Maybe It’s Not the Economy

Much has been made – and rightly so – of the almost-40% drop in median family wealth in the United States in the last five years – from $126,400 to $77,300. The main reason was the collapse of the housing market. But the recession has taken its toll in other ways, particularly through high unemployment, much of it unrecorded but obvious to those who see growing numbers of homeless people begging on our city streets. The current election is being fought over two economic visions, as David Brooks described last Friday: the Democrats’ contention that the welfare state got hijacked by the ultra-rich and fairness needs to be reinstated vs. the Republicans’ argument that the welfare state is obsolete and needs to be replaced with something more dynamic that would create “an efficiency explosion.”

In 1972 some people from MIT published The Limits to Growth, which argued that spiraling economic and population growth would soon come up against the limits of a finite world. The thesis enjoyed a short day in the sun, not least because of the first great oil crisis that had people shooting each other waiting in lines at gas stations. Then oil prices dropped precipitously, and the world seemed limitless again.

But maybe the authors were right, and decades of relatively cheap oil obscured the enormous pressures we continue to put on our environment – creating feedback loops of resource extraction and population growth that we cannot sustain and cycles of hunger and poverty that we should not countenance.

Money

Money has been much in the news of late, particularly in Europe, where  the Greeks don’t have enough, which is bad, and the Germans worry that if the Greeks abandon the euro and inflate the drachma, they will have too much, which would be worse. Money is a medium of exchange that itself has no intrinsic worth – the paper of a ten-dollar bill is not worth $10. Backed in the past by precious metals, usually gold, the dollar’s value is now based solely on the assurance of one Rosie Rios, who happens to be the United States Treasurer, that it is “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” But money is also a commodity that is bought and sold, and while the government can say whatever it wants, the marketplace will determine its value.

Clearly, money has enabled humans to accumulate goods and wealth in ways we could not otherwise have done. But it has done so, I think, by making possible the concept of “never enough.” If we are hungry – and lucky enough to have food – we eat until we are sated. Likewise, we fill our other needs until we have enough. To go beyond that is to have an addiction.

It is different with money. Because we can’t get enough of it, we are driven relentlessly to get more. The result is that money has become the opposite of wealth, for it has caused us to extract the earth’s bounty and exploit its people in ways that diminish the value of both.

New Role for the Old

Our granddaughter, Calliope, will be going home today, having spent almost two weeks with us while her parents were in Alaska. We have fallen in love with this small person, who eats practically nothing, hears instructions selectively, and has more energy than we can bottle. Yet I was the last person who looked forward to grandfatherhood.  For one thing, I wasn't old enough. For another, I had thrown my life into raising my own children. I still do – and they are still my reason for being every bit as much as I am, literally, theirs.

So how could I possibly have the time, the energy, even the love for the next generation? I had the rest of my life to lead.

But I now see that my role is different. As a father, I was intent on my children – on loving them, on helping them grow, on protecting them from harm, on preparing them to go out into the world – ever conscious that my desire to protect them from the world might be a disadvantage in preparing them for the world.

It is Calliope’s parents’ role to prepare her for the world. Mine is to use whatever wisdom I have acquired and whatever energy I have left to prepare the world for her.

Maybe we have the cycle of life backwards. The young must navigate the world as they find it. It is up to us, who have been through that, to change the world, in whatever small ways we can, so it becomes a little closer to the kind of place we wanted it to be when we were young.

Stumble of the Week

As Egypt stumbles toward weekend elections, pressure is growing to postpone the vote until mid-November in the hope that Barack Obama might be looking for work. “Obama would make a great president for us,” said Darwishi Hussein, a lawyer sitting in Tahrir Square. “He has the qualifications: he was born in Africa and is a Muslim. And he has very good name recognition. There are lots of Husseins in Egypt”

“If you don’t want him, we very much need him,” said Geb Sawalhi, an unemployed musician. “He has experience running a country filled with politicians who revile each other. And now that our supreme court dissolved Parliament, he won’t have to deal with squabbling legislators.”

Speaking at a Rotary breakfast in Ohio, Mitt Romney said, “Barack Obama says he is an American, and I’ll take him at his word until Donald Trump proves otherwise.”

Reached at his sprawling gated ranch in Trump (formerly Arizona), Trump declared, “The Trumpettes are hot on the trail of the real birth certificate. It’s locked in a cave in Utah.

“You should see what is running around down here at night,” he added. “Obama is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The Obama campaign issued the following statement: “Enough is enough. Mitt Romney destroyed thousands of jobs at Bain Capital. This is one he won’t get his hands on. His policies are fine for the 1%, but even with our electoral college, 1% doesn’t get you elected president . . . at least not since 2000, when Clarence Thomas elected Bush.”

Conversation

The posts over the last couple of weeks have brought a good deal of response, which has been both challenging and gratifying. Much of it has focused on President Obama, and while it may not be representative of the national debate, it is the kind of thoughtful conversation this country should be having. Perhaps unsurprisingly, birthers and Tea Partiers do not seem to regularly follow this blog, and those who write or tell me of their current opposition to Obama are primarily disappointed supporters from four years ago. Republicans of the vanishing moderate breed, they welcomed the alternative of inclusiveness and moderation that Obama offered to eight years of Bush and Cheney’s nose-thumbing partisanship, ruinous wars and financial mismanagement. They were appalled at the emergence of Sarah Palin and what she seemed to signify for their party.

But they are pragmatists, not dreamers, and Obama has not lived up to their expectations, or even their hopes. They cite his poor administrative skills, saying that his lack of executive experience has made him unable to work the system. They think he dropped the ball on Simpson-Bowles.

While I think there is truth to these criticisms, I strongly believe that the vision Obama presented in 2008 remains the best path forward not just for America but for the world. But these are exactly the kinds of disagreements we need to have in this country – a conversation that is both measured and passionate, one that makes each side stronger by the very act of listening to what the other side says. It may not change our minds – and it should not change our principles – but it will surely help us to work together for the common good.

Calliope

I am the co-minder of our granddaughter, Calliope, while her parents are in Alaska. The original Calliope was the Greek muse of epic poetry, She was Homer’s muse almost 3000 years ago when he composed the first enduring works of Western literature. The current Calliope is almost 2. Sometimes when I am with our granddaughter, I think of the future and wonder about the world she will inherit from us. This morning I think of the long arc of history between the first Calliope and ours, and how, through all the immense upheavals and changes in that history, our urge to tell stories and pass them on, to try to make sense of the world and our role in it, of war and peace, of love and death, has persisted. It is our culture, our guide for understanding our past and for charting our future.

Every politician who has ever run for office has talked about making the world a better place for the generations to come. But their conception of the future is too often how much of it they can sacrifice to protect their next election. Long term? It took Odysseus 12 years to get home – the equivalent of six terms in the House.

The promise of Barack Obama, at least for me, was that we could have a longer and a larger view – one that bridged the old divides that threatened to destroy us: race, wealth and poverty, religion, environmental destruction. I believe we can get there. For Calliope’s sake, I know that we must.

Suicide

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” So opens “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus’ essay on the meaning of life in an absurd world, written as the Nazi atrocities had commenced in France.

Camus’ philosophical musings – which were born of the resistance movements in both France and Algeria – met the modern world head on last week when the Associated Press reported that suicides in Afghanistan now exceed combat deaths among American troops.

Part of the reason is that we are winding down the war: since January 1^st there have “only” been 124 combat deaths. By contrast, there have been 154 suicides, a number that has been rising since 2005.

The Pentagon and veterans groups give several reasons for the increase, one of the primary ones being the ongoing lack of compassion for soldiers who seek treatment for emotional stress. That stress is compounded by the traumas of multiple combat tours and family and financial problems back home.

War is the ultimate theater of the absurd. In it, young people are trained to kill – and taught to die – in defense of life . . . and then discarded. Their isolation is exacerbated in a professional military that is cut off from the people whom it is meant to serve. The old draft kept the army connected to those people, if only because it had to train so many who did not want to be there and because they asked the question that all commanders dread: why are we doing this?

Stumble of the Week

The Democrats. The last time there was a major recall election in this country, Gray Davis was sent packing from Sacramento and Arnold Schwartzneggar ended up governor of California. Then the housekeeper surfaced with the love child, and Maria Shriver filed for divorce. So before you push for a recall, you better have your ducks lined up, which the Democrats in Wisconsin did not. As a result, they suffered an embarrassing loss: Scott Walker won more handily than he had the first time and became in the process a Tea Party icon. Outside groups poured millions into the race, with Walker getting the lion’s share of the record-setting $80 million total. Teachers. The backlash against teachers in the wake of the Wisconsin vote is kind of breathtaking, at least on talk radio, where self-styled anti-intellectuals hold kangaroo court. It may seem counterproductive for a country that constantly wrings its hands over the state of its education to treat its teachers so shabbily . . . until you realize that many of the hand-wringers blame teachers for the state of our education. In a nation where both teachers and students go into some urban schools just hoping to survive, where school boards insist that creationism belongs in the science curriculum, and where the exploration of new ideas is considered a subversive activity, teachers have enough on their plates without being made the scapegoats of a problem we need to solve together.

History Lesson

Herb Reed and William Lee Miller have almost nothing in common, other than that their obituaries appeared side by side in yesterday’s newspaper. Reed was the last living member of the original Platters, the 1950s pop group that recorded “The Great Pretender,” “Only You” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” They were one of the first so-called crossover groups, whose songs appealed to both white and black audiences in an era when “race music” was banned in much of the South.  We now call it “rhythm and blues.” Miller was a historian who wrote popular books abut the national debate over slavery. In addition to biographies of Abraham Lincoln, he wrote Arguing About Slavery, the story of the “gag rule,” which forbade any petition about – or even discussion of – slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams spent the last years of his life fighting and finally repealing the rule.

Almost 120 years separated the introduction of the first gag rule in 1836 and the release of “The Great Pretender,” the Platters’ first number-one hit, in 1955. A lot had happened in between: The Civil War; the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South after a brief interlude of Black progress; the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education mandating public school integration. And yet, despite the Platter’s enormous success across racial lines, they still had to play for segregated audiences in the South. “There was still so much prejudice everywhere,” remembered Reed. “How could you enjoy it?”

The Good Drone

Sixty-eight years ago this morning, allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches and began the push through France that would end the war in Europe within a year. World War II, known as “the Good War,” was the deadliest war in history. Over 60 million people were killed, more than 2.5% of the world’s population. Yesterday, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, in what we are told is a major blow against terrorism.

Why does the world not seem safer this morning?

Because the war on terrorism is the current century’s equivalent of “the good war,” we justify the use of unmanned drones to seek out and kill people thousands of miles away. But the program seems at least morally uncertain and, in the long run, strategically counterproductive.

Exactly a week after D-Day, the Germans unleashed a barrage of unmanned V-1 rockets that did far more damage to Britain than had the entire Blitz. Three months later came the V-2, which, according to Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, “traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence.”

There is a huge distinction between Hitler’s rockets, which were weapons of indiscriminate destruction, and the drones, which are infinitely more precise. And yet, the latter are clearly descendents of the former, which, wrote Evelyn Waugh, were “as impersonal as the plague,” bringing death suddenly from the sky.

Both weapons killed; neither brought victory to those who used them; and in Germany’s case, the rockets led to Nuremburg.

Crude

In 1967, Texaco (now Chevron) discovered huge reserves of oil beneath the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, a roadless place whose indigenous inhabitants had virtually no contact with the outside world. That swiftly changed, as Texaco and its partners built roads and even an airport into the jungle to extract billions of barrels worth trillions of dollars. They left behind 18 billion gallons of toxic sludge. Or so the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Amazonian people claims. That suit has been going on since 1993, and last year, in an unprecedented ruling, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion. It will be a long time – if ever – before the company hands over a dime. In fact, it responded by suing the plaintiffs’ American lawyer, Steven Donziger. But the real motivation is less to save the money (Chevron recorded a record profit of $26.9 billion in 2011) than to send a signal. As a company lobbyist said to Newsweek, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

I teach a documentary about this case, “Crude, The Real Price of Oil,” whose maker told Mother Jones, “I hope that the film sends the message out that you should be very aware of where your products come from and how companies act in your name.”

I hope as well that it makes people look closer to home, where the forces behind gas “fracking” are making the same promises and behaving with the same arrogance as Chevron has in Ecuador.

Gaydar

A recent study by two psychologists concludes that “gaydar” – the ability to gauge sexual orientation simply by looking at someone – is real. Participants, who were shown photographs of men’s and women’s faces for 50 milliseconds, demonstrated “above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.” Skeptical, I did some digging and came across several similar studies, including:

Afrodar. As the antebellum and Jim Crow South discovered, this is much easier to determine in theory than in reality . . . although, interestingly, the darker the skin color, the more likely respondents were to classify the person as Black. Overall, however, a greater percentage of participants correctly identified Norwegians.

Jewdar. Participants demonstrated a complete inability to distinguish Israelis from Arabs, with one exception: if the head had a yarmulke, 100% identified him as a Jew.

Gendar. Fully two-thirds of respondents (67%) correctly identified the gender, a figure that increased to 92% when photographs of full-frontal nudity were shown. The margin of error was +/- 3%.

WASPdar. The study was aborted when the photographers were denied access to the country club.

Catholodar. 72% of participants correctly identified people emerging from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Ash Wednesday as Catholics. 28% thought they were Hindus.

Fidar. The ability to identify dogs turns out to be breed-dependent. While English Toy Terriers were often misidentified as  rodents, all but one respondent recognized the Great Dane as a dog. The lone incorrect answer was “Hamlet.”

Stumble of the Week

Yesterday Buddy Roemer announced, “I am no longer a candidate for President of the United States." Who knew? I was reminded of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who discovered World War II was over when he came out of a Philippines jungle and surrendered his .25-caliber rifle in 1974.

Of the entire collection once touted as major Republican candidates, only Ron Paul is left (oh, and Fred Karger, the gay-rights advocate who has so far received 3,805 votes). Despite my horror at the time, I kind of miss the mind-boggling prattle and those who uttered it in the endless debates:

• Michele Bachmann, who turned out to have her own birther issue, as she had secretly held Swiss citizenship since 1978.

• Herman Cain, who was finally taken seriously on Stephen Colbert’s ticket.

• Newt Gingrich, whose self-righteous bombast could not conceal all those stories about his ex-wives.

• Jon Huntsman, Jr., the self-proclaimed moderate who got clobbered early and often.

• Gary Johnson, whose platform to legalize marijuana got him laughed out of the Republican fold . . . and nominated by the Libertarians.

• Tim Pawlenty, who ran for so long that people forgot who he was. Well, he’s now on Romney’s vice-presidential short list.

• Rick Perry, whose performance in one debate caused a journalist to ask if he had suffered a stroke.

• Rick Santorum, who almost convinced his party to nominate a 21^st-century Torquemada.

• The Donald, who will simply never go away.

All these candidates had one common goal: to prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination. They couldn’t even do that.

Doc Watson

Doc Watson died on Tuesday. Yesterday I listened to some of the recordings he made over his long career and, while I have little musical knowledge and less talent, as Justice Stewart famously said of pornography, I know beauty when I see it . . . or in this case, hear it. Years ago I used to ask myself: who has made a greater difference to the world, Mozart or Napoleon? Winston Churchill or Paul Cezanne? This was not an idle question because I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, and one of my aspirations was to leave behind some small legacy. I thought bigger in those days, but the question was really: who has a more lasting influence on the world – those who seek to create something beautiful, often by withdrawing into a private world, or those who are driven to immerse themselves in public affairs?

I was brought up firmly in the latter camp, taught that leadership meant service to others and being fully engaged in public life, not in the self-absorbed worlds of artists and dreamers. My history books told of the lives of “doers” – generals, statesmen, titans of industry, even, in the modern versions, rebels and labor leaders. Artists were relegated to sidebars in catchall chapters on culture.

But art endures, as empires don’t. And artists have borne witness in ways history texts don’t capture. And beauty seems a greater legacy than conquest.

And Doc Watson, blind since infancy, sure could play.

The Other Priest

Michael Doyle came to Camden, New Jersey, in 1968, sentenced to serve in one of America’s poorest parishes because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. He was 33 and arrived with all his worldly belongings in the back seat of his Chevrolet. He has been the priest at Sacred Heart ever since, and has watched Camden go from destitute to desolate. After 9/11 a young parishioner told him that he felt safe in the city . . . because anyone flying above it would think the terrorists had hit it already. Father Doyle is a man of deep faith, who has chosen to serve his God by devoting his life to serving Camden’s poor, accepting as a given his own life of poverty. He writes monthly letters to church supporters that are filled with compassion, and also with sadness, with anger, and occasionally with despair, as he bears witness to what he calls a national crime: the urban neighborhoods where America has discarded its poorest people and delivered its most toxic wastes. Among Camden’s abandoned buildings and violent crime, New Jersey has sited a sewage treatment plant, a trash incinerator and a dump.

“The threat to the future of this nation is not in Iraq,” he wrote a few years ago, “but in the inner core of our deadly cities. If only we had a national guard with hammers and saws and marines who did nothing but plumbing.”

Michael Doyle’s letters are the basis of a documentary, “Poet of Poverty.”

The Butler Did It

We were what you might call an Easter Christian family. On the one Sunday of the year when we made it to church, the congregation was overflowing and, because we were late, we were usually ushered to a pew in the front. When the minister announced, “There are a lot of new faces here today, we welcome you, and we hope we will see you before next year,” I felt he was looking directly at me. And I knew enough theology to understand that this was not a good start on the road to the afterlife. Even so, we were brought up to honor clergy as (in those days) men who had given up the pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasures to dedicate their lives to seeking spiritual truths. They had, we were taught, an extra magnitude of goodness. We counted among our family friends a future Episcopal Bishop of New York and a Trappist monk . . . and while few wanted to emulate the monk, all treated his decision with reverence.

So the continuing revelations of “the biggest scandal to rock the Vatican in decades” stun me. And they continue to take their toll. Last week, the president of the Vatican bank was forced out. Yesterday the Pope’s butler was arrested. The pope's butler?

Of all the “Vatileaks” revelations, the one for which I was least prepared is not the allegation of nasty internal power struggles, institutional corruption, money laundering or even mob connections. It is that the pope has a butler.

Memorial Day

There is no easy way to write about Etan Patz. We were living in New York’s east village, just a few blocks from where the six-year-old boy disappeared 33 years ago. Our first child was almost two. So the news reports hit close to home. In those days the abduction of a child seemed a rarity. It was before Megan’s Law. Before Brian David Mitchell took 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart to be his “second wife.” Before 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard spent 18 years in a series of sheds and gave birth to two children.

Etan was the first missing child to have his face on a milk carton, and for many of us he will always be that impish and innocent little boy – the adventurous first grader who begged his parents to let him walk alone to his school bus stop just one block away – until they finally relented on May 25, 1979. Now designated National Missing Children’s Day, it was also the date last Friday that police charged Pedro Hernandez with Etan’s murder.

But while Etan’s smile has remained stopped in time, our lives have not. We have grown older, perhaps had our own tragedies. But I will not forget that face.

The death – or worse, the disappearance – of a child puts unimaginable pressures on a family. At first, it draws them closer, but people cope in different ways, heal at different rates, if at all. For many couples the death of a child ultimately brings the end of their marriage.

Etan’s parents still live in the same loft on the same street in Soho. In 33 years of indescribable pain, they have given us an image of extraordinary grace.

Stumble of the Week

Update. A reader asked whether Harold Simmons (May 24) really was the biggest PAC donor? Bigger than the Koch brothers? Because of the current ability to give both personally and through corporations, it is becoming as hard to trace the money as to pierce the veil of Simmons’ empire. I think Simmons is still the largest individual donor, but Huffington Post reports that the Kochs solicited $100 million to defeat Obama at their recent retreat for rich right-wing donors – and they pledged $60 million themselves. So, in this unsavory contest, Simmons’ lead is clearly in jeopardy – but not nearly as much as the democratic process. Horse Racing. Barely two weeks before he saddles “I’ll Have Another” for the final leg of the Triple Crown, trainer Doug O’Neill received a 45-day suspension for doctoring a horse, a charge he denies. The suspension kicks in after the Belmont Stakes. With its heavy gambling, sorry ethics and abuse of horses, the “sport of kings” has become the “sport of thugs.”

Harvard is apologizing profusely for printing the updated profile submitted by Ted Kaczynski for his 50^th-reunion report. The Unabomber (Harvard 1962) listed his profession as “prisoner” and counted “eight life sentences” among his awards.

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark and Obama insider, is also apologizing for his public criticism of the campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital. Booker’s real mistake was trying to make a complicated argument in an arena that reduces everything to its lowest common denominator. See Steven Rattner’s piece for a good analysis of the issue.

American Dream

Harold Simmons leaves a bad taste in your mouth. One of America’s richest men, Simmons was born in poverty in rural Texas and has subsequently amassed billions through an arcane holding company that shields him from responsibility for the trail of toxic sites he has strewn across America. One of those sites is an abandoned NL Industries property on New Jersey’s Raritan River. Simmons bought the former National Lead in 1986, acquiring both the company’s assets and its considerable liabilities. It would appear that if you exploit the assets and stonewall the liabilities, you can make a lot of money out of toxic metals.

Last evening I gave a program in environmental justice for the New Jersey Council of the Humanities, which opened with the documentary, “Rescuing the River: The Raritan.” New Jersey is trying to clean up the Raritan, whose waters historically sustained some of the nation’s largest industries. Parts of the river now sustain nothing at all, primarily because of the toxic wastes those industries have left behind. It is a crime repeated along countless rivers across America. The Raritan’s biggest culprit is NL industries.

Perhaps coincidentally, Simmons is a huge philanthropist in Dallas and the largest individual contributor to SuperPACs in the country. As of March, he had give $18 million. Although Rick Perry was his first choice, he has subsequently contributed to every Republican candidate.

But there's hope: Simmons’ foundation, which is run by his daughters, supports immigration rights, campaign and prison reform, gun control and reproductive rights.

Is More Better?

After determining that China has been “dumping” its heavily subsidized solar panels on the U.S. market, the Commerce Department recently imposed duties of 31 percent on imported Chinese panels. This set off the predictable debate about free trade and protectionism, trade wars and global capitalism, the economics of alternative energy and Chinese currency manipulations.

It’s way too complicated for me, but a debate on NPR yesterday pitted US panel manufacturers against panel distributors and an environmentalist from the Rocky Mountain Institute. The manufacturers pushed for the tariff because of what they claim is China’s drive to create an international monopoly. By unfairly subsidizing its manufacturers, they argued, China has undermined the U.S. domestic industry – and ensured the transfer of thousands of jobs overseas.

The others raised concerns about the impact of substantially higher panel prices on the still-fledgling efforts to shift America from fossil fuels to alternative energy, and they forecast continue dependence on “foreign oil” and increased contributions to global warming.

Despite the variety of their views, they were united on the need to produce more of what all accepted as an unmitigated good: sustainable energy. In the last depression Americans were promised a chicken in every pot; in this one it is a solar panel on every roof.

But one reason we are in this mess is because of our insistence that more is better, that we can have our cake and eat it too. In a finite world, maybe we can’t – and maybe it’s time to talk, not just about alternative sources of energy, but about alternative ways to live.