The Problem with Poetry

 The history of a Movement, it is said, begins as tragedy and ends as farce. The GOP these days seems to epitomize that. It began with the Abolitionist Movement, a noble effort to deal with the tragedy of Slavery, and the first President from the Grand Old Party was Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s greatest; now it seems closing in on its end with the truly farcical competition among clownish politicians for the party nomination in 2016. When I hear yet another Trumpism, like his statement that an enacted Constitutional Amendment was unconstitutional, I can’t help but recall the comment of Everett Dirksen (a great Republican in his day), about another politician that, “like Samson,  he seeks to destroy his enemies with the jawbone of an ass.” . The Democratic Party candidates also seem so far at least lacking in the luster one associates with candidates for President. The same lack of seriousness applies to policy debate in the Congress (neither side excepted.) Real public and foreign policy debate has been discarded for slapstick. So, recognizing the futility of serious political discussion in the face of that, and in part to protect my stomach, I plan to shift the focus of my postings for the next few months away from policy and politics to other, more serious topics that interest me. I shall get back to policy eventually.

I start by angering many contemporary poets – at least those few who might read this. Poetry is an area I dearly love but I have mixed feelings about poets.  My belief is that much, not all, currently published poetry suffers a malaise similar to that of modern Jazz in late 20^th century, though Jazz seems to be recovering now. Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and Mark Doty are notable exceptions, but like the later “cool” jazz of Miles Davis, et al., poetry in the hands of some of its practitioners has become hermetic, contemptuous of the audience and possessed of “a problem with communication.” Notable non-exceptions to that are much recent poetry published in the New Yorker. I hardly bother with much of their poetry these days because it so obviously is not intended for the little old lady in Dubuque.

Poetry has entered a period of over- emphasis on prose poetry, a mess in the hands of unskilled practitioners, but that is not its problem. Prose poetry was out of fashion in the 20^th century, but its history, from scriptural psalms to the prose poetry of John Donne, runs long before that. The malaise stems from two causes. First, some poets have forgotten that great poems are great because they communicate to a wide audience of all varieties of readers. If the sonnets of Shakespeare had been written only for the appreciation of a knowledgeable crowd of insiders they would not be with us today. Contemporary poets such as Doty, Collins and Oliver are in tune with that. A new poem of Oliver’s about her dog playing in a new fallen snow was like a breath of fresh air. Second, too many poets seem unaware of or have forgotten that great poetry, in the words of Shelley, involves a search for the transcendent in the ordinary. Too many poems today are personal and psychological rather than transcendent. Transcendence is just not there in them. Robert Frost riding along a country road at night found far more that spoke to the human condition than such contemporary poets.

 I plead for poets to resume their search for that elusive transcendence in each of us. In the words of Mark Doty, “Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if  we could be opened into this— If the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky.”

Profitable Virtue and the Clash of Cultures

One of the odd moments of the U.S. Constitutional Convention was when, at the opening session, Benjamin Franklin rose to propose that each session be opened with a prayer, and the delegates, over half of whom were ministers of various faiths, voted to table his motion, effectively killing it. The clergy could be understood: most of them were dissenters from the Church of England fearful of a return to its religious autocracy and aiming to create a purely secular Constitution – which they did. But what was Franklin, whom we think of today as a liberal skeptic, thinking when he made the motion in the first place?  It turns out, from reading his Autobiography, that Franklin - a relative of the great New England preacher Cotton Mather - began as a devout young man who attended church regularly until he heard a minister he had respected preaching that “the fruits of the Holy Spirit” passage in the scriptures referred not to Love, Mercy, Kindness, etc., as it clearly says, but to tithing, regular church attendance, etc. Franklin, who knew better, was outraged and walked out, never to return. Today we would commend him for showing real virtue. He knew that virtue consisted of more than just obeying rules of good behavior. And at the Convention, both Franklin and the clergy who opposed him were acting virtuously.

I thought of that while reading a fascinating article in the August 3 New Yorker about the Greek Finance Minister and the European financial crisis. The article demonstrated that the crisis is becoming every day more openly and obviously not an economic crisis only but a clash of cultures. In fact, at one point the article reports that the German representatives commented about the Greek that he was only an economist and couldn’t possibly understand the politics. It so happens that a whole cadre of distinguished economists including Stiglitz, Galbraith, Sachs, etc., and staff of the IMF, support the Greek need for debt restructuring, and even the conservative Economist sees it as necessary and laments the lack of a “risk sharing” mechanism in the EU. Where the economists differ is whether Greece, somewhat like Franklin, should storm out of the EU never to return or hang in there for the sake of Europe. Stiglitz says leave; Galbraith says stay. Then the Germans were appalled when Greece actually held a referendum, saying “How could you possibly put an issue such as this before the Electorate?” Funny, I thought electorates were what politics is all about. And of course, Greece basically invented elections. But throughout the whole ordeal the Germans have maintained the Greeks knew the rules and didn’t follow them and austerity is their necessary consequence even if they are destroyed by it.  In Germany, following the rules is a primary virtue and a contract is a contract. Years before when discussing the initial crisis with a friend who had been born and raised in Germany but had lived in the U.S. for over fifty years, I saw that response deeply engraved, almost as a reflex. To the German ministers, Greeks were wild creatures who must be tamed.

Which brings to mind Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a recent book by Yuval Harari.  One of Harari’s themes is that each civilization has embedded in it a hierarchy the chiefs of which profit from a code of behavior that is taught and enforced to the point of becoming a cultural norm. Greek democracy –group decision with maximum laissez faire for individual citizens, even idiots, the old Greek word for those who refused to be involved in group decision, were derided but accepted -  dates back to Solon and the Constitution of Athens and is indeed a cultural norm. A signed contract does not end negotiation; it begins it. That has enabled the growth of many wonderful things from which we all profit every day; and it creates massive traffic jams in Athens each day and makes Greek houses sometimes take two years to build. Germany’s pressure for order and obedience began with the military hierarchy of the Germanic tribes and it too is a cultural norm.  But Europe is seeking a unified voice in a 21^st century world.

The solution may lie in that system of “risk sharing” mentioned by the Economist. That is essentially what Alexander Hamilton invented for the United States when it began.  The thirteen colonies had widely varying cultures and economies and widely varying debt loads. There was a quiet little border war between North Carolina and Georgia going on about that time you never hear about. The U.S. treasury assumed the debts of the individual former colonies in exchange for a uniform tax code administered by the Treasury, a financial code, enabling contracts to be valid wherever made, and the problems of each state to be addressed by all through the federal system. It wasn’t easy, but it worked. The EU lacks that risk sharing, so when Greece got in over its head in the manipulations of the financial corporations, Germany felt no obligation to help them out. And the strength of the Euro from which Germany’s export driven economy benefited devastated Greece’s tourism based economy. Both cultures have to bend to enable such risk sharing to happen, but it can. It really depends on how much each wants Europe to emerge.

The Infrastructure of Containment

George Washington’s advice in his Farewell Address to “Beware foreign entanglements” has always been well heeded by Americans, to the point of having become a cultural value. That value is strengthened by our isolation  on the American continent from other worlds, with only friendly Canada and Mexico as our neighbors. That is why Americans in general are so skeptical of the recent Iran Agreement. It goes against the American grain to enter into a ten-year entanglement between far away nations neither of whom really understands or trusts the other. The problem is compounded when success with this entanglement will involve creating many more with other nations, some of whom are old antagonists. It is, as they say, a hard sell.

The Iran Agreement was reached while I was vacationing in Maine (one of the thousand ways you can tell my views had absolutely no effect on it), leaving me away from the keyboard long enough to research and reflect a little. It is, as various analysts have noted, a subject complex enough that people of sense and good will can easily differ widely on it, and the cultural bias is against it. My thinking has been influenced most by an article on it in the Foreign Affairs Journal and by an excellent discussion on the Charlie Rose Show by Bill Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment. The Foreign Affairs article provided an even-handed discussion of the Agreements strengths and weaknesses, and provided some interesting insights into some possible ramifications not often discussed. The Burns discussion provided insights into what it will take to make it work. Both raised the basic question of which was better, a regulated but untrusted Iran or an Iran actively developing nuclear weapons with no monitoring or regulations.  Both agreed that the agreement was worthwhile and in fact necessary, and both emphasized the fragility of it and the urgent work to be done for it to succeed. And both believed it was an enactment of the long-term Obama policy of Middle East containment through limiting the danger of really violent confrontation, a policy with which I agree. So, to start, it involves creating an entanglement to avoid the dangers of more dangerous ones.

The Foreign Affairs article emphasized my own view that the Agreement was a holding action to keep Iranian nuclear development in bounds and well monitored, while awaiting a generational change in Iranian leadership. The success of that strategy depends on avoiding ideologically based impulsive action by current Iranian leadership in the meanwhile. That in turn involves things we and they are not good at, like avoiding inflammatory rhetoric and perceptions that the other is gaining control – something like the school yard situation in that neither of us is good at “plays well with others.” Our political leadership has to reach new levels of sense and sensitivity. And it will involve building up a web of understandings and agreements with other interested parties, some of which may be surprising. For example, both Israel and Saudi Arabia are opposed to Iran’s influence and activities throughout the Middle East. Nothing promotes friendship like a common enemy, so those two nations, usually at odds with each other, may move toward rapprochement and become working partners in containing Iran. Help in doing so becomes part of our task. Russia and China, who are both our sometimes adversaries and sometimes working partners, are suspicious of the intrusion of Iranian-driven Shiite expansionism into their territories, and we may find ourselves working with them against an expansionist Iran. Iran is, in the meantime, as interested as we are in curtailing Sunni ISIS violence, and arrangements with Iran may not always be mutually hostile ones.

Similar ideas were expressed by Bill Burns in his discussion with Charlie Rose. He emphasized our need to maintain international consensus about regulation of the Iranian nuclear program by continued demonstration of our willingness to negotiate peacefully. That consensus is required to build coalitions capable of acting successfully to constrain Iranian nuclear activity. He cast the challenge as one of purposefully building an infrastructure of containment via coalitions of nations sharing a common interest. And that is indeed our challenge. We are used to thinking of international relations as “us versus them” except in times of active war, when “The Allies” are grudgingly acceptable. In this global world we must learn to think differently and begin “we versus them” thinking. Old George to the contrary, other continents are no longer faraway places with whom entanglements can be avoided.

Personal Responsibility and the Greek Crisis

CNN reports Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, passed a new landmark by having a personal net worth of 1.1 billion dollars, arising from his bonuses  out of Goldman Sachs's huge profits; concurrently they reported an interview with Blankfein in which he regrets the great financial inequality in the world and comments that those with great wealth ought to take some personal responsibility for redistributing it to improve conditions for the poor. Another CNN article reports on the 40 percent rise in homelessness in Athens in the past 3 years following the collapse of the Greek economy and another article reports the angry rioting in the streets, with crowds shouting "They can't take our Acropolis." The photo above shows an elderly man sitting with all he has on the street there. Meanwhile, a new report from Robert Reich notes the Greek economic collapse occurred when financial manipulations by Goldman Sachs caused the Greek national debt to double and go out of control. I had pointed that out back in 2012, when Goldman Sachs profits were on the rise. Deutsche Bank then pitched in to help complete the job on Greece. Is there some irony there?
Even The Economist shows the first trace of crocodile tears as it comments how the heart says the EU should grant relief to Greece, but the head says they shouldn't. The Economist also notes that the German demands for austerity take the pressure off the IMF to write off  their loans to Greece. The collective response is probably one of the finest jobs of juggling responsibility ever accomplished by the financial world. The saddest footnote is the report that some of the harshest critics of  Greece are the small nations of Eastern Europe who are recent members of the EU. They should know better from their own experience, but don't. What we are witnessing is the dismembering of the cradle of European civilization by the nation states of Europe acting as agents for the international financial corporations. They are transforming democracy to anarchy (both terms invented by Greece.) Meanwhile profits and bonuses continue to grow. And the recipients of the profits remain very silent, accepting no "personal responsibility."
That of course is the dark secret of the international corporation. It absorbs all personal moral responsibility for acts that, if done by a person, would be branded as atrocities. It's similar that way to the remark attributed to Mafia executioners, "Nothing personal, just business." The corporation moves to get a better tax subsidy, leaving behind a devastated local economy - "Nothing personal, just business." The corporation diverts the equivalent of the corn crop of Iowa to soft drinks, doubling the price of food in starving third world countries - "Nothing personal, just business." The corporation doubles the national debt of Greece, threatening to destroy a nation - "Nothing personal - just business." Perhaps the CEO's of the world like Lloyd Blankfein might give some thought to what personal responsibility really means.

Negotiating the Future

There were two headlines almost side-by-side, for a few minutes at least, on CNN Money page recently. One was about a failed meeting of EU finance ministers attempting to resolve the Greece crisis. The IMF Director was quoted as saying scornfully that “What we need are adults in the room.” One columnist commenting on the crisis remarked that Greece’s problem was that they lacked the competence to manage their finances properly. The scorn at Greece’s “childlike” attitude was obvious. Since then, other negotiations have failed and Greece faces potential default and departure from the EU after Tuesday. We shall see. But one interesting comment posted on CNN about the crisis was, “Wouldn’t Greece be better off owing more?”

The other CNN headline was about the anger and derision leveled at school administrators for disciplining a cafeteria worker who fed a hungry child who had no money to pay for his meal. Hmm. A malnourished child not in debt versus a healthy child in debt – how does that come out? Think of the budgetary impact if that were wide spread.  That was not a real issue of course, for everyone’s ire at school administrators reflected a shared view that the future of a child weighed far more than the cost of a school lunch.

Perhaps there should be more children in the room when Greece and Germany are negotiating, to represent the many Greek families struggling with a real unemployment rate now estimated at over 30 percent and a 25 percent drop in Greek GDP brought on by withdrawal of liquidity and demands for enforced austerity from the Germans. It might remind participants of the human costs of what is at once a deep cultural conflict between nations and an even deeper threat both to the EU and to the future of the nation state.

As a cultural conflict it is a whopper. Germany possesses both a “Protestant Ethic” regard for frugality as a virtue and an export-based economy which requires low wages and overheads as a key to success. Their culture imposes a stern preference for austerity as the solution to all problems (except at Oktoberfest.) But doing it the German Way is just not in the cards for countries like Greece. Over millennia, Greece’s major exports have been Democracy, Philosophy, the Olympic Games, architecture and small amounts of olive oil, feta and wine. Imagine telling Greek leaders not to listen to the voices of their people! Greece does not make heavy-duty export items. People come to Greece to experience the good life, if only briefly. That is their major product. The Greek crisis arose not because of Greece doing anything different from what they have always done, but because the global financial panic in 2007 caused an abrupt withdrawal of funds by international financial corporations and consequent loss of liquidity. And the German remedy destroys all the things Greece has always been attractive for. Tourists do not come to view factories and starving children.

There’s been a lot of furor about Greece leaving the EU, an organization they probably should never have joined in the first place. Their departure certainly would highlight the built-in fragility of a group that is too tightly bound to function with separate policies and too loosely bound to function as a unified group. And it could threaten the future of that alliance. But the real conflict is not state versus state, but corporations versus states. Greece is functioning as a traditional state, while Germany is serving as the voice of international financial corporations. If Greece becomes a “failed state” as some fear, they will be the first nation to fall under the onslaught of corporations, a signal that international corporations are not only capable of destroying nations in the name of profits, but are prepared to do so.. And it is the state that serves as both the voice and the protector of their people. Corporate profit calculations do not include the cost of mal-nourished children and ruined lives.  That is why remembering children is important in those negotiations rooms. If remedies, such as debt forgiveness, are not found that preserve traditional Greece the future of the small traditional nation state looks bleak indeed.

Harnessing the Devil

Back in East Texas, when you had just found a good solution to a bad problem, you “had the Devil on a down-hill pull.” That seems to be what’s happening with regard to China’s new law censoring Non-Governmental Organizations and tightening the ”Great Firewall” of censorship on China’s portion of the Internet. A large group of international corporations that do business with and in China have banded together to say that China’s new laws are “bad for business” and must be changed or risk China’s loss of their business.  The Devil in this case is both censorship and economic determinism, so it’s actually more of a tug of war. But however it works out, it’s a welcome pressure against oppression and represents economics at its best as a force for good. The Devil of economic determinism is being put to worthy purposes. 

It reminds me of a prior post of mine about the differences between physicists and economists, (Economics and Cosmology). Physicists and Engineers discover that gravity is the most powerful force in the universe, capable of creating black holes and moving galaxies, say “fascinating”, and go out to build ladders, stairs, cranes, skyscrapers, airplanes and rockets to the outer planets. A friend of mine who pilots the Messenger and New Horizons rockets, and piloted the rocket that safely landed on an asteroid, actually started the asteroid mission by looping the rocket around the sun in order to gain the gravitational momentum to get it to the asteroid belt. Gravity was both a friend and an enemy. Economists on the other hand determine that economic considerations are the most powerful motivators in human life -  “economic determinism”, say “well, that’s it”, and sit like the proverbial bump on a log muttering “TAANSTAFL” (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). If you propose something like an embargo or economic blockade such as with South Africa during Apartheid, which are enactments of TAANSTAFL, they just look gloomy and mutter “won’t work, hurts profits and it’s not strong enough.” Well then, figure out how to build a stronger ladder or an elevator – that’s what the engineers did.

The problem is that economists have lost sight of the truths that economics is not an end in itself but a tool to further human happiness and that there are more facets to happiness than economic gain. If they had only taken or stayed awake in a social science class that covered the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, they would have learned that satisfaction of economic needs by itself is one of the lower rungs of that hierarchy, necessary to cross but simply a route to satisfaction of higher needs, not a destination in itself. The engineers understand that gravity is indeed the most powerful force but sometimes you need to go higher.

What we need is a new paradigm of economics as a tool for satisfaction of higher human needs. Economics originally had that. Aristotle coined the word to describe management of a household, and it takes a lot more than money to make a happy household. Adam Smith invented modern economics but as a Moral Philosopher deplored the indifference of the rich to the needs of the poor. Keynes invented the economics conservatives so despise during the Great Depression years to improve the overall happiness of society. The version of economics we practice today focuses on total GDP and along the way at possibly reducing unemployment, akin to the antiquated view that the only Vitamin C you needed was the amount to eliminate symptoms of scurvy. The prior wiser vision of economics has been lost and needs to be regained.

Perhaps the necessary shifts could be begun by adopting not the current simple-minded goal of just increasing total GDP, but instead, of increasing median per capita net wealth. If, in the process, we increase total GDP – good - but not at the expense of lowering the median level. That, after all, is supposed to be what democracy is all about. Then, after working as a society to get past those lower rungs of the hierarchy of needs, we could move on up the ladder. Yes, economic determinism is devilishly strong, but we as a nation have the wits to climb past it. It’s time to harness the Devil.

Signalling Through the Clouds

When I study the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty being argued about these days, what comes to mind is that classic song,” Clouds” -  on my short list for greatest pop song of the 20^th century. “I’ve seen the world from both sides now, from win and lose, but still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall; I really don’t know life at all.” Proponents say the TPP perfectly enacts a containment strategy toward China, assimilating it into the regulated trading world while concurrently securing active trade arrangements with Japan and India, a keystone of the Obama “pivot toward Asia”. Obama himself argues that any job loss to Pacific trade partners will be minimal, since companies prone to move jobs elsewhere have mainly done so already and that any newly lost jobs will mostly be offset by increased exports. Latin countries included in the agreement, they argue, will have little impact on American jobs, while Australia’s and New Zealand’s impact will be positive. The supporters warn that a lack of Fast Track Presidential authority could create a real international mess, and there’s a lot of merit to that argument.

Populist opponents say they’ve heard that song before, and they are not buying illusions any more. Their big concern is all the secret negotiations with corporations going on that could weaken health and safety standards, stall climate change regulation, etc., and with provisions which could enable Foreign courts to force arrangements detrimental to American workers without recourse to American law. 

The negotiators say, “Relax, trust us.”  At the extreme populists sound like traditional protectionists, but toward the middle, they seem wise indeed. The cogency of arguments on both sides leave me casting around for a “pope’s mule”, an outside-the-box argument that can serve as a tipping factor one way or another.

My roving eyes alight on the recent UK election results, where an anti-EU David Cameron won a surprisingly large victory over his liberal opponents. My knowledgeable grandson attributes it to the British equivalent of gerrymandering – ages ago, the Brits called gerrymandered districts “rotten boroughs”, so they’ve been around awhile there – and says that the popular vote was actually anti-Cameron. I haven’t checked the numbers to verify that, but even if so, it just adds to the point that concerns me. That point was that the Cameron margin was an awful lot like a sigh of defeat for belief in the abilities of national governments to defend the lives of their people in complex international terrain. The Brits seemed to be saying to themselves, our representative government just can’t adequately support the people with the amount of sovereign authority it’s given up. The British gerrymandering argument just reinforces the belief in representative government’s ineffectuality – as the effects of gerrymandering likewise emphasize in the U.S.

That, to my mind, is an essential issue with the TPP. The quest for Fast Track authority is an admission of disbelief in the idea that open discussion of the issues in a representative assembly can be effective. That implies either disbelief in the efficacy of representative government in a global community, or belief that revelation of treaty provisions will show them to be unfavorable to the American people. I’m aware that lack of Fast Track authority could create a total mess, and might well doom the TPP. But it is a significant infringement on the principle of representative government and a signal that in a world as complex as ours has become, democracy is no longer considered effective. Our Congress hasn’t been helping its own case lately. The problem is, as Churchill stated long ago, that all the alternatives to democracy are worse.

I’ve said many times how international corporations and national governments are struggling for global dominance, and that the corporations are winning. The world will not be a better place for ordinary people if they do so. The British election was a no-confidence vote for the belief that sovereign states can protect their people in such an unregulated global environment. Greek threats to leave the EU are a similar sign. Rejecting Fast Track authority would be another such signal. Those signals need to be given. The international scene these days is too wildly unregulated for the interests of individuals to be protected. International corporations are not sovereign governments functioning for the betterment of all the people, and it is time the corporations ceased trying to substitute their interests for the interests of the people. If no sovereign authority is in charge, then corporate interests are. Stronger international institutions and treaties are needed, and the TPP might even be a step in that direction. But we cannot know that based on the current secrecy of agreements. Confidence can only be obtained though open discussions, not secret negotiations. The TPP has much merit to it, and it is time for that to be publicly argued without suspicions of secret reservations.

How the Other Half Lives

There’s an old statistician joke about the statistician who drowned wading a river with an average depth of six inches. It comes to mind when comparing the  “average” American’s wealth against that of citizens of other countries . A 2013 comparison of per capita wealth in 20 “advanced” economies showed Americans had an “average” net worth of $301,000, good enough for fourth internationally.  Switzerland was first on that scale – not all Swiss bank accounts are held by foreigners. But America was 19^th on the median net worth scale, at $45,000. Only Israel was lower, and its average net worth was also low. Interestingly, Australia was first in median net worth and second in average net worth. They are doing something right there.

Average net worth just counts wealth, and is influenced heavily by the wealth of people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and, I suppose, Donald Trump. Median net worth is literally the egalitarian standard. It measures the half-way point at which as many people make less as there are people who make more. In this case, it means about 157 million Americans have less than $45,000 in net worth. The difference between $301,000 and $45,000 says a lot about the American economy. For one thing, it says something about how well those baby-boomers reaching retirement age are really prepared to retire. They aren't. It also says how limited that glittering life style that seems the norm on TV actually is among Americans in general. People with a $45,000 net worth do not buy $45,000 cars or $500,000 houses. For another, the U.S. spread between average and median wealth is by far the largest among “advanced” nations. We are doing something wrong here.

But the actual picture is much worse than that. In a recent analysis of Federal data by CNNMoney of spending patterns by the bottom 30% of the U.S. population, the “poor” –  numbering 92 million in 2010 and almost 100 million now, have average annual incomes of $14,000 (including subsidies)  – less than the typical urban “living income” of $15,000. They spend 182 percent of their incomes just to keep afloat, and consequently have negative savings and high debt loads. They spend on average 72 percent of income on housing, 28 percent on food and 28 percent on transportation. As you will have already noted, that adds up to well over their income, without consideration of things like clothes and medical care. More than 17 percent of Americans –that’s over half of that bottom 30 percent, or about 53 million people – said in the survey they had lacked money to buy food at some time in the previous year. These are the people Kansas wants to prohibit from going to the movies. The legislators shouldn’t worry – the poor can’t afford that any more. The 100 million people treated like dirt by the legislators are more than the entire population of the U.S. when the Constitution was enacted, yet “promoting the general farewell” for them is never part of the legislative agenda. The typical “one-percenter” whose desires set the agenda has never even had a conversation with one of the 30 percent.

Those in the middle of the income picture – the middle class –seem to fare not much better. The survey reveals they earn $54,000 on average but can save only about $6,000 per year after living expenses, not a good basis for planning retirement. Meanwhile the top 30 percent have incomes substantially in excess of living expenses and continue to have an average of one-third their income disposable.

The question remains of how legislators, in Kansas and in Washington, D.C., can remain so oblivious to the state of 100 million Americans. Ideology has blinded them to the situation of the actual people they serve. The top one percent nationwide amount to slightly over 3 million people, yet legislators act as though they are the only ones worth legislating for. For each one “worthy” citizen, there are 24 they ignore.  Then they are shocked, shocked, when the 24 begin to protest. As protests grow, they will have only themselves to blame. Ted Cruz was recently quoted as saying that the first thing one had to lose on going into politics was a sense of shame. His and other’s success at that is obvious.

Seeking the Unexpected

John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey series, commented in an essay that a thing he hated was to enter a room full of people whose words he would know before they opened their mouths. I feel the same way about books. I opened my Internet browser to CNN this morning and found four ads from Sears for items I had viewed the day before on Amazon. Aside from the invasion of privacy implicit in their presence, they offered nothing new, except perhaps price, beyond what I had seen the day before. You can choose whether you want liberal or conservative TV news by picking between Fox and CNBC. A prime goal for Internet publishers these days is to provide you with a personalized news service that presents you only with information they know you are interested in and will enjoy. I am appalled at the idea.

After my father died when I was two years old and my mother worked long hours as a seamstress, my after-school babysitter was the public library.  It was a delight to roam the stacks, constantly encountering new and totally surprising knowledge. There were no categories of what I had been interested in previously, what I would enjoy reading or what would be suitable for me. I tasted a bit of everything from Rabelais to Relativity, from Mein Kampf to Machiavelli, from the Crimson Pirate to science fiction. Some things I hated, but all things taught me at least what to ignore. Later on, browsing in my very good college library for background readings on Renaissance politics, I stumbled on the Memoirs of Casanova. I still chuckle over that. Learning comes from reading the unexpected, not the expected.

The Washington Post this Sunday published a review of a recent book on the future of the public library in the Internet age. Unfortunately, the book reviewed was by the chief librarian of the Harvard Law Library, a lawyer himself. His lament was that libraries were falling behind the technology of the internet, and that nostalgia over the past was an impediment to bringing them up to date by making them more efficient information scavengers. That would be suitable for specialized institutions like law libraries, but it misses the point of the general library entirely. The general library is meant to be an entrance to the hallways of knowledge, not an exhaustive source of knowledge on any particular subject. The good library is at its best when it surprises you.

I have commented before about how our current culture is separating us into tinier and tinier bubbles, where no one really can experience and understand the lives of others outside their own group. The rich and poor used to shop side by side and attend the same schools, except in the segregated South. We had no interaction with far off countries. Now,we do not understand where countries with whom we must deal, such as those in the Middle East, are coming from, just as our police and the angry protesters surrounding them do not understand each other. The wealthy do not understand the lives of the poor. Those things in turn are major contributors to the pervasive empathy gap which creates so many of our social and political problems.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent book, Fields of Blood, points out that the Indian word Moksha, which we often translate as enlightenment, originated in ancient times as the military term for breaking through a hostile encirclement. That to me is in fact what enlightenment is about these days. We are surrounded by technological and social pressures that hem us in to our particular niche in a complex society, that know what interested us yesterday and force us to see only that again today, that deny us knowledge of what the world is about outside our particular niche by deluging us with knowledge “appropriate” to our place. Enlightenment comes from breaking that encirclement to enter the glorious chaos of surprising knowledge. That, not efficiency, should be the goal of our librarians, as it should be our own.

Punishing the Poor

When I was in elementary school, we were living on my mother’s income of 50 cents/hour earned by working in a sweat shop seamstress job after my father’s death when I was two years old. In an otherwise limited and dreary existence, the brightest spot each week was going, in the company of most of my friends, to the double feature cowboy movies, with a cartoon and serial in between, on Saturday afternoons. At a 60th high school reunion I just attended there were numerous references to those Saturday afternoon movies with their preceding yo-yo contests. After the movies – which cost 10 cents - I would spend 15 cents on a chocolate ice cream soda. It made my week!  The 25 cents for my weekly orgy was scavenged by my mother from the $20 total her work brought her. She thought it worthwhile and always found a way. We were never on Welfare, but never far away from it either.

Vincent Van Gogh would have understood. In his youth, Van Gogh was a devout Dutch Reformed Church missionary among abjectly poor coal miners. He felt so passionately about their plight that he sometimes would take clothes off his own back to give to a miner in need. On hearing of this, his Church, which held the stern Calvinist view that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, kicked Van Gogh out, and he became a painter. The great art we admire today was a product of that stern insistence on the unworthiness of the poor. I wish I could say something else good was a product of that attitude, but I can’t.

The Dutch Reformed Church was replaced recently by the State of Kansas, when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill barring people on Welfare from using their money to go to the movies or buy ice cream. Kansas also restricted welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25/day from their welfare account, even though opponents noted some subsidized rentals were as much as $600/month, which by itself would require $20/day be withdrawn. Going to a swimming pool while on welfare was also prohibited. The expressed goal of legislators was to get poor people to spend more responsibly.

Kansas is not alone. Somewhat similar restrictions are being pushed for by conservatives in Missouri and Yew York. Emily Badger wrote recently in the Washington Post about the double standard that creates, discriminating against the poor. Four times as much is spent by the government on the home mortgage interest deduction as is spent on subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is visible while the deduction appears mostly as a refund regarded as payback of taxes already paid. Welfare payments are visible, but the many subsidies to the wealthy often take the form of items simply not listed as income on the tax return. The result is placing inordinate burdens on the poor. Back when I was looking at the subject some years ago, a $25,000 farm subsidy required a one-paragraph application, while a food stamp application required three pages. Badger calls this the effect of visible versus submerged government spending. We see only the visible, not the invisible.

I have a harsher view. I call it punishing the poor. It is a byproduct of the Protestant Ethic we need to get past, and a direct product of the American Empathy Gap that I’ve mentioned before. In Calvin’s view, being wealthy was a sign that God had blessed you because you were destined for Heaven. By contrast, the poor obviously had moral failings condemning them to Hell and deserved punishment along the way. Our frontier heritage produced the empathy gap with the myth that rugged individuals survive without help from others, and to need help is a sign of weakness not deserving support. We think they are poor because, at the least, they lack good judgment and are incapable of making decisions on their own about when to buy ice cream, and don’t deserve ice cream anyway. The effect of an ice cream cone on the life of a child is not worth considering. The facts belie that. The great majority of the poor become poor because of adverse circumstance, not moral failure, and to think otherwise is simply to demonstrate moral blindness. Somewhere around 50 percent of women who are widowed, like my mother, or divorced have incomes below the poverty level in the years immediately following. We are entering a period as a nation where large numbers of baby boomers will enter retirement without adequate incomes after a lifetime of stagnant wages, the retirement often forced in the form of permanent unemployment. Our needs for community support of the poor will increase drastically and innovative ways of doing it are needed, not harsher punishments. We are a better people than that.

Seeing Beyond

This being poetry month, it’s hard, try as I might, not to think about Shelley. He is not my favorite poet. In fact, in high school the only grade I got less than an A came from an English Teacher who adored him, and who reacted quite negatively when I poked fun at the line in Ode to a Nightingale, “Bird thou never wert.” I called it the worst line of poetry in the English language, and her forbearance snapped. But Shelley was far better at explaining poetry than, in my regard, he was at writing it. His essay, “A Defence of Poetry”, which I highly admire, is the work which best gets at the essence of what poetry is all about.

In his essay, Shelley contrasts poetry with philosophy and poets with philosophers. Specifically, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Irony, he finds Homer a better philosopher than Plato. It is Shelley's reasoning that gets to the heart of things. He sees that both philosophers and poets seek to find and express the transcendent. But while philosophers seek the transcendent “beyond”, for Plato in a world of Ideals, poets find it in the ordinary. Whitman was speaking to that in titling his work, "Leaves of Grass." You can see explicit expressions of it on my Poetry by Others page in Mark Doty’s poem, “A Green Crab’s Shell” or in Eamon Grennan’s poem, “Wing Road.”

Shelley’s insight goes beyond poetry. A trivial example was on view last night at the NCAA Basketball Championship when a tame eagle was released during the National Anthem, flopped around a bit and settled on his trainer’s shoulder. It was a kind of performance doggerel, illustrating our need, successful or not, to see something “beyond”.  Silly or not, it temporarily elevated vision beyond the event itself. We need that sense of beyond to counter the grinding down we encounter each day from the world around us, and both poetry and religion, in different ways, provide it.  Else we fall prey to seeing all those around us as simply complex heaps of dirt. Seeing only the dirt, we miss what Joseph Campbell called, “the light within the light bulb.” And that kind of devaluation of others is the underlying cause of many of the problems of the world.

That is reason enough to celebrate poetry – that it contributes to making the world a better place. Can you think of any great villain who was also a great poet? One famous critic’s definition of a good poem was that it is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Argentina has found that music, so closely related to poetry, has, as a standard course in school, made the school a calmer place and reduced teenage violence. Who knows what a poetry course might do? But of course, one doesn't write either poetry or music just to achieve a social purpose. A good poem is an end in itself. Write one, and see.

The Premature Demise of War

There’s an old story about a preacher, sermonizing about the evils of hate, who asks rhetorically, “Is there anyone who doesn’t hate someone?” An ancient man sitting at the rear of the congregation rises feebly and says, “Pastor, I don’t hate anyone in the whole wide world.”  The astounded preacher asks him, “What is your secret, sir?” At which the man exclaims joyfully, “I outlived them all!” Reviewing the daily news from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Asia, it’s hard not to think of that old man. We seem everywhere some days to proceed toward Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, enjoying every step of the route. The saddest part of the picture is the crowd, including many members of our Congress, cheering along the way.

I wrote a couple of years ago, in “War and Peace and Money”, about how our proclivities for killing each other were very gradually being reduced by the increasing costs of warfare. Armies once totaling in the thousands were now measured in the millions, rifles replaced by million-dollar rockets. All this was to the profit of the military-industrial complex, but strangely enough, also to the profit of peace. Periods of no war had increased by almost 50 percent, the number of wars per century had declined, and the numbers killed were also dropping, all because of the expense of war. Fewer and fewer nations were able to afford it – it had become a luxury item. Even international standards to prevent war were gradually improving. But perhaps the news of war’s demise, like that of Mark Twain’s, was premature.

Alas, some in the complex seem to have seen the handwriting on the wall and have begun correcting the problem.  Their most notable achievement to date has been the development of drones. Devastation can be spread so much more cheaply! It’s an everyman kind of tool, as also, in its own way, is biological warfare. War has been downsized to become more affordable again. Researchers are also talking of such advanced notions as body-enhancement armor, warriors genetically modified to improve their killer abilities, robotic soldiers, etc. Eventually they may succeed in producing the situation where one former-human is left to crow triumphantly, “I’ve done it! They’re all destroyed”, - followed by a very long silence.

A saving grace is the emergence of cyber war. It’s so much cheaper it will likely be the favorite for the international corporations which some predict will soon overwhelm the already declining nation state. And there’s less likelihood with it of large-scale loss of customer base. Even lone terrorists may come to enjoy it. And perhaps the greatest, though distant, grace is the evolution of altruism. Biologists like E. O. Wilson are pointing out that forms of altruism are actually a product of advancing evolution. “Reciprocal cooperation” is also a trait anthropologists note that arises in harsh “prisoner’s dilemma” situations.  The lack of any concerted intelligent response to climate change is pointing toward more and more such harsh conditions as the next few hundred years wear on. Compassion has also been found to be a genetic trait shared at least in limited ways among all species that rear their young. As human “childhood” becomes more and more extended because of the learning and skills required in advanced societies, is it possible that greater compassion will evolve?

So, an emerging prospect, though not yet certain, is of a very grim 21^st century, followed by the as yet faint glimmer of a happier distant future for humanity. But we are creatures of the 21^st century, as likely are our children and grandchildren. In such a long-term future, we are all dead. The situation reminds one of the science fiction story by C.S. Lewis in which an astronaut finds himself stranded on, I think, Venus in what is a veritable Garden of Eden. And the garden includes an Adam and Eve being tempted by a Satan. The despairing astronaut cries out, “God, do something. Don’t let that happen again!” To which God replies, “I did. I put you there.” Perhaps, at this Easter season, with Spring blossoming all around us, and the prospects, with work, of a still possible better future facing us all, that’s a good thing to remember.

The Global Rorschach Test

The Global Inkblot Test

As the old joke goes, a psychiatrist was administering the Rorschach Inkblot Test to a patient.  You remember that’s the test where the patient is asked to look at swirls of ink on a set of cards and tell the doctor what he sees in each swirl. This particular patient keeps seeing an obscene picture on each card, until the doctor bursts out, “Don’t you see anything but obscenities on those cards?” The patient responds, “I can’t help it, doctor. You’re the one who gave me the pornographic cards.” The joke of course is that the Rorschach cards are totally without any meaning except that which the patient puts into them in interpreting them.

I can’t help but think of that as I read and hear about all the troubles going on around the world. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about Ukraine lately, from news articles, magazines, talking heads on TV and from a talk I attended recently by one of our former ambassadors there. The West is, depending on one’s point of view, either steadily eroding Russia’s sphere of influence, which it regards as a necessary buffer against a Europe that has launched two invasions its way, or it is struggling to contain an expansionist NovoRussia seeking to regain status as a superpower. Looked at one way, Putin is being an old-fashioned slavophilic Tsar, just seeking to consolidate his borders and maintain access to the sea against what he sees as a northward march by NATO and a “Westernization” of Russia.  Another view is of an adventuresome former KGB agent seeking to re-instigate the Cold War. Another interpretation is of a valiant new democracy in Ukraine going through its Valley Forge winter, striving to survive the continual pressure of “King George” Putin. Another is of a bunch of rascals on both sides milking the situation for their own individual benefit. One claim is that the recent cease fire is a cynically begotten failure from the start, another that it is reasonable progress toward a resolution. Yet another view is that it’s all just a necessary shaking down of northern Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which will probably take a quarter-century before each party is reconciled to their situation. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the common citizen who will suffer through all of whatever it is.

A similar ambiguity pervades the Middle East. Each nation there, and its leaders, is a villain, a hero, or a hopeless dupe, depending on your point of view. The mutual executions and bombings going on, the continual exchange of threats and insults between parties too numerous to count , etc., lend an air of unending chaos to the whole area. And a similar debate goes on about the financial situation in the EU. Each of the world’s areas these days is a card depicting either obscenities or angels, depending on your point of view.

One of the insights of social psychology is that we each construct our own “history” of events and facts in our lives which leads us to label ourselves as victims, survivors, successes, failures, etc., and that self-labeling directs our future actions to perpetuate itself. Victims remain victims, survivors somehow manage to survive. The psychologist Eric Bern used to say that some people without money are “poor” while others are “temporarily without funds”; poorness and richness are states of mind, not factual conditions. So, often, is hostility.  An analogous, though obviously not exact, interpretation can be applied to our views of the various messes around the world.  John McCain seems to sense every situation as an opportunity for a good fight, John Kerry as an opportunity for a negotiation.  Over time negotiations may lead to more problem resolutions than do fights, though on occasion fights are necessary.  Viewing yourself, as Netanyahu seems to, as a permanent target of a permanently hostile Iran does not lead to resolution other than by total destruction of at least one of the opponents. Both Israel and Persia have been around a very long time, living along side each other sometimes amicably – after all, it was Persia which returned the Hebrews to Israel after their exile by Babylon, and it was Islam which provided refuge for Jews persecuted in Europe during the Middle Ages; it’s quite unlikely that either party will disappear. Current hostilities will pass; it’s a matter of how best to make that happen. The new Finance Minister of Greece has been described as a highly skilled professional making inroads into a disastrous European financial mess, or as an idiot on a fools errand, depending on which school of economics claims your allegiance.  The same can be said for Angela Merkel.

In short, we the people, whose views will shape the preferences of the decision makers, are being administered a kind of global Rorschach Test. What we see says as much or more about who we are as it does about what is actually going on. The lives of millions, and of our grandchildren, will be shaped by the images we see in highly ambiguous situations and events. Look closely, and don't be distracted by the shouting. This is a test we don’t want to flunk.

The Complexities of Ingratitude

At the end of the Napoleonic wars, a foreign diplomat remarked to the Austrian foreign minister that Austria should be grateful for the efforts of other nations to free Austria from Napoleon. The response was, “The world will be astounded at the magnitude of Austria’s ingratitude.” We hear echoes of that in the current jaw-clinched impasse between Germany and Greece over German insistence that Greece maintain a severe austerity regimen despite 27% unemployment or have its loans revoked by German controlled banks. For Germans seem to have forgotten completely the days following WWII and the Marshall Plan.

It’s easy to do: you have to be over 65 to have been there when it was all happening.  Angela Merkel would have been just a baby. But back then was when Germany was reeling with the agonies of recovery from WWII, and those who had just defeated her not only forgave half her foreign debt, they specified repayment of the remainder only as a portion of proceeds from Germany’s exports, then proceeded through the Marshall Plan to rebuild German infrastructure and stimulate the German economy with cheap imports to gain the health it enjoys today. And Greece, just devastated itself by Germany, was one of the 20 nations who joined in doing so. Talk about magnitudes of ingratitude.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote today of those wild and wooly times, an instructive reminder of how Germany itself, and all of post-war Europe, was saved by the opposite of austerity. He doesn’t mention, though, an equally instructive part of that tale that the Germans back then would not have been necessarily aware of. For in the U.S. itself, leading the charge to restore the German people and the German economy generated a boom which, added to the post-war baby boom, helped stimulate the American economy for a decade. To some extent the golden 50’s were a product of helping Germany. As was the European Common Market, predecessor of the EU.

Germany today is struggling with its own stagnant economy – a partial product of self-imposed austerity.  And it is struggling to save the EU, severely fractured by the bitter divide on austerity. What better way to stimulate its own economy than by funding a recovering Greece to enable purchasing imports. It doesn’t even need to be half as forgiving as Greece was to Germany. And healing the divide is at least as important.

Of course, the issues and solution apply far beyond Europe. The World Bank worries about a stagnant world economy. Some economists worry about a century of declining economies. I’ve mentioned before that third world economies are being starved of the ability to continue expanding by the reluctance of the Deutsche Banks of the world to fund them. It’s the EU austerity problem writ very large. And solutions are similar.  Not long ago the World Bank president spoke of the desirability of a Marshall Plan for the world. Think about it.

The Price of Stereotyping

A friend once, at Christmastime, commented that in Boston, Christmas lights on Protestant houses tended to be multi-colored while Catholic houses tended to have white lights. I noted that in Maryland it tended to be the opposite way, with white on Protestant houses and multi-colored on Catholic. We both of course were stereotyping. It’s so easy.  It was even easier to do so by religion rather than by location-based cultural differences, though those too would be stereotypes. It was harmless for us, since no malice was meant or perceived by either of us. But the Charlie Hebdo situation reinforces how costly such stereotyping can become.

I have emphasized my views about the strains of modernization tearing at the Middle East. A proud culture had its golden age torn apart in the 13^th century by the Crusades, the Mongol and Turkic invasions, and immediately thereafter by the Black Death, which killed a higher percentage of the population there than it did in Europe.  It was natural to blame faithlessness and foreign influences for everything – after all did not the Torah blame the Babylonian Exile on faithlessness also? -  and the Arabic culture withdrew into a shell lasting for centuries and eventually resulting in Sunni Wahhabism. Now western modernization has reached the Arabic Middle-East, and the backlash against that modernization has produced the terrorism by small Islamic minorities akin to the KKK movement in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War. For make no mistake, there is an Arab Civil War raging now, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years War, which eventually will give way to a modern Middle East. Nowhere are the dangers of religious stereotyping better illustrated than by modern Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation, whose modern Islamic culture is further removed from that of Wahhabic Saudi-Arabia than Liberal Episcopalians are from Primitive Baptists in America. Yet we, and many Muslims, persist in harboring grudges against Islam or Christianity as though each were a gigantic monolith.

Stereotyping makes us cast the Charlie Hebdo tragedy as Mohammed versus Freedom of Expression. Yet Fareed Zakaria points out that most Islamic scholars agree that there is no reference to or repudiation of blasphemy in the Koran, and that picturing Mohammed as an offensive act is a tenet of Wahhabism only, not Islam in general. And when we teach our two-year-old to use an “inside voice” or our older children not to use profanity at the dinner table or grade movies as X or PG, are we not limiting Freedom of Expression? The price of stereotyping is that it limits our awareness of the nuances of behavior and our sensitivity to the need to respect differences.

A January 14 article in the Washington Post by Yasmine Bahrani, a Journalism Professor at the American University in Dubai, and today’s comments by Pope Francis both speak to that need to respect differences. Bahrani writes of how stereotyping causes her students, who largely are “modern Muslims” who feel shame at backward practices like segregating women, to take seriously such claims as that the CIA organized fake vaccination drives in Pakistan and that the prosecution of Tsarnaev in Boston is a set-up. To them, America lacks credibility – and they are the Arabs who should be leaning toward, not away from, us.

Pope Francis speaks to the essence of the Freedom of Expression issue when he, like Giuseppe Mazzini long before him, reminds us to look not to our rights, but to our obligations to others. The killings at Charlie Hebdo were inexcusable and tragic, but the killings by a small minority of Muslims do not justify giving deliberate offense to what we believe, erroneously, are the views of all Muslims in the name of Freedom of Expression. Just as we might avoid challenging an elderly relative’s views on FDR or Reagan at the Thanksgiving dinner table both to be civil and because we love them, we need to remember our obligation to respect cultural differences. Yes, you have a right to Freedom of Expression, and yes, you have an obligation to avoid speech which you know is deliberately and unnecessarily offensive. J.S. Mill, the “Father of Modern Liberalism”, wrote that the only political speech that is truly offensive is a personally derogatory remark about an opponent. When stereotyping both on your part and on an Arab’s part causes both of you to regard picturing Mohammed to be offensive, then you have the right to do so anyway, but you have the obligation to respect cultural sensitivities. The relationships between all parts of an increasingly complex global society need to be strengthened, not attacked. We share the world together.