April 17, 2008
It’s over for another year.
Every January, the resolution at the very top of my long list reads: "Do your taxes next week." Every April, I find myself stuck at the computer, dancing with the virtual reality of TurboTax, not to mention the virtual reality of my records and the tax system itself.
Preparing my income tax return is the most repulsive civic responsibility I have to perform. Not even jury duty comes close. I have so severe a psychological hangup about it that the tricks that are usually effective in getting myself to do things I don’t want to do --mark artificial deadlines on my calendar, take the job in small steps, call somebody to talk my fears through, think of how good I’ll feel when it’s done, reward myself with a celebratory dinner — are totally useless. As March bleeds into April, the 1040 is constantly on my mind, with a little voice niggling me: "Do those taxes, Roger." Nothing works, except the real deadline. As the dread day approaches, I become the opposite of my former self, maniacally focused on the work, poring over statements and forms and instructions and Quickbooks reports (the federal Paperwork Reduction Act is as specious as the tax code itself), plugging numbers into TurboTax, looking at the results, and making liberal, undocumented adjustments for a better outcome (as Joel Katz, the cigar-chomping accountant who years ago taught me enough about taxes to give me the confidence to do them without him, once told me: "It’s all basically smoke and mirrors"). Finally, late on the night of April 14, I say to hell with it, print everything out, sign the damned things, and heave them into the mailbox, fingers crossed.
Aside from the tedium of assembling the documentation, preparing taxes is infinitely simpler today than it was a decade or two ago. Computerized bookkeeping programs spit out your records by category, and computerized tax programs step you through the process with comprehensible questions, do all the calculations, and plunk them into all the right places on the panoply of forms. Remember the good old days of manual preparation? — "Subtract line 9 from line 8 and enter on line 10. Enter the lesser amount of lines 7 and 10 on line 11." Now I barely look at the forms; I can’t understand them anyway. If you can’t trust your tax preparation software, whom can you trust?
Yet relative ease of preparation does not mitigate my revulsion of the whole byzantine system of income taxation. There is something intrinsically wrong with it, beginning with the fact that it is a huge thicket of provisions that not only the average citizen but the trained tax preparer at your H&R Block store and even high-priced accountants who devote their lives to it can never fully master.
The major problem with the tax code is that over the last 50 years or so it has come to be used not primarily as a means of raising revenue but as an instrument of social policy — the redistribution of wealth (more often to the wealthy) by the back door. Rather than give direct grants to achieve national goals — buying a Prius, for example — governments write ever more new deductions and credits into the tax code. In addition to making the code incredibly complex and bewildering, what this does is to sever the link in everyone’s mind, from layman to legislator, between taxation and its basically simple original purpose: to raise revenue to balance the budget.
The best approach to tax reform is, of course, a progressive flat tax. This has been proposed by politicians as ideologically diverse as Jerry Brown and Mike Huckabee but has never gotten anywhere, mostly because special interests see "tax relief" as more passable (because more hidden) than direct appropriations.
The thought of a simpler and fully automated income tax — a flat percentage of income graduated by bracket and tied to the annual budget, with a sole exemption for dependent children - is an appealing idea if there ever was one, except of course to all those tax preparers, accountants, and interest groups, which is probably why it’s an idea whose time will never come.
Before going to my celebratory dinner on Tuesday, I took out my calendar, turned to January 1, 2009, and scribbled in: "Do your taxes next week."
Ha.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
OUR LADY OF THE ANGLES
April 10, 2008
"Well, it’s big."
That was my sister Joanie’s summary comment on the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles when we visited it shortly after its dedication in 2002. We had a second opportunity to see it a week ago last Monday, when I was in your area to enjoy the weather of paradise and catch up on things with family and friends.
The best way to approach the cathedral is on foot, where you can see it in its urban context. This we did — on, of all things, a walking tour of downtown, guided by our long-time friend Francisco Balderrama, who teaches California history at Cal State L.A. The idea of a walking tour of Los Angeles sounds as oxymoronic as sun-bathing in Antarctica or dining on Big Macs in Paris. But our little excursion in the fresh spring air, starting at that temple of transportation, Union Station, breaking for breakfast at Philippe’s French Dip, winding through the historic Pueblo district, and ending at the Cathedral and the Music Center, brought a refreshingly positive perspective on the center city to me, who grew up in L.A. and had mostly seen it through the window of a car.
After admiring the original Queen of Angels Church on the Old Plaza, built in 1822, we walked over the Hollywood Freeway to Temple Street and looked west. Conspicuous at the top of the hill was the new cathedral, planted there like a fortress, squat and defensive, emblazoned with a huge crusaders’ cross. As we marched up the steep incline of Temple Street — another reason to walk this area, not drive it — we could contemplate the contours of the building with incremental clarity. Our Lady of the Angels is more like Our Lady of the Angles. There are no lofty spires, nothing to direct your eyes to heaven. The walls of the structure oppose each other in a kind of static clashing. According to the cathedral’s website (olacathedral.org, rich in detail about the church and its furnishings), the architect, José Rafael Moneo, designed a building "that avoids right angles and symmetry," in order to evoke a "feeling of mystery." Actually, the feeling it evokes is disorientation. For a place dedicated to a woman, the mother of Jesus, there is nothing feminine about it at all — no graceful curves to delight the eye as in the old Plaza Church, nothing to suggest openness and receptivity. Built at the height of the priest scandals, it presents itself as an unwitting symbol of the conflictedness, the asymmetry, within the Church as an institution.
The interior, though impressively appointed, is similarly troubling. With its sloping seating like a theater, one looks down upon, rather than up to, its central feature, the altar.
Most of the churches designed after the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s reject excessive adornment to focus the attention on the altar itself, but this is not the case here. All along the sides of the building hang enormous tapestries depicting the saints, taking the place of the stained-glass windows of the old cathedrals. It is impossible to take your eyes off them. The representations are so lifelike that you find yourself looking for somebody you know among them — exactly the effect the artist, John Nava, sought to achieve. "A saint," he said, "could look like me." (In fact, the artist employed a Hollywood casting agent to find his models.) There’s no doubt that realism is attractive, but to me at least, the attraction here was aesthetic, not spiritual, not a window to the other world but an entertainment in this one.
Perhaps the most telling feature of all is the placement of a magnificent seventeenth-century Spanish altarpiece, located not in one of the many side chapels but along the back wall. It is to be viewed purely as a museum piece, not as an object of devotion and prayer. To me this clearly shows just how radical is the break with tradition in contemporary Catholic church design. Old churches are treated as museums, and its visitors as spectators, admirers of a bygone spirituality.
There are many inspirational aspects to the place, notably the immense bronze doors, the use of alabaster for windows of gentle light, and the striking tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. But the various components, beautiful in themselves, do not fit together as a whole. They seem to reinforce the asymmetry that the architect saw as central to his concept of design.
On the first page of the cathedral website is a "Did You Know?" box detailing significant features of the building and grounds. One of them is: "Number of parking spaces: 600."
Pay this fact no attention. Park your car at Union Station, calm your soul in the Old Plaza Church, and walk up the hill.
"Well, it’s big."
That was my sister Joanie’s summary comment on the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles when we visited it shortly after its dedication in 2002. We had a second opportunity to see it a week ago last Monday, when I was in your area to enjoy the weather of paradise and catch up on things with family and friends.
The best way to approach the cathedral is on foot, where you can see it in its urban context. This we did — on, of all things, a walking tour of downtown, guided by our long-time friend Francisco Balderrama, who teaches California history at Cal State L.A. The idea of a walking tour of Los Angeles sounds as oxymoronic as sun-bathing in Antarctica or dining on Big Macs in Paris. But our little excursion in the fresh spring air, starting at that temple of transportation, Union Station, breaking for breakfast at Philippe’s French Dip, winding through the historic Pueblo district, and ending at the Cathedral and the Music Center, brought a refreshingly positive perspective on the center city to me, who grew up in L.A. and had mostly seen it through the window of a car.
After admiring the original Queen of Angels Church on the Old Plaza, built in 1822, we walked over the Hollywood Freeway to Temple Street and looked west. Conspicuous at the top of the hill was the new cathedral, planted there like a fortress, squat and defensive, emblazoned with a huge crusaders’ cross. As we marched up the steep incline of Temple Street — another reason to walk this area, not drive it — we could contemplate the contours of the building with incremental clarity. Our Lady of the Angels is more like Our Lady of the Angles. There are no lofty spires, nothing to direct your eyes to heaven. The walls of the structure oppose each other in a kind of static clashing. According to the cathedral’s website (olacathedral.org, rich in detail about the church and its furnishings), the architect, José Rafael Moneo, designed a building "that avoids right angles and symmetry," in order to evoke a "feeling of mystery." Actually, the feeling it evokes is disorientation. For a place dedicated to a woman, the mother of Jesus, there is nothing feminine about it at all — no graceful curves to delight the eye as in the old Plaza Church, nothing to suggest openness and receptivity. Built at the height of the priest scandals, it presents itself as an unwitting symbol of the conflictedness, the asymmetry, within the Church as an institution.
The interior, though impressively appointed, is similarly troubling. With its sloping seating like a theater, one looks down upon, rather than up to, its central feature, the altar.
Most of the churches designed after the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s reject excessive adornment to focus the attention on the altar itself, but this is not the case here. All along the sides of the building hang enormous tapestries depicting the saints, taking the place of the stained-glass windows of the old cathedrals. It is impossible to take your eyes off them. The representations are so lifelike that you find yourself looking for somebody you know among them — exactly the effect the artist, John Nava, sought to achieve. "A saint," he said, "could look like me." (In fact, the artist employed a Hollywood casting agent to find his models.) There’s no doubt that realism is attractive, but to me at least, the attraction here was aesthetic, not spiritual, not a window to the other world but an entertainment in this one.
Perhaps the most telling feature of all is the placement of a magnificent seventeenth-century Spanish altarpiece, located not in one of the many side chapels but along the back wall. It is to be viewed purely as a museum piece, not as an object of devotion and prayer. To me this clearly shows just how radical is the break with tradition in contemporary Catholic church design. Old churches are treated as museums, and its visitors as spectators, admirers of a bygone spirituality.
There are many inspirational aspects to the place, notably the immense bronze doors, the use of alabaster for windows of gentle light, and the striking tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. But the various components, beautiful in themselves, do not fit together as a whole. They seem to reinforce the asymmetry that the architect saw as central to his concept of design.
On the first page of the cathedral website is a "Did You Know?" box detailing significant features of the building and grounds. One of them is: "Number of parking spaces: 600."
Pay this fact no attention. Park your car at Union Station, calm your soul in the Old Plaza Church, and walk up the hill.
STUMBLING BLOCK
March 20, 2008
During this week preceding Easter, in millions of Christian churches throughout the world, one or more of the four scriptural accounts of the death of Jesus will be read. Over the centuries they have been so encrusted with theology and devotion that it is hard — for believing Christians surely, but even for others without a religious stake — to hear them for what they are: an appalling story of arrogance and fecklessness leading to the brutal execution of an innocent man. Novelists and movie-makers from atheist to fanatic have rarely been able to portray this purely human drama without sanctimony. For all its claimed realism, even that gory film, The Passion of the Christ, was so permeated by piety that the literal and universal theme of the crucifixion was obscured: Homo homini lupus: Man is a wolf to man.
But it was always so. Almost immediately after Jesus’ death, theological theories, esoteric sayings, and fanciful tales either sanitized these accounts or denied them altogether: Jesus, the divine Son of God, could not possibly have died like that, if at all. Some claimed that the whole thing must have been an illusion, a kind of trompe l’oeil painted by God to sift those without spiritual eyes from those with mere physical ones.
Early Christianity produced many versions of the life, work, and teaching of Jesus — "gospels," they were called — but only four of them contained narratives of Jesus’ death. The others avoided the subject, asserting instead that salvation lay in the illumination of the soul by the knowledge of spiritual truths communicated by Christ. These "gnostic gospels" (from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis) have sparked renewed interest today by scholars like Elaine Pagels, and for good reason. We’re "spiritual, not religious"; we want comfort, not contradiction.
But when it came down to choosing which gospels would form the center of the collection of writings recognized as inspired by God — a Christian Bible complementing the Hebrew one — the consensus of the churches over four centuries concluded that only those containing a narrative of Jesus’ death expressed the true nature of Christian belief. If they had sought uniformity, they’d have picked one Gospel as the official version; instead they included all four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, similar in theme but inconsistent in detail.
What repulsed the Gnostics in their religious idealism and perfectionism was the fact that the narratives of Jesus’ death are a complete contradiction of what we even now expect religion to be: the protection of God for those who love him, the faithfulness of its adherents, the inspired role of religious authorities as moral leaders and agents of God’s work. Instead what we get here is an account of the vilest and most pathetic aspects of human nature, the self-serving use of religious authority, and most contradictory of all, the utter absence of any God throughout the whole chain of events. Stripped of the evangelists’ unique glosses, the story could have been reported by an atheist.
Among all the characters in this drama, Jesus alone is the man of authenticity and selfless courage. But even at that, as the leader of a moral and religious movement, he is depicted as a failure. It was understandable that the curious crowds that had followed him for his wisdom and his healings could turn fickle under stress, but even his hand-picked disciples, who had sat at his feet and grown to know him and his teachings intimately over three years, were unable to respond to his training. As so often happens in families, in churches, and in politics, his inner circle is the most depraved. Judas, his friend, betrays him; Peter, his "Rock," denies that he ever knew him, and three times no less, just for emphasis; and the rest of them abandon him. The authorities of his own religion, threatened by his integrity, put on a show-trial and convict him on spurious evidence, then expect the civil authorities to do their bidding and execute him.
It is an entirely dismal story, and it reads as real today as it did then. Why has religion, which on its face promises release from suffering and the redemption of the human personality, so often been the cause of suffering, and its fiercest adherents the most unredeemed? Why has Jesus’ admonition to the initially-aggressive, later sniveling Peter, "The ones who take the sword shall perish by the sword," been so roundly ignored through two millennia of Christian history? And why, in the end, was this ignominious death seen by believers as the portal to life? And where, in fact, was God amidst all this?
It’s absolutely absurd — as St. Paul wrote, a stumbling block.
Anyone, Christian or no, religious, atheist, or "spiritual," would do well to take up these passages, uncluttered by eyes of either devotion or suspicion — and stumble over them.
During this week preceding Easter, in millions of Christian churches throughout the world, one or more of the four scriptural accounts of the death of Jesus will be read. Over the centuries they have been so encrusted with theology and devotion that it is hard — for believing Christians surely, but even for others without a religious stake — to hear them for what they are: an appalling story of arrogance and fecklessness leading to the brutal execution of an innocent man. Novelists and movie-makers from atheist to fanatic have rarely been able to portray this purely human drama without sanctimony. For all its claimed realism, even that gory film, The Passion of the Christ, was so permeated by piety that the literal and universal theme of the crucifixion was obscured: Homo homini lupus: Man is a wolf to man.
But it was always so. Almost immediately after Jesus’ death, theological theories, esoteric sayings, and fanciful tales either sanitized these accounts or denied them altogether: Jesus, the divine Son of God, could not possibly have died like that, if at all. Some claimed that the whole thing must have been an illusion, a kind of trompe l’oeil painted by God to sift those without spiritual eyes from those with mere physical ones.
Early Christianity produced many versions of the life, work, and teaching of Jesus — "gospels," they were called — but only four of them contained narratives of Jesus’ death. The others avoided the subject, asserting instead that salvation lay in the illumination of the soul by the knowledge of spiritual truths communicated by Christ. These "gnostic gospels" (from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis) have sparked renewed interest today by scholars like Elaine Pagels, and for good reason. We’re "spiritual, not religious"; we want comfort, not contradiction.
But when it came down to choosing which gospels would form the center of the collection of writings recognized as inspired by God — a Christian Bible complementing the Hebrew one — the consensus of the churches over four centuries concluded that only those containing a narrative of Jesus’ death expressed the true nature of Christian belief. If they had sought uniformity, they’d have picked one Gospel as the official version; instead they included all four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, similar in theme but inconsistent in detail.
What repulsed the Gnostics in their religious idealism and perfectionism was the fact that the narratives of Jesus’ death are a complete contradiction of what we even now expect religion to be: the protection of God for those who love him, the faithfulness of its adherents, the inspired role of religious authorities as moral leaders and agents of God’s work. Instead what we get here is an account of the vilest and most pathetic aspects of human nature, the self-serving use of religious authority, and most contradictory of all, the utter absence of any God throughout the whole chain of events. Stripped of the evangelists’ unique glosses, the story could have been reported by an atheist.
Among all the characters in this drama, Jesus alone is the man of authenticity and selfless courage. But even at that, as the leader of a moral and religious movement, he is depicted as a failure. It was understandable that the curious crowds that had followed him for his wisdom and his healings could turn fickle under stress, but even his hand-picked disciples, who had sat at his feet and grown to know him and his teachings intimately over three years, were unable to respond to his training. As so often happens in families, in churches, and in politics, his inner circle is the most depraved. Judas, his friend, betrays him; Peter, his "Rock," denies that he ever knew him, and three times no less, just for emphasis; and the rest of them abandon him. The authorities of his own religion, threatened by his integrity, put on a show-trial and convict him on spurious evidence, then expect the civil authorities to do their bidding and execute him.
It is an entirely dismal story, and it reads as real today as it did then. Why has religion, which on its face promises release from suffering and the redemption of the human personality, so often been the cause of suffering, and its fiercest adherents the most unredeemed? Why has Jesus’ admonition to the initially-aggressive, later sniveling Peter, "The ones who take the sword shall perish by the sword," been so roundly ignored through two millennia of Christian history? And why, in the end, was this ignominious death seen by believers as the portal to life? And where, in fact, was God amidst all this?
It’s absolutely absurd — as St. Paul wrote, a stumbling block.
Anyone, Christian or no, religious, atheist, or "spiritual," would do well to take up these passages, uncluttered by eyes of either devotion or suspicion — and stumble over them.
DOPPELGANGER
March 13, 2008
Power corrupts in the most fascinating ways. The one I like best is the Evil Twin.
Why everyone got so worked up over Bill Clinton’s philandering is hard to understand, except for political reasons. He was just a good ole country boy with a huge appetite for everything, women included. It was part of his nature. We all knew when we elected him that he was hardly unimpeachable, so when he was officially impeached — not for having sex but for defining it — it looked more like a grudge-match by those opponents he had so often outsmarted. And the most delicious irony of all came from those several snarling watchdogs of public morality, including alpha-dog Newt Gingrich, whose own sexual improprieties were unmasked in the process.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is another case entirely. He runs in the line of televangelists like Jim Bakker and the aptly-named Jimmy Swaggart, and all those pedophile pastors and toilet-stall congressmen who preach "family values" without a grain of compassion for fallen human nature, only to become the objects of their own rants.
I saw Spitzer’s downfall coming long ago, though I never thought it would happen the way it did. I figured the electorate would be so sick of four years of the man’s sour self-righteousness that they’d throw him out on his ear the next time around. After just a year in office, his approval rating had dropped from near unanimous to around 30 percent; we knew we’d elected a lemon.
Over the span of a decade, Spitzer had made a name for himself both statewide and nationally as an activist attorney general, hammering the Big Guys of business and Wall Street for fraud, price-fixing, and environmental pollution, fearlessly going where federal officials were afraid to tread. Simultaneously, he consciously cultivated an image of devoted spouse and father. Every Christmas, I and a million others would receive a homey holiday card with best wishes and a lovely family photo. Over years of these cards, we watched his three beautiful daughters grow up. The Spitzers became part of our own families.
But those cards struck me as self-serving: He was nurturing the public for a step to higher office.
When he ran for governor in 2006, the magic worked. Virtually everybody in the state admired, even adored, him. He won the Democratic primary overwhelmingly, and for the general election, the hangdog Republicans offered up an unknown former state assemblyman, John Faso, as little more than fresh meat, despite the enduring respect and relative popularity of the retiring Republican governor, George Pataki. Spitzer won decisively, with 69% of the vote.
But good prosecutors seldom make good executives — the skill-set is different. As a governor, you can’t go after people, you have to work with them. He’d promised the public to "change the culture" of the often-immobilized, in-the-pocket state legislature, but right from the start his manipulative tactics of overstepping political decorum — "I’m a fucking steamroller," he is reported to have said early in his tenure — alienated even his Democratic allies. In the state legislature he’d met a collective opponent much different from all those insurance and entertainment companies he’d dispatched so handily as attorney general — and they wouldn’t budge.
After just a year in office, Spitzer’s demeanor had gotten under the skin of most New Yorkers, and the man that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson once toasted as "the future of the Democratic party" was becoming political toast himself. He began apologizing for his abrasiveness and claimed to seek a more collaborative approach, but the citizens, who’d come to expect colorfulness (or failing that, colorlessness) in their governors were already weary of him and eager to see him gone.
Most observers thought he would just sputter out, locked in the petty imbroglios of Albany. Nobody thought he would go down in flames.
But we should have known. Spitzer is the stuff of Homer and Shakespeare, the man of overweening pride ensnared in his own net. The revelations of this week are a thing of grotesque beauty and symmetry. As attorney general he had prosecuted several high-end prostitution rings with the same fervor he applied to big business. And now, as "Client 9" of the Emperors Club VIP, he was caught on a government wire-tap, the object of aggressive investigative techniques much like his own.
Spitzer’s is the real-life case of the classic literary character, the Doppelganger, the Double. Most of us lead lives of muddled morality — a little good here, a little bad there. We realistically come to see ourselves and others as both graced and flawed. But those who crusade for absolute moral rectitude, the perfectionists who demand from others the perfection they see in themselves, walk with the shadow of absolute moral depravity by their side. It is a kind of psychological antimatter, the Black Hole of the soul, the death-wish.
If there weren’t enough evidence from the state of the world at large, the fall of Eliot Spitzer might convince you of the existence of Satan.
Power corrupts in the most fascinating ways. The one I like best is the Evil Twin.
Why everyone got so worked up over Bill Clinton’s philandering is hard to understand, except for political reasons. He was just a good ole country boy with a huge appetite for everything, women included. It was part of his nature. We all knew when we elected him that he was hardly unimpeachable, so when he was officially impeached — not for having sex but for defining it — it looked more like a grudge-match by those opponents he had so often outsmarted. And the most delicious irony of all came from those several snarling watchdogs of public morality, including alpha-dog Newt Gingrich, whose own sexual improprieties were unmasked in the process.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is another case entirely. He runs in the line of televangelists like Jim Bakker and the aptly-named Jimmy Swaggart, and all those pedophile pastors and toilet-stall congressmen who preach "family values" without a grain of compassion for fallen human nature, only to become the objects of their own rants.
I saw Spitzer’s downfall coming long ago, though I never thought it would happen the way it did. I figured the electorate would be so sick of four years of the man’s sour self-righteousness that they’d throw him out on his ear the next time around. After just a year in office, his approval rating had dropped from near unanimous to around 30 percent; we knew we’d elected a lemon.
Over the span of a decade, Spitzer had made a name for himself both statewide and nationally as an activist attorney general, hammering the Big Guys of business and Wall Street for fraud, price-fixing, and environmental pollution, fearlessly going where federal officials were afraid to tread. Simultaneously, he consciously cultivated an image of devoted spouse and father. Every Christmas, I and a million others would receive a homey holiday card with best wishes and a lovely family photo. Over years of these cards, we watched his three beautiful daughters grow up. The Spitzers became part of our own families.
But those cards struck me as self-serving: He was nurturing the public for a step to higher office.
When he ran for governor in 2006, the magic worked. Virtually everybody in the state admired, even adored, him. He won the Democratic primary overwhelmingly, and for the general election, the hangdog Republicans offered up an unknown former state assemblyman, John Faso, as little more than fresh meat, despite the enduring respect and relative popularity of the retiring Republican governor, George Pataki. Spitzer won decisively, with 69% of the vote.
But good prosecutors seldom make good executives — the skill-set is different. As a governor, you can’t go after people, you have to work with them. He’d promised the public to "change the culture" of the often-immobilized, in-the-pocket state legislature, but right from the start his manipulative tactics of overstepping political decorum — "I’m a fucking steamroller," he is reported to have said early in his tenure — alienated even his Democratic allies. In the state legislature he’d met a collective opponent much different from all those insurance and entertainment companies he’d dispatched so handily as attorney general — and they wouldn’t budge.
After just a year in office, Spitzer’s demeanor had gotten under the skin of most New Yorkers, and the man that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson once toasted as "the future of the Democratic party" was becoming political toast himself. He began apologizing for his abrasiveness and claimed to seek a more collaborative approach, but the citizens, who’d come to expect colorfulness (or failing that, colorlessness) in their governors were already weary of him and eager to see him gone.
Most observers thought he would just sputter out, locked in the petty imbroglios of Albany. Nobody thought he would go down in flames.
But we should have known. Spitzer is the stuff of Homer and Shakespeare, the man of overweening pride ensnared in his own net. The revelations of this week are a thing of grotesque beauty and symmetry. As attorney general he had prosecuted several high-end prostitution rings with the same fervor he applied to big business. And now, as "Client 9" of the Emperors Club VIP, he was caught on a government wire-tap, the object of aggressive investigative techniques much like his own.
Spitzer’s is the real-life case of the classic literary character, the Doppelganger, the Double. Most of us lead lives of muddled morality — a little good here, a little bad there. We realistically come to see ourselves and others as both graced and flawed. But those who crusade for absolute moral rectitude, the perfectionists who demand from others the perfection they see in themselves, walk with the shadow of absolute moral depravity by their side. It is a kind of psychological antimatter, the Black Hole of the soul, the death-wish.
If there weren’t enough evidence from the state of the world at large, the fall of Eliot Spitzer might convince you of the existence of Satan.
STRAIGHT TALK ON EXPRESSIONS
March 6, 2008
Words matter.
Part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy has been to portray her opponent Barack Obama as a man of eloquent words and herself as a woman of decisive action — it’s performance, not peroration, she would say if she were eloquent, that makes an effective president.
She’s right in at least one sense: Words can indeed seduce, and empty words are often the most seductive of all.
This applies not only to Obama but to political discourse in general. Words do matter; they construct the mental picture that shapes our view of the world and our responses to it. If words are misused or misapplied, some very bad responses can result.
There are certain words that when beaten enough in political rhetoric take on a life of their own. They trigger a host of associations that go far beyond their basic meanings. Used ideologically, they can cloud clear thinking and push people and politics in ways that often defy common sense. A true straight-talker would do the public great service by unmasking these words for what they are and opening new and honest dialogue on the issues that lie beneath them.
"Tax" is such a trigger-word. Its straightforward meaning as a levy used by government to pay for its operation and for public projects has been turned by ideologues clustered around the long-ago oratory of Ronald Reagan into a symbol of intrinsic evil, detached from any purpose. California’s Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, is an early and classic example of this detachment, where residential property tax rates were set at fixed levels and no longer pegged to the needs of the community. When public education costs, for which property taxes had been primarily used, continued to rise, there was no longer the instrument of taxation to pay for them — or to provide an incentive to control them.
With sufficient haranguing, the detachment of taxation from its purposes spread to all levels of government. The current administration has carried this disconnect to remarkable heights, cutting taxes while simultaneously prosecuting a trillion-dollar military operation in Iraq and now burdening the nation with even more debt with that dubious "economic stimulation" package. Every candidate for president is loath to make the bold but common-sense assertion that if we want good and necessary things — health care, education, transportation — we have to pay for them. The public, in fact, would gladly agree, as long as they could see results.
A truly straight-talking candidate would destroy that malevolent icon and reestablish the relation between taxation and its purposes.
"War" is another trigger-word. Most incendiary of all, it opens up visceral feelings of nationalism and defensive fear. It also opens up the desire for discipline and self-sacrifice. Metaphorical uses of the word can lead to unwarranted aggression and demoralization.
The Bush administration has ruthlessly exploited the power of this word. Calling the response to terrorist threats a "war" has generated completely inappropriate and ineffective reactions. Terrorist groups are not nations but tiny, diverse, and often unrelated cells of individuals without armies, air-power, or large-scale munitions; they rely on home-made explosives and arsenals of small arms plundered or purchased. Common sense dictates that they should be dealt with on their own terms, on their own scale, by working with the police forces of the countries where they hide to flush them out and bring them to civil justice, and by censuring those countries that consciously harbor them.
The administration most effectively used the war-on-terror metaphor to whip up support for starting actualy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, most analysts agree, did not squelch terrorists but opened up new opportunities for them.
The war-metaphor is also employed to heighten anxiety and compel support for the continued American presence in Iraq. By every conventional definition, the war there ended when the Iraqi army was defeated and Saddam Hussein deposed, but politicians and the press have continued to designate as "war" what is plainly now a policing operation, an attempt to bring order to a country beset by paramilitary factions. As with the "war on terror," the "war in Iraq" terminology shapes the policy of maintaining a huge military presence that has proved to be a helpless Goliath pelted by the small stones of improvised explosives and small arms.
"We are a nation at war," all the candidates, including opposed-from-the-start Obama, repeat in their stump speeches. But as long as that phrase is hammered at, a realistic resolution of the Iraq dilemma will be impossible.
And then there’s "defense spending." Though the U.S. spends more on the military than all other nations combined, no candidate has touched the subject of whether all this is really necessary, fearing political suicide. But the promise of a thorough review of the military budget might make a candidate actually credible. Rather than being tarred as "soft on defense," a forthright candidate would be seen as "hard on accountability." Half of the annual $700 billion defense budget — the highest in adjusted dollars since World War II — is being spent on high-tech, big-ticket items like multimillion-dollar fighter planes that are useless in the small-scale, on-the-ground actions that are most likely to occur today, while the manpower needed for these actions is lacking and often woefully underequipped and unprotected. Were the public truthfully apprized of the skewed priorities of the Pentagon and the Congress (which routinely appropriates more than even the Pentagon proposes, to fuel projects in their states and districts), the magic of the defense-spending mantra might evaporate.
Until a candidate has the courage to cut down these shibboleths and many more like them that stylize and distort the debate, there will be little straight-talk on the issues, eloquent or prosaic. And little action either.
Words matter.
Part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy has been to portray her opponent Barack Obama as a man of eloquent words and herself as a woman of decisive action — it’s performance, not peroration, she would say if she were eloquent, that makes an effective president.
She’s right in at least one sense: Words can indeed seduce, and empty words are often the most seductive of all.
This applies not only to Obama but to political discourse in general. Words do matter; they construct the mental picture that shapes our view of the world and our responses to it. If words are misused or misapplied, some very bad responses can result.
There are certain words that when beaten enough in political rhetoric take on a life of their own. They trigger a host of associations that go far beyond their basic meanings. Used ideologically, they can cloud clear thinking and push people and politics in ways that often defy common sense. A true straight-talker would do the public great service by unmasking these words for what they are and opening new and honest dialogue on the issues that lie beneath them.
"Tax" is such a trigger-word. Its straightforward meaning as a levy used by government to pay for its operation and for public projects has been turned by ideologues clustered around the long-ago oratory of Ronald Reagan into a symbol of intrinsic evil, detached from any purpose. California’s Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, is an early and classic example of this detachment, where residential property tax rates were set at fixed levels and no longer pegged to the needs of the community. When public education costs, for which property taxes had been primarily used, continued to rise, there was no longer the instrument of taxation to pay for them — or to provide an incentive to control them.
With sufficient haranguing, the detachment of taxation from its purposes spread to all levels of government. The current administration has carried this disconnect to remarkable heights, cutting taxes while simultaneously prosecuting a trillion-dollar military operation in Iraq and now burdening the nation with even more debt with that dubious "economic stimulation" package. Every candidate for president is loath to make the bold but common-sense assertion that if we want good and necessary things — health care, education, transportation — we have to pay for them. The public, in fact, would gladly agree, as long as they could see results.
A truly straight-talking candidate would destroy that malevolent icon and reestablish the relation between taxation and its purposes.
"War" is another trigger-word. Most incendiary of all, it opens up visceral feelings of nationalism and defensive fear. It also opens up the desire for discipline and self-sacrifice. Metaphorical uses of the word can lead to unwarranted aggression and demoralization.
The Bush administration has ruthlessly exploited the power of this word. Calling the response to terrorist threats a "war" has generated completely inappropriate and ineffective reactions. Terrorist groups are not nations but tiny, diverse, and often unrelated cells of individuals without armies, air-power, or large-scale munitions; they rely on home-made explosives and arsenals of small arms plundered or purchased. Common sense dictates that they should be dealt with on their own terms, on their own scale, by working with the police forces of the countries where they hide to flush them out and bring them to civil justice, and by censuring those countries that consciously harbor them.
The administration most effectively used the war-on-terror metaphor to whip up support for starting actualy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, most analysts agree, did not squelch terrorists but opened up new opportunities for them.
The war-metaphor is also employed to heighten anxiety and compel support for the continued American presence in Iraq. By every conventional definition, the war there ended when the Iraqi army was defeated and Saddam Hussein deposed, but politicians and the press have continued to designate as "war" what is plainly now a policing operation, an attempt to bring order to a country beset by paramilitary factions. As with the "war on terror," the "war in Iraq" terminology shapes the policy of maintaining a huge military presence that has proved to be a helpless Goliath pelted by the small stones of improvised explosives and small arms.
"We are a nation at war," all the candidates, including opposed-from-the-start Obama, repeat in their stump speeches. But as long as that phrase is hammered at, a realistic resolution of the Iraq dilemma will be impossible.
And then there’s "defense spending." Though the U.S. spends more on the military than all other nations combined, no candidate has touched the subject of whether all this is really necessary, fearing political suicide. But the promise of a thorough review of the military budget might make a candidate actually credible. Rather than being tarred as "soft on defense," a forthright candidate would be seen as "hard on accountability." Half of the annual $700 billion defense budget — the highest in adjusted dollars since World War II — is being spent on high-tech, big-ticket items like multimillion-dollar fighter planes that are useless in the small-scale, on-the-ground actions that are most likely to occur today, while the manpower needed for these actions is lacking and often woefully underequipped and unprotected. Were the public truthfully apprized of the skewed priorities of the Pentagon and the Congress (which routinely appropriates more than even the Pentagon proposes, to fuel projects in their states and districts), the magic of the defense-spending mantra might evaporate.
Until a candidate has the courage to cut down these shibboleths and many more like them that stylize and distort the debate, there will be little straight-talk on the issues, eloquent or prosaic. And little action either.
THE PARENT TRAP
February 28, 2008
Mrs. Clinton has lately been taking the pundits’ advice to reinvigorate her candidacy by re-deploying her sensitive side. It worked in New Hampshire, remember? It could work again in Texas and Ohio.
After last week’s debate with Barack Obama, it looked like nurture was overtaking nature. Clinton made some feeble jabs at her opponent (Plagiarism? Please.), but in the end it was she who tried to actualize what Obama has long been talking about: conciliation, negotiation, flexibility — the politics of hope.
"You know," she said in the debate’s closing moments, "no matter what happens in this contest, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored. You know, whatever happens, we’re going to be fine."
It appeared to many that she was preparing herself and her supporters for a gracious and noble concession on the nomination: no bitter end-game, no end-run with the super-delegates. As the polls showed her base eroding from all sides, she presented herself as someone who was above the fray, someone who would sacrifice her ambition and near-hereditary claim on national leadership for the unity of the party and the good of the country. Reporters from the New York Times commented that for most of the debate, she and Obama were "acting more like running mates than rivals."
Nurture.
But nature came out on Saturday, in response to a flier by the Obama campaign claiming (falsely, it turned out) that she was a free-trade proponent. "Shame on you, Barack Obama!" she shrilly reproached.
Shame on you? Now she sounded like a scolding mom. Hearing this, Chelsea may have had flashbacks to the high-chair and spilled vegetables. You may have had them too; I certainly did.
Over the months, the Democratic race has evolved into a microcosmal clash of the generations, a symbol of what is going on, largely unarticulated, in the country as a whole. The caucuses and primaries threw out all those graying friends of the family, Biden and Dodd and the rest, and what remained was the fundamental: the test of wills between Mom and the Kid.
Oh, and let’s not forget Dad. Bill Clinton’s January remark that Obama’s she-was-wrong/I-was-right taunt on Iraq was "the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen" is just the male version of "Shame on you." These are the familiar cries of frustrated parents everywhere and at every time: How could you do this to us, after all that we’ve done for you? They’re the spontaneous yet stereotypical reactions to rebellious children. Who doesn’t remember returning home from their first semester away at college, full of naïve, idealistic, and derisive opinions on everything, and being laughed away from the dinner table by their offended elders — and maybe berated for plagiarism, too?
The clash of generations has long been played out on the political stage, because politics is a mirror of the culture. Most ironically, it last appeared between the Clintons and the first Bush in 1992: forward versus backward, innovative versus establishment. That the Clintons have ignored frequent reminders by the press that they were then the same age as Obama is now, and that they then employed the same rhetoric of change that he’s employing now, speaks to the overall state of denial among the Baby Boomers: Thinking themselves forever young, they cannot face the inevitability of eclipse, supersession, and eventual discard.
The endorsement of Obama by Ted Kennedy and his nieces Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver was no mere endorsement. It was a symbolic act reaching deep into the American psyche: The torch must again be passed to a new generation of Americans.
In the best families, the children grow up and the parents grow down. There is an alliance, not an alienation, of the generations, a mutual acknowledgment that each has something at stake and something to give. The youth provide vigor and often unthematic hope; the elders provide practical experience tempered by failure and proven by success.
Hope is Obama’s theme; experience is Clinton’s. Neither yet seem to realize that the two themes are not opposites but complements. Melding them would make an unbeatable team.
"We’re going to be fine."
Mrs. Clinton has lately been taking the pundits’ advice to reinvigorate her candidacy by re-deploying her sensitive side. It worked in New Hampshire, remember? It could work again in Texas and Ohio.
After last week’s debate with Barack Obama, it looked like nurture was overtaking nature. Clinton made some feeble jabs at her opponent (Plagiarism? Please.), but in the end it was she who tried to actualize what Obama has long been talking about: conciliation, negotiation, flexibility — the politics of hope.
"You know," she said in the debate’s closing moments, "no matter what happens in this contest, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored. You know, whatever happens, we’re going to be fine."
It appeared to many that she was preparing herself and her supporters for a gracious and noble concession on the nomination: no bitter end-game, no end-run with the super-delegates. As the polls showed her base eroding from all sides, she presented herself as someone who was above the fray, someone who would sacrifice her ambition and near-hereditary claim on national leadership for the unity of the party and the good of the country. Reporters from the New York Times commented that for most of the debate, she and Obama were "acting more like running mates than rivals."
Nurture.
But nature came out on Saturday, in response to a flier by the Obama campaign claiming (falsely, it turned out) that she was a free-trade proponent. "Shame on you, Barack Obama!" she shrilly reproached.
Shame on you? Now she sounded like a scolding mom. Hearing this, Chelsea may have had flashbacks to the high-chair and spilled vegetables. You may have had them too; I certainly did.
Over the months, the Democratic race has evolved into a microcosmal clash of the generations, a symbol of what is going on, largely unarticulated, in the country as a whole. The caucuses and primaries threw out all those graying friends of the family, Biden and Dodd and the rest, and what remained was the fundamental: the test of wills between Mom and the Kid.
Oh, and let’s not forget Dad. Bill Clinton’s January remark that Obama’s she-was-wrong/I-was-right taunt on Iraq was "the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen" is just the male version of "Shame on you." These are the familiar cries of frustrated parents everywhere and at every time: How could you do this to us, after all that we’ve done for you? They’re the spontaneous yet stereotypical reactions to rebellious children. Who doesn’t remember returning home from their first semester away at college, full of naïve, idealistic, and derisive opinions on everything, and being laughed away from the dinner table by their offended elders — and maybe berated for plagiarism, too?
The clash of generations has long been played out on the political stage, because politics is a mirror of the culture. Most ironically, it last appeared between the Clintons and the first Bush in 1992: forward versus backward, innovative versus establishment. That the Clintons have ignored frequent reminders by the press that they were then the same age as Obama is now, and that they then employed the same rhetoric of change that he’s employing now, speaks to the overall state of denial among the Baby Boomers: Thinking themselves forever young, they cannot face the inevitability of eclipse, supersession, and eventual discard.
The endorsement of Obama by Ted Kennedy and his nieces Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver was no mere endorsement. It was a symbolic act reaching deep into the American psyche: The torch must again be passed to a new generation of Americans.
In the best families, the children grow up and the parents grow down. There is an alliance, not an alienation, of the generations, a mutual acknowledgment that each has something at stake and something to give. The youth provide vigor and often unthematic hope; the elders provide practical experience tempered by failure and proven by success.
Hope is Obama’s theme; experience is Clinton’s. Neither yet seem to realize that the two themes are not opposites but complements. Melding them would make an unbeatable team.
"We’re going to be fine."
TAKE A BREAK!
February 21, 2008
Whew! After six weeks of non-stop primaries and caucuses, with the candidates frenetically jetting to an upcoming state to give their victory or non-concession speeches for the previous one, a break in the action looms. They’ve got a whole two weeks before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, and after that there’s only the Wyoming Democratic caucus on March 8 and the Mississippi primary on March 11 before the perhaps decisive, delegate-rich Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Soon they’ll have a lot of time on their hands; what will they do with themselves?
Doesn’t it make you wonder about these people? Even among your Type-AAA friends, do you know a single one so driven? Wouldn’t you think they’d get tired of hearing themselves talk? Can’t they ever relax? If you managed to get one or other of them to your home for a barbecue, would you find them pacing on your patio, gulping the guacamole and treating your guests like a focus-group? Can you imagine any of them clearing the calendar and getting away for a while, to be silent for even a day or two, to listen and to think? Mike Huckabee, bless his heart, did take off for the Cayman Islands this week, but even that was for a lucrative speaking engagement, and John McCain went home for a couple days, prompting the ever-ironic Huckabee to chide him for "doing absolutely nothing."
But doing absolutely nothing is at times the very best thing to do. Ceaseless rallies before adoring fans have already turned the contest from issues to egos. That’s true for all the candidates, but most particularly for Barack Obama. When he started out, the voice of conciliation and unity crying in the wilderness, the message was all about us; now, as the front-runner basking in uncritical applause, the message is all about him. When he has to apologize for giving a policy speech, you know things are going awry.
Both Democratic candidates will probably maintain their torrid pace during the lull in primaries, trying to sustain or regain "momentum." But they might sober up with a quick check of their Latin dictionaries, where momentum is variously defined as "motion," "impulse," and "moment." Movement caused by impulse is momentary. After over a year of ever-increasing exposure, the candidates’ faces and voices are beginning to wear on the public. For their own good and ours, this may be the time to back off for a while.
Now is their window of opportunity. I’d be most heartened to hear news that a candidate has gone to some humble monastery or Walden-like shack to breathe something fresher than airport air, to face themselves alone, and to put the campaign, their goals and their roles, into perspective.
How can candidates be honest with the people if they are not honest with themselves? And how can they be honest with themselves if they haven’t a moment (momentum) to themselves? How can they develop cogent, comprehensive, and long-range policy positions for the country if they are driven by the A.D.D. of relentless motion (momentum)? One only has to look at the slap-dash, quick-fix remedies for everything from Iraq to the economy to see how counterproductive and possibly destructive the politics of impulse (momentum) can be.
So go ahead, candidates, take a break — and give us one too. You need time to think, and we do too. Turn your Blackberries off and go to a place where you can pick some real ones. Try to become real people again. You’ll thank yourselves for it — and the country will thank you too.
Whew! After six weeks of non-stop primaries and caucuses, with the candidates frenetically jetting to an upcoming state to give their victory or non-concession speeches for the previous one, a break in the action looms. They’ve got a whole two weeks before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, and after that there’s only the Wyoming Democratic caucus on March 8 and the Mississippi primary on March 11 before the perhaps decisive, delegate-rich Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Soon they’ll have a lot of time on their hands; what will they do with themselves?
Doesn’t it make you wonder about these people? Even among your Type-AAA friends, do you know a single one so driven? Wouldn’t you think they’d get tired of hearing themselves talk? Can’t they ever relax? If you managed to get one or other of them to your home for a barbecue, would you find them pacing on your patio, gulping the guacamole and treating your guests like a focus-group? Can you imagine any of them clearing the calendar and getting away for a while, to be silent for even a day or two, to listen and to think? Mike Huckabee, bless his heart, did take off for the Cayman Islands this week, but even that was for a lucrative speaking engagement, and John McCain went home for a couple days, prompting the ever-ironic Huckabee to chide him for "doing absolutely nothing."
But doing absolutely nothing is at times the very best thing to do. Ceaseless rallies before adoring fans have already turned the contest from issues to egos. That’s true for all the candidates, but most particularly for Barack Obama. When he started out, the voice of conciliation and unity crying in the wilderness, the message was all about us; now, as the front-runner basking in uncritical applause, the message is all about him. When he has to apologize for giving a policy speech, you know things are going awry.
Both Democratic candidates will probably maintain their torrid pace during the lull in primaries, trying to sustain or regain "momentum." But they might sober up with a quick check of their Latin dictionaries, where momentum is variously defined as "motion," "impulse," and "moment." Movement caused by impulse is momentary. After over a year of ever-increasing exposure, the candidates’ faces and voices are beginning to wear on the public. For their own good and ours, this may be the time to back off for a while.
Now is their window of opportunity. I’d be most heartened to hear news that a candidate has gone to some humble monastery or Walden-like shack to breathe something fresher than airport air, to face themselves alone, and to put the campaign, their goals and their roles, into perspective.
How can candidates be honest with the people if they are not honest with themselves? And how can they be honest with themselves if they haven’t a moment (momentum) to themselves? How can they develop cogent, comprehensive, and long-range policy positions for the country if they are driven by the A.D.D. of relentless motion (momentum)? One only has to look at the slap-dash, quick-fix remedies for everything from Iraq to the economy to see how counterproductive and possibly destructive the politics of impulse (momentum) can be.
So go ahead, candidates, take a break — and give us one too. You need time to think, and we do too. Turn your Blackberries off and go to a place where you can pick some real ones. Try to become real people again. You’ll thank yourselves for it — and the country will thank you too.
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