Who's the boss of who?

I'm really sick of reading articles like these -- reading opinion researchers and political scientists applauding the cleverness or canny smarts of politicians who do what the people who voted for them want them to do.

Take this example:

The survey … by Democratic pollster Diane Feldman and Republican pollster Bob Carpenter using live phone calls to 1,500 women, found that “women who may not ordinarily vote in a non-presidential year are among those most engaged with issues of gun violence.” ...

“As we approach the 2014 congressional elections, the question will be to what degree do single women, lower income women, persons of color participate since that’s the Democratic edge,” she said. “And this is an issue that can encourage them to participate.”

TPM

Well, duh --- if politicians pay attention to our needs, we'll pay attention to them. Otherwise, why bother?

Or this more subtle example from John Sides: the political scientist lists a long list of issues on which the Prez is working for what the people who elected him want -- gay rights, gun control, withdrawal from Afghanistan, women's equality. Then he wonders:

… it’s not clear to me whether Obama’s actions on these issues are really about catering to his Democratic base—and thereby rejecting these “right-leaning whites”—or just catering to broad numbers of Americans, including many outside his base.

…Obama is confronting minorities of Americans on these issues—and minorities that really haven’t been Democratic votes for some time.

The President is just doing what the majority who elected him wants him to do. What needs pondering about that?

What requires all this study is why elected officials so often ignore what their constituents expect of them. That's worth digging into: are we seeing corruption, individual ambition, stupidity, or are they scared to spell out the push and pull of governing to their constituents? If the last, why not?

Doing what politicians were elected to do should be the norm in a functioning democracy, not some novelty to be studied.

Friday cat blogging

Morty is such an appealing fellow. He knows how little it takes to distract a human who ought to be petting him.

Happiness quantified in an unhappy empire

Adam Davidson, a Planet Money guy, has written an interesting piece on "Happiness Quantification." Apparently economists are now studying what makes us happy and have noticed that having more money makes people around the world happier. Yay for proving the apparently obvious!

Except that their conclusion may not seem so obvious from where we sit: alone among nations, citizens of the United States are not getting happier as the country has become richer.

… most rich countries have reported increases in happiness as they become richer. There is one strange exception. The U.S. is nearly three times as rich today as it was in 1973, when Easterlin was collecting his data. According to nearly every survey, though, Americans are not at all happier than we were back then. This is explained, in part, by the fact that many Americans have not shared in the increased wealth. With the disappearance of pensions and the increased volatility of labor markets, many workers face more uncertainty than ever before.

But the decline in happiness may suggest a more deeply rooted issue. So much debate over government policy is based on economic statistics that come out of the market. But the goal of government is not just to maximize revenue. It’s also to make citizens better off. There is no standardized way for it to see how its decisions influence our well-being. What if government is spending money on things that don’t make us happy?

My emphasis. Who says we need a military budget amounting to 40 percent of all global arms spending and "six to seven times larger than the $106 billion of the military budget of China and is more than the next 20 largest military spenders combined."

Of course we need that military budget only because we (or our elites) are bound and determined to be Top Empire. Today Digby reproduced an Oliver Stone disquisition that speaks directly to how we might get back on track to enhancing the national happiness:

As we close out this series we must ask ourselves humbly, are we so happy to be number one?  Are we right to try to police this globe?  Have we helped others?  Have we helped ourselves?  Look in the mirror.   Have we perhaps in our self love become the angels of our own despair?  The atomic bomb dropped on Japan was the founding myth of our national security state, and we have as Americans benefited from that.  The bomb allows us to win by any means necessary; which makes us, because we win, right.  And because we are right, we are therefore good.

Under these conditions there is no morality but our own.  And if we hurt or interfere in other nations, the bomb allows us to be forgiven and apparently live without the consequences of our mistakes.  Thus life becomes the law of the jungle and the one with the biggest club feels good because he's right.  That is the law of brutality that governed Earth at it's origins many thousands of years ago.

Six empires have collapsed in the lifetime of a person born before World War II; Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union.  Three more empires earlier in the 20th century; China, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  By the laws of history, therefore the United States will fall sooner or later.

Alfred McCoy suggests our empire just might win this bet with the gods and through space and cyberspace dominate the globe; at least until the mid-decades of the 21st century.  But if so, we will be hated as a tyrant and no tyranny can last.

As an empire we must ask is it not possible still to retract, grow old and wiser without dispair and violence assetting it?  Could not our empire accept the idea now that there is no need for an exceptional mission blessed by divinity; that to be human is enough.  That to fail is not tragic.  To be human is.

…Let's surrender our exceptionalism and our arrogance.  Let's cut out the talk of a dominant America.  Surrender that word 'dominate'.  Hardliners will object and scream, but theirs is proven not to be the way.  A young woman said to me in the 1970's, "We need to feminize this planet."  I thought it strange then, but now I realize there's nothing wrong with love.  Let us find a way back to respect the law that is the first principle of civilization.  It is the law not of the jungle, but of civilization; when we come together and put aside our differences to preserve certain things that matter.  There is in most all of us a conscience, a higher knowledge of a force that is greater than ourselves, that includes us but is greater than all of us combined.

There's more and it is all good. Click on over to Digby or Oliver Stone's TV series for more to ponder.

Warming Wednesdays: Crappy Diem to you in The New Abnormal!

The Colbert Report
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Stephen Colbert explains how he came to terms with climate change.

I don't want anybody happy at my funeral. … [ we've reached] the fifth state of conservative climate change grief: denial, denial, denial, denial and … acceptance. … Our problems are just too big to cure … Give up! Crawl into bed with a cheesecake and wait for death!

Cuts close to home, doesn't it?***On Moyers and Company, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, recently shared what he has learned about how people in this country respond to information about global warming. I never entirely trust these social science opinion research profiles, but they provide an interesting way to think about ourselves and how our audiences might think. Here's how Leiserowitz breaks us down:

... here’s one of the real dilemmas, is that we've done a really good job at helping people understand that there is this thing called climate change. Almost all Americans have at least heard of it. But we've in our own work showed that in fact there is no single public. There are multiple publics within the United States. In fact, what we've identified are six Americas.

Six different Americas that each respond to this issue in very different ways and need different kinds of information about climate change to become more engaged with it. So the first group that we've identified is a group we call the alarmed. It's about 16 percent of the public. These are people who think it's happening, that it's human caused, that it's a serious and urgent problem and they're really eager to get on with the solutions.

But they don't know what those solutions are. They don't know what they can do individually and they don't know what we can do collectively as a society to deal with it. We haven't done a very good job of explaining what we can do. Then comes a group that we call the concerned. This is about 29 percent of the public. These are people that think okay, it's happening, it's human caused, it's serious, but they tend to think of it as distant.

Distant in time, that the impacts won't be felt for a generation or more and distant in space, that this is about polar bears or maybe small island countries, not the United States, not my state, not my community, not my friends and family or the people and places that I care about. So they believe this is a serious problem, but they don't see it as a priority.

Then comes a group, about a quarter of the public that we call the cautious. These are people who are kind of still on the fence, they're trying to make up their mind. Is it happening, is it not? Is it human, is it natural? Is it a serious risk or is it kind of overblown? So they're paying attention but really just haven't made up their mind about it yet. They need to be just engaged in some of the basic facts of climate change.

Then comes a group, about eight percent of the public that we call the disengaged. They've heard of global warming, but they don't know anything about it. They say over and over, "I don't know anything about the causes, I don't know anything about the consequences. I don't know anything about the potential solutions." So for them it's really just basic awareness that they need to be engaged on. Two last groups, one is we call the doubtful, it's about 13 percent of the public. These are people who say, "Well, I don't think it's happening, but if it is, it's natural, nothing humans had anything to do with and therefore nothing we can do anything about."

So they don't pay that much attention, but they're predisposed to say not a problem. And then last but not least, 8 percent of Americans are what call the dismissive. And these are people who are firmly convinced it's not happening, it's not human caused, it's not a serious problem and many are what we would lovingly call conspiracy theorists. They say it's a hoax. It's scientists making up data, it's a UN plot to take away American sovereignty and so on.

Now, that's only eight percent. But they're a very well mobilized, organized and loud eight percent. And they've tended to dominate the public square, okay. So here you have these six totally different audiences that need completely different types of information and engagement to deal with this issue. So one of the first tasks, and you know this as a communicator as well as I do, one of the first rules of effective communication is, “know thy audience.”

If you don't know who your audience is it's kind of like playing darts in a crowded room with the lights off. You might hit the target sometimes, but most times you're going to miss. And unfortunately too often you're going to do collateral damage. You're actually going to hit somebody by mistake and cause a backlash.

So what are you? Alarmed? Concerned? Cautious? Disengaged? If you are reading here you are probably not Dismissive -- but then again, who knows?

Minimally, we need to turn the Alarmed and the Concerned into effective activists or we don't have a chance.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Voting -- the struggle is long

Happy early voter in California where a Democratic Secretary of State has made voting simple and accessible.

The rumor is out that the Prez is going to make a push for easier voting in the State of the Union speech next Tuesday. And so he should:

Democrats in the House and Senate have already introduced bills that would require states to provide online voter registration and allow at least 15 days of early voting, among other things.

Fourteen states are also considering whether to expand early voting, including the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, according to FairVote, a nonprofit group that advocates electoral change. Florida, New York, Texas and Washington are looking at whether to ease registration and establish preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Several recent polls and studies suggest that long waiting times in some places depressed turnout in 2012 and that lines were longest in cities, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll taken shortly after Election Day, 18 percent of Democrats said they waited at least a half-hour to vote, compared with 11 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites. ...

Of course just because the Prez wants it and Democrats will introduce it, doesn't mean reforms to make voting easier and procedures more uniform will come about. Republicans don't like all this voting: the wrong people do it. Too many of them are young, or women without husbands, or of color. So we can expect no more than noise in most states and Congress where the Party of No retains an ability to veto.

Meanwhile this year the Supreme Court will have a chance to gut one of the prime enforcement mechanisms of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This law gave teeth to the 1869 15th Amendment to the Constitution which ordered that voting rights can't be denied on the basis of race, color or past slavery. According to legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin, Chief Justice Roberts seems to think that the Voting Rights Act represents "a kind of legal smallpox vaccine—a cure for a disease that no longer exists." That depends on where you look. Guess he's not looking at voter ID laws that exclude the very young and very old or the those long lines. Or maybe he's just okay with obstacles once perfected by the old segregationist South spreading nationwide wherever Republicans can enact them?

We might be less stunned by current efforts to restrict voting if we were more conscious of the history of Reconstruction -- the era (1865-1876) in which the post-Civil War white rebel South was fully reintegrated into these "United States." Reactionaries have been at this for a long time. Nicholas Lemann has just published a short cogent account of that period in the Washington Monthly that provides background context for current struggles. Reading it, we have to understand that in those days, it was northern Republicans who stood for (and to benefit from) Black votes, while Democrats stood with resisting whites.

The right to vote had given the Black former slaves access to political power in the conquered white South. White people didn't like the election of a slew of Black politicians.

None of this was especially popular in the North, and it was wildly unpopular in the white South. Most of the rest of America chose to understand black political empowerment in the South in terms that are still familiar in conservative discourse today: excessive taxation, corruption, and a power imbalance between federal and state government. These arguments were more presentable than simply saying that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and they built sympathy for the white South among high-minded reformists in the North who were horrified by the big-city political machines that immigrants had created in their own backyard. Good-government reformers hated the idea of uneducated people taking over the democratic machinery and using it to distribute power and patronage, rather than in more high-minded ways. Liberal northeastern publications like the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly were reliably hostile to Reconstruction, and their readers feasted on a steady diet of horror stories about swaggering corrupt black legislators, out-of-control black-on-white violence, and the bankruptcies of state and local government.

The Ku Klux Klan, which began in the immediate aftermath of the war and was suppressed by federal troops, soon morphed into an archipelago of secret organizations all over the South that were more explicitly devoted to political terror. These organizations—with names like White Line, Red Shirts, and White League—had shadowy ties to the more respectable Democratic Party. Their essential technique was to detect an incipient “Negro riot” and then take arms to repel it. There never actually were any Negro riots; they were either pure rumor and fantasy that grew from a rich soil of white fear of black violence (usually entailing the incipient despoliation of white womanhood) or another name for Republican Party political activity, at a time when politics was conducted out of doors and with high-spirited mass participation. The white militia always won the battle, if it was a battle, and nearly all the violence associated with these incidents was suffered by black people. In the aggregate, many more black Americans died from white terrorist activities during Reconstruction than from many decades of lynchings. Their effect was to nullify, through violence, the Fifteenth Amendment, by turning black political activity and voting into something that required taking one’s life into one’s hands.

…there was no mystery about what the remedy to Southern political terrorism was: federal troops. Just as in every “Negro riot” the white militia won, in every encounter between the U.S. Army and a white militia, the Army won. The Army was in the South to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments, and it became increasingly clear that without its presence, the white South would regionally nullify those amendments through terrorism. …

Eventually Washington pols cut a deal and the southerner white supremacists were free from federal interference for nearly one hundred years. The Lemann article is an important reminder that universal voting rights are one of the pillars of a more equitable democracy and that we've never enjoyed such rights without a fight.

If the Supreme Court rules that the federal government can no longer enforce the voting rights of all, are we headed back to a situation in which many citizens will be denied the vote? If Republican Congresscritters and state governments get their way, will voting be made harder and more exclusively the privilege of the well-off and white? It's clear that today's Republicans are working for such an outcome where they can. White liberals have not always been stalwarts on the other side, but today's emerging majority -- the coalition of the ascendent that elected our improbable Black president -- is rooted in universal suffrage. So is all progress these days. We will fight to keep and extend the vote.

I'm a Kushnerite

Writing that long post about a biography of Micheal Harrington a few days ago, I found myself thinking something like this: Harrington adopted a kind of leftism that drew him into sectarian backwaters and then, at the key moment of political opportunity, unfitted him for working with effective mass mobilizations. This is not a pretty trajectory and certainly not where this exponent of democratic socialism wanted to end up. It's the kind of story that has given "the left" a bad name in the US (actually, it is one of the better variants; Harrington had more influence for good than many.)

So I have to ask myself, what sort of leftist am I? Some kind I think -- I think politics is about increasing justice, equality, democratic citizen empowerment, and peaceful national choices. I believe people can and will make their societies better -- or worse -- and it is worth trying to move people and nations in better directions.
These days I'm catching up on podcasts of Moyers and Company and so just encountered the writer Tony Kushner talking with Moyers about the film Lincoln. And lo and behold, I found an answer, at least for today, to the question, what sort of leftist am I. Here's Kushner passing on a perspective I profoundly agree with:

TONY KUSHNER: ... I think that the left at this point and progressive people have a complicated job which is to figure out how we do our jobs as citizens of saying, you know, the drone strikes are terrifying-- the drones are a terrifying new weapon, and how is this to be used responsibly? And Guantanamo still being in operation is a horrifying thing and why is this-- you know, there's a lot-- why are we still leasing deep water offshore oil wells and nuclear power plants and so on.

But at the same time that level of criticism has to allow for the possibility that during election cycles people who have maybe not done everything we wanted them to do can get reelected so that we can build a power base so that we can actually do things. And I think we have a balancing act. And I think we've gotten unused to that balance we've spent the entire years of the Reagan counterrevolution out of power. And so we've become critics. ...

BILL MOYERS: I think you said to [an audience of young people] if you don't commit and get active the world's going to end.

TONY KUSHNER: Absolutely, well, and I believe that. I believe that literally. I used to say that hyperbolically, but now with climate change I believe that absolutely literally. But being active as a citizen doesn't mean being, you know, sort of mindlessly in opposition. And you know, anarchism's much more romantic than, you know, electoral politics.

You get to wear sexier clothing and hang out in parks and, you know, really scream about the revolution, and that's thrilling. But if you don't actually believe that we're in a revolutionary moment and if you've read the history of revolution you might have some questions to ask about what comes often out of violent revolution. I'm not saying that I don't believe in revolution, but I think that there's some questions to be asked. Apart from the sort of romance of revolution and the glamour of it and the hope that it brings because it gives us the sense that evil can be done away with instantaneously, what is, you know, what Lincoln said, "The last best hope of mankind is democracy, is electoral politics." And that means licking-- oh well, nobody licks envelopes anymore, but figuring out emails chains and so on. And it's boring and it's tedious and it's harder to do than I think when you're young than when you're an old person like me.

But the abandonment by the left of the possibility of radical change through democracy which ironically because, I think, of the Vietnam War happened at the apogee of the democratic process as an engine for change, at the moment of the civil rights-- African American civil rights movement culminating in the voting rights act, Civil Rights Act, the beginning of the great society.

And then the left said, "You know what? Democracy doesn't work. Let's take to the streets." Well, always take to the streets, but always make sure that there are people in the halls of power who can listen to what you're saying on the streets and say, "Okay, I get it. I'm going to do something about this."

Which means surrendering to some degree the romance of revolution. I hope that I'm not less radical in terms of what I'd like to see transformed. I believe that we can live in a more economically and socially just world than we live in. I think we have to save the planet and I think that's going to call for enormous sacrifice and a transformation of society where we really come to terms with what has to happen in order to stop global warming or reverse it.

Perhaps it befits the times that I find my leftist inspiration not from a "scientific" socialist or a Democratic Party politician, but from a gay man who is an artist with words. I'll take what I can get!

Superbowl consolation

Exiled in New England from my 49er faithful friends, I indulge in the local brews. Quite good.

Michael Harrington: stranded "mid-air between sectarian irrelevance and successful betrayal"?

I asked a well-read older friend just now, do you remember Michael Harrington? She looked blank. Was he a novelist? No, he wasn't.

Harrington has faded from our historical memory nearly completely some fifty years after his path breaking exposé The Other America. The book is said to have inspired President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. We've too often lost any immediate consciousness of US poverty these days, ever since we pushed destitute women with dependent children off the national agenda with the the 1996 "welfare reform." Liberals and progressives talk about harms to "the middle class." Harrington demanded the United States deal with its poor citizens.

Recently I read Maurice Isserman's 1990 biography of the man who made poverty an issue in the 60s, The Other American : The Life of Michael Harrington. Harrington's life seems an instructive tragedy -- one I'm draw to in part because I too passed through one of his formative influences, the New York house of the Catholic Worker movement.

I'm not going to try to explain about Catholic Workers here. At this website contemporary CW folks tell their own story -- at the moment they seem entangled in responding to the Catholic hierarchy's intent to fully appropriate and canonize their founder, Dorothy Day -- when they are not getting busted for protesting Guantanamo and the drone war.

Harrington came to the CW out of an intense, insular Catholic upbringing in St. Louis and then at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass. Bumping around in New York after college, he rediscovered his youthful Catholicism and honed his journalistic skills in the movement's paper. Isserman reports on a 1952 article called "Poverty U.S.A" that gave a taste where Harrington was drifting intellectually at the time. (Throughout the book, Isserman irritatingly refers to his subject as "Michael," as if the man were a little boy. I reproduce that here.)

Michael set out to challenge the current economic consensus that "things are pretty good." … Michael added an interesting caveat to his article, intended to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Catholic Worker's religious radicalism to the blend of economic determinism and ends-justify-the-means cynicism that he believed characterized the outlook of more secular radicals, particularly Marxist revolutionaries. In doing so, he introduced a dichotomy between the head and heart, and between the pressing social needs of the present and the vision of a transformed social order in the distant future, that became a recurring theme in his political writings.

If the problems of the poor were understood as and reduced to "the means toward the well-being of some future generation, as merely an incitement to class consciousness on the part of those involved," he warned, "then we have changed people into objects, means. The problem must be faced as one of the future -- and of the present. Immediate relief through any means which are not clearly immoral must be studied. To think otherwise, to view this poverty as a force in a historic [dialectic], is not only the dehumanization of the poor; it is the dehumanization of him who thinks it. The reaction to this poverty should be partly one of calculation, of how can it be eradicated, but it must also be of the Beatitudes, of hunger and thirst for Justice, of love and grief for what goes on before our eyes."

Though Harrington would drop the Christian frame in later life, this catches the impossible dance he was caught in between " calculation" -- understanding systemically how and why evils happen and are perpetuated -- and a necessary recourse to "immediate relief" in response to dehumanization. He never seems to have found a satisfactory balance -- a balance between mind and a good heart -- that satisfied him. Many of his subsequent gyrations seem to come from that conflict.

From the Catholic Worker with its soup kitchen and immersion in the dirt and pain of the poor, Harrington jumped into 1950s sectarian Marxism, an environment that today seems even more exotic than the Catholic Worker. If you couldn't swallow the Stalinism of the Soviet-affiliated Communists but were drawn to "scientific socialism," you ended up a Trotskyist of some sort, as Harrington did. Trotskyists elaborated intricate, and sometimes insightful, readings of capitalist development -- but as intellectual rebels within and against an authoritarian tradition, they tended to be greatly attached to their own intellectual rectitude. Consequently, Trotskyist groups usually split over arcane theoretical disputes after they attained any size -- several hundred adherents at most -- and devoted most of their energies to afflicting their ideological foes rather than attacking the system.

Isserman is very good at describing this obscure snakepit in which Harrington rapidly made himself a leading figure through sheer brainpower and energy. He became an accomplished sectarian infighter -- and yet, even at his most removed from real-life struggles in his "socialist" cocoon, He remained someone who allowed realistic concerns to break through his intellectual bubble. Many of his comrades mused that a socialist country could properly use nuclear weapons against the imperialists. Not Harrington.

When it came to atomic weapons, Michael argued that moral judgment had to be absolute not relative; under no conceivable circumstance could the use of such weapons be justified, regardless of whether they were good socialist or bad capitalist bombs. If he had to step outside the boundaries of conventional Leninist concepts and terminology to justify his position, Michael was willing to do so. …

Such breaks with sectarian orthodoxy as well as the post-McCarthyism thaw in US politics gradually drew Harrington closer to mainstream respectability. It became possible to point to social ills without being hounded for "Soviet sympathies." Harrington gradually came to occupy a somewhat unique position as a prominent self-proclaimed socialist who could nonetheless mingle with the more liberal fringes of the political class, the more daring Democrats of the day. Out of this phase of his life came the book -- The Other America -- that put domestic poverty into common discussions. That book may not hold up as sociological inquiry, but it is still in print and on Kindle which says something for its longstanding influence.

After Kennedy's assassination and Lyndon Johnson's decision to make his own mark by pushing a radical "War on Poverty," Harrington was drawn into staff consultations on the program. He seemed poised to exert real influence on the creation -- if not of socialism -- of progressive policy choices that mitigated the evils of unregulated capitalism.

And then it all fell apart, not only for Harrington, but for everyone who hoped for a relatively united liberal-left, for what we call today an "inside/outside" strategy for political progress, a choice to use both the tactics of electoral participation and of applying street heat to win partial victories for the society's less fortunate.

Harrington was an intellectual combatant, not so much a movement worker or an organizer. By embracing Trotskyism, he had placed himself outside the grass roots social movements of his day. Though the little socialist sects of the 50s-era provided some infrastructure assistance to the emerging black-led Southern freedom movement, that movement kept them at arms length, not wanting the stigma of Communist associations or the intrusions of white guys who were theorists, not doers. Meanwhile President Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam alienated a generation of young people who saw no reason to die in the jungles for an immoral imperial policy. Harrington was out of sync, still as much concerned that Vietnamese Communism was an evil system as by the atrocities of his own country's war.

In the eyes of Michael's critics, the issue at stake in Vietnam simply did not turn on the question of whether or not Ho Chi Minh was a Stalinist, but on whether the United States had the right to unleash its vast technology of destruction on a poor and distant country like Vietnam, in defiance of the very principles of national self-determination that Americans supposedly cherished. …

While Martin Luther King and young left leaders everywhere denounced the Vietnam adventure, Harrington -- scarred by his resolute fights in the previous decade to reclaim the label "socialist" from the Communists -- never could whole-heartedly join their vigorous witness against the war.

In the late 60s and 70s, as the possibility for a progressive coalition between socialists and liberal Democrats collapsed in the bitter divisions about Vietnam, the War on Poverty lost its elite backing. And while Harrington was losing his influence both to his left and his right, he was elaborating a progressive balancing act that still has some resonance today. As early as the mid-60s, Isserman writes that Harrington asserted:

There was no single formula for principled political behavior. In different historical eras, different balances would have to be struck, according to circumstance and opportunity. In the early 1950s, Michael contended, when there was no movement for fundamental change afoot or even on the horizon, the radical intellectual "was obliged to seek his own alienation." In the 1960s, with a … widening of the possibilities for securing real social gains, "the radical must brave semi-commitments." [Christopher Lasch's] The New Radicalism in America, Michael argued, "misses the ambiguity of the radical who must exist in mid-air between sectarian irrelevance and successful betrayal."

Again, from the mid-70s:

[Harrington wrote] "The vocation of a radical in the last portion of the twentieth century is to walk a perilous tightrope. He must be true to the socialist vision of a new society and constantly develop and extend its content; and he must bring that vision into contact with the actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread."

[Isserman observed that for Harrington] … Socialism was a process, rather than a result, and there was never going to be a final moment of triumph when the red flag was raised over the prostrate capitalist foe. But neither was the world static and unchanging. The accumulation of thousands of small and often hidden changes in politics, in economics, and in culture would some time or another add up to a transition -- if not a revolutionary leap -- to a qualitatively different world, where human existence was governed not by necessity but by freedom.

Harrington sought to give his principles institutional form by founding the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (1973 -- merged into Democratic Socialist of American in 1982). At the founding convention, he laid out a realistic tactical stance:

'We must go where the people are, which is the liberal wing of the Democratic party," Michael told the assemblage. Radicals should get over their love affair with being principled losers: "Victory, even limited victory, is radicalizing. Defeat, even glorious defeat, convinces people you can't fight city hall. It is time to speak our own name in the Democratic party, to become a conscious visible presence."

The aftermath of that meeting smacked Harrington upside the head with what he'd missed through his effective absence from the on-the-ground struggles of his day: the women of DSOC pointed out he'd envisioned an all-male leadership and they weren't going to take it. The organization never escaped its limitations: good ideas didn't translate into effective on-the-ground practice. Harrington toiled on, teaching, writing, sticking to the principled socialist loyalties of a lifetime, and died quite young of cancer in 1989.

I found Isserman's biography informative, annoying (it is neither tightly constructed nor deftly written), and mostly just sad. There's lots for any political progressive to learn in the Harrington story, even when his life seems far removed from contemporary struggles. We're all still caught in Harrington's balancing act between envisioning a better, more just and moral, society and deciding what compromises and associations we have to take on to get closer to it. Harrington played out these contradictions on a larger stage than most; I'm grateful to Isserman for preserving the story. I wouldn't be surprised if Harrington attracts new biographers as new generations re-examine his era.

Saturday scenes and scenery: public health posters from the 1940s

I've been helping a friend struggle through the collections of a long life. These posters were among today's finds:

The artist Ray Gordon (here he signed himself "Ramon") created these during his stint in the war time army or perhaps shortly after.


That kind of confidence that "the doctor knows best" is gone for good.


We're not even so certain about the value of check-ups any more, but at least they'll come free with Obamacare.

Catholic bishops get a Shabbos goy from Obamacare

Descriptions of the latest iteration of regulations under the Affordable Care Act that define how women will have free access to contraception services didn't clarify much for me. But some digging, including a smart Catholic source, has helped me make some sense out of this which I'll share here.

I knew the back story: Catholic bishops were enraged last year that the government mandated that the insurance they provide to their employees -- Catholic or not -- must include contraception. Contraception is part of healthcare in the secular thinking of this democracy. The government said "okay -- if you are a church that doesn't allow women to control when they get pregnant, your insurance company will do the job for you, no charge." The bishops and some lay Catholics (mostly ones who didn't like Obama anyway) remained outraged because the compromise would leave institutions that proudly announce their Catholic connections -- universities, hospitals, social service agencies -- but operate in a secular context, without a fig leaf when they obeyed the law.

Since Catholic individuals are about as likely to approve of contraception as anyone else in this country, the brouhaha over the contraception mandate had no electoral effect. Bishops fumed and the majority of Catholics voted their consciences -- for Obama.

The latest go-round brings the historically Catholic institutions that operate in the secular world into compliance with the law by putting the burden for providing free contraception on insurance companies that write policies for the institutions. Presumably they'd recoup because contraception is good preventative medicine, saving money later -- and the Department of Health and Human Services also gives cooperating insurance companies a break when they also participate in the market portion of "reform," the exchanges.

That is, this rule makes an insurance companies act like a Shabbos goy -- a person not bound by religious prohibitions who performs an act that would be forbidden to a Jewish household that observes the sabbath in the full traditional manner. In the modern context, this concept, a concept that has analogues in many religions, seems like a strange concession to tribal gobbledy-gook -- we are mostly ethical universalists: if it is good for me, it is good for thee. The HHS rule allows some institutions to say "it is not good for me and perhaps thee -- but you'll be covered and the matter is subject to your individual conscience." In a pluralist system, that's what we should expect.

But hey -- this Obamacare compromise preserves the central win for women in the new system: contraceptive and reproductive care is simply healthcare.

The new rule doesn't cover private businesses that provide insurance. If your boss is some kind of fundamentalist with idiosyncratic medical ideas and the company offers insurance, he can't impose his medical prejudices on you.

Will the Catholic bishops and other fundamentalist objectors be smart enough to recognize this is probably the best deal they can get in a country that largely thinks they've jumped the shark in their struggle to control women's bodies? I hope so.

Friday cat blogging

Very soon, those fascinating little men that Morty is inspecting will be gone from the screen for six months.


I'm sure he'll find something else to contemplate.

Why immigration reform is both so hard and yet so beneficial ...

... in one chart, courtesy of Juan Cole.

Only the blue and possibly the yellow wedges of that pie derive from places that the contemporary U.S. majority thinks of as the source of the North American culture.

That's changing, but this takes time. As has been true since Europeans invaded this continent, the future and dynamism of this country depends on immigration.

Bloomberg View, an organ of business news, is willing to let Ezra Klein explain this:

... consider a few facts about immigrants in the American economy: About a tenth of the U.S. population is foreign-born. More than a quarter of U.S. technology and engineering businesses started from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born owner. In Silicon Valley, half of all tech startups had a foreign-born founder.

Immigrants begin businesses and file patents at a much higher rate than their native-born counterparts, and while there are disputes about the effect immigrants have on the wages of low-income Americans, there’s little dispute about their effect on wages overall: They lift them.

The economic case for immigration is best made by way of analogy. Everyone agrees that aging economies with low birth rates are in trouble; this, for example, is a thoroughly conventional view of Japan. It’s even conventional wisdom about the U.S. The retirement of the baby boomers is correctly understood as an economic challenge. The ratio of working Americans to retirees will fall from 5-to-1 today to 3-to-1 in 2050. Fewer workers and more retirees is tough on any economy.

There’s nothing controversial about that analysis. But if that’s not controversial, then immigration shouldn’t be, either. Immigration is essentially the importation of new workers. It’s akin to raising the birth rate, only easier, because most of the newcomers are old enough to work. And because living in the U.S. is considered such a blessing that even very skilled, very industrious workers are willing to leave their home countries and come to ours, the U.S. has an unusual amount to gain from immigration. When it comes to the global draft for talent, we almost always get the first-round picks -- at least, if we want them, and if we make it relatively easy for them to come here.

... There are few free lunches in public policy. But taking advantage of our unique position as a country where the world’s best, brightest and hardest-working desperately want to live is surely one. In the end, economies aren’t mainly about budgets and tax codes, though Congress occasionally pretends otherwise. They’re about workers and business owners. Immigration reform is a way to get more of both.

Klein concedes that new immigrant workers may, sometimes, compete with native workers who are already struggling. I'm not one to deny that; I see it in construction, in yard work, in the hotel industry -- regardless of the broad statistical picture. There are citizens who have a harder time because someone else has come along to do the dirty work. No question about that.

But it's not usually these citizens who are leading the charge against the newcomers. It is too often those of us who simply find immigrants too strange and take that as threatening. Those new people are a challenge. They won't look like us; even once they learn English (and they do, fast!) they won't speak like us; they bring different foods and different sports. But this new United States that is coming into being including all these cultural strands is our best future. Hiding our heads accomplishes nothing. We're in for yet another nasty season of backlash and haggling as immigration reform bumps along in Congress. Real, already present, neighbors are hurt by our reluctance to move ahead on this.

But -- despite the dreams of some of the white Republican base -- there's no going back. Those "foreign born" are part of our future.

Warming Wednesdays: small steps in Massachusetts

Since I'm temporarily located in the Bay State, it seemed right to look into what measures are afoot here to reduce carbon emissions. It turns out that even more permanent residents can be unaware of local progress, according to "charley-on-the-mta" writing at Blue Mass Group.

Little known fact, which bears repeating: We in the northeast USA are under a cap-and-trade program right now — the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It has put an ever-increasing price on carbon emission[s], and spreads the proceeds around to conservation measures, like the terrific MassSave program, which gives big incentives to get your house insulated, sealed-up, and otherwise energy-efficient. (I’ve taken advantage of it personally — they subsidize 75% of insulation work, up to a cap of $2000. It’s a big savings and makes the house more comfortable. What’s not to like?)

Charley goes on to point to a New York Times article about the RGGI that highlights some of the program's challenges linked to the arrival of low cost natural gas (fracked in other folks' states, by the way.) Charley thinks New Englanders should know this is no time to back down on their efforts:

... now is absolutely not the time to back off on carbon pollution, which is a direct threat to … well, everyone on the planet, but certainly those of us who live near the ocean and in the line of hurricanes.

***Here on Martha's Vineyard, the local media are celebrating the official launch of a solar project built on a capped landfill that will power the municipal infrastructure in Aquinnah.

The panels are expected to produce enough power to meet all of the town's municipal electrical needs and more. … The town currently spends more than $14,000 per year on its municipal electrical load, including town offices, police and fire stations, the library, street lights, and public bathrooms.

The 50-kW panels are expected to produce approximately 65,000kWh per year. Their life expectancy is almost 30 years. Mr. Wilson said that in ten years when the town buys the panels, he expects they should turn a profit for the town.

Martha's Vineyard Times, 1/23/2013

Other towns have taken note and plan to place solar arrays on their dumps -- got to make something of such valuable municipal land.

The photo shows one of the panel trucks belonging to The South Mountain Company, a builder of the Aquinnah site.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Not with a bang but a whimper …

Office Working to Close Guantánamo Is Shuttered
FORT MEADE, Md. — The State Department on Monday reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and will not replace him, according to an internal personnel announcement. Mr. Fried’s office is being closed, and his former responsibilities will be “assumed” by the office of the department’s legal adviser, the notice said.

The announcement that no senior official in President Obama’s second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues pertaining to repatriating or resettling detainees appeared to signal that the administration does not currently see the closing of the prison as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so.

Charles Savage, NYT, 1/29/2013

Well that's over … unless you are one of the United States' "war on terror" prisoners -- mostly now cleared for release -- who gets to rot in our "legal black hole" for the the rest of their lives.

Over, except that the shame of our law-free rendition site, set up for the purpose of being beyond the reach of the US courts, will continue to undermine our pretensions to being a state ruled by law.

Thanks David Addington, thanks Dick Cheney, thanks George W. Bush, for cowardice in the face of a novel challenge that has permanently humiliated your country.

Rays of effing sunshine: The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Tyrone Power skewers an evil Basil Rathbone and wins the girl -- not to mention bringing peace and justice to the peasants -- all by passing as fag.

What's not to like? Caught on Turner Classic TV and highly recommended.

Truth abolished but united mongrels triumph

A friend sent me a link to this, asking whether the U.S. military would still produce something like it? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure some Tea Party politician would blow a gasket on Fox News if they did any such thing.

During World War II, the military propaganda machine not only spewed out anti-VD posters, it also devoted its considerable artistry to condemning the ideology of the fascist enemy in Europe. The result was a vigorous endorsement of citizen solidarity against racial, religious and ethnic prejudice.

This U.S. Army Signal Corps trailer was filmed and shown to some returning GIs and even in some civilian theaters in 1946-7.

Unconstrained by fidelity to historical fact, it's portrayal of brave resistance to Nazis among German Christian clergy and academics is seriously exaggerated. But the viewer gets the point: the Nazis crushed all opposition institutions in order seize power, impose their racial agenda, and lead Europe into a futile war. They had to be stopped and citizens of the United States should be proud of having done the job.

Concurrently, the struggle in the Pacific theater in World War II evoked quite a different sort of propaganda. The fight against the Japanese empire was portrayed as honorably racist, a battle against an enemy depicted as hate-filled primitive savages. The Japanese side was no less racist.

"Don't Be a Sucker" is a pleasant artifact of another time. Enjoy.

Drone war: what for?

Code Pink visits the San Francisco residence of Senator Diane Feinstein. Photo: Rashad Sisemore, The Chronicle

Joshua Foust isn't Code Pink. He's a Fellow at the American Security Project with expertise in irregular warfare and Central Asia. That is, he's one of those guys who run in U.S. intelligence, military, and D.C.-establishment think tank circles. He has recently churned out a public paper on the drone war.

The Obama administration seems more and more enamored of using drones for overseas power projection. It's nice to see Foust move beyond technical assessments to ask the hard question:

Ultimately, the question that must be answered when evaluating drone strikes is “what is the end state?”

Drones have some discrete and measurable effects, but what purpose are the strikes meant to serve? The stated U.S. policy is to destroy, degrade, and defeat al Qaeda. But determining what that looks like is no simple task. While drones can be effective at destroying parts of al Qaeda and thus degrading its capacity to launch attacks, they are also insufficient on their own for accomplishing the broader goals of U.S. counterterrorism policy. 

Most academic studies agree that targeted killing conducted by armed drones may be effective as part of a broader strategy. Drones, however, have limits. Where drone strikes are found to have a measurable effect, it tends to be temporary. Successful strikes correlate in some circumstances with a temporary reduction in the incidence and intensity of terrorist violence, but may also correlate with long-term increases in retaliatory attacks against local government and persistent instability.

This suggests that while drones can manage the terrorist problem for a short time, they are not necessarily contributing to a long term reduction of the threat. The long term reduction of threat is absent in most discussions of the drone program. Drones have killed many al Qaeda terrorists, but the threat appears to be migrating elsewhere and taking on new forms. So what is that end state drones are meant to accomplish, and can we measure whether that end state is being reached?

There it is again, just as became obvious in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the U.S. is flaunting our unparalleled military capacity wherever our government chooses -- but for what purpose?

The Iraq invasion was a vainglorious war of choice without any purpose that served the interests of the United States people -- and which produced nothing for us but wasted treasure and squandered lives. Nobody ever figured out what the object of the Afghanistan occupation might be after the Taliban were smashed and Bin Laden evicted in late 2001; the U.S. will leave in 2014, never having set a plausible objective for the murderous exercise.

Current U.S enthusiasm for drones is simply a cheap technical fix for the imperial drive to show the world who is boss. Okay, we get it. The U.S. can blow up people remotely (in countries that can't shoot back) with some accuracy. But the questions remains, what's the point? It is really just to prove we can? Of course there are people who hate us and would do us wrong -- but do we have to wander the world playing "whack-a-mole," all the while making new blood feuds where once there were none? Or, in Foust's language: "“what is the end state?”

These days, on the domestic front, enough of us are on to the con; we don't like wasting lives and our tax dollars on stupid wars. So playing with our latest hardware is pretty much all our rulers can do without major political pushback. (Ask George W. what happens to a presidency when majorities turn against a costly war.) The U.S. monopoly on this new plaything won't last. By the standards of military hardware, these things are cheap. All developed countries will have them soon enough. That will be a lovely world.

Shooting up little guys who can't shoot back is what dumb empires do. And democracies die when their rulers can't even explain to their people who and why they kill -- or why we should take on distant fights.

Saturday scenes and scenery: sudden immersion in a New England winter

I didn't expect to be here now, but I can hardly be ungrateful for this time when I look out the window at dawn.


Yes, this east facing window holds a permanent screen. In the summer, I'm glad of it.


At ground level, the western sky is beginning to clear.


Clouds can take on a momentary pink tinge.

Snow is fun to visit, but I wouldn't want to live with it.

Extractive or inclusive; vicious or virtuous?

When I was growing up, economic and political development was supposed to involve a linear march toward riches and progress. Think W.W. Rostow's stages of growth. Nowadays the more apt metaphor seems to be a circle, vicious or virtuous.

James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty is one of those "big books" -- an attempt to envision a grand unifying theory that the current of era of post-Marxist awareness that modern capitalism has kicked the Anthropocene into high gear necessarily evokes. I found it interesting and often persuasive, though, as with all such efforts, only time will tell how predictive their thinking proves.

Here's how the authors describe their project:

…we need a theory of why some nations are prosperous while others fail and are poor. This theory needs to delineate both the factors that create and retard prosperity and their historical origins. This book has proposed such a theory.

Our theory has attempted to achieve this by operating on two levels. The first is the distinction between extractive and inclusive economic and political institutions. The second is our explanation for why inclusive institutions emerged in some parts of the world and not in others. While the first level of our theory is about an institutional interpretation of history, the second level is about how history has shaped institutional trajectories of nations.

Central to our theory is the link between inclusive economic and political institutions and prosperity. Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few and that fail to protect property rights or provide incentives for economic activity. Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions, that is, those that distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy. Similarly, extractive economic institutions are synergistically linked to extractive political institutions, which concentrate power in the hands of a few, who will then have incentives to maintain and develop extractive economic institutions for their benefit and use the resources they obtain to cement their hold on political power.

These tendencies do not imply that extractive economic and political institutions are inconsistent with economic growth. On the contrary, every elite would, all else being equal, like to encourage as much growth as possible in order to have more to extract. Extractive institutions that have achieved at least a minimal degree of political centralization are often able to generate some amount of growth. What is crucial, however, is that growth under extractive institutions will not be sustained, for two key reasons. First, sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics. Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ultimately short lived. Second, the ability of those who dominate extractive institutions to benefit greatly at the expense of the rest of society implies that political power under extractive institutions is highly coveted, making many groups and individuals fight to obtain it. As a consequence, there will be powerful forces pushing societies under extractive institutions toward political instability.

The synergies between extractive economic and political institutions create a vicious circle, where extractive institutions, once in place, tend to persist. Similarly, there is a virtuous circle associated with inclusive economic and political institutions. But neither the vicious nor the virtuous circle is absolute. In fact, some nations live under inclusive institutions today because, though extractive institutions have been the norm in history, some societies have been able to break the mold and transition toward inclusive institutions. Our explanation for these transitions is historical, but not historically predetermined.

That's all pretty dense and abstract. Our authors eagerly apply their model concretely. Perhaps it's not surprising that they are pretty confident that they can predict what countries will be rich in coming decades:

…vicious and virtuous circles generate a lot of persistence and sluggishness. There should be little doubt that in fifty or even a hundred years, the United States and Western Europe, based on their inclusive economic and political institutions, will be richer, most likely considerably richer, than sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central America, or Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, they are also pretty sure that the continuing strength of extractive political institutions (arbitrary and corrupt rule by a self-selecting elite) ensures that China will reach a limit to the extension of its somewhat inclusive economic development.

…Even if Chinese economic institutions are incomparably more inclusive today than three decades ago, the Chinese experience is an example of growth under extractive political institutions. Despite the recent emphasis in China on innovation and technology, Chinese growth is based on the adoption of existing technologies and rapid investment, not creative destruction. An important aspect of this is that property rights are not entirely secure in China. Every now and then, … some entrepreneurs are expropriated. Labor mobility is tightly regulated, and the most basic of property rights, the right to sell one's own labor in the way one wishes, is still highly imperfect. The extent to which economic institutions are still far from being truly inclusive is illustrated by the fact that only a few businessmen and -women would even venture into any activity without the support of the local party cadre or, even more important, of Beijing. The connection between business and the party is highly lucrative for both. Businesses supported by the party receive contracts on favorable terms, can evict ordinary people to expropriate their land, and violate laws and regulations with impunity. Those who stand in the path of this business plan will be trampled and can even be jailed or murdered.

Though skeptical about China's potential to generate a virtuous circle in which inclusive economic and political institutions support each other, they are much more optimistic about developments in contemporary Brazil.

The formation of a broad coalition in Brazil as a result of the coming together of diverse social movements and organized labor has had a remarkable impact on the Brazilian economy. Since 1990 economic growth has been rapid, with the proportion of the population in poverty falling from 45 percent to 30 percent in 2006. Inequality, which rose rapidly under the military, has fallen sharply, particularly after the Workers' Party took power, and there has been a huge expansion of education, with the average years of schooling of the population increasing from six in 1995 to eight in 2006. Brazil has now become part of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the first Latin American country actually to have weight in international diplomatic circles. The rise of Brazil since the 1970s was not engineered by economists of international institutions instructing Brazilian policymakers on how to design better policies or avoid market failures. It was not achieved with injections of foreign aid. It was not the natural outcome of modernization. Rather, it was the consequence of diverse groups of people courageously building inclusive institutions. Eventually these led to more inclusive economic institutions. But the Brazilian transformation, like that of England in the seventeenth century, began with the creation of inclusive political institutions. But how can society build inclusive political institutions? History, as we have seen, is littered with examples of reform movements that succumbed to the iron law of oligarchy and replaced one set of extractive institutions with even more pernicious ones. …

There are many parallels between [previous instances of] historical processes of empowerment and what took place in Brazil starting in the 1970s. Though one root of the Workers' Party is the trade union movement, right from its early days, leaders such as Lula, along with the many intellectuals and opposition politicians who lent their support to the party, sought to make it into a broad coalition. These impulses began to fuse with local social movements all over the country, as the party took over local governments, encouraging civic participation and causing a sort of revolution in governance throughout the country. … empowerment at the grass-roots level in Brazil ensured that the transition to democracy corresponded to a move toward inclusive political institutions, and thus was a key factor in the emergence of a government committed to the provision of public services, educational expansion, and a truly level playing field.

***Short excerpts cannot do justice to this ambitious project. I hope these quotations have piqued interest.

I was fascinated by this thesis for use in thinking about how development occurs within nations when countries are treated as distinct entities. But I wondered how these authors' extractive v. inclusive frame worked in the context of a global system that exploits and exacerbates poor countries' internal contradictions to the benefit not only of rich global elites but also to some extent of the general populations of rich countries. There are many examples of transnational extractive institutional arrangements. Remember the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank? Can a framework so rooted in the experience of particular discrete states be usefully applied to the era of universal global capitalism? There are hints here, but the nation is the primary unit of analysis -- and possibly not the true way the planet is presently divided, if it ever was.

I read this book during the U.S. election campaign and couldn't shake the image of Romney as the slippery champion of extractive elites who promote their interests by way of the Republican Party. The book's frame describes these forces to a T. Republicans increasingly aim to interrupt the U.S. virtuous circle embodied in electoral institutions that maintain some measure of inclusive equality among citizens. It's not just attachment to patriotic hokum when progressives stick up for the democratic rights of all of us. Robinson and Acemoglu remind us that the decisions about what kind of country we are going to have happen in history -- there's nothing that ensures we'll keep our relatively inclusive economic and political institutions, though inertia helps. These inclusive institutions are worth defending and these authors would contend that organized collective defense can matter.

A friend remembered

I suppose in the end some combination of the pain and his skewed, convoluted rationalizations against despair won out. Nothing ever quite shut off the toxic tsunami of rejection, complex ideation, and brilliance that always seemed to be barreling down life's way toward him, about to submerge him.

He was a Jew who grew up in Texas: not the modern Texas of Dallas suburbs, but "home on the range" Texas. He was an urban poet who needed to be around horses. At times he seemed almost happy, when selling and recommending books.

He was an overage hippie who had once been a stalwart of the War Resisters League. Later on, he proudly affixed a National Rifle Association decal to his ancient VW bug.

He was a transman. That fit him better than being a courtly, diminutive, aging lesbian. That identity seemed closer to who he felt himself to be. It was better, but maybe the person inside it all never quite fit any of his civilization's labels. I don't know.

He finally ended his life -- shot himself, naturally -- in Central Park in New York. I can't say "why." None of his friends are surprised; I feel sure all are as horrified as I am. I guess the pain won. That was not right.