David Brooks

Several of you mentioned David Brooks’ column in Monday’s New York Times, and one even suggested I write about it. My initial response, of course, was that I will write about David Brooks’ column when he writes about mine. But on deeper reflection, it occurred to me that David has better things to do. I, on the other hand, do not. For those not familiar with him, Brooks is the Times’ conservative columnist and the right-of-center counterpoint to E.J. Dionne on NPR and Mark Shields on PBS. Hired by William F. Buckley at The National Review, he later wrote for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Brooks, like his intellectual hero Edmund Burke, is a sober, thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful spokesman for moderate conservativism – a movement so diminished in today’s GOP that the Times later hired Ross Douthat to speak for the hard right.

Brooks has written admiringly of Obama, and while he speaks out against his policies often and forcefully, his criticisms seem born more of disappointment than dislike.

In Monday’s column, Brooks, writing in an unusual satiric tone, sought to parody the media’s depiction of Romney as rich, aloof and shallow. The piece was so out of character for Brooks and so edgy about Romney, however, that in lampooning the pundits, he also roasted the candidate.

David Brooks’ ideal candidate is one who is pragmatic, thoughtful and represents a conservatism that builds on the best traditions of the past – one like the old Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts. But, whether in jest or not, that is not the Romney he presented on Monday.

Conventional Wisdom

The big question for many this week was whether the wrath of Mother Nature would pound down on the Convention of the Angry God. For now, at least, it appears that Hurricane Isaac is content to stay to the west and probe the levees built in the wake of Katrina – a reminder of the most expensive and one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Meanwhile, nature is sending another message from the north, as the volume of sea ice in the arctic has hit a record low. These reminders of the need to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, the desperate plight of the urban poor and the clear evidence of climate change have so far gone unnoted in Tampa. But after all, the reason people go to Florida is to get away from the ice and snow of winter. What disruptions there have been to the carefully orchestrated Republican convention have come from the mouths of Ron Paul’s delegates, who yelled loudly each time his votes were ignored in the official tally. With the big networks limiting coverage to both conventions, the wonderfully ribald process of political horse-trading, rousing speeches and brokered conventions is a thing of the past.

Maybe the process wasn’t any better back then, but it did have more surprises. The results were not so clearly pre-ordained nor were the candidates so programmed to stay on message. Politics perhaps has never been pretty, but it used to be more fun.

Radio Talk

I was driving back on Sunday afternoon from a wedding between one man and one woman, channel surfing on my car radio, when I landed on a talk show station that had just broadcast a long interview with Mitt Romney. The station had asked Laura Ingraham to do a post-interview analysis of the speech and preview this week’s Republican convention in Tampa. Ingraham, the host informs me, is the most ”listened to” woman on the radio. She got right to the point. The interview, she said, had shown a man of strong principles and deep faith who is comfortable with himself. This humanized Romney could now focus on the state of the economy, a subject his opponent desperately wanted to change. All the Democrats have to offer, she said, is “higher taxes, more aborted babies and gay marriage.” That, she concluded, was not a winning agenda.

Now, I don’t often find myself in agreement with a Fox commentator, but I think she’s onto something. If that’s all Obama’s got, he is in trouble.

As I thought about Ingraham’s trifecta, it occurred to me it was actually the mirror image of the GOP platform, which calls for constitutional amendments on taxes, abortion and marriage. That’s a lot of fundamental changes to a document we are told has been sacrosanct since 1789.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to create a fair tax system that recognizes our obligations to each other and to allow each of us to make personal decisions based on our needs rather than the dictates of the state?

“We Came in Peace for All Mankind”

Neil Armstrong died unexpectedly on Saturday, 51 years and one month after becoming the first person to walk on the moon. With over half the world’s population not yet 30, the moon landing is ancient history. And it does seem a different era. The Apollo Program, which fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, was the culmination of an intense space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, with the backdrop of the Cold War and fears of a science gap, which would lead to nuclear weapons inferiority, a destabilized world and a withering war.

So it is not surprising that Armstrong planted an American flag on the lunar soil. But unlike conquistadors of old, Armstrong did not claim the moon as American territory. In fact, not far from the flag, he and Buzz Aldren laid a plaque that read simply: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

With private companies gearing up for the commercial opportunities of space travel, with others thinking about exploiting the resources out there and colonizing new planets for when we have destroyed this one, with space itself increasingly littered with human debris and weapons of war, the words of that plaque are worth remembering.

With the exception of those doubters who insist he was actually in Arizona, Armstrong’s “small step” electrified the nation. Conceived by a president and built with public funds, it’s a reminder of what we can accomplish when we dream together.

Stumble of the Week

• As if it weren’t dead enough, bipartisanship stumbled this week when Judge Robert Simpson of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court refused to block the state’s voter identification law. Such laws may appear benign and reasonable in their wording, but at least in this case the intent was “to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That’s not me speaking; that’s Mike Turzai, the Republican Majority Leader who sponsored the legislation. A recent study found 27 instances of voter impersonation in 197 million votes cast across the country from 2002-5. To swat that gnat, lawmakers are eager to disenfranchise as many as 9 percent of the state’s eligible voters.

• Tolerance stumbled again in Tampa when the GOP platform committee added a draconian plank on immigration to go with its call to end abortion with no exceptions. Explained Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Secretary of State, “If you really want to create a job tomorrow, you can remove an illegal alien today,” oblivious to how many more of our jobs are going to Asia than to immigrants. I can’t wait to see the convention’s civil rights plank.

• Now that Larry Ellison has bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai, archrival Bill Gates has apparently set his sights on Rhode Island. Asked his opinion on buying a whole state, presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “I am in favor of privatization . . . especially of states whose electoral votes my campaign wrote off months ago.”

Basic Goodness

Like many people, I have long struggled with the conflict between individualism and community – between the quest to be a distinct, whole and individuated person and the desire to be an integral part of a group. I admire the person who stands up to the crowd, who sets off alone on the open road, who thinks for himself and speaks what he thinks. And yet I also get the need for community, not for companionship only but to be part of something larger than yourself. We suffocate in communities; we starve without them. In his New Year’s address to the Shambhala community in Halifax, NS, sent to me by my brother Walker, Sakyong Mipham talked about “basic goodness,” saying that it “is not just a personal experience, it is also a social experience.”

“It is not just about me,” he continued; “it is about humanity . . . this notion of human nature is the most important global issue. What we do to our planet, what we do to ourselves, how we relate to our own minds, how we make decisions, and how we relate to the world is all coming from this notion of basic goodness. It is up to us.”

Basic goodness, as I understand it, does not require us to submerge our hard-won egos into the group, but it does ask us to see our interconnectedness with all living beings in a world filled with violence and anger – and to note that the path to building a peaceful world begins with being at peace with yourself.

Rape

Todd Akin is no quitter. In the face of calls for his resignation from Republican leaders across the country, Akin announced yesterday that he would stay in the race for Missouri’s Senate seat. Who can blame him? Polls show him winning, and he is in lock step with his party, which yesterday approved a constitutional amendment to ban abortions with no exceptions and to apply 14^th-Amendment protections to a fetus. Meanwhile, Akin told Mike Huckabee that he was being pummeled for “one word and one sentence on one day.”

The word that seems to stick in everybody’s craw is “legitimate.” The word that should is “rape.”

These guys talk about rape like it was like falling off a bicycle or getting a bloody nose. You know, stuff happens. And, occasionally a little miracle is the result. The great fear is that women will feign rape to get access to abortion services, but the gatekeepers are too vigilant for that.

Rape is an instrument of violence, of torture, of war. During the war in Bosnia, the UN Commission concluded, rape served “a political purpose – to intimidate, humiliate, and degrade [a woman] and others affected by her suffering.” It was also a tool for “ethnic cleansing,” and Bosnian Muslim women raped by Serbs were often forced to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth to “little Chetniks.”

Todd Akin is not some distraction from the real issues of this election. Wrapped in the false rhetoric of the sanctity of life, he represents a worldview that is as dangerous as it is repugnant.

Soul of America

While today’s hot question is whether Congressman Todd Akin will give up his bid to be Missouri’s next senator, the more significant questions are: (1) after his disquisition on “the female body,” why is he still leading Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill? And (2) how did he get the nomination anyway? Akin is no one-blunder wonder.

On Energy: “Energy regulations from the EPA and other agencies have stifled our industry.”

On Guns: “Certainly, some people commit crimes with weapons and I support the prosecution and conviction of these lawbreakers – this includes everyone from the street criminal to our Attorney General, Eric Holder.”

On Health Care (other than pregnancy, of course): “Health care decisions are intensely personal and touch every American.”

On Taxes (other than the very rich): “We need a system where more people would pay some taxes and, thus, have ‘skin in the game.’"

On National Defense: “Defending our country is a proud part of the Missouri tradition. . . . Missouri is ranked 5th in the nation in total defense contracts, with over $12 billion, . . . almost 160,000 jobs in Missouri are connected to defense, and over 16,000 active duty military personnel are garrisoned in our state.”

On Climate Change: “In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change, you know. Who in the world wants to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways?”

Despite Akin’s complete unfitness for office, McCaskill ran ads supporting him in the Republican primary – which he won with 36% of the vote – because she considered him the easiest challenger to beat. That is to say, she spent $2 million people had donated to her campaign to put this man in position to be a U. S. Senator. That is unconscionable.

Sticks and Stones

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) via Annie Blaine. This, I think, helps explain the poisoned atmosphere of our political discourse. It has become personal in the worst kind of way.

It has happened before. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U. S. Senate, Preston Brooks, Democratic Congressman from South Carolina, beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts so viciously with his cane that Sumner never recovered. The attack came in response to a speech two days earlier in which Sumner had heatedly attacked both the institution of slavery and the character of those who practiced it. Brooks intended to “punish” Sumner, not for his attack on slavery but to avenge the honor of his relative, Senator Andrew Butler (D, S.C.).

Many Southerners thought Sumner had it coming. As the leader of the radical Republicans in the Senate, he was an uncompromising abolitionist whose speeches were filled with invective and incendiary allusions. (His counterpart in the House was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, he of the club foot, who held the seat I ran for in 1996, a seat now occupied by one of the most reactionary men in the United States Congress. Such is the sad trajectory of the Grand Old Party.)

Four years later, the country was at war, in part because some had taken forceful speech against an unconscionable institution as attacks on their personal honor.

Stumble of the Week

Lucky 13. That’s the minimum percent of his income that Mitt Romney paid in taxes the last 10 years. “Every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent,” he said. “And if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity,” added Mitt, “why the number gets well above 20 percent.” Suggesting that his tax-deductible tithe to the Mormon Church virtually doubles his effective tax rate is certainly creative bookkeeping. The Romneys announced their findings after rereading a decade of their returns. But they aren’t sharing them with the rest of us. Maintaining that they are “very transparent to what’s legally required of us,” Ann Romney said releasing more returns would just provide “ammunition” for their foes. Well, of course. It gets even better, wrote a friend who sent a link to Jerome Corsi after last Friday’s “transcripter” post. Corsi, a tea party activist, Harvard PhD, author of The Obama Nation and “swift boater” in the 2004 elections, who has called Fox News too liberal and Paul Ryan the “best possible choice.” has now produced evidence that, before Michelle, Barack Obama was married to his Pakistani roommate at Occidental College. I think there must be a contest to see who can lay the most abominations on Obama, and Dr. Corsi will be hard to beat: homosexuality, same-sex marriage, miscegenation, interfaith dating, loving a Moslem, sitting in another man’s lap, hypocrisy, lying. I know this is the fringe – at least I hope it is – but how often do we need to be reminded that the fringe is dangerous?

The Jordan

I was in a seething black rage the other day, and so I went down to the water. Jordan Stream runs clear and cold much of the year. Its waters descend from the mountains of Mount Desert Island and gather in Jordan Pond before continuing to the ocean. They run through a woods of mostly conifer, poplar and birch, where the only sound, apart from an occasional birdcall, is the rippling of the stream as it meanders over red, brown and deep gray granite stones. If this won’t calm the mind, nothing will.

Streams and rivers do a lot for us. They provide water and food. They irrigate our farmlands and replenish their soil. They transport both goods and people. Harnessing their power was the first step in the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it. But we need to stop thinking of streams simply as public utilities that provide essential goods for human consumption.

They are places of great beauty and spiritual rebirth. None more so than the Jordan River – the real place where Jesus was baptized and the mythical destination that slaves sang of crossing to freedom, one way or another.

Today, the Jordan River is the source of fierce contention in the Middle East, where it is listed as one of the world's 100 most endangered ecological sites – another reminder that a stream is an ecosystem that supports the entire web of life, and a refuge from the world and, sometimes, from my own rage.

Big Fracking Deal

Think of natural gas as the methadone of our fossil-fuel addiction. It’s cheaper than oil and therefore more addictive. It’s cleaner than coal so we can feel good about using it. And there is lots of it so we can take it until we drop dead. In Pennsylvania, dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas” because of its massive Marcellus shale deposits, 60,000 new wells are forecast by 2030. They will require clearing thousands of acres of woodlands, threaten the forest habitat of countless species, and have a multi-dimensional impact on fresh water: drilling a well requires hundreds of thousands of gallons; gas companies contend the chemicals they inject are a proprietary secret; and hundreds of wells will be drilled near the state’s cleanest streams. A chemical engineer friend told me that, while the technology exists or soon will for safe fracking, he doubts many oil and gas companies will use best practices. Meanwhile, stories of both human and environmental contamination pile up.

In the face of risks that are both huge and still largely unknown, the gas rush intensifies because the money is mind-boggling and the oil companies have enormous economic and political power. They spew the usual mantras: jobs, growth, dependence on foreign oil – although, as my son Jake pointed out, the U. S. is a net exporter of oil products.

As Bill McKibben wrote in a recent article that will wake you up, as long as the big energy companies control the public debate, little will change, and our addiction will end like all other addictions . . . badly.

Intercontinental Ops

One of the great pleasures of reading Dashiell Hammett is that his plots are so convoluted that I have to focus on the memorable characters (Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, the Continental Op) and the murky, smoke-filled backgrounds that become characters themselves. The novels bear almost endless rereadings as I try to unravel the intricacies of the story. The closest thing to Hammett’s fiction is Chinese reality, where two current law cases would do Dashiell proud. They have everything: lust for power, greed, bribery, corruption, magnificent names, murder – everything, oddly, but sex, which lurked ever below the surface in Hammett’s work.

The first case involves the fall from power of Bo Xilai (think French wine), amid revelations of extraordinary wealth and corruption among the ruling elites, and the imminent conviction of his wife Gu Kailai for the murder of a shady British character who made the fatal miscalculation of threatening Gu’s only child. The trial lasted a few hours. China’s conviction rate is 98 percent.

The latest case involves Sheldon Adelson, the ubiquitous billionaire who has poured over $35 million into Republican campaign coffers. He recently accompanied Mitt Romney to Israel to make sure he toed the hard line there, but it also turns out that two-thirds of Adelson’s fortune derives from his casinos in Macau, an island noted for mob activity and the only legal gambling in China. The case, which involves a socialite named Bao Bao and a frantic call to Tom Delay to bury a resolution condemning China, is but one more example of the global scale of corporate greed, political corruption and organized crime.

Olympic Moments

“Jake,” I asked my son recently, “do you think my titanium knees give me an unfair advantage in climbing mountains?” “No,” he said, and returned to his iPhone.

I had brought the matter up because one of the two Olympic stories that fascinated me was that of Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter whose legs were amputated just below his knees when he was 11 months old. Fitted with an unlikely-looking set of prostheses, Pistorius runs fast enough not only to qualify for the Olympics but to have his legged opponents complaining about his “unfair advantage.” Although he has been subjected to batteries of inconclusive tests, the true test seems simple: in a world in which people will go to almost any lengths to gain an advantage, I have yet to hear of anyone amputating his legs in pursuit of Olympic glory.

The other story is that the International Olympic Committee again refused a moment of silence for the 11 Israeli athletes who were taken hostage and murdered at the 1972 Munich games. Meanwhile, Sarah Attar, the first female Saudi track competitor, was cheered wildly for finishing last in the 800 meters, perhaps because her government required her to run covered from head to toe in traditional garb. No one complained about her handicap.

Attar represents a step toward equality in the Arab world, but the continuing refusal to acknowledge the barbaric tragedy that happened 40 years ago in Munich shames everyone who allows it to happen.

Stumble of the Week

“Birtherism,” the cult – whose most famous members are Glenn Beck and The Donald – that insists Barack Obama was not born in America, despite how many iterations of his birth certificate he produces, and is therefore at best ineligible to be president and at worst some kind of Manchurian candidate whom dark forces have made the first communist* president of the United States, seems finally to be running out of steam. But fear not, it has been replaced by “transcripterism,” whose adherents have offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who can produce the president’s transcripts from Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law School. In an article in Beck’s “The Blaze,” Wayne Allyn Root (Columbia 1983) suggests the reason he never heard of his now-famous classmate was because he rarely went to class, got lousy grades and “attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.” Oh, well, perhaps birtherism isn’t dead yet. Root, of course, equates the demands for Obama’s transcripts to those for Mitt Romney’s tax returns. * Helder Camara (1909-1999), Catholic Archbishop of Brazil: “When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist” (sent by my daughter, Annie).

Human Justice. In northern Mali where the people now live under Sharia law, an alleged thief recently had his hand cut off and a couple accused of adultery was stoned to death. I’m not saying all fundamentalists are alike. I just don’t want them running my country.

Bleeding Kansas

It didn’t rival the border wars in Kansas territory that culminated in John Brown’s deadly attack on the pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, but Tuesday’s Republican primaries for the Kansas state senate were bitter enough. When the votes were counted, the Tea Party candidates had shellacked the moderates, reducing the latter to a rump group with little clout. Such state and local elections are where the political map of America is being redrawn, largely out of sight because the national media aren’t paying much attention – another consequence of the collapse of the traditional press. And it takes a tiny fraction of eligible voters to make a big difference in these races. In March Rick Santorum’s 15,290 votes gave him 51% of the Kansas vote – crushing Mitt Romney by over 2-1.

This vitriolic infighting is happening across the country. It’s not clear what it will mean for this election, but the Republican right’s distrust of Romney has deep roots. Although it began in 1854 as the party of abolition, the GOP was from the beginning the party of big government and big business – and also of midwestern farmers who were deeply conservative on social issues. Nixon’s “southern strategy” enticed southern whites to the GOP over civil rights, and Reagan attracted working-class Democrats in big numbers. Those constituencies have long distrusted Wall Street and the eastern capitalists who run the national party. They now have the votes to remake the party in their own image. They also have the money. The Koch brothers are from Kansas, too.

Unspoken Words

A friend sent me the following in response to yesterday’s post. Words never mentioned on the campaign trail:

• "the poor"
• "climate change"
• "gun control"
• "reforming financial markets"

I was stunned. These are four of the most critical issues we face. They all have enduring consequences, and the first two go a long way to defining what kind of a country we will be – for how we treat each other, particularly the poor, and how we treat the earth are two sides of a single coin of humanity and survival.

It is not especially surprising that Mitt Romney isn’t talking about these things. Concern for the poor is not a striking trait of the modern GOP. Climate change is a hoax. The Second Amendment is sacrosanct. And the financial markets need liberation not reform.

But Barack Obama could build a campaign around these issues. The poor are a constituency that needs empowerment. Climate change already affects all we do. With Jared Loughner pleading guilty to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting spree and recent bloodbaths in Wisconsin and Colorado, it seems a good time to discuss America’s obsession with guns. And the accusation that Standard Chartered laundered billions for the Iranians is but the latest in a never-ending story of arrogance, corruption and greed in the marketplace.

There are other words that aren’t mentioned much either: entitlement reform, Palestine, community.

In what many call “the most important election in our lifetime,” the candidates seem determined to talk about nothing important at all.

Beyond the 99 Percent

Today’s post is an almost-inadvertent addendum to yesterday’s. In the interim I read a review of The Price of Inequality, in which Joseph Stiglitz describes the consequences of the vast inequalities of wealth that now define America, perhaps more than any other nation on Earth. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that our two-tiered society has arisen, not primarily because of either the survival of the fittest or the impact of globalization, but because the rich have become increasingly able to control the political system: “While there may be underlying economic forces at play, politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” The result, he says, goes beyond unfairness; it undercuts the virtues of a free market system by promoting inefficiencies, reducing the educated labor pool and not investing in the infrastructure capitalism requires. (Yes, Barack Obama was absolutely right to point out that we don’t do it alone.) My concern is that the focus on a two-tiered society obscures what is happening. This entire political campaign cycle now involves rebuking or vindicating the one percent and toadying up to the mythical middle class, which is everybody else – the 99 percent. Once again, the poor, whose lives are as removed from the middle class as they are from the rich, have become invisible – none more so than the urban poor, who are locked in ghettos from which there is little escape. This is a moral calamity. It is also a tinderbox . . . and every time we reduce essential public services, we add fuel for the flames.

Home and Garden

I spend a good deal of time in my car – a beat up old Volvo with 119,000 miles on it – and I can usually find whatever I need in the trunk – sleeping bag, tennis racquet, clothes. Still, I have never actually considered it the equivalent of my home, so I was surprised to read that in Detroit, the birthplace of the American automobile industry, a Chevy Malibu and a new house both cost $21,000. The car may be the better buy. My friend Charity, who has a degree from the University of Michigan, supports seven people across three generations on $12,000 a year. A few years ago, the city took her family's house by eminent domain to build middle-income housing. When she lost her next home to foreclosure, she sold everything she had and bid $2,500 to get the house back at auction. A suburban “investor” bid $3,000 . . . and then took her note for $10,000 in exchange for not evicting her family.

Yet Charity has dedicated her life to saving her city. She focuses on food security because nutrition is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the urban poor, and she spends her days nurturing the hundreds of urban gardens that feed growing numbers of Detroiters. Many have flowers as well as food, and they are tiny oases of beauty in a devastated city.

“I’m trying to starve the ugly,” said Charity. “But I cry.”

She will never give up: “I believe the community will win. We have no choice. The apathy cannot survive.”

Stumble of the Week

Oddities I stumbled on last week: • The latest CBS poll shows that 12% of Americans approve of the current Congress. Meanwhile, a new study estimates that spending on all federal elections will total almost $6 billion this cycle, 77% of it from business interests. That’s a lot of money to buy influence with people held in such low regard. Why not create a lottery for the unemployed, draw 535 names at random and send them to Washington; return the $6 billion to the rich contributors; and raise their marginal tax rates by 10%? Fresh faces, campaign finance reform, fair taxation – done.

• When Lech Walesa endorsed Mitt Romney, he became the first major labor figure to support a Republican since the Teamsters backed Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s. Known for their infiltration by the mob, the Teamsters also supported Richard Nixon in 1972, six months after he had pardoned Jimmy Hoffa and three years before Hoffa disappeared without a trace.

• In response to a contribution to the Obama campaign, I got a letter from the national finance director that seemed more ‘price is right’ than presidential: Thanks so much for your generous donation. . . .We've always depended on supporters like you – not special interests or Washington lobbyists – for every dollar we get. To show our appreciation, here's a special coupon code for the Obama 2012 store.

DEADLINE!

Using that code at checkout will get you 10 percent off orders of $10 or more. But it's only good through August 1st, so swing by the store now.