Dragons and Toothpicks

Well, it appears to be apocryphal but for years I've held onto the notion that either Camus or Sartre wrote a short story in which two strangers are sharing a compartment on a train. Their entire dialogue consists of talking about "them" and what "they" are doing to us. They, naturally, are never identified, but we are all familiar with this rhetorical device and have probably engaged in a bit of "they are to blame for it all" ourselves. The amorphous "they" enables us to vent our spleen but at the same time to refrain from delving into details that might necessitate doing more than whining about how they are robbing us blind.

Progressive talk radio, to me, exemplifies this sort of gassing. I've tried to listen but I think I'm too old for it. If you think Rush Limbaugh condescends to his audience, listen to Keith Olbermann without agreeing or disagreeing—I would've thought no one could possibly sound nearly as righteous as Glenn Beck. Oh, but wait a minute. That's right. You can't listen to Keith Olbermann. Because he sold out. Even though this principled individual already had a guaranteed 14 million smackers for yammering, he traded in his microphone, promising to be a quiet little boy for a while, for additional wads of cash. How much? Well, haven't you heard of the right to privacy?

Speaking of which, I suppose we shouldn't be nosing around Larry Page's 60 million dollar yacht. I mean, he's worth it, right? Still, it's difficult to refrain from doing the math. Keith and his 14 mil, Larry and his disposable 60—74 million dollars. Two thirds of American households take in less than $65,000 annually. http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-does-the-average-american-make-breaking-down-the-us-household-income-numbers/ So something like 1138 plus families could survive for a year on what these men regard as chump change. Okay. I take that back. Olbermann lives on his 14 plus million. He needs it.

Because the question about both men is how they add $74,000,000 in value to our economy. Of course, Page is draining far more than that since he bought a toy (not a home or some other necessity) with an obscene amount of money. Years ago men with this much moola at hand were giving 90% of it to Uncle Sam. Trickle down put an end to that, otherwise known as "voodoo economics." The mysteries of how megabucks descend from offshore accounts or offshore investments into the pockets of American workers have never been solved (although Obama has recently adopted the theory).

Yes, where is progressive radio in all this murk? Listening one day to a station billing itself as "Progressive Talk," I turned and furled my brow to hear the following: Initially, what struck me as a pretty good analysis of why the tax on the rich used to be 90%--namely, because in a previous US lifetime it was understood that the rich, by making money off investments, produced no value. They didn't make widgets that saved people in the grip of heart attacks or devices that warmed cold feet in frostbite weather. They merely made money off of money. You might visualize it as siphoning the gas from your car while telling you the deed will increase the engine's efficiency. Good, I thought. Nice going. Until . . . .

The very same commentator turned to his ad material and in the same tone of voice waxed ecstatic over gold as an investment. He himself, he enthused, had been investing in gold for years. Oh my.

The superficiality of this man's understanding or his ethics (I can't say which) boggles the mind. But it also points out the narrow bandwidth employed by progressives. Years ago, the right co-opted the left by denouncing the censorship of so-called "political correctness." The left caved, completely intimidated by this rhetoric coup. The right is not oblivious to the power of words to shape thinking. George Bush and his gang hired hordes of PR specialists to design a language that would enfeeble critical thinking skills and punch all the knee-jerk buttons.

They hammered in acceptance of the "entitlements" for insurance programs into which workers have paid. When the press describes Obama as a "centrist"—which basically means someone without a guiding political philosophy, otherwise known as a "wet finger in the wind"—they participate in the obfuscation that makes it increasingly difficult for the American voter to recognize where his or her own interests lay.

In his State of the Union address, the President never mentioned homelessness. He never mentioned foreclosures. His references to joblessness were gilded with fantasies of getting Congress to "invest" in our crumbling infrastructure. He paved over the reality that more and more citizens are succumbing to abject poverty and talked instead about "competitiveness". Guided by Republican cynicism, he avoided the word "spend," hoping that use of the business term "invest" would derail criticism.

He spent some verbiage on improving education without alluding to the crisis nearly every state in the Union faces, forcing slashes to education budgets already pathetic. Once a great university, UC Berkeley, has had its resources hacked to crumbs by philistines like our President whose eyes are on short-term gains without reference to the long-term calamity they expedite.

A Congressional committee on the financial meltdown concluded (apart from a handful of diehards who want to blame the greedy poor) that three entities were primarily responsible for the pandemic squeezing governments across the globe, noting that the outcome was entirely predictable: greedy and reckless corporations, financial institutions recklessly investing, and feeble government oversight.

Think about Obama's address. He focuses on the importance of empowering those greedy and reckless corporations, removing the shackles of regulation that keep them from expanding their reach. As for the financial institutions, he touts new regulations that will keep greed in check. Allan Sloan of the Washington Post is unimpressed:

. . . with a rare exception or two, this 2,000-page bill nibbles at the toes of the problems that brought us the worldwide financial meltdown. It doesn't go for the throat -- its sponsors just pretend that it does.

Yes, Dodd-Frank may be, as President Obama calls it, "the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression." If that's the case, the bill shows how narrow our ambitions have become, and how little history we know. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062804483.html

We are in the mouth of the dragon and our President comes with a toothpick. God help us indeed.

Purveyors of Fear

Sorry for the hiatus. I've been ill.

Spreading the blame around once again has become the order of the day. And thus we learn that liberals are guilty for expecting too much of Obama and not doing enough to bring about the change he promised. And everyone is guilty of the shooting in Arizona because we're all—especially our politicians—talking trash.

This "tone down the rhetoric" sermon interests me. It is akin (to my way of thinking) to insisting that since rapists are "impassioned," men should never get passionate.

In other words, we have more form over content working the crowd here. Surprise, surprise. Voters on the right get incensed when journalists suggest the far right is guiltier of inflammatory rhetoric than is the so-called extreme left. (I'm still looking for those folks, by the way.) The idea is to smear the blame around until it is impossible to effect any change at all because, in the final analysis, humanity's responsible and how can you change humanity? We see similar footwork in arguments regarding public funding of various (limited but even so rarely extended) props to the less efficient in our efficiency-obsessed economy. The argument is either "Blame The Victim" or "Everybody Is Culpable." Thus, when children are failing in crappy public schools, it's the fault of the parents who don't spend time reading to their little ones and supervising their homework. It's irrelevant that many parents are incapable of doing these things, through some deficiency or disability or because they are just too exhausted after working at a rotten job or two to keep their family in food and rent. They ought to do better, according to the Judicious Critics of Those Who Don't Behave As They Ought. And so the "public" is let off the fiscal hook.

In this case, the politicians are let off the rhetorical hook since they are "all" doing it. We don't need to examine the content of speech, merely its level of passion. Truth? Well, first, let's be nice because we need civil debate in Congress. Politicians must refrain from attacking one another.

Excuse me, but at this point, thanks to our esteemed President, we have been buried by civility. As I write this, for instance, Congress has voted to overturn the Medicare bill. The GAO reports that ditching this bill will cost the Treasury more than keeping it, but do you hear our President articulating this fact forcefully? I don't. He didn't stump for Single Payer, presumably because he might've annoyed some of his enemies by speaking the truth. Now he isn't even stumping for the watered-down version. I know he's aware of the importance of winning over the American voters because recently he said he had to take his case for automatic citizenship for children born on American soil to (drum roll) the People. Well, duh.

The problem is not that our political speakers are passionate or even that they are harsh. The problem is that they are manipulative. As a nation, we've been manipulated into terror by these fools. Funny how the War on Terror has accomplished just that. We have a lot more to fear from fear itself, lavishly purveyed by the right and endorsed by their cohorts on the so-called left, than we do from Islamic Terrorists. Islamic Terrorists, as I have argued previously, are merely the "Better Dead Than Red" FedEx packages of the present day.

As for fear, it has a funny way of behaving, particularly in men. I recall when I carried two large dogs around in a truck equipped with a camper shell, one dog a giant poodle, the other a German shepherd. These are deep-chested dogs that individually can turn bones to water when they bark. In stereo, in a sudden invisible barrage, they are scary as hell. Walking back to the truck, I've witnessed women jumping several feet in reaction to the dogs' territorial announcements. Afterward, the women often laughed at themselves.

Men, however, were generally a different story. One man keyed the truck. Other men shouted in fury. This, I believe, is the source of the violence we are witnessing. Fear is catching and it is a disease. Disturbed individuals will pass it on.

It's not passion we need to quash; it's manipulation and lies.

Eggless in Gaza

NOTE: If you're in the dark (as I tend to be) about the functioning of Wall Street and how the scammers there make money off non-money, read William D. Cohan's op-ed piece in The New York Times, "Friends With Benefits," on why it doesn't matter a bit to Goldman Sachs that Facebook is not worth $50,000,000,000. I especially liked the bit about how Facebook makes minimal profits, something I inferred but didn't know. You can find the column at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/friends-with-benefits/?ref=todayspaper

In 1952 and 1956 Adlai Stevenson ran for President of the United States. Known as an egghead, he lost out to the warm and fuzzy thinking Dwight D. Eisenhower. At the time, there was a great deal of angst among liberals over the perception that an intellectual could never become President of the United States. The liberals may have been right.

Consider recent history: The recently departed Theodore Sorenson was the source of JFK's most brilliant remarks. Even Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, seems not to have been authored by him. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2478/did-john-f-kennedy-really-write-profiles-in-courage

Don't make the mistake of seeing intellectual as synonymous with smart. Intellectuals think deeply about issues and articulate subtle distinctions. Barack Obama is a smart man but he's not an intellectual. His speeches, the product of PR hacks, avoid complexity at the expense of the very goals he was elected to pursue. Bill Clinton is another smart man but he also pancaked issues into agreeably bite-sized pieces.

Richard Nixon, lacking a moral compass, never lacked for gray matter and he never let ethics interfere with good politics. Through red-baiting, he trashed the career of Helen Gahagan Douglas, a New Deal Democrat. When he perceived the billions to be made off the burgeoning China marketplace, Nixon was quick to turn his back on his hatred of "Commies" and forge an alliance with the emerging Chinese capitalists. Americans liked him (before they found out he was a crook) precisely because he didn't seem to be appreciably smarter than the average guy. One banal question posed by the press in the Presidential elections was "Would you like to have a beer with this guy?" Wanting an ordinary Joe to occupy the White House has led our country straight into the mouth of the lion.

In reviews of Elvin Lim's The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, the following observations appear:

"Recent American presidents have dumbed down democratic discourse, Elvin Lim shows in his disturbing new study of presidential leadership. The chief culprits are presidential speechwriters, who prize style over substance and subvert the reasoned articulation of policy."--Jeffrey K. Tulis, author of The Rhetorical Presidency

"That 'Presidents and speechwriters have killed oratory and gone anti-intellectual' will come as no surprise."--Elizabeth Sanders, Department of Government, Cornell University

"Elvin Lim documents a disturbing trend. Presidents are talking more, but their speech is getting less substantive and less informative. Simple declarations have come to substitute for reasoned arguments."--Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

Arguably, Jefferson and Lincoln were our nation's only intellectual presidents. They wrote their own speeches, thought deeply about philosophical and ethical issues, and, Lincoln at least, had a sense of humor. When an opponent accused the homely Lincoln of being "two-faced," our future President retorted (quick as a New York minute), "If I had another face, do you think I'd be wearing this one?"

A dark and self-deprecating wit may be the natural byproduct of a subtle mind. Certainly, Lincoln's riposte was a lot funnier than the doltish Dubya bending over in the Oval Office, searching under the Presidential Seal for WMDs, while Iraqis and Americans were bleeding to death on the battlefields he and his cronies ordained.