Racist, Xenophobic, Democrats

I think that in the great political debates, one of the most powerful tools we can use to win our arguments is to use the stock, classic arguments of our opponents against them.

On the left, an obvious example of this rhetorical technique is the argument that if abortion is murder, and murder is wrong, then how is the death penalty not murder, and how is the death penalty not wrong? If you're against murder, you should be against murder, so what gives? How effective this line of argument has been in persuading death penalty advocates is up for debate, but I'm sure the argument is very satisfying to the left (if for no other reason than it validates their belief that the right is filled with heartless, irrational nut jobs who don't have the brains to make a consistent argument and are therefore worthy of our unending contempt).

On the right, more recently (and to my mind less effectively), the case is being made that the unborn are a discriminated against minority and that the leading edge of the civil rights movement is not the gay movement but the movement to protect the fetus from murder. This argument is virtually unknown in the left-o-sphere, and even if it were, I don't think it would hold a lot of water. But nonetheless, it is used by the right to bewilder themselves about how leftists can be so adamant about the rights and treatment of adult minorities, when they can be so heartless and cruel about the rights of the powerless. These arguments are again a powerful bludgeon to reinforce our own stereotypes about our ideological opponents.

And that's not likely to change.

So in the spirit of marginally constructive debate, I would like to offer the right a better bludgeon, a more powerful bludgeon, and a bludgeon that will not only fracture the left's coalition but will be infinitely harder to dispute (on the left's own terms) than the fetus-as-citizen argument which is far more problematic.*

And that argument is about unions, and it is about racism, and goes something like this: "How can the left support private sector labor unions when private sector labor unions are blatantly, boldly, and entrenchedly racist?"

Wha??? Unions are racist??? A little blue-collar for coastal tastes, perhaps, but racist???


Well, we can start with a preamble, though this is not the meat of the argument, and remind ourselves that for most of the course of the high union period, union members were almost exclusively white, Christian, heterosexual (or closeted) males. This is quite simply a fact. There was no room in these cloistered organizations for the breadth of diversity that would represent the great coalition of leftist idealists the Democratic Party has associated itself with for the past 50 years. The unions and the diversity clique have historically been totally at odds.

But that's not the point, and in fact the domestic diversity batch is not the object of modern union racism. In fact, beyond racism, we'd have to add another left vs. right bludgeon to the mix: xenophobia. Not only are unions racist but they are also xenophobic, that horrible term the Democrats use to beat down border state Republicans who wish to shoot migrating Mexicans from airplanes like wild hogs.

So what am I getting at here? Unions ostensibly exist to protect workers from injurious, inhuman labor conditions and to insure a living wage for honest work. To take the auto unions in America for example, it has been proven that labor conditions for car manufacturing are safe enough that Subaru, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and others safely build cars all over America safely and without union labor. They make a decent living and, by all accounts, a superior product- without these protections for their mortal being.

So the notion that we need certain labor unions to protect the health and wealth of workers has been proven fallacious in America.

We can also note that an AFL/CIO car maker earns a real wage in the $100,000+ a year range for a job that can be done - arguably better - by non-unionized labor. Presumably operating the machines is not so complicated that it takes special union-boosted training to accomplish. It looks more or less like anyone can do it.

And that "anyone" includes Mexicans in Mexico, Chinese in China, Indonesians in Indonesia, Indians in India, Vietnamese in Vietnam, and Thai in Thailand. Outsourcing to all of these countries will get you more or less the same car (when built to US specifications) for labor that is far, far cheaper. And while one of labor's biggest beefs is with the "wealthy," they seem to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that in any one of the above mentioned countries, someone earning low 6-figure income is *extremely* wealthy.

They are so wealthy in fact that the salary for one unionized American worker could pay the salary of 10 or more Thai, Chinese, or Indian workers. Easily. For the same work, a company (Subaru, Ford, etc.) could feed the families of 10 men instead of just 1. The only difference between those men is that the 1 is American (and probably white, Christian, and straight), and the others are generally dark-skinned, non-Christian (and probably straight).

How is this not racist? How is the valuing of a white life worth the lives of 9 dark-skinned lives to do exactly the same job? I don't understand it. The only answer I can come up with is that the unions have not just a protectionist bent but a racist and xenophobic one as well. For any college educated Western elite, this is clearly unacceptable, and the rift that runs through the Democratic party between the educated coastal intellectuals and the midwestern blue-collar union workers ought to be chiseled out by any thoughtful Republican.

This is a wedge issue for within the Democratic party. And it is one that most Democrats are unaware of, because the tent-members are so spread out geographically.

But it is there, and it is undeniably real - particularly on an intellectual liberal's own terms. Why should we prop up one white family and let 10 Mexican families starve (and then force them over the border to be shot like wild hogs by flying Republicans)?

There is no justification for this. Private sector unions are inherently racist and should be abolished by the Democrats' own cultural standards.

What Republican is making this argument? When and how are they bringing it into the Democratic camp to illuminate the differences between Democrats' own members? How will leftists deal with the internal contradictions and hypocrisy of their party? Can that but be good for Republicans?

Seems to me only so.

So I admonish the next level of Republican leaders never to mention the word "union" without mentioning "racist American unions," or, depending on the crowd, "xenophobic, racist, American unions," and wait for someone to ask you why you would call them that.

Then the door is wide open to split a camp that is in denial of its own irreconcilable differences. For Republicans who like to play hard ball with rhetoric, this is as hard as it gets.




*Problematic firstly because despite the fact that many on the left would prefer to see fewer abortions, they realize that the life prospects for most aborted fetuses are dim and dismal. They consider it a humane gesture - both to the pre-person and to the larger society - to spare both of a life that will most likely turn to crime, poverty, and despair. This is a tragic and uncomfortably realistic moral assessment, and while it is open to debate on several grounds (including the religious), there is almost certainly something to recommend it from a humanist point of view.

Second of all, the question of when "life begins" remains uncertain for many, many people. While this may be a self-serving ambiguity for some, it nonetheless remains a hard notion to pin down. And this is particularly true when we are discussing American law. As the Birther movement has so recently and vigorously reminded us, American laws and the rights of citizenship (and rights to the presidency) are contingent upon being *born* here, not being conceived here or having visited here while pregnant. A Saudi couple, for example, could have spent 8.5 months on vacation in Ohio, the wife might become pregnant here, but upon returning to Saudi Arabia and giving birth there, that child would be a Saudi citizen with no guaranteed rights to vote, assemble, speak, or practice its own religion. It certainly would not become president of the United States. Even if the family came back to the States the next day, they would still all be Saudi citizens and would need to seek asylum here if they wanted to avoid the fate being a citizen of that country implies. Thus the place one is *born* is legally the marker of the beginning of one's legal rights. To extend that into pre-birth is an argument that is interesting but very, very slippery, for this reason and for many others.

Totalitarian America

I recently completed a compelling and moving course on The Rise of Hitler before World War II. The professor, among many other interesting points, found it important to highlight the difference between an "Authoritarian" regime and a "Totalitarian" regime.

These two terms are much conflated in common parlance, but there was a difference - and an important one at that: The "Authoritarian" regime would demand that its subjects obey the will of the authorities, that the subjects do what they are told. But the "Totalitarian" regime took this a step further in that it placed its demand not just on external behaviors but on the "total" person. In other words, not only was the regime concerned with what you did publicly, but it was at least as concerned with what you did privately, and in the end, who you were yourself. This "total" claim of the individual, by American standards, is exponentially more horrifying than the simple obedience model, which, after all, most Americans learn to cope with creatively during their school years.

I am reminded of the dramatic tale of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was very nearly dragged off by the secret police because of his composition of "unpatriotic" music. For those of us who studied Shostakovich, we learned that hidden in his music were secret pieces of "rebellion" couched in music that would certainly be approved of by the State. The almost gruelingly sarcastic marches and "triumphs" that Shostakovich was famous for upheld and took the piss out of the State at the same time. Here was a man who was under an Authoritarian regime and yet kept his own personal beliefs for himself.

But for the Totalitarian, such as Hitler, apparently, even this public/private division was intolerable. The Totalitarian demanded not just total obedience, but total "conversion" to the cause of the State.


Last month, David Brooks wrote an unpretentious and gloomy piece about the way things go in Washington, specifically regarding the dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal because of a politically gauche rant he made to a reporter. This reporter has been lionized by others in the press - particularly in the blogosphere - for his willingness to expose conflict and internal contradictions within the government, supposedly in the grand tradition of American muckraking journalism. But I tend to side with Brooks, in this case at least.

Yes, the general was off the mark, and yes the president had no choice but to dismiss him. And yet for all the pomp and righteousness, we must ask if this inevitable result was in the best interests of the country. It seems to me that at best it was a wash. McChrystal was good at his job and was willing to take on a thankless one. He is being replaced by David Petraeus, who is also good at his job, but whose approach will likely be basically the same.

This was not Watergate, Whitewater, Iran Contra, or even Monica Lewinsky. This was a mouthing off by someone who has arguably the most stressful (and hopelessly impossible) job in the world. Is it a sign of Special Ops exceptionalism and arrogance? Maybe. But if anyone has earned the right to feel exceptional and arrogant, it is the guys who run special ops. I know the rest of us couch potatoes and weekend warriors would like to think more highly of ourselves, but get real guys - we're not in their league.

And the collateral damage goes well beyond the exceptional McChrystal, and so I would argue it is not a wash: The people most worthy of running the country - because of their own exceptional diligence, courage, intelligence, or candor - these people will not volunteer for the thankless jobs anymore, for fear of being torn down in the same way that McChrystal and so many others have been in recent decades. I, for one, am ten times more intelligent - to say nothing of more charismatic- than the drones that serve today in Congress. And so are you. But will you and I ever run for public office? In the words of the Minority Leader - Hell No!

So in this, Brooks has it exact. He writes:

But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. The old Totalitarian model made demands on its citizenry to conform both externally and internally to the demands of the State - however arbitrary those demands might have been. But in America, the freest nation in the history of Earth, we have somehow managed to invert this system: We The People, the demos, have deemed necessary to appropriate every last drop of our governors' lives as our own property. We The People have become the Totalitarians. It is a staggering inversion and a terrifying indictment about the universality of tyranny - that the freest souls in the world yet demand authoritarianism - nay, Totalitarianism - for themselves over whomever they can have it.

And in a Democracy, where the leaders are in fact the servants, we are shown that it is the leaders who must yet bear the yoke of our arbitrary morals, prejudices, and cultural demands. They, the few, are the subjects of the many, whose hearts and minds and thoughts we must control even as we (pretend to) control their public actions. And this pretension is perhaps the saddest judgment on modern Democracy - that our interest in and engagement with the vital public actions of our leaders aren't nearly as accountable to our consciences as the tribulations and specifics of their personal lives.


It is possible that Brooks may have been spreading McChyrstal into this taint with too broad a knife. This was not a sex scandal or a gambling problem (or for that matter, polio), but was something closer to military insubordination, a true crime on the government's own terms. But the point is well made and should be well considered as we move into the second 3rd of our 3rd century as a grand political experiment. What happens to totalitarian systems historically? Do they all break? And in a democracy, who is left to do the breaking? What leader will lead the uprising against the tyranny of the people?

I suspect it will not happen in the obvious way, but in a subtle, almost silent way, with the draining away of the virtuous, "the honest and freewheeling," from public life. Without adequate leaders, the public can not but decline. As always in a democracy, the demos must hold itself accountable to itself. Are we really willing to do that? Even, as Churchill suggested, after we have exhausted every other possibility? Or would we still prefer to take credit for our leaders' public successes and stick them with the bill for their own private failings? We Americans do like our cake, but how much of it will we eat too before we explode our own selves?

Soccer and U.S. Saturnalia

So this afternoon I was listening to an enthused Ghanan holding forth on his predictions for the upcoming U.S.-Ghana soccer match in the world cup. Several times during the interview, I audibly yawned, and my mind drifted.

"Who cared?" I thought. I have my sports that I get worked up for, and I have enjoyed playing soccer as a youth, but international competitive soccer remains for me a bore.

Is this an unthinking collective engagement on my part? Maybe. But I'm not ashamed of it. American indifference to soccer is an important part of our cultural identity, and I embrace it fully. But it is not, I believe, simply one more instance of American exceptionalism, baffling and annoying the world. It is, I believe, something more.


In ancient times, many kingdoms, including the Romans had a version of the Saturnalia festival. This was an extended festival - usually about one week - that was held every so often- perhaps every seven years or when the king died, etc. The point of festival was that for the proscribed duration, the class roles of the society would be reversed. Servants would order their masters around, and noblemen would act in general subservience to their "inferiors." It must have been a rollicking good time (at least for the inferiors), and when it was over, steam was blown off and the normal, unfair order of things could return.

I think you know where I am going with this.

Worldwide resentment of the U.S. is nothing new. Despite the average American's innate isolationism and indifference to the ridiculous tribulations of global populi, the U.S. remains a world leader. Deep in our hearts, despite our nearly universal preeminence, we dearly wish that other countries would fully play by our rules so that they would be equal tradesmen and not merely "oppressed" "quasi-colonial" underlings. We really do. But since they don't, the default position is one of US supremacy.

This puts us largely in the position of the monarchs and noblemen of old. We are the masters, and the world, the servants. We remain largely indifferent to this fact, the world remains acutely aware of it, quietly (or not so quietly) seething, chafing, and waiting for their ascent to power which will never come.

Well, it is my contention that to let off this steam, we have had - for decades now - a kind of Global Satunalia, in which, for the time being, the U.S. is treated as just some other random country in universal competition, and even a suck a lowly land as Ghana is given equal or superior coverage in the context of the "universal" sport of soccer.

In what other arena would the U.S. and Ghana be seen as equal players, or even players in which the advantage was to the small African nation? None that I can think of. And yet for this moment, the boyish enthusiasm in the Ghanan commentator's voice betrayed his glee not just that his team might win, but that it might (once again) fell the mighty U.S.! And the U.S. puts up with this - largely with indifference.

I think this is wise. I think this is very wise. I think the U.S.'s mediocrity at "the world sport" is - if not a deliberate political calculation - an extremely suitable way to placate the resentments of the world. Let them feel the thrill of trampling on their master's toes for a moment- once every four years. Let it last a couple of weeks, and then let the normal order of regency restore itself. Simple as that.

That the U.S. has been doing unusually well this year (or so I've been told) does not bode well for us, in my opinion. For to require that we prove ourselves on the soccer pitch inversely mirrors our potential decline in global political preeminence. Let us hope it is not so.


Some have said that we simply need a U.S. superstar to bring soccer to life in the American psyche- A Beckham, A Jordan, a Woods to focus the celebrity receptor sites to the touchless game. But this is hooey. Deep down Americans know that soccer is the sop to the world's deflated ego. Let them have their 2-1 victories, their silly colored cards, and their penalty kicks. We know better than to get caught in the emotion and master the sport, lest the world lose its one safety valve for its groans under Uncle Sam's mighty boot.

Department of Unintended Consequences

This is a good lesson, and up until now, I've only had one pristine example of it working.

The rule is that government control and regulation does little or nothing to solve the real problems at work, and in fact can have the opposite effect and undermine acceptable (or what society deems to be acceptable) levels of public good.

The example I've been using for years has been Marijuana. Since anti-marijuana laws have become stricter, demand has not abated at all. That much is common knowledge. But on top of that, the process of punishing marijuana use and cultivation - based primarily on weight - has had the perverse effect of focusing gardeners' minds on concentrating the potency of pot into smaller and smaller plants. The result is that today's pot is orders of magnitude stronger than the stuff Cheech and Chong used to smoke in their movies. A good old fashioned doobie filled with modern day kush from Humboldt county could literally last some people a year.

This has been the gardeners' collective response to (extreme) government control of their product. Now, a non-prosecutable amount of pot could still take care of all your smoking needs for at least a week- thus making skirting the laws effectively an ordinary experience for most users. The government plan to control or (ridiculously) cease, marijuana usage has backfired, and the only "good" to come to society is increased wealth extraction by government for the sake of enforcement, incarceration, and prosecution of drug offenses.* But in general, the government actions have made pot more popular, more potent, and now completely ubiquitous. Exactly the opposite of what the laws supposedly intended.

But you probably knew all that.

The new example I've discovered, which has been sitting right under my nose, is Oil:

Years of regulation and innovation have made us better at finding, extracting, refining, and using oil. Oil might be cheap compared to its true costs, but adding those costs in wouldn’t make it unaffordable. That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are only cheap or expensive relative to one another. And the anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it. (emphasis mine)

It had never occurred to me before that the massive regulations of the oil market could have had similar effects in focusing the minds of oil execs to maximize extraction techniques and minimize price- just as the pot growers do (although, due to prohibition, the pot growers have some more latitude in not reducing price). If necessity is the mother of invention, being under continual duress for a product that enjoys unlimited demand will certainly create many leaps of genius to keep the supply lines running.

Many bytes have been spilled in recent weeks, paralleling the BP oil leak, reminding us that it was government regulation that forced BP to drill so far out into the ocean in the first place. And by and large, the oil companies have done a stellar job at safely extracting petroleum in extremely difficult environments. We have to assume that the technological innovation that helped them to do that led to cost benefits across the board.

In other words, the better they had to get at extracting oil (because of government controls), the better they got at extracting oil. And the better they got at extracting oil, the cheaper the oil would be per "unit." Just as you get more bang for your buck with modern pot, modern oil extraction techniques give oil companies better access to more oil.

One can imagine a parallel history in which pot growers and oil producers were left alone for the past 40 years. Their methods of cultivation would be much sloppier and less efficient. And while we believe there may have been more societal ills along the way, in the case of oil, it seems possible that a well guided alternative would have taken hold much more easily. The investment and the government-engendered technological innovation in the oil sector has created an industrial force that is extremely competitive. The same companies in the 70s were not nearly as fierce, and it is possible that they could have been more easily competed away today without the steroids they were forced to take to keep up with government regulations.

(One could also imagine a parallel history of relatively weak cannabis that had only a mildly disturbing effect on society over the past 40 years. For the general public to learn how to safely deal with the new super-strains will likely involve a steeper learning curve with more potential for disorientation and danger as we move towards a prohibition-free society. Should there be enough cases of pot-induced trauma in a hypothetically de-prohibited culture, we may even find a more virulent backlash from the government to re-schedule the substance, thus tightening the curve of innovation further.)

Some interesting things to think about as we ponder the oil spill just as "peak driving season" is about to begin. . .


*and if you're black you might add serving the cause of continuing 1950s segregation by other methods, namely incarceration.

Reverse Flotilla Folly

I read this whole article, and the whole time I kept saying to myself- This will never work, and they shouldn't even try. It took me a while, though, to figure out why I thought that, but then I got it.

Here's why this won't work:

It's juvenile, and I'm surprised Sullivan endorses it. To me it's symptomatic of the idiocy that rules the educated mind. The notion that running a flotilla to expose Turkey's hypocricy will have any effect is ridiculous. It postulates that there is some objective arbiter sitting somewhere who will pass impartial judgment on a political situation. This is a fantasy. There is no doctoral thesis board or Poli-Sci professor sitting somewhere on the equator passing good judgment and doling out reward for good points. We don't live in a world of deans and panels, we live in a world of people. And people act based on interests not on moral gotcha points.

So the flotilla will arrive in Turkey, and what will happen exactly? All of the Europeans and the rest of the Muslim world will issue some sort of decree condemning Turkey and then suddenly take the pressure off of Israel about Gaza? This is in sane. People aren't really that mad about Gaza. It is a convenient (and largely appropriate) front for their anger at Israel in general. Israel has many, many enemies, whereas Turkey has few. And Turkey's allies will - as the US has done for Israel - largely parse and downplay the Kurdish situation there, and then get right back on the offensive against their common enemy. This silly intellectual exercise in foreign expose will yield no results. It is childish and exhibits the worst of small-minded intellectualism divorced from realpolitik. Even, heaven forbid, if they are all killed, sympathy from the larger world will be minimal, and Israel will be forced into a war which will immediately obviate any gains from the stunt.

Incentive Alignment and the Libertarian Initiative

A new post over at my raw site details Libertarianism in action. It is centrist vitriol at its best. Worth a look.

D-Blog

Campaign Finance

Well, here's the thing. This was never supposed to be a problem. Democracies are meant to work with small groups of people. In the Constitution, most Americans, to say nothing of the slaves and Amerindians, could not vote. It was only land owners who were allowed to vote, presumably since they had the highest stake in the government to protect their property and investments.

Because they had an interest in their government, they would have taken it upon themselves to suss out which political candidates would best look after those interests and throw their support behind them. Campaign contributions were not necessary, because the electorate would be doing the most active shopping, having themselves the most active interest.

This is obviously a bit of an simplification, but it is illustrative.

As democracy became more and more inclusive to include non property owners, blacks, and women interests became more diffuse, and "casual voting" became more possible. Also, given the larger numbers of represented involved, personal distance from candidates became greater and greater over time such that "access" is something one must now buy with campaign money (rather than the old-fashioned pulling up a chair at the local diner).


But what are the campaign contributions for anyway? Well, advertising, mainly. Advertising for what? Advertising to bring the representatives' messages closer to the people who will be voting for them - the "casual voter." The "interested" voter, the modern day equivalent of the old landed aristocracy will have made their own selves aware of the issues and the candidates' positions. No "interested" voter pays any serious attention to political advertising, except to see how it will likely sway the "casual" masses in their man's favor.

But rather than blaming the inherent evils of campaign contribution themselves, we ought to do what we always ought to do in a democracy: blame the demos. We, the people, are the ones who create this condition by our sloth, our laziness, and by our casualness towards the political process. We actually expect to achieve an informed opinion through television advertisements, as if these mini-flicks weren't explicitly constructed to manipulate us. The real work of researching a candidate is not even bothered with, and, since the campaigners understand that, they tend to raise hordes of money to submit advertisements to the lazy public.

Over the years, scheme after scheme has been loudly proclaimed to limit campaign contributions - especially by those who have the greatest interest and are the least "casual." These have always amounted to nothing and will continue to into the future, no matter how many cries for "reform" we hear.

But there's another solution. Stop it altogether. Don't allow *any* campaign contributions - or more precisely, don't allow *any* campaign advertisements. If people want to know which pol to vote for, they can get off their asses and find out. They can talk to their friends, they can watch the news, they can search the web for voting records, they can even turn to citizen-sponsored activist groups to educate the public on behalf of certain candidates. But none of this can be done by advertising.

This will leave the casual voter out of the equation, or he/she will vote indiscriminately in a way that will be an electoral wash across the board.

On the politicians' side, the problem of access can be solved the same way: instead of lazily expecting corporations to show up on your door to hock their wares, do your own (or have your staff do) actual research as to what is best for your representatives.

No campaign contributions - no undue influence, no undue access. Let the responsibility lie on the voters and the pols to find out who is best for them And if they're too lazy to, then they get what other lazy people get- whatever they get. And the rest of us can get on with our work.

Wow, this is good too

And makes the point even better, I think. I'll give you a link this time. D-Blog

Blatant (yet regretful) Self-Congratulation

Not really.

It was a good piece then, and I'm proud, as a writer, of its prescience. I actually largely understand Obama's response to the oil spill, from his point of view. And in a way he's performing an almost Rand Paulian adherence to his principles of centricity and equanimity even when raw politics is what is being asked of him. It may well even be that he has some long term strategy to use this is a stick to impose a gas tax- but even if he had, his own poor reviews will likely have stymied that before it were to leave the ground.

So what have we here? Maureen Dowd says it well today (please don't get used to hearing that from me), and I think my forewarning from the inauguration speech provides much of the underpinning for her concerns.

You can read Maureen's piece here. Mine is reprinted below:


TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009

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.

Cultural Bias, Medicine, and Hoops

We believe that allopathic medicine is the only way to treat illness. But that's just a cultural bias, it's a prejudice. It's not true. We give doctors the power to define disease and then we give them an exclusive monopoly to treat it. But intellectual cerebralization is an American cultural bias. We don't think it is a bias, we think it's truth. But the attitude that mechanical, chemical, and technological methods of treating disease are superior simply because they are mechanical, chemical, and technological reflects the American financial bias towards our own competitive advantage.

And that is fine up until a point, but we have to appreciate that that bias crowds out competing viewpoints (in this case techniques for healing that are not technologically based). It's as if we were saying only white people can play basketball. That's how it was for a long time in this country, and it was a cultural bias. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but we didn't know what we were missing. Were there any Michael Jordans, Shaquil O'Neils, or LeBron Jameses back then? Not really. But because we were biased, we didn't ever have an opportunity to find out. We just didn't know what we didn't know. And it was all because of bias. How much better are we all - how much better is the sport of basketball - for these non-white players?

And how much better would be our health, how much better would be medicine if we took off our cultural blinders and allowed other viewpoints to compete fairly? This is the essence of capitalism, and it is the essence of America. We just don't always see where we don't do it. We usually think we know best - or some expert knows best - and so there are exceptions where competition shouldn't apply. We should be very leery when we see situations like that. And when we discover areas of massive waste and overweening expense, we should take that as a signal to start sniffing out where our biases are, where our short-sightedness is. In almost every event, they will be disguised as a common "good," but really they are concealing a destructive prejudice that hurts all but a very few.

Back to that coat hanger. . .and saving utopia from itself

I want to make a somewhat metaphysical comment about my analogy of legislation to "bending the coat hanger," since it is more descriptive metaphor than it at first may seem.

Firstly, in order to pull the thing straight again, you require two opposing forces - just as you do to bend it. But when these forces are in equilibrium and pulling rather than pushing, the happiest results occur.

Secondly, the process makes at least one assumption about the nature of metal: ductility. There is an *inherent property* in metals that allows them to be stretched into a wire. It is one of the properties that makes them metals and not, say, rocks. Trusting in this innate feature of metals is what gives someone the wisdom to pull rather than merely counter-push if one wants to make the coat hanger "right" again.

Thirdly, it is harder. It takes more work, more resilience, more trust in the opposing ("loyal opposition") forces to execute than simply re-bending the coat hanger. It requires a unified effort to work and thus requires the transcendence of duality (up until a point) where one realizes that without one's "foes" one can not achieve a real solution, only a crookeder wire.


All of the above is true for mankind as well. We must postulate an inherent ability, a natural ability, born in man to restore equilibrium and to "heal" after an injustice. Just as healed skin reveals no trace of the original wound, so too do all healings, when executed properly by nature "erase the stain" of sin that was the cause of the wound in the first place. (This may be extremely difficult to visualize for the allopathically oriented, but for those of us actively engaged in holistic healing, it is a daily occurrence. The experience of healing, either through fasting, or other natural models is such that there is literally no memory of the original insult in the first place. There is a sense - if there is a memory of the insult at all - that nothing was ever wrong in the first place and that at most there had been some sort of confusion-created disturbance. While such experiences are everyday occurrences in the holistic community, they nonetheless appear to be utterly miraculous when first encountered by someone raised with the double-bent coat hanger approach to healing and health.)

Finally, we must say that the experience requires work. It requires willful transcendence of division towards a unified goal. This is rarely politically expedient, and it is always riskier. But with a build-up of patience and a vision (on both sides) that the other side has valid concerns, such a transcendence is possible.

Indeed it happens rarely. . .there were moments in our history, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, when the things that divided us were surely less significant than the things that united us, and everybody felt that. These were extraordinary moments to seek common ground with those whose viewpoints oppose our own, a moment to see past our own grievances towards a collective humanity. Obviously these moments can be seized or thrown away and exploited, and it is the mark of leadership to know what to do when such a moment arrives.

The reason it is dangerous is that if the connection is missed, the "libido" required to make it falls back into the worst kind of unconsciousness and polarized bickering, since each side feel betrayed by the other and will need to wait a long time before adequate trust is restored to try again. Because in the end, if you're pulling hard on your end of the wire, you have to trust that the other side will pull back. A modicum of trust is necessary to proceed, and, in the best of circumstances, it can grow and grow until a higher order is achieved.

We experience this every day as capitalists, only we tend to trust absolutely in the low road rather than the high road, which is, perhaps, why it takes longer to reach our goals than visionary utopianists would like. But trusting in another's self interest, in the end, works, and, in economics it is more a question of maintaining that larger trust through the necessary missteps and relocations. The danger many economists felt at the height of the meltdown was that this trust would be lost forever and we would be back to bending wires long into the future.

Fortunately (imho), the protectionist impulses to rebend, or indeed to snap the wire were adequately resisted. This marks the 2008 calamity as a true test of the economic relationship gains that were made during the 90s/00s. We have proven, in a way, that those bonds - while clearly too frothy - are nonetheless secure enough to hold our financial system through whatever difficulties lie ahead.

Perhaps we require such "testing" again for our will to reconcile politically as well. Virulent polarization mixed with just a little bit of trust gives enormous power to undo wrongs. It is the Libertarian contribution to the debate, and it is mine personally- to address the underlying motives of each side's irrational claims such that we can, at least momentarily, glimpse that they are indeed sane underneath it all. Holding the vision of a common humanity is the goal of the middle. And to use the powerful, electrical forces of he electoral polarity for the benefit of all will be its greatest blessing.

Continuing conversation. . .

[with MC re: Rand Paul & Civil Rights]


Philosophically, I look at legislation (and most things) the way I look at a coat hanger: Once you bend it in one direction, you can't just bend it back in the other direction and pretend that makes it straight. It just makes it bent in two places, which to my mind, makes it twice as crooked.

The holist in me, the raw foodist in me, and the libertarian in me prefers a process of unwinding rather than winding tighter and piling imperfection on top of imperfection - with the risk of ossification at each juncture.

The thing, to be fully and finally resolved, must be *un"wound. And the more layers we put on top of the original sin, the harder and more protracted the unwinding becomes.

In the case of unjust laws, such as Jim Crow, simply pulling those laws is what makes sense to me. If the feds were to make legislation, legislation forbidding the passage of unjust (and pretty clearly unconstitutional) laws to me is better than creating new laws that compel any particular action by anybody.

This sounds simplistic, and perhaps things had gotten so far along that more was required than simply un-injusticizing the south and letting the proper equilibrium set in. Many raw foodists experience this kind of problem- they "pull" the problem by eliminating toxic foods, but their bodies are still so toxic from years (and generations) of chemical ingestion that a more proactive effort is required- intentional detoxification, in this case.

But in the process of actively intervening to accelerate the organic cleansing process (by means of herbs or enemas), one does not lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal is to release the poison organically, not to enshrine it and build monuments to its evil. This is akin to what I had mentioned before about hewing to the ideal wherever and whenever possible while dealing with the accumulated mess of reality along the way. To get mired only in the back and forth karma of history is to create unending monstrosities that have no end - like the civil rights struggle in America, which is far from over and indeed may never be.

Your argument that slavery is also economically sound is an argument I take to heart. But at some level I must disagree. I do not, as many of my generation do, equate sweatshop labor with slavery (though I do equate cubicle work with it). And replacing slave labor with sweatshop labor - no matter how deplorable the conditions - is ultimately economically more sound since it creates, over time, a new class of consumers who will eventually feed into and invest in the global economy, thus benefiting everybody on earth.

Slavery is a dead end. It is zero-sum economics, since it deprives the economy of potential consumers and taxpayers. It needed to be enforced through violence, because it relied on inherent racism to maintain- that blacks were incapable of making reasoned choices, etc., and therefore are better to the world as chattel than as economic participants. The racism had to be institutionally maintained, otherwise it would reveal the obvious benefits to market and government by having more purchasers and taxpayers. (Incidentally, this is one of the pillars of my ongoing crusade for youth suffrage and the repeal of "child labor laws," that by ageist bigotry, we deprive ourselves of valuable economic and creative resources. There are other pillars as well, but this would be the one to win over economists.)


The deeper the problem the deeper the penetrating into underlying causes must be. Slavery has been around forever, and, as the posted bills in the East Village remind me, didn't end in 1865. It is an immortal archetype that must be dealt with as forthrightly as possible. Free markets, I think, do the best job, as they do for most things when bestial tribal prejudices are involved.

Looking at the underlying roots of racism is an important step, and it is something we refuse to do. Our PC university style "racism is just ignorance" is vacuous and insipid. (It does, however reflect the ineffectiveness of simply bending the coat hanger back to straight by creating a permanent class of anti-anti-black people rather than just "people" as they claim they are.)

Racism is rooted mostly in economic/sexual scarcity models, the remedy for which has always been greater market liberalization. Pulling ourselves out of our localized biases is the modern impulse that is most uncomfortable to animallian stasis- it is the definitive characteristic that makes us human and non-animal. Open markets offend every primitive instinct (CF: AFL/CIO) and yet their benefit to the larger family of humanity is indisputable. Isn't that the larger point for those seeking to abolish racism?

One point that is seldom made (besides the point that racism is much more virulent in non-white, non-American populations throughout the world - as I discovered being a distinct minority as a white boy at Juilliard) is that there are potentially intractable problems with black-white racism:

Firstly, the psychologically inclined would suggest that racism is merely the projection of one's tribal shadow elements onto another: We are hard working (thus suppressing our inherent laziness), *they* are lazy (thus acting out our laziness for us). In a holistic world, this happens all over the place. PIGS countries are famous for their laziness and hedonism (thus repressing their own rigor and productivity) and scoff at the anal retentiveness of their northern comcontinentiots.

Joseph Campbell makes this point well in "Hero with 1000 Faces," in an effort, perhaps, to dilute some of the idealism we moderns have towards Amerindians. They all had cultural norms and required "others" to act out the shadow or unlived life of their own culture. Gradually, through (presumably) economic union, we begin to retract some of those projections and recognize a picture of a larger human than the tribal one. Eventually, we come to be able to see our foibles with humor and learn to appreciate the complimentary aspects of other cultures (as well as their own foibles). And eventually, we learn to integrate the healthier aspects of other cultures and shed our own misguided biases. Thus we become more and more complete within ourselves. And in doing so, we become closer to being one people, thereby recognizing the truth of the religious calling that God loves us *all* (not just the industrious ones and not just the hedonistic ones, etc.) and loves all (parts) of us.

It is a beautiful thing.

In the case of white-black racism, as I was saying, this is more difficult than normal. In the dream language, the psyche expresses the deeply repressed/consciously rejected aspects of oneself literally as dark-skinned people (I have experienced this numerous times myself in dream and journeywork), and in seeing an "other" who looks exactly like our internal picture of our own evil, a rejectionary stance is almost inevitable. Psychologcailly speaking, it would only be by reintegrating our rejected parts that we could end racism, by having no more negative projections on which to hang on others. That's a tall order, but it's identical to the order to form a human family as I indicated in the previous full paragraph.

Incidentally, as proof of this psychological theory, we have only to look at black culture as the perfect antithesis to white culture: In white culture, skinniness in women is valuable, in black, fatness is valuable (both almost to a comic extent). In white culture, unassuming dress is considered appropriate, in black culture blatant ostentation is de rigeur. Violence, sexuality, and overt masculinity are intolerable. In black culture, violence is normal, as is free expression of sexuality, etc. Thugs, hos, bitches, and gangsters are all classic Venus/Mars shadow projections of the dominant (white) cultural attitudes towards these archetypes. Attitudes towards physicality vs. intellectualism are perfectly complimentary, etc. etc. That each represents the distorted shadow of the other could not be more obvious. (It has been brought to my attention, though my research is sparse, that black dreamers may see "ghosts" or shadow figures in the reverse, as white figures, but I am not so sure.)

At any rate, this natural occurrence in dreams is a monkey wrench in race relations I don't expect to hear much about. But by legislating to try to control surface behavior, we make it harder and harder for this truth to bubble up to the surface and be dealt with honestly. Command and control, to my mind, is as ill-advised culturally as it is economically, because it drives the hidden root causes of our problems farther from consciousness and deeper into the shadows, thus making them almost impossible to resolve until they explode (and nothing happens then).


So I guess I don't really think that government inaction is the point, but zenlike government "awareness" might be. Rather than reflexively "correcting" everything by rebending the legislative coat hanger, a judicious patience followed by surgical undoing is more likely to offer real solutions. Now whether politicians really want real solutions or not is another story (how many pols owe their careers to the tenuousness of Roe?). But as someone who strives for a semblance of inner and outer peace, resolution through dissolution is the only thing that really delivers and leaves the mind tranquil enough to imagine a new future for us all. And I like that. Maybe I can get it to fit on my business card. . .
D

The Revolution Might Be Televised, but you'll never see it. . .

Well, this, I think, is a real problem.

As boring as it is, the prospect of a cyber attack should be truly terrifying. Probably because it doesn't call on bravery and courage to wage, it doesn't capture our imagination the way that Top Gun style warfare does. There is no valor in a keystroke, and the thought of being rendered impotent by some dastardly Estonian's Javascript skills is too much for most folks to handle.

But the real danger of a cyber threat is that there are so many different kinds of them that it's hard to pinpoint what it would look like. It could be anything. And the worst danger is likely not from the attackers themselves but from our own selves. Even a temporary loss of civilizational infrastructure could devolve US culture to Lord of the Flies style savagery. We are a culture that has been coddled so long, has been wholly reliant on techno-comforts to do our thinking, our planning, and even our relaxing, that its sudden disappearance might leave us alone with only our atrophied instincts to protect us from the elements and ourselves.

Is this a serious problem? It might be. Depends on the nature of an attack. Shutting down power grids for a while might push all of us to the limit. Stymying bank databases might not. But a clever attacker would try us out in all sorts of ways. Civilization, we are told, is a thin veneer covering the basest of Hobbesian impulses. Even its temporary apocalypse might release the beast in all of us.

So we'll see.

Am I making too much of this? Possibly. But I think Clarke is right that it might take a Pearl Harbor attack to wake us up. Of course if none of us has TV, we might never know it happened. . .

Continuing discussion of Rand Paul

Copied from a private email with MC.


Well, I'm not all the way into the Paul thing, but I think he did a poor job of getting himself out of a difficult sitch with the Maddow interview. As a Libertarian, one would be just as appalled by institutionalized Jim Crow Laws as laws meant to counteract them. Why not just pull the laws and let the culture deal with the problem on the culture's terms rather than having cultural preferences (for blacks, whites, or anybody else) institutionalized and dictated by government. I think that's a fairly easy case to make.
But because the body politic views issues in a binary way - left vs. right - if you pose any position that is not squarely in one camp or the other, you are dumped into the 'other' and labeled a "racist" or a "pinko" or whatever else for the sin of having a nuanced (and, to my mind, forward thinking and useful) point of view.
It won't be easy to argue the libertarian position before a polarized nation (if that is indeed what Rand is trying to do), as I have experienced many a time. The point of the position is that it resolves the conflicts and puts the onus on society and culture to deal with its problems creatively, and that's too much for most people to trust in. Do I sound like a victim of my own idealism yet? I think the best one can do is hold the idealism where it belongs - in the intellectual stratosphere - and hew to it wherever possible and as much as possible while acknowledging that as one descends nearer and nearer to the less rarified ether of reality that compromises and imperfections must be swallowed gracefully with the view that they will eventually be digested into something that comes closer to the idealistic vision.
This is, in any event, the alchemical path. And paradoxically, the more willing one is to embrace the prima materia of realistic imperfections, the sooner one can get on with the business of perfecting them. Because in their elegant embrace we can be free enough not to lose site of the vision while we work on the denser matter. But by letting the necessary compromises pile up under the rug by ignoring them in favor of easy idealism, we make the day of reckoning, when it comes, that much more painful.
But in a 100 member body, having one or two guys fiercely locked into the abstract idealism might actually strike the right balance between gross politics and pristine intellectual purity. Time will tell, and so will the Uranus ingress. Looking forward to both, if we're not eaten alive by man-made bacteria in the interim. . .D

Comments

So. It has come to my attention that some of you have been trying to comment on my blogs, but the bureaucratic red tape of signing in/registering dissuaded you. You have my deepest sympathies and understanding.

Now that the problem has come to my attention, I have taken steps to correct it, and now anyone - anyone - can comment on these blogs. Have at, go to, but please try to have no less tact than I display here on a day to day basis- which should give you plenty of latitude in your commentary.

I will look forward to reading it.

D-Blog

Original Libertarian Theme Song

Finally found this online. John Goodman, in the original Big River Cast.

Open Letter to the Vegans

Dear Vegans,

Stop hating.

Love,
The Animals

The first rule of politics is that nobody cares about your rage. Nobody. Politics is not based on morality but rather on the ease of the flow of emotions. And nothing is easier to do than to write somebody off as a crackpot or a rager. Coming off as a rager gives people (in their mind) license to ignore everything you say because they don't like you. It gives them license to throw the baby out with your bathwater. And that is a shame. Not for them - because, remember, they don't care - but for you and whatever cause you believe in.

Nothing incenses me more than the horrific treatment of the helpless. Animals, children. . .you name it. It is maddening. But that madness remains my madness until somebody else decides to share in it. And most people have enough to be mad about in their lives without taking on my madness as well - no matter how righteous that madness may be.

In a moral arena, there would be room to discuss this, but in a political arena, the fight is already lost. The other person has used their free will to move on - to whatever they feel like - The Cosby Show, Online betting, Oprah- whatever. You have just lost your audience without lifting a finger. And when you lose your audience - in politics - you lose your power, your power to make a change in the world.

This is an ugly truth. Nobody likes it. Even the people who are ignoring you don't like it. They have their causes that they get angry about, and they don't get it either when normal people dismiss them as whack-jobs because they think schools should hand out condoms or partial-birth abortions should be banned or whatever. But if you want to make a difference and change the world, you have to engage with enough "other" people to tilt the world along lines that you would prefer. And since you are in the minority, that is going to take some effort, some persuasion, some patience, and a whole lot of self-discipline.


I met my first vegan while I was in college. It was a music school, and everyone was, as a rule, pretty liberal. But out of 150 students in our little school, there was only one vegan (which is actually fairly representative of the population as a whole).

Well let me just say that as interesting as I found her ideas, this girl was an absolute bitch. Forget about self-righteous, forget about condescending, forget about being a rager. . .she was just maddening and annoying to be around. And the thought went through my head - and it went through the heads of everyone else who knew her - "I am never becoming a vegan."

Some 10 years later, when I became a vegan - almost overnight, as it turned out - I thought of my old college acquaintance. And in the moment I made the switch, I told myself consciously that I am doing this not because of her but in spite of her. In fact I made the point to say to myself that I am doing this for the sake of my own personal health and explicitly *not* for the sake of the animals.

Now, I did not not care about the animals. But I made certain that that wouldn't be my motivation, since I did not want to build my health on a foundation of anger. And, of course, the more I ate vegan, the more I cared about the animals I wasn't eating, and the more horrified I became at the way animals are treated in our world. But I refused to put that at the centerpiece of my philosophy, partly for political reasons, and partly to maintain a distance - both for myself and others - from vegans like the girl I went to college with.


Now it is true that life should not just be a popularity contest, and it takes character to hold unpopular views. But we have to remember that politics in a democracy *is* a popularity contest. In fact, that's the point, because the person who is the most popular wins. And the person who wins is the one who can make the changes he or she wants to make.

So if we want to make a difference, if we want to win people over to our cause, the worst way we can do that is to alienate them. They don't have to love us at first, but they at least have to not hate us. And most skilled politicians can take it from there.


Now there is an important point here that needs to be made about radical movements. In my heart, I don't believe veganism to be a radical movement at all, but one that is wholly normal, rational, and exceedingly healthy. But in reference to the world we live in, it is statistically, anyway, a "fringe" movement that most people would consider highly radical. And here I have to say this: radical movements can attract a certain kind of person that is more concerned with the radicalism of the movement than with the movement's success.

To take a current example from an objective standpoint, we can look at the Republican Party.

There is a radical wing of that party (led these days primarily by Sarah Palin) that is sticking to its guns and alienating not only their natural opponents (Liberals) but their natural allies (other Republicans). In New York, they recently succeeded in ousting a moderate Republican candidate in favor of a more radical candidate with the result that their party had no chance of winning at all.

There is a kind of purity of doctrine amongst these types that believes that holding on to their "truth" is more important than winning. In its way, it is a highly moral position to take. But the political results (politics being non-moral by nature) are pre-ordained: they will always fail. Many will view this failure as a sign of their purity, and so they welcome it as a kind of proof of their devotion, the way some Muslims maintain scars (zabiba) on their foreheads to show how sincerely they pray each day.

And indeed, there can be a kind of ecstatic self-immolation that comes with maintaining one's righteousness even in defeat. It is a kind of religious experience for the faithful to throw up their hands at their loss and pray for vengeance against the evil sinners who defeated them.

But it won't save a single animal.


And that is the point. That is what we must remember as vegans. That is, as the economists put it, "the bottom line."


And, my friends, for decades now, we have failed miserably in this pursuit. So much have we failed, in fact, that we are not even starting from a neutral place with the public. We are starting at a huge deficit even before we put on our first "Animal Rights" button.

Decades of throwing "blood" on fur coats, of persecuting medical practitioners for their experiments, and all manner of cockeyed schemes have made vegans a joke long before they are able to plead their case. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because the sad thing is, most people really agree with us anyway. They are heartbroken and torn, but ultimately resigned, about what happens to the animals they are eating. They have seen those slaughterhouse videos, and they are disgusted. But they don't think there is any way to change any of that, so they look for ways to put it out of their minds.

Banging on these peoples' doors with your anger reminds them of things they feel they can do nothing about. This is not helpful. Worse, it suggests to them that they are less humane than you are, less caring than you are, and therefore inferior to you. And it gives them every excuse they need to write you off - and veganism with you.

When you bring your self-righteousness to these people, they feel that you perceive them as less than human. They perceive that you don't recognize that they care too, but that they don't know how to make a difference.

And the truth is- neither do you. You are both in the same boat. You want to make a difference, but you're not- not like this. If you turn three friends vegan while they're in college but alienate 10,000 strangers in a publicity stunt, then you don't know how to make a difference any more than Ronald McDonald.

But if you can start from a place of understanding, then there is more hope of building a coalition with the majority population that is disgusted by animal cruelty but feels powerless to do anything about it. If you can view their decisions to block out animal rights as a *sane* one and not an immoral one, then you have a better chance of winning a friend and a supporter. But first you have to admit that you don't really know how to change things yet. First you have to find a way to deal with the anger, to learn that shouting through a megaphone feels good for an afternoon, but that no animals were saved by that alone, and in some cases, many more were killed, because you gave meat-eaters one more excuse to ignore you.


Your anger is righteous. It is just. And it is humane. It is a human response to an inhuman ordeal.

But anger is cheap. Anybody can do it.

Finding solutions through work and patience is difficult. It is a schlog, as are all things in politics, and it is not for everybody. For people who care enough to put in this kind of work, there is an endless life mission ahead of you. For the people who just like to throw rocks at other people, you had best sit this one out if you care about animals. As perverse as it sounds, you would do better to share a chicken leg with a meat eater and talk about how hard it is to think about where this meat came from than to throw blood on him while you eat your tofurkey and scoff. This is a political fact. It is not a happy one, indeed, it is somewhat grim. But you have to continue to ask yourself- why am I doing this? Do I want to make a difference? *Am* I making a difference? And if not, why not?


This kind of questioning is not cheap; it is not easy. It is the work of the disciplined and patient mind, of one which can care enough to put off cheap results until real results can be achieved. There are not many people in "fringe" movements of any kind who are willing to do this, and for those who are, it is incumbent upon you to "police your own." Contain the rage in your group that you know is causing more harm than good. Channel their efforts, or perhaps just tell them to stay home. . .or you can even send them over to Sarah Palin!

The fight for animal rights is a heartbreaker- day after day. It is an uphill climb that seems like it may never end. It is no wonder that most people prefer to just turn the other way. But those people are human just like you. Maybe it's worth seeing what they are thinking. Because we can not do it alone, and without those people on our side - people who really want to be on our side - we can not achieve what we want to for the other species we share the planet with. But with a little courage, a little reflection, and a broader vision, we may just find solutions that will benefit all of us who live here on Earth.

D-Blog

Hamilton

Nice words from Roger Cohen.


When I used to travel in Europe, the idea that these disparate nations could form any sort of coherent whole baffled me. I just couldn't believe it would ever happen. It was mainly a cultural intuition for me then, but Cohen lays the economic groundwork here, and I think he is right. You'll never get a man like Alexander Hamilton in the Old World, and it is likely too late to discover a viable authority over the whole EU anyway. In a funny way, it's too cravenly democratic with all the rotating heads, and such. Hamilton was loathed in his day for his federalist/monarchic streak, but in the end, it's what turned this collection of rag-tag nation states into a unified whole. (I think Schenker would have been proud.)

I've always felt that the democracy was unfit for Europe - that the slavish/monarchic impulse was yet too strong there to allow the rough-and-touble individualism that is required for vibrant democracy. And in a way, the attitude they take towards democray - and indeed most liberal ideas, from civil unions to environmentalism - have a kind of "do what you're told" quality to them, which, in a democracy is really the opposite of how it should be. The trust in authority - experts, panels, boards of scientists - is the antithesis of democracy but is the natural tendency towards laziness of the mono-cultural mind.

It is, indeed, natural that when living in a homogeneous racial group, the old-brain system of heirarchical organization sets in, and the king and the tenency towards deference to the king and his noblemen's decrees are replaced by deference towards the decrees of the polit bureau, and the (these days not even elected) group of aristocratic assemblymen who "know best." It is unaboidable so long as men live in tribes and herds to think this way, and with the sweep of democracy over the continent that followed the World Wars, a sort of sleight-of-mind has taken place where there has been a shift in appearance, and yet the underpinning authoritarianistic impulse remained (what Fromm called "Escape from Freedom").

It is the evegiving blessing of America that we are the nation of perpetual immigration, in which the mammalian impulse towards authoritarian heirarchy is perpetually - and forever - upended with each new wave of "other." "Other" nations, "other" religions, "other" orientations and outlooks will constantly upset out homeostasis and push us out of our lazy, lower brain patterns. It is this constant upheaval combined with the defintive characteristic of the American - that is one who leaves, one who rebels agains the comforts of home in search for a life of one's own - that ensures that the purest seat of democracy will always remain here - and that the hearts of men (though there be ebbing at times) will always desire to find their deepest expression of Freedom on her shores.

There is a price to pay for this, no doubt- in lack of comfort, in constant anxiety, in never-ending change. But dancing above that change, indeed trusting that that change will propvide us with the surest ground gives us the confidence to persevere throughout. And there are plenty of outlets to give the baser instincts an outlet. Local government is generally more mammalian, and there are endless religious and cultural groups where men of like mind or like heritage can share in a Euro-style experience of collective rightness with one's own people. But yet the overarching framework of the Nation will never let those groups exercise true dominion over all others as is the ancestry of our European - and indeed all foreign - counterparts.

It is why I have contended for so long that - despite their elegant manners and stunning cultural pre-20th century achievements, the modern European appears utterly primitive compared with the New Man being created in the forge of American Democracy. It is as if they have not yet caught wind that the new man will give up his localized, ancestral cultural assumptions and take each experience anew, on its face, and in its present meaning, rather than weighing it based on what tradition has dumbly handed down to him. In France I have heard it described by an American ex-pat as the "C'est comme ca sickness" in which you ask a Frenchman why something is a certain way, and he shrugs and says, "C'est comme ca," that's just how it is.

Just because someone's grandpappy said something was something doesn't mean it's true for you. How many of our grandparents have generally useful advice for dealing with the world we inhabit today? Ce n'est plus comme ca, I'm afraid. A 7 year old has a more valuable skill set for creating the future than his 87 year old grandpa. And that's just the way it is.

From "The Last American Man"

This is the incredible story of Eustace Conway.


For those who find this characterization of "The American Man" odd or offensive, remember that the mortality rate for the first Virginia settlers was something like 98% for the first few years. Thus, those that remained were of the sturdiest stock available. They didn't survive by playing Sudoko or badminton but by biting and killing their way to reproductive maturity. This kind of brutality is almost entirely lost on us in the Northeast, but it's nonetheless a vital bloodline of the country. We ignore it at our peril.


Here is my favorite quote from the introduction:

"The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.

This was a particular kind of man, this wilderness-bred American. He was no intellectual. He had no interest in study or reflection. He had, as de Tocqueville noticed, "a sort of distaste for what is ancient." Instead, he could sterotypically be found, as the explorer John Fremont described the Über-frontiersman Kit Carson, "mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle and scouring bare-headed over the prairies." Either that, or whipping his mighty ax over his shoulder and casually "throwing cedars and oaks to the ground," as one extremely impressed nineteenth-century foreign visitor observed. In fact, to all the foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American Man was a virtual tourist attraction in his own right, almost as fascinating as Niagara Falls or that ambitious new railroad system or those exotic Indians. Not everybody was a fan, of course. ("There are perhaps no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans," griped one British observer in 1818. "Every American considers that it's impossible for a foreigner to teach him anything, and that his head contains a perfect encyclopedia.") Still, for better or worse, everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible. That was the bottom line: nobody could believe how fast these guys worked."

Clearly this take on American productivity was written before the Detroit Union Era. When Obama says that no one works harder than Americans do, I always scratch my head. Seriously? How can they work so hard when they're all obese and on 2 dozen medications? I figure what motivates hard work is hunger - like the kind they have, say, in, oh, I don't know. . .China? Or any other country looking to claw its way out of desperate poverty? How can the fat, unionized American worker compete with that? What the hell was Obama talking about?

But I guess he was resurrecting the old frontiersman myth to try and inspire us anew. But when I look at the unionized stagehands at Carnegie Hall who make low six-figures for moving music stands two times in an hour, I have to wonder how far along this line of reasoning is really going to bring us into the 21st Century. It was one thing when the rest of the world was riven by warfare and destitute with disease and poverty. But now, we will have to call on something other than distant memories to allow us to compete. I'd bet on the hungry guy over the fat guy any day.

From Fredrick Jackson Turner

"In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

First stabs

Some of you may know that my ongoing cause celebre has been youth suffrage, coupled with abandonment of child labor laws and compulsory schooling. I have many paragraphs strewn around google docs and Micro Word on the subject, but they have yet to congeal into a concrete paper.

To me, this is the most important topic of the day, though it is admittedly quite far from the mainstream awareness. Since most people in America went to school and were not allowed to work for compensation or vote, it requires some imagination for them to perceive the value of something so far from their experience. Unfortunately, the public is not well known for its powers of imagination, Obama's messianism aside.

Still, I think it is important to make rational points on behalf of what I believe is the silver bullet to many of America's problems, including the national debt, global warming, medicare, and gang violence in our inner cities.

That's a pretty weighty docket of problems, but I am certain that over a generation or two, they could largely be addressed by giving a voice to the only people who have a genuine interest in their positive outcome. in the case of gang violence, that would be the young people themselves who are getting killed, and in the other cases, the young people who will grow old enough to bear the brunt of the latent catastrophes their parents are creating.

In fact, that is the point I would add to the argument below: that self-interest is what rules American democracy- period. The interest of a 6-year-old born today, who can reasonably be expected to live for another 90 years are other than the interests of his father who might live another 30 or 40 at most. The long term impact of economic and environmental irresponsibility will be tangibly felt by the child but not likely by the father. Long term stability, therefore, should be the province of the young, who are going to live through the long term, not the old, whom death will spare the punishments for their profligacy.


I have heard only one other public voice share my concern, and this short post moved me to force some of my thoughts into a bullet point reply. You'll find my summary below.

Some points:

1. Being informed is not a pre-requisite for voting in America. Having interests is, and children have interests. There are people who vote by making pretty patterns with the levers on the ballots, and their votes count as much as yours do.

2. You can’t give parents an extra vote for their children, because parents’ interests and children’s interests are often at odds- think long term debt vs. short term market gains, or global warming impacts, etc.

3. Kids appear uninterested in politics because they have no power to influence politics. I have no interest in the private jet market, because I have no power to purchase a private jet.

4. Most likely kids would vote to repeal mandatory schooling and child-labor laws which restrict their ability to exercise their will and power in the world. When you treat somebody like a child they will act like one (Uncle Tom = Uncle Junior). Right now children have responsibilities (like homework) but no freedoms as a result. This is equivalent to tyranny over a minority and should not be allowed in a democracy.

5. All arguments that seek to deprive children of voting were applied to slaves and women in previous centuries and were all proven false once those groups were given power to affect their lives.

6. Just want to iterate that being an informed and educated voter is not essential in a democracy. People can be quite informed (Brooks and Dionne) and still come to opposite conclusions. It’s not about being right, it’s about having desire. And even if being right were a valid consideration, millions of senile, uneducated, old people can vote but an informed 17 year old can not. Even on those terms, this is not a just state of affairs.

7. And even assuming intelligence is a valid concern, while all young people might not be intelligent, a natural leadership would arise from those who are. Not all women or blacks (or environmentalists or WASPS) are intelligent either, but their interests can be wrangled by bright leaders within their own community. There are plenty of children who would be capable of representing for their fellows in lobbying government. This is particularly true in poor black and latino communities where these young politicians (for lack of political power) become gang leaders and express their leadership in violence rather than in debate. These poorer communities would benefit the most from youth suffrage, as they already have powerful leaders who have no other outlet to seek their own interests other than gunplay and crime.

8. Finally, engaging the generation that is closest to the future and future trends, who is fluent in the technology that will be running our lives a generation off, would be a huge boon to our community. Shunting these kids into schoolroom dungeons is the biggest waste of resources in the country. I want that 6 year old programmer developing aps for my iPhone, investing in stocks, and retiring at 40 to become a philanthropist- not memorizing multiplication tables and poetry that he doesn’t like or understand.

End of lecture.
D

"Haven't they suffered enough?" - H.S.

I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but I find it hysterical. As Sullivan says, it's not an Onion headline.

The American Scene

So I'm digging this blog. A link to a provocative, and I believe accurate, post.

Manzi

Manzi's article here is right on point. I was impressed by the nuance of his reasoning and by the dexterity with which he teased apart two nearly overlapping concepts over the course of his article.

What surprised me a bit, then, for such a clever thinker, was that his final paragraph seems to be completely irrational. In it, he cites human slavery as the sort of moral problem that might upend Libertarian thinking. But how can slavery fit at all in a Libertarian framework, since the human slaves themselves possess no liberty? (Letting alone the political and moral problems, slavery in and of itself causes huge market distortions for the labor market, as much a reason to be rid of it as any, from a Libertarian point of view.)

For a man as obviously intelligent as Manzi, this lapse in logic is perplexing. Would love for him to further elaborate in case it is I who is missing something.


In the mean time, I offer this playful post as a truly Libertarian notion of slavery, influenced by recent acquaintances I have found who are deeply embedded in the sexual bondage community. While presently I find this lifestyle to be somewhat out of my reach, I have been fortunate enough to meet with folks who are embedded in it who have opened my mind to new and surprising values in the perverse and scandalous. For further elaboration, I can do no better than to direct my reader here.


In any event, it is a pleasure to have discovered Mr. Manzi (by way of Andrew Sullivan's hiatus), and I shall look forward to keeping up with his work over time.

Health Care

Well it's time I weigh in on this one. I have been reluctant to for some time, since I have long believed that guaranteed universal health care is a bad idea and that, even though most people want it, there is still no reasonable way it can be achieved. And we are now at a point in the debate where I believe it is clear that the idea is going to fail, so I think it's time to look at the real reasons why.

It has been argued that health care is too costly, that costs go up and up, largely because medical innovation continues - and will continue so long as we humans still experience death. It has been said that it is too complicated. It has been said that without tort reform (an impossibility for a Democratic administration), there can be no true reduction in cost. It has been said that the details of the plan are unbeknownst to anybody - including, based on his prevaricative explanations of the plan, the president. It has been said that the government can't do anything well or efficiently, and so they should not be put in charge of something as important as emergency medical treatment, long term care, or end of life decisions.

A lot more has been said besides, and it is all true. This sort of policy making is the messiest, sloppiest, most boondoggle-laden monstrosity that the government could possibly come up with. It was doomed to fail from the start.

But how did it get so complicated?

Why is it so so so so complicated?

Well I'll tell you why.

It's simple, of course. In any economic system, when you have a monopoly of control, when you have high degrees of regulation, you create unneeded complexity. It is a law of life- regulation created problems, it creates inefficiencies, it creates overlapping jurisdictions, it creates waste- it creates unmanageable systems.

And that is what we have in health care in this country.

But where, you say, are the regulations? Where is the monopoly?

The answer is that it is in the very concept of modern medicine itself.

As always, when things get crazy, the solution lies in uncovering assumptions we make that are incorrect and which lead to needless confusion. In our case, the assumption we make is that the only way (this is the monopoly part), the only way people get healthy is through western medical intervention. This is the false assumption upon which our entire system lies. It is one that is so entrenched, that people hardly see it for what it is - an assumption, not a truth. That the medical model has asserted supremacy over all forms of legally sanctioned healing is an impressive display of will and power that has taken nearly a century to consolidate. And now that it has, it is asking for more.

One other principle of economics, which compliments the problem of mandates and regulations, is that when you guarantee someone something, you are also guaranteeing waste and inefficiency. One can see this in all manner of government service jobs and in many positions that involve the guarantee of tenure. If you are guaranteed $100,000 a year to do your job, and you will get that money no matter what, your honor may compel you to do the job well for a time, but eventually, you will descend to perform it adequately, and eventually, once it sets in that you will be making your money anyway, you will apply your energy someplace else and do your job poorly- while still making the money, thus creating huge waste for your employer and unbearable annoyance to your customers.

When the government guarantees money to doctors and pharmaceutical companies - which it already does in the form of Medicare and Medicaid - you are giving them a monopoly on care, and you are guaranteeing corruption. It is a law of nature. Whether the doctors heal people or not, whether they do it efficiently or not, whether they use experimental methods on unwitting patients or not, they are still guaranteed the government's money. When there is no alternative to a method of care, when there are no choices, then you are no longer free, and you are no longer engaged in an open market system. And a closed system is a system that will breed waste, inefficiency, and corruption every single time. It will create confusion and overlap as different entities vie for their share of the guaranteed dollars. It will create a monster.

And that is what we have today in the medical model. A monster. An expensive monster that is growing and growing. Were Obamacare to succeed, we would be throwing gasoline on the fire. The financial guarantee to the medical industry would form a monopoly to make Microsoft look like the corner bookstore. It would divert nearly 1/3 of US dollars to the medical monopoly, who, if they were smart, would find new ways to make us sicker and so provide us with more drugs, tests, and procedures. It is a simple business model.

Right now, doctors have no idea why people really get sick, and what's more, they don't really seem to care. We have innumerable diseases that were non-existent even a generation ago. And the diseases that we used to have are presenting many times more frequently and more virulently than they ever were before. For someone who makes money treating the symptoms of these diseases, this is a very good thing for business- more customers. By treating symptoms and not underlying causes, we can create the illusion of health-giving, while insuring that true health - in the form of absence of need of doctors - is never achieved.***


I have been a raw food and detoxification enthusiast for five and a half years this September. I have seen miracle after miracle in my own body and in many of my colleagues who have followed this healing path. Most of us are convinced, through our own experience and transformation, that much of the underlying cause for what people call disease is horrendous nutrition combined with innumerable artificial toxins in our food, air, water - indeed in all areas of our life- including our medicine. Is it a coincidence that we ingest on a regular basis chemicals that have never been in contact with biological organisms in the past and that we are coming down with illnesses that have never afflicted us before either? Are these statistics not running in parallel with one another?

There are many other non-western medical healing modalities which produce miraculous healings on a daily basis. For many Christians, simple prayer is responsible for much in the way of increased health and healing. The Christian Science literature is jammed with testimonial after testimonial of disease reversal. And there are all manner of modern shamans, acupuncturists, and bodyworkers who have watched their clients' lives turn around through their work. Of course, as with any system that operates on the fringes of society, there are many incompetents and even frauds in these professions. This is undeniable. But that does not mean that they are all frauds - or that even most of them are, as the medical industry would prefer we believe. And with medical error (to say nothing of drug side effects) being the number 2 cause of death in America, I think it is unfair to say that the incompetents are in the alternative field alone.

While I am impressed by the work of these various healers, my own experience with deep tissue detoxification has convinced me that in a true level playing field of health practices, this method would win out over all. I have never felt more ecstatic - moment to moment - than when I have completed a deep cleanse and am fasting or eating raw foods. I now have a definition of health that is not merely, 'wow, my arm doesn't hurt today,' but 'wow, I feel really ecstatic today.' It is not simply an absence of disease that I feel, but a presence of health, radiance, and joy. To my knowledge, there is no parallel for this in modern medicine. One either has an illness or one is "healthy." But there is no thought that one could be healthier and healthier, though one can be sicker and sicker. There is no concept that the avoidance of disease is not the end but the beginning. For raw foodists, striving towards ever increasing levels of health and happiness is a lifelong passion. In a level playing field, raw foods would win every time.

But of course it is not a level playing field. Massive subsidies are provided by the government for drug research. Non-profit status is granted to hospitals and medical schools, saving them tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year. The foods we eat - which make us sick - are subsidized as well. We are funding both the diseases and the "cures" at the same time, creating a profit cycle that goes round and round and never stops. The libertarian and the rational economist both know that this is insane- that this is why you stop giving free money to companies in a free market. It is a guarantee of disaster. The danger here is that the majority of the population thinks it is helping them.

The only comparable wastes of money are the global war on terrorism and the global war on drugs. Our interventionist attitudes are feeding the resentment of America and growing new terrorists faster than we can kill the old ones. The drug war follows largely the same pattern, except the "terrorists" in this case are the domestic suppliers, whose market is insatiable. The good news, at least with the drug war, is that we are beginning to see that we can not afford to spend all our money incarcerating domestics and warring with foreign nationals when there is no tangible societal benefit. It is my hope that the head we are coming to in the medical debate will have a similar "wake-up" effect- that we simply can not afford to spend every last dime on the medico-pharmo industry. True alternatives must be found, and they will be found in healing practices that really produce health, not which tinker around the edges at ruinous cost.

Most economists understand the principles at work here. What they don't understand is the assumptions they have made guaranteeing medicine a primary position in the nation's pursuit of health. If they did, they would apply normal economical principles and let the different available modalities compete on an equal playing field. They would pull ALL the money to doctors and drug companies and let them compete against colon hydrotherapists and rolfers. This would eliminate much of the unnecessary complication and would radically reduce costs. It would eliminate layers of government bureaucracies, and it would increase innovation that leads to price reduction. Right now the medical innovations only increase the cost of doing business. That's not what innovation is supposed to do. It is supposed to make things cheaper and more accessible. If there are techniques of acupuncture that reduce suffering and inflammation better than surgery, then those would be flocked to by willing patients. And since acupuncture can be had for less than $100 per hour, it would be stiff competition for doctors performing $5000 surgeries + huge hospitalization bills.

If people became healthier by eating organic raw foods instead of corn-starch cereal, then they would do that. But right now, chemical foods and agriculture are being subsidized and raw food is not. This gives the illusion that such "food products" are cheaper. In fact, they are not cheaper even on their face, once the subsidies are lifted, and when the cost to people's health is factored in through early onset cancer or diabetes, then the costs turn out to be much, much higher.

Government intervention distorts the marketplace. Always. Always. This is true whether they are subsidizing sardines or surgery. Al-Ways. Understanding where we mistakenly think these subsidies are helping is the first step to simplifying the process and making it less expensive. But instead, subsidizing all health insurance will do the opposite. It will make everything more costly, less efficient, and more complicated. This is why I have opposed it from the start and continue to now. My only hope is that this breaking point in the debate opens up new avenues for the exploration of other, saner options. If this be the effect of the discussion at this point, then it will have been worth the fight.



***At the risk of appearing too cynical here, it is worth repeating what I have said elsewhere- that while the motives of doctors themselves may be as pure as the New England snowfall, the people who control them, the drug and medical equipment companies, are beholden to shareholders, not to patients. I, myself, own stock in some of these companies, and I assure you I have never taken the Hippocratic oath. It would be against my financial interest to do so. Again, I don't wish to impugn the motives of all doctors. In many ways they are the equivalent of well meaning, patriotic soldiers who wish to do good by the people. But these same loyal soldiers have placed their destiny in the hands of corrupt and mischievous governments whose interests often collide with those of the military- and even their own citizens. (I will not insult your intelligence by offering examples from recent history.) By turning their art over to anonymous corporate interests - like myself - doctors leave themselves vulnerable to these same unfortunate distortions.