Stumble of the Week

3^rd Runner-Up: Mitt Romney stumbled over the poor . . . but his donors have forgiven him. 2^nd Runner-Up: Newt Gingrich watched Romney seize the coveted Trump endorsement and Rick Santorum land Tom Tancredo . . . which left Newt only half the wacko ex-candidates: Herman Cain and Rick Perry. No word yet on Michelle Bachmann.

1st Runner-Up: The current Mrs. Gingrich was reportedly spotted in public with a hair out of place and an expression on her face . . . information as yet unconfirmed, so probably just a rumor.

This Week’s Winner: Me. I went to move my car yesterday, and it wasn’t there. Unlike the incident with my computer (“Aging”), I did not lose my car. I knew exactly where I had left it . . . although I did frantically search a 10-block radius just to make sure. It turns out I had some minor confusion about the day of the week, and the car had been towed the day before I thought I’d parked it.

So I walked 70 blocks to Pier 76, where they tow misparked cars, following New York’s wonderful westside park system that seeks to reconnect city dwellers with their river. At Pier 76 I didn’t feel so alone or dumb, as I joined in line:

• a sign painter who had been waiting for five hours because they couldn’t find his truck;
• a contractor on a job in midtown whose truck had been towed from exactly the same spot for the second day in a row; and
• a UPS guy in his brown suit, whose truck loaded with packages had been towed . . . while he was making a delivery.

When I was finally escorted to my car, there was a parking ticket on the windshield.

Safety Net

Several of you reminded me that some people sleep on the subway because that is the only place they can sleep. Last evening a man on a packed uptown train emitted a stench that literally cleared the back third of the car.

And Mitt Romney said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

I know there is a connection here.

But I don’t think it’s the obvious one that everybody pounced on. Mitt Romney doesn’t seem any more out of touch with the world of struggling people than any of the other candidates who ride around in big buses, insulated by aides, and speak in platitudes to hand-picked crowds. Maybe they would have developed more empathy for the dispossessed if they had done a stint as community organizers.

Still, no amount of backpedaling, clarifications and “you-took-me-out-of-contexts” can justify Romney’s remark because:

1. The “safety net” is the essence of the welfare state that is under assault by all the GOP candidates. To use its current existence to dismiss the plight of the very poor is hypocrisy.
2. The idea that the safety net is adequate (in fairness, Romney said he’d fix it) seems a little callous. As the stinking man made clear, the subway provides sleeping places, not bathing facilities . . . which may explain why the reaction to him was startlingly sympathetic.
3. Polls show that most Americans are incensed at the rich and the poor. But the notion that politicians should divide the country into those they care about and those they don’t – whether it’s Romney’s 90-95% or Rove’s 50% +1 – contradicts the duty of a president to bring us all together.

Sleeping on Subways

Not everyone sleeps on the subway. Many people stare at those extensions of their hands with the ubiquitous little screens – although no more than the population at large. Quite a few read books, and a surprising number appear to be doing homework or cramming for exams. Still, it is remarkable how many people are sleeping – and the positions in which they seem able to do so. They sleep standing up and sitting down, leaning against a pole or simply propped up in the crowd. They sleep with their heads flung forward, pushed back, straight up or on the shoulder next to them. They sleep clutching their handbags. I live pretty far uptown, and if I get on the subway in the morning, the sleepers are already on board; and when I ride back in the evening, the sleepers keep on going after I get off.

Sometimes I ask myself why these people are so tired. I mean, being on food stamps can’t be that exhausting. And these folks are obviously on food stamps because they look exactly like the people whose lives Rick Santorum said he didn’t want to make “better by giving them somebody else's money." And they are surely the people Newt Gingrich said must learn to “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

So why do I think that maybe these people are riding from someplace they can afford to live to the best – and maybe the only – job they can find?  And they are tired.

Walking

I am an inveterate walker. When I am in the country I walk nowhere in particular – like Henry Thoreau, who wrote of “sauntering,” a word derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre – to the holy land.” The land I walk across is holy to me, but it is also mostly private property. No one has yet thrown me off, however, so I walk where I please. I tread carefully, mindful of others’ privacy and of the fact that I am a visitor in every sense of the word. I walk in the clouds, lost in my surroundings and in my own head. In the city, where I walk more often now, it is different. The streets are alive with people and filled at all hours with sounds. The tabloids scream out their headlines (“Dumped” “Thighs the Limit! “Tom Talks Trash”). Here I don’t saunter; I am going somewhere. I am seeking vitality not serenity. “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, and our cities have always seemed the foster children of America’s landscape, places for those who don’t really belong.

But as someone who just walks around, I believe that America needs both the energy of the city and the reflective peace of the wild.

Back to the Future?

While I know little about China, the press it has received over the last few weeks has fascinated me. There seem to be three Chinas:

• China, the model to emulate
• China, the competitor to fear
• China, the human and environmental tragedy

Clearly, the three Chinas are interconnected, since they are all the same country. The question for me is: how dependent are the first two on the foundation of the third?

Document3

Photos by Lu Guang

The descriptions of China remind me of 19^th-century America, when the nation underwent enormous growth based on technological and financial innovation, the exploitation of natural resources and the abuse of human labor. It was a time characterized by the creation of massive wealth, with unprecedented chasms between rich and poor, and with almost no regulatory protection for workers, consumers, children or the environment. The period experienced harsh labor violence from Homestead to Cripple Creek. In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court implicitly recognized the personhood of corporations in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and a decade later in Plessy v Ferguson, the court endorsed the Jim Crow South. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan burned 146 young seamstresses to death.

Our economic prosperity is also built on the foundation of that era, but it is hard to imagine returning to such unregulated times – as some of our aspiring leaders are urging us to do.

Stumble of the Week

January 27, 2012 Stumble of the Week Last week we focused on the stumbler. This week we look at the stumbling block:

4^th Runner-Up: Switzerland: Its banks just can’t keep secrets any more, as Mitt Romney, whose omission of the account from his financial disclosure form was called a “minor technical” issue by his staff, was outed on his tax returns.

3^rd Runner-Up: Margaritas: It turns out that the reason Pat Sajak seemed to stumble through entire episodes of “Wheel of Fortune” was that he and Vanna White had had “two or three or six” of those guys during the break. Consequently, they had “trouble recognizing the alphabet.”

2^nd Runner-Up: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have become the clubs with which Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney beat each other up. “You tooted their horn.” “You own their stocks.” “You do too.” Lost in the campaign narcissism are the millions of homeowners and investors who continue to suffer deeply over the actions of the mortgage twins.

1^st Runner-Up: Milk: Not only did the president’s sophisticated joke go right over the heads of Congress (particularly the two men sitting behind him with glazed eyes), but it enraged members of the environmental community who pointed out that spilled milk is no joke. These days everything is a serious matter, so perhaps we need to lighten up a little.

This Week’s Winner: The Moon: Apparently when Alan Shepard hit golf balls there 40 years ago, it awakened in a young Newt Gingrich the possibility that the moon could become, not just a gated colony of 13,000 Americans, but our 51^st state. He’s aiming for 2020, the year scientists believe global warming will become irreversible down here (see Jan. 17 blog, “2020”).

Anger and Hope

In the fall of 2008 I, and a lot of other people, volunteered for the Obama campaign. I spent many evenings in Philadelphia going door to door in both white neighborhoods and black (for in Philadelphia, as in every city in America, those distinctions still define most neighborhoods). In the latter, some of which I would have feared to enter in other times, I was welcomed with jubilation; in the former, there was less joy but the work seemed more important – for after seven years of a needless and failed war, the collapse of the housing and financial markets, and the worst recession in 70 years, what was driving this campaign was hope – people joining together across racial, ethnic, economic and political boundaries to rebuild America. But there remains a lot of anger in this country – much of it legitimate – and the politics of anger has too often proved stronger than the politics of hope. It enabled the Know Nothing party to take every state office in Massachusetts in 1854; it was the foundation of Nixon’s southern strategy in 1972; and it delivered South Carolina to Newt Gingrich last week. There is a great deal of pressure on Barack Obama to play to that anger, but to do so would betray those he brought together four years ago. Hope is not a sign of weakness, nor anger a sign of strength, and no one can play the anger card like the current group in Congress. If this election is about anger, they win. If it is about hope, we do.

State of the Union

As an army veteran (European front), I get nervous when someone uses the military as the beacon for us to follow. So when the president said last night that “this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world,” I thought, he needs to get out more. Leading off his speech with military and foreign affairs, however, was a brilliant tactical maneuver, for it caught the “it’s-the-economy-stupid” people by off guard and went virtually unnoticed by the pundits. And it allowed Obama to frame the state of the union around his most spectacular moment – the killing of Bin Laden – and to play to the country’s infatuation with the military. Other institutions have let us down, he said, let’s follow the military’s example. Not, I hope, of paying $640 for a toilet seat or urinating on dead Afghans. With his paean to the Hoover Dam, praise of fracking, and insistence that “we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” Obama stepped firmly into the past at a time when we desperately need a new vision of environmental justice. And his efforts for social justice brought tepid applause for tax fairness and none for a millionaire’s tax.

Then came Mitch Daniels. Aside from making Bobby Jindal’s 2011 performance look animated, his pedestrian rebuttal contained startling Republican praise for “these proud programs” of social security and Medicare, the usual Europe bashing, and such soaring rhetoric as: “the problems are simply mathematical, and the answers purely practical.”

Good enough for William Kristol, who is leading the “Draft Daniels” movement with an enthusiasm he hasn’t shown since the invasion of Iraq.

New York, No Bikes, 'Nough Said

President Palin

One thing seems clear from Saturday’s South Carolina primary: Republican voters don’t like any of their candidates very much. It’s hard to disagree. In the last few months, not one of the current candidates has offered a new idea or an original thought. Oh, some have shifted position slightly to pick up ever-angrier and more conservative voters, but mostly they have shouted louder, spent more, and double-downed on meanness. This is now all about them, not us. But don’t we know enough about them already? Rick Santorum has staked out his turf as the most rigid social conservative since Torquemada. But since he also lost his Pennsylvania senate seat by a 2-1 margin, electability would seem to be an issue. For months Mitt Romney has moved painfully to the right on social issues – only to get beaten up for being a successful businessman with an aversion to paying taxes. Isn’t that the very model of a modern-day Republican? Newt Gingrich is just shameless. Battered by Romney’s superPAC in Iowa, he came back with one of his own in South Carolina and headed straight for the gutter . . . where he thrived. Ron Paul, it seems to me, has been the most thoughtful candidate, his positions the most interesting. They are also nutty.

The process itself has become repellent. It has stripped people who are vying to become our next president of every shred of their dignity. How low can we go? Enter Sarah Palin.

Stumble of the Week

4^th Runner-Up: Big Oil, although almost everyone seems to think Obama’s veto of the Keystone pipeline killed only the location, not the plan. 3^rd Runner-Up: Newt Gingrich, whose former wife, Marianne, called him morally unfit to be president (although that seems to have sent him surging in the South Carolina polls).

2^nd Runner-Up: Rick Perry, who stumbled from front-runner to dropout in near-record time. Only Herman Cain got there quicker, and he hadn’t fallen nearly as far or fast as Perry, who had 2% of the South Carolina vote when he quit. Will he get a cabinet offer? Since Cain dropped out first and dibsied Defense, Perry may have to settle for the Department of . . . um . . . you know.

1^st Runner-Up: Mitt Romney, who did not have a good week. First there were the comparisons with his father who released 12 years of tax returns in 1968. Then there was the tax rate itself, which was “probably closer to the 15% rate than anything.” I am not sure what that means, except it is undoubtedly closer to 15% than my rate. Then came the Cayman Islands. And finally, it turns out he lost Iowa. But I like how he counts: his initial six-vote victory over Rick Santorum was a landslide; his 34-vote loss “a virtual tie.”

This Week’s Winner: Francesco Schettino, who after running the Costa Concordia aground off the Tuscan coast, claims that he “tripped” . . . directly into a lifeboat, where he was stuck for an hour and unable to get back aboard his sinking ship. He faces potential charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship.

The Bet

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and the next time I’m in one perhaps I’ll convert. In the meantime, though, I do wonder about these proselytizing efforts that are based on Pascal’s Wager. Since we can’t know if God exists, Pascal wrote, we have to bet one way or the other . . . but you can make that bet a sure thing: if God doesn’t exist and you bet on Him, you lose nothing; if He does and you bet against Him, you will be paying for a long, long time. “Wager, then, without hesitation that He is” . . . whether you really believe it or not. Heads you win, tails you don’t lose. I’m betting that if God exists, he can see through that. But I also know that eternity lasts forever, which is a frightening thought. Still, as I look at a world in which God does not seem to be paying much attention or perhaps he just doesn’t care, I don’t want to be diverted by what may happen next. All I know is that I am here, now, and I want to make some small contribution.

We are all seeking something . . .a god that will shed meaning not just on our own lives, but on life itself. The god I am looking for is one who would make a world in which the only beings living in foxholes are foxes. I think the only god that can do that is us.

Correction: Yesterday’s entry inadvertently turned ex-candidate Huntsman into a four-letter word. His first name is Jon. The h is absent, not silent. I apologize for the error.

2020

Notwithstanding the fact that he was only the second-best looking Mormon in the race and was trailing even Stephen Colbert in the South Carolina polls, Jon Huntsman’s decision to drop out of the Republican primary is largely due to the reaction to his August tweet: "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." The second sentence makes clear that he knew what was coming, and that perhaps it was crazy to go public with such bizarre beliefs. But do we really want a president who does not believe in evolution and maintains that global warming is a hoax? So, what does the probable candidate say on the matter? Virtually nothing. Only three issues appear on Mitt Romney’s website: Jobs, Healthcare and Foreign Policy. But scroll down under Jobs, and you come to this: “Amend Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its purview.” Short-term economic growth once again trumps long-term environmental health.

An old friend of mine, a businessman who has been deeply involved in the issue, told me recently that the scientific consensus is zeroing in on 2020 as the critical year in global climate efforts. “After 2020,” he said, “it’s game over.”

In 2020 my granddaughter, Calliope, will be 10 years old.

King

In the winter of 1963, at a small boarding school for boys in rural Massachusetts, a visitor came for the weekend. He gave a talk on Friday evening, spent Saturday in class and at meals with the students, and preached on Sunday in the majestic stone chapel that dominates the campus. He started slowly, almost quietly, before falling into the rhythms and phrasing of his own Baptist tradition. He ignored whatever notes he had and became a vessel for his rich stentorian voice, which reverberated off the chapel walls and summoned the 200 boys to help build a just society. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had never heard anything like that sermon. There had been a handful of black students at the school since the early 1950s, which was unusual in itself, for most of us had grown up in a world in which Stepin Fetchit and Rastus were not so much vicious stereotypes as insidiously benign jokes. They were how we were taught to view a people about whose lives we knew nothing. A lot happened in 1963. King led the March on Washington that summer. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. Some say that marked the end of the dream. But I don’t think so. You can tell a lot about where people stand today by how they remember the 1960s. To me it was a time of hope and courage, of stirring calls to join hands across deep divides. A lot of people have tried to kill the dream and those who espouse it. They may yet succeed. But I believe that King’s vision, which calls us back to Lincoln’s vision at Gettysburg and Jefferson’s in Philadelphia, is the American Dream we must revive.

Aging

I was planning to write about Christy Whitman’s comment that if legislation irritates both extremes, it’s probably a good bill. That will have to wait because my computer disappeared at the airport. I got to the gate with plenty of time to write, took the computer out of my backpack, put it down, and got briefly distracted. Ready to work, I went to get my computer . . . It wasn’t in the pack. I looked all around. No computer. I remembered putting it in the tray at security, but after that. . . ? My entire professional life is on that computer, so I raced back to security. They looked high and low. No computer. Now they’re concerned because somewhere in the airport is a black box that someone might mistake for a bomb. I’m concerned because whoever stole it now has access to my bank account. I report it to the police, who look at me skeptically. “How old are you?” one asks. “Sixty-six,” I reply, suddenly not quite sure. Then it dawned on me: they think I’m senile. “What’s your phone number?” I pause – just briefly – is the prefix 563 or 963? They smile. I fill out a report and return to the gate, where boarding is almost complete, but I give it one more shot . . . and under the seat, upside down, blending in with the carpet, is my Mac. I’m relieved, of course, but I worry about these things.

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.