Letter 58B: North American politics at the cross-roads-The United States

This second essay on North American politics at the cross-roads, in this case that of the United States, has been very difficult to write as seven drafts (each started from scratch) amply attest. The reason for this brain-freeze is easy enough to explain. For many Americans (e.g., me), citizenship is a part of self. As it is more challenging to examine oneself than it is to analyze another, so it is proving to be for me with political thinking. To be sure, there are other reasons; yet my lack of perspective is a big one for me.

Unlike México’s choices for destiny, our cross-roads seem to be more dilemmas imposed upon a declining power. Though I have tried writing about the same policy specifics in many different ways, I fall back, exhausted, to two basic questions that define the politics.

• Will it be guns or butter?
• Does the Constitution really matter anymore?

Bottom line, I fear that we are losing the belovèd America I knew – a noble, mighty nation founded by philosophers that later trounced the fascists. The days of euphoric recall of the greatest generation, for an era that almost none of us knew directly, are fading fast. Great as our fathers and grandfathers were in times of national need and nightmare, liberty's price remains vigilance and not reminiscence.

Guns-versus-butter is nothing new, especially to baby-boomers. Thanks to recent fiscal fugues, albeit imposed by the national necessity following 9-11, as well as the Federal Reserve playing God with the greenback, the dollar is close to facing its last rites as the international currency. In the long run, this is likely to be better for the world. In the short run, however, it may well be stagflationary Hell for us.

For twenty years, I have been reading about, and blowing off (apparently, like many others), the fiscal time bombs of healthcare and social security. On the other hand, we are now struggling to maintain defense spending at an unsustainable and insatiable level higher than such expenditures by the rest of the world combined. In truth, this relative level may be exaggerated by differences between countries in the national accounting for healthcare and retirement for the military.

Trying to be the sole superpower has consequences, not the least of which is accelerating use of interventions to cover for policy failures or, worse, the absence of any policies at all. Thus “might makes right” in the eyes of the political ‘pragmattorney’ who turns expedients into precedents to ossify them into policies. Overuse of our military is not only immoral toward, but also dishonours the mission of, our citizen-soldiers, active duty and National Guard alike. The consequences for innocents around the world are little discussed, at least among U.S. political leaders.

So the current debate on the Healthcare Bill as opposed to Defense ‘sequestration’ really boils down to which of two implied rights – one to health-care or another to unassailable military power – will prevail. Neither choice is particularly palatable. For many reasons, the Healthcare reform in the current law is unconstitutional. The eight words mentioning the “general welfare” in the Constitution can not justify the politics of convenience at the expense of some seventy-seven hundred other words contained in our national contract.

The whining over sequestration is equally bogus. Thoughtful analyses, readily available, indicate that the consequences – in dollars and cents – will be similar to other periods of demobilization after modern wars (declared or undeclared); and, we are de-mobilizing by withdrawing from Iraq and as we wind down operations in Afghanistan. Instead, this rhetoric against sequestration shrouds the unseemly choice of picking guns over butter.

As mesmerizing as this cross-roads of empire versus social programs is to me, the mortally dire challenge is the current and unrelenting erosion of the Constitution by a President who, by all accounts, is a very intelligent and high-minded man. Security-versus-liberty has always been a subject for heated discussions over dinner. This time around, however, we may be presiding over the slippage of republican constitutionalism from a democratic ethos to manipulated mythos.

The Constitution is damnably inconvenient; it is supposed to be. Yet we live under an Administration, the outward behaviors of which are as dismissive toward constitutional constraints wisely imposed as those manifested by President Nixon. Consider these examples, if you please; acknowledge them, if you don’t please.

1. A recent executive order allowing the President to govern by executive fiat. Such powers are reserved for war-time (i.e., real wars where the very existence of the republic is at stake). Now, the President’s mere and unilateral declaration of a national emergency will suffice.
2. Signing a Defense Authorization Bill enabling the government to jail citizens or resident aliens as potential terrorists without due-process merely for suspicion of being (i.e., seeming like) terrorists. The old I.N.N.A. (Irish Need Not Apply) has evidently been supplanted by A.N.N.A. (Arabs Need Not Attorneys).
3. Apparent support for an Air Force plan to develop and deploy domestically drones the size of golf-balls or toy helicopters for routine surveillance of Americans thought to be of interest to the military with 'incidental' findings turned over to civilian law enforcement agencies.
4. A campaign to vilify Bradley Manning and to prosecute Julian Assange as a spy for the responsible release of information arbitrarily classified to keep it out of the public domain.  At least the wikileaks documents I have read have taken pains not to endanger people; embarrass, perhaps.  Place in harm's way? No.
5. Open defiance of Congressional subpeonas through an indefensible invocation of ‘executive privilege’ combined with a dubious, media-saturated assertion of a current policy gone terribly wrong as representing nothing new.  That excuse did not work for John Mitchell, et al. and President Nixon nor should it for Eric Holder and President Obama forty years later.
6. Violations of Pakistani and Mexican sovereignty in the same manner as the Nixon Administration did with Cambodia, though with fewer civilian deaths and Congressional acquiescence in these instances.  

As with most dilemmas of one’s own making, if our nation is to be great again, she will have to be so from the inside out. In 1968, Senator Kennedy called for a national cleansing of the sickness of the “menace of mindless violence.” That call still holds today. Yet the violence now extends also to that against our national character, our constitutionalism.

This oncoming period of national renewal will not be easy for any of us. It may require remedies – like progressive taxes or imposing tort reform – that are anathema to both sides. While I shudder at the possible pain ahead, deep within me, resides that traditional American optimism and adaptability. Time and time again, politicians have vastly underestimated the moral tenacity of the ‘simple’ electorates who hired them in the first place.

Letter 58A: North American politics at the cross-roads: Part I, México

Both the U.S. and México have presidential elections this year within four months of each other. While both involve politics at the cross-roads, the moods could not be more different. While each nation has its anxieties, one faces hard choices while the other responds to a call of destiny, of national risk.

Mexicans head to the polls in ten days. Since I have not followed the election closely and have watched only one debate, I cannot say much about whom I would prefer. My political propensity would be for the P.A.N. party, the conservative voice. The candidates were interesting in the national debate of ten days ago. So, in my adolescent way, I would like to share some first impressions of these candidates.

My favorite was Gabriel Quadri, the resident intellectual. Quadri has held some important posts in the Mexican government but not elected office. He is an intellectual as his unfortunate 4% showing in the polls attests. Quadri was an unsung hero in the debate nevertheless since his presence and breezy demeanor elevated the tone of the discussion. Bottom line, he lack that cast-iron belly to be “el Hombre”.

My second favorite, strictly on impressions, was Andrés Manuel López Obrador. First, he cited President Franklin Roosevelt favorably, disproving the theory that, in the eyes of every Mexican, each American is presumed ugly until proven dead (mini-ha-ha). López Obrador led a break-away populist movement from the traditional ruling class (of the P.R.I.) after the downfall of México under President Salinas de Gortari in the mid-1990s. ‘AMLO’, as he is called in the press, reminds me of President Truman, with his questionable cronies but character beyond question.

My third pick, in a virtual dead heat with López Obrador was Enrique Peña Nieto of the P.R.I. (Partido Revolucionario Institucional-¿how is that for an oxymoron?), whom I affectionately call pinhead (PNhead). Peña Nieto probably won the debate in terms of his polished presentation and holding his own with Quadri on content.  Yet he seemed less sponaneous than his quirky counterpart, perhaps a little slick. PNhead has taken flak for looking like a movie-star and being married, after he was widowed, with a 'tan guapa' television personality. On balance, notwithstanding some skeletons doing a hat-dance in his closet, he seems to be high-minded and capable.

My 'way-last' pick was Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (P.A.N.). She has an attractive and erudite air about her. Nonetheless, I found her performance in the debate to be very disappointing because she turned so negative.  Unsurprisingly, she called the P.R.I. a dictatorship, a refrain true enough until President Zedillo but hacneyed by now.   Vázquez Mota was, in turn, dismissive toward Quadri, out of step with culture of courtesy in México.  She harshly criticized López Obrador (for being, well, AMLO). All of what  Vázquez Mota said may be true, yet I heard too little about what she stood for; in truth, she sounded desperate.

In all, I think the crop of candidates is quite good and representative of the strains of thought – or, the thoughts of strain – woven through Mexican society: populism from the campo to the disenfranchised fringe of the cities (AMLO); the youthful emergence of an urban middle class intent on making México a power in her own right (PNhead); the deep but numerically limited tradition of leftist intellectualism in México City (Quadri); and, the fretfulness of the scared and alienated (common anywhere these days; Vázquez). México is at a cross-roads as her current, embattled President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa – whom I admire – prepares for a well deserved rest and retirement.

Here’s why.

President Calderón has strengthened his country through several unglamorous or unpopular initiatives:

• the war on drugs or, better put, the fight to rally the rule of law;
• an accounting system aimed at reinforcing a new transparency upgraded across the government;
• a financial system greatly strengthened, though still requiring improvement, after the 2008 banking crash in the U.S.;
• an increased emphasis on college level studies in the sciences with México now graduating more B.S.es (no, not B.S.ers) in recent years than the U.S.;
• reforms to support entrepreneurs (e.g., a patent law that doesn’t enable defensive patents); as well as,
• trade treaties galore, making México the freest wheeling country on the planet.

These are serious structural changes that have positioned México at the convergence of four points of inflection in her destiny.

First, the struggle with the drug cartels is at a possible tipping point. The population has increasingly turned against the gangsters, though the conflagration, costing more lives than we lost in Viet Nam, is deeply unpopular for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, this is a fight to save the rule of law in México; the country will prevail because she simply has to; at least, that is my hunch.

With the new law favoring class-action suits in México, it would be interesting to see if an N.G.O. would sue the drug cartels, for example in the name of all the 1.4 million citizens of Juarez City, for damages suffered at the hands of these warring gangsters. This law lends itself to this type of action since plaintiffs can wait until the case is decided in their favor before signing up and not end up on a hit list should the case fail.

Second, the country has invested in basic scientific research for fifty years and in applied engineering research for forty, currently producing 40% more graduates – in absolute numbers – than the U.S.  México has a population better and better educated (at least for the upper half), making her ideal for foreign direct investment in value-added manufacturing.

Third, is the industrial inflection. With the skill base transcending the maquiladoras, Mexican companies along the U.S. border are now migrating backwards in the value chain, having been exposed to the transfer of technology. The science and research centers are being nudged by a Science and Technology Law of 2009 to take the intellectual capital accumulated over two generations and mobilize it through technology transfer.

Gradually these government-sponsored centers are pushing forward along the same value chain as the more energetic maquiladoras in the private sector. The point of inflection here is the convergence of the maquiladoras moving rapidly backwards (out of competitive necessity imposed upon U.S. firms by globalization) and the science centers moving forward cautiously along that national value chain.

Fourth, México’s free-trade régime – to the extent that any such fiction manifests anywhere – is in a sweet-spot (¡not sweat-shop!) geographically. Think of the R.C. sign of the cross. The forehead is the U.S. and Canada; the bottom of the sternum is Brazil and South America; one shoulder is Japan and the Australasian Pacific Rim; the other shoulder is the European Union. Who is in the middle of these four points, at the heart of it all? México, that’s who.

With wide-open sea lanes for access, a high quality but relatively inexpensive work force and a propitious position on the U.S. door-step thanks to N.A.F.T.A., this country might be the sweet spot for future advanced technology manufacturing: not too big to be a nuisance but just right for leveraging the knowledge and research of other countries laboring under worsening shortages of engineers.

The choice belongs to the Mexican people. While I hear many educated Mexicans complain of their compatriots’ fatalism, I sense an emerging middle class filled with readiness to risk, led by restless entrepreneurs blessed with a strong work ethic deemed by O.E.C.D. sees as second to none. If México can steer a course increasingly independent of the United States, in twenty-five years, my home country may well be banging on her door begging her young to move north.

Letter 57: time alone - time enough

Life’s interventions have a peculiar timing, or they do not. After the past month, I cannot say and really no longer care. What remains evident is that life has a way of making sure I listen.

That call is not the irresistible charm of a siren; been there, done me. Instead, it is the overbearing, at times lethal, screech of illness. Fortunately, mine was not serious though the screech quite grating.

Nevertheless, the illness landed me – butt-first – in an excellent hospital with attentive nurses and conscientious doctors here in Mexico. The Peace Corps physician, la Dra. Lourdes Gonzales, was a god-send to me.

My colleagues at the science center where I serve really cared about my welfare and have shown me a steady solicitude since my tentative return to work. These blessings have accelerated my recovery and, to all these people, I am grateful.

A week of looking alternately at an intravenous drug unit (the first I can recall ever being plugged into me) and a ceiling with plaster tiles cut from the exact same mold, followed by a week stationary rest, left me a great deal of time.

Though I tried reading, I was not up to it; physically, I was almost too weak to hold the book up. So I just lay there, immersed in a mixture of self-pity and self-reflection.

Mortality was not the big deal for me. Long ago, I came to terms with the fact that when I die, loved ones will grieve. That hard reality in itself is sobering. Yet the world, my employer, even my family and countless innocent bystanders will somehow manage without me.

After a couple of days of reflecting on a variety of life experiences that ran the gamut of time of human feeling, I started trying to tie these often discordant images into a coherent meaning.

Recalling that my overriding goal in life had always been the pursuit and attainment of wisdom, I raked through these memories, these triumphs, these defeats, these resentments, these fantasies. Influencing me to be honest about this time alone was the fact that my little jaunt to the hospital was the first such divertissement in forty years.

Honesty is an ambivalent virtue, perhaps over-rated. In any case, in that enforced solitude, I took stock on just how much closer to wisdom I was now than when I first read The Death of Socrates , Siddhartha and Stride Toward Freedom in 1972 or walked around le Mont Saint Michel on a winter twilight in 1975.

Not much, it turns out. You see, I had wisdom all figured out. All I really needed to do was suffer enough, like Job, and then I would attain wisdom.

Well I have suffered plenty in recent years, at times facing calumny and at other times making those difficult decisions of which memory never lets go. Perhaps my reactions to those realities— confronted by each of us – have diminished me, taken me further away from wisdom.

Absent the suffering, I "just knew" that wisdom would come with age and experience, preferably diverse. Nope; again my mind seems smaller – not in intellectual capacity – but in that balance of courage and conscience that wise people historically have exhibited. Shoot, mister, I have experienced many things in many places, all to no discernible end.

Then came the last conviction that by reading that next ‘right’ book – of fact, fiction or philosophy – would I taste the forbidden nectar of wisdom. Well, wrong again. Yes, I can quote or note a lot of things. These trifles fall to dust in the face of wisdom and my knowing how painfully far away from it I really am.

None of these elements have proven to be stepping stones to that wisdom. In fact, I believe I am a smaller minded man today than I was thirty years ago. Granted, to outward appearances, I may qualify as knowledgeable, maybe even intelligent. But wise?

That I am not; nor, honestly these days, do I expect ever to be. After all of this thinking, it dawned on me that the “Male Calvinist Pigs” of centuries ago may have been right, to some extent, about divine predestination. Yikes.

To me at least, wisdom likely is distilled from all of the things I have already mentioned (and more, I am sure) through the medium of “grace”. Not in the Hemingway but in the more traditional sense.

Lucky for me, I had caught a whiff of this other-wordly, if not ethereal, quality from several people in schools along the way and others whom I met fresh out of college.  Theirs was an innate purity and grace, or so I thought at the time; I do not know, even today.

What I do know is that I wanted what these people had and that I never came close to getting it. It is not easy to admit that I will likely enjoy neither grace nor wisdom, at least in this world. These days, I still come across grace in people, though, with time, it seems rarer.

Grace remains as unmistakable today as it was unusual in my teens and early twenties. 

So, during those hours of solitude in illness, I wondered – aloud and alone, even – what was it that had failed me in my life's quest for wisdom. Why did that boney-fingered grip around my heart not let go and reach toward grace and, through it, wisdom? Presented the opportunity several times, I cravenly shied away.

Now, I have a tentative idea. Grace may indeed be a gift quite independent of anything I am or do yet it requires that most elusive of all human virtues. And, what virtue is that?

Well, to answer that question, I defer to Alfred Lord Tennyson, so little in vogue these days of edgey realism and brutal achievement. Tennyson did a far better job than I ever will in identifying that wispy virtue. In his timeless, enchanting recount of the Arthurian legend, Idylls of the King, Tennyson wrote:

“O son, thou hast not true humility,
the highest virtue, mother of them all…
                                  …for what is this
thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins?
thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself
as Galahad."

Letter 56: Thoughts on the Health Care Reform Bill

It has been four weeks since I listened to all (six hours, I think) of the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Health-Care Reform Bill.  Unfortunately, between time requirements in my Peace Corps service and an illness, I am only now, with fading memory, pecking out these thoughts. 

The three topics discussed by the Supreme Court were whether an individual can be coerced into buying insurance; whether the law is severable (akin to a ‘line-item’ constitutional review); and, whether Medicare and Medicaid should be extended further into the states.  A few house-keeping notes. 

• First, the two constituent bodies under the Constitution – the states and the people – are asserted to be coerced and are in fact affected by this decision. 
• Second, this decision and this bill are not about President Obama.  In fact, “Obama Care” is a misnomer since the President actually proved himself to be a statesman by negotiating an outcome after the bill had come to an impasse in Congress.  Apparently, a large chunk of the bill came out of the Heritage Foundation, hardly a partisan Democratic organization. 
• Third, the alternative I propose may not be available in view of our current fiscal insolvency.  Besides, it sounds a little simplistic.

Coerced transaction.  Of course this is a coerced transaction.  Justice Scalia failed to grasp the economics of pooling risk, as Paul Krugman pointed out, with his analogy to buying a commodity.  Nevertheless, requiring young people at the pain of a stiff fine to purchase something manifestly outside their needs can only be coercive. 

Coercion, however, is permitted by the Sixteenth Amendment; former Justice Learned Hand deemed taxation as a “coerced transaction.”  So, call this fine what it is: a tax.  The Constitution permits taxing for the general welfare.

Severability.  Severability, if permitted, should be applied in this case to the reauthorization bills to avoid a funding crisis.  Nice try, whoever crafted the law, but the ‘reform’ part of the bill ought not to derive a bogus legitimacy from routine spending bills.  Of course, how a bankrupt country expects to pay for all of these things lies beyond the scope of this letter.

Extension of the power of Medicare and Medicaid.  Big Problem; this involves a coercive usurpation from the states of rights protected under the ninth and tenth amendments.  As dismissive as most people are of the now famous “broccoli” argument of Justice Scalia, that popular disdain blithely ignores a far more fallacious, and damaging, argument asserted by Justices Kagan and Breyer. 

That argument states to the effect: the Federal Government’s willingness to give a lot of its money to the States can not be considered coercion.  Here are the fallacies of this logic:

• First, the Federal Government is not giving anything to the States because it has nothing to give.  That money belongs to people who earned it through their toil and then paid taxes.  Alternatively, it is money funded by a debt issue – meaning it is money that belongs to future private earnings taxed to pay that debt.
• Second, this is as not as simple an offer as it sounds.  When Justice Kagan asks rhetorically, why anyone would turn down ten million dollars to work somewhere, she is overlooking the possibility of a bribe.  Let us imagine a policeman who is about to arrest a bank-robber.  The desperate fellow says, “Hey, pallie, how about half the loot if you let me go?”  The officer is not being coerced but we hope he does not take that bribe or the thin blue line just got snipped.
• Third, that is not all the two Justices overlook.   Not only is there a big enticement in taking the Medicare / Aid monies under the extension, but there is a large penalty: losing all current federal support for elderly and indigent care.  Now that is like the bank robber saying instead, “Hey, pallie, how about half the loot if you let me go?”  The officer says no and is about to add attempted bribery as another crime committed when the robber cuts in, “Okay, then, have it your way. But if you don't take this deal, bud, we will kill you and your family.”  The robber somehow proves he is not bluffing and so the police officer relents.  That is coercion.

Taking these last two points back to this case, does the analogy fit?  Unfortunately, yes, it does.  Who is the robber?  The federal government.  Who is the police officer being coerced? The states.  What is the crime? Usurpation of states’ rights by the Federal government. The law is unconstitutional, except for the reauthorizations.

So should we turn our back on our fellows who are old, indigent or both and cannot afford health-care?  That surely does not sound like the America I want to live in, does it?  Put another way: is health-care a right?  After all, President Franklin Roosevelt and other liberal presidents have argued that it is.  I tend to agree with Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton: health-care is a right. 

There are two issues to be reconciled with this notion.  First, if health-care is a right, then it is one that is not enumerated in the Constitution and thus reverts under the ninth and tenth amendments to the states or to the people.  No, general welfare language (i.e., collective security) does cut it for it is not explicit enough.  So how do we get to a right of health-care?  There are two constraints to consider before proposing a solution:

• First, what is the level of health-care contemplated by this right?  Hint: of course medical care is rationed; it always has been.
• Second, we are the United States of America.  We are not Japan, Canada or Britain.  A lasting solution to this national dilemma will have to be organically consistent with our culture and Constitution.  We can not expect to apply another country’s plan willy-nilly as a template.

So, here is what I propose.  That the Federal government provide a minimum guarantee of health-care in the form of preventive health-care.  This could be accomplished transparently by allocating $1,000 per person and send sending these ‘capitated’ payments to the states for each resident in the state as a block grant.  This $1,000 level is arbitrary and whatever the median cost of preventive health-care across the country could then be adjusted for the comparative cost of health-care of each state (within reason). 

Any additional ‘right’ to health-care would come from the state, which tends to be more answerable to its citizens.  This right is collective in nature because of the pooling of risk; hence, it reverts to the states, not the people.  Additionally, private insurers could sell ‘supplemental' health policies. 

These would be paid for by people or by their employers (as an attraction to work for said employers) as they deemed necessary.  In truth states have already started experimenting in health-care provision (e.g., much maligned ‘Romney Care’ in Massachusetts).  Over time, I suspect, the states and the people would become willing to delegate some of their rights or autonomy to the Federal government for additional leadership on the health insurance issue. 

This expectation brings to mind President Carter’s old proposal of some type of coverage of the upper reaches of catastrophic illness.  Then the states, the people and private sector are left to fill in the space (e.g., child-birth) between the two book-ends of preventive health insurance and catastrophic reinsurance.

How much this would cost is anyone’s guess.  This idea may not be affordable and may overlook too much of what we take for granted.  Only time, and, in the short term at least, the Supreme Court will tell.

Letter #55: The Bleakness of Freaky Friday

This new Executive Order (E.O.) issued on March 16th (ironically the birth-date of the father of our Constitution) is frightening and is yet another reminder that the America of today is not the America I knew. I do not agree with the ‘Anonymous’ message insofar as I did not read an explicit element of compulsion in the E.O. in forcing people to work for the government (unless Selective Service were expanded to include the National Defense Executive Reserve).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs1ZIMovelY&sns=fb

Nevertheless, the broad authorities given could conceivably (and applying little imagination) lead to that. What concerns me is that these authorities are appropriated by a supposedly peacetime government and not during a formally declared state of war. Instead these powers are placed in the Presidency in anticipation of some future yet undefined 'national emergency'. On a pragmatic level, there is a telling difference between this E.O. and the National Defense Authorization Act (N.D.A.A.), which allowed for interning U.S. citizens as potential terrorists without explicit recourse to due-process.

In the N.D.A.A., President Obama signed a repugnant bill out of the necessityof supporting our younger brothers and sisters in uniform serving in nasty places, with the verbal proviso that he would not enforce the provisions so contrary to our national mission as a republic. This E.O., however, was drafted under the authority of, and issued by, President Obama himself.

Being the bored crank that I am, I have read the language of this E.O. thoughtfully. By not drilling down into referenced documents, I may be missing context here. In trying to fathom how such a usurpation of power by a fine man and liberally predisposed President, I came up with four guesses to which I assigned entirely subjective percentage probabilities to identify relative possibilities, writhing in my mind only.

• President Obama signed this order under threat to his life, limb or loved ones (1%).
• President Obama signed this order under influence; i.e., he was bamboozled (2%).
• The United States is, or will soon be, in a state of war (30%). Finally,
• This E.O. is an indirect justification for a massive intervention into the economy similar to the New Deal or the economy during World War II (67%).

The first two possibilities are largely theoretical since I do not subscribe to conspiracies nor do I sense that the President is either stupid or weak-willed. On the one hand, too many people would have to be involved in such a conspiracy for it not to migrate into the public discourse. On the other, President Obama survived Chicago politics and has demonstrated an ability to say or do something that is unpopular.

For the third possibility, this E.O. reads more like a war mobilization order to implement a Congressional resolution declaring a state of war. Since, Afghanistan is the only military conflict in which the U.S. is currently involved, and one that hardly poses an existential threat, a reasonably bored crank would infer that this mobilization order pertains to an imminent state of war (likely not to be declared as it should be), perhaps with Iran, North Korea or Syria, none of which appear to be existential threats. Of course the anti-nation of Pakistan, with its low-hanging nuke-fruit dangling in front of IslaMaoists, is the wayward wild-card on our existential radar.

The only two conceivable existential adversaries are Russia and China. Yet, while one power has been aggressive in trying to recapture or at least reintegrate old fiefdoms, Russi'a aggressiveness may be limitless but her ambitions limited. The U.S. and Europe are dealing with that threat. The other power, Red China, appears to be on an inexorable rise to the top, set to overtake the U.S. economically in the next few years. Yet China’s policies have been less overtly aggressive; the threat from the People’s Republic is more towards intellectual property and cyber-security, both material but not enough to warrant this E.O.

Finally, the last alternative appears the most likely. If so, I suspect that President Obama has lost patience with, and faith in, the market system for allocating resources efficiently (patience) and effectively (faith). The Secretary of the Navy testified last week that the military will continue to buy massive amounts of bio jet-fuels, though they cost seven times the cost of fossil fuels and that doing so will create the pathway to a sustainable market eventually.

This sounds like command economics to me. At the very least, this sounds like the activist economic planning of France in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. What did all of that technocratic meddling actually accomplish? You make the call. On the side of irony (if not history) arises the question of wondering if the Pentagon is taking a page right out of the playbook of the People’s Army in spearheading social change.

This program of ‘contemplating our naval’ is continuing because, potential adversaries hold a lot of the oil we consume. That sobering fact has been true for a long time and yells out loud for building the Keystone pipeline and, if necessary, figuring out how to satisfy legitimate environmental needs. The Pickens plan for a reasonably paced switch-over to natural gas over time, with gradual maturation into economically viable bio-fuels in a generation’s time makes more sense than this “moral equivalent of war”.

http://www.pickensplan.com/

The last alternative makes sense also because of the implied ability of the President to support trade unionism, which I support – but through transparent appeal of the unions to the work-force without coercion (i.e., right-to-work). Indeed, about 20-25% of the work-force needs to be unionized to keep corporations honest. Corruption, not capitalism, wrecked the trade unions. The E.O. also spells out a preference from small businesses, the traditional engine of job creation.

Laudable as all the goals are of what I view as the most likely alternative, they undercut the good side of capitalism and they erode people’s civil liberties in favor of a paternalist corporativism. Now President Obama seems like a decent man with high character; I mean that sincerely. What if we are not so fortunate with future presidents?

Letter #53: Culture Shock 102--A dark fantasy of Fanon and middle age

Well, I decided arbitrarily that it is time for me to write home again. At first, I was going to scribble out a diatribe about the center where I serve (with negative 40% operating profit margin to no one’s surprise, chagrin or even titter) and how difficult complacency is to overcome even when the bus is blithely flying off the cliff. Soon enough, however, I realized that I was having an inward hissy-fit and who wants a testimonial of self-pity, right?

Right, especially after beginning to watch a flic sent to me by a most excellent friend here in the Peace Corps that seems to be a latter-day Hispanic version of the Wretched of the Earth. Unfortunately, the computer lacks volume and I the facility in Spanish to make out much the dialogue. The visuals are intensely revealing, nonetheless; guns need no subtitles.

Life is suffering. And to think I was talking about John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice just yesterday with our wonderful ‘Doctora’ at the Peace Corps. This film is sobering – “Sid and Nancy” type of sobering. You know the world is a tough place when ‘hacer sexo’ is the one of the very few moments of pleasure wrested from long days and weeks of misery of grinding poverty.

Survival of the fittest in this dark world means surviving in a gang where expansive tattoos are one of the few means of identity. There are many people I know with tasteful tattoos – ones I would like to have had, if I had had the guts. The tattoos in this film are not among those: they hide God’s handiwork behind a permanent persona of survival on the surface. Enough for now.

So after checking in with a few friends via e-mail and facebook, I set off for my first quest officially as a middle-aged adult. You see, I have endured my first “itis” since my tenth grade year and that was only tonsillitis. Nothing serious, to be sure, but it did require a little experience that led to my second culture shock here in Mexico.

To get this ‘itis’ thing down, I decided to set off from my apartment today to take a urine culture to the laboratory. I tucked it in a bag, figuring it was sealed. Why I did not wait to do the deed until I got to the center lies beyond the scope of this letter as well as my mind.

When the here-and-now seems to be spiraling down-and-out, along comes those instances of unexpected cheer when the trite migrates beyond the trifling into the true…My culture shock today was one of those. As I walked along about half way to the clinic, I got the culture shock.

The translucent culture jar was in fact not sealed: AWKWARD. 

So, I had to carry it in my hand. When I got to the clinic, I found that the dump was closed for the day. Well, you can imagine the reactions as headed back to the apartment, walking through the streets with a dripping urine culture in my hand, plain to the sight of others. Again, why I did not consign the contents, visibly yellow to innocent bystanders, down a street drain attests to my not thinking well on-the-fly. 

Discreet as I tried to be, there was no hiding the cargo. Oy vey. So the pleasantries of small-talk became highly charged verbal ions electrified by choice facial expressions.

• When people passed me by from behind, they invariably looked down at my hand and then at me, either smiling or expressing (understandably) annoyance. So, I would say the logical small-talk response, “Sí (subtitulo: “Hey, pal, watcha lookin’ at? I am the one who has to carry this thing!”).
• When someone looked at me like I had committed some crime against humanity or, at least, a sin against God, I would smile, shrug my shoulders and say, “Yo sé…” (sub-titulo, “I know, I know. But, judge that ye not be judged, IDD-EEE-UT…”)
• When some Mexican family was simply enjoying the rhythm of a sunny day and had the temerity to walk in a relaxed gait in front of me, I would say with an urgency similar to that of Grant taking Richmond, “Por favor, con permiso!” (sub-titulo, “Get the ‘F’ out of my way! Can’t you see I have a culture shock here in my hand?”).

Hopefully, by now, you have some sense of where I was coming from and so I will wait until Monday morning and do what I really should have done all along: drop a casual thirty pesos (two and half bucks, that is to say, can you see) on a taxi and go to the clinic at 7:30 a.m. By the way, that film is harsh, really harsh. More about that film, now.

Life in Hell is pretty easy to figure out, even if can one only manage an occasional ‘entonces’…But then comes that smoldering justice borne by the noble savage though, in this case, it manifests with a machete through the jugular of a man about to attempt his second rape in a week -- in front of the victim's family -- having murdered his first target: a fourteen year old girl who tried to resist.

With this first sexual assault occurring in a cemetery; it is Camus on steroids, this visual anguish. The flic is unsparing in its visuals. The fifteen year old boy tries to stand up for one fourteen year old; he does save another, as the thundering herd of migrants hurtles forth from Honduras through Mexico toward Tejas. These “illegals” desparately seek what we take for granted everyday.

That boy's love for the second girl -- chivalry in all the wrong places -- is finally consummated, not by the way that long word usually implies but in making sure she gets to Tejas. The price for that love? Giving up his smart-phone and then, moments later, his life so she may live after a quick trip across the Rio Grande on an inner-tube.

The vengeful gang members pursuing him through Mexico finally vindicate the tattooed leader that the nameless teen had killed so other innocents could live. To make a depressing film almost completely hopeless, the fifteen year old urchin-saint is first shot by his ten year old brother, admittedly after some hesitation.

Quickly enough, however, fear and the mandate of early manhood kicks in and snuffs out that flicker of humanity in the ten year old brother. The little one has passed his initiation, now, and watches as his new extended family (all under twenty-five years old) arrive and light up on the body of his former sibling to make sure the message, whatever that message is, remains clear.

And there isn’t a damn thing one can do about it. It is only a movie, right? One of the things that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau could possibly have envisioned was the casual continuance of such nihilistic poverty amid so much plenty in our time.

 Indeed, that protracted poverty is the structural violence of our time. So, now it is my time to get up, dust myself off and don some decent clothes to attend a very worth-while fund-raiser so that I can feel somewhat worthy, too, with that culture shock in my refrigerator, safe for democracy.

Letter #52: the other price of admission

It becomes ironic in life when a son realizes that not only has he forgiven his father, he has morphed into him. In actuality, there really should be nothing unusual about this abrupt awakening to one’s past. After all, most people remain, throughout their lives, creatures of habit beholden to frames of reference. Well, that has certainly proved to be the truth with me.

In this last essay, sounding like my father forty years ago, I will try to touch on a few decisive issues that will make me say, like my father had about himself, “Why, I am so far out, I’m in.” The issue of pro-life versus pro-choice in the last discussion made untenable any allegiance to the Democratic Party. The good news is that, contrary to my fear, abortion simply has not become a popular form of birth control.

GAY MARRIAGE: civil unions yes; marriage, no. Full rights ought to be accorded to, and enforced on behalf of, partners who enter long-term committed peaceful relationships. Marriage is a sacrament and the base of the family unit. It is a tradition not to be trifled with unless the rights of partners in civil unions can not be protected. Then civil rights accorded in civil society trump religious tradition..

DEPT of DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION BILL: opposed. While we are cleaning house, let’s get rid of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. As is often the case, the muscle-bound over-reaction of the government has likely hurt the larger society more than did the original provocation. If there is evidence to document a probable cause of a clear and present danger, then get the warrant and arrest the citizen like everyone else.

The WAR on DRUGS: decriminalization yes; legalization no. Too many people are getting murdered in Mexico and too many black youths rot away in jails for petty crimes. Re-direct the war into one against addiction. That gets people out of jail who have no business being there and frees up a lot more resources to help the addicts who need it and to arrest the really bad people selling stuff to kids.

BRADLEY MANNING: innocent and good for Wiki-Leaks. Bradley Manning did what a responsible citizen should do in airing out information that wasn’t secret but damning. Wiki-Leaks took pains not to reveal truly sensitive information per Manning’s request. Vilifying Manning as some deranged homosexual probably is the best argument I could devise to support the implicit righteousness of his behavior.

The INVASION of IRAQ: supported. The problem with this war of aggression was not misinformation. It was, as I wrote at the time, the absence of a formal Congressional declaration to hold the government and the American people accountable. By 2003, any observer could see that the sanctions did not work and that a nation of oppressed people was going hungry. President Bush bravely ended that.

ISRAEL and PALESTINE: both have rights. Israel has a right to exist and the Palestineans have a right to return. What is taking place now is apartheid and it is brutalizing a once-liberal democracy. The U.S. has likely forfeited its opportunity to facilitate a one-state solution. It would be interesting to know how many Palestineans have been killed by the I.D.F. versus Israelis by terrorists. The math ain’t pretty.

IRANIAN NUCLEAR CAPABILITY: non-issue. Iran’s rising stature in the region is the issue. Southern Iraq may become a shadow satellite of Iran, a strategic set-back for the U.S. One of the hoped-for benefits of the “twinvasions” of countries flanking Iran was to topple that much harder society to defeat militarily. So we are now demonizing a gangster regime, possibly pushing it into gangster actions.

AFGHANISTAN: time to go home, now. The surge in Afghanistan actually assured an outcome the U.S. did not want, unlike the earlier surge (which I had also opposed) in Iraq. The difference? Afghanistan is not a nation but a no-man’s land contained by the frontiers of three erstwhile empires – the British, Persian and Russian. Call me a reincarnated Gladstone but our National Guard was designed to defend our people not an empire.

WALL STREET RESCUE: opposed. Instead of putting up all of this money to exempt plutocrats from facing up to the consequences of their actions, the Federal Reserve could have ring-fenced the Street and liquefied the overnight markets to keep regional and retail banks working. Main Street would not have gone broke bailing out Wall Street. The whole rationale reeks of paternalistic prattle.

OCCUPY WALL STREET: support. These people are exercising rights peaceably to assemble under the Constitution. Claims of criminal infiltration smack of excuse-making rhetoric. If there are criminal elements identified, produce the evidence, get a warrant and arrest the alleged criminals. Then let the law abiding 99% go back to demonstrating. We owe them thanks, not spanks.