7/31/10

(*&%$#@*&!!!

When things go south they seem to like company. Lots of things going wrong and being reported wrongly the last several days. It's hard to know where to begin.

A report in the NYT a couple days ago notes that the Mexican drug cartel bosses are moving south into the plantation "republics" of Honduras, Guatamala, and El Salvador. South is away from the U.S., I know, but when these bastards take over several countries and assume the "powers" of nation states, the ante goes up and the kind of trouble we are going to have will be ever more complex and expensive. Keep an eye out for news in this area.

Domestically, there is a report today in the Times about a memo allegedly generated in the agency charged with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration, a memo which suggests ways in which the administration could skirt Congress to achieve "... 'relief' to illegal immigrants -- including delaying deportation for some, perhaps indefinitely, or granting green cards to others -- in the absence of legislation revamping the system."

Read this article carefully, because it will become the bete noir for Democrats through the entire campaign season, which is well underway and needing the sort of scandal that will turn white voters around in their tracks. This brou-ha-ha will do it. Meanwhile, the administration is getting its inevitable way with Arizona's attempt to fill the gap of enforcement.

Clearly, a law that requires law enforcement to question the citizenship status of persons being questioned or apprehended for other matters (such as traffic violations, smuggling, drug sales, etc.) presents the risk of any officer relying on what is known as "racial profiling." Ethnic profiling would be a better term. If officers challenged everyone then that would be an equal application of the law. But, the "system" is not ready for a few thousands of inquiries daily about everyone apprehended or stopped in Arizona each day. At least that is what the State Department has said.

The problem with the ethnic profiling complaint is that it arises from within a community deliberately harboring illegal aliens (family and relatives, for instance) and scoffing at the immigration laws of this country ... both on the basis of historical fecklessness on the government's part and on the sheer logistical complexity of the situation. Add to that the idea that Hispanics in place in the U.S. will vote for the party that serves their goals best, and you have a nasty mess ... which might have given rise to the memorandum alleged to have originated in the Immigration agency.

Well, I doubt that many working Hispanics in the U.S. will vote Republican anyway. I spoke with one two years ago while doing campaign volunteer work, and he told me his family would lynch him if they knew he preferred McCain. The odds are with the Democrats as long as they demonstrate a convincing dedication to the rule of law and determine to manage a fair system ... fair to domestic workers and to legal-track immigrants and their relatives already here. Immigration will be a key issue this fall.

Then, to make going south even more painful, and amid all the bad news from the Red Sox, the Steelers, the Diamond Backs, etc. I did not make the inner circle list for Chelsea's wedding today!

JB

7/15/10

One of the subjects that is given short shrift in public school history classes, and even in undergraduate college courses, is the history of immigration policy in the United States. One of the reasons is, of course, that there are almost endless opportunities for inadvertently teaching prejudice and discrimination and racism in this subject. But, we did learn about the great waves of immigration from Ireland, eastern Europe, southern Europe, China, and in the latter days of the 20th century, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, not to mention the illegal immigration across our southern borders from and through Mexico.

The history of immigration is also the history of people fleeing from oppression and oppressive religious and economic conditions, so the histories dodge around the epithets that the source countries richly deserve in favor of giving the new immigrants a "clean slate" upon which to write their new narratives. And, surely, immigrants do that pretty well, having virtually abandoned centuries or millenniums of old habits, cultural folkways, and suppositions about the world.

Less well taught are the commercial interests that come into play in the great "recruitments" of immigrants by railroads and agricultural interests, not to mention the rapidly growing industrial sector in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Still less well elucidated are the pressures brought to bear by agribusiness throughout North America, whose needs for pickers, packers, and alway low income wage labor has been a constant for the best part of a hundred years.

Immigration plays into foreign policy in a significant way that schools and colleges give scant attention to. In the case of Mexico and Latin America you cannot understand our immigration policy without also understanding the governmental structures and stabilities of the regimes from which immigrants are departing. In the case of Mexico, I have asserted that the plantation structure of Mexican politics, although is is changing slowly, represents the very sort of stability that American economic (and political) interests want and will pay for ... preferably with other people's money and efforts.

So, it is more than of "passing interest" that the Democratic governors of the states last weekend met in Boston and tried to explain to President Obama's people that suing Arizona was a really bad idea on political grounds alone. Not only is the principle involved subject to vigorous debate, but in most areas, the ACLU loud-mouths and certain ultra-liberal, knee-jerk sectors excepted, the American people approve of the Arizona law. Indeed, it is expected that most states will have SB1070-type laws under consideration by the end of this year!

It strikes me, as a closely affected observer, that the boycotts of Arizona were deployed much too rapidly to represent much more than the ultra-liberal point of view. The boycotts hurt in this shambles of an economy, and Arizonans like me are asking that, unless you want Arizonans to respond in kind in your direction, including cutting off the electricity to Los Angeles, you should reconsider your decision to never see the Grand Canyon or never play golf year round.

The will of the people will be heard in this matter. So far, the Obama administration has muffed this issue so badly that it makes the up-coming mid-term election look like the opporunity for a blood bath and for the likes of man-tan Boehner to become Speaker of the House ... a real tragedy if it occurs, since John Boehner of Ohio is among the least capable of politicians in Washington and so distant from being a towering intellect as to suggest precisely the opposite.

The Democratic governors are correct. Obama needs, in addition to sacking Rahm Emanuel forthwith, to back off this position before Labor Day. I believe that he should give Hillary Clinton the advantage of leading this retreat and see how she does. Clearly, if the Democrats take a bath in November, Hillary may be the option we want in 2012, if Howard Dean does not want it and can squelch the resistance in the press.

JB

5/25/10

Well, you say, change is change. It is self-defining and means simply that things are different from what they were. And so the popular view of "things that change" is more than slightly naive, even in the terms of popular thinking. Today is Tuesday, and yesterday was Monday. Is this change? Yes, but last week the same thing happened, so is it really change? Yes, because last week was mid-May and now we are already at the "end" of May, and to belabor the point a great deal has happened in the seven days we are comparing.

Well, what has happened? The American stock market has declined sufficiently that 2-3% of the wealth represented in market indices, like the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, has "evaporated." That is a lot of money value, billions! For those who came up short at the end of the seven days, change was easy to define as BAD!

What this little example tries to demonstrate is that change takes place at different levels of "granularity." In a family the day of a wedding or of a death is a "milestone day" wherein takes place a signal event for which all concerned must change their routines and behaviors. They are "changed" irrevocably. Lots of people die and lots get married, so the idea of this kind of change is not earth-shattering on a broad scale, but nevertheless, at the broad scale we acknowledge the inevitability of these "little local" changes as part of the relevant, even salient, reality.

And, vice versa, at the local, almost private, and in the privacy of our own thoughts we acknowledge that changes in the large scale often have scant effect upon our daily lives, but we know that perforce a large-scale change will eventually change our path in the world. The institution of Social Security in the 1930's had no effect immediately, but since we are a life-form that plans and calculates a variety of plausible futures, we were changed. We accommodated ourselves to the idea of Social Security and did things somewhat differently at our private and local levels.

Meanwhile, of course, the federal government geared up a system that, predicated on certain assumptions, principally the ratio of those working to those retired, trundled along quite nicely with small changes accumulating more or less "out of sight." Birth rates declined slowly, life expectancy rates increased slowly, industrial jobs gave way to office jobs for many or their children, and all these accumulated. Social Security is a classic example of individuals seeing the opportunity for change, resisting it politically, or not, and arriving at the present with a sense of angst or self-satisfaction.

David Brooks, columnist in the New York Times tackles the subject of change courageously today, describing two important "theories of change", to which we Americans are heir—the British and the French. Brooks quickly and courageously wrestles to the ground a whole epoch of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought. He takes necessary short-cuts through the thickets of history and philosophy, but arrives, I think, at a reasonable and instructive dichotomy, which practicing historians usually call the aspects of "continuity and change" in civilizations and cultures. You should read Brooks's account.

The problems we face today are very much the product of tidal forces set in motion by choices we made decades and even centuries ago. There were "savants" then who said if you do This there is a strong likelihood that That will happen eventually. If you immigrate to America nothing will be the same for you and your family again. If millions immigrate then the force of personal, private change becomes public and large, and America will never be the same.

But that is not where I want to leave it. Change, as Brooks writes, has its "British sentimental component," that is, the capacity (or lack of it) that humans have (or don't have) to conceive of and then endure change. Against this is the what I will provisionally call the "urge toward continuity." In the last election the candidate offered the hope for Change, political change, directional change, emotional change, taking sustenance from the reaction in the multitudes, noting the private, personal, local need for large-scale public change. It has not happened.

What you are seeing is called a paralysis of conscious behavior. It is analogous to thinking about every step you take while walking. You cannot contemplate each step, send a "voice-mail" directive to the appropriate muscles, and expect to get down the road. You will soon stumble and fall. You will, if you are lucky, get up and run to catch up to where you should be. That's where the candidate Obama is now. He is trying to avoid every ant and blade of grass in our path. He just cannot do it. He has infected his staff with this paralysis, and his staff, led by Rahm Emanuel loves it, because it means they can avoid doing something that might turn out bad. They are, of course, avoiding doing anything that might turn out good, even those things that we agree need to be changed!

JB

Post script: You might want to watch Sir Ken Robinson at TED for a very, very good point of view of this problem.

5/10/10

I am on one of Russ Feingold's distribution lists and get his periodic announcements about politics. He recently used the words in the title of this essay as an on-ramp to his region's current political loutishness. The words echoed in my brain this morning as I read James Carroll's "Jeremiads of spring" in Monday's Boston Globe.

Carroll takes the somewhat less traveled roads, definitely more scenic and less prosaic. His pondering of the up-coming graduation speeches and the tradition of American self-analysis, (to some "self-flagelation,") struck me as apt and perhaps a little self-indulgent. If Walt Whitman is, as Carroll states, one of the critics of American civilization and culture and Tony Judt is another, then what are the benefits of their analyses? Do people actually read them for advice on how to be an American, or do commencement speeches and social criticism actually fall on deaf ears?

I think that down where it really counts we are fundamentally deaf. Millions of people have never read Walt Whitman and know virtually nothing about him. Same for Tony Judt. Although the literate know both, are the literate actually swayed by them? I am not. I read Judt in the New York Review of Books recently. I did a term paper on Whitman back in high school. I am impressed with the fact that they saw what I saw and see, that Americans are a roiling mass of hungry homo sapiens, probably more roiling than the French or the Danes are these days, but clearly weighing self-interest against duties to the commonwealth and coming out for self almost every time.

There is a sense of this "smallness" in society, a feeling that come what may, the real things are the close things, that vast movements and aggregations are not as real, and in any case, intractable. Avarice is nothing new. The will to power is as old and human as all of history. The notion of commonwealth, on the other hand, is tentative and exploratory, and ultimately beyond that sure sense of trust that we do not have in our fellow man.

As college presidents and hired speakers come to campuses all across the land and put their best shine on the status quo. The graduating classes offer up their hopes to fit in and make the best of what we have bequeathed to them. Valedictories accept the challenge of an imperfect world, salutatories accept the differences among us and hope for courage and intelligence among our leaders, college presidents hope for more donations and less campus violence, and social critics, full of the distemper of failed expectations, acknowledge imperfection with a metric that says it does not have to be as bad as it is.

It is bad, but we thrive, we procreate, we invent marvelous things from thin air, we have our families, and we trust that families will deal with their members who "crash." But we know they don't.

JB

5/9/10

Klinkenborg is one of those rare writers with a knack for stumbling deliberately off the beaten path to take in the moment, the apple tree, the freshly painted fire hydrant, the pulse below the pulse. Today in a few hundred words Mr. Klinkenborg takes on nothing less than Los Angeles, a place in time and space so different from Binghamton or Richmond or Lexington or St. Jo as to be a probable category fault.

Klinkenborg, deliberately or not, uses the the word facade several times as if to say, and I think he means that he is groping for the truth rather than trying to doll it up, that Los Angeles seems to be not so much a series of Potemkin villages as a vast congeries of stage sets ... but then only in the sense that the set is not the reality.

He concentrates on the National Boulevard on-ramp to "the 10." I smiled. The Ten is I-10, but in L.A. all freeways either have homey names (Pasadena Freeway, Harbor Freeway, Golden State Freeway) or more commonly just the number, like "the 405." This suggests that these roads have a life of their own, a character different from others of their kind; they are not just sinews or arteries, but rather experiences ... especially "the 405" at 85 m.p.h. (how else to bear the volume of traffic we demand of her!)

But, Klinkenborg is no accidental writer. He is a poet and knows that the transitions are as important as the destinations, so the "hidden on-ramp" seems to him to be deliberately a "rhetorical flaw" in the narrative presentation, a piece rightfully left off the stage set because it doesn't fit, but in other places would fit.

What fits in L.A. is the illusion of neighborhood as if it were also "community." But, in a year or so, or less if you are Klinkenborg, you begin to notice that there are few neighborhoods in L.A. that are complete and self-sufficient for what they are, even the vast arrays of homes seem to be slightly incomplete and somehow artificial, not exactly what they seem, incomplete for their denizens, who may turn up in restored Culver City for a meal and movie or on the Santa Monica Mall or on the long stretch of traditional commerce in Belmont Shore in Long Beach, each place a venue for different behaviors and styles, sort of like one of those virtual worlds on the internet, simulations everywhere, carefully (or not) backed up to one another without much regard for the jarring dissonance between and among them.

I love L.A. and Klinkenborg got his finger on (or very close to) one of the aspects of this great city that it most difficult to describe.

JB

3/30/10

I have to admit that I have become numb to and increasingly aware that I am ineffective against the hot seething anger that is being enacted out there. My numbness is caused by conflicts within my conscience, my need to strike out against the McConnells and Boehners, Cantors, Becks, Malkins, and others whose strategy is to overturn the commonwealth's applecart. I have wanted in my deepest despair to fundamentally eliminate some of these really bad people, but I know that they have rights to be what they are. Then I think that who am I to say they are "bad" or "evil," just because they stand foursquare against everything I believe in? I try putting on their shoes and find that they actually hate me, and would not accord me the same rights as I am entertaining for them. The battle within lurches back and forth on this uneven ground.

The anger motivating TeaParty folk is different from the animus motivating the demogogues like Beck and Limbaugh. Limbaugh, at least, is making big money doing what he does. These demagogues are preying on the people with the real angers out there; the media hate barons are willing risk tipping the apple cart to take it over and run it themselves, selling apples only to selected people and letting the rest grow their own. They will deny the obvious racism in their rantings, but without it, they would not be touching the TeaParty folk, for it is racism at the core of the anger, and beneath that are two concepts that really bear some examination.

Frank Rich, in the New York Times Sunday wrote about the essential disconnect between the Health Care Reform legislation and the seething anger. He correctly points out that when you peel away the opportunist demogogues and their misrepresentations, lies, and prevarications you have naked racism, spoken and heard. I happen to think that Health Care itself is part of the mix, though.

Directly at stake in the culture wars our country has been going through since 1954 and "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" is a fundamental idea about humanity inherited from nineteenth century European (predominantly German) pseudo-science about race, mixed with real Darwinian evolution theory, and contaminated with the sort of Social Darwinism that pervaded this country in the Gilded Age (1885-1929) and has been a mainstay of racist explanation ever since, namely, that there are fitter people and less fit people, and that the less fit should be left to their own devices to survive ... or not. Fitness, of course, is measured by success in the local, regional, and national economies as well as by acceptance by the higher ups in these environments.

To me racism is at least half this pseudo-scientific idea that inheritance is key and that experience is not. It is just bad luck to be born Black or born in perpetual poverty in Mexico or Haiti or you-name-it-stan. The other half of the seething anger out there was addressed by Sam Harris the other day in a brief video interview.

Harris's understanding of human cognitive frailty is well stated here. He begins and ends with religion as the bogeymeister that convinces us that we "have" the answers to big questions, but his thesis applies to all world-views. It applies to all verities and theories clung to by human beings. And, of course, when cracks appear in the hypotheses, what do humans typically do? They cling all the more strongly to the "thought system" that provides those handy and comforting answers, whether the answers are at odds with facts or not. We have lots of factual data on this process, lots of wars and revolutions.

At some point, then, the cracks are so apparent and the worldview so decrepit that the faithful, the afficionados, the stalwart holders of these opinions are faced with the embarrassment of becoming ignorant (again), and they hate it. They hate being publicly shown to be wrong with a purple passion. They hate those who have proved their favorite ideas wrong or inadequate. They hate themselves in a way, because they know they will have to learn a whole new way of seeing the world, and they think they are not strong enough to learn. Many of them would rather die. We see this among the suicide bombers from other cultures.

Racism is a world view and it has been proved to be based on prejudice and emotion and not on fact. It is a way of explaining one's own successes and the failures of others. It does not explain one's own failures, so when a Great Recession strikes and 25 million people are out of work for a long, long time, these people are understandably angry about their situation and the thought processes that got them into it ... mostly trusting a system that is based on fallacious reasoning of the Reagan era. They invent bogeys and strawman enemies to combat, and when they run out of straw—when the last straw is passed from one willing hand to the next—they go blind with rage, knowing that finally in the violence of their primal tantrum they will be heard, noticed, and maybe in some way vindicated.

But, no! Definitely not! Vindication is out. Return to a Currier & Ives America or Father Knows Best or any such nostaglic scenario is not possible, even if it were desirable. Adjustment to ever changing realities is possible, painful or not. For many, though, the most realistic chance is that they will live out their lives with the crippling, humbling knowledge that they are fundamentally wrong and that the flood of human knowledge and understanding has passed them by. We are at one of the crisis points in the long process of human Progress.

JB

3/6/10

I was a Virginian for fifteen years. I grew up there and went to the University of Virgina and got my baccalaureate degree in Russian Studies there. I have relatives in Virginia still, and I keep close contact with the University as a proud alumnus. I contribute annually to the University, and in fact, partly because of alumni who contribute, the University of Virginia has attained and maintained superior status among universities, (currently ranked 2nd among public universities, but often tied with UC Berkeley for 1st), all this despite the dramatic funding cuts from Richmond.

These cuts are nothing new. During the Reagan years the percentage of the University's budget coming from the Commonwealth dropped into the low teens and hovered there for years ... never rising, but always being nibbled and then gobbled away as a perversely and ironically ignorant state population elected Republicans to keep house in the Old Dominion. But the percentage of state support for the University of Virginia has reached a new low this year, down to a mere seven percent of the total budget. It is all the more ridiculous then for the state's Attorney General to demand that all "public" universities in Virginia rescind their admission and conduct policies that extend protection to persons "without regard to their sexual preferences."

This is what you get when you elect ideological morons from the Right. The denizens of southern and southwestern Virginia are particularly responsible for this outrage. If the Board of Visitors at UVa actually complies with this bogus concept that only the state Assembly can identify classes of persons ... which is threadbare reasoning to begin with ... I will be visiting the Grounds Thomas Jefferson created and I will be quite vocal about removing the University from the ranks of public universities. Richmond telling Charlottesville how to conduct a university is like the guy who wipes down your car after a carwash telling you where you may drive.

JB

1/12/10

From a friend in the UK comes this magnificent demonstration of the power of individual people ... like you. Iron Mountain was founded on the principles that a military-industrial state supporting an elite (including the central finance sector) cannot survive without brain-washing its population. See what you can do ... at home ... at work ... wherever your voice can be heard.

JB

1/11/10

The epigram in the title of today's essay suggests that god manifests him/herself through the people ... as a whole. It is an interesting concept which often is turned around to suggest that deity is us. No matter really, the problem in all of this is us. And, the problems we have are quickly manifested in politics and culture generally. Today's subject is mental health and the decline of it in recent years.

When I read this article about mental disorders increasing in teenagers and young adults that was forwarded to me by a colleague in Boston, a couple things leapt into my mind: the irresilience of the human mind and the consequences for democracy where significant numbers of people are not completely "sane."

What I mean by irresilience is that given any number of people there will be a percentage who cannot accommodate themselves readily or easily to change, especially significant change like a Great Recession or rapidly evolving technostructures or revolutions in social mores. I do not mean that all people have significant irresilience, but I do mean that all people have some and some people have a lot and it shows on little studies as blips in the overall percentages. In other words, sometimes things change too fast for some people, and they become disoriented, anxiety ridden, and to one degree or another incompetent.

The consequences for democracy are pretty clear. The more people who are acting and behaving out of unhealthy mental states the less likely the country is to be making good decisions about the commonwealth and our need to pass along a stable society to our progeny. It raises the awful question of whether democracy is the right way to handle statecraft.

The answer to that question is that democracy finds a home where people demand it, and otherwise the forces of elites tend to fill in the vacuums created by distracted and disorient mental health. We are in such a situation now with finance elites basically calling the shots from their own self-perceived Olympus. The flaw in their reasoning, of course, is that any group of human beings is susceptible to bad mental health and bad decision-making.

To put this all in tangible terms, it appears that the White House is suffering from a hubristic elitism that accepts the notion that Finance has its hands on the toggles and switches, so ipso facto they must know what is going on. How the White House comes this conclusion is that their view of the general society is full of misgivings, particularly as the rant from the right suggests ever increasing "insanity." It gets to you after a while ... and the White House is no exception.

JB

12/14/09

The History Channel premiered a "revisionist" version of American history,"The People Speak," Sunday evening that has created a stir here and there. Here, I was moved by both the readings and the words, by—finally—having these words included into American history as a theme, not just as spicey-but-errant noise in the background of Manifest Destiny or What's Good for General Bullmoose. Howard Zinn, is preachy, and if you are not careful, or don't have a Ph.D. in History, you might easily miss the point that his is definitively not THE history of the American republic. He never says it is, but he says his history ... which is a social history of politics, rather than a political history of society ... has been glossed over and sometimes left completely out of the picture and narrative of American History.

The stir "there" has been very mixed. Tom Shales, (yes, I know you have never heard of him), at the Washington Post did not like the four hour show all that much. People further right or those inclined to be supporting the status quo, take your pick, have even nastier things to say. On the other hand, perhaps predictably, Mary McNamara, of the Los Angeles Times was strongly supportive of the History Channel effort.

I don't know when or even whether the two part documentary ... sorry, Shales, these are real words by real people who were really consequential in American history ... will air again, but I certainly recommend it. I recommend it with the proviso that it be understood as just the tiniest beginning of a popular social history of the United States. For those of you on school boards, I frankly do not see how you can continue to teach American History as if these things were not said and the circumstances of their being said did not happen!

Finally, after watching this show I watched a documentary on the narcotics problem along the Mexican border, within Mexico, and within the United States. The problem was distilled succinctly by a narrator whose name I missed. The problem is that drugs are the largest single business in the world. The United States is the biggest market. The market is billions and billions of dollars. "Apparently, Americans cannot face their democracy without drugs," he said!

Well ... sooner or later people are going to see a connection between our national obsession with drugs and the cognitive dissonance of our mythologies!

JB

11/30/09

An Open Letter to the People of Iran

Iran is the heir to Persia, and as such is a very, very old civilization. Every literate person in the world knows this. Modern Iran is not an old civilization, however, and even modern Iranians may not understand the implications of their country's relative youthfulness. The truth is that a huge percentage (43.2%) of the Iranian population is under thirty years of age. Of these males outnumber females, which is also more than just interesting.

These demographics play to some very interesting psychological, moral, and cultural issues. For instance, in the western democracies (where the population is more evenly spread across older age groups and sociology is a highly developed study not only by universities but by insurance companies) it has been discovered that the average male does not develop a full appreciation of personal risk until well into their twenties, often not until the age of thirty. Accordingly, young drivers are understood statistically to be much more dangerous drivers of automobiles, for instance, but also much more likely to be reckless in other ways.

One of the basic and universal stages of human development is the transition from dependency on one's parents or other familial elders to independence. This usually a period of conflicted emotions, false starts, and reassessments of one's personal social environment. Successful transition depends on youth acknowledging (however grudingly) the wisdom of elders and equally on the practice of wisdom by those elders ... not overlooking any member of youth.

One of the complications of this universal transition is the flaring of sexuality as the gonads mature and begin to pump surprising hormones into the bodies of young people who are simultaneously approaching full adult height, if not weight, and certainly not experience. Sexual awareness carries with it social and personal issues relating to passion and to economics, since it becomes almost universally understood in this transition period that babies happen when girls and boys engage in sex. It is one of life's biggest concerns, and yet it is in most cultures treated as if it were not a central issue, obscured by embarrassments of various kinds, dubious moral principles, over a background of half-truths, outright falsehoods, and perplexing taboos.

Sexual and most other kinds of youthful recklessness in the West and some Asian cultures is moderated by strong pressures brought to bear on young men and women by large and strong cohorts of more mature (that is, risk cognizant) older people, usually cohorts who hold the keys to certain kinds of life opportunities like education, jobs, and political interests.

In populations like Iran's (and many other countries) the demographics have been skewed toward youth for a very long time. Where large and strong older cohorts were not available to exert moderating pressures on youth, religion took up this responsibility. You can see this in the older practices and principles of the Roman Catholic Church that presided over medieval Europe, in certain Hindu traditions, and very clearly in Confucianism and Islam.

In many respects the ferment in Islamic societies is due to the fallout from political and economic injustices that rain down on a youth population demographic constrained by religious and moral principles that are at odds with modernism and especially modern communications. Islam cannot replace the stern and admonishing father figure when it is vividly obvious that that father figure is trapped by religious principles more appropriate to bygone non-technological centuries.

And yet ... youth in Islam know full well as their risk appreciation increases and their full social mentality matures that there needs to be something to hold down the passions and excesses that the rowdier of their cohort participate in and from which comes so much trouble and grief.

Perhaps the younger citizens of Iran already know that Grand Ayatollahs are prisoners of their own awareness of a disconnect between faith and fact, between the reasons for certain moral principles historically and the reasons now ... if any. Perhaps the young people of Iran know that their form of government is a last gasp of an ancien regime, but they do not know how to make a society behave the way they expect without the trappings of "revealed" authority.

Know this young Iran: nuclear weapons have been used already, so if you develop them you can be pretty sure they will be used by you. If you use them, the older people cultures of the planet will annihilate your country.

If your country acts as if it is unique and given by Destiny or Kismet to take its place among the nations of the earth, then know that it must grow up. You must grow up! You must figure out a way to survive to be older, to provide the necessary moderating influence on the passions of youth, know them, respecting them, but moderating them.

There are many of us in the outside world who believe you can do it. Know that we will support you and that mistakes will be made. Learn tolerance and forgiveness.

JB

11/12/09

The Illusions of Arrogance

I missed this excellent essay when it first came out in the Boston Globe. In some ways there is an irony to the geographical origin of the piece, since New England spawned the "city on the hill" and the Emersonian mythos of American rugged individualism. A look around the country, though, will reveal that the idea of American exceptionalism is deeply rooted everywhere, fed to our children in whopping doses in public (and private) schools, paraded by civic groups and veterans associations, paid mete adoration by politicians of every conceivable stripe, and ground into the fabric of society by marketeers through television, movies, and national sports associations. It is embarrassing!

But, as Neal Gabler clearly writes, it is a lot more than just embarrassing. It is dangerous for us and for the rest of the world. You just don't hear the Danes or the Dutch or the French, Norse, Portuguese, or almost any other nation of peoples strutting their national myths across the planet like we do, nor do you see them arrogantly declaring themselves the savior or the model for all to emulate. There is something sick in our polyglot society.

Some historians point out the fact that leaders of our country were afraid a new nation made up of peoples from all over the planet could not possibly survive because of the wide variances in cultures brought into the American "melting pot." Their anxieties may have seemed quite vivid in the great days of European immigration that brought fiercely contesting peoples into this country. Their solution, to raise the bar, to declare that America was an exception among nations, was to preclude the idea that old-country animosities could work to destroy the "united" states. In effect they said that until you began to mouth the platitudes of American exceptionalism you were not truly American. It was a stroke of genius, but also a fatal mistake.

It is clear by now, after Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and now Afghanistan that we are simply mortal, error-prone like all human beings, but in love with our toys and our myths to the exclusion of evidence and rationality. It has been said for decades that this will be our unraveling—our destruction. We will see if Obama has the courage to stand up to this huge malignant mythology and reverse our course in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been almost no preparation of our culture for the necessary change of attitude, so I guess we should be prepared for the worst.

JB

9/7/09

It is Labor Day 2009 and Labor is hurting. The lead story in the San Jose Mercury is about not wanting to celebrate 9.7% unemployment, especially with the prospects for recovery any time soon being so poor. Congress and the White House in their misguided attempts to be frugal about the T.A.R.P stimulus package (and believe me most people think that 700 billion dollars is not frugal!) have undercut the ability of the "natural" economy to recover quickly. You hear people talking about V-shaped and L-shaped recoveries. Obviously L-shaped portends a long haul, whereas V-shaped suggests a much briefer dip and then "business more or less as usual."

With these thoughts running around in our head this often misunderstood day, I was amazed to see James Carroll in the Boston Globe offering up a version of the situation that seems to blame economists. Actually he pretty much identifies them as witch-doctors.

What is going on here? Tested categories of economic analysis have all been applied. Depression. Recession. Business cycle. Soft landing. Money supply. Credit crisis. Catastrophic deficits. Statistics. Data. Globalization. Mumbo jumbo. Are we to be consoled that every society on earth is at the mercy of such disorder, or that the one reliable social law - impoverished groups and individuals always take the hardest hit - is holding true? After two years of expert predictions being shown up as wild guesses, and mathematical projections as stabs in the dark, a mask has been ripped from the face of the science of economics, exposing primitive superstition. The debunking of the academic study of the structure of wealth is equivalent to astronomy being shown up as nothing more than astrology after all. “I saw the best minds of my generation,'' to take off from Allen Ginsberg, destroyed by the smug assumption that they knew what the hell they were talking about.

But Carroll goes on in his Monday column to suggest an even more fundamental and more disturbing phenomenon. He edges up to

... the sneaking suspicion that beneath today's massive economic dislocation is some kind of species-changing shift in the way humans relate to work itself.

Carroll puts his case perfectly in this passage from his concluding paragraph

The nightmare of modernity, since Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, has been of an invasion of the home planet by creatures from some other world, but we have reversed that story. With our laptops and iPods, not to mention, say, our laser beams and drone bombers, we stand on the threshold of a world inhabited by aliens all right, but, as our home planet becomes something unrecognizable, the aliens are we ourselves.

Carroll is straightforwardly disconcerted by the acceleration of knowledge and of expertise (and one intuits that he is equally upset about the beneficiaries) in our modern era. To be fair, Carroll is worried about re-establishing some sort of golden period where the dignity of labor meant sweat, tears, toil, and sometime blood. It is an irrational idea, because it is formed from a very narrow and Olympian point of view. The truth is that everything that is happening now is not good, but that everything that happens now is either "inevitable," given the nature of our national and planetary cultures and economies, or a matter of the "free will continuity or change" of history. The bugger in this is "Change."

Change is for human beings both desired and feared. Rapid change upsets routines before they can adapt to the different circumstances. Rapid change reverberates throughout a culture calling into question verities and first principles, some of which, are then made out (like "primogeniture") to be obsolete and (like "racism") to be destructive of the human spirit. Very slow change, like filling the atmosphere with heat absorbing gases and causing global warming, is invisible to most human beings and the portents of global warming are lost on them, more than lost, these portents suggest changes that are altogether unpalatable ... and so are resisted with every synapse.

Modest change and the other kinds, rapid and glacial, hit populations across a wide range of acceptance, from rejection to eager adoption. James Carroll seems now to be a public intellectual who sees his world crumbling under the onslaught of epiphenomena caused by laptop computers and iPhones and Wii systems. He is floundering because somewhere in his daily ambit he stepped over an important lesson about Change. Change is inevitable, not constant; it is a condition of an entropic universe that suggests—nay, demands!—that human beings not settle in to comfortable ideas so well that they cannot get up and change, too.

Obviously, what the United States is experiencing now is Change, for some too rapid and for some too slow. We must take the initiative in Change and understand that those for whom Change is feared are real people, but that over time their psychology will adapt. For those for whom Change is too slow, they must be tutored in the realities of political reality. We pass laws that effect everyone simultaneously whether every last one of us are ready or not. Some people still refuse to fasten their car's seat belts when driving. We fine them now, but it is a fact that highway deaths per miles driven are way down. These doubting Thomases have a right to doubt, but they must understand the nature of collective (political) wisdom. It is now long since time for seat belts and for national health care reform!

JB