There But for Fortune

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." H.L. Mencken. Despite losing $14 million last quarter, The New York Times produced on Sunday the kind of in-depth journalism that is disappearing from newsrooms around the world. “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” Scott Anderson’s 18-month-in-the-making article on the disintegration of the Middle East, is a remarkable tribute to one newspaper’s determination to stick to its mission in hard times. There are a number of reasons for the decline of newspapers. Many are self-inflicted, but more dangerous now are the constant and gratuitous assaults on the press from politicians who despise transparency. We need a strong and free press.

The second lesson I took away from the article is how disastrous has been the West’s refusal to grasp the diverse histories and cultures of the Middle East’s people. We continue to lump all Muslims and Arabs together, to seek simple solutions to terrorism, like “carpet-bomb[ing] them into oblivion,” and to pat ourselves on the back for our “priceless gift” of liberation to the Iraqi people. We need leaders who understand complexity.

The third lesson is how quickly things can change. We are easily lulled into the belief that our lives are on a predictable path into a foreseeable future. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, our familiar world is upended. For many in the Middle East that’s become the new normal – a life in which the past has been obliterated and the future reduced to getting through today. We need to take responsibility for our part in making that so.

The Fix is Out

Recently, three federal appeals courts, in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas, affirmed what Republican state legislatures have barely even tried to conceal – that voter identification laws hurriedly imposed in the wake of Barack Obama’s election had one purpose: the disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters whose singular offense is to vote largely for Democrats. Critics have long maintained that the laws were a partisan solution to a non-existent problem. The most comprehensive investigation reviewed one billion ballots and found 31 credible cases of fraud. “Election fraud happens,” wrote the study’s author – citing vote buying, coercion, fake registration forms, voting from the wrong address, ballot box stuffing by local officials – but ID laws aren’t aimed at preventing those things. They’re after something else.

“[B]ecause of race,” wrote Judge Diana Motz of the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals, “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history."

But last month’s decisions have created a new problem for at least one candidate. The system is “rigged,” announced Donald Trump. “People are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?”

No, they’re not going to vote 10 times, but they are now more likely to vote once – and these are folks who don’t like the Republican nominee very much. A recent poll, for example, found him getting 1% (!) of the black vote; another pegged his unfavorability rating among black voters at 94%.

So it seems the system is a little less “rigged” than it was a month ago.

War on Coal

Increasingly absent in the bombast and bizarre behavior of this campaign is a discussion of issues that separate the candidates and their parties – issues that once defined the boundaries of political debate. I’d like to examine some of them in upcoming posts. First up: energy and the environment.

When I traveled through the Rust Belt last month, people talked of the “war on coal” in very personal terms. Since the 19^th century, coal had been the engine that drove the steel industry that provided jobs and prosperity. Now coal is under attack, the mills have closed and the jobs are gone, victims, I was told, of environmental over-regulation and cheap foreign competition. Sixty years ago, for example, the steel industry employed over 13,000 full-time workers in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alone. Today, 500 are left.

Those jobs are not coming back, a retired newspaper editor told me. “Natural gas, not regulators, killed the coal industry,” he said, and almost three-quarters of the steel used in the U.S. is still produced in the U.S., “just not here.”

And we forget, too, the horrendous cost of coal: miners’ short lives and black lungs, dark clouds of filthy air, streams of undrinkable water – and the removal of entire mountaintops, perhaps the single most destructive industrial practice ever conceived.

We need to move beyond arguments that pit the economy against the environment, beyond treating the earth as a pit from which to rip resources and a cesspool into which to dump waste. As a nation, we need to move beyond coal, but not without investing in the lives of those people and families who produce it.

The Last Best Hope of Earth?

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois wrote that line 113 years ago to demonstrate that Black lives matter. Well into the 21^st century, how far have we come?

In the wake of Dallas and Minnesota and Louisiana, I believe we can still become what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” – a far nobler ideal than to make America great again.

I believe it because the language of equality is in our DNA. And although we have lived a lie – exterminating Native Americans, enslaving Africans, abusing immigrant laborers, imprisoning our people – we have never abandoned the language of our American creed. And while that makes us exceptional hypocrites, it also gives us the foundation for joining together.

We have said it over and over again.

John Winthrop said it in 1630: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

Thomas Jefferson said it in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Abraham Lincoln said it in 1863: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it in 1963: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’"

Barack Obama said it in 2009: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

How many times do we have to say it before we make it come true?

When will they ever learn?

“It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) in the aftermath of Watergate. The disquieting image of two private jets on the tarmac in Phoenix: plush capsules that transport the powerful who seem ever more insulated from the rest of us 30,000 feet below; the 30-minute visit to discuss grandchildren and golf that was handled with more attention to secrecy than some state department documents; the silence until questions were raised by the press.

Thank God for the press.

So it goes with the Clintons, who first came to Washington on behalf of ordinary people “who work hard and play by the rules,” and who long since began behaving as if the rules don’t apply to them.

And so it is with the emails. It’s not the numbers: 110 of 30,000 (0.4%) were classified; 12 (0.04%) were top secret. It’s the gall – the evasions, the untruths, the stonewalling, the decision to move headquarters from Foggy Bottom to Chappaqua in the first place.

And the silence. Yesterday Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced a college-tuition plan, and while I’m all for getting back to the issues, ignoring the Comey report is not taking her campaign to a higher level.

She is already too much above the fray, too disengaged from the people she seeks to serve. She needs not just to “take responsibility” but to take ownership of this tawdry mess.

Because this is the kind of political behavior that gives license to demagogues.

In case you hadn’t noticed.

Out Among the Angels

The moons have mythical names: Calisto, Europa, Io and Ganymede, whom Homer called the most beautiful of the mortals, the four largest moons orbiting around Jupiter. Last night they were joined by Juno, the solar-powered spaceship NASA launched almost five years ago, which went into orbit a few minutes before midnight. After traveling 1.7 billion miles at speeds up to 1650,000 mph, Juno arrived at the precise spot the scientists in Pasadena had programmed. Sometimes it’s easy to feel discouraged about the fate of the earth and the future of its people, who treat both the earth and each other with such carelessness. Where America is embarking on an ugly election campaign to elect a leader the majority of voters abhor. Where we build walls and fences topped with razor wire to keep out the undesirable, and where ISIS celebrates the slaughter of innocents.

But think also of the things of which we are capable when we set free our imaginations, follow our sense of wonder and expand our horizons. When we come together around a project – which will take years to complete – to explore the outer reaches of our solar system.

None of this solves the problems we face daily. It doesn’t stop the killing or feed the hungry. It doesn’t relieve the anxieties of the fearful or open the hearts of the angry or tear down the walls that keep us apart.

But today I think of Juno, out beyond the heavens, touching what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”