Frederick Douglass' admonitions to a President's step-children

In honor of this President's Day, here are some excerpts from a speech by Black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass on the occasion of the dedication of the Freedmen's Monument pictured here. The African American citizens of the capitol were proud of their statue. This 19th century statue is not easy to look at from a modern perspective. We don't do kneeling homage nor do we believe in benevolent "liberators."

It's not as if Douglass was a fawning character. Quite the contrary. An escaped slave, before emancipation he campaigned tirelessly for his people's freedom and continued on, after the Civil War, to champion equality for all, including the then-ridiculed cause of votes for women.

His speech here is a lesson to those of us who have such a hard time dealing with the very mixed blessing that is Obama administration. We want and need so much; the President seems always only to stand for inadequate half measures. But if we're serious, we need to find the good where we can and then never give up on pushing for something better. Sometimes great good comes.

Here's Douglass:

…we, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this Republic, have now and here unveiled, set apart, and dedicated a figure of which the men of this generation may read, and those of after-coming generations may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham Lincoln, the first martyr President of the United States.

…Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

…He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government.

The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity….

… we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. …

…I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

… the assassination of Abraham Lincoln... was a new crime, a pure act of malice. No purpose of the rebellion was to be served by it. It was the simple gratification of a hell-black spirit of revenge. But it has done good after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.

Yes -- President Obama is not our man, not a man of the peace movement, or of civil libertarians, or of the left. He's a product of a "meritocracy" that provides the ideological support for the nation's increasing inequality, for the domination of the one percent. He's the anointed custodian of this waning empire and behaves accordingly. When we consider the urgency of the threat of climate change, he seems "tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent."

But he's also the best most of us are likely to see. We must try his patience (and that of his fellow pols) with "injudicious and tedious delegations..." and keep on keeping on.

Saturday scenes and scenery: the fish are almost gone

The little port of Menemsha on Martha's Vineyard is getting dock repairs over the winter. Come summer, small boats will pull up here to be refueled. It's a busy place then. Now it is quiet.


Menemsha is a fishing village -- the landing for fishermen bringing in the catch. Stanley Larsen sells what they bring him in a store next to the dock. He's unique in these parts because he stays open through the tough winter.


The market sports a tank full of lobsters, buckets of clams and oysters -- and these offerings.

A sadness hangs over Menemsha these days. The cod for which the area is named are nearly depleted. There are arguments over what killed the fisheries; regulatory miscalculations, industrial fishing, pollution, and a warming ocean are among the factors. But some combination has left the Gulf of Maine cod population at only 18 percent of what scientists say is healthy and Georges Bank, off Cape Cod, at a dismal seven percent. And without the cod, there goes a way of life. Mandated cuts in the cod catch will echo through the human ecosystem. The scientists agree that the cuts will

decimate fishing communities across the region and have a domino effect on seafood processors, wholesalers, distributors and retailers who all make a living off the water.

"The impact will be severe," said John Bullard, the regional administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who voted in favor of the cuts.

"It wasn't easy, but it was necessary."

This winter, customers at Larsen's market come as much for the chowders as for the bulk fish. This tough New England fish monger has adapted. People do. But that doesn't do away with the sadness.

They can do this to anyone

The "no-fly list" ain't what it used to be. Back in 2002, when I had my own brush with this legal travesty, it was at least plausible that the secret designation had something to do with airline security.

These days, as civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald points out, the list has taken on a new function:

State punishment without charges and trials is now perfectly normal -- for Muslims.

According to an article in the Oklahoman, Saadiq Long served in the Air Force with distinction. For several years he has lived in Qatar with his wife and children, making a living teaching English. Last November he sought to fly home to see his sick mother -- and was told the U.S. had barred him. U.S. citizens and rights advocacy groups like CAIR kicked up enough fuss so the man was finally allowed to return to his country. On arrival he was tailed by the FBI who also told local law enforcement, falsely, that he and his sister were fleeing felons.

Knowing that someone in the government had it in for him, Long and his lawyers alerted authorities when he planned to fly back to his overseas job -- but nonetheless he was barred from boarding a plane. Why? Well, as we learned over 10 years ago now, our Heimat Security bureaucrats insist they don't have to say.

…TSA spokesman David Castelveter would only say this: "It's my understanding this individual was denied a boarding pass by the airline because he was on a no-fly list. The TSA does not confirm whether someone is or is not on the no-fly list, as that list is maintained by the FBI."

Somebody, in some FBI office or some other crevice of our surveillance bureaucracy, has decided this guy has to be punished. No charges, no process, no nothing. During the several months Long has been in Oklahoma, the government could easily have charged him with any illegal act. If they have even a ghost of case, the spooks seldom hesitate to shout about it -- justifies their budgets. But not a peep here.

Mr. Long's lawyer writes:

Saadiq hasn't been indicted, charged or convicted of any crime. And yet the FBI has claimed for itself the power to impose permanent punishment upon Saadiq: life without air travel. If FBI agents can impose this sentence on Saadiq, they can do the same to any of us.

So they can.

The Archbishop admonishes

This letter was published in the New York Times on February 12.

I am deeply, deeply disturbed at the suggestion in Court to Vet Drone Strikes (news analysis, front page, Feb. 9) that possible judicial review of President Obama’s decisions to approve the targeted killing of suspected terrorists might be limited to the killings of American citizens.

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

DESMOND M. TUTU

It's so easy, here behind two oceans and cocooned in our fabulous wealth, to lose track of how others see us. Archbishop Tutu asks us to remember and re-evaluate.

An enduring challenge to democracy, fairness and now survival

Then:

Now:

They don't care; they don't have to.

A book for Ash Wednesday

Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.

Ash Wednesday Liturgy, Book of Common Prayer

When I read the Rev. Kate Braestrup's memoir, Here If You Need Me: A True Story, I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it in the context of the Ash Wednesday admonition. Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist minister who has found a vocation as chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. She is charged to bring comfort to families and the wardens themselves when the Maine wilderness claim victims, some ignorant of the hazards of the wild and some too intoxicated to use whatever brains God gave them. The job can be pretty gruesome.

But additionally, this book is about Braestrup's own trajectory from the sudden accidental death of her beloved partner, the father of her children, to seminary, and then to a new career of service. That is, it is about knowing that death is comes … and going on to live beyond death.

Her deceased husband, Drew, had wanted to go to seminary. She wrestled with whether her own choice to take up ministry was somehow an attempt to hang on to her dead partner and realized the answer was yes -- and no.

I do not dismiss the notion that I might have been trying to keep Drew with me by doing his work. Drew and I, as a long-partnered pair, did in some sense become intertwined elements of one richer whole. Together we made a family; together we chose our church and entered into the life of our faith community; and together we made our commitments to it. When we discussed his plan for the future, therefore, we had actually been discussing our plan. And I would cheerfully admit mine to be a hand-me-down calling -- I, a mere understudy for this God Gig -- were it not for an almost guilty self-awareness: I studied for the ministry because I wanted to be a minister.

Along with her children, she visited Drew's grave site, each time bringing a new stone to add to the marker. And then, eventually, she came to understand it was time to stop bringing the stones.

Drew's body went where all bodies -- my body, your body -- will eventually go. … we will all go into the dirt to become the dirt that welcomes those who come next.

…Faced with a significant loss, we might spend years piling and repiling stones, grooming the grave, contesting the will, making rooms, houses, whole lives into shrines. I suppose at some point this becomes unhealthy. It is an unnecessary waste of a human life to fling it onto a funeral pyre or to make of it a stone.

…Someday, the last stone must be placed, and we must walk away, but when? I think if I were my own minister, I would answer that question this way, and I won't pretend it isn't hard: Go ahead. Arrange and rearrange the stones on top of your beloved's grave. Keep arranging those stones for as long as it hurts to do it, then stop, Just before you really want to. Put the last stone on and walk away.

Then light your candles to the living. Say your prayers for the living. Give your flowers to the living. Leave the stones where they are, but take your heart with you. Your heart is not a stone. True love demands that, like a bride with her bouquet, you toss your fragile glass heart into the waiting crowd of living hands and trust that they will catch it.

This book was suggested to me by a dear friend who several years ago lost his longtime spouse and admired best friend. I feel as if I'd been admitted to a window on how he has sought to come to terms with a grief whose depth I can only shy away from. Here's a little bit more from Braestrup on how she goes on:

Death alters the reality of our lives; the death of an intimate changes it completely. No part of my life, from my most ethereal notion; of God to the most mundane detail of tooth brushing, was the same after Drew died. Life consisted of one rending novelty after another, as anyone who has lost a spouse can attest. Still, as time went on, some of those novelties proved to be blessings. And, like anyone who has survived the death of an intimate, I had to learn to live with a paradox. If Drew had lived, I would not have gone to seminary, would not be ordained, would not have become the warden service chaplain. There are places that would have gone unvisited and friends I would never have met, friends I now can't imagine doing without. So while on one hand there is my darling Drew, whom I will never cease to love and never cease to long for, on the other hand, there is a wonderful life that I enjoy and am grateful for.

This seems a good starting point for the self-examination of Lent; what am I doing with the one life I have the chance to live?

Warming Wednesdays: why are we still snowed in if the planet is getting hotter?

The Union of Concerned Scientists has explained what they can confidently assert about storms like the one that buried the Northeast last week and the more general phenomenon of human-induced climate shifts. It's a lot.

What is the relationship between weather and climate?
Weather is what’s happening outside the door right now; today a snowstorm or a thunderstorm is approaching. Climate, on the other hand, is the pattern of weather measured over decades.

NASA and NOAA plus research centers around the world track the global average temperature, and all conclude that Earth is warming. In fact, the past decade has been found to be the hottest since scientists started recording reliable data in the 1880s. These rising temperatures are caused primarily by an increase of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere created when we burn coal, oil, and gas to generate electricity, drive our cars, and fuel our businesses.

Hotter air around the globe causes more moisture to be held in the air than in prior seasons. When storms occur, this added moisture can fuel heavier precipitation in the form of more intense rain or snow.

At the same time, because less of a region’s precipitation is falling in light storms and more of it in heavy storms, the risks of drought and wildfire are also greater. Ironically, higher air temperatures tend to produce intense drought periods punctuated by heavy floods, often in the same region.

These kinds of disasters may become a normal pattern in our everyday weather as levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere continue to rise. ...

Overall, it’s warming, but we still have cold winter weather.
The seasons we experience are a result of the Earth’s tilted axis as it revolves around the Sun. During the North American winter, our hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun and its light hits us at a different angle, making temperatures lower.

While climate change won’t have any impact on Earth’s tilt, it is significantly shifting temperatures and causing spring weather to arrive earlier than it used to. Overall, spring weather arrives 10 days earlier than it used to, on average. …

Winters have generally been warming faster than other seasons in the United States and recent research indicates that climate change is disrupting the Arctic and ice around the North Pole. … It’s not clear how much impact this trend will have in the future, especially as the Arctic ice continues to lose mass. ...

It’s not too late.
The choices we make today can help determine what our climate will be like in the future. Putting a limit on heat-trapping emissions, encouraging the use of healthier, cleaner energy technologies, and increasing our energy efficiency are all ways to help us to avert the worst potential consequences of global warming, no matter what the season.

It's up to the people to make the pols make better choices.

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 the change we voted for

The President's spokesman says he'd be willing to cut Social Security benefits. The Prez wants his "big deal" on the budget and deficit. And apparently he's willing to screw old people to get it.

From Monday's press briefing:

Q    What about reducing the annual cost of living increases for Social Security recipients?

     MR. CARNEY:  Again, as part of a big deal, part of a comprehensive package that reduces our deficit and achieves that $4-trillion goal that was set out by so many people in and outside of government a number of years ago, he would consider that the hard choice that includes the so-called chain CPI, in fact, he put that on the table in his proposal, but not in a cherry-picked or piecemeal way.  That’s got to be part of a comprehensive package that asks that the burden be shared; that we don’t, as some in Congress want, ask seniors to bear the burden of further deficit reduction alone, or middle-class families who are struggling to send their kids to college, or parents of children who are disabled who rely on programs to help them get through. …

     Q    But I just want to be clear what you said at the beginning of that answer, which is the President --

     MR. CARNEY:  It is not our --

     Q    -- as part of an overall balanced approach, he does not rule out effectively reducing benefits for Social Security recipients?

     MR. CARNEY:  He has put forward a technical change as part of a big deal -- and it’s on the table -- that he put forward to the Speaker of the House.  The Speaker of the House, by the way, walked away from that deal even though it met the Republicans halfway on revenues and halfway on spending cuts and included some tough decisions by the President on entitlements.  The Speaker walked away from that deal.
     
But as part of that deal, the technical change in the so-called CPI is possible in his own offer as part of a big deal.

What would so-called chained-CPI do?

Bold Progressives offers a picture.

Besides using "technical" obfuscation to disquise a cut to benefits, cutting Social Security is an injustice. Social Security does not add a dime to the deficit. This idea is a myth propagated by people who don't want to pay taxes for things they do like, such as wars and the Border Patrol.

The Prez is buying a crock here.

Constituional crackup

This is a talking dog book, more compelling for who is writing it than for what it says. Thomas E. Mann is a fixture at the Brookings Institution while Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. That is, these are a couple of Washington insiders who've concluded as, as they said in their title: It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. The US constitutional system of checks and balances makes it much too easy to for a cranky minority to derail majority initiatives and the Republican Party is malevolently unhinged.

Here, I'll pass it to them to say it:

… we identify two overriding sources of dysfunction. The first is the serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Parliamentary-style parties in a separation-of-powers government are a formula for willful obstruction and policy irresolution.

… however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one to the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges.

This certainly isn't a novel insight to any of us frustrated progressives -- but it is pretty strong stuff from this oh-so-Establishment source.

This volume reminded me of California Crackup, a very similar book about the Golden State that I wrote about last year: great diagnosis, lousy suggestions for a fix. Like those California writers, Mann and Ornstein seem to cling to the notion that there's an unheard, moderate, centrist majority that just needs some systemic tweaks in some legislative rules and voting procedures plus better leadership from their betters to get the ship of state back on an even keel.

California actually points to a very different solution whose working out we're still in the midst of -- an emerging majority that is sick of being obstructed by reactionary, bigoted idiocy finally rises up and simply takes back the institutions of government. Democrats were hamstrung in Sacramento for decades, but the recent election finally left the Republicans under the one-third level in the legislature, meaning that more normal politics can be resume. This won't end conflict, but it will shift the working out of policy to between people who all want the state government to succeed -- Democrats of different flavors -- even when they differ on priorities and how to get there.

It didn't look as if this could ever happen in California, but the turnaround has begun. We'll find a way to get there nationally as the Republican Party becomes more and more a nasty southern rump of whining older whites. Something will give, impossible as that looks at the moment.

Blog pause

Here's a little cheerful class consciousness while I recover from flying. I'm back on the West Coast after three less-than-relaxing weeks in bucolic but wintry rural Massachusetts. Enjoy:
Regular blogging will resume tomorrow when my body figures out where I am ...

Bright and clear after the storm

The drifts and the ice will be around for awhile, but in the sun today, it is hard to remember how violent the nor'easter was 36 hours ago. That yellow object is a small car.

Massachusetts miscellany: Gay Head Lighthouse

My activist friends here in Massachusetts were thrilled by a bit of good news from the big stage in the last few weeks. Because recently-ejected former Senator Scott Brown decided not to run for the open seat left John Kerry, they are not going to have to work on another do-or-die campaign to put in a Democrat this spring. They just did that, electing Elizabeth Warren. They are not complacent (that's how they got stuck with Brown two years back) but they feel a great burden has been lifted.


And anyway, out here in the remote beauty of Martha's Vineyard Island, politics is a series of local issues that add up to the idiosyncratic charm of the place. One of the largest (heftiest?) this season is taking form at the far western tip where the town of Aquinnah is being forced to decide what to do about the Gay Head Lighthouse. Without town action, the massive 19th century brick structure will be undermined by the eroding cliffs and slip into the sea.


For summer tourists whose dollars support many locals, even more than the red cliffs at ocean edge, the lighthouse is Gay Head. It is no longer used for navigation (superseded by GPS) and the Coast Guard would happily declare it surplus property. But simply tearing it down would rob the area of its totem. It is not particularly attractive, but it is is there, dominating the landscape. What to do?

Practice democracy, of course. The Martha's Vineyard Times reports:

On a cold, snowy night, Aquinnah voters turned out for a special town meeting Tuesday and agreed to purchase the Gay Head lighthouse and initiate the process to preserve, restore, and relocate it.

… A total of 43 voters, or just 12 percent of the town's 389 registered voters gathered … voters agreed to purchase the lighthouse and appropriate $5,000 from the town's Community Preservation Act (CPA) funds to pay for a feasibility and planning study for work to save the lighthouse.

There's lots more to do. Apparently there is a company that specializes in moving massive brick lighthouses that could do the job. But where to put it? You can't just drop a multi-ton lighthouse on a bog -- and land is Aquinnah is more than expensive. Besides, the lighthouse's fans plan to fundraise for most of the costs.

But all that is down the line, to be argued out in subsequent meetings. For the moment, the town has decided. The lighthouse will live on, somewhere.

The morning after the storm

View out the window. Got a 20 inch drift to shovel, but power is back on after a 12 hour outage.


We had sleet for several hours before the snow really hit, so this is what all the windows that have screens look like. I had to find one (a glass door actually) without a screen to take the picture above. At first light, it remained sort of gray indoors.

Liveblogging the storm

We're hunkered down here in Chilmark, Massachusetts waiting for these two weather systems to collide in what is predicted to be a massive weather event. The map is from last night.

The northeast has shut down as much as possible. That means I spent two hours on hold yesterday trying to change my flight reservations; I was supposed to depart Saturday afternoon when the storm is expected to be at its most ferocious. Ordinarily I'm a fan of JetBlue. But when their web systems overload necessitating voice contact, it is no fun to listen to blaring techno-crap muzack and a recording telling me that by using their online site, it's easy to find "one-stop shopping" for travel with "no looking for parking, no lines, and no crowds." Not quite. I know they are trying, but they could change that hold message!

Here's what conditions looked like early this morning.


And here's the same scene two hours later. Still not very threatening.


It looks like a lot of snow is falling, but really it doesn't amount to much around noon.


A little after 2:00 pm:

Thanks to Paula's tips in comments I grabbed this map from New England Weather Works. I guess this thing is coming right at the Vineyard.

At 3:30pm, this is really beginning to live up to its hype, though still not much wind.


By way of the Wunderground, here's a radar map (about 4:00pm) of the coming together of cold and warm storms that is generating all this snow.

One last video as the darkness closed in around 5pm. Though our total snowfall so far has only been around 4 inches (12 or more inches forecast), the winds suggest we are just beginning to feel the main body of the storm.


6:53pm
We just switched onto generator power. I expect to lose connection any time soon.

9:45pm
Quick, before we lose power again, here's the regional radar map:

11pm
One more video, more for the audio of the wind than the picture. [Shortly after we lost power and connection.]


I will update throughout the storm as feasible.

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.