Opinion-Columns.com

In Case You Missed It

In the avalanche of imagery that buries our daily memory of what’s happening in the world, you may have missed this picture of a Ukrainian man, crying in the great square of Kiev.

He’s in his sixties by the look of him, a working-man no doubt by the rough hands that gently hold flowers, as at a christening or funeral.

I know him.

He was here in Czechoslovakia in ’89 in the crowd on Wenseslas Square as the Iron Curtain came down---that same unmistakable look of heart-stopping wonderment that a man feels as he first sees a newborn son, bloody and dripping and squealing with life. Will he be okay? have all his fingers and toes? love me as I love him? Look again at the tear-washed face and see the bitterness and lost dreams of his six decade life tremble in the hands that hold the flowers.

The Czechs became free in ’89 and watched as freedom siphoned off their wealth to the same old power brokers over the next ten years, old commies and new mafia merely pushing different levers. But it was only wealth and wealth can be made again---it’s freedom can’t be manufactured and they have that in all the splendor of its inequity. Because freedom is meant to be inequitable, a shaking-off of what Churchill called communism’s right for all men to be equally destitute.

Kiev---Prague---Budapest---names from storybooks, lands of our fathers, roots of our American nation.

We see many Ukrainians here in the Czech Republic---mostly they are our builders---smoking cigarettes and buttering mortar on bricks like jam on bread, sending their money home to a country the Russians just won’t let go. Ukrainian doctors and lawyers and university professors up on those scaffolds, working for the lowest wages in an already low-wage country because there is nothing at home in Ukraine.

But now, in the great square in Kiev, in the tear-streaked face of the man holding flowers, you see the crack in the iron that has held Ukraine to Russia. Leonard Cohen tells us “there is a crack, a crack, in everything---that’s where the light comes in.” If you look closely at the other faces in the crowd behind this man, they’re younger and they’re sober and serious but they don’t have the rapturous look of a miracle at hand. That belongs to him and now it belongs to you and to me if we take a moment to hold it in our minds---not let it slip away among the Christmas images---maybe even bow our heads for a moment to one man’s hope.

A Great Idea Long Past Due

Robert Reich has a hell of an idea. Bob’s a bright guy, great company in a fishing boat and one of my favorite friends to have over for dinner.

Okay, I confess I don’t really know him personally, but if he was in a fishing boat you’d love his banter and maybe he’ll come to dinner one day and become my instant favorite. It’s possible---he was awarded the Vaclav Havel Vision Foundation prize for “pioneering work in economic and social thought” in 2003 and I live in the Czech Republic. That makes Vaclav and me almost neighbors, although he doesn’t come for dinner either.

Reich, at a recent conference, made the outrageously brilliant suggestion that college loans be funded differently from what they are (see article).  We seem to be the only advanced country in the world that gives so little encouragement to university education and yet makes it such an inescapable entry requirement to a good job. That puts a huge burden on kids and their families. Worse, in Reich’s view, it steers students into the necessity of taking high paying jobs at the expense of what they might otherwise choose if the loans weren’t so big.

How can you choose to teach or work in small-town America with $50-100,000 hanging over your head? Who can become a journalist, an artist or small businessman with such a load to carry? Not bloody many.

Reich’s idea is to establish a student-loan program (he suggests graduate school only) where the loans provided would be paid back by a small percentage of after-college salaries over a ten to fifteen year period. No matter the salary, all would pay the same percentage. Thus, presuming a $50,000 loan and a 7% repayment percentage (the figures are mine, not Reich’s), a lawyer grad at a big firm earning $80,000 would pay $466 a month and a teacher making $28,000 would cough up $163. Both of them pay the same number of years and the proceeds go into the program for re-lending.

How do you sell an idea like that to the big firm lawyer? On the basis of fairness. It’s fair, perhaps the fairest idea ever conceived, to encourage the educated to follow their hearts and idealisms into their working lives after university. Like most of the great ideas in the world, this one isn’t fully developed and the chances are it will be niggled to a still-birth. But it’s a great concept and as government increasingly cuts back on student support at all levels, we need some great concepts. Check out his web site.

Dinner is usually about eight, Bob.

…as Harry used to say

“It’s amazing what you can get accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.” That was Harry Truman, who accomplished a great deal of legislation within a hostile congress, with no mandate at all. Holding up the famous Chicago Tribune “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, Harry grinned that wide grin. But he knew damned well that a razor-thin victory required a certain amount of humility.

What we have today in similar un-mandated circumstances is hubris. Both words begin with “hu” and other than that are worlds, decades and presidencies apart.

Dennis Hastert, current Speaker of the House, carrying on in the reckless tradition of Newt Gingrich, disavowed credit sharing in favor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Bathwater, in the current lexicon of the House, is all Democratic members. The baby in this case was the much-needed intelligence reform legislation on the floor of the House. Hastert threw baby and bathwater directly into the face of his president. The bill could easily have been passed with minimal (and willing) participation by House Democrats but Hastert declined to bring it to a vote until he could assure a Republican-only victory. Why? Hubris. Because he could, which is the same reason Newt Gingrich gave for impeaching Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, badly needed legislation is held up and in turn holds up the necessary processes that follow. Congress will be late getting to a piece of work it could have had done with and, knowing the machinations of legislation delayed, the final bill may have additional teeth pulled by compromise. Thanks, Dennis. There’s been a leakage of hubris within the presidential coterie and some of it got on Dennis Hastert. I hate when that happens!

Every failure of character has its origins in some form of public humiliation. At least that’s my take on it. Bullied by fathers or picked on in the school yard, scorned by lovers or faced down in saloons, men become character-flawed. It’s the same for institutions and the increasingly vicious tone of politics (I believe) comes from the Republican institutional humiliations under Nixon and the embarrassment of Watergate. Throw in a generous dash of Vietnam.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency was over too quickly for the long knives to assemble themselves and Republicans didn’t see a Democrat in the Oval Office for another twelve years. Like the bullied child, they had only memories but that was enough and the trashing of Bill Clinton was far more about Watergate than Travelgate, Whitewatergate or Monica. When George Bush was seated as president, most of us thought the feud between the Martins and Coys was finally at rest---the Republicans held the presidency and both houses of congress.

Not so, not to be. This administration in everything it touches lashes out against remembered humiliation. The Republican party of today knows no healing and now seems bent upon writhing against itself. 

What Drives The Poverty Rate

The poverty rate was up for the third year in a row, according to 2003 records and that included almost thirteen million children. Walking the dog this evening along my snowy, moonlit mountain road I pondered just what it is that drives the poverty rate. Outsourced jobs and the third-world pay rates of McDonalds and Wal-Mart are too easy an answer. We’ve always had shit jobs at the bottom of the ladder. What for the most part has lifted the gifted among the poor has always been reasonably good health and education. That’s where desire comes from---from not being chronically sick and knowing there are other options beyond what you see in your neighborhood.

So, it’s strange to me that we as a nation continue to close down and nail over two of our most basic freedoms---staying healthy and getting an education---combined they are the fuel that runs our economic engine. The crunch of snow under my boots kept me free of considering the human issues behind all this. Humanity is hard to ignore by the warmth of a fire, but easy enough to set aside in the chill winter wind of reality-walks with my Labrador. Nothing like cold to clear the mind.

On the health issue, it seems to me in embracing the egalitarian concept of cat-scan access for all, we’ve accepted the impossibility of basic medical care for all citizens. I believe that’s hypocrisy at its most dangerous and fearsome. Health “insurance” is a vastly different concept than national health care. Insurance implies the ability to pay and the moving target of costs is currently $9,000 annually (and rising) for a family of four. Not an option unless your employer foots the bill or you’re well enough off to come up with nine grand in discretionary income. Thus 45 million Americans are uninsured---the bottom 45 mil and that impacts their chances of moving up (or anywhere). We oughta stop arguing and provide basic, uncomplicated, keep-you-from-dying-in-the-street national health care for everyone and insurance for those who can afford cat-scans.

As for education, in the fifty years since I left high school we’ve turned primary education (at least in the cities) into extended day-care. Discipline is gone, civility is gone as well and we face the conundrum of the worst primary and finest university systems in the world. We used to have the best of both, but pissed away the former. College is no longer a practical option except for the wealthy. Thus the 45 million Americans who are uninsured are pretty much the same 45 million prevented from university education.

Not because they’re not smart.

As we made the turn and I whistled the dog back, I looked out across this sleepy little mountain village and wondered if it suits our national dream to keep it so. Are the decision-makers among us content to keep thirteen million children from dreaming dreams? Worse yet, do the decision-makers among us think they have no dreams?

Crunching the last 200 yards home, I glanced up and looked at the house, it’s windows aglow, a friend up from Prague and a turkey in the oven. I thought about the life that brought me here, the constantly changing scene of friends who grace our home and the myriad influences on my life that shape my thought. I have missed many opportunities, done a bunch of things the wrong way and yet among my 260 million American compatriots there are 45 million who walk a different dog, one that at any moment may show the teeth of ignorance , disease or dreams never dreamed. It’s Thanksgiving and I’m not sure I’ve ever celebrated with such mixed thoughts about my advantage. I stomp my feet, hang up my coat, smell the dinner smells and glance approvingly at the fire in the fireplace.

And once again I am reminded that I haven’t moved away from my country so much as it is moving away from me.

It’s Not Always “Better Late Than Never”

Alan Greenspan is warning us now about the dangers of the growing deficit, when three years ago he supported the Bush giveaway of trillions to the rich. Uh huh, way to go Alan. Similarly, but in a different arena, Colin Powell caved in as the one remaining voice of reason in the Bush cabinet when he went along with the assessments of Iraq as a threat to our safety.

Both men knew they were shitting in the wind, yet both went right ahead and sold their integrity down the river. Now Powell will no doubt write a book about how hard he fought against the forces of evil within the administration and it will be a best-seller. Greenspan will console himself about the coming financial meltdown that he “warned the congress,” even though his warning came three years late and after an astonishing loss of courage over the tax cut issue.

“What could I do?” they will whine, “it’s all so complicated and no one but me knows what I’m up against.”

For starters (although it’s time now only for enders) they could have each stood up to the moral test of telling their country what they know to be right, when it’s personally painful and when a resignation might be the only way to underline the importance of a stand.

That takes guts.

The Army PFC who should have stood his ground and refused the order to mistreat prisoners is mirrored at the very top, by a general who became a diplomat and still felt the military binds to obey his “commander-in-chief.” If that PFC goes to jail and is dishonorably discharged for a “moral failure,” what is the appropriate judgment for Colin Powell, who’s moral failure penetrates the very core of his honor? Yet he will write that book, it will sell like hotcakes and he will make inspiring pronouncements about how difficult is the world of diplomacy. That’s crap, Colin.

The new guy on the desk at Price-Waterhouse or (name your favorite sleaze-firm) who cuts a corner here or delays a sale there to advantage his client or himself---and goes to jail for it, is mirrored at the very top by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve who cuts some slack for a tax break he knows to be injurious.  A man who mumbles about “bubbles’ but never points out the one about to burst. Yet we revere this man and stand in awe of his incomprehensible language before Senate committees. That’s crap as well, Alan.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. That’s a Mark Twain quote and, like so many of his words, bears a constancy of truth that is timeless. It’s no wonder that the courage and conviction of our founders is so greatly revered and little enough wonder that our present-day leaders so thirst after that reputation. They talk about their  “legacy” in an age of expedience. The fact is each man, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan alike, had the opportunity to stand in honor and both men knelt instead to expedience.

A fact does not cease to exist because it is ignored.

They Became a Political Power the Old-Fashioned Way, They Worked For It

Interesting bit from my regular Wednesday e-mail delivery of  The Weekly Spin:

The Center for Media and Democracy's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton write, "Republican successes have not come quickly or easily. For more than four decades, conservatives have worked to build a network of grassroots organizations and think tanks that formulate and promote their ideas. They are now enjoying the fruits of this long-term investment." The right wing "has simply done a better job than anyone else of organizing from the grassroots up. This isn't because their ideas are more popular or palatable - they aren't - but because the right has been serious and strategic in its commitment to winning and wielding power."

That's already underway in a fashion with John Podesta's fledgling Center For American Progress think tank. But it's early days in this four-decade catch up.

The message, I suppose, is that our republic needs a constancy of nourishment from all points of view and responds not at all to a frantic realization of what  we have come to be as a nation. There are many messages here, from how the civil rights movement died of starvation after King's assassination to the emergence of the radical religious right as a political power.

Time to stop agonizing and get back to the business of democracy---time to get down to the work---the necessary work---it's catch-up time.

All This Red and Blue Crap

Yeah, not supposed to use that kind of language if your vocabulary’s above about 5^th grade, but sometimes a word is a word is a word. Crap perfectly describes my attitude toward those who have suddenly found it fashionable to divide my country up like a poorly-made quilt.

We’ve always been a divided country and thank-god for it, it’s our greatest strength. Without division, how is intellectual, spiritual and economic growth possible? The best current example of what happens without division is the cancerous growth of Wal-Mart and, now that we’re growing tired of Sam Walton as a low-wage icon, it’s division that will bring changes. Division is the point-man of American change. Let’s celebrate.

Yet it pains me to see maps of my country red-and-blued. For one thing, it’s an Electoral-College coloring rather than an accurate indication of electorate mind-set. The electorate, the common terminology for a widely disparate mass of individuals, all with differing needs, desires and aspirations, has a lot of things on their collective minds when they touch that screen or pull that crank. Chances are, few of them vote with a high degree of enthusiasm for any candidate. A middle class soccer-mom who cringes at the thought of gay marriage, may have a nephew in Iraq and hate the thought of all the guns on the street. She may well touch the Republican screen, but don’t tell me she’s totally comfortable with that choice. She’s divided within herself, as we all are if we have a working brain. Her sister, the one with the son in Iraq, may or may not have voted Democrat within their “red” state, but the chances are that this mindless coloring of nuance is keeping them from discussing the candidates---and there’s the rub.

The old advice to never discuss religion or politics is un-American at its core. We argue over sports teams and reality-TV, then shy away from talking about who’s doing what in Israel and why, or if national deficits are more dangerous than maxing our credit-cards. That’s wrong! We are a nation of arguers and are at our best when raising our voices.

So, I submit that it’s just plain silly to paint everyone in Mississippi red and California blue. I have friends in both states, friends who are multi-agenda thinkers and who from time to time have voted for candidates in either party. They are approachable. Their minds are not set. They are no man’s coloring exercise. Abraham Lincoln was despised in the same south that supports George Bush and its intervening decades were solidly Democratic. So, what color do we paint that?

Changeable, I would guess.

That Horse Is Long Gone

Today’s lead Washington Post editorial, Arctic Thaw, reaffirms a point of view that has been meaningless for three decades, that moves must be made by the industrial world to slow, prevent and reverse global warming.

Sorry, globe, but that horse left the barn a way long time ago and what was once opportunity galloped away in hot pursuit.

Even the strictest enforcement of the Kyoto Protocols, which we as Americans don’t belong to anyway, would merely hope to freeze greenhouse gas production at turn-of-the-century levels and those levels are already melting the planet’s ice. So, we are left with the world as it is instead of the world as we would have it. No blame here, no shaking of fists, no screaming across police barriers, just a realization.

Those realizations are going to have a profound affect on nation-building and the real estate and building industry in all its forms. A new nation will certainly have to be constructed for Holland, a.k.a. the Dutch, a.k.a. the Netherlands as their nation becomes some of the best bass-fishing in Europe. The world population’s propensity for building cities along the shores of various oceans will have vast populations tippy-toeing to higher ground and thus the realtors will slap ‘ocean-front’ designations on properties upgraded from their old ‘ocean-view’ status. Florida will mostly just disappear and who can possibly deserve it more? Ditto Wall Street, Trump Tower and a thousand kosher delicatessens (the deli’s will be missed). All in good fun and profits to be made, so we’ll learn to cope and roll with the punches.

A punch not so easy to roll with is the inundation of seawater way, way, way upstream in most of the world’s important rivers and the corresponding overpowering of a large percentage of freshwater aquifers. Agricultural resources may be halved.

George Carlin once said “I’m tired of all this bitching about the planet being in trouble. The planet is not in trouble, the planet is just fine. People are in trouble.” And of course George is absolutely right. That line, which once brought a sort of gotcha-moment of revelation, now brings sort of an oops-look and oops, as we all know, is the past tense of oh-my-god-I-think-I’m-about-to (spill this coffee, drop this ice cream cone, get really wet feet).  Anyway, too late to close this barn door.

It all happened on someone else’s watch, during someone else’s presidency and in the endlessly current quarters of someone else’s annual report. It had more scientists shouting and pointing, more experts witnessing and giving testimony and more Greenpeacers driving up and down the oceans in inflatable boats than the public memory could hold in its excitable mind. And thus it became that dreary old scolding with which we soon became impatient. But it’s nice to see the Washington Post drag it out again and put it at the head of their editorial page.

Kind of like waving flags at an army long departed.

I’m Irresponsible, Give Me Money!

We all have our favorites to trot out at cocktail parties (does anyone actually have those anymore?) but this will do for the moment, from today’s Washington Post:

HELENA, Mont. -- The parents of two 11-year-old boys whose frozen bodies were found in a snowy field after they skipped class and guzzled vodka have sued the school district for $4 million. The wrongful death lawsuit claims the Ronan School District failed to protect Justin Benoist and Frankie Nicolai III and did not hire enough native American staff members, who would be "sympathetic to the problem of alcoholism and alcohol disease prevention."

Well, gosh. Certainly the parents are not in any way responsible for letting a couple of pre-teen kids drink themselves to unconsciousness. If the original colonists were still around to sue, a case could be made that it’s their fault for introducing alcohol to Indians in the first place. Vodka, I guess it was. Polish and Russian, call the Embassies.

The article is yet another example of our need to find someone else to blame (and sue for $4 million, if possible) for the light that’s out on our porch, the brakes we failed to replace on our car, the hole in the pavement in front of the butcher-shop and the kids that we let grow up untended like weeds in the yard. On the other hand, I did the same damned dumb thing with a friend and a bottle of Jim Beam when I was fourteen. Stanley and I were lucky, but you can’t always depend on luck to pull you through.

The only difference is, if we had died in a snowbank our parents would have been pissed-off at us (fruitless), then blamed themselves (equally fruitless) and never even considered blaming someone else, much less asking for money.

Don’t Look To Pogo For An Explanation

There is scarcely an excuse for not knowing the issues of the past election except for John Kerry’s outrageous inability to define them in terms the electorate could understand. Not only understand, but rally 'round.

For that you can blame the electorate in the half-century old words of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s swamp philosopher, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Well, perhaps.

Or we can go straight for the throat of Democratic National Committees, Democratic Conventions and Democratic candidates themselves and demand to know why, in those same fifty years since Pogo, they've managed to give us only two guys with an evangelist's fire; John Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired to death of wine and cheese and mannerly response preaching to the choir and changing no one's mind. I am sick at heart from sitting back, pounding the table (and typewriter) urging a Eugene McCarthy, Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis, George McGovern, Al Gore or John Kerry to get the marbles out of his mouth, to enunciate a position in terms understandable to our grand American electorate.

And they are grand, don't you ever doubt it. The fiber of this country hasn't come apart, it's been bamboozled.

Never has a president been so vulnerable as this one and never in my voting lifetime of twelve presidential elections has an opponent so thoroughly botched a slam-dunk. Lest this sound like too wide-eyed-Democrat a charge, let me confess the fact that, in eight out of those twelve elections, I voted Republican for president, splitting the remainder of my tickets. But George Bush went back on every single promise he made to the nation prior to his 2000 ‘victory.’ He tore this country into red and blue with a vengeance, lying his way into an unnecessary war, having lost interest and focus on the necessary one, in the meanwhile trashing America's international reputation and effectively bankrupting our grandchildren.

And John Kerry couldn’t make that case.

Well personally, I’m sick of candidates who can’t make the case and allow themselves to be distracted into ankle-biting issues by their yapping opponents. It’s been said disparagingly of Bush that he was a cheer-leader at Yale. Well, politics loves cheer-leaders---cheer-leading is about chanting the basics, whipping up enthusiasm, playing to the crowd, keeping it simple, doing back-flips in the face of disaster on the playing field.

George Bush just grabbed a national election from his Yale cheer-leading experience.

Four years from now we’ll likely have John McCain as the Republican candidate and he’s a formidable campaigner. The Democrats better find someone other than Hillary or Al Gore---someone who can arouse a crowd like Barack Obama and, win or lose, get a clearly defined message out there.