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My Four-Star Books in 2016
Dec 31, 2016
I rate the books I read (I finished 60 in 2016, a bit below my average). Three stars is Recommended; four stars is Highly Recommended. Here are my 30 Four-Star (and one rare Five-Star) books from 2016. The ones in boldface were particularly memorable.
The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
Another life, Michael Korda
The book of Aron, Jim Shepard
Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass
The ginger man, J.P. Donleavy
Fourth of July creek, Smith Henderson
The Blackhouse, Peter May
Dumbing us down, John Taylor Gatto
The white boy shuffle, Paul Beatty
The 6:41 to Paris, Jean-Philippe Blondel
Someone, Alice McDermott
Madison’s gift, David O. Stewart
The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger (five stars, simply masterful)
Nine stories, J.D. Salinger
All the light we cannot see, Anthony Doerr
The smartest kids in the world, Amanda Ripley
One of us, Asne Seierstad
The dog, Joseph O’Neill
The UnAmericans, Molly Antopol
The Federalist papers, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay
That night, Alice McDermott
An unnecessary woman, Rabih Almeddine
The sellout, Paul Beatty
Submergence, J.M. Ledgard
Tenth of December, George Saunders
The son, Philipp Meyer
The souls of black folk, W.E.B. Dubois
Men we reaped, Jesmyn West
The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Play it as it lays, Joan Didion
After this, Alice McDermott
Let Me Ask You
Dec 24, 2016
Let me ask you a couple of questions:
Do you think an adult living legally in the United States of America, between the ages of 18 and 65, who is ready, willing, and able to work should be able to get a job?
Do you think an adult living legally in the United States of America who is working full time should earn enough to live on?
If you answered “Yes” to either or both of these questions, then you need to be made aware of the extent to which you are living in a country where this is decidedly not the case, and then you need to answer a third question: What are you going to do about it?
The lack—not the love—of money is the root of all evil, and that evil displayed itself in spades on November 8.
Our actual unemployment rate is not four point something, it is 37.4%. That is the percentage of the labor force—Americans 16 years and over—that wasn’t employed in November 2016. In 1998, that number was 32.8%, and it has gone up in 16 of the 18 years since. You can look it up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (data.bls.gov). In numbers, that is 119.2 million Americans who don’t work.
Of those who do work, more than half earn less than enough to live on. More than half! Read earlier blog entries here for citations you can look up to verify these numbers.
I don’t object to the rich. God love them, they’ll always be with us. But I do object to the poor. There is no excuse for poverty in the richest nation in history, never mind that that poverty has been increasing frighteningly since the Great Recession, as more and more multi-billionaires find more ways to squeeze the American workers—or do without them altogether—to enrich themselves beyond even their own wildest dreams.
And speaking of dreams. The American Dream must not be allowed to die. It will take the world with it, if it does. The next four years may not be dispositive of that question, but if we are not working from now until then to assure its survival, I am not at all sure it will survive.
Our traditional political parties are bankrupt of ideas. The Republican party has given itself over wholeheartedly to a reactionary and mean-spirited plutocracy. The Democratic party has self-destructed on the bifurcating influence of a misguided neoliberalism. Money dominates all.
Only a new, third party can save us. And it can happen. If Donald Trump can be elected president, anything can happen. But it will take a party that represents the beliefs of a large majority of Americans. To my mind, those beliefs include equity, opportunity, self-reliance, and independence. And none of those ideals is possible without assuring every American a job that pays enough to live on.
That is the first, non-negotiable, plank of the American Dream Party platform. More on the other planks next time.
The Gathering Storm
Dec 15, 2016
We’ve heard it all our lives. We never really believed it. But now we find out it’s true: Anyone born in the United States can grow up to be president. Absolutely anyone at all.
I don’t know what will happen over the next four years. It is easy to imagine a worst-case scenario bringing about the end of civilization. Climate change or nuclear proliferation could spell our doom, and both are in “full vigor” to quote Ebenezer Scrooge.
Meanwhile, cities and states vow to become “sanctuaries” for Muslims and/or undocumented immigrants.
Mayor DiBlasio says NYC police won’t be pressured into increasing the use of stop-and-frisk.
Women’s rights advocates plan a “Million-Woman March” on Washington to exacerbate Trump’s hangover on the day after his inauguration.
It’s not enough.
It’s not enough to organize to stop the wave of unwelcome change that is coming our way. It’s not enough to support the status quo that was soundly rejected on November 8.
Sixty million Americans voted for someone they had ample reason to know was morally reprehensible, intellectually lazy, and utterly without the mindset or inclination for public service. Many of them voted against Hillary Clinton. All of them voted against the status quo. And forty-two percent of us didn’t vote at all.
And although we are about to be served up with “business as usual” on steroids for the next four years, further affecting our incomes and entitlements, especially for those who voted for Trump, business as usual will not do any longer.
Something in the social construct of America has to change. I believe that that change must happen in the areas of employment and compensation. All working-age Americans need to be able to obtain employment at a wage that affords them a decent living. Right now, we are so very far from that, and the number of people in the labor force who are working continues its 20-year decline.
The Tasmanian devil of unrestrained capitalism is about to have its way with America. Most of the social issues—abortion, immigration, gay marriage—are just smoke and mirrors for the real agenda, which is to concentrate as much wealth into as small a fraction of fabulously wealthy Americans as possible.
And we have just the president, congress and, soon, supreme court to do it.
Bad News
Nov 13, 2016
The holocaust we visited upon the indigenous populations.
Four hundred years of African-American torture and oppression.
The Japanese internment.
My Lai.
Assassinations of foreign leaders.
Abu Ghraib.
Somehow, these horrific acts all pale when set against the worst enormity ever perpetrated by the ignorant, arrogant, and brutish citizenry of this benighted country. This week’s election should lay to rest forever the risible myth of American “exceptionalism” and may rank us with the lowest of the low among history’s tyrannies.
I am so ashamed of my country I can scarcely lift my head.
Though I may strongly disagree with, possibly even abhor, some of his policies and procedures, Obama is one of the most intelligent, eloquent, and gentlemanly leaders we have ever had the good fortune to have in the White House. He will be succeeded by a petulant, vindictive, and inarticulate boor who never grew up, who does not know how to behave in private or in public, who hasn’t the civic understanding of a sixth grader, who is incapable of acting for anything or anyone except for his own pathetic self-aggrandizement, who is a resounding failure in both his personal and business life and still imagines himself a success.
Now, a few days after the election, we enter a period of uncertainty. Some pundits are attempting to assuage our anxieties, telling us, “Oh, he can’t do that” or “Oh, he can’t do the other.” In truth, we have no idea what he can or will do.
What we do know is that on January 20, 2017, two of the three branches of our federal government will be in the hands of racist, homophobic, and misogynistic loonies who, in denying climate change, will hasten the greatest train wreck in history which is about to rule our days and nights and drive us to extremes of desperation.
What we also know is that shortly after January 20, all three branches will be in the hands of those loonies, after the Senate invokes “the nuclear option,” as they in all likelihood will, if it is the only way they can confirm Supreme Court nominees as disgusting as Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas.
You may say, “Oh, he can’t do that,” but can he ignore the 60 million Americans he courted so shamelessly? Can he turn his back on building the wall; deporting tens of millions; killing NAFTA and the TPP; overturning Obamacare; repealing Roe v. Wade; letting slip the dogs of oppression against women, gays, and minorities; and “locking her up”?
I don’t really believe he has a clue as to what he is in for. He happened upon a line of virulent nonsense that was catnip to a fed-up and ignorant constituency, and he was swept, if not against his will then against his understanding, into the White House.
And so we march resolutely into the past, in search of a Great America that never was, but that we thought, perhaps, given our brash optimism and the blessings of our geographical situation, might be just ahead, if we could but muster the generosity, compassion, and political will that we hoped was in our hearts.
Note: I will be taking time off Alltogethernow.org for a while. Everyone seems to be doing a great deal of talking these days, and I am not sure who is listening to whom any more. I have grown as tired of my own voice as I have of all the cacophony around me. Silence is golden; and meanwhile we all await further developments.
Stump Speech
Oct 09, 2016
My fellow Americans,
Good [morning | afternoon | evening].
I stand before you a rather odd duck: A politician without portfolio, a candidate for no office. I speak to you today not for my sake, but for the sake of my country.
I am not currently living in my country.
My country does not let bosses pay their workers less than a living wage, then force the rest of us to make up the difference.
My country does not educate its African-American citizens in inferior schools, then bedevil them throughout their lives with discriminatory hiring, housing, and policing.
My country does not become entangled in ruinous military adventures that deplete our public treasury of trillions of dollars while overflowing the private coffers of the obscenely wealthy.
My country does not kill, maim, and traumatize generations of its youth in order to bolster tyrannies which, if they were not our allies, would be our deadliest of enemies, opposed to all we stand for.
My country does not minimize, sexualize, or traumatize its female majority with boorish characterizations, substandard pay, and physical violence in order to assuage male insecurity.
My country does not risk the future of humanity in the face of the overwhelming evidence of imminent environmental apocalypse.
My country is not governed by men and women who are servants of big money, subservient to a tiny fraction of our population to the detriment of the rest of us.
No.
In my country everyone who can work has the opportunity to do so at a living wage, with only two expectations: That they perform their job to the best of their ability and that they be good citizens.
In my country, those who can’t work are cared for in a humane and benevolent environment designed to give them the fullest life possible.
In my country, the education of every single one of our young citizens is everyone’s priority and everyone’s most important task, as it is everyone’s only realistic hope for the future of our species.
In my country we acknowledge our racist tendencies and struggle mightily every day to overcome them, knowing that discriminating against a fellow human being is the worst thing you can do to them, short of depriving them of their life.
In my country, foreign relations are made for the purpose of promoting democracy, not commerce, and those nations that are not ready, willing, or able to entertain the prospect of endowing themselves with the blessings and responsibilities of self-determination may be tolerated without being welcomed into the community of a free people.
In my country, men are the equal of women.
In my country, our technological ingenuity is focused on the task of developing renewable energy sources for all our needs as soon as possible. And if it is not possible to do this within a decade or two, we will nevertheless turn our backs on the burning of fossil fuels and make do with whatever benefits may be had from the energy we can produce.
In my country, no special interest ever takes precedence over legislation to promote the good of all the people all the time.
In my country, there is inequality, but there is no poverty.
In my country, there are no hungry children.
In my country, we are all created equal and endowed with rights that may not be attenuated by reason of race, creed, class, income, gender, age, sexual orientation, or any other compartment into which the small-minded among us try to maneuver those of us whom they think of as threatening.
This is the country I hope to live in some day. So if my country is your country, let us make it our country. There is only one way to do that.
You know what it is.
Does Someone Need to Shoot Donald Trump?
Sep 17, 2016
With the exception of Donald J. Trump, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the weakest candidate for president we have
seen in our lifetime. She is an inept campaigner, cold as the proverbial well-digger’s knee, and widely
mistrusted and disliked. She carries baggage that would floor anyone even moderately capable of being
ashamed of themselves: her emails, the Libyan debacle, Bill, quarter-million-dollar speeches, habitual warmongering. And finally, it seems apparent she is not well. Should she have to drop out before the election, and should her
running mate take her place at the top of the ticket, he has neither name recognition nor much of a track
record in politics, and would seem to be unelectable given a choice between a celebrity and someone no one
has ever heard of. Biden? Perhaps, but how can they justify a candidate who hasn't even campaigned?
This week in The New Yorker, John Cassidy asks, “The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls.”
In the piece, Cassidy mentions several recent polls which show Trump fast approaching Hillary’s numbers
and, in one terrifying case, overtaking them. Cassidy’s Big Question is essentially, “Can he maintain this new
momentum and carry himself into the White House?”
But we can’t have Donald Trump in the White House. So my Big Question is, “Does someone need to
shoot him?” Or poison him, or strangle him, or toss him off a high bridge?
Now, before the Secret Service gets all bent out of shape, recall Trump has made more than one lightly
veiled allusion to the desirability of someone offing his opponent. So tit for tat.
Of course, I don’t believe anyone needs to shoot Donald Trump. Or should. Any halfway competent
opponent would have made mincemeat of this lightweight long since. And he’s no Hitler, as I have
said elsewhere in this blog. However, in the White House, he is a menace to us all, to our pocketbooks, our
health, our domestic tranquility, and to our lives. With his testy and dummkopf finger on the button, he could
easily bring on the End Times.
At the very least he will preside over four years of political chaos in which the modest gains of the Obama
years will disappear; Supreme Court justices even loonier than Clarence Thomas will be appointed; Black
Lives will Matter not at all, never mind brown ones or, for that matter, any white ones not intimately
associated with the inner sanctum. The world economy will stagger under his ignorant fumbling; our alliances
will unravel; our climate will deteriorate further; and income inequality will soar.
If this sorry excuse for an American faces the Chief Justice on January 20th and mouths the oath of office,
the office will never be the same and, in a way, perhaps, America will have fulfilled its destiny, after all.
Something to Do
Sep 10, 2016
“I like life. It’s something to do.” —Ronnie Shakes
Finding something to do has become a problem for many of us.
Almost eight million people had nothing to do in August, and that is only counting the unemployed who were looking for work. One point seven million more had given up looking. Another 6.1 million, involuntarily employed part-time, did not have enough to do.
Perhaps the most telling statistic is this one: 37.2 percent of Americans who might be working (the so-called labor force) are not. No doubt some are the stay-at-home helpmates of CEOs or the offspring of seven-term senators. Still, that figure has been steadily increasing since its low of around 33 percent 20 years ago. (Source for all the above: Bureau of Labor Statistics (.pdf).)
The situation is certain to become worse, and rapidly, owing to several factors. The Big Two are globalization and mechanization. Globalization will continue to move low- and medium-skilled jobs overseas and, increasingly, highly skilled jobs as well. Mechanization of manufacturing and service sector jobs is about to skyrocket, owing to the increasing speed and capacity of computers and the maturation of robotics.
Additionally, merger mania, with its emphasis on downsizing and layoffs; an aging population that stays on the job longer while still receiving retirement benefits that must be paid for through current F.I.C.A. contributions; and substandard health and education infrastructures that are driving down our standing in relation to both our allies and our antagonists are three more stressors on the labor force in addition to the Big Two.
It is arguable that a machine ought to do any job of which it is capable, freeing up the human for higher-level pursuits. That may be true, but between globalization and mechanization, it is all happening too fast, as the labor force participation rate so graphically reveals. And as for programs to retrain the out-of-work, they are few, underfunded, and of questionable value. You may attempt to train a 50-year-old laid-off coal miner to program in Python, but your success rate is not going to be anything to write home about.
On the other end of the work force, our children are not being trained today for tomorrow’s jobs. A K-12 school system in New Hampshire with which I am familiar has no computer science courses, or any plan to offer them. If there is one area of employment in which we may reasonably expect humans will be involved in 50 years it is in configuring, programming, managing, and repairing these beasts that will have by then relieved us of all sorts of work we do today. Not to prepare our children for that will, one day, be looked on as an unforgivable sin of omission.
What are people going to do? What should we be doing to ensure they have meaningful and remunerative work and, even more importantly, are ready to perform it? Probably a great deal more than we are doing now, or even talking about doing now.
I wrote a piece here entitled “Make America Work Again” in May. There I noted that over half of working Americans do not make enough to live on. But at least they are working. Increasing numbers of us are not, however, and our polarized and paralyzed political system holds out little hope for effective action at this time.
If any of us are to continue to have something to do, we must do something. And now.
Shame on You?
Aug 20, 2016
If you shop at Amazon.com, be sure to do it through their Smile program. Why? Because Smile donates one-half of one percent of sales to the 501c3 charity of your choice (that’s 50 cents of every $100 purchase). This gives you an absolutely cost-free, hassle-free opportunity to help some struggling organization you care about, and if you’re not buying through Smile and don’t begin to after reading this, you are essentially admitting you don’t give a damn about anything. And if that is the case, shame on you!
It’s as easy as pie to join Smile and once in, your shopping and buying experience at Amazon doesn’t change one bit (except you go to smile.amazon.com instead of plain old amazon.com), and you never really have to think about it again. Your purchases just keep on giving.
I have a charity that I have been running since 2012, called bookaworld. Its mission is to place a Library of the world’s most important, educational, and entertaining books into the hands of every child in the world. It costs us about $100 per recipient right now, and if, after you’ve read a bit about it, you’d like your Smile account to benefit bookaworld, sign up with Smile at this link:
http://smile.amazon.com/ch/32-0378198
(And if you do sign up and want a quarterly accounting of our receipts, send me your email.)
If you want to benefit some other registered 501c3 organization, sign up with this link:
http://smile.amazon.com
But sign up! And before you make even ONE MORE PURCHASE.
Or shame on you!
Goldman Sachs vs. the Yahoos
Jul 23, 2016
As we pause between the clumsy dud of a Republican convention last week and what will probably be a clumsy dud of a Democratic convention next week, let us contemplate what we will face on the day after the 102 endless days between Hillary’s investiture on July 28 and Election Day.
Someone on that parlous day will be President-Elect and, barring human or divine intervention, it will be either Donald J. Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As Bertie Wooster would, and probably did, say: The mind boggles.
I said my piece regarding Mr. Trump in Look Who’s (Maybe) Coming on April 28. Here, I will only remind you of Trump’s failures, as a husband (three wives), a businessman (four corporate bankruptcies), a writer (someone else scribbled all that nonsense), and a speaker (just listen). That Trump has never held elective office and now aspires to lead the free world by, presumably, the seat of his pants, speaks to his overweening arrogance, ambition, and asininity.
And then there is Hillary, who will probably win, because who can imagine we have produced sufficient Yahoos over the past few generations to actually propel this hateful and know-nothing narcissist into the Oval Office.
Hillary promises business as usual, which has got us where we are today and she will be frogmarching us for four years further down the now familiar path toward the destruction of our species. Her puppet masters have long been outed, and the corporatocracy will not count their pennies as they finance the necessary destruction of her loose cannon of an opponent. (Happily, the Yahoos are broke.)
With Hillary, we can look forward to increased income inequality, further degradation of the climate, employment anxiety for additional millions, and many more executive branch military adventures. Hillary never saw a war she didn’t like and is even today no doubt champing at the bit to start a few more splendid little conflicts here and there. After all, what’s good for Lockheed-Martin . . . .
Having taken the pledge (see my November 2014 entry), I have no stake in the coming debacle. No candidate has come forward with real solutions to the existential problems we face, so I will be sitting out this election, and almost certainly any others in the limited time remaining to me. I invite you to join me on the sidelines.
To paraphrase George Carlin, if you don't vote, you have every reason to complain about what those who did stuck you with.
Make America Work Again: Our Employment Crisis
May 30, 2016
We are in the midst of an employment crisis in this country. Too few people are employed and too many who are earn less—sometimes far less—than enough to live on.
Nearly eight million people were on the unemployment rolls in April. [1] Only 62.7% of Americans of working age are employed or looking for work, the lowest percentage since 1978, [2] and this does not include the nearly 600,000 who have given up looking for work.[3]
Additionally, around three million people who are working earn at or below the minimum wage, which has been $7.25 at the federal level since 2009. [4] Living wage calculators at MIT [5] and the Economic Policy Institute [6] both indicate that $7.25 is less than one-third of a living wage for an adult with one dependent child living in Vermont or New Hampshire. Millions of other workers earn more than the minimum wage but much less than these calculated “living wages.” Almost half of all American workers earn less than the inadequate $15 per hour currently called for by various activists and politicians. [7]
Finally, around six million working people are involuntarily employed part-time and also probably earning well below a living wage. [8]
People need to work, and when they don’t, or when they work for less than a living wage, those of us who do work and earn a living wage are unfairly called upon to pick up the hefty slack, while employers reap the benefits, often, as in the case of the Walmart heirs, becoming multibillionaires in the process.
A recent study by the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC/Berkeley [9] determined that a mere four social welfare programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid cost $152 billion a year between 2009 and 2011. That is almost half a trillion dollars in only three years. Over half that assistance went to working families. And there are dozens of other taxpayer-funded federal, state, and local programs in addition to these.
How long would a business that only paid a third of its electric bill or half the cost of its raw materials remain open, or deserve to? And yet Walmart, only the largest employer to pay their workers less than a living wage, goes on growing year after year. Forbes magazine reported in 2014 that Walmart alone cost taxpayers about $6.2 billion a year in public assistance. [10]
We need to forge a new social contract with ourselves, setting out our rights and responsibilities. The two most important elements on the rights column would be an adequate education and a job that paid a living wage. Every U.S. citizen and legal resident should be guaranteed both. And in the responsibilities column?: Perform your job to the best of your ability and be a good citizen.
Then we can dismantle all these expensive, inefficient, ineffective, and humiliating “safety net” programs and let people enjoy the independence of which we are (almost) all capable. Those few who can’t work could be cared for. Those who can work and won’t, well, good luck to them.
When almost everyone is working and receiving a living wage, almost everyone will be paying into our shared tax pool instead of siphoning funds out of it. Tax revenue up; social “welfare” expenses down; lower taxes for all of us to pay.
Before any “political revolution,” we need a social revolution, one that acknowledges that although we are a liberty-loving, rambunctious, and ingenious people perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves, we are too easily tempted to let someone else take care of us if the opportunity is available.
We would all be much better off if our system encouraged, enabled, and, yes, expected us to exercise our natural independence rather than the contrary.
What individual of any political persuasion could offer a valid argument against such common sense? The left-leaning inclination to expand the safety net and the right-leaning inclination to limit such support to business and the one percenters, are both equally misguided. There is dignity in work, and there is equity when everyone, worker and business alike, pulls their own weight.
Our employment model needs to be based on the unique individualism, love of liberty, and instinct for self-reliance which has always characterized our people. It also needs to stop enabling so many of us—employer and employee alike—to be dependent on the rest of us.
But don’t take my word for it:
“This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States (1858-1919)
“It seems to me . . . that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country . . . and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States (1882-1945)
“The best social program is a good job.”
William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president of the U.S. (b. 1946)
Sources
[1] http://tinyurl.com/zpu5uv
[2] http://tinyurl.com/zpu5uv
[3] http://tinyurl.com/h37rmuj
[4] http://tinyurl.com/z6e53mp
[5] http://livingwage.mit.edu/
[6] http://www.epi.org/resources/budget/
[7] http://tinyurl.com/h2p7h2n
[8] http://tinyurl.com/zmfhsbk
[9] http://tinyurl.com/kda4v6q
[10] http://tinyurl.com/jjyv7d3
Look Who's (Maybe) Coming!
Apr 28, 2016
Adolph Hitler was the worst thing that ever happened to the world. And in the 2014 German seriocomic film, Look Who’s Back, he returns to the modern world and sets about happening to it again.
Halfway through the film, Hitler reminds the young man who is making a documentary about him of two important facts. One, he announced everything he was going to do in his book, Mein Kampf, published eight years before he came to power. And two, he came to power in a free election.
Here in 2016 U.S.A., we are presented with a candidate who has told us everything he is about and much of what he intends to do in easy-to-understand language, universally available for review by googling “things Trump has said. ”
In a few months we will have an opportunity to elect him in what will be a slightly less-than-free election, considering the stumbling blocks that have been erected to restrain many voters who normally vote Democratic from exercising their franchise. Nonetheless, it will have about it the patina of a free election.
The German people had no reason not to understand what they were getting. They knew who he was, they wanted who he was, and they got him.
I am not comparing Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler. Hitler was an evil genius. Trump is a cents-off demagogue who has happened upon an audacious sales pitch precisely attuned to the ear of a xeno- and homophobic, misogynistic, poorly educated, and plain fed-up constituency that just may elect him in November.
If they do—if we do—no one can tell us that, like the Germans, we didn’t know what we were getting.
And make no mistake, we produced that constituency ourselves over the past 35 years. So we have no grounds to excuse ourselves for the train wreck that may be coming.
Here Comes Hillary!
Mar 19, 2016
If you think a black president poleaxed the U.S. Senate into sullen and resentful inaction, wait until you see what a woman does to them.
Political Revolution?
Feb 11, 2016
Political revolution? As we bask in the short interval between Bernie’s New Hampshire rout of the Democratic establishment this week and the unknowable future in Nevada, South Carolina, and beyond, perhaps we can pause a moment to contemplate the possibility.
I have written in this space of my reservations regarding Bernie’s agenda, particularly his flagship issue of income inequality. His plan for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in a few years is hopelessly inadequate.
However, it is inarguable that he has hit the nail on the head regarding the ills America faces. And, incredibly, the electorate is responding to his message. Incredible, because most candidates never shut up about how exceptional and wonderful and perfect America is compared to the rest of the dreary, ill-informed, and dysfunctional world. Newsweek, too, had a piece following the NH primary which noted how very unusual this campaign round is in that regard.
I have also written in this space, “We will take our country back by ballot or by bullet. I cannot see any third alternative, and bullets are notoriously unpredictable. People are making noises about third parties, but nothing significant has been launched that I know of. Now is the time.”
This was way back in October 2011, when there was no hint of a Sanders candidacy. I wrote quite a lot about third parties back then because I could not imagine the coming of a candidate from either major party (could you?) who would espouse systemic reform to the extent that Bernie has.
So perhaps we do have a political revolution in the making. We certainly have as much of one as I am likely to see in my few remaining years. The establishment, as we have seen, will stop at very little to put the kibosh on that revolution, as they must. Establishments don’t make revolutions, people do.
So thank you, Bernie, for the frisson of hope you gave us this week. If the ball keeps rolling, well and good. If it falters, if the misrepresentations, belittlement, threats, and prognostications of doom from the establishment pundits, pols, and plutocrats combine to sufficiently intimidate and frighten the sovereign voters of this great nation, well, no one will be surprised.
But we’ll always have New Hampshire.
Sermon on the Slope
Jan 01, 2016
We all are angry. We all are vindictive. We all are envious.
None of us of sound mind and body is free of the inclination, all too often, to feel and express the most deplorable, dispiriting, and destructive of human emotions. And the fact that we all are also capable of compassion and the many varieties of love does not compensate for that fact, unless we consciously reject the destructive in favor of the life-affirming attitudes and emotions.
It is especially important that we do this in the political arena. The Republican field in the 2016 presidential race is filled with individuals who are adept at arousing our least admirable and most destructive emotions. The more adept they are, the higher they rank in the polls, with Donald Trump—part demagogue, part buffoon—today leading the pack.
These people, whichever of them becomes the party’s nominee, would have us renege on the social contract we have with ourselves.
They would increase the income inequality that already today is marked by the largest gap in history and a disappearing middle class.
They would consign to the capitalist system large swaths of public life—education, retirement, infrastructure—that depend upon cooperation and not competition or the profit motive to succeed.
They would marginalize and criminalize large sectors of our population while protecting the privileges and power of a tiny band of the super-rich.
They would enter upon dangerous military adventures that have already siphoned trillions from our coffers in pursuit of losing battles and in support of corrupt dictatorships that tyrannize and murder their own people.
Unfortunately, on the Democratic side, though the picture is not so dire, neither can it be considered very hopeful. Hillary Clinton is the epitome of a “business as usual” candidate, and only at our great peril can we carry on as we have for the past 35 years. And even Bernie Sanders, with his “political revolution” fails to adequately address questions of militarism, domestic unrest, environmental catastrophe, and—surprisingly since this is his defining issue—income inequality (see my Open Letter to Bernie Sanders in September 2015).
We must set aside our anger, our vindictiveness, our envy, and our fears. We are better than this. We are stronger than this. We are a caring, liberty-loving, rambunctious, ingenious, and generous people. And our happiness depends on promoting the happiness of others. The fact that we have not attended to this business for a generation or two is responsible for the sorry state we find ourselves in at this start of a new year.
Copyright © 2008 All Together Now.