Eric The Blue

And another thing

The Katherine Kersten column I criticized here includes the following:

Today, American democracy's Judeo-Christian roots are no longer well-understood or appreciated.  In fact, we're accustomed to hear religious faith abused by influential voices intent on driving it to the margins of our public square.

Possibly these "influential voices" would be more influential if their larynxes had names.  Anyway, it is evident that, despite their best efforts, religion has not been driven "to the margins of our public square."  Not even close.  While Kersten was composing her column, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, hard at work on the problems of The Lone Star State, signed a Proclamation reading, in its entirety:

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and

WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land and destroyed almost 400 homes, causing me to issue an ongoing disaster declaration since December of last year; and

WHEREAS, these dire conditions have caused agricultural crops to fail, lake and reservoir levels to fall and cattle and livestock to struggle under intense stress, imposing a tremendous financial and emotional toll on our land and our people; and

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto signed my name and have officially caused the Seal of State to be affixed at my Office in the City of Austin, Texas, this the 21st day of April, 2011.

RICK PERRY
Governor of Texas

Our founding fathers would not have been capable of creating such a document.  Bless them.

 



Kersten's Easter sermon

Since Easter falls on a Sunday this year, and Sunday is the day for Katherine Kersten to spatter her fantasies on the editorial page of the Star Tribune, you could pretty much count on a lecture concerning how America has fallen away from the Christian principles of its founding, the dire consequences for our Republic, and the urgent need to reinstitute "limited government" as required by the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And the train rolled into the station right on time!

Kersten will believe that the founding fathers were a congregation of Bible-believing Christians if it pleases her to believe that.  But it's a little rich for her to argue at the same time that "truth exists" and  can be apprehended by ordinary people exercising their reason.   If that is so, why is she so clueless about the views of Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, et. al.?  

Oh, but I've overlooked the inscription on the Liberty Bell!  She's as ridiculous as Bachmann.

Kersten's regard for what she calls "the truth" ends where her politics start. Evidence of that is the bogeyman she puts up opposite the vaunted Judeo-Christian tradition--"scientific materialism."  This is just a way of coloring the argument by borrowing some of the vaguely unfavorable associations of "materialism."  The subject of science is materiality.  Its methods are materialistic.  There is no such thing as "unscientific materialism."  Kersten's phony distinctions conceal that her real problem is with the modern world, especially science, which has done such a good job of uncovering the real answers to questions formerly pontificated upon by churchmen that nowadays people like her are reduced to spreading falsehoods about America's founders.

That's progress, I guess.

Obama and the Republicans

During his general election campaign for the presidency, I sometimes tried to put angry words in Candidate Obama's mouth.  Fight back!  But doing things his way, "No Drama" Obama won 364 electoral votes, including those of Indiana, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado.  Pretty good.  What do I know?

Now he's been president long enough to get a health care reform bill passed and I've spent most of the time silently shouting at him in my soul.  Fight back!  His opponents won't vote for a "public option," so it is withdrawn, and they vote against health-care reform sans public option.  What's the point of playing ball with these characters?

I know, I know, you can't win with 51 votes in the Senate, you need 60, and Obama has to deal with Republicans who'd rather break eleven commandmants than permit him to achieve something, not to mention the preening deliberations of the likes of Joe Lieberman.  Plus Obama's read a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr on "realism."  Okay!  But Gawd, it's hard to watch.

Regarding the deficit and the Ryan plan, I agree with everything Obama (finally) said last Wednesday.  Since the Ryan plan is crazy, I hope we don't end up with something half way between Obama and Ryan, because that would be at least half crazy.  It is as if the Republicans are being rewarded for living on Fantasy Island.  All we card-carrying members of the reality-based community know that people like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are full of batshit.  Still, their gravitational pull is displacing the "center" of American politics.

The Republican view seems to me not just crazy but nihilistic.  The goal should be to have a fair, decent, prosperous society.  But for them low tax rates are an end in themselves.  There is an argument in theology about whether God commands things because they are good or things are good because God commands them.  Republicans must hold to the latter view.  With regard to taxes, anyway, the Republican view is that they're bad because Republicans have said so.  It's hard to argue that their policy prescriptions have led to anything good.  After twelve years of Reagan and the first Bush, the economy was in the hospital, the federal deficit the greatest it had ever been.  Clinton was elected and proposed an economic  program that included a modest tax hike on high earners.  Not a single Republican in either House or Senate voted for it. They had a lot of Chicken Little arguments about what a catastrophe it would be if enacted.  It was enacted anyway and the catastrophe didn't develop.  Quite the opposite.  Then the second Bush became president, tax-cutting policies were re-instituted, and after eight years of it the economy was in the ICU again.  

But that is all beside the point. Fundamentalists care nothing for logic, reason, and experience.  Republicans aren't offering the country anything, or addressing its problems in a serious way.  Health care costs, for example, have been rising alarmingly for a generation. Their solution?  Repeal "Obamacare" and slough skyrocketing costs onto the elderly and the infirm. 

Perhaps Obama, by letting the Republicans "lead" on the budget, has permitted them to hang themselves.  If that is the plan, he won't be compromising with them, right?  He'll be kicking down the scaffolding below the trap door. 

Little Dorrit on my Nook

As throngs of this blog's devotees know, I've been reading Little Dorrit, and am now approaching the end of Book One, "Poverty," which is followed, naturally, by Book Two, "Riches."  That's all the books in this immense novel.  It's often grouped with Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, a grand triumvirate of Dickens's mature genius. 

I haven't mentioned, however, that I'm reading Little Dorrit on my Nook, the Barnes and Noble e-reader.  It's a gift from my wife, Amanda, who I think was hoping I wouldn't like it.  When I expressed initial pleasure, and still seemed pleased as the end of the trial period drew nigh, she went out and bought her own.  A second $250!  I hope that means next summer's vacation to Wisconsin Dells is off. 

If she thought I might not like it, she had reasons.  Imagine Henry David Thoreau charging up his e-reader on the shores of Walden Pond.  His masterpiece includes this judgment: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."  Thoreau wasn't the only book-loving reader to take a dim view of technological advancement. I have a theory that people educated in "The Humanities" are inclined to deprecate applications of scientific knowledge, which are viewed as "soulless" and "materialistic" beside the eternal Truth and Beauty contained within My Favorite Poem.  Amanda might have thought that I was, you know, one of them.

I sort of am.  I take pleasure in sitting on the couch, gazing at the crowded shelf across the room, letting my eye drift from one spine to the next while thinking of what I know about this book and that one, what was going on in my life when I first read it, what part I particularly liked, an exercise that sometimes makes me rise from my seat to take the volume in hand, the heft of it comfortable and reassuring as I seek out the remembered passage and find it, perhaps just as I'd expected, about a third of the way down a right-hand page three-fourths through the mass of it and marked by me with an exclamation point made with a ballpoint pen in the margin.  The Nook does not afford such pleasures.

It has its advantages, however.  Portability, for example.  From where I am sitting I can see on the shelf The Portable Tolstoy, The Portable Nietzsche, and The Portable Chekhov.  My Nook, which weighs a fraction of these three volumes and still has 4.82 GB (out of 5.00) free, includes The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  If you like books and reading, why would you not want to carry around a library with you?  This morning, in a coffeeshop with an electronic Little Dorrit, I was reading in Chapter 34 of the Barnacle family when I came to this sentence

Secondly, because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle.

and, contemplating the aptness of the name, Barnacle, wondered about zoological details of that creature.  Dunn Brothers was not equipped with reference books but I could press my finger on the word on the "page" of the Nook and be taken to the following definition

any of numerous marine crustaceans (subclass Cirripedia) with feathery appendages for gathering food that are free-swimming as larvae but permanently fixed (as to rocks, boat hulls, or whales) as adults

before, with a second tap of the screen, proceeding to the Wikipedia article on same. 

With the Nook, it's also easier to read the newspaper on the bus: you don't have to fold up the paper to keep it out of the face of the person next to you, then keep folding it in new places as you progress through the article.  There is such a thing as a useful gadget.  Thoreauvians: I'm just sayin'!

More on Stiglitz

The Joseph Stiglitz piece I linked to a few days ago--here it is again--makes a familiar argument about income and wealth inequality seem fresh and compelling.  I like the way in which, almost in passing, he sheds light on the foolish and self-defeating actions of a lot of people with the phrase "trickle down behaviorism."  Why do people spend on things they plainly cannot afford?  Well, if the top one per cent of income earners have about a quarter of all income, and the wealthiest one per cent control forty per cent of all wealth, then it makes sense to churn out products and services that the people with all the resources desire.  As the high-end end of the economy proliferates and becomes ascendant, people of ordinary means are tempted to play--it's too much like the only game in town. 

Everyone shops for the things advertised on TV during golf tournaments.  But hardly anyone can actually afford them.  Why then are the advertisements for them all around us?  Because the very few people who can afford them have such a high percentage of all the money there is.  Wealth inequality has the effect of shifting economic outputs toward high-end consumers.  It also has the effect of sucking people of ordinary means into the high-end game, where they soon lose, thereby widening the gap between themselves and those they were foolishly emulating.

Little Dorrit and Maria Beadnell

I've been reading Little Dorrit, one of the great dark novels from late in Dickens's career.  Yesterday's reading installment included Chapter 13, wherein Arthur Clennam, having returned to London after years in China, pays a visit to Christopher Casby and meets again his daughter, Flora, the great love of Clennam's youth.  He's still single, she a wealthy widow, and the meeting is for Clennam quite a disappointment:

Clennam's eyes no sooner fell upon the object of his old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces. . . . Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath, but that was not much.  Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much.  Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly.  That was much.  Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now.  That was a fatal blow.

The interest of the scene derives in part from the fact that it is drawn from a small episode in Dickens's own life.  His first love, Maria Beadnell, who had broken with him in 1833, when Dickens was 21, had contacted him more than twenty years later, as Little Dorrit was forming in his mind.  Dickens, however, was about to leave for Paris, and there followed, instead of a meeting, an incubation period during which they exchanged shyly ardent letters.  By the time the meeting finally occurred Dickens, married and in his mid-40s, had worked himself up into quite a state of expectation.  But, surprise!--the Maria of his imagination, an idealized version of a woman twenty years younger, was in the flesh fat and foolish.  In his biography Peter Ackroyd reports that, after this meeting, "the passionate epistles are followed by letters of excuse or delay, in which he evokes the sacred name of his art in order to explain his inability to meet her."

The incident is akin to that experienced by a million attendees of school reunions.  But I for one am inclined to attribute to one of the great novelists of all time a degree of sophistication that should have made him immune to such a disappointment.  Dickens seems to have been quite affected, and his disappointment has an angry, aggressive flavor.  He put it right into Little Dorrit, where Maria might have recognized quite an unflattering portrait of herself.   

Of the rich, by the rich, for the rich

Eric the Blue is the proud owner of a Spotty^TM, awarded by Spot, one of the Cucking Stool bloggers, to the author of a letter to the editor, blog post, or comment that Spot wishes he had written himself.  In a similar spirit, I'd like to give a call-out to John F. Hetterick, of Plymouth, Minnesota, the author of the following letter to the editor published in Friday's Star Tribune:

While I agree with a March 31 letter writer that the government is not a charity and that disabled  children are first and foremost a family responsibility, I part company on her willingness to accept government selection of the "most affected" who are to be supported. 

My family is blessed with a reasonable degree of financial security.  We have educated our developmentally disabled and mental-health-challenged adult daughter well and have provided secure lifelong housing for her at our expense. 

We cover all of the financial gaps that we can but most certainly could not provide the services provided by the government long-term, especially medical care, minimal basic income and life-support services. 

Without us and the public supports, our daughter would most likely be impoverished and homeless, especially when we're gone.  And we are among the most fortunate. 

For those less fortunate--in other words, the majority of Minnesotans--the government is the only game in town.  How can we, as a society, willfully impose poverty on our least fortunate?  I just don't get it. 

Mr Hetterick sounds like a real mensch.  But that may be why he just can't get it.  Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel in economics, performs an exercise in demystification:

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it's tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we're doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we'll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today's standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. "I certainly hope so," he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work. 

Mr Hetterick, your daughter is not one of the productive members of society.  Too bad.  It would be the height of folly to ask the most productive citizens, like Wall Street executives who nearly triggered another Great Depression and Ivy-educated lawyers who represent in court deep-pocketed corporate clients, to kick in a little something-something for the likes of her.  Good luck to you both, however.  Maybe if you were a little richer, you'd understand.