Dear Senator Alexander, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Alexander,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Your recent vocal efforts in the Senate to spearhead the repeal effort take us backward, not forward. It is the wrong battle, waged against the wrong enemy. Speaking as one of the working poor, as a person scraping every day to make a business work in this economy, we are not the problem. We need Washington to give us support and increased safety nets like the Health Care law, not take threaten to take them away!

I realize we deeply disagree on this issue. Therefore I am hopeful that, if nothing else, I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Dear Senator Corker, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Corker,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Mr. Corker, two summers ago you and I spoke face to face at a town hall meeting. At that time you watched as angry voices heckled me because I asked you to help me and my pregnant wife by voting in favor of health care. That evening, you looked me in the eye and I had the feeling you were ashamed at what your constituents were shouting at me. Like me, I hope you feel we are better than that in this state.

Therefore I am hopeful that I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Five Theses on the X-Files: An Appreciation

As an adult, I have never owned a TV or had television in my home. Nevertheless, those that know me know that I have managed to become fanatical about a handful of shows over the past two decades. Despite not having a TV I have exploited videotapes, then DVDs, and more recently streaming technology to catch up and keep up with my faves. I also have benefited over the years from the generosity of folks who were willing to let me come over week after week when I couldn't wait until the end of a season to find out what happened (Jonathan, Maria, and Laura, I am talking to you).

My fanaticism is no joke. I either ignore TV or I obsess about it. This is likely a holdover from my youth when, as a bored (and boring) child, I watched everything indiscriminately. I could sit and watch awful tripe for hours on end. I avoid that nowadays, but I find that, when I let myself, I fall into narratives and get totally wrapped up.

Some of the shows that have held me fast over the years only did so for a handful of seasons. Smallville, for example, faded for me after several major characters left the show (and it started feeling like Dawson's Creek with super powers). Similarly, though the first two seasons of 24 were gripping, it eventually became formulaic at best and a torture-fest at its worst. I still enjoy going back to episodes of both on occasion, but the series arc overall does not hold me.

Then there are the series that held me the whole way through. LOST immediately comes to mind, as does Buffy the Vampire Slayer (it took sticking through a season to get me hooked, but I got hooked and stayed hooked). A more recent discovery was The Wire, which was utterly fantastic throughout, and AMC's Rubicon, which had tremendous promise but has sadly been canceled at the end of its first season.

Of all this fanaticism, however, nothing holds a place in my heart like the X-Files.

I was first introduced to the series by my friend Theron, and over the years I would catch an episode here and there. Later, when the DVD box sets came out, I watched the "mythology" sets, and then the whole thing. Repeatedly. I loved it.

This past Christmas Theron and I had a conversation about the series, and that got me thinking about some of the things I have come to believe about what it means for me. It made me want to watch it again, as well. So over the past several weeks, my wife Kira and I have begun to re-watch the series from the beginning. We are now just finishing Season Three. This is Kira's second time all the way through. It is my fifth. As we've been talking about the episodes along the way, some observations have come up that seemed fit to share. So thanks for letting me be a nerd for a few minutes about my favorite show.

First of all, this is my first time re-watching the series since I finished watching LOST last year. I'll be honest, I had expected that LOST would have cooled me on the X-Files somewhat, but I am finding that is not the case. If anything, the intricacy and connectedness I find in LOST has just made me appreciate X-Files all the more. In fact (and I don't think JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse would dispute this), in many ways the X-Files made a show like LOST possible. Certainly LOST found an audience primed and hungry for weirdness and conspiracy in the wake of Mulder and Scully's long run. LOST made it respectably through six seasons, weathering a writers' strike and still delivering a quality story throughout. The X-Files managed to make it half-again longer than that, weathering a change of production location and the loss of its major star, and still delivered quality throughout. Kudos to both for that.

I know that some of my readers are long-time fans. I also know some have never seen the show. I hope the following will pique the interest of the latter half and give way to some good conversations with the former half. In what follows, I am going to make some opinionated observations, and I welcome comments and corrections from both newbies and fanatics alike.

Strap in, ladies and gents. We are entering alpha-nerd territory. Here are my five theses about the X-Files:

If you think the X-Files is a series about aliens, you are missing the point. Around the release a couple years ago of the second movie, X-Files: I Want to Believe, I had many conversations with folks who voiced their disappointment and confusion with the film. "Where are the aliens?" was what I heard over and over again.

It makes sense, of course. Clearly the alien stories and mythology were an essential part of the series. But -- as important as a backbone is -- it is nothing without the muscles and sinews around it. The X-Files was preoccupied foremost with telling creepy stories, and telling them well. The alien stories were definitely creepy, but so were the stand-alone "monster of the week" episodes (and sometimes more so. Think of "2Shy" from Season 3, or "Home," which some have rightly called "the scariest hour ever aired on television").

Which is all to say that a focus on the aliens alone means you miss a lot of good tingles -- both from the creepy monsters and from all the good development of Mulder and Scully's relationship.

If you think the X-Files is about figuring out the conspiracy, you're missing the point. This is a similar temptation to the one that frustrated a lot of the LOST viewers. Like the LOST writers, Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and the other key players in the X-Files were very good at weaving intricate, long-running story arcs that dropped clue after clue in an ever-widening web of intrigue.

But the X-Files is not a mystery novel. Despite the pedantic tone of the series finale, the story arc does not neatly resolve or tie itself off in satisfying closure. This is largely because there is not one conspiracy at work in the X-Files, but several overlapping ones at once.

Remember that the Consortium are pretty much all dead by the end of Season Six, having been killed off in a hangar by the rebel faceless aliens (alpha-nerd - I warned you). But their death did not mean the conspiracies went away. Even before their demise, we were shown that there were other agendas at work, at all levels of the government and the shadow government.

The one common thread was venality and self-interest. As the conflicting intrigues unfolded we see again and again that self-interest is the strongest loyalty most of the characters hold. Krycheck certainly exemplifies this, selling his services to the highest bidder and repeatedly double-crossing everyone, but he is only the most visible exemplar. Everyone and every organization is out to increase its power and cover its hind quarters. The overlap of these self-aggrandizing machinations drive most of the deep plots of the long-term story arc.

In fact, as time goes by, we come to discover not only multiple agendas among the humans in the show, but also the multi-leveled conflicts among the various alien races, at work for or against the colonization plot, and for or against hybridization. The complexity makes the show rich with narrative possibility, and -- for me -- makes the show's conspiracies all the more lifelike and realistic. I mean, spend a little time researching the various conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination -- trying to find one clear narrative in that rabbit hole is a lost cause, mostly because everyone's explanation brings in more and more groups that had some interest in the events, from Oswald ad infinitum.

The desire to take the complex story line and find the key to unlocking it can drive other simplifications, as well. So it seems important to say this -

If you think the X-Files is about the struggle between science and the supernatural, you are missing the point. A theme that resurfaces continually in the series riffs on the polarity between Scully, "trained in hard science" and rational inquiry, and Mulder, whose "spooky" ideas have taken him "outside the Bureau mainstream" into laughingstock territory.

In the first two seasons, in fact, this polarity is sharply emphasized, and it leads to some very interesting stories in which Mulder holds the place of "the feminine" in the narrative. What I mean is that the other men in the FBI treat him, narratively, as females have often been treated in television procedural dramas. Detectives roll their eyes at him, refuse to take his ideas seriously, and work actively to get him out of the way so the "real work" can be done. It is especially interesting to watch Scully's reaction to this behavior, especially when she participates in it.

If that were the whole of the tension, that would certainly be interesting. As the series develops, however, we are exposed to the complexity of this tension, and the polarity is anything but simple. First of all, while Scully is a rationalist and scientist, she is also a person of religious faith -- a fact that should provide common ground with Mulder's supposed "irrationality." Instead, her faith confounds him. Despite his credulity for all forms of the supernatural, this is one realm into which Mulder refuses to venture. In Mulder's world, there is room for aliens, but not angels. Scully, however, can see the hand of God in events, and becomes more bold in saying so as time goes by.

This asymmetry makes for one of my favorite aspects of the show. Throughout the series we see both Mulder and Scully facing crises of "faith," as Scully waxes and wanes with her Catholicism and Mulder bitterly abandons his belief in aliens as a result of one of the many false conspiracies that are "revealed" to him by the venal powers manipulating his crusade for their own purposes. In the final episode, when we hear Scully assert to Mulder that "you and I believe the same thing," the admission is as hard-won as it is accurately inaccurate. Mulder and Scully may believe the same Truth, but their respective articulations of that Truth, and its ultimate meaning, are still deeply personalized.

If you think the X-Files "jumped the shark" after Season Seven, you are missing the point. Next to the lack of aliens in the film, Mulder's departure from the series is often cited by my friends as their biggest disappointment about the series. The implication is that the series went disastrously awry, in terms of character and story, with David Duchovny's absence. In television parlance, this is known as "jumping the shark." Even the Cigarette Smoking Man says, "you know how important Mulder is to the equation."

True as this may be, there is more to the story. Though he is physically absent for the majority of the last two seasons, Mulder's absence forms a central presence to both the narrative and the development of the relationships between Scully and her new partners, Doggett and Reyes.

In Doggett and Reyes we have a chance to see the X-Files through new eyes, and new perspectives. The approaches of both to the unexplained phenomena in the Files are significantly different to those of Mulder, and in confronting these approaches, Scully is pushed to further define her place as the X-Files's advocate. Where her original role was that of skeptic, brought in to debunk Mulder's work, by Season Six she is the voice and the champion of the X-Files in a changed FBI landscape.

I will admit that the final two seasons are somewhat weak, but so are the first two seasons of the show. With the introduction of new major characters, a period of adjustment has to occur for dynamics and relationships to become firmly established. This was certainly true through all of Season One and most of Season Two. Think, for example, of "Ice," an early episode where Mulder and Scully's relationship is tenuous at best and there is very little trust or camaraderie in the face of unknown dangers. In contrast, by Season Two's cliffhanger conclusion, "Anasazi," Scully defends Mulder's innocence despite his violent and aberrant behavior and seeming guilt in the death of his father.

Truly, the high water mark for the X-Files finds its home in seasons Three through Six, but this means that those who would dismiss the Doggett and Reyes episodes should also dismiss the early Mulder and Scully episodes. While weaker than the strongest seasons, I contend that Seasons Eight and Nine are at least as strong as Seasons One and Two, and in some cases stronger.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion:

If you think the X-Files is about Mulder, you're missing the point. Despite all the twists and turns along the way, the Mulder that we encounter in X-Files: I Want to Believe is fundamentally the same Mulder we first see in the basement office in the Pilot episode of Season One. Mulder is static. He matures, but he does not change.

The X-Files is about Scully. From the very first scene of the series (where we see her enter the J. Edgar Hoover building to be briefed), to the last shot of the show (where she and Mulder lay quiet as the rain falls outside), to the last shot of I Want to Believe (where she begins the operation to save the boy's life under the prayerful eyes of the nuns), Scully is the focal point. Mulder doesn't change, but Scully does.

While remaining committed to her scientific and rational view of the world, we get to watch as Scully rediscovers her childhood faith, and then watch again as that faith broadens beyond dogma to spirituality, ecstasy, and ecumenism. She meets a boy messiah, angels, miracle children, three incarnations of Satan and at least one incorruptable martyr along the way. It is more than subtly hinted that her inexplicable child, William, has a somewhat Christ-like "dual nature" that could someday bring peace between the aliens and the human race. By the last seasons of the show, she has had a remarkable faith journey, to say the least.

More than this, however, she becomes open to the Truth of the phenomena contained in the X-Files. Not in the way Mulder is open, but she achieves a credulity that remains balanced with her commitment to scientific inquiry. As an empiricist she has encountered overwhelming evidence of mysteries; unlike Mulder, she does not jump to explain them, but she accepts that, until the proper answers are found, these experiences cannot simply be dismissed. By the time she is paired with Agent Doggett, then, she has become the "spooky" one at the FBI. She has not become Mulder, but she understands him and what he must have gone through in those early years alone in the basement office.

This, in the end, is what makes the X-Files -- from very start to very finish -- so compelling for me. The slow build up of trust and affection between Mulder and Scully, the eventual consummation and inseparability they achieve in the narrative, despite Mulder's absence, and the tenderness and respect they show each other, are deeply satisfying to me. Moreover, as a person who makes his living trying to understand the deep conflicts that drive and motivate persons of faith, Scully's struggles and triumphs are to me very realistic and extraordinarily edifying.

And that, from start to finish, is for me the heart and soul of the X-Files. More than any other show I have seen, I think the creators and writers of the X-Files kept integrity with that heart and paid honor to that soul. This is why, to the confusion of my friends, I was so happy with I Want to Believe, despite its lack of aliens, and why I am certain this will not be the last time I watch the whole thing, start to finish. I want to. I believe.

Overheard on Limbaugh

So today, January 18, 2010, Rush Limbaugh said the following as part of his daily radio program:

The left is constantly telling anybody who will listen how rotten this country is, how rotten we are, how rotten the nation is, how unfair and unjust our economic system is. They create this environment of pessimism, self-hate, and desperation. They tell victims -- and they try to make as many people victims as possible by putting them in groups of victims.

They tell these people that they've got no chance in this unjust and unfair country. "If you're Hispanic, you got no chance. If you're African-American, you got no chance. If you're a woman and African-American, you are doomed! You have no chance. The only out for you is the military, and if you do that, you're stupid, but you really can't be blamed because this economy was so destroyed by George W. Bush, you have no future." What is this going to do to people? And this went on for eight years. And before Clinton got to ten it went on for 16 or 12 years, during Reagan and the first term of Bush. This has been a constant refrain: Uunjust, unfair America is.

What stuck me was how similar, at least on the surface, this sounds to a message written by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, in 1933, in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro:

THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence. For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity.

I'd like to suggest, however, that there is a vast world of difference between Dr. Woodson saying this from a place of oppression, and Rush saying similar things from behind the gold-plated microphone of the EIB Network. To see the similarities on the face of the messages (that minorities have been fed a load of ideological horse manure about their proper place in society) is to miss the fundamental point.

For a member of the master class to point this out (and El Rushbo is always happy to point out, with his "nicotine stained finger," that he is part of the master class) is perhaps gauche, but has no possibility of being a call to revolutionary consciousness. When Dr. Woodson names it, however, he names not only the problem itself but those who perpetrate and profit by it.

When patriotic critics speak of the inequalities facing the minorities in this country, it is not to score points in the political game. It is to name a problem that, God willing, will be rectified.

The key question, the one El Rushbo doesn't actually ask, is who constitutes the "they" spreading these messages of inferiority? Woodson knows. Were he alive today, Woodson would be pointing steadily at the man behind the gold-plated microphone, and the powerful interests for whom he speaks.

Dear Senator Corker, redux.

Senator Corker,

I heard one of your Republican colleagues on NPR this morning saying that he thought the "American people had spoken" in rejecting health care reform. This is disingenuous.

When I looked you in the eye this summer at that rally and told you about the fears my wife and I had had as a young couple just out of school with no resources to pay for COBRA and a baby on the way, I appreciated that you seemed sympathetic to our plight. You were sympathetic despite the crowd around me jeering that we "shouldn't have gotten pregnant," implying, I suppose, that we should have destroyed or rejected our precious daughter, Maggie, instead of rejecting and working to change a system in which parents like us are forced to make tough and impossible choices for the convenience of maintaining the "status quo" of a health care system that is greedily and monstrously out of control.

As one of your constituents, I have contacted you in the past to say that I am in favor of a SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM and a GOVERNMENT OPTION. I am in favor of radically reducing and curtailing the influence of health care lobbyists on Capitol Hill (including the donations they make to the campaigns of you and your colleagues), and that your poor and working constituents especially do not have time to wait while you and the Republicans obstruct and play politics.

I am writing to say that I am STILL for these "impossible" outcomes. Moreover, I know I am not the only one of your constituents writing to tell you this.

What I think, sir, is that when you and your colleagues refer to the "will of the American people," you are simply only attending to the polls you and your benefactors in the health care industry find most expedient.

I think you and your fellow Republicans' behavior these last months during the debate on health care has been shameful. We need drastic, not incremental change, and we need it now. People are dying, sir. They are dying from a system that denied them access to care and to affordability; they are dying from "preexisting conditions."

The rhetoric that has flown in the past months about "denial of choice of doctors" and "death panels" ignores the fact that these conditions are already in place with the system we have, only they are factors currently of the "free market approach" you love and esteem so much.

In rural central Tennessee and now in Memphis, as an educator and a pastor, I have seen with my own eyes the devastation the "business as usual" approach to health care has brought to honest and hard working families. At the Saturn plant, in Culleoka, in Nashville, and here in Collierville and Memphis, there are a whole bunch of hurting (and dying) folks that just want the kind of access to decent, affordable, effective health coverage and care that you and your colleagues in the Senate enjoy every day.

Whether you call it "socialism," sir, or just good merciful common sense, I am an American, and your constituent, and I am asking you to get off your kiester and work for it.

Cordially,

Dr. David Dault
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Christian Brothers University
Memphis, TN

Hell yeah.

Brother West, tellin' it like it is.

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding."

When I grow up, I want to be Malcolm Gladwell.

I just got done reading his recent book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and it is one of the best written and most enjoyable reads I have had in quite a while.

Gladwell first came onto my radar late last year, when I saw a clip of him on The Colbert Report. He seemed very subdued and soft spoken, and very out of place in the full glare of Colbert's rapid-fire wit. Despite this, I sensed that Gladwell had a sharp mind, and I was won over by the quiet forcefulness of his ideas. Plus, he had this crazy hair that I thought was pretty cool.

So my brother in law gave us Blink for Christmas, and I picked it up a couple of weeks ago for some "distraction reading" (the types of books I pick up to fill gaps in days when I'm not writing myself or reading something specific for my class preparations). When I do this type of reading, I often put the book down pretty quickly, as I get easily bored with a lot of popular titles.

Not so in this case.

Having spent several years as a science correspondent for the Washington Post, and later as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, Gladwell has honed his writing to a fine journalistic edge. He has already penned several bestsellers, and seems to have no limit to the amount of popular books he can produce.

Gladwell writes in a very conversational, engaging style. It almost feels as if he is perched in the chair next to you as you are reading, and the two of you are just tossing ideas around. The ideas, in this case, are more interesting, however, than those that pop up in your average casual conversation.

Blink is preoccupied with the human capacity for what Gladwell calls "thin slicing." This is his term for the instantaneous, gut level decisions that we make, that often turn out to be much more accurate and incisive than those decisions over which we expend a great deal of time, research and deliberation.

As but one example, my favorite portion of the book was the chapter entitled "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory," in which Gladwell becomes a fly on the wall for a set of war game exercises conducted by the American military in 2002. The event was intended to be a showcase of the latest in reconnaissance and strategic technologies. Think about those Air Force recruitment commercials you've seen lately -- "It's not science fiction; It's what we do every day" -- that sort of stuff. The Big Idea was that during the war game simulation, the armed forces would use all this new technology, and veteran commander Van Riper would play the part of a rogue general in the Middle East theater. It was supposed to be a rout.

However, as Gladwell's account unfolds, things did not turn out the way the military brass anticipated. The very technologies that were deployed to keep the commanders abreast of every last detail of field operations quickly overwhelmed both the high-level and mid-level officers, leading to hesitations. Meanwhile, Van Riper and his fictitious factions of zealous rogue armies very quickly exploited every tactical advantage, leading to some rapid, stunning, and quite embarrassing defeats for the American forces in the war game.

Gladwell points out that information, in itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing to have. It is, instead, knowing which information is essential in a given exchange that makes the difference. This is as true on the battlefield as it is in the worlds of fine art, education, music, and taste-testing.

During the course of the book, we are introduced to leading psychologists who demonstrate how this "think slicing" capacity we have leads us to make really excellent (and truly horrendous) decisions. Along the way, we encounter a researcher who (supposedly) can read faces so acutely that he can judge, just by looking at someone, their motivations and sexual orientations. We also learn that most people, when put under pressure, reveal reflexive tendencies toward bigotry and racial profiling that are unintentional, but nonetheless very measurable.

Gladwell does not just present these facts, but frames them in a series of ethical questions that helps the reader to see that these sorts of insights into the human mind might actually, if applied, make the world a slightly better place. "This is the real lesson of Blink," he writes. "It is not simply enough to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know how the mind works -- about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment -- it is our responsibility to act" [276].

What I enjoyed most about the book was Gladwell's seemingly endless ability to make interesting connections. How did he find all of these people? It seems like he spends his time traveling to various locations, following one lead and then another, having fascinating conversations and gleaning these nuggets of vital knowledge. It strikes me as a very similar approach to the one taken by the folks at RadioLab, only there it's sound and here it ends up on paper.

This book is the real deal. It's informative and inspiring. I got done reading it and the first thing I thought was, "I want to write like that. I want to have conversations like that."

Seriously. Even if I never will achieve his cool hair, I still want to grow up to be Malcolm Gladwell.


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Brother West on Democratic Socialism and the legacy of Dr. King

Cornel West, honorary chairperson of the Democratic Socialists of America, spoke earlier this week with Tavis Smiley of Public Radio International about socialism and capitalism, as they apply (or don't) to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview here.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trust me. I have dropped a name or two in my day.

Like many academics, I suffer from an almost indescribable inferiority complex. If the world's economies aren't enough to make you feel irrelevant in your life's work, your students are always there to seal the deal. The fear that no one, but no one, will care that I am breathing has, on occasion, driven me to some gauche behavior. And, I mean, come on. I have some really interesting friends. Lots of them are quite accomplished in their fields. Several of them are famous. A handful are really famous (and one, admittedly, is infamous).

So, on those occasions when I am weak from my fears of irrelevance, I have dropped a name or two, or stretched my own importance, thanks to the borrowed importance of my more accomplished friends and acquaintances.

I am reminding you of this, dear Reader, not because I am particularly proud of this behavior, but rather to establish my bona fides for the invective that is to follow.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are in the military, or loosely associated therewith. Thinking back to the build up to the most recent Iraq war, I recall many of those acquaintances and friends taking me to task for my hesitancy about, you know, invading. What I recall hearing, more than once, was a strange form of name dropping that, I think, is akin to what I was describing in myself above.

When I would argue against invading from the evidence I had (the evidence that was available in the media and through my researches beyond the limitations of the American media), these jolly ol' Jingoes would get a knowing look on their face and a sage twinkle in their eyes. These old Hawks, mind you, are ancillary. They are factotums. They are sideliners now, and armchair warriors at best. Yet they wanted me to know that they were in the know. And they knew something I didn't.

"Well, I can't say much now. But I've been talking to [fill in the blank], and he's close to Colin Powell, you know, and he said...."

The upshot of what "he" said, in these cases, was that there was a whole lot of intelligence that was simply too sensitive to leak to the media, but if we (us common folk) ever knew the full extent of it, we'd be demanding ol' Saddam's head on a pike and thanking Dubya and Co. for invading when they did. The implication, in other words, was that the evidence I had was irrelevant, in light of the evidence that I didn't have.

Now, of course, it turns out they actually didn't know something I didn't, after all. They wanted to feel important and in the know. They (and lots of other folks) bought into a culture that was fed off equal parts fear and self-aggrandizement. That latter factor, I think, was what gave these Hawks (some of them quite well placed and influential - hey, I told you I know important people, didn't I?) the impetus to take the little crumbs of rumor they had and talk like they had fat seed cakes of certainty.

Let them eat cake, indeed. And we did. And why not? After all, "they knew something we didn't." A-yup. And we should have known better. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

But if you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe one of the knowiest in the know fellas in the game, Tony Blair, himself. Yesterday he pretty much admitted that the whole WMD justification was a pretense, and that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Hussein regardless of whether there were WMD's or not.

This has led a prominent international lawyer, Phillipe Sands, to remark that Blair may now be open to war crimes prosecution, given that he joined into the war, and the justificatory posturing that preceded it, "irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality" of invasion in light of the lack of positive evidence.

There's a full story on this developing fiasco here.

Tony Blair, however, is not our problem. He merely is a good, close friend to our problem. He had tea with our problem just last week, in fact, and they had such a fine time, and...

Let me venture this: there is a deep inferiority complex at the heart of this nation. It has been endemic for generations, and it became epidemic in the last ten years. From Enron to the housing bubble to the credit crunch, we as a nation are running amok, from one fiction to the next, trying our best to feel relevant and important without the substance of fact or character to bolster us. The names we are dropping now, however, are names like "patriotism," "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and, yes, "hope."

These are the names of acquaintances whom these days we barely know. However, if we drop the names often enough, and broadly enough, everyone will assume we're still all old chums, won't they? And if those listening to us are convinced by our associations, then that's close enough to being real, isn't it, to fill the hole?

Sure it is, chum. That's the ticket. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

All of these lives... rearranging themselves for me

A couple of months back I posted about a series of ads I noticed in the Atlantic monthly, and the subtle (or not so subtle) racist undertones I noted in them.

Now that the most recent fracas -- that being over whether Joe Wilson's outburst at the President was an act of racism or not -- is finally starting to die down, I figured it was time to say a little something about this:



Now, yes. I want to give this some benefit of the doubt. It is a stunning ad, and quite amazingly executed (assuming these are actual human acrobats, and not cgi). Be that as it may, however, every time I watch this I think the exact same thing to myself:

Look. Here's over a thousand black-haired, brown-skinned people, arrayed reverently (given the saffron-like robes, one might even say, worshipfully) around the supine blond white woman.

At her every whim, they whirl and shift themselves into new patterns around her: "All of them rearranging themselves... all of the time..."

It is hard, what with the visual imagery being what it is, not to think of all the gyrations and rearrangements that third-world economies have gone into in order to provide us (supine white folks) with the earlier generations of our American comfort objects, our shoes and our handbags.

The fact that she is the focal point is clear. The fact that she is the only one not working her ass off is also clear. What is even more clear is that she seems completely oblivious (or uncaring) to all this black-haired motion that is, quite literally, everywhere she might care to turn her gaze.

The technologies of the industrialized world's white reality -- whether we are talking about television (where it took us a long, long time to get from Father Knows Best to the Cosby Show) or the American electoral process (ditto) -- have always been geared to generate illusory results. White technologies obscure the plain realities of racial, economic, and class disparity that haunt the green meadows of our "civilized" world. We may present ourselves with prettied-up images of all this, but the actuality of it is actually much more grisly and horrific and absurd.



I'm not telling you anything new, of course. You know this. James Cone and Jacques Ellul told you all this a long time ago, and many others besides. But now here is the Palm Pre, reminding us again, only now in much more direct manner, of this simple truth: For every relaxing, oblivious white girl out there, there are a hell of a lot of hard working brown skinned people, rearranging themselves and their lives.

That the result of this disparity is sometimes beautiful for us does not obscure the fact that it is also obscene. Tote that around in your Blackberry, little Miss America.

How much is that white guy in the window?

Forgive me. I've been reading the Atlantic Monthly again.

Flipping through a recent issue, I began to become aware that there was a common thread running through the images I was seeing. Not in the layout of the magazine itself, per se, but rather in the advertising. Every few pages there was this commonality. Once I noticed it, I went back and checked to make sure. Sure enough. It was there.

The first image was near the front of the magazine - within the first few pages, I'd say. As you can see, it shows an image of, well, a white guy in the right corner of a window. He stares out, masterfully, over a production floor. He looks calm and relaxed and in control, even though his shirt sleeves are rolled down. His posture (arm up, legs slightly crossed) communicates that things are okay. He is where he should be, right? And so is everything below him. Where it should be. For some reason, this guy's back simply oozes confidence, to my eyes, at least.


So far, so good. But then, a few pages on, here was this second image - in many ways a direct replica of the first. Powerful-looking man, in lower right corner of window, looking out through window in a visual narrative of poise and mastery. This time its is harder to tell the racial profile of the man, but he is quite decidedly not African-American (this will become more important in a second). If I'm not mistaken, that's Taiwan through the window. I especially like the tagline: "The end of think. The beginning of know." Introspection is dead; kiss it goodbye. Now is the time for the blind bling-bling of bourgeois assurance that brought us great advances like collateralized debt obligations and... you know... dioxin and stuff. all this to say, by white guy #2, I was starting to get a little suspicious.

That was when I came across this third image, toward the back of the magazine (wouldn't you just guess that?). In contrast to the two masterful non-African-Americans in the right of the two previous windows, here is a very nervous looking African-American, posed to the left of the frame, in a similar manner to the first two. Only here, the window is replaced by a (barred!) railing, a poor-man's window, if you will. The caption reflects uncertainty and lack of control over one's life - precisely the opposite of the message of the first two images. If the first two guys are management, this fellow is lower-middle management at best, and facing an immanent layoff at worst.

What is one to make of these images, taken together? First, probably, is the fact that they are together. All three of them occur within fifty pages of each other in the same magazine. You would think advertising firms would want to keep their material a bit more fresh than this. And yet, here they all are.

Second, taken together, they convey a narrative of business in our present-day global America. The narrative, as I have intimated above, is one of mastery and its lack. To the white guys sweating the present "economic downturn," the message seems to be, "don't worry - you're still on top." To the non-white, however, the message is just as clearly one of nervousness and lack of control over one's resources and, ultimately, time (delay of retirement indefinitely, for example).

It is not lost on me that these images are amalgamated within the Atlantic, a magazine I continue to have serious misgivings about reading. I keep feeling like the editorial policy of the Atlantic should be much, much to the left of what it actually is. You pick it up, it at first has that nice lefty vibe, like the one you got clearly in the good ol' days when Lewis Lapham was at the editorial helm over at Harper's, or, sainted memory!, the really good old days of "fighting" Bob LaFollette and Milton Mayer over at the Progressive. I can't help thinking that any of those mags would have put the kibosh on these sorts of semiotic shenanigans between their covers, despite the loss of potential ad revenue.

Alas, however, not so the Atlantic.

So, like the old song, I ask, "How much is that white guy in the window?" How much as in, "how often?" of course, but also, "at what cost?" I ask because, cute as he is, I am certain that white guy is for sale, and I want to suggest that the price - for us nervous folks, non-white and otherwise - might indeed be too high. Caveat emptor.

Richard Henry Lee...

...Virginian statesman and delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776, is best known for the motion that led to the Declaration of Independence. He made the motion on June 7, 1776, and the deliberations stretched on into weeks. Finally growing impatient, Lee again arose in the assembly in early July and declared:

"Mr. President, we have discussed this issue for days. It is the only course for us to follow. Why then, Sir, do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and to conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe [and the world] are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast, in the felicity of the citizen, to the ever-increasing tyranny."

Happy birthday, America. Don't forget where you came from.

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

Today, in the parking lot of the post office, I observed a family (with a small dachshund, no less), driving a Volvo with truck nuts.

And I thought, already in my horror:
What if this is not irony?

Books that changed my life: How Children Learn / How Children Fail, by John Holt

Years ago, during the first couple years of high school, I had a pretty cool English and Literature teacher, Mr. Youngblood. Being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much for English, or Literature, or sitting in a desk to listen to much of anything being taught to me (so goes adolescence). I did, however, care about Mr. Youngblood. Mr. Youngblood was pretty cool.

I guess he thought I was okay, too, because when he was packing up to move (he left for new horizons and opportunities between my sophomore and junior years) he invited me and a couple other kids to his house to get first crack at a bunch of his stuff before he pared it down in a series of yard sales.

Mr. Youngblood pointed me to a stack of albums by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - and since that moment there has not been a day gone by that I am not eternally grateful for that gesture. He also had a large and unruly pile of unsorted books, and, being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much that they were unruly or unsorted. I dove in.

Turns out a lot of those books in that pile were about education, and it turns out that a lot of them soon made it into my car and eventually into my personal library. Mr. Yougnblood had been schooled in the sixties and early seventies, and a lot of the education books I found had a sort of granola/hippie uselessness to them (I was them, as I am now, essentially a punk rocker at heart, and I distrust mightily all that "peace-love-dope" crap). These were eventually read, considered, and discarded from my own unruly pile. Wheat and chaff, after all.

Despite my skepticism, a handful of the books were worth keeping, and reading, and re-reading. Among these - the top of the unruly pile, certainly - were two books by John Holt: How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

The books are actually collected excerpts from a series of journals Holt kept during the early-to-mid sixties, as he was observing classrooms as part of his own training as an educator. His reflections on what he saw was revelatory to me - both concerning my own difficulties at the time with my schooling, and in years hence as I have worked with students of my own.

A basic thesis of the books can be boiled down to the fact that what a teacher believes is happening in an educational moment, and what the students believe is happening, may be profoundly different - even alien - from each other.

Education, of course, always involves discrepancies of power. Teachers are more powerful than students in that teachers have the power to grade. The difficulty arises in the fact that, in our culture, grading a student's "performance" feels (in many, if not the majority of cases) from the standpoint of the student herself like a summary judgment of her worth and quality as a person. This is not just true of young children; think about adults you might know who hear criticism as attack or disrespect - these responses are similar to how students, young and old alike, feel in such moments. Our culture blends ontology (the state of one's being and worth) with how well one "performs."

Holt argues that the result of this unspoken blending is a situation toxic to learning.

It works like this:

1. the feeling of being judged and found unworthy is uncomfortable, and it is an understandable and shared human trait to want to minimize or eliminate this discomfort as quickly as possible Schools subtly use this discomfort, especially in early education, to keep students "focused on the problem" they are given (as Holt puts it, "We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour" [HCF 198]). Teachers use the unspoken threat of disapproval and rejection to corral young students into "working hard."
2. Instead, students - motivated to minimize or eliminate the discomfort of feeling judged as quickly as possible - redirect nearly all their energy away from the educational moment in favor of working on the real problem, as they perceive it: how to stop feeling, as quickly and decisively as possible, the discomfort of being judged and the threat of being rejected or disapproved of as a person.
3. As a result, what students really learn from these exchanges are simple strategies to end the discomfort quickly. This learning is reinforced, again, and again, so thoroughly that by the time most of us are out of kindergarten they are already fully formed defensive maneuvers.

For some of us, the strategy is to simply learn whatever details will help us answer the questions we are asked so completely that we can always "perform" properly, and thus be praised and rewarded (we all know folks like this growing up. I remember in my class in second grade when one of them I knew got his first "B" - the terror and the tears of the tantrum that followed showed just how much pressure this poor little kid felt he was truly under). Others - perhaps the majority - learn how to "fake it." That is to say, they make a good show of pretending to wrestle with the problem, all the while watching the instructor for subtle, nonverbal clues about what the right answer might be - all amounting, in the end, to a highly theatricalized guessing game. Still others simply quit trying altogether, and just take their lumps, put their heads down on the desk, and tune out (I was one of those).

What is common to the entire spectrum of responses, says Holt, is that whatever the motivation for the student was coming in - curiosity, love of learning, enjoyment of community - it is very quickly replaced by fear.

What is essential to understand - and what is most brilliant in Holt's analysis - is that in every educational moment learning is always taking place. The problem is simply that what is being learned may not what the instructor, or the institution, thinks is being taught.

As a teacher, I may think I am neutrally teaching "a subject" like Algebra or Theology. Some of my students may have come there out of an actual interest in the subject. Many others are simply there because they were told they had to be there (and this is as true in college and seminary classes as it was in grade school). The subject is complex; I give what I think is an adequate and sufficient explanation - some of the students' brows furrow, and I glower at them. "I explained it once already, people - aren't you smart enough to get it...?"

The problem, of course, might not be in my students. The problem might (and often is) in the way I have structured the course, or my examples, or communicated my thoughts. But here we are in a situation where I have the power to make my judgement that some of them are stupid (not me) a matter of permanent and semi-public record. It is a lot easier (and advantageous, in the short run) to perpetuate the illusion that my teaching and reflection on teaching is up to snuff, and it must just be that some folks are too stupid to get it. They simply failed to learn.

But Holt makes this a much more complex interchange. The students are aware, as I am, of this power dynamic at every moment. The difference is that the students are often much smarter about how this dynamic can be used to their advantage. Many of them, from the very first moment of class, are undeniably learning: they are learning to fool me. Most of them will be able to make me think they have learned something, despite the confusing and mis-thought manner in which I have presented the information. I will, unconsciously, communicate enough of my likes and dislikes that students will feed me exactly what they, very perceprively, have learned that I want. In that case, the subject of the class is no longer "Algebra" or "Theology," but rather "David's [or fill in any other instructor's name's] ego." I know, when I was a student, I sometimes got a decent grade in classes exactly this way - I imagine some of you have, too. It took a lot of study and critical thiking to get that grade - but not study of "Algebra" or "Theology." As Holt puts it, "[Students] in the right-wrong situation will naturally grasp at every available clue. We teachers have to learn to present [our educational tasks for the students in such a way that] irrelevant clues will not so often lead to correct performance" [HCF 183].

Other students, by contrast, develop elaborate strategies to outwit the educational expectations entirely. This may be for a variety of reasons. For some students, the instructor presents the material in a manner that is fundamentaly disrespectful or demeaning to the student's background or culture. The strategies developed in such a situation are no less elaborate, but they are much less pleasing to the instructor's ego. If you have been a teacher and ever wondered why certain students, who seem to be so alive and intelligent outside the classroom, suddenly become to dull and unresponsive when they sit down in the chair, it is likely that this is a strategy. By "playing dumb," the student allows herself the means to "preserve a small part of their integrity in a hopeless situation" [HCF 195]. As Holt goes on to say:

Subject peoples both appease their rulers and satisfy their desire for some human dignity by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent that they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies [HCF 195].

I think both Holt and I are pessimistic when it comes to the institutions of education currently in place in our society. Far too many of our classrooms reflect the unspoken dynamics of power mentioned in the quotation above. What I learned from these two books, however, is that I could work to be a better teacher than some that I had (and don't get me wrong - I have had some excellent teachers, and I'm not just saying that on account of the Captain Beefheart albums), and that it might be possible in some moments for actual, real and good learning to take place.

If you are an educator (like me), Holt will give you some concrete lessons in learning to listen to what is not being said (though it is very loud and apparent, once one has ears to hear) in your classroom. If you are a former student who has difficulty remembering multiplication tables and long division (like me), his books may help you unearth what went awry in your own learning all those years ago.

What I think you will most gain from Holt's books, though, is the hope and possibility that (whether student or teacher), even at this late hour, we still might learn something new and useful, together.

Of the Human and the Sublime

A few weeks ago, back in late March, I was in Manhattan for a conference and to visit with some old friends, and I had one of those moments that linger with you and affect you for a long time. In order to adequately describe it, I need to give a little context about myself and these sorts of "defining moments" that pop up every decade or so.

Years ago - a lifetime ago, really - when I was eighteen, some friends and I drove to Atlanta to see a show. We went to the Metroplex, a punk club in the heart of downtown Atlanta. It was 1988, and I think the Metroplex was on Moreland Avenue or somewhere like that. At any rate, we were there to see Fishbone. I hadn't seen many shows at that point in my youth. This night, however, would in many ways change and define my life.

The Metroplex was a fairly sizable club. It was rare in that, in addition to "the pit" (the area in front of the stage where the slamdancers "moshed") it had a balcony that circled three sides of the performance area. I was sitting in the balcony. That detail is important.

(The opener was the truly mighty Follow for Now. I remember they started their set out with an instrumental riff on the Rush song "Tom Sawyer" that opened a can of whoop ass in the room. But that just set the stage for what was to follow.)

To say that Fishbone was energetic would be an understatement. They started their shows hard, and then intensity just grew continually through the evening. The very first thing Angelo (the lead singer/saxophonist) did was run across the stage and dive into the audience, surfing on top of the crowd. The crowd, needless to say, was with the band from the first, and the spasmodic energy was palpable.

I have seen a lot of Fishbone shows in my time. One of the common threads to each was a point in the set where Angelo would induct the crowd into what they called the "Fishbone Familyhood." Though never exactly defined, the Familyhood was a sort of transracial love-fest. Ambassadors of goodwill to the cosmos, sort of like if the Deadheads moved faster and looked more like the Rainbow Coalition.

In most shows, the Familyhood induction speech happened from the stage, with Angelo leading the crowd, eventually, in a common "oath," of sorts, culminating in a chant: "Peace. Love. Respect. For everybody! Peace! Love Respect! For everybody!"

This night, however, when it came time for the Familyhood speech, Angelo had surfed the crowd to the back of the room. He had climbed one of the support columns beneath the second floor, and was now hanging from the balcony railing. He was less than ten feet from where we were sitting, and about fifteen feet above the floor below, hanging on with one hand while his other held the wireless microphone. Soon the whole crowd was chanting, "Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody! Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody!"...

...and Angelo leapt into the air, into the empty space above the crowd.

There is something about watching a human body hang in the void, even for a spit second, that stops your breath. I thought of this again, a few months ago, when Kira and I, along with our friend, Katy, went to the Belcourt to watch the award-winning documentary, Man on Wire.

There is a point, right at the end of the film, when - after all the preparation and intrigue, the planning and covert research that preceded Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center - Petit mentions that he "made the decision to shift [his] weight from the building to the wire."

What follows is a slow series of still photos of Petit in the air, a quarter mile above the ground, as lilting strains of Eric Satie play without voice or comment. I have seen the film now several times, and the sight of this still stops me short and chokes me up. (If you have yet to see the film, see it. The moment is indescribably beautiful. Sublime.)

So on that day back in March I was walking around Central Park with my old friend Anson. I was feeling bummed because part of what I had planned to do during my visit to New York was to go see a play he was in, "Mourning Becomes Electra," but it had been canceled before the end of its run. Anson, however, was insisting that this was good, in fact, because this meant I now had a chance to go see what he claimed was "the best show in New York" at the time, "FuerzaBruta."

I'm not much for last minute schedule changes, so I was initially hesitant. Anson, however, was both enthusiastic and insistent, and I soon agreed. He made a call on his cellphone to another acquaintance of mine (who was in the show), and arranged to have a ticket discounted for me. Done.

A couple of hours later, I was on the subway heading south to Union Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village. After looking around a bit, I found the Daryl Roth Theatre, which apparently used to be an old bank. I stood in line, got my ticket (thank you, Jon!) and walked up the stairs as the show was just beginning.

How to describe FuerzaBruta? It was like that moment when Angelo leapt out over the crowd; it was like the moment in Man on Wire when Petit makes the decision to shift his weight from building to space; only it went on for more than an hour.

The performance space is cavernous. every inch of it was utilized - horizontally and vertically. The sweep of the themes and narratives (there is very little dialogue) is cavernous as well. The narratives are open-ended and infinitely interpretable. Horrifying, startling, liberating, exhilarating, euphoric... every moment brings a new possibility for feeling huge feelings. I have never seen anything like it. It was beautiful. Afterward, in fact, when discussing it with Anson and Jon (the performer who helped secure me the ticket), I said it was probably one of the most beautiful events I had ever seen. I meant it then, and I mean it now. Beautiful.

More than beautiful, though. The right word isn't "beautiful," I think. The right word here is "sublime."

The sublime was important years ago to folks like Shelley, Wordsworth and Lord Byron - Romantic poets dealt with the sublime. "The sublime has its source in the associated qualities of 'power,' 'vastness,' 'infinity,' and 'magnificence,'" M.H. Abrams wrote in his classic, Natural Supernaturalism, "and its characteristic effects on the beholder are the traditional ones aroused by the conception of the infinite power of a stern but just God: 'terror,' 'astonishment,' 'awe,' 'admiration,' and 'reverence.'"

You will think I am exaggerating, but this is not the case. Standing in the crowd at the Daryl Roth Theatre that evening, I felt those feelings. I think many around me felt them, too, though I am also certain that the range of responses was vast and unpredictable.

As I stood in the crowd, I thought of my Mother, who passed from this Earth the month before. I thought of how differently she and I saw things, and yet how we were still both able to be moved so deeply, in our own ways, by huge intangible things like "Beauty" and "Truth." It is a connection we shared, though our lives together had been been broken asunder by time and circumstance. Standing in that crowd, I missed her and mourned her, as I do now, typing this: in my own way. Death has a sublimity, too. But love, strange and broken and interpretable thought it may be, is still the stronger, in the end.

You will want me to link to video and show you pictures of what I saw that night. I will not. You will want to go to Google and look it up yourself. I cannot stop you, but I will say: you should not.

What I will tell you instead is that you should go to Manhattan. Get on a plane and go to Manhattan and get on the train and go to Union Square. Go the the Darryl Roth Theatre and buy your ticket and stand in the crowd and never forget that you are human. Frail and fragile and lost in the immensity of the universe you may be; but you are human... And it is wonderful to be human.

Angelo leapt into the air. The crowd reached up to him with its arms, and caught him.

Go to Manhattan.

What would Nietzsche say?

My new media crush

Thanks to a recent episode of The Daily Show that I watched on my laptop, I learned a little bit about MSNBC and Air America host, Rachel Maddow. Turns out she watches The Daily Show on her laptop, too - because she doesn't have a TV either. Cool.

And there are lots of other things we have in common, too. We're both wryly witty, we both like radio a whole bunch, we're both sorta-lefty, sorta-not. Oh, yeah - and we both dig girls. So much in common! I can't believe I didn't know about her before.

I'm totally crushing, here.

[Sigh...]

The Iron is Hot

What, exactly, constitutes a "crisis" in this nation?

On the way to answering this, let's take a moment for a history lesson. A chartered corporation is, under American law, what is known as "juristic person." That is, in the development of legal precedent around the issue, corporations in America have, over time, been treated - from the standpoint of the law - more and more like human beings. There is a certain logic to this, of course. Corporations engage in commerce, just like real persons do, and therefore the "naturalization" of corporations as "citizens" is tantamount to the removal of impediments to commerce. Good business sense, there.

A strange moment happened in 1886, however. The Supreme Court that year heard a case known as Santa Clara County v.Southern Pacific Railroad. Prior to the rendering of the actual judicial decision in the case, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite stated clearly, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

While this opinion was not a proper legal precedent, it has been reported and repeated as if it were, resulting in a de facto extension of Fourteenth Amendment protections to American corporations.

Now remember, it took seventy years to begin to "fully" extend these rights to actual flesh-and-blood American persons (persons who happened to have the "wrong" color flesh or "non-white" blood), if we take the civil rights decisions of the mid-1950's as a benchmark. Of course, it could be argued that the Fourteenth Amendment has never actually been fully inclusive of the actual flesh-and-blood human persons it was (ostensibly) designed to protect. Our legacies of Jim Crow, and still-economically-and-racially-segregated cities, attest this fact.

Thomas Jefferson opposed the chartering of corporations, unilaterally, deriding them as "monopolies of commerce," and a threat to the health of the nation. So the 1886 "decision," and its effects, it can be argued, mark a radical change from the founding ideals of American government. The most radical effect of these changes is the preference of fictional persons over actual flesh-and-blood persons.

We see this effect writ large today, as our country groans and flexes its fear muscles over the pain being felt by many of these corporate "persons" - today mainly banks and financial institutions, yesterday semi-government loan agencies. We are being cajoled into swallowing a truly staggering amount of debt - nearly a trillion dollars - to assuage the suffering of these fictional persons.

The one upside to this 700 billion dollar debacle is this: all talk of universal health care "costing too much" is, by my lights, instantly nullified.

I was just reading the New York Times, and they reported recently that the estimates for the cost of universal, comprehensive health care for (nearly) all Americans would be somewhere in the 60- 90 billion dollar range. That is somewhere in the range of one tenth the cost of the proposed bailout.

It is a bargain at that price, certainly, but it is a clincher when you add that real flesh-and-blood humans, not legal fictions, would be directly helped by such a move. That, it seems to me, is a clear mandate for enacting such measures immediately - especially since we now know the money and the means are obviously available.

On NPR's "Marketplace Morning Report" this morning, Scott Jagow used words like "crisis" and "peril" to describe the situation. Dan Gretch, commenting from Miami, talks about the man in Miami Lakes whose condo is now losing value.

Excuse me?

Come to Nashville, and I will introduce you to Steve, who occasionally lives in the Post Office at night when the weather is cold. Folks in my city - real flesh-and-blood people - don't have homes, and they don't have health care. Their concern is not about losing investment value or market share. Their concern is about losing teeth, getting beaten up or harrassed by police, or their kidneys failing.

I don't say this to diss the man in Miami Lakes. I feel for him, too. His losses, relative to his context, are significant. But in both cases - Steve and the man in Miami Lakes - we are talking about people.

It is a very different thing to talk about a fictional person, and its pain, and its groaning, as if it were equal in importance, or more important, than Steve. Steve - though insignificant by economic indicators - is a living human being. No matter how little he contributes, he is, he must be, considered more important than any legal fiction. His pain and hardship must be considered more real and more important than the pain and hardship of any legal fiction.

Let me put this in concrete terms. Imagine there is a burning building. Inside the burning building is a baby and a corporate charter. The firemen who rush into the building ignore the baby and use all their resources to secure and protect the piece of paper from damage.

Think about that for a minute, and then try and convince me that such behavior is not a textbook definition of moral perversity. Yet the equivalent of this abhorrent, evil, immoral action is being played out before our very eyes this very day.

I say, do not stand for it. Stand for something better.

I say, stand up for the health and safety of your flesh-and-blood sisters and brothers - the guy in Miami Lakes, sure, but especially for the "least of these" among us, the millions of Steves in the post offices and under the bridges of America.

Stand up by contacting your representatives and saying to them that if they vote for the bailout of fictions and against the healthcare of real persons, you will vote them out of office.

Stand up by saying "no" to the insanity that would protect the piece of paper and let the human baby burn.

Stand up to a news media that cries "crisis, peril!" in the face of corporate discomfort, while remaining mute, uncaring and unnoticing of the human disaster of health care and housing in our nation.

For God's sake, stand up.

Strange bedfellows, my ass

One of the interchanges between John McCain and Barack Obama in last night's presidential debate involved McCain repeatedly reminding us that he has been "friends with Henry Kissinger for 35 years."

Kissinger, you may recall, is the ex-secretary of state for the Nixon administration. You may also recall that Kissinger has had difficulty traveling abroad of late, because judges and state officials in both Europe and South America keep trying to arrest him for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

It was Kissinger, you will certainly remember, who famously spoke out against democracy when he said, "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

You, hopefully, will also recall that it was Kissinger who proudly said, in 1973, that "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer" (New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973).

1973 was just around the time, if we are to trust McCain's math, that he began to be friends with Kissinger, "35 years" ago.

Do you suppose, in all this time, McCain might have pulled his friend Kissinger aside and taken him to task for - say - war crimes (something McCain certainly would oppose, based on his POW experience), or the trampling of nascent democracies in Central and South America, or the slaughter in East Timor?

Do you think McCain has mentioned any of these to Kissinger, even once, during these 35 years of their friendship?

No, sadly, I don't think he has, either.

Caveat emptor.

Mr. Dylan, meet Mr. Bierce

economist - n. - a weatherman who doesn't know which way the wind blows.