A Real Horror Story

Today I opened up the free local newspaper, Dekalb Neighbor, and leafed through it before dropping it in the recycle bin in the kitchen. The Lifestyle section had  a special on locally "haunted" places, and one of the articles was about the Decatur cemetery:

In 1879, Capt. Edward Cox shot and killed Lt. Col. Robert Alston. The two Georgia statesmen and Civil War veterans were in a heated debate over the state's convict labor laws. Alston was trying to put an end to the practice of renting out prisoners for profit while Cox was becoming rich on the corrupt system. Cox was convicted of murder but later pardoned. Now Cox and Alston lie just a few feet apart in the Decatur Cemetery. Cox's grave is one of the stops on the new Decatur Ghost Tour, co-founded by psychic Boo Newell. Since beginning tours in September, Ms. Newell said visitors have reported feeling cold, touched, pulled and breathed on at the grave site. "Cox is still here trying to prove he's the man," Ms. Newell said. "He feels he never got the credit he deserves." (Dekalb Neighbor, 28 October 2009, B:1)

Ms. Newell may be a psychic, but I think she's misread the vibes at this grave site. More likely, Cox is unable to sleep well in his grave because of a guilty conscience. The convict labor laws were instrumental in re-enslaving black Americans after the Civil War, especially in the South. Draconian laws were passed, guaranteed to gather in African-American men who could not pay the fines the courts levied against them, and so their sentences, often for ridiculous non-criminal activities such as "changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight carts without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity--or loud talk--with white women," were lengthened (quote from Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name).

In this way, the white South continued to profit from the unwilling labor of African-Americans. The system was corrupt and brutal--and continued well into the twentieth century until World War II. As Blackmon writes in the introduction to his well-documented history of the re-enslavement of African-Americans,

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. (Blackmon, p 7-8)

That people were well aware of the moral bankruptcy of forced convict labor is evidenced by the fact that Lt. Col. Alston, who fought in the Civil War, argued so strongly against its use that Captain Cox, profiting from just such a system, refused to hear those arguments, refused to countenance them so fiercely that he killed the man trying to convince him. That the whole society was complicit in the brutal system is illustrated by how long it lasted and by how that society viewed the man who murdered Lt. Col. Alston: Cox was pardoned. In fact, years later, when Lt. Col. Alston's widow died, The New York Times published a derisively dismissive obituary from Atlanta, GA., that not-so-subtly supported the murderous Captain Cox:

DEATH OF MRS. ROBERT A. ALSTON.

ATLANTA, Ga., Sept. 5--Mrs. Robert A. Alston died in Decatur to-night at 6  o'clock. She was the widow of the late Col. Robert A. Alston, who was murdered some years ago in the executive office by Capt. Edward Cox. The shock of her husband's death followed Mrs. Alston through life. Col. Alston was a liberal liver, and on his death left nothing, so that his widow's life has been much trouble. Capt. Cox, who was pardoned by Gov. Stephens, now occupies an official position here. (published September 6, 1884, from The New York Times archives)

No, I don't think that Capt. Cox is still trying to show "he's the man." More probably, he rests badly in his grave because he profited from murdering a man who was in the moral right, the man that the writer of that obituary sneered as being a "liberal liver."

And so here, I praise Captain Robert A. Alston, despite whatever faults he might have had personally, a man who tried to do what was morally right and was killed for it. The re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War is a real horror story that all Southerners should confront--or else sleep fitfully in their graves.

Cleaning the Creek

Early this morning we headed north to the Georgia Mountains, to Holly Creek, near Chatsworth. The Nature Conservancy was sponsoring a clean-up location for Rivers Alive, "Georgia's annual volunteer waterway cleanup event that targets all waterways in the State including streams, rivers, lakes, beaches, and wetlands," according to the organization's website. Our mission was to clean up a certain length of Holly Creek. We left home before dawn and arrived at Holly Creek a little after 9 a.m., along with several other people. I'm not sure how many people participated at our site because as soon as volunteers arrived, we signed the necessary paperwork, chose a partner, got a trash bag, and went to work. A Boy Sout troop of about eight boys arrived, with their adult sponsors, families with young children showed up, as well as couples and folks on their own. We trudged the creek from around 9 a.m. to noon, and by the end of that time, we had collected many bags of garbage, as illustrated in the photo.

The most disgusting items I found were disposable diapers, especially one group stashed in a hole in a bank of the creek near a picnic area. Because the area had recently received rain, these diapers were not only full of human waste; they had also absorbed a large amount of rain water, so they weighed down one's trash bag quite a lot. Our daughter had the most disgusting experience of the group, however. Leaning down to pick up trash, she plunged her gloved hands into the putrefying remains of a small animal. She quickly returned to the rendezvous site to exchange her gloves for a fresh pair. Tom had the most exciting find: a dollar bill.

Despite the disappointment of discovering that such a pristine-looking area was so littered with human garbage, the clean-up was really quite enjoyable. The day was cloudy and very cool, and the woods created a sensory overload in colors and textures. I took photographs, but photographs cannot duplicate the experience or even a true image of the experience. In one shallow area of the creek, fall leaves had massed just below the surface of the water, creating an impressionistic image like a Monet painting. In another part of the creek where water rushed over and around several big rocks, the movement created a low rhythmic sound like distant, hollow drums. Staghorn moss covered slick areas of ground, fantastic mushrooms grew on the wet humus, bright red sweetgum leaves fluttered down from branches to catch on branches still blanketed with green leaves. Holly Creek is a beautiful place. Too bad people pollute such beautiful, soul-restoring places.

A Walk in the Woods

This afternoon we took a walk in the woods in Sweetwater State Park, up the blue-blazed trail through the shade of lollolly pines, American beech, sweetgum, slippery elm, and burr oak. The day was beautiful: clear, bright sunny skies and temperatures in the 50s (Farhenheit). I had tested the temperature at the sunny, south side of the house before we left home and thought the air warmer than it really was. When we arrived at the park, the wind was blowing cold off the water of George Sparks Reservoir. Canada geese, coots, and large white geese waddled across the lawn near the lake where we had parked first, but then we drove up to the interpretive center, re-parked, and began our walk through the woods.

Little streams ran through the woods, and once we stopped to turn over rocks, but Tom didn't find anything of interest beneath them. The blue-blazed trail switchbacked up a bluff and then down to the creek, where the remains of an old mill still stands. This mill was once part of a small creek-side settlement before the Civil War. Slaves made the bricks from which the mill was built, and poor white women did the mill work while their husbands were away fighting the war. In 1864, Union soldiers burned the mill, freed the slaves, and loaded up the women and children for transportation to prison in Kentucky. Many of the people never returned...but evidence of their work remains. The old millchase still channels some of the creek toward the mill, but the water returns to the creek through collapsed stone walls of the millchase before reaching the mill. Some walls of the mill stand, and piles of broken brick peek brightly from beneath their thick cover of earth.

Two weeks ago, a lot of countryside around Sweetwater Creek and the Chattahoochee River was underwater, and some roads still remain closed. The trail to the falls was closed with yellow tape across the trail, but we stepped over some of the yellow tape in order to get a closer look at the creek. There in the rocks that tumble downstream and pile up along the banks, I saw small pieces of brick, probably from the mill, that had tumbled and settled with the rocks. Some of the brick pieces were as round and smooth as the tumbled rock, and could have been taken for rock except that their red color stood out among the quartz, gneiss, and mica schist, as illustrated in the photo at the upper left-hand corner of this post. Given enough time, Mother Nature reclaims all that we have ever dared to call our own.

What We Cannot Deny: The Tangled Web of Ancestry

I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)

A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.

Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.

I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.

As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.

Further Information: Searching for Slave Ancestors

• Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
  
• Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.

Prizes

First, congratulations to Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. We all have a pretty good idea why the Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him the honor: Obama has changed the tone of the White House by embracing the rest of the world as partners in arms rather than opponents to arm against. This is a good thing. The rest of the world--except the Taliban, Al-qaeda, and the usual fringe voices on the right (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, those people)--think this is a good thing. Republicans who have not forgotten how to be gracious think that's a good thing. That being said, the award of the prize to Barack Obama, whom I support and for whom I voted for President of the United States, reminds me of when my son played Little League baseball one year in Waverly Hall, Georgia.

The person in charge of the Little League teams was a woman who also was going to coach a team. She made sure that she had a chance to see every child's baseball skills; then she chose the best players for her team. My son, who was enthusiastic but not skilled at baseball and who was also a little unconscious at times (looking at the sky, thinking of something else besides the baseball heading his way), ended up on a team of very unskillful players. It was a sad situation. The woman who should have made sure that every team had an equal mixture of skilled and unskilled players was looking out only for herself and a handful of children.

At the end of the season, my son's team had not won one game. (Wait, I think they may have been awarded a game because another team forfeited for some reason.) Anyway, the coaches of the team planned an end-of-season picnic, and we all showed up to discover that each child was receiving a huge trophy. My husband and I couldn't believe it. Sure, we weren't happy that the team suffered from a huge handicap due to the poor choices of the Little League leader; we were sorry our son's team didn't win one game; and we thought it was important to praise the boys for the work they had attempted. But huge trophies? Maybe a small gift or token to illustrate the importance of trying and to encourage the kids not to give up when faced again with such insurmountable odds.

I'm afraid that our son's trophy was a family joke. We told him that we were proud that he had done the best job he could have done but that we didn't think the team's efforts were worth such ostentatious rewards.

I feel a little the same way about our President's award. I'm happy and pleased that important people think our president is doing a good job, that he has begun to lift the dark cloud of hubris and suspicion that the Bush administration created, that he is really pushing for nuclear disarmament, that he is engaging the world in diplomacy. But the peace prize seems a little premature. Oh, I know there is an argument for it. The prize shows support of his efforts. But it's such a big prize. Couldn't a smaller prize have done?

I just hope the Nobel Peace prize doesn't become a family joke and that the President lives up to the expectations it raises. Good luck to him. We should all support him.

Note: I think that James Fallows provides a good analysis of the President's speech this morning in which the President acknowledged the Nobel Peace Prize: "Obama's Nobel Remarks: Four Very Skillful Paragraphs."

I Had a Friend

Last night I received a telephone call from my best friend, who now lives on the coast of far northern California. We met twenty-five years ago--in 1984--when I was teaching at Louisiana State University and she was teaching in a local high school east of Baton Rouge. Although my husband and I moved from Louisiana in 1987, my Louisiana friend and I have been best friends ever since, through highly dramatic times and more peaceful, settled times. For years, I did all the moving, from Louisiana back to Texas, to Minnesota, to Georgia, back to Texas, back to Georgia, while my friend stayed in Louisiana. Now she has moved, and an entire continent separates us.

My friend and I rarely talk on the phone. The only people I frequently call are my mother in Texas and my husband and children for short conversations on the cell phone. For years, I was a prolific writer of letters, and this is how my friend and I kept in touch, as well as how I kept in touch with other friends. The other friends, eventually, quit corresponding, but this friend has remained a faithful correspondent since 1984. We write fewer letters, but we keep in touch by e-mail. Letters are best, I think, but it seems that few people these days are letter writers.

Not too long ago, letter-writing was an art and a blessing. It was how people who loved one another yet who lived far away from one another kept in touch. We have boxes and boxes of letters written by my husband's ancestors and their friends, some going back to the mid-1800s. I have begun going through those letters again and all the ephemera attached to them: the recipe clippings of a grandmother, the postcards of a great-aunt who was epileptic and who collected postcards as a hobby, the valentines collected by another great-aunt, the religious pamphlets and tourist guides someone collected and filed in a drawer somewhere to be discovered again 70-100 years later, the photographs of people long forgotten. I went through these boxes when we first received them in the late 1980s, but the remnants of these once engaged and eager lives filled me with sadness. They reminded me too well of the eventual fate of myself and all that I have ever loved.

Last night, after talking with my friend for a hour or so, I returned to the pile of family records I have here in my study (boxes are stacked elsewhere). In one basket I had placed a number of those memorial booklets provided by funeral homes. The geographic stability of a family can be established by looking at such booklets. The oldest one in this particular collection is dated 1943; it's the memorial record for my husband's great-grandmother, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (Sr.--one of her daughters had the same name), who was born in 1864 and died in Houston, Texas, in 1943. Next comes the memorial record of Edwin Oscar Cook, a cousin of the family, who was born in New Orleans in 1880 and died in Houston in 1955. Next is the memorial booklet for the great-aunt who was epileptic: Helen Frances Armstrong, born in Houston, Texas, in 1898, and died in Houston in 1962. Finally, the latest memorial booklet is for Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (known as "Mimi" to her family, the daughter of MONA Sr.), born in Houston in 1896, died in Houston in 1986. Every one of these remembrance booklets have the stamp of Geo. H. Lewis & Company or Geo. H. Lewis & Sons. From 1943 to 1986, George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors have prepared the final services for the elderly members of my husband's family. The company still exists in Houston, Texas: George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors.

Having in her possession when she died most of the family materials, Mimi lived all her life in Houston, with summers spent in Boulder, Colorado, and she taught first grade in Houston for 30 years. As old as she was when she died, a number of friends and family remained to write their signatures under the "Relatives and Friends" column of the remembrance album--sixty of them, including me, an in-law. Edwin O. Cook, however, the cousin who died 350 miles from his New Orleans home, at the age of 75, has no signatures of friends left behind--though the booklet does contain a typed list of eleven floral remembrances. Finally, we outlive every friendship, and some distant relative sends chrysanthemums to the funeral home, or, these days, donates to the American Cancer Society.

Going through these old papers, photographs, and memorials can be depressing as one remembers that they represent people who once lived and loved. Years ago I read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford and was struck by the profound insight revealed by the main character, Miss Mary Smith, when she and her elderly friend Miss Matty sit down one evening to read old letters:

I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.

Yes, the reading of old letters is a sad enterprise, as the letter writers rise up before us as apparitions of their corporeal selves. And it seems very appropriate, as I was having these thoughts by going through old letters, that this morning I opened a book I've been reading, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and encountered this poem by Buson:

Mourning for Hokuju Rosen


You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you so far away?

Thinking of you I go to the hillside and wander.
The hillside--why is it so saddening?

Yellow of dandelions, the shepherd's purse blooming white.
There's no one to look at them.

A pheasant calls and calls without stopping.
I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.

Smoke rises, the west wind blowing so hard
in the fields of bamboo grass and sedge
it doesn't linger.

I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.
Not even the birds call out hororo.

You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you far away?

By the image of Amida I light no candle
and offer no flowers. I sit here alone,
my heart heavy, filled with gratitude.

Gratitude. Yes. I have still a friend. We live with a continent between us.

New Blog--Left for Texas

I have started another blog on which I will post historical information. Most of the posts will be about my husband's family, from whom we have inherited many boxes of letters and ephemera, but I will occasionally include information about the history and times of my own family. I have begun the blog with descriptions of some of my husband's ancestors and will include images of advertising, copies of family photographs and other clippings that the family gathered over the years. That blog is called Left for Texas. At this point the blog is open to any reader. Feel free to visit it!

Oops! I just repaired the link to my new blog. I had inadvertently mistyped the link.

Cozy, Cozy, Cozy

Matthew Yglesias links to a Frank Rich column today in The New York Times, in which Rich describes the lobbyists' cozying up to Democrats. Those of us who cheered--especially those of us who care a lot about health care reform--when Barack Obama promised in his inaugural address that under his leadership Washington would "do our business in the light of day" are cheering less these days as it seems as if business is being conducted as usual in Washington. Just a few highlights from the Rich column:

• Heather Podesta, the high-profile lobbyist for "health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna"? She is married to "Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition."
  
  
• How do these close connections to the White House work out for the lobbying duo? Tony's "business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent."
  
  
• During the last administration, the place to meet, greet, and influence was Jack Abramoff's restaurant Signatures. These days, it's Ristorante Tosca, where the likes of Heather Podesta (lobbying against health reform for big healthcare companies) and Steve Elmendorf (former chief of staff for Dick Gephart now lobbying for financial clients such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs) meet their clients and government officials they hope to influence.
  
  
• "[I]n early August...the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business." Those lobbyists whose clients include UnitedHealth Group? Steven Elmendorf (Elmendorf Strategies), Tom Daschle (ummm, not officially a lobbyist, but a "special policy advisor"...), and "a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader."
  
  
• Of course, the Republicans may be out of power, but they're just as easily influenced as those in power. Eric Cantor and John Boehner "are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash." And, of course, there's John Ensign (R-Nevada), who used his connections to provide clients for his mistress's husband--a special category of lobbyist influence all of its own.

But then, we knew that...and those of us who voted for Barack Obama hoped that he would deliver on his promise. As Frank Rich says, "If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform."

Quotations from Frank Rich's op-ed column, "The Rabbit Ragu Democrats," The New York Times, 3 October 2009.

See also: Thomas Franks' column in The Wall Street Journal, "Obama and the K Street Set," 30 September 2009.

Haiku for an early-fall day

This morning glory
blooming with chrysanthemums--
Summer waves goodbye.

Living Haiku

Discouraged by the extreme rhetoric of mainstream Republicans as well as those I know who are on the far right, I haven't been writing much on my blog lately. Other bloggers address the ridiculous claims of the far-right better than I do, and I don't just want to repeat what I read. Also, I have returned to Facebook, having deleted the "friend" who had the most vile posts about Barack Obama and refusing to admit any new "friends" who admit to far-right views. I have enough of those friends already, family members who compare Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez, who think Obama is some kind of far-leftist and who claim they want the government totally out of their lives (no Medicare or Medicaid, no public schools, etc.), yet who had nothing to say when the Bush Administration increased presidential power, suspended habeas corpus for terrorist suspects (even American citizens), and provided unprecedented power to the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens.

To maintain my peace of mind, I've decided to write at least one haiku every day that emerges from something I experienced or observed during the day. This is what I post to my Facebook status. Several years ago, I studied haiku in conjunction with teaching world literature classes at a university in Georgia and as a consequence, also, of having read and thoroughly enjoyed the travel sketches of Japan's most famous haiku poet: Matsuo Basho. I've been amazed by how writing haiku has influenced my perspective. Committed to writing one haiku a day, of condensing a mood or image or experience into seventeen syllables (I'm sticking to that traditional syllabic limitation although I don't believe it's a requirement), I pay more attention to small details, especially details of nature. As R. H. Blyth writes in his classic book on haiku,

Haiku is concerned with the ordinary, the everyday. It has nothing to do with exceptional things, evenings of extraordinary magnificence and splendour. It turns inwards, toward the infinitely small and subtle, not to the vast and sublime.

To pay attention and to recognize the significance of these subtle details of life twenty-four hours a day is "the Way of Haiku," says Blyth. Well, I can't claim to be totally awake to the "real nature of things" all day long, but I am paying more attention. And so, when I first saw a caterpillar on the parsley in my Victory Garden, I began looking closer and found several other caterpillars in various instar stages, the stages between molts--of the beautiful black swallowtail butterfly.

There on the parsley
a black swallowtail larva
becoming itself.

And then I began looking closer at other plants and discovered orange and black caterpillars--again, different instars--of Gulf Fritillaries, eating the leaves of the passion vine on our mailbox. Being aware and open to the small details of nature puts into perspective the pettiness of politics and the unreasonableness of those who demonize others with views (or ethnicity or lifestyle) different from their own.

Sane Conservative Voices I: Bruce Bartlett

As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.

In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:

On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:

When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:

Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.

Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:

Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."

In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.

Health Care Reform--Polling doctors

The New England Journal of Medicine has posted the results of a health care reform poll focusing on doctors' opinions: "Doctors on Coverage — Physicians’ Views on a New Public Insurance Option and Medicare Expansion". The initial poll was sent to a random sample of 5,157 U.S. doctors (some excluded from the original list of 6,000 because of their being in training or their practicing medicine outside U.S. territories). The doctors were divided into four groups:

• primary care physicians,
• medical subspecialists, neurologists, and psychiatrists
• surgical specialists and subspecialists, and
• other specialties

The physicians were asked which of three options for expanding health care they preferred:

• "public and private options, providing people younger than 65 years of age the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans;
• private options only, providing people with tax credits or subsidies, if they have low income, to buy private insurance coverage, without creating a new public plan.
• or a public option only, eliminating private insurance and covering everyone through a single public plan like Medicare."

Of the total number of doctors polled, 43.2% of doctors responded:

• 62.9% supported the public and private option
• 27.3% supported offering private options only
• 9.6% supported offering only a public option.

Interestingly, of the four categories of physicians, primary care doctors most supported the public and private option. Also,

Overall, 58.3% of respondents supported an expansion of Medicare to Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 years. This support was consistent across all four specialty groups, with proportions in favor ranging from 55.6% to 62.4%.

So, as in the wider American public, a majority of doctors favor expanding insurance coverage by providing access through both public and private options. Just saying.

Go to the article (link above) for graphs and such. For further discussion of this poll and others, go to "Listen to Your Doctors," by Harold Pollack, posted at The New Republic, 15 September 2009.

Animal Feces--or Worse--in Your Water?

The New York Times has an interesting article on violations of the Clean Water laws, of the EPA's lax oversight during the Bush administration, and of the consequences of that laxness: "Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering." In interviewing "more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists," New York Times journalists have discovered that "an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways." The article describes the consequences of water pollution on the health of one family in West Virginia who live just seventeen miles from the state capital and on the career of one lawyer who joined West Virginia's environmental protection agency, where, he discovered, "everyone was terrified of doing their job." He eventually lost his job because he did his job; powerful industry lobbyists used their leverage with state politicians to get him fired.

In West Virginia, as in Washington, the corruption of those hired to keep the state's water safe can be seen in the revolving door of the state's environmental agencies: regulators "leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed." Pressure from the EPA has been seriously lacking, too:

Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. “For the last eight years, my hands have been tied,” said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”

The New York Times has gathered data on "more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance." Want to see how your state measures up?: "Find Water Polluters Near You." I clicked through the pages of companies in Georgia that have permits to discharge pollutants and was surprised by the number of violators who hadn't been fined for their violations. Uh.... okay....maybe I wasn't surprised. Just disgusted.

Here is another interactive map: "Clean Water Violations: The Enforcement Record." Enforcements in Georgia: 48.2 per 100 violations. Enforcement Record for my home state of Texas: 7.6 per 100 violations. Big surprise.

Health Care Costs

Updates below

Conservatives I know--and these are the Fox-News adherents--always bring up predictable issues when we argue politics. In a recent discussion, one family member seemed to suggest that health care costs would be significantly lowered by tort reform. It's amazing to me why this person, a blue-collar worker all his life, worries so much about medical malpractice. The class of people who seem to concern him most are folks who make five or six times what he made working in a carbon black plant. Because I love him--okay, he's my dad--I usually drop the issue when the discussion becomes too contentious or when he changes the subject to another hot-button issue, a familiar technique: chase another rabbit when the first one looks like it's going to become dinner for another fox. I try to bolster my arguments with facts, but facts just don't stick with many people; too often we ingest "facts" that are watered down--or dissolved completely--and served up with a toxic salsa of paranoia, fear, and self-refential world view.

But because I am at heart an optimist who thinks that perhaps people can change their minds when confronted with facts, carefully gathered details, and thoughtful observations, here are some facts about health care and medical malpractice, courtesy of Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere (with a h/t to Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the link):

• Yes, more Americans sue their doctors than citizens in the UK and in Canada. However, "[t]wo-thirds of the U.S. claims were dropped, dismissed, or found in favor of the defendant; in one-third, plaintiffs received compensation after a settlement or judgment." Here is a table comparing the "Malpractice Claims and Payments in Four Countries, 2001."
• What about the legal costs of defending those malpractice suits?

  Legal costs are estimated to average $27,000 per claim in the United States, which adds approximately $1.4 billion in costs to the $4.4 billion paid in settlements and judgments.23 The costs of underwriting insurance against malpractice claims are estimated at an additional 12 percent, or $700 million.24 The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims, including awards, legal costs, and underwriting costs, was an estimated $6.5 billion in 2001—0.46 percent of total health spending.

• Look at that last line in the quote above: "The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims" is less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Malpractice claims do not add significantly to overall health care costs. The writers conclude that malpractice litigation is a growing problem--and it probably should be addressed. However, the claim that health care costs in this country would be significantly reduced by tort reform just does not hold up under the facts. Once again: The cost of defending malpractice claims in the United States comes out to be less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Can we then, please, turn to a more thoughtful, fact-supported discussion of significant ways to reduce health care costs in this country?

Source:
Gerard F. Anderson, Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Affairs, 24, no. 4 (2005): 903-914. 13 Sept. 2009. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/4/903

Updates, more sources:For another discussion of healthcare costs and medical malpractice, see Maggie Mahar's blog, Healthbeat, and these posts: "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part I and "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part II.

See, also, Atul Gawande's article, "The Cost Conundrum," in The New Yorker.

Decatur Book Festival 2009, Second Day

On the second day of the Decatur Book Festival, I got a late start. My husband left home earlier in order to meet one of his favorite cartoonists, Keith Knight, at a noon venue. He bought two or three of Keith's books, too. Tom has purchased more books than I at this festival. With just a part-time job, I'm really aware of where every penny of that paycheck goes. I bought a volume of the journal Five Points, a publication of Georgia State University edited by David Bottoms, because the young woman at the booth looked so bored and because she was handing out free copies of older journal issues: a two for one. I purchased a couple of copies of the Wren's Nest latest publication because my daughter's artwork appears in this year's volume and because I like to support youthful writing endeavors. And on the second day of the book festival, I purchased a slim volume of poetry from a young woman standing on the sidewalk near the outside food court.

"Would you like to buy my book?" the poet asked.

"Not really," I replied, but then I softened my refusal by asking her a few questions before moving on. When I came back by a few minutes later and saw the woman still standing there, I thought, what the heck. What's five dollars? I'll buy one of her slim little books. I can always use the book for art projects later if I'm not moved by the poetry.

She said she was from California and that she had attended the book festival in previous years. Later I saw another middle-aged woman like me holding the poet's books while the poet bought some food from a vendor. What easy marks we are, I thought, for the young and hopeful.

Authors were everywhere hawking their books in many imaginative ways. I saw an alien right after I arrived, standing behind a board advertising Drake Highlander's book, What Not to Do When You Find a Spaceship. Drake Highlander himself was rather nondescript, a young man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved polo shirt. He handed me a brochure about the book and a bookmark with more information. The alien posed for me.

Although I didn't plan it, the venues I attended turned out to be focused mostly on Southern writers. I found Tom at the Decatur Conference Center where John Yow was promoting his book The Armchair Birder in his good-humored Southern drawl. Yow first read a passage from the book where he describes his inability to catch a glimpse of a wood thrush. It's a funny passage because everyone he asks has seen a wood thrush but himself even though his own yard, he claims, is good habitat for one. After the reading, Yow led a bird-calling contest, with help from two of his friends sitting at the conference table with I-pods and recordings of bird calls. He solicited members of the audience to perform bird calls and then to compare those calls with the recordings. This was a lot of fun, and the person who won the contest, hands down, was a young woman (teens? early twenties? it was hard to tell from the back of the room where I was sitting) who did a loud, convincing, and energetic call of a sandhill crane.

Tom and I then went to hear Sonny Brewer and Rick Bragg, both from Alabama, though Bragg is the most well-known of the two as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing that he did for The New York Times and for the well-received books based on his experiences growing up in Possum Trot, Alabama. Although I haven't read any of Bragg's books, I have run across his writing elsewhere and remembered the trouble he got in at The New York Times for using a stringer's reporting to write a story in the first-person as if he had done all the interviewing himself. But the big guy (almost 6-foot, 3-inches and quite a bit over 200 pounds) is funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and profane--as many good Southern story tellers are. He blamed his weight on the M&Ms that hotels stock in their mini-bars. "I don't drink," he said, "but those fancy hotels that I stayed in on book tours always had three-pound bags of M&Ms in their mini-bars. Now these are hotels that wouldn't have me if I weren't a well-known author on a book tour. I'd have a pound of M&Ms in the evening while watching pay-for-view and another pre-breakfast pound the next morning. Now this is true. I gained thirty-five pounds eating M&Ms."

The final event I attended was in the Decatur Courthouse and was titled "Women & The New South," featuring Janis Owens, Masha Hamilton (the only non-Southerner of the three), and Cassandra King. On her blog, Janis Owens wrote that "The title of the panel should be: Running Our Mouths, because that’s what we do." And she certainly did a lot of the talking. Raised in the Florida panhandle in what she calls the "cracker culture," Owens told one funny story after another about her life, her culture, and her family, without skipping a beat between each story. For instance, she told the story of a grandmother who was so large that the mortician had to break her legs to fit her in the coffin. When the three women opened up the discussion to questions from the audience, however, the other two authors got a chance to talk. Some of the audience members were very familiar with King's and Hamilton's books and had very specific questions. One person asked what inspired Cassandra King to write The Sunday Wife. "I made it up completely," she said. Then she paused and told the real story, that she was once the unhappily circumscribed Sunday wife who eventually left the pastor. The novel wasn't published, she said, until after her mother died, for her mother always held her accountable for leaving the pastor. Now King is married to well-known author, Pat Conroy.

Masha Hamilton, who has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, is also a novelist. She went to Afghanistan in 2004 and returned in 2008, and has begun the Afghan Women's Writing Project as a way to give voice to Afghan women. The website for the project describes the efforts:

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

As Hamilton was preparing to leave New York and her three children to visit Afghanistan, she thought long and hard about how her traveling to such a dangerous country might impact her children. But she also wanted her children to know that some actions are worth the risk. Just before she left for Afghanistan, she said that her teenage daughter went out one night to Central Park with some friends. When her daughter returned home, Hamilton told her that she should never go to Central Park at night, that she was very worried about her. Her daughter looked at her and said, emphasizing every word with a pointing finger, "You are going to Afghanistan and you're worried about me being in Central Park at night with friends?"

I left this session very glad that I had attended it on the spur of the moment, for these are authors whose writings I will look for in the future. One of the great things about the Decatur Book Festival is that it brings in lots of well-known authors along with a little less well-known authors and even obscure authors. There is a venue for almost every interest. What a great event!

Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.

Christians and Hatred

Justin Elliot of TPM Muckraker points out today that the guy who showed up with an AK-47 at an event where Barack Obama spoke attends a church where the pastor preaches sermons with titles such as "Why I Hate Barack Obama." In fact, Chris Broughton, the man with the AK-47 and handgun, had heard just that sermon the day before showing up armed. I tried to listen to the entire sermon, but I couldn't stand to hear such hatred. The preacher referred to "the whoredoms and witchcrafts of the U.S. government and Barack Obama" and said that he prays to God that Barack Obama will "die and go to hell."

We might be tempted to wave a hand dismissively and label this pastor as a small feeder on the fringe. But elected Republicans are spouting language that is just as incendiary. Republican Senator John Inofe (Oklahoma) told his constituents, "We're almost reaching a revolution in this country." (h/t Steve Benen, Josh Marshall) He says he doesn't know what's in the health reform bill, won't read it, and will vote against it (in the full splendor of his self-proclaimed stupidity). Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) wants her constituents to be "armed and dangerous." These people may claim to be using such language "figuratively," they may be punctuating their calls to arms with little moues of self-righteousness, but they are building a fire they will not be able to control.

A Right Wing Terrorist A "Great American"?

Here's a thought: If someone stood up in a town-hall meeting and said he was proud to be a left-wing terrorist, what do you think would be the audience's response and the response of mouth-frothing radio talk show hosts?

Well, in Redding, California (that's northern California, far away from the "crazy" Southerners Kevin Drum excoriated in a blog a couple of weeks ago and to which I responded), a citizen stood in such a meeting and said he was proud to be a right-wing terrorist. Instead of repudiating the language and the violence inherent in it, the crowd cheered him. And the Republican congressman present praised him:

“Amen, God bless you,” [Republican Congressman Wally] Herger said with a broad smile. “There is a great American.” (Paul Boerger, "Web extra: Congressman Herger calls Obama plan 'threat to democracy'," Mt. Shasta Area Newspapers, posted Friday, August 21, 2009.)

Ummmm.... Timothy McVeigh was a "right-wing terrorist." Is he a "Great American"? My God, what is happening in our country where people can make these claims and be cheered?

Phil Gingrey Encourages Gun-totin'

When Chris Matthews asked Phil Gingrey (R-GA) if he believed that people should bring guns to town hall meetings where health care is being discussed, Gingrey replied, "I would think that they should exercise their rights under the 2nd Amendment." Gingrey essentially is encouraging people to take guns to town meetings, to meetings where folks have already been worked up into hysterical fear by lying politicians and media faces. Folks who carry guns to those meetings didn't just casually strap on their weapons when they dressed in the morning; they deliberately holstered-up when they prepared to attend a meeting in which they disagreed with the speaker. They are visually communicating the idea that if the speaker says something they don't like, they have force on their side: a deadly weapon. Even if they don't intend to use that weapon, their message is clear. And it's clear to those who might be so fearful or so mentally unstable that they indeed might use deadly force.

People like Phil Gingrey are helping to establish an atmosphere of intimidation and potential violence in public discourse. In a country where four presidents and several popular leaders have been assassinated (and others have faced would-be assassins), it seems insane to me that people are encouraging gun-toting to political rallies. That Gingrey understands the potential violence is revealed in his own words when he laughs and says he has nothing to fear because he gets standing ovations at his town hall meetings:

I've already had five town hall meetings. I have six more planned. I don't plan on wearing a bullet proof vest. In fact, I usually get standing ovations when I come into these meetings, so I have no fear.

So my question for Phil Gingrey is this: If you didn't get standing ovations at your town hall meetings and if you were, instead, faced with people shouting angrily at you, would you then fear for your life if you saw those same folks toting guns?

Rachel Maddow addressed the issue of gun-toting at political events in an with interview Joseph Petro, who served for twenty-three years as a special agent and who authored the book, Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service. She asked Petro how the Secret Service deals with ordinary citizens, not police or security officers, who show up armed at a political rally where the president is present. She referred to an AP report about how a dozen such armed folk showed up at a recent event with President Barack Obama. "Well, that's not something the Secret Service often encounters," Petro responded. He went on to say the following:

But I think this is less a Secret Service issue and more an issue for all of us. [What] you said a few days ago that the possibility of American politics turning to violence or to terrorism at the fringes is not all that theoretical. I would argue that the vitriolic political rhetoric we're hearing, some from seemingly responsible people, is stimulating a lot of these foolish stunts, and they're not very helpful. And I think they're dangerous, actually. And I think they're dangerous for two reasons. One is: it's hard enough to protect the president. The Secret Service and the local police are being distracted from that duty, to keep our president safe. And I think the second reason may be even more serious, is the fact that it could incite or encourage one of those individuals at the fringe that you mention from doing something really dangerous and perhaps violent against the president or some other person .... Maybe the politicians should look at lowering some of the rhetoric to try to create a more positive atmosphere. (Joseph Petro, Rachel Maddow Show)

Angry mobs, inflammatory political atmosphere, and gun-toting citizens....even at open events with President Barack Obama. If anything happens to my president, people like Phil Gingrey will have a lot to answer for.

See Also:

David Sirota, "What it Means to Wear a Gun in Public," posted in Salon, 22 Aug 2009.

Read Bob Herbert

"most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn."

--T.A. Franks, "Why is Bob Herbert Boring?: The Perils of Punditry for the Powerless," Washington Monthly, October 2007

I had read T.A. Franks' column some time ago but was reminded of it this morning in one of Matthew Yglesias's posts. Franks writes about how right New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been on many issues over the years--yet Herbert is not an influential columnist such as David Brooks or Maureen Dowd. I quit reading Maureen Dowd a while ago; her columns are smarmy, and her nasty descriptions of public people can go viral so quickly in mainstream media that her characterizations stick to those people like tar, absorbing all light and directing attention away from the real issues. I only occasionally read Brooks' column, but see him every Friday evening on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer voicing support of Republican ideas and actions in his soft and reasonable way (ideas which he is finding kind of difficult to defend these days; he has actually criticized recent Republican shenanigans). But I don't read Bob Herbert much, either, only when a blogger links to his column. Well, I'm going to make a real effort to read Bob's column and encourage others to do so, too. These days, with people screaming at town halls so that no civil discussion to take place, we need calm, reasonable voices that clearly identify the problems in this country and in the world and that encourage us to work to fix those problems.

Another reason I'm going to read Herbert's column is that his column of August 7th clearly articulates thoughts I have rolled over and over in my mind about George Sodini and his attack on those women in that aerobics class--but I hadn't gotten around to putting those thoughts into any coherent order. In "Women at Risk,", Herbert writes that

[w]e have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

I, too, had been thinking of how so many of these public mass killings have been perpetuated by men who direct their disappointments in themselves and in their society toward women. As Herbert points out, if the victims of these men had been chosen because of their ethnicity, there would be a huge uproar; but because they are women, there is an immediate shocked response, and then a return to life as usual. No one seems to be trying to get to the root of misogyny in this country in order to weed it out of us. (Of course, there is disturbing evidence of racism and an unhinged attitude toward Barak Obama in Sodini's online journal, as well.)

Oh, and Herbert received 310 comments on that column, so someone is reading him.