to this, but it is not relevant to the central point that Palestinians living on the land did not assent to the establishment of the state of Israel and that tens of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in a process that resembles in every detail other colonial expropriations of land.

It may also be true that some Palestinians were not rooted in a specific spot, but a nomadic existence in a territory does not weaken a people's claim to their land. Neither does it make any practical difference that Palestinians were hardly a coherent political community at the time of the establishment of the Jewish state; such a description suggests that European Jewish leaders were simply better positioned to manipulate major world powers than were the leaders of Palestinian clans and groups. More relevant is the point that South African apartheid is gone, defeated both by native African resistance and international pressure, while Israel, denying that it maintains a system of religious, political and cultural domination and separation, forcefully expands its grip on Palestinian territory, while resisting international pressure and a relatively impotent U.S.

Certainly there is a linguistic argument against the use of the word "apartheid" to describe the regime maintained by the theocratic Jewish state of Israel, but the argument is trite. In Apartheid? Not Israel, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen argues that Israel is not an apartheid state "where political and civil rights are withheld on the basis of race and race alone." Israeli Arabs, Cohen writes, "have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews."

But this statement is a gloss on a reality in which Arabs in Israel live as second-class citizens. Public schools in Arab neighborhoods are underfunded and are clearly a case of "separate and unequal;" the same reality exists in regard to health care, development funding and other government services. Israel also allows Jews from anywhere in the world to come to Israel and assume all the rights of Israeli citizenship, an implicitly clear statement on the differing status of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

Meanwhile, many Palestinians, displaced during the creation of Israel, have no rights to citizenship and no way to claim damages for their displacement or for their continuing exile from their homes. They live in de facto bantustans, and are subject to punitive raids by the Israeli armed forces, collective punishment, house demolitions, further expropriation of territory, extra-legal arrest, detention and imprisonment, and regulated access to most essential requirements and services, such as employment, education, health care, sanitation and, even, water. If the Palestinians living in the occupied territories were included in calculations of the Arab population in Israel, the result would reflect the forceful domination by a minority of a distinctly and separately defined majority population. Because it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is apartheid.

But if anything defines the difference between the South African and Israeli apartheid states, it is that the South African version named itself. Israeli apartheid is the apartheid that dare not speak its name. It is understandable that large numbers of American Jews cannot concede this truth, Richard Cohen among them. Israel was created at a moment of celebration and hope for Jews around the world. Freshly scarred by the Holocaust, and still fearful that history might repeat itself, Jews were inclined not to notice that their joy might be the occasion for the suffering of others.

In this way, Israel, became "a beacon of hope," entering the mythology of American Jews and, eventually, becoming the driving force in the creation of a specific American Jewish ideological argument supporting the Israeli state in its current form. The power of that idealizing of Israel pushed me to celebrate Israeli victories in the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Despite the fact of my anti-Vietnam War activism and the continuing displacement of Palestinians, I easily convinced myself that Israel's cause was simply self-defense. It would be many years before I would be willing to judge Israel's founding and expansion in Palestine with the same critical perspective that I routinely applied to the foreign adventures of the United States.

But Cohen doesn't want to hear it. Those who name Israeli apartheid, who assert that zionism is racism, "have made Israel tone-deaf to legitimate criticism and exasperated with any attempt to find fault," he writes. "Israel has its faults (don't get me started), but it is not motivated by racism. That's more than can be said for many of its critics."

But Cohen "will never get started." Neither he, nor most American Jews, feel comfortable with criticisms of even the most minimal and obvious nature, like, say, the suggestion that continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an absolute violation of international law. Cohen is as guilty of slamming the door shut on dialogue as are the critics whom he calls "tone deaf." They batter on the door, shout to be heard, and quite frankly are no longer speaking to Cohen or to the garrison state of Israel. Their accusations are aimed at a shrinking group of neutral observers, who may not believe that Israel is a racist or apartheid state, but are not inclined to believe that the name-calling is the problem. The world is watching and losing patience with an Israel that perpetrates continuing injustice.

Health Care: The Four Week Countdown

2010-02-25T19:34:00.004-05:00

Democrats have a month, reconciliation is the only way

On CNN this evening, James Carville had nice things to say about the way Lamar Alexander and Tom Coburn opened today's health care summit between Democrats and Republicans. He also said that he thought Barack Obama was the "smartest guy in the room." It was painful to watch the six hour discussion, Carville said, because he was an ADD sort of guy, but it seemed a good setting for Obama to show what he had.

Never mind. Win the discussion or lose it, Obama knows time is running out on health care and the Democrats, They must act before the Congressional recess for Easter, which begins four weeks from Friday. If they don't, Democratic senators and representatives will return from their districts cowed by voter anger and anxious to do something, anything about the economy. But the thing is, without passing a health care bill, nothing Democrats do after April will sway an electorate ready to abandon them in sufficient numbers to cost virtually every single swing seat they hold now. And Harry Reid will go down, too.

So here's the deal: There is going to be a bill passed by reconciliation. Now is the time for every one who gives a damn about what's in the bill to lobby to make it as good as it can be--the 51 votes are there. And if the bill passes before April, it will do very little downstream harm. The republic will not collapse before November and the economy, with a little more government action, will stagger forward; not in a way that fixes much, but well enough to reduce some of anti-government anger that so frightens the Dems. And with health care off the agenda temporarily, expect Congressional Democrats to do a little better with economic and environmental issues.

Khalil Gibran and the Poetry That Is Prayer

2010-02-23T08:03:00.004-05:00

I am not prayerful, but, in a particular mood, perhaps something awfully like it.

In the prose poem that follows from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, I like especially that the singers and the dancers and the flute players come to town and belong because they,too, produce with the effort of farmers and fishers:

And a merchant said, Speak to us of Buying and Selling.

And he answered and said:

To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.

It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you will find abundance and be satisfied.

Yet unless the exchange be in love and in kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.

When in the marketplace you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices,--

Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.

And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labor.

To such men say,

"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;

For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."

And there shall come the singers and the dancers and the flute players,--buy of their gifts also.

For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.

And before you leave the marketplace, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.

For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the least of you are satisfied.

I read this at the right moment and every word rings like a bell tone in my ear. And, maybe a little bit, in the memory of my right hand, I can feel the weight of my favorite hammer.

My feelings at those times, I imagine, are like the openness and waiting that comes to people who believe more strongly and speak in rhythms and in chants to the fountainhead of their belief. Of course, prayerfulness and mindfulness do not automatically transform believers into justice activists; sometimes, and instead, into something that seems a good bit more diabolical.

But there is a lot to be gained in reminding oneself, privately or in community, of the gifts of the world and the joy in connection and the harmony in creative and productive effort. Gibran shares this with us over and over.

"And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain." This the Prophet proceeds to do, ending with this observation:

"And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips,has been fashioned with the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."

Against All Odds

2010-02-18T08:42:00.003-05:00

America's futile campaign for military hegemony

Americans use almost five times as much energy per capita as does the average human inhabitant of the globe. Yes, the United States does produce much more per capita than the rest of the world, but not five times as much (US GDP per capita, about 32K; World GDP per capita, about 7K); and the country does not distribute its surpluses equitably, anyhow. The US also produces greenhouse gasses at a substantially higher rate per capita than the rest of the world, making it a principal culprit in climate change. (Readers can find the source for this data here.)

All of this means that a good portion of the world has no reason to be okay with the United State's disproportionate share of energy consumption, or its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, or its lack of commitment to global equity. Of course, because the United States is also the globe's only military superpower most other countries only politely object to American greed or, even, curry favor by pretending not to notice. Only a very few countries and a few non-governmental organizations like, say al Qaeda or the Taliban, are openly hostile.

But for several reasons, the status quo is not sustainable. The U.S. is currently spending more than $1 trillion every year to maintain its mighty military machine. The country's annual budgeted spending (excluding wars and several other significant expenditures) is currently over $600 billion per year, almost 40% of budgeted global military spending, but because many national economies are industrializing and growing rapidly, the United States will find it increasingly expensive to maintain its current military advantage. And because military deficit spending is a huge contributor to the US national debt, the country will spend between $1.5 to $2 trillion over the next decade on interest payments attributable to that spending.

In decades to come more countries will become hostile to American appropriation of energy resources that need to be shared, and to American consumption habits and greenhouse gas production that have damaging environmental consequences, but the country will not be able to afford the escalations in military power and spending necessary to maintain the status quo.

Wouldn't it make more sense to recognize the inevitable, to concede that 400 million people will not be able to force 7 billion people to accept an unfair distribution of wealth and resources? Wouldn't it make more sense to reorganize our own economy to address inequity and inequality here at home and to prepare ourselves to be an equal partner in a world that will have no choice but to begin sharing both benefits and burdens equally?

Social Security Spending Helps the Economy

2010-02-17T08:50:00.004-05:00

Military spending drives the deficit

I could have sworn that my 28th letter to the Washington Post, which follows here, would be the second one that they would publish. Alas, I was wrong, again, but it is the content that matters, not the quarrel. The letter focuses, once more, on how unhelpful it is to talk about the national debt and federal budget deficit without even acknowledging military spending. Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), also addressed the same opinion piece to which I'd responded. I've interspersed Baker's response, which ran in his weekly Beat the Press blog, in the text of my letter.

Editor,

So Robert Samuelson is calling on the Obama administration to be more open about future debt and deficit difficulties (“America’s Candor Gap,” Feb. 8), but his version of fiscal reality lacks some important details, as well. The federal government is projected to spend almost $46 trillion between 2011 and 2020, Samuelson writes, and $20 trillion will go to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Such a “…budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes,” he continues.

But as income transfers go, Samuelson’s example is relatively benign. Most of the transfer in this instance is from younger workers to older ones and most of the money transferred is spent immediately on goods and services—a reliable exchange that helps to keep the economy going. And, as economist Dean Baker and others have pointed out (see a list of CEPR's many reports about Social Security here), if the cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes is raised, higher income professionals will bear more of the tax burden, making the income transfer even more positive for the economy.

But there is a less benign income transfer that Samuelson does not even mention: military spending of more than $1 trillion annually (the sum of Defense Department spending + national security spending + military spending in other departmental budgets + supplemental war spending + interest on that portion of the national debt attributable to deficit spending on the military in previous years). In fact, 25 percent of the six to eight trillion dollars that will be spent on interest on the national debt during 2011-2020 will be attributable to previous military spending.

Discussing the country’s fiscal hemorrhage without discussing the military budget falls far short of full disclosure.

***************************************************

Readers of this blog may find Dean Baker's report, "The Social Security Shortfall and the National Defense Shortfall" of particular interest.

Baker's response to the same column by Samuelson is here. More about the rise in Pentagon spending compared to the increase in spending for Social Security is here. Finally, it is worth noting that, in the last cited piece, Baker does not use the $1 trillion+ figure for military spending that I use because he includes only budgeted spending for the Department of Defense and does not include the additional spending itemized in my letter to the Post.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse...

2010-02-16T13:13:00.004-05:00

Nate muscles up a metaphor

I left our family home when Nate was 14 and Julie was nine. My separation from their mother ended in divorce about three years later, about the time that I moved down to Dayton to live with Marrianne. But working for the American Friends Service Committee I travelled a lot and being the noncustodial parent, I wasn't as present in Nate and Julie's life as I wanted to be. A frequently absent father is not a good thing, but kids do a lot of adapting and find ways to compensate. Nate certainly did, finding a number of different adult males to guide and mentor him.

One such man, Jack, the father of Nate's high school girlfriend, worked as a therapist. He took a real interest in Nate and they developed a friendship that outlasted Nate's relationship with his girlfriend. A couple of days ago, in a long phone call, Nate talked about Jack for a bit. In trying to describe aspects of Jack's outlook on life, Nate grasped for a line, the first line, from a Dylan Thomas poem. "I can't remember it exactly," he said, "but it's something about 'the power rushing through a green fuse.'"

Nate's comment excited me; I've been a Dylan Thomas fan since high school when I actually decoded, if only briefly, some of Thomas' complex metaphors. That experience of sudden comprehension thrilled me, and seeking to recreate the rush, I've frequently returned to Thomas' poems over the years. And then there's Thomas' voice (you can hear a recording of him here), for me the most sonorous and elegant and compelling (and Welsh) of all voices, with the possible exception of James Earl Jones (except for the Welsh part) in his prime.

So, forgetting for the moment that Nate was trying to make a point about Jack, I dug out my copy of Thomas' Collected Poems, while Nate lingered on the line. Though it is a digression of fairly significant dimensions, I cannot resist observing that my hardcover copy, published by New Directions and in its 23rd printing when I bought it, sold for $3.80, discounted by the now defunct University Cellar Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich. from its cover price of $4.25. The Cellar, a nonprofit bookstore established by the University of Michigan regents in response to student demands for cheaper text books, is a whole other story, but not for now. This digression must conclude.

At any rate, after the second scan through the table of contents, the poem, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," turned up. And as it did, I remembered that Nate was making a point about Jack and quickly understood that he was saying that Jack believed in a pervasive spiritual presence, a "god force," which inhabited all things. Though I had to look up the line to understand what Nate was trying to say, it turned out that he could hardly have been more economical or more vivid in characterizing Jack.

But here's the point: In paraphrasing Thomas, Nate connected two separate ideas that ended up illuminating each other and providing me with the rush of an "aha!" moment; one in which I suddenly understood a good bit of the poem and a whole lot more of it than I had been able to grasp previously.

I haven't been writing poetry much lately, confining myself most often to blogging about politics and the need for social change, And, when I do write poetry, I'm not in the same league as even ordinary Welsh poets, let alone Dylan Thomas. But sometimes reading poetry satisfies some of the same urges that motivate writing poetry. Either way, one frequently wrestles metaphors uphill and gets flattened by runaway tropes, if one's stores of energy run out before reaching a safe place to rest.

But here is the Thomas poem. Read it and see if a decent understanding of the first line doesn't help to unlock the meaning of much of the rest of the poem. And thanks to Nate, also, for somehow always finding a way to teach me something new.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

2010-02-13T08:58:00.006-05:00

How do we go from individual acts of courage to a mass movement for peace and justice?

In 1971, when the first of the Johnson administration's major escalations of the war in Vietnam was already a decade old, the New York Times began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers, a Rand Corporation study of the history of U.S. military and political involvement in Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg, a high-ranking strategist at Rand, working under a contract with the Pentagon, copied and leaked the top secret report to the Times, the Washington Post, 17 other newspapers and several members of Congress.

The story of Ellsberg's evolution from elite war strategist to anti-war activist is told in The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a documentary that premiered Friday night in D.C. and several other cities. Former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who moderated a question and answer session after the showing, was also featured in the film for his role in inserting the whole of the Pentagon Papers into the official records of a Senate sub-committee he chaired. The Q and A, featuring Ellsberg, himself, and filmmaker Rick Goldsmith, highlighted a few key issues connected to the absence of a contemporary anti-war movement and apparent obstacles to movement-building; but passing through a sustained challenge to one's courage and integrity, as Ellsberg did on his journey to leaking the documents (and Gravel did, as well, in reading portions during a formal session of his sub-committee) does not automatically qualify one to speculate about how to build a movement.

Perhaps, it is uncharitable of me to carp about Ellsberg and Gravel, who deserve virtually any applause they get for their individual acts of moral courage and for their lifetime commitment to peace and justice, as well. But I have a churlish streak, so I will plunge ahead with the point that both Ellsberg and Gravel (and "The Most Dangerous Man...) seem essentially unaware that they were standing on the shoulders of a movement when they shared the secret papers with an apparently astounded public. Yes, the movie does acknowledge a certain measure of movement activity, of clashes between demonstrators and police, and of leadership from a select few politicians, but the nod is only cursory; the film goes so far as to claim that with his actions Ellsberg set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.

This strikes me as very bad and unhelpful history. By 1969, the year when Ellsberg made the decision to begin copying the Pentagon Papers, the anti-war movement had already made the war a political hot potato. By that time, the first of thousands of campus teach-ins against the war (at the University of Michigan) was already five years past. Also earlier, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City ("A Time to Break Silence") first linked the civil rights struggle to the war in Vietnam.

Soon, if not already, King said, our troops "must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated must surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor."

From that point forward King moved beyond his brief as a leader of the civil rights movement to become a leader of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. A year later, in a tragic moment that injected a fresh moral energy to both movements, but also added to a growing cultural and social division in the country, King was assassinated.

It was also the movement (and therefore a collective expression of a myriad of moments of individual courage) that forced President Johnson to give up the presidency at the end of his first full term in 1968. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding thirteen. Ten days after Kent State, the police in Jackson, Miss. fired on a crowd of students at Jackson State University. Two students were killed, another 15 were wounded. Though the series of demonstrations at Jackson State began as a civil rights protest incited by an incident in which a white motorist injured a black pedestrian, there was also a strong anti-war message infused in the demonstrations organized by students at the historically black university.

All of this and much more was part of the zeitgeist that inspired, shaped and affirmed Ellsberg and Gravel and others in their individual acts of conscience. And all this matters because in this history lie the lessons we must learn if a movement for peace and economic and environmental justice is to develop early in the 21st Century. The first person to speak during the Q&A following the film on Friday night was an older guy who spoke about his own despair over the absence of a viable popular movement in the U.S. Neither Ellsberg nor Gravel could speak to the question of how a movement develops though they both asserted that there is always hope; hope that is kindled in individual acts of resistance. This is reasonable and true, but we cannot mistake the moment in time when an otherwise collaborationist media publishes something like the Pentagon Papers as a pivotal moment in the development of a movement.

That moment comes when a mature movement has already forced people in positions of influence who have remained studiously neutral or have been complicit, as Ellsberg himself was, to confront their own consciences. In such a moment, some, like the editors at the New York Times and Washington Post, may finally make the decision to do the right thing and publish the truth, or a reasonable facsimile. The crowd at the premiere seemed to believe that the publication of the Pentagon Papers was an act of journalistic courage, but the comments of the Washington editor of the Times suggest something else. Once we had the documents in our possession, he said, we had to publish. If we had not, and the public had ever found out what we knew, it would have ruined the newspaper.

It is worth noting here, in the autumn of the newspaper publishing business, that journalists need not rue the fate of our great newspapers who have failed to relentlessly investigate and publish the truth about our war frauds in Iraq and Afghanistan. The end of the major urban dailies is at hand, in any case. By and large, the public has lost interest in their fate. So it should also be obvious that no strategy for building a movement can depend, in any part, on newspaper or, even, television news coverage. Audiences are too fragmented and have too many media choices for any message from any source to fall on millions at once with the same impact.

The good news here is not that I have any better idea how to build a movement than do Dan Ellsberg or Mike Gravel. The good news is that elements of that movement already exist. They exist in affinity groups and collectives focused on individual issues. Elements of the next movement exist in neighborhood collaborations aimed at improving local schools or reclaiming abandoned housing. Elements exist even here, in Washington, where some electeds, like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich keep fighting the good fight. There are also organizations fighting for economic and environmental justice on a global scale. Though labor unions are only a pale shadow of what they once were, some unions continue to organize low-wage workers and strategize ways to connect to a larger movement.

None of this is enough. What is missing here is a critical mass of young people who have not yet fully compromised with prevailing attitudes or who are not yet resigned to a comfortable cynicism. I do not know how to persuade people 30 or 40 years younger than me that their future, that the future of the world they will grow into is at risk; that to be 50- or 60-something in 2040 will be a lot more unpleasant than being that age now. I cannot even say persuasively how I know this to be true (though I will keep working on my argument that it is so). Nor can I say what exactly is required of me now. But I will say that I won't stop thinking or writing about these questions until I have better answers. And when I get to that happy point, I'll keep working on the same questions, anyway, because nothing less is required of each of us.

Media News That Fails Us

2010-02-12T10:05:00.005-05:00

Collaborators in the news room

In 1967, I informed my draft board that I considered both the draft, in general, and student deferments from the draft, in particular, to be immoral and that I wished to be reclassified from 2S to 1A. Ignoring my larger moral argument, the board sent me a new card with a new classification making me immediately eligible to be drafted. I then notified them that I intended to burn my card in public at an appointed time and place. Though they did not show up for the event, they did draft me shortly thereafter, whereupon I departed for Canada, the location of further adventures only tangentially related to the focus of this post.

Since those halcyon days of antiwar protest, I have fervently believed that reducing military spending and ending militarism ought to be critically important to activists regardless of their issue focus. Since the news media, historically, has been the handmaiden of American military interventions, it follows that journalism, journalistic practice and media ought to be another point of strategic concern for all issues activists. A case in point is the major media's abject failure to investigate the full story of the Bush administration's duplicity in making the case for the invasion of Iraq and to tell that story early and often, with the result that the Iraq War has gone on for a tortuously long time at a cost of nearly $1 trillion.

Writer Sebastian Jones has produced a well-researched piece, "The Lobbying-Media Complex" that adds to the indictment of cable and network news media. The story, running in The Nation, gets right to the point in its first three paragraphs, detailing how ex-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge and retired general Barry McCaffrey appeared recently on news shows as experts on energy and the Afghanistan war, respectively, without the relevant disclosures that the two men have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from energy companies and military contractors.

To end his piece, Jones quotes Arizona State University journalism professor Aaron Brown's observations following 2008 election coverage, which featured endless line-ups and roundtables of analysts sharing little of real value: "We live in a time when there are no shortages of opinions and an incredible deficit of facts."

The point needs augmenting, I think. Having and sharing opinions, after all, seems part of human DNA, but the constitutionally protected function of news media is to uncover and share relevant information that good citizenship requires. Otherwise media is nothing but a toady for the rich and powerful, collaborating with their policy goals.

What Can You Do With Three Feet of Snow?

2010-02-11T07:19:00.008-05:00

Argue climate change, keep shovel ready

As landlords go, ours is a good one. She did raise our rent last year, which raised my level of ungenerous thoughts about her. But she called the other day to ask how we were making out during the series of snowstorms that have blasted D.C. and the rest of the mid-Atlantic. I told her we were fine and our conversation moved on to the statistical odds against having two Top Ten snowstorms hit the area in the same year (a subsequent 10" snow hit the area yesterday--not Top Ten, but big enough to be the largest storm in most Washington winters).

Good weather records for the area (at least regarding depth of snow deposited by storms) go back 100 years or so. So the likelihood of having a Top Ten storm happen in any given year is about 1 in 10. The likelihood of two Top Ten storms in any given year is 1 in 100. Add in a third 10" storm and consider that area weather data goes back more than 100 years, the likelihood of all three storms happening in the same year is probably somewhere around once every 150 to 200 years. Long odds, I think, but nowhere near rare enough to prove anything, least of all climate change, which will abound in very difficult to predict consequences (for the Daily Show's perspective on the difference between weather and climate, go here).

Still, whether or not the recent snows reinforce arguments for or against climate change, they are most certainly weather, which is, once again,something everyone likes to talk about. The thing about heavy snowfall is you don't just get to talk about it, you actually have to shovel it. And, let me note here that I'm going through my 62nd winter on this planet and spent 59 of those winters in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Boulder and Dayton, residing here in D.C., south of the Mason-Dixon line for the last three.

But it is only here in Washington that I have had to shovel snow every day for a week; that's what people do in North Dakota and Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, I guess, in Buffalo. So, though isolated weather events do not prove climate change , rigorous scientific models that support the argument for global warming also predict increases in severe weather events (see a discussion of climate change and severe weather here). Personally, after moving around an estimated ton of snow in the past week, I'm going to invest in a back up snow shovel; my unsolicited advice to those living in the Deep South, the current bastion of Republicanism and center of the fundamentalist argument with science: Keep a snow shovel handy. The one you use for manure just won't do.

The $1 Trillion War Fraud

2010-02-10T10:34:00.004-05:00

Feb. 10, 2003: Iraq agrees to U.S. surveillance overflights

Seven years ago today, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq was already thoroughly planned (and less than 40 days from actual launch), some 60 weapons inspectors from two international agencies were already in place there and, in a further gesture of surrender, Saddam Hussein agreed to regular U-2 spy plane missions throughout Iraqi air space (you could look it up at This Week in Peace History).

To be forced to agree to the presence of international weapons inspectors and reconnaisance overflights is an act of capitulation, but the U.S. (with cover from 40 other countries) invaded anyway. Though examples of corporate media failure to perform the basic function of investigating and exposing the activities and pretensions of government abound, the persistent and enduring journalistic failure to report the truth about the Iraq War is an act of collusion similar to the "yellow journalism" tactics of William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal, which diligently promoted the Spanish-American War.

In the upshot, the Iraq War, the third longest U.S. war ever (the Afghanistan War is longer, the Vietnam War longest), a product of the de facto alliance of duplicitous government, collaborating media and a rapacious military-industrial complex, has cost the country over $700 billion to date; that cost continues to rise at a rate exceeding $100,000 per minute (about the same rate as the Afghanistan War--to watch the cost of both wars rise, check out this web page of the National Priorities Project). Together, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds $1 trillion; about the amount an effective and urgently needed stimulus package would cost. It ought to be obvious that peace and economic justice are two sides of an ideal coin, but harder to arrive at when the media itself is not interested.

Manufacturing the News

2010-02-08T17:21:00.002-05:00

Polls paid for by media become news stories

This is my 27th letter to the Washington Post. I generally do believe that the letters I write have a chance of being published, but I knew this one was a bigger stretch than usual. The letter accuses the Post of paying for polls on topical issues, then managing the way the results are released in their paper. That's actually not where the stretch lies; it's what they do. But it is also easy for editors and reporters to argue that the poll results they report actually examine public feeling to a depth that readers cannot. Still, polls generally report who is hot and who is not. Much of the additional detail organized in reports of polls as if it were factual is actually subject to both interpretation and statistical error.

My guess is that newspapers started polling as a defensive move; an attempt to protect their stories from the spin that owners of private poll results might introduce. After all, politicians were polling before newspapers, and leaking the results of polls to targeted journalists in an effort to influence coverage of elections. That doesn't happen so much now that everybody, politicians and journalists come armed with poll results. Campaigns don't try as hard to use their polls to spin stories, primarily because they more often use their polls to identify target audiences and develop messages aimed at groups of voters. Nor would spinning work as well in an environment where a newspaper can report their own, perhaps different, poll results. But the original defensive purpose for polling has changed--survey results are now news, and journalists no longer have to hit the streets to get the story.

Editor,

A quick look at the last two issues of the Post provides a clear example of how print media manages the news, rather than simply reporting it. The front-page over-the-fold story on Sunday, Jan. 31 (“Fenty’s approval ratings plummet”) says that a “new Washington Post poll” shows that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty’s popularity among residents has dropped dramatically since a 2008 poll.

A day later, in a metro story (“D.C. Schools Chancellor Rhee’s approval rating in deep slide”), we read that the same “new” poll reveals that the public perception of Chancellor Rhee is also much more negative now than it was two years ago. But the serial nature of the stories raises the question of exactly what journalistic criteria might have dictated reporting the two stories separately. Personally, I know of none. But I can imagine the business considerations that went into deciding that the stories would have more impact, if they ran separately on Sunday and Monday rather then running together on, say, a low-circulation Saturday.

Speculating in this manner raises further questions, I think. For example, if poll results are news, at all, then why wouldn’t the Post report the results when they first become available? But, perhaps more to the point, why would the Post bother to write about poll results, at all? Editors and reporters routinely assert that journalists investigate and report stories; they do not manufacture them. But news stories based on polls that newspapers pay for seem perilously close to product manufacturing.

Perhaps editors assume that none of us actually talk to each other. It is therefore a great service of the Fourth Estate to share the news with me that my neighbor to the east likes Fenty, while my neighbor to the west does not. If that is the assumption that editors are making, it may be helpful for me to share this fact: by and large, we do know what our neighbors are thinking.

How the Right, and the Rest of Us, Can Shrink Big Government

2010-02-07T07:20:00.005-05:00

Musings of a Snow Shoveler

It was so quiet on DC streets yesterday, you could hear yourself thinking. The streets weren't completely impassable, but only a tiny number of vehicles drove by; the great majority of cars were stuck in snowdrifts and garages. High mounds of snow narrowed the roadways, absorbing much of the noise made by the mainly emergency vehicles and snowplows that did pass by. There were no trains running on the four lines of railroad track about a block away, and the blowers and fans that heat and cool the air for the hospital buildings nearby were, for once, inaudible. Humans were out and about, shoveling and talking and, somehow, the otherwise sound-deadening qualities of the snow facilitated the easy travel of conversational voices.

A neighbor two doors away shoveled vigorously east, so I shoveled vigorously west. We met halfway, a proud moment in the ongoing process of reclaiming the public right-of-way. Like the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways, it was a moment deserving of celebration, so, though we've lived on the same block for three years, Scott and I introduced ourselves to each other for the first time in history. Sadly, the neighbor to our east has failed to shovel his sidewalk, so the full corner-to-corner pathway remains incomplete.

But before the historic meet up with Scott, I couldn't help reflecting that the economic output in the very big East Coast neighborhood, ranging from as far south as, say, North Carolina, north to New York state and west to Pittsburgh had dropped dramatically. In fact, probably the single most productive activity in the whole megalopolis was moving snow around, a lot of it volunteer activity. My own snow moving output for the weekend, about six hours worth at a conservative $25/hour (snowplow drivers contribute much more) ought to add about $150 to the Gross National Product.

This thought got me to the further notion that if people who are most particularly incensed by big government really wanted to advance their cause, they could go out and do an hour's worth of volunteer activity every week on behalf of someone less well off, sicker or older than they are. Cutting grass, building a wheelchair ramp, making dinner, picking up medicine on behalf of someone who would not be able to do those things themselves, might, in fact, leave them undone would add huge sums to the GNP. Moreover, doing them would be preventative. They would improve quality of life for the beneficiaries, increasing health and well-being, and reduce the cost of future government intervention.

Say, for argument's sake, that 10 million people, otherwise consumed by political frustration about Big Brother, did engage in this sort of volunteerism for an hour a week and 50 weeks a year. At a conservative labor value of $20/hr., these activities would add about $10 billion to GNP. If 10 million more progressives, wishing to encourage such volunteerism and desiring to share directly in the community-building process were to match the effort, we could add another $10 billion to GNP and dial down ambient political heat in favor of light. If the same 20 million were to also give away their spare change to the homeless twice a week, we could inject another $2 billion annually into local economies. If all of this were to happen on a yearly basis, the total would equal a modest stimulus package, and it wouldn't take 60 votes in the Senate to make it happen.

Military Spending Tsunami Threatens Social Programs

2010-02-04T10:53:00.005-05:00

Let's discuss this, says the Left

In "No Defense for This Budget" Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel criticizes President Obama's proposal to impose a freeze on all federal discretionary spending except for core defense spending, which will be allowed to increase by two-plus percent. Specific spending for war in Afghanistan and Iraq will increase even more.

"Exempting all security-related expenditures from common sense cuts will have serious consequences for almost everything the government does--from job creation, poverty reduction and alternative energy development, to aid for cash-strapped state and local governments," Vanden Heuvel wrote. Since the freeze in all other discretionary spending means actual cuts in social programs, Obama's proposal means less funding will be available to address the social needs exacerbated by The Great Recession.

In January, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) wrote a piece that the rising federal deficit means that the U.S. cannot consistently fund social services without cutting the defense budget by 25 percent. That piece also ran in the Nation and can be found here.

Given the name-calling, general dissing and overall disrespect that characterizes a third to a half of the comments responding to Vanden Heuvel's piece, it is probably a very good thing that there is no comment chain following Frank's article; that chain would have been longer and much more vituperative. Frank, after all, is not only a New England liberal, he is also openly gay. The virtual venom coming from the libertarians. conservatives and troglodytes who police the Nation's website would probably have turned the magazine's server into a quivering shadow of its former self. But the thing is, Frank is calling for a large cut that would be phased in over time. Enough time to create good new jobs for workers who lose there's when weapons plants get shuttered.

Nor is Vanden Heuvel a raving left-winger. "Right now, for those who understand what's at stake with these budget priorities, it's high time to tell your legislators and the White House that if there is indeed going to be any freeze on spending, the exorbitant defense budget should be included in that," she concludes. That's pretty mild stuff in a country driving tanks toward bankruptcy.

One Day, A Non-militaristic Military

2010-02-03T08:57:00.004-05:00

Adm. Mullen says let openly gay soldiers serve

No one wants to be regarded as a complete loon. Accordingly, despite my sweeping anti-militarist condemnations of U.S. militarism and our bloated military budget (and weapons industry), I wish to stipulate that, yes, we do need a military. Though the one we have is probably too large by half, it should also be stipulated that the one we need ought to be competitive--larger, for instance, than the Vatican's Swiss Guard, but smaller, say, than the combined military of all Europe.

Further, if we are going to have one, the more it looks like America, the more appropriate (and less militaristic) it will be. It's also worth noting that we may very well be moving toward that ideal. Yesterday, Armed Forces chief Mike Mullen told Congress that it's time to do away with "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Though Mullen's statement will certainly heat up one front in the culture wars, it is good news; progressives should hear it as a call to action. Though it may be premature, someone ought to begin taking nominations for the first female chair of the joint chiefs.

D-E-F-E-N-S-E Spells Predictable Assault on Better Budget Priorities

2010-02-02T10:08:00.008-05:00

No progressive budget without cutting military spending

Winding up to blog about federal spending, in general, and military spending in particular. Two weeks ago, I was on Michael James' Saturday morning radio show, broadcasting from the Heartland Cafe, for about twenty minutes. It was fun, but not nearly long enough for big fun. Michael and I connected briefly on a couple of things. Most important, as the show wrapped up, I laid out my best "old man" advice for progressives working on specific causes. Paraphrased, it went something like this: "Whether activists are focused on health care, affordable housing, public education or anything else, everyone ought to include military spending on their priority list. It is difficult to make substantial progress on those other issues as long as militarism and military spending shape the budget to the tune of $1 trillion plus annually."

Here are some websites and posts I'm reading and will use as a source for a longer post on military spending:

The Security Spending Primer from the National Priorities Project. The primer was developed based on the 2009/2010 federal budget, so some of it is about a year old. But the principles and perspective are absolutely current and appropriate to any discussion of the US military budget.

A liberal, broad-brush perspective on the need for Congress and the President to exercise greater control over the relentless growth of tax expenditures, written by Len Burman, a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The article ran in today's Washington Post and is available here.

An article in today's Post (about the recent firing of the general in charge of "the Pentagon's most expensive weapons system."The story, "Defense secretary Gates fires general in charge of Joint Strike Fighter program," is here.

A good piece by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, is here.

The Politics of Healthcare Failure

2010-01-29T11:06:00.005-05:00

Organized labor's unfortunate role

At this very moment in time, lots of people seem to be feeling that our country is ungovernable. Even a reasonable start at healthcare reform, which seemed so very doable just a year ago, appears out of the question. The anger and cynicism of ordinary working people who have morphed over the last 40 years from lunch pail Democrats to Reagan Republicans to foot soldiers in the tea-party movement, seen in the context of falling real wages, underwater mortgages and failing public institutions like mass transit and public schools, makes sense.

Ordinarily, I confine my j'accuse to militarism, capitalism and their corporate agents, but it might also make sense to take a look at what appears to be the recent tactical failure of organized labor and the role of unions like Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in this summer's missed opportunity for healthcare reform. It's true, of course, the union movement is a pale shadow of the powerful entity it became (despite occasional setbacks) during the middle 40 years of the last century. A strongly negative critique of unions, coming from a sometime union member and long-time ardent supporter may have a kind of "piling on" flavor, but so it goes.

Unions played a leading role in establishing the eight-hour day, the five-day week, Social Security, civil rights, Medicare and other socially and broadly important advances, but business unionism, the prevailing practice after World War II for all but a few unions (e.g., the UAW and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers) took the AFL-CIO out of the broader progressive movement for the last 30, or so, years. And, even before that, the AFL-CIO's internal red-hunting and collaboration with the U.S. Cold War-agenda undermined the entire American Left.

Five or six years ago, Andy Stern (president of SEIU) and his Change to Win initiative seemed to be leading labor back to the critical point position of a broader and growing progressive movement. The chief evidence for that has been the forceful union push for national healthcare. But, in the end, at the cost of a decent healthcare bill that never actually materialized but would, I think, already have passed the House and Senate, unions decided to come down on the side of the narrowly defined economic interests of their members by absolutely opposing a tax on "Cadillac" healthcare coverage. That union leaders would define and protect their members interests in the most parochial way has been obvious since the summer, even if it did not play a significant role in the public debate at the time. In that light, the behaviors of senators like Nelson and Lieberman, who decided that they, too, should, and could, get a little more for their own constituents makes perfect sense.

Had Stern and other leaders taken the long-term view that the eventual demise of employer-provided health coverage needs, in the interests of union members and everyone else, to be carefully managed to its extinction rather than bitterly defended to the last detail, several things might have happened:

One, Ted Kennedy would have gotten to vote to pass a better plan;

two, the House and Senate plans would have resembled each other more closely and differences might have been resolved in conference in a timely way;

three, unions could have expected more favorable treatment for the other items on their agenda, like a more sympathetic and effective National Labor Relations Board (though the Employee Free Choice Act never had a chance);

four, their own members would have suffered little or no actual economic loss (the details of which could have been negotiated) and, living in a world in which their own extended families and communities are deeply and adversely affected by the current healthcare system, likely would have applauded passage of a good bill;

five, the resulting effects would have begun to improve the global competitiveness of major manufacturing sectors (like auto);

and, six, it would have made Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts far less likely.

Unfortunately, Stern, the most pivotal union figure in this scenario, was busy visiting the White House (22 times in the past year, I heard), continuing to position himself in his own mind, I'd guess, as the most powerful and creative union leader of what turns out to be the most tediously long century (the 20th, about 110 years, or so), in American history.

The Healthcare Bullet That Wounds Us All

2010-01-27T03:35:00.006-05:00

Mom scrapes by and yet...

I just spent a week in Chicago with my mom. She was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2006, about six months before Marrianne, Brendan and I completed our move from Chicago to DC. Mom will be 85 in May, but considering her age and her disease she's doing all right. She still has all her marbles and she is still living at home on her own.

Her cancer treatment hasn't been debilitating; all along it has been aimed at slowing the spread of the disease and maintaining her quality of life. A chemo assault on the cancer, aimed at eliminating it, might have shortened her life, and almost certainly would have had side effects severe enough to rob her of much of the energy she has invested in living the life she wanted these last three years.

But Mom's had a bad run for the last couple of months. She fell at home and hit her head once, suffered through spells of dizziness and nausea, and through periods of high blood pressure and high anxiety about what was happening to her. Thankfully, the last week was pretty good for her. I don't think that my presence had all that much to do with her gains in strength and appetite; my sisters Dale and Teri and brother Mark had already been on the spot during the more difficult time before I arrived.

Still, it is clear that Mom was still reeling and full of distress while I was there. Ordinarily, she's both a gregarious friend and an intensely private person. When she's feeling good, she's very clear about boundaries. The daytime is for chores and for socializing. The nighttime is private time, rest and recharge time. She likes to see her children, her grandchildren and her toddler great-grandchild, and she loves them all best when the visits are short. Most times when I come in from DC, she gives me a big hug when I arrive and, 48 hours later, begins wondering when I'm going to leave. But this visit I was still somewhat welcome a week after I got there; that's how bad she has been feeling.

There's no question aging is tough. So is being so sick that your life doesn't feel like your own anymore. Mom hates those feelings and hates being dependent, but she's luckier than most people her age and most people with her diagnosis. She's got her problems, but she's financially secure and she has first rate health insurance that doesn't cost her anything. As the widow of an Illinois state legislator who served in that role for 14 years, she has Cadillac healthcare coverage and a decent pension. Of course, she also has Social Security, Medicare (which pretty much guarantees that holes in her healthcare coverage are plugged), and what remains of an originally sizable payment from my dad's life insurance coverage. As a result, there are some things she simply doesn't have to worry about.

But most people her age have only Medicare coverage and, by itself, that has enormous holes. And many people with diagnoses as severe, or worse, live their lives with poor and inadequate healthcare. They may also live in substandard housing and have to scrape by making the choice to pay some bills and ignore others. Some are elderly, sick, homeless and hungry.

I suppose I could do a little research and come up with some estimate of how many millions of people are worse off, in many cases, much worse off than Mom, but I'm just going to say there are millions in that position. And in the best possible scenario, those millions of people are loved and cared for by millions more who undoubtedly are stretched financially, emotionally and physically in the process. These people, dependent on others for basics they cannot themselves provide, and their caregivers, live in communities and neighborhoods where still more millions are witnesses to their need and must themselves decide whether and how much to help.

The social ramifications of witnessing needs and being unable to respond adequately are huge. When such a story is repeated over and over again the social consequences of our collective helplessness in the face of injustice are almost too much to bear. I think those consequences include widespread alienation, shame and anger. We cannot bear to keep looking at what we cannot fix and so we look away. But though we may not acknowledge that we have looked away, we must do something.

One familiar option is blaming the victim. The social desperation around us is, for example, the fault of those who suffer. They were not prudent or wise or diligent or independent; they are or were lazy, unmotivated and otherwise undeserving. It is they who are bankrupting are healthcare system, creating trillion dollar deficits, weakening our country.

Never mind that our healthcare system is what it is, a disaster for some of us, a chronic problem for most of us, because it is a profit opportunity for a very few of us. U.S. healthcare is, currently, just another mechanism for concentrating wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of Americans. Our trillion dollar plus budget deficit is arguably as connected to rampant American militarism, to annual military spending that exceeds a trillion dollars (Pentagon spending plus spending by other departments plus off-budget spending plus interest on that portion of the debt attributable to past military spending), as it is to any other cause. Congressional leaders, most particularly Republicans, and tea party organizers alike, are better at finding ways to mask our shame and express our frustration at our helplessness than they are at addressing our fundamental problems. Democrats, who this past year have managed to squander every apparent political advantage, now appear ready to abandon healthcare reform altogether. This will not be a tragedy for my mom individually, who will address her own challenges with the relatively mighty set of tools at her disposal, but she will suffer her share of our collective failure, if we cannot pass even a sorry compromise of the separate bills that have already passed the House and Senate.

Passion and Optimism

2010-01-22T08:25:00.004-05:00

No change without them

On Saturday morning (9 a.m. Chicago time) I will be on Michael James' radio show talking politics. The show can be heard on-line here. These things never go as planned, but as I have prepared by focusing on what I think people, especially young people, might do to define and develop an activism adequate to the 21st century's enormous political challenges, I find myself baffled by all the things I don't know.

Despite all the sturm un drang that seems endemic to our political culture, I'm under the impression that there are fewer people actively engaged in politics and more young adults convinced that they are powerless to address the issues that concern them most. Of course, as I set out to investigate this assumption further, I confront only more questions that I will have no time to answer by tomorrow morning:

1. I know, or know of, plenty of young people who are passionately engaged. The daughter of one friend is living in Central America and working as a volunteer on village development projects. Others have committed their working lives to investigating and writing about a wide range of issues, from climate change to how to use new media to build progressive political networks. Some of them do these things without much concern for career path or compensation. Still others have entirely rejected the more material aspects of our culture and focus their efforts on building community and pursuing their art. But it seems to me that there are nowhere near enough young people who are persuaded that their efforts will make a difference and are proceeding accordingly.

2. In a world where climate change will reach a tipping point before efforts to abate it begin to have an effect, and in a country where racism and discrimination still devastate lives and communities, and almost everyone must struggle with the Great Recession--the worst domestic economy in 70 years--how does one go about priortizing the targets for activism?

3. The Supreme Court's decision to throw out campaign finance restrictions on corporations has to be one of the most anti-democratic rulings in years. The notion that absolute limits on corporate contributions to campaigns violate the free speech provisions of the constitution is nonsensical. The whole point of the constitution and the bill of rights was to establish, protect and extend democracy. The court's use of the free speech principle to advance anti-democratic practices is a clear and present danger. The effects of this ruling will increase individual feelings of powerlessness and apathy, but by how much?

4. People I talk to are devastated by the Republican victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday. They want to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The how of it all isn't obvious, but some of the factors are clear. Thought the turnout was high for a special election, the fact is that many Obama voters, mobilized and enthusiastic just 13 months earlier, sat out the election (see a good analysis here). I suspect that the Right saw an opportunity to "steal" a Senate seat a month before Democrats recognized the seat was at risk. It seems likely that many of the people who voted for Brown have had little or no effect on previous statewide elections. But the election gave them an opportunity to convert their sideline cynicism into an angry and passionate rejection of the liberals and Democrats they have learned, these past 10 or 20 or 40 years, to fear. In an environment where Obama voters have learned to question their earlier passion, the quick special election created a huge opening for a loud "no". How much of this is because of what the Obama administration failed to accomplish in its first year?

5. How much of the Left's frustration with current politics are connected to unrealistic expectations for change? How much progressive change can be achieved without a larger and more vibrant Left? Where does political optimism and passion come from?

Peace and Justice the Hard Way Is the Only Way

2010-01-19T21:45:00.006-05:00

The Right will fervently oppose even the smallest changes

There is this: that the Right opposes virtually every single small move to build a more democratic and humane future. This strategy is based on the understanding that each success, however small, makes the pressure for the succeeding step harder to resist. That is why the Right opposes the efforts of even the smallest community to sanctify gay marriage; that is why the Right mobilizes to stop every initiative aimed at legalizing private marijuana use even to relieve suffering; and that it is why it is not OK to pass even the most limited of health reform measures. And as long as the Right understands this, and proceeds accordingly, the Left must come to understand the same thing--that incremental change is the way most change happens in this country, slowly, slowly and arduously. The Left must make that understanding a strategic cornerstone.

King's Day...

2010-01-18T11:06:00.002-05:00

and other things
on my mind

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, while I consider Dr. King the most effective, progressive leader of my lifetime, my thoughts are only briefly on him, focused instead on a radio show that I’m going to guest on in Chicago on Saturday, the 23rd. Host Michael James, whose business card identifies him as an activist and an entrepreneur, is a former SDS member and co-owner, with Katie Hogan, of Rogers Park’s legendary Heartland Café. It’s worth noting, as an aside here, that SDS was not only basically correct in its political analysis and righteous in its fury, but also entrepreneurial to the core. There was not a soul running or sympathizing with SDS who was not themselves capable of falling out of line at any given moment.

Anyway, Michael wants a little summary of what I want to talk about. He will, he says, do his homework on whatever subject I choose. But that won’t be necessary. There’s nothing I want to talk about that he hasn’t thought about himself. There’s a high probability that we will talk about Chicago’s 1983 mayoral race, because the show originates at the Heartland Café on the city’s Northside, and because I am Bernie Epton’s son and because there is always more to say about that election and the people who made it what it was..

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to outline some other things to talk about. Here’s a list:

1. Politically, the real dangers of this moment are more compelling, lethal and closer to overwhelming, than were IMO the challenges of any other decade of my adult life.

2. Poverty and the failure of democratic institutions, like the public schools and mass transit, affect a larger number of people more severely than ever before.

3. Climate change, militarized agendas, market health care and the socialized liabilities of private capital are poised to sicken, maim, wound and kill more people in a single century than the total sickened and killed by similar means in the entire history of the world.

4. Inevitably, consider also the accuracy of the previous statements.

5. The people alive now, especially people under, say, forty years old, can not only stop the looming catastrophe, they can be the force that ushers in a global Golden Age.

6. What is there that we can offer from the perspective of those of us who once believed we would be the agents of some sort of similarly creative and humane epoch?

Also, time permitting, what might we say about the collapse of mainstream journalism enterprises, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of life?

From 1993 to very nearly the last day of 1999, Marrianne McMullen and I ran the Dayton Voice, aka Impact Weekly. In combining so much life and so much love, at least for me, the mini-decade of my life largely defined by my association with the Voice and my colleagues there and the whole city of Dayton, OH stands out in memory as seven fruitful and creative and satisfying years.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Voice would run a graphic image of King on the front page and excerpt one of his speeches. Here’s a brief quote from one of those speeches:

“It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must admit that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon On Peace”
Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, December 1967

The Washington Post's Bad Example

2010-01-16T16:04:00.004-05:00

Time to cover real news

Here's my 26th letter to the Washington Post over the last two and a half years (one published to date):

Editor,

The January 8 Post had no fewer than four opinion pieces and three news stories about intelligence failures related to the Christmas Day "underwear bomber, " who manages to somehow continue to terrorize journalists and politicians despite the fact that he actually failed to ignite his bomb, as did shoe bomber before him. That incident was also the occasion for much political handwringing about security failures and the need for reform. But the fact is, the US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on homeland security since 9/11. Though it is impossible to determine precisely the exact level of security necessary (and the commensurately appropriate expenditure), it seems likely that what has been both spent and reformed to date has something to do with the fact that there has been no successful attack on US soil by a foreign terrorist since 9/11.

Moreover, it is very likely that Osama bin Laden is as perplexed at the failure of his own operatives as we appear to be perplexed by the failure of ours, despite the fact that human beings working under extreme conditions in complex operations likely fail more often than they succeed. Simply put, to err is human.

In the meantime, we have spent much smaller sums to expand health coverage that might have saved thousands of actual American lives. And on January 8, the Post ran one story on a scientific study focussing on the environmental harms created by the common practice of coal mining by mountaintop removal ("Scientists in mining study ask for action"). There is nothing theoretical about the illnesses, deaths and environmental degradation that arise from that method of extraction. Would it be asking too much of the Post's editors that they back off from the hysteria about terrorism and that they assign and encourage reporters and columnists to follow up on the very real consequences of mountaintop removal?

Jeff Epton
807 Taylor St., NE
Washington, DC 20017

War As Profit Opportunity

2010-01-13T08:15:00.004-05:00

Why we need a military draft, why we won't get one

On Monday, Fresh Air host Terry Gross introduced an interview (on-line here) about civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan by quoting a severely injured contractor who said, "It's almost like we are an invisible, discardable army."

This particular contractor got both legs blown off by a roadside bomb and subsequently discovered that he was not entitled to any sort of federal compensation for his loss or for his health care. He had to fight his private insurance company to get a shot at prosthetic legs. I didn't hear all of the interview with reporter T. Christian Miller, so I don't know if the conversation pursued the deeper point that while the US maintains both an all-volunteer army and a private mercenary army, war becomes a profit opportunity that is largely shielded from effective political opposition.

Here we are, involved in two of the longest wars in American history, at a cost to the federal government of over one trillion dollars and climbing, with minimal effective public and Congressional opposition to those wars. The Vietnam War, in its many phases--military advisers and trainers, CIA mercenary armies, the mobilization of a fighting force over 600,000 strong, and secret bombings and incursions in Cambodia and Laos--was longer and killed far more American soldiers than have been killed to date in Iraq and Afghanistan (more information here and here). The Vietnam War also killed more civilians than the current wars have killed so far, but the difference is not worth applauding.

But here's the thing: the Vietnam War was pursued by two presidents in the face of relentlessly increasing public opposition. Though that opposition did not end the war in a timely way, say, 1969 or '70, rather than 1975, active resistance and public disapproval forced both Presidents Johnson and Nixon to conduct portions of the war in secrecy and otherwise compromise war aims. Arguably, public and Congressional opposition is also forcing compromise on President Obama, but it seems more likely that weapons manufacturers and military contractors are currently forcing political compromises that will prolong those wars.

Indeed, the influence of the military-industrial complex might right now be at an all-time high, at least in proportion to the influence of the public and anti-war organizations. In each of the six complete election cycles since 1998, the contributions of corporations in the war business have climbed 10 to 20 percent, with the exception of the 2008 cycle when the increase was
more than 20 percent (go here to explore the ugly truth, note that the 2010 cycle promises to break all previous records). In a 1997 article, "Guns r' Us" in In These Times, a magazine I worked at for two years, writer Martha Honey recounts the many ways that weapons manufacturers seek to increase markets for their products. Ten+ years later, the situation is worse.

Of course, anti-war opposition has limited some of the options of those who would rather pursue the current wars more vigorously. But the practices of maintaining an all-volunteer army, and employing contractors to reduce the direct cost of war, have obvious roots in the lessons that political, military and corporate chiefs learned from the civil unrest and mass opposition that they confronted during the Vietnam War.

First, make sure that large numbers of people do not serve in the front-lines in a manner that is obviously against their will. This lesson was initially applied with the end of active conscription in December 1972. To ensure an adequate supply of volunteers, regular pay for members of the armed forces was increased significantly in 1971. By itself, the pay increase would not have been sufficient, but by the mid-'70s, the economy began to stagnate and the real value of workers pay began to drop; to drop far enough, in fact, that many women not in the workforce at the time, began to work in order to maintain household income. Thus began a cascade of economic changes (including relative reductions in unemployment compensation, financial aid for higher education, cuts in welfare payments and childcare) that has often made enlistment in the all-volunteer army an economically coerced decision. This state of affairs has made it much more difficult for many working people to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the use of private companies providing personnel for security and other non-military services (like transport, food prep and garbage services) has helped to reduce war visibility and exported some of the costs of the war onto the shoulders of those least able to afford it and powerless to do much about it. These are the individuals who work under contract with the Blackwaters and Brown & Roots who pull down tens of millions of dollars annually from the Pentagon. These individuals, like the man quoted at the beginning of Fresh Air, are among those coerced by economic conditions at home to serve in harm's way abroad. And they do so, largely at their own risk.

I started at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1965. The spring before I got to Ann Arbor, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first teach-in against the war. At the time, there was still very little public opposition to the war, and little need for the military to resort to an active draft to maintain the then relatively low force levels in Vietnam. But Ann Arbor and the U of M were a center of anti-war fever and it didn't take very long for me to succumb to the virus. In point of fact, focused as I was on what could be learned outside of class, I quickly lost interest in maintaining my student status. I opposed the war and, soon after, began active opposition to the draft.

Even then it was obvious that some companies would profit from the war. President Eisenhower, soon to leave office, had given a speech in 1961 warning the country of the existence of a "military industrial complex" with interests separate from a broader national interest. And, as the Vietnam War heated up and middle-class students enrolled at colleges and universities escaped service, it also became obvious that the brunt of war fighting and dying was falling largely on minorities and the white working class. In that context, maintaining a student deferment became a moral conundrum that troubled many young men who had such deferments, and troubled many working people who saw family members fighting and dying in Vietnam while others went to college.

The obvious solution to those who would prefer to fight wars less encumbered by controversy would be to reduce the flash points, and nothing flashes quite like being forced to leave home to fight and die. That is why there will be no draft. And the absence of a draft is also one of the reasons why obvious elements of economic justice, like a reasonable minimum wage, an adequate supply of affordable housing, and universal health care are not a part of this democracy.

Future Calendar

2010-01-11T05:10:00.004-05:00

Next year, it says, we get much stronger

On this date in 1890, a woman assassinated Solotouchin, chief of the Moscow secret police (there are no web references to this guy that I can find, though there are references to the use, by Chris Brown, of the phrase 'solo touchin'). Also, 77 years ago today, 16 peasants and workers were murdered in Spain by the Guardia Civil. That event, my 2010 organizer tells me, is known as the Massacre of Casa Viljas. Just 12 years ago, 25,000 people occupied the construction site of a dam being built on the Narmada River. The proposed dam was part of a series of projects on the river that would wipe out the homes and livelihoods of millions. A people's organization, Narmada Bachao Andolan, organized opposition to the projects. At least three major literary figures were born on this day, as well: Eugenio Maria de Hostos, a philosopher, novelist and true citizen of the Americas (read about him here and here) in 1839, American author William James in 1842, and Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, in 1903.

I learned all these things from, variously, my Half Price Books 2010 calendar, the Peace Buttons on-line calendar, and, as noted, from my 2010 organizer, produced by the Slingshot Collective. I consider such little bits of historical data helpful. The political stuff provides a consistent reminder that people everywhere refuse to suffer indignity and injustice quietly, that the instinct to build community based on humane vision and opposition to authoritarianism is actually written into human DNA. And, though the births and deaths of revered historical figures often come to be celebrated at the expense of the memories of the mass of individuals who built the cultures from which individual achievement sprang, it is nice to be reminded that artistic and creative genius does exist, even if I am also reminded, in the process, that such genius does not dwell in me.

In these calendars there is a sort of half-baked genius. The calendars vaguely suggest stories. But they don't do any of the work of detailing specific stories. To accumulate detail we have to consult other sources, historians, teachers, books, songs, friends, imagination. In his book, 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed To Know, Mickey Z appears to have taken some left political calendar of some kind and lavished it with research and imagination. This he does, I am certain, because he believes that what each of us contributes toward progressive change is more important than we individually can ever imagine. To that effect, Mickey Z quotes Howard Zinn:

"[Revolution is] an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society."

I'm pretty sure that Mickey's z is a self-chosen last name, with plenty of possible references. Z standing alone, for instance, might suggest revolutionary resistance, as it does in the Costa-Gavras movie "Z." Or it might be that Mickey is simply announcing his own subversive intentions, identifying himself and others as a "zigzagger," the human embodiments of Zinn's revolutionary waves. Or, I suppose, it could be that Mickey's last name starts with z, is hard to spell and harder to pronounce. No matter. His book is an act of radical imagination.

Sitting next to "50 Revolutions" on our pile of bathroom books is The Future Dictionary of America(FDA). Let me say, as a person once convicted of malicious destruction primarily on the testimony of a self-described "unemployed lexicographer," that as dictionaries go, FDA is probably on the unreliable end of the spectrum. But FDA is also an act of radical imagination. Edited by a quartet of young (heartbreaking) geniuses, it includes numerous entries that try to imagination a richer, more humane future. One entry written by revered graphic novelist Art Spiegelman reads:

"Geneva Convention [jen-ee'-vah kon-ven'-shun] n. a large annual Spring gathering of cartoonists that takes place in Geneva, Switzerland...The highlight of this convocation is a drawing contest [in which] cartoonists compete to best capture [an] audience's shifting expressions of shock, awe, disgust, prurience, anger and anguish[in reaction to] pornographic video footage of early 21st century American soldiers performing atrocities on Moslem civilians..."

Well, OK, that definition is more of an inspired critique than a vision of a benign future, but I personally see the image of a bunch of cartoonists sitting in judgement of war crime as a bit of alternative futuring. And though FDA has far more critical and satirical definitions of the tired and corrupt normal, there are many definitions of a future world that are as inviting as a warm featherbed in winter.

But what I really want here is this, a calendar based on the good real people aspire to accomplish within the span of their own lives, a calendar that takes such personal visions and reports all the good things that will happen in the future. Like, say, the entry for January 11, 2034: writer Sylvia Waters transmits the completed manuscript of her biography of the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to her publisher.

And I know this happens how? I know this happens because SW told me that is her deadline for finishing the book. And, as we all know, individual aspirations are the tributaries of the rivers that flow to the oceans where the tidal waves of change are generated. Frankly, though I will be 88 by the time the book is finally available to me, I can hardly wait to read it. Further, if there are readers out there who aspire, openly or secretly, to move a certain change by a particular date, please share your dream with me, if you would. Personally, I feel a strong need to see visions, to feed on the nutritional richness of such a future calendar.

The Great Terrorism Scam

2010-01-05T06:20:00.006-05:00

The Century's Biggest Boondoggle

On any given day, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack on the United States in the 21st century are vanishingly small, say, less than one chance out of 35 billion. Lower than that, actually, unless, you are living on a military base in Texas, which does get attacked (in the 21st century) about one day every 3,500 days, or so. But on a really bad day--September 11, 2001 comes to mind--your chances of being killed go up to something less than one in 100,000. There are plenty of likelier ways for each of us to die.

Nevertheless, we are fighting a War on Terror that has to qualify as one of the biggest wastes of national treasure and brainpower and collective energy in our history. We kill about 100 of our own with our cars and trucks every single day (about 37,000 deaths per year). A death toll that we tolerate and, even, encourage. After all, we encourage driving, spending tens of billions of state and federal dollars annually to repair and expand our system of streets, roads, highways and bridges. Daily risk of dying in a driving accident: still pretty low at less than one chance in 3 billion, though higher, of course, if you are actually out driving.

One of my favorite books is Jeffrey Reiman's The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice, now out in its eighth edition. In my experience, Reiman improves and updates the book with every new edition, but I am looking now at chapter two from the sixth edition, "A Crime by Any Other Name...". The chapter includes subheads like "Work may be dangerous to your health," "Health care may be dangerous to your health," "Waging chemical warfare against America," and "Poverty kills." As you might guess, in this chapter Reiman demonstrates his thesis that our criminal justice system goes to great expense to "punish" criminal harms while national policy essentially overlooks far greater risks to individuals that arise from poverty and from routine occupational, medical and environmental practices.

Using data from 1997, Reiman points out that the FBI's "crime clock" showed a murder happening once every 29 minutes. A similar "clock ticks for half of the population that is in the labor force--this clock would show an occupational death about every 17 minutes! In other words, in about the time it takes for two murders on the crime clock, three workers have died just from trying to make a living." He goes on:

"To say that some of these workers died from accidents due to their own carelessness is about as helpful as saying that some of those who died at the hands of murderers asked for it. It overlooks the fact that when workers are careless, it is not because they love to live dangerously."

Workers, Reiman says, have quotas to meet that they do not set, workplaces to work in that they did not design with an eye to their own safety, equipment that they did not purchase themselves and may not be empowered to maintain. The point, updated to 2010, when far fewer dangerous jobs exist because they have been moved to China or elsewhere, is that far more Americans die each year from workplace accidents and work-related illnesses than will die from terrorist attacks in the next decade, or, even, during the remainder of this century. Yet we spend billions more every year on protecting ourselves against attacks that rarely happen (and when they do, happen with consequences that don't compare to other more regular events) than we spend on improving workplace safety and protecting workers against occupational illness.

In his section on health care, Reiman leads off with a quote from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, released more than 35 years ago: "A recent study of emergency medical care found the quality, number, and distribution of ambulances and other emergency services severely deficient, and estimated that as many as 20,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year as a result of improper emergency care." Reiman demonstrates that little has changed since the report was released. Thousands of Americans still die from poor, inadequate and improper emergency care, while the number of deaths from terrorist attacks on American soil is, in most years, zero. And tens of thousands die annually in nonemergency situations from unnecessary, inadequate, improper and/or unavailable health care and from medical mistakes (malpractice). Yet we have spent perhaps a trillion dollars this decade on homeland security and "anti-terrorist" activities, while debating the appropriateness of improvements in national healthcare that would cost less and save and prolong and improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Washington National airport recently closed down for an hour in the middle of the day after someone entered a high security area by walking through an exit passage. Though the individual who did so was never found, thousands of airline customers waited in security lines and at gates while police combed the airport. That single incident may have cost several million dollars in lost productivity and further delays at other airports.

After a passenger on a Detroit-bound international flight was overpowered with a faulty bomb he had snuck onto the plane in his underwear, President Obama declared that the intelligence failures which permitted the man to fly in the first place would "not be tolerated." This is an interesting phrase.

Googling "will not be tolerated" reveals a vast range of things that someone somewhere stands ready to oppose. The list of intolerable things includes indiscipline in political parties, bleaching of hair and skin, homosexuality, terrorism, harassment of commuters, foul language, slandering the dead, foreign terrorists, mistreatment of fellow cannabis users, intolerance and something called "swine flu supplement fraud" to name just a few. Most of these things happen anyway, which suggests that nothing fails like a firm commitment to keep people from doing very human things, like failing to widely share information about suspected terrorists.

It would be far more helpful if President Obama were to say something like "hysteria about terrorism will not be tolerated," though it's quite clear that there is little that can be done to prevent that kind of hysteria, other than, perhaps, a return to form by the man once promoted as No-drama Obama. The truth is, there probably aren't very many people in the world, al Qaeda members, or otherwise, who are both capable of and willing to pull off a terrorist attack on American soil.

Sure there are regular suicide bombings in countries struggling with open conflict, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, to name three. But these are locations where people have been brutalized by acts of war and a variety of other assaults. They are also places where the line between combatants and noncombatants has been all but erased, and the possibility for vengeance, real or imagined, is high. But to travel to the US from one's homeland, or to immigrate here and subsequently evolve the mindset that might create a terrorist substantially reduces the number of possible attackers. Estimates available on the web puts the number of possible attackers somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand (see Ken Silverstein's 2006 piece, "The Al Qaeda Clubhouse: Members lacking" in Harper's Magazine here).

Further, you can bet that terrorist leaders, like Osama bin Laden "will not tolerate" failure by terrorist conspirators. That fact suggests that terrorists, like CIA agents and airport security personnel, fail frequently. So, yes, there will be more attacks (and many more failed attacks), but most of us, almost all of us, in fact, will survive. We may wait untold hours with our shoes and belts off, holding up our pants, waiting to be screened, and pay more to fly because somebody has to pay for the delays and the extra personnel, but we will survive. Meanwhile, people in power must want it to be this way, because they know, like we know, that lack of affordable healthcare and unsafe employment and climate change will kill (and sicken) more of us than terrorists ever will.

Confession

2009-12-26T16:04:00.005-05:00

Once, when Nate and I were discussing the way I parented him, he said that he always thought of me as too self-centered to be a really good father. He seemed to think that often when I was around the house, around him, I wasn't really present. Except, maybe to get angry with him when he distracted me from the things I was focussed on.

I defended myself. I don't remember exactly what I said. Something about how much I thought about him all the time. I tried to make it sound like the way I thought about him was on an emotional level equal in some way to the power of my perceived absence. I don't think he bought it, but he had the mature grace to let me pretend that he was persuaded.

But--and this is why I'm actually blogging on the day after Christmas--Nate was right. I was quite self-centered (still am, I guess) and I wanted to get it written down here so that I couldn't take it back.

Still, let me try to extract something of value from this. Three things, really. I'm proud of Nate, of the adult he has become. I hope Nate knows that he is right in his understanding of how much more I could have done for him and with him. And, I hope all of us understand that every day is a chance to do better.

The Guaranteed Upside of Down

2009-12-25T10:38:00.001-05:00

Closing one’s eyes,
a key to revelations,
shocking moments,
explosions

Rest, as well,
but in this case,
facing mid-winter
sun

Closing one’s eyes,
key to the déjà vu
experience of this
place

And to the never
before seen
experience of this
place

Closing one’s eyes,
ranging to remote
and to exotica and to
right here, right now

If you can withstand
the vibe, rhythm, shake,
rattle, roll, bangin’,
clangin’ and sweet singin’
of right here, right now

Long enough to be deep
in the remote, in the erotica
of this place, this right here,
right now

Bad Health Care Bill Is Better Than None

2009-12-23T09:49:00.007-05:00

The hard road to a more perfect democracy

The health care bill that hopefully will pass in the Senate on Christmas Eve isn't final. The finalized legislation will be negotiated between House and Senate conferees early next year. But it seems safe at this point to make a few observations about what the Health Care Reform struggle 2009-2010 will do or has done.

• It has helped clarify just how dysfunctional Congress is (see Ruth Marcus' "The next decade from hell?" Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Richard Cohen's "An imperfect ray of hope," Washington Post, Dec. 22 here).

• It exposed some members of the Senate, like Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) or Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as particularly repellant (see Michael Gerson's "For sale: One senator (D-Neb.). No principles, low price." Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Eugene Robinson's "Health-care hardball," Washington Post,Dec. 18 here).

• It created opportunity for Republican members of the Senate to raise the bar for hypocrisy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and his caucus did everything they could to keep health care reform in any form from passing, including forcing Democrats to get 92 year-old Sen. Byrd (D-W Va.) to haul himself and his wheelchair to the Senate for roll call votes three times in the last week. They relentlessly criticized every compromise Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brokered in an effort to get something passed. Hearing Sen. Lindsay Graham (D-SC) on NPR denounce the admittedly repugnant deal with Ben Nelson, as though Graham was a disappointed advocate for a better bill, seemed somewhat like we had all fallen down a large rabbit hole. Other Republicans seemed to be wishing for fate in the form of, say, a sudden illness that would prevent Democrats from rounding up 60 votes. It boggles the mind that Republicans have seemingly decided their obstructionist behavior and petty cruelties improve their chances of success in the 2010 mid-term elections.

• It will result in a bill that will dismay virtually every Democratic voter (see Harold Meyerson's "For unions, a messy bargain," Washington Post, Dec. 23, here), but it is a start; that fact will prove to be more important than many disappointed advocates are likely to believe (see Eugene Robinson's "Carpe health reform," Washington Post, Dec. 22, here or Henry J. Aaron's "Health-reform legislation would accomplish more than critics admit," Washington Post, Dec. 18, here).

• It confirmed that there is a senator for the rest of us. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont worked diligently to make a bad bill as promising as possible (see Katrina Vanden Heuvel's post on The Nation's website, Dec. 22, here).

It seems to be a general perception that if the US electorate were as sophisticated as the Western European demos, we would have a democracy that provided national healthcare, assumed international leadership on global warming and invaded fewer foreign countries, but that's probably not a helpful comparison. We should measure our democracy by the effort we put in to improving it, by the quality of our encounters with political opponents, and by the accumulated progress we make. As Eugene Robinson pointed out in "Carpe health reform," the US may continue for some time to come to use wealth and work as a means to ration health care, but with President Obama's signing of the health care reform bill early next year, we will, for the first time, "enshrine the principle that all Americans deserve access to medical care regardless of their ability to pay." We should celebrate that achievement while we are also working on the peace dividend, affordable housing, quality public education. and clean air and water.

Snowboarding in DC

2009-12-22T05:15:00.006-05:00

Does climate change come with that?

DC's 14-inch Saturday snowstorm is history. And, in fact, four days later the snow is more than half gone. But it will live on in local lore--probably forever. It will certainly live on in Brendan's memory. He managed to snowboard three days in a row. He never did that in Chicago, which gets far more snow than DC residents could tolerate, because there are no boardable hills in Chicago.

All three days in DC, some combination of Brendan, Marrianne and I slogged half a mile through drifts and wound up at a hill. A similar slog to a hill in Chicago would probably end up somewhere in Wisconsin; though there is an artificial sledding hill on the lakefront just north of McCormick Place. Marrianne and Brendan did have to journey from there one time after the car battery died. They walked, broke fresh trail through snowdrifts, took bus and train, and made it home. They arrived pretty bedraggled. Based on that experience (and other facts known to me) I don't think any of us would survive a winter hike to Wisconsin.

Considering that snowboarding only developed as a sport in the last 20 years or so, and that it has been pretty much confined to places that actually have winter, Brendan might be the first person ever to snowboard in DC on three consecutive days. Though I put in good effort crafting the snowboard run, I didn't ride it.

Still, it was good winter sport for me, too. And, as any long-time Midwesterner could testify, winter weather sometimes presents painful challenges, but vigorous outdoor play in winter is both exhilarating and the stuff of fond memory. Brendan has some such memories from living in Chicago for eight winters, but now he will have a rare thing, a DC winter weather memory.

Anyway, I started wondering whether global warming would jeopardize our collective chances for winter experiences in the future that subsequently become fond memories. So, though you cannot google "will global warming jeopardize our collective chances for winter experiences in the future that subsequently become fond memories," I did a little checking up and, I'm happy to report that with global warming we will still have winters. And, more good news, our winters might be milder, but have worse storms. Doesn't that sound nice?

Of course, there's the usual bad news; we'll be breathing increasingly toxic mixes of air (more carbon dioxide, more methane, less oxygen), but maybe we'll have more hallucinations, too. You have to admit that would be a sort of silver-lining. Regardless, here is a selection of the "key messages" extracted from something called "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" (you can find the paper posted on Scribd):

• Projections of future precipitation generally indicate that northern areas will become wetter, and southern areas, particularly in the West, will become drier.
• The amount of rain falling in the heaviest downpours has increased approximately 20 percent on average in the past century, and this trend is very likely to continue, with the largest increases in the wettest places.
• Many types of extreme weather events, such as heat waves and regional droughts, have become more frequent and intense during the past 40 to 50 years.
• Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

There are other messages we're getting about global warming, as well. These messages range widely, but we can ignore, for now, the ones about conspiracies of climate change scientists, and technology-will-fix-it, and twenty-years-ago-they-were-predicting-global-winter. Let's instead focus only on the notion that what happened at Copenhagen wasn't good enough. I know progressives are distressed that Obama has failed to push the envelope in so many ways. Banks and brokers still seem to be getting away with murder or, at least, most of the cash; there won't be another stimulus that focuses more closely on working people; and there won't be universal payer, or, even, a public option.

But Obama didn't keep the world from making good progress toward reducing carbon emissions, that clearly wasn't happening; he got to Copenhagen late in the process and talked to China, India and Brasil. That engagement should seem to everyone like a huge change in the US attitude toward the rest of the world. All by itself that change should be more than enough to keep everyone talking. Continued discussion means hope, hope that there really will be a climate change treaty that will reduce and reverse the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the next year or two. If that does happen, it won't be Obama who stands in the way of treaty ratification by the US Senate, it will be Republicans. If people really want to do something about climate change, then they ought to be working to elect Democrats and keep them focused on important things. Blaming Obama for lack of progress on all the things we want to change won't cut it.

Copenhagen turns out to be just one more stop on the way to making something earth-shaking happen. That's what it will take to reduce human contributions to global warming. But that's what it should take to save the planet--something earthshaking.

American Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

2009-12-14T08:51:00.004-05:00

Jews are not the tail wagging the dog of American policy

"Support for Israel is another part of this worldview," writes Kevin Phillips. "In mid-2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, another survey taken for the Pew Center found 63 percent of white evangelical Protestants calling the state of Israel a fulfillment of the biblical policy of the second coming of Jesus, whereas only 21 percent of mainline Protestants did so. (pg. 364, Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century)"

Henry Herskovitz, a long-time friend from whom I am now estranged, leads a Saturday morning vigil at Temple Beth Israel in Ann Arbor, Mi., protesting Jewish support for Israel's theocratic state and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Years ago, Henry came to the conclusion that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was unjust and largely the result of scheming and manipulation by Jewish neo-cons in the Bush administration and Jewish organizations like AIPAC (the American-Israel Political Action Committee). Jewish communities in the United States were further implicated, in Henry's estimation, by the millions of dollars in annual aid to Israel raised by Jewish organizations around the country. Further, Henry saw analogies to the now defunct South African system of apartheid in Israel's denial of certain rights and privileges to its Arab citizens and its confinement of Palestinians behind roadblocks, checkpoints and walls. American Jews, Henry noted, were a significant presence in the American domestic opposition to apartheid. Why, Henry wondered were American Jews so absent from public opposition to the oppression of Palestinians?

After trips to Iraq and to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, Henry returned to the U.S. with photographs, stories and a fervent desire to speak to Jewish congregations about the injustices visited on Palestinians by the state of Israel, injustices occurring, at the very least, with the silent acquiescence of American Jews. His overtures to three Ann Arbor temples and synagogues were rebuffed, sometimes rudely, by the rabbis who maintained absolute control over access to their congregations. So Henry, supported by a few other reliable vigilers, began his Saturday morning silent protest (with signs), a protest that continues some four years later.

The vigil has provoked much debate in Ann Arbor. The City Council has condemned the vigils as an affront to religious freedom and Henry has found himself much reviled in a variety of forums, including the pages of the Ann Arbor News (RIP). Powerful disagreements over the vigil tactic and message have also divided the sizable peace community in town. From time to time, Henry and his allies extend the protests to major fundraising events within the Jewish community and to public events focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At every opportunity, Henry calls on high-profile visitors to Ann Arbor who support, or claim to support, Palestinian self-determination to express their support for a one-state solution in Palestine and their opposition to a Jewish theocratic state.

Henry seems to believe that his tactics work. Or, at the very least, believes that the dire state of the Palestinian people justifies his activism, even if he, himself, is demonized and neither he nor his colleagues seem able to engage local Jewish congregations in dialogue.

It seems to me that the basic problem with Henry's strategy is the assumption that without Jewish neo-cons and Jewish organizational support there would have been no invasion of Iraq and no significant and continuing American political support for Israel. But self-identified Jews make up only one percent of the population of the United States, while the evangelical Protestants cited in the Kevin Phillips quote that leads off this post make up as much as a third of the population--fifty times the Jewish population of the country. It may be an unhappy irony that American Christian fundamentalists, long indifferent to or unhappy with the presence of Jews in American society, are enthusiastic supporters of Jewish rule in Palestine, but only in places like Ann Arbor, where fundamentalists are less evident than Jews, could it look to an observer as though Jews are the whole problem.

Make no mistake, the attitudes of a sizable number of American Jews are an obstacle to a workable Middle East peace. And American military support for Israel has helped to build a garrison state in Israel that would have otherwise been bankrupted by its own military spending. That same support has allowed Israel to divert funding from other domestic needs to the construction, in violation of international law, of housing and settlements on Palestinian territory. The settlements, in turn, have become both the passion of increasingly fundamentalist Jews who see all of biblical Israel as territory promised to the Jews by God, and the anguish of Palestinians who see them as an obstacle to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

It is a further irony that the polarization in Ann Arbor has come to resemble the deadlock in Palestine. But both situations seem a symptom of a larger problem in the politics of the US. Our inability to move toward reasonable and just outcomes in virtually all policy areas, health care, climate change, quality public education, market regulation, reliable public transit and reduced dependence on fossil fuels to name just a few, seems endemic. And ultimately traceable to the politically expedient marriage of religious fundamentalism and corporate interests. When oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Big Pharma, insurance interests, hospital corporations and the Southern Baptist Convention find themselves working together against broader social interests, we are all in trouble.

Under the circumstances, doing nothing seems profoundly dysfunctional. Doing something, even vigiling at a single Jewish temple in Ann Arbor must seem better than acquiescence. Certainly, relying on a Democratic president and a Democratic congress seems risky. So far, we have a possible shot at health care reform without a public option, a possible withdrawal from Afghanistan after a Bush-like surge, a near-trillion dollar bailout of unregulated banks, and a continuing and appallingly large military budget. But I continue to believe that in the Obama administration, at least, there is hope. Activism aimed at being heard, at repeating essential truths, at calling for less militarism and more justice, and at insisting on dialogue, is essential. I believe that through such activism we can reach this administration and slowly change policy. But activism that polarizes communities and eliminates any chance for dialogue is hopeless, and part of the problem. It is not enough to speak out. The will to dialogue must be present and powerful.

Water Sport

2009-12-11T08:05:00.001-05:00

With every thing to lose,
we should be sure to test
all prescriptions we endorse.
So, run ourselves a nice, warm bath,

the sort where we linger and lounge
until the water cools. Step in,
sit down, ease back, ears underwater
listening to our life pulsing, waves rolling in.

Nice, warm, wet to sopping washcloth
over nose and mouth, inhale, exhale,
head further back, inhale, water trickles in,
breathing harder now, fighting panic, inhaling,

fighting to breathe, sitting up abruptly,
breathe hard, breathe grateful, repeat,
head back, nice, warm, wet to sopping washcloth,
say “ve vant names, giff us names, you must

tell us of ze evil plots against us,”
inhale through water invading nose,
mouth, lungs, fight rising panic, fight to breathe,
to breathe, to breathe and up. Breathing gratefully deeply.

Now chuckle audibly and say this:
The United States of America does not torture and
repeat nice, warm, wet to sopping washcloth over
nose and mouth, fight to breathe, feel the anger and

fear invading nose, mouth, lungs and panic,
panic, panic. Think we 300 million witnesses
to trauma, we Chuck and Larry, Carlos and Jamal,
Sandra and Casandra, we Amina and Judith,
we who stood by, silent witnesses to torture.
:

Flowing to the Sea

2009-12-06T08:46:00.010-05:00

At an address slid gracefully from memory,
the welcoming light, a tiny bulb nestled in
a frosted glass bowl, a glowing egg cradled
in a translucent hand, filtered upward
through a black, steel disc
poked about with tiny holes,
slouching like some flattened hat.
The distant ceiling, in focus, then out,
circled lazily, the arrangement of lights
a wheeling constellation across a firmament
hovering above the wayfarer moving on
to a portal opening on a lowering sky
dripping rain backlit by stars
speaking radiantly through a skylight
recently installed for the person
long forgotten, size, face and gender
unrecalled, oblivious to me passing by
to further spaces, growing in simplicity,
caressed by warm nocturnals, gentle as rose petals,
where I stood in some flowing garment
soon shed for nakedness on the silent sand,
toes drinking the lap of the primordial sea,
awaiting what will come.