Clarence Speaks

Yesterday Associate Justice Clarence Thomas spoke publicly from the bench for the first time since Feb. 22, 2006. According to the Supreme Court’s official transcript, Thomas broke his almost-seven-year silence with the words, “Well – he did not —.” One Court analyst called those four words “perhaps the most important speech in Thomas’ 21-year career on the bench” – although no one in the courtroom seems to have any idea what the enigmatic jurist actually meant. Professor Emily I. Dunno, who teaches linguistics and constitutional law at Southern Indiana Law School, pointed to the dashes for insight into his potential meaning. “Half as many dashes as words,” said Dr. Dunno. “That’s a lot of dashes.”

There are various explanations for Thomas’ taciturnity. He has written that he is self-conscious of his rural southern accent, and at other times has said he comes to listen not to talk, and that his verbose colleagues make it hard to join the discussion. My own thought is that asking questions will only muddy the thoughts in Thomas’ rigidly made-up mind.

It hardly seems more than two decades since the Bush administration cynically pushed through a man, who openly resented the idea of affirmative action, to replace Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights titan who insisted on the justice of such action to confront three centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas was confirmed 52-48, the smallest margin in over a century, and his subsequent silence has obscured the extremity of his opinions on an increasingly right-wing Court.

Our Trillion-Dollar Baby

I had somehow missed the discussion about the trillion-dollar platinum coin, which the Treasury Department would mint under a creative reading of a 1997 law that authorizes the production of commemorative coins. The coin would be deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank, where it would sit in splendor, like a beneficent monarch, enabling its country to carry on without Congressional action on the debt ceiling. The idea has met with much ridicule. But I love it. It brilliantly combines the hard currency demands of those who support a return to the gold standard with the cheap money of the Populist free silver and greenback traditions. All of American history can be read as a recurrent battle between the advocates of “hard” money (let’s call them Creditors) and “soft” money (let’s call them Debtors). Creditors want money to be as rare as possible so they can squeeze the blood out of those in their debt. That’s why we call them bloodsuckers. Debtors, by contrast, want cheap money so they only have to pay back 47 cents for every dollar they borrowed. That’s why we call them the 47 percent.

The plan is that, when Congress finally raises the debt ceiling and the coin is no longer needed, it will be destroyed. But that seems like a terrible waste of money – and obviously we are going to need that coin soon again. So I think we should give it to the Chinese as a memento of our entangling financial relationship . . . and as full payment on a trillion dollars of debt.

A Samoan Tragedy

I was, to put it mildly, a modest high-school football player on a team of which our coach noted, “We’re small, but we’re slow.” Junior Seau and I had nothing in common football-wise – except that I once had a concussion that knocked me loopy, sent me to the infirmary, and that I wore as a badge of honor until I started reading about chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a degenerative brain disease – a close relative of boxing’s “dementia pugilistica,” which is just “punch drunk” dressed in a toga – that can only be diagnosed in the brains of the dead. To the living it brings early-onset Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, often in the prime of life. Seau was 43 last May when he went home and put a bullet through his chest, preserving for science the brain that had brought him to suicide. Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health confirmed that it was riddled with CTE.

The CTE story is much like the global-warming story. The scientific evidence is beyond dispute, but the culture refuses to accept it. Boston University researchers have studied 34 brains of former pro football players; 33 had CTE. So players, fans, coaches, owners insist the evidence remains insufficient.

Pro football is no longer a game. It is a “spectator sport” in the way the Roman games were. It involves enormous amounts of money, both legal and illegal, and a class of gladiators who do battle to bloodthirsty cheers. Unless that changes, the brains of the Junior Seaus will remain simply a cost of doing business.

And the Democrats?

What are their ideas for the country’s future? Obama has learned that much of governing requires pragmatic deal making for marginal progress. But that is not all of governing, and I believe the Democrats need to renew the vision of a diverse, just and vibrant America that excited the electorate in 2008 and was noticeably subdued last fall. For me, the big issues we face are:

1. The growing disparities between rich and poor.
2. The devastation of our environment.
3. The militarization of everything – from China’s saber rattling to Iran’s nuclear threat to ivory poaching in Africa.

These are not unrelated. The huge gaps between rich and poor, both within America and around the world, are creating expanding pockets of misery and despair. These mock the idea of a community of all people, and encourage environmental destruction by creating some classes who amass nature’s fruits for their private enjoyment and others who must do whatever they can to survive. Such a world creates opportunities for heavily armed gangs, terrorists groups, and rogue armies to sell themselves to the highest bidders.

A country as divided as we are threatening to become internally – and as isolationist externally – ignores these issues. We rightly make much, for example, of the nation’s 7.8% unemployment rate. But we barely notice that half the people of Detroit are out of work.

Obama’s promise was to build a national community of our diverse parts. We are headed in the other direction. He needs to lead us back.

The Hollow Men

The Republican Main Street Partnership yesterday removed the word “Republican” from its title. But “we have not changed our values or our mission, “ said its president, former Congressman Steven LaTourette (R-OH), “ We will continue to . . . represent the governing wing of the Republican Party." This might be a good place for the GOP to focus its frenzied efforts at self-analysis in the wake of its election losses. Its nominee had spent hundreds of millions polishing the very presidential bona fides (business executive, governor, Olympics guru) with which his primary opponents filleted him (vulture capitalist, Massachusetts moderate). Romney could have stood out from the crowd by standing up for his carefully created image. True, he might have lost, but it’s hard to imagine one of his primary opponents as an actual presidential candidate (Santorum? Herman Cain? Newt?). But Romney caved to the party's know-nothings . . . and then was required to execute another about-face in the summer. No wonder people were incredulous. The Obama team didn’t come up with the term “Etch-A-Sketch;” Romney’s top adviser did.

As the election showed, the “social issues” do matter. Our core beliefs are the heart and soul of our identities as people and as political parties, and while we don’t seem to think much of our politicians right now, we do expect them to stand for something. What stronger signal could a party send of its current hollowness than to have the group that claims to represent its governing wing remove Republican from its name?

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.”