NFL Monday Night Football fans will recognize that title from the pre-game show which highlights bonehead plays or stupid calls from games the day or week before. It’s not a highlight you want to be featured on.
If politics were football, the pre-game show on Monday night would have a field day. The biggest problem would be which boneheads to feature, given the time constraints. Neither of the two major political parties would be exempt, but the GOP has dominated bonehead plays for the past couple of months starting with the emergence of Gov. Rick Perry as the leading GOP candidate for President.
Come on, man!
But the most recent bonehead call was the GOP reaction to the President’s jobs proposal which calls on millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share in reducing the deficit while investing money in programs that create jobs. Immediately, House Speaker John and other GOP leaders called the measure “class warfare.”
What about the point that billionaire Warren Buffett made that his workers – middle income wage earners – pay higher tax rates than he does? Or what about the fact that the income gap between the rich and the poor in this country widens every year? Or that in 2010, median household income declined, the poverty rate increased and the number of Americans without health insurance coverage has topped 50 million? Are we expected to ask these already overburdened Americans to pay more to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest?
Come on, man!
Foreign affairs is not exempt from GOP bonehead plays either. It used to be that politics ended at the water’s edge, but that was a long time ago and both parties have contributed to that unfortunate decline. So, now, while the President and Secretary of State Clinton are engaged in intensive negotiations to deal with the looming vote on statehood of Palestine in the U.N., some GOP leaders, including Governor Perry, are accusing the President of throwing Israel under the bus in these negotiations in the hopes the GOP can gain some Jewish American votes in the next election.
Fortunately, most Jewish Americans are smart enough to realize it is not in the short term or long term interest of the U.S., or Israel, to encourage the isolation of Israel in that part of the world.
As NYT columnist Tom Friedman wrote recently, “I’ve never been more worried about Israel’s future. The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.
“This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/opinion/sunday/friedman-israel-adrift-at-sea-alone.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman
So, if the GOP were really earnest in its support of Israel, it would not be encouraging the intransigence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu and the Likud Party. But, emboldened by the Republican win in the recent election in New York’s 9th District which is heavily Jewish and traditionally Democrat, the GOP sees an opportunity to peel off some of the traditional Jewish American vote in the next election.
Come on, man!
Gerald E. Lavey
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Finding Joy in Small Things
Someone once quipped: The first sign of insanity is when you wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and then fire off an angry letter to the editor. On a more personal basis, it might be when a person starts a blog and regularly posts cranky denunciations on the subjects of politics and religion.
So, in order to give both you and me a break, I decided to post something more positive. But, first, let me go back several weeks to set the stage.
In the midst of all this unremitting bad news over the past several months, there appeared an article in The Washington Post in July that showed up like a gentle breeze on a hot, summer day and snapped my perspective back in place, if only momentarily. It was titled “Debt crisis, sure, but a good day for life’s tiny joys.”
The author Monica Hesse wrote: “The world appears to have hit a particular nexus of awful: debt ceilings, credit ratings, London riots. One is tempted to go searching, full of hope, for pinpricks of light that poke holes through the black… If one is willing to look hard enough, to go small enough, to recognize that people often don’t measure life in Dow points but in tiny pleasures — extra cream, friendly dogs, pumpkin curry — then Tuesday was an extremely good news day in Washington.”
The ability to downshift is what Andrew Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona calls resilience. The resilient among us “sort through the muck and find the things we can control,” he says, according to the Post article. “It’s not ignoring the larger problems of the world; it’s finding a way to see them, then see beyond them.”
The poet Mary Oliver wrote: “[What] I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."
And in another place she observed: "I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
When one enjoys the benefits of health and an adequate income, it is easy to rhapsodize about the small joys of life. But, ironically, in my experience, it is often those who are struggling the most with health and other life challenges who seem most attuned to the blessings of life, large and small.
Whatever the case, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11, divided as we are politically, I suspect all of us Americans, as we look back at that awful day, are of one mind in our gratitude to the first responders and other heroes of New York, Washington, and Shankesville whose memories remind us of what is best about America and us as a people.
Gerald E. Lavey
So, in order to give both you and me a break, I decided to post something more positive. But, first, let me go back several weeks to set the stage.
In the midst of all this unremitting bad news over the past several months, there appeared an article in The Washington Post in July that showed up like a gentle breeze on a hot, summer day and snapped my perspective back in place, if only momentarily. It was titled “Debt crisis, sure, but a good day for life’s tiny joys.”
The author Monica Hesse wrote: “The world appears to have hit a particular nexus of awful: debt ceilings, credit ratings, London riots. One is tempted to go searching, full of hope, for pinpricks of light that poke holes through the black… If one is willing to look hard enough, to go small enough, to recognize that people often don’t measure life in Dow points but in tiny pleasures — extra cream, friendly dogs, pumpkin curry — then Tuesday was an extremely good news day in Washington.”
The ability to downshift is what Andrew Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona calls resilience. The resilient among us “sort through the muck and find the things we can control,” he says, according to the Post article. “It’s not ignoring the larger problems of the world; it’s finding a way to see them, then see beyond them.”
The poet Mary Oliver wrote: “[What] I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."
And in another place she observed: "I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
When one enjoys the benefits of health and an adequate income, it is easy to rhapsodize about the small joys of life. But, ironically, in my experience, it is often those who are struggling the most with health and other life challenges who seem most attuned to the blessings of life, large and small.
Whatever the case, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11, divided as we are politically, I suspect all of us Americans, as we look back at that awful day, are of one mind in our gratitude to the first responders and other heroes of New York, Washington, and Shankesville whose memories remind us of what is best about America and us as a people.
Gerald E. Lavey
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Flirting with Lunacy
Maybe it’s just a part of the wider human condition, but the American electorate seems to have a particularly alarming taste for the bizarre and outlandish from time to time. With the rising influence of the Tea Party in the Republican Party, I fear we are entering one of these phases again.
In the 60’s, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Richard Hofstadter wrote a book I recall reading at the time and recently re-read parts of again, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. Among other works, he also wrote ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, which I also picked up again. I suggest that the theses of both books are most pertinent today.
In THE PARANOID STYLE, Hofstadter chronicles radical movements in this country dating back to our beginnings: the anti-Masonic movement, anti-Catholicism, and the always convenient anti-Semitism as spewed by Father Coughlin and others, for example. At the time of the book’s publication, the U.S. was just emerging from the McCarthy era but the John Birch Society was still going strong and Barry Goldwater was about to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Goldwater lost in a landslide in the 1964 election but he paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
As many will remember, Goldwater attacked America’s liberal Democrats with the standard charges from the conservative Right, characterizing them as Socialists/Communist sympathizers and the source of American’s moral decay. Goldwater went so far as to suggest that the liberal backed Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not really a law that citizens needed to follow. In foreign policy, he attacked the bipartisan approach to containing the Soviet Union, initiated during the Truman administration, and called for nothing less than all-out war against the Soviet Union.
Although his image was softened by later developments, Goldwater was scary -- the master of the simple answer to the country’s challenges, famously proclaiming that “just as extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In supporting Goldwater, Governor Ronald Reagan declared: “They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts as morally right.”
Reagan won the Presidency in 1980 on a platform of building up the military, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget, a patently absurd formula on its face, but it worked politically because he sang a tune Americans wanted to hear. Besides, the country was tired of Jimmy Carter and Reagan promised “a new morning in America” in contrast to Carter’s gloomy assessment of a national malaise.
George W. Bush, who adopted Reagan’s simple approach in contrast to his own father’s nuanced approach, was again the master of the simple answer, as was his Vice President Dick Cheney, and this country paid a severe price. We’re still trying to dig out of a hole that they created and are looking around for a simple answer, forgetting who got us into that mess in the first place.
And now we have President Obama, a highly intelligent, educated, balanced personality, who inherited this mess. He sees the world whole, rejects the simple answer, is willing to reach across the aisle, and as a result he is in deep trouble politically. Standing in the wings and heading up the slate of GOP presidential hopefuls are Governor Rick Perry and Rep. Michelle Bachman, two masters of the simple answer. Just cut spending and reduce the tax burden on the job creators, they say, and all will be well. (By the way, they fail to mention that these “so called” job creators -- millionaires and billionaires -- are already creating millions of jobs, but they are jobs overseas where they have to pay workers a fraction of what they would have to pay U.S. workers here.) And, if this simple solution means cutting liberal, socialist New Deal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and certainly Obamacare, so be it.
Of course, as we have seen, the GOP leadership has caved in to this simplistic approach, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor even opposing disaster relief for states and counties devastated by Hurricane Irene unless commensurate cuts are made in other discretionary programs. Earlier, to cite another example, the tentative agreement on the debt ceiling reached by President Obama and Speaker Boehner would have been a no-brainer in ordinary times and considered a victory for good government. But, not now when the country has gone mad and reason and common sense have taken a hike. The simple-answer, anti-intellectual crowd doesn't want to hear about compromise and balance, especially when they are offered by liberal intellectuals from Ivy Leagues schools who think they’re smarter than anyone else. This country needs to be put back in the hands of freedom-loving, God-fearing patriots, they say, good Christian folks who are real Americans and don’t need all that book learning to know what’s right for America. They know in their hearts what’s morally right.
An unfair caricature? Maybe, but Hofstadter’s books reminded me once again that paranoia and anti-intellectualism have strong, deep roots in American culture and from what I see they are in full bloom once again.
Gerald E. Lavey
In the 60’s, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Richard Hofstadter wrote a book I recall reading at the time and recently re-read parts of again, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. Among other works, he also wrote ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, which I also picked up again. I suggest that the theses of both books are most pertinent today.
In THE PARANOID STYLE, Hofstadter chronicles radical movements in this country dating back to our beginnings: the anti-Masonic movement, anti-Catholicism, and the always convenient anti-Semitism as spewed by Father Coughlin and others, for example. At the time of the book’s publication, the U.S. was just emerging from the McCarthy era but the John Birch Society was still going strong and Barry Goldwater was about to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Goldwater lost in a landslide in the 1964 election but he paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
As many will remember, Goldwater attacked America’s liberal Democrats with the standard charges from the conservative Right, characterizing them as Socialists/Communist sympathizers and the source of American’s moral decay. Goldwater went so far as to suggest that the liberal backed Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not really a law that citizens needed to follow. In foreign policy, he attacked the bipartisan approach to containing the Soviet Union, initiated during the Truman administration, and called for nothing less than all-out war against the Soviet Union.
Although his image was softened by later developments, Goldwater was scary -- the master of the simple answer to the country’s challenges, famously proclaiming that “just as extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In supporting Goldwater, Governor Ronald Reagan declared: “They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts as morally right.”
Reagan won the Presidency in 1980 on a platform of building up the military, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget, a patently absurd formula on its face, but it worked politically because he sang a tune Americans wanted to hear. Besides, the country was tired of Jimmy Carter and Reagan promised “a new morning in America” in contrast to Carter’s gloomy assessment of a national malaise.
George W. Bush, who adopted Reagan’s simple approach in contrast to his own father’s nuanced approach, was again the master of the simple answer, as was his Vice President Dick Cheney, and this country paid a severe price. We’re still trying to dig out of a hole that they created and are looking around for a simple answer, forgetting who got us into that mess in the first place.
And now we have President Obama, a highly intelligent, educated, balanced personality, who inherited this mess. He sees the world whole, rejects the simple answer, is willing to reach across the aisle, and as a result he is in deep trouble politically. Standing in the wings and heading up the slate of GOP presidential hopefuls are Governor Rick Perry and Rep. Michelle Bachman, two masters of the simple answer. Just cut spending and reduce the tax burden on the job creators, they say, and all will be well. (By the way, they fail to mention that these “so called” job creators -- millionaires and billionaires -- are already creating millions of jobs, but they are jobs overseas where they have to pay workers a fraction of what they would have to pay U.S. workers here.) And, if this simple solution means cutting liberal, socialist New Deal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and certainly Obamacare, so be it.
Of course, as we have seen, the GOP leadership has caved in to this simplistic approach, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor even opposing disaster relief for states and counties devastated by Hurricane Irene unless commensurate cuts are made in other discretionary programs. Earlier, to cite another example, the tentative agreement on the debt ceiling reached by President Obama and Speaker Boehner would have been a no-brainer in ordinary times and considered a victory for good government. But, not now when the country has gone mad and reason and common sense have taken a hike. The simple-answer, anti-intellectual crowd doesn't want to hear about compromise and balance, especially when they are offered by liberal intellectuals from Ivy Leagues schools who think they’re smarter than anyone else. This country needs to be put back in the hands of freedom-loving, God-fearing patriots, they say, good Christian folks who are real Americans and don’t need all that book learning to know what’s right for America. They know in their hearts what’s morally right.
An unfair caricature? Maybe, but Hofstadter’s books reminded me once again that paranoia and anti-intellectualism have strong, deep roots in American culture and from what I see they are in full bloom once again.
Gerald E. Lavey
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)