letters2america

Dear America,

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The three comments to which I refer were an editorial from the staff of The Times itself, a letter to those editors from a Tennessee woman, and a brief, innocuous comment from David Brooks, a noted essayist and thinker. The editorial was on a different subject: Jim Crow laws, arguing that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still necessary because the vestiges of segregation persist in this country, and the states still need oversight if they are to be kept from reversing the gains they have made at the polls through new, restrictive voter registration laws. The comment from the Tennessee woman had a chilling irony to it in what the woman saw fit to defend in the American worker. The articles previously mentioned had pointed out that the manufacturing facilities of the companies doing Apple's bidding included dormitory facilities for as many as 3,000 workers, necessary so that they could stay on the job working what we would regard as double shifts and doing so sometimes seven days a week, with the resulting personal distress of the workers sometimes leading to suicide. She was reacting to a comment by a former supply/demand manager at Apple recounted in The Times in which she said, "What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms." Apparently at Apple, that kind of demand on workers is a capitalistic coup, but the woman did not make the point that we had just spent a century remedying that kind of abuse of the working person. No, her complaint was that indeed there are people in this country who would live to produce I-Phones, abandoning their lives to do so. They are veterans, immigrants, homeless people and recent high school graduates who are discovering that they will not be able to live their parents' lives. Her point was that we can be more Chinese if Apple will just let us. And the third comment was from Brooks in his bi-weekly op-ed piece. It was about the need for change...not incremental change, but dramatic change. He said that staffers in The White House had said that, "[T]o compete with China, we only need to shift the playing field a bit," a criticism of President Obama's "cautious tendencies."

My point is that instead of reveling in the evolution of social justice in this country and dedicating ourselves to defending it, we seem to be lapsing into the mentality that in order to defend the amoral, we only need to pare down some of our morals. We can build dormitories for workers so that they can be housed for months at a time between weekend visits with their spouses and children. Never mind the righteous claim of the Evangelical Right that we need more family time and better family values, including two parents in the home. And we have people so starved for employment that they will work for less than a living wage because those at the top have tee times to make and Mercedes payments due at the end of the month. We can put our sixteen year olds to work, either in those dorms or as janitors in the schools as Newt Gingrich wants to do, and reverse a century of enlightenment that staunched the use of children as industrial fodder so as to allow them to go on to reasonable adult lives. If all of our progress toward civilization is dispensable, we can go to the lengths decried by the Times' editorial staff and forgo voting rights and opposition to Jim Crow laws. We can just go back to slavery and add children to the indentured class. That would be really capitalistic. You know, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing all the way

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The State of the Union Address, and for that matter the opposing party's response as well, are usually no more than broad statements of principle dedicated to the purpose of putting the American electorate on notice of what the president and his party intend to attempt to do over the next year and how the opposition intends to stop him. They are sprinkled with vague proposals-- sub-principles if you like-- but they are short on remedies for the problems that exist. It may have been at one time-- before there were mass media to be employed in making political hay-- that the state of the union was actually the subject that the president addressed, but no more. The President laid out his agenda last night, and Mitch Daniels, the conservative Republican governor of Indiana, laid out the Republican rationale for opposing, and in this modern era of the filibuster as a common form of obstruction, thwarting Mr. Obama's efforts to right the ship of state. In that sense, it was all very uninteresting. We know that the Republicans will do anything to prevent the success of the Obama Administration, especially now when they have been so successful at it that they are on the verge of accomplishing their purpose in doing so...that is fighting off economic recovery long enough to give themselves the chance to maintain their control of the House of Representatives and take control of The Senate in 2012. They hope to prevail in consequence of the opposition's failure to restore the American economy and to overcome the Republicans' recalcitrance, which has resulted in the governmental inertia that has been visited on us. If the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) in general can prevent remedial action for just six more months, they can call Mr. Obama a failure and perhaps take the White House along with the congress. They are rooting for failure, and that is what was interesting about The President's speech last night.

Throughout the speech, the camera focused from time to time on Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor, but Cantor in particular, sitting stone faced with hands in lap as the rest of the congress, or at least the Democrats in it, applauded for points made by President Obama that seemed indubitably universal. For example, it wasn't long ago that Republicans were chanting for tax reform, and several of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination even floated plans of their own by virtue of which a single tax rate would apply to all and deductions of virtually every description would be abrogated. Yet, when President Obama talked about reforming the tax code in the name of restoring our economy so as to do those very things, Cantor and McConnell sat on their hands with their bare faces hanging out...on national television. Meanwhile, behind The President sat John Boehner, the Speaker of the House. He did not demonstrate any particular enthusiasm for any part of President Obama's speech, but he applauded politely whenever the occasion arose, thus demonstrating his partisanship, but eschewing the appearance of obstructionism or Machiavellian dogmatism. That is what interested me. Boehner seemed to be separating himself from the hard line partisanship of the Republican conferences in both houses, perhaps unintentionally, but never-the-less demonstrating that he is what even his political adversaries often say: a decent man. Cantor and McConnell however demonstrated that neither of them is any such thing. I have mentioned only The President's proposal to reform the income tax code, but there were other points in the speech when the Republican disloyal opposition revealed themselves to be interested in Political purposes but disinterested in doing anything, even the right thing. It was all there for the people and the press to see. The question is, did they see it, or more importantly did they see it for what it was.

President Obama took a milder approach to the issue of partisanship than I would have. But then, when I was still practicing law, I would often put aside for a day or two a letter I drafted in anger before I sent it, and more often than not, I would throw it away. So my attitude on the speech today may not be where I wind up after a period of temperate reflection. So, with the prospect that my emotions will subside with time, I must say that the speech did us all a lot of good. Mr. Obama calmly, but in no uncertain terms said that he intends to resurrect our economy with or without congress. And he pointed out that the filibuster is the favored tactic of those who would sabotage his plans, thus making an overt pitch for a change in the rules after the 2012 election, both in The Senate where the filibuster has prolonged the disaster of this recession/depression that was thirty years in the making and in The House where obstruction is also practiced but without the fanfare that it gets in the other chamber. And he astutely insulated himself from criticism for letting partisan politics influence him on that point by admitting that neither party was without blame when it came to misusing the rules of congress for ulterior reasons; he admonished both parties to stop the manipulation of national politics with process rather than substance...with tactics rather than casting their votes in the light of day.

This next ten months promise to be exciting if nothing else. The frustrations of obduracy in the opposition will continue to be present, but if The President has revealed his inner politician with The State of the Union Address, it will at least be a fight that we will all see...a true political battle for the hearts and minds of the American people...and for our wellbeing as well.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

All my life I have striven to understand how conservatives could believe what they did. I could not see how they could validate their overarching principles if they were in touch with the real world, and the inability of progressives...my inability...to persuade them of the fundamental, logical error of their belief system has baffled me. Certain truths have seemed to me to be "self evident" all my life, and I have been unable to comprehend how such axiomatic precepts could be ignored by the other political pole. But I came to realize over the course of the current political dialectic-- the argument between the two main political schools of thought aimed by each at wresting control of the American political process from the other-- that the disparity between what I consider compellingly rational-- and more importantly, moral-- and what the conservatives in this country do is not a matter of recognition of the truth or of the facts as they are. What's more, it is not just a matter of differing opinion on the salient issues. It does not matter whether consumption creates jobs or suppliers create them leading to consumption. It does not matter whether more people receive food stamps today than received them ten years ago, nor is the shape and form of welfare, Social Security or Medicare really the issue. It is rather a matter of the most fundamental orientation of the psyche of each of us. I have both thought and said that the next election will be a determination of what kind of a nation we are, and I still believe such to be the case. But the nature of the outcome will actually be even more fundamental than that.

I would posit the notion that there are two kinds of Christianity. There is the kind that begins with a capital C and then there is the kind that begins with a small c, and while the two coexist in many people, it is not necessarily so for just as many, if not more of us. I recognize that you may find the distinction I am about to make sanctimonious and unacceptable, but to me it is an epiphany, and it has helped me not just to understand the variegation in the American polity, but to come to terms with it and accept it as expository of the polarity in our culture that has revealed itself so clearly over the past three years. The Christians are those for whom the tenets of organized religion are mandatory and irreducible. They proudly call themselves advocates for "family values," which they associate with the churches to which they belong, at least most of the time. They put money in the collection plate, say grace before they eat, refrain from swearing, don't indulge in premarital sex, or at least don't talk about it openly, and they respect their elders, which includes the nation as expressed in a certain kind of chauvinism...the kind that supports country without question unless those running the country are themselves asking questions about it. And they are proud of who they are, which is somewhat paradoxical in itself. They are not bad people, though I have to admit that I have gone through periods in my life during which I thought that they were. They are not even misguided. They are just conservative. They do not believe in situational or relative morality. To them, morality is an absolute, and when they have trouble determining what is moral in particular circumstances, they pray to the heavens for guidance in deciding rather than examining the world around them. They do not accept variance from their theism as a moral choice, and therefore find the rest of us lacking...so much so that they would enforce their attitudes as a matter of law if they could. Belief in God is a fundamental and necessary element of virtue for them, and in fact is the first qualification, the sine qua non for any claim of virtue. Apostasy can be forgiven so long as the apostate begins and in the end returns to his belief in God. Sin can be tolerated as long as forgiveness is sought, and return to the values of God and church are ultimately manifested in the sinner. Lapses in judgment, unkindness, lack of charity, depravity, prevarication and outright lying can all be overcome by demonstration of religiously defined virtue in the aftermath. Even pride-- the first of the seven deadly sins according to the Book of Proverbs in The Bible-- is acceptable if it is in the right thing. Capital C Christianity is doctrinal...like coloring between the lines.

On the other hand, there is christianity with a small c. That is what I am: a small c christian. We are more interested in what I refer to as secular humanism than in what capital C's call "values." To us small c's, the issue is not whether God approves of a thing, but rather whether we think it is right. Of course without some God to advise us, we may be lacking the kind of certainty from which capital C's seem to take great comfort. We writhe over our perceptions of injustice and inequality without much consideration of who deserves what and whether "free will" is what gets us where we are rather than the collective effect of all the circumstances of our lives, many of them-- as we perceive them-- with ineluctable effects on us that vitiate any will that we might muster, free or otherwise. To us, the question is not who qualifies for what, but whether everyone has enough, and accretion of wealth is something that we would love to accomplish, but not at just any price. We believe in reward for work, but we do not believe in reward for ownership of capital, especially when that ownership is a result of birthright rather than earned right. And ironically, we small c's believe that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is rich man to enter the gates of heaven, at least for a rich man who covets and accrues more than he can ever use just so he can have it...something wholly acceptable, even laudable, to many capital C's. We believe that what people do in the privacy of their lives is their business as long as no one gets hurt by it, and that even the capital C's have the right to be who they are without interference as long as they leave us un-interfered with.

When I speak in terms of Christians, or christians if you prefer, I include us all: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Gnostics and agnostics, even atheists. And I chose Christians for small and large c's, but I could have chosen Jews for large and small j's or Muslims for large and small m's. It's all the same. The question is, do we believe in dogma or doctrine, in ritual or practice, in rites or rights, in the pride of sanctity or in doing what sanctity requires of us. We are at a crossroads, America, and I must confess, I am afraid.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

A couple of days ago, Newt Gingrich said something that got Mitt Romney mad...something about Mitt's failure while in office to create jobs, and he touted himself as having created millions of them when he was speaker of the house and during the Reagan years when he was an up and coming congressman from Georgia. Romney responded with indignation, not just attributing the job creation during Gingrich's tenure to Reaganomics, or the supply-side economics doctrine to which he himself ascribes, but also declaiming righteously that government doesn't create jobs anyway. Business does. I guess he forgot that he has been touting his business credentials as the basis on which he should become the job creator in chief, because he knows how to create jobs and he will do so as president if he is elected. Apparently he failed to see that if Gingrich couldn't create jobs while a member of the government because government doesn't create jobs, the same will go for Romney if he gets to be in government again. Mind you, in Romney's case, he is probably correct as his record as governor of Massachusetts demonstrates. Romney probably can't create jobs from within government--he never has--and frankly, his record indicates that he probably can't do so even if he goes back to Bain Capital; there is debate as to whether he created any significant number of jobs in the balance over and above the ones he destroyedafter he and his fellow equity holders took their profits. It's too bad we have given up the medieval practice of naming people for their cardinal traits. We could call Gingrich Newt the grandiose, and Romney could be Mitt the apostate.

Then there was the announcement that Newt Gingrich's second wife is going to be interviewed on television about her life with The Speaker. In previews, she is heard to say that when Newt confessed that he had taken up with his present wife, Callista, he proposed that they stay married, but that he be permitted to keep Callista as his mistress: a sort of open marriage. Newt's response when he heard about the interview was to have his daughters write to ABC to protest the interview on the ground that it was a family matter and is not appropriate for public airing, and ordinarily I would agree. When a person falters in his commitment to his values, it is personal...the first time. But with the 84 charges against him when he was before the House Ethics Committee-- he only avoided being publicly tried for them by pleading guilty to only one that he now claims was minor while he never mentions what the other 83 were about-- and the fact that he did the same thing to his first wife that he did to his second, these moral lapses, which he chooses to characterize as "mistakes," are more like a modus operandi than peccadillos, and on that basis, I think his Republican supporters should know the truth. Notably, his two daughters seem headed for political careers as they not only wrote the letter, they got on television and earnestly informed America that there was never any such proposal of an open marriage, as if they could possibly know what their father said to their mother at what I must assume he would have wanted to be a private moment. As willing as they are to follow in their father's footsteps...in every respect...they will go far when they run for office, at least until their apparent moral flexibility catches up with them.

And then there's the way in which Newt couched his condemnation of the whole interview thing. He said "we" knew that they would make false charges against "us." "We" knew that they would engage in negative campaigning and unscrupulous tactics, but "we" felt that the country was worth it. That's the same country that he said at the beginning of his campaign he loved so much and was so devoted to that he forgot himself and made these mistakes that are now catching up with him. It was overwork on all our behalves that made amoral ...that and patriotism...not his lack of character, all of which left me wondering.Who are the other members of this "we" he keeps talking about? I hope he's not including me when he says that.

Your friend,

Mike