The Populists

I once ran for Congress, and I know how easy it is to get sucked into twisting something your opponent says to suit your needs. Like Newt Gingrich did when he, of all people, hammered Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who “likes to fire people.” It didn’t work, probably because we already knew that, and so Romney rolled to his second straight primary victory with 39% of the vote. Ironically, I got 39% in 1996 . . . and lost by a landslide. But Romney is claiming yesterday’s margin – plus his eight-vote Iowa victory – as a presidential mandate. In second place was Ron Paul who, despite running in a state whose motto (“Live Free or Die”) could be taken from his campaign literature, finished 40,000 votes behind. He was, though, the only candidate to defend Romney’s firing quote, saying that his critics “are either just demagoguing or they don’t have the vaguest idea how the market works.” Your choice.

Gingrich and Rick Santorum finished in a dead heat, with 9% apiece, which together just edged out John Huntsman’s total. Finally, Rick Perry barely beat newcomer Buddy Roemer, who finished third in his last campaign for re-election as governor of Louisiana – behind David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Edwin Edwards, who later served almost 10 years in the federal penitentiary for racketeering.

But the quote of the campaign was Rick Santorum’s response to Obama’s stated desire to have every child go to college: “what elitist snobbery out of this man.”

These Black presidents are so out of touch.

Gladiators

I was listening to the New York football Giants on the car radio on Sunday afternoon, when Hakeem Nicks caught a short pass from Eli Manning and jigged and hurdled his way to a 72-yeard touchdown run. It sounded like a pretty spectacular play, and here is how color analyst Carl Banks described Nicks’ run: “He made the routine look exceptional.” “Heck,” I said. “In my day, I could make the routine look impossible.”

At 6’2”, 165 pounds with unimpressive muscles, I am rarely mistaken for a football player. But I was once, albeit a long time ago in a very small high school. I weighed 30 pounds more then – about the same as “Night Train” Lane and Johnny Unitas, who are in the Hall of Fame.

Like most Hall of Famers, I also had a concussion. I told the coach that I couldn’t remember the play from the huddle to the line of scrimmage, which clearly made me a liability to myself and to my teammates. So the coach sent me to the infirmary, where the recommended treatment for almost any ailment was an enema . . . which almost killed poor Stephen Pierce when he went in later that fall with appendicitis.

Like all football players, we thought of ourselves as gladiators who played through pain. But football was a game, and it was supposed to be fun. It’s not a game anymore – it is a very big business. It is also a way to keep the people entertained. It’s an old trick. As millions of modern-day Romans watch gladiators try to kill each other in the coliseums below, Tiberius must somewhere be very proud.

"Bipolar America"

That was the collective title of two reviews of three books in yesterday’s New York Times. All deal with the rightward shift of the Republican party and the destruction of its moderate wing. Michael Kinsley’s review of Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right asks: what causes so many working-class people to vote against their own interests? The same thing that always has, I thought: big money and the race card. But Timothy Noah’s review of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rattled my self-satisfied mind. Tea Partiers, it seems, want to do away with all entitlements . . . except their own. The reflexively oppose all new taxes . . . except those levied on other people. How unconscionably selfish, I thought, until I realized they weren’t so different from me. I know we need entitlement reform . . . but Medicare is the best health insurance policy I have ever had (of course, I’ve never been in Congress), and social security is a safety net. We need reform . . . but this was a promise. These are not isolated thoughts. As a committed environmentalist, I have reduced my footprint . . . but not quite to the point of inconvenience. I abhor what is happening in our inner cities . . . but I lock my car doors when I drive through them. I am not as self-sufficient as I think I am. I need more inconvenience . . . and to unlock the doors.

Hyprocrisy

It turns out that Rick Santorum, the self-proclaimed paragon of moral values, may have received a sweetheart mortgage from donors to his campaign. I write “may” because after Santorum lost his seat in a landslide to Bob Casey Jr., the Senate Ethics Commission dropped the inquiry. Why does it seem that the virtues our political leaders most loudly proclaim become the ones that take them down? Remember Gary Hart’s 1988 challenge to the press to “put a tail on me” two days before he was caught on a boat called Monkey Business with a model named Donna Rice? Apparently Herman Cain didn’t. Is political success simply another narcotic that alters your reality by surrounding you with people who tell you how great you are? Newt Gingrich’s personal peccadilloes are too well-documented to need rehashing, but his loud complaints about being steamrollered by Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC seem a bit hollow given his enthusiasm for the Citizens United decision that brought them to life. It wasn’t the court decision that did him in, Gingrich told MSNBC. It was Mitt Romney and “a bunch of millionaires getting together to run a negative campaign.” Romney, of course, denied any connection to his own SuperPAC . . . just as Ron Paul, the man of the people, denied any connection to The Ron Paul Political Report whose analysis of the Los Angeles riots concluded that “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks. . . .”

Santa

It is said that the embers were removed from the fire place in the Stamford, Connecticut, house that burned to the ground early Christmas morning because the three young girls worried that Santa Claus would not be able to come down the chimney. Every child has that thought, and yet Santa always comes. Except last week in Stamford, when those embers caused a searing, tragic fire that engulfed the house in minutes and snuffed out the lives of the three sisters and their grandparents. For a parent the death of a child is an unimaginable horror, one that defies the accepted order of the world and leaves a hole in your heart that can never be filled. You bring children into the world to give them life, to love them as you have never loved anyone before – without measure and without expectation – and to give your own life purpose and continuity. To lose them is to lose a part of yourself forever. Santa did come that Christmas. The girls’ grandfather, Lomer Johnson, spent his retirement playing Santa Claus to all kinds of children. It was, he said, the best job he had ever had. “If you want to talk about a good time,” he wrote, “try listening to and talking with kids at Christmas.” Mr. Johnson died on the roof, trying desperately to rescue his granddaughters.

The American Dream

It is harder for Americans to rise from poverty to prosperity than citizens of almost any other nation in the so-called first world, according to an article in today’s New York Times. Actually, scholars have debunked the “rags-to-riches” story for years, beginning with studies showing that Horatio Alger’s heroes rose not to great wealth but to middle-class respectability. The lesson of the stories was more about hewing to the corporate line than accumulating great wealth. Ragged Dick was not the last tycoon so much as the first organization man. And even though upward mobility might mean only a slightly better life for your children, the American Dream was that opportunity was there for all to seek. But now even that fluidity seems to be going in the wrong direction. Because the frailty of America’s safety net condemns the poor, and our current tax policies insulate the rich, we live in a society that looks ever more like a banana republic than the land of opportunity. America’s poor have become not just a separate class, but a distinct caste – especially in the cores of our cities, where crime, poverty and vast and chronic unemployment are both epidemic and ignored. And yet we continue to insist that our politicians demonstrate their reverence for an American Dream that has become a nightmare for so many.

Iowa

Cynicism dies hard after the Iowa caucuses, even though the press certainly seems to take them seriously. And so they become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – not in the sense that they accurately predict the ultimate Republican nominee (they don’t), but that they give an imprimatur to some candidates while turning the big losers into roadside litter. Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry could come back from their dismal showings, but it seems pretty unlikely. Maybe they just want to be vice president. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is seeking to turn his 8-vote victory over Rick Santorum into an indicator of his inevitability. I don’t think that less than a quarter of the 112,255 votes cast translates into a mandate for anything, but I do think Romney will be the candidate because everyone seems to think he is the one Republican who can beat Obama. But obviously he still doesn’t go down well with the hard right, and they are refusing to go down easily. Rick Santorum, who tells people over and over and over again, that he is the only candidate to have to visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties, moved in a few days from the far end of the debate podium to the new unRomney. He almost won, as he has been predicting for months. Ron Paul did, too, despite new disclosures about his unsettling past and unsavory fellow travelers. Newt Gingrich bore testimony to the power of well-funded, quasi-anonymous negative advertising, as Romney’s supporters spent millions bashing him from front-runner to also-ran. People complain about the coverage of the horse race instead of the issues, but the horse race is the only interesting thing about this primary. On to New Hampshire.

Her Whole Life

Today is the 33^rd birthday of our second child, known as little Joanie. She was born more than three months prematurely and weighed under a pound. She lived almost three days, finally giving up her fight for life on January 5^th. She lies now in London Grove cemetery, next to her grandparents and her cousin, Dallas, who died of SIDS in 1974. Joanie’s gravestone reads simply: “Joan Blaine, January 3-5, 1979, “God’s own, the earth’s and ours.” It is not our custom to bear our sadnesses in public, but I think it is also important to acknowledge a life that was lived to its fullest, however curtailed it was. Joanie never got out of an incubator, never drew a breath on her own, never probably knew where she was and why she was here. But she lived, and we rooted for her to live longer, although the odds were always prohibitive. When a child lives such a short time, it sometimes seems self-indulgent to talk as if the grief at her loss could compare with those who lose a child they have known far better and loved far longer. And so the tendency is to say nothing, to say, I have four children, knowing that I have five. In this I think the pro-life people have a point. Life is precious, and no one can judge when another’s life begins. But to make that belief a litmus test of political ideology is as shameful as to fail to recognize the sacredness of life – all life – itself.

Haiti

Haiti           In the lead book review in yesterday’s New York Times, Adam Hochschild reviewed Laurence Dubois’ Haiti: the Aftershocks of History. In 1804, after almost 15 years of horrific guerilla warfare against France, Britain, Spain and the new nation to its north, Haiti became the second republic in the New World – and the first black-led republic anywhere. Only the United States was older. Yet the comparisons end there. The U.S. embarked on a journey to become the richest and most powerful country in the world, while Haiti has remained the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, wracked by poverty and disease, ruled by a series of vicious dictators, victimized by its history of natural disasters. Hochschild’s reading of Dubois places the blame firmly on the conditions of Haiti’s birth: the long, terrible years of Caribbean slavery on the earth’s richest agricultural island, where thousands of slaves were worked literally to death; the destruction of an infrastructure on which to build a nation; and the continuous violence that prevented democracy from establishing itself on that fertile and bloody land. The review underscores the question of America’s role in the world, which has become a critical litmus test of today’s politics. Are we the beacon of freedom – our statue of liberty literally (or metaphorically for the growing number of nativists) welcoming those who seek a better life? Or is American imperialism a powerful force for evil – one that has supported Haiti’a most vicious dictators and put American corporate interests ahead of Haitian human rights? Increasingly, there seems no middle ground.