Sandy Strikes New York City: Rush Limbaugh Calls it God's Will

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

A woman who gets pregnant as a result of a rape is pregnant because of God's will.  So sayeth the Republican Party. Or Mr. Murdoch, a Republican. Other Republicans are not appalled by the comment, but by the reaction. They say Democrats are playing politics, twisting meanings.

(Actually, this blog is going to be soft on attribution.  I don't remember which Republican said what any more. They all sound alike to me by now.)

In a way, there is a consistency to the thinking:  After all, the fetus did not rape the mother.  If you consider that eight cell conceptus a human being, then it has an immortal soul, and it has not had a chance to sin yet. So it is, by definition, innocent. Why "kill" it? What has that conceived thing done to deserve extermination?

When you believe life begins at conception, this is where you are led. 

And then you get to the idea of what kind of rape?  Another Republican (? Aiken)  floated the idea of "legitimate rape," by which he meant, I suppose, some women who claim to have been raped were not raped. They had consensual rape and then went home and thought about it and decided they didn't like what happened, and they were raped.  There was  that case of a Brown university junior who had sex with a drunken coed, who, the next morning gave him her phone number and seemed happy enough, until she got back to her dorm where who knows what happened, but then she claimed to have been raped. Considering that case, the concept emerges that not every woman who claims to have been raped may have had sex with a man who had any idea what he was doing was rape. He thought he had drunken sex with a willing partner.

So then we get to the murky area of decision:  If a woman says she was traumatized by the sex which resulted in pregnancy, is she entitled to the exception which allows her to have a legal abortion?  Does the right or wrong of abortion depend on the mother's state of mind at the time of intercourse?  Can it depend on the mother's state of mind an hour after intercourse?  

Paul Ryan would make no exception for rape, and you can see the logical consistency of his argument.  But he would make no exception for the health of the mother, either. So would you agree if the mother would likely die if she carries the pregnancy to term,  she cannot have an abortion?

How about the mentally deficient woman, who has intercourse, not understanding what it is, and gets pregnant? Can she have an abortion?

The Democrats have their own consistency: Let the mother decide what she wants. She is the one who  has to carry the pregnancy and deal with the consequences.

The problem with God's will is we do not hear directly from God. We cannot really know His will. Some, of course, say they know God's will, because they find it in the Bible or from personal revelation. But Democrats, in general, are leery of this claim. The Taliban makes the same claim, as does every wild eyed fanatic.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, is never in doubt. He hears voices in his ears. 

That is the Republican mindset.  

I think it was Bertrand Russell who asked:  Why is it the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt?

Jamel Mims and The Supreme Court

Lost in all the election hoo hah has been an ongoing cinder in the eye of liberty in these United States:  Owing to the recent Supreme Court decision, Florence vs the Board of Chosen Freeholders, anyone in this country can be stripped searched once arrested.   

And we are not talking about arrests for violent crimes, or for suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon, we are talking about the 16 year old girl who rolls past a stop sign. Florence, in fact, was a Black passenger in a car. The police computer said there was an outstanding warrant for him, but the computer was wrong, and Florence presented a document he carried with him showing the warrant had been rescinded. No matter: he was strip searched three times the night of his arrest.

The court made it very clear the whole rationale for these searches is to protect the jailers, and to a lesser extent, to protect the other prisoners in the jail. But in the various opinions of the justices voting for allowing strip searches, the jailers were in danger, because you just never know what some young woman may have up her vagina.  No matter the statistics presented documented the almost vanishing rarity of any weapon being found up a vagina or a rectum. It could happen. We are talking the four horsemen of the security state apocalypse here: Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.

Sheriff Arpaio, Who Arrests Citizens for Looking  Hispanic

Given this level of back up on the highest court in the land, the two bit bullies are unleashed. Oh, they've given us license to do just about anything!  And if you are 
Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, that means to you can arrest people for looking Mexican,  or  if you are DA Brown of  Queens, NY, you  arrest Black men for looking "suspicious,"  i.e. Black.  And a Black man who confronts a police line, however non violently, well take that boy to jail.

It has long been recognized Gandhi would have become a simple number in Stalin's gulag. We ought to remember the man who protests non violently is appealing to conscience, if not the conscience of the police, at least to the conscience of his fellow countrymen. The reason Gandhi could succeed is there were newspapers in Britain and they have Prime Minister's questions in parliament and with that kind of responsive democracy, an appeal to conscience could work.

I'm not sure Gandhi would have fared much better in Arizona, or in South Carolina, or in Alabama, or in Mississippi--or apparently in New York City--than he would have fared in Stalin's Soviet state. In fact, in Stalin's Soviet State, the main offense was to question Stalin; it was not a racial thing. 

Here,in America, or at least in some parts of America you don't have to say or do anything; it's all about what you look like.  But if you look not white and you protest, well, that's a guarantee, make your reservation for a suite at the Queens jailhouse.

In the case of Jamel Mims, the question is open whether or not his countrymen will be offended enough to rise to his defense.  It remains to be seen whether or not Jamel Mims's countrymen are moved to action by the prospect of a police state in New York City. 

It reminds me of that wonderful closing scene in Nashville, where the pixie who has been trying to get onstage to belt out her song finally gets to let loose: But what she sings is, "It don't bother me. It don't bother me. You may say, that I ain't free, but it don't bother me."

Jamel Mims Prostests Indiscriminate Stop and Search In Queens, New York

Stop and Frisk: Jamel Mims Belongs to History

Mississippi Sheriff Laughs At His Trial for Lynching

John Lewis Treated to Southern Hospitality

Mayor Bloomberg's Sheriff of Nottingham

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Queens DA have apparently colluded to make an example of a Black man who had the temerity to point out the simple truth that stopping a Black man for being Black is an assault on the liberties of all men, Black and white.  

In some parts of New York City, evidently, walking while Black is the equivalent of  looking suspicious . 

Mr. Bloomberg and his DA, Mr. Brown, have,  to all appearances, joined that pantheon of white officials , including Lawrence Rainey, a Mississippi sheriff who laughed at his trial for murder of a Black man, knowing the white Southern jury would never convict him.  Also included in that perverted group of white men in power are the three beautifully attired police manhandling the man who would become Representative Lewis from Georgia. 

Police acting as an arm of racism is something you expect in Mississippi, Alabama or South Carolina, or South Africa,  but The Phantom is stunned to learn police can behave the same way in New York City.

This is not the way The Phantom remembers New York's finest. The Phantom got to know a few New York City police,  and he liked them. They had a raw, cynical view of life which comported well with The Phantom's own understanding of what the underbelly of American society can be like.  And watching the NYPD in action, most of the time, The Phantom was impressed with the good sense and professionalism--they kept things moving, in control,  with a minimum of force. They seemed to respect the power they had been given; they did not abuse it. They were, in a word, reasonable. 

But of course that was then, and The Phantom is white.

What the Jamel Mims case looks like, from afar, is a disturbing revelation. And the most revealing part of it is what it says about Michael Bloomberg.  The Phantom actually liked the mayor inveighing against supersized soft drinks, liked the vest pocket parks which made for a better street experience in Manhattan.  

But it must be recognized now, when a billionaire mayor decides he needs to give vent to his controlling personality by ignoring the idea of a free society, when "security" and "statistics" become an excuse for using police to humiliate citizens for being Black, Mayor Bloomberg has shown his very most dark side.

Add Jamel Mims to the Honor Roll

Stop and Frisk Jamel Mims: Protest As Crime

Jamel Mims, a New York City teacher, will stand trial for protesting the Stop and Frisk practices of the New York City Police department, a practice which New York City's billionaire mayor, supports. 

One always wants to pause, when something as obviously wrong as stopping a black youth and throwing him up against a wall and emptying his pockets or running your hands over his body above and below his belt is purveyed as a public safety practice, especially when over half a million such police actions have been aimed at Black and Latino men, and fewer than 120,000 have been conducted on Asian and white men.

Given the fear white police have of Black and Latino men, this sounds like a program of intimidation, clear and simple. But you want to ask what the argument is, on the other side, on the side of the mayor and the police.

You can argue tactics like this keep the streets safe. You can say, if you look at the statistics, over 80% of the time, nothing is found, no more action is taken, and the Black man thus examined is allowed to continue on his way. This is said, as if nothing has happened.

But something has happened. A Black man has just been told he is guilty of Walking While Black. 

The question is, even if we could demonstrate, with really reliable statistics (which we cannot) that this tactic is effective, would its efficacy justify the harm it does?

The answer is:  If it is so important, then why are white men not stopped and frisked on the streets of the Upper East Side? And you might ask: How long would Mayor Bloomberg defend it if it were done in Tribeca, Wall Street, or SoHo?

Now, Mayor Bloomberg might reply: We don't use this tactic against white men on East 69th Street because we don't have statistics to say those white men are likely to be carrying weapons--we have crime statistics for Queens, Bedford Stuyvestant to say that's where the crime happens and Black men are who do it.  But the statistics would also say 98% of Black men in these areas are law abiding and non violent. How can you justify violating 98% to get at the 2%?

When elements within the New York City Police complain they are being tracked by police supervisors as to how many stop and frisks they have done, when these numbers are used to judge performance of police officers, you, once again, have a perversion of the use of statistics by the mayor and his lieutenants in the police department. 

When the leaders of protests against this practice are jailed, charged with escalating levels of charges, the District Attorney of Queens and the Mayor of New York City begin to look like those southern police and the Governor of Alabama, who Martin Luther King described as having "hate dripping from his lips."

The Phantom considers himself an honorary New Yorker, having lived in the city for 8 years and having had his most formative years there.  The Phantom loves this pulsating, vibrant city and rejoices that NYC has become safer than Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Oakland, Los Angeles and Boston, Chicago and Miami.

Now, you may say, that is because all of those cities have failed to address the violence in their own Black and Latino communities. And you may point to statistics as the best way to document trends in crime.

But the Phantom has doubts, and those doubts arise by viewing the actions of the white guys in power, by looking at the attempt to intimidate by arresting a Jamel Mims and threatening him with a year or more in prison. This is the way the Governors of Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and Arkansas responded. They said they had no complaints from their Blacks, until uppity agitators from the North came down. There was a time when Southern sheriffs arrested and disappeared freedom riders and protesting Blacks with impunity. And now it looks like the same thing  is happening in New York City, right now.  Jamel Mims is called "and agitator" by police officials. 

Yes, he would likely agree he is an agitator, just as Nelson Mandella was an agitator, just as Martin Luther King was an agitator. He is agitating to right a wrong.

And that wrong begins with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man who strikes a very different pose than Governor George Wallace, but a man who is doing, in this one area, pretty much the same thing.

The Phantom knew Jamel Mims, when he was a 10th grader at the Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, DC, the same school  President Obama's kids attend. This is a very high class private school, in the swankiest part of Washington, DC, but Jamel Mims did not come from that part of Washington, DC. He came from across the river in Anacostia. Driving him home one late night, after a wrestling tournament, The Phantom found himself driving a van load of white wrestlers from some of the most prominent and wealthy families in the nation's capital, through a part of town which made the blood of most white people run cold. Jamel asked to be let off near a Metro stop but the Phantom, fearing for Jamel's safety said, "No, I can take you all the way home, just tell me where to go."  Jamel shook his head, "No, this is fine." 

Jamel did not want to endanger that van load of white kids. He pointed the safe road out of that dangerous area, and disappeared into the darkness.

Now, ten years later, Jamel is still walking into the darkness, trying to keep other people safe.

Romnesia

We've Got To Destroy That Village To Save It

Down With the 47%

Hey, I Can Guard Your Henhouse. I've Got Experience.

Remember when the campaign for President began, way back a year ago. And then it was very clear, all the pundits agreed, Mr. Obama was toast. The economy was languishing, everyone hated Obamacare and there was gridlock in Washington all because Mr. Obama would not play with Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Boehner. And all the talking heads on Fox News and Sunday morning talk shows and The News Hours said Mr. Obama was toast.

Then the Republicans nominated Mr. Romney, who turned out to be an idiot, insulting our friends the Brits, saying dumb stuff like if you didn't pay income tax, you were a slacker and thought the government owed you a living, and it turned out he didn't really pay income tax himself, or at least not much, and he hid most of his money from the American government in offshore accounts. And all the talking heads said he was cooked.

And now, Mr. Obama is toast again, because he missed his chance in the first debate and Hendrick Hertzberg said that was his best shot and he blew it.  

Ever notice how sure everyone is 12 months, 6 months, 3 months and 3 weeks before the election?  

But what I remember, which still seems to be true is Mr. Ryan tried and is still trying to kill Medicare, although he will never admit that.  And the Republicans still hate Medicare and Social Security and are trying to kill it, by rumoring it into death and then "saving" Medicare by turning it into Couponcare and Social Security they are going to save by privatizing it and turning it into personal stock portfolios so you can get as rich as Mitt.

Some things never change.

It Is Written

Lawrence of Arabia has one scene which keeps bubbling up in my mind:  Lawrence has just had to shoot to death a young Arab man he had previously taken considerable risk to save and Lawrence is grim about the irony of it all. His Arab ally tells him, "It is all written."  Don't worry about it. You had no choice and that young man was simply meeting his fate.  "Nothing is written," Lawrence snaps. 

We believe we create our own fates, here in America. But, we cannot control the tides or the minds of our countrymen.

Obama got no bounce after he trounced (or at least neutered) Romney. It was all written. 

It may have been Obama wrote his own fate with his first debate debacle, but their were others who were writing their own fate, 300 million of them, and that may simply be written for them.

It's up to us to struggle against it. I'll be out knocking on doors for Obama, but it may be like trying to save that young Arab--it may all be written.

President Romney.  
Where is that vomit bag?

Earthquake Hits New Hampshire: Romney Blames Obama

I don't know why I didn't see it the first debate, but that rapid fire, earnest, full of conviction patter which is Mitt Romney is right out of that great con artist story, The Music Man.  The con man arrives at a small Iowa town, peopled by a naive core of rubes, and he proceeds to fool most of the people all the time with his fast talking predictions of financial disaster looming around the bend, talks the good, uncritical people out of their money and skips town.

Mitt Romney may not have invented the part, but he's got it down cold.

So now the deaths of four Americans in Libya, the riots in Egypt, the civil war in Syria are all Mr. Obama's fault. So is the poor economy, never mind Mr. Obama rescued that economy, as if we ought to blame the doctor because the man he resuscitated isn't running marathons yet.

We, as the Music Man said, "We got trouble. We got trouble right here in River City." 

And as Pogo said, "The trouble is us."

Affirmative Action: Abigail Fisher and University of Texas

The Supreme Court heard arguments in another affirmative action case. The one vote against affirmative action nobody questions is that of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has raged against affirmative action from day one of his tenure.

Why would a Black man rage against a program which, from its inception was intended to give Black children a better shot at success?  Because he knows, as did everyone that once you set up a separate system to consider the virtues of Black applicants to Harvard, you have everyone saying about the Black Harvard graduate, "Well, he is Black."  Which means, of course, well, you don't have to be impressed he went to Harvard because it's easier to get into Harvard if you are Black.

Scott Brown has tried to smear Elizabeth Warren with the stain of having used affirmative action to get into Harvard, saying she gamed the admissions system by claiming to have Indian blood, so her admission to Harvard was tainted, and the fact she did well enough there to wind up on the Law School faculty could not wash that stain out. 

In Warren's case, of course, this is just dirty lying politics--throw some mud and hope it sticks in the minds of Joe Sixpack.

But even dating back to 1965, when Lyndon Johnson first backed the notion of affirmative action, there were objections which predicted where we have come today:  What will this stamp of validation coming from the meritocracy mean, if there is a "sneak" around the perilous rapids for some people?  In kayaking, you can go right through the class five rapids and if you make it out alive on the other side, you have proven you are a world class kayaker--but if you can take the "sneak" around the rapids, even if you arrive at the same end point. what have you proven? 

One might argue, this is a poor analogy. The applicant to Harvard who is admitted, still has to perform once they arrive. All you have done is to allow the Black student to line up at the starting line, not sneak around the tough rapids. But this would be more convincing if those applicants, once admitted, majored in engineering, science or math. If they major in English, sociology or African studies, maybe not so much. 

Of course, the whole idea of meritocracy  is pretty fraught. Athletes, legacy students, children of rich people, potential benefactors have always had a sneak around the admissions gauntlet. In fact, the children of Ivy league graduates applying to their parent's alma maters do not have an advantage at all, never have, unless those parents gave big time to the alma mater. A mere $200 a year got your kid no selective advantage.  A $10,000 annual contribution might get your kid a little boost, but $20,000 a year for 10 years, with the potential for a million for a building or sports program virtually guaranteed admission for your feckless offspring. So the "meritocracy" idea was always perverted by money.

It was very evident that Black students who had not been read to as children, who did not have enrichment by tutors, music lessons, travel, coaches, highly competitive friends, affluent communities where Ivy League educations were valued were simply not in a position to compete when they got to university, for the highly competitive places in medical schools.  When they were jumped ahead of the line, they were unable to perform as medical students. 

Except for those who were able to perform, despite having lower test scores and/or grades. 

The exceptional case, that Black man who played football at a state school, got into medical school and performed well then was a star at the radiology program at a first line medical school like Duke raises basic questions for the entire concept of meritocracy.

How meaningful were those test scores, when you get right down to it?  How important was that grade in calculus?  How important was that grade in organic chemistry?  Why is it the male athlete who was a swimmer or a college level soccer player did better as a resident in medicine, surgery or radiology than the girl who had never had lower than an "A" from kindergarten onward?

"That girl, now a woman, never learned to learn from her mistake," a chief of a renown academic department suggested.  "You correct her now, at age 26, and she falls to pieces. That man, who as an athlete was always getting beaten, coached, corrected, shakes off a setback, a little failure and he's better the next time. In short, he learns. At the end of three years, he's a great radiologist, a terrific surgeon.  The thing about a jock is the one thing he's demonstrated is perseverance and the capacity to grow."

So maybe the idea of meritocracy is not completely bogus. Maybe what's bogus is the criteria by which we judge merit. We have been lazy. We say, "Oh, there are SAT exams to tell us who's bright, who to bet on." We have stopped thinking about what intelligence, aptitude really means. We have destroyed meritocracy by failing to think hard about what constitutes real merit and real virtue.

Opening statements: Intelligent Life in the Universe

Some people love poetry; some love music; others are dazzled by fireworks going off in the summer sky. 

Why we love these things, for each person who loves them,  likely there is a different explanation.  For some,  it's the sheer delight in the flash; for others it wells up from an appreciation of how hard it is to do: poetry, music, pyrotechnics, whatever. 

For me, it's opening line, whether in a bar or a novel, that is the most difficult thing of all. How do you approach someone you do not know and begin a conversation?  Now consider the problem of approaching that person without being able to see him or her, without knowing anything about them, what they look like, where they came from, what they believe in. You are just talking to the dark theater and you cannot see beyond the stage, blinded as you are by the spot lights.

I am not the only one to be dazzled by this peculiar virtuosity. There is a well known game, "Guess the book," from opening lines.  It's an easy game, if you've actually read those books, because those lines are indelible. 

But what kind of mind can write those lines?

I have five, of many, which come to mind.  Intriguingly, only one is written by a man, the rest come from women.  I like each for different reasons.

Here they are, for no particular reason, in no particular order:

#1  In the later summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

#2  It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.--Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

#3 How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other." But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names--Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them--not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance--revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart." "--Beryl Markham, West With the Night.

#4  WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since; I never ask about snakes. Why should a Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more." --Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays.

#5 Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, and an unchartered season which lives until winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged-edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening." --Grace Metalious, Peyton Place.

In these days, when we have to listen to inanities from the mouths of politicians, trying to appeal to unseen audiences, talking down to the lowest common denominator, these minds, these words wash over The Phantom as a healing balm. There is, or was once, intelligent life in the universe.

Romney for Wimp In Chief: Real Men

At times like this, when it appears the scoundrels will win, and the nation is going to the dogs, I find history a healing salve. Reading Joshua Chamberlain's account of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox is just the thing. It reminds me what real adversity means, what real men are like, and what real crisis entails.

General Joshua Chamberlain (pictured in the top photo) was given the task of accepting the surrender of Southerners, and he had his troops line up along the road as the various units of the Southern army marched by, stacked their arms and disbanded.  He knew every unit, could remember where they were at Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and who their commanders were. 

And he mentions that once the arms were stacked the regimental colors, the flags which had been carried ahead of the men into battle, were brought forth and laid on the rifles and some of the soldiers kissed these flags and wept. 

These were men who fought real battles, not just engaged in debates where frat boy rules reigned. These were men for whom defeat was a burning hole in their souls, not just a game lost.

And Chamberlain was given the honor to preside over this, although he was not the general who commanded the division which lined the road. He mentions he was a little uncomfortable with this honor since the general who commanded the division would have expected that role, but the general was gracious about it. These soldiers, who had fought with bullets flying around them--and Chamberlain had a fresh arm wound--were very concerned about how their comrades saw them. Embarrassment was a driving motivator. "Honor" meant standing up and pressing forward in the face of bullets and bombs.

Those 19th century men were made of sterner stuff than we are today. Mr. Obama had a tough decision to make sending the crew in to get Osama Bin Laden. He might have felt at home among Chamberlain and Sheridan.  

But even he, and certainly not Romney, did not make decisions with the bullets whizzing around his head.

Ron Buckle Gone Hollywood

Connie Bruck presents a portrait of Ron Buckle in the October 8 New Yorker , which, like most good biography,  places the man in his world, and seeing him in that world what might be repellent becomes, at least, understandable. 

The man started working in his family's grocery store, became a union member and when he became owner of a chain of grocery stores he dealt with unions sympathetically, and he even named each of the planes in his private fleet after the union he had joined as a youth.

On the other hand, the people who work in those stores put a lot of themselves into the small part of the operation they run--whether it is the meat cutting or the produce section, they prepare the stuff and they deal with the customers. 

It reminded me of a story a friend told me about the first job he ever had, in the produce department of Giant Food, in suburban Washington, DC. One day a middle aged man wandered through, picking up peaches and squeezing them, putting them back and my friend looked at him,  waiting for him to take a bite out of one or maybe slip a few into his pocket. The man noticed him and asked, "How are the peaches today?"  And my friend said, "I don't know. What do you mean?"  And the man introduced himself: He was Israel Cohen, and he owned the chain of Giant Food stores and he said, "Well, if you work in produce, you should take a bite out of each peach, each pear, so when a customer asks, you know something."  My friend stammered, "I thought if I was caught eating the fruit, they'd fire me."  No, Cohen told him, that is part of the job, knowing your product. Cohen floated through all his stores and a few weeks later he appeared again and asked again and my friend told him the peaches were a little unripe but the pears were sensational. Cohen beamed and asked him his name and kept coming back and eventually offered to pay his way through the University of Maryland, if he would commit to working for Giant for 4 years after his graduation.

Ron Burkle bought chains of grocery stores and the stores and the details of what makes a food store good, I suspect, had little interest for him. He was interested in the big picture.  He moved from grocery stores to the movie industry, where he dealt with other men who had little or no feeling for what makes a movie work or wonderful, but they packaged the financing for movies and bought and sold packages of movies, movies which haven't even been made yet.  What interested them was the financing, the money, how to drive the best bargain so even if the movie is a flop, they make money, or at least do not lose any, and someone else absorbs the financial blow.

Which brings me to my new favorite current PBS television series, Call the Midwife , which has introduced Chummy, an awkward behemoth of a woman, who comes from money and the upper classes, but for unstated reasons has decided to work as  a nurse midwife in the impoverished East End of London in the 1950's.  As you see her conquer her fear and deliver a breech baby, all her awkwardness dissipates, and you can see the thrill she experiences in her hard won skill in midwifery, what that skill means to the family of the baby, and to the community. She is in the trenches. She is sampling the fruit. She is unconcerned by the financing of the institution which pays her salary.  She loves her job more than anything.

She is McNulty, who loves his job, loves bringing in a really significant case; she is Major Dick Winters, who wants Easy Company to do its job well, but sees no sense in sacrificing a single good man if it is not required to the overall mission; she is the engineer who builds the bridge, the steel worker on the girder, the tug boat captain bringing the ship up the river past the shoals. 

Doctors, for half a century, found themselves in the enviable position of doing their jobs in the trenches, enjoying the rewards of practicing one patient at a time. Then a type of doctor who no longer saw individual patients but who drew a salary in the millions emerged, and he organized deals and flew around in private jets and he lost touch with what it is that really matters...in life. 

I suppose we need the guy at the top, although why he should be rewarded so extravagantly is beyond me.  But, if you could wish for your child a life doing deals or delivering babies, or doing surgery, one patient at a time, which would you choose?

American Democracy: Chatter as the Opiate of the Masses

Is the idea of democracy delusional? 
My grandparents lived in what today would be called poverty; being penniless in America, they were virtually powerless. They lived in fear of the landlord, the police, the authorities. They were immigrants.
But they were intensely political. My grandfather, once retired, when out every day to "the benches" in the park, where he argued all day long with his friends and neighbors, most of whom were union members (retired) and leftist, and I wondered what they could argue so ardently about, given their shared political inclinations. (I could not understand what they were arguing about, because they were not speaking English. Occasionally, one would notice me and pat me on the head and then go back to the raucous fray.) This was about mid 20th century.
Thinking back on these men, I sometimes think: What fools. They could argue all day long whether Eisenhower or Stevenson should be President, but these men had no effect on the choice. 
In a capitalist society, there are people with money, who can amplify their opinions, voices and thinking and there are the great unwashed masses, whose opinions are never heard and whose opinions do not influence others, apart from a dozen other men on a park bench.
Now, in the 21st century, with the blogosphere, everyone has an opinion and everyone seems to be heard, just as Andy Warhol predicted: In the future everyone will be famous, for 15 seconds. 
Even the once mighty television networks are no longer all that influential. And that is a good thing. In the 1960's CBS, NBC and ABC prolonged the war in Vietnam by looking to profit from reporting on it. In the end, the coverage probably helped to turn the tide of American opinion, but had there been the proliferation of channels we now have, the end of that war might have come 25,000 American deaths and 250,000 Vietnamese deaths sooner.
Now, it's Obama vs Romney and I hope the blogosphere makes a difference; I hope it helps thwart the Republicans. But I'm not sanguine on this point. It appears, from here, there is just crowd noise and that doesn't get you either here or there.
Even a clarion voice, like that of Andrew Hacker, who has written with such clarity about government and about education, is mostly ignored because he is just one voice in the stadium. 
So why are we all still talking?
Is anyone listening?

Todd Aiken: Republican Pixie Dust

"And what sort of places do these bottom-of-the-food-chain doctors work in? Places that are really a pit. You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die."

--Todd Aiken, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate

It is not unusual for right wing spokesman from Rush Limbaugh to Todd Aiken to spew forth some free flowing, stream of consciousness invective, but what I tend to do with a paragraph like the one reproduced above is to hear it as a whole and categorize it in my mind and simply label it, "Weird, stupid right-wing stuff," shove it in the trash folder and think no more about it.

But could there be any value in teasing out its parts and trying to see how a mind can get this twisted? We do this with various sorts of diseases, and I imagine psychiatrists or psycho analysts must discipline themselves to do this sort of thing to analyze what this is saying about the person, just as a physician watching a man walking up stairs, stopping, grabbing the banister, wheezing and coughing must think, okay, this is the pathology which all this might signify.

The first thing which strikes you is this is a man talking about something he knows nothing, first hand, about. He is giving you his imaginings of what a doctor who performs an abortion is like, and about what the room in which he works must look like. It is something like the paintings of Hell, or of Dante's rings or levels of hell come from, that dark place in the mind which imagines hideous things. 

So, Mr. Aiken sees an unsanitary pit.  Of course, at least since Roe vs Wade, the black pits of back alleys have been replaced by spotless, stainless steel and tile operating rooms.

And what sort of person would do this sort of work? Well, he'd cheat on his taxes--odd sort of perfidy coming from a right winger, in that right wingers typically do not like paying taxes, so one would expect the offense of not paying them would  be high on their list of bad acts.  Another bad thing Aiken lists, is "misuse of anesthetics."  Again, one might expect this mind to conjure up blood and gore, but no, he talks about anesthetics, which are pretty undramatic sorts of drugs, at least in the pantheon of drugs he might have decided to talk about. Of course, you can anesthetize a patient and rape her, or kill her, so maybe there's more going on in his mind.

The last point, of course, is the most obvious:  How do you perform an "abortion" on a woman who is not pregnant?  But, I'll give him a pass on this, allowing he might have been referring to the procedure itself, a dilation and curettage (D&C), which you could do on a uterus pregnant or not.

Now, coming from a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity,  or especially a Glenn Beck, all this might be expected. None of these men got past freshman year in college, if I am correct. So they are simply ignorant and they have to create scenarios from their own fetid imaginations, rather than drawing from actual knowledge.  

But Aiken graduated with a degree in engineering from Worcester Polytech. This is not an untrained mind, and yet he drifts off on clouds of imagination, rather than remain tethered to the firm ground of reality. He, of course, has taken flight before, insisting that women who have been "legitimately raped" would not get pregnant because their bodies would shut that down.

But this is a characteristic of the rabid right, through and through: The desire to believe, without any real substantive evidence, despite all contrary evidence, and without actually investigating what the arguments are--well, a woman who really didn't want to have sex won't get pregnant.  The good ones are not punished. Their immune systems protect them.

 And the most amazing thing is it's happening in the internet age, when you can so easily go on line and check out the facts, the arguments.

My personal favorite is the man interviewed on the street, must have been South Carolina, or maybe Texas, who asserted, with utmost certainty, that President Obama is indeed not a legitimate President because he is not a "natural born" citizen because his father was not born in this country. "It's right there in the Constitution," he asserted. "You're not natural born if your father wasn't born here."

You could look it up. 

And, of course, I did. 

It's not in the Constitution. 

I'll save you some time: Article II Section 1. 

But for the right wing, it's all pixie dust. When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.