Category Archives: Random Blogging

Apples and Trees

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

In the wake of Judge Rosenberg’s ruling that Charlie White was ineligible when he ran for Secretary of State, his father posted a series of highly inflammatory, anti-Semitic rants on his Facebook page. Subsequently, he must have realized how damaging they were, and took them down.

Lesson One: in cyberspace, nothing is ever erased. (Just ask George Allen, he of the “Macaca moment.”)

Lesson Two: when people are angry, all too often their real nature emerges. In this case, it isn’t pretty.

Lesson Three: when you are really puzzled by an individual’s seemingly bizarre behavior, sometimes looking at nature and nurture will supply a hint.

I received a call from a reporter with the Indianapolis Star, inquiring about this sordid little rant. One of her questions was “As a former ACLU Executive Director, do you think he had the right to post such things?” The answer, of course, is an unequivocal yes. People have the right to be bigots and to utter hateful nonsense. And the rest of us have the right to criticize and judge them for it.

I’ve tried to copy the screenshot, below, so you can judge for yourselves.

Update: the Star is reporting Darrell White’s claim that his account was hacked. As ‘proof,’ he says he reported the matter to the local sheriff–a somewhat bizarre thing to do when no identity theft is involved. The Star quoted Mike Delph as saying he’d never known the Whites to be hateful. (Yes, that Mike Delph…) At this point, people can choose to believe he was the innocent victim of a Facebook hacking, or that he was the author of what certainly seem to be heartfelt, if revolting, posts.

Comments

“Those” People

Republicans in the House of Representatives send an “up yours” message to the middle class, while explaining that “job creators” must be protected.

Rick Santorum is quoted as saying that today’s massive inequality is a reflection of the fact that some people work harder than others.

These are just a couple of the the more recent expressions of a persistent sub-text in American life, a perversion of early Calvinism that leads people to justify privilege by diminishing the value of those who have less. The poor, they believe, are poor because they are somehow morally flawed. They don’t put it quite that way, of course–instead, there is talk of “work ethic” and “middle class values” that “those people” lack.

I am a believer in the market. If everyone is playing by the rules, some people will do better than others. Society will value the contribution of some people over others. When markets are properly regulated–when no one can game the system–we all benefit from the efforts of the guy who invents a better widget, the artist whose work adds beauty to our lives, even (she says through gritted teeth) the athlete whose prowess we admire.

When the system is broken, when rewards are distributed on the basis of cronyism and influence-peddling, when those rewards are wildly disproportionate to the social or other value of the work involved (to investment bankers who invent credit default swaps, for example), I suppose it is understandable that the recipients would want to justify their good fortune by claiming that they really have earned their millions. When that self-justification takes the form of dismissing the value of those who’ve been less fortunate, however, is when it becomes truly obscene.

I’ve been haunted by a segment that aired on 60 Minutes last Sunday. The report focused upon the foreclosure crisis, and in particular, on the 11+ million homeowners who–despite being “underwater” on their mortgages–stubbornly continue to make their payments. There were people who had lost jobs, people living paycheck to paycheck, who refused to walk away from mortgages on which they owed twice what their homes are currently worth. In one interview, a woman who was barely eking out a living was asked why she continued to pay when others were abandoning their properties. Her response? “I signed the contract.  I’m not the sort of person who fails to live up to my obligations.”

It may come as a shock to the bankers and assorted plutocrats whose gated communities and social circles protect them from interaction with the American middle and lower classes, but most people–including poor people–work forty or more hours a week.(That’s why we call them the working poor.) They try to pay their bills, help their neighbors, and educate their children. A thousand dollars doesn’t represent a really fancy meal; it makes an enormous difference in their lives.

It’s bad enough when elected officials pursue policies that protect their cronies and contributors at the expense of their constituents. It’s unforgivable when they dismiss those constituents as unworthy of their concern.

Comments

Pants on Fire

The interminable GOP debates continue to offer entertainment, if not enlightenment. Michelle Bachmann continues to display total ignorance of the Middle East (as Pierre Atlas notes, she clearly has no clue that there are differences between the Shia and Sunni–but then, she has little comprehension of the US Constitution, either). And in the most recent debate, Mitt Romney claimed that Obama’s policies have been the most costly of any President–a clear “liar, liar, pants on fire” statement that may have played well to the debate audience, but is wildly untrue.

As a helpful graph in the New York Times makes clear, George W. Bush’s “policies” cost 5.07 trillion dollars. Obama’s, by contrast, have cost 1.44 trillion.

But what is more revealing by far is what that money bought. Bush waged wars he didn’t pay for–one of which was an unnecessary and ruinous war of choice. Obama’s spending was primarily on the stimulus–to prevent the economic depression that Bush’s policies would otherwise have ushered in–and health care reform. And if the health economists I know are correct, the initial costs of health care reform will eventually be recouped as the reforms force efficiencies and savings in our patchwork, bloated “system.”

Faced with the stark differences between the two administrations, I can understand why Romney might duck the issue entirely. But he is apparently unable to refrain from pandering–even at the expense of the truth.

Commentators continue to puzzle over the “anyone but Romney” attitude of the Republican base. It may have something to do with this pandering, which is painfully obvious. The current base wants authentically crazy, not just pretend.

I Guess It Isn’t the Money….

Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports:

“By employing a plethora of tax-dodging techniques, 30 multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day — including weekends — during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections, according to a new report from the non-partisan Public Campaign.

Despite a growing federal deficit and the widespread economic stability that has swept the U.S since 2008, the companies in question managed to accumulate profits of $164 billion between 2008 and 2010, while receiving combined tax rebates totaling almost $11 billion. Moreover, Public Campaign reports these companies spent about $476 million during the same period to lobby the U.S. Congress, as well as another $22 million on federal campaigns, while in some instances laying off employees and increasing executive compensation.”

To put these numbers in perspective, these corporations spent three times as much lobbying for preferential treatment as they paid in taxes.

Comments

Sounds Familiar….

I was filing some papers the other day, when I came across my somewhat dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s classic article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It was written for Harper’s Magazine in 1964–but it sounded as if it could have been written for our own toxic times. Hofstadter explained his terminology thusly:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds….I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind.”

The article used historical examples–the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement and others–to give the reader a flavor of the “paranoid” mindset to which he was referring. The anti-Masonic hysteria he described just seems quaint today, when the few Masons still around have an average age of 103 or so, but the anti-Catholic rhetoric has uncomfortable resonance. “A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by the ‘potentates of Europe,’ multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation and sending increasing thousands of of voters to ‘lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.'”

As Hofstadter memorable put it, “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”

He also made an observation that seems particularly salient today–that the difference between the spokesmen for these historical movements and today’s right wing is that previous hysterics felt they were fending off threats to a way of life they still possessed, while today’s culture warriors feel dispossessed. They believe America has largely been taken away from them and their kind. And he quotes another author’s observation that there may be a “persistent psychic complex” made up of “preoccupations and fantasies” that characterize the paranoid style: a megalomaniacal view of oneself as Elect, wholly good, persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of great power to the adversary of the moment…It’s hard to read that without thinking of the contemporary insistence that “bible-believing” Christians are “victims,” that gays are a rich bloc pursuing a nefarious “agenda” and that all Muslims are well-funded and powerful terrorists.

I don’t know whether to be comforted or disturbed by the similarities between today’s “paranoids” and those described in the article. On the one hand, America survived those past eruptions–the know-nothings, the nativists, and the other ugly and regrettable episodes of our history did become footnotes of our larger story.

On the other hand, we waste an enormous amount of time and energy trying to solve not only the real problems we face, but the problems such people create.

Comments