Citizen K.

The Republican War on Everyone Else

2011-04-08T00:01:00.001-07:00

The following comment appeared in the New York Times in response to a Paul Krugman column criticizing Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal:

Congressman Ryan is from one of the wealthiest Wisconsin districts, just across border from Illinois and a favored bedroom area for wealthy commuters from Chicago. He's representing the wealthy voters to whom everyone not one of them is invisible.

Congressman Ryan proposed earlier budgets in which he would have eliminated the health care for children (CHIPS.) His constituents didn't protest. As far as they're concerned, Americans working for a living are lucky to be employed and should have worked harder and studied harder.

His constituents pay to keep him in office because he'll carry their water: make it possible for the strong to prey on those who lack their wealth and connections. It's something the working people in this nation fiercely fought to overcome in the 1930s, 1940s, and even into the 1950s.

I still recall when my father was a petroleum company executive during a refinery strike during my younger years and him telling how he had to low-crawl to his car after his month of working to keep the refinery operating. I remember the wives of the workers in that strike coming to our rural home with their children, and asking for food and toilet paper. I recall my mother answering the door with a revolver in one hand hidden behind her back. I recall us setting up a a pantry in the garage and my mother telling them she couldn't feed them all but would help in emergencies. I recall my father expressing amazement that after low-crawling to the car, the union workers opened the gate and waved him out. I remember his consternation when my mother showed him the garage pantry and explained why they'd waved him out. She said the strike was between the men, and union or not, she'd always share her food with mothers and children. I remember our house being shot at and seeing the bullet holes in the living room window.

I recall one of my father's friends over one evening talking to him about a railroad strike. He told of how union workers had been found along the rail bed beaten black and blue. About that moment he looked up and remarked to my father that "little ears were nearby" and he'd better stop or there'd be nightmares. I was sent to bed.

I recall the news stories on WGN radio about acid being thrown into truckers' faces during trucking strikes.

I recall the death threats sent to my parents about kidnapping and killing me. I recall at age 7 people in Halloween masks attacking the windows on my bedroom and I then recall being taken to St. Louis where a large black German Shepherd named Windy and I were trained together for my protection. I recall the annual re-training through my eleventh year. That probably had a lot to do with my father regularly took me overseas with him.

That is the era back to which Congressman Ryan and his bought, phony, grass-root supporters want to take us: the era of real class warfare. It's sick. They're morally corrupt.

From President Truman forward, every Democratic President has reduced the national debt as a percentage of the nation's GDP. Since Truman forward, ONLY TWO Republican Presidents have reduced the nation's debt as a percentage of GDP: President Eisenhower in both terms and President Nixon in his first term. That's it. Since then, Republican Presidents have always increased the national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Congressman Ryan's budget isn't the least bit serious. It's not a budget to build a great nation. It's a delusion concocted by his vanity egged on by the thought of accolades and personal riches from this nation's wealthiest. Congressman Ryan's budget has all the scope, insight, and foresight one might find in the Christmas wish list of a sheltered, spoiled child.

Exile

2011-04-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

night
after night

I walk

the smouldering
dark streets

Sevastapol
Crimea

Inkerman
Odessa

Balkan
Lucknow

Belfast
is many

places then
as now

all lie
in ruins

and
it is

as much
as I can do

to save
even one

from oblivion

-Ciaran Carson, 2003

Juan Cole's Open Letter to the Left on Libya

2011-03-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole was an early, articulate, and prescient opponent of the Iraq War. His blog, Informed Comment, became the go-to place for those of us seeking to construct a knowledgeable case against the war. Professor Cole supports the intervention in Libya, and explains why here.

Cole analyzes differences in the left over the intervention as a matter of cognitive dissonance: On the one, the left supports the efforts of ordinary people to free themselves from tyranny; on the other, it opposes as imperialism military intervention in their lives. In the case of Libya, Cole believes that the opportunity to rid the Libyan people (and the world, for that matter) of the sociopathic predations of Muammar Qaddafi is paramount and must be exploited.

The responses opposing Cole's position are depressingly predictable, illustrating a doctrinaire intellectual vacuity that substitutes sloganeering for critical thinking. To be fair, the left is hardly alone on that score...

In Defense of Dithering

2011-03-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Where Citizen K. rants, the New York Times' Timothy Egan -- who lives here in Seattle's Seward Park neighborhood -- offers a cool defense of President Obama's style. I have wondered that the same "progressives" who rightly despised President Bush's strutting and preening continuously gripe that Obama doesn't act in the same way. (The Nation doesn't publish an issue without someone blasting the president for not rearing up on his hind legs and blaring like a rogue elephant.) Apparently, bluster and certitude are just fine so long as it is the bluster and certitude of the left.

R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-24T00:58:00.000-07:00

The New York Times calls her "the last movie star," and they're probably right. Born in 1932 in London to American parents, Elizabeth Taylor became an international star at age 12 with her winning turn in 1944's, National Velvet. As seemed to happen often, Taylor's presence inspired her leading man -- in this case, Mickey Rooney -- to do some of his best work. Rock Hudson was never better than as Bick Benedict in Giant, and Montgomery Clift was at his considerable best in A Place in the Sun.

The tabloid headlines and legendary marital brawls obscured Taylor's impressive range: She played and played well characters created by Tennessee Williams, John O'Hara, Edward Albee, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare. She made her mark in family movies and smoldered in sprawling epics and soap operas. She played it for laughs in Father of the Bride as naturally as she evoked pity and disgust in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

To me, though, Elizabeth Taylor is first and foremost Leslie Benedict, the brash Maryland debutante who over the course of 201 minutes becomes the seasoned partner of a Texas rancher. (I grew up a mile from the main gate of the King Ranch, upon which Giant is based.) Over the course of the movie, the outsider becomes an insider while her principles and wit remain intact, a combination that causes her husband Bick Benedict (Hudson) to conclude that he won't understand her if he lives to be 90 (or a 100 or 150, one suspects). Taylor takes advantage of Giant's to show her character as arch, sardonic, wondering, overwhelmed, determined, warm, sympathetic, feminine, and maternal. She shifts moods as easily and naturally as you or I might change shirts. It's a bravura performance, all the more so as their isn't a trace forced or self-conscious.

Whatever the misfortunes of your personal life, Liz, you were not only one of the greats, you just may be the last of them...

Don't miss this 1949 Times profile of 16-year old "soft-spoken, rather quiet, almost shy" Elizabeth Taylor...

The savage fight scene from Giant, followed by the closing:

All Over

2011-03-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

At 6'8", Gene Conley was big enough to be that rare athlete to play two professional sports. From 1952-63, the three-time All Star took the mound for the Boston and Milwaukee Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Boston Red Sox. For good measure, he put in six years with the Knicks and Celtics of the NBA (spaced out between 1952 and 1964), where he was a capable rebounder off the bench.

By 1964, Conley's strong right arm had given out. As he stared bleakly at the end of his sports career, he determineded to give it one more shot. Conley called Cleveland Indians executive Gabe Paul, who agreed to let Conley pitch for an Indians minor league club in order to see if there was anything left.

There wasn't.

In this memorable passage from Donald Honig's Baseball Between the Lines, Conley recounts his final realization that he was through:

So I started a game. We were playing Greensboro, North Carolina. Those kids came up to the plate and started knocking line drives all over the place. I tried flooring a few of them but they weren't impressed; I didn't have enough on the ball to scare anybody. After four or five innings they had to take me out.

I called Gabe Paul the next day.

"Gabe," I said, "I tried but I can't do it."

"I thought that might be the case," he said. "I guess you just had to get it out of your system."

"Well," I said, "It's out."

When I walked away from that telephone I was really shocked. There was no more fooling myself. It was all over and I knew it. Not only that, I didn't have a job, nothing to go back to. The basketball was about over, too. So I was pretty depressed.

I wandered around for a while, a lost soul on the streets of this town in North Carolina. Then I walked into a church and sat down in the back, all by myself. There was a service going on. After the singing this Baptist minister started preaching. All of a sudden it hit me real hard and I caved in and started crying. I just sat there in that last row and cried and cried, trying to keep my head down so as not to upset anybody. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I looked up. An elderly Southern gentleman was standing there gazing down at me.

"What's the matter, son?" he asked. "Did you lose your mother?"

I shook my head, the tears still running. "No sir," I said. "I lost my fastball."

What is Preventive Heath Care?

2011-03-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

These before and after pictures of the tsunami will stun you. Don't miss them (scroll down)...

Paul Krugman writes that GOP staffers recently jeered at the part of a Kaiser Permanente presentation that discussed the importance of preventive health care. (It's a "slush fund," apparently.) Claiming that there is no such thing as preventive health care is the medical equivalent of saying that the world is flat, yet I've seen this showing up more and more in the comments that I monitor. There are even cherry-picked references to a CBO study. (Funny how conservatives like the CBO just fine when they can distort it to in their own interests.)

The thing is, Americans have relatively ineffective preventive health because we practice it in the context of our commitment to heroic medicine. There's much more to the concept than a yearly physical and PSA (which may not do that much good, anyway). We don't really practice what is known as population health, which includes outcomes, determinants, interventions, and policies that impact the health of a group. A group can be as small as the total number of patients in a given practice and as large as the entire population of a country, and be based on condition, locale, demographics, or some combination of the three.

At the end of the first quarter of school, my team made a presentation based on steps that could be taken to reduce the number of pediatric asthma admissions to a rural emergency department in an area with a heavy migrant worker population. We set a goal (50% reduction, based on research) and designed a program based on ED clinical staff training, patient education, check-in and check-out procedures (wherein, for example, no one left without what's called an Asthma Action Plan), home mitigation strategies, and primary care followup. We minimized other possibilities because of budget limitations and likely behavioral restrictions on the families. This is the idea behind preventive care based on population, although it doesn't address public policies that might improve outcomes even further (such as improving air quality eroded by a high concentration of pesticides).

So, if someone tells you that preventive health care doesn't work, the chances are that they don't know what it is and that they're unaware that we really don't practice it here.

Utah Teabaggers Support Gay Sex

2011-03-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

These people are nuts. But it has been fun watching Orrin Hatch humiliate himself by sucking up to them. I mean, I thought these people were all for family values and against gay sex. But here they are: Making old Orrin give them exactly what they tried to crucify Bill Clinton for.

Two Songs About Rivers

2011-03-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

If there's a better American song than this one, I'd like to hear it. Here's a Brit performing an aching rendition. Away, I must away:

Kris Kristofferson looks like singing "i'm gonna sit right here until I die" with Johnny Cash fulfills a bucket wish list. It tore me up every time I heard her drawl that southern drawl:

The Dean Passeth

2011-03-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

Journalist and commentator David Broder passed away today at the age of 81.

The Dean was the ultimate insider, a man with an almost childlike faith in the senior elected officials he courted and befriended. Although he often wrote in broad strokes about the stultifying ideological partisanship that has paralyzed Congress and especially the Senate, he rarely named names out of a seeming reluctance to offend. While Broder often criticized presidents, one had the feeling that it was because he saw them as DC blow-ins unworthy of the noble men and women of the legislative branch.

Broder was a throwback, an American innocent at home who never really understood the corruption of Congress by corporate lobbyists and money. To do so would have offended his sense of the politician's noble calling to represent the people. He never explored the gap, or even the possibility of a gap, between the calling and the reality: That might have made him unwelcome at the highest levels of the DC party circuit. No gap -- especially when it wasn't really real -- was worth missing out on martinis with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.

He valued compromise, even though compromises almost never hold. He cranked out column after column with an almost Talmudic weighing of issues, only to conclude that there was no conclusion other than to wait and see. Somewhere along the line, he mistook an absence of point of view for intellectual integrity, and too often settled for pabulum. Today, this passes for a balanced perspective.

Although Broder was once an undeniably fine reporter, the DC political and social whirl informed his views as a columnist, and he seemed more anxious to not offend his friends (and to parrot their opinions) than to actually analyze. He too often dealt in stereotypes and believed in his own importance, never a good thing for a supposed observer. Nonetheless, he was a rare voice of civility. Even though that came with a paucity of actual insight, I suppose it will be missed...

Citizen K. wrote critically of Broder here and here...

The Art of the Poster: Sullivan's Travels (1941)

2011-03-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' pre-war masterpiece, concerns a movie director (Joel McCrea) who has tired of making light comedies and wants to make a film about the downtrodden forgotten man. So, like William Powell in My Man Godfrey, he goes incognito as a hobo, but finds that no matter what he does, he winds up back in Hollywood. Several plot twists later with the help of The Girl (Veronica Lake), Sullivan succeeds in becoming a hobo only to wind up on a chain gang serving time for manslaughter. Here, he learns the value of laughter and decides that possibly he has been contributing after all. Like any Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels is satiric and sharply observed, though this time the satire informs a powerful social message. Many regard this as Sturges' best film.

In this famous scene, Jesse Lee Brooks leads a congregation in "Go Down, Moses" as the convicts arrive to see a Disney cartoon:

Vermont Moves Toward Single Payer

2011-03-08T01:24:00.000-08:00

Dr William Hsaio, perhaps the world's foremost expert in the implementation of new health care systems, has delivered a report to the Vermont General Assembly recommending that the state adopt single payer health care based on a hybrid means of financing. Financing would stem from an employer-employee payroll deduction; benefits would be comprehensive and come with a low co-pay. It leaves Vermont Medicare and Medicaid intact, apparently because eliminating them would greatly complicate implementation. The General Assembly is expected to pass some version of Hsiao's proposal. The state would then request a waiver from the Affordable Care Act, which the Obama administration would almost certainly grant.

Implementation of a single payer program would be a health care reform development on the scale of Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. Hsiao estimates (conservatively, he says) that Vermont will save 25% of expected health care costs between 2015 and 2024. If the plan delivers as promised, pressure will grow on other states to reduce costs by expanding coverage and benefits. HealthMatters details the proposal here.

Youthful Idealists Need Not Apply

2011-03-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

[The knight] had gone but a few paces into the wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age, from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty farmer was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with scoldings and commands, repeating, "Your mouth shut and your eyes open!" while the youth made answer, "I won't do it again, master mine; by God's passion I won't do it again...

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

The Washington Post reports that New Hampshire Republicans have prepared legislation limiting the voting rights of college students on the grounds that students are "foolish" and "just vote their feelings," causing them to inevitably vote liberal. This, apparently, must be suppressed for the good of the state and the country. Another Republican cites "youthful idealism" as justification, complaining that young people are inexplicably "...focused on remaking the world, with themselves in charge, of course, rather than with the mundane humdrum of local government."

Citizen K. sometimes can't resist shooting fish in a barrel and this is one of those times. One might forgiven for thinking that the the phrases "foolish," "just vote their feelings," and "focused on remaking the world, with themselves in charge" might, say, apply to the teabaggers behind all of this foolishness. One might also be forgiven that were the shoe on the other foot, conservatives would be screaming bloody murder and accusing liberals of eviscerating the Constitution.

Which brings me to another point: Once again, Republicanists mount a frontal assault on the document they profess to revere as much as the Bible. The Twenty-sixth Amendment is as clear on the matter of voting age as the Fourteenth is on citizenship birthright. It doesn't say, as New Hampshire Republicans would apparently prefer, that the voting rights of citizens eighteen are older "shall not be abridged unless they are college students." The meaning and intent is quite clear, and it's not "keep your mouth shut and your eyes wide open."

Voter suppression to prevent youthful idealism? God knows that we wouldn't want too much youthful idealism. That will kill a country, every time.

By Two and Two with Fetters on Their Feet

2011-03-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

From the newly published Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Eltis and Richardson):

[The Africans are] so crowded, in such disgusting conditions, as the very ones who transport them assure me, that they come by six and six, with collars around their necks, and those same ones by two and two with fetters on their feet, in such a way that they come imprisoned from head to feet, below the deck, locked in from outside, where they see neither sun nor moon, [and] that there is no Spaniard who dares to stick his head in the hatch without becoming ill, nor to remain inside for an hour without the risk of great sickness. So great is the stench, the crowding and the misery of that place. And the [only] refuge and consolation that they have in it is [that] to each [is given] once a day no more than half a bowl of uncooked corn flour or millet, which is like our rice, and with it a small jug of water and nothing else, except for much beating, much lashing, and bad words. This is that which commonly happens with the men and I well think that some of the shippers treat them with more kindness and mildness, principally in these times...[Nevertheless, most] arrive turned into skeletons.

"Description of Africans on a Slave Ship (1627)," in W. D. Phillips, Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

The Atlas is a remarkable volume, everything a reference book should be: Focused and detailed with informative and ideally designed graphics and maps that explicate its six parts: Nations Transporting Slaves from Africa, 1501-1867; Ports Outfitting Voyages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade; The African Coastal Origins of Slaves and the Links between Africa and the Atlantic World; The Experience of the Middle Passage; The Destinations of Slaves in the Americas and Their Links with the Atlantic World; and Abolition and Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

One map shows that the direction of sea currents and prevailing winds caused slavers to take a longer but easier voyage from central Africa as opposed to points further north. Another details the flow of slaves from specific African ports (and the number of slaves from each) to their destination ports in the New World. Still another breaks down the demographics of age and gender of captives on typical voyages.

Each page is the turn of a screw, slowly revealing until undeniable the official complicity of European nations in the deliberate design and perpetration of a horror that lasted for over three-and-a-half centuries. For the captives who survived the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery, the horror had only begun, and would be passed down from generation to generation.

The slavers and their investors, though, pocketed their profits and began preparations for more voyages to the central African coast. This included taking out insurance that protected "The Insurers from any loss or damage from the Insurrection of Negroes" but that otherwise specified a precise value for human life "computed on the nett Amount of the Ship Outsett & Cargo -- Negroes valued at Thirty Pounds p Head." Of course, to the slavers and slaveowners, these were not human lives: They were nothing more than commodities of labor valued at 30 pounds per unit.

R.I.P., Suze Rotolo

2011-03-03T00:29:00.000-08:00

They looked so domestic. Just a young couple crazy about each other, strolling a New York City street with the confidence that the world was their oyster. The near mundaneness of the image belied the brilliance of the music within, but once you heard the music within, you took a second look at the cover. Suddenly, it portrayed something else: A portrait of a young man as an artist who had just changed popular music forever and his (somewhat reluctant, it turned out) muse. She clings to him smiling and proud as he whispers something secret -- a private witticism, perhaps, a sweet nothing, or a tale of the Village night. The images of the cars behind them futilely attempt to freeze the image in late 1962 or early 1963, but the music had already demolished the mere temporal pretensions of a camera: It's already immortal. And Suze, you feel, knows it. The smile says, "This record? He couldn't have done it without me."

Suze Rotolo is gone, succumbing to lung cancer at age 67. She inspired Bob Dylan's interest in the political world and became the subject of some of his greatest songs. Here's, Dylan's friend Ramblin' Jack Elliot sings one of them (music begins around 3:30):

Those Union Members Will Get You Every Time

2011-03-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.

Cold Toddy

2011-03-01T07:20:00.000-08:00

This is not just some academic exercise for me. I am trying to actually shrink scope and size of government. If Harry Reid comes back and says no spending cuts, no nothing, at that point I feel I have no choice given what I ran on, given what I got 70 percent of the vote on, I have to shut down the government.

Representative Todd Rokita (R-IN)

I? I?! I have to shut down the government?! Who died and made Todd Rokita king?

Rokita, all of 40 years old, has apparently crowned himself King of the United States of America. During the day, he's the freshman representative from Indiana's 4th district, a gerrymandered sprawl wrapped around the spine of western Indiana. Rokita, who claims to oppose gerrymandering, represents -- according to the Cook Report -- one of the most Republican districts in the country.

Moreover, while no doubt opposing every piece of legislation important to African-Americans, Mr Rokita has urged Republicans to reach out to that constituency. Pointing out that 90% of African-Americans vote Democratic, he once wondered aloud, "How can that be? Ninety to 10. Who's the master and who's the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?" (He later apologized for the remark.) However, as a stalwart opponent of nonexistent voter fraud: As Indiana's Secretary of State, Rokita instituted a requirement that voter's produce a photo I.D., which has the effect of suppressing African-American turnout. How can that be healthy?

The boy king has apparently decided that getting the vote of 139, 788 Hoosiers in one most Republican districts (94.8% white) in the country entitles him to personal free rein to shut down the government. This is not only a signature of teabagger provincialism and self-importance, it shows how disconnected from reality these people are. More than 75,000 of Rokita's constituents receive Social Security; his casual threat to personally shut down the government threatens each and every one of them with not receiving their monthly deposit. But, I suppose you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and King Todd does have an imagined potential personal affront from Harry Reid to stew about.

The rest of us, though, have to worry about the man who would be king.

Dispatch from the Bloodlands

2011-02-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Ideology cannot function without economics.

-Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Snyder adds:

Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill. It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.

Unfortunately, claiming victim status does not itself bring sound ethical choices. Stalin and Hitler throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they, too, were victims: of an international capitalist or Jewish conspiracy. During the German invasion of Poland. a German soldier believed that the death grimace of a Pole proved that Poles irrationally hated Germans. During the famine, a Ukranian communist found himself beleagureed by the corpses of the starved at his doorstep. They both portrayed themselves as victims. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-firsr century, we see a second wave of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit references to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. The Austrian policeman shooting babies at Mahileu imagined what the Soviets would do to his children.

The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping at their deaths. By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by identifying with the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim, but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander [italics added]. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding intellectuals and politicians -- for example, Edward Benes and Ilya Ehrenburg -- yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet-Jewish writer were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

Go Ahead: Make My Day

2011-02-26T00:01:00.001-08:00

Cleve Loney had had enough. The taciturn Montana state legislator had sat quietly as Democrats criticized Republican legislation that, if passed, would nullify federal laws impacting gun ownership and law enforcement jurisdiction and would state with unadorned, down home common sense that global warming is good for business. Governor Brian Schweitzer described Republican plans as "toxic" and reminiscent of the Civil War. When House Minority Leader Jon Sesso questioned whether Montana politicians could wisely interpret the Constitution, Cleve Loney saw an opening. The quiet man gathered his thoughts (such as they are) and stood tall.

"I don't intend for us to secede from the Union," he said reassuringly. "But I will tell you," he added with sage if wildly wrong determination, "it is up to us. We are the people to decide."

Well.

I -- and I'm certain that President Obama, too -- will certainly sleep better knowing that an obscure Montana politician has decided not to rend the Union asunder. Yet, anyway. Of course, this issue was settled in blood some time ago, and neither Montana nor any other state has the right to unilaterally secede.

Part of me, though, says let them secede if they want to. It would take less than a year for the whole country to discover just exactly how dependent Montana and everyone else is on the federal government.

For starters, Montana would have to be self-sustaining: It has no port, and neither Canada nor the United States would recognize its status. So there will be no way for food and other imports to get in or for exports to get out.

There would be no Social Security or Medicare. The state that ranks 43rd in per capita income but is the 6th oldest in age would be on its own in terms of keeping its retirees housed, fed, and cared for.

There will be no federal support of the University of Montana or Montana State University. Tuition and fees would rise to such levels that the schools might as well close their doors, leaving a state in which less than 20% of its population has a bachelor's degree even worse off. In the process, the lovely college towns of Bozeman and Missoula would wither and die.

Montana does not have a medical school and, under the circumstances, the University of Washington would be unlikely to accept applicants from there. Moreover, health sciences programs tend to have a heavy dependency on federal grants. Montana would quickly lose any semblance of being able to meet the health care needs of its people.

Montana receives $1.58 from the federal government for every $1.00 it contributes in taxes. The teabagger plan to address that 37% dropoff would make for interesting reading.

Equally interesting will be the plan to assume the responsibilities of the 21,000 federal employees in Montana, including national park rangers, biologists, forest management, and fish and wildlife specialists.

Go ahead, Montana -- secede. You'll make for a great object lesson.

The Latest

2011-02-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Having been caught off guard by President Obama's announcement that he would not enforce the odious Defense of Marriage Act, the right uncharacteristically took a day to articulate a typically incoherent response. But fear not: They've found their footing. The president's announcement, it seems,

is a needless distraction from the pressing business of turning the economy around and creating jobs. Never mind that the first thing the new Republican house majority accomplished was to introduce and approve socially conservative legislation, or that the only thing they've proposed to do about jobs is to eliminate them;
along the same lines, the announcement polarizes the country at a time when we should be acting as one. Never mind that the Defense of Marriage Act polarized by design or that, since Obama's election, every public act and utterance by conservatives has been deliberately divisive;
a cynical political ploy by a cynical president who doesn't care any more about gay rights than...than...well, we do. Never mind that securing a political advantage by supporting gay rights is an impossibility if, as conservatives insist, they represent majority sentiment;
is an arrogant power grab, that unilaterally declaring the act unconstitutional only shows Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Never mind that Obama declared no such thing: The announcement is in response to an opinion issued by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Once an AG -- the executive branch makes such an unambiguous statement, the POTUS had better have a good reason not to follow through;

Moreover, one of the initial actions of House Republicans was to pass a rule requiring that all legislation passed by Congress include a Constitutional justification. The Attorney General's office is certainly better positioned than the legislative branch to make such a determination -- true conservatives would applaud this effort to rein in state overreach.

Once again, these people show that they don't like government except when they like it. When they do, any effort to contravene them is by definition an arrogant, unconstitutional power grab. To be fair, they know more than a little about arrogant, unconstitutional power grabs.

Indiana AG to Open Fire on School Teachers

2011-02-23T16:05:00.000-08:00

Police attack striking truck drives in Minneapolis, 1934

With a chilling echo of the days when state governments called out the police to attack striking workers, Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox has urged police to "use live ammunition" in dealing with fellow Wisconsinites. When asked to confirm his advice, Cox replied "You're damn right," no doubt assuring him of heroic status among the peace-loving teabaggers who urged "Second Amendment remedies" should they not get their way via the democratic process and who howled in incoherent rage at Civil Rights hero John Lewis. The Wisconsin demonstrators include school teachers, policemen, and fire fighters.

The Republican Jobs Agenda

2011-02-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

Image from The Whisperer's, by Orlando Figes

You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic–the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men.

President Dwight Eisenhower, December 5, 1955

The only good Union is a dead union.

Comment on RSRedState

Months from now, when this is enacted and people realize it’s not the end of the world. Not all, but I think the vast majority, including the vast majority of the public employees, will realize this was not nearly as bad as they thought it was going to be.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R)

In these tough times, I think people are going to feel that this is not that much to ask. Everyone is going to have to pitch in.

Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Naturally) Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly

There's pitching in and then there's Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's undisguised plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights -- only the most publicized latest Republican assault on the democratic process. Governor John Kasich of Ohio has readied similar legislation, and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey openly boasts of the hatred that New Jersey firefighters have for him. Ten years ago, in the wake of 9/11, publicly disdaining firefighters would have been unthinkable. Times have certainly changed.

As Rachel Maddow points out, things have fallen into place for conservatives. With the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision having allowed unlimited campaign contributions to overflow the coffers of Republican candidates, the Republicans can now unleash an offensive against public employee unions, the prime institutional source of Democratic party money. Meanwhile, flush with their success in destroying ACORN, Republicans continue the suppression tactics designed to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting. Combined, the Republicans hope these three tactics will provide near-permanent electoral success even as the demographics of the country shift against them.

The Republican Jobs Agenda has become all too clear: An underpaid, disenfranchised workforce too discouraged and too exhausted for political activism but all too useful in serving the dwindling privieged tier of affluent white collar workers and financiers. The working class victims of the RJA will be uneducated by design, will lack technical and financial skills, and will find themselves in a constant scramble to stay fed by the non-nutritional food choices available to them. Continually squeezed funding for education and public safety and the deregulation of the environment will ensure that they exist with daily stresses of low income, inadequate learning, the threat of violence, and air unfit to breath. In short, their vision for most Americans is a combination of Blade Runner and Soviet bread lines.

Add 1984 to the mix as well: As consumers of unrelenting propaganda, the groups that comprise this "thrifty working class" will each resent the existence of the other and blame the other for their plight, much as today's middle class whites -- what is left of them -- are encouraged to fear minority groups. As always, they will find psychological safety by supporting the Great Lies they absorb as revealed truth.

The end of collective bargaining would be a catastrophe for every person who has a boss and who ever will have a boss. It would devastate an already tottering democratic process. The question, of course, is why anyone -- even Republicans -- would want that. For the answer, look no further than the frozen steppes of ideology. In this respect, Republicanism has become indistinguishable from Stalinism: The party and the country (and, if they have their way, the state) are one, and what is good for one is and should be good for the other. Opposition to Republicanism is opposition to Americanism and therefore unworthy of good faith treatment. Lies and half-truths are not only justified, they're a necessity in dealing with people who attack your way of life.

And the biggest threat to this is the Great Satan of redistribution. Essentially, Republicanists see government as agent created by liberals through which the hard-earned money of white conservatives is redistributed to underserving minorities (often euphemized as the "poor," complete with quotation marks). That's why conservatives claim without shame that the tax rates should be adjusted to collect more from the poor and middle class -- after all, they've been stealing from their betters for years.

Fixation on the supposed redistribution values of liberals illuminates Republicanism's commitment to the distribution of scarce resources to winners and losers, with the losers seen as their political opposition. Thus, politics is no longer a means to attain a greater societal good (however defined) but a strategy for marginalizing opponents economically, psychologically, and politically. Under this perspective, it is desirable to transfer wealth from and to neutralize the power of one's perceived enemies because it prevents them from doing the same to you. There is no concept that the opposition is any more capable or desirous of acting in the general interest than conservatives are. In fact, a critical component of rationalizing the drive toward a divided society of winners and losers is the conviction that "they" will do it if "we" do not, except that then "we" will be the losers. And since "we" equals America, our policies mean a victory for America against the enemy within, whereas consigning "them" to servitude is just desserts.

This explains why the right constantly whines about being victims of its own tactics, except that it doesn't identify them as such. Hence, whites are victims of racism and hate speech and Barack Obama is the one who perpetrates violent rhetoric (because out of the total sum of his public utterances, there is apparently one in which he quotes a line from the 1987 movie The Untouchables. Apparently, this easily overshadows every sick remark from Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, not to mention the vile signs and speeches of the teabaggers.)

You may well wonder how someone with $5,000,000,000 under Republicans can be a loser with $4,995,000,000 billion under Democrats. In this case, the interests of society suddenly become convenient: The wealthy man's economic freedom has been diminished by the forced transfer of his money to people who don't deserve it because their poverty is their own fault. Thus, the act of taxing wealth strikes a body blow against personal liberty and encourages indolence like this man's:

(photograph by Dorothea Lange)

I have seen the future: It is murder.

The Wonderful D. O. I.

2011-02-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

It was the summer of 1971. I looked dubiously at one line of the contents of the envelope. No, it wasn't my draft lottery number: This was something of more immediate concern. H. M. King High had sent out fall class assignments, assigning me to Mr. Maddox's American History class. Students -- at least some of us -- derided Mr. Maddox for an approach to pedagogy that was both orthodox and unorthodox, but always in the service of rote learning. I showed the paper to my mother, whose brow furrowed.

Nonetheless, worse things had happened. It was still 1971, I was still 16, I was still exploring rock-and-roll, I was still college-bound, and there were still girls everywhere I looked. Life was good, all things considered. If Mr Maddox wanted to start off the school year by teaching us to memorize the Declaration of Independence by learning to sing it, well, it was only an hour out of a bustling day.

"The Wonderful D. O. I.," he called it, and he performed it with gusto: "WHEN in the course (WHEN in the course) OF human events (OF human events) IT becomes necessary (IT becomes necessary)..." I'll never forget it. How could I?

Having taught us The Wonderful D. O. I., Mr. Maddox set us to work writing an outline of the textbook, which we turned in periodically for a grade. This was the plan for the rest of the year. I don't recall anything about the book itself, but it couldn't have been that bad: Nothing in it made me want to ask my parents, "Is this true?", as so much of junior high history had.

One day about six weeks into class, I received a summons to the office of the school counselor, an ascetic, resentful woman with the unlikely name of Helen Troy. Miss Troy glared balefully (a formidable expression reserved for all students regardless of race, class, color, or creed. Miss Troy was a firm believer in equal opportunity) while informing me that I had been transferred to another teacher's class. My mother, it seemed, had been working assiduously to that end for some time.

I returned to class and gathered my books. Mr. Maddox, with a somewhat defeated look, shook my hand and said that he thought that the other class would be better for me. I nodded uncertainly, and left.

My new American History teacher, Mrs. Cooper, had a reputation for pushing her students to think critically within the limits of the unsettled combination of the 11th-grade intellect and half her class in miniskirts. Her reputation was merited, and in fact she did her job a little too well: At the end of the school year, the school board declined to renew her contract (overruling the school principal). While I was learning The Wonderful D. O. I., she had taught via a simulation that the post-Civil War South might not have been the most hospitable place for black Americans.

Mrs. Cooper, who had roots in Kingsville, was not going anywhere. Plus, she liked her job and wasn't at all understanding about the necessity to fire anyone who raised uncomfortable truths. (Years later my father disclosed that he had heard a local doctor ask "Why did she have to bring up the niggers?") So, she sued and eventually prevailed.Ten years later, she returned to her old job. (You can read a summary of the suit here, under "Academic Freedom," and the legal details here.)

The Coopers were family friends, and I remember her husband angrily pointing out that a well-known reactionary teacher had worn to school -- of all things -- a "Belles for Bush" headband in support of H. W.'s failed 1970 senatorial campaign. This woman was genuinely hateful: I once witnessed her corner a black student and demand to know why she shouldn't call him "boy."

I myself had sat through a long-winded exhortation from a speech teacher about the endless virtues of a book called A Texan Looks at Lyndon, a right-wing screed by one J. Evetts Haley. (John Birch was Adlai Stevenson in comparison to J. Evetts Haley.) Anyway, these teachers "taught" on in no danger of losing their positions.

Next to them, Mr. Maddox wasn't so bad. His students were, at least, memorizing the most resounding sentence in American political prose:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

He didn't qualify it, nor did he seek to minimize it. No, Mr. Maddox unabashedly told his students -- most of whom were Hispanic unaccustomed to hearing Anglo adults call them equal -- that this sentence was "wonderful," when there were no doubt many residents of Kingsville who secretly found it subversive. You couldn't fire anyone for teaching The Wonderful D. O. I., though.

Mr. Maddox must have known that most of his students were not college bound and that anything they took away from his class would be a plus. He didn't have the skills to teach as Mrs. Cooper had, but he stayed within his game and didn't stack the deck. I carried the parting look he gave me in the recesses of my mind until recently, when I realized I had sold him short. Hey, if someone is going to make a fetish of something, better "all men are created equal" than the Second Amendment.

(Music begins at around 3:30.)

Armed And Ready, But For What?

2011-02-15T12:58:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a useful interactive graphic on President Obama's 2012 budget here. It doesn't include percentages, so I've provided them below. Also, the graphic misleads regarding Social Security: The program also pays for itself, meaning that while it is part of the budget, it does not contribute to the debt. Key areas of expense by percent of the budget (rounded):

Health and Human Services: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: 30%
Social Security Administration: 22%
Treasury: Interest on the National Debt: 13%
Defense - Military Programs: Operations and Maintenance: 8%
Defense - Military Programs: Military Personnel: 4%

Defense - Military Programs: Procurement: 3.5%
Agriculture: Food and Nutrition Service: 3%
Labor: Employment and Traning Administration: 3%
Agriculture: Farm Service Agency: 2.5%
Office of Personnel Administration: 2%

Transportation: Federal Highway Administration: 2%
Treasury: Internal Revenue Service: 2%
Veteran's Administration: Benefits Programs: 2%
Other Defense Civil Programs: Military Retirement: 1.5%
Veteran's Administration: Veteran's Health Administration: 1.5%

All other departments are budget at less than 1%.

I'm no financial analyst, but this looks to me as if (a) we're for some reason armed to the teeth, and (b) we're getting older without preparing for it (or the debt wouldn't be so high while Medicare costs increase). Plus, it appears that for every dollar we spend on weapons, we spend more than two maintaining them.

Read the Times editorial on the budget here...

The debate -- such as it is -- over our aging population is all wrong. Conservatives see it as opportunity to gut Social Security and Medicare, two programs they've been sharpening their knives for since becoming law. The real question, though, is this: How will we as a nation deal with the requirements of an aging population while keeping the social contracts implied by Social Security and Medicare? Is the answer really to put elders on their own at a time when the next generation of Americans faces the possibility of limited prospects?

The Right Is Wrong...Again

2011-02-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

(Page 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment)

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...

From Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

The latest gambit from conservatives eager to start gutting the Fourteenth Amendment and its unambiguous elevation of the federal government over the states with guarantees of equal protection and due process is, of course, to deny citizenship to American-born children of undocumented workers.

The argument goes that the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment is to secure citizenship rights for newly freed slaves, and that it was never meant to apply to anyone else. The more erudite conservatives might add that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott Decision and that it was also aimed at curbing southern abuses of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Therefore, it's a minor matter to edit the amendment to exclude any U.S.-born child of illegal immigrants from the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.

However, there are some problems with the conservative position. In the first place, the Supreme Court has already held (United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that the citizenship clause does apply to anyone born in the United States and may not be interpreted as limited to former slaves. Moreover, Wong specifically holds that Congress may not act to override the Fourteenth Amendment, which renders bills as those introduced by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) as so much grandstanding. (For the record, Deal's legislation bears such august titles as the "Citizenship Reform Act," and the "Birthright Citizenship Act.")

Then there's the nature of the conservative position itself, which unsurprisingly reveals the right as either intellectually incoherent, cynical opportunists, or both.

Conservatives oppose the Affordable Care Act as being unconstitutional, in part because the Constitution is silent on the question of health care. (No doubt, as there was no such concept in 1789.) In the case of the ACA, conservatives hew to a strict originalist line that permits determination of constitutionality only on the basis of the text of the document.

Unfortunately for conservatives, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is silent on the matter of intent. It doesn't use the words "slave" or "slavery," much less refer to the Dred Scott Decision or the Thirteenth Amendment. If you want to overturn the ACA on the basis of a strict textual reading, then you can't suddenly claim to divine framer intent behind Section 1 and hope to maintain any notion of integrity. (Unless of course you are a cynical opportunist and don't give a rat's ass about intellectual honesty as long as what you say suits your purpose.)

Much as conservatives won't admit it, the Fourteenth Amendment is clearer on citizenship by birthright than the Second is on gun ownership. Language can't be much plainer than this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States...

"All persons," not "All persons except." Following the conservative line of strict adherence to the text, one can quite plausibly assert that if the framers had meant "former slaves," the amendment would specify "former slaves." As it doesn't, the door is left open for additional possibilities. For example, perhaps the country paid a debt to the foreign-born children of immigrant soldiers who died fighting for the Union. Or perhaps the framers looked ahead as well as back and wanted to ease the path to citizenship for the children of the immigrants they knew would be necessary to ignite the great American economic engine untethered by the Civil War. These possibilities can't be refuted by anyone who relies on a textual reading (other than, of course, by the usual ad hominem attacks on America-hating libtards.) This is the direction you take when you read intent into arguably the most direct sentence in the entire Constitution.

When it comes to the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives are hoist on their own petard -- a position that must seem familiar to them by now...

Can anyone think of a greater or equal sense of dislocation than going from sipping a margarita in Makawao (Maui) to standing in the freezing rain at Sea-Tac Airport a few hours later?...

The lyrics, Ringo, the lyrics! You did write them, after all!...

Prayers to the Devil

2011-02-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

Last night, we had dinner at Merriman's, one of Maui's premier restaurants. Located in the resort of Napili, Merriman's unassuming exterior belies both its menu and the splendid view of the Pacific from its bar and dining room. As I ate warm crusted surfing goat cheese (Kula strawberries, Maui onions, strawberry and garden mint vinaigrette), Kahua Ranch naturally raised lamb, and white chocolate-filled malasadas (with Maui Oma coffee caramel cream dipping sauce), I glanced around the room at the hundred or so exclusively white patrons.

Have dinner in a place like this, I thought, and you can see who has the money in this country.

This proves nothing, some will object. Maybe Maui isn't a preferred vacation destination for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but there are plenty of native Hawaiians living on Maui: The closest any of them get to Merriman's is as a parking valet. We have a servant class in this country, something that is rarely more evident than when one goes on vacation, where it is always the predominant local ethnic minority that parks car, cleans rooms, launders linen, washes dishes, and carries bags for the white guests.

They're conspicuously absent, though, when it comes to waiting tables in expensive restaurants. When the service job pays well, suddenly the most obvious members of the servant class are nowhere to be found. Perhaps there's something intimate about relationship between the server and the patron about to order an expensive meal that subtly directs high-end restaurants to populate that part of the servant class with smiling, familiar white faces.

And I, I partake in this feast, this American dream meant for the likes of me but not for others. Am I simply enjoying life as should we all, or am I inevitably bowing to the demons of race and class?...

Today, we drove the winding roads along the mountains of West Maui, which is surely one of the most breathtaking and -- with its plethora of dips, sudden rises, and hairpin turns on cliff's edge -- hair raising roads in the country. We stopped often to watch pods of whales that had maneuvered themselves in close to shore, the babies breaching, adults fluking, and everyone spouting, the abrupt boom of an adult fin slapping the water carrying across the surface and on up to us.

In Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux describes Hawaii thus:

Hawaii is hot and cold volcanoes, clear skies, and open ocean. Like most Pacific islands it is all edge, no centre, very shallow, very narrow, a set of green bowls, turned upside down in the sea, the lips of the coastline surrounding the bulges of porous mountains. This crockery is draped in a thickness of green so folded it is hidden and softened. Above the blazing beaches were the gorgeous green pleats of the mountains.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

On the Road to Hana

2011-02-10T00:30:00.000-08:00

Made in the Shade

2011-02-08T01:53:00.000-08:00

Aloha!

2011-02-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Man, do I love this place! Hawaii even has compulsory employer-provided health insurance for anyone who works at least twenty hours a week. Believe it or not, everyone here seems pretty laid back despite this blatant theft of their "freedoms" by the state. How could they be so blind? They're living in a police state and don't even know it. It's a frightful price to pay for the knowledge that when you're sick you can go to the doctor or the hospital and worry only about your illness...

Even the BFI himself has nothing but good things to say about Hawaiian health care...

I took the photo above from our table at dinner. T. saw a pair of whales cavorting in the distance...

This is our view from the restaurant where we had dinner. T. saw a pair of whales cavorting in the distance.

Alleged Birthplace of the President, Here We Come!

2011-02-05T00:36:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago, my youngest son came home from school the first day back after Christmas and asked if we could go to Hawaii over mid-winter break. Neither my wife nor I had ever had much interest in going to the 50th state, in part because everyone in the northwest who doesn't ski goes there. But it turned out that I could get tickets and a place to stay on Maui. I still don't know how I pulled that off: Getting to Hawaii from Seattle during midwinter break takes the same degree of advance planning as going to Yellowstone in the summer.

Well, we had a great time, and I've been going there off and on ever since. And for me, February is the month to go because that's when the humpbacks migrate to LaHaina Bay to calve. There are so many that you can't help but see them from the beach, from the hotel room, from any boat ride taken. My inner seven-year old comes out, I guess, because they are what I most look forward to.

That, and fresh frozen mangorita from the H'aile M'aile General Store in the part of Maui called Upcountry, near the western slope of the Haleakala volcano. It's not the kind of drink I usually order, but someone talked me into it once and I'm glad they did.

Pictures to follow!

St Ignatius Chapel, Seattle University

2011-02-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Hipstamatic iPhone app; John S lens, Float film

Egypt

2011-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

A young friend is currently pursuing an advanced degree in Middle Eastern studies. His take on the events in Egypt:

There are definitely a few interesting observations on consensus opinion among the professors and students in my department with strong ties to Egypt, whether through academic expertise, long-term residency, or nationality. First, most everybody has assumed, or at least hoped, this would not end well for Mubarak since the president of Tunisia abdicated. The vast levels of hatred of Mubarak and his cronies throughout the Arab world cannot be overstated enough. The level of corruption in Egypt is truly astronomical and pervades really all levels of government and business. Likely any remotely decent job in the country is filled on the basis of patronage or corruption (and even if this weren't true, everybody assumes it is true). Egypt also suffers from a huge lack of opportunities for my generation. There are millions of Egyptian recent college graduates with no jobs and no real prospects for future employment. Therefore they delay getting married and continue living in crowded slum apartments well into their thirties. This is a common problem in the region, for example, the Tunisian who set himself on fire and set off their protests was a well educated college graduate who had been selling fruits and vegetables from a cart for years because he could find no other job, and he was protesting a highly uneducated policewoman, appointed to her position because of some patronage connection, confiscating his cart. However, Egypt suffers these problems most acutely.

Another crucial observation is the widespread trust in the military by the Egyptian people. The military is not seen as merely a tool of the regimes' power, like the police (especially the mukhabarat, or secret police) and has a fairy widespread membership in their enlisted and officer ranks. This is in stark contrast to countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia. For example, most key positions in the Syrian military and state security apparatuses are held by Alawites, a tiny minority religion from a specific geographic area of Syria that the president's family belongs to. Furthermore, the military absolutely did not like Mubarak's attempts to designate his son as heir apparent. In an incredibly corrupt society, the Egyptian military is seen as a (relatively) fair arbiter of power and everybody I've talked to seems to trust the military to get rid of Mubarak. Whether or not this will lead to a civilian government or yet another military coup (it is worth mentioning that Mubarak, Sadat, and Nasser were all army officers) is the only question. Many also say the army will never allow the Muslim Brotherhood to lead Egypt.

Finally, the most debate concerns the regional implications. If the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power in Egypt (something that I think is highly unlikely for numerous reasons, its more a threat being wielded by Israeli hawks rather than a serious claim), the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty could be threatened. However, I can't imagine the Egyptian military turning away their multi-billion dollar yearly bribes by the U.S., much of which is diverted by the top military and civilian leadership into their Swiss bank accounts, to keep the peace. The bigger question is will this movement continue in other Arab countries. Lebanon and Yemen barely have governments to be angry at, and any protests you see there are likely from other long-standing country specific problems. People are always obsessed with the possibility of the al-Assad family falling and democracy spreading to Syria. However, Syria has been in the process of progressive reforms for the last seven years and many Syrians see their social and employment prospects improving rather than getting worse. There is also less corruption, or at least obvious corruption, and the president is much better liked among Syrians than Mubarak. Most importantly, the Syrian security service has a much tighter stranglehold on the country than in Egypt, which, while an authoritarian dictatorship, can't really be described as a police state in the same way Syria can.

Where I see the strongest likelihood of this movement spreading is in Jordan, which has a serious demographic problem of tons of angry citizens of Palestinian descent who significantly outnumber the ruling Heshemites. It is also worth mentioning that for all the talk of the importance of Mubarak to the U.S., I think Jordan is significantly more important. We only really support Mubarak because of Isreal, however, our State department, CIA, and DoD have incredibly strong relationships with their Jordanian counterparts and Jordan is of crucial importance to Iraq.

Finally, I'm sure this goes without saying, but do try and watch al-Jazeera English for coverage, and if not, the BBC. AJE easily has the most comprehensive English language news coverage in the whole region. As the major US news agencies have been pulling people out of the Middle East to cut costs, AJE has been investing huge amounts of resources on their bureaus in the region. Reuters also has a good liveblog.

The Fighting Side

2011-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

In response to this recent story, a conservative commenter repeated the standard Republican canard that the deficit had skyrocketed under Barack Obama, it presumably having been under control before then. I responded by explaining that while, yes, the deficit had risen dramatically in 2009, the federal government fiscal year had begun on October 1, 2008. Which essentially lays the 2009 deficit at the feet of the final Bush budget. I then enumerated the main contributors to the deficit: two unfunded wars, unfunded Medicare Part D, TARP, etc.

The commenter responded by calling me a liar.

Upon which it occurred to me that this exchange was emblematic of the two-year rhetorical food fight that passes for public discourse in this country. The bones of it are this:

A conservative repeats an unfounded right-wing talking point about Barack Obama
A liberal refutes the assertion with facts that require some effort to put across
Challenged by facts, the conservative denies reality by making an ad hominem attack on the liberal.

This dynamic plays out over and over. Here's another one:

Ireland's fiscal calamity is due to its socialist economy and welfare state.

That might be the case were Ireland socialist, but it isn't: This is a crisis of capitalism, not a cautionary tale about socialism.

You are a socialist elitist libtard.

Or:

Obama is a socialist because he socialized the auto industry.

No, he didn't. Two of the three auto companies were temporarily and partially nationalized. That's a different thing altogether. Plus, the auto companies asked the federal government to step in.

How does it feel to be a tool of union bosses?

One side assumes an error of fact and responds appropriately. The other assumes duplicity and responds as if personally attacked.

Read the conservative comments on MSNBC some time: They are basically one unfounded assertion after another, without the slightest effort at providing supporting evidence. One of the latest is to ascribe every piece of negative economic news about health care to the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to account for medical inflation. (The ACA has barely begun to take effect, so any attribution of negative impact is bound to be an overstatement.) Then there are the obvious attempts to spread rumors. Take this one: The health care law has caused private physician practices and long-term care facilities all over the country to close. No evidence is cited of this because there is no evidence of it.

Which is no surprise, as conservatives, like Pavlov's, dog, have been trained by their masters at Fox News and on talk radio to respond to reality with a snarl. (Although surely their mouths water first.) There's no such thing as debate in conworld: Only attacks on their wallets and way of life. Well, their wallets are being attacked, just not by who they think. As for their precious way of life -- the one in which shooting and God are equal moral values -- they've somehow drawn the contorted conclusion that anyone who doesn't want to share it is attacking it.

Seriously, does Mark Holwager actually believe that gay marriage is going to bring Sodom and Gomorrah to Monroe City, Indiana (pop. 548). Or that regulating firearms in Washington, D.C., will keep him from shooting? Do the Cosgrays fret that $33,000,000.00 in federal grants will end Life As They Know It in White County? Or that a blogger in Redmond, WA hates them with every fiber of his being? Apparently, they do.

It's old news, I suppose, but conservatives have gone from hiding behind a distortion of facts to showing blatant contempt for them. That's a fact.

My Indiana Home

2011-01-30T02:00:00.000-08:00

Heartland America doesn’t feel the same way as people in the cities. We do believe in religion, we go to church all the time, we shoot and fish, and love our families. Some of the time you wish folks in the cities would come live with us and see how we live.

Indiana teabagger Mark Holwager

You can't make this stuff up! It's here. As I understand Mr Holwager, because I live in the city,

I don't believe in religion. (O.K., he got me there. But there are a lot of churches in Seattle despite my best efforts.)
I never go to church. (Guilty. But I'll bet Mr. H has plenty of neighbors who sleep in on Sunday.)
I don't shoot and fish. (Guilty, but of what? Shooting and fishing are values?)
I hate my family. (You'd have to ask my kids, but I think I'm okay on this score.)

As for Mr Holwager's invitation to come on in an set a spell, a visit to rural Indiana any time soon isn't in the offing. Then it hit me: If I can't take Citizen K. to French Lick, I can bring French Lick to Citizen K. And I have to admit it: Who wouldn't want to live where you can mount a scope while you get a haircut?

The thrill of it all.

Indiana has had a massive influx of Chinese immigrant.

Where else but Heartland America can you get a Rice Krispy Flurry?

Scope and a haircut.

Fine dining in the Heartland. Reservations only after 6 pm.

There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.

"Come see how we live."

Indiana values diversity and does not tolerate racism.

One of many thriving business districts in rural Indiana.

Homes in rural Indiana have many modern conveniences.

Community swimming pools are a common sight.

Wyoming Will Be Your New Home

2011-01-29T01:24:00.000-08:00

No law shall restrict a person’s natural right and power of contract to secure the blessings of liberty to choose private health care systems or private plans.

So says a law under consideration by the Wyoming state legislature. The law would impose a fine and a five-year jail term on any federal government official or employee or an employee of any corporation doing business with the federal government (read: hospitals) who attempts to "enforce" the Affordable Care Act in Wyoming.

I have it on good authority that the Constitutional originalists in Wyoming have access to James Madison's most closely guarded papers. Among them, they found this partial draft of the preamble to the Constitution:

...promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty ~~to choose private health care systems or private plans~~ to ourselves and our Posterity...

Below the draft, the originalists read the following:

While I must to define the Blessings as meaning the Inalienable Right to private Health plans, I cannot. For yester even a mysterious man cloaked in Black waylaid me and told me that should I not remove These nine words from the Preamble, he and other Liberals would go to Dolly. And he described in great detail the Things the Liberals would do to my Wife while the Negroes came in from the fields to watch. As I could not bear this, I removed the Nine. I fear I have doomed the Nation to Government run Health care. Although it is the Liberals who have done This. It is always Them.

So It is done. Now I must decide whether a Slave is 3/5's or 3/4's of a Person...

Upon reading this, the originalists looked at each other grimly. Wyoming would be the Constitution's new home. It would be safe there...

It was impossible to resist including the photo of a woman who depends on Medicare holding a sign objecting to government-run health care. Shooting fish in a barrel, I know, but sometimes the flesh is just too weak...

I Wish I Was a Headlight on a Northbound Train

2011-01-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

I wish I was headlight on a northbound train
I'd shine my light through the cool Colorado rain
I know you rider, gonna miss me when I'm gone

Some time around 1934, the musicologists and folklorists John and Alan Lomax heard a young African-American woman, in prison for murder, sing a verse from a song they came to call "Woman Blue." The Lomaxes found other verses of "Woman Blue," which may be over a hundred years old, and published the lyrics in their book American Ballads and Folk Songs. The "rider" of the lyrics is either a man or a woman; the term possibly finds its origins in images of mounted prison guards.

Consigned to obscurity for nearly thirty years, "Woman Blue" was resurrected by the white folk singers of the early Sixties and recorded for the first time, as "I Know You Rider." From the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, the song migrated to rock acts interested in folk music; it eventually became a concert staple for the Grateful Dead. (They performed it more than 500 times.) A few years ago, the Allman Brothers began playing it, and the song with roots in Texas prisons and work farms became a transcendent communal anthem complete with virtuoso guitar solos.

The enigma of "I Know You Rider" is why it lay dormant for so long. It's a great song of dogged hope, the yearning for freedom, and a devoutly wished-for flight to a better world -- feelings and desires that resonate throughout human history. If young people experience that as celebratory, perhaps they are dancing for humanity's unique connection to itself from one generation to the next. Or maybe they're dancing for the sake of dancing. That's okay, too.

There They Go Again

2011-01-27T00:37:00.000-08:00

John Boner and Eric Cantor have been talking big about cutting the defense budget, but plenty of members of their own caucus don't like the idea. At. All. Sez Rep. Howard McKeon of California:

I cannot say it strongly enough: I will not support any measures that stress our forces and jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform...

Brave words indeed.

But guess what Howard didn't say strongly enough? In fact, he didn't say it at all -- strongly, weakly, or mediumly -- that in the last election cycle he received $300,000.00 in campaign contributions from defense contractors. Last cycle was especially kind to Howard, since it brought with it nearly 40% of the $778,000.00 he's received from the masters of war since 1992. Always one to know on which side his howitzer shells are oiled, Howard certainly won't be complaining about unrestricted corporate campaign contributions any time soon. Yep: Those defense contractors is just real good folks...

You know who else is real good folks? Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, the New York Times reporters who wrote this story. In a 17-paragraph story, they buried the fact that Howard was the single biggest recipient last election of defense contractor largesse in the 12th 'graph. The Times has editorialized against the influence of unrestricted corporate donations. Is it too much too ask their reporters that they elevate the single most relevant fact in the story to place where people might actually read it?

State of the Union

2011-01-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

President Obama was not at the top of his game last night, but he gave an effective speech. The most telling part of the aftermath was the near-uniform Republican dismissal of the idea of federal investment in the development of future job sectors. It wasn't a radical proposal: The president didn't call for an industrial policy (although we need one, and badly) and he didn't call for anything beyond the American government's traditional role as an incubator. Yet, Republicans made the curious and undocumentable claim that that has never worked. Just who do they think came up with the internets, anyway?

Of the response during the speech, what struck me the most was the tepid applause when Obama called for a five-year freeze in federal spending. I don't regard that as anything more than a rhetorical gambit, but both sides responded to it with disapproval: Republicans, because he didn't demand cuts; Democrats, because he didn't demand expansion.

This showed not only the impossibility of compromise in this climate, but that actual consensus on anything is about as likely as Woody Allen dunking over Shaquille O'Neal. But maybe there was something to Obama's proposal: Perhaps he came across like a responsible man making a reasonable request of the children in the room, all of whom chose to sit on their hands and pout...

The New York Times thinks he done good...

So do the American people...

Stanley Fish on Obama's rhetoric (he liked it)...

Rush to Judgment

2011-01-23T23:22:00.000-08:00

It was smart, it was articulate, it was oratorical. It was, it was all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.

Rush Limbaugh on President Obama's Tucson speech

Limbaugh spoke these words while accusing conservative Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer of "slobbering" over the president's call for unity in the face of tragedy. Krauthammer's acid response ("I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart, articulate, or oratorical in delivering a funeral oration") was correct enough, but missed the larger point and ironically played into Limbaugh's hands: His arch, sarcastic words put himself in the role of a disdainful elite who sneers at the dittoheads who represent the real America.

I have no doubt that Limbaugh's remarks were thought out and planned in advance. He knew that he was speaking to and for a responsive audience that resents President Obama's education and intellect and, by extension, the supposed condescension and snobbishness inherent to liberalism. So, if Limbaugh was on safe ground by accusing the president of intelligence, fluency, and eloquence, he speaks for people who self-identify as being none of those things, people who see themselves as uneducated, tongue-tied, and coarse.

People who are self-loathing.

People who may wrap their ugly self-image in the ribbons and bows old-fashioned 1950s values, but whose rage belies the plain-spokeness they think they're conveying.

People who deep down -- or maybe not so deep down -- find it awfully tough to swallow the reality that the black son of a single mother has run laps around them in the game of life. This is even tougher to ingest than a similar reality about a small-town boy from Arkansas raised by a single mother, and that went down about as smoothly as a dreadnought.

People who believe that their guns actually serve as a bulwark against government tyranny, a pathetic delusion if there ever was one. A real tyrant -- a Hitler or a Stalin -- would chew these guys up, spit them out, wipe his mouth with the 2nd Amendment, and take about three seconds to forget what had happened. I've seen the people who frequent gun dealers: They could stand up to the Gestapo or the NKVD about as well as I could protect Drew Brees's blind side.

And the country has let itself be held hostage to this.

If This Is Socialism, Give Me A Double Dose

2011-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

When the right wing claims that the Affordable Care Act is a government takeover of health care, they're wrong. When they argue that it will add to the deficit, they're wrong again. And when they pontificate that it represents "European-style socialism," they're wrong again.

But is European-style socialism necessarily a bad thing? Every country in Western Europe operates on the basis of some form of democratic capitalism. Seven of those nations -- Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the four Scandinavian countries -- have socialized medicine: Their health care systems are government-owned and -operated. If the health care systems of these seven countries represent what the paranoid right calls "creeping socialism," then socialism is moving at a very slow creep indeed: Britain socialized medicine just after World War II and it doesn't appear to have infected the rest of its economy.

Rather than signifying anything ideological, it's more likely that those nations drew a pragmatic conclusion regarding health care: That the profit motive underlying capitalism could not deliver quality, economically efficient health care on an equal basis to the population at large.

Regarding efficiency, they appear to have been right: Not only can each country boast economically efficient delivery of care, they can claim it to the same degree. Insurance-based models range from very efficient to less efficient, but the single-payer systems rate roughly in the upper center of the group of 25 wealthy economies.

Think Again...Or Even For A First Time

2011-01-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

Writing to his usual standards of incomprehensible Latinate, George Will yesterday laid this egg:

The public sector's involuntary tendency to become, regarding productivity, a concentration of stagnation...

George, have you read your own column lately? You've been intellectually and stylistically stagnant for years. Moreover, you work for a newspaper still coasting on the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate investigatory reporting of the early '70s.

I hate to disillusion you (o.k., not really), but the private sector is as subject to stagnation as the public sector. Why do you think Toyota and Nissan kicked Detroit's ass? Why do you think the BP/Halliburton catastrophe happened? Why do you think that Apple ambushed every recording label in the world and took over the music distribution business? Should I go on?

What a minute...think...I guess I'm not being fair: I shouldn't expect thinking from someone who hasn't had a new thought in thirty years.

Low Country Blues

2011-01-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

The pipes may not quite be what they were, but look at it this way: When Usain Bolt is 62, he'll still run faster than just about anyone else. On Low Country Blues, Gregg Allman covers mostly obscure blues songs, material he mastered back in the Truman Administration. Plus, it's good to hear him singing something besides the standard Allman Brothers repertoire, as great as it is.

Allman reflects on Low Country Blues, his long-time love of the form, working with T-Bone Burnett and Dr John, and past drug use:

More Responses to My Request for Conservative Input on Health Care Reform

2011-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

This morning, I made a comment similar to this one on a story about House Republican plans to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. By 10:00 last night, I had received these proposals:

On another topic, what can I fairly say about Holy Joe Lieberman without copying every page of the Inernational Dictionary of Obsenities?

David Corn on the 'Baggers

2011-01-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I had the pleasure of meeting David some years back. In person, he is as he comes across here: Thoughtful, considerate, and articulate.

A Healthy Debate

2011-01-17T02:01:00.000-08:00

Last night, in a comment on a story about attitudes softening toward the Affordable Care Act, I invited conservative commenters to propose an alternative. Read on...

There's no shortage of nay-saying here. So, those of you who favor repeal, what do you replace it with? Repeal, and we'll return to this situation:

* 45,000,000 uninsured. Number increasing as businesses withdraw health insurance because of medical inflation and because of high unemployment. As many as 60,000,000 at any one time lack insurance.
* 15,000,000 underinsured. Number increasing as businesses reduce benefits because of medical inflation.
* Future Medicare financing in question because of increased number of retirees and because real wages have not kept pace with medical inflation since 1980
* People with pre-existing conditions cannot buy health insurance
* Insurance companies can withdraw individual or family coverage when claims get too high for their liking
* Benefit caps, impeding the care available to anyone with co-morbidities
* Shortage of primary care physicians (somewhat alleviated by the ACA)

Question #1: Is this a problem?
Question #2: How do you address it?

Since Republicans spent over a year complaining that the ACA had been crammed down their throats, your solution must be credibly bipartisan.

Hint: The CBO estimates that selling insurance across state lines will allow 3,000,000 more people to have access to insurance.

Have at it.

#512 - Sun Jan 16, 2011 9:08 PM PST

Curdtz

Easy enough to fix. Rid us of all the ileagle Mexicans,then drop all of the wellfare leaches. If you want to give to the mexicans and leaches then do it at state level. The lib states can have them all.

#512.1 - Sun Jan 16, 2011 9:12 PM PST

Brian777

Seems much better than ObamaCare. It's been working great so far.

#512.2 - Sun Jan 16, 2011 9:20 PM PST

The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2011-01-14T08:23:00.000-08:00

As always, click to enlarge...

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round -- more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

WELL, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.

"Who dah?"

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me -- I'll never vote agin as long as I live."

"Oh, well, that's all interpreted well enough as far as it goes, Jim," I says; "but what does THESE things stand for?"

It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar. You could see them first-rate now.

Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:

"What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is TRASH; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."

Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed HIS foot to get him to take it back.

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

I went to the raft, and set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn't come to nothing. I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn't see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking -- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell" -- and tore it up.

"Cuss the doctor! What do we k'yer for HIM? Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Words Have Consequences

2011-01-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

“You’ve got to think about it, our democracy is a light, a beacon, really, around the world because we effect change at the ballot box, and not because of these outbursts, of violence in many cases. Change is important, it’s a part of our process, but it’s really important that we focus on the fact that we have a democratic process.”

-U. S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ)

“I think it’s time as a country to do a little soul-searching. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”

-Clarence Dupnik, Pima County Arizona

Today, Gabrielle Giffords fights for her life, one of 19 victims of a political assassination that include a federal judge and 9-year old girl. The shooter is undoubtedly an insane man who acted on the murky motives of psychosis. Another time, another day, that may have been explanation enough. In 2011, it is not.

Over the next few days, conservatives will condemn these political assassinations in stentorian tones, repeating over and over that they do not condone violence. John "Hell No" Boehner, who must no doubt be pleased with the media stock photos of him and Giffords sharing a laugh, tells us that "Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society." (Apparently, those of us who are not public officials are out of luck.)

But that isn't the issue.

The question isn't whether conservatives condone murder. Few people do. But they have fomented it with their unveiled threats to water the the tree of liberty with blood of supposed tyrants; with their dark talk of a second civil war; with their wild accusations that anyone not like them is a dangerous socialist; with their portrayal of President Obama as a psychotic villain; with their threats and calls to arms; with their advocating the lynching of US senators; and with their use of rage and lies as a substitute for the honest debate that they cannot win. And for some, though the Susan Collinses and Olympia Snowes will deny it, it has come with their silent acquiescence to behavior that one hopes troubles them deeply.

Sarah Palin has reportedly removed the above graphic (the emphasis on Rep. Giffords is mine) from her web site while at the same time denying that it in any way signifies the culture of violence adopted by the extreme right and encouraged and exploited by establishment Republicans. Giffords' opponent last fall, one Jesse Kelly, disputes that campaign commercials depicting him with a gun and wearing hunting fatigues were in any way relevant to the actions of a madman. Others urge us not to jump to conclusions about causality and gather their guns around them as if the Second Amendment had been assaulted and not nineteen innocents at a Tucson shopping mall.

There is a place in our political culture for anger and outrage: Both have fueled movements for justice. But that's just the point: They were means -- and not the only ones -- to humane ends of extending the blessings of liberty. They weren't expressed through intimidation and terror with the intent of silencing and disenfranchising the Not Like Us.

These people are nothing but thugs. They should be treated as such. Palin's graphic has one thing right: It's time to take a stand.

Don't You Know It Makes Me High When You Turn Your Love My Way?

2010-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Citizen K. has been an important part of my life for three years. Writing it has sharpened my thinking, helped me choose a new direction, and introduced me to new friends who have enhanced my life in countless ways. Anyone who follows me knows of my love for reading; my parting class to you is that most male of things, Top Five lists, in this case of books (each compiled in no particular order):

Five Contemporary Novels

The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver)
Liars and Saints (Meloy)
White Teeth (Smith)
About a Boy (Hornby)
Birdsong (Faulks)

Five 20th C. American Novels by White American Men
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)

Five Coming-Of-Age Novels
Huckleberry Finn (Dickens)
Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)

~~Five~~ Nine Non-Fiction Books
...And the Band Played On (Shilts)
The Fire Next Time (Baldwin)
Baseball's Great Experiment (Tygiel)
The Years of Lyndon Johnson (The Path to Power and Master of the Senate) (Caro)
America in the King Years (Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge) (Branch)
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Sublette)
The Shock of the New (Hughes)

Five Contemporary Irish Novels
A Goat's Song (Healey)
The Secret Scripture (Barry)
Inishowen (O'Connor)
The Story of Lucy Gault (Trevor)
Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (Wilson)

Five Baseball Novels
The Great American Novel (Roth)
Bang the Drum Slowly (Harris)
You Know Me, Al (Lardner)
Hoopla (Stein)
The Kid from Tompkinsville (Tunis)

~~Five~~ Six Books You Should Just Plain Read
Black List, Section H (Stuart)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
Women In Love (Lawrence)
Invisible Man (Ellison)
The Country Girls (O'Brien)
Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Spiegleman)

No matter what my mood or how down I am, "Blue Sky" never fails to cheer me up. I'm sending it out with gratitude to everyone who has followed Citizen K. at any time during the past three years, and especially those who have taken their own time to better this blog with their comments. Please check out my new blog, Health Matters.

Happy New Year!

Tomato, Tomahto

2010-12-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

From this story about baby boomer fears that Medicare won't be there for them:

Initially, 63 percent of boomers in the poll dismissed the idea of raising the eligibility age to keep Medicare afloat financially. But when the survey forced them to choose between raising the age or cutting benefits, 59 percent said raise the age and keep the benefits.

Am I missing something? Suppose that I live to be 75 and that starting at 65 my Medicare benefit averages $500 per year for a total payout of $5000. If the eligibility age is raised to 70, the payout drops to $2500. How is that not cutting benefits?

The choice offered here is not between cutting benefits or raising eligibility age, it's between cutting benefits and cutting benefits. Medicare is in increasingly desperate need of reform, but raising the age of eligibility in a time of high unemployment and to an age higher than many people can work under any circumstances leaves people desperately hoping that they don't get sick between the ages of 65-69.

Here's a thought: Everybody buys health insurance under the auspices of a single program, with premiums determined by income and community rating, and basic coverage sold on a nonprofit basis. Remove a drag on wages and salaries by eliminating the employer tax exemption (not to mention the subsidy paid by the self-insured and uninsured), and get the government out of the insurance business while retaining its regulatory role.

What the heck:

Great Expectations (1946)

2010-12-30T01:02:00.000-08:00

Here's the memorable opening sequence from David Lean's postwar classic:

Scottish character actor Finlay Currie had over 140 credits between 1931 and 1969, none better than his work in this scene. He performed right up until his death in 1968 at age 90.

Great Endings: Great Expectations

2010-12-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

I took her hand in mind, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of parting from her.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Sunday Funnies and Arts

2010-12-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

As always, click to enlarge...

Thanks to PWALLY for the steering wheel!...

HealthMatters and the Beveridge single-payer model...

PHOTO GALLERY
A single leaf...

Peace on earth...

Old time holiday train...

Hilliard Bridge winter...

Peace...

FROM THE JUKEBOX
Did he ever return? Here's the true story of man named Charlie...

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down...

Good Will To Men

2010-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Father Urban, and perhaps Wilf and Brother Harold, too, sensed the rare peace now reigning among them, but Jack rejoiced in it visibly. Still, a moment later, it was Jack who broke the spell. "You know, Urban, I don't feel right about those animals," he said -- not, Father Urban knew, to be critical but just to be saying something. For a moment, they had all been lifted up, and this was Jack's way of letting them lightly back down to earth, where they had to live. "I've always understood that what heat there was at Bethlehem came from the animals. By rights, they should be closer to the Holy Family. Of course, I realize that's not possible in this case."

Father Urban looked over at the tree, at the hamper of food and liquor there. "Let's open one of Billy's bottles," he said.

"A Couple Of Nights Before Christmas," Morte D'Urban, J. F. Powers (1963)

And Judy, of course...

Boob Bob Redux

2010-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

During the BP Oil Catastrophe last summer, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal insisted that the construction of artificial sand berms was a sure-fire means of containing the spill. Government and independent scientists objected: No underlying science supported the project, it would expend money and resources better used elsewhere, the berms couldn't possibly be built in time to do any good, and they might well be counterproductive. Just federal bureaucrats getting in the way of state leadership, Jindal bawled, and amidst the general caterwauling to Do Something Anything, the government reversed its position and allowed Jindal's vanity project to proceed.

Well, as Rachel Maddow reports, it turns out the Obama administrations concerns were justified. The berms, reported a bipartisan commission, were of no use but did cost a lot of money (and, incidentally, were a gold mine for Louisiana dredging interests; this was really little more than Jindal acting as a bagman for special interests). Watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Great Endings: For Whom The Bell Tolls

2010-12-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940)

Lest We Forget Joe Strummer

2010-12-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

August 21, 1952-December 22, 2002

All Things Must Pass

2010-12-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

I began Citizen K. three years ago because I wanted to write about whatever I wanted to write about. I have made some wonderful friends in the process, and have enjoyed every minute of it. I've also learned and, I trust, honed my writing skills.

In the past several months, I've discovered something that I want to write about in particular. So, in the next couple of weeks, I'll be transitioning my efforts from Citizen K. to Health Matters, which I hope will serve as a forum for reasoned discourse about health care, ranging from policy to specific issues such as public health, health technology, health literacy, compensation, and overtreatment. In particular, I want to explore the health care systems of other nations with the idea of learning from them, something that Americans resist to near pathological degree. I invite you to join me.

Citizen K. will be around until the first of the year. Whatever you may have learned from me pales compared to what I have learned from you.

Sunday Funnies and Arts

2010-12-19T02:07:00.000-08:00

As always, click to enlarge...

The annual Famine Walk in County Mayo commemorates the death of hundreds of Irish peasants who died seeking emergency food supplies during the Great Hunger...

History, Memory, Technology: Marronage in Saint-Domingue (Haiti)...

The Republicans explain a financial crisis with politically correct dogma...

In the stacks: The Boston Public Library...

The Virginian and Hollywood's Old South...

PHOTO GALLERY
C&A Seafood: Hot Lunch Shrimp Crawfish...

Visions of corned beef danced in her head...

Art of the Poster: The Birds...

Fall free as old confetti...

FROM THE JUKEBOX
Emmylou and Dick Gaughan transcendant on "Wild Mountain Thyme"...

John Waugh explains why Hank Williams sang as well as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, or anyone else for that matter...

Just A Song: "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"...

Woke up this morning, had them Statesboro blues:

Jamaicans for Justice: Victim's Voices

2010-12-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

I'll believe when I see it, but with 63 senate votes to cut off debate, the end of the stupidity of DADT is in sight. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), whose alleged football injury and (for good measure) student deferment allowed him to spend the Vietnam war in the comfort of a fraternity house and who later accused triple amputee and Silver Star winner Max Cleland of being soft on defense, echoed past arguments against integrating the armed forces: "It the middle of a military conflict, this is not the time to do it." When would be the time, Senator?

James Inhofe (R-OK) claims that "it is working very well." How does that explain the 14,000 soldiers discharged for their sexual orientation, including Arabic linguists and others with mission critical skills? And why is it working, Senator? Because 14,000 is the right number, or because thousands more can't serve their country with suppressing who they are?

DADT has accomplished nothing but lying, shame, and subterfuge. It has deprived the military of dedicated, honorable men and women just when it needs them most. Retaining it says that it is the victims' duty is to adjust to the bigots, when it must be the other way around.

Heads They Win, Tails We Lose

2010-12-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

Fred Kaplan writes that the situation in Afghanistan is worse than ever.

We're in a position of having to depend on an unstable nation (Pakistan) with a political agenda that does not sync with ours. Moreover, that country's stance is dictated by its acrimonious relations with a third country that are beyond our control or influence. Moreover, we're in bed with a notoriously corrupt regime. This is the definition of an untenable position.

If containing the Taliban in Afghanistan is a vital national interest, then Americans must accept the reality of an indefinite and dangerous police presence there.

If containing the Taliban is not a vital interest, we must withdraw.

Those are the realistic terms of the debate. We should cease the fiction that any sort of conventional victory is in the cards.

Much Good Work to Be Done

2010-12-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

One quarter into my MHA, here's what I learned/think about health care reform:

An acceptable level of overall population health at a reasonable cost requires universal access to health care via single program. This means that residents of all ages are in the same program, without the fragmentation of Medicare/Medicaid, employer insurance, self insurance, and out-of-pocket payment. (I'd leave the VA alone because those patients have unique needs that civilian health care is not set up to handle.)
Universal access is a prerequisite, not a guarantee
Improved outcomes and savings require robust federal, state, and community public health policies aimed at containing the dangerously rapid increase in obesity, and the major chronic diseases of asthma, cancer, depression, diabetes, and heart disease. (Obesity is a risk factor in all five)
Improved outcomes and savings also require a system based on primary care, not specialties. Currently, 30% of U.S. physicians are primary care doctors. The number should be 50%, at least.
Overtreatment in some areas and undertreatment in others is a problem traceable in part back to the high proportion of specialists
The state of health information technology is dismal
As politically significant an accomplishment as it is, the Affordable Care Act mostly buys time and doesn't address the issues of cost or quality. (In fairness, it isn't designed to.)
Only so much can be accomplished by government at any level. Much reform must come from within the system
Regarding the economics of American health care, it is supply driven and not demand driven. That is, an area with more heart surgeons with have more heart surgery than an area with fewer, but it is unlikely that overall cardiac health with differ significantly between the two
My right to access a health care system and the public interest in community health supersedes your right to choose to not access the system

In short, there's much good work to be done...

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson struck down the portion of the Affordable Health Care that mandates the purchase of health insurance on the grounds that the individual right to not purchase health insurance supersedes anyone else's right to purchase it and the community interest in public health. Ian Millhiser thinks that Hudson's opinion reveals the weakness of the hand being played by the opposition. I think the ruling is not only misguided, it places ideological correctness ahead of addressing what should be considered a threat to our national security. It's simply foolish to be taking an option off the table when it doesn't involve shipping people off to gulags.

No Sunday Funnies Today

2010-12-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

I'm heads down on final project for school. The Sunday Funnies and Arts will be back next week.

Wankn' Fookin' Bankers

2010-12-11T09:41:00.001-08:00

This one deserves to go viral!

The Flat Tax: A Bad Idea Whose Time Will Never Come

2010-12-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

When the Republicans assume control of the House next month, they will undoubtedly start talking about tax "reform." At least some Republicans will push for a flat tax, a notion embraced in its essence by the misbegotten Deficit Commission's recommendation of a greatly flattened tax. Sounds fair and sounds tantalizing doesn't it? Everyone regardless of income pays a the same rate -- the typical proposal is 15%, although one-time presidential candidate Steve Forbes pushed for 10%. Just about everyone's bracket drops, and we all live happily ever after. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

Lots, as it turns out. For one thing, the flat taxers never take the deficit into account. We'll see why that's important in a minute. For another, just because your top rate is, say, 25%, doesn't mean that you pay 25% of your income in taxes. Remember that the current tax system still has vestiges of progressivity, so if you file singly and earn 50K -- which puts you in the 25% bracket -- your actual income tax paid is less than 10% before deductions. That's because only the income that exceeds 34K is taxed at 25%.

Consider these five taxpayers, all filing singly:

A: Earns 20K, pays $2,581 or 12.9% (.1% of all taxes paid)
B: Earns 50K, pays $4,681 or 9.4% (.2% of taxes)
C: Earns 100K, pays $13,609 or 13.6% (.7% of taxes)
D: Earns 500K, pays $139,616 or 27.9% (7.4% of taxes)
E: Earns 5M, pays $1,714,616 or 34.3% (91.4% of taxes)

The total tax revenue is 1.875M. Let's posit that by some miracle we have a balanced budget and that expenses equal revenue. And let's remember that in the real world, there are a lot more B's and C's than anyone else (millions more than E's), meaning that their share of the total tax burden is much higher.

Now, consider the effect of a flat tax of 15%

A: pays $3,000 (.4%)
B: pays $7,500 (.9%)
C: pays $15,000 (1.8%)
D: pays $75,000 (8.8%)
E: pays $750,000 (88.2%)

Notice what has happened here. Taxpayers A, B, and C are paying more, not less, taxes. Moreover, the tax burden lowers for only one of these taxpayers (if you think it's the one most like Steve Forbes, you get a gold star); it increases for everyone else. And don't forget: The actual distribution of taxpayers means that B and C -- the middle class, in other words -- will wind up absorbing the brunt of the shift in burden.

And, it gets worse. Under a progressive system, these taxpayers raised and spent 1.875M. Under a flat tax, they raised 850K, meaning that they have to cut expenditures by 1M or create deficit. And the deficit is apportioned equally. Thus, the low income taxpayer who makes 20K must shoulder 200K of the deficit, putting himself 183K in debt (including his 3K tax liability). But taxpayer E can absorb his share of the deficit easily: In fact, his share plus his 15% tax liability comes out to less than his tax bill under progressive taxation and a balanced budget. In this scenario, a balanced budget works against him.

Which is why Republicans talk big about a balanced budget and do little. The malefactors of great wealth that bankroll Republicans from the leadership to the teabaggers not only care little about a balanced budget, they don't want one. Balancing the budget inevitably means raising taxes progressively, and the Koch brothers, Jamie Dimon et. al. would rather have the middle class crash and burn than face the prospect of actually contributing to society. So they oppose government with one hand while seeking to master it with the other.

Consumer-Driven Health Care

2010-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

One of the many problems facing health care delivery in the United States is the performance of unnecessary procedures. This contributes greatly to a health care economic model driven by the supply of a particular provider, as opposed to patient need or demand, and which in turn ratchets up cost. The underlying logic is complicated, but for now it's enough to now that fraud is rarely a factor.

A -- not "the" but "a" -- recognized driver of this is a tendency on the part of employer-insured patients to request (and get) care and procedures that they don't need simply because the cost is invisible to them: They show their insurance card, make a co-pay, and leave the rest to their employer and the insurance company. Consumer-Driven Health Care is a conservative response to this problem aimed at righting the supply-demand relationship, making the patient more prominent and responsible for health care decision making, and reducing the role of the employer so that insurance becomes portable.

Generally, this involves an individual or family establishing a Medical Savings Account (there are a number of different types) paired with catastrophic health insurance. The individual contributes pre-tax dollars to the account (some plans permit an employer match) that incur tax penalties if spent only on anything but health care. Unspent dollars roll over to the next year and the account belongs to the individual: Even if an employer matches it or sets it up as part of a health coverage plan, an individual changing jobs take the account with him or her.

Criticisms of the plan take aim at its lack of utility for the chronically ill, unsuitableness for low income people who might quickly use up their medical savings and repeatedly hit the gap between the account and the insurance policy, the issue of health literacy, and the real possibility that the pendulum will swing too far and create a situation where people don't get care that they do need. In my mind, though, none of these objections are necessarily insurmountable. (Health literacy is a complex issue that I don't deal with here.)

But I believe that the real Achilles Heel of CDHC lies elsewhere, and that if it becomes the dominant health care financing paradigm -- a real possibility -- it will if anything exacerbate the problem it is designed to solve.

It's a curious thing that when experts on left and right debate health policy, they conduct the debate from an Olympian perch that ignores one of the most important commercial forces in American life, and that has certainly happened here. When the aggregate dollars in the various accounts reach a certain level, they will attract the attention of a marketing and advertising apparatus. This apparatus will labor mightily to separate that money from the accounts and transfer it to the interests they represent. And the apparatus is very good at what it does. People will be told that they "need" certain procedures and that they should not "forget" to get a regular this or that, none of which they will actually need, at least at the pace recommended by the various advertisements.

The campaigns will work well enough that the health care system will wind up performing just as many or more unnecessary procedures. We'll be right back where we started from, except that the health care system will have deprived people of their savings and turned hospitals, clinics, and group practices into racketeers. I don't think that that is the kind of doctor-patient relationship that Hippocrates or Galen had in mind...

One of the most important ongoing health care projects is the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Dr. John Wennenberg, the genius behind the atlas, discovered and first documented the phenomenon of unnecessary care driven by provider supply in a particular area. Unnecessary procedures do not affect health outcomes in a given area. For example, it's possible for heart surgeons in one area to install twice as many stents as heart surgeons in a different area but resulting in no discernible difference in overall cardiac health. In this case, we would say that the difference in the number of procedures may have been unnecessary. Use the atlas to find out which procedures in your area may be performed at an unnecessary rate...

Sunday Funnies and Arts

2010-12-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

As always, click to enlarge...

I didn't read the entire book, but what I did read of Christopher Hedges The Death of the Liberal Class was a tedious disappointment. The author of the excellent War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning has a good idea: How the decay of liberal institutions such as the press and the Democratic party has opened the door to a corporate assault on the middle-class way of life. But the sections I read were just another tired left-wing assault on liberalism, the kind of thing I've been reading and hearing since high school.

Hedges can't understand, for example, why liberals detest Ralph Nader. Nader is a saint, after all. And his candidacy had nothing to do with Bush's win in 2000. Bush cheated, Gore ran a poor campaign, and anyway there is really was no difference between the two. Hedges doesn't consider why liberals found this claim wrong in 2000 and ludicrous by 2008. He merely shakes his head sorrowfully when Eric Alterman explodes at Nader in the film An Unreasonable Man.

The problem with liberalism, Hedges argues, is that it never heeds the left. But that's a two-way street: The left never listens, either. It issues policy pronouncements and then accuses liberals of selling out on imagined commitments that could have been met had they only believed more.

Progressive systemic change in this country has typically been driven by mass movements. Hedges' liberal establishment cannot by definition produce movements, but historically it has (eventually) heeded them. Despite a disappearing middle class, the left has failed -- if it's even tried -- to organize. What is needed is not yet another left wing critique of liberalism, but a left wing critique of the left...

Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is anathema to me. But I have to ask myself: If my choice is to extend the cuts and extend unemployment benefits or let the cuts expire at the price of the Republicans killing unemployment benefits, what do I do? Do I call their bluff? But what if it's not a bluff? Do I put people in danger of losing food and shelter when I can take on the tax cuts next year when when the economy may have improved?...

PWALLY takes on the red wombat eyes of the older sister...

PHOTO GALLERY
I wish were lions...that would be nice...

Babylon Cafe, NOLA...

Song sparrow in Russian olive...

To Echo Mountain via Castle Canyon...

Stone...

Volatile soup...

Telling It Like It Is

2010-12-04T14:10:00.001-08:00

Devil in Disguise

2010-12-02T21:27:00.000-08:00

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

The Book of Genesis, 2:16-17

I don't spend much time wondering about who will head the Republican National Committee, but I did happen to glance through this article. And was rewarded with these utterly stupefying remarks from former ambassador to Luxembourg and would-be RNC Chair Ann Wagner:

I left after four years of living in and around socialism. What it really did on a daily basis for me and my children, and my husband...it deepened our love, our appreciation, and our respect for America. I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe in the soul of America and the things that make us, not better, but unique.

Think about this for a second. Four years as the American ambassador to one of the smallest and most easily traversed countries on the continent, and she can't tell the difference between socialism and a constitutional monarchy.

The half million people living in Luxembourg would no doubt be surprised to discover that their application of democratic capitalism is in fact a socialist worker's paradise. Many of them, though, might wonder exactly what Ms. Wagner finds so threatening about an unemployment rate of 6%, a deficit of 5%, the 16th-best health care system in the world, the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, and an income per capita of nearly $61,000. If this is socialism, we should welcome it with open arms.

Not that I really think that Ann Wagner or any of these fools know what socialism is. (But an ambassador? Even a Bush appointee?) It's become one of many meaningless catch-alls for "not like us," another casualty in the right's assault on the English language -- in its assault on meaning itself. That is, I think, at the root of right-wing paranoia: The fear of knowledge and the dread places it might lead. To them, knowledge is not a path to enlightenment, but the road to uncertainty and doubt. What to any sane person is the signal trait of humanity is to them the devil in disguise, with the black president nothing less than the beguiling serpent in the Eden of America.

They'd like nothing more than to return the apple to the tree. Try as they might, though, it's been plucked and we're the better for it.

Great Endings: The Natural (1952)

2010-12-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

When Roy looked into the boy's eyes he wanted to say it wasn't but couldn't, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.

Bernard Malamud, The Natural, 1952

Moral Depravity Lives

2010-11-30T00:15:00.000-08:00

Read it and weep many bitter tears...

Sunday Funnies and Arts

2010-11-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

Cartoonists appear to have taken the holiday week off! As always click to enlarge...

In this valuable blog entry, political theorist Benjamin Barber not only explains why President Obama is not a socialist, he shows how loose use of words like "socialism" and "communism" can cripple politics. Don't miss it...

School beckons, so no links today. They'll be back next week. In the meantime, here's the pride of Quincy, MA singing "The Fields of Athenry:"

The Fields of Athenry
By a lonely prison wall,
I heard a young girl calling
Michael, they have taken you away,
For you stole Trevelyan's corn,
So the young might see the morn.
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.

Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry.

By a lonely prison wall,
I heard a young man calling
Nothing matters, Mary, when you're free
Against the famine and the Crown,
I rebelled, they cut me down.
Now you must raise our child with dignity.

Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry.

By a lonely harbor wall,
she watched the last star falling
As that prison ship sailed out against the sky
Sure she'll wait and hope and pray,
for her love in Botany Bay
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry.

It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry.

Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry.

Tearin' o' the Green

2010-11-27T18:41:00.000-08:00

I've been reading comment boards following stories about the Irish austerity plan. The ignorance displayed by conservative commenters is uniformly appalling. To a person, they assume that the most free market economy in Europe is a socialist dystopia bankrupted by union greed and an idle citizenry dependent on massive entitlement programs.

Possibly in a parallel universe, but here on earth the actual facts speak an inconvenient truth. The crisis in Ireland is the same as the crisis here: A failure of free market capitalism specifically brought on by a real estate bubble.

Not only is Ireland not socialist, neither is any country in western Europe. England, Italy, Spain, and the Scandinavian countries have socialized medicine, but that's because they each concluded long ago that the free market could not efficiently and equitably deliver health care access to an entire population, something that each country decided was a moral right. So, they removed the free market from the equation. That's a long way from a socialized economy.

All other nations in Europe provide health care via insurance. This system is heavily regulated because these countries very sensibly don't trust the free market to accomplish much for population health, but it's not socialized medicine.

Norway has nationalized its petroleum reserves, which, contrary to what the teabaggers might think, is not remotely socialistic. It simply means that the state (a.k.a., the people of Norway) retains ownership of the country's most valuable natural resource. Private companies extract and commoditize the oil, then split the profits with Norway. Norway gets a platinum-plated health care plan and financial security for its aging population out of the deal. If that's socialism, smite me with it.

One commenter confidently wrote that Irish crisis was a result of -- I kid you not -- Keynesian economics, a phrase he no doubt picked up from Glen Beck's whiteboard. As Ireland often ran surpluses before unregulated bank speculation defecated on people's lives and as the government is now desperately trying to balance the budget on the backs of the innocent, it's literally impossible to see where Keynes fits in.

Well, as he often does, the great Christy Moore knows the right of it. This one goes out to Pat, Ann, Ian, Mina, Declan, Mary, and all of my Irish friends:

How I Left The Left

2010-11-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

With the 2000 election shaping up as a contest between Al Gore and George Bush, The Nation magazine urged Ralph Nader to run for president on the Green Party ticket and eventually co-endorsed him. His presence at the head of the ticket, The Nation argued, gave the Green Party a fighting chance at attracting 5% of the vote and a seat at the 2004 presidential debates.

In a moment of rare political prescience, I wrote to the magazine, objecting. What was to be gained by a Nader candidacy?, I asked. To get the votes of over 3,000,000 people, you had to be more than a consumerist celebrity: You had to present yourself as a credible president, which Nader could not do. A Nader candidacy, I argued, risked great harm for a remote chance of good. If he made a show of getting 5% of the vote and came up significantly short, his candidacy would marginalize progressives. Worse, he could swing the election to the Republicans. The only justification for a Nader vote was if you really believed that there was not a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Gore, and that was a ridiculous proposition.

We all know what happened: The Nader candidacy played a key role in swinging Florida and New Hampshire to Bush. In vain, I waited for a modicum of self-examination from the left, but it never came. Instead, I read that Nader played no role in Bush's victory because Bush cheated and Gore ran a poor campaign. True enough, but all that means is that the Nader candidacy put the outcome in play. (Conveniently glossed over was Nader's paltry overall vote total and its marginalizing effect.)

As the catastrophe of the Bush presidency mounted, though, the left provided a reliable, articulate voice of opposition. Combining fact, compassion, and investigative intrepidness, the left exposed the Bush presidency for what it was: A shabby cabal of grasping autocrats driven by stunted psyches and motivated by greed. It was perhaps the left's finest hour since the Vietnam war.

Then came the last two years, in which the left parlayed a naive disdain for politics and process, a greatly inflated sense of itself, an unexpected ignorance of history, and an obstintately blindered view of the teabaggers into a morally precarious stance from which it could inflict harm but do little good.

To begin with, the teabaggers are not misguided economic populists, as many on the left desperately want to believe. The 'baggers are anti-intellectual racists. Period. They actively agitate in favor of states' rights. Their favorite politician questions the legitimacy of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their favorite media darling calls the Affordable Care Act the first step toward reparations. They blame the economic collapse and the mortgage crisis on the minorities who took out loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Never mind that the latter is impossible: Government mortgages are secure and the poor hardly have the financial muscle to crater the global economy. But since it's psychologically impossible for the 'baggers to even think that fellow white conservatives could have led us to this pass, they do what they always do: Take out their anger on minorities. Nonetheless, leftist writers, unwilling to awaken from the wet dream that the 'baggers are economically sympatico, continue to insist that common cause can be made with thugs who would just as soon lynch the average contributor to The Nation or Huffington Post as have turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

It's an article of faith among the left that its harsh -- and often brainless and naive -- criticism of President Obama puts it squarely in line with the left wing "insurgencies" (as Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote) that pushed Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to the great reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society. This might be a fair point if it bore any actual relationship to reality.

One might be forgiven, for example, for wondering exactly what modern-day insurgency Vanden Heuvel refers to. The soldiers of labor and civil rights put thousands of boots on the ground and had commitment in their souls: Men, women, and children were willing to accept injury and death as the price of justice. But today? A few people milling aimlessly around a MoveOn "rally" isn't exactly the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Moreover, where's the leadership? I see no John L. Lewis, no Martin Luther King. The most prominent figure of today's left is Michael Moore, who presents himself as a clown. The "insurgency" is nothing more than a hodgepodge of policy statements and snarky op-ed pieces. Big deal.

Then...

Now...

Moreover, the Labor and Civil Rights movements helped Roosevelt and Johnson go where they wanted to go anyway. As vice-president, Johnson urged John Kennedy to be more aggressive on civil rights, and he and King liked and respected each other: They were hardly in opposition. Plus, these movements represented votes, the political coin of the realm. Both presidents knew that Lewis and King could turn out numbers that would support them at the polls. Today's left would have trouble convincing a lush to drink a martini.

With the eagerness of a child at Christmas, the left has compared Obama to Bush practically since the day after Obama's election. It constantly berates him for compromising on what they call "Roosevelt moments," as if FDR would have shipped his mother to Auschwitz rather than cut a deal. This ignores the troubling reality that FDR dealt with the devil regularly: Most New Deal programs were either segregated or white-only; Roosevelt had to agree to this in order to retain the necessary support of the segregationists in his own party. One reason for his not pursuing health care reform was an unwillingness to battle the segregationists, who feared integrated hospitals. Following the left's logic, this makes FDR the moral equivalent of Strom Thurmond or Bull Connor.

But real-life politicians don't deal in moral equivalents: They do what they have to do to get as much as they can get under the circumstances. It has always been that way, it will always be that way, and it's childish to pretend otherwise. You cannot expect a president to push for systemic change in the absence of an impetus external to the system. Lewis knew that, King knew that, and so did the leaders of the anti-war movement. On the left, that impetus doesn't exist, unless you call cheap talk an impetus. The pressure comes from the right; the left has failed -- dismally -- to respond.

As for the naivete, I've ranted about that before, so I'll keep it brief here. On health care, of course I'd like a public option. My experience, though, is that any time major legislation passes by the skin of its teeth, any movement to the right or left would sink it. Not one single member of the left has proposed exactly how the hacks and poltroons named Baucus, Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln, and Nelson could have been persuaded or forced to support a public option. On finance reform, no one on the left explains how major reform would have been possible when a mediocrity like Scott Brown can hold up modest reform over an insignificant matter.

If the left ever quits wallowing in certitude, it should ask itself some questions:

If we're so right about so many things, why does no one listen?
Aside from helping George Bush get elected president, why have we been politically irrelevant since the Vietnam War?
We once organized mass movements, but -- except for immigration reform -- we're all talk. Why can't we can't we get organized?

Recognizing that the system is rotten and then attacking the president for not getting more out of it while sitting on the sidelines carping...well, I don't care to be identified with that. However I see myself, I've shed ideology, said goodbye to all that, and lit out for the territory ahead of the rest. I'm looking for what works, and I don't much care where it comes from.

Sunday Funnies & Arts

2010-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

As always, click to enlarge...

Understanding the Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Health Care System. For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. The project uses Medicare data to provide information and analysis about national, regional, and local markets, as well as hospitals and their affiliated physicians. This research has helped policymakers, the media, health care analysts and others improve their understanding of our health care system and forms the foundation for many of the ongoing efforts to improve health and health systems across America. And it's fun: You can spend hours playing with it...

Medical factoid: Regions of the country with the highest overall medical expenses have poorer outcomes than regions with the lowest expenses...

Strange days indeed with Mrs Ingeborg Koeber, Regnar Dahl, Christian Apnes, and Mrs Stolt-Nielson...

PHOTO GALLERY

South Claiborne Avenue...

Art of the Poster: Dead of Night...

Emmylou and Myra Taylor...

Softened at the edges. Sometimes, death arrives on folded feathers...

Vista with buzzards...

Girl with a hoop...

FROM THE JUKEBOX

End of an era: The Radiators call it quits...

OK, The Allman Brothers Band. Don't miss this 1970 set...

Darkness, Darkness

2010-11-18T04:25:00.000-08:00

The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story is, in a word, magnificent. In 1976, embroiled in a lawsuit and disillusioned by the hoopla that had accompanied his masterworkBorn to Run, Bruce Springsteen began to write and record an expansive group of songs that would eventually become distilled into his finest album, released in 1978. The Promise tells that story via three CDs and three DVDs -- a remastered version of Darkness on the Edge of Town, 21 additional songs recorded during the session, a documentary about the making ofDarkness, a recent performance of the entire album, a compilation of recording sessions and concert clips, and a complete concert from the triumphant 1978 tour.

I saw Springsteen twice in 1978 (once the day before the performance included in The Promise). They were great shows delivered by an artist and band that seemed to treat every note as a make or break moment. The San Antonio show on July 14 remains not only the best show I've ever seen, it's easily the best show I've ever seen.

The Promise is not only the release of the year, it's the release of most years: An epic account of a great artist at the pinnacle of his game...

A conservative friend from Texas writes:

I just drafted a letter to Senators Cornyn and Hutchison and representitive Gohmert asking them to reconsider the TSAs new policy giving us a choice of the x-ray that reveals all or the pat down that touches all. I might feel differently if the policies in place had caught a single terrorist or seemed to make much sense...
I agree with him, but have no inclination to join him in writing my senators. If the TSA lifted the policy and something happened for whatever reason, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Fox News, the teabaggers, and every right-wing politician on the face of the earth would fall all over themselves in the rush to be the first to blame President Obama...

Be sure to check out the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care:

For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. The project uses Medicare data to provide information and analysis about national, regional, and local markets, as well as hospitals and their affiliated physicians. This research has helped policymakers, the media, health care analysts and others improve their understanding of our health care system and forms the foundation for many of the ongoing efforts to improve health and health systems across America...

How about those Seahawks, anyway?

Constitution "tragic," say right wing. When a court found a Guantanamo prisoner not guilty on all but one count, Republicans were quick to denounce President Obama's decision to try suspected terrorists in civilian court. Apparently, they do not trust the system of justice prescribed by the Constitution they pretend to revere. I'm waiting for the left to defend the president. Judgement Day will come first...

Sunday Funnies & Arts

2010-11-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

The inspiring story of our friend Catherine Reynolds, the sommelier extraordinaire whose life was nearly ended by an aneurysm but who is now back in business after a dogged rehab...

Could the Civil War have been prevented? One thing is for sure: The conservative concept of compromise hasn't changed much in a 150 years...

With the help of the The Three Stooges, Still Ironic employs a carcharhine analogy to explain modern finance...

PHOTO GALLERY

Sunset...

Top end of Pine Street, New Orleans...

Gable to Mamie: Can't a guy have a drink in peace? And when I'm done, Bill Faulkner and I are going hunting...

Open studio in Lakewood...

Get behind the mule!...

SPORTS PAGE

Pick your ten best Topps baseball cards...

Ebbetts Field Flannels now offers vintage grounds crew jackets. Citizen K. can't decide between the Termite Palace and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum...

FROM THE JUKEBOX

Stuck In The Muddle

2010-11-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

When the delegates to the Constitutional Convention debated the form of government under design by James Madison, those from small states declared an unwillingness to support a Constitution that codified political domination by the large states. Accordingly, the United States Senate came into being, an upper house composed of two representatives from each state regardless of size. In 1789, the largest state was about twelve times the size of the smallest state. Moreover, senate rules evolved to give great power to individual senators, a development that further favored small states.

Today, the biggest state (California) is 62 times the size of the smallest state (Wyoming). Nonetheless, both are equally represented in the senate. Thus, there is one senator for every 18.5 million Californians and one for every 272,000 Wyomingites.

Were that the extent of the problem with the senate, things might be manageable. But the centrifugal forces of history have dispersed the majority of Americans into ten states. Consider the implications for a legislative body that requires 60 of 100 votes to pass legislation:

Over 50% of the population is represented by 20% of the senate
41 senators representing 10% of the population can block any piece of legislation they wish
60 senators representing 25% of the population can pass any piece of legislation they wish

Although the latter two have never happened in practice, they nonetheless illustrate the extreme structural bias of the senate toward small, rural states in a nation of large urban populations.

The Nation points out that California senator Barbara Boxer received more votes than ten teabagger senate candidates, and yet they were in position to give control of the senate to the Republican party. Boxer received 4.3 million votes, easily outpolling the combined totals of media darlings and teabagger losers Sharon Angle (321,000), Ken Buck (783,000), Joe Miller (68,000), and Christine O'Donnell (123,000). In other words, 100,000 or so more votes judiciously applied would have given 1.3 million voters more political power than 4.3 million and handed control of the senate to the Republican party.

This in no way resembles any concept of democracy, even faintly. Combine it with an arcane apparatus of rules, procedures, and multiple committees and subcommittees, mix in stark polarization, and you have an utterly dysfunctional legislative body incapable of accomplishing anything progressive but very capable of extreme obstructionism. The left has harshly criticized Barack Obama over the makeup of his economic team, an irrelevant waste of effort if there ever was one: Had Obama enlisted the modern day equivalents of Karl Marx and Michael Harrington, we would be nowhere appreciably different. The Senate and the political system it epitomizes are that bad.

But suppose that by some miracle the Senate got fixed. We'd still have a political tradition that denies the necessity of domestic policy and that extols that rights of property over the rights of man. Lobbyists would still infest the halls of Congress. Corporate personhood -- a legal reality that goes back to the 19th Century -- would still exist, enabling the unobstructed flow of money into the electoral process.

Moreover, a divided country would still lack a sense of national purpose. Thirty years of bare-knuckled right-wing assaults on liberal values have accomplished what the Confederate states could not: It's split us in two. And a house divided cannot stand.

Enormous problems face our nation. The political momentum belongs to a faction that touts an easy fix: Turn back the clock to the glories of Reaganism and the Traditional Values of...of...well, sometime...and everything will be The Way It Is Supposed To Be, with white people on top and minorities properly invested in the success and comfort of whites. No wonder the corporatists poured money into the teabagger campaigns: They saw those suckers coming from a mile away.

Whatever easy answers the teabaggers have convinced themselves exist, it's not at all clear that the American political system can move with the alacrity, boldness, and imagination needed to pull our fat out of the fire. If yesterday's Bowles-Simpson report is an example, it can't.

Oops, They Did It Again

2010-11-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

"We'll both be in a witness protection program when this is all over, so look us up," says former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson. He refers, of course, to the preliminary report to the bipartisan deficit commission.

But witness protection is far too good for Simpson and co-chair Erskine Bowles: A group of sixth-grade kids working on a class project would use more imagination than this dynamic duo. When all is said and done, their plan is about forcing the middle class to pay to retain the system that got us into this mess. As always, the wealthy win out, giving up a few pennies here and there in exchange for lowering the top marginal rate to 23% and the corporate tax rate to 25%.

What do the rest of us get? For starters, whether you're a man or woman in uniform, a civil servant, a homeowner, or a retiree, you get your pay cut. Most galling are the attacks on Social Security, a solvent and successful program now asked to bear the brunt of the deficit reduction through a combination of reduced benefits and an increased retirement age (which amounts to second benefit cut).

There's no talk about what got us into this mess: Unfunded wars, a massive unfunded entitlement, tax cuts, and a deregulated financial sector. There's no talk of fixing Medicare once and for all by folding it into a better and cheaper national health care plan. There's no talk of revisiting defense policy so that it reflects the 21st Century and not 1962. There's no talk of a creating a financial regulatory structure to prevent future TARPs.

And there's no talk of the Bush tax cuts. It seems to me that if you really and truly believe that the deficit is The Number One Problem Facing The Nation, then you start by rescinding all of the tax cuts. Now, that might be enough to land you in witness protection.

Just a complete, total failure of imagination.

I'll eviscerate the United States Senate tomorrow.

The Fire Sweeping

2010-11-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times that Republicans are unprepared to confront the nation's three biggest problems, which he identifies as

the short-term challenge of a jobless recovery, the long-term crisis of entitlement spending and, in the medium term, an economy that wasn't delivering for the middle class even before the financial crisis struck.

Douthat is right about Republican unreadiness but misses the larger point: A fractured American political system will not allow us to meet the demands of a 21st Century global economy. Moreover, the underlying values of the American political tradition might well impede even an intact system from responding with the alacrity demanded by the modern world.

As China and India maneuver to take their place in the global economy, American politics looks inward to the banalities of partisan politics. Two billion people demand their slice of the pie -- and it's unimaginable that they won't get it -- and instead of turning its attention to expanding the pie, American politics has become engulfed by a wave of nativist know-nothings who vehemently oppose relatively modest legislation that at best will buy time while we deal with the issues Douthat outlines.

Douthat, though, is dead wrong about the nature of these problems. They don't divide neatly into short term, medium term, and long term. Each reflects a major challenge that if not addressed with urgency could undermine the economy for decades.

It is not at all clear that unemployment is a short-term crisis. In fact, the economy may well be impaled on a two-edged structural sword. Businesses have money but are not using it to hire, having discovered that they can get by requiring employees to work more while getting paid less. Meanwhile, the mortgage crisis has driven consumers into a fetal position.

Most homeowners regard their house as their long-term savings account. When the brokers of unsecured mortgages ravaged the economy, they did so in part by looting the life savings of longtime owners with secured mortgages. As home values plunged, billions of dollars transferred from the middle class to the Wall Street marauders.

Consumers are unlikely to consume when their life savings have been decimated. Since mortgage foreclosures continue unabated, home values won't be returning to their pre-recession levels any time soon. Between the lack of spending by business and the lack of consumption by everyday people, it's hard to see unemployment as a short-term crisis.

Regarding entitlements, the problems posed by Medicare are immediate, not long-term. As the country ages, the spending on Medicare has rapidly outstripped what little increase in income there has been. Unless something is done now, conditions will worsen until the point that Medicare threatens the entire economy. (Social Security, however, is on relatively sound footing and requires only minor adjustments.)

As for Douthat's last point, the economy hasn't delivered for the middle class in thirty years: Real wages have barely budged since 1980 after years of rapid increases. Today, the United States suffers from one of the broadest income disparities in the developed world.

This is not news to politicians or economists. And yet our political system lumbers futilely, like Cyclops blinded. Why? In large part, the blame falls on the legislative body called the United States Senate.

-Next: Stuck In The Muddle-

Great Endings: Moby Dick

2010-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Final lines of the epilogue to Moby Dick:

Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.