Category Archives: Politics

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Let’s Stop It

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Lughnasa                                           Waning Harvest Moon

Death.  We generally agree it should come to us unbidden, at a time unknown and in a manner uncertain.  Cultures sanction the unwilling death of another, outside of war, as murder, the taking of life.

Laws provide penalties for murder.  They vary in length of prison time and occasionally in type, the instances of capital punishment.

Today in the news are two different executions, one in Texas and one in Georgia.  The first killed a white supremacist who attached a black Texan to his truck and drove until he died.  The second was a black man accused of killing a guard.  Many, many people had become convinced of his innocence.

Now both men have moved past the pale of earthly justice.  Their penalties render them forever beyond forgiveness, findings of innocence or redemption.

Here is my question.  Since their deaths were unwilling and outside of war, can the state be held as anything less than a murderer?

We have the rituals of justice, the patina of equity, but the rolls of those executed tell a different story.  It is a punishment most often meted out in the South and often, too often, to poor people and again too often, to poor people of color.

How we can turn aside this culture of death and state sanctioned murder is unclear to me.  I wish it could be done.  I’m sad tonight about the deaths of both of these men, just as I was sad to hear of the death of James Byrd Jr and would have been sad had I heard of the death of the guard.  I’m sadder still that I live in a time and a nation that cannot see itself through the eyes of those it kills.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Politics, Writing

Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

 

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Grief

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Lughnasa                                                    Full Harvest Moon

Grief.  I’ve been asking myself, over this weekend, why we have had such an outsized response to 9/11.  Outsized, I say, when considered in the context of other, smaller countries who have as large or larger tragedies.  Outsized, I say, when it suggests we alone suffer.  Outsized, I say, when considered against lives lost in other conflicts like Vietnam, WWII, WWI, the Civil War.

This morning it finally came to me.  Probably obvious to you already.  It is not an outsized response when the grief is for vulnerability, a new feeling of OMG, the dangers of the world might apply to us here at home.  Grief for a nation with two of the largest moats ever to defend a homeland:  the Atlantic and the Pacific.  Grief for a sense of a particular safety, a feeling that we could fight all of our wars far from our own shores.

On 9/11 we entered the global village, became one with Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Russia.  Not one with them in scale of tragedy because their tragedies exceed our own, but one with them as fellow humans now fully exposed to the fracture lines of our too factional world.

We gathered and mourned yesterday not for a particular event, though it was a tragedy, or at least not solely for a particular event, but for a new raw feeling, a wound not to the flesh, but to the heart.  Our hearts are now open, open to the pain and suffering experienced by those who have known all along that the world is not a safe place.

May it make us less willing to inflict on the world yet more suffering.

Politics, US History, World History

A Black Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

On September 11, 2011 we will have a full Harvest Moon in the sky.

What has been the harvest of the September 11th terrorist attack in New York City?  Is it one we want?  It is the one we have created.

Shock and awe.  The neo-cons Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld’s favorite description for the blitzkrieg-like attack we promised the Iraqi government of Sadam Hussein.  More like a description of our response to 9/11.  We sat back, stunned, shocked by the devastation and awed by the daring of this sudden disruption to our national consciousness.

It inflamed our imaginations, brought us together as a people, a people under attack by a faceless, but brutal enemy.  What to do?  Instead of letting the shock fade and the awe give way to a reality based understanding of what had happened we blundered into the most mistaken metaphor of my lifetime:  A War on Terror.

Wars are fought by armies and air forces and navies.  In wars we blow things up, take people down, topple regimes and conquer nations.  We fight uniformed adversaries with our own uniformed champions, a sort of contemporary knight errantry hired to settle claims between or among rival powers.

Only this wasn’t really a war.  It was a struggle more like an armed criminal investigation.  Their gang, Al Qaeda, against our gang.  Only we chose as our gang the US military instead of, say, the FBI or the CIA.

We know this now, ten years on.  We’re gradually scaling back the ten years war, leaving the field to special forces, blends of military and intelligence operatives, working much like investigative agencies.  OK, really, really well-armed investigative agencies.

In the meanwhile we have followed Paul Kennedy’s prescription in his Decline and Fall of Empires.  We have spread treasure and lives so freely across the Middle East and Central Asia that we have created a weakened economy, one vulnerable to severe shocks like the recent great recession and, possibly, yet a second recession.

Not only have we weakened ourselves economically, we have impoverished once cherished civil rights through such draconian legal measures as the Patriot Act (Orwell, anyone?), extraordinary rendition and the prison at Guantanamo.

We have also created a secret America that continues to expand at an increasing rate, its budgets hidden, its employees unknown and its mandates invisible.

The fruits of this full Harvest moon come from poisoned fields:  people killed and injured, money missing by the pallet load, our own civil rights constricted and a Pentagon of occult agencies both outside and beyond our control.

If we continue to gather in this crop, then, as George W. was fond of saying, the terrorists have won.

 

 

Dogs, Politics, Sierra Club, Travel

Plans and Further Foolishness

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Lughnasa                                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

We moved Gertie (the German wire hair, formerly of Denver) and Kona (our oldest dog now, a whippet) downstairs.  Gertie had slept in our bedroom but consistently got Kate up between 6 am and 6:30 am.

Their crates downstairs, right under the heating ducts, carry sound well, however, and Kate said she heard Gertie cry at 6:30 this morning.  Due to my deaf ear and sound sleeping those noises don’t filter through to me.

No plan is perfect.

Further example.  We paid extra to get Mark’s visa on the desks of the Travisa folk by 8:30 am.  At 9:30 Washington, DC, time it was still not there.  Gonna get that extra money back.

First Sierra Club legislative committee meeting for the 2012 session of the Minnesota legislature starts tonight at 6:30 pm.  We’ll be gone during most of October and November so my participation for the early work has to get done in the next six weeks.

Great Work, Politics, US History

At The Char House

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Lughnasa                                                    Waxing Harvest Moon

Politics.  A strange animal.  A mixer for a congresswoman at Mancini’s in St. Paul.  Milling around, drinks in hand, small plates of meat balls, chicken wings and tomatoes in the other, men in suits talked to women in dress clothes, all vying for a bit of notice, a nod of recognition, perhaps from the congresswoman, or, if not her, then others, the back roomers, the money folks, the union business agents, an environmentalist or two.

These strange rituals collect money and influence, this time in a Char House, a place where a burnt steak and a baked potato, a wedge of lettuce and a Bud chased by Jack constitutes supper.  A joint out of the 50’s with naugahyde booths, no sunlight and dark wood.

In such places all across the country the odd beast that is American democracy begins its biennial slouch toward Washington.  Those of us with interests to further make sure we show up, run our flag up the pole, shake hands, smile and then flee, glad to go home, back to the family we left behind.

Most folks don’t see these rites of fall, as dependable as high school football teams and marching bands.  They think politics consists of the voting booth, then Congress, repeat.  Any of us who work political interests come to know at least some of these tribal gatherings and go to play our part.

Aging, Family, Health, Politics

Is There a Prophet In the House?

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Lughnasa                                                                                                  New Harvest Moon

NB: prophet is a gender neutral word as I use it.

Kate.  Always ahead of her time.  When Kate was in high school in Nevada, Iowa, she arranged a deal to take most of her senior classes at nearby Iowa State.  She’d run out of classes in the high school, at least classes that could keep her interest.  In her senior year, just as the deal was to kick in, the high school changed their mind.  Later, as a nurse anesthetist, she insisted on better pay for her position at Mt. Sinai.

After that, too long in the role of helper, she decided, at age 34, to go to medical school.  The medical school thought that since she was already a doctor’s wife, she should be happy with that.  She graduated and became a board certified pediatrician in the best medical delivery system in the US.

After a serious illness and poor treatment at the hands of her then partners at Metropolitan Pediatrics, Kate moved to Allina, its Coon Rapids’ clinic.  While there she became frustrated with corporate medicine and chose to become lead physician for her group.  Over her time there she integrated pediatric and family practice offices, initiated (by doing it herself) after hours care and agitated for a better deal for primary care docs in general.

Now, several years after she pioneered it, Coon Rapids’ peds has regular after hours clinic and the Clinic has an urgent care unit providing after hours non-emergency medicine.  Kate works in the urgent care, part-time.

She has been tireless in haranguing me about the stupidity of pediatricians treating psychiatric problems for which they have little to no training. (see today’s Star-Tribune)  The arguments about vaccine that I read in this months Scientific American I first heard over the breakfast table.  She also campaigns against the overuses of anti-biotics, the over prescription of pain-killers and, most passionately of all, the need for a single-payer health system.  An equitable distribution of health care services has been at the top of her need list for a long time.

She is a prophet in a system that, though excellent in its care, has become sclerotic in its administration.  The current over managed (way too many administrators with way too much power) model, corporate medicine as she styles it, focuses its efforts on the bottom line (money), on standardization (easier to manage), on patient satisfaction (results would be a better yardstick) and on turning physicians into employees.  Those who run these systems should listen to this practical, intelligent critic and change their ways.

Politics, Travel, US History, World History

Brother and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

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Lughnasa                                                                         New Harvest Moon

Took Mark over to Walmart where he shopped for work clothes, slacks and button down shirts.  He bought 5 of each, a set for each day of the week.  Here’s the weirdness.  Bangladeshis made the clothing.  They came, most likely, by container ship to California, then by truck to a Walmart regional distribution center.  At some point, again on a truck, these shirts and pants completed their journey to Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Mark walked in and bought them.  He now has them here in Andover.  In less than a month he will pack up those same new clothes and carry them, via plane, to Saudi Arabia.  If he takes them on a subsequent trip to Southeast Asia, they will have traveled around the world plus a little.  Strange.

There is an interesting counter argument to local boy Thomas Friedman (grew up in St. Louis Park) and his flat earth model of globalization.  It suggests that the world has actually grown more local, with only a tiny percentage of the world’s population ever leaving their home country and a large percentage of those who stay in their home country rarely or never leave their own locale.  Globalization, in this view, is a veneer of corporate profit taking spread over the world, a sort of cheap plywood globe on top of which the elite travel by jet, work in several different time zones and consider themselves transnationals.  Under this veneer toil the sweatshop workers who make the elite’s transnational world possible.

The world they make possible though, as in all times, lies as far from them as the earth lies from the sun.  No Bangladeshi textile worker could ever hope to duplicate the trip the slacks he or she made have already taken.  Never.  The vast majority of Chinese who work in export related manufacturing could never follow their products to America or Europe or even to Shanghai or Beijing.  Travel to any region of the world where globalization functions to shift resources or cheaply made goods to developed markets.  There you will find sugar cane workers or miners or electronics assemblers or athletic shoe makers paid poorly so that we might buy cheaply.

Attacking this kind of global disparity seems to be a job for trade unionists, but they’ve not been up to the task.  Not sure how you push against it with any success.

When the whole thing crashes though, that cheap plywood globe will make a hell of a skateboard park.

 

Great Work, Politics

Organize

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Lughnasa                                                                      New Harvest Moon

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Gandhi

OK.  Heresy moment.  Being the change you want to see in the world will not change the world.  Paraphrasing Patton’s famous quote:  You don’t change the world by changing yourself, you change the world by getting other poor bastards to change it.  Change is a political as well as a personal process and for any personal change to become larger than one person, you have to engage others.

Additionally, even if you change yourself, the world will not change along with you.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say you desire a greener world.  In order to achieve a greener world you decide to drive a Prius or a Volt, compost your household organic waste, put solar panels on your roof next to the wind turbine and grow your own vegetables.  Maybe even throw in chickens and bees to round things out.  You’ve changed yourself.

Is that a bad thing?  Of course not.  Did it contribute to a greener planet?  Yes, but in a very, very small way.  Are you setting a good example for others?  Yes.

Do people follow good examples?  Not so much.  People follow marketing, neighbor’s status symbols and their own values.  If others don’t voluntarily buy a Volt, compost, create renewable energy and grow their own vegetables, how will we get to a greener world?

By government incentives on solar panels and wind turbines.  Feed in tariffs.  A city or county owned compost pile available to residents.  A government that creates more public transit and fewer roads.  National standards for mpg.  A carbon tax.  Any of several wedges that can create enough change to ratchet down the pace of climate change.

How do we get these things to happen?  How do we get these changes to happen in the world?  Not by changing ourselves (though it won’t hurt), but by becoming strong enough politically to change how government and corporations treat carbon emissions.

Even though Ghandi become the change he wanted to see in the world, he also organized and led a large non-violent resistance movement against the might of the British Empire.  It was the British Empire that changed.  And not because Ghandi changed himself, but because thousands came along with him in a political movement.

To make the change you want to see in the world, organize.

Politics, US History

Michele, My Belle

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Lughnasa                                                         Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

My representative.  Michele, my belle, Bachmann.  Even the very low tide of American political consciousness that washes up on our civic beach heads these days has the collective will to turn back Michele.  My instincts have been wrong before, but I cannot imagine an American election where a person with the ideological baggage Michele has wins.  I think the election in recent memory that seems similar is McGovern-Nixon in 1972.  That time, I was a member of the analog to the Tea Party, the anti-war movement, New Left wing of the Democratic Party.

Nixon was not a popular president, but he was lucky.  He ended the Vietnam War and opened a way to China.  The economy was ok, too.  McGovern’s nomination felt like a real victory for the American left.  Finally, a banner carrier in the race.

Oops.  Forgot.  The American electorate votes centrist politics, perhaps center-right a bit.  Think Bill Clinton or Gerald Ford, even George Bush in his first race.  Michele’s power right now comes from her energized base, a cohesive and well-funded movement on the far right of even her own party, the Republican.  To win a national election she has to widen her base beyond the Tea-Party and Libertarian right and I don’t see that happening.

Here’s a cynical thought I’ve had lately, though.  You know the gaffes that keep on coming?  Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire.  Congratulating Elvis on his birthday which turned out to be the date he died.  And most recently her admonishment to watch out for the rise of the Soviet Union.

What if these are a carefully orchestrated attempt to separate her from the “elites”, that is, most of you who read this blog, the college-educated upper middle class and upper class folks who run most of the countries businesses and institutions.  And the reporters, artists, intellectuals and political operatives of the left like union organizers and community organizers.

Here’s how I imagine it goes.  Michelle makes a gaffe.  The elite delights in running articles proving how stupid and unaware she is.  Just like the Bushisms and now Perryisms.  The result is that those Americans who wouldn’t know how to answer the questions either–general knowledge is at an all time low in America–have  a moment of fellow feeling with one of their own, a victim of the elite’s petty insistence on knowing everything.  This fellow feeling gives her a wide margin of error with those folks,  in fact a presumptive imprimatur.

We need to debate her on the substance of her proposals and their impact on middle and working class families, not sit on our degrees and howl with laughter at the rube, my representative, Michele, my belle.