Sunday, March 25, 2018

The Future Of America Is Finally On The "March"

I have said here on at least one occasion that all politics are not so much local as they are generational.  To a degree, that fact explains at least some of the left-right shifts in political history, including our own. 

The generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II benefited by, and therefore believed in, the power of government to save us from our own excesses and to create a world in which our most dangerous tendencies are restrained, and subjected by national and international institutions to the power of reason, debate, and peaceful resolutions of conflicts and crises.  So it could be said that they moved the world in a leftward direction.  On the other hand, Boomers--i.e., my generation--took all of this for granted and, in seeking an ever-increasing level of self-gratification, reached the limits of what hard work could accomplish and began to see those institutions as nothing more than consumers of their resources.  So they listened to the Republican siren song of tax cuts, deregulation, and "family values."  And we started moving in a rightward direction.  And, with the exception of a few brief course-correction years during the Obama Administration, we've been headed that way ever since.

By most reckonings, the last members of the Boomer Generation were born in 1964, the last year in which a Democrat won a landslide victory in the presidential election.  Fifty-four years ago.  Since then, three more generations have come of age in this country--Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennials.  In which direction are they headed?

Up until now, that hasn't been clear.  And Boomers have been a big reason for that.  For a long time, they have so dominated the American landscape by shear force of numbers and the intensity of their various demands that I suspect succeeding generations--their children and grandchildren--all decided to quietly give up on politics.  For a very long time.  During that time, we have had a succession of Boomer Presidents--Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump--pushing and putting the needs of their generation ahead of everything else (again, with the exception of a few of Obama's years).

I write today to tell you that, in case you haven't noticed, Boomers, our time is up.  And, quite frankly, I couldn't be happier about it.

Yesterday's nationwide "March For Our Lives" event was much more than a response to the wave of school shootings over the past two decades since the Columbine tragedy.  It was much more than a political event, and was certainly not a partisan one, given the failures of Democrats and Republicans to take serious action against gun violence.  More than anything else, it was a primal scream against an entire political and economic culture that has been consciously designed to value their very existence far less than the supposed "right" of anyone to have a military-level arsenal.  A scream, I might add, fully supported and endorsed by their parents and grandparents around the world.  (And I suspect that Paul Krugman is right:  the #MeToo movement among women fighting sexual abuse is somewhat of an allied movement, as both are directed against many of the same targets.)

So, since young people are the future of this country, and they are prepared to challenge Republican orthodoxy on an issue key to Republican campaigns in the past, what have Republicans done in responding to the rise of the MFOL movement?

Why, just what you'd except from a highly-adept, well-oiled political machine ready to respond to public opinion shifts on a moment's notice.

Sarcasm.

And not even particularly bright sarcasm at that.  Here, for example, is Rick Santorum, whose 15 minutes of fame expired somewhere in the 1990s.  His advice to students being mauled to death by semi-automatic fire?  Learn CPR.  As if that would make a difference to someone whose heart and lungs have been punctured by multiple rounds of bullets.  As if everyone would have the time necessary to even do that when they were under attack.

Santorum's "advice," sadly, is not an outlier.  Over the past several weeks since the shootings in Parkland, Florida, I have spend a good deal of time on social media looking at and gauging the conservative response to the accumulation of gun tragedies that can no longer be brushed aside with empty wishes of "thoughts and prayers."  I have been hoping against hope that a majority, even a plurality, would finally wake up and accept the reality that facts overwhelming confirm:  sensible gun restrictions save lives, even in locations with a reputation for violence like New York.

And instead of promises to help provide safety, the first duty of any level of government, and admittedly with a tiny handful of exceptions, young people are being told that the thoughts and prayers of children don't matter at all.  Only the thoughts and prayers of adults matter, especially if they are part of the Republican establishment, in and out of government.  See if you can survive the awesome power of the G-d-given Second Amendment coursing through school systems in exactly the way the Framers intended, and, IF you survive, maybe, just maybe, by then we'll listen to you.  And hopefully, if you're anything like your parents, you'll have become a "sensible" Republican by then, with your own arsenal, ready, eager, and willing to let your own children become cannon fodder.

Or, to put it another way, "SHUT UP." 

In fairness, it should be pointed out that this intolerance extends not only to adults, even within electoral politics.  In at least one case, there's a little more than a hint that "SHUT UP" might be followed by an "OR ELSE."

That's the mindset of a party that knows it's already lost the future.  That's the mindset of a party that, like its "leader" in the White House, cannot and will not think beyond the next fifteen minutes, so afraid are they of what might happen to their control of power after that.  That's the mindset of a so-called "conservative revolution" that ran out of gas long ago, and has been subsisting on fumes while being in denial about the changing world surrounding it.

But it's too late.

For one thing, the "children" are not that far away from being adults.  Those who survived the Sandy Hook shooting are now teenagers.  The Parkland students are literally on the cusp of being able to register and vote.

And not all parents are as idiotic as most Republicans seem to be on this issue, as well as others.  Indeed, many of them are surprising sensible, even in the case of those educating Donald Trump's youngest son.  (That poor kid.  Oy.)

Even among the "children," it seems that there is an ability to defend differences of opinion on guns, while finding common ground on solutions.  Take a look.

And, when it comes to thinking about solutions, there is new ground to be broken.  We can, for example, require firearms manufacturers to be strictly liable, and force them to eat the costs of the tragedies they help to create.  We already do that with the manufacturer of explosives, which are every bit as much "arms" as are pistols and rifles.  We can also require gun purchasers to purchase insurance each time they buy a firearm.  Not only would this help to pay for the cost of the carnage, but it would also slow down the number of purchases, due to the extra cost.  As conservatives themselves are fond of saying, "freedom isn't free."

So, to my fellow Boomers, I have a suggestion.  Let's stop standing in the way of the future.  Let's spend some of our own time and treasure giving back to the world that has given us so much.  Let's think more about a legacy, and less about our leisure.  Let's work with those who are walking in our footsteps, trying while we do to remember what it once felt like to care more about the future than about the present.  Let's do what our parents once did:  whatever it took (and takes now) to take care of our children and grandchildren.  If that means "moving to the left" so be it.  Moving to the left nearly a hundred years ago launched an American Century.  Doing it now might yet launch another one.

*****

I'll be spending the next two weeks preparing for, and observing, Pesach, and will be back here after that.  Happy Pesach, Easter, or whatever you observe, and an early spring for all of us.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

"We, Not I"

"There's no such thing as society."

Those words were famously uttered by Margaret Thatcher, the first prime minister of Great Britain, who, during her time in office, used the power of government (which would not exist in the first place if there were truly no such thing as society) to destroy the individual lives of many in order to enhance the individual pleasure of a few.  As Ronald Reagan did shortly thereafter here in the U.S., she justified the sheer magnitude of her cruelty on the grounds that the rights of the individual to do whatever he or she wants are always paramount.  Always.  Unless, of course, you need to boost your popularity by fighting the splendid little war here or there (see:  Grenada, the Falkland Islands).

But then, except for the occasional war, why have a government at all?  If there's no such thing as society, why not just return to the days of our most primitive ancestors, where everybody did nothing but kill each other for the sake of short-term survival?  It might actually solve a lot of problems.  Aside from eliminating a lot of the administrative overhead for services we take for granted (police, fire fighters, schools, hospitals, emergency weather services, etc.), and therefore the need to pay any taxes at all for them, it might also help to reduce a lot of modern problems--overpopulation, pollution, and the steady gaze of an entire world at their cell phones.  Above all, no taxes--for there would be no government that would need them for support.

Taxes, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, are the price we pay for a civilized society.  When Margaret Thatcher was attempting to deny the existence of society, the thing she was really trying to attack was government, and the taxes that support it.  Because, with both of those things, all of us are better off, whether we want to admit it or not.  Thatcher had her own self-interested reasons for not wanting to admit it.  Like most of her peers in Britain's Conservative Party, and the then-Reagan wing of the Republican Party, what she really wanted was a world that catered not to all individuals--i.e., "society"--but the handful of people who suffered (then and now) from the same blinkered form of narcissism that currently resides in the White House.

Lately, though, at least a few of them are re-thinking their position.  Here's one example.

Last year, former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling lost his son to an accidental overdose of opioids.  You can read about it in some detail here.  Although the article doesn't go into extensive detail about what happened, there's enough in it to surmise that nothing had taken place which would have led Bolling or his wife to think that their son was in any danger.  The news hit both of them with stunning suddenness.

It should go without saying that Bolling's loss demands our sympathy and support for their loss and their overwhelming grief.  But it's almost impossible to overlook the fact that Bolling was, up to the point of his son's death, someone who, like his employer, disdained thinking about human suffering in the aggregate, and failed to see that individual tragedies can occur at a rate that ultimately demands that we think about their impact on all of us.  In saying this, I am not making argumentum ad hominem; I am simply reflecting on Bolling's own words in assessing the way forward from his loss. They are as follows:
Not-my-kid syndrome is a killer. Because you just don’t know. It could very well be your kid. So do us all a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do your family a favor. Do your children a favor. Have the discussion with them and do it again. And again. Get involved in your kids lives. …You could save a life.  (emphasis added)
Bingo.

The Reagan-Thatcher era has been all about not only a denial of "society," but a denial of any collective responsibility to help individuals in need.  Far easier to say it's someone else's problem.  Far easier to push away the person who begs you for help.  Far easier to claim a false sense of superiority in the process.  Far easier to overlook the reality that all of us, not matter where or how we are situated, are vulnerable to the changing, churning world around us.  Including the people whose lives collide with each other, often without any concern for the impacts of those collisions.

Arthur Miller, the American playwright who did more to speak about our social obligations than any other dramatist in our country's history, understood this very well.  His first major success on Broadway, "All My Sons," is precisely about those obligations.  A defense contractor sells faulty engine parties for military planes, justifying his crime by the need to keep open his business and take care of his family.  He later learns that one of his sons, who had dissappeared and was thought to be lost in action, actually committed suicide because of his anger over his father's perfidy.  It is in that moment that the father realizes that all of the men killed by the faulty engine parts were, in fact, "all my sons."

Former New York Yankee Bob Watson understands those obligations as well, refusing to accept a life-prolonging kidney from one of his children because he wants them to be able to live their life to the fullest.  As for Watson himself, it's enough for him to have had, as he put it, "a real good life."  I'm not a huge fan of sports metaphors, but I'm enough of a baseball fan to see how it illustrates the need in life for all of us to strike a balance between the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, or the one.  (And, of course, "Star Trek" illustrates it as well; I'm enough of an ST fan to see that and share the previous link.)

So consider the case of Dallas Green, who took over as manager of the underperforming Philadelphia Phillies during the 1979 season.  Green, who had played for the Phillies and was working in the team's front office at the time he took over, saw a locker room full of players more concerned with their individual statistics than they were about winning or losing games.  His response was to post a sign in the clubhouse that contained a simple message, one that Green drilled into the Phillies for the rest of the season and the one that followed:  "We, Not I."  As for the results of that message, it's enough to point out that, in 1980, the Phillies won their first World Series in the team's history.

But Green's story does not end there.  After the 1980 season, he was hired away by the Chicago Cubs, operating under new ownership.  In this case, Green was taking over a team with far less individual talent than he had to work with in Philadelphia.  In this case, Green saw the need to build up the confidence of the individual players, so that he could lay a foundation for making the types of trades and free-agent signings that would be needed to make the Cubs contenders.  So he flipped his message, de-emphasizing "We" while trying to build up the "I" in each player's mental approach to the game.  And the result?  In 1984, the Cubs made the postseason for the first time in nearly 40 years.

My point, ultimately?  It's never always about "We."  It's never always about "I."  Contrary to what Ayn Rand tried to tell the world in "Anthem," both words matter  Human beings are wired for both solitude and connectivity.  We all have areas of our lives which are exclusively ours, and we all have areas of life that we need--I can't emphasize this enough, need--to share with others.  We all have needs that demand individual attention, and needs that can only be addressed on a mass scale, requiring us to be viewed as a unit, not a collection of disassociated individuals.

And we have spend 40 years overdosing on "I."  As a consequence, our country is falling apart--physically, financially, and culturally.  Soon, there may indeed be no such thing as society, because we will have destroyed it, and all of the good things that society creates.

We need to get back in balance.  We, the people of this country, need our own Dallas Green to walk into the national locker room and put up a sign that says "We, Not I."  Time is short.  And getting shorter all the time.

Friday, March 9, 2018

Billy Graham: The Original Televangelical Sinner

It's impossible for me to comment on the death of Billy Graham without violating the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  At the same time, it feels more than a little dishonest to let the news of his death pass without saying something about it here, especially since, at one time in my life, I would have had a dramatically different take on this news than I do now.

I was an evangelical Christian between the ages of 18 and 30, primarily due to the influence of a group of Oberlin friends who provided my social life with a structure that the college otherwise did not afford me.  I ultimately realized that, as a spiritual (and otherwise) guide for my life, evangelical theology was not a good fit for me, made peace with the decision to walk away from it, and did so.  Although I still regard as friends most of the people I befriended during this period, I have never looked back at this decision, and am completely at peace with having made it.

During this period, I went from seeing Graham as a slightly sinister figure, due to his association with Richard Nixon, to accepting the mainstream evangelical view of him as the central leader of a spiritual revolution that America desperately needed.  I even got an opportunity to hear him speak in person, at a missionary conference in Urbana, Illinois in 1976.  As an actor/attorney, and therefore as a connoisseur of public speaking, I have to say that, when it comes to sheer rhetorical skill, I still regard Graham as one of the leading public figures of the 20th century, without regard to the content of that rhetoric.  That evening I listened to him is the main reason I feel that way.  True, I had seen him many times on television.  But seeing and hearing him in person took the experience of listening to him to another level.

Even so, there in one moment in that evening that telegraphed, in a way, the downfall of the evangelical movement his ministry launched.  He told a story that, subsequently, I learned he was fond of telling often in sermons and in speeches.  As told by him, he was having lunch on Capitol Hill one day in the Senate dining room.  One of the Senators with him mentioned a conversation he had with his colleagues about the world being divieded between optimists and pessimists.  He asked Graham whether he was an optimist or a pessimist.  Graham replied "I'm an optimist.  I've read the last page of the Bible, and I know that God's going to win."  The audience at the conference roared with laughter, and otherwise with approval.

That mix of humor and conviction was obviously what Graham was hoping to express in telling this story, and it obviously worked for the audience on that evening, and I'm sure on many others.  But there's something else about the telling of it that struck me, then and now.  Graham was obviously very proud of his political connections, even though he recognized through his experience with Nixon that those connections had hidden dangers that could manifest themselves at any time, dragging him down in the process.  The lessons of Watergate had not stopped him from trying to serve Caesar and Christ at the same time.

Billy Graham's marriage of televised preaching and political networking, like it or not, has to be viewed as the topsoil from which the modern televangelical movement began to sprout in the late 1960's, beginning with Pat Robertson and the "700 Club."  He liked to dissasociate himself from some of the more extreme political views of that movement, but not from all of those views.  Simply put, he helped to plant in the minds of a large number of Americans the idea that evangelical Christianity and political conservatism were in every sense joined at the hip, despite obvious points of departure between the two such as the issues of poverty and civil rights.  To paraphrase both the Gospels and the epistles of Paul, Graham helped to popularize the idea that one can serve both G-d and Mammon, and that politics demands that believers be "unequally yoked" with unbelievers.

Fast forward several decades to the present.  The White House is now in the hands of a man who works doubletime to enhance his well-earned reputation as a moral reprobate, both financially and sexually.  This is not fake news, or fake anything else.  These are facts against which any efforts at denial die on contact with them.  Who helped to elect him?  Who, in fact, make up his most durable constituency, one that simply shrugs off the daily litany of scandal oozing out of the Oval Office?  Evangelical Christians, based on little more than Donald Trump's latter day status as a "anti-abortion" President.

And who is one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, "spiritual advisor" to this President?  None other than Franklin Graham, Billy's son and heir to his ministry.  And, while his father made at least some nominal attempt to separate himself from the seamier sides of politics, Franklin's effort in this regard feel even more half-hearted.  Perhaps the best illustration of that fact is the following quote, taken from a New York Times article that assesses the differences in the lessons that father and son learned about mixing faith and politics:
“In my lifetime, he [Trump] has supported the Christian faith more than any president that I know,” Mr. Graham said. “That doesn’t mean he is the greatest example of the Christian faith, and neither am I, but he defends the faith. There’s a difference between defending the faith and living the faith.” (emphasis added)
Someone needs to tell Franklin that the sophistry in that last sentence is fooling no one, at least no one who is thinking for himself or herself.  Personally, the best and most concise rebuttal to that statement came in a letter to the Times' editorial page in response to the article:
Yes, it is called hypocrisy.
That, however, is a purely secular perspective.  For a more spiritual one, perhaps for many a more devine one, it might be worth considering the words of another source:
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.' (Matthew 15:8-9, ESV)
I do not condemn the Grahams and their broadcast descendants for their failure to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.  The Gospels and the First Amendment both do that for me.  At this point, it's up to these televangelical sinners to stop talking out of both sides of their mouths, and to stop using that which is held as sacred by many as a vehicle for empowering a few.  And its time for the followers of these sinners to remind themselves and each other that G-d does not choose political sides, but only asks who is on His side.  And that He expects us to treat everyone, regardless of their political views, with humility and respect.