Big Lies

"Beware the big lie!” the 1951 American propaganda film of the same name warns us. “Beware the dove that goes BOOM!" We have seen a lot of big lies lately from people in high places who have looked into the collective face of America and told bald-faced lies so often and so insistently that you think they must be telling the truth.

• Calling himself the most “the most tested athlete on the planet,” Lance Armstrong denied for years that he took performance-enhancing drugs. Last month he answered “yes” to every single question Oprah Winfrey asked him about his drug use.

• For decades Cardinal Roger Mahoney repeatedly denied that priests in his Los Angeles archdiocese abused young people. Last week the court-ordered release of 12,000 pages of church records documented repeated abuse, often by serial violators and always denied by the church.

• Yesterday Essie Mae Washington-Williams died. She was 87 and the daughter of Strom Thurmond, who 65 years ago bolted the Democratic convention and ran for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket, winning four states. Carrie Butler, Washington-Williams’ mother, died that year at 38. She had been a teenaged Black maid in Thurmond’s house when he impregnated her. “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” Thurmond said in a campaign stump speech, “that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Clarence Speaks

Yesterday Associate Justice Clarence Thomas spoke publicly from the bench for the first time since Feb. 22, 2006. According to the Supreme Court’s official transcript, Thomas broke his almost-seven-year silence with the words, “Well – he did not —.” One Court analyst called those four words “perhaps the most important speech in Thomas’ 21-year career on the bench” – although no one in the courtroom seems to have any idea what the enigmatic jurist actually meant. Professor Emily I. Dunno, who teaches linguistics and constitutional law at Southern Indiana Law School, pointed to the dashes for insight into his potential meaning. “Half as many dashes as words,” said Dr. Dunno. “That’s a lot of dashes.”

There are various explanations for Thomas’ taciturnity. He has written that he is self-conscious of his rural southern accent, and at other times has said he comes to listen not to talk, and that his verbose colleagues make it hard to join the discussion. My own thought is that asking questions will only muddy the thoughts in Thomas’ rigidly made-up mind.

It hardly seems more than two decades since the Bush administration cynically pushed through a man, who openly resented the idea of affirmative action, to replace Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights titan who insisted on the justice of such action to confront three centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas was confirmed 52-48, the smallest margin in over a century, and his subsequent silence has obscured the extremity of his opinions on an increasingly right-wing Court.

And the Democrats?

What are their ideas for the country’s future? Obama has learned that much of governing requires pragmatic deal making for marginal progress. But that is not all of governing, and I believe the Democrats need to renew the vision of a diverse, just and vibrant America that excited the electorate in 2008 and was noticeably subdued last fall. For me, the big issues we face are:

1. The growing disparities between rich and poor.
2. The devastation of our environment.
3. The militarization of everything – from China’s saber rattling to Iran’s nuclear threat to ivory poaching in Africa.

These are not unrelated. The huge gaps between rich and poor, both within America and around the world, are creating expanding pockets of misery and despair. These mock the idea of a community of all people, and encourage environmental destruction by creating some classes who amass nature’s fruits for their private enjoyment and others who must do whatever they can to survive. Such a world creates opportunities for heavily armed gangs, terrorists groups, and rogue armies to sell themselves to the highest bidders.

A country as divided as we are threatening to become internally – and as isolationist externally – ignores these issues. We rightly make much, for example, of the nation’s 7.8% unemployment rate. But we barely notice that half the people of Detroit are out of work.

Obama’s promise was to build a national community of our diverse parts. We are headed in the other direction. He needs to lead us back.

Humbug

“And how about tossing in a couple of bucks for Saint Jude’s?” Why did this question irritate me so much?

It was only a few days before Christmas, and I was standing at the counter of a venerable men’s haberdasher, buying some of its smaller offerings for my son’s stocking. At last, I had been able to start my shopping, and I was feeling the Christmas spirit. And out of nowhere this nattily dressed man was laying a guilt trip on me.

Didn’t he know that I gave generously to the charities of my choice? Wasn’t it enough for him that I had just bought two pairs of overpriced socks? Now, all of a sudden, I have to play Ebenezer Scrooge to his Bob Cratchit?

“Not this time,” I mumbled, as I handed him my platinum credit card . . . as if at any other time I would have jumped at the offer. But today I chose to stand on principle, even if that principle amounted to a two-dollars donation to a good organization. How much does Brooks Brothers give to charity? I found myself wondering, as I became increasingly unhinged by the moral trap this man had sprung on me.

Our once-jovial relationship turned into a frosty professional one. This had become nothing more than a transaction over socks, which is why I had come into the store in the first place.

As he handed me my receipt, he said, “Have a nice Christmas anyway.”

The Road to Hell

This slightly abbreviated exchange between Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) and a friend of mine underescores the banality of good intentions: Subject: Standing with Newtown

Dear Friend -

Something horrible and unexplainable happened in Newtown on Friday. I've been there almost non-stop since Friday morning, and there are simply no words to express the grief of our friends and neighbors.

Today, Newtown is grieving. But Newtown is recovering too. Every day I have witnessed hundreds of individual acts of humanity as the people of this small town reach out, with full hearts, to each other.

We have our role to play too. I know that those on the outside can feel a sense of helplessness, and many people ask me, "What can I do to help?"

Well, if you've been looking to do something to support the community, consensus is that a contribution to the United Way of Western Connecticut is the best way to help.

I just made my contribution, and if you are moved to join me you can do so here:

http://www.chrismurphy.com/united-way

While Newtown grieves, the most important thing we can do for them today is to make sure they know Connecticut, and the rest of the country, supports them.

Chris

With all due respect, Senator, and thanking you for your presence in Newtown since the recent tragedy, the most important thing someone in your position can do for people in Connecticut, and Americans in general, is to fight for passage of meaningful legislation limiting access to firearms in this country. I hope you will be standing with Senator Feinstein in her efforts to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, which is at least a start! 

Sincerely,

No More Martyrs

President Obama took us almost to the mountaintop last night. But he stopped short. Let’s hope he doesn’t turn back. In a lyrical and moving speech, Obama summoned the rhetoric of which he is uniquely capable when his words come from his heart. But he did not mention the guns that had killed those children and brought such horror to a place and such desolation to its people. Maybe last night in Newtown was neither the time nor the place to do so. The president’s message of healing and coming together is one we need to hear. And he did prepare the way for legislative action in the days ahead. Let’s hope so. We have been here before. And each time four things have happened:

1. A public outcry to regulate guns.
2. The counterattack against the “predictable hysteria” of those who would disarm America. Because the gun lobby’s political flacks were largely silent yesterday means that they aren’t stupid, not that they aren’t working.
3. 2^nd-Amendment lunacy. I haven’t yet heard the argument that six-year-olds should be armed, but an NRA board member did say that if the teachers had had their guns in school, this tragedy might have been prevented.
4. Nothing. The laws in most states are less restrictive than they were before the Arizona killings two years ago; the subject was never discussed during the presidential campaign.

How much worse does it have to get? We do not need more young martyrs. Let these children and their teachers be, finally, the impetus for change.

Birth and Carbon

Last week the Pew Research Center announced that in 2011 the U.S. witnessed its lowest birth rate in history. The greatest decline was among immigrants, particularly Mexican women, which undercuts the image of hordes of Hispanics slipping across the border to have American babies. The news unsettled pro-growth conservatives, represented by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who equated America’s future as a great power with the continuation of “our demographic dynamism.” This is an idea whose time has gone. In the 19^th century American newspapers, in small towns and big cities, constantly beat the drum for population growth as a sign of greatness. Numbers mattered, not quality of life.

With 7 billion people on Earth, it’s time for a new model, particularly in light of a second report last week that record global carbon emissions have rendered current planetary warming targets already obsolete.

Douthat attributed lower birth rates to “a decadence . . . that privileges the present over the future [and] embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”

This is supercilious tripe. Historically women had more children because mortality rates were high, child labor was a critical economic asset, birth control was ineffective, and women had less control of their own lives.

The current trend toward smaller families is because young people want to provide their children a better life, are fearful of the world they will enter, and worry about the fate of the earth.

This is not selfish. It’s responsible.

The General Store

A recent survey named Wal-Mart employees the lowest-paid corporate workforce in America. This was not especially surprising, as the giant retailer has a solid reputation for low wages, lousy benefits and class-action lawsuits brought by disgruntled “associates.” The survey reminded me of the time I published a weekly newspaper, and we opposed Wal-Mart’s plans to build a store on the edge of town. While our editorials resonated with most readers, who worried about the relentless sprawl the development portended, others called us shills for local merchants or elitist snobs. Wal-Mart won, as it generally does, but I like to think we made a difference to the final product.

And yet Wal-Mart is also the country’s most popular and successful retailer, patronized by 125 million people each week. It is the world’s largest employer, and its revenues trail only those of Exxon and Shell. Hilary Clinton once sat on its board, and George Will called it: “the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy,” one that saves shoppers $200 billion annually.

You can find almost anything you want in a Wal-Mart, which is how I felt in the 1950s when I went to the general store in my grandmother’s town with my allowance in my pocket. I took my time deciding what to choose, knowing I couldn’t have everything on the shelves.

Maybe it’s just my nostalgia, but the excitement of choosing something seems to have been lost in a world where we can’t ever seem to have enough.

Principles and Pragmatism

As I drove northeast into Maine, listening, when I could stand it, to talk radio’s toxic spew, I wondered whether Maine’s diverse political composition might provide a blueprint for a fractured nation to move forward together. The first step is to turn off the hatemongers, those who make a living demonizing their opponents and inciting their followers to make it personal. The antidote to bad ideas is not personal attacks. It is better ideas. The response to lies is not bigger lies but an honest effort to find the truth. The role of journalism is not simply to tell us what each candidate said but to analyze the truth of their claims.

But then what? How can we reach common ground without compromising our principles? How do people like me, who find much of the current Republican platform abhorrent, bridge the divide? One answer is to honor basic principles – our own and others’.

For pragmatists, accommodation is a first principle. It is not a bad thing to have leaders who understand the importance of compromises that will enable small steps forward. But core principles are, by definition, not negotiable. We must determine which those are for us and keep fighting for them. That’s what Lincoln did, and Churchill.

We must be sure that the principles on which we stand are too vital for us to give up and too important for us to give in. And if we lose, we must keep fighting for them without scorching the earth.

The Morning After

What has changed? The president was re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he had in 2008, an almost identical political composition in the House, a sliver of a gain in Senate seats, a knotted popular vote and a political map of America that shows vast expanses of red between coastal slivers of blue? No wonder Democrats take global warming seriously: they live by the oceans. But yesterday, I think, brought a sea change of a subtler kind. In a country where millions of people are really hurting, voters rejected the Republican’s punitive economic alternative and stayed the course. We do need real change, but not the kind being offered. And we saw a more generous America in other ways: gay marriage won a referendum for the first time ever – in Maine and Maryland – and is leading in Minnesota and Washington; the Tea Party’s most frightening candidates – Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana – lost in heavily Republican states; and Obama’s huge support among immigrant voters of all kinds will lead, I hope, to kinder and more effective immigration policies. (One person told me yesterday that Asians vote overwhelmingly Democratic because the evangelical lectures on “family values” so offend them.)

What now? I think the pundits need a rest. We have had enough of scrutinizing Obama’s impenetrable soul and parsing Romney’s shifting principles. The question the president faces remains: how do you reach across the aisle to folks who want nothing to do with you? With neither Romney nor Ryan carrying his home state, Americans signaled that they are tired of hard-right intransigence.

Immigrants and Others

For the immigrant families, both working- and middle-class, I have met in my few days in Ohio, the vote is an almost mythical thing. Unlike many people whose doorbells I have rung, new citizens seem grateful I have come to urge them to vote. They have not taken Ohio’s early-voting option because they want to go to the polls in person today and stand in line with their fellow citizens. Several plan to take their children to see the process of a democracy in which they still strongly believe, at least on this one day. The people of color with whom I have spoken – native-born and immigrant – are overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama. Does that mean that race is the driving force in this election? I believe it is one of them. But those who play the “race card” are not those seeking the minority and immigrant votes, but those who have written them off. Voter suppression is a big issue in Ohio, as it is elsewhere, and it is the Republicans who are most intent on using it, while its victims are overwhelmingly minorities, immigrants and the poor.

Yet those are the people who have said to me, “We are all in this together,” which is exactly the opposite message the Republicans have been sending overtly until a few weeks ago – and continue to signal to their core.

In a changing country, I think it is both a reprehensible and a losing strategy.

The sun is out this morning in Cleveland for the first time in a week. I take it as an omen.

Notes from Ohio

Day 1: (Cleveland) No one answered the door at my first house, which was listed as the residence of an old woman. As I was leaving the porch, a car sped up with its hood raised. The driver angrily asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was looking for Mrs. ____. “She’s not here.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“She won’t be back.”

“Is she dead?"

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. Do you know you’re driving with your hood up?”

“I saw you snooping around my property and came over to blow your head off.”

And he threw it in reverse and roared back to the repair shop across the street.

Day 2: Now in the suburbs, I spent the day in McMansion ghost towns – sprawling subdivisions of huge houses on eerily empty streets. While the houses are all different, the mailboxes are identical. Here is where the housing bubble burst, as people watched their impossible dreams turn into defaulted mortgages. Several of those I talked to were immigrants, who had recently bought from the original owners. Many houses appear vacant. I did not see a single child playing outside.

Day 3: I talked to young middle- and working-class couples who remain undecided two days before the election. Because they are struggling so in this economy, they are focused, not on ideology, but on things that affect them directly. Romney’s extreme makeover and mendacious TV ads do not seem to enrage them. They are not mean-spirited; they are worried about their families and their future – and they feel their politicians have betrayed them.

Obama

Delayed by Sandy, but not denied, I am heading to Cleveland to do what I can to help re-elect the president. When I came of age, I realized that the things I most cared about were: ensuring civil rights; eradicating poverty; caring for the earth and ending war.

They still are, and for me Barack Obama remains the embodiment of that unfulfilled agenda. Mitt Romney is its antithesis.

It is neither an easy nor a popular agenda, and we are engaged in a battle whose outcome is uncertain, and some of the reason for that falls on people like me.

Drawn to Obama’s humanness, we turned him into an icon . . . and then expressed our disappointment when he showed himself to be human.

We loved his innocence . . . until it became his inexperience.

We resonated to his appeal across race, class, gender and ideological differences . . . except when it led him to compromise on issues we held non-negotiable.

But it was more than just his frailties or our expectations. He inherited a global depression that was created by the values he opposed and was creating an America we would not recognize. He faced two off-the-books wars and policies that made us loathed around the world. And he encountered implacable opposition that was as well-funded as it was mean-spirited.

He accomplished much, from health care to Iraq, that is significant and lasting.

He is not prefect, but I believe that Barack Obama has been one of the best presidents of my lifetime, and he has the chance to help transform this nation.

This is my 200th post. Thank you for being a part of it. If you know others who might like to read it, please invite them to www.jamesgblaine.com

Malala

On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, four Ku Klux Klansmen put a box of dynamite under the steps of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. When it exploded, it took the lives of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, each of whom was 14 years old, and Denise McNair, who was 11. On Tuesday afternoon, October 9, 2012, gunmen stopped a school bus in Mingora, Pakistan, demanded the identity of Malala Yousafzai and shot her in the head. Malala survived, and yesterday she arrived at the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Center in England, having been transported in darkness and in secrecy because the Taliban have vowed to shoot her again.

Malala is 14 years old. Her crime is not just that she wants to go to school but that she had the courage to say so in public. “She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area,” a Talabani spokesman said. “She was openly propagating it. Let this be a lesson.”

The terrorists knew exactly what they were doing. The demand for women’s rights and public education is as great a threat to the state they seek to impose, as was the moral courage of the Baptist churches to the Klan’s way of life.

It is difficult to be anything but speechless in the face of such evil. But silence and submission are exactly what those who kill children seek.

Malala is not a symbol of Western culture. She is a symbol of courage that is rare, dangerous and universal. May she live to inspire us again.

Rich States, Poor States

Nine of the 10 states with the highest median household incomes in America voted for Barack Obama in 2008. (The exception was Alaska, whose governor was the Republican candidate for vice president.) That trend holds this year (except Virginia and New Hampshire are currently toss-ups). Nine of the 10 poorest states are solidly Republican – both in 2008 and today. New Mexico is the sole blue exception. The other nine are rural, southern states. All 10 states receive far more in federal payments than they pay in federal taxes.

But why do poor states overwhelmingly support candidates whose policies favor economic inequality, while rich states vote for higher taxes and more government?

False consciousness? Karl Marx wrote that, because the powerful control the public conversation, they can induce the working class to vote against its own interests. But that doesn’t explain the behavior of the rich states.

The help? Are servants outvoting their employers in Greenwich and Palm Springs? But the domestic vote isn’t what it used to be.

I think the explanation is historical: With the break-up of the New Deal coalition came the rise of third-party movements (Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968) that led white southerners out of the Democratic party. Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and “Reagan Democrats” realigned the parties around social and cultural issues: abortion, guns, evolution, environmentalism – and, let’s be candid, race.

Far from the distractions people try to make them, these are the issues over which this election is being contested.

Richest States         1968 Vote                           Poorest States         1968 Vote

10. California                 DEM                                    10. Oklahoma               GOP

9. Delaware                    DEM                                    9. South Carolina          GOP

8. Hawaii                        DEM                                    8. New Mexico              DEM

7. Virginia                       DEM                                    7. Louisiana                  GOP

6. New Hampshire        DEM                                    6. Tennessee                 GOP

5. Massachusetts           DEM                                    5. Alabama                    GOP

4. Connecticut                DEM                                    4. Kentucky                    GOP

3. New Jersey                 DEM                                    3. Arkansas                   GOP

2. Alaska                          GOP                                    2. West Virginia           GOP

1. Maryland                    DEM                                    1. Mississippi                GOP

Triumph of the Week

Tomorrow my son Jake is marrying the wonderful Emily Oakes. It had been my understanding that the father of the groom had nothing to do except bask in reflected glory and pay for a few things. It turns out there is stuff to be moved besides audiences, games to be played and wine to be tasted.

I will be back in print next week.

In the meantime, I am a proud and happy man.

Out of Poverty

I believe that the model of extractive economic growth has more than run its course. It is overwhelming the environment limits of a finite world and creating institutions that destroy the social fabric of community. In his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond traces the disappearance of societies to their inability to adapt to catastrophic environmental change, often abetted by political corruption and hostile neighbors. The single most important factor was overpopulation relative to the environment’s ability to support human life. The lesson for today’s world should not be lost on us.

In search of an alternative way of living, many have turned to reviving local communities, practicing sustainable food and energy production, and focusing on the quality of our lives. A recent report on “The 10 Poorest Countries in the World” reminded me that it’s not that simple.

Nine of the poorest countries are in Africa and the poorest of all is Haiti. Six have per-capita incomes under $1,000 a year – in Congo people live on 63 cents a day. Several countries have or had rich natural resources – from Zimbabwe’s now-ravaged land to Sierra Leone’s diamonds to Equatorial Guinea’s oil and gas. Yet the bulk of the people rely on subsistence agriculture, which is not the romantic yeomanry that many of us like to envision, but a way of life that ravages both the people and the land.

We do need a new path forward, but for the 135 million people in the 10 poorest countries, that path may not be into the past.

Tragedy of the Commons

What does it mean to denigrate someone’s religion? This is not a rhetorical question. In the last few days Barack Obama has admonished us not to do so, while the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood has demanded “criminalizing assaults on the sanctities of all heavenly religions.” Meanwhile a foundation in Iran has again raised the bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head, and Igor Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” is preparing to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of its opening, which brought howls of (non-murderous) protests for its pagan theme.

While every religion wants its beliefs and practices respected, it seems that only the fundamentalist wings of the three Abrahamic religions demand their beliefs be held sacrosanct in the public arena. Never mind that half the things those people say offend my religion, which is a combination of spiritualism, rationalism, humanism and optimism – a singular religion, to be sure, but one I have a first-amendment right to espouse.

I think of the world as a commons that we all share and for which each of us is responsible. Right now two things most endanger the commons. One is hate, which drove the production of “Innocence of Muslims.” The other is fear, which is driving the reaction to those who violently protest a film most haven’t even seen.

Hate poisons the commons. Fear closes the commons – as surely as fear of being mugged keeps us out of a park. The best way to protect the commons is to stand up to those who would claim it for themselves, even if they put a bounty on your head.

Conscience of a Conservative

The four columns that David Brooks wrote during the two conventions continue to fascinate me. The New York Times columnist is a conservative in the old sense of the word: a believer in small government and free markets, one who values the continuity of institutions and the traditions of a community. The Republican Party is Brooks’ natural political home. But he does not seem at home in this one. He praised the GOP convention for its celebration of “the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked within and became wealthy.” But in the end, he wrote, today’s Republican party cannot govern because “its commercial soul is too narrow.”

He was disappointed with Obama’s speech because he believes that a country that has lost its way needs a leader with big ideas and the audacity to push for big change. Romney cannot do that. Obama has yet to show he will.

I agree. This election is about two men playing it safe, appealing to a narrow wedge of voters without offending their base. The way to do that apparently is to go negative . . . to show why the other guy is a worse choice than you.

If this election turns on who can be meaner, more partisan, more negative, we will all lose. And that is the direction in which the campaign is headed. Barack Obama is the only candidate who can rise above that and offer the communal vision this country needs. I hope he does.

Shoes

One of my earliest memories is my first visit to the shoe store. Above the doorway hung a sign that read, “I had no shoes and I complained . . . until I met a man who had not feet.” In hindsight the shoe store seems an incongruous place for such a sign, as it counted neither the shoeless nor the footless among its clients. But it made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps the sign was simply aimed at telling kids like me to be grateful for what we had. But I read a deeper message, one that required me to think about my connection to others who had no shoes, or even no feet – and that demanded, not just gratitude for what I had, but compassion for those who had little or nothing.

I thought of that sign as I drove recently to Flint and Detroit, places where large numbers of people have so little and feel increasingly unconnected to the America in which I live. And when I drove back to Maine, where I write this, I was struck by how little we know of – or think about – the people in our crumbling cities.

When Ferdinand Marcos was deposed from the Philippines’ presidency in 1986, the enduring symbol of both his corruption and his detachment was the allegation that his wife, Imelda, owned 1,700 pairs of shoes in a country filled with shoeless people. And I fear for an America where those who have so much are increasingly insulated from those who have so little.