The Courage of Obama's Convictions

I voted for Barak Obama, because he promised to reform the health insurance, the banking, and the financial services industries. He also vowed to close the prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and eliminate the "don’t-ask-don’t-tell" policy against gay men and women in America’s armed services.

Now, eight months into his presidency, I am disappointed by his ineffective leadership. He has allowed his opponents to define his policies for voters, which effectively turns over the control of the current legislative agenda to the American Conservative movement.

Conservatives have a lot to answer for. Who first advocated and enacted the bailout of banks and Wall Street? George Walker Bush. Yet Conservatives call such bailouts "intrusive big government spending" and blame Obama for the mess. Who created the enormous budget deficits that will burden our grandchildren? George Walker Bush. Yet Conservatives shout into their radio mikes about Liberals and Socialists who seek to destroy this country by spending it to death. Who increased the size of the United States government? George Walker Bush. Yet Conservatives keep up their mantra about Obama’s enlargement of an already oversized bureaucracy that saps Americans’ self-reliance and interferes with citizens’ personal choices.

Conservative aggression has stymied the Obama administration, but Obama has aided and abetted Conservatives by not stating, clearly, the policies that would aid Congress to pass the necessary reform legislation. He has been so busy being bipartisan that he has failed to notice that he has lost the political initiative that had swept him into office. He will likely never regain it.

If he had had the courage of his convictions, he would have advocated, right from the beginning, health insurance reform, rather than health care reform. That would have eliminated the nonsense about "death panels." The insurance reform would have included a government insurance program, like Medicare, that would compete with private insurance companies, thus lowering the costs of premiums charged by private insurers. The government’s program would not have covered elective surgery. Nor abortions, except in cases of incest, rape, or when the life of the mother was in danger. Obama could have stated clearly, at the beginning of his administration, that this program would have been available only to citizens of the United States and resident aliens. Which would have made Representative Wilson’s outburst not just stupid and untrue, but politically ineffective.

He would have stated, clearly and forcibly, that those who had wanted to stay with private insurance companies would have been allowed to. And they would have been protected from the insurance industry’s questionable practices. The reform would have kept health insurance companies from raising premiums or canceling coverage because of a policyholder’s illness. Insurance companies would not have been allowed to deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions, age, job change, or employment termination. Policyholders would have been protected from a reduction of coverage or an increase of deductibles as long as the policyholder had been paying the premium.

This would have given legislators real issues about actual problems to debate. But it would not have prevented Limbaugh, Beck and Company to distort and lie about insurance reform. But if nothing had been accomplished, they would have had, hanging around their necks, the lack of adequate health care for millions of Americans, many of whom were their listeners and readers. And Obama would have reminded them who was responsible.

Obama would have stated that he wanted to separate consumer banking from stock market and international trade. He would have told Congress to re-enact the Glass Steagall Act, regulate the stock market and international trade so that derivatives and the packaging of mortgages to be sold as securities would be illegal.

He would have advocated specific laws and regulations to stop the extravagance of corporate executive compensation. Bonuses would not have exceeded 20% of an executive’s base salary, and would have been subject to withholding taxes before they were disbursed. They would not have been paid unless the corporation posted a profit of no less than 5% after stockholders had received their dividends. All deferred compensation would have been eliminated, as would all corporate tax deductions for all executive perquisites such as club memberships, use of corporate jets for personal use, executive dining rooms, private use of all corporation-owned transportation, first-class and business class airline tickets, except for business travel outside the continent of North America. These perquisites would have been allowed only if these expenses had been listed as compensation for the specific executive who received them. Then the corporation would have withheld taxes from the base pay of the executive who received them, and the executive would have paid federal and state income taxes on the value of perquisites received.

Yes, Limbaugh and Beck would have shouted "Socialism!" into the Conservative echo chamber (which shows that their ideas and rhetoric have limited intellectual substance). Banks would have claimed that they needed the perquisites and bonuses to retain experienced and productive personnel. Hopefully, Obama would have pointed out that those experienced and productive personnel had been the ones that had brought the banking industry to its knees. Obama would have also pointed out that, in the recession caused by their inept and corrupt management, the executives would not have quit their jobs if they had not received those bonuses and perks. New positions, even for executives, would have been very difficult to find.

Immediately after assuming the position of Commander-in-Chief, Obama would have ordered the closure of the prison for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. He would have also closed all the "black sights" maintained around the world. He would have transferred the inmates and internees to the federal facility at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Kansans would have protested loudly, but their protest would have put them in the awkward position of wanting the money that the Federal facility would have brought into their state, but, at the same time, casting doubt on the ability of the military to hold its prisoners. Hardly a way to support the troops. However, they would have benefited from the thanks of their fellow Americans who would have spent millions in Kansas for expanded facilities. They would have also received the thanks for all those fiscal conservatives for helping to eliminate the expense of maintaining all those secret holding sites around the world.

Obama would have put accused terrorists on trial in civil courts immediately and ordered that all evidence against them be revealed. He would have let the evidence reveal whatever it did, including the sources of intelligence and the US government officials that approved the imprisonment and torture of the accused. He would have ordered that the innocent be returned to the countries where they were first detained, thus returning the United States of America to the status of Nation of Laws.

Of course, the Swift Boaters, various retired generals, and probably Senator John McCain, would have gotten on Larry King and Fox News to call for the impeachment of President Obama for treason and putting Americans at risk. Limbaugh would probably have called Obama an "Arab-loving thug" and demanded another investigation into Obama’s birthplace. Again, Obama would have forcibly reminded Conservatives that we were a Nation of Laws, not Lies, and that our military could hold prisoners effectively. He would have reminded them that fair and open trials had been something that terrorists wanted to destroy. He also would have announced that we needed to recruit translators of languages that are spoken in the Middle East, and that he would rehire those foreign-born and gay Americans that had been fired because they were foreign born and gay.

After that, he would have told Congress to reverse the law formulating the "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy against gays in the military. While Congress debated the issue, he, as Commander in Chief, would have ordered that gays in the military be allowed to serve openly and without prejudice to their expectation of promotion. Thus joining the armed services of such countries as Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. I leave the Conservatives’ probable response to your imagination.

President Obama wasn’t elected to be popular. He was elected to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States of America and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He was also elected to fulfill his campaign promises. That he has not done.

Hate Speech Leads to Violence and Death

Please read "Where Did ‘We’ Go?", by Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, September 30, 2009. It's posted on their website.

The Ministry of Truth of the United States of America

President Obama revealed his educational agenda by telling children to stay in school and study hard. He also told them that hard work leads to good things. The very thing that President George Herbert Walker Bush told schoolchildren in 1991.

At that time, the Democratic Party wrongly complained about Bush’s agenda and even investigated the money that was spent to broadcast the speech. Yes, wrongly, since nothing illegal was done. The whole incident made the Democrats look silly. Yet during the last few days, the Republicans, instead of learning from the silliness of the Democrats, blustered about Obama’s lust to preach the doctrines of socialism to schoolchildren, his desire to set up a personality cult, and his abuse of presidential power.

Before Obama gave his speech, a forthright conservative parent worried that Obama would turn public schools over to some socialist agenda. A guest on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program compared Barak Obama to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Another radio pundit, fearful for his child’s safety, said, "I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barak Obama talk to my kid alone." These assessments of Obama’s speech appeared in The New York Times on Friday, September 4, 2009, four days before Obama spoke, and three days before the text of the speech was released.

I would think that these concerned citizens might be embarrassed now that Obama’s speech has been delivered. Some others might even expect these good people to admit they were wrong and support Obama’s statements to American schoolchildren. But they cannot and they will not. Without realizing it, these folks have themselves become indoctrinated by the American version of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

The Ministry of Truth was run by the Party, which was divided into the Inner Party and the Outer Party. The Inner Party was in complete control of all economic and political activity. It also broadcast news of glorious military victories and increased manufacturing production. The data was repeated again and again. And again.

The Outer Party’s members, who obeyed all rules promulgated by the Inner Party, had to listen to the news everywhere, in the street, in restaurants, in train stations. Even in their homes, where television sets, installed by the Ministry of Truth, could not be turned off. The uninterrupted news distracted them from the rusty plumbing in their flats, their utter dependence on the Inner Party for employment, and the ever-diminishing vocabulary that they were allowed to use. Their world was a vast echo chamber of ideals preached by the Inner Party.
Members of the Outer Party never thought of examining the data they were told; to do so would have been a thought crime, punishable by public humiliation, torture and maybe death. So, they repeated the data to each other in conversations that became ever more restricted in subject matter. There were no discussions of sex, politics and religion, only the repetition of data and the three principles of the Inner Party: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

Repetition and more repetition taught them the truth, and they believed it because their fellow members of the Outer Party believed it. As a matter of fact, it comforted them and, as Winston Smith the protagonist did, they overcame their individuality and learned to love Big Brother.
In his afterword to the novel, Erich Fromm wrote in 1961: "It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality into something relative to his own interests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions: to the slogan ‘how can millions be wrong’ is added ‘and how can a minority be right.’ Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgement concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane."

The American Ministry of Truth is a creature of radio, television, and the Internet, which can be used to inform, persuade and entertain. They are also used by the majority to repeat ideas that ruin careers, distort government policy, and hide destructive activities.

Think of the times in which the majority was wrong. Until Joseph Welch revealed Joseph McCarthy’s lies and distortions, the majority thought that Communists had taken over the government. Until Alexander Butterfield revealed that the Nixon White House had tapes of conversations held in the oval office, the majority of Americans believed that Richard Nixon had not been involved in the Watergate break-ins. Until the US invaded Iraq, the majority of Americans knew that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, and until September, 2006, the majority of Americans knew that Hussein and Osama bin-Laden had plotted the attack on the World Trade Center. In all these cases, the truth was what the majority said, and the minority was shouted down and vilified as being unpatriotic.

Despite the number of times the majority is proven wrong, we Americans continue to seek out popular public figures who express popular opinions that mirror our own prejudices and ignorance. We revel in radio and TV talk shows that feature shouting opinionizers who are retired military officers, political activists, think-tank scholars, government officials, and columnists who role-play as liberals and conservatives. The George Will and Sam Donaldson Act is a favorite among the majority of Americans who prefer vaudeville to journalism.

The information we receive from each of them is biased toward the views that we already hold, because we avoid programs that do otherwise. We find comfort in the "fair and balanced" doctrine, which simply means that a liberal and a conservative sit in front of a microphone and camera to shout at each other for our benefit. When our favorite scores a point, we cheer; when the other guy does, we boo. We are entertained, but are neither persuaded nor informed.

Celebrities know what their audiences want to hear. Thus Rush Limbaugh tells his audience: "Remember, now, the Alinsky rule: ‘You speak within the realm of your audience's experience.’ The American people want to hear children motivated to be good, to do the best they can, to work hard. Okay, so go out and use the language and use the philosophy that makes your audience comfortable with you when your objective is the exact opposite of what you say. Barack Obama wants as many of these kids in school to grow up needing government services as he can."

Limbaugh uses the Alinsky rule, and then tells his followers that Obama said something that he didn’t. I do not believe that Obama wants kids in school to grow up needing government services. Nor have I seen any evidence of actions taken by his administration that demonstrate Limbaugh’s assertion.

However, if I were to get all my political and economic information from no one but Limbaugh, I would whoop with delight every time he insulted a government official in the Obama administration. I would repeat the latest Rushism to my fellow believers in conversation or via e-mail and ask them to send it on to their friends. Thus I would become an instrument of the American Ministry of Truth.

I have to give Limbaugh credit; he uses language very well, and he is in Don Rickles’s league when it comes to insults and put downs. The difference between them is vast. Rickles is an entertainer; Limbaugh is a thrice-divorced, recovering drug addict posing as an advocate for American family values. And pretending to be a Christian-American’s Minister of Truth.

The Ministry of Truth also uses e-mail to repeat untruths. (Look up my blog of December 27, 2008, which examined the lies spread by someone posing as a historian.) A recent e-mail, which has been making the rounds, uses a good cause to assert a religious prejudice. It uses all capital letters to show its indignation and heart break. I have left it in its "flaming" format for full effect.

"RECENTLY THIS WEEK, UK REMOVED THE HOLOCAUST FROM ITS SCHOOL CURRICULUM BECAUSE IT ‘OFFENDED’ THE MOSLEM POPULATION WHICH CLAIMS IT NEVER OCCURRED. THIS IS A FRIGHTENING PORTENT OF THE FEAR THAT IS GRIPPING THE WORLD AND HOW EASILY EACH COUNTRY IS GIVING INTO IT. IT IS NOW MORE THAN 60 YEARS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE ENDED. THIS E-MAIL IS BEING SENT AS A MEMORIAL CHAIN, IN MEMORY OF THE SIX MILLION JEWS, 20 MILLION RUSSIANS, 10 MILLION CHRISTIANS, GYPSIES AND 1,900 CATHOLIC PRIESTS WHO WERE MURDERED, MASSACRED RAPED, BURNED, STARVED AND HUMILIATED WITH THE GERMAN AND RUSSIAN PEOPLES LOOKING THE OTHER WAY! NOW, MORE THAN EVER, WITH IRAN, AMONG OTHERS, CLAIMING THE HOLOCAUST TO BE "A MYTH," IT IS IMPERATIVE TO MAKE SURE THE WORLD NEVER FORGETS. THIS E-MAIL IS INTENDED TO REACH 40 MILLION PEOPLE WORLDWIDE!"

There are indeed people who deny the occurrence of the Holocaust, the President of Iran being one, and Roman Catholic Bishop William Richardson of the UK being another. However, this e-mail seeks to inflame hatred of Islamic people by claiming that Muslims forced the British Education Ministry to remove the Holocaust from its curriculum. Which is not true.

There was a controversy in a town in Northern England (both BBC and The Guardian have stories about this on their websites), where Muslims wanted a local council to remove the Holocaust from the curriculum. But it wasn’t removed by the local council; nor, I repeat, was it removed by UK’s Ministry of Education.

Another similar e-mail said the same thing about the Kentucky public schools, but it wasn’t true either. Both are being circulated by that party of Americans who believe that Islam is evil. However, what they believe, in this instance, is a lie.

The Ministry of Truth of the United States of America gets its ideas from prejudices—that shadow world of narrow minds and mean spirits who transform reality into something relative to their own interests and functions.. They have made themselves instruments of circulation and repitition, because that is the only way the flimsiness of their reasoning can appear solid. After all, if a million people believe it, how can it be wrong?

Our Health Care Brawl

"What we have here is a failure to communicate!"
Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke

In the current health care brawl we are not listening to our political opponents. At our town meetings, we are shouting down our elected representatives, and we are threatening our opponents with violence and death. We scream epithets at politicians, and brand them liars, socialists, communists or fascists. We admire those of us with the loudest voices that interrupt our opponents with satiric rejoinders rather than relevant information. We all have become members of a political WWF, and we smack down our political opponents with animal roars and vulgar gestures that we should have left on the elementary school playground. Some of us even carry pistols to town meetings and rallies, in the belief that the Second Amendment means it’s okay to intimidate people with weapons. On television every night, we are presented with the alarming spectacle of our feeding on our own emotions.

We can’t communicate because we are afraid. Many of us agree with the voter who screamed, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Yes, it was an amusing slip, but the man is not stupid. He is genuinely afraid. Afraid that, even though Medicare is a government program, we will not receive proper medical attention if we adopt national health services such as those in England and Canada. Some of us shrink from a government bureaucracy that we have been told will stand between Americans and their physicians. Others of us shudder at the reports of federal death camps for our ailing elderly who cannot pay for medical care. We fear, and we will literally fight to the death those that are advocating evil policies. Even if our fears are based on lies or our own ignorance.

Ignorance is the bane of political discourse, and we can’t communicate because we simply don’t know what we are talking about when we discuss the national health services of England and Canada. They aren’t perfect, but those of us who claim government provided health care is wicked do not understand those programs. In England and Canada surgery, births, end-of-life counselling, vaccinations, medications, physical exams are all provided free, and without permission from a bureaucrat or insurance claims adjustor.

The ultimate in ignorance was an editorial in Investor's Business Daily, which claimed, "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." However Professor Hawking denied the assertion. "I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told The Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." I hope that the IBD’s editorial board expressed their views out of ignorance of Professor Hawking’s nationality (he is British, not American), not out of a wish to deceive their readers. Investors Business Daily later corrected their editorial blunder.

We are divided into camps that justify lies, exaggerations, and intimidation of our opposition. And we get away with it, because no one has explained what health care reform will do. However, health care is not the problem. The US has excellent health care. The problem is getting to it. We do not need health care reform, we need health insurance reform.
We are debating the wrong issue. We need to directly address the federal regulation of the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, and the industry that manufactures medical devices and implements.

Federal regulations will not destroy capitalism, privacy and family values. We need regulations to protect consumers of health insurance that pays for the drugs, pace makers, urine analyses, liver transplants, spinal taps, and the machines, tubes, meters, monitors and all the other gadgets and materials that are attached to or inserted into our bodies.

Consumer protection is the issue we should be debating. How do we protect consumers from being denied medical care by corporate bureaucrats and insurance clerks with no medical training? How do we protect consumers from unjustifiable cancellation of medical insurance? How do we protect consumers from unnecessary and fraudulent medical tests and procedures? From losing insurance coverage when our employers go out of business? From emergency rooms overcrowded with ill and injured people with no insurance at all. From fees on our medical bills that pay for the medical treatment of others who are uninsured?

President Obama, Vice President Biden, the United States Senate, and the US House of Representatives have not dealt with these problems. Instead they have kept the debate about health care, a topic so broad that it can be easily manipulated. Obama has not presented a plan that says, specifically, what it will do to protect health insurance consumers. Senators and members of Congress haven’t either.

They can’t, because they are in the pockets of the very industries that need regulation. As long as their re-election campaigns are financed by these corporations and their lobbying groups, consumers will continue to suffer. When Congress re-convenes in the fall, nothing will happen. Health insurance reform will not happen. The number of us with no health insurance will increase, but government workers, including The President, his cabinet and aides, members of the Senate and House of Representatives, will be covered. To them, and to executives and employees of the health insurance industry, "God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world."

As long as they keep us ill-informed and deaf to one another’s reasonable words.

White Male Victims and Judicial Activists

During the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, no one learned much about Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, but there was enough drama to fill a reality TV show. Over four days, seven white, conservative Republican Senators sought to portray themselves as victims of Sotomayer’s ethnic prejudice and judicial activism. They became, in effect, the White Senators Council of the Judiciary Committee. And they were very upset by a statement Judge Sotomayor had made to a group of Hispanic law students at the University of California, Berkeley.

And this is what Judge Sotomayor said: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Judge Sotomayor’s statement asserts that a Latina woman’s experience is richer than that of a white man who has not had to raise families in drug-ridden neighborhoods with poorly equipped schools, a white man who has not had to endure jokes about wetbacks and funny accents, a white man who has not had to prove that he was an American citizen when applying for a job. These experiences, which are commonplace in the Latino community, are sources of wisdom for Latina women who succeed in spite of them.

Sensible Americans understood the judge’s meaning, but the members of the White Senators Council were really hurt. To the quick. After all, they as white men had every right to be expected to reach conclusions that were at least as good as those of a wise Latina woman. They were Senators. Some of their best friends were Latinos.

They drew themselves up in righteous indignation and attacked Judge Sotomayor for being prejudiced against white people. They so eagerly took on the role of victim that I expected them to bring charges against the judge under the Civil Rights Act. One injured member of the White Senators Council, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, felt constrained to say in his own defense, "If I ever said something remotely like that, my career would have been over."

Senator Graham spoke in code, White Speak Code. Translated, the message was: "White people, despite a three-hundred-year history of racial and ethnic bias, slave trading, miscegenation, and murder, are really nice folks whom non-whites must love, respect, and never say anything negative about."

White Speak Code used to be difficult to decipher, but it is now so prevalent that it is easy to translate. We all have heard the complaint, "I don’t want my tax money spent on people who are too lazy to work and too lazy to learn English." Believe it or not, conservatives think that such statements are assertions of good American virtues. They also believe that only conservative white voters can decode the message. "You-know-who" are lazy, jobless people who refuse to learn English.

In the old days, members of the White Senators Council were more honest about their beliefs. I remember another South Carolinian, the late Strom Thurmond, who yelled "Segregation NOW! Segregation FOREVER!" He also fathered a black girl out of wedlock.

Suppose Senator Graham had said, "I would hope that a wise white man, with the richness of his experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived his life." Would his career have been over? I doubt it. There is still an elite who believes that the lives of white people are richer than and superior to those of all other ethnic groups. They believe that a white man’s wisdom is gained from telling jokes about the way "illegals" speak, attending schools in all white, drug-free neighborhoods, and making sure their tax money does not go to people who are too lazy to work or learn English. These folks would continue to vote for Lindsey Graham. And for the time being, they will be able to re-elect Graham and all the other members of the White Senators Council.

But not for long. And this is why Graham and his colleagues on the White Senators Council act like victims. They are frightened.

The world is no longer of the white, by the white and for the white. The world contains a growing Latino and African-American population that no longer asks for help but demands its rights, a population that votes and no longer depends entirely on white men for employment. This world contains Junot Diaz and Toni Morrison, Edward James Olmos and Denzel Washington, Ricardo Sanchez and Colin Powell, Mario Molina and Mark Dean. Not to mention Sonia Sotomayor and Eric Holder.

The White Senators Council simply does not understand what is happening in the world. They do not understand that they can no longer order Latinos and African Americans around. Nor can they patronize them. They have to cooperate with them.

And they don’t know how. Frank Rich in his column for The New York Times (July 19, 2009) describes what to me was the most embarrassing moment in the Sotomayor hearings.
"…When Tom Coburn of Oklahoma merrily joked to Sotomayor that ‘You’ll have lots of ’splainin’ to do,’ it clearly didn’t occur to him that such mindless condescension helps explain why the fastest-growing demographic group in the nation is bolting his party.

"Coburn wouldn’t know that behind the fictional caricature Ricky Ricardo was the innovative and brilliant Cuban-American show-business mogul Desi Arnaz. As Lucie Arnaz, his and Lucille Ball’s daughter, told me last week, it always seemed unfair to her that those laughing at her father’s English usually lacked his fluency in two languages. Then again, Coburn was so unfamiliar with Jews he didn’t have a clear fix on what happened in the Holocaust until 1997, when he was 48. Party elders like Bill Bennett had to school him after he angrily berated NBC for subjecting children and 'decent-minded individuals everywhere' to the violence, 'full-frontal nudity and irresponsible sexual activity of Schindler’s List."

Senator Coburn’s wisdom is the true White Man’s burden: ignorance through complacency. What the White Senators Council doesn’t know is not important to them, because it doesn't touch them personally. And here we arrive at what I have observed about conservatives. Conservatives believe that if something hasn’t happened to them, it hasn’t happened. If it has happened to other people, it is unimportant.

Maybe they will acknowledge problems in the Latino and African American communities when those votes push them out of office.

The White Senators Council also assumed the role of Constitutional Scholar-Philosophers when they accused Judge Sotomayor of being "a liberal judicial activist." As explained by the White Senators Council, judicial activism is the unConsitutional assumption of legislative powers by any part of the judiciary, but especially the Supreme Court. However, the term "liberal judicial activist" is really White- Speak Code for any judges whose decisions they disagree with.

Truth to tell, all judges serving in Federal courts—conservative, moderate, or liberal—are judicial activists. They write opinions explaining their decisions of the court, and the decisions and opinions, even the dissents, become a part of the law. The interpretation of the law becomes a part of the law by explaining how the law may or may not be applied, how and why the processes of the courts may or may not be correct, or even whether a Federal or State law is Constitutional. Even whether a past Supreme Court decision is still in effect.

Historians, journalists, and professors have pointed this out. James MacGregor Burns (Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, Penguin Press, 2009) gives us a history of the conflict between the Supreme Court and the President, between the Congress and the Supreme Court, and shows us that judicial activism began with John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803). Marshall wrote: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Marshall went on to say that this judicial power "extended to all cases arising under the constitution." Burns tells us, "With these words, Marshall laid the basis for a power of judicial review of acts of Congress—indeed over the acts of all branches of national and state governments—so absolute and sweeping that it would eventually create supremacy of the Supreme Court over American government (emphasis Burns’s)."

Thus began partisanship in the process of the appointment of judges by the President and the confirmation by the Senate. Presidents want judges to decide cases so that their political party’s goals will be supported. So do Senators. Sotomayor is a judicial activist, and so are John Paul Stevens, Antonin Gregory Scalia, Anthony Mcleod Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Gerald Breyer, John Glover Roberts, Jr., and Samuel Anthony Alito.

The White Senators Council wants justices to be umpires, but the analogy is ridiculous. Imagine in a baseball game a close play at third base. Now imagine the runner who was called out appealing to the chief of the crew of umpires on the field. Imagine the manager of the opposing team presenting his arguments in support of the call. Imagine the crew chief stopping the game, listening to the arguments that are presented in a calm, deliberate manner. Imagine, the umpires in a closed meeting presided over the crew chief. Imagine the crew chief getting a vote of all the umpires that were on the field at the time of the play, then assigning a particular umpire to write an opinion that will have to be researched and footnoted by an umpire’s clerk, then submitting the written opinion to the full crew for review, and finally publishing, and maybe, reading the opinion to the fans along with dissents from other disagreeing umpires.
Supreme Court Justices are no more baseball umpires than talkshow pundits are US Senators.

Unfortunately for the citizens of our republic, the White Senators Council behave like talkshow pundits instead of members of what was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.

Promoting the General Welfare

Medical care is a human need.

Medical care should not be a commodity to be sold for profit the same way that supermarkets sell canned tomatoes and toilet paper. But it is.

Medical care should not be a privilege acquired by family wealth and connections, nor a perquisite bestowed by corporate committees. But it is.

Insurance for medical care should not be paid for by employers who resent the expense, nor by employees who lose their medical insurance coverage when their employers go bankrupt or leave town. Employees who become ill should not lose their coverage, when they change jobs, because of "pre-existing conditions." But all this is true.

Those who need medical care should get it immediately. No one else but physicians and their patients should determine what treatments should be provided. Then physicians and medical technicians should provide it. All without obtaining permission from insurance clerks untaught in science and medicine.

We the citizens of the United States of America should receive, at the very least, the same health care that our elected officials (correctly called "the hired help" by Will Rogers) give themselves. After all, we pay to the Federal and state governments income, excise, property, sales, airline ticket, and gasoline taxes, and we the employers should control the benefits that our hired help receive.

The best way to assure all Americans the excellent medical care that they need is a government-sponsored, single-payer plan that is financed by a flat tax on all gross personal and corporate income, regardless of its source. It would be collected by the Department of Health and Human Services, through the Internal Revenue Service. The money would be deducted from paychecks, stock and bond distributions of all kinds, including those that are currently "tax free." Those reporting their income quarterly would pay when submitting their quarterly returns. This plan would increase revenue because medical expenses would no longer be deductible on income tax returns. Most important, this plan would eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid.

All medical expenses, approved by the patient and physician, would be paid by HHS directly to the doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and medical laboratories involved in the treatment.
Would some doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, medical laboratories and patients take advantage of this plan and cheat the government out of billions of dollars? Possibly. Do some of them cheat the government now? Yes. No law has ever prevented fraud, any more than a stop sign has kept speeders from racing through intersections. We do not pass legislation to keep crime from occurring. We pass laws to give victims of crime a just system of redress. We also pass them to benefit citizens that obey the law. And we pass them to fulfil the mandate of the Constitution’s Preamble: to form a more perfect Union and to promote the general welfare. A single payer system will do just that.

Unfortunately, this won’t happen, because insurance companies won’t allow it. They have more influence over lawmakers than we voters do.

Why did American insurance companies and their clients, the employers of American workers, become the gatekeepers to American health care? Because we American citizens gave them the keys to clinics and hospitals during the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. Our human need for medical care became an integral part of our employment compensation, as important as salary.

At first, medical insurance was considered something of a gift from a benevolent employer. The company would take care of you as long as you worked hard and were a productive employee.
However, employee productivity rose, but company benefits shrunk. The employee share of group medical insurance premiums increased, and in some cases the employees paid 100%.
Some companies dropped group medical insurance altogether.

Others offered a so-called "medical savings account," which allowed the employer to deduct money from the employee’s paycheck and send it to medical insurers. The money accumulated in these accounts was then used by the employee to help pay medical bills.

Help pay medical bills, but not completely pay. Most normal medical procedures, e.g. appendectomies, childbirth, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and few people could afford to save that amount of money. Employees might have thought that, after three or four years, their medical savings would grow to an amount that allows them to pay their medical bills. But most medical savings plans paid no interest, and any savings that the employee did not spend in one calendar year went to the insurer.

Insurance companies profit at the expense of human need, and we Americans have surrendered our human values to money. Why should insurance companies and their clients continue to control this human need? Because American culture values money above all else.

As do our elected officials. They cannot be re-elected without campaign contributions from the health care industry. Until our election campaign laws are changed, insurance companies will buy the votes of elected representatives. Consequently, very little will change in our municipal, state and federal governments.

To see how much your elected representatives accept from insurance companies, go to www.MAPLight.org.

The Clown from Georgia's 6th

Newt Gingrich is a public man with a public record. He lives in a glass house, but he revels in throwing stones. His most recent target has been Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. To ABC radios’ Robert Marcus Wilson, he said her recent press conference on the CIA’s use of torture was "the most despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort I've seen in my lifetime. … She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior." I am no fan of Speaker Pelosi, as I wrote in my blog October 9, 2008, but Newt Gingrich is in no position to throw stones at Nancy Pelosi. Despicable? Dishonest? Vicious? Gingrich, as aggressive, nasty, and hypocritical as Rush Limbaugh, lives in a glass house. A quick look at his record as a human being and as Speaker of the House reveals narrowness of mind, sexual hypocrisy, and unethical behavior.

Gingrich’s viciousness is clear to all in one of his more famous statementsd to Republican Party members: "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but lousy in politics." He wants Republicans to be nasty, and he encourages his fellow party members to avoid neatness, obedience, loyalty, and faithfulness.

As for viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, Gingrich is a star Republican who virtually shut down the government in 1995. He is also the victim of his own compulsive logorrhea. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, he refused to submit a revised Federal budget allowing previously approved appropriations to expire on schedule, thus causing parts of the Federal government to shut down for lack of funds. He claimed the Republicans only wanted to slow the rate of increase in government spending. However, his motor mouth led him to reveal that his adamantine budget position was in part due to his being insulted by President Clinton, who made Gingrich sit in the rear of Air Force One on the return trip from Yizhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel. You can’t get any narrower than Newt Gingrich.

As for dishonesty, Gingrich should remember his own sins before casting the first stone at Nancy Pelosi. But he has a very short memory, or he must believe that no one else remembers the ethics investigations of his actions while Speaker of the House. Gingrich claimed tax-exempt status for a college course that he had run for obviously political purposes. During the investigation, he was forced to admit to providing inaccurate statements about the college course. He agreed to pay $300,000 for the cost of the investigation, despite denying the charges over misuse of tax-exempt funds. The House Ethics Committee concluded that inaccurate information supplied to investigators represented "intentional or ... reckless" disregard of House rules. For more about Gingrich’s dishonesty, begin your internet search with Wilkipedia.

Let us also remember the dishonor he brought on himself and his family when it was revealed that he was having an extramarital affair during the height of the congressional investigation of President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Let us also remember that he has married three times, and that he told his first wife of his plans to divorce her as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer. Let us also remember that the thrice-married Newt Gingrich (reminds me of Rudy Giuliani) has just joined that bedrock of family values and sanctity of marriage, the Roman Catholic Church.

Gingrich writes the same way he speaks. Aggressively, nastily, and often inaccurately. He wrote about Nancy Pelosi in the conservative newsletter, Human Events, "The person who is No. 2 in line to be commander in chief can't have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can't afford it." What makes the statement aggressive and nasty is the inaccuracy. Nancy Pelosi does not have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. She supported the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. To my chagrin, she even refused to allow an impeachment process to begin in the House of Representatives. Bush and Cheney, by their own words, admitted to having committed war crimes, and should have been impeached. But New Gingrich forgot Pelosi’s positions and shot his mouth off for the narrowest of political purposes. He loves the media spotlight.

And there he stands, center stage, and not just on Fox News or MSNBC. The ABC network loves the man; he is great for ratings. So, since we are stuck with this windbag, I suggest that the only thing we can to do is laugh at him. Laugh at him just as we do at clowns. Laugh at him just as we do self-important dottores and pantalones from the commedia dell’arte. Laugh at him, just as Mel Brooks, in The Producers, laughs at Adolf Hitler

Noble, Noble Cruelty

The front page of The New York Times, May 14, 2009, shows a photograph of Explorer Scouts participating in a program that trains them to kill terrorists. Jennifer Steinhauer reported for the Times that the training could involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as facing down terrorists and taking out active shooters who bring gunfire and and death to college campuses. In a simulation raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. "Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up." As A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy said in the article, "This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl. It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boys Scouts."

A knee in the back and taking out shooters on campus is the path to honor and bravery. Is it a path to a merit badge? In any case, violence is now noble, and its practitioners see themselves as self-sacrificing knights.

America is medieval. It is saturated with cruelty justified by paranoia and xenophobia. So saturated, in fact, that the United States government cannot face the truth that under the Bush administration, it committed crimes against humanity when it tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the aptly named "black sites" all over the world.

President Obama wants to close the book on the Bush administration, but many, myself included, want to keep it open on the page where George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice are proven to be sadists in the worst tradition of Tomás Torquemada.

This late 15th-century Dominican friar, called by one contemporary, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order," sought to protect Christianity by burning people at the stake, forcing confessions by torture, and hounding Jews and Muslims out of Spain.

Cheney, the American Torquemada, has been making the talk show circuit, hammering the heretics who still believe that torture is illegal, claiming that President Obama has made America safe for terrorists and trying to preempt any investigation of his national security activities while in office. He, along with George W. Bush, denied that the US was using torture to get intelligence from prisonders, then when the torture became public knowledge, they first said it was a matter of a few bad apples disobeying orders, then they started to justify it.

As they sought information to protect the Homeland (at least they didn’t call it the Fatherland), Bush and Cheney worked hard to be the saviors of their country. They tortured detainees to get information that they claimed would prevent another terrorist attack.

They would not tell us what information they had gained through waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, because doing so would reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Presumably that would lead to the deaths of spies loyal to us, the strengthening of terrorist cells, and finally more terrorist attacks. However, after seven years of Bush-Cheney intelligence gathering, Osama ben Laden still roams freely, and stories of American torture are used to recruit new suicide bombers for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.

Despite the blackout on the intelligence gathered from detainees, information about many suspected terrorists have been handed over to journalists. One example is Captain James Yee, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Muslim Chaplin in the US Army. Yee was assigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison. In 2003, while going home on leave, he made headlines when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, because, according to government agents, he was carrying suspicious documents. He was then subjected to the same treatment as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: the agents shackled and blindfolded him and jammed soundproof earmuffs over his ears. He was taken to a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he spent 76 days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. These are capital offenses.

Despite all the media hoopla and the posturing by the Bush administration and the military, no evidence against him was ever presented. In 2004 all the criminal charges were dropped, and Yee was released from custody. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, cited national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence, and reportedly made his decision after consultation with government lawyers and intelligence officials.

Miller’s statement implied that the evidence against Yee, if presented in a court of law, would have shown him to be a dangerous spy. For our protection, the general released a person he believed to be a dangerous man back into our society.

Yee resigned from the military. His purported danger to our security was ignored by the US Army when it granted Yee an honorable discharge and awarded him a medal for "exceptional meritorious conduct."

Richard Cheney yammers on, as does Rush Limbaugh. Bush and Rumsfeld remain silent, as do the former Justice Department lawyers who worked hard to convince them that the wrongs they all committed were right. Despite the torture, the lies, the twisted logic, the romantic assertions of patriotism, Osama ben Laden is still at large.

Maybe they should turn over all anti-terrorist activities to the Boy Scouts.

Stress Tests: What We Don't Know and Won't Learn

Our government does not know how much has been lost in sub-prime mortgages, derivative instruments, and other bad debt. What is called for is a complete and independent audit of all the organizations being bailed out by taxpayer money. The independent auditors, appointed by the President or Congress, would examine the company’s accounts to judge their truth and correctness. They would scrutinize the amounts and sources of all their income, the amounts and purposes of all their expenses, the amounts and distribution of all their profits and losses. With this information, the government could realistically assess the damage to our economy and make realistic plans with realistic goals to alleviate the current crisis.

Instead of dealing with hard facts obtained by a rigorous audit, the Obama administration will work with information derived from a so-called "stress test", which is a computer program using economic models based on assumptions for the future. An economic model, according to the Dictionary for Business and Finance (John V. Terry, University of Arkansas Press, 2nd edition) is "The consideration of quantifiable factors which may be either variables or constants and the construction of relations among them that may be expressed in the form of an equation." That's business school language for, "If any activity can be measured, it can become part of an economic model."

Unfortunately, it is usually what cannot be measured that brings economic troubles: greed, arrogance, stupidity, political ambition—these cannot be measured, but they adversely affect our economy. Unforeseen and unpredictable events—hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods—also directly affect jobs, industry, food production, and shipping, to name only a few economic activities.

To make things worse, the stress test will also include other predictive models created by the banks themselves. Those who survive the stress test—that is, those bankers who create models that show that their organization can survive—will receive government aid. Unfortunately, any MBA or graduate-school economics major can create an economic model that will show high profits and enormous growth in the future.

It is arrogance on the part of economists, bankers, brokers, and financial analysts that lead them to believe that they can predict economic activity through the use of models, and it was their economic models combined with greed, stupidity, as well as unforeseen and unpredictable events that put us into this mess.

Another reason for the need of a complete audit is the law prohibiting the regulation of derivatives, which are at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis. The mortgages were bundled into single financial instruments, whose value was then divided further into other securities and sold to investors as security-swap or credit-swap agreements. The value of these agreements, also known as derivatives, were based on a model—another model!—of what the issuers thought the value would become.

Derivatives are not regulated by the SEC. In fact, the SEC is forbidden to regulate these chancy investments by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. It states in part, that " the Commission is prohibited from registering, or requiring, recommending, or suggesting, the registration … of any security-based swap agreement." Also the SEC is prohibited from making, interpreting or enforcing rules "… as prophylactic measures against fraud, manipulation, or insider trading with respect to any security-based swap agreement."

Another result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Glass-Steagall prohibited commercial banks from acting as investment banks. Commercial banks could lend money, but they could not underwrite any stock or security. With the repeal, commercial banks took ownership of investment companies and began offering investments as well as savings accounts.

Banks’ profits from their customers’ investments grew faster than those from their customers’ savings accounts. They were affected during the Reagan administration by banks and by law. First, banks began to require minimum balances, usually in the thousands of dollars. If a young worker tried to accumulate a nest egg via his savings account, but had less than three thousand dollars, his account was charged a service fee, very often an amount equal to the modest addition that worker could make to his account. Thus, workers stopped saving, and banks increased their profits by paying little or no interest on savings accounts.

Second, almost simultaneously, laws were passed so that banks offered IRAs to their customers and corporations, 401Ks to their employees. Both involved investing in stocks or money market accounts. Conspiracy theorists, mysteriously, have yet to pick up on this coincidence, but IRAs and 401Ks increased banks’ profits and helped Wall Street recover from a decline that had begun during the Carter administration. Workers’ savings became dependent on their employers’ payroll departments.

All this leads me to believe that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act must be repealed as soon as possible and the Glass-Steagall Act, or its modern equivalent, be re-enacted. Part of this legislation must be the creation of an Auditor General who can check a corporation’s books and enforce the law. To those who protest because they are committed to small government, I respond by protesting the financial services industry’s fradulent behavior makes this kind of law necessary.

How did the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions get away with it for so long? Where did our money go? We may never know, because the financial services industry sponsored the re-election of almost all members of Congress, as well as the President and Vice President. See my blog about campaign finance "Of Time, Money, Elections and the Constitution," November 16, 2008. Few elected officials in Washington are pressing for a complete disclosure from their benefactors.

These benefactors have also helped the two men appointed by President Obama to oversee America’s economic recovery. Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner were involved in the very activities that put us into our current crisis. Frank Rich reported in The New York Times (12 April 2009) that Lawrence Summers had received over $5 million from D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund, and almost $3 million in speaking fees from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other such institutions which have gotten money from the taxpayer bailout. Summers also tried, and failed, to have a co-founder of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisers, appointed to the job of running the TARP bailouts. This was clearly a conflict of interest, because while president of Harvard, Summers had done consulting work for Taconic.

The other man responsible for creating our economic chaos is Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. Before President Obama appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, President Bush appointed Geithner President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As such, he was responsible for the regulation of the largest bank holding companies in the USA. However, following standard operating procedure of the Bush administration, he did nothing. He sat in his posh office at the Fed and watched cash gush from the banks under his supervision. He watched assets dwindle, and then claimed in Congressional hearings that there was nothing he could have done. He even claimed that there had been too much regulation in many sectors of the financial services industry!

During his confirmation hearings, we learned that Geithner had not paid income taxes for several years. He apologized and paid the back taxes. The man chiefly responsible for re-invigorating our economy, the man with degrees in international economics and experience in domestic banking, did not have the financial acumen and legal awareness to pay his own taxes.

So, we have laws that encourage unethical behavior and fraud, and we have government officials who do not pay their taxes, accept money from the organizations they are supposed to regulate, and ignore what they cannot cover up.. This is a scenario that Lewis Carroll would have thought too implausible for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

For more on coverups, go to www.PBS.org and look at Bill Moyers’s interview of William Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.

The Conservative Mind

As I examined what the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation profess on their websites, I learned that their first principles are almost always figures of speech rather than actions to be emulated.

Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation profess individual liberty; limited government; free and private enterprise; strong, vigilant, and effective national defense. And they both believe in traditional American values, political accountability, and open debate.

Conservatives used to profess small government, but since World War II, the federal government has increased in size, even under Republican administrations. So, their wish is for limited government, an abstraction that doesn’t tell us how we can limit government and still have strong, vigilant, national defense. As for individual liberty, national security, and political accountability. I will mention only in passing, Richard Nixon, who was never held accountable for the White House enemies list. Nor was he held accountable for his part in the Watergate break-in, which is a monument to failed conservative ideals of national security and individual liberty. Nixon was forced to resign, but he left office believing that whatever a President does is legal. He even kept his Presidential and Congressional pensions because his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.

Citizens suffer the consequences any time a Conservative brings up "traditional American values." That phrase is now as meaningless as "the American dream." I regret to report that, when put into action, Traditional American Values means keeping various ethnic groups separate and conforming to the code of "Do as I say, not as I do," and "Do whatever you want; just don’t talk about it."

The Traditional American college alumnus holds an MBA and values his university’s football stadium more highly than its chemistry laboratory. A Traditional American values Walt Disney more than Henry James, and theme parks more than art museums. A Traditional American seeks the dominance of Christian evangelism and a material comfort level equal to Nero’s palace. A Traditional American takes his rights for granted, but becomes agitated when his opponents demand theirs.

The American Dream means simply, "Get rich, and don’t worry how."

During my reading on the Heritage Foundation’s website, I came across the summa of conservatism. It is Heritage Lecture #81, "The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement" (2003), by Lee Edwards, PhD, Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Dr. Edwards took as his text, The Conservative Mind (1953) by Russell Kirk, a book which Edwards credits as the origin of modern conservatism. Unfortunately, the most telling quality in Kirk’s ideas is his weakness for tropes instead of concrete deeds.

Edwards tells us, "The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets." More nouns but no active verbs, which shows that Conservatives are no longer vigorous activists; they are simply tiresome nags.

At the heart of conservative values are Russell Kirk’s six basic "canons" of conservatism. Unfortunately, the canons are all values, not actions. The Ten Commandments tell people specifically what they are NOT supposed to do, and the Constitution of the United States tells the governed and their governors what they may and may not do. Actions, not values.

I had expected to read something like the following: "Conservatives vote only for candidates who pledge to reduce the number of employees working for the federal government, and if they do not fulfill their pledge, conservatives complain to the officeholder in person. Or they send letters and e-mails, and phone his office until he complies or resigns." Instead, I found six limp creeds made up, as all creeds are, of abstractions and metaphors. They suggest, but do not illuminate. They are vague.

The following is the list of the six canons:
1. A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society.
2. Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity.
3. Civilized society requires orders and classes.
4. Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
5. Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason.
6. Society must alter slowly.

These six canons would be frightening, if they could ever be put into practice. But they can’t, because they are all image and no substance. Kirk uses the terms "divine intent" and "personal conscience" as personifications of political agents. If divine intent and personal conscience ruled society instead of mankind, we would practice religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices and start religious wars. Some Americans try to put this canon into action by not only shunning Islamic people, but also torturing and killing them. Others find new nicknames for members of non-white, non-Christian races and creeds. The latest I heard from a woman who called them, "people of a different demographic."

No one has settled the question "What is ‘divine intent’?" No one can. It has been asked in a variety of ways, including George W. Bush’s query, "What would Jesus do?" To which there are a thousand answers. When one religious group believes their answer is better than another’s, society gets very ugly. Religious denominations become political action committees, and true believers of divine intent, in good conscience, bulldoze homes and houses of worship or fly airliners into skyscrapers.

We may be a society of people with consciences, but our varying attitudes, opinions, and beliefs make personal conscience an arbitrary, contradictory ruler. As a society, we may be aware of our consciences, but we must obey laws passed by a duly elected legislature and enforced by police who must obey the laws themselves.

In the second canon, "traditional life" and "variety and mystery" are oxymorons . People cling to traditions as a means of eliminating variety and mystery. Traditionalists prefer the known to the unknown. They seek that which is acceptable to their peers rather than what is satisfying to themselves alone. Traditionalists would rather have Hilary Rodham Clinton and Condaleeza Rice at home vacuuming their rugs or at church arranging flowers on the altar.. They would keep gays and lesbians from marrying, and they would have all public school children recite "The Lord’s Prayer" daily. Thus they ask "What would Jesus do?" instead of the more difficult question, "What should I do, and how can I do it?" Conservatives are Traditionalists, and theirs is the narrowing uniformity.

In the third canon about orders and classes, I guess Kirk means that the higher orders and upper classes, much in the manner of Plato’s guardians, control the lower orders and lower classes. In concrete terms for the 21st century, it means that Conservatives want to eliminate the minimum wage and labor unions. Conservatives believe that the guardians in the managerial class must keep workers on a tight leash, and the workers should accept their wages gratefully, regardless of the working conditions they labor in, regardless the size of their families, and regardless of their skills.

The upper class’s attitude toward the lower orders was shown when former first lady Barbara Bush visited a refugee center set up in Houston’s Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina. There she was, surrounded by people smelling terribly from the lack of showers and clean clothing, people weeping for lost homes and family members, people numbed by the inhumane treatment they had received from FEMA and their police department. Mrs. Bush surveyed her fellow citizens and said, "They never had it so good." Compassionate Conservatism, indeed. To Barbara Bush, these people were poor before the hurricane, and government aid was a step up for them.

Many Conservatives thought it was okay for the lower orders to huddle in an improvised shelter, but they were afraid that they would want to live in the Astrodome for the rest of their lives. That they would become dependent on using chemical toilets and community showers, not to mention standing for hours in line for food rations. That these people would love being separated from their families and their homes.

In the fifth canon, Kirk states that property and freedom are inseparable. In keeping with this canon, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that America was an ownership society. Unfortunately, this is true, and those who own little, or who have recently lost much, are prisoners of the current economic downturn. Parents have lost their jobs and their homes through foreclosure, and they raise their children in cars, motel rooms or tent villages springing up in vacant lots. Similar camp sites along railroad tracks in the 1930s were called Hoovervilles. These new tent villages should be called Dubyavilles.

Conservatives have yet to admit their role in creating the current Depression. Instead they believe workers should have known that their factories would close with no notice, even though their employers did not. Conservatives also believe that these workers should have anticipated the fall in market values of their homes, even though bankers and real estate brokers did not.

The fifth canon, about controlling one’s appetites and will, is a cliché similar to "Enough is as good as a feast," "Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill," or "Where there’s a will, there’s a way." Hearing these old saws causes superficial men to nod seriously during business-club luncheons and forget all about them at dinner. Certainly self-control is the mark of a mature person, but in the past eight years Conservatives have shown much self indulgence and little if any self control. Imagine Roman Catholic priests controlling their will and appetite for children, Richard Cheney controlling his will and appetite for power, Rush Limbaugh controlling his will and appetite for illegal drugs.

I am glad to say the sixth canon about gradual social change was ignored by the Continental Congress of 1776. And by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.

There is much lacking in these conservative canons. Nowhere did I find any mention of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, and sheltering the homeless. Nor anything about learning the law and obeying it. That’s why we won’t find in any Conservative’s canon, "Actions speak louder than words."

Principles and Their Consequences: The Cato Institute

Before I examine certain professed principles of Conservatism, I would like to add a post script to the previous blog, Embryonic Stem Cell Research. It is about the Roman Catholic Church, with whose faith I have no civic dispute. However, I do dispute their moral authority which they assume when they express the value of human life—the sacredness of young life, as they term it.

To me, the Roman Catholic Church in general, and the priesthood in particular, lost their moral authority when Catholic priests and bishops sexually abused children, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy not only covered up the abuse, but kept the guilty priests and bishops in positions of authority over children. Although I believe in forgiveness, I simply cannot accept any pronouncements from people who have not yet proven to me that they practice what they preach. Until they do, I will exercise my citizen’s right to ignore their hypocritical dicta.

The Church’s failing to protect the children under its care is only one example of Conservatives’ ignoring the gap between their professions of belief and the actions they take. A more recent example of this pragmatic gap was seen when Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was recently interviewed by GQ (see GQ’s website). In the interview Steele remarked that abortion was an "individual choice" and gay-marriage decisions should rest with the states. However, at no time did Steele endorse gay marriage or abortion, and if you read the complete interview he comes across as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative Republican. He declared himself to be "pro-life."

Nevertheless, Steele’s statements upset many party leaders. As reported by NPR, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, one of Steele's rivals for the RNC chair, told the conservative Web site, www.Townhall.com. on Thursday that Steele needs to "re-read the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the 2008 GOP platform."

So, who is the real Conservative? What, in fact, do real Conservatives stand for? To get the answers, I visited three Conservative websites. This essay is about the highly respected Cato Institute*. This organization states its mission as follows: "The mission of the Cato Institute is to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace."

The institute also says, " … ‘liberal’ may well be the perfect word in most of the world—the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina are supporters of human rights and free markets—but its meaning has clearly been corrupted by contemporary American liberals."

The Cato Institute believes that liberals in other lands are uncorrupted supporters of human rights and free markets, and it believes that if free market capitalism exists in a country, so do human rights. Unfortunately, for people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), capitalism has never guaranteed human rights.

James A. Dorn, China specialist and vice president of academic affairs at the Cato Institute, agrees. Partly. In the institute’s Policy Analysis No. 553 (November 2, 2005), he wrote, "Although it is proper to criticize China for its human rights violations and its lack of a transparent legal system, we should not ignore the substantial progress China has made since it embarked on economic liberalization in 1978. … To avert the risk of conflict, the United States needs to treat China as a normal great power, not as an adversary; ensure that only those commercial transactions that genuinely threaten national security are blocked; and recognize that by increasing economic freedom we increase personal freedom. Our economic security, as well as China’s, will depend on sound free-market policies, not on destructive protectionism."

To the Cato Institute trade with PRC and free markets are more important than "… human rights, individual liberty and peace." PRC, which has been a member of the WTO since 2001, also believes in free markets, but not individual liberty and human rights. I am disappointed that Mr. Dorn ignores PRC’s prison systems. They are called Laogai and are filled with rapists, thieves, and corrupt politicians. However, this system includes the Laojiao, which is a form of administrative rather than judicial detention, where dissidents, petty criminals, and vagrants can be imprisoned for several years without a trial or any other legal proceedings. For more information on this system go to www.laogai.org.

Mr. Harry Wu, the Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on "The Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and China Regarding Prison Labor Products" on June 19, 2008. He reported that, despite the US law forbidding the importation of products made by forced prison labor, many of those products have made their way into American markets. In fact 314 laojiao camps are listed by Dun and Bradstreet, the prestigious credit reporting company that gathers information on businesses throughout the world, enabling companies to check on one another before conducting transactions requiring one company to extend credit to the other. Mr. Wu also reported, "The 314 entries for Laogai camps found in the D&B databases represent 72 different products (specific) and/or product categories (broad)."

Laogai is translated to "reform through labor," and laojiao means "reeducation through labor." Together those names sound a frightening echo of Nazi Germany’s motto for their concentration camps, Arbeit macht Frei, or "Work makes you free." All this leads me, sadly, to conclude that it has been the Cato Institute, not contemporary Americans, that have corrupted the word "liberal."

The institute goes on to say, "The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates Cato's work has increasingly come to be called ‘libertarianism’ or ‘market liberalism.’ Many Conservatives, as well as conservative organizations, hold Thomas Jefferson as an exemplar of conservative values, even though many of his actions belied his professed beliefs. Historian Joseph J. Ellis, in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), described the problems Jefferson encountered when his philosophy in action actually seriously damaged the American economy. Ellis points out that Jefferson believed in fiscal austerity, so much that he tried to dry-dock or destroy America’s navy, which had been developed by his predecessor, John Adams. Unfortunately, that interfered with his need to protect American commercial ships which were being captured by British and French frigates. So, to get back at the Europeans, whom Jefferson saw as corrupt and belligerent, he got Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807. This closed all American ports to foreign trade and thus violated two of the Cato Institute’s principles. First, it removed the United States from the free market (emphasis mine). Second, as Ellis tell us, " … [it] required the federal government to exercise coercive powers to enforce the embargo, thereby contradicting the Jeffersonian principle of limited government" (Emphasis mine).

We should also remember that despite his expressed antagonism to the institution of slavery, Jefferson owned at one time more than 200 slaves, and at his death most of his slaves were sold off to pay for his estate’s enormous debts. During his lifetime he practiced the tradition of Southern plantation owners and fathered several children by slavewomen that he owned. This is the face of his writing "… the amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.". I know of no Liberal worthy of the name who agrees with Jefferson. I hope no Conservative does.

The Cato Institute also "… combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism." At this time America’s market process is an invalid, queasy with greed, crippled by immorality, and in extremis brought on by inaccurate prognoses of vigor and long life. Its corporations pay few if any taxes even when they file a return.

They are skeptical about the benefits of the welfare state, but they have not developed any serious opposition to the corporate welfare that may bring our free enterprise system off its knees. Yet, how free can our various enterprises be when businesses get income tax breaks for the losses their incomes suffer because their managers make bad business decisions and fail to detect changes in the marketplace? Where are the capitalist adventurers when they screw up? In their board rooms giving themselves congratulatory bonuses for leading their various enterprises to ruin.

So far I have found that Conservatives hold to their beliefs in the face of brute actuality. First principles are very important to them. More important than the consequences of the actions they take in the name of their beliefs.

I must point out that, although the Cato Institute’s mission statement about limited government and free markets can be argued with, its stand against foreign military adventurism stands up under examination. It has, as far as I can discover, never supported the invasion of Iraq. In fact it has held many conferences to find a way out for the US armed forces.

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* I will write about The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in my next blog.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Conservatives have mounted another attack against common sense in government, science, and religion. They are against President Obama’s executive order releasing funds for stem cell research. Not content with failing to come up with solutions for problems in our economy, our health care system, and our foreign policy—problems that they themselves created—now they seek to eliminate important research involving, among other things, frozen embryos.

They claim that these frozen embryos are human beings, deserving protection from being destroyed in the cruel laboratories of Godless science. The National Right to Life Committee titled their response statement, Obama Order Opens Door to Widespread Killing of Embryonic Humans in Government-Funded Research. Spokesman Douglas Johnson said, "It is a sad day when the federal government will fund research that exploits living members of the human species as raw material for research."

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. wrote in the Boston Pilot, a newspaper for Catholics, "taking the lives of young humans cannot be pronounced ethical simply because it might result in huge benefits to older, more powerful, or more wealthy humans."

The Republican Party Platform calls for a ban on human cloning and for a ban on the creation of or experimentation on human embryos for research purposes. U.S. Congressman Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said, in a press release, "The President has ordered pro-life taxpayers to foot the bill for promoting overseas abortions and for scientific research that destroys human embryos. Sadly, the President's action ignores the miracles found in adult stem cell research. Embryonic stem cell research has failed to provide a single treatment to a living patient. It's unfortunate President Obama has chosen to support the empty promises of embryonic stem cells despite the living hope available in adult stem cell research."

In a statement released by his office, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, "The president has rolled back important protections for innocent life, further dividing our nation at a time when we need greater unity to tackle the challenges before us. As we move forward, I am hopeful that the president will re-evaluate this and other controversial decisions that put government at odds with the sanctity of human life," Boehner said.

These citizens have a right to their attitudes, opinions, and beliefs, but examining their statements is the best way to reveal their weaknesses. To begin, let’s look at the respect that Conservatives say they have for the lives of the young.

Conservatives have never shown an unwillingness to exploit young, innocent life. For good or bad, Americans have been taking lives of young humans since the creation of the Republic. That process is called war. We also encouraged our young warriors to smoke by giving them free cigarettes, manufactured by companies run by Conservatives. MSN Encarta reports that during World War II (1939-1945), American physicians endorsed sending soldiers tobacco, and cigarettes were included in the field ration kits of U.S. armed forces personnel until 1975.

To Father Pacolczyk, I point out that older American citizens got very rich, not from exploiting embryos, but from sending living American children to coal mines, steel mills, and sweat shops, where thousands died. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is only one example. Another is my late father-in-law, who, during the Depression, bribed his way into a job as a Chicago sandhog. He was too young for the job, but his age was no concern to the owners of the tunnel construction company. To them he was a laborer, an immigrant, and expendable. To Conservatives, young human life is sacred if it belongs to the children of the upper 1.5% of income earners. Or if it is an embryo. But once out of the womb and a poor, fully developed human, it is no longer sacred, and subject to scorn.

Republicans also hold human life sacred if it is a subject for political rhetoric that feeds citizens with misinformation. Many of us remember the case of Terry Schiavo, whose parents forced their son-in-law to keep her on life support even though her brain had ceased to function. We remember Senator Frist waxing eloquent about Mrs. Schiavo’s sacred life. And we remember that when Mrs. Schiavo finally died, her autopsy revealed that her brained had severely atrophied, and she could have never regained consciousness.

Now we have Representative Pence claiming that President Obama advocates "overseas abortions" which is hyperbole in the worst degree. Abortions are not really a part of stem cell research. Period. And while it is true that embryonic stem cell research has produced little of medical value, President Bush stopped the research before it could develop much at all. And it is pitiful that I have to remind Douglas Johnson of the National Right to life Committee that medical research and pharmaceutical companies exploit living members of the human species every day; that’s how medicines are tested.

Exceptions to the Republican Sacred-Life-Rule exist. They include the lives of servicemen or women, or American children with no health insurance, or children starving in Darfur, or children working in sweatshops abroad, making products for American retailers.

Like almost all Republicans, Congressman Mike Pence loves to protect taxpayers’ money, except for that $12 billion in cash lost in Iraq, still unaccounted for. During the time the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, not one hearing was held to find out what happened to all that cash. However, Republicans also like spending taxpayers money on such things as unbudgeted warfare, rendition of unindicted American citizens, Richard Nixon’s pension, and Congressional pay raises, among many others.

Although they mishandle the tax payer’s money, the Republicans’ characterization of the Democrats as the party of tax and spend is accurate. Democrats do indeed tax citizens and then spend the revenues for programs that benefit the entire country. Republicans like to spend revenues, too. Lots and lots of revenues. But Republicans get their revenues from borrowing from China, Saudi Arabia, and the European Union. So Republicans are the party of "Borrow and Spend." And they don’t give a damn how the debt is paid.

Representative Boehner chided President Obama for not caring about the unity we need to face the great challenges ahead of us. It is a strange idea of unity that has led Boehner to oppose every measure that President Obama has sent to Congress. Republicans want to appear that they are working for the benefit of the citizens of the United States of America, while they actually work very hard to keep the initiatives of President Obama from succeeding.
Only one man in the Republican Party has refused to pose as a unifier or call for reconciliation with Democrats. He is true to his convictions and honest enough to call for the failure of Liberals in general and the agenda of President Obama in particular. That one honest man is Rush Limbaugh, a recovering drug addict who calls for long jail sentences for such people. Except himself, of course.

Finally, Conservatives, against all common sense, declare that embryos are human beings with rights. Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, is the author of a column called Making Sense out of Bioethics that appears at the NCBC website (www.ncbcenter.org) and in various diocesan newspapers across the country. After earning a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University, he did post-doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. He subsequently studied in Rome where he did advanced studies in theology and in bioethics.

Father Pacholcyzk is a well educated man, who has every right to express his attitudes, opinions and beliefs, just as any other American citizen does. But what he states is Roman Catholic dogma, which differs from those of other Christian faiths, non-Christian faiths, and even agnostics and atheists. We see what happens when religions control what governments do, and we see the tragic consequences when religions clash. People die in wars, and schoolgirls are not allowed to leave a burning building because they do not have approved garments to wear in public. I have no desire to be killed for my beliefs, or the lack of them. I do not want to live in a theocracy. I seek a thoroughly secular, Constitutional government, free of all religious entanglements.

Let religion be the basis for individual belief and action, but not for legislation and governance.

Let the embryonic stem cell research begin.

On the Collective Widsom of Conservatives

It must be duly noted that the only sensible thing conservatives have said in the last few weeks is their acknowledgement that Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States of America. Their collective wisdom comes from Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who said that the New Deal was a flop. The right’s de facto leader, Rush Limbaugh, called Obama a Chicago thug and a cruel socialist. Congressman Ron Paul claimed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that our financial crisis was brought on by too many government regulations and too much government oversight.

In the Republican response to President Obama’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress on February 24, 2009, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana reached the acme of banality and innacuracy. He denounced the waste in the stimulus program, which, he said includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government. To the governor, it is wasteful to buy new automobiles for the FBI, the US Marshal’s Service, the Secret Service, the DEA, the Treasury Department, and the Departments of Agriculture, Transportation, and Defense. He also complained about "…$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ " This conservative leader, whose state suffered from Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, did not ask for a reduction in the US Weather Bureau’s budget, but decried a government program that would prevent another disaster caused by volcanic eruptions like that of Mt. Saint Helens, Washington. This is petty carping, not fiscal statesmanship, and the whole speech was rightfully scorned by all but the far right.

Nevertheless, Bobby Jindal is the darling of the Republican Party. He exemplifies the American Dream. Jindal is the son of immigrants, and he tried in his speech to compare his background with Obama’s. "My own parents came to this country from a distant land." However, this immigrant story is totally unlike that of Obama’s parents. The Jindals had come to America in 1971, but the governor’s father was a civil engineer, and his mother was a PhD candidate at Louisiana State University. His mother is now Director of Information Technology for the Louisiana Department of Labor.

Jindal, true to his Republican ideology, spoke the words that have been magic for Republican campaigns. He called for less government spending, not more. He said, "What it will do is grow the government, increase our taxes down the line, and saddle future generations with debt.. Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need?" He and his speech writers obviously had forgotten that future generations were already saddled with debt, including an unbudgeted $600 billion for the Iraq war, all created by the Republican tax cuts and by eight years of non-existent oversight by the Bush administration. It is more likely that he hoped that Americans would continue supporting bankrupt ideas.

Since January 20, 2009, Americans have waited in vain for intelligent commentary from conservative leaders. Somewhere there must be a conservative American who has some new ideas that will help the USA drag itself out of the quagmire of two wars, increasing unemployment, a decreasing Gross Domestic Product, stalled wages for workers and growing bonuses for executives, failing schools, crumbling highways, growing health care costs and declining quality of medical care, global warming and a ever growing dependence on coal and other carbon-based fuels. Is there a conservative with enough courage to stand up and say, "We conservatives let things go to hell, and here are some practical ideas that will help us reverse America’s descent into oblivion."

We moderates and liberals are waiting for those ideas. Until the time we hear from him or her, we’ll go with Obama's.

The Culture We Deserve

I did not take a class from Jacques Barzun, nor have I ever met him. However, I have studied his works and the works that he wrote about, and both have affected my work as a teacher, occasional essayist, and citizen.

I first encountered Barzun almost thirty years ago as I prowled through the open stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in search of some diverting, but substantive, summer reading. My eyes fell on The Energies of Art . That title intrigued me, so I flipped through a few pages to sample the writing of this (to me) unknown writer. In his introductory essay, "The Critic’s Task Today," he wrote: "Chaos in the world and art is in truth Criticism’s opportunity to shine. For chaos has causes; confusion has clues; history is not an impenetrable riddle, and if one can for a moment rise above the anxious fret of the personal, one will discover at least some namable sources of public dismay."

Then: "Who are we in the stream of time and Western thought? Supplying an answer to this question is the critic’s task today, and the best excuse for his existence. For my part, I am willing to be judged by this test for venturing to use up paper and print on ‘mere’ criticism."

I was surprised by the clarity of Barzun’s writing—surprised because the last few critical works I had read were jumbled mixtures of puns and quotations pompously declaring themselves deconstructions of texts. So I flipped to the last essay of the book, "William James and the Clue to Art," and found this:

A … way … of showing the relevance of James’s psychology to art is to sample its abundant evidence for the view that the mind is the original artist, who hardens into a geometrician only by special effort or dull routine. James’s radical new view itself resembles an artistic revolution in that, displacing from the foreground as ready-made all ideas and objects, it restores primacy to sensation and will. Objects are always clear, hard, unyielding things that remain ever themselves as they recur, whereas will and sensation fluctuate. The Jamesian mind is thus the innovator’s—bathed in sensation, individual, free, and confident of its power to shape the congenial material of its own perceptions.

In The Book of J, Harold Bloom wrote, "As we read any literary work, we necessarily create a fiction or metaphor of its author." In my fiction Jacques Barzun is my teacher, with whom I stroll through the Grove of Academe. He points out fads posing as breakthroughs and clichés disguised as tenets; he teaches me that the giving and the taking of meaning is not automatic; and he professes the virtue of clarity. Then he ushers me to the gate between the grove and agora and pushes me into the marketplace where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics I empirically test what I have learned.

Winded and sweaty, I return to the grove with the test results, and Barzun reminds me that the grove is as arduous as the agora, and that enlivened minds keep the gate between them open. He also introduces me to other teachers who can cool me off. Teachers such as Walter Bagehot, Samuel Butler, and William James, who all remind me of Bunyan’s great warning against "Knowledge not attended with doing.". And Lionel Trilling, with whom Barzun taught a colloquium of great books of the modern period at Columbia University. Their method—what Barzun calls a "methodless method"—defied classification. Trilling and Barzun dubbed it "cultural criticism," which Barzun describes in his essay, "The Imagination of the Real" (Art, Politics and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, Basic Books, 1977).

[The method] arose from a lively sense of the force of circumstances, balanced by an equally strong sense of the free life that ideas lead when hatched. It seemed clear to us that in order to know what books and works of art, philosophies and movements of opinion intend, one must learn their antecedents and concomitants of whatever kind; and to know how ideas thrive and change, one must trace their consequences. …The effort was a work of the sturdiest imagination—the imagination which springs from fact and is hedged in by possibility, the literal imagination, the imagination of the real.

Those last five words hang over the gate as I return to the agora again, ready to converse with my fellow citizens.

About conversation and its concomitant, meditation, Barzun writes in "Culture High and Dry" (The Culture We Deserve, Weslayan University Press, 1989):

Culture in whatever form—art, thought, history, religion—is for meditation and conversation. Both are necessary sequels to the experience. Cultivation does not come automatically after exposure to the good things as health follows a dose of the right drug. If it did, orchestra players would be the most cultured people musically and copy editors the finest judges of literature. Nor does ‘reading up’ on art suffice unless it spurs meditation and conversation. Both are actions of the mind along the path of finesse. No one can imagine a systematic conversation. As for true meditation, it excludes nothing; its virtue is to comprehend—in both senses: to understand and to take in the fullest view. Both are actions of the mind-and-heart, and therefore charged with the strongest feelings. Indeed both interior monologue and spoken dialogue aim at discerning which feelings and to what degree of each belong to an idea or an image. That is how culture reshapes the personality: it develops the self by offering the vicarious experience and thought; it puts experience in order.

Culture is not a diversion for the idle or the passive, though many believe it to be. William James alerts us to this tendency in his essay, "The Social Value of the College Bred (1908):"

We of colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. … In Edith Wyatt’s exquisite book of Chicago sketches called "Every One his Own Way" there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart—feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. … Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations [and] it pounces unerringly on the human core.

We get the words culture and cultivated from Latin: to till, to plow a field. Preparing a plot of land for a crop is no more sweaty an activity than cultivating one’s mind. As tools for cultivation, James’s "sympathies and admirations" go well with Barzun’s "meditation and conversation," and together they open the gate of our imagination of the real, so we can put our experience in order.

My experience has shown that the grove, the agora, and the gate are real. Even in my retired state, my stroll with Barzun and his colleagues continues. Daily, I work to keep my experience in order by reading, meditation and conversation. As I seek the antecedents, concomitants and consequences in the apparent chaos of the world and art, I sometimes find a namable source of public dismay.

For example, I am dismayed by the current Republican Party leadership’s lack of any imagination of the real. They encounter no cultures different from their own. They embody my definition of a Conservative: a person who takes action on the belief that if something has not happened to him, it is not important or it hasn’t happened at all.

I doubt that many Congressional Conservatives have stood in unemployment lines because their factory has closed. Their educations and life-experiences have kept them in the grove of clubs and board rooms and away from the agora swarming with their fellow-citizens, many of them currently unemployed. Their culture—history, religion, art, thought—is one of exclusiveness and has made them, in James’s words, "feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave." That label tells them two things: First, money is the final value of all things. Second, those who disagree are evil.

This is why Conservatives who preach bipartisan effort in governance practice narrow, one-sided politics. Their legislative behavior, meditations in caucus rooms, and conversations on the floors of the House and Senate all reveal their beliefs: Unemployed people should stop complaining and get a job. Banks, securities traders, and real estate brokers should be allowed to do anything to make a profit. So should food and drug processors and manufacturers. The rule of law applies only to political opponents.

Recently the Republican National Committee elected a new Chairman, Michael Steele, who declared in his victory speech, "We're going to say to friend and foe alike, we want you to be a part of us. And to those of you who will obstruct, get ready to get knocked over."

These words are not destined to be engraved in the tablets of our republic alongside those of Lincoln, or even Theodore Roosevelt. This new leader of conservative America offers an iron hand in an iron glove to his political opponents. So Congressional Republicans are continuing their culture-war by obstructing the progress of the badly needed legislation to stimulate the US economy.

As for the Republicans’ foes, we will not join in the conservative march toward the deterioration of our economy. Nor the destruction of the culture we deserve.