The Topsy Turvy TPP

Today’s question: What famous manifesto ends with the words: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” (More famously, "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!") Correct. The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’ 1848 exhortation to working people everywhere. So it was startling to read this headline, “Communist Vietnam Says It Will Allow Unions and Strikes” – a condition insisted on by the Obama administration for admission into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I think this is the best opportunity we’ve had in years to encourage deep institutional reform in Vietnam that will advance human rights,” the state department’s Tom Malinowski told The New York Times. Hopefully, it will work out better than our last effort to democratize Vietnam.

Yet to pass legislation he considers critical to his legacy, Obama must rely on Republican votes in the face of fierce opposition from very strange bedfellows: environmentalists, organized labor and the Tea Party.

So here is America, which seems headed toward the wealth disparities described in the Manifesto and where politicians rise to prominence by attacking unions, telling one of the most “communist” nations on Earth to treat its workers better. On that anomaly alone, this agreement is more interesting than the reflexive responses it has evoked from both sides.

The legislation also contains a human rights agreement with Brunei, which recently instituted Sharia law and a return to “flogging, dismemberment and death by stoning.”

Confused?

Gotcha!

“The problem with you,” said my high-priced handler early in my never-to-be-repeated campaign for United States Congress, “is that when someone asks you a question, you think you need to answer it.”

He had me there. Other than a question like “How are you?” (to which the answer is, not, “I’m having an anxiety attack,” but “Fine, thank you.”), I was raised to answer questions truthfully. In fact, I thought that was the purpose of campaigning: people, or their stand-ins in the press, ask questions and the candidate tries to answer them so the voters can decide whom to support.

Well, no. A question is an opportunity to deliver, yet again, your three (always three) talking points. But seasoned reporters already know that. Their job is to get you off message to give voters insight into something more substantive than a bumper sticker. You may have noticed that John Kasich’s wonderfully impassioned and well-rehearsed condemnation of the know-nothings in his party came in response to the evening’s first question: “What is your biggest weakness and what are you doing to address it?” To which he responded, “Good question, but..."

It was all downhill from there, and I didn’t make it to the end. The questions were tiresome, the answers unedifying and the only poignant moment was Jeb’s sad smile as he watched his takedown of Marco blow up. It’s all about entertainment now, like hoping for a pile-up at NASCAR. And sadly, both the media and the candidates know it.

American Tension

This morning I sit on a rock at high tide, watching the pyrotechnic dance of the sun’s rays on the water.Looking out the Western Way, between the Manset shore and Great Cranberry Island, I watch lobster boats glide soundlessly in the distance and wonder at the ability of gulls to float sideways in the air.

Soon I will pack my car and leave this place. It’s time. Solitude begets, at least in me, the need for the energy of city life. That, in time, will produce again the need for the quiet place I’m leaving, and I’ll return. Perhaps a congenital discontent has bred this errant life, but I think it’s simply the natural pull between action and reflection, between immersion and refuge, between the search for adventure and the desire to be safe.

“In a world inclined toward chaos,” wrote Kenneth Lockridge of 17th-century Dedham, Massachusetts, “the most men could hope for was a stable life in a small community.” But one man’s chaos is another’s opportunity, and the ensuing 400 years of American history can be read as the tension between our two most powerful myths: the quest for community, where neighbors watch over each other; and the pull of an individualism that calls us to flee the suffocating conformity of those places and “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.”

“And the end of all our exploring,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Friday's Quiz

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 . . .

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 21^st hearing on Benghazi. It held a total of 22 on the attacks of 9/11.

The 400 & The 158

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

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

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

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

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)

Epilogue. “Even Butter Wouldn’t Bring It Back” On September 18^th 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.