Nukes

I know this isn’t a good time to joke about nuclear packages, but Anthony Weiner is back in the news. The eponymous former Brooklyn Congressman is thinking of running for mayor of New York, which is what he was doing in 2011 when his campaign was derailed by the viral photograph of his crotch. The tasteful self-portrait was taken by the congressman himself, who then absent-mindedly tweeted it to 45,000 people. Weiner’s claim that the photo depicted someone else was difficult to verify absent a line-up, but his story quickly unraveled, and he resigned from Congress on June 21, 2011. Now he is back with a large campaign war chest, a supportive wife, young child, and an 8,000+-word profile coming out in The New York Times Magazine.

On the other nuclear front, former Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday told Congressional Republicans that “we’re in deep doo doo” with regard to North Korea, indicating that, while Denis Rodman’s recent visit to the gulag state has done little for international relations, it has certainly lowered the bar for diplomatic language. According to CNN, Cheney said that Kim Jong Un “is unpredictable and doesn't share the United States’ worldview,” which has also been said about Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, NPR was reporting that South Koreans were calmly going about their lives, ignoring the “playground bully” and telling the world to call his bluff, which is unfortunately one thing that really makes bullies mad.

I apologize for the late post. The server was apparently hacked and down for the entire day. My daughter, Annie, called to make sure I wasn’t dead. This post will be Thursday/Friday’s.

Big City Blues

America has long loathed its big cities. At least since Thomas Jefferson’s vision of sturdy yeoman farmers as the backbone of the nation (never mind that Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves), we have looked on our cities as places of filth and disease, low morals and high crime. So obviously, those places where Americans are most fearful are our big cities. Or not. On a list of the 10 cities where people feel least safe, published by 24/7 Wall Street, New York cannot be found, nor Chicago, Los Angeles nor any of America’s largest cities. Instead, we find Beaumont, Texas; Rockford, Illinois; Yakima, Washington; Stockton, California. The average population is 385,555, and only Memphis has more than a million people. Forbes list of the most murderous cities is less surprising: Washington, New Orleans, Detroit are on it. But even here, the average population is 561,546, and only Philadelphia exceeds a million.

We have too long overlooked the roles our large cities play. They are centers of art and culture, commerce and education. For immigrants, the small-town restless and artists, they are destinations, places of opportunity and personal independence. “City air makes men free” went the old adage, and serfs could actually claim their freedom in medieval cities. And cities are not just composed of millions of rootless people. They are characterized by communities, both of interest and ethnicity. Dynamic cities do not fail; stagnant cities do – and it is in our smaller and declining cities, where opportunity has disappeared and communities have eroded, that fear rules the streets.

The Iron Lady and the Teflon Cowboy

"What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways" (Margaret Thatcher, Nov. 8, 1989). There was much to dislike about Margaret Thatcher, but she was no Ronald Reagan, the national leader with whom she will be eternally coupled. She was one of the first major politicians to grasp the damage that humans were doing to he earth; he assured us that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” Nor did Thatcher’s England bear much resemblance to Reagan’s America. While both countries suffered from the global economic affliction dubbed “stagflation,” Britain, in the 1980s, had become a sluggish place whose sclerotic labor movement and clubby conservatives both seemed to be forever looking backward.

The short-term benefits of liberalizing the economy were clear and necessary, but the long-term price of a philosophy that ignored the poor and blamed the victim, that undermined both the safety net and the social contract, has proved as divisive in England as it has in America. In the wake of Thatcher and Reagan, we have become heedless societies, increasingly unconcerned about creating an inclusive community.

And climate change? Thatcher recanted in 2003. An Oxford-trained chemist, she did not dispute the science. She was upset the issue had become a rallying point for liberals.

Lessig and Pell

When Haven Pell stopped by my house a month or so ago, we had not seen each other in 50 years. We had become friends at the age of four, and one year for his birthday, Haven’s mother took us to the Howdy Doody show in New York, where we sat in the legendary Peanut Gallery. We met again this winter because Haven had discovered that we were both “sunset” bloggers, who were interested in thinking about and sharing what we had observed over the years. Our perspectives and our politics are different, but we both believe that something has gone seriously wrong in Washington, and we want, not just to point out the obvious, but to work for change. It is how we try to avoid self-indulgence. Last night Haven’s blog showed up in my inbox. It was short, because we are conscious that our “free” posts demand your valuable time, and we don’t want to abuse it. So he just urged readers to watch Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk on the financing of federal politics. I beg you to do the same. Here is where this country’s growing wealth disparity, the Citizens United case, and feckless career politicians combine to threaten our republic.

PS If the links don't show up above, cut and paste this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.htm

Haven's link is www.libertypell.com

Stumble of the Week

A once-regular feature returns. • Honor. America’s continues to stumble at Guantanamo Bay, where people disappear, seemingly forever, into a place that violates our most basic principles. A hunger strike expanded this week to dozens of inmates, although the only people who seem to notice are the ones who already detest us.

• Language. Newt Gingrich and his Orwellian bombast are back, talking about gay marriage and the “tyranny of secularism.” In the new speak of the far right, the efforts of people to participate fully in American society are deemed a threat to the beliefs and institutions of those who disagree with them. Asserting your place in the communal fabric is, apparently, not justice, but tyranny.

• Education. The indictment this week of 35 teachers and administrators in the Atlanta school system illustrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that the lowest people on the educational totem pole are the children. Mimicking hedge funds and investment banks, the Atlanta system doled out huge bonuses to those who made their numbers. They made their numbers by cheating – by erasing their students’ wrong answers on the standardized state tests and checking the right boxes. One principal even wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. What these people did was wrong, but it was abetted by a system that – from No Child Left Behind to all the reforms it has spawned – is obsessed with quantifiable results, has little use for true learning and treats children like assembly-line products.

Bully Boys

Kim Jong-un’s creepy behavior has now been traced to his brief stint on the Rutgers Basketball Team under Coach Mick Rice, who was fired yesterday, after a video showed him kicking his players, throwing balls in their faces, and screaming homophobic slurs. One of his regular targets, it turns out, was the 5-foot, ¼-inch dictator, whom Rice derisively dubbed “Little Queen.” Kim demanded to play power forward, but Rice told him to “get your G**ky ass over with the point guards,” suggesting he run through the forwards’ legs. Kim couldn’t dribble, and he only passed the ball to his bodyguard. But his threats to shoot were taken so seriously that the other point guards quit the team. Rice rode him mercilessly. “Kim,” he sneered. “That’s a girl’s name. Is it short for Kimberly?” And from then on, his name was “Kimberly,” even though he has a long list of official nicknames that include Outstanding Leader, Great Successor, Brilliant Comrade, Young General, Young Master and Lil Kim (!).

North Korean propaganda insists that Kim went to Rutgers, not to play basketball, but to “learn bullying at one of the best places for that,” and it’s no coincidence that he is threatening nuclear war on the eve of the Final Four, college basketball’s biggest weekend, nor that he has hired Denis Rodman to coach his 2016 Olympic team.

Breaking News: American rapper Lil’ Kim (“Hard Core,” “The Naked Truth”) is suing Kim Jong-un for identity theft.

Now and Then

I was walking yesterday on a trail called “Main Road,” which is a good indication of its degree of difficulty, when I tripped on a small root and fell on my face. I got up, cursed myself for being old and clumsy, and walked on. I realized that I walk inside my head, lost in my thoughts and unaware of my surroundings and the dangers they hold. So I made a Zen-like effort to pay attention to the world around me. It was a cold and beautiful day, more like fall than spring. The trees were still bare, and little was blooming except skunk cabbage along the stream. About 15 minutes later, absorbed now in the nature's beauty, I went down again. Lying there, I wondered, “How do you fully experience the place you are in and still keep moving?” This is an especially poignant question for the elderly, who are in no particular hurry to get where we know we are going, even as time speeds us along the way. Perhaps this is what drove Albert Einstein to his ideas of relativity, in which space and time fuse into one. In a letter to the family of a friend who had died, Einstein wrote, “for us physicists (sic) believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." If only he’d left out the last phrase.

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.