Guns in America

            What we have today is a shortage of guns in America, not a surplus. So say the gun rights folks who argue that had more people been armed in Aurora or Columbine or Sandy Hook, fewer lives would have been lost. The assumptions that lie behind this assertion are rather low caliber:

1.       Good guys with guns could drop a lunatic before he could fulfill his mission;

2.       More guns reduce violence;

3.       If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

            Each of these assertions, in turn, relies on the assumption of individual power, individual self-defense, individual independence, and individual self-reliance as having primacy over any notion of group action. The bottom line is always I, and I alone, must finally protect myself because government will never provide the same protection without severely limiting my freedom. On the other hand, more availability of guns in the public domain is going to increase the odds of those guns getting into the wrong hands and being abused. But never mind that irritating detail that might otherwise disturb the imperfect logic of owning a personal gun.     

            Let us, for example, take a look outside the realm of firearms and use the personal car (automobile) as an analogy. America has one of the lowest commitments to public transportation of any developed nation because of the personal freedom the personal car affords the individual. We can come and go as we want when we want. Even though we might complete our daily commute in half the time were we to utilize a more readily available public form of transportation, we choose the privacy of our personal vehicle over sitting on a bus or a train. Therefore, saving time is not the issue. It is the privacy and isolation that we are unwilling to compromise for greater efficiency of energy, money, and time use. Once again, our personal freedom is defined as the individual compartment we would rather ride to work in even if vastly superior public transportation could exist as it does in many European and Asian cultures.

            Therefore, in the context of our bizarre cultural mores that puts personal freedom from contact with our fellow Americans in traveling to and from work above any other sense of convenience such as cost, speed, or efficiency, is it no wonder that the personal firearm is seen as a “logical” extension of that notion of freedom?  Rich folks can hire a bodyguard to be their personal protector or policeman, but even that is inconvenient in that one has to manage the bodyguard and put up with his personal idiosyncrasies, so therefore why not just buy a gun and be self-reliant? After all, self-reliance is at the heart of the American ethos. Just look back at Emerson’s essay on the subject and you will be reminded of just how self-sufficient and therefore inefficient we truly are. Perhaps the notion of self-reliance prompted Emerson to write the statement in another essay: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

            Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the United States of America, you can look forward to more cars, more guns, and more ammunition with which to secure your personal self-reliance in the face of any and all threats to your personal freedom. You can also look forward to a more exciting shopping experience this Christmas season, even in that out-of-the-way antique store where you might find an exquisite decanter from which to pour your personal favorite whiskey so that you can isolate yourself even further from the rest of humanity in your own personal alcoholic fog:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt7FDTpzGvo.

Tea Party to Change Name

            In order to start 2013 on fresh footing, the heretofore Tea Party has decided to change its name. Having gone overboard with attacks on taxation of anything and everything, Goodman Norquist has suggested that a new name more in line with the movement’s actual historical precedent would be a fit way to celebrate the New Year. After all, it was at Salem rather than Boston that the witch hunt originated.  Proclaiming socialism as the 21^st Century equivalent of witchcraft, Goody Norquist has called for a refocus on the devil in our midst. Taxation is just a small aspect of the larger evil.

            Since over one million Americans googled the word “socialism” in relation to President Obama in the last year, Norquist hopes to capitalize on this new-found focus and link it to the most prominent witch hunt in America history. The Tea Party will hereafter be called Salem Lights .

 

            Not to be confused with the cigarette by that name, Salem Lights will be symbolized by the incandescent bulb, a  now historical form of lighting that produces a lot of heat, uses a lot of energy, costs the user a great deal more money, and burns out in a couple of years. Any member of Salem Lights will be required to use incandescent bulbs as a matter of principle. After all, it is socialism that has brought us the energy saving fluorescent bulb followed by the LED bulb which stands for Lighting Every Democrat. Who do those socialists think they are imposing energy-saving devices on American patriotic citizens? If the incandescent bulb was good enough for Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison or even doubting Thomas, it is good enough for us.

            Norquist is careful not to link the new name to the failed campaign of Senator McCarthy who orchestrated his own quest (or is it quist?) in the early 1950’s to root our communism from American culture.”Communism,” says Norquist, “is not an issue. It is the insidious nature of socialism where people actually help each other. The more fortunate take care to make sure the less fortunate have a chance to succeed. It’s more subtle than communism and less obvious but becoming so pervasive we are almost at a point of no return. Imagine a world where no longer may the rich get richer and the poor be damned. Socialism is deceitful in that it feels so natural and yet we know it is an abomination. So what if Jesus practiced it. There is no mention of socialism in the Bible. Therefore, it is the work of the devil.”

            Now that we have shed some light on what Salem Lights is all about, why not go out and buy a pack of cigarettes by that name and celebrate your new-found freedom from government coercion and re-submit your psyche to the control of private enterprise. After all, isn’t the tobacco industry a more trustworthy repository of goodness than the U.S. government?  Must USA come to mean United Socialists of America?       

Banana Republican

            Facts seldom matter in the United States. Perception produced by spin has become the fabric of our lives. A tweet is currency, unlike an essay: it not only gets to the point, it is the point because it is pointed and flies like an arrow. Give a zinger, and don’t linger. In God We Trust. 

            Obama lost the first debate not only because his energy was low; he lost it because he succumbed to factuality. The problem with an incumbent is that he goes through a metamorphosis during his first term. He starts out as a butterfly, all colorful and full of light. By the time four years are up he has transformed into a dung beetle. All the crap of his presidency is dragged out into the open for all to see, rolled up into a ball, and attached to him with a chain. He can deliver slivers of reality all he wants, but the public is already gawking at a new butterfly full of promises.

            The new butterfly, Mitt Romney, is all silver and gold, except for his face, which is bronze. He twinkles and flits from position to position like a butterfly in a flower garden.  He is a creature above it all, far out of reach of any political iguana with a sharp tongue. You get the impression from his post-debate campaign that he somehow spoke truth to pretense and pummeled defenseless Obama with fact after fact until the President stood listless on the podium at Magness Arena. For someone who never found success in sports, Romney sure looked agile.

            The truth is Magness Arena should be renamed Madness Arena after Romney’s brazen use of weapons of mass deception and Obama’s apparent shock that Romney dared to use them on prime time television. It was rope-a-dope time with Mitt transforming from mere butterfly to spider in butterfly disguise threading the stage with so much supply-side spin Obama became a rapt wrapper – just another suit.

            Now Romney is pro-abortion. At the debate he was suddenly pro-regulation. By the end of his campaign he will have had so many pros and cons the American public will finally conclude he is nothing but a PROfessional CON-artist.  But no: The American public is so gullible, so emotional, so star-struck by anything that glitters it will embrace the face and ignore the truth. This brazen-faced butterfly Romney just may land in the White House, not because he has a coherent philosophy or plan.

             Politics is really a form of professional wrestling (ask Linda McMahon of Connecticut) where the candidates dress up in gaudy platitudes and promises and do battle on a stage. The guy who looks the best at the end wins, never mind how many real blows he lands.

            America is essentially becoming a banana republic in so many ways, not the least of which is signaled by the growing divide between rich and poor. That so many in the 47 percent could vote for a man who writes them off suggests just how irrational America is.  Tea Partier is an inappropriate name for them. Banana Republican is much better.     

            Here’s a definition of a Banana Republican: a person who is duped into voting against his own interests either by himself or by somebody else. He may be a member of the Tea Party or just some uninformed voter who cannot or will not separate the facts from the chaff. He may be a billionaire or a pauper. What he does not understand is that Democrats have presided over the greatest increases in both the stock market and the main street market over the last 80 years. Republicans have presided over none.* He fails to understand that we are all better off when we are all better off.

            Let’s face it. If you sit in front of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News and absorb the high calorie-low nutrition political diet they feed you, you will vote against your self-interest. It’s as simple as that. Big Brother Rush is in your head, in your gut, not Big Government or Big Bird.  If there is any trickle down dynamic going on out there in America, it is trickle-down self-deception. 

* See The Economist: Buttonwood: “Voting with the wallet” October 6, 2012

Mitt Romney: Automobile

            Mitt Romney’s father made cars and ran for president. Mitt, it turns out, IS an automobile. Granted, he is tireless and doesn’t absorb bumps well like most cars, but he does offer a host of features that are remarkable.

            For example, the Mitt does not require you to select a color. It is a mechanical chameleon capable of changing colors as it goes. If you are feeling bright and sunny and want to project warmth, you simply have to reflect that feeling and your new Mitt will turn red or orange depending on whether or not you are in Florida, where oranges are popular or Vermont where the leaves turn bright red in autumn. However, the default color is white to reflect both the slimming but still majority of the U.S. population as well as the aura of innocence and purity.

            Another feature of the Mitt is that it can change direction on a dime. One minute it can be cruising along a route that is straight and narrow and suddenly you find your Mitt making a turn and heading in a direction quite different from the one you expected. It has a kind of creative GPS and route program that shifts without notice but adapts to the environment and circumstances of the moment. In other words, the Mitt may ride hard over bumps but it slithers along reading the landscape and adapting to what it sees as efficiency and expediency. It may run roughshod over lower orders of life such as American workers and big birds, but it does have the capacity to carry caged canines on its roof.

            The Mitt is a handsome car but rather expensive. It requires millions of dollars to keep it running and can only operate on high octane dollars from crude sources. Fortunately, it has a fuel injection system directly into its tank from nearly all the major oil companies, so it never has to worry about running out of fuel.

            You may not have ever heard of a car running for president, but let me remind you that it is not the first machine to run. Back in the 1920s we had a Hoover win an election, and we all know what happened with that result. It really sucked.

  

           

Of Fences and Offenses

            Last night my wife and I experienced the privilege of opening night at the Space Theatre for August Wilson’s Fences, his Pulitzer and Tony Award winning play about a black former baseball player whose dream of playing in the majors never gets a chance. In fact, if he is the Jackie Robinson who never made it to the big time it is mainly because he spent his prime in prison. After prison and long past his biological window for baseball success, he eventually settles for a job as a garbage collector for the city of Pittsburgh, the setting for all of Wilson’s plays. As the play unfolds we learn Troy is fighting to become the first black driver of a Pittsburgh garbage truck rather than remain confined to being a mere garbage can handler at the back of the truck.

            As with all of Wilson’s plays racism serves as the fuse that burns slowly through the early stages but inevitably what must ignite is more universal human dynamite, the measuring stick of all great literature. Wilson is no playfully punning Frost whose narrator in “Mending Wall” challenges his neighbor’s adage “good fences make good neighbors” by asking what they are walling in or walling out as they restore the rocks that have been “frost-heaved” and tumbled from a stone wall that separates their properties:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

                Wilson’s protagonist is named Troy implying he is capable of catastrophic, large-scale destruction... including self-destruction. He is of classic scale, larger than life, orbiting somewhere between Loman and Lear.  From the beginning we see him strutting around in front of his dilapidated house within what is the beginning of a new wooden picket fence that he adds to on weekends during most of the play. As his humiliation of working at the back of the garbage truck is relieved by his promotion to driver, so is his humanity diminished by the  appetite for more that blossoms unchecked into selfishness and grandiosity at the hands of an unstoppable charismatic “de-fenceless” ego let loose by even a small success. He is now in the driver’s seat, so off he goes. He lacks the self-discipline to manage his new power and freedom constructively and lets it run on a path to self-destruction and isolation. There is no fence to hold him. We need fear the fences of our own making more than those imposed.

                Meanwhile, he prevents his youngest son Corey from having the chance to use sports, in this case football, to make his mark and go to college ostensibly because Troy wants to protect him from the pain of being denied fulfillment of that dream. In reality, Troy himself refuses to recognize that his own behavior, not racism, was instrumental in his failure to become a major league baseball player. So he builds a fence around Corey consisting of various interventions that prevent him from fulfilling his dream. Troy cannot stand the thought of either son transcending his own garbage-collecting station in life. That’s how selfish Troy is.

                The final expression of this selfishness loses the affection and devotion of his wife when he announces he is having a child with another woman. His excuses are all self-serving and add to the fence he has built walling himself out of a meaningful life. He ends up essentially friendless, wifeless, and fellow workerless by having moved to the driver’s seat of the garbage truck his life has become.

                The message is we become our enemy. Frost was on to something.  We may think we are walling in when we are walling out and giving everyone offence (a fence). At the end of the play Corey returns home in a Marine corporal’s uniform but he is still giving power to his chief oppressor, his father, who is now dead and about to be buried. His mother, half- brother, and even his young half-sister gradually break down his defenses little by little and take apart the fences he has built that still allow him to be his father’s prisoner. He is finally freed to attend his father’s funeral and bury not only his father but the legacy of anger and hatred his lineage has so adamantly maintained for generations. He is free at last from the bondage of others but especially the bondage of self.     

                What made this production especially great was the very high level of acting across the stage throughout the play. All the characters were believable, wonderfully human, and flawlessly represented.  For a first show or even a seasoned production, the details were exquisitely refined.

                I will not soon forget this production, and I will never look at a fence the same again.         

              

The Truth about the Tea Party

            The great disadvantage of an incumbent today is that facts are available. President Obama has a very public record of his presidency; Romney does not. In a nation that embraces facts only when they are convenient, the candidate with the most reality attached is at a distinct disadvantage.  The most glaring reality available today is an 8.3% unemployment rate. It is the albatross that weighs Obama down.

            Never mind the fact the Tea Party was created as soon as Obama arrived in the White House. Made to look like a grass roots movement, it was funded and orchestrated from the beginning by the likes of David Koch, an American oil baron, who, among others, was not about to let a pragmatic black man run the show. Even though Obama inherited the worst economic mess since the 1930’s, the very people who created the mess would quickly use the artificially inseminated grass roots trick called the Tea Party to make sure Obama’s solutions would not work. By installing Tea Party candidates in the House by 2010, the blockade was successfully erected. No further Keynesian solutions would be allowed. The “market” would be restored as mover and shaker and this uppity community organizer out of the wrong side of Chicago would be thwarted and neutered.

            What the Tea Party has been taught to fear more than anything is a powerful government. If government could actually succeed in reversing all the damage done by bubble and bust laissez-faire capitalism on the loose, the high stakes games played by the fast and loose players on Wall Street and the corporate big guys like Koch would be curtailed. They no longer would be able to generate bubbles as large and profitable as they once had.

            Meanwhile, thanks to voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News brainwashers, the lowly soldiers of the Tea Party are convinced that their self-interests are the same as the Wall Street gamers and corporate giants and that government is the problem. The truth is corporations such as Wal-Mart and Target have had a much greater negative impact on small businesses throughout the country than government ever could.  And yet the small businessman has been taught to see big business as a big brother rather than his destroyer. Unlike the unemployment statistic, there is no comparable index that measures the job or small business loss through Big Box economic oligarchy.

            The dimming myth of the American Dream is kept alive by the same trick that gets statistically impaired people to buy lottery tickets. You, too, can be a winner. All you have to do is play. Target and Wal-Mart are simply the current winners. Your turn is just around the corner. With hard work and a little luck, your business can become another Home Depot. The only thing that stands in your way is…government. That’s like blaming the referee for your winless or mediocre season.

            Let’s call Big Box stores Big Boxers. In the sport of boxing there are weight classes. The heavyweights do not box the bantamweights. In capitalism it’s a free-for-all where all weight classes are in the same arena, small businesses and large. The only hope for the small business is that a heavyweight does not come to town and pummel the lightweight with prices and variety it cannot possibly match.

            The American Dream was once most broadly alive during the Eisenhower administration when taxes on the rich were about 90%. Employment was high, home ownership was on the rise, and the difference between the wages of the average worker and the CEO were about what they are in Japan today: CEOs made twenty times what the average worker made.  Today,  a president, who is labeled a socialist by today’s extreme right (the Tea Party folks), is actually right of Eisenhower in relative conservatism. But the American public has been sitting in the ever increasingly conservative cauldron for the last three decades like the frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water and failing to notice that their American Dream is dying a slow death.

            It is time to wake up, America, to the truth. Stop being true believers shaped by Wall Street and big business. They are pursuing their self-interests, not yours. And their self-interests have become all-powerful. Your only hope is a more powerful referee, not the absence of one.