Category Archives: Random Blogging

Speaking of Illiteracy….

The recent Duck Dynasty brouhaha has demonstrated once again that many Americans are totally clueless about what freedom of speech and religion are and aren’t. But apparently, a whole lot of Americans are equally ignorant of what’s really in that bible people keep thumping.  According to a recent article by one C.J. Werleman,

More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible, while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves” is a biblical verse. 

The article notes that when Congressional Republicans quoted 2 Thessalonians (“Anyone unwilling to work should not eat”) to justify cutting food stamps,  90% of Christian respondents to a poll attributed the quote to Jesus.  It was actually from a letter purportedly written by Paul to members of his church in Thessalonica, reminding them that if they didn’t help build the church, they wouldn’t be paid. (As it turns out, the letter wasn’t even from Paul; biblical scholars have dismissed it as a forgery.)

The actual texts of both the bible and the Constitution can be inconvenient, even for determined cherry-pickers. Add in historical and cultural context and….well, I guess it’s just too much work to actually read the damn things.

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Justice, Justice….

“Justice, justice shalt thou pursue.”

Yesterday, I read two unrelated items that brought that Talmudic injunction rather forcefully to mind. The first was a line in an excellent review in the Atlantic of two books about Sholem Aleichem, sometimes called the “Jewish Mark Twain.” (Aleichem was the creator of Tevye, the inspiration for the central character in Fiddler on the Roof.) The sentence that struck me was this: Jewish humor arises in the gap between reality and dreams, reality and justice.”

The other item was a story from the Huffington Post. The headline says it all: For the First Time Ever, a Prosecutor Will Go to Jail for Wrongfully Convicting an Innocent Man.

The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, possessed evidence that would have cleared the defendant, including a statement from the crime’s only eyewitness that the defendant wasn’t the perpetrator. Anderson sat on that evidence and obtained a conviction of the accused, who remained in prison for the next 25 years.  Meanwhile, Anderson’s career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.

As unjust as this situation was, as shocking to the conscience, what makes it newsworthy is the fact that Anderson actually was punished. As the story notes–and as most lawyers can attest– this is not an isolated case of malfeasance. Although most prosecutors and judges are ethical practitioners who take their obligations to the rule of law seriously, there are far too many who do not, and they are rarely, if ever, sanctioned. A recent study found prosecutorial misconduct in nearly a quarter of all capital cases in Arizona. Only two of those prosecutors have been reprimanded or punished in any way.

Evidence of gross misconduct leading to injustice isn’t limited to the legal system. It is increasingly impossible to ignore the corruption of our social and governing institutions. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen it everywhere–from rampant corporate misbehavior to major league sports doping to revelations of priestly child molestation to corrupt lobbyists to propagandists masquerading as journalists to Congressmen who cut food stamps for hungry children while fiercely protecting tax loopholes and corporate welfare for their patrons.

In this dismal ethical environment, justice isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

An unjust, unfair world invites–demands–political satire, and satire, at least, is thriving. You need only watch Jon Stewart for an example of Jewish humor that “arises in the gap between justice and reality.” It’s a big gap. The Sholem Aleichem reviewer suggests that the purpose of Jewish humor is to “give yourself some distance from your hopeless situation.” If that’s accurate, most humor these days is Jewish humor.

Gallows humor.

I enjoy a good laugh, but I’d prefer a more just world.

Connecting More Dots

I’ve often argued that universal healthcare–Medicare for All–would spark an outpouring of entrepreneurship. If you want to open a shop, or go into the widget-making business, one significant barrier to doing so is the need to offer (very expensive) health insurance to your employees. Of course, you could decide not to provide that benefit, but you wouldn’t be very competitive in the market for good workers.

I understand, dimly, the historical reasons why the U.S. linked employment to health care, but it has always seemed to be a bad idea. What about people who don’t/can’t work? What about independent contractors? Why should an employer have to assume the costs–and risks–of employees’ health? Other countries do not couple jobs and insurance in this way–health insurance is provided as part of the social safety net, and the costs are spread much more widely.

Yesterday, in a Facebook post, a friend of mine explained why medical insurance provided through government–decoupled from employment–would boost the economy and make American businesses more competitive.

As he noted in his post, when you buy a product, all the costs of creating that product are reflected in the price: production, workers’ wages and benefits, materials. Most of the nations with whom we trade big-ticket items have had government-sponsored health care for decades, and at far lower cost. As a result, Saab and Mercedes, among others, are able to compete unfairly with American-made autos whose prices include a hefty private-sector health care premium. (I’ve seen numbers suggesting that this was one of the reasons GM and Chrysler went bankrupt; healthcare coverage for current and retired employees added over 2000 to the average price of their cars.)

If we really cared about keeping U.S. businesses competitive–and the health insurance system comprehensible–we’d have Medicare for All, or at least for anyone who wanted it.  Given our political environment, and the lobbying clout of Big Insurance and Big Pharma, that was never in the cards.

Obamacare was (barely) politically feasible because it was originally the Republican alternative. With all its warts, it’s a step in the right direction, but if we want America to remain competitive,  we will eventually need to separate access to health insurance from the vagaries of employment.

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Revealing Behaviors

My mother used to lecture my sister and me about the importance of treating other people well; her (very outdated) measure of other women’s character was how they treated their maids.

Maids are in very short supply these days, but the sentiment remains valid. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat subordinates or strangers.

Or–as I was recently reminded–by the way they act behind the wheel of a car.

My husband and I were driving home from South Carolina a couple of days ago and encountered one of those construction sites requiring the merger of two lanes of interstate traffic into one. Most of the affected motorists dutifully “lined up” when they first saw the signs, but there were several who immediately sped up–passing the patient/obedient drivers who were inching along waiting their turns, in order to get to the head of the line where a courteous person would allow them to merge ahead of the rest of us suckers.

This behavior, of course, further slowed the progress of everyone else.

Drivers who do this are sending a pretty clear message: “I matter, other people don’t, and if some of the schmucks obeying the signs are inconvenienced, I couldn’t care less.”

I can think of few behaviors that are more revealing of essential “assholery.”

These are the people who go through life making everything harder for the rest of us. If they had maids, they’d treat them badly.

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Recycled Crazy

Evidently, trash isn’t the only thing that gets recycled. Lunacy does too.

From the Houston Press article “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the War on Christmas,” here’s your nugget of Holiday history, or the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same:

The “War” Was Started By the John Birch Society: If you’ve never heard of the John Birch Society then you probably get a better night’s sleep than I do. Founder Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer, started off with a fairly legitimate organization dedicated to fighting communism in 1958, but like most people who made fighting communism a life-long goal what he started turned into a paranoid conspiracy that accused everything from fluoridation of water to the Book of the Month Club to being sinister, subliminal plots from hidden American commies to overthrow the capitalist nation.

One of their earliest campaigns, though, was the idea that Christ was being eradicated from Christmas celebrations as a classic communist strike at undermining religious belief in order to make people less able to resist the state. From the 1959 pamphlet “There Goes Christmas?!” by Hubert Kregeloh:

“The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand. They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”

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