So Close and Yet So Far

             In Greek mythology Tantalus was condemned to be eternally kept out of reach of plump, luscious fruit dangling overhead. The fruit was tantalizingly close, a situation that spawned the word “tantalize.” Today, we can get all the fresh fruit we want any time of year at Whole Foods, so it’s never a matter of being denied in 21^st Century America if you have the means.  We can also gather all sorts of “friends” on Facebook and tweet to our heart’s content, staying in touch with hundreds of our most tweetable friends.

            Rather than host “at homes” or “tea” for our short list of intimate friends and family as was popular in Victorian times, we seem to find ways to hide from each other in plain sight.  Any packed Starbuck’s Coffee House at any time of day or night will easily display a group of 30 or so folks busily engaged with their iPads, iPhones, or laptops even while seated at the same table with no contact whatsoever with the person most proximate. We have created the illusion of being social butterflies while wrapping our actual lives in technological cocoons. We have become politicians with constituents rather than friends with genuine face-to-face connectedness and intimacy.

            The art of conversation has been lost to “what’s on your mind” postings or tweets rather than real discussion. The polarization of the country has been accomplished because civil discourse has gone the way of the parlor and the dining room. They are vestigial aspects of a former humanity left in the dust by our unwary eagerness to embrace handy tools as ends in themselves. Words were once tools; now they are ammunition, fired at will, blasted out at the world from a vacuous void of thought at distance.

            Investment bankers now sit in front of computer screens and play the stock market with billions of dollars nano-seconds at a clip. It has nothing to do with “investing,” which by definition implies a long term commitment.  It is playing computerized pinball with the world economy so that a few make billions in seconds while the consequences to national economies have been and will continue to be devastating.    

            We even fight wars at a distance so remote, thanks to the technology of drones, that former fighter pilots now sit in offices with computers directing their drones to destroy enemy targets as if war is nothing more than a video game played for real stakes. 

            Our nation’s obesity epidemic is not just the product of too many calories: it is the result of the loss of real human contact and intimacy that technology has enabled. We are starved for the socially fulfilling harvest of real face-to-face relationships instead of Facebook “friending;” the return of slow food family dinners in the dining room; the restoration of neighbors stopping by the front porch to chat; and the Woodstockian reunion of the republic of the United States of America.  

            Our infrastructure has cocooned us in gated communities without neighborhoods, automobiles rather than mass transportation, and rugged individualism rather than cooperation. The higher fruit of a true civilization is just out of reach, and we have put it there by making lesser fruits into gods. Those lesser fruits are full of sugar and have no sustenance. They are full of empty calories that sustain nothing more than empty lives.    

            There is nothing wrong with the technology, per se, it is how we use it and what we expect from it that is profoundly wrong. Perhaps our abuse is a reflection of our overweening emphasis on liberty, rugged individualism, and the culture of “me,” lies that serve as protections against having to look into the face of the other and see the loneliness that we feel.

               

           

Supreme Court Stimulus Package

            Just when you thought free speech had nothing to do with money, the U.S. Supreme Court, or at least part of it, has upheld the right of corporations to spend freely and secretly on political ads even in Montana. You see Montana has tried to keep corporations from having influence on politics ever since the copper mining industry indulged in purchasing votes and politicians about 100 years ago.  However, in the name of free speech, the Supreme Court has kept the corporate political influence geyser blowing money all over Montana.    

            

            While the robed but not hooded court (the conservative 5/9ths of it) has given the go-ahead to Arizona to detain any Latino living in the state who is caught jaywalking until he or she can prove legitimate presence in the state, it has denied Montana the right to prevent undue political influence peddling by corporations in the name of free speech. Who says the court is foolishly consistent. Apparently you can pay for votes indirectly, just not directly. And apparently if you are Latino, you are guilty until you are proven innocent. The big guys in Montana get a bye (or buy), and the little guy who speaks English with an accent gets detained. It’s a neat trick. Big guys get protected; little guys get persecuted.

            The good thing about the political ads on television is that conservatives are pouring millions of dollars into the economy just in time to stimulate it for President Obama’s benefit. As the U.S. economy expands in spite of the European Union’s struggles because of this extraordinary mid-summer stimulus, the U.S. economy will begin looking better and better. 

            Of course no corporations will look at the money pouring into political ads as stimulus. All they can see is the defeat of that socialist/Muslim President Obama, which brings me to comment on that confusing label. Obama can be a Muslim OR a socialist, but not both. Have you ever heard of a socialist Muslim? It’s an oxymoron. The fact is, he is neither, but that does not stop conservatives of one sort or another throwing out labels that contradict each other.

            Ironically, all of that unintended stimulus money will fulfill the Keynesian promise that stimulus, not austerity, will restore the American economy, and it will be funded by none other than the folks who believe just the opposite. That’s an even neater trick.

The Absolute: Ideal Cover for the Dissolute

         Football, the stock market, and the Catholic Church are three examples of ideas that have become cultural holy grails worshiped and revered by loyal fans and followers in America. The most successful in those arenas become heroes and even idols, especially when they profess to represent goodness as well as greatness.
       What we forget is that our institutions are human constructs and are therefore imperfect. When we trust them as if they were absolutes, we put ourselves and especially our most vulnerable at risk. The most respected and revered examples of those institutions affiliated with our most revered ideas become the ideal cover for those who would harm us.
      Penn State was one of the most respected and revered college football programs in the nation. It stood for tradition, integrity, hard work, excellence, and success. Penn State players graduated in high numbers; they generally behaved themselves much better than most; and they played for one of the most revered and respected coaches in the land: Joe Paterno. Jerry Sandusky used that institutional reverence as part of the cover for his pedophilia.
      The most famous Ponzi schemer in the history of the United States, Bernie Madoff, lured many a believer into his scheme because he maintained the appearance of the consummate exclusive, successful, investment manager who produced fantastic results, literally. He became an institution of one that attracted true believers because he was able to sustain for a very long time a charismatic god-like image that provided the perfect cover for his deceit. It is blind faith in the “goodness through growth” of the market system that gave cover to Bernie Madoff’s scam.
       And most egregiously, the Catholic Church continues to cover for what is turning out to be countless pedophiles among its clergy.
       In all three examples the perpetrators used other people’s blind faith in institutions and in ideas as their cover. Therefore, our most cherished beliefs can make us immune to any notion that anything untoward could possibly exist in conjunction with the purity our minds insist on seeing. We fall prey to absolutes because they provide the false but enticing clarity of black and white in the face of a gray world.
      But ultimately it is hope distilled into faith that is our greatest liability as human beings. We get intellectually lazy in some aspect of our lives and begin to rely on faith rather than judgment. We “decide” to stop thinking and simply trust. We transform a part of our relative lives into some sort of absolute. It is comforting for a time, but inevitable reality intrudes. More often than not we choose belief over fact because we are, as humans, foolishly consistent even in the face of change.
       As D.H. Lawrence says, in Studies in Classic American Literature, “Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.” In fact, we make gods of all sorts of things to let ourselves off the hook. Except for sociopaths and psychopaths, who represent a small percentage of the world’s population, we know right from wrong. We learn it by all sorts of means, but we learn it. We continue to learn it throughout life and we act on it regularly when the costs are low. It is when the costs are high, when the power of evil masquerading as goodness is great that we more often than not fail to act. That is why true heroes are rarer than diamonds, and why human evolution is so very slow.
      Maybe rapidly evolving technology will enable us to hold ourselves and others more accountable than has happened in the past. Equipping the whole world with cell phones and cameras may give us the means of capturing more of reality moment by moment and lay waste the cover our hallowed institutions have provided those who would harm. But all the accurate exposure in the world will have little effect if we do not stop making gods out of our own sloth and intellectual resignation or faith out of hope.

Romneybus

Mitt Romney will go down in history, way down in history, as the presidential candidate who strapped the family setter to the roof of the family station-wagon. It turns out Romney himself is strapped to the roof of a busload of extremist interest groups whose support he needs to secure the Republican nomination. They really don’t like Romney because he is not pure enough for their causes, but he is the last man standing in the GOP race to recapture the presidency. And yet he’s still the outsider. He is the dog on the roof. To the evangelical Christian right he’s the Mormon who has too many books in his bible and too many grandmothers in his ancestry. To the fiscal conservatives he’s the guy who brought Obamacare to Massachusetts and gave Obama the blueprint for Obamacare. To blue collar conservatives he is too rich and aloof. To Tea Party purists his record is too liberal no matter how much he promises he will be the Hoover (the vacuum cleaner, not the former president) of government waste. He can ride on the roof of the Republican omnibus, but he’ll never be one of them. He will remain aloof on the roof. Thanks to the media monopoly of Rupert Murdoch and the braying of right wing pundits and commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, both of whom have been in hot water recently for questionable behavior towards victims of injustice, the blue collar masses will be continue to be badgered, brainwashed, and buffaloed into believing that right wing positions on the economy, on government, on everything are the way to economic and spiritual salvation for both the country and themselves. Instead, they will see only a greater and greater divide between rich and poor. It’s all a cruel hoax. They can’t quite fathom it, so they keep Romney at a distance outside their cramped rows of sorry seats, up on the roof. There is no better symbol for that distance between rich and poor than Mitt Romney on the roof of the conservative omnibus. He is noticeable and aloft, pretending to be in charge, but barely tolerated and relegated to a place where excess baggage is sometimes consigned. He looks like a shivering pedigreed setter rather than a greyhound. He is not the driver; he is the driven.

Rush to Oblivion

The Republican candidates for president, the Tea Party congress people, and their Murdoch-appointed public whips are rapidly alienating and igniting such a large segment of the heretofore apathetic liberal and moderate base of the American people, particularly women, it will be a wonder if there is anything left of the neo-conservative movement by November. In attempting to pinpoint and lock-in their so-called moral compass, they have managed to convince America they are nothing more than male chauvinist pigs in the usual guise of moral leaders. They are nothing more than a malevolent version of “Father Knows Best.”
It was and is one thing to attack the legitimacy of the first President of the United States of African ancestry by insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that he was born in Kenya. It was and is another thing to pass along a racist anti-Obama joke from the U.S. Judiciary in Montana and then to apologize for it; but to attack women the way Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum and even Mitt Romney have of late has made this former independent voter more fervently committed to the re-election of President Obama. Obama has been attacked on the basis of race or origin repeatedly throughout his entire first term by all sorts of right wing attackers from Rush to Sherriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona presumably because either they do not believe some island state of Hawaii peopled by brown folks could possibly get a birth certificate right or because it must be a forgery.
Thanks to the creation of the Tea Party by the Koch brothers et al, the Republican Party has principled itself to the edge of oblivion. Its red-with-rage true color has shown through loud and clear during this presidential primary to the point that it has nowhere to go but in retreat back toward the middle of the political spectrum in the future, if it can wrest it away from the democrats. Olympia Snowe’s decision to leave the Senate because of her party’s ideological rigidity and refusal to compromise or reach across the aisle to find common ground with the opposition has paralyzed politics in America. Meanwhile, Obama, labeled a socialist by the right, has moved deftly to the center during his first term to occupy what might have been held by the Republicans had they not drunk the cool-aid of ultra-conservative orthodoxy stirred by the likes of Grover Norquist, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh, financed by the Koch brothers, and marketed by Rupert Murdoch.
George Will is already suggesting that the Republicans will likely lose the presidential election no matter who is nominated this round. He compares this moment with one back in 1964 when Goldwater clearly was going to lose his election. But if pundits and even politicians from the right continue to call women sluts, African-Americans illegitimate welfare seekers, and brown people illegal, there can never be any civil discourse let alone a renewal of real civic mindedness.
However, Will is counting on stopping Obama in congress where the Republicans can continue to block him from significant success as they have during Obama’s first term. It’s the very strategy that has brought moderate Olympia Snowe to end her career in the senate.
There are seven things that must happen if the United States is to get moving again:
1. Yes, the national debt trajectory has to begin to reverse direction;
2. The widening gap between rich and poor, executive and worker pay, needs to be reversed;
3. Corporations need to become civic-minded in a sustainable way;
4. Regulation of business needs to serve the greater good, not just itself;
5. Manufacturing in the U.S. needs a stronger magnet or incentive;
6. Entitlements need reform to be sustainable;
7. Women and minorities should not be treated as subordinates, victims, or demons.
The notion set forth by conservatives that it all can be done with no increase in taxes is nonsense. The notion set forth by liberals that taxing the rich will solve the problem of funding entitlements is equally nonsense. Some sort of all-of-the-above approach is what will work if the ideologues will kindly get out of the way so that congress can get something done. Until we send the ideologues packing, nothing will. What this country needs more than anything is more Olympia Snowes and her democratic equivalents, not fewer.

GOP: DSI*

The price of gas is rising thanks to the number one GOP sponsor: the oil and gas industry. Thank goodness they have come to the rescue of the GOP just when it looked as if they were becoming issueless. Here it is still winter and the rumors are beginning to be marketed by industry analysts who dare to suggest that the rise is because summer is coming. Ha! Other factors mentioned are the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, a new European recession’s failure to materialize, and the U.S. recovery. The main factor, however, is the deliberate jacking up of prices by U.S. refiners.
All the other possible reasons for the current rise in price are just so much hogwash. The oil and gas industry wants a Republican in the White House so that it can return to the days of Dick Cheney and the free-for-all drilling that went on during the “W” administration, “W” standing for Windfall, not wind power. The industry wants to “frack” to its heart’s content without worrying about being convicted of damaging water supplies by being required to list the heretofore proprietary chemicals they use in the process. They want to drill-baby-drill on as many public lands as possible without consequence or responsibility and with maximum profit.
Republican candidates are now shifting their focus to gas prices as a way of criticizing the Obama administration for actually making the industry drill safely. In the name of job creation (temporary as it always is) and increasing supply (until the price of crude is so low it does not make economic sense to keep drilling), the GOP is now sounding the alarm to open up public lands for yet more drilling, even though we are already currently drilling and extracting on domestic soil at an all time high level….under the Obama administration.
What the industry fails to mention is how much water it takes to “frack,” the nickname given to hydraulic fracturing. Anywhere from 400,000 to a million gallons of water is required per well. In the East, where water is plentiful, water usage may not be a huge issue. However, in the West, where water is gold, using it to extract oil and gas is of questionable overall merit. Any true cost-benefit analysis would weigh the impact of water usage against the gain in energy and conclude that as water becomes increasingly scarce, its value for the maintenance of life itself transcends all other uses. After all, water is ultimately more important and valuable than oil and gas, for it is the primary source of life on this planet. Ramping up drilling, especially in the West, for the sake of rising gas prices is only a short term fix, not a long term solution.
Therefore, when you hear another GOP politician call for more unregulated drilling, have a glass of water. Given their plans, in the future it may begin to cost you as much for that glass of water as you are currently paying at the pump for a gallon of gas.

*Desperately Seeking Issues

Churchill Downs to Add Race on Derby Day

In an unprecedented move The Kentucky Derby Corporation has announced an addition to this year’s May 5th program: a quarter mile event featuring the Republican candidates for President of the United States.
The idea came about when one of the Derby stewards noticed that candidates “run” for office. Why not see who is actually the most fleet of foot on turf rather than in mouth? He actually meant “of mouth” as in who is the fastest talker but even stewards can make slips of the tongue, not just candidates.
So far two stable owners (or is that unstable owners since the candidates are not really stabled themselves), Sheldon Adelson and Foster Freiss, like the idea and have begun training their candidates in preparation for the big day. They embrace the notion of “running-the-run” which is a faster version of walk-the-walk. “Talking-the-talk has obviously gotten no candidate anywhere.” says Adelson, owner of Newt-Fortuit, that old but still randy stallion from Georgia. Freiss, owner of Santorum (which by itself sounds like the name of a thoroughbred), is eager to enter the dark horse from Pennsylvania who is so purely conservative some think he was immaculately foaled. After all, he is the youngest of the field and is more apt to receive the benefit of divine intervention given his lifelong purity of purpose.
One problem is getting Mitt-the-Fit to the gate. That high mileage, eternally frisky, fast-talking and directionless self-gelding is backed by a posse of “One-Percenters” from Wall Street to Beaver Creek even though he is rich enough to own himself and make his own decisions. And yet there is no telling which side of the track he’ll end up on given his propensity to drift from one lane to the next.
The other problem is Paul the Revered. This horse is as old as the Revolution. He is practically ready for the glue factory, and yet a certain segment of American youth reveres him because he wants to legalize drugs as part of his libertarian platform. He is not apt to add any drama to the race because as both a libertarian and septuagenarian he will set his own pace and to hell with the Derby stewards. He has no owner, no halter, and no saddle. He is so appallingly individualistic he would run his own race, make his own silver trophy, and award it to himself.
When asked if it would be all right to invite President Obama to participate, the owners of the Republican candidates protested that Obama was not qualified to enter because he had no clearly identified owners other than large aggregates of the American people.