Friday's Quiz

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Who wrote the following? A. “Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. . . .These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.”

  1. David Brooks
  2. Paul Krugman
  3. Harry Reid

B. “For Putin, it’s clear where the weakness lies: in the White House. . . . the cost of [Obama’s] Doctrine of Restraint has been very high. How high we do not yet know, but the world is more dangerous than in recent memory.”

  1. George Will
  2. Mario Rubio
  3. Roger Cohen

The answers are:

A. David Brooks, The New York Times’ thoughtful conservative columnist, wrote The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus, a sharp criticism of the current GOP.

B. Roger Cohen, the paper’s thoughtful liberal columnist, wrote Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, a strong critique of the administration’s foreign policy. He followed it with Obama’s What Next?, in which he wrote: “Syria is the American sin of omission par excellence, a diabolical complement to the American sin of commission in Iraq – two nations now on the brink of becoming ex-nations.”

While three columns do not make a trend, I sense a shift in press commentary from reflexive partisanship to more reflective analysis, an effort to reclaim the media’s role to stimulate serious thinking, rather than whip up parochial prejudices. A good columnist isn’t always predictable.

Even a Blind Pig . . .

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Just because he comes across as sort of stupid doesn’t mean Donald Trump is always wrong. Take his latest dust-up with Jeb over George W. Bush’s responsibility for 9/11: Trump: “He was president, okay? Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign”(sic).

Bush: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”

Trump is right. George Bush was nine months into his first term and had just returned from a 30-day vacation on his Texas ranch when the planes hit. That doesn’t mean the tragedy was his fault, but not once has he, or anyone else in his administration, accepted any responsibility for what happened.

As for Jeb’s response, after two wars in which over 10,000 American soldiers and civilian contractors died and over 100,000 were wounded, that cost over $6 trillion in mostly off-the-books expenses and produced America's first-ever defense of torture, I’d say his brother left this country in a shambles. Whether he kept us safe seems a matter of opinion.

Can you imagine the reaction of this Congress if 9/11 had happened on Barack Obama’s watch? Let's see: foreign-born Muslim president and 19 foreign-born Muslim hijackers steal four airplanes in American airspace . . . Trey Gowdy would get so excited connecting those dots he’d put his gavel through the table.

Meanwhile, as James Fallows notes in The Atlantic, Congress prepares for tomorrow’s 21st hearing on Benghazi. It held a total of 22 on the attacks of 9/11.

The 400 & The 158

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On March 26, 1883, Mrs. Vanderbilt gave a party. And what a party it was: it cost, in today’s dollars, $6 million, and its 1,200 opulently costumed guests included included the Mrs. Astor, who had rigorously excluded the Vanderbilts and their crass, arriviste ilk from her list of New York’s old-moneyed elite. But she capitulated because, while they may have been socially inferior to the 400, the new breed of millionaires were a lot richer; and when they wanted something – social acceptance, a state legislature, an English title – they bought it. Their manners – and their ethics – were constantly questioned, but their energy was never in dispute. I thought of the 400 while reading The New York Times’ examination of the 158 families who have so far contributed almost half the money to the 2016 presidential campaign, almost all of it to non-establishment candidates. In depicting the current Republican split between a blue-collar, red-necked Tea Party and the Wall Street wing, the media overlook how much of the conflict is between new money and old – and how much new money there is.

There are major changes going on in America, comparable to the Gilded Age, and while I do not like the politics it has brought, I respect the energy. I think of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s enduring portrait of America. And I remember that, for all the ugliness of their family fortune’s origins, subsequent generations of Rockefellers have used their money to do much good in the world; and Andrew Carnegie endowed 1,689 libraries across the country.

Poll Numbers

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It all seems so reasonable. Who could possibly object to a law that simply requires a person to produce proof of identity before voting? We’ve all heard the stories of dead people voting in Cook County and live people paid to vote three or four times in different places. The vast majority of Americans support photo-identification laws, which are now in place in 17 states. True, the numbers are underwhelming: one study found 26 incidents of voter fraud in 197 million ballots cast; another found 31 in a billion-vote sample. True, far from being part of our national electoral tradition, voter-ID laws have arisen in the last decade, promoted primarily by Republican legislatures in states where demographics (i.e., minorities and the poor) favor the other party. And, yes, some legislators have said strange things – such as Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai’s boast in early 2012: “Voter ID . . . is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (It didn’t.)

And now we have Alabama, a state with a long history of voter suppression, where a law requiring voters to produce government-issued photo IDs went into effect last year – on the same day the Supreme Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act. The most common form of photo-ID is a driver’s license. Unfortunately, the state will be closing most of its license bureaus, including those in eight of the ten counties that voted most heavily for Obama and in “every single county in which blacks make up 75 percent of registered voters.”

Apparently, it’s a budget issue.

Families

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The Vatican’s vigorous denial of the details of the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis as described by her lawyer – and its emphasis instead on his embrace of a gay friend who arrived with his partner – made me think of the increasingly fluid definition of family. As did the story of Chris Mintz, the man who put himself in the line of fire at Umpqua Community College and took several gunshots in his body. It was, he told the gunman who then shot him again, his son’s sixth birthday. Tyrik is autistic, not yet toilet trained and unable to speak, and he is the apple of his father’s eye. The Mintz family is not a conventional one: he and Jamie Skinner, Tyrik’s mother, were never married and have since amicably split up. Chris now lives with Jamie’s sister and brother-in-law while he goes to school and works odd jobs. He also stays at home with Tyrik, which allows Jamie to work full time.

“All happy families are alike,” begins Anna Karenina; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy was wrong, I think. No two families are alike; each adapts – or fails to adapt – according to its particular circumstances, and what the intransigent defenders of the “traditional” family fail to understand is that, as with almost everything else in this world, it is their diversity that enriches families, and their adaptability will ensure the survival of an institution which cannot be reduced to a single definition imposed from without.

They Will Go Somewhere

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At the Belgrade airport we were told we could drive our Serbian rental car anywhere in eastern Europe – except Kosovo. But Kosovo, I noted, is not on the map. That’s because it is part of Serbia, said the Hertz man, as he sketched its approximate borders with his pen. Then how will we know when we get there, I asked? Oh, you’ll know, he said. They’ll stop you. They don’t like us very much. For DeWitt Sage, a documentary filmmaker, and I, who have come here to try to comprehend the refugee situation threatening to overwhelm Europe, it was a jolting reminder that the Balkans, which is now the pathway for refugees fleeing by the hundreds of thousands from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and elsewhere, was not long ago itself the scene of brutal ethnic warfare – of sieges, bombardments and genocidal executions that unleashed centuries of hatred in what seemed an endless war. In 1999 NATO air forces bombed Novi Sad, the city on the Danube where I write, so massively that it took four years to restore the river.

It is a reason for hope that peace, however fragile, has returned to the Balkans less than two decades later; and it is a reason for despair that this area is now the passageway to Europe for those fleeing atrocities so horrific they seem unprecedented in their scope and barbarity.

What it is not is a passing phenomenon. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 42,500 people are forced from their homes every day. They will go somewhere.

The Lifeboat

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In his famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin used the metaphor of a pasture in which all farmers are free to graze their cattle. “Each man,” he wrote, “is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Six years later he produced “Lifeboat Ethics,” which is unflinching in its misanthropy and yet has been much on my mind. Using the metaphor of a lifeboat, Hardin argues that it is suicidal for those in the boat to respond from the heart – because those still in the water will eventually overwhelm and sink the boat. “Complete justice. Complete catastrophe.”

While Hardin would surely resonate with many of our presidential candidates, it is in Europe where his argument and his imagery seem most poignant – where images of boats crammed with desperate people and a small Syrian boy dead on a beach have moved many to tears but, with hundreds of thousands in or heading toward Europe, produced few ideas about what to do.

As Germany prepares for 800,000 refugees and Hungary builds a 110-mile fence, we watch, from afar, the unfolding of one of the most agonizing stories of our time. For someone who has recently been in a lifeboat, Hardin’s image will not go away.

Rescue at Sea (Epilogue)

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Epilogue. “Even Butter Wouldn’t Bring It Back” On September 18th the crews of Restive and Sparky will gather in Marion for the presentation of the Bavier Trophy to Sparky’s crew for their courage and seamanship during a rescue at sea one late afternoon in early July.

Excerpts from two letters capture something of the bond that grew between the crews.

July 8th   Dear Rob

It’s been a week since you took us aboard Sparky from our life raft. . . .So thank you, Eric – for being strong and helping us aboard, thank you for understanding some of our emotions as you took us in. Thank you, Jack – for being so strong, for hugging me from the raft over the lifeline, and, later, for your sense of the ridiculous, helping re-attach me to reality and the present, and not the rescue. Thank you, Nancy – for your warmth, generosity, nursing, and selflessness. Thank you, Bob – for applying your seamanship skills perfectly at the right time for Restive’s crew – and for cooking, cleaning, and loving each of us.

And Rob, thank you. You exemplify the essence of being a skipper, of helping others in need, under all circumstances – from the mundane to the extreme. Cool-headed, experienced, strong, thoughtful, skillful and prepared. Thank you.

George

August 21st   Dear Jamie,

Hearing the account from your perspective and the thoughts and conversations of the Restive crew prior to and during the rescue was fascinating! I assume that your experience that day will stay with you for a the rest of your lives, and as strong as your lifelong friendships with these extraordinary men have been in the past, this experience will create a bond that few people ever enjoy.

Know this is from our heart – we will never forget the calm, courageous, caring, thoughtful, gentlemanly men that we had the honor of meeting on July 1, 2015. You all have affected our lives in a most wonderful way. The crew of Restive showed us how to handle adversity with the utmost of grace and courage, and we will never forget any of you.

Warmest regards, Nurse Nancy and Bob

And finally this:

August 28th  James,

I came back yesterday from a three-day sail on Restive with George to Block Island, Tarpaulin Cove and back to Jamestown, and it was great fun. Needless to say, the food was superb, matched only by the wine and company. I did have to toss out the French toast, which was still in the oven. Even butter wouldn't bring it back.

Fred

Thank you all for the wonderful responses to this series, which is now available in its entirety at: www.jamesgblaine.com.

Rescue at Sea (22nd in a Series)

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Part 22. Tears It turns out that captains aren’t the only grown men who cry. As we awoke aboard Sparky on the final day of our journey, much of the morning’s talk centered on the events of the day before. When we got within cellphone distance of shore, Fred called his wife and daughters, who were still under the impression that he was out for a leisurely sail with old friends.

“I don’t know what it is,” said the man on whose physical strength we had so heavily relied. “I can talk about what happened with everyone here, but when I try to describe it to my family, I start crying.”

The next morning David and I drove back to Maine. We stopped at the Kennebunk Service Plaza, where a young and very nervous trainee took our orders under the watchful eye of her mentor.

“Explain this to me,” said David, as we downed our 486-calorie breakfast sandwiches with 11 grams of saturated fat and 1,037 milligrams of sodium. “I wanted to encourage her, but when I tried to tell her what a good job she was doing, I burst into tears.”

As for me, I held out until I read this comment on my website a month later:

“I'm glad four of my oldest friends (and Dave) are finally safe, very sad about George's beautiful Restive. A wonderful story of seamanship and friendship.

"’It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas.’*

“But you did.”

*From Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat.

 

Rescue at Sea (21st in Series)

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Part 21. “Those in Peril on the Sea” The sea has many voices, many gods and many voices.   (T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages)

As such things go, the North Atlantic is a relatively good place to abandon ship, and my own experience has made me more mindful of the daily, often horrific, dangers faced by others at sea. “In many parts of the world,” writes Ian Urbina, “the waters beyond national jurisdiction represent an outlaw ocean, where crimes ranging from murder and slavery to dumping and illegal fishing occur with impunity.”

The world’s ocean, whose contiguous parts are named Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Southern, is a vast, beautiful, dangerous and endangered place. As described by Scott Gass, its 139 million square miles cover 71% of Earth’s surface; it holds 97% of the world’s water and comprises 99% of the world’s biosphere. It has the world’s highest mountain, Hawaii’s Mauna Kea rising 33,000 feet from ocean floor to snow-capped peak; longest mountain range, Mid-Ocean Ridge, ten times longer than the Andes; deepest ravine, Challenger Deep, six times deeper than Grand Canyon; biggest waterfall, Denmark Strait cataract, which falls over two miles and carries 116 times more water per second than Congo’s Inga Falls; and largest animal ever, the 98-foot, 200-ton blue whale.

It is also a place, Urbina writes in “The Outlaw Ocean,” where “tens of thousands of workers, many of them children, are enslaved on boats” and thousands die each year, where commercial vessels devastate the world’s fishing stocks, dump oil and sludge at unsustainable rates, and emit more air pollutants “than all the world's cars.”

From a vital global commons we have fashioned a lawless global dump.