Odds and Ends

• Taking a page from Bibi Netanyahu’s playbook, wherein the prime minister calls recognizing Israel as a Jewish state “an essential condition” for peace, the Tea Party is demanding recognition of America as “the nation-state of the Christian people.” “It’s the only way to win the war on Christmas,” said an unidentified spokesperson, who added that the Party is considering burying the hatchet with John Boehner over immigration reform. “Instead of calling those 14 million Mexicans ‘illegal immigrants’, let’s think of them as Catholics. And minorities? Most of them have lighter skin than Boehner. So no more ‘Happy Holidays’. No more Muslim presidents. And a pathway to the presidency for Ted Cruz.”

• Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman prepares to return to North Korea for his basketball game between American professionals and North Koreans. The game is scheduled for Jan. 8^th, the 31^st birthday of brutal-dictator-cum-basketball-fanatic, Kim Jong Un, although Rodman is having trouble signing up players. This isn’t surprising, since the last American to visit, 85-year-old Merrill Newman, spent a month in jail, and Kim more recently called his favorite uncle “despicable human scum” and had him shot for, among other things, “half-heartedly clapping.”

It’s an odd relationship between the 6’7” Rodman, who wore a wedding dress to promote his autobiography, Bad As I Wanna Be, and tiny Kim, who rules a country dominated by horrendous human suffering and an atomic bomb. But there have been stranger envoys in history, and, who knows, maybe basketball will prove better diplomacy than isolation.

New Year Story

When it didn’t disintegrate harmlessly in the air, the two women in the car realized that what had just blown off the truck’s roof was not snow. Seconds later a block of ice the size of a shoebox slammed into the windshield on the passenger’s side, shattering the glass and the morning calm. My wife, Joanie, managed to steer the car to the shoulder and then to a small gas station near the town of Brewer, Maine, while our daughter, Annie, picked fragments of glass from her face. Somehow, no one was hurt. Inside the tiny market, its shelves crammed with soup cans and potato sticks, Sharon, the proprietor, swung into action, finding a tow company and doling out sympathy. She refused Joanie’s money for coffee (“It’s an hour old. I should have made a new pot”), all the while keeping up a kindly banter with the rough-hewn customers who came in to buy beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets, asking about their Christmas, their families, a grandson’s hockey game. And they, looking at the car outside the window, asked what had happened, responding with a mix of awe and compassion that made us feel we were not strangers. Here in a small market in rural Maine, where people come in to buy hope and ease disappointment, and where we had washed up by frightening chance, we had become, if only for a moment, part of a community, enveloped in its kindness and its humor, watching hope arise from the wreckage.

Peace on Earth

Ninety-nine years ago, in history’s most famous and curious soccer game, German soldiers beat their British counterparts 3-2 between the icy trenches of Flanders. World War I was barely five months old when a Christmas Truce spontaneously broke out along parts of the western front. Featuring carol singing and the intermingling of troops in “no man’s land”, the lull appears to have been entirely the initiative of young enlisted men. By Dec. 27^th each side was back in its own trenches trying to annihilate the other. Infuriated high commands ensured such fraternization would never happen again, nationalist propaganda machines set out to dehumanize an enemy who lived only yards away, and Europeans killed each other by the millions in history’s most senseless war. I thought of this story driving home from dropping my son at the airport, listening to news that told of nothing but war and violence: South Sudan, Thailand, Beirut. And yet, I read that the world has never been more peaceful, that statistically, the violence we commit against each other continues its centuries-long decline. How do we square that with the news – and with the foreboding we feel, even in our own relative safety? Is humanity's natural state that of war or community? Part of the answer lies in the trenches. Those in them stopped to celebrate Christmas. Those behind them insisted on war. “I'm fed up with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in,” said George McGovern.

We need to choose peace.

Christmas Travels

The president has returned to Hawaii for Christmas, just as Joseph returned to the place of his birth for the first Christmas two millennia ago. Perhaps because he was going home to be taxed and seemed a person of little importance, no one demanded Joseph’s long-form birth certificate to disprove rumors he was really a Syrian, while Obama is still dogged by those insisting he was born in Kenya. May the president shed the malaise that has lately fallen over his administration and return to Washington reborn in the spirit that excited us so in 2008. Just because the president is on vacation, however, does not mean that all issues of racial identity have gone on holiday. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly rushed to fill the void by announcing that Santa Claus is a real white man – and that Jesus was a white man, too. (“That’s a verifiable fact.”) Fox News’ crack investigative team is now looking into allegations that Santa is undocumented and Jesus was actually a Jew.

In other birthday travel news, Denis Rodman is back in Pyongyang, organizing a basketball game between young North Koreans and NBA veterans to celebrate Kim Jong Un’s 31^st birthday on January 8^th. The big obstacle is that the Americans are afraid to come, despite Rodman’s insistence that “it’s all love here.”

Here in Maine, our family traveled through ice, snow and cancelled flights to get here for Christmas. It’s an exciting and hopeful time. I wish you warmth and good cheer.

Let’s Take the Christ out of Christmas

I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, especially at this time of year when conspicuous consumption is in the air and pandemonium rules the malls. Others suggest that I am just cheap. In any event, I side with those who think it’s time to take the $ out of Chri$tmas. But why stop there? Let’s go all the way and take the Christ out of Christmas. Does this make me a warrior in the “war on Christmas” that Bill O’Reilly sees all across America, that has led Glenn Beck’s Nativity Defense Force to counterattack against liberals, atheists and Satanists? No. I love the story of Christmas: a young girl, about 14, rides into Bethlehem on the longest night of the year, accompanied by her companion, a carpenter. They go to an inn but are told there is no room. What were they thinking – a destitute couple, dirty from the road, the girl nine months pregnant? Of course there was no room for them. There still isn’t. So they go to a stable where the girl gives birth to a child, who will later rebel against the narrowness of his tribe and the oppression of the state – which will join together to silence him. This story is not a weapon in the culture wars or any other war. It is no more about sectarian exclusion than it is about material gluttony. It is a universal story of courage and hope and inclusion, of birth and rebirth.

Merry Christmas.

Snow

It is absolutely quiet this morning on the coast of Maine. All of nature lies still beneath an eight-inch blanket of undisturbed snow. It follows the curve of the porch railing, covers the branches of the spruce trees beyond, and literally blankets the earth. It is early still, and there is as yet no footprint on the snow’s surface. It is as if no being wants to break the spell of peace that covers the land. I start to read the newspaper, my early morning ritual. Its reports of violence abroad and political bickerings at home are little changed from yesterday or last week. They seem, at least for now, so distant that they come as an intrusion into this enchanted world. I stop reading. Soon enough, I will go out and shovel the steps and start the car, the town’s plow will break the silence of the street, and people will struggle to get to work and to school.

In some places people are suffering terribly from the cold and snow. “In a cold so biting that exposed fingers quickly start to ache,” wrote Anne Barnard recently in the Times, “Syrian children in plastic sandals trudge through mud and chunks of ice, their tiny feet red from exposure” – while I look out at the gently falling snow from the warmth of my study. Something in me wants this morning to last forever, even as I know that the beauty I see is no answer to the injustice they suffer.

Perfect: Enemy of the Good

Soon after the House passed the bipartisan budget agreement I received an email from Moveon.org. That wasn’t surprising, as I get about three a day. This one slammed the agreement, urging me to write my Congressperson and, of course, to send Moveon $3. A modest sum compared to the numbers we hear from the likes of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ 501(c)(4), but it's getting tiresome nonetheless. The message, too, is getting tiresome. While we hear much about the right-wing fulminations against the bill, we hear far less about the progressive opposition (which includes people I genuinely admire, such as Chellie Pingree of Maine and Nebraska’s Tom Harkin). And there is plenty not to like, particularly the refusal to extend emergency benefits for the unemployed, which is both heartless and counterproductive.

But the agreement is a step, however tentative, toward rebuilding a consensus for actually governing. I am tired of the humorless scolds, on the left as well as the right, who have decreed any compromise to be a renunciation of the faith – and a great fundraising tool. We should hold fast to our principles. We should fight for them. But our principles do not make us gods. It is at least possible we are wrong, that there are other ideas, that it might behoove us to listen to other people. We get angry when we know we’re right and can’t get our way. Isn’t it time to put the doubt back into democracy and the humor back into humanity?

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Ridiculous

• Saying “we squandered the goodwill of the world by our actions in Guantánamo,” General Michael Lehnert, the base’s first commander, yesterday called for closing “a prison that should never have been opened.” • The Pennsylvania senate overwhelmingly confirmed Christopher Abruzzo to head the Department of Environmental Protection, despite his testimony that "I've not read any scientific studies that would lead me to conclude that there are adverse impacts to human beings or animals or plant life at this small level of climate change." Abruzzo did concede an impact on human health "from things like air pollution."

• Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s hard-right Congresswoman, criticized the proposed budget agreement, which isn’t surprising since she opposes defense cuts, federal stimulus, tax increases, drilling restrictions, greenhouse-gas regulation, abortions, etc. But reducing Wyoming’s porcine royalties from mineral exploration on federal lands? No way! (She ended up voting for the bill.)

• Michigan’s legislature passed a law requiring women to buy rape insurance if they want coverage for such an event. Oh, and they have to buy it in advance, not after they’re pregnant.

•  “Believe it or not,” Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey told Gail Collins, “Paul Ryan is a good friend. He calls me Mom. I call him Naughty Boy.” With Orrin Hatch again evoking his bond with Ted Kennedy, we are reminded that friendships can cross ideological divides, something I experience each time I publish this blog.

• Finally, a Georgia woman is suspected of supergluing herself to a Home Depot toilet seat.

Just Wanna Be Me

Sometimes I am asked who I would like to be, and, after all these years, I am happy just being me. But I know who I don’t want to be: Jang Song-thaek, the uncle and former mentor of North Korea’s corpulent young dictator, Kim Jung-un. Jang, who many saw as the regime’s regent while Kim learned the ropes, was stripped of his power, publicly humiliated and forcefully removed from a special party meeting last week. Jang has bounced back before, but two of his closest associates have already been executed, and others coldly denounced their one-time benefactor, while hundreds of party lackeys stared impassively ahead, all dressed identically, their faces showing nothing but a numbing blankness, lest they be singled out for the deviancy of individualism. When the bully is agitated, you do not want to catch his eye. Jang apparently committed many sins during his “dissolute and depraved life”, from fornication to cornering the iron-ore market, but none worse than being a potential rival to his 30-year-old nephew. And so, on the eve of Machiavelli’s 500th birthday, Jang learned the regent’s lesson that dates from Nero’s murder of his mother Agrippina almost 2000 years ago: Beware when they grow up – as Cheney learned during Bush’s second term.

We may never know the fate of Jang, one man in a country that seems to find men expendable. But I will not soon forget the chilling photo of rows of robotic functionaries watching without emotion. I wouldn’t want to be them either.

Old Age and Old Art

A long time ago a young man set out to make his mark in the commercial art world. He went to work for a major New York gallery, which we’ll call Wildenstein. A few years later the dejected man resigned, saying the world of international art had much to do with moving great sums of money across borders and almost nothing to do with beauty. Art and money: last month an anonymous buyer bought Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” for $142.4 million. Last week the monetization of art was again in the news with Detroit’s Dilemma: should the city tap into its Arts Institute’s extraordinary collection to help pay down its mind-bending debt? You bet, say its creditors, art is not “essential” to Detroit.

I mean, people sell art all the time. It’s why Wildenstein exists. It’s the primary “business” of Christie’s, which Detroit hired to appraise its collection. It’s how the museum got some of its finest pieces in the first place. Why not unload a few and give this reeling, impoverished city a lift? Wouldn’t Van Gogh want to sell his “Portrait of Postman Roulin” to help the city’s workers? Wouldn’t Diego Rivera, whose room of murals celebrates working people, want art to benefit the masses instead of the privileged few?

This dilemma is the unhappy legacy of big money and art, of Wildenstein and Christie’s. But go into the museum. Lose yourself in its beauty. Sell the collection? It would be like selling the city’s soul.

Mandela

The Moses of the modern world died yesterday. Nelson Mandela led his people to the Promised Land, where the lion really does lie down with the lamb. But Mandela, like Moses, never got to enter that valley because it does not exist, either in South Africa or anywhere else. And so he left behind a powerful, unrealized dream, built on extraordinary courage, sacrifice, blood, endurance and humility. He was the man I most admired in the 20^th century. In declining a second term as president, he eschewed the totalitarian paths of Lenin and Mao to walk with Gandhi, Havel and King. He was neither a saint nor a hero, but seemed instead a profoundly human person. In truth, we need fewer saints and heroes, who are archetypes set on fragile pedestals rather than people struggling in a stubborn world, people who experience tragedy and joy, who make compromises and trade-offs, who are inconsistent and often unfathomable, who choose life over immortality.

And Mandela was a towering person, enduring 27 years on Robben Island and emerging to ask his jailer to join with him to build a community that few had even been able to imagine. (His English first name, bestowed in grammar school, seemed a symbol of his longing to bridge once intractable divides.) He paid a heavy price – in his torture and incarceration, in his loss of a private life that sustains us on this journey – to give all of us a vision of a better world.

Reassessing Reagan

The more I read about the great economic divide in America, the more its origins seem set in the 1980s. In his recent memo, “Which Side of the Barricade Are You On?”, former Clinton confidant Doug Sosnik traces “Americans’ alienation from our political system and its leaders” to “long-term domestic economic trends dating back to the early 1980s.” What are some of those trends? The concentration of income in the hands of the very rich and the corresponding stagnation of the middle class. (Last year one percent of Americans received 19% of all income, creating a gap not seen since 1928.) A 50% decline in unionized workers. A median household income unchanged since 1979. A “decoupling” of economic productivity from middle-class prosperity.

What happened?

“It’s morning again in America,” announced Ronald Reagan in 1984, as he asked for another four years to dismantle the country’s safety nets and blow holes in the belief that we were all in this together. Beneath the soothing pronouncement that America was “prouder, stronger, better”, the Reagan presidency accentuated class and racial divisions (“there is a welfare queen from Chicago’s South Side”), debunked environmental efforts (“trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”), and set us on an unprecedented path to indebtedness (the deficit more than doubled during Reagan’s eight years in office, and the national debt tripled – rates unrivaled before or since).

This side of Reaganism, which was evident in the 1980s, has disappeared in the soothing glow of historical revisionism. We have paid a heavy price for our amnesia.

An Eventful Life

I’m not sure why I even read it. Maybe it was my times in Ireland and my sense of connectedness to that enchanted, benighted land. Or the smiling face of young Joe Reilly, freckled and red-haired, born in the Mission District of San Francisco in 1926, who died almost 88 years later not far away in San Leandro. The grandson of immigrants from County Armagh, he sold newspapers on the city’s streets as a boy, enlisted in the navy at 17 and spent three years in the Pacific, returning home in 1946 to marry Bess, his wife for 67 years, and raise 10 children. He delivered milk in Berkeley Hills, where his customers welcomed his smile and laughed at his blarney. When Berkeley Farms ceased home deliveries in 1970, he became an ice cream man, working a second job as a concessionaire at Oakland Coliseum. Joe was an entrepreneur as well as a salesman – an early distributor of mineral water to local health food stores, he subsequently discovered a geyser well and launched Napa Valley Springs Water Company, which he sold four years later. He spent his last quarter century happily retired, traveling with Bess, playing with the grandchildren, fishing daily with his buddies at the lake. A long, happy life lived within 20 miles of his birth, yet filled with the tragedy of living. Childhood poverty. Witnessing the carnage at Midway. Enduring the deaths of two daughters and a great-grandson. A life like millions of others, tracing the arc of 20^th-century America, unique and precious.

A Question of Charity

Let us give thanks for the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate the “non-profit” front organizations that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into clandestine political campaigns. Let’s hope it’s a step toward getting rid of the fraudulent 501(c)4s that have poisoned American politics. Their $300 million in annual contributions have neither edified the public conversation nor enlightened the public. But why stop there? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the non-profit concept entirely. What was once a creative incentive for charitable giving has become big business. American non-profits now have assets in excess of $4.3 trillion, almost twice the net worth of the continent of Africa. The largest foundations, which control billions of dollars, behave like independent countries, setting their own domestic and foreign-policy agendas. Universities, once citadels of free inquiry, are increasingly wedded to lucrative commercial contracts clouded in secrecy and dependent on proprietary information. America’s taxpayers subsidize elite private schools where they couldn’t possibly afford to send their children but to which donations are tax deductible. At the other end of the spectrum, small social-service agencies are so strapped for money that they often must alter their mission to meet a donor’s demands. Fundraising in the non-profit world has become an end in itself.

Collectively, these organizations do enormous good. Often they take on responsibilities that governments, employers, even neighbors have abdicated in a society that undervalues the public good. In doing so, however, do they also risk shrinking the commons by substituting private charity for our communal commitment to each other?

Pregnant Corporation Seeks Maternity Leave

Another case on the constitutional rights of corporations is heading for the Supreme Court. In its 2010 Citizens United decision, the Court banned limits on political contributions from corporations and labor unions, asserting that such spending constitutes free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment to all persons. Never mind that corporations can’t talk, write, hold up protest signs or do any of the other things we normally associate with speech. They are nonetheless constitutionally entitled to spend their shareholders’ money to influence elections. But why stop at speech? What about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Sure enough, the Court will next decide whether the Constitution protects a corporation’s religious beliefs, now that the 10^th Court of Appeals has applied “the First-Amendment logic of Citizens United” to uphold Hobby Lobby’s right to “religious expression.” Indeed, wrote Justice Harris Hartz, “A corporation exercising religious beliefs is not corrupting anyone.” Religious beliefs? Might Exxon believe in God? Can Google be baptized? We have entered an absurd semantic world, whose dangers are more than linguistic. “If thought can corrupt language,” wrote George Orwell in 1984, “language can also corrupt thought.”

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that’s all."

Next up for corporations: the Second Amendment.

Family Values

Mike Enzi is the senior senator from Wyoming, a conservative Republican from a red state. How conservative? Enzi supports privatizing Social Security and opposes Medicare expansion. He favors drilling almost everywhere and abhors alternative energy. He loves fossil fuels, which doesn’t hurt in a state that mines 40% of America’s coal and ranks second in overall energy production. Enzi opposes all abortions, supports a border fence, thinks Guantanamo is just fine, and rejects gay marriage. He has a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee and an A+ from the NRA. He is also, they say, a nice man for a senator and takes constituent services seriously. A perfect fit for Wyoming, right? Apparently not, says Liz Cheney, who insists Wyoming needs a real conservative in the Senate. So she is running against Enzi from the right! It’s not easy to find daylight to the right of Mike Enzi, but it gets really complicated when your sister is married to someone named Heather Poe. Naturally, the Enzi campaign attacked, with a super-PAC-funded ad campaign blasting Cheney as soft on gay marriage, and (surprise!) it worked. A recent poll has Cheney losing by 52 points. So she publicly disavowed her sister’s lifestyle this week, and there are rumors of huge money ready to come into Wyoming on her behalf. The only thing missing from this campaign are issues. But Cheney will let neither that nor her sister stand in the way of her ambition. Is this what our politics have come to?

Those Poor Poor

In an apparent coincidence, Warsaw is hosting both the International Coal and Climate Summit and the United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change. Guess which one the Poles, who rely on coal for 90% of their electricity, like better? While the two meetings have little in common but the word “climate”, both emphasize the impact of coal on “the poor”. Unsurprisingly, they see things differently. There are “1.3 billion people in the world who live without electricity,” said Godfrey Gomwe, of the World Coal Association. “A life lived without access to modern energy is a life lived in poverty.” Coal is here to stay.

Across town, representatives of some of the world’s poorest countries argue that, far from paving the way out of poverty, coal is the major contributor to climate change, whose impacts are already overwhelming the poor. They talk of “climate injustice” and demand compensation.

There seems little likelihood much will change. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” said Todd Stern, America’s climate envoy. Meanwhile, the U.S., which has scaled way back on domestic coal use, now exports millions of tons to Asia.

So we are left with a conundrum: the only path to prosperity we understand is an economic growth so dependent on energy extraction that it threatens to become our road to ruin. In either case, the primary victims are the poor, real people who have become an abstraction. We need a different way.

Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eggs

The problem with screwing up something as badly as the administration appears to have screwed up the Obamacare rollout is that you don’t just get egg on your face, you create huge problems for those who support you. I still hope that Obamacare is the critical first step toward universal health coverage – and ultimately a single-payer system, which many doctors insist is the only way to provide it. But we are now in danger of heading in the opposite direction, as feckless Democrats rush for political cover. The current comparisons to George Bush’s bungled reaction to Katrina seem unwarranted because (1) Bush hadn’t spent the previous five years planning for a large hurricane and (2) his administration’s response seemed based as much on callousness as incompetence. The Affordable Care Act, on the other hand, was meant to be about compassion – particularly for the millions of Americans without health coverage. It was the president’s signature act and meant to be his legacy. Now its opponents tout it as Exhibit A of government’s inability to do anything.

People warned me that the law was not 11,000 pages for nothing – that it was meant to obscure the giveaways to all manner of special interests, including the insurance companies who now dance happily atop what they hope is Obamacare’s grave. Meanwhile, America continues to have the most expensive, least comprehensive and most bureaucratic (yes, insurance companies are bureaucracies, too) health care of any developed country. We can’t afford to fumble away the chance to change that.

The Value of Art

My right-leaning friends insist that the market is the fairest and most efficient arbiter of value. From this I deduce that Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, which sold this week for $142.4 million, is the finest picture ever painted. Its price, Roberta Smith noted, exceeds the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Clearly, art is less in the beholder’s eye than the investor’s pocket. My own modest foray into the art world, however, might contain a gram of caution. Many years ago I bought at Christie’s a very large painting for $1,800. When it arrived at our door, my wife took one look and decreed it would not hang in our apartment. That seemed no way to treat a serious collector, especially one with a formula: I had observed that big paintings generally sold for more than small ones – and mine had the highest square-inch value in the entire auction. Plus, the artist was dead. This was a slam dunk.

Because the painting wouldn’t fit in a taxi, I had to haul it back uptown on the subway. It sold at the next auction for $850.

The value of art also made news in Detroit, where the city-owned Institute of Art teems daily with schoolchildren, staring wondrously at Diego Rivera’s epic mural celebrating the common man. Creditors are pushing the city to sell some of its “priceless” art to pay down some of its $18-billion debt. I wonder what the children think. I wonder what Rivera thinks.

Yomamacare

You’ve got to love the Koch Brothers. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word, but those guys and their proxies pop up everywhere. Their latest stunt is a $750,000 tailgate tour of 20 college campuses by Generation Opportunity, a “non-partisan” 501(c)(4) non-profit that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, does not have to reveal the names of its donors. So far, though, it has received over $5 million from groups associated with the Kochs. The motorcade’s mission is to persuade students across America to reject Obamacare.

First stop: the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game, where, GO spokesman David Pasch emailed the Tampa Bay Times, “we rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8-foot-high balloon bouquet floating overhead.”

Then “brand ambassadors (aka models with bullhorns)” rolled out a full suite of alternative health options, ranging from cardio exercises (beer pong) to balanced nutrition (pizza and beer) to something called “cornholing” (which turns out to be a combination of beanbag and a warning about what Obamacare will do to you).

“And,” added Pasch, “we educated students about their healthcare options outside the expensive and creepy Obamacare exchanges."

The kids had a ball. I mean, free beer, loud music and hot models vs. creepy Obamacare? That’s some choice for college students, especially those still on their family’s health plan.

The Kochs’ (rhymes with “just folks”) commitment to family values and home remedies is unwavering, so perhaps we should call their health-care alternative “Yomamacare”.