(Click to make the images bigger. Graphics by Kevin Kreneck.)
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Selections from the April 15, 2012 issue
COVER/Irin Carmon
GOP fights female rights
EDITORIAL
Mandate or Medicare
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Morality left out of corporate calculations
DISPATCHES
Dishonoring Trayvon Martin;
Concealed Carry death toll mounts;
Five states debate ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws;
Senate Repubs tease, then block move to end oil subsidies;
Senators who voted to protect oil tax breaks got $23M from Big Oil;
Exxon profits up, taxes down;
Obama orders strong carbon rules;
Five banks control 52% of US assets;
Four voter fraud cases disenfranchise 800,000 Texans;
Voter restrictions block electoral vote;
House Repubs accidentally endorse constitutionality of ACA;
US appeals labeling smackdown;
Public doesn't like GOP Medicare plan;
Obama gets world's vote ...
BOB BURNETT
‘Game Change’ documents GOP ID crisis
MARGIE BURNS
Republicans head for heated convention
DON ROLLINS
GOP rep says no poor folks in N.C.
MARK ANDERSON
Keystone pipeline meets stubborn Texan
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Looking at a year of revolt in Wisconsin
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Medicare on chopping block
SAM URETSKY
Romney and Santorum ridicule college
WAYNE O’LEARY
Not going postal
JOHN BUELL
Politics in these times
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Energy costs shifted to society
JIM CULLEN
Ten documentaries to look for
ROB PATTERSON
Young people retire in ‘Portlandia’
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Take a look around and everywhere you’ll see the benefits of government to businesses and people
By Marc Jampole
Yesterday I took a local Metro North train from White Plains, where I had been meeting with a client, back to Manhattan, where we’re staying for a few days. The train was crowded and along the way I saw people get on and off, riding from one Westchester County suburb to another. At the Fordham stop in the city, a bunch of college students boarded. I saw many like me carrying briefcases and dressed for the business world. Others were clearly bound for a cultural attraction or to do some shopping.
What I also saw was government providing low-cost transportation to people of all social classes and helping to address both traffic and environmental problems.
Along the way, we went over bridges and saw other bridges, filled with automobiles. We saw roads and when we could see streets, they were mostly clean. Government built those roads and bridges and maintains them.
In the evening, we took the government owned and operated clean and safe subway to Carnegie Hall to see Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony do a magnificent concert of 20th century classical music. In the program notes I discovered that Carnegie Hall presents a wide range of music and other cultural activities, something for everyone. The program also lists all the donors that have contributed at least $2,500 in the past year to what is perhaps America’s most famous concert hall. But it also tells us who owns and operates Carnegie Hall. Guess what! It’s the City of New York.
At the concert, we spoke briefly with an older woman whose clothing and jewelry told us that she is fairly well-off. This very pleasant and enthusiastic woman most assuredly receives her medical services at low cost through Medicare. She likely collects Social Security, as well.
Earlier that day I had lunch with a cousin who lives in the tiny Scarsdale suburb about one of her children who has a learning disability. The boy goes to a public school and gets special attention and classes. I also spoke on the phone and made plans to see another cousin, who is a magnificent school librarian, a real pro with a special charisma who knows how to engage children of all levels of development. And yes, she works at a New York City public school. And then I remembered what a great education I received from the New York City schools (until my family left in 10th grade), highlighted by the opportunity to attend Stuyvesant High School, a high school for the gifted with wonderful laboratories and other facilities.
Everywhere I looked I saw government making our lives better: protecting us, keeping our streets maintained and clean, taking us places, educating our children, making it possible for businesses to exist, keeping us healthy, providing a stable retirement program for all workers.
And it’s all threatened by more than 30 years of low taxes and cuts to government services, fueled by the political mentality that I call Reaganism. The two central beliefs of this mentality propose that individuals should only care about their own selfish interests and that the government is always bad (except for fighting wars). This regime of tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy and ultra-wealthy and underinvest in our civilization has led to a dire situation:
Yesterday I took a local Metro North train from White Plains, where I had been meeting with a client, back to Manhattan, where we’re staying for a few days. The train was crowded and along the way I saw people get on and off, riding from one Westchester County suburb to another. At the Fordham stop in the city, a bunch of college students boarded. I saw many like me carrying briefcases and dressed for the business world. Others were clearly bound for a cultural attraction or to do some shopping.
What I also saw was government providing low-cost transportation to people of all social classes and helping to address both traffic and environmental problems.
Along the way, we went over bridges and saw other bridges, filled with automobiles. We saw roads and when we could see streets, they were mostly clean. Government built those roads and bridges and maintains them.
In the evening, we took the government owned and operated clean and safe subway to Carnegie Hall to see Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony do a magnificent concert of 20th century classical music. In the program notes I discovered that Carnegie Hall presents a wide range of music and other cultural activities, something for everyone. The program also lists all the donors that have contributed at least $2,500 in the past year to what is perhaps America’s most famous concert hall. But it also tells us who owns and operates Carnegie Hall. Guess what! It’s the City of New York.
At the concert, we spoke briefly with an older woman whose clothing and jewelry told us that she is fairly well-off. This very pleasant and enthusiastic woman most assuredly receives her medical services at low cost through Medicare. She likely collects Social Security, as well.
Earlier that day I had lunch with a cousin who lives in the tiny Scarsdale suburb about one of her children who has a learning disability. The boy goes to a public school and gets special attention and classes. I also spoke on the phone and made plans to see another cousin, who is a magnificent school librarian, a real pro with a special charisma who knows how to engage children of all levels of development. And yes, she works at a New York City public school. And then I remembered what a great education I received from the New York City schools (until my family left in 10th grade), highlighted by the opportunity to attend Stuyvesant High School, a high school for the gifted with wonderful laboratories and other facilities.
Everywhere I looked I saw government making our lives better: protecting us, keeping our streets maintained and clean, taking us places, educating our children, making it possible for businesses to exist, keeping us healthy, providing a stable retirement program for all workers.
And it’s all threatened by more than 30 years of low taxes and cuts to government services, fueled by the political mentality that I call Reaganism. The two central beliefs of this mentality propose that individuals should only care about their own selfish interests and that the government is always bad (except for fighting wars). This regime of tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy and ultra-wealthy and underinvest in our civilization has led to a dire situation:
- School budgets are being cut in New York and everywhere else. In many schools, art lessons, music education and other non-core classes have been slashed and classes are too large.
- State governments are retreating from their long-term commitment to state supported universities and colleges. In the late 60s and early 70s, my tuition (paid for by a state of Wisconsin “Leadership and Need” scholarship) was $175 a semester to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus and learn from many inspiring scholars such as Davy Carozza, Corliss Philabaum and Ihab Hussan. Enough said there.
- More than 30 years of inadequate investment and maintenance have left our infrastructure of roads and bridges in a sorry state. We’ve seen bridges crumble and potholes seemingly multiply like rabbits. Of course, when we let roads deteriorate because taxes are too low, individuals end up paying more on tires, brakes, gas and realignments.
- In New York, mass transit cuts appear to be an irritant only, but in many other places such as Pittsburgh, transit cuts are hurting many people.
It’s no coincidence that residents of the New York City metropolitan area pay some of the highest tax rates in the country. They enjoy so many services.
Government is not perfect. Government comprises people, and people make mistakes. Large groups are sometimes slow to identify and react to new challenges, which can lead to an inefficient use of funds. Bureaucracies can be infuriating. Leaders can sometimes lead government entities down the wrong path, as with the Bush II wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or Truman’s decision to pursue nuclear-generated electricity instead of solar power in the early 50s.
It sounds just like every company for which I ever worked, all of my clients and my own small business.
And don’t believe the nonsense that raising taxes hurts the economy and leads to layoffs. As the estimable Eduardo Porter pointed out in The New York Times earlier this week, “a growing body of research suggests not only that the government could raise much more revenue by sharply raising the top tax rates paid by the richest Americans, but it could do so without slowing economic growth. Top tax rates could go as high as 80 percent or more.”
So the next time you consider voting for anyone who wants to maintain taxes or lower them still further, look around you and see what government does for you and the community in which you live and the economy that provides your income. Think about how much better things could be if government had the money to improve these services. And remember that the more money you make, the more valuable to you are the government services that make it possible. Now in my mind, when you get more, you pay more.
No class warfare here, just the realization that we’re all in this thing called the United States together and that everyone should give their fair share so that our society and all of us can thrive.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Anti-global warming professor may or may not know physics, but he sure knows propaganda
By Marc Jampole
William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who specializes in optics and spectroscopy (study of wavelengths), authored an anti-global warming screed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal which could serve as a primer for propaganda techniques. The article pretends to prove the veracity of its title “Global Warming Models are Wrong Again,” but careful analysis reveals his arguments are built more on rhetorical tricks than on facts.
Whatever the quality of Happer’s scientific research, he is a superb propagandist. But when we pick apart some of the statements and assertions that Happer makes in this hapless article, we find he primarily uses propaganda techniques and not facts or logic to make his case. In the bullets below, Happer’s quotes are in italics:
William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who specializes in optics and spectroscopy (study of wavelengths), authored an anti-global warming screed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal which could serve as a primer for propaganda techniques. The article pretends to prove the veracity of its title “Global Warming Models are Wrong Again,” but careful analysis reveals his arguments are built more on rhetorical tricks than on facts.
Whatever the quality of Happer’s scientific research, he is a superb propagandist. But when we pick apart some of the statements and assertions that Happer makes in this hapless article, we find he primarily uses propaganda techniques and not facts or logic to make his case. In the bullets below, Happer’s quotes are in italics:
- “What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years.” What Happer does is take a meaningless slice of time for climate change. If he looked at 200 years of data, he would see that the world is getting warmer. Making the last 10 years as the length of time in which to measure global warming uses a technique I call FRAMING, which occurs when you define a problem to get the answer you want.
- “CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated. Nations with affordable energy from fossil fuels are more prosperous and healthy than those without.” Let’s forget the fact that the life that existed on earth with much higher levels of CO2 than today didn’t include humans or other large mammals. Let’s focus instead on the end of this paragraph, which is a NON SEQUITUR (which loosely means that it makes no sense or that A doesn’t really prove B): Although fossil fuels release CO2, that does not mean that you can disprove the theory that too much CO2 harms the Earth; it only means that cheap energy is necessary for nations to thrive.
- “The direct warming due to doubling CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be calculated to cause a warming of about one degree Celsius. The IPCC computer models predict a much larger warming, three degrees Celsius or even more, because they assume changes in water vapor or clouds that supposedly amplify the direct warming from CO2. Many lines of observational evidence suggest that this "positive feedback" also has been greatly exaggerated.” Note that Happer gives attribution for a computer model that predicts global warming, but does not tell which studies or computer simulations disproves it. He uses the passive construction to AVOID ATTRIBUTION. If he changed the passive “can be calculated to cause…” to an active tense, “XYZ calculates,” grammar would force him to tell us who did the calculations. “Many lines of observational evidence…,” begs the question, “Which lines?” and also avoids telling us who is following, making or observing these “lines.” If you believe in this research, sir, tell us who did it? But if Happer told us who did this so-called research he cites, we might find that it’s shoddy, has already been discounted, makes framing mistakes, was done by non-scientists or isn’t really research. We don’t really know unless Happer offers the citations.
- “But there is no hard evidence this is true. After an unusually cold winter in 2011 (December 2010-February 2011) the winter of 2012 was unusually warm in the continental United States. But the winter of 2012 was bitter in Europe, Asia and Alaska.” Happer is ARGUING BY ANECDOTE. The argument by anecdote provides examples and assumes that we will extrapolate from those examples to the conclusion the writer or speaker wants us to draw. Happer talks about what has happened over the course of two years, when global warming is a process that has occurred over many decades; in this context, two years are only anecdotes, not statistically valid data.
- “Nightly television pictures of the tragic destruction from tornadoes over the past months might make one wonder if the frequency of tornadoes is increasing, perhaps due to the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. But as one can read at Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, dotearth, ‘There is no evidence of any trend in the number of potent tornadoes (category F2 and up) over the past 50 years in the United States, even as global temperatures have risen markedly.’” The sentences I quote are the beginning of a multi-paragraph argument in which Happer proves without a doubt that the number of tornadoes have not increased in the United States (he never mentions the rest of the world). He really takes apart those who believe that global warming has led to more tornadoes. But who is saying it? I googled “tornadoes global warming” and could only come up with articles in which experts say that there has not been an increase in tornadoes. I could come up with no article in which a scientist or a group has said that tornadoes have increased (except for a speculating weather personality or two trying to spice up coverage of a tornado). What Happer has done is set up a STRAW MAN, which means he creates an argument which is easy to destroy and then destroys it. And once again, he bases his argument on a NON SEQUITUR. He wants us to believe that just because there has not been an increase in tornadoes that there has been no global warming, nor damage from same. His reasoning is absurd, even if it builds on the idea that global warming will create more extreme weather. Extreme weather includes a lot more than tornadoes. I sense (but don’t know for a fact) that he selects tornadoes to discuss for precisely this reason, another example of FRAMING the argument to get the conclusion you want. Reduced to rhetorical principles, Happer frames the argument, then destroys a straw man, all so he can make a statement that’s a non sequitur.
Happer ends by invoking the sainted Richard Feynman on scientific research in general. He then closes with, “The most important component of climate science is careful, long-term observations of climate-related phenomena, from space, from land, and in the oceans. If observations do not support code predictions—like more extreme weather, or rapidly rising global temperatures—Feynman has told us what conclusions to draw about the theory.” If you only skim these last two paragraphs, you might come to the conclusion that Feynman, one of the most important physicists since Einstein, is against global warming. But all Feynman is saying is that science is based on facts.
Note that in this last paragraph, all Happer is really stating is that we should judge the theory of global warming on facts and if the facts aren’t there, the theory is wrong. His rhetoric avoids a direct statement about global warming. Some might call is a rhetorical flourish: the writer puts down the facts and we make the conclusion, a kind of 1+1=2 (or in the case of the implication that Happer wants us to draw, 1+1=3!).
But I think Happer is using this rhetorical device to avoid speaking directly, because he knows that the facts are against him.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Atheist march reminds that in our secular society there shouldn’t be polarization between believers and nonbelievers
By Marc Jampole
Yesterday’s rally of atheists, agnostics and others who don’t believe in religion had a flavor of liberation politics. The tone of the language reported across the country and around the world resembled the kind of pleas for recognition that people of color, gays, women, Hispanics, people with disabilities, Moslems and other groups seeking their rights in society have issued through the years.
Sample these comments by speakers:
Yesterday’s rally of atheists, agnostics and others who don’t believe in religion had a flavor of liberation politics. The tone of the language reported across the country and around the world resembled the kind of pleas for recognition that people of color, gays, women, Hispanics, people with disabilities, Moslems and other groups seeking their rights in society have issued through the years.
Sample these comments by speakers:
- “There are too many people in this country who have been cowed into fear of coming out as atheists, secularists or agnostics,” said Richard Dawkins, the British scientist whose ventures into pop science have unfortunately led to his misleading anthropomorphizing of chemicals in the body (i.e., he attributes emotions and goals to genetic material).
- “These are battles that homosexuals have won, people of color have won, women have won,” said Jamila Bey, who claims to have once lost a job when her boss learned she was an atheist.
- “We have the numbers to be taken seriously,” said Paul Fidalgo of the Center for Inquiry, which promotes the scientific method and reasoning and helped organize the rally.
- “Coming here makes me feel less alone,” said 13-year-old Catherine Williams, who attends a small conservative private school and is reported to have said that it can be uncomfortable because many of her classmates are vocal about their religious beliefs.
While discrimination against atheists for their beliefs may exist, lumping non-believers together as just another interest group may ultimately have a negative impact on achieving the goals that brought together the 20 groups and 15,000 people who rallied yesterday.
Here’s why: The social right-wing always pose religious issues as a battle between good and evil and the rest of the country hears it as a battle between two competing special interest groups, for example, women versus the Catholic Church. For both the right and the mainstream, religiously-tinged issues—contraception, abortion, gay marriage, crèches in public, religious groups in public schools and the teaching of evolution—are characterized as battles between two sides. Identifying a new special interest group—nonbelievers—intensifies this tendency towards polarization.
And yet the Constitution is clear: there should be an absolute separation of church and state and all individuals should have the right to practice his or her own religion, assuming it doesn’t break the basic laws of the land, e.g., mutilation of children or marrying more than one wife. By presenting themselves as an oppressed group, nonbelievers buy into the “us versus them” mentality created by the opposition of special interests. The media and society then both take it upon themselves to “balance the needs” of the competing groups, when in fact there should not be a competition or a balancing at all, since we are officially a secular country.
In short, by assuming the mantle of a special interest group, nonbelievers turn the story into a battle between atheists and the God-fearing. That plays right into the hands of social conservatives. The issue transforms from right-wingers against the Constitution into believers versus nonbelievers.
Instead of pleading for recognition as a group, the rally should have focused more on the key issues which I believe unite all those who don’t believe in religion:
- National science standards that would insure that we teach science in science classes, while leaving religious theories such as intelligent design for elective comparative religion courses in high school.
- National environmental, energy and other policies that are determined and implemented based on scientific studies.
- Standards of conduct that would ensure that proselytization of one religion never again becomes the unofficial policy of a branch of the armed services as it did to a certain extent in the Air Force for years.
These policy issues, by the way, should unite atheists, agnostics and secularists with most Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Animists, Pantheists, Wiccans and all brands of Christians. In an open society all religious groups can thrive, as none are either oppressed or treated with any special deference. Let’s focus our efforts on keeping our society as open as it is and opening it more. We don’t do it by conceptualizing oppressed groups. That only helps the right-wing legitimize itself and feeds the news media’s predilection to polarize instead of analyze. Instead, I urge nonbelievers to put their energies into the issues.
I’m not saying that nonbelievers shouldn’t organize, only that they should organize around issues and thus avoid becoming the “counter-balance” to believers.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction offers insightful review of the history of U.S. health care reform
By Marc Jampole
With the Supreme Court considering multiple challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 next week, Progressive Populist readers might want to delve into the long-term history of health care reform in the United States. If so, there is no better place to go than Paul Starr’s recent Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, which traces health care reform from the earliest proposals for government-sponsored health insurance just before and during World War I.
Starr is without a doubt the guy to tackle the subject. Since its 1984 publication, his Social Transformation of American Medicine has become established not just as the seminal work in the narrow field of health care, but as one of the very most important books of American social history. Since then, Starr has taught, conducted historical research into both health care and the media and served as a senior health care advisor for Bill Clinton. He is co-editor of The American Prospect.
Here are some of the insights that I gleaned from reading Remedy and Reaction:
A lost golden moment
There was a golden moment when all the stars were aligned for a major overall of the healthcare system which would have ensured that virtually every American had healthcare insurance. Both Republicans and Democrats pretty much agreed on what to do, the various constituencies such as insurers, physicians and the public were either on board or not opposed and the president in charge supported the idea and knew how to get things done. Unfortunately, the president was Richard Nixon and a potentially watershed moment drowned in the Watergate scandal.
Mitt Romney's important role
Starr documents that the Affordable Care Act is profoundly the child of the successful Massachusetts plan that Governor Mitt Romney competently shepherded to passage and then efficiently implemented. The federal plan is derived from the same philosophy and using pretty much the same set of strategies and tactics as the Massachusetts plan. Starr also points out that Romney did not talk about healthcare reform during his gubernatorial campaign, but once in office he rolled up his sleeves and displayed enormous competence. Starr doesn’t say it, but I will: the Romney disavowal of his landmark accomplishment strongly suggests that Mitt is a value-free technocrat whose idea of being in charge is to implement competently the desires of his backers, whatever that means. By repudiating his own good works, Romney transforms himself from a major statesman to the ethical equivalent of an Albert Speer, that wonderfully brilliant architect and thinker who dedicated himself to accomplishing the will of his backers.
Not a socialist plot
Starr shows that the basic philosophy behind Obama’s plan from the beginning has been to cover more people and cut the cost of coverage while taking a pragmatic approach that does not profoundly upset the current complicated system that mixes public and private solutions and funding sources. Its dependence on private insurance and patient cost sharing derive from Republican ideas. So is the idea of not creating a “public option,” but instead establishing insurance exchanges, which are marketplaces for insurance for those not covered by government programs or their employers.
Like all compromises, there is something for everyone to hate and love about the Affordable Care Act. But Starr, who would probably have preferred a more European style system, brings up a stunning fact that should win the day with many centrists and progressives: The impact over Obama’s healthcare reform over 10 years will be to increase total healthcare costs in the United States by a worst-case 1 percent, while providing coverage to 32 million more people, or a little over 10% of the American population. By that math, the cost per person for health care goes down, which means that by applying some quick fixes to the current system, we cover many more people and at a lower cost.
It’s an imperfect law that doesn’t address all the challenges of perfecting an imperfect system, but it is nevertheless landmark legislation. Let’s hope the most right-wing Supreme Court since the Dred Scott days agrees.
With the Supreme Court considering multiple challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 next week, Progressive Populist readers might want to delve into the long-term history of health care reform in the United States. If so, there is no better place to go than Paul Starr’s recent Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, which traces health care reform from the earliest proposals for government-sponsored health insurance just before and during World War I.
Starr is without a doubt the guy to tackle the subject. Since its 1984 publication, his Social Transformation of American Medicine has become established not just as the seminal work in the narrow field of health care, but as one of the very most important books of American social history. Since then, Starr has taught, conducted historical research into both health care and the media and served as a senior health care advisor for Bill Clinton. He is co-editor of The American Prospect.
Here are some of the insights that I gleaned from reading Remedy and Reaction:
A lost golden moment
There was a golden moment when all the stars were aligned for a major overall of the healthcare system which would have ensured that virtually every American had healthcare insurance. Both Republicans and Democrats pretty much agreed on what to do, the various constituencies such as insurers, physicians and the public were either on board or not opposed and the president in charge supported the idea and knew how to get things done. Unfortunately, the president was Richard Nixon and a potentially watershed moment drowned in the Watergate scandal.
Mitt Romney's important role
Starr documents that the Affordable Care Act is profoundly the child of the successful Massachusetts plan that Governor Mitt Romney competently shepherded to passage and then efficiently implemented. The federal plan is derived from the same philosophy and using pretty much the same set of strategies and tactics as the Massachusetts plan. Starr also points out that Romney did not talk about healthcare reform during his gubernatorial campaign, but once in office he rolled up his sleeves and displayed enormous competence. Starr doesn’t say it, but I will: the Romney disavowal of his landmark accomplishment strongly suggests that Mitt is a value-free technocrat whose idea of being in charge is to implement competently the desires of his backers, whatever that means. By repudiating his own good works, Romney transforms himself from a major statesman to the ethical equivalent of an Albert Speer, that wonderfully brilliant architect and thinker who dedicated himself to accomplishing the will of his backers.
Not a socialist plot
Starr shows that the basic philosophy behind Obama’s plan from the beginning has been to cover more people and cut the cost of coverage while taking a pragmatic approach that does not profoundly upset the current complicated system that mixes public and private solutions and funding sources. Its dependence on private insurance and patient cost sharing derive from Republican ideas. So is the idea of not creating a “public option,” but instead establishing insurance exchanges, which are marketplaces for insurance for those not covered by government programs or their employers.
Like all compromises, there is something for everyone to hate and love about the Affordable Care Act. But Starr, who would probably have preferred a more European style system, brings up a stunning fact that should win the day with many centrists and progressives: The impact over Obama’s healthcare reform over 10 years will be to increase total healthcare costs in the United States by a worst-case 1 percent, while providing coverage to 32 million more people, or a little over 10% of the American population. By that math, the cost per person for health care goes down, which means that by applying some quick fixes to the current system, we cover many more people and at a lower cost.
It’s an imperfect law that doesn’t address all the challenges of perfecting an imperfect system, but it is nevertheless landmark legislation. Let’s hope the most right-wing Supreme Court since the Dred Scott days agrees.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
For Mitt Romney, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to win
The core of Romney’s big speech in Chicago yesterday was his accusation that the Obama Administration has pursued “an assault on freedom” with new business regulations and higher taxes. The expression freedom is bandied about a lot, especially by Republicans bewailing its imminent loss—economic freedom, personal freedom, religious freedom. But what about freedom from breathing dirty air? The freedom from hunger? The freedom from economic insecurity? The freedom from disease?
We can pose both sides of most issues as a test of freedom. In the days of the civil rights movement, it was the freedom to sit in a restaurant versus the freedom to deny service in a business establishment. The current flap about contraception pits the freedom of women versus the freedom of a religion to discriminate against women.
Of course, the more we apply the word “freedom,” the more it loses all meaning. And that’s the point!
The value of any word to a propagandist or ideologue increases as the meaning of the word becomes more amorphous, harder to pin down. And there is no more amorphous word than freedom.
The first definition of freedom in Merriam-Webster’s is “the quality or state of being free: the quality or state of not being coerced or constrained by fate, necessity, or circumstances in one’s choices or actions.” The entry, however, goes on for many paragraphs and gives many different meanings to the word. The synonyms for freedom, some contradictory, suggest how easy it is for propagandists to find a meaning to fit the moment: “self-determination,” “independence,” “liberty,” “facility,” “ease”,” right,” “privilege,” “franchise,” and even “generosity” (which is not the essence of the freedom from taxation that Romney would like America’s wealthiest to continue enjoying). Then there’s Kris Kristofferson’s definition, made famous by Janis Joplin: another word for nothing left to lose.
One anecdote on the use of freedom outside the political realm should illuminate the power of words that lose meaning. A few years ago at a family Bat Mitzvah in California, the rabbi performing the service said in his sermon that “Torah is freedom. The more Torah, the more freedom.”
It was of course, a completely false statement. The Torah, which comprises the first five books of the Jewish Bible, does include many well-loved biblical stories and all of the ones told by Jews, Christians and Moslems alike. But the Torah is primarily a book of laws, 613 to be precise, whose purpose is to restrain the behavior of people, i.e., take away their freedom. Thou shall not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. These are the birds you should regard as unclean. According to the Jewish tradition, the Torah is the source for every Jewish law, even those not mentioned in it. That includes all the laws that take away freedoms related to eating, traveling and mixing the sexes in social situations.
These laws take freedom away from people. The more Torah, the less freedom. And yet so many of the congregants smiled in agreement when the rabbi equated a book of mostly proscriptive laws with freedom.
Whether he knew it or not, the rabbi was using yet another definition of freedom. Freedom is also that feeling of supreme exhilaration and limitless power that people describe as “feeling free.” I remember when I was much younger and religious, I would sometimes read the Torah and get a sudden feeling of being free, like the feeling when I used to take my feet off the pedals and glide my bicycle down a steep hill, or the feeling when I quit one job for another one that paid 36% more. Many TV commercials will say their products help attain this “feeling of freedom.”
From kindergarten on, we are indoctrinated to the importance of freedom and “the feeling of freedom” at school and in the mass media. We are taught that the United States was founded to promote freedom (at the time, of course, only for white adult males who owned property) and that the United States is a beacon of freedom to the world. One of the major themes in our history is the gradual spread of freedom through increased freedom for our citizens and in the foreign lands that the myth says we have saved. We claim that every war we fight is to protect our freedom or the freedom of the people whose land we are invading, or both. Thinking about American freedom can swell the chests of many of us with an almost swooning pride. We have learned to feel the “freedom feeling” whenever we consider our history, culture and laws.
It is this definition of freedom—this feeling—to which Romney appeals when he talks about economic freedom. When he says the policies of his party will increase freedom, he wants people’s hearts to swell with the feeling of freedom and then recoil with the fear at the thought of lost freedom because of environmental regulation, healthcare reform or raising taxes on the wealthy. He never mentions that his tax freedom results in less money for society to help people be free from disease, from ignorance, from hunger, from the helplessness of old age and from the frustration of poverty. He never mentions that his freedom from regulation makes people less free from business scams, unsafe products, dirty air and infectious water.
Many philosophers believe that the essence of civilization is restraint. Learning restraint—limiting your freedom for your future good, the good of others or the common good—is at the heart of the process of growing up from infancy into a mature member of society.
Romney and the rest of the Republicans don’t really want absolute freedom in the economic realm. They just believe that our laws should protect the rights of individuals and organizations to do as they please (outside the sexual realm) as opposed to protecting the rights of people to have the basic human dignities of food, health care, education and the opportunity to make a living and improve their lot. Those who say that unfettered economic freedom enables more people to enjoy all the other freedoms are merely expressing their beliefs, which they constantly and inaccurately present as a fact-based theory. History, however, is filled of examples of how taking away an economic freedom—the freedom to hire children, the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into rivers, the freedom to charge what you like because you have a monopoly, the freedom to pay someone less than minimum wage or the freedom to prevent union organizing—has improved society and helped the economy. It’s one set of rights versus another. We can also call them freedoms, but once we do, the concept of freedom loses its meaning.
In the realm of political campaigning, “freedom” has become something one accuses the opponent of not loving/having/protecting/cherishing. With name-calling, we say, “you’re this,” but freedom in the Republican’s sense is conjured only in its absence as a characteristic. Saying the opponent or the idea is against freedom is a highly sophisticated form of name-calling, dependent not just on conflating different concepts of freedom, but also on a body of unproved assertions and an almost autonomic emotional reaction.
But emotions aside, keep it in mind that when Romney says the election is about freedom, he means the freedom of the economic and social class he represents to continue pulling more and more wealth from everyone else through continued low taxes for themselves and low wages and declining government benefits for everyone else.
We can pose both sides of most issues as a test of freedom. In the days of the civil rights movement, it was the freedom to sit in a restaurant versus the freedom to deny service in a business establishment. The current flap about contraception pits the freedom of women versus the freedom of a religion to discriminate against women.
Of course, the more we apply the word “freedom,” the more it loses all meaning. And that’s the point!
The value of any word to a propagandist or ideologue increases as the meaning of the word becomes more amorphous, harder to pin down. And there is no more amorphous word than freedom.
The first definition of freedom in Merriam-Webster’s is “the quality or state of being free: the quality or state of not being coerced or constrained by fate, necessity, or circumstances in one’s choices or actions.” The entry, however, goes on for many paragraphs and gives many different meanings to the word. The synonyms for freedom, some contradictory, suggest how easy it is for propagandists to find a meaning to fit the moment: “self-determination,” “independence,” “liberty,” “facility,” “ease”,” right,” “privilege,” “franchise,” and even “generosity” (which is not the essence of the freedom from taxation that Romney would like America’s wealthiest to continue enjoying). Then there’s Kris Kristofferson’s definition, made famous by Janis Joplin: another word for nothing left to lose.
One anecdote on the use of freedom outside the political realm should illuminate the power of words that lose meaning. A few years ago at a family Bat Mitzvah in California, the rabbi performing the service said in his sermon that “Torah is freedom. The more Torah, the more freedom.”
It was of course, a completely false statement. The Torah, which comprises the first five books of the Jewish Bible, does include many well-loved biblical stories and all of the ones told by Jews, Christians and Moslems alike. But the Torah is primarily a book of laws, 613 to be precise, whose purpose is to restrain the behavior of people, i.e., take away their freedom. Thou shall not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. These are the birds you should regard as unclean. According to the Jewish tradition, the Torah is the source for every Jewish law, even those not mentioned in it. That includes all the laws that take away freedoms related to eating, traveling and mixing the sexes in social situations.
These laws take freedom away from people. The more Torah, the less freedom. And yet so many of the congregants smiled in agreement when the rabbi equated a book of mostly proscriptive laws with freedom.
Whether he knew it or not, the rabbi was using yet another definition of freedom. Freedom is also that feeling of supreme exhilaration and limitless power that people describe as “feeling free.” I remember when I was much younger and religious, I would sometimes read the Torah and get a sudden feeling of being free, like the feeling when I used to take my feet off the pedals and glide my bicycle down a steep hill, or the feeling when I quit one job for another one that paid 36% more. Many TV commercials will say their products help attain this “feeling of freedom.”
From kindergarten on, we are indoctrinated to the importance of freedom and “the feeling of freedom” at school and in the mass media. We are taught that the United States was founded to promote freedom (at the time, of course, only for white adult males who owned property) and that the United States is a beacon of freedom to the world. One of the major themes in our history is the gradual spread of freedom through increased freedom for our citizens and in the foreign lands that the myth says we have saved. We claim that every war we fight is to protect our freedom or the freedom of the people whose land we are invading, or both. Thinking about American freedom can swell the chests of many of us with an almost swooning pride. We have learned to feel the “freedom feeling” whenever we consider our history, culture and laws.
It is this definition of freedom—this feeling—to which Romney appeals when he talks about economic freedom. When he says the policies of his party will increase freedom, he wants people’s hearts to swell with the feeling of freedom and then recoil with the fear at the thought of lost freedom because of environmental regulation, healthcare reform or raising taxes on the wealthy. He never mentions that his tax freedom results in less money for society to help people be free from disease, from ignorance, from hunger, from the helplessness of old age and from the frustration of poverty. He never mentions that his freedom from regulation makes people less free from business scams, unsafe products, dirty air and infectious water.
Many philosophers believe that the essence of civilization is restraint. Learning restraint—limiting your freedom for your future good, the good of others or the common good—is at the heart of the process of growing up from infancy into a mature member of society.
Romney and the rest of the Republicans don’t really want absolute freedom in the economic realm. They just believe that our laws should protect the rights of individuals and organizations to do as they please (outside the sexual realm) as opposed to protecting the rights of people to have the basic human dignities of food, health care, education and the opportunity to make a living and improve their lot. Those who say that unfettered economic freedom enables more people to enjoy all the other freedoms are merely expressing their beliefs, which they constantly and inaccurately present as a fact-based theory. History, however, is filled of examples of how taking away an economic freedom—the freedom to hire children, the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into rivers, the freedom to charge what you like because you have a monopoly, the freedom to pay someone less than minimum wage or the freedom to prevent union organizing—has improved society and helped the economy. It’s one set of rights versus another. We can also call them freedoms, but once we do, the concept of freedom loses its meaning.
In the realm of political campaigning, “freedom” has become something one accuses the opponent of not loving/having/protecting/cherishing. With name-calling, we say, “you’re this,” but freedom in the Republican’s sense is conjured only in its absence as a characteristic. Saying the opponent or the idea is against freedom is a highly sophisticated form of name-calling, dependent not just on conflating different concepts of freedom, but also on a body of unproved assertions and an almost autonomic emotional reaction.
But emotions aside, keep it in mind that when Romney says the election is about freedom, he means the freedom of the economic and social class he represents to continue pulling more and more wealth from everyone else through continued low taxes for themselves and low wages and declining government benefits for everyone else.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Selections from the April 1, 2012 issue
COVER/Steve Kornacki
Rush poisons GOP brand
EDITORIAL
Civil liberties on the frontier
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Climate change strikes home
DISPATCHES p. 5
Current TV adds talkers to morning lineup;
Rush ads suspended;
Super PACs dominate;
Limbaugh's not the only one;
Super PACs dominate, are hated;
Kaptur emerges from showdown with Kucinich;
Work hours point to continued job growth;
Mitt ‘clear favorite’ of lobbyists;
Mitt declines Medicare, embraces vouchers for seniors;
Stuck paying medical bills of woman who sued Obamacare;
Another con talking point falls apart;
Medicare growth slowing;
Feds deny Texas women's health money;
Senate rejects Keystone XL pipeline order;
GOP blocks judge nominees in a snit ...
ROGER BYBEE
Obama weighs ins and outs of ‘insourcing’
HAL CROWTHER
Meaner — and dumber — than rats
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
GOP ‘zombies’ follow ALEC’s script
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Bone marrow transplant and the market
SAM URETSKY
Republicans practice old-time religion
WAYNE O’LEARY
Obamacare meets reality
N. GUNASEKARAN
Arab Spring avoids corporate rule
JOHN BUELL
Colleges run debt peonage business
DON ROLLINS
Evangelicals, Catholics strange bedfellows
ROB PATTERSON
French were right about Jerry Lewis
POPULIST PICKS
Coma ruins Neeson’s week
and more from The Progressive Populist
According to Mickey D’s,the hot spot for octogenarians to hook up for romance is Mickey D’s
By Marc Jampole
For the first time ever, the fast food version of Siva the Destroyer, AKA McDonald’s, is going after senior citizens—and I don’t mean newly AARPed 50-year-olds, but those in their late 70s and early 80s.
I saw this commercial for the first time during one of the many breaks during the last two minutes of an NCAA tournament game this past weekend.
The commercial unfolds as a series of vignettes, with quick fade-outs and fade-ins to tell us that it’s another day of the week. In each vignette, the same two elderly gentlemen—one bald--stare at what a former employee of mine once called a “senior babe,” an extremely attractive woman in her late 60s or early 70s. They make juvenile comments about how the bald one wants to go over and try to meet her. As far as attracting the attention of unknown members of the opposite sex goes, these guys don’t seem as if they’re out of practice, but rather as if they never really were in practice.
In every vignette, the would-be lover, his intended and the friend are drinking coffee or a special McDonald’s coffee drink—you know, sweetened coffee topped with a pyramid of white whipped froth consisting of corn syrup and dairy products, topped by a few rivulets of a thicker, less airy corn syrup tinted with food coloring and a roux of natural and artificial flavorings. They’re called McCafé drinks.
In the last vignette the potential suitor arrives at the table wearing an awful fitting toupee which transforms him into a pathetic clown. Meanwhile a bearded man, looking slightly younger and spryer than the toupéed jester, approaches the senior babe. Brandishing his McCafé drink as a peacock shows his tail, he asks if he can sit at her table. Her eyes light up and they begin an animated conversation. We cut back to the two oldest adolescent males in the jungle. The friend says the would-be lothario should have put the wig on his chin instead of his head. Before the McDonald’s music and logo, the scorned lover mugs pathetically with the toupee in a way that made me feel embarrassed for and angry at the guy at the same time.
What do we learn from this commercial?
We learn that senior centers, libraries, venues for volunteer activities, dances, houses of worship and family gatherings are not the best places to meet women when you are of a certain age. Instead, you have to hang at Mickey D’s on a regular basis. Of course, that’s a completely false impression. True enough, there must be groups of seniors who use McDonald’s to meet and schmooze once a week, or maybe every day. But what happens in this commercial is slightly different. It’s hanging at Mickey D’s to hook up. And what I’m saying is that the scene rings more false than cute because there are so many better places for seniors to meet and match nowadays.
We also learn in this commercial that the relationship marketplace for straight men in their 70s and 80s is pretty grim. In a turnaround of Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” (to which these characters would have probably danced decades ago), it’s three boys for every girl. Of course, that’s false, too. Death and illness give men the numbers advantage when it comes to late-in-life love. The older the age group, the more eligible women there are per eligible man. Neither Target nor Wal-Mart would ever commit such a demographic sin in one of their commercials. When they depict a demographic group in an ad, everything is right in every detail.
Target and Wal-Mart would also never make mean fun of its customers, although they both will “make fun with” their customers, as McDonald’s has also done through the years. “Making fun with” includes such scenes as the wife letting the husband think he’s making the buying decision; the couple arguing about what to do with the savings they have from buying something; the kids trying to use smart phone technology to trick dad into buying more treats. These are gentle teases which affirm the attractiveness of the target audiences. But depicting an octogenarian as an infantilized Pagliacci is inherently insulting to the characters and by implication to the demographic they represent, which is why the scene seems more uncomfortable than cute,
despite the peppy McDonald’s “ba-da-da-da-da” playing brightly in the background.
The irony is that whoever worked on this spot started with the right ideas. McDonald’s strategy to go after senior citizens is a good one, since the original denizens of Big Macs are baby boomers now retiring and aging.
To connect the consumption of a product with an emotion is a staple strategy of advertising, one that McDonald’s has pursued with a vengeance for decades, especially in spots featuring African-Americans and young adults. And as we have seen in many McDonald’s spots through the years, what better emotion can there be than romantic attraction? Moreover, one unifying theme shared by all McDonald’s spots for specialty coffee drinks over the past few years is an attitude best described as hip cuteness, and what could be cuter and hipper at the same time than seniors in love?
On paper, the spot has it all: It connects a product to an emotion, focuses on a target market that is of growing importance, and has thematic and design similarities with other McDonald’s spots that will help enhance the overall brand message that the company tries to make in all of its advertising.
Somewhere along the way, though, these strategies led to the uncomfortable and unrealistic mess we see in the commercial. Because it presents a reality that doesn’t exist and one in which the representative of the target market is humiliated, I’m certain that the commercial will fail with that target market.
But I’m betting it plays well with the enormous youth market for coffee drinks, i.e., the young and slightly unsophisticated who will accept the McCafé drink as a cheaper substitute for a beverage from a real coffee house or that corporate imitation known as Starbucks. The humor is a highly sanitized version of the crude and somewhat humiliating humor of a lot of youth movies. Young men and women can relate to the awkward dilemma of a boy wanting to pick up a girl in a fast food restaurant but being afraid to ask.
And there can be no doubt about it. That’s not Viagra or water from the mythic fountain of youth that the bearded elderly gentleman has in his hand that makes him so attractive to the senior babe. It’s a McCafé! The elixir of love.
For the first time ever, the fast food version of Siva the Destroyer, AKA McDonald’s, is going after senior citizens—and I don’t mean newly AARPed 50-year-olds, but those in their late 70s and early 80s.
I saw this commercial for the first time during one of the many breaks during the last two minutes of an NCAA tournament game this past weekend.
The commercial unfolds as a series of vignettes, with quick fade-outs and fade-ins to tell us that it’s another day of the week. In each vignette, the same two elderly gentlemen—one bald--stare at what a former employee of mine once called a “senior babe,” an extremely attractive woman in her late 60s or early 70s. They make juvenile comments about how the bald one wants to go over and try to meet her. As far as attracting the attention of unknown members of the opposite sex goes, these guys don’t seem as if they’re out of practice, but rather as if they never really were in practice.
In every vignette, the would-be lover, his intended and the friend are drinking coffee or a special McDonald’s coffee drink—you know, sweetened coffee topped with a pyramid of white whipped froth consisting of corn syrup and dairy products, topped by a few rivulets of a thicker, less airy corn syrup tinted with food coloring and a roux of natural and artificial flavorings. They’re called McCafé drinks.
In the last vignette the potential suitor arrives at the table wearing an awful fitting toupee which transforms him into a pathetic clown. Meanwhile a bearded man, looking slightly younger and spryer than the toupéed jester, approaches the senior babe. Brandishing his McCafé drink as a peacock shows his tail, he asks if he can sit at her table. Her eyes light up and they begin an animated conversation. We cut back to the two oldest adolescent males in the jungle. The friend says the would-be lothario should have put the wig on his chin instead of his head. Before the McDonald’s music and logo, the scorned lover mugs pathetically with the toupee in a way that made me feel embarrassed for and angry at the guy at the same time.
What do we learn from this commercial?
We learn that senior centers, libraries, venues for volunteer activities, dances, houses of worship and family gatherings are not the best places to meet women when you are of a certain age. Instead, you have to hang at Mickey D’s on a regular basis. Of course, that’s a completely false impression. True enough, there must be groups of seniors who use McDonald’s to meet and schmooze once a week, or maybe every day. But what happens in this commercial is slightly different. It’s hanging at Mickey D’s to hook up. And what I’m saying is that the scene rings more false than cute because there are so many better places for seniors to meet and match nowadays.
We also learn in this commercial that the relationship marketplace for straight men in their 70s and 80s is pretty grim. In a turnaround of Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” (to which these characters would have probably danced decades ago), it’s three boys for every girl. Of course, that’s false, too. Death and illness give men the numbers advantage when it comes to late-in-life love. The older the age group, the more eligible women there are per eligible man. Neither Target nor Wal-Mart would ever commit such a demographic sin in one of their commercials. When they depict a demographic group in an ad, everything is right in every detail.
Target and Wal-Mart would also never make mean fun of its customers, although they both will “make fun with” their customers, as McDonald’s has also done through the years. “Making fun with” includes such scenes as the wife letting the husband think he’s making the buying decision; the couple arguing about what to do with the savings they have from buying something; the kids trying to use smart phone technology to trick dad into buying more treats. These are gentle teases which affirm the attractiveness of the target audiences. But depicting an octogenarian as an infantilized Pagliacci is inherently insulting to the characters and by implication to the demographic they represent, which is why the scene seems more uncomfortable than cute,
despite the peppy McDonald’s “ba-da-da-da-da” playing brightly in the background.
The irony is that whoever worked on this spot started with the right ideas. McDonald’s strategy to go after senior citizens is a good one, since the original denizens of Big Macs are baby boomers now retiring and aging.
To connect the consumption of a product with an emotion is a staple strategy of advertising, one that McDonald’s has pursued with a vengeance for decades, especially in spots featuring African-Americans and young adults. And as we have seen in many McDonald’s spots through the years, what better emotion can there be than romantic attraction? Moreover, one unifying theme shared by all McDonald’s spots for specialty coffee drinks over the past few years is an attitude best described as hip cuteness, and what could be cuter and hipper at the same time than seniors in love?
On paper, the spot has it all: It connects a product to an emotion, focuses on a target market that is of growing importance, and has thematic and design similarities with other McDonald’s spots that will help enhance the overall brand message that the company tries to make in all of its advertising.
Somewhere along the way, though, these strategies led to the uncomfortable and unrealistic mess we see in the commercial. Because it presents a reality that doesn’t exist and one in which the representative of the target market is humiliated, I’m certain that the commercial will fail with that target market.
But I’m betting it plays well with the enormous youth market for coffee drinks, i.e., the young and slightly unsophisticated who will accept the McCafé drink as a cheaper substitute for a beverage from a real coffee house or that corporate imitation known as Starbucks. The humor is a highly sanitized version of the crude and somewhat humiliating humor of a lot of youth movies. Young men and women can relate to the awkward dilemma of a boy wanting to pick up a girl in a fast food restaurant but being afraid to ask.
And there can be no doubt about it. That’s not Viagra or water from the mythic fountain of youth that the bearded elderly gentleman has in his hand that makes him so attractive to the senior babe. It’s a McCafé! The elixir of love.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
NY Times article shows that wealthy get more in tax breaks than
Bravo to Eduardo Porter for his article titles “A Nation of Too Many Tax Breaks” on the front page of today’s New York Times’ business section.
Porter demonstrates that while the poor do get more in government benefits, the rich more than make up for it in the tax breaks that enable them to reduce the taxes they pay.
At the heart of the article are two sets of bar and circle graphs. One set depicts the average that each family in various quintiles (fifths of the country) get in government benefits such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, housing assistance and food stamps. The other set depicts the amount families in each quintile save on average on what they pay in taxes because of tax breaks.
Just looking at the bar graph is enough to see that when you add up tax breaks and benefits, the wealthy make out like bandits. We can also see that we give more tax breaks than benefits, so if we ended tax breaks, we could fund the benefits and make a dent in the deficit.
But because Porter never bothers to actually add the totals, we never see the hidden story: the middle class are getting screwed, not by the poor as Santorum, Gingrich and their ilk imply, but by the wealthy.
Here’s the math:
By not adding the totals, Porter misses the fact that the middle class get so little from the deal. The middle class—those in middle fifth and second highest quintiles--get about 24% less in benefits and tax breaks than the poor do. But the wealthiest fifth get more than twice as much as the middle class do in benefits and tax breaks, and 80% more than the poor and near poor.
When we look at these numbers, I don’t see how anyone could be angry at the poor. No religion or culture that I have ever encountered ever showed anything but charity for the least fortunate among us, which makes me wonder why anyone lucky enough to be part of the middle two-fifths of the country would begrudge the poor $4,000 a year from the collective resources of the government, especially since the fund is always earmarked for specific needs, such as for food, health care or education, or vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the disabled.
The true target of ire should be the wealthiest fifth, who are better off than everyone else and yet get the lion’s share of the government’s largess.
I’m guessing that anyone in the middle who does the math (or reads OpEdge) will gain more sympathy for the position of the Occupy Movement that posits a class war waged by the wealthiest 1% of the population against everyone else. Or at least they might if the Occupy Movement could make the transition that the Tea Party movement did and become a party that has positions and supports candidates.
When we look at these numbers, I don’t see how anyone could be angry at the poor. No religion or culture that I have ever encountered ever showed anything but charity for the least fortunate among us, which makes me wonder why anyone lucky enough to be part of the middle two-fifths of the country would begrudge the poor $4,000 a year from the collective resources of the government, especially since the fund is always earmarked for specific needs, such as for food, health care or education, or vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the disabled.
The true target of ire should be the wealthiest fifth, who are better off than everyone else and yet get the lion’s share of the government’s largess.
I’m guessing that anyone in the middle who does the math (or reads OpEdge) will gain more sympathy for the position of the Occupy Movement that posits a class war waged by the wealthiest 1% of the population against everyone else. Or at least they might if the Occupy Movement could make the transition that the Tea Party movement did and become a party that has positions and supports candidates.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Television commercials enter our cultural pantheon next to Shakespeare and Lincoln
By Marc Jampole
It was only yesterday that I first saw the new TV commercial starring Mean Joe Green, a professional football player from the 1970s. The commercial, for a laundry detergent, parodies a TV spot that Mean Joe did in 1979 that makes all the lists of top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.
In the original spot, a young boy calls to Mean Joe as the athlete trudges through a stadium tunnel after a game. The boy hands Joe a soft drink and Joe respond by tossing him his jersey.
In the new spot, it’s a housewife, played to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom-next-door perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the characters much more than the original spot did. The housewife tosses a bottle of the detergent to Mean Joe, dressed in uniform and looking very sharp and buff—for a guy in his mid-60’s. When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it, makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.
A great spoof.
TV commercials have spoofed TV shows, movies and other art forms for decades. And parody sometimes enters into the revival of an old ad concept like Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu or Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial imitating itself.
This laundry soap commercial marks the first time, however, that I remember seeing a television commercial that mocks another television commercial for a different product. (If I’m wrong, please tweet me about it.)
What does it say about our culture when to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about another television commercial? One that’s 30 years old!
Mass culture chews up images and concepts quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne; historical figures such as the short Napoleon or Washington crossing the Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents like the Spitzer scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are just some of the communication forms that cannibalize cultural references.
Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs in many ways: Over time, we expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax conservative or Martin Luther King comes to represent general service to the community. We make references to cultural icons, as when James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic or when a secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the “Sherminator.” We morph them, as when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu become good guys. We take them out of context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.
The surest sign that an event, person, character or saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it has undergone a large number of these and other processes of cultural expropriation over years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to make fun of the Mean Joe Green soft drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives whose ages range from 30-65.
What would they say, those like Harold Bloom who put together lists of the great literature and other cultural artifacts with which every culturally literate person should be familiar? At first glance, you might think that they would probably frown dyspeptically at the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown.
To do so would be to stake out new ground in the culture wars. For centuries, the argument has been between high and low culture, between Latin versus the vernacular, painting versus pottery, Beethoven versus folk songs and the Beach Boys. But a television commercial is something different from both high culture and low culture. It represents commercial culture, and the cultural dictators of all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural essentials. We see poster advertisements by Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists and others hanging in art museums all over the world. Why not a TV ad?
Rather than speculate on whether the Mean Joe Green laundry soap commercial marks a watershed in what defines cultural literacy, let’s have a little fun by imagining commercials in which the following well-known fictional ad characters pitched these other products. I’m not going to sketch out the commercials, only the characters and products. I think everyone can use their imagination:
So imagine if these four characters---Mikey who will try anything; the slimy Joe Isuzu; that little old lady shouting “Where’s the beef?” and Madge the wise and practical manicurist…
…were in their typical TV spot environments, but selling any of the following products—hospital systems; fast food; Wal-Mart; potato chips; financial planning; beer; or prescription drugs, say for depression or erectile dysfunction.
I especially like Madge recommending a beer and Mikey trying Cymbalta. Joe Isuzu shilling a hospital isn’t bad either.
It was only yesterday that I first saw the new TV commercial starring Mean Joe Green, a professional football player from the 1970s. The commercial, for a laundry detergent, parodies a TV spot that Mean Joe did in 1979 that makes all the lists of top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.
In the original spot, a young boy calls to Mean Joe as the athlete trudges through a stadium tunnel after a game. The boy hands Joe a soft drink and Joe respond by tossing him his jersey.
In the new spot, it’s a housewife, played to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom-next-door perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the characters much more than the original spot did. The housewife tosses a bottle of the detergent to Mean Joe, dressed in uniform and looking very sharp and buff—for a guy in his mid-60’s. When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it, makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.
A great spoof.
TV commercials have spoofed TV shows, movies and other art forms for decades. And parody sometimes enters into the revival of an old ad concept like Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu or Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial imitating itself.
This laundry soap commercial marks the first time, however, that I remember seeing a television commercial that mocks another television commercial for a different product. (If I’m wrong, please tweet me about it.)
What does it say about our culture when to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about another television commercial? One that’s 30 years old!
Mass culture chews up images and concepts quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne; historical figures such as the short Napoleon or Washington crossing the Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents like the Spitzer scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are just some of the communication forms that cannibalize cultural references.
Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs in many ways: Over time, we expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax conservative or Martin Luther King comes to represent general service to the community. We make references to cultural icons, as when James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic or when a secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the “Sherminator.” We morph them, as when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu become good guys. We take them out of context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.
The surest sign that an event, person, character or saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it has undergone a large number of these and other processes of cultural expropriation over years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to make fun of the Mean Joe Green soft drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives whose ages range from 30-65.
What would they say, those like Harold Bloom who put together lists of the great literature and other cultural artifacts with which every culturally literate person should be familiar? At first glance, you might think that they would probably frown dyspeptically at the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown.
To do so would be to stake out new ground in the culture wars. For centuries, the argument has been between high and low culture, between Latin versus the vernacular, painting versus pottery, Beethoven versus folk songs and the Beach Boys. But a television commercial is something different from both high culture and low culture. It represents commercial culture, and the cultural dictators of all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural essentials. We see poster advertisements by Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists and others hanging in art museums all over the world. Why not a TV ad?
Rather than speculate on whether the Mean Joe Green laundry soap commercial marks a watershed in what defines cultural literacy, let’s have a little fun by imagining commercials in which the following well-known fictional ad characters pitched these other products. I’m not going to sketch out the commercials, only the characters and products. I think everyone can use their imagination:
So imagine if these four characters---Mikey who will try anything; the slimy Joe Isuzu; that little old lady shouting “Where’s the beef?” and Madge the wise and practical manicurist…
…were in their typical TV spot environments, but selling any of the following products—hospital systems; fast food; Wal-Mart; potato chips; financial planning; beer; or prescription drugs, say for depression or erectile dysfunction.
I especially like Madge recommending a beer and Mikey trying Cymbalta. Joe Isuzu shilling a hospital isn’t bad either.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Covering birth control v. ED pills illuminates what health insurance is supposed to do
By Marc Jampole
After I wondered the other day why those against health insurance covering birth control for women make no such objection to coverage of erectile dysfunction pills, several people tweeted me to uncover what they think is a fatal flaw in my argument: ED pills treat a medical condition, whereas birth control does not.
Medical condition versus no medical condition: At the heart of this distinction by those opposed to birth control for women is the idea that health insurance should not cover preventive medicine, such as annual physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears, mole removals, vaccines and dental check-ups. None of these tests or procedures cure anything, only prevent conditions or prevent them from becoming fatal. Imagine how much more suffering there would be in the world if polio and small pox were still running rampant through the world, or if the many early stage and pre-cancerous conditions were not caught.
To say that medical care and health insurance have as their sole goal to cure ailments is just wrong. Medicine and health insurance also prevent ailments.
The birth of a child is a wonderful thing, but only if the child is wanted. Pregnancy is always fraught with risks for both mother and child. Often women have ailments or disabilities that increase those risks to the point that pregnancy would be life-threatening. Those risks multiply for the child in unwanted pregnancies and can continue throughout childhood and beyond. Unwanted pregnancies can also lead to abortions, which, while not usually dangerous if performed under proper medical supervision, are objectionable to many people. To deny that birth control is part of preventive care requires ignoring a slew of data on women’s health issues.
Health insurers and medical professionals are always trying to figure out what and how many preventive tests, procedures and examinations are needed to keep people healthy while minimizing the unnecessary. After what must have been many studies repeatedly analyzed, most agree that covering birth control is worth the cost because it lowers total medical costs and prevents the pain and suffering of many unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Now the other side will say that there’s another way to prevent pregnancies and unwanted abortion, the “little white aspirin pill between the knees” method, AKA abstinence. They ask, why make society pay for the personal decision to engage in sex? And of course, the same question can be asked about ED pills.
And so those opposed to coverage of birth control pills are left with a dilemma:
Republicans have latched onto the “birth control coverage” issue because they think they can use it to make other messages that will resonate with the right-wing. The overt messages have to do with government interference, especially as it involves health care, and the role of religion in the government and society. The subtext, though, entails some old-fashioned and wrong-headed ideas about the role of women in society.
After I wondered the other day why those against health insurance covering birth control for women make no such objection to coverage of erectile dysfunction pills, several people tweeted me to uncover what they think is a fatal flaw in my argument: ED pills treat a medical condition, whereas birth control does not.
Medical condition versus no medical condition: At the heart of this distinction by those opposed to birth control for women is the idea that health insurance should not cover preventive medicine, such as annual physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears, mole removals, vaccines and dental check-ups. None of these tests or procedures cure anything, only prevent conditions or prevent them from becoming fatal. Imagine how much more suffering there would be in the world if polio and small pox were still running rampant through the world, or if the many early stage and pre-cancerous conditions were not caught.
To say that medical care and health insurance have as their sole goal to cure ailments is just wrong. Medicine and health insurance also prevent ailments.
The birth of a child is a wonderful thing, but only if the child is wanted. Pregnancy is always fraught with risks for both mother and child. Often women have ailments or disabilities that increase those risks to the point that pregnancy would be life-threatening. Those risks multiply for the child in unwanted pregnancies and can continue throughout childhood and beyond. Unwanted pregnancies can also lead to abortions, which, while not usually dangerous if performed under proper medical supervision, are objectionable to many people. To deny that birth control is part of preventive care requires ignoring a slew of data on women’s health issues.
Health insurers and medical professionals are always trying to figure out what and how many preventive tests, procedures and examinations are needed to keep people healthy while minimizing the unnecessary. After what must have been many studies repeatedly analyzed, most agree that covering birth control is worth the cost because it lowers total medical costs and prevents the pain and suffering of many unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Now the other side will say that there’s another way to prevent pregnancies and unwanted abortion, the “little white aspirin pill between the knees” method, AKA abstinence. They ask, why make society pay for the personal decision to engage in sex? And of course, the same question can be asked about ED pills.
And so those opposed to coverage of birth control pills are left with a dilemma:
- Loudly oppose coverage of ED pills (since to engage in sex is a matter of personal choice) or admit they have a double standard.
OR
- Come out against coverage of all preventive medicine.
Republicans have latched onto the “birth control coverage” issue because they think they can use it to make other messages that will resonate with the right-wing. The overt messages have to do with government interference, especially as it involves health care, and the role of religion in the government and society. The subtext, though, entails some old-fashioned and wrong-headed ideas about the role of women in society.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Arizona professor finds that tax progressivity does not matter in creating an equitable society
By Marc Jampole
Most people who have been reading the progressive or the mainstream news media know that the last 30 years have seen the United States become a less equitable society, with fewer people in the middle class and more people who are poor and near poor. By income, assets or any other measure, the top 1% now control much more of the wealth of the country than they did in 1979.
In my view, that net transfer of wealth took place in three ways:
- Tax rates were lowered and the tax system made less progressive, which means the difference in the tax rate paid by the wealthy and the poor narrowed.
- Government programs transferred less money to the poor and middle class.
- Less income went to the wages of the non-owners, non-executives and non-professionals and more went to high earners and to corporate profit.
It has long been a mantra of the left, including myself, that making taxes more progressive is one of the best ways to reduce income and wealth inequality. When I spoke with Professor William Domhoff of “Who Rules America?” fame in Santa Cruz this past January, he began to make the case that maybe we shouldn’t harp so much on tax progressivity.
Earlier this week Professor Domhoff sent me a link to an article at the blog of Professor Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona in which Professor Kenworthy analyzes how different industrialized countries reduce income inequality. He uses existing statistics, but looks at them in an innovative way.
It turns out that no other country reduces income inequality through a progressive tax system except the United States, the nation that does the worse job of reducing the inequalities of wealth that the free market seems to generate naturally.
Professor Kenworthy writes that “the chief contribution of taxes to inequality reduction is indirect. Taxes provide the money to fund the transfers that reduce inequality.” He finds that “it is the quantity of the tax rather than its progressivity that matters most.”
Professor Kenworthy reaches the conclusion that we should consider a national consumption tax with all the proceeds earmarked for programs that help the poor and middle class. Kenworthy suggests a 5% tax with funds used for universal healthcare, universal preschool and/or high quality child care. Everyone pays the same rate on a consumption tax, which people and businesses pay when they purchase goods and services, so it is regressive.
I think the idea of any tax that has all funds earmarked to improving our tattered social service net is a great idea, and certainly worth very serious consideration when we are talking about reforming the tax system. But I warn progressives interested in getting behind this idea not to sever the link between the tax and the earmark to social service programs. If that link is severed, the right-wing will jump on the tax part and then use it to pay down the debt or cut other taxes on the wealthy.
Moreover, I was wondering if perhaps there were a more direct way to transfer wealth, and that’s to implement policies that equalize income, such as:
- Raise the federal minimum wage
- End state “right to work” laws and other anti-union laws
- End privatization of government services, such as prisons, charter schools and military supply line support, since this privatization typically leads to lower salaries for most of the employees of the privatized operation.
No matter how we prioritize the progressive economic agenda, Professor Kenworthy has thought outside the box and uncovered an important idea—that tax progressivity is not important and therefore can be a bargaining chip with the right.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Study begs question: do people get rich acting unethically or act unethically because they think they are privileged?
By Marc Jampole
The news this week that a new study found that wealthier people were more likely to behave unethically set off a chicken-or-egg debate in my mind.
In the study, Paul Piff, a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, led a team of researchers at UC-Berkeley and the University of Toronto in a variety of behavioral experiments involving about 1,000 people.
They ran 7 experiments, all of which concluded that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals:
The researchers used a number of ways to evaluate socioeconomic status, such as education levels, annual income and the participants’ own perception of their social standing. But it didn’t matter what measure they used to sort participants into classes: those with higher status tended to behave in ways that served their own self-interest, even if it was unethical. My own view is that the reason it didn’t matter which criterion they measure: In the United States, virtually all social status reduces to money. The wealthier you are, the higher the social class, the higher the self-perception of class, the higher the annual income and the higher the level of education.
By the way, neither the study nor anyone else is saying that all wealthy people are unethical, only that a larger percentage of wealthy people than poor people will do or consider doing things that most people consider to be unethical.
Now comes the chicken or egg: do people gain higher status primarily by engaging in unethical activities? Or does having a higher status make people think they are better than others and can play by their own rules?
Let’s start with the “chicken” speculation of the authors of the study, i.e., being rich changes how people behave:
We know that there is less social mobility in the United States than ever before in its history and less than any other industrialized country.
What that means is that today’s upper class of wealth is primarily, but not exclusively, children of the upper class. That would certainly speak to the idea that the chicken came first, that is, that wealth created the pattern of bad behavior and not the other way around, at least in the current generation.
The researchers did find an “egg” explanation, which means that there may be something about cheating, lying and other unethical behavior that helps people get rich. The researchers found that unethical behavior was closely related to positive feelings about greed. Although the connection appeared to be strongest among high-status individuals, even lower-status individuals were more prone to ethical lapses if they felt that greed was good.
In other words, if you want money as an ends to itself and value the acquisition of wealth, you will be more likely to behave unethically.
Here comes the paradox: greed imbues our entire value system. We equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of wealth. We measure success by wealth and what it buys: the amount of the sports or book contract, the size of the diamond or the house. We admire rich people and follow their doings. Much of the mass media revolves around celebrities, who for the most part are either rich or striving to be rich. Over the past 30 or so years, our leaders have created a system that provides no constraint on the accumulation of wealth, even if that means a decline in public services for everyone else, thus confirming private greed as the central economic value.
Everywhere we go, we are told to be greedy. Now comes this research that shows that greed causes people to turn their backs on our shared norms of social and economic interactions. In other words, the basic drive that propels our society erodes its foundation.
The right-wing likes to blame many groups for the decline of American civilization that they see: The real implication of this research is that it shows that it’s not the pointy-headed academics who have led us into the fix we’re in, nor the European-style socialists, nor those who offend archaic family values.
No, it’s greed pure and simple that is sinking the United States.
The news this week that a new study found that wealthier people were more likely to behave unethically set off a chicken-or-egg debate in my mind.
In the study, Paul Piff, a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, led a team of researchers at UC-Berkeley and the University of Toronto in a variety of behavioral experiments involving about 1,000 people.
They ran 7 experiments, all of which concluded that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals:
- In two of the studies, upper-class individuals were more likely than lower-class individuals to break the law while driving.
- In a laboratory study, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies.
- Other lab studies showed upper class people more likely to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation and to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize.
- Yet another lab study showed that those in the upper class were more likely than the poor to endorse unethical behavior at work.
The researchers used a number of ways to evaluate socioeconomic status, such as education levels, annual income and the participants’ own perception of their social standing. But it didn’t matter what measure they used to sort participants into classes: those with higher status tended to behave in ways that served their own self-interest, even if it was unethical. My own view is that the reason it didn’t matter which criterion they measure: In the United States, virtually all social status reduces to money. The wealthier you are, the higher the social class, the higher the self-perception of class, the higher the annual income and the higher the level of education.
By the way, neither the study nor anyone else is saying that all wealthy people are unethical, only that a larger percentage of wealthy people than poor people will do or consider doing things that most people consider to be unethical.
Now comes the chicken or egg: do people gain higher status primarily by engaging in unethical activities? Or does having a higher status make people think they are better than others and can play by their own rules?
Let’s start with the “chicken” speculation of the authors of the study, i.e., being rich changes how people behave:
- The independence offered by financial security may foster a sense of entitlement and a lack of concern for others.
- Affluent people may be more likely to get away with misbehavior because they have better paying jobs and better paying jobs are associated with less supervision.
- The affluent may be more willing to take ethical risks because they have the resources at their disposal to address the inconvenience of getting caught.
We know that there is less social mobility in the United States than ever before in its history and less than any other industrialized country.
What that means is that today’s upper class of wealth is primarily, but not exclusively, children of the upper class. That would certainly speak to the idea that the chicken came first, that is, that wealth created the pattern of bad behavior and not the other way around, at least in the current generation.
The researchers did find an “egg” explanation, which means that there may be something about cheating, lying and other unethical behavior that helps people get rich. The researchers found that unethical behavior was closely related to positive feelings about greed. Although the connection appeared to be strongest among high-status individuals, even lower-status individuals were more prone to ethical lapses if they felt that greed was good.
In other words, if you want money as an ends to itself and value the acquisition of wealth, you will be more likely to behave unethically.
Here comes the paradox: greed imbues our entire value system. We equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of wealth. We measure success by wealth and what it buys: the amount of the sports or book contract, the size of the diamond or the house. We admire rich people and follow their doings. Much of the mass media revolves around celebrities, who for the most part are either rich or striving to be rich. Over the past 30 or so years, our leaders have created a system that provides no constraint on the accumulation of wealth, even if that means a decline in public services for everyone else, thus confirming private greed as the central economic value.
Everywhere we go, we are told to be greedy. Now comes this research that shows that greed causes people to turn their backs on our shared norms of social and economic interactions. In other words, the basic drive that propels our society erodes its foundation.
The right-wing likes to blame many groups for the decline of American civilization that they see: The real implication of this research is that it shows that it’s not the pointy-headed academics who have led us into the fix we’re in, nor the European-style socialists, nor those who offend archaic family values.
No, it’s greed pure and simple that is sinking the United States.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The Great Courses video lectures presents a history of the west and calls it world history
By Marc Jampole
On the back cover of this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review was a full-page advertisement for a “Great Course” (that’s the brand name) set of DVDs or CDs titled “The World Was Never the Same: Events That Changed History.”
I never read these ads, but the idea of reducing history to 36 incidents appeals to my “top 10” mentality, like the “10 greatest battles in history” or the “25 most influential people of the 20th century.” Great Courses describes the video course as “36 of the most important and definitive events in the history of the world. It’s an intriguing and engaging tour of thousands of years of human history.”
With only 36 events, I assumed that selection of events to include on the list would reveal the ideological bent of the lecturer, in this case a professor at the University of Oklahoma by the name of J. Rufus Fears.
Never fear, in his list of important events of world history, Fears reveals himself to be another white male selling an old-fashioned and specifically American version of the growth of the Christian world, spiced with a survey of world religions to promote a superficial diversity. Check out the list or skip to my analysis:
There are so many things wrong with this list from the standpoint of world history that I don’t know where to start!
Except for the Hammurabi Code and the founding of some major world religions, all the events involve the growth of the Christian West according to the mid-20th century middlebrow American version that goes from Greece to Rome to Christian Europe to the land of the free.
One quarter of all the events involve the United States, a nation that has existed for about 230 years, or a mere 2% of the time since humans began cultivating plants and animals. How, for example, did the assassination of John Kennedy change world history? Eisenhower and Kennedy had already committed us to Viet Nam and the civil rights movement was already growing. And how do both the 1929 stock market crash and the election of FDR get onto a list of 36 events that changed history?
Neither of the events representing arts and letters changed history. There are commonalities between the creative artists involved: Both are recognized by most people. Both represent more of a summing up of a tradition than a break with tradition. Both have created examples of Christian art:
There are subtle signs of ethnocentricity everywhere: For example, the founding of Europe’s first university in 1088 is mentioned, but not the introduction of the examination system in the Chinese civil service more than 475 years earlier. We learn of the Battle of Vienna in which the Christian Hapsburgs turned back the Islamic Ottomans, but nothing about the founding of any Chinese dynasty, nothing about the Mughal conquest of India, nothing about Chinggis Khan! Also note the male-centric nature of the lectures: no event involves a woman.
We would have to hear or see the lecture to know for sure, but the promotional materials suggests that Fear’s handling of slavery and its bloody demise—a major theme in world history—is a whitewash. The event representing the American Civil War is presented from the point of view of the South, i.e., “General Pickett leads a charge.” The paragraph description of this lecture on the website makes the specious claim that the South would have won the Civil War if it had won the Battle of Gettysburg. This understanding of the war conveniently forgets the tremendous resource advantage that the North had, which Ulysses S. Grant understood and used to his advantage in planning his battles. But more to the point, there is no room in the course for any event depicting the 400-year history of the slave trade, which funded the economic and technological advances of Western Europe and the United States from the 16th through much of the 19th centuries.
And who is this J. Rufus Fears, who lectures to us about these important events in world history?
The Great Course promotional material calls Fears a “historian,” but judging from what I could find about him on the Internet, he is as much of a practicing historian as Rufus T. Firefly.
An Internet search finds that Fears teaches a lot of video/audio courses for adults, all about great men or great ideas of the West or of world religions. His only publication other than course material that I could find is as editor of a book by Lord Acton, a 19th century English Catholic historian and politician. Fears did write an article in “Atlantis: Fact or Fiction,” a 1978 book of essays on possibilities of the actual existence of Atlantis that focuses on Atlantis in myth and literature. The University of Oklahoma says that he’s a professor of classics, which is not really history, although it can involve history. I cannot find one scholarly article or book by Fears, or even one book or article of popular history of the sort that David McCullough or Bruce Catton might write.
While perhaps not a historian, Fears is a regular guest on “The Rusty Humphries Show,” a right-wing radio talk show that runs on more than 250 stations. A visit to Humphries website lists some other recent guests, the usual right-wing suspects, including John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, anti-choice activist John Schneider and Rand Paul.
I’m not saying that “The World Was Never the Same: Events That Changed History” doesn’t provide history to those who buy the course. But everything I can find out about the course and the good Professor Fears indicates that what we’re getting is comforting if distorted verification of the ideological imperatives of western superiority and American exceptionalism.
I think I’ll pass on Fears’ version of world history and instead reread some Fernand Braudel, Mote’s magisterial Imperial China: 900-1800 or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
On the back cover of this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review was a full-page advertisement for a “Great Course” (that’s the brand name) set of DVDs or CDs titled “The World Was Never the Same: Events That Changed History.”
I never read these ads, but the idea of reducing history to 36 incidents appeals to my “top 10” mentality, like the “10 greatest battles in history” or the “25 most influential people of the 20th century.” Great Courses describes the video course as “36 of the most important and definitive events in the history of the world. It’s an intriguing and engaging tour of thousands of years of human history.”
With only 36 events, I assumed that selection of events to include on the list would reveal the ideological bent of the lecturer, in this case a professor at the University of Oklahoma by the name of J. Rufus Fears.
Never fear, in his list of important events of world history, Fears reveals himself to be another white male selling an old-fashioned and specifically American version of the growth of the Christian world, spiced with a survey of world religions to promote a superficial diversity. Check out the list or skip to my analysis:
- Hammurabi Issues a Code of Law (1750 B.C.)
- Moses and Monotheism (1220 B.C.
- The Enlightenment of the Buddha (526 B.C.)
- Confucius Instructs a Nation (553–479 B.C.)
- Solon—Democracy Begins (594 B.C.)
- Marathon—Democracy Triumphant (490 B.C.)
- Hippocrates Takes an Oath (430 B.C.)
- Caesar Crosses the Rubicon (49 B.C.)
- Jesus—The Trial of a Teacher (A.D. 36)
- Constantine I Wins a Battle (A.D. 312)
- Muhammad Moves to Medina—The Hegira (A.D. 622)
- Bologna Gets a University (1088)
- Dante Sees Beatrice (1283)
- Black Death—Pandemics and History (1348)
- Columbus Finds a New World (1492)
- Michelangelo Accepts a Commission (1508)
- Erasmus—A Book Sets Europe Ablaze (1516)
- Luther’s New Course Changes History (1517)
- The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588)
- The Battle of Vienna (1683)
- The Battle of Lexington (1775)
- General Pickett Leads a Charge (1863)
- Adam Smith (1776) versus Karl Marx (1867)
- Charles Darwin Takes an Ocean Voyage (1831)
- Louis Pasteur Cures a Child (1885)
- Two Brothers Take a Flight (1903)
- The Archduke Makes a State Visit (1914)
- One Night in Petrograd (1917)
- The Day the Stock Market Crashed (1929)
- Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany (1933)
- Franklin Roosevelt Becomes President (1933)
- Mao Zedong Begins His Long March (1934)
- The Atomic Bomb Is Dropped (1945)
- John F. Kennedy Is Assassinated (1963)
- Dr. King Leads a March (1963)
- September 11, 2001
There are so many things wrong with this list from the standpoint of world history that I don’t know where to start!
Except for the Hammurabi Code and the founding of some major world religions, all the events involve the growth of the Christian West according to the mid-20th century middlebrow American version that goes from Greece to Rome to Christian Europe to the land of the free.
One quarter of all the events involve the United States, a nation that has existed for about 230 years, or a mere 2% of the time since humans began cultivating plants and animals. How, for example, did the assassination of John Kennedy change world history? Eisenhower and Kennedy had already committed us to Viet Nam and the civil rights movement was already growing. And how do both the 1929 stock market crash and the election of FDR get onto a list of 36 events that changed history?
Neither of the events representing arts and letters changed history. There are commonalities between the creative artists involved: Both are recognized by most people. Both represent more of a summing up of a tradition than a break with tradition. Both have created examples of Christian art:
- Dante is one of my favorite poets, one who I have studied extensively and reread quite often, but I would never claim that he changed history, not even literary history, unless you believe that no one else would have thought of writing in the vernacular instead of Latin. Other than the innovation of writing in Italian, his style represents the height of medievalism, soon to be swept away by the stylistic innovations of the Renaissance. Real literary innovators with lasting influence include Li Po and Tu Fu (late Tang Dynasty poets), Cervantes and Joyce.
- Same thing goes for Michelangelo, whose event was getting the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel. A magnificent and extremely famous painting, but Michelangelo, though imitated, did not revolutionize painting, only helped it a little to evolve. Nothing Michelangelo did was as influential as the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Van Eck, Monet or Picasso, not to mention the late Yuan Chinese painter Zhao Mengfu, who had a lasting impact on both Chinese and European art.
There are subtle signs of ethnocentricity everywhere: For example, the founding of Europe’s first university in 1088 is mentioned, but not the introduction of the examination system in the Chinese civil service more than 475 years earlier. We learn of the Battle of Vienna in which the Christian Hapsburgs turned back the Islamic Ottomans, but nothing about the founding of any Chinese dynasty, nothing about the Mughal conquest of India, nothing about Chinggis Khan! Also note the male-centric nature of the lectures: no event involves a woman.
We would have to hear or see the lecture to know for sure, but the promotional materials suggests that Fear’s handling of slavery and its bloody demise—a major theme in world history—is a whitewash. The event representing the American Civil War is presented from the point of view of the South, i.e., “General Pickett leads a charge.” The paragraph description of this lecture on the website makes the specious claim that the South would have won the Civil War if it had won the Battle of Gettysburg. This understanding of the war conveniently forgets the tremendous resource advantage that the North had, which Ulysses S. Grant understood and used to his advantage in planning his battles. But more to the point, there is no room in the course for any event depicting the 400-year history of the slave trade, which funded the economic and technological advances of Western Europe and the United States from the 16th through much of the 19th centuries.
And who is this J. Rufus Fears, who lectures to us about these important events in world history?
The Great Course promotional material calls Fears a “historian,” but judging from what I could find about him on the Internet, he is as much of a practicing historian as Rufus T. Firefly.
An Internet search finds that Fears teaches a lot of video/audio courses for adults, all about great men or great ideas of the West or of world religions. His only publication other than course material that I could find is as editor of a book by Lord Acton, a 19th century English Catholic historian and politician. Fears did write an article in “Atlantis: Fact or Fiction,” a 1978 book of essays on possibilities of the actual existence of Atlantis that focuses on Atlantis in myth and literature. The University of Oklahoma says that he’s a professor of classics, which is not really history, although it can involve history. I cannot find one scholarly article or book by Fears, or even one book or article of popular history of the sort that David McCullough or Bruce Catton might write.
While perhaps not a historian, Fears is a regular guest on “The Rusty Humphries Show,” a right-wing radio talk show that runs on more than 250 stations. A visit to Humphries website lists some other recent guests, the usual right-wing suspects, including John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, anti-choice activist John Schneider and Rand Paul.
I’m not saying that “The World Was Never the Same: Events That Changed History” doesn’t provide history to those who buy the course. But everything I can find out about the course and the good Professor Fears indicates that what we’re getting is comforting if distorted verification of the ideological imperatives of western superiority and American exceptionalism.
I think I’ll pass on Fears’ version of world history and instead reread some Fernand Braudel, Mote’s magisterial Imperial China: 900-1800 or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Selections from the March 15, 2012 issue
COVER/Chris Kirkham
States get cash for prisons
EDITORIAL
Breaking up is hard to do
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Don’t worry, eat your ‘transgenic’ food
DISPATCHES
Billionaire Romney donor threatens critics;
Payroll tax cut bill includes work sharing;
Loss of tax credits threaten wind energy;
Clearing the way for 'White Knight' harder than it looks;
US gas goes overseas;
GOP wrecks the vote;
Why did single-payer health fail in Calif.?;
'Where are the women?';
'Big Green' takes corporate cash;
Texas study shows fracking 'no problem';
Clerical skills again elude Republicans;
'Where are the women?';
Kos: Play to win;
Crazy cost of becoming president ...
BILL JOHNSTON
President needs to exercise power
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Drilling industry SNAFU
DON ROLLINS
Obama promotes education as equalizer
JOHN BUELL
Global climate change lessons from Southwest
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Romneycare improves health in Mass.
SETH SANDRONSKY
Wealth extraction sparks Mexican revolutions
WAYNE O’LEARY
Primal scream of the GOP
DAVID SCHMIDT
Mexican town embodies NAFTA
SAM URETSKY
Santorum crusades to rewrite history
CHRISTOPHER COOK
Workers rank behind social issues
JIM VAN DER POL
Small farmers keep economy moving
ROB PATTERSON
Whose ‘Homeland’ is it?
Thursday, February 23, 2012
By saying Obama follows a secular not a religious agenda, Republicans make case for reelecting the President
By Marc Jampole
The Republicans are doing a lot to restore my faith in President Obama.
First Rick Santorum accused Barack Obama of being the most anti-religious president in the nation’s history. Then Mitt Romney said that Obama sought to substitute a “secular agenda” for one based on faith.
What a relief to know we have a secular president.
What a relief, especially after weeks of hearing Santorum, Romney and the other Republicans talk about introducing religion into public policy and political decisions in one way or another.
What a relief to have reaffirmed the fact that President Obama, unlike his immediate predecessor, follows the U.S. Constitution and the wishes of our mostly deist founding leaders and promotes a secular agenda.
We are, after all, a secular country, one that is not supposed to have religion enter into government decisions, nor to favor one religion over others.
I understand that a good 20-25% of voters think differently. They believe that we are a Christian nation. What’s more, they want to force a set of values on everyone that they associate with Christian practice.
But we have to go no further than the issue of birth control to recognize how much the real world diverges from the ideals of the Christian right wing. In the real world, 98% of all women use birth control sometime during their life. In the real world, the cost of birth control is far less than the cost of an unwanted pregnancy, which means that when you ask a religious organization to pay for their employees' birth control you are asking them for no money and in fact giving them money since their insurance costs will decline.
To be sure, both Romney and Santorum are playing to the hard core base that now determines Republican primary elections. But besides pandering to the right-wing “values” voters, the labeling of Obama as “non-Christian” and “non-religious” also has a subtle impact on other voters. It’s another, harder to disprove, version of the “Obama wasn’t born in the United States” canard. Wherever we fall on the political spectrum and however devout or non-practicing we are, most Americans have a Christian background and live their lives by an ethos they identify as Christian. To say that Obama is not Christian or is anti-religious (which is just another way for them to say “anti-Christian”) turns him into the “other” or the “stranger” who has historically been so feared in American culture and politics. The ultimate outsider, of course, is the Black.
There’s an economic aspect to the accusations, too: that old saw that communists and socialists are godless. Americans for decades are used to hearing the words “godless” and “socialist” (or “communist”) pronounced one after the other to describe progressives and liberals. To say that Obama is against religion is also a veiled way of saying that he is against our free market capitalist system.
And yet, I think many will share my desire that religion not enter into a president’s decision-making. I think most of us prefer that decisions are based on facts, science, reason, the law and what’s best for the country and its people.
That Romney and Santorum affirm that our current president is following a secular path gives me more confidence in what Obama is doing. That the Republican candidates don’t like Obama’s secular path is scary. Because they could get elected, and that would be trouble. We recently had a faith-based president and it didn’t really work out, unless you like useless, goalless wars, state-sponsored torture, catastrophic environmental change and the largest deficit in American history.
The Republicans are doing a lot to restore my faith in President Obama.
First Rick Santorum accused Barack Obama of being the most anti-religious president in the nation’s history. Then Mitt Romney said that Obama sought to substitute a “secular agenda” for one based on faith.
What a relief to know we have a secular president.
What a relief, especially after weeks of hearing Santorum, Romney and the other Republicans talk about introducing religion into public policy and political decisions in one way or another.
What a relief to have reaffirmed the fact that President Obama, unlike his immediate predecessor, follows the U.S. Constitution and the wishes of our mostly deist founding leaders and promotes a secular agenda.
We are, after all, a secular country, one that is not supposed to have religion enter into government decisions, nor to favor one religion over others.
I understand that a good 20-25% of voters think differently. They believe that we are a Christian nation. What’s more, they want to force a set of values on everyone that they associate with Christian practice.
But we have to go no further than the issue of birth control to recognize how much the real world diverges from the ideals of the Christian right wing. In the real world, 98% of all women use birth control sometime during their life. In the real world, the cost of birth control is far less than the cost of an unwanted pregnancy, which means that when you ask a religious organization to pay for their employees' birth control you are asking them for no money and in fact giving them money since their insurance costs will decline.
To be sure, both Romney and Santorum are playing to the hard core base that now determines Republican primary elections. But besides pandering to the right-wing “values” voters, the labeling of Obama as “non-Christian” and “non-religious” also has a subtle impact on other voters. It’s another, harder to disprove, version of the “Obama wasn’t born in the United States” canard. Wherever we fall on the political spectrum and however devout or non-practicing we are, most Americans have a Christian background and live their lives by an ethos they identify as Christian. To say that Obama is not Christian or is anti-religious (which is just another way for them to say “anti-Christian”) turns him into the “other” or the “stranger” who has historically been so feared in American culture and politics. The ultimate outsider, of course, is the Black.
There’s an economic aspect to the accusations, too: that old saw that communists and socialists are godless. Americans for decades are used to hearing the words “godless” and “socialist” (or “communist”) pronounced one after the other to describe progressives and liberals. To say that Obama is against religion is also a veiled way of saying that he is against our free market capitalist system.
And yet, I think many will share my desire that religion not enter into a president’s decision-making. I think most of us prefer that decisions are based on facts, science, reason, the law and what’s best for the country and its people.
That Romney and Santorum affirm that our current president is following a secular path gives me more confidence in what Obama is doing. That the Republican candidates don’t like Obama’s secular path is scary. Because they could get elected, and that would be trouble. We recently had a faith-based president and it didn’t really work out, unless you like useless, goalless wars, state-sponsored torture, catastrophic environmental change and the largest deficit in American history.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Why pick on affirmative action? Why hasn’t anyone sued universities about favoritism to legacies and athletes?
By Marc Jampole
Yesterday’s announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted an appeal from a rejected white applicant to the University of Texas-Austin reminds me that every time the constitutionality of affirmative action returns to the issues agenda, one question is always left out:
Why didn’t the applicant suing a university for accepting minorities with a less impressive record of academic achievement also or instead sue the university for discriminating in favor of athletes and legacies? Legacies, for those not up on academic admissions parlance, are students whose parents previously went to or have contributed money to the university.
The unfairness of lowering standards to accept athletes to an institution dedicated to intellectual achievement and professional training seems fairly obvious. I can understand giving a break on the SAT or grades to a national chess champion or the winner of a science fair, but what does sports have to do with the mission of higher education?
And yet where are the lawsuits claiming that the university acted illegally in preferring a kid with a 1000 on the SATs who can throw a football 70 yards through a tire to someone with 1100 on the college boards who has no extra-curricular activities?
The advantage given to legacies is even more unfair, because it is a major part of the rigidity in the college system that necessitated affirmative action in the first place.
A quick search of “college admissions legacies” will reveal the oft-told history of legacy preferences, which Ivy and other colleges began to use after World War I when their objective criteria were leading to the admission of too many Jews. Today, Ivy League and private colleges give from 10% to 15% legacy preference, but some give as many as 30% of all acceptances to legacy applicants. Overall, many more students are admitted as legacy preferences than are admitted through affirmative action programs. What’s more, polls find that 75% of all Americans are opposed to legacy preferences.
Yet no one sues universities because they are giving preferences to people whose parents graduated from or gave money to the school.
Correction. In his 2010 analysis of everything that’s wrong with legacy preferences in The Chronicle of Higher Education, educational policy guru Richard D. Kahlenberg cites a losing 1970’s case filed against legacy preferences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The problem was that the plaintiff included legacies in a hodgepodge of discrimination complaints, including discrimination for being an out-of-state student. Her SAT scores were 850, uncommonly low for an in-state or out-of-state UNC student both back then and now.
Kahlenberg summarizes the compelling legal argument against legacies at both public and private universities, based on the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He also demolishes the argument that universities need legacy admissions to keep the donations rolling into the university coffers. Analysis reveals that people give about the same to their alma mater or other universities with or without the legacy factor.
The higher the university on the food chain, the more the legacy admission undercuts the ambitions of other competent but less connected candidates. Let’s face it, the more important the job, the more likely it will be filled by an Ivy or Ivy-like (e.g., Stanford or Northwestern) graduate, and if not an Ivy, a public Ivy (e.g., U of Washington or UNC) or other prestigious school. The college educated earn more in general, so no matter how you slice it, legacies come from wealthier families on average than non-legacies at virtually every university.
When you’re better off, you are more likely to have special lessons, more likely to travel abroad, more likely to participate in national youth competitions, more likely to take an SAT prep course and more likely to live the lifestyle behind the cultural assumptions of the SATs. Affirmative action is one of the ways that colleges can level the playing field.
I’m not saying that once legacy admissions are ended we won’t need affirmative action anymore. What I’m saying is that the legacy system reflects the subtle action of institutional racism and is one more reason we need affirmation action. By the way, we’ll know that we won’t need affirmation action anymore when the rate of poverty among African-Americans or the average wage of African-Americans is about what it is for everyone else.
As others have pointed out, the Supreme Court decision to take the appeal is especially disturbing in light of its 2003 ruling upholding affirmative action. In that ruling, the Supreme Court laid down some affirmative action guidelines for universities and suggested that the high court shouldn’t revisit the issue for another 25 years. Of course that was before Roberts and Alito joined the court.
Most of the plaintiffs in these affirmative action lawsuits are middle class and upper middle class whites. That leaves us with the fact that none of these fighters for equality ever thought to take on legacies. There are certainly more legacies than there are affirmative action students, and the legacies tend to include more of the children of those people who have taken money from the middle class through the economic and tax policies of the past 30 years.
It’s quite puzzling. The only answer that I have is that it’s another manifestation of the racism that has distorted the politics and social policy of this country since its inception.
Yesterday’s announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted an appeal from a rejected white applicant to the University of Texas-Austin reminds me that every time the constitutionality of affirmative action returns to the issues agenda, one question is always left out:
Why didn’t the applicant suing a university for accepting minorities with a less impressive record of academic achievement also or instead sue the university for discriminating in favor of athletes and legacies? Legacies, for those not up on academic admissions parlance, are students whose parents previously went to or have contributed money to the university.
The unfairness of lowering standards to accept athletes to an institution dedicated to intellectual achievement and professional training seems fairly obvious. I can understand giving a break on the SAT or grades to a national chess champion or the winner of a science fair, but what does sports have to do with the mission of higher education?
And yet where are the lawsuits claiming that the university acted illegally in preferring a kid with a 1000 on the SATs who can throw a football 70 yards through a tire to someone with 1100 on the college boards who has no extra-curricular activities?
The advantage given to legacies is even more unfair, because it is a major part of the rigidity in the college system that necessitated affirmative action in the first place.
A quick search of “college admissions legacies” will reveal the oft-told history of legacy preferences, which Ivy and other colleges began to use after World War I when their objective criteria were leading to the admission of too many Jews. Today, Ivy League and private colleges give from 10% to 15% legacy preference, but some give as many as 30% of all acceptances to legacy applicants. Overall, many more students are admitted as legacy preferences than are admitted through affirmative action programs. What’s more, polls find that 75% of all Americans are opposed to legacy preferences.
Yet no one sues universities because they are giving preferences to people whose parents graduated from or gave money to the school.
Correction. In his 2010 analysis of everything that’s wrong with legacy preferences in The Chronicle of Higher Education, educational policy guru Richard D. Kahlenberg cites a losing 1970’s case filed against legacy preferences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The problem was that the plaintiff included legacies in a hodgepodge of discrimination complaints, including discrimination for being an out-of-state student. Her SAT scores were 850, uncommonly low for an in-state or out-of-state UNC student both back then and now.
Kahlenberg summarizes the compelling legal argument against legacies at both public and private universities, based on the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He also demolishes the argument that universities need legacy admissions to keep the donations rolling into the university coffers. Analysis reveals that people give about the same to their alma mater or other universities with or without the legacy factor.
The higher the university on the food chain, the more the legacy admission undercuts the ambitions of other competent but less connected candidates. Let’s face it, the more important the job, the more likely it will be filled by an Ivy or Ivy-like (e.g., Stanford or Northwestern) graduate, and if not an Ivy, a public Ivy (e.g., U of Washington or UNC) or other prestigious school. The college educated earn more in general, so no matter how you slice it, legacies come from wealthier families on average than non-legacies at virtually every university.
When you’re better off, you are more likely to have special lessons, more likely to travel abroad, more likely to participate in national youth competitions, more likely to take an SAT prep course and more likely to live the lifestyle behind the cultural assumptions of the SATs. Affirmative action is one of the ways that colleges can level the playing field.
I’m not saying that once legacy admissions are ended we won’t need affirmative action anymore. What I’m saying is that the legacy system reflects the subtle action of institutional racism and is one more reason we need affirmation action. By the way, we’ll know that we won’t need affirmation action anymore when the rate of poverty among African-Americans or the average wage of African-Americans is about what it is for everyone else.
As others have pointed out, the Supreme Court decision to take the appeal is especially disturbing in light of its 2003 ruling upholding affirmative action. In that ruling, the Supreme Court laid down some affirmative action guidelines for universities and suggested that the high court shouldn’t revisit the issue for another 25 years. Of course that was before Roberts and Alito joined the court.
Most of the plaintiffs in these affirmative action lawsuits are middle class and upper middle class whites. That leaves us with the fact that none of these fighters for equality ever thought to take on legacies. There are certainly more legacies than there are affirmative action students, and the legacies tend to include more of the children of those people who have taken money from the middle class through the economic and tax policies of the past 30 years.
It’s quite puzzling. The only answer that I have is that it’s another manifestation of the racism that has distorted the politics and social policy of this country since its inception.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
MIT professor revisits the cultures that bombed Pearl Harbor, destroyed the WTC and dropped A-bombs
I’m reading a very fascinating scholarly study called Cultures of War by MIT history professor John Dower. Professor Dower analyzes in detail the similarities in the cultural assumptions, bureaucratic decision-making processes, fascination with technology, religious orientation, use of propaganda and strategic military imperatives of four events that serve as symbolic points in the cultural history of two wars.
Interestingly enough, in all cases the decision to act proved disastrous for mankind. In three, and maybe all four, it was also disastrous for the nation/organization instigating the act:
The obvious symmetry in considering the cultures that produced all four of these actions is that they are paired: in both pairs, the actions of the United States are typically considered to be reactions against horrible deeds, by a nation in one pair and by a terrorist organization in the other.
But Dower carefully draws U.S. defensive motives into question: He recapitulates what we already know about the duplicitous lead-up to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush II Administration. He also reminds us that no one can say for sure that dropping two atom bombs saved more lives than the more than 200,000 that the U.S. obliterated in two fairly short bombing raids. We know for a fact, however, that the U.S. wanted to brandish its new weapon for the Soviets and everyone else in the world and wanted to stop potential grumbling at home about the cost of the Manhattan Project. Dower also shows us how much the U.S. wanted to go to war against Japan before Pearl Harbor and how much the Bush II (non)brain trust wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11.
Many would consider it blasphemy and/or treason to equate the moral bearing of Osama bin Laden and the U.S. under Bush II or Roosevelt, but Dower makes a very strong case. Here are some of the similarities:
We really did feel threatened by the combined force of the Japanese and Germans, and we really did feel threatened by the terrorist attack. But Dower makes it clear that Osama’s followers, too, felt their civilization threatened by U.S. military activity and economic and social imperialism.
The fact that many of us think that the Japanese and the extreme Islamists were fools or devils to feel that their way of life was superior merely suggests that we are unable to transcend our own cultural imperatives that tell us that our way of life is the best. I’m not saying that Al Qaida was right to launch the 9/11 attack. It was as wrong as we were to drop the atom bombs and to attack Iraq (and to pursue the Viet Nam War for that matter). But they certainly were right to think their civilization was threatened by U.S. military and political actions.
And just as Pearl Harbor united even the most vocal pacifists and isolationists in the United States, just as 9/11 united us again, so did the invasion of Iraq, the declarations by the Bush II Administration of a holy war and our establishment of a world-wide torture gulag help Osama recruit many new terrorists throughout the Islamic world. In all cases, too, the governments and terrorist organization embarked on major propaganda campaigns to convince their people that they did the right thing by unleashing death, in one case against soldiers sworn to fight to the death and in the others against innocent bystanders.
Perhaps the most horrible similarity in all the cultures of war that Dower considers in his provocative and easy-to-read book is that in all four attacks, the participants—the military men, the government officials, the scientists and engineers, the soldiers who did the dirty work—were able to forget that they were engaged in killing large numbers of people.
Many factors led to the dehumanization of the people at the receiving end of the bombs, tanks and suicide plane crashes:
These factors affected the decisions and actions of the one-party Shinto autocracy, the Christian representative democracy and the Islamic theocracy. Who has the moral high ground here?
There is no threshold for terror, for starting wars of choice or for unleashing weapons of mass destruction.
There is no military justification for bombing and attacking civilians that can offset or override the moral evil involved in killing masses of innocents.
Heinous acts of terror, genocide and lawlessness in a just cause turn that cause to evil and take from the perpetrators any claims of morality or civilization.
I came away from reading Cultures of War more convinced than ever of these things.
Interestingly enough, in all cases the decision to act proved disastrous for mankind. In three, and maybe all four, it was also disastrous for the nation/organization instigating the act:
- The Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor
- The United States detonation of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Al Qaida’s terrorist attacks by suicide crash on September 11, 2001
- The United States “war by choice” against Iraq under the false pretext of destroying weapons of mass destruction and disabling Al Qaida.
The obvious symmetry in considering the cultures that produced all four of these actions is that they are paired: in both pairs, the actions of the United States are typically considered to be reactions against horrible deeds, by a nation in one pair and by a terrorist organization in the other.
But Dower carefully draws U.S. defensive motives into question: He recapitulates what we already know about the duplicitous lead-up to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush II Administration. He also reminds us that no one can say for sure that dropping two atom bombs saved more lives than the more than 200,000 that the U.S. obliterated in two fairly short bombing raids. We know for a fact, however, that the U.S. wanted to brandish its new weapon for the Soviets and everyone else in the world and wanted to stop potential grumbling at home about the cost of the Manhattan Project. Dower also shows us how much the U.S. wanted to go to war against Japan before Pearl Harbor and how much the Bush II (non)brain trust wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11.
Many would consider it blasphemy and/or treason to equate the moral bearing of Osama bin Laden and the U.S. under Bush II or Roosevelt, but Dower makes a very strong case. Here are some of the similarities:
- The use of religion as a justification and of religious imagery in manifestos about the events
- The postulation of a battle between civilizations
- The belief that your civilization/religion is infinitely superior to the civilization/religion of the foe
- A justification of killing innocent civilians, politely known as “collateral damage”
- The focus on technology (in the case of Osama, it was computers, not weapons)
We really did feel threatened by the combined force of the Japanese and Germans, and we really did feel threatened by the terrorist attack. But Dower makes it clear that Osama’s followers, too, felt their civilization threatened by U.S. military activity and economic and social imperialism.
The fact that many of us think that the Japanese and the extreme Islamists were fools or devils to feel that their way of life was superior merely suggests that we are unable to transcend our own cultural imperatives that tell us that our way of life is the best. I’m not saying that Al Qaida was right to launch the 9/11 attack. It was as wrong as we were to drop the atom bombs and to attack Iraq (and to pursue the Viet Nam War for that matter). But they certainly were right to think their civilization was threatened by U.S. military and political actions.
And just as Pearl Harbor united even the most vocal pacifists and isolationists in the United States, just as 9/11 united us again, so did the invasion of Iraq, the declarations by the Bush II Administration of a holy war and our establishment of a world-wide torture gulag help Osama recruit many new terrorists throughout the Islamic world. In all cases, too, the governments and terrorist organization embarked on major propaganda campaigns to convince their people that they did the right thing by unleashing death, in one case against soldiers sworn to fight to the death and in the others against innocent bystanders.
Perhaps the most horrible similarity in all the cultures of war that Dower considers in his provocative and easy-to-read book is that in all four attacks, the participants—the military men, the government officials, the scientists and engineers, the soldiers who did the dirty work—were able to forget that they were engaged in killing large numbers of people.
Many factors led to the dehumanization of the people at the receiving end of the bombs, tanks and suicide plane crashes:
- A bureaucratic language that used euphemisms and passive constructions to conceal horrible realities
- A focus on the complex challenge of the task at hand (as opposed to the destructive ends)
- A belief in the inferiority of the victims
- The self-deception often generated by the constant creation of propaganda for others
- A religious belief, i.e., that you’re on a religious mission
These factors affected the decisions and actions of the one-party Shinto autocracy, the Christian representative democracy and the Islamic theocracy. Who has the moral high ground here?
There is no threshold for terror, for starting wars of choice or for unleashing weapons of mass destruction.
There is no military justification for bombing and attacking civilians that can offset or override the moral evil involved in killing masses of innocents.
Heinous acts of terror, genocide and lawlessness in a just cause turn that cause to evil and take from the perpetrators any claims of morality or civilization.
I came away from reading Cultures of War more convinced than ever of these things.
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