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Friday, November 18, 2011

Why I’m glad OWS “has no coherent message” for the media

Occupy Wall Street has obviously struck a nerve. Protests have sprung up all over the world, and despite what some want us to think, it’s not just a homeless camp. For the most part, the protesters have homes and educations and want JOBS. Not handouts, not world peace, not nuclear disarmament – JOBS. Jobs and the kind of fair wealth distribution that led the Founding Fathers to reject the English feudal system in which the whole country lived and worked at and for the pleasure of the ruling class of nobility. We may have dispensed with titles in this country, but make no mistake – we have re-established the ruling class. And for 30 years they have been herding us back to feudalism. (See prior post re: Tea Party Feudalism).
            
  This post is about the message. The goals. Those oh-so-elusive sound bites that the media just love because everyone can replay them over and over and pick them apart. That’s what’s missing from OWS. Sound bites. Little bumper-sticker sized clips that the news outlets can peddle in a 15 second promo. It is my firm belief that the lack of these sound bites is why the mainstream media can’t get a handle on OWS and seems to resent it. And this is not an accident. It’s not the product of disorganized rage or unfocused malcontents in tents. It’s very deliberate. Because three things happen immediately when a movement or protest or similar action takes on a fixed goal. First, they get pigeonholed by that one thing. Once you give AP and Reuters a little clip, they’ll fling it out into the universe as “what the protesters want” and BANG! Any time you alter, expand, explain, add to, or take from that goal, you’re in hot water for moving the goal posts, changing the message, not knowing what you want, or just being whiny. Second, you become responsible for solving the problem or proposing solutions.  Then you – the protester – own the outcome for better or worse. And third, you open yourself up to be undermined, argued with, picked at, and otherwise dispersed by the other side. Whoever they are. In my opinion, OWS has been brilliant in avoiding these problems and this is why I’m OK with that.
            
 First problem – pigeonholing. I know, I know, it sounds dirty but it’s really not. It’s actually what happens to a lot of legitimate politicians who develop a more complex understanding of a problem or are presented with new facts and craft more sophisticated positions over time. Americans don’t do sophisticated. We like our politicians to say the same things over and over no matter what, and we like our politics presented to us in on-the-go, Happy Meal sized packets. We don’t like to have to wrestle with complicated arguments or multiple sides of a thing. So if OWS came out and said “we want caps on executive salaries tied to average non-managerial wages.” Done. That’s it. That’s all they want. If someone from OWS talks to another outlet in two weeks and says “we want higher corporate tax rates and the government to regulate gas as a utility and not a commodity” the media has a field day with the ‘splintered factions’ of the movement and the disorganized message and the lack of focus and they don’t know what they want and suddenly the whole conversation shifts to who said what when to whom and why.
           
Second problem is owning the solution. Once a protest movement makes a demand, they have to own the outcome. If the protesters went after oil subsidies specifically and then gas prices went up (because, let’s face it, there’s no limit at all on how much gas companies can charge and if Hugo Chavez comes down with a cold they jack up the prices), immediately the fingers point to the protesters and the fault is theirs. Every major act of legislation involves complicated balancing acts and nearly always yields unintended consequences. If OWS gets pinned with those consequences, then their larger message is undermined and the conversation stops because "they failed."
          
And finally, the risk inherent in any specific proposition is that once you pin down a talking point, you’ve pinned down a target. Then the opposition forces have a very specific place to attack. The opposition to OWS is generally very well-funded and largely shameless in their willingness to peddle misinformation, lies, and spin to get what they want. Make an argument, propose a solution, or suggest a course of action and the fight is on. Then you find yourself defending the larger goal from a death by a thousand cuts. This  puts you on the hook for coming up with answers and responses for each individual attack. That’s not the point here. 
       
The protests are not about specific solutions or even specific problems because it’s not their JOB to write laws or identify economic influences. That’s what politicians and experts are FOR. What we have is a crop of cowardly pols who are so afraid of attack ads that they can’t even speak to the nation’s real problems. OWS is pushing for exactly that – SPEAK! Speak for us! Don’t cow out and make the protesters do your dirty work so you can skate during the next election cycle because – hey, you didn’t say it, the protesters did. Kudos to OWS for not letting the pols off the hook. It’s about time someone on the ground said “HEY! We voted for you, now do your job!”
             
OWS has one simple message that isn’t being reported because the media doesn’t know what to do with it. “Talk about US!” It’s not about X law or Y regulation or Z treaty or C politician. It’s about US. The 99% of Americans who’ve been milked by the 1% for 30 years with government help. It's about us feeling like those farmed bodies in "The Matrix" - biological, economic units formerly known as humans that exist to power the Powers. It’s about talking about the Great Lie: that the 1% got there because they’re just that much more awesome than everyone else and the free market works. It’s about the fact that we don’t HAVE a free market – we have a market with not just a thumb, but an entire Congress weighing down the scale on behalf of the moneyed. It’s not about changing a law, it’s about changing the conversation from illusory and fleeting deficits that only matter on paper (within limits, of course) and talking instead about American families and workers who can’t keep up because the system isn’t working – it’s working against them. 
      
OWS isn’t about making specific demands or proposing solutions, it’s about pointing fingers at the people we elected to do that for us. We the People don’t have the information and we know that. We CAN’T propose solutions because so much of the problem exists under the sheets where politicians and billionaires frolic out of our sight. It’s about making those politicians think about US for a change, and reminding them that the Koch brothers might have more money than a dozen third world countries combined, but they still only have 2 votes. Our leaders have the information and the resources to make changes and IT’S THEIR JOB! OWS is about reminding them of that. And in the process, hopefully, reminding us of that too. And reminding Americans that we all matter, and we can do better.  

Monday, August 29, 2011

Values, Worth, and the Two-party System

            Like it or not, we have a two-party political system and those two parties are the Democrats and the Republicans.  Now keep in mind that much of the platforms of the respective parties has changed considerably over the years, to the point that they are almost reversed in some areas.  This was put into focus by ex-Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter who (despite bungling the press pretty badly) quite legitimately and admirably switched sides when he realized that the Republican party had moved so far right that his steadily-held values were no longer represented by the Grand Old Party. 
            That being said, I’ve boiled it down to the one most fundamental difference that underlies the views and positions of the parties in their current incarnations.  I know, I know, there are SCADS of policy differences and party line variations, but they all really come down to one tiny kernel of Big Bang importance: worth. Or, I suppose, more accurately: worthiness.  The principle underlying the GOP platform focuses on who Republicans deem worthy. The Democratic platform begins with the assumption that everyone is equally worthy. And before you start, I know full well that there are precious few actual, live politicians who fully embrace either platform if they think it will play badly in the press or cost them votes back home. Truth be told, I doubt there are very many who have even considered this particular value in the Parade of Political Values. I know this.  But the insight (or lack thereof) of individual humans doesn’t negate the foundational principles of the parties they represent (and consequently the policies they embrace).
            So to begin this discussion, allow me to identify two very different Republican factions.  There are money Republicans and there are social Republicans.  Money Republicans are the Koch Brothers, the Bushes, the Daddy Warbuckses and the Trumps who have oodles of dough and spend more on their dogs than an increasing number of Americans make in a year. And they want to keep it.  The system is working for them, and (understandably) they like it that way.  They pull the strings, control the rules, and continue raking in the bucks and the power.  These are the folks who by and large (despite the manufactured and exaggerated ‘hardships’ of their contracted-to-be-bestsellers memoires) came from positions of advantage and were raised to believe that they earned everything that was specially-made and handed to them literally on silver platters.  The artificial bootstrap story. The “I made it big all by myself” tales that ignore or minimize the truckloads of leg-ups they had in life. Of course there are a few exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. For the most part, even in America, the rich and powerful don’t come from the gutter. They come at worst from the middle class, the majority, and the inner-workings of a system designed to be as unseen as the real world was to Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. It is a mythology drafted and meticulously carried out to convince the privileged that they deserve everything they have.  And I do not claim that these folks didn’t work for their successes – I truly appreciate the effort and hours and stress that Trump and Hilton and others put into their businesses.  I simply say – you had the opportunity to be successful built up under you, so despite the fact that you do work for your returns, you most assuredly did not climb out of the gutter by the sheer sweat of your own brow.
            The money Republicans believe this mythology, and it tells them that if they can do it, anyone can do it if they work hard enough.  Therefore, the story goes, if you aren’t successful, it’s just because you’re not working hard enough.  Therefore, you are unworthy.  If only you were as industrious as they, you could be just as successful.  This leads to judgments about who is deserving, and unfortunately becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prediction.  If you were worthy, you would be successful.  Because you are not successful, you are not worthy. No way out.
            The social Republicans, on the other hand, tend to be the sort of bubble-wrapped suburban conformists who carry a view of what the “right” way of doing things is. These folks are self-congratulatory and slightly deluded in the same way as the money Republicans, but since they can’t generally feel financially superior, they define success as propriety by their own standards in order to be morally or socially superior. This line of thinking says that you marry someone of the opposite sex, produce children, buy a  house and furniture and a couple of cars, drive and spend, have picnics, play baseball, and have a nice, respectable job with a nice respectable benefits package, mow your lawn, and go to church on Sunday, that’s The American Dream and you are therefore contributing to the betterment of society. For many, this is fine and leads to nothing worse than being boring dinner guests, but for a growing segment of the population, this becomes a line of demarcation like the edge of a demilitarized zone. Everything outside becomes bad, threatening, and destructive to the very fabric of society. Fear of a thing is almost universally worse than the thing itself, and when people  cocoon themselves in a cozy little suburb and shut out the world, the world seems to become terrifying and must be controlled at all costs. I often wonder how many people who take this view do so simply because they cannot convince their souls that their lives are as satisfying as they think they have to believe they are, and just need everyone else to espouse the same values in order to maintain them. But I digress.  Social Republicans are becoming cornered-dog-like in a rising passion of resistance to everything on the other side of that line. Muslims, gays, teen mothers, the poor, the mentally ill, immigrants, and whatever enemy has yet to be named. And they are jealously guarding their turf against any legitimation of views other than their own. Understandably, because those other views threaten to expose the painted dome they’ve enclosed themselves in.
            So what does all this  mean politically for the GOP? It means that there are symbiotic value judgments on both sides. The money Republicans judge the needy as generally unworthy of help, and the social Republicans judge the different as unworthy of tolerance.  In some ways I think the social Republicans are more dangerous to civilized society both because there are more of them than the moneys, but also because their position isn’t just about help or support, but the very existence of the Others. Of the moneys, I fully acknowledge their due for charitable giving. I would never claim that no wealthy Republican ever gave to a non-self-serving cause, but mention that the help could be more productive and make a bigger difference with government intervention and they will be apoplectic before you can say Rockefeller. 
Even in help to the needy, the money Republican view is that help should be a personal decision so that the person doing the helping can decide for themselves who is deserving and who is not. Social Republicans do the same thing.  Help for the elderly and the injured soldier – of course! No problem, they’re deserving.  Help for the drug-addicted, poverty-stricken, or uneducated? Mmmmm …. Not so much. Maybe if we can tailor the help to only help the ones who were completely faultless in their circumstances. Helping poor children? Maybe – how many are there? Is it the mother’s fault they’re poor? Have they ever done bad things?  What’s their immigration status? We’ll have to see about that. The uneducated? Well, is it their own fault or are they victims of someone else? Is that someone else a parent who’s illegally here? Did they drop out of school? Get pregnant at the Prom? Then no. Otherwise, maybe. We’ll have to decide if they deserve it; if we think they’ll make good enough use of the help.  Chances are, probably not.

I also harbor no particular delusions about the puppies-and-rainbows version of the Democratic view of worth. Yes, it may start with the premise that everyone is worthy, but this also diverges into two problems. The first is that this view implies that if everyone has equal opportunity, then everyone can achieve equally. The second is that this view easily slides into an extreme-left social view that is as potentially destructive as the extreme-right; when too many social resources are allocated to lower-achievers, then social motivation crumbles.
I’m sure I’ve engendered a good bit of anger here, but this is my blog. Don’t like it? There’s a comment function. The first problem with the Democratic view is this equal-opportunity-means-equal-achievement idea. Which sounds very noble and very American and is fundamentally a good place to start. People should not be held back in our society simply because they weren’t born into white, middle class, educated, propertied families. But the basic idea that all achievement differentials can be traced to opportunity is overly simplistic and can – perversely – be very disempowering and dehumanizing to some. The fact is that not everyone can achieve by the same standards, and not everyone wants to. People have different values. And that’s a beautiful thing. Society doesn’t need all doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. We need janitors, baristas, mechanics, hair stylists, lifeguards, the guy who holds the “Stop/Slow” signs at construction sites. And many people don’t have either the intellectual capacity or the desire to devote themselves to years of education and training. I address this is the “BBQs” post from June, so I won’t go further with it here.
I will, however, note that many self-described liberals accept that capitalism and inherited wealth, and personal responsibility are all fine and valuable things and do not want the fully socialist government that conservatives seem to think we all want. Most of us want balance. We want government to work for all people, not just the powerful. We think that people deserve to be housed, fed, and cared for in times of need regardless of their position in society. We do not want our lives, or anyone else’s lives, consumed by the government. Nor do we want our lives to rise or fall on whether it’s profitable. There is a wide swath of operable society between the right-wing ‘pay for it yourself or die in the street’ mentality and the left-wing ‘government should provide everything and make everyone share nice’ view. Neither is functional and neither is complete. Capitalism is not the enemy. UNREGULATED capitalism is. Socialism is not the enemy. UNCONSTRAINED socialism is.

But to return to my fundamental point – human worth. It may be a part of the political party system that neither side really wants to talk about, but let’s face it – it’s really the Republicans who will have a harder time admitting that their policies boil down to judgments of worth. And I suspect that – ironically – it is the social Republicans who will have the most trouble with this analysis. The money Republicans seem less apologetic about their value judgments because the underlying thought process equates money with effort. Therefore in the mind of a money Republican, there’s nothing immoral about denigrating those who have less money because they have put forth less effort.
The social Republicans, though, face a different sort of resistance. Their value judgment is rooted in Christian morality and the social order. This makes it infinitely more problematic for a social Republican to admit that they are doing some very unchristian things. But not impossible. After all, who is better at judging others unworthy without quite admitting it than Christians?

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Adam and Steve

I’ve always been an advocate of gay rights, and on the heels of the New York vote to legalize same-sex marriage, I’ve been listening to and reading a lot of commentary. Having done extensive research on the topic, little of the discussion was new to me. Typically I dismiss the biblical rationale as unfit for a civic discussion. Not that the Bible should be dismissed as a personal guide, but it has no place in government – like it or not. But this time I started wondering a little more about what the Bible-thumpers were really saying and why. And that took me down an interesting path. The funny thing about this is that gay marriage is really the last place where it seems ok (even expected) to bring the Bible front and center in a political discussion. Even abortion opponents can only go to church doctrines and Vatican pronouncements – the Bible just doesn’t talk about it. But gay marriage? BIBLE BIBLE BIBLE all the way.
So I’d like to share a couple of thoughts about the Bible and gay marriage. There are only about 6 passages in the Bible that even arguably have anything to do with homosexuality and the Bible doesn’t invoke marriage at all. It’s just a background civic construct that seems to be achieved simply be declaration, not a defined “thing” and certainly not in any sort of ‘ordained by God’ kind of way. Sodom and Gomorrah? Every scholar with any understanding knows it wasn’t about the gay sex, it was about the lack of hospitality. The gay sex part was about domination of strangers who deserved welcome.  And we can’t rely on anything Lot said or did – he wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box. I suspect he was a little mentally challenged, truth be told. Letters from Paul to random people were just that - what some guy thought, not bearing any sort of divinity or inherent truth.  Leviticus is all about ritual and kosherite law – not broader concepts of sin or God, telling people how to live ritually. Leviticus’ declaration that man lying with man was an ‘abomination’ is surrounded by other, equal abominations like shaving your beard, not eating the fruit of newly-planted trees until their fourth year, and not committing adultery on pain of death. Interestingly, the biblical prohibition against homosexuality is VERY specifically a ban on male homosexuality (“if a man also lieth with mankind as he lie with a woman” Lev. 20:13) not on lesbians.
But the biggie is Adam and Eve (oft noted as “not Adam and Steve or Madame and Eve”).  And leaving aside the fact that there are at least two and probably three distinct genesis stories in the book of Genesis, as well as the obvious fact that Adam and Eve were very obviously not (and obviously not intended to be) the first people on Earth (since Cain and Abel took wives and Cain was marked on his face so all those other people would recognize him), here are a few thoughts that I’ve never heard make their way into the conversation. I give them to you not to challenge the Bible itself or the word of God or Christianity (since Christ never even mentioned it), but to challenge the hateful and judgmental use by people seeking some noble reason for their own fears.

1)      Adam and Eve weren’t married. In fact, it could be said that they were twins (same genetic fabric). Ignoring the super-tight incestuous overtones of that, THEY WEREN’T MARRIED! They weren’t sexual beings at all in Eden. The Adam and Eve story is a virginity parable about “eating the fruit of knowledge.” “Knowing,” in the biblical sense, casts one out of the garden of innocence and irresponsibility, and into the wilderness of adulthood. But at any rate – even it was a place with walls and trees and they got thrown out – why? Why did they get thrown out? Because they became sexualized. They became aware of their own bodies and their own nudity and were banished. And childbirth was inflicted upon Eve as a punishment. There were no babies before that, and if they had followed the rules, probably never would have been. Babies were God’s punishment for not following the rules. Before that, God just borrowed spare parts to make more humans.
2)      SO – here’s another idea: how do you KNOW they weren’t gay when they were made? There was no sex or breeding in the garden and there doesn’t appear to be any reason to believe it was originally intended. They were companions, never intended to be romantic lovers. Even once they were cast out, if you believe the literal text, then they were ostensibly the only two people in the world. Well, gay or not gay, once the sex-switch has been flipped, sex is a powerful drive. Many, many gay people experiment with the opposite sex when their sexuality is developing, and straight people have often experimented with same-sex relationships as well. So now imagine that the only person available is (if you’re straight – the same sex as you ; if you’re gay – the opposite sex). Well, point one, how would you ever know that the relationship was less fulfilling than it could be with a more appropriate partner? And point two, so what? You’re the only two people ON EARTH! You’re going to get down, no matter how unappealing or less-than-fulfilling it is. The bare fact that they reproduced does not, in itself, speak to whether or not they were gay or straight – only that they were isolated and sexually aware, with no operative option to discover which gender they would choose as a partner.
3)      OK, so let’s presume that if God really did intend for Adam and Eve to propagate the species. It makes sense that they would be straight. But why does the genesis of the species operate in the social (biblical) consciousness as the terminal function? Why should we believe that the beginning of a journey indicates its end? And not only the end, but the only acceptable operation along the path? So God created two breeders to breed. Why would it offend that plan if some of the bred were not breeders? Is that all humans are? Breeders? We’re here to multiply? Wasn’t there a bunch of stuff in the Bible about honoring God and caring for each other and tending flocks and running the family farm and so forth? So it seems to me that God created a species with much more to do that just beget. But hey – if you want to think of humans as gerbils, go ahead. I prefer to see something unique in our mental capacity. In our ability to conceive of God in whatever meager way we can, in our abstractions and philosophies, we are more than our genitalia. When you start building a house, you lay a concrete or brick foundation. Then you build wooden floors and frames, add insulation, drywall, roofing, electrical wires, granite counters, and all the things that make it a home. Similarly, you begin a species with breeders and then move on to all the wondrous variety of people we have now.
4)      God is genderless. God is not “both man and woman” – God is more than that. But if that’s all you can get your mind around, it’s a useful framework. So what that means is that God is not gay or straight, because God is both gay AND straight AND bisexual AND asexual. If we are created in God’s image and God is genderless, then it’s a shameful fallacy to imagine that God must exist (even if you accept that God is not an old man with a beard) as EITHER a straight man or a straight woman. God is neither and both and more. Is god reproductive? Perhaps through His creations. Does God feel romantic love? If we are created in her image, then we must assume so. If so, why is the love of God so limited by the flawed representations that we are? The nature of God is a huge and unresolvable question, but I cannot conceive of God as having a gender or suffering from the kind of self-hate that people who think “God Hates Fags” must imagine s/he feels. If there is no gender, there is no opposite gender. Therefore, no hetero or homosexuality. Therefore no dominance of one over the other in goal. Only in initiating functionality (creating breeders to make more humans at the beginning).
5)      And finally, homosexuality is only all about sex to people who don’t understand it or who fear it. To gay people, it’s about love. It’s about walking into a room and seeing that one person you haven’t met yet who makes your heart pound and your eyes glaze over. The one person you glance at from the corner of your eyes as you pose and preen and laugh and do everything you can think of to make them notice you. It’s about the person you think about when you imagine your old age and your quiet moments. Sex is sex and it’s a critical part of most relationships, of course. But it’s not what defines a person. Except to other people.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Food for thought: BBQs


I can’t help noticing that the leading superstars of the uber-conservative Tea Party movement share something. They’re hot women. Of course, of course, there are also men and non-hot women, but none of them seem to have moved to the front of the line in terms of being marquee names. “Hmmm,” I think to myself. I wonder what this is about. It’s always rewarding to see women succeed the way Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Nikki Haley have, but exponentially more disappointing when we see that these women really do seem to be there just because they look good, and not because they offer actual solutions or legitimate claims to public office. So I ponder a bit. Amidst the head-shaking, face-palming, shudder-inducing humiliation heaped upon women by the Brainless Beauty Queens who never met a camera they didn’t like, something else is going on. I admit here that I know relatively little about Nikki Haley and have only heard of a few bad moves, so for current purposes I will exempt her from the BBQs, pending further information.
            What is it that makes women like Bachmann and Palin so very fundable, so endorsable, so interviewable, and yet so utterly embarrassing and so violently out of touch with what one of them termed “real America” (albeit without quite explaining what “real America” is)? I hear from them the singular voice of those who have benefitted from the system as-is. They are pretty, white, middle- to upper-class, not too educated to be threatening, but educated enough to think themselves qualified for anything. They are the product of the “of course you can do it, honey!” world where they have never been challenged as members and beneficiaries of society. Their confidence may be based on the kind of shallow achievements that pass for measures of personal success in the privileged status quo, but it is real confidence nonetheless. They are convinced they are superior because they’ve mastered the kiddie pool.
            And therein lies the rub. They have been successful at blocks and Go Fish, so they believe unquestionably in their own abilities. But they don’t have the wherewithal to know or explore or understand how little they actually know or understand. And no one has ever bothered to do more than pat them on their coiffed little heads cuz they’re so cute. The voice they share is “it works for me and my husband thinks I’m super, so it must be a good system.” These women have never faced the kinds of social barriers and challenges that inform the best of us.
I think this is why their voices carry so far and get so much response. To them, everything is simple, black-and-white, ‘cause-the-Bible-tells-me-so objective truth. There is something deeply appealing about that to voters who are consumed by daily life, unable or unwilling to invest the time and energy it takes to wheedle a nugget of unsatisfying truth from the enormous and complex issues we face in government. The absolute certainty with which these women speak can be convincing, and is certainly better suited for news trailers and sound bites than the reality of the circumstances. But this does a great disservice not only to the BBQs, but to all of their followers who find refuge in the oversimplifications. They are denied the depth and breadth of information that is necessary to truly understand.
The BBQs will never understand this because neither has ever been a poor black child with a drug-addicted mother and a father in jail. None has ever been poor white trash living in a run-down trailer park where hope goes to die. None has ever had check the bank account before heading to the emergency room or asked “is it really bad enough to justify the copay”? None has had to live in a forgotten ghetto under the smokestacks or in public housing. None has had to swallow her pride and admit that she can’t feed her child without help. None has had to watch her dreams pass her by because the resources weren’t there or the opportunities went to someone prettier, better dressed, better socially placed, better educated.
Similarly the invocation of God is a personal arrogance in many ways. It’s a way of saying “there must be a God because I’m a good girl and I got married and have a nice house and lots of  babies, so see? Good people get rewarded and bad people get punished.” Really? So there are no good poor people or bad rich people? Your scrubbed and polished cookie-cutter suburbs harbor no wife-beaters, animal abusers, cheaters, liars, embezzlers, tax cheats, or (gasp!) liberals? But nevertheless, the perspective that they’re blessed because they’re better than other people persists. Even if they don’t realize that’s the thought process, it is. Bachmann was even waiting for word from Above about whether to run or not and whom to hire. I never realized God ran an HR firm.
What I hear is the carefully cultivated (by the others who similarly benefit from the status quo) outrage of one who has reaped the benefits and been fully shielded from the costs. Sure – your life might have been rosy even if that’s not the narrative you’re selling right now, but you have no idea how many people’s lives have been destroyed by the systems you so obliviously benefit from. So the crying about the unfair tax system, abortion rights, Planned Parenthood, the evil EPA, and other such conservative outcries really are no more than “keep things as they are, because they work for me, and all you have to do is be as good as me and they’ll work for you too.”
And maybe that’s the truest, most fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are those for whom the system works (or who have come to believe that it does). Liberals see a system that works excessively well for some at unacceptable cost to others. I don’t believe in the idea of a fully level playing field. I don’t believe that everyone can achieve the same thing to the same degree if given the same opportunities. There are people who simply lack the capacity to be certain things that have been defined as ‘success.’ There are also, obviously, people who have the capacity but just don’t use it. And there are lots and lots of people who DO have the capacity to succeed but life and society get in the way.
The support these women never see in the background of their “going rogue”ness and their carefully cultivated outsider self-image is the full support of The System. The old guard of power, money, and status. All the people and institutions they think they are rebelling against are the scaffolding upon which their positions are built. And the status quo supports them because they give a much better face to The System than someone like Newt Gingrich or Jim DeMint. So the saddest part of all of this is that these women are basically social patsies. They’re put face-forward to defend the status quo and handed a rebel-sounding script, sent out into the paparazzi and left to embarrass themselves (and us) with their utter lack of knowledge, understanding, or self-awareness.
So – to the privileged BBQs who will never see this, and would never understand it if they did, I say: I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry that you have missed so much rich and rewarding life by staying in your safe little bubbles where people pat you on the head and promise you that you’re just the smartest little thing. Where you can derisively blame the “lamestream media” for making you look bad and believe that those who criticize you are inherently flawed or stupid or mean or whatever THEIR problem is. Because you will never see that they send you out to be the smartest little thing in the backyard while the grownups talk. You are being manipulated by your own ignorance, and the shame you bring to women is deep and intense. You can’t see the advantages you’ve had, so you can’t see how little you understand or how tied you are to the inequities of the system. You don’t understand real struggle or the ugly, desperate reasons people make the choices they make. Even I don’t understand real struggle, but I understand more than you do because of that. Because I can say “I don’t know your life, tell me.” And that’s something you can’t do. Because to know how hopeless the world can look, how little opportunity there really is for the vast majority of Americans, and how limitless even those few opportunities seem to people of other nations, you would have to question the status quo. And since it worked for you, questioning it would undo your whole perspective. And sadly, I fear that the primary reason why that would be so devastating to you is your ego. And ego is never a good reason to fail so miserably to understand those you claim to represent (or claim you should), nor is it a good judge of public policy. It certainly won’t help you acquire the humility and empathy necessary to see that your success is not the product of your own superness, but of the advantages you received through no fault or act of your own.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Who’s Guarding the Henhouse? How government accountability goes hand-in-hand with topheavy departments and bloated payrolls.



You know what they say: be careful what you wish for.  That goes double in government.  And right now we’re seeing some simultaneous fallout from and aggravation of the public wishing for the ephemeral illusion of “accountability” in government.  Now don’t get me wrong – anyone charged with doing a thing for pay, and especially those who are charged with serving the public for tax-pay, should be accountable for their work.  Unfortunately “accountability” has become a red herring.  Everyone must be endlessly accountable to everyone for everything all the time, and open to criticism from anywhere about what they do.  (If I haven’t already posted something about how the judiciary should emphatically NOT be accountable to the public, I will soon.) OK. Fine. That’s Thing 1.
            So let’s look at Thing 2. Thing 2 is the recession-and-GOP-driven neurosis about government payrolls.  It’s a recession, I get it. See prior post about government not being a business. BUT – just because you see a big number somewhere doesn’t mean that number must be inherently inflated or illegitimate because it’s big. That’s what’s happening now with state and federal employees.  GOP officials all over the country, and Tea Partiers in particular, armchair-politicianed and minority-party-grandstanded themselves into a corner by yelling from sea  to shining sea about cutting budgets/deficits/spending/entitlements/etc. Then America called their bluff.  Now they’re in office going “oh shit – I can’t actually do anything about this stuff, now what?” So – they look for a big number and an easy enemy, and come up with government workers. 
            As in every job, there are many, many dedicated individuals who pursue their tasks diligently and caringly. There are also jackasses. They are everywhere and they are part of the fabric of human existence. And BTW America – from what I’ve seen, a lot of you calling DMV and postal workers names had it coming! I’ve seen you acting like jackasses yourselves, so you don’t get to feel put-out when someone gives it back to you. But I digress. The point is, “government payroll” – when taken as a whole – tends to be a big number, and everyone in society has encountered a jackass at some agency or other, so officials have set about turning working people against each other. The better to rob you with, my dear.
            So now we’ve got the litany of evils about government workers.  See prior post about Wisconsin and the GOP hypocrisy of union-busting there. Next on the list, though, is how top-heavy government agencies are. There are X managers for every Y employees and that’s so clearly unreasonable that something must be wrong and we’re getting fleeced and DAMMIT they’re not gonna take it anymore!
Well, OK. What’s the remedy? ACCOUNTABILITY!! We’re spending thousands/ millions/ gazillions on this project or that agency or this other goal, and someone should be accountable for how that money gets spent! Well, yes. And odds are that someone is. Odds are that after multiple bites at this particular apple over the past dozen decades or so, that many people are. Because every time some administration has an accountability-gasm, they start putting new people into new places to do new things designed to “oversee” or “monitor” or “regulate” what everyone else is doing, including the ten people who were previously appointed to oversee, monitor, and regulate the same thing. So now every time an agency does something, every second of every employee’s time and every consideration of every step of every committee for every change of anything anywhere has to be accounted for multiple times.
Guess what that means. That means that every time one of these accountability pimps puts another measure in place, the agency has to restructure its work flow to “be accountable” to one more person for one more thing. So we get lots and lots of people watching a henhouse where the hens can do nothing but report and track and “be accountable,” and then we get the incessant hue and cry about how inefficient the government is – how they can’t seem to do anything without twelve forms filled out in triplicate, filed with four different offices, approved by nine managers, sent to committee, sent back, reassigned, expired, resubmitted, reassigned again, lost, found, and buried in peat moss. You got what you asked for.
There are lots of people in government whose jobs are to manage the accountability. They collect information about what other people think will be the timelines or costs or outcomes or risks for a project, and what’s actually happening.  They assemble it, analyze it, move it around, prepare reports for the project managers, the enterprise managers, the division managers, the department managers, the committees, the boards, the legislators, and the public.  That’s their job: being accountable. There are often more of these people than there are people being accounted for.  
And once again the hue and cry has gone up about topheavy/ bloated/ unsustainable/ socialist government payrolls and how someone should have to be accountable and DAMMIT they’re not gonna take anymore! So here we sit. Waiting for the next rule change or revolutionary piece of legislation  that tells us we need one more report to go to some new committee who will appoint some new overlord to look at reports and save the world. Meanwhile some of us try to fit in a little bit of actual productivity amongst all the accounting. Bawk bawk.

Complainers - the good, the bad, and the ugly

            “Quit complaining”. How many times have we all heard and said that. Just stop complaining, it’s not that bad. It’s better than it was before. It’s fine – you’ll get used to it. Whatever the incarnation, there’s a pervasive cultural sense that complaining is bad, useless, destructive, polarizing, or paralyzing. I disagree.
            I have a political blog elsewhere, so I won’t get into it, but very much on-point is the blind “American Exceptionalism” style of non-campaigning that Sarah Palin has come to symbolize. The “everything is great and perfect and wonderful” idea that any complaints or suggestions are not only unwarranted, but unpatriotic and potentially dangerous. So BIG SMILES everyone! Don your flag pins and put the hooks in the sides of your mouth so the rest of the world can see our bright, shining, contented faces. But like the family Christmas card that shows the perfect, loving family that is bitterly divorced by April, superficial declarations of perfection are the real danger.
            Yes, I said it. Saying everything is wonderful is dangerous.  Of course sometimes things ARE wonderful, and some things are perfect for the circumstances, but society is like evolution, and suffers the same misperceptions.  And, interestingly, from many of the same people.  The people who think that there is a static ideal somewhere.  That Man is the perfect animal that evolution has been struggling for millennia to achieve. That America is the equivalent: the embodiment of the progress of a thousand generations of fits-and-starts and experiments. Here we are, World! Your Golden Child, your epitome of all things, your 42. 
            But, ladies and germs, evolution and society are not static things. They are very dynamic processes of adapting and changing to suit changing circumstances.  What may have worked fine during the Industrial Revolution or the expansion of Manifest Destiny is badly out of step with modern society.  Very few, I suspect, would claim otherwise, despite the recent bellyaching about debtor’s prisons and child labor laws and environmental regulations. We live in This world. Not That one. In order to survive in This world, we have to adapt to it, and adaptation means change. I believe this is what we are seeing in the Middle East and parts of Africa – societies mired in That world struggling to adapt to This one. Unfortunately, societies change exponentially faster than biology does and humans as a species are generally unwilling to give up power just because it no longer serves the purposes of the culture.
            Which brings me back to complaining.  Complaining is a recognition (if it’s constructive) that something is not what it could be, is not functioning the way it should, or is somehow flawed.  Without seeing the flaws in a thing, you cannot fix them.  If the downstairs tenant doesn’t complain about the dripping water in the ceiling, the manager doesn’t know that the upstairs plumbing is rotted out and the whole floor is about to collapse.  If no one complains about slavery, abolition never happens. If no one complains about the fact that their drinking water catches fire, no one knows that the natural gas mine is leaking flammable gas all over town until it blows up and kills everyone in sight. 
            Complaints (again, if they are constructive) drive clearer visions of weakness and thus space for improvement. You can’t improve what you think is perfect.  So while it may sound very Wal-Mart American, “American exceptionalism” desperately needs to take its own advice. America is exceptional. It is a unique experiment in many ways, and an evolving one. The exceptionalism is that evolution. Our founders build a government that is flexible enough to stand the ages, but built in enough deliberative process and mitigating influences to slow the changes to a manageable pace, avoiding the violent overhauls going on in less adaptable nations. BUT. Being exceptional is not the same as being perfect.  People work to fix, change, grow, and perfect systems and things they care about. Things they want to be the best they can be. By claiming that everything is perfect (or would be, if only we had Republicans calling all the shots, as Palin and her ilk would have us believe) stunts the process of analysis and growth that is American Exceptionalism.  It prevents people from engaging critically  and asking “what can we do better”?
            Which, of course, is what that brand of  politician wants. They want people not to ask questions or think about things for themselves.  They want people to take their word for it, and rely on their judgment.  That way they can pretty much muck about however they want and as long as they wear flags and say American-y sounding things a lot and tell everyone how perfect things are, no one will get in the way with all those pesky questions and ideas. 
            So I say – RISE UP, COMPLAINERS!! Seize your power and be heard! Complain, whine, bitch, mutter, grumble, and most importantly – SUGGEST CHANGE! Even if you don’t know how to solve a problem, GET INVOLVED and be part of the discussion. People can only think what they think – so share what you think! But you must also be open to hear what others think. Sometimes things simply can’t be fixed, because the harm done by the alternative is worse, and you must be prepared to accept that. But even in that, you can help. If there is some piece of the puzzle that is particularly troubling that can be mitigated, COMPLAIN ABOUT IT! Make someone look and say “you know what, you’re right, maybe if we just tweaked this a little it would be better”.  And when someone calls you unpatriotic, you call them the same. This country was founded with an artfully designed complaint system built in.  The very forces that drove the founders to complain about England strenuously enough to revolt and try a better way continue to operate. And they designed it that way. We can go to court, we can give every official the bum’s rush, and we can amend the very Constitution that allows all of this. If we stop looking for ways to improve, we go the way of the dodo. And while Palin may already be there, I’d just as soon not have my country follow.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Wisconsin's REAL cheese

OK so in case you've been living in your car like lots of foreclosed former-homeowners, you've heard something about some stuff going on in Wisconsin. You've probably also heard about how it's all because of those greedy, shiftless state workers and those manipulative, duty-shirking Democrats all cohooting to try to bring the state to its knees. (to what end, we're not really sure, but that's not really important - all that really matters is that Glenn Beck can draw a chalk line from a librarian in Wisconsin to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt so they must be really bad)
So - here's what I see.  There are two really big, histrionic charges hurled routinely at the left from the right.  First, that lefties are all about enabling the lazy and unwilling to take personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And second, that the left aims to bring democracy crashing down and replace it with a socialist nightmare where everyone has to share the same pool of government-told-ya stuff. All backed up with "fiscal responsibility" banners.
Let's now look very briefly at the bottom line of the dispute in Wisconsin.  Leaving aside the fact that none of the arguments are legitimate because the "budget crisis" was caused in large part by Governor Walker and the GOP granting huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy and that the actual goal is just elimination of collective bargaining, it comes down to one major rallying cry: the state is "broke" (see the post called "Government is NOT a Business") and can't afford its pension plan or benefits for workers. 

Putting those two together, we get this -
1) the right is the side of personal responsibility, the left wants no consequences for anyone's actions.  Well folks, the pension fund is a little short because the government of the state failed to fulfill its obligations to invest and protect the money that was put in the fund by the employees by way of deferred compensation. This means that part of the 'salary' of every state worker was $X that would be paid later - that's how WI pension works. So the state dropped the ball and borrowed money from the pension funds, and now that they're busy cutting everything and everyone in sight, state workers are choosing to retire rather than get screwed by this short-sighted blame-mongering. So suddenly what we're seeing is that the workers didn't fail - the state government did.  The consequence of that should be the political fallout of having to raise taxes (at least on the wealthy) to pay for THEIR OWN mistakes. So what is the GOP doing in the face of facing personal responsibility? Shifting blame to the people who've worked for the government for 30+ years instead of 2.  Klassy folks. Way to stay on message.
and
2) the right is the defender of democracy, where everyone succeeds or fails on their own, the left is the side of pooled resources and socialism and everyone having to depend on the government for everything.  And yet, again, because of government mismanagement, the GOP is fighting tooth and nail to hang the workers out to dry, demanding that they balance the budget for everyone else by surrendering their rights to negotiate in the marketplace in order to pass on the aforementioned tax cuts to the rich.  And, well, to everyone, since apparently the entire future of all of Wisconsin hangs in the balance, depending on state workers to sacrifice for the benefit of everyone else. Wait - if I knew how to make a head-shaking emoticon, I would put one here.  So..... the workers who bargained for their free-market compensation should graciously take a dive so that you can give more money to someone else, but it's the LEFT that's all about socialism?  These people work for their money, bargain for their benefits, and yet are being villainized for not putting more money into someone else's pocket? Once again - way to stay on message.

Hardly revolutionary news, but the GOP are lying to America's face and they aren't even really bothering to try to do it well anymore. Kind of like the guy who comes home with a hooker and says he's completely faithful.  What actually concerns me is how many Americans are saying "well OK then, your sister can stay a few weeks, just til she gets on her feet."

Sunday, February 20, 2011

GOP Tax Policy and Other Fairy Tales

OK so I know this is a little out of date now, but the point remains worth making.

Let’s talk about the Republican economic hypocrisy. This could be a long litany of the many examples of this (increasing the deficit during every administration since Eisenhower, and by exponentially more than the only 4 Dems to increase it at all since Wilson (in 1913) comes to mind), but no, I just want to mention the recent “taxes kill jobs” obsession that pervades despite all the evidence to the contrary. The tagline of the 2010 election was “jobs jobs jobs” and the causal “tax reduction” cry.  The story goes like this: business aren’t hiring because of “tax uncertainty” so the economy remains sluggish and all those multinational corporations are sitting on obscene piles of cash because they’re just terrified that they might have to face a tax increase – ANY tax increase.
            Let’s start with that statement just by itself and take a whiz-bang tour through federal taxation.[1]
1.      The “tax rate” is actually the marginal tax rate. It’s not the rate that a payor actually pays, it’s the rate applied only to the income in that bracket. So if your marginal tax rate is 20% (I’m making up numbers) because you made $100,001 last year and the 20% tax rate is for the “$100,000 - $150,000” bracket, then you pay 20% tax on that $1. Not on $100,001 -- on $1. Below that you pay exactly what everyone else does on that money. Thusly:
a.       $0 - $20k               5%
b.      $20,001 - $50k      10%
c.       $50,001 - $100k    15%
So if you made $100,001, your taxes will be:
      20,000*5%=1000
      30,000*10%=3000
      50,000*15%=7500
      1*20%=0.20
Total: $11,500.20  (or 11 ½% of your taxable income)
(This is the basic model of how income tax works. Corporate taxes are understandably much more complex, but let’s start there)

Which is the next point. This is NOT “I made $100,001 last year so I pay tax on that.” No you don’t. No one does, and they shouldn’t.  Because when you do your taxes, you take either a standard deduction or itemized deductions.  And the truth is that the higher your tax bracket, the greater percentage of your income is deductions, owing partly to the things that you may be doing with your money (charity, employees, health care, etc.) and partly to the fact that the wealthy generally have lawyers, accountants, and/or tax advisors who are skilled at shuffling income to reduce taxable income. So of that $100,001 you made last year, you may be reporting something like $75,000 in taxable income (again – making up numbers).  So not only are you NOT actually PAYING the 20% tax rate on your income, you’re not paying ANYTHING on a portion of that income to begin with. 
This is even more significant for corporations who, despite endless weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the high corporate tax rates, almost never pay those rates on anything, and often pay nothing at all due to the multitude of loopholes and deductions available.

            Which brings me back to my initial point.  The GOP spent vast sums of corporate money in 2010 to convince people that companies weren’t hiring because the Bush tax cut issue was unsettled. Let’s put aside the absurdity of that for a moment (companies hire who they need to do what they need when they need it based on demand and economic outlook, not based on a largely fictional tax rate) and look at the reality of the landscape.  Lo and behold, the GOP may actually be right about this one. But not for the reasons they’ve been peddling.  Companies may have actually been delaying hiring decisions (in small part) pending the tax package outcome, but consider this: nearly[2] all of the costs of having employees are deductible.  So, in fact, the tax rate has little or no effect on hiring at all, since almost nothing a company pays to an employee (or for them) is taxable. But also consider the impact of a REDUCED tax rate on that same dynamic. The deduction you get for payments to employees is reduced, so the benefit of hiring a tax deduction is diminished.  So what the GOP says is “if they have to pay more taxes, they won’t pay employees” but what businesses are looking at (whether they admit it or not) is “if the tax rate goes UP, the benefit of the deduction is more, but if the GOP cuts the tax rate DOWN, then I won’t get as much of a benefit.”
            Now, let’s get into a little more advanced stuff. The capital gains rate, which was slashed under Bush and is on the table for an increase now. Villainized, of course, as stifling investment. Capital gains tax is paid on investment income like interest or increased value of assets you sold (subject to lots more exclusions, but that’s the idea).  Put them together, and the picture becomes: increase the tax (and thus decrease the incentive to buy assets hoping they will generate income) and increase the tax on taxable income (thus incentivizing deductions) and you’ve got a double-edged sword creating double-edged incentives to hire employees rather than sending money off-shore to foreign banks and investments. 
            So where does that leave us? Besides, of course, with a GOP that has shown absolutely zero interest in doing anything related to jobs or the economy two months into their reign.  It leaves us with the Citizens United decision granting unfettered influence over elections to companies who want to hang onto their cash, send jobs overseas, cut benefits to workers (and hire illegal immigrants for less than that – Smithfield Pork, I’m looking at you), and tell you that it’s all the fault of the people trying to stop these very behaviors by using the tax system to motivate positive behaviors. 
Which is, after all, what tax deductions are all about in the first place. They’re a way to encourage socially beneficial behavior without requiring it. So higher tax rates on imports, on American companies’ overseas operations, and closing loopholes that allow companies to earn billions in profits by taking advantage of American society while paying a fraction of the cost of maintaining that society have always been relevant and proper uses of the tax code.  Unfortunately the GOP has been manufacturing the Kool-Aid that some Democrats seem to be drinking.  And certainly it’s been sold to the public so forcefully that a significant number of Americans seem to be believing this plot.  (Remember? The one that says a 3% increase in the income tax rate kills babies jobs?
            I am reminded of the first tenant of film and TV: suspension of disbelief.  Convince your audience that it’s more fun or beneficial to just lose themselves in the story, and they will follow along with you as you introduce implausible decision points and have bored housewives suddenly become super-spies. I see a similar dynamic here using the economic fear that pervades our country right now. People are looking for a handle on incredibly complex and dynamic situations, and the GOP is right there with a simple, bumper-sticker-worthy answer; it’s the taxes, stupid!  In the frightfully effective strategy of Glenn Beck, they’ve concocted an “C-B = A (and don’t look at anything else” formula that, in isolation, appears to at least make sense.  Even if it’s only a tiny portion of the story and told backwards.


{In the interests of full disclosure, I’m not fully convinced that the tax cuts affected hiring at all either way, but I write this to inject a framework into the conversation and at least introduce the idea.  So please, by all means, disagree. But don’t do it just because of the aforementioned weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, do it because you considered the actuality of the policy and business motivations and other factors. Thank you, and good night.}


[1] I wish to thank BoJack (if you need to know, you know) for teaching me everything I know about tax.  Which may amount to 1/10 of 1% of what there is to know, but considering I knew absolutely nothing before, I owe my knowledge to him.  However, he is not to blame for what I’ve done with that knowledge. All of the facts about operative tax policy are to his credit, but he is not to blame for my opinions about how to use that policy.  Kthxbai.
[2] I say “nearly” and “almost” just to hedge bets and allow a margin of error.  I think payroll taxes paid on employees are not deductible, but I’m not certain about that, and even so, they amount to something like 4% of a portion of salary and are not at issue in the Bush tax package. (BoJack: if you read this, could you clarify the deduction issue?)

Monday, February 7, 2011

Tea Party Feudalism (11/16/10)


            I think it needs to be said that the Tea Party is not only badly out of touch with the reality of America and its own preferred candidates, but they are also desperately deluded about the reality of their own positions.  If Tea partiers spent a fraction of the time considering the policies they advocate as they do on their costumes, some might see that they are not only supporting jaw-droppingly unqualified candidates, but also some very un-American policies.

            The Tea Party is not advocating a return to “traditional American values” in the Disney-fied sense of the oil paintings and great orations related to us in 6th grade history class (if, indeed, they still teach history). They are advocating a return to feudal England where the Haves have everything and the Have Nots die in the street crying “God Save the Queen.”  The real difference? Miniscule and diminishing.  American feudalism is rooted in an increasingly unbalanced “free market” where the brochure says anyone with gumption can succeed and hoard resources unto themselves and their heirs.  The English system, on the other hand, relied solely on family inheritance and ownership of money-making capacity. But the outcome is the same.
            The semi-secret catch in the free market myth is something felt more acutely by minorities, but increasingly by the middle class: generational wealth tips the scales.  Sure, there are the occasional fairy tales of The Guy Who Made It with little more than a dream and some ambition, but these are rare enough to be made into movies (The Pursuit of Happyness, for example). Outside these exceptions – which provide a pointing-place for the Haves as proof that the system works (and therefore that they are better than you) – most Americans are slipping further and further behind.  Meanwhile, the Haves continue to gain, hoarding power at levels that make it possible to build their own advantages into the systems that are then sold to us as a “free market,” disguising the fact that it is rigged to accelerate the funneling of resources right back to the people who made the rules because they had the money.  
            Meanwhile the rest of America is losing resources to those upper echelons, creating a situation where people in the middle class are losing their homes, losing their savings, and being forced to sell anything of value just to stay afloat. This leaves less (if anything) remaining for heirs to inherit, reducing their position and resource pool – and thus reducing the resource pool of their own heirs.  This increasing disparity in generational wealth has been studied as a factor in racial equalization, but it now affects Americans across the board in record numbers.  And there’s no end in sight, as Republicans continue to amplify the American myth and accelerate the redistribution of wealth upwards via protective policies. Not the Land of Opportunity we like to write songs about and give seminars about in other countries.

            Enter the Tea Party. Interestingly enough, made up almost exclusively of Have Nots who are convinced they have made it, and funded by Haves who feed off the ignorance of these self-satisfied minions and continue to tell them that they have made it! They’re American success stories! Why? Not really sure – most of them are unemployed or retired, so the measure of “making it” is a little fuzzy, but hey ... it sounds nice.
            Dressing up in costumes and crying for a return to the age of slavery, oppression of women, wanton pollution, industrialist robber barons, and 16 hour/52 week work lives, Tea Partiers merrily avoid any element of history they didn’t see in the theme park of Colonial Williamsburg, where the actors playing colonists are protected by labor laws, minimum wage, lead-free paint, and health insurance. Y’know, for a society that likes to say “those who don’t learn their history are bound to repeat it,” we’re sure doing a lot more repeating than learning.

            When it comes to the American Dream, we have flirted with it at times (maybe best during the post-war era), but we clearly haven’t gotten it right yet. It may turn out that “live and let live” is anathema to human nature if the let-ees are too different from the let-ors.  Democracy and the great Melting Pot may fade away into an interesting blip on the EKG of political history.  But I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. 

            We may be a young country, but we are a deliberate country.  We didn’t slip into ourselves over centuries of war and takeovers and turnovers and coups; we invaded, we settled, we rebelled, and we designed ourselves a government. Maybe not from whole cloth, but certainly from the better scraps.  Like children are shaped by their parents but destined to shuffle loose, America was informed by her mother (England – for those who slept through history) but set out to forge her own path and drive her own destiny, taking the best and rejecting what didn’t fit our burgeoning self-image. 
            This is why it pains me to hear so many refusing to respect those principles that we developed or imported.  Like hippies who grew up to be conservatives like their parents, leaving the rebellious, free loving, revolutionary spirit behind like faded tie-dyes, we seem to be facing a tide of fear-driven regression from those idealized goals of our collective national youth: liberty and justice for all.  Not for just the white, the male, the moneyed and landed, the Christian, or the heterosexual. ALL. Everyone. All of us. “One nation, indivisible.” 
            Too many voices on the extreme right (Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich) are preaching open, and sometimes violent, divisiveness.  With patronizing flattery and manufactured fear, they urge their followers to listen instead of think.  To take up arms instead of joining hands. To point fingers instead of finding solutions. And affirming that whatever unfounded, ignorant, hateful, fear-based opinion you’ve half-formed is the OBVIOUSLY correct/ patriotic/ reasonable/ intelligent/ whatever viewpoint (so don’t bother listening to those Lefty NoGoodNiks who want you to consider consequences or facts).
            I wonder – what would America be like if the founding fathers had embraced this ugly side of human nature, rather than designing a temperate, cooperative system?  I know, I know, they weren’t saints, the system wasn’t perfect, and we’ve made some terrible missteps along the way (Jim Crow comes to mind) and occasionally had some terrible outcomes, but isn’t that what growth is about? It’s not about popping from the womb with a PhD and a perfect soufflĂ© in hand, it’s about falling down and getting back up. It’s about burning your hand on the stove and never touching it again.  It’s about learning from your mistakes and not repeating them.  Where did we lose sight of this? When did we, as a society, decide to throw history to the wind and head breakneck down the perilous and damaged road behind us instead of looking forward and thinking about what we could do better?
            So how about we try the real old-fashioned way of doing things. Let’s stop sniping and digging in our heels to get our way, and actually engage in the debate.  Bring the ideas, recognize that there will be intractable disagreements, and DO THE WORK! Wrestle with the conflict, discuss the differences, and take a legitimate vote. By all means – get worked up! Get mad, get irritated, but USE that to develop your views and ENGAGE in the process. Because that’s where we learn where the weaknesses and failings of our best-laid plans lie.  I will refer readers (reader?) back to my first post regarding social disconnectivity here. Since that’s really why I write these things; so I don’t have to repeat myself.
            Let’s consider what that flag that some people have gleefully wrapped themselves in really means. How this country actually came to be.  Et Mesdames et messieurs, it did not come on a silver platter of handholding and unicorns. It came in the sweltering humidity of a pre-air-conditioning Philadelphia summer. It came with hours and hours of arguing, debating, discussing, handwringing, and disappointment.  It came with a large dose of egos and apocalyptic predictions as well. And yet, the world did not end when someone’s idea got voted (or shouted) down. It has not ended in the 200 years since, despite innumerable other ideas being voted and shouted down.  And whoever you are, if your idea doesn’t make it, don’t be afraid – the world will not end then, either. Even though I admit, I see the harbingers of doom in the increasing valuation of thoughtlessness, selfishness, and intransigence.  And the disturbing number of candidates willing to run on “I’m not that smart and I have no experience, but I’m really, REALLY mad and really REALLY sure I’m right about everything!” platforms.  We used to respect educated, experienced professionals.  Now we call them “elitists” and “establishment” and villainize them for our own lack of understanding and unwillingness to learn.  I wouldn’t hire someone with no experience to build my house or run my business. Why would I hire them to steer my country?  I’m just sayin’.