NYC: no place on earth so governed by paradox. Every cliché holds true and falls bankrupt; it is the best of all possible worlds, and certainly also the worst. It sprints at the future but is hopelessly mired in the most antiquated thinking west of Rome. It is sleek and modern and clean; it is run-down, ruggedly beat up, beautiful only when the lights are out and no one's home. Beautiful: it can be beautiful. Unexpectedly so, because who counts on beauty in a place so large and loud and hulking. There is wealth here truly beyond an ordinary man's imagining. And there is poverty as grim and hopeless as any on earth. It is a thrilling place of coincidence and calamity and sex and surprise — and, yes, also a dullish place of relentless numbing routine, the soulkilling grind of day-in and day-out. It cherishes its routines. It also cherishes its eccentrics, which can seem, on some days, everyone, all the time: not a single normal step in all the millions, everyone a weirdo to his own idiosyncratic degree.
Why should its people be any different? They are not. They're crass, rude, insolent and unfeeling. They are soulless, money-grubbing, worshippers of the deal. Size matters here; your money is your life. They are cocky beyond all justification. They are more bark than bite, they are in fact the bark that disguises the bite's mediocrity — and yet. They work miracles. They get things done, enormous things, things others wouldn't dare to dream. They are restless. They are arrogant, but not complacent. They stay out late at night because they are afraid, afraid, afraid there is someone somewhere, even everyone everywhere, getting more of life than they are, making more of it, and if they could only keep their eyes open until the right moment it would all be theirs forever. They are bold and brash and they take what they want. They pride themselves on takvng what they want — it's a religion with them, a thing they practice at home in front of mirrors. But they want you to take what you want too. They don't mind getting in line, though they have appearances to keep up and so must pretend they do. It's all a game to them, this thing they are, this thing they are always becoming. They are always becoming. They're on the move. Work hard, play hard, fuck the rules. What are the rules? We make the rules.
And they can be kind. They can be gentle and humble and sweet. They are kids from Queens, sons and daughters and moms and pops who know and remember what that means. They can love you. You will not believe it but they can love you. They are just guys with jobs, they are girls who want to have fun, they are boys who want to make time with pretty girls, or pretty boys. They want to fall in love like anyone else. They are a woman pushing her baby. They are a man reading his paper. They drink their coffee in the mornings, watch their televisions at night. They go to sleep decent hours; they have to get up early, catch the subway, go to work.
You come here to be somebody. You also come here to be nobody. The nobodies and the somebodies stand next to one another, neither acknowledging the other, for reasons that are worlds apart but still relative. The myth is all around you and you can hate it but you can't ignore it: what this place is, what it stands for. The famous come and go; so do those no one cares about, or remembers. Possibility is an endless river. Not everyone, though, will get their chance to swim. The knowledge of this is maddening. It is a taunt, a threat, a jibe that punctures your field of vision in every walk down every street. And at the same time there is the joy of being in a place where apologies are almost never required. Whatever your neurosis, your obsession, your weird little habit, you can feel free here to indulge it — just so long as it doesn't require touching (though even this: there are people who wait to hug you — you; anyone; for free — in Washington Square Park, any given weekday). Can't stand walking slow? Walk as fast as you can. Can't stand walking fast? Go at a snail's pace. And no, you needn't bother getting over to one side; people will find a way around. Don't like sitting in the third seat from the left? Get up and move. The truth is that no one will notice, much less reproach you. There is a refreshing capitulation to reality here. The city's favorite saying may well be "It is what it is." You'll hear this ten, twenty times a day. It means exactly what it says, which is a lot. It means we cannot live in a land of wish. It means we live in the world, and the world is real, and reality must be dealt with, congenial or not. The truth may be ugly, but it is the truth. It cannot be escaped.
And there's beauty in that.
July 30, 2005
June 11, 2005
Ensurance
A Thanksgiving story for you, as we verge on July. While visiting a friend's house for a group cook-a-thon last November 25, I sliced my finger. It was the index finger of my left hand. The offending instrument was a serrated bread knife in outstanding condition, long and mean. Not uncommon: get a group together, open wine, start cutting; eventually blood will be spilled. In this case the blood was copious, as was the attendant pain. Nonetheless, I wasn't overly concerned. But when the usual home remedies — thorough washing, direct pressure — failed to mitigate either pain or bleeding, and after a quick uncomfortable look at the wound, we decided to drive to a local ER.
This wasn't a decision I labored over. At the time I was covered by a more-than-adequate insurance policy. Deductibles were low. Because it was a COBRA plan, I'd been paying full premiums myself for nearly six months, and they were substantial, and I had yet to use the policy for so much as an aspirin. What was all the expense for if not peace of mind — the knowledge that if and when I did need medical attention, I could easily get it?
The hospital wasn't far from my friend's house in Brooklyn. (It's even closer — 2 blocks — to my own. At the time I viewed this as a pleasant discovery.) We arrived in early evening, around the traditional Thanksgiving dinner hour, and the ER was thus empty. A TV blared in the lounge. A man sprawled over an armchair in a state of restless unconsciousness, ignored by the skeleton crew. I was taken in by the triage nurse, who asked a few clipped questions before hustling me to an exam room.
Here is your first clue: these days, the first thing that happens when you're hustled to an exam room in emergency medicine is that you are visited by the insurance fairy. In my case the insurance fairy was a woman in navy scrubs pushing a loaded cart. Loaded: with computers, I mean, and other unidentified filing and machinery. Not mechanisms of health care in the traditional sense — you need them, yes, but they won't do a damn thing for you by themselves — these are the tools by which the insurance fairy plies her trade, which is verification of coverage. She is spectacularly thorough. I spent no less than twenty minutes going over every possible personal and demographic detail while she patiently, doggedly typed into the top of the cart. There were questions I wouldn't've been asked by a banker (I'd recently applied for a mortgage; I knew). There were questions I was sure my attorney would've advised against. I answered them all. It wasn't that I feared the insurance fairy, exactly — I had insurance, after all. I'd whipped out the card and thrust it at her like van Helsing with his crucifix. But the finger continued to bleed, and to hurt.
And here it's worth noting that, during the insurance fairy's interrogation, no actual medical care was being dispensed. If all you've done is slice a finger, that's not such a big deal. But what if that's not all you've done? What happens if half your head's caved in? I'm sure there's an answer to this, and I'm sure I don't want to ever need to know it. But the fact that the question even occurs should tell you something about just how sick we've become.
I was given a small cup of betadine and told to soak the finger in it. The attending or resident or whatever — the truth is she didn't really say, and I didn't really ask — took a look at the wound. She advised more soaking. A few minutes later she looked at the wound again. This time she told me I could have stitches, or I could try the glue. I'd heard about the glue. I'd heard, for example, that the glue was more or less the same thing as superglue — that it had been developed during the Korean war, or maybe the Vietnam war, for treatment of battlefield injuries. Whatever. It sounded less traumatic than stitches. Let's do the glue, I said; and we did. She glued me together. They sent us home.
That's the uneventful part of the story.
Several weeks later, I recieved a notice from my insurance carrier. The claim — a bill for slightly more than $200 — had been denied, and I would be held responsible. This was, to my way of thinking, given all the checks I'd written, an outrage; and, outraged, I took the statement to the company through which I'd subscribed, and for which I still did freelance work. My understanding, I told the HR director there, was that emergency room visits were fully covered. My understanding was that I shouldn't be paying a thing.
I don't know what I expected; another bureacratic fobbing off, I guess — a reading of the policy fine print in which it was stipulated that yes, emergency visits were covered, EXCEPT, followed by a description of the exact circumstances under which I'd gone. Instead the HR director agreed with me, emphatically. Yes, yes, she said, seeming more outraged still. Absolutely, fully, yes. Phone calls were made. Wheels were set in motion. I'd responded to bureaucracy with bureaucracy, and it seemed, so far, to have worked.
Several days later we got an answer from the carrier. The problem, they said, was that the bill had come from the doctor, not from the hospital. The doctor was not a member of their provider network; the hospital was. Therefore they'd refused to pay.
We — the HR director and myself, now in a Vulcan mindmeld of entitlement — pointed out that, (1), I had entered the hospital emergency room, not the doctor's office, with the intent of (2) seeing whomever happened to be on duty, not of seeing this particular physician or any other. We further pointed out that, (3), the policy provides coverage of out-of-network physicians anyway, just at a higher copay level, so under no circumstances should there have been a complete denial.
They said they'd look into it.
Around this time I got a bill myself, and it was indeed from the doctor. (Who wasn't a doctor, for what it's worth, but an NP — not that under the circumstances it really matters.) I took it in to the HR director. Yes, yes, everyone said. Now we've got it. It's the hospital's fault. Because we haven't yet received a bill from them, we can't verify it as a legitimate emergency room visit; thus we can't pay. We'll just have to wait for the hospital to issue their bill. Then the doctor's bill will be legitimate, and all will fall into place.
It's yet another sign of cultural illness and decay that this made, in some warped, bureaucratic, utterly logicless way, a kind of sense. But it did. And so we sat back to wait.
Weeks passed. Having set the various corporate chains in motion, I assumed the engine would eventually reach speed. Surely the hospital wanted to get paid, and so surely they'd send a bill. But I am also a cynical type, and I began, as such, to wonder several things. Was it possible the doctors were engaged in some kind of side-billing scam, for example? Hoping, I mean, that I would simply pay the denied claim at face value, thus sparing them the insurance company's negotiation? Or had the hospital, for similar reasons, worked out some kind of weird subcontractor relationship with the physicians, leasing facilities rather than employing them outright, to diffuse responsibility and costs? Just what new twist in the already byzantine dance of American healthcare was this?
The insurance rep, by his own account — which seemed genuine — made multiple attempts to reach the hospital with requests for their bill. For weeks, neither calls nor emails were returned. Finally he got through, and reported that the bill had been sent; the claim would be resubmitted; and he had marked it to be paid. A week or two after this I received another statement from the insurance company; this time, the claim, it reported, had been paid in full. This notice was dated May 6, 2005 — not quite six months after the inury itself, and the superglue that fixed it.
All's well that ends well, yes? And so I thought. Yet just this week, two more pieces of mail on the subject of my hacked finger (which has healed, but uglily; and the nerves are askew to this day). The first was a letter from an attorney, demanding payment for the doctor's bill that had been denied so long ago. The attorney's letter was dated May 29, a full three weeks after all contention had ceased and the check had, presumably, been sent. I replied with a copy of the insurance statement. This might or might not take care of it. It won't surprise me if there are more letters to be exchanged, more representatives whose opinions must be sought, more threats to trade before everyone agrees to call it done.
But the last was worst. There was yet a third Explanation of Benefits statement from the insurance company; in this one, I was informed I'd have to pay a $50 deductible. More shocking, though, was everything else on the statement — all the stuff I wasn't having to pay for because the insurance company was. There were four line items, ranging in associated cost from $60 to $400. The total bill was $897.00. All line items were marked with the hospital's name and "Specialty Room." That's it; no variation, just "Specialty Room," four times, and next to each an amount. This meant that, with the previous bill, the total charge for my visit was more than $1,100.00.
This was stupefying. It had to be, I figured, a mistake, or — worse? better? just different? — a scam. I'd been there thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if you included the perfunctory triage interview and the insurance fairy's visit. The skill level involved in every step was minimal, by medical standards or any others: a student could have treated me in exactly the same way, in the same amount of time. A gym teacher could have, almost. The most sophisticated equipment deploying during the entire episode was that on the insurance fairy's cart. There were no x-rays, no ultrasounds, no CAT scans or MRIs. There was scarcely any palpitation. She took a couple of long glances and shifted some skin around — with her fingers. Supplies-wise, we used 1 plastic cup; about 1/4 cup of betadine; four or five drops of the glue; some gauze, and assorted dressings and bandages. Dinner at Otto uses greater amounts of more expensive stuff.
I called the insurance company immediately. They'd been snowed, I figured. I would do them a favor. I would let them know what had really gone down. I would do my part to rein in the spiraling costs of US healthcare.
You know what happened next. It has probably happened to you. Statistically speaking, it must have happened to some of you. The woman on the other end of the line — my ally, I'd expected — received my indignant whistleblowing as though I'd come over the line in Martian.
Do you realize this was a trivial thing? I asked, my incredulousness running over.
Oh, yes, she replied.
Do you realize the total amount they're charging for this trivial thing?
Oh, yes. They do that all the time.
This is normal?
Oh yes.
For something like this — to cost so much?
Oh yes.
They bill you for the doctor, she said, and they bill you for the room, and they bill you for the equipment and the supplies. They bill you for everything. It adds up.
This is, I said, the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life.
Is there anything else I can do for you today? she said.
There was not.
It's funny. Except that it's not funny. It's what passes for your healthcare system. It has severed all ties to reason; even to call it a "system" implies logic, and that's nearly impossible to uncover in such a mess. It costs more than any comparable system on the face of the earth and its efficiencies dwindle every day. How could they not, when an episode like this is not an exception but the norm? Forget about where the money's going; let's assume it's going several places. Let's assume there's not just one set of pockets being lined by all that cash but a number of them, in several professions and industries. The drug companies. The equipment manufacturers. The administrators of the corporations that own the hospitals, and the administrators of the corporations that insure us. Does it make any difference? We currently have forty million uninsured in this nation, many of them children; the number does not decrease every year, ladies and gentlemen, it increases. Soon we'll have fifty million, and after that sixty million, seventy, a hundred. That's one in three. Things are getting worse. And no one is doing anything about it. It is, to borrow a phrase from the Republicans who adore this so-called system, and who defend it nearly with their lives, and certainly with their pocketbooks (which it has, of course, considerably fattened), a moral outrage.
The nature of that outrage is a subject for other, deeper, angrier and even more confusing meditations. In the meantime, if you happen to slice your finger, consider the following regimen: wash it in cold running water ($0). Apply direct pressure with some sterile gauze ($3.99), and keep the hand elevated above the level of your heart to help ease the flow of blood ($0 — and yes, it's quite possible this is an old wives' tale. Your guess is as good as mine). Once the bleeding has abated, rinse it with some hydrogen peroxide ($0.99) and clean the nearby surfaces with rubbing alcohol (also $0.99). Attach the separate ends with a butterfly bandage ($4.99), or, if you're really feeling the need, with an over-the-counter version of the medical glue, which you'll find these days right next to the bandaids at your local pharmacy ($9.99). Wrap the whole business in more sterile gauze (from the same package as before, so $0), and/or put some appropriately sized bandaids around it, tightly but not so tightly you cut off circulation. Change dressings every day, twice a day if you need to, and avoid getting it wet for a week or two (wrap a plastic bag — $2.29 — around your hand if it helps, and seal it with a not-too-tight rubber band). Of course I'm not a doctor or an NP, or any other kind of licensed medical practitioner, so I can't charge you for this list; I also can't guarantee it will work. You'll have to attempt at your own risk. But then, there'd be no guarantees if you went to the hospital and they told you pretty much the same thing. And the bill in that case would be approximately $1025.00 more.
This wasn't a decision I labored over. At the time I was covered by a more-than-adequate insurance policy. Deductibles were low. Because it was a COBRA plan, I'd been paying full premiums myself for nearly six months, and they were substantial, and I had yet to use the policy for so much as an aspirin. What was all the expense for if not peace of mind — the knowledge that if and when I did need medical attention, I could easily get it?
The hospital wasn't far from my friend's house in Brooklyn. (It's even closer — 2 blocks — to my own. At the time I viewed this as a pleasant discovery.) We arrived in early evening, around the traditional Thanksgiving dinner hour, and the ER was thus empty. A TV blared in the lounge. A man sprawled over an armchair in a state of restless unconsciousness, ignored by the skeleton crew. I was taken in by the triage nurse, who asked a few clipped questions before hustling me to an exam room.
Here is your first clue: these days, the first thing that happens when you're hustled to an exam room in emergency medicine is that you are visited by the insurance fairy. In my case the insurance fairy was a woman in navy scrubs pushing a loaded cart. Loaded: with computers, I mean, and other unidentified filing and machinery. Not mechanisms of health care in the traditional sense — you need them, yes, but they won't do a damn thing for you by themselves — these are the tools by which the insurance fairy plies her trade, which is verification of coverage. She is spectacularly thorough. I spent no less than twenty minutes going over every possible personal and demographic detail while she patiently, doggedly typed into the top of the cart. There were questions I wouldn't've been asked by a banker (I'd recently applied for a mortgage; I knew). There were questions I was sure my attorney would've advised against. I answered them all. It wasn't that I feared the insurance fairy, exactly — I had insurance, after all. I'd whipped out the card and thrust it at her like van Helsing with his crucifix. But the finger continued to bleed, and to hurt.
And here it's worth noting that, during the insurance fairy's interrogation, no actual medical care was being dispensed. If all you've done is slice a finger, that's not such a big deal. But what if that's not all you've done? What happens if half your head's caved in? I'm sure there's an answer to this, and I'm sure I don't want to ever need to know it. But the fact that the question even occurs should tell you something about just how sick we've become.
I was given a small cup of betadine and told to soak the finger in it. The attending or resident or whatever — the truth is she didn't really say, and I didn't really ask — took a look at the wound. She advised more soaking. A few minutes later she looked at the wound again. This time she told me I could have stitches, or I could try the glue. I'd heard about the glue. I'd heard, for example, that the glue was more or less the same thing as superglue — that it had been developed during the Korean war, or maybe the Vietnam war, for treatment of battlefield injuries. Whatever. It sounded less traumatic than stitches. Let's do the glue, I said; and we did. She glued me together. They sent us home.
That's the uneventful part of the story.
Several weeks later, I recieved a notice from my insurance carrier. The claim — a bill for slightly more than $200 — had been denied, and I would be held responsible. This was, to my way of thinking, given all the checks I'd written, an outrage; and, outraged, I took the statement to the company through which I'd subscribed, and for which I still did freelance work. My understanding, I told the HR director there, was that emergency room visits were fully covered. My understanding was that I shouldn't be paying a thing.
I don't know what I expected; another bureacratic fobbing off, I guess — a reading of the policy fine print in which it was stipulated that yes, emergency visits were covered, EXCEPT, followed by a description of the exact circumstances under which I'd gone. Instead the HR director agreed with me, emphatically. Yes, yes, she said, seeming more outraged still. Absolutely, fully, yes. Phone calls were made. Wheels were set in motion. I'd responded to bureaucracy with bureaucracy, and it seemed, so far, to have worked.
Several days later we got an answer from the carrier. The problem, they said, was that the bill had come from the doctor, not from the hospital. The doctor was not a member of their provider network; the hospital was. Therefore they'd refused to pay.
We — the HR director and myself, now in a Vulcan mindmeld of entitlement — pointed out that, (1), I had entered the hospital emergency room, not the doctor's office, with the intent of (2) seeing whomever happened to be on duty, not of seeing this particular physician or any other. We further pointed out that, (3), the policy provides coverage of out-of-network physicians anyway, just at a higher copay level, so under no circumstances should there have been a complete denial.
They said they'd look into it.
Around this time I got a bill myself, and it was indeed from the doctor. (Who wasn't a doctor, for what it's worth, but an NP — not that under the circumstances it really matters.) I took it in to the HR director. Yes, yes, everyone said. Now we've got it. It's the hospital's fault. Because we haven't yet received a bill from them, we can't verify it as a legitimate emergency room visit; thus we can't pay. We'll just have to wait for the hospital to issue their bill. Then the doctor's bill will be legitimate, and all will fall into place.
It's yet another sign of cultural illness and decay that this made, in some warped, bureaucratic, utterly logicless way, a kind of sense. But it did. And so we sat back to wait.
Weeks passed. Having set the various corporate chains in motion, I assumed the engine would eventually reach speed. Surely the hospital wanted to get paid, and so surely they'd send a bill. But I am also a cynical type, and I began, as such, to wonder several things. Was it possible the doctors were engaged in some kind of side-billing scam, for example? Hoping, I mean, that I would simply pay the denied claim at face value, thus sparing them the insurance company's negotiation? Or had the hospital, for similar reasons, worked out some kind of weird subcontractor relationship with the physicians, leasing facilities rather than employing them outright, to diffuse responsibility and costs? Just what new twist in the already byzantine dance of American healthcare was this?
The insurance rep, by his own account — which seemed genuine — made multiple attempts to reach the hospital with requests for their bill. For weeks, neither calls nor emails were returned. Finally he got through, and reported that the bill had been sent; the claim would be resubmitted; and he had marked it to be paid. A week or two after this I received another statement from the insurance company; this time, the claim, it reported, had been paid in full. This notice was dated May 6, 2005 — not quite six months after the inury itself, and the superglue that fixed it.
All's well that ends well, yes? And so I thought. Yet just this week, two more pieces of mail on the subject of my hacked finger (which has healed, but uglily; and the nerves are askew to this day). The first was a letter from an attorney, demanding payment for the doctor's bill that had been denied so long ago. The attorney's letter was dated May 29, a full three weeks after all contention had ceased and the check had, presumably, been sent. I replied with a copy of the insurance statement. This might or might not take care of it. It won't surprise me if there are more letters to be exchanged, more representatives whose opinions must be sought, more threats to trade before everyone agrees to call it done.
But the last was worst. There was yet a third Explanation of Benefits statement from the insurance company; in this one, I was informed I'd have to pay a $50 deductible. More shocking, though, was everything else on the statement — all the stuff I wasn't having to pay for because the insurance company was. There were four line items, ranging in associated cost from $60 to $400. The total bill was $897.00. All line items were marked with the hospital's name and "Specialty Room." That's it; no variation, just "Specialty Room," four times, and next to each an amount. This meant that, with the previous bill, the total charge for my visit was more than $1,100.00.
This was stupefying. It had to be, I figured, a mistake, or — worse? better? just different? — a scam. I'd been there thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if you included the perfunctory triage interview and the insurance fairy's visit. The skill level involved in every step was minimal, by medical standards or any others: a student could have treated me in exactly the same way, in the same amount of time. A gym teacher could have, almost. The most sophisticated equipment deploying during the entire episode was that on the insurance fairy's cart. There were no x-rays, no ultrasounds, no CAT scans or MRIs. There was scarcely any palpitation. She took a couple of long glances and shifted some skin around — with her fingers. Supplies-wise, we used 1 plastic cup; about 1/4 cup of betadine; four or five drops of the glue; some gauze, and assorted dressings and bandages. Dinner at Otto uses greater amounts of more expensive stuff.
I called the insurance company immediately. They'd been snowed, I figured. I would do them a favor. I would let them know what had really gone down. I would do my part to rein in the spiraling costs of US healthcare.
You know what happened next. It has probably happened to you. Statistically speaking, it must have happened to some of you. The woman on the other end of the line — my ally, I'd expected — received my indignant whistleblowing as though I'd come over the line in Martian.
Do you realize this was a trivial thing? I asked, my incredulousness running over.
Oh, yes, she replied.
Do you realize the total amount they're charging for this trivial thing?
Oh, yes. They do that all the time.
This is normal?
Oh yes.
For something like this — to cost so much?
Oh yes.
They bill you for the doctor, she said, and they bill you for the room, and they bill you for the equipment and the supplies. They bill you for everything. It adds up.
This is, I said, the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life.
Is there anything else I can do for you today? she said.
There was not.
It's funny. Except that it's not funny. It's what passes for your healthcare system. It has severed all ties to reason; even to call it a "system" implies logic, and that's nearly impossible to uncover in such a mess. It costs more than any comparable system on the face of the earth and its efficiencies dwindle every day. How could they not, when an episode like this is not an exception but the norm? Forget about where the money's going; let's assume it's going several places. Let's assume there's not just one set of pockets being lined by all that cash but a number of them, in several professions and industries. The drug companies. The equipment manufacturers. The administrators of the corporations that own the hospitals, and the administrators of the corporations that insure us. Does it make any difference? We currently have forty million uninsured in this nation, many of them children; the number does not decrease every year, ladies and gentlemen, it increases. Soon we'll have fifty million, and after that sixty million, seventy, a hundred. That's one in three. Things are getting worse. And no one is doing anything about it. It is, to borrow a phrase from the Republicans who adore this so-called system, and who defend it nearly with their lives, and certainly with their pocketbooks (which it has, of course, considerably fattened), a moral outrage.
The nature of that outrage is a subject for other, deeper, angrier and even more confusing meditations. In the meantime, if you happen to slice your finger, consider the following regimen: wash it in cold running water ($0). Apply direct pressure with some sterile gauze ($3.99), and keep the hand elevated above the level of your heart to help ease the flow of blood ($0 — and yes, it's quite possible this is an old wives' tale. Your guess is as good as mine). Once the bleeding has abated, rinse it with some hydrogen peroxide ($0.99) and clean the nearby surfaces with rubbing alcohol (also $0.99). Attach the separate ends with a butterfly bandage ($4.99), or, if you're really feeling the need, with an over-the-counter version of the medical glue, which you'll find these days right next to the bandaids at your local pharmacy ($9.99). Wrap the whole business in more sterile gauze (from the same package as before, so $0), and/or put some appropriately sized bandaids around it, tightly but not so tightly you cut off circulation. Change dressings every day, twice a day if you need to, and avoid getting it wet for a week or two (wrap a plastic bag — $2.29 — around your hand if it helps, and seal it with a not-too-tight rubber band). Of course I'm not a doctor or an NP, or any other kind of licensed medical practitioner, so I can't charge you for this list; I also can't guarantee it will work. You'll have to attempt at your own risk. But then, there'd be no guarantees if you went to the hospital and they told you pretty much the same thing. And the bill in that case would be approximately $1025.00 more.
June 09, 2005
Getting It
If you are, like me, one of those people who've assumed that the spasms of fervor rolling out of Christian corners since last November are nothing more than the latest media darling, the socio-political equivalent of Britney's navel or J-Lo's ass, you may want to reconsider. Yes, these folks have certainly been getting coverage disproportionate to their numbers, to their representativeness in American culture, and to the sway they lent our last election. Yes, radically conservative religious sects have been a fixture of American culture since colonial days, and though they've sunk beneath the surface of popular consciousness for long stretches they've also had a habit of coming back up for noisy air. You have to keep in mind that less than a hundred years ago it was illegal to sell or purchase alcohol in this nation; it wasn't atheists who hacked the taps. We got over that, of course. (We were even bequeathed a mainstay of American cultural mythology for our trouble: the gangster, a massive thumb in the eye of pious assurance and a figure that would, you'd think, give pause to anyone who presumes the darker impulses of human nature can be legislated away.)
Still, there are a couple of differences in the current uproar. The first is the movement's ambition. The second is its connections. For insight into both I'd point anyone interested — and you should all be interested, especially those of you in blue America, literally or figuratively — to the May 2005 issue of Harper's. A double feature therein tries to grapple with two of the most significant faces of the fundamentalist Christian political movement, and it makes for some creepy reading.
Why creepy? Maybe because of all the rhetorical antecedents from 1950s America, under McCarthyism, and 1930s Germany, during the late adolescence of National Socialism. Maybe because there's not even any real attempt to conceal the desire for a theocratic — well, revolution: that's really the only word. And maybe most of all because the rhetoric coming from Colorado Springs and Orange County — the settings of the two reports — is not just militant, it's militant in a Taliban kind of way as opposed to, say, a Malcolm X kind of way. These guys are shaping up to be some kind of domestic Hezbollah. They talk about "training camps"; they talk about "bombs" and "explosions"; they pass out maps of New York City with "targets" marked. Toward the end of the first piece, the author runs into a local fellow. The author explains he's from New York. The local fellow's response is to say, simply, "Ka-boom"; and frankly by this time it's not a surprise. It's more like a culmination.
Interesting to note that both authors — Jeff Sharlet in the first piece, about Colorado Springs and the New Life Church; Chris Hedges in the second, about the National Religious Broadcasters conference in Orange County, CA — fall into different but similar forms of breakdown by the ends of their pieces. I imagine they, too, expected something more innocuous, more akin to a purportedly disenfranchised group demanding its place at the national table, claiming a corner of public dialogue and calling for an end to past neglect. This is, after all, the common public face of the fundamentalist movement. We've been put down, picked on, shut out; and we're not going to take it any more — making America safe for Christians and all that, as if anyone had ever contended it shouldn't be. From the inside these movements look like quite something else. And how could they not? The claims of persecution have always been specious. Christians are the most powerful coalition of organized interest groups in the United States. They have been since Jamestown. The only way to see them as persecuted is to understand persecution as the denial of their desire — in their eyes, their right — to hold dominion over every square inch of earth and everything that moves, breathes, or thinks within it. Which is precisely what Sharlet and Hedges, in their research, found the groups gearing up for. If they were Islmamists, we'd be calling their plans a "jihad." We'd be calling them terrorists-in-the-making, or at least extremists, militants, hardline factions. But they're not Islamists, so I guess we just call it going to Sunday worship. Nonetheless, the intensity of their fervor, the anger and hatred and intolerance for difference that fuel it, seem to take both writers by surprise — and to drive them, frankly, in the end, a little mad. Pay attenion: we may all be driven a little mad before this is over.
Every time I start trying to write about these people, I find I don't want to do it. Something in me resists — feels it shouldn't be necessary, really; even to broach the subject is to lend it a credibility, a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. We are rational folk. It is 2005. Creationism? Outlawing the teaching of evolution? To a certain extent, it's a discussion that offends the intellect by its very existence.
They are right about me, you see. I want to dismiss them. More than that: I do dismiss them. I don't "get it"; I am utterly baffled by "it" in fact — it; them; the whole fanatical program. It is, in some sense, difficult for me to take such a worldview seriously on an intellectual level. I don't feel this way about all religious folk, only about the literalists: the ones who assign every word its face value, every recounting the merit of eyewitness news, every precept the crack of a military command. Those whose approach to religion involves the sublime — who view it as mystery, something utterly beyond them, inexplicable and unknowable but potent nonetheless, and moving, and present: these I respect. These I even understand, though I don't share. I take love as a simplistic analogy: it defies logic, yet it's essential. Others look into the darkness and call it God; I look in and call it Stuff I Don't Know.
Fundamentalisms take a different tack altogether. To these people, there are no mysteries. There are no metaphors. Theirs is a dry world of proscription and detail in which ecstasy, such as it is, comes not from encounters with the sublime but from the competitive, condescending joys of being in the club. Because the Bible is God's word, and because God's word is literal and complete, there is nothing to interpret; nothing's been left out or unsaid. There are no meanings to decrypt or contemplate, nothing to wonder at or about. It is what it is. It means what it says. Either God pronounced it or he didn't; and if he didn't there's no reason for us to take it up — except to convert it, silence it, exile it or have it killed.
Such a construction of the universe is binary, of course, even Manichean. The divisions are dull and predictable, all flowing from the base duality of God and Satan. Even this is simple: if a thing is not God, it must be Satan. One is right, therefore, or one is wrong; one is just or one is evil; one is saved or damned.
Like all binary systems, one side is only knowable with reference to the other. If you, like me, find yourself in a state of perpetual wonder at how fundamentalists can muster the time and energy to care what you do with yourself all day (and all night), here's your answer: you're the other side of their duality's coin. Robbed of the fertile terrain of an inner life — what's the point, when God's done all the thinking for you? — their gaze must turn outward. To be real to themselves, then, they must look at you.
How else to explain their claims that they're threatened by what you do? Threatened. Take the marriage example: that the marriages of straight men and women are tormented, even "damaged" (and yes, this is the language), by same-sex unions. They're serious about this, and they don't mean that gay couples come to their houses waving weapons and making demands. What they mean is that they understand themselves by what they are not, and that when the boundaries between what they are and what they are not get blurred — say, when gay couples are allowed to call themselves "married" under the law — then their understanding of what they themselves are gets eroded. Such an understanding of self comes from without, not from within; thus it really is fragile, and it really is dependent on who you are and what you do. Wittingly or not, you can become an affliction to people you've never met.
Most of us tend to view this as their problem. We don't care what they do, after all, regardless of how disagreeable we might find it — as long as they keep it amongst themselves and don't get imperial about it. As long as they don't make their problem, that is, our problem. But perhaps the point is that they've now decided to do just that. And this, too, when you consider it, is natural enough: we couldn't have expected a solution to come from within.
Here, too, may lie an explanation for why fundamentalists so often feel hurt and outraged by those who don't share their worldview. It is not easy to be a person of faith, especially a person of this kind of faith. It must be exhausting, in fact. It requires constant policing of the self, constant policing of others. It requires absolute devotion to the evangelical hierarchy, which is for all intents and purposes feudal: God as king; church leaders as vassals; everyone else as more or less serfs, doing the grunt work and paying the dues, avoiding question of the higher-ups. Even if they didn't believe those outside the fundamentalist community were against them as a matter of course, your everyday fundamentalist would pretty much have to build up a rich store of resentment toward those who exempt themselves from the hierarchy. If they must suffer, so must we all; and as in any kind of hazing, the most vigorous are always the ones who got it worst themselves. What does President Bush say about the Islamists — that "they hate is for our freedom"? Indeed.
But perhaps there's more subtle psychological interplay as well. Faith of such a severe sort is not only materially difficult to sustain, it is imaginatively difficult. It requires a repression of human impulses toward curiosity and inquisition. It requires the abandonment of logic. It requires the suspension, often, of sense. So as a nonbeliever, or even a different believer, you are a catalyst for cognitive dissonance. You challenge the fundamental presumption by your presence alone. You are a trial, and trials — even if a routine part of the life of faith — require energy to overcome. No one likes to face constant ontological threat. If there is only one truth, and if that truth is perfect, comprehensive, total, then on one level the person of severe faith must ask himself how anyone could stand outside it. I suppose there are ready answers for this — God gave man free will; a long history of infidels; tests of faith, etc. But these explanations don't really suffice. They make the almighty seem a petty trickster, playing games with humans as a cat might with mice. Such free will is an illusion, after all: to use it in pursuit of any program aside from God's is to be damned, and that's hardly a viable option. Free will thus understood looks more like a trick: choose correctly, all is well; choose poorly, you die. Is this really, to put it in earthly terms, how one wants to think of the Supreme Being spending His almighty time? Has He really nothing better going on? Is His idea of conducting the universe truly as petty as an adolescent boy's? And if it's not, why doesn't he just call a halt to the circus and employ His almighty authority in a giant shove to push everyone into line?
It's always tempting to wade into the waters of theological debate. But in this case they're beside the point. The debate we should be having now is not about theology but about political life, civic life, social existence and national cohabitation. The debate we should be having is about why not one politician in America would dare pronounce himself a skeptic, let alone an atheist, in the public space — not one. We should be talking about climates of fear and retribution, about the rhetoric of militant assault. We should be talking about whether we're willing, as a culture, to allow tolerance and pluralism — the concepts, the practices — to be debased, discouraged, even criminalized. We should be talking about whether the sadness of September 11 arose from the fact that New York, a representation of America, itself a representation of all these things — tolerance; pluralism; mutual respect in the public sphere; acceptance of difference, and a determination to coexist within it; the primacy of the will of the people (which is the meaning of democracy, after all); and the rule of impartial laws that enforce the above but do no more — if sadness arose from the fact that it was these things that were attacked, or from the fact that it was Islamist Arabs who did the attacking. Because it's looking more and more like it wasn't only radical Islamists on the streets of Palestine and Pakistan who might have been cheering the towers' fall.
Still, there are a couple of differences in the current uproar. The first is the movement's ambition. The second is its connections. For insight into both I'd point anyone interested — and you should all be interested, especially those of you in blue America, literally or figuratively — to the May 2005 issue of Harper's. A double feature therein tries to grapple with two of the most significant faces of the fundamentalist Christian political movement, and it makes for some creepy reading.
Why creepy? Maybe because of all the rhetorical antecedents from 1950s America, under McCarthyism, and 1930s Germany, during the late adolescence of National Socialism. Maybe because there's not even any real attempt to conceal the desire for a theocratic — well, revolution: that's really the only word. And maybe most of all because the rhetoric coming from Colorado Springs and Orange County — the settings of the two reports — is not just militant, it's militant in a Taliban kind of way as opposed to, say, a Malcolm X kind of way. These guys are shaping up to be some kind of domestic Hezbollah. They talk about "training camps"; they talk about "bombs" and "explosions"; they pass out maps of New York City with "targets" marked. Toward the end of the first piece, the author runs into a local fellow. The author explains he's from New York. The local fellow's response is to say, simply, "Ka-boom"; and frankly by this time it's not a surprise. It's more like a culmination.
Interesting to note that both authors — Jeff Sharlet in the first piece, about Colorado Springs and the New Life Church; Chris Hedges in the second, about the National Religious Broadcasters conference in Orange County, CA — fall into different but similar forms of breakdown by the ends of their pieces. I imagine they, too, expected something more innocuous, more akin to a purportedly disenfranchised group demanding its place at the national table, claiming a corner of public dialogue and calling for an end to past neglect. This is, after all, the common public face of the fundamentalist movement. We've been put down, picked on, shut out; and we're not going to take it any more — making America safe for Christians and all that, as if anyone had ever contended it shouldn't be. From the inside these movements look like quite something else. And how could they not? The claims of persecution have always been specious. Christians are the most powerful coalition of organized interest groups in the United States. They have been since Jamestown. The only way to see them as persecuted is to understand persecution as the denial of their desire — in their eyes, their right — to hold dominion over every square inch of earth and everything that moves, breathes, or thinks within it. Which is precisely what Sharlet and Hedges, in their research, found the groups gearing up for. If they were Islmamists, we'd be calling their plans a "jihad." We'd be calling them terrorists-in-the-making, or at least extremists, militants, hardline factions. But they're not Islamists, so I guess we just call it going to Sunday worship. Nonetheless, the intensity of their fervor, the anger and hatred and intolerance for difference that fuel it, seem to take both writers by surprise — and to drive them, frankly, in the end, a little mad. Pay attenion: we may all be driven a little mad before this is over.
Every time I start trying to write about these people, I find I don't want to do it. Something in me resists — feels it shouldn't be necessary, really; even to broach the subject is to lend it a credibility, a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. We are rational folk. It is 2005. Creationism? Outlawing the teaching of evolution? To a certain extent, it's a discussion that offends the intellect by its very existence.
They are right about me, you see. I want to dismiss them. More than that: I do dismiss them. I don't "get it"; I am utterly baffled by "it" in fact — it; them; the whole fanatical program. It is, in some sense, difficult for me to take such a worldview seriously on an intellectual level. I don't feel this way about all religious folk, only about the literalists: the ones who assign every word its face value, every recounting the merit of eyewitness news, every precept the crack of a military command. Those whose approach to religion involves the sublime — who view it as mystery, something utterly beyond them, inexplicable and unknowable but potent nonetheless, and moving, and present: these I respect. These I even understand, though I don't share. I take love as a simplistic analogy: it defies logic, yet it's essential. Others look into the darkness and call it God; I look in and call it Stuff I Don't Know.
Fundamentalisms take a different tack altogether. To these people, there are no mysteries. There are no metaphors. Theirs is a dry world of proscription and detail in which ecstasy, such as it is, comes not from encounters with the sublime but from the competitive, condescending joys of being in the club. Because the Bible is God's word, and because God's word is literal and complete, there is nothing to interpret; nothing's been left out or unsaid. There are no meanings to decrypt or contemplate, nothing to wonder at or about. It is what it is. It means what it says. Either God pronounced it or he didn't; and if he didn't there's no reason for us to take it up — except to convert it, silence it, exile it or have it killed.
Such a construction of the universe is binary, of course, even Manichean. The divisions are dull and predictable, all flowing from the base duality of God and Satan. Even this is simple: if a thing is not God, it must be Satan. One is right, therefore, or one is wrong; one is just or one is evil; one is saved or damned.
Like all binary systems, one side is only knowable with reference to the other. If you, like me, find yourself in a state of perpetual wonder at how fundamentalists can muster the time and energy to care what you do with yourself all day (and all night), here's your answer: you're the other side of their duality's coin. Robbed of the fertile terrain of an inner life — what's the point, when God's done all the thinking for you? — their gaze must turn outward. To be real to themselves, then, they must look at you.
How else to explain their claims that they're threatened by what you do? Threatened. Take the marriage example: that the marriages of straight men and women are tormented, even "damaged" (and yes, this is the language), by same-sex unions. They're serious about this, and they don't mean that gay couples come to their houses waving weapons and making demands. What they mean is that they understand themselves by what they are not, and that when the boundaries between what they are and what they are not get blurred — say, when gay couples are allowed to call themselves "married" under the law — then their understanding of what they themselves are gets eroded. Such an understanding of self comes from without, not from within; thus it really is fragile, and it really is dependent on who you are and what you do. Wittingly or not, you can become an affliction to people you've never met.
Most of us tend to view this as their problem. We don't care what they do, after all, regardless of how disagreeable we might find it — as long as they keep it amongst themselves and don't get imperial about it. As long as they don't make their problem, that is, our problem. But perhaps the point is that they've now decided to do just that. And this, too, when you consider it, is natural enough: we couldn't have expected a solution to come from within.
Here, too, may lie an explanation for why fundamentalists so often feel hurt and outraged by those who don't share their worldview. It is not easy to be a person of faith, especially a person of this kind of faith. It must be exhausting, in fact. It requires constant policing of the self, constant policing of others. It requires absolute devotion to the evangelical hierarchy, which is for all intents and purposes feudal: God as king; church leaders as vassals; everyone else as more or less serfs, doing the grunt work and paying the dues, avoiding question of the higher-ups. Even if they didn't believe those outside the fundamentalist community were against them as a matter of course, your everyday fundamentalist would pretty much have to build up a rich store of resentment toward those who exempt themselves from the hierarchy. If they must suffer, so must we all; and as in any kind of hazing, the most vigorous are always the ones who got it worst themselves. What does President Bush say about the Islamists — that "they hate is for our freedom"? Indeed.
But perhaps there's more subtle psychological interplay as well. Faith of such a severe sort is not only materially difficult to sustain, it is imaginatively difficult. It requires a repression of human impulses toward curiosity and inquisition. It requires the abandonment of logic. It requires the suspension, often, of sense. So as a nonbeliever, or even a different believer, you are a catalyst for cognitive dissonance. You challenge the fundamental presumption by your presence alone. You are a trial, and trials — even if a routine part of the life of faith — require energy to overcome. No one likes to face constant ontological threat. If there is only one truth, and if that truth is perfect, comprehensive, total, then on one level the person of severe faith must ask himself how anyone could stand outside it. I suppose there are ready answers for this — God gave man free will; a long history of infidels; tests of faith, etc. But these explanations don't really suffice. They make the almighty seem a petty trickster, playing games with humans as a cat might with mice. Such free will is an illusion, after all: to use it in pursuit of any program aside from God's is to be damned, and that's hardly a viable option. Free will thus understood looks more like a trick: choose correctly, all is well; choose poorly, you die. Is this really, to put it in earthly terms, how one wants to think of the Supreme Being spending His almighty time? Has He really nothing better going on? Is His idea of conducting the universe truly as petty as an adolescent boy's? And if it's not, why doesn't he just call a halt to the circus and employ His almighty authority in a giant shove to push everyone into line?
It's always tempting to wade into the waters of theological debate. But in this case they're beside the point. The debate we should be having now is not about theology but about political life, civic life, social existence and national cohabitation. The debate we should be having is about why not one politician in America would dare pronounce himself a skeptic, let alone an atheist, in the public space — not one. We should be talking about climates of fear and retribution, about the rhetoric of militant assault. We should be talking about whether we're willing, as a culture, to allow tolerance and pluralism — the concepts, the practices — to be debased, discouraged, even criminalized. We should be talking about whether the sadness of September 11 arose from the fact that New York, a representation of America, itself a representation of all these things — tolerance; pluralism; mutual respect in the public sphere; acceptance of difference, and a determination to coexist within it; the primacy of the will of the people (which is the meaning of democracy, after all); and the rule of impartial laws that enforce the above but do no more — if sadness arose from the fact that it was these things that were attacked, or from the fact that it was Islamist Arabs who did the attacking. Because it's looking more and more like it wasn't only radical Islamists on the streets of Palestine and Pakistan who might have been cheering the towers' fall.
December 04, 2004
Value
For those still following, Louis Menand's article in the December 6 New Yorker debunks the myth of the "moral values" tsunami we've been told washed over us on November 2. No less an authority than Jan Van Lohuizen, one of the Bush campaign's own pollsters, is quoted as having declared "'I've seen no data that, in the composition of the electorate, the religious voter was more heavily represented.'" The percentage of voters who attended church regularly declined in both Ohio and Florida, even though the overall numbers of voters increased.
This means two things. First, that blowsy pronouncements from leaders of the religious right are so much hot air; the floosies in our beloved national media can call a halt to their airborne sycophantics, because god-squadders are no more significant, statistically speaking, than they've ever been, wishful thinking and declaration notwithstanding.
Second, it means — as Menand points out — that Bush actually increased his support among non-church-goers since 2000. In other words, it's not just the lunatic fringe who put this team back in office. (And yes, the team is disintegrating; but that's for worse, not for better — we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.) A sizeable number of people who don't take orders from the voice in their toaster voted Bush/Cheney. In the end, this may well be worse news.
The puzzling over what this election has taught us may well continue until it's been buried under another kind of tsunami: that of history, which proceeds apace. There's far less puzzling over what it will give us in terms of policy. The latest alarm bell our press corps have decided to attend is that of the dollar's precipitous decline. It's not news, exactly; the dollar has been in a slide for about four years now. (Curious timing, that.) So I suppose what's waking everyone is that it's not turning around. Everyone, I guess, expected this to be a temporary thing, a minor adjustment to overvaluation — cyclical, as analysts are so fond of calling any unforeseen bump in the macroeconomic road. (If they're cyclical, of course, how could they also be unforeseen?) Americans, and the American press, so prone to the pathetic fallacy, no doubt figured that as soon as the national election angst was behind us — one way or another — everything else would fall into place.
But the operative principle in macroeconomics, as in all else, is inertia. Why would anything change, given that nothing has changed? With the Bush team back in place by virtue of — well, whatever it might have been — the fiscal policy of the US government remains what it was before the election. Which is to say, none at all. Or rather: no sane one. Spending on the Iraq occupation — we can finally call it that, can't we? we can dispense with the euphemisms? — continues to mount, faster even than the death toll, which has itself climbed by nearly 25% (to, by today's count, 1259) in just the last 10 weeks. The administration plans to move ahead with promised tax cuts, making old ones permanent and adding new ones under the banner of "simplification" (this is code, by the way, for requiring those with fewer resources to bear more of the national burden — a kind of rich-folks' liberation policy; and given the oppression under which the brave and steadfast American rich have been laboring, it couldn't come at a better time). There is no systemic spending-cuts plan yet, and one wonders what might be on it even if there were: the lion's share of our national budget goes to defense, and there's no hope of reducing that now. Perhaps the president could offer an "Okay, Wait: Leave Some Children Behind" revision to his first-term legislation, but since the original was underfunded it's hard to know what's left to throw out. Social security and medicare reform will take years to work out, years more to show economic fruit, assuming the seeds actually bear any; and in any event congress has shown zero political will — one might call it moral fiber, but what do I, living as I do in the satanic anarchist northeast, know about that — for pursuing reductions in lucrative porkbarrel expenditures.
What this augurs, of course, is further debt. If you've been reading your local paper during the past week, the mechanics have been spelled out for you, and I'll not repeat them. Suffice to say that the US government has been funding its day-to-day operations with credit. This is like paying your rent and your utilities with your MasterCard, and I'm not talking about the debit MasterCard. It's an extremely bad idea, with an extremely short shelf-life: temporary at its absolute best. Eventually, MasterCard has to get paid. The US government's MasterCard has been foreign investors — most significantly, foreign central banks; and most significantly among these, central banks in China, Japan, Russia and Europe. Because businesses in their nations have benefitted from their support of the dollar — a propped-up dollar allows American consumers to continue to afford their exports — these central banks have been willing to go along. But the math grows increasingly shaky, and worse still — again — there's no plan to revise it. The central banks are becoming nervous. All investment is, at bottom, a kind of bet; we're starting to look like a bad one.
The whole business is compounded by the fact that it's consumption that drives the US economy. The "recovery" of the last few years, such as it's been, rests on three things: spending on the war in Iraq; consumer spending; and real estate investment. All three are fueled by debt. It's an economic house of cards. As a nation, we rely on consumer spending — mostly from the middle class — for our economic progress. Since middle-class wages have been suffering the death-drip of a slow, steady decline, much of that spending comes not in cash but in credit. It also comes by sacrifice of savings, which in the US are lower than in any other advanced postindustrial nation — so low, in fact, as to be negligible. There is precious little fallback should the credit spigot run dry. The middle class has likewise driven the real-estate boom: low interest rates have allowed more of us to buy more expensive houses, which in turn has driven up housing prices, which has increased our net worth, which has allowed us to get more credit and thus buy even more expensive houses. Housing values may not be tied directly to interest rates, but there's certainly strong sympathy between the two. If interest rates were to suddenly and significantly rise, not one but two pillars of our current economy — consumer spending and real estate — would tremble at the very least. What would that mean?
We may soon find out. It's not hard to understand why Japan and the EU might look at the contemporary US and find its prospects wanting. We don't invest in our future; why should they? We don't save; we don't provide the vast majority of our population with a globally competitive education; we have no rational healthcare delivery system; our policies, foreign and domestic, shift on the increasingly passionate winds of neoadolescent fervors, religious and otherwise. It's not moral fiber we lack, it's vision; direction; a sense of what it means to cultivate a society over the long term. The world has long admired our freedom, our energy, our innovation. But our freedoms are increasingly trivial, reduced to t-shirt slogans and the competitive idiocies of cable TV; our energy looks more like fanaticism each day — or, on the other hand, mere overwork; and our hold on the innovation market has been slipping for fifteen years, if not longer. We're driving our economy and our culture headlong toward neofeudalism, and the last people on the face of the earth who seem recognize it is us.
It's not surprising, then, that Japan, China, Russia, even the EU might consider shifting their investments elsewhere — might buy Euros instead of dollars, for example. Might even apply the Euro as the new global currency standard, devaluing the dollar still more. The consequences for the US economy could be severe: credit would become dramatically more expensive, not just for government but for us all. The Fed would be forced to spike interest rates. We can't say for sure what the effect would be on consumer spending or real estate, but it's reasonable to expect that both would slow, if not come to a screeching halt. Recession is probably the best we could hope for.
Nothing is inevitable, of course. But the principles of inertia still apply: unless something changes, things are bound to stay the same. The Bush administration has said publicly that it supports a strong dollar, but that's just talk; it means little to the domestic audience, still less to the more crucial international one. A shift in policy is the only thing that matters, and there's no sign of that on the horizon.
Here's another cyclical thing: the decline of cultures. We may be learning more about that than we'd like to. But then again, 51% of our voting population put in the lesson request. Too bad it's all of us who'll be forced to attend.
This means two things. First, that blowsy pronouncements from leaders of the religious right are so much hot air; the floosies in our beloved national media can call a halt to their airborne sycophantics, because god-squadders are no more significant, statistically speaking, than they've ever been, wishful thinking and declaration notwithstanding.
Second, it means — as Menand points out — that Bush actually increased his support among non-church-goers since 2000. In other words, it's not just the lunatic fringe who put this team back in office. (And yes, the team is disintegrating; but that's for worse, not for better — we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.) A sizeable number of people who don't take orders from the voice in their toaster voted Bush/Cheney. In the end, this may well be worse news.
The puzzling over what this election has taught us may well continue until it's been buried under another kind of tsunami: that of history, which proceeds apace. There's far less puzzling over what it will give us in terms of policy. The latest alarm bell our press corps have decided to attend is that of the dollar's precipitous decline. It's not news, exactly; the dollar has been in a slide for about four years now. (Curious timing, that.) So I suppose what's waking everyone is that it's not turning around. Everyone, I guess, expected this to be a temporary thing, a minor adjustment to overvaluation — cyclical, as analysts are so fond of calling any unforeseen bump in the macroeconomic road. (If they're cyclical, of course, how could they also be unforeseen?) Americans, and the American press, so prone to the pathetic fallacy, no doubt figured that as soon as the national election angst was behind us — one way or another — everything else would fall into place.
But the operative principle in macroeconomics, as in all else, is inertia. Why would anything change, given that nothing has changed? With the Bush team back in place by virtue of — well, whatever it might have been — the fiscal policy of the US government remains what it was before the election. Which is to say, none at all. Or rather: no sane one. Spending on the Iraq occupation — we can finally call it that, can't we? we can dispense with the euphemisms? — continues to mount, faster even than the death toll, which has itself climbed by nearly 25% (to, by today's count, 1259) in just the last 10 weeks. The administration plans to move ahead with promised tax cuts, making old ones permanent and adding new ones under the banner of "simplification" (this is code, by the way, for requiring those with fewer resources to bear more of the national burden — a kind of rich-folks' liberation policy; and given the oppression under which the brave and steadfast American rich have been laboring, it couldn't come at a better time). There is no systemic spending-cuts plan yet, and one wonders what might be on it even if there were: the lion's share of our national budget goes to defense, and there's no hope of reducing that now. Perhaps the president could offer an "Okay, Wait: Leave Some Children Behind" revision to his first-term legislation, but since the original was underfunded it's hard to know what's left to throw out. Social security and medicare reform will take years to work out, years more to show economic fruit, assuming the seeds actually bear any; and in any event congress has shown zero political will — one might call it moral fiber, but what do I, living as I do in the satanic anarchist northeast, know about that — for pursuing reductions in lucrative porkbarrel expenditures.
What this augurs, of course, is further debt. If you've been reading your local paper during the past week, the mechanics have been spelled out for you, and I'll not repeat them. Suffice to say that the US government has been funding its day-to-day operations with credit. This is like paying your rent and your utilities with your MasterCard, and I'm not talking about the debit MasterCard. It's an extremely bad idea, with an extremely short shelf-life: temporary at its absolute best. Eventually, MasterCard has to get paid. The US government's MasterCard has been foreign investors — most significantly, foreign central banks; and most significantly among these, central banks in China, Japan, Russia and Europe. Because businesses in their nations have benefitted from their support of the dollar — a propped-up dollar allows American consumers to continue to afford their exports — these central banks have been willing to go along. But the math grows increasingly shaky, and worse still — again — there's no plan to revise it. The central banks are becoming nervous. All investment is, at bottom, a kind of bet; we're starting to look like a bad one.
The whole business is compounded by the fact that it's consumption that drives the US economy. The "recovery" of the last few years, such as it's been, rests on three things: spending on the war in Iraq; consumer spending; and real estate investment. All three are fueled by debt. It's an economic house of cards. As a nation, we rely on consumer spending — mostly from the middle class — for our economic progress. Since middle-class wages have been suffering the death-drip of a slow, steady decline, much of that spending comes not in cash but in credit. It also comes by sacrifice of savings, which in the US are lower than in any other advanced postindustrial nation — so low, in fact, as to be negligible. There is precious little fallback should the credit spigot run dry. The middle class has likewise driven the real-estate boom: low interest rates have allowed more of us to buy more expensive houses, which in turn has driven up housing prices, which has increased our net worth, which has allowed us to get more credit and thus buy even more expensive houses. Housing values may not be tied directly to interest rates, but there's certainly strong sympathy between the two. If interest rates were to suddenly and significantly rise, not one but two pillars of our current economy — consumer spending and real estate — would tremble at the very least. What would that mean?
We may soon find out. It's not hard to understand why Japan and the EU might look at the contemporary US and find its prospects wanting. We don't invest in our future; why should they? We don't save; we don't provide the vast majority of our population with a globally competitive education; we have no rational healthcare delivery system; our policies, foreign and domestic, shift on the increasingly passionate winds of neoadolescent fervors, religious and otherwise. It's not moral fiber we lack, it's vision; direction; a sense of what it means to cultivate a society over the long term. The world has long admired our freedom, our energy, our innovation. But our freedoms are increasingly trivial, reduced to t-shirt slogans and the competitive idiocies of cable TV; our energy looks more like fanaticism each day — or, on the other hand, mere overwork; and our hold on the innovation market has been slipping for fifteen years, if not longer. We're driving our economy and our culture headlong toward neofeudalism, and the last people on the face of the earth who seem recognize it is us.
It's not surprising, then, that Japan, China, Russia, even the EU might consider shifting their investments elsewhere — might buy Euros instead of dollars, for example. Might even apply the Euro as the new global currency standard, devaluing the dollar still more. The consequences for the US economy could be severe: credit would become dramatically more expensive, not just for government but for us all. The Fed would be forced to spike interest rates. We can't say for sure what the effect would be on consumer spending or real estate, but it's reasonable to expect that both would slow, if not come to a screeching halt. Recession is probably the best we could hope for.
Nothing is inevitable, of course. But the principles of inertia still apply: unless something changes, things are bound to stay the same. The Bush administration has said publicly that it supports a strong dollar, but that's just talk; it means little to the domestic audience, still less to the more crucial international one. A shift in policy is the only thing that matters, and there's no sign of that on the horizon.
Here's another cyclical thing: the decline of cultures. We may be learning more about that than we'd like to. But then again, 51% of our voting population put in the lesson request. Too bad it's all of us who'll be forced to attend.
November 19, 2004
Shame on who
I hate to be doing this. Really, I do. One of the major gripes I've always had with the American left — of which, philosophically, I consider myself a member — is its tendency toward self-flagellation. It can seem like (and maybe is) the pitiful legacy of voguish socialism: enormous energy spent correcting the ideological "errors" of one's allies, precious little on countering the enemy. However. I am forced (forced, I tell you) to revisit Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. I give you the following paragraph, from his column of November 17, 2004:
In its own small way, this is a stunning passage. And so by way of response I offer the following comment from a friend:
Kristof seems like a nice guy. An unbelievably nice guy — the kind who would, for instance, use personal funds to buy a teenage prostitute her freedom: downright saintly. But the latitude he's given both Bush and Bush supporters pushes "nice" to the territory of "chump." Anyone who witnessed Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission can't call her "honest" without having watched through some deeply rose-colored glasses. More to the point, there's something Pollyanna-ish about the question Kristof's posed here. Was there ever any doubt about the theme of a Bush second term?
Not among the evangelicals. They came out for the election, then they came out to strut — to let the rest of us know, in no uncertain terms, that they'd won the election for Bush (not necessarily true, but it's the stuff of myth now, so never mind), that they'd acquired sizeable IOUs in so doing, and that they fully intend to collect. The sanctimony has been thick.
The mistake Kristof makes — and he's not alone — is in thinking Bush was adopting a pose when he catered, during the campaign, to the right-wing evangelical base. This was not the pose. The pose was what he adopted to cater to moderates; "compassionate conservatism" — that was the pose. The first term, especially the first term post-9/11, revealed this pretty vividly. It's true that the Bush campaign trundled out the tired wheelbarrow of moderate promises for electioneering; and it's true that mainstream media, liberal and right-wing alike, dutifully assisted in sprucing up that wheelbarrow and making it roll. None of this changes the reality that was being disguised, and that should have been (and really, honestly, was) obvious to anyone paying attention.
This has been a revolutionary regime from its beginning. Note my friend's recollection of the punditry after the 2000 election: given the contentiousness of the process, conventional wisdom predicted moderation and centrism. It made sense if one assumed genuine intentions (a) to govern effectively, and (b) to build a national consensus. The actual intention was (c) to intensify and broaden the right-wing conversion experience of this nation. Appointments of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Card, Rice, and Ashcroft telegraphed this; nominations to the federal bench confirmed it. (And one man's obstructionism is another man's principled stand against — hate to say it — an activist judiciary.)
Powell and No Child Left Behind provided window-dressing through the first term, as did occasional fictive references to the middle class in discussions of tax cuts. All were well and amply deployed — to the point, at least in Powell's case, of depletion. The pretense to moderation returned when it served political expedience; it was received and disseminated with credulity by a press desperate to counter blatantly partisan accusations of partisanship; and then it was tossed aside. This continued right up until the day after this year's election, when Kerry conceded and Bush flashed his gilded tease of an olive branch. The next morning, it vanished for good. "We'll work with those who support our goals," Bush announced, telling the truth at last.
So he has. So he will. Perhaps Kristof — spun, like the rest of us, so relentlessly by this administration — thought he was being twirled across the dance floor one more time. No such luck.
I would suggest the following, to Kristof and the rest of us: no more second chances. No more benefits of the doubt. More than ever, these men are what they are. While you wonder about their "legacy," they're off, in the words of one of their own, "creating new realities." Which is to say they're not catering to the revolutionaries, they are the revolutionaries.
The only real question is this: in four years, just how bad can it get? It would seem we're about to find out.
The central question of President Bush's second term is this: Will he shaft his Christian-right supporters, since he doesn't need them any more, and try to secure his legacy with moderate policies that might unite the country? Or, with no re-election to worry about, will he pursue revolutionary changes on the right?
In its own small way, this is a stunning passage. And so by way of response I offer the following comment from a friend:
For whom, exactly, is this a question? Note the assumption inherent in “secure his legacy with moderate policies”: that moderate policies are in fact the stuff of securing one’s legacy. How much more evidence does Kristof need to be convinced that George W. Bush is the Christian right, and that he fervently, unironically (was there ever a politician with less of a sense of irony?) believes that his hard right policies are what God wants and the American people (present and future) need, bitter medicine or no? Kristof’s brand of thinking was forgivable back in 2000, when all the pundits announced, “With such a tenuous hold on the Presidency, given the electoral and popular vote, Bush will obviously have to lead an administration of great moderation (huff, chuff)... a sort of centrist ‘coalition government’ if you will (ahem, ahah)....” Positing the same sort of hoo-hah in 2004 falls into “Fool me once, uh... shame me twice, er... no... shame me once... fool on me...” territory.
Kristof seems like a nice guy. An unbelievably nice guy — the kind who would, for instance, use personal funds to buy a teenage prostitute her freedom: downright saintly. But the latitude he's given both Bush and Bush supporters pushes "nice" to the territory of "chump." Anyone who witnessed Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission can't call her "honest" without having watched through some deeply rose-colored glasses. More to the point, there's something Pollyanna-ish about the question Kristof's posed here. Was there ever any doubt about the theme of a Bush second term?
Not among the evangelicals. They came out for the election, then they came out to strut — to let the rest of us know, in no uncertain terms, that they'd won the election for Bush (not necessarily true, but it's the stuff of myth now, so never mind), that they'd acquired sizeable IOUs in so doing, and that they fully intend to collect. The sanctimony has been thick.
The mistake Kristof makes — and he's not alone — is in thinking Bush was adopting a pose when he catered, during the campaign, to the right-wing evangelical base. This was not the pose. The pose was what he adopted to cater to moderates; "compassionate conservatism" — that was the pose. The first term, especially the first term post-9/11, revealed this pretty vividly. It's true that the Bush campaign trundled out the tired wheelbarrow of moderate promises for electioneering; and it's true that mainstream media, liberal and right-wing alike, dutifully assisted in sprucing up that wheelbarrow and making it roll. None of this changes the reality that was being disguised, and that should have been (and really, honestly, was) obvious to anyone paying attention.
This has been a revolutionary regime from its beginning. Note my friend's recollection of the punditry after the 2000 election: given the contentiousness of the process, conventional wisdom predicted moderation and centrism. It made sense if one assumed genuine intentions (a) to govern effectively, and (b) to build a national consensus. The actual intention was (c) to intensify and broaden the right-wing conversion experience of this nation. Appointments of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Card, Rice, and Ashcroft telegraphed this; nominations to the federal bench confirmed it. (And one man's obstructionism is another man's principled stand against — hate to say it — an activist judiciary.)
Powell and No Child Left Behind provided window-dressing through the first term, as did occasional fictive references to the middle class in discussions of tax cuts. All were well and amply deployed — to the point, at least in Powell's case, of depletion. The pretense to moderation returned when it served political expedience; it was received and disseminated with credulity by a press desperate to counter blatantly partisan accusations of partisanship; and then it was tossed aside. This continued right up until the day after this year's election, when Kerry conceded and Bush flashed his gilded tease of an olive branch. The next morning, it vanished for good. "We'll work with those who support our goals," Bush announced, telling the truth at last.
So he has. So he will. Perhaps Kristof — spun, like the rest of us, so relentlessly by this administration — thought he was being twirled across the dance floor one more time. No such luck.
I would suggest the following, to Kristof and the rest of us: no more second chances. No more benefits of the doubt. More than ever, these men are what they are. While you wonder about their "legacy," they're off, in the words of one of their own, "creating new realities." Which is to say they're not catering to the revolutionaries, they are the revolutionaries.
The only real question is this: in four years, just how bad can it get? It would seem we're about to find out.
Common
A friend sent the following link for my perusal:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-28.htm
To which I respond: Rah.
Maybe I'm in the minority (even within the minority), but I'm finding sophomoric pep talks like these nearly as demoralizing as Condi Rice's appointment or Gonzales's nomination. They suggest nothing so much as that that the so-called loyal opposition will continue to have its head up its ass and naught but pieties up its sleeve.
Henceforth, to think of US politics as though it were just a matter of knocking on one more potentially pro-union door is to truly misunderstand the disastrous circumstances, economic and political, faced by this nation — and particularly by nonelites in this nation. It's also to underestimate the enthusiasm with which huge numbers of those nonelites are jogging up the gangplank of their own death ship. And finally, it's to overestimate — condescendingly, I suppose — the degree to which elites can, or should, or have been invited to, "save" those who aren't. All anyone of conscience can really do is keep telling the truth as ardently as possible. In the end, if the greater number of the populace continues to select disaster, then disaster is most probably what they'll get.
(And yes, I am aware there's an argument that most people don't get the truth but rather something very different. But I am not convinced. The little channel arrows on the remote go up as well as down. A wide variety of newspapers are available free of charge online, or at newsstands for about the price of your average can of soda. When people feel that two guys pledging troth to one another in a ceremony before family and friends is more of a "threat" to our cultural definition of "marriage" than is, say, "The Bachelor" or "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?" or the fourteen-thousandth People magazine cover on Jen & Ben/Jen & Marc/Jen & whoever-it-is-this-week, I'm not sure all the data in the world on economic change and job depletion, let alone unemployment among young men in the Arab-Islamic middle-east, is going to have any salient impact. Some people may just want to eat cake, especially when they can enjoy a simultaneous side dish of self-righteous resentment of those supposedly hedonistic northeastern elites against whom elections are to be used as a form of fantasy revenge.)
Besides, the strongest bulwark against creeping theocratic fascism from every direction ain't Canada, it's the EU, which has genuine economic clout to rival or exceed that of the US as well as growing political influence. Currently it's the strongest refuge of secular middle-class culture. Canada's just a short nation-building intervention away. Can't you just see it? Baptist sleeper cells creeping north from Oklahoma and Utah, disguised as disaffected Oregonians?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-28.htm
To which I respond: Rah.
Maybe I'm in the minority (even within the minority), but I'm finding sophomoric pep talks like these nearly as demoralizing as Condi Rice's appointment or Gonzales's nomination. They suggest nothing so much as that that the so-called loyal opposition will continue to have its head up its ass and naught but pieties up its sleeve.
Henceforth, to think of US politics as though it were just a matter of knocking on one more potentially pro-union door is to truly misunderstand the disastrous circumstances, economic and political, faced by this nation — and particularly by nonelites in this nation. It's also to underestimate the enthusiasm with which huge numbers of those nonelites are jogging up the gangplank of their own death ship. And finally, it's to overestimate — condescendingly, I suppose — the degree to which elites can, or should, or have been invited to, "save" those who aren't. All anyone of conscience can really do is keep telling the truth as ardently as possible. In the end, if the greater number of the populace continues to select disaster, then disaster is most probably what they'll get.
(And yes, I am aware there's an argument that most people don't get the truth but rather something very different. But I am not convinced. The little channel arrows on the remote go up as well as down. A wide variety of newspapers are available free of charge online, or at newsstands for about the price of your average can of soda. When people feel that two guys pledging troth to one another in a ceremony before family and friends is more of a "threat" to our cultural definition of "marriage" than is, say, "The Bachelor" or "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?" or the fourteen-thousandth People magazine cover on Jen & Ben/Jen & Marc/Jen & whoever-it-is-this-week, I'm not sure all the data in the world on economic change and job depletion, let alone unemployment among young men in the Arab-Islamic middle-east, is going to have any salient impact. Some people may just want to eat cake, especially when they can enjoy a simultaneous side dish of self-righteous resentment of those supposedly hedonistic northeastern elites against whom elections are to be used as a form of fantasy revenge.)
Besides, the strongest bulwark against creeping theocratic fascism from every direction ain't Canada, it's the EU, which has genuine economic clout to rival or exceed that of the US as well as growing political influence. Currently it's the strongest refuge of secular middle-class culture. Canada's just a short nation-building intervention away. Can't you just see it? Baptist sleeper cells creeping north from Oklahoma and Utah, disguised as disaffected Oregonians?
November 15, 2004
Stark Raving
Snippets from responses to Kristof's column last week regarding intimidation of the press:
Under normal circumstances I'd recommend ignoring this kind of frothing-at-the-mouth babble. I'd advocate a high road approach, write such comments off as the ravings of delusional O'Reilly/Limbaugh brownshirts or else raging psychopaths on a breather between serial homicides. (And speaking of the rabid right-wing's two favorite sons: when the moral values are scored, where do sexual harrassment — sorry; alleged sexual harrassment; have you read the complaint? it's available online at thesmokinggun.com; pay particular attention to the, uh, attention devoted to loofah — and self-confessed addiction to prescription narcotics, with attendant socializing with dealers and other upstanding citizens, come in? I just want to know when I'm trying to reserve a seat on the train to paradise: who sits where?)
But these days we can't ignore it. It's the party line. And they sound exactly like little Bolsheviks as they deliver it, reading (or typing) from the cards. Fox News good, New York Times bad. Christian rights assaulted by libertine freaks who won't let them tell everyone else what to do. Liberals trying to force America to have sex with goats!
Just for the record, livestock had no place on the Democratic platform. Unless you're reading something I'm not in the donkey. (But then, the GOP sports an elephant; that's a brand of math I steer clear of.)
Of the first writer, one wants to ask: If reporters (and op-ed columnists) at the NYT suffer such severe credibility deficits, why the hell are you bothering to read them? Are you unemployed? (If so, I'm sure Bush is on it.) Are you employed but underchallenged, and therefore bored? I don't have time to take in the media I admire, let alone that I'm convinced is shit. Seeking a different point of view may be one thing, and a respectable one. Engaging in what you yourself have deemed a total waste of time is something else. Get a life.
It's the second of these two that's more profoundly disturbing, and probably the more emblematic of the fractured state our state is in. This writer feels put upon. She feels assaulted. Her freedoms, she's convinced, are under attack. She doesn't specify which activist judges, or which freedoms they've taken aim at, so the best we can do is speculate. Maybe she's a practicing Christian, for example, and she lives — unlike me — in a place where they've outlawed the practice of Christianity. She's forbidden to go to church, forbidden to associate with fellow Christians; if she's caught praying she'll be remanded to jail. It's unlawful for her to donate money to representatives of her chosen faith. Christian schools are outlawed, as is reading the Bible to your kids.
Or perhaps she's a heterosexual, and she lives in a place — unlike me — where heterosexuals are not allowed to openly practice their, uh, lifestyle. She's not permitted to date members of the opposite sex. She's certainly not permitted to have sex with members of the opposite sex. And needless to say, the penalties for cohabitation with, let alone marriage to, a member of the opposite sex are severe. Maybe, where she lives, they're even forcing her to spend time with members of the same sex — special time, if you see what I mean. They come to her house and extract her, maybe with weapons, and they take her way out in the woods to a grim cabin with bad plumbing. They make her wear flannel. They threaten to cut her hair.
If these are the kinds of things writer #2 is complaining about, then she's absolutely correct: her "cultural freedoms" are under assault. We ought to find out where she lives and head down there with the pickaxes and shovels. If not, I'm going to need more information. Because I'm inclined to think the "cultural freedom" she'd like to see less curtailed is the freedom to dictate to her fellow citizens how they're to conduct their own affairs.
Tell me I'm wrong. Please: tell me I'm wrong, and convince me.
And last, a note to those of you who climbed into the George Bush boat only to find yourself, less than two weeks later, a little queasy at the prospect of spending serious time with some of your fellow passengers. The note is this: we told you so. And this: you didn't just hand them the oars, you passed along the tiller as well. And finally this: when you've had enough and you miss the country you grew up in, make the leap. There's a bunch of us treading down here in the waters of sanity; we can always use a new pair of hands. One of these days we'll accumulate the wherewithal to build ourselves a raft.
"So sorry, but they SHOULD be locked up . There is no guarantee of protection for 'sources'. Unfortunately, journalists have proven themselves to be every bit as deceiving and manipulating as anyone else. The old days of trusting you folks is over. Is there really a source? Did the reporter actually report ONLY the truth? What, in view of the disgraceful conduct of the media outlets during the Presidential election, and the hysterical babblings since, (NYT, LAT, and others) we're supposed to get all worked up in outrage over the jailing of possible Jayson Blairs? Hah! Your days of credibility are over, face it."
"You are more than willing to blame judges for an assault on YOUR 'professional' freedoms, but are unwilling to recognize the even greater assault by activists judges on the cultural freedoms the bulk of Americans revere"
Under normal circumstances I'd recommend ignoring this kind of frothing-at-the-mouth babble. I'd advocate a high road approach, write such comments off as the ravings of delusional O'Reilly/Limbaugh brownshirts or else raging psychopaths on a breather between serial homicides. (And speaking of the rabid right-wing's two favorite sons: when the moral values are scored, where do sexual harrassment — sorry; alleged sexual harrassment; have you read the complaint? it's available online at thesmokinggun.com; pay particular attention to the, uh, attention devoted to loofah — and self-confessed addiction to prescription narcotics, with attendant socializing with dealers and other upstanding citizens, come in? I just want to know when I'm trying to reserve a seat on the train to paradise: who sits where?)
But these days we can't ignore it. It's the party line. And they sound exactly like little Bolsheviks as they deliver it, reading (or typing) from the cards. Fox News good, New York Times bad. Christian rights assaulted by libertine freaks who won't let them tell everyone else what to do. Liberals trying to force America to have sex with goats!
Just for the record, livestock had no place on the Democratic platform. Unless you're reading something I'm not in the donkey. (But then, the GOP sports an elephant; that's a brand of math I steer clear of.)
Of the first writer, one wants to ask: If reporters (and op-ed columnists) at the NYT suffer such severe credibility deficits, why the hell are you bothering to read them? Are you unemployed? (If so, I'm sure Bush is on it.) Are you employed but underchallenged, and therefore bored? I don't have time to take in the media I admire, let alone that I'm convinced is shit. Seeking a different point of view may be one thing, and a respectable one. Engaging in what you yourself have deemed a total waste of time is something else. Get a life.
It's the second of these two that's more profoundly disturbing, and probably the more emblematic of the fractured state our state is in. This writer feels put upon. She feels assaulted. Her freedoms, she's convinced, are under attack. She doesn't specify which activist judges, or which freedoms they've taken aim at, so the best we can do is speculate. Maybe she's a practicing Christian, for example, and she lives — unlike me — in a place where they've outlawed the practice of Christianity. She's forbidden to go to church, forbidden to associate with fellow Christians; if she's caught praying she'll be remanded to jail. It's unlawful for her to donate money to representatives of her chosen faith. Christian schools are outlawed, as is reading the Bible to your kids.
Or perhaps she's a heterosexual, and she lives in a place — unlike me — where heterosexuals are not allowed to openly practice their, uh, lifestyle. She's not permitted to date members of the opposite sex. She's certainly not permitted to have sex with members of the opposite sex. And needless to say, the penalties for cohabitation with, let alone marriage to, a member of the opposite sex are severe. Maybe, where she lives, they're even forcing her to spend time with members of the same sex — special time, if you see what I mean. They come to her house and extract her, maybe with weapons, and they take her way out in the woods to a grim cabin with bad plumbing. They make her wear flannel. They threaten to cut her hair.
If these are the kinds of things writer #2 is complaining about, then she's absolutely correct: her "cultural freedoms" are under assault. We ought to find out where she lives and head down there with the pickaxes and shovels. If not, I'm going to need more information. Because I'm inclined to think the "cultural freedom" she'd like to see less curtailed is the freedom to dictate to her fellow citizens how they're to conduct their own affairs.
Tell me I'm wrong. Please: tell me I'm wrong, and convince me.
And last, a note to those of you who climbed into the George Bush boat only to find yourself, less than two weeks later, a little queasy at the prospect of spending serious time with some of your fellow passengers. The note is this: we told you so. And this: you didn't just hand them the oars, you passed along the tiller as well. And finally this: when you've had enough and you miss the country you grew up in, make the leap. There's a bunch of us treading down here in the waters of sanity; we can always use a new pair of hands. One of these days we'll accumulate the wherewithal to build ourselves a raft.
November 08, 2004
Moondate
Not surprisingly, and in keeping with their conduct prior to the election, the administration since has made claims wholly unsupported by actual evidence from planet Earth. Some of the most egregious of these claims involve the so-called mandate given them by voters, and size of same. It's, uh, big, they say. Really big. In fact the biggest.
Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; like the liaison between Saddam and Osama; like Colin Powell's influence on US foreign policy, this turns out to be mostly a figment of Dick Cheney's imagination. Or perhaps Andy Card's, or William Kristol's — would that Jung were around to theorize on the collective unconscious of neoconservatives. Would he need body count stats for that?
Examples of administration storytelling prowess: from Mr Cheney: "President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate." From William Kristol: "An even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996." Like I said: Bush's mandate is big; really big.
We'll have to skip the "clear agenda" part; I heard all three debates, and I can't tell you what it might have been. I do know that "Leave No Child Behind" was a jobs program. After that, it's all a huffy blur. Of course, "Leave No Child Behind" came in the first year of his first term. Does that count as an agenda item for the second term? Maybe he meant he was going to reiterate his support for the already-passed "Leave No Child Behind." Yaay! Cross that one off the list: done. Or maybe he meant he was going to fully fund it, finally — it was his program, after all. Or maybe he meant he was going to start a National Lawn Mowing Corps, thus uniting Non-Left-Behind Children with Jobs. (Good for the middle class, too: some of them have been known to have lawns.)
If you are enjoying the mandate fantasy, please avert your eyes. (It sounds sinful anyway.) If on the other hand you'd prefer to clasp your fingers around a small slice of reality (hey, maybe yours is a big slice of reality — no offense intended), see John Nichols's column in the current online issue of The Nation. I'll reproduce some of his most salient data here:
• Bush won a popular vote majority of about 3.5 million. (That's roughly 3 percent. That's so low that if it were a mortgage rate, you'd cut off your left fist to get it. And yes, it would have to be the left fist.)
• Bush won an electoral vote majority of 286-252.
• In presidential elections from 1904 through this year, 21 of 25 victors won by a wider percentage of the popular vote than Bush received on Tuesday.
• Over those same 100 years, 23 of 25 presidential victors won by wider margins than Bush in the Electoral College. The only narrower winners were Bush in 2000 and Woodrow Wilson in 1916. In other words, Bush squeaked by with the third skinniest margin in the last 100 years. And one of the two people he outdistanced was himself.
Nichols goes on to point out that the president with the victory margin closest to Bush's was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter's popular-vote margin was identical to Bush's; his electoral margin was larger (297-240). Nobody thought of the Carter presidency as wielding a mandate — in fact, as Nichols reminds us, people thought of it as embattled, beleaguered, just barely scraping by. And the Republicans of the day were not intimidated in the least, in spite of the fact that Carter's congressional majorities were even more formidable than Bush's today.
But I'll also say this: Cheney et al. have faced down the truth by fiat repeatedly over the last four years, and they've yet to see evidence that it won't work. One of the reasons they won at all — by any margin — was their repeated insistence, contrary to all facts and evidence, that Saddam Hussein had provided aid and comfort to Osama Bin Laden. This is a well-demonstrated falsehood, and yet over 70% of those who voted for the incumbents claimed to believe it. They likewise insisted — again, contrary to facts and evidence — that the war in Iraq was a success, that the insurgency was minor and diminishing, and that the invasion as a whole had diminished the threat of terrorism. Demonstrably false, each and every one of these claims. And yet.
If Bush and Cheney and Card and their cohorts declare a mandate (as they have), and if those same people who believed them about Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and Iraq believe them about this (as I see no reason to think they will not), then the mandate, like the second term, will become a reality.
We are in the funhouse now, ladies and gentlemen. Do not underestimate the regime's capacity for deception and scheme. Do not underestimate the population's willingness to go along, especially if it feels good (and spreading democracy with God on your side feels very good). And do not overestimate the power of the truth to fight back. The battlefield now is the American mind, and facts, as weapons, may be of limited use.
Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; like the liaison between Saddam and Osama; like Colin Powell's influence on US foreign policy, this turns out to be mostly a figment of Dick Cheney's imagination. Or perhaps Andy Card's, or William Kristol's — would that Jung were around to theorize on the collective unconscious of neoconservatives. Would he need body count stats for that?
Examples of administration storytelling prowess: from Mr Cheney: "President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate." From William Kristol: "An even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996." Like I said: Bush's mandate is big; really big.
We'll have to skip the "clear agenda" part; I heard all three debates, and I can't tell you what it might have been. I do know that "Leave No Child Behind" was a jobs program. After that, it's all a huffy blur. Of course, "Leave No Child Behind" came in the first year of his first term. Does that count as an agenda item for the second term? Maybe he meant he was going to reiterate his support for the already-passed "Leave No Child Behind." Yaay! Cross that one off the list: done. Or maybe he meant he was going to fully fund it, finally — it was his program, after all. Or maybe he meant he was going to start a National Lawn Mowing Corps, thus uniting Non-Left-Behind Children with Jobs. (Good for the middle class, too: some of them have been known to have lawns.)
If you are enjoying the mandate fantasy, please avert your eyes. (It sounds sinful anyway.) If on the other hand you'd prefer to clasp your fingers around a small slice of reality (hey, maybe yours is a big slice of reality — no offense intended), see John Nichols's column in the current online issue of The Nation. I'll reproduce some of his most salient data here:
• Bush won a popular vote majority of about 3.5 million. (That's roughly 3 percent. That's so low that if it were a mortgage rate, you'd cut off your left fist to get it. And yes, it would have to be the left fist.)
• Bush won an electoral vote majority of 286-252.
• In presidential elections from 1904 through this year, 21 of 25 victors won by a wider percentage of the popular vote than Bush received on Tuesday.
• Over those same 100 years, 23 of 25 presidential victors won by wider margins than Bush in the Electoral College. The only narrower winners were Bush in 2000 and Woodrow Wilson in 1916. In other words, Bush squeaked by with the third skinniest margin in the last 100 years. And one of the two people he outdistanced was himself.
Nichols goes on to point out that the president with the victory margin closest to Bush's was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter's popular-vote margin was identical to Bush's; his electoral margin was larger (297-240). Nobody thought of the Carter presidency as wielding a mandate — in fact, as Nichols reminds us, people thought of it as embattled, beleaguered, just barely scraping by. And the Republicans of the day were not intimidated in the least, in spite of the fact that Carter's congressional majorities were even more formidable than Bush's today.
But I'll also say this: Cheney et al. have faced down the truth by fiat repeatedly over the last four years, and they've yet to see evidence that it won't work. One of the reasons they won at all — by any margin — was their repeated insistence, contrary to all facts and evidence, that Saddam Hussein had provided aid and comfort to Osama Bin Laden. This is a well-demonstrated falsehood, and yet over 70% of those who voted for the incumbents claimed to believe it. They likewise insisted — again, contrary to facts and evidence — that the war in Iraq was a success, that the insurgency was minor and diminishing, and that the invasion as a whole had diminished the threat of terrorism. Demonstrably false, each and every one of these claims. And yet.
If Bush and Cheney and Card and their cohorts declare a mandate (as they have), and if those same people who believed them about Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and Iraq believe them about this (as I see no reason to think they will not), then the mandate, like the second term, will become a reality.
We are in the funhouse now, ladies and gentlemen. Do not underestimate the regime's capacity for deception and scheme. Do not underestimate the population's willingness to go along, especially if it feels good (and spreading democracy with God on your side feels very good). And do not overestimate the power of the truth to fight back. The battlefield now is the American mind, and facts, as weapons, may be of limited use.
Secure
Post-election pronouncements have been little short of apocalyptic on both sides, but the smug assurance of right-wingers is overwhelming given the 51/48% vote tally (it's a smugness reinforced, admittedly, by self-flagellation and extravagant mourning on the left). Democrats are being treated to all sorts of fine lectures about how to court suburban voters, how to court southern voters, how to get in touch with the real America.
As a guy who gets up and goes to work on the subway after a cup of coffee and a baked bread product every morning, I've begun to resent this dismissive condescension. I am not a trust-fund baby; I am not a froth-mouthed radical. I am not immune to security concerns. I live in New York City; I'm not sure security could occupy greater space in my modest brain. When the Republican convention was in town I couldn't walk down a sidewalk for lunch without visions of detonating car bombs. I took the bus instead of the subway, changed the route by which I conducted basic business like purchasing milk (yes, we do conduct basic business like purchasing milk here in Pointy-Headed Elitist Urban Voterland), and called my wife every couple of hours to make certain she was safe. It all felt pretty real to me. I tried to steer clear of the myriad monuments and historical locations that pepper our streets, those much-discussed symbols of the nation and its ideals which are, presumably, thus despised by enemies worldwide: the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Grand Central Station, Times Square. And it seemed as I did so that I was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other hardworking, equally anxious American souls — as real as they could be, each one of them.
Claims of "real America-ness" are also a way of exaggerating the Bush campaign's connection to suburban voters. My brother lives in the suburbs; my mother too. They were both staunch supporters of Kerry. So were their neighbors. This is just another fictitious form of Republican self-congratulation. And a way to normalize themselves, to suggest — to whom? to David Brooks? Spare your breath; he'll convince himself — they didn't get pushed over the top by an evangelical appeal.
Many Bush voters cited security as their issue; and indeed "success" in the so-called war on terror, plus presumably attendant security, were an important part of Bush's sales pitch. It's interesting to note that the people who actually live in places that either have been hit by terrorist attacks or are likely to suffer them in the future — coastal cities; commercial and political centers: Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Seattle, Chicago — voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. We who feel our lives are on the line every day, and who have good historical reason for feeling so, could not disagree more strongly about who we'd like watching our backs. We do not feel safe with Mr. Bush in office; we do not believe he has done or will do a competent job of protecting us, our places of business, our homes. (And why my home as a thirty-something resident of New York is suddenly less valuable, less "authentic," or less authentically "American," than the home of a thirty-something resident of Phoenix escapes me.) It is true that when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers they intended a strike at America in its entirety, the idea of America and the reality of America and its place in the world; but it was New Yorkers who died (and here I employ the regional definition, one that includes people from New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and so on). It will be New Yorkers, by and large, who pay for the rebuilding, spiritual and material. If we are hit again — America, I mean — it will once more, in all likelihood, be in New York or San Francisco, Chicago or Washington or Boston. It will once again be the residents of whatever urban coastal region who die. It will not be residents of an Iowa suburb, or rural Mississippi, or exurban Indiana. (I know we see news reports from such places depicting fears of immanent attack, but this is, realistically speaking, self-aggrandizing paranoia. And lest I be dismissed as a pointy-headed northeastern elitist for saying so, I'd offer the Al Qaeda record. It suggests a strategy of mass casualties. I'd offer, furthermore, that it's not exactly an enviable position in which to find oneself. Could there really be competition over being a target?)
It's well and good to suggest that we reach out to the midwestern voter, but I for one would first like to see the midwestern voter make rational decisions about allocation of national resources. I won't ask for corn subsidies for farmers in Long Island; they shouldn't ask — as they have, twice now, successfully — that folks in Wyoming receive higher per capita homeland security funding than folks in New York. At the moment, I simply do not trust Red America to make competent choices about my safety. And I'd say the assumption that midlanders understand the security concerns of an urban coastal city at this point in our history ranks higher on the arrogance meter than my own assumption that they don't. Frankly, this particular policy shakedown — the allocation of homeland security funds prioritizing local pork over national threat — bespeaks a severe lack of judgment about the security challenges faced by this nation. I don't care what your congressman has been telling you (he gets paid to do that); I don't care what Dick Cheney has been telling you (he gets — oh, never mind). If you think Wyoming is the homeland's front line, you don't understand this fight.
It's an assumption that ran through a great deal of the reporting on the campaign: that suburban and rural voters had safety as their first concern and thus voted (of course, the implication goes) for Bush, whereas urban voters placed different concerns in the foreground, leading to support for Kerry. I think many urban voters would tell you it was the reverse: that they voted for Kerry precisely because they feel their lives are at stake, and they do not trust Bush to protect them. They were just as obsessed with security as folks in the heartland. They simply reached radically different conclusions about who could and would provide it. And if you asked, I wager most would tell you it was a question of competence. Bush has displayed none; Kerry, though admittedly untested at the executive level, at least held promise. He seemed to approach the subject with thoughtful gravitas, rather than with bull-headed slogans and nasty soundbite quips. Last I checked, bull-headed slogans and quips were unsuccessful at turning Kalashnikovs into bread loaves in Iraq.
This struggle has come down to an argument over the definition of moral commitment — a disagreement over who has it and to what. The irony is that, much as Red America would like to paint us as wild-eyed pushers and pimps who want to drive stakes through the hearts of those who refuse corruption, Blue America's motivating philosophy is pluralism. We're happy to let Red America do as it pleases, so long as what it pleases to do is not legislate our personal moral codes. We don't want to convert and we don't want to be converted. The evidence suggests, we think, that at the end of that road you find Talibanland, and we would prefer to be spared that particular — and particularly lethal — ride.
Sidebar: Former-leftish-now-born-again cadabout Christopher Hitchens is fond of citing fears of Islamic fundamentalist cells working today, in our midst, when explaining his support for President Bush. You'll see this logic pop up even in such unlikely pieces as his discussion, in this week's NY Times Book Review, of Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times. It comes off mostly as a revisitation of McCarthyite ranting — a hysterical justification of Bush and Ashcroft's suspension of habeas corpus as well as god knows what new surveillance schemes. He'll gladly hand over his dirty underwear, if only they'll protect him, protect him. Good luck, Hitch. Maybe you should move to Wyoming. I hear they've got enough homeland security funding there to get every last terrorist out of your soup.
Look for Hitchens to be playing the Walter Winchell role in a remake of They Came From Planet Red, coming soon to a theater near you. Right about the same time one — just one — of the more than 2000 people Ashcroft's Justice Department has arrested and held without trial gets convicted of something other than jaywalking. If they're really doing such a bang up job, Hitch, shouldn't they have acquired some evidence over the last two years? Even the Nassau County Sheriff can manage that from time to time. And if the reason they haven't is because terrorists are really that much more clever, shouldn't we hire smarter guys? Maybe less time in prayer, more time following up leads ....
In any event, even Hitch can't explain how the bungled adventure in Iraq has improved security on the homefront.
But there I go with my pointy-headed arrogant northeastern elitism again — always asking for results, results, when any good American boy, especially nowadays, just has faith.
As a guy who gets up and goes to work on the subway after a cup of coffee and a baked bread product every morning, I've begun to resent this dismissive condescension. I am not a trust-fund baby; I am not a froth-mouthed radical. I am not immune to security concerns. I live in New York City; I'm not sure security could occupy greater space in my modest brain. When the Republican convention was in town I couldn't walk down a sidewalk for lunch without visions of detonating car bombs. I took the bus instead of the subway, changed the route by which I conducted basic business like purchasing milk (yes, we do conduct basic business like purchasing milk here in Pointy-Headed Elitist Urban Voterland), and called my wife every couple of hours to make certain she was safe. It all felt pretty real to me. I tried to steer clear of the myriad monuments and historical locations that pepper our streets, those much-discussed symbols of the nation and its ideals which are, presumably, thus despised by enemies worldwide: the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Grand Central Station, Times Square. And it seemed as I did so that I was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other hardworking, equally anxious American souls — as real as they could be, each one of them.
Claims of "real America-ness" are also a way of exaggerating the Bush campaign's connection to suburban voters. My brother lives in the suburbs; my mother too. They were both staunch supporters of Kerry. So were their neighbors. This is just another fictitious form of Republican self-congratulation. And a way to normalize themselves, to suggest — to whom? to David Brooks? Spare your breath; he'll convince himself — they didn't get pushed over the top by an evangelical appeal.
Many Bush voters cited security as their issue; and indeed "success" in the so-called war on terror, plus presumably attendant security, were an important part of Bush's sales pitch. It's interesting to note that the people who actually live in places that either have been hit by terrorist attacks or are likely to suffer them in the future — coastal cities; commercial and political centers: Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Seattle, Chicago — voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. We who feel our lives are on the line every day, and who have good historical reason for feeling so, could not disagree more strongly about who we'd like watching our backs. We do not feel safe with Mr. Bush in office; we do not believe he has done or will do a competent job of protecting us, our places of business, our homes. (And why my home as a thirty-something resident of New York is suddenly less valuable, less "authentic," or less authentically "American," than the home of a thirty-something resident of Phoenix escapes me.) It is true that when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers they intended a strike at America in its entirety, the idea of America and the reality of America and its place in the world; but it was New Yorkers who died (and here I employ the regional definition, one that includes people from New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and so on). It will be New Yorkers, by and large, who pay for the rebuilding, spiritual and material. If we are hit again — America, I mean — it will once more, in all likelihood, be in New York or San Francisco, Chicago or Washington or Boston. It will once again be the residents of whatever urban coastal region who die. It will not be residents of an Iowa suburb, or rural Mississippi, or exurban Indiana. (I know we see news reports from such places depicting fears of immanent attack, but this is, realistically speaking, self-aggrandizing paranoia. And lest I be dismissed as a pointy-headed northeastern elitist for saying so, I'd offer the Al Qaeda record. It suggests a strategy of mass casualties. I'd offer, furthermore, that it's not exactly an enviable position in which to find oneself. Could there really be competition over being a target?)
It's well and good to suggest that we reach out to the midwestern voter, but I for one would first like to see the midwestern voter make rational decisions about allocation of national resources. I won't ask for corn subsidies for farmers in Long Island; they shouldn't ask — as they have, twice now, successfully — that folks in Wyoming receive higher per capita homeland security funding than folks in New York. At the moment, I simply do not trust Red America to make competent choices about my safety. And I'd say the assumption that midlanders understand the security concerns of an urban coastal city at this point in our history ranks higher on the arrogance meter than my own assumption that they don't. Frankly, this particular policy shakedown — the allocation of homeland security funds prioritizing local pork over national threat — bespeaks a severe lack of judgment about the security challenges faced by this nation. I don't care what your congressman has been telling you (he gets paid to do that); I don't care what Dick Cheney has been telling you (he gets — oh, never mind). If you think Wyoming is the homeland's front line, you don't understand this fight.
It's an assumption that ran through a great deal of the reporting on the campaign: that suburban and rural voters had safety as their first concern and thus voted (of course, the implication goes) for Bush, whereas urban voters placed different concerns in the foreground, leading to support for Kerry. I think many urban voters would tell you it was the reverse: that they voted for Kerry precisely because they feel their lives are at stake, and they do not trust Bush to protect them. They were just as obsessed with security as folks in the heartland. They simply reached radically different conclusions about who could and would provide it. And if you asked, I wager most would tell you it was a question of competence. Bush has displayed none; Kerry, though admittedly untested at the executive level, at least held promise. He seemed to approach the subject with thoughtful gravitas, rather than with bull-headed slogans and nasty soundbite quips. Last I checked, bull-headed slogans and quips were unsuccessful at turning Kalashnikovs into bread loaves in Iraq.
This struggle has come down to an argument over the definition of moral commitment — a disagreement over who has it and to what. The irony is that, much as Red America would like to paint us as wild-eyed pushers and pimps who want to drive stakes through the hearts of those who refuse corruption, Blue America's motivating philosophy is pluralism. We're happy to let Red America do as it pleases, so long as what it pleases to do is not legislate our personal moral codes. We don't want to convert and we don't want to be converted. The evidence suggests, we think, that at the end of that road you find Talibanland, and we would prefer to be spared that particular — and particularly lethal — ride.
Sidebar: Former-leftish-now-born-again cadabout Christopher Hitchens is fond of citing fears of Islamic fundamentalist cells working today, in our midst, when explaining his support for President Bush. You'll see this logic pop up even in such unlikely pieces as his discussion, in this week's NY Times Book Review, of Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times. It comes off mostly as a revisitation of McCarthyite ranting — a hysterical justification of Bush and Ashcroft's suspension of habeas corpus as well as god knows what new surveillance schemes. He'll gladly hand over his dirty underwear, if only they'll protect him, protect him. Good luck, Hitch. Maybe you should move to Wyoming. I hear they've got enough homeland security funding there to get every last terrorist out of your soup.
Look for Hitchens to be playing the Walter Winchell role in a remake of They Came From Planet Red, coming soon to a theater near you. Right about the same time one — just one — of the more than 2000 people Ashcroft's Justice Department has arrested and held without trial gets convicted of something other than jaywalking. If they're really doing such a bang up job, Hitch, shouldn't they have acquired some evidence over the last two years? Even the Nassau County Sheriff can manage that from time to time. And if the reason they haven't is because terrorists are really that much more clever, shouldn't we hire smarter guys? Maybe less time in prayer, more time following up leads ....
In any event, even Hitch can't explain how the bungled adventure in Iraq has improved security on the homefront.
But there I go with my pointy-headed arrogant northeastern elitism again — always asking for results, results, when any good American boy, especially nowadays, just has faith.
November 06, 2004
Bad Religion
An email sent to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in reponse to his most recent column ("Time to Get Religion," November 6):
Mr Kristof:
Have to disagree with you, both on principle and pragmatically. If the Dems follow your advice, what would be the point of having a second party at all? The philosophy you outline has already been embraced by moderate Republicans. (Can you say Arnold Schwartzeneggar? Rudy Giuliani?)
As for Michael Moore, the problem was never the content of his argument. The problem was tone. Howard Dean had the same problem, or was at least successfully portrayed as having it. In addition, I'd wager that if Moore looked and dressed like Jude Law, people would've had far less objection. I know, I know: that's reality, an incontrovertible consequence of the media culture in which we live. We have to deal with it. But it still points to the fact that substance matters less than style and delivery.
With regard to religion, your prescription is fine if we're willing to cede one of the fundamental principles of American democracy, which is the exclusion of theology in the formation and application of law. We may lose this battle anyway — are already losing it in certain instances — but that doesn't mean it's not a battle worth fighting, or that the pendulum won't swing back as it's done before.
The biggest trouble with your prescription, aside from its abandonment of principle in favor of victory, is that the chances of it leading to victory are slim. Republicans are hands-down better at articulating homespun centrism, and hands-down better at portraying their Democratic opponents as principle-free hacks. In polls asking which candidate actually seemed to mean what he was saying — that is, to believe in it — Kerry consistently lost, and by a wide margin. People got the impression he'd say anything to get elected. They weren't convinced he actually stood for something at all. Part of the reason they believed this is that Republicans told them so (and told them so convincingly, using soundbites Kerry helpfully provided). Another part is that Kerry and the DNC have spent the last 15 years following advice much like yours, with the result that their capacity for articulating a coherent vision for the nation has atrophied. No one, including Democrats, has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for. We know what the party historically stood for, but we don't know what kind of world modern Democrats want to shape. You can't say that about Republicans.
And you can't apply Clinton to any other circumstance. Clinton is the most gifted politician of his generation, and his charisma — like Reagan's — transcends policy. There were a whole lot of people who just didn't give a damn what Clinton's politics were; they liked the guy. They still like the guy: if he'd been running against Bush, there's no doubt in my mind he'd've won. It's also worth noting that when he did run, it was against two incredibly uncharismatic, untelegenic, uncharming sourpusses. And the overall political tenor throughout Clinton's two terms, though moderate by today's standards, was still moderately Republican.
Something else about Clinton: if he'd been running, we'd've spent a hell of a lot less time talking about Vietnam. Which brings me to a final point: the Democrats ran, at best, a mediocre campaign. Even before the Democratic convention, I got on the elevator in my office building in Manhattan and was joined by a woman who I'd guess was in her middle-thirties, professional. The news screen on the wall flashed something about Kerry and Vietnam, and the woman said, under her breath but impulsively, irresistibly, "Shut up about Vietnam already." I don't know if she planned to vote for Bush or not, but I do know Kerry had little hope of reaching her after that — especially since Vietnam's presence in the conversation only expanded. If Democrats were out of touch with anything, it was what American voters wanted to hear about. They hemmed and hawed, started and stopped, tried one thing and then another. Sometimes they hit it right and sometimes they missed completely. In the end, it was hard to say what it all added up to. The most consistent support they got was from people who couldn't stand the thought of four more years of Bush.
I think before you jettison the product, you try to revamp your marketing strategy. And you find some better salesmen too. Maybe some who actually know what the product is, and like it, and think others should like it too, and can talk about it clearly and movingly. Then you'll really know whether there's a market or not.
Mr Kristof:
Have to disagree with you, both on principle and pragmatically. If the Dems follow your advice, what would be the point of having a second party at all? The philosophy you outline has already been embraced by moderate Republicans. (Can you say Arnold Schwartzeneggar? Rudy Giuliani?)
As for Michael Moore, the problem was never the content of his argument. The problem was tone. Howard Dean had the same problem, or was at least successfully portrayed as having it. In addition, I'd wager that if Moore looked and dressed like Jude Law, people would've had far less objection. I know, I know: that's reality, an incontrovertible consequence of the media culture in which we live. We have to deal with it. But it still points to the fact that substance matters less than style and delivery.
With regard to religion, your prescription is fine if we're willing to cede one of the fundamental principles of American democracy, which is the exclusion of theology in the formation and application of law. We may lose this battle anyway — are already losing it in certain instances — but that doesn't mean it's not a battle worth fighting, or that the pendulum won't swing back as it's done before.
The biggest trouble with your prescription, aside from its abandonment of principle in favor of victory, is that the chances of it leading to victory are slim. Republicans are hands-down better at articulating homespun centrism, and hands-down better at portraying their Democratic opponents as principle-free hacks. In polls asking which candidate actually seemed to mean what he was saying — that is, to believe in it — Kerry consistently lost, and by a wide margin. People got the impression he'd say anything to get elected. They weren't convinced he actually stood for something at all. Part of the reason they believed this is that Republicans told them so (and told them so convincingly, using soundbites Kerry helpfully provided). Another part is that Kerry and the DNC have spent the last 15 years following advice much like yours, with the result that their capacity for articulating a coherent vision for the nation has atrophied. No one, including Democrats, has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for. We know what the party historically stood for, but we don't know what kind of world modern Democrats want to shape. You can't say that about Republicans.
And you can't apply Clinton to any other circumstance. Clinton is the most gifted politician of his generation, and his charisma — like Reagan's — transcends policy. There were a whole lot of people who just didn't give a damn what Clinton's politics were; they liked the guy. They still like the guy: if he'd been running against Bush, there's no doubt in my mind he'd've won. It's also worth noting that when he did run, it was against two incredibly uncharismatic, untelegenic, uncharming sourpusses. And the overall political tenor throughout Clinton's two terms, though moderate by today's standards, was still moderately Republican.
Something else about Clinton: if he'd been running, we'd've spent a hell of a lot less time talking about Vietnam. Which brings me to a final point: the Democrats ran, at best, a mediocre campaign. Even before the Democratic convention, I got on the elevator in my office building in Manhattan and was joined by a woman who I'd guess was in her middle-thirties, professional. The news screen on the wall flashed something about Kerry and Vietnam, and the woman said, under her breath but impulsively, irresistibly, "Shut up about Vietnam already." I don't know if she planned to vote for Bush or not, but I do know Kerry had little hope of reaching her after that — especially since Vietnam's presence in the conversation only expanded. If Democrats were out of touch with anything, it was what American voters wanted to hear about. They hemmed and hawed, started and stopped, tried one thing and then another. Sometimes they hit it right and sometimes they missed completely. In the end, it was hard to say what it all added up to. The most consistent support they got was from people who couldn't stand the thought of four more years of Bush.
I think before you jettison the product, you try to revamp your marketing strategy. And you find some better salesmen too. Maybe some who actually know what the product is, and like it, and think others should like it too, and can talk about it clearly and movingly. Then you'll really know whether there's a market or not.
November 05, 2004
The Moving On
And so now Kerry has delivered his concession speech, Bush has laid claim. I've received my thank you notes from the Kerry campaign and from MoveOn.org: consolatory returns on my first-ever campaign contributions. They all insist it's not over. We'll fight on, they insist; it was an excellent start. Perhaps. But today I am of other minds. Something, certainly, is over. And is there something else — for better or worse — that might have begun?
It's customary in the aftermath of battles like this one — protracted, vicious, winner-take-all — for everyone to issue calls for fresh unity. For the defeated, it's the last gasp of influence, a chance to blare, as foot number 2 slides toward the grave, a reminder of what might have been and what might yet be someday. Play nice, it says to the other side, lest the shoe migrate — as it usually does — to the other foot. It's also a chance — a last chance, most probably — to project magnanimity on the grand stage. Such moments are history, after all. We want to be remembered well when we're gone.
For the victor it's simpler, and less costly: a demonstration of good sportsmanship before the raping and pillaging commence.
Kerry and Bush played by these rules on Wednesday, tossing out calls for the burying of hatchets, the mending of fences, other newer-age variants of same. Bush even went so far as to promise to earn the trust of his opponent's supporters. Once again, one has to question his connection to reality. It's a little like an abusive spouse knocking on the door on the sober morning after, pleading for one last chance. The smart money says we'll get hit again.
Still, it's a swell thought. And it's not wrong, at least in spirit: though it was difficult to remember on Wednesday, the country is evenly divided, two almost-halves split by little more than a margin of error. Kerry got 48% of the popular vote to Bush's 51%, and the election really did come down to fewer than 150,000 votes in Ohio. Progressives huddling in near-suicidal disbelief beneath the heavy dark shadow of four more years of Bush-Cheney — plus Republican control of every major branch of government by ever-wider margins — might be forgiven for seeing it otherwise. Nonetheless, it's a fact.
And yet. And yet. It's all just a little too facile. The last eight months have been bitter. And the bitterness has not felt incidental. For Rove it may have been no more than a tactic. (For Rove, everything may be no more than a tactic, except the win itself. Who knows what really drives this man — what he really thinks, really is, in his heart of hearts, if he has one — beyond the all-engulfing need to win.) But for the footsoldiers on each side there seems little question. The divisions were heartfelt. They were profound, material. It may be they cannot be bridged.
The right wing is fond, especially in the mocking aftermath, of telling the left that they "just don't get it." They're not wrong. We don't. I certainly don't. But then again, neither do they. Let me offer the following exchange. It took place on Wednesday morning just after reports of Kerry's call to Bush to concede, on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, between a guest — Ruben Navarrette of the Dallas Morning News — and a caller, Kathy, from Stamford CT:
Kathy: ... More depressing is the previous caller, who talked about "moral values" and then said, "We don't want homosexuals to get married, we don't want affirmative action" and all those things. If by "moral values" those people mean "we hate everybody who's not like us," then I'd say this country is well on its way to going to hell in a handbasket. If "moral values" meant good things, and taking care of people, and worrying about people who have no homes, no food, no health care, no jobs, then I'd say, "Okay, I'll go with you guys. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but I'll get on your moral value wagon." But every person I know — and that guy was just like one of them — who talks about "moral values," it's a nice code word to mean "I hate this group, I hate that group." And we are increasingly becoming a country of people who hate each other. And that's how the Republicans ran the campaign against Kerry: they tried to demonize him.
Let's note a couple of things about this back-and-forth. Kathy makes an inarticulate but heartfelt attempt to lay competing claim to the high ground of "moral values"; she doesn't put it quite like this, maybe because she's not quite aware it's what she's doing. That's symptomatic of the left in general. We're so suspicious of words like "moral" that we're afraid to acknowledge that we have them. Beheath the clumsy phrasing, Kathy's point is that there is a value system there, and it's strong, and it doesn't waver.
Navarrette calls Kathy arrogant and self-centered; he suggests she's somehow squelching, with her big elitist Connecticut toe, the opinions of those who — what? — object, let's say, to gay marriage. He's pissed that she's calling such folk homophobes. Never mind, for now, that she didn't. First question: if "objection" to gay marriage does not spring from homophobia, then from what, exactly, does it spring? Navarrette can't answer this, because as he's quick to point out he doesn't object. (One would like to hear him explain why not.) But it seems to me you can't have it both ways. Either you think there's something wrong with being gay, and it "upsets" you to see gayness express itself in a state-sanctioned union (John Kerry, by the way, did not support gay marriage either, but he did support civil unions — meaning that those who voted for Bush based on this issue must have objected to more than the application of "marriage" itself: they must have objected to state sanction of gay relationships altogether, mustn't they? or else Kerry's position would have been sufficient) — either you think there's something wrong with it, and you don't want it sanctioned, or you don't think there's anything wrong with it, in which case you don't give a damn. And if you think there's something wrong with being gay, you're a homophobe. That's just how definitions work. As Navarrette himself implied earlier in the show, if you believe a thing, you might as well say it, and you might as well stand up for it consistently. Does that make such people "haters"? I don't know. Perhaps homophobia isn't always hate, or always exactly; maybe it's fear. Or maybe it's just a queasy discomfort rising from a hidden swamp of fear, or hate, or both. (One thing's certain: it involves an excessive interest in what other adults do behind closed doors.) Either way, why would the guy in Arkansas or Mississippi or Texas object to being called a homophobe if he really thinks gayness is wrong? I understand why Navarrette objects — he doesn't think it's wrong; he's not a homophobe. But that other guy, the one who disagrees with both Navarrette and Kathy: why wouldn't he wear a t-shirt with "PROUD HOMOPHOBE" scrawled across the chest, if it's really such a moral issue to him, such a question, in the end, of principle? Why deny, I mean, a conviction you're not ashamed of?
Lastly, who's really the arrogant elitist in this picture? Who's really exuding the "air of moral superiority"? Did I miss the part of the story in which Kathy travelled down to Arkansas, or Mississippi, or Texas, and found this guy and put a gun to his head, dragged him out of the house and down to city hall, forced him to marry some burly stud from up the block? Because if she did that, I'd agree: no question, Kathy's attempting to deny that poor soul his opinion on gay marriage. But it seems to me Kathy's position is precisely the opposite. It seems to me Kathy's not trying to mandate gay marriage, but only to permit it to those who choose. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas is completely free, in Kathy's universe, to make his own decision about whether or not to engage in gay marriage, even whether or not to like gay marriage, or think it's a good — a moral — idea. Which is to say Kathy's not imposing values on anyone, with one exception: the value of pluralism. And when you think about it, pluralism, as a value, is rather anti-elitist by nature and by history. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas, on the other hand: it's hard to suggest he's not legislating morality. If anyone's demonstrating an "air of moral superiority," it's the guy convinced he knows what's best for all of us, and trying to pass a law to back it up. And more important for conservatives, it's the guy using government to suppress the expression of opinion, and feelings, and values. Because constitutional amendments banning gay marriage employ the state to stop consenting adults from undertaking a wholly private negotiation that has no material impact whatsoever on others. Navarrette's man: he knows right from wrong, for us all. If that's not arrogant, I'm not sure what is.
It's hard to see where the common ground might be, harder still to see the incentive for hunting it. And really, this applies to both sides. Conservatives are in charge now; they don't have to listen. For three years they've steeped themselves in the rhetoric of nonnegotiation: you're either with us or against us. Given this, someone who doesn't agree with them might be forgiven for interpreting calls to work together as calls to come over to their side or to get, once and for all, out of the way. Unable to bring himself in line, a person who does not agree might see little point in "working together," even symbolically; and he might focus instead on honing his opposition. He might reasonably assume that the next four years will be an even fouler train wreck than the last, and that a great many of his fellow citizens have seen to it that he has few options remaining by way of mitigation.
The day after the concession/victory speech working-together double-whammy, Bush gave a news conference in which he said more or less what henchmen Rove, Cheney, and Andy Card, among others, had been saying since early Wednesday morning: we're in charge now, full steam ahead. It was a preview. Every time a reporter dared ask a multi-point question, Bush tossed barbed jests about how they hadn't been "listening to the American people," who had, he implied, now given him license to do what he'd already been doing anyway, which was whatever he damn well pleased — including not answer multi-point questions. The dynasty is complete as far as they're concerned, and Bush has already been quoted describing, at pre-election fundraisers, the rush they'll embark on to change political life as we know it before he starts, to use his own words, "quacking like a duck." So much for reaching across the aisle.
Hendrick Hertzberg, political editor for The New Yorker and one of the authors of its unprecedented endorsement this year of John Kerry, described the "coldness" of the distance between the two Americas, and called it unlike anything he's felt in his lifetime — different even, he said, from the '60s, and worse. The alienation is profound. It is of course more than political: it is deeply cultural, deeply personal. As one friend put it, "it's like discovering a member of your family is a serial murderer." Perhaps it's a sign of the atomization of our society that no sense of shared history survives it, no understanding of common identity, purpose or goals. This may be especially true in the northeast. Much has been written about the electoral college and its distortion of our campaign process — all energies, all philosophies directed at a small sliver of voters in the middle west — but none of it captures the feeling we have here that this campaign had little to do with us. Certainly, northeasterners voted in tremendous numbers. And passions here ran high before, during, and after the race. But for the most part our concerns were not inscribed on the map, and except for the Republican convention — during which we were invaded by strangers who, though personable enough, either hate us for being sin-infested devil-worshippers or view our city as a theme park through which they might pass like one of the "lands" at Epcot, all the while pimping us, willingly or not, as a symbol of the war they're so enamored of and that will, we can rest assured, never be brought home to them (though it already has and may well again be brought home to us) — aside from this, we played no role in the proceedings.* One side took our votes for granted, the other dismissed them. In a very real sense, it was not our election. And it is not our government that results.
I think it's fair to say, too, that this alienation is exacerbated by an intense region-bashing that was central to the campaign. By debate number three, Bush was spitting the words Massachusetts liberal at Kerry like a schoolyard epithet, and the implication went broader and deeper. You can hear it in Navarrette's response to Kathy. Whether it's the northeastern elite or Massachusetts liberals, they mean us, and they're not being complimentary. I'm sure some of their best friends are from up here, but that didn't stop them from publicly using the part of this nation we live, work, love and, once in a while, play in as a personal and political insult. We seem to be the boogeyman invoked in middle and southern states to frighten wayward kids, and they don't seem to mind admitting it. Can you imagine the fervor if Kerry had talked about Texas rednecks or Okies or South Carolinian white supremacists? He'd've been accused of fomenting civil war. Yet it's common practice for Bush & co. to employ — and appeal to — similar sentiments, and to my knowledge no one's ever seriously called them on it.
The general impression now — my impression — is that no one remotely connected to the northeast will be elected, ever. Even Rudy "Rambo" Giuliani may be too secular, too tainted by all those years of doing business with the pencil-necked northeastern elite to pass muster in the heartland; and you can forget altogether about democrats. We will thus be governed for the forseeable future by people who have no connection to our region, may even openly disdain it, and who don't need to — and won't — address us in any significant way during campaigns. Why wouldn't we feel disconnected from the process?
A topic that's come up repeatedly in the aftermath of the election (and more than a few times before it) is northeastern secession. Most people aren't serious when they offer this, but I'm beginning to think it's worth consideration. A stunning thought, I know. But ask yourself: why not? It seems there are fundamental differences in social philosophy. It seems those differences are growing — we're diverging rather than coming together, and there's increased intransigence on each side. And it seems that we in the northeast are precluded, structurally and by prejudice, from a base of power sufficient to compel negotiation. We're facing deTocqueville's tyranny of the majority. Why not simply leave? Given current (and probably future) sentiments, it seems a mutually satisfactory course. They'd get rid of an annoying, pointy-headed and sin-drenched thorn in their sides; we'd get to return to actually having our votes matter. They could get to work building the brave new theocracy they're so excited about, and we could return to enjoying the Enlightenment-based, pluralistic democracy we inherited. There's no reason the separation needs to be rancorous — hey, they don't even like us, and I'm sure folks in Iowa (see footnote) would be happy to stay right where they are rather than wasting time re-educating New Yorkers. What's really to be lost? The economy is global now anyway. True, most of their states are receiver states under the current arrangement — they get more money out of federal coffers than they put in — but given their feelings about federal government, that has to keep them awake at night with rage. This could be their opportunity to reform. And it could be our opportunity to stop subsidizing folks who hate us and who hate big, subsidizing government. As for daily business, we could negotiate highly favorable trade agreements, liberal (uh, sorry — generous) border crossings, excellent diplomatic terms. The northeast would become like a second, more populous Canada, with an even funnier accent. What's so bad about that? Personally, I'd love to figure out a way we could include a few of the Great Lakes states — Illinois in particular — as well as California and the Pacific Northwest, but that seems logistically impossible. They may have to go it on their own. (Though I'd point out that the current United States includes non-contiguous Hawaii and Alaska.)
Who knows? In this freshly-formed republic, Giuliani might actually have a shot.
Food, as they say, for thought. In the meantime, what to do? I myself intend to take a page form the conservatives' handbook. I intend to pause, take a look around, and draw comfort from the culture that surrounds me. Call it New York, call it the northeast; it is a complete culture, diverse and vibrant, shuffling and scuffling. It absorbs the world, relishes it, gives it back. It has more than a few irrational moments, but at its core it is, as the United States was, a child of the Enlightenment: humanist, rational, pluralistic. It is a place of pragmatism and compromise. And rather than study the darkness that lies beyond it, detesting, I intend to immerse myself in it. I intend to celebrate it, and sustain it, and to let it sustain me. America may be busy redefining itself, but the idea of America has never been so fully expressed as it has been — and is — right here. And I love the idea of America.
* Speaking of the Republican convention: now there was an opportunity to learn about arrogance, self-righteousness, and elitism. Here's just one juicily instructive nugget: the Times reported on a man standing in line outside Madison Square Garden, where protesters had gathered with chants and signs. The man was a delegate from Iowa. "What they need here in New York," he said, "is some people from Iowa to come here and teach them what life's all about."
Maybe he wasn't aware of the vast percentage of New Yorkers who came here, in fact, from places like Iowa — to escape. And yes, they do teach us what life is all about — as do the people from Ecudaor, Somalia, Jamaica, Italy, Uzbekistan, North Dakota, Laos and South Orange. But we sure are grateful for the thought.
The only part of the country that might have taken harder shots than the northeast is northern California. That same Times article reported on another Republican guest who, upon his arrival, exclaimed, "It looks like New York has been taken over by San Franciscans." Now what could that possibly be code for?
So many depraved cities, so few Iowans with time to spare ...
It's customary in the aftermath of battles like this one — protracted, vicious, winner-take-all — for everyone to issue calls for fresh unity. For the defeated, it's the last gasp of influence, a chance to blare, as foot number 2 slides toward the grave, a reminder of what might have been and what might yet be someday. Play nice, it says to the other side, lest the shoe migrate — as it usually does — to the other foot. It's also a chance — a last chance, most probably — to project magnanimity on the grand stage. Such moments are history, after all. We want to be remembered well when we're gone.
For the victor it's simpler, and less costly: a demonstration of good sportsmanship before the raping and pillaging commence.
Kerry and Bush played by these rules on Wednesday, tossing out calls for the burying of hatchets, the mending of fences, other newer-age variants of same. Bush even went so far as to promise to earn the trust of his opponent's supporters. Once again, one has to question his connection to reality. It's a little like an abusive spouse knocking on the door on the sober morning after, pleading for one last chance. The smart money says we'll get hit again.
Still, it's a swell thought. And it's not wrong, at least in spirit: though it was difficult to remember on Wednesday, the country is evenly divided, two almost-halves split by little more than a margin of error. Kerry got 48% of the popular vote to Bush's 51%, and the election really did come down to fewer than 150,000 votes in Ohio. Progressives huddling in near-suicidal disbelief beneath the heavy dark shadow of four more years of Bush-Cheney — plus Republican control of every major branch of government by ever-wider margins — might be forgiven for seeing it otherwise. Nonetheless, it's a fact.
And yet. And yet. It's all just a little too facile. The last eight months have been bitter. And the bitterness has not felt incidental. For Rove it may have been no more than a tactic. (For Rove, everything may be no more than a tactic, except the win itself. Who knows what really drives this man — what he really thinks, really is, in his heart of hearts, if he has one — beyond the all-engulfing need to win.) But for the footsoldiers on each side there seems little question. The divisions were heartfelt. They were profound, material. It may be they cannot be bridged.
The right wing is fond, especially in the mocking aftermath, of telling the left that they "just don't get it." They're not wrong. We don't. I certainly don't. But then again, neither do they. Let me offer the following exchange. It took place on Wednesday morning just after reports of Kerry's call to Bush to concede, on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, between a guest — Ruben Navarrette of the Dallas Morning News — and a caller, Kathy, from Stamford CT:
Kathy: ... More depressing is the previous caller, who talked about "moral values" and then said, "We don't want homosexuals to get married, we don't want affirmative action" and all those things. If by "moral values" those people mean "we hate everybody who's not like us," then I'd say this country is well on its way to going to hell in a handbasket. If "moral values" meant good things, and taking care of people, and worrying about people who have no homes, no food, no health care, no jobs, then I'd say, "Okay, I'll go with you guys. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but I'll get on your moral value wagon." But every person I know — and that guy was just like one of them — who talks about "moral values," it's a nice code word to mean "I hate this group, I hate that group." And we are increasingly becoming a country of people who hate each other. And that's how the Republicans ran the campaign against Kerry: they tried to demonize him.
Ruben Navarrette: Hey, I don't want to make a joke of it, but I hate callers like that. I hate comments like that. I think that the problem, and the first caller ... brought up this point, that somehow if you come out against gay marriage — I happen to be in favor of gay marriage; I'm an exception maybe in some Republican ranks and some Bush supporters' ranks — but if you come out somehow against gay marriage, you're a homophobe. I think that the left, the elitist left has made a terrible mistake. They come off as arrogant, self-centered; they have an air of moral superiority about them, and they throw around words like "hate." Everybody's a hate-monger. "You hate people, I love people." That's just not the way you win elections.
Kathy: Talking about self-centered. I'm talking about voting — I live in Connecticut. I have plenty of money. But I try to vote in candidates who would vote in health care, and housing, and food. We have empty food banks in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Now that to me is not being self-centered. My food pantry is full. But I'm worried about people who aren't going to have enough money to live through the winter.
RN: It's self-centered if callers like that don't recognize that there's a person in Arkansas or in Mississippi or in Texas who doesn't live in Connecticut and who doesn't have a lot of money but does have a perspective on this presidency and they're entitled to their opinion. And they need not be called a "hater" for it.
Let's note a couple of things about this back-and-forth. Kathy makes an inarticulate but heartfelt attempt to lay competing claim to the high ground of "moral values"; she doesn't put it quite like this, maybe because she's not quite aware it's what she's doing. That's symptomatic of the left in general. We're so suspicious of words like "moral" that we're afraid to acknowledge that we have them. Beheath the clumsy phrasing, Kathy's point is that there is a value system there, and it's strong, and it doesn't waver.
Navarrette calls Kathy arrogant and self-centered; he suggests she's somehow squelching, with her big elitist Connecticut toe, the opinions of those who — what? — object, let's say, to gay marriage. He's pissed that she's calling such folk homophobes. Never mind, for now, that she didn't. First question: if "objection" to gay marriage does not spring from homophobia, then from what, exactly, does it spring? Navarrette can't answer this, because as he's quick to point out he doesn't object. (One would like to hear him explain why not.) But it seems to me you can't have it both ways. Either you think there's something wrong with being gay, and it "upsets" you to see gayness express itself in a state-sanctioned union (John Kerry, by the way, did not support gay marriage either, but he did support civil unions — meaning that those who voted for Bush based on this issue must have objected to more than the application of "marriage" itself: they must have objected to state sanction of gay relationships altogether, mustn't they? or else Kerry's position would have been sufficient) — either you think there's something wrong with it, and you don't want it sanctioned, or you don't think there's anything wrong with it, in which case you don't give a damn. And if you think there's something wrong with being gay, you're a homophobe. That's just how definitions work. As Navarrette himself implied earlier in the show, if you believe a thing, you might as well say it, and you might as well stand up for it consistently. Does that make such people "haters"? I don't know. Perhaps homophobia isn't always hate, or always exactly; maybe it's fear. Or maybe it's just a queasy discomfort rising from a hidden swamp of fear, or hate, or both. (One thing's certain: it involves an excessive interest in what other adults do behind closed doors.) Either way, why would the guy in Arkansas or Mississippi or Texas object to being called a homophobe if he really thinks gayness is wrong? I understand why Navarrette objects — he doesn't think it's wrong; he's not a homophobe. But that other guy, the one who disagrees with both Navarrette and Kathy: why wouldn't he wear a t-shirt with "PROUD HOMOPHOBE" scrawled across the chest, if it's really such a moral issue to him, such a question, in the end, of principle? Why deny, I mean, a conviction you're not ashamed of?
Lastly, who's really the arrogant elitist in this picture? Who's really exuding the "air of moral superiority"? Did I miss the part of the story in which Kathy travelled down to Arkansas, or Mississippi, or Texas, and found this guy and put a gun to his head, dragged him out of the house and down to city hall, forced him to marry some burly stud from up the block? Because if she did that, I'd agree: no question, Kathy's attempting to deny that poor soul his opinion on gay marriage. But it seems to me Kathy's position is precisely the opposite. It seems to me Kathy's not trying to mandate gay marriage, but only to permit it to those who choose. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas is completely free, in Kathy's universe, to make his own decision about whether or not to engage in gay marriage, even whether or not to like gay marriage, or think it's a good — a moral — idea. Which is to say Kathy's not imposing values on anyone, with one exception: the value of pluralism. And when you think about it, pluralism, as a value, is rather anti-elitist by nature and by history. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas, on the other hand: it's hard to suggest he's not legislating morality. If anyone's demonstrating an "air of moral superiority," it's the guy convinced he knows what's best for all of us, and trying to pass a law to back it up. And more important for conservatives, it's the guy using government to suppress the expression of opinion, and feelings, and values. Because constitutional amendments banning gay marriage employ the state to stop consenting adults from undertaking a wholly private negotiation that has no material impact whatsoever on others. Navarrette's man: he knows right from wrong, for us all. If that's not arrogant, I'm not sure what is.
It's hard to see where the common ground might be, harder still to see the incentive for hunting it. And really, this applies to both sides. Conservatives are in charge now; they don't have to listen. For three years they've steeped themselves in the rhetoric of nonnegotiation: you're either with us or against us. Given this, someone who doesn't agree with them might be forgiven for interpreting calls to work together as calls to come over to their side or to get, once and for all, out of the way. Unable to bring himself in line, a person who does not agree might see little point in "working together," even symbolically; and he might focus instead on honing his opposition. He might reasonably assume that the next four years will be an even fouler train wreck than the last, and that a great many of his fellow citizens have seen to it that he has few options remaining by way of mitigation.
The day after the concession/victory speech working-together double-whammy, Bush gave a news conference in which he said more or less what henchmen Rove, Cheney, and Andy Card, among others, had been saying since early Wednesday morning: we're in charge now, full steam ahead. It was a preview. Every time a reporter dared ask a multi-point question, Bush tossed barbed jests about how they hadn't been "listening to the American people," who had, he implied, now given him license to do what he'd already been doing anyway, which was whatever he damn well pleased — including not answer multi-point questions. The dynasty is complete as far as they're concerned, and Bush has already been quoted describing, at pre-election fundraisers, the rush they'll embark on to change political life as we know it before he starts, to use his own words, "quacking like a duck." So much for reaching across the aisle.
Hendrick Hertzberg, political editor for The New Yorker and one of the authors of its unprecedented endorsement this year of John Kerry, described the "coldness" of the distance between the two Americas, and called it unlike anything he's felt in his lifetime — different even, he said, from the '60s, and worse. The alienation is profound. It is of course more than political: it is deeply cultural, deeply personal. As one friend put it, "it's like discovering a member of your family is a serial murderer." Perhaps it's a sign of the atomization of our society that no sense of shared history survives it, no understanding of common identity, purpose or goals. This may be especially true in the northeast. Much has been written about the electoral college and its distortion of our campaign process — all energies, all philosophies directed at a small sliver of voters in the middle west — but none of it captures the feeling we have here that this campaign had little to do with us. Certainly, northeasterners voted in tremendous numbers. And passions here ran high before, during, and after the race. But for the most part our concerns were not inscribed on the map, and except for the Republican convention — during which we were invaded by strangers who, though personable enough, either hate us for being sin-infested devil-worshippers or view our city as a theme park through which they might pass like one of the "lands" at Epcot, all the while pimping us, willingly or not, as a symbol of the war they're so enamored of and that will, we can rest assured, never be brought home to them (though it already has and may well again be brought home to us) — aside from this, we played no role in the proceedings.* One side took our votes for granted, the other dismissed them. In a very real sense, it was not our election. And it is not our government that results.
I think it's fair to say, too, that this alienation is exacerbated by an intense region-bashing that was central to the campaign. By debate number three, Bush was spitting the words Massachusetts liberal at Kerry like a schoolyard epithet, and the implication went broader and deeper. You can hear it in Navarrette's response to Kathy. Whether it's the northeastern elite or Massachusetts liberals, they mean us, and they're not being complimentary. I'm sure some of their best friends are from up here, but that didn't stop them from publicly using the part of this nation we live, work, love and, once in a while, play in as a personal and political insult. We seem to be the boogeyman invoked in middle and southern states to frighten wayward kids, and they don't seem to mind admitting it. Can you imagine the fervor if Kerry had talked about Texas rednecks or Okies or South Carolinian white supremacists? He'd've been accused of fomenting civil war. Yet it's common practice for Bush & co. to employ — and appeal to — similar sentiments, and to my knowledge no one's ever seriously called them on it.
The general impression now — my impression — is that no one remotely connected to the northeast will be elected, ever. Even Rudy "Rambo" Giuliani may be too secular, too tainted by all those years of doing business with the pencil-necked northeastern elite to pass muster in the heartland; and you can forget altogether about democrats. We will thus be governed for the forseeable future by people who have no connection to our region, may even openly disdain it, and who don't need to — and won't — address us in any significant way during campaigns. Why wouldn't we feel disconnected from the process?
A topic that's come up repeatedly in the aftermath of the election (and more than a few times before it) is northeastern secession. Most people aren't serious when they offer this, but I'm beginning to think it's worth consideration. A stunning thought, I know. But ask yourself: why not? It seems there are fundamental differences in social philosophy. It seems those differences are growing — we're diverging rather than coming together, and there's increased intransigence on each side. And it seems that we in the northeast are precluded, structurally and by prejudice, from a base of power sufficient to compel negotiation. We're facing deTocqueville's tyranny of the majority. Why not simply leave? Given current (and probably future) sentiments, it seems a mutually satisfactory course. They'd get rid of an annoying, pointy-headed and sin-drenched thorn in their sides; we'd get to return to actually having our votes matter. They could get to work building the brave new theocracy they're so excited about, and we could return to enjoying the Enlightenment-based, pluralistic democracy we inherited. There's no reason the separation needs to be rancorous — hey, they don't even like us, and I'm sure folks in Iowa (see footnote) would be happy to stay right where they are rather than wasting time re-educating New Yorkers. What's really to be lost? The economy is global now anyway. True, most of their states are receiver states under the current arrangement — they get more money out of federal coffers than they put in — but given their feelings about federal government, that has to keep them awake at night with rage. This could be their opportunity to reform. And it could be our opportunity to stop subsidizing folks who hate us and who hate big, subsidizing government. As for daily business, we could negotiate highly favorable trade agreements, liberal (uh, sorry — generous) border crossings, excellent diplomatic terms. The northeast would become like a second, more populous Canada, with an even funnier accent. What's so bad about that? Personally, I'd love to figure out a way we could include a few of the Great Lakes states — Illinois in particular — as well as California and the Pacific Northwest, but that seems logistically impossible. They may have to go it on their own. (Though I'd point out that the current United States includes non-contiguous Hawaii and Alaska.)
Who knows? In this freshly-formed republic, Giuliani might actually have a shot.
Food, as they say, for thought. In the meantime, what to do? I myself intend to take a page form the conservatives' handbook. I intend to pause, take a look around, and draw comfort from the culture that surrounds me. Call it New York, call it the northeast; it is a complete culture, diverse and vibrant, shuffling and scuffling. It absorbs the world, relishes it, gives it back. It has more than a few irrational moments, but at its core it is, as the United States was, a child of the Enlightenment: humanist, rational, pluralistic. It is a place of pragmatism and compromise. And rather than study the darkness that lies beyond it, detesting, I intend to immerse myself in it. I intend to celebrate it, and sustain it, and to let it sustain me. America may be busy redefining itself, but the idea of America has never been so fully expressed as it has been — and is — right here. And I love the idea of America.
* Speaking of the Republican convention: now there was an opportunity to learn about arrogance, self-righteousness, and elitism. Here's just one juicily instructive nugget: the Times reported on a man standing in line outside Madison Square Garden, where protesters had gathered with chants and signs. The man was a delegate from Iowa. "What they need here in New York," he said, "is some people from Iowa to come here and teach them what life's all about."
Maybe he wasn't aware of the vast percentage of New Yorkers who came here, in fact, from places like Iowa — to escape. And yes, they do teach us what life is all about — as do the people from Ecudaor, Somalia, Jamaica, Italy, Uzbekistan, North Dakota, Laos and South Orange. But we sure are grateful for the thought.
The only part of the country that might have taken harder shots than the northeast is northern California. That same Times article reported on another Republican guest who, upon his arrival, exclaimed, "It looks like New York has been taken over by San Franciscans." Now what could that possibly be code for?
So many depraved cities, so few Iowans with time to spare ...
November 02, 2004
Everything Must Go
Reports again of trouble in southern Florida, prompting hard thoughts of a potential firesale of the entire state to Cuba. Think of it more along the lines of a merger; the terms could be simple: Castro steps down. They'd get millions of relatively prosperous lost sons, prime real estate, lucrative theme parks, and an aging but by and large wealthy bunch of white folks that our health care system can't support anyway. We'd get rid of Castro, then get a good night's sleep. And oh, yeah: as a bonus to us, they keep Jeb Bush.
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