Back at the Farm

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

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

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

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"

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

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"

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.