Higher Education Meet Democratic Process

This is a re-post, trimmed and tweaked a bit from its original stream of consciousness version. The idea emerged as a free flow of thought about the merits and demerits of tax-exempt status in American institutions. It is also an adjunct to a future proposal about youth suffrage in general, with side tracks into twin proposals to repeal the child labor laws and the laws requiring forced school attendance.

For the original text, please see "Sam Brownback and So Much More" below. D-Blog



Columbia University has an endowment in the billions. They are the largest owner of real estate in Manhattan. They’re doing fine. Yet not one penny of their real estate is taxed, nor are the capital gains from their investments. So they have benefited enormously from non-profit status. Were they taxed like a normal company, their liability would likely be 100s of millions of dollars a year. But instead it’s nothing.

Like other schools, they get the bulk of their capital from two sources- tuition and public or private contributions.

There are a few problems with this. First of all, the existence of tuition makes attending Columbia University an impossibility for millions of intelligent Americans- not to speak of third world internationals whose education might even be considered more important for global peace and prosperity.

Next, the bulk of public contributors make donations for the same reason as for classical music- the prestige of donating to something somebody deems to be important. I will concede right away that there is an enormous amount of important research being conducted at universities. My point, though, is that it is not up to a democratic process to decide what makes these things important. That people deem one subject important causes them to donate more money. The more money donated to a subject the more important it seems, thus creating a spiral (virtuous or otherwise) of importance. Once entrenched, this spiral is very difficult to stop, and the subject itself becomes immune from democratic review, protected, as it were, by a monopoly of prestige.

(The same fate condemns political candidates with the capital of media coverage. The more coverage they get the more money they get, the more money they get the more coverage, etc. Many worthy candidates get sidelined through this kind of cycle of donation and exposure.)

Furthermore, any academic can tell you there are tremendous amounts of waste in the Uni way of doing things. Fun or not, those are dollars that could be spent in other, more productive ways. But they won’t be, because there’s not as much prestige in many of those other ways. This is a longer discussion that aims at core problems with research and the scientific method. For another day.


As for private donations, of the graduated who give back- and here let’s drop down a tier to a less prestigious College, say Sarah Lawrence- those graduate donors who are worth cultivating by the development office (and thus those who may have some influence in the school) will be only the most successful graduated, say 5 – 10 % of alums making significant contributions in the millions of dollars. So the monetary votes of those SLC grads working at Starbucks simply will not count- and the school, its curriculum, values, or methods will be none the wiser. Only the rich’s voice will be heard, and presumably their voice will favor that which is already in place (with some tweaks), because that is what brought them to their state of richness. The Starbucks barista might be angry and embittered, resenting the school that taught him nothing about life, but he would be in no position to do anything about it. Were he to bang on the door of the dean’s office, they would simply call security and have him escorted out. The people for whom the curriculum worked would have the red carpet rolled out with the credit card machine waiting at the other end.
[NB: this point could be argued extensively, but it is not central to my case, and so I will leave it as is- food for thought.]

In order to curb these disparities of clout, my first proposal would be to eliminate tax-exempt status from schools.

But then who would pay for education? Would only those institutions with legacy funds be able to continue operations? That would be unfair to say the least, and it would contribute to real academic stagnation. As it stands, the most prestigious schools are more concerned with cultivating donors than students. In fact, students are put in the helpless position of vying for entry into a school system over which they have no power, thus encouraging an attitude of subservience to institution that will not serve them in entrepreneurial life.

It is worth repeating what one author, James Herndon, said about institutions: An institution’s first, and usually unstated, goal is self-perpetuation. Whatever is in their mission statement comes after that one. All the lofty goals of improving society, educating the public, etc., come after paying the rent, the faculty, and the bureaucracy that runs it. Forgive the cynicism here (I’m quoting a cynical author), but few Americans can afford to work productively for an institution that has a sunset clause built into its mission. People have tended to want to keep their jobs as long as possible, at least if they are expected to commit real effort and energy to them. Thus any mission statement dedicated to the betterment of the students or public that runs counter to the interests of the school bureaucracy to maintain the status quo if bettering the students' lives would institute policies that changed the status quo too drastically would not be enacted. That was a long sentence, so bravo if you got it the first time around. The idea is that the students' and the institution's interests are not necessarily the same. And the institution, which will outlast the students, will always win. This is true even before enrollment, as students approach the school more as supplicants than applicants, and continues until graduation.

So it is not hard to see how this arrangement can easily conspire against the interests of the students, the ones whose interests the institution ostensibly serves. For example, the best teachers, are the ones who make themselves obsolete- they convey their information, they teach the students how to learn for themselves, and like so many male arachnids, their task completed, they simply expire. Since most professors don’t want to expire, there is a natural power struggle built into the teaching relationship in which there is an incentive in the teacher to prevent the student from achieving intellectual independence, as such independence would render the teacher obsolete=powerless=dead. Whether this is enacted overtly or more subtly, it is a fact of human nature that must be dealt with in a society.

A less psychologically disturbing example might simply be that of tenure. Once tenure is established, the incentive to improve and evolve one's teaching methods goes down. Obviously. What's worse is that before tenure, the teacher's incentive is primarily to do whatever it takes to get tenure which may or may not serve the students' interests either. That graduate assistants regularly teach undergraduate classes is also blatantly not in the students' interests if their interests are to have the best, most effective and inspiring professors. There are countless other examples having to do with curriculum, housing, clubs- to say nothing of post-university-life preparation, which I will leave to those who actually went to college to ponder.


So how do we generate a system of education that is genuinely student centered?

Easy. And no need for tax breaks, at least not for the schools.

Higher education (let’s start with that) would be absolutely free of charge to students.

But there would be a contract. Upon graduation, or shortly after, a small percentage (say ½ a percent) of the student’s annual income would go to back to the school until retirement, say 70 years of age

This system would inextricably link the life interests of the student with the financial interest of the schools.

In the current system, once the student forks over his tuition, the school is under no obligation to do much of anything. They can teach Ping-Pong for 4 years and call that an education (or Art History, perhaps). But under the new system, schools would have to think seriously about the entire life future of the student- starting with the basics: If the student drops dead at 35 by eating too many Big Macs, the school has just lost 35 years of income. Therefore basic life skills would factor heavily into the initial curriculum. 4 or 5 failed marriages can drain the coffers pretty quickly too and cause bankruptcy. How about general life skills about building relationships- and not just the fruity new age kinds. Schools would have to do research (on their own dime) to find ways of getting along that really work for people, and they would have to find ways to teach those ways effectively to their students.

And then the whole manner of teaching changes- how things are taught, what is deemed important is no longer ‘deemed’ but is discovered- if reading Chaucer adds enough to one’s quality of life that it allows for more productivity and more income, then Medieval English would be a good investment. Otherwise, not so much.* Also, if dull, mega-lectures conducted by graduate assistants really do further the students’ education after all, they would continue. If not, a better system would emerge.


A school that taught the students nothing useful would receive nothing useful in return and would fold. A school like Juilliard that graduates hundreds of Starbucks baristas would be entirely bankrupt, unable to function. If they wanted to raise money, they would have to demonstrate the worthiness of their mission- and do so without the tax-break incentive to donors. In either case they would have to openly admit to their students that they have little likelihood of earning a living wage, to say nothing of a comfortable wage, based on the skills they learn there.

The same would go for research institutions. Research is indeed valuable to society, and factored into that ought to be a certain amount of inefficiently spent time and money. But this money can be raised separately from the education funds. Generally student research is a form of slave labor, pardoned by the prestige and sophistication of the work they are doing and the institutions that permit it. So another system would need to be in place.

Most importantly, all schools would eventually be competing amongst themselves for the best students- young or old- much the way the virtually-for-profit football wing of the school already does.

Prospective students would also think seriously about whether or not college was a useful option for them. Could they learn as much on their own without being indentured to Harvard for the rest of their lives? Right now there is virtually no choice for a promising 18 year old than to spend $100,000 to be rammed through a standard, "balanced" curriculum for 4 years. Why not turn the tables and empower the student- on whose fortunes the collective depends far more than the institutions themselves.

Economic prejudice would therefore end with this system as less well-to-do families would have the same opportunities as wealthier families. This would also contribute positively to racial and cultural integration. Business works best when it is color blind, and this would indeed be a business relationship. Slowly a true meritocracy would begin to emerge.

A corollary to this would be that "legacy" students would become more rare as financial clout was shifted from wealthy alumni donors to the promise of the younger generations. The school would not stand to profit from some rich person's kid as much as it would from some brilliant son of immigrants, adn the student body would begin to reflect that.

As for these younger students, the focus of their teenage years would move away from "getting into college" or doing things that "would look good on their transcripts" (in the manner of our tenure-seeking professors) and move towards things that made them superior people in terms of independent thinking and real world life skills.


As an option, instead of a fixed percentage being given back to the school, other arrangements could be made: perhaps a Medical student could defer back payments until he was 35 but pay a slightly higher percentage. There could also be some sort of buy-out arrangement for the ultra rich. Presumably a four-year college education is not worth ½ a percent of a CEO pulling seven figures each year. Some sort of figure could be agreed on in advance to release the student from his obligation to the school.

The flip side would also need to be taken into account. There are many (and ought to be many) who pursue a career out of love for their field with the predetermination that they will live a modest life. I personally believe that this thinking is unnecessarily limiting, and that even someone who enjoys sea horse biology can still find a way to become wealthy given the right frame of mind.

There are many options for this. Traditional liberal arts universities in the English tradition could continue to exist focusing on less-profitable studies like history and philosophy. In general, however, these graduates feed back only into universities and thus have a static, circular effect which is not generally beneficial to the larger society. The best solution to this question, I believe, would be to begin studying these subjects in earnest after one has made one's fortune in something profitable. Or, as in England, these sorts of studies should be left to the rich who are exempt from the demands of regular life. (In another article I will talk about the value of repealing child-labor laws, allowing the likelihood of retirement by the early 40's, thus giving an individual the bulk of their productive adult life to learn things of his or her own choosing. Please suspend comment until you read the completed piece. . .) Alternately, a kind of "tax" on the graduate remittances could be levied to provide for less-profitable studies at the university if it would benefit student life to have those departments around.

Now you might be saying, "This sounds basically the same as the student loan program. It's like taking out a loan to go to trade school and then paying it back over years and years." The difference is that by paying a bank back a student loan, you are not having any effect on the institution itself. Your post-college payments are payable to a third party. As far as the school is concerned, unless you are going to donate millions of dollars, you are irrelevant as soon as you throw your cap in the air. Furthermore your remittances will vary with your income, so if you aren't making any money one year, you won't be saddled with debt payments. You will simply pay 1/2 a percent of your $2,000 income, and that would be that.


One question is: could the system be corrupted? The short answer is- very likely. Research on best teaching practices could be distorted to push students towards excessive financial achievement at the expense of personal happiness. Financial gain is hardly the only measure of life success, and there would need to be some system in place to assure that quality of life be valued appropriately. Again, in the long term, schools found to be abusing the education of their students would see a drastic drop in attendance (remember, they’re competing for students, not the other way around), and any temporary gain would not be worthwhile. A smart school would therefore set up effective checks on the power of its administrators.

I believe that the teachers’ salaries should be directly tied to the school’s annual financial gains so that each teacher receives a certain percentage of the school’s annual earnings. Better still, the teachers’ salaries could reflect the percentage of time they spent with each student during the college years. This would also set up some competition between teachers to attract the most/best students through innovative and effective teaching methods.

The difficulty with this is that teachers would not realize the rewards of their effort until for a few years after those efforts, so some alternate system would need to be put in place. Perhaps the teachers could be paid an estimated rate for the first few years as their students "get going" and be required to give a refund – not to go below a certain amount – or be given extra funds if their students turned out to be especially successful. This would be a little more complicated, but if there were certain guarantees, then it might work. Perhaps a better system could be worked out.

If this system seems too restrictive – in the sense that it views education as simply a means for making money in the narrow free-market view of the world – then perhaps some 20 % of the education would be required to be reserved for. . .Art History, Chaucer, whatever. The money to pay for it might even be able to be collected from the students themselves or through some kind of donation system. But a strict cap would have to be placed on what percentage of the budget could be used for school-reimbursed time, and this would have to be agreed upon by the students in advance.

The other non-academic aspects of College life could be outsourced so that the students participate as real workers in research facilities or as part of a volunteer book club, chess club, fencing team, etc. As stated above, the truth is only people with adequate money will be able to devote serious time to these other activities anyway. So it will be the rich who can afford them and the rich who would be able to send their kids to liberal arts college, where they would have done these activities otherwise, anyway. Those who make adequate money through the new system will be able, later in life, to pursue ‘extracurricular activities’ with more freedom, having become wealthy themselves.


That’s the start of the plan, anyway. There is no doubt much to be argued about, but this should get the ball rolling on a discussion.

In future, we shall look at the benefits of de-mandating so-called "primary" and high-school education. That young people act in such an immature way is partly due to society's constantly infantilizing them. Given a degree of power and real say over their lives, students will begin to accept basic self-responsibility earlier on and thus make the choices described above with greater care and intelligence. The value of work and de-schooling for younger children - both for themselves and for adult society - can not be overstated. I realize the public will largely be skeptical to such ideas, but I look forward to the opportunity to convince you of my proposals' merits. Please stay tuned. D




* Note: I am a firm believer in the value of leisure, reflection, and learning for learning’s sake. Presumably the proportional value of this would be factored in to a school’s calculus.

An alternative perspective on the Bailout

Sebastian Mallaby is very interesting. At the risk of encouraging China-bashing, I appreciate his looking into this a little more deeply. Click here for details.
D

At Least Bush Kept Us Safe - Enough, already

I fought the war,
I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the war won't stop for the love of God.

I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the war won't stop for the love of God.

I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the WAR WON!

-Metric


“At lease President Bush kept us safe for the last 7 years”

This gem has been making the rounds in recent days, and it deserves a thorough debunking. The suggestion is typical of the short-sighted approach Bush took to *all* problems, and this failure disguised as a success deserves to be unmasked.

When I was an orchestra conductor I used to tell my musicians, “Playing all the right notes isn’t the most important thing.” Of course I believed it was important, but during the time when I began in music, the recording and editing technology had made live performers obsessive in their attempts to emulate “perfect” recordings. The “live” part of live music went almost extinct during that time, and I felt it my duty to restore the vitality associated with living performances to classical music.

“If your only goal is to play all the right notes,” I would tell my group, “then if you play only one wrong note, then your entire performance was a failure and you go home dejected. But if your goal is to inspire people, move people, discover beautiful phrasing, interpret, play dynamics and clear articulations, then you have a much more exciting goal set. And should you accidentally play a wrong note, it won’t sink your entire performance- both you and the audience will go away enthused and inspired.”

As a New Yorker I am loathe to say this, but American could have handled another attack these past seven years. A unified nation, bound by shared sacrifice, shared courage, and shared ideals could have rebounded- and would have been supported by virtually every country on earth. In that moment the terrorists would have lost and America would have shown its tremendous strength and resilience to lead the world into the 21st century.

Instead we showed our tremendous weakness by cowering behind our bombs and our detention centers and by spewing the kinetic energy of our armies in the greatest ‘petit mort’ in history.

So Bush played all the right notes, right up until Tuesday. But one wrong note on Wednesday and the whole thing would have been for naught. And the wrong note will come, some day; Bush all but guaranteed it by ramping up the resentment that caused the 9/11 attacks in the first place. Only this time there will be no resilience to buoy it, no international outcry to condemn it, and no bombs left even to attempt to annihilate it.

Vision. It’s what leadership is all about.

The endless small-ball, 51% strategy of the Rove gang and its short-sightedness which saw only as far as the next poll lowered the bar for tolerable cynicism in America. The utter lack of long-term vision in favor of cheap-skate point scoring was the true failure of the Bush years. It permeated everything, from the steel tariffs to the War in Afghanistan to the War in Iraq to Abu G to New Orleans to going to Mars to Alternative Fuels Promises and on and on and on and on and on. Keeping us safe for another 24 hours day after day was one more failure, because short term thinking is an endless expenditure of energy, sucking possibility from every other potential endeavor. Endless fear and endless possibilities down the tube. Could there be a more perfect way to wreck a country?


Below is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic:


The argument that Bush has kept us safe for 7 years is specious. 7 years is not a very long time. Sensible policies after 9/11 would have guaranteed our safety for much longer without the constant threat that any day now the 'winning streak' might end. The enormous increase in anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and indeed the entire Muslim (and much of the non-Muslim) world has only increased the likelihood of a terrorist attack at some point in the future. The best Bush has done was to hold back the behemoth he created in the world for a few years while all but guaranteeing that it would explode somewhere down the line.

An intelligent policy after 9/11 would have been to harness global good will (including Middle Eastern good will) and domestic unity to suss out the root causes of terrorism as stated by bin Laden himself. As many said at the time, an investment in a sane energy policy with the subsequent withdrawal of much of our Middle Eastern meddling would basically have done the trick at a fraction of the cost. The stated (eventually) goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East would have happened not at gunpoint but under the manpower of the region's own people.

This would have taken the charge off of much of the issue of terrorism instead of ramping it up even further. Allowing those countries to readjust themselves to their own needs without the constant interference of US oil interests would bring the wave of Democracy that Bush hoped for much quicker and with much less unnecessary U.S. bloodshed.

So I am unimpressed by Bush's keeping us safe for a measly 7 years - and by the way, does anyone honestly think that even the most peacenik Democrat (including Jimmy Carter) wouldn't have done the same? It's not like Bush was out there himself surveilling Waziristan. We do have a fairly capable military and intelligence agency that will do its job no matter who is in office. And no reasonable person after 9/11 would have instructed them to dial down their efforts at weeding out terrorists. Ramping up anti-terrorism efforts after 9/11 was a no-brainer- and perhaps that's why we credit Bush with having gotten it right.

So let's put that one to rest. The Bush presidency has been an abject failure. The fact that Americans' minds are not at ease 7 years after 9/11 is the evidence of that. The perpetual war he started was unnecessary and foolish. Instead of talking about having kept us safe, let's talk about the squandered opportunities that our endless distraction with Iraq has cost us. When we understand that we could have stayed safe, promoted national and international unity, created a new energy future for the world, and helped democratize the Middle East by Leaving Them Alone (!), had we had a thoughtful president in charge - then will we begin to realize the extent of the catastrophe that has been "the past 7 years." Keeping us safe was child's play.

The Bailout- Take your head out of the sand

So the economy is in crisis. We're all going to hell in a hand basket. The market's down; home prices are down, and that's the good news- because it effects the people who still actually own homes and the businesses that are still actually in business.

The market has run out of options, and the Fed has come to the end of its rope and is essentially giving away free money to banks who are still refusing to spend it. The treasury is the last bulwark, then, between civilization and total planetary financial meltdown. The treasury, of course is billions of dollars in debt, so it's really the communist Chinese that are holding the world together with both hands, as it were. So whether or not you believe socialism has hit the US, there's no denying it's the socialists who've got our backs.

But we're happy to put our faith in the government, since there would appear to be no other option. We're looking for our leaders to lead us, and we will essentially do whatever they say. How far we've come from the days of King George.

One of the folks we're looking to is the Fed Chair, Ben Bernanke. Highly touted these days, almost as an ocd-style mantra, is that Mr. Bernanke is an expert on the great depression and therefore is especially well suited to lead us through the financial crisis. And if we look at the policies being dictated by the officials, they mirror the New Deal solutions almost exactly, with the spigots of national debt thrown open to all and sundry.

This approach is incredibly stupid.

It's not that you shouldn't spend money in a recession. It's that you shouldn't base your decision making on precedent. History may repeat itself, yes, but it never repeats itself in the same way. History is too smart for people, and our childish attempts to pull an end-run on the story of mankind are futile. Because it is us, finally who are desiring the story to unfold as it does. We want the financial meltdown, we want the tech bubble, because these are the stories that animate time and give motion to our lives. The intellectual notion that we can somehow "stop" history by outsmarting it is preposterous. History will simply find another way to do what it's going to do. Because as we stand in our one position and regulate all around us, we fail to see that we ourselves remain unregulated, and so the weak link through which history will pass has already been written- by ourselves!

The endless attempts to "meta"-regulate ourselves all end in failure, because whichever Archimedian point you choose to stand on to view a situation creates a blind spot where you are standing. It is inevitable that as you look in one direction you fail to look in another. That is the story of life, and it behooves us to embrace it and enjoy the ups and downs rather than try to control absolutely everything and grind it to a halt. This is where the new age admonition to "let go" becomes more than an annoying slogan. It becomes a valuable life practice, economically, socially, and environmentally. This is the holistic view. The non-holistic view practiced by really smart people is to simply write off the remainder, what they don't know, "where they're standing," and say that it is not important and that they know enough.

If one were to postulate a god at this point, now would be when it would start laughing at us. The inevitable product of our belief that something, anything, in the universe "doesn't matter" is that that thing, which is as much a part of the universe as anything else, will swell in importance in direct proportion to our ignorance of it. And then that missing element, in order to reclaim its rightful place in the universal order will exact revenge on us. The revenge will inevitably come "out of nowhere" since we ourselves have taken the thing off of our map by saying it doesn't matter.

My concern, from a practical point of view, from an economics point of view, is that we *never* know everything. Never. And when we decide that certain economic factors "don't matter" simply because we are intellectually incapable of factoring them in, those factors will become the source of our problems. Inevitably.


There used to be an ostrich bubble in this country. Ostrich meat was going to be the next big thing. Ostrich was to farmers in the 80s what wasteofmoney.com was to techies in the 90s- the ticket to big bucks. Well ostriches eventually collapsed (I'm sure you're shocked), and many farmers were left holding the bag.

Well the regulators took care of that, and you know what- there hasn't been an ostrich bubble since. The system worked!

Well.

Those of us still holding 200 shares of wasteofmoney.com at 2 cents a share are feeling the same way. We're not expecting another tech bubble very soon either.

Why?

Because while history repeats itself, it never repeats itself in the same way. The regulators will have at with the evil bankers and neuter them all. Fine. But does anyone really think there's going to be another finance bubble? No one alive would throw the dice on a half million dollar, no interest, adjustable rate mortgage if they knew they were pulling 50k a year, gross household. Nobody. And yet the feds will be tightening the screws like it's the Spanish Inquisition, not realizing that the they're stretching a corpse.

There will be no more housing bubbles. But will there be a solar energy widget bubble? Maybe an implantable cell phone chip bubble? A global warming protection ozone converter bubble? Maybe it'll be goji berries- they're from the Himalayas!

All these things are possible if not inevitable, and yet the public stoning that the feds are administering will do nothing to prevent them.

Back to ostrich farming*-

At the height of the boom, ostrich farming became full of greedy morons who had no business being ostrich farmers. They never belonged there in the first place. And when the bust came, all those people went back to where they belonged and the only ones left farming ostrich were the ones who wanted to be farming ostrich- real ostrich farmers. The whole industry needed to be cleared out from the dross - not just because it was an insult to the 3 or 4 people in the world who really love farming ostrich, but because the resources represented by all those poseur ostrich-wranglers were required elsewhere- in tech, in nursing, in grocery, wherever. The system that includes all people, like all systems in nature, is efficient. It demands people be in the right place so that all the bases are covered for collective survival.

During the tech boom I was in the non-profit sector, and I couldn't find *anybody* to work for me. Why? Because every jackass who could read was running a website and making mid-six-figures. Well a system can't run when everybody is doing only one thing, so the system righted itself. In markets we call it "correcting." In bubbles we call it "bursting." In life we call it getting back to reality. (And in Farming it's called soil depletion.) It's nice to take a trip now and again, but to thrive, we really need everybody doing what they do best, and not everybody was built to code javascript 16 hours a day.

Another example: since 2000 it seemed like everyone and her sister in New York was a real estate agent. It was the ticket for anybody with a blackberry to strike it rich. "Concrete Gold," it could have been dubbed. While pricing my own bit of real estate I met dozens of realtors- all of them terrible. Why? Because they weren't realtors. They were computer programmers and bishops and school teachers and musicians who were just trying to make a buck off the rising tide. Fair enough, nothing wrong with taking an opportunity. But the larger system still requires school teachers and firemen and mechanics. And with all those resources wrapped up in selling overpriced apartments, the system threatened to become too imbalanced. So the system burst itself.

That's what systems do- they self correct, because it is in everybody's interest to do so. Those firefighters in realtor's clothing were, in the end, harming the system and making survival and prosperity less likely for the whole group, so the tidal wave comes by and washes them back to shore. No harm done.

Not a bad way to look at things, really.

Lets take a look at the real estate bubble and its sister bubble, the finance bubble. What caused it? The easy answer is greedy financiers and lax regulators. Well bully. And bull too. These guys were just doing their thing just like you and me, trying to make a buck. If we look a little deeper, though, we have to ask- why were these loans being pushed so hard? Why wasn't credit card debt the new bubble or car loans?

Well mortgage rates are structured in a peculiar way: First of all the life of the loan is usually 30 years. The payments are structured so that for the first 15 of those 30 years, almost all of your payments go to pay interest instead of principle. So for the first 15 years you're basically just paying rent- you're not paying 'back' the loan and gaining equity in your home. The last peculiarity of a mortgage is that you get a special tax break for taking one out. Why is it set up this way? The government *wants* you to take out mortgages. They *want* you to buy homes, and they want you to *stay* in them. And when they're all paid off they want you to hold on to them.

But why? Why does the government want you to buy a home and stay put? Yes there's the bit about the American Dream of Homeownership, but that's mainly hype. If it really was a dream, they wouldn't have to try to control whether you buy or not or how long you live there. The real reason seems fairly sane: homeownership encourages stable communities. It's good for the country to have people locked down in one place, according to the government. The kids grow up together, people care about their neighborhoods, keep the lawns trimmed, the potholes fixed, etc. The "pride of ownership" insures it.

Well this whole ideal of planting down roots in a subdivision for at least half of your adult life probably made sense 50, 60, or 80 years ago. After all, you'd graduate from high school, get a job in a factory, or graduate from college and get a job with a corporation, and work and work and work and work until you died or retired. It must have seemed perfectly sensible to lock people into their homes since they would be locked into their jobs too, and these twin lock-downs created the stability that those in charge decided was best for the country and those not-in charge went along with.

Well how does that sound today? Is there a single business in the world that you are positive will be around in 30 years? How about 20 years? How about 5 years? Bear Stearns, maybe? Enron? WorldCom? If it were me I'd put my money on Coke and Pepsi, but beyond that I can't think of much that's a sure bet in 30 years. And young people today are cynical about the prospects of "job security" anyway. The recent stats come to something like the average college graduate today having 7 different employers before she is 30. Do you think all of those employers are going to be in the same neighborhood? Do you think that person is going to want to go through the hassle of the mortgage process with a 30 year commitment when they have no idea where they're going to be in 3 years?

The answer is no. Obviously. People these days, especially people with enough money to afford a home are not going to experience themselves locally. As the world "flattens" a US architect getting a job in Dubai will be taken for granted as normal. An actor will easily split his or her time between New York, Toronto, and LA. Remember, these mortgage arrangements were set down before there were ever regular trans-atlantic flights. And when the airlines deregulate internationally, the prices for such flights will begin to go down and down.**

The point of this is that the mortgage system as stands is past its sell-by date. Nobody likes it, nobody wants it. It's not fair, and it artificially affects the price of real estate in unpredictable yet manipulable ways.

I live in the exact same apartment I did 9 years ago. Didn't spend a dime to improve it. The demand to live in my cushy neighborhood is exactly what it was when I moved in. And yet the price of the apartment doubled in the intervening years- not the value of the apartment, which if anything has deteriorated as the appliances started to wear out, but the price. Why? Because when mortgage rates are low, people can "afford" more house, so the price of the house goes up to accommodate the fact that there are more eligible buyers for the same home. But it's not that these people can afford to buy more house, it's that they can afford to pay the same amount of "rent" as they would have if the mortgage rates were higher. As the rates go lower, the monthly payments for the same amount of house goes down, so it seems like you're getting more for less. But it's still the same house in the same neighborhood- we just don't value it as such. So this gives the government incredible latitude (by adjusting interest rates) in causing and un-causing housing bubbles.

The more short term reason for our current housing bubble is that the fed already tried this artificial market propping after the dot com bust. After that first 21st century recession, the market needed to clear, people needed to feel the ouch so they would learn not to touch the hot stove again. (You better believe the ostrich people will think twice before they'll be convinced that llama meat is the new bacon.)

But nobody felt the pinch, because the fed, in their "wisdom" took the edge off for us a bit by dropping interest rates into the basement. This made money "cheaper" and with it everything else you wanted too. This extra low rate actually created the real estate bubble by making real estate *appear* so cheap. With prices this low, everybody got in the game, and we found ourselves in the same position from our systems point of view- all of the farmers, all of the ambulance drivers, all of the theater critics were selling homes. Unsustainable. Wash it away.

But in the larger sense, more had to go than a few inadequate real estate hawkers. It's time in our collective psyche to be more mobile, and it's time for the mortgage death-grip on our freedom to let go. Imagine a world with PDAs, lap tops, iPods, cheap cars, but you still had to go home to make a phone call. Ridiculous. Well it's time for us to start looking at real estate and career the same way. That is why this recession will be so long. Because it will not relent until we have adequately rethought our attitude towards fixed real estate and reimagined our relationship with our careers.

This will be a huge revolution in the way we think and do business. The entire value of a home will have to be rethought. It will have to do more with the cost of building than any sort of price flexibility that we are used to now. Leases will have to be shorter term, and there will need to be much more in the way of 'hotel-like' temporary residences, now the province of business jst-setters primarily.

For those buying a home, they will have to use something more akin to a high balance credit card than the bizarre, highly controlled mortgage system. This would make buying and selling a lot easier, it would make paying off the home a more flexible proposition where more can be paid during the fat years and less during the lean years depending on *your* income, not the arbitrary fed rate. Or you could pay nothing at all for a period. If different loan companies could compete for different pricing structures (not just "interest only" loans but different principle to interest ratios) the consumer would benefit, there would be greater market predictability, and the real estate industry as a whole become more lean and efficient. Good for everyone.

Systematically speaking, this is what "wants" to happen. This is where this recession is going in terms of transforming the way we think and act as a collective.
The stagnation in the "air" is the space needed to disintegrate the old models in our collective mind and begin to dream up the new ones that will allow for a more flexible future vis a vis real estate, banking, and career "stability."

The great wise men who have "seen this before" have not. The concept of precedent is something that allows us to feel we have some control over something over which we have none. The New Deal-based bail-outs, masterminded by "smart people" will be a failure, because they address what people think is the problem rather than seeing the seed of transformation inherent in what foolish smart people call a crisis.

The tide in the psyche has turned, and mobility will become key for the next generation of global citizens. That global generation has already been born and we as a culture will need to be ready for them when it comes time for them to buy houses - for their way of life, not our grandparents'.***

So it's not just about real estate, it's about the career/work-structure that underpins real estate. The top-down corporate model will not remain reliable in its current form. It will need to be restructured. The 'housing' crisis is really a mortgage crisis, but housing and career patterns are part of a hidden axis in the psyche, and one can not transform one without the other. Right now we're seeing one end of that axis fail so that it can become more flexible. Before we're done with crises we will need to see the complementary shoe fall as well.


Post Script and Political Caveat:

Now I am no fool. The government can not be seen to be doing nothing. The great swarming masses, reared on the value of "hard work and responsibility," will not tolerate idleness. Whether the Treasury Secretary be Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, or my Aunt Miriam, the policy would be the same: spend and spend and spend.

But ironically, it is idleness which in fact holds the most promise for saving civilization- once the notion of saving civilization is dispensed with. For what we are experiencing now is not maintaining an undesirable status quo but a joyous unraveling of same. And the less we do to interfere with that, the less painful the transition will be and the sooner we will enjoy the fruits of the new order of things.

If the government must act, it should make every effort to alleviate the inevitable suffering of the most vulnerable, and make every attempt to keep the slightly less vulnerable from losing ground. Bailouts directly to taxpayers would be the best way to do this, either through checks, mortgage re-negotiations, mortgage subsidies, or a combination of all three. Such action would not be economic but humanitarian and would be just in the minds of the people. This would encourage them to ease up and not fight the process as much.

Would chaos ensue if the financial system were left to collapse. Absolutely. But it is chaos out of which all new worlds are formed, and we should therefore embrace it. We, of course, will not. And so we will watch this crisis unfold for longer than is really necessary, just as the Depression did.

Fair enough. It reflects the universe's great sense of humor that Mr. Bernanke & Co., who studied history in order to prevent it from happening again are watching that very same history repeating itself all over again- right under their noses. Perhaps this will set a precedent for mistrust in precedent and instigate a trust in the future- which has never let us down. I certainly hope so.


*I have omitted the preamble from this piece which details my version of systems theory, referenced below. I will be posting it in another context soon.

**You may say that's just as well for the rich people who go to Columbia and were going to be international citizens of the world anyway, but what about the grunts? Their jobs aren't moving all over the place. Don't be so sure. Within 10 years, everything that can be outsourced will. There will be fewer grunt jobs available in America anyway- we will be forced to raise our class status relative to the rest of the world if we are to survive. But for those jobs that are guaranteed to be stuck in one place for 50 years (and if you can name one I'll buy you a donut), those folks can have their homes, or they can just rent.

***This by the way is one more point in favor of youth suffrage. Children born today who are fluent in mobile technology will be born expecting more mobile living. If they had a voice in the discussion, they would be showing us the way we are needing to head, while we are still stuck thinking like our parents.

Arrabiato waxes poetic

from the comments section of George Will's column:


"This chaotic inauguration, with its out of control crowds who were treated so badly by this city's government, the absolutely inexcusable eff-up by the Chief Justice of the United States with the oath of office-and what was up with CJ Roberts "reproving" Obama, huh? calling him "Senator" Obama (he was already President when the bungled oath got underway-why would he not have called him Pres. elect Obama, or President?) cutting him off, completely mangling the oath, and then asking Obama "so help you God?" as in a question! I don't know about anyone else, but that bungled oath of office threw me almost as much as it did Obama-it threw him off his stride, his inaugural speech was not inspirational-the choice of prayer givers-AWFUL, Aretha's hat-AWFUL, AND HER SINGING NON-INSPIRATIONAL, that "poet" (I use the term loosely) MORE AWFULNESS-IT WAS ALL AROUND NOT GOOD-IT JUST WENT DOWNHILL AFTER THAT INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING OF THE MANGLED OATH-AND THEN, SEN. KENNEDY HAS TO BE TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL FROM THE INAUGURAL LUNCH WITH CONVULSIONS-I SINCERELY HOPE IT GETS BETTER FROM HERE ON OUT, BUT I'M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH....VERY INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING...."


Chin up, A. You know what they say. . .bad wedding, great marriage. . . D-Blog

A word from the guy with the bowtie

George Will really is super.

and some more, briefly

I was thinking on my way home about Rudy Giuliani's mocking during the general election of Barack's status as a former community organizer. It was an ugly scene to behold, no doubt, but it is worth thinking about at least for a moment to see if there actually was any meat on those savage political bones.

The risk is, as I stated two posts ago, that the community orgainzer, as an outsider, may himself really desire to be embraced by the community that he organizes- and yet he never can. Giulinani's cynical dismissal of someone who does not practice cut-throat realpolitik is an attempt to expose the unconscious motives behind this kind of communitarian do-gooderism.

I think it feeds into Barack's bold dream for community leadership, since the organizer of the community is by definition not part of the community but stands without it. This is the perverse paradox one saw in yesteryear with Stalin and still today with Hu Jintao. There is such a thing as an organically self-organizing community, but the structure it organizes is not communitarian but hierarchical. This is the case with all mammals and humans are no exception. Communitarian-style communities (excuse me) must be artificially constructed, and their creators must therefore be excluded from the sense of belonging that is inherent in the communal experience. This produces a strange paradox for the outcast social engineer and will likely prove a source of frustration for Barack in his attempt to mobilize the great American center as a community.

Once more I wish him well, but on this particular front I remain wary. The scene from Huckleberry Finn keeps flashing through my head- when Sherburn steps out on the porch and yells at the mob about how they're all cowards and that they only brought half a man with them to lynch him, etc. A wonderful indictment of the weak character of group actors in general, and one that tends to get ignored by - groups.

Communities are certainly capable of great works, and there are innumerable things that can be done by the many that can not be done by the individual. But the struggle between the one and the many is an ongoing one, and it strikes me that America is one of the few places on earth where the individual is given so much room to succeed or fail by his own merits. Herding is natural and easy for most. But for those from whom that instinct is missing, it is a kind of impossible suffocation that stagnates the flow of progress which will inevitably come around and benefit the herds that that individual has left behind.

Perhaps we will find Barack leaving his own legacies of individual genius for the herds to lap up in future. I would like to see his own magnificent character flexed and displayed as a proud individual whose own bootstraps are well-worn from a lifetime of tugging. Let the communities organize around that.

Further thoughts. . .

Hmmm.

Maybe part of the problem with the speech was that it was not what it wanted to be. I'm hoping here.

To make the speech that (perhaps) Obama wanted to hear, to make the speech his supporters wanted to hear, and to make the speech that most of the country and all of the rest of the world wanted to hear- that would be the speech that irrefutably repudiates the past 8 years. Obama's election was a vindication for all those elements - human, environmental, and philosophical - that were so thoroughly trod upon during the Bush years. It was a catharsis. Many of us assumed that out of respect (and political sense), Obama held his tongue during the past three months, but that once the oath was sworn he would hold forth in true revolutionary spirit.

But he didn't. This would have been his chance to stand there in full vindication of those who elected him and the gestures he would seek to make around the world and in one fell swoop announce the end of an era, the end of the bickering and the petty cronyism. Americans are exhausted with outrage and futility and desiring to know that the worst of the intransigence is truly behind us. The world yearns to hear that with-us-or-against-us, anti-intellectual populism is truly a thing of the past for at least the next 4 years.

But we didn't.

There were moments. There was the bit about worn-out dogmas. That was nice. "[O]ur time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed." That was good too. And I think the high point was the insistence that Freedom and Security not be seen as an either-or proposition (citing Hamilton & Co. would have been nice to give this some heft).

But there was no death-blow to the past. There was no "double bar," as we say in music, ending one movement and beginning another. There was a kind of 'coitus interuptus' in the national outrage whose one true moment to be expressed was now.

And this may be the weakness of Obama's brilliance and the limitation of his academic sensibilities. He was in most ways, too polite, too deferential, too demure.

I can chalk this up to two things - neither bodes well for Obama the president.

First of all there was his civility to present company. Much has been written in recent days of John F. Kennedy's visual recrimination of the Eisenhower administration by his simple choice not to be protected by an overcoat during his inaugural. THat was a made-for-TV image of the page turning. Words were hardly necessary. In Obama's case, with the now-former president (feels good to say that!) sitting only a few feet away, it would have been unbecoming for the professor to give him the deep verbal shafting he so richly deserves. And yet, many of us in America (and certainly in Europe) feel that kind of rancorous page-turn needed to happen. In public. Today. And that would have been enough. One good "I told you so" on behalf of the lefties and the Euros would have been all that was required. Instead, we got reconciliation and forberence. Mature, yes, politically intelligent, I'm afraid not.

Because it's true: The left wants blood. We're human - self-righteous, but human. We have those primitive desires for revenge, for overturn, for trammeling on the graves of our enemies. Most of us understood that the untested black man could not bring the rage at any moment before this one for fear of getting dumped into the Sharpton/Jackson heap. Understood. Keep your head dowm, get the delegates, do the thing. But the tacit understanding was that once the victory was sealed, once there was no going back** that the great exhale followed by the great "Fuck You!" could be released.

But it wasn't.

So maybe it's not coitus interrupted. Maybe it's actually blue balls. But that rage has to be given a voice somewhere. It can no longer just be implicit.

And that is the second point. That emotions are always important in politics. That most people will never be capable of the rigors of intellectual debate- which require the suspension of passion in order to make informed judgments. For most folks, passion is all they've got, and to suspend it would simply mean the end of life. This goes for those on the fringe left as well as the wahoos in the heartland. We need the release, otherwise we fester, and that festering will be more deletirous than any one-off Bush-bash at the inaugural would have been. A simple "America has chosen change over stasis, hope over cynicism, and dedicated service over incompetent ctonyism" would have sufficed.

Just like the right, the left has its codewords. Throwing in a biblical reference is a wink and a nod to the right that "I'm on your side." There are countless sleights of tongue that can be used to imply that the spics, niggers, and Jews are out to get you without saying so explicitly. The left has them too, and in polite company (with Bush & Dick within spitting distance) they should be used with subtlety and tact.

Obama did not. Or at least not really. I am fully in favor of his current tract of bipartisanship and his politically unnecessary yet governmentally intelligent embrace of the right. His desire to be president of the whole country is legitimate and to be commended. The need to alienate some of your left flank in the service of this lofty goal is required too. I have no problem with this.

But there was a missed opportunity here to let some of his constituency - which we must admit are also part of the whole country - feel their vindication.

But he didn't.

We shall see. I have no doubt that Obama can walk the partisan tightrope forever. He has the political acmumen and the intellectual fortitude to be more than up to the task.

With the public I'm not so sure. How long can we suspend our passions while Barack reasons us out of this noodle? The answer to this question may inform the outcome predicted in my previous post. For the time being, I think America is content to be exhausted and let the smart people figure it out. The time to have called on us to act and dedicate ourselves to service was on September 12th 2001. Or 2002. Or 2003. But since that time the good will that underpins service has been eroded beyond all recognition and transmuted itself only into vast and unpayable credit card debt. Patriotism to our markets has not payed the dividends that Obama's Americorps expansion would have 5 years ago.

So we'll see. The emotional energy required for action, perseverence, and passion for service is too still at this time to be actively harnassed. THe level of exhaustion in the country can not be overestimated. The almost certain failure of the stimulus to achieve its goals will leave us with a matching twin sister for the debt we are incurring in the Iraq war- and like the Iraq war we will likely have nothing to show for it other than a few extra bridges.

The one pool of emotional energy available in the country at this time is rage against the Bush catastrophe. The failure to harness the power of that emotion may be Obama's political undoing. Dispassionate reasoning is the privelege of the gifted. It is not the motivator of the masses. If Obama continues to ask from the people that which they do not possess, he will drain their morale even further leaving only him and his bipartisanship to steer a ship that has long since sunk.


The engine of the ship of state is the passion of its people which can be directed by a sage leader towards the best of causes. Obama never bested Hillary Clinton on this front, and her camp warned him of the potential consequences. Political reconciliation and good will have their purpose, but it can quickly drain the powerful electric current generated by alternating poles of public passion. Perhaps Obama should expand his quest for alternative forms of energy to include something that will motivate his people without having them fight with one another. This will be the real trick.





**Regarding Obama's being safely sworn in, I'm sure I'll be getting some right wing emails soon challenging the validity of the oath of office, since it was not repeated verbatim from the Chief Justice. These will follow closely on the further emails to invalidate Obama's citizenship documents. So Barack may yet feel like the door isn't totally closed behind him.

My Concerns About Obama

I had been looking forward to Obama's speech for some time.

He seems to understand the breadth of his mandate and the patience the people have for a reality check, and so his tone of late has been hardly as soaring as it was, say, in the mid-primaries. This is to be expected.

But to my "American" ear, the tone of today's speech was unnecessarily morbid. Perhaps 8 years of Bush and 7 seasons of West Wing have attuned me to the tenor of boundless optimism and cheer that has characterized presidential speech since the demise of Jimmy Carter. But despite my recent seasoning there was nonetheless a peculiar relish the new president seemed to have in the seriousness and pessimism that marked the first several minutes of the speech. I admit, I was taken aback.

Where was the "We can achieve, we will break through this, America shall rise again from the ashes of cynicism and cronyism. . ."? There were glimpses throughout to be sure, but it was hard for me to feel that they ever took us out of the grimness of the address enough to lift our spirits over the next horizon. Indeed this seems to be one of the rare moments when Barack appeared truly tone deaf. The national mood, fully aware of the impending doom, has been in particular good cheer lately in anticipation of the inspired leadership Barack has to offer. And amongst many of us, there was the faint hope that the soaring rhetoric of the old days might make a brief reappearance, if only to remind us that what brought us all into this guy's camp in the first place was not his cool-headed competence but his fantastical idealism.

So for me the speech was a bit of a let down. And I hate to say it, but I even sensed the slightest bit of self-satisfaction in talking down to a lazy, sloppy worldview for which the self-made man must have some real personal contempt. The overall thrust of the speech was that, yes, government will do its share, and as well as possible, but it will be you, the people who must raise yourselves up and do the extraordinary. You, the people will lead the country to better days. In your hands, in your care will be your future and the future of this country. This, I'm sure Obama imagines, is the true call of leadership- to lead people into their own power, to step out of the way and give people the opportunities to better themselves and create their own greatness.

And herein lies my concern.

Americans believe in the exceptionalism of America, but not of Americans. In general our citizens pride themselves in their ordinariness, not in their specialness. Being an "average" American is a point of pride in this country, and distaste for and mistrust of individual excellence is almost a national religion.

Obama's rise above his life's obstacles, his taking responsibility for his actions and his choices- these are the hallmarks of great men. But the electorate, indeed the country, is not made up of great men. It is rather made up of many, many small men.
The idealist in Obama has been vindicated because he, himself has done the work on his own behalf. The idealist in most people flounders because they expect their ideals to come true for free. And in many ways this is the American dream that most Americans want. They are small, anxious to evade tough decisions, and eager to pass the blame onto someone else. This is not the course to greatness that Obama has charted in his own life, but it is the course to mediocrity that most men have charted in theirs.

Many an idealist has risen to a place of power with the earnest goal of liberating people from their predicaments. Empower them, give them responsibility for their own decisions, these leaders believe, and the people will rise to the occasion. Well often as not these leaders retire realizing that if those people had really wanted to be self-empowered, they would have done it already, and that really what these people want (despite their own inner pretensions) is to be led. This is a sad moment of realization for the idealistic leader who has tirelessly toiled to manifest his own dreams in reality through perseverence, struggle, and the exercise of exceptional gifts. That the rest of the world does not relish these virtues comes as a shocking diasppointment to the leader, himself a truly great man. He may find, reflecting on his disillusionment, that his desire to save the people was an abstraction- to feel needed, wanted by the enormous masses was the deferment of the hope to be needed, wanted by anybody.

After all, the man capable of the self-discipline to realize his vision is himself by necessity an outcast. He can not fit in, because to fit in would mean to dilute the attainment. So as the man walks alone, he can not but dream that somewhere, some time, there will be a world, a culture that will include him. And by projecting that culture, that clique, onto the vast, anonymous masses of a country, indeed a world, he will seek redemption through their embrace.

But this is my fear for Obama. That they will not embrace him once they fully digest what he is asking of them. "You are the change you have been waiting for." If that were really the case, then they would not have needed to wait. They would have changed themselves already. That people do not want to extract from the herd, that masses of people do not want to individuate, do not want to self-actualize is a fact of history that can not be denied. It is only the man forced by his fate to become himself that is capable of the discipline, the hard work, to accomplish this worthy goal. But to expect that of others, indeed to demand that of others. . .well that is only to remind them of their own unworthiness, their own lack of discipline, their own insecurities about their gifts and their ability to achieve.

And this again is my fear for Obama: that the people will turn on him. That the mirror he holds up for them will not reflect their glory but their weakness. That the light he shines will show, in even starker relief, their flaws and their failures. That his demand to raise themselves up will be too much for those desiring only a savior- and they will revolt.

There has been for some time speculation about the specter of assassination in the tradition of promising young leaders in this country. I am no longer as concerned about this as I once was. I don't think the loony fringe will decide to take him out in the name of white supremacy or some such. My greater fear, though, is that America will grow weary of the difficult dream that Obama has for them. They will prefer to keep the outcast in his traditional role as scapegoat and shove him aside rather than face their own sins.

If this is so, then I can foresee the public's internal estrangement from the Obama ideal being cause for his leaving the stage, any assassination being the outward expression of unconscious collective will rather than petty vengeance or agenda. This will be all for the best perhaps, as Obama, arriving at such a state will be filled with disillusion beyond measure. He will know when and if he has lost the people. And he will know that his dream for them is not enough to wake them from their sleep.


Of course like all idealists, I am hoping to be wrong about this. I am hoping that Obama's own path has brought him the balance of wisdom required to seek his own fulfillment through himself and not strictly through service to an anonymous "the people." It is so easy to project one's fantasies of love, acceptance, and community onto those whom one will never personally know (and it is equally easy to accept the love of a leader whom we will never know as well). If this is Obama's course, then I am sad for the let down he will face with us and we with ourselves. But if Barack is able to use his own competence and intelligence in the service of the people, then that will be for the best of all, and finally that is all the people will require.

We must not forget that Americans were seduced more by Reagen than by Carter, more by Bush than Kerry. From our politicians, we like the dream, we like the horizon- the nuts and bolts not so much. That we get enough of in regular life. If the politicians can turn our daily grind into magic, into the myth of America, then we will work forever. If we must work to curb our own excesses (or worse, the excesses of others), then the inspiration goes missing. The last time we needed to work like this, Russia gave us the motivation. The time before that it was Hitler. They were the great causes, the great adversaries. Now it is only us. Bush tricked us for a while into believing our adversaries were the teeming swarms of anonymous Muslims, but Barack has reminded us that our true adversaries are really ourselves- and may have been all along. America no longer has any great enemy. We are at war with ourselves, with our own souls. We are at war with our own sloth, with our own greed, with our own arrogance.

Obama has already won that war within himself. It's what makes him a great man. To lead the American people to victory over their own souls. . .that will be a challenge unprecedented by any leader of any time. I wish him Godspeed.



NB: in case the eschelon machine happens upon this blog through the keywords of "assassination" and "Obama," let me make myself clear that I have no intention or desire to see such an act occur, nor would I in any way imaginable participate or encourage participation in same. DG