Stockman’s Screed

David Stockman, the aging boy wonder who was Ronald Reagan’s budget director at 34, wrote a 2700-word op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times. Its bottom line was “get out of the markets and hide out in cash.” Stockman takes us on quite a journey to get to this simple point. He tells a tawdry story, peopled with many scoundrels and few heroes, an eight-decade morality play of government excess, corporate greed, entitlement explosion, political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty, in which the losers are the 99% of Americans, and especially the poor, while the winners, at least for now, are the greedy manipulators of finance and their bi-partisan henchmen in Congress, the oval office and, above all, the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a relentless, depressing march to Armageddon – one that is actually part of a long American tradition of populist anger that stretches from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Tea Party. Sometimes the issues change: in the 1890s the insurgents wanted cheap money; Stockman (and the Doctors Paul) want a return to the gold standard. Its twin villains are Washington and Wall Street. Its solutions are less clear: “These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis,” writes Stockman. “The way out would be so radical it can’t happen.”

From a curmudgeonly conservative, this is a disquietingly bi-partisan indictment. Stockman challenges the core policies of both parties, and his analysis of a country whose answer to everything is, as George Bush urged, to “go shopping” is too insightful to be dismissed.

April Digression

“We do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” David Brower famously said. Or did he? I googled. Some attribute the quote to Moses Henry Cass, an Australian Minister for the Environment; others to Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear advocate. Chief Seattle, as always, has strong support. Brower was delighted to get credit for something he didn’t remember saying: “I searched my unorganized files to find out when I could have said those words. I stumbled upon the answer in the pages of an interview that had taken place in a North Carolina bar so noisy, I could only marvel that I was heard at all. Possibly, I didn’t remember saying it because by then they had me on my third martini.”

I thought of the quote when I was walking recently through East Marlborough Township’s wastewater-treatment field. It’s a beautiful spot, marred only by the hundreds of spigots that periodically spray the people’s private waters onto their common ground. Some criticize the field’s current use, but to me it seems preferable to another suburban subdivision – and far better than the old practice of sending sewage into the stream. Not long ago, a scientist told me that every municipality that releases its “clean” wastewater into a stream should have to put its drinking-water intake pipe just downstream from its wastewater discharge pipe. I don’t own this field, but I consider the hours of peace it has given me an inheritance, and I hope future generations will see its beauty, and not think of it only as the place the community deposits its wastes.

Good Grief

I have never really understood Good Friday, beginning with what’s so good about it. Today is the lowest point on the Christian calendar, the day a charismatic young man, recently come back from the wilderness where he had turned down Satan’s transparently better offers, was nailed to a cross. Over the intervening 2,000 years Christians have killed a great many Jews in retribution, so it obviously hasn’t been a good day for everyone. Crucifixion was a not uncommon and excruciatingly slow way to die (remember the scene with the crucified slaves from Spartacus?), and it has both horrified and baffled me since I was a child. I spent five years in a church school, where these were not incidental questions, and I have listened since to ministers and radio preachers say that Christ died for me, for us, for our sins. This doesn’t get me very far, and when I press for more, I'm told that the crucifixion is the sign of God’s love for mankind. I remember that sacrificing your child had also come up with Abraham and Isaac, and as the father of four, it never sat very well with me.

As I grow older I am learning, slowly, to take responsibility for my own sins, which isn’t nearly as easy as blaming someone else. But it seems so indispensable to my self-understanding that I’m reluctant to farm it out. Perhaps, Jesus is the image of each of us accepting ourselves and our lives, as painful as that can be. Just no nails, please.

John Wesley Powell

Sixty years ago Wallace Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It’s a wonderful book about an extraordinary man, a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the first to navigate the Grand Canyon by boat, a journey so terrifying that three of his small crew took off at Separation Canyon, climbed the Colorado’s steep walls and were never seen again. Powell went on to a long career as an explorer and government agent. He was a staunch critic of the national obsession to overdevelop the west, arguing that its water resources couldn’t sustain the massive agriculture he foresaw. He pushed the novel idea of creating political boundaries based on natural watersheds. Stegner reprinted a rainfall map that shows why: east of the 100^th meridian the country has plenty of rain; west to the Rockies it is mostly desert. But governments and homesteaders ignored Powell’s warnings. Embracing the widely held and thoroughly debunked theory that “rain follows the plow,” they made the Great Plains bloom –nowhere more so than Nebraska, which became one of America’s most productive agricultural states. What it lacked in rainfall, it made up by finding itself atop the huge Ogallala aquifer and its seemingly endless water.

But Powell’s vision of a west of small farms, animal grazing and land protection has proved prescient. According to a recent study, Nebraska has become the driest state in America, all of it in the grip of severe drought, which caused last year’s wheat production to decline by 18%.

The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . Anthony Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist best known for his pioneering coverage of the Supreme Court, did not believe those words granted special status to the media. The press, in his view, referred, not to institutions but to the printing press itself, which in his view was simply an extension of speech. “It’s a great mistake,” he said “for the press to give itself a preferred position.” I had never thought of that until I read it yesterday in Lewis’ obituary. As a long-time First Amendment absolutist, I believed it gave journalists unique protections to report the truth and required, in return, a singular commitment from publishers and other media owners to the public trust.

Yet Lewis’ view has inspired me. The decline of the traditional media, both in terms of dwindling revenues and diminishing public respect, is in many ways self-inflicted. The journalism of Fox News and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s abysmal empire are tough to reconcile with a belief in a free and responsible press: “Gotcha” journalism; wiretapping and gross invasions of privacy; putting the bottom line before the public interest – and then wrapping it all in the First Amendment – this couldn’t be what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

But the protections that all of us have, not just to speak our minds but to publish our thoughts  – even on this blog – without government censorship or fear of arrest, now that is a right worth standing up for.

That Rain is Gone

We called Erbold “our Mongolian,” not in a patronizing way, but because we had never met anyone quite like him or from so exotic a place when he came to spend a year with us and our youngest son, Daniel. Assured that he spoke English, we quickly realized that a smiling “yes” really meant “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he was gritty and determined. We bought him the first ice skates he had ever seen, and after the last game of the JV’s season, he raced home to announce he had scored a hat trick. He came to us through Clyde Goulden, a scientist married to Erbold’s aunt, who spent half his year studying Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, and the other half in his office at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Erbold’s favorite stories were about summers spent with his grandfather, a nomadic herder on the Mongolian steppes. He loved that life and was devastated when his grandfather died.

Yesterday NPR reported that Clyde Goulden has received Mongolia’s highest award, the Order of the Polar Star, for his work on climate change. He and his wife, Tuya, traveled the country, where the 4-degree temperature rise since the 1950s is four times the global average. They interviewed Mongolia's herders, who told them “everything is changing” – particularly the rains, which have shifted from long-lasting silky rains to short, inundating showers.

Mongolians have many words for rain, Tuya told NPR, but the words for good rain are disappearing. “That rain is gone,” she said.

The Bottom Up

This, says my friend Henry, is where my “grasp of the obvious” kicks in: People who look at the world from the bottom up have a very different view from those who look at it from the top down. Despite my empathetic efforts to do so, I don’t know what life looks like from the bottom, and that may explain why I am always losing political arguments with my friends. For to us, life presents a series of rational choices. We may disagree on particular solutions: whether to build a fence along the Rio Grande or offer citizenship to undocumented immigrants; whether to address unemployment or the deficit. But we seek rational and coherent solutions because we know that when reason breaks down, chaos results.

But my arguments founder on a world that refuses to cooperate. In Burma, the generals end 50 years of unholy repression that pitted neighbor against neighbor, and now in the city of Meiktila rampaging Buddhists (itself an oxymoron) slaughter their Muslim neighbors; while today in Detroit, a state-appointed manager, whose independence from community stakeholders is supposed to make him impartial, tries to resuscitate a city near death.

For the people in Meiktila and in Detroit, the big picture, the rational solution, is often hard to see, when what they are trying to do is survive. So when we ask them to understand the long-term benefits of whatever plan we impose, we need to do all we can to understand the pain it will inflict

Dining with the Stars

The first time Arshad Hasan met Gov. Howard Dean, Hassan was putting a big messy forkful of spaghetti and tomato sauce into his mouth. This information arrived in a personal email in which Hassan, executive director of Democracy for America, “a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom up,” breathlessly described Dean’s Olympian response to this chance meeting: “Right there in the office, he introduced himself, talked about how excited he was to meet me, and made me feel so at home, I almost forgot to put down the fork.”

I have never met Hassan, but apparently my contributions to the Obama campaign have made us intimate enough to share such personal details. Moreover, Hassan offered me the same opportunity. Well, almost. For a $3 donation, my name will go into a pool, and if I win, “DFA will pick up the tab for airfare, hotel, and dinner, so you can focus on what's important: Getting to know Governor Dean.”

Sixty years ago I had a haircut next to Gary Cooper, but this is the closest I’ve come to dining with a celebrity, even if the invitation seems kind of smarmy. It’s the $5,000-a-plate equivalent for little people, except my $3 buys a raffle ticket instead of influence.

But wait. Gov. Dean himself has written, “James, I'd like to take you out to dinner. Chip in $4 . . . and you and a friend will be automatically entered to join me for dinner in DC.”

I’m holding out for “all you can eat.”

Ten Years On

Two days after the tenth anniversary of the bombing of Baghdad, I would like to devote this post to listing the benefits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that cost the lives of over 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis:  

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.