The American Revolution, as I learned in high school, was a war fought by the united thirteen colonies against their British overseer to form a government whose legitimacy was derived from the voluntary agreement of its citizens.
We never thought of it as a war with Britain like that fought in 1812, nor did we see ourselves as rebels. We certainly never thought of it as a civil war fought between neighbors. In fact, it was all these things, and a revolution only after it had been won, the constitution ratified, and John Adams elected.
Like any war, people’s commitment to the cause varied by how deeply they were involved. For many on the northern frontier, it was simply an extension of the French and Indian wars, only this time the Indians were allies of the British. For people in Boston, whose livelihoods were threatened by British trade acts, the necessity to protest was greater.
South Carolina had been rebellious since it was founded, and settlers refused to accept the authority of the proprietors to establish the rules of governance. When the proprietors made grants to Huguenots to attract rent paying settlers, the people of Charles Town redefined political districts in the 1690's so they wouldn’t be represented in the House of Commons.
When the Board of Trade issued plans for inland townships in 1730, they were seen as frontier outposts whose existence would protect Charles Town from Indian attacks. When men moved into the farther frontier from Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 1740's, the people of Charles Town shrugged. The French and Indian war began in 1756 and they took the brunt of Cherokee attacks. Rice planters suffered from a decline in shipping.
The Board of Trade sent a Colleton relative, Thomas Boone, in 1761 with orders to reduce the powers the colonial House of Commons had assumed when it threw off the proprietors in favor of the king in 1720. The next year, Boone dissolved the assembly. When the assembly reconvened, it refused to work. The Board of Trade censured Boone in 1764, which left control to his lieutenant, William Bull.
The Peace of Paris in 1763 ended the war with France, but increased conflicts with England, who needed to pay war debts and believed the colonies, who benefitted from eliminating the French in North America, should contribute. The Sugar Act of 1764 taxed luxuries, including indigo, but exempted rice. The Currency Act banned colonial currencies and the money supply shrank. Henry Laurens retired from the slave trade.
A new governor appeared in Charles Town in 1766, Charles Montague, but when people in the back country asked the colony to establish courts to punish the gangs that were raiding their settlements, they were ignored. Only when the frontiersmen organized themselves and began hunting down outlaws did the Commons take note of the usurpation of its authority by the Regulators who controlled the back country by 1768. They soon degenerated into vigilantes who provided cover for some to settle old scores with what Walter Edgar called "sadistic" violence. Montague had already left Bull in charge.
Britain passed the Navigation Acts in 1767 to limit colonial shipping, and seized one of Laurens’ ships the next year. Bull tried to suppress the regulators in 1768 and dissolved the assembly for supporting Boston protests. The assembly went on strike again in 1771, refusing to pass any legislation, effectively ending any semblance of organized government. In 1772 John Colleton, the great-grand-son of the original proprietor, sold his Mepkin plantation to Henry Laurens.
Britain enacted the Tea Act in 1773, and Charles Town called a mass meeting to protest. Supporters harassed those who disagreed and banished slave trader William Wragg. According to Edgar, activists weren’t able to extort agreement from a back country that was more angry with the city than with the British.
By the time South Carolina sent five low country planters and lawyers to the Continental Congress in 1774, people were divided into competing groups that endure to this day. However, the responses to the war didn’t follow those regional patterns. Instead, there were people in every community who were loyalists and some who enlisted, and a great many, as they had in Barbados during the English civil war, who simply didn’t wish to take sides. When neighbors disagreed, there followed the demands for loyalty oaths, confiscations and banishments for those who refused, similar to the punishments seen on the Caribbean island after Humphrey Waldron migrated there.
The war had little effect on Charles Town until the British, led by Henry Clinton, appeared in 1779. Then William Moultrie, aided by a spongy walled fort, successfully repulsed the troops, who took everything of value, enticed slaves to flee and destroyed the rest as they retreated, creating enemies as they moved.
When Clinton reappeared in 1780, some were still willing to surrender if the troops could be evacuated. However, Clinton couldn’t accept those terms, and when he took the city, there were new loyalty oaths to swear, and new demands men take up arms, this time against the rebels. Charles Cornwallis ordered the sequestration of the plantations of more than 100 men who refused, including Henry Laurens. 65 of those who had actively fought the British were deported to Saint Augustine, along with leaders like Thomas Heyward, David Ramsay and William Johnson.
In the back country, the British raised troops among local loyalists, who then helped attack their neighbors. Thomas Sumter was so angry when men, commanded by Banastre Tarleton, burned his new house, he roused his neighbors to attack. The rebels finally prevailed at King’s Mountain, in October 1780. Many of the defeated loyalists were from North Carolina.
As happens when war goes on too long and exacerbates existing civil conflicts, the prisoners were mistreated, court martialed, then hung. After the war, there was no surviving political or economic order. Men refused to pay debts and attacked sheriffs and courts who tried to enforce payment. Outlaws reappeared to harass settlers and travelers. People demanded the General Assembly identify and punish any remaining loyalists with banishment and confiscation.
One of the few to protest such demands was an Irish born, Charleston lawyer, who served as a judge in the Scots-Irish Ninety Six district under the Articles of Confederation. Aedanus Burke warned they would give way "to malice, avarice, or revenge; commit more injustice and glaring partiality" than would some form of reconciliation.
To prove his point, the remaining property of the deceased Margaret Colleton, widow of the last John Colleton, was seized, divided into lots, and sold. William Moultrie was among the buyers.
By the time a meeting was held to ratify the constitution in 1788, people were so hostile to one another, Burke said "4/5 of the people" were against the document and the only reason it was ratified was chicanery by the Charleston elite.
Safety returned only after the economy revived with the adoption of cotton as a crop in the 1790's, more than fifty years after gangs first appeared in the back country. Eventually, angry men and women died, but not before a new generation came of age believing the war was fought to establish their belief an individual was not required to submit to any government.
Notes:
Burke, Aedanus. On the constitution, letter to John Lamb, 23 June 1788, much quoted; on danger of revenge, An Address to the Freemen of South Carolina, quoted by Edgar.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 7:1911.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Middle Class
Too many people are claiming the government isn’t helping middle class people like them, when I have no idea what they mean by the term "middle class."
In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.
When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.
By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.
However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.
Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.
By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.
Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.
Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.
I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.
Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.
I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.
She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."
No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.
They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.
More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.
They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.
The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.
It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.
When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.
But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.
They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.
They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.
Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.
Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.
In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.
When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.
By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.
However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.
Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.
By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.
Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.
Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.
I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.
Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.
I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.
She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."
No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.
They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.
More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.
They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.
The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.
It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.
When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.
But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.
They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.
They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.
Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.
Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Tax Code
Each year when I do my taxes, I get a refresher course in the ways our tax code has contributed to our current economic mess.
I’ll skip my shrinking, meager W-4 for Schedule B where I must list all the interest I earned on savings accounts as it was reported by banks to the federal government. When I first deposited money with my local bank in 1999, it was paying 4.17% interest. That fell in September, 2001, to 3.69%, then dropped to 2.75% the next month. It’s been hovering around 1% since 2004 and last month fell to its all time low, .75%.
Whenever I get my bank statement I say thank you Mr. Greenspan for making money so cheap and using your power at the Federal Reserve to implement your view that savings were bad for the economy. With the rates I’ve been paid for the last decade, why would anyone save? And why does the federal government still want to tax my tiny earnings at the full income rates? Unearned capital gains on hedge fund returns are treated more gently.
Then I get to Schedule A which allows me to itemize deductions. I do the formula for medical and dental expenses, and actually now have enough to report. That’s not because I’m sicker, but because I no longer have employer paid health insurance, and deductibles and co-pays have risen.
Back when I was finishing graduate school in the early 1970's, I was paying $2.25 a month for birth control pills. I’m now paying $38.00 a month for my portion of the $56.07 paid by my insurance company for the hormone replacement that uses the same chemicals. They claim it retails for $59.60.
That constantly changing W-4 never increased that much. My highest income was less than 5 times what I made as a beginning college instructor, but the retail price of my drugs is 26 times what it was then. The fact I actually pay only 16 times more is not much consolation when my income in now only twice what it was then.
Thanks Congress for never having the guts to stand up to lobbyists.
When I complete Schedule B I realize my total is now less than the standard deduction because I now own my house. The people who benefit most are those who pay the highest interest on their mortgages. Those who pay no principal make out the best, and those are the mortgages that caused the first problems with the housing market. But, when the banks were offering those deals and the government was subsidizing the mortgage payment, why would anyone do anything more responsible? It only cost money.
If Congress wanted to encourage home ownership, there are other ways they could create this deduction that benefitted people who lived in their houses for years rather than those who moved every few. But, of course, the person who stays in a house generates no income for the mortgage lenders, and so becomes a drag on the economy.
Last year I noticed Schedule L which allows me to add some of my real estate taxes to my standard deduction. But the limit is $500. If I were able to itemize my expenses, I could deduct the whole $614.15.
To get to the final total on Schedule L, I have to wade through the section that lets me deduct the sales tax on a new vehicle up to $49,500 in value. The more I spent, the more I deduct. The more I spent, the more likely it was I bought an SUV or other vehicle that consumes more gas than my 10 year old Hundayi. Again, the fiscally conservative receives less than those who contribute to our environmental and energy problems, because their spending creates jobs and we do not.
When I got done several years ago, I discovered if I had declared zero dependents and used standard deductions, I ended owing taxes. That hadn’t been the case the year before, but politicians had started manipulating the deduction schedules to give people more money each week which could then be spent on houses and cars they couldn’t otherwise afford. At the end of the year, no one remembers the benefits, only faces the bill and curses the government and taxes.
My solution, encouraged by the tax code, was to play accounting games. I took money out of that savings account that’s paying such low interest and moved it to an IRA that pays less than I made in 1999. That sleight of hand movement of money that’s been sitting there from the time when I had a higher income, earns me a refund. Why would I save money, Mr Greenspan? To buy a refund.
So here I am, getting ready to mail a tax return that benefits those who invest in gas guzzling cars and bad mortgages, that punishes savers and people who stabilize communities by staying in their homes, that teaches tax avoidance and creates unnecessary frustration, and think no wonder we’re in the fix we’re in.
I’d say, if you want to do something serious about the economy, fix the tax code. But then I think, this Congress would only make it worse.
I’ll skip my shrinking, meager W-4 for Schedule B where I must list all the interest I earned on savings accounts as it was reported by banks to the federal government. When I first deposited money with my local bank in 1999, it was paying 4.17% interest. That fell in September, 2001, to 3.69%, then dropped to 2.75% the next month. It’s been hovering around 1% since 2004 and last month fell to its all time low, .75%.
Whenever I get my bank statement I say thank you Mr. Greenspan for making money so cheap and using your power at the Federal Reserve to implement your view that savings were bad for the economy. With the rates I’ve been paid for the last decade, why would anyone save? And why does the federal government still want to tax my tiny earnings at the full income rates? Unearned capital gains on hedge fund returns are treated more gently.
Then I get to Schedule A which allows me to itemize deductions. I do the formula for medical and dental expenses, and actually now have enough to report. That’s not because I’m sicker, but because I no longer have employer paid health insurance, and deductibles and co-pays have risen.
Back when I was finishing graduate school in the early 1970's, I was paying $2.25 a month for birth control pills. I’m now paying $38.00 a month for my portion of the $56.07 paid by my insurance company for the hormone replacement that uses the same chemicals. They claim it retails for $59.60.
That constantly changing W-4 never increased that much. My highest income was less than 5 times what I made as a beginning college instructor, but the retail price of my drugs is 26 times what it was then. The fact I actually pay only 16 times more is not much consolation when my income in now only twice what it was then.
Thanks Congress for never having the guts to stand up to lobbyists.
When I complete Schedule B I realize my total is now less than the standard deduction because I now own my house. The people who benefit most are those who pay the highest interest on their mortgages. Those who pay no principal make out the best, and those are the mortgages that caused the first problems with the housing market. But, when the banks were offering those deals and the government was subsidizing the mortgage payment, why would anyone do anything more responsible? It only cost money.
If Congress wanted to encourage home ownership, there are other ways they could create this deduction that benefitted people who lived in their houses for years rather than those who moved every few. But, of course, the person who stays in a house generates no income for the mortgage lenders, and so becomes a drag on the economy.
Last year I noticed Schedule L which allows me to add some of my real estate taxes to my standard deduction. But the limit is $500. If I were able to itemize my expenses, I could deduct the whole $614.15.
To get to the final total on Schedule L, I have to wade through the section that lets me deduct the sales tax on a new vehicle up to $49,500 in value. The more I spent, the more I deduct. The more I spent, the more likely it was I bought an SUV or other vehicle that consumes more gas than my 10 year old Hundayi. Again, the fiscally conservative receives less than those who contribute to our environmental and energy problems, because their spending creates jobs and we do not.
When I got done several years ago, I discovered if I had declared zero dependents and used standard deductions, I ended owing taxes. That hadn’t been the case the year before, but politicians had started manipulating the deduction schedules to give people more money each week which could then be spent on houses and cars they couldn’t otherwise afford. At the end of the year, no one remembers the benefits, only faces the bill and curses the government and taxes.
My solution, encouraged by the tax code, was to play accounting games. I took money out of that savings account that’s paying such low interest and moved it to an IRA that pays less than I made in 1999. That sleight of hand movement of money that’s been sitting there from the time when I had a higher income, earns me a refund. Why would I save money, Mr Greenspan? To buy a refund.
So here I am, getting ready to mail a tax return that benefits those who invest in gas guzzling cars and bad mortgages, that punishes savers and people who stabilize communities by staying in their homes, that teaches tax avoidance and creates unnecessary frustration, and think no wonder we’re in the fix we’re in.
I’d say, if you want to do something serious about the economy, fix the tax code. But then I think, this Congress would only make it worse.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Economics and Biology
Supply and demand is in conflict with the bell curve. The one argues demand will bring into existence supply; the other posits there are limits on supply. Gresham’s law suggests in those situations where demand outpaces supply, not only will poorer quality supply appear, but it will attack that which is genuine so it alone can flourish.
The laws of Mendel show that, if there were such a thing as a good/evil gene, then one quarter of the population would be saintly, one fourth would be devils, and the rest of us would be middling, neither one nor the other, but willing to follow the bidding of whoever was in power.
If you want good men, and the demand exceeds 25%, you’re not going to get them, no matter how hard you recruit. They simply do not exist. But, it you persist in your demand, the larger population of lesser people will put themselves forth as good, and persecute those who might expose them by comparison.
The Roman Catholic church put artificial restraints on the population of priests by demanding celibacy. Metaphorically, the ability to be a man of faith requires a different gene than the one to be asexual, but when the one trait is used as a filter to define the other, the available supply shrinks.
For centuries the two requirements for the priesthood were not a problem, although folklore and pornography are filled with stories of bawdy friars. Sometime in the last century, either the demand for priests increased with population growth, or supply declined as young men saw other opportunities to escape poverty than joining the church, and the reports of bad priests began to increase.
After Vatican II, two more factors influenced the composition of the pool from whom priests were drawn. More left the church or didn’t enter, and allegiance to a conservative ideology like that reinforced by the current pope became more important. The already skewed gene pool was further altered by social factors.
The badness we’re seeing now that’s shocking isn’t the reports of men who molested young boys, but the blindness of the church hierarchy, which was probably always filled with a combination of the good, the mendacious, and the mediocre. Now it seems the good have disappeared, and only the ambitious survive, men who don’t understand the feelings of ordinary people towards the predatory sexual problems of a few fathers and see only their personal survival, and that of the institution that supports them, as important.
We’re seeing the same dynamic in politics. Campaigns have always been ugly, and the noble few. However, since Richard Nixon’s senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, attacks grounded in ideology, not simple partisanship, have so increased in viciousness one wonders who would become a politician.
The answer isn’t nobody, but judging from the headlines, it’s the vain, the ambitious and the greedy who fill the vacuum left when honorable men are driven from the public square by men like Rush Limbaugh.
Democrats seem plagued with the vain, from FDR, who ran for a third term because he believed the country couldn’t do without him, to the easily flattered John Edwards. For many, including Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, the vanity was associated with a refusal to recognize society’s limits on the sexual freedom of married men.
Both parties attract the ambitious who abuse power for personal ends. On the one side, there’s New York’s governor, David Patterson, who asked the state police to intervene in a domestic violence dispute to protect an aide. On the other, there’s Sarah Palin, who wanted the state police to take sides in a divorce dispute of a relative when she was governor.
The Republicans seem to have the current monopoly on men who don’t understand the boundary between personal and public money. There’s John Ensign, who’s being investigated for asking donors to hire the husband of his mistress. There’s Jim Greer in Florida, who’s accused of using party donations to a business he secretly owned. There’s the Republican National Committee that used party funds to pay for an outing at a questionable nightclub and lists alcohol as an office supply.
However, Detroit’s financial problems reveal greedy Republicans are only more visible right now, and Mark Sanford shows the Democrats aren’t the only ones who are self-centered.
Many claim Jimmy Carter was a failure, but, in retrospect, he seems to be one of the few genuinely good men who entered politics. He may have been naive about Washington, but, one suspects that that’s not why he was hounded from office. The good are an offence to the wannabe’s, and the current crop of wannabe’s are an offence to the rest of us.
The laws of Mendel show that, if there were such a thing as a good/evil gene, then one quarter of the population would be saintly, one fourth would be devils, and the rest of us would be middling, neither one nor the other, but willing to follow the bidding of whoever was in power.
If you want good men, and the demand exceeds 25%, you’re not going to get them, no matter how hard you recruit. They simply do not exist. But, it you persist in your demand, the larger population of lesser people will put themselves forth as good, and persecute those who might expose them by comparison.
The Roman Catholic church put artificial restraints on the population of priests by demanding celibacy. Metaphorically, the ability to be a man of faith requires a different gene than the one to be asexual, but when the one trait is used as a filter to define the other, the available supply shrinks.
For centuries the two requirements for the priesthood were not a problem, although folklore and pornography are filled with stories of bawdy friars. Sometime in the last century, either the demand for priests increased with population growth, or supply declined as young men saw other opportunities to escape poverty than joining the church, and the reports of bad priests began to increase.
After Vatican II, two more factors influenced the composition of the pool from whom priests were drawn. More left the church or didn’t enter, and allegiance to a conservative ideology like that reinforced by the current pope became more important. The already skewed gene pool was further altered by social factors.
The badness we’re seeing now that’s shocking isn’t the reports of men who molested young boys, but the blindness of the church hierarchy, which was probably always filled with a combination of the good, the mendacious, and the mediocre. Now it seems the good have disappeared, and only the ambitious survive, men who don’t understand the feelings of ordinary people towards the predatory sexual problems of a few fathers and see only their personal survival, and that of the institution that supports them, as important.
We’re seeing the same dynamic in politics. Campaigns have always been ugly, and the noble few. However, since Richard Nixon’s senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, attacks grounded in ideology, not simple partisanship, have so increased in viciousness one wonders who would become a politician.
The answer isn’t nobody, but judging from the headlines, it’s the vain, the ambitious and the greedy who fill the vacuum left when honorable men are driven from the public square by men like Rush Limbaugh.
Democrats seem plagued with the vain, from FDR, who ran for a third term because he believed the country couldn’t do without him, to the easily flattered John Edwards. For many, including Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, the vanity was associated with a refusal to recognize society’s limits on the sexual freedom of married men.
Both parties attract the ambitious who abuse power for personal ends. On the one side, there’s New York’s governor, David Patterson, who asked the state police to intervene in a domestic violence dispute to protect an aide. On the other, there’s Sarah Palin, who wanted the state police to take sides in a divorce dispute of a relative when she was governor.
The Republicans seem to have the current monopoly on men who don’t understand the boundary between personal and public money. There’s John Ensign, who’s being investigated for asking donors to hire the husband of his mistress. There’s Jim Greer in Florida, who’s accused of using party donations to a business he secretly owned. There’s the Republican National Committee that used party funds to pay for an outing at a questionable nightclub and lists alcohol as an office supply.
However, Detroit’s financial problems reveal greedy Republicans are only more visible right now, and Mark Sanford shows the Democrats aren’t the only ones who are self-centered.
Many claim Jimmy Carter was a failure, but, in retrospect, he seems to be one of the few genuinely good men who entered politics. He may have been naive about Washington, but, one suspects that that’s not why he was hounded from office. The good are an offence to the wannabe’s, and the current crop of wannabe’s are an offence to the rest of us.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Bart Stupak
After Michael Moore claimed credit for changing the health care vote of his congressman, I was so confused I looked up the boundaries of Bart Stupak’s first Michigan district.
It does not include Flint, but does include the entire upper peninsula, as well as the northeast quadrant of the lower one. It has more land and more counties than any other and probably the lowest population density in the state.
Its boom times came with logging and mining, exploitive industries that moved on when the resources were gone, leaving environmental eyesores that time and the CCC reforested. The soil’s too thin to support farming, the summer’s too short. The region now lives on tourists, seasonal residents, retirees, the neighboring lakes and what natural resources are left.
As I looked at the map, I realized both health insurance and abortion are problems of areas with reasonable, if not now healthy, economies. In Stupak’s district, I imagine the major health crisis is simply finding a doctor.
A study done for the Michigan Medical Society in 2005 listed three counties Stupak represents as having the fewest number of physicians per 100,000 residents: Arenac, Keewenaw and Oscoda. The last two have only one physician. He also represents three counties with high ratios, but such small populations the numbers are probably misleading: Emmett had 32,741 people in 2003, Dickinson 27,186, and Marquette 64,616.
In contrast, Kalamazoo and Genesse counties, some of the hardest hit by the state’s deindustrailization, were still in the top ten best counties for physician availability. Both had grown on lumber, but Kalamazoo replaced the paper industry with a pharmaceutical company and Genesee includes Flint. The drug company was sold, and its operations slowly closed. Even the new research center in Washtenaw county’s Ann Arbor was shut as redundant. Moore has documented what happened to his home town.
The place where I grew up, bordering Kalamazoo and Ingham counties, home of Oldsmobile, was never as rich as Kalamazoo, Flint or Lansing, but had three factories making parts for automobiles, refrigerators and televisions, as well as a community hospital built in 1924. The hospital was sold to private investors in 1967, and closed in 2002, the same year the last large factory moved operations to Mexico.
The town is better off than Keewenaw and Oscoda counties. There are still hospitals in cities 30 miles away, and it still has physicians. The roads, including an interstate, are clear most of the year, unlike the far north, but most of the doctors have Indian sounding last names.
Stupak’s district does not include a single county with an abortion rate near the state’s 12.5 per 1,000 women of child bearing age. Some have numbers so low, they can’t be reported statistically.
With so few physicians, there may be areas with no abortion provider. Women have to go elsewhere, as the residents do for any kind of specialized medical service. Some abortions may be buried in the statistics for young people who leave the region every year, and others may use unlicensed practitioners or folk remedies.
Young, unmarried teenagers, however, aren’t the only ones who seek abortions. When you read oral histories of poor areas or descriptions of folk medicine, you realize that abortion has always existed, regardless of cultural values, among women who felt there was no way they could feed another person. In areas with no self-sustaining economies, perceptions of malnourishment and deprivation may differ, but the edge of subsistence is still there.
The areas with abortion rates above Michigan’s average are all ones that have seen their industrial economies threatened since I graduated from high school: Detroit with 29.2 per 1,000 women, the rest of Wayne County with 17.1, Genesse with 15.2, Kalamazoo with 15.0, Saginaw with 14.3, Ingham with 13.7, and my home county with 13.2.
The high abortion rates seem to reflect the sense of economic desperation of people who see their incomes falling or disappearing. The health reform bill doesn’t address that root problem, only the consequences.
People, like his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall, ask how Stupak could be against health care reform when there are 44,000 uninsured people in his district. That’s more people than live in many of the constituent counties. The bill doesn’t address the problem of shortages of doctors and nurses, only creates more demand on the existing ones and keeps the Medicaid reimbursements lower than those paid in more affluent areas with lower doctor-patient ratios.
Stupak’s views on abortion probably not only arise from his Roman Catholic background, but from the fact one of his sons committed suicide in 2000. Anyone who’s lost a child that way is likely to have a more emotional view of the value of children.
Moore may like to take credit for helping convince Stupak that many more of his voters and contributors supported health care reform than he may have thought, but Moore’s self congratulations don’t recognize that for Stupak, more than political calculation was involved, and the benefits to his district are not as great as they are to Flint or Saginaw.
Notes:
Michigan Department of Community Health. “Abortion Rates by County of Residence, State of Michigan, Michigan Counties and Detroit City, 1998 - 2008.”
Moore, Michael. “How the People in My District Changed Stupak's Mind and Saved Health Care Reform,” Huffington Post 22 March 2010.
Public Policy Associates, Inc. “The Future Supply and Demand for Physicians in Michigan,” 2005.
Saltonstall, Connie. Campaign website.
It does not include Flint, but does include the entire upper peninsula, as well as the northeast quadrant of the lower one. It has more land and more counties than any other and probably the lowest population density in the state.
Its boom times came with logging and mining, exploitive industries that moved on when the resources were gone, leaving environmental eyesores that time and the CCC reforested. The soil’s too thin to support farming, the summer’s too short. The region now lives on tourists, seasonal residents, retirees, the neighboring lakes and what natural resources are left.
As I looked at the map, I realized both health insurance and abortion are problems of areas with reasonable, if not now healthy, economies. In Stupak’s district, I imagine the major health crisis is simply finding a doctor.
A study done for the Michigan Medical Society in 2005 listed three counties Stupak represents as having the fewest number of physicians per 100,000 residents: Arenac, Keewenaw and Oscoda. The last two have only one physician. He also represents three counties with high ratios, but such small populations the numbers are probably misleading: Emmett had 32,741 people in 2003, Dickinson 27,186, and Marquette 64,616.
In contrast, Kalamazoo and Genesse counties, some of the hardest hit by the state’s deindustrailization, were still in the top ten best counties for physician availability. Both had grown on lumber, but Kalamazoo replaced the paper industry with a pharmaceutical company and Genesee includes Flint. The drug company was sold, and its operations slowly closed. Even the new research center in Washtenaw county’s Ann Arbor was shut as redundant. Moore has documented what happened to his home town.
The place where I grew up, bordering Kalamazoo and Ingham counties, home of Oldsmobile, was never as rich as Kalamazoo, Flint or Lansing, but had three factories making parts for automobiles, refrigerators and televisions, as well as a community hospital built in 1924. The hospital was sold to private investors in 1967, and closed in 2002, the same year the last large factory moved operations to Mexico.
The town is better off than Keewenaw and Oscoda counties. There are still hospitals in cities 30 miles away, and it still has physicians. The roads, including an interstate, are clear most of the year, unlike the far north, but most of the doctors have Indian sounding last names.
Stupak’s district does not include a single county with an abortion rate near the state’s 12.5 per 1,000 women of child bearing age. Some have numbers so low, they can’t be reported statistically.
With so few physicians, there may be areas with no abortion provider. Women have to go elsewhere, as the residents do for any kind of specialized medical service. Some abortions may be buried in the statistics for young people who leave the region every year, and others may use unlicensed practitioners or folk remedies.
Young, unmarried teenagers, however, aren’t the only ones who seek abortions. When you read oral histories of poor areas or descriptions of folk medicine, you realize that abortion has always existed, regardless of cultural values, among women who felt there was no way they could feed another person. In areas with no self-sustaining economies, perceptions of malnourishment and deprivation may differ, but the edge of subsistence is still there.
The areas with abortion rates above Michigan’s average are all ones that have seen their industrial economies threatened since I graduated from high school: Detroit with 29.2 per 1,000 women, the rest of Wayne County with 17.1, Genesse with 15.2, Kalamazoo with 15.0, Saginaw with 14.3, Ingham with 13.7, and my home county with 13.2.
The high abortion rates seem to reflect the sense of economic desperation of people who see their incomes falling or disappearing. The health reform bill doesn’t address that root problem, only the consequences.
People, like his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall, ask how Stupak could be against health care reform when there are 44,000 uninsured people in his district. That’s more people than live in many of the constituent counties. The bill doesn’t address the problem of shortages of doctors and nurses, only creates more demand on the existing ones and keeps the Medicaid reimbursements lower than those paid in more affluent areas with lower doctor-patient ratios.
Stupak’s views on abortion probably not only arise from his Roman Catholic background, but from the fact one of his sons committed suicide in 2000. Anyone who’s lost a child that way is likely to have a more emotional view of the value of children.
Moore may like to take credit for helping convince Stupak that many more of his voters and contributors supported health care reform than he may have thought, but Moore’s self congratulations don’t recognize that for Stupak, more than political calculation was involved, and the benefits to his district are not as great as they are to Flint or Saginaw.
Notes:
Michigan Department of Community Health. “Abortion Rates by County of Residence, State of Michigan, Michigan Counties and Detroit City, 1998 - 2008.”
Moore, Michael. “How the People in My District Changed Stupak's Mind and Saved Health Care Reform,” Huffington Post 22 March 2010.
Public Policy Associates, Inc. “The Future Supply and Demand for Physicians in Michigan,” 2005.
Saltonstall, Connie. Campaign website.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Waiting for Godot
Despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re still an achieving society.
Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.
The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.
The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.
We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.
As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.
Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.
Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.
The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.
The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.
We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.
As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.
Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Mark Sanford
Every now and them something happens that exposes cultural fractures we don’t even suspect exist.
In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.
Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.
Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.
When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.
The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.
We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.
Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.
Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.
Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.
His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."
The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.
Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.
Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.
Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.
Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.
Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.
Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.
In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.
Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.
Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.
When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.
The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.
We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.
Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.
Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.
Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.
His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."
The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.
Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.
Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.
Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.
Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.
Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.
Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.
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