What a Snob!

My friend Stuart forward this link to an article in the Borowitz Report.  In Andy Borowitz's (satirical) view, Obama is running a grave risk in his correct use of the English language--a distasteful shock to many American voters.  As he himself noted about his rival at the recent White House Correspondents dinner, "What a snob!"

ACT UP

I hear that it's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of ACT UP this week, and a time to take note of the effectiveness of civil disobedience at times when government refuses to respond to the clear needs of the citizens it is supposed to serve.

The year was 1987.  Ronald Reagan was still President of the United States.  Americans were dying in their thousands--mostly, but not exclusively gay men.  AIDS was by this time indisputably an epidemic.  And still the President had not seen fit to mention the word AIDS in public.  And still the government had refused to address the issue.

ACT UP changed all that.  Those who participated in its unruly actions--mostly, but not exclusively gay men--refused to abide by the "rules" of conventional behavior.  They rejected the proper channels, which had already proven unresponsive to this national health crisis.  They chose, instead, to "act up."  For this they were vilified by some and ridiculed by others--in part for their sexuality, in part for their bad behavior.  But they persisted.

It is their persistence that has resulted in medical advances that make it possible to control the disease.  It is a human disgrace that, though controllable, the disease continues to ravage victims in many parts of the world.  It is allowed to do so because governments cannot, or choose not to find the money to control it, and because corporations look first to their bottom line and only secondarily to the health of those who buy their products.

Still, ACT UP provides us with an important lesson: that keeping quiet and following the rules of civilized behavior is not necessarily the best way to get results, especially when the cause, though just, is not a popular one.  Sometimes it becomes necessary to scream and yell and, yes, behave badly, if that is what it takes.

I fear that, in America today, the majority of us have been cowed into submissive behavior.  We have allowed ourselves to be herded like sheep by monied interests into acting--and voting--as they want us to. The "Occupy Wall Street" folks had the right idea.  They, too, were swiftly vilified and ridiculed by those whose will they sought to oppose.  My hope is that their message was heard, and that the results run deeper than they appear to at the surface.  May that message surface once again, and powerfully, in this fall's elections.

It's time for a return to sanity, even if that involves some bad behavior.

SECOND TERM SOCKS

I'm looking forward to reading Jann Wenner's interview with Barack Obama in the new issue of Rolling Stone, due out tomorrow--but apparently available online today.  I watched the CBS This Morning interview with Wenner, in which the founder and long-time editor and publisher of the magazine was long on praise for the President's strength, tenacity, his focused attention and intention, his "sure-footedness," and his sense of humor.  It seems that Obama had admired Wenner's bold striped socks on the occasion of an earlier interview, and that Wenner had subsequently sent a couple of pairs as a gift.  For this interview, he brought a similar gift, and the President had no trouble in predicting what was in the package.  On opening it, he gave the socks an appraising look, admiring their bold design--but deciding that, after all, these were "second term socks."

I hope to see him wear them.  I like the warm and genuinely human quality he manages to convey in his contact with people of all kinds--including those who bitterly oppose his policies.  I can't claim to know what's behind what we see of him in the media, but what we see is firm as well as likable, strong as well as compassionate.  I hope--and believe--that this is the real man, and not some creation of the political hacks.  In his interview, Wenner apparently broached the subject of the President's challenger in the fall, Mitt Romney, and Obama expressed the opinion that it would be difficult for the presumptive Republican candidate to back off from the extreme right-wing positions he had embraced in his battle for the nomination.

Have we seen "the real Romney" in the course of the primaries?  I have less faith in the awkwardly shape-shifting images he has presented of himself than I do in the image I have assembled of Obama, in the new several years we have been watching him in diverse circumstances.  There seems to be a solid core, a consistency to the President's character, even in the most adverse of situations.  There are multiple Mitt Romney's, as I see it; there is only one Obama.  No matter what color the socks.

SANITY, PLEASE

My thoughts went back last night, as I watched a recorded episode of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, to a moment of glory for The Buddha Diaries when we were headlined in an article by Janet Malcolm in The New York Review of Books.  Ellie and I had traveled to Washington DC to join Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive."  "On October 31," the article began,

Peter Clothier, a seventy-four-year-old author and retired professor, posted an entry on his blog, called The Buddha Diaries, about the wonderful day he and his wife Ellie had spent at the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30 at the Mall in Washington, D.C., between noon and 3 PM. “We stood there trapped for a good two hours, surrounded by people who, like us, had showed up. We saw nothing, heard nothing of what was happening on the stage. It was great!” Clothier writes. He and Ellie had risen at 5:30 AM to catch a 6:45 Amtrak train from New York, which should have gotten them to the rally in time to not see and not hear for the full three hours. But they were detained by a horrendous and dangerous crush of people in the Washington Metro.

"The Metro system was utterly unprepared for the invasion,” Clothier writes. The station was “a mob scene.” “People were waiting in lines ten deep to board” and train after train went by “so full that not one single person could squeeze aboard.” However, with the exception of one angry man, who was “quelled by fellow passengers,” everyone kept his frustration in check and no one behaved badly.

It was a great occasion, but one that did not, finally, live up to its promise.  A quarter of a million people (the media hugely underestimated attendance) showed up that day at the end of October, 2010, drawn to Washington by a common distress at the dysfunction of our political system and the insanity of so much of the then-current political rhetoric.  We were "fed up, and we weren't going to take it any more."  Many of us--most, I suspect--had mistaken Stewart's and Colbert's strictly satirical intent; we were true, perhaps naive believers that our protest might just possibly begin to bring about some change.

Sadly, it didn't happen.  It didn't happen then, and it has not happened since.  In fact, I suspect that most of those who attended that rally would agree that things have only deteriorated into something worse.  The sanity we hoped for, a return to the rule of reason in our political house, remains the dream of the few who gather at the center--well, maybe, for the sake of reason, a little to the left!--to achieve a tempering of rhetoric and a more effective, more compassionate approach to government.  The chasm between left and right has grown wider and the exchanges across that chasm still more bitter and intransigent.  My own view, of course, is that it is principally the doing of a relatively small group of extremists on the right, whose fanaticism has served only to alienate Americans from each other and from the government that serves them--or should serve them better.

That moment was a missed opportunity.  The two principals, I'd argue, failed to recognize the meaning of the response to their appeal; they kept insisting that it was all a joke--albeit a serious one--and refusing to take it seriously.  Their audience had come expecting to be counted, and heard.  They were neither counted accurately, nor heard.  The insanity continues.  Most people I know throw up their hands in horror or despair when they listen to the news, and many chose simply not to listen.  We face the prospect of six more months of bitterness and lies, six more months of deceptive commercials and speeches that ignore the truth in favor of crowd-pleasing bumper-sticker cliches.  We long for the quiet voice of reasonable debate, but cheer when the message has to be pitched loud and angry by our besieged President.  When the other side is reduced to hurling personal insults and to predicting, literally and frequently, the end of America if Obama is reelected, the President must match the angry volume of their voices with his own, even as he seeks to present a rational alternative to the proven failure of their tired ideas.

But anyway, metta to all of them.  Goodwill, I say, to all our leaders and political aspirants. As Than Geoff says, tirelessly, the world would be a better place if we all found peace and happiness in our lives.

DINNER TABLE TALK

Talking to friends last night about the presidential campaign over dinner.  I noticed strange looks from the neighboring table as we spoke.  This is Orange County, California, a Republican stronghold.  At our table, we had no trouble agreeing that Obama has done a good job, given his inheritance of thirty years of failed trickle-down economics.  What a burden to have to carry!  We also agreed on incredulity that, for all their anti-tax and reduce-the-deficit banner waving, so many Americans seem prepared to vote against both their own economic interest and, eventually, reasonable expectations of debt reduction.  The Rand budget's proposals, as I understand them, fail on both counts.

Please let me know what you think.

GUNS

Please note my entry about guns at my other site, The Buddha Diaries.

WHO SIDES WITH WOMEN?

The eagerness with which Republicans jumped on a careless remark by a minor "Democratic strategist" last week should not be allowed to deflect attention from their broadly anti-feminine platform. It is patently absurd to put forward the argument, on the basis of this remark, that Democrats fail to honor motherhood or the real, daily grind of work demanded of mothers who choose to stay at home and take care of the family.

The rhetoric of the "war on women" is, to my mind, almost equally absurd. What is clear, however, is that Republican positions and policies are antithetical to the interests of women in a number of important ways. Along with opposition to legislation requiring equal pay for equal work, the attack on funding for Planned Parenthood, on a woman's right to make choices for her own well-being and that of her family, and on programs that provide for women's health care are the only most obvious examples. As damaging, though, are the budgetary constraints on the provision of child care for mothers who choose to work, whether or not of their own volition and, for the poor, of food stamps and other safety net programs that affect women more immediately than their male counterparts.

We thought to have settled many of these matters fifty years ago. The reactionary rhetoric and policies of today's Republicans will ring hollow, if not threatening, to the ears of every thoughtful woman voter, and the feminist movement has helped to create generations of thoughtful, well-educated women who can stand up for themselves. Since his early action in signing equal pay legislation, the president has time and again established his credentials as a supporter of gender equality and the basic human rights that women have worked hard to earn in this country, and continue to struggle for in many parts of the world. Much more than his Republican challenger, he has earned the support of independent women voters, and I trust that his respect for them will be returned in November.

A FAREWELL TO SANTORUM...

... and a hello, once more, to the politics of division, rage, and hatred. (Cross posted to The Buddha Diaries.)

Well, I'm going to say it... metta to him, but I'm happy not to have to be listening to his right-wings mantras any more. Santorum spoke to the true believers of the far right, and his views on social issues were evidently catnip to extremists in the Christian world, whether evangelical or Catholic. I wish him well, particularly in his touching devotion to his infirm little daughter... but I'm glad to see him gone from the presidential race. He promises to continue the fight, so we can safely assume that this is not the end of his brand of radicalism, but we won't be hearing it quite so loudly as before. It now remains for Newt Gingrich to keep the far right's banner waving--and for the beleaguered Mitt Romney to attempt to back out of the corner of mean-spirited conservatism in which the rightists have managed to entrap him.

In the meantime, our President maintains a voice that sounds--to this listener, at least--like that of sweet reason. He'll need to be prepared for an onslaught of the kind that Romney and his surrogates have used--with murderous efficiency, be it said--against his Republican opponents. Backed by vast resources of unrestricted money, these people will flood the airwaves and the television screens with lies and propaganda in the desperate attempt to protect their interests against those of the vast majority of Americans. They will use every swift-boat tactic they can imagine to attract uncritical minds to their cause. They will not be ashamed to stoop to the appeal to irrational prejudice, ignorance, even hatred. We know that there is literally nothing they will not do in order to have their way.

I have always believed that Obama has an excellent sense of timing. He is remarkably cool under pressure. An agile political fighter, he has the skill of the martial arts expert to use the weight and power of the opponent to his advantage. He will need those assets in the coming months, against the onslaught fueled by the Republican obsession with his removal from the White House. And he will need the consistent backing those of us who find his vision and policies more palatable than those of his opponents.

In the meantime, between now and the Republican convention, may we hear a little less of the sulphorously hot air coming from the far reaches of the right? Please...

DINNER TABLE POLITICS

So there we were, eight at the table, talking politics. It was one of four round tables set up for a celebration of the Passover seder, where talk often turns to politics. On this occasion I refrained from joining in, in part because I never find the right words in such a circumstance—I think better on the keyboard than on my feet—and in part because it would have seemed futile. Such discussions rarely lead to a change of opinion. So I kept quiet. But I have been thinking about that discussion ever since.

Good left-leaning people all—some further to the left than others—our group was indulging in the familiar luxury of damning the president with faint praise. The focus was particularly on the economy, and particularly upon his choice of advisors to deal with the dire situation he had inherited from the disaster of the Bush years, the Goldman Sachs gang. The argument has been repeated so often that it is by now an accepted truth. Or perhaps a cliché. The president erred terribly in appointing men who had, in their recently previous lives, been a prominent part of the culture that created the problem. In so doing, he allied himself with the corrupt elite that had brought us to the brink of disaster and poisoned the system for everyone except the elite themselves, the obscenely wealthy and the profiteers.

It’s an emotionally appealing argument. It satisfies that inner sense of distrust, indignation, anger and disempowerment—feelings that I absolutely share. But then I think to myself, who better to understand and address the problem than those who helped create it? And I think of the old adage, “the proof of the pudding”… It doesn’t matter much who the cooks in the kitchen are, what matters is the result. And while we may gripe a good deal about the speed of the recovery, there seems to be little doubt now that it is taking place. A British economist on Sixty Minutes last night, pretty much as an aside as she compared the situation here to the one in Europe, used a (to me) surprising word like “spectacular” to describe the American recovery. Even the columnist Paul Krugman, a powerful advocate for bolder steps than Obama was able to make, acknowledges the fact of the improving situation—though he never fails to add that it could have been faster and more robust.

Okay, I agree with Krugman. I wish the steps taken from the earliest days of the Obama administration had been bolder, more decisive. But politics is famously the art of the possible, and I’m in no position to know what was then possible to achieve, and what sheer pragmatism might have dictated. By the same token, I agree most heartily with those who wished for a single-payer system, Medicare for all, and who were disappointed that the “affordable health care” measure did not go much further than it does. But then I consider how fierce the opposition was, and how virulent the animosity—not merely on the part of very far right-wing Republicans, but on the part of a significant number of Americans who were persuaded, rightly or wrongly, by the propaganda from the right. I would personally have wished for the president to hold out for the principle, but am in admittedly no position to judge whether that position would have scuttled the whole deal. After a century of failure and frustration, we finally managed to arrive at the beginnings of a health care system for all. It seems to me counter-productive, now, as we face the presidential election in November, to make light of that achievement, or to pronounce it a failure.

I spoke of the luxury of “damning with faint praise.” It’s what we Democrats, in our righteousness, do best. We have done it to too many of our leaders, who fail to live up to our exacting standards and our idealistic expectations. Like all luxuries, it comes with a steep price tag—in this case, potentially, the loss of the White House in November to a Republican contender. For all that he has failed to do, or perhaps done wrongly, Obama remains consistent in the articulation of his vision of a more just, egalitarian America, a country that honors and supports its creative entrepreneurs and its technological visionaries; a country committed to the education of its young and the protection of its most vulnerable; a country tolerant of the religious views and protective of the individual rights of all its citizens. Mitt Romney—if he indeed is the choice of Republicans—is equally consistent in his devotion to the interests of the wealthiest among us and a narrowly conservative, if not repressive view of the social issues that affect us all.

In the face of this, and of the virulence of the hatred directed at the president personally, faint praise will not get Obama re-elected in the Fall. As Ellie rightly pointed out at our dinner table, even a hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-him attitude contributes only to a thoughtless dissemination of the poison in the already too swollen ranks of the thoughtless in this country. Those of us who believe in the vision of this President must be willing to work, and with enthusiasm, for his re-election; or to surrender to the forces of those we believe to be dangerously misguided.

NOT SO GRAND

I was reading a headline this morning using the acronym GOP for the Republican Party. And I thought to myself, what's so grand about the Grand Old Party any more? It seems to me that it's a Petty Od Party, a POP, with small ideas and mean-minded policies for the vast majority of Americans. If there's anything grand in what they have been putting forward as ideas in their primaries and, more recently, their budget, it's a grand life-style for the already very rich. For the rest of us, not so much.

It happened that I also watched a documentary last night about the building of the Panama Canal. There was a grand idea, if ever there was one, and it came about because it became the grand vision of Teddy Roosevelt--a grand old Republican, if ever there was one. The empire building, the assumption of American exceptionalism and American superiority may be questionable, in the light of history--just as European colonialism. But the idea was certainly a grand one, as was the achievement, still one of the greatest engineering feats in human history.

I do not side with those who would deny funds to our space program, and I am greatly saddened by its currently much reduced ambitions. I think we need grand ideas, not only to expand our horizons and keep us moving forward into an exciting future; but, in the case of the space program, to stimulate the inventiveness and creativity so essential to our economic health. Thinking small brings small results, and it seems to me that we have been thinking smaller and smaller as a nation in the recent past; we talk too much about what we can't do, out of fear---or budgetary restraint--and too little about what we might do if we could envision it. We have become so risk-averse, so accustomed to the knee-jerk "no" that we have forgotten how to say "yes!"

All very well to talk about the individual effort, about privatization. The truth is that the resources available only to the collective power of government are sufficient to support a truly grand idea, a truly grand vision of the future. That government today is more and more reluctant to put its weight behind the big ideas does not bode well for the future of this country as a major presence on the world stage. We are likely, it seems to me, to go the way of past empires, into the trash bin of history.

I have caught glimpses of great ideas from our current President, for example in calling for support for research and experimentation with alternative energy sources. Which is one more good reason to let him loose in a second term, with less to lose and much more to gain. It's my belief that he envisions greatness, but that his vision is hampered by the picayune--and by the practical contingencies of administration. Let's give him a chance to achieve the greatness of his promise.

SUPREME DISCONTENT

I confess to ignorance about the law, but I do have an ounce or two of common sense and it seems to me that common sense would not be out of place in the legal world. This said, I noted with some bemusement the US Supreme Court's 5 - 4 decision that it's right and proper for police and jail authorities to strip search even those brought in for the slightest offense--and even when those offenders prove to have been wrongly apprehended. This was the case before the court: a man brought in for an unpaid fine that had actually been paid long before. Instead of the apology he was due, he was rewarded with a humiliating strip search--on two separate occasions--and kept in jail for six days. The Supreme Court justices, in their wisdom, ruled that such searches are legal no matter how trivial the reason for the arrest.

Like many of my fellow liberals, I have been dismayed by many of the Supreme Court's actions in the past. From my point of view, in the only most egregious example, the Bush v. Gore decision gave us a president who led us down a path not only into a disastrous and unnecessary war but also into fiscal disaster by the end of his term. And let's not even talk about Citizens United. I am dreading the announcement of their decision on the health care law. I can't escape the judgment that the five conservative members are guided by political rather than legal considerations. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her rightly devasating New York Times column yesterday: "[The Court] has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes."

It's ironic that these same people and those who supported their appointment were precisely those who fulminated against an "activist" judiciary.

The court reflects this country's increasingly partisan divisions and the rejection of what seems to me no more than common sense in favor of impassioned prejudice. Unelected and seated as they are, for lifetime terms, the justices owe it to the country to limit themselves to the consideration of, precisely, questions of justice, and keep their noses out of policy and politics.