The Lake District

It’s hard to picture Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud as I drive along Lake Windermere in northwestern England, past billboards marketing water sports and hourly cruises, the slightly nauseating smell of fish and chips, and casually dressed tourists whose crimson necks and ruddy faces reflect temperatures in excess of 85 degrees. Yet the next morning, as I stand on a hill above the lake, looking across to shadowy peaks beneath the pale blue sky, I am struck by the beauty of the place. Beside me is a slab of stone, set in memory of Gordon Stables, who died July 4, 1978, age 55 years: “By his endeavors he prevented electricity pylons being placed on this landscape” – followed by lines from Wordsworth’s The Recluse: ‘Tis, but I cannot name it, ‘tis the sense

Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,

A blended holiness of earth and sky,

Something that makes this individual spot,

This small abiding-place of many men,

A termination, and a last retreat,

A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,

A whole without dependence or defect,

Made for itself, and happy in itself,

Perfect contentment, Unity entire.

This is not the grandeur of the Rockies or even the Highlands to the north. Its beauty is more civilized, the kind of pastoral landscape the Romantics loved. Today I long more for wild places, perhaps because the wilderness is disappearing so fast, perhaps because my own life seems sedentary and tame.

On the other hand, I hike without fear of being attacked by sheep.

The British Health Bureaucracy

“Just remember,” the oncologist told my friend Lee, “you are in charge of your own health. We work for you.” As Obamacare continues to be assailed in the courts and Congress, amid dark visions of rationed care, death panels and bureaucratic doctors – and along dishearteningly partisan lines – one physician’s words remind us that the issue, in the end, is not about politics but about human health and human dignity.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the doctor practices in Scotland, where as part of Britain’s national health system, he is a government employee. He also makes house calls and has given Lee his cell-phone number and told him to use it any time, night or day.

I have come to Glasgow to visit Lee, who has been my friend for 55 years. He has esophageal cancer, which is not a diagnosis you want anywhere, but better in Britain than many places I can think of – particularly if, like Lee, you are poor and live alone. The system isn’t perfect – when Lee had a stent inserted in his chest, he recovered in a hospital ward reminiscent of World War I movies – but it seems a far cry from the rants of American radio hosts. Those with cancer even receive a government stipend, public recognition that the disease carries enough indignities without piling poverty on top.

It’s hard to believe, I know, that this bureaucratic system treats Lee, not as a patient, but as a person. But it does.

“All they will call you will be deportees”

“In this country immigrants are still treated like victims. . . .If you can help them tell their stories, you will have done a lot.” I am reading Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s The Shadow Girls, recommended by a friend, about the thousands of people – from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere – who wash up daily on Europe’s southern shores. It is a reminder that America isn’t the only country with an immigrant issue, that all those children at our southern border are not just problems but people, and that most of them are not so much coming for America’s freebies as fleeing for their lives. Don’t misunderstand me, this is a huge problem, but it is a human one and it is global in scope. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that the world’s refugee population now exceeds 50 million for the first time since World War II.

Last Friday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ordered every Christian still living in the city of Mosul to leave, convert or be killed. In images chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, ISIS appropriated the gold, confiscated the houses and destroyed the icons of the Chaldean Christian community that had lived in Mosul for 1,700 years. Many “expressed a sense of utter abandonment and isolation,” The New York Times reported. They fled with nothing but the clothes they wore, bringing the number of Iraq’s internal refugees to 1.2 million.

Seventeen hundred years of history. Gone forever. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Metamorphosis

Only Antonin Scalia knows for sure, of course, but I believe the original intent of the nation’s Founders was to make impeachment a rare event for a serious cause. In fact, only three presidents have ever been impeached: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Both Johnson, who was a dreadful president, and Clinton, who has ironically become the Republicans’ favorite Democrat, were acquitted of trumped-up charges; when Nixon understood that he would be impeached and convicted, he resigned. So Barack Obama must have done some pretty bad things because Republicans want to impeach and sue him. While the lunatic fringe – from Sarah Palin to the South Dakota Republican Party – is demanding impeachment for a ragbag of offenses – our unsecure borders, Bowe Bergdahl’s release, Obamacare’s lies – John Boehner is suing the president for delaying implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate, a law he opposes.

Kafka could not have written this script. Israel is invading Gaza; Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels just shot down a Malaysian passenger jet; ISIS has declared a bloody caliphate in Mesopotamia; Iraq and Afghanistan are falling apart. Here at home, we have a crisis on our southern border; our inner cities are crumbling victims of apartheid; most of the West is battling a drought of Biblical proportions.

And the Speaker of the House, to avoid the political disaster of impeachment and yet cover his right flank, is preparing to sue the president for not implementing a law that his caucus has voted 54 times to repeal. 

Gasoline Prices Are Dropping Now (Hurrah! Hurrah!)

24/7 Wall Street recently reported a nationwide fall in gas prices – always good news for the sluggish U.S. economy, which depends on low energy costs and on subsidizing the American consumer and his automobile. And it’s particularly good news for the poor and middle class whose stagnant real income is most sensitive to gas prices. Right?

Well, we need more than cars to drive; we also need things to drive on, like roads and bridges, which are in deplorable disrepair across the country. And perhaps, instead of subsidizing consumption with cheaper fuel, we should encourage conservation by bringing gas prices into line with social and environmental costs. But such changes require two very bad things: public works and higher taxes.

Right now, the highway trust fund is fast going broke, jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of both projects and jobs, because House Republicans won’t touch anything that might be perceived as a tax and don’t think the government should be responsible for anything except their pensions and health care. Never mind that only Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have lower gas taxes than America, and that almost half our states haven’t raised the gas tax in ten years.

Still, we continue to crush high-speed rail and any other innovations that might be more efficient and might leave in the ground some of the fossil fuels damaging our climate.

What if instead we rebuilt our crumbling infrastructure, tripled the price of gasoline, and subsidized the transition for those hit hardest by the changes?

R.I.P.

Charity Hicks, a Detroit social activist and policy director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, died on Tuesday in a New York hospital. Early on May 31^st, Charity was waiting for a bus to take her to a panel discussion when a car veered off 10^th Avenue, slammed into a hydrant and the bus stop sign, which fell on Charity’s head. She never awakened from her coma. Despite having his car, eyewitness descriptions and a first name, the police have not yet arrested the driver who fled the scene.

I met Charity several years ago at the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. She was wearing, as she always did, African clothes of bright colors and speaking in rhetorical cascades about the world’s injustices. Heir more to the Black Power than the Civil Rights movement,  she fought for dignity for all people. She devoted her life to Detroit’s oppressed, focusing on food and water security, supporting her extended family on a part-time university stipend. In May, while demonstrating against the city shutting off water to the poor, she was jailed. “The conditions,” she said, “are meant to shame you, demoralize you, criminalize you and break you down.”

She was a fighter with a very human heart, filled at times with self-doubt, subject to depression, yearning for peace in places she would never visit. “My work is in the city,” she once said. “But my heart is in the wild.”

Charity was my friend. I will miss her big heart. 

We Are Not Immune

Some years ago, in a sparsely populated part of Costa Rica, I listened to the sounds of rustling and murmurs throughout the dark night. At first I envisioned large animals out hunting, which was frightening enough, but I soon realized the sounds were people moving in endless procession, and my imagination turned to guerillas, drug runners, kidnappers. In the morning I learned the travelers were Nicaraguans on a perilous journey to a better life. Some of them undoubtedly ended up at the U.S.-Mexican border, where they became part of the crisis of illegal immigration, the subject these days of so much heated talk and so little proposed action – particularly around the 4^th of July when patriots blabber on about “American exceptionalism” under siege from porous borders.

I don’t know the ultimate solution, but it seems clear that the old ways of thinking do not work. You cannot build a fence high enough or dig a moat deep enough to keep desperate people out. More importantly, what the new nativists don’t grasp is that this issue signifies, not America’s specialness, but how much a part of the world we have become.

For as more and more people gather at our borders and in our detention centers, what we face is not an immigrant problem, but a refugee problem – with a profile much like the rest of the world, where 45 million refugees, 80 percent of them women and children, live impoverished lives in squalid camps, breeding anger and discontent.

Going Backward

I do not write to flog Hobby Lobby, the company behind the latest legal challenge to Obamacare. I admire companies that are mission-driven and espouse values other than just the bottom line. What distresses me is that contraception, an issue I thought settled long ago, is again under assault. This is a form of guerilla warfare, with no fixed lines, in which women are forever forced to retake old ground. How can abortions be safe, in any sense of the word, if contraception is continually under attack? This is a women’s issue, and I’m not sure many men actually get that. The Supreme Court’s three female justices don’t just dissent on contraception cases. They seem personally affronted, as was the elderly woman who asked me 18 years ago when I was running for Congress: “Are you pro-choice or anti-woman?” When Rick Santorum attacked birth control as well as abortion in the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates, it just seemed more proof of how firmly rooted in the Inquisition his political beliefs are. Santorum is running again in 2016; his views have not changed.

But there is more than politics involved. My friend Bayard Storey spent his long career studying reproduction, for which he received scientific honors and a philosophical awakening: “A woman provides 99.999 percent of the metabolic input to development of the offspring; the male’s contribution to the process is miniscule. It’s the woman who has to do all the work and carry the burden. No legislator has the right to regulate that.”

The Corporations’ 4th of July Party

Disclaimer: Many of you were shocked by Wednesday’s report on Justice Scalia’s speech to NICE! and wanted to know more about the organization. Unfortunately there is no NICE!. While Wednesday’s post was satire, today’s story is entirely factual. The second in my series to humanize corporations takes us to a cookout and fireworks display hosted by the Corporations. Despite having been declared persons with ever-expanding constitutional rights (cf, fetuses, illegal immigrants) by the Supreme Court, the Corporations remain among the most misunderstood of Americans. Apparently, while their money is “speech,” it doesn’t talk to everyone.

The Corporations throw their annual July 4^th party in their awesome house with the glass ceilings. ("They keep the ladies on their toes," joked Mr. Corporation.) Unlike some of the phonies I could mention on our block, the Corporations are real persons, whose history in America traces, not just to Citizens United in 2010, but all the way back to 1819 and the Dartmouth College case. Almost two centuries later they have extra reason to celebrate, as they have just gained freedom of worship as well as of speech

There are no more loyal Americans than the Corporations, who celebrate the Fourth of July as the day the colonists declared "no taxation without representation". "And we are working hard to bring those days back to America," they said, "so we can bring back the millions of jobs and billions of dollars we have had to keep overseas because, until this Supreme Court, we haven’t had a voice."

NICE!

In a speech last night to the National Institute for Corporate Entities (NICE!), Justice Antonin Scalia urged corporations to pursue their rights under the Second Amendment. “We have now secured for you two of the three most important constitutional rights – free speech and freedom of religion,” he told the audience. “It’s time to go for the trifecta.” Asserting that corporations have the same right “as any other person” to protect themselves from harm, Scalia suggested the Court would be open to an expansion of the Second Amendment, and he counseled corporations against waiting too long. “Women are ‘feminizing’ the law,” he said, making quotation marks with his fingers, “and on this Court, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan – like women everywhere – almost always vote as a bloc against the manly virtues. If Hillary is elected in 2016 and packs the court with women, you can kiss District of Columbia v Heller goodbye and my famous line that ‘it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct’. As for gay marriage, don’t get me started.”

Scalia concluded by looking wistfully into a future in which corporations enjoy all the protections of the Bill of Rights. “I dream of an America in which you are secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, cannot be compelled to testify against yourself, and ‘excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed.’

“Each of you is a NICE! person, and don't let the liberals try to tell you otherwise.”

“Warre of every one against every one”

Amid the western world’s preparations to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of World War I, maybe it’s a good time to think about World War III. Maybe not. It’s a depressing subject, and most of us prefer to live our lives removed from both the threat and the reality of war. But that’s not so easy in a world where war seems to be everywhere, including places where we spent many years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to avert it. “You break it, you own it,” Colin Powell famously told George Bush before the Iraq war, and we certainly broke it. But what does it mean to own it? Clearly, we don’t control it, and it seems foolish and dangerous to think we can. Moreover, whenever we concentrate on one war, others break out elsewhere. What’s a great power to do?

We can no more disengage from the world than control it, much as Americans might like to, and, as the big business of tourism demonstrates, the world beyond our borders is not just a dangerous place. It’s also an interesting place. Perhaps for us armchair policy makers, that’s a start. We can’t change the world, but we can engage it differently. Just as the movement to reclaim city parks considered too dangerous to enter began when people refused to cede them to muggers, so, instead of pulling up the drawbridge, we can go out into the world with curiosity and an open mind. Just be careful.

Keep Your Eye on Mississippi

Six-term Senator Thad Cochran edged Tea Party-backed Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's Republican primary run-off, but only with the help of black Democratic voters, a tactic that has McDaniel seething and threatening to challenge. It will be interesting to watch African-American voting patterns in November, when they choose between Travis Childers, a former Congressman who opposed Obamacare and describes himself as “pro-life and pro-gun,” and Cochran, who ran on his formidable ability to bring big-government bacon home to Mississippi. And it will be equally interesting to watch how Childers and Cochran treat black voters, who make up  36% of the electorate in the most racially polarized state in America. It should be quite a tap dance, particularly since Cochran is the worst kind of pork barreler: Mississippi gets $2.47 in federal funding for each dollar it pays in federal taxes, yet it remains at the bottom of the barrel in health care, poverty, education, and general well-being. Correction. Readers picked up two big errors in my last post:

1. Adams and Jefferson died in 1826, not 1825.
2. More importantly, they became bitterly estranged after the election of 1800, then reconciled in 1812 and remained friends until the end of their lives. While this reinforces the idea that vitriolic partisanship is nothing new, it does temper the notion that their politics was not personal. “Acid does do damage,” one of you wrote. But Adams and Jefferson give hope that such damage can be overcome and they reaffirm civil discourse as the political ideal, which today seems sadly in doubt.

Civil Discourse

Kenyon is a small liberal arts college, founded in 1824, from which my son Daniel graduated and where I am attending a seminar on the “Essays” of Montaigne, which he described as his “attempts” to put his thoughts into words. Kenyon is physically and culturally an idyllic place, where civil discourse is still prized as the foundation of both learning and community. The college’s politics are predominantly liberal, and yet a longtime political science professor with neo-conservative views praised it for its openness. “No speaker has ever been disinvited here,” he said.

That is my hope for this blog: a forum where I can "attempt" to write what I think – or what I think I think – and invite you to do the same. I want to open the discussion to other views. I welcome your thoughts on how to do so.

I do not believe that vitriolic partisanship started only in the last few years. The Jeffersonians brutally attacked John Adams and the Federalists returned the broadsides in spades. They were ugly and sometimes violent. But Jefferson and Adams renewed their friendship before they both died on July 4, 1826, America’s 50^th Independence Day. What is different now, I worry, is that even the ideal of civic discourse is under attack, the notion that political rivals can be personal friends seems a fading memory, and forums for the true exchange of ideas grow fewer. Yet that ideal is the foundation of our political system. We cannot have a republic without it.

Irony in Black and White

When I suggest that race plays a more-than-incidental role in the opposition’s implacable opposition to Barack Obama, some accuse me of playing the race card; others just roll their eyes at my lame excuse for Obama’s presidential failings. But it’s neither lame nor an excuse. It’s a reality. How could it not be? Consider:

• Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” explicitly used race to appeal to southern white voters, pulling the old Confederacy almost overnight into the GOP (and driving blacks overwhelmingly to the Democrats).

• Ronald Reagan expanded that strategy to white working-class voters everywhere, and “Reagan Democrats” provided his margins of victory.

• In 2005 Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP for his party’s efforts “to benefit politically from racial polarization.”

• But perhaps the most bizarre sign of Republican race polarization is Senator Thad Cochran’s last-ditch effort to woo black voters in Tuesday’s primary run-off against Chris McDaniel. Cochran believes African Americans will find the Tea Party-backed McDaniel even more offensive than him, and he appears to be correct. The cynicism is breathtaking, but the irony is that Cochran’s desperate pursuit of black votes may do more to build an interracial coalition based on  self-interest than did the election of a biracial president who appealed to our better natures across the grim line of race.

A discouraging thought, but as I look around the world I see idealism everywhere in retreat from the sectarian forces that would keep us apart.

But I’m not giving up.

Enough

Dick Cheney, who "had other priorities in the 60's than military service," has become America’s most vocal warrior in his old age. He is much in the news this week because of the op-ed piece he and his daughter Liz wrote for The Wall Street Journal. I disagree with the Cheneys’ message; with their reading of recent history (“we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”); with their amnesia about the 500,000 Iraqi dead as a result of the American invasion; and perhaps above all with their style of personal attacks and innuendo, depicting a president who “doesn’t seem to care,” is “blithely indifferent,” is determined to take “America down a notch.” The Cheneys’ Journal article was part of a larger campaign to announce the launching of their Alliance for a Strong America (there was a time when newspapers didn’t offer their editorial pages to public relations campaigns), a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization. My reaction to the package of article, video and website was visceral repugnance, and the post I began writing this morning was littered with vituperative references to WMDick Cheney and Liz’s over-the-top Senate campaign.

No, I don’t like these people, but I am tired of fighting the battles in the past – the invasion, the surge, the withdrawal, who lost Iraq? – which have led us all down a path of ad hominem blaming, name calling and paralyzing national divisiveness. In my revulsion to the Cheneys I saw a part of me I didn’t much like.

Levels of Intolerance

I was driving in rural Maine, channel surfing on my car radio, when the dial paused on an evangelical preacher (of which Maine radio has many). “I know some non-Christians who are nicer than some Christians,” he was saying, some who are kinder and friendlier. But they aren’t going to heaven, he continued. You don’t get there by being a nice person. There is only one way to heaven, and they aren’t on it. My takeaway: Enjoy these charming people while you can because you will never see them again. From my perspective this seems progress, if not exactly toleration, for at least the preacher is giving me a chance to get out of this world unrepentant. Of the next world he has no doubt, and I think of his heaven as a place where he can say “I told you so” for eternity.

For now, though, there exists the possibility of friendship between the saved and the damned, although marriage still seems off-limits.

For Zakia and Mohammad Ali, the young Afghan couple – Zakia a Sunni, he a Shiite – who fell in love and eloped, marriage isn’t just off-limits. In their families’ eyes, it's a capital offense. They have been in hiding, in jail and live in fear for their lives.

“After I get released,” Zakia told a Times reporter, “I hope we can have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. If my family catches us, they won’t leave us alive.”

Four Ways to Create a Community

How do you create a community in a world where Sunnis and Shiites slaughter each other, Ukraine, Myanmar, Kenya seethe with ethnic hatred, and our own country grows dishearteningly divided?

• The Melting Pot is the foundation of America’s faith in assimilation. It seeks to erase cultural and ethnic differences and bring forth a new American. Marxism seeks to eradicate class distinctions in pursuit of the same goal. Such differences have proved stubbornly resistant, and policies to deal with those deemed unassimilable, whether kulaks or Native Americans, too often turned into genocide.
• The Quilt recognizes the importance of diversity by replacing the melting pot with a single fabric woven from different pieces, each maintaining its own identity while contributing to the beauty of the whole.
• Walls, topped with glass shards and razor wire, defended by heavily armed troops taught to hate what’s on the other side, seem where we’re headed now. “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that wants it down,” wrote Robert Frost, and it’s hard to see how our world can survive as bristling fiefdoms behind bricks and wire.
• The Retreat offers the chance to create small purposeful communities, often close to the natural world. While such a life seems increasingly attractive, I believe a retreat must be a place to recharge, and not retire.

Globalization seems bent on eradicating our differences by homogenizing the world. It has unleashed, in reaction, unimaginably brutal responses. Our survival depends on understanding that our differences are what make us human.

Fresh Blood: A Youth Congress?

Many of you have responded positively to proposals for universal service – and my friend Jock Hooper sent me his article, “Ten Reasons for a National Youth Service” (which notes that only 0.5% of America’s young people are engaged in any public service). The idea is getting national traction: it was the focus of Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Sebastian Junger, for example. But one place where nobody talks about it is Congress, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Libertarians hate the idea, and the Republican Party is so jumpy after Virginia’s primary that people predict no significant legislation of any kind before November – which  shows that Eric Cantor’s unexpected defeat changed little in Washington. Which gives me an idea. Our discussions of national-youth-service jobs include the military, Peace Corps, rebuilding infrastructure, fighting forest fires, restoring public lands, teaching in poor schools. What about Congress itself, where the average age is 55? Why not throw those 435 jobs into the lottery? This isn’t a new idea. Andrew Jackson believed that government is “so plain and simple” anyone can do it (or not do it, as we see today); and in New Hampshire men once served in the legislature, not to stoke their egos or line their pockets, but because it was their turn. A Congressional term is only two years, and if we make the pay and perks commensurate with those of army recruits, think how much money we will save the country and the Koch brothers.

Praying for Charity

“Charity Hicks needs our prayers” was the email’s title. “I am writing with some sad news . . . Charity Hicks was in a hit-and-run car accident a week ago in New York City.” She is in a coma, on life support. Many of you know Charity from these pages. She is the Virgil who guided me through the hell that has become so much of Detroit – and she is the Beatrice who showed me often-hidden signs of hope. The granddaughter of Alabama sharecroppers recruited to come north to Detroit’s once-booming auto plants, she is a firebrand who has given her soul to the neighborhoods she loves and despairs for in equal measure. She has no illusions about the city in which she lost, first her job, and then her house, sold at auction to a bottom feeder who offered it back to her for a tidy profit – a city that, she says, “has given up on government” and spawned a generation of young men so marginalized they “would kill you without thinking about it.”

But despair always gives way to determination, to her belief that out of the rubble will grow a garden. She has dedicated her life to food security, and in a city where 150,000 people live outside the cash economy, she finds hope in Detroit’s 27 urban farms and 1,800 community gardens. More than hope: “There is power in these gardens,” she says. “They show our resilience and our resistance.”

May those qualities see her through now.

“He was lost and is found”

I have had a good life. Whether it has been a useful one is for others to decide. But of the value of four gifts – five, really – bestowed both on me and from me I have no doubt. My life changed completely from the moment my children – Gayley, Jake, Annie and Daniel (and little Joanie, Jan. 3-5, 1979, who struggled mightily for her whole short life) – appeared. They are the legacy I will leave. So, I bristle when I see a father pilloried by mean and ignorant people because he loves his child. Bob Bergdahl grew a beard and learned to speak Pashto during the five years his son was held captive by the Taliban. It’s OK, apparently, not to shave before the big game or until you have achieved some personal milestone, but not in solidarity with your son, who, by the way, speaks only Pashto now.

“He has learned to speak the language of the Taliban and looks like a Muslim,” said Bill O’Reilly, “actually thanking Allah right in front of the president.”

"If he wasn't so light-skinned, he actually looks like the terrorists,” echoed grammatically challenged radio host Laura Ingraham. (Actually, if he were any lighter-skinned he’d look like Timothy McVeigh.)

“Your son's out now,” said Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade. “Are you out of razors?"

What began as a celebration of a son’s return turned quickly into a nightmare. It’s an old story, first told by a bearded man in the Gospel of Luke.