Is That a Skeleton in My Closet?

Today is the 55^th anniversary of my mother’s marriage to my stepfather, who ultimately became an important and beloved part of the lives of my sisters and me. It wasn’t easy at first. I was an awkward teenager, unsure how to relate to this man who had just entered our family, and I was saddened by the divorce that had made it possible. Divorce was unusual in 1958 and carried a hint of scandal. It was even more of a scandal when my grandparents had divorced 40 years before, and it was front-page news when my great-grandparents divorced in 1892. My great-grandfather, the son and namesake of the most prominent political figure of the day, was 17 and seemingly unstable when he eloped with an older woman, an aspiring actress who, according to news reports, had quite a flair for the dramatic. What followed, as the boy’s parents sought an end to the marriage, was truly soap operatic: the publication of bristling letters carrying such lines as “for an impure girl can never make a pure woman;” accusations of spies posing as hotel guests; a charged trial in Deadwood, South Dakota – and my three-year-old grandfather caught in the middle. I thought of all this as I read of Tuesday’s enactment of a same-sex marriage law in Minnesota, the 12^th state in the country and first in the Midwest to have one, amid prophecies of doom for the American family and the republic itself. From where I sit, I think we’ll be okay.

The Tea Party, the IRS and Me

I never thought I’d be writing this, but I empathize with the Tea Party. Three years ago I was part of a group seeking to launch a non-profit investigative reporting organization. We believed that the decline in the traditional media’s ability to conduct in-depth, independent investigations deprived the public of a critical source of information and oversight. Our efforts were not novel: The Center for Investigative Reporting, NPR and others had been operating as non-profits for years, and Pro Publica has won two Pulitzers since it began in 2008. We knew the IRS process was cumbersome, but we had no idea how bureaucratic – after three years and three revisions of our application, we are still awaiting judgment. My assumption, to be honest, was that the IRS did not like journalists, especially those with no corporate ownership and no agenda but the truth – which would make the agency a good target for the journalism we proposed to do. Singling out organizations for special scrutiny based on their political convictions is not new in this country, nor has it been confined to conservative organizations. In any form, it is reprehensible and a threat to the democratic process. But there is another question to ask: why are purely political groups granted tax-exempt status in the first place – not just the tea parties, but the huge political fund-raising machines, spawned by the Citizens United case, that spent more on advertising in 2012 than the SuperPACS, and whose secret donor lists and covert activities are no less dangerous to the republic?

Three Questions

• Have global levels of carbon dioxide reached their highest concentration in human history? • Did the Obama administration make serious mistakes before and after the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya?

• Is Barack Obama an American citizen?

What do these questions have in common? First, the answer to all of them is yes. Second, the monumentally unhinged wing of the Republican Party sees them as part of a giant conspiracy to undermine American institutions and take over the country; and they intend to get to the bottom of it, no matter how long it takes, how much it costs and how much damage it does to, well, American institutions and the country. And since there is no bottom – no scientific consensus on global climate change that will satisfy Senator Inhofe, no birth certificate that will convince Congressman Hudson, no investigation that will mollify Congressman Issa – these matters will remain party applause lines through 2016.

However understandable the president’s frustration with the Benghazi investigation, he should release the unclassified emails John Boehner wants. Yes, Boehner’s staff has seen them already, but perhaps they are slow readers. Don’t just make them available to Congress, publish them for all of us. Google probably has them anyway. The best antidote to conspiracy theorists is complete transparency. You will never convince the witch hunters, but you will answer the questions they raise in others, and even the hint of a cover-up can be fatal.

Other Perspectives

• “Jamie, I view the right to travel (and to settle some place you've traveled to) as inalienable. As far as I'm concerned that trumps all considerations of whether we want immigrants or not.” One reason I love this work is for the thoughts of others that set me on new paths of thinking. That’s why I call the blog “Perspectives.” Imagine an inalienable right to travel and to settle. That would mean a world without gated communities and other places that exclude people for arbitrary reasons. We wouldn’t need passports, and without them, there would be no reason for borders, and therefore no need for nation states, so many of which were arbitrarily carved out in the first place. Without nations, we wouldn't need huge national defense budgets, which would free up trillions of dollars to fund universal health coverage and a dignified old age. With those guaranteed, we would no longer need to treat life as a zero sum game in which we must fight each other over its limited resources. OK, time to wake up and publish.

• “Dear Jamie, I just HAD to share this with you.”

“Is Boston’s finest hour over? All our neighbors who lost life and limb, those who dug deep into themselves and performed heroically without a second thought, those who courageously kept a community safe – has the honor of those moments come down to this: a shabby anti-tug-of-war over the body of the dead bomber? You take him – no, you take him. As if the ground isn’t big enough – hasn’t always been big enough – to hold both saints and sinners.” (http://blog.ellensteinbaum.com)

The I Test

  The Heritage Foundation’s assertion that immigration reform will cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion is the latest example of a complex study used to support a foregone conclusion. Jim DeMint, the Foundation’s president and Tea Party stalwart, is a vociferous opponent of legislation to create a “pathway to citizenship” for 11 million undocumented immigrants. And it isn’t just the Tea Party grinding its own axe: Silicon Valley companies are lobbying for more highly educated “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) immigrants; labor unions protest cheap and compliant workers; farmers want migrants to harvest their crops; environmentalists fear population overload. Many of the arguments, however self-serving, are legitimate, and in the face of a bill that keeps getting bulkier and wordier (over 50 amendments already filed), how are the rest of us supposed to know what to think?

Overwhelmed, we gravitate to positions that fit our preconceived prejudices, and the politicians continue preaching to the converted. In such cases I recommend the “I Test” – looking through the prism of personal experience. For example, I live in an area that is politically conservative and overwhelming white – and has a large undocumented Latino population. They arrived poor and uneducated, and there are worrisome pockets of gangs, drugs and crime. But on balance my life has been greatly enhanced by their contributions – colorful Cinco de Mayo celebrations, thousands of people who seek nothing more than a chance to work, the diversity required to keep a community vibrant. The I Test is not a substitute for rational analysis, but it affords the opportunity to step back and look through the stereotypes.

A Brace of Six Shooters

Sixty years or so ago I asked my father for a BB gun, like the ones some of my friends used to shoot at tin cans and small birds. He said he would never get me a BB gun because “a gun is not a toy.” When I retorted that I had a brace of six guns (whose ammunition was a roll of caps) with shiny plastic handles and fake leather holsters, he was not amused. An avid hunter and fisherman, my father said that when I was old enough he would buy me a real gun. And because, he said, “a gun is always loaded,” he told me never to point my cap pistols directly at someone. It’s easy to moralize in the aftermath of tragedies, particularly one as sad and seemingly senseless as five-year-old Kristian Sparks accidentally killing his two-year-sister Caroline last week. Hunting is a way of life in in rural Kentucky, and Kristian’s gun was for hunting, not cowboys-and Indians. Still, there is something very wrong when Keystone Sporting Arms, a manufacturer of weapons for children, produces its Crickett (“my first rifle”) in pink and blue and markets it on its “kids corner” web page. Just as there is when a Pennsylvania sheriff raffles off an assault rifle at a fundraiser. And when the objective in video games and arcade shooting galleries is to kill people, however virtually, with guns, however unreal. Sure, it’s all a game . . . at least most of the time.

Stumble of the Week

• China’s first national water census has reported the disappearance of over 28,000 rivers. That is not a typo. According to The Atlantic, over half the 50,000 rivers flowing 30 years ago have “vanished.” The government is blaming a combination of bad maps and global warming (which its heavily censored Internet has not yet discovered is a hoax). A more likely culprit is China’s out-of-control growth, which has extracted water and paved over rivers at an unsustainable rate. Given the intense fears of Chinese expansion throughout the region, its neighbors might want to make sure those missing rivers don’t reappear on their maps. • It will be hard laying into turkey and all the fixins’ next Thanksgiving after reading about Henry’s Turkey Service, whose 32 workers at an Iowa processing plant were just awarded $240 million. Under a special provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Henry’s paid its mentally handicapped workers $65 a month, a figure that hadn’t changed since the 1970s and was completely unconnected to hours worked. The company also provided room (a leaking, rat-infested bunkhouse), board and “care” (a tough love that replaced medical coddling with working through pain and heaps of physical abuse). It withheld the costs of such services from the workers’ payments, while simultaneously reimbursing itself from their social security benefits. And how will the workers spend their $7.5 million-per-person windfall? In their dreams. Henry’s is defunct.

• Finally, in Chester County, Pa., Sheriff Carolyn “Bunny” Welsh has organized a charity raffle, which features an AR-15 assault rifle similar to the one used at Sandy Hook.

May Day

Why is it that liberals always emphasize the “funds” in trust funds instead of the “trust?” On International Workers’ Day, in particular, lefties everywhere denounce the very people who had the brains to foresee an America imperiled by teachers’ unions, confiscatory taxation and Obamacare and took the steps necessary to protect their families and their capital. They set up generation-skipping trusts, invented “carried interest” to cut their tax bills in half, and sent their money to the Cayman Islands. I mean, who wouldn’t? Meanwhile, like the New Testament’s “wicked and slothful servant,” the millions of Americans who did not invest wisely find themselves “cast into outer darkness [amid] weeping and gnashing of teeth." As they sink deeper into debt, they naturally blame the prudent investors for causing the so-called “wealth gap,” which liberals see all around them: a widening chasm between whites and non-whites; a wealth differential in educational outcomes; a growing disparity between rich countries and poor ones. It's like teeing off on the responsible little pig who built his house of bricks and financed it with a mortgage he could afford.

This May Day, instead of the traditional jeremiads against the prosperous few, let’s give them their due. Who better to be trustees of an ever-growing percentage of the nation’s wealth than those wise enough to protect their own? As the Good Book says, “To everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Self-Reliance

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841). I write on behalf of 19^th-century individualism, which is not much in vogue on the political left these days. It is seen as the progenitor of the ruthless capitalism that destroyed idyllic communities where people lived in peace with their neighbors and in harmony with the land, where no one was greedy and disputes were resolved by consensus. But I see, not too little community, but too much – groups of like-minded people, joined together by geography or faith, ethnicity or interest, family or class, who enforce conformity on their members and circle their wagons against the world. Increasingly, we talk only to those with whom we agree, reinforcing our belief that we have a special grasp on the truth. Jihadists do this, of course, as do evangelicals and Fox News and progressives like me who feel the urgent need to set the world straight. We read opinion pieces whose conclusions we know in advance, and when we want to tell others what we really think, we send them something written by someone else. Is it any wonder that our politicians lead from behind, taking the pulse of their electorates before making up their minds?

I believe that the true measure of our education system is not a score on a test or fitness for the marketplace, but the development of the courage, critical thinking and self-esteem necessary to stand up to the accepted truths of one’s world.

The Global Frontier

Years ago I drove my son Daniel to play ice hockey in Toms River, New Jersey. It was there I first encountered the famous “hockey parent” – grown-ups clanging cowbells and unleashing barrages of epithets at the other team. By the second period both sets of parents were howling insults across the rink. Daniel was eleven. Dan Fagin presents the town in a different light. Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation is a parable of big industry running roughshod over a small American community. In 1949 Ciba, the giant Swiss chemical company, bought 1350 acres of forest and farmland in Toms River and built a dye manufacturing plant. “Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business,” writes Fagin, noting that “the dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.” At first Ciba buried its waste on the property, which became an early Superfund site. Later the company dumped directly into the river, and when that was thoroughly polluted, Ciba built a pipeline from the plant straight to the ocean. When parents raised alarms about a childhood cancer cluster, the company strong-armed local officials, threatened to relocate its jobs, claimed its chemicals were trade secrets, and emitted black smoke only at night.

Eventually, the company left New Jersey for the lower wages and more relaxed regulations in the South, and ultimately for Asia, where China “is now the largest producer and consumer of the world’s most heavily used toxic chemicals.” The dye, the jobs, the pollution had left, but the waste stayed in Toms River.

My Blog and Us

This is my 302^nd post on a blog I began on January 2, 2012. It seems a good time to take stock and to look ahead. I started with eleven readers and now have 197 “registered subscribers,” so it’s fair to say I have not become a virtual rock star. But that's not my goal now, even if maybe it was when I began. In fact, if I had had a clue about branding and marketing, I probably wouldn’t be as proud of what “Perspectives” is . . . and what it might yet become. Nor would I would feel the same connection to its readers. My goals are (1) to use my own experiences to connect our personal lives to larger issues and (2) to offer some small thought that might make you look at the world a little differently, or even just to laugh, with me or at me. The blog is neither a journal nor an editorial; it is simply a shared reflection. Now I want to take it out into the world more, to explore new places and listen to other voices, and to share them with you.

My plan is to write two or three posts a week instead of five. Don’t worry, they will be just as short and shallow as ever. There just won't be as many, for I do know that the main virtue of this blog is its brevity. I love this journey. I have learned so much, and I am grateful for your companionship.

The Other Explosion

The tragedy in Boston has so saturated the news that the explosion in West, Texas, two days later, has become almost a sidebar. Yet the blast that destroyed the West Chemical and Fertilizer Co. killed 14 people (so far) and injured about 200, in a town of 2,700. The detonation of 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate (which Tim McVeigh used in Oklahoma City) registered 2.1 on the Richter scale and sent a mushroom cloud into the sky. There are important differences between the two events. One was carefully planned; the other an accident. One activated our worst fears of terrorists bringing war to America’s streets; the other involved the second-largest employer in a small town. One featured a deadly chase through suburban neighborhoods; the other leveled the community. One was premeditated murder; the other was the result of negligence. What they had in common was the extraordinary outpouring of compassion and courage at the scene. In West, almost all of those who died were volunteer first responders.

For its victims, terror comes in many guises – homegrown, imported and corporate, to name three. Preliminary investigation indicates that the Texas plant was storing much more ammonium nitrate than the company acknowledged, and federal regulators cited five “serious” violations when they last inspected the plant. They fined it $30. That was in 1985. Corporations bring jobs to a community, and “jobs” has become the great mantra of American politics. But as we have seen in Love Canal, in Toms River, and now in West, Texas, we need to pay attention to more than the economics.

Battle Royal

Kings Midas and Canute are alive and living in the Hamptons. Midas, as you may remember from your studies of ancient Greece, was offered one wish as a result of an act of kindness, and he asked that whatever he touched be turned to gold. His wish was granted (an outcome which current Greek politicians are desperately trying to replicate), and he went merrily around his palace showing off. . . until he tried to kiss his daughter. Canute, who ruled Denmark, Norway and England a millennium ago, sought to teach his fawning courtiers about the limits of human power by ordering his throne brought to the beach, where he commanded the waves to stop. They didn’t.

Canute offered his lesson on the beach of Southampton in Hampshire, England. It is a lesson lost on the modern plutocrats of Southampton, Long Island. A recent article in The New York Times tells the stories of billionaires building huge fortifications to protect their beachfront mansions from the next Hurricane Sandy. It is a modern fable of hubris, as hedge fund managers seek to impose their wills on nature with little understanding about how nature operates and less regard for the impact of their actions on others. The erosion of the public beaches being caused by the heroic battles to save their vacation homes is just collateral damage. Their insistence on the primacy of their private property rights over those of the public square is yet one more example of the tragedy of the commons.

Patriots Day

I cannot, and do not want to, compete with the events now unfolding in suburban Boston. Today is the original Patriots Day, when the American Revolution began in Lexington and Concord with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the shot heard round the world.” It is also the day in 1995 that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and it is the day the siege at Waco ended. May the killing stop.

One Powerful Man

With 54 of 100 senators voting in favor, and strong popular support in the country, Senate Bill 649 was defeated yesterday. The Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013, a compromise offered by NRA members Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia and Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, would have required background checks for online and gun show sales only. But the National Rifle Association, which once supported such checks, threw its money and muscle into the fight, as Wayne LaPierre, its executive vice president, has emerged from the carnage in Newtown as one of the most powerful men in America. We have come a long way since 2000, when a single Supreme Court vote gave George Bush the mandate to invade Iraq. Yesterday, a majority of senators could not pass a bill. Much is being made of the partisan nature of the vote: only four Democrats voted no and four Republicans voted yes. But consider this: according to a recent study, the ten states with the most gun violence are: (10) Georgia; (9) Arkansas; (8) Missouri; (7) New Mexico; (6) South Carolina; (5) Mississippi; (4) Arizona; (3) Alabama; (2) Alaska; (1) Louisiana. In those ten states, 15 senators (75%) voted against SB 649, including two of the four Democrats, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. The only Republican to vote yes was John McCain.

Note the absence from the list of all those big urban states, which are actually curbing gun violence in their cities. Meanwhile, the most gun-violent states want no checks. Sometimes you reap what you sow.

“We Lost Our Compass”

“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases. We lost our compass.” James Jones, co-chair, Task Force on Detainee Treatment. Almost a half century ago, when I was stationed in Europe, I asked a Dutch friend how she had learned her flawless English. She told me that, after the Allied liberation of her country, all Dutch schools taught English from kindergarten on. “We loved everything American,” she said. Our subsequent efforts at liberation haven’t gone as well. The images of hands desperately grabbing at helicopters lifting off from the embassy in Saigon in 1975 remain vivid, and they have been updated in Afghanistan by stories of interpreters who cannot get exit visas and fear for their lives and the lives of their families. Are we to think that Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans are less able to understand their own liberation than Europeans were? Or has something changed in how we wage war?

After World War II, the United States pushed for the prosecution of Nazi officials for war crimes, including torture, at Nuremburg. According to the bipartisan report on detainee treatment released yesterday, “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture,” which was approved by the president. Our actions, it concluded, were both unjustified and ineffective. Above all, they violated our values. “The United States has a historic and unique character,” said Asa Hutchinson, task force co-chair and undersecretary for Homeland Security in the Bush Administration, “and part of that character is that we do not torture.” Unfortunately, according to his own report, we do.

Boston

I have no insights into Boston’s tragedy, but it brought to mind something my son Jake said to me on Saturday: “Sometimes I think we are running our evolutionary course, just like all other species do.” We were talking about environmental issues – global warming, massive extraction of resources, poisoning the air and water, 7 billion people increasing exponentially – but how we treat the earth is inextricably tied to how we treat each other. Yesterday brought a horrific reminder that some people treat humans as callously as nature, and when the terror strikes so close, we must realize that we can no longer try only to insulate ourselves from it. The world seems a bleaker place this morning. Three people dead, including an eight-year-old boy, others suddenly without legs, a day of celebration defiled. And yet for the rest of us, “life goes on,” a phrase that evokes the resilience of the human race. But it can’t go on like this forever, and we are the only ones who can change it. And if we do not, if we run our evolutionary course and vanish from the earth, who will care? Certainly the earth won’t. It will miss us no more than it misses the dinosaurs, and undoubtedly less since we do so much more damage to it. This is not about saving the earth. It is about saving ourselves. On the day after three tragic deaths, we need to affirm life.

Spring

Yesterday wasn’t technically the first day of spring, but it felt like it. As I set off for my weekend battle with the vines that are strangling trees along a small stream, the sky was clear and light blue, the sun warm, and a northwest breeze kept the humidity in check. Absorbed in my work, my arms bleeding from the thorns of the multiflora rose, I suddenly heard the stream beside me. It has been there all along, of course, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. Now, as the water moved through a shallow riffle, I became so struck by the sounds it made that I sat down and listened, watching it flow over glistening stones. I’m not much of a naturalist, but what little I know I have learned from unexpected moments such as these, when the sounds and colors of the natural world gently push themselves into my consciousness. I worry that we are increasingly moving our efforts to understand this world indoors, particularly for children. For reasons that range from the price of insurance to focusing on test scores, schools don’t send their students much into nature anymore, and we have replaced real experiences with computer models and simulations. There are people sounding the alarm on this, particularly David Orr and Richard Louv, whose book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, tells a story in its title. We can learn a lot from our computers, but we can’t learn to love an abstraction. And if we don’t love the natural world, we won’t take care of it.

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.