tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53523959706819960952024-02-02T09:54:29.166-08:00Casa CognitoSwellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.comBlogger321125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-72651175113246287132015-12-14T21:40:00.000-08:002015-12-14T21:40:28.767-08:00Big Bold Political Prediction<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Okay, so time for another bold and
extremely early political prediction regarding the Republican primary contest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(I enjoy making bold and extremely early political
predictions for two reasons: (1) I like to game out my understanding of things
and then let future events be the judge of how well I actually have a handle on
what is going on; (2) as professional political pundits learned a long time
ago, if my predictions are wrong then no one remembers, but if my predictions
are right then I can point to my early forecast and tell people I’m a genius.
Win/win!)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, here it is: Marco Rubio will be the
GOP nominee, but that won’t be obvious until we get to the actual Republican
convention. Follow below to see how I get there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My operating assumption is that Republican
insiders, the people who actually control the Republican party, will <u>never</u>
allow Donald Trump to be the GOP’s nominee. Were Trump to be the nominee then
those people would have effectively ceded control over the party to Trump and his
followers, and humans are <i>famous</i> for
never ceding control of an institution of which they are in charge; people will
almost always allow an organization to burn to the ground before they let
another group replace them as leaders of that organization.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">With this operating assumption in mind,
let’s look at how the GOP nomination actually gets awarded. Basically (and I am
using round numbers here for simplicity’s sake), the GOP casts 2400 delegate
votes at its convention, and the candidate who obtains at least 50% + 1 of
those votes (<i>i.e.</i>, a simple majority)
becomes the Republican presidential nominee. This means that a candidate needs
to lock up about 1200 votes (again, rounding) in order to secure the
nomination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Now of the 2400 total delegate votes cast
at the convention, 600 of those votes are of the type called “nonpledged.”
These are votes controlled by Republican insiders and party leaders, and during
the very first nominating round these votes can be cast for <i>anybody</i> those Republican insiders and
party leaders want. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The other 1800 votes come from “pledged”
delegates. Under current GOP rules (the rules change after nearly every
political convention), pledged votes are assigned based on a candidate’s performance
during the primary and caucus contests held prior to the convention. Once
assigned, the pledged delegates are <u>required</u> to vote for the candidate
to whom they are pledged, but only in the first nominating round. If, after the
first nominating round, no candidate has obtained a 50% + 1 vote majority, then
a second round of voting takes place and – at that point – all the delegates
essentially are “unpledged,” meaning they can vote for whomsoever they please.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What this means is that, to lock up the
nomination <i>prior to</i> the first
nominating round, a candidate needs to secure 1200 out of the 1800 pledged
delegates awarded during all the state contests. In other words, if the
candidate wins two-thirds of all the available pledged delegate votes, then he
(and on the Republican side it is definitely going to be a <i>he</i>) will secure the nomination regardless of what the party
leadership, with its 600 unpledged votes, wants to have happen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, the candidate I’m most thinking
of here is Donald Trump. I just don’t believe that <i>any</i> of the party leaders’ 600 unpledged votes are going to be cast
for Trump, for the reason I mentioned above: Republican party leaders do <u>not</u>
want Trump to be their presidential nominee, because that would mean the loss
of their own, personal power over the party apparatus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, what this means is that the <i>only</i> way Trump gets the nomination is if
he can manage to win two-thirds of the delegate votes awarded during the state
contests. Or, said another way, Trump can only be the Republican nominee if he
manages – prior to the convention – to pick up <i>twice as many delegate votes as <u>all</u> the other Republican
candidates <u>combined</u></i>. Now, I suppose Trump potentially could do just that,
but the sheer numbers in play make it seem highly unlikely to me that he actually
will. Judging from his favorable/unfavorable ratings in polls of Republican
voters, Trump just doesn’t have that broad a base of support.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nevertheless, I still fully expect him to do
very well in the state contests because he is such a very, very moderate candidate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Okay, no, I’m kidding. Trump actually is
some kind of deranged proto-fascist, but he polls well with moderate
Republicans and that is going to be key to securing delegate votes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Here’s the deal. The crazy, hard-right,
xenophobic Tea Party base of the GOP increasingly seems to be driving the
party’s agenda. In the last election, Tea Party candidate David Brat ousted No.
2 Congressional Republican Eric Cantor largely because he campaigned on
Cantor’s being “soft” on immigration. John Boehner just recently resigned his
position as Speaker of the House when the Tea Party’s “Freedom Caucus” – which,
let’s remember, only has about 40 members – threatened to forcibly oust him.
And the Republican debates (another one Tuesday night!) have been marked, as
usual, by candidates competing to see just how hard to the right they can run
to pick up that sweet, sweet, crazy Republican base vote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But to a very large degree, that sweet,
sweet, crazy Republican base does not allocate the majority of the delegates
during the primaries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You see, in the contests held prior to
March 15<sup>th</sup>, delegate votes are allotted <i>proportionally</i>, so they are going to get divided amongst several
candidates depending on how well each does in a particular contest. More
importantly, delegates are awarded both for how well a candidate does in a
state on an overall basis and <u>also</u> how well the delegate does <i>in each individual congressional district</i>.
And – here’s the key – each congressional district awards 3 delegates, no
matter the political constituency of that district.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What does this all mean? Well, it’s kind
of like the U.S. Senate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The U.S. Senate is a profoundly
undemocratic institution. Wyoming has a population of about 600,000, and it has
two senators. California has population of 38.8 <i>million</i>, and <i>it</i> has two
senators. The votes of 600,000 people in Wyoming carry the same weight, in the
Senate, as do the votes of <i>more than 60
times</i> that number of people in California. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(It all goes back to the founding of the
country, when small states, before they would agree to ratify the new constitution,
had to be assured that larger states could not run roughshod over them in the
new government. Interestingly, according to the Constitution itself,
representation in the Senate is the one provision that is <i>not</i> subject to a Constitutional Amendment. Of course, the lawyer in
me delights in pointing out that we could always amend the provision that says
that the clause concerning Senate representation is not subject to amendment,
and then <i>that </i>would allow us to amend
the clause concerning Senate representation.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, if the voters in a deep, deep red
district in, say, Texas, cast 150,000 votes for Mitt Romney in 2012, that
district will allocate 3 delegates to whoever wins that district’s votes in
next year’s Republican primary. And if the voters in a deep, deep blue district
in, say, Vermont, cast only 2,000 votes for Mitt Romney in 2012, that district
will <i>also</i> allocate 3 delegates to
whoever wins that district’s votes next year in the Republican primary. In
other words, for purposes of allocating Republican delegate votes, Republicans
in moderate or liberal “blue” states have outsized voting power in the
Republican primary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This almost certainly was by design, by
the way. For decades, it has been the received political wisdom on the right
that the way to win the presidency is to (i) run hard to the right during the
primaries to win the Republican nomination, and then (ii) run hard back to the
center during the general election to win the presidency itself. (You may
remember the Romney campaign, last time around, describing this as the “etch-a-sketch”
strategy; they planned to simply change all their previously espoused positions
when it came to the general campaign, assuming that everybody would simply
forget what Romney had promised Republicans during the primary.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By giving Republican voters who live in
moderate districts the same delegate count as those who live in hard-core,
deep-crazy conservative districts, the GOP almost certainly was hoping to tamp
down on their own base so as to secure the nomination of a more moderate
candidate who might have a chance to actually win the general election.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Okay, but how does this play out for 2016’s
Republican candidates?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, I’m going to go ahead and just
dismiss most of them. I mean, Perry, Walker, and Jindal already have withdrawn
from the race, so they’re out. As for Bush,
Graham, Christie, Carson, Paul, Kasich, Fiorino, Gilmore, Santorum, Huckabee, and
Pataki, no one paying attention thinks that these candidates any longer have much
of a shot at winning either, even though – for some reason – they keep insisting
on showing up for the debates. No, I’m going to go with the received wisdom (at
this point, anyway) and assume that the real nominating contest is between
Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then I’m going to get rid of Ted Cruz.
Cruz is one of the most <i>loathed</i> Senators
to ever stalk that chamber’s corridors, and that loathing comes from members of
his own party. They hate, hate, <i>hate</i>
Ted Cruz. Moreover, I have never really believed that Ted Cruz even <i>wants</i> to be president. He has gone out
of his way in his short time on the Hill to alienate anybody and everybody in
the Republican leadership who might be a useful ally, all in an effort to suck
up to the most reactionary members of the GOP electorate – the ones who make a
lot of noise but have very little formal power. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No, I think Ted Cruz is actually running
to be King of the Tea Partiers. Being the leader of the crazy caucus will yield
Cruz a great deal of <i>in</i>formal power
within his party, it will ensure – barring some drastic demographic changes to
the Texas electorate – his continued reelection to the Senate in perpetuity,
and it will keep him wired into the grifting opportunities by which Republican political
leaders/strategists fleece their base voters. (This fleecing has been going on
since at least the 1960’s, when Richard Viguerie realized that voting lists
could be harnessed to drive direct mail marketing/fundraising campaigns. The specific
form of fleecing may have changed over the years – direct mail solicitations largely
having been replaced by appeals made over talk radio, email, <i>etc.</i> – but the grift remains the same. <i>See, e.g.</i>, Huckabee using his donor list
to make money hawking diabetes “cures” based on biblical passages.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But even if Ted Cruz <i>is</i> seriously running for president, casting himself as the
arch-conservative of arch-conservatives is no way to win the nomination. Cruz
is likely to do well in Iowa – a state where the Republican party famously
votes strongly for evangelical, born-again, Christianist Republicans and a
state in which Cruz has invested the bulk of his energy and money – but he
simply is not going to be able to rack up very many delegate votes in any district
other than the most hard-core conservative ones. Cruz is going to emerge from
next year’s election with very high name recognition and great favorabilities
with the Republican evangelicals/Tea Partiers, but he is not going to emerge as
the GOP presidential nominee (like I said, it’s a grift).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, that leaves us with Trump and Rubio. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Surprisingly, and despite his deeply
pronounced authoritarianism, Trump does pretty well with moderate Republican
voters. I recently saw a poll conducted by a couple of political scientists,
and they broke down the Republican electorate into three categories: (i)
moderate Republicans, defined as being to the left of Republican
congressmen/senators, (ii) establishment Republicans, defined as being pretty
well in line with Republican congressmen/senators, and (iii) conservative Republicans,
defined as being to the right of Republican congressmen/senators. Trump had the
support of 33-36% of the voters in each of these three camps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, sitting as he is at the top of the polls,
and being fairly well-liked across the entire spectrum of the Republican
electorate, Trump looks poised to do very, very well in next year’s primary
contests. It seems likely he will do better than any other Republican candidate
out there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But the party leadership doesn’t <i>want</i> him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Now think about this. If no one in the
party leadership is willing to cast a delegate vote for Donald Trump, the man
needs to win 1200 of the 1800 pledged delegate votes that are up for grabs prior
to the Republican convention. But if the party leadership is willing to rally
behind Marco Rubio, then Rubio only needs to win <i>600</i> of those votes. He can pick up the other 600 from the
Republican leadership and insiders, who will cast their unpledged votes at the
convention itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Rubio’s path to the nomination, thus,
seems a heck if a lot easier than The Donald’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Moreover, I think Rubio’s campaign has
figured this out. Rubio has been spending some ad monies in Iowa and New
Hampshire, but has also been spending a lot of <i>time</i> in other, later voting states. This behavior has puzzled some professional
campaign watchers. After all, Iowa and New Hampshire voters are used to getting
their asses kissed every four years by high-powered politicians running for
president. In fact, they <i>demand</i> it.
Traditionally, if a candidate does not appear in these states to personally
kiss ass, then that candidate will not win those states’ contests. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And, finally, for <i>decades</i> no one has won the GOP nomination without <i>also</i> winning at least one of these two
first-in-the-nation states.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what is Rubio doing?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, to be sure he’s playing what looks
on the surface to be a dangerous game. Do you remember Rudy Giuliani’s campaign
eight years ago? He was a national poll leader prior to any actual votes being
cast, but he decided to sit out Iowa and New Hampshire and wait for later
elections in which, presumably, he’d do better. However, by the time those later
elections rolled around the media buzz was all about green room favorite John
McCain (who stomped all over everybody to win New Hampshire), and Giuliani
already had been relegated to the “also ran” category. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And that is the <i>real</i> reason doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire has been so
important in the past: not for the actual delegates a candidate racks up in
those early states, but for the delegates the candidate can rack up in later states
based on the perception that now – having won Iowa and/or New Hampshire - the candidate
is “a winner.” For example, in 2012 Iowa declared Mitt Romney the winner, but also
that Rick Santorum had come in a surprisingly close second. This gave a boost
to both Romney and Santorum’s campaigns – a boost that Santorum, certainly,
desperately needed to remain viable. Weeks later, Iowa would change its mind
and declare that, no, actually, <i>Santorum</i>
had won the caucuses and <i>Romney</i> had
come in a close second, but this revision didn’t really matter; what was more
important was that Romney had been <i>declared</i>
the winner, and he went on to win a bunch of later states and, eventually, the
nomination itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(In fact, Santorum didn’t turn out to be the
actual winner either. Of the 28 delegates that Iowa awarded in 2012, <i>twenty-two</i> went to Ron Paul, and <i>zero </i>went to Santorum. That is because,
four years ago, the actual delegates were not awarded based on the results of
the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, but on the basis of <i>later</i> Iowa county and state Republican conventions; the
first-in-the-nation caucuses were really nothing more than a non-binding
popularity contest. However, this situation no longer obtains; my understanding
of the new GOP rules is that there no longer are any non-binding contests.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But Rubio isn’t a good fit for either Iowa
or New Hampshire. He doesn’t get the evangelical blood pumping in Iowa the way
that Ted Cruz does, and the Floridian faces stiff competition from Trump,
Christie, and even Bush in New England’s New Hampshire. I think Rubio is making
only token appearances in these two states because, when he loses both of them,
his campaign can argue that he wasn’t really trying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, in previous election years this
might have doomed his nomination chances, but Rubio is gambling that he will have
the resources to keep his campaign alive going into what he hopes remains a
very fractured primary season. Prior to March 15<sup>th</sup>, almost all the
state-wide contests allocate delegates proportionally, and a lot of those
states are not deep, deep red states. Although Trump’s support amongst moderate
GOP voters is fairly good, he does still have some very high unfavorability
ratings with voters who haven’t drunk the Trump Kool-Aid. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On the other hand, Rubio has been deliberately
marketing himself as a moderate Republican too, and to be sure he doesn’t come
across nearly as snarling as does Cruz (but then, really, who could?). Indeed,
Rubio’s greatest perceived weakness with the crazy GOP base is his apostasy a
few years back in pushing for immigration reform. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(Fresh off of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012,
the Republican party engaged in an “autopsy” of its campaign and decided –
among other things – that it had to do a better job of reaching Latino voters.
Silly, silly Marco took the party at its word, and got right to work trying to
come up with a bipartisan immigration fix. This completely alienated the crazy
nativist base of the Republican party, and Marco has been paying a price for
his attempt to bring Latino voters into the GOP fold ever since.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">However, Rubio’s aborted attempt a few
years ago to broaden the Republican party’s appeal to non-white voters may very
well work to his advantage in the actual apportionment of delegate votes for
2016. With the other GOP candidates essentially out of the running (for reasons
of voter perception, if nothing else) all Rubio needs to do is present himself
as a moderate alternative to Donald Trump and try to rack up 600 or so
delegates over the course of the next 5 months. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, finally, here is my specific
prediction . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We get to the Republican convention on
July 18<sup>th</sup> with no declared winner. Trump will have the most pledged
delegates of any candidate, maybe around 800 - 900 or so, or about <i>half</i> the delegates then available. The
other half will be split up amongst various other candidates, with Rubio
sitting at second place with 600+ votes. Political pundits will be slavering
over the fact that we are going to have a “brokered convention,” and that will
drive up TeeVee viewership for the convention itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">However, the Republican party really,
really does not want to have a “for real” brokered convention; they don’t want
the TeeVee cameras to reveal to the American public a fractured party, riven
with factions, trading votes back and forth and getting into rule disputes.
(The Dems had one such convention back in 1972; George McGovern didn’t get the
nomination until about 3:00 AM. When he gave his acceptance speech, America
already was asleep. This is one, but only one, of the many reasons no one can
recall a “President McGovern.”) Accordingly, the Republicans are going to want
to have settled on a nominee by the end of the <u>first</u> round of voting, when
things can still be kept under some kind of control, before everything goes
“unpledged” and chaos takes over. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Which means the leadership will rally
‘round Rubio, and he will get as many of the unpledged delegate votes at the
convention as necessary in order to put him over the top and secure the
nomination in the first round of voting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Which will be just delightful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Trump will almost certainly be apoplectic
at losing, as will the people who voted for him. <i>How can it be</i>, they will ask, <i>that
<u>our guy</u> won all the primary contests, and the Republican party just gave
the nomination away to someone else?</i> Remember, the political thinking this
year is that Republican base voters are <u>pissed</u> that they keep voting
Republicans into office and then those Republicans don’t do what they promised
to do. They haven’t abolished Obamacare, they haven’t outlawed gay marriage,
they haven’t criminalized abortion, they haven’t defunded Planned Parenthood,
they haven’t declared open season on Mexicans, <i>etc., etc., etc.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, Republican Senators and
Congressmen simply don’t have the power to do any of these things, but
Americans are notorious for not understanding or even caring about how their
government actually works. Hell, Americans tend to think that the president is
“King of America,” and can basically order by fiat whatever he wants done. This
is why more Americans vote during presidential elections than in off-year
elections: they don’t think elections really mean anything unless the
presidency is on the line.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But if the average American is clueless
about their own government, how well do you think they understand the byzantine
intricacies of their political parties’ nominating contests?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, absolutely none of this matters
to most voters. Most voters are children: <i>they
want what they want and they want it now and they are going to throw a temper
tantrum unless they get it.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So, I stand by the prediction I made way
back when Trump announced his candidacy. The leadership will never allow him to
be the nominee, Republican voters who vote for Trump (and these voters do seem
to really, <i>really</i> like him) will
interpret the GOP’s denial of the nomination to Trump as a betrayal, and
whoever the Democrats nominate (Hi, Hillary!) will basically waltz into the
White House.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">P.S.
I should acknowledge that I have been known to be very wrong in some
prior political predictions. For example, before Trump entered the race I
thought Scott Walker was the candidate most likely to be the Republican
nominee. Of course, Scott Walker ended up being the first guy to drop out of
the race. When I get things wrong – and I often do – I get them very, very
wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-79527822284883026022012-11-28T13:39:00.000-08:002012-11-28T13:39:44.655-08:00With Respect to Rationality<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> By and large, humans are not good at
thinking rationally, but, really, who can blame us? We have not had much
practice at it. According to the accepted wisdom of anthropologists and
paleontologists, by no later than 12,000 B.C.E. – approximately 14 millennia
ago – humans already had spread to and settled in every continent on the planet
except Antarctica. Yet we only started to make <i>rational</i> sense of our existence a few hundred years ago. Prior to
the mid-seventeenth century, nearly all human understanding of ourselves and
our world arose out of a mythic, poetic, narrative sense – not a rational one.
Of course, that is because “rationality” – properly understood – is not a
concept easily embraced by humans. We are drawn to certainty and to firm, fixed
answers, but for an idea to be <i>rational </i>it
must be capable of being proved false. To embrace rationality means to embrace
uncertainty, rationality’s essence.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This injunction runs directly
counter to the goal of nearly every person who seeks to understand anything.
When a person asks, “Why did such-and-such happen?” or “How does such-and-such
work?” or, more generally, “What is the <i>right
</i>thing to do?” that person is unlikely to be persuaded by a response that
begins, “Well, to the best of our understanding . . . .” As a general rule,
people prefer conviction and certainty over querulous equivocation; in fact,
people prefer it so much that often they will embrace terrible policies and
follow awful leaders so long as those leaders speak forcefully enough in
support of whatever rotten ideas they happen to be pushing. As Bill Clinton
once famously observed, “Americans prefer strong and wrong over weak and
right.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> It is to the human race’s great credit that we
are slowly learning to give up our natural desire for certainty when it
conflicts with our desire to better understand the world around us – an understanding
that can only be achieved through embracing the ever shifting, uncertain
terrain of rational thought. The great philosopher of science Karl Popper
alluded to this idea in his writings about the need for what he termed
“empirical falsification.” Popper’s writings suggest that no idea, concept, or
assertion qualifies as <i>rational</i> unless
it has the potential to be proved false. If the idea, concept, or assertion is
incapable of being proved false, then it is not rational but is instead simply
an unverifiable belief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Consider the European discovery of <i>Cygnus atratus</i>, the black swan. For millennia,
every swan ever seen by any European had been white. Accordingly, Europeans
rationally believed that “all swans are white.” The supposed proof of this assertion
lay in the fact that every time a new swan was seen – sure enough! – it, too,
was white. So it came as quite a shock to Europeans when they landed in
Australia and beheld a black swan for the first time. Nevertheless, what made
the Europeans’ idea “all swans are white” a rational concept was not its correctness
or incorrectness, but the possibility (later realized) that it might be proved wrong.
Sighting after sighting after sighting of white swans, for years and for decades
and for centuries, certainly suggested that all swans are white. But it took
only a single example of one black swan to falsify that suggestion. Having been
proven false, the idea then could be revised and refined until it more closely
approximated what now appears to be the case: <i>most</i> swans are white. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Unfortunately, it is difficult to
internalize the concept that an idea must be capable of falsification in order
to be rational, and this difficulty has led to some catastrophic consequences.
For example, on June 6, 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a
press conference at NATO headquarters. At the time, the Bush Administration was
arguing that going to war against Iraq was a necessary response to the supposed
threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
However, that argument was undermined by the Bush Administration’s inability to
present any actual evidence that Hussein did, in fact, possess such weapons.
When a reporter asked Rumsfeld upon what basis the Bush White House was making
this claim, Rumsfeld replied, “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of
absence. . . . Simply because you do not have
evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it
doesn't exist.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> According to reporters Michael
Isikoff and David Corn, this was not merely an off the cuff remark uttered by
Rumsfeld in the middle of a press conference. In their 2006 New York Times
bestseller, <i>Hubris: The Inside Story of
Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,</i> Isikoff and Corn reveal
that Rumsfeld’s assertion about the absence of evidence was actually an
argument routinely made by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, who had
been charged with making the case internally for going to war with Iraq, and
whom General Tommy Franks – the man who led both the 2001 Afghanistan invasion
and the Iraq War – once called, “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> According to Isikoff and Corn, Feith
argued that if Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction – as the Bush
Administration believed – then it only made sense that Hussein would hide those
weapons. Accordingly, the failure of U.S. intelligence and UN inspectors to
find any actual evidence that Hussein possessed WMD was perfectly consistent
with the idea that Hussein <i>did </i>possess
WMD. As a result, Feith argued, the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein was a
dangerous threat could in itself be considered evidence that Hussein was a
dangerous threat. Relying upon such arguments, George W. Bush invaded Iraq,
tens of thousands of U.S. troops were wounded or killed, and hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis – men, women, children, and infants – died horribly. Of course, no
WMD were ever found.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Even if one puts aside the dubious
nature of Bush’s good faith in invading Iraq and simply accepts that he and his
advisors honestly believed the rationale they were mouthing to one another, one
still is struck by how completely irrational these people were when they
committed the United States and Iraq to war and terrible bloodshed. They
posited that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction, then claimed support for this assertion by
pointing to the fact there was no evidence Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction. Simply stated, they made a case in favor of war that could not, under
any circumstances, be proved false without actually going to war – which was the
entire point to begin with. It is difficult to imagine an argument more
irrational, or one with more tragic consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Our understanding of the world is and
can only be a mere model of the real thing. Our ideas exist only within the
confines of our skulls, and it is something of a miracle that within such a
small space – only a few hundred cubic centimeters – we are capable of
representing the Universe. Unfortunately, we often forget that the
representation we create for ourselves is not the reality, and that the map we
draw in our heads is not the territory. Every map, no matter how finely drawn,
is only an approximation of what it represents; some information is always lost
when the map is created, some terrain is never represented entirely correctly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> To have the surest guide, we must be
willing always to embrace the idea that the map we have drawn might be wrong and
might need to be revised. Of course, that also means embracing the idea that we
sometimes will get a little lost, and that at times we may even have to reverse
course, but we can accept such setbacks if we also recognize that changing our
map when necessary is the only way by which we can progress, stumblingly and
haphazardly, to the Truth. If we give in to our natural impulse to sacrifice
doubt for certainty, to give up rationality for belief, then we will end up drawing
our map so that that its errors cannot be repaired; if that happens, then
eventually we will wander where “there be dragons” and, ultimately, we will
perish.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-50169517434258092742012-08-01T17:38:00.000-07:002012-08-01T17:38:44.658-07:00Confessions of an Aspiring Buddhist<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I am an idiot. I think it is important to get that statement right out there, from the beginning, so that anybody reading what comes next understands how amazingly dumb I really am.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I started reading up on Buddhism for the same reason I tended to do anything when I was younger – for a girl. Well, okay . . . for a woman. I was desperately in love (unrequitedly) with a woman for whom Buddhism had become very, very important, and I decided to learn about Buddhism so that I could understand better what she was thinking about.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And it was an easy sell for me. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated with the idea of <i>consciousness</i>. What does it mean to be self-aware? What does it mean to be sentient? Can we create artificial intelligences and, if we do so, will we recognize them when they speak to us? What does it mean to be <i>human</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">These are all heady questions, and yet the same basic ones we all have been asking for millennia. We dress them up with code words like “epistemology,” “ontology,” and “consciousness,” and we give out degrees for stringing the correct words together in the correct way, but really they are the same questions that any reflective person asks as a child and for which we have yet to find a completely satisfactory answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">In Buddhism I discovered an unbroken tradition – stretching back 2,500 years – devoted to thinking about these very things. I was hooked! I have spent more than a decade since studying and reading Buddhist teachings, and I am constantly amazed at the insights these teachings have about the nature of consciousness, reality, and perception. I cannot think of a sutra that has not made me sit back and think, <i>Whoa . . . . <u>that’s</u> a new way of thinking about it.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The thing is, I’m not a Buddhist myself. One of my standard lines, whenever somebody is so gauche as to ask me about my religion, is to tell them that I am an “aspiring Buddhist.” It is kind of a funny line, if you think about it, because in itself it indicates that the speaker recognizes the value of Buddhism, but also acknowledges that the speaker doesn’t quite think he is worthy of claiming the title. It is like saying one is a “lapsed Catholic,” but in reverse.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Now, here’s the thing . . . it is impossible to study Buddhism strictly for the reasons I did. (And I’m not talking, now, about the girl.) Yes, Buddhism does have an unbroken tradition stretching back for millennia questioning the nature of consciousness. But that isn’t Buddhism’s main concern. It is impossible to read and study Buddhism without being powerfully affected by what it has to say about <i>compassion</i>. Compassion is the center of Buddhist teaching, and it is the core of everything the religion/philosophy is about. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I began by explaining that I am an idiot, but even I am not so idiotic as to fail to take away at least <i>something</i> from Buddhism about the compassion we owe each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">As I’ve written about elsewhere, I am a Certified Nursing Assistant. I wasn’t always one. I went to law school and spent a dozen or so years working as an intellectual property trial attorney. I mention this only because I want to provide a little background for what comes next.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">It turns out that I am very good at my current job. I am as surprised by that as pretty much anybody who knew me before would be. I think that people who knew me professionally, as an attorney, would tell you that I am an ass. I am the kind of guy who has no patience for fools. I am the kind of guy to let you know, immediately, if you are stupid. I am a fairly smart guy, and the people whom I tend to think are stupid are legion.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">At least, that’s who I <i>used</i> to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Or, maybe, who I still am – at least a facet of me. When my CNA classes were up and I was sitting through my last evaluation with the teachers who are responsible for graduating us and ensuring that we don’t, you know, <i>kill</i> anybody on our watch, my teacher laughed and smiled and asked me, “<i>Why</i> are you doing this?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">There is a lot in that question. On one level, the question asks why I am doing this when I could be making a whole lot of money doing something else. That is the aspect of the question that really bugs me, because it bugs me that – implicitly – it suggests that making money is the point of our existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">There is also the suggestion that I am smarter than this job. In a way, that is true. One doesn’t have to be particularly smart to do what I do now, not to learn the actual physical skills, at least. One can learn to change briefs and hold a patient, one can learn to handle a urinal, one can learn to feed people . . . none of this requires a great deal of book learnin’.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">In the end, I answered my teacher by telling her, simply, “Buddhism.” I explained that I feel the need to exercise my compassion muscles – I think I am atrophied there. I feel the need to work on <i>caring</i>. I already know that I can comprehend what patients are going through, but I need to be viscerally involved in that. I want, more than anything, to <i>help</i>, and I am not sure that I am qualified to do that yet.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">At least, that is what I thought a few months ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The local hospital hired me before my classes had even ended. I have been working there for about four months now, weekend nights. It has taken a while, but I have developed my own pattern of patient care. I can look at the clock and know what it is I should be doing. I usually have anywhere from 8 to 12 patients, and I am responsible for making sure they are okay.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Sort of.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">There are always at least two actual, honest-to-God nurses on shift with me, and – really – <i>they</i> are the ones responsible for making sure the patients are okay. Me? I’m just the guy who makes sure the patients aren’t dirty, that they aren’t in pain, and that they aren’t distressed. I’m the guy who answers when the patients ring the bell and need assistance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">My favorite story? About a month or so ago there was a woman about my age, in the hospital for chest pain. Her teenaged daughter was staying in the room with her. I had just finished the 4:00 am vital sign check when the patient sat up in bed and started vomiting.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Now . . . this was not a big deal. As far as hospital emergencies go, this was nothing. But it freaked the girl out.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I grabbed a towel and caught the vomitus in it. The daughter jumped up and started squeeking: <i>Omigod, Omigod what’ll we do?</i> and I told her, <i>Listen to me. I need you to go outside and around the corner. You’ll see some blue bags hanging on the wall. Grab one and bring it to me.</i> And the daughter said, <i>Blue bags. I got it.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Again . . . it wasn’t a big deal. It really wasn’t anything. What it was, if anything, was being in the right place and being confident, and giving the person who was freaking out something to do. After the patient had finished throwing up and I had washed her face, I told her and her daughter that I would let her nurse know what had happened and I opened the door.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Thank God you were here,” said the daughter.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“No Ma’am,” I told her, “this wasn’t anything. I’ll make sure your nurse knows to look in on you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Now, the thing is . . . that made my week. It was a Nothingburger, but it was important to <i>those people</i>. It occurred to me to think about how many other people have a job where – when they’re doing it – somebody says to them: <i>Thank God you were here</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I’m pretty sure <u>nobody</u> else has a job like that. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Man, I’m lucky.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I mentioned before that I am good at my job. That wasn’t a boast, and it wasn’t a brag, it is just a statement that needs to be made in order to get to the next point. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I am good at my job. When I work the night shift, patients call the nurses’ station and ask for me by name. I got my 90-day evaluation a month ago, and the nurses themselves wrote how they were always happy to find out if I was on duty.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And I like my job. I don’t think I’ve ever had a patient I disliked, and I enjoy taking care of my patients. I like exercising those compassion muscles.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Here’s the thing: I’m still an ass.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" /> </span> <div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Back in February, I moved in with my grandmother. It was winter, and I was tired of waking up at 5:30 in order to make my 8:00 am class (I need a <i>lot</i> of coffee in the morning). My grandmother lives (lived) alone, and less than two miles from both the community college and the hospital. My family suggested that I stay with her, and – incidentally – keep an eye on her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The experience has been . . . trying.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Please understand that I love my grandmother very much. My mother had me and my sister when she was still quite young, and my grandparents helped raise the both of us. My grandmother taught me to read – I can still remember sitting on her lap and parsing out Dick And Jane books – and that is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. My grandfather put me to work in his bookstore when I was only ten years old, and it is to him I still credit a lot of my understanding of things.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But Ammy is . . . problematic. She is in her eighties, and as she has gotten older she has stopped caring about other people’s perceptions of her. Unfortunately, and because she grew up in North Carolina back in the 30’s, this means that I am constantly fielding mild to overtly racist comments. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I am not the kind of guy to excuse racists because they are old. <i>What?</i> I want to ask old racists, <i>have you not been paying attention? Where the f*ck are you from, anyway?</i> But it’s my <u>grandmother</u>. What can I say?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The thing is . . . that is just one example, one egregious example, of how my grandmother now behaves, and it isn’t even the egregious example that got me to try and work this out by writing about it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(I wish it were, because then I’d at least be standing up and striking a blow for, I dunno, racial equality or something. As it is, I’m just mad about a personal insult and am trying to make a larger point about it.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">On Monday morning I came home from a very good session at the hospital. I had been able to help a lot of patients, and a number of them had told me how happy they were to have met me. I was in a good mood.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And then I started making breakfast, and my grandmother woke up. My grandmother is the opposite of my introverted self; I can’t stand to talk to people, she can’t stand not to talk to people. But I was in a good mood and I ended up talking with her anyway. I was half-way through an argument about the death penalty when she cut me off mid-sentence.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Could you turn the TeeVee on to Channel 12,” she asked, “and could you turn the volume back on?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I was astonished. I had thought that she and I had actually been engaged in a conversation. But it turned out that she had just been watching me flap my gums and was only waiting until 8:00 am rolled around to watch her TeeVee. I think my jaw was hanging open, because she seemed to notice something was wrong and told me, kindly:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“You can keep talking, if you like.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">What the f*ck?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> I can keep talking, <i>if I like</i>? It won’t <i>bother you?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Oh, I was furious. I turned the TeeVee to Channel 12, I turned the volume back up, and I went outside to fume. I mostly fumed about the fact that I was pretty sure my grandmother didn’t even know how rude she had just been, and wouldn’t understand if I explained it to her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And, then, it occurred to me to wonder why <i>I</i> was behaving this way. I had just spent the weekend working at the hospital with dozens of patients just as self-centered as my grandmother, and I had felt nothing but love for them, whereas I felt nothing but contempt for my own grandmother’s narcissism. What was the difference?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The difference, I decided, was that when I came home and talked to my grandmother, I was engaging her as an equal. This is kind of a big revelation for me. I had never thought about this before, but the truth is that there is a kind of power dynamic that goes on when you take care of somebody else. It seems obvious now, but even our language – mercy is <i>bestowed</i>, compassion <i>drips down</i> – is based on a power dynamic. Being compassionate is often about <i>choosing</i> to be compassionate, and the fact one can make that choice means that one has the power to make the choice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I don’t know what to do with this revelation. I kind of think that my life will be better if I simply stop thinking of my grandmother as an equal. Perhaps both our lives would be better if I simply started thinking of her as another patient.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And yet, how condescending is that? Shouldn’t it be possible to be both compassionate and egalitarian?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Man . . . sometimes this job bugs me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-58498511457860824862012-07-10T10:58:00.000-07:002012-07-10T10:58:57.375-07:00More Free Advice for the DemocratsMitt Romney's refusal to disclose his tax returns has gotten some media attention lately, but I don't see that this attack has successfully migrated out of the pundit zone and into the heads of most average American voters. I think a lot of this has to do with the way Obama and the Dems have pushed the story so far: "Every other presidential candidate in the modern age has released more than two years of tax returns," and "If there's nothing to hide than there's nothing to fear," and <i>etc.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
So far, Romney and his surrogates have responded to the demand for the release of additional tax returns by simply lying about precedent. For example, Romney claims that John Kerry only made two years of tax returns public before he ran for president, a claim that <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/mitt-romney-doesnt-need-to-release-all-of-his-income-taxes-mccain-says/2012/04/15/gIQAOojVJT_blog.html">John McCain repeated a few months ago</a> on <i>Face the Nation. </i>In fact, by the time he ran for president <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/04/17/466341/romney-lies-kerry-tax-returns/">John Kerry had actually released about <u>20 years</u> worth of tax returns</a> -- not the two that Romney and McCain claim.<br />
<br />
The fact that McCain has been shilling for Romney is telling. After all, 4 years ago when Romney was angling to be McCain's running mate Romney made <i>23 years worth</i> of his tax returns available to John McCain as part of his vetting process -- a vetting process that Romney failed to pass. Indeed, John McCain ultimately decided that Sister Sarah Palin would be a better running mate than Mitt Romney.<br />
<br />
If you look at it that way, the way to get some traction for this story is simple: make it a conspiracy.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The media absolutely <i>adore</i> juicy conspiracy stories. In terms of ginning up audience interest and ratings, they provide more bang for the buck than nearly anything else. The TeeVee blow-dries can bloviate and speculate and wonder what it all means and what it could mean and what Romney might be hiding <i>and it's our job to find out</i> and it doesn't cost them a dime. After all, investigative journalism is expensive but speculating? Speculating is for free, and speculating about a (potential) scandal, a (potential) scandal that could affect the Presidency? That's practically free money to the talking head crowd.<br />
<br />
If I were in charge of getting this story some legs, I'd be having op-eds ghostwritten for newspapers around the country, and I'd be sending surrogates onto the talk shows to make the following simple but highly-charged argument: <i>Mitt Romney already has 23 years' worth of tax returns compiled -- he gave them to John McCain. And McCain, after looking through them all, decided that <u>Sarah Palin</u> was a better choice for the vice-presidency than Mitt Romney. What could possibly be in those returns that is so terrible that John McCain rejected Mitt Romney in favor of <u>Sarah Palin</u>? And now that he wants to be <u>President of the United States</u>, why is Mitt Romney so terrified to show the America people what John McCain decided made Mitt Romney unfit even for the Vice-Presidency? Why won't Mitt Romney level with the American people?</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
I just don't see how this doesn't get a ton's worth of positive coverage for Obama and the Democrats. (And by "positive coverage for Obama and the Democrats" I really mean terribly negative coverage of Romney and the GOP). McCain will have to go on the TeeVee and claim that it wasn't the tax returns that made him pick Sarah Palin over Romney, which will then lead people to wonder <i>what else</i> Mitt Romney might be hiding. It'll humiliate McCain, who will then have to argue with a straight face that <i>he really did </i>pick the best candidate for the position -- which weakens Romney even further, exposes McCain for the clueless old man that he is, and reminds voters that it is the Republican Party that attempted to foist Sister Sarah on us in the first place. <br />
<br />
It'll bring Sister Sarah out of the woodwork, because then she'll have to insist that McCain did in fact make the right choice, further driving a wedge between the Teabillies that still hang on her every word and the more pragmatic Republicans who - after all - basically nominated Romney because they think he is the only person who can beat Obama . . . an assessment that the rabid, Teabilly base did not share, as evidenced by the successive candidates who took turns occupying the NotRomney spot at the top of the polls for months.<br />
<br />
Seriously, I don't see a downside on this one. It'll grab the media, it'll drive a wedge into the GOP, it'll remind average Americans why they turned their backs on Bush, McCain and the GOP only four years ago, it'll humiliate Romney, it'll keep the story going forever or until Romney releases his tax returns, and it'll be <i>free</i>.<br />
<br />
Yeah. I really do think they should do this.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-86925135172441342942012-06-28T10:12:00.002-07:002012-06-28T10:24:44.484-07:00First Thoughts on the Healthcare RulingWow.<br />
<br />
A surprising victory for the Forces of Light and Good. Romney seemed unable to articulate a response other than to repeat that healthcare repeal will be his first job if he wins the presidency -- that even if the ACA is constitutional that doesn't make it good law. Notably, Romney did <i>not</i> say that he would replace it with anything. Presumably he is appealing to that extremely large constituency that wishes we could go back the days when college students were kicked off of their parents' plans, when people could be denied coverage for any pre-existing condition, and insurance companies weren't required to spend any particular portion of the premiums they receive solely on reimbursing health care expenses.<br />
<br />
President Obama's statement was dignified in its understatedness. He outlined - again - what the bill does and does not do (necessary, as I've been seeing a lot of Romney ads that grossly misrepresent the bill) and suggested that everybody should now move on. It'll be interesting to see if the GOP can do that.<br />
<br />
Finally, the big news is that the 5-4 decision upholding the bill was decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, and not by Kennedy. Indeed, it appears that Kennedy would have ruled that the bill <i>in its entirety </i>was unconstitutional<i>. </i>So can we now <i>please</i> dispense with calling Kennedy the all-important "centrist swing-vote" on the court? One every significant 5-4 decision rendered over the last few years, Kennedy reliably comes down on the conservative side of the court. He gets called a "swing-vote" and a "centrist" because he makes a pretense of hemming and hawing and being open to suggestion, but he always votes with the conservative bloc. Let's just acknowledge that the Supreme Court as it currently stands is dominated by a reliably conservative five justices: Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas.<br />
<br />
And speaking of Roberts . . . . look, I'm glad he cast the deciding vote to uphold the law, and maybe I'm getting a bit cynical in my old age and I should just count my winnings and shut up. But it occurred to me to wonder where this decision came from. (Chris Matthews seems to believe that Roberts simply did not want his name associated with something that killed healthcare reform; the argument that Roberts ruled this way based solely upon considerations of his legacy seems unlikely to me -- he certainly wasn't worried about his <i>Citizens United</i> ruling).<br />
<br />
Then I remembered that the one main reason Roberts generally is known for being "conservative" is that he is <i>overwhelmingly pro-business</i>. I remember I saw an analysis a few months ago about the Court's decisions (sorry, I'm not going to bother to try and track it down again today) that found that the Robert's Court seemed to follow two main rules in its 5-4 decisions: (i) always back big business, and (ii) always back the federal government over the individual rights of non-rich people.<br />
<br />
One of the things that most bothered liberals like me about the Affordable Care Act is that it basically operates by requiring people to purchase money from the same insurance companies that have economically raping the American public for years. Sure, it's supposed to also regulate those companies more, but the essence of the deal -- the reason Obama thought he could get it through Congress in the first place -- was that in exchange for insuring almost everybody, the insurance companies were going to get a whole lot of new, low-cost customers.<br />
<br />
So within about 15 minutes of the decision being reported, I immediately wondered whether this was simply another example of Roberts going along with what Big Business wants. I mean - hey! - maybe the Teabilly rubes do think requiring everybody to enter into the private market and buy insurance from private companies constitutes "socialism" and so are against the ACA on ideological grounds, but I wonder if Roberts is simply thinking that - in the end - this is going to be good for business.<br />
<br />
I know, I know . . . I'm an ingrate.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-81012307032014909752012-06-28T10:06:00.000-07:002012-06-28T10:06:04.778-07:00The Lucky Ducky Older Generation<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Speaking of Kevin Drum, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/war-against-young">a post he wrote the other day</a> triggered something I’ve been thinking about for a while now:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Both the boomers and the generation before them were enormously lucky to have started their careers in the postwar world, roughly from 1950 through 1980. Good jobs were plentiful; retirement benefits – both public and private – increased steadily; and a variety of factors kept middle-class growth high. But the beneficiaries of this good fortune, like all beneficiaries of good fortune, became convinced that they had done well solely through hard work and native talent. If today’s kids aren’t doing as well, it must be because they’re dumber and lazier.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">This sounds exactly right to me. My grandmother is 81 years old, and is interested in discussing only a very few topics. One of those is how godawful poor she and her family were when she was growing up in the 1930’s. Seriously, it doesn’t matter what your opening conversation gambit is, she will find a way to turn it into a diatribe about how dirt poor she was when she was growing up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Another of her favorite topics is how the world has gone to hell in a handbasket over the past couple of decades, how people spend too much money and take on too much debt, and how unjustifiable are their complaints about the state of their financial affairs. “Nobody helped me and Papa,” she’ll tell you, “we came from nothing and we did all right.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">It never occurs to her that maybe in the 80 years of her life some significant things have changed.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">For example, she was born into the Great Depression. Don’t get me wrong . . . her family was dirt-poor to begin with, but the fact the country was mired in the Great Depression <i>and</i> she was born to a rural family <i>and</i> that rural family lived in one of the least developed of the states (North Carolina) certainly didn’t help.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But shortly after she was born FDR started implementing the New Deal and Keynesian economics. Government spending was increased, even though that led to record government deficits. Social Security and Medicare were signed into law. By the time she was 12 World War II had started – an absolutely <i>huge</i> federal spending measure – and the amount of economic stimulus that deficit-financed project required lifted us out of the Depression.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">By the time she was 20 and had married my grandfather, America was still pursuing Keynesian economics. The highest marginal tax rate was <i>very</i> high (91%) and the money being raised by taxes was being plowed back into the economy. Military spending continued as the Cold War boomed, the national highway program was taken up, and money was provided by the GI Bill to get millions of people a college education and get them started in middle-class professions.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Unions were strong. By and large, wealth was not being concentrated only in the hands of the CEOs and a few upper-level executives, but was spread out amongst working-class Americans too. As more and more people’s standard of living increased, they spent that money and provided a further boost to the economy. Moreover, as Drum points out, back then people could be secure in their retirement because so many could actually count on receiving a pension, and – of course – America led the world in oil production.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">My grandparents directly benefited from only a few of these economic factors (for example, my grandfather served 20 years in the Marine Corps, and they lived next to Camp LeJeune), but they indirectly benefited from all of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Since then . . . let me see. America no longer leads the world in oil production, but is the greatest importer of oil. The assault on the New Deal has proceeded apace, and it is anyone’s guess whether Social Security and Medicare will be left standing five years from now – despite the fact workers have been overpaying into the Social Security trust fund for 30 years. Unions have been gutted, and almost nobody has an actual pension to rely upon. At the same time, income taxes have been reduced and flattened, and the capital gains tax has been slashed to 15%.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Keynesian economics is sneered at, federal investment in infrastructure and education has been increasingly cut back, and wages stopped keeping up with rising American productivity 35 years ago. Now almost all the gains in American productivity are concentrated in the hands of only a tiny fraction of the American population. And if you have the temerity to want to lift your social standing by getting a college education, you will almost certainly incur an enormous amount of non-dischargeable debt to carry around for the rest of your life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">In short, the economic factors that control much of one’s ability to earn a decent living, set money aside for retirement, and provide for one’s family have changed significantly over the life of this one woman. In the beginning, those factors were almost entirely negative. Then, for a brief couple of decades, they were incredibly favorable. And now, they are once again very negative.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">It is as if when she was born my grandmother were a tree seedling slowing dying on the ground in the middle of the desert, but then was suddenly picked up by a breeze and carried to the fertile plains of Iowa. In that place she was able to grow strong and prosper, but it never occurs to her that most of the reason she was able to thrive is because she was surrounded by such a rich environment. And now that our political system has been so thoroughly captured by short-sighted people whose only concern is to exploit that environment until now it too is almost a desert, she cannot see how hard it has become for most seedlings to grow strong the way she did.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I’ve tried to explain this to her on a couple of occasions she’s already settled on her narrative. And as with the vast majority of people, having settled on her narrative it is extremely difficult to get her to give that up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-28349658153327919372012-06-26T05:28:00.002-07:002012-06-26T05:29:25.541-07:00Cynicism (cont'd) and Political Mendacity<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;"><a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2012/06/cynicism.html">In my last post</a> I discussed two substantive areas of my life in which I’ve experienced a real disillusionment over the decades – the law and finance – but I neglected to mention one other important area of disillusionment: politics.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">I know, I know . . . I am revealing myself as a naif and a heretic from the Church of the Savvy, which is the only way one should properly understand politics: with a knowing cynicism that the only thing worth discussing in politics is Who is Up and Who is Down.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">But as I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t really start paying attention to politics until the 2000 presidential race. Until then I had assumed that everything I had been taught in what passes for civics class these days – high school social studies, undergraduate political philosophy classes and, I suppose, my Constitutional Law classes – was more or less accurate. Specifically, that different groups of people have different ideas about how the country should be run, that they argue these ideas in the legislature and in election campaigns, and that this by and large is how the will of a majority of American citizens is implemented.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Like I said . . . naive.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">It is simply astonishing to me how baked in our acceptance of deep political mendacity and a refusal to engage in good faith debate has become. For example, Kevin Drum has argued several times that there is nothing surprising about the GOP’s decision to abandon its previous support for a health insurance mandate and to insist instead that such a thing – originally a Republican idea – is, in fact, an unconstitutional blasphemy. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 19px;"></span></span></div><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;"><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/republicans-hypocrisy-and-individual-mandate">Drum argues</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;"> that the GOP has <i>always</i> believed the best thing to do about health insurance is <i>nothing</i>, but that back in the 1990s it looked like the Clinton healthcare plan might actually pass.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;"> So what’s a Republican to do? The answer is obvious: choose whichever option is the best one available at the time. If Clinton’s plan looks like it might pass, you support the next best alternative: private insurance with a mandate. If private insurance with a mandate is on offer, you once again support the next best alternative: nothing. There’s not really anything mysterious about this. You don’t need to resort to cynicism, motivated reasoning, or even a genuine change of heart to explain it. You merely need to realize that political actors – <i>both liberals and conservatives</i> – will always fight for the best deal they can get. If you offered me Obamacare, I’d take it, but that doesn’t mean I’d give up fighting for what I really want. Likewise, after conservatives defeated Clintoncare, I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t just rest on their laurels, but kept on fighting for what <i>they</i> really want.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">(emphasis added).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">All of that is true enough, so far as it goes. But I think Drum slips in a significant false equivalency here, and that relates to <i>how</i> liberals and conservatives go about fighting for what they want.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">During the health care debate, actual liberals were very vocal about the fact they wanted a public option included in the proposed bill. Like Drum, most were willing to take Obamacare if that were the only option presented, but the amount of liberal outrage and our sense of betrayal when Obama took the public option off the bargaining table was palpable. There are plenty on the Left who are willing to accept Obamacare but still feel it doesn’t go nearly far enough – and we’ve been vocal about letting that be known.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">This is <i>not</i> how the Right debated the merits of Clintoncare. Again . . . the individual mandate was a <i>Republican</i> idea. Back in the 90’s the GOP told the rest of us that they, too, were concerned about out of control health insurance costs, but believed that the appropriate way to address them was by requiring everybody to purchase health insurance – subsidized if necessary – thereby increasing the insurance pool with the addition of low-risk insureds, and let the market work its magic. In other words, Republicans told the American public that the real choice for reforming health insurance was between a public option and an individual insurance mandate, and that they favored the individual insurance mandate.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Foolish liberals – foolish Obama Administration – to take them at their word. Because as soon as Obama took the public option off the table in an effort to reach the Village Holy Grail that is Bipartisanship, the Republicans immediately changed their tune. Not only did they not support an individual mandate, they considered such a plan absolutely <i>unconstitutional.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">(Much the same thing happened with negotiations over greenhouse gas emissions. Back in the 90’s the Clinton EPA was considering establishing some hard and fast limits on the amount of carbon dioxide individual factories could pump into the air. The GOP argued that the government should instead sell “greenhouse gas permits” that would limit greenhouse gases overall; companies could then trade these permits between themselves, and market magic would allocate greenhouse gas limitations most efficiently. Of course, now that liberals have come around to the GOP’s cap-and-trade program, the GOP has repudiated it.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">The difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to policy arguments is clear: liberals may disagree with conservatives when it comes to policy, <i>but they argue in good faith</i>. According to Drum, not only do conservatives fail to argue in good faith, but none of us should be surprised at their mendacity.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">For a representative democracy, this seems to me to be a pretty big problem. How can we possibly craft responsible public policy, choosing between competing interests, if we cannot know exactly what those real choices are? According to Drum, back in the 90’s the <i>real</i> policy on display were (i) passing Clintoncare, or (ii) doing nothing. If so, then <i>that</i> is what the debate should have been about. But it wasn’t. Instead a false alternative was provided, which allowed a significant number of people to think that maybe the alternative would be preferable to Clintoncare – which then failed to pass. If this is what happened then the entire rationale for our representative government was undermined, because there was no way for policymakers to accurately assess the policies that were <i>really </i>up for consideration.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Chris Hayes discussed this on his show over the weekend. He talked about a meeting he had with a Democratic lawmaker who explained to him (and this is from memory, so my phraseology may not be entirely accurate) that we are now living in “a post-truth policy concession world.” What he meant was that our political media has been sufficiently captured by the right-wing noise machine that the granting of policy concessions has absolutely no political effect on reaching legislative consensus.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">For example, Hayes pointed out that illegal immigrant deportation skyrocketed under President Obama, and that Obama specifically explained in a State of the Union address that this was intended to demonstrate that the administration took the issue of illegal immigration seriously. Consequently, Obama explained, he expected the parties to come together in Congress and address real immigration reform.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, of course, that didn’t happen. Just as giving up the public option on Obamacare didn’t prevent the GOP from claiming that the Affordable Care Act was a “complete takeover of health care by the government,” so too did Obama’s willingness to deport 400,000 undocumented workers fail to prevent Republicans in the Senate from filibustering health care reform. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">(Of course, now that Obama has announced a DREAM Act-lite by executive order, Republicans are faulting Obama for failing to pass the DREAM Act itself. Political reporters dutifully transcribe these claims and present them to the American public, without ever bothering to point out that it was in fact the Republicans who killed the DREAM Act.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Of course, none of this is really new to “amateurs” like me and most of the progressive blogosphere, who follow politics closely. We’ve been screaming for years that the GOP quite obviously is not negotiating in good faith, and that when Democrats grant policy concessions the only result is that “”acceptable” policy goals just get moved further to the right. And maybe the Obama Administration is finally – <i>finally</i> – figuring this out. But, if so, what’s the likely effect?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Well . . . I see two things. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">First, if Democrats can actually give up their high school social studies book learnin’ and really internalize the idea that the GOP no longer negotiates in good faith, then during those periods when the Democratic Party can set the agenda – when, say, they control the White House and at least one Congressional house – it should stop them from making any more pre-emptive policy concessions. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">If Democrats had assumed going into the health insurance reform negotiations that Republicans had never really been serious about supporting an insurance mandate, then Democrats would never have offered one. Instead, they could have demanded a public option – <i>let the Republicans bring up the health insurance mandate </i>– and then compromise with them and pass the health insurance mandate on a bipartisan basis. Democrats’ willingness to concede policy ground early in the negotiations – in a gesture of good faith – only made bipartisanship agreement <i>less </i>likely.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">Second, during those periods when the GOP sets the agenda – if, say, Romney wins the White House and the Republicans take back the Senate – then Dems can adopt the same mendacious but successful strategy Republicans adopt: either insist on policies that are the polar opposite of what Republicans want, or refuse to argue in good faith. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">For example, when Republicans argue for the complete elimination of the capital gains tax, Dems can counter that the tax instead should be raised until it is at least the equal of income tax rates. They can then compromise on keeping it the same. Alternatively, the Dems can argue that the current tax is perfectly fine and that it shouldn’t be changed, and then bide their time until they can take office again and try to raise it then. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">The one thing they <i>shouldn’t </i>do is be hoodwinked into compromising by lowering the tax to, say, 5% and then boasting that they prevented it from being eliminated completely. Because the next year the Republicans would be back, arguing again for its complete elimination and asking – quite rightly – what’s the difference a 5% tax makes <i>anyway.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">For obvious reasons, I think it would work a terrible disservice to our country if <i>both</i> parties decided that the only way to make policy was to argue in bad faith. That prevents the American public from understanding the real stakes at issue in these arguments.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, funnily enough, I kind of also think that if <i>everybody</i> understands the rules of the game, then nobody is being deceived. Policy making will just become even more a kabuki theater; and while the American people might not be able to follow the plot, at least the actors will understand their roles.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-66880783174009499632012-06-22T12:35:00.000-07:002012-06-22T12:35:26.205-07:00Cynicism<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Via Kay, at Balloon-Juice,<a href="http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/06/22/will-be-hard/"> I see this</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">When I was reporting out my New Yorker piece, I spoke with Akhil Reid Amar, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale, who thinks that a 5-4 party-line vote against the [Affordable Care Act’s] mandate would be shattering to the court’s reputation for being above politics. “I’ve only mispredicted one big Supreme Court decision in the last 20 years,” he told me. “That was <i>Bush v. Gore</i>. And I was able to internalize that by saying they only had a few minutes to think about it and they leapt to the wrong conclusion. <b>If they decide this by 5-4, then, yes, it’s disheartening to me, <u>because my life was a fraud</u>. Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(empasis added).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Uhhmmm . . . yeah. It’s sad that Professor Amar is having to go through this, but it is only what I went through years ago. If you devote yourself to a profession like the law for any reason other than money, then you are a fool and a naif and real people should kick you in the ribs and laugh at you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 19px;"></span></span></div><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Mark Twain once wrote something like, “Any man who is a master of his profession is contemptuous of it.” I used to think that what Twain meant is simply that people who are masters of a particular job later find it so easy that it is not challenging. But now I think he meant something more profound and darkly cynical: that there is no nobility to be found in anything that pays well, that every profession modern society claims to revere is, at heart, a massive scam. That what we <i>really</i> respect is the guy who can steal as much money as possible from the less savvy, the less savvy who exist only to be despised by all right-thinking people. I think Twain was saying that anybody who really understands their job also necessarily understands that their profession turns them into thieves and crooks and liars.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Finance<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I was a finance major when I was an undergraduate. This was back in the 1980’s, and I <i>believed</i> in the idea of financial markets. I believed especially in Ben Graham’s idea of value investing: find a company whose shares are trading at below their bankruptcy value, and buy it. Let me explain that . . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">If a company has $1.5 million in assets, and $0.5 million in debt, then it is has a net worth of $1 million. That is the measure of its equity. If its equity has been divided into 1 million shares, then each share has a value of $1. So if those shares are trading at, say, 50 cents, then they are massively undervalued; for 50 cents you can purchase something that is worth a dollar. Even if the company were to be broken up the very next day and sold for scrap, you’ve doubled your money.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">This makes sense.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Of course, situations like the one I’ve just described are not found very often. What I’ve described is the equivalent of finding a 15<sup>th</sup> century Spanish doubloon whilst walking on the beach. By and large, equity markets are very efficient and so you don’t really see a lot of unclaimed doubloons. If you want to go hunting for them, you have to invest a <i>lot</i> of time. How efficient is that? Well, that depends on the amount of time you have to invest, the value of your time spent doing other things, and – most importantly – the amount of capital you have at your disposal.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Let’s suppose you have $10 million to invest. Let’s further suppose you will need to spend 5 years of your life painstakingly hunting through financial data, company books, and balance sheets before you find that 2-for-1 financial doubloon. At the end of five years, you will have doubled your money. That’s a $10 million payoff – the equivalent of earning $2 million for each year you sat around on your ass hunting through financial documents. Not bad!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But let’s say you have only $100,000 of your own money to invest. Now you’ve spent 5 years making $100,000 -- $20,000 per year. $20,000 isn’t anything to sniff at, but it’s still not really a great salary.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But let’s say you – like most people – don’t have $100,000 to play with. It’s more realistic to imagine you’ve got $10,000 to invest. If you spent five years of your life looking for a chance to double that money, then you’ve earned $10,000 over those five years -- $2,000 a year. <i>That</i> is a truly shitty salary.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Which is why most people cannot spend all of their time looking for investment opportunities – they just don’t have the capital to make that expenditure of time worthwhile. Instead, they turn their money over to “professionals,” whom they trust to have the time to look into this kind of stuff and make better decisions for them. They figure that by pooling their monies with other small investors, there will be enough capital to invest that makes it worthwhile to do the hard, data-tilling spadework that is necessary for successful investing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Or at least that is what I thought when I was graduating from Chapel Hill in 1990. I was one of those guys who didn’t shy away from numbers and math, and I had done very well as a finance major. One of my professors told me he had contacts on Wall Street, and that he was sure he could get me a job with Salomon Brothers (if this is before your time, just know that it was eventually gobbled up by the CitiGroup leviathan). I had gotten tired of living hand-to-mouth, of never having the money to ask a girl for a date, and decided this seemed like a good idea. But my parents wanted a professional in the family and they bribed me to go to law school, about which more later. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But I understood financial markets, or, at least, how they are <i>supposed</i> to work, and so I paid attention to the financial news over the years. What I saw astonished me: an endless series of asset bubbles being inflated, for no discernible reason other than that these inflations could line the pockets of the financial geeks <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(like me!) who supposedly were doing the tiresome spadework for which we rewarded them with our savings.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Back in the 90’s, during the dot.com speculative bubble, I must’ve gotten 3 or 4 cold calls a day in my office from some investment firm trying to get my money. And why not? I was a young and therefore supposedly still naive professional making a good salary – exactly the kind of guy ripe for plucking.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">My favorite of these conversations went something like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">INVESTMENTDIPSHIT:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Mr. Wells, I’m calling about investing your money in the stock market. Have you <i>seen</i> what the Nasdaq is up to?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">ME:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">INVESTMENT DIPSHIT:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Well, this is an opportunity to take advantage of that. I represent an investment outfit that specializes in “technical analysis.” Do you know what that is?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">ME:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">INVESTMENT DIPSHIT:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> You do?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">ME:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Yeah. It’s the opposite of value investing. It’s numerology, basically. You guys look at the last 6 months or 5 years or whatever of a stock’s movement to find patterns, and then you bet on the patterns. But humans can find patterns in anything; that’s why we have Rorschach tests. Finding a pattern doesn’t necessarily mean there is one. What you do is about as worthwhile as attempting to discern the future from sheep entrails, but you call it “technical” to make it seem special. It’s not. It’s make believe.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">INVESTMENT DIPSHIT:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> . . . . . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">ME:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> . . . . . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">INVESTMENT DIPSHIT:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> So . . . you’re not interested, then?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">ME:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> No. Thanks for calling.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">That was really an astonishing time. During the dot.com/Nasdaq bubble, I was involved in an 8-week state court trial. I remember my partner checking his beeper at least once every hour to get a feel for how “the market” was doing. I remember thinking that there was no way anything of significance could have happened in the 60 minutes since he last checked his beeper, and then realizing that this is how the new market works: by feeding on immediacy. People are being conditioned to crave constant stimulus – which is the <i>opposite</i> of what investing is supposed to be about. Banking is supposed to be a stolid, solemn, risk-averse business. But we’ve turned it into a casino <i>and nobody seems to care</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I guess just because serious, stolid, risk-averse investing is <i>boring</i>. Why <u>not</u> lose all your money? It’s exciting!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The Law<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Like I said, my parents bribed me to go to law school. I was 22 years old, and they bought me a convertible and told me they would give me more spending money if only I enrolled in law school immediately and didn’t bother going to work for a living on Wall Street.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(Which, really, is kind of ridiculous. I get the feeling that what my parents want more than anything is for me to be rich, and calling me off of Wall Street back in 1990 is only about the <b><i>worst piece of advice possible</i></b> if the goal is to simply make a lot of money. I suspect that my parents were victims of a 1950s mindset – already being eliminated, as fallout from the Reagan Revolution kept destroying the New Deal policies that made Middle-Class America possible – that insisted only “professionals” had real job security.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I got the car, but I don’t recall seeing a lot of additional spending money. But that was okay, because I tested through the roof on the LSATs, and William and Mary not only gave me a scholarship but also a 2-hour a week job that kicked a good bit of money my way. My parents might not have been sending me checks, but the school was.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The thing is . . . I really liked the law. William and Mary insists on its first-year law students showing up a week before classes begin (we called it, disparagingly, “law camp”), and we were forced to sit through an interminable series of lectures on “what law school is about.” One of the underlying subtexts to each of these lectures was: <i> A lot of people go to law school because they don’t know what else to do with themselves, and they hate it. If this is you, don’t stick around. If you don’t want to be here, just go</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Holy crap!” I thought, “they’re talking about <i>me</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But then the first week of classes started and I realized that – at its best – the law is about trading ground on different policy points. Safety, or freedom? Don’t let the liberals/conservatives mislead you (by the way, I am a <i>huge</i> liberal) that really is a choice. Not one or the other, but deciding where to draw the line. This is the nutcutting that is the heart of any really good debate. (One of my uncles is a conservative. He and I talk politics constantly and have a really good time doing so; he and I disagree on only about 2% of the things we discuss, but that 2% is why I am a liberal and he is a conservative. The 2% is important, even crucial, but the 98% we can agree on is important too.) <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 2.5in; text-indent: -2.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I absolutely soaked law school up. Man, did I like that stuff! I liked the policy arguments, I liked the reasoning implicit in making any good argument, and – surprise, surprise! – it turned out that I liked being on stage <i>making</i> those arguments. I am a ham, and I absolutely loved having a jury or a judge’s sole attention while I won them over. I <i>believed</i> in the law, the same way I once <i>believed</i> in finance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">If there is anything that bugs me about my law school career, it is a memory I have of being home for Christmas vacation and talking with my dad as we drove somewhere one night. He listened to me talk for a while about how much I liked law school, and then asked “Do they teach you, in law school, that the judge is more important than the law?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Uhmmm . . . . no. They teach us the law. They teach us that <i>the system</i> is what’s important. That even if you get a crazy judge, there is always the appellate process to put that right.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Huh. See, that’s not been my experience.” And then he went on a long diatribe about how the system had screwed him over back when it came to his ex-wife. (He’s my step-dad.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Well,” I said, in my naivete, “that’s gotta be an outlier. The system doesn’t really work that way.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I’ve thought about that conversation for years. It seemed odd to me that a person so adamant that I go to law school as opposed to – I dunno – getting a job and earning some money, would even then have been so cynical about the profession. Did my parents push me into this for . . . . the title? If they thought the law was a ruse to begin with, why insist that I do the job? This is one of the reasons I suspect they were more interested in me being rich than in me being happy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">It also bugs me to no end of description that it turns out my dad was <i>right</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Let me tell you about the case that forced me to confront the fact the law is mostly a scam designed to help the already powerful stay powerful. As Professor Amar, quoted above, indicates, <i>Bush v. Gore </i>was a giant tell. <i>Bush v. Gore</i> opened with a statement to the effect that “nothing here in is supposed to be considered precedent. We are only deciding this because we want to decide it, but you can’t hold us accountable for anything we say later on.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Wow. Just . . . wow.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But I already had lost my faith in the law, because of an employment issue just a few years before.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">About 10 years ago, when I was still working as a partner at my old firm down in Miami, I was approached by a couple of Miami-Dade police sergeants. They wanted to know if they had a case against the county for unpaid overtime. You see, the county classified them as “management,” which meant they were not subject to overtime protection; they were “exempt” employees. And yet, the county still would dock them one or two days’ unpaid leave for various disciplinary reasons. They asked me to look into the legality of all this.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I did, and I was psyched! At the beginning, this looked like a huge ka-ching<i>!</i> case for an enterprising young lawyer. Y’see, here is how it works . . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(1) Supervisory personnel who are paid a salary are not required to be paid overtime. The reasoning is that – if you are being paid a salary – then you are being paid for doing a job and not for doing the hours. If you can do your job in 10 hours, then you still get paid a weekly salary; you are not an hourly employee. Of course, that means if you need 50 hours to do your job, you don’t get overtime. You are not being paid by the hour.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(2) However, some unscrupulous employers will try to classify <i>everybody</i> as “salaried,” in order to work them to death and not pay out any overtime at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(3) So, a couple of rules were put in place to prevent that kind of stuff. One of the most important of these rules is the “less than one week without pay ” rule. If an employer suspends an employee for less than a week – say, 1 or 2 days – and does not pay the employee for that time, then the employer obviously considers the employee to be an hourly worker, and not a salaried worker. The employer obviously believes that it is not paying the employee to do a job, but instead to show up for work. There is a difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">So when the Miami-Dade police sergeants told me that they had been working 60 and 70 hours without overtime, but were still subject to being suspended less than a week without pay, I realized that they had a very good case. Miami-Dade clearly did not consider these guys “salaried” employees, but were only claiming them that way in order to avoid paying overtime.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Let me repeat that: they didn’t want to pay overtime to the cops who are responsible for keeping us safe.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But it gets even better. In researching this stuff, I went back to the Federal Register. The Federal Register is how the federal government allows people to discuss and argue against proposed federal regulations. Although you would never know it from watching Fox News, the federal government does <u>not</u> “shove regulations down your throat.” When a new rule is being considered, it is first proposed on the federal register and anybody – anybody – has 90 days to complain about it, suggest changes to it, or support it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">When overtime regulations for cops and firefighters were first proposed the <i>Miami-Dade government</i> argued against them. The county argued that restricting its ability to selectively dock pay from its “paramilitary” force would hamstring its ability to enforce discipline. Now, you may agree or disagree with this reasoning, but the point is that this argument was raised and it was rejected. So not only was Miami-Dade breaking employment law with respect to its own cops, but it <i>knew</i> it was breaking the law and doing so anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">This kind of blatant disregard for workers’ rights triggers a second provision under the Fair Labor Standards Acts, and awards the plaintiffs <i>three times</i> their actual damages. It is intended to be a warning to unscrupulous employers: do not mess with your workers. <i>Ka-Ching!</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But . . . it went downhill from there.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">As I dug further into the law surrounding this case, I came to a horrible ruling. Back in the early 90’s – when I was still working for the federal court – another judge had been presented with precisely this situation. That lawsuit didn’t involve cops, but it did involve state “managerial” employees who had been denied overtime pay. A group of six sued the City of Sunrise (it is within the federal Southern District of Florida, as is the City of Miami) for lost overtime wages. Their total claim – for all six plaintiffs – was for about $80,000.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The city hired lawyers and defended against the suit for a year and a half. Eventually, the federal judge (I knew that guy) was about to rule against the city. So the city then took advantage of what is called the “safe harbor” provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The safe harbor provision was intended as a good idea. Remember how I mentioned that employers that <i>intentionally</i> violate the FLSA get hit for three times the damages? Well, the safe harbor provision allows employers who <i>honestly</i> made a mistake to avoid that penalty. Essentially, it was intended to be used by employers who didn’t realize they were screwing their employees over, cottoned to their mistakes, and paid the money back. “Sorry, didn’t quite know what I was doing,” seems to have been the theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But not for the City of Sunrise. Right before losing its case, the City turned around and paid the plaintiffs all the money they had been asking for. The City then asked the judge to rule in its favor on the non-payment of overtime because the plaintiffs had been rendered whole. The judge granted the motion, and that should have disposed of the case. The plaintiffs got what they were entitled to, the City learned a powerful (and expensive) lesson, and everybody walked away the better for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Except, not really. No, what really happened was that after the City won summary judgment against the plaintiffs – essentially for conceding the entirety of the plaintiffs’ case against it – the City sued for its attorney fees. You see, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, whoever technically “wins” the lawsuit is entitled to collect its fees. Since the City of Sunrise “won”<i> </i>by conceding it had to pay the plaintiffs $80,000, that meant the plaintiffs were on the hook for the City’s <i>more than $150,000 in attorneys’ fees</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Now, this doesn’t make a lick of sense unless you were around in the Southern District of Florida back in the early 90’s, and you remember the fiscal crunch every single municipality was facing back then. Hell! I think the State of Florida even took over Miami for a while. Back in the early 90’s, the idea that the City of Sunrise would be bankrupted for – I dunno – <i>stealing from its employees</i>, was unthinkable. So a judge found a convenient way to prevent that from happening.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Of course, that “judicial reasoning” stayed on the books, and is now law. I had to tell my cops that I couldn’t represent them and that it wasn’t in their best interests for me to represent them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Understand how this is going to work,” I explained. “Say each of you is owed $40,000 case. All the City has to do is run up $200,000 in legal fees (which won’t be hard), pay you the $40,000 it owes, and then you will each be on the hook to the City for $50,000 in legal fees. More then the city owes you. You guys have a case, but you can’t bring it. It literally will cost you more money than it is worth, and I guarantee you that the city knows it. That’s why it can screw you. Sorry.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Yeah. A “noble” profession.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Nursing</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I am forty-three years old, and these days I bathe people, help them eat, and help them clean up for themselves when they cannot clean up on their own. It is a job that nobody pays me even close to what I was making as a lawyer, and nowhere near what I read about assholes on Wall Street making.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Yesterday, my lab partner in Microbiology broke out the old chestnut about how “If you aren’t a conservative before you are 30 you have no heart, and ifp you aren’t a conservative after 30 you have no brain,” and I told him that I had heard that one before, but it is working the opposite for me. I started, I believe, as a huge, hard-core conservative, but as I get older I am turning increasingly liberal.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And I think a large part of that is my growing realization that most of what we are asked to do in Real Life is to scam other people. When I hear “conservative” what I hear is “grow up and scam people like <i>we</i> do. Don’t be a naif.” Despite the fact the banksters ruined our economy, they are still on my TeeVee and we still apparently are supposed to think they have something to say worth listening to. And don’t even get me started on the explanations I’ve had to recite to explain to people about how I used to be a lawyer and now I’m working the hospital hallways trying to help others. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">(Seriously . . . the next time someone asks me about that I’m going to point out that if you are – like me – more than 40 years old and you still think that “making money” is the entire point of your existence then you are a small-souled individual.) <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">I am working at a hospital. I work nights on the weekends. A large part of what I do is very basic stuff – I bathe people, I wipe people who cannot attend to themselves, I feed people who cannot handle spoons.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The weird thing? The job I do now is undoubtedly more important than any of the jobs I used to do, and yet it pays far, far less. My suspicion is that it pays far less because there is no wiggle-room for the graft that is what humans truly admire. If I were still a stock trader or a lawyer, people would pay me more because they would think that I must be up to something.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But I just tend to patients, and there is no graft there. There is a reward, but there is no profit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-61866831944342618322012-06-21T07:04:00.000-07:002012-06-21T07:04:58.452-07:00Cannibalizing from School (cont'd)This second essay is what they are calling a "classification essay" -- essentially, we are asked to differentiate and explain the differences between various things. That sounded boring, and so I decided to go a bit <i>meta</i> and write instead about what storytelling is really like.<br />
<br />
I am not a particular fan of this essay, because there is so much yet left to say. But we have a 4-page limit, and to meet that I have hacked and chopped away a lot of otherwise promising stuff.<br />
<br />
Essay below the fold.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Our Increasingly Lame Storytelling Technologies<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I am a born storyteller in that, like everybody else, I communicate almost exclusively through narrative. Human perception is the savage editing of a vast sensory overload in order to carve out an understanding of ourselves and our world that, by necessity, will always be unique to each of us. Attempting to share that understanding requires even further editing, demanding that we omit true and relevant but less important information (“noise”) for the sake of producing a more coherent message (a “stronger signal”). Whether we realize it or not, we all try to share ourselves by crafting narratives – stories – with an eye toward achieving the best signal to noise tradeoff possible. But as technology makes the cost of spewing our stories increasingly negligible, it renders this tradeoff less critical; consequently, our storytelling signals degrade. Three of our most popular storytelling technologies demonstrate how this happens.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Writing<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> One of the reasons the oldest of our stories still resonate with us is that when those stories were created no technology existed that would have made banality worth bothering with. Inscribing stelae and stone tablets must be exhausting and time consuming work. When parchment was a rarity and papyrus a treasure, words would have been forced to do double duty – for economy’s sake if no other. That is one reason our most ancient writings – the Rape of Troy, the Saga of Gilgamesh, the Fall from Grace – are so richly layered with meaning that they grip our imaginations even today.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Although people do not usually think of writing as a “technology,” it is, in fact, the most important technology ever invented. We began with pictures, but graduated to hieroglyphs and pictograms. We then abstracted several steps more and invented marks that symbolize – not concepts – but the sounds that make up the words that represent the concepts. This was the invention of writing, and with it we gained the ability to reliably pass ideas, discoveries, thoughts, <i>culture itself</i>, from one generation to another – even if those generations sometimes were separated by centuries. Writing – recorded story – ultimately is the only thing that makes human progress at all possible.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Still, several millennia would pass between the invention of recorded story and the near universality of writing. Even during all those centuries in which writing evolved and improved – passing from clay tablets to fine paper, from scrolls to codices and folios, from being the sole purview of priests and scripture to the more generalized business of civil servants and the state – it remained very much a mystery to the general population, many of whom believed that the written word possesses magical properties.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Which, in a sense, it does. There definitely is something magic-seeming about the ability to capture an abstract idea in physical form, like mounting a butterfly under glass. Doing so conjures something inchoate and abstract out of thin air, gives it a body, and fixes it in the material world. That is the very definition of a Magician’s trick. Writing is not like the spoken word, which disappears in an instant. Writing has weight, writing has presence, writing has permanence, and that weight and that presence and that permanence gives writing a power beyond anything to which the spoken word can aspire.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Of course, writing is also more laborious than simply talking with someone, but that is writing’s chief technological advantage. Writing invites you to take the time to really think about the story you are attempting to tell, to polish it until it sparkles, until it sings, until it says <i>exactly what you need it to say.</i> Of all the ways in which we communicate, writing still provides the greatest signal to noise tradeoff. Which is why writing remains the greatest technology yet invented for the storytelling that is the only way we know to share ourselves with one other.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The Telephone<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> A much less worthwhile storytelling technology is my long-time personal bane, the telephone. People are very good at communicating with each other in person. It comes so easily that we often fail to notice how important are the nonverbal aspects of face-to-face communication. We so effortlessly pick up on facial expression, body language, the movement of hands and the shifting of eyes, that sometimes we understand the speaker intends to convey the very <i>opposite</i> of what he or she is literally saying. We call that specific kind of messaging “irony,” and most of us can recognize it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But telephone technology sacrifices all the natural advantages of face-to-face storytelling for mere immediacy. On the phone, the nonverbal cues upon which we unconsciously rely disappear, and we are stuck trying to make sense only of the speaker’s words and, perhaps, the timbre of the speaker’s voice. I know – from personal experience – that speaking ironically over the phone can lead to tragic misunderstandings and hurt feelings, and have had to learn the hard way that phone conversations do not really lend themselves to subtlety, nuance, or gallows humor. As a general rule, a great deal of storytelling playfulness must be sacrificed when talking on the phone – playfulness that would have been understood and appreciated if only the conversation had been held in person. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Text Messaging<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Text messaging is the apotheosis of bad storytelling technology. It thrives on an unreflective, truncated immediacy that means little to no real thought can go into whatever text is being sent; it is a technology of mental chaff. Moreover, every text message that ever has been sent and ever will be sent was and will be, in fact, an insult. When somebody sends you a text message, the very fact they are doing so is an implicit declaration that they don’t wish to sully themselves with you. After all, if they wanted to actually commune with you it would have been far easier to call you on your phone – the same phone to which they just directed their text message. Instead, they were so repelled by the idea of having to interact with you that they elected instead to play with their thumbs for 2 minutes, laboriously pecking out a series of unintelligible abbreviations and gross spelling errors<i>.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Text messaging’s reduction of communication to pointless blather, unreflective immediacy, and inherent insult reveals a technology in which the noise so overwhelms the signal that it constitutes the worst communications technology yet invented. There is no possibility of narrative in text messaging, no chance of communion, but only an endless stream of static trying oh so very hard to disguise itself as actual story.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Of course, I understand that I probably constitute a minority of one when I decry text messaging and telephones. In the United States at what is still only the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, I seem to be alone in my disdain for that kind of stuff. But I don’t care. I don’t care, because I am sure I am right: the greatest technology ever invented to satisfy our need to tell our stories – our need to commune and share with one another – is still the written word. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> That’s the story I wanted to tell here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-27782978433573395772012-06-21T07:01:00.000-07:002012-06-21T07:01:18.318-07:00Cannibalizing from School<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I regret not posting for so very long. I did not realize - back when I didn't have a job and wasn't going to school -- just how labor-intensive maintaining a website can be. In my mind, I was just tossing off a coupla ideas whenever they struck me. But in Reality, it really was a lot of work to try to spit-shine and polish my mental meanderings until they were something I wanted to share.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In any event, one of the classes the school is making me take is an introductory English, designed to teach me how to write. Since I'm writing this stuff anyway, I figured there wasn't any real difficulty in sharing it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What follows is the first of the 4 or 5 essays we have to write. It is a "process essay," in that it is intended to teach us how to explain to others how to do something.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The Festival de San Fermίn: How to Run With the Bulls<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I spent the summer of 1991 studying abroad in Spain, and I knew even before my plane left the States that while there I would run with the bulls in Pamplona during the Festival de San Fermίn. Every year thousands of drunken Spaniards and addled tourists take part in this lunacy and, every year, one or more bull runners are gored, trampled or even killed. But Hemingway long ago made the running of the bulls iconic, and I couldn’t see how in all good conscience I could let an opportunity to run with the bulls pass me by. In the event, I discovered that running with the bulls is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that anybody can do safely, provided one knows what to expect and plans accordingly.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Of course, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are in Pamplona at the right time and that you have assembled the correct uniform. The running of the bulls takes place from the 7<sup>th</sup> to the 14<sup>th </sup>of July, so you have only one week to participate in this madness. The uniform is nothing more than a pair of white pants and a white shirt set off by a red sash wrapped around your waist and a red kerchief tied about your neck. The sashes and kerchiefs are for sale all over Pamplona, but you will need to provide the pants and shirt yourself. You should also make sure you have a newspaper, about which more later.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Some additional necessary preparations are blindingly obvious. For example, it is probably best to run the bulls <i>sober</i>. However, you may find this slightly difficult to pull off. You see, the run (the <i>encierro</i>) takes place in the morning and so you will have to be in Pamplona the night before, and during the Festival de San Fermίn the entire city is a non-stop party. Literally hundreds of social organizations and political groups set up booths selling beer or wine, there is dancing and music on every street corner, and unless you lock yourself in a hotel room it is difficult not to join in the fun. If – like me – you find you simply cannot restrain yourself, then I recommend making the conscious decision to stop drinking no later than 2:00 am. This will give you six hours to sober back up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Of course, you might as well use those six hours productively, so that is a good time to locate the <i>encierro</i> and walk the course. In fact, walk it several times. In just a few hours you’ll be barreling down it at top speed, a thousand pounds of thundering hoofed death hot on your heels, and you’ll want to be familiar with its layout. How embarrassing to be trampled to death (not even gored!) because you were so careless as to trip over an unexpected sidewalk.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> You’ll also want to make sure you are in the <i>encierro</i> no later than 7:00 am, one hour before the run actually starts. The Festival de San Fermίn is Spain’s most heavily attended fiesta and there may be more than a thousand idiot thrill-seekers just like you who want to run the bulls that day. You will need to find a place that isn’t too crowded. You won’t want to have to push past too many bodies in order to reach top speed. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> When the 8:00 starting rocket goes off and the <i>encierro</i> begins, do not – I repeat, do <i>not</i> – wait around. Unless you decided to start at the very beginning of the course, the bulls are being released some place a block or more away from you. Do not wait until you actually see them to start running. First, nobody else is going to be waiting. (If you thought it would be embarrassing to be trampled by a bull, just imagine how much more humiliating to be knocked down and trampled by a thousand other runners who were smart enough to start without you.) Second, bulls at speed can move surprisingly fast; if you don’t start running immediately, by the time you glimpse the bulls it may already be too late. Just put your head down, grip your rolled-up newspaper tightly, and <i>go</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> When you reach the arena you will pass through a short, high-ceilinged tunnel and then into the stadium proper. The entire mass of runners will then split in two, one half peeling off to the right and the other peeling off to the left. You should be prepared for your reception. The arena itself will already be packed with spectators who will rise as one and cheer you as you enter, and the noise is deafening. I remember thinking when I experienced it: <i>This must be what it feels like to run into the Superbowl</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Of course, the bulls will be following right behind you, but that is precisely why the runners split off to the sides. For some reason, after they enter the arena the bulls seem to lose all interest in the runners on either side of them and simply run directly across the stadium field. On the far side of the stadium a gate opens up and the bulls trot right through. None of those bulls will be seen again until they are brought out later in the afternoon to be slaughtered by that day’s matador.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But this doesn’t mean the bull running is over. After the bulls that have just chased them through the streets disappear behind the far gate, the runners assemble on the ground directly in front of that gate and start chanting, slapping their rolled-up newspapers in their free hands to keep time. When I ran the bulls I unquestioningly sat down in front of the gate too, and tried to translate what my fellow runners were chanting. I had just worked out that they were asking for the bulls to be released again when suddenly the gate opened up and one came charging into the arena, trampling a few people sitting directly in front. Thankfully, it was not one of the monster bulls that had chased us through the streets but a much younger, smaller bull whose horns had been padded to prevent anyone from actually being gored. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> And that was how I discovered that after running with the bulls in the streets, a new game is played in the arena. Three or four young bulls are released into the stadium and the runners take turns rushing up behind them, swatting them with rolled-up newspapers and then running away. The bulls will chase the person who swatted them until somebody else comes up and swats them again; the bulls then instantly give up on whomever they were just chasing and turn to pursue this new affront. The easily distracted nature of bulls, coupled with the fact you can jump/clamber over the stadium wall if necessary to get away, makes this part of the bull running more fun than it is dangerous.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Once I had worked out the nature of the “swat bulls and run away game” I played until – on my third trip over the wall – I landed poorly and broke one of my toes. <i>Well, that’s that</i> I thought to myself. I decided that I had accomplished what I had set out to do, that I had acquitted myself adequately, and that running the bulls in Pamplona was something I now could cross off of my bucket list. So I rejoined my friends, tossed aside whatever scraps of good sense I still had left, and availed myself of all the festivity San Fermίn had to offer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Done correctly – with foreknowledge, planning and relative sobriety – running the bulls in Pamplona can be a reasonably safe and yet still iconic, once-in-a-lifetime experience. In fact, the kind of experience that should be once-in-a-lifetime. Because having run the bulls once, you can spend the rest of your life secure in the knowledge that there is no need to ever, ever do something so crazy stupid again.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-17442121643259305632012-05-18T13:32:00.000-07:002012-05-18T13:32:42.111-07:00Of Comic Books and Conservatives<div class="MsoNormal">Straight up confession, here. I am a 43 year old man, and I still read comic books.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, that’s not too big of a confession these days. Take a look at the box office receipts and you will see that the ranks of fanboys have taken over a good chunk of popular culture. Like most of America, my ass was in a movie seat for the <i>Avengers</i> within 3 days of its release, despite the fact that (for various reasons) when I saw it I was working on less than 4 hours sleep in the past 36 hours.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(Speaking of which . . . did I miss something while zoning out in the darkened theater? That entire second act, when Loki was in the SHIELD helicarrier . . . was there a point to any of that? I think that was just there to fulfill storytelling requirements, but <i>why</i> did he plan to get locked up in the first place? Was that ever explained?)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I come by my fanboy biases honestly. When I was only about 4 years old my grandfather, who owned a bookstore, gifted me a trade paperback that reprinted the origin stories of Marvel’s greatest heroes: Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Dr. Strange . . . . And I pestered my grandmother to re-read those stories to me so much that in exasperation she decided it would be easier to teach me to read for myself. So I went from comic books to Dick And Jane stories and then back to comic books again.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I really treasure what comic books have given to me. Not only the gift of learning to read, but also a love for mythology. My introduction to the Norse and Greek pantheons was made via comic books. And they expanded my vocabulary. To this day I remember getting bullied because when I was seven I called another boy “incorrigible.” It wasn’t the insult that got me bullied, it was the fact that I was using polysyllables. I had picked up the word from a Green Arrow story.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And let’s be clear . . . when I was a teenager, growing up in the 1980’s, that was a golden age for comic books. My grandfather had expanded his bookstore into VHS tape rentals, magazines, and comics and I worked there during High School. We ended up starting a lucrative business buying and selling old comics, and because I was the only one in the family who knew anything about this stuff I got to be in charge of it. The 1980’s saw Frank Miller’s <i>The Dark Knight Returns</i> and Alan Moore’s <i>The Watchmen.</i> I remember reading that stuff when it came out, and waiting breathlessly for the next issue. That was some heady, heady stuff. It paved the way for Neil Gaiman’s <i>The Sandman</i>, which easily clears the bar of high grade literature.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what I remember being most impressed with was not the stories – not exactly – but with being confronted by the use of the medium to tell those stories. There was an issue of <i>Swamp Thing</i> written – of course – by Alan Moore that epitomized this for me. In a single 22-page issue, Moore told two parallel but contrasting stories, each of which were separated by a single page. That is, when you were holding the book in your hands, the page on the left told one story and the page on the right told a different story. But the two were connected, and you could literally <i>see</i> the construction being made . . . a construction that was greater than the sum of its parts.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And the meta-story ended exactly the way all conflicted stories should: with the narrator puzzled by what it all means. It was a beautiful, beautiful piece of fiction writing, and something that could not have been conveyed in any other medium.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">* * *<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But, of course, these tales are an ode to the best of what the medium can produce, not a description of what the medium is mostly about. What it mostly is about is brain candy, Right and Wrong in great, four-color format. Morality tales dressed up in tights; Truth, Justice and the American Way easily digestible and easily absorbed.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not that there is much wrong with that. It’s nice to feast on pablum, every once in a while. And there is a reason we refer to things that are bad for us as “comfort food.” One can only have so much vegetables. Occasionally, we all need some cookie dough.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so I keep that injunction in mind while I read my comics, skimming through what passes for entertainment and looking for that truly emotive moment that I know these things can still provide. I understand that most of what I am reading is <i>not</i> literature, is <i>not</i> morality, is nothing more than brain candy, a rush of sugar – like a pixie stick – to be downed before rushing back to the adult world.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But y’know what? I worry about conservatives. I worry that they haven’t figured out that this kind of brain candy, infantilized storytelling doesn’t really reflect the Real World. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Part of the problem I have with your standard comics story is that I don’t understand the motivations of the Bad Guy. Picture Doctor Doom or the Red Skull: <i>I Will Rule the World!</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Seriously? These guys want to “rule the world”? They’re supposed to be geniuses, and yet <i>this</i> is their goal? I think ruling the world would suck. Don’t get me wrong . . . I understand wanting to be free to do whatever you want to do. But that just means that you are rich. Ruling the World actually means a lot of work, and being responsible for, well, <i>everything</i>.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And that leads me to my next point: after you’ve got enough money to do whatever you want, what kind of person believes their lives will be better if they just have a little bit <i>more</i>? Seriously, how does that make any sense at all?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, we are treated to stories like<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/18/1092716/-Mitt-Romney-says-he-might-move-to-Florida-after-the-election"> this,</a> in which Mitt Romney – aspirant to the highest job in the nation – talks about moving to Florida because it doesn’t have a state income tax. Mitt Romney, already richer than any of us common folk can fathom, wants to live in a state because that means he’ll have <i>just a little bit more.</i> <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I can’t be the only person who looks at people like this and sees a cartoon, comic-book villain, can I?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-89478268933498125102012-05-15T12:33:00.001-07:002012-05-15T12:35:08.647-07:00Random Thought For the DayI came across the word "portmanteau" today. I'm familiar with the word -- have been for years -- and understand that it is a mash-up of two different words to describe a new concept. And I've understood that for years as well.<br />
<br />
And yet, it is not a common term and so - as always when I run across it - I have to take a moment to remind myself what the word means. And, as always, I am once again struck by the fact that the term "portmanteau" doesn't refer to a piece of furniture.<br />
<br />
"Portmanteau" . . . it just sounds like the name of a piece of furniture.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-73088873183097411942012-05-08T16:06:00.000-07:002012-05-08T16:06:28.729-07:00Napoleon, R.I.P.<br />
<div id="intro" style="background-color: white; color: #242424; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
About five months ago <a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2011/12/watching-napoleon-part-i.html">I wrote about a recent scare</a> I had had with my dog, Napoleon. </div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
(That's him, there, toward the right . . . the avatar I use.)</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
I knew he was growing old and was increasingly in bad health, and something happened back in December that scared me and more than half persuaded me at the time that his checking out of my life was imminent. But then it all turned out to have been a false alarm, something easily fixed, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Still . . . I titled the post "Part I" because I knew that there was no long-term solution to the real problem that my poor dog was growing old and that I was going to eventually lose him.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
I lost him this past Saturday.</div>
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="article-body" id="body" style="background-color: white; color: #242424; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
I am working nights, these days, at the <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">local hospital</span> on the weekends. Which means I need to get plenty of sleep on Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons in order to be rested enough to do my job on Saturday, Sunday and Monday early mornings.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
When I got back home early last Saturday morning I ate some breakfast and then went out to the garage to play with the dogs (Napoleon and Homer). I let them out to use the bathroom, then secured Homer's leash (he's still very much a puppy) so that he couldn't get away and I did some work in the garage, cleaning up after them. (I can't stand the idea of leaving them in crates - no matter how large the crate - while I have to be away, but they are not used to not being in the house; they express their displeasure by soiling the garage's concrete floor, and I express my penitence for their <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">temporary exile</span> by cleaning up after them.)</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
I suppose now, in hindsight, I should have noticed something. Napoleon didn't move about much in the yard, preferring instead to sit in the sun. He didn't go to the bathroom and, later, he didn't express much interest in food or water. But he had been getting old and infirm for a while now, and I chalked it up to not much more than that.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
After a few hours I put him and Homer back into the garage, told them I would see them again in a few hours, and went off to sleep.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
When I woke up around 8:00 or so, I went back out to check on them. Homer was anxious to see me, but Napoleon was dead on the floor of his open crate.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Damn.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
* * *</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
As before, when I lost Virgil and turned to Napoleon for comfort, my <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">immediate refuge</span> was simply to keep moving. I snapped the leash on Homer and took him for a walk. This, after all, had been one huge motivating factor in my finding Homer a year and half ago: I knew that I would be losing Napoleon soon, and I wanted to have another bulldog to comfort me and to help share the space Napoleon was going to leave in my life, exactly the way Napoleon had comforted me and helped to share the space that had been left in it when Virgil died.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Perhaps fortunately for me, work beckoned. <a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2012/05/nursing-and-surfing.html">As I've mentioned before</a>, one of the biggest attractions of doing what I do these days is that my job requires that I put aside any thoughts of myself and focus instead on others. I am convinced that being able to do so for hours Saturday night was a <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">huge benefit</span> for me, because when 7:00 am Sunday morning rolled around I think my subconscious had been able to sort out the fact of Napoleon's loss (no, screw that for sheer euphemism . . . <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">my</em> loss of Napoleon) whilst the rest of my brain was otherwise engaged. I felt strangely composed driving from the hospital to collect my dogs.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Homer, again, was incredibly excited to see me; Napoleon, naturally, remained in the blanket in which I had wrapped him the night before. I loaded both into my car and drove the 20 minutes to my parents' house on the Intracoastal Waterway.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
After I arrived I found a spot under their porch that was blessedly free of PVC pipe, cable wiring, etc., and started to dig. Homer was attached to his leash, which was tied around a railing on one of the backstair banisters, and he watched me toil. Unlike when I buried Virgil on Emerald Isle, the soil here is not really soil but clay. Which means it is waterlogged and very heavy. Scooping shovelfuls out of the ground was <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">backbreaking work</span>, but I kept at it longer than I needed to. Much, much longer.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Like everybody, I like to think I know why I am doing the things I am doing. I like to think that I am rational, and that I have a good reason for what I am doing. But I'll say this for digging a grave: the sheer <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">physicality</em> of shifting that much dirt will draw you up sometimes.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
And the nice thing about clay is that it will hold the walls of a grave well -- there is no sliding of loose soil about the pit you are digging. All you have to do is point the shovel blade straight down, step on it, and a nice sized chunk will come off while the rest of the surrounding earth stays in place. You can dig one of those nice, well-defined graves like you see whenever the Winchesters are digging up a corpse on <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Supernatural</em>, the kind of grave-digging you think doesn't exist outside of Hollywood.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Unfortunately, that also means that you don't have the excuse of sliding walls of dirt to keep digging. Once you've got a pet's grave four <span class="inline-link inline-link-active" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 148, 208); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: blue; cursor: pointer; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">feet deep</span> or so, once you find yourself at that stage and taking a break to rest on your shovel to get your breath back, once you are that deep into the ground and you find your shirt soaked completely through with the effort . . . well, then you have to stop and ask yourself why you are still digging.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that because if you don't keep digging then you'll have to stop, and when you stop you will have to bury your dog, and you don't really feel like doing that. Unfortunately, once you realize that this is what you are doing -- delaying the inevitable because you don't want to have to make that final goodbye -- you know it is time to stop.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
* * *</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
I carried Napoleon in my arms for the last time, in the blanket I had wrapped him in, and dropped him into the deep, deep pit I had made for him. Homer, who had tangled his leash around various fence posts, was yet by Napoleon's grave and he looked at me.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
"You were a good boy, Napoleon," I gave my eulogy, "you were a great boy." And then I shoveled the clay back onto the body of my good, great boy. After I had filled in the grave I found two flat paving stones, left behind from some unfinished previous work of home improvement that my parents abandoned before they abandoned this house to live in a condo. I used those stones to mark Napoleon's grave.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
* * *</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
After a night's worth of work and a day's worth of grave-digging, I was exhausted. I knew already I wouldn't be able to get nearly enough sleep to feel 100% for Sunday night's shift, and that I wouldn't get any rest afterward because I had my last CNA class first thing Monday morning.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
But that was okay.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
One thing that occurred to me, on the 20 mile drive back from my parents' old place -- and this may sound weird -- but I wonder if we haven't undergone some unappreciated loss by our efforts to make death and the loss of loved ones as painless as possible.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Please don't get me wrong, and please don't for a moment think that I am trying to equate the loss of my pet to anybody's loss of a beloved relative. (For what it is worth, I've lost beloved relatives too.)</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
But it occurred to me that -- all in all, and understanding (as I have, for years) that being forced to say goodbye to Napoleon was <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">always</em> how our relationship was going to play out -- I felt <span style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">better</span> for having been there for all of it with him, and I felt <span style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">better</span> for having killed myself Sunday morning digging his grave. It was almost a sense of expiation, as if by breaking my back to prepare his resting place I had . . . I dunno . . . <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">honored</em> him? <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Acknowledged</em> him?</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
One thing I think our modern material outlook gives too little shrift to is the real need humans have for symbolism and emotive meaning. I firmly believe that the Universe is a vast, abstract, random series of events and what makes humans and Consciousness Itself so wonderful is that we absolutely <em style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">refuse</em> to see it that way.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Humans are not the tool using creatures, we are not the beast that walks on two legs, we are not even the laughing ape . . . we are meaning-creating creatures. We create meaning in the world.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
From a strictly materialistic point of view, I suppose I could have taken Napoleon's body to the local vet and had him cremated. It would have cost some money, and it would have been vastly easier.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
But, sad as it was, it feels infinitely better to have actually buried him.</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
Goodbye Napoleon. You were a good boy.</div>
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-61703478846553756202012-05-02T13:50:00.000-07:002012-05-02T13:50:44.110-07:00Nursing and Surfing<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So I was walking my dog Sunday evening; I was trying to
adjust my sleep schedule so that I can be awake in the mornings again. I slept away most of Sunday afternoon and
hoped to get some more sleep later before I had to show up for my eight o’clock Monday morning class.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">These days I spend Friday night/Saturday mornings
and Saturday night/Sunday mornings at the local hospital, where I work as a
Certified Nurse Aide. I became a CNA I
about a month ago, and am still in school for the CNA II. But my school does clinical work at the local
hospital, and apparently I made enough of an impression that they wanted to
hire me before I finished my program.
And so for the past two weekends I’ve been working at the hospital
whilst I finish learning all the stuff I need to help the patients for whom I
am caring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It has been an interesting experience, this actually
doing the job for which I am still being trained. It is exhilarating, for one thing, that sense
of flying by the seat of your pants when you know that you don’t <i>really </i>understand yet what you are doing
but have to pretend that you do anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 21px;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For example . . . I am developing a better sense and
clearer understanding of the necessity of all the clinical stuff that my class
did earlier in the program. Don’t get me
wrong. I would never in any way
denigrate what it is that we CNAs do, or the skill it takes to do what we
do. But . . . still . . . if you can
demonstrate your ability in the lab, in the classroom, then you can demonstrate
that same ability in Real Life, with Real Patients. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Except you can’t, because it is never the same, not
in the Real World. And, besides, a lot
of what we do is fairly intimate. We
bathe people, we feed people, and we wipe people’s bums. We insert catheters into people. We see people at their most helpless and
their most vulnerable. We are there to
help, but a lot of people don’t know how to accept that help, or feel ashamed
for doing so. One woman, just two weeks
ago, told me that she was ashamed that she had a colostomy bag, which I was
changing and cleaning for her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So you learn to think on the fly, and try to address
the particular patient’s needs as they arise, and you learn how to talk to
people who look to you to provide them comfort and are often ashamed to be
asking for help.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For my money, the real importance of all that stuff
we were doing earlier in clinicals was <u>not</u> about learning to do the
stuff we learned to do in lab better, it was about learning to do the stuff we
learned to do in lab <i>well</i>. It was about learning how to talk to and
relate to and deal with the actual human beings who are the people we are
supposed to be helping. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">My sense is that one of the biggest obstacles to
people doing this job well is that none of us are naturally comfortable with
the kind of intimacy the job requires.
Seriously, who in their right mind – in the normal world – would be at
all comfortable with the idea of cleaning out another adult’s anus, or genital
region? Who would feel comfortable even with <i>feeding</i> another adult, or wiping their
chin?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But this is the job that has to be done, for a lot
of people, and when that job needs to be done it is the most important job –
for that person – that anyone can be asked to do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The <u>real</u> benefit of clinicals, of being forced
to deal with this stuff at least once or twice a week, is not that it inures
you to the natural negative reaction you might otherwise have to piss, or shit,
or vomit, but that it destroys your <u>own</u> reticence with other
people. Suddenly you are not imposing on
somebody’s private business, you are assisting them in getting past a bad
spell. You are not a public gawker, you
are a private confidante. More than
anything, you are someone whose job is to be there for that person when they
need someone, whether to hold their hair or lift them up or just squeeze their
hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">That is always a challenging and interesting
experience, and – I think – a rewarding one as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I am old enough to have lost track of the people I
am supposed to be. It is my sense that
most people think they have characters and roles and functions they are
supposed to fill. A lot of people want
to be a Hero, or a Love Interest, or a Quip.
I’ve wanted to be one or two of those things myself, until I got tired
of trying to fit myself into some other thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But I am very much enjoying myself these days, with
the new job and the new education I am pursuing. I was thinking about it this evening whilst
walking my dog and trying to nail down what it was I enjoy so much about
working at the hospital. And then I
realized why I was so happy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What I am doing, these days, is surfing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I still believe what I believed when I was a
teenager: Nobody is an <i>ex-</i>surfer. Nobody once surfed, and then stopped. There is no way anybody could mainline what
it is like to be a Surfer – an <i>honest-to-God
Surfer</i> – and then decide . . . . <i>Hmmmmmm
. . . . no, I think I’m done with that.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Surfing doesn’t work that way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But I’ve thought about why that is, and I am pretty
sure I know the answer. It is because
surfing is the closest most people get to experiencing Enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong . . . . I’m not talking some mystic bug-a-boo in the
sky. I’m talking Enlightenment with a
focus on the material world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The way I see it, most of the time we all spend our
lives not really living them but <i>thinking</i>
about how we are living them. Hell! That’s the premise of most advertising
commercials these days: <i>Buy our product, you'll think your life is better</i>. Even in sports, when you hear an announcer
scream <i>He was in The Moment</i> (or,
alternatively, <i>The Zone</i>), what you
are hearing is an acknowledgement that somebody just pulled off some incredibly
difficult athletic feat <i>because he wasn’t
thinking, he was just <u>there</u></i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Surfing is the quintessence of that experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When you catch a wave, when you slide down its face
and start working the board over it . . . your mind just goes right out of your
body. For that ride – and it is a short
ride, where I live (beachbreaks) the ride doesn’t last much beyond 10 whole
seconds – the brain has just checked out.
Instead, I am moving my legs, my toes, my <i>body</i> simultaneously with a fickle piece of moving, changeable water
and <i>it isn’t until I am done with it</i>
and am paddling back toward the lineup that I even know what it is I just did.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Surfing is mostly about replaying what you just did,
because you can’t watch yourself doing it.
And y’know <i>why</i> you can’t watch
yourself doing it? <i>Because you’re bloody <u>doing</u> it!<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Same/same with taking care of patients. I’m still in orientation, but somebody called
in sick the other night and I was asked to take over one wing on my floor and
run it by myself. “Sure!” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But it was great.
In fact, it was exhilarating. I
spent 8 hours taking care of 16 patients and – when it was done – I realized
that for the entire time I hadn’t thought about myself at all. I had spent 8 hours thinking about other
people, and what they might need and what I needed to do to make sure that they
were taking care of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I had been surfing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Cool. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-64974794383332327472012-02-03T13:38:00.000-08:002012-02-03T13:38:27.313-08:00Toward a 21st Century Economic PatriarchyThis is just a brief rumination. I've not thought too deeply or too long about it, so perhaps there is something I am missing or there is some wrinkle I don't see that makes the metaphor not work . . . but it struck me a little while ago how seemingly connected is the economic Right Wing's worship of the <i>uber-</i>rich "job creators" and the social Right Wing's denigration of women as second-class citizens.<br />
<br />
Bear with me on this one, while I try and tease out these thoughts.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Here's how it started: I was reading <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-adv-komen-20120203,0,7840097.story?track=rss">this LA Times op-ed</a> about the Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfuffle when I ran across this statement: "<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">The Komen decision will probably prompt more attacks on Planned Parenthood, which has long provided low-cost medical care<i> to women</i> in need." (emphasis added) Because I am (i) a guy, and (ii) a language nerd who owns an unabridged copy of the OED and who frequently speculates about word and term origins, one of the first things that struck me about that phrase was the idea that anything that called itself Planned <i>Parenthood</i> would necessarily be focused on <i>women's </i>health-care needs -- after all, it takes two people to make a child and men are parents too.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">(Put down the pitchforks, please . . . I'm getting to it.)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Of course, immediately following my word-nerd reaction was the real-person understanding that - </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">duh</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> - parenthood doesn't affect men and women the same way. It just </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">doesn't.</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> Biologically speaking, a man can be a parent after a moment's worth of seizure and the contribution of a single sperm. A woman becomes a parent after nurturing a little person in her own body -- often at the sizable expense of her own health and welfare -- for nine months. Delivering that little person into the world is sometimes vastly dangerous and very often extremely painful. And none of this even touches on the fact that the (putative) "Daddy" may already be long gone, leaving the (undeniable) "Mommy" solely responsible for caring for a new soul that will be without the capacity to care for itself for years and years and years.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Yeah . . . it takes two to reproduce, but only one of those two has a choice about whether to shoulder the burden of that reproduction, and the one without any such choice is always the woman. I'm all for gender equality and treating Men and Women the same, but not when doing so flies in the face of Reality. When it comes to reproduction, Men and Women are </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">not</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> the same and we do ourselves and our very reason a disservice when we try to pretend that they are. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">"Planned Parenthood," "reproductive rights" . . . these are all issues that primarily impact women and we men -- even we men who are wholly behind and supportive of these issues, and women, and feminism, and </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">etc.</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> -- we are mostly just along for the ride to offer encouragement, moral and political support.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">* * * </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">The next thought I had was how weird it is that for most of recorded history, men have claimed their children as their own, like a property right. As if a man has any right to his child merely by contribution of a spasm and a sperm cell compared to all that the woman has had to contribute: her own time, her own body, her own agony, her own nutrition.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">"I fathered that boy, Rebecca," we've all seen some version of this in our movies or our books or our </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">etc.,</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> "and I won't let you take him from me."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Really? </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Really?</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> You grunted out half an epileptic fit on top of some woman and now you and you </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">alone</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> own the fruits of her body? How insane is that idea?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Note . . . I'm not talking about </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">daddies.</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> Anybody can be a father, it takes someone important to be a Daddy. What I'm talking about is the mindset that can believe for a second that an instant's worth of seed results in a lifetime's worth of claim.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">* * * </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">And now, maybe, you've intuited where I'm going with this.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">By far, the supporting refrain I've heard most often about how Rich People are "the job creators" is the slogan "A poor person never hired anybody." I think it is intended to shut down debate, and that the implicit argument goes like this: nobody can get a paying job unless there is somebody who can pay them, and the only people who can pay people to work are rich people. Ergo, if you punish rich people, they will stop hiring others and the jobs will go away.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">It is a witless argument, but let's consider it on its merits.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Essentially, the idea is that rich people have the seed money to drop into productive enterprises. Those enterprises, nurtured by the work, sweat and toil of their employees, will produce goods and/or services that others will want, which will -- in turn -- increase demand for more of those goods and services. Which will result in even more jobs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">But - according to the "job creator" understanding of the world --</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> what is important in this formulation is </span><u style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">not</u><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> the people who had the vision for this new company, and it is </span><u style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">not</u><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> the people who worked hard to keep this new company afloat, and it <u>not</u> the people who sacrificed their blood, sweat and tears to keep the company going . . . No. No, none of that <i>gestational</i> stuff is important at all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">The only thing that is important is the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">seed</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"> money. If you deliver the seed money, you get to claim ownership of the offspring. And so the important thing, whenever you look at a productive enterprise, is not the people that work there or the people who support it or the people who keep it going . . . no, the important thing is that there was once someone there to provide it with seed capital. </span><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Once there was an investment banker - I forget his name, child, but he was a charmer, yes he was, and he and he alone is responsible for the fact that your Daddy had a job he could go to until the day he worked himself to death - and he and he alone will be responsible for the fact that you, too, will one day drop dead while still working.</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;">Sing His Praises. </i><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><br />
</span>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-48427064094192961502012-01-28T17:01:00.000-08:002012-01-29T07:46:51.513-08:00Democracy by Date Rape, Representation by RoofieSo this morning I was alerted - via <a href="http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/01/27/friday-evening-open-thread-12/">Anne Laurie</a> over at <i>Balloon Juice</i> -- about this <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/why-yes-mitt-romney-does-lie-a-great-deal.html">Jon Chait piece</a> regarding Mitt Romney. I've read the Chait piece in its entirety and its premise is that Mitt Romney is just a goddamned liar. He lies repeatedly, he lies often, he lies regularly, and he lies without regard for the truth. Good. Glad Chait recognizes that.<br />
<br />
But then, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/why-yes-mitt-romney-does-lie-a-great-deal.html">there's this</a> from that same piece:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I've always had a soft spot for Mitt Romney, who strikes me, in a way I can't completely define, as a good guy. The fact that he is an audacious liar does not strike me as a definitive judgment on his character, but primarily a reflection of the circumstances he finds himself in -- having to transition from winning a majority of a fairly liberal electorate to winning a majority of a rabidly conservative one, one that cannot be placated without indulging in all sorts of fantasies. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">[<i>snip</i>] </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">I see him as a patrician pol, like George H. W. Bush, who believes deeply in public service but regards elections as a cynical process of pandering to rubes.</blockquote>I gotta tell you . . . I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I understand what Chait is saying here -- and I understand that his main take-away is that Romney is, in fact, an inveterate liar on the campaign trail -- but couple that with the foregoing and I think what I am listening to is an <i>excuse</i> for Romney to be a huge liar on the campaign trail.<br />
<br />
The excuse goes something like: <i>Yeah, sure . . . Romney is lying, but he's only saying things he doesn't believe in order to get elected. Deep down and underneath it all, he's not a bad guy -- he's like Poppy Bush.</i><br />
<i></i><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Excuse me but . . . WTF?!? This entire thing smacks of the very elitism and self-regard that the 99% are always railing about regarding the 1% - economically speaking.<br />
<br />
First . . . either you believe in democratic self-governance, or you don't. Either you believe the people can govern themselves, or you don't. Jefferson said it best when he said the great mass of men break down between those who trust the people, and those who fear the people and who prefer instead an aristocracy. It can be an aristocracy of Aristotle's <i>arete</i> (which never has been tried) or it can be an aristocracy of wealth and privilege (tried many times before with - uhhmm - <i>disastrous </i>results), but it is definitely not a <i>democracy.</i><br />
<br />
Second . . . if you declare that the people are fit to govern themselves and that you believe in democracy, you don't get to point to all the people's flat-out failures of self-governance (for example, giving George W. Bush a second term), as a reason to justify pandering to and duping them. Self-governance counts for nothing if the people are duped into voting for their leadership; that is democracy as date-rape, that is governance by the consent of the roofied.<br />
<br />
Third . . . if you cast your lot with representative democracy <i>and</i> you think that the people often make amazingly poor decisions (as, personally, I do) then you must ask yourself <i>why</i> that is; why have the people - in whom the very hope for democracy rests - failed themselves?<br />
<br />
My favorite answer is that the pundits and the political media have failed us. People like Chait, who at once can say they think Romney is a nice guy and then excuse his lying and pandering as "just something one needs to do to get elected" are the ones who already think they are not "of the people." They obviously think that "the people" are those other, lesser masses, the great unwashed and unlearned who cannot be reached but only patted on the head and distracted with a pretty lie.<br />
<br />
Personally, my belief in democracy is a bit stronger. I'm pretty sure that my next door neighbor would have no problem recognizing right and wrong if the people reporting on our politics weren't so goddamned gun-shy about being called "partisan" whenever they pointed out that -- oh yeah, by the way -- Mitt Romney is lying <i>again.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
Just yesterday I was listening to Diane Rehm's Friday News Roundup, and she had -- as always -- three political pundit/reporters on. One was talking about Mitt Romney and his claim that the US is militarily weaker now than it ever has been before because -- for instance -- we have less ships in the Navy now than at any time since 1917.<br />
<br />
"This is a nonsense argument," the guy said, "because of course we have different<i> types </i>of ships now. We have aircraft carriers with sonar and radar and we can control a huge amount of sea with less actual ships. So this is like comparing apples to oranges and doesn't really tell us anything.<br />
<br />
"Of course," he continued, "it is <i>technically</i> true, so Romney can make this argument and I guess we'll have to see how this plays out in the campaign."<br />
<br />
Really? <i>Really?</i> "Romney can make this argument and we'll have to see how this plays out in the campaign?" And <i>you</i> -- the guy the rest of America looks to to tell them the <i>news</i> -- have <i>no obligation </i>to point out that Romney is fucking lying to us all?<br />
<br />
And then these same pundit/reporters want to sneer about how dumb the American electorate is, and how politicians have to pander to us, and they never - ever - think that maybe they are even the least bit responsible for this state of affairs. That maybe if they were actually <i>journalists</i> -- and not stenographers and theater critics -- our democracy might actually work a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
The First Amendment's concerns for the freedom of the press weren't inscribed so that political star-fuckers could hitch their wagons, get famous on the TeeVee, and live well. Those concerns were put in place because -- when we started the going concern that is the United States of America -- it was understood that somebody had to speak Truth to Power, and that somebody had to call <i>BULLSHIT!</i> when they saw bullshit happening.<br />
<br />
That somebody was supposed to be the press. The press was supposed to be something other than, different than, <i>better than</i> entertainment and propaganda.<br />
<br />
Politics as a bloodless bloodsport, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets, pick your teams, try to forget that it doesn't really make a difference and never, ever pay attention to the little man whose hand is in your pocket and whose accomplice is stealing your future.<br />
<br />
To be sure, today's political press will never tell you.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-88816906012721813092012-01-28T15:19:00.000-08:002012-01-28T21:23:53.308-08:00An Old Man in SchoolWell, I'm back. The frequency of posting obviously has gone down since <a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2012/01/making-life-change.html">the nursing classes in which I enrolled</a> actually started. The classes themselves consume 30 hours a week, and I am still juggling professional responsibilities in the Life from which I am slowly disentangling myself. <br />
<br />
Also, a lot of my free time has been consumed by a bunch of additional extraneous errands necessary to get through the nursing program. First, I had to get my shot records, which I was unable to find anywhere (I have never really had a regular doctor) and so just this Wednesday I ended up getting hit with about 6 different vaccines all at once and was sick as a dog for two days. I also had to get a brief physical, which, it turns out, you can't get unless you can produce your shot records (had the physical today, and am in good health - if not great shape - thank you very much). And finally - for some reason - a dentist has to say that my teeth look alright (I'm taking care of that Monday afternoon). <br />
<br />
All of this is in addition to getting CPR certified (taken care of last week) and passing the criminal background check (which, between you and me, is the only one I was worried about and yet the easiest one to get through . . . mostly because it didn't require any effort on my part.)<br />
<br />
Oh yeah . . . and I've moved again, which involved relocating myself, a good deal of my possessions, and the dogs.<br />
<br />
So while I've been keeping abreast of recent goings on I haven't really had an opportunity to comment much on them. And I intend to, shortly, but first I thought I'd talk about one aspect of my experience in the nursing program: being the oldest guy in the class.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>As I mentioned earlier, my program is the Certified Nursing Assistant program -- the CNAs are the people who actually provide direct care to patients. So we are learning all kinds of practical things, like how to turn patients (without injuring them) so that they do not develop bed sores, or how to change the bed linen of a patient who cannot get out of bed. <br />
<br />
Typically, the first 2 hours are spent in lecture, and the remaining time in class is spent practicing the actual physical skills that we are supposed to be able to do. The classroom is outfitted with 6 practice hospital beds, and my class of 12 has been divided into 6 pairs. My partner is a young woman named Danielle.<br />
<br />
Because we are expected to be able to actually do this stuff in the Real World, it is insufficient for us to simply demonstrate a technical knowledge of each skill that we learn; we also are expected to be able to communicate with our patients. The school wants to inculcate in us a reflexive respect for the patients' dignity and an empathy that goes beyond mere professionalism. So in addition to demonstrating technical skill, we also are required to role play; one person plays the CNA, the other person is in the bed, playing the role of the patient.<br />
<br />
And each skill practice/demonstration begins the same way. You knock on the door and wait for permission to enter the room. Then you greet the patient, introduce yourself, and then <i>ask the patient to confirm they are who they are supposed to be</i>. (Because you want to make sure that you're not giving care to someone for whom it was not prescribed.) You do that by asking the patient to state their full name and date of birth while you check what they say against the medical bracelet on their wrist. (Kind of like being a bouncer, if you think about it.) Finally, you draw the privacy curtain (very important) and proceed to the skill set.<br />
<br />
The goal is to make this routine so standard that we do it reflexively, without thinking. The two most important aspects, of course, are (i) confirming the patient's identity by name and birth date, and (ii) drawing the privacy curtain.<br />
<br />
Of course, what this means in Real Life is that you end up knowing exactly how old is any person with whom you end up working. Our instructor told us when classes began that if we liked we could lie about our ages and I very briefly contemplated doing so, but dismissed the idea as the weakest sort of vanity. I am who I am -- I'm the Old Guy. My only concession to vanity was to stop, a few days into the exercises, actually giving my birth date by month, day and year, and substituting instead a string of numbers: "1-8-69." The string of numbers seemed slightly euphemistic.<br />
<br />
As it turns out, my partner - Danielle - was born the same year I graduated High School. I've known this now for some weeks, and still remember being hit with the knowledge the first time she answered when I asked for her date of birth. And then, just this past Thursday, I worked briefly with another young woman - April - and I discovered that she was born the same year I graduated college. Damn.<br />
<br />
But by far the worst of these is Jessica. On the very first day of class, when we were all asked to introduce ourselves, Jessica explained that she <i>had just graduated High School</i>. Thinking quickly, I figured that meant that she was probably born the same year I was graduating from law school. Of course, I didn't feel any real need to draw anybody else's attention to this fact. But it wouldn't stay unremarked upon for too long.<br />
<br />
This Tuesday, during the very first of our skill set practices, I was lying in the hospital bed pretending to be the patient and Danielle was standing over me and asking for my name and date of birth. When I said "1-8-69" the privacy curtain flew open and there was Jessica staring at me gob-smacked and gap-mouthed.<br />
<br />
"My God," she said, "do you know that you're older than <i>my Mom?</i>"<br />
<br />
"What?!?" I exclaimed in mock outrage. "What! What the <i>hell</i> kind of information is that to hit a guy with at eight o'clock in the morning? What the <i>hell</i> is the matter with you? Do you think I need to hear that this early in the morning? Jesus! What's the <i>matter</i> with you?""<br />
<br />
Of course, one of the great things about the truly young is that they are easy to bluff. Jessica's mouth went from gap-mouthed open to the more common "O"-open of embarrassed shame. "No, no," she stammered, obviously thinking she had committed a <i>faux pas</i>, "you don't understand. My Mom, she's very young, she's a <i>young</i> Mom, she -"<br />
<br />
"No, no," I said, "no, don't try to walk it back. You can't un-ring that bell, Jessica. You've ruined my morning, just go." And I made that little shooing sign with my hands, and sighed very loudly. Jessica retreated behind the privacy curtain again and I winked at Danielle, who giggled.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Later, Danielle would let Jessica know that I wasn't really upset, which, y'know, I really <i>wasn't</i>. I was mostly just amused by it all, but also I took it as an opportunity to reflect on how everyone's sense of identity plays out inside of ourselves.<br />
<br />
When I was growing up, I was very close with my mother's parents. My grandmother was named Ammy, and my grandfather was Papa. And, by the time I was about 12 or 13, I was an acolyte in the Episcopal church in which my grandmother played the organ. My parents never went to church, so whenever I was required to serve I would spend that Saturday night with my grandparents, and then catch a ride with them to church next morning.<br />
<br />
Maybe my strongest memory of my grandfather comes from one of those nights spent sleeping over at their house. I was crashed out on the couch, and my grandfather and my uncle had gone out for beers after closing up the bookstore that evening. When my grandfather came home he was trying to be quiet, but he made enough noise to wake me up anyway. When he saw that I was awake, he pulled up a chair to talk to me. <br />
<br />
We talked about a lot of stuff, I suppose -- I think the conversation went on for more than an hour. I can't remember what any of it was about, now. I remember realizing that he was a little drunk. But I'll never forget how he ended that conversation.<br />
<br />
"You know," he told me, "you look at me and you see an old man. You've never known me any other way. But it's weird, y'know . . . I still feel the way I felt when I was 17 -- like I'm just getting started. I think everybody feels that way, all the time. You grow up, you get a job, you get married, you have a family. People start to look to you like you know things, like you have the answers. But you don't, not really. Really, you're always just the kid you've always been.<br />
<br />
"At least, that's how I've always felt. And y'know? It's how I expect I always will feel -- like a kid who doesn't know anything, and who is just getting started." Then he kissed me, and went off to bed.<br />
<br />
I've thought about that conversation many, many times over the years. It was the centerpiece of the eulogy that I delivered on the day my grandfather's body was buried. And I believe now, as I believed then, that he was right about that. We none of us really change; we just become more and more who we already are.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
This isn't exactly on point but just the other day, while we were taking a break, Jessica and Danielle and Crystal were debating the deliciousness of pomegranates. April said that she loved the seeds, Crystal claimed not to be able to stand them. "Eat the seeds, go to hell," I told April.<br />
<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
"You've never heard that story?" April shook her head. So I gave her an abbreviated version of the Persephone abduction story, and how it explains the changing of the seasons:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>When the world was new and the Gods were young, Demeter was the goddess of green growing things and she had a beautiful daughter named Persephone. </i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>One day Persephone was walking in the fields of Earth and Hades, Lord of the Underworld, looked up and said: "That's the girl for me." </i><i>The earth split open under Persephone's feet and Hades, in a chariot drawn by four large, black horses, grabbed the girl and took her to stay with him in his kingdom under the Earth.</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>When Demeter could not find her daughter she became so sad that the green things stopped growing, and so the rest of the gods joined together and approached Hades and told him that he must give the girl up.</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>"Fine," said Hades, "but only if she has taken nothing from me and my kingdom."</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Unfortunately, Persephone had eaten 6 pomegranate seeds while she was in the Underworld. And so a deal was reached. Persephone would spend six months of the year - one for each pomegranate seed -- in the underworld with Hades, and the rest of the time with her mother.</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>And so it came to pass that - once a year - Persephone goes underground and Demeter grows sad, and the growing things die and we have Autumn and, eventually, Winter. But, after six months have passed, Persephone returns and Demeter is so overjoyed we have Spring again.</i> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>And so it has been going, year upon year upon year, forever after. The Seasons themselves turn because of a mother's love.</i></blockquote> When I was done, April smiled. "That's a nice story," she said.<br />
<br />
And she has a beautiful smile, and I thought suddenly how nice it is to have had the time to learn the stories that can do that for people.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-31612376492204573992012-01-21T09:37:00.000-08:002012-01-21T09:37:39.624-08:00Romney: The Worst of Both Worlds for the GOP<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I came across two interesting posts this morning that got me thinking some more about the Republican nomination contest.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The first is <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/the_problem_thats_hard_to_fix034906.php">Steve Benen’s summation</a> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">of Mitt Romney’s most recent political woes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">Think about where Mitt Romney stood a week ago. He’d won the nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire; his national lead was large and getting larger; and he enjoyed double-digit leads over his squabbling competitors in the South Carolina primary.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">And then think about where Romney stands this morning. It turns out he lost Iowa to a candidate he outspent 7 to 1; his national lead has, according to Gallup, “<a href="http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/4378" style="border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; font-style: inherit;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #004499; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">collapsed</span></a>” over the course of the last several days; he struggled through two widely-panned debate performances; and polls suggest he’s likely to lose the South Carolina primary.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">It’s likely, in about 12 hours, the only contest Romney will have won will be in the state he lives in for much of the year.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">Benen goes on to point out that far and away Romney’s biggest political liability is that voters <i>just don’t like him</i> – the more people see of him, the less likely they are to want to vote for him.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">This ties in very well with Steve M.’s comment “<a href="http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/">A Blind Romney Finds a Nut</a>,”</span> <span style="color: #222222;">in which he argues that Romney’s apparent refusal to participate in Monday’s GOP debate in Tampa may be the best way to quash Newt Gingrich’s surging momentum. Newt doesn’t have the money to fund an ad campaign that can keep up with Romney’s in Florida, but Newt does very well in debate formats and has successfully leveraged those performances to keep his candidacy viable. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">Steve M. goes on to speculate that – as the “establishment Republican candidate” – Romney may well benefit by the GOP establishment deciding to simply cancel any further debates, thereby depriving Gingrich of the oxygen he needs to continue his assault on Romney. I would suggest that such a move might also benefit Romney directly by keeping him from further alienating primary voters with his very personality.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">Assuming both Steves’ observations are more or less on point, my question is: what does the Republican Party hope to gain by engineering the nomination of the guy that the rabid Republican base simply cannot stand?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">After all, Romney’s big selling point – the reason he was supposed to be the inevitable Republican nominee – has always been his supposed “electability.” Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich . . . each was considered too extreme a candidate to do well in the general election. So while the GOP base switched from one candidate to the other searching for the anti-Romney, a candidate about whom they could be excited, the GOP political apparatus quietly lined up behind Mitt. The thinking seems to have been that nobody in the Republican Party liked Romney, but in the general election they would all hold their noses and grudgingly vote for him and that he might in fact be able to beat Barack Obama in November.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">But while Romney may not be too blatantly “extreme,” it sure is beginning to look like he is too patently <i>unlikeable</i> to actually win. When it comes to Romney, even the slightest degree of familiarity is sufficient to breed truckloads of contempt.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">But if Romney is just as unelectable as the other candidates (albeit for a slightly different reason), then I just don’t see what the downside is for the Republicans if they ran Gingrich or Santorum instead. They’d lose – sure – but at least they’d be running a candidate that actual Republican voters could be enthusiastic about. Instead, what they are likely to end up doing is running a candidate that actual Republican voters <i>simply cannot stand</i> and then lose the contest anyway – the worst of both worlds for the GOP.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">Unfortunately, it may very well be a lousy outcome for the rest of us as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">As others have pointed out before me, losing with Romney will only <i>exacerbate</i> the current craziness of the GOP. If they run Mitt Romney and he loses to Barack Obama – the man whom most Republican know-nothings have convinced themselves is the most reviled president in modern history – it will only be further confirmation that they lost by being too <i>moderate</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">They will – just as they did after the 2006 and 2008 elections – double-down on the Crazy. If you thought the American political landscape has been a bit nutty since the Tea Partiers got started, just wait until you see what it’s going to be like after the unlikable “moderate” Mitt Romney dashes all those Teabaggers’ dreams.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 11.5pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #222222;">The Crazification Factor will go all the way up to Eleven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-73536900665167831222012-01-15T08:49:00.000-08:002012-01-15T08:50:13.075-08:00Another Reason to Organize, Occupadores!Over at <i>DKos</i> Mark Sumner is <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/15/1054880/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up:-we-interrupt-the-caviar-tasting-to-bring-you-this-news-edition?via=blog_1">rounding up the pundits</a> and has this to say about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/sunday-review/gop-history-vs-the-tea-party.html?_r=1&ref=opinion">Sam Tanenhaus's op-ed</a> about Tea Party weakness:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #242424; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">What's making for weak Tea? In this case, the formula seems to contain <b><i>plenty of uprising, but few core beliefs</i></b>. The only demand placed on Tea Party candidates is that they be rabidly mad at Democrats, for any number of mostly make-believe reasons. That may be enough to win an election cycle, but as it turns out, it's not enough to sustain a movement. This party's over.</span> (emphasis added).</blockquote>Seriously?<br />
<br />
Look . . . I'm a Sumner fan and I don't like the Tea Party . . . but how is this also not an indictment of the <i>Occupy</i> movement as well? Don't get me wrong, I think that the Tea Party is as doomed as a political movement as Sumner thinks it is but . . . well, doesn't the same thing apply to <i>Occupy</i>?<br />
<br />
This is the reason I and so many other people have been saying that <i>Occupy</i> needs to rally around/behind at least one or two political causes: because without having something to fight <i>for</i>, any movement eventually just becomes noise.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-73766785123822313132012-01-14T18:16:00.000-08:002012-01-14T19:46:23.176-08:00Making a Life Change<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Well, I’ve not been around for a while. Real Life, as they say, has gotten in the way of blogging. If anyone’s missed the running commentary, I’m sorry ‘bout that and I promise to try to do better in the coming weeks. Although that may not always be easy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’m trying something new these days, and it is gripping and exciting and very, very different than anything I’ve done before with my adult life, but it is also demanding quite a bit of my time, so blogging may be a bit sporadic until I get more of a routine down. I’ll tell you about it, but let me first back into it by telling you a bit more about me and how I came to be where I am today . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Decades ago, when I was just graduating High School, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. But I wanted to make a nice living and I knew that I was fairly smart and I came from an immediate family that never had produced a member of the “professional class” and so – like about 1/3 of that year’s graduating High School seniors – I decided I would be a doctor. It sounded nice, y’know . . . I’d get paid well and be smart and respected and, well, that was it, really. That was about as far as my 17 year old brain took me with that idea.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The truth is that I hadn’t a clue what I would do, I just knew that I was blessed enough to be smart enough to do whatever I turned my mind to and I figured, “eh, being a doctor sounds alright.” It was an amazingly feckless way to launch myself on what we always are told is a Very Important Decision.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And in large part because I didn’t really care too much about that first decision, it was an easy enough one to abandon. I came home from school after my freshman year at college and started dating a woman who had been one of my best friends since junior high (and whom I had known for much longer) and I thought <i>Hot Damn! This is It! This is Love!</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And, seriously, how could it <i>not </i>have been Love? I was dating one of my best friends, a woman (girl) I had known since elementary school except now we could do the naughty stuff too – <i>this must be that Love thing people have been telling me about</i>, I thought. And so I decided to transfer to a new school to be close to her, but the closest school to which I could transfer on a moment’s notice did not have a pre-med program. No problem.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve decided I don’t wanna be a doctor</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">, I told my parents (who were paying for their son to become a professional), <i>I think I wanna be a lawyer instead. I’ve always like learning about how business works – I’ll get a business degree and then go to law school</i>. What the hell, I didn’t care . . . I was all of 18 years old and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew I wanted to stay with Her. And so I followed my True Love off to her school.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Which was – of course – a huge mistake. I had made my decision impetuously at the beginning of the summer, and by the end of the summer the two of us no longer were dating. (Yeah . . . I know.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But my transfer already had taken place. I still remember the first day of the second semester that second year, waking up in my 11<sup>th</sup> floor dorm room at 5:30 a.m. to perk coffee in my (illegal) coffee percolator and to stare at the 3 feet of snow on the ground – snow I would have to walk through on the mile long hike to my first early morning class on the other side of campus.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">You know</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">, I can still remember thinking to myself, <i>a year ago you were waking up in a dorm room in Miami where the window was never closed. When the wind was right you could smell the salt air from Biscayne Bay. You used to walk to your classes barefoot. You had a beautiful girlfriend, fraternity brothers, and the beach whenever you wanted it. And you gave all of that up for a girl. And now you don’t even have the girl. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">You screwed up really big, somewhere</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But as Life tends to do if you take a long enough look at it, things worked out. I moved on and even – years later – happily attended that girl’s wedding. I also transferred to yet a third school where I met a crew of people who are even now among my closest friends, and I did end up going to law school which taught me – wonder of wonders – how to actually <i>think</i>. And by that I mean how to think critically, and logically, and structurally, and also how to couch a good, logical argument in an emotionally gripping – and therefore persuasive – way. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So I can’t really regret any of what got me to that point, or how I spent the years afterward, putting the skills I learned in law school and then later, in the real world, to work. Like I said . . . things tend to work out.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I, of course, have changed a bit over the years.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">When I was still a freshman pre-med student down in Miami I got a job as a computer programmer at the local VA hospital. They needed someone to decipher a Frankenstein program that had been cobbled together by a number of grad students over the preceding few years and nobody had bothered to put any documentation into the code; it was a huge puzzle, and I delighted in showing up at the hospital with my pass and my lab key at 1:00 a.m. to pull pages and pages of print sheets out on the floor so I could try to follow the variables and solve what it was doing (the lab was paying me to make it do something slightly different). I loved being alone in a quiet room painstakingly going over row after row of code, sussing out what it all meant and how the program worked and where it could be improved. It was sterilely elegant.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And, at the same time, I hated the chemistry labs I had to spend at least one evening a week doing. I hated the imprecision of it all, the ugliness of it all. <i>This</i> plus <i>That</i> equals <i>Something Else</i> . . . . <u>maybe</u>. If you got it all right then . . . maybe. Real Life wasn’t as elegant as abstract life and I found it . . . messy. Dealing with the <i>idea</i> of Things, I discovered, is always easier than dealing with the Things themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But not only was Real Life inelegant, it was also unpoetic. I remember the precise moment I turned against the Life Sciences: I was driving back to UM after an evening spent in my VA computer lab. To avoid traffic I had taken a residential street that paralleled US-1 and as I drove I noticed that the leaves on the trees were curled up. I knew that meant a storm was on its way.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But what saddened me was <i>how</i> I now knew that for storm sign. I had grown up playing in the pinewoods of eastern North Carolina, but even those woods had leafy trees. Nobody had had to tell me what curling leaves mean – after a few years of playing in the woods, you just figured it out for yourself: take shelter when you see the silvery side of leaves because a squall is about to hit.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But back then, driving in my car to UM, all I could think was that I had just learned that leaves have special cells that contract when the humidity in the air increases, so that they can soak up more moisture before a storm. And that is the reason why the leaves curl.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Which is interesting</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">, I thought, <i>and I am sure it is in some way useful . . . but it isn’t poetic or particularly special</i>. I remember looking at the upturned leaves that day and thinking about the physics and the chemical reaction that went into making the leaves curl up, and realizing that with that knowledge a little bit of magic had gone out of my world.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But now I think I’ve come full circle, in at least two ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">First . . . I now think it is <i>cool</i> to know why things work the way they do. I can find poetry in the stoma cells of a leaf, I can find elegance in the science of a chemical reaction. I think maybe with age comes the relaxation of one’s grip on Newtonian cause-and-effect, and – as an adult – one begins to understand the truly wondrous possibility of <i>probability</i>. The Rules make Knowledge possible, but the Exceptions keep Life exciting.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">More than that, though . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I have grown tired of the sterile elegance of models and ideas and argument. I want to see the messy side of things, I want to see the messy side of Life. Not to mock or to recoil, as I might have done when I was a kid, but to help out. I want to help do something for other people, and it has occurred to me that I don’t have any really useful skills. I can think, and I can reason, and I can argue and I can write . . . but I can’t <i>help</i>. Not in a hands-on kind of way. Which really, really sucks.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So, a few weeks ago, I enrolled back in school. I’m going to be a nurse.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">My local nursing program only has a few slots, and I took the last of the entrance exams today. It is a computerized exam on reading, writing, math and science, and you get your score back immediately after finishing the test – I aced it. I say that with a small bit of pride, sure, but it’s just a fact; I’ve always been a very good test-taker. Unfortunately, there are very few seats available in the RN program (a result, apparently, of the fact that there are few hospital seats in my rural community so there are limited clinical opportunities), and I am competing against a bunch of other people who already have a good deal of health care experience. So even though I aced all the tests, I think the odds of me getting into the program this year are not that great and I’ll have to re-apply in about 9 months.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But for my purposes, that’s okay. Even before you can enroll in the nursing program you’ve got to become a Certified Nurse Assistant, which means you have to actually learn and provide direct care. I am not a CNA, so I am enrolled in that course right now. If I beat the odds and get into the RN program, then being in the CNA program this Spring means I’ll be able to go into the RN program next Fall; if the odds beat me and I <i>don’t</i> get into the RN program this Fall, well . . . then I’ll still be a CNA in a few months and I can try again for next year’s program.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And that’s neat because CNA’s are the people that feed patients, walk patients, bathe patients, change (if incontinent) patients . . . all that stuff. CNA’s are the people who actually tend to the patients. Which, quite frankly, terrifies me. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Until about 10 years or so ago, I spent a lot of my time dedicating myself to not letting my Life get messy. I had a career, I had a plan, I had a house. I would have had girlfriends but the job usually kept that from happening. It was a terrible existence and I dropped out of it, but the truth is that I still find myself keeping most people at an arm’s length. I’m a “hale fellow, well met” kind of guy, but I’ll shy away if you invite me ‘round to your house for a bar-b-que if I think it might mean that now I’ll have to see you every other day. I like people, I do, but I’m not particularly sociable.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The point is that I think I’m usually best when dealing with people at arm’s length. I know how to be fairly funny (without being obnoxious) and since turning about 22 I’ve only made a handful of really, really good friends. I find it easier to be facile with most people.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But I’m learning something new in my CNA class. For one thing, we all have to role-play and put our hands on each other, moving each other around and talking to each other. It is very unlike almost all the academic classes I have ever taken, where you didn’t have to interact at all if you didn’t want to. This one demands that you interact verbally and physically.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And it is weird, because I can almost kind of <i>feel</i> my personality come out when I interact with the women in my class (oh yeah . . . just to make this all that much weirder, I’m the only <i>guy</i> in the class), and I realize that it isn’t a persona I’m putting on so much as it is just a different aspect of me, an aspect that hasn’t had much exercise since I stopped having to go to court. Court Guy was a sociable guy, but it turned out he was also me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The other thing I find myself thinking about more and more are the clinical aspects of the course, and the dealing with patients and residents. I actually am excited to work with these people, and to help them. In my head, there are two polar opposites of what that might turn out to be like:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Scenario A</span></u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">: Way back when I was about 20, I was home for summer break. My great-grandmother lived in the house next door to my family, and we took care of her. This particular day, I had gotten up late and made a brunch of grapefruit juice and vodka, and then had retired to float around in the pool reading Hunter S. Thompson. (I know this sounds like I’m making it up, but I had just discovered Thompson and this is, in fact, what I did.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">On the second or third trip back into the kitchen to fill up my greyhound, the phone rang. It was my dad, who asked me to go next door and tell Great-Nana that he would be late for lunch, but that he would be along shortly to prepare it for her. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So I went over and found my Great-grandmother sitting in her wheelchair in front of the glass front door, looking outside. I opened the door and – yelling at her so that she would hear – I explained that Dad was running late but that she should not worry.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I just want you to know,” she said, patting my hand in hers, “that I am so very happy that neither you nor your sister smoke or drink.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Well. I was fairly heavily buzzed by all that vodka I had just been drinking down at the pool, and I felt <i>amazingly</i> guilty. So I sat down next to her and, until Dad showed up about an hour later, I listened – really, really <i>listened</i> – to her stories of what it was like to grow up around the turn of the last century. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">That was an amazing afternoon, and because of it I ended up spending hours and hours later with my great-Nana that it never would have occurred to me to do but for that one day. (Yay, Vodka! And Guilt!)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Scenario B</span></u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">: will involve an old woman suffering from dementia, whom I will have to help calm down and clean up after she has shat herself. It will be degrading for her, and terrible for me. And, of course, unspeakably gross.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But – and this is the real point – <i>it is something that will still need to be done</i>. Just because something is ugly or foul or unpleasant doesn’t mean it is something that doesn’t exist. The messy bit is what the rest of it is about. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">After my great-grandmother finally slipped and broke her hip and we put her in the nursing home, <i>somebody had to clean her</i>. Somebody had to take care of her. Somebody had to make sure she was fed, and comforted, and that she did not get sores. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And I am sure that the people who had to take care of my great-grandmother thought that a lot of what they were doing was, well, disgusting . . . but I hope they also were taking pains to ensure that in her last years she had as much dignity and respect as she deserved. Which was all of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve written before about the fact that – were I to consider myself a religious man at all – that religion would have to be Buddhism. And I’m self-aware enough to realize that there is a selfish part of me that wants to do this. I look forward to being a CNA because it seems to offer almost a perfect opportunity to exercise compassion. This will be a compassion work-out, no doubt about that. Doing this job will be like going to the gym. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Anyway . . . that’s what I’m doing these days. I’ll still be blogging, of course, and Reading Marx and maybe – now that I’ve come clean about what I’ve been up to these past few weeks – I’ll be blogging about the nursing thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So, y’know . . . keep tuning in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-22049371514420165212012-01-08T18:46:00.000-08:002012-01-08T18:46:26.724-08:00Santorum: Fishing in the Crab Pot<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There is a disturbing tendency among a lot of people to equate suffering with virtue, to equate ignorance with “common sense,” and to equate sacrifice with value. It appears that Rick Santorum is treading these well-worn boards on the campaign trail.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">It should be noted that Santorum </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a lobbyist, a corporate consultant, and one of Fox News' <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-gun1.htm">gunsels-for-hire</a> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(go ahead . . . click on the link to find out what the word “gunsel” really means). It should also be noted that his tax plan, were he to be elected president, would actually add about <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/04/397368/santorum-deficit-tax-plan/">$6.5 trillion to the national debt</a>, mostly by <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/01/04/santorum_tax_cuts_for_the_rich.html">cutting taxes for corporations and the richest 1%.</a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yet despite the fact Santorum is an unapologetic mouthpiece for the plutocracy, in two recent campaign speeches he can be seen attempting to garner working-class votes by telling voters they are the backbone of America and the salt of the earth -- even as he works to screw those people over. Unfortunately, a great number of these Americans pay almost no attention to politics and therefore have no idea what Santorum's policies really portend, so when they hear someone like L'il Ricky give a speech lauding their willingness to work hard for little pay they naturally think: <i>Hey, he appreciates me.</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">No, no he doesn't. He appreciates the fact that some of these people will vote for him even though he does intend to make them work harder for much less compensation, and he appreciates that some of the people that vote for him can be persuaded afterward that because they will then be suffering even more they will have somehow proved themselves to be "better" than people (like Santorum) who don't have to suffer at all. Simply stated, Santorum</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is trading on the propensity people have to turn themselves needlessly into martyrs.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some people, I swear, you have to physically take the hammer and the nails away from them because otherwise they'll be climbing up on that cross the first moment your back is turned just so they can prove their superiority by suffering <i>more than you</i>. It is arrogance disguised as humility, it is the elitism of the self-consciously put-upon, and it is the stock in trade of a good deal of conservative rhetoric about <a href="http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000392.html">how absolutely <i>fantastic</i> are the average Americans pointlessly being broken on the wheel of Conservative economic dogma</a>:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Ms. Mornin: Okay, I’m a divorced, single [57 year-old] mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Pres. Bush: Fantastic. First of all, you’ve got the hardest job in America, being a single mom . . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Ms. Mornin: I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Pres. Bush: You work three jobs?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Ms. Mornin: Three jobs, yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Pres. Bush: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Ms. Mornin: Not much. Not much.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In L'il Ricky's case, the first moment his "martyr ploy" came to my attention was when he gave his celebratory speech after tying Mitt Romney for first place in the Iowa caucuses. A good part of that speech was an encomium of his grandfather, who upon coming to America promptly sold himself into debt slavery in the Pennsylvania coal mines.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Rick Perlstein at <i>Crooks and Liars</i> did <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/rick-perlstein/santorum-freedom-slavery">a masterful take down</a> of this portion of Santorum's speech, and I highly recommend clicking on the link to check it out in its entirety. But the essential story is as follows: Santorum's grandfather went to work for a coal mining company that would not pay him in actual money, but instead paid him in company "scrip," which could only be redeemed at the local company store -- stores that were notorious for rejiggering the books so that miners ended up perpetually in debt. Without money, miners could not move to seek better employment; worse, because almost all were kept in debt bondage to the company they worked for, if they were to leave they could be arrested for attempting to flee a debt. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">This system -- a system that chewed workers up, spat them out, and usually prevented them from seeking any kind of life outside of perpetual slavery to the mining company itself -- was where the oft-covered and immortal song <i>Sixteen Tons</i> came from:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/mwuc5k-LKFU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And it is this system that </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Santorum praised as inherently superior to "government interference in the free market" -- even to the government interference that was responsible for ending the kind of debt slavery his grandfather suffered under.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">(One of the most annoying things about listening to professional Conservatives describe American history is that they always point with pride to the suffering our grandparents and great-grandparents endured during the Depression and World War II, and they always leave implicit the argument that in America if you are just willing to work hard and suffer enough then everything'll eventually turn out okay -- just as it did in generations past. But they always ignore that the <i>reason</i> things ended up turning out okay in generations past is that those generations embraced liberal economic policies like FDR's New Deal and Social Security and Medicare, and it was our unwillingness to just <i>continue </i>suffering that actually brought an end to what was for many a hideous way of life.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">* * *</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The second time I noted L'il Ricky nakedly appealing to class distinctions and urging working class voters to identify with him and against President Obama was when <i>ThinkProgress</i> pointed out that only a few days Santorum had <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/education/2012/01/07/399915/santorum-elitist-snobbery-college/">accused Obama of "elitist snobbery"</a> for declaring that everybody in America should have the opportunity to go to college. What really shocked me was to hear the applause this attack line elicited:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/c65WNw84HRY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The only way this is an applause line is if one assumes that the people listening to Santorum spew this bilge think that Obama - by mere dint of suggesting that people should be able to go to college if they want -- is somehow sneering at or looking down on people who didn't go to college, or - more accurately -- who didn't have the opportunity to go to college.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I can only imagine the "thinking" that goes on in someone's head when they hear Obama's aspirational goal for the country and immediately see themselves as victimized by it: <i>Well, Mr. SmartyPants, I didn't go to college. I guess you think that makes me dumb, huh? Well, I'll show <u>you</u>! Ima gonna vote for Rick Santorum!</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'm sorry, but . . . huh? The President of the United States said it would be a good thing if everybody who graduated High School had the opportunity to go to college. Rick Santorum used this -- the most bland, "education is good" general policy statement imaginable -- to stir up class-based resentment amongst (I am assuming) the working class who did <i>not</i> have the inclination and/or opportunity to get an education beyond High School. </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And it might be working</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">* * * </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In <i>Unseen Academicals</i>, Terry Pratchett introduced the sociological idea of "the Cr</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">ab Pot." See, when you dump a bunch of crabs into a pot filled with boiling water, all the individual crabs scramble to claw their way out of the pot. But any crab that gets close to clawing itself out of the pot is immediately pulled back down by its fellow crabs, so ultimately they all end up boiling together.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For humans, the "Crab Pot" is the natural tendency we all have to insist on our individual dignity and pride. Unfortunately, that means we have a tendency to take pride in almost anything. If we are poor, then there is a large number of us who will insist on taking pride in our poverty and will resent people who suggest we can do better. If we are uneducated, we will take pride in our ignorance and deride people who suggest that maybe our children could get a better education.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Crab Pot people are all too willing to pull down anyone who tries to make their lives or the lives of their children even just a little better. But they will more than happily vote for the candidate - like Santorum - who tells them that accomplishing little and suffering greatly is all it takes to make them great too. And - really - what could be easier? The Crab Pot people were planning on doing that <i>anyway.</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sure, if they elect Santorum their lives will suck just a little bit more, but at least L'il Ricky (and all his intellectual <i>comrades</i>) will tell them they are great just for being who they are, and for the Crab Pot people being <i>told</i> you're great -- when you've got nothing else -- is all it really takes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-1554186939849389622012-01-08T16:23:00.000-08:002012-01-08T16:23:25.725-08:00Reading Marx – Part XIII<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(<b><i>Routine Introduction: </i></b>For reasons explained <a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-marx-part-i.html">here</a>, I’m in the process of slogging through Marx’s <i>Capital</i>. The plan is to read it in conjunction with watching David Harvey’s <a href="http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/">free on-line lectures</a> about the book. I’ll be posting notes and initial impressions as I read. This will be an extremely long-term project.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 2, Subsection c</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><u style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"></u></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><u style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection c “Coins and Symbols of Value”</u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
--Marx points out that the only difference b/w coin and bullion is one of shape, but that once a coin leaves the mint it begins wearing away, some more, some less; “coins of the same denomination become different in value, because they are different in weight”;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--accordingly the circulating medium ceases to any longer be a real equivalent of the commodities whose prices it realizes; he apparently wishes to provide a historical explanation as to how mere tokens of money – paper money – can come to replace the actual universal equivalent commodity, which is gold; “the fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation b/w their nominal and their real weight . . . implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the same purposes as coins.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--for Marx, the amount of paper money that any nation might issue is and must be limited to the amount of gold coins that can actually be current<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Paper-money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented by the paper. Only insofar as paper-money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(<b>NOTE: </b>Wow! This I just do not agree with at all. As I understand Marx, he is suggesting that paper money has no actual value unless it represents gold (or some other commodity). But that just is not the case. The paper money we use now has value and it comes not from the fact that it is equivalent to gold but that it is equivalent to <i>all</i> commodities in ever shifting amounts, amounts determined by billions and billions of decisions being made in the marketplace (and by governments) that determines its fluctuating collective value. In a very real sense, the money we’ve been using for the past 40 years is just a collective agreement we all struck with each other; its value is real the way that Love, and Friendship, and Honor are real – non-material, but real nonetheless.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(I think Marx here is trapped by his own reductionist system of thought, because he desperately wants money to have some objective value – separate and apart from human fecklessness. I’d be willing to bet he started his consideration with gold as society’s money and then attempted to figure out how gold can be valued – given that it isn’t actually very useful in and of itself. He then figured that the only way to value gold is to measure the amount of labor that went into producing it, and decided that this was the proper determination of Value for all commodities.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(That very likely is why he started his discussion w/commodities to being with; he backdoors his way into explaining how gold comes to be the universal commodity, maybe because he is aware that his historical explanation is a “just so” story. But now he has to insist that paper money has no value unless it is backed up by gold . . . and we know that this just isn’t true.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Marx goes on to suggest that gold is replaceable by a token of no intrinsic Value (paper money) only to the extent that token is taking over the function of gold work as a circulating medium (although Marx implies that gold has other functions as well as serving as the means of circulatoin); each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation <i>only so long as it keeps circulating</i>; thus the minimum amount of gold (money) necessary in the system is that amount of money necessary to be circulating at any one time . . . which Marx claimed in the last subsection is relatively stable (although he did not show his work in making that claim; such a blanket statement seems a bit dubious);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--So, the minimum amount of gold necessary to circulate is what may be replaced by paper money; these tokens must have an objective social validity of their own, which they acquire by the compulsory action of the State to require that they be accepted as money; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAY</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">: The function of money is the circulation of commodities (the economy) and to serve as the means of circulation. A minimum amount of money is necessary to remain in the system at all times, circulating away.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Next Up:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <b><i>Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 3 “Money”, Subsection a “Hoarding”</i></b> – Well, that <i>was </i>quick. And now the final section in Chapter 3 is coming up; it is divided into three relatively short subsections, and since today’s very short reading was a lot more fun than slogging through a bunch of this at once, I’ll probably break this down and do a separate entry on each of the short subsections in Section 3 “Money.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-50307493150679658612012-01-08T05:53:00.000-08:002012-01-08T06:38:45.946-08:00Random Observations Re: Last Night’s Debate<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">When I finally tuned out last night, the bobbleheads were calling the debate for Mitt Rombot because (i) the Rombot failed to completely short circuit on stage, and (ii) none of the other contenders really went after it. From the bobbleheads’ perspective, calling the debate in the Rombot’s favor is undoubtedly the safe call as the Rombot is almost certain to win the New Hampshire primary two days from now and apparently is topping the polls in South Carolina (curse you, Newt Gingrich! You have once again proven that I simply cannot predict what Republican voters are likely to do.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">In no particular order, below the fold are some random observations about last night’s GOP debate:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(1) The questions were pretty execrable. For example, Diane Sawyer asked Jon Huntsman why he would make a better Commander-in-Chief than the others, a lay-up question if there ever was one (although Huntsman refused to talk smack about the other candidates; I swear, it’s as if he doesn’t really </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">want </i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">to be the nominee in 2012).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And George Snuffleupagus spent about 15 minutes asking Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul about whether they think states should be permitted to outlaw contraceptives. I know what Snuffie was trying to get at – the Right to Privacy – but he couched his question so badly that the candidates were able to skate right past it and the crowd began groaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">For the record . . . <i>Roe v. Wade</i> declared the complete outlawing of abortion to be unconstitutional because it interferes with a person’s reproductive autonomy, which is protected by the “right to privacy” that the Court previously had held arises out a “penumbra” of the other civil right explicitly protected by the Constitution. (The Right to Privacy itself cannot be located in the text of the Constitution.) The candidates declared that <i>Roe </i>was wrongly decided, with Santorum and Ron Paul indicating that they did not believe in any right to privacy other than as spelled out in the Fourth Amendment, which only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">However, the Right to Privacy was also the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in <i>Griswald v. Connecticut</i>, which held that the individual states could not ban access to contraception. Presumably, what Snuffie was trying to get at was where and whether Mitt and Santorum would draw the line: anti-<i>Roe</i> but pro-<i>Griswald?</i> (Although Santorum is pretty much anti-<i>Griswald</i>, too) And it that’s their position, why draw the line explicitly <i>there?</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But Stephanopoulos apparently felt that the debate format did not lend itself to a long lead-up question, and so skipped right to asking about whether states have the right to outlaw contraception. The Rombot essentially declared it was a stupid question because no states want to do that, and mocked George S. for asking it. Santorum – who has stated explicitly that he thinks the use of contraception is morally wrong – took advantage of the confusion to simply say that <i>Roe</i> was wrongly decided.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(2) Newt deployed his favorite rhetorical trick for not answering a question: refocusing the debate until you’re looking at it from so far away you might as well be in outer space.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">At one point the candidates were asked about whether they were in favor of bringing the troops back home from Afghanistan. When it was his turn, Newt just sighed and said that we were not seeing the big picture, and then proceeded to list all the dangers of “radical Islam” that he could think of, including Iran. By the time he had wrapped up with some standard boilerplate about America taking a “firm stand against this serious threat” nobody remembered that he had failed to answer the actual question.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(3) Ron Paul’s decision to go after Santorum as a “big government Conservative” for voting to increase spending – No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Prescription Drug Amendment, voting to raise the debt ceiling on numerous occasions – struck me as a little weird.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">First, it’s an incredibly ineffective attack. Conservatives <i>say</i> they’re in favor of reducing spending and shrinking government, but they like big government just fine if it’s spending money on them and things of which they approve. It’s only when they think money is being given to the poor, to foreign countries, or to lazy, shiftless black and brown people that they get upset. Arguing that Rick Santorum isn’t conservative because he voted to give old people prescription drug assistance is just lame.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Second, it seems strategically strange to attack another Not Romney and not to attack the Rombot itself. Sam Seder of <i>The Majority Report</i> has floated the possibility that Ron Paul wants to use whatever leverage this last race gives him to extract some concessions from the GOP on behalf of his son Rand, and that this might explain why Paul has gone so easy on Mitt Romney during the race. I confess that Seder’s speculations flitted through my mind once or twice during last night’s debate.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(4) Nobody seemed to notice, but Santorum made the most radical statement of the night by declaring that he believed the business of marriage is legitimately a federal concern because, he said, it lies at the heart of American society. This despite the fact family law always has been a state issue, and is an area of which the federal government has <i>always</i> steered clear. Simply unbelievable. This guy thinks the 10<sup>th</sup> Amendment (which reserves to states the powers not delegated to the federal government) means that the fed cannot impose environmental restrictions on polluting corporations, but that it <i>can</i> dictate to the states and their citizens what “marriage” means. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Newt Gingrich added to the confusion by saying that he respects gay couples in long-term, loving relationships, but that this doesn’t mean the government needs to extend to gay couples the “sacrament” of marriage that it extends to heterosexual couples. <i>Psst . . . . Newt! A marriage license is not a “sacrament” – “sacraments” are something you receive from a <u>church</u>.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And the Rombot appeared to be the most addled, drawing the line against gay marriage by arguing that America has an interest in fostering families that have both male and female parental figures, and that in order to encourage such unions we grant married couples certain legal and financial benefits. So . . . Romney thinks people get married for the government benefits? Or that gay people might renounce their homosexuality and marry opposite sex partners if the government just sweetens the pot a little bit? Jesus . . . what a poorly designed tool.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(5) Oh, and speaking of the federal government dictating to its citizens whom they can love, marry and have sexual relations with . . . I think pretty much everybody at some point talked about the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and how they are fighting for our “freedom,” or “to keep America free,” or how it is only our military that ensures we “remain free.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">To me, it sounded like they were all speaking in tongues or invoking some ritualistic incantation designed to please the Great God GOP. And, good lord, I wish I could have strangled this trope in its crib. The plain fact is that American freedom is not in any danger from terrorists or mullahs or foreign nations of any sort. It may be in danger here at home from our own elected representatives who want to give the president the authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without charge or trial, or who want to proscribe the most intimate contact two people may share with one another, but sad fact remains that there isn’t a single service member wounded or killed in either Iraq or Afghanistan who made any person in America any more “free.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">America is the world’s preeminent nuclear power, and nobody else on the planet even punches in our weight class when it comes to conventional warfare. Which is why absolutely nobody (else) in the world is trying to destroy America, or take it over, or proscribe our freedoms – because they know there isn’t a chance in hell they’d succeed. These days our active military engagements are used to project American power, not to defend the country against nations attempting to conquer it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2012/01/nobody-understands-dumb-or-krugmans-heresies.html">PerhapsThers said it best</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">:</span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">A lot of the point of [my] blog is to say bad words on the Internet as a way of blowing off steam. But the other idea is to find the touch moments of ideological censorship and fuck with them. For instance, no active military service member is fighting for the freedom of any American civilian. Individual American freedom is not now seriously threatened by any foreign enemies, nor has it been for generations. Likewise, no service member who has died in Iraq or Afghanistan sacrificed their life so that any American might be more free. It is just the facts.</span></blockquote><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(6)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">With the exception of Ron Paul, everybody seemed to be itching for a new war, this time with Iran.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">No wonder Iran might think it’s a good idea to get its hands on a nuclear weapon.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Quick history note – number of countries with nuclear weapons the US has attacked or invaded:</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">zero. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(7) Finally, I was struck by the candidates’ conception of US/China relations and what it means to be “competitive” in the 21<sup>st</sup> century.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">China remains a reflexive bug-a-boo in conservative circles and – who knows – maybe they even believe China is a threat. Hell, prior to 9/11 the Bush Administration --</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> or at least Dick Cheney’s wife -- <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1826550083">was lobbying hard for declaring </a></span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1826550083">friggin’ war</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2007/07/gary-hart-lynne-cheney-and-war-with-china/7644/"> on China</a>. And, of course, we have this nastily paranoid and jingoistic anti-Huntsman ad put out by someone who supports Ron Paul:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/0PsJvLVoOq4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Rombot argued that America needs to slash taxes in order to remain “competitive,” but it isn’t clear with whom he thinks we are competing.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">America’s </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">effective</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> corporate tax rate (what companies really pay) is already among the lowest in the industrialized world, and if we are looking for comparators to gauge our economic success I would rather look to the industrialized countries of Europe (whose manufacturing industries, with high worker salaries and benefits, higher real corporate tax rates, stronger unions and a greater social safety net, appear to be doing just fine) than to, say, the emerging BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), where the standard of living is far, far below that found in Europe or here.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">More fundamentally, I wonder whether “competing” is still the best way to view our relationship with other nations. Historically, nations have competed with each other either in the exploitation of resources or in warfare. I would like to think that humans are slowly getting out of the idea that declaring war on a country in order to annex them/subjugate them/steal from them is a good or even a valid idea (although, let’s be honest, that is exactly what George Dubya was attempting to do in Iraq).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And now that there are no new frontiers to grab, nations simply are not competing against each other to colonize, monopolize and exploit newly discovered natural resources. Wherever natural wealth is found, countries have to – or, at least, they are <i>supposed</i> to – negotiate with the people already living there to expropriate and exploit that wealth. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I suppose one could say that nations compete with each other for markets, but even that isn’t really true. Multi-national <i>corporations </i>compete with <i>each other</i> for markets, and increasingly it is of little interest to any nation’s actual citizens which of these enormous corporations can obtain a particular competitive advantage – especially if, as everyone on stage last night seemed to argue, those corporations should pay <i>nothing</i> in taxes. What do I care whether ExxonMobile or BP gets to exploit an Iraqi oil field if not a penny of that money is going to be taxed in order to help pay for the common good here in America? I am not ExxonMobile, and I certainly am not going to cheer if they beat out BP for a lucrative contract because “they’re my team.” Because no . . . no they are not. They’ve been making it quite clear for some time now that they aren’t playing on my behalf.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Besides, in an increasingly interconnected world of global trade, the richer China gets the richer America gets. China is growing its wealth by exporting to us, and we are eagerly snatching up all the cheap Chinese goods we can pack into our Wal-Mart shopping carts. Americans <i>love</i> getting cheap shit, and we’ve got a lot of it now. I suppose Americans would love it even more if they could get all that cheap shit without paying for it at all, but if continuing to purchase cheap Chinese crap means that China continues to grow, the American consumer is going to think that is a pretty good trade. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">And although the Rombot argued that China is “taking” our manufacturing jobs, that isn’t true either. We are <i>giving </i>those jobs away by failing to do anything but reward US manufacturers who ship jobs overseas because labor costs are cheaper. If we’re not shipping those jobs to China then we’re shipping them somewhere else, and the only government that can halt this race to the bottom is the US government. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">As Europe’s manufacturing industry demonstrates, racing to the bottom in terms of lower wages and less benefits isn’t the only way to compete in today’s world, it’s just the way the 1% wants America to compete. In the end, it isn’t China that’s impoverishing this country, it’s the American plutocrats who control it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-42348773857970787392012-01-07T14:01:00.000-08:002012-01-07T14:01:56.083-08:00Reading Marx – Part XII<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(<b><i>Routine Introduction: </i></b>For reasons explained <a href="http://casacognito.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-marx-part-i.html">here</a>, I’m in the process of slogging through Marx’s <i>Capital</i>. The plan is to read it in conjunction with watching David Harvey’s <a href="http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/">free on-line lectures</a> about the book. I’ll be posting notes and initial impressions as I read. This will be an extremely long-term project.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Today: Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III, Section 2, Subsection b</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><i><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection b “The Currency of Money”<o:p></o:p></span></u></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Marx argues that the circulation of commodities (Commodity --> Money --> Commodity) is a closed circuit for commodities (one commodity ultimate is exchanged for another commodity); but while <i>money</i> circulates in an economy it does not form a closed circuit, but rather always gets further and further away from its source; (well, maybe, but one could say the same thing of the linen, I suppose; the original linen never comes back to the weaver; maybe it doesn’t always move further away from the weaver because it is intended to be consumed, but then again many commodities are sold not for final consumption but for resale, <i>i.e., </i>wholesalers sell to retailers; I’m not sure this is a valid distinction to draw b/w money and commodities);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--the course of money continuing away from its “source” (which also seems a little arbitrary; the source seems to be wherever Marx decides to first start tracing the movement of money) Marx deems its “currency” (‘Currency’ thus is a defined term, <i>i.e.</i> the movement of money);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Marx argues that in the market it <i>appears</i> that trade is effected by money circulating amongst traders, but in reality it is the commodities’ circulation that constitutes trade (?); Marx assumes that upon the sale of any commodity it is immediately consumed (or, maybe, transformed into another commodity, like linen being turned into a shirt), and thus in trade commodities are constantly dropping out of the market while money continues to circulate;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(<b>NOTE: </b>it seems to me that Marx is using a pretty free hand here to define his terms; I’d be curious to know what it is he specifically means by “circulation of commodities,” which I am reading as “the market”; it simply is not true that in every sale of a commodity the commodity drops out of trade circulation; some commodities are incorporated into other, larger commodities (a computer chip into a laptop, for example), which are then re-sold; I suppose Marx could mean that the commodity drops out of <i>that particular market</i> (the market for computer chips), but it looks like he is attempting to make a more global statement and I just don’t know if that statement holds up; it doesn’t appear to)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(<b>NOTE:</b> I think I understand the point Marx is attempting to reach, but I am suspicious that in order to get there he is invoking a simplified model of “the market” that does not actually correspond to real life; if the model doesn’t relate in a material way to real life then no useful lesson can necessarily be drawn from that model)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--every commodity, when sold, falls out of circulation only to eventually be replaced by other commodities (when the money acquired by selling the first commodity, <i>i.e.</i>, the linen is used to purchase something else); but money, as the medium of commodity circulation, never leaves the system; Marx wants to know how much money the “sphere of circulation” constantly absorbs;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Looking at the total commodities offered for sale in a nation, the amount of money that must be present in order to effect those sales is the sum total of all their prices; but while their collective Value (the socially necessary labor time to produce those commodities) always remains constant, their prices will vary with the Value of gold (the material of money) as it falls or rises;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--I think it is important to note that Marx seems to be assuming that gold is constantly entering the system as it is mined and refined around the world; <b><i>this is very different than what happens now</i></b>; so gold is “entering into the sphere of circulation but is never dropping out of it, as other commodities do”; of course, as more gold enters the market the Value of any individual piece of gold (expressed as a fraction of the total gold present) goes down, and so more gold is needed to equate to the Value of commodities and their prices rise; if gold were to become more rare (and how can that happen if it never drops out of circulation?) then each small piece of gold is a greater fraction of the Gold Commodity in the global market, hence more valuable, hence less is needed to equate to the Value of the commodities (<i>i.e.</i>, prices go down);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">---Hhhhmmmm . . . Marx then states: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A one-sided observation of the results that followed upon the discovery of fresh supplies of gold and silver [the New World], led some economists in the 17<sup>th</sup> and particularly in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, to the false conclusion that the prices of commodities had gone up in consequence of the increased quantity of gold and silver serving as means of circulation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If I understand this correctly, what Marx is saying is that what led to the inflation Europe experienced after Spain found the riches of the New World was not just that now there was more gold and silver in circulation, but that the Value of any particular piece of gold was less because the total gold in circulation was more. In other words, supposing there are 100,000 oz. gold total in the market. Of the Total Value (socially necessary labor time) expended to get 100,000 oz. gold into the market, 1 oz. represents 1/100,000 of that total Value;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Let’s call SNLT a unit, and say that one SNLT unit is required to get 1 oz. gold on the market;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But suppose a treasure trove of say, another 100,000 oz. gold is discovered that requires less SNLT units to get on the market – let’s say one SNLT unit gets 10 oz. of this new gold on the market; now we have a total of 200,000 oz. gold, which collectively requires 110,000 SNLT units to produce. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Under the original circumstances, 100,000 oz gold = 100,000 SNLTs; under the changed circumstances, 200,000 oz gold = 110,000 SNLT; So, 1 oz gold use to equate to 1 SNLT; but now, 1 oz gold equates to 0.55 SNLT; but the Value of the linen (say, 10 SNLT) hasn’t changed; so whereas before it would take 10 oz gold (10 SNLTs) to equate to the linen, now it takes 18.19 oz gold (10 SNLTs) to equate to 10 SNLT Value of linen);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I think the point Marx is trying to make here is that it isn’t just the greater amount of money in circulation that drives up prices, but that the greater amount of money in circulation reflects more gold being produced at less socially necessary labor time, <i>i.e.</i>, its Value has decreased<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">* * * <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--All of the foregoing notwithstanding, Marx concludes by merely asserting that for purposes of this discussion he is going to treat the Value of gold as a fixed given (as it is at any particular point in time);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Okay, now . . . Marx is going to assume that the quantity of all commodities remains constant; he also is assuming that the value of gold is fixed; thus, the amount of money that is going to be necessary in the global market will vary depending on the fluctuations of the prices of the commodities (how can those prices fluctuate if the Value of gold is fixed? I assume because either there are differences in the socially necessary labor time needed to produce these commodities, or else changes in the supply and demand of and for each product);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--generally speaking, as the total sum of prices goes up, more money must be put into circulation, as the total sum of prices goes down, less money is needed (so, <i>contra</i> earlier, money <u>can</u> drop out of circulation – I <i>knew </i>it);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--now, if four articles are sold in different localities to different purchasers, and each of those articles has a price of $2, it follows that there must be $8 dollars in circulation. But suppose each of these articles is sold as part of a chain: a farmer sells wheat for $2, and purchases 20 yds of linen for $2; the weaver takes that $2 and purchases a Bible, and the bookbinder takes the $2 and purchases 4 gallons of brandy, then we only need $2 to be in circulation; the point here is that <i>time</i> is required for the completion of the series;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“<i>Hence the velocity of the currency of money is measured by the number of moves made by a given piece of money in a given time.”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--suppose in this example the circulation of the 4 commodities takes a day; the sum of the prices is $8, the number of moves the money makes is 4, and the quantity of money circulating is $2. Generally speaking, the quantity of circulating money is equal to the sum of the prices of the commodities in circulation divided by the number of moves made by money of the same denomination;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--since the total money changing hands is going to be equal to the sum of the prices of all the commodities in circulation, then the higher the velocity of money the less quantity of money is needed (because the same money can be reused more quickly), and the lower the velocity of money the more money is needed; thus, if money velocity speeds up, more money will drop out of circulation, and if money velocity slows down, more money must enter into circulation in order to keep trade going;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--although commodity prices remain constant, the amount of money in circulation may increase either because the number of commodities increases, the velocity of money decreases, or some combination of the two;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--on the other hand, money will drop out of the system when there are less commodities available or if money velocity increases, or both;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--when prices rise, the quantity of money in circulation will remain the same provided the number of commodities available decreases proportionally to the increase in prices, or provided the money velocity increases at the same rate as prices rise (the quantity of commodities in that case remaining constant);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--if prices fall, the quantity of money in circulation will remain constant provided the number of commodities increase proportionally to the fall in prices, or provided the money velocity slows down at the same rate as prices fall (the quantity of commodities in that case remaining constant);<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">--finally, although the monetary velocity, the quantity of commodities and their prices may all vary, they may do so in a way that mutually compensates each other such that the sum total of commodity prices in the market and the amount of money in circulation remains more or less constant; Marx suggests that – looking at the big picture – the quantity of money in circulation in any country remains more or less a constant;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">FINAL POINT</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">: What Marx wants to get at here is that given the sum of the values of all commodities and the average velocity of money in an economy, the quantity of gold that is in circulation depends on the Value of the gold; he argues that economists’ previous understanding – which held that prices depend on the amount of money present in the system – is <i>erroneous</i>. Marx argues that this opinion “was based by those who first beheld it on the absurd hypothesis that commodities are without a price, and money without a value, when they first enter into circulation . . . .”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">MY THOUGHTS:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Marx wants to assign an objective Value to the money commodity – gold – equivalent to the SNLT to produce a given quantity of gold; he seems to making an argument about causation; prices go up because the Value of gold goes down, which requires more gold to enter the market; it is not that the Value of gold goes down because more gold enters the market. I think that’s correct.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Next Up:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <b><i>Vol. I, Book I, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”, Section 2 “The Medium of Circulation”, Subsection c “Coins and Symbols of Value”</i></b> – another subsection coming up! And it’s a short one! Yay for totally unjustified feelings of accomplishment after completing short segments.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div>Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5352395970681996095.post-49518908433416702452012-01-07T04:20:00.000-08:002012-01-07T04:20:40.591-08:00Some Honest to God Good Employment News<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/business/economy/us-adds-200000-jobs-unemployment-rate-at-8-5.html?_r=2&hp">Last month the US added 200,000 new jobs</a>, and the official unemployment rate dropped to 8.5%. This is a big deal, because as a rule of thumb the US needs to add about 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. So, roughly speaking, 200,000 new jobs means that not only did we manage to accommodate all the new workers entering the labor force, but also that about 50,000 people who previously had been unemployed were able to get a job.<br />
<br />
Yay, us.<br />
<br />
There's still a long way to go, and all the usual caveats about potential future crises still apply (I for one am still keeping a wary eye on Europe), but good news on the employment front is fairly rare these days and I'm happy to have an opportunity to remark on something positive for a change.Swellsmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05593178312657435749noreply@blogger.com0