When Strategy, Vengeance and Justice Converge

May 7, 2011

          This week the news reports and commentaries filled the papers and web sites dissecting into the thinnest slices the killing of Bin Laden.  To some, the shots that pierced his head constituted an “extra-judicial” execution in violation of his human rights and international law. (See “Obama’s fickle European fans,” by Charles Lane, “Bin Laden, Extra Judicial killing-And The Shining Example That Was Nuremberg” by Mark Seddon, and Noam Chomsky’s remarks.)  Some critics have even opined that those well placed bullets make the U. S. no better than Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda murderers who, in their orgiastic worship of death, have shredded innocent human lives with hijacked jets or suicide bombs hidden beneath their clothes.

          The difficulty some are having is that the U. S. Navy Seals killed Bin Laden instead of capturing him so he could be tried for his “crimes of mass murder.”  It needs to be remembered that the plan carried out by the seal team was one of three options offered to President Obama.  Another option Obama could have chosen was to have stealth bombers obliterate the Bin Laden compound with 2,000 pound bombs.  Ironically, had this method been used, critics complaining about violations of international law or justice would have to find something else to carp about.  But they would not claim that international law or Bin Laden’s rights to a trial had been denied.

          Perhaps the problem some are having with how Bin Laden was killed amounts to the problem of defining what he was.  How do we categorize him?  As enemy combatant?  As criminal?  As terrorist?   He is these and more: a hate filled man obsessed with planning the murder of as many innocent human beings as possible in the name of an ideology that claims divine justification for its actions.  In the end, the killing of Bin Laden is a triumph of reason over the fanaticism of benighted men (and women) who want to murder any who resist their desire to oppress all with their totalitarian theology. 

Pope John Paul II: The Halo and the Cover Up

        In the movie “True Confessions,” Cardinal Danaher (Cyril Cusack) tells Father Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro) to transfer Msgr. Seamus Fargo (Burgess Meredith) to a distant desert parish against Fargo’s wishes.  To justify the transfer, Cardinal Danaher states that Fargo must be moved “For the good of Holy Mother Church.”  “For the Good of Holy Mother Church”; how often, I wonder, was that phrase was uttered by bishops as they protected pederast priests by transferring them to different churches once potential publicity of their crimes against children made their continued presence in a parish an “inconvenience” for church officials?
        This Sunday, May 1, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate a mass of beatification for Pope John Paul II.  Yet, blighting the halo that is forming around John Paul’s head is a terrible sin of neglect. (See James 4:17: “Therefore to that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”)  As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her Sunday, April 25, New York Times’ column, John Paul chose ignore the lamentations of the vulnerable as mounting evidence of almost ubiquitous sex abuse infected the entire Catholic Church.  For him, the plight of the victims must have mattered less than “the good of Holy Mother Church,” which meant protecting priests who had serially abused and, in many cases, raped children.
        There are apologists who defend John Paul, claiming he did not know the magnitude of child abuse.  And there are those so determined to see him canonized that they argue that “beatification isn’t a ‘score card’ on how John Paul administered the church but rather recognition that he led a saintly life.”  (Associated Press, January 14, 2011.)   The Associated Press also noted in the same January 14 report that “while John Paul himself was never accused of improprieties, he has long been accused of responding slowly when the sex abuse scandal erupted in the United States in 2002. Many of the thousands of cases that emerged last year involved crimes and cover-ups during his 26-year papacy.”
        If his general hesitation to punish priests who abused children isn’t enough to convince Catholics that John Paul’s beatification is a mistake, then his specific conduct regarding Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, most certainly should.  By 1989 or 1990 the latest, the Vatican had been alerted to this priest’s crimes of rape and abuse brought against him by seminarians under his authority.  Yet, even when compelling evidence demanded action and justice, no inquiry was initiated; instead, orders were issued that no investigation or trial be conducted, orders which most certainly came from John Paul himself.
        Of course, it is quite impossible to alter the near idolatrous adulation many Catholics feel for Pope John Paul II or persuade them that his beatification will evoke for thousands nightmares of the torture they suffered year after year as the Church ignored their cries for help and systematically obstructed justice.  In fact, relentless stories of sex abuse by priests have made faithful Catholics yearn for something spectacular to relieve their anxiety, disgust, and loss of faith in their church leaders.  The beatification of John Paul offers a specious distraction from the depravity that has soiled the Catholic leadership even as it attempts to create a preternatural hero who might levitate the Church above the sordid complicity involving its multiple attempts to cover up sex crimes.  It won’t, however, sweep the dirt of its shamefully criminal behavior under a shroud of saintliness proposed for a pope who was a good man in many ways and an abject failure by far in the way that mattered most.

Is The Tea Party Morally Myopic?

April 18, 2011

       The guiding principle of the Tea Party is to reduce the burden of taxes and regulations on the American people and, thereby, reduce the seize of the debt and deficit.  Human beings have baulked about paying “too much” in taxes in every society as far back as history can record.   Everyone always wants to pay less in taxes. 

       Last week, the Tea Party saw those principles embodied in Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which passed the House or Representatives with full Republican support.  The Republicans support the plan because it cuts taxes for the wealthy and for corporations and also scales back government regulations on business.  Sadly, Republicans refuse to acknowledge that the debt and deficits can only come down through a combination of cuts in programs and across the board tax increases.  

       Thankfully, there is little chance of a Ryan’s tax and spending cuts being enacted, since its tax cuts would in fact increase the deficit and debt and its spending cuts would destroy some of the last century’s most humane social programs.   Perhaps in its place, the Congress will adopt a sensible plan that trims all spending (including military) and raises revenues--but given the influence of special interest money that pours into politics, something “sensible” remains doubtful.  

       What is not in doubt regarding the Tea Party’s philosophy is its morally myopic anti-regulatory positions.  It is true that local, state, and the federal governments have some rather cumbersome and even stupid regulatory laws that infringe on personal liberty and property rights.  Why, in my own village, the building code prevents me from installing a fence in my backyard above the height of five feet.  If you saw my neighbor’s yard, you would agree that a ten-foot fence wouldn’t be too high.  No doubt, the regulation is senseless.  The village has also other prohibitions, such as I can’t bury in my yard toxic materials or anything that might pose a hazard to human beings.  No doubt, that regulation is sensible.  

       Some of the government regulations the Tea Party opposes should  be re-examined and even eliminated.  But according to a report by Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times:  G.O.P. Push in States to Deregulate Environment April 12, 2011, the Tea Party  and Republican allies are fighting to eliminate and dismantle regulations that protect the water people drink and the air they breath all in their effort to ease the way for businesses to profit without being responsible for the air the pollute and the water they poison.  

       Perhaps many Tea Party disciples don’t fully grasp the  consequences of supporting the anti-regulatory zealots among them who view profits as the only measure of an honest, good and productive life.  Perhaps they should read “Chemicals Were Injected Into Wells, Reports Says,” Ian Urbina, New York Times, April 15, 2011 and discover how oil and gas companies have been employing a process called hydraulic fracturing that injects hundreds of toxic chemicals into the ground as a way to extract natural gas more effectively and economically.  Or even better, discover how the  companies using this method have been unwilling to “publicly disclose” the chemicals they use and how Congress cannot compel them to do so if the “chemical identity of products” are “proprietary” (although among the chemicals is benzene).  No doubt, in the future we will be reading about cancer clusters and sundry other diseases linked to locations where these drilling operations took place.

If any company uses dangerous chemicals in the process of manufacturing or, in this case, obtaining, their product, then that company has moral obligations to take whatever steps are needed to protect anyone who could possibly be harmed by that product or process.  It is simple: the responsibility is theirs.  But since so many in this and other industries refuse to accept responsibility for the risk or dangers their activities might pose, it then becomes the moral obligation of the government to regulate (police in effect) businesses and impose standards and regulations to protect the public’s health and safety.  If the Tea Party cannot see the moral imperative of such regulations, then they suffer from moral myopia or worse.

Economic Woes

                                            Economic Woes


      Class warfare has been declared in America, though the usual suspect is not the one we have come to expect - the Democrats.  Democrats have used class conflict effectively to influence the working and middle classes to vote for democratic candidates in the past.  That strategy began to backfire during the Reagan eighties as more and more Americans entered the middle class.  During the same economic expansion, government programs grew and debt and deficits ballooned.

     The government began to run surpluses in the late nineteen-nineties and some economists predicted that the modern economy had vanquished recessions for ever.  This myopic notion was used to justify George W. Bush’s refusal to raise revenue to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Disregarding the financial strain from two wars and his tax cuts, Bush increased spending even further with his Medicare prescription drug plan. Just as his term of president ended, Republicans began prophesying the downfall of America if the federal government was not purged of its profligate spending addiction.

        For the republicans and their Tea Party allies, the solution to the debt and deficit crisis is to “defund” discretionary spending programs.  Of course, their goal is to destroy not only economic programs they hate, but also the social ones that offend their hypocritical sense of morals. These cost too little to have any effect on reducing deficits and debts, but that does not keep Republicans from being obsessed with cutting money for Planned Parenthood and funding for Public Broadcasting.

     Of all the Republicans, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) has been praised most lavishly by conservative pundits (David Brooks, NY Times, April 7,2011) for offering a bold and courageous approach to deficit and debt reduction.  It is impossible to believe Ryan’s sincerity when he puts forth a plan that decimates social programs for the poor and middle class while at the same time cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  Thus, the political party, who serves at the behest of the wealthy, has interpreted the results of last year’s mid-term elections as the vindication of their political and economic philosophies and have decided they no longer have to hide from middle class Americans the true allegiance to the wealthy and their contempt for the rest of Americans.

     If one needs confirmation for the Republicans’ contempt for all but the wealthy, then consult a few important facts.  Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed a ten year budget plan that would cut taxes for the wealthiest down to twenty-five percent while cutting from Medicaid hundreds of billions of dollars and by turning Medicare into a voucher system in which Americans can purchase private insurance that in effect will not be enough to cover their medical costs.  This plan also cuts money for veterans benefits, education, and transportation, all programs that help the poor and middle class.

     The argument that cutting taxes for the wealthiest will stimulate the economy in such a way that prosperity will trickle down to the ninety-nine percent of Americans who occupy the middle and lower classes does not stand up to scrutiny.  Over the past decade when taxes were lowered by George W. Bush, the middle class watch its wages and income stagnate.  In fact, the top one percent continues to see their wealth and income grow at rates far faster as middle class purchasing power diminishes.  A quarter of a century ago, the top one percent of Americans took in about twelve percent of the nation’s income and control about thirty-three of its wealth.  Today that one percent captures close to twenty-percent of the country’s income and possesses forty percent of the country’s wealth.  According to Joseph Stiglitz, over the past ten years the top one percent of Americans have enjoyed an eighteen percent increase in income while the middle class  incomes have declined.

     In his essay in Vanity Fair, (May 2011) Stiglitz identifies a few facts that should make Tea Party members reconsider the logic of some of their positions.  Almost all U.S. senators and the majority of house members have incomes that are in that top one percent.  Moreover, when they leave congress, many of these elected officials will be rewarded with lucrative jobs by corporations whose agendas they have promoted.  Congress has steadily become an institution of the wealthy for the wealthy.

     A feasible way to pay down the debt and deficit would be to cut spending and increase revenues.  Congress has read the report of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, which has devised a formula of spending cuts and tax increases that could reduce deficits by an estimated four trillion by 2020 and “stabilize the debt by 2014.”  But rather than implement a sensible combination of cuts and taxes, which would spread more fairly among us all the burden of our economic woes, the Republicans would prefer to shield the wealthiest Americans from even the slightest inconvenience, since by serving them they can, in turn, serve themselves.

Chemical Cheating

       “Nothing is enough to the man for whom enough is too little.”    Epicurus

        “Envy is the adversary of the fortunate.”  Epictetus


     The Barry Bonds’ trial for perjury began this week with the prosecution saying to the media, that it was “an utterly ridiculous and unbelievable story” that Bonds did not know he was taking performance-enhancing drugs during the years he broke home run records.  There is little doubt that Bonds used PEDs, but he could have avoided the serious trouble he finds himself presently in.

     In 2003, Bonds was called to testify before a federal grand jury and was granted immunity to encourage him to tell the truth.  No doubt his lawyers at the time informed him of the perils of lying to a federal grand jury.  Yet, when questioned about using PEDs, Bonds claimed that he thought the substance he was applying to his skin was only a mixture of flaxseed oil and arthritis cream.

     Bonds’ lawyers might manage to convince the jury that he is innocent of lying because he believed naively, despite the measurable, physical evidence (his head size grew from 7 1/8 to 7 1/4 and shoe size from 10 1/2 to 13) that his astonishing surge of power after the age of thirty-five was engendered by this miraculous elixir of flaxseed and not by PEDs.  But why did he need to lie?  And why did he lie when no harm could have come to him for telling the truth in the first place?

     As reported by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker, Bonds felt envy’s sting when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were dominating baseball headlines in the summer of 1998 as they blasted their way through Roger Maris’s 1961 home run record of 61 home runs in a season.  Already considered baseball’s best player, Bonds revealed himself to be also the man “for whom enough [recognition] is too little.”  Ego and envy driven, he plunged himself into a regiment of maniacal weight lifting while spreading steroid laced cream over his body to chemically transform his natural talent into a muscle bulging home run recording breaking machine.

     Too bad Bonds didn’t experience the kind of envy William Hazlitt once described:

       “Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of the love of justice in it.  We are more angry at undeserved than deserved good-fortune”

This variety of envy might have led him to state publicly what most in baseball already knew: that both McGwire and Sosa had fraudulently achieved their records through steroid fueled power.  By telling this first truth, Bonds could have exposed these cheats and punctured the praise being lavished on them by the media.  Perhaps at the time he felt that such action would have been disloyal and dishonorable for him to do to fellow ballplayers.  But they would have gotten a justice they deserved; instead, Bonds, whose fortune it was to possess without steroids a talent the whole league envied, succumbed to an “Envy [that] is the adversary of the fortunate.”   His envy induced him to cheat, compelled him to lie in 2003 and now has branded him as no less a fraud than those whose shabby conduct he imitated to garner a recognition synthetically won and a disgrace naturally deserved.

The Trouble with the Truth

 

The Trouble with the Truth

     These days the art of lying seems more brazenly practiced than it was in the past.  Of course, that’s not true, but we tend to see the past more idealistically than the present and believe that the people who lived then had an innocence they really didn't.  A rebroadcast of "Nixon" on Channel 13 cleared away my naive nostalgia.  I watched Nixon addressed the nation about his innocence regarding Watergate thought how his deceptions soured the air with the words that dripped from those sweaty jowls.  How easily he lied.  When behind closed doors with his advisors, he was crudely frank about how to use lies against adversaries.  Lying for him was never a question of right or wrong, but one of practical and political utility.

    Like Nixon, many politicians will lie liberally as they try to manipulate the media and deceive the public.  They fool few, yet resist unrelentingly telling the truth. Other politicians tinker with facts in order to mischaracterize an opponent or promote an agenda.  Habitually and naturally mendacious, politicians lie as a matter of course.  However, I shouldn’t castigate politicians without admitting that everyone feels occasionally the irresistible urge to lie.   It’s easy to think of examples when my conscience surrendered custody of the will and a lie or two suited better (I thought) the situation I faced.  Who hasn’t tried to lie, mislead or obfuscate his way out of trouble? Who hasn’t stretched the “truth” to serve some purpose hidden from family, friends, and acquaintances?

     Two insouciant liars came to my attention this week when I read Stanley Fish’s blog post, “So’ Your Old Man,” and in Bob Herbert’s op-ed column, “The Sports Needs to Change,” (New York Times online: March 14.)

     Fish’s blog considers the logical flaws in Leonard Pitt’s recent column in The Miami Herald, in which Pitt excoriates Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for not “denouncing” a proposal to honor “Nathan Bedford Forrest by issuing vanity license plates bearing his name.”  When asked by the NAACP to “denounce” the proposal, Barbour stated, “I don’t go around denouncing people.”

   Pitt’s logic might need shoring up, but his conclusion is no less valid.  Barbour has claimed not to be a racist (especially as he now runs for president), but when he tried to burnish his bona fides as a good old boy of the south and sidestep the racist implication of supporting the Forrest license plate by feigning to be a man who eschews denouncing others, he betrayed instantly his propensity for deceit.  To no avail, Barbour tried twist his way around being labeled a racist while simultaneously scoring points with those in Mississippi possessed even today by an inexorable racism.  Subsequently, Barbour learned that it was better politically to oppose the Forrest license plate proposal, and announced his plan to not sign the legislation honoring the K.K.K. leader if it reached his desk.  Is Barbour a racist?   When he refused to take a stand in the first place, was he lying to the racists who proposed the plate?  Is he lying now that he has taken a stance against it and, in fact, is really for it?  Racist or not (I think he is), at least we can count on him to lie regardless of his beliefs; though I’d think with so much practice he could become more adept at it.

   In a different story, Bob Herbert looks at the effect of the destructive violence in professional football.  Herbert tells the story of Dave Duerson who shot himself to death in February this year.  At the time of his suicide Duerson was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (he thought he was, but did not know for certain) which symptoms include memory loss, dementia, and depression.

   More and more retired football players have been reporting symptoms of dementia, memory loss, and depression, but the NFL, until recently, did what it could to hide from the public the irreparable brain injuries caused by the physical collisions unavoidable in football.  In October, 2009, NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, testified before the House Judiciary Committee and would not admit a connection between “football and cognitive decline among retired N.F.L. players. (“N.F.L Scolded Over Injuries to Its Players” Alan Schwarz New York Time October 29, 2009)

    Goodell’s testimony is another illuminating spectacle of lying.  Of his testimony, committee member Linda Sanchez noted that Goodell reminded her of the tobacco companies when they used to argue that there was no connection between smoking and lung disease. (Schwarz, New York Times, October 29, 2009)

    Since that hearing in 2009, Goodell and the N.F.L. have begun to admit a connection between football and brain damage. They have even urged states to pass legislation protecting young football players from concussions.  How many fans will view this admission and their efforts to help youth avoid damage from head injuries as sincere?  How many will forget all the years they intentionally obstructed the truth about brain damage incurred from playing football?

   The lies told by the pro football establishment about the dangers of head injuries shouldn’t be forgotten.  But even if they aren’t, the fans will continue to fill the stadiums and stare at their oversized television screens while lovely autumn days recede into winter.  Millions of dollars will flow into the coffers of advertisers and corporate sponsors.  And commentators will incessantly yap on about the game that’s greater than all the rest—a lie too many will believe or deceive themselves into believing.

College Made Easy

“Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
         

          The quotation, which comes from Bob Herbert’s column (http://www.nytimes.com/), would make one suspect that those who fit this description either have great difficulty getting a degree or graduate with very low grade point averages.  However, his column reveals a different trend: students who are ill prepared and poorly motivated, and who advance little or not at all in the critical skills their education is meant to impart, not only get their degrees, but also leave college with averages between B and B-plus.  

That many colleges make it easy for many sub-par students to attend their schools and complete a degree is quite well known these days. That they set absurdly low standards, and offer vapid courses within intellectually vacant degree programs so students can navigate four years of learning without learning anything might make some parents upset.  Yet, if colleges were to uphold standards or impose rigor, they would be forced to turn away or flunk out too many students necessary to their revenue and existence.

The “attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors…at odds with academic commitment” that define college students have been planted and cultivated by the American public school system.  By the time kids reach college, this system has fully conditioned them to value leisure, fun, games, and just about anything else other than academic work.

When kids begin school as elementary students, they enter a system that pressures them with excessive homework and yearly tests.  Piling homework on elementary kids predates the Bush era’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which has driven the testing mania for the past decade.  Although “No Child Left Behind” was badly conceived and implemented, its goal of challenging students by testing what they had specifically learned in each subject in the elementary grades was laudable.  Unfortunately, too many states hastily developed exams and reduced too many classroom lessons to mind numbing drill work that ended up replacing intelligent educational practices.

After the stress of elementary grade testing, students reach middle school, and are prepared to face more academic rigor.  Ironically, it is at this point that school begins its slide toward academic and intellectual anemia. In middle schools, the philosophy, and thus primary objective, is to nurture the emotional growth of kids rather than propel their intellectual progress.  In line with this approach is a policy of social promotion.  Students quickly discover that they can never study, fail five or more subjects and still proceed to the next grade.  By the end of two years, the middle school experience has eroded the academic commitment and work ethic initiated in the earlier grades and necessary to foster further academic and intellectual growth.

In high school academic discipline loses even more ground.  Students enter an environment that is obsessed with sports, clubs, bake sales; they are forced to attend assemblies, countless meetings with guidance counselors, appointments with social workers or and psychologists.  These, and endless other distractions, dominate a school’s tone and reduce class work, homework and studying to secondary importance.

Herbert’s thesis that colleges permit (maybe even encourage, I would think) students to skate through fours years of school without exerting themselves, and then reward them with respectable B-plus or B GPA’s only exposes the tip of the problem.  For six years prior, schools provide a smooth and easy way to flow toward college with little effort or concern.  To expect colleges to buck this momentum of academic sloth and negligence, especially at great financial cost to themselves, is wildly naive. So, things will remain as they are, as the few who labor and learn continue to leave behind those too foolish and indolent to know what they will have lost.