The Lost Generation

While analysts of last week’s elections focus on the fight for the soul of the Republican Party, they pay little attention to Democratic divisions. Yet, it would be hard to find two winners more different than Bill de Blasio, mayor-elect of New York, and Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s next governor. Pundits hold their noses when discussing McAuliffe, a smarmy backroom dealmaker who outspent his Republican opponent by $15 million. De Blasio is an unabashed liberal who makes no apologies for his support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and whose campaign focused less on the middle class than on the forgotten poor. McAuliffe’s first post-electoral act was to call up Republicans – to reach across the aisle. De Blasio plans to tax the richest New Yorkers to provide universal pre-school education. Yet only 4% of Virginia’s Republicans voted for McAuliffe, whereas, the Daily News noted, de Blasio “captured the majority of hearts and minds in New York, winning virtually every kind of resident – blacks, whites, rich, poor, Jews, Christians – in his sweeping victory.”

Both candidates won over 90% of the black vote, which is now critical to the Democratic Party. But centrist Democrats aren’t addressing the critical issue for the black community: the millions of young men, particularly in America’s big and troubled cities, who have dropped out of the system. They have become invisible to us, except as symbols of society’s “takers”. De Blasio seems intent on reaching them – and in doing so recapturing the soul of the Democratic Party.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Detroit, which is 83% black, made headlines by electing its first white mayor since 1973. The significance of that result is clouded by the fact that (1) the state-appointed emergency manager makes all key decisions for this bankrupt city and (2) 80% of the people didn’t bother to go to the polls. “This city,” my friend Charity Hicks said, “has given up on government.” Yet, like every desert when you look closely, Detroit is teeming with life. The city, said Jamie Shea, who guided me through this underworld, attracts risk takers because “ideas are welcome and you can make an impact.” Ideas like:

• A hydroponics farm in Detroit’s most desolate neighborhood.
• Detroit Soup, which hold monthly dinners where “for $5, you get soup, salad, bread and a vote” for one of the entrepreneurs presenting a social-impact project.
• The Empowerment Plan, where homeless women make winter coats that turn into sleeping bags for homeless women.
• A project to sell organic food in the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores because “that’s where people shop.”
• Sit On It Detroit, which turns repurposed hardwood into bus stop benches with attached bookshelves to create interactive outdoor libraries.

In this third-world city where three of five children live in poverty, an exciting movement is incubating: the ingenuity of entrepreneurs is melding with the social conscience of community organizers to produce a “third way” – that navigates between a capitalism obsessed with profits and a government entrenched in bureaucracy to create mission-driven projects focused on the needs of people and the health of communities.

The Big Empty

There is an emptiness about Detroit that you feel everywhere in this sprawling 139-square-mile city. Weeds grow in empty lots, creating neighborhoods of lonely, locked and isolated houses. The dark window frames of 78,000 derelict buildings stare down like indifferent eyes. The sidewalks are empty, especially at night, in a city where violent crime is epidemic and half the streetlights don’t work. The city’s population has declined from 1.8 million in 1950 to less than 700,000 today – a quarter of the residents have left since 2000. Over half the property owners are tax-delinquent, two-thirds of the murders are unsolved, 20 percent of the housing stock is vacant. Detroit has suffered an extreme form of the inner-city decline that has afflicted all urban America: post-WWII white flight transformed a melting pot of ethnic groups in 1950 to a city 80-percent black and overwhelmingly poor. Racial redlining bred de facto segregation. Government corruption is rampant – former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick began a 28-year prison sentence last month – as are crime and drugs. The hollowing out of American manufacturing staggered the greatest manufacturing city in America.

Detroit was also a victim of its success. The modern city was built by and for the automobile industry, whose cars took people off the sidewalks and sped them out of their neighborhoods in insulated bubbles. Detroit’s grand boulevards and ubiquitous freeways cut through and killed struggling communities.

Yet, as in all deserts, if you look closely you will find Detroit teeming with life, which I will try to describe next time.

Enemies of the State

On this day in 1646, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it a capital offense to deny the divine origin of the Bible. Only 16 years after a small group of Puritans had set up be a rigorously intolerant community of believers, enough people were questioning its basic principles to raise alarm among those in command. The dissenting had been going on for a while – Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had been exiled a decade earlier – but the death penalty indicates that harsher steps were required. Colonial Massachusetts did not execute people the way modern Texas does (506 in the last 30 years), but they did hang a few Quakers and other heretics who kept trying to undermine the social order. It didn’t work terribly well, as conditions in 17^th-century New England were clearly not conducive to the persistence of a theocratic state. One reason, I think, was the evolution of individualism – both theologically  (in the growing belief that one could talk directly with God) and socially (where the idea of a rigid hierarchy was under assault).

Individualism is itself under attack these days, viewed as the foundation of capitalist greed and the enemy of community. But America has a long history of dissenters who refused to be buckle under to the tyranny of the group, who followed their conscience and dared to dream. It takes courage to stand alone.

PS Today is also the day in 1884 when Grover Cleveland upset James G. Blaine to become president of the United States in 1884. We continue to demand a recount.

Stumble of the Week

An occasionally regular Friday feature • According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Michael McStay of Newcastle-upon-Tyne filled his room with gas with the intention of committing suicide. He changed his mind, shut off the gas and opened his window. He then lit a cigarette and blew the roof off his apartment building.

• Notre Dame quarterback, Everett Golson, suspended last spring for academic transgressions, assured Sports Illustrated that "it wasn't due to poor grades or anything like that." No, "I had poor judgment on a test." "Did you cheat?" asked Andy Staples. "Yeah, something like that," said Golson.

• Having used Citizens United to establish freedom of speech for corporations, the Supreme Court may soon decide they also have freedom of religion. Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based evangelical crafts store, has sued the government over the Affordable Care Act’s inclusion of morning-after pills and IUDs, which the company argues violates its religious beliefs. The 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, seeing “no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.”

• Barack Obama stumbled mightily this week as criticisms of the health care rollout – and more generally of his disappointing second term – went bipartisan. I have issues, but I also ask myself which signature legacy I would prefer: passage, over vitriolic opposition, of legislation that has many flaws but the goal of providing every American with decent health care – or the invasion of Iraq, approved over spineless opposition and predicated on a lie?

The Climbing Boys

As I wander around Glasgow admiring the striking buildings produced during the Industrial Revolution, I remember reading somewhere that the worst job ever was that of chimney sweep. Beginning at the age of six, these “climbing boys” were made to shimmy up the flues of chimneys, 14 inches by 9 inches wide, with several sharp twists along the way. To harden the sweeps’ knees and elbows against the awful scraping, their masters would stand them nightly before a hot fire and rub brine into their bodies with a wire brush. Often the sweeps got stuck in the chimneys and suffocated in the soot – or burned to death from the heat. Almost all developed bodily deformities, blindness and “chimney sweep cancer”, an excruciating and fatal disease of the scrotum. The coal whose dust they “swept” was itself mined by men working under conditions only slightly better than their own. Glasgow was built by the Industrial Revolution. Its wealth came from textile mills that were powered by the vast coal deposits nearby, as well as from international trade in, among other things, tobacco and slaves. Glasgow became one of the richest cities in the world – “the Second City of the British Empire” – and its story reflects the history of the industrial age. In many ways it has been an extraordinary journey, propelled by human ingenuity, inquisitiveness and imagination, as well as human greed. But as the chimney sweeps’ short and miserable lives bear witness, it came also at enormous human cost.

Dateline: Glasgow

As I was waiting to board my plane to Glasgow, an elderly woman from rural Maine talked about her fear of the impending implementation of Obamacare. She is self-employed and has never had health insurance. “I don’t know how we can afford the premium’” she said. “We are really scared about what will happen.” I thought, if you can't afford the premium, what will you do when you get sick? This is precisely the reason that the Affordable Care Act makes health insurance mandatory – an idea, we should remember, that came out of the conservative think tanks in the 1990s and, however much he tried to deny it during the last campaign, was the cornerstone of Mitt Romney’s policy in Massachusetts. I have come to Glasgow to visit a childhood friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer. He is a painter, with little money, living in a country where health care is free – and where taking care of the sick is considered a national responsibility, not an unwelcome burden. To people here, the American model of health insurance is simply unfathomable, as is the ferocity of the attack on Obamacare as an infringement on individual freedom. When we do get sick, as all of us will, we feel vulnerable, scared and alone. Knowing that good care is both available and affordable is not just a medical benefit for us as individuals, it is a reaffirmation of the importance of community in each of our lives.

Friends Like Us

Everybody’s doing it, but nobody does it quite like us. I’m talking, of course, about America’s insatiable penchant for scarfing up information from tapped telephones and redirected emails around the world. Le Monde reported, for example, that in a single month the U.S. collected data from 70 million French phones. And that’s just France. And yet, it was only 84 ago that Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down the government’s cryptanalytic office with the words, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." Now we are told we should have no expectations of privacy because if the government isn’t reading our mail, Google is.

Still, yesterday’s revelations that the National Security Agency had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cellphone has Europe seething, even though this is hardly a novel practice there. The most famous episode was the 1989 bugging that overheard Prince Charles telling Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be reincarnated as her tampon. It’s important to know these things.

While the U.S. government offers fumbling explanations for spying on its foreign friends – not to mention its own citizens – it sees little irony in its indictment of Edward Snowden for espionage. And Senator Diane Feinstein has urged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be “prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

As for me, the final damage from the computer crash I reported last week is the permanent loss of seven months of files that contain pretty much my entire life. Not to worry, I have a call in to the NSA.

McDonald’s Happy Deal

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the journey of steer 534 from a South Dakota pasture to the take-out window at McDonald’s. By the time his steer gets to a feedlot in Kansas, Pollan can no longer track him individually, and by the time what’s left of 534 ends up between two buns in a Happy Meal, he’s become more vegetable than animal. In fact, the entire meal the Pollan family consumes at McDonald’s is made primarily of corn. “Animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass,” Pollan writes, “must be adapted by us — at considerable cost to their health, the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters — to live on corn.” It turns out that Pollan’s list is incomplete. In a just-released study, “Super-Sizing Public Costs: How Low Wages at Top Fast Food Chains Leave Taxpayers Footing the Bill”, the National Employment Law Project estimates that McDonald’s also costs U.S. taxpayers $1.2 billion a year. That's what we pay in public assistance to augment the “low wages, non-existent benefits, and limited work hours” of the company’s 700,000 front-line workers. And let’s not forget, 534 – and the corn he is force-fed – is also taxpayer-subsidized every step of his short, miserable life.

Meanwhile, the company, its shareholders and its brass are doing just fine: $5.5 billion in both profits and shareholder returns last year, and a CEO earning $13.7 million. Maybe those who excoriate the “takers” in our country should look up as well as down.

Context Matters

To understand something, you must know the context in which it occurs. Take, for example, the phrase, “No need to dress for dinner.” Its meaning differed markedly when uttered on 1930s Park Avenue or 1960s Haight Ashbury. In the former, it meant, you don’t need to put on white tie and tails – what Bertie Wooster called ''the full soup-and-fish”. In the latter, if you came over in anything more than your sandals, you’d probably be overdressed. So too with Obamacare. Some people are so pathologically obsessed with it that they drown out rational debate with barrages of invective against the law and the man for whom it is named. Others, however, talk reasonably about the program’s huge future costs and the unseemly legislative process that turned a good intention into a garbage bag of special interests. We should listen to them. But I hope we also consider the full context of the national conversation. America has over 48 million people without health insurance, which among other things causes 48,000 preventable deaths annually. Estimates of covering them are high: a 5% increase in health spending, about 1% of GDP. The costs of not covering them are staggering on two levels. The first is the impact on our economy from the combination of ultimately higher treatment outlays and lost productivity of the uninsured, both of which are eventually borne by taxpayers. The second is the impact on our community from tolerating the presence of such a large marginalized group. Life is short; dignity is precious.

Losers Win

As I read the smug headlines about “The Republican Collapse” and “The Republican Surrender”, I keep asking: why can’t you see that yesterday’s big winner was the Tea Party? How can that be? Didn’t they lose by 2-1 in the House and 4.5-1 in the Senate?

Yes, but they emerged from the disaster they themselves created with their “principles” unsullied and their standing in their districts enhanced. Moreover, they didn’t have to take the blame for – or even cope with – the consequences of a government default. They got to have their cake and eat it too. Preferring posturing to governing, they are the heroes of talk radio and the billionaires who bankroll the hard right. And with the sequester cuts intact, they established the new baseline for fiscal debate.

Like all absolutist movements – from Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Khomeini – Tea Party Republicans are now turning on their own, seeking to purge all traces of moderation from the party. And thanks to the roll call vote in both houses, they have a hit list in their hands. Having been bailed out by their colleagues, they now savage them.

“The surrender caucus is the whiner caucus,” Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) said of his colleagues who made the difficult choices – and who in his view are nothing more than spineless traitors. “It’s pretty hard when [Boehner] has a circle of 20 people that step up every day and say, ‘Can we surrender today, Mr. Speaker?’”

A Dark Tan in an Empty Suit

In a country where the people govern, the people stand helplessly by as those who govern in their name drive their country off a cliff. Yesterday the House Republican caucus opened its meeting by singing “Amazing Grace”. That was the high point for the band of self-congratulatory know-nothings who call themselves the Tea Party Caucus. We knew all three verses, Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said. “Isn’t that impressive?” Adding his bass voice to the chorus was John Boehner, the most inept Speaker in history, rivaled only by James Orr (1857-9), the South Carolina Democrat who used his post to promote slavery, support secession and open the way to Civil War.

Some express pity for Boehner, sympathizing with the difficulty of “herding cats” and trying to placate the hardline reactionaries in his party. And it’s clear that many Republicans are hiding behind the Speaker because they fear, above all, a primary challenge from their party’s fanatic fringe. This isn’t about principle; this is politics, pure, simple and in-your-face.

As Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Boehner’s role is to lead his colleagues, not pander to them. “We’re trying to find a way forward in a bipartisan way that would continue to provide fairness to the American people under Obamacare,” he said yesterday, a statement both utterly meaningless and totally dishonest, since the ransom his caucus sought when it kidnapped the country was the destruction of Obamacare.

Why do I keep thinking of the last throes of the Weimar Republic?

"Because We Care"

Lost among the avalanche of headlines on the government crisis last week was the heartbreaking story of Anjelica Castillo. For 22 years she was known only as “Baby Hope”, and the New York City Police Department continues to piece together the details of her short life and violent death. It’s a story that probes the depths of the human capacity for evil and our equally strong capacity for love – even the love of an unidentified four-year-old child whose decomposed body was found in a blue picnic cooler just below the Henry Hudson Parkway on a sweltering July day in 1991. Two years later, after an investigation in which every lead hit a dead end, the officers of the 34^th precinct buried Baby Hope in a Bronx cemetery. “We are her family,” said Jerry Giorgio, the detective leading the investigation. “We are burying our baby.” But they never forgot her. They kept watch over her grave, which had a toll-free number for tips. They kept the investigation open. And this weekend they charged her cousin with rape and murder. No one ever reported Anjelica missing. No one who had seen anything came forward to report it. Even Anjelica’s body revealed no clue of her identity. I don’t think any other species treats its own kind with the malevolent cruelty that marked her life. But I also don’t think any other species has the devotion that drove Giorgio, now 79, and his colleagues all those years. Who else would have named such a child “Hope”?

White, Black and the Blues

When the curtain rose on Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Apollo Theater in 1957, the cheering audience was stunned into silence. The African Americans who filled Harlem's most famous theater had expected the band to be black. Years later, according to the documentary, Muscle Shoals, Paul Simon called Al Bell at Stax records and said, "Hey man, I want those same black players that played on 'I'll Take You There'."

"That can happen," Bell replied, "but these guys are mighty pale."

"These guys" were the Swampers, a group of north Alabama country boys.

"We didn't expect them to be as funky or as greasy as they were," Aretha Franklin remembered.

American music has been one of the most unifying forces in our history, transcending differences that have polarized the country. In a recent lecture on "Gershwin, Ellington and the Search for an American Sound", Georgetown professor Anna Celenza described a music, anchored in folk, blues and gospel, that has sprung from the lives of Americans, both black and white, and mostly poor. It influenced not only Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue") and Ellington ("Symphony in Black"), but such classical composers as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Antonin Dvorak, the Czech native whose use of folk melodies had a huge impact on American music.

"They saw music as a way of creating community," said Celenza, and I like to think of the American Sound as the bedrock of our sprawling culture, creating harmonies in a land that seems elsewhere discordant and fragmenting.

Naked in the Modern World

Not only the government is shut down. Yesterday, as I was downloading a new application, my computer crashed, creating a catastrophe I had not foreseen: the disappearance of every file, program, family photo, financial record and song into some black hole, from where, the experts inform me, they are never coming back. My new back-up time capsule had been incorrectly configured, so it too was empty. The perfect storm. My life had literally evaporated into cyberspace. My first thought was to blame my enemies, although I didn't believe them  capable of such a feat. Then I became paranoid about identity theft, imagining that a heavily bearded James G. Blaine running AK47s over the Khyber Pass, while my bank accounts were being drained. But since all my passwords were on my computer, I can't verify that. I had literally ceased to exist, and since it had not been a good day to begin with, that was a depressing thought. But nothing clears the mind like a good crisis, and I remembered all those existentialist heroes who believed we must create our own meaning in an absurd world. I was free of so much detritus, most of it of my own making. I seem to be the same person without it. The lessons? Be careful downloading new programs and make sure your back-up system works. But remember that you can survive a shutdown and emerge refreshed. Just as America can if our president holds firm against the extortionists.

Beacon of Hope

There is much to abhor about the Catholic Church, from laundering money to repressing women to abusing young boys. Not to mention the Inquisition. The new pope brings hope of change. The first sign was his name: of the 266 popes, he is the first to choose Francis, the gentle 12^th- century monk who was canonized but never ordained. St. Francis didn’t just preach to birds. In the view of some historians, he represented an alternative path – ministering to the dispossessed and advocating the equality of all things before God, rather than their subjugation by man – which the church systematically stamped out. Pope Francis’s first official trip was to the island of Lampedusa, the destination of millions of African migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Thousands never make it, drowning at sea in smugglers’ boats. It is a place much like the American southwest, but the pope’s plea that Lampedusa be “a lighthouse in all the world” is rarely heard in Arizona. “How many times,” Francis asked, “do those who seek this not find understanding, reception or solidarity?” Last week, he linked the horrific shipwreck off Lampedusa to the “inhuman global economic crisis, a serious symptom of a lack of respect for the human person.”

“Today is a day of tears,” he said. “Such things go against the spirit of the world.”

Remember our own better self? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses learning to breathe free . . . I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Mama Warned Me

My mother was displeased when my daughter, Annie, moved to Houston. “I don’t like Texans,” she said. “They’re so conceited. They just talk about how much better Texas is than the rest of America.”

She loved making spectacular generalizations out of very few data points – her opinion was based on two fliers in my father’s World War II Marine squadron, one of whom became my godfather. And in truth, Annie spent two good years in Texas, and one of my closest college friends is from San Antonio.

Still, my mother’s words echo. Texas has always been unruly. After breaking away from Mexico in 1836 and forming a republic, one powerful faction wanted to expel the Native Americans and expand to the Pacific. Texas joined the union in 1845, but was soon gone again, deposing Governor Sam Houston and seceding in 1861. That sentiment never died: over 100,000 Texans signed a secession petition this year.

And emboldened by the country’s most in-your-face Congressional gerrymandering ten years ago, Texas Republicans are leading the fight against Obamacare and manning the barricades against compromise. It’s not just Ted Cruz. Congressman John Culbertson compared the GOP antics to “let’s roll” of 9/11. Steve Stockman and Blake Farenthold talk of impeaching the president. The legislature is considering a nullification bill, and Governor Rick (Oops) Perry opted out of the Medicaid expansion to insure his state’s poor. This week he declared the implementation of Obamacare “a criminal act”.

So guess which state has the worst health coverage in the country?

Yep. Texas.

One Good Gig

I may have mentioned on these pages that I ran for Congress in 1996. My opponent had spent 24 years in the Pennsylvania legislature, where the pay is good and the benefits are even better. I’ll pass over his dreadful politics, other than to say that he doesn’t much like government and he can’t stand the federal government. So he promised the voters he would serve 10 years in Congress and then come home. Seventeen years later he’s still in Washington, rising enthusiastically to every roll call to shut the government down. Government, he says, is bad for us. But it has certainly been good for him. Pennsylvania’s legislative salaries rank fourth in the country, exceeding 150% of the state’s median household income. And that’s just the beginning, what with per diems, allowances, lobbyists’ nightly parties, and of course the most comprehensive health care our money can buy. The legislators get it for life, along with their defined-benefit pensions, which the private sector has long considered unaffordable. These he brought to Washington where he found life even better – and unaffected by the recession, which he blames on . . . government.

Our mythology tells us that public service is a sacrifice made on behalf of the republic. But this is by far the best job he could ever get, and he has held it for 41 years. He is not alone (Ted Cruz spent one year in the private sector). We have created a professional class of government haters who live off the government.

Birdie Africa

Twenty-eight years ago, Michael Ward survived one of the most searing events in Philadelphia's history: the siege of the heavily armed MOVE compound at 6221 Osage Avenue, which ended when police dropped two bombs from a helicopter, obliterating three city blocks and killing 11 people. Ward, then named Birdie Africa, ran naked from the house, a malnourished, unloved, illiterate, horribly burned 13-year-old boy. A subsequent report excoriated Philadelphia, which became known as “the city that bombed itself.” Ward, who rarely discussed the misery of his early years, slowly recovered, graduated from high school, served in the army, became a long-haul trucker, married and had two children. He drowned last week in a hot tub on a Caribbean cruise ship named "Dream”. He was 41. “In a way, I’m glad it happened,” he once said of the bombing. “The only regret I have is about me being hurt and my mom dying and the other kids. I feel bad for the people who died, but I don’t have any anger toward anybody. See, I got out.”

When I first read that, I was stunned by the contrast between the drama of the event and the banality of the words to describe it. “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” George Orwell wrote. But we also use language to blunt our memory of tragedy and to survive in the face of true horror. Each time I read Ward’s words, the more articulate they become. Rest in peace, Birdie Africa.

The GOPs Must Be Crazy

Yesterday, John Boehner announced that the 2012 federal election will be held (again) next week. Still unable to distinguish between thinking they should have won last November and actually losing by 3.5 million votes – and buoyed by Obama’s poll numbers, which are falling nearly as fast as their own – House Republicans apparently believe they deserve a do-over. So in exchange for supporting a temporary increase in the debt ceiling to prevent America from defaulting on its current obligations and spurring a global economic crisis, they are demanding the immediate construction of the Keystone pipeline, increased energy drilling both offshore and on federal lands, an end to EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and coal production, Medicare cuts, and a delay to Obamacare (which they have voted 43 times in vain to defund). Having previously cut food stamps and extended the Bush tax inequities, Boehner has now produced a list of proposals that brought people like me to the polls last fall. And we won. Didn’t we?

“That’s why we’re paid the big bucks – right? – to figure these problems out,” said Blake Farenthold, an overfed Texas congressman who abhors food stamps, loves his health benefits and remains skeptical about the “legitimacy” of Obama’s presidency. Actually, Congressman, that’s why we have elections. In the meantime, this doesn’t seem like a very good time to shut down the government.

In other news, Ted Cruz voted in favor of the motion he had spent 21 hours trashing, which then passed the Senate, 100-0.

Go figure.