Imbolc                                                      Woodpecker Moon

I remain unmoved by the current Presidential race.  The fracas swirls somewhere below the level of America’s current malaise.  No one, Obama included, looks like they have a clue.

There’s an old phrase I learned long ago:  how you define is how you solve.  That seems to be the problem.  How do you define the American weltanschung?  How do you define the root causes of our (apparent) decline?

Let me take a side trip while we consider those questions.  There have been two prominent books on child rearing of late:  Tiger Mother and Bringing Up Bebe.  One extols what the author defines as the Chinese way and the other, the French way.  These are seen as antidotes to the current state of child rearing practices here.

(Rearing children is a funny thing.  On the one hand my pediatrician wife thinks there should be a license exam before people get to be parents.  Plenty of evidence to support such a notion.  On the other hand there was my basic attitude to child rearing:  billions, literally billions of children, have been reared by people who had no formal knowledge of child rearing.  And the vast bulk of those kids survived into adulthood, so I figured I could do it.)

So, I’m waiting for the American Way.  You know, the book about raising an American child. Why?  Because we have an acknowledged knack for raising innovators, creators, scholars.  And you know what?  We got that reputation using the clunky, clanky old education system we had, even the one we had back in the long ago day when I was a student.

What I’m trying to say here is that we know how to do stuff.  Important stuff.  In our child rearing, in our educational system, in our economic system, in our political system.  In our military, too, for that matter.  We’re not world beaters at everything, no nation ever was, nor will ever be.

It is ironic in the extreme that this latter day radical critic of Amerika and our war in Vietnam would take up the banner of his country, wave the flag, not necessarily of our government, but the flag that represents this real place.  A place where we argue about immigration all the while we take in many, many immigrants.  A place where we argue about the failings of our education system while continuing to crank out the Zuckerburgs, Gates, Jobs types.  The David Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Christopher Hitchens types. 333 Nobel laureates including:

1. Christopher A. Sims, Economics, 2011
2. Thomas J. Sargent, Economics, 2011
3. Saul Perlmutter, Physics, 2011
4. Brian P. Schmidt, Physics, 2011
5. Adam G. Riess, Physics, 2011
6. Ralph M. Steinman, born in Canada, Physiology or Medicine, 2011
7. Bruce Beutler, Physiology or Medicine, 2011

The modern feminist movement had its European roots, of course, but look at what Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinham and that whole movement of women accomplished.

Consider the global impact of the US work of Martin Luther King.

Consider this, too.  All the people I’ve named here lived or are living during my lifetime.

Chuck Close, Siha Armajani, Mark Rothko (immigrant), Albert Einstein (immigrant), Morris Lewis, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenberg, Robert Indiana.  You add the names that are meaningful to you.

Not to mention athletics.

I mean, come on, for a nation in decline, for an American psyche in freefall, we seem to be doing ok.  Not perfect, not our best, not all we could hope for*, (see the cartoon) but ok.

So, to get back to how you define is how you solve, I would ask this question.  Let’s look at those things that produced all these positive, good, extraordinary people and their life work.  Then, let’s do more of that.

Maybe it’s as simple as writing a book on how to raise an American kid.

*my sense is that we could move the whole public policy/state of the nation debate forward if we would analyze our country in terms of class, first.  That’s the point of the cartoon and I agree with it.  We are failing the working class, would-be middle class.  Badly.