Roger Repohl

AND WHAT ROUGH BEAST?

2012-01-25T21:17:00.000-05:00

January 26, 2012

The Republican voters of South Carolina turned the race for President on its head last Saturday by turning themselves on their heads. In the space of less than a week, Mitt Romney's double-digit lead over Newt Gingrich in the polls became a double-digit deficit in the voting booth. The candidate deemed most electable was unelected.

For Mitt, it was the perfect storm; for Newt, it was the perfect wave.

The PAC ads may have had something to do with it, but moistly it was the debates. Pressed to disclose his tax returns as his dad George had done in his own bid for the nomination in 1968, Romney the Junior got that deer-in-the-headlights look and finally blurted out, "Maybe." Asked to estimate his tax rate, he stammered, "It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything because my last ten years, my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments," immediately evoking in his listeners the "Buffet Rule," Barack Obama's tax-the-rich proposal based on billionaire Warren Buffet's critique of a tax code that gives investors like him a lower rate than wage-earners like his secretary. Then there was that remark calling the $374,000 he'd earned in speaking fees last year "not very much," which opponents quickly pointed out is around ten times South Carolinians' average yearly income. Add to all that the millions he's stashed in tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, and you've got a little income-inequality problem here.

Suddenly Romney was transformed — or rather, transformed himself — from Horatio Alger to Jay Gould, from boot-strapper to robber-baron. Suddenly it looked like he just might do to the country what he did in his years at Bain Capital, his private equity firm: take it over, milk it for a few years, and flip it to the Chinese for a tidy profit. His flustered responses to these questions made a lot of people think that he was not the solution to the nation's problems but a primary cause.

For Gingrich, it was the same, only opposite. Pressed to comment on his second wife's allegation that he'd asked her for an "open marriage" so he could consort with Callista without having to move out, he took the lash to the media, his choice whipping-boy, for their petty preoccupation with the personal. Asked about his own tax return, he trotted it out the next day, revealing he'd payed over 30 percent, looking by comparison like a middle-class schoolteacher instead of the guy that got $300,000 a year from Freddie Mac to serve as their historian. As the debating progressed, he got that tiger-in-the-headlights look, yellow eyes burning brightly in the night, confident of forcing the Romney victory van to a screeching halt. At every turn, his rhetoric buried his reality.

The ironies are dizzying. Romney's tax rate — actually 14 percent, based on the returns that he grudgingly released on Tuesday — makes him Exhibit A for Obama's Buffet Rule and renders laughable his own proposals to eliminate estate taxes (yes, one day he too will die) and to "hold the line on individual income tax rates," most especially his own. Gingrich's self-serving repentance for his marital compromises — no dust-and-ashes there — must surely be suspect among Evangelical voters; leopards, especially of the political breed, are unlikely to change their spots. Nor could voters in general consider trivial his financial shenanigans and reputation as an erratic tyrant as Speaker of the House; those spots are even less likely to change. Yet they swallowed their suspicions and flocked to him in the final hour, demonstrating that the supposedly hard-core principles of family values and personal integrity turn to mush in the desperate desire for someone to unseat Obama. Even the squeaky-clean, up- from-the-working-class Santorum, acceptable to them in every principled way, they rejected as too much of a niche-candidate.

Now the ever-hopefuls are blanketing Florida with ads and debates in anticipation of the next showdown, January 31. But somewhere down there, in the swamps and on the beaches and amidst the foreclosed homes, an unexpected threat lies in wait. After spending millions on ads and bloodying one another in debates, they face a specter lurking in the mists who may wrest the nomination from their grasp as dissatisfaction and deadlock loom down the line — an apparition, a Burning Bush.

Jeb.

SOUTH CAROLINA: ELECTING THE ELECTABLE?

2012-01-17T16:10:00.000-05:00

January 19, 2012

The South Carolina primary is coming up on Saturday, and — surprise! — the Republicans may have found their nominee much sooner than anyone expected, even a month ago. Mitt Romney, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (without the angst), The Man Nobody Knows (just one step down from Jesus, whom the book by that name calls "the world's greatest business executive") — is charging to the convention, despite being The Man Nobody Wants. His once- formidable opponents are shriveling like prunes in the Southern sun.

Jon Huntsman, lower in the polls than comedian Steven Colbert, dropped out on Monday. You wonder why he never got any traction — he was the most reasonable of the lot (maybe that's why), thoughtful, composed, balanced, experienced both nationally and internationally (ditto), good-looking, family man, his Mormon faith a non-issue (as with Romney this time around; another hurdle of bigotry cleared?). Perhaps he was too much of a wonk to win; perhaps it was the China connection (colluding with the enemy, and I don't mean China); or perhaps it was the sense that he really didn't crave the job, just wanted to serve the country. Whatever the case, the media ignored him and the public wrote him off.

Another one down. Rick Perry's next, running a smidgeon above Colbert, though his hybris won't let him drop till Saturday night at the earliest.

The future's not bright for Newt Gingrich either, whom the voters have finally concluded is too erratic and delusional to trust with high office.

Evangelical groups got together last weekend to draft an A.B.M. ("Anybody But Mitt") treaty and endorsed Rick Santorum to represent the family-values agenda and the Art of Tea, but it looks like many South Carolina evangelicals will turn to Romney the Electable.

Lastly but not leastly is Ron Paul, the libertarian fly in the anointment, whose views are simultaneously attractive/repulsive to both the left (demilitarize/deregulate) and the right (deregulate/demilitarize). His ideological consistency and blithe disregard of polls, focus groups, and issue-du-jour spin is entirely refreshing: Liberals long for a liberal Ron Paul, conservatives for a conservative one. But Paul can be just who he is because he knows he'll never be nominated; the ones who have real hopes almost always have to be double- talkers.

Romney, in fact, is the anti-Paul, and it's no wonder Republican voters are gritting their teeth while marking their ballots. He's the chameleon of chameleons, turning from blue to red to fit the background. He's as shallow and insipid as any candidate since James Buchanan. His sole desire is not to do but to be, which sounds pretty Zen but it's pretty high-school — what he really wants in life is not to act as president but simply to be president, and his history has shown he'll make any accommodation in order to one day bask, however fleetingly, in the adoring glow of the nation.

This is a candidate without a single fresh idea. At least Herman Cain came up with 9-9-9 and Gingrich with mining the moon and repealing child-labor laws. All Mitt can do is parrot the threadbare Republican laundry-list: dismantle "Obamacare," (or is it "Romneycare"?), cut taxes, shrink government, drill-baby- drill, equate the effectiveness of national defense with the amount spent on it, and of course, that perennial bill of goods, "create jobs."

Ho-hum.

In the frenzied months before Iowa, Republican voters kissed one frog after another, hoping for their prince or princess charming, and all they got was warts. Now it looks like they're giving up and settling for the boy next door. Think he'll have the moxie to beat that big guy across the street?

* * * * *

Uh-oh. I'm channeling Andy Rooney: "Did you ever notice how many presidential aspirants have one-syllable names? This time around you've got Mitt, Newt, Ron, and two Ricks. In the recent past you had Joe, Mike, Fred, Bill, Al, Bob, and probably others I can't think of at the moment. Why is this? To show they're tough? (You know, like ‘Spike.') To show they're just folks? ("Shucks, just call me Al.") To show they're not all that serious? Maybe that's it. It's just a small point, but it'll keep me wondering till next week."

GIVING IOWA (NEW HAMPSHIRE, ETC.) A TRY

2012-01-17T16:06:00.000-05:00

January 12, 2012

Oh, there's nothing half-way
About the Iowa way to treat you,
When we treat you,
Which we may not do at all....
You really ought to give Iowa a try.

So sang the townspeople of River City to that conniving Music Man, Pseudo-professor Harold Hill, fresh off the train from Gary, Indiana, to perpetrate his latest scam.

There was nothing half-way about Iowa's treatment of Republican presidential aspirants this season, either. Seven of these traveling salespersons gave Iowa a try, descending on the state like four-year locusts, pitching their politics retail and jostling for customers by debating the merits of their snake-oils ("Ya can bicker-bicker-bicker, ya can talk all ya want.").

Four of them were thrown out on their ears. Pizza godfather Herman Cain made an early surge among these prudent Christian people with his 9-9-9 tax plan, only to turn his numerals upside- down and become the personification of 6-6-6, the Sign of the Beast; they shoved his own pie into his face. Michelle Bachmann, an Iowa native no less, won the straw poll in the fall and then came a cropper, so to speak, at the caucuses, returning to Minnesota a sadder but (possibly) wiser girl. Pseudo-professor Newton Gingrich popped into town with a suitcase full of trumpets and uniforms, touting his innovative "Think Method," but the voters concluded he was carrying too much baggage, was fleecing the citizens, and couldn't even shape up a boys' band, much less a country. And Rick Perry, despite looking a lot like Robert Preston, flubbed up all the patter-songs, and the audience gave him the hook.

But what the heck, you're welcome,
Glad to have you with us,
Even though we may not ever mention it again.

Only three of the bunch seemed to know the territory well enough to make a modest sale. Ron Paul appealed to Iowan contrarianism ("And we're so by-God stubborn / We could stand touchin' noses / For a week at a time / And never see eye-to- eye."). Mitt Romney promised miraculous (that is, undefined) salvation from Democrat-caused economic disaster ("Oh-ho, the Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin' down the street, / Oh please, don't foreclose on me!"). Rick Santorum whipped up a citizenry alarmed at the rejection of family values, crying trouble-trouble- trouble: "Libertine men and scarlet women! / And ragtime, shameless music / That'll grab your son, your daughter / With the arms of a jungle animal instinct! / Mass-'steria!".

Trouble, all right, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pols.

Well, they all gave Iowa a try, except John the Huntsman, who sensibly realized he didn't know the territory. Instead he focused on New Hampshire, where people practice extreme moderation and at least some of them around Dartmouth speak Chinese. Having carved out a tidy niche for himself and his prospects, he lay in wait for his competitors, who abandoned Iowa on election night with hardly a thank-you and headed for the Granite State, packing their posters and pollsters, invading the coffee shops and nursing homes, and spinning their stories in the climate-changed, snowless streets.

To those stoic New England souls, who are either living free or dead, Paul preached his gospel of self-reliance ("If any would not work, neither should he eat."), Santorum endured the jeers of skeptics and idolaters, Perry babbled on about Babylon-on-the- Potomac, and Gingrich appealed to the angels of our better nature while simultaneously unleashing his fire-breathing PAC on Romney, who like his own angel Moroni sounded the golden trumpet high above the fray. Through it all, the Huntsman held his fire, hoping against hope that his foes would eat each other up.

Iowa and New Hampshire — two quirky states elbowing to be king-makers. How they ever got there is an equally quirky matter of history, but they've come to be the winnowing-fan of presidential politics, as Tuesday's results showed.

Regardless of how skewed the social demographics of these states are (and by the way, TV pundits, the word is not "skewered" — that's what Gingrich tried to do to Romney with his PAC ads), their elections work psychologically on primary voters down the line, either supportive or reactive. The pundits may think that with a faux victory in Iowa and a real one in New Hampshire Romney has skewered his opponents, but that's far from certain.

And that's why even the bottom-most candidates press on to South Carolina. Like Harold Hill, they hope a miracle will happen before the citizens see through them and pummel them out of town.

The lyrics above, with one satyrical modification, are excerpted from The Music Man by Meredith Willson, copyright 1957.

A CHRISTMAS PLAGIARISM

2012-01-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

December, 2011

Reagan was dead to begin with. Dead as a door-nail, and Senator Mitch McConnell had proof: He'd stood before the body lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda and took leave of his hoary partner for what he thought was forever....

Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve — old McConnell sat busy in his office. Now Senate Minority Leader, he had once more succeeded in keeping the Congress in session to the brink of a holiday, wearing the Democrats down till they submitted to another compromise they had declared they never would make.

The door of McConnell's office was open, that he might keep an eye upon his staff, lest one or other abandon their stations to partake of Yuletide cheer.

"A Merry Christmas, Senator!" cried a chipper voice. A young intern peeked through the door, his head topped with a furry Santa cap.

"Bah!" said McConnell. "Humbug!"

"Don't be cross, Senator," said the intern.

"What else can I be," returned McConnell, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? What's Christmas-time but a time for paying bills without money; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em presented dead against you? Let me hear another word from you and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation."

The intern, bemused, shook his head with a hearty laugh, the bell on his cap jingling gaily.

"Very well then," said McConnell. "You may go. I suppose you must have the whole day tomorrow. Be here all the earlier next morning. We have Democrats to deter."

Late in the evening, McConnell walked to his house near the Capitol. His wife was home in Kentucky; she'd take care of Christmas for him. Putting his key in the lock of the door, he glanced at the very large door-knocker and saw not a knocker, but Reagan's face.

"Humbug," he said to himself. Entering the cold foyer, he heard a clanking noise from the cellar, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain. The cellar door flew open, and the visage that came forth was unmistakable: the coiffed hair, the crinkly face, the actor's gait. Only the shackles on his feet looked amiss to him; cowboy boots should have spurs.

The Ghost lumbered with its load of iron to a chair in the living room, and sat down.

"Ronnie!" McConnell said imploringly. "Old Ronald Reagan. Speak comfort to me, Ronnie!"

"I have none to give you," the Ghost replied; "I am only the Communicator. Tonight you will be haunted by Three Spirits. Look to see me no more."

The living-room window opened of itself, and the specter floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

The grandfather's clock in the hallway struck twelve, and McConnell found himself face to face with an unearthly visitor. It was a strange figure. The arms were very long and muscular, the hands the same. It wore a brown double-breasted suit and had a shimmering aura about its head.

"Who, and what are you?" McConnell demanded.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"You look like Jimmy Stewart."

"Just call me Smith. Rise, and walk with me!"

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and in an instant were standing in the well of the Senate Floor.

"I saw your movie when I was just a poor Kentucky kid, going to trade school," said the Senator. "It made me want to get into politics, to make a difference, just like you did. I loved how you fainted at your filibuster, and how you licked all those corrupt politicians. I got elected to the Senate in the Reagan landslide of 1980. Together we would change the world: Government didn't solve problems, it was the problem. And look what all we did: Freed up those forests for logging, spotted owl be damned! Busted the unions. Deregulated the airlines and the S&L's. Flushed out those welfare queens. Laffer Curve! Trickle-down! Ah, bliss! We'd started dismantling the New Deal. Not only that, but we changed the rules of filibuster so we could obstruct legislation without having to blab away night and day like you did. Those were the days!"

"Yes, they were," replied the Spirit. "Then, you were young and idealistic. Now you are old and ideological. I guess you never saw It's a Wonderful Life — but that's all humbug to you. You wanted to make a difference, and you surely have, as your next uninvited guest will show you."

Smiling, the Spirit disintegrated into tangled coils of celluloid. McConnell found himself in his own house, and had barely time to reel to bed before he sank into a heavy sleep.

The clock struck One, and the Senator awoke with a start. A blaze of ruddy light shone round his bed, and he began to think that its source might be in the adjoining room. He got up softly, and shuffled in his slippers to the door.

"Come in!" cried a voice. "Come in, and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me!"

Before him sat a giant of a man with a silver cigarette holder clenched between his teeth and a woollen throw cast over his lap. A pair of crutches lay on the floor beside him.

"I know you," said McConnell.

"Indeed you do," replied the Spirit. "Come with me; I'll show you around."

The Ghost cast off the throw and rose, hoisting his torso up with the crutches. Pivoting, his legs came together with a clink of iron.

"Braces," murmured McConnell. "A literal shade of Tiny Tim."

"So you've read the book," said the Spirit.

"Couldn't avoid it. A flight of Dickensian fancy, I thought ... at the time."

"Let's take our own little flight," the Ghost invited.

The next moment found them jostling among gleeful shoppers and gazing at graceful skaters around the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. The Spirit had discarded the crutches, and the braces on his legs seemed no longer an impediment; indeed, he moved lithely through the crowd, sprinkling passers-by with ash from his glowing cigarette.

"Here you see some of the top one percent," said the Ghost, "people like you and me. But I favor the poor the most."

"Why the poor the most?" asked the Senator.

"Because they need it most. Come with me."

They descended into the subway and boarded the "D" train for the Bronx, crammed to standing room with people bearing gifts. At 59th Street the affluent exited; remaining in the car were a scattering of weary workers heading home. McConnell and the Ghost sat down.

"I live elsewhere now," said the Spirit, "but I still read what newspapers are left, and listen to the radio. I like the radio. You and your party have tried to reduce funding for almost every program that betters the condition of the poor and unfortunate — unemployment benefits, food stamps and child nutrition, low-income housing and heating assistance, medical care. You've also opposed almost every program that betters the condition of the whole country — transportation, environment, infrastructure. And you've especially targeted for elimination the intangibles, like funding for the arts, which lift the human spirit in dark days. Now you're plundering Social Security and calling it a tax cut. Everything I envisioned to bring the country together and regain its self-respect, you have strived to take apart. Why?"

"People should take care of themselves. Are there no workhouses?"

"They're coming back. Your man Gingrich wants to repeal the child-labor laws."

"The Treadmill?"

"Another Newtonian idea for energy independence — tens of thousands of prisoners, children, and indigents generating electricity. Here's our stop, Tremont Avenue."

They ascended the subway stairs.

"We'll drop in on a family I know," said the Ghost. "We'll see them but they won't see us."

They entered a cold and crumbling apartment. A woman and her young son and daughter were sharing chicken and fries, while in a corner of the room a family of mice delighted in an unguarded bowl of cat food.

"O Man! Look here!" exclaimed the Ghost. "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both. The boy will turn to drugs and guns, the girl will die of asthma."

"Have they no refuge or resource?"

"Not if you can help it."

McConnell looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. Then, lifting up his eyes, behold a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, toward him.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?" asked he.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand. The Senator followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.

The Ghost ruffled its shroud, the gloom surrounding it lifted, and there they stood at the Tidal Basin in Washington. The cherry trees were in bloom, their petals gently floating like snowflakes to the ground.

A young man and woman chanced to meet along the path.

"Merry Christmas!" they exchanged.

"Really balmy, don't you think?" smiled the man.

"You can't walk much further down this path," said the woman. "Everything's flooded."

"Thanks to old McConnell and his successors for blocking every climate-change treaty. Not much to be merry about these days — all our beaches underwater, international drought, twenty- year depression, the health care laws rescinded. But they've balanced the budget."

The Phantom beckoned and the Senator followed to a darker scene: A churchyard. The Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood. McConnell crept toward it, trembling as he went, and following the finger read upon the stone his own name, and below it the epitaph: "NO!"

Therewith the Phantom shrank into a bedpost. It was McConnell's own bedpost, on his own bed, in his own room. Best of all, the Time before him was now his own.

What then transpired is left to the reader to invent.

MIRACLE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

2011-11-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

December 1, 2011

"Barry, whom shall we get to play Santa for the White House Christmas party this year? Last year's guy turned out to be a Tea Party operative who told all the kids you were playing Santa Claus with their parents' money. I should've known. I thought I smelled Darjeeling on his breath."

"How about Newt Gingrich? He's got the girth and the hair. I wonder if he can grow a beard in a couple weeks."

"He's grown noses in less time than that."

"Forget it. He's too erratic. We need a stable Santa. Besides, his name sounds too much like ‘Grinch.'"

"What about Romney? That chameleon could morph into a Santa in the space of a debate cycle. The only problem is, not even Republican kids would believe in him. His name fits, though — every all-American boy and girl wants to find a mitt under the tree. Who else? Clinton?"

"Michelle, you've hit on it! Clinton's got global qualifications and I love that disheveled white hair. Add a red pant-suit, and . . ."

"Not Hillary, sillery. I meant Bill."

"Oh, Bill! Never think of him. But he sure fits the part, a right jolly old elf. Twinkling eyes and red nose to boot."

"Let's text him. See what he says."

"Too bad. He's busy that day. Playing Santa in Africa somewhere."

"Excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Obama. I'd like to offer my services for your party."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Nicholas de Myra."

"How'd you get in here?"

"I have to advise you that your chimneys are not secure. You should alert the Secret Service about that."

"How'd you find out that we're looking for a Santa?"

"I hacked you in the Cloud. Gotta keep up with the times, you know. Parents don't want their kids sitting on Santa's lap anymore — can't be too careful. And kids don't know how to write letters anymore either. Facebook and Twitter are helpful, but it's that secret texting between parents that tells me what their kids really want — and what they'll really get."

"You do look authentic, right down to the ashes and soot. But I think we need a second opinion. Sasha, come here! Who is this man?"

"He's Santa Claus!"

"Now be sensible, girl. If you want to be a lawyer like your daddy and me, you've got to prove that this man really is Santa Claus."

"That depends on what your definition of ‘is' is."

"You'll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a President."

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"I can't believe it, Michelle. At the party, that guy worked the room even better than Bill could have. He actually had Boehner and Reid talking with each other instead of at each other. Even the worst ideologues left shaking hands, just like Macy and Gimble. And he got results, too. Before the Christmas recess, Congress passed a progressive tax, cut the defense budget, gave immigrants a path to citizenship, authorized high- speed trains. Of course a Santa would think of trains. I'm glad he likes drones, too, the naif. He thinks they're just oversized model airplanes."

"But I knew it wouldn't last. The Senate Homeland Security Committee just subpoenaed him."

* * * * * * * * * *

"Please state your name."

"Senator McCain, it's a pleasure to meet you. My full name is Nicholas de Myra, but most Americans call me Santa Claus. That's what comes out when you say ‘Saint Nicholas' really fast."

"It's nice to meet you too at last. Where were you born?"

"In the region of Lycia, which is now part of Turkey."

"Do you still live there?"

"Not for many years. The place got a little too hot for me, so I moved farther north."

"Are you a Muslim?"

"I used to be a Christian, but I've transcended that. I bring gifts to all children. I bring good will to all believers, including atheists."

"You're a citizen of . . ."

"The world."

"State your age."

"I'm not sure. Close to 1,700, I think."

"Don't make light of these proceedings. Can you produce a birth certificate?"

"Mr. McCain, have you become a birther too? To find out my age, you'd have to carbon-date me. Just be sure to clean off the ashes and soot."

"Mr. de Myra, you're undermining your credibility already, and you know that your credibility is why you are before us today. Don't get me wrong. I admire all the good you've done around here lately. The Congressional approval rating has jumped into double digits. Consumer confidence — and I know that seems to be your specialty — is bouncing back."

"So I see. In fact, I've written a little song about it:

     I'm dreaming of a Black Friday,
     Just like the ones I used to know.
     Where the midnight spending is never-ending,
     With Wal-Mart raking in the dough.
     I'm dreaming of a Black Friday,
     With Nooks and Kindles in my sack.
     May your bank card never be hacked,
     And may all your Fridays be as black.

"That's beautiful. Almost makes me believe."

"Oh, don't believe because of that; that's just economics. Believe the intangibles. Years ago at a similar hearing, my lawyer brought in sacks and sacks of mail addressed to Santa Claus, and the judge took that as proof enough of my identity. Those were the days, when the Postal Service was solvent. Have you checked your iPhone lately?"

"OMG, Facebook is full, and there's tons of tweets! Kids all over the world are threatening to occupy the Senate if we don't clear you. What do you say, colleagues?"

"Thank you for your vote of confidence, esteemed Senators. I'll head back north now; the reindeer are restless. And please don't forget the intangibles."

OCCUPY ATHENS

2011-11-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

November 10, 2011
I'd like to say a few words about the relation of Greece to world economies. I don't understand it fully, but that doesn't deter me because I'm not sure that many politicians and even economists understand it fully either. In fact, I'm not sure that anybody anywhere really understands international economics, which have gotten so complex from globalization over the last several decades that "complex" is hardly descriptive of the magnitude. It's not Adam Smith's world anymore.

In ECON 101, the eye-opener in the first class is the revelation of the obvious — that all economies are driven by countless individual decisions about what to do with money, from whether to buy that candy bar to whether to buy that house, from whether to put your earnings into stocks or under the mattress. Suddenly students recognize they're the muscles and sinews of the Invisible Hand. Today, however, so many of these individual decisions are no longer made by individuals at all but by computers, which is why radical swings in the stock market, attributed daily by the media to tiny upticks in employment and tiny downticks in industrial production, are actually automatically triggered by logarithm, trading billions of shares with little or no human intervention. My so-called portfolio doesn't stand a chance against those forces.

The play of great economic forces on the small includes small countries as well, most poignantly illustrated by the case of Greece. Since adopting the euro as its currency a decade ago, Greece has become a groveling debtor to the big banks. Thinking their loans on the euro standard were ironclad, the banks shoveled money to Greece, despite its history of corruption and political unrest, its top-heavy state bureaucracy, and its lavish social-service spending.

After the world crash of 2008, things turned sour indeed, as Greece's own economy lagged in the euro-zone and the bonds kept coming due. Pressured for "fiscal responsibility" by the European Union, the government imposed "austerity measures" on the country in February of 2010 — salary freezes, benefit reductions, and layoffs of government workers — setting off mass demonstrations and strikes. Those measures weren't austere enough to satisfy the Big Guns of the E.U., notably Germany and France, and over the course of a year, more were imposed, including enormous tax increases coupled with steep decreases in salaries, pensions, and social services. Less money earned and more money taxed — even before taking ECON 101, anybody with common sense sees that's no way to spark an economy. As Keynes turned restlessly in his grave, Greece's GDP declined and the budget remained grossly out of balance, while the public debt continued to grow.

Yet now the E.U. is insisting on still more austerity in return for infusions of cash from its Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and for negotiating a 50-percent "haircut" — now there's a term — in outstanding loans from private banks, supposedly to prevent complete default.

Meanwhile, the demonstrations continue with ferocity. The entire country is angry at everybody — the E.U. as instigator, the government as implementor, the banks as the wolf at the door. It's an anger born of impotence, a feeling that Greece's identity as a sovereign state is being swallowed whole by Germany, France, the IMF, and the big banks. Jean-Paul Fitoussi, an economics professor in Paris, told the New York Times that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicholas Sarkozy of France "were acting as if they were the real government of Greece."

Several weeks ago, as I read about these unfolding events, I thought: Wouldn't the citizens of Greece regain at least a shred of their self-esteem and even embrace some austerities if they were consulted on these matters, drawn into dialogue with their government, invited to work collaboratively to share both present sacrifice and future benefit? Thus I was pleasantly surprised last week when the American-educated Prime Minister, George Papandreou, proposed just that: a referendum on the E.U. bailout plan. Whatever his motivations — and the speculations on them were diverse, from sheer stupidity to a crafty way to garner votes for the bailout in Parliament — I'd like to trust his own explanation: "Let us allow the people to have the last word; let them decide the country's fate."

Of course, Merkel and Sarkozy, enraged at his ungrateful impudence, immediately and almost literally took him to the woodshed, publicly humiliating him and forcing him to recant.

What a pity. In a land that coined the term 2500 years ago, demos-kratia — the people's rule — was quashed by foreign powers. Who knows how the people might have spoken?

One way for Greece to throw off the yoke of the banks and reassert its sovereignty would be to throw off the euro and return to its own currency, the drachma. There are as many projected outcomes of this move as there are economists who make them — which proves my point about complexity, above — but the most hopeful one to me is the comparison with Argentina, which released its peg on the U.S. dollar and reinstated the peso in 2002. After a period of disruption, bank runs, and inflation, export goods selling at devalued prices became attractive, foreign investment returned, conditions stabilized, and Argentina's economy is now growing steadily.

The big banks are petrified at this prospect, and Chancellor Merkel herself recently remarked that the bailout has been fashioned not to save Greece but to save the euro.

Regaining control of the small from the big is the overarching theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupying Athens, the original seat of democracy, would not be a bad idea at all.

MODELS OF REVOLUTION

2011-11-30T10:43:00.000-05:00

November 3, 2011
One of the most remarkable things about the "Arab Spring," besides that it happened at all, is the unique ways in which it happened, country by country. Spontaneously generated and developing more organically than systematically, each of these revolutions will be analyzed by historians and social scientists as models of the dynamics of power and their ultimate results. Such analysis is exceedingly complex, involving a host of factors, including the extent and depth of popular and political grievances, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the opposed government and its successors, the role of the military and police, the cohesion or fragmentation of the society, the level of education and the grip of indoctrination, the tactics of resistance, and the intervention by foreign powers.

A distinguishing feature of the Arab Spring is the use or rejection of violence as a tool of revolution. On one end of the spectrum is Tunisia, whose protests remained largely peaceful despite police crackdowns and the deaths of over 200 protesters. Less than a month after the demonstrations began, the aged president Ben Ali abdicated. Several interim governments rose and fell until the vestiges of Ben Ali's political apparatus were purged and the secret police force was dissolved. Last week, ten months into the revolution, elections were held for a Constituent Assembly to frame a new constitution, with 90 percent voter turnout. The Nahdah party, considered "moderate Islamist," won a plurality of the seats. The social and political situation seems to have stabilized, but questions remain about the ongoing freedom of the country under Nahdah rule.

In the middle of the spectrum of violence is Egypt, whose protests also remained predominantly nonviolent and resulted in the removal of President Hosni Mubarak, also within a month. Unlike in Tunisia, however, the cronies of the deposed dictator have held on to power, postponing elections and reimposing limits on free speech and assembly. Insidiously, they are attempting to undermine the effectiveness of the protesters by diversion and division along religious fault-lines. On October 9, a peaceful march for the civil rights of the Coptic Christian minority, formerly protected by Mubarak but now assailed by Islamist elements, was attacked by a mob possibly summoned by the police; it took the army, once considered sympathetic to the protest movement, six hours to respond and restore order. By then, 27 were dead, both Copts and supporting Muslims. Will the goals of the revolution be subverted by infiltration?

At the other end of the spectrum of violence is Libya. In this case, peaceful protests lasted but a few weeks before being supplanted by disaffected soldiers in remote areas who commandeered stockpiles of government weapons. This action not only played into the hand of dictator Muamar Qaddafi, flush with weapons supplied by the arms merchants of Europe, but drew the Western powers into the conflict like a magnet. Nonviolent opposition is a mystery to the military mind, which is why if resistance to Qaddafi had remained peaceful, the United States and Europe might have refrained from intervention and let the internal dynamic take its own course, as they did with Tunisia and Egypt and are now doing with Syria and Yemen. Once the revolution had become a war, it was easy for military powers to understand and thus to intervene under the pretext of protecting civilians (having made no effort to protect civilians in the other revolutions) and forestalling "genocide" (of which there was in fact no evidence). The NATO mission was a nice live-fire exercise for an organization that for decades has had virtually nothing to do. For reasons still unclear — brainwashing? fear? Qaddafi's total control of all institutions? genuine support? — loyalty to the dictator perdured; his was not the house of cards they had expected. It took seven months, 9,600 bombing sorties, and a cost of $2 billion for the U.S. alone and billions more for the other participating nations to dislodge him.

The barbaric assassination of Qaddafi, along with the claim of the interim government that he was "caught in the crossfire" (a prevarication lifted directly from the CIA playbook for the assassination of Osama bin Laden) continued the cycle of violence and lies. Despite the wanton expenditure of firepower between Qaddafi and the rebels, the cache of armaments and munitions amassed by the dictator was so enormous that there still are plenty left to fuel factional wars and/or terrorist insurgencies. The present government's rhetoric of liberation and promises of free elections and a stable society, even if honest, may be vaporized in the atmosphere of arms.

Still moving fluidly along the spectrum of violence are the protests in Syria and Yemen. What their ultimate model of revolution will be remains to be seen.

LIBYA: RECALLING THE WAR AT ITS START

2011-11-30T10:40:00.000-05:00

October 27, 2011

The following column appeared in the Easy Reader on March 31, shortly after NATO forces began their air campaign over Libya. I reprint it here to remind you of my early take on the situation in Libya; next week, I'll offer an update.

On the cover of The New Yorker magazine for March 14, a drawing by Barry Blitt depicts Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, as a scarecrow, dressed in military finery, stuffed with straw, and mounted on a stick, with a desert landscape below. Flying around the scarecrow is a flock of white doves, several of them pulling tufts of straw protruding from its arms and head, another unraveling the braids on the uniform, gathering nesting material for spring.

The drawing is entitled, "Hope is the thing with feathers."

How quickly hawks snatch doves in flight, scattering their feathers in the wind.

Barely a month ago, as Blitt was pitching his idea to The New Yorker's editors, it seemed to much of the watching world that the near-miracle of peaceful revolution wrought in Tunisia and Egypt would replicate itself in Libya. Mass protests calling for Qaddafi's resignation were met with a waffling similar to that of those aged dictators to his east and west: a show of force followed by the promise of concessions. Qaddafi's brutal crackdown against the demonstrators in mid-February shocked even his own government, with two of his air force pilots flying their French-built Mirage jets to asylum in Malta and several of his ambassadors and diplomatic staff resigning their posts.

A few more days of demonstration might have toppled the regime. But for reasons as yet unclear, the center of nonviolent opposition did not hold. Disaffected military personnel seized arms and munitions in outlying regions and persuaded some of the citizens to join them in battle. Quick as that, protesters had become rebels; civil resistance had become civil war.

Thus allowed to play the game the way he liked it, Qaddafi set about smashing the revolt with attacks from air and ground — and almost immediately drew much of Europe into the vortex of violence. This crazy-as-a-fox colonel had been pushing the buttons of the West for 40 years, now threatening, now cozying up, back and forth — first a Communist and then an anti- Communist, first a terrorist and then an anti-terrorist. Having blown up the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and then having initiated a chemical and nuclear weapons program, he turned right around and apologized, proffering reparations to the Lockerbie survivors and dismantling his WMD's, hoodwinking none other than George W. Bush in 2004 to rescind Libya's terrorist status, thus clearing the path for multi-billion-dollar arms deals with France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, among others. It is those very weapons, so readily supplied to a country lacking a single external threat, that he's now using against the rebels, and that the U.S. and NATO are now firing their missiles at to take out.

So here we go again.

Another megalomaniac Little Caesar twirling the great powers around his finger. Another internal conflict inflated into an international one. Another military intervention in the name of protecting civilians with so-called "pinpoint bombing" that inevitably results in the death of civilians they are bombing to protect. Another commitment to topple — or not to topple, can't get quite clear on that one yet — the dictator with only the vaguest knowledge of who will take his place. Another rejection of Colin Powell's doctrine that every entrance strategy must have an exit strategy.

And thus far, despite it all, the latest Little Caesar remains, laughing at the world while his country goes up in smoke.

How can this be, and so soon, too, with Iraq so fresh in the mind?

President Obama's defense of military action in Libya, outlined in his address to the nation on Monday, is based on would-have's and could-have's: "We knew if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. ... A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders .... The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship .... A failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America."

Preemptive war is a war of would-have's.

But since we're speculating, there is another set of would- have's to consider: What would have happened had the Libyan resistance remained nonviolent? What would have happened had the militants been left without external assistance? Would those democratic impulses dawning across the region have been strengthened or diminished had the "international community" opted against force?

Oh yes, and one could-it-be: Could it yet be that in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and even Palestine, those things with feathers will continue to pick at their respective scarecrows?

OCCUPYING WALL STREET

2011-10-19T12:20:00.000-04:00

October 20, 2011

Last Sunday, the New York City Community Garden Coalition occupied Wall Street. It was a good day to do it. October 16 is World Food Day, commemorating the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on that date in 1945. The FAO's focus this year in meetings and rallies across the globe was on the problem of swings in food prices caused by commodities speculation, a dynamic that threatens the hungry from the Horn of Africa to the South Bronx.

Community gardens, often dismissed as whimsical patches of green where claustrophobic apartment-dwellers do fantasy farming, play a surprisingly large role in maintaining urban food security. A research project oxymoronically named Farming Concrete, which tracks the amount of food harvested by New York City gardeners, reports that last year the 110 participating gardens produced about 87,700 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Extrapolate that figure to the 400 or so gardens that didn't submit data, and you're really talking food security, immune from price-swings.

The Garden Coalition is a good fit for the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its decade-long history of battling the Big Guys — in this case, Big Development, which for years has sought to bulldoze these little havens for more buildings. It's 99% vs. 1% in earth tones, and the Coalition, along with other greening groups, has succeeded in beating them back — at least for now.

On this bright and breezy autumn afternoon, Coalition members tagged up with a World Food Day rally in Foley Square near City Hall, sponsored by a group called Millions against Monsanto. Then, bearing their banners, they proceeded to march the several blocks to Zuccotti Park, the pulsing heart of Occupy Wall Street. The Financial District, which in times past was all but deserted on weekends, was teeming with people, most going to and coming from both the newly-opened 9/11 Memorial and Zuccotti Park, now as world-renowned as Cairo's Tahrir Square.

As the contingent made its way through the crowd, they took up the chant: "More green! Less greed! More green! Less greed!" Halted by a red light, they were approached by a man in a smart pinstripe suit and straw hat. "I agree with the part about the green," he grinned and walked away.

When the group reached the park, they staked out a spot, jostling for space among dozens of disparate causes: free education, full employment, justice for Agent Orange survivors, ending corporate personhood, Medicare for all, anti-Big Pharma, anti-fluoridated water, and of course, anti-bank everything. They became a tile in that living mosaic of solidarity, framed in a city block.

In the month since its occupation by Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park has become a functioning commune, with organic soup kitchens, first-aid clinics, book exchanges, impromptu schools on all subjects, and electronics charging stations — everything necessary and desirable except plumbing, now being passively provided by nearby fast-food chains. (No anti-McDonald's groups were in evidence.) Also of critical importance is the sign-making area, offering materials, space, and probably no little kibitzing for the construction of that most anachronistic yet most effective communication device of Occupy Wall Street: the hand- lettered sign.

The signs spring up in the park like mushrooms, and seem to grow ever cleverer through competition. They range from the general ("Mean People Suck") to the specific ("519 years of occupation through genocide. Remember the Native Holocaust."); from the rhyme ("Health Care, not Wealth Care") to the pun ("NYC Community Gardeners demand Peas and Justice"); from the hopeful ("99% + 1% = 100%. We are all one.") to the almost hopeless ("Why am I here? Because voting, lobbying, writing letters, lyrics, columns, and speeches hasn't done SHIT.").

Taken as a whole, the signs may describe the essence of the movement, elusive even to its originators: the yearning to breathe free. Spontaneously generating in cities all over the world, Occupy may be fulfilling a need for community and honesty (now euphemized as "transparency") that the dystopic machine of the "world community" and its octopus economy cannot. This is what Marx was about until Lenin reworked him.

The fruit of the movement may be more personal than political, more local than global. Its participants may return to their homes feeling more like humans and less like cogs. Rather than forcing the 1% to change their ways, many of the 99% may change their own, shaking off at least a chain or two of the anonymous social monolith to which all of us are enslaved.

It's about getting back to the Garden.

Deep inside Zuccotti Park on Sunday, a solemn-faced woman sat at a card table bearing the hand-lettered sign: FREE EMPATHY. She had no clients, but perhaps that was because empathy was free all around.

Photo credits: #1: Roger Repohl; #2 and #3: Magali Regis

THE HONEYBEES' DARFUR

2011-10-11T14:54:00.000-04:00

October 13, 2011

"Look at how hard they're working," my bee-master Bob Jeffers told me one spring day a decade ago when I was his apprentice. Before entering the hives, we would spend some time observing the activity of the bees outside as they came back in clouds from their foraging expeditions, laden with nectar and pollen. "Do you know what they're thinking? They're thinking of winter."

Most of us are existentialists in springtime, crazy for the moment, living in the warmth of the now. Not so the honeybee colony. Its workforce of thousands is being deployed to ensure its survival during the five or so months here in the Northeast when there are no flowers and the bees remain inside, clustered in a tight ball, shivering their bodies to generate heat, and consuming the stores of honey and pollen they'd built up in the warm season. Our colonies here need at least 60 pounds of honey to last them to the spring.

Right now, in the fall, the colony is preparing for its long winter wait. On warm days, the foraging workers, all sterile females, are bringing in the last drops of nectar from late- blooming plants — chrysanthemums, asters, goldenrods, and their particular favorite, Russian sage. It is at this time that you see many of them on the ground around their hive, wings frayed, exhausted from their labors, struggling to make it home with their cargo one final time. Inside the hive, the queen bee gradually slows down her egg-laying duties from her summertime high of over a thousand a day to almost none by late fall. With no flowers to visit, the production of young halts until mid- winter, when she begins strengthening the colony for the spring. As the weather turns cold, the colony's energies become focused solely on survival; everything unnecessary must be eliminated.

And that includes the male bees — the drones.

The sole function of the drone is to inseminate a virgin queen from another colony; his duty fulfilled, he dies in the process. Other than performing this critical function — and only the most aggressive get the chance — drones are useless. True to their name, they do no work in the hive and just loll about, eating precious honey. Mating occurs in spring and summer; by the fall, those that are left are disposed of.

Standing in front of the beehive on a chilly October day, you may see the eviction of the drones. Bulkier than their sisters and with enormous eyes ("The better to see you, my dear"), they are easy to identify. They are escorted outside by the workers; seemingly confused, they try to return but are prevented by the guards at the entrance. Soon they will die from the cold.

As we witnessed this event some years ago, Bob Jeffers shook his head and laughed ironically. "It's Darfur," he said.

The reason we can take honey for ourselves is that honeybees are hoarders. They will not stop with their requisite 60 pounds but will continue packing it away as long as there are enough flowers producing nectar, enough workers to gather it, and enough space to store it. When nectar dries up in the heat of summer, foraging bees from powerful colonies will invade weaker ones. Mounting an assault like medieval soldiers storming the gate of a castle, hundreds of bees will fight their way past the guards at the entrance of a vulnerable hive and plunder its contents, leaving the abject colony to die of starvation during the winter. Beekeepers call this activity "robbing," and in apiaries of side- by-side colonies it can become pathological, with foragers even ignoring flowers and going after ready-made honey instead, swirling around the bee yard in a frenzy. Once robbing starts, it's difficult for beekeepers to stop it; the best they can do is to plug up the entrances to the victim hives, leaving just enough open space for the bees to defend adequately and to enter and exit for their own foraging.

I had this happen in my apiary this year. It's appalling to open up a hive and see combs that should be heavy with honey sucked completely dry. No matter how strong a colony appears to be, without honey stores it is doomed to die over the winter. In desperation, I feed the bees a sugar-water syrup until the weather freezes, and pure sugar after that. And hope against hope.

A few years ago, a beekeeper named Holly Bishop published a "biography of honey" called Robbing the Bees. Her title refers to humans' long history of taking the bees' food for themselves. Before the invention of the movable-frame hives which we use today, removing honey involved not just robbery but murder — the bees had to be killed to get at it. Today most beekeepers leave plenty of honey for the bees' own use, taking only the surplus. Holly Bishop does not mention the robbing that bees do to each other.

Do not be deluded by the common myth that honeybees are lovable models of altruism. Think of Darwin instead.

And think of our own pathologies of exploitation and extermination, long before and long after Darfur.

THE WEEK IN REVIEW

2011-10-11T14:52:00.000-04:00

October 6, 2011

It's once around the world, once around the clock:

NEW YORK — The Occupy Wall Street movement, which a couple weeks ago was just another ragtag bunch of crazy kids camping out in a city park, has turned into something like a force. The numbers have swelled from dozens to thousands, composed of a growing array of mad-as-hell people frustrated by wealth- disparity and the apparent determination of a bought-and-paid-for government to keep it that way. Now you've got Michael Moore plying the crowd, and even some labor unions poised to join up. The demonstrations have gone from polite marches around Lower Manhattan to storming the Brooklyn Bridge, where 700 were arrested on Sunday for blocking traffic. Who'd have guessed that the tactics used in Tunisia and Egypt would translate so well to America? And who'd have guessed that the Tea Party would be countered by a grass-roots movement on the left for the first time since Vietnam? The Arab Spring turns into the Financial Fall. Now cells of the movement are springing up in major cities across the country, including Los Angeles. Is a viable third party about to emerge?

YEMEN — On Friday, the United States assassinated two of its own citizens, Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, an editor of the organization's on-line English magazine, in a targeted drone strike on their car. It was a clean little operation that brought them to justice while avoiding the expensive and time-consuming alternative of apprehending and trying them. So the Wild West turns up in the Middle East.

The War on Terrorism was first conducted as if it were a real war, with military invasions and occupations. That was the wrong way to deal with an invisible enemy, but at least it was aboveboard and nominally subject to international law. Now the job has been turned over to the CIA, gunslingers who operate under the legal radar, with little apparent constraint by Congress and with the full support of our Nobel Peace Prize President. Terror begets terror.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Republican Party announced Monday that it would move up the state's presidential primary to January 21, leapfrogging over Iowa and New Hampshire and trumping Florida's own leapfrog date of January 31, determined just last week. New Hampshire, which has an "us first" rule, may set its primary in December. It's checkers, played on a very big board.

In 1933, the U.S. Constitution was amended to move the inauguration of Presidents from March to January; given the increased speed of transportation and communication, a four-month gap between election and inauguration was clearly unnecessary. Here we have the reverse: the possibility of nearly a full year between the first primary and the general election, forcing even more money to be raised and spent on mindless and mind-numbing campaign ads. Common sense would dictate that given the increased speed of our own transportation and communication, we'd only need a couple months to select candidates, give them a hearing, and make up our collective minds. If the hopefuls actually took a year to refine their positions on issues, it might make some sense, but all that will be refined is the precision of attack ads.

TRENTON, N.J. — Republicans, dissatisfied with their either dull or dotty slate of possibilities and looking for straight- talking charisma, spent the last few weeks pressuring New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to throw his belt in the ring. Lawyer, county freeholder, lobbyist, U.S. attorney, and for just a year and eight months, governor: Now there's a résumé for President even slimmer than Barack Obama's was. Isn't anybody worried about the 3 a.m. phone call? Sensibly, he conquered the temptation, leaving the party to seek another savior.

Hey, wait a minute! Why not tap Admiral Mike Mullen? There's a guy with real experience, and judging from his recent Congressional testimony and media interviews, he's got straight- talking charisma aplenty. He just retired from the military and may be looking for something to occupy his golden years.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bank of America announced last week that it would begin charging customers $5 a month for using their debit cards. What were they thinking? As if the American public were not pissed off enough at big banks (see lead story above), here they go nickeling and diming folks for taking out their own money.

Go ahead, Chase, now's your chance! Announce that you'll gladly welcome all customers from fee-charging banks, smoothly transitioning their accounts, direct deposits, and automatic payments, and maybe even giving them $5 a month for a year. You could gut your competition and increase your bottom line by billions in new deposits, and become the unlikely hero of the middle class as well.

NEW YORK — Andy Rooney delivered his last monologue on 60 Minutes last Sunday after 33 years on the job. Did you ever notice how the more things change, the more they stay the same?

PALESTINIANS: WE ARE SOMEBODY

2011-09-27T16:05:00.000-04:00

September 29, 2011

It was about time that the Palestinians — half of them, anyway — brought their case for independence to the United Nations. After decades of being treated, and treating themselves, as non-persons, it was an "I-am-Somebody" moment.

Right from the beginning, when the stymied British off- loaded Palestine to the fledgling U.N. to deal with, the Arab peoples of the region were more in the way than on the way. With the exception of six months of deadly skirmishes with the Jewish settlers following the U.N. resolution of partition in 1947, all the wars in Palestine were initiated, or provoked, by outsiders — Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq. Refugees displaced by the wars were shunted into camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, where their descendants remain to this day; not even their Arab brethren thought them worthy of integration into their societies.

It took 15 years after the partition for the Palestinians to develop a semblance of leadership of their own, the Fatah or Palestine Liberation Organization, but their terrorist tactics alienated most of the world. Since replacing the confrontational, erratic, and bizarre-looking Yasser Arafat as leader of the Fatah party in 2004, Mahmoud Abbas has nurtured a civilized, sensible, and nonviolent image that has brought international legitimacy and credibility to the Palestinian cause — though his efforts have been sabotaged by the retrograde Hamas party in Gaza, with its misguided (in both senses) rocket attacks and its anachronistic refusal to recognize the Jewish state.

Abbas went to the U.N. to make the rest of the world come clean. He knew, of course, that his application for statehood status would be rejected one way or another, but he wanted a recorded vote. He also wanted to unmask the contradictory positions of the United States. Just four months ago, President Obama called for a two-state solution with borders based on those that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War, and "land swaps" to accommodate some of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Abbas's petition resulted in an embarrassing about-face: the threat of a U.S. veto in the Security Council, based on the premises that such recognition would impede the resumption of talks and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be resolved only by the two parties themselves — both rather strange, given the utter stalemate of the so-called "peace process" over the last couple decades.

The whole issue keeps getting thornier, just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any thornier. The "Arab Spring" that is working its way through Israel's neighbors adds even more instability and uncertainty to the region, further heightening the country's sense of threat and making it even more unlikely to engage the Palestinians. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank continue to grow, turning the area into a crazy-quilt of jurisdictions that will make even the most minimal proposals of "land swaps" ever more difficult. And then there is Hamas. Nothing at all can be accomplished until Hamas rejects violence and embraces the two-state solution, impossible to imagine in the near term.

Some observers predict that the likely rejection of President Abbas's bid for full U.N. membership will provoke Palestinian violence and hamstring the role of the United States in the "peace process." Regarding the latter, it may be a signal for America to release its grip and allow other countries to assume the task of mediation, as France has proposed. Regarding the former, Abbas's insistence on nonviolence will, I think, not go unheeded. In his unassuming way, he is giving West-Bank Palestinians a sense of their own identity and integrity — which, as Gandhi and King showed in like circumstances, is the real key to liberation.

We are Somebody.

9/11: THE ANGELS OF OUR BETTER NATURE

2011-09-27T15:50:00.001-04:00

September 15, 2011

Early last Friday evening, my friend Judy and I were walking down Tenth Avenue near 23rd Street in Chelsea. We passed a U-Haul van pulled over to the curb with a police car, lights flashing, behind it. The driver stood next to his vehicle, being questioned by the officers.
"See that?" said Judy. "It's 9/11 paranoia. I had to drive around the city all day today, and the traffic was snarled everywhere by all the searches. I lived downtown ten years ago, and I saw the towers fall. All this stuff just brings back the horror, and I don't need it. What good does it do? Why can't we just move on?"
It's like scratching a scab.
"This whole thing is just what happened right after the attacks," she continued, "the orange alerts and stuff. Today I heard the government had, quote, ‘credible evidence' that Al Qaeda was planning to bomb the tunnels and subways and the police were looking for two American Arabs. Then in the same breath they said they had no specifics. It's all done to keep us fearful."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a similar point on his Friday radio show. "We've got to make sure we don't let the terrorists take away our rights without any terrorism," he said. "If you lock yourself in your house because you're scared, they're winning. If you don't let somebody else pray or say what they want to say or you deny any rights to certain people — that's exactly what they want. I don't think we should do that."
A word of good sense. Of course, he and his police chief Ray Kelly ordered the searches. As one anonymous law enforcement official told the New York Times, the plot "could all be one big fabrication, but no one wants to take any chances."
I suppose you can't be too careful, and I myself had mixed feelings of revulsion and relief watching the NYPD deal with the man in the van.
That's the nature of terrorism. It's like those poltergeist movies: Your skin crawls because you never know when and how the killer will strike; you don't even know who or what the killer is. No matter how strong you are or what actions you take, you feel impotent in the face of the unknown. You want to direct your seething rage, but there is nowhere to direct it. You want to protect yourself from another attack, but the enemy is a phantom.
Just look at the government's responses to 9/11 over the last decade: Another bloated bureaucracy with the still-eerie name of Homeland Security (Fatherland and Motherland having already been taken); two military invasions with loss of innocent life exponentially greater than that on our shores; practices of torture that got no results and only defiled America's sense of decency and integrity; a monstrous airport security apparatus that keeps the country in a constant low-level state of anxiety and fear.
Whether or not any of these actions, costing trillions of dollars and untold damage to body and spirit, has been effective, we'll never know. How many of the rumored plots were real, and how many were "fabrications"? Most of the ones we know were real, like the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, and that goofball who set his truck on fire in Times Square, were thwarted by the bumbling perpetrators themselves.
Unlike the movies, there is no ending, no resolution. Even the assassination of Bin Laden last May, shamelessly gloated over by our President, brought no relief, only a momentary release of frustration and a shallow burst of flag-waving. No V-J Day here.
It's to the credit of the American people, imbued with the spirit of freedom and equality and chastened by memories of lynchings and interments, that this anxiety, fear, and pent-up rage have not, except at the fringes, been released on the Muslim community. The angels of our better nature, up to now at least, appear to be winning.
The tenth anniversary ceremonies, and the telling and re- telling of stories of tragic loss and unparalleled heroism that occupied the media in the weeks preceding, were acts of catharsis, a form of therapy for our collective post-traumatic stress disorder. The focus of most of it was not against enemies, whoever they were and may be, but toward the resilience of the human spirit in the face of disaster, no matter what the cause.
Now it is over for a while again, but it is never really over. What we must do, as Judy said, is move on.

9/11: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

2011-09-27T15:48:00.000-04:00

September 8, 2011

The terrorist attacks of ten years ago left untold scars on the American psyche. When the towers fell, whole worldviews fell with them.
My friend Jim first heard the news when he returned to his office at a small college here in New York after his class on Buddhism. The study of comparative religions had been good to Jim; twenty years in the academic saddle had allowed him and his wife Sarah to buy a big apartment on the Upper West Side before the area became desirable and to give their two children a privileged education. He'd turned 54 the day before; another decade or so of grading papers, updating his syllabi, and grumbling about the administration would bring him a happy retirement — maybe a farmette in the Poconos, where he could grow masses of vegetables and write the book he never had time for before.
He'd majored in religion not in hopes of a career but in hopes of a revelation. He'd been a skeptic from his youth, yet he was drawn to religious ideas; somewhere in that tangle must lie the key to self-discovery.
What he loved was the Big Questions, from the existence of God to the existence of evil to existence after death, and as a teacher he performed more like a lawyer in a courtroom or Socrates in the Agora, confounding every facile argument and prodding his students to think, damn you, think.
His own quest for God was never fulfilled. "Religious systems have a lovely symmetry," he told me years ago, "but I'm not sure they have a referent."
Before grad school and before his marriage, he'd spent a year in a Zen monastery in upstate New York, seeking satori, that flash of enlightenment where the mind, as one master put it, is as clear as a polished mirror. But of course, the more you long for satori, the less likely it will come.
A type of satori hit him that day. In his course on Buddhism he had been discussing the "Four Passing Sights" which would eventually turn the young Siddhartha Gautama into the Enlightened One: an aged person, a diseased person, a corpse, and a peaceful ascetic. He had taken his students into the hallway of the building, where photographs of graduating classes dating back almost a century were displayed. "Look carefully at these faces," he told them. "They're just like you. Work backwards: Class of 2000, 1970, 1940, 1910. Where are these people now? In fact, who were they at all?"
Pleased with the sobering results of his presentation, he returned to the faculty building to find his colleagues huddled around the television in the history chair's office. "This is the end of America as we've known it," she prophesied. "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
Jim knew no one who worked in the Twin Towers, but many of his former core-curriculum students had taken jobs around Wall Street. Where are they now? Later he learned that the husband of one of them had perished in the collapse.
Like many of us that night, he and his wife lay sleepless. Their children, both away at college, had called to ask if everything was all right with them. "Physically, yes," he told them. "Spiritually, I don't know."
"In all my years of teaching," he confided to me some years ago, "I never painted a pristine picture of religion. From the Book of Joshua to the crusades to the jihads, I felt students needed to reflect on the dark side of religion. It was a contradiction I could not solve, but to me then it was just another intellectual question. I'd became something of a Manichean, thinking that there must be a fixed quantity of evil in the human collective; when it's tamped down in one place, it erupts in another, like vulcanism.
"That night, my uneasy peace with religious violence began to unravel. When my students asked me next class what I thought of the disasters, my rhetorical skills vanished. All I could say was ‘I don't know.'
"That semester was literally horrible for me. The questions that had fascinated me all my life became absurdities. I kept thinking of that line by the devil Nickles in J.B. by Archibald MacLeish — his free-verse play on the Book of Job: ‘If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He is not God.'
"The only thing that made sense were the syllables of Hindu mystics. At the end of their journey, all they could say about God was ‘Neti, neti' — ‘Not this, not this.' How can you teach a course when all you have is one word?"
Jim quit teaching two years later and bought a half-interest in a neighborhood wine shop. He and Sarah travel to Europe at least once a year, picking up bargains.
Except on rare occasions, he never mentions religion.

NEW YORK HURRICANE: DRY RUN

2011-09-27T15:43:00.001-04:00

September 1, 2011

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took no chances this time, for reasons as political as practical. Last winter, his administration was roundly ridiculed for doing too little and too late when a major blizzard swept through — streets unplowed, cars stranded in snowbanks, subways snarled.
That was the cold memory on the hot nights of last week, as citizens and city officials watched Hurricane Irene march toward the Atlantic coast. Irene was nothing like her name; hardly irenic, she portended to match the most damaging hurricanes of the past. The trajectory projected a direct hit on the city, the fulfillment of all those Gotham-gothic cinematic scenarios. Bloomberg's third-term poll numbers were lower than the air pressure in a hurricane's eye; to save himself, he had to do things right this time.
So in moves unprecedented, he ordered the entire metropolitan transit system shut down, and people living near the ocean, the rivers, and the sounds — some 280,000 of them — to evacuate. All events were canceled; Broadway would be dark on Saturday and Sunday, in addition to the usual Mondays, anticipating the inundation of the Great White Way by the Great White Wave. Those outside the evacuation area were told to stay inside; those living above the tenth floor in buildings throughout the city were admonished to seek shelter with their neighbors below. Media meteorologists advised taping windows so if they broke, the glass would more likely fall into the street, not the room; if your bed is near a window and can't be moved, they cautioned, sleep with a sheet up over your head to protect yourself from shattering glass. Stock up on drinking water, flashlights and batteries, and canned foods; while the occurrence itself would be short, the effects might be very long.
Pre-hurricane Friday was beautiful — sunny, warm, and calm. Gardeners at Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx came by to harvest their cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes. I asked them if they were ready. "It's just a hurricane," said a man from the Dominican Republic. "We get them all the time at home." One native New Yorker in his 70's just shrugged. "Forget about it," he huffed. "Nothing'll happen. I've been through lots of these. In the days before satellite pictures and all the media hype, we just used our common sense. When I was a boy, hurricanes didn't have names. Now they're like the personification of evil, some Greek goddess, Medusa or somebody."
Many others were taking the threat seriously. The local supermarkets were clogged with customers Friday and early Saturday, denuding the shelves of bottled water and batteries, carts piled high with provisions, including frozen foods — strange things to buy, I thought, in the face of a power outage.
The actual event was more of a non-event, at least to those on high ground, like around here. As the hurricane approached the city Saturday night, it was already deteriorating into a tropical storm. The rain came down in sheets, but the winds were much weaker than predicted, and there was no loss of power. When the eye of the storm passed overhead in the early afternoon on Sunday — indeed a direct hit — the sky cleared and a few of us neighbors drove around to survey the damage, which amounted to just a couple of downed small trees. We ended up in a little coffee shop on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx's Little Italy, the only establishment in the area brave enough to open. "I'm disappointed!" one person at the table said over his plate of silver-dollar pancakes. "I was hoping for some drama."
Actually, the comparatively worst was yet to come. As the remnants of the storm moved north, the winds came up the rear. By early Sunday evening the gusts were approaching frightening; the lights flickered momentarily, shingles flew off roofs, trees swayed mightily — they're built for wind — but everything seemed to hold. In the morning I went to the garden and found its huge plum tree toppled. It was old and unproductive, and I'd long thought of cutting it down. Mother Nature did it for me.
Many people, before and after the hurricane, were quick to criticize the mayor for taking measures they considered disproportionately severe. I didn't, and I don't. What the city undertook was an exercise in preparedness and prevention, and to me it was a beautiful thing to see. New York tried out its disaster plan in real time and brought most of its eight million people, imagine that, together in common defense. Not a single life was lost. Were the trains kept running and the warnings more lax, who knows what troubles we'd have seen?
With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the back of every New Yorker's head, this was a dry run, shall we say, for emergencies to come, both from nature and from man.
Plus, now everybody's got a story to tell.

PERRY FOR PRESIDENT!

2011-08-23T18:18:00.001-04:00

August 25, 2011

Gov. Rick Perry would make a great president.
As he tirelessly reminds us, the United States is a shambles — mounting debt, high unemployment, religiously unrooted, over- taxed, entangled in entitlements, with a Federal Reserve Bank whose actions are treasonous and a federal government seeping like an oil spill into every individual's life.
It's time for a daring experiment, and he's just the man to undertake it. Imagine: He could totally eliminate the federal bureaucracy, return to the gold standard, bring Christ and creationism back into the public schools, secure foreign borders, privatize Social Security and health care. It would be the biggest social revolution since the New Deal, and he could do it all if he were the president — of Texas.
Rick, don't waste your purpose-driven life running for an office that will only frustrate you. You call Washington "the Devil's city," and now you're aspiring to go smack in the center of it. Besides, the U.S. is just too big and complex to allow your vision to flourish. But Texas! There you'd have a nice little country about the same size as Spain or Afghanistan, with a GDP and population close to that of Australia. You've spoken of this for years; why not go for it? Resurrect the Republic of Texas, born in valiant revolution against Mexico and independent for a decade, until in 1845 President Sam Houston, over great objection, got it folded into the U.S. — primarily so the federal government could assume Texas's enormous war debt. How's that for irony? For old-time Texans, the Republic is their meta-narrative, and who is better able to make their myth a realty than you?
Of course, there will be obstacles, but you're no Sisyphus — you can push those boulders right over the top. Presuming that the U.S. is now too weak-willed and war-weary to fight, you can begin as soon as your legislature ratifies the articles of secession.
It'll be chaos for a while, ushering the U.S. out of there and replacing the federal apparatus with a Texan one. The military will be a major problem, but they're getting so used to troop drawdowns that they'll beat a gradual and orderly retreat over five years, declaring victory. Then you can convert all those army bases into training centers for a beefed-up Texas Rangers. And while you're at it, you can use the abandoned Johnson Space Center in Houston for an ambitious program to put a Texan on the moon before the decade is out. What patriotism that would inspire!
Then there are all those U.S. federal grants to get off the citizens' backs — over $35 billion of them in 2009 — for agriculture, education, energy, environmental protection, child care, highways, on and on. I know that as governor you lobbied vigorously to get even more of them — $47.5 million last year for undocumented immigrant health care, for instance, and $14.5 million for No Child Left Behind, the educational standards program which you've called "a direct assault on federalism." But that's history now, and your countrymen will forgive you. There's always a price for freedom, and I'm sure all those farmers and oilmen and students and poor people will be more than willing to pay it.
Then there's immigration, which will be interesting, since you'll have to deal with not only one border but all of them. On the southern side, you can be as ruthless as you choose — drive those undocumented Mexicans out, like your forefathers did in the 1830's. But how porous will you let your other borders be? Will you require passports and work permits for Oklahomans? There may be a great influx of unemployed people from the States, seeking work in the Promised Land. On the other hand, there may be plenty of Texans, many educated and prosperous, who'd rather live in America. Will you let them go?
And then there are all those nasty entitlements. At least for Social Security, you've got a grace period. Non-citizens who've paid into the program can claim benefits, as long as they don't live in interdicted countries like Cuba or Cambodia. Presuming Texas is not added to the list (and why should America treat its separated sibling harshly?), your seniors can milk the system for decades, giving you time to devise and implement your plan for privatization. With Medicare gone, you can get those insurance companies back in the game, generating thousands of jobs to boot. And for those too poor to pay, well, we all know that Texans have big hearts and will take care of their neighbors like they used to, in the days before the welfare state.
As for money, returning to the gold standard probably wouldn't work right now, prices being what they are. You could tie your currency (the Pecos bill?) to oil or, appropriately, natural gas. You could also swallow your pride and continue to use the U.S. dollar, like Ecuador does. You can always switch to China later.
There are a lot more questions, like whether and how to insure bank deposits when the FDIC withdraws, but I'm sure you'll meet each and every challenge with your can-do resourcefulness. Shoot, if Georgia (the country, that is) can go independent, Texas surely can.
So Rick, set your sights on a presidency that really counts. There's a bill before your legislature calling for a plebiscite on Texas nationhood. Forget the U.S.; turn your mighty campaign force toward your homeland, where you've never lost an election.
Future Mr. President, you're made for Texas, and Texas is made for you.

CRACKDOWN IN BRITAIN

2011-08-19T16:30:00.000-04:00

August 18, 2011

You can add one more country to the long, long list of repressive regimes in the world. It's not in the Middle East or Asia; it's right across The Pond.
Great Britain? How can this be?
Consider the reaction of the British government to the riots and looting that occurred in London, Birmingham, and other major cities last week: Mass arrests of suspected looters, many of them identified by the surveillance cameras ubiquitous in urban areas; 24/7 "speedy justice" trials, dishing out jail terms even to children and even for thefts as small as a couple bottles of water or packs of chewing gum; authorizing the police to quell disturbances with rubber bullets and water-cannon (evocative of that other Birmingham, on our shores); proposing to disable social networks (an eery parallel to the actions of despots in Egypt, Syria, and Iran); and just about the worst of the worst, evicting from public housing the families of the convicted.
Consider as well the rhetorical reaction. "This is criminality, pure and simple," said Prime Minister David Cameron when he returned to England early from his idyllic vacation in Tuscany to manage the situation. Days later, asked what those people thrown out of their homes would do then, Cameron replied, "They should have thought of that before they started burgling." The answer to the same question by no less an authority than London's housing commissioner himself, a man with the charmingly English name of Eric Pickles, was: "They could get a job."
The callousness, both in word and deed, is straight out of Dickens.
It's an exaggeration for me to lump Great Britain with the likes of Bahrain or Burma. To the credit of the police, with its long tradition of responding to crime temperately and usually without firearms, no deaths occurred in the mayhem. And yet the pronouncements and many of the actions of the government are disturbingly similar to those in truly repressive countries. Rather than seeking and addressing the root causes of the violence, they only serve to heighten the frustration and anger of those who feel cut off and boxed in.
And the denigration continues. In a speech on Monday, having had plenty of time for considered reflection, Cameron expanded his analysis beyond criminality, pure and simple. Calling the riots symptoms of "the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country" — and everybody knows just which parts he meant — he ticked off the causes: crimes without punishment, undisciplined schools, absentee fathers, and that other old standby, "moral relativism." Not a word of compassion, not a hint of awareness, not a sign of support.
Opposition leader Ed Miliband broadened the scope of British decrepitude to encompass "greedy, selfish, and immoral" bankers, phone hackers, and politicians — examples, he said, of "a me- first, take-what-you-can culture." Enough incrimination to go around, but still just incrimination.
He might also have included the 100,000 citizens who signed a government website's petition in support of the eviction proposal.
For indications of the "moral collapse" of British society, Cameron should look no further than his own nose. Any government built on retribution rather than healing, on blaming the poor for their poverty, and on denying the role of racism in policy and policing is itself in moral collapse.
We Americans have been through this ourselves often enough, and in many ways the attitudes of our leaders today mirror those of Britain's. Even President Obama, who from his early work in community organizing should be the first to go to bat for the poor, has extended his compassion no further down than to the middle class.
Cutbacks in social programs and job-creating public works are just beginning to affect the most vulnerable here. Lacking hope for the future, what more is there than to take what you can, when you can? One wonders if and when the patience of our own desperate will snap.

ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

2011-08-06T09:44:00.001-04:00

August 4, 2011

Politics is supposed to be the art of compromise, but the end result of the debt-ceiling debacle was the most artless compromise in memory. Actually, it wasn't compromise at all, it was capitulation. Imagine: Both houses of Congress, and the President of what used to be called the Greatest Nation in the World, held hostage by a handful of Republicans, most of them just halfway into their first term.
It's like freshman hazing in reverse, forcing the upperclassmen to scrub the Floor of the House on their knees while chanting "Freshmen rule! Freshmen rule!" It's like taking away the football from the varsity team and making them play Kick the Can.
We haven't seen a tea party this mad since Alice discovered Wonderland. Indeed, you wish Lewis Carroll were around to make sense of it. Nobody else can.
All his zany characters, and then some, are in the House of the March Hare, with its chimneys shaping into ears and its dome being thatched with fur. You've got the Tea Partiers gaggled at one corner of the otherwise empty table, crying to Alice the Minority Leader, "No room! No room!" You've got Eric "Mad Hatter" Cantor, spouting riddles no one can solve. ("Why is taxation not a deficit-reducer?" is even more inscrutable than "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?")
You've got John Boehner, the beleaguered and weepy Hare of the House, dipping the Hatter's stopped watch into his tea.
And you've got Barack the neutered Dormouse, asleep on the table, where Hare and Hatter, as Carroll wrote, "were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. ‘Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice, ‘only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.'" You also suppose the Dormouse didn't mind when they tried stuffing him head-first into the teapot.
In our narrative, other Wonderland characters turn up, like Queen of Hearts Michelle Bachmann ("Off with their heads!") and that Cheshire Cat, Ronald Reagan, whose smile still lingers long after the rest of him is gone.
"It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!" said Alice as she fled the scene in disgust and began nibbling on the mushroom that would make her just a foot tall. "Now, I'll manage better this time."
Let's hope so, for what adventures still await! Despite her diminished stature (Who'd have thought it before she fell down that rabbit-hole in 2008?), the ceiling cramps her head. All is small now and getting smaller, except for the Big, who keep getting bigger.
Washington has become a world more topsy-turvy than even Lewis Carroll could conceive. Instead of constructing an economic policy, Congress deconstructs it. Instead of setting comprehensive goals for the betterment and prosperity of the country and then rationally determining how to pay for them, the Congress, pulling the President along by the nose, goes nuts over spending cuts, regardless of the merit of the program. The Big Picture has shrunk to the head of a pin. And like the Mad Hatter's watch, there is no future: "It's always six o'clock now," he tells Alice; "It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles."
It's self-absorption dissolving into pettiness. The so-called "debates" endlessly swirling around the debt-ceiling issue were goofier than the conversation at the Hatter's party.
And all the while, the economy sputters, the poor and sick are pushed from the table while the fat lick up the butter. "The common good" are words as meaningless as a stanza from "Jabberwocky."
Oh, my fur and whiskers!

HANDLING THE HEAT

2011-07-26T19:06:00.000-04:00

July 28, 2011

Here in New York, the heat wave finally broke on Monday, sending the temperature plummeting from Friday’s high of 104 degrees to a mere 83. It was time to resume the activities of daily living, like washing clothes and running the dryer, before the next debilitating wave hits.
I can’t bring myself to turn on the dryer with the thermometer in triple digits. Besides doing my small part to avert a city-wide power failure, it seems crazy to pump very hot air into very hot air. Riding on the elevated trains that emerge from underground in the Bronx, you still pass apartments with clothesline pulleys strung from one building to the next, shirts and skirts and underwear fluttering like international flags — and flags of surrender — in the breeze. Once symbols of tenement blight, these little solar-powered devices could make a comeback as a renewable energy source. Plus, your clothes smell so good when you pull them in, and no static cling. I may get one myself.
Heat brings out the New Yorker in New Yorkers. Another ancient summer tradition is the opening of fire hydrants for instant refreshment and water-sport. No matter that the little park right down the block has a delightful walk-under fountain spraying a cooling mist 24/7, and no matter that gushing hydrants discharge millions of gallons of water into the sewer and lower the water pressure, keeping both firefighters and people in upper-floor apartments from getting their own critical supply. Despite the threat of a thousand-dollar fine for tampering with hydrants — the law was enacted in the Giuliani days, part of his “quality of life” initiative — it is still common to see hydrants open full blast, kids with boogie boards surfing in the surge or deflecting it to douse passing cars. (Forget to close your windows and you’ve got a rolling swimming pool.)
When I moved to New York from drought-ridden Southern California in the early 1990’s, I was appalled by the waste of this precious element. In my first sweltering summer here, I was on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, where a stocky, bare-chested man with a can of Bud and a cigarette in one hand and a pipe-wrench in the other stood by a gushing hydrant. “Why are you wasting all this water?” I asked indignantly. “Because I want to,” he snarled. Welcome to New York.
Ever the Californian, I am still appalled, but I now think the better of openly challenging neighbors wielding wrenches. Instead, I call the city hot-line, and sooner or later some public employee will arrive to shut off the hydrant, fit it with a tamper-proof cap, and take the heat of hostility. That’s got to be the worst job in the world, and a futile one, too: A few minutes later, New York ingenuity successfully tampers with the tamper-proof cap, and the fun begins again.
In low-income areas like the South Bronx, where apartment air conditioning means one little window unit in the bedroom and one big electric bill at the end of the month, beating the heat becomes a community event. The spacious public parks are chockablock with people fully equipped for such occasions, lugging from their fourth-floor walk-ups barbecues, beach chairs, canopies, coolers, and recreation equipment. Dueling boom-boxes — rap and soul from one group, salsa and bachata from another, reggae from a third — all get along in a cacophonous melting-pot.
Also competing for the ear’s attention are the jingles of ice-cream trucks at streetside, one playing “The Entertainer,” another “Turkey in the Straw,” yet another the cloying Mister Softee theme. Many New Yorkers count the Mister Softee ditty as noise pollution because for some reason it keeps playing in their heads long after the truck has gone. In 2005, the City Council passed an ordinance permitting operators to play their jingles only when the truck is in motion — a measure that, like the hydrant law, is just laughed off.
Watching New Yorkers cope with oppressive heat is watching a wonderful cultural phenomenon — and the next opportunity arrives on Friday. Neighbors, get out your wrenches!

GOD, LOVE, AND THE MARRIAGE EQUALITY ACT

2011-07-26T18:59:00.001-04:00

July 20, 2011

The lone Democrat in the New York State Senate to vote against the Marriage Equality Act on June 24 is from the South Bronx. Ruben Diaz, Sr. — Pentecostal minister, hot-headed demagogue, one of those colorful characters once common in New York politics, and in the still-common dynastic tradition, father of the current Bronx Borough President — took his parting shot during the floor debate before the vote: “God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.”
There were surely other legislators who secretly agreed with his premise, if not his rhetoric, and yet finally voted the other way, persuaded by the powerful gay-rights lobby, promises of political pull by the popular governor Andrew Cuomo, and the emotional pull of homosexual family members and friends. Brooklyn Democratic Senator Carl Kruger, for example, was ostracized by the gay nephew of his girlfriend for voting against a similar same-sex marriage bill two years ago. According to the New York Times, his colleague, Democratic Majority Leader John Sampson, told him, “When everything else is gone, all you have left is family.” This time he voted yes.
“I don’t need this,” Kruger told him. “It has gotten personal now.”
Personal indeed, and it goes right to the top. President Obama, long an advocate of civil unions and a critic of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal benefits to same-sex couples, continues to hold the belief that the word “marriage” means a man-woman union. He now says that his views are “evolving,” though he refuses to explain how and why.
I think I can understand his dilemma; it is a conflict between the public and the personal. Like the president, I support the complete equality afforded by measures such as California’s domestic partnership law, and yet, presumably like the president, I personally believe that marriage connotes a heterosexual union. What I don’t support is what amounts to an official endorsement of any particular life-style, either opposite-sex or same-sex, the public approbation of an essentially private activity.
That’s why I’m in favor of disestablishing marriage, just as the First Amendment disestablished religion. A pioneering state like California could replace civil marriage with a universal domestic partnership contract open to any two consenting adults without regard to gender and without the implication of sexual relations. The question of what marriage is and who may participate in it would thus be left to individuals, religious bodies, and other social groups. The state’s only concerns would be the witnessing and disposition of the contract and the protection and encouragement of stable family relationships, however they are configured, through the rights and benefits secured by the contract.
Over the last fifty years, government’s involvement — intrusion, really — in the realm of personal relationships have steadily waned. As courts identified and refined the right to privacy, laws prohibiting all manner of consensual sexual relations both within and outside of marriage were struck down, the adverse legal consequences of out-of-wedlock birth were eliminated, the exemption for spousal rape was removed, and non-consummation as grounds for nullity was obviated by no-fault divorce.
Changing social mores have compelled states to accord varying degrees of legal status to forms of family configurations other than marriage. Depending on the jurisdiction, unmarried parents are now held to the same responsibilities of child support as married couples, adoption has been extended to single people and same-sex couples, and privileges similar or identical to those formerly reserved to the married are given to cohabiting widowed persons over age 62 (to preserve survivorship benefits), and even blood-relatives.
Today, the preferential legal status of marriage, however the term is construed, is de facto being done away with by modern family law; marriage now is widely treated as one form of protectable family relationship among others. So why not take the next step?
A state like California could easily become marriage-neutral by abolishing its marriage statutes and folding heterosexual unions into its existing domestic partnership law.
The advantages to this approach are many. First, it would make clear by terminology that government’s fundamental interest lies not in the presumed sexual activity of the partners but in nurturing and strengthening stable personal and family relationships. Second, it would obviate the valid argument made by gay-marriage advocates that equal but separate marriage and “civil union” laws create implicit class distinctions. Third, it would terminate government’s entanglement in the problems of definition. Finally, these contracts could also be opened to a wider range of committed couples, such as two celibate friends or unmarried siblings who share their lives and property and deserve the privileges of any married couple, gay or straight, but who would never want to be considered “married.”
In 1765 — simpler times, indeed — the English legal scholar William Blackstone wrote: “Our law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract. The holiness of the matrimonial state is left entirely to ecclesiastical law.”
In a closed-door meeting before the New York Senate vote, Governor Cuomo reportedly convinced wavering key Republicans with the exhortation, “Their love is worth the same as your love.”
Diaz based his argument on God; Cuomo, on love. I side with Blackstone. Neither legislatures nor courts should meddle in those holy realms.

GLADNESS AND SADNESS FOR SOUTH BRONX CATHOLICS

2011-07-26T18:58:00.001-04:00

June 21, 2011

It was a month of milestones for the Catholics of the South Bronx. On May 28, Rev. Thomas Fenlon, pastor of St. Augustine Church, celebrated 50 years as a priest. On June 3, Our Lady of Victory Church celebrated 100 years as a parish. On June 18, St. Augustine School graduated its 150th annual class. Happy occasions, each tinged with sadness and uncertainty.
Father Fenlon held his anniversary Mass in the historic Immaculate Conception chapel at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, on the Hudson River in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. Over 800 people attended, including 150 relatives converging from all parts of the nation and the world. He rented buses to bring parishioners from churches where he’d served, in the Bronx, Harlem, and upstate Newburgh. After the two-hour ceremony, animated by St. Augustine School’s African dance troupe and the church’s Gospel Choir, he threw an outdoor catered reception with an ethnic balance of Latin and soul food, good wines and kegs of beer, stations serving ice cream and Italian ices, and even face-painting for the kids. The DJ played both bachatas and the Electric Slide. All this cost him plenty, but he spent gladly and lavishly, not for himself but for the people he loved through half a century of ministry among the poor.
He would have preferred to celebrate in his parish church, but the once-magnificent 115-year-old structure was shut two years ago as unsafe. The 300-member congregation now worships in the school auditorium, a contraction that may foreshadow its dissolution in the New York Archdiocese’s next round of parish closings coming up next year. Founded in 1849, when the area was mostly farmland, St. Augustine’s served the South Bronx through urban growth and urban decay; it may not be there to serve the new waves of immigrants coming to occupy the thousands of housing units going up just blocks away.
A sesquicentennial should be cause for rejoicing, but the graduation ceremony at St. Augustine School was cause for tears — the 150th class was also its last.
In the heyday of Catholic education throughout in the first half of the last century, up to a thousand students, first through eighth grades, packed the classrooms each year, drawing from the Irish, German, and Italian families that then characterized the neighborhood. As the demographics changed to largely non-Catholic African-Americans, the mission of the school broadened to serve not just Catholics but the whole community, a refuge of quality and discipline amidst the corruption and chaos of the public school system.
In a sense, the school was a victim of its own success. When charter schools, publicly financed yet independently run, began opening in the South Bronx a decade ago (many explicitly owing their educational philosophy of academic rigor, classroom order, and even uniforms, to the Catholic model — everything except the religion and the tuition) enrollment at St. Augustine’s began to erode; this year there were barely 200 students. Rather than committing to maintain the Catholic presence in the neighborhood through active recruitment and a sliding-scale tuition policy, the archdiocese evacuated.
In a last touch of irony, a charter school down the hill, with a surfeit of students and a dearth of space, will rent the building as a second campus.
The ceremony for the final 12 graduates was somber but inflected with that most absurd of the theological virtues, hope. “God has something in mind,” principal Cathryn Trapp told the disheartened handful of parents and parishioners in attendance. “God is working. We may have nothing, and yet we have it all.”
The centenary dinner for Our Lady of Victory, a parish less than a mile northwest of St. Augustine’s, was also bittersweet. Beneath the accolades and the merengue music was everybody’s realization that one hundred years marked only memory, not expectation. Like St. Augustine’s, this parish, with its charming little church on Webster Avenue that saw the transformation of its neighborhood from clusters of row houses and modest apartment buildings to massive public housing projects, became a satellite of a larger parish two years ago — a portent of impending demise.
When the South Bronx was at its worst, amidst the fires and the drugs and the violence that made it a worldwide symbol of urban desolation, the Catholic Church stood firm. Young priests, filled with the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council’s liberating call for justice for the poor, spent their lives here, tirelessly preaching the Good News of human dignity and organizing the community at large to address issues of discrimination, housing, hunger, addiction, and guns. Catholic schools sheltered children from the streets and prepared them for good colleges and good careers. During that time, the archdiocese channeled contributions from its wealthy parishes into the Church’s ministry to the inner city.
Now these priests, after 50 years or more of service, are leaving the scene, with few to replace them. The financial lifeline once thrown to impoverished parishes and schools by the archdiocese is being hauled in, citing “fiscal prudence.” Milestones are now millstones. Just as the Bronx is springing back, the institution of the Catholic Church is beating a retreat.
But the remnant remains at work, braced by that absurd theological virtue of hope.

REP. WEINER TRIPS UP

2011-07-26T18:48:00.001-04:00

June 14, 2011

I met Anthony Weiner once. Well, I sort of met him. In 2005, when he was battling the Bronx’s native son, Fernando Ferrer, for the Democratic mayoral nomination, the Brooklyn/Queens Congressman made a brief foray into enemy territory to appear at a rally staged by South Bronx Churches, the local community-organizing arm of the Industrial Areas Foundation. He came in late and left early. Standard IAF practice is to allow politicians exactly three minutes to speak. Just as he was cranking up, a little Puerto Rican woman approached and tapped him on the shoulder: “Your time’s up,” she whispered. “I’m not used to shutting up so soon,” he laughed, and the crowd laughed with him. The IAF knew the value of Twittering long before Twitter existed. Weiner would later become adapt — or inept — with the Tweet.
He was then subjected to the standard IAF practice of demanding yes-or-no answers to the questions on their agenda: Do you support our proposals on education reform? housing for the homeless? gun control? Like almost everybody I’ve seen in this hot-seat, Weiner started off with, “I’ll answer your question, but first I’d like to say ...” — whereupon the leader would interrupt: “Just answer the question, Congressman: yes or no?”
At first baffled by the whole process, he learned quickly. He answered yes to everything, then excused himself: “I hate to go, but I’ve got another meeting in Brooklyn. You’re doing a great service to the community.” Exiting by a side aisle, he paused only to shake hands with people along the way, and grabbed mine for a New York second. So I sort of I met Anthony Weiner.
As far as I know, the Bronx never saw him again. Ferrer won the primary and Weiner went back to his job, and his other activities, in Washington.
The IAF likes to put politicians in their place as the servants, public servants, they ought to be — it’s good for them to experience a little embarrassment once in a while. Unlike many bigwigs that I’ve seen at these meetings, flush-faced and seething at the constrictions imposed on them, Weiner seemed to take it all in good humor, aware of the irony and also aware of the power of these usually powerless people to make or break him at the polling booth. I respected him for that.
While I never became a Friend or even a Follower of Weiner, I found his talk-show appearances refreshing — a guy with Brooklyn brashness who’d gleefully bash big oil, big ag, big tobacco, big everything except big government — an unapologetic liberal who dogged the right at every turn. He was often outlandish — I guess we should have suspected something right there — but some of his pranks bordered on genius. In 2009, in the midst of the health-care frenzy, he simultaneously introduced two bills, one to abolish Medicare and the other to extend Medicare to everyone. It was an unforgettable stroke of legislative irony; he designed those bills not for passage but to expose the absurd contradiction of supporting a single payer for the elderly and opposing it for the rest.
When the news broke last week of Weiner’s Twittering trysts, my first thought was: “Uh-oh, he’s a goner. Now all we have left is Dennis Kucinich.”
Thus far, Weiner has resisted the pressure from most of his party, including President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to resign. After the customary rehab and the less-than-customary self-flagellation, he could hold on to his seat, hang low, so to speak, continue to cast votes toward the liberal cause, and let his term mercifully expire.
In any case, whether he quits or stays, he’s finished in politics. People will forgive adulterers — look at Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, though the fate of the latter remains to be seen — and they’ll sometimes even forgive paid sex — look at Eliot Spitzer, disgraced governor turned CNN commentator — but they’ll never forgive a pornophile, especially when the porn is of himself. A twit on a Tweet. That’s about as creepy as it gets.
But who knows? Weiner and Jon Stewart were college buddies. What a sidekick that guy would make!
I can see it now ...

THE BEES GET A TASTE OF THE CITY

2011-05-26T09:05:00.001-04:00

May 26, 2011

One of the questions most frequently asked of urban beekeepers is: Where do you get your bees? Do they just fly into your yard?
Sometimes they do. A surprising number of people I meet tell stories of coming home from work one fine spring afternoon to find an undulating ball of honeybees nestled on a nearby tree-branch or fence. Seeing this phenomenon, some go into a panic and call 911; others go into a reverie and call their children out to marvel. In either case, by the time a beekeeper or — horrors! — an exterminator arrives, or by the time the family looks the next morning, the bees may have already flown away.
It’s the passing of a swarm.
Swarming is the honeybees’ way of propagating their species. When a colony becomes large, the bees — tens of thousands of sterile female workers, a few hundred male drones, and a single fertile female, the queen — raise another queen. The colony then divides into two groups, one staying put with their new queen and the other flying off with the old one to find another home. The swarm will settle temporarily on branch or fence or pole or wall while several hundred of the most experienced worker bees scout the vicinity for a suitable and safe cavity to inhabit, most often a hollow tree.
Despite centuries of study, entomologists still don’t understand exactly how each bee determines whether to stay home or to swarm, but they are coming to know how a swarm finds its new digs. Cornell professor Thomas B. Seeley recently summarized the research in his book, Honeybee Democracy. Contrary to the common belief that the queen bee is the autocrat of the colony, Seeley’s experiments show that the swarm makes a collective decision about where to live. The scout bees, having examined many possible dwellings for location and size, return to the swarm and, through the same kind of dance-like movements used to direct their sisters to sources of nectar and pollen, communicate their conclusions about the desirability of each prospect. Other bees then go to look at the options, and gradually the swarm forms a consensus on which one to take, flies off, and moves in. (Seeley discussed this process with NPR’s annoyingly flippant science correspondent Robert Krulwich on Tuesday’s Morning Edition; you can find the interview at www.npr.org.)
Beekeepers can influence the swarm’s decision by taking it to an empty hive — a comfy, ready-made home which the bees are usually (but not always) most happy to accept.
But back to our FAQ. Failing the good fortune of capturing a swarm, where do beekeepers get their bees?
More often than not, they buy them in what are called “packages” — several thousand worker bees culled from strong colonies, weighed out in two-pound lots, and placed in a shoe-box-sized cage with a mated queen in a separate little cage. You spray the bees with sugar-water to keep them temporarily flightless and busy licking the sweet stuff off each other, open the package, dump the sticky clump into an empty hive, release the queen from her cage, close up the box, and walk away. Within a week the package of disparate bees has become a functioning colony, the queen laying a thousand eggs a day, the workers foraging for nectar and pollen to feed themselves and the babies.
Usually these packages are made up by large-scale honeybee farmers, predominantly in the South, and are either sent directly through the mail or shipped by truck to a central location for pickup.
Having lost two of my three colonies to this year’s long and brutal winter, I ordered two packages from a beekeeping cooperative which supplies equipment, bees, and instruction to both aspiring and experienced beekeepers in New York City.
The co-op’s truckload of packages from Georgia was delivered to their warehouse on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn one morning last week. How was I to get my bees to their new neighborhood in the Bronx? Fight weekday traffic and risk a ticket for double-parking while I dashed into the warehouse? Nah. These Southern transplants would get around just like most New Yorkers do — by subway.
At the warehouse, conveniently located just steps away from a station with direct service to the Bronx, I sprayed the bees with water for hydration, zipped them up in duffel bags, and took them underground for their first New York adventure.
At nine in the morning, the subway car was packed with commuters heading to work in Manhattan. Several people looked up from their seats at this guy with two big bags slung across his shoulders, jostling for standing room. A recorded voice came through the loudspeaker with the routine message: “Remember, if you see something, say something. Report suspicious packages immediately.”
Yikes! Visions of the transit police swooping down and finding ten thousand stinging insects in my possession (a type of terrorist attack not unheard of in history; the Roman army threw bags of bees into enemy lines) made me shudder. But the gods were with me, the trip was smooth, and in an hour and a half two new colonies were ensconced in their homes in my Bronx apiary.
And that’s how this urban beekeeper got his bees.

OSAMA ON THE BUS

2011-05-04T09:52:00.001-04:00

May 6, 2011

The bus making its way through the South Bronx on Monday was unusually alive with chatter.
"Obama got Osama!" a gray-bearded man in a Yankees jacket gloated loudly to his seat-mate. "That's poetry!"
"Beautiful," the other replied. "I heard they threw his body into the sea. Now he sleeps with the fishes."
"Ha! He smells so bad even the fishes won't eat him."
A middle-aged lady in the seat ahead piped up in Spanish. "He killed so many people. Now he's tasting his own medicine."
"No me gusta, the way they just took him out," said a young woman across the aisle. "It's just more killing. They shoulda captured him. I wanted to see what he had to say. Maybe he was sorry."
"Too late, baby," a man in a wheelchair said from the front. "He gone for good now. He gave all those people at Ground Zero hell on earth for a few hours, but he's gonna burn forever."
A well-dressed woman sitting next to me handed me a pamphlet. On the cover, yellow and red flames licked around the title: "Hellfire: Is It Part of Divine Justice?"
"Read this," she said to me softly. "Go to your bible and see for yourself."
I glanced at the tract, from the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Have you ever seen someone tortured?" it began. "We hope not. Deliberate torture is sickening and abhorrent. ... Many religions teach that God tortures sinners in an eternal hellfire. ... Would a God of love inflict torture that even humans with any measure of decency find revolting? ... Even if someone perpetrated extreme wickedness for his whole lifetime, would everlastingtorment be a just punishment? No."
"God is love," she whispered. "How can there be a hell?"
A man leaned forward from the seat behind us. "The truth is, nobody really knows what happens in the next world. All we know for sure is about this world, and I'm glad Osama's out of the way here. He can't do anything more to us now."
The graybeard overheard. "Oh yeah? We have a saying in Puerto Rico: ‘You cut off the head of a snake and two heads grow back.' He's got people all over the world ready to take his place."
"I heard he has a hundred children," the middle-aged lady said in Spanish.
An African woman in a headscarf, cradling a baby on her lap, stared blankly out the window.
"They shoulda just forgot about him," the man in the wheelchair said. "Let the sleeping dog lie. Things was just settling down. The people in Egypt got their revolution without blowing anything up, and they was saying Osama's ideas are stupid and he's a has-been. Now we're on red alert again, that's what I heard. We're back to where we was after 9/11. Before, they just had a man, now they got a saint. Who knows what they'll do now?"
"I don't care," the man behind me said. "We'll get them too. I'm proud to be an American, and I'm glad Obama got him."
"Jerome Avenue," the driver called, pulling up to the stop. Passengers got off and on; the spontaneous social network traveling through the South Bronx changed friends.
"I found a nice apartment in Queens," a woman told her companion. "I'm moving next week. It's closer to my job, and it's more quiet there. Quiet and peaceful."

LIBYA: WOULD HAVE? COULD HAVE?

2011-04-05T20:47:00.001-04:00

March 31, 2011

On the cover of The New Yorker magazine for March 14, a drawing by Barry Blitt depicts Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, as a scarecrow, dressed in military finery, stuffed with straw, and mounted on a stick, with a desert landscape below. Flying around the scarecrow is a flock of white doves, several of them pulling tufts of straw protruding from its arms and head, another unraveling the braids on the uniform, gathering nesting material for spring.
The drawing is entitled, "Hope is the thing with feathers."
How quickly hawks snatch doves in flight, scattering their feathers in the wind.
Barely a month ago, as Blitt was pitching his idea to The New Yorker's editors, it seemed to much of the watching world that the near-miracle of peaceful revolution wrought in Tunisia and Egypt would replicate itself in Libya. Mass protests calling for Qaddafi's resignation were met with a waffling similar to that of those aged dictators to his east and west: a show of force followed by the promise of concessions. Qaddafi's brutal crackdown against the demonstrators in mid-February shocked even his own government, with two of his air force pilots flying their French-built Mirage jets to asylum in Malta and several of his ambassadors and diplomatic staff resigning their posts.
A few more days of demonstration might have toppled the regime. But for reasons as yet unclear, the center of nonviolent opposition did not hold. Disaffected military personnel seized arms and munitions in outlying regions and persuaded some of the citizens to join them in battle. Quick as that, protesters had become rebels; civil resistance had become civil war.
Thus allowed to play the game the way he liked it, Qaddafi set about smashing the revolt with attacks from air and ground — and almost immediately drew much of Europe into the vortex of violence. This crazy-as-a-fox colonel had been pushing the buttons of the West for 40 years, now threatening, now cozying up, back and forth — first a Communist and then an anti- Communist, first a terrorist and then an anti-terrorist. Having blown up the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and then having initiated a chemical and nuclear weapons program, he turned right around and apologized, proffering reparations to the Lockerbie survivors and dismantling his WMD's, hoodwinking none other than George W. Bush in 2004 to rescind Libya's terrorist status, thus clearing the path for multi-billion-dollar arms deals with France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, among others. It is those very weapons, so readily supplied to a country lacking a single external threat, that he's now using against the rebels, and that the U.S. and NATO are now firing their missiles at to take out.
So here we go again.
Another megalomaniac Little Caesar twirling the great powers around his finger. Another internal conflict inflated into an international one. Another military intervention in the name of protecting civilians with so-called "pinpoint bombing" that inevitably results in the death of civilians they are bombing to protect. Another commitment to topple — or not to topple, can't get quite clear on that one yet — the dictator with only the vaguest knowledge of who will take his place. Another rejection of Colin Powell's doctrine that every entrance strategy must have an exit strategy.
And thus far, despite it all, the latest Little Caesar remains, laughing at the world while his country goes up in smoke.
How can this be, and so soon, too, with Iraq so fresh in the mind?
President Obama's defense of military action in Libya, outlined in his address to the nation on Monday, is based on would-have's and could-have's: "We knew if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. ... A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders .... The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship .... A failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America."
Preemptive war is a war of would-have's.
But since we're speculating, there is another set of would- have's to consider: What would have happened had the Libyan resistance remained nonviolent? What would have happened had the militants been left without external assistance? Would those democratic impulses dawning across the region have been strengthened or diminished had the "international community" opted against force?
Oh yes, and one could-it-be: Could it yet be that in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and even Palestine, those things with feathers will continue to pick at their respective scarecrows?

IN PRAISE OF PRINT

2011-04-05T20:45:00.001-04:00

March 17, 2011

Easy Reader publisher Kevin Cody's puzzled prognostication on the death of newspapers (EasyReaderNews.com, February 24) set me a-shivering. It was what the passage of Prohibition did to drinkers and what the smoking bans did to tobacco lovers: When the papers are no more, how can I live?
There's something about a newspaper, and it isn't just the news. It's the paper.
You can spread it or fold it. You can linger over it or glance at it. Turning its pages yields constant surprises. Reading a paper is a non-linear activity; looking across its broad pages, you see many things at once — headlines, photos, ads — some you follow, others you don't.
The comment of Will Rogers, the homespun pundit of the 1930's, that "All I know is just what I read in the papers," certainly applies to me. Much of what I've learned or been prompted to learn has come not from courses, journals, books, or on-line sources but from the newspapers, just as it did for generations before me.
Newspapers were their window to the world.
Uncle Frank, my mother's brother, a book-binder with a knack for picking stocks, retired at age 55 and for the next 30 years spent every afternoon reading the Los Angeles Times. He read it the way people commonly did it on buses and trains in pre- iPod/iPad days, folding it in half lengthwise, reading the left side of the front page, turning it over to the right side, then folding that side back to reveal page 2, and so on to the end. When I was a boy, I was fascinated by this method and begged him to teach me how to do it, but after several attempts when I turned his Times into a pile of random pages, he gave up. I eventually mastered the technique, but now seldom use it, preferring the compact New Yorker on the subway instead. (As proof that you can find absolutely everything on the internet, go to RealSimple.com and search for "How to Fold a Broadsheet Newspaper" for illustrated instructions. Real simple, they say.)
Uncle Frank's method was an early version of multi-tasking, in which he held several unfinished articles in his head at once, resuming them wherever they were continued inside. My father, a machinist with a post-Depression suspicion of stocks, had a different approach with the evening Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the people's paper, which he bought daily after work. Dad was an interactive reader, spreading the paper on the kitchen table and noisily turning the pages to find the continuation of a font-page story. He processed the essential facts, offering running commentary on international politics, labor relations, government boondoggles, or movieland scandals to anyone nearby, and failing that, to himself.
Neither of these men had a formal education, but both of them displayed an astounding command of ideas and issues, due almost exclusively to their lifelong love of the newspaper.
It's no wonder I got hooked on newspapers at an early age. First I cut out cartoons, then later amassed huge files of clippings ranging from hard news to human and natural oddities. In high school I helped to found and went on to edit a mimeographed alternative weekly to counter the glossy and vapid establishment organ produced by the journalism class. I wrote a column for the Bellflower Herald Enterprise, as local as local news got. When I went off to college on the East Coast, I had the Sunday L.A. Times mailed to me, my medication for homesickness. There hasn't been a day in the decades since when I've begun my morning without the paper, any paper, wherever I was, even in Poland or Italy, where all I could do was look at the photos and guess at the words.
Reading the newspaper is part of my life's ritual. On days when the New York Times doesn't come — delivery to the Bronx is spotty, and when it snows they don't even bother — I feel the ache of absence, the symptoms of withdrawal.
My approach to internet news is different. I use the Web in much the same way as I did the public library's reference room in bygone days — another identity problem, by the way — to search for information on specific topics. When I enter a news site, I rarely browse the home page; sitting at a computer screen is work, not leisure, and there's something about the screen itself that makes me vaguely anxious. I cannot linger; when I find what I want I print it out and read the hard copy.
This purpose-driven activity leaves me usually oblivious to the ads flashing and framing the screen, most of which I treat as so much annoying spam, as worthless as e-mails from the Nigerian lottery.
Cody's mystification about why the Easy Reader, like all papers, is losing advertising to the electronic media mystifies me too. I'm much more likely to be attracted to and act on an ad when I come upon it as I turn a page rather than having it in my face on a computer screen. Plus, you see so many more of them in hard copy.
But as surveys continue to show more and more people getting their news from the internet, the more I dread the death of my old friend, the newspaper. Only a retrieval of appreciation for its unique contribution to daily life will save it.
Last month I got three handwritten letters from people under 30. Maybe some revival is at hand.

DRAMA REVIEW: "IN BETWEEN"

2011-02-02T12:55:00.002-05:00

February 3, 2011

If there's any place on Earth for a modern Romeo-and-Juliet story, Israel must top the list: Jews and Arabs, living together yet apart, locked in mutual distrust and in many cases, mutual hatred. Yet here and there, eyes meet, smiles are exchanged, and something happens that makes all the barriers fall.
"All you need is love, love: Love is all you need." So sings Ibrahim Miari at the beginning of his one-man autobiographical play, "In Between," presented last Sunday at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Greenwich Village and sponsored by the Pax Christi organization. He's recounting how his Arab father won his Jewish mother in 1969, in Galilee, with a fire-red VW Beetle and its radio blasting out the Beatles. "I don't really know how they met," he admits, with a smile at the audience. "Neither of them ever talk about it. But I'd like to think it was this way."
He pulls a silver ring from his shirt pocket and examines it. "This isn't their ring either," he says. "It's ours."
Now he unfolds the story of his own graced encounter of eye catching eye in a Jerusalem coffee shop: Ibrahim, Israeli citizen, struggling playwright, an "in-between"; Sarah, an American student visiting Israel, a Jew. In short order, they decide to marry, and Sarah invites him to Boston to meet her parents and arrange the wedding.
Whirling slowly in a Sufi dance, Miari shifts the scene to the Tel Aviv airport. He retrieves a suitcase from a corner of the barren stage and snaps a latex glove on his right hand. His gestures split his body from top to bottom, right hand motioning to bewildered left to step aside: the pat-down. Left hand drops pants, right hand investigates body. Next scene: the supervisor's office. Right hand opens the suitcase, rummaging through the contents and tossing some items on the floor: a necktie, a silk scarf — a gas mask? The supervisor examines his passport. "You are an Arab and a Jew? You have been to Gaza? And what's all this?" "I am a playwright," he explains. "These are props for a play I'm trying out."
Another whirl. Now we're in Boston. Miari takes on the soft voice and anxious pose of his fiancee's mother. "Sarah, Ibrahim, I would love to give you my blessing — as long as you'll be married by our rabbi."
Out of the open suitcase comes a towering puppet, an empty black gown topped with a grotesque foam-rubber head wearing a broad-brimmed hat over ringlets of hair. Another interrogation: "Will you raise your children as Jews?" the puppet asks. "We want to let them decide." Request for marriage refused.
Whirl again, flashback to childhood, early 1980's. The actor becomes his father, telling the boy gruffly that though he was raised as a Jew in his mother's line, he is now an Arab. His name will be changed from Abraham to Ibrahim, and he will be transferred from Hebrew school to Islamic school. The scene shifts to a school-yard: His lifelong Jewish friends call to him through the fence to join them in play. He cannot come.
Another whirl, to present time. His father, enraged at the news of his son's engagement, curses his own interracial marriage as "a mistake." "Remember our proverb," he admonishes: "If you don't marry from your tribe, you'll suffer until you die."
The puppet appears twice more, first as an imam and then as a Buddhist priest ("We're ‘Jew-Bu's!'" Ibrahim tells him). Sorry; all impossible.
The play ends abruptly there, with Ibrahim telling the audience they went ahead with the wedding without religious officialdom, calling on a friend to witness their vows.
The last third of this work is dissatisfying. The dramatic tension built up through the airport scene falls flat. The puppet takes on a major role, a satire of formal religion, while — with the exception of the tirade of Ibrahim's father — the characters of Sarah and the parents are left undeveloped. (Indeed, Sarah's father and Ibrahim's mother are barely mentioned.) The resolution, such as it is, is achieved with little of the anticipated conflict. In the end, it's less Romeo and Juliet and more Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Nevertheless, the overall mood is evocative. By masterfully dividing the gestures of his body, Miari illustrates the sad division between Jews and Arabs, both the Biblical descendants of Abraham/Ibrahim, a division that lives in his very self and in his very name, extending back to his parents and forward to his children. (A far better ending, in fact, would have been a reflection on those children-to-be.)
"In Between" leaves you thinking that those who marry in spite of ethnic prohibitions are living symbols of hope, unmasking the absurdity of racial and religious intolerance and pointing the way to a world as yet untried.
All you need is love.

WHERE'S THE CARE IN HEALTH CARE?

2011-01-26T11:12:00.001-05:00

January 27, 2011

Having delayed it a week in deference towards Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot through the head in Tucson, the Republicans of the House brought up and voted en bloc to repeal the health-care bill signed into law just ten months ago. The measure is entitled "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." Job-killing? Killing, period? Now that's a lovely choice of words, considering the topic and the circumstances. But even something kinder and gentler — "job-eliminating" or "employment- effacing," for instance — wouldn't soften the Republican message that health-care legislation is about jobs, or about the deficit, or about taxation, or about states' rights — about anything but health.
As usual, the anything-but arguments are hardly compelling. Republicans contend that the law will "kill" jobs because businesses will let employees go rather than be burdened by either insuring them or paying an additional tax; Democrats say the effect will be minimal.
The ambiguity in the deficit argument is even greater. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that repealing the law will add $230 billion to the federal deficit over ten years, while the Republicans insist that keeping the existing law will add $701 billion. The fact made obvious by this divergence is that nobody really knows for sure. This isn't policy, it's politics.
But consider the case of Rep. Giffords. What will be the total cost of repairing her wounded brain and leading her to recovery — the hospitalization, the teams of medical specialists, the surgeries, the medications, and all the rehabilitation therapies — speech, occupational, physical - that will last for months or quite possibly years? The figure will be astronomical, and it will be paid for almost entirely by her federal insurance plan.
What of the 12 others wounded in the shooting? Five of them are over 65 and covered by Medicare. As for the rest, are there maybe some who have little or no health insurance? What will they and their families do?
Last month, Virginia federal judge Henry Hudson ruled that federally-mandated insurance coverage for almost all Americans, a key provision in the law intended to distribute the costs more equitably, violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. "Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," he wrote. Virginia state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who brought the suit, remarked that "if the government can order you to buy health insurance, they can order you to buy a car, to buy asparagus, even cauliflower ... or join a gym. The power is expandable almost without limit if this is allowable and constitutional."
Two other federal judges have also weighed in on the question thus far, affirming the opposite, that the mandate is constitutional; so the issue is hardly settled. But while Cuccinelli's comment is just typically embarrassing Republican rhetoric (see "job-killing," above) the judge's sober analysis makes sense. Health insurance is no different from life insurance or homeowner's insurance; it's a product. How can the government compel people to buy it?
Health insurance is a commodity, "in the stream of commerce" — but the essential medical services it pays for are not. They are not a matter of choice, like cauliflower; they are a necessity.
Return to Rep. Giffords. When she was shot, the entire nation, and I daresay that includes the most libertarian opponents of health-care reform, focused single-mindedly on her condition and on the measures being taken by the heroic medical staff to save her life and restore her wholeness. In this tragic moment, health care suddenly was not about jobs or deficits or comparison shopping. It was about health.
And it's about us all. Rep. Giffords is exactly like the tens of thousands of people who will be hit with something just as unexpected and devastating this very day — a gunshot wound, a workplace accident, a heart attack, a diagnosis of cancer. Injury and disease are the absolute leveler, the one thing that eventually will afflict every single human being, from the billionaire to the indigent to the immigrant.
Despite its "laudable intentions," as Judge Hudson readily admitted, I believe the present law is flawed in preserving almost intact the role of insurance companies, reinforcing the notion that health care is product involving, in the judge's words, "an individual's right to choose to participate." It is not. Because it is a universal need, medical care should be considered a public responsibility whose burden must be shared by all. Like education, health care should be treated not as a commodity but as a civil right.

TOMBSTONE

2011-01-13T11:08:00.001-05:00

January 13, 2011

"I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America," said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik after the Saturday massacre in Tucson.
Tombstone, the silver-mining boomtown-turned-tourist town 70 miles south of Tucson, holds a signal place in American mythology, with its macabre name, its historic reputation for lawlessness, and its told-and-retold story of the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral — the epitome of all that was wild about the Wild West. Sheriff Dupnik, 30 years on the job and long noted for his blunt and sometimes contrarian views on hot- button social issues not necessarily connected to law enforcement, tapped into the well of mythology as few others could; after all, Wyatt Earp himself was once the sheriff of Pima County.
Sheriff Dupnik had his home state in mind, of course, and there's certainly some reason for it; Arizona has lost its fun- in-the-sun image of late. The passage of SB 1070, the strictest illegal-immigration state law in the nation, last April, ignited protests and boycotts throughout the country. (Dupnik said the law "is unwise, it's stupid, and it's racist" — "a national embarrassment".)
Also recently enacted were laws allowing Arizonans to purchase guns without a license and to pack concealed weapons without a permit, and prohibiting counties and municipalities from setting tougher regulations themselves. (Dupnik: "I have never been a proponent of letting everyone in this state carry guns under almost any situation, and that's almost where we are." An ironic sidelight on the issue came from Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen, writing in Politico: By 1880, she notes, the town of Tombstone itself had outlawed the possession of all firearms.)
On January 1, a law went into effect withdrawing state funding from schools offering courses that are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and that "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals" — a law which the state superintendent of schools said was specifically directed against the Chicano studies program in the school district of ... Tucson.
Perhaps even more than elsewhere, an atmosphere of rancor seems to have infused Arizona state politics over the last several years, beginning with those shouting-matches called "town hall meetings" over health-care legislation and continuing through the bitter midterm Congressional campaigns. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," Dupnik said after the shootings. "And unfortunately, I think Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Dupnik may be right about Arizona — it's certainly developing a reputation — but the myth of the West, of which Tombstone and the O.K. Corral are examples, is embedded in the American consciousness, containing themes of individualism, scorn for governmental control, hatred for outsiders, and the supremacy of the gun, all of which underlie much of the rhetoric of the Right.
Whether or not the Tucson shooter was acting out those Tombstone themes may never be known. Yet, as Dupnik remarked: "To try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with."
For those of normal disposition, the rhetoric of anger is taken metaphorically and sublimated. For those who are "unbalanced," it can become an atmosphere of pure oxygen waiting for a match.
Wouldn't you think that the deaths of those six innocents would change a nation's mind about the common sense of gun control? Wouldn't you think that the wounding of those 13 others would demonstrate how vulnerable to fate we all are, and that medical care is not a commodity but a necessity and a right? Wouldn't you think that this horrifying event would at the very least sober people up about the dangers of incendiary words?
The answer is probably no. The myth of Tombstone will not die.

YULETIDE LETTER, 2010

2011-01-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

Time is telescoping now. It's been 20 years since I moved to New York. The day I arrived here is as fresh in my memory as yesterday; what has happened in between is becoming a blur.
Driving through the South Bronx to St. Augustine's Church that September afternoon, nervously checking and re-checking the directions given me by Father Jeffers the pastor, I had day-mares of getting hopelessly lost and in big trouble, like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities. The crumbling housing projects on Webster Avenue, the burnt-out buildings, the blocks of vacant lots strewn with garbage and picked-over carcasses of cars — it was a social moon-scape, the world's symbol of the death of the American city. But the people I met from that very first day — struggling families, recover ing addicts, old men running numbers at the corner, children playing in the gushing fire hydrants — were among the warmest and most welcoming I've ever known. The Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
Thanks in great part to the tireless work of the churches and their heroic ministers, who over three decades of agitation built housing, cleaned up the projects, brought in businesses, chased out drug-dealers, and made the city improve the streets, parks, schools, and hospitals, the South Bronx has turned the corner. You'd hardly know how hellish this place once was.
My sister Jeannie and her husband Rob from California, and Rob's sister Marsha and her husband Rod from Oregon came to visit in October, a wonderful week of sightseeing in ideal autumn weather. One of our stops was Ellis Island, where many of the people who built the Bronx — Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans — got their first taste of America. Their descendants, pros perous from years of hard work, fled to the suburbs as the area deteriorated in the 1960's. Now, with the housing stock expanding, new waves of immigrants are settling here — Central and South Americans, Carib beans, and most recently, West Africans. Storefront mosques are opening up, next to storefront Holiness churches. Men in kaftans and women in long gowns and veils are everywhere now, an interesting parallel to the traditional habits of Mother Teresa's nuns and the Franciscan friars, who serve the poor here.
Venerable St. Augustine's Parish, the spiritual home for immigrants for over 150 years, has added many West Africans to its complement of cultures, including Ameri can Blacks, Hispanics, Haitians, West Indians, and the Garifunas of Guatemala. Talk about diversity!
Though the parish has been given a reprieve from closing by the Archdiocese of New York, St. Augustine School is now on the endangered list. This year, enroll ment slipped below 200 because of the sagging economy and the allure of new charter schools opening nearby. To demonstrate their determination to save the school, the faculty voted to cut their already uncompetitive pay. To increase enrollment, the administration devised the most affordable tuition plan imaginable: 3% of family income. The median income in this area is only $16,000, so tuition for all the children in a median family would be only $48 per month. Since the policy was announced last month, over 50 new students have signed up. But the arch diocese wants a balanced budget, so the shortfall in revenue has to be made up by donors. If you're looking for a worthy cause to support, this is one. Visit their website at www.staugustinebx.com.
Food has always been a major issue in this impover ished community, but the dynamics sure have changed over my years here. One of the best things about the New Bronx is that supermarkets, once the dumping ground of turning meats and wilted produce, have been seriously upgraded. You still can't get arugula, a good steak, or sometimes even cottage cheese in them, but the selections are better and the perishables unperished. In addition, a farmer's market opened on McKinley Square right up the block last summer, run by students from a local charter school with an urban-agriculture theme. Set up to take food stamps, it did a roaring business, offer ing fruits and vegetables from small upstate farms and the school's own garden.
The St. Augustine Food Pantry serves over 400 people per week, and the days of dented canned goods and bricks of nasty surplus cheese are gone — now, thanks to the resourceful Food Bank of New York City, clients get fresh meats and produce and an often intriguing selection of products snagged from overstocks at Manhattan gourmet stores.
The chicken project at St. Augustine School continues. Last spring, Rafael, the school's custodian, who raised chickens in the Dominican Republic, slaughtered and dressed the aging first batch of 15 hens, which went to school families. The project has now expanded to 35 chickens, each laying an egg a day, distributed to the needy in the neighborhood.
Genesis Park, the community garden next to St. Augustine's rectory, welcomed several new gardeners this year, immigrants from El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, who had worked on farms back home and brought their skills with them. The garden yielded remarkable amounts of vegetables last season.
The bees did quite well too. Despite a six-week drought and heat wave that dried up the nectar sources in July and August, by fall I'd harvested 360 pounds of honey, still well above the average.
The South Bronx is still about immigrants, sharing their talents and industry with their neighbors. Part of the Christmas story tells of St. Joseph and his new family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod's persecution. It's good to remember that the rolls of immigrants and refugees include the Son of God himself.

COMPROMISE OR COMPROMISED?

2011-01-13T11:05:00.001-05:00

December 16, 2010

There are good and bad meanings to the word "compromise": one is to come to agreement through mutual concessions; the other is to undermine one's integrity by caving in to opposition. On the tax-cut deal now before the Congress, did President Obama engineer a classic compromise that gives each side an equal balance of things wanted and unwanted; or did he compromise himself, surrendering his principles for things he should have had anyway with more guts and better timing?
Compromise of principle is on the minds of both the left and the right. Many liberal Democrats are appalled that their president blinked in the stare-down with Republicans over extending the Bush tax cut for those making over $250,000 a year — another campaign promise come a-cropping. Republicans are delighted that what they said was absolutely non-negotiable was taken by the president as absolutely non-negotiable — a sign that if they keep saying "no" long enough and loud enough, he'll fold every time.
Some observers, however, do not perceive weakness but shrewdness in Obama's tax-cut proposal. David Brooks of The New York Times lauds the president for "returning to first principles" — the principles of working with the opposition, a centerpiece of his campaign and early presidency — not an ideologue but a "network liberal" in the line of Ted Kennedy, someone who believes that "progress is achieved by leaders savvy enough to build coalitions ... with people they disagree with." Obama's move, Brooks writes, was not a Clintonian shift of position from left to center, not a self-reinvention; instead, it was "standing at one spot in the political universe and trying to build temporary alliances with people at other spots in the political universe."
Announcing the proposal last week, Obama said as much: He continues to oppose the tax break for the upper class as a giveaway irrelevant to the recovery; but given the political circumstances, it was better to throw the Republicans this bone if they'd go along with things they themselves dislike — extending unemployment benefits, decreasing the payroll tax, maintaining the earned income tax credit — things beneficial to the middle class and at least marginally helpful to the economy.
There does seem to be something different in Obama's approach to the tax issue. In his early initiatives, notably health-care legislation, he naively expected bipartisan cooperation; then, frustrated by "no" at every turn, he had the Democratic Congress ram the bill through on procedural technicalities, alienating independent voters and sparking the Tea Party movement. This tax bill, by contrast, was pure horse- trading, real compromise, both agreeable and disagreeable to all, but with enough agreeables to make it palatable. Monday's test- vote in the usually deadlocked Senate — 83 to 15 to forestall a filibuster — was nothing short of remarkable in this paralyzed political climate.
Brooks thinks that "Obama has put himself in a position to govern again ..., reminding independents why they liked him in the first place."
Whether this will prove true for the rest of his term, especially with the power-shift in the new Congress, remains to be seen. Will voters see him as a Great Compromiser or as greatly compromised? Stickier issues than tax cuts await him.

JUSTICE STEVENS v. DEATH PENALTY

2010-12-03T13:01:00.001-05:00

December 2, 2010

"It is of vital importance to the defendant and to the community that any decision to impose the death sentence be, and appear to be, based on reason rather than caprice and emotion."
John Paul Stevens, who retired from the Supreme Court last term at age 90, wrote those words in 1977, in the majority opinion on the case Gardner v. Florida. In his freshman term the year before, he had voted with the majority in allowing a 1972 Court-imposed national moratorium on executions to lapse, expressing his belief — and hope — that closely restricted parameters and rigorously enforced procedures would guarantee "evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law." By the end of his 34-year tenure, however, he had concluded that caprice and emotion in regard to capital punishment are so endemic within the judicial system and popular attitudes that rationality and consistency are in almost every case impossible.
Stevens' evolution — I'm not sure that is the right word for it — can be gleaned from his review of the book Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, a comparison of American and European approaches to capital punishment by the British legal scholar David Garland, appearing in the upcoming issue of The New York Review of Books and available on-line at www.nybooks.com. Garland's thesis as outlined by Stevens is that in most of Europe, strong governments abolished the death penalty after World War II despite popular support for it, eventually swaying a majority of citizens to embrace abolition as a mark of civilized society; in the United States, by contrast, the "tradition of community-level executions dating to colonial times [and] frontier beliefs in meeting violence with violence" shaped state and local policy to favor capital punishment, while "the more politicized bureaucracy and the relatively weak national parties" were "inadequate to the task of overriding public support."
Thus, in its 1972 moratorium decision, Furman v. Georgia,the Supreme Court deferred to the states, leaving them to revise their statutes to conform to the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, to "narrow the category of death- eligible offenses while enforcing procedural safeguards against the risk that facts unrelated to moral culpability would affect sentencing."
While the Court did succeed in reining in the most egregious aberrations — "eliminating categories of defendants (juveniles and mentally retarded) and offenses (rape and unintentional killings) from exposure to capital punishment nationwide" — the strictures Stevens endorsed from the beginning were subsequently undermined by "the regrettable judicial activism" of more recent appointees, whom he respectfully leaves unnamed. Particularly, he cites three significant reversals of prior Supreme Court decisions which (1) had banned victim-impact statements as inflammatory and peripheral to the facts of the case; (2) had forbidden the exclusion of prospective jurors on the basis of their opposition to the death penalty; and (3) had eliminated seeking the death penalty for accomplices to a murder. In addition, he cites the failure of the Court in 1987 to mandate reform of the Georgia judicial system, in which murderers of Whites were sentenced to death eleven times more frequently than murderers of Blacks.
It is not that Stevens' initial position had changed over the years. The imposition of death remained for him a legitimate prerogative of the state under the Constitution. But, as he argued in Gardner, "the action of the sovereign in taking the life of one of its citizens ... differs dramatically from any other legitimate state action" and thus must be held to the highest and most dispassionate of standards — standards which, given the pressures from a society which in Garland's words has a "fascination with death" and revenge are in almost every instance impossible to achieve.
Concurring for the most part with Garland, Stevens contends that arguments for capital punishment based on deterrence are specious, lacking any statistical proof; that the prolonged and expensive process of trial and appeal in capital cases imposes a "monumental" burden on the judicial system; that the very possibility of executing the wrong person makes the finality of the death penalty abhorrent; that the argument for "retributive justice" — revenge — is inherently emotive, thwarting rational criteria; and that the practice in many states of electing prosecutors and judges makes them more likely to seek or impose the death penalty "for political or cultural purposes."
Unlike religious positions against capital punishment — "only God can take a life" — which de facto alienate both nonbelievers and eye-for-an-eye radicals on the opposite religious side — Stevens' argument, formed over decades of experience, is purely practical: The death penalty is, as he wrote in a 2008 opinion, "the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernable social or public purposes."
An argument for reason.

A TSA THANKSGIVING

2010-11-24T09:50:00.001-05:00

November 25, 2010

If you were sensitive about your looks in the past as you returned to your folks' home for Thanksgiving and presented yourself before the groaning board, your imagination will run positively amok this year as you present yourself to the full- body scanner at the airport. My God, what do I look like to these Transportation Safety Administration officers checking the X-rays in their secluded room? Are they having a good laugh, refining their jokes about Mr. Flab or Big Sister, Piano Legs or Plucked Turkey? Will they mistake love-handles for plastic explosives? Will they send me over to the Pat-down Department? If so, couldn't the Patter be cute?
The screen-machines may inflict mild trauma on some, and they'll bring their stress home for the holidays: Are my sags and bulges providing a pinch of levity to the living-room conversation while I'm in the kitchen helping mom with the cooking? Is old Uncle Lear out there secretly longing to do a pat-down?
Oh, and think about the return trip, after you've stuffed yourself with stuffing and had a weekend's worth of leftovers, those delectable baby onions in heavy cream, those big turkey sandwiches with gobs of mayonnaise, that butter-laden pecan pie. Won't the scanning crew have a ball with your body then?
The anxiety doesn't stop with scanners. On National Public Radio's Morning Edition on Tuesday, a TSA official took questions on carry-on items. Are pumpkin pies allowed? Yes. What about my traditional cranberry sauce? No. Explosives must perform better in gelatin than in custard.
Terrorism really works. We're all half-crazy now.
Those $100,000 scanners and the prodding prison pat-downs are just the latest reaction-response to the endlessly innovative mind of the terrorist. First the pocket knives, then the liquids, then the shoes: You try it, we'll head it off. The latest obsession is what could be under the underwear, and as we saw last month, it never really ends; now it's wired-up toner cartridges. Maybe for the holidays they'll bury a bomb in a fruitcake — not even an X-ray could pierce those dense bricks.
All this is enough to make you say to hell with it: Air travel is so revoltingly demeaning now that I won't put myself through it anymore. If I can't get there by car or train, I won't go anywhere; I'll spend the holidays with my neighbors and have a nice Skype visit with the family far away.
That may not be such a bad thing. Our culture, infuriated by flying, may return to the life of the pre-airline era, when holidays brought together people down the street or in the next apartment for feast and fun, a time for relaxation, not agitation. No terror, or terror of terror, just peace and friendship, so different from the anonymity and intrusiveness of the airport.
For the holidays, there may be no place like your own home.

OBAMA AND THE MIDTERMS: RHETORIC AND REALITY

2010-11-24T09:47:00.001-05:00

November 11, 2010

The higher the hope, the deeper the disappointment.
Just two years ago, it looked like Morning in the Universe. Late on election night here in the South Bronx, people poured into the streets shouting "O-bam-AH! O-bam-AH!" Halfway across the world, in Germany, the father of a friend of mine told his son, "Er ist der Weltpresident" — "He's the World-President."
It looks a bit different now, even from the horse's mouth. As President Obama told political satirist Jon Stewart, "What I would say is: Yes we can, BUT — but, it's not going to happen overnight."
BUT? Uh-oh.
It's hard to tell whether the Republican comeback in the midterms portends a one-term president, a permanent lame duck. As the historians have pointed out, many other presidents whose party took a drubbing halfway through — Clinton, Reagan, Truman, even Franklin Roosevelt — reclaimed the electorate's confidence and won second terms.
Can this president do it?
The answer may lie in lining up rhetoric with reality.
Remember those heady first days of the administration — the conciliatory speech to the Muslim world at Cairo, the rapprochement to Cuba at the Summit of the Americas, the "transpartisan" gatherings with Congressional leaders on economic stimulus and health-care reform? Remember the Nobel Peace Prize and the Copenhagen climate-change conference?
Where has it all gone? Thirty-thousand more troops to Afghanistan, deadlock on Palestine, hardly a word or deed on Cuba, no progress on climate, the near-blind eye to post- earthquake Haiti. Domestically, we got an anemic economic stimulus, dithering on the BP blowup, a health-care law that nobody really understands.
The legislative dynamic on health care reveals a great deal. Obama's first mistake was to leave the fashioning of the bill to Congress instead of presenting his own version up front. This came partly from his lingering belief that the sausage-makers could cut a good steak, and also that the chastened Republicans, repudiated and supposedly in disarray, could not hang together. He also underestimated the fractiousness of his own party, all those Blue-Dog Democrats who rode his coattails into office and then promptly jumped off. In hindsight, the better course would have been the incremental — tiny little bills agreeable to all, eliminating pre-existing conditions, closing the "donut hole" in the Medicare drug law — things that, one by one, nobody could deny, and building upon them. What we got was sausage, parts of which almost everyone found indigestible. This, coupled with the Democrats' ramrod passage of the bill by arcane parliamentary procedures, left the public — even some ardent supporters — feeling dispossessed and impotent. From this came the revolt of the masses in the "town hall" meetings in the summer of 2009, and the birth of the Tea Party movement.
Through all this, Obama's rhetorical skills evaporated when it came to interpreting his policies and motivating people to back them. The prophetic did not translate to the pragmatic. Somehow der Weltpresident found himself unable to provide the nation and the world with compelling moral arguments for his proposals; indeed, as his proposals shrank in size and scope, it seemed like he could not even provide compelling moral arguments to himself. Dismissing Gandhi and King, two of his philosophical inspirations, he turned to the "practical theologian " Reinhold Niebuhr, reading him either too closely or too superficially.
It is possible to be both a politician and a prophet, getting things done while giving people hope in a new and better order. Lincoln did it, FDR did it, Obama was poised to do it. But he could not establish the link between the prophetic and the pragmatic, a fact quite evident in the contrast between his speeches and his interviews and press conferences, soaring rhetoric replaced by hesitant hedging.
Never once has he taken on the Tea Party on philosophical grounds, even though as a constitutional lawyer he could best them at every turn. He has let them command the argument, with all of its nonsense about taxation without representation and "taking back the ‘gubment' for the American people." If ever there was a target for a constitutional lawyer, the eye-doctor Ron Paul should be one, but for some reason — not to appear elitist? — he holds his fire.
In 2008, a majority of the American people endorsed his rhetoric of hope. Can he save his presidency by applying it to reality?

THE DEVIL AND JUAN WILLIAMS

2010-10-26T15:10:00.001-04:00

October 28, 2010

When you make a pact with the devil, the devil always wins.
The Faust of the moment is Juan Williams, the political commentator who was fired from National Public Radio last week for a remark he made at his other job as the left-wing provocateur on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor. It was a remark that was unexpectedly candid — even to him, I think — and that could have led to fruitful dialogue. Unfortunately for all of us, he made it on Fox News, dialogue's desert.
In a segment entitled, "Danger from the Muslim World," host Bill O'Reilly leadingly asked Williams, "Where am I going wrong there, Juan?" "I think you're right," he replied. "When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous." Digging himself deeper, he continued, "Now I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week, he said the war with Muslims, America's war, is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts." Uncharacteristically, O'Reilly did not interrupt. He didn't have to: Why hang somebody who's hanging himself? Surprised, it seemed, at his own words, Williams quickly pivoted, taking O'Reilly to task for identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists.
In a reasonable venue, where participants talk with each other instead of at each other — NPR and PBS, for example — Williams might have retained the composure to soberly reflect on what he'd said. But in a format that abhors reflection and values only the juicy bite, that was impossible.
Days later, on ABC's Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos perceptively prodded Williams: "Should you have gone the extra step and said, ‘Listen, they're irrational, these are feelings I fight'?" "Yeah, I could have done that," Williams replied. Reiterating his comment about airports and Muslim clothing, he added, "in the aftermath of 9/11, I am taken aback. I have a moment of fear and it is visceral, it's a feeling .... So to me, it was admitting that I have this notion, this feeling in the immediate moment."
Speaking for myself, I have similar feelings, even though I live in a neighborhood populated by West African Muslims and see the "garb" on the streets every day. I think many, if not most, non-Muslim Americans have these feelings too. They are part of our ongoing 9/11 post-traumatic stress disorder; any little reminder of that disaster triggers them. As Williams himself admitted, these feelings are irrational. It is our collective national principles of justice and civil liberties grounded in the Constitution that have thus far spared us from total surrender to them, yet they have influenced much of our national reaction, from the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq to the uproar over the "Ground Zero mosque."
It is the irrational, the visceral, the incendiary that governs the panoply of programs on outlets such as Fox News. Williams may have taken that job at Fox with the best intentions, thinking he could inject some reason into the unreasonable. But he ended up leading a double life, sacrificing his integrity as a seasoned, insightful commentator to play O'Reilly's "liberal foil," as a New York Times story described him.
Sucked into the vortex of the visceral, few could escape. Though NPR's decision to sack him was inevitable — long before the present incident, his format-fed flippancy on O'Reilly"undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR," in the words of its press release — the "feeling in the immediate moment" led first to NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller's passive- aggressive recommendation to "take it up with his psychiatrist or his publicist," and then to renewed attacks from the right against public broadcasting and calls to eliminate its federal funding — which, thanks to its enthusiastic listeners and like-minded foundations and corporations, comprises only two percent of NPR's budget.
Right now, Williams is sitting pretty, the unexpected darling of those he has spent most of his career opposing, sweetened all the more with a $2 million contract from Fox News.
But as with Faust, sooner or later the devil will have his due.

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AND THE POWER OF THE IMAGE

2010-10-26T15:07:00.001-04:00

October 14, 2010

Cuba has long been a magnet for photographers. The intensity of the island — its natural beauty, its prodigal hedonism and dire poverty, its political volatility — drew photojournalists like Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson to document it extensively in the first half of the twentieth century. When the charismatic and photogenic Fidel Castro and his companions came on the scene in the late 1950's, opportunities for the saleable shot for thirsty news magazines worldwide proved irresistible.
It is that window of utopian hope, wedged between the Fascist totalitarianism of the 1950's and the Communist totalitarianism of the 1960's, that is the subject of "Cuba in Revolution," an exhibit of photograph and film at the International Center of Photography in New York City through January 9, 2011.
The chronology begins with a room devoted exclusively to the work of Constantino Arias, often called "the Cuban Weegee" for the "flash and run" spontaneity of his pictures. He started out in 1941 as a society photographer for the Hotel Nacional in Havana, snapping photos of overdressed matrons, jitterbugging couples, and bloated businessmen from America, liberated from the button-down life in the States and captured at their most uninhibited. Gradually, however, he was drawn to what lay just steps from the swank hotels — the cluttered alleys and tumbledown tenements of the other Havana, the aging prostitutes, sweating pushcart vendors, and most of all, the homeless and hungry. On the first wall you're amused by a full-length shot of a middle- aged American tourist clad only in swimming trunks and a huge sombrero, with a quart of Vat 69 in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the other, teeth clenching a fat cigar; on the opposite wall, you're appalled by the image of an emaciated young woman in a grimy dress, curled like a fetus against the wall of a colonnaded building. On a third wall is a series of photos of the demonstrations at the University of Havana in 1952, students marching with locked arms in one scene, panicked and scattered by water cannon in another. Arias caught the brewing storm.
In the next room, a collection of news photos from 1953 to 1959, Fidel and Che first appear, boyish and beardless in business suits, predating their hairy transformation. Fidel, fresh out of law school, organized a guerilla band and led a symbolic attack on a military barracks in July of 1953. He was captured and imprisoned, and two years later was exiled to Mexico, where he met Ernesto Guevara, an Argentinian physician whose student travels around oppressed Latin America turned him radical. The two snuck into Cuba in 1956, recruited troops, and engaged in increasingly widespread and effective skirmishes with government forces, eventually toppling the Batista regime in 1959. From the beginning, Castro knew well the power of the press and welcomed photographers such as American Andrew St. George to document not only the battles but the humanizing day-to-day life in camp — Fidel reading newspapers in his makeshift study, Che on his cot, stripped to the waist, dreamily sipping yerba mate tea from a ceremonial bowl and straw.
The revolutionaries entered Havana in triumph on January 8, 1959, and the photographers followed, capturing the gesticulating speeches of Fidel and the adoring faces of the crowd. Shortly thereafter, Castro took a prolonged tour of the Western Hemisphere, attempting to build support for his cause. Rebuffed and embargoed by President Dwight Eisenhower, he went to the United Nations in September of 1960, sidling up to the Soviets and infuriating his American hosts with a trip uptown to Harlem to identify himself as a champion of civil rights. St. George captured the mood in a photo of raucous protesters carrying placards reading fidel is welcome in harlem anytime! and u.s. jim crows fidel just like us.
As he settled into leadership, Fidel exploited the camera to solidify his salvific image among Cubans. One room of the exhibit is devoted to "Heroic Portraits." Osvaldo Selar's ultra-closeups of Fidel, one a profile cropped at the eye, slender fingers cradling a cigarette at his lips, every hair of his beard in crisp detail, and a second one backlit to illuminate the cloud of smoke from his cigar, are among the finest in the genre.
Even more sensuous are the photos of Che, surely the sexiest subversive of all time. Among them is Alberto Korda's 1960 shot of Che with beret, taken on the fly yet so quintessentially iconic that, stylized and colorized, the likeness soon turned up as posters, T-shirts, and among the oeuvres of Andy Warhol.
Even death did not detract from Che's photogeneity. When he was executed in Bolivia in 1966, local photographer Freddy Trigo was present when Che's body was displayed to the public as a warning to would-be revolutionaries. An entire room of the exhibit is devoted to his photos of the corpse, laid out on a slab, stripped to the waist as in the yerba mate shot, head propped up, eyes open, staring at the camera: And you thought this was the end of me.
The remaining part of the exhibit features Soviet-style heroic photos of post-revolutionary life, and a strange little section on the already-subversive youth culture of the late 1960's, images of free love and of teens displaying purloined Beatles albums, along with a propaganda short depicting the singers as chimpanzees.
Two other propaganda films are of more interest, one a lengthy "March of Time"-like chronicle of the revolution, another from the mid-1970's showing "mi hermano Fidel" dropping in on a blind old campesino and ordering him a new home, a pension, and free health care. "Socialism," he tells him (and the viewers), "has something more to do for you."
The exhibit is an extraordinary reminder of the power of the image to shape the attitudes of a nation and the world. Fidel, still before the camera 50 years later, knew that from the start.

CONNECTING THE DOTS ON THE DRUG WARS

2010-10-26T15:01:00.002-04:00

October 7, 2010

If there's any word to describe the American political scene today, it's "myopic" — no forest, only trees. Confined to their own little boxes of self-interest and fear, most politicians and many of their constituents can't see the Big Picture, can't connect the dots between one issue and another.
Take the Mexican drug wars, for example.
The conflicts among the cartels, which have left 28,000 dead over the last four years, are fueled by arms primarily supplied by dealers in the United States. Yet there is no political will to shut off the supply. As The Washington Post reported recently, "Some 7,000 gun stores operate along the U.S.-Mexican border. Most are not required to notify authorities even if an individual buys dozens of assault weapons in a short period. In fiscal 2009 U.S. agents revoked the licenses of just 11 stores for violations. Once the guns are purchased — usually by ‘straw' buyers acting on behalf of cartel middlemen — they are easily trafficked across the border."
Reinstating the ban on the sale of assault weapons, which expired in 2004, would eliminate 80 percent of the estimated 5,000 AK-47s and similar firearms crossing the border every year. But Congress, ever in the thrall of the National Rifle Association, has been unable to pass such legislation. Even President Obama, once a forceful champion of the ban during the campaign, has retreated from his promise, despite pleas from Mexican President Felipe Calderón himself. What makes the most sense evokes the least action.
Then there are the dots between the drug producers, the drug runners, and the drug buyers and users. U.S. drug policy has focused primarily — and unsuccessfully — on shutting off the supply of drugs from abroad while doing little to decrease the demand here. A number of international think-tanks, such as the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, consider the so-called "war on drugs" a failure and recommend treating drug abuse as a public health issue, not a crime. Legalizing marijuana, which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates comprises 60 percent of the Mexican drug cartels' business, may be far more effective in gutting them than interdict. As Jorge G. Castañeda, formerly foreign minister of Mexico and now a professor at New York University, and historian Héctor Aguilar Camín wrote in The Washington Post last month: "Legalization would make a significant chunk of that business vanish. As their immense profits shrank, the drug kingpins would be deprived of the almost unlimited money they now use to fund recruitment, arms purchases and bribes." They argue that passing California's Proposition 19, which would allow the private use, cultivation, and sale of marijuana, could effectively evaporate one of the cartels' major markets.
The dots are all over the map. They lie beyond borders. Connecting them demands understanding that it's not just us, it's all of us.

CUBA LIBRE?

2010-09-21T16:04:00.001-04:00

September 23, 2010

Forget Costa Rica. Forget the Bahamas. Forget Mexico for sure. It's Cuba we're all longing to see. The land of Cugat and Arnaz, of Hemingway and the Buena Vista Social Club, of vintage cars and rollicking bars. Not to mention baseball.
Fidel's little admission recently made to a reporter from Atlantic magazine — and then quickly retracted — that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" was soon followed by his brother Raúl's announcement that a whopping half a million people on the government payroll would be dismissed by next March, leaving them to find or create their own jobs in a loosened-up private sector. Equally whopping was his estimate that there are yet another half-million state employees who do virtually nothing and will also be released in time.
"We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working," President Raúl Castro wryly noted.
Talk about transparency. Such admissions, and such concrete proposals with hard numbers and even a fixed date, you seldom get from any leader, much less any "dictator." Something's happening on that island, and this is just the beginning.
Details of the plan are thus far sketchy — what the hell do you do with 500,000 newly unemployed? — but the outline released by the government last week gives a good hint of it: Some small state-run businesses like light manufacturing will be turned into private "cooperatives" owned and operated by their employees; this will absorb 200,000 workers. The remainder will be expected to find work on their own, mostly as small-scale entrepreneurs like taxi drivers, plumbers, farmers, and, as the document cited, wine-makers and massage therapists. The government apparently will not assist them in starting up these enterprises — no mention has been made of grants, small-business loans, tax breaks, job and management training, and the like.
Nobody outside the inner circle knows for sure what's coming next, but it does seem that the inner circle has a distinct vision for the future. Teams of Cuban economists have visited China and Vietnam; they are learning from the successes and disasters of other Communist countries' transitions to a freer market, and are determined to get things right from the start. Or so it seems.
What the Castro brothers fear the most is losing control of the process, something entirely understandable. I don't think they fear a revolution as much as a takeover by U.S. interests. They would welcome, of course, a relaxation of the trade embargo which has been strangling the country for decades — it's not just Communism that's made the Cuban economy the worst in the Western Hemisphere. But the last thing they want is to be colonized by their neighbor to the north — that's what prompted Fidel's own revolution in the first place.
If any country can make a peaceful transition to a mixed socialism, Cuba can. As the refugees and their descendants in the United States have amply demonstrated, Cubans are hardly lazy — they don't want to "live without working," they want to live in a society where work pays off. Those on the island have been chomping at the bit for an opportunity to make their country over, and in their own way.
They've been under U.S. interdict for so long that they already have a vision of self-sufficiency; their urban agricultural programs, for example, have been studied by American agronomists as models of "sustainability." What the Castro brothers seem to be saying is, with us or against us, we're going to prosper by ourselves.
By all indications, change in Cuba will not be violent but velvet. There will be no overthrow here. Most people in Cuba, I think, have a genuine affection for Fidel — he's not a despised dictator but a beloved father and liberator. If only the Castros can open up the country to private initiative while preserving the best elements of socialism — medical care, education, equitable distribution of wealth — they could turn Cuba into the Sweden of the Caribbean.
It's interesting that after that momentous announcement there was hardly a peep out of the State Department, and as far as I know, President Obama hasn't mentioned it at all. Perhaps they were taken by surprise and are pondering their next move. The best thing the U.S. can do at this point — and not only for Cuba, by the way — is to tear down that wall of trade.
These are exciting times. Maybe I'll be able to visit the Hemingway house and take in a ball game after all.

RELIGION AS SHILL

2010-09-01T11:46:00.001-04:00

September 2, 2010

Using religion to advance political goals is probably as old as religion itself. Its claims to absolute truth and certainty, and its highly emotional character, excite political extremism far better than politics itself. We all know that by now.
That is why it was no surprise that Glenn Beck, the incendiary talk-show host, took his Tea Party followers to the other dimension with his "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial last weekend.
"It has nothing to do with politics," he shouted to the crowd. "It has everything to do with God."
Sure. With himself and Sarah Palin on the stand, it was pretty easy to see through that one. And staging it in the very place and on the very date of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech 47 years earlier made the event positively creepy. On his radio show he said he hadn't known about the coincidence of dates beforehand; it was "divine providence" that guided his hand on the calendar.
It was providence too, presumably, that anointed him, of all people, as the restorer of Dr. King's dream, which, he said, "has been so corrupted." It is he and his followers that are "the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it."
They?
Beck's attempt to co-opt the civil rights movement with charges of "reverse racism" — remember, he once called President Obama a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred of white people" — is only topped by his attempt to co-opt Christianity.
After the rally, in an interview on "Fox News Sunday," he called President Obama "a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim." On his own show the previous week, he had stated that liberation theology is "all about victims and victimized, oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."
"People," he concluded on the Fox News program, "aren't recognizing his version of Christianity."
But Jesus might.
Take the Gospel of Luke, for example. Often called "the Gospel of the Poor," it is all about oppressors and the oppressed.
Right from the beginning of this Gospel, you know what social class Jesus comes from. Unlike in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus is born in a house and is visited by magi bearing precious gifts, in Luke he is born in a smelly stable, and first to do him honor is a group of humble shepherds — the underclass.
When he begins his public life, he announces his mission: "to bring glad tidings to the poor," "to let the oppressed go free." Time and again in his sermons and parables, he expands on that theme. In Luke's version of the Beatitudes, Jesus says bluntly: "Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours"; and in contrast: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation." In one parable, Lazarus the poor man is received at the bosom of Abraham while the rich man, who would not give him so much as a scrap from his table, burns in hell. In another, the despised tax-collector's prayers justify him, while the lofty pharisee's do not.
Even before Jesus' birth, his mother had already summed up his life and work: God "has thrown down the mighty from their thrones but lifted up the lowly."
For Jesus in Luke, the new social order he proclaimed was not pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die; it was arriving right now: "The Kingdom of God is among you." Jesus was the first liberation theologian.
Obama is hardly a liberation theologian, even by Beck's simplistic definition. He may favor rescinding tax-cuts for the rich, but his emphasis is on the middle class, and his policies and pronouncements rarely address the plight of the poor. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were more "liberationist" than Obama is.
Beck preaches a theology of personal salvation without a social dimension — which is odd in itself, since he is a convert to Mormonism, as "collectivist" a religion as you'll find. And in implying that "individual salvation" is what most Christians believe, he ignores a denomination as large as the Catholic Church, with its highly-developed body of official teaching advocating his despised "social justice."
The Tea Party philosophy — Don't tread on me, tread on them — presumes a Horatio Alger libertarianism that, had Jesus embraced it, would have catapulted him from the barn to the boardroom in 33 short years. But no. Jesus was born poor and died poor, in solidarity with the poor.
Too bad Jesus wasn't a featured speaker at the "Restoring Honor" rally. You wonder what he'd have to say.

CLASH OF SYMBOLS

2010-08-24T15:41:00.001-04:00

August 26, 2010

The imam wasn't sinister. He was starry-eyed.
Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose idea it was to build a 15-story mosque and community complex at 51 Park Place, two blocks from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, is no extremist. For decades he has worked to integrate American Muslims into the cultural mainstream. He has cultivated interfaith dialogue among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. He forcefully denounces violence. His views are so widely regarded and his integrity so trusted that both the Bush and Obama administrations have regularly sent him around the world to articulate the compatibility of American and Muslim law and values.
Imam Abdul Rauf conceived of Park51, as his project is called, as something New Yorkers would flock to — a place with something for everyone, an Islamic version of the Young Men's/Women's Christian Association (now called "The Y") or the Jewish Community Centers, with athletic facilities, an auditorium, meeting rooms, an art gallery, a fine restaurant, and a mosque in the mystic Sufi tradition where women and men worship together, religious garb is optional, and ecumenical activities are encouraged.
Indeed, he saw the choice of location as a statement — a symbol of solidarity between Americans who are Muslims and Americans who are not, a symbol of healing and of the renunciation of violence.
So sure was he of these aspirations that plans for the complex, according to the project's website, www.park51.org, include "a September 11th memorial and quiet contemplation space, open to all."
In their religious idealism, he and his supporters, including a host of prominent rabbis and Christian clergy, failed to read the signs of the times.
Almost at once, the proposal turned political, both micro and macro. The hearings of the Lower Manhattan Community Board in May and the Landmarks Preservation Commission early this month were marked by angry protests, and the overwhelmingly favorable votes were seen by many not as objective assessments of the project's civic worth but as compulsory political correctness at best or sympathy for the devil at worst.
On the macro side, Mayor Michael Bloomberg explicitly framed the issue in Constitutional terms. After the Landmark Commission vote, standing on Governor's Island with the Statue of Liberty in the background, he recalled New York's historic religious tolerance and called the decision "an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime."
Reactions were expected and understandable. One man asked, "What better place to teach tolerance than at the very area where hate tried to kill tolerance?" Another said, "The pain never goes away. When I look over there and see a mosque, it's going to hurt."
The actual problem is not about seeing a mosque but about seeing this one. There are several small mosques in the immediate vicinity, including one occupying a room at the proposed site; no one has challenged their right to exist. It is the enormity of this project that touches nerves. Rather than humbly living in the ghostly shadow of the Twin Towers, still ever-present to New Yorkers, Park51 is regarded by many not as a complement but as direct competition. Move it ten blocks away, they say, move it to Midtown — or, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "build it in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. That is where 9/11 came from."
The most pragmatic argument came from Bill Doyle, representing a group of 9/11 families. Ground Zero, he said, "should be a serene site. Now you're going to see protests and demonstrations there all the time."
Last Sunday, his prediction was proved right. Protestors from both sides engaged in a shouting-match at 51 Park Place, held back from each other by the NYPD.
And it's not hard to think that much worse may come — not just raucous protest but a van-load of explosives sent by some extremist Christian group: terrorism from the opposite side.
Just as the Justice Department was forced to relocate the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of 9/11, from the Federal Courthouse in Lower Manhattan because of the massive security risk and drain on NYPD forces involved, so too should this project be relocated. The question is not about religious liberty; it is about the common good.
Given the climate of suspicion and fear of Islam growing unabated in this country, it is certainly possible that an Islamic center of this scope would be a terrorist target no matter where it was located. But to have Ground Zero and the mosque, two symbols of such potency, so near each other would create a magnetic field attracting more the worst than the best of human nature.
Daisy Khan, the wife of Abdul Rauf and spokesperson for the project, told the press on Sunday that the developers were open to building elsewhere. It's too bad, but it's the thing to do.

THE MOSQUE CONTROVERSY: NATIONAL PTSD

2010-08-19T09:57:00.001-04:00

August 19, 2010

Much of this country suffers from a collective post- traumatic stress disorder. Almost nine years after the shock of 9/11, we still have nightmares. We try to put it all behind us, to look to the future, to get on with our lives, but as with soldiers shaken by the constant surprise of the roadside bomb and the suicide bomber, any little thing can set us off, drive us crazy with fear.
What's set the country off now is mosques — the mosque going up on that parking lot down the street, that mosque proposed for the long-empty convent next to the Catholic church, and most pointedly this week, the mosque and Islamic cultural center slated to be built two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood.
It's hard to get past the paranoia. Even the most responsible non-Muslims feel a twinge of it. It takes an act of the will to separate fact from fear, and the fact that Islam as a religion cannot be equated with terrorism can't keep people from fearing that it actually is, can't keep them from regarding all Muslims, even their neighbors, with secret suspicion.
Fanning the embers of suspicion are pundits and politicians who should know, and do know, what results their remarks will cause. The most vile example to date is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who declared on national television Sunday that "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. ... There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."
Islam = terrorism.
President Obama himself got caught in the thicket of the Ground Zero controversy by singling it out in his otherwise balanced speech at the White House Ramadan dinner last Friday. After reiterating the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, he said: "Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities — particulary in the City of New York."
Ouch! He could have confronted what appears to be a widening national problem by invoking the First Amendment against bigotry everywhere and anywhere — a problem which New York Times religion writer Laurie Goldstein brought to light days before his speech, in an article citing people's opposition to mosques all over the country, from Tennessee to Temecula. The issue, she wrote, has metastasized from "traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they may object to a church or synagogue," to "Islam itself," where their argument is "that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law."
The President could have alerted the nation as a whole to the cancerous threats to liberty growing within their own communities, but instead he chose to target the Ground Zero issue, one immeasurably more sensitive and complex: "And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."
The following day, he told a reporter: "I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about."
Despite the assessment of some individuals that he was "backpedaling" on the Ground Zero question, I think his clarification was right: Given a nation gripped by PTSD, is it wise to build an ostentatious Islamic cultural complex two blocks from the symbol of terror?
I'll deal with the Ground Zero specifics in next week's column.

ANOTHER BIG SPILL

2010-07-27T16:28:00.001-04:00

July 29, 2010

Just when one leak was plugged, another erupted. Just when the worst of the Gulf oil spill seemed at last to be over, that enormous spill of classified documents on the Afghan war hit the news. The Pentagon will use dispersants; the administration will do the "junk shot," throwing its own version of golf balls, old tires, and (of course) mud down the hole; the National Security Agency will lower an intelligence dome — but the gusher will go on. The bureaucrats will work frantically to develop technologies and strategies to prevent such incidents from happening again, but happen they will. It's not just possible, it's inevitable.
With 92,000 globules of documents spewed to the press by WikiLeaks, an off-shore cyber-rig drilling down a mile deep into database bedrock, it will take a long time to clean up. Its immediate consequences are as yet unknown: Will it end the American public's apathy towards the war? Will it change administration policy? Whatever the case, Afghanistan is on nobody's back burner now.
The amazing thing about this story is not so much the information itself — even Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai shrugged that there was nothing new there — but its acquisition. How vulnerable are secret files? If WikiLeaks can get at them, how about Al Qaeda, or Russia? Who needs to plant spies in New Jersey when a couple of crafty hackers in Moscow could do so much better?
The Big Leak came on the heels of "Top Secret America," a Washington Post investigative report by Dana Priest and William Arkin, describing the growth-like-topsy of the so-called "intelligence community" since the 9/11 attacks — 854,000 people now have U.S. top-secret security clearances. Any kid who's sworn friends to secrecy can tell you what happens: The more people that are in on a secret, the more chance someone will blab. There's little doubt that more and — can you imagine it? — even bigger leaks will bubble to the surface, not only about Afghanistan but about any and every issue any bureaucracy is trying to hide. Talk about transparency!
It will take a good while for the true usefulness of the present feat to be revealed. The three publications to which WikiLeaks unloaded its information — The New York Times, The Guardian in England, and Der Spiegel in Germany — used Google- like (Google-made?) search engines to cull through gaga-bytes of data and roughly categorize them into topics of interest — civilian casualties, drone-plane flights, and Pakistan-Taliban connections, among others — in order to build their stories. Beyond journalism, however, historians, military analysts, and political and social scientists will arrange the files for their own purposes. They'll lock the little pieces together and lay them out in clusters, like working a 92,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, until the picture is assembled. Such efforts will yield perspectives on this war — and war in general — that scholars of past conflicts could only dream about.
You'd like to hope that the WikiLeaks spill will lead to a major rethinking of American policy towards Afghanistan. It is true that there is little in the documents thus far presented by the press that most of us didn't already know or suspect: that Afghanistan is quicksand. But perhaps the assemblage of facts on this large a scale will shake the public up, as those primitively-procured Pentagon Papers did about the Vietnam war four decades ago.
Maybe this gusher will do the nation good.

DOG DAYS

2010-07-20T16:28:00.002-04:00

July 22, 2010

It's been a hell of a summer in New York City, with temperatures topping 90 degrees for days at a time and only the occasional thunderstorm to cool things off and moisten the earth. The Dog Days of August started in June this year, and all you want to do is lie under a tree and sleep. The usually lush lawns in the parks are brown and prickly, so even lying under a tree is not pleasant. Criminals too have grown lethargic, and street-beat reporters — from the New York Times, no less — with nothing much to write about but the heat, experiment with frying eggs on Manhattan sidewalks. (They haven't quite succeeded as yet, but it's only July.)
The upstate reservoirs that feed the city are down to 83 percent of capacity — normally they're almost full. Street-corner grandpas, never giving a thought to where water comes from, pull out their wrenches and open up fire hydrants so neighborhood kids can get knocked back in the gusher and passing cars can get a free wash.
Genesis Park Community Garden in the South Bronx is looking pretty wilted these days. We put upstate water to better use, giving the drooping plants a morning drink that allows them to survive if not prosper. Only the cucumbers and melons, which thrive in the heat, are producing well. Bean-plants are brown and scraggly, and the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are just holding on.
My colonies of honeybees are sweating it out, too, thousands lolling outside the hives to cool off, the bee-version of the apartment-house stoop. In this weather, even bees aren't busy.
Honeybee colonies are more like an organism than a society. Though individually cold-blooded, the bees as a group control conditions thermostatically, maintaining the temperature inside the hive at precisely 92 degrees year-round. In the cold of winter, they accomplish this by shivering their bodies, just as we do, to generate heat. In summer, they use fans, just as we do, fluttering their wings to draw in cooler air and circulate it throughout the hive — apian air-conditioning.
Other pollinators seem impervious to the heat. Bumblebees by the double dozen move about the cucumber and squash blossoms, and many other kinds of bees — carpenter bees, green metallic bees, mason bees — visit flowers that suit their size — mint, cilantro, hibiscus, butterfly bush.
This year the garden is participating in the Great Pollinator Project, a citizen-science experiment sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. In late spring, the project provided gardeners with several kinds of bee-attracting plants — sunflowers and cosmos for summer blooming, goldenrods and asters for the fall. Participants are asked to sit in front of the blooms and count the bees that visit them — five bees or half an hour, whichever comes first. They then enter the results in an on-line database, pinpointing their location using GoogleEarth, noting the date and time of the observation, the type of flower, and the kind of bee. At season's end, the data will be consolidated to map the abundance and variety of bees throughout New York City.
We've seldom had to wait the half-hour. Usually, at any time of day, the sunflowers are laden with bees, sometimes two or three per bloom, jostling for space.
All this in the heart of the South Bronx.
Kevin Matteson, the Fordham University entomologist coordinating the effort, has been researching urban pollinators for almost a decade. With their rich vegetation and pollinator- friendly habitat, he told me, "community gardens are incredibly important to maintaining bee and butterfly diversity, especially in heavily developed neighborhoods of New York City."
Sitting before a sunflower in the evening shade, sipping a gin and tonic, tallying up the bees — that's turned out to be one of the better ways for a wilting gardener to beat the heat.

CUBA AND VATICAN CLOUT

2010-07-20T16:26:00.001-04:00

July 15, 2010

One of the many dashed hopes contrasting the Obama campaign with the Obama administration has been that of a fresh and open approach by the United States government toward Cuba.
Two months after his inauguration, President Obama rescinded the Bush-era restrictions on Cuban-Americans' travel to Cuba and on sending dollars to their relatives there, and immediately got this response from Cuban President Raul Castro: "We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about."
Such a disarmingly frank overture yielded exactly nothing. Things have remained just the way they've been for half a century, with Cuba strangling from an economic embargo that has only served to stiffen its ideological stance: a little Cold War going on long after the big Cold War had ended.
Last week, the Cuban government announced that 52 of its 167 political prisoners would be released, and on Tuesday the first six of them were reunited with their families and left for exile in Spain.
It was not the United States, stuck in its unbending demand for unilateral social and political change, that arranged the releases but the diplomatic efforts of Spain and, most significantly, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Last month, the Vatican's foreign minister, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, paid an official visit to Cuba to celebrate 75 years of diplomatic relations. While there, he and the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, along with Spain's foreign minister Miguel Moratinos, met with Cuban President Raul Castro to negotiate a prisoner release.
The effort was successful, partly as a gesture to the Church, which since Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998 has experienced less repression and growing influence. Cardinal Ortega has not softened his criticism of the totalitarian state nor his calls for democratization and social justice, and yet he has simultaneously managed to convince the government to relax its restrictions on religious activities. It is entirely possible that Raul, unlike his brother Fidel, sees the Church not as an enemy but as a pragmatic ally, an institution whose diplomats can go where Cuba's own cannot, to improve relations with other governments including the U.S., and whose influence on the citizenry can facilitate gradual internal change by promoting stability and restraining the advocates of radical overthrow.
Ortega pulls no punches on the other side either, sharply criticizing the Obama administration's apparent abandonment of its promise of dialogue. In a recent interview in the Archdiocese of Havana's magazine, Palabra Nueva, he noted that on the campaign trail Obama had "indicated he would change the style and would seek to talk directly with Cuba. After taking office, however, the new U.S. president has repeated the old model of previous governments."
On both the macro and the micro levels, we see playing out the unique political position of the Catholic Church, at once a religious body and a secular state, a fusion formed over 1500 years ago to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Long a world power, in modern times the Vatican lost its armies and almost all of its land, but it continued to play a significant role in international affairs, both through a diplomatic corps in formal parity with other states' and through its social teachings born of that fusion, more pragmatically philosophical than religious. The instrumentality of John Paul II in bringing down the Soviet bloc is perhaps its most recent and potent example.
Unfortunately, much of the Church's political power has been undercut by the internal corruption of the sex-abuse scandals. In contrast to Cuba's, American Catholic bishops — once greatly respected and regularly called upon to testify before Congress on social issues — have now been rendered impotent, partly because of the scandals and partly because of an obsession with abortion that has put them at odds with otherwise valuable political allies and even with some of their own institutions, as the opposition of Catholic hospitals and women's religious orders to the bishops during the recent health-care debate has shown. With the exception of Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and several of his colleagues on immigration reform, the American hierarchy's voice for justice is now largely mute.
That's why it was almost rehabilitative to hear of the political successes of the Church in Cuba. In some areas of the world at least, the Church as state can still play hardball.

McCHRYSTAL BALL

2010-07-20T16:22:00.002-04:00

July 1, 2010

It was every reporter's dream: to write a small article that brings down a big guy. Not only that, but an easy article to boot: Do a little background research, summarize others' previous reportage and publicly available documents, interview your subject, his wife, and his aides, have a few beers with them to glean some loose-lipped quotes (expletives undeleted), and tie it all together in 8,000 very readable words. No need to invoke the Freedom of Information Act, no need to face jail for refusing to name names, no Deep Throat. Can't beat it.
The reporter himself, Michael Hastings, probably had no idea that his piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, published in Rolling Stone magazine last week, would have the effect it did: the summary dismissal of the architect of allied military policy in Afghanistan. The Big Guy was gone before the hard copies hit the newsstands.
If you haven't read Hastings' story, read it. You'll see that there's virtually nothing in there that you didn't already know or suspect: that there is widespread disagreement within the administration and the military over how to conduct the operation in Afghanistan; that there is open contention between the military and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and National Security Adviser Jim Jones; that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a corrupt and capricious ally; that many troops bitterly complain that McChrystal's policy of avoiding civilian casualties has left them vulnerable to Taliban attacks; that last spring's incursion into Marja, the test-case for the McChrystal counterinsurgency plan — "clear, build, hold, transfer" — has become, in the General's own words, a "bleeding ulcer."
It's all common knowledge. How could a story like this have had a result like that?
The answer lies not in the collection of facts but in Hastings' engaging profile of McChrystal that, almost entirely by inference, makes the general look big and the president look small.
Ostensibly, Obama fired McChrystal to maintain a united front in the conduct of the war. "I believe," Obama stated when he accepted the general's resignation, "that this mission demands unity of effort across our alliance and across my national security team. ... I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division."
I'm not quite sure what's the difference between debate and division, but Hastings' article succinctly showed that the "team" is about as dysfunctional as the French World Cup soccer squad. Indeed, the coach and his star player seem like the only ones sharing the same page; after all, the counterinsurgency strategy was McChrystal's idea, and Obama gave him almost everything and everybody he asked for to attempt it. Obama has long tried to present himself as the picture of confidence, in control of things Afghan, but the fact is that there are too many variables out there for anyone to be in control.
What really stuck in Obama's craw was that one little line in the article, where McChrystal (according to unnamed sources) "thought Obama looked ‘uncomfortable and intimidated' by the roomful of military brass" in his first meeting with them after the inauguration.
That's it? Sure, across the article the general and those unnamed sources shot their mouths off, but the words come across as griping, what all soldiers do, not as insubordination, conduct that in Obama's words "undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system."
A lot has been made about Obama's "Truman moment," but analogies with the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur are thin. MacArthur repeatedly upbraided Truman in the press for supposed faint-heartedness and "appeasement" in not escalating the Korean War into mainland China, but far beyond personal insults, he committed a truly undermining act of insubordination in going over the president's head with his own communiqué to China, threatening an invasion. By contrast, Obama himself on Dismissal Day acknowledged that "Stan McChrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully." Just as McChrystal, to his credit, is no MacArthur, so Obama is no Truman.
What McChrystal's firing really demonstrates is just how deeply disarrayed the situation in Afghanistan is. McChrystal was the scapegoat, symbolically bearing the whole sorry mess into the wilderness. But the illusion of unity evaporated into the summer air of the Rose Garden as soon as the words left the president's lips.
About the only ones to benefit are Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone. Despite the dire predictions about the death of journalism, the press, or whatever we should call it nowadays, can still bring down the big guys.

EATING AND BEING

2010-06-15T12:20:00.002-04:00

June 17, 2010

For just about forever, the charitable act of feeding the hungry meant filling stomachs with leftovers. In the book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible, to use an ancient example, the wealthy landowner Boaz lets his impoverished relative Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth glean whatever grains of barley the harvesters had left behind. (He later marries Ruth.) Until quite recently, most food-assistance programs gave out canned and dry foods gleaned from Thanksgiving drives and generic processors, and foot-long blocks of tasteless government-surplus cheese.
That's why I was astounded to discover what the St. Augustine Food Pantry here in the South Bronx has been putting in their grocery bags these days: fresh apples and carrots, frozen vegetables and blueberries, whole-wheat pasta, elegant grinders of McCormick garlic sea-salt, bottles of fruit juice, chocolate- chip cookies, boxes of Triscuits, family-sized wedges of Borden cheddar and mozzarella chesses — things everybody loves to eat and drink. Last week's selection even included several cases of Fresh Ginger Ginger Ale with Pomegranate Juice, concocted by Asian-food guru Bruce Cost.
Sister Dorothy Hall, O.P., the food pantry director, recently treated me to a glass.
"Wow," I said as the bits of ginger hit my palate, "this is the best carbonated drink I think I've ever had. Where did it come from?"
"The Food Bank," she told me. "I can't believe the quality and variety of the food we get from them. It's a pleasure to give it out."
Every Monday, Sister Dorothy's pantry in the basement of St. Augustine Catholic Church distributes bags containing food enough for nine well-balanced meals to around 500 people. Her primary source is the Food Bank For New York City, which started out in 1983 as Food For Survival, a clearinghouse to solicit and store food donations and government allocations and channel them to participating food pantries and soup kitchens. This in itself was a major step forward in addressing the growing problem of hunger in the city, relieving the small neighborhood agencies of the anxiety of finding food and of dealing with the complexities of the food bureaucracy. Throughout the years, it has broadened its scope to include nutrition education, cooking classes, school programs, and assistance in applying for federal food stamps and earned-income tax credits.
It's not just about survival anymore; it's about bringing people into the mainstream. "Food Bank" is a more accurate name.
"The old idea of feeding the hungry was that the desperate will take anything," says Carol Schneider, the Food Bank's senior media relations manager. "It's the opposite now. All people have equal dignity, and our goal is to provide the most nutritious and tasty food available and to get people out of the band-aid mode so they can shop for their own food, make healthy choices, and feel good about themselves."
This attitude is no better seen than in the Food Bank's Food Sourcing Division and its director, David Grossnickle. Just a year into the job, Grossnickle has transformed the operation, tirelessly spreading the word to merchants large and small.
"It's all about communication," he says. "When I call up a prospective donor, they usually come to the phone with this mind- set that, oh, you're the group that gives to homeless people. When I explain that there are all kinds of people that need food assistance — families, people that have jobs and a future, young and old, maybe even some of their neighbors — they end up saying, ‘I had no idea.' Usually I can close the deal."
About five percent of the Bank's procurements are wholesale purchases of staple foods that food-assistance programs rely on every week — canned vegetables and fruits, tuna, ground beef, chicken, condiments. In addition, many of the name-brand items like the Triscuits come through Feeding America (formerly called America's Second Harvest; see Ruth, above), a national clearinghouse that solicits and distributes large-scale donations from the big food manufacturers.
The rest of the food comes from local donations.
"Most distributors have excess food at one time or another," says Grossnickle, "and that's when we can help. We make it as easy as possible. I tell them, ‘When you've got a space problem, remember we're just a phone call away.'"
Sometimes Grossnickle lands some very interesting stuff, like Bruce Cost's ginger ale and the load of Greek cookies and biscuits he recently secured from an importer. "These kinds of foods are great because they give people the chance to try something they've never tried before."
Healthy eating is a priority. "We're always looking for foods that are nutritionally dense," he says. "We try to stay away from sugary donations. If a distributor offers us soda, I usually tell them, ‘Well, soda isn't really great — what else do you carry?' That's where a lot of our juices come from."
Accessing fresh foods is another part of Grossnickle's mission. Of the 70 million pounds of food distributed yearly by the Food Bank to over a thousand groups serving 1.3 million people, 13 million pounds is fresh produce. With their warehouse right in the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, the nation's largest wholesale produce distribution center, the Food Bank gets first pick of excess perishables and screens it for quality before sending it out to the programs. The Bank also partners with food banks in upstate New York for a wide selection of seasonal produce from local farmers.
For the Food Bank, it's still about leftovers, but leftovers of a different kind, gleaned from the top, enhancing not only health but human well-being.
Sister Dorothy, got any more of that ginger ale?

FRESH VERSUS FAST

2010-06-08T10:57:00.004-04:00

June 10, 2010

At Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx, the summer vegetables — tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra, collards, beans, cucumbers, melons — are growing lustily in the hot weather, shading the early-spring plantings of lettuces, spinach, radishes, and cilantro, which the gardeners are now harvesting. The cool-weather crops of peas, broccoli, and carrots will be ready soon.
At this time of year, the garden is a busy place. Kids off the street and from local youth groups come by to dig for earthworms, shriek at centipedes, pull weeds, shovel compost, plant seeds, water, and wonder at the miracle of life.
Recently, after they'd put in a morning of solid work, I asked the kids if they'd like some lemonade. Before they had a chance to reply, their youth-group leader interjected, "Or I could take you to McDonald's."
Guess which option they chose.
McDonald's! I cringed. After all that hands-on education in urban farming, they still salivate for greasy McNuggets, salty fries, and sugary sodas.
My mind went a step further: But what about my instant lemonade, that sweetened water with a little flavoring? Right next to the pitcher in the fridge was a big jug of apple juice — why didn't I think of offering them that?
Am I becoming a food alarmist? Will I supplement reading the obituaries in the morning paper with reading the Nutrition Facts on the cereal boxes? Will seeing a kid with a Burger King bag cause the same horrified reaction as seeing a kid with a pack of Marlboros?
I hope not — I guiltlessly take in a Whopper now and then — but it's hard to resist dietary paranoia. Every few months some study linking some food to some disease hits the news and the nerves, only to disappear or be discredited. As one friend, a native of the Gambia, West Africa, once told me: "Back home, we eat to live. Here in America, we eat to die."
The latest object of national obsession is childhood obesity, an issue now made prominent by First Lady Michelle Obama's campaign against it.
This may not be paranoia. Something is actually following us.
We all know the statistics, and it's not just about childhood: Over the last 30 years, the percentage of clinically overweight adults in the U.S. rose from 45% to 68%, and those classified as obese jumped from 13% to 34%. For children and adolescents, the overall numbers have increased from around 7% overweight/obese to 30%. The latest studies in New York City indicate that 43% of elementary school children are overweight.
We all know the results of obesity: diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancers.
And we all know the reasons, too: processed foods, sugary drinks, lack of exercise.
Not one of the half-dozen children in the garden that day was overweight — they, among their friends and classmates, probably showed up there because they enjoy the outdoors and physical activity; they may even like vegetables. It may also be that to them and to their parents, a trip to McD's is a rare treat, not a daily diet.
But what about the rest?
Twenty years ago, a nearby pastor celebrated the arrival of the first McDonald's in this neighborhood, right up the street from his church; to him it was a sign that the South Bronx was bouncing back. Now there are three of them, and you'll pass plenty of other fast-food outlets and carry-out delis in between.
You deserve a break today. In fact, you deserve a break this very minute.
At first glance it's crazily incongruous that obesity rates are the highest among the poor. More than one cynical visitor to this area has remarked, "If hunger is such a problem around here, why are so many people fat?"
The answer to this paradox is the paradox of the food- delivery system. A recent segment of the PBS NewsHour profiled the problem of obesity in the town of Lambert, Miss., where farming is an industry, the crops are trucked away, and all the system gives them back to eat comes from the convenience store, the pizza place, and the ubiquitous McDonald's — no good supermarkets for 20 miles. In the midst of plenty, Lambert is what the experts are now calling a "food desert." People have lost their ancestors' skills at raising their own food in their back yards, as well as their ambition for it; stories of picking beans, shucking peas, gathering eggs, and baking blackberry pies for the family dinner are just stories now. Locked in the grip of the system, it's hard to think and act beyond it.
In many respects, the South Bronx is better off than Lambert in terms of food delivery. Supermarkets with a decent if limited selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats are within walking distance for most. But the ready availability of the quick-fix — the sweet, the salty, the packaged, the processed — is irresistible. Given the choice, people will bypass the oven for the microwave, the preparation for the prepared, the cookbook for the can. That's especially the case among the poor, for whom instant gratification of open-and-eat is one of their few consolations.
Conquering obesity means conquering the industrial food- delivery system and putting a local one in its place. The gardeners at Genesis Park are pointing the way.

GOD ANTES UP

2010-05-19T10:43:00.000-04:00

May 20, 2010

It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. It would be fiction if it wasn't a fact.
On March 31, President Obama announced a plan to open areas off the East Coast and new portions of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to oil exploration. Exactly three weeks later, the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing eleven workers and sending a gusher now estimated at over 200,000 gallons of crude per day — and possibly much more — into the sea. The slick continues to grow, threatening coastal wildlife, Louisiana fisheries still recovering from the convulsions of Hurricane Katrina, and the tourist trade along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. It was as if God herself had anted up at the energy- policy table and was playing some cards of her own.
The plume issuing from the ruptured well a mile deep in the Gulf was, as God often has it, not only a physical reality but a moral metaphor, and the human responses to both rival some of the best stories in religious literature, the sulphurous fire over Sodom and Lot's wife entombed in salt coming readily to mind.
The attempts at physical damage control have been pure Rube Goldberg. First came the "dispersants" — detergents used to break down the oil into droplets — which are turning large sections of the Gulf into a giant washing machine, sending the oil below the surface and possibly endangering layers of sea-life on the way down. Then came a giant concrete dome lowered over the blow-hole on the sea bottom, and when that failed, a smaller "top-hat" which has yet to be deployed. Then underwater robots attached a tube to siphon some of the escaping oil up to a drill-ship above. And just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier, BP delighted news-media illustrators and commentators with the "junk shot," a proposed procedure apparently often used successfully on land, to funnel a collection of debris including golf balls, rope, and old tires and topped off with mud, into the hole to stop it up, much like food scraps stop up your sink. My plumber stands amazed.
The metaphorical plume is widening too. Through its spokesman, the aptly-named Kent Wells, BP assured the public that everything possible was being done and those businesses hurt by the spill would be compensated, all the while shifting the blame for the event to the equipment maker and the contractors. (The far-off Marshall Islands, under which the rig is registered, have yet to be blamed.) You wonder who the insurers are; might one of them be AIG? The world economy could sink again, not only by Greece but by grease.
It gets better. A key player in the debacle is the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department responsible both for issuing permits for offshore drilling and for enforcing environmental laws. This once-lighthearted group has long been known for what Obama has called its "cozy relationship" with the oil and gas industries, a relationship both figurative and literal. During the previous administration, the MMS regularly drew up leases without demanding the required safety and environmental-impact studies — the BP rig was one of them. Equally regularly, members of its staff not only took countless gifts from industry personnel but took drugs and had sex with them too, giving new meaning to the term "interior department." Though the Obama administration early on vowed to clean up yet another deadly spill from the Bush years, the permits kept coming, even if the orgies did not; in fact, five of them were issued just a couple weeks ago.
BP's Wells, among other industry advocates, has evoked the memory of man-made disasters from the Titanic to the Exxon Valdez to the space shuttle Challenger to remind us that clouds have silver linings; they've led to improved technology and increased safety. But in each of these cases, as in the present one, it was primarily negligence in construction and/or operation that doomed them.
The administration has now put a hold on new permits, pending an investigation by an independent panel. And some drill- baby up in Alaska, looking back, may end up as a pillar of salt.

SEND IN THE BEES

2010-05-10T10:51:00.002-04:00

May 6, 2010

After a couple years of consciousness-raising and political agitation by urban-agriculture groups, the New York City Department of Health has removed the honeybee from its index of forbidden creatures. Oh, freedom! No longer would beekeepers in the boroughs have to live furtively, fearing betrayal by neighborhood informants, their locations disclosed, their hives confiscated, their checkbooks garnished, their pacific hobby denied them by The Regime.
The prohibition against keeping honeybees in New York was a recent development. In 1999, presumably as one of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Quality of Life initiatives, bees were added to the City Health Code's list of "wild animals" that are "naturally inclined to do harm and capable of inflicting harm upon human beings." The list, minutely detailed, includes whales, lions, Komodo dragons, Tasmanian devils, scorpions, and what was reputed to be Rudy's particular peeve-pet, ferrets.
I started keeping bees that same year, in a community garden on public property. I'd not heard of the official ban, and neither apparently had the officials. Horticulturists from the Parks Department periodically visited the garden and commended me for bringing pollinators to the blighted South Bronx. School groups, agricultural academics, and reporters from as far away as Germany and Australia came to watch the bees at work and sample their delightful honeys culled from the flora of the nearby parks and the banks of the Bronx River. In well-known community gardens where bees had been kept for decades, parks commissioners and even mayors took pride in posing for photos in front of beehives before whooping it up at the summer solstice festivities. Even people who kept bees on their own property were either unaware of or undaunted by the code; one fellow maintained hives at over a dozen sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn, appeared regularly on the local TV news, and sold his "Rooftop Honey" at upscale farmers markets, eight ounces for ten bucks. Occasionally, alerted by some disgruntled or paranoid neighbor, the city would shut down and fine a private beekeeper, but such instances were rare; there was no K.G.Bee surveiling the streets, hunting for hives.
Then someone unearthed the "bee law." It was right there in black and white, and it made urban-agriculture groups nervous. Their hope was to take beekeeping from a quirky novelty to a widespread practice, with bees as ubiquitous as broccoli in back yards and community gardens. But they could not move confidently toward their goal as long as that one word, "bee," was on the books.
Thus began the campaign to legalize beekeeping in New York City, a masterstroke of public relations working synergistically with the anxiety-provoking news of the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder that was more than decimating the honeybee population in rural areas. While petitioning the City Council and the Department of Health for hearings, beekeeping advocates staged photogenic rallies and parties, many of whose participants came dressed up as queen bees, sunflowers, and assorted vegetables. They also took to the talk shows, portraying honeybees as gentle, "domesticated" creatures and beekeepers as admirable outlaws, Clint Eastwoods in bee-veils, green subversives who brought pollination to plants and local honey to the allergy-afflicted despite the threat of interdict.
It worked. In March, the Department of Health excepted "non- aggressive honey bees" from the list of wild animals while requiring beekeepers to register their hives with the department and keep them in good order. Beekeepers could henceforth be fined for creating a substantiated nuisance, but no longer for simply harboring the insects.
Such a balanced ruling, without licensing, inspections, or other red tape, was a relief to veteran beekeepers, who feared not fines but fees and entanglement in the web of bureaucracy, to use an arachnid analogy.
The health-code change released a flood of pent-up desire to install honeybee colonies. The NYC Beekeeping Meetup Group, the largest of several local associations, has more than 700 members and this season sold bees and equipment to over a hundred novices. It is impossible to gauge how many others are setting up hives on their own.
The rush to beekeeping may have some negative consequences. With many more bees, there will inevitably be many more swarms — a natural collective form of reproduction where colonies divide in two and one of them takes off and temporarily gathers on a tree branch or fence while searching for a new home. Swarms are not dangerous, but uninformed citizens may think they are. There will also inevitably be more accidents and more incidents of stings.
The Meetup Group offers an intensive course on proper beekeeping practice and has a hot-line where experienced beekeepers talk novices through their uncertainties. Those who take their new hobby seriously will in time grow skilled in it, but what of those who lose interest and neglect their hives?
Keeping bees is not like keeping chickens, and in that respect, the old code had got it right: Honeybees are in fact not domesticated; they remain wild venomous insects, and if threatened are quite capable of inflicting harm upon human beings. They can be successfully managed, but they can never be completely controlled.
Cities like San Francisco and Seattle actively encourage beekeeping, and you never hear of trouble; perhaps the citizenry has learned to take swarms and stings in stride.
So send in the bees. There ought to be bees.
Don't bother — they're here.

BASHED CATHOLICS?

2010-04-24T15:38:00.001-04:00

April 22, 2010

Last week a friend forwarded me an e-mail forwarded to him from another friend to whom it had been forwarded. “Jewish Sam Miller on Catholics” was the title, and under it, “Excerpt from an article written by non-Catholic Sam Miller, a prominent Cleveland Jewish businessman.”
“Why would newspapers carry on a vendetta against one of the most important institutions that we have today in the United States, namely the Catholic Church?” the excerpt began, followed by a list of statistics on how many children Catholic schools educate, how many people Catholic hospitals serve, and how much money Catholic organizations save the American taxpayer.
“But the press is vindictive and trying to totally denigrate in every way the Catholic Church in this country,” the piece continued, followed by more claimed statistics, among them that “12% of the 300 Protestant clergy surveyed admitted to sexual intercourse with a parishioner; 38% acknowledged other inappropriate sexual contact in a study by the United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, 1.7% of the Catholic clergy has been found guilty of pedophilia. 10% of the Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia. This is not a Catholic Problem.”
Finally: “The agony that Catholics have felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of the Church.... Walk with your shoulders high and your head higher. Be a proud member of the most important non-governmental agency in the United States.”
General skepticism of the truth of forwarded e-mails is always advisable, and some fact-checking before re-forwarding them or writing about them is definitely recommended. In this case, an internet search for “Sam Miller Cleveland” turned up several references to Miller, a controversial 88-year-old board member of Forest City Enterprises, the megalith real-estate development company based in Cleveland, and promoter of Jewish and Catholic causes. It also turned up dozens of Catholic-oriented sites and blogs quoting from and commenting on Miller’s alleged words taken, some of them stated, from a 2008 speech to the City Club of Cleveland. What appears to be the full text, a six-page PDF file, is posted on the Knights of Malta website, www.maltausa.org/files/newsletter_hospitallers_18_stand_up.pdf.
Though this document presents some positive proposals for interfaith cooperation in confronting sexual abuse, much of it is an unrestrained rant against the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other papers, and their “kangaroo journalists ..., Catholics or ex-Catholics who have been denied something they wanted from the Church and are on a mission of vengeance.” Anybody about to push the FW button should think twice, especially about the accuracy of those numbers on sexual abuse among Protestants.
On a related theme from a mainline source, the April 15 issue of the liberal-leaning National Catholic Reporter, columnist Melissa Musick Nussbaum seeks to redirect the press to more pressing problems. After supplying her own set of statistics on media attention to sexual-abuse cases (those by the Hare Krishna sect and at an Episcopalian-run school in South Carolina have been largely ignored, as has the dramatic drop in abuse claims against priests over the last two decades), she suggests that reporters delve into more recent and even more shocking ones, such as the findings of a U.S. Justice Department investigation issued in January that “an estimated 10.3 percent of youth in state and large non-state [juvenile] facilities report experiencing one or more incidents of sexual abuse involving facility staff annually.”
“The fire is out in one house but still raging in the house down the block,” she writes; it’s “the present emergency” that should be the focus of the news.
Is the press out to get the Catholic Church? Despite these facts and factoids, I don’t think that’s the specific goal. There has not been widespread bias against Catholics, either in the media or in American culture at large, since John Kennedy dispelled it by example 50 years ago. Instead, what reporters are going after today is what reporters are always going after, the man-bites-dog story. Nussbaum is right: “Hare Krishnas and Episcopalians don’t summon the same rich associations as Roman Catholic clergy.” Priests are unique because of their promise of celibacy and because of the mysterious spiritual powers of their office, both enduringly fascinating to the public at large. The ethical bar for Catholic priests is thus much higher than for officials in other institutions, religious or secular, and failing to jump it makes much better news.
On the political level, there are the tantalizing prospects of the cover-up, irresistible to the investigative reporter. Watergate or Toyota, Pentagon or pope, it’s pretty much the same: the thrill of the hunt, and the singular pleasure of bringing down the high and mighty.
Miller in his alleged speech makes an arguable point in contrasting the many good works of the institutional Church with the relatively few numbers of predatory priests. But writing in the April 18 edition of Miller’s despised New York Times, the intrepid investigative columnist Nicholas Kristof, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his first-hand accounts of the Darfur genocide, makes perhaps a more arguable point in contrasting the Catholicism of Rome to the Catholicism of the trenches, “the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy ... obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice” versus “the Church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children.”
Negligence of the hierarchical Church, bashed; praise for the Church of the people, unabashed. That’s a fairly fair assessment.

A NEW REFORMATION?

2010-04-15T10:28:00.001-04:00

April 15, 2010

In 1902, Alfred Loisy, a French priest and biblical scholar, wrote with evident disillusionment: "Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God, and what arrived was the Church."
What would/does Jesus think of what became of his utopian religious vision over the centuries?
To Jesus, the Kingdom of God would turn all conventional kingdoms on their heads. His Kingdom would belong to the poor and the meek. It would have no armies. Its leaders would be servants, getting down on their knees to wash their followers' grimy feet. There would be no priestly class; every believer would have unmediated access to God through Jesus. Complicated religious rituals would be replaced by the simple sharing of bread and wine in memory of him. Mountains of rules and regulations would be supplanted by one great law of love.
It was, I guess, a bit much to ask, even from God himself.
Within a hundred years of Jesus' death, the small communities of believers began taking on the characteristics of "organized religion." By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, Christianity was so organized it took over the reins of government as well.
What had arrived was the Church, complete with lands and armies and a rigid hierarchical structure and a mediating priesthood and elaborate rituals — in so many ways the very things Jesus found as obstacles, not vehicles, to God.
Power corrupts, and Church history is replete with the misdeeds of popes, bishops, abbots, and priests. All seven of the Deadly Sins — pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth — were committed with abandon by wanton ecclesiastical potentates. Yet to the pure of heart, the Church in its essence was still the living Body of Christ on earth, a precious treasure held in vessels of clay. It was, to extend Luther's phrase beyond the individual, simul justa et peccator, saved and sinner at once. People like Francis of Assisi in the 13th century looked to the almost-forgotten Jesus of the Gospels and embraced his example of poverty, simplicity, and humble service while remaining faithful to a hierarchy they saw as authentic dispensers of grace, despite disgrace. In so doing, they shamed a corrupt institution into righting itself again and again: Ecclesia semper reformanda.
In the 16th century, Martin Luther, in reaction to egregious abuses of power emanating from Rome, rejected the institution itself, asserting that salvation comes not through priest and sacrament but sola fide, by personal faith alone. The Protestant Reformation was not so much a reformation as a revolution, a definitive break from a religious structure that had remained virtually intact for over a millennium. Protestant denominations simplified both governance and worship, modeling their communities on the ones closest to Jesus' own time, as described in the New Testament.
Yet despite these massive defections, the Roman Catholic Church survived. The question at hand is whether it will survive the priest-pedophile scandal of today.
There are reasons to think it will not, at least in its present form.
From the cultural standpoint alone, there are increasing numbers of people in the Western world, especially among the young, who believe in and pray to God but have little use for religious doctrine and practice. A recent Pew poll found that only 18% of Americans under age 30 who identify themselves as affiliated with a particular faith regularly attend its services; for them, religion is primarily personal. Given those statistics, sustaining any mainline church will become hard to do, scandal or no scandal.
Specific to practicing Catholics, there are many whose notions about religious authority have been demythologized by the scandals. In times past, Catholics overwhelmingly believed that priest, bishop, and pope were by their ordination channels of grace regardless of their sins. Today they subject their clergy to what Marxists of beloved memory called the "hermeneutic of suspicion," critically judging them by their merits, not their office. Whereas Catholics used to respect their priests because they were priests, they now give priests respect only if they've earned it.
The attitude of unwavering obedience by Catholics to religious authority is still prevalent in developing countries, which is why hierarchies there have so far been able to keep the lid on their own scandals. But once the hermeneutic of suspicion begins to take hold, those lids too will blow, just as surely as in the United States and Europe.
What may come of all this is a Catholic Church so weakened by distrust that it will have to reorganize itself on a less hierarchical, more egalitarian model: another Reformation, but this time from within.
Among the weeds and briars of the institutional Church, seeds of the Kingdom of God may be, as Jesus once put it, growing secretly.

THE ICON OF PETER

2010-04-09T09:26:00.001-04:00

April 1, 2010

It's Holy Week, the most solemn time in the Christian Church's liturgical year. Those who tune in the TV to watch Pope Benedict XVI officiating at those magnificent ceremonies at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome may have some other stray thoughts running in the back of their heads: What did he know? When did he know it? What did he do about it?
These ancient rites commemorating the passion and resurrection of Jesus are in their essence the same as those enacted in Rome for over 1500 years, performed by popes as noble and saintly as Gregory the Great and John XXIII and as smarmy and sinful as the Borgias and Medicis. According to the doctrine of ex opere operato, long ago established to deal with lapsed priests after the Roman persecutions, the moral condition of the presider has no bearing on the efficacy of the act. The validity of a sacrament comes from "the work worked," not from the worthiness of the one working it.
Yet it is the question of worthiness that may bother us as we watch. Benedict — theologian, intellectual, champion of orthodoxy — can hardly be compared with the Medicis, but does he share the guilt of denial in the sexual-abuse scandals that have infected the Catholic Church in the U.S., Europe, and possibly beyond?
The cock crows; is it crowing for him?
The particular scandal that may undermine his papacy goes back to the 1980's, when he was Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich. Hard on to Holy Week, the New York Times revealed memos and minutes of meetings showing that Ratzinger was aware of if not instrumental in the reinstatement of a pedophile priest in his diocese who continued his abuses and was eventually convicted under civil law. The Times also broke a disturbing story of the abuse of dozens of boys at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee in the 1970's and the inaction by the Vatican office headed by Ratzinger when it was finally brought there by the Milwaukee bishop years after.
The dynamic in these two cases is identical to almost every other one everywhere: Same time-period — late 1960's through mid- 1980's; and same response — the bishop is apparently aware but passive, leaving the disposition of pedophile priests to ecclesiastical bureaucrats who put them into therapy and then reassign them. The pattern was so uniform and so worldwide, despite there being at the time no body of Church law or regulation to refer to, that one can only conclude that it was the product of an insular institutional culture operating out of ignorance, compassion, and fear: ignorance of the intractable nature of pedophilia and the belief that it was a moral rather than a pathological problem, a sin to be absolved and healed by confession and its grace; compassion for a fellow priest and the understandable desire to shield the faithful from scandal; and fear of intrusion by secular authorities into what was seen as an internal matter.
Things are different now. As with the Church's stance on slavery, which throughout much of its history was commonly accepted as a given but is now recognized as appallingly evil, moral acuity develops over time. Pedophile priests were treated with a now-unbelievable institutional blindness to the agony of the victims, de facto aided by a laity fiercely loyal to the institution and unwilling to think the unthinkable, that their pastors could ever do such despicable things.
As with slavery, the unmasking of clergy sexual abuse has led to shamed apologies and reparations for past evils and stringent policies to avoid future ones. To their credit, both the present pope and national conferences of bishops have done admirable work towards these ends. But there remain elements of coverup, reluctance to come completely clean, from certain bishops' stonewalling the release of documents to the pope's own silence about his involvement in the Munich case. It's this lack of "transparency," what writer David Gibson has called "circling the wagons," that is fueling the present furor.
We are not used to popes speaking personally. We see them as icons, not individuals, successors of St. Peter, by whose office the work is worked.
But Peter himself, afraid for his life after his master's arrest, three times denied knowing Jesus. Realizing his betrayal, the Gospels recount, "he went out and wept bitterly." Full disclosure.
No matter how great or how small the culpability, the icon of Peter should do nothing less.

HIGH DRAMA IN HEALTH CARE

2010-03-23T11:22:00.002-04:00

March 25, 2010

Last Sunday's rush to passage of the health-care reform bill by the House of Representatives was an example of high drama you never thought happened in a place better known for droning diatribes made to an empty chamber. It was a parliamentary flurry of motions and amendments and scrupulously-timed speechlets and nail-biting votes. For those watching it on TV, the experience was positively exhilarating, a seldom-seen live civics lesson on how bills become laws, how your do-nothing Congress actually does something. It may have changed the minds of not a few young voters about the value of entering public service.
Another civics lesson, far beyond the scope of textbooks, was the way in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama marshaled their recalcitrant troops for the necessary 216 votes, an outcome quite uncertain just hours before.
To the surprise of almost everybody, they hauled in the two big fighting fish of totally different ideological species, single-payer proponent Dennis Kucinich and abortion opponent Bart Stupak, along with their respective schools.
Exactly how they did it may never be fully known. No smarmy sweeteners like those bestowed on certain Senators are yet evident; it appears to have been the result of fervent appeal to party loyalty, the promise that their respective objections would not go unheeded, and Obama's Voltairian mantra, "We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Whatever the tactics, it was a masterful display of the power of persuasion, Dale Carnegie on steroids.
Of all the high drama, swaying Stupak and his anti-abortion Democratic colleagues was certainly the highest. Long before Saturday's vote, this new little caucus, whose convictions had been excluded from the Democratic tent and platform for decades, became the makers or breakers of health-care legislation. They were no naïve fools, either, showing serpentine political acumen first in allying themselves with the Republican minority to block passage of last November's House bill unless highly restrictive language on abortion funding were included, and then in pulling the rug out from under them by going with their party at virtually the last minute on Sunday ("Baby killer!").
Stupak himself was the best of all. Last week, when the Network nuns defied their own bishops by coming out in favor of the bill, he enfuriated them by declaring that "on right-to-life issues, we don't call the nuns"; days later, he reversed positions and became their hero. Most interestingly, Stupak and Co. not only exhibited a flexibility seldom seen in the anti- abortion movement but forced flexibility from staunch abortion- rights advocates Pelosi and Obama. Both sides, for the time being at least, eschewed the perfect for the good.
Many more fascinating developments still lie ahead. The first is what enactment of this law will do to the fate of the Democrats in general and Democrat-in-Chief Obama in particular. Over the months, the public has expressed ambivalence at best and hostility at worst both to the legislation and to the legislative process itself. Republicans act convinced that they can still tap into fears of "socialized medicine" and fan a backlash to the majority party's parliamentary ploys; Democrats act convinced that once the law is on the books and people see its immediate effects, they'll come around to support it. We'll get a hard sell from both sides right through the November elections.
The second development is development; reforming the health-care system is a work in progress. Next week, Senate Republicans will try to thwart the House's "fixes" to the new law, then try to repeal it altogether; neither attempt is likely to succeed. Progressive Democrats will do the opposite, proposing gradual changes leading to what they've wanted all along, a sleek and seamless single-payer plan. Having a law in place may allow them to do what they couldn't do in committee; as with Medicare — initially indefensible but now indispensable — they believe that once people see government actually doing some good, they'll ask for even more of it.
As with much high drama, the denouement may be as exciting as the climax.

THE HEALTH CARE VOTE

2010-03-21T06:10:00.001-04:00

March 18, 2010

Can it possibly be? After a year of dithering, this week the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives will actually attempt to ram through a health-care bill that has already passed the Senate and send it to the President's desk.
Forget the niceties. Forget bipartisanship. Even forget it's a bill many Democrats don't particularly like.
Just do it.
Finally, an act of courage from a party, or most of a party, now fabled for its spinelessness and liberal angst. Next thing you know they'll be taking on Big Coal.
Even their Supreme Leader Barack Obama has shed his failed big-tent strategy and is starting to act like Lyndon Johnson, postponing a trip to Indonesia to fan the embers of his dispirited base and to cajole his party's waverers in the House.
It's a do-or-die battle for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her minions. Unlike the Republicans, who stand like a stone wall against the legislation, the Democrats are the usual herd of cats. At one end, you've got all those Blue Cats that object because the bill goes too far; at the other you've got those Pink Cats that object because it doesn't go far enough; and then you've got the abortion-rights advocates and opponents, both reluctant to compromise.
Can Pelosi pull it off?
On the PBS NewsHour on Friday, pundits Mark Shield and David Brooks were both uncharacteristically flummoxed. "Right now they're short" of the 216 votes necessary to put the measure over the top, Brooks said. "But Pelosi is very smart and knows what she's doing. I don't see how they'll do it, but I assume they're very close."
If Obama, Pelosi, and Co. can come up with the votes, it will be the biggest legislative coup since Johnson passed Medicare in 1965, or at least since Clinton passed the surplus- generating tax hike by a tie-breaking vote in 1993. It would not only be a step towards reshaping U.S. health care; it would also give Democrats something like faith in themselves, a sense of solidarity that could result in bold initiatives on education, environment, agriculture, lobbying, obstructionists be damned. "Yes we can!" could at last be not a campaign slogan but a party mandate.
There's no doubt that the bill Pelosi wants to pass is flawed. It's your standard sausage, a mishmash of provisions that keep the present dysfunctional "system" virtually intact. Nevertheless, as many advocates of a "Medicare for All" single- payer system agree, it's far better than nothing, a modest reform that moves toward universal coverage and control of insurance- company policies and profits.
Believe it or not, there seems to be a certain sense of moral obligation to this effort. With mid-term elections coming up, many House Democrats in swing districts are rightly worried that a yes vote will give the Tea Party people ammunition enough to shoot them down. Their bet will have to be that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is wrong, that the American people don't "hate this bill" but are merely skittish about it, and that once it becomes a fact rather than a fantasy, they will eventually wonder how they ever got along without it, much like what happened with Medicare and, more recently, with Massachusetts' compulsory-insurance law.
Access to health care is not so much a matter of dollars as of justice. The Democrats now have the chance to show what they're made of. Amazingly, they just might be made of principle.

"THE HURT LOCKER"

2010-03-11T15:52:00.001-05:00

March 11, 2010

My college classmate Roger, a physician at the Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Wash., came for a few days' visit early last November. In addition to the plays, concerts, and tourist sites he wanted to see, he searched the movie listings for one film: The Hurt Locker.
"It's a story about an Army bomb squad in Iraq," he told me. "A friend of mine recommended it — he's a very thoughtful ex- Green Beret. It's not playing anywhere in the Seattle area, but it's got to be here in New York."
It was, at only one place, an art-house in the Village. We went to an early-evening weekday show. The theater was practically empty, and most of those that were there were folks like us, Vietnam-era Boomers, some of them apparent veterans, a few with disabilities.
"I think it's hard to find this movie because most people don't want to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan," he guessed as we settled in with popcorn and sodas. "They don't want to hear about it or think much about it because it doesn't affect them directly. They go to the movies to escape, not to face hard questions."
So it was a big surprise to both of us that The Hurt Lockerswept the Oscars last Sunday. Now venues nationwide will multiply, and people will go just to see what they'd ignored all these months.
They won't be disappointed.
What makes this film unique and prize-winning is that it's not your standard war film — but that's because Iraq was not your standard war. In conventional war movies, as in conventional wars, there is a defined, uniformed enemy engaging in defined battle; battles are followed by relative calm, a time of release before the next conflict begins. In this film, as in Iraq itself, there is little release, and in that sense it falls more in the genre of suspense or horror. The tension is unrelieved because, as in a horror movie, no one really knows who or what the enemy is or when or where it will strike next: terror on every side.
Scenes showing the obsessed explosives expert Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, delicately unearthing improvised explosive devices and deftly snipping detonation wires keep your stomach in knots, and when the last critical wire is cut, you want to sigh in relief — but you can't. Your stomach knots again as the camera pans past alleyways and doors and balconies where Iraqis stand looking, watching, some with camcorders and some with cell phones, then turns to the three- member squad, themselves panning the same surroundings with their rifles.
There is no respite to the anxiety because it's clear that any one of these ordinary-looking people, man, woman, or child, could be a killer.
It is this unrelenting uncertainty that makes the film an overpowering experience. It is also the real-life uncertainty in the minds of the troops that has surely contributed to the extraordinarily high incidence of psychological trauma among our soldiers — one in five, by some estimates. It is horrible enough to kill a uniformed enemy, but there the guilt can be salved by clearly knowing exactly who the enemy are. In the conflicts in Iraq and now Afghanistan, the enemy could be anyone at all.
Prior to his medical career, Roger served as an officer in the Army; today he continues to serve those wounded in combat, both physically and psychologically. He knows things from the inside.
The other day, he e-mailed me: "This morning I heard a report about one of the hardest-hit platoons in Iraq, covered by a journalist who wrote a book about them called They Fought for Each Other. It was heartbreaking to listen to the trauma they had to endure. The platoon had been so over-exposed to IED's and death that they actually refused to go out on patrol one day, as they all met with a psych counselor and told him they would likely shoot anyone in sight due to their anger, and they felt it would be inadvisable to go out. The psychologist agreed, but the commander didn't, and they still didn't go out — a small act of mutiny which went unpunished. In the end, the commander actually praised the soldiers' judgment in staying behind."
Months after seeing it, the film was still playing in his head as it was in mine, as the invasion of Marja in Afghanistan began, the roads to which and in which were strewn with Taliban IED's.
In another e-mail, Roger wrote: "One line that impressed me in the movie was when Sgt. James is disarming a bomb and encounters the recalcitrant Iraqi driver who doesn't want to get out of his way. After finally forcing him to back up his car by putting a gun to his head, the sergeant's comrades jerk the Iraqi out of his car and beat him up. The sergeant says, ‘If he wasn't a terrorist before, he is now.' My impression is that war brutalizes everyone it touches — the good guys and the bad guys, from whatever perspective you define those terms. While we praise the sacrifices of our military people, we don't realize the physical and psychological devastation ravaged upon them by repeated ‘deployments' to war zones, especially to war zones as weird as those we are in now."
The Hurt Locker captures that weirdness precisely.

PLEDGE BREAK

2010-03-02T09:41:00.001-05:00

March 4, 2010

That's NPR News at the top of the hour. Good morning, I'm Paige Turner, and as you've all feared, this is Pledge Week at KHBX, Public Radio 830. We're taking a break from Morning Edition to ask for your support. For the life of me, I don't understand why this works, but it does. They must have done studies. If I were you, I'd punch that preset on your radio and jive to the oldies till we're done with this stuff. That's what normal people do, but I am not you.
Are you still there? See, you Public Radio listeners really are different. You like us because you like our long, in-depth stories, and so I guess you must also like our long, shallow, repetitive, uncreative fund-raisers. It's counter-intuitive! Wouldn't you be more likely to make a pledge if these drives were entertaining? I don't know, maybe it's hypnosis: We put you into a trance with our monotonous drone and plant the urge to pledge into your subconscious. Yes, that could be it: You are now completely relaxed. When I clear my throat, you will become fully awake. Ahem! Now you will pick up the phone and dial 1-800-555- 1212, or log on to www.KHBX.org. This will only take a couple minutes, and afterwards you will experience a profound sense of well-being.
If that didn't work, consider this: We're commercial-free! — well, sort of. Unlike the all-news-all-the-time stations with their two two-minute stories followed by a minute of annoying commercials 24/7, all we have every hour all year long are a few minutes of modest little announcements from our corporate sponsors. They're delivered so soberly by our staff that they hardly qualify as commercials, don't you think?
Yes, I know Pledge Weeks are different; I admit they're like one giant commercial. But the genius here is that it's concentrated — all-commercial-all-the time, but for just three weeks a year. How cool is that? What if the all-news stations did it our way? What if our cousin PBS did it our way? They're the epitome of cleverness. They lure you in with spectacular specials and then, just when you're hooked on that Peter, Paul and Mary retrospective, they hit you with The Pitch for ten minutes at a time. That's not us. We don't lure, we don't even surprise. We do full disclosure weeks in advance, sort of like the military at Marja giving the Taliban plenty of notice to get out of town.
I digress. If you've already made your pledge, thank you, and I give you permission to change stations. For the rest of you, I really do hate to have your serene morning commute upset by this harangue, but think of it this way: It's sort of like what your mom did to you as a kid, you know? — "I hope you appreciate all I'm doing for you, and you better be grateful to me." This is listener-supported radio, and that means you! If you tune in every day — think about it, how many of you tune in every day? — and believe Fresh Air and Speaking of Faith are your God- given right, then shame on you. Shouldn't you render to us a fraction of what we render to you? Speaking of faith, doesn't your rabbi or pastor or imam tell you that every week or so?
If you're sufficiently guilt-ridden by now, salve your soul by picking up that cell phone on the passenger seat, checking the mirrors carefully, of course — we of all people don't want to get you in trouble — and call 1-800-555-1212 or iPhone an e-pledge to www.KHBX.org. If you're distracted and fatally plow into the car ahead, our station-manager Beatrice will lead you to the ring of KHBX supporters in the Paradiso. No kidding. We've set it up.
That's 1-800-555-1212 or KHBX.org. Oh, but wait, wait, don't tell me! Is there something positive here? Yes! We're not all about guilt. For a pledge of just $60 you will receive a sturdy, eco-friendly KHBX tote-bag to add to that vast collection in your closet. Sixty dollars! Why, that's just five dollars a month! That's crazily cheap when you think about it. What do you pay for your cable and phone? I'm back to guilt, but it's the truth! Call 1-800-555-1212.
And wow! Here's another great way you can pledge: Become a Sustaining Member! All you do is tell us to bill your credit card for a small amount every month for as long as you live or until you declare bankruptcy. Set it and forget it! What could be easier?
There. That's over for another 15 minutes. For most of the year, I'm a responsible news anchor. For three weeks, I'm a shameless huckster. I hate this, but what can I do? Help me redeem my self-esteem! Call 1-800-555-1212.
We now go back to Morning Edition, but first:
"KHBX is sponsored by ...."

EXPERIMENT IN AFGANISTAN

2010-03-02T09:36:00.001-05:00

February 25, 2010

It's brilliant, really: a mini-war with minimum bloodshed, followed by a mini-MacArthur stabilization plan, a quintessentially American combination of prudent military force and benevolent reconstruction.
Rather than attempting to pacify all of Afghanistan at once — finally recognized as impossible in a country dominated by feudal war-lords — the American military settled on a localized strategy. They would pick a large city infested for years by the Taliban — in this case, Marja, population 80,000. They would give the enemy two weeks' notice of the upcoming invasion in the hope that most of the foe would flee, thus minimizing the devastating door-to-door combat that characterized the early days of the Iraq War, and with it minimizing civilian casualties. After two or three days of fighting — that was the initial prediction — the Taliban that remained would be taken care of — the die-hards would either die or get out of town, and the rest, persuaded more by their pocketbooks than by ideology, would be bought off.
Once the city had been secured, an indigenous government would be set up (much like General Douglas MacArthur did in postwar Japan), guided by career Afghan bureaucrats from Kabul: "We've got government in a box, ready to roll in," said Commanding General Stanley McChrystal before the incursion began. Schools, medical facilities, and rebuilding projects would be provided, mainly staffed by local people. Opium-poppy fields and heroin-processing plants would be replaced by legitimate agriculture. Finally, with all running smoothly, the U.S. and British troops would withdraw, leaving a stable and harmonious city-state and a model for similar actions in the future.
As David Sanger of the New York Times wrote recently: "In the Bush years, the rallying cry when operations like Marja began was ‘clear, build and hold.' President Obama has added a fourth step, ‘transfer.' At the end of the three-month-long review of Afghan strategy, Mr. Obama vowed he would begin no military operation unless a plan was in place to transfer authority promptly to the Afghans."
The idea is so beautiful, so simple, so American — but will it work?
The "clear" phase has already met with obstacles. The advance notice apparently did make a significant number of the Taliban leave, but it also gave them plenty of time to riddle the city with roadside bombs, which the military acknowledged it had not anticipated — imagine that. The allied troops have also been meeting unexpectedly strong resistance from resourceful Taliban snipers, and have been impeded in their efforts by stringent "rules of engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties. The predictions of two or three days to subdue the Taliban have turned into a month or more.
Meanwhile, the "build" phase has already started. Two "schools in a box" — something I guess like FEMA trailers with desks and supplies for 25 students each, and presumably complete with teachers — have opened, and over a hundred locals have been hired for maintenance tasks, a small but quick infusion of cash into the economy.
The "hold" and "transfer" phases will be the most difficult to implement and sustain, because as configured they are much more difficult for the Americans to direct and control.
The news on "hold" does not look particularly good, if it ever did. The Afghan military, which was supposed to take the lead in the conflict and provide a friendly and familiar face to the occupation, has in fact lagged behind the American and British forces, suffering only two deaths to the allies' dozen. Its field commander, Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, last week proffered a fanciful account of the operation that conflicted entirely with the American version. Elsewhere, defections of Afghan troops to the Taliban have occurred, and there are reports that soldiers' wages are being siphoned off by their paymasters.
The Obama extension, "transfer," which is really the linchpin of the operation, seems like pure idealism. If, as the State Department has acknowledged, the Afghan central government is corrupt, why should we expect that any government set up in Marja could be any less so? As easy as it may be to buy off the Taliban, it may be just as easy for the Taliban to buy everybody back, including the government in a box.
The Marja project, hopeful as it looks now to Gen. McChrystal, may be hopelessly utopian. "Clear, build, hold, and transfer," though not called such at the time, was a strategy that worked in postwar Japan and Germany because those countries had a long history of social order and, astonished at the absence of Allied retribution, embraced their rebuilding plans enthusiastically.
It's different in Afghanistan. Nation-building can't work if there isn't a nation to build. The city-state experiment, because of its modest size, offers a better chance. But, I would predict, not much better.

HAWK AND DOVE

2010-01-26T10:32:00.002-05:00

January 28, 2010

One day in early January, I glanced out my fourth-floor window and noticed a commotion high in a huge honey-locust tree nearby. Among the bare branches was a red-tailed hawk, its enormous wings flapping wildly. Hawks, believe it or not, have been turning up in the South Bronx for several years now, expanding their range down from Van Cortlandt Park and the New York Botanical Garden a few miles north. I have observed them from time to time in that tree, usually sitting serenely on a sturdy branch, heads rotating, shrewdly surveying. This one's actions were very different. Grabbing my binoculars, I saw why. The hawk had a pigeon by the tail in one claw while trying to stabilize itself with the other. It tumbled among the twigs of the upper branches, seeking a claw-hold, the pigeon struggling desperately to pull free.
It was no use. The hawk finally found a branch big enough to support itself and pinned the pigeon on top of it. It was easy from then on. Soon the prey lay limp, and the predator went to work methodically to take it apart. First came the feathers, the hawk plucking them out in clumps and shaking them disgustedly from its beak; they floated lazily away, like snowflakes. Next came the innards, the hawk digging them out and knocking them back greedily.
After these morsels, the bird stopped in surfeit, as if in the middle of a heavy Thanksgiving dinner, digesting. Then it resumed with the breasts and thighs, and after nearly two hours, the meal was finished. The hawk released its grip and the empty carcass dropped, bouncing off branches to the ground.
The sight was gruesome and awesome at once, the beautiful horror of nature.
When the drama in the tree was over, I went to the store and bought a plump roasting chicken for my own dinner. No muss, no fuss, no feathers.
Most of us modern carnivores behave more like herbivores. We graze at the meat counter, pulling out plastic-wrapped cuts like tufts of grass, seldom thinking of the killing, the disemboweling, the dismembering that brought them there. If we considered that long enough, or witnessed it, or had to do it ourselves, we might adjust our diets a bit.
That's what happened to my friend Jane, who for a while supplemented her income as a special-ed teacher in rural Connecticut by milking cows. At first it was just a job, but in time she developed a personal relationship with each of the animals. When their milk production failed with age and the farmer sold them off for hamburger and dog food, a part of her heart went with them. "They knew me, and I knew them," she explained to me. "As they were taken away, I could see the fear on their faces. That's when I decided that I would never eat anything that could look me in the eye."
Then there's another friend, Judy, who a few years back dropped into her local vivero or live-animal butcher-shop up in Tarrytown, N.Y., thinking how nice it would be to make her family an absolutely fresh chicken dinner.
"It was hot and awful in there," she told me. "The smell was overpowering. The animals were kept in tiny cages, just waiting to die — and you know it's far worse for the ones raised for supermarket meat. I was so repulsed that I turned right around and walked out. That's when I became a vegetarian. I'm not opposed to eating meat, but I think I'd have to kill the animal myself, quick and painless. Maybe I should go hunting, just to see if I can do it."
That was the attitude of Novella Carpenter. In her gallows- humored book, Farm City, she describes her gradualist move towards "sustainability" in a down-and-out section of Oakland, Calif. In a vacant lot near her apartment, she began with the usual vegetable garden, then set up a beehive, then got some chickens for eggs. But craving meat, she took the next step, teaching herself to kill. She started out with chickens, ducks, and rabbits, slaughtering them in her bathtub by day and serving them up to delighted guests by night. Then she tackled larger fare — geese and turkeys and finally pigs, all of which she raised herself and, like Jane, loved and treated like pets — before pragmatically dispatching them. She wanted, she writes, to have a "dialogue with life" — and death was a part of that dialogue.
Before feedlot farming, all this was a matter of course for countless people — slaughter was as normal as seeding. When I worked on my Minnesota cousin's farm for a summer in my youth, butchering chickens and pigs was a joyful community event, the work of many neighboring families. The men would kill, the women would pluck, dress, and cook, the children would clean up and watch, preparing for their own day. Their dialogue with death was perfectly natural. At the midsummer chicken harvest when I was there, after my cousin had pulled a bird from the pen, chopped off its head, and stuffed the convulsing body in a cinder-block to drain the blood, his eight-year-old son philosophically confided in me, "And that's the end of the poor old chickie."
Nature, of which we are a part despite our ideas to the contrary, is no Peaceable Kingdom. Unobserved by most of us, hawks and doves continuously pirouette in the Dance of Death.
The inhabitants of the henhouse in St. Augustine School's Peace Garden are now too old to lay. Perhaps it is time for the next step.

HAITIAN PHOENIX?

2010-01-19T18:41:00.000-05:00

January 21, 2010

Poor Haiti. It almost makes you think the country has been cursed by God, or by some voodoo spirit, or by the ghost of Papa Doc. The first modern Black nation, independent of colonial rule in 1804, Haiti was born in hope but for most of its history has been battered about both by the elements of nature and by human avarice.
Roiled by revolutions, exploited by foreign powers, ransacked by its own leaders, in the dead-on path of hurricanes and sitting on top of a San Andreas-like fault, it's a Murphy's- Law place, a bull's-eye for the arrows of evil. Even some of its saints became its greatest sinners: Once in office, both the benevolent physician François Duvalier and the liberationist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide turned into vicious oppressors. Power corrupts, absolutely. And just when a fragile social and political stability had been achieved in the last few years, the tectonic plates collided, flattening the capital city, cathedral and presidential palace included. Completely lacking building codes and with a government too weak and preoccupied to develop a preparedness plan, destruction and death were inevitable.
And yet, to this point there has been surprisingly little violence or social upheaval. Some of the most touching scenes in the immediate aftermath of last Tuesday's quake were the gaggles of people lifting their hands in prayer and their voices in song.
St. Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, is said to have complained to God, "If this is the way you treat your friends, Lord, it's no wonder you have so few of them."
Somehow — inexplicably — for those with faith it doesn't seem to matter if everything goes right or everything goes wrong.
The Problem of Evil aside — who can ever figure that out? — the anguish of Haiti today may be — shall I say it? — a blessing in the cruelest disguise, an opportunity to rebuild this land, both literally and figuratively from the ground up.
Think of it: There are over 3,000 humanitarian organizations in Haiti, more than in any other country in the world. The United Nations has had a strong peacekeeping and advisory presence there for several years, and now the U.S. military is demonstrating its non-military side by mustering hospital ships and aircraft carriers and logistical expertise to bind the nation's wounds. Were all of these institutions to work cohesively, Haiti could rise from its ashes.
Unlike the "nation-building" efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, here is a chance for the United States to help reconstruct a society in its own back yard, unburdened by ulterior military motives. Despite their historical experiences with American interventionism (the country was an occupied "protectorate" from 1915 through 1934), Haitians in general display little anti-American sentiment. The Haitian population in the U.S. is significant; it is educated and energetic, producing respectable numbers of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and business- people. Haitian-Americans treasure the freedom and opportunity that democracy has provided them, and most continue to maintain strong family ties in Haiti. Why not enlist them as major players in reshaping the country?
A truly international effort, at a fraction of the cost of those futile "wars" so far away, could raise Haiti from the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere to a prosperous one by bulldozing the ruined shacks, installing a modern infrastructure, and devoting both financial and human capital to education, medical care, environmental sustainability, and entrepreneurship.
This should not and cannot be done as an "American project." Using the model of Partners in Health, an agency that has worked in Haiti for two decades, the focus should be on training local people to assume responsibility, thus building up self-esteem and self-sufficiency, and in developing an effective national government.
The phoenix of Haiti could cancel the curse.

NOT ENOUGH DOTS

2010-01-14T11:04:00.000-05:00

January 14, 2010

Damn it. Just when I was ready to book my winter getaway, some blockhead with a bomb in his boxers tries to blow up a plane. Just when they were loosening up a bit at airport security, now it's back to full humiliation mode. Who knows what they'll make us take off this time, or where they'll pass the wand. Once in the air, we can't even relax with our Bloody Mary and blue corn chips; we're each profiling the other passengers and making personal no-fly lists — perhaps the most sensible security measure of all.
Thank God the fool tried to set himself off at his seat where everybody could watch him work and jumped him. He may have succeeded had he done it in the privacy of the plane's privy. Maybe he'd thought the better of dying at that moment but could placate Allah and Al-Qaeda, not necessarily in that order, by feigning a try and begging for an intervention. If it weren't so serious, it would be a comedy Peter Sellers would love.
One thing you have to say about terrorism: It really really works. If a country goes to war against a standing army, the minds of its citizens focus on a visible enemy and muster their efforts, from military to factory to victory garden, to defeat it. With terrorism, there is no army, and as we see even more clearly from this case, there is no nation either, just small cells of conspirators or even loners scattered all over the globe, communicating by computer; candidates for missions like this one sneak in for secretive seminars with explosives experts hidden in a myriad of places and start their deadly journeys from unlikely spots. The enemy is nowhere and everywhere at once, and the sheer uncertainty can drive us crazy. That's why war movies are less frightening than horror movies: In the former, the fear of the viewer is channeled and resolved through direct action against an obvious target; in the latter, the fear just hangs there because you never know when or where the stalker will strike next.
Even though historically the chances of being taken down by a terrorist on your next airplane flight are far less than being taken down by mechanical malfunction, paranoia at the possibility runs madly through our minds, ironically made the worse by the security directives issued reactively after each novel threat: first the pocket-knives and scissors, then the shoes, then the liquids, now the blankets and bathroom visits.
As common sense dictates and many security experts have acknowledged, it's impossible to prevent every terrorist attack; human ingenuity, especially in the pursuit of evil, will inevitably trump the best efforts to thwart it from time to time.
President Obama brought some sense to the situation when he told the country not to "succumb to a siege mentality": "Great and proud nations do not hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust," he said. But he simultaneously canceled out that breath of reason by resurrecting the old Bush line, "We are at war."
Can we retire than metaphor, please? The only anti-terrorist actions resembling war are sometime skirmishes with Taliban swamp-foxes in Afghanistan, and those remote-controlled drone strikes around Pakistan, both far removed in place and purpose from the dynamics of this latest incident. Military models, conventional or revisionist, simply don't work against terrorism; it's trying to kill mosquitoes with a baseball bat. They're only meant to comfort the jittery American soul, trillions spent to persuade the public that their government is doing something they can see.
But this is not war. It's a test of wits to see who can outsmart the other — one other being a byzantine alphabet soup of surveillance agencies, each with enormous databases of suspicious persons, and which, in our bomber's case, were unable to "connect the dots"; and the other other being countless numbers of suicidals from everywhere who may not have enough dots to connect.
Of course, let's keep trying to connect what dots there are, and be more restrictive on issuing and pulling visas. But beyond that, let's aggressively seek a trans-national agreement to make airport security measures uniform and practical, and most importantly and effectively, pour our resources into works of peace and progress, to reverse the image of a bellicose America and defuse at least some of the bombs of hatred set to go off in people's brains.

YULETIDE LETTER, 2009

2010-01-14T11:02:00.000-05:00

One day in October I called Frank Edwards, an 80-year-old member of my choir who'd recently celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary. His wife Tootsie answered the phone, and after the hellos she said, "Could you give me a second? One of the orna ments just fell off the Christmas tree." When she got back, I asked, "Your Christmas tree? You're early."
"We don't take it down anymore," she told me. "A couple years ago, we looked at it after New Year's and said to each other, "It's so beautiful and cheerful, and every year we feel so sad putting it away. Why don't we just leave it up?"
There's something to that, grabbing on to a beloved season and not letting go. Besides, when you reach a certain age, Christmas returns so quickly it seems that just when you've boxed everything up you're taking it out again.
Personally, I'd prefer an eternal springtime, but there's nothing I can do about that — except to get outside as often as I can in that season, imprinting the bursts of blooms upon that inward eye, to fill my heart with pleasure in bleak midwinter.
Actually, I had to spend some of my inward-eye capital last spring and early summer — here in the Northeast it was so rainy and cold that even the daffodils, all drooping and dripping, couldn't draw me out. The bees stayed inside too, which is why their honey production was dismally low, down two-thirds from last year.
It could be "climate change," everything topsy- turvy. In a few years I may be growing avocados in the garden here, while Samoa washes away.
Speaking of "change," consider the word as a political slogan. A year ago, much of the country and the world was swept up in giddy hope. Remember the love-feast on the Capitol Mall on inauguration day? Quite inexplicably, or is it, hope lost its audacity after about a hundred days. Though G. W. Bush was soundly repudiated, his policies, by and large, were not — more troops to Afghanistan; little or no movement on energy, environment, transportation; health-care "reform" that's basically a gift to the insurance companies. Even relations with Cuba, despite the warm early initiatives, haven't thawed. I may have to sneak in for a look.
So no Cuba so far, but I did get to Costa Rica in June, where my sister Jeannie and her husband Rob have built a lovely house and vacation rental apartments near Nosara on the Pacific Coast. The beaches are beautiful, the water warm, the wildlife fascinating, the pace of life slow. Pura vida, as the natives say.
Meanwhile, back in the hectic South Bronx, the building boom continues despite the economy, with all that enterprise-zone money locked in from headier days. We've even got a Home Depot now. But the recession has had its effects on the people — over 600 line up at the St. Augustine Food Pantry every Monday, three times the number of two years ago. One encouraging note is that several farmers' markets opened up here this summer, providing fresh produce that people can buy with food stamps — a healthy step up from the canned goods and surplus cheese of years past.
The St. Augustine Church community was saddened this fall when its century-old church building was closed as structurally unsafe and irreparable. The school auditorium across the street has been turned into an interim church. Pastor Thomas Fenlon, a team of parishioners, and the Archdiocese have been exploring the possibility of razing the grand old church for senior housing and building a smaller new one, but the recession has put a hold on that for now. So there she stands, a relic of what the Bronx used to be, in prosperous times and poor.
Our Lady of Victory Church down the street, where I am the music director, suffered a grievous loss with the death of its longtime pastor Peter Gavigan, who collapsed during Sunday Mass and died three days later, on March 17, St. Patrick's Day. He was one of those street-fightin' priests of the South Bronx, tena ciously present for his people during 30 of the very worst years in this area, mobilizing them to combat drugs and violence and compel the city to improve education and housing. As a young priest he was shaped by the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council, and he never relented, never looked back. We shall not see his likes again, part of that generation of giants now almost gone. I miss him.
As for myself, I'm being overrun by technology. Two decades ago, I was designing computer applica tions, and now computer applications have their designs on me. Over the last year, I've been inundated by e-mail invitations from half a dozen social networking sites to become "friends" with people I never heard of. Recently I got a Facebook message from a woman I met in a ballroom dancing class in 1976 and never saw again. If she could find me, who — or worse, what — is out there in Cyberland trolling for my identity, spending patters, political views?
It makes me want to flee to a monastery, but they're on-line too — ten Trappists tweeting.
But who knows? Maybe by next Christmas I'll be thoroughly linked-in, and this letter will arrive on your computer, precisely 140 characters long.
Meanwhile, let's take a tip from Tootsie and hold our holiday cheer throughout the year!

YEAR ONE

2010-01-14T11:01:00.001-05:00

December 31, 2009

The year began in giddy hope. George W. Bush, that wrecker of worlds, was at long last on his way out, and Barack Obama, the multifaceted symbol of change, was on his way in. The country was sliding into recession and bogged down in amorphous "wars" against terrorism and for nation-building or whatever, and as in 1933, the stars seemed aligned to provide the right leader for the times, a man with a new vision for a just society and a foreign policy of openness and cooperation. Here, people were calling Obama the new FDR, and in Germany, the father of a friend of mine called him Der Weltpresident — the World-President.
Inauguration Day on the Capitol Mall was a love-feast, people coming together from all over to partake in an event to tell their grandchildren about. Cheek to jowl in the bitter cold, Pilgrim patricians and descendants of slaves, immigrants and refugees, and all in between swayed to the music in celebration of the first Black president, the living icon of America as ideal.
It was all about hope, which only in exceptional cases is also about politics. We should have prepared ourselves for disappointment.
So at year's end, what have we got? A convoluted health-care reform bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve, awaiting a long reconciliation fight with the House version; yet more troops marked for Afghanistan; no change on climate change; stasis on energy, transportation, and agriculture; ten percent unemployment. But wait! Guantanamo is closing! The big banks are saved! And don't forget cash for clunkers!
There is indeed much to be glad about within the executive branch: The Justice Department has regained its integrity; Obama's first appointment to the Supreme Court, Sonya Sotomayor, was shrewdly chosen and confirmed speedily; the Interior Department was purged of corruption; the Environmental Protection Agency started re-growing its teeth. But most programs requiring legislation have been tepid at the proposal stage and surprisingly weak in the follow-through.
Those not blinded by the mantra of "change" had already had their suspicions during the campaign. Candidate Obama occasionally apportioned some soaring rhetoric towards a fundamental realignment of priorities in transportation, energy, agriculture, environment, but his approach to the issues occupying the attention of the debates and the interviews amounted to tinkering with the status quo: On health care, he positioned himself to the right of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton; on Afghanistan, he labeled it a "war of necessity." His pitch at the time was toward the middle class, no mention made of closing the gap between rich and poor.
Once elected, and with that overwhelming sentiment of good will, he could have afforded to embolden his positions on the social and economic fronts. He could have mobilized that enormous database of supporters he'd amassed during the campaign to pressure Congress to pass just about whatever he wanted. But caution trumped audacity, most tellingly in the health-care dynamic, where he let go of the reins and let the Congress take them, Democrats pulling one way and Republicans the other. His dream of dialogue (remember the microcosmal Beer Summit?) remained a dream because dreams don't come true by themselves. To pass Medicare in 1965, Lyndon Johnson was on the phone with Republicans day and night, twisting arms and making deals. Instead, Obama put faith in "the legislative process," which is actually the lobbying and propaganda process, and what finally passed was compromise compromised.
It may be that Obama turns out to be a political genius, tacking this way and that, thwarting left and right as he's done with Afghanistan, ordering buildup and promising withdrawal in the same stroke.
But there is the unmistakable air of contrivance in all this, best illustrated by the relocation of the detention facility in Guantanamo to a prison in Illinois: Obama fulfills his pledge to close down Guantanamo while leaving intact the underlying Constitutional issue of holding people for years without trial.
What do we have as our president, an agent of change or the ghost of G. W. Bush?
It's only been a year, and there is much more drama to come. Will "hope" regain at least something of its audacity? Will there be a second love-feast on the Capitol Mall?

HEARTS AND MINDS

2010-01-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

December 10, 2009

It took President Obama months to decide what to do next in Afghanistan; he finally presented his plan at West Point on December 1. Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy examination of his decision-making process — days and nights of meetings with his advisors, many of whom held widely divergent views. He displayed a comprehensive grasp of the issues, the article recounts, prodding the participants with questions and comments, resembling both "a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner," as one of them put it.
In one sense you can't help placing confidence in this man's judgment. By these accounts, he was not "dithering" but discerning, exercising a measured quest for clarity, not shooting from the hip. And yet, the sheer multiplicity of perspectives among the experts does not inspire confidence at all. The fact that everybody has a different idea on what will work means that nobody really knows what will work.
Even the "what" in "what will work" yields almost as many opinions as there are people to express them. Is the objective to keep Al Qaeda from regaining a "safe haven" in Afghanistan? Is it to keep the Taliban insurgents from regaining their pre-invasion oppressive control of the country? Is it to recruit and train a national army and police force to take over the task of stabilizing the country? Is it to make an end-run on Pakistan, our fickle ally, which may have been the terrorists' real safe haven all these years? Is it to do "nation-building" toward a Western-style democracy? Is it to eradicate the opium poppy crop that the Taliban had all but eradicated before the Americans deposed them?
Is it all of the above?
After so much deliberation, it was disconcerting to find the president's decision entirely conventional, preserving General Stanley McChrystal's recommendations almost intact: an Iraq-like "surge" of 30,000 more troops, a temporary deployment that would "get the job done" in a year and a half and pave the way for withdrawal.
In his speech at West Point, the president presented himself as absolutely sure of the outcome: "We will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months."
"Will"? Not "could," "should," or "might"? You'd like to trust Obama's rhetoric of certainty, but will-power never seems to have succeeded in Afghanistan; from the British to the Russians to the Americans, the wheels of their military juggernauts have all bogged down in the mountainous muck.
What are the American people to think of all this, we who are supplying most of the troops and are financing this operation to the tune of $100 billion a year? Obama's approach may have been a stroke of political genius in disarming Republicans with an escalation and Democrats with a drawdown, but it leaves honest ordinary citizens in confusion. What in the world is going on there?
This isn't World War II, and it isn't Vietnam either; in both those instances you had a unified government and military to fight; here you have the elusive, hydra-headed Taliban, everywhere and nowhere at once. (Obama, flouting conventional usage purposely, I think, referred to the Taliban in the singular — "the Taliban is" — though the word in Pashto is the plural of talib, meaning "student," and the reality is plural too.) This isn't even an Iraq, with its long history of dictatorship and powerful standing armies; here you have a kind of virtual country, ruled locally by countless warlords. The nominal "central government" commands little respect or loyalty; how can Western military advisors, no matter how skillful, recruit and train an indigenous army and police force when it's payoffs, not patriotism, that's the major inducement for joining up?
And speaking of payoffs, there's talk of trying to duplicate Iraq's "Anbar Awakening" by luring warlords and Taliban cells over with dollars — a most ironic strategy, given that bribery is endemic in the country and allegiance is as fungible as money is.
Frankly, there doesn't seem any way out of Afghanistan except the way out — but that course was impossible for Obama, who has long labeled the occupation as a "war of necessity" and took any option for immediate withdrawal off the table at the beginning of his consultations.
The Taliban can never be defeated because they're not an army but a movement; they can only be managed, and they may best be managed by the warlords themselves. The allegorical "war on terror," inherited from the Bush vocabulary, cannot be "won" by killing off a few Al Qaeda along the Pakistan border because terrorist cells are all over the world, connected by computer; they can only be inhibited by enhanced surveillance and prudent covert operations.
The example of Greg Mortenson, the intrepid American who is building schools in Pakistan, seems to make far greater sense than further military action: He has pacified whole areas there by offering what people really want — an education, to give them their own way out and up.
One hundred billion dollars a year to support 100,000 troops makes easy math for Mortenson — that's a billion dollars per soldier, and for the cost of keeping just one soldier he says he could set up and run 20 schools.
Wouldn't that be a better way to win hearts and minds? Wouldn't that be change we can believe in?

GOLD FRIDAY

2010-01-14T10:56:00.001-05:00

December 3, 2009

While 195 million shoppers were jostling for bargain merchandise at the stores on "Black Friday" last week, I was in the quiet of my basement honey house, performing its seasonal transition. I inspected and organized the beekeeping equipment I use on the hives for the bees' summer honey production, dismantled the extractor, the centrifuge that pulls the honey off the comb, and put them away — another summer gone, another spring to be: memory and hope. Then I set the place up for the winter task of candle-making.
When the bees have cured the thin, watery nectar of flowers into thick, rich honey, they seal it up with a capping of wax produced by glands in their bodies. Before extracting the honey, you cut off the cappings and set them aside. After the last honey harvest in the fall, you melt the cappings in boiling water and pour the wax through a filter into makeshift containers like orange-juice cartons, where it hardens into blocks for use in candles and cosmetics.
I prefer hand-dipped tapers over the poured varieties of candle. They're elegant on the dining-room table and make coveted gifts. It takes about 30 dips of the wick into a pot of molten wax to produce a standard-width taper, and you must wait a few minutes after each dip for the new layer of wax to harden. I use four metal dipping frames strung with wicking that make six candles each, and work in assembly-line fashion; by the time I've dipped the fourth frame, the first is cool enough to dip again. At the end of the session, I've got 24 beautiful, honey-scented candles of pure beeswax. It's a long and tedious process, but there is a certain meditative quality to this kind of tedium which I enjoy.
This week, time and motivation permitting, I'll tackle the cappings and the candles. Then I'll take a day for another tedious but gratifying job, putting together a couple dozen little loaves of honey-blond fruitcake. It's a recipe I've experimented with for years, with no molasses and no green things, the two ingredients that give fruitcake a bad name. This cake turns out light and fresh-tasting, quickly converting the most die-hard of fruitcake-haters. (I'll send you the recipe on request.) Couple those items with bottles of the bees' honey and jars of pickles and relishes I canned over the summer, and I've got holiday gift-packs that Harry and David's can't touch.
Hand-crafted gifts are immensely satisfying, both for the giver and for the receiver. They demonstrate a care that is direct and personal, the fruit of one's labor unmediated by money. Some of the things I treasure the most are those that came from the heart, not the wallet: a quilt from a longtime friend, a tiny clay bee-skep from an eight-year-old boy, a pair of unwearable knitted mittens in garish colors from an elderly aunt — as well as ones that are now only delicious memories: boxes of fudge and cookies from warm winter kitchens and jars of dried herbs from a neighbor's summer garden.
There is something spooky about "Black Friday" besides its name. (Wasn't the day of the 1929 stock market crash called "Black Thursday"?) It gives me anxiety just thinking about it — the frenzied rush to Christmas and the sudden vacuum that follows, and the identification of Christmas with consumption. Clogging the aisles of the Wal-Marts and the Macy's, individuals become generic, nameless except on their credit cards, pursuing countless ready-made products that come all the way from China, many of which will end up in the generic land-fill both physical and mental, not too long after the gift-wrap does.
The recession has not severed the link between Christmas and consumerism, but it seems to have reined it in a bit — initial Black Friday data indicate there were more shoppers than before the recession but they spent less. Perhaps too, the growing eat- local movement may be triggering a more general hearth-and-home Yuletide attitude, where time spent with family and friends is the greatest value and simple gifts are the finest of all — slow food, slow living and giving.
I was glad to spend Black Friday in the honey house — it was Gold Friday to me — away from the hordes, happily anticipating a Christmas of peace.

NEWMAN'S OWN

2009-11-14T16:41:00.001-05:00

November 5, 2009

In one sense, it's all about sex. In another, it's not about sex at all.
On October 20, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, announced that the Roman Catholic Church would provide a unique home for Anglican converts, a "personal ordinariate" — in effect, a separate "Anglican rite" similar to the Catholic Eastern rites, allowing them to retain their own liturgical practices, parish structures, and married clergy. They would, of course, be obliged to accept the totality of Catholic doctrine and recognize the pope as their chief shepherd.
Cardinal Levada explained that this initiative had come in response to requests by traditionalist Anglican groups to enter the Catholic Church while "preserving elements of their distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony."
Though he did not mention it, the principal reason for the traditionalists' movement to Rome is their objection to the Anglican Church's ordination of women as priests and bishops. To many both inside and outside the Anglican Communion, this seems like just another example of misogyny, and in some cases it probably is. But underlying the controversy is a significant theological issue: the role of tradition in the Christian faith.
If many Anglicans turn to Rome, it will not be the first time. In 1845, Anglican clergyman John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism. For over a decade, he and a group of other theologians at Oxford University had undertaken a systematic study of the traditions of the Christian churches. Examining the writings of the early Fathers, they concluded that the Roman and Orthodox churches had maintained an unbroken link with the ancient Church in doctrine and liturgical practice. They came to believe, as Newman put it, that Catholicism in its broad sense was "a real religion — not a mere opinion" as he found so much of Anglican preaching and theology to be, "but an external objective substantive creed and worship."
Through their publications and preaching, these first "Anglo-Catholics" encouraged their church to reject the Protestant evangelical model dominant since Elizabethan times and reshape it on the orthodox model, following its traditions of belief, hierarchical structure, and ritualized worship while retaining its independence and distinctive features such as the Book of Common Prayer and married clergy.
This "Oxford Movement," as it came to be called, faced vociferous opposition from the established Church of England, forcing Newman and many of his colleagues reluctantly to abandon it and be received by Rome.
The conversions continued for well over a century, mostly among intellectuals, and for similar reasons as Newman's. G. K. Chesterton embraced Catholicism in 1922 at age 48, asserting that it was the only "creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one." Graham Greene, many of whose novels are extended meditations on the paradox of saintly sinners, converted at the behest of his wife and rarely practiced the faith, but was "convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed."
In America, Thomas Merton, who was baptized a Catholic while a grad student at Columbia in the 1930's and then became a Trappist monk, wrote about his initial contact with Catholicism in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain: "How clear and solid the doctrine was: ... you felt the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition."
It was this "Catholic Synthesis," a comprehensive worldview that integrated faith and reason, history and contemporaneity, that attracted these thinkers troubled by a purposeless, fragmented modernity.
James Joyce, who gave up on Catholicism in his youth, ironically summarized this attraction in his autobiographical novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When Stephen Dedalus, tormented by religious doubt, is asked by his friend Cranley if he was thinking of becoming a Protestant, he replies: "I said that I had lost the faith, not that I had lost self- respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"
Those Anglicans seeking union with Rome today come with convictions much like Newman's — that the traditions of the Church rank alongside Scripture as windows to God's revelation. The male clergy is part of that tradition.
However, there is another aspect of Newman's thought that eventually may come into play: that the tradition is not static but develops, and that the development is articulated by the Church's bishops gathered in ecumenical council. There may well be some traditionalist Anglicans, soon to align with Rome, who desire the ordination of women but believe that it must be accomplished collegially, as every other clarification of doctrine has been since apostolic times.
The infusion of Anglo-Catholics into the Roman Church may hasten a doctrinal development among Catholics and Orthodox that is long overdue.
And of this, Newman would surely be proud.

TERM-LIMIT TURMOIL

2009-10-20T14:16:00.001-04:00

October 22, 2009

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, occupies a paradoxical position in the polls as the November 3 election approaches. The latest survey, conducted by Quinnipiac University last month, found that 69 percent of likely voters approve of his performance but only 52 percent intend to vote for him.
It's not that his Democratic opponent, city comptroller William Thompson, presents an even better alternative — the same survey found that 44 percent of voters "don't know enough about him to form an opinion." It's that a year ago, Bloomberg shepherded a bill through the City Council to modify a referendum passed by voters in 1993 limiting all elected officials to two four-year terms. The mayor and his supporters lengthened the limit to three terms, arguing that the economic crisis demanded "continuity of leadership." The legislation gave Bloomberg a third shot at mayor and 35 two-term Council incumbents a windfall opportunity to hold on to their seats for another four years.
They never realized what a backlash of resentment their action would cause. Bloomberg's been good for the city, people are saying, but I won't vote for him because he trampled on the will of the people. Who does he think he is, a king? In perhaps the most radical slap, the Spanish-language paper El Diariocompared him to Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez, whose attempt to tamper with the term limit was defeated in a referendum: "New Yorkers," it editorialized, "were not even given that chance."
If there were no term-limits law in the first place, Bloomberg would have had no problem at all: He's been the quintessential New York mayor — on the spot in every emergency, creative and effective in his policies, takes the subway to work. Even in this overwhelmingly Democratic town, voters would have elected him, once a Republican and now an independent, enthusiastically. He'll still get elected — Thompson has been unable to get traction — but many citizens will pull the lever reluctantly, with his manipulative behavior sticking in their craw and his reputation for integrity sullied. The third term will not be like the other two.
Such is the paradox of term limits. On one hand, don't limits short-circuit the democratic process, preventing voters from endorsing or repudiating their officials at the ballot box? And on the other hand, shouldn't public office be not a career but a temporary calling, a work demanded of an array of competent citizens who, like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, would serve as needed and then speedily return to private life?
In the first instance, the problem is that it's not all that easy to "t'row da bums out." Politicians, even the worst of them, easily become entrenched in office, amassing huge war-chests that make opposition almost impossible and relying on the complacency of an electorate that would rather vote for a devil they know.
Alternatively, too-short term limits put office-holders in a revolving door; as they go in and out, the business of the public is left in the hands of bureaucrats and lobbyists, the only ones maintaining "continuity." Furthermore, as the California legislature's experience with severe term limits show, there are few Cincinnati among the politically driven — rather than returning to the plow, they just plow ahead from one office to another.
Plus, there are many creative ways to get around term limits — nepotism, for example. Here in the South Bronx, when Councilman Wendell Foster was forced to relinquish his 24-year sinecure, his daughter Helen stepped right in and was handily elected. After two terms herself, she was delighted to vote for Bloomberg's proposal; with no significant opposition, she'll extend her career on the Council for another four years.
Actually, a 12-year term limit might in fact be the best, or least worst, of both worlds. My own sense is that eight years is the turning-point for politicians: Either they've hit their stride and deserve more time, or they've hashed things up enough for voters to decide for themselves to get rid of them. After 12 years, most of these ducks are pretty lame on their own account and should be mercifully retired, like it or not.
The New York state legislature is as dysfunctional as California's, but for exactly the opposite reason: an insularity that results in immobility. In the Assembly, for example, almost half of the 106 members have been there two decades or longer, feathering their nests. A 12-year limit would help break the stranglehold of the old and liberate the legislature for productive work.
So despite the uproar, extending the term limit in New York City may be ultimately beneficial, giving voters the opportunity to have a positive say on third-term candidates while capping their tenure at a reasonable time.
Whether Mayor Bloomberg emerges unscathed, however, remains to be seen.

TAKE ALL THE TREES . . .

2009-10-06T11:30:00.001-04:00

October 1, 2009

"A tree museum?" I laughed into the phone one day last April. "Are you going to charge the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em?"
"Of course not," the young woman said, sounding half offended. "It's free. It's an art project along the Grand Concourse this summer. We're marking a hundred trees with medallions on the sidewalk that identify the tree and give a phone extension. When people stop at one, they'll call the extension from their cell phones and get a one-minute narration. Would you like to do one on bees?"
Please!
Some time later, I got a call from the woman's boss, an Irish artist named Katie Holten, who conceived the installation and named it the Tree Museum.
"I'm trying to get Joni Mitchell to come to our grand opening in June," she told me, "but it doesn't look like she'll make it."
She'd have loved it.
The Tree Museum is part of a year-long celebration of the centennial of the Grand Concourse, a five-mile thoroughfare running from the base of the Bronx at 138th Street northeast to the Mosholu Parkway. Today it's a heavy traffic corridor, speckled with stop lights annoying to drivers and meaningless to pedestrians. I've driven up and down it for years, heedless of its history and its charms. It took the Tree Museum to make me walk the length of it over two warm autumn days last week, strolling past kids playing handball against apartment-house walls, Dominicans doing dominoes on folding tables, bodegas blaring Latin music — and pausing at the medallions, calling the extensions, and contemplating the sights described in the narrations. As with any good indoor exhibit, this museum-without- walls opens your eyes to things you'd never noticed before.
Katie Holten designed the audio guide to represent a cross- section of the Concourse community. She tracked down historians, architects, geologists, environmentalists, urban farmers, hip-hop artists, poets, musicians, elderly reminiscers and teenage gardeners to contribute. There's even some kid telling the world why he hates the Yankees (stop #94). Many of the trees (there are 24 species represented) are just convenient spots for hearing about other features of the neighborhood.
For my own talk (#42), I stuck to the tree theme, choosing a copse of little-leaf lindens shading a tiny park at 170th Street, about a mile northwest of my beehives, noting that lindens are a major nectar source in May and June, attracting clouds of bees and yielding a distinctive light and minty honey.
While narrations like my own were sometimes interesting, it was those on history and architecture that kept me walking and dialing.
The northernmost tree (#100, a cottonwood), for example, stands in an attentively-kept garden which in the 1980's neighbors planted on the site of an abandoned gas station. They named it for Louis Risse, an Alsatian immigrant and urban planner who in 1890 proposed a "Grand Boulevard and Concourse" as New York City's Champs-Élysées. When it opened in 1909, it was indeed grand: a 60-yard-wide, tree-shaded, unpaved promenade with lanes for carriages, bicycles, and pedestrians, slicing through farmland and village, providing Manhattanites direct access to the wilds of Van Cortlandt Park to the west and the exotic animals and plants at the zoo and botanical garden in Bronx Park to the east.
When the Jerome Avenue elevated train opened parallel to the Concourse in 1917 (##74-76, 80), the farms and orchards were quickly bought up by developers, and soon thousands of families, mostly Jews and Italians escaping the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side, moved in to sparkling new apartments along the route.
From the 1920's through the 1950's, the Concourse was the place to be, and many of the talks at the trees describe the monumental edifices dating from that era. Ruth and his Yankees built their house a few blocks west in 1923 (#21, narrated by Bernie Williams), and the elegant Concourse Plaza Hotel went up the same year (#23). The opulent Loew's Paradise Theatre made its debut in 1929 (#69). Many of the apartment buildings were magnificent specimens of Art Deco design (#97, narrated by architect Daniel Libeskind). Jewish congregations erected massive stone synagogues (#58). Banks built their temples to mammon (#74). The Bronx County Courthouse (#20) and the Central Post Office (#7), striking examples of moderne architecture adorned with social-realist art, were constructed by the WPA during the early years of the Depression.
In the 1960's, things began to slide, a history not often mentioned at the trees. As the city razed slums in Manhattan, thousands of people were forced to relocate. Poor Blacks and Puerto Ricans poured into the Bronx; long-time residents grew frightened and fled. By the mid-1970's, the Bronx was burning, the Concourse Hotel and many once-elegant apartment buildings were abandoned and taken over by squatters and crack-cookers. The Paradise Theatre was boarded up — there may even have been plans to pave the Paradise and put up a parking lot.
You don't know what you've got till it's almost gone ....
In the 1990's, after 30 years of decline and devastation, the Grand Concourse, like the Bronx as a whole, began turning around. Historic buildings, including the Paradise, have been saved and restored; dark and dangerous parks are now illuminated and manicured; and the boulevard itself is being renewed with classic lighting and thick plantings of trees, shrubs and flowers in the medians.
And oh yes, Joni: The big yellow taxis, whose drivers fearfully used to refuse fares from Manhattan into the Bronx, are starting to ply the Concourse again.
The Tree Museum installation will be open till October 12, when the medallions will be pried from the sidewalk and the phone line shut down. I think Katie Holten's idea is so stimulating and informative that it should survive in some permanent fashion, perhaps with markers in front of historic sites and an audio guide — a walking museum of the Grand Concourse.

For more information on the Tree Museum, visit the website, www.treemuseum.org. For a map of the stops, click on "What" and "Visitors Guide." For the audio guide, call 718-408-2501 and choose an extension.

CLOTHING AS COMMENTARY

2009-09-18T12:08:00.002-04:00

Consider the pant-suits of Hillary Clinton and the fluff- skirts of Sarah Palin. Think of the major-general and the monk. Clothes aren't just coverings, they're extensions of one's personality and politics. They tell you at first glance that this woman in the flannel shirt and faded jeans is an organic gardener and a single-payer advocate, or that this man in the tweedy coat and bow-tie is a professor of economics, Keynesian.

Clothes are moving works of art; their frames are inside, not out, and their museum is the world.

Fashion designers are artists in their own right, but there's another group of practitioners, the art-for-art's-sake type, that make not fashion statements but statements about fashion.

Their work is what you see in Dress Codes: Clothing as Metaphor, an exhibit running through October 4 at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y., 50 miles northeast of New York City. Coordinated by guest curator Barbara J. Bloemink, 36 contemporary artists use dress to comment on politics, religion, national tragedies, and, so to say, the social fabric.

Take, for example, the latest controversial article of clothing, the chador, that head-to-toe covering worn by conservative Muslim women. Mella Jaarsma's version of the garment in "The Follower" (2002) is a colorful pastiche of shoulder- patches from organizations in her native Indonesia — a symbol, one guesses, of unity in diversity. In a 2004 work, Iranian-born Farhad Moshiri puts a plain black chador in a clear plastic package like a 99¢-store tablecloth, stapling a cardboard strip at the top with the cartoon head of a shrouded woman, only her languid eyes exposed, and some conventional promotional slogans: "CHADOR — the protector of inner beauty, with sporty sophistication — exotic — Mysterious — Shocking — As seen on TV." Tradition meets mass-marketing.

"Vigilante" (2003) by the fittingly-named duo of Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz (calling themselves Guerra de la Paz) is a kind of military version of the chador — an eight-foot- tall stuffed camouflage suit enveloping head and face and dribbling down in four serpentine legs to the floor, intimidating and anonymous.

Not surprisingly, many of the pieces dwell on the exploitation of women by fashion. In "Thinner than You" (1990), Maureen Connor has created a gauzy black strapless evening gown in a size so surrealistically slender it could only fit a Giacometti sculpture. Most blatant is Kate Kretz's "Defense Mechanism Coat" (2001), a wool garment with red velvet collar and lining embroidered with a schematic of a body's arteries and veins, and the outside bristling with 150 pounds of rusty roofing nails. Perhaps a bit of anger there?

Two works in the show are particularly fascinating because of the stories behind them. According to the description on the wall, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña went to her Wal-Mart store in Hartford, Conn., on May 26, 2005, bought a Jordache sheer camp shirt colored "Lucky Lime" for $9.87, took it home, and made a look- alike version on her sewing machine. She transferred the labels and tags from the original, photographed her shirt, and brought it to the store, placing it on the same rack the original had come from. On the museum wall, framed, are the store-bought shirt and a print of her copy, enlarged to size. She performs this exercise frequently — "shop-dropping," she calls it — as a surreptitious protest against the "appalling labor conditions" of third-world clothing manufacture. What some unsuspecting buyer gets is a unique garment, lovingly hand-made in the USA.

Related in theme is the "Labels Project Sculpture" (2008) by Luca Pizzaroni. This is a "ready-made" — a collection of shirts, pants, and coats on a circular rack, at first glance a dull parody of mass-market clothing. Atop it, however, is a sign declaring "Clothing Browsing is Permitted," followed by a list of the 193 recognized nations of the world, most in black lettering, a few in red. Reading the explanation on the wall, you understand his "project": it's to acquire an article of clothing from every country, identified by the "MADE IN _____" tag sewn inside. Clothing browsing, I found from personal experience, becomes addictive; I must have spent half an hour at it. There's a Banana Republic sport shirt from Zimbabwe, an Eddie Bauer tee from Burma, a High Sierra woman's top from Brunei, a Van Heusen sport from Mongolia — on and on, 172 countries in all. Who knew? Missing from the rack are only 21, the red ones on the sign, including Iraq and Rwanda and excluding Palestine, which the artist notes is not a "recognized country." His purpose, he writes, is "to foster communication and broader cultural understanding by exposing and informing our instincts about brand." It's a work in progress; like every obsessive collector, he continues to search for the remaining items to complete his set.

It's ironic that the exhibit ends on October 4, St. Francis' Day. Back in the thirteenth century, Francis used clothing as metaphor himself, doffing his wealthy finery in the public square of Assisi and standing naked to vow his life to Lady Poverty.

That was a fashion statement if there ever was one.

HEALTH CARE AS JUSTICE

2009-09-16T13:05:00.002-04:00

September 17, 2009

The most moving part of Barack Obama's speech to Congress and the country on health care last week was his tribute to Ted Kennedy. He quoted from a letter the ailing senator had written in May, to be delivered after his death. "What we face," Kennedy wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."
Obama went on to say that "part of the American character" is "a recognition that we are all in this together; that when fate turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand," and that "sometimes government has to step in to deliver on that promise."
A major disappointment in Obama's approach to health care is that he has never framed the debate specifically in terms of moral principle and collective responsibility. He has used morality as a rhetorical device, as he did in this speech, but has never made a compelling philosophical argument that medical care is a basic human and civil right that demands a unified national commitment and the sacrifice of individual interest for the common good. Doing so would have changed the very nature of the debate, calling on legislators and the public to account for their various positions in ethical terms.
The fundamental moral question is: Is care for those who are sick part of the Constitution's pledge that "we the people of the United States" will "promote the general welfare," right along with ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, and securing the blessings of liberty? Common sense would surely say so. When the country is threatened by swine flu, doesn't the federal government have the obligation to muster all of its resources, financial and technical, to combat and prevent it? Virtually no one would argue otherwise. Are not infant mortality, whose rate in this country is among the highest of all developed nations, and the thousands of needless deaths for lack of care to the uninsured and denial of care by insurance companies just a slower, institution-caused pandemic?
Is making money off the sick morally wrong? Aren't doctors and hospitals care-givers rather than businesses? Shouldn't insurance companies be simply risk-sharers, not profit centers? Denial of coverage for a woman with breast cancer, Obama lamented in his speech, "is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America." And yet, he said, "insurance executives don't do this because they are bad people. They do it because it's profitable" — strangely implying that profit is a good in every case. A law compelling all insurance companies to return to their roots as non-profit collectives would be an important step towards health-care justice.
Is health care a privilege reserved only to American citizens? "There are also those who claim that our reform efforts will insure illegal immigrants," Obama stated. "This too is false — the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." The "You lie!" blurt by Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina only called attention to a moral contradiction. Health care is a universal human need. Denying coverage to illegals is not only morally inconsistent, it undermines the nation's collective health. Doesn't the good health of every person living in this country enhance the good health of all? The president himself noted that emergency-room care, mandated as a social obligation to the uninsured and to the illegal, adds "a hidden and growing tax" of $1,000 per insured person per year. Would it not simply be better, both morally and practically, to provide equal care to all human beings living in this country without scrutinizing their papers?
In his 1933 inaugural address on the economic crisis, Franklin Roosevelt saw the solution in "our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline." The situation is similar with health care today.
"I am not the first president to take up this cause," Obama stated at the beginning of his speech, "but I am determined to be the last."
As long as the fundamental principles of social justice, rather than the details of policy, are not addressed, his solution will only be an interim one.
With audacity, I hope he won't be the last.

CAMPING IN CONTRASTS

2009-09-09T09:22:00.002-04:00

September 10, 2009

Summer in the Northeast this year wasn't summer. June and July were the rainiest on record, and the coolest. The highs in July never once hit 90, a first for usually sweltering New York City. Crops in urban gardens were slow to grow, and the summer honey production from my beehives has been dismal; it rained so much that the bees had to stay inside just when the flowerings were at their peak. August turned typical, hot and insufferably humid, with almost-daily thunderstorms, but last week, the first one of September, was at long last perfect: dry and warm, with the pastel sunlight of approaching fall.
I try to go tent-camping in regional parks every summer, and here was my first real window of opportunity all season long. I chose the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, over 4,000 acres of woodland, meadow, and rocky promontories in northeast Westchester County, just 45 miles from the teeming Bronx.
It's a remarkable place. Once a farming and lumbering area, the land for the park was acquired by the county piecemeal from 1926 through 1938. In an act of astounding foresight, long-time local Republican boss William L. Ward persuaded the politicians to trump developers who'd planned to bulldoze the site for housing tracts. The various parcels were bought up for a final total of $400,000. Led by a group of ecologists long before that word was invented, the parks department began a carefully- considered restoration and reforestation project. In 1933, they found a fortuitous ally in the Civilian Conservation Corps, Franklin Roosevelt's youth-employment program. For five years, hundreds of gung-ho young workers cleared land, tore down abandoned houses and barns, and planted half a million native trees. They forged hiking trails on the old wagon roads, carved out picnic grounds, and constructed 24 three-sided camping shelters out of local stone, topped with sturdy lumber roofs. The foundations of the CCC base camp, which once housed 200, are still visible today.
The shelters are a camper's dream. They're not just protection — any old wooden lean-to will do that. They're your own miniature castle, complete with fireplace and chimney. They're a wonder in the afternoon thunderstorms that regularly sweep through the area in summer. You watch the drama of wind and rain and lightning-flash from your dry and cozy fortress, your private theater. None of the misery of the soggy tent here.
The hiking ranges from easy to challenging, made the better because each trail has a fascinating natural or historical objective. Near the park entrance is the old cemetery of the town of Pound Ridge, with grave markers dating from the mid-1700's. Further on are the stone walls of a once-bustling grist and cider mill and its water-race off the Cross River. Deep in the forest is the Bear Rock petroglyph, the clear image of a reclining bear etched by the Lenape or Delaware Indians possibly as early as 2500 B.C.
Surely the most intriguing to the imagination is the Leatherman's Cave, one of the many dwellings of a mysterious mute hermit who appeared in the locality in 1860 and walked a precise circuit of 300 miles around Connecticut and New York, round and round for almost 30 years, dressed in a hand-sewn leather coat and breeches and begging food at farmhouses. His route was so exacting that farmers' wives would mark his upcoming arrival on their calendars and have a nice hot meal waiting for him when he appeared. Legend has it that he was a French or French-Canadian leatherworker who was jilted by his employer's daughter and went mad, fleeing to New York to walk off his grief. Sounds like a legend, doesn't it?
The curious thing about this park is that during the week, even in summer, it is practically deserted. You'd think that of the tens of millions of people in the metropolis, there'd be more than enough to keep the place full. But there aren't, and that's fine enough for me.
Pound Ridge is hardly in a wilderness. Just outside the reservation is a nice shopping center with a big supermarket for stocking up your cooler. A few miles on either side are the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., and the Katonah Museum in tony Katonah, N.Y., where Martha Stewart has a country home. Also nearby is Caramoor, an expansive Mediterranean-style estate from the 1930's that now hosts an impressive array of musical performances in its outdoor amphitheater from May through November.
With the chill of autumn closing in, a few days at Pound Ridge puts a beautiful seal on the summer.

OUTSTANDING

2009-08-31T14:16:00.007-04:00

September 3, 2009
It must be nice: Spend your summers traveling around the country, sampling the finest regional wines, eating the best locally-grown meats, cheeses, and vegetables prepared by the best local chefs, chatting it up with vintners, small farmers, and swooning gourmands. And make a living from it too.
Such is the life of Jim Denevan and the crew of Outstanding in the Field, a moveable feast that has delighted the palates of thousands of people from California to Maine for a decade. If you've got 200 bucks and the foresight to book your reservation months in advance, you'll have a dining experience you'll never forget. Jim has sixty of those every season.

It must be nice.

Last Sunday afternoon, a couple hundred folks came to La Plaza Cultural, a block-long community garden in the East Village, for something to eat and drink. After a glass or two of brut-brut Chardonnay champagne from Wolffer Estate Vineyards on Long Island and hors d'oeuvres of heirloom cherry tomatoes skewered with fresh mozzarella and basil, the group gathers around Jim, six-foot-four with straw hat on head and wine glass in hand, who tells of his adventures on the culinary road and of what to expect today. He's followed by Beatriz Arremony, a lithe and lovely cheesemonger whose husband Dennis is president of the garden's association, who relates the story of La Plaza, which twenty years ago was a drug-infested vacant lot and now is a paradise of flowers and fruit trees.

And then it's time to really eat. The guests seat themselves at tables stretching half the length of the garden, and then it comes, on big platters, the work of chef Josh Eden, owner of Shorty's 32 in the Village: tangy greens and grilled vegetables with a lemon-thyme dressing, and a semisweet Tokai wine; then some spicy grilled shrimp and Swiss chard, and a bone-dry Riesling; then honey-glazed grilled rack of pork with garlicky green beans and fluffy mashed potatoes, and a big Cabernet Franc; then (can there be more?) dessert of strawberries in half-whipped cream and a sweet late-harvest Chardonnay — all from local producers. With every course, the volume of talk increases, and by the end of the evening strangers are now friends, business cards are exchanged, and the guests crowd around Jim to render most hearty thanks for four hours of pure perfection.

Jim Denevan grew up surfing in Santa Cruz, taught himself to cook at age 17, and worked as a chef in several area restaurants until he got the idea of taking his show on the road. Catching the wave of interest in local and regional foods, his concept was simple: outdoor dinners at small farms and urban gardens, cooked up by local chefs and interspersed with brief talks from the farmers, the bread- and cheese-makers, and the other food artisans that produced it all.

That's how I got into it.

Four years ago, when Outstanding was about to hit the big- time in New York City, Jim made the rounds of our community gardens, snipping bunches of herbs and twisting off tomatoes and eggplants for his organic extravaganza. When he got to Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx, he discovered my beehives and invited me to supply honey and attend the dinner to talk about urban beekeeping. In years past, the honey was drizzled on the desserts; this year it ended up as a crusty glaze on the pork — hardly a better use for it.

The best thing about the food is that by necessity it must be simple as well as extraordinary; it's prepared on the spot, on huge charcoal grills and atop propane stoves. You take one look at these dishes and say to yourself, "I can do that." No Julia or Julie here.

It's a hell of a job to serve 200 people, and one outstanding part of the Outstanding dinners is how effortlessly they are done, thanks to the preternatural organizational ability of Katy Oursler, who has been coordinating these events since 2003. Unfailingly cheerful and continuously calm, she's the quintessential maître d', moving among the tables and chatting with the guests as if she'd known them all her life. Her staff of waiters, osmosing her own disposition, work the tables enthusiastically, keeping the platters filled and the wine flowing.

Jim Denevan sees these dinners as his mission in life. They are, he told Howie Kahn in an interview for GQ magazine, "the story of thousands of years of people bringing in the harvest, gathering it at a table, and breaking bread.... I think giving people the chance to share the table with all the characters involved in the process is something that might change culture."

Just might.

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Outstanding in the Field dinners, scheduled from May through October, come frequently to California — mostly in the north, with several in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. This year Jim is venturing further south, holding two events at the Wattles Farm in Hollywood in October, both sold out. For background and the list of venues (2010's will be posted early next year), visit the website, www.outstandinginthefield.com.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

2009-08-25T08:56:00.003-04:00

August 27, 2009

Last week, a violent little storm hit Manhattan and the Bronx. It lasted just a few minutes, but what the meteorologists called "microbursts" of wind reached 70 miles per hour. When it was over, almost a hundred trees, some over a century old, had been felled in Central Park alone, and many more came down here in the Bronx.
Early the next morning, I got a call from Jim Fischer, a master beekeeper who maintains the beehives atop the World of Birds building at the Bronx Zoo and recently formed the Gotham City Honey Cooperative, an association of urban beekeepers.
"I'm here in the giraffe area," he reported. "The storm knocked down a huge tree right in front of their barn, and the downed section is crammed with honeybees. We've got to get them out of here as soon as possible so the keepers can let the giraffes out. I've gotta chain-saw this thing so we can get it down and level — the piece of trunk with the bees in it is propped up against a giraffe-sized fence about 15 feet up. I'll have to get a ladder and see what we've got. This is really something. I'll keep you posted."
That afternoon he called again.
"We cut the bee section off and swung it with a rope to rest flat on a pile of big limbs," he said, breathless, "and I've pried it open so it looks like a log-canoe. The bee nest is about two feet wide and eight feet long. It's bigger than anything else I've seen in 25 years. It looks like they've been there for a very long time. There may be several coexisting colonies there, with multiple queens. If you want bees to strengthen your colonies, come and get 'em. And call all your beekeeping friends — there's plenty to go around. Bring some bee-boxes with empty frames. We'll cut up the comb and put them in the frames and the bees will go along with it. Let's meet here tomorrow morning at 7:30. This may take all day, and it's going to be hot as hell in those bee-suits."
Worker bees are like interchangeable parts. As long as there's no queen with them, you can put them in another hive, they'll pick up the scent of the queen, and almost immediately they'll integrate into the colony. Beekeepers regularly do this, taking bees from strong colonies to beef up the numbers in weak ones. Rarely do they get their bees from fallen trees, however.
I called Sara Katz, a young and adventuresome beekeeper with a couple hives at a community garden near Yankee Stadium. "I'll be there," she said without a beat.
Sara and I met Jim at the zoo gate the next morning, and we ran a car-caravan to the giraffe enclosure. There it was, the log-canoe, teeming with bees in the half-light.
Most American beekeepers house their bees in those familiar rectangular boxes, the invention of Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania. In 1851, Langstroth devised a way of organizing a hive to encourage the bees' own building techniques while making it easy for the beekeeper to examine the colony and remove the honey without tearing everything asunder.
Honeybees construct their living quarters of wax secreted from glands on their abdomens, shaping it into a "comb" of hexagonal cells in which they raise their young and store honey and pollen, their food. In the wild, in hollow trees or other crevices, they build comb in distinct layers, with space in between to allow them to move and work all around it. Measuring the width of the comb and the distance between combs, Langstroth found it was uniform — about 3/8 of an inch. "Seeing by intuition, as it were, the end from the beginning," he later wrote, "I could scarcely refrain from shouting out ‘Eureka!' in the open streets."
What Langstroth had discovered was "bee-space."
Inside his wooden boxes, he put hanging frames 3/8-inch wide with a 3/8-inch space on all sides, and as expected, the bees built their comb precisely to the dimensions of the frame and not beyond. It then became a simple task to take out the frames and their contents while leaving the hive intact.
What we saw in the log that morning was natural bee-space, though the layers of comb had been crushed together by the impact of the fall. Peeling back the layers, we measured sections to fit our empty frames, cut them out with a serrated knife, secured them in the frames with rubber bands, shoved them in the bee- boxes, sealed the boxes up with window screen, and took them home. Most valuable was the comb that contained "brood," the beekeepers' term for developing bees in egg, larval, or pupal stages. Placing the brood and the bees that covered it in our hives, we would soon enhance our workforce by thousands.
With the eye of a highly-experienced beekeeper, Jim quickly discovered a queen among the maybe 100,000 workers, caged her, and designated her for a hive of one of his apprentices with a weak and unproductive queen.
Later that morning, several beekeepers from Brooklyn arrived by subway to take their share of bees. As the day warmed from sultry to sweltering, the operation was discovered by wasps, bumblebees, and foraging bees from other places, all battling both the colony and the beekeepers for access to the exposed combs of honey. "Robbing" is the term for it, and it's done regularly to colonies that are vulnerable or weak and unable to defend themselves.
The scene was complete chaos, but Jim and his sweating comrades managed to sweep most of the remaining bees into boxes containing packets of artificial queen-pheromone to make them think a queen was present and induce them to stay put. They sealed up their boxes, and at nightfall, when the robbers had gone home, Jim loaded them into his old Volvo wagon ("Half a million miles and counting," he says proudly), and delivered them to the Brooklynites' hives.
Within a couple days, the remaining comb in the log had been robbed dry, and the zoo crew could set about sawing up the logs and taking them away.
Amidst the detritus of the storm, a treasure was revealed: the secret life of bees.

HEALTH CARE: VISION, WORD, AND WILL

2009-08-19T12:32:00.001-04:00

August 20, 2009

My friend Joanie tells the story of her bout with strep throat while vacationing in London some years back.
"I was getting really sick, so I went over to the medical clinic near where I was staying. A doctor saw me right away, did an examination and prescribed antibiotics, which I got at the dispensary right on the premises. The whole thing took maybe 40 minutes, and my total cost was something like $2.50 for the pills. And I was a foreigner! No questions asked, no identification to show, I just signed in. I was sick, so they treated me."
It's experiences like Joanie's that change Americans' minds about universal health care. What? No preliminary questions about payment? No paperwork? No cost? It makes you want to tip the doctor.
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) has been drawn into our own so-called debate in the most curious ways. Opponents of reform here have made the NHS a frightening caricature, the Ghost of Christmas Future if Congress adopts even modest changes to our non-system. They thought that the Brits' frequent complaints about the NHS for its acknowledged inadequacies was a sure sign they're ready to ditch it. But they got an unexpected reaction from across the Pond: Citizens were outraged at the exploitation and embarrassed for America's callous treatment of its sick. Despite its problems, they are fiercely loyal to their system. Even the leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron, last week declared forcefully that the NHS would be strengthened, never abolished.
What brings about such adamance in a country that's not only not socialist but that has privatized many other government entities over the last three decades? Perhaps it's because, like our Social Security system, the NHS was instituted in a time of crisis, after World War II, a living symbol of the cohesiveness that brought the country through the war. It removed a Dickensian social scourge and affirmed British dignity as a civilized people. After 60 years, universal health care in the United Kingdom is a given; it's part of the national identity.
You'd think that the U.S., so close to the U.K. in attitude and outlook, would come to see it this way too. Aren't we the most generous nation on earth? What is it about health care that has made it the hot-button issue, even more divisive than war?
Given the widespread dissatisfaction with skyrocketing costs and denials of coverage, the time seemed ripe for a real shift. Yet the same sorry arguments that have been used since Harry Truman's time are de-wheeling the reform juggernaut: socialized medicine and higher taxes. "If Barack Obama and the Democrats get their way," runs a Republican National Committee radio ad, "the federal government will make the decisions about your health care. And their plan costs a trillion dollars we don't have." Whether or not these assertions have anything to do with the actual proposed legislation is almost beside the point. The G- word and the T-word still cause inflammation of that little Darwinian lobe in the collective brain that evokes the self- reliant pioneers and the self-made John D. Rockefeller. No matter that it's insurance companies that now make your health-care decisions and that they're the ones that are taxing you; once the fever starts, the nation becomes delirious.
This could have been stopped.
As the history of effective leadership has shown, it takes a clear vision, a forceful word, and an iron will to dampen inflammatory rhetoric and rally the country around a cause.
Many of us thought this was what Obama was about. Remember "CHANGE"? "HOPE"? "YES, WE CAN!"?
Well, ah ... maybe we can.
Obama's problem with health care is that he thought he could apply the principle of dialogue, one of his most attractive and effective features, to achieve reform. Right after inauguration, he got all those health-policy wonks and insurance/drug execs around a table and they all came out smiling. Then he threw the ball to Congress, somehow presuming they'd play as a team to craft bipartisan legislation to his liking, instead of sending down a bill himself. The first hundred days have turned to 200, those executive smiles hover over the Capitol like the Cheshire cat's, the radical right saw the door wide open to bring him down, and now it's a town-hall free-for-all. Couldn't he see this coming?
The extent to which Obama has lost control of the issue was no better illustrated than by his exchange with the college student in Grand Junction, Colo., last Saturday, who asked him how private insurance could ever expect to compete with a government-run "public option." All he could say was, "This is a legitimate debate to have."
College kid wins. FDR turns in grave.
Rather than taking on the insurance/drug establishment (the correct answer to the student question is: "You're exactly right, and that's why we want it."), he's not only let them in the game but let them call the shots. And rather than taking on the ultra- right by identifying their smears as plain old lies, he tells us they're just "differences of opinion."
Remember Chicago on election night? Remember Inauguration Day? Obama once had the momentum to make health care a national imperative, a part of our identity, as it is in Britain.
No vision, no word, no will: No more.

MEDICARE FOR ALL?

2009-08-12T12:22:00.001-04:00

August 13, 2009

The September issue of Consumer Reports is out. Cover story: "Ratings of 76 Health Plans."
Seventy-six health plans? And those are only the major ones identified in a survey of 37,500 CR subscribers.
Talk about bureaucracy. Most of those plans — 35 health maintenance organizations (HMO's) and 41 preferred provider organizations (PPO's) — operate in individual states; only a few are multi-state or nationwide. Each has its own policies and protocols, each its own billing and payment system, each its own customer service apparatus. It's no wonder that the average health-insurance premium rose 38% over the last two years, due substantially to administrative costs (lobbying included) that comprise around 30% of their budgets.
The CR article reports that 64% of those surveyed were "completely satisfied" with their insurance plan, wryly noting that such a "lukewarm response" is only slightly higher than the satisfaction level for cable TV companies. And as with cable TV, people can't use CR to comparison-shop for a better deal; they're basically stuck with whatever they've got.
The health-care "system" today isn't a system at all; it's a byzantine collection of individual units from providers to insurers, all out there to profit from the third thing that's sure in life besides death and taxes: sickness.
You'd think that with all the red tape people are tangled in (the CR survey rated the billing procedures of every single PPO as fair to poor), they would be clamoring for a simple, unobtrusive insurance system. Today, almost 30% of the people of America are covered by some form of government-funded insurance: Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor, S-CHIP for children, Tricare for military personnel and veterans. Medicare and the military programs, which are administered by the federal government, are user-friendly and immensely popular — so popular, in fact, that some people don't even think they're government- run; witness the widely-reported story of the man who told Rep. Robert Inglis of South Carolina, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
Why not take something that works admirably for people over 65 and extend it to everyone?
What Congress is now grinding out is the usual sausage — baloney, specifically: a hodgepodge of tinkering that leaves the non-system basically intact and has so confused and frightened the public that they're pulling back from these proposals like turtles into their shells. It's not that they've suddenly become happy with their health plans; it's just that they have utterly no idea about how these various thousand-page pieces of work will affect them.
That's why it was so refreshing to hear that Rep. Anthony Weiner of Brooklyn/Queens is introducing two bills into Congress, one to abolish Medicare and the other to extend Medicare to everyone. The first one is a piece of legislative irony you seldom see in the present climate of Congressional nastiness, daring all those public-payer paranoids to dismantle a program their constituents love. The second one is a straightforward single-payer alternative. Weiner had to wait a long time for this — he had to secure Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reluctant agreement to put single-payer on the docket — but it may in fact be a stroke of good timing. Many people, including some members of Congress, are so frustrated by the mishmash that they may take a good look at a plan that's clear, simple, and efficient (administrative costs for the present Medicare program are 3%).
So many of the objections to single-payer are driven not by evidence and common sense but by ideology, and of course by the insurance industry. As Weiner has noted, almost everybody who's privately insured has a single payer right now: their insurance company. There's very little "freedom of choice" involved; employers give few options other than choosing between an HMO and a PPO. The only difference is that their money is going to a business rather than to a government agency.
It's so strange that people and politicians can get so worked up about paying taxes and be so resigned to paying premiums. According to CR, the median annual premium of the individuals surveyed — that's not counting employer contributions — is now $1,829. Why not eliminate the premiums — and the companies that charge them — and tack that amount, and perhaps substantially less, onto a universal Medicare tax?
Once again, as in so many other legislative proposals both federal and state, there is apparently little in the several health-care bills about paying for them. President Obama himself has created his own "read-my-lips" moment by promising "no new taxes" on the middle class. But new programs should always be directly linked to new taxes. All this "creative financing" — cigarettes here, "the very wealthy" there — just leaves everybody, middle class included, with feelings of unfairness. The best solution is the most "transparent": a graduated health tax on income both individual and corporate. Right now, the Medicare tax is flat — 1.45% on all earnings for employer and employee, and 2.9% for the self-employed. Graduating the tax based on ability to pay (and that would include retirees, who presently pay nothing for Medicare Part A hospital insurance) would equitably raise the funds for universal health care.
The intangible health benefit of the current Medicare program lies in its providing not only insurance but assurance. It's guaranteed, and in most cases, it's hassle-free. People can worry about their health rather than their health insurance.
For those over 65, health care has come to be seen as a universal right. Why not extend that right to the population at large?

THE MOON AT FORTY

2009-07-28T10:10:00.001-04:00

July 30, 2009

What is most astounding about the Apollo 11 moon landing is that it happened 40 years ago. What is most depressing is that so little has happened since.
In 1969, if you're old enough to remember, you played music on phonographs and reel-to-reel tapes. You shot photos on Kodachrome. You warmed up food on the stove. You wrote letters in longhand or on a typewriter, made your "CC's" with carbon paper, added up figures in your head or with a pencil. If you needed information, you went to a library. To tune in Walter Cronkite, you twisted the rabbit-ears.
And if you tuned in on July 20, 1969, what you saw were blurred black-and-white images, broadcast from a quarter-million miles away, of one man making a small step and mankind making a giant leap.
Or so he thought.
When Neil Armstrong planted that first boot-print in the lunar dust for all eternity, he believed he was a Columbus — not just the first, but the first of thousands. When Cronkite was rendered speechless on TV as the lander touched down — all he could say was "Wow!" — it was because he saw the heavens opening to us, as the earth opened to Europe nearly five centuries before. The Apollo mission was the cornerstone of a new era of daring and hard-fought exploration reaching to the stars — Per aspera ad astra, the Roman proverb that was inscribed on the plaque commemorating the death of three astronauts in the launch- pad fire on Apollo 1 in 1967 and that also graced the packs of Pall Mall cigarettes all those technicians in Mission Control were nervously sucking up as the lander made its approach.
In promoting his vision of manned space-flight in 1962, President John Kennedy had said much the same: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills .... And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
When the Apollo 11 module Eagle landed, most of us who watched it thought that way. Our collective imagination ran high, like it ran in other times of intense exploration, from the conquest of the American West to that of the earth's frozen poles: first the moon, then the moon-base, then Mars, then Jupiter, then beyond. Everything seemed possible, because the seemingly impossible had been accomplished almost flawlessly and in so short a time: the first American satellite to orbit the earth had gone up just eleven years before.
The depressing part of the 40th anniversary commemoration is the realization that it all basically ended 40 years ago. Apollo was not the cornerstone of space exploration, it was the capstone. America had poured its ingenuity, daring, and resources into the moon-landing, fulfilled Kennedy's promise, beat the Soviets cold — and then didn't know what to do next. The trajectory of exploration, if not the trajectory to the moon, was lost. There were five more lunar landings over the next couple years, but they led nowhere: the astronauts picked up a few buckets of moon-rocks but otherwise spent their time hitting golf balls and clowning for the camera.
Apparently, NASA had not seen much beyond Apollo. In 1969, at the request of President Richard Nixon to present a long-range plan, the agency's Space Task Group recommended space-stations to study the earth and to launch payloads for a permanent lunar base and manned probes of the planets, serviced by reusable spacecraft. What America got instead was a runt of the idea: not a project named after constellations and Greek gods, not a Mercury or Gemini or Apollo, but ... the Space Shuttle, as mundane and repetitive as an airport-hotel bus, and several orbiting stations going round and round, with nothing going up and out.
Even as the Eagle was landing, the mood of the country was changing. Rioting and assassinations had scarred America the previous year, and young senator Ted Kennedy had met his Chappaquiddick just the day before. The anguish of Vietnam, which Cronkite had called a "stalemate," was stalemating the aspirations of the people, and Watergate eventually checkmated them. In the introspection, self-doubt, and inner conflict, the outward vision evaporated.
Forty years later, NASA is drawing up plans for a base on the moon, using vehicles remarkably similar to those of the Apollo mission. (A splendidly illustrated description of the proposal is in the August issue of Astronomy magazine.) President Obama has pledged to support lunar exploration, but what will come of it? This generation has enough of its own Vietnams and domestic troubles to blur any vision of the stars.
In his 1962 speech on space exploration, John Kennedy recalled George Mallory's response to skeptics asking why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: "Because it's there."
Today, there's no there there.