A Fable

Once upon a time long ago, there was a republic known for its civic tolerance, diverse cultures and passion for innovation. The glue that held it together was the people’s belief in an open political system and a tradition of civic debate. But hard times hit, and the republic went into a recession. The old communal bonds weakened. Parties purged their ranks of dissenters. Moderates became an endangered species. Demands for ideological purity triumphed over pragmatic efforts to build the coalitions required to govern in a pluralistic society. Voters increasingly turned out in support of extremists, and eventually the commitment to maintain the republic itself was called into question. There was plenty of blame to go around, but one right-wing group was especially relentless in pursuit of its agenda. Under the banner of patriotism, its members manipulated national symbols to vilify foreigners, non-whites, gays, Jews. They actively sought to shut down the government and ultimately to bring down the republic. Few took them seriously at first. They seemed a laughable bunch of bombastic buffoons, ranting against a society that was leaving them behind, shouting down their political opponents. One day powerful interests asked the leader of the party to become the leader of the nation so that order could be restored. And that’s where the fable ends. Because the rest is history: Immediately after being named Germany’s chancellor, “Hitler rushed to his headquarters and told Goebbels with tears in his eyes, ‘Now we are on our way.’”

(Drawn from Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman)

A Disturbing List

24/7 Wall Street published a list of America’s ten fastest-growing jobs over the last decade. They are: (10) Skin Care Specialists; (9) Personal Care Aides; (8) Personal Financial Advisors; (7) Coaches and Scouts; (6) Human Resources Specialists; (5) Massage Therapists; (4) Interpreters and Translators; (3) Music Directors and Composers; (2) Petroleum Engineers; (1) Service Unit Operators, Oil, Gas and Mining. There are lots of ways to interpret this list – the authors point to an aging population and “non-conventional” fuel sources. But what jumped out at me was the absence of any jobs focused on building communities, or on building much of anything, really. Instead, I see a people absorbed with taking care of ourselves, both physically and financially, while becoming increasingly oblivious to – and dependent on – extractive energy policies that threaten the health of the earth, which is the ultimate source of our own well-being. I was heartened by the presence of composers as evidence that we still value the creative arts, until I read that one “factor driving job growth for this occupation is the expected greater need for original music scores or transcriptions used in commercials.” We need translators because globalization has exposed our weakness in other languages, a weakness we exacerbate by insisting that good Americans only speak English.

Reading this less-than-robust list, I kept thinking of the decline of Rome, destroyed by the self-indulgence of a people no longer involved in their own governance. And that music, I wondered? Could it be the sound of Nero fiddling?

Early Morning, Low Tide

The sea is so calm this morning. I sit on the rocks sipping my coffee, looking out the “western way,” which lies almost due south between Cranberry Island and the Manset shore, the silence broken only by the sound of a few birds and the occasional melancholy clang of a bell buoy. Later the water will be filled with boats, both working and pleasure, but now I can see only two small sails far in the distance, one carrying its passengers away, the other coming toward home. A handful of gulls skim soundlessly above the water’s surface, landing without effort on a rock or the waveless sea. Somewhere, out of sight, a boat’s motor breaks the silence. There is just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and it is so clear that I look far out to a horizon, which the Episcopalian burial liturgy tells us is “nothing save the limit of our sight.” Or more fully, “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.” I imagine what lies beyond, but am mostly immersed in my surroundings here, so absorbed that my coffee has gone cold. I think, I don’t have the words to describe this, which suits me because they would limit what is limitless. My religion taught me early on to fear God. I sit in awe of this.

What Next?

“As I transition into the next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” With those words, issued through her lawyer on yesterday’s “Today” show, the former Bradley Manning began a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth. Tactically speaking, I’m not sure I would have made that particular announcement as I was entering a federal penitentiary, but this is a person who apparently believes that we need to know everything. I write this, not to belittle Chelsea Manning, but to wrestle with a case that is at once heartrending and bizarre. I believe: (1) Manning launched an important discussion about our government’s actions and secrecy by disclosing a lot of information we have the right – and the need – to know; (2) the length of the sentence is unjust; and (3) Manning has every right to assert her own identity. None of this makes me especially comfortable with an army private, struggling with huge personal issues, deciding unilaterally what government secrets to release to the world. Clearly, our government operates in far too much secrecy. I’m not sure I trust Manning’s judgment on where to draw the line. In other news, Anthony Weiner went one up on former Australian legislator (and chair of the Parliamentary Ethics Committee) Peter Dowling, who had acknowledged texting his mistress a photo of his, um, wiener in a glass of merlot. Weiner admitted in Wednesday’s New York mayoral debate that he had texted while driving.

e pluribus unum

What accounts for the differences between the “March on Washington” fifty years ago this month, which produced significant changes in American life, and the current protests in Cairo, which have produced a bloodbath? It is tempting to point to the evolution of western democracy. And there is truth in that. But the 1960s – America’s equivalent of the “Arab Spring” – witnessed far more violence than we like to remember, including urban riots that brought tanks onto the streets of our cities and a bloody response to protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention that was later declared a “police riot.” I think two factors are critical to understanding the differences: the commitment to nonviolence and the appeal for inclusion. Faced with intimidation, beatings and murder, civil-rights protesters were trained to “stand their ground,” unarmed, in one of the most remarkable displays of mass courage in history, demonstrating the power of moral suasion to effect lasting change. And civil-rights leaders appealed, not to tribal differences, but to our common humanity. In his speech before the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King invoked the two most important documents in American history – the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address – to demand that we live up to the ideals we espouse: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” King’s dream was the American dream – for all people, in all our diversity, bound together as one community. This is “American exceptionalism” at its best.

Too Big to Fail

Remember the huge, corrupt, rapacious banks that were deemed too big to fail despite the spectacular damage they wrought during the last market crash? That drama may have been just a dress rehearsal for something much bigger, which is now lurching under the weight of exponential growth and colossal corruption: China. And just as we were told in 2008 that it was essential the banks survived, so we are now being told the same about China. This concern stems from no particular fondness for the Chinese – any more than our support of Middle Eastern sheiks, whose kingdoms sat on top of our oil, belied affection for Arabs. It is because American economic well-being is entwined with China’s stability, which is now threatened by the side-effects of unrestrained growth and a mind-boggling corruption that has brought huge disparities in wealth to a country that still mouths the platitudes of socialist solidarity. As a net energy exporter – and a net exporter of oil for the first time since 1949 – America is no longer dependent on energy imports, despite what the drilling zealots insist. Now we are dependent on Chinese money and manufacturing, and once again our foreign policies are dictated by our domestic addictions. China has become the Walmart of the world, promising cheap goods while hollowing out our communities and the local economies that sustain them. I wish no ill to the Chinese, but we have got to redefine the good life in terms other than never-ending growth and more cheap stuff.

Three Lives

I read obituaries for the light they shed on living. On Monday, three men with little in common reminded me of the diversity of our travels from birth to death: Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and endured five years of living hell in the Hanoi Hilton prison. He never broke, and his courage inspired his fellow prisoners, including John McCain. I consider personal courage among the highest virtues; I just wish our culture would uncouple it from warfare and honor it in all its manifestations. And I was saddened to read that Colonel Day later supported Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in their efforts to smear John Kerry, a sad postmark to a brave life.

Garry Davis, also an army aviator, embarked after World War Two on a quixotic journey when he renounced his American citizenship to become a “citizen of the world.” “The nation-state,” he wrote, “is the breeding ground of war” – a point worth thinking about as our government insists that secure national borders are the key to peace in Palestine, where the shame of the Israeli settlements is less that they infringe on Palestinian sovereignty than that they are an inhumane response to the tragic squalor of Palestinian camps.

J.J. Cale’s life celebrates the importance of making music. A musicians’ musician and writer, Cale didn’t need the bright lights on him. “I’d like to have the fortune,” he wrote, “but I don’t care too much about the fame.”

Black and White

A president has perhaps no more important role than to embody the contradictions of our national conversation: Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning hundreds of slaves; Abraham Lincoln, who set out to hold the union together and ended by emancipating the slaves; Dwight Eisenhower, the warrior who warned us against the military-industrial complex; Barack Obama, who is black and white in a country where legally and demographically people are black or white. We have made much progress on the issues of race since Jefferson’s time, but the issue itself will not go away because we refuse to address it openly – until it rears its head, as it inevitably did again after Trayvon Martin’s murder. Race is implicit in so many of the issues with which the country wrestles: the immigration debate is about people of color; the bankruptcy of Detroit reflects the apartheid of our inner cities on which we have turned our backs; the growing disparity in wealth, in which whites own 20 times more than African-Americans, and aspiring blacks are urged to choose class over race, while impoverished whites are taught to identify with their race, not their economic condition.

The president cannot duck these issues because he is a target of them. And when he addresses them – as our national leader and a human being – as he did in 2008 in Philadelphia and last week at the White House, I remember, again, why his presidency is so important for our country.

Draft ‘Em

A friend sent me a report on last month’s Aspen Institute Summit on the Franklin Project to establish national service for every American, an idea I have supported in previous posts that seems to be gaining traction. There are many examples to build on – military service, Civilian Conservation Corps, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps – and there is so much to do – rebuild our infrastructure, revitalize urban neighborhoods, protect natural areas, educate children, revive a military that reflects the people as well as defends them, create a sense of shared community in a deeply divided nation. But I worry that the current efforts to attract the broadest constituency will just water down the program. It’s fine to appeal to vague idealism, but we already have the flag, mom and apple pie. Rotarians and legislators love the clichéd language of civic boosterism, but do 18-year-olds? Doesn’t the call to make universal service “socially obligatory” rather than “legally mandatory” mean that those who don’t want to do it don’t have to?

I think we should draft them, all of them. It’s fairer – one of the great injustices of the Vietnam-era draft was that the system was easy to manipulate by those seeking a way out. It’s more democratic – we pay lip service to the soldiers we hire to fight our wars, even as we grow increasingly separated from them. And it would make us pay attention to what is happening to our country, both at home and abroad, and produce young people who might really become the change we have been waiting for.

They the People

In light of the Egyptian army’s sacking of the country’s democratically elected – if unpopular – president in the name of the people, it’s worth considering who the people are and who gets to speak for them. As we used to say as kids, “Yeah, you and what army?” Just about everyone claims to speak for the people (except for the pope, who speaks for God). Robespierre did all the way to the guillotine. Lenin did, and Mao. Just yesterday, Bashar el-Assad said the Egyptian uprisings somehow demonstrate that he speaks for the Syrian people. Our own congress is supposed to embody the people’s will, although at the moment only 6 percent of the people approve of its performance.

Our constitution begins simply, “We the people,” and then proceeds to lay out a series of checks, balances and restrictions that put a good deal of distance between the government and what James Madison called the passions of the people. Ironically, this seems to be the source of its strength and longevity. Those who wrote the constitution recognized the fallibility of the people they were exalting and the dangers of unchecked power. They understood that anyone who claims to embody the popular will is a demagogue, not a representative. For “the people” is an ideal – the aspiration that all the different peoples of America will live peacefully together. Democracy is the messy process of trying to get there, and it only works when it strives to include all the disparate voices in the conversation.

The Six-Percent Solution

Yesterday five justices of the Supreme Court enshrined the southern strategy of the Republican Party into the Constitution of the United States. In so doing they vacated the court’s six-decade history as the protector of civil rights and social justice. In 1954, a Republican chief justice, Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregated schools unconstitutional, a decision that changed America. Yesterday, another Republican chief justice, John Roberts, writing for a sharply divided court in Shelby County v. Holder, announced that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was no longer needed, at least in its current form. Certainly there have been improvements, and as Roberts noted, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama, both murderous places in the 1960s, now have black mayors. But in 2006, Congress, by a combined vote of 488-33, renewed the act until 2031, and recently we have witnessed a series of efforts, ranging from voter-identification laws to gerrymandering, aimed at suppressing minority voters. It’s that history the court majority ignored. Another movement emerged from the civil rights era, one that transformed the GOP from the party that enfranchised black voters to one that received 6% of the black vote in 2012, making it perhaps the most segregated institution in the United States. This is not a coincidence. From Strom Thurmond’s switch to the party in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s “welfare queens,” Republicans have consciously sought to divide the country for political gain. The legacy of Lincoln is no more.

Other Perspectives

• “Jamie, I view the right to travel (and to settle some place you've traveled to) as inalienable. As far as I'm concerned that trumps all considerations of whether we want immigrants or not.” One reason I love this work is for the thoughts of others that set me on new paths of thinking. That’s why I call the blog “Perspectives.” Imagine an inalienable right to travel and to settle. That would mean a world without gated communities and other places that exclude people for arbitrary reasons. We wouldn’t need passports, and without them, there would be no reason for borders, and therefore no need for nation states, so many of which were arbitrarily carved out in the first place. Without nations, we wouldn't need huge national defense budgets, which would free up trillions of dollars to fund universal health coverage and a dignified old age. With those guaranteed, we would no longer need to treat life as a zero sum game in which we must fight each other over its limited resources. OK, time to wake up and publish.

• “Dear Jamie, I just HAD to share this with you.”

“Is Boston’s finest hour over? All our neighbors who lost life and limb, those who dug deep into themselves and performed heroically without a second thought, those who courageously kept a community safe – has the honor of those moments come down to this: a shabby anti-tug-of-war over the body of the dead bomber? You take him – no, you take him. As if the ground isn’t big enough – hasn’t always been big enough – to hold both saints and sinners.” (http://blog.ellensteinbaum.com)

A Brace of Six Shooters

Sixty years or so ago I asked my father for a BB gun, like the ones some of my friends used to shoot at tin cans and small birds. He said he would never get me a BB gun because “a gun is not a toy.” When I retorted that I had a brace of six guns (whose ammunition was a roll of caps) with shiny plastic handles and fake leather holsters, he was not amused. An avid hunter and fisherman, my father said that when I was old enough he would buy me a real gun. And because, he said, “a gun is always loaded,” he told me never to point my cap pistols directly at someone. It’s easy to moralize in the aftermath of tragedies, particularly one as sad and seemingly senseless as five-year-old Kristian Sparks accidentally killing his two-year-sister Caroline last week. Hunting is a way of life in in rural Kentucky, and Kristian’s gun was for hunting, not cowboys-and Indians. Still, there is something very wrong when Keystone Sporting Arms, a manufacturer of weapons for children, produces its Crickett (“my first rifle”) in pink and blue and markets it on its “kids corner” web page. Just as there is when a Pennsylvania sheriff raffles off an assault rifle at a fundraiser. And when the objective in video games and arcade shooting galleries is to kill people, however virtually, with guns, however unreal. Sure, it’s all a game . . . at least most of the time.

The Other Explosion

The tragedy in Boston has so saturated the news that the explosion in West, Texas, two days later, has become almost a sidebar. Yet the blast that destroyed the West Chemical and Fertilizer Co. killed 14 people (so far) and injured about 200, in a town of 2,700. The detonation of 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate (which Tim McVeigh used in Oklahoma City) registered 2.1 on the Richter scale and sent a mushroom cloud into the sky. There are important differences between the two events. One was carefully planned; the other an accident. One activated our worst fears of terrorists bringing war to America’s streets; the other involved the second-largest employer in a small town. One featured a deadly chase through suburban neighborhoods; the other leveled the community. One was premeditated murder; the other was the result of negligence. What they had in common was the extraordinary outpouring of compassion and courage at the scene. In West, almost all of those who died were volunteer first responders.

For its victims, terror comes in many guises – homegrown, imported and corporate, to name three. Preliminary investigation indicates that the Texas plant was storing much more ammonium nitrate than the company acknowledged, and federal regulators cited five “serious” violations when they last inspected the plant. They fined it $30. That was in 1985. Corporations bring jobs to a community, and “jobs” has become the great mantra of American politics. But as we have seen in Love Canal, in Toms River, and now in West, Texas, we need to pay attention to more than the economics.

Battle Royal

Kings Midas and Canute are alive and living in the Hamptons. Midas, as you may remember from your studies of ancient Greece, was offered one wish as a result of an act of kindness, and he asked that whatever he touched be turned to gold. His wish was granted (an outcome which current Greek politicians are desperately trying to replicate), and he went merrily around his palace showing off. . . until he tried to kiss his daughter. Canute, who ruled Denmark, Norway and England a millennium ago, sought to teach his fawning courtiers about the limits of human power by ordering his throne brought to the beach, where he commanded the waves to stop. They didn’t.

Canute offered his lesson on the beach of Southampton in Hampshire, England. It is a lesson lost on the modern plutocrats of Southampton, Long Island. A recent article in The New York Times tells the stories of billionaires building huge fortifications to protect their beachfront mansions from the next Hurricane Sandy. It is a modern fable of hubris, as hedge fund managers seek to impose their wills on nature with little understanding about how nature operates and less regard for the impact of their actions on others. The erosion of the public beaches being caused by the heroic battles to save their vacation homes is just collateral damage. Their insistence on the primacy of their private property rights over those of the public square is yet one more example of the tragedy of the commons.

Patriots Day

I cannot, and do not want to, compete with the events now unfolding in suburban Boston. Today is the original Patriots Day, when the American Revolution began in Lexington and Concord with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the shot heard round the world.” It is also the day in 1995 that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and it is the day the siege at Waco ended. May the killing stop.

Nukes

I know this isn’t a good time to joke about nuclear packages, but Anthony Weiner is back in the news. The eponymous former Brooklyn Congressman is thinking of running for mayor of New York, which is what he was doing in 2011 when his campaign was derailed by the viral photograph of his crotch. The tasteful self-portrait was taken by the congressman himself, who then absent-mindedly tweeted it to 45,000 people. Weiner’s claim that the photo depicted someone else was difficult to verify absent a line-up, but his story quickly unraveled, and he resigned from Congress on June 21, 2011. Now he is back with a large campaign war chest, a supportive wife, young child, and an 8,000+-word profile coming out in The New York Times Magazine.

On the other nuclear front, former Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday told Congressional Republicans that “we’re in deep doo doo” with regard to North Korea, indicating that, while Denis Rodman’s recent visit to the gulag state has done little for international relations, it has certainly lowered the bar for diplomatic language. According to CNN, Cheney said that Kim Jong Un “is unpredictable and doesn't share the United States’ worldview,” which has also been said about Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, NPR was reporting that South Koreans were calmly going about their lives, ignoring the “playground bully” and telling the world to call his bluff, which is unfortunately one thing that really makes bullies mad.

I apologize for the late post. The server was apparently hacked and down for the entire day. My daughter, Annie, called to make sure I wasn’t dead. This post will be Thursday/Friday’s.

The Iron Lady and the Teflon Cowboy

"What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways" (Margaret Thatcher, Nov. 8, 1989). There was much to dislike about Margaret Thatcher, but she was no Ronald Reagan, the national leader with whom she will be eternally coupled. She was one of the first major politicians to grasp the damage that humans were doing to he earth; he assured us that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” Nor did Thatcher’s England bear much resemblance to Reagan’s America. While both countries suffered from the global economic affliction dubbed “stagflation,” Britain, in the 1980s, had become a sluggish place whose sclerotic labor movement and clubby conservatives both seemed to be forever looking backward.

The short-term benefits of liberalizing the economy were clear and necessary, but the long-term price of a philosophy that ignored the poor and blamed the victim, that undermined both the safety net and the social contract, has proved as divisive in England as it has in America. In the wake of Thatcher and Reagan, we have become heedless societies, increasingly unconcerned about creating an inclusive community.

And climate change? Thatcher recanted in 2003. An Oxford-trained chemist, she did not dispute the science. She was upset the issue had become a rallying point for liberals.

Coming Home

Having just returned from two weeks in a country that is tentatively emerging from 50 years of secret government, it was unsettling to arrive home to a nation that sometimes seems headed in the other direction. Two cases in point: (1) by the predictably partisan 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court’s majority dismissed a challenge to a Bush-era law that gives the federal government broad powers of secret surveillance over its own citizens; and (2) it took Rand Paul, of all people, to get the administration to address the limits of targeting Americans for assassination on U.S. soil. No, the situations in Burma and the United States are not comparable, and people everywhere hunger for this country’s tradition of open dissent. But that tradition depends on transparency in government, and Paul, for all his grandstanding, underscored the fact that political leaders must constantly to be reminded of that. I was startled in Burma to hear the word “transparency” on many lips. It speaks of people’s new faith that one of the world’s most “Orwellian” governments is changing. In a country – once home to the author of Animal Farm and 1984 – where dissent was ruthlessly crushed and surveillance an ubiquitous fact of life, there remains the fear that the generals will renege on their promises. But it is tempered by the hope that each day of openness will make that more difficult to do. The Burmese take nothing for granted. Their history says they are wise not to.

Burma Road

I told someone not long ago that my two favorite decades were the 60s – the 1960s and my sixties. That was probably more distilled memories and wishful thinking than the truth (and, in fact, my actual favorite times were when my children were young and still willing to play with me). But I do think of the 1960s as a time when hope and altruism drove young people to try to change the world. As for my current decade, sixty, whatever it may seem, is actuarially no longer old. But as the years pile on, I have become oddly aware of a sense of anticipation for the future, even of the optimism I was supposed to feel when I was young. For there seems little use in worrying about all my separate failings when my entire body is sending me a message of, well, inadequacy. Like it or not, this is who I am. Recently, a friend urged me to see “Quartet.” It is a wonderful film about people who learn – because it doesn’t come naturally – to grow old with joy. They are musicians, and they may no longer be able to hit the high notes, but they can still sing. And they do.

I leave later today for Burma, daunted by the hours of flying but excited to see a completely new place. I am told that, for reasons of time management, Internet access and personal well-being, I must take a break from my blog. So I will take notes and give you a vacation. See you in March. Rejuvenated.