The Dark Side of Imagination

The human ability to abstract reality has given birth to many beautiful things. What human beings have imagined: soaring cathedrals and bridges, spacecraft, ballet and jazz, they have created. But imagination’s dark side is our ability to abstract other human beings, so that manifestly irrational behaviors like the intentional bombing of civilians, the premeditated sale of tainted milk and peanuts and the dumping of toxic waste can be rationalized. Governments, corporations, and even religious figures take advantage of this aspect of imagination by utilizing useful abstractions like ‘Democracy’, ‘shareholder equity’, and ‘God’.

I’m not saying that God doesn’t exist – I’m saying that when a religious figure invokes God to incite violence or promulgate intolerance, or preach, beyond all reason that condoms make the AIDS crisis worse, they are using our abstract concept of God for their own uses. Similarly, I love democracy, but most of the wars this country has fought in the name of Democracy were in reality about money, power, and subjugation.

People too often justify whatever is done by their government, their corporation, their military unit, their church, by citing rules, regulations, books and slogans. This is how mild mannered clerks kept the trains running and the gas well stocked at Auschwitz. How Douglas McArthur justified his massacre of Bonus Army veterans during the Depression. And how General Curtis LeMay rationalized not only countenancing, but actively trying to foment World War Three with the Soviet Union.

During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay took unilateral, illegal steps, like sending our strategic bomber flights way past their normal turn-around points, in hopes of goading the Russian bear into war. No one questioned the sanity of their superior officer when he spoke of dropping 7000 megatons on the Soviet Union as ‘acceptable’. LeMay opined for the rest of his life that it was too bad we didn’t start World War Three while we had the chance to win it. This highly decorated general, who later ran for vice president on a ticket with George Wallace, was a sociopath; How else to describe a man capable of countenancing the death of millions of innocents as ‘collateral damage’? And LeMay literally had his finger on the nuclear trigger in those days, as there were no locks on these weapons, and the chain of command during times of heightened alert was quite ambiguous. Just think how America would be seen in the history books had he prevailed; how this butchery would have dwarfed Stalin, Mao, and all the other murderers of history combined. .

Imagination permits some people, even people with little girls of their own, to view an innocent little girl as a ‘towlhead’ who should be ‘bombed back into the stone age’, because the abstractions of war, firepower deployed via pushbutton at 30,000 feet, allow them to escape the reality of blood and carnage. Perhaps a media that resolutely insisted on showing us that carnage rather than cravenly substituting video-game like displays of weaponry would make that particular abstraction harder to sustain.

When I visited the Terezin Concentration Camp in the Czech Republic, I often wondered how the commandants, the guards, the myriad others needed to run an enterprise like that could live with themselves. How could they starve little children, only to go home to play with their own? What trick of imagination allowed them to survive such cognitive dissonance?

But could empathy be taught? Could we as a society make the teaching of empathy a priority in our schools? What would emerge if were all trained to feel what others are feeling, to retard our ability to objectify and rationalize; taught the simple primacy of human life over so-called human values? Sure, the true sociopaths – the rapists and thrill killers among us would still exist. I know we couldn’t cure them – but what if we could cure the little complicit pieces of them in all of us?

We’d have a society where men like LeMay would never get their hands anywhere near nuclear weapons, for there would be no nuclear weapons, and no one would be poisoned by greedy corporations or murdered by religious fanatics.

The Real Sacred Cow (Podcast Version)

When budgets and deficits are discussed in the media, and on the floors of congress, Social Security and Medicaid are often called the ‘sacred cows’ of American politics, both by laissez-faire Conservatives, who think them a ‘Socialist’ abomination, and by Progressives, who see them as part of the safety net a humane society erects to protect its more vulnerable members.. But the real sacred cow is so sacred, it’s rarely mentioned seriously as a candidate for pruning at all.

It’s the US military budget, of course. Currently, the US military budget proper is 515 billion for fiscal 2009. Add discretionary spending, veteran’s benefits, and military programs that are under the auspices of other departments, and you’re up to over one trillion dollars per year on defense and war.

One trillion is a very hard number to get your mind around. It is bandied about almost casually these days in discussions of bailouts and wars to the point that it loses any real meaning. An American trillion is a one followed by 12 zeroes. One trillion dollars is over 3,000 dollars for every single man, woman and child in America. But that’s still too abstract. How about this: one trillion seconds ago was 31,688 years ago! 31,000 years ago we were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in caves. Agriculture was still 20,000 years in the future. Textiles, domesticated animals, pottery and metallurgy, medicine, writing, the wheel, the arch, houses – none of these existed.

Throughout history, empires from the Romans to the Spanish, Dutch, and British have all made the same mistakes. They’ve expanded rapaciously, controlling more and more territory and natural resources, often under force of arms, and then rotted from within as their treasuries went deeper and deeper into debt supporting the vast weight of their conquests.

America is certainly following the imperial paradigm to the letter. As in Rome, our infrastructure is crumbling; our educational and health care systems are no longer nearly the world’s best, based on any standard metrics from mathematical literacy to infant mortality. Our standard of living is manifestly eroding. We have military bases all over the world, from remote islands in the Pacific to Antarctica. Our military alone uses more fuel than the eighth largest country in the world, Nigeria, which has a population of over 140 million. And our military budget is greater than all other military budgets on earth… combined. Do we really think that this country can keep spending over 3,000 dollars per year for every one of our citizens and survive? That’s over 10 percent of the average adult American’s annual income!

There is a book entitled ‘addicted to war’ which details what our bloated military costs us. It also points out why this state of affairs persists decade after decade: our senators and congressmen are bought and paid for primarily by the Military-Industrial Complex, a term coined not by some left-wing radical, but by Dwight Eisenhower in his parting speech as president. In a draft, he originally called it the ‘Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex’, and his speech should be required reading in every school, as should Addicted to War, because we will not survive if we continue down the path of every empire that has preceded us.

Now, I’m not saying we don’t need a military; Far from it. There are real threats out there that must be met. Nor am I saying that our veterans don’t deserve the best possible care; they do. But I am suggesting that maybe the United States no longer needs bases in Germany, Poland and Great Britain. Maybe the European Union can figure out how to protect itself. I’m suggesting that a plane like the B2 bomber which was designed for a mission that no longer exists and costs over 2 billion per airplane is not the wisest way to spend our money. Our expensive weapons aren’t winning our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will always need defense, and deterrence against aggression, but if we stop trying to bend the world to our will, and trade coercion for cooperation, we will see a precipitous drop in the number of enemies we face.

And we must tell our elected representatives and the media that the military budget must be cut, if we are to prosper as a nation.

Audio Version

Monkey Business

You know, in general, I think everyone's too PC, too damn sensitive, and can't take a joke. Yet when I finally ignored the fact that Sharpton, one of the worst opportunists and demagogues of recent history, was decrying it, and looked at the Post cartoon, I had to agree: it's racist, incendiary, tone-deaf, in execrable taste, and worthy of condemnation. It's so damn obvious, I can't even call is a 'coded' racist attack. It's overt, and the subtext (assasination) only makes it even more troubling. Now, maybe the cartoonist isn't protesting too much. Maybe he's actually too stupid, or too White (as in 'I've never spent any social time at all with Black People) to see how disgustingly this plays on racial stereotypes. Maybe they're so imbedded in him that he can't even preceive them.

But that's what editorial boards are for.

No, I don't this was a mistake. It's like the mistakes on Fox, where the Republican Congressman who's trying to bed his congressional pages is labelled with a 'D' instead of an 'R' (for weeks on end). This was premeditated slander.

I hate to admit it, since I believe in free speech, and am generally in favor of puncturing PC balloons, but I agree with... Sharpton (oh that hurts!).

I'd agree with a call to boycott the Post too but.. who reads it? Mostly white, working class conservative guys who probably hate the idea of a Black President. I mean, this might improve the Post's circulation with that demographic.

So, when do we get worried? (Vol 1)

I see that the left's honeymoon with Obama is still in full swing. Despite mounting evidence that Obama is not going to be a very liberal president at all, that he is hiring some of the same guys who got us into this economic mess to fix it, that he's following that Bush administration's policies forward on excessive secrecy and on Guantanamo prisoners, everyone's cutting him a lot of slack.

Kinda reminds me of the right; You know, the guys who supported Bush no matter what he did?

Yes, I know it’s early. Yes, I know we can’t blame him for Republican partisan slash and burn tactics in Congress. But we can blame him for the company he keeps, and the policies he crafts, and for legacy policies that he upholds rather than repudiates. And we can also blame him for hypocrisy when he abrogates his own rules, citing the financial meltdown as an excuse.

Some things to ponder about the Obama administration so far:

1) In the administration’s first major test case on the rights of a Guantanamo detainee, they supported the Bush administration’s previous position.
2) Timothy Geitner was former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's right-hand man during the crafting of the initial, woeful T.A.R.P. plan - the one that had no real oversight at all for how the money was spent - hence, no loans, and big bonuses for execs in the bailed out companies. Geitner and Paulson are both veterans of Wall Street. Couldn't Obama have picked someone more Progressive, like Paul Krugman, or former Labor Secretary Robert Reich? Similarly, Robert Rubin, another top architect of the Obama economic plan, helped gut Citibank (while receiving a salary of over 100 million dollars annually). And Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, loves tax cuts and hates infrastructure. Sounds like... Bush! These people are embedded representatives of the culture of unrestrained greed and short-term gain that got us into this mess - do we really want the foxes guarding the hen house again? Don't we want people who are part of the solution, not part of the problem?
3) A recent NY Times article found the Obama economic plan to be strikingly similar to the Bush plans drawn up in November and December.
4) Obama abrogated his own promise not to hire lobbyists into his administration, citing the financial meltdown as a mitigating factor. Yes, I’m absolutely sure that there are no people outside of the power/money elite that have the skills and background to do the job.
5) A new article today indicates that the Obama administration is also perpetuating the same over-secretive tactics of the Bush administration in its dealings with congressional oversight and Media.
6) Despite the most catastrophic economic meltdown since the 1930’s, no one from the President on down through his administration has talked about our bloated, unsustainable military budget. This is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, studiously being avoided by everyone in power. It is inconceivable that this bloated budget (which includes plans for more nuclear submarines and a new generation of larger, even more expensive aircraft carriers), not be under review. One would think that the ‘most liberal member of the Senate’ might spend a little of his political capital (after all, unlike Bush, he actually did win a mandate) and put our military budget, our Imperial Achilles Heel, into the national debate about our future. Instead, all signs point to a heroin-like injection of even more capital into military projects, which will provide some short-term relief, and major withdrawal symptoms later on. This country has been on a permanent war-economy footing since 1939, and we simply can’t sustain it. Yet, the President, the Congress (and the Media, for that matter), don’t mention it, don’t bring it into the debate, into public consciousness.

So, yes, I’m officially worried. Far from being the most Liberal president in my lifetime (I guess I’d give that to Carter, who’s looking more prescient every day in some respects), Obama seems Centrist, embedded in the power elite, and towing the line for the Military-Industrial Complex.

It’s time for the left (where oh where for art thou, Move On?) to make some noise. It’s time to stop wishing, and fantasizing, and imbuing Obama with all of our hopes and dreams, and start demanding some action on the ground.

This financial crisis is actually an incredible opportunity to change this country’s direction, and to challenge some of the basic tenets of our government and economy that have been taken for granted for years. It’s an opportunity that hasn’t been seen since the early days of FDR. Unlike FDR, Obama is dealing with a much more strident and intransigent Republican faction in congress, which is more intent on bloodying him and the Democratic party than in saving working people’s lives, livelihoods, and dreams. I get that. But he is not even speaking to the real problems. He’s not even trying to inject new thinking into the old order. He’s surrounded himself with the usual Beltway/Wall Street suspects, and they’re polishing deck chairs on the Titanic. (Think I’m exaggerating? Look at the Stimulus Bill, and compare it to what FDR did; very little money for boots on the ground projects, lots to government agencies and… I can’t believe it… MORE TAX CUTS!). Yes, he needed some Republican votes. But the input from the Obama side itself had woeful little in terms of infrastructure construction and repair. The bill should have created something like the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The government could have employed hundreds of thousands of people to install solar power and water heating, windmills, for every federal building. This would have been akin to Roosevelt’s bold moves. Instead, we get incremental, timid, mostly status-quo mediocrity.

No, Obama isn’t Bush – don’t mistake what I’m saying for that. But from Geitner, Rubin etc. to his policies on secrecy and detainees, there is a whiff of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ – or at least, it’s feeling a bit more like that than ‘change we can believe in’ – I don’t see it. Same old crew, same old policies, incrementally polished up, same lobbyists like Remoras, swimming in a stream of money, sucking on the Federal carcass.

Kinda makes you pine for a real Revolution…

1300 Palestinians, 13 Israelis

When I was seven, the six-day war was raging in the Middle East. We were one of the first Jewish families in a primarily Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn. The Syrian Ambassador came to Atlantic Avenue and gave an incendiary speech. The only reason I remember it is because it terrified my mother.

Our next door neighbors, whose Americanized name was Kirshy, were Syrian. On the last night of the war, there was a knock on the door. When my mother opened it, the entire Kirshy clan, from young boys to the ancient matriarch, Nina, came in. They carried platters of food, including homemade stuffed grape leaves, made with leaves from our very own backyard grape arbor.

“Let Them Fight over there”, Nina’s eldest son Mike thundered, “here, let’s have a party.” And so we did.

This all seems so naïve now, because the ratio of suffering in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is so one-sided. One cannot simply smile and break bread here, when so many are dying there; Israel’s response to rocket attacks is so disproportionate that it seems a Goliath towering over David.

I saw Fiddler on the Roof a few years ago and was struck by the ending, where the Jews flee the pogroms and the land seizures, to go to the bright new land of Palestine. To do what, I thought? To seize land from others? To rule with an iron fist? To replicate their own suffering, with only the roles reversed?

I sometimes equate Israel to a battered child, which grows into a big, strong man, who batters his own small children. The Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust – something that is not unique to Jews in intent, as any Rwandan or Armenian can tell you – has become a sort of moral carte blanche. We were nearly destroyed by the most highly industrialized genocide in history, and somehow, that gives us an excuse to do the inexcusable. And so, the Jewish state steals land and resources, tortures people, and practices collective punishment.

During the last 40 years, throughout every peace negotiation, Israel has continued a feverish process of land grabs and settlement building, which, to my mind, is untenable to true peace. America has made public noises about the need for this to end, but has privately winked and nodded.

But you cannot plow under a man’s house, his olive groves, where his family has farmed for 500 years, over and over, and not engender outrage.

This outrage has become darkly perverted: sweets are handed out after suicide bombings, so-called art exhibits, which are simulacra of Jewish limbs and blood flying out from explosions, are exhibited in the universities of the Arab world. The Palestinian Authority teaches school children that Jews are subhuman, and the preachers preach the same. And of course, the Muslim world as a whole finds the death of one Palestinian at the hands of the Jewish state to be far more distressing than thousands of Muslim deaths at the hands of the Islamic state of Sudan. There is no moral equivalency being practiced by anyone, and there are no clean hands in the Middle East.

So, what can we do to stop a runaway chain reaction that is inbreeding hate? Can we, as Jews, really abide the graffiti in Israel that exhorts ‘Send the Palestinians to the Crematoria’? Or do we, the American Jewish community, need to take a stand. You cannot really change the other in a relationship, only yourself. We need to change ourselves, alter our relationship to the Arab world by reasserting our relationship to our own ethical tradition of justice that stretches back over two millennia.

We should lobby our politicians to cease all financial support of Israel if one more house is planted on other people’s land. They must move back to the borders of 1967. Leave the towns and cities they’ve created intact, gifts to the Palestinians, or forfeit our support.

There is a perception that the American Jewish electorate is monolithic. It isn’t. There are many like myself who think that America’s one-sided support for Israel endangers America, Israel, and, ultimately, the Jewish people themselves. It is time we spoke up.




Audio Version Here

Fox: red-blooded journalism for those with Iron(y) poor blood!

Fox News ‘contributor’ and NPR Political Correspondent Mara Liasson was visibly angered that Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein at his press conference. Horrors! A blogger was called on by the President! Never mind that Sam Stein has been a MSM reporter for years, including stints with Newsweek and the NY Daily News. No, the big question on my mind for Ms. Liasson is, you work for Fox, right? The most biased, propagandistic arm of Main Stream Media, and you really wanna go there? Have you ever heard the expression about 'glass houses', darlin'?

On a related note, former press secretary and serial liar for the Bush Administration, Ari Fleischer, on O’Reilly’s show, noted with some glee that Bush ‘never called on dot.coms and other oddballs’. Yeah, he just called on a shill with a fake name, (who was also, just for flava, a male escort), whom the White House granted credentials,
without a background check, in order to throw softball questions for the President to hit out of the park! Very professional, Ari!

And let’s not even bother with O’Reilly, one of the greatest bullies of all time, who recently wrote a book for kids which tells them that bullying is wrong. Kinda like Hitler writing a nursery school rhyme about how all life is precious.

Human beings know no shame!

Intransigence (winning at any cost, even if it means losing America)

When Rush Limbaugh said ‘I hope Obama fails’, he spoke volumes, not only about his own world-view, but that of the conservative movement in general, and when coupled with his recent op-ed piece calling for more tax cuts, he really gave us a condensed view of the conservative zeitgeist.

In what he called (apparently without irony, since Rush’s ego knows no bounds) the ‘Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009’, Limbaugh projects a sort of collegial disagreement, a mere quibbling with the President over details and proportions of modalities to be used to stimulate the economy. But on his radio show, his hard-line intransigence shows that he has nothing but contempt for Obama in particular, and the Democrats in general.

The tax plan he ‘boldly’ recommends is striking not only in its lack of originality, but in its utter adherence to the obviously failed policies of the last eight years. He touts more aggressive tax cuts for individuals, notably ‘wealth’ taxes, like Capital Gains (and who has seen their capital gain, of late, Rush?), and feverishly beats farts out of the dead horse that we have ‘one of the highest corporate taxes of all industrialized nations’. Well, yes we do, on the books, but unfortunately, the corporate tax laws are so rife with loopholes that in practice, we have actually one of the lowest.

I guess one question is whether Rush believes his own propaganda (I’m of the belief that he does – witness how he views his own drug problems, which included possession of an incredible 30,000 Oxycontin pills – versus those of others, most notably inner-city minorities). I know it’s hard to believe, but somehow, I think he really believes that he can save us, and with the same discredited ideas, with the label ‘New and Improved!’ slapped on them. Infomercial political thought, Sham-Wow policy-making.

But saying he hoped Obama would fail shows the other side of the Republican coin: that of a group that has been rejected, shamed, cast out into the wilderness, that is essentially saying, ‘If you don’t play by our rules, we’re going to pick up our marbles and go home.’.

The only problem is that home is here, in the US, and it’s teetering on a cliff of another Depression, and it’s the only game in town. I know that Rush and his ilk, with their large salaries, may be out of touch with the ‘common man’ (ironically, the blue collar ‘silent majority’ types they preach to daily on the radio), but on some level, with bank failures, and all the rest, the reality of the situation must have impinged itself on their consciousness a little, no?

But whether it has or not, the logical conclusion of militant intransigence in the face of our grave situation seems to have escaped not only Rush and his imitators, but the Republican party, from John McCain to the entire Republican side of the House: If Obama fails, we fail. It’s that simple. There’s not going to be egg on the face of the Dem’s and a resounding Republican comeback in the midterms if they just dig in their feet and stage (as one Republican congressman actually said) a ‘Taliban-like insurgency’ – there will be a possibly-fatal meltdown of our entire economic system.

During the great depression, things were so bad under Hoover that Roosevelt got what he needed from Congress; in the first 100 days of his administration, they passed almost all of his proposed legislation. Not so this time. Our political culture has evolved into a zero-sum game – Democrats win, Republicans lose – at least in the minds of the hyper-partisan on both sides. This acrimonious warfare trumps common sense, and the common good. Winning or losing the battle for control trumps losing America. We can’t all win, so we will all lose. But if the Republicans insist on clinging to old implementation of old ideas, and also secretly desire the President’s downfall more than America’s resurrection, we’re doomed.

A juvenile policy predicated on Republican shadenfruede at the expense of the Democrats does not public policy make. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. we’ve tried it the Republican way, it hasn’t worked – except for the very wealthy. It’s time to stop bickering, stop worshipping ideology at the expense of empirical observation, and get to work fixing this country.

I am, frankly appalled at the Obama plan, and not because of the ‘tons of pork’ that everyone on the right is apoplectic about (why, oh why, were the TARP bailouts not ‘pork’? Why is Halliburton’s extortionate pricing of military logistical support not ‘pork’? – oh, never mind) No, what galls me are the tax cuts, and, most of all, the miniscule investment in infrastructure! It’s absurd how little is going to project that will put American men and women back to work!

And yet, even this pathetically watered down bill, a bill totally unequal to the task, is too ‘radical’ in Republican eyes.

And I see the next Republican idea on the horizon. I see the billionaires rubbing fingers together. The way out of this situation must be… a nice big war! I mean, after all, it got us out of the Depression, didn’t it? Never mind that common sense dictates that you cannot survive on a permanent war economy, making things that are destroyed, rather than things like bridges, hospitals, and schools. Never mind that we’re already in a war! No, the solution must be… a bigger war! Perhaps a World War!

War in congress, war on the airwaves, perhaps war with Iran, perhaps with all of Islam; war without end, amen. I think that this, plus unrestrained greed, a juvenile Rovian win-at-any-cost pranksterism and a startling lack of empathy for regular folks, is what has blackened the heart of the GOP and reduced it to a legislative prankster and thug, rather than the party of progress and courage that it once was, under men like Lincoln.