The Stars and Bars

            One afternoon a few years ago, several members of my family and I, along with a dozen or so other pods of people, were taking the gulf breezes on a beach in Florida when a group of five or six youngsters, college age or thereabouts, came along and picked out a spot not far from us.  They staked out their territory in the customary way, plopping down their coolers, laying out their blankets, and deploying their beach umbrella.  But then, all of that done, they unfurled a sizable confederate battle flag and planted its staff deep in the sand.

Our reaction to this was visceral and, I believe, normal: We were sort of dumbstruck by the effrontery of it and a little worried about the group’s intentions. Did they mean to make some political statement? Were they unilaterally designating this as a blacks-not-welcome place?  Were they itchin’ for a fight? I don't know.  Nothing happened, and we went our separate ways at the end of the day.   Once again, though, the rebel flag proved itself to be a potent symbol, certain to elicit immediate reactions and strong feelings, most of them negative.

This all comes to mind as the confederate flag once again gets in the news, as it has from time to time over the years when reasonable people have voiced their objections to its being flown in various public places.  Fortunately, in many quarters, public officials are now hearing those objections. Others are not, though, and there are still pockets of people who continue to argue not just in defense of the right to display the flag but also in defense of the appropriateness of displaying it.  This is still predominantly (though not exclusively) a southern thing and my unsolicited advice to those southern folks as to whether they should continue to fight for the right to display the rebel flag:  Sure -- assuming, of course, that they wish to portray themselves -- and reinforce and perpetuate an image of southerners in general -- as slack-jawed, back-woods racist.

Most Southerners, of course, are not that, and, presumably, neither are the self-described Missouri “rednecks” who get in such high dudgeon over criticism of their confederate flag flying.  But they should realize that in associating themselves with this symbol, they’re risking labeling themselves, and by proximity and association, others, in exactly that way.

And let’s not be coy about what the rebel flag stands for.  It stands for racism. It has, at various times, been used as the banner of the KKK.  It was the banner of the Dixiecrat Party whose platform was overtly and unabashedly anti-civil rights. And it is widely if not universally understood, among both blacks and whites, to be associated with sensibilities ranging from intolerance to hate. Ask any black person if he or she, upon seeing a group of whites displaying the flag, would interpret it as a sign of welcome.  And ask the displayers if they consider it to be one.  The insistence by sons of the Confederacy types that the rebel flag is nothing more than a benign memorial to the Confederate movement and its fallen soldiers is, to put it cvharitably, disingenuous.

And as to that Confederate movement, its true believers (and the flags they wave) here in the early part of the twenty-first century represent at the very least an inexplicable fixation on, and homage to, an era now a hundred and fifty years and many generations distant.  No matter how loudly these southern colonels rattle their sabers and eulogize their great-grandfathers, their connection to it all is tenuous.  Still, blood ties to and reverence for their fallen Civil War ancestors of so long ago is a theme we hear much of from Southerners of this particular bent, but not nearly as much from the descendants of Union combatants who fought and died in the same war. The underlying suggestion is that the Confederate cause was in some way more worthy -- that it was one in which the South fought valiantly against overwhelming odds for something it believed in, and that it thus had a nobility that the North’s lacked

To put it not so charitably: Baloney. The South’s action was an insurrection.  Whatever they believed and however they justified it, what they did was attack and attempt to tear apart a country, the United States, that had been formed a hundred or so years earlier at great cost in blood and treasure -- the “noble experiment” which, until the Civil War, had operated not perfectly but pretty successfully in terms of the liberty and prosperity enjoyed by its citizens -- and wage a war in which they killed some 365,000 of their fellow Americans from the North and in which about 165,000 of their own were killed, a war in which many of their cities and farms were ruined, their railroads destroyed, and their industry and trade brought to a standstill.  And the high cause for which all of this was done -- for which the sons of the South spilled so many rivers of blood:  the right to enslave, for their own ease and economic benefit, three and a half million of their fellow human beings.

That many if not most of the southern soldiers were apolitical and maybe only dimly aware if at all of the issues on whose behalf they waged war may be true; and that being the case, it’s certainly appropriate to lament, and memorialize, their suffering. Unfortunately, the rebel flag doesn’t do that.  What it does instead is memorialize the repugnant cause they did the fighting and dying for.

A younger generation with a more clear-eyed view of the South’s role in the civil war appears to be in the majority now  -- people who understand the incendiary nature of the rebel flag and are finally ready to disown it as a public symbol of who they are and what they believe.  It’s good to see that they’re getting on with it.       

There are no Clocks in Baseball

To borrow and shamelessly recast a mantra of the 60s: A baseball game needs a clock like a fish needs a bicycle.  Nevertheless, major league baseball games now have, of all things, clocks. Their purpose: to enforce rules aimed at speeding the pace of the game, something a small but vocal segment of baseballdom has been obsessing over for years, repeatedly (and annoyingly) offering up various stratagems for “saving” time having mostly to do with how long a pitcher can take between pitches and whether or not a batter will be allowed to step out to knock dirt out of his spikes and adjust his, um, equipment.

That group has finally gotten its way. So now…

·        Batters must keep one foot in the box at all times, except after foul balls, steals and other scenarios that can occur during an at-bat.

·        Breaks between half-innings are timed. Once there are three outs, a timer will be set (2:25 for local games, 2:45 for national broadcasts), requiring pitchers and hitters to be ready for action when the timer winds down to 20 seconds.

·        There will also be a timer for pitching changes, with a maximum break of 2:30. The clock starts when the new pitcher crosses the warning track or foul line onto the field.

Pitch clocks haven’t been instituted yet in the majors, but will be.  They are now being used in AA and AAA games.

All of this, of course, is a solution in search of a problem.

One sportswriter characterized the “problem” this way: “Anyone who has attended a baseball game in recent years, whether it’s the big leagues, the minors or even tee ball, will tell you that baseball is too slow, an increasingly plodding exercise.”

In fact, no one has told me that. In recent years, or ever.  No one, except this tiny but apparently influential group of nattering nabobs of negativism.  Not once, as I’ve left a game, have I heard anyone say, “boy, am I glad that’s over; that last twelve minutes was torture,” so it doesn’t appear that this perceived need is in response to any outcry from the fans, who continue to vote -- when it comes to the attractiveness of major league baseball games as an entertainment alternative, at whatever duration -- with their feet.  As for its being “an increasingly plodding exercise” I say, nonsense, it’s the same plodding exercise it has always been.

My theory is that all this comes mainly from (a) that generation of sportswriters that is emotionally and intellectually, to put it delicately, not fully evolved, and who’ve been chronically over-stimulated by video games and trash sports and therefore tend to be rendered cranky by anything short of relentless high-intensity action and continual motion; and (b) team owners, whose principle interests in being connected in any way with baseball have to do with money and bragging rights but do not extend to actually liking the game, and whose top priority when in attendance at one is figuring out the earliest possible inning they can exit the premises without jeopardizing their reputations as passionate devotees of the sport.

I think what both of these groups really believe, deep down, is that baseball is fundamentally boring, and therefore the shorter the games, the better.  What they offer as their public rationale, on the other hand, is that (at least as I understand it) games would be more to the liking of the public if they were ten or twelve minutes shorter, and that more people would therefore attend games than already do.  The whole thing makes little sense, and when subjected to even the most rudimentary analysis, pretty much falls apart.  To wit…

           

How long is a piece of string?  Apparently the shortening crowd hasn’t noticed that not all baseball games are the same length.  In fact, generally speaking, no two games are the same length, rendering any talk of cutting the length of an average game meaningless.  Is a 4:10 game improved by cutting its length by 12 minutes?  A 2:38 game?  A 1:55 game.  Well…no, no, and no.  So if there’s a need for ball games to be shorter, the question has to asked – shorter than what?  And of course the duration of virtually every game is determined not by the dawdling of the pitcher but by his overall effectiveness; that is to say, games featuring the most offense, which this crowd admittedly likes best, take the longest.  Pitchers’ duels, for which they have the least affinity, are the shortest.  Go figure.  The bottom line here:  Ball games take a couple or three hours, and if twelve minutes are trimmed from them, they will still take a couple or three hours.

Why is there so much downtime in baseball?  There isn’t.  Baseball has somewhat more of it than hockey and basketball and considerably less of it than football, a sport which uses about thirty seconds of planning and discussion (the huddle) for every ten seconds of action (the play) and which stops every game dead in its tracks, exactly in the middle of the action, for 30 to 60 minutes.  There seems to be some confusion over whether all these pace-of-game measures are aimed at overall game length or within-game inaction, but the accusation that baseball is “slow” and needs to be “speeded up” clearly comes from people who are interested in the game only when balls are flying out of the park or bases are being feverishly circled.  They disdainfully refer to people who are actually interested in other less frenetic parts of the game, which is most of the people who watch baseball regularly, as “purists.”  For these millions who actually enjoy the game, the almost infinitely variable interplay of pitcher vs. hitter – something that takes up more of a baseball game than any other single activity – is not downtime.  But for the shorter-is-better crowd, it is.

In a seeming paradox, from the same sort of mindset that is always arguing for the shortening of baseball games comes the increasingly strident bitching about baseball officiating and the grand injustices visited upon the hometown heroes because of it, and consequent calls for stepped-up use of video replay to set things right.  Waiting for yes-or-no decisions to be made by way of video playback has become a significant yawn-time contributor. But it’s not a really a paradox.  Both ideas spring from the mind of the literalist – the sort of person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; the sort of person who can get way down in the weeds and ferret out facts that he then draws like a gun, but who is congenitally unable to see the big picture. 

So, this isn’t about pitching changes or trips to the mound by the manager or time elapsed between innings. Its about the game itself.  That’s what these people are bored by: Baseball.  Those of us who are not bored by baseball don’t think the time we spend watching ball games needs to go by any faster than it already does.

Anti-Semitism in State Politics

Tom Schweich, the Missouri state auditor and a candidate for governor, committed suicide after complaining about a Republican political ad that compared him to Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff in the old Andy Griffith show, and about a pernicious “whispering campaign” among Republicans regarding his religious affiliation – specifically, that he was Jewish, a heritage that, if true, would doubtless cost him the votes of some of the electorate’s dimmer bulbs.  He believed party chairman John Hancock was responsible for the rumor.

Hancock denied it, saying he “may have” mentioned in passing that he thought Schweich was Jewish but that any such mention was innocent and done in the same way that one might mention that someone was Presbyterian or Catholic, and therefore had no anti-semitic overtones.

There are a couple of problems with that:

1. There is no “may have’ here.  Either Hancock did or did not say, or speculate, that Schweich was Jewish.  So, when he says “may have” that means he did.  If he didn’t. he would have denied it.

2. Schweich was not Jewish.  He was a prominent member of St. Michael and St. George Episcopal; Church in Clayton, a church that doubtless counts among its members some staunch Republicans, prominent or otherwise.  That Hancock, party chairman and former top political consultant whose job is to formulate and implement the strategies that will defeat Democratic candidates, didn’t know what religion Schweich was is simply not plausible.  He did know, but brought up the Jewish thing anyway.

3. The contention that mentioning in passing that someone is Jewish -- in general and particularly in the context of a political campaign -- is the same as mentioning that they're Presbyterian or Catholic is such obvious claptrap that it’s hard to believe anyone would take it seriously. The Hancocks of this world mention Jewishness "in passing" for one reason and one reason only: to produce a reaction and a result  -- part of a long tradition of mentioning Jewishness to produce a result.

Hancock’s defenders have denied the existence of any whispering campaign, arguing that it was a delusion -- the product of an unhinged mind.  Schweich’s suicide is evidence that he was, in fact, unhinged, and there is every reason to believe that his problems ran far deeper than distress over political advertising and dirty-tricks speculation regarding his religion.  But the fact that the whispering campaign was not a reason to commit suicide does not mean that the campaign didn’t exist.  The fact that Hancock speculated on Schweich’s Jewishness, even though he doubtless knew better, is evidence that it did exist..  Further, the state’s most distinguished Republican, former Senator John Danforth, said in his eulogy for Schweich that such a campaign did in fact exist and he sharply criticized his party for doing it.  Danforth may not be the party kingpin that he once was, but the idea that he doesn’t know what’s going on in Missouri Republican circles is not believable.  He does know.

The shame here is twofold:  That people resort to anti-semitic innuendo, and that there is a market for it.  They do and there is.

After-the-Fact Quarterback

No one feels sorry for professional football coaches, who have astronomical salaries, legions of adoring acolytes in the public and sporting press, and more than the normal allotment of toadies.  But they do have their crosses to bear, most notably the lacerations inflicted by football tacticians whose expertise is born entirely of hindsight.  These people are known – in football and, metaphorically, in a thousand other pursuits -- as Monday morning quarterbacks.  Their primary function: To dissect the tactical worth of play calls after the outcome of those plays is known.

A lot of this goes on in a lot of different activities, but it is endemic to football. It goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, with just about every play (since every play has an outcome.) God knows it’s a thoroughly explored phenomenon here in St. Louis where legitimate coaching shortcomings have kept the Rams out of the playoffs since the Clinton administration.  But legitimacy often gives way to irrationality, as when a play goes for a touchdown, and then, when the exact same play is stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the team is accused of, quelle horreur!, unimaginative play calling. Or, to put it another way, a play that works is a good call, and a play that doesn’t work is a bad call, even if it’s the same play. This is the equivalent, in baseball, of saying your slugger should never have swung at that pitch, unless he hits a home run, in which case he should have. Never once has a football fan been heard to say, following a touchdown, “I wish they hadn’t run that play; it was a bad call.”

Which brings us to the 2015 Super Bowl and the more or less instant judgment – and something that became conventional wisdom before the confetti settled to the ground – that calling the pass play on which the outcome of the game turned was a demonstrably and self-evidently idiotic decision..  The thing, however, is this:  Had that play gone for a touchdown – and it absolutely could have – no one, as the trophies were being handed out and the breathless winners were being interviewed and the Gatorade was being splashed about, would have been saying what a dumb idea it was. The likelihood, in fact, is that the exact same people now calling the exact same play moronic would be calling it dazzling and tactically amazing and would be nominating Pete Carroll for genius of the century.

But wait.  Everyone knows that calling for a pass play in that situation is crazy…something no one does and no one of sound mind would ever do. Right?  Wrong. That strategy -- trying a pass play on second down inside the five -- is not a wrong one or even an unusual one.  Nor is it a particularly risky one.  From Benjamin Morris of the Web site FiveThirtyEightSports, we get this information: “On the 1-yard line, quarterbacks threw 66 touchdowns with no interceptions prior to Wilson’s errant toss. Not mentioned: They also scored four touchdowns on scrambles (which Wilson is pretty good at last I checked). That’s a 60.9 percent success rate. Just for comparison’s sake, here’s how more than 200 runs fared this year in the same situation: 125 led to touchdowns; 94 failed to score, of those, 23 were for loss of yardage; two resulted in lost fumbles.”

So, the idea that it was an inexplicably cockamamie call from nowheresville is just wrong.  In fact, it was closer to being a customary call in that situation. There is an element of class resentment in play here, as in “these overpaid geniuses can’t see what we ordinary joes can see as plain as the nose in your face.”  But what all the ordinary joes need to get their heads around: The play call didn’t fail.  The play failed.  (If they are prepared to say they’d have branded the play dumb and crazy even if it had won the Super Bowl for the Seahawks, then I stand corrected.)

Here’s the Morris article, which contains lots of interesting information about this episode…

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-head-coach-botched-the-end-of-the-super-bowl-and-it-wasnt-pete-carroll/

Palin Again

(This post was first published in 2011.  Unfortunately, it again seems relevant.)

A recent declaration by Sarah Palin that she doesn’t intend to shut up is the best news the Democrats have gotten in months. In her public life to date, everything that has come out of her mouth that hasn’t been uninformed in content and inarticulate in execution has been hopelessly bland and non-specific -- completely lacking in any indication that she has any but the vaguest understanding of basic principles of governance, conservative or otherwise. And there’s no reason not to expect that to continue.

Soon after the election, it seemed that the Palin phenomenon had ended -- that she had disappeared from the national stage for good, and, as conservative pundits and politicians had their inevitable what-was-I-thinking moment, the idea of her taking on the leadership role in the Republican party had receded further and further into the gloaming.

But no. She reappeared with a book, then a television show, and has managed to stay alternately on the fringes or in the forefront of public consciousness throughout. People who seem otherwise reasonably sensible are again saying things about her – things which, if they say them, they presumably believe them -- that are totally at odds with the evidence – the evidence she herself has supplied with her every public utterance.

An article by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal asks “what's behind the left's deranged hatred” of Palin. The answer is, it’s not deranged and it’s not hatred -- and it’s not just the left. It’s a simple recognition of that fact that she is the lightest of intellectual lightweights – an unschooled talking-point repeater totally lacking in statecraft skills and with no real understanding of “the American people” she repeatedly and thoughtlessly invokes. Granted, she has this in common with many politicians, maybe most, but still… this is the person that seemingly sane party strategists see as their leader?

The more relevant question, then, isn’t what's behind the left's deranged hatred of Palin, but what’s behind the right’s deranged infatuation with her. What has she said or done, or thought or written, that demonstrates to this constituency that she belongs at the top of government? Nothing about her stands up to detached analysis, leading to the conclusion that their support is, at bottom, emotional – schoolboy/schoolgirl crushes formed during the time of her initial public emergence that they haven’t gotten over yet. In any case, they continue to say things about her that are demonstrably not true. One pundit, for example, referred to Palin’s “obvious smarts” – a real head-scratcher, because if she has any smarts, to date, they’ve been anything but obvious.

The flip side of the conservative punditry’s inexplicable enthusiasm for Gov. Palin is the indignation with which they’ve reacted to the less-than-enthusiastic reception her initial selection received in many quarters, and their righteous anger at what they consider to have been unfair treatment in the press. Well, one pales at the thought of the lacerations these same people would be inflicting on Gov. Palin if she were a Democrat and been offered up by that party as its VP candidate. This person is a lightweight, not national-candidate timbre, is what Republicans would be saying – and much, much more – if Palin were on the other team. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh and all the rest would have set new records for sneering.

To risk stating the obvious, Sen. McCain didn't pick Gov. Palin because he thought she would make a good vice president or a good president. He picked her because he thought it would help him win the election, and he didn't hesitate to put her the proverbial heartbeat away. Ironically, the calculation, cold as it was, that Palin’s selection would drive votes to the Republican ticket was remarkably clueless, and demonstrated the bizarre understanding McCain and his team seemed to have about actual voters out here in flyover territory. At the very least, the idea that this would bring women voters over to their side speaks loudly and clearly about their low opinion of women voters.

In the days and weeks after the election, Sen. McCain diplomatically declined to publicly implicate Palin in the failure of his ticket. But he has to know that her selection was a ghastly mistake that came perilously close to making a laughing stock of his campaign. As for Gov. Palin’s political future: The likelihood is that her refusal to “shut up” will lead, sooner or later, to her exit from the national political stage and a retreat to the television reality show hosting career that her cynical thrust at high office may have been aimed at all along.

Income Inequality (cont'd)

 Among the various obsessions of true believers of the right and left, the idea of “income inequality” is one of the more incomprehensible, inasmuch as income inequality is a state of affairs just about all of us, including crusading editorial writers, spend our adult lives trying to achieve.  Its pursuit is why we go to college, send our kids to college, work hard, improve our skills and get better at our jobs, work ourselves half to death, and lecture our children on the importance of hard work and good grades and not settling for being that tattooed guy behind the counter at the local Git ‘n’ Go. We try to better ourselves.  We try to improve our lives and the lives of the people who depend on us. We strive, because we want to make our incomes unequal to the incomes of those who don’t.  There is nothing unusual or immoral or unfair about this, and it’s something that is universally embraced – left, right, and center – in this country.  But, maybe it’s something every generation has to learn anew, as they grow into adulthood and try to come to grips with the reality that while people are equal under the law, they are not equal in terms of intellect, drive, or wealth-creating ability and ambition.  Some people are smarter and more industrious – and more willing to sacrifice in the short term for the sake of the long -- than others.  Get used to it.

I assume that when people talk about income inequality, they understand that its opposite is income equality – a condition in which all people make the same amount of money. How they think that would work, and why they think it would be desirable, is anybody’s guess. Note to the income-inequality-anguished: If that’s not what you mean by the term, then you should let us know what you do mean.  Please be specific. 

From what I can gather, specifity here is a statistical exercise in which the breakdown of wealth concentration in the U.S. is put on display, and the display itself becomes prima facie evidence of an unfair and possibly dangerous state of affairs about which something needs to be done. As in…

·        The top 1% took in 23.5% of all of the country's income in 2007. In 1979 they only took in 8.9%.

• Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation's private wealth. That's more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.

·        400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion.

They draw these statistics like a gun, as though the wrongness of the conditions they describe is self-evident.  But what all of it really means is that while the numbers and percentages go up and down, the basic picture remains as it has been since time immemorial: Some folks have a whole lot of money and most of the rest of us don’t.  The obvious question is:  So what? That people do not all make the same amount of money; and that there are far fewer rich people than not-rich people is not news, nor is it “wrong” or immoral. Wealth accumulation is not a zero-sum game; money that the extremely rich take in does not come out of the pool available to wage earners and others. Those people (which is most of us) are free to improve upon their circumstances regardless of what wealthy people are or are not up to. People are not poor because other people are rich. It is absolutely true that improving upon one’s circumstances can be quite difficult, but the difficulty does not stem from what other people have or don’t have.

Also, this: Not everyone who is un-rich is poor.  In fact, very few of us are in that category.  The reality is that every single one of us occupies a slot on a vast continuum of income levels ranging from the very-hard-up to the just-making-ends-meet to the doing-okay to the plenty-prosperous to the really-rich to the have-more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with – and the innumerable slots in between.  The idea of just two classes – a ridiculously wealthy one-percent and everyone else in the poverty-stricken masses -- is illusory. That there is a tiny and super-powerful coterie of lavishly wealthy moustache-twirling villains cackling over the plight of the wretched rest of us is a mythology from which those who bemoan income inequality appear to draw much of their energy and anger.  But that’s not the reality.  The reality is that there is still a huge middle class in this country that does okay and whose members are unconcerned with how (or how much) money flows to the top 1%.

There is a rich vein of class resentment mixed with adolescent moral indignation in the income inequality argument that is hard to ignore. The sense is that anyone with money, simply by virtue of having that money, doesn’t deserve it; and anyone who doesn’t have money, simply by virtue of not having money, does deserve it.  The very rich have “more than they need” and should therefore, in the service of remediating the income inequality problem, hand some of it over to people who don’t. In fact, most of the people who think that are themselves impossibly rich compared to other people in the world and even in the U.S.  It’s all relative.  Does the editorial writer who makes $150,000 a year even understand that he is most certainly rich compared to a person who makes $20,000 a year?  Doers he understand that their income inequality is gulf-like?  The very idea of a guy who makes, say, $250,000 a year resenting and castigating members of the top 1% is laughable.  It is indisputable that the $250K guy, including the one who rails against the evils of income inequality, is identified far more closely in most people’s minds with the top 1-percenters than he is with the $20K guy.

In this country, there are people without means who need and deserve the help of the rest of us.  We should give it to them.  And we do.  But that’s a different discussion from the gauzy concept of income inequality, which seems to be arguing that a tiny and incredibly greedy minority is rendering all of us poverty-stricken. Fighting about it has the effect of siphoning political energy and resources away from related but real problems, including a tax code that may not share the tax burden fairly, and shifts in the economic landscape that have caused less-than-robust wage growth and the contraction of the middle class.  Hand-wringing over income inequality is a self-indulgent and unproductive exercise in moral superiority of the sort that would be more at home in that little saloon down the street that’s popular with earnest college sophomores.

Obsessing over Obamacare

Although the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, doesn’t do much to address the gorilla in the room – the preposterously high cost of medical care -- it does help a significant number of Americans, the heretofore uninsured, deal with those costs, and that’s a good thing. And that’s really all it does. But the ACA is now hip deep in misinformation and deliberate politically-driven disinformation about what it is and is not, to the point where its basic attributes have been rendered all but unrecognizable. (Recent surveys show that when people are asked to choose between the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare, they overwhelmingly select the ACA, even though they are one and the same thing. That says it all.)

So let’s take a few steps back and review some of the basics:

One: Health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives are fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. It’s not as if they think the status quo is fine and that Obamacare is a needless intrusion on it. So, the need is there, and that’s something that’s widely agreed upon.

Two: Although they (Boehner, et. al.) enthusiastically endorse the idea that something needs to be done, what they think that is they have not made clear. They have only said Obamacare isn’t it. There is no comprehensive alternative approach on the table. Their only “solution” is to scuttle the one initiative out there that even begins to address the problem they readily acknowledge exists.

Three. No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Romney’s program in Massachusetts is essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders.

Four: The ACA is not behind rising health care costs and the resultant rise in insurance premiums. Those were skyrocketing back when Obama was still organizing poor folks on the south side of Chicago and Obamacare was not yet a gleam in anyone’s eye. Health insurance premiums have risen almost 200 percent since 1999

Five: Despite the fact that some folks are clearly obsessed with it, it can be argued that the ACA is a relatively minor piece of legislation, not meriting all the hollering and foot-stomping it has engendered on the right. It does not affect the three out of five of us who get our health insurance through our employer, or the one in five of us who get it through Medicare. All it really does is attempt to make insurance more readily available to the one in five of us who don’t have it. That, by most estimates, amounts to about 50 million people, all of whom are one medical catastrophe removed from total financial ruin.

Six: The poorly implemented web-based process for enrolling in the program was not the same thing as the program itself, despite critics’ efforts to conflate the two. Their righteous indignation over problems with enrolling in a program they disdain was laughable. And in any case, the botched rollout of the enrollment Web site is over with and soon forgotten, and will stay that way no matter how hard and how many times Obamacare critics try to resuscitate it.

Seven: Some insurance companies canceled policies which they had sold but which didn’t comply with the new law, rendering inaccurate the president’s assurances that people could keep any policy they were happy with. It’s something of a mystery, though, why those companies – instead of precipitously canceling non-compliant policies upon implementation of the law -- didn’t communicate with the affected policyholders long beforehand, warn them of impending problems, and offer up alternatives.

Eight: It should be unnecessary to point this out because it’s all so nonsensical, but here goes: The Affordable Care Act is not a commie plot. It is not a government takeover of health care. It is not socialized medicine. It has nothing to do with socialism. Obamacare does not employ doctors or operate hospitals or provide insurance. It funnels people to insurance companies -- private enterprise – which then, in the finest tradition of free markets everywhere, compete for their business.

The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guarantees continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem all Americans share.

The N-Word

That we have commonly substituted the phrase “the n-word” for the word itself – the word “nigger” -- is testimony to its awesome negative power; its anger, its poison, its snarling ugliness.  When we’ve wanted or needed to refer to it in speech or print, because of its malignant toxicity we’ve recoiled in disgust from saying it aloud or putting it in print, and instead substituted a kind of  juvenile code-speak. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

But these days, apparently…not so much.  Hold the lipstick…behold the pig.

The suspension of professional football player Richie Incognito for, among other things, tossing the word around all too freely, has unleashed a surprising (to me, anyway) and regrettable outpouring of affection and support for it, along with the depressing realization that its full-monte use, disdained by all but slack-jawed, vacant-eyed mouth-breathers (or so I thought), has enjoyed an apparent resurgence.  Little did I know that its use in athletic locker rooms was as common as we now know it to be, and that it had so many enthusiastic defenders, among both blacks and whites, as evidenced by comments from Charles Barkley, Michael Wilbon, Matt Barnes, Paula Deen, Shaquille O’Neal and others.

Maybe it’s fortuitous that this new debate about the appropriateness of the word “nigger” raises its ugly head at about the same time as we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  In it, Lincoln refers in the very first sentence to the “proposition that all men are created equal” a phrase, and a sentiment, that Americans purportedly hold dear and take seriously, and which, by itself, gives lie to the notion that it makes sense to lump an entire class of people together with one dismissive and derogatory word.

But there are other parts of the Gettysburg Address that are even more on-point.  Much that follows that first sentence speaks to the deaths that resulted from the Civil War – 10,000 at Gettysburg alone.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives…”

“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here…”

“…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…”

“…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The message that Lincoln’s words conveyed so elegantly and eloquently, and sorrowfully, was that so many people died in this awful conflagration, and for what?  What cause was worth such upheaval and carnage? What principle was the confederacy defending that justified the unutterable misery, destruction, and death the Civil War brought  -- the south sent to war and thereby brought about the deaths of 258,000 of its own sons and 360,000 of its adversary’s?

What was it all for?

Answer: The defense and preservation by southerners of a system by which they enriched themselves through the use of free labor to produce their goods and services – free labor they availed themselves of by enslaving hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings; a system that treated blacks as a sub-human species, to be bought and sold as if they were cattle or furniture, to be kept in chains, to be capriciously and forever separated from their kith and kin, to be understood as possessions, not people, to be whipped, shot, beaten, maimed, and slaughtered; to be not cared for and loved but owned; to be literally worked to death.

And the word of choice for these southerners to identify the people to whom they did these things and whom they perceived not as people but as commodities:  nigger.

That, in a nutshell, is the history and provenance of that awful word, and it has been used ever since as a way to forcefully and without equivocation convey hatred and naked contempt.  Its use has accompanied, among other things, vilification and denigration, total denial of basic human rights, economic oppression, unspeakable brutality, rapes, hangings, and lynchings. It contemptuously lumps together people tall and short, young and old, male and female, rich and poor. smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, strong and weak, talented and talentless, skilled and unskilled, educated and ignorant, athletic and ungainly, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts  --all as one thing – dark of skin and therefore valueless.

That is some strong and potent – and dangerous -- word.

Nor has the word “nigger” lost any of its malignant potency over time. It’s never funny or cute, or an ironic term of endearment, a usage Barkley and others think older folks and the hyper-sensitive can’t comprehend. As columnist Jason Whitlock put it: “The N-word is a not a generational issue. The N-word was never a fad. It was a primary tool in the enslavement, disenfranchisement and cultural destruction of a race of people.”

In some African-American circles, use of “nigger” is embraced and defended, in an exquisite irony, on the grounds that refraining from using it constitutes being told what to say and what not to say by The Man; or that it’s used only in a jocular way; or that’s it’s used only to describe a certain type of person; or that it’s long-since been stripped of its toxicity.  Thus, this reasoning holds, it’s certainly okay for black people to use it if they want to, and it’s even okay, in certain circumstances, for whites to use it. And whites who are so inclined will see that as a license to join in the fun.  But make no mistake. When a white person uses the word “nigger,” without exception he is using it in exactly the same way white people have always used it.

You can’t ban a word.  The only hope is that the people who toss it around so freely and who keep ginning up excuses for it will come to see it for what it is: crass and insulting terminology that carries a boatload of ugly baggage and is an important facilitator of the racial stereotyping that continues to bedevil African-American everywhere.

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The Bureaucracy Did It

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank expresses doubts about the claim that the president didn’t know until recently about NSA spying activities involving other countries’ leaders.  “It strains credulity to think that the U.S. was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge,” Milbank wrote.  He is not alone in his skepticism.  I, on the other hand – given the size, power, complexity, and self-preservation instincts of your average government bureaucracy, particularly those involved in any way with national security – would be amazed if the president did know what was going on.  This president or any president.

The NSA wasn’t tapping into Angela Merkel’s cell phone chats because it was trying to gather intelligence that would help defend the United States.  It was tapping into her phone because it could.  What spy organizations are capable of doing, they do.  And they may or may not tell anyone about it.  Imagine NSA operatives (or whatever you call them) upon discovering, as the technology evolved, that they could listen in on the conversations of the world’s heads of state, including those of our allies:  “It’s so cool that we can do that, but it wouldn’t be right and there’s nothing to be gained from it.  So even though we can, we won’t.”

Um, no.

Given the bazillion things the NSA watches, listens to, and otherwise monitors, and given the fact that it’s a vast bureaucracy whose job is (a) spying, and (b) keeping secrets, it is entirely plausible that it was listening to plenty of people, heads of state included, without telling the president or anybody else.  Milbank quotes an AP reporter asking the question, “Was the president kept out of the loop about what the NSA was doing?” The answer is yes, in a manner of speaking. But I would suggest that there is no loop; that NSA people decide what the president, and, for that matter, the congress and even their own bosses need to know when it comes to the multitude of spying activities the organization indulges in.  They don’t do this in a seditious way.  They do it in more of a this-is-nobody-else’s-business  way.

Deciding who’s going to know what is something the NSA has in common with all Washington mega-bureaucracies which all have, in effect, a life of their own.  They know that they are permanent and that politicians are, for the most part – particularly those in the executive branch – transitory.  The bureaucrats know that long after the president and his minions have departed the scene and turned their attention to foundations and libraries, they and their impenetrable machinery will still be there.  They listen and smile as politicians vow to end waste, fraud, and abuse, and then they get back to business.  Job One for them is not serving the needs of the American people, but self preservation and perpetuation. Just as an example of how big, powerful, and immovable these agencies are, the smallest of the cabinet-level departments, Education, has 5,000 employees and a budget of about $70-billion.  The president doesn’t spend his evenings going over DOE’s contracts.  The idea that the congress and/or the executive branch are on top of everything the bureaucracies are doing is an illusion.  (They tend to be on top of those matters only insofar as they can influence spending that benefits their friends, relatives, contributors, and, ultimately, themselves.)

Republicans and other irrational Obama-haters aren’t sure which rap to try to pin on Obama to get the most political mileage out of this spying affair: Spying on friends? Spying on friends but not knowing about it?  Spying on friends, knowing about it, but lying about knowing about it.  You can pick only one.  The likely reality, though, is that friends were pointlessly spied on but it wasn’t the president’s fault.  The bureaucracy did it.  Meanwhile, what we’re all pretty sure of is that everybody spies on everybody else and that foreign politicians, allies of the U.S. or not, whether they're tapping the U.S. president's phone or not, know they’ll never lose any votes by vowing to their constituents that they won’t stand still for being pushed around by America.

Redskins

The existence of team mascot names in sports is, of course, a little silly.  When we watch a game, we can plainly see that the participants are people and not big jungles cats, little red songbirds, or venomous snakes. But we cut the whole idea some slack because it’s been that way in competitive team sports for a long time and, even though we know it’s a bit goofy to linguistically convert ordinary people into birds and bad-ass animals, we take it with a grain of salt.

But there are some names we need to give more careful consideration to.

For those who consider the controversy surrounding Washington’s NFL team to have been manufactured by the excessively politically correct  – just another cause fueled by liberal hypersensitivity and not worth worrying about-- imagine your 5-year-old coming home from school and announcing that he’s made a new friend.

“Great!  What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Jones.  He sits right behind me.  He’s a redskin!”

Some may see this usage as being not quite as poisonous as an announcement by your kid that his new friend was a nigger or a spic or a kike, but it certainly shares the coarse and degrading spirit of those snarlingly ugly labels.  Unless you’re a member of that thankfully small segment of society that uses this sort of language routinely and means it, you would be at least taken aback by this use of the word redskin.

 

You would chalk it up to innocence and ignorance and you would set the lad straight regarding the use of perjorative racial terminology.  And you would do that not because you’re excessively touchy about such things but because you are a decent member of a society that finds those sorts of usages ignorant, impolite, uncivil, and possibly dangerous.  In short, you would not be accused of being overly sensitive should you gasp at your child’s use of the word redskin to identify and describe a fellow human being.

And so it is with the controversy over the Washington Redskins name.  It seems fair to say that people are not being overly sensitive when they question the use of an appellation for a football team that would immediately be deemed an unacceptable racial slur when it came out of the mouth of a kid. 

Washington fans who want to keep the name because they're just really, really attached to it need to get a life.  Do they really, truly care what animal, vegetable, or mineral the team is called? Or are they going to seriously argue, as the team’s owner has, that to renounce an ugly and pointless racial insult is something that shouldn’t be done because it would defile a venerated tradition? 

This is, really, a no-brainer  -- not number one on the world problem list, but a fix that is simple to do and simple to understand why.

Somewhat more subtle considerations surround the names Braves and Indians, but they would seem to have at least one foot on the same slippery slope, if only because they seem intended to convey ferocity and aggressiveness in the same way that animal names do – Tigers, Lions, Bears, Wildcats, Bulldogs, etc.  As team names, they are less overtly perjorative than Redskins, but they are still tone-deaf, in the same way that names like the San Francisco Jews or the Dallas African-Americans would be. We will see what, if anything, happens in Cleveland and Atlanta. 

Here is a discussion in Wikipedia on the use of Native American names as team mascots, including a short history of organizations that have changed their name.

Figuring Out What Republicans Want

A reliable source says the following conversation has been taking place behind closed doors in recent weeks:

Boehner/McConnell:  We want you to shoot your dog, and if you don’t shoot your dog we’re going to shut down the government and destroy the economy.

Obama:  My dog!?  What does my dog have to do with it?

Boehner/McConnell:  We don’t like your dog.  We want him dead.  And there’s a group of crazy people in the House, representing an equally crazy constituency, maybe even crazier, whom we have succeeded in convincing that your dog is the devil’s spawn.  Maybe convincing them of that wasn’t such a great idea, but it’s done now and we can’t really do anything about it.

Obama:  My dog is not the devil’s spawn  He’s a perfectly good dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, these people think he is the devil’s spawn and, in fact, they are completely obsessed with him.  They are absolutely willing to bring about the end of civilization as we know it to get rid of him…to destroy the village in order to save it, you might say.  So, you need to shoot your dog.

Obama:  Well, I’m not shooting my dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then, cut off his tail and one leg.  Maybe we can convince the gang of 40 that he will then be incapacitated enough to not be able to ruin the country like he was going to.  He's a job killer and he's not fair to the American people.  We're not sure what that means, but it's our talking point with regard to your dog.  It's what we say.

Obama:  I’m not shooting my dog or cutting off any of his parts.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, can’t we at least have a conversation about this?

Obama:  No, we can’t have a conversation about killing or maiming my dog in exchange for not destroying the U.S. economy.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then we’ll have to tell the country that the president refuses to negotiate.  Country, the president refuses to negotiate!

Obama:  That’s not negotiation.  That’s blackmail.  It’s like saying give us what we want and no one gets hurt.  You can’t threaten to bring the economy to its knees if you don’t get your way, and call that negotiating.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, you know what – this whole business of default causing dire economic consequences is overblown anyway. Rep.Ted Yoho has said default would actually bring stability to the world markets, and a lot of our wing-nuts agree with him. True, Ted isn't an economist.  He's actually a veterinarian. But anyway, that's the story we're going with now, or at least one of them...that a default would be no big deal. 

Obama: So what about the dog? 

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, our crazy people are every bit as obsessed with government spending as they are your dog, so now we’re threatening to cause a default if government spending isn’t cut.  And default would be a very bad thing.  Except that it wouldn’t be.  But don’t think we’ve forgotten about your dog.  We still want you to shoot him – or we want somebody to shoot him.  But maybe we’ll take care of that later.

Obama:  So what exactly do you want in exchange for re-opening the government and not destroying the economy – which, by the way, every reputable thinker from the Wall Street Journal to Warren Buffett says might well be the result of a default.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, we’re not exactly sure what we want.As our esteemed colleague Marlin Stutzman so eluquently put it: "We're not going to be disrespected.  We have to get something out of this.  And I don't know what that even is."  In other words, if you disrespect us we'll ruin the world. But we definitely plan on getting that dog of yours shot.  Our wacko-birds want that, and they’ll can us if we don’t get it done.  And that’s the most important thing -- that we don’t get canned.

Gingrich:  Boy, you just can’t deal with that Obama guy like you could with Clinton.  We made a perfectly reasonable offer – shoot your dog and we won’t shut down the government and bring down the economy – and what does he say?  He says no!  You just can’t work with a guy like that.

Guns and the Mentally Ill

Without getting into the ins and outs of firearms legislation and the entrenched positions of the ideologues that come at this from left and right, can there be any doubt that we have to find a way to keep the unhinged and guns separate? It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there.  

But on that relatively limited objective – keeping guns out of the hands of the delusional – is where the focus needs to be if the depressingly regular front page appearance of mass shooting news is ever going to stop.  The quixotic efforts of the left to rid society of guns altogether, or at the very least, guns whose appearance they disapprove of – viz., so-called “assault” weapons -- are politically impossible and doomed to failure.  Worse, they drain energy and focus away from gun control efforts that might actually do some good and that there is some possibility of getting all parties to agree on – the more narrow but reachable objective of stopping mentally unbalanced people from playing out their revenge fantasies with bullets.

Every bit as futile (and nonsensical) as the left’s obsession with the impossible or the irrelevant is the insistence by the right, as personified by the National Rifle Association, that a gun in every American hand is a constitutional imperative, and that any effort whatsoever to regulate guns, including keeping them away from felons, insane people, and small children, is the camel’s nose under the tent.  (In this connection, it’s worth mentioning that we already have a considerable amount of gun control legislation on the books: Automatic weapons – machine guns – are heavily regulated, and you can’t have bazookas, hand grenades, or surface-to-air missiles, to name just a few.  No one – okay, hardly anyone -- considers these prohibitions violations of the right to bear arms.)

It can be argued that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, et. al. is by definition mentally ill.  At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire. Which is to say, these events are virtually always connected to mental illness of some type and/or severity. And so like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows the shootings.  And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected.

Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in this effort, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible.  It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment. True believers on the left and the right should quit worrying about unserious ideas like no guns or more guns and put their efforts behind something that can actually happen and that can do some good.