Opinion-Columns.com

Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Andrew Carnegie

The big news is that Warren Buffett has decided to give away most of his wealth. And the manner in which he has chosen to do that is big news as well.

Warren understands that setting up and running a foundation is complicated. Foundations are businesses themselves, with products and sales-forces, as well as huge internal bureaucracies. Warren has never been into that. He’s a visionary, a gambler, a man of intense perception and focus, but definitely not a nuts and bolts guy. Picking winners has been his talent rather than building businesses or foundations.

Melinda Gates has already done that, got the T-shirt and now Bill’s getting into the action as well, as he gradually steps out of the day-to-day at Microsoft.

A perfect fit for Buffett. An organization up and (efficiently) running, social goals that are supportive to his own and the only people richer than himself on the planet running the show, people who have no financial motive to cook the books or feather-bed their administrators.

It’s not new, this giving away of great wealth. Big news, but not new. For those who dare to venture off the Interstate highways across America, there are countless small towns with Carnegie Libraries. Delicious little gems, widely divergent architecturally, but dedicated to what Andrew Carnegie lacked—books and the knowledge that comes from reading.

Libraries were Carnegie’s legacy, built from the smoking infernos of his steel plants and the crisply suited accounting floors of a thousand financial institutions he dominated.

The names come easily; the Ford, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Johnson, Kaiser, MacArthur, Sloane and Westinghouse Foundations. Mostly generalists that give back a major portion of what my old daddy called “the small and sometimes not-so-small crimes behind every major family fortune.” Carnegie’s ego was such that he left his name carved in granite across the nation.

So, that answers for Gates and Buffett and Carnegie, but what of Ted Turner?

I have a special place in my heart for Ted, I admit it. Ever since he won the America’s Cup international sailing race in 1977 and fell face-down drunk in his dinner plate at the award dinner, he’s been particularly human to me. Computer-whizzes are cool and investor-geniuses are certainly okay, but Ted grabbed the family business after his father’s suicide and turned certain disaster into blinding success by going against the tide of advice.

What’s not to love about that?

Turner makes John McCain look reticent by comparison, a guy who never had an opinion he wasn’t prepared to defend, a man driven by a sort of thirst for the unconventional, a next-generation Howard Hughes without becoming a recluse. The Atlanta Braves and CNN, the MGM film library and Time-Warner, fourteen ranches in six states and his own foundation are each of them enough for any man and collectively several lives worth of innovation.

In 1998 Turner gave a billion in Time-Warner stock to the United Nations and challenged the billionaires of American society to ante-up. Saying

"There is something more than money. We can no longer measure the value of a life by net worth!”

True enough. Another raising of consciousness from a man who has raised his share of hackles as well as consciences.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Veering For Sure, But Veering Back

July 4th, 230 years later

If the President uses his annual State of the Union speech before Congress as a kind of report-card, then the 4th of July seems the perfect time for we citizens to chip in our opinions?

It’s a day of sunburns, over-stimulated small children, dads in shorts lining the parade route with their youngest on their shoulders and the old folks arranged in the front row, their lawn-chairs dotting the curb along Main Street. There will be lawn-mower drill-teams, a Model-A roadster or two and someone’s lovingly restored Packard convertible.

Flags borne by blonde cowgirls on skittish palominos, the mayor in a ’38 Buick, floats pulled by tractors, pickups full of jazz quartets and queens of this and that, fill out the first couple of blocks. Then come the kids on bikes, red, white and blue crepe-paper woven in the spokes. The VFW will march and more than a few will hobble, but they will be there, paying tribute to a country they fought for. The high-school band will do their thing, as Boosters and Lions and Kiwanis march or ride motorcycles or hang out on a float, showing off their wives and daughters. There may be a sky-diver, there is rumor of one.

It’s a grand tradition, celebrating a grand country, an orgy of flags hung from windows and porches or tied to the antennae of cars. Firecrackers keep most dogs home, quivering under the dining-room table. It’s not a day for dogs.

So, how are we this year, as a nation? Veering, I would say. We’ve been veering for six years now and, Republican or Democrat, we’ve been tried as few generations can remember. But my sense of it is that we’re veering back to the old, base, core values that are so boringly, simply American.

We’re tired out a bit from prolonged anxiety, sunburned by sustained messages of fear within an otherwise unfearful nation, but it feels like we’re back in the saddle—or at least we’ve sized-up the horse. America is letting out a 4th of July breath it’s been holding for five years and it feels pretty good.

On Main Street and Central Street and Elm Street, we’ve collectively written another love-letter to America. There will be naps for the kids, water for the dog and a quiet barbecue with friends before heading out to the fairgrounds or down to the lake for fireworks.

They’re beautiful, always a little awe-inspiring. We hug our kids to us and look up.

What’s more American than that?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

The Sustainable Mind

Sustainable is the word of the decade, possibly the adjective for an entire century yet to come—a buzz-word, jargon, lingo of the linguists and necessary part of every top-ten, self-help or planetary-help best seller. Necessary hyphenated headline for the hip, the in, the new-age when that term is already old-age.

Whether the word itself is sustainable is yet to be seen.

Certainly most of the nouns for which it serves as modifier are in what Dick Cheney would describe as their ‘last throes.’ Sustainable agriculture? Good luck. Pick your favorite noun, from art to zen, and ask yourself if it’s sustainable. In an increasingly distracted and throw-away world, we’ve all too often ‘moved on from that.’

If something has been lost, the thing we’ve moved on from is the sustainable mind.

My definition of a sustainable mind is one that is able or trained to reflect upon conditions, keep them in focus long enough to draw a conclusion and then defend that conclusion among various alternative possibilities. The ultimate in sustainability is to stay with the subject long enough, often over a period of decades, to shift opinion depending upon new evidence or a change in societal, economic or environmental circumstance.

Not easy. Not the stuff of sound-bites. The brain is local, the mind is not.

Young people, as they always do, represent the most graphic evidence of where society is headed and they are multi-takers of the first order. Raised with iPods plugged in and the other ear to a cell-phone, doing homework (or any kind of stationary work) while simultaneously watching TV, listening to music and text-messaging, they are the new edition of the human animal.

It’s not an accident that society no longer hears, except in the short bursts of sound-bites. Not surprising that war is insupportable unless quickly won. Drowning in information, unable to listen in the constancy of messages, we've moved on. America (and maybe the world) lost interest in Iraq. Who really cares for the Abramoff story and which congressman may or may not be connected to his chain of legislation by payoff. President as liar, it’s old news. Tell me something new. Today is a blizzard of events that buries yesterday.

Over half the humans that have ever been born on this planet are alive today. 95% of everything created by human hands has been created in the past 100 years.

Turn off the iPod and the TV to reflect on that for a moment. Those realities mirror the overwhelming expanse of numberless stars that so excited our imaginations as kids on a summer night, gazing into infinity.

Reflecting on the recent (for it is recent) loss of the sustainable mind, who is there to reach for in explanation but Darwin? The evolutionary pace of the animal world, which includes our species, is relentless but it is slow. A thousand years to learn a skill, a million to seek the refuge of a cave, two million to come back out again to agriculture.

Yet the lightning eyewink of two hundred years has thrust us from a life on horseback into and through ever shorter ages; agricultural, industrial, flight, space, computers and the wizardry of the time-payment plan. Technology may have run right over the top of our ability to cope with it—or even recognize ourselves as trampled.

From writers, artists and musicians to lawyers, scientists and hedge-fund managers, we embrace the solitude of abandoned beaches in the Caribbean and mountain cabins. Never too far away from a good restaurant, mind you and close to satellite-access to the Internet, if possible, but places where the mind can linger for a moment or a week or a month. Our nostalgia for ‘life in the slow-lane’ may not predate air conditioning or antibiotics, but it pants at our feet like a friendly dog.

There are those who hunger for Walden Pond and those who are unexpressed without a motorcycle, a second career, a third wife and the mad desire to hang-glide if they can work that into a ballooning vacation. Like many, I want some of each. Like others, I wonder at the race to more income than can be reasonably spent.

The sustainable mind makes us wonder, the unsustainable makes us want—or so I have come to think.

Nothing wrong with wanting. It’s made of us a wondrous society and (until recently) the envy of the world, the place most think of when ‘opportunity’ of any kind or dimension comes up in conversation. But, just as ‘high-tech’ has come to value the benefit of a balancing ‘high-touch,’ it may be that ‘wanting’ needs the symmetry of reflection, the hammock-time out of the busyness of business. Enough sustained mind to settle in on and establish the price we are willing to pay for wanting.

I am fond of saying you can have anything, but you cannot have everything. The first and foremost anything I would hope to have, is a sustainable mind. From that, all else comes.
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Real Estate Prices and Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. was unable to completely accomplish during the Civil Rights Marches of the sixties is happening now, in cities where segregation was most problematic. The strange thing is that inner-city blacks are now coalescing on the other side of the issue. Their complaint? Whites buying them out of black ghettoes at big prices.

Unintended consequences have turned the housing boom (or bubble) into a de-segregator. I wonder what King would have thought of that?

When I was a kid in 40’s and 50’s Evanston, Illinois, the city boasted the outstanding amenity of being home to Northwestern University, which kept it from being a mere bedroom suburb of Chicago. It also had a ‘black belt,’ which had nothing to do with karate and much to do with who was allowed to live where. The balconies of its many movie theatres were reserved for blacks and, although restaurants were not officially segregated, a well dressed black family could wait a very long time to be served.

Evanston Township High School was integrated, as were a most of the grade schools, but the (all white) Swimming Team practiced at the YMCA (also ‘restricted’) because white parents had repeatedly turned down referendums to build a high school pool. Not hard to draw a conclusion from that, yet Evanston seemed a racially uncomplicated city, at least to my young, growing-up self.

So, here we are, sixty years later and Seattle and Portland, Oregon are in the news. Their crime is not segregation this time, but desegregation. Blaine Harden’s WaPo article quotes Charles Ford, five years older than I am and a self-described Portland black activist; "The heart of the black community is gone. There ain't no center anymore."

Well, of course there is. But it’s not the center Charlie Ford knew and loved and, from what he seems to be saying, one of the things he loved was its blackness, its more or less exclusive and comfortable blackness.

Charlie has a point. The pleasures of place revolve around inherent comforts, whether we be black, white, Asian, Hispanic or Muslim and that has a lot to do with the ease of association, food, backstory and lifestyle.

It’s not chic to talk about what Charlie Ford brings up, but it’s very real and I don’t quite know how we get over it or if getting over it is even a useful mind-set. King didn't want us to get over it, he preferred that we get on with it and set about the business of valuing one another.

Speaking for myself, I haven’t a single black friend and I can’t go looking for black friends any more appropriately than I can any other color. I can only have a friend and, if he is black, I am fortunate in that additional dimension. I have two Muslim friends, both Iranians. Thus I know, personally, the very people we threaten to bomb. I don't know, at least not personally, the friends Charlie Ford is losing within his neighborhood.

"I am concerned and I am frustrated because I don't know what the alternatives are," said Norman Rice, who in the 1990s was Seattle's first and only black mayor. "It clearly isn't racist; it's economics. The real question you have to ask yourself is: Is this good or bad?"

I think it’s probably good, Norman. I have a hunch there’s an inverse proportion between mixed-race friendships and age. My gut tells me whites half my age have twice the exposure to friends of other races or ethnic backgrounds and those half their age, twice again. It’s possible that was what King hoped for as well. We have got it (or some of it, more of it every year) by the unintended consequence of an inner-city housing bubble.

At the end of Blaine Harden’s article,

Charlie Ford takes a reporter on a tour of his gentrified neighborhood and discovers a not-so-handsome house for $400,000, a price that astonishes him, especially because the house was considerably smaller than his own. "When I see prices like that, I wonder who . . . of my race can continue to live here," he said.

Ford began ruminating about the price -- and the profit -- he might be able to get for his house, which he has owned since 1968 and which sits on a fine corner lot near a fixed-up city park. "I have said I would never sell," Ford said. "But who can resist these prices?"

Harden’s piece points out, “as white gentrification accelerates in Portland and Seattle, where the percentage of black residents was already the lowest among the nation's largest cities, it is erasing the only historically black neighborhoods these cities have ever had.”

That’s the nature of cities, as Chicago’s Pilsen loses its Czechs and its ethnic areas become less Danish and Italian and Chinese, more Hispanic and (dare I say it?) even white. Pilsen was a section of Chicago named specifically after the famous brewery city of Pilsen, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The only historically Czech neighborhood in the city and it is now lost as well.

I can easily imagine Evanston becoming a better city for the loss of its ‘black belt.’

Let me know how it works out for you, Charlie, if you elect to cash in.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Trying to Get My Mind Around Barbaro

The colt’s racing career is over, his crushing injury witnessed by a crowd dressed for a wedding instead of a funeral. The stunning picture of jockey Edgar Prado, standing on the racetrack, leaning into and supporting a horse that had given himself over to his rider’s care. The rest of the Preakness field was long gone and unaware.

It’s late on Monday now and the surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania, after five and a half hours of surgery, say the colt’s life is still ‘a coin toss.’ But he’s standing on the leg that suffered a shattering injury and he’s eating. The feeling is, unless something goes terribly wrong, he’ll be okay.

Terribly wrong is not always controllable. Unless something went terribly wrong, he was a strong favorite to win the Preakness and go on to a shot at the Triple Crown.

Like many of you, I spent what was left of my weekend, the Saturday night and Sunday part, with Barbaro never far from the edges of my mind. I walked my Labrador and thought about him, ate dinner, showered, brushed my teeth and went to bed, all with the image in my mind of the colt and his jockey, leaning into one another, holding each other up. The power of loss. We’ve lost so much these past years in America.

I wonder at the fact that in the prop-wash of terrible news emanating from a terrible world, piped into our consciousness on a daily basis, the crippling of a two-year-old thoroughbred colt grabs so tightly at our collective gut. It may be that this is a heartache we can get our minds around, the destruction of a young horse’s career, come apart so nakedly in front of a hundred thousand screaming fans, caught in mid-scream.

The rest is too big. We are vulnerable and likely to compartmentalize the young men continually shot to bloody pieces in as unloved a war as this nation has ever fought. Embracing that loss too closely is dangerous territory, a place we mostly dare not go. Tens of thousands raped and murdered in Darfur, a planet in critical condition, whales grounding, immigrants chased down in American deserts, the wheels coming off our government, it’s all too much, too constant, too impossibly out of reach.

So we love the colt.

And why not? We need something clean and pure, gallant and untarnished to hold dear. God love him for that, he never let anyone down. Nor have his doctors, his trainer, owners or the weeping jockey who held up a half-ton horse with his hundred-ten pound body.

Barbaro will recover, because it’s his destiny to achieve that one final miracle for us. With any luck at all, and it’s his turn for luck, he’ll live another twenty-five years. He has no knowledge of what he’s missed, no understanding of careers or trophies or world recognition. Possibly, that’s another touchstone for those of us too closely tied to careers and trophies.

A life at pasture. A new career making expensive little thoroughbred babies. Someone to scratch his nose, find an apple in their pocket and lean into him when he needs it.

What’s not to like?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Mint Juleps and the Smell of Kentucky Bluegrass

A twenty-horse field for the 132nd year of the Kentucky Derby and the superlatives swirling around winner Barbaro pile up;

• Largest margin of victory in 60 years, six and a half lengths
• 4th win in a row by a first-time trainer
• Only the 6th undefeated horse to win here
• 14th fastest run in Derby history
• 1/5th second slower than Affirmed, the last Triple-Crown winner
• First Derby win for jockey Edgar Prado
• Second largest Derby Crowd.

One of the great things about horse racing is that it’s so unchanged over the decades since we celebrated horses like Man O’ War, Whirlaway and Citation. Jockeys with legendary names like Eddie Arcaro, Willie Shoemaker and now Edgar Prado continue to sweat out weigh-ins and risk their lives every time the gate opens.

Bean-counters don’t train race-horses at 5:30 in the morning, horsemen (and women) do that. Rock-star CEOs don’t build bloodlines, breeders like Roy and Gretchen Jackson put in the years and tears and cheers that bring champions down to the wire.

Racing is still more Ernie Banks than Barry Bonds, more Bing Crosby than Michael Jackson.

And now the annual dance begins about whether this horse is good enough to be a Triple Crown winner. Before the Derby he was touted as a horse that could only run on turf. But that was before. Can he go a distance? Who knows? He was opening up lengths, not losing them at Churchill Downs.

If trainer Michael Matz, himself an equestrian silver medalist at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, had a near-perfect day, Roy and Gretchen Jackson had double-perfect. Their second entry in the Derby ran sixth and a horse they bred (and sold for $2.1 million) won one of England's classic races, the 2,000 Guineas only hours before the Derby. “We’re in a bit of shock,” said Roy.

Matz proved the nay-sayers wrong with his prescriptive rest of Barbaro. No one could possibly win at a mile-and-a-quarter after running only once in the past 13 weeks. No matter that Barbaro won the Florida Derby five weeks ago, Needles was the last horse to win with more than a month of rest and that was fifty years ago. Barbaro’s answer to that was to write a 60 year margin of victory in the record-book.

Those are stories that warm the hearts of old horsemen. Matz is no old man, at least not yet at age 56, but one thing is for sure. Tomorrow he’ll be in the stable at 5:30 in the morning, just as usual.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Lessons Forgotten From My Old Daddy

Readers are perhaps familiar with my old daddy, as he pops up from time to time in my columns. He’s gone now, some forty years and it seems at the same time inconceivable and very real. Not hard to remember his face or his unselfconscious full-body-hug or the unique way he always smelled of tweed and tobacco.

America has its own old daddies, we keep referring to as founding fathers, but we don’t really believe it. Not all that much history taught anymore about how we came to be a nation.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation, a lady is said to have asked Dr. Benjamin Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin, already 81 at the time, gave the pre-Churchillian reply, “A republic madame, if you can keep it.”

If we can keep it. We’d like to keep it. Sometimes it seems we don’t try all that hard, no matter the flags we fly on our car antennae or the mumbled words of the Anthem before a first pitch or opening kickoff. But we mean to. Our republic was new to Franklin, the world's greatest unproven experiment and he saw it with the clarity and skepticism of an experimenter.

We see it as our heritage, something that's always been there, the same-old same-old.

James Madison, our 4th president is particularly interesting man to listen to, for his continual warnings about the danger that war places on a republic.

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

And he went on at another time to expand on that sentiment a bit. These 146 words are worth the reading, then reading again, sleeping on and getting up in the morning to go back over with a hot cup of coffee.

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

One last mention from Madison,

"The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad."

Real, pretended or imaginary. If we dare fast-forward thirty presidencies, Dwight Eisenhower, aside from his famous warning against the military-industrial complex, admonished us

“We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”

The vain search. One can only assume, by the great amount of attention these men gave to the dangers facing America, that they feared the nation would not overcome them. Paraphrasing Jefferson, he said that the framers must grab every freedom possible at the moment of birth, because citizens would quickly become involved with making money and neglect to demand anything further. Along those lines, he saw other economic difficulties

“I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”

“When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.”

This from a man who sat in the seat of power and yet encouraged a healthy governmental fear of the people they governed. There’s not much spin in that, not a great deal of fumbling around to put a different face on things.

Teddy Roosevelt, another man who sat there, saw the dangers of presidential awe,

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

As did John Adams,

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.”

“Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.”

Abraham Lincoln,

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
 
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

My old daddy often angered me when he laid down the law, but I came to realize (almost too late) that he wasn’t trying to save himself, but me. I was a hard save, but he never quit on me.

It’s the same for America’s old daddies, founding and otherwise. They hadn’t a thing to save themselves from. They’d done their work and what they said to us, in just the fraction of their great writings I’ve quoted here, were meant to keep us safe.

They didn’t ask us to look up from our work but just occasionally. Didn’t require a constancy of attention to their voices. They’d written in their own hand, without need of spin or poll or speech writer, the guidelines for contemporary freedom.

All they ask is that we look sharp and pay attention when times are dangerous.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

A Wake-Up Call Over Arrogance and Power

If you want yet another reason among the gazillion that make America a great country, witness how it treats the arrogant and powerful when they become too sure of that power.

Tom DeLay decided today that ‘for reasons of party unity’ he will resign from the House of Representatives and not run for his old seat this coming fall. Horsefeathers!. Tony C. Rudy, DeLay’s former deputy chief of staff just copped a plea and Tom suddenly became hotter than a $2 pistol as the pols waited for whatever shoe might drop from Rudy’s informed lips.

All bets are off for whether Tom will find his polished shoe stuck in Jack Abramoff's mud. But the old bluster and bluff of ‘I’ll be back’ has tanked. A DeLay who’s naked as a jay-bird (a minor pronunciation away from jail-bird) won’t garner a whole lot of Republican trial-costs support. Unless it’s hush-money. Hushing is hard to do under oath, Tom.

The braggarts fall hard. Newt Gingrich can give chapter and verse about that.

The next to fall, although it may be a few years down the line, are likely to be among the Christian conservative broadcasters. Last year, Harper’s Magazine ran a piece by Chris Hedges subtitled Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters.

Hate and religion? Tell me it isn't so. An interesting topic for the small-denomination preachers from their more humble pulpits. Hedges writes,

Since the reelection of George W. Bush in November, the rhetoric on the Christian right has grown triumphal and proud; rumors of spiritual war are abroad in the heartland, and fervent whispers of revolution echo among the pews and folding chairs of the nation’s megachurches.

Triumphal and proud caught my eye, because Newt and Tom were both triumphal and proud before they became disgraced and discarded. Dis-graced; to fall from grace.

We are overwhelmingly a Christian nation, although at least up until recently, we have been a religiously inclusive nation as well. Hedges’ piece gave me pause about the Christianity that I have always known,  based in modesty, charity and good will.

Frank Wright, the new president of National Religious Broadcasters, takes the stage.  He promises the audience that as the NRB president, he will fight to block the passage of hate-crime legislation. “For the first time in history, representatives and senators may pass hate-crime legislation,” he says, “which is one step to oppose what you do as against the law.

Does that square with what you know to be Christian charity? Chris Hedges continues,

Illinois evangelist and radio host James MacDonald, pounds home the theme of persecution by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the values and faith of “Bible-believing Christians.” MacDonald runs a church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and is heard regularly on more than 650 Christian radio outlets.

Power enough in 650 stations I guess, but just who is it that persecutes MacDonald and his particular brand of faith? The very separation of government from his church (and all others) that he decries as persecution, is what prevents his branded version of Christianity from being oppressed or suppressed.

He continues, “Ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclamation” and  “there is power in the unapologetic proclamation of truth. There is power in it. This is a kingdom of power.” When he says the word “power,” he draws it out for emphasis. He tells the crowd to shun the “persuasive words of human wisdom.” Truth, he says, does “not rest in the wisdom of men but the power of God.” 

One wonders just where the persuasive words of human wisdom come from in his mind, if not from God, why they are so worthless compared to proclamation? But the subtext is power. Not yours, certainly not mine, not even God’s, although he claims it. Perhaps he means power as transmitted over his 650 stations.

Jesus delivered God's word in humility and poverty and sacrifice. These evangelists sacrifice nothing, an absolute zero in the sackcloth-and-ashes department.  The word as Jesus spoke it, came through 2,000 years without the need of a TV Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Or Christian radio's MacDonald.

The threat to religion doesn’t come from government or the ACLU, it comes from the arrogance of preachers with too large a voice. Stentorian tones may stir the blood, but theirs is a religion of division, a diatribe against all that is not them. Syndicated TV evangelists and their counterparts on religious radio fall in love with their own voices, the stretch of their power as well as that of their limousines. Drunk with temporary political power, they seek to be kingmakers on the national political stage.

The price for the vote they claim to deliver is Christian fundamentalism.

Political fundamentalism brought down Newt and Tom. Moslem fundamentalism has paralyzed a third of the world. We’re not yet ready in this country to march behind religious demagogues. Our national lack of faith in either political party is prescient.

In keeping with the precedent of Joe McCarthy, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, America is poised once again to renounce the fundamental in favor of the inclusive. It's our nature. We are an inclusive nation.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Parenting Kids and Occasionally, When Needed, Our Country

Fear! Big motivator, fear. My old daddy instilled a certain amount of it in me and my brother, mixed with enough love to make it palatable.

As a writer, I operate occasionally within the restraint of my own fears and one of them is comparing Bush and his associates to Hitler and his. That no-no (and I agree with it) is too hot to handle, distorting and inflaming by imagery a bunch of other truths, that we then become unwilling to face. It turns the things that need to be faced into a wild-eyed rant and then we both stop listening. Everything's lost to the roar in our ears.

Even the language of my labored point is twisted by unwillingness to put an American president up to such a comparison. Beneath all that contorted say-it-isn’t-so-ism is a surface that, once it’s scratched, makes for understanding of a different nature.

Some things come suddenly clear, when you scrape away, sometimes shovel away, the rhetoric.

I have, for sixty years, wondered about and discussed with friends, how the German people ever got to the mental-construct that blossomed into the Holocaust. I've read a lot about Hitler's and Stalin’s rise to power. We shake our heads and wonder at the slow and deliberate and unrelenting pace of the lies the German nation accepted, as it stumbled along its way to an ultimate horror. Hitler was an elected leader. Sometimes we forget that.

I have begun to understand and this administration sparked that understanding.

The Big Lie has been oversold. It wasn’t so much the celebrated big lie, but the continued and unresisted acceptance of many small lies that did Germany in. Small lies are like small thefts. Accepting the first makes the next and the next and the next much easier to justify. Ultimately, shoplifters and dictators become adept at ‘deserving’ their thievery.

That’s why parents march their children back to the corner-store to stutter an apology for pocketing a candy-bar. It’s not that the theft is so great, not to shame the child, but to stop the escalation in its tracks . Parents are right to do it. It must be done, lest our kids turn to petty thievery and from there to worse.

If you make the case that we, as voters, are the parents of our country, we have been and are this moment neglectful.

I think that case can be made and made eloquently. Small lies, unchallenged in the far reaches of government, are the metaphor for pocketing candy bars. It’s time, way past time but not yet too late, to march President George Walker Bush by the ear, to the national corner-store and require his shamefaced confession.

"We do not torture," he told reporters during a visit to Panama last November. That’s as unequivocal a statement as can be made. It’s documented, on tape. No wiggle-room in that. A lie. He knows it to be a lie, we know it, the world and the courts and the man-on-the-street know it and yet we have allowed him to pocket that lie as if it were no more important than a candy-bar.

As parents, we understand the imagery of pocketed candy-bars.

In federal court yesterday (March 2, 2006), Justice Department lawyers argued that the McCain law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to detainees held at the Guantanamo military prison.

It’s a moot point. Our president told us we do not torture. So, we don’t. End of discussion.

But why, if that’s true and if our president didn’t actually pocket the candy-bar, are government lawyers in U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler’s courtroom? How can a law about what we do not do be argued by Justice Department attorneys?

Why is a Guantanamo detainee, held since May 2002, begging protection from the torture we do not do, under the anti-torture provisions of Senator John McCain’s law? How can the judge possibly find ‘allegations of aggressive U.S. military tactics used to break the detainee’s hunger strike "extremely disturbing" and quite probably against U.S. and international law?’

We don’t torture.

Justice Department lawyers argued before Judge Kessler that ‘even if the tactics were considered in violation of McCain's language,’ detainees at Guantanamo would have no recourse to challenge them in court.

Even if? The candy-bar is pocketed or it’s not. There can be no even if. Even if means the President must stand down or be removed. As parents, we know this. As a nation, Germany has come to know this, the German people paid and continue to pay an enormous price for that knowledge.

Aharon Barak, Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, ruled against torture of Israeli prisoners in 1999 and made this statement;

“This is the destiny of a democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand."

Learning the destiny of my democracy and what should be acceptable to it, from a foreign source stings my sense of what it means to be American. My democracy. Not an abstract democracy, but mine.

We voters are indeed the parents of our country or our country has no parents. Framers, fathers and forefathers are long gone. Jefferson is in his grave, Lincoln is dust, the rest mere faded memories. This president, who cannot and will not be truthful, must be taken by the ear to confess his pocketing of our essence as a nation. It’s our civic and parental duty or we are lost.

And lost we will deserve to be.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

I Have a Hunch There Will Be No More Karl Roves

Seldom, if ever, has a political consultant come along with both the power and effectiveness of Karl Rove. The man is a genius in coalition-building, that modern day making of whole boards from slivers.

Having said that, I think he’ll be the last rather than the first of a new breed, a sort of one-trick pony whose effectiveness is just too stultifying for any but the weakest of candidates. And, while we may have more than our share of weak candidates, it’s not often an admitted failing.

Ego at that stratospheric level doesn’t often allow much handling. It’s not in the nature of presidential candidates to give over their destiny to a strategist.

It's perhaps useful to remember that the Republican majority in Congress, the first in half a century, had nothing to do with Karl. Newt Gingrich engineered that palace coup with his disingenuous Contract With America, six short weeks before the mid-term 1994 elections.

Nor did Karl have a hand in building the K-Street Republican stranglehold over lobbyists. That was vintage Tom DeLay.

So, when we come down to it, Karl gets the credit (and massive credit it is) for twice seating a president who once lost the popular vote and a second time lost the public confidence. He accomplished that miracle in the first term by getting Bush close and then kidnapping the Supreme Court; in the second case by scaring the pants off the entire nation that the sky was falling and terrorists would strike again.

Effective, you have to give him that. Two times, count 'em pardner, presidential elections that were presumed by the pundits to be lost causes were turned on their heels into victories.

It’s bound to be a controversial view, but my personal take on it is that three influences will prevent the Rove-Code from becoming a dominant parameter to getting-your-guy into the Oval Office:

• The required whipping up of narrow-based constituencies leaves a candidate vulnerable and perhaps even captive to disparate philosophical groups; i.e., by example, a coalition of gun-nuts, tree-huggers and global interventionists. Not compatible, these sliver groups without a common denominator, are hard to keep happy and even harder to justify to the nation as a whole.
• Rove-Code success requires iron discipline of the Congress, special interests (such as lobbyists), Cabinet-level departments and the courts. That is the antithesis of democratic government. Coalition, bi-partisan government is still the ponderous model-of-choice for Americans in Washington and their home states.
• Rove-Code administration is in a constant state of coming undone. It’s a juggling act that requires a president to keep fifteen balls constantly in the air, the slightest slip of the hand bringing on collapse. It’s simply too tiring and distracting a way to govern.

Again, it’s a judgment-call and may be wrong as wrong can be, but I suspect that we’ve come a long way as a nation since 9-11 and learned some things about aftermaths.

The dramatic and jaw-dropping image of the World Trade Center disintegrating in collapse has largely been assimilated into our collective history. Everyday life has leveled out. Striking back from fear and anger hasn’t worked as well as we all had hoped, no matter our politics.

Republicans and Democrats alike are shocked by the position in which we find ourselves today, at war with an increasing portion of the world, estranged form out traditional allies, in moral chaos at home on both business and governmental fronts, edgy with our friends and neighbors, as well as in a state of economic unease.

We seem and we are pulled apart as a nation rather than brought together.

So, I decipher from all that, a national hunger to believe. We are believers, we Americans. Optimists, problem-solvers, takers-on of the thorniest dilemmas and overcomers when we find ourselves at odds with our image of ourselves. We are an image-drivensociety and that’s not so bad a thing to be when the chips are down.

So, Karl, thanks for the memories and it’s been an interesting ride. But I doubt we’ll walk your road again.
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.