National Public Radio can be really astonishing, every now and then. Today, they were interviewing young twenty something Wall Street bankers in a bar. Now, one of the things I learned about New York City bars is they are a strange blend of the public and the private.
Bars in New York City are where you can say things you really, actually believe, but cannot say in polite, politic or intellectually mixed company. And you can shout it out, generally over the din of surrounding customers who are trying to do pretty much the same thing.
So, whoever these NPR reporters are, they have clearly decided it would be interesting to hear what certain people, namely these Wall Street banker up and comings, think. The reporters had asked questions, apparently before I tuned in, about what these bankers think about the Obama idea of taxing the rich more than the poor. The bankers, young as they are, apparently meet the definition of rich and they are appalled they have been singled out for special treatment.
They work for banks as employees, so they do not try to voice that tired old canard so many Republican spokesmen mouth--that if you tax the billionaires and some millionaires, they will simply take their balls home and refuse to play, that is, the "job generators" the "small businessmen" who are billionaires, will will just fold their arms, pout and stop creating new jobs just to spite President Obama and all those who sail with him.
No, what these young bankers say is they deserve their wealth and nobody should take any of it away from them.
But, the reporters press on, if not for the bank bail out you'd be out of work, on some unemployment line, and not rich at all. So the government, in a very real sense, gave you your job or at the very least preserved it for you and now you're making millions in bonuses and whatnot.
No, the bankers replied, we are rich because we were smart enough to become bankers and smart to enough to stay bankers. We were smart enough to know the government would have no choice but to bail us out.
They really said that.
Then again, it is a bar, where people are liquored up, back stage and can speak the truth.
The reporters press on: But you got your jobs because you went to the right schools and got educated, some of you in public schools before you went to the Ivy League, and were it not for all that infrastructure, you could not possibly enjoy the wealth you enjoy today and look forward to in the future. And if the government giveth, does the government not have a right to taketh away?
No. The bankers laughed and started talking very slowly, as if to a very slow witted child. You see, I am smarter than other people, which is why I am rich. That is what makes it right.
But what about the bailout.
I saw it coming.
This is all redolent of that old line about the psychic who sued the CT scan people because the machine stripped her of her psychic powers when she had a CT scan of her head. But, if you were psychic, then couldn't you know, couldn't you see into the future and know that would happen? But then, again, you could also see this million dollar law suit. Same progression of thought.
It is all an echo of that old divine right of kings. Dieu et mon Droit, on the royal crest of England, which some people take quite literally as God and my right (hand) but which likely really meant, God is my right, i.e God provides me with the right to rule, to be wealthy while my subjects live in poverty.
The really curious thing is not that there are people who can rationalize this way--people will always convince themselves whatever is good for them personally is ordained by God, or is right in any number of ways.
What's really amazing is so many people sitting in mobile homes believe them. It's the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" thing. You've got people struggling, get foreclosed, watching their end of the economic ship inundated with waves washing them overboard and they look up to the bridge overhead, where the Captain is dining with rich people in dinner dress and saying, "Oh, this is as it should be. Someday, when I'm rich, I'll be happy about these rules."
Go figure.
Then again, this is a country which elected a demented man twice, and then followed that with a retarded one. Sorry, he was mentally challenged. No, sorry, he was special. All those rich people are special.
Stop reading if you've heard all this before, but being a volunteer, working in the soup kitchen down in the ghetto, wearing a pink jacket and ushering people around the hospital, ushering at the local community theater, are things typically done by well meaning souls who should simply stop doing this.
Volunteering or "Giving back to the community" is also very big among professional football and baseball players. Another way of looking at what they are doing is saying, I am paid millions of dollars a year for an activity which entertains, but provides no service essential to the survival of the community, so I'll give a limited amount of time to something really worthwhile, like visiting kids in a hosptial. Now, you will object and you will say, like the arts, sports are essential to the spirit and the soul of the community, and these people are so highly paid because they are so exceptionally talented, and all that may be true, but the work they do could stop tomorrow and society would continue to function. On those snow days, when only "essential personnel" are told to report to work, they don't mean professional athletes. Pro athletes are fluff, from a sociological point of view, unless you are a Republican and still believe in trickle down economics, in which case Mike Tyson is a small business owner who deserves to be spared the estate tax.
Volunteering, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was also a way for the really rich to salve their consciences, those who actually had a conscience, when beset with the question: Why should I have so much when others have so little? So if you were Lady Astor or Electra Vanderbilt, you could spend a morning at the soup kitchen and then go home and change into riding jodhpurs and feels completely absolved. You could live in your estates and host your dinners and feel you'd paid your dues. You were the deserving rich and the rest of them were the undeserving poor.
But this is not really the basis for my objection to volunteers, many of whom come from the middle classes now, and are not rich. They are simply old and retired or they are housewives with a little time on their hands. And they have been told by their President (usually by Republican presients) and by their pastors to volunteer and go out and do good works. Very Christ like. Work with the poor.
But name any job worth doing, whether it's in a soup kitchen, a hospital or a theater and I will show you a job which is worth being paid to do. Volunteers simply take work away from somebody who could use the job and the money more than they do.
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and that crack pot crowd are always nattering on about the flood of immigrants arriving to take you job. That ingratiates the terrified masses to the right wing blow hards, who, don't you know, are for saving what belongs to you and me. But they never say, hey, there's plenty of jobs out there which the well off steal from the poor by doing for free. Would you be as happy if the waitress was a volunteer? Or how about if the cop was a volunteer?
What about the volunteer fireman? Well, okay, in a rural community where everyone is employed and it's all the local fire department can do to buy a truck, maybe.
But for the most part, if it's a job worth doing, it's a job somebody should be paid for.
S.C. Gwynne's book about the fall of the Comanches in the second half of the nineteenth century needs an editor, but notwithstanding its repetitiveness,
there is quite a lot of illuminating cultural anthropology going on between its covers, and not a little debunking.
This is particularly difficult for someone like me, who never got over boyhood fantasies about Indians--among my top five favorite movies are Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis), Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man. And this book destroys the image of the noble Indian, living in harmony with nature, kind hearted and misunderstood by the white man, who destroyed the Indians in a spasm of arrogance and racism.
Actually, it was worse than that, in one sense: It turns out three of the authentic heroes of the Civil War, Sherman, Sheridan and Grant looked dispassionately at the Comanches (who were the key to the control of the West) and applied the same scorched earth principles to them as these generals applied to the South during the war.
The generals first looked at what made the Indians what they were, how they lived their lives, what they valued and then methodically set about destroying it. It turned out to be not all that complicated: The Indians were nomadic carnivores who depended on the buffalo. Destroy all the buffalo, and you destroy the Indian way of life. So they brought in the most ruthless, pitiless destroyers that century and this continent have ever seen and presided over the destruction of millions of buffalo.
The buffalo hunters got buffalo hides to sell and the white man's government got the great plains rid of Indians who lived on buffalo. It was as effective as burning Atlanta. Only in the case of the plains Indians, there was no city to burn. The plains Indians were nomadic and could pack up their tent cities at a moment's notice and move on. But kill the buffalo and you kill the Comanche way of life.
Not that that way of life was pristine and warm and fuzzy.
Comanches dealt with interlopers into their territory much as the Taliban does today. Cut off noses, scalps, ears. Rape, disembowel. They were most unpleasant. But these depredations had the desired effect--in Texas, the white man retreated back eastward whenever the Comanche went on the war path.
The Comanches were very effective and ruthless terrorists. They actually had no word for "surrender." You got into a fight with Comanches, they took no prisoners. Well, actually, occasionally, they did, but only prisoners who were no threat to them, like women and children.
What Comanches liked were horses. They took lots of horses. They were such good horsemen they put the United States Calvary, the Texas Rangers and every other white man's armed militia to shame. They actually had technological superiority over the white units in plains warfare, until a few white men, like Jack Hays and Ranald Mackensie studied them and figured out the secret of their tactical success.
Which brings me to Afghanistan.
Historical analogies are pretty tenuous, I realize. History is one long argument. On the other hand, history does present lessons, military history in particular.
And this is the lesson I got from reading about the defeat of the Comanches: Unless and until we are willing to do what the generals did to the Comanches, we are not likely to have much success against the Afghan Comanches.
Of course, there are big differences--the Taliban are not quite as willing or able to live on the land as the Comanches were, one suspects.
But, from our point of view there is the major difference: The white Americans were there to stay, when it came to Comanche lands. They wanted to take the land and stay there. But white Americans have no desire to stay on Afghanistan's mountains and dirt plateaus. We want to get the hell out.
And there are no buffalo for us to slaughter in Afghanistan. We can burn poppy fields, but they grow back the next year. Maybe, if we looked for the modern equivalent of the buffalo hunters--men who would swoop in and gather up all the poppy fields and kill anyone who tried to stop them, we might have an effective tactic.
But then we've have to allow these guys the economic incentive the buffalo hunters had: You can sell the cash crop.
Somehow, I just don't see it.
