Missing the Point

Bernie Sanders may have enjoyed Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Don Quijote de la Mancha) a little too much in his youth. Then perhaps he read or saw it more recently.  Either way, the Romantic view that he fashions himself as the leader of a “revolution” speaks more of windmills than of reality. 

That doesn’t discount the value of his opinions.  Bernie has garnered substantial support because he has addressed, with authenticity, systemic problems that our current divided government is incapable of addressing.

Nevertheless like most politicians, he presents these problems with little substance.  He’s heavy on the what and rather light on the how. A case in point is healthcare, which he doesn’t even address as an “issue” on his website.

I find that disappointing since Sanders is the only candidate with the courage enough to advocate a single payer system.  It’s disappointing because in the real world healthcare has no equal for stressful issues that impact our daily lives…our actual lives. 

People can stress over terrorist attacks, gun use, runaway germs, environmental deterioration, bad parents, puppy farms, you name it, but none of these actually impact the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans.  This is not to say that we should ignore issues that don’t affect us directly.  Were that the case, slavery might have lasted into the 20^th century.  But we should not ignore the obvious.

In the recent December Democratic debate Bernie was asked how he planned to pay for a single payer healthcare system. He was actually asked how much specifically in taxes would have to be raised to pay for it.  This was a how much more this month do you expect to be beating your wife kind of question.

He awkwardly (and timidly, in my opinion) attempted to point out that, essentially, every American is already paying a huge healthcare tax in the form of premiums and co-pays (my words), and the elimination of that would offset any tax increase.  He didn’t succeed.

Moreover, he failed to give even the slightest idea on how we get from here to there.  Democrats, in their desire to defend Obamacare, have added nothing significant to the debate on this issue.  The Republicans simply want to eliminate the law (which they invented) and let the chips fall where they may.  Not surprisingly, those chips would be like poker chips going to very few winners.

Saunders and other politicians often ask this question but don’t have the cohunes to give an answer: why do Americans pay multiples more (per capita) in healthcare costs than any other developed nation yet receive outcomes no better or inferior for the society as a whole? The American capitalist approach to healthcare, unique in the world, makes the difference and the reason it doesn’t work has to do with healthcare itself.

General healthcare is not a marketable commodity as Republicans would like you to think.  It is a service which is essentially inelastic, meaning that regardless how much the price goes up the demand for the service does not drop.  It is no more marketable than Police protection, Fire Departments, the Military, food safety, road repair or any one of many public services.

There is no free enterprise pressure to lower cost and no practical way to shop for services based on price. Controlling cost is the real issue and Obamacare doesn’t take us one step closer…but it could have.

Insurance based Universal Healthcare, as they have in Japan, is probably the type of system we could gravitate toward, given the passage of Obamacare.  However, Japan’s system has both central control of pricing and outlaws for-profit hospitals.  These are critical ingredients to controlling healthcare costs and a near impossible goal given the flora and fauna of American politics. Or is it?

In enacting the Affordable Health Care Act Obama caved on the most important aspect of the law, the public option.  He was willing to risk long term failure for short term success. It was a bad deal. It was like negotiating your right to bake bread by giving up the yeast.

The most cost-effective healthcare in the Country today is Medicare.  The public option would have essentially created a “Medicare” for American’s under 65.  It is likely it would have attracted a lot of support and combined with over-65 Medicare could have given the US Government the kind of leverage that is needed to control costs.

Given enough support we might be able to back door into a Japanese type of Universal Health Care, which ironically America created for the Japanese after WWII.

For those brain-dead Conservative Republicans who robotically respond that the Government is incapable of handling such power, I suggest they give a portrait of Lyndon Johnson the finger and turn down their Medicare benefits when they turn 65.

Bernie, Hillary and common sense Americans who know that Obamacare isn’t going away anytime soon need to start to address how to improve it and deal with its overriding fault…cost. It is by reinstating the “public option”. That is what Saunders should have responded with and should have done it with gusto.  Does he even get it?

Take a Deep Breath

Take a deep breath America, relax…it’s only Donald. 

What we’re seeing in the Republican Party this political season relates more closely to Reality TV than reality.  The massive attention “The Donald” has received from both news media and bias media (Right and Left) is no less bizarre than the affection he gleans from his supporters.

He has been called or accused of being a fascist, a tower of strength, a demigod, a racist, a patriot, a loser, a winner, a womanizer, a fighter, or a megalomaniac, among other things.  Take your choice. 

None of them are true.  I liked Martin O’Malley’s label of “carnival barker”. After all, what kind of colorful, fast talking trickster stands before a crowd trying to entice them into the Fun House.  Sounds like Trump to me.

In truth, what he says is meaningless, beyond the generation of endless rhetoric.  It’s what he does that defines who he is, and as of yet he has done nothing other than talk.  Moreover, there is nothing he can do and, likely, nothing he will do.

I’m not suggesting that rhetoric has no value, far from it, but a weather report is not the weather. When someone is forecasting a July snowstorm in Miami, it’s time to stick your head out the window.

Trump is not alone. All politicians, but the Republicans especially, campaign with the use of outrageous fantasies.  How many times have I heard Republican presidential candidates advocate the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service?  An $18 trillion Federal budget with no agency assigned to collect the money??  We’re going to run the Country on goodwill and the honor system??  Perhaps we could employ the Salvation Army bell ringers during their off season.

Deporting millions of people, building impenetrable walls, stopping immigration (even visitation), or tagging Americans by their personal beliefs are just as cockeyed and brain dead as any other political fantasy.

So can this carnival barker actually become President of the United States? After all, we did have Warren G. Harding, Chester A. Arthur, and (gulp) George W. Bush. Of course Trump won’t become President.  No prior President ever gestated in the world we know as Reality Television, and it’s not going to happen, all other things being equal.

It should be no mystery, however, why Donald attracts the starboard side of the good ship GOP.

Republican politicians primarily trade in the use of fear to harvest support.  They’re good at it and they readily get mass media to help. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of immigrants, minority crime, “leftists”, or even simply the “Government” (which they are trying so desperately to be part of) their followers are, by their opinion, deep in doo-doo…and it works.

When a Republican candidate expresses his dire concern about the cunning insertion of Shiria Law into our Judicial System, as most of them have, it should evoke universal belly clutching laughter…but it doesn’t. Hell, we can’t even get good law passed, let alone Shiria Law.

Instead of gun control laws let’s pass laws that take away the driver’s licenses from all women.  Yeah…that’ll be easy.  Regrettably, it doesn’t cause laughter even in those who know better. What it does, when said over and over, is to create uncertainty, the mother of fear.

So who are these “legions” that support Donald, Ted, Rubio, Ben, Jeb and the like? 

This week Bernie Sanders was asked that question.  He said emphatically that they were those individuals angry from the injustice and inequality of our (non-pluralistic) economy in which the power barons in Washington fight to maintain.  According to Bernie, Republicans like Trump give them a scapegoat by blaming the Muslims or Latinos, just as Hitler used the Jews to gain power in a very sick Germany.  Sounds good but, sorry Bernie, you couldn’t be more wrong, except for one thing…they are angry.

The diehard Trump supporter is white, Christian, and with reasonable income and assets by national standards. He or she is usually rural, older, suspicious of education generally, and adverse to change. What makes them angry?  Quite simple really: bias talk radio and television. 

Most all the things that make them angry and engender irrational fear are not really happening in their lives.  Without Rush Limbaugh, Carl Levin, Fox News and the like they probably could deal with, for example, a black President.  Does that make them stupid?  Not really. Still, when fear walks in one door, generally intelligence walks out the other.

The good part is that there are just not that many of them.  One well thought out estimate I read recently argued that if The Donald could hold onto every one of his current supporters in a general election he would garner less than 5% of the vote.  Breathe easy.

The United States is not the German Weimar Republic of 1934…not even remotely close. However, the similarities on the kinds of things that can cause fear in both cultures are notable. Add to that our 21^st Century ability for instant mass communication and you can see how relatively small events or incendiary rhetoric can have widespread impact. 

Donald Trump knows this and uses it to his advantage…but not to be President. 

The Donald is a business man, as he claims.  It is what he actually does.  He is currently merchandizing the “Trump” brand with hundreds of millions in free advertizing.  I believe he’s not interested in being President, probably not even the Republican nominee.  He might leave the Party as an excuse to exit the race, but he won’t run a third party campaign because he wouldn’t spend a dime of his money on a sure loss. He is not a man of principal…obviously.

Trump is a smart, rich narcissist and we’ll be seeing him in the news long after we start saying “Marco…ah, what’s his name?”  So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.  Reality starts again next fall.

Who Really Are the Pros?

Christian, right-to-life, Conservatives promote abortions. Wouldn’t that be an interesting concept to see addressed in a serious yet proactive way? That it seems contradictory only adds irony to reality.

Regrettably, abortion has become the biggest social issue political candidates exploit, even though the issue is simply not political, nor should it be. I know good people who will support politicians and vote on this one issue alone, their rationality virtually disabled by emotion and manipulative rhetoric.

The subject of abortion as a significant political issue is unique to the United States among developed countries.  A primary reason is that those who influence the Conservative electorate in the US have successfully linked the right to choose an abortion as a desire to have an abortion.

 You will rarely if ever hear an activist, right-to-life, Conservative refer to someone as supporting a “right to choose”.  Instead you will hear the term pro-abortion.  They have even been successful in having the media divide the debate between “anti-” and “pro-”.

The great irony is that, in fact, it is your Christian Conservative who is unwittingly pro-abortion and your right-to-choose liberal who seeks a path toward reducing abortions.  Why?

It is a fact that abortion has been an active human endeavor at least throughout recorded history, if not before.  Look it up.

The world’s historical record shows that from ancient times through the 19^th century when and where abortion was occasionally made illegal was not due to some ethical valuation of life. It reflected the desire of those in power to manipulate the transfer of wealth or to increase the population of the laboring class. 

In other words, those in power who opposed abortion did so in their own self interest.  Not much has changed.  Efforts to make abortion illegal today or impossible to obtain affect only the poor or disadvantaged. Even your most diehard Christian-Conservative can’t deny that the wealthy will always have the resources to obtain the procedure in a clean, safe environment. So what really are the anti-abortion group's motives?

No one argues that the emotion which right-to-life activists convey is not real and is not born of the ethics they find compelling given their religious faith.  The question, however, is what this outcry of emotion is accomplishing?  It is presented as a love of life (I guess not to be confused with life as it relates to warfare, guns, or capital punishment). 

Yet, wouldn’t it make more sense that their efforts be directed at reducing abortions rather than purifying humanity by making women and doctor’s criminals?  But the right-to-life movement is not really interested in reducing abortions or the related potential harm to pregnant women. Nothing short of a social law on the books will do. They overtly or unconsciously want to promote and satisfy their own personal self-righteousness.  

There are essentially no women who want to have an abortion or find it positive experience.  They don’t get pregnant for the purpose of having an abortion. How refreshing would it be for all participants in this debate to take this fact and mutually find ways of reducing unwanted pregnancies, not even taking into consideration the societal gains from less burdened single women or families.  Most of what Planned Parenthood does is just that.

Unfortunately, unwanted pregnancies cannot be reduced without sex education and contraception, two factors Christian-Conservatives often don’t want to address or oppose outright. 

For example; they’ll rile, as they did recently, about abortions by African-American women in New York City exceeding live births by the same minority, but never mention the soaring teen pregnancies within that group.  How mindless to think making abortion a crime will stop these girls from getting pregnant.

Just who benefits from tying abortions to acts of sin and criminality?  It is certainly not the unborn in the US, where abortion rates are higher than other western nations with greater abortion availability and acceptance.  Nor is it the disadvantaged pregnant women who are subjected to a system that wrenches from them their self-esteem as they deal with emotional and physical distress.

The great beneficiaries are the Republican politicians who manipulate the issue as a means of garnishing votes for elective office, or at least in the primary process if not general elections. 

An omnipotent Christian God could have designed women to lay eggs instead of live births, where wealthy white men could oversee their gestation…but he didn’t.  By design, women have the difficult burden to decide what happens within their own bodies, not Republican politicians or religious zealots.

Perhaps Republicans can kindle Huxley’s Brave New World concept of human hatcheries. The necessary technology isn’t all that far away.  Now there’s a great job for “limited government”. Until that nightmare, Republicans and Christian-Conservatives can continue to facilitate the killing of unplanned and unwanted fetuses which their own self-interest forces to take place.

Running For The Silver

Why is Carly Fiorina running for President?  Although smarter by multiples than her one-time supporter Sara Palin, the track record to support her candidacy is really less compelling than Gov. Palin’s was prior to her run with John McCain. 

Carly , born Cara Sneed, had a 14 year meteoric rise in big corporate management (1990-2004); from a corporate officer at AT&T, to group president for sales and marketing at Lucent Technologies (an AT&T spinoff), to finally CEO at Hewlett-Packard.  At one point she was named the most powerful woman in American business.

She had an even more precipitous fall from corporate stardom, being fired by H-P’s Board and not having her franchise picked up by any other corporation (to date).  Jeffrey Sonnenfield, noted Harvard and Yale business management professor and Republican advisor, was quoted to say “You couldn’t pick a worse non-imprisoned CEO to be your standard-bearer”.

Her leadership style(s) and screw ups at both H-P and Lucent are legendary and too numerous to regurgitate here.  Some skirted the law and violated business ethics such as her involvement to have Lucent make large loans to customers so they could purchase back Lucent products, thereby creating both assets and revenue with the same dollars.

Numerous and ill-conceived acquisitions gave an illusion of growth, but net revenues plummeted, thousands of US jobs were lost or transferred overseas and stock value tanked.   

Tens of billions of dollars in capitalization were lost at both companies as a result of her direct involvement (losses she often inaccurately claims were the result of the dot-com bust). The proof in the pudding was her subsequent banishment from the business world.

All was not a loss however. Per Fortune Magazine, Carly grossed $100 million in compensation for her 5 year stint at H-P (including her severance) even as stock values plunged 52%.

So how in the world does someone who did so poorly when placed in major leadership positions think that such would parlay her into becoming the leader of the Free World and the Commander-in-chief of the largest military force on the planet?  When testing her background in her first and only political adventure, running for a California Senate seat, she failed in a landslide.  Her past was transparent.

She is intelligent, attractive, and speaks quite well. She knows how to get sound bites broadcast (although the use of things such as the death of her 35 year old stepdaughter as “I know what it’s like to lose a child” makes me want to puke).

She is notably more intelligent than most of her Republican opponents.  Being so, she undoubtedly knew from the get-go she couldn’t win the Republican nomination let alone the general election.  A disastrous history followed by 11 years of unemployment is hardly the formula for success…or does it really make a difference?

I’m suggesting here that Carly saw the potential impact on her life of one particular person: Hillary Clinton. 

It has been reasonably assumed that given the historical Republican penchant for repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot on women’s issues Clinton would likely garner the lion’s share of the female electorate.  Should that share be overwhelming, it alone precludes a Republican win in 2016.  I believe Carly saw that the desire to place a woman as the Vice-Presidential Republican running mate would be irresistible.  How better to obtain the necessary name recognition than to do reasonably well in the primaries…not win, just do well. 

If those are in fact her plans, I for one think she’s right.  At this point she is the logical number 2 choice no matter which other candidate wins the Republican nomination. That choice will be pressured by the RNC and I don’t believe it really makes a difference if Hillary gets the Democrat’s nod or not. 

I think it unlikely that Fiorina even considers herself as a candidate for the Presidency or even what that would mean. The VP is an easy gig after all.  If her mind wanders to the fact that the Vice-Presidency is a major stepping stone to being President I’d wager she’d take her cue from Scarlett O’Hara thinking…Why not? After all…tomorrow is another day.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Who is most responsible for creating the Frankensteinian, presidential candidate Donald Trump?

There are likely many who might claim a hand in molding Trump, including such nebulous groups as reality TV watchers and media outlets that currently give him constant free coverage.  For me I believe that the most influential hands that have sculpted this comic candidate Trump into leading candidate Trump belong to none other than Ronald Reagan. 

No, it's not because they both had names which had previously reached national recognition as part of the entertainment industry. Nor that they were both lifetime Democrats before having their come-to-Jesus-Republican epiphany.  

There is nothing we are aware of about Ronald Reagan, the man or politician, that inspired Trump, anymore than the Bible/Art of the Deal literary one-two punch inspires the Donald. It is merely coincidence that their first names rhyme. No, it was something Ronald directed in 1987 with all too little public debate.

In 1987, at the direction of then President Ronald Reagan, Dennis R. Patrick (Reagan’s appointed chairman of the FCC), ended an FCC doctrine that had been in place for 40 years.  It was called the Fairness Doctrine. 

Simply stated, it required that all licensed broadcasters (radio and television) present both sides of any controversy of public interest.  In the wake of the one sided broadcasting that helped make World War II possible, someone in the Truman Administration came up with the crazy idea that honesty, equity, and balance might be better served if the media, as part of their licensure, could not give just one side to any controversy they chose to report on.

Congress agreed, as did the Supreme Court 20 years later.  After seven Presidents, it took Ronald Reagan to see the wisdom in allowing mass media to spew whatever they wanted without the necessity of being held accountable. Congress passed legislation to make the doctrine law, but it was met with a Reagan veto. 

Who was the first person to take advantage of Reagan’s insight? Arguably, in 1988, it was the former disc jockey, college drop-out, four times married, drug addict named Rush Limbaugh.  At least he has been the most successful in taking advantage of Reagan’s acumen. Many followed. 

Initially, AM radio was the most utilized tool. It still is. Television prior to the advent of cable programming was too expensive to target select polarized audiences.  Even today, bias cable programming (Fox News, MSNBC and so forth) is reluctant to go too extreme for fear of poor ratings.  Not so for radio.

Targeted radio programs from Rush and other (almost exclusively) radical Conservative pundits have expanded their followers by the tens of millions.  Personalities such as Rush, along with notables as Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Carl Levin, and a veritable host of Limbaugh wannabes reach every corner of the Country.

Like Wal-Mart, their audience started mostly in rural markets and slowly expanded to larger and larger urban areas.  Also like Wal-Mart, with the increased followers came the tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from sponsors and endorsements.  

It was an easy discovery that the more polarized, more vitriol, more fear laden the message was, the more dedicated and expanding their less educated listener base became.  Cha-ching. 
 
I have listened to all the big players and many small ones, sometimes at length.  More often I can’t even believe what I’m hearing.  The hate, lies, and half-truths presented as representing both nationalism and religious dogma is nearly an insult to the senses let along the intellect.

So how has the main street Republican Party, the bastion of political Conservatism, reacted to this growing Godzilla in their nest?  

As the audience numbers grew, Republicans embraced the talk show group enthusiastically and routinely included them as supporters in their campaigns.  What was said on these shows paled against the numbers delivered by the possibility of an endorsement or even simple supportive commentary. 

Then it began to change as the messages became more severe, the hate more expressive, and the fears more unstable.  Given that, you’d think the Grand Old Party would react by calling out these radio pit bulls and begin to distance themselves from them.  Not so.

To this date no major (or even minor, that I’m aware of) Republican politician has taken a proactive stand against Conservative Talk Radio and addressed the reality of what they espouse.  They have remained supportive by omission.  And what have they received for this tacit support? 

Ahh yes, a full grown Godzilla, otherwise known as Donald Trump.

The Conservative radio crowd loves Donald Trump without regard to his past and without regard to the fact that in matters of domestic and international politics, and in historical awareness, he is a complete, I repeat a complete idiot.  The Republican leadership cannot comprehend how the lunacy that spews out his mouth can resonate, but then I’m confident they really haven’t been listening to the radio either.  Or if they have, they discounted it as not meaningful to their Party.  They shouldn’t discount it any more.

They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind  is a gem derived from old Hebrew texts.  Ronald Reagan planted the seeds and with each season the harvest gets bigger.  Donald Trump is truly the first major storm from that sowing and, all things being equal, he won’t be the last.

Stupid is...

When it comes to international agreements and treaties entered into by the United States the general population is, as a whole, always clueless.  Very few citizens are even interested or have any sense that it affects their lives. Of those who do, even a smaller number have any in-depth knowledge of what the agreement or treaty entails.  That small number can be even further shaved by those who lack the historical awareness to interpret the agreements in any meaningful way.  Likely the populations of other nations are even poorer at being notably engaged.

For better or worse, this Nation, as a whole, depends on leadership to make the decisions that are in the best interest of the American People, more than with any other actions taken by the Federal Government.  Historically, the US has been pretty good at this, with limited political complications.

So how come nearly the entire US television watching population has seen, perhaps multiple times, ads denouncing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iranian Deal)?  How does anyone seriously believe a 15 or 30 second ad can explain an argument against this 159 page agreement? Who’s paying for these ads? What do they want to accomplish?

The easy answer of course is that they want to influence political leadership by swaying potential voters.  However, there is no referendum in process, so the influence they hope to achieve is through public polling and the potential loss of financial support in upcoming elections.

The Republicans fell in line immediately, essentially before the ink was dry. It is a revealing statement of its own that every single Republican Congressmen denounced this Plan, a plan which is enthusiastically applauded or supported by virtually every single nation on this planet except one, as well as every international organization (such as the UN and NATO). This is the leadership on which we depend? Are these robots?

I attempted to read as much as I could of the 159 page Agreement (109 on paper) and eventually yielded to read a couple of the best objective summaries I could find.  Then I stepped back and tried to see what was happening.

The Agreement on its face is good.  It links extensive controls over the enrichment of natural uranium and supporting hardware, limiting the production of U-235 to enrichment levels well below those necessary for weapons (limited to 3.6% vs the necessary 90%).  150 inspectors will work full time for the next decade and a half.

Even though it ends in 15 years, Iran has agreed to never produce a nuclear weapon and to rejoin the non-proliferation protocol which will put them in a more vulnerable position than they are now for international sanctions and possible military action. 

The arguments against the Agreement are entirely based on what ifs; what if Iran cheats, what if Iran can dodge the inspectors, what if they use the money to promote terrorism (money which like it or not is theirs)? These and other arguments in effect preclude any diplomatic solutions.  Therein lays the real story.

The governing body in Israel does not want a diplomatic solution.  Netanyahu’s history and that portion of Israel’s government that support him have had a long history of managing Israel’s security through military actions.  He still revels in the glory of the 6-Day and Yom Kippur wars in which he participated (actually fighting in the Yom Kippur War). 

He and his supporters want a military solution because they feel it would be more conclusive and, if they were honest, more magnificent than mundane diplomacy.  The key is they also want the United States involved militarily.  What he wouldn’t give to have Lindsey Graham as President.

So who is funding these ads? Billionaires like Sheldon Adelson are cutting the checks. He’s a zealot supporter of Israel who has huge investments in casinos in the Middle East, and (as an aside) funds anything that opposes Obama.  Sheldon and those like him are the ones hoping to sway the electorate to pressure the few Democrats, such as NY Sen. Chuck Schumer, who are vulnerable to that kind of influence.

If Sheldon succeeds then, well Forest Gump said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. It’s just too bad that the ignorance of the public matched by the stupidity of Washington politics could possibly result in the human tragedy of war.

I Don't Like...

So I’m watching this young woman, probably in her late 20s or early 30s, walking into a house and saying; “well (a shake of her head)…I don’t like THAT!” She’s looking at wallpaper.  Then she spies a small light fixture hanging from the ceiling and shakes her head again. “This has GOT to go”. Later she’s looking at an obviously updated, granite kitchen counter and casually remarks; “I can’t live with this.” 

She’s looking to buy a home for herself (plus spouse), maybe her first.  It’s another episode of House Hunters which occupies significant space on the cable network HGTV, the network which acts as pornography for women.

My wife Jan doesn’t just watch HGTV, she lives HGTV. If, like the little girl in Poltergeist, she was sucked into the TV by nefarious and super natural forces…I’d know where to tune her in. Unlike in Poltergeist however, my problem would not be in how to get her out, it would be how to talk her into leaving. “Walk toward the Tiny Houses”, I might wail (she hates the Tiny House craze –“why don’t they just buy an RV?”).

As such, I find myself inadvertently watching various episodes of real estate marketing and home improvement as it exists in the alternate universe known as reality television.  It is often the price I have to pay for eating ice cream in an immobile yet comfortable body position.  

I spend some of this HGTV emersion making wise comments about what I observe (much to the chagrin of my wife): “Oh, look how surprised they are peeking into that bonus room and turning on the light.  I wonder if they’re equally surprised to find a camera crew in there as well”. However, sometimes I can regard many of these HGTV players who are not professional actors and, even with careful editing, those aspects of their personalities spilling forth on the screen.

Our neighbor’s daughter was featured on an episode of House Hunters International.  A perfectly lovely young woman, her thoughtful and engaging persona shown through, even though the search for the ideal apartment in Brussels was compete horse-poopie.  She had been living in the apartment she “finally chose” even before being picked for the show.  The search was, in the words of the Bard, much ado about nothing.  My neighbor’s daughter, on the other hand, was genuine.

So it is reasonable to ponder on these characters that lay out their lives and temperament to a national audience.  The personality traits they demonstrate, by virtue of their amateur status, may be the only reality in this particular corner of “reality” television.

What I’ve been pondering are the two distinct types that walk through these staged buildings passing judgment on such important items as electrical outlet covers and doggie doors. 

There are those who make the vast majority of their observations as a testimony to why they enjoy life.  They’ll go into a room that looks like the archangel of the 1970s threw up on the walls and say, “Ooo…there’s so much potential”, or squeeze by a partially collapsed floor that looks down into the depths of Hell and remark; “Well…that looks like an easy fix.”  I don’t think these are the people HGTV wants.

The producers of HGTV probably want the type of person I was watching who, while trying to decide on a $748,000 California bungalow, are appalled at the sight of a crooked lamp on a night table or the crimson velour grandma drapes in the spare bedroom. As these observations have nothing to say about the quality of the house, they have oodles to say about the observer and that’s what the producers love.

There are people who go through life who simply don’t like.  Don’t like what, you ask?  They just don’t like…you fill in the blank.  They base their world view not on what they enjoy or value, but rather on that which they find annoying and distasteful.  They also feel some sense of individual superiority to pass judgment critically.  Even on things they like they can find some small shortfall to comment on; “…boy that was a great dessert, except for the odd way the raspberry sauce was streuseled on the plate”.  They focus first on what they don’t like; what they see, what they eat, what they encounter.  Whether weather is naturally produced or has inside conditioning it is an endless search for improvement.

Okay…okay, everyone is like that to some extent and realistically no one is a pure Pollyanna.  I don’t like 4 out of every 5 movies I see…oh dear. Still the bell curve on this is not tall and the distinction between those individuals who heavily lean positive and those negative are pretty easy to flesh out.  On HGTV it’s a snap! 

Most of the viewers actually enjoy disliking those obnoxious house hunters and home renovators.  I’m not like them, you think.  But take a listen in your reality and see how often you hear “I don’t like” verses “I like” (or their verbal equivalent).  If people are truly interested in changing their lives for the better then they need to focus on all those little things they find they don’t like and…well…shut up.  Because this isn’t reality TV and, frankly, no one really gives a damn about what you don’t like.

Evolutionary Ethics and the Conservative Mind

In last month’s news one possible conclusion emerged; that people in Minnesota are paying entirely too much for dental care.  Walter J. Palmer, the Bloomington, MN dentist who also fashions himself a big game hunter (emphasis on the word ‘big’) can now be internationally known as Dr. Shameless.  Still, the fact that he and others like him exist at all is far more a revelation to the general public than the fact that root canals and crowns can allow a relative nobody to spend $50,000 to shoot a big cat.

Throughout most of recorded history killing big animals would rarely raise an eyebrow, if at all.  Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when the need to hunt for food and clothing was effectively eliminated and wealth could be produced remotely, the killing of big animals somehow became sport. Few found a problem with it. From Theodore Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway, to the capturers of King Kong, generations viewed such “sport” Romantically rather than repulsively.  That’s not the case anymore, we love our buffalos. So what happened?

As there has been social evolution for human beings generally throughout our history, so have ethics evolved.  Quite different from sluggish biological evolution, evolutionary ethics over the past few centuries appear to be changing at increasingly faster rates. The changes seem to coincide with both the expansion in human population and speed of communication. There is hardly a youth introduced to history who isn’t amazed by what we considered ethically correct only two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago. In fact, one only needs to read the Bible and observe how long people have adhered to its archaic rhetoric.

Yet in the present, behavior that can seem so blatantly unethical on its face can also feel painfully slow to change. One primary reason is an irrational fear of change and blind self-interest which, most often, lays deep in the Conservative psyche. 

Perhaps one day I’ll meet a poor, old, black lesbian with cancer.  She will be a very special person, indeed, for she embodies most major human traits that over the past one hundred years or so Conservative America has fought tooth and nail from being ethically acceptable.  You won’t see a statue of her on Monument Avenue, but you should.  On it would be carved: Once I Wasn’t You, but Now I Am.

Let’s briefly take a look at what this lady has had to endure in her struggle to become one of us.

First she’s black.  Forget the Civil War, in which the entrenched Conservative South was more than willing to sacrifice everything to preserve ethically acceptable slavery. Instead, start with Jim Crow laws that most of the Nation didn’t have a problem with for decades after the Civil War ended. The segregation that existed up to the civil rights laws of the 60s was, by in large, accepted social order, even sometimes by those who were repressed by it. 

Segregation and prejudice still exist today, whether by choice or economics, but only on the fringes would anyone say or feel they are ethically correct today. That same Conservative mind fought the legislation that codified the new ethic, not just in the Conservative South, but also nationwide (think government institutions and the military). It took generations to change the ethic.  Even today foolish symbols of supremacy and ego, such as flags, cannot resist the changed ethics on race as they might have 25 years ago.

Second, she is a woman. She is one of a class of human beings that have been essentially the chattel of men since Homo sapiens wiped out the competition.  She made little progress toward full human status for the first 160,000 years or so.  The ethic that condemns the idea of women as the possessions of men didn’t finally change until the first half of the 20^th century, yet Conservatives fought that ethical evolution for centuries.

The 19^th Amendment (woman’s suffrage in the US passed in 1920) refused to be ratified by most states of the old Confederacy until decades after it had passed, as late as 1984. In many cases women’s equal status was fought with overt discrimination, violence, and personal abuse. It often still is. However, it is hard to argue the correctness of such inequity, even as Conservatives continue to oppose equal rights legislation for women and conservative religious zealots practice scriptural female exploitation in the US and around the world.

My lady is also poor, old, and sick.  Perhaps because the over 65 population is so large, the ethic that it is socially and morally wrong to let the poor and aged rot in the streets once they can no longer work has gone mainstream with Conservatives. Still, we only have to go back 100 years or so to see how Conservatives fought vehemently, up through the 1930s, what became Social Security, or what led to Medicare in the 1960s.


The patron saint of Conservatism, Ronny Reagan, campaigned as a spokesperson across the country that Medicare would destroy Capitalism in America.  How far would he have gotten in the 1980s with his gray patriots if he advocated the repeal of Medicare? Today self interest drives the opposition for means testing, but the ethic is fully adopted and the solutions to solvency for SS and Medicare won’t turn against it.

The Affordable Health Care act (aka Obamacare) is in the midst of the same battle.  The ethic that supports a reality in which everyone in the US would have adequate access to health care and that no one should be made bankrupt simply because they got sick is not shared by Conservatives.  Not yet. They will lose the fight, possibly at great cost to everyone by delaying the control of medical expenses. When they do finally lose they will embrace the new reality as if it was always theirs, just as they have with racial ethics, women’s ethics, and elder ethics.

Finally, she is gay. The acceptance of her sexual orientation still awaits the death of the current senior generation of Conservatives.  Once they are gone, a marriage of a same sex couple will garner less notice than a change in hair style.

If my extraordinary lady lived in say 1914 and I proclaimed she was free to go where ever she wanted to, she could vote without restriction, after she stopped working she would be given an income for life on which she could survive, if she got sick her medical care would be covered in full, and she could have all that while married to another woman with whom she has sex, I would have been vilified (if not shot) as a Socialist-atheist-anarchist-Satanist, anti-American hybrid. Yet all those social benefits are accepted today as ethically sound and many a diehard Conservative would defend most of them as such.

A fear laden, Fox watching, Reagan loving Conservative mind would run a Republican out of town for suggestions of eliminating Social Security and Medicare and scoff at calls to repeal a woman’s right to vote or an African-American’s right to equality. Yet, they continue to support those that benefit from the status quo.  Limited health care, unrestricted access to handguns and assault rifles, restrictions on gays, a woman’s right over her own body, institutional executions, to name a few, are issues to which Conservatives will ultimately relent as they take up arms to delay the next evolving ethic.

How someone who has even a rudimentary knowledge (and understanding) of history can proudly call themselves a Conservative is a befuddlement.  The evolution of ethics in modern America is mostly our attempt to modify our behavior to deal with the numbers in which we populate this planet and share information and resources.  The post-enlightenment social Conservative wants to ignore both.  More likely that Conservative mind sees their social ethics supported on a three legged stool.  One leg is fear, one is ignorance, and the third is greed or (more kindly) self interest.  Pull out just one leg and the whole thing falls… none too soon

Bad at Math

On August 11, 2011 the Republican candidates for President, eight at the time, met in Iowa for one of the early debates.  Notable in that debate was a question given to all eight to be answered by the simple raising of hands. 

The question was: with Democrats insisting on tax increases to go along with any spending cuts, would you (candidates) “walk away from a 10 to 1 deal”, ten dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of tax increases.  They all raised their hands without question or qualification.  A Politburo couldn’t want for a better response.

Jon Huntsman, arguably the most moderate candidate in race that year, would much later lament that the choice to raise his hand was the major mistake of his brief campaign.  But why should he regret his choice? It was Republican solidarity, right? Moreover, why should he consider it a mistake?

Huntsman insists his response was a knee-jerk salute to the Republican mantra of “no taxes”, consistent with Republican mania in the era of Tea-Party politics.  He felt it was not a reflection of him, what he would do, and therefore something less than honest.

The fact that the group response was ridiculous on its face didn’t seem to be part of his regret.  It should have.  He, along with any other candidate, had been given a unique opportunity.  He had the chance to separate himself from the crowd on a point which would have made the rest of the field look like lemmings. 

I say that because it would have taken just one candidate to provide contrast and make the question stand out as absurd.  He could have simply pointed to the rest of them and said ‘these people are nuts…I’m running to govern’ and he would have been off to the races…literally.

Now the Republicans are doing it again, at least by their individual responses.  I suspect we may have a similar moment in their first debate as well.

This week the Supreme Court threw out the last challenge to the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) on the grounds that a single uncorrected line couldn’t change the obvious intent of the law. There is nothing left to prevent the AHCA from continuing,  barring a Republican President, a super Republican majority in the Senate, a Republican majority in the House, and probably a Scalia led decision in the Supreme Court.

Before those stars line up, the AHCA will be part of the American fabric, unable to be removed without causing an ugly tear in our social structure.  The same was true for those dreaded Democrat boogie-plans of Social Security and Medicare. So how is the Republican leadership reacting to this latest reality check?

Aside from imitating the act of puking, they have all (all that were reported) essentially called for a redoubling of efforts to have the AHCA repealed.  After “repealed”, they often include the words “and replaced”, but in a much, much smaller font size.

How can they not see that the reality of the situation? How can they not do the math?  Isn’t there a smart one in the bunch?  One of them who might break away and say ‘…it’s law; I’m going to work with what’s there and make it better’. 

Sure, he/she would probably lose the semi-lunatic fringe, but those tea-cozies would have to be divided up by the rest. However, he/she would be out of the chorus line and under the spotlight.  A spotlight viewed favorably by an expanding majority of Americans.

In an early debate this year I can almost expect the question: ‘If you as President could repeal Obamacare would you do it? Just raise your hands’. It is more likely than not that they would all go up.  They won’t be able to perceive that it is a 10 for 1 question.  They will again be so blindly stupid not to see that the need for healthcare is no less required than the need for taxes in a functioning society. 

Maybe Chris Christie, who is both savvy and desperate, will dance to apron of the stage.  However, will we see an actual contender take that brass ring on the carousel?  Not likely.  They’re simply no good at math… just good at going ‘round and ‘round.

Robbing Peter...

It is gratifying for me to see the hit the ol’Confederacy is taking nationally in the wake of the Charleston killings.  As a Virginia resident for 34 years I’m tired of seeing that war continued to be fought, not just in race relations, but also against the notion of achieving most any kind of improvement on a national scale.

Such things as healthcare, infrastructure, poverty, safety, environment, or education (to name a few) are somehow viewed as an assault on individual freedom and states’ rights to the Rebel faithful.  Reality plays no part. The Johnny Reb of today would never believe a Confederate States of America would ever have any socialist mechanisms such as, say…taxes.

That said, I am dismayed to see such media debate at this time and with this tragedy.  The major problem that surrounds this shooting is not racism or hate, it is the tools with which people can act out their unhinged fears and the acceptability we, as a culture, tacitly give to their actions.

 The way the Charleston shooting is playing out feels like a script written by the NRA.  At this point the Confederate battle flag will be partially vilified, removed from some (maybe all) public places and folks will walk away saying ‘job well done’. It may feel good, but frankly, nothing substantive will have been accomplished.  We will have robbed a starving Peter and fed a growing Paul.

There is nothing illegal about racism, prejudice, or hate in the United States.  We can, do, and should create laws to restrict how people act on those attitudes, just as our social ethics (laws) seek to protect us one from another for any reason.  Those laws create trends like social antibiotics in a sick nation. We actually begin to change.

The great defeat for the dilatory effects of racism occurred in the late 1950s to early 1970s.  Manifested racism, especially for African Americans, was given a mortal blow and has been dying ever since. That may not be comforting to those blacks that still feel the effect, but it is true. 

We won’t see racism fully replaced by essentially an historical aberration until the baby boomer generation has finally died off.  The reason is that the boomers are the last generation to have lived in and been influenced by people who lived (their entire lives) in an era when racism and the segregationist realities that came with it was more than okay, it was normal.

The Millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000) will take over this country with the knowledge and attitude that no matter how they feel about racism, they know it is ethically wrong.  It will change everything.  The same is playing out with the discrimination of homosexuals.  Women are finally now starting to feel the effects of being unchained.

What’s not happening is even the beginning of an attitude adjustment toward the use of guns in the US. That is not to say that a majority of American citizens don’t want these guns (more specifically handguns) under serious control uniformly across the country.  They do.  It does say that the nation as a whole does not have the political will to begin to take the first steps to change the future. Given the same political will applied to those aforementioned issues, all aspects of this nation would today be exclusively run by straight, white guys. Mad Men wouldn’t have made it past the first season it would have been so mundane.

The major problem to deal with is not the racism of the 21 year old perpetrator of the Charleston church shooting, or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Muslim religion, or James Eagan Holme’s psychosis, or Adam Lanza’s undiagnosed behavioral problems, or Seung-Hui Cho’s being bullied, or any other reason why the deranged run amok.  The problem is that our American society feels it is okay to give them the means to act out their shocking unbalanced mania. 

This doesn’t even address the over 6000 lives taken each year in the US by the use of handguns. All this carnage is because this nation and its leaders lack the political will to find it abnormal and unacceptable.

Okay, stick a fork in the Confederacy, it’s done and way overcooked.  But in the process don’t close your eyes to the war that actually rages around you.  Don’t let Peter be a victim, just to feel good about Paul.

Obama, You Just Don't Get It...

In the wake of the latest mass killing in Charleston, SC I watched a cable news program play a litany of Obama reaction speeches he has made after similar events over his term as President.  They were eerily alike, in both content and tenor, with a little more emphasis this time on differentiating the US with the rest of the world.  They also broadcast comments from other political and social leaders regarding this attack and they too sounded similar with lots of; “we must never let this happen again” and “it’s not how we fall, but how we get up” and “love and faith will conquer evil” and so forth.


If there were creatures viewing this from Space they would find it humorous, just as we might laugh watching a dog chase his tail. However on planet earth and, more specifically, Homeland America, we feel real pain, yet wallow in tragedy more like it is a ritual than any kind of lesson.  When 21 six year old children can be gunned down and murdered in a horrific fashion, in a benign location, and the society they lived in does absolutely nothing to react to it other than to provide sympathy, then we shouldn’t expect that the killing of 9 adults in a church will tomorrow be anything more than yesterday’s news.

President Obama is as responsible as any group or individual for his failure to understand the problem we, as Americans, face as a society, which he so blithely points out doesn’t exist in most other nations.  He has the pulpit but doesn’t use it.  He talks to the nation like a retired college professor might speak to a Senior Center preceding the beginning of bingo night.  I am so tired of it, Mr. Obama. This is the speech I want to hear:

For six years as your President I have misunderstood what we refer to as the “gun debate” and the proliferation of gun violence that we have now routinely addressed with this month’s or that month’s mass killing.  I have also failed to adequately communicate the connection between these mass tragedies and the small ones that occur daily, if not hourly, around the Nation.  I have less than two years left and I will not make this same mistake again, even if my efforts only end up tossed on desert air.

I and other political and social leaders have stood before you and said we need to act so that whatever mass killing du jour was examined such would never happen again.  That was a lie. It was always a lie, even to those like me who were foolish enough to believe it might be true. These killings will happen again and there is nothing we can do to stop it. 


A volcano with all its fury and devastation only spews a fraction of the molten lava that exists beneath the surface.  We have too many guns that can be concealed and, like any society, we have a lunatic fringe. However with 320 million people, that fringe, however small the percentage, is huge in numbers.  There is much that we can do socially to deal with psychotic individuals, those with criminal intent, or poisoned with hate, but we cannot make it “never happen again”.  I am far more fearful that I will see in my life another Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech than hopeful I will not.

However, I am referring to my life.  What about the lives of my children and my grandchildren or yours? Can we make it “never happen again” for them or at least make it the exception rather than the rule? What is it we can do now that will make a difference in the future?

There is a lot we can do, and to the extent we don’t we only push the problem to the next generation and irrationally compound the agony these weapons create among us.

The destruction that high capacity guns that can be readily hidden from public view goes far beyond the mass killings that brings so many of us to our knees.  They allow crime of all kinds, both overt and coercive to thrive.  It is so hard to control that law enforcement across the nation has begun to react offensively, like warriors proactive in their own defense instead of being the stewards of our safety.
  
A clear majority of the Nation does not feel more secure because there is a proliferation of these weapons, quite the opposite.  We need to decide as a Nation, as a Society, and as a culture that these weapons should not be part of the American fabric and begin taking the steps that will ultimately impact the next generation or certainly the generation after that, not simply with the reduction of handguns, but a fundamental change in what they will view as right and normal. No one views today the restriction of smoking in public places as abnormal, while fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable. Why should guns be different? 

How do we do make that change?  Four steps; we propose aggressive laws, we emphatically point out who opposes those laws, we overcome them politically, and we pass those laws. As our children grow to take over this country they will see what we started and, I believe, tend and nurture the seeds we have planted. They will see the commitment that will lead to the new normal.

These are the first laws I feel are essential:  First, that there can be no concealed handguns carried by any individual in the United States unless that individual is in public law enforcement or has been licensed by the Federal Government, second, the magazine capacity of all existing and manufactured handguns be regulated by the Federal Government, third, that a Federal background check must be completed and accepted for the transfer of any handgun, public or private, and fourth, all handguns must be registered with the Federal Government. Violation of these laws and subsequent regulations would be a felony under Federal statute and subject to harsh penalties.

It is no mystery that states with powerful Conservative minorities would fight such laws. They would do so primarily through Republican representatives in Congress and the funding by national interests such as the NRA.  They would wage a dirty fight, manipulating citizens through use of conspiratorial fears and false claims of patriotism, just as they always have. They would evoke the word “freedom” to their own ends.  Perhaps freedom to them is a metal detector at every door of every school, church, pizza parlor, dry cleaner…you name it. Maybe freedom to them is the fear of being shot by a traffic cop as you pull your wallet out of your pants pocket.

The Republican Party will take the shameless position of advancing their political control at the expense of innocent and precious lives.  They too will argue that freedom is in jeopardy, but I for one will no longer be passive to their hypocrisy.  Let them fight; I’m ready to do battle. I have no more elections to win and if my own Party does not back me, so be it.

I ask every American who feels the same as me to commit time and money to make vocal their position and to support those in public office who hold the same.  Even if in a given state a majority is persuaded by the powerbrokers to support Republican opponents of gun control, I will not abandon those who suffer in those states for lack of national commitment.  Anyone who loses their life because we, as a nation, have failed to act is a minority of one.  In this country everyone counts, not just those who feel threatened because they no longer have uncontrolled use of handguns. Join me.

Get real Obama.  What do you have to lose?