Tuesday, November 29, 2016

REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016

REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016

          The story continued....

          This is basically a story from the annals of writing, and for all those who think being a writer is a really cool way to live. I had told my editor that I would do what I did, spend some time in a mental hospital as a patient and report on the experience in the book that was to come out of my investigation, and he thought that meant I would do it more than once, in different parts of the country. But once was enough. I did indeed go to different areas of the country to visit mental hospitals, talk to psychiatrists about the systems they ran, check out what was at the time the take people out of mental hospitals and put them into community mental health centers, and otherwise do the thorough job that needed to be done on a subject that was then, and remains, almost universally ignored. I even went to Esalen, in California, new age mecca, to speak with a psychologist there about new ideas in mental health care. That was interesting; you walked onto the grounds and scattered around were people doing yoga in the nude. But at bottom it was what I should have expected--at a remove from the gritty intractable reality of the lives of the mad. I drove across country in an old Ford Econoline van with the engine mounted between the van's two front seats. I slept in the back. Research on the cheap. America on the cheap. A story for another time.

          And on the way I stopped in Kansas for a few days, camping in a state park near Topeka populated mostly by mosquitoes. I have nothing good to say about Kansas. There Topeka State Hospital had set up a series of interviews for me, among them one with a Dr. Rinsley, who ran their children's unit. He was a queer bird, fixated on his theory about childhood schizophrenia; he had, in fact, diagnosed every child who entered his unit as being schizophrenic,regardless of their symptoms, and it was his opinion that his  job was to take each child apart and rebuild him or her in a healthier manner. To put it another way, he was playing God with every child on his unit. At one point during the interview, I remember, he looked at me and said, you've looked into the abyss, haven't you. Well what do you say to that? Deny it, and you seem shallow. Affirm it, and you'd have to explain. In fact, as I said in the first part of the story, I was quite sane, and always had been. As it says over the entrance to the oracle's cave at Delphi, know thyself. And I did.

          Anyway, I went on, finished the research, wrote the book, it was published, the publisher did its job and got me on various TV shows, I testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Birch Bayh about drugs in institutions, the nightly news showed a clip, I thought I would make some money from this book. I was a hero to mental patients for exposing the evils and insufficiencies of a system designed, like most institutions, not to serve its clients, but itself. But I neglected to foresee the obvious--that mental patients can't afford, for the most part, to buy books. As for the reading public generally, the whole subject is a downer. They don't want to know about it. The publisher printed 7,000 copies, sold 3,500. Lesson No. 1. When it went into bookstores as a remainder, at $0.49 a copy, I was too broke to buy more than one.

          Lesson No. 2. A year later a stranger knocked on the door of my apartment in Ossining, New York, asked me if I was Anthony Brandt, and when I said yes handed me a piece of paper. Dr. Rinsley was suing me and my publisher for invasion of privacy, libel, and other things, asking $3,750,000 in damages. How about that. At the time I was going through a rancorous divorce from my first wife, living on credit cards, still driving that old van around, my father had recently died, my mother was settling into the early stages of Alzheimer's. I remember taking one of those stress tests that showed up in magazines once in a while in those days and scoring at a level where you were supposed to have heart attacks and breakdowns and a host of other ills, but as I said, I'm sane, none of those things happened. What happened instead was that my publishers asked me into their offices and told me that I should get my own lawyer, and they would get theirs. They were abandoning me. As it turned out, they hired a local lawyer in Topeka who had never tried a libel case. Through a friend, I hired the libel lawyer for the Kansas City Star. He carried the case, not the publisher's lawyer.

          I had indeed written about Dr. Rinsley. Shortly before I finished the book, I got a call from Kansas that I had to come back. A child had died on Rinsley's unit, thanks to what appeared to be a misdiagnosis that was particularly egregious. She was a little girl, eleven years old, and skin and bones at the time. She died tied down to a crib, alone, being tube fed, choking to death on her food. When she was very young she was diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, one symptom of which was tongue thrust, where the tongue pushes food out of the mouth involuntarily instead of swallowing it. She never really got better, even on medication, and at some point doctors at a state hospital decided she was being uncooperative, and they took custody away from the parents, who were fundamentalist Christians, and who said they were going to take her home and pray for her. After that she wound up on Rinsley's unit. I went back to Kansas, talked to the parents, talked to some other people (including a Holocaust survivor out of Bergen Belsen) about Rinsley and his theories, and added this story to the book. Rinsley had decided in this case that the little girl could swallow her food but was defiant and refused to swallow her food. At the time of her death her parents were allowed to see her only half an hour a week, in a supervised visit. It was a particularly striking example of unregulated psychiatric power to play with people's lives. And I was definitely outspoken about it. "How many more children must die before men like Rinsley are stopped?" Rhetorically, I've always had a tendency to go over the top.

          It took nearly eight years to resolve this case, with something the courts laughably call summary judgement. That means that it never went to trial. After depositions, document searches and all the other stuff that goes on, it was clear that I had made only one small mistake of fact in the body of the book, which I had corrected in a footnote, and that everything else was factually true. My lawyer moved for summary judgment and won--that took maybe two years--and Rinsley appealed. The case then went to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Another five or six years. In the end the three-man court ruled unanimously that Rinsley had no case. He was both a public official and a public figure and had to prove actual malice, all the facts were true except for the one, and that had been corrected. He just didn't like being criticized. I still have a copy of the judgment.

          And me? I'm still sane, but the whole episode came close to wrecking my career, such as it was. When it was over I owed my lawyer $45,000. It soured me on writing books for a long time, and I turned to magazines to make a living. I can't really complain. I had a great success in magazines, and I still write for them in a small way, made smaller all the time as magazines disappear. But when you talk about the romance of writing, don't talk to me.

          I found out later, by the way, that my publisher had never given the book a libel reading. It was a muckraking book, it needed a libel reading, I assumed it would get one. But my editor had decided on his own, without telling me, that he didn't want to limit his authors' abilities to express their views. Maybe I'll forgive him in hell. As for Dr. Rinsley, he's already there. And yes, Dr., I have looked into the abyss. That little girl weighted 29 lbs. when she died on your watch.

         

         

Monday, November 28, 2016

ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BIN

November 28, 2016: ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BIN

          People always look at me a little strangely when I mention that I spent eleven days in the state mental hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. I hasten to explain to them that I was doing research for a book I wrote on the mental health system, that I wasn't a real patient but had faked my way in with the help of a friend, and had barely escaped the locked ward where they keep the violent people but had been sent instead to a ward where they let you out in the morning and left the door open all day. I used to walk over to the store on the grounds in the morning, buy a Times, and do the crossword puzzle on a bench just to get out of the ward. Which turned out, naturally, to be full of unbalanced people.

          Adventures in writing. Anything for a story. This came to mind today when I was thinking about my career, all the things I've covered for magazines and the places I've been, and the loony bin was a highlight of sorts, possibly the most dangerous story I did, since they might well have tried to keep me there against my will if I had in their presence actually done something crazy. I was careful not to. Except for not having a job since I was 35 and living by my wits, I'm quite sane.

          But I think about that place once in a while. The people. They were a motley bunch, all of them on drugs of one sort or another, mostly thorazine, which I also took--you had to, they gave it to you, you put it in your mouth and swallowed it, and then they looked in your mouth to make sure you had--that were supposed to keep you passive and quiet, and indeed they were not violent in any way. One I remember, a young man who complained that his parents had committed him because he'd taken his stuff out to the garage to lay it out on the floor and arrange it. He was manic depressive, had a portable cassette player he took everywhere with a bunch of tapes, and he would jam a tape in, play it for thirty seconds, then jam another one in and drive the entire ward crazy with the noise. He was restless. He also had his own room, where he brought women in off the female wards at night, paying the attendants off for the privilege. Plus he had access to other drugs, the illegal kind. A resourceful young man, in a manic phase.

          Others gave little impression of being insane, but only pathetic. Unable to handle everyday life; they were taken every day to a nearby IBM plant where they put cardboard boxes together, in a program designed to make them useful to society, and thereby to themselves. I remember at lunchtime, which was served on a cafeteria basis, one man would go up to the table and take ten or eleven pieces of bread, and nothing else. Another was catatonic, did not speak, walked around in a trance. I saw him one day drop a turd from under his hospital gown, reach down to the floor, pick it up, and try to put it into his mouth. The whole ward groaned at that, and the attendant rushed over and prevented him from completing this grossness. Yes, there were people there who were quite seriously mad.

          I learned a lot in those eleven days. For one, madness is not literary. You do not find characters out of Dostoevsky, say, or Baudelaire, passionate to the point of unreason, in mental hospitals. It is also for the most part not violent. The culture characterizes the insane as killers, but they actually commit less violence, statistically, than the general population. Mostly it is their ineptness that impresses you. They have not mastered the simple art of living. Something going on in their heads prevents them for focusing on the ordinary.

          After a week it started to get to me. The ward had a large TV set and it went 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that the place was always full of noise. I don't do noise well. The food, not surprisingly, was execrable. They put me in a therapy group and that was a joke. And being surrounded all day and all night by people who were seriously troubled was difficult. We slept in dormitories at night, on beds that had rubber sheets under the cotton ones. My first night I was given a shot of Thorazine, which made me thirsty, but when I tried to get to the water fountain I could barely walk, had to hold onto the wall to get anywhere. I had it all planned, knew the law, and went through the formalities of leaving, which entailed writing a letter announcing my intention of leaving. They had three days to commit me against my will, but didn't bother. My wife drove out and picked me up--I had checked in with a story about our separation, and hearing her voice over the radio when it was turned off--and drove me home. I lay down in the back seat and cried, not for myself but for all those people who couldn't leave so easily. It was so sad. I'll never forget the really bad cases, patients with tardive dyskinesia, which is a permanent side-effect of taking drugs like Thorazine. It affects the brain in such a way that their tongues, their faces, their limbs move uncontrollably, their tongues in and out of their mouths, their faces in constant distortion, their limbs jerkily, in every direction. Thorazine tames the hallucinations, but it also destroys the life.

          I'm told, by the way, by people whose experience of the mental health system is way more recent than mine--the book, Reality Police, came out forty years ago--and have read the book that very little has changed. The mental health system still relies almost exclusively on drugs to control the behavior of the people it serves, and psychiatrists are really no closer to understanding what mental illness is or where it originates. For some people, life is tragic every day.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAIN

NOVEMBER 9, 2016. BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAIN

          Trump won, against all expectations, and those who thought he was as bad a candidate as the country has ever seen are upset and baffled. The American people ignored the criminality, the narcississm, the sexism, the racism, the frauds, the abuses, indeed embraced it all, as if it were nothing to them, as apparently it was. In favor of what? Climate change? Coziness with Russia? Reckless foreign policy? Who can understand this?
          Those at the bottom, apparently. Not the desperate poor at the very bottom who gave up hoping for anything better a long time ago. Not the disenfranchised, the immigrants, the refugees, blacks, Moslems, the chronically ill, the old, and all the other people stuck in the glue of killing defeat. I'm speaking of the adult whites who have lost not just jobs but futures to globalization, automation, and all the other economic forces that beset us, who are watching their lives drift away on the unfavorable tide of history. These are the people, apparently, who turned to Trump to save them, with his border wall and his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, all eleven million of them, and to keep Moslems out of the country, and to bring back American jobs. And in the processs of making those promises he ignored all the Constitutional protections that individuals enjoy in the United States and all the institutional traditions that have proven as well to protect the orderly processes of government, plus he ignored the impossibility of bringing back what has been lost. There was never any mention of how he was going to do these things, never a program, a plan, a strategy.  Jobs have in fact been lost to macro-economic forces that nobody has the power to stop. Some of the Constititional protections he said he would destroy, others he simply acted as if he would ignore--in short laying an authoritarian hand over government as if it belonged to him. But it has never belonged to any President, however strong. There are fundamental checks and balances built in, and traditional ways of working in government as well, that are designed to keep situations, and governments, under control. It remains to be seen whether this system will continue to work.
          But given the man's record, I'm quite nervous. Not only does he have no actual policy positions, no programs, only bankruptcies and bad behavior behind him, nobody knows what will happen next. His closest advisors are fools and buffoons like Gingrich and Giuliani. His own wife is an illegal immigrant. And this is the "people's choice."
          
          So if this is what the people preferred, it's time to look at the people. Hillary Clinton called them, half of them anyway, a "basket of deplorables." It's a general rule that people get the governments they deserve. The Founders understood this; when Franklin was asked when he walked out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 what kind of government they were making, he famously replied, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."
          If you can keep it.
          And Jefferson saw the import of that, he understood that to be a citizen at all required a level of attention and knowledge on the part of  the individual that went well beyond the ordinary, that people needed to be informed, and understand how government worked and to an extent how the world itself worked, in order to be responsible citizens. That citizenship came with responsibilities. That a citizen needed to be involved not only in his professional life, his working life, but in the life of the community and the country, that his opinions had to be as versed in the complexities of issues, in the pros and cons of different courses of action, as time would allow. Jefferson was superbly informed himself; he went out of his way to educate his own family, he founded a University to educate his state, Virgihnia.
          That's the ideal, that's what makes a republic work, makes it viable. An informed citizenry. But we have failed, miserably, to make this happen. Our public educational systems no longer require courses in civics that explain the mechanics of government, how laws are passed and the like. Newspapers, even the best, continue to shrink and shrink and lose readership. Other sources of news have lost their sense of public responsibility, of public mission; and news increasingly passes over into entertainment. One consequence is that the whole public realm weakens, a sense of unity, of being part of one people, dissipates, and what divides us does so more and more strongly, more permanently, and we no longer feel like we have one purpose, one identity. As citizens of a particular place and a particular country.
          When that goes, we get what we got yesterday. A demagogue for a President.
          Republics, to put it another way, are hard work. To keep them going takes a cerrtain amount of wisdom, and that in turn takes an education, it takes knowledge, and not just in school. It takes keeping up with events and their meamings, it means reading about events and their meanings, not just in the papers but in news magazines and even books. It means developing your curiosity. It means in the end getting involved. Especially at the local level, where it's possible to be unusually effective.
          For starters, we would have to go back to teaching civics. To teaching history, political history, diplomatic history, all the old-fashioned kinds of history, which educated people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and most of the modern Presidents as well. This is what Lincoln read, picking up his education when he could. Now srtudents take something called Social Studies, an umbrella term for intellectual volleyball; toss it, teach the classics. When the country was being created it was reading Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot--the Enlightenment philosophers, and their thoughts thread through the Constitution. It was Voltaire who said, "If you believe absurdities, you will commit atrocities." Right now our own citizens believe the most amazing absurdities, because they don't have the knowledge or even just the information to know better. Thus Donald Trump. He is no better just because he's been elected President. He's only more dangerous.
          The idea should be not to dumb down, but to smarten up. The whole culture has to bend its efforts to make this happen, or we are permanently lost.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

September 1, 2016: ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

          I've always liked Tip O'Neill's famous dictum--all politics is local--because of the paradox inherent in it. Who doesn't like paradox? No, all politics is clearly not local. World wars are not local, vast global struggles for power and influence are not local, statewide Senate races are not local, and so on. And yet something like the opposite prevails as well. The global so often emerges from the particular, the struggle for power is pretty much the same no matter what level it takes place at, global is local on a grand scale--and so on once more. I remember Graham Robb writing in his wonderful book THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE about a village on one side of a river in rural France that had been at odds for generations with a village on the other side of the river, and how they would periodically gather, each on its own side of the river, and shout oaths and imprecations at each other. In different languages. The universal use of French in France, it turns out, is a recent phenomenon, imposed by French kings in the 17th century. Or there was the rebellion in the Vendee at the time of the French revolution, where this relatively remote province conducted a revolution against the Revolution, based on its loyalty to the Catholic Church and its hatred of government officials imposed from above conscripting local men for the national army. Thousands of people died in this conflict. People were tied to rafts and the rafts were then deliberately sunk. The local definitely went global in that case.

          And now here I am, immersed in local politics. I have not run for office since I was asked to run for president of my high school class by various teachers, because they needed somebody to run against a boy they didn't approve of, who was majoring in shop. I lost big time. But I have been appointed, twice now in thirty years, to chair a regulatory board in Sag Harbor, and it's a hot seat right now: the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review. Sag Harbor is a beautiful old village dating from Colonial days, it is full of historic houses in all kinds of architectural styles, and it relies on its appeal to the tourist industry, to retirees, and to second home owners for its economic health. And that appeal is so great that it has attracted way too many overly wealthy people. The average house size in Sag Harbor is about 1500 sq. ft. It's all very charming, and the wealthy people want to own a piece of it. But they're wealthy, wealthy people don't live in small houses, so they want to take these little houses and double or triple their size, thereby destroying the historical value of the house, and, if that happens often enough, ultimately the village. We have a fairly strict zoning code, and it's our job as a regulatory Board to enforce it. And nothing, it would seem, makes a hedge fund manager worth hundreds of millions of dollars angrier than being told he can't do, or get, what he wants.

          And the conflict inherent in this situation and makes this job so challenging has gone, if not global, then national. The New York Times has reported on it. Vanity Fair wrote a piece about it just recently in which I'm quoted and my picture appears. Wow. Famous for fifteen seconds. I've been in all the local papers. But what's interesting about it is the degree of local involvement. Letters to the editor. Phone calls from supporters. Stand firm. Hold fast. And we're trying. And I think, this is a classic case--public interest against private property; and the whole village is involved, so are people who live nearby but not in the village. This is democracy at work. And it's clean. Nobody has offered me a bribe, or any of the other four members of my Board. We do our very best to decide cases on their merits alone. This is democracy the way it's supposed to be, don't you think?

          But then shit happens. Some people, usually but not always the wealthy, ignore the code and overbuild anyway, willing to pay the paltry fines we're allowed to impose to get what they want. Repeatedly applicants appear before our Board, and no doubt other Boards, and lie to us. "I need an extra bedroom, or two or three, for my grandchildren," they tell us, when in fact they're developers hoping to maximize their profits. One man made that argument before a board at the same time his proposed large house (on a small lot) was listed for sale on a real estate web site. This becomes routine, and as a board member you come to the point where you really don't believe anyone who wants something from you. You turn cynical. 

          The parallel between the local and the national should be obvious. What other wealthy person presents his case to the public and lies, regularly, repeatedly, and demonstrably? Who else goes ahead and does what the law, the rules, disallow, and figures he can get away with it? Who else is indifferent to public policy, to public values; who only wants to game the system to his own ends?  These are rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. And I ask myself two related questions, here in my little upstairs office, crowded with books--can Sag Harbor survive this onslaught of wealth? And can the nation survive Donald Trump?


Monday, July 25, 2016

CHAOTIC NOW

THE CHAOTIC NOW. Monday, July 25, 2016.

          Overhead, a thunderstorm. On the television, speeches and chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Bernie supporters screaming at the speakers. The DNC chair resigning. Last week it was the Republicans, this week the Democrats. The center does not hold. Some rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. Constant killings on the news, unarmed black people being shot, policemen being shot in a blind retaliation, terrorism worldwide, suicide killers, the Russians meddling in a U. S. national election, fraud rampant, and bad feelings. A whole lot of bad feelings and mistrust. An astrologer friend tells me that the stars are in a position similar to the time of the French Revolution. And we know what that entailed. The Terror. Populism taken to its logical conclusion. And then Napoleon.

          History does not repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it rhymes.

          Here is what I believe. I do not believe in populism either on the left or the right. Populism attracts demagogues, it likes simple, and simple-minded solutions to complex problems, it likes to blame others, groups, establishments, blacks maybe or immigrants or whatever they fix on for intractable problems that have a long history of their own and cannot be solved, if they can be solved at all, with simple answers.

          I do not believe in organized religion. Before he died my brother told me he thought that religion was the cause of most of the world's problems. I could only agree. This is true all through history. Christianity made Galileo deny what he perfectly well knew, that the heavens are in motion. Christianity sacked Jerusalem in the First Crusade, sacked Rome in 1527, killing 10,000 people the first day; a crude version of conservatism calling itself Christian hates gays and lesbians and God knows who else. A group of Muslims of unknown size wants to live in the 7th century and beheads people who do not share their religion. These are monstrous things. Anyone of any sense knows that if there is a God he or she or it would not sanction this kind of insanity. Organized religion led to the sexual abuse of countless numbers of children in the Catholic Church. Is this not sick? Does it not disgust you? It disgusts me. I wrote a piece once on child sexual abuse, interviewed a few of its victims as adults. Their lives had been permanently ruined. Listening to them was like watching people bleed and not being able to stitch them up. This is Christianity?

          Alexander Hamilton said that the real problem was democracy. The Founders feared mob rule, as well they should. Winston Churchill said that democracy was a terrible way to govern, but the other ways were worse. The founders created a republic, not a democracy. But we have devolved. Our legislatures nationwide are a sad joke, and Congress is criminally irresponsible, interested only in power, money, and certainly not in the national interest. So I do not believe all that much in democracy. But at the same time I must. There is no alternative. I also believe in our constitution, but it desperately needs to be rewritten. The second amendment has been twisted out of all meaning, and the mob is now armed, as if we were all living in Tombstone. It's a ridiculous situation, preserved and prolonged by a corrupt Congress.

          I believe that it will take centuries to undo America's original sin, which is slavery, and that extensive intermarriage among the races is the only way it will disappear. I only recently found out something of the extensive use of Native American slaves in the colonies, and the slave trade in that group of people. Really, is there no limit to the horrors people perpetrate on each other? As a writer of military history, I say the answer is no. There is no limit.

          I believe in history. I believe it should be compulsory reading for anyone entering politics. Why? Because it saddens you. It teaches you about the law of unintended consequences, and what happens when people in power do not think through all the reactions that a particular action--like invading Iraq--might create. It teaches humility, and caution. And thoughtfulness.

          Let me end it here. Paul Simon is about to sing Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a song that always makes me cry. I could easily cry. Cry for my country most of all. We are in the process of going mad, losing our reason, our restraint, chasing chimeras off the stage. My wife tells me the crowd has calmed down. Let us hope so.

         

          

         

Sunday, June 12, 2016

AMERICA THE STUPID

June 12, 2016: AMERICA THE STUPID

          When Jefferson left France in 1789 to return to the United States after his five years there as the American minister plenipotentiary, he sent ahead of him boxes of books to friends. One was a box containing six cubic feet of books to James Madison. These included the famous Encyclopedie, Diderot's compendium of current knowledge, one of the great projects of the European Enlightenment, along with various editions of the Greek and Roman classics, in their original languages, plus the works of Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and many other Enlightenment figures. Books were hard to obtain in America. In Paris and London they were plentiful.

          He sent books to his nephews as well. Jefferson had no white son, only daughters, and his ideas about their education were typical of their time--to wit, what was the point of educating women? He told his daughter Martha that she should become adept with the sewing needle, and otherwise master the social arts. For his nephews he developed a carefully thought out program of reading of the classics, studies in science, geography, and modern languages, and the law. The classics were to be read in their original languages. Other than that, he believed in walking. He himself used to walk six miles a day around Paris, no matter what the weather. "It's only water," he said of rain and snow.

          And then, years later, after his presidency came to an end, he founded the University of Virginia and did much to establish its curriculum, based on the same principles he wrote to his nephews about, the same books he sent to them and to Madison and James Monroe and other friends. He had in mind a classical education, and a preparation for political service in the government of the United States. For which a familiarity with Thucydides and Polybius and Cicero was as important as a familiarity with the U. S. Constitution.

          This was the sort of education that most of the founding fathers had. One exception was George Washington, and he felt the lack of it, but did what he could to catch up. When Jefferson sold his library to the government to help found the Library of Congress, and to pay a portion of his many debts, he owned more than 6,000 books. Washington had a few hundred. So this sort of education was not, strictly speaking, an absolute necessity to govern well. But it was a huge help. It gave the founders the mental equipment, and the common background, of an Enlightenment education in the theory and practice of government. To read Thucydides is to learn a great deal about what was essentially civil war, Athens vs. Sparta, from a writer who participated in it. To read Polybius is to discover how a small city in central Italy, Rome, could become the master of the whole Mediterranean. And Hume? Hume's words and thoughts can be found in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu explained how republics worked, and we live in a republic. Only small ones survive, Montesquieu argued. The U. S. was small then. Now it is very large.

          A wiser time. And how do people prepare today for governing? Does anyone get this kind of education any more? I certainly didn't. In public school I remember a course in civics where the process of proposing and passing legislation was taught, but dully. And I was one of two juniors in high school who were sent to Boys State for a couple of weeks one summer, where we went through the process of running for office and electing mock legislators and a mock governor, who at the end gave a speech. It was run by the American Legion and I wonder whether it still exists. For personal reasons I was miserable the whole time and got nothing out of it. As far as the classics go, no course in them was available. Not until I got to college did I read anything of the Greeks, and then it was Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy. What I know of political life and government I know by educating myself, and by practicing it in the village where I live.

          We all know the consequences of the abandonment of political education in this country. People like Donald Trump, who flaunts his ignorance of issues, an avowed racist, bankrupt both morally and intellectually. People who serve in Congress, make laws, control committees, and have an approval rating, collectively, of 9%. People who serve in state governments, where corruption is an everyday occurrence. And the people themselves, who not only don't read the classics but don't even read newspapers any more, a people so generally ignorant that comparisons of the ability to do math or read or write consistently place us in the middle to low range with respect to other first world countries. How many people can name their state representative, their state senator? How many can name the three branches of the Federal government, and explain what they do? How many still believe that the sun orbits the earth? Or that the earth is four thousand years old? Or that global warming doesn't exist? America has become stupid.

          In a republic, life is inescapably political. You have to educate people to politics, to understand it if not participate in it. Jefferson saw that clearly, and founded a university to accomplish it. He rejoiced when a Pennsylvania farmer invented a new and more efficient way to make wagon wheels, based upon a reading of Homer-- in the original Greek. It's a big and complicated country, with innumerable interest groups, many different factions, and it takes educated people to run it, indeed to do such an elemental thing as vote. But education is the first thing to get cut, the last thing most state legislatures respect.

          So we sink deeper into ignorance, deeper into dysfunction, deeper into paranoia. The coming election is, more than anything, a test of American intelligence. And it's an open question whether we'll pass.

         

Thursday, May 5, 2016

REPUBLICANS I HAVE KNOWN

May 5, 2016: REPUBLICANS I HAVE KNOWN

          I grew up in a Republican household, it was middle-class, my father commuted to New York City every morning and worked in railroad insurance, he had met my mother in the office when they were both young, and she was the boss's daughter and his secretary. She could type 120 words a minute. All these people were Republicans. We lived in a solidly Republican town, Westfield, N. J., an old suburb. My older brother, my only sibling, went to Cornell, took chemical engineering, worked for a couple of years at an oil refinery in Perth Amboy, then enrolled in law school nights and ultimately became Westfield's town attorney, holding the job for twenty-three years, a state record. He was Republican through and through. When my wife and I went to see him late in life you could not walk into the house without finding Fox News going on the TV. All hours of the day and evening.

          I was seven when FDR died. I had been hearing all my little life that Roosevelt was a "traitor to his class," so I grabbed a pot out of the kitchen, took a large spoon, and started walking around the outside of our house beating on the pot and crying, "Roosevelt is dead, Roosevelt is dead," and that lasted until my mother rushed outside and grabbed me and took me back inside. You get the picture.

          So--quite a long life I've had, long enough that I voted my first time around for JFK. I've voted Democrat ever since. Princeton did this to me, deepened my knowledge of history, explained issues to me, got me interested in politics and what the two parties stood for. One of my roommates one year was the son of a Democratis kingmaker in Hartford, Connecticut. He subscribed to the New York Times. There was political talk in our rooms, and I listened. And began to follow the news. And abandoned my family's politics, which wasn't very strong anyway. Their politics were a small element in their overall character. They were respectable, conventional people with a great sense of humor, loving to their children, determined to give us every opportunity. Solid. You could rely on them completely. Cornell, Princeton--they made large sacrifices to send us there. They were great parents, and what I came to think of as classic Republicans, business oriented, traditional, relatively tolerant, patriotic, family centered.

          What happened? How did a party into whose hands you could put the country without fearing for its life become the party of people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump--people so inherently evil or so stupid and ignorant as to make the U. S. the laughing stock of the world, and/or a source of bafflement and panic internationally? Look back. Wendell Wilkie was a one-worlder along the lines of Woodrow Wilson. Dwight Eisenhower was boring but quietly effective, and wise. Thomas Dewey would have made a decent President. The only joke on the scene was Harold Stassen, and he never had a chance in any of the many elections he threw his hat into. No one took him seriously. The Republican Party was an educated party then, it was the party of business and always opposed regulation, but it was not irresponsible. Was it Nixon?

          Yes, no doubt that was part of it. He was a strange bird, quite intelligent, deeply paranoid, never sure how to behave with people. You can cite his famous "Southern strategy," liberating the racism inherent not only in the South but also lurking in shallow burials all over the American landscape, and thereby turning the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, racist. But it took a long time after that for the party to become completely mindless, to give it over to know-nothings like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to tolerate people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and let them become the party's voice. Nixon wasn't the whole story. Much more had to happen for the U. S. to become an outlier among the civilized, developed nations of the world.

          Shall we call it the failure of the Establishment? No doubt that's another element, but then we have to define exactly what the Establishment consists of, and that's not easy. I'm pretty sure that if I had chosen another line of work I could have become a member of the Establishment. My mother saw me becoming a college president. In a large and extremely diverse country like ours, I think an Establishment is pretty much a necessity. A kind of semi-permanent government, the top edge of a permanent bureaucracy, it develops a sophistication about government that is often cynical but seldom reckless. We can all think right away of the many mistakes made by establishments, but you don't do away with them because they make mistakes. Or because they're intertwined with business interests. Business interests are part of the foundation of America. Alexander Hamilton understood that, and, as a friend of mine says, we're all Hamiltonians now. We deplore business lobbies and their power, but there are environmental lobbies and artist lobbies and PBS lobbies as well and wealthy people are necessary to support them.

          I could go on and on citing reasons. They're no doubt endless; we could cite a perfect storm of reasons for the decline of the Republican Party. But they add up to a major tragedy. As a home for people like my parents, my brother, it has simply vanished. Now all in Republican World is illogic and rage, a profound stupidity, anti-educational, anti-science, anti-factual, hypocritical, overtly racist. It no longer has a moral compass, a sense of noblesse oblige, a sense of responsibility, and these are things that an opposition requires to have a real place in the country's sense of itself. There is no longer any intelligence in it, or anything but a kind of inept calculation. We can no longer trust it. Once we could. And this is tragic. It is doing the country permanent damage.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

BERNIE OR HILLARY II

April 10, 2016: BERNIE OR HILLARY II

          Last time I considered this question--a month ago? six weeks?--I left room for changing my mind. Barring unforeseen circumstances, my mind is now made up. I am 100% for Hillary.

          And it is Bernie himself who killed the small chance he had with me. The more I learned, the more I disliked and distrusted. One of the key things was finding out on FB that in the ranking of our 100 Senators on a scale of willingness, or ability, to compromise, he came near the bottom, 98th out of 100. Who was number 99? Ted Cruz. That told me a lot. Politics is all about compromise. In the real world no one gets everything he or she wants. Every engineer designing cars or airplanes or ear plugs knows that if you want one feature, you have to give up another. Every politicians knows that to get anything done, you have to make deals with people you may not like whose views you abhor. You have to compromise. Bernie, at no. 98, clearly has not been willing to compromise. He stands on principle. Well, that's nice, but it's also a killer in terms of accomplishment. Bernie does not have his name on major bills. He is known if at all for attaching amendments to bills. Bernie is, in short, an ideologue.

          Standing on principle. Spare me. My redoubtable wife, Lorraine Dusky, has been trying for years to get the closed adoption laws in the State of New York, indeed in states all over America, changed, so that adoptees can find out who their biological parents are, and therefore who they are. Change has been blocked often by adoptive parents who happen to hold office in State Legislatures and have done everything in their power to block change. And they have. This has gone on in states all over the country. It persists. It is a major injustice. In states where the laws have changed, they have often had attached to them a proviso that a biological mother can if she wishes veto its application to her. They can choose to remain anonymous. Well, there are other campaigners in this process who find this veto proviso unacceptable, and campaign against the passage of laws that don't give them the whole shebang, total change, total surrender from the other side. All or nothing. They wind up with nothing. But they stand on principle. They're ideologues.

          A free college education for everyone, at least in the public colleges? Wow! A direct appeal to the young, saddled with crushing debt from their own college educations. I quote Ernest Hemingway--"Isn't it pretty to think so." The how of things seems to escape Bernie at every stage. The 50 states all have some sort of public education, which those states pay for with the college tuition they charge, as well as general funding from taxes, and in may states right now this funding is shrinking, partly on Republican grounds, namely 'why should we do anything for our people?' and partly on good old American anti-intellectualism and its pride in native ignorance. So how is this going to happen? Is Bernie going to tax the rich? Great. Now in the states controlled by Republicans, and the majority of them are, how is the Republican love for the rich going to transform suddenly into its opposite? The Republicans in these states are not going to disappear. They are not going to change their minds. It seems obvious this year that a lot of Republicans at the national level are going to lose their offices, but at the state level? Is the gerrymandering that favors Republicans going to disappear without floor fights that will go on for years? Bernie is not giving us the how. Bernie promises to get rid of the big banks, but when pinned down he can't say how.

          But there's going to be a revolution, he says. Really? Where are the signs of that? I don't see any. This is not a revolutionary country; the people who take arms against a sea of troubles already have the arms. and they're pointing their muzzles in the other direction--against change; against minorities and liberalism and government control of Western lands and the like. When it comes time to vote for true liberals like Gene Macarthy or Walter Mondale or Hubert Humphrey, they don't. It's not a liberal country, and the many liberals among my friends don't seem to understand that they live in a bubble, that out there in Oklahoma and Idaho and the South it's very different. Very different indeed.

          And Hillary? She gets it. She doesn't engage in magical thinking. She campaigns, as Gail Collins pointed out yesterday, in the places where people live and work and she listens. She finds out what they care about. She knows that Wall Street is immortal and it's a good thing to get to know people who control hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. They are not necessarily the enemy. It's a complicated world. Wall Street, like any business, needs to be regulated, but it's not all evil and greed. Nothing is. Wall Street fulfills essential functions. So does mining, so does agribusiness, so do so many of the big bad wolves of American liberalism. These entities are not the enemy. You regulate them. Regulation has powerful enemies in Congress. You have to work through Congress to get major things done. Hillary will compromise. Bernie doesn't compromise. He stands on principle.

          Hillary lives in the real world. She knows you don't get everything you want, and you don't get anything in politics all at once. You have to work for it, and real change, deep change, takes years. How long has it been since we won the Civil War? One hundred and fifty years. And where is racism now? All gone? I used to say it would take as long to give out as slavery lasted--more than 300 years. Now I'm thinking, maybe longer. She knows that as President, you have to be president of all the people, not just the liberals. You lose as often as you win, and are happy to make small gains. If you can't reform the system, which is entrenched, you try to manipulate it to your advantage. You make friends with the press if you can. You keep your friends close, your enemies closer. She is one of the most experienced politicians in America, as everybody knows, and she's down on foreign policy; indeed, she has a foreign policy, and it's not clear that Bernie does, or what it might be when he's faced with the enormous problems it constantly presents. In the now famous Daily News interview he couldn't figure out how to balance the American role in Israel with his native distaste for Israeli injustice toward the Palestinians. Come on, Bernie. You're running, as John Oliver would say, for fucking President of the United States. You have ISIS to deal with along with North Korea and China and the woefully neglected South American countries, along with the terrible conditions in Central America that drive immigrants into our arms. How are you going to deal with it? What's your policy? Do you have a policy? Or is it all and only about income inequality, which is another major problem nobody knows how to solve?

          Hillary does not have charisma but I like her more and more. I like strong women and married one. She keeps me alert. She has her causes but she's not ideological. She can change her mind. But her heart is always in the right place. And she is no ideologue. She understands what's possible, what isn't; she fights for her cause but can compromise. So do I, in my small role running a regulatory board here in Sag Harbor. I don't stand on principle, I stand on practical, doable. I am mostly liberal, but not always. The arc of history moves toward justice, said Martin Luther King, but slowly. Very slowly. That is a wise thing to say. Bernie has yet to say a wise thing. We all know economic inequality is a plague, a blight upon the idea of America. But he promises impossible things. Thanks for bringing it up, Bernie, but it's time to let the people who live in the real world manage change. And by the way, you really look bad when it comes to gun control.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

THE COWBOYS

March 23, 2016: THE COWBOYS

          We gave a brunch last month for some old and new friends and I was sitting next to someone on our couch that I've known for 35 years, let's call him David, and he leaned over to me and said something about Iraq, to the effect of, what if we had left Saddam Hussein in power?

          Amen to that, brother.

          And then this week I read the very long piece in the current Atlantic about Obama's foreign policy, and my admiration for that policy was confirmed. Obama is cautious. Prudent. He believes in diplomacy, not war. He understand the complexity of the world and its interconnections. He gets it about tribalism in the Middle East. He knows something of the history of the region. He is trying to point America in the direction of the Pacific, as the coming region, a region where we might do more good than in the snake pit of the Near East..

          Most of all, he understands that America is not the savior of the world. It cannot impose democratic systems on societies that do not want them, have no experience with them, and are not ready, and may never be ready, for them.

          So naturally Thomas Friedman, writing today in the New York Times, devoted his column to critiziaing Obama's views as expressed in the Atlantic. To be brief about it, I have long despised Friedman's views on foreign policy. He was one of the principal hawks promoting American intervention in Iraq in 2001, one of the idiots who drank the Kool-Aid, believing in the carefully calculated lies of whichever Chalabi (sp?) it was, who convinced the Neo-Cons that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction even though the international experts--I'm thinking primarily of Hans Blix--knew there weren't, having actually been in Iraq looking for them and found none.

          Has anyone noticed we are still there? Still involved? Is the situation better than it was? As Obama points out, Iraq presented no serious threat to the security of the United States at the time. Is the situation in Afghanistan better than it was? I wrote a piece about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and read a book about the British experience in Afghanistan and it all still applies. The Soviet intervention, ten years worth, was an utter disaster. Afterwards a Soviet ambassador to the U. S. warned  someone at the State Dept. not to make the mistake they had made. Wasted words. The English in the nineteenth century tried to impose, by force, a tribal leader on the Afghans who would rule the country, and wound up losing an entire army, every single man killed. Nothing has changed. There's an excellent movie out now, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, with Tina Fey, that graphically depicts how things currently fare in Afghanistan, and only the technology has changed. More helicopters. More IEDs.

          I blame Woodrow Wilson for much of this. Make the World Safe for Democracy. Right, Woody, you naive fool. American intervention stems from this doctrine, although, to be sure, there was plenty of infantile talk in the nineteenth century about America being the Redeemer Nation, showing the world how to live free, and this talk went on even while we were exterminating the Indians, another tribal culture, and buying and selling black human beings, breaking up families, treating human beings like cattle. WE did this. Holier than thou Americans, smug, lucky in their isolation between two oceans, and consequently stupid.

          It's a cowboy dumbness. It believes in myths, Shane, really fast with a gun, quick on the trigger, defending the innocent family, killing Jack Palance, then riding into the sunset. And all those who followed, Clint Eastwoods riding into town, killing the bad guys, almost always all by themselves, then riding on. That's who we are, we Americans, heroes bringing law and order to chaotic places. The appalling thing is to see this mentality at the very top, among people who actually run things and have serious power, and seeing how they persist at these levels no matter how many terrible mistakes they make. Caution? Prudence? Not for them.

          Serving in the military, actually firing weapons at other people, and being fired at? Not for them.

          Not until this country faces the truth about itself and so much of its past will it ever crawl out from under its own arrogance. But I don't have a whole lot of hope. Myths are extremely difficult to kill. In a country that seldom pays attention to its own history, its own moral failures, myths can only flourish.

         

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

AMERICA ALAS

AMERICA ALAS

March 1, 2016

          Every weekday morning I sit in Starbuck's and spend too much for a cup of tea--in Starbuck's tea costs more than coffee--and read the NY Times and brood. This morning it was an op ed page piece telling us that in Europe Donald Trump awakens memories of Benito Mussolini. As well he should. He has the Republican establishment in a panic, although they created him. He makes me distinctly nervous. He makes the Europeans nervous, as well he should. He is a demagogue, indifferent to policies or the political process, bent on power no one knows how he will wield, an obvious narcissist, racist, blowhard, willing to accept the endorsements of the KKK, a man with no discernible moral standards, with a history of failure, a man who offers no ideas or positions or point of view, who does not argue but wins the crowd with ad hominem insults, and turns every crowd into a mob.

          The Republican Party created their own monster, and now he rages about the countryside raising havoc. The Republican Party created Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, both lying machines, and Glenn Beck and any number of others of their kind, and let them deliberately misdirect the public and play to their prejudices and resentments and buried hatreds. Now we all pay the price. The media love it because it's such good theater, and the mob loves it because it gives voice to their hatreds. Their racism. Their bitterness at their own struggle to make ends meet, which they blame, rightly, on forces beyond their control. And the manifest injustice of seeing the CEO of the corporations they work for making 400 or 500 times what they make, and flying around in their private planes. How ironic that the leader of this mob flies around in his own private plane.

          At some point in the future a clever writer will untangle this disaster and tell us why it happened, although by then it may be too late; we may have, or have had, a President Trump, and the country will be lost. I certainly hope not. But even if the country is not lost this time around, it will remain in trouble, because the fundamental flaws will remain. Let me list them.

          The survival of a republic requires an educated public. Our educational levels are steadily sinking in relation to the rest of the world. If education is adequately funded at all, it is only for the STEM disciplines, science, technology, math, which are thought to be useful, while all the rest are, in the mind even of our own highly educated President, evidently, merely an indulgence. This is an ongoing tragedy. The founding fathers we revere so much were all educated in the classics. Read Jefferson's letters to his nephews about this. He tells them what to read, and it is the classics, and the Enlightenment political philosophers; and it is this that created the Constitution. This is what made Washington, Jefferson, and Madison and Hamilton and James Monroe such wise leaders politically. Now our political leaders are mostly lawyers. Jefferson's reading lists are truly formidable. But he fully expected his nephews to grow into political leaders themselves. That was their duty. That remains the duty of every voter in a republic--to educate himself about politics, to lose his innocence and plunge into it, to study it and to serve. To be a citizen is to take on responsibility for government, to get involved, to follow it closely. And to vote. Fewer than half the eligible population votes in the typical American election now. And that's criminally shameful, and one of the primary reasons the republic is unlikely to survive.

          What else? Money in politics. This is so obvious it hardly needs comment. Every thinking citizen I know believes the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United was essentially corrupt, based on a disastrous nineteenth century precedent that corporations have the legal status of a person and designed to give free rein to the rich to control the politics of the country. A decision, significantly, engineered by the former corporate lawyers on the Court. "The business of America is business," said Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.. As anyone can see, business bought Congress a long time ago. The lobbying industry is huge in this country; lobbyists write legislation, spend money taking legislators on junkets to golf clubs, all the machinery of corruption firmly in place. Only legislation can change this fact, and what are the chances of that? What are the chances of an amendment to the Constitution destroying Citizens United?

          And then? Ideological rigidity. A few years ago I wrote a piece in this space on why I am a Democrat, which has been lifelong with me, and it has to do with human nature and my understanding of the nature of human society in America. I think most political ideologies are based on just such views, which seem to emerge from particular personality types. More authoritarian types turn Republican. Less authoritarian turn Democrat. It sometimes puzzles me that I'm a Democrat, since I come from a Republican family. In any case, these are deep-seated differences, built into us, which means they are probably, in whatever names, Republican, Democrat, Whig, Tory, Copperheads, Know-Nothing they appear in history, permanent. Which means that the practice of politics will always require compromise. It was just that that Barack Obama tried to practice when he first entered office. The refusal to compromise is what is now coming home to roost on the Republican right. Their inflexibility, their rigidity is doing them in. And it was planned. That's the most remarkable thing. Nothing this President proposed was ever going to get enacted as long as the Republicans held power in Congress, and this was deliberate. Now it's an issue with the Supreme Court, and the egregious Scalia's replacement. They won't even shake hands with Obama's nominee. This is a version of treason. It brings government to a standstill, and it is one source of the mob mentality that engulfs the country. It embodies the smugness, the contempt for the political process, that people instinctively hate about what politics has become in this country. Normally, no politician can afford to be ideologically pure. To his public he must pretend to be if he wants to get elected, but in practice he must work with the other side, make concessions, make deals, tit for tat, in order to get a step closer to what he wants. It takes time and it takes a certain level of prevarication, but that's how it works. In office you serve all the people, not just your side. Purity has no place in politics. But one side has closed its doors. Which is what totalitarian governments do.

          I could go on, and probably will before too long. I am deep in Sag Harbor politics, chair of one of the village's regulatory boards, dealing with the public every two weeks at our meetings, and it's not easy. We have been sued already, will probably be sued again. Hot issues surround us. Vanity Fair will be publishing a piece on these issues in just a month or two. I get paid nothing for this. It's my duty as a citizen. If we don't do it, our village will die. Think globally, act locally. Don't get me wrong, I'm no hero. I just take citizenship seriously. So must we all, if our country is to survive.

Friday, February 5, 2016

HILLARY OR BERNIE?

February 5, 2016: HILLARY OR BERNIE?

          What does a President do first thing every morning when he, or possibly she, wakes up in the White House? Let's call him a he, for the time being. He has breakfast, or maybe just coffee, walks into the Oval Office, and gets his daily intelligence briefing.  He wakes up to the daily crisis. He gets his daily instruction in the real world.

          I've often wondered what that must be like, what it does to a person to be reminded, day after day, how complex most situations are, how difficult, even impossible the choices are one faces in dealing with them, and how far away solutions are. Consider the situation in Syria, and our unfortunate involvement in it. Everything in Syria is a horror--the dictator, Assad, willing to do anything to maintain his control; the rebels, wielding different ideologies of their own, united only in hating Assad; ISIS, filling the vacuum created by these separate horrors with their own extraordinary levels of violence, their own spectacular horror, and all of this affecting the entire surrounding Middle East. So what do WE do in this situation. What do WE do about the refugees, streaming toward Europe to escape the madness, to add another dimension to the five or six already at work. I have no answer. We're already bombing and strafing ISIS, throwing out own violence into the picture, but is that an answer? A lot of collateral damage enters the scene. We are responsible for it. And now some idiot on the right proposes we carpet bomb the entire country, maybe bomb the entire Middle
East, and an equally idiotic right wing thinks that's a grand idea. It cannot be fun to be President of the United States. It's hard enough, complicated enough, to be the chairman of Sag Harbor's Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review, which I currently am.

          I am also currently an historian, writing American and military history and working on a second edition of my version of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. History is an education in reality, and what it taught me early on is that most Americans do not live in the real world, but in a fantasy world, a dream world in which, in one version, everybody is self-reliant, or can be if they stop being lazy, government is a con job, and freedom is the only value. That's the right's version of the dream. On the left, the dream is that we can ultimately conquer corruption, self-interest, and Wall Street, and regulate our way to a utopian society in which everyone has a guaranteed income, college is free for all, and all of us will finally be men and women of good will--what one of my nephews calls the nanny state. Both dreams are very old, the current ones being modern incarnations of ideas that date to the beginnings of Western civilization. They have cropped up repeatedly in American history. Thomas Jefferson distrusted government even while he ran it, while at the same time dreaming of a happy agricultural republic where farmers read Homer in the original Greek. His dear friend James Madison was far more realistic. "If men were angels," he wrote in Federalist #51, "government would not be necessary." But men are not angels. Government is necessary. Left to themselves, people would descend into a Hobbesian universe of all against all. Into the dystopian anarchy of the apocalypse, where we all die.

          Hillary or Bernie? I remember telling a teacher many years ago that I wanted to live in the real world, and have tried to do so. In truth, I am not enthusiastic about either candidate. Hillary has been with us for a long time, she makes mistakes in judgment, she has ties to Wall Street. On the other hand she also has close ties to minorities, she has been a fierce advocate for women, for human rights generally, and she has the kind of international experience and relationships that are crucial for America's role in the world. Bernie is clearly a decent man, progressive to his fingertips, and righteous. He talks the talk progressives and young people rally around. And it's appealing. But his on the other hands are that he's never gotten anything important through Congress, he obviously cannot and will not be able to finance his proposals, and he's too far on the utopian side for my taste.

          But there are miles to go. And people are unpredictable. I thought Barak Obama a poor choice in 2008 for his lack of experience and the fact that he seemed too large a target for some fanatic's rifle, but he has proved to be an excellent President caught in awful circumstances. The fact that he's black brought back out of the twilight a recrudescence of the racism that Americans have harbored for 400 years, and that was unfortunate. However, it opened our eyes to the depth of the racism that afflicts us, to the depth of our own particular horror. Politics remains what it has always been, the art of the possible, an impossible job of maneuvering among the dream worlds of this interest and the other, trying to keep one's own balance, and the nation's, while dealing with what's real. I think Hillary will be better at this than Bernie, who's an ideologue, and that she will accomplish more. But we'll see. When we reach November, I'm not sure now who I will vote for then, except that it will be the Democratic candidate. As usual, everything depends. Time will tell.
         

Thursday, January 14, 2016

LIBERTY IN OREGON

January 14, 1916                        LIBERTY IN OREGON

          Armed militia taking over a Federal facility--really? Are they serious?

          I suspect they are. Serious and stupid at the same time. But it's not as if it's new. Portions of the United States are always looking for ways to separate themeselves from the Federal Gov't., most famously in the Civil War, and somehow it's always in the name of liberty, or freedom, or get out of my backyard. I know the impulse from writing about the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in the 1790s, shortly after there first was a United States under the Constitution. Farmers there were growing corn and converting it to whiskey in order to have a product that was much cheaper and easier to ship west down the rivers to New Orleans than it was to harvest the corn and ship it east to markets in the cities there. Corn in bulk is a lot more expensive to ship anywhere on farm wagons and with multiple mules than corn condensed into whiskey, for which there's always a demand. The tax on spirits, which was levied at the source, was one of the very first taxes the Fed. government enacted, and western Pennsylvania farmers responded with an armed rebellion. It didn't come to an end until George Washington himself called up the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York militias and sent them into the Pittsburgh area, himself leading the way. It took about fifteen minutes, once Washington's army came close, for the rebellion to disappear.

          So it has always been in the U. S. We're free, right? Doesn't that mean that we can do whatever we want? If we're living here, isn't this basically our land? Why should there be Federal land at all? Benedict Anderson called nations "imagined communities." Most of us don't live in eastern Oregon, can't personally know these people, the local communities they belong to are alien to us, who live in totally other communities with different styles of life and differing experiences and different relationships to our physical environments. So what makes us one "nation"? Where do our true allegiances belong? In Europe the allegiances center on their long histories, their differing languages, their defining literatures, their relative homogeneity. We have the one language, though with different accents, but most everything else seems unreal. How many of us can imagine having common ground with a cattle rancher? In effect, that's what being a nation on some level requires. Just that level of imagination, albeit in the abstract. We have to commit to the same idea of the nation, the same image in our mind of what it means, and those images, as our politics so plainly reveal, are not the same.

          I've written about these matters before in this blog, and I'll no doubt do it again. As the populace gets further removed from its original Enlightenment principles--who asks James Madison any more what the liberty of a citizen actually means?--as more and more people come here or are born here, as the diversity in the world and all the conflicts it generates grow more and more intense, the centrifuge that is our "nation" will only speed up, and what holds us together--I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that is--will come to seem more remote. We have had these regional differences from the start. As Obama's brilliant presidency reveals, the racism hasn't gone away. The military supposedly represents the nation at its best, but in fact we treat them like shit. As differences escalate and harden, people grow more selfish. Compromise vanishes. Mutual understanding is not to be found.

          I've quoted Benjamin Franklin before, too. Let me repeat. As he emerged for the last time from the hall in Philadelphia where the Constitution was written, a woman asked him what sort of government they had conceived. And he famously said, "A republic, ma'am. If you can keep it."

          If you can keep it. It must be kept, that is, from inside the hearts and mind of a people dedicated to the task. As the President said in his final State of the Union address the other night, it's a hard task. It takes dedication, and, most of all, it takes service.

          But as a study at Princeton concluded recently, we have already lost it. We do not live, it claimed, in either a republic or a democracy any more. We live in an oligarchy.