Calling anyone who wants to help families right before Christmas stay in their homes, pay their utilities, or get a present or two for their kids a Maoist is just plain silly (and once again insensitive to the victims of those mass movements that killed so many).
Jobless benefits are not "largesse"; they are returned premiums paid by employers and employees into a compulsory federal unemployment insurance system. Workers received less money for years in exchange for the benefits they are receiving now. They have already paid for them. If the system runs a deficit, it will be replenished once the economy recovers. This is how it has always worked (unlike communism, which generally hasn't).
Tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%, on the other hand, are completely un-financed and un-budgeted. Most of those dollars will not be spent, so are taken out of the economy. They represent a redistribution of wealth by fiat from a central government to a well-connected and well-represented elite. Although such historical allusions are hyperbolic, there is far more evidence to support the idea that this transfer is far more reminiscent of Soviet-era handouts of cash, cars, privileges, and dachas to a well-connected few. Communism didn't fail because it professed concern for the worker but because it, like Republicans today, instituted policies that were ultimately harmful to them. No, I'm not calling Republicans communists, but simply because Boehner says he loves free markets does not mean he is to be trusted anymore than Stalin when he said he believed in the universal rights of man.
If you think jobless benefits are trivial, you clearly have not talked to a family who depends on them. Or to local businesses who are disproportionate recipients of the benefits. Or to their employees whose jobs will be lost if those benefits are cut off prematurely.
No recession lasts forever. I have faith in the long-term strength of the United States economy and believe most of those out of work today won't be in 12 to 18 months.
But in a sustained downturn we have a moral obligation to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves. I am willing to help. Are you?
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Obama Should Have Fought Tax Cuts for the Rich by Jim Wallis
[Since I could not figure out a way to get a link to this article, I am pasting the entire Jim Wallis post below:]
Obama Should Have Fought Tax Cuts for the Rich
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Time and again, we heard Barack Obama on the campaign trail say that Washington was broken, and he was running for President of the United States to change it. He was right about our political system, and his presidency has offered further proof. Washington is a broken system and needs to be changed. But early on in the Obama presidency, the White House decided that the system was even more broken than they had imagined, special interests were even more powerful, and the influence of money over everything in Washington was almost complete. So instead of changing the "broken system," and "the ways of Washington," they decided to work within it, and still tried to get some things done for the people. That was a mistake. That was the moment the new president should have called in leaders of social movements, including those from the faith community, to strategize how to create enough pressure from the outside to make real reform on the inside possible. But that never happened.
At a Democratic National Committee fundraising dinner in February 2010, Obama said, "Change is easy if you're just talking about tinkering around the edges. Change is harder when you actually dig in and try to deal with the structural problems that have impeded our progress for too long." What Obama has found is that as long as the system is broken, change is hard, even when you tinker around the edges. We have seen tinkering around the edges when it comes to the poor, our economic system, the war in Afghanistan, and immigration reform. But these systems don't just need tinkering, they need deep change.
Obama should have fought on taxes. The richest 2 percent of the country just got an extension of tax cuts they didn't need at great cost to us all. There was GOP opposition, and Democrats battling with one another, but President Obama should have been fighting against the self-interests of the wealthiest Americans long before this. He allowed those who benefit from these tax cuts and the political allies they have bought in Congress to frame the debate and set the terms of engagement. So Obama is now backed into a corner, and just made a compromise that he thinks is the best deal possible when up against the clock. He got some good things for working families in the payroll tax cut, the extension of unemployment benefits, various refundable tax credits, and the important middle class tax cut. But the president is now presiding over the great redistribution of wealth that has been going on for a very long time -- the redistribution of wealth from the middle and the bottom, to the top of American society -- and leaving us with the most economic inequality in American history. This will only grow larger with the Obama "compromise."
If Obama had he fought earlier, he could have ensured the protection of small business owners, who are the primary job creators. Obama could have focused the higher tax rates on the very rich and protected those who are more in the middle and really creating jobs. But now, most of the people who will be keeping their tax cuts are not job creators. After all, how many jobs will be created by the Goldman Sachs traders, or the hedge fund gamblers, or the celebrities who dominate our lives? Almost none. On the contrary, they have been the "job destroyers," and have wrecked this economy and the lives of so many people.
Let's be clear here: At the root of the crisis was just a handful of banks -- not the banking industry, not business in general, but a handful of very rich people who took big and selfish risks. They are already getting richer because of our taxpayer bailout, and now we're giving them more tax breaks and estate tax bonanzas. There is socialism in America, but it's only for the rich. Risk has been socialized for some of the very richest people in the country, and then, the "free market" pain is distributed to all the rest.
The rich are too big to fail in America, while many in the rest of the country really are failing. The president did want to keep some things for average Americans in this compromise, but he lost the big battle a long time ago when he did not fight the people whose greed, recklessness, and utter lack of concern for the common good led us into this terrible crisis. He waited too long to fight, to force a national debate on economic fairness, and to counter the distortions of the Republicans who clearly don't mind adding huge sums to the deficit (almost a trillion dollars with the tax cuts) as long as it benefits their wealthy patrons. The Republicans will now seek to reduce the deficit by adding more pain to the rest of us -- especially those on the bottom and increasingly shaky middle rungs of the economy. And now, Obama and the rest of us are all backed into corners without a way out.
Our national economic philosophy is now to reward the casino gamblers on Wall Street and to leave the majority of the country standing outside the casino with a tin cup, hoping that the gamblers are at least big tippers. More tax breaks and benefits for the very wealthiest people in America is not only bad economics and bad policy; it is fundamentally immoral. In aletter to the president signed by more than 100 religious leaders, we said just that.
So far, they haven't listened.
At a Democratic National Committee fundraising dinner in February 2010, Obama said, "Change is easy if you're just talking about tinkering around the edges. Change is harder when you actually dig in and try to deal with the structural problems that have impeded our progress for too long." What Obama has found is that as long as the system is broken, change is hard, even when you tinker around the edges. We have seen tinkering around the edges when it comes to the poor, our economic system, the war in Afghanistan, and immigration reform. But these systems don't just need tinkering, they need deep change.
Obama should have fought on taxes. The richest 2 percent of the country just got an extension of tax cuts they didn't need at great cost to us all. There was GOP opposition, and Democrats battling with one another, but President Obama should have been fighting against the self-interests of the wealthiest Americans long before this. He allowed those who benefit from these tax cuts and the political allies they have bought in Congress to frame the debate and set the terms of engagement. So Obama is now backed into a corner, and just made a compromise that he thinks is the best deal possible when up against the clock. He got some good things for working families in the payroll tax cut, the extension of unemployment benefits, various refundable tax credits, and the important middle class tax cut. But the president is now presiding over the great redistribution of wealth that has been going on for a very long time -- the redistribution of wealth from the middle and the bottom, to the top of American society -- and leaving us with the most economic inequality in American history. This will only grow larger with the Obama "compromise."
If Obama had he fought earlier, he could have ensured the protection of small business owners, who are the primary job creators. Obama could have focused the higher tax rates on the very rich and protected those who are more in the middle and really creating jobs. But now, most of the people who will be keeping their tax cuts are not job creators. After all, how many jobs will be created by the Goldman Sachs traders, or the hedge fund gamblers, or the celebrities who dominate our lives? Almost none. On the contrary, they have been the "job destroyers," and have wrecked this economy and the lives of so many people.
Let's be clear here: At the root of the crisis was just a handful of banks -- not the banking industry, not business in general, but a handful of very rich people who took big and selfish risks. They are already getting richer because of our taxpayer bailout, and now we're giving them more tax breaks and estate tax bonanzas. There is socialism in America, but it's only for the rich. Risk has been socialized for some of the very richest people in the country, and then, the "free market" pain is distributed to all the rest.
The rich are too big to fail in America, while many in the rest of the country really are failing. The president did want to keep some things for average Americans in this compromise, but he lost the big battle a long time ago when he did not fight the people whose greed, recklessness, and utter lack of concern for the common good led us into this terrible crisis. He waited too long to fight, to force a national debate on economic fairness, and to counter the distortions of the Republicans who clearly don't mind adding huge sums to the deficit (almost a trillion dollars with the tax cuts) as long as it benefits their wealthy patrons. The Republicans will now seek to reduce the deficit by adding more pain to the rest of us -- especially those on the bottom and increasingly shaky middle rungs of the economy. And now, Obama and the rest of us are all backed into corners without a way out.
Our national economic philosophy is now to reward the casino gamblers on Wall Street and to leave the majority of the country standing outside the casino with a tin cup, hoping that the gamblers are at least big tippers. More tax breaks and benefits for the very wealthiest people in America is not only bad economics and bad policy; it is fundamentally immoral. In aletter to the president signed by more than 100 religious leaders, we said just that.
So far, they haven't listened.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Silencing an unpopular or even offensive point of view as the National Portrait Gallery is currently being pressured to do does not justify or excuse censorship. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many censorship campaigns that did not claim to be acting on behalf of the People, usually a majority suppressing the dissenting voice of a minority. Inserting a sensitivity clause into the First Amendment was something the founders could have done but wisely chose not to. And by the way, if we don't defend speech we disagree with, then freedom of speech doesn't really mean much does it? Popular speech needs no protection - it's popular!
And let's not forget that history is full of voices that spoke words that offended the majority of their time but were in fact correct.
Galileo seemed to be contradicting Scripture and the majority of his time who "knew" that the earth was stationary and the sun revolved around it. He was censored.
Mark Twain questioned the morality of slavery and the arbitrary taboo of interracial friendship, offending the majority of his time in his book Huckleberry Finn (a work some school systems in the United States, conservative Christian ones still want to ban).
When Margaret Sanger opened a clinic to help poor women take control of their reproductive lives, she was almost arrested for violating the Comstock Law of 1873 that prohibited discussion or dissemination of information about contraceptives as "obscene." It would not be until 1966 that the Supreme Court recognized the right of (married) couples to use contraception! Yet these ideas were considered as offensive to the majorities in their time.
When Martin Luther King spoke out against racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War (which he saw as interwoven), he was condemned as a communist (Glenn Beck would have been proud). Even LBJ, who parted ways with MLK over Vietnam, referred to him at one point using the n-word.
And of course we can go back much farther to a long line of moral leaders who were condemned in their time for saying unpopular, even offensive things, such as that the rich would have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel getting through the eye of a needle, or that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us. That sort of thing.
And while we are speaking of offensive free speech, let's consider that book found free in most hotel rooms. In this story, you'll find several cases of infanticide, incest, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder, slaughter of innocents (and their animals), and a fairly detailed account of one (censored) man's torture and execution... which brings us of course to the ants.
I personally fail to see how ants on a corpse are as offensive as, say, graphic pictures of Sebastian riddled with arrows (I counted at least 12 in the Louvre alone), beheaded John the Baptists, and more punctured, bleeding, broken, suffering Jesus's than I think is healthy for any small child (or adult) to see. I remember walking into a room in a museum in Florence to see a giant picture depicting in gleeful detail the torment of several people being burned alive in an auto de fe. Now the spiritual descendants of those engaging in this cruelty - and depicting it in such apologetically graphic terms - want to remove a work of art because it has some insects? Give me a break!
I do not advocate censorship of the more violent and divisive imagery thrust upon us by a religious "majority" (although most accept without thinking too much about it, such as why the nails went through the palms rather than the wrists or why blood would have spurted several feet (as one particularly gory painting in Rome illustrated) when a soldier pierced Jesus's side even though it had been established that he was "already dead"). I would prefer not to have my view of a beautiful mountain-top marred by a wood carving of a corpse nailed to a piece of wood, as recently happened near Zermatt, but understand the religious organization that put up the memorial has a right to free speech, even if it may offend me and disturb small children (or adults who think about it much).
And let's not forget that history is full of voices that spoke words that offended the majority of their time but were in fact correct.
Galileo seemed to be contradicting Scripture and the majority of his time who "knew" that the earth was stationary and the sun revolved around it. He was censored.
Mark Twain questioned the morality of slavery and the arbitrary taboo of interracial friendship, offending the majority of his time in his book Huckleberry Finn (a work some school systems in the United States, conservative Christian ones still want to ban).
When Margaret Sanger opened a clinic to help poor women take control of their reproductive lives, she was almost arrested for violating the Comstock Law of 1873 that prohibited discussion or dissemination of information about contraceptives as "obscene." It would not be until 1966 that the Supreme Court recognized the right of (married) couples to use contraception! Yet these ideas were considered as offensive to the majorities in their time.
When Martin Luther King spoke out against racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War (which he saw as interwoven), he was condemned as a communist (Glenn Beck would have been proud). Even LBJ, who parted ways with MLK over Vietnam, referred to him at one point using the n-word.
And of course we can go back much farther to a long line of moral leaders who were condemned in their time for saying unpopular, even offensive things, such as that the rich would have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel getting through the eye of a needle, or that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us. That sort of thing.
And while we are speaking of offensive free speech, let's consider that book found free in most hotel rooms. In this story, you'll find several cases of infanticide, incest, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder, slaughter of innocents (and their animals), and a fairly detailed account of one (censored) man's torture and execution... which brings us of course to the ants.
I personally fail to see how ants on a corpse are as offensive as, say, graphic pictures of Sebastian riddled with arrows (I counted at least 12 in the Louvre alone), beheaded John the Baptists, and more punctured, bleeding, broken, suffering Jesus's than I think is healthy for any small child (or adult) to see. I remember walking into a room in a museum in Florence to see a giant picture depicting in gleeful detail the torment of several people being burned alive in an auto de fe. Now the spiritual descendants of those engaging in this cruelty - and depicting it in such apologetically graphic terms - want to remove a work of art because it has some insects? Give me a break!
I do not advocate censorship of the more violent and divisive imagery thrust upon us by a religious "majority" (although most accept without thinking too much about it, such as why the nails went through the palms rather than the wrists or why blood would have spurted several feet (as one particularly gory painting in Rome illustrated) when a soldier pierced Jesus's side even though it had been established that he was "already dead"). I would prefer not to have my view of a beautiful mountain-top marred by a wood carving of a corpse nailed to a piece of wood, as recently happened near Zermatt, but understand the religious organization that put up the memorial has a right to free speech, even if it may offend me and disturb small children (or adults who think about it much).
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Sarah Palin has 2.5 Million "Likes" on Facebook; Should We Admire Her for This?
If only popularity were correlated with intelligence, character, or ability to lead...
The most popular type of website remains pornography; does this mean we should admire pornographers for their genius or shake our heads at their shameless pandering to the lowest element of our humanity?
Sarah Palin would not be a household name if the Republicans had not tapped her to be McCain's running mate. For all we know, she would have completed her term as governor rather than be lured by a multi-million dollar contract with Fox News and a lucrative book deal.
I have a beef with any public servant, including candidates for national public office, leveraging their name recognition which they gained through no personal merit per se (there were strategic reasons for selecting Palin that had nothing to do with any accomplishments) into lucrative private contracts. That includes ex-presidents receiving $100,000 a pop to speak when the only reason they are paid so much is because they once held a public office. All the goodwill that comes with that office (here I am using goodwill in the business sense) is a function of the trademark and brand recognition that is really the property of the taxpayer.
(My "if I were king of the world" solution? Apply a very high return-to-the-people tax on the proportion of speaker's fees or book royalties that could reasonably be assumed to be a function of the fact the person held public office, in the same way that we must pay capital gains on the proportion of proceeds from the sale of stock that represent a profit. In other words, if someone was paid $10,000 for speaking prior to being elected president, then is offered $100,000, it is safe to assume that $90,000 of those fees are generated as a function of publicity gained while serving the people; why not tax that $90,000 at 50% and use it to reduce the deficit or publicly finance the next election, rolling the money back into the public coffers?)
Yes, Palin has some organizational skills and a knack at manipulating public opinion (her "death panels" post on Facebook perhaps more than any other single factor brought the popularity of healthcare reform from over 70% to about 50:50 for and against).
But were it not for the clout of the Republican Party and the national publicity a run for president gave her, she would be using those skills at the level of her local PTA, town council, or Alaska statewide politics (a state, let's not forget, with a population less than Columbus, Ohio). Instead of 2.5 million likes, she would have 2,500. As Barbara Bush pointed out, Sarah Palin seems happy in Alaska - perhaps she should stay there.
In our winner-takes-all media circus, we will have exaggerated measures like this that seem to make people appear much more important, popular, or significant than they really are. Let's also remember that 2.5 million is less than 1% of the population of the country, and that no doubt a number of those "likes" are more than one person (since people often have multiple profiles).
I would not be surprised in a country in which 4 million Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens that 2.5 million like Sarah Palin.
The most popular type of website remains pornography; does this mean we should admire pornographers for their genius or shake our heads at their shameless pandering to the lowest element of our humanity?
Sarah Palin would not be a household name if the Republicans had not tapped her to be McCain's running mate. For all we know, she would have completed her term as governor rather than be lured by a multi-million dollar contract with Fox News and a lucrative book deal.
I have a beef with any public servant, including candidates for national public office, leveraging their name recognition which they gained through no personal merit per se (there were strategic reasons for selecting Palin that had nothing to do with any accomplishments) into lucrative private contracts. That includes ex-presidents receiving $100,000 a pop to speak when the only reason they are paid so much is because they once held a public office. All the goodwill that comes with that office (here I am using goodwill in the business sense) is a function of the trademark and brand recognition that is really the property of the taxpayer.
(My "if I were king of the world" solution? Apply a very high return-to-the-people tax on the proportion of speaker's fees or book royalties that could reasonably be assumed to be a function of the fact the person held public office, in the same way that we must pay capital gains on the proportion of proceeds from the sale of stock that represent a profit. In other words, if someone was paid $10,000 for speaking prior to being elected president, then is offered $100,000, it is safe to assume that $90,000 of those fees are generated as a function of publicity gained while serving the people; why not tax that $90,000 at 50% and use it to reduce the deficit or publicly finance the next election, rolling the money back into the public coffers?)
Yes, Palin has some organizational skills and a knack at manipulating public opinion (her "death panels" post on Facebook perhaps more than any other single factor brought the popularity of healthcare reform from over 70% to about 50:50 for and against).
But were it not for the clout of the Republican Party and the national publicity a run for president gave her, she would be using those skills at the level of her local PTA, town council, or Alaska statewide politics (a state, let's not forget, with a population less than Columbus, Ohio). Instead of 2.5 million likes, she would have 2,500. As Barbara Bush pointed out, Sarah Palin seems happy in Alaska - perhaps she should stay there.
In our winner-takes-all media circus, we will have exaggerated measures like this that seem to make people appear much more important, popular, or significant than they really are. Let's also remember that 2.5 million is less than 1% of the population of the country, and that no doubt a number of those "likes" are more than one person (since people often have multiple profiles).
I would not be surprised in a country in which 4 million Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens that 2.5 million like Sarah Palin.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Why Racism Won't Disappear Anytime Soon....
There are those who want us to believe that racism is over and it's time to move on. Anyone who doesn't, to use the parlance of Sarah Palin, is just dwelling on "scars."
But a scar is healed and I think racism has left a much deeper and more recent wound than Palin might want us to believe.
I still remember the Willy Horton ads and Florida 2000 and Georgia any-year-you-care-to-name (where voters in black precincts are much less likely to have their votes counted). In the country we live in, where African American unemployment is double that of whites, where you are much more likely to be in poverty if you are black than white and where public services that disproportionately help black citizens are being cut to finance tax cuts that disproportionately go to wealthy white citizens, this issue is not going to go away any time soon.
Certainly not if white agitators such as Andrew Breitbart go out of their way to try to discredit African American organizations such as Acorn or the NAACP.
It is true that despite the fears of many whites interviewed prior to the election and of Glenn Beck since, President Obama has not advanced a "black nationalist" agenda. There has been no move for reparations or more aggressive affirmative action programs. If anything, he has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he is not racially biased, even rushing to fire Shirley Sherrod, the African American Agriculture employee whose father, incidentally, had been murdered by a white farmer.
McCain's 2000 primary run was torpedoed by a successful push polling campaign, probably launched by the Bush campaign, that asked South Carolina voters if they would vote for a man who had a "love child" with an African American woman. When they said no, they asked the voters to observe McCain's family closely. (He has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, I believe.) The fact is that ugly campaign worked, and that was only 10 years ago.
I disagree that racism is not a factor in the attempt to "get" President Obama if for no reason that Beck, a telepundit on the most watched "news" network said so, calling a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
When armed white men from the south showed up to shout down town hall meetings to discuss ways of insuring our children, saying they wanted "their country back" the echoes to the segregationist standoff of a generation earlier are hard to overlook. In both cases, you had a predominantly white, rural population feeling it was being victimized by an overreaching federal government that was presuming to tell them through "activist courts" "legislating from the bench" how to run "their" communities (never mind that in many cases half of their communities were non-white).
When Sarah Palin was asked to name a Supreme Court decision she felt represented an overreaching federal government or judicial activism, she of course drew a blank. One possible explanation is that she really didn't know (most likely).
But another more disturbing possibility is that she did, but did not want to say it: Brown v. Board of Education. Perhaps even she appreciated that if what she was really calling for was a return to the days of the Thurmond segregationist platform (what another Republican, Trent Lott, recently referred to wistfully as something that might have avoided all that trouble over all those years), that voters would consider that too radical. But giving a nudge-nudge, wink-wink nod then playing dumb may have been a much safer strategy (just as she quoted Reagan in his ad campaign against the great evil of Medicare during the debates without identifying either speaker or issue (knowing probably that many of us would go dig it up on her own)).
It is correct that I have not faulted or credited Bush or Clinton for the color of their skin. There is frankly nothing remarkable about another white male president in a country that has only - until 2008 - elected white male presidents.
The election of an African American president, on the other hand, receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, in a country that is only about 15% African American is absolutely remarkable, noteworthy, and a reason to be proud. We went from being a country literally founded on the backs of slaves to one in which a man whose parents' marriage would have been illegal in many states when he was born became president.
When I see an articulate, thoughtful president who has committed no crime and whose policies are centrist to a fault being called (by white commentators) everything from a racist to a Maoist to a Muslim to a non-American to a Marxist, the burden is on those who come up with these ridiculous charges (charges not leveled against any white president) to prove they are not racist. When someone responds with antipathy way out of proportion to any available information, then some other, unstated factor must be at play. It's possible it's his tone of voice, his maddeningly calm manner, or his ability to sink a 3-pointer (nothing but net) while soldiers and journalists look on. Possible, but I don't think it's likely.
Those who hate President Obama generally have consistently hated him before he even had a chance to do anything to allow them to rationalize their rage.
Those who claim they are mad, mad, mad because of healthcare reform ignore the fact that they were almost all on camera being mad, mad, mad before healthcare reform was even a twinkling in Congress's eye.
Those who claim they are furious about the Wall Street bailout and stimulus plan have to explain why their fury was so remarkably absent when a white man occupied the oval office (and started both policies).
Those who claim they want to see yet another birth certificate have to explain why such a bizarre request (most of us do not have multiple birth certificates and the state of Hawaii has been more than generous at putting this matter to rest long ago when Obama filed his candidacy) was never made to a white president. Isn't foreign just another code word for Other, for Not Like Us?
Even if Sarah Palin is not personally racist (I just think she's relatively oblivious to the suffering of African Americans since she comes from a state with so few (3.5%) and where all the white residents receive welfare payments just for living in Alaska), I'm sure she understands that many of her supporters are, just as Reagan knew damn well what crowd he was playing to when he used the term "welfare queen" over and over again in campaign speeches.
The fact is that we are not over our past because our present still needs a lot of work. Sarah Palin says these are scars, but I think they are partially healed but infected wounds.
But a scar is healed and I think racism has left a much deeper and more recent wound than Palin might want us to believe.
I still remember the Willy Horton ads and Florida 2000 and Georgia any-year-you-care-to-name (where voters in black precincts are much less likely to have their votes counted). In the country we live in, where African American unemployment is double that of whites, where you are much more likely to be in poverty if you are black than white and where public services that disproportionately help black citizens are being cut to finance tax cuts that disproportionately go to wealthy white citizens, this issue is not going to go away any time soon.
Certainly not if white agitators such as Andrew Breitbart go out of their way to try to discredit African American organizations such as Acorn or the NAACP.
It is true that despite the fears of many whites interviewed prior to the election and of Glenn Beck since, President Obama has not advanced a "black nationalist" agenda. There has been no move for reparations or more aggressive affirmative action programs. If anything, he has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he is not racially biased, even rushing to fire Shirley Sherrod, the African American Agriculture employee whose father, incidentally, had been murdered by a white farmer.
McCain's 2000 primary run was torpedoed by a successful push polling campaign, probably launched by the Bush campaign, that asked South Carolina voters if they would vote for a man who had a "love child" with an African American woman. When they said no, they asked the voters to observe McCain's family closely. (He has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, I believe.) The fact is that ugly campaign worked, and that was only 10 years ago.
I disagree that racism is not a factor in the attempt to "get" President Obama if for no reason that Beck, a telepundit on the most watched "news" network said so, calling a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
When armed white men from the south showed up to shout down town hall meetings to discuss ways of insuring our children, saying they wanted "their country back" the echoes to the segregationist standoff of a generation earlier are hard to overlook. In both cases, you had a predominantly white, rural population feeling it was being victimized by an overreaching federal government that was presuming to tell them through "activist courts" "legislating from the bench" how to run "their" communities (never mind that in many cases half of their communities were non-white).
When Sarah Palin was asked to name a Supreme Court decision she felt represented an overreaching federal government or judicial activism, she of course drew a blank. One possible explanation is that she really didn't know (most likely).
But another more disturbing possibility is that she did, but did not want to say it: Brown v. Board of Education. Perhaps even she appreciated that if what she was really calling for was a return to the days of the Thurmond segregationist platform (what another Republican, Trent Lott, recently referred to wistfully as something that might have avoided all that trouble over all those years), that voters would consider that too radical. But giving a nudge-nudge, wink-wink nod then playing dumb may have been a much safer strategy (just as she quoted Reagan in his ad campaign against the great evil of Medicare during the debates without identifying either speaker or issue (knowing probably that many of us would go dig it up on her own)).
It is correct that I have not faulted or credited Bush or Clinton for the color of their skin. There is frankly nothing remarkable about another white male president in a country that has only - until 2008 - elected white male presidents.
The election of an African American president, on the other hand, receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, in a country that is only about 15% African American is absolutely remarkable, noteworthy, and a reason to be proud. We went from being a country literally founded on the backs of slaves to one in which a man whose parents' marriage would have been illegal in many states when he was born became president.
When I see an articulate, thoughtful president who has committed no crime and whose policies are centrist to a fault being called (by white commentators) everything from a racist to a Maoist to a Muslim to a non-American to a Marxist, the burden is on those who come up with these ridiculous charges (charges not leveled against any white president) to prove they are not racist. When someone responds with antipathy way out of proportion to any available information, then some other, unstated factor must be at play. It's possible it's his tone of voice, his maddeningly calm manner, or his ability to sink a 3-pointer (nothing but net) while soldiers and journalists look on. Possible, but I don't think it's likely.
Those who hate President Obama generally have consistently hated him before he even had a chance to do anything to allow them to rationalize their rage.
Those who claim they are mad, mad, mad because of healthcare reform ignore the fact that they were almost all on camera being mad, mad, mad before healthcare reform was even a twinkling in Congress's eye.
Those who claim they are furious about the Wall Street bailout and stimulus plan have to explain why their fury was so remarkably absent when a white man occupied the oval office (and started both policies).
Those who claim they want to see yet another birth certificate have to explain why such a bizarre request (most of us do not have multiple birth certificates and the state of Hawaii has been more than generous at putting this matter to rest long ago when Obama filed his candidacy) was never made to a white president. Isn't foreign just another code word for Other, for Not Like Us?
Even if Sarah Palin is not personally racist (I just think she's relatively oblivious to the suffering of African Americans since she comes from a state with so few (3.5%) and where all the white residents receive welfare payments just for living in Alaska), I'm sure she understands that many of her supporters are, just as Reagan knew damn well what crowd he was playing to when he used the term "welfare queen" over and over again in campaign speeches.
The fact is that we are not over our past because our present still needs a lot of work. Sarah Palin says these are scars, but I think they are partially healed but infected wounds.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Note to Palin Supporters: Katie Couric is not running for office - Sarah Palin might be...
Note to Palin supporters who want to make Katie Couric the issue, now that Sarah Palin has refused to sit down and talk with her a second time: Couric is not running for office.
Oh, and she's not that tough of an interviewer. Consider these tough, impossible-to-anticipate questions:
“When it comes to establishing your world view…what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read?”
Would you have trouble answering this question? I doubt it. But Palin did. That is frightening in a world where she might have to answer yes or no about deploying an aircraft carrier (or which Korea to send it to). But the even larger point is that she considered this a "trick question." She was caught having to admit that she basically DOES NOT READ!!! This is very frightening, to have someone a heartbeat away from the presidency who relies on Fox News (everything else is the "Lame Stream Media") for her information.
Here is how Palin answered the question:
PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —
COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
COURIC: Can you name any of them?
PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
She could not name a single Supreme Court Decision. (Roe v. Wade was part of the question as I recall, so we are not 100% certain she could identify that.)
"Well, let's see. There's -- of course -- in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings."
[What kind of sentence is that anyway? A 6th grader who forgot it was her turn to present to the class could have pulled something out better than "in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings." Really?]
She could not name a single piece of legislation on which McCain voted in a way that she considered to be "maverick" despite using the term repeatedly.
She claimed erroneously that Obama had voted to cut off funding for our troops (and never corrected that misstatement (which led to cries of "TRAITOR!" and "KILL HIM!" at her rally, cries she ignored)).
She ran as the candidate who wanted to get government off our backs, yet her state, Alaska, was a huge net recipient of your tax dollars and mine: $321 per person (v. $22 per person in Illinois).
She falsely claimed that her running mate voted to reform bankruptcy laws to help distressed homeowners; as it turned out, not only was McCain absent for that vote, he opposed the reforms.
She believed apparently during the debates that we are still in the Civil War, referring to McKiernan several times as McClellan (a Democrat, by the way, who ran against his former CIC, Republican Lincoln).
I am not sure how any of this can be blamed on Couric who simply did what any good journalist should do: ask questions and press until they are honestly answered.
Now if you want a tough interview (I don't think the Palin interview was that), dig up Couric's interview with Ann Coulter. Ouch.
At any rate, none of us is voting for Couric. We might be confronted again with the possibility of voting for Palin. You and I deserve to know what newspapers she reads and what Supreme Court decisions justify her railing against "activist judges." And just as significantly, we deserve to know if she is just making it up as she goes along, as she did with death panels.
Oh, and she's not that tough of an interviewer. Consider these tough, impossible-to-anticipate questions:
“When it comes to establishing your world view…what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read?”
Would you have trouble answering this question? I doubt it. But Palin did. That is frightening in a world where she might have to answer yes or no about deploying an aircraft carrier (or which Korea to send it to). But the even larger point is that she considered this a "trick question." She was caught having to admit that she basically DOES NOT READ!!! This is very frightening, to have someone a heartbeat away from the presidency who relies on Fox News (everything else is the "Lame Stream Media") for her information.
Here is how Palin answered the question:
PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —
COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
COURIC: Can you name any of them?
PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
She could not name a single Supreme Court Decision. (Roe v. Wade was part of the question as I recall, so we are not 100% certain she could identify that.)
"Well, let's see. There's -- of course -- in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings."
[What kind of sentence is that anyway? A 6th grader who forgot it was her turn to present to the class could have pulled something out better than "in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings." Really?]
She could not name a single piece of legislation on which McCain voted in a way that she considered to be "maverick" despite using the term repeatedly.
She claimed erroneously that Obama had voted to cut off funding for our troops (and never corrected that misstatement (which led to cries of "TRAITOR!" and "KILL HIM!" at her rally, cries she ignored)).
She ran as the candidate who wanted to get government off our backs, yet her state, Alaska, was a huge net recipient of your tax dollars and mine: $321 per person (v. $22 per person in Illinois).
She falsely claimed that her running mate voted to reform bankruptcy laws to help distressed homeowners; as it turned out, not only was McCain absent for that vote, he opposed the reforms.
She believed apparently during the debates that we are still in the Civil War, referring to McKiernan several times as McClellan (a Democrat, by the way, who ran against his former CIC, Republican Lincoln).
I am not sure how any of this can be blamed on Couric who simply did what any good journalist should do: ask questions and press until they are honestly answered.
Now if you want a tough interview (I don't think the Palin interview was that), dig up Couric's interview with Ann Coulter. Ouch.
At any rate, none of us is voting for Couric. We might be confronted again with the possibility of voting for Palin. You and I deserve to know what newspapers she reads and what Supreme Court decisions justify her railing against "activist judges." And just as significantly, we deserve to know if she is just making it up as she goes along, as she did with death panels.
Friday, November 26, 2010
The Thanksgiving-Washington Myth
Perhaps myth is over-stating it, but you may have seen something floating around the Internet, perhaps emailed by a Christian friend, that reads as follows:
It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour...requefted me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many...favors of Almighty God... -George Washington
If you Google this quotation, you will get many hits to Christian web sites, most of which are attempting to make an in-your-face-Secular-America! case that George Washington was overtly religious and on record as essentially ordering the United States to pray (presumably to a Christian god).
There are several problems with this interpretation.
First, Washington did not actually write these words. Although he did sign a similarly-worded proclamation at the request of Congress, the historical background is more consistent with Washington's Deist impulses. Washington generally eschewed and mistrusted overt expressions of religiosity, as did most of the founders, who were much closer historically to the religious wars and mass murders that convulsed Europe shortly before the founding of the United States. All were steeped in the ideas of John Locke and Voltaire who railed against the dangers of religious excess, especially of a Christian variety.
Second, William Jackson, not George Washington, wrote this document (although George Washington signed it). He wrote it not because it would have entered his head to do such a thing but because some members of Congress requested it (although others felt is was intrusion into a personal and religious affair, or mimicked the fake compulsory shows of thanksgiving demanded by European monarchs).
Third, the actual statement he signed (see below) has been altered by religious apologists wanting to make Washington appear to be more religious than he actually was. I have included the complete paragraph of the proclamation in question, highlighting in red the alterations made in the circulating Internet version:
Washington did not capitalize pronouns referring to "Almighty God" as a Deist would not generally do (he did, however, capitalize Nations). This insistence on avoiding overt religiosity among the founders was fairly consistent; the Declaration of Independence makes a vague reference to "Nature's God" and a "Creator" but does not capitalize any pronouns related to this creator either. The Constitution does not mention God at all. Washington is elsewhere on record as stating that the United States is "in no ways a Christian nation."
A full text, showing Washington's actual spelling and capitalization is available at the Washington archives or the University of Virginia.
It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour...requefted me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many...favors of Almighty God... -George Washington
If you Google this quotation, you will get many hits to Christian web sites, most of which are attempting to make an in-your-face-Secular-America! case that George Washington was overtly religious and on record as essentially ordering the United States to pray (presumably to a Christian god).
There are several problems with this interpretation.
First, Washington did not actually write these words. Although he did sign a similarly-worded proclamation at the request of Congress, the historical background is more consistent with Washington's Deist impulses. Washington generally eschewed and mistrusted overt expressions of religiosity, as did most of the founders, who were much closer historically to the religious wars and mass murders that convulsed Europe shortly before the founding of the United States. All were steeped in the ideas of John Locke and Voltaire who railed against the dangers of religious excess, especially of a Christian variety.
Second, William Jackson, not George Washington, wrote this document (although George Washington signed it). He wrote it not because it would have entered his head to do such a thing but because some members of Congress requested it (although others felt is was intrusion into a personal and religious affair, or mimicked the fake compulsory shows of thanksgiving demanded by European monarchs).
Third, the actual statement he signed (see below) has been altered by religious apologists wanting to make Washington appear to be more religious than he actually was. I have included the complete paragraph of the proclamation in question, highlighting in red the alterations made in the circulating Internet version:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me 'to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanks-giving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
A full text, showing Washington's actual spelling and capitalization is available at the Washington archives or the University of Virginia.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Les matins de Jénine - My Review
Public Reviews Written by You
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 excellent book but a bit heavy-handed, This review is from: Les matins de Jénine (Mass Market Paperback) This was an excellent book but there were some distracting literary and historical devices that detracted a bit from the power of the narrative. I enjoyed - if enjoyed is the correct word for such a tragic book - this novel.As much as I support the plight of any people dispossessed, misunderstood, and whose suffering is discounted - the Palestinians are all of these things - I must admit that Susan Abulhawa's treatment of the topic was a bit heavy-handed, perhaps not from a historical perspective but from a what-are-the-odds perspective. For a protagonist to be in all the wrong places at all the wrong times struck me as a bit far-fetched, plot-wise. The Palestinian diaspora is huge, the world's largest refugee population, so the probability of happening to pop into and out of Sabra and later Jenin struck me as low. Other literary devices that struck me as unlikely were the snatched baby who just happened to have an identifying scar, the extremely high body count in one family, and the almost complete absence of Palestinian violence or provocation. Yes, having your home taken away is cruel and unjust, but so is stepping onto a bus laden with explosives and to deny that the latter was occurring makes the actions of the Israelis seem gratuitously cruel. An author diving into such an explosive, painful recent past is challenged with a central question: do I want this work to be a transcendent, universal work of literature with lessons for all of us or do I wish it to be a polemic that delivers a powerful political message even if in doing so it requires air-brushing away some nasty historical counter-evidence? I think the author chose the latter approach, and although the book is at times lyrical, at some level I felt my emotions were being played upon for maximum political impact. There are worse literary offenses, but does anyone who knows anything about the history of the region think anything good is going to come to those she has befriended in Shatila? Or from her visit to Jenin that just happened to be during the Intifada and the Israeli promise to level the camp? The introduction of Ari as a prominent, sympathetic Jewish character is important, as was perhaps the recipient of the snatched brother, whose anguish represents in so many ways the anguish of a people looking for "their" land while knowing at some level they have stolen it from someone else. The character of David also creates an interesting "what if" and shows how arbitrary yet fatally divergent the accidents of one's upbringing and affiliation are in that part of the world where your right to live may be a function of who your mother is. That distraction aside, it is an outstanding book. Anyone who does not understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should read this book. The chronology is itself revealing, reminding us again of the temporal and logical relationships between the massacres at Sabra and Shatila and the advent of suicide bombing against the United States who until then were seen as honest brokers in the region. I was intrigued by the cover of the book and looking for something to read in French (I was unaware it was originally written in English!), and knowing what happened in Jenin, I knew it would be a difficult read. I found it haunting and disturbing and perhaps that is a good thing. We all need to experience a little piece of the pain of those who have been displaced and occupied and largely forgotten or discounted. Interestingly, I read this while exploring my own roots in Eastern Europe looking for traces of a grandfather arrested and executed during another of history's all-too brutal occupations, so could relate to Amal's (Amy's) desire to assimilate versus longing for her past, and her daughter's desire to find out who here "people" are and were. Although the climate and particulars are radically different, the elements that really matter - dispossession, displacement, cruelty on a massive scale, and abandonment by an oblivious West - are present sadly in both situations and in so many others. My daughter once asked me why people do such cruel things and I cannot answer that question. But part of the answer must lie in our inability to forget that when we take something that is not ours from people we have convinced ourselves are Other and therefore not as worthy to own it or perhaps even to live, then we can do some very ugly things. Throw in nationalism and religious differences and you have an ugly, lethal mix. This book is a voice from one of those Others reminding us all, if we will listen, that They are Us. We are all brothers and sisters and every act of murder is really part of an extended family dispute. We forget that at our own peril. | ||||||||||||||||||
Friday, November 5, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Some More Election Thoughts: Failure is not an option.
Failure is not an option.
This is a longterm struggle and we will win some and lose some. Our country is stronger for the give and take. I just wish we didn't run crazy people for high office and didn't think it was necessary to lie so much. If you don't like providing healthcare to children or don't want to pay for it, say so, but don't fabricate death panels to make your case. And if you don't like Obama, don't vote for him, but don't call him a Muslim (hoping enough Americans share your religious biases to vote against him) or a Marxist-Leninist when he's not. Don't make stuff up. There is enough to argue about that is real without creating phantom arguments.
If this is the best the defenders of the large corporations can do - especially after Citizens United legalized the purchase of elections by those corporations - and with 10% unemployment that favors whoever is NOT in office with those headline numbers, whatever their ultimate cause or direction, then I am not as worried.
With Faux News and hate radio blaring nonstop, the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove pumping billions into every race they can find, with this last election, a non-presidential one, blowing out past records for money spent (many countries could be run on what ours spent on ludicrous, dishonest attack ads), I am surprised any Democrat got elected. The fact that we control the Senate and won key elections in our largest, most prosperous and populous states (New York and California) is very hopeful.
Money can't buy you love and it can't buy you an election either (although it can come close).
I imagine after 2 years of Republican control of the House (assuming some Tom Delay or Jack Abramoff type of scandal does not lead to some game-changing turnover) people will realize you can't run a government on platitudes and given a choice between the guy who is convinced government can't do anything right (and wants to prove it by running it) and the guy who agrees with Winston Churchill that however imperfect democratic government is, it's better than all the alternatives, going with the guy who believes in what he is doing is the better bet.
If Republicans successfully abort healthcare reform before it is out of the first trimester, 50 million Americans will find themselves lacking both health insurance and any hope of getting any. Then what? Why is 45,000 dead Americans a year, the body count from a respectable excess mortality estimate made by Harvard researchers an acceptable status quo?
We turned our society upside down, suspended habeus corpus, held people indefinitely without trial, engaged in torture, invaded and occupied two countries, in response, directly or indirectly, to the death of 3,000 Americans but forcing people to pay for health care before they need it to prevent many times this number of deaths is considered some Stalinist left wing plot. Since 9-11, if the study's death rate remained constant (and it was written when the number of uninsured was much lower), then 405,000 Americans are dead now who would not have been had we had universal healthcare.
And before launching some abortion-kills-more-people retort, remember that this is not an either-or argument. Not a single abortion is prevented, and many may be prompted, by the for profit status quo. Insured women are less likely to have an abortion than their uninsured counterparts. Countries with universal health insurance have far lower abortion rates than ours. If you're pro-Life, you should be fighting like mad for universal healthcare.
If getting government off our backs means some of us will die of preventable or treatable illnesses, others will go to crumbling schools, and still others will work in unsafe mines or drive over uninspected bridges or eat uninspected food, then I very much want government on my back, thank you very much. I don't want government in my daughter's uterus, in my bedroom, or monitoring my telephone conversations (they are boring anyway), but I do want them making sure the car I drive is as safe and fuel efficient as possible and that our foreign policy is reality-based, not faith-based, so that my son will not be deployed in a war by a President channeling spirits instead of reading reports.
This is a longterm struggle and we will win some and lose some. Our country is stronger for the give and take. I just wish we didn't run crazy people for high office and didn't think it was necessary to lie so much. If you don't like providing healthcare to children or don't want to pay for it, say so, but don't fabricate death panels to make your case. And if you don't like Obama, don't vote for him, but don't call him a Muslim (hoping enough Americans share your religious biases to vote against him) or a Marxist-Leninist when he's not. Don't make stuff up. There is enough to argue about that is real without creating phantom arguments.
If this is the best the defenders of the large corporations can do - especially after Citizens United legalized the purchase of elections by those corporations - and with 10% unemployment that favors whoever is NOT in office with those headline numbers, whatever their ultimate cause or direction, then I am not as worried.
With Faux News and hate radio blaring nonstop, the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove pumping billions into every race they can find, with this last election, a non-presidential one, blowing out past records for money spent (many countries could be run on what ours spent on ludicrous, dishonest attack ads), I am surprised any Democrat got elected. The fact that we control the Senate and won key elections in our largest, most prosperous and populous states (New York and California) is very hopeful.
Money can't buy you love and it can't buy you an election either (although it can come close).
I imagine after 2 years of Republican control of the House (assuming some Tom Delay or Jack Abramoff type of scandal does not lead to some game-changing turnover) people will realize you can't run a government on platitudes and given a choice between the guy who is convinced government can't do anything right (and wants to prove it by running it) and the guy who agrees with Winston Churchill that however imperfect democratic government is, it's better than all the alternatives, going with the guy who believes in what he is doing is the better bet.
If Republicans successfully abort healthcare reform before it is out of the first trimester, 50 million Americans will find themselves lacking both health insurance and any hope of getting any. Then what? Why is 45,000 dead Americans a year, the body count from a respectable excess mortality estimate made by Harvard researchers an acceptable status quo?
We turned our society upside down, suspended habeus corpus, held people indefinitely without trial, engaged in torture, invaded and occupied two countries, in response, directly or indirectly, to the death of 3,000 Americans but forcing people to pay for health care before they need it to prevent many times this number of deaths is considered some Stalinist left wing plot. Since 9-11, if the study's death rate remained constant (and it was written when the number of uninsured was much lower), then 405,000 Americans are dead now who would not have been had we had universal healthcare.
And before launching some abortion-kills-more-people retort, remember that this is not an either-or argument. Not a single abortion is prevented, and many may be prompted, by the for profit status quo. Insured women are less likely to have an abortion than their uninsured counterparts. Countries with universal health insurance have far lower abortion rates than ours. If you're pro-Life, you should be fighting like mad for universal healthcare.
If getting government off our backs means some of us will die of preventable or treatable illnesses, others will go to crumbling schools, and still others will work in unsafe mines or drive over uninspected bridges or eat uninspected food, then I very much want government on my back, thank you very much. I don't want government in my daughter's uterus, in my bedroom, or monitoring my telephone conversations (they are boring anyway), but I do want them making sure the car I drive is as safe and fuel efficient as possible and that our foreign policy is reality-based, not faith-based, so that my son will not be deployed in a war by a President channeling spirits instead of reading reports.
Congressman (Elect) Mike Pompeo: Give a Dollar to Charity for Every Dollar Spent Campaigning
An open letter to Mike Pompeo, who graduated #1 in our class at West Point and recently was elected to the United States Congress as a Republican representing Kansas's fourth district:
Dear Congressman (Elect) Pompeo,
You campaigned for a smaller, more limited government, a central tenet of the Tea Party you support. Smaller government means fewer social services, so private charities must fill the void. Many are skeptical that this private-public gap will be filled. I am proposing a way to prove your critics wrong.
Specifically, I am challenging you to do the following: why not donate $1 directly to a charity of your choice for every $1 you spent on your campaign?
According to the Federal Election Commission, your campaign received $2,031,065 as of October 13, 2010 (I imagine the final figure is greater and that all this was spent by election day). Why not donate a matching $2 million to a local shelter, the Salvation Army, or another deserving charity? About 672,000 people live in your Congressional District meaning this donation would be less than $3 a person but would go a long way for the few who really need it. Maybe you could provide shelter for the homeless or prevent a homeowner from losing his house.
Such a generous action on your part could purchase tremendous good will and would help dispel the notion that Republicans do not represent average Americans, many of whom are struggling.
Thank you for considering this request and congratulations!
Sincerely,
Mark
Mark Vakkur, MD
www.vakkur.com
mvakkur@gmail.com
Geneva, Switzerland
Why We Should Not Read Too Much into the Election and What We Need to Do To Win a Few More
I think people are reading far too much into these election results. The bottom line is that we did much better than I anticipated (OK, so I have low expectations). The craziest Tea party nut jobs lost. Republicans like to win more than anything else, and they are smart, so I think they are less likely to run extreme candidates in 2012, which is good for all of us.
The economy is horrible. Unemployment is in double digits. Yes, I believe this is the result of Bush mismanagement but also part of a business cycle that is disconnected from politics. Nevertheless, people vote according to the most basic principles and economics drives the boat. It probably wouldn't be too hard to develop a simple model predicting how many midterm seats will be lost by the incumbent party given a certain unemployment rate going into the elections. I would bet that that model would predict that we should have done much, much worse than we did. When you take into account the Faux News phenomenon, Hate Radio, and the Koch Brothers now being able to pump as much money as they like into elections (thanks to the Supremes), I am surprised that any Democrat won.
Nevertheless, I agree we have to get on message and stay on message and reduce our policies to their most concrete and graphic terms.
Saying you're pro-Life is easy; defending the idea of empowering a government bureaucrat to force your daughter to have her rapist's child (as Palin has repeatedly stated she wants to do) is quite another.
Saying you don't want a government takeover of healthcare is easy (especially when no one proposed such a thing) but defending the idea of letting even a single child die of a treatable condition because her parents worked for the wrong employer or were between jobs when she got sick is much harder.
Saying you oppose deficits and debt is easy; explaining why you then support tax cuts that created that debt in the first place (and have obviously done nothing to grow our economy) is harder.
We need to keep firing at them and now we don't have to be the only ones driving while they keep jeering from the back seat hoping we will fail to get the car out of the ditch they drove us into. It's their turn (at least in the House) to put up or shut up.
And we have to use the L word more. I don't care if Jon Stuart thinks it's not nice, we can't sit back and ignore it when the other side lies. Sarah Palin's death panel fabrication should have been a career ender as a credible infotainer (or whatever she is) just as Dan Rather's far less egregious lapse ended his career. We should hound these people when they lie and repeatedly and often remind people that they have not yet retracted, explained, or apologized for past dishonesty, so why should anyone believe them now? Remember that the same people screaming about the risks of a nonexistent government takeover of healthcare with nonexistent death panels are the ones who screamed a few years ago about the nonexistent WMD threat in Iraq. A broken clock is right twice a day, but these guys don't even have that kind of batting average.
And that's all I have to say about that.
The economy is horrible. Unemployment is in double digits. Yes, I believe this is the result of Bush mismanagement but also part of a business cycle that is disconnected from politics. Nevertheless, people vote according to the most basic principles and economics drives the boat. It probably wouldn't be too hard to develop a simple model predicting how many midterm seats will be lost by the incumbent party given a certain unemployment rate going into the elections. I would bet that that model would predict that we should have done much, much worse than we did. When you take into account the Faux News phenomenon, Hate Radio, and the Koch Brothers now being able to pump as much money as they like into elections (thanks to the Supremes), I am surprised that any Democrat won.
Nevertheless, I agree we have to get on message and stay on message and reduce our policies to their most concrete and graphic terms.
Saying you're pro-Life is easy; defending the idea of empowering a government bureaucrat to force your daughter to have her rapist's child (as Palin has repeatedly stated she wants to do) is quite another.
Saying you don't want a government takeover of healthcare is easy (especially when no one proposed such a thing) but defending the idea of letting even a single child die of a treatable condition because her parents worked for the wrong employer or were between jobs when she got sick is much harder.
Saying you oppose deficits and debt is easy; explaining why you then support tax cuts that created that debt in the first place (and have obviously done nothing to grow our economy) is harder.
We need to keep firing at them and now we don't have to be the only ones driving while they keep jeering from the back seat hoping we will fail to get the car out of the ditch they drove us into. It's their turn (at least in the House) to put up or shut up.
And we have to use the L word more. I don't care if Jon Stuart thinks it's not nice, we can't sit back and ignore it when the other side lies. Sarah Palin's death panel fabrication should have been a career ender as a credible infotainer (or whatever she is) just as Dan Rather's far less egregious lapse ended his career. We should hound these people when they lie and repeatedly and often remind people that they have not yet retracted, explained, or apologized for past dishonesty, so why should anyone believe them now? Remember that the same people screaming about the risks of a nonexistent government takeover of healthcare with nonexistent death panels are the ones who screamed a few years ago about the nonexistent WMD threat in Iraq. A broken clock is right twice a day, but these guys don't even have that kind of batting average.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Why Georgia Voters Who Voted Down a $10 Tag Fee to Finance Trauma Care Are Simply Wrong
There is such a thing as an informed opinion. Not all beliefs are equally valid, even widely held ones. As Galileo reminded us a few hundred years ago, the popularity of an opinion does not prove it since so few people reason well.
Anyone who believes that paying an extra $10 in tag fees is less costly than having an emergency room fold or someone die because a trauma center is beyond the golden hour away does not understand probability and statistics (which unfortunately is most people). When we drive our cars, whether we get in an accident or not, we probabilistically bear the cost of the loss times the frequency and distribution of the loss. You don't have to be an insurance company actuarial to realize one or two saved lives will offset a $10 fee. For God's sake, that's 2.7 cents a day! How can one claim to be pro-life but values that life at less than a nickel a day?
Taxes and insurance premiums both represent a trade-off most mature and intelligent adults accept (unless either is too high, which is not empirically true here). In exchange for a small certain loss ($10) we offset a potentially catastrophic but low probability loss (or in this case, help pay for it). Those who want the benefit of an extensive trauma network, one of the best in the world, but don't want to pay for it are trying to get a free ride.
If they understand this, then they are immoral. If they do not understand this, then they are ignorant. Some of course (Sarah Palin comes to mind) are a little of both.
I think it's time we stand up to the bullies spreading hate and misinformation just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Republican of course) did in his time: "There is a splinter group, of course, that believes that you can [attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs]... Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Their numbers remain negligible but they are rich and figured out that if you buy a news station you can buy an election by duping people into voting against their economic interests. That's what they did here. This was the most expensive election in United States history and it wasn't even a presidential election! Most of the billions spent went into nonsensical, misleading attack ads. Sadly, those ads worked.
As Goebbels, arguably the inventor of using modern media for propagandistic effect, put it best, a lie repeated often enough will be believed.
Anyone who believes that paying an extra $10 in tag fees is less costly than having an emergency room fold or someone die because a trauma center is beyond the golden hour away does not understand probability and statistics (which unfortunately is most people). When we drive our cars, whether we get in an accident or not, we probabilistically bear the cost of the loss times the frequency and distribution of the loss. You don't have to be an insurance company actuarial to realize one or two saved lives will offset a $10 fee. For God's sake, that's 2.7 cents a day! How can one claim to be pro-life but values that life at less than a nickel a day?
Taxes and insurance premiums both represent a trade-off most mature and intelligent adults accept (unless either is too high, which is not empirically true here). In exchange for a small certain loss ($10) we offset a potentially catastrophic but low probability loss (or in this case, help pay for it). Those who want the benefit of an extensive trauma network, one of the best in the world, but don't want to pay for it are trying to get a free ride.
If they understand this, then they are immoral. If they do not understand this, then they are ignorant. Some of course (Sarah Palin comes to mind) are a little of both.
I think it's time we stand up to the bullies spreading hate and misinformation just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Republican of course) did in his time: "There is a splinter group, of course, that believes that you can [attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs]... Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Their numbers remain negligible but they are rich and figured out that if you buy a news station you can buy an election by duping people into voting against their economic interests. That's what they did here. This was the most expensive election in United States history and it wasn't even a presidential election! Most of the billions spent went into nonsensical, misleading attack ads. Sadly, those ads worked.
As Goebbels, arguably the inventor of using modern media for propagandistic effect, put it best, a lie repeated often enough will be believed.
Sarah Palin Self-Made E-card I Sent To A Tea Party Friend Who Thinks Palin is a Feminist...
3 Out of 6 Ain't Bad...
scroll down or click for the back of this self-created e-card...
Would Sacagawea and her anchor baby have been deported by the Tea Party (they look Mexican)?
"Gotcha!"
Happy Birthday, XXXX!
Too bad that Girl Power thing didn't work out for
Sharon and Meg and Christine...
(Even though it's not my birthday, Christine
was a present to all of us from Sarah.)
But if you ignore gender, you got a nice birthday present on Election Day...
And one of the women Republican feminists sent home was that evil Nancy so that's
one less woman in power.
With feminists like this, who needs chauvinists?
Now if we can just get Republicans to vote for women the way Democrats do!
Mark
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
There is a Difference Between Losing Some Elections and Losing Your Country
Unlike Sarah Palin, I won't whine and snivel about wanting my country back. There are no tanks in the streets, no midnight knocks on the door, and we didn't even completely lose this election.
There is a huge difference between being a minority party and an outlawed one, as is the case in China or Egypt, for example.
The Republicans will probably obstruct, but since they control the agenda of the House, they will be expected to do something other than just say no. Gingrich found this out the hard way when he shut down the government, losing his job and his majority in the process.
It is natural for the incumbent party to lose seats in the midterm election. The proportion of this loss is directly proportional to the unemployment rate.
The Republicans, if they are smart (and many are), will put away the champagne and look at how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in several key races. Perhaps they will realize that running right wing nut jobs like Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle is a bad substitute for a strategy. Sarah Palin and the Koch brothers might have a little less influence in 2012 than they had in 2010.
Ironically, this could be bad for the Democrats, since the Republicans are less likely to run an unelectable extremist, but good for the country, since even an unelectable extremist can drag the political discourse into the mire, as Palin's addition to the McCain ticket illustrated.
The Dems did a poor job of getting out a simple message and repeating it often. In contrast, this is the core of the Republican strategy. Democrats should have trumpeted the many meaningful things they got done:
- Healthcare reform has been unsuccessfully tried for the better part of a half century; President Obama and the Democratic Congress got it done in under 2 years despite a vicious right wing smear campaign and Sarah Palin's fabricated death panels.
Progressives needs a pit bull - imagine a Karl Rove or Sarah Palin but with ethics. This should not be hard, since we enjoy a huge advantage: as Stephen Colbert once lamented, reality has a well-known liberal bias. The truth is on our side. We don't have to lie to make the other side look ridiculous.
Advocating tax cuts while howling about the deficit makes no economic sense. Saying tax cuts pay for themselves when they clearly haven't makes no sense.
Saying that giving people tax deductions to offset taxes they don't pay anyway to buy health insurance they can't afford from for profit companies who won't insure them makes no sense.
Saying that the world is only a few thousand years old and our 99% genetic congruence with chimpanzees is a wild coincidence and that we should teach this to our children in science class makes no sense.
Saying that oil companies and coal mining companies and hedge funds should get to self regulate when clearly they have never been able to do this makes no sense.
Calling a centrist president who has been friendly to a fault to a for-profit insurance industry a Marxist-Leninist makes no sense.
It is not enough to say this once; we have to hammer it home at every opportunity. That's what Republicans do; they take a message, even an inherently dishonest or nonsensical one (that more tax cuts will help balance the budget, for example) and repeat it ad nauseum until people at the margin absorb it.
So it will be easier in some ways to hold the Republican sound bites up to scrutiny because they will have a living laboratory in which to put up or shut up. No more chanting "treason!" or "kill him!" from the sidelines. They are controlling part of the government so many of them have ranted against in the most graphic terms, describing it as a "beast" that needs to be drowned or bludgeoned.
Of course, turning a government over to those who hate it gives them an opportunity, as did Bush and Cheney, to illustrate how inept government can sometimes be.
Let's hope the voters - and the surviving Democrats - hold them to account.
There is a huge difference between being a minority party and an outlawed one, as is the case in China or Egypt, for example.
The Republicans will probably obstruct, but since they control the agenda of the House, they will be expected to do something other than just say no. Gingrich found this out the hard way when he shut down the government, losing his job and his majority in the process.
At any rate, Democrats still control the Senate and the White House.
So those of us who believe in those radical progressive concepts such as insuring our children or fully funding the obligations we have to the least among us should all cheer up.It is natural for the incumbent party to lose seats in the midterm election. The proportion of this loss is directly proportional to the unemployment rate.
The Republicans, if they are smart (and many are), will put away the champagne and look at how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in several key races. Perhaps they will realize that running right wing nut jobs like Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle is a bad substitute for a strategy. Sarah Palin and the Koch brothers might have a little less influence in 2012 than they had in 2010.
Ironically, this could be bad for the Democrats, since the Republicans are less likely to run an unelectable extremist, but good for the country, since even an unelectable extremist can drag the political discourse into the mire, as Palin's addition to the McCain ticket illustrated.
At any rate, reading too much into the Congressional races to glean hints of the 2012 presidential race is dangerous. Most of the anger of Americans is with Congress (over 70% disapprove) not with the president (who enjoys about evenly split approval to disapproval, something Bush with mid-teens approval ratings could have only dreamed of).
Since there is no evidence that the economic cycle has been abolished, it is highly likely that the economy will be roaring by 2012. If so, discontent with the Presidential and Senate incumbent party will be lower (although watch Republicans try to take credit for the recovery from the recession that they created under Bush and that ended (according to economists) under Obama before election day). That recovery plus the inevitable disillusionment that will follow from sending telegenic, tea bag-waving rabble rousers to Washington will likely undo some of the damage done yesterday to the progressive cause.The Dems did a poor job of getting out a simple message and repeating it often. In contrast, this is the core of the Republican strategy. Democrats should have trumpeted the many meaningful things they got done:
- Healthcare reform has been unsuccessfully tried for the better part of a half century; President Obama and the Democratic Congress got it done in under 2 years despite a vicious right wing smear campaign and Sarah Palin's fabricated death panels.
- President Obama delivered on his campaign pledge to end our combat mission in Iraq.
- Democratic Congress passed meaningful financial regulatory reform that protects consumers and makes a future financial melt-down and bailout less likely.
- President Obama turned around what could have been a complete meltdown of the Western financial system by injecting billions of liquidity into the system; many economists believe unemployment would be 20% and the economy in far worse shape had Obama not continued the Bush-Paulson bailout that the Tea Party successfully blamed him for.
Like the stock market, politics follows a sometimes volatile trajectory but the longterm trend is up. Just think: only 6 years ago, Republican strategists were able to use homophobia as the central pillar of their campaign strategy (distracting people with gay marriage prohibition amendments when we should have been talking about Abu Ghraib). Now we know that many prominent Republicans are gay and homophobia does not sell to most voters anymore, even conservative ones (Sarah Palin tried to ban a library book on homosexuality from her local library when mayor but hardly mentioned the subject this election cycle).
If history shows anything it's that Americans swing wildly from one election to the next. Nothing is ever over. If people are still out of work in 6 months to a year, they will demand results from Boehner. All the platitudes about getting government off their backs mean nothing to the guy who lost his job and is losing his house and (thanks to Boehner if his threats to "kill" healthcare reform are delivered) his health insurance. A tax cut does you no good if you have no taxable income and hopefully many Americans will understand that campaigning for massive tax cuts they will never enjoy does them no good if their neighborhood is losing cops, firemen, and teachers. Progressives needs a pit bull - imagine a Karl Rove or Sarah Palin but with ethics. This should not be hard, since we enjoy a huge advantage: as Stephen Colbert once lamented, reality has a well-known liberal bias. The truth is on our side. We don't have to lie to make the other side look ridiculous.
Advocating tax cuts while howling about the deficit makes no economic sense. Saying tax cuts pay for themselves when they clearly haven't makes no sense.
Saying that giving people tax deductions to offset taxes they don't pay anyway to buy health insurance they can't afford from for profit companies who won't insure them makes no sense.
Saying that the world is only a few thousand years old and our 99% genetic congruence with chimpanzees is a wild coincidence and that we should teach this to our children in science class makes no sense.
Saying that oil companies and coal mining companies and hedge funds should get to self regulate when clearly they have never been able to do this makes no sense.
Calling a centrist president who has been friendly to a fault to a for-profit insurance industry a Marxist-Leninist makes no sense.
It is not enough to say this once; we have to hammer it home at every opportunity. That's what Republicans do; they take a message, even an inherently dishonest or nonsensical one (that more tax cuts will help balance the budget, for example) and repeat it ad nauseum until people at the margin absorb it.
So it will be easier in some ways to hold the Republican sound bites up to scrutiny because they will have a living laboratory in which to put up or shut up. No more chanting "treason!" or "kill him!" from the sidelines. They are controlling part of the government so many of them have ranted against in the most graphic terms, describing it as a "beast" that needs to be drowned or bludgeoned.
Of course, turning a government over to those who hate it gives them an opportunity, as did Bush and Cheney, to illustrate how inept government can sometimes be.
Let's hope the voters - and the surviving Democrats - hold them to account.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Evolution Deniers Forget Their Theories Are Supported by No Facts At All
Those who deny evolution, almost always for religious reasons, have no idea how central to biology evolution is. Several of my West Point classmates years after graduate remain enamored of creationism. Since creationism and Tea Party affiliation are highly correlated, maybe in this area we can agree: for some of us the quarter-million-dollar West Point educational tab does represent government waste!
The fallacy of believing literally in a 7,000-year-old planet devoid of evolution is not simply at odds with what carbon-dating, sediment deposits, the fossil record, and our DNA tell us - it is absolutely irreconcilable.
As Herbert Spencer put it best, "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." [1] In other words, there are not two competing theories. There is a comprehensive central theory of evolution supported by a wealth of data, proven in real time (asking anyone who deals with microbial resistance to antibiotics or dog breeding for verification). Juxtaposed against this theory is a fundamentalist minority offended that 99% of their DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees. They can speculate about whether the sun was really created on Day 4 but cannot chant away a far more compelling narrative told by their own genetic code, a code the authors of the bible never dreamed we would be able to read.
At any rate, given the behavior of our species as compared to, dogs, let's say, why should kinship with animals so offend us? If anything, it is the dog who should be offended!
Religious fundamentalists lost the early battles against evolution, which they thought they could win simply by stating evolution was counterintuitive (chimpanzees are clearly not human, end of story) or trumped by scripture (Genesis is as silent on evolution as it is on DNA, nucleotides, proteins, or amino acids). Their fear is understandable if they insist on telling their children the Bible is inerrant and should be believed literally. If their secular biology teacher exposed their children to evolution, it could risk making the biblical narrative seem at best an absurd fairy tale, at worst an outright fabrication.
But our DNA does not seem to care all that much about what people encoded with that DNA scribbled on parchment a relatively trivial (in geological time) couple thousand years ago. Nor does it much care how people encoded with that DNA feel about reconciling truth and Genesis. DNA like so much in our universe simply is regardless of how we might feel about it. In fact, there is no scientific phenomenon I can think whose existence is altered by how we feel about it.
Evolution does what any scientific theory is supposed to: it explains and it predicts. Modern fundamentalists have learned that sneering at such a theory wins few converts. Appeals to scriptural authority have been no more successful, especially since neither the authority nor the interpretation of those ancient texts is universal (even among religiously devout). So to win a scientific battle, religious fundamentalists had to don religious garb, however badly it fit.
We no longer ban outright the teaching of evolution, although we did until at least 1925 (John Scopes, the high school biology teacher of the famous 1925 case, was convicted, after all).
So to evade charges of censorship, fundamentalists created creationism and its in-bred offshoot, intelligent design. Creationism allows fundamentalists to distract us from the fact that they are imposing their religious beliefs on our children.
Why, it isn't a religious belief at all. It's a scientific theory, no more or less valid than evolution. Why not let our children be exposed to each and let them decide?
Speaking the language of science, reasonableness, and consumerism cannot hide the fact that every minute wasted on creationism is a minute stolen from understanding biological science. Put bluntly, creationism is not a viable competing counter-theory to evolution. It is a visceral protest disguised as a science.
100% of those who advance intelligent design are fundamentalists, the vast majority Christians. In contrast, most Christians see no contrast between their faith and science - only fundamentalists seem intent on believing that god wants us to ignore the story the universe is telling us.
Did you know there is a Christian fundamentalist group that even sponsors trips down the Grand Canyon to prove the verity of Genesis (which mentions neither America nor the Grand Canyon much less the hundreds of millions of years of geological time whose story the rocks there tell, a far more compelling and believable story than the childishly inaccurate fable some want us to take literally)? (Which version of Genesis I'm not sure, but perhaps different groups get to choose from Genesis I or II.)
Stephen Jay Gould, who has been in a running battle with fundamentalists all his life, reminds us that "evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a 'fact'. (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree in the perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)"[2]
Sigmund Freud, a man I usually don't quote too much because some of his followers have created a pseudo-religious cult of personality around him with all the same reinforcing circular beliefs of any religion, even weighed in on why we resist accepting the truth our genes tell us:
"Humanity has over the course of time had to endure from the hand of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to descent from the animal world."
But Mark Twain put it best when he pointed out how ludicrous and self-centered it is to assume that a planet that existed for so long before our species' arrival was created only for that species: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took 100 million years to prepare the world for him his proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno."
Twain's numbers reflected the best guesses of the time, but of course since then, the depth of geological time has been extended dramatically, making his point even stronger. The Earth is probably about 4.6 billion years old and hominids - bipedal primates - have been on it for perhaps 4 million years. Our species maybe as young as a few hundred thousand years, depending on how you count, but even using 4 million, that represents about a tenth of a percentage of the total existence of the planet.
Bill Bryson uses an excellent analogy to illustrate this. If you spread your arms to represent the span of the Earth from left to right, visible life (non-microscopic life) didn't appear until your right wrist (the Cambrian Era) and hominids didn't appear until the very tip of your rightmost middle finger (the difference in lengths of your fingers is greater by many magnitudes than the total time of human existence). All of human history could be erased by simply scraping your outermost fingernail.
It could be our bodies were created for the benefit of the outermost cuticle of the fingernail on one hand. But as Twain would say, "I dunno."
Endnotes
[1] as quoted in Scientific American, March 2005)
[2] - Stephen Jay Gould, Time magazine, 8/23/99.
For a summary of excerpts and articles on evolution I have put together, visit http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfdcpm87_506wrb6xghm.
The fallacy of believing literally in a 7,000-year-old planet devoid of evolution is not simply at odds with what carbon-dating, sediment deposits, the fossil record, and our DNA tell us - it is absolutely irreconcilable.
As Herbert Spencer put it best, "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." [1] In other words, there are not two competing theories. There is a comprehensive central theory of evolution supported by a wealth of data, proven in real time (asking anyone who deals with microbial resistance to antibiotics or dog breeding for verification). Juxtaposed against this theory is a fundamentalist minority offended that 99% of their DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees. They can speculate about whether the sun was really created on Day 4 but cannot chant away a far more compelling narrative told by their own genetic code, a code the authors of the bible never dreamed we would be able to read.
At any rate, given the behavior of our species as compared to, dogs, let's say, why should kinship with animals so offend us? If anything, it is the dog who should be offended!
Religious fundamentalists lost the early battles against evolution, which they thought they could win simply by stating evolution was counterintuitive (chimpanzees are clearly not human, end of story) or trumped by scripture (Genesis is as silent on evolution as it is on DNA, nucleotides, proteins, or amino acids). Their fear is understandable if they insist on telling their children the Bible is inerrant and should be believed literally. If their secular biology teacher exposed their children to evolution, it could risk making the biblical narrative seem at best an absurd fairy tale, at worst an outright fabrication.
But our DNA does not seem to care all that much about what people encoded with that DNA scribbled on parchment a relatively trivial (in geological time) couple thousand years ago. Nor does it much care how people encoded with that DNA feel about reconciling truth and Genesis. DNA like so much in our universe simply is regardless of how we might feel about it. In fact, there is no scientific phenomenon I can think whose existence is altered by how we feel about it.
Evolution does what any scientific theory is supposed to: it explains and it predicts. Modern fundamentalists have learned that sneering at such a theory wins few converts. Appeals to scriptural authority have been no more successful, especially since neither the authority nor the interpretation of those ancient texts is universal (even among religiously devout). So to win a scientific battle, religious fundamentalists had to don religious garb, however badly it fit.
We no longer ban outright the teaching of evolution, although we did until at least 1925 (John Scopes, the high school biology teacher of the famous 1925 case, was convicted, after all).
So to evade charges of censorship, fundamentalists created creationism and its in-bred offshoot, intelligent design. Creationism allows fundamentalists to distract us from the fact that they are imposing their religious beliefs on our children.
Why, it isn't a religious belief at all. It's a scientific theory, no more or less valid than evolution. Why not let our children be exposed to each and let them decide?
Speaking the language of science, reasonableness, and consumerism cannot hide the fact that every minute wasted on creationism is a minute stolen from understanding biological science. Put bluntly, creationism is not a viable competing counter-theory to evolution. It is a visceral protest disguised as a science.
100% of those who advance intelligent design are fundamentalists, the vast majority Christians. In contrast, most Christians see no contrast between their faith and science - only fundamentalists seem intent on believing that god wants us to ignore the story the universe is telling us.
Did you know there is a Christian fundamentalist group that even sponsors trips down the Grand Canyon to prove the verity of Genesis (which mentions neither America nor the Grand Canyon much less the hundreds of millions of years of geological time whose story the rocks there tell, a far more compelling and believable story than the childishly inaccurate fable some want us to take literally)? (Which version of Genesis I'm not sure, but perhaps different groups get to choose from Genesis I or II.)
Stephen Jay Gould, who has been in a running battle with fundamentalists all his life, reminds us that "evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a 'fact'. (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree in the perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)"[2]
Sigmund Freud, a man I usually don't quote too much because some of his followers have created a pseudo-religious cult of personality around him with all the same reinforcing circular beliefs of any religion, even weighed in on why we resist accepting the truth our genes tell us:
"Humanity has over the course of time had to endure from the hand of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to descent from the animal world."
But Mark Twain put it best when he pointed out how ludicrous and self-centered it is to assume that a planet that existed for so long before our species' arrival was created only for that species: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took 100 million years to prepare the world for him his proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno."
Twain's numbers reflected the best guesses of the time, but of course since then, the depth of geological time has been extended dramatically, making his point even stronger. The Earth is probably about 4.6 billion years old and hominids - bipedal primates - have been on it for perhaps 4 million years. Our species maybe as young as a few hundred thousand years, depending on how you count, but even using 4 million, that represents about a tenth of a percentage of the total existence of the planet.
Bill Bryson uses an excellent analogy to illustrate this. If you spread your arms to represent the span of the Earth from left to right, visible life (non-microscopic life) didn't appear until your right wrist (the Cambrian Era) and hominids didn't appear until the very tip of your rightmost middle finger (the difference in lengths of your fingers is greater by many magnitudes than the total time of human existence). All of human history could be erased by simply scraping your outermost fingernail.
It could be our bodies were created for the benefit of the outermost cuticle of the fingernail on one hand. But as Twain would say, "I dunno."
Endnotes
[1] as quoted in Scientific American, March 2005)
[2] - Stephen Jay Gould, Time magazine, 8/23/99.
For a summary of excerpts and articles on evolution I have put together, visit http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfdcpm87_506wrb6xghm.
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