Tip of the Volcano

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Iceland is magical place. Unknown

Geologically, it’s the youngest country on Earth: its newest volcanic island erupted from the ocean in the mid-1960s. It’s a land filled with raging waterfalls and bubbling roadside hot springs, which together create a nation powered almost solely by renewable energy. The Althingi, founded in 930, is the oldest national parliament in the world; and its wonderfully named poet and political leader, Snorri Sturluson, was murdered in 1241 by the King of Norway to make way for Iceland’s annexation.

A normally conservative people, with the world’s highest literacy rate, Icelanders fell hard for privatization in the early 1990s. They went on a debt-fueled spending spree, as their per capita wealth exploded and the country’s three banks became casinos for foreign money. In 2008 the banks defaulted and the economy collapsed. Icelanders kicked out their government, let the banks fail, indicted the bankers and handed out mortgage relief. It worked. The country recovered, presumably sobered.

Yesterday, Iceland’s prime minister resigned, the first victim of the Panama Papers – and certainly not the last.

The just-released numbers are staggering: 214,000 offshore accounts; 14,000 clients; over 200 countries and territories (not bad, as there are only 196 countries in the world); “leaders” from every walk of life; 11.5 million documents; 2.6 terabytes of data. Putin’s favorite cellist is worth $100 million, and FIFA is back in the news.

The 1% – or 0.1% – is not an American exception but a worldwide disgrace, uncovered by the kind of investigative journalism that has become an endangered species.

I think Bernie’s on to something.

Trust the Young

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I’m just not feeling the Bern. It’s probably an age thing. The young are flocking to Sanders’ revolution. They want to change the world . . . or so I’m told. At my age, it’s hard just summoning the energy to try and tweak it. Back in the 1960s when we didn’t trust anybody over 30, we too set out to change the world. But along the way we gave up or we gave in or we dropped out. The world changed, but not because it bent to our will. Still, I read with hope that today’s 18-29-year-olds are among those who most disdain Trump – and most strongly support Sanders.

I’m not yet ready to join them. For one thing, I believe in the power of a free – and fair – marketplace to effect change. Not the one where corporate cartels – too big to fail and too entrenched to regulate – ride roughshod over the common good, but the one where start-up businesses breathe new life into their neighborhoods; where impact investing is a powerful social, environmental and economic tool; where young entrepreneurs bring their creativity and passion to Detroit, intent on making not just a fortune but a difference. Will they stay? Will the dig in? Will they hold onto their visions? With the young, you never know. But it's exciting.

The young are the future, and they have historically been the forerunners of change. Though I’m not ready to join them on Bernie’s bandwagon, I support their journeys, and I look to them to lead the way.

Magic Carpet Bombing

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Scott Atran, a French-American anthropologist who lives in Paris, is a thoughtful and challenging expert on terrorism, who argues in “ISIS is a revolution,” that “we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.” Michael Jetter, a German-born, US-educated economist who teaches in Medellín, Colombia, has found that “media attention devoted to terrorism actively encourages future attacks.”

Atran contends that, however brutal and repugnant ISIS is to us and most Muslims, it speaks directly to people who “yearn for the revival of a Muslim Caliphate and the end to a nation-state order the Great Powers invented and imposed” and who long “for something in their history, in their traditions, with their heroes and their morals” – in other words, marginalized people seeking a homeland. This is not the first quest for a homeland in the region, and it has fired adherents around the world “in the service of some indomitable moral and spiritual force” – and created “the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force” since WWII.

Jetter found that “one additional NYT article [increases] the number of attacks in the following week by 11 to 15 percent.”

Together, the studies suggest we: (1) rethink strategies, such as the “tired call to shore up the broken nation-state system;” (2) recognize that bellicosity, fear mongering and sensationalism play into ISIS’ hands; and (3) realize that retreating into Fortress America makes the world – and America – a more dangerous place. Finally, the authors’ multinational perspectives underscore how our xenophobic fears keep us from understanding a world in which borders are increasingly outdated.

I am grateful to friends who sent both articles.

Holy Smokes

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Friday’s post brought quite a reaction, particularly after my social-media consultant (who in real life is my daughter Annie) spent $50.00 to “boost” the post on my blog’s Facebook page. I’m not exactly sure where the money went, or why, as I’m challenged in these matters, but measured solely by “cost per insult” we definitely got good value. Things started out well. Some people agreed with me, others didn’t. It seemed that a civil conversation might actually break out. “I respect your views but do not agree,” wrote Adelina Clonts in a decided understatement. “I’m glad [Obama] has someone who thinks of him respectfully. Thank you for sharing your view.”

“I’ve read all the entries since mine,” wrote Joann Williams, “and am pleased that dialogue was taking place.”

Which turned out to be the red flag in front of the bull. “You’re a moron,” responded Matt Wargny, and we were off. As the disputants turned on each other with escalating and expletive-laced ferocity, I seemed to fade into the background.

“That’s probably not a bad thing,” said Annie. “But you are still the cause of their vitriol.”

As the process took on a life of its own, and more and more Obama denigrators joined in, it started to feel like a Trump rally – although Annie assured me I wasn’t in any immediate danger: “Nah, they just want to hear themselves talk.”

Facebook has a Compassion Team to make personal interactions “more human, and more humane.” Maybe they’ll launch a political arm.

Subterranean Samaritan

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“I am an invisible man . . . invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me” (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man). On the train heading north beneath Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, the woman slumped across two seats, clutching her belongings in her arms, three more paper bags on the floor below. She wore a ragged winter coat, and her eyes were closed as she slept, oblivious to the rest of us in the crowded car. It’s an all-too-familiar sight on New York subways, particularly on winter nights when the cars provide refuge and a little warmth for some of the city’s homeless. Standing above her, a tall African-American man prepared to get off at the next stop. When the doors opened, he reached over, put a $20 bill inside her coat and wordlessly left the train. No one saw his act except me. The woman slept on, and I imagined her waking up, perhaps at the end of the line, and finding the money hidden in her coat.

I don’t know whether this single act of kindness made much of a dent in the woman’s life, let alone in the matter of New York’s homelessness, now at its highest level since the Great Depression, with an estimated one in every 147 New Yorkers currently homeless. Nor do I know how many other acts of kindness were happening across the city. All I know is that the world seemed a kinder, more hopeful place.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise (Luke 10:36-7).

American Idyll

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I remember thinking, while stationed many years ago at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) in Belgium, that my European friends seemed disappointed in me for not living up to their image of an American: a big, jovial man in a ten-gallon hat, a little crass, largely unread, and out of his depth in Europe – but good-hearted, a figure almost larger than life. It was an image straight out of the movies, but grounded in the enormous gratitude Europeans still felt for their American liberators 25 years after the end of World War II. By contrast, my New England understatement and diffidence made me seem like a junior-varsity Englishman, although without the English arrogance that so annoyed the rest of Europe. To many Europeans then, America was a magical place – perhaps even “a city upon a hill.” An Irish emigrant, who set sail from his homeland long ago, once said to me, “I actually believed New York’s streets were paved with gold.”

A friend who has lived in Europe for many years and is an astute observer of cultural nuances recently told me he thought the European romance with America ended for good in 2003, when a faux Texan with a twang and a cowboy hat invaded Iraq and put the last nail in the illusion of American exceptionalism. Now, he said, Europeans are watching, with a combination of horror and disbelief, as Hollywood’s good-natured cowboy morphs into a snarling demagogue who inflames his followers' basest instincts. They have seen it before.

Restitching the Quilt

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“American Exceptionalism” is the belief that the United States has a unique history and a special calling. Founded as a “city upon a hill," America was destined to be a beacon to the world. Noted first by Alexis de Tocqueville, belief in American exceptionalism has lately become a political litmus test for the far right – like defunding Planned Parenthood, open carry and wall construction. But consider this: the U.S. is the only nation, so far as I know, whose motto celebrates a union created from diverse parts. For the Continental Congress, E Pluribus Unum meant a union created from “the countries from which these United States have been peopled.” It has long been America’s defining myth: a “nation of immigrants,” a melting pot or patchwork quilt that will “tear anywhere sooner than in the seams.”

We have not lived up to our national ideal, and too often we have used it to conceal an uglier reality. Yet we have never quite relinquished the dream. It remains the measure by which we judge ourselves – even for those to whom the dream has been denied. “I still have a dream,” said Dr. King in 1963, “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” However much or often we fail, we are still called back to what Lincoln deemed “the better angels of our nature.”

“But especially the people,” sang the blacklisted Paul Robeson, “that’s America to me.”

More than greatness, we need to restitch our exceptional quilt.

Random Thoughts

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  • Long ago my Republican friends talked excitedly about their party’s “deep bench” of presidential candidates. Donald Trump, who wasn’t even on the team then, has now sent the entire line-up – with the lingering exceptions of Rubio and Cruz – to the showers. His strategy has been to belittle his rivals in a way that demeans both them and the entire process. Meanwhile, John Kasich, still at the end of the bench but moving closer by subtraction, seems ever more a voice of reason and humanity amid the nastiness.
  • Following her all-too-familiar pattern, Hillary Clinton is refusing to release transcripts of her lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs. Is it a strategic delay – holding out so Bernie can't see them and then releasing them in the general election to woo Republicans voters?
  • Meanwhile, Cruz fired his communications director for spreading an improbable story questioning Rubio’s faith and thus escalating their competition for the piety vote. “All the answers are in [the Bible],” asserts Rubio. Asked by a fundamentalist pastor about submitting to Jesus as "the king of the President of the United States," Cruz replied, "Any president who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander-in-chief of this country." Still unclear is whether they apply the same Scalia originalism to the Bible as they do to the Constitution (except perhaps for the “king-of-the-president” reference). The pastor favors the death penalty for homosexuality.
  • “I promise you, Donald,” said Cruz last night, “there’s nothing about you that makes anyone nervous.”

Really?

How Soon the Black Shirts?

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Because Donald Trump is a buffoon does not mean we should continue treating him as a joke. I’m no longer interested in trying to plumb the shallows of his mind. We don’t need to know the causes of his psychopathic narcissism, nor should we care what turned him into a bully. He is a man who will say anything because he believes in nothing – and takes no responsibility for his words. Like every aspiring demagogue, he feeds on scapegoats and thrives on the damage he begets.

Neither he nor his message is new in American history. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to protect us from immigration and free speech, and three decades later, passed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears. We have endured Know Nothings and Dixiecrats, the Palmer Raids after World War I and George Corley Wallace. South Carolina gave us “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a rich Populist who built a mass movement of “Red Shirts” with his message of violence and racial terror; and Wisconsin gave us a cowardly, prevaricating, destructive blowhard named Senator Joe McCarthy.

But no one has come so close to being the presidential nominee of a major party, whose leaders are now debating whether to oppose him or embrace him. They’re worried he’ll destroy the party. But what about the country?

“Make America Great Again.” How’s he doing so far?

To paraphrase the man who brought McCarthy down, “At long last, have we no sense of decency?”

A Reader Responds: Buckminster Fuller, Part of the Climate and Energy Series

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Buckminster Fuller, an enormously influential thinker in the mid-20th century has fallen from view in recent decades, but a reader thinks he can, at least philosophically, help us understand the issues around energy and climate change: After reading an old New Yorker profile of R. Buckminster Fuller, the following Fuller insights seem particularly relevant to bridging the current divide over climate change and formulating appropriate local and global responses.

  • All humanity shares one “spaceship earth.”
  • Mankind, with its power to affect the survival of our species and the health of our planet, must accept the role of “co-pilot” and act to keep the “spaceship” healthy.
  • Humanity is an “experimental initiative of the Universe,” and our intelligence gives us the capacity to make the experiment either a success or a failure. Nuclear and biological weaponry are the most dramatic powers in our destructive arsenal – and few disagree over the threat they pose to survival. But we haven’t achieved political consensus on either the threat posed by how we live or our responsibility for climate change.
  • We have the ability to create a sustainably high standard of living for all – if we convert our technological focus from weaponry to “livingry.”
  • No-growth advocates fail to understand technology’s potential to provide increasingly more from increasingly fewer resources.
  • Fuller believed that to achieve a sustainable “spaceship earth:”
    • It’s futile to try to reform human nature.
    • Social change requires a “design revolution" that incorporates responsible and sustainable technological alternatives.
    • We must bridge the "conceptual gap" between C.P. Snow's “two cultures” (science and the humanities) – which in the western world speak completely different languages – if we are to make complex scientific research (such as that behind climate change) comprehensible to the general public.

Our Deliberative Democracy

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Any justice who upholds my right to burn the American flag can’t be all bad, and, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us, Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, could be your personal friend even as he was your ideological foe (“I love him, but sometimes I’d like to strangle him”), which is exactly how it should be in a republic. A man of great intellect and wit, who defended with integrity what was in truth a very narrow vision of the Constitution and the country, Scalia also bears some responsibility for the partisanship and incivility that are strangling the public discourse. I think his embrace of “original intent” (the belief that the meaning of the Constitution was set at its creation) was more nuanced than either his apologists or his critics contend, but in the end it simply underestimates the founding fathers he claimed to revere, men trying desperately to hold together a confederation on the edge of dissolution. They disagreed deeply about the composition of the new nation – and since they didn’t agree, it’s improbable they thought they could speak with certainty for unborn generations. They had lived through times of tumultuous change, and when they looked around America, they did not yet see heaven on earth. They knew that some issues could only be resolved when the nation had matured. One – the “slavery question” – would take the Civil War to settle.

“[T]he multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently ‘living’ document,” writes Joseph Ellis in The Quartet, his exceptional collective biography of Washington, Madison, Hamilton and John Jay. “For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the [state or national] sovereignty question (or, for that matter, the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of ‘originalism’ or ‘original intent,’ this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end" (p. 172).

The Constitution, Jefferson insisted, is not “too sacred to be touched.” Its brilliance is that it provides an architecture for governance and a process for resolving issues deliberatively and reasonably. Judging by Saturday night’s debate, it has its work cut out for it.

Taking Trump and Sanders Seriously

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If you’re wondering how a socialist who touts countries with the world’s highest tax rates and a demagogue who appeals to people’s ugliest instincts continue to be their parties’ presidential frontrunners, consider this: The United States ranks dead last among well-off countries in income and wealth inequality and close to the bottom in job creation and economic mobility, according to a just-published report by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. Among its findings, the U.S: “has a distinctively anemic safety net and distinctively unequal distribution of wealth;” “performs poorly in domains that have historically been regarded as its strengths,” such as job creation; “fails to deliver on its long-standing commitment to . . . high mobility;” and “is starkly at variance with our reputation as the land of opportunity.”

This is not the America we venerate at Super Bowl games and Rotary Club breakfasts; nor the one we learn about in schoolbooks. That exceptional America has left the building, replaced by one “where the birth lottery matters more. . .than in most well-off countries.”

And yet we’re still inside, clinging to the myths on which we were nurtured, wearing our American flag lapel pins, cheering patriotic speeches, thanking veterans for their service, asking God to continue blessing us – and dismissing the possibility that Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could ever get nominated, let alone elected, president of the United States. While millions of Americans, across all spectrums, are experiencing the gulf between the America of their dreams and the reality of their lives.