Food for Thought

“I am having a hard time eating quinoa,” my daughter emailed me yesterday, “now that I have read that article saying it is ruining Bolivia.” For those unfamiliar with current dietary rages, quinoa is one of the three major food groups (along with Greek yoghurt and kale) for today’s upscale eaters. It first achieved prominence when NASA scientists determined it was the perfect food to serve astronauts in space. Since then it has come far from its Andean roots, where for centuries it was the staple of mountain peasants.

Now, unfortunately, the peasants can’t afford it. But the quintupling of quinoa prices has been a great boon for farmers and exporters, and it has had a significant impact on the local economies where it is grown. Naturally, farmers are planting more of it and there are signs of an emerging export-driven monoculture. Meanwhile, poor people are turning to white bread and noodles, which are cheaper and, it is said, taste better. Malnutrition rates are on the rise.

Sound familiar? The mandated use of ethanol was meant to break our dependence on foreign oil, produce cleaner gasoline and revive American agriculture, all by planting corn? One side effect was an estimated $6.5-billion spike in world food prices. Then there was the Soviet Union’s forced production of cotton (or “white gold”) for export, which poisoned the fish in the Aral Sea and reduced it to 10% of its original size. And, of course, McDonald’s, whose practices have changed agriculture everywhere and created the modern enigma of malnourished obesity.

John Brown’s Body

Yesterday, I spent time in the woods removing vines that strangle the life out of the trees that feed them – bittersweet, Virginia creeper, multiflora rose, poison ivy, some grown so thick it takes a chainsaw to cut them. Naturally my mind turned to Henry Thoreau. Whose wouldn’t? Too often we think of Thoreau at Walden as a mild environmentalist, a man who planted beans, went for long walks and dined regularly with the Emersons. We sell him short. I went out yesterday to cut vines and clear my mind; Thoreau “went to the woods . . . to front only the essential facts of life, . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” This was no gentle sojourn in his mind, no diversion from real life. This was Jesus in the wilderness confronting his own life and impending death.

A few years after leaving Walden, Thoreau wrote about John Brown, soon to be executed for leading the attack at Harper’s Ferry and arming local slaves, and who has ever since been demonized as a wild-eyed fanatic, America’s first terrorist. Not to Thoreau. Of the small band, he wrote, “These alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the greatest compliment which this country could pay them.”

And he reminded the rest of us that “we preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day.”

Bridges to the Future

Last week, Senate Democrats finally produced a budget. It is for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, which means we must keep lurching ahead without a roadmap until then. Many people think we don’t need a map to figure where the country is heading, and since this budget is not going to pass the Republican-controlled House, it’s not really a map to anywhere. Much has been made of the difference between Paul Ryan’s House budget and Patty Murray’s Senate one. Depending on your point of view, the latter is either a reasonable effort to balance a trillion dollars in increased revenues and spending cuts – or it is another example of the Democrats’ refusal to get serious about the deficit, cut taxes and reduce the size of government, which to Republicans minds are all the same thing.

Lost in the “heartless spending cut versus job-killing tax hike” argument is something Murray’s budget actually addresses: Investment. Unlike other spending, investment is not a cost of doing business, it is a guarantee of staying in business. The senate budget includes about $200 billion for investments that we badly need in the country’s worn-out infrastructure: from rail lines to bridges to schools. It comes under the government’s constitutional responsibility to “promote the general welfare,” which many people no longer trust our government to do. But if not our government, then who? I am weary of listening to politicians prattle on about protecting “future generations,” as they let the foundation of that future crumble right now.

Burmese Scenes (Resilience)

(1)   The moment the rusting green ferry touched the banks of the island not far from Mandalay, children swarmed the gang plank, hawking the usual wares: plastic-wrapped postcards, jade bracelets, bronze bells, wooden elephants. My special tormentor was Ida, a 14-year-old with an engaging smile and extraordinary persistence. “You buy,” she said, taking a small bell from her pack. “Very good price.” “No,” I said, and repeated as she pulled out a gong, a necklace, bracelets. “No. No. No.” “Please, Jamie,” for by now she knew my name. “You make me happy.” She walked with me to a horse-drawn cart that would take me to an inland temple, producing ever more baubles from her bottomless pack. “Maybe later,” she said, following the cart on foot. I looked away, and when I turned back she was on a bicycle, looking determinedly at me. At the temple I succumbed, buying two bracelets for a $4. “I remember you” were her happy parting words, but she had already locked her eyes on someone else. (2)   Descending the covered stairway from a large pagoda, running the usual gauntlet of vendors, I saw a man painting lacquer ware. He had no arms, and one leg ended at the knee. I thought of thalidomide babies and those suffering from mercury poisoning in Minamata half-a-century ago. With his stump, he clasped the bowl against his body and, with his paintbrush between his toes, he drew the delicate lines required of his art.

It’s amazing, when I look, how many scenes I see that remind me not to feel sorry for myself.

America and the World

Those of us who grew up following Major League baseball love lists, and the latest to catch my eye was “Ten Countries that Hate America Most.” They are, in reverse order: (10) Serbia; (9) Greece; (8) Yemen; (7) Iraq; (6) Iran; (5) Egypt; (4) Lebanon; (3) Algeria; (2) Palestine; (1) Pakistan Note who isn’t on the list. Not a single country from Latin America, where resentments once ran high. But it’s been a while since United Fruit overthrew a government, and Obama’s presidency has burnished our image with Latino peoples. Nor are any of our Cold War enemies, from Russia to Vietnam. Finally, countries with mafias apparently find it more profitable to deal directly in our economy than to waste time hating us.

The presence of erstwhile allies in the war on terror (Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq) brought to mind a passage from Peter Olszewski’s Land of a Thousand Eyes, in which he asks a group of Burmese if they want to be liberated by the Americans: “The answer was a vigorous no because, they said, an American invasion would simply be exchanging terror for horror. . . . Terror was living with the regime, and horror was being saved from it by the Americans.” And drones do not appear to enhance our popularity.

Yet, I find that, while many people I meet dislike America’s actions in the world, they hold America in great esteem. It still shines, as it did for Hugh Maguire, who told me that when his ship sailed into New York Harbor 65 years ago, he refused to believe that New York City lay before him. “Back home,” he said, “we thought the streets were paved with gold.”

Cutting to the Bone

The New York Times has again revealed its bias by juxtaposing two articles on its digital front page that allegedly have nothing to do with each other. In one, the newspaper reports that Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) has presented a budget that would slash not only Medicare and social security but job training, infrastructure investment and higher education. Nearby, we learn that “A New York police officer was convicted on Tuesday in a bizarre plot to kidnap, torture, kill and eat women, ending a trial whose outcome hinged on the delicate legal distinction between fantasy and reality.” Coincidence? I don’t think so, although a spokesperson for the paper called the charge “complete b*ll sh*t, just like the rest of your blogs.” A representative from Ryan’s office scoffed at the comparison, defending the budget proposal as “necessary and long-overdue surgery to save the lives of Medicare and social security.” Quoting a famous maxim from Vietnam, he noted that “sometimes it is necessary to destroy a thing in order to save it,” adding, with regard to cannibalism, “it’s Obamacare that’s eating our young.”

He said there was no comparison between the current proposal and the Romney-Ryan budget the voters soundly rejected in November. “In the election we had to take the plan to the country, where people like Obama better than us. But here on Capitol Hill, the Republicans rule. We have a majority in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, we have the filibuster.”

They Endure

The last words of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s tale of aristocratic family disintegration and underclass survival, kept running through my mind as I flew home last week. “They endured,” he wrote of Dilsey, the matriarch of the black family that had served the Comptons for generations and witnessed the white family’s self-destruction. I was trying to make sense of my short visit to Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), and those two words seemed to offer a clue. The Burmese have endured half a century of one of the world’s most repressive military governments, one that brutally crushed any dissent and created an Orwellian surveillance network that kept its aptly named Insein Prison overflowing. Actually, life hadn’t been that great before: Burma was ravaged by Japanese and Allied fighting in World War II, which followed a century of British rule, when the “white man’s burden” was carried on the brown man’s shoulders.

Last year, “the generals” shifted gears. Without explanation, they loosened their harsh rein and opened up the country to the outside world. The speculation is they need both hard currency and a counterweight to China. People in Burma talked more freely than I had expected, but their answer to any question about the future was a fatalistic, “We don’t know.” As a tourist I went where I was told and saw what I was meant to see, but still I carried away a deep respect for the resilience of a people who endure.

Traveling Man

When I travel to new places, I become increasingly impressed with my own ignorance, a trait I normally like to keep under wraps. It isn’t just that, to get where I’m going, I stand in long lines like a sheep, pass through machines that penetrate my body, and sleep sitting up. Far more unsettling is that, in the comfort of my armchair back home, I had a clear understanding of the world, which was delivered to me in books, newspapers, my computer. Then I ventured “out there” and discovered that I didn’t have a clue. For every single thing I knew turns out to have been a projection I imposed on a world that is too vast, diverse and messy for me to grasp. I think we all do this. If we didn’t create a subjective framework to order the world around us, we would be bombarded by the chaos, much as the autistic children I once taught felt besieged by the stimuli that came unfiltered to their minds. Likewise, when I landed in Burma on a journey I hope to write about this week, I encountered a world of colors, smells, sights and ideas that overwhelmed me. I had left everything I “knew” back in my armchair. I had to take the country on its terms, not mine, and I didn't begin to understand it. Travel forces us out of our smug isolation and challenges our preconceptions. That’s why Hilary Clinton’s 900,000 miles traveled and 112 countries visited is not a statistic; it’s a secretary of state’s job description.

Coming Home

Having just returned from two weeks in a country that is tentatively emerging from 50 years of secret government, it was unsettling to arrive home to a nation that sometimes seems headed in the other direction. Two cases in point: (1) by the predictably partisan 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court’s majority dismissed a challenge to a Bush-era law that gives the federal government broad powers of secret surveillance over its own citizens; and (2) it took Rand Paul, of all people, to get the administration to address the limits of targeting Americans for assassination on U.S. soil. No, the situations in Burma and the United States are not comparable, and people everywhere hunger for this country’s tradition of open dissent. But that tradition depends on transparency in government, and Paul, for all his grandstanding, underscored the fact that political leaders must constantly to be reminded of that. I was startled in Burma to hear the word “transparency” on many lips. It speaks of people’s new faith that one of the world’s most “Orwellian” governments is changing. In a country – once home to the author of Animal Farm and 1984 – where dissent was ruthlessly crushed and surveillance an ubiquitous fact of life, there remains the fear that the generals will renege on their promises. But it is tempered by the hope that each day of openness will make that more difficult to do. The Burmese take nothing for granted. Their history says they are wise not to.

Burma Road

I told someone not long ago that my two favorite decades were the 60s – the 1960s and my sixties. That was probably more distilled memories and wishful thinking than the truth (and, in fact, my actual favorite times were when my children were young and still willing to play with me). But I do think of the 1960s as a time when hope and altruism drove young people to try to change the world. As for my current decade, sixty, whatever it may seem, is actuarially no longer old. But as the years pile on, I have become oddly aware of a sense of anticipation for the future, even of the optimism I was supposed to feel when I was young. For there seems little use in worrying about all my separate failings when my entire body is sending me a message of, well, inadequacy. Like it or not, this is who I am. Recently, a friend urged me to see “Quartet.” It is a wonderful film about people who learn – because it doesn’t come naturally – to grow old with joy. They are musicians, and they may no longer be able to hit the high notes, but they can still sing. And they do.

I leave later today for Burma, daunted by the hours of flying but excited to see a completely new place. I am told that, for reasons of time management, Internet access and personal well-being, I must take a break from my blog. So I will take notes and give you a vacation. See you in March. Rejuvenated.

Party Lines

Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC), who grows increasingly shrill in the face of a possible Tea Party primary challenge in 2014, called Chuck Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time." Senator, get a grip . . .

More radical than Donald Rumsfeld (2001-6), who oversaw the disastrous war in Iraq,who became the first leader of America’s military to justify torture, and who rationalized the condition of U.S. battlefield equipment by telling his own troops that “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want ” – even though it was America that had decided to go to war?

Or than Jefferson Davis (1853-7), the only secretary of war to be subsequently charged with treason – for leading a war against the U.S. government that resulted in 700,000 American dead?

More unqualified than Dick Cheney (1989-93), who responded to a question about his five Vietnam-era deferments by saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service?”

Or than Simon Cameron (1861-2), who resigned from the war department after less than a year because his corruption was so astounding?

Republican objections to Hagel seem fourfold: He challenged the Israeli lobby; he opposed the Iraq war; he seeks alternatives to bombing Iran; and he crossed party lines to support Obama in 2008. Good for him.

In 1997 Bill Clinton nominated Republican Senator William Cohen to be secretary of defense. The senate confirmed him unanimously. And he went on to do an excellent job. How times have changed.

Pretty Yende

The tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law school graduate, has brought into focus a host of clichés about big time sports, the rise and fall of heroes, the link between domestic violence and the proliferation of guns, and the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as one of the world’s most violent countries. Steenkamp was shot by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, the sprinter who was born with no fibula and became the first double amputee in Olympic history. His inspiring story of rising above adversity to become a hero to millions has become the all-too-familiar sports story of those we lionize turning into clay. But this story has an extra dimension: the level of violent crime in South Africa and the image of white people barricaded in their houses at night, armed to the teeth. It is an image that sits uncomfortably with that of a country that overcame the most oppressive colonialism and racial apartheid to itself become an inspiration for a continent. Is this too in question?

No. Last month 27-year-old Pretty Yende made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera. That a young black woman could come from a South African township to one of the world’s largest stages would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Her triumph, though, is not only personal because her voice really is a gift to the world. Perhaps we look in the wrong places for hope and inspiration. It is in art that we find the beauty that expresses our common humanity.

Old Money

It’s ironic to me that Ponce de Leon stumbled onto Florida while searching for the fountain of youth. My experience of the state has been a place where old people get fleeced by a workforce that exists solely for that purpose. Case in point: when my stepgrandmother died years ago, she left a strip of her property to the nice man next door who had looked after her place. Unfortunately, that strip was the driveway, which made it hard to sell the property to anyone but the nice man next door. Meanwhile, her stock certificates had disappeared from her safe deposit box. That history probably predisposed me against Marco Rubio’s speech, and to be evenhanded I now turn to the unseemly relationship between Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, and Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach eye-surgeon-cum-venture capitalist, who seems to have done very well by the elderly. Maybe too well, as the government wants to recover $8.9 million it calls fraudulent Medicare billings. Melgen is also the largest contributor to Menendez, the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and coincidentally the doctor is trying to secure a contract to supply drug-screening equipment to the Dominican Republic that could pay him $500 million over 20 years. Such investments require flying your important friends to see them on your private jet, and I am happy to report that the senator recently reimbursed the doctor $58,500 for two trips he made in 2010 but had inadvertently forgotten.

We are Citizens

Three issues rarely heard on last fall’s campaign trail made their way forcefully into the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening: the poor, climate change and gun control. I was happy to see them; we have ducked an open discussion of them for too long. Obama was most oblique about the poor. But his reference to “inescapable pockets of poverty” was a rare acknowledgement in a country where everything is meant to be escapable, where a new life lies just beyond the frontier. I hope the president’s “ladders of opportunity” will enable us to rebuild American communities that are as ravaged as any in the developing world, rather than be simply the means to get out of them.

The president’s most encouraging message was his full engagement with climate change, which is becoming a signature issue for him. He may well be our most environmental president, although with Richard Nixon often offered as the reigning champion, the competition is pretty thin. But the president must show us how we can simultaneously have all the growth we seem to need and protect the increasingly ravaged earth on which our lives depend.

It was not a passionate speech until the end: first, on guns, when Obama adopted the “call-and-response” cadence of a Baptist preacher, “They deserve a vote;” and then the finale: “We are citizens . . . this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations . . . our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” Amen.

The Other Speech

One measure of how much Barack Obama has grown over his four years in office was Marco Rubio’s speech last night. I don’t just mean the cotton-mouthed diction, the furtive search for that tiny bottle of Poland Springs, or the high school debating team delivery, for he has the skills to surmount his oratorical infelicities over time. No, it wasn’t so much his style. It was his substance. What a hypocrite. The opposition’s response to the State of the Union, first given by Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford in 1966, is a delicate matter, for on this night the president reports to the country in his role as leader of the nation, not simply of his party. Not to sound too naïve, but some sense of protocol would demand that the response rise above the slash-and-burn partisan invective we saw last night, filled as it was with straw men and taking aim at things the president did not say but that his opponents have long insisted he stands for. On this night, at least, the president need not be presented as a cartoon character.

But Rubio has a deeper problem. His overriding message of damning the government that has been his only career and praising the private sector, which he has experienced primarily through campaign donors, was kind of irritating. And as he listed the government programs that have benefited him and his family – from student aid to Medicare – I waited in vain for a single word that might have tempered the shrillness. Gratitude.

La Mama

Veteran Vatican watchers were befuddled yesterday when out of St. Peter’s dome came neither black smoke nor white smoke . . . but lightning. Traditionally, black smoke has meant the assembled cardinals have not yet agreed on the next pope; white smoke means the church has a new leader.

Lightning, it turns out, means the next pope is Theresa Speyer, a no-nonsense, 12^th-generation Catholic from Olive Branch, Illinois. The new pontiffa (or “La Mama”) traces her ancestry to the Diet of Worms, which, she told reporters, family archives describe as “delicious” and “loaded with protein,” as well as "putting Martin Luther in his place."

At her first press conference, Speyer said she “totally” accepts church doctrine on marriage and the priesthood. “Are you kidding," the twice-divorced leader-elect asked? "I wish I had listened to Him years ago.”

As a woman, Speyer hopes to be more inclusive than some of her predecessors, men like Innocent III whose Inquisition, she noted, rubbed certain people the wrong way. “I plan to sit down with the world’s major religious leaders and see if we can’t be nicer to each other.

“We have the most trouble with Muslims,” she continued, “so first up will be Barack Obama. I’d like to get him with Rick Santorum, who converted Governor Brownback of Kansas when they were in the Senate together.”

Asked about the Dalai Lama, who has made world peace the center of his religious teaching, Speyer demurred. “Let’s start with people who actually believe in God.”

War Crimes

Did U. S. Forces commit war crimes in Vietnam? And 50 years later, does it matter? In his relentless new book, Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse argues that the infamous slaughter of 500 unarmed women, children and the elderly at My Lai in March 1968 was not a rogue action that went out of control, but the inevitable result of a policy that came from the top and was intended to “produce a veritable system of suffering.” Turse methodically traces that suffering, and its cover-up, in long-secret files that document atrocities committed in pursuit of the “body count,” a policy that equated military progress with dead bodies. The grossly misleading numbers, which appeared nightly on American television screens in the 1960s, were themselves a result of the “mere gook rule” or MGR, which encouraged killing Vietnamese people with impunity.

What’s missing in Turse’s chilling history is the context in which U.S. troops lived and fought in a landscape filled with constant misery and omnipresent danger against a hardened and largely invisible enemy who didn’t play by the rules of Nuremburg either – a war brought searingly to life by Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War and Michael Herr in Dispatches.

War crimes were committed in Vietnam, as they are in all wars, by people who were trained to dehumanize others and in the process became dehumanized themselves. We cannot justify those crimes; but we must ask why we believe that something as horrific as war can be played by a set of civilized rules.

Stumble of the Week

Historical Truth. As a 16-year-old during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I remember the collective fear of a nuclear attack, followed by relief that the calm and steely resolve of President Kennedy had made the Soviets blink. In a review of Sheldon Stern’s new book, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Benjamin Schwartz writes that almost everything we have been taught about the event is not true. The miscalculations and political considerations of the Kennedy administration brought us to the brink of war, and a legendary counter-story was concocted and fed to a gullible press. One of the villains is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “whose histories ‘repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts.”’ Schlesinger, who left academia for the halls of power and became the model of the “public intellectual,” was long considered a sycophant by his old academic colleagues. They have been vindicated. His “accounts – ‘profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive,’” writes Schultz, “were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.” Women’s Rights. The fight for the hearts, minds and other organs of the Republican party continues stage right. The Daily Beast reports that the “transvaginal ultrasound” is back on the legislative dockets in Michigan, Tennessee and Alabama. A year ago, the Virginia legislature passed – and then rescinded after a national outcry – a bill mandating the procedure, which the Michigan GOP insists “further protects the interests of the women seeking an abortion by assessing the viability of the fetus and confirming the approximate gestational age of the fetus.” The party of non-intrusive government has embraced women’s rights.

Sequestration

Of course they have to do it. Congress needs to pass some package of interim spending cuts and tax “reforms” to head off the drastic reductions (known for some reason as “sequestration”) that will automatically go into effect on March 1^st because . . . well, because once again our representatives have backed themselves into a corner on the elementary issue of what kind of country we want and how to pay for its governance. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,’” said John Boehner yesterday. “Now I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough. It’s time to act.” It’s worth noting that Boehner is not exactly a disinterested observer. He is the Speaker of the House, the person who is supposed to lead his colleagues, not just wring his hands. In fairness, though, a budget would help, and the president needs to submit one. It is wrong, I think, to consider the budgeting process as simply a financial exercise in allocating the money we have (or even the money we don’t have). It is a vision for where we want to take the nation and a blueprint for the journey. Last November, Americans had a clear choice, and a majority of us gave Barack Obama a mandate to govern because we believe in his vision. Now we want to see his blueprint. Why should plotting the nation's journey be any less exciting in 2013 than it was in 1789?

Big Lies

"Beware the big lie!” the 1951 American propaganda film of the same name warns us. “Beware the dove that goes BOOM!" We have seen a lot of big lies lately from people in high places who have looked into the collective face of America and told bald-faced lies so often and so insistently that you think they must be telling the truth.

• Calling himself the most “the most tested athlete on the planet,” Lance Armstrong denied for years that he took performance-enhancing drugs. Last month he answered “yes” to every single question Oprah Winfrey asked him about his drug use.

• For decades Cardinal Roger Mahoney repeatedly denied that priests in his Los Angeles archdiocese abused young people. Last week the court-ordered release of 12,000 pages of church records documented repeated abuse, often by serial violators and always denied by the church.

• Yesterday Essie Mae Washington-Williams died. She was 87 and the daughter of Strom Thurmond, who 65 years ago bolted the Democratic convention and ran for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket, winning four states. Carrie Butler, Washington-Williams’ mother, died that year at 38. She had been a teenaged Black maid in Thurmond’s house when he impregnated her. “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” Thurmond said in a campaign stump speech, “that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”