Random Blogging – Page 384

Bad Monkey

I’m writing this before the November 2d elections, knowing that it won’t see print until the election results are known. The timing won’t keep me from making a prediction: voters will reward sleazy tactics, outright liars and buffoons of all political persuasions.

That’s because the election season that will (mercifully) be over when you read this has been dominated by two parties—not Republicans and Democrats, but those I’ll dub “denialists” and “enablers.”

Denialists have a variety of motives, but essentially, they are fleeing the complexity and ambiguity of modern life. They span a spectrum from the outright delusional—the so-called “birthers” who have convinced themselves that President Obama was born in Kenya, and the one in five Americans who believe he’s a secret Muslim—to the various groups of creationists, climate change deniers and others who are suspicious of science and empirical evidence and looking for any opportunity to reject findings that do not confirm their own beliefs or serve their own interests. They include the revisionists who cling to carefully selected and edited versions of America’s history and constitution.

There have always been denialists on the fringes of American political life. What is different today is that they are being enabled by the emergence of a media landscape in which the time-honored function of genuine journalism—truth-telling—has been pushed aside in favor of what sells, and telling people what they want to hear is a sure winner. The fact that paying talking heads to spout uninformed—occasionally deranged—opinions is so much less expensive than paying journalists to do actual reporting is just icing on the cake.

In this intellectually dishonest, morally distasteful environment, can we really be surprised that candidates of both parties have participated in a content-free, ugly exchange of untruths and half-truths?

In the run-up to November 2d, it has been impossible to avoid the hammering of negative, misleading ads. I am supposed to be outraged over the “government takeover” of Medicare (and too stupid to know that Medicare is a government program). I am supposed to believe that a candidate for prosecutor who once represented a defendant accused of child molestation is thereby disqualified for office (and to ignore the profoundly unethical conduct of a candidate who would make such a charge). Presumably, I am supposed to listen to the out-of-context charges and counter-charges, the grainy photographs and gloomy atmospherics and make my candidate selection based purely on my emotional response.

No wonder Jon Stewart held a rally for sanity. If the antics of this electoral season are any indication, it’s in short supply.

Actually, it was Stewart who came up with the best description of our current politics. In an interview, Terry Gross of NPR asked him about his focus on politicians and the media, and who was most culpable. Stewart said “Politicians are politicians. If you go to the zoo and monkeys are throwing feces, well—that’s what monkeys do. But you’d like to have the zoo-keeper there saying ‘Bad Monkey.’”

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Dickens’ classic book “A Tale of Two Cities” begins, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That’s a pretty apt description of the world Americans inhabit right now.

On the plus side, advances in transportation and communication allow us to travel the globe and connect with others in ways our parents could never have imagined. Medical science has given us longer, more comfortable lives. Technology has improved our productivity, and brought education, books, and the arts to millions who otherwise would lack access to them.

The best of times.

And then there is our experiment with self-government, which isn’t going so well.

It’s partly the economy, of course. During times of economic distress, people get testy. Prejudices emerge. (Attacks on immigrants and Muslims, especially, are getting ugly.)

But it’s not just the economy. We also seem to be in the throes of a massive cultural backlash, driven primarily—although certainly not exclusively—by old, angry white guys. Most of these angry folks cannot articulate what it is that makes them so furious—probably because they really don’t know themselves. They just know that the world they were born into (or think they were born into—that “leave it to Beaver” world that existed, if at all, for a very few families) has changed.

If you listen to Tea Party activists for even a few minutes, you cannot help but be struck by the fact that they cannot describe policies they support, although they can certainly identify what they are against—much like a cranky two-year-old, or that character from “Broadcast News” who was “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

Conventional wisdom tells us this rage will translate into the election of several of the crazier candidates who have emerged from the primaries. We are two weeks away from an election where a lot of irrational folks are energized and large numbers of reasonable citizens are dispirited.

If, as many of our pundits predict, this angry electorate votes indiscriminately against moderates and incumbents, opting for extremists who display little or no recognition of the complexities of the issues (or even basic understanding of the world we inhabit), we will all suffer the consequences. If we turn the apparatus of government over to the “simple answer” ideologues—the creationists and climate-change deniers, the folks who want to repeal Social Security and the Civil Rights Act, the conspiracy-theorists who have convinced themselves that President Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the United States—the consequences will be grim.

We have never needed sane and steady public servants more than we need them today.

Which brings me to another quote that seems apt right now: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

If reasonable people don’t vote in large numbers, and the ideologues and crazies and know-nothings take the reins of power, “the best of times” will become “the worst of times” in no time.

Recycled Politics

Indiana citizens aren’t making much progress recycling paper and plastic, but we seem to be leading in the reuse of old politicians. Evan Bayh is apparently preparing to run for Governor again, and in the race to replace him, Republicans want us to send Dan Coats back to Washington—a city he is intimately familiar with, having been there as a Representative, Senator, Ambassador and lobbyist.

I don’t know which is worse, listening to Bayh piously declare that he left the Senate because his sensibilities were offended by partisan sniping, or listening to Coats engage in it.

This is the point in the political cycle where it is nearly impossible to avoid 30-second spots in which Candidate A explains that Candidate B is unfit for public office, because—unlike Candidate A—Candidate B lacks “Hoosier Values.” Plenty of politicians employ these tactics and the empty phrases that invariably accompany them, and it may be unfair to pick on Dan Coats, but his ads are especially vacuous.

Here is a man who certainly should know something about policy. He’s been part of the legislature; a member of George W. Bush’s inner circle (he was even tapped by Bush to shepherd a Supreme Court nominee through the confirmation process) and most recently, a high-priced lobbyist. Yet his political ads are absolutely devoid of content; they consist entirely of labeling and name-calling.

The wisdom and adequacy of the new healthcare law is an entirely appropriate issue for debate and discussion. Coats clearly disapproves of the law, but he doesn’t tell us why. He just calls it “Obamacare” and “a bad idea.” What parts of it does he disagree with? Does it go too far? Not far enough?

In one ad, Coats says that support for the economic stimulus was a “vote against Indiana.” There is an overwhelming consensus among economists—conservative and liberal alike—that the economy would be immeasurably worse without that stimulus. If Coats disagrees, he doesn’t tell us why. We are supposed to know the stimulus was “bad” because it is associated with “Pelosi, Reid and Obama.” Should voters ask Coats how he reconciles his claim to fiscal conservatism with his support for the profligate Bush administration? These are not arguments; they are guilt-by-association smears.

As long as we’re recycling, I’ll resurrect the famous Wendy’s commercial question: where’s the beef?

The truth is that there isn’t any “beef.” Coats—and Bayh, if he really does run again for Governor—are useful to their respective parties because they have money and name recognition, not because they bring energy or new ideas to the table. They have name recognition because they’ve been around for a long time—and have thus been part of the problem. They have money because they are old Washington insiders who’ve demonstrated an ability to play nicely with the vested interests. We can assume they have no new ideas, because they aren’t offering any.

I’ll recycle paper and plastic, but I draw the line at recycling old politicians.

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Park It

Mayor Ballard’s proposal to privatize the city’s parking continues to spark bipartisan concern. Last week, the Sunday Star ran a “point-counterpoint” between Deputy Mayor Michael Huber, the proposal’s architect, and Aaron Renn, a respected urban affairs expert who has criticized it. Star editor Dennis Ryerson noted that many open questions should be answered before the City-County Council makes a final decision.

What are those questions?

Why would any city turn over an important part of its infrastructure to any private company for fifty years? Even if the deal were less one-sided fiscally, decisions about where to place meters, how to price them, what lengths of time to allow and so on have an enormous impact on local businesses and residential neighborhoods. They are decisions requiring flexibility in the face of changing circumstances; they are most definitely not decisions that should be held hostage to contracting provisions aimed at protecting a vendor’s profits.

Why would we enter into a contract that will add significantly to the costs of downtown development? Indianapolis has worked hard to encourage construction of hotels, retail establishments and residential units in our urban core. Often, that construction interrupts adjacent parking. Now, the city can choose to ignore that loss of parking revenue, or to charge the developer, based upon the City’s best interests. This contract requires that ACS be paid whenever such interruptions occur. It has been estimated that such a provision would have added over two million dollars to the cost of the current legs of the Cultural Trail.

Why ACS? Much has been written about the problems with Chicago’s parking privatization, but far less about ACS’ track record in places like Washington, D.C., where an audit documented mismanagement, overcharging, over-counting of meters, and the issuance of bogus tickets (ACS gets all the revenue for tickets). Washington lost $8,823,447 in revenue and experienced a twenty-fold increase in complaints from the public. And it wasn’t just D.C. Police officers in Edmonton, Canada, were tried for accepting bribes from ACS, and a few years ago, the company’s CEO and CFO stepped down after admitting to $51 million in stock fraud. Why enter into such a disadvantageous deal for so long a term with a company having so troubling a track record?

One of the problems with privatization in general, as we learned during the Goldsmith administration, is that it leads to speculation about cronyism and political back-scratching. In this case, the Mayor’s personal advisor is a registered lobbyist for ACS through Barnes and Thornburg, the same law firm that employs the President of the City-County Council. Whatever the facts of the situation, those relationships raise an appearance of impropriety.

Finally, why not simply retain control of our infrastructure, and issue revenue bonds for the necessary improvements? Interest rates are at a historic low, making it an excellent time to do so. If this administration simply can’t manage parking, create a Municipal Parking Authority, as Councilor Jackie Nytes has suggested.

However we proceed, we should park this proposal. Permanently.

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When Will We Ever Learn?

There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a history dotted with them. It’s ironic, in a way, that just as we seem poised to accept the justice of GLBT claims for equality—a recent CNN poll actually found a slim majority in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time ever!—hostility to immigrants and Muslim-Americans has become vicious. And make no mistake, this mindless lashing-out at those considered “other” threatens all of us who come from groups that have been or could be demonized, because it strikes at the very heart of what it means to be an American.

What makes Americans out of our diverse and disparate population is fidelity to a certain set of social/legal principles; a particular approach to the age-old question “how should people live together?” The very heart of that approach is our belief in judging people on the basis of who they are and what they do—on the basis of their behavior rather than their identity. It is that fundamentally American approach that has allowed the gay community—and Jews, and Catholics, and African-Americans, among others—to argue the unfairness of discriminatory stereotypes used to justify unequal treatment.

The arguments against the community center/Mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero are based on just the same sort of anti-American stereotyping that we recognize as pernicious in other contexts. Treating all Muslims as if they are terrorists is no different than treating all Germans as Nazis, all Catholics as pedophiles, all Irish as drunks, all women as weak and emotional, all gays as promiscuous. Every community that has fought for the right to have its members treated as individuals rather than as part of some monolithic whole, and every American who believes in our constitutional principles, should be standing up for our peaceful Muslim neighbors.

I know we’ve been through times like this before, but I can’t help worrying that the internet has dramatically increased the reach and immediacy of the craziness. Propaganda outlets like Fox “News” and political opportunists like Newt Gingrich play on the fears of the economically and socially insecure. It has never been easier to disseminate outright lies: Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the U.S., the Imam of the proposed Mosque is funded by Saudi Terrorists, illegal immigrants are having “anchor babies” who will be raised as terrorists and sent back into the country to attack us…Ridiculous as these and similar claims are, there is a cohort that really does believe them.

They believe them because they want to. And in today’s media environment, it is so easy to create a “bubble” where you hear only those things you want to hear, listen only to those who will feed your paranoia.

My friends and family are tired of hearing me say this, but here’s my theory of what we are living through right now. A group of old, pissed-off white guys (and they are disproportionately old and guys—the average age of Fox’s audience is 65 and it’s largely male) woke up one morning and looked around. There was a black man in the White House, a woman running Congress, gay people getting married, brown people speaking Spanish. And they are throwing a world-class tantrum. They want “their” country back: the country that privileged white, heterosexual, Protestant males over the rest of us.

I hope and believe that this is a final eruption—a last gasp of spleen and bigotry—before their cohort dies off. But it is doing a great deal of harm while it lasts.

When will we—and they—ever learn?

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