American Nightmare

“No modern society could function under a libertarian government, which is why none exists,” says a reporter in today’s Doonesbury, poking fun at Ron Paul for his utopian delusions.

Well said, though it could be pointed out that no modern economy has enjoyed enduring prosperity under the kind of “small government” raw capitalism that all the GOP candidates espouse. Those eras in which we got too close to this small government model led directly to economic crashes and widespread suffering. Exhibit A: the economic collapse of 1929 which followed a reign of unbridled, pro-corporate, Republican conservatism.

Republican leaders seem to love the idea of small government because it will give rich people, and the corporations on which their wealth is based, more power. This power would come at the expense of the rest of us, who depend on democratic government to protect us from exploitation by the rich and powerful.

It’s peculiar that any middle class voters would support a program aimed specifically against their own economic interests. The explanation for this support seems to lie in the GOP’s success at promoting the idea that democratic government is the enemy of democracy. “Freedom,” the conservatives argue, will be enhanced if we restrict government and thereby further empower the corporations which already dominate our economy – and which, by the way, operate on a “one-dollar/one-vote” principle.

The good news is that lately the GOP primary candidates have been effectively beating each other up. They seem like nothing so much as a pack of drunken kangaroos as they smash wildly against each other. Gingrich says Romney is a politician with no enduring principles and Romney says Gingrich is a loose cannon unfit for the White House. I’m inclined to agree with both of them.

Of the two, Gingrich would make the worse president. He resembles Dick Cheney in his ethical standards, but he has less charm than the former vice president, and an even scarier wife. God forbid that he would ever make it to the White House, but if he did, the end times would surely be near. The only reason he is attracting almost as much support as Romney in the primaries is that he is so damn mean that Republicans who hate the president keep picturing him being vicious and nasty in debates against Obama.

It is still all but certain that Romney will get the nomination, despite Gingrich’s recent surge. As president, it is hard to say what he would do since he apparently would do whatever he thought would get him re-elected. This is one reason why so many Republicans don’t like him. He doesn’t appear to believe in anything except advancing his own interests.














For those of us who believe that the Constitution is not just something to talk about, but is actually the document on which our government and our freedoms are based, none of these fanatic, small-government Republicans would make an acceptable president. Weakening the government would only diminish the power of the Constitution to enhance our rights. The causal chain is direct: it runs from us, the citizenry, through the Constitution into the hands of our elected representatives. To weaken any link in this chain would only strengthen the hands of the oil, tobacco, drug and insurance companies as well as the banks. And if they were to be so strengthened, we could not expect them to do right by us.

A libertarian society, in which every individual struggles against every other, is a society in which those controlling concentrated wealth control everything. That is not the American Dream, though messrs. Romney, Gingrich, Paul and Santorum would have us believe that it is.

Perhaps You've Heard this Before...

Prepare to be totally bummed out. Last week a friend of mine, who is currently in law school, wrote of the fear he felt but was unable to acknowledge when, as a child, he contemplated the vastness of the universe.

Fear inspired by the limitless cosmos must be common among children, since I recall experiencing it myself and I have reason to believe others have as well. And I don’t believe it’s confined to children.

Recently I watched a series on PBS which explained our current understanding of both subatomic particles and the extent of the universe. One point the program made was that we may well inhabit one little universe among a collective multiverse whose dimensions and numbers are immeasurable and uncountable. And somewhere in this endless collection of universes, there may be one identical to our own, inhabited by people just like us.

The prospect that we may have cosmic doppelgangers living their lives in a neighboring universe exactly as we do is a consequence of the possibility that the cosmos in its entirety is limitless and time is endless. Everything we will do today has been done before by our exact replica in some twin realm somewhere in the infinite everywhere.

Go ahead and pretend that I didn’t just blow your mind.

As Nietzsche once wrote, “Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible!”

If escape were possible, where would we escape to? Somewhere with indoor plumbing and decent Chinese food, I would hope, but there are no guarantees. It would be interesting to know exactly what wormhole leads to the twin cosmos where I could enjoy a life identical to the one I now live, except, perhaps, with no mention of any Kardashians ever.

The thought that existence comprises multitudinous universes extending ad infinitum through time and space makes our infinitesimally tiny selves and accomplishments seem utterly inconsequential. Damn.

As scary as the infinity of time and space can be, the idea that they are limited is equally scary. If time is destined to end, then what? Well, nothing, but how does that work? A related question is this, If time is endless, what is preferable, the prospect of death or the prospect of living forever?

OK, you may now thinking that worse than either of these is the prospect of my going on forever with these speculations, so I will bring them to a halt here. In doing so, and in line with my general policy of “Don’t worry, be happy,” I’d like to offer a couple of pictures representing Rollins’ celebration of Chinese New Year, which begins officially on Monday.



Who Better to Bring in the Year of the Dragon than Our Own Hongjin and Zhao Chang










Chinese Food - A Hit in Any Universe















Chi Fan, Sun Laoshi!

Freedom’s Just another Word for Screw You

For some Americans, “Freedom” isn’t so much a concept as a logo. Its main purpose is not to promote a glorious idea but to simply stand for America in the same way that the Golden Arches stand for McDonald’s. This kind of “Freedom” is all about self-promotion and not in the least about souls unfettered.

As a vacuous tribal emblem, “freedom” was particularly on display during the Iraq War when a couple of Representatives named Ney and Jones demanded that Congressional cafeterias change the name French fries to “freedom fries.” These patriotic gentlemen were angry at France for daring to suggest that President Bush’s invasion of Iraq was not a cool idea. Before discussing further the stupidity of renaming Congressional foods, I think it’s worthwhile here to point out that France has been downright helpful at key points in America's history. Actually, without the help of France, the United States would probably not even exist as an independent (i.e., free) nation.
   

France was by our side, for example, at The Battle of Yorktown which led to the surrender of British General Cornwallis’s army. This battle is considered the decisive showdown of the American Revolution, the victory that secured our freedom. General Washington led a combined American and French army here and the French fleet, which stood offshore, prevented Cornwallis from escaping or being reinforced. France’s support, in other words, played a decisive role in Washington’s victory. In fact, when Cornwallis saw that his situation was hopeless, he insisted that he should surrender his army to the French. The French, however, graciously refused, saying it was the Americans to whom Cornwallis must surrender.

Let’s face it, without French help, our ancestors would probably have been defeated by the British and then have muddled along as colonies number 2 through 14, with mighty Canada being number one. No doubt the British Parliament would have given the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley to their well-behaved Canadian subjects and restricted the thirteen American colonies to a thin strip along the Atlantic seaboard.






















Yes, insulting France just because the French thought invading Iraq was a bad idea was idiotic. But equally idiotic was the choice of the name “freedom fries.” These deep-fried little artery cloggers are yummy, but they have nothing to do with freedom. It’s also quite possible that they have nothing to do with France, but never mind.

What troubles me is the way the word freedom is tossed around to justify any sort of policy, foreign or domestic, that suits one sleazy politician or another. Every White House ignoramus who has needlessly sent our troops into harm’s way in some foreign land has claimed that he was acting in the name of “freedom.” But, more often than not, these hare-brained military interventions have had little to do with freedom -- ours or anyone else’s. President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, was mainly a reflection of his interest in controlling Middle Eastern oil (and had the added advantage of supporting his profit-seeking buddies at Halliburton and Blackwater). Invading Iraq had nothing to do with our freedom, and rather little to do with Iraq's.

Domestically, the word “freedom” is tossed around just as shamelessly as it is in foreign policy. We are often told, for example, that owning household firearms is essential to our freedom. It is not, as any number of perfectly free and democratic countries whose citizens are not armed to the teeth can attest. Of course the NRA has promoted this bizarre mentality for so long that many Americans have forgotten that the capacity of Mom, Dad and the kids to mow people down with lethal firepower is not directly related to freedom. In fact, I think it’s time for the psychiatric establishment to give us a formal word describing that malady according to which the possession of murderous implements is thought to be the key to freedom.

Where real freedom is concerned, politicians like Ney and Jones of  the infamous “freedom fries,” seem strangely uninterested. There was an opportunity just a couple years ago to offer every family in America the freedom to choose publicly funded health insurance, but Representative Jones opposed it. I feel it’s safe to say that Representative Ney would also have opposed it, had he not been forced out of office and into jail before the issue came before Congress.

I don't think I'm asking for too much here. I would simply like people to stop using the word “freedom” as though it were a self-serving logo or a handy device for promoting aggressive wars. I say, let's not use it at all except when we are really enhancing freedom. And, by the way, contrary to what all of the Republican presidential candidates have been saying, dismantling the government whose democratic institutions are the very embodiment of our freedom, does not count as enhancing freedom.




Redneck Haiku

Oh, Canada!
So maply yet so gunless;
Ripe for Invasion

(Winking emoticon here)

Mexico

Modern Mexico was built partly on a socialistic foundation. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled that country for most of the 20th century, allowed rural Mexicans to control precious farmland through communal ownership, and protect it from the greedy hands of the millionaire class. Every village had perpetual control over its farmland and distributed it to resident families for them to farm as they needed it. On this basis, most of Mexico’s tens of millions of peasants lived in relative peace and economic security for decades.

Deb Bennett and I lived in Pustunich, a Yucatecan village, during the summer of 1970, when I went there to do some research on Maya identity. While there, our friend, Armando, told us a story about how the poor peasants of Pustunich organized a kind of “Occupy Pustunich” rebellion against the local “One Percenters.” (The peasants didn’t refer to their rich neighbors as “One Percenters,” of course, that’s my editorializing. They just called them the ranchers.)

The conflict began because the ranchers, who owned thousands of head of cattle, refused to fence their herds in, and the cattle began to wander onto the village lands and devour the crops there. The villagers pleaded with the cattle barons to put up fences, but the ranchers refused to act. When the peasants went to the local government to complain, the government, being in the pocket of the rich, did nothing.

So the village men got together and decided to kill the cattle that were on their land. They were all part-time hunters, so they were well enough armed to take down all the straying cattle and they acted quickly to do so. They vowed not to take any of the meat of the cattle for their households, to avoid being accused of selfish motives, and then they sent a message to the local government saying, “If you come to arrest any of us, you will have to arrest all of us, and if you try to do that, we will resist.”

Within a matter of days, fencing went up around the cattle ranchers’ pastureland. End of problem.

Our constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms solely for the purpose of organizing a local militia, and, in effect, this is what the Pustunich villagers were doing in their 1960s uprising. For them, the essence of their freedom was not in the murderous power of the guns, to which they rarely referred (and which, not being gun nuts, they didn’t glorify). Their freedom and their economic security were based on their capacity for collective action, and that’s what they emphasized when they recounted their story.

Socialism is a kind of patriotism – patriotism being a matter of our looking out for each other in our community and our nation. It does, in fact, take a village to properly raise a child, but the people in that village need to see each other as rooting for the home team – as the Pustunicheros did.

Our men and women in uniform, in fact, are part of a kind of socialistic organization. The overriding principle in the U.S. Army, for example, is concern for the group as a whole. The individual who acts for his or her own profit or glory is a lousy soldier. That’s socialism.

I wouldn’t actually call myself a socialist, but I would certainly like to see socialism treated with more honesty in our media and in our culture generally. But the vast right-wing conspiracy that dominates our media has sold us a bill of goods on its nature. Americans have been trained, like Pavlovian dogs, to react with hostility to anything or anyone that can be labeled as “socialist,” even though socialism offers real potential for the promotion of freedom and justice. The people of Pustunich knew this, but we in the U.S. have been trained to think otherwise.

On a lighter note, here are some pictures from Pustunich and other sites in Linda Mexico that Darla and I took during our 1990 stay in Merida.





Pustunich House







Pustunich Hatmaker with His Family









Backyard Vegetable Garden











 




In Pustunich, everyone sleeps in hammocks - and they often make their own: Hammock-Making Rack.









Turkeys would sometimes wander into homes in Pustunich. Revenge for the humans came in the form of turkey tacos - a Yucatan staple.







Pustunich Family Livestock
















In the City of Merida: The Municipio or Local Government













Mexicans Love Their Children. A Children's Parade in Which the Youngsters Are Dressed Up in Local Garb.



 













Little Guerita Grace Watches the Parade on Dad's Shoulders











In 1990 Darla and I saw many welcoming signs in which the folks in the city affectionately referred to Americans as "gringos."























Adios, my fellow gringos.


*****

This I Believe: On Noah's Ark and Individualism

There are apparently still six or seven American voters who have not yet made up their minds to detest Congress. Last week, in an attempt to win these last few holdouts over to the “Congress Sucks” bandwagon, Speaker John Boehner orchestrated a roadblock against a bill that would have extended tax breaks and unemployment compensation for millions of Americans.

Boehner’s scheme seemed to be working until, under pressure from Senate Republicans and the Wall Street Journal, he caved. Consequently, there may still be a few citizens who continue to believe that Congress will occasionally do the right thing.






Speaker Boehner






There were actually a number of good reasons for supporting the bill that Boehner tried to kill. First, it benefits tens of millions of Americans, particularly those whose extended unemployed status has kept them in desperate poverty. Secondly, it would give a needed boost to the economy when those citizens spend their extra income. After all, it is these very citizens who are America’s real job creators, not the corporate fat cats on whom the GOP seems to have an undying crush.

Of course, Tea Party Republicans had a powerful rationale for opposing the bill, namely that President Obama favored it. Tea Party doctrine says that anything Obama supports must be evil, socialistic and Kenyan, so they felt obligated to take a stand against it, but to no avail.

It is possible to move beyond the petty politics embodied in last week’s dispute, beyond the tiresome posturing that has spawned deadlock after deadlock in our government since the 1990s. There are, in fact, real philosophical differences that divide left from right, Democrat from Republican.

Leaving aside the hostility to gays, to non-whites and to non-fundamentalists that motivate much of the Republican base, we can consider the real discernible differences in ideas about how the economy works that divide liberals from conservatives. The essential difference boils down to a belief in individualism which conservatives embrace but toward which liberals are leery. The conservative view (as I, an outsider, understand it) holds that some people become rich and successful because they are hard-working or clever innovators or bold and prescient risk-takers whose efforts make the economy surge. So, if the government will simply back away and let the best people strive, the economy will naturally work out a just system of rewards while at the same time generating robust growth from which all, rich and poor alike, will benefit.

It is hard for me to write those words, actually, because they seem so patently false. But there you are. Right wing, anti-government hyper-capitalists are hereby invited to let me know if I have your philosophy wrong.

I would actually agree that there is an element of truth to this ideology, but it is a very limited element. It is true that, as a rule, a hard-working individual does better economically than a lazy one, given the same opportunities, etc. It is true that risk-taking investors help promote innovation and diversification of the economy. The problem is that the limited truth embodied in this ideology is pumped up by conservative propaganda into a kind of religious fervor. Conservatives seem to believe in this ideology with the same single-minded intensity that Pat Robertson believes in Noah’s Ark -- and in the face of similarly damning counter evidence. But evidence counts for little to those whose beliefs are based on religious fervor.

I’ve heard the conservative argument, for example, that the Federal Reserve is an evil institution that should be abolished because it entails government intrusion in the economy. Yet there is widespread agreement among economists that the Fed, since it was created, has muted the effects of most of the recessions over the past hundred years. During the hundred years prior to the creation of the Fed, the U.S. economy suffered one devastating panic after another.

The FDIC, a government program, has prevented the disastrous unregulated bank failures that impoverished thousands of middle class families in the 1930s.

The Social Security Act has made the lives of tens of millions of retired people comfortable when, before it was enacted, the misery and humiliation of the poorhouse was a common end-of-life experience for the elderly. Do right-wing efforts to “privatize” or otherwise destroy this government program really make sense? Is Social Security an example of government evil? If not, why argue that government intervention is always bad for the economy? Same thing with Medicare, unemployment insurance and the G.I. Bill.

On the G.I. Bill, I have to point out that a beloved gentleman of my acquaintance who, through hard work and intelligent effort lifted himself from Depression-era poverty to millionaire prosperity, once told me that the single thing that made the biggest difference in his life was the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill, this liberal Democratic program, this entitlement, allowed him to get a Bachelor of Science degree when, as a young man during the Depression, he never imagined there would ever be any way for him to attend college. Oddly, as a conservative Republican, he continued to rail against “government entitlements” throughout his life. It’s like a religion, I tell you.

This topic is too big to cover adequately in a blog post, but let me just end with a handful of questions for which I have never found convincing conservative answers: If effort and ability determine who gets rich and who stays poor, why is it that the overwhelming majority of Americans live and die within the same class into which they are born? Why is it that no child, born as a migrant worker, has ever become a senator, governor, or, to my knowledge, powerful CEO? Why did the American economy grow so rapidly during the heyday of liberalism (1945-79) and why has it done so much worse since the rise of conservatism? Why, during conservatism’s rise, have the “one percent” managed to suck into their own coffers such a disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth? Did these one-percenters suddenly become more “hard-working and intelligent” after 1980? And, finally, what impressive personal qualities made George W. Bush a solid member of this privileged one percent?












 From America's Top One Percent: George W. Bush

POTUS & SCOTUS

My gut-feeling says that President Obama has about a 53% chance of getting re-elected. This is close enough to a toss-up that we might as well call it a toss-up.

His advantages are that he is an obviously intelligent and well-intentioned man who has tried to avoid ideological extremism while striving to bolster the economy and provide some protections (like access to health care) for the poor and marginalized.

His main disadvantage is that the economy is improving only very slowly and, though he has done a lot to prevent a depression and to push us in the right direction, he will be, as presidents always are, blamed for the weak economy if weak it still is next November. He’s like a firefighter who struggled to put out a raging house fire, but is now being blamed because he hasn’t restored the damaged parts of the house to their original mint condition. So, the voters are threatening to send him packing and bring back the arsonists who started the fire in the first place. Short memories, the voters.

One of the worst consequences of an Obama defeat would be the packing of the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Republican presidents are in the habit of appointing justices who are unbendingly conservative, which is to say, pro-corporate. One obviously problematic consequence of the pro-corporate bias of the current court is the Citizens United decision of 2010 which enhanced, in Justice Stephens’ dissenting words, “the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering.” But “enhancing the corrupting potential of corporations” is what conservatives are all about, so we can expect a Republican-packed Supreme Court to produce a “Corporations Gone Wild” electoral environment.

So what kind of people would a GOP president apppoint? Well, think about Dick Cheney’s good buddy, Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia was a driving force behind the Bush v. Gore decision which, on the basis of the privilegio de favoritum candidatum principle, shut down the ballot recounting following the 2000 election. The conservative justices held that continuing to count the ballots would have resulted in more democracy than was good for the country. Scalia and his right-wing pals seemed to think the Florida voters were being uppity in favoring Al Gore over Bush and Cheney and needed to be reminded who was boss. Clarence Thomas, an appointee of George W. Bush's dad, was also a strong supporter of the Bush v. Gore decision.














 

And there’s more. When, in 2006, Scalia was confronted with criticism from citizens who continued to fault him for his part in Bush v. Gore, he responded by saying, “Get over it…that was an election ago.”

Now there’s a legal principle for you, the “Get Over It” postulate. I wonder how Osama bin Laden might have made the same argument to the Seals as they burst into his lair last spring. “Are you Americans still resentful over 9-11? Come on, that was two or three terrorist attacks ago!”

Anyway, it is people like Scalia and Thomas who will dominate the Court for decades to come if a Republican wins the 2012 election. A shady, pro-corporate Supreme Court wouldn’t be the only horrible consequence of a GOP victory, but it would certainly be among the worst.

He Touched Me

So Herman Cain is suspending his presidential race. Well who can blame him? After all, several women have totally made up a bunch of stories about him having harassed them sexually and now here comes this Ginger White lady claiming they had had a long-term sexual affair. But, as Mr. Cain has clearly explained, she was merely his “secret friend about whom his wife knew nothing” for 13 years and that’s all she was.

Somebody isn’t being straight with us here and, according to Mr. Cain, it’s the media. After all, it’s the media who keep reporting on this army of women that Mr. Cain never approached sexually in any way, and it's the media, as the good candidate has repeatedly stated, that we should blame for his downfall. See? This is really all Brian Williams’ fault.

Don’t forget that Herman Cain is a businessman and not a politician. As several people have pointed out, this means he would make a terrific president. For sure we don’t want professional politicians in the White House. We tried that with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Lord save us from that lot. And I bet not a one of them could answer questions about Libya any better than Herman can.

What we want is someone that businessmen all over America can point to with pride as a non-politician. We want Herman Cain! Or someone of his character.

Oh, Herman, isn’t there a chance that you’ll reconsider? There can’t be that many more women out there that will keep making up stories about your horny ways.

And note that a recent poll in Florida showed that 15% of Republicans in that state still want to vote for you, even now, after Brian Williams has done his dirty work. These are probably the smartest 15% in the whole GOP, and they are bound to have some influence on their fellow Republicans in the upcoming primaries.

All I’m saying is, do you really want to give up? Aren’t you the Cain who launched a thousand pizza trucks and dazzled the peerless powers of mediadom? Is there no chance that you’ll reconsider? Oh Herman, we can’t believe you would leave us now – not after having touched so many of us in such a special way.