History Lesson

In his wonderful book, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan asks us to consider evolution, not just from our own perspective, but from that of the things we grow. He gives four examples of how a plant’s appeal to a particular human desire enables it to gain an advantage in its fight to survive and propagate, which it then ruthlessly exploits. We should suspend, suggests Pollan, our conventional – and certainly Biblical – view of ourselves as gardeners in control of the earth and try to see creation from other creatures’ points of view. Having arisen this morning to day four of the vicious flu, I see his point. And while it’s hard to work up much empathy for the germs, it’s instructive to think of the process as Pollan does. After a sneak attack made more devious by the flu shot I had had two weeks before, the germs are now clearly in control of my body, having come out of nowhere, like Genghis Khan’s hordes, to crush a more advanced civilization. My germs, though, seem more like the Europeans in Africa, who appropriated the land, superimposed their own institutions on a weakened culture, and forced the natives to do their bidding. I wonder if my settlers believe, as the British did, that they are doing me a favor by cleansing me of the evils of my primitive practices. But Pollan – and history – have shown that they are there solely for their self-seeking purposes, and I must quietly marshal my strength to drive the invaders out.

Lance and Me

(If you get this twice, I apologize. Technical problems. JGB) “My name is Lance Armstrong, and I’m a doper.”

Recent news reports indicate that Armstrong may soon admit he used performance-enhancing drugs and illegal blood transfusions during a cycling career that included seven consecutive Tour de France victories after he had recovered from testicular cancer. The admission would come in the face of years of aggressive denial and in the wake of Armstrong having been stripped of his medals and banned for life last October for “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."

Armstrong had an extraordinary career. He was a national triathlon champion before taking up cycling, and his Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised hundreds of millions for cancer research. Not only does that career now appear built on a lie, but he has joined so many other public figures, from Barry Bonds to Bill Clinton, who have looked straight into a camera and unflinchingly denied the truth.

Their insistence is so pathological it’s hard not to believe them, even as the evidence mounts. Caught in a lie, they lie more. They believe themselves outside the rules for ordinary people and are too competitive to admit failure. While all these are undoubtedly true, I also think that all of us have parts of ourselves we want to shield from public scrutiny because they expose our conviction that we don’t live up to our own self-image. It is so human to be imperfect, but in a culture that insists on heroes it is so hard to admit it.

Congress is Back (to be read aloud)

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ooooohhh Ho Hee Ho Hee Haw Haw Oh, my sides hurt. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho  Oh . . .  My . . . God . . . Ooooohhh! Stop! Stop! You’re killing me! Ho Ho Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho . . . Congress is back! Like in session? Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho. That’s so funny. Ooooohhh Ho Ho Ho. Hah. Hah.  Hee. Hah. Ohhhhhhh. Too funny. What for?

Connections

It was dark when I got up this morning, and the ground outside was frozen. Death is much on my mind. The sadness of it. And the wonder of it. As we plan for our mother’s service and burial, I remember our second child, who was born 34 years ago today and lived only three days. My mother, who was not born to grow old, lived for 90 years, almost all of them filled with a zest for living. I have never known life without her. My daughter I barely knew. She lies in a Quaker graveyard overlooking the peaceful hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a plot she shares with her maternal grandmother, who died too young at 62, and grandfather, who lived fully for two more decades; her cousin Dallas, who died suddenly at three months and whose parents I first met at her graveside service; and, in unmarked graves, Leonid Berman, the painter who fled the Russian Revolution and survived the Holocaust in rural France, and his wife, the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe.

It’s an eclectic community, so resonant of life’s caprices. For reasons I don’t really understand, I feel connected to all of them, as much now as when they were alive. I wonder where they have gone and why some of their lives were cut so short, while others survived wars and shipwrecks.

The daylight has come, and the ground will thaw. But I still wonder why, with all the sadness death brings, we inflict it so wantonly.

Thelma and Louise

The 1991 film ends with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon floating timelessly above the Colorado River, having just driven their car over the Grand Canyon cliff. Spared the bloody crash that must come next, gullible movie fans could dream of a miraculous escape. Just like last night. To save itself from a disaster it had created almost entirely by itself, Congress passed a bill that solves virtually nothing. But it had no choice. For while the bill enshrines most of the odious Bush tax cuts and does nothing to address the questions our children must face, it just might stave off the recession that Republicans seem eager to trigger by destroying our government when we need it most.

That concept was lost on both the liberal lobby group, moveon.org, and the Tea Party, which demanded that their followers oppose the legislation. But leave it to Congressman Darrell Issa of California to capture the utter irresponsibility of the Republican right. “I thank all of you who will vote for [the bill],” he said. “I cannot bring myself to vote for it” (i.e., thank you for bailing me out, so I can save the only job I care about – my own).

With the cliff momentarily averted, Democrats must now show they are serious about entitlement reform – not by neutering Medicare, but by ensuring the future of the most important social program we have. Caring for its sick is a fundamental responsibility of every human community.

Keep the Faith

“I think part of what we're seeing,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an NRA board member, “sadly is again Rahm Emanuel's comment never let a good crisis go to waste. And the gun control advocates for a long time have jumped on every tragedy and tried to exploit it in unhelpful ways.” “People where I live,” said Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina – “I’ve been Christmas shopping all weekend – have come up to me: ‘Please don’t let the government take my guns away.’”

First, I do not ever want to go Christmas shopping with Lindsay Graham. Second, it is the gun lobby that is demagoguing the Newtown shooting –  NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre’s response last week was nothing but a panegyric to guns and those who shoot them, which seems kind of tasteless, to say the least.

But the issue goes way beyond bad taste. A rabid, unelected and well-funded cabal has decided it can override the popular will through fear mongering and money, and it seems eager to bring down the government over a millionaire’s tax and a rational gun law. We have seen such disdain for flabby democracy before. It brought Hitler to the Reichstag in 1933.

This is my only post of Christmas week, and I don’t want to dwell on the lunatic fringe at a time when all our children are briefly home together, and our goal is to celebrate life and rebirth, family and friends. That is all. In light of what is happening in the world, that is a lot, and we are thankful to have it.

Keep the faith. Happy Hannukwanzmas!

Stumble of the Week

A storm rolled through southeastern Pennsylvania early this morning with magnificent force. It was not the kind of storm we nostalgically associate with the winter solstice and the advent season: soft snowflakes falling gently across an Arcadian countryside, leaving the world still and peaceful. No this was blinding rain and roaring winds that pounded against the house as if the world were about to end. “Wait a minute,” I said to myself. “Today is the day.” So far so good.

Meanwhile, back in the more mundane world of John Boehner’s psyche, the Speaker pulled “Plan B,” his plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone who makes under $1 million per year and thus avert the “fiscal cliff.” Boehner was unceremoniously dumped by the right wing of his party, who insist that people with annual incomes over $1 million certainly are in the middle class. In their view, everyone is in the middle class, except the 47 percent who are in the freeloading class.

Figuratively washing his hands of the mess he himself had created in just four days, the Speaker said, “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

We do want to avert the much-maligned cliff, whose arbitrary combination of tax increases and spending cuts would suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of an economy that is barely standing now.

And with Plan B dead, it seems fair to ask, “What's Plan A?”

Maybe the Mayans know.

Humbug

“And how about tossing in a couple of bucks for Saint Jude’s?” Why did this question irritate me so much?

It was only a few days before Christmas, and I was standing at the counter of a venerable men’s haberdasher, buying some of its smaller offerings for my son’s stocking. At last, I had been able to start my shopping, and I was feeling the Christmas spirit. And out of nowhere this nattily dressed man was laying a guilt trip on me.

Didn’t he know that I gave generously to the charities of my choice? Wasn’t it enough for him that I had just bought two pairs of overpriced socks? Now, all of a sudden, I have to play Ebenezer Scrooge to his Bob Cratchit?

“Not this time,” I mumbled, as I handed him my platinum credit card . . . as if at any other time I would have jumped at the offer. But today I chose to stand on principle, even if that principle amounted to a two-dollars donation to a good organization. How much does Brooks Brothers give to charity? I found myself wondering, as I became increasingly unhinged by the moral trap this man had sprung on me.

Our once-jovial relationship turned into a frosty professional one. This had become nothing more than a transaction over socks, which is why I had come into the store in the first place.

As he handed me my receipt, he said, “Have a nice Christmas anyway.”

Retail Hypocrisy

Yesterday Wal-Mart had what Judith Viorst would call a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” The folksy retailer with the heartland twang, which is known for “always low prices,” as well as the nation’s lowest-paid corporate workforce, the destruction of the small towns whose values it pretends to champion, and, just last week, shooting an alleged shoplifter to death in its Houston parking lot, was the subject of an in-depth report on its corrupt practices in Mexico in yesterday’s New York Times. In addition, after early reports that it would pull the “Bushmaster Sporting Rifle” from its shelves, the company announced “we have made no changes in the assortment of guns we sell in our stores.” Lack of demand caused Wal-Mart to stop selling guns in most stores in 2006, but the sagging retail market brought them back five years later. Wal-Mart is now the largest gun seller in the country. As for Mexico, The Times spent months tracking down obscure leads as its reporters methodically unmasked systematic corruption. This wasn’t about having to do business in a shady world, the paper reported. “Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance – public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.”

Wal-Mart likes to sell itself as the quintessentially American company. It’s scary to think it might be right.

The Road to Hell

This slightly abbreviated exchange between Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) and a friend of mine underescores the banality of good intentions: Subject: Standing with Newtown

Dear Friend -

Something horrible and unexplainable happened in Newtown on Friday. I've been there almost non-stop since Friday morning, and there are simply no words to express the grief of our friends and neighbors.

Today, Newtown is grieving. But Newtown is recovering too. Every day I have witnessed hundreds of individual acts of humanity as the people of this small town reach out, with full hearts, to each other.

We have our role to play too. I know that those on the outside can feel a sense of helplessness, and many people ask me, "What can I do to help?"

Well, if you've been looking to do something to support the community, consensus is that a contribution to the United Way of Western Connecticut is the best way to help.

I just made my contribution, and if you are moved to join me you can do so here:

http://www.chrismurphy.com/united-way

While Newtown grieves, the most important thing we can do for them today is to make sure they know Connecticut, and the rest of the country, supports them.

Chris

With all due respect, Senator, and thanking you for your presence in Newtown since the recent tragedy, the most important thing someone in your position can do for people in Connecticut, and Americans in general, is to fight for passage of meaningful legislation limiting access to firearms in this country. I hope you will be standing with Senator Feinstein in her efforts to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, which is at least a start! 

Sincerely,

No More Martyrs

President Obama took us almost to the mountaintop last night. But he stopped short. Let’s hope he doesn’t turn back. In a lyrical and moving speech, Obama summoned the rhetoric of which he is uniquely capable when his words come from his heart. But he did not mention the guns that had killed those children and brought such horror to a place and such desolation to its people. Maybe last night in Newtown was neither the time nor the place to do so. The president’s message of healing and coming together is one we need to hear. And he did prepare the way for legislative action in the days ahead. Let’s hope so. We have been here before. And each time four things have happened:

1. A public outcry to regulate guns.
2. The counterattack against the “predictable hysteria” of those who would disarm America. Because the gun lobby’s political flacks were largely silent yesterday means that they aren’t stupid, not that they aren’t working.
3. 2^nd-Amendment lunacy. I haven’t yet heard the argument that six-year-olds should be armed, but an NRA board member did say that if the teachers had had their guns in school, this tragedy might have been prevented.
4. Nothing. The laws in most states are less restrictive than they were before the Arizona killings two years ago; the subject was never discussed during the presidential campaign.

How much worse does it have to get? We do not need more young martyrs. Let these children and their teachers be, finally, the impetus for change.

Apocalyptic Heat

There’s no future in predicting the end of the world because only two things can happen, and both are bad: either the world will end, in which case nobody will care about your prediction, or it won’t, in which case you will become a joke. The world’s latest “drop dead” date, if you will excuse the expression, is one week from today, when the Mayan calendar either does or does not forecast the Apocalypse. I’m not predicting, but (full disclosure) I haven’t done my Christmas shopping.

According to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 2% of Americans believe the Mayan story, which isn’t surprising since the Mayans couldn’t even predict their own demise. But a much larger number believe the end of the world is approaching, although they diverge sharply on the reasons for, the meaning of, and the correctives to such an event.

The evidence is in the weather, which most Americans now believe has grown more extreme of late. Specifically, 75% believe that the globe is warming – although a majority of the Republican Party faithful nevertheless continue to insist that “global warming” is a hoax.

Here’s where things get dicey. If you believe, as most Americans do, that “God is in control of everything that happens in the world,” you are likely to also be among those who believe that the Biblical “end times” are near. If you’re ready, this is very good news.

On the other hand, if our role is to ensure the future wellbeing of the earth, this is not the time to sit back and enjoy the Rapture.

Thank You

Several of you wrote me wonderfully kind notes about my mother’s death. Many who didn’t know Mum seemed to grasp her essence, which was heartwarming to me. She was not your standard-issue mother, but, of course, nobody’s is. Over the last weeks I have learned something about the American health care system and the bureaucracy of death, on which I will undoubtedly pontificate in the months ahead. I learned that people matter. Mum’s doctor was more than her medical professional. He was her friend, and he made house calls. And when staff members of all levels at her assisted-living residence embraced me in tears this week, I knew that people really cared for my mother.

The health system is a mess because too often it crushes that caring, and people don’t seem to be its focus. When Mum was in the hospital, I said to my sister, “we seem to be the least important people in the process . . . except for the patient.” To those who say, if you think it’s bad now, wait for Obamacare, I say, I can’t wait for Obamacare because there is something inherently incompatible between corporate demands and patient needs. Our lives should not be “measured out with coffee spoons.”

As Hospice shows. At every step of the last days, the people of this extraordinary organization were sensitive to the dignity of Mum’s life and the dignity of her death – something that seems too often absent in the political debates about when life begins and how it ends.

Celestial Food

Mum couldn’t eat pizza any more because she had pulled her teeth out one night a while ago (which is another Mum story). So she set out before dawn yesterday morning in search of more celestial food. She went alone, leaving her worn and wracked body behind. Mum was not born to grow old, and yet she lived to be 90 with grace, anger at times, and some bewilderment.

“How did I get to be so old, Jamesie?” she asked not long ago.

I urged her to get up and walk to help her failing legs. But she was in pain and she was stubborn.

“They won’t let me walk here,” she said.

“Who won’t let you walk?" I asked incredulously.

“The people who run things,” she answered mysteriously.

“A woman comes here every morning for three hours, and she would be happy to help you walk.”

“I don’t feel like walking in the morning.”

“Well, we can ask her to come in the afternoon.”

“Oh . . .  I don’t feel like walking in the afternoon either.

“Anyway,” she added, “all the people here tell me I look 50.”

“Fifty?”

“Well,” she conceded, “maybe 60.”

And in truth, she had barely a wrinkle on her face.

We were silent for a while, and then she said,

“Now I live only in my dreams?”

“What are your dreams?” I asked.

“Whatever I want them to be.”

“How are they?”

“Wonderful,” she said, as a smile came to her lips and she closed her eyes.

Stumble of the Week

The Disabled. After what Gail Collins did to Rick Santorum yesterday, anything more would just be piling on. But thanks to Santorum, the senate refused to ratify a United Nations treaty that is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. Apparently the treaty somehow threatens our national sovereignty and could allow the New World Order to forbid him from homeschooling his child. The U.S. has also yet to ratify UN treaties on the rights of children (sole ally: Somalia) and women (Iran has joined Somalia), and the Kyoto Protocol on the warming hoax. Well, at least we aren’t hypocrites. Resignations half a world apart provide hope for a saner future. In Egypt, nine ministers resigned in protest over Mohamed Morsi’s power grab, which may signal enough political will to derail his efforts to reverse Egypt’s “Arab Spring.” And Jim DeMint, the avatar of Tea Party narrow-mindedness, is leaving the senate to run the Heritage Foundation. He can do plenty of damage at the conservative think tank, but for now let’s savor his departure from the senate.

Color. Jack Brooks died on Tuesday. The Texas congressman backed civil rights in the deep South, abortion rights in the Bible Belt, and led efforts to impeach Nixon and Reagan. He was also staunchly pro-gun, and his ability to bring federal money into his district got him elected 21 times. Brooks is a reminder that we vote for real people, not bullet points. His obituary ended with the story of his last effort to bring home millions. “If it’s pork,” he said, “it’ll be tasty.”

Bumper Sticker Christians

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker:

Ordain Women

Or stop dressing like them

that was right up there with our old family favorite from the 1970s, when Phil Esposito was scoring at a goal-a-game clip for the Boston Bruins:

Jesus Saves

But Espo knocks it in on the rebound

I may well not be the person to critique religious doctrine and practices, since the church militant stopped speaking for me many years ago, and I had my quadrennial fill of fundamentalism during the last election cycle. But the spiritual side of my childhood faith resonates still, as I wonder: who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? And, increasingly, where are we going? I still love the music, the blended sound of organ and human voice. I love the beauty of the churches and the language of King James, and I can still recite much of the liturgy by heart.

But the doctrinal exclusiveness of many sects and their dogmatic definition of the good life turned me away. It is a complicated history. Churches have been both the essential drivers of civil and human rights and the great impediments to universal understanding. And the backlashes against women and gays, which are particularly strong in the three monotheistic religions, strike me as immoral. We express righteous outrage at the treatment of women in other societies but silently tolerate our own Taliban. In most cultures through most of history, women were essential members of the religious communion. As they should be.

Honk if you love Jesus

Modern Malefactors

I was going to decry the folly of John Boehner (R, Ohio), who occupies the Speaker’s chair and appears to think of himself as co-president, even though his party could not even carry Ohio. But behind Boehner – and often in opposition to him – stands the implacable right wing of the Republican Party. And behind them stand the vested interests of finance, whose pockets are stuffed with money and politicians – people like the Koch Brothers, the most venal twosome in America, and their lackeys like Sarah Palin, the most ludicrous. These people simply want to do away with government, which is the one thing that stands between them and a return to the robber-baron era of the 19^th century, when the country was dominated by those whom Teddy Roosevelt called “the malefactors of great wealth." How else can we explain their insistence that any additional budget revenues must come from a source other than taxes? Taxes are the way governments raise money. And right now the government needs money, not just to rein in the national debt, but more importantly, to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. With corporations sitting on historic amounts of cash, the economy in a shambles because of the criminal behavior of the private financial system, and the world facing a grueling recession, it is time for our government to restore our highways and bridges, our public schools and universities, our national parks and transport systems.

This will cost money, but it will put people to work now creating an investment that will benefit the entire country for years to come.

Life Force

The phone rang late Thursday. “The doctor called from the emergency room,” my sister said. “Mum has huge clots on her legs and no pulse in her lower body. He said to come soon.” Our mother is 90, and while her spirit is irrepressible, her physical health has long been failing.

At the hospital the dire news was reiterated: her legs were virtually dead, she had a barely discernible pulse, and gangrene seemed imminent. While diagnosis was based on palpable visual evidence, it had not been vetted through her personal doctor, who is affiliated with a different hospital. His note explaining Mum’s history had inexplicably disappeared on its way to the ER, which was too bad because she has endured her startling symptoms for many years.

The doctors were good. The diagnosis was wrong. The system, which is corporate- rather than patient-centered, made understanding our mother’s unique situation almost impossible, and we, who have no medical expertise, had to translate between medical systems that did not communicate with each other.

Still, Mum’s health is failing, and we tried to prepare for what was to come. By 3 p.m. yesterday we had arranged for her return to her apartment with 24-hour care and hospice. She had eaten nothing in four days and slept a lot. “Let her know food is available,” the doctor said, “but don’t force her. She’ll know what she wants.”

“Mum’s had a good run,” I added portentously. “I think she’s trying to tell us something.”

At 3:15, she woke up and asked for a pizza.

Birth and Carbon

Last week the Pew Research Center announced that in 2011 the U.S. witnessed its lowest birth rate in history. The greatest decline was among immigrants, particularly Mexican women, which undercuts the image of hordes of Hispanics slipping across the border to have American babies. The news unsettled pro-growth conservatives, represented by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who equated America’s future as a great power with the continuation of “our demographic dynamism.” This is an idea whose time has gone. In the 19^th century American newspapers, in small towns and big cities, constantly beat the drum for population growth as a sign of greatness. Numbers mattered, not quality of life.

With 7 billion people on Earth, it’s time for a new model, particularly in light of a second report last week that record global carbon emissions have rendered current planetary warming targets already obsolete.

Douthat attributed lower birth rates to “a decadence . . . that privileges the present over the future [and] embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”

This is supercilious tripe. Historically women had more children because mortality rates were high, child labor was a critical economic asset, birth control was ineffective, and women had less control of their own lives.

The current trend toward smaller families is because young people want to provide their children a better life, are fearful of the world they will enter, and worry about the fate of the earth.

This is not selfish. It’s responsible.

Stumble of the Week

• Maine. When I applauded Maine for the diversity of its political system, I noted that its GOP governor had been a disaster. He is not alone. Tea Party Republicans have at least one more loon: party chairman Charlie Webster announced that Obama’s victory was a fraud because “in some parts of the state, there were dozens of black people who came into vote. Nobody in town knew them.” While it is certainly true that African Americans, who compose 1.3% of Maine’s population, would have stood out in rural towns, there must have been a lot of them trucked in to swing the election. Obama beat Romney by over 100,000 votes of the 700,000 cast. The Obama election team may be ruthless, but it isn’t stupid, and the image of busloads of Blacks heading north on the Maine Turnpike defies reason. Webster’s claims have never been validated, nor has the question of how he became GOP chairman ever been adequately answered.

• Global Warming doubters. 2012 has proved (again) to be one of the hottest years on record, and Arctic icecap melting outpaced both 2011’s rate and predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• Common Sense.  By a vote of 138 to 9 (with 41 abstentions) the UN granted Palestine nonmember observer status. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, why did the U.S. vote against the resolution, which isolates Hamas and reaffirms the two-state solution? Do Israel and the US think they can choose the Palestinians’ negotiating team? When elections were last held, Hamas won. It’s time to get real.