Vote No on the Banana Republic Question

I have always respected and vocally admired Hilary Rodham Clinton for her intelligence and energy. I was first and most impressed by her acuity back when they were trying to promote a new health care system for the country in 1994, or whenever that was. Props too for surviving the brutally public life of politics generally. But, I can’t vote for her now and I would urge others not to either. It’s not that I’m anti-Clinton per se; I’m anti-dynasty.

Let others keep democracy limited to a few families. The Perons, the Duvaliers, the Ghandis, the Bhuttos. (There are more.) It’s bad enough as it is here today, where you need money more than intelligence, more campaign backing than compassion, and thick skin more than thinking to run for and become leader of the United States. Perhaps it was always thus: We did have the Adamses (John and John Quincy) and the Harrisons (Benjamin and William Henry) before we had the Bushes to set us down the path of dynasty-making. The Kennedys were nipped in the bud. I’m allowing the Roosevelts as they were not-close cousins. But today, when education and opportunity are supposed to be available to every American, where technology and enlightened thinking should make us more able to avail ourselves of the talents of 250 million people…. it’s an embarrassment to stick to candidates and leaders from the same-same families, like some teetering banana republic.

It looks terrible.

So, much as I hope Mrs. Clinton stays in public life as a self-proclaimed public servant, she shouldn’t be president. Nor should Chelsea Clinton. Nor Jeb Bush.

Leaving the White House as president and coming back as first spouse is a little too reminiscent of leaving the Kremlin as president and coming back the next week as prime minister. Maybe not that bald. But why go down that route at all?

I will vote for Obama on Super Tuesday. I would have considered Edwards too, had he not withdrawn. I like ‘am both. Now the decision is easy. When asked whether I would vote for McCain in November (if it came to that) to take my stand against dynasty making, I have to confess my principles only go so far on this. But still. Make it be Obama. Much more fun to vote FOR something than to merely cast a vote against the other side.

Vote against family dynasties. Thank you. This message was approved by me. Only.

 

Hey, What Happened to All Those Posts? (Plus Invective)

What happened to all my posts?

Since May? Huh? Oh, right, now I remember; they never did make it out of my head. But they were boiling away in there and I e-mailed myself many reminders and enticing ideas. I’ll try to revisit them and see if any had value that survived the moment.

(New job recently and other schedule-altering things. Transitions eat up time. (What’ll be my excuse in another five months?))

But one thing continually plaguing my mind and bringing on fits of sputtering invective these days is how we are poisoning our world. Not in a dramatic Exxon Valdez kind of way; in an incremental, dull, nonphotogenic kind of way.

Dry cleaning. Paint for toys. Plastic water bottles. Antibiotics (and antibacterials, don’t get me started) and hormones in strange places. Cellular phones and towers. Agriculture. New and improved products of every stripe.

It’s not stuff you can get high-minded about avoiding. Everybody should now know that smoking is very bad for your health. If you persist in doing it, you’re a dum-dum. Likewise, eating a Supersize Me diet or working in asbestos remediation without a respirator are bad ideas. Most people have a choice in these things.

And, sure, they have a choice about dry cleaning, buying toys, walking down the street, or drinking water. But it’s an uninformed choice since they don’t know these things are potentially hazardous in the long term. And have no logical reason to suspect them. Products and services are offered up without concern and consumed without question. Despite complaints to the contrary from free market champions, there’s too little regulation about what we put on or in our bodies, let alone in the water or earth or air. How can we be so stupid?

More to the point, why does the government, which historically loves to invoke the defense of the citizenry to back up all kinds of bold and improbable acts (overseas particularly), not step up defend us once shadowy killers have been identified near at hand? (This is an analogy that bears exploring and would bring a new twist to a war on “terror.”) How do we ourselves contribute to the flood of poison? When will the connection be obvious enough to force action?

Maybe it’s not fair to ask how we can be so stupid. Maybe we are intrinsically hopeful and optimistic and trusting people and until presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, we prefer to go blithely about like Candide, all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds (wasn’t that it?). But whether we (and I’m applying that collective pronoun back a generation or so) were trusting or wilfully ignorant, I think better living through chemistry has come around to bite us in the butt.

The reason I’m particularly pissed off about all this is that my close circle of friends (to say nothing of acquaintances or people at one degree of separation) now includes too many widow[er]s who are not yet at or past middle age. Bone, ovarian, pancreatic, and breast cancer killed their spouses. We do not live in Love Canal. We do not live in Hannaford, Washington, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. These friends who died took care of themselves, lived healthy, active, and athletic lives. Did not work in factories, mines, or incinerators. Did all they could to fight the disease. But where did it come from?

I know, thankfully, just as many survivors of cancer as people who have died from it. They too are young: in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Breast, brain, testicular, uterine…. And their survival would lead a lot of people to cheer: Hooray for treatment and advances in medicine. Send more money for cancer research! I’m glad they are still alive and grateful for what made that happen. So yes, keep the treatments coming. But what I still want to know is, where did the cancer come from?

Pharmaceutical companies enthusiastically pursue research into treatments, because they can sell these expensive life-saving tortures to people and doctors desperate to save lives. Where’s the profit in finding out the cause of these illnesses? Especially if the cause turns out to be within some other arm of your diversified business. (Check out The New Cigarette, reviewed in Slate.com.) Where’s the money to find and fight the genesis of this scourge instead of just swatting it back? (Yes, I know, in the same place as the money for finding and fighting the genesis for terrorism, but I digress.) Cynically, the return on the investment just isn’t as good.

I have a friend who takes this thinking a step further, with a so-far only privately expressed, completely heretical notion: Down with the Jimmy Fund!

That campaign platform would be a hard sell, even for me in my riled-up snit. But behind the memorably shocking slogan, his idea is serious. Spend at least as much on stopping the disease from occurring in the first place as on developing new ways to fight it once it strikes.

Somewhere there must be organizations or people researching exactly what we are putting in our environment that is killing us. (Let alone the fishes and frogs.) Anyone out there know? That way when next I’m asked to sponsor riders in the Pan Mass Challenge, a very fine event (money goes to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute), I can split my contribution between those riders and someone investigating further upstream.

Where does it come from? What unknown dangers wait in my cupboards? Where is the Upton Sinclair of our times?

Not Even the Silly Season

Oh my, this (below) made me laugh. It’s from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, a website worth visiting and a newsletter worth subscribing to. It’s weekly, so sometimes hard to keep up with, but almost always full of gems. He looks at new words coming into use in English (both British and American (and other variations too)), the odd history of words, and funny misuses of words.

The following is from his most recent newsletter from the section called “Recently Noted,” about words coming to prominence.

E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with the “e-” (for “electronic”) prefix that I’ve long since given up mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to the terms “e-petition” and “e-petitioner” becoming widely known. It all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister’s office—some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised, one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public transport and another one—which has gained a surprising level of informal support—arguing that Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” should become the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative proposals to introduce road-pricing—charging road users by the distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even though trials are several years away and full run-out could not happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic petitions. “Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat,” he said. (Prat: an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term for a person’s buttocks that also appears in “pratfall”.)

Don’t miss Gold on YouTube—priceless.

$10 Million an Hour

That’s what we’re spending in Iraq. Regardless of whether you think the war is justified philosophically or politically, it’s really hard to imagine it is justifiable economically.

Think of all we could do with that money. Years and years of $10 million an hour. My god, it boggles the mind.

We could have paid the salary every military person who’s been deployed, then kept them home to grease the wheels of the economy or sent them off as peacekeepers to Darfur. Could have rebuilt New Orleans and environs, set some smartypants types to work on alternative fuels, and sent enough humanitarian aid to disgruntled teenagers in desperate places that we might have urged them toward hope rather than hate. But I digress.

The $10 million figure came from an interview I heard with Stephen Flynn, who has been all over the FM dial this week with the release of his book The Edge of Disaster. He appeared in short bits on consecutive days on Morning Edition. On Tuesday night, driving home from basketball, I caught a longer interview with him on the Diane Rehm Show—really interesting and inspiring, if you can stand listening to the Diane Rehm Show. (You have to be in a certain mood to bear with her slow and creaky delivery that sounds like she will probably expire at the end of every sentence.)

I like what Flynn has to say: We don’t need so much emphasis on the prevention of every twisted terrorist possibility, but rather need more resiliency. A greater ability to respond and to bounce back from whatever it is—acts of terrorists, acts of god, accidents. By removing known dangers (his example was unnecessarily hazardous chemicals for such things as oil refining stored near population centers) and preparing for reactions to any crisis, we are much safer than with each new restriction on airplane carry-ons or state police orders to look for illegal aliens. (Here’s where the $10 million figure came in: Retrofitting an oil refinery from some particularly lethal chemical to the undeniably-yucky-but-not-so-deadly sulphuric acid would cost about $20-30 million. A tolerable sum in light of oil companies’ recent record profits, and, literally, three hours of government spending.)

Especially by giving people, citizens, and communities the information and the resources to rally and rebuild, Flynn argues, we make the “homeland” stronger. These are often “unsexy” and even simple things that occur at a local level (he refers to the the placing of luminescent strips and handrails on the fire stairs at the World Trade Center towers after the 1993 attack, which helped save so many lives in 2001). He makes really great analogies, all of which I’ve conveniently forgotten just now, but which make me want to read the book.

He’s also critical in the right places, about the lack of national leadership for example, without being emotional or apparently partisan. He was an old Coast Guard guy himself.

And there’s something comforting in his theory, despite his examples involving Bhopal-like terrorist acts. Comforting because, for one thing, he reiterates that natural disasters are much more likely than terrorism to lay us low. The results may be as devastating but to me the absence of evil makes it seem less like the world is rotting from the inside out. The other thing is that, by being resilient we make terrorism less effective.

Stephen Flynn for president!

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Tempered Delight

You’d think I would have weighed in with at least a whoo-hoo! since last Tuesday’s elections.

Of course, on the one hand I am thrilled with the results in that a lot of mindlessly conservative Republicans lost. But I’m less than thrilled that they’ve been replaced for the most part by tactically conservative Democrats. It may have been a victory for the Democratic Party, but you can’t call it a victory for any kind of progressive agenda. So call me perennially dissatisfied, but it is a little bit dismal in the harsh light of day after the initial rejoicing over the brakes being put on the no-checks-or-balances evil empire.

I guess these are the Blue Dog Democrats and their ilk. Normally I like things to do with dogs, maybe not just mixed with donkeys.

Grateful for the Well-Spoken and Annoyed

Toothless I remain (not literally, thanks to Dr. Polansky), but where has all the invective gone?

My god, things have come to such a pass that I am reduced to spluttering. Which is why I don’t post much here, in the place I thought I would do my political ranting. Take Bush in his press conference today, going on about the dire, most serious, portentious, and did I say dire, situation in regards to Korea (a.k.a. part of the Careen Peninshla). Trying to look like a responsible leader. Here’s a snippet:

[THE PRESIDENT:] Kevin.

Q Thank you, Mr. President –

THE PRESIDENT: If I might say, that is a beautiful suit. Q Thank you, sir. My tailor appreciates that.

THE PRESIDENT: And I can’t see anybody else that even comes close. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you very much. I’ll be happy to pass along my tailor’s number if you’d like that, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll take that back. I will recognize that — please.

Q On May 23, 2003, sir, you said — you effectively drew a line in the sand. You said, “We will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.” And yet now it appears that they have crossed that line. And I’m wondering what now, sir, do you say to both the American people and the international community vis-à-vis what has happened over the last 48 hours?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that, and I think it’s very important for the American people and North Korea to understand that that statement still stands, and that one way to make sure that we’re able to achieve our objective is to have other people join us in making it clear to North Korea that they share that objective. And that’s what’s changed. That’s what’s changed over a relatively quick period of time. It used to be that the United States would say that, and that would be kind of a stand-alone statement. Now, when that statement is said, there are other nations in the neighborhood saying it.

And so we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work. It is very important for us to solve these problems diplomatically. And I thank the leaders of — listen, when I call them on the phone, we’re strategizing. This isn’t, oh, please stand up and say something; this is, how can we continue to work together to solve this problem. And that is a substantial change, Kevin, from the previous times.

Suzanne. First best dressed person here. Sorry.

Q Kevin and I coordinated.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. He actually looks –

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

Et cetera.

See, where do you begin? Well, in truth, I begin by appreciating those with the stamina to give voice to their outrage. Even if it feels it has no effect, it does no good to stop, right? I think I’ve mentioned The Disgruntled Chemist in here before. Did I mention Arse Poetica? Just a likeable soul who appreciates good things (say, food and praying mantises, though not together), suffers with others, and excoriates public idiocy (say, questionably elected leaders).

You can always find something good, if more intellectual than visceral, on 3 Quarks Daily. For example, you can’t beat a headline like this:
The Return of Henry Kissinger: Will We Never Be Free of the Malign Effect of This Little Gargoyle?, which links to a column in that vein by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.

One Good Move is a good compendium of outrageous observations, remarked upon with a blandness that accentuates the beyond-rage quality of outrageousness.

I’ll try to keep sharing the voices that in some way or other say what I would have said if I were half so clever. Or profane. Or not beaten down by the disbelieving dread of it all.

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Thanks to The Independent by way of 3 Quarks Daily.

Disgruntled Chemist Writes Letters

I do not know the Disgruntled Chemist, but I like his blog and the pep and righteousness of his disgruntlement. Plus dry humor. And who doesn’t love chemistry?

He posted a letter he wrote to his senator regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East and he invites all and sundry to steal and add to it and send it to their own elected officials. I will send something like it to my two Senators K. and I pass on his invitation to anyone who stumbles upon this page.

I like the notion of passing this on. It’s a rootier grass roots than old MoveOn.org, which I found inspiring during the ‘04 election, and still admire, but which now seems a bit diffuse and unfocused.(Sadly, I hardly ever open mail from Eli Pariser anymore.)

I was once a teaching assistant for a professor who tried to preach to his torpid-looking students in the windowless classroom that they ought to DO something. That activism wasn’t that hard, nor did it demand much. Five minutes a week, he said, could make a big difference. I try to remember that, and even act on it, though usually end up expending half a year’s five minuteses in one big clump, toothless and all.

An Article on Civil Disobedience

My friend Melanie in Strasbourg writes, “I just received Harper’s and read this article that might interest you. It is not online but I found a blog that has excerpts: The Green Knight.” The essay is by Curtis White and is called “The Spirit of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance,” but more on that in a sec.First off, The Green Knight is a pretty cool blog, overtly Christian and yet deeply reasonable. Sorry to say I find those things don’t often go together these days. (The author calls himself “an unreconstructed liberal, a dual Canadian-American, a High Church Anglican, and a medievalist.”) There are a lot of links to smart places in the blogroll under “US Links,” with inspiring titles like World o’ Crap, That Colored Fella’s Weblog, The Disgruntled Chemist, and Sadly, No! Thus explaining why I won’t get to bed before 1:00 a.m. Sigh.

I appreciate the pains The Green Knight has taken to get some of the subversive ideas from Harper’s into the world outside the newsstand. Go see. Here’s just a tiny snippet or two…

According to our leading wise men, the great contemporary moral and political question of the age is: Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture?…What's doubly strange is that Americans should follow with such fascination and intensity this old dispute over our national character while entirely ignoring the dominant ethos of our culture for the last two hundred years. It should go without saying that it is capitalism that most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment….

And yet for all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost….This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists…. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson imagined that the world is held together by a spirit that is not of the Church, and certainly not of Reason, but of a direct experience of the world. Emerson made this Romantic idea American, and he gave it first to Henry David Thoreau….

My word, the transcendentalists! Let us bring them back, the long-lost Transcendentalists.

I was recently reminded of Thoreau when, mired in a slough of particularly onerous adulthood, I recalled his saying “most men live lives of quiet desperation.” As a youth I had thought—“Fah, that’ll never happen to me.” Now I think, haha. And I even think, while it’s not a state to be sought, there’s even something admirable in it. (That’s how far the desperation goes, I guess!)