The Sanctity of Life

Today is the 40^th March for Life, the massive annual protest on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. This is not a coincidence. The GOP has long manipulated the abortion issue, and this year it is downplaying the sectarian stridency that offended many women and is instead emphasizing public-funding issues and (here’s a surprise) tying it to Obamacare. I believe that all life is sacred, but that is not a simple matter in a world where life depends on – and arises from – death. I have yet to meet a woman whose abortion was a callous choice rather than a wrenching decision, and it seems a cruel irony that those who scorn the role of government in our lives demand it regulate the most personal of all decisions. This is not new. When I ran for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1996, abortion was rarely discussed even though everyone knew it would determine the election. In Lancaster County, a teenage boy followed me screaming, “baby killer” (for the record: not true), and on the Sunday before Election Day, ministers across the district commanded their congregations to “do your duty” on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, “stand-your-ground” and “open-carry” laws find increasing favor in the pro-life party; and Texas, where husbands could once kill adulterous wives and lovers, “provided the killing takes place before the parties to the adultery have separated,” will today execute its 509^th person since 1976, although his arrest violated international law

The Mantle of Reasonableness

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court last week overturned the state’s 2012 Voter ID law. It seemed a reasonable law, intended only to prevent people who were not eligible to vote from voting. Who could be against that? Unfortunately the state has yet to find a single instance of anyone – a dead person, say, or an “illegal immigrant” – showing up to vote. The law, Judge Bernard McGinley wrote, did nothing “to assure a free and fair election.” On the other hand, there is now evidence that, in its short lifetime, the law inhibited plenty of other people from voting – students and the elderly, poor people and people of color. This was precisely what the law, which passed the legislature without a single Democratic vote, was intended to do. This law, announced the House majority leader after its passage, “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

Beware of extremism clothed in reasonableness, particularly when the evidence is slim. Who, for example, could be opposed to applying hospital building codes to abortion facilities, especially in light of “all” those butcher shops we keep reading about? In a nation where the vast majority believes in God, why not teach intelligent design as a possible explanation of the origins of life? Isn’t education a competition of ideas? Who could disagree that the market allocates resources – including health care – more efficiently than government bureaucrats?

We like our extremists to be wild-eyed and ranting, but they’re way too smart for that.

• Some of you have not been getting the blog regularly because of a glitch, for which I apologize and which I believe is fixed. You can find all the excitement you missed at www.jamesgblaine.com

So Much Heat. So Little Light

There is an important discussion to be had about global warming. But we aren’t having it. A friend’s response to my last blog got me thinking about why the debate over climate change is so overheated and so unenlightening. The reason, I think, is simple: We have confused two different conversations – one scientific, the other political; one over, the other barely begun.

The scientific debate is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming is real and that humans play a significant role in exacerbating it. Contrary assertions by corporate interests and right-wing zealots are self-serving hot air that diverts attention from the discussion we should be having, which is what to do about climate change. This is a question of politics, and everyone’s voice should be heard – even those who say we should do nothing. For there is a difference between doing nothing after debating the consequences and just sticking our heads in the sand. Perhaps, like the dinosaurs, our dominion over the earth is a transitory niche rather than evidence of our immortality, and there isn’t much we can do. Certainly, environmentalists’ admonitions that we live for the seventh generation must sound callous to those whose children are starving. Perhaps new technology will save us, or creative entrepreneurs. Perhaps we will change our lifestyles or our values. Perhaps we will simply adjust.

Just because the Flat Earth Society still exists doesn’t mean it should be part of the geography curriculum. We need to get real about climate change.

January Morning

Like many other places across America, the coast of Maine has had some freaky weather of late. Last week’s frigid temperatures, which turned waterfalls here into ice sculptures, made global warming doubters positively giddy (although I was heartened to read that the Obama administration is, however quietly, pushing climate initiatives behind the scenes). Then came the pouring rains and yesterday morning’s welcome sunrise, which brought with it a soft blue sky and warmed my aging body as only sunshine can. A southwest breeze carried the resonant sound of waves breaking on the rocks, and the few birds still here woke up singing. It was a day to be outside. The water that had been pent up in ice was suddenly released into mountain streams, and its exuberance brought the mountain itself to life. Even for simpletons like me (are those prints of a deer heading north or a rabbit going south?), there is so much to learn here, things that the computer-simulated models  favored in science classes cannot teach. None is more important than that we are part of something astounding, a world we seek to manipulate but do not fully understand.

I remember at times like these the words of my friend Charity, who has lived most of her life in Detroit’s ravaged neighborhoods, and who was asked why she cared about saving Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which she would probably never see. “My work,” she said, “is in the city, but my heart is in the wild.”

The Christie Boys

It was quite week for the Christie boys. Chris, the tubby one, was up to his jowls in self-mortification (“humiliated”, “heartbroken”) and personal blamelessness (“blindsided”, “stages of grief”) over what Gail Collins has dubbed Bridgegate: the closing of two lanes onto the George Washington Bridge and snarling traffic for four days in Fort Lee, N.J. as an act of political revenge. Doug, the tall one with the reality show wife, was part of Dennis Rodman’s team of basketball players celebrating Kim Jong Un’s 30-somethingth birthday 7,000 miles away in Pyongyang. The Americans, whose average age is 48, lost the competitive half of the game – which enabled the Korean team to avoid ruining the birthday party of the Great One, a man believed to be even more vindictive than the governor of New Jersey. It’s a strange world in which Americans lose a basketball game to a country where the average height is 5’5” and The New York Times devotes three op-ed pieces to smarmy politics in New Jersey. Isn’t this fodder for supermarket tabloids, rather than the last citadels of responsible journalism? Perhaps. But think what we learn about the current state of our political system in which people at the highest levels of power gleefully inconvenience – and even endanger – the lives of thousands as an act of petty vengeance. And what an image we get of North Korea, watching Dennis Rodman sing Happy Birthday to a man who has summoned his entire government to watch a pick-up basketball game.

We’ve Got Shale!

Heavy metals pollute millions of acres of China’s farmland. Less than half the country’s water is safe to drink. Its air kills more than 500,000 people every year. This is the price of progress. Eight thousand miles away, Governor Tom Corbett wants Pennsylvania to be “the Texas of the natural gas boom.” He’s getting his wish. “The amount of clean-burning natural gas being safely produced is nothing short of staggering,” the Marcellus Shale Coalition recently announced. Natural gas, “non-profit” industry shills like the Coalition keep telling us, is wonderful: cleaner than coal and safer than nuclear, it is the energy equivalent of a wonder drug that cures our ailments without demanding changes in our lifestyles.

Except it isn’t. A growing body of research shows natural gas extraction to be anything but benign – most recently, Stroud Water Research Center scientists found that even low levels of fracking’s wastewater were highly toxic to stream organisms.

The industrial age is over. It brought great benefits, but the earth and its inhabitants can no longer sustain its human and environmental costs. It arose in response to new ways of understanding the world – and the entrenched powers, both church and state, resisted it with all their might. But what seemed to them the end of the world was but the start of an exciting new age. Today, the entrenched powers, both government and corporate, resist any alternative to the old order of “more is better”. The Inquisition didn’t stop the last paradigm shift. It must not stop this one.

Virtual Disaster

I have long wondered if people who ask you to “friend” them on Facebook or another other social media site have hurt feelings when you don’t respond. I now know the answer. They do not. Let me back up.

When Facebook appeared a decade ago, my children informed me that I was never to sign up. That was fine with me. I do not care what Justine Timberlake ate for breakfast and I only read graffiti on urban walls.

Last week a friend asked me to connect on LinkedIn. One of my children, who shall remain nameless, told me that membership had “no downside” and could even expand the reach of my blog. So I accepted – and I got this sinking feeling when hundreds of emails instantly went out to God knows whom.

Soon I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in years. “I don’t want you to take it personally,” wrote one, declining my “offer”. “Is this really from you,” wrote another? Citing an article on the NSA, a cousin wrote, “I wouldn’t put my contacts on LinkedIn for the world.” “It’s really just an avenue for people to spam you,” wrote a fourth. Others I apparently invited included the Harvard Extension School, American Embassy in Bogota and TripCase.

Writing letters of explanation actually did connect me with old friends, although the sense of not being in control was unsettling. Still, with all the real disasters around the world, I think I’ll survive this virtual embarrassment.

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.