6 Generations

Self-Righteousness, Resentment, Anger...and the Girl Scouts

2012-01-23T16:04:00.008-05:00

As I type this post, my door is open, and I can hear doves cooing, the kwirrr of a red-bellied woodpecker, and the rising "turreee" of towhees. It's a warm January day in south Louisiana. When I went outside to fill the bird feeder, I saw a black swallowtail butterfly fluttering around the yard. The peacefulness of this place provides for me such sharp contrast to what I hear and read about the political culture at large. Every day I thank whatever higher power there is--if she cares--for this respite from the anger, self-righteousness, and resentment that I confront in the news every day. There seems to be little room for grace and mercy these days--except for those who helped muster in this sad state of affairs. Somehow, folks who loudly, vocally (and often aggressively) identify as Christian are ready to vote for a man who helped create the poisonous political culture we now live in and are ready to pronounce him "redeemed" from his sin of adultery.

Well, I don't care if he married three women, but I do think that how he treated those first two women says something about his character, and I also believe that how he condescends to others says something about his character, as well as his readiness to make those nasty connections to racial resentment and hatred: Obama is the "food stamp" president; to Juan Williams work is a "strange concept." And anyone who isn't "you" is "elitist." Come on. We know exactly to what prejudices those comments pander.

But I'm not here today to talk about the Newt, really. What really bothers me is how self-righteousness, resentment, anger and pitiless judgment affect those of us who can't afford a half-a-million dollar credit at Tiffany's to help us cope with life's little meannesses.

Take the Girl Scouts, for example. Who cannot like the Girl Scouts? Well, those folks who think Girl Scouts shouldn't have reproductive counseling and sex education or allow transgendered children within their ranks. The Girl Scouts are very "pro-girl," in that they have from the inception of the program provided girls with the power to become whatever they can be in a changing culture. Some folks want those girls back in the kitchen making the cookies and not in the boardroom managing the marketing of those cookies.

Oh, and if you are transgendered, the Girl Scouts East Louisiana troop doesn't want you. In fact, some parents are so afraid of the POSSIBILITY of getting cooties from a transgendered child that they will take their kids out of the local troop even when that troop publicly announces it will not accept transgendered children and no transgendered children have even applied to join the troop. No, the refusal was just not "fast enough" for those folks:

But Susan Cramond, a troop leader who had two children in the group that met at Northlake Christian School in Covington, said she and other like-minded parents felt Louisiana Scouting policy-makers should never have had to discuss the transgender issue in the first place. Cramond said when she first contacted Louisiana’s Scouting leaders to ask whether a transgendered child could be accepted into a local troop, she didn’t get the quick and unequivocal “no” she was hoping for.

So Cramond and fellow troop leader Susan Bryant-Snure, a Lacombe doctor, informed other parents. She said they collectively decided to abandon the Girl Scouts and seek affiliation with American Heritage Girls, a similar organization that describes itself as a “Christ-centered leadership and character development ministry.”

Bryant-Snure said by banning transgendered children, the Louisiana board eventually made the “right decision; they just made it in a way that made us nervous.”

[Bruce Nolan, "Transgendered Girl Scout in Colorado Causes Stir in St. Tammany," The Times-Picayune, 22 January 2012.]

I guess the American Heritage Girls are sweating in the kitchen baking those cookies they hope they can sell more quickly now that so many like-minded folks are boycotting Girl Scout cookies.

Yep, this is where we live now....in a state of mind so rigid that just the possibility of otherness causes panic. Think I'll sit here and listen to the doves.

h/t: Mary Elizabeth Williams, "The Right's Latest Target: Girl Scout Cookies," posted in Salon, 23 January 2012.

A New Year...New Projects

2012-01-17T11:25:00.002-05:00

About mid-December, I became so disheartened with politics that I quit blogging. Now that corporations are people and vast amounts of corporate money can be slathered on politicians and wannabe politicians of choice, what possible impact can one small voice in the wilderness of the GOP-dominated South have? Not much, I thought--and think. When I began this blog, I was really thinking of my children, of being for them a role model of writing, thinking, and engagement with the world around us, especially since we had just up-ended our comfortable life by moving to another state and a huge urban area. Now the kids are off on their own (mostly; we continue to support them. I hope to God they can support themselves in the near future), and their own pursuits engage their time and energy: university studies and research, part-time jobs (volunteer and paid), activities with friends. Also, well-known bloggers who are also reporters are writing about issues with far more skill and knowledge than I have. Let them carry on, and I'll read and ponder, keeping my thoughts to myself.

But here's another reason for me to blog: keeping my thoughts to myself too often results in those thoughts spinning around in a kaleidoscope of ideas that never coalesce coherently. Writing helps me to think. And writing publicly (even though the real public of one's blog may be one or two people) encourages me to choose my words more skillfully and think through my ideas a little more carefully. That discipline is worthwhile to me. Also, online blogging provides me with tools I wouldn't have in personal journalling. I can insert a photo in seconds or a link to something I've read--or get a quick bit of information with a Google search. So I've decided to maintain this blog for a while longer, but I may not write regularly and I may, despite my best intentions, just pass on what I've read, what I think is worth reading, with little original comment.

However, here at home, I have started a journalling project which I hope to carry throughout the year for my own enjoyment. I am creating an altered-book art journal, which will combine craft, art, and writing. I saved my husband's huge Organic Chemistry textbook and am altering it into a personal journal in which I will practice my art skills (minimal at this point) and writing. The photo at the beginning of this entry is of the altered cover of that book. I am now beginning on the opening pages. Here are photos of the book before and as I began altering it into a journal:

And here is a photo of the inside-cover spread which I am working on now:

As you can see, it's a collage of images from other sources: a print of a painting that friends of mine bought in China years ago while teaching there; a cut-out from a copy of a larger geometric ink drawing of one of my husband's great-aunts, words cut from magazines and journals, photos of flowers cut from gardening catalogs, a couple of line drawings from a dictionary--nothing original to me except the juxtaposition of these various cut-outs on this inside cover and some daubing on of alcohol inks and matte gel medium. The drawing of the shovel and hoe on the front cover IS my original art, very elementary. But over time and with practice, perhaps my art will improve. Certainly, I am learning already how to use media that I've never used before in my art and craft projects.

And I continue with my ongoing projects of gardening and making things:

Some things remain the same from year to year, some of which constancy is heartening, and some of which is disheartening--like the continuing spiraling downward of our political discourse and democratic process. Making things and growing things will help keep me positive in the long election year ahead of us.

Another Quote for the Campaign Season

2011-12-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

"If Gingrich is nominated, it won’t be because of his ideological clarity – he’s Flip to Mitt Romney’s Flop. It will be because he’s seen as the most likely to bully and humiliate Barack Obama. And that’s what GOP politics has come down to today." --Joan Walsh, "When Obama Underestimated Newt," posted in Salon, 11 December 2011.

Stupid, Mean and Condescending Stuff

2011-12-09T10:02:00.003-05:00

First up, Rick Santorum, former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and presently a Republican presidential candidate, has this to say about food stamps and obesity: "'If hunger is a problem in America, then why do we have an obesity problem among the people who we say have a hunger program?' Santorum asked." Joann Glamm, "Santorum: 'Town crowds are getting a little bigger," LeMars Daily Sentinel, posted 6 December 2011.

Here are some answers, Rick Santorum, to your question, from study done by Prof. Patricia Smith, professor of economics at University of Michigan-Dearborn:

"..[F]ood stamps’ contribution to obesity among the poor is minor, accounting for only about 5 percent of the cases of obesity among poor Americans."
“'Food stamps may enable women to buy more calories or the once-a-month distribution schedule may lead to disordered eating patterns, tempting women to feast on calorie-dense comfort foods when benefits arrive at the beginning of the month and then fasting at the end of the month when benefits have run out,' Smith explains."
"Smith also finds compelling evidence that poverty contributes to weight gain by limiting the poor to neighborhoods with reduced access to nutritious lower calorie foods, fewer facilities for physical activity and greater exposure to stressors such as crime and pollution."
"In addition, childhood abuse, family violence and disability can increase both the risks of poverty and obesity, according to Smith."

And, evidently, obesity is increasing in upper-income groups, too: "Obesity Rising Among the Rich", CBS News Healthwatch, 2 May 2005.

So get your facts straight and your heart in a better place, Rick Santorum.

Next up, Concerned Women of America opposed Senator Jeanne Shaheen's amendment to the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow military women access to government-funded insurance for abortions. Since 1981, women who serve in our military have been denied government-funded insurance for any abortion that didn't "endanger" the health of the mother. In other words, women who serve our country are refused insurance in their medical plans for abortions caused by rape, when pregnancies caused by rapes are a big problem in the U.S. military.

"Women already have access to abortions at a military facility in instances of rape or incest. However, American taxpayers have not been forced to pay for those abortions," Concerned Women of America gripe in a letter signed by their CEO and president, Peggy Nance.

Oh, please....our taxes provide medical insurance for civilians who work for the federal government and for rape victims in federal prisons, medical insurance that pays for abortions caused by rape or incest. Why provide less for women who serve in the military?

But the most grievous sentences in Nance's letter are these:

"Pregnancies under such circumstances need an extra measure of compassion and support. We need to remember that these women are victims of a heinous crime. But our priorities should be placed on preventing these crimes, punishing the perpetrators, and not covering up a crime by merely dealing with the physical consequences. Women deserve better than simply being given abortion as a 'cure-all."

So condescending to women who find themselves in "such circumstances"!

Women who find themselves in "such circumstances" should be the ones to decide what course of action they should take--and they should have the means to do it, the insurance to cover the abortion if they so choose.

Oh, and a vote on the amendment was blocked in the Senate.

What gets me is that the same people who would refuse abortions to women under ANY circumstance are often the same people who fight against providing sex education and access to birth control. bleh!

Kids Can't Pray in School? Give Me a break!

2011-12-07T10:35:00.008-05:00

So Texas governor Rick Perry has a new ad out in which he makes these assertions:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

“As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion, and I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.”

My children attended Texas schools for almost four years, from 2003-2007, and I also attended Texas public schools in the 1970s, so I know something about Texas schools. Not much seemed to have changed from when I was a kid in public school and when my kids attended Texas public schools thirty years or so later. Someone still prayed in public, over the loud speaker, before the football game, and school events were often preceded with a prayer. I particularly remember one event for students and parents in which the speaker went into a long description of her personal conversion to Christianity and credited Jesus Christ for overcoming an illness. Her whole presentation was an example of proselytizing, if there ever was one, and it ended in "in Jesus' name, amen."

Not every school is as egregious in its flouting separation of church and state, but Rick Perry is lying when he says that children can't pray in schools. Children can pray anywhere. Does he really think that people's mouths have to move for God to hear their prayers? As Jesus himself said,

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6: 5&6)

So I guess Christians are the ones who should be in closets.

As for the comment about gays? Well, that's just prejudice and hatefulness. And there's nothing new about that, either.

I'm so tired of the lie that President Obama is waging a war on religion and that liberals are attacking "our religious heritage." Examples, please?

Last year I attended a Christmas party--with Christmas tree and presents--at a U. S. GOVERNMENT facility, attended by U.S. government employees. Guess how the event began? With a public prayer from an employee who is also a Christian preacher. And, yeah, that prayer ended "in Jesus' name, amen."

So I'm standing there, thinking that this is no place for a sectarian prayer, but I'm also thinking that some of the people there with their heads bowed and eyes closed think the U. S. government is waging a war on--oh, not just any religion, but--the Christian religion.

Give me a break.

Update
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a few words to say about Rick Perry's ad: "Rick Perry and the Politics of Resentment," posted at The Atlantic, 8 Dec. 2011.

Some Quotes from Phil Nugent (on the Republican party)

2011-12-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

"For Republicans, at this stage of the game, picking a candidate is all about the personalities involved, and what they most want is somebody whose personality is calculated to piss off or appall the people they hate."

"...[I]t is wrong to classify the contemporary Republican party as "conservative". because true conservatism, whatever its lapses, is a reality-based school of thought that respects learning, scorns flattering appeals to the stupid, and seeks to actually conserve some things besides low tax rates for millionaires and the right to call anyone who doesn't agree with you a "class warrior" if your opponent is wearing a tie and a "smelly hippie" if he is not."

"In the meantime, the man seen as the most rational and in-touch of the Republican presidential candidates, Jon Huntsman, is seen as unelectable within his own party because he's not stupid, while the other one who has been known to claim to believe sensible things is regarded as a contender because he's now willing to claim to have repudiated all those sensible beliefs. Mitt Romney is supposed to be the responsible Republican front-runner, because he says enough crazy, stupid things to be acceptable to voters within his party, and also because the media and the party professionals believe he's actually a smart guy who's just pretending to be stupid until he has his hand on the Bible and is reciting the oath of office. They're openly signaling to people on the fence that it's okay to vote for Romney, because everything he says between now and Election Day is a bald-faced lie: he really knows better! This can't be good for the children."

All three quotes above from Phil Nugent's post, "O, Stuporman," on The Phil Nugent Experience, posted 19 November 2011

Of course, now that Jon Huntsman smells blood in the water (Mitt Romney being overtaken by Newt Gingrich in polls), he's backing off his previous smart and educated pronouncements, too.

Unlimited Detention of American Citizens

2011-12-01T10:55:00.002-05:00

I am not an admirer of Rand Paul, but I think he has done the right thing in voting against the provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that allows "the U.S. military to pick up and detain, without charges or trial, anyone suspected of terrorism, including American citizens, and to restrict transfers of prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay." Unfortunately, the amendment didn't pass. Read Dahlia Lithwick's article for a fuller discussion of possible consequences.

Once again, I am reminded of the importance of diversity and independence of thought in our governing leaders. Just because one disagrees with others on one issue doesn't mean there is no room for agreement on other issues. I think this is important to keep in mind when we are tempted to demonize those who don't agree with us. Our world views intersect in more ways than we might imagine.

Here is the roll call of the votes: U. S. Senate Roll Call Votes, 112th Congress, 1st session; on Amdt. # 1107 to S. 1867

h/t to Dahlia Lithwick and to Steve Benen.

Quote for the End of a Difficult Year

2011-11-28T13:01:00.000-05:00

Massive financial crashes always produce some inherent unfairness. For some reason, though, we were willing to overlook that unfairness when it was Wall Street that came begging, but became obsessed with it when all the rest of us came begging.

This is how 2008 radicalized me. It's one thing to know that the rich and powerful basically control things. That's the nature of being rich and powerful, after all. But in 2008 and the years since, they've really rubbed our noses in it. It's frankly hard to think of America as much of a true democracy these days.

--Kevin Drum, posted under "How 2008 Should have Radicalized Us All," Monday, 28 November 2011.

Police State?

2011-11-10T16:11:00.015-05:00

Yes, I begin this post with a question mark, but a number of news stories over the past few months have made me wonder if I should follow such a phrase with an exclamation mark. The Occupy Wall Street movement has certainly brought the police force out in numbers in cities around our country. Yes, in Oakland, CA, a few fringe folks in a recent peaceful demonstration turned more violent, but the OWS movement is committed to peace. So why did the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security personnel infiltrate the Nashville, Tennessee OWS?

Nashville's The Tenneseean obtained e-mails that reveal that State Highway Patrol troopers were taken off their highway duty to infiltrate Nashville's OWS. And one policeman revealed his own attitude in one of those e-mails: “If they start camping, I’m confident that a public health issue will soon develop...Then the Health Dept. can shut it down and we all look like the good guys.”

One Occupy Nashville protester wonders: "My question in response would be : ‘Why are they messing with such a peaceful protest in such a warlike manner. Why declare war on peace?'"

This is what I think is the answer to that question: Too often it seems that the police have a pre-existing bias against groups that assemble to protest peacefully, especially if those groups are full of young people or minorities. And that attitude has been aided and abetted by Homeland Security. Ever since 9/11, police departments around the country have been highly weaponized, and I think this encourages a certain mindset--a tendency to use excess force in dealing with ordinary situations, of seeing the public as "them," even when the "them" is not much of a threat.

Just recently, a sheriff's office in Conroe, Texas, obtained an unmanned Shadowhawk helicopter that could carry a weapons payload. Yes, that's right--an unmanned drone with the potential to carry weapons. Why does Conroe, Texas, need an unmanned, weaponized drone? Nearby Cut-and-Shoot isn't that much of a threat, is it?

The drone can also look into people's backyards and has infrared capabilities to see into homes.

Police might have the best intentions, but even the best intentions can deteriorate into untenable consequences that challenge our civil rights--or worse.

Updates

"But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers' tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction." (Berkeley)-- "UC cops' use of batons on Occupy camp questioned," Will Kane, Demian Bulwa, SF Gate, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 November 2011.

"Portland Pepper Spray Incident Generates Iconic Occupy Photo," Las Angeles Times, 18 November 2011.

"Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic, 19 November 2011.

"#OccupyMissoula--Police Dropping Off Drunken, Hostile People," posted on Plutocracy Files 19 November 2011. (h/t David Crisp)

"How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police," Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartman, The Atlantic 7 November 2011. (h/t James Fallows)

"Turning Patrolmen into Soldiers: How did we let this happen?," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic, 21 November 2011.

Alone but not Lonely

2011-11-10T13:17:00.002-05:00

This morning while struggling with the beginning of a scarf I'm crocheting for hire, I heard a hawk call, very close. I keep my binoculars in a basket near the sofa in our sunroom, along with Peterson's Eastern Birds, so I grabbed the binocs and headed out into the chill that a cold front had brought to south Louisiana. There was the hawk, circling in the sky, then plunging downward to perch upon the broken limb of a dead tree. Early this summer, a pair of hawks nested in the same area and watched over their juvenile's soaring and diving in this little patch of woods near a creek, just minutes from the paved parking lots of big box stores of the nearest town of any size.

I live in an old cottage in a small town, on a road that ends near a creek. My husband and I have bought two lots on this road, and we would buy a third if the price weren't so high and we weren't worried about what the economy will be like under the next president. These days, I want space between me and the next person; perhaps I'm becoming a misanthrope. Someone who saw photos of our house told me our house and property looked like a "retreat," and it is. It's a retreat for me--a retreat from a life where I had spent my working hours (not just in the office and in the classroom) trying to help other people write better, think better, and understand the world better through reading, writing, and thinking; a retreat from a world where we are considered "consumers" rather than "citizens"; a retreat from those paved parking lots and all the stuff we're encouraged to buy to "keep our economy growing."

I like it here, especially in the fall and winter, when the air is cooler and drier, and especially here at my retreat, where I am alone most days, but not lonely.

I know that I should get a job; I'm only fifty-four (nearly), but I have yet to decide what I want to be in my old age. I know that I don't want to teach. I don't have the patience for it anymore. At one of the last universities where I taught, a student wrote on her evaluation of my teaching that she hated that I made her read about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. As part of a research project, my students read an essay by Philip Gourevitch about the genocide, the public documents of a government review at the 10th anniversary of the horror, and contemporary news articles about the genocide in Darfur. This was at a Baptist University, where one would think the student population would have a deep concern about injustice in the world, but my student did not want to know and said so. Just a couple of years before, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, my students viewed a collection of online photographs taken of people north and south of the Mexican/US border and then wrote about what they saw. One student told me that one difference between the people south of the border and north of the border was skin color. "Americans are white," she said.

No, I had more patience then, though it was wearing thin.

Here I watch the hawks, pet my cats, weed my gardens, and hope...hope that the economy doesn't tank any worse than it has already, that the person who gains the White House in 2012 won't lay off thousands of federal employees or dismantle the EPA or de-fund education (I really don't want to be surrounded by more people such as the two students I've described above) or take away support from PBS (one of the few sources of real--and entertaining-- information these days, and much of it online) or abolish Net Neutrality. I guess that means I hope that a Republican doesn't win.

And I work at figuring out what comes next, in the afternoon of my life. Lots to think about. No time to be lonely.

The Stupid, Stupid Scapegoating of Public Employees

2011-11-09T21:45:00.000-05:00

So...evidently Mitt Romney has in this evening's debate of Republican presidential candidates claimed that he would "link pay of public employees to that of private-sector workers." However, as the writers at Think Progress point out, such a claim would actually require RAISING the pay of public employees. According to an article in the Washington Post, Saturday, November 5:

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a 'pay gap' that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.

Got that, Mitt Romney, and all the other Republican talkingpoint-bots who like to scapegoat public employees?

It's all just a diversion tactic--to get people to focus on what's NOT important and to forget what IS: the increasing income gap in this country, the over-weaning power of corporations, and unemployment.

Sick of Politics

2011-11-09T16:23:00.001-05:00

In mid-September, my husband and I left for a two-week vacation, with Nova Scotia as our end destination. It was a great trip, in which we saw fossils of ancient trees in the cliffs near Joggins and the Bay of Fundy, watched humpback whales and porpoises up close, drove foggy roads along the Bay of Fundy, hiked in the rain, and viewed the land that my original Acadian ancestor farmed. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if the British hadn't ethnically cleansed the Annapolis Valley and the shores of the Bay of Fundy of French Acadians? What if Abraham Dugas' grandsons had remained instead of finding refuge in the swamps of Louisiana and then, later, the marshes of Anahuac and the Old and Lost Rivers of southeast Texas (where "Dugas" became "Dugat")? What would it be like to be Canadian now instead of American?

During our trip, I tried to stay away from the internet and the nastiness of our political discourse, but then one morning, a Canadian asked us at breakfast a question about our politics, and soon other people at the bed and breakfast were voicing their opinions, especially an ex-patriate from West Texas who had married a Canadian. Our hosts, however, were visibly silent; they were trying to sell their bed and breakfast so that they could spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Nova Scotia, untroubled by testy customers who wanted better views.

I was sick of politics. I just wanted a better view, not from my window but from my heart, a better view of humanity. History was not the place to find it, however. Abraham Dugas had never been compensated for the land confiscated to build a fort at what was then known as Annapolis Royal; his grandchildren were deprived of their cattle, the farmland they had improved, and their homes were burned; his descendants were transported to British colonies where many had to beg and where their daughters were taken away to work in the big houses of Protestants, where their language and their Catholicism were scorned.

Just the politics of kings: the strong taking from the weak. But how is that different from today?

It was the greediness of Wall Street--of banks and CEOs of corporations and financiers and politicians-- that brought our economy and the economy of the world to the brink of disaster, yet corporations continue to profit while laying off workers, politicians continue to cut deals, the banks are bigger, the CEOs who led those bloated financial institutions are not in jail but making more money than ever. So that's not the smoke of burning homes in the distance or of people loaded into ships with only the belongings they can carry, but, really, how different is it?

Mitt Romney can run for the highest office in the land of a democratic republic and tell voters that foreclosures should just be allowed to run their course. So what that people lost their jobs because Wall Street sold toxic derivatives and over-leveraged. So what that those people now can't keep up with their mortgages while looking for other jobs. Let those with money buy up those homes at rock-bottom prices and rent them out. In other words, let the rich make more money off the losses and grief of the working and middle class. That's Romney's message to the people.

Or how about making federal employees scape goats for the economy? Mitt Romney, whom it is estimated to be worth up to $250 million, shows up at a steel fabrication plant, dressed in jeans and a plaid work shirt, and tells the workers that government employees are "making a lot more money than we are." I'm married to a government employee, and, with a Ph.d., he still makes less as a government employee than he did working for a private non-profit and less (counting inflation) than he did working for a corporation over ten years ago. I bet you he makes less than some of those working in the steel fabrication plant.

Who does Mitt Romney think he's fooling? This is a man who made his fortune buying sinking corporations, laying off the workers, and re-selling what remained. And he's likely to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

What a joke. On us. The middle-class, the working class.

Our houses are burning, our wealth confiscated, our voices silenced in a sea of political bullshit.

Low Information Voters and Republican Strategy

2011-09-08T13:07:00.009-04:00

Some of the most distressing descriptions of American citizens I've read lately have been detailed by two retired Congressional staffers, one a 28-year veteran of the Republican party and the other who worked for a moderate Democrat. These are not people on the fringes of the right or left. And now that they have retired, they feel free to write what they really believe, what they have actually experienced and observed. This is what Mike Lofgren, who served 28 years as a Congressional staffer and "16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees," writes :

There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Lofgren goes on to describe how "the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends." People who think government doesn't work decide that their vote doesn't count, too. And so they stay home while the far-right minority, "whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News" increases its clout in elections. This strategy of weakening trust in government institutions to create citizen malaise goes hand in hand with another Republican strategy, that of disenfranchising voters who are more likely to vote Democratic:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies)**; by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

Lofgren says that other folks are very upfront about these strategies:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption [the more recent Republican strategy to filibuster every confirmation and routine procedural motion] .... By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

So what Republicans cannot succeed in doing by rigorous debate of the issues and communication of those issues to constituents, they plan to win by subterfuge and destruction of democratic institutions. Again, this is not some leftie talking; this is a guy who witnessed Republican strategy for years from the bullpen and who mourns the demise of Republican virtue (if virtue exists in politics). He is no supporter of President Obama, he says, but he wanted Obama to succeed in the worst economic crisis the country has faced in years because he wanted his country to succeed. The Republicans--those leading now--want the country to fail so that Obama will fail. The country fails, millions of Americans suffer--but they will blame the current president. Why? Because they are low information voters who have no idea how government works.

The second negative description of American citizens comes from a Congressional staffer who worked for years for a moderate Democrat. This staffer wrote in response to James Fallows' post about Mike Lofgren's essay.

The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters' minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

Although the pollster mentioned above is referring to Congressional races, I grimaced a little when I read how inattentive voters are in making their choices. While I understand my own ideals and how those ideals have affected my voting record in national elections and state level elections, I have been less attentive to local elections. Yet that's where many politicians get their start, in their being elected to the school board or to mayor. From the city level, they may go to the state level and then the national level--though, more often than not these days, the already-rich jump directly to representing us at the state and national level.

If anything should convince those disaffected voters to get out to vote, this should: there are people hoping that you won't vote so that their ability to whip up the anger and fear of the fringe will have a stronger impact. And that's not good for our country...or for ordinary Americans.

**I have read that the push in Wisconsin to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices has been tabled. A spokesman said that there was no intention to shut down offices in Democratic constituencies, but a Democratic spokesman said that a look at which offices were planned to be shut down counters that claim. However, a recent Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles memo came to light in which employees were directed to provide material when people ask for the free ID but that they should not readily provide information if not asked. So it's pretty clear what the intent is.

More on the Wisconsin voter ID conflict: This guy evidently should have used his personal e-mail to send out his message, but....."Wisconsin Employee Fired for E-mail Defying Voter ID Policy," posted on TPM. More at the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "State Employee Fired After Telling Co-Workers about Photo ID Policy," 8 Sept. 2011.

Antidotes for Angst and Despair

2011-09-07T00:20:00.010-04:00

For days, weeks even, I have been thinking of trying to address as honestly and straightforwardly as I can why I usually support liberal causes over conservative causes and why I have become increasingly cynical about politics and the possibilities of change in the way we are governed. I envisioned a series of such exploratory posts, and yesterday I wrote the first one, addressing my changing perspective on religion. And then I lost the entire post because I was using the updated Blogger interface, which evidently doesn't save drafts automatically as the older interface does. Or perhaps the loss of the post was due to some error of my own. Whatever the cause, nothing I could do resulted in my being able to retrieve the lost essay. So I surrendered to the capriciousness of technology and took a walk instead. Later I recorded some details of that walk with photos and a post that turned out quite differently than I had originally intended.

I have found, however, that experiencing--and recalling--details of the natural world helps me maintain perspective when confronted with political landscapes where alliances are constantly shifting, where people say what they don't believe, don't believe what they say, say they believe what facts and figures can't support, or massage facts and figures to conclude what they wish from them, or just make up stuff and hope that saying it over and over will convince people of its veracity. (Unfortunately, research shows that this last strategy works.)

So a day when I get online and read that even a career Republican Congressional staffer thinks that the Republican party is now "full of lunatics" or that "the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress," I know that's a day I need to leave despair at the keyboard and get outside.

A camera can be distracting if I am constantly snapping photos so that the initial experience is distanced and delayed to later viewing. But having a camera in hand can also help me to focus on sights I might otherwise overlook: the mushroom covered in tiny brown fibers that look like furry hair, the fly with red eyes perched on an autumn-blooming flower, the photography-worthy gate to one's neighbor's yard, slender green limbs heavy with purple beauty berry, a dragonfly posing patiently on a blue-black salvia bloom. Just small moments of awe and beauty can help restore my equilibrium.

However, I'm afraid that all my antidotes to angst and despair--immersing myself in the natural world, gardening, crafting things, writing--have limited efficacy and must be administered frequently. The next news cycle requires another dose.

For an enlarged view of the dragonfly I photographed today on my patio, click on the photo.

After the Storm

2011-09-05T17:01:00.000-04:00

Tropical Storm Lee has finally left Louisiana after days of dropping copious amounts of rain. At our house, we received just a little less than 11 inches of rain. What remains is wind, lots of cool wind brought in by a cool, dryer front colliding with the warm moist air of Lee. Our cats can be seen sniffing the air and walking in and out the front door, which we propped open in order to enjoy this uncharacteristically cool air at the end of summer in South Louisiana. The cooler north wind brings with it, perhaps, unfamiliar scents and a hint of fall, both welcome after four days of rain.

Like the cats, my husband and I also ventured out to sniff the air, to enjoy the cool breeze, and to appreciate the subtle signs of fall. The sky was still overcast when we left the house to walk through our neighborhood and along a paved trail, but by the time we returned, the clouds were on their way out, headed to Georgia and the Appalachians.

More Irony

2011-09-01T13:42:00.006-04:00

I don't get cable anymore, so I'm evidently missing out on a whole host of reality television shows turned bad--not that I ever was a fan of reality shows, in the first place. First there was the poor guy who had appeared on that "Housewives" show who hung himself after his wife filed for divorce. How horrible! And now here's Stephen Seagal with his little reality show, Steven Seagal: Lawman. I mean, it's funny how actors like this (the Chuck-Norris syndrome) take themselves so seriously. Here is Steven Seagal playing lawman with that controversial sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, Joe Arpaio. Evidently, alongside Sheriff Joe Arpaio, ol' Seagal raided a guy's home for alleged animal cruelty (cock-fighting)--a raid that included driving a tank through Jesus Sanchez Llovera's front gate. (What is this, Iraq?) In the raid, Llovera's 11-month-old dog and over 100 of his roosters were killed by gunfire.

h/t TPM

Update: But maybe the dog wasn't killed after all-- "Arpaio, Seagal deny dog killing claim during raid."

Quotes for the Week (Lest We Forget)

2011-08-31T11:19:00.005-04:00

Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is trying to polish his image as he gets oh-so-gently interviewed on television about his new book. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has this to say about Dick Cheney:

"He wanted desperately to be president of the United States... he knew the Texas governor was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration."
"He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him." Both quotes quoted by Elspeth Reeve for The Atlantic Wire, Powell Aide: Cheney was President 'For All Practical Purposes'," posted 30 Aug. 2011.

Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that "until there are legal consequences for those who order or engage in torture, we will only be pretending. Cheney is the beneficiary of that artifice." And that's the tragedy:

Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons. On his most combative and truly lawless positions, Cheney still stands largely alone.
The tragedy is that it doesn't matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.

And Conor Friedersdorf reminds us why Americans loathe Cheney (except those, perhaps, who frequented the cocktail circuit with him in Washington, D.C.; amazing how close proximity to power blunts the moral nerve endings--my observation, not Friedersdorf's). Friedersdorf's blog post titled "Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney" is based on the investigative reporting and writing of several people, including Wil S. Hylton, Barton Gellman, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, and Jack Balkin. Friedersdorf ends his numerical march down memory lane with this gem:

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.
After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office.
Good riddance.
[my emphasis]

Morning Reading, Morning Thoughts

2011-08-23T12:48:00.009-04:00

My morning's reading:

Ryan Lizza's "Leap of Faith," about "the transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race," in The New Yorker. I found this article particularly interesting because, like Michele Bachmann, I was early influenced by evangelical Christianity; only for me, that influence was in a country Southern Baptist Church that my paternal grandmother helped establish. I also read Francis Schaeffer's works in search of an intellectual way to verify my beliefs, and for a time, the church in which I was a member focused on eschatology and most specifically on Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. So there is nothing in Michele Bachmann's far-right views that is unfamiliar to me. The difference is that I rejected those views. Brain-washing* is a peculiar thing: when you're under the influence, you don't realize that you are being manipulated--or if you suspect, as I did, you search for ways to justify your continued adherence to the views of your group while also fearing the rejection that will come when you leave the group. When you shake yourself free--not easily and not unassisted--you are appalled by your emotional and rational--and even moral--submission to views you now find untenable. Having been under the influence of far-right Christianity as a youth, I certainly don't want to experience being under that same influence as a citizen. While I find much to admire in the teachings of Jesus, I find much to abhor in how those teachings are expressed in far-right Christian theology.
"Your Head on My Shoulder: Parasitic Twins and other Half-Formed Siblings," by Jesse Bering, in Slate--This article was interesting in its gruesome descriptions of parasitic twins, in which one twin is born healthy and another is mal-formed, incomplete, and attached to the healthy twin. And, also, the author's comments at the end connect to the current movement in this country to ban abortions. We have leaders advocating banning abortion of any kind, even if the young woman is a victim of rape or incest. Evidently, these same people would ban abortions of mal-formed twins (some of which are just a jumble of parts) though such intervention might promote the health of the fully-formed and viable twin. When Michele Bachmann and others such as she say they believe in "liberty," they don't mean the liberty for women to make their own reproductive decisions, even when those decisions are based on sound science and/or compassion.
Dave Weigel's piece in Slate, "Republicans for Tax Hikes (Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people)"--My previous post responds to this crazy turn of events in the Republican party. But Weigel's analysis points out that there is a method to this madness: Tax the poor more so that they will support lowering taxes for everyone. That way, there is more support for keeping taxes low on the rich.
In 2002 and 2003, long before it got Huntsman in the room, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that poor people who didn't pay income taxes were "lucky duckies." The poor slob with a low income and child tax credit would get a small or nonexistent tax bill, not one that would "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." The problem here wasn't that the poor slob wasn't paying any taxes; the problem was that his meager tax bill failed to foment enough anger to reduce taxes on other people. Tax cuts for the rich—tax cuts for anyone, really, but the Journal has always been concerned about tax cuts for the rich—require a broad base of outrage.
Diabolical. And I don't mean that in an admiring way.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog post, "Affirmative Action for Colonial White People," on The Atlantic's website--Actually, I read this piece last night, but it seems to me that what Coates points out here about how slaves (black) and servants (mostly white) were manipulated to prevent their finding common ground speaks to how people continue to be manipulated by those in power in order to prevent those without power from uniting against that power. (See above.)

___________

*"Brainwashing" may be too strong of a word to describe my experience in the Southern Baptist Church, but the message I got as a child was full of fear and loathing--loathing for the physical self, fear of damnation--and it was sometimes delivered in scary ways. We had preachers who would get all worked up about sin and hell until they were shouting and stomping around the pulpit. At the close of sermons, at what is called "altar-call," we were asked to close our eyes and raise our hands if we felt we needed forgiveness. "Don't worry," the pastor would say, "Only I and God can see your raised hands." But then, once we would raise them, he would tell us that if we had raised our hands, we now needed to come forward publicly and make a confession, implying that we fell "short of the glory of God," in the Apostle Paul's words, if we didn't have the courage to do so. Guilt was a mighty tool. And that time we were studying Hal Lindsey's books was a very dark time, full of foreboding. I had nightmares about Jesus coming back in the clouds and my feet not being able to leave the ground to join the throng of believers in the sky. And one of our pastors would get so excited when our church's gospel quartet sang "The King is Coming," that he would begin screaming. Really.

The Poor

2011-08-22T11:41:00.016-04:00

My mind has lately returned to my childhood and a place that I once held very dear, my maternal grandparents' home in East Gate, Texas, on the prairie in Liberty County, near Gum Grove, Texas, not far from Huffman, Texas, and Dayton, Texas. My grandparents lived there in a wooden house built by my grandfather and his father. My mother and her siblings were reared there. And I spent many summer days there, picking peas and then shelling them in the shade of pecan trees, shucking corn, playing board games and dominoes with my grandmother, who never seemed to tire from playing those games with her grandchildren. In the evening, we would watch westerns on television or the Grand Ol' Opry with my grandfather. My grandmother would prepare food that sent us home in despair when we were teenagers; one summer one of my sisters gained ten pounds after staying a week with my grandmother. The typical breakfast spread? Fried eggs and bacon, sausage, homemade biscuits served with milk gravy and butter from the Jersey cow, fig preserves, and very black coffee. My grandmother would also prepare spice cake, lemon meringue pies, chocolate meringue pies or pecan pies for later desserts. Supper was frequently fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a selection of vegetables we had perhaps helped pick.

My grandparents' education did not go beyond 9th grade. My grandmother told me that when she was in ninth grade, she caught flu and stayed home to recuperate. She never returned to school. My grandfather worked the rodeos, labored in the oil fields before I was born, and worked for Liberty County doing odd jobs. He raised cattle and sold cattle. He, my father, and one of my uncles herded their cattle together, with that of other friends, on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers when I was a child. I still have clear memories of my grandfather on a horse, of the sound of boots on a wooden floor, of the jangle of spurs and the whispering shush of leather chaps--and of Papa playing "Redwing" and "Orange Blossom Special" on his harmonica.

My grandmother's favorite television show was a morning show called "Dialing for Dollars." At the beginning of the show, the host would announce a password, and later in the show, the host would dial a telephone number. If the person answering the telephone knew the password, that person would win prize money. We couldn't be far from the telephone on those days that my grandmother watched; she always hoped that she would win. And I think she did win some groceries one time. Other than that, my grandmother didn't watch much television. But she loved the Houston Astros, and she would listen to games on the radio.

Only occasionally was I reminded that my grandparents were poor, especially in their old age. My grandmother clipped coupons, counted her change, and was careful to purchase items on sale. When I was a very little child in the early sixties, she made her own cotton dresses on a treadle sewing machine. I remember the old wringer-washing machine that was in the side yard next to the house and the clothesline where we hung out clothes to dry. Later, of course, she had an electric washer and dryer installed in what we called "the back porch," rooms enclosed at the back of the house near the kitchen. I suspect that the electric washer and dryer were gifts from family, perhaps her children. The house itself lacked air-conditioning. Instead, someone had installed an industrial fan in the dining-room window. The fan didn't have a switch. We would have to plug it in and then give one of the fan blades a push to get it going.

And, then, once when I was a young adult, maybe still a teenager, we had a family gathering at which I was forcibly reminded of my grandparents' poverty. A young woman from Houston whose mother had married into the family was visiting with her fiance, a very well-off young man. As they walked under the shade of the pecan trees into the yard bare of grass and up to the un-air-conditioned house, I overheard the young woman say to her future husband, "Can you imagine living here?"

I can still feel the hot flush of anger...and shame...that I felt then, loving my grandparents as I did and also realizing that they were indeed poor, specimens of poverty in the eyes of the suburban middle-class and the Houston wealthy.

What we never lacked at my grandparents' house was plenty of love. My grandmother's freezer and refrigerator were always full of food, and she loved preparing meals for her extended family. She and my grandfather were generous and kind.

I think of them when I hear pundits sneer about the poor today, about how 51% of Americans don't pay federal income tax because they are, indeed, poor. Those pundits easily forget that those Americans pay other taxes, payroll taxes (if they have jobs), taxes on goods, property taxes, and state income taxes in those states with such taxes. I was enraged by Fox News pundits claiming that Democrats, President Obama, and even that really wealthy guy Warren Buffet were inciting class warfare against the rich -- and at the language used on Fox News to describe the poor as "takers" and "moochers." And I was happy to see Jon Stewart expose the hypocrisy and meanness of those who think the poor can't be poor if they own a refrigerator or a microwave or a cellphone. Watch Jon's takedown here: Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, August 18, 2011.

We owe a lot to the working poor.

Irony

2011-08-21T13:17:00.001-04:00

Here's a bit of irony: "Karl Rove Created Rick Perry--Now Can He Stop Him?"

Karl Rove created campaign tactics to cynically appeal to the religious far-right. Now there's a presidential candidate that perfectly (and just as cynically, perhaps--who knows?) epitomizes the far-right to which Rove appealed, and Rove doesn't want that candidate to be nominated for president. Why? Because he thinks the guy can't be elected, or that, if he is, folks like Rove won't be able to control him or the far-right that he represents. Karl Rove is Frankenstein, I guess, who has created a monster (the far-right's current influence on the Republican party, not Rick Perry, necessarily--I don't know the man personally, but I was reared in far-right country).

Interested in Rove's amoral political tactics? Read the following:

"Karl Rove in a Corner,", by Josh Green, for The Atlantic, 2004.
Frontline's "Karl Rove: The Architect."

And Karl Rove's political predecessor, Lee Atwater:
Frontline's "The Lee Atwater Story: Boogie Man."

University Costs

2011-08-17T17:35:00.004-04:00

My husband and I recently moved both our adult children back to the universities that they are attending: two children in two different states. Now we're back to a two-adult household, just as we started our married lives 33 years ago--except that we still have dependents. We are essentially maintaining three households, with some assistance from our children. The undergraduate has a state scholarship based on high-school attendance in the state and on grade point average. The graduate student just discovered that he has been assigned a Teacher Assistant position in the department where he is studying, a position that will perhaps waive out-of-state tuition (but not tuition altogether) and offer a small stipend. Both saved money from summer jobs this year while living with us to cut expenses.

What a difference I see between the time that my husband and I were in college and today. The costs of higher education have increased significantly since 1978-1987, when my husband and I married as undergraduates and then attended graduate school. My husband and I were able to pay all our expenses with the money we made as a Graduate Assistant Teacher and a Graduate Research Assistant. Our son's TA position will fall far short of providing for living expenses, books, and tuition. Students such as he must either depend upon family assistance or student loans. One university sent our son a letter informing him that he was eligible for a loan, of course--for $45,000 a year, essentially what comes to a $100,000 debt for a master's degree. My husband and I paid less than $100,000 for each of the first three homes that we bought between 1983 and 1993. And we graduated with a master's degree and a Ph.D with no debt, due to scholarships, teaching and research appointments, cheap married-student housing, food hand-outs from family, and penny-pinching. Pity the kids who graduate with a $100,000+ debt and want to begin a Ph.D program, too. Or start a family.

See also: "The Debt Crisis at American Colleges," by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, in The Atlantic, posted 17 August 2011.

Interesting Comparisons

2011-08-10T11:44:00.013-04:00

A recent study published by the Pew Research Center used data collected by the Census Bureau to determine the effect of the recession on certain segments of the population. From 2005 to 2009:

"the median wealth of Hispanic households fell 66 percent
....while the median wealth of whites fell just 16 percent over the same period."
"African Americans saw their wealth drop 53 percent."
"Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent."

Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, 26 July 2011.

In contrast, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new study out showing that:

... "congressional members’ personal wealth collectively increased by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009."

... "[n]early half of them -- 261 -- are millionaires, a slight increase from the previous year..."

"And of these congressional millionaires, 55 have an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million or more, with eight in the $100 million-plus range."

Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour National Economy," Open Secrets Blog at opensecrets.org

Here's how the median household net worth plunged for different segments of American society:

Hispanics: from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,235 in 2009.
Blacks: from $12,124 in 2005 to $5,677 in 2009.
Whites: from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.
Asians: from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009.
All: from $96,894 in 2005 to $70,000 in 2009

Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," New York Times.

In contrast, the median wealth of our leaders in Congress and the Senate INCREASED:

U.S. House member: from$645,503 in 2008 to $765,010 in 2009.
U.S. Senator: from $2.27 million in 2008 to $$2.38 million in 2009.
ALL members of Congress, House members and Senate members: $785,515 in 2008 to $911,510 in 2009.

Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour Economy," www. opensecrets.org

Of course, these numbers represent median wealth of groups whose members have very disparate household worth. But the comparison is stark between the median wealth of members of the U.S. Congress and those of the citizens who elected them and who are suffering the most from the economy. It is therefore difficult not to be cynical when Republicans insist on not raising taxes on the wealthy (letting the Bush tax cuts expire, as was initially planned) to help balance the budget. Two-thirds of the American people think those taxes SHOULD be raised on the wealthiest. Therefore, whose interest are Republicans serving?

Signs of the Times

2011-08-09T12:48:00.020-04:00

The rich hire protection from the economically-depressed masses: "These Guys will Stop you from Killing your Boss," Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones, July/August 2011 issue.
Is poverty being criminalized?: "Turning Poverty into an American Crime," Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation (originally posted on TomDispatch.com), 9 August 2011.
Why is there such hatred of the poor as the poor get poorer and the richer get richer?: "Nebraska AG Jon Bruning Compares Welfare Recipients to Scavenging Raccoons," Benji Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, 9 August 2011.
What is happening to the middle-class in America?": "Can the Middle Class be Saved?," Don Peck, The Atlantic, September 2011 issue.

The unemployed need not apply: "The Help-Wanted Sign comes with a Frustrating Asterisk," Catherine Rampell, The New York Times, 25 July 2011.

London burns in riots "led by gangs of young people and organized in part via BlackBerry instant messaging." The riots began in economically-depressed neighborhoods and have spread to other cities: "London Burning: A Foreign Policy Slide Show"; also "Why London Exploded Last Night," Michael Goldfarb, Salon, 9 August 2011.
Social media used by criminals to create flash mobs to cover for crimes: "For Flash Mobsters, Crowd Size a Tempting Cover," Eric Tucker and Thomas Watkins for Associated Press, Salon, 9 August 2011.
Voluntary citizen clean-up crews in London use Twitter to organize after rioting: "Londoners Turn to Technology to Stop the Looting,", Adam Clark Estes, The Atlantic Wire, 9 August 2011.
governmental coverups--Severity of radiation exposure downplayed by Japanese government: "Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril," Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler, The New York Times, 8 August 2011.
regulation coverups--Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S. doing its job?: "Whistleblowers Say Nuclear Regulatory Commission is Losing Its Bite," John Sullivan and Cameron Hickey, ProPublica, 27 July 2011.

just a few.....

Sunset

2011-08-08T21:31:00.002-04:00

This is a photo of the sun setting in Mississippi yesterday evening. I took the photo while I was driving back to my home after taking my daughter, my youngest, back to university in another state. Like the sun here, I am no longer at Astronomical Noon in my children's lives. One must adjust emotionally, of course. I just hadn't realized that it would be this difficult.

Cynicism Redux

2011-07-25T11:46:00.007-04:00

I've been following the debt ceiling debate with growing--and now matured--cynicism. Today, House Minority Leader Harry Reid has evidently offered the Republicans a debt plan that includes $2.7 million in spending cuts, with no new taxes, with the stipulation that the debt ceiling be raised through 2012. (h/t Brian Beutler at TPM). As Matt Yglesias points out, however, the House Republicans don't want to accept this plan that nominally meets their publicly stated requirements because it doesn't repeal Medicare and it doesn't take future tax increases off the table. The Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire in 2012:

In particular, the plan doesn’t cut Medicare, which means that Democratic party candidates for office in November 2012 and 2014 can accurately remind voters of the content of the Republican budget plan. In case you forgot, this plans repeals Medicare. Having repealed Medicare, it then gives seniors vouchers to purchase more expensive private health insurance. And having replaced Medicare with a voucher system, it then ensures that the vouchers will grow steadily stingier over time. It was only after voting for this plan that Republicans seem to have realized that repealing Medicare is unpopular. Since that time, they’ve been trying to entrap Democrats into reaching some kind of Medicare détente with them, which would immunize them from criticism. Reid’s plan doesn’t do that. "Harry Reid Calls House Republicans' Bluff"

Politicians hope that people won't REALLY understand what they're up to: Repealing Medicare is unpopular with the American people, so Republicans have tried to sell their voucher plan. Yet the Republican voucher plan for Medicare will increase costs for old folks and thus result in denial of services. Republicans hope that no one will notice the switcheroo in their plan. (Ca-ching--another coin in the cynicism bank)

And, dang it, those tax cuts are SUPPOSED to expire. Not only that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data. That’s true whether it comes to their federal income taxes or their total federal taxes." "Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families at Historically Low Levels."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also points out just what is responsible for our current debt crisis:

If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time. "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits"

And a graph in the New York Times handily compares the results of new budget policies under Bush and Obama, based on data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Policy Changes Under Two Presidents"--A $5.07 trillion increase under Bush and a $1.44 trillion increase under Obama.

As Steve Benen points out: "And now these same Republicans [who helped turn a large surplus into a massive deficit] claim the high ground on fiscal issues, and demand that President Obama clean up their mess immediately. Worse, they demand he do so in a way they find pleasing, or next week, they’ll crash the economy on purpose." "Blame Where Blame is Due"

Kevin Drum describes the Republican narrative that too many people are buying into:

Up until very recently, Republicans were mostly taking a hard line on the deficit and weren't shy about making sure everyone knew it. The hard line itself hasn't changed since then, but over the past few weeks they've come to realize that it doesn't make for very good PR. So now their enablers in the media are furiously pushing the story that it's really Obama who's completely intransigent and insincere, rejecting deal after deal no matter how much Republicans try to accomodate his crazed desire to punish the rich. This narrative, as near as I can tell, is now virtually unanimous among conservative commenters.

So the question is, will anyone buy this? It's so self-evidently preposterous that it doesn't seem possible, but then, I wouldn't have figured that they could successfully make the world so quickly forget that they were responsible for the deficit in the first place, nor that they were also responsible for the most epic financial meltdown since the Great Depression. But they have. Their ability to shape popular narratives can hardly be underestimated. "Republicans and the Deficit Narrative"

It's amazing to me that anyone still takes these Republicans seriously. Oh, I know that there are conservatives who are speaking out against the rash policies of these radicals, but those folks aren't in power.

It's like a bunch of whiny kids who trashed a house at a party. Another group of kids come in to clean up and have to buy supplies to do so. The ones responsible for the mess then scream about the costs of the clean-up and convince bystanders that the clean-up crew is responsible for all the costs and damages. Unbelievable.

Cynicism

2011-07-23T13:48:00.005-04:00

My children tell me that I am very cynical, so when they confront some evidence of a younger me--in my writing or the writing of friends--who comes across as naive and trusting, they seem surprised. Of course, our children never really know us, do they? They weren't witness to many of the events (our own failings as well as the failings of others) that transformed us over time--either because they were not present or because they were too young to understand what was going on. I'll admit that a little bit of faith in humanity remains in me, but in the last several years, that bit of faith has received a beating.

The Republicans taking hostage of the debt ceiling is a big disappointment; I mean, they didn't have difficulties with debt ceilings under President Bush. Why so recalcitrant now? (That's a rhetorical question). But the treatment of Elizabeth Warren by Republican Congressmen is in a category by itself, I think. Or maybe not. Given some thought, I could probably come up with other similar examples. Here is a very smart woman who speaks plainly and who has worked to help make financial matters more transparent to consumers, that is, people such as I.

Here is Elizabeth Warren speaking on those credit card contracts that none of us can understand:
"Elizabeth Warren on Credit Card 'Tricks and Traps'," at Now, online, 2 January 2009.

Here she is talking about bankruptcy caused by medical bills and "aggressive hospital collections":
Interview 1
Interview 2

Here she is talking about subprime mortgages in 2004--raising the alarm before subprime mortgages, bundled up as toxic assets, helped to almost blow up our economy:
on "Books of our Time"

People with this kind of sense, with this kind of concern for ordinary families, evidently have no place in our government, according to the Republicans who refused to accept her as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Their condescending questioning and unrelenting demonization of this woman is a travesty of public service.

In The New York Times, Joe Nocera reviews Elizabeth Warren's travails with Republican 'leadership,' in this, her last week with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "The Travails of Ms. Warren," posted on Friday, 22 July 2011.

Here is an example of Warren's own lack of cynicism. She thought that if she could make clear to Congress what the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be, the accusations and demonization would stop:

“I’ve never been an ideologue,” she told me. “And I thought the best way to deal with that perception was to put our vision out there. The vision is clear. Consumers should be able to tell the price and risk of any credit product before they buy it. We want to mow down the fine print. I thought once that was on the table, and it was clear that we were executing on it, the accusations would go away.” Nocera, "The Travails of Ms. Warren"

But: " House Republicans regularly brought her before their committees and acted as if this were the second coming of Joe McCarthy....Republicans would cut off her answers and speak to her in tones ranging from contempt to condescension. The treatment wasn’t just disrespectful. It was ugly. And it never stopped."

As I have stated in a previous post, I would have loved having an Elizabeth Warren looking out for my interests. Unfortunately, bankers and financial institutions have far more money than I have and far more influence over those Republicans who made sure that Elizabeth Warren would never direct the agency she was responsible for helping to create.

It's a real shame. Add another coin to my cynicism bank.

Let's Remember This...

2011-07-11T14:04:00.001-04:00

As the investigation of the phone hacking of News of the World reporters and private investigators continues, let's remember, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us, that it was a newspaper that investigated and brought to light the misdeeds of News of the World:

The prime minister's office showed itself incapable of conducting an investigation; the courts and the prosecutors appeared to have no idea of the state of the law, and the police were too busy collecting their tip-off fees. Admittedly, it isn't usually the job of these institutions to keep the press honest. (Indeed, I could swear that I read somewhere that the whole concept was the other way about.) Still, it's encouraging to record that when the press needed a housecleaning, there was a paper [the Guardian] ready to take on the job.

Other Views: Media Moguls, Rupert Murdoch

2011-07-09T00:54:00.000-04:00

For what it's worth, here are some links to articles with a little more positive attitude toward Rupert Murdoch and British tabloids:

Nicholas Lemann, "Paper Tigers," The New Yorker, 13 April 2009.
Toby Young, "Three Cheers for Murdoch," Salon, 8 July 2011.

Darker and Deeper: Murdoch and the Phone Hacking Investigation

2011-07-07T12:59:00.014-04:00

The investigation into how reporters for Rupert Murdoch's News of the World hacked into voicemail of murder victims and their families, members of the royal family, celebrities, and, perhaps even dead soldiers and victims of the London Underground bombing continue. Why should we care here in our bright "city on a hill"? Well, Murdoch is a media mogul whose print and cable media stretch from Australia to Great Britain to the United States (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post) to Asia. The woman who managed the newspaper charged with these illegal acts, Rebekah Brooks, is very close to Murdoch. He treats her almost as his own daughter. But even more importantly, as print, cable, television, and online media become more and more consolidated, under the control of one corporation or one multi-billionaire, the news we receive is all the more susceptible to being manipulated by people with immense power. I think we have to be vigilant and to fight against misuse of that kind of power.

First, a little bit of background about the despicable practices of Rupert Murdoch's reporters, from the epicenter of the scandal [h/t to Jack Shafer for most of these links]:

A timeline of the scandal: "Phone hacking: timeline of scandal," The Telegraph, 5 April 2011.
Nick Davies and Amelia Hill, "Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World," Guardian, 4 July 2011.
Sandra Laville and Vikram Dodd, "News of the World Paid bribes worth L100,000 to up to five Met officers," Guardian 7 July 2011.
A British reporter deconstructs Rupert Murdoch's statement about the investigation: Roy Greenslade, "Phone hacking: reading between the lines of Murdoch's statement," Guardian 6 July 2011.
Andy McSmith, "Behind Rupert Murdoch's Throne: The story of Rebekah Brooks," The Independent Press, 6 July 2011.
On Murdoch's decision to allow Rebekah Brooks to lead an internal investigation on the phone hacking: Helene Mulholland, "Letting Rebekah Brooks lead enquiry is 'extraordinary,' says PCC chair," Guardian, 7 July 2011.
On News of the World journalists spying for murder suspects: Nick Davies, "News of the World surveillance of detective: what Rebekah Brooks knew," Guardian, 6 July 2011.

Another connection between our shores and the shores of the white cliffs of Dover:

Peter Hutchison, "Phone hacking: Rupert Murdoch brings in Joel Klein to oversee investigation," The Telegraph 7 July 2011.

Today's headlines at The New York Times online:

Sarah Lyall and Jo Becker, ""Woman Rises to the Top in Male Tabloid Culture," The New York Times, 7 July 2011.
Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell, "Murdoch to Close Tabloid Amid Fury over Hacking,", The New York Times, 7 July 2011.
Jeremy W. Peters and Brian Stelter, "The Murdoch Style, Under Pressure," The New York Times, 6 July 2011.

Today, Jack Shafer turns the investigation into film noir on Slate: "Rupert Murdock: Film Noir Villain"

And, for background on Rupert Murdoch, The Atlantic provides a link to an article in their archives by James Fallows: "The Age of Murdoch," first published in 2003.

We Know Who has the Real Power

2011-07-06T17:13:00.000-04:00

Well, here are two seemingly contradictory quotes in an article by Jodie Ginsberg, writing for Reuters, posted on Talking Points Memo website:

British politicians have said in the past they feared criticizing any of the Murdoch papers because they feared their own private lives might be exposed.

The [British] government has maintained that the hacking scandal should not influence its decision [on allowing Rupert Murdoch "to secure the 61 percent of broadcaster BSkyB he does not already control in a deal expected to be worth at least $14 billion"], which will be based on whether the takeover will give Murdoch too much power over the British media and politics -- a view Cameron's ministers reject.

Worth Reading

2011-07-06T15:29:00.003-04:00

Frank Rich lets loose: "Obama's Original Sin," in New York Magazine's "News and Features," 3 July 2011.

This article would be great to use in a communications class in which one is discussing the art of rhetoric (ethos, logos, and pathos) and the emotional appeal of language (buried metaphors such as "paw print," alliteration, understatement, hyperbole, aphorisms, etc.)

A few excerpts:

"As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers."

"It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in."

"What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up."

"Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords." (my emphasis--Just listen to the hard "R's" rolling through the first part of that last sentence, only to be let out like air from a tire, with the emphasis on "S's" at the end of the sentence.)

And--ouch!: "But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys."

And the final two paragraphs that one hopes the President (or someone who can influence him) reads and heeds:

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.
The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Where's the Outrage?

2011-07-06T13:36:00.006-04:00

Since moving to Louisiana, I decided not to connect my television to cable, which means that I won't have access to any television channels beyond what I can access online. In Atlanta, we cut our cable, too, but my husband had to install an antenna on our house to access "free" television channels, and anytime we had a change in weather, the reception pixelated and stalled even though we were just a few miles from major transmitting stations. But here in south Louisiana, we've chosen a television-and-cable-silent zone (except for the Internet), and thus I have no access to the 24/7 chatter of cable news, and we no longer even watch the News Hour on PBS every evening as we did previously. Thus, I've missed all the intensity surrounding the trial of Casey Anthony, who was charged with killing her young daughter.

I have read the occasional news story about the trial, and today I've read several articles about the results of the trial and the public reaction, but I didn't keep up with all the details. Yes, I sympathize with families who are victims of terrible injustices--kidnapped children, murdered family members, incest, etc.--but those stories, to me, are local stories, unless they represent something significant in the wider culture. I will read an in-depth news story describing such a local tragedy, but I don't get swept up in the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day inundation of images and analysis though I understand the attraction to such stories. Color me conservative in that I recoil from the emotionalism and voyeurism exhibited in cable coverage of sensational news.

What bothers me is that these sensational stories get all the media attention while stories that have wider significance are relegated to print media that do not capture the attention that cable does--or get overlooked altogether on the back pages of newspapers. Or those stories that should capture our attention are reported by news organizations or bloggers that do not have a national audience.

For example, finally gaining some attention in international media is the story that British tabloids consistently use criminal means to gather information, including hacking the voicemail of celebrities and royals. Rupert Murdoch's News of the World has been caught in extensive hacking of voicemail not only of public figures but of every day citizens experiencing the kind of horror that little Calee Anthony's family has experienced. Private investigators for News of the World hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a young teenager who was kidnapped and murdered. For months the police looked for Dowler, and for a while, the family had some hope that their loved one was still alive, for messages from Dowler's cell phone were deleted as if someone were still using the phone. It turns out that a private investigator working for News of the World had hacked into Milly Dowler's full voicemail and deleted messages so that more messages could be recorded. The reporters were monitoring the calls. Then the reporters interviewed the parents who had regained hope that their daughter was still alive since her voicemail was showing activity.

This kind of reprehensible behavior on the part of reporters is not limited to the shores of Great Britain. We see similar behavior, I think, in the likes of Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart might not be hacking the voicemails of murder victims, but he publishes cleverly edited video that conveys inaccurate information that he passes off as real journalism.

More troubling, however, is Rupert Murdoch's connection to this imbroglio. Murdoch, of course, owns News of the World, the Times and Sunday Times in England. He also created the Fox Broadcasting Company in the USA, purchased The New York Post, worked with MCI Communications to create The Weekly Standard, got into USA cable news with Fox News, and recently bought The Wall Street Journal. Is anyone so naive as to think that what happens in the news rooms of News of the World has no impact in the news rooms of Fox or The Wall Street Journal? As Jack Shafer writes in Slate, Rupert Murdoch has:

swept away every scandal--major and minor--he has ever faced because of his special skill at normalizing his malfactions. [my emphasis] He sacked Times of London editor Harold Evans after guaranteeing the paper 'independence.' He deployed his reporters to unearth dirt on business rivals. He purchased the forged Hitler diaries. He repeatedly and cravenly kowtowed to the Chinese. He approved the acquisition of O.J. Simpson's book, If I Did It, and more...We expect the worst from Murdoch, and he lives up to our expectations.

"Normalizing...malfactions" is a real threat to journalism. People mistrust the media already. Sometimes that mistrust is deserved, but often it isn't. If we cannot trust journalists to gather and report to the best of their abilities, we lose an important--necessary--means for evaluating and understanding our world and people in power.

That trust continues to be eroded.

The British Daily Mail's website presence, Mail Online, recently published an article that describes how Roger Ailes, president of Fox News and chairman of the Fox Television Stations, had planned as early as 1970 to create a pro-Republican news station to promote then-president Nixon, for whom Ailes worked as executive producer of TV. Mark Duell reports that "a memo called 'A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News' was discovered by a Gawker journalist inside the Richard Nixon Presidential Library." Evidently, Ailes hoped that the White House could pay for the station. Ummm...that's called propaganda in reality world.

Melissa Bell includes in an article in the Washington Post a very revealing quote from that early Ailes memo:

Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit--watch--listen. The thinking is done for you.

So there you have it: Roger Ailes has finally achieved his goal in Fox News.

And, of course, manipulating a passive public is not limited to Roger Ailes.

These stories should create an outrage, too, for the consequences are far-reaching. Without access to excellent journalism, we cannot act as informed citizens in a democracy.

See the original Gawker article on Roger Ailes' early plans for a GOP-news station here: John Cook, Roger Ailes' Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News," 30 June 2011.

See more articles about The News of the World controversy here:
Sarah Ellison, "The Never-Ending Story: News of the World's Andy Coulson Condoned Police Payoffs," in Vanity Fair, 5 July 2011.

"News of the World Phone Hacking Live", The Telegraph 6 July 2011.

Outrage Fatigue

2011-07-05T10:48:00.008-04:00

Reading the news online these days gives me outrage fatigue. Today I got out of bed at 4 a.m. because I couldn't sleep. Now, four hours later, I'm exhausted and would like to stay in bed all day to recover. Here is my day's quota of outrage:

First up, a list of banking crises and bailouts in Paul Krugman's and Robin Wells' article in The New York Review of Books has me wondering why we can't learn from our mistake of not regulating the banking industry (and larger financial industry) more vigorously: The Busts Keep Getting Bigger. Why?". Clearly, some people have been getting very, very rich through insufficiently regulated speculation and trading, but millions of Americans have suffered because of the greed of a few:
what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America...[T]the vast sums of money channeled through Wall Street did not improve America’s productive capacity by “efficiently allocating capital to its best use.” Instead, it diminished the country’s productivity by directing capital on the basis of financial chicanery, outrageous compensation packages, and bubble-infected stock price valuations....And what has happened in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 crisis is still worse: all the evidence suggests that the United States is on track to spending the better part of a decade experiencing high unemployment and sub-par growth blighting millions of lives—particularly the old, the young, and the economically vulnerable.

Next up, an article about how a law to protect pregnant women from domestic violence is being used to criminalize women who have miscarriages: Ed Pilkington's "Outcry in America as Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges," The Guardian, 24 June 2011. Women whose addictions may or may not have caused them to abort are being arrested and charged with murder. And this is in a country where abortion is still--theoretically, at least--legal. Now, I believe in a woman's right to have a legal, safe, medically-arranged abortion, a right that is becoming increasingly difficult to attain in states that are throwing up more and more legal barriers. Personally, I don't think abortion is the right way to practice birth control; I would prefer that women and teenagers have cheap and easy access to birth control. However, the same folks who would refuse abortions to women who seek them (or women who require them for medical reasons) also fight to prevent easy access to birth control. I believe that women have the right to make their own decisions about reproduction, and I'm not really sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of cells can have "rights" from the moment of conception. Yet that seems to be where our current anti-abortion groups are leading us--to a place where women's bodies become their prisons, their fetuses--at whatever stage--their jailors. It's difficult for me not to see misogyny in how this law is being pursued:
At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy. (my emphasis)
Once again, we have a law whose consequences folks just weren't far-sighted enough to imagine.

Even David Brooks is calling out the Republicans for obstinancy: "The Mother of All No-Brainers," The New York Times, 4 July 2011. Brooks describes the fanatic movement that has taken over the Republican party as unwilling to compromise, "no matter how sweet the terms," as lacking "moral decency," as deniers of facts (refusing to believe scholars and impartial experts), and as unfit to govern. This is DAVID BROOKS, not some lefty. What I don't get is why so many citizens are influenced by these same fanatics. And I found Michael Lind's article "The Three Fundamentalisms of the American Right" useful, too, in understanding my own outrage at today's conservatism--because today's conservatism isn't the conservatism that I grew up with: it's fundamentalism, not Burkean conservatism. And just as I grew more and more outraged as the Southern Baptist Church, the church in which I was born and reared, became more and more fundamentalist, I have become more and more outraged as conservatism has become fundamentalist. And that makes sense. For, as Lind points out, one cannot have a civil discussion with people who think they are always right--and therefore Good--and anyone who disagrees with them is always wrong--and therefore Evil:
The rise of triple fundamentalism [Protestant fundamentalism, constitutional fundamentalism, and market fundamentalism] on the American right creates a crisis of political discourse in the United States. Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

Enough outrage for the day. It's mid-morning; I can still salvage the day.

What We Eat and Who Suffers for it

2011-06-29T17:38:00.017-04:00

Illegal immigration has been in the news lately as states pass stricter laws to police undocumented immigrants. In Georgia, the law requires that employers verify the legal status of their employees, using E-Verify. In Arizona, immigrants must carry their alien registration papers at all times, and anyone whom law enforcement suspects is in this country illegally can be stopped, questioned, and asked to show such papers. (One can imagine how this part of the illegal-immigrant laws can cause all kinds of problems: racial profiling, harassing people who can't produce papers because they are American citizens with, perhaps, only a driver's license on them when stopped, etc.) As these laws get passed in more and more states, the public's attitude toward those who work in our fields, our houses, and our meat-processing plants become more intolerant, too. Or maybe, the intolerance came first, and then the laws. But the two go hand-in-hand.

Illegal immigration is a difficult problem, but every time the federal government tries to reform immigration, voices speak up loudly to prevent any kind of amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been living within our borders, working hard, paying taxes on the goods they buy, and raising children in better circumstances than those they left behind.

A few articles that I have read recently have illustrated to me how our country depends upon the work of those who are here illegally and thus have influenced me to believe that we need laws that allow those who are working illegally to work legally. Employers take advantage of people who are scared that they will be deported or arrested and jailed. And those who say that illegal workers are taking away jobs that unemployed Americans could have in this terrible economy need to look at the kinds of jobs that illegal immigrants are doing--jobs that require little or no education. Does anyone really think that a recently layed-off manager of a retail store or a fifty-year-old tax accountant is going to take a job digging out pig brains?

An article in Mother Jones--"The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret," by Ted Genoways--describes how foreign workers, many of them undocumented, toil away in meat-processing factories, juicing pig brains for a thickener used in stir fry. Austin, Minnesota, is very proud of Hormel's location in their city of 24,718 residents. Novelist Tim O'Brien was born there. The contracting company that does the meat-processing for Hormel, Quality Pork Processors, Inc. (whose web site is also in Spanish) is also located in Austin, within the 15-foot privacy wall of the Hormel compound. Within those walls, people kill pigs, cut up pigs, turn pig head meat into sausage, and juice pig brains for that thickener which is exported to Asia. "More than 19,000 hogs" can be processed in a single day.

The work is not easy, and the effects can be life-threatening:

Since 1989, the line speed at QPP had been steadily increasing—from 750 heads per hour when the plant opened to 1,350 per hour in 2006, though the workforce barely increased. To speed production, the company installed a conveyor system and humming automatic knives throughout the plant, reducing skilled tasks to single motions. Workers say nearly everyone suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome or some repetitive stress injury, but by October 2007, there were signs of something else. Workers from QPP's kill floor were coming to Carole Bower, the plant's occupational health nurse, with increasingly familiar complaints: numbness and tingling in their extremities, chronic fatigue, searing skin pain. Bower started noticing workers so tender that they struggled with the stairs to the top-floor locker rooms, high above the roar of the factory line.

Workers at the "head" line, that is, those who dig the meat out of the pigs' heads and pull out the spinal cords, and juice the brains into a frothy mix that looks, according to some, like strawberry milkshake or Pepto Bismol, began exhibiting neurological damage. The article describes the terrible effects of that damage on some of the workers. Interestingly, Customs and Immigration started investigating the documentation of those workers who were ill, illustrating, once again, how we take advantage of undocumented workers. We want them to work in our factories, do the dirty work many Americans won't do (and work for which companies want to pay as little as possible), yet we don't want to pay when those workers are hurt in the process. The CEO of QPP negotiated settlements with "up to a dozen of employees who had filed workers' comp claims": "After attorneys' fees, each received $12,500, a half-year's pay." One man who had been permanently injured received $38, 600.

Two other articles about food production in this country also reminded me of how much we depend upon immigrants. This first one is actually a post by Mark Bittman, on his New York Times blog, about Immokalee, Florida, "the source of almost all the winter tomatoes grown in the United States": "Immokalee, America's Tomato Capital," posted 12 May 2011. The second is a follow-up post written by Jennifer Mascia: "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida", posted 15 June 2011. Bittman's post is a description of his tour of the town where:

tomato workers have gone from enduring slavery, beatings, wage theft (and sub-minimum wage pay) and 12-hour days in the blazing heat with no shade, to a victory that, that, while not quite complete, is possibly the most successful labor action in the United States in 20 years...

In her post, Mascia provides more details of the town and the workers who make sure that tomatoes are available in the produce section of grocery stores. She describes the work that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has done to prevent slavery and to raise wages and living standards of the people who toil in the fields. Big chain stores fight to get lower prices to pass on to consumers--and the people who suffer are the workers in the field. For after paying for automotive machinery and diesel, where else do farmers have to turn to cut back on costs? Wages.

The production of tomatoes in Immokalee also can be an ecological disaster, as the soil is not rich enough in nutrients to grow crops: "Because of this, the land is bombarded with fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides" (Mascia, "Everything You ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida"). Also, the tomatoes are picked green and then gassed with ethylene to "ripen" them. Vine-ripened tomatoes, that is, tomatoes too ripe to be gathered and transported, are left on the vines to rot and are ploughed under with the plants after picking, which is done by hand.

Mark Bittman also has a post titled "The True Cost of Tomatoes" (posted 14 June 2011) with more information about the lives of tomato pickers, and Barry Estabrook has written a book detailing the production of tomatoes in Florida and the people who work to get them to the supermarket, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit. Here's an excerpt from his book: "Slavery in the Tomato Fields," published 8 June 2011, in The Atlantic. One can listen to an interview with Estabrook here: "The Tasteless Modern Tomato", posted by Justin Megahan, 21 June 2011, on the website of Creative Loafing, Tampa.

These articles remind me not only to care about the people who put the food on my table but also to be more aware of the food choices that I make. We owe a lot to immigrants in this country. Grappling the problem of illegal immigration requires some humility and mercy, along with justice.

[The photo at the top of the post is one of our own tomatoes, gathered from our first garden since moving in March to south Louisiana.]

Additional comment: Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama says he's willing to do anything short of shooting illegal immigrants to get rid of them. He says that:

they have no right to be here. They are clogging up our emergency rooms, and making our education system more expensive. If you go to the Madison County Jail, there are far too many illegal aliens there because they have victimized Americans...[He adds that they] need to quit taking jobs from American citizens.

Maybe he will take their places in the tomato fields of Florida or the pig-brain-sucking head table of Hormel in Austin, Minnesota: "Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks Makes Strong Comments on Illegal Immigration Law," WHNT-19 News, Huntsville, Alabama, 29 June 2011.

More about the meat industry here:
Tom Philpott, "How the Meat Industry Turned Abuse into a Business Model," Mother Jones, 29 June 2011.

And on how House Republicans' refusal to fully fund the Department of Agriculture's appropriations bill for next year will hurt small farmers: Monica Potts, "GOP's Tiny Cuts Wound Small Farmers," Grist 23 June 2011.

See also: Monica Potts' "The Serfs of Arkansas," American Prospect, 9 March 2011.

Protecting the Rich and Powerful

2011-06-27T13:13:00.014-04:00

This morning, I read on Salon's website an article titled "The Rich Aren't Like You and Me," by Michael Winship. Winship describes how the rich are getting richer and richer and the poor, poorer and poorer. CEO pay and compensation continues to grow while workers' salaries stagnate. Of 438 companies analyzed:

[a]t 158 of the companies, more was paid to those in charge than was shelled out for outside audit fees. And 32 of them paid more in top salaries than they paid in corporate income taxes. The pay of 2591 executives was up 13.9 percent in 2010. Total, before taxes: $14.3 billion, almost equal to the GDP of Tajikistan, population: more than seven million.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (See also, here) was passed in 2010, in response to the financial crisis, but interested parties have been chipping away at its regulatory power. One of the requirements of the Dodd-Frank would have made transparent the difference between CEO compensation and worker compensation of publicly traded companies: "The Dodd-Frank Act requires publicly traded companies to disclose the median annual total compensation of all employees of the company, the annual total compensation of the CEO, and the ratio comparing those two numbers."

Some folks, however, think that gathering this information is just "too burdensome" for companies and that the money spent gathering that information would best be spent on hiring workers. (Really, how difficult would it be for a company to publish that information in its annual report?) So Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) has sponsored a bill--which has passed in the Committee on Financial Services--to do away with this "burdensome" requirement. Companies, of course, have a vested interest in not making this kind of information easily available to the public--and their own workers. Nan Hayworth also has a vested interest. As Michael Winship points out, Nan Hayworth's official biography

cites 'reducing regulatory burdens on businesses' as one of her top priorities. Among her leading 2010 campaign contributors: leveraged buyout specialists Vestar Capital Partners, distressed debt investors Elliott Management and financial services giant Credit Suisse. Not to mention the anti-taxation Club for Growth.

Businesses, of course, are making profits once again in our stressed economy; workers, however, are not seeing their pay rise accordingly.

So I was curious to see who co-sponsored this bill to lift such a "burdensome" requirement, as outlined in H.R. 1062: Burdensome Data Collection Relief Act. Here are the names: Judy Biggert (R-IL), Francisco Canseco (R-TX), Bob Dold (R-IL), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Michael Grimm (R-NY), Peter King (R-NY), Bill Posey (R-FL).

As Peter Whoriskey reports in his article in the Washington Post, "Business Group: Public Companies Shouldn't have to Compare CEO and Worker Pay":

The committee vote was largely along partisan lines: Twenty-nine Republicans and four Democrats supported repeal; 21 Democrats opposed it.

As income disparity grows in this country, it's interesting to see just who forms alliances to hide that disparity and to protect the rich.

And so it goes.

Additional information:
members of the Committee on Financial Services

Register opposition or support: popvox

The Hellscape

2011-06-24T10:18:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I did a bad thing and a good thing. The bad thing I did was to withdraw the money from my defined contribution plan that covered the last three years I worked part-time in Georgia. No, it wasn't that much money, but the advice my husband had given me was to roll it over into an IRA. Instead, I withdrew the money, deposited most of it in a newly-opened savings account and some of it in a newly-opened checking account in a bank near my new home. Then I went shopping.

I really don't like to shop, especially in the kind of shopping centers that plaster the area where I have moved and that plaster most of America's cities and suburban areas, what my husband calls "The Hellscape," acres of parking lot in front of big-box buildings.

What I loved about the place from which we moved is that the local community (one of the densest populated in Georgia) had made a conscious effort to recreate a real downtown, with businesses lined up along sidewalks and parking available in designated areas behind businesses or in parking garages. Trees lined the streets. Tables were set out in front of restaurants. An art gallery was located next to an import shop which was located next to a coffee shop where local kids read their poetry on Friday nights. Several good restaurants were within walking distance of my house, a mile from downtown. I could walk the shady sidewalks of my neighborhood and within fifteen minutes arrive at a bookstore or at my hairdresser's or at a restaurant where I could order an excellent margarita.

Not so in The Hellscape. You are damned to arrive only by car--everyone in his or her own car, all the cars stacked up at the three-eyed (or four-eyed if there's a left-turn lane) traffic light that guards the way into The Hellscape. And once you've arrived, and parked, and walked the steaming hot pavement (for this IS south Louisiana) to the somewhat shady portico of the building you're headed for, there are few surprises left to anticipate. All the stores are all the stores you will find in any other Hellscape, and the products sold are products you would find in any other Hellscape store. Maybe you'll find something on sale.

To shop, I drove to a larger Hellscape from a smaller, labyrinthine Hellscape. The labyrinth had been designed, evidently, to test the orienting skills of the newly-damned. I failed--even with a printed Google map and a satellite photo of the shopping center where the Louisiana Division of Motor Vehicles was located. I had to make a phone call to my husband, who had earlier navigated this labyrinth of Chinese restaurants, pawn shops, and car title stores.

Once I escaped the Division of Motor Vehicles (where I had to pay a very hefty amount of money to make my car Hellscape legal), I headed to the Big Box Hellscape. Here, at least, there was a bookstore, a Big Box bookstore, but one where I was able to find the books on my reading list even though I had forgotten the titles of those books and the names of the authors. I remembered enough to be able to scan the shelves to find what I needed--and even to pick up a book that was not on my list but which captured my attention as one I might like to read.

And that was the good thing I did: I went shopping for books. Well, I think, probably, the better thing I could have done was to go to a library and check out those books, but I can't be TOO good.

(Click on the photo above to see the books I'm anticipating reading. My son immediately snatched up David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and is almost midway through it.)

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

2011-06-23T14:03:00.003-04:00

The Awl has an interesting post on how Michele Bachman's supporters will use negative criticism to inflame her base--those nasty lefty bloggers, you know--much as Sarah Palin has used negative criticism to make the case that her critics are mean and unfair. But what really caught my attention was the discussion of how local Minnesotans who have been following Bachman's career and catching her out on lies and craziness don't get the credit for their work. Instead, big-name writers such as Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, grab information from those local sites and often don't credit the source. Shame on Rolling Stone! A second criticism of writers of large media publications is the tendency to condescend to folks who live in those towns from which Bachman and Palin hail: Stillwater, Minnesota; Wasilla, Alaska. It's easy to jet into a place, sniff out some local color, and draw quick conclusions that don't stand up in the light of real analysis--or conclusions that, while not untrue, are simplistic. This is another reason folks hate the media.

Anyway, giving credit where credit is due: Karl Bremer of Stillwater, Minnesota, has been following Michele Bachman's career from a front-row seat. So check out his blog: Ripple in Stillwater. Also, check out these other sources that did not receive credit for information used by Matt Taibbi in writing for Rolling Stone: Minneapolis City Pages and The Dump Bachman Blog.

Politics Vs. Substantive Discussion of Issues

2011-06-22T11:01:00.010-04:00

"... [R]elentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems." --James Fallows, in "Why Americans Hate the Media," Atlantic Magazine, February 1996.

I am re-reading this article from The Atlantic's archives. Fifteen years later, it seems to me that the media focus is even more on politics rather than on substance, substance such as how our country should deal with the very real problems of unemployment, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Libya and maybe even Yemen), the financial crisis, and climate change. Republicans have ~~just about~~ abandoned any real attempt to create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans, and they are threatening to blow up our country economically by holding the debt limit hostage to their budget-cutting demands, despite contrary advice from economists within their own party. I'm beginning to think that Republicans are willing to sacrifice American livelihoods to win the presidency--They just rejected a suggestion to cut payroll taxes, a move that would stimulate the economy and a tax cut they very much favored in the past. It's all about politics. All about how a poor economy will hurt President Obama's prospects--and the Democrats'--in 2012. And the media focuses on the politics--on how not embracing Paul Ryan's budget plan will affect Republican nominees' chance at the presidency, not on how adopting Ryan's plan will affect ordinary Americans. It's not about us, the people, and how these policies will affect our everyday lives.

Update (Thursday, 23 June, 2011):
The point that James Fallows makes in the quote I've excerpted above has been demonstrated once again in the discussion of climate change. Al Gore has published a very well-written, insightful article in Rolling Stone on climate change. Does the media then discuss climate change, the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the tremendous push-back from vested interests, the consequences of climate change, the ways to confront climate change? No, of course not. Because Al Gore included some criticism of President Obama in his article, the media immediately focuses on politics: Al Gore vs. Barack Obama--as if the whole issue boils down to a boxing match.

Yet Gore's criticism of Obama is muted and is only a small piece of the long article. Once again, the media turns a serious topic into political entertainment.

It's disheartening.

Read the article: "Climate of Denial," Al Gore, Rolling Stone, 22 June 2011.

Typically, television media frames Gore's discussion of climate change as a political spat, "Gore vs. Obama." On Hardball, Chris Matthews begins his show using that very frame, though he does give a little push back in the lead-in, as do Joan Walsh and Eric Bates: "Drop the Gore vs. Obama Script," Joan Walsh, Salon, 22 June 2011.

Gotcha!

2011-06-09T11:17:00.005-04:00

Ever since Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin what newspapers she read to keep informed, Palin has complained that the "lame-stream" media is always trying to trip up politicians with such "gotcha" questions. For my part, Couric's question seemed quite straight-forward. How difficult could it be to name a newspaper or journal or two? Surely Palin read The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine founded by one of her most ardent supporters at the time, William Kristol. Maybe she occasionally read Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy? I mean, she was the running mate of a man who wanted to lead the most powerful country in the nation. Were he to become president, she would be, as they say, a heart-beat away from the presidency. Or, really, how difficult would it be to pucker one's lips to say The New York Times or Washington Post? She could have started locally, with the Anchorage Daily News or the Wasilla Frontiersman. I mean, she was governor of Alaska then, and it would make sense to us voters that she kept up with state news and politics. In short, there was nothing "gotcha" in that question that Sarah Palin herself didn't provide in her answer.

Ever since the Couric interview, Palin has again and again accused the media of focusing on "gotcha" questions. Certainly, there are people and organizations who long for and aggressively look for that "gotcha" moment. The group following Congressman Anthony Weiner's Tweets is an example. Andrew Breitbart is an example. Writers for The Enquirer may be further examples. But these aren't--usually, I guess I should add here--providers of news for mainstream and authoritative news organizations.

Now Dan Amira, with New York magazine, has put together a slide show of Palin's complaints about these "gotcha" questions--all of which seem quite legitimate questions to me posed to people who were or are running for the highest offices in the land.

Judge for yourself: "A History of Sarah Palin Complaining about 'Gotcha' Questions," Dan Amira, New York Magazine, News and Features, 8 June 2011.

Please go back to your real job, Paul Broun (R-GA)

2011-06-08T12:46:00.004-04:00

I am getting really, really tired of hearing U.S. Congressmen and Senators excoriate other public employees. For some reason, Republicans don't seem to think that federal employees are citizens; they certainly don't care if their budget cuts and threats not to raise the debt ceiling deprive hundreds of thousands of citizens of their jobs. And now Paul Broun, Republican Congressman from Georgia, flippantly states on conservative radio host Martha Zoller's show that not raising the debt limit would only put 250,000 or so people out of work. And who cares about those people, anyway? They're just federal employees:

Well, [Paul Broun said] those are gonna be government employees that are put out of work. There are a lot of government employees that need to go find a real job. [Hear these words here:"Paul Broun Fine with 250,000 Public Employees Being Laid Off..."]

Just what is a real job, Congressman Broun? Is taking care of the payroll with the Department of Defense not a real job? Is running the veterans' hospital system not a real job? Is collecting federal income taxes not a real job? How about managing federal lands and national parks? How about the crews who do the cleaning up after tourists at national monuments, national parks, national museums? How about the folks who provide summer informational tours and activities for children at those national museums and national parks? How about those folks at NOAA who chart hurricane activity in the summer and fall? How about the people who make sure (to the best of their ability even when stymied by budget cuts and ideological demagoguery) we have clean air and water?

I admit, Paul Broun, I have a dog in this fight. My husband works for the federal government; he was fortunate to get this job, one which he not only enjoys but for which he is eminently qualified, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have been married for thirty-three years, have seen hard times and good times, and are putting two kids through college. Well-educated, neither of us has ever received a paycheck that truly compensated us for our skills and education, but, also, neither of us has ever been motivated primarily by money. We've had jobs that enabled us to give back to society in some way, through education, conservation, or scientific research. And now we have reached the age when it becomes increasingly difficult to find appropriate employment if we lose our jobs. I know. I've been either under-employed or un-employed for the past several years, despite an excellent employment history (though being a woman who changed jobs to fit the needs of her family certainly did not help me in the long-term). There are hundreds of thousands--millions--of Americans like us, people who paid their taxes, took responsibilities for their families, contributed to their communities, and looked forward to, if not a comfortable retirement, at least a livable retirement.

Those hundreds of thousands of Americans include federal employees who have helped people like you steer the ship of state. And now, in a time of great distress, you are all for abandoning them and for taking an economic path that would not just put more Americans out of work when the current national unemployment rate is 9.1%, but that would also have additional serious consequences for millions of people around the world. Not raising the debt limit could--according to economists that include those from your own political party--cause another financial crisis, and we're not even out of the current crisis yet. Some are even predicting that the current crisis could escalate into another Great Depression. And you're just itching, evidently, to add fuel to the fire.

So please go back to your real job, Congressman Broun. As a federal employee.....you suck.

Traveling with Hate from One Century to the Next

2011-06-01T23:11:00.010-04:00

This afternoon I read an article on Slate titled "The Persistence of Hate," by Ray Fisman. The author describes a study done by Nico Voigtländer of UCLA and Joachim Voth of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain. The two academics set out to answer this question by looking at the roots of anti-semitism in Germany: "How persistent are cultural traits?" By comparing historical records, the authors discovered a correlation between the treatment of Jews in certain locales during the Black Plague with anti-semitism in the same locales in Nazi Germany:

When the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1348-50, it was often blamed on Jews poisoning wells. Many towns and cities (but not all) murdered their Jewish populations. Almost six hundred years later, after defeat in World War I, Germany saw a country-wide rise in anti-Semitism. This led to a wave of persecution, even before the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. We demonstrate that localities with a medieval history of pogroms showed markedly higher levels of anti-Semitism in the interwar period. Attacks on Jews were six times more likely in the 1920s in towns and cities where Jews had been burned in 1348-50; the Nazi Party’s share of the vote in 1928 – when it had a strong anti-Semitic focus – was 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.

The authors conclude that hatred was transmitted over centuries, toward a group of people who basically disappeared from Germany in the 1500s (after all the burning and torturing) and who did not return in numbers until the 1700s. You can evaluate the authors' methodology yourself at the following link and download the published paper: Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany," Nico Voigtländer and Joachim Voth, Social Science Research Network: Tomorrow's Research Today, May 27, 2011.

I have scanned the article but have not read it thoroughly, but the findings do not seem out of the realm of possibility to me. Hatred is transmitted from one generation to another, even when the receiving generation has had no personal contact with the persons against whom the hatred is directed.

Just hours after I read the discussion of the study on Slate, my son returned from the tutoring center where he is working part-time this summer. "Guess what question a fourth-grader asked me today," he said to me. "He asked me which side I was on in the Civil War."

A regular student at the tutoring center, this child evidently often tries to engage the tutors with off-the-wall questions not related to the subject in which he is being tutored. He had asked the same question of the woman who was tutoring him, and, not liking her answer--"on the side of the North"--he turned for vindication to my son, who was tutoring other students. When my son said that he was glad that the Union had won, the fourth grader asked him why. "Because slavery is evil," my son replied, trying to keep his answer short and to the point before getting the student back on track.

"But the Civil War wasn't about slavery; it was about state's rights," the kid replied. "Abraham Lincoln made it about slavery to stick it to the South." Then he added that he hated Abraham Lincoln and that it was a good thing that John Wilkes Booth shot him. And he asked my son why he didn't live in the North since he wasn't "for" the South--still fighting the Civil War in his little head.

Later, as my son and I were describing to my husband these two interlinking experiences--my reading the article on Slate and my son's experience with the young student--we discussed a myriad of responses, some a little smart-alecky:

"You're right: it was about state's rights--about the rights of states to establish or to maintain slavery as an institution."
"Which side was I on? I wasn't alive during that war. Surely I don't look that old."

But it really wasn't a funny story. Hate never is. .......

Update: This must be hate-Abraham-Lincoln week. I just read Andrew Leonard's post on Salon: "Was Abraham Lincoln a Jewish Pawn of the Rothschilds?" Only in this story, hatred of Abraham Lincoln is directly connected to hatred of Jews. It seems that there are conspiracists who believe that Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War because the Rothschilds thought it would be good for banking. It's true that after the Civil War--and in order to help pay for that horrible war--Lincoln reformed the banking system, establishing a national currency--and thus stabilizing banking. As Leonard points out, a similar narrative is being tossed around today toward another president who initiated major banking reform. Is there no exit from these stupid conspiracy cycles and hate transfusions?

Back at the Farm

2011-05-28T13:53:00.007-04:00

I left Georgia two months ago to relocate to Louisiana, but I still keep up with news there through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's website. So I read with interest Governor Nathan Deal's recent signing into law House Bill 87, described as an Arizona-styled immigration law. An article published in early May in the AJC states that:

Deal and other supporters of HB 87 have hailed it as a victory for taxpayers who have borne the cost of illegal immigration in Georgia. A recent estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center puts the number of illegal immigrants in Georgia at 425,000, the seventh-highest among the states. Those illegal immigrants, supporters of HB 87 say, are taking jobs from state residents and burdening Georgia’s public schools, hospitals and jails. [Jeremy Redmon, "Governor signs Arizona-style immigration bill into law," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 13 May 2011.]

Supporters of the bill re-affirm that Georgia is a "business-friendly" state, but that HB 87 "represents [the state's] responsibility to watch the taxpayers' bottom line just as the business community vigilantly guards their bottom line." As the farming season gears up, however, one of the consequences to the bill has not been so "business-friendly." Evidently, Hispanic workers "are bypassing Georgia to work in other states." [Jeremy Redman, "Governor asks state to probe farm labor shortages," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 27 May 2011]

That Hispanic labor shortage has caused farmers to lose money, to let some of their produce remain uncollected in the field. One blue berry farmer estimates that he has lost 10% of his crop due to the labor shortage. An owner of a 4,500 acre vegetable farm near Tifton, GA, says that "between 75 and 100 Hispanic workers he depends on didn't show up for work this year....causing him to lose some of his vegetable harvests" [Redman, 27 May 2011]. Some farmers are talking about cutting back on production in order to adjust to the loss in labor; others have tried enticements, such as extra monetary bonuses, to get Hispanic laborers to overcome their fear of the restrictive law. According to the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association "the labor shortages afflicting South Georgia counties could put as much as $300 million in crops at risk" [Redman, 27 May 2011].

Now I know what some folks are going to say: with Georgia's unemployment rate still near 10%, that maybe those unemployed should seek work on Georgian farms. Well, we all know the history of farm labor in the South, don't we? Also, it's back-breaking, hot, tough 8-hours-a-day work. The typical wage, evidently, is $12.50 an hour, on average. And "experienced workers can earn as much as $200 a day" [Bill Chappell, "Georgia Farmers Say Immigration Law Keeps Workers Away," GPB News, 27 May 2011]. However, the work is temporary and seasonal. And it takes practice to become "experienced" in picking vegetables quickly and efficiently. Hey, I know. I used to pick peas every summer when I stayed with my grandmother Ruby Benton in Gum Grove, Texas. I hoed long rows of vegetables in our own family garden, and I helped harvest many Irish potatoes. But that work was brief, not five 8-hour days a week for five months. Evidently, Mexican and Guatemalan laborers weren't "taking jobs from state residents," as proponents of the bill claimed. Some farmers have described their lack of success in trying to get local people to do the work of the immigrant laborers.

Working as a laborer on a vegetable or fruit farm might put groceries on the table for a while, but it isn't going to offer any health benefits for the ensuing back pain.

I am always amazed--not!--at how the unintended consequences of punitive laws can be as problematic, if not more so, than the original situation the laws were meant to ameliorate.

Later Comment: I've been told that the guys who work on those farms don't work eight hours a day but work "can to can't"--from can see to can't see.

Depressing if True

2011-05-28T00:19:00.004-04:00

William Greider, writing for The Nation, seems to think that while Republicans have certainly done their best to demonize Elizabeth Warren, there are folks surrounding President Barack Obama who also don't want this candid woman to chair the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Greider's information relies on a Very Reliable Source, unnamed, so who can really tell how accurate this is. But based on what I've read about the financial industry and how all those finance guys seem to end up in positions of power around the presidency (including Obama's), I wouldn't be surprised. Here's a quote from Greider:

Tim Geithner, said my Very Reliable Source, really, really doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren in the position where she is sure to be a tough-minded and independent voice on major financial-policy issues. As CFPB director, Warren would also sit on the new “systemic risk” council of regulators who decide very large questions like “too big to fail.” The other regulators can outvote her easily enough, but Warren has an alarming history of personal candor. She says what she thinks, out loud and in public. That naturally disturbs the club members, all of whom have a rank history of making life easier for the big boys of banking.

Warren made her integrity clear when she served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel digging into the financial crisis and bailouts. Her investigations turned up alarming facts the bankers and bank regulators wished to avoid. Furthermore, Warren was often dissenting on legislative issues Geithner and team were pushing in the congressional debates on financial reform. Geithner doesn’t tolerate contrary thinkers in his midst; witness the galaxy of Wall Streeters he recruited to run the Treasury department. Geithner is a favorite of the president’s, perhaps because he is absolutely faithful to the financial establishment’s best interests. [William Greider, "Why is Obama Dragging his Heels on Appointing Elizabeth Warren to head CPFB?," The Nation, 27 May 2011.]

I don't know the answer to the question in the title of Greider's article, and I'm no expert. But I've read enough about the economic crisis to know that we can't blame just one political party for all the deregulation that eventually led to the risks that the financial industry took and the financial crisis that ensued. Those at the top seem to cover each other's backs very well. Just sayin'.

David Corn, an editor for Mother Jones and a former editor of The Nation, described the distance between Timothy Geithner and Elizabeth Warren in this article on HuffPost's "Politics Daily," in 2010. Here is a quote from Corn's article: "Elizabeth Warren Vs. Timothy Geithner: A Big Decision for Obama."

As head of the bailout oversight panel, Warren has fiercely called out Geithner and Treasury on a number of fronts: for providing a backdoor bailout to AIG, for botching homeowner relief programs, for failing to get mega-banks to resume lending. Moreover, she's an articulate and thoughtful populist, who applies a Main Street-first perspective toward financial matters and who has been a scourge of credit card companies and banks. Geithner is a member of the Big Finance establishment; he's no crusader.

It would be nice to have an "articulate and thoughtful populist" on one's side.

No Consequences for Bad Behavior; Little Regulation to Prevent It

2011-05-25T03:14:00.018-04:00

For a long time I have been thinking--almost brooding--over the global financial crisis. Before 2007, I hadn't thought much about Wall Street though I had read my share of news articles over the years about the power of Wall Street and was passingly concerned about the influence of that power over our elected officials. With the financial meltdown in 2008, however, I began paying much more attention to financial and economic news. Nothing in my background--poet, teacher of literature and writing, gardener, art car enthusiast--prepared me for such an interest. I certainly knew nothing about derivatives. But the financial meltdown has enough sturm und drang for any engaging narrative of greed and corruption, tragedy and despair. And when the narrative touches one's own life, well, it does make one sit up and pay attention, doesn't it?

After reading numerous articles and blog posts about the crisis, after watching PBS Frontline specials and Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job (now available through Netflix), I think I can say with some confidence that the rats who almost blew up the world as we know it are still on the ship. Nor have they been caught and brought to trial and punished for their bad behavior. Nope. Some are at the helm of the ship. Others are cocooned on islands of privilege and are enjoying their millions.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans have been laid off, are out of work, can't find work, have lost their homes, are in danger of losing their homes, can't afford a college education or to pursue their dreams of owning a business. Ordinary Americans have bailed out the banks and the bastards who brought us to the brink--yet our elected leaders are trying to cut the very benefits that would prevent many Americans from suffering an impoverished and miserable old age. We can afford to save Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae but not Medicare or Medicaid. We can regulate a woman's uterus but not the financial market.

Today, in The Washington Post, Ezra Klein points out that "though the financial crisis remains lodged in our minds, and in our jobless rates," our elected officials are not confirming leaders to help regulate the financial institutions that caused the crisis:

... [T]he Federal Reserve lacks a vice chairman for banking supervision. There’s no one officially in charge of the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. The seat marked “insurance” on Financial Stability Oversight Council is empty. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a leader but not a director. No one has been confirmed to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And Republicans are still saying Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond is underqualified to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors." "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it'll be our fault," The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.

And, in their over-the-cliff plans to cut the deficit, "the House GOP is fighting to starve financial regulators of the resources they need to do their work." As Klein points out, we have a deficit because of the financial crisis, and we have a financial crisis because of a lack of regulation, and we're not funding regulation because we have a deficit. See some circular reasoning on the part of our leaders?

How to respond to such idiocy? With cynicism, says Kevin Drum (well, actually, he says the situation overwhelms his own cynicism):

It's this, more than anything else, that has convinced me over the past couple of years that America's wealthy class is simply morally bankrupt and that the leadership of the Republican Party is politically bankrupt. Five years ago I would have been embarrassed to write a blog post suggesting that this might be the reaction of the moneyed class to an economic collapse. Then we had one and this was the reaction. Once again, events have outrun my best efforts to be cynical.

It's certainly with cynicism that I listened to Dave Davies interview Gretchen Morgenson on NPR's Fresh Air today. Morgenson, who writes about finance for The New York Times, has just published a book she co-wrote with Joshua Rosner: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. In this book, Morgenson "focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government supported mortgage giant." Like the later financial players of Wall Street--Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, et alia--the managers of Fannie Mae pursued deals that enriched them and that weakened regulatory oversight. But lest listeners think these details support the Republican narrative that the financial crisis was all due to mortgage defaults, to the government's "meddling in the market" in its determination to "push home ownership" to people who couldn't afford it, Morgenson adds that "Wall Street was not a passive player." Had regulators done their due diligence, had there been rigorous oversight, we would not be in the economic situation that we're in now.

And it's certainly with cynicism that I read today that the Tea-Party backed candidates who were elected because of the anger people felt toward the bailouts and Wall Street shenanigans "are now pushing pro-Wall Street legislation" and that "[t]he 10 Republican freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee have taken in nearly $600,000 from the financial industry since Election Day, according to the Sunlight Foundation." ["Tea-Partiers Swept in on Anti-Wall Street Wave Now Pushing Deregulation," Ryan J. Reilly, TPMMuckraker, 24 May 2011.]

To maintain that realistic and appropriate level of cynicism, I am creating here a list of articles to read (or re-read) and documentaries to view (or re-view) on the financial crisis, on who took us there (a bipartisan ride), who abandoned us, who profited, who suffered, and why it's probably gonna happen again. (in no particular order except that I'm working backward from today and jumping around locating articles I remember reading and identifying others I haven't read but which look promising)

Marian Wang, "Cheat Sheet on Bank Investigations and the Probes that have Petered Out," ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest, 24 May 2011.
Matt Taibbi, "The People versus Goldman Sachs," Rolling Stone, 11 May 2011.
Matt Taibbi, "The Great American Bubble Machine," Rolling Stone 5 April 2010.
Brian Beutler, "One-Time Warren Foe Now Pressuring Obama to Give Her Recess Appointment to Head Consumer Bureau," TPMDC 23 May 2011.
Ben Protess, "Warren and Republicans Spar Over Bureau's Power," DealBook, in The New York Times, 24 May 2011.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, "Why Obama Should Appoint Elizabeth Warren,", in The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.
The Reckoning--a series of articles published in The New York Times that "explored the causes of the financial crisis of 2008." The series includes these articles, among others: Peter S. Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson, "Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans," 28 December 2008; Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, "White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire," 21 December 2008; Louise Story, "On Wall Street, Bonuses, not Profits, were Real," 18 December 2008; Eric Lipton and Raymond Hernandez, "A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits," 14 December 2008; Peter S. Goodman, "Taking a Hard New Look at Greenspan Legacy," 9 October 2008.
Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, "The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Housing Bubble Going," ProPublica, 9 April 2010.
Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, "The 'Subsidy': How Merrill Lynch Traders Helped Blow up Their Own Firm," ProPublica 22 December 2010.--Or read the series of ProPublica's investigative articles on the financial crisis here: "The Wall Street Money Machine."
Oh, and this little post is sort of funny: Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?", posted 23 April 2010, by Daniel Indiviglio, associate editor at The Atlantic.
Jack Dolan, Rob Barry, Matthew Haggman, "Borrowers Betrayed," Miami Herald, 2009--series on the Florida mortgage industry and the lack of regulation oversight that led to criminals being granted state licenses.
Dean Starkman, of Columbia Journalism Review provides a list of worthy articles on the financial crisis: "No Pulitzers, But Here's an Audie", posted 21 April 2009.
"The Warning," a Frontline report on Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration, who tried to warn the economic power-brokers of the potential for economic meltdown if the derivatives market was not regulated. As of this writing, the full video can be watched online. DVDs are also available for purchase from PBS.(air date, 20 October 2009)
Frontline's "Inside the Meltdown," first aired on 17 February 2009, at this writing, can be viewed entirely online on the PBS website. Or just go to the webpage that includes links to all the Frontline videos that are available online: "Watch Frontline Online".
Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra," Vanity Fair, April 2009--Unfortunately, this article is no longer fully available on Vanity Fair's website, but I found a .pdf version elsewhere, "Wall Street on the Tundra", that might still be accessible. This is the article that really got me interested in the details of the financial crisis. I remember reading it shortly after it was published online.
Kevin Hall, "Mortgage Crisis Shows Why Financial Regulation is Needed", McClatchy, 1 November 2009. And you can see all the stories and videos that resulted from McClatchy's five-month investigation into Goldman Sachs here: McClatchy Newspapers, investigation into Goldman Sach's contributions to the economic crisis.
Paul Solman interviews Charles Ferguson, director of Inside Job. In the interview, Ferguson talks about undisclosed ties and conflicts of interest in the financial relationships between academics in economics departments and the financial sector.

This is a short list of all one can find on the economic crisis online. I didn't include articles from The Wall Street Journal because I'm not a subscriber and am therefore unable to access them. Most of the sources on this list are not locked behind a subscription wall--except for, perhaps, The New York Times articles--because I do subscribe to the online version of The New York Times.

--so little time, so many opportunities for corruption.....

The Proliferation of Dubious Information

2011-05-23T14:44:00.005-04:00

I guess that I was lucky in that when the Internet began to blossom, I was teaching at a university. Those born in the Internet Age won't understand this, but when one of my students described in a senior research paper in the late 1980s the possibilities of hyper-links, I was amazed. In 1994, my husband and I noted that when we searched the World Wide Web, we often found links that led to nowhere, to internet parking spaces for future development. By 1997, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, those parking spaces had become shopping malls. I spent the summer finding information on the web that I could incorporate in my freshman English classes, as part of the university's mandate to help our students become Internet savvy. Every semester, I designed a workshop to demonstrate to my students the need to view their internet sources with a critical eye. We looked at websites that were parodies of official government web sites. We looked at websites with a political agenda; we looked at websites that seemed authoritative yet which provided no proof to support their authority. In educating my students, I was educating myself.

And so I look with a jaundiced eye at what I read online. When I write, I try to support any facts or figures or quotes with a trusted source. This morning, I experienced another lesson in the importance of this practice. I was looking for statements that politicians had said publicly about the unemployed. I remembered reading in the news some rather negative statements that Speaker of the House John Boehner had made about the unemployed in the government battle to extend or not to extend unemployment benefits during the worst economic slump since the 1930s. To find those quotes, I used Google's search engine, and I came across a blog with a very disturbing quote attributed to Boehner--but the language of the quote made me pause. Can this be for real? I wondered.

And so I "Googled" a selection from the quote, and lots of links to blogs appeared in which the quote was reproduced. The writer of one blog, however, did mention that the quote was from an interview Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, did with John Boehner, but the author of the blog did not include a link to the interview. Now all the warning sirens were going off in my head. Blogs are often useful sources of information, but accurate blog writers are going to include references or links to news sources to back up their facts and figures.

Of course, some blog authors are journalists who do their own research and who interview their sources. And sometimes, news worthy information may be overlooked by national news outlets, for any number of reasons. And perhaps they've just buried the information in the inside pages. But this is my rule of thumb:

If a search brings up a long list of blog sources, and particularly blog sources with a political bent or agenda, then, whether or not I agree with that political agenda, I look for additional information from news sources. (If the blogs provide links to such a source, then those blogs have made my search easier and have helped establish their own credibility.)

In this case, I went looking for the purported interview that Matt Taibbi did with John Boehner, and I came across Taibbi's own blog post about this purported interview: It never happened. In a blog post titled "I Did Not Interview John Boehner,", Taibbi writes:

There is a story flying around the internet that purports to contain an excerpt from an interview that I did with John Boehner. This interview is a hoax, and neither I nor Rolling Stone had anything to do with it. There are some seriously bored people out there... if people are going to make up a fantasy activity for me in the future, please, make it a foot massage from Jessica Gomes, not face time with John Boehner.

And, no, I won't reproduce the dubious quote here. But if you want to read what Matt Taibbi actually did write about John Boehner, you can read his article here: "The Crying Shame of John Boehner," in Rolling Stone, 5 January 2011.

It takes a lot of time to make sure that what one is reading can be trusted. Most people don't have that time. But, hey, I'm unemployed and over fifty. What better use can I find for my time? Now I'm going to go plant a garden.

"ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me"

2011-05-23T11:13:00.013-04:00

One day this week, my daughter, a college student home for the summer, my son, a recent college graduate working part-time until starting graduate school in the fall, and I were talking about our current situations. All of us now depend upon my husband's full-time job, a job he has had for almost a year after 6 months of job-searching during the most serious economic slump since the 1930s. We are middle-class, well-educated, tax-paying, engaged citizens. So it was with a great deal of anger over the past year that I listened to politicians as they criticized the unemployed:

'Ninety-weeks [of unemployment benefits] is too long' [complained Jim Lembke, Missouri Republican Senator]. 'People need to get off their backsides and get a job. Maybe they'll have to get two jobs or three jobs to make ends meet, but they need to quit stealing from their neighbors.' ("Four Republicans Hold Up Missouri Jobless Benefits")

I am sure that hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans approached their job search much as did my husband, with the same intelligence, dedication and care he has provided in every job he has ever had in his life. He got dressed every morning, sat at his desk for hours searching the job boards, e-mailed his updated resume and letters of application, made phone calls, attended the mandatory federal workshops for the unemployed even when they weren't particularly useful, and did part-time work for neighbors so as not to be idle. My part-time job and my husband's unemployment benefits helped pay for the groceries and the bills. And, like many Americans, we spent a lot of what we had hoped to have had available when we retired. But we also know that we are better off than thousands of Americans still looking for jobs. And these folks are facing employers who won't even interview people who are currently unemployed.

Throughout his undergraduate years, our son worked part-time on the campus of the large university he attended and to which he will return this fall as a graduate student. With that part-time job, he paid his bills and bought his groceries; we paid for tuition, books, and housing out of a fund my husband had set up years before. After my husband and I married before our junior year in college, we supported ourselves with part-time jobs and scholarships--with a little help from my husband's parents, who paid his tuition, and with an occasional handout from my parents. As graduate students, we completely supported ourselves with part-time research and teaching positions at the university we attended. My husband received a scholarship to work on his Ph.D., while I taught full-time in the English department of the university at which my husband was studying. We finished our undergraduate and post-graduate education with no debt. Today's college students cannot expect such opportunities. At the four graduate schools to which our son applied (and to all of which he was accepted), our son was told that he could not expect a graduate research position as a master's degree student. One university sent him a letter to let him know he was eligible for a financial aid packet--a student loan that would add up to almost $100,000 at the completion of his master's degree program. Such debts are not unusual for college graduates these days. According to Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com,

As many as one-third of bachelor's degree recipients can expect to still be paying back their student loans when their own children head off to college. Katie Leslie, "College Graduates Saddled with Debt," The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 22 May 2011.

This summer, our son has moved in with us to save money. All of his apartment furniture is in our shed. He and his sister, also home for the summer, are sleeping on twin mattresses on the floor because the furniture for our guest room hasn't arrived yet (and our daughter's bedroom furniture is headed to an apartment in June). He got a part-time tutoring job at a tutoring center in a nearby town. And because of the Affordable Care Act, we've been able to keep him on our health insurance policy.

So it was with all this background in mind that my son said, "President Obama needs to embrace the label 'Obamacare' that opponents call the Affordable Care Act."

"Do you mean 'co-opt' the label?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "He needs to turn it into a positive. And I should get a t-shirt with the slogan--ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me."

My husband and I are in our early fifties. We have worked all our lives; until recently, I taught at universities and colleges in or near every town in which we've lived. In 1987, my father retired at the age of fifty-four, one year older than I am now. Retirement is a distant goal for my husband, and unemployment an every day experience for me. We still have adult children to support.

We are the middle-class upon which the economic health of this country depends.

ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Us.

Laughing at the End Times

2011-05-22T13:07:00.008-04:00

The story of Rev. Camping's deadline for the end of the world and the rapture of the faithful just barely crossed my consciousness at first. Others had predicted the end of the world and had lived to see the deadline come and go, to see the sun rise the following morning and set the following evening. I had seen a billboard announcing the end and made some passing comment to the other passenger in the car I was in. Then I pretty much thought of other things. But then news organizations began focusing on the predicted event, on the man who made the prediction, on the followers who were preparing to leave this earth, and on the millions of dollars of donations that Family Radio has received.

On Thursday, NPR posted a request on Facebook that people choose the song or musical composition they thought was most appropriate to be listening to as the end approached. Thousands of Facebook friends complied, and, for fun, I created a Countdown to the End of Time play list of my own, and when I told my adult children what I was doing, they started creating their own play lists. I first scrolled through the responses of NPR's FB friends and chose from those suggestions songs that I liked. Then I added my own pensive suggestions. When I finished, I had 30 songs on my End of Time playlist, and I posted the list in my notes on Facebook, along with YouTube links to performances. Some of the songs I chose were melancholy (Eliza Gilkyson's "When You Walk On"), others comforting and hopeful (Modest Mouse's "Float On"), and some downright silly (Monty Python's "Galaxy Song: Remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving...").

My family shared our songs, we noted the next day the times that Reverend Camping said the Rapture would begin, and also noted that the Rapture could be happening and the four of us would not know it because, well, we expected to be left behind if such an event really occurred--though there was a time when I, a child of the Southern Baptist Church, would have expected to be in the number of those rising into the clouds.

As Saturday evening waned, I expressed some sympathy for Reverend Camping and his followers, who were discovering what they so longed for was not going to happen as predicted. We wondered what these disappointed folks would do now. And then we passed the evening in playing a game of Scrabble.

Then, this morning I began some selected reading online and came across Tiffany Stanley's finger-wagging article "The Media's Shameful Obsession" on The New Republic's website. Stanley takes to task those in the media who have expressed smugness or superiority in their coverage of Harold Camping and his followers. She labels the coverage "a media circus."

There's a cruelty underlying our desire to laugh at this story [Stanley writes]--a desire to see people humiliated and to revel in our own superiority and rationality--even though the people in question are pretty tragic characters, who either have serious problems themselves or perhaps are being taken advantage of, or both.

Well, maybe that's so in many cases, but as a survivor of The Rapture--or, rather, of obsession with The Rapture--I think that I need to feel no shame at creating my playful play list for the end of times and for shaking my head at the hubris or senility or insanity of a man who thinks he can predict the end of the world.

In the Southern Baptist church in which I grew up, I was immersed in the literature of the End Times. We read Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, studied it in evening services, pored over its confident charts outlining the ages of man and world events that all inevitably led to the world's ending....maybe in the 1980s. In any event, we were convinced that the end was near. My sisters and I, a performing trio in our church, sang a song "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," which not only scared the hell out of me (literally, I decided to be baptized a second time, just in case the first baptism didn't take) but also gave me nightmares (Christ came in the clouds, and my feet couldn't quite get off the ground).

I was a smug, self-righteous twerp who also agonized too intensely over the state of her own soul. But because I was also a studious child, really interested in the world and in the viewpoints of other people, and also, of course, sinful beyond my own childish imaginings, I outgrew that insular religious phase. The world didn't come to an end. And when, in 1978, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, my love affair with The Rapture and the teachings of the end times in the Southern Baptist Church pretty much ended. I watched the news with great expectation. The 70s had been full of violence, and the thought of two enemies trying to make peace between their nations filled me with hope. Yet many people in our churches did not welcome this event; it was viewed through the distorted lenses of a particular interpretation of the most controversial book in the New Testament, The Revelation. The predictions were that instead of ushering in peace, the agreements heralded the approaching end of the world.

I began to note that every movement toward peace was viewed with suspicion, as evidence that some crazy Anti-Christ was going to take over the world. How mixed up is that, I thought. It's almost as if the those who revel in the chaos of some End Time are working toward a self-fulfilling prophecy--reacting with suspicion and even outright hostility to any person or world event that suggests peaceful solutions are possible. Any charismatic leader with a message of hope was a possible Anti-Christ.

That world view has consequences today. Hal Lindsey can suggest that Barack Obama, with a campaign message of hope and change, may be the Anti-Christ, the Beast described in The Revelation, and thousands, perhaps millions, of people take his comment seriously. Michelle Bachmann, a possible Republican candidate for President, can negatively twist Obama's speech on the Middle East, and thousands of Christians will believe her distorted version, especially when she purses her lips into the dog whistle that those who reject Israel (in whatever way she defines "rejection") will be "cursed."

In 2010, the Pew Research Center, in conjunction with The Smithsonian, polled Americans to discover what they thought about the future of the world and the United States. Forty-one percent of those polled believed that Jesus Christ will return within the next 50 years. If you're expected to be taken out of the world in an instant, in a flash of lightning, you're not going to get too torqued about world peace or global climate change or Medicare or Medicaid--or in making the world a better place in any number of ways. In fact, you might be pretty hostile to any organization or group of people who would attempt to make the world a better place or the lives of others less fraught with peril. A peaceful world--or even a somewhat peaceful world--would undermine your whole world view, that only you and other selected good people will be saved while the world erupts in flames.

I hear and understand the dog whistles. My ears were once atuned to those high-pitched tones. I've lived in Oz; I believed in Oz. But I've been behind the curtain, and I didn't like one bit what I saw. Unfortunately, those who would laugh at that forty-one percent also might not recognize the serious consequences of a belief that absolves one of responsibility toward a world one expects to be providentially destroyed in one's lifetime.

So, here's to Reverend Camping and all those who would divert us from trying to solve the problems that we have here on this one world: John Lennon--"Imagine."

Book Review: John Barry's "Rising Tide"

2011-05-18T13:56:00.003-04:00

John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

As the Mississippi River began to pass previous flood records, I re-read John Barry's history of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. We bought the book in 1999, if I remember correctly, when my husband and I were in New Orleans for several days. During the day, my husband was attending a conference, and I was wandering the streets of the French Quarter and spent some leisurely time in Faulkner House Books on Pirate Alley. The second time through this book was as interesting to me as the first time I read it. I highly recommend this telling of that historic flood that most people had never heard of until news organizations began mentioning it again in light of the flood that is still making its way down the Mississippi River as I type these words. Barry weaves together the stories of nineteenth century engineers whose personalities had a profound effect on decisions made in trying to tame the Mississippi; of the personalities of the Percy family of Greenville, Mississippi, whose authority as planters and politicians had profound effects on the lives of the descendants of former slaves, blacks who labored on the plantations made fertile by thousands of years of flood deposits of the Mississippi; of the racism of the South and of the flight of African-Americans after the flood to the north, carrying with them the birth of the blues that came out of their horrendous experiences in that flood; of the venality of the rich and powerful in New Orleans.

And just a few minutes ago, while looking up and reading reviews of Barry's book, I came across a review by one of the Percy family, William Armstrong Percy, a character if there ever was one--and an academic.

When I lived in Louisiana before--all those years ago, from 1983-1987--when Tom was working on his Ph.D., and I was teaching in the English Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, I became interested in the writings of Walker Percy, grand-nephew of Leroy Percy, the Mississippi planter and senator who figures so largely in Barry's history. One of my friends recommended to me Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book," and I was hooked. I read much of Walker Percy's fiction and a couple of his novels. I was a serious Walker Percy fan for a while. Now that I'm living again in Louisiana, near the town where Percy spent his adult life, I've been thinking of him. Maybe I'll pick up Lost in the Cosmos and re-read it. I seem to be in a re-reading phase, returning to books I read years ago. Maybe that's a sign of approaching old age--reviewing what one once knew and now remembers rather hazily!

Meanwhile, pick up Barry's book Rising Tide, immerse yourself in another time, and ask yourself just how much has changed in how money and power work in this country.

Lessons Learned about Self-Monitoring?

2011-04-18T10:55:00.012-04:00

On Saturday of this past weekend, my husband, son, and I traveled to Franklin, Louisiana, to attend the Franklin Black Bear and Birding Festival. On the banks of Bayou Teche,venders had set up booths of local products and crafts, various conservation groups had prepared displays and games for children in a nearby warehouse, and musicians were scheduled to play for a street dance. We took a pontoon ride into the Bayou Teche Wildlife Refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a beautiful day, clear and cool, and on the trip up a canal dug over one hundred years ago for logging, we saw several alligators sunning on the banks as well as several species of egrets. The particular area of the refuge near Franklin that we boated into is closed to motorized vehicles from September 1st to April 15th. That area had just been opened for motorized vehicles, and the gate was open, as the picture at left illustrates.

As we motored slowly down the canal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee steering the boat and directing the tour mentioned that there were no old-growth trees here because the area had been intensively logged at the turn of the last century--that is, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Historical records indicate that from 1890 to 1935, timber companies removed virtually all of the cypress from Louisiana; any old growth remaining was few and far between. The trees one sees now are ones that have regenerated since then. The canal we were traveling on was also left over from the timber industry's work. Canals were dug in the swamps in order to get to the trees and then to drag the trees to waterways where they could be then be floated to timber mills. If you pull up a Google Earth map of Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain, you can still see straight canals radiating out from the places where cypress had been harvested, dragged into the canals by pullboats, and "cribbed up into booms and pushed like barges" to mills. [Frank B. Williams: Cypress Lumber King, by Anna C. Burns]

Timber industry supporters today complain about the restrictions on harvesting the cypress that has regenerated since 1935 when Louisiana was just about completely stripped of cypress. But the past history of just about any industry that pulled its resources from the natural world--or just about any industry, for that matter--indicates that industries are unable to monitor themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an industry that harvests the resources of the natural world or the banking conglomerates that sell derivatives. Management and employees live high on the proceeds until they have exhausted the resources that provide those proceeds--or until the financial enterprise threatens to go bankrupt and take the country down with it and is bailed out by the government. Frank Williams "celebrated his fiftieth year in the lumber business by distributing $100,000 in bonuses among his employees" [Burns]. A few short years later, the cypress industry had exhausted its resources. Other timber industries began liquidating their assets in the 1910s, but the company that Frank Williams established managed to branch out into oil and real estate and thus operates to this day.

In 2006, Goldman Sachs paid "its employees a total of $16.5 billion in compensation," bonuses that, if distributed evenly, would mean "$623,418 for every" one of its 26,467 employees. ["The Goldman Sachs Premium," by DealBook, 18 December 2006] By 2008, it was clear that Goldman Sachs and other financial industries had almost brought the U.S.--and the world--to financial disaster. Millions of Americans have yet to recover. But taxpayers bailed out the financial industry, and those "titans" got to keep their bonuses.

But have we learned this lesson: that industries must be vigilantly regulated for the health, safety, and welfare of not only ordinary people but the planet? It seems that a lot of us haven't. More on that in another post.

More on the logging of cypress in Louisiana:
Jacobs, David. "Logging Off." Baton Rouge Business Report. BusinessReport.com. 10 September 2007. http://www.businessreport.com/news/2007/sep/10/logging

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 1 of 2) YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/HF3-0NISvs4

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 2 of 2). YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/FxSP08zJ5tE

Pruning

2011-04-13T01:59:00.003-04:00

As I try to shelve my books here in our 120-year old cottage, with its sloping wooden floors and lack of storage, I discover that I still have way too many books for the available space. It's time once again to prune back the overabundance of reading material that still remains from previous thinning. I did some serious pruning in 2007, when my family and I moved from Texas to Georgia, then again before packing up for another move to Louisiana, and now, soon after, another attempt to corral my books to fit the available space.

It's a difficult task, for even the books that I know I will probably never read again provide a service for me: they remind me of the different interests I cultivated during certain times of my life--hence the volumes of Walker Percy non-fiction. Some remind me of particular people, for there are inscriptions inside that reveal relationships, expectations, promises. On the inside cover of a slim volume of Nikki Giovanni's poems--Happy birthday, Anita. I love you. Always, Marie, written by a once-close college friend from whom I am now separated by years of sporadic--and then failing-- communication. On the inside cover of Michael Shaara's novel of the civil war, Killer Angels, a student from my first years of teaching at Louisiana State University thanks me for providing him with a better insight into reading. He tells me that he enjoyed the class very much. How unappreciative I am in not having yet read this novel. I'm putting it on my bedside table right now. (I've done this before, but because this yellowing paperback novel has survived several "thinnings," it seems that I continue to believe that someday I will follow through with my resolution.)

Then there are the necessary kind words of the poetry workshop leader. To Anita, Margaret Gibson salutes me on the title page of Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; with warm wishes and respect for your work. On the title page of Recovered Body, my poems go from achieving "respect" to "beauty." For Anita, Scott Cairns has written, well-met at the Glen. Here's wishing you the best as you continue with your beautiful poems. Barbara Crooker's volume of poetry, Radiance, reminds me of a workshop I had attended the year previous to the date of this note: For Anita, In the pleasure of your company (missed you this year) & in the great pleasure of your work. Well, I must keep these books to cheer me in the dark hours of the night when the muse is MIA, and I am afraid I'll never write another poem again.

Other books recall the ghosts of emotions I felt when I first read them, like the recollection of passion long past spent. This morning as I was sitting in the old recliner in my study, looking at the piles of books on the floor, I spied the tattered cover of John Graves' narrative of his canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas, Goodbye to a River. For a fleeting moment, I was in my mid-twenties once again, newly aroused to the fecundity of meaning in the natural world that a poet could delve and develop. That much younger me bracketed the first sentences of chapter seven with these words: read in English 103 class. I suspect I was teaching descriptive writing to English freshmen at Texas A&M University at the time and thought of using Graves' words to coax my students toward specificity. And an asterisk beside the following words suggest that I identified with the author's sentiments:

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man/) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known....If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.

In these books I see the roots of what I once was, the evidence of how and why I have become who I am. To subvert a line from Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have read." But there is just not enough room in this house for all our stuff and the stuff we've been dragging around from previous generations of my husband's family. Time again to prune. Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage to do the same with my journals and letters--only instead of pruning, I'll build a bonfire to my vanity.

The Old Recliner

2011-04-11T11:32:00.012-04:00

If anything represents how we cannot seem to divest ourselves of stuff, this old recliner does. The first time I met it, it was at my in-laws' house, with the stuffing pooching out. The recliner had belonged to my husband's grandfather, who was a lawyer in Houston, Texas, and I guess Sam Tom's (first and middle name--Samuel Thomas) daughter kept it not only for sentimental reasons but for practical reasons as well. Eventually, my mother-in-law had the chair recovered; what you see is her choice of fabric, circa 1980s.

My husband loves this chair. I have stuffed it away in sad corners, but it always manages to make its way to a more public and useful place. I have threatened to sell it or to give it to Goodwill, but I have decided that I value my marriage more. This time I made a place for it right away, in my study, where my husband can read, rest, watch, or comment while I blog or work on my latest craft project. And so I celebrate compromise, resilience, and a long marriage by allowing this chair in my own space! Now if I can only convince Tom to have it recovered!

Maybe we hang on to these things because life itself is so unpredictable. We thought that our move to Atlanta would be our last move until retirement, that we would have a cool, urban place for our college-age children to return to and to call home. But our married life of almost 33 years has been one move after another, moves which we have decided to take upon ourselves, seeking better prospects or more amenable accommodations and surroundings or moves that have been forced on us by circumstances, such as layoffs, budget crises, and uncertain economic times. However, there is no exceptionalism in these experiences; American society has been a mobile one since its inception. My husband often reminds me of an article he read the year he finished his Ph.d. at Louisiana State University. The author predicted that college graduates of that year would move an average of seven times over the course of their working lives. We have met that average. Our experience is not uncommon, particularly in these unsettling times. Though the unemployment rate has recently dropped below 9%, millions of Americans are still seeking jobs, and college students can't find jobs comparable to their skills and education. Again and again, I read of college students who graduate with huge debts, who expect to spend the rest of their lives paying off the debt they incurred in order to achieve that degree. Is it worth it?

We face this question--is it worth it?--as our oldest child heads off to graduate school and our youngest child begins her second year as an undergraduate in the fall. Our son was admitted to all four aerospace engineering schools to which he applied, but it looks like the choice he will make will be the one that's less expensive. The school he has chosen--the one he attended as an undergraduate--is a great school, ranked in the top 20 aerospace programs; at least one of the other, more expensive schools is ranked in the top 10. Does that difference matter? Is it worth it to shackle one's future to a huge debt? We think not, but only the future will determine whether or not our son has made the right decision. And isn't that the case for every decision that we make? We just do the best we can with the cards we've drawn from the stack.

What I do know is that we're not ready to make that recliner our permanent seat in our new home. For our generation and generations to come, retirement will be pushed further and further away unless one belongs to that lucky 1% of Americans who own 40% of the nation's wealth. The recliner will just be a respite from life's difficulties, not a permanent refuge.

But today I read an article in which a doctor describes research that suggests resiliency is the characteristic we most need in order to achieve a healthy old age. He has patients who are over 100 who have full mental capacity. What characteristics seem to have served them well? The ability to overcome serious setbacks without whining, to face those difficulties with a deprecating sense of humor, and to move on. These we can all practice to achieve. And life does seem to be providing us with plenty of opportunities to practice!

And so I welcome this change even though it was not one of my making or choosing.

New Year, a Little Late

2011-01-11T15:20:00.003-05:00

A new year suggests new beginnings to many of us, and this year, despite our country's economic woes and our own family's geographic woes (husband working in one state, myself remaining behind in another state to help daughter adjust to university and change on top of change, son now graduated and in-between states as he applies to graduate schools), the new year is still freshly minted, shiny, and promising. After the holidays, my husband returned to Louisiana, my daughter returned to the University of Georgia, and my son remains here for a short while longer with me. We just give thanks that a tough year is over and a new year offers new beginnings.

Here in Metro-Atlanta, we ended the year with snow on Christmas Day, and we have begun the new year--the second week into the new year--with more snow, ice, and freezing rain. The city is practically in lock-down due to the weather, but at least I'm not alone, and my husband left behind lots of firewood for our fine fireplace insert. There's nothing that will warm the heart more on a cold, gray day than some radiant heat--and perhaps a couple of cups of hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps.

Yesterday, my son and I took a long walk in the neighborhood. The neighborhood roads and sidewalks were covered with ice-crusted snow and slick in places, but there were a few folks out enjoying the winter. Some folks had managed to build snowmen before the snow became too icy, and other folks had roped off steep streets where kids and their parents were sledding down the smooth, icy surfaces. In one yard, two men had built a fire and were inviting passersby and neighborhood friends over for cookies and hot chocolate. The walk reminded me of how much I love this town just east of Atlanta. It's been designated the most walkable town in Georgia. Although it's also one of the most densely populated towns in the state, it's also one of the most green urban areas I've ever seen. People care about the environment, community gardens, dog parks, recycling and neighborhood block parties. It's very hard for me to leave. But I've lived in many places, and I know that I will create a space for me and my family to live and to thrive.

Neighbors provide a warm spot from the cold

Neighborhood street roped off for sledding

Another street in the neighborhood full of winter activity

Snowman in our neighborhood

It's a new year. I gotta believe.

What Doesn't Change

2010-09-17T16:22:00.004-04:00

I have recently been reflecting on being in my early fifties and confronting change once again when I had hoped life to be more settled, not knowing, really, any better than I did at the age of twenty-five or thirty-five, the best course to take. It seems that one just muddles through, no matter what the age. One of my Facebook friends recently posted a cartoon of two chickens celebrating a birthday. The cartoon is one of Doug Savage's "Savage Chickens." Standing over a birthday cake with candles, the first chicken assures the second chicken: "You're not getting older, you're getting wiser."

The second chicken testily responds: "That's bull@*!#!"

In the next frame the first chicken chortles: "See? You're wiser already!'"

Whenever I think of the "wisdom that comes with age," I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat when she was in her eighties (she lived to be ninety-six). I guess I had asked my grandmother how it felt to be as old as she was. She was a very stoic woman, a faithful member of the Southern Baptist church, a non-smoker, non-drinker, a lifetime gardener, and for many years a middle-school English teacher.When I was young, whenever we had a crisis at our house, which was located just across the country lane from my grandparents' house, Grandma Dugat was often the first person we turned to (though this statement fails to convey the complexities of family dynamics and secrets). When my sister Cynthia fainted in the bathroom one day, with the door locked, and she wouldn't respond when we called, my sister Nancy crawled through the window while my mother frantically directed me to call our grandmother. Calm came into the room with my grandmother.

But years later, when I asked my grandmother what it felt like to age, her answer surprised me: "Inside I still feel like I'm fifteen years old," my grandmother said. "And I look in the mirror and don't recognize the person there."

My grandmother had always been old to me. When she was the age I am now, two months short of fifty-three, I was almost five. My grandmother's seemingly unwavering view of the world, of her place in it and that of God's above it, had prepared me to expect a more weighty answer. And then--to say she still felt as if she were fifteen! I remembered what it was like to be fifteen--full of questions, bursting with hormones, head full of dreams--a vulnerable age. How could my grandmother, former middle-school teacher and Sunday School teacher, daily Bible reader, experienced gardener, woman of sorrows, feel like a vulnerable fifteen-year-old? Couldn't she at least feel like she was twenty-five or thirty? What hope did I have of becoming wiser as I aged if my own venerable grandmother still had a vulnerable fifteen-year-old peering out of her faded green eyes?

Now that I am on the cusp of old age, I understand, at least a little, my grandmother's answer. The accreted knowledge of age forms like layers of plaster of Paris, like those masks my children and I made years ago, taking strips of plaster of Paris, soaking them in water, then molding the strips to our faces and removing the resultant form when it began to harden. We all have a "mask" of experiences that help us determine what roles to take in a new stage of our lives, what choices might be appropriate. But, sometimes, the eyes staring out of that oh-so-carefully molded mask are those of a fifteen-year-old, who suspects that the choices are capricious, multitudinous, with unpredictable consequences.

Last week, as we curled against one another in bed, facing together another challenge in our 32-years of marriage, my husband murmured, "I keep thinking about how two-thirds of our lives is already over."

That fifteen-year-old in me gazed wildly into the darkness of the bedroom. "But I've only just begun to live!" she whispered.

photos above: my first-grade photo; my grandmother, picking butterbeans, in her eighties (click on the photo for a larger version)

Reflecting on Links to the Past

2010-08-09T15:08:00.008-04:00

I have been going through the hundreds of letters that my husband's family kept over the years, letters that go back to the 1850s. The work is tedious because each letter must be opened carefully, quickly read, and then filed. As I read, I store ideas for posts on my Left for Texas blog, which I am using to create a narrative of the family, to establish connections in the family genealogy, and to help organize the overwhelming material that we have. I also perform online research and have made interesting discoveries about the history of the South before and after the Civil War as well as discoveries about distant relatives of my husband's, all descended from the same great-great-great grandparents. (I plan more extended research--in university libraries and on locale--after I have organized this material.) I have also made other discoveries: that human nature hasn't changed, that people can paradoxically hold progressive and abhorrent ideas, and that much of the daily experiences of our ancestors weren't much different than our experiences today. We may have better technology, access to faster transportation, better nutrition (perhaps), and multiple conveniences, but much remains the same.

One idea that many people have about the past is that people remained in one place for generations. This might be true in old civilizations, but it's less true in America, where folks seem to be in continual flux. News articles make a great deal of spouses living in separate cities or states, but these family letters reveal that spousal mobility and separation is not all that new. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong, moved to Texas from Virginia, where he was first employed with a drugstore/pharmacy in Bryan, Texas. Then it seems he began representing a large drugstore retail business based in New Orleans, and he traveled all over Texas from town to town promoting products for that company. His traveling meant that he was often separated from his wife and young family in the last decade of the 19th century. His wife, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong, would also take the family back to visit relatives in Virginia, staying for weeks. The couple communicated by writing two or more letters a week to one another. As the family grew and Baker became more prosperous (by speculating in oil in Houston), Mary followed her young brood to boarding schools, staying nearby for weeks, and to sanitariums, where the couple sought medical help for their daughter Helen, who was epileptic. Also, the family bought a second home in Boulder, Colorado. Mary and the family would precede Baker in moving to the home in the summer. Of course, Baker and Mary were among those better-off individuals, but Baker was not only supporting his immediate family; he was sending money back to Virginia to his un-married sisters as well as to his wife's un-married sisters (two of Mary's sisters lived with the Armstrongs in Houston for a time in the early twentieth century), and the occasional handout to various other relatives, including Baker's youngest brother, who never seemed to succeed in anything he undertook.

Reading these letters provides some comfort to me, as in this current economic climate, our family has its own separations with which to cope: one spouse working in one state, the other spouse working in another and remaining there until the youngest child can be successfully situated, and a second young adult child in yet another state. Our concerns for our young adult children are really no different than the concerns that Baker White Armstrong's parents reveal in their letters. The worries may be slightly different--yellow fever, the lure of strong drink, the "wildness" of Texas in the 1800s--but the underlying parental concern is much the same.

The letters also provide cautionary tales. In 1879, Perry Nugent's family was doing well. The girls were being educated at female academies, and the boys were soon to be sent away to well-respected institutions of higher education. They had recently moved from New Orleans to a fine old home, called Longwood, in Salem, Virginia. Perry still had his business concerns in New Orleans, and he was able to wonderfully furnish the family's new abode. Two of the oldest girls, Lizzie and Helen, were enjoying the waters, body rubs, and meals at Clifton Spa, probably located near Clifton Springs, New York. Helen writes a very diverting letter to her younger sister Mary, describing the clientele. She bemoans the changes in dress and style of the current clientele, and she makes mild fun of a woman from New Orleans with a heavy drawl who knocks on Helen's and Lizzie's door to inquire whether or not the girls might be acquainted with her own friends in New Orleans. As I read the not-very-flattering description of the young woman that Helen Nugent provides for her sister Mary, I couldn't help thinking of Helen's own future as well as the future of Perry Nugent's family. In December of 1888, less than ten years after Helen and Lizzie were enjoying the good life at Clifton Spa, Longwood and most of its lovely furnishings were to go up in smoke. Shortly after the fire, Perry Nugent was to experience a number of financial set-backs (the house was inadequately insured), and the family was to be scattered. Helen was to end up in a boarding house, carefully counting every penny, and becoming more and more obsessive and manic. Eventually, she was to find some safe haven in the Armstrong house (with her sister Mary and family) in Houston, Texas, but the intervening years were to take a terrible toll on her.

These letters remind me to count the blessings I have today, as small and insignificant as they may seem, and to judge carefully the actions and appearances of others, trying not to let diverting vindictiveness rule my judgments.

The past is not so different from the present.

Image above: Perry Nugent Family in better days at Longwood, near Salem, Virginia--Click on the image for a larger version of the photo.

The Press Should be the "Friend" of Political Candidates?

2010-08-03T12:08:00.010-04:00

Every political candidate and elected politician would love to be questioned by "friendly" reporters, of course, but more and more far-right candidates refuse to speak to any reporters other than those they believe will shill for them. Sharron Angle, the far-right candidate running against Henry Reid in Nevada, has avoided all press questions from any but the friendliest news outlets--and friendliest for conservatives and the far-right is Fox News. On Fox News yesterday (h/t to Matt DeLong, Washington Post) Sharron Angle said that she wanted the press to be the "friend" of her campaign. That would mean asking no difficult (or serious) questions and allowing her to advertise her campaign for free in any interview or press session:

We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it reported.

Voting for Sharron Angle is voting for someone with a warped view of the responsibility of the press. Her view, however, is becoming less and less radical and more and more mainstream, as the propaganda of the right that the press cannot be trusted gains more and more ground. Without a free and robust press, we're sunk. Of course, Fox News is just the kind of press the Sharron Angles, Sarah Palins, and Rand Pauls of the world want, a press that will not report on their truly radical ideas and that will ask only softball questions, as Angle herself described in an interview with David Brody:

Well, in that audience will they let me say I need $25 dollars from a million people go to Sharron Angle.com send money? Will they let me say that? Will I get a bump on my website and you can watch whenever I go on to a show like that ["Fox News or more conservative outlets"] we get an immediate bump. You can see the little spinners.

Additional note: This kind of use of the press is the wave of the future, Kevin Drum points out. Conservatives and right-wingers have led the way, but liberals will follow suit--so he thinks.

"The Liars Win" when Propaganda is Conflated with News

2010-07-26T12:50:00.011-04:00

E. J. Dionne's editorial in The Washington Post today accurately describes what is happening in the media today as propaganda and outright lies are being treated as "news." (hat tip to Steven Bennen for the link) There has long been a tradition in the media (if imperfectly executed) to provide "both sides" to the story. This approach works if both sides act, at least relatively, in good faith. But people with an agenda can take advantage of this approach by promoting lies and propaganda as news. As long as citizens can recognize the difference, the republic stands. However, in recent years, the liars seem to be winning.

The first step, it seems to me, was to fuel people's fears that journalists could not be fair if their personal views leaned in one political direction. This, of course, meant completely denying the professionalism of journalism. So the meme has become "the liberal media"--and in spite of all evidence, the public at large believes that this "liberal" media is bent on promoting only its "side." Yet as many analysts have pointed out, the talk shows on radio, the guests invited to speak on those Sunday shows, the folks interviewed on the major networks are most often conservatives. Just look at how often John McCain, a twice-failed candidate for president, gets a slot on those shows. Mike Huckabee gets his own talk show. Did John Kerry get his own talk show? Or Howard Dean? But if you can convince the public that "the media" is "liberal," then you have convinced the public not to trust journalists' pursuit of truth--and then you can take advantage of that mistrust by promoting your own "truth."

The firestorm over the Journolist (a listserv for journalists) is the latest attempt at totally annihilating trust in journalists. "Journolist scandal proves media bias" screams a headline--and people fall for it without reading any more of the details. Tucker Carlson, a conservative pundit, has been milking this "scandal" for all its worth--but he refuses to release the full e-mails on which he is basing his claims of a liberal conspiracy among the members of that listserv, a listserv that included one of his own conservative reporters (so how conspiratorial could the listserv be?!). Ezra Klein, the creator of Journolist, explains why he created the listserv here: on his blog for The American Prospect. Most of the members on that list lean center-left, but their participation was not conspiratorial but empirical: they needed a place to discuss their ideas and to access experts who might be less willing to answer questions elsewhere. (The thing is, most of the public probably doesn't even know what a listserv is--and how many there are for every subject and interest.) Sure, ideas were raised that others in the listserv shot down--but Tucker Carlson and his ilk don't reveal the shooting down, the consequences of debate. Of course, right-wingers love conspiracy theories (uh huh, and left-wingers do, too, but for some reason, the left-wing doesn't carry the day, does it? Does anyone with any sense REALLY believe the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11? Oh, but how many on the right believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States--and that he's a commie pinko?) To further support their view of the leftist conspiracy of Journolist, radicals claim that liberal pundits such as Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were on the list. Not so, says Klein. But who's listening?

And that's the point, isn't it: to get people to stop listening, to stop thinking. When the majority of the public believes that journalists cannot be trusted, then the power-hungry win. The liars win.

This trend to conflate propaganda with news is evident in the recent Andrew Breitbart/ Shirley Sherrod episode. And here, the purpose was not only to conflate propaganda and legitimate news but to push the idea of the equivalency of white racism and black racism in this country. The NAACP had called on the Tea Party to repudiate racist elements in its ranks. Now, anyone who has listened to Tea Party participants in interviews and who have watched videos know that there are racists in the party. That's not to say that every person involved in the Tea Party is a racist. A radical group is going to attract un-desirable elements. But wouldn't it be best for the country if a group such as this said, "We're in opposition to the government led by a black man, but we're not against a black man being president. Racist literature, signs, and statements are totally out of character in our movement." But instead of doing that, radicals such as Andrew Breitbart go about trying to prove that white racism can't be so bad because there are black racists, too: the stupid (yes! stupid!) argument of equivalency. It's the childish argument that what I'm doing isn't so bad because others--especially those who claim some kind of moral superiority--are doing it, too. Only in this case, Breitbart chose a woman who was communicating exactly the opposite of what he purported that she was communicating. Here was a woman who had experienced racism of the worst sort--the kind that led to a miscarriage of justice. Yet here she was, telling her audience of how she rose above hate and how she believed that they should all work together to create a society where people of all ethnicities could live in better communities. And her audience demonstrated their understanding of her message with "uh huhs" and "alrights" and "amens" and their sympathy with her feelings and experience, likewise.

Here, again, the purpose is to call into question any sense of fairness and justice on "the other side"--and to use race to do that. The far-right has the media and the government so scared of being accused of unfairness, that they bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of unfairness and thus give credence to lies. Breitbart got what he wanted: a larger audience, a national presence in the media, and more white followers who believe that they are just as discriminated against as blacks in this country--contrary to evidence. Because, guess what, they've been gradually led not to believe in evidence, to conflate propaganda with news.

Without journalists being able to ask hard questions, without people having some trust in the professionalism of journalism, a country's citizens are at the mercy of the powerful. Just look at dictatorships such as Burma, which routinely arrests journalists and passes jail sentences of twenty years on those who speak truth to power. The rodeo clowns win; the man (or woman) in the saddle loses.

More Conflation, Propaganda vs. News, black racism vs. white racism

"Fox News, the DOJ Pseudo-Scandal, and White Racial Hysteria," Jonathan Chait, at The New Republic
And now the back-tracking to find SOMETHING to hang around Shirley Sherrod's neck: "Defining Lynching Down," Adam Serwer, on Jeffrey Lord's claiming that Shirley Sherrod lied when she described Bobby Hall's being beaten to death by Sheriff Screws and his colleagues as a "lynching." Disgusting. Having been called out for lying about Sherrod's hopeful message, the right now is looking for any mud to sling on the woman.

Taking Away the Limelight from Scumbags

2010-07-24T14:18:00.000-04:00

Michelle Cottle says it best: "The End of Andrew Breitbart," on The New Republic website. And here's a quote:

Increasingly no one cares about (or recognizes) the difference between marshalling facts to make your argument and just completely making shit up.

Unreconstructed Lying

2010-07-23T15:32:00.014-04:00

When the Shirley Sherrod story broke, I was in the middle of attending freshman orientation with my daughter at a state university in Georgia, and so I came in on what seemed to be at the time the tail-end of the story: a tape of Ms. Sherrod's speaking at an NAACP dinner had been edited to suggest that she was a racist; it had been published on Andrew Breitbart's website; after Breitbart and his ilk created a firestorm, administrative officials panicked and fired Ms. Sherrod without researching the truth. It was finally revealed that the tape had been edited to grossly mislead (and that Brietbart had had it in his possession for several weeks before posting it).

I learned that, at first, Breitbart and other far-right bloggers yelled foul over Ms. Sherrod's words, claiming that here was a prime example of an African-American woman in a position of power (USDA's Georgia state director for rural development) who admitted to failing to help a white farmer. It was a nice story to use to claim the equivalency of black racism and white racism in this country, that there was no foundation for criticizing all those white Tea Party people showing up with racist signs. Only that was a lie. Now Breitbart is claiming that he posted the video not because it reveals Ms. Sherrod's racism (racism which the unedited tape clearly refutes) but because it reveals the racism of the NAACP members listening to Ms. Sherrod and clapping at times in her speech when she is describing her previous attitudes. Only that's a lie, too, now that I have listened to the whole damn tape, to five sections that Breitbart has now posted on his website, probably believing that most people won't take the time to listen to it. And as there are only 8 comments on that site (as of 2:00 p.m. today), I think it's safe to say that most of Breitbart's loyal listeners and readers will not view the entire tape and will accept Breitbart's continued unreconstructed lying.

What Ms. Sherrod does in her speech is put one of her past actions in context. First, she tells the crowd about her father being murdered by a white man and the family never receiving justice. Anyone who knows anything about the African-American experience, especially in the South, will know that it was not unusual for a white man to murder a black man and not suffer any legal consequences. In addition, Ms. Sherrod describes a time when a bunch of white men showed up at her home and burned a cross on the front yard. Her mother--then a widow--was home alone with the baby boy born just weeks after his father's murder--and a couple of other children. The family was in danger, but several neighbors--all African-American men--showed up with their shotguns. They didn't fire a shot, and they allowed the white men to leave, but their show of unity prevented further violence. This background puts everything else into context.

Ms. Sherrod describes how she had wanted to leave the South, with its terrible memories, but that she finally decided to stay to help create change, and so, long before her tenure as a government official with the USDA, she worked for a non-profit to help farmers. But she said that when she "made that commitment [to stay in the South and to create change], [she] was making it to black people, and to black people only...But you know," she went on to say, "God will show you things and he'll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people." [Here the silence is broken by affirmative responses: "all right, all right."] And that's her preface to the story of when her attitude changed. In the edited tape, these words are missing--Ms. Sherrod's indicating to her listeners that she was to change her mind about helping "her own" alone. The audience did not clap when she said that her first intentions were to help black people alone. There were no "amens" there. So Ms. Sherrod tells the story that most people have heard totally out of context, of how a white farmer came to Ms. Sherrod for help and how when he had spent a great deal of time showing he was superior to her, she wasn't inclined to help him as much as she should have, so she referred him to a white lawyer because she figured he could get help from "his own." When the white farmer came back to her and told her that the lawyer had not helped him, she realized that she had been wrong. Sherrod then helped the white farmer get what he needed, and she goes on to say some really inspiring words:

I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate.... I've come to realize that we have to work together. And it's sad that we don't have a room full of whites and blacks here tonight 'cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison says, 'Race exists, but it doesn't matter.' We have to work just as hard. I know it's, you know, that the vision is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive, you know, our children won't have the communities that they need to stay in, to live in and have a good life if we can't figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people--we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.

After viewing this entire tape, it's clear to me that the folks in that room were receptive to Ms. Sherrod's message. They weren't applauding her racism; they were applauding her altruistic ideals to overcome racism and to make the world a better place. As Ms. Sherrod says, the problem is poverty; the problem is the haves and have-nots; the problem is that those in power want to keep power, and they keep that power by dividing us. In posting the edited video and in continuing to spew lies, Andrew Breitbart and others like him are counting on perpetuating those divisions.

[After writing that last sentence, I came across this video of Anderson Cooper's interview with Ms. Sherrod. Breitbart himself might not be racist, but he is using racism to make a political point (albeit, unfairly, and with lies), and he certainly doesn't care one iota about who gets hurt. His cynical manipulations, however, are no better than racism. And he needs to be called out on this!]

More Here:

"Some Find Irony in Shirley Sherrod's USDA Incident," by Krissah Thompson, Washington Post, 23 July 2010.
"Amen Canard," by William Saletan, Slate, 23 July 2010.

Pet Peeves I: The Teaching of Writing

2010-07-14T20:17:00.006-04:00

For about twenty-five years, I taught writing at the university/college level. I was a good teacher, consistently receiving positive evaluations from my students as well as from colleagues who visited my classes and evaluated my teaching. To prepare for that teaching, I took graduate classes in rhetoric and composition and taught a total of eight freshman composition classes in graduate school. Later, I learned from experienced colleagues, in the inevitable exchange of ideas with office mates, in workshops and in reading research. And I learned from my students. One of the most important things I learned as a teacher was not to underestimate my students. I treated them as practicing writers, and they became practicing writers. Oh, there were certainly failures--but the successes far outnumbered the failures.

And so it is with a sinking heart when I hear from students that their college writing teachers are telling them to write paragraphs with 7 sentences (or 11 or 10) in each paragraph, and to write essays with five paragraphs that develop three points. I tutor these confused students, who think the form is the rule rather than a (suspect-at-the-college-level) teaching tool. The college instructor who tells her students that every paragraph should have so many sentences, no less and no more, is condescending to those students. She is assuming that adults cannot understand that writing is a messy process that involves discovery and experimentation. She is so concerned about whether or not that student is going to pass the state writing test that she has abdicated her role as a teacher, someone with experience in the craft who passes on to students the best of what she has learned.

Of course, I understand the frustrations the writing teacher encounters, especially at open enrollment colleges such as the one where I now tutor part-time. Because of the poor economy, colleges are filling classes to the maximum and beyond; full-time writing instructors teach at least five classes. Students in those classes are variously prepared for those classes: some learned English as a second language, others don't quite meet the expectations of the proponents of academic English after twelve years of secondary education, and others are returning to writing after years in the work force where they weren't required to write academically. The easy way for the writing instructor to tame the unruly is to demand adherence to rules, no matter how arbitrary those rules might be in the apprenticeship of real writing:

An essay is composed of five paragraphs: an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Each body paragraph has a topic sentence that states the focus of that paragraph.
Each body paragraph should have ____# sentences (7 sentences, 11 sentences, 12 sentences--number depends upon the teacher).
Never begin a sentence with "because."
Never begin a sentence with "and" or "but."
Never use the second person ("you") in an essay.
Never use the first-person ("I") in an essay.
Never write sentence fragments.

The conscientious student, especially, takes these rules to heart. And so [woot! woot! here I am breaking a "rule" that is not a rule!] that is why today I had a student who was worried about which way was the "right" way to write an essay. The teacher in her first learning support class told her that she should have three points in every essay and that those three points should be developed in five paragraphs. The teacher in her second learning support class told her that it was okay to have two points in an essay and that if those points needed to be developed in six paragraphs, that was okay, too. "Which is right?" she asked me. That is also why I tutor students who have the most wonderful experiences that relate to the topic they are trying to develop but are frustrated because their instructor told them never to use first-person in their writing. And students who have a great, approachable "tone" in their writing but have been told by their writing teacher never to use the second person. [Woot! woot! the previous sentence is a sentence fragment AND begins with a coordinating conjunction!]

I was recently asked by a writing instructor how many sentences I suggest students include in paragraphs that they write for the state writing exam. I tried to give a nuanced answer, but it was clear that this instructor thought his students too stupid for nuance. "At this level [the freshman level of English composition]," the teacher said, "students need a number."

Take a number. That's education today. And that's my number one pet peeve.

Returning

2010-07-07T18:42:00.007-04:00

I've moved many times in my adult life, but those moves have doubled back on themselves so that I often feel as if I'm in some kind of reincarnation cycle, that I'm being sent back to a place I've been before in order to work something out or rectify some grievance or succeed in some task I've failed before. But the cycle is just shy of the mark in a couple of ways, perhaps the most important way being that my returns have yet to result in any clarification or illumination. I've returned to Texas twice in my adult life, after living in other states of the union, but not exactly to the same locale. In 1983, my husband and I left our birth state of Texas to live in Louisiana for four years; then we returned to Texas, to Bryan/College Station, where we lived and worked for six years. Then we left for Minnesota, where we lived for 2 1/2 years before heading to Columbus, Georgia (and a town nearby) for a seven-year stint before returning to Texas once again, to Belton, a small town an hour's drive north of Austin. Staying there for 3 1/2 years, we were lured back to Georgia by expectations that ultimately didn't materialize, and here we've been--except now my husband has taken a job in Louisiana, just north of New Orleans. Shall I follow? Will we have lived twice in every state in which we've made a home in our adult lives? I don't know yet. I really like the town where I'm living now, and my husband is hesitant to cut the cord, too. We remain in a kind of limbo before our next geographical reincarnation.

But the one state to which we have yet to return to live--though we have vacationed there several times--is Minnesota. When will I return to live there, I wonder, as I sequester myself from the heat wave that is washing across Georgia. Today, the temperature in Ely, Minnesota, rose to 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Here where I am in Georgia, the temperature hit the mid-nineties and is predicted to hover near 100 degrees tomorrow. Perhaps because I haven't returned to live in Minnesota as I have in Texas, Georgia, and (perhaps) Louisiana, Minnesota still has the lure of a young love never consummated. It remains in memory not just as a "what was" but as a "what could have been," a "could have been" more poignant because of the opportunities that were opening up to me there just as I was packing to leave.

If the history of my doubling back stops in south Louisiana, perhaps the northwoods of Minnesota will be there for me just past my last breath. Perhaps I will be reincarnated in some other form, as Heart-flower (Pale Pink Corydalis), clinging tenaciously on a rocky outcrop above the Kawishiwi River; or maybe as a loon (more likely) calling wildly on Lark Lake. Or maybe I'll just be content with this last request: scatter my ashes on some quiet lake in northern Minnesota, my last return, my final resting place.

BP, Bad Bosses, and the Rest of Us

2010-07-06T17:53:00.011-04:00

As oil and gas continue to gush out of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and as the CEO of BP Group has made one public relations gaffe after another, I have been thinking of how people end up in management positions for which they are experientially or temperamentally unprepared or ill-suited. Tony Hayward seems to have risen steadily through the ranks, from his blue collar background to his appointment as CEO of BP Group. Along the way, did Hayward reveal any of the hubris and public relations cluelessness that he has displayed so well since the oil rig explosion? Or is he so embedded in a culture in which disdain of "ordinary" people is a given that his behavior was not interpreted as unusual or contemptible as the public would assess his later words and actions to be? More talented and smarter people than I concluded long ago that money and power corrupt. Too little of either, and one is crushed, diminished, hopeless--too much, and one becomes superior, assuming that one is better than others, blessed not because of caprice or luck or circumstance but because of some entitlement that gives one permission to discount the worth of others.

Like many managers promoted to levels for which they are, nevertheless, ill-suited or unprepared, Tony Hayward seems to have known the right people and said the right things in the past. Hayward's stepping into the role of CEO followed an earlier tragedy, the explosion of BP's oil refinery plant in Texas City in 2005, in which 15 workers were killed and 170 others were injured. An investigation of BP's safety record revealed serious problems, and OSHA imposed a huge fine on the company. The CEO at the time, Lord John Browne (the man who had been impressed by Hayward and who had promoted him to the position as his executive assistant in 1990), retired early and Hayward took his place. Before that final promotion, Hayward said these words at a townhall meeting in Houston: "We have a leadership style that is probably too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well. The top of the organization doesn't listen hard enough to what the bottom of the organization is saying." He told his audience that "we need to be part and parcel of the society in which we operate."

Has BP's safety record improved since Hayward spoke those words and since he became the public face of BP? Has the top of the organization listened to the bottom? The record certainly suggests not, as information has emerged indicating that employees raised many concerns about safety even months before the explosion. And in his testimony before Congress, Hayward repeatedly claimed that he was not aware of decisions made concerning Deepwater Horizon, so he must not have been following his own advice to "listen...to what the bottom of the organization is saying." His own words and actions--saying he wanted to get his life back, suggesting that the oil spill would be minimal, and attending a tony yacht race while shrimpers and fishermen in the Gulf were losing their livelihoods--suggest that he also was not "part and parcel of the society in which [BP] operates."

How often have workers heard such high-minded promises from management, only to be disappointed by the lack of consequent action? Not only are organizations difficult to change. Something happens to many people when they reach the top of their professions, are promoted to positions where they have power over other people, or achieve their dreams of wealth. There are exceptions, but too often people begin to believe that they deserve their rewards more than any other, that luck, caprice, or circumstances had little to do with their achievements. Or if they think that luck and circumstances had too great a hand in their success, they do everything they can to conceal that fact, their lack of confidence in their own worth translating into bullying behavior. (See the research reported in "The Making of Toxic Boss" for a discussion of how the combination of power and incompetence leads to abusive behavior in the workplace.)

Over the years, most of us have encountered these "Mini-Me's" of management. Anyone who Googles "bad habits of bosses" will find numerous articles that list behavior he or she will recognize:

The boss who gives staff an assignment that is "high priority" and that must be completed immediately--and then reverses his demands. The staff spend hours on the assignment, only to be told that the work isn't important, after all. Priorities change overnight, sometimes within the hours of a single workday. Or reports that the boss insisted were high priority are completed, handed in, and disappear into a black hole. The boss does not provide feedback, fails to follow through with the recommendations, and then acts as if the report never existed.
The boss who constantly criticizes and rarely, if ever, praises. In 2002, National Public Radio's Workplace Correspondent David Molpus used a recent academic study on bad bosses to solicit stories from his listeners. One listener described two laboratories where he had worked. In one, the workers were proud of their work, competed in working overtime, and stayed with the company a long time. The boss of this laboratory listened to her employees, praised them publicly, and when one of them made a mistake, worked with the employee to rectify the error. At a second laboratory, however, the boss rarely ventured outside her office, was impatient when employees reported problems, never praised employees, and publicly criticized those who committed errors. At that place of employment, the turnover rate "was staggering."
The boss who blames others for every error, mistake, or roadblock. People on the make are particularly prone to being abusive in this way. They are frantic to be seen by those above them as always competent, prepared, perfect, so they deflect any problems away from themselves. They are quick to blame mistakes and errors on others, even when the problems are part of the everyday experience of the job, unavoidable and eventually solvable. This abusive behavior can even become psychotic, for the person who fails to admit his own mistakes--or who refuses to accept that less-than-perfect outcomes may be the result of circumstances or multiple rather than individual error--may be so compelled to deflect blame from himself that he begins to view his employees as "enemies," as people determined to undermine his authority. He may direct blame for all problems--real or imagined--to one employee who becomes the scapegoat for the boss. Other employees may notice this behavior, but because they fear for their own jobs and because they feel they don't have the power to change the office dynamics, they can't help but be relieved that someone else is there to buffer them from their abusive boss.

These and other habits of bad bosses show up again and again in articles on management. Although in the long run bad management is bad business, bad bosses often have long tenures because senior management may only care for the bottom line. If the bad boss looks good on paper (often the result of the good work of cowed yet competent workers), the bad boss remains, no matter how many talented employees leave in response to bad management.

So what recourse do employees have? Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and author of No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving one that Isn't, says that "[i]n normal organizational life, for people who have less power, the best thing is to get out. If you can't do that," he advises,"try to avoid contact with the person as much as possible." As a final recourse, he suggests that "[y]ou can learn not to care." [See Sutton's "Why I Wrote the No Asshole Rule," Harvard Business Review, March 16, 2007; also, "Prof has advice for tackling workplace jerks," at msnbc.com.]

In an economy where over 14 million people are currently unemployed and job competition is fierce, leaving a bad boss is not an option for many people. Also, avoiding the bad boss is useful advice only for those who do not answer directly to management. The best option might be learning not to care, especially if you're a cynic to begin with--but that's a poor option for those to whom other employees report, unless you're an asshole yourself. And there's the rub: evidently, assholeness is contagious. "Jerk poisoning," Professor Sutton says, "is a contagious disease. It's something you get and give to others."

Of course, we don't know how BP CEO Tony Hayward treats employees who answer directly to him, but his public behavior certainly reminds us that poor management skills can have devastating consequences, to individuals, to the organization, and even beyond. In this terrible economy, organizations need to re-assess their management techniques and do as Robert Sutton suggests, that companies "screen for jerks as they hire and purge the bullies already in their ranks because, in almost all cases, they cost more than they contribute."

Coming Back

2010-06-23T23:19:00.010-04:00

I quit blogging before spring arrived, and now we're just past the summer solstice. In the meantime, I've been thinking, writing, creating, dreaming, plotting. Life has been a little difficult these past few months and continues to be not what we had hoped and planned, and yet here we are.

A lot has happened since March 5th, when I decided to take a break from blogging, and I'm working on a long reflective piece to post maybe by the end of this week. Meantime, here are photos of the second folk art quilt I made, this one for my daughter. (first quilt here)I finished it a couple of months ago and am now working on smaller projects. I mark my return here with this evidence of my busy hands before I plunge into deeper waters.

Holding the Space, Being Silent

2010-03-05T11:04:00.000-05:00

As anyone who reads my blog can see, I haven't posted much lately. Right now I am concentrating on my own life and the lives of people I love, especially those who depend upon me. Anyone who cares knows how to reach me. If you have found something here over the past two years that you enjoyed reading, please check back periodically. I can't be silent forever. Happiness to all.

So Much for Miracles...or at least this one

2010-02-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

It seems that the miraculous story of the man being "unlocked' from a vegetative state of more than twenty years is not so miraculous, after all. The Belgian man suffered serious brain injuries when he was twenty and has been unconscious for over twenty years. Last year, doctors discovered more brain activity than was previously supposed, and a speech therapist seemed to demonstrate that the man could communicate, using "facilitated communication," "in which the patient supposedly directs the hand of a speech therapist who type[s] out his thoughts." The results, however, seem to have been false: "Belgian coma 'writer' can't communicate," BBC News, Saturday, February 20, 2010.

Irony?

2010-02-13T14:09:00.007-05:00

On page 104 of the 18th edition of Barron's GRE study guide is the following test question:

There is some _______ the fact that President Barack Obama is viewed as representative of African American society, for he spent his childhood growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, and did not live in the black community until he was an adult.
(A) gratification in
(B) irony in
(C) validity to
(D) uncertainty about
(E) apprehension about

According to the answer key, the answer is "(A) irony in." Now let's unpack the assumptions made in this question: first, that only a certain sort of black American--not defined, of course-- can represent, without irony, "the black community." What is "the black community"? Is it a physical location? Well, of course not--but the question suggests that it is, that someone has to live there to be considered un-ironically black. So--if one is black, but grew up in a neighborhood that's majority white, is one precluded from being "African-American"? Is a certain percentage of "blackness" required in the neighborhood in which one grew up in order for one to be able to un-ironically represent African-Americans? The "black community" is taken as a whole to be representative of all African-Americans. And that "black community" is indeed diverse, is now, has been in the past. There are people who identify themselves as belonging to the "black community" who are poor, who are rich, who are middle-class, who grew up in the South, who grew up in the North, who grew up in the East or the West, and who live overseas on military bases or in foreign countries as government employees or even as citizens whose parents are employed by multi-national companies . So wouldn't it stand to reason--and not be "ironic"--that any African-American could represent this very diverse group? And does where one spent one's childhood somehow define whether or not one is truly "American" or "African-American"?

The second assumption? That growing up in Hawaii necessarily precludes someone from being seen as truly African-American? I thought that Hawii was one of the fifty states, as American as Alaska or Texas. Why is it "ironic" that an African-American born in Hawaii might represent the "black community"? Except for four years spent in Indonesia with his mother and step-father, Barack Obama lived in Hawaii as a child and adolescent.

This question--with its suspicious fill-in-the-blank answer--raises troubling questions about how African-Americans are viewed in our society. And it's very troubling that Barron's GRE Guide seems to perpetuate those narrow views.

By Their Leaders You Shall Know Them

2010-02-05T12:03:00.001-05:00

So the National Tea Party Convention is underway in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of the touted speakers is former Congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado). In the speech he gave at the Convention yesterday, Tancredo claimed that Barack Obama was elected president because our country does not have a "civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country." Ummmm..... when and where in this country was a literacy test required for voting? And who was the target of that literacy test? Mr. Tancredo, standing in a city in the South, demands a literacy test for voters?

What century is he wishing he lived in? Or to what century does he wish to drag back the country?

Good. Lord.

Feeling Grumpy but Not Over-Educated

2010-01-31T15:04:00.002-05:00

So a few days ago I read a headline announcing that a majority of the "over-educated" continue to support President Obama, and I wondered just what is meant by "over-educated." The most popular definition of that term suggests that someone with a post-graduate degree is over-educated. I have a post-graduate degree, and I don't feel over-educated.

How stupid a term is that: "over-educated"? More than educated? I really don't see how someone can be over-educated. By whose measurement? If I'm a plumber with a doctorate, am I over-educated? Why? Because I know more than I need to know to fix a faucet? Who says so?

I'm feeling quite surly about this.....curmudgeonly, perhaps.... or.....misanthropic--an indication that I might be "over-educated"?

Good. Lord.

Not a Health Care Soundbite

2010-01-22T15:36:00.001-05:00

Jerome Groopman, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and author of How Doctors Think has an interesting article online at The New York Review of Books website about how medical "best practices" might be included in government health care legislation and how that inclusion might play out in the decisions of doctors and their patients. Groopman provides two viewpoints of how "best practices" might be legislated in health care reform, one that uses the established best practices as a "nudge" to get doctors to choose governmentally-approved health decisions, another that more aggressively promotes these "best practices" by providing financial incentives or negative consequences. President Obama's friend and advisor, Cass Sunstein, favors the first (providing doctors with some leeway not to choose always the established "best practice" method in dealing with a patient's health issue) and Peter Orszag, another of Obama's advisors and director of the Office of Management and Budget, prefers the more strong-armed approach:

Doctors and hospitals that follow "best practices," as defined by government-approved standards, are to receive more money and favorable public assessments. Those who deviate from federal standards would suffer financial loss and would be designated as providers of poor care. In contrast [to the Senate bill], the House bill has explicit language repudiating such coercive measures and protecting the autonomy of the decisions of doctors and patients.

I didn't know much about this debate until I read Groopman's article this afternoon, and I was fascinated by Groopman's discussion of how established "best practices" sometimes turn out to be wrong or not the best health choice for certain individuals. Thus, there are problems with aggressively pushing doctors to choose the "best practice" standard at all times in all situations. This situation reminds me of the debate over mandatory-sentencing laws. When judges do not have any discretion over sentencing criminals, serious injustice sometimes results, for instance, first-time drug offenders given long jail sentences when they could have been put on parole, provided with rehabilitation, and given the opportunity to change the course of their lives (and thus not cluttering up the prison system and costing the taxpayers huge amounts of money).

What really struck me was the anecdote of Groopman's personal contribution to a "best practice" standard that proved to be wrong. You just got to listen to folks who are willing to admit their mistakes.

Anyway, it's a long article, published in another one of those magazines that some people sneer at for being "elitist," and thus won't be part of any health care soundbite--but it's worth reading: Jerome Groopman, "Health Care: Who Knows 'Best'?," The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010 edition.

Profiles that Complicate our Cardboard Cut-Out Judgments

2010-01-22T12:12:00.009-05:00

Reading the profile of John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, online at The New Yorker this morning reminded me of some of the reasons I have subscribed to that magazine off and on over the years. The article's in-depth description of a complicated character makes me re-think my own knee-jerk reaction to Mackey's op-ed on health care reform that the Wall Street Journal published last year. Not only did I think the guy was a nut, I agreed with Matt Yglesias, who wrote that:

there’s asking a CEO to pander to your prejudices, and there’s pressuring a CEO not to go out of his way to offend your prejudices. Corporate executives have a lot of social and political power in the United States, in a way that goes above and beyond the social and political power that stems directly from their wealth. The opinions of businessmen on political issues are taken very seriously by the press and by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Once upon a time perhaps union leaders exercised the same kind of sway, but these days all Republicans, most of the media, and some Democrats feel comfortable writing labor off as just an “interest group” while Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Jack Welch are treated as all-purpose sages. One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.

What Yglesias had to say on the issue still resonates with me--the idea that rich CEOs have too much power, anyway, so they need to be careful about how they throw their weight around in the public arena--but Nick Baumgarten's article also provides me with a more nuanced profile of John Mackey, whom I had never really thought about until Mackey wrote that op-ed. Like many interesting characters, Mackey is a contradictory mix of hippie, capitalist, libertarian, paternalism, and goofiness. I think Mackey's idea that the world would be a wonderful place if other corporate leaders ran their companies as he does his--his idea of "conscious capitalism"-- and thus there would be no need for government laws to protect people from the over-reaching power of corporations, is very pie-in-the-sky. I think we've had a very nasty wake-up call as to the self-centeredness and greediness of corporations--manned by their overpaid CEOs--in the debacle of Wall Street, the bail-out of banks, and the almost-collapse of our economy. I am glad that there are corporate leaders such as Mackey who do think it necessary and good to provide their workers with fairly generous benefits and good wages--too bad there aren't more of them these days.

Reading the article on Mackey reminded me of the profile of Barack Obama that I read in The New Yorker a couple of years ago: "The Conciliator," by Larissa MacFarquhar. Anyone who read that article would not have been surprised by Obama's leadership style this past year. Obama might have been one of the most liberal voters in the Senate, but as MacFarquhar pointed out two years ago, " In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative." Obama had a history already of trying to understand "the other side," on whatever the issue might be. This is a telling story from his long-time friend Cassandra Butts:

Obama is always disappointing people who feel that he gives too much respect or yields too much ground to the other side, rather than fighting aggressively for his principles. “In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers,” Cassandra Butts says. “The issue of the Second Amendment came up and Fried is pretty much a Second Amendment absolutist. One of our classmates was in favor of gun control—he’d come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue. And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out—he was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc, where they didn’t have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn’t understand that.”

So when I read the crazy right-wing comparisons of Barack Obama to "Hitler" or the claims that Obama is a "socialist," I know right away that the person making that claim is just plain stupid or highly misinformed--or deliberately misleading. And there are a lot of folks like that. They obviously don't read The New Yorker, and, of course, I'm sure they hold in high disdain anyone who does. It's an "elitist" magazine. But I sure as hell have learned a lot from reading it--many times the articles challenge my own assumptions. However, there are a lot of people who don't want their assumptions challenged or their minds changed in any way.

I quit subscribing because, damn it, the magazine is published every week, and I can't keep up with the reading of it. I love the cover art, and I continue to think I will return to read articles I don't have time to read right away, and so the paper copies just stack up--I can hardly bear to recycle them (though I did grit my teeth at the end of the year and did just that). I think I need to get with a couple of other people who would like to subscribe and start a joint subscription--in other words, have someone to whom to pass on my copies.

Fandom--Because I don't want to think about politics today

2010-01-22T03:27:00.005-05:00

I don't write much about television or films, but that's not because I don't enjoy television or films. I love a good drama. Recently I've become a fan of the British television series Life on Mars, the story of a British policeman who is hit by a car in 2006 and "wakes" up to find himself 33 years in the past, in 1973. The series is being re-broadcast on PBS. Although I root for the modern, methodical, more sensitive DCI Sam Tyler, the officer who is stunned to discover he's on almost alien soil in 1970s England, I have an awful soft spot for the often corrupt and bullying DCI Gene Hunt, but I would like to think that soft spot is more the result of my rather swooning regard for the actor who plays Hunt--Philip Glenister--than of any admiration for the ham-fisted Hunt. But evidently Gene Hunt has a swooning effect on many women viewers, and I'm just one of many. Maybe it's that confident swagger and curling lip that attracts us so. However, I first really noticed Glenister as an actor in his role as Mr. Carter in BBC1's Cranford, a very different role than that of DCI Hunt--and I immediately liked that character, too. So, yeah, though he is not traditionally handsome, for some reason, I think Philip Glenister has a lot of sex appeal. I think I'm a fan--or as much of a fan as I ever am of actors. Here is a list of some of my favorite actors/characters:

As a child, I loved Eric Fleming's Mr. Favor in Rawhide, my first "crush" on a fictional character.
Vying for second place were Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock from Star Trek (all those other women could have the captain!) and Patrick McGoohan's "Number Six" in The Prisoner.
Kevin Kline--a great talent
French actor Jean Reno--oh yeah!
British actors Alan Bates, Bill Nighy, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, John Hannah, and Alan Rickman--all very sexy (and, yeah, I know that Everett is gay, but that doesn't make him less sexy!)
I love Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes.
Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, especially his role in Yojimbo
Don Cheadle--not only a great actor but also very good-looking
I first really noticed Forest Whitaker in Smoke and have enjoyed his acting ever since.
Indian actors Aamir Khan and Ajay Devgan.

And that's my list of favorite actors, none of whom are really traditional heartthrobs--provided here today because I don't feel like addressing the really important news of the day, such as the execrable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. Yep, taking refuge in the superficial and entertaining.

Satisfaction in a Completed Project

2010-01-18T15:39:00.008-05:00

I finally completed one of the folk art quilts I began last year. This one is my son's; I am now finishing my daughter's quilt. In order to guarantee I wouldn't lose interest and thus finish only one quilt, I crafted simultaneously the blocks for two quilts before crocheting the blocks together. Over the Christmas holiday, I sewed blanket stitches around each block of my son's quilt and then crocheted a half-double-crochet edging to each block. Then I hand-sewed the blocks together and finished the quilt with a crocheted edging.

Now I am sewing blanket stitches around the blocks for my daughter's quilt, and will then crochet an edging to each block before hand-sewing (yarning in the backs of each stitch) the blocks together. It is really satisfying to complete a project such as this, a project that evolved out of my interest in felting worn wool sweaters. Half of the blocks on each quilt are embellished with buttons or applique from cut-outs or of my own design. The picture at top left is of the front of the quilt.

The back of each square is made of cotton material I saved over the years. Much of the material came from clothing I purchased from Marketplace India. When the outfit became too worn, I would toss it in my rag bag. Some of the material came from items of my children's clothing; for instance, on the back of my son's quilt is one square with an embroidered dragon from a robe he had as a small child. Also, both of my children practiced embroidery stitches when they were young; I found some of these early attempts and incorporated them into the quilts, too. The photo on the right is of the back of the quilt.

Discouraging

2010-01-10T14:39:00.009-05:00

Yesterday evening as we drove home from watching the 3-D version of Avatar, we noticed a woman at a stoplight. As soon as cars came to a stop at the traffic light, she stepped off from the sidewalk to brave the still-slippery spots of the icy road in order to beg for money. She passed from car to car, holding up a one-dollar bill in mute request for more. I thought of her later as I remembered Judy Woodruff's report about jobs in December: the percentage of joblessness was remaining steady--but that was in light of the fact that 600,000 people had stopped looking for jobs. Where does the government get the numbers for unemployment statistics? I had been told that the number comes from unemployment offices and that it is derived from the number of people still seeking employment and receiving benefits. The answer is more complicated than that, however, and is described on this website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Just as discouraging as the number of folks who quit looking for jobs last month (for whatever reason), is the information about what recently re-employed people are discovering in the current economy. Most folks take a pretty hefty pay cut with the next job. And this pay cut affects their future earnings:

[P]eople hired at lower wages in a tight job market tend to lag behind their peers for years, sometimes decades. For example, workers laid off during the 1981-82 recession earned 20 percent less than people who remained in a job — even 20 years after they were rehired, a Columbia University study found. The study examined pay for white- and blue-collar workers, managers and hourly workers. ("For the Unemployed, New Job Often Means a Pay Cut," Christopher Leonard, Associated Press Writer, 10 January 2010)

In addition, "[m]ore than six people are now vying, on average, for each job opening, according to Labor Department data — compared with just 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007." (my emphasis)

Some institutions benefit from joblessness. I read a recent article that reported a tremendous rise in the number of people returning to college, particularly to community colleges, and the number of traditional students who are choosing less-expensive colleges closer to their homes. (See Washington Post's "Community Colleges Get Influx of Students in Bad Times," by Valerie Strauss, 31 May 2009). However, many community colleges are unprepared for this huge influx of students, for their state funding has been hurt by the economic downturn as well. (See "Community Colleges Get Squeezed," by Brian Burnsed, Business Week, 15 January 2009) One consequence is that community colleges are hiring more part-time faculty. Look at the employment pages of any community college and note how many adjunct positions are being advertised. For instance, as of last year, New Jersey's Burlington County College was planning "to hire up to 200 new adjunct faculty members, increasing its part-time teaching staff to about 575, at the same time that the college faces a drastic cut of nearly 42 percent from the county and state."

Such part-time jobs for educators might sound great in this tough economy, but the pay for those jobs is often very low, particularly in the South, and those part-time positions also offer little or no benefits. In a country where one receives better access to health insurance through full-time employment, that's not good news.

(For more on part-time faculty at community colleges, see Inside Higher Ed's The Part Time Impact," 16 November 2009).

The Problem with "Eyewitness" Accounts

2010-01-07T11:24:00.004-05:00

I clicked on the article about the man who opened fire at a power plant in Missouri, depressed, again, by how many people turn to violence to express their frustrations with their colleagues and fellow workers, with their spouses, with the government. What really caught my attention in the article, however, was the description of the shooter, a description that illustrates the problem with eyewitness accounts:

Descriptions of the gunman have been confusing to police as one witness described the gunman as a black man, about 5-foot-8, wearing a tan coat and carrying a semiautomatic weapon — but later, a company supervisor called police to give the name of a disgruntled worker, a white man, who had possibly been recently fired, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

The news account reports that relatives of workers are saying the shooter was a disgruntled worker.

The End of Christmas

2010-01-04T21:21:00.002-05:00

....not with a bang but a whimper--from the perspective of our cat Pluto, looking out a window into our neighbor's yard...

Doing Justice

2009-12-28T16:54:00.006-05:00

The tip of my hat to Steve Benen today who posts on justice finally being served to REPUBLICAN attorneys screwed by George Bush's Justice Department. The first was Leslie Hagen, who, despite her "outstanding performance" and Republican credentials, was kicked out of the Justice Department in 2006 because Monica Goodling heard a rumor that the attorney was gay. Like many other people who think their world view is the only one and that therefore they are always right (a kind of insanity, I think), Goodling not only did not renew Hagen's contract, she undermined the attorney at every turn, making sure that she could not get an appointment anywhere in the Justice Department. If hell exists, there is a special place for people such as Monica Goodling. And since I don't think hell exists, I believe it behooves the rest of us to counter-act in whatever legal, moral--hey, and maybe even comedic--way we can the malicious, vindictive acts of people such as this. There is a singular perniciousness in people who vindictively try to prevent qualified folks from attaining appropriate employment. After a national search to fill the position in the new administration, Hagen was re-hired. (Gee, and she isn't even a Democrat! Imagine an administration that doesn't politically vet all of its Justice hires.) However, as an article on NPR's website describes:

It is not a perfectly happy ending for Hagen. Nobody official from the department ever apologized to her for what happened. She still owes thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and the Justice Department has refused to pay those bills.

The other attorneys Benen mentions in his post are William Hochul --who Goodling got rid of because Hochul's wife is active in the Democratic party though Hochul himself is a Republican-- and Daniel Blogden, who, as U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, was fired because he refused to politicize his office. Both attorneys have been rehired by the Obama administration.