No, I’m not writing about the present state of the Irish economy. I’m also not writing about that wonderful soupy mixture I yearned for as a kid when Mom cooked fish on Friday. Today’s post treats several topics: the hijacking of the Republican Party by the Tea Party extremists; the Mideast peace talks; Labor Day; and bedbugs. Hence, it’s a stew.
Mr. Obama’s speech last night struck me as serious and cautious. He exhibited caution with respect to Iraq and caution with respect to the economy. Moreover, not by what he said so much as what he didn’t say, I received the distinct impression that he now realizes there is only so much a president can do and that sometimes you just have to let events play out.
Iraq is a sore point, to be sure. Mr. David Brooks in yesterday’s N.Y. Times declared nation building there a success. He considered the economic and political fronts, just as Mr. Obama did. Others are not so positive, including Mr. Obama. While Iraq this year might end up with the fastest growing economy in the world, growing from zero is a lot different than growing from an already high level. ABC News even thinks it’s significant that people can now go out in Baghdad and eat ice cream. I don’t know if that’s economic or political, but it is sophistic.
In contrast to Mr. George Carlin, I don’t intend for this post to be funny. I’m not very good at doing funny. While Mr. Carlin was adept at poking fun at many things and certainly used a more flowery vocabulary, the only thing I’ll do in his memory is to steal his title. I recently learned that titles can’t be copyrighted, so, authors out there, go for it. (My novel, Full Medical, for example, is often seen as some POD self-help non-fiction work. Unless you’re one of the villains, there’s not much about self-help in it. But I didn’t steal that title. Well, just a wee bit, in tribute to Frederik Pohl and his sci-fi classic Gateway.)
We visited the D.C. area this weekend. Usually a city trying to revert back to the swamp that it was, the humidity was low enough that the heat was tolerable. A good day for demonstrations, I thought. No, I didn’t go see Professor Mouth, Mr. Glen Beck, lead his mostly white crowd in their push to establish an American theocracy. I also didn’t mingle with the mostly black crowd in their nostalgia fix of celebrating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I thought that was going to be on the Mall too, but I couldn’t find it. Just kidding. I wasn’t looking for either one. But the drive from New Jersey gave me time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.
While the illegal drug war is like a pit bull that takes big, random bites out of American citizens and their wealth, there is a legal drug war going on that is more like a vicious little dachshund continuously nipping at those same heels. Drug companies, home grown or otherwise, are at war with the American consumer. It is an insidious war of greed, privilege, and exploitation, and the innocent victims in this war are legion.
To end the week, it is appropriate to follow-up on some of my recent posts.
First, with respect to California’s Prop 8, the judge has opened the door to gay marriage, starting August 18. He is giving time to the Prop 8 defenders to gather together arguments on how to deny rights to a group of people. Given his carefully constructed decision, they will need all the time they can get.
It’s hard to argue for giving rights to one class of citizens and not to others. Yet it seems we, as a society, always have this debate, probably because there’s always a new crop of fundamentalist bigots out there that want to impose their way of life on everyone else. The Pilgrims and Puritans brought this kind of bigotry with them to America. We celebrate it each Thanksgiving. I suppose they would be happy that the tradition continues.
The latest gnashing of Republicans teeth and their bashing of most Dems is directed at supporters of Mr. Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for those making $250,000 or more and leave them in place for those that make less. Other options are to leave them all in place for everyone (what the GOP and some Dems prefer) or to remove them for everyone (what a few GOP members and a few Dems prefer). Eliminating them for everyone will add $1800 to the average NJ family’s tax bill—this is the last estimate I’ve seen.
I’ll focus on only those agencies that deal with intelligence—not my intelligence or yours, as taxpayers, but intel: snippets of data that allow us to stomp on the “bad guys.” You can focus on any other part of the government, of course, and ask the same question. Here I’m just referring to the usual alphabet soup of acronyms: DHS, DEA, CIA, FBI, etc. In some sense, they are the most important ones when analyzing losses to our personal freedoms. They are inextricably involved with the future of our democracy. They also provide good examples of waste in government, especially if you add the cost of the military’s bureaucracy. And they are the most important to me as a writer.
You hear it on the news all the time: conservative Dems do this; Rockefeller Republicans do that; neocon Republicans twirl; liberal Dems swirl. It is a fact of political life in America that we basically have two parties. It is another fact that each party has a wide ideological spectrum and the labels Republicans and Democrats at best only indicate a general tendency.
The only way such a chaotic taxonomy can work is that every voter study the candidates, independent of their party, and determine where they stand on the issues, selecting the candidate that best overlaps with their own opinions and prejudices. Fat chance of that! Too many voters are yellow-dog Dems or rabid Republicans. Too many voters are one-issue voters. And too many voters choose on the basis of the candidate’s personality, mannerisms, race, or hair styles (Ms. Carly Fiorina’s comment about Ms. Barbara Boxer is an example of a candidate even encouraging this). In our media world of tweets on the internet and thirty-second ads on TV, there is a tendency to trivialize politics. Most politicians really don’t want voters to be informed—an informed voter is likely to know all the bad stuff about a candidate as well as the good stuff.
The release of the Afghan Papers this weekend—notably in the N.Y. Times today—brings to the fore once again the perpetual conflict between national security and personal morality. We don’t like to talk about this gray area even though most of us probably have opinions about particular cases, but I will try to touch upon some of the issues and hope for the best.
I’m not cheering. I’m wondering how long it will take BP to clean up the mess they made in the gulf. Two years? Five? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? A logarithmic scale seems appropriate here since the spill in the gulf is a multiplier of the Exxon Valdes disaster. BP is probably counting on the media losing interest (they already are—success isn’t newsworthy), the local people either moving away or quietly accepting what little money BP or the government hands out, and the majority of the rest of the American public turning back to their sports, stupid reality shows, and celebrity watching (they’re already salivating with the Mel Gibson scandal).
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