Tag Archives: Parsing

What’s In a Name?

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The Art of the Ridiculous

I recently heard the suggestion that legislation no longer be named, that it be known only by its number.  This idea seems so simple, so genius, so obvious that I can’t believe it’s not already the practice (oh, wait, this is the U.S. Congress…). After all, how is one to vote against something called “The Patriot Act” or “The Leave No Child Behind Act?” More importantly, how is the public supposed to know what the legislation really does or means when it’s given the false curtain of an equally false title? Especially when amendments are often added which have nothing to do with the basic, initial purpose of the bill. While this change wouldn’t provide more outright transparency to legislation, it would at least prevent the illusions and false (some would say deliberately misleading) impressions caused by the current standard of giving a totally uninformative, unrealistic, and generically jingoistic or idealistic title. Whether bills are named for the author or just numbered, it would be a really easy way to make the government just a little less ridiculous.

“The Removal of Propaganda from Law-I Heart America Act of 2011,” anyone?

Specificity is Highly Overrated

From the Indianapolis Star, 18 February 2011, “Historical sites will reopen to tourism Sunday. Archaeologists were cheered by the recovery of a rare statue of King Tut’s father stolen from the Cairo Museum.”

“King Tut’s father?”

King Tut’s father, Akhenaten, the so-called “heretic,” more historically important, and not terribly obscure, certainly not unknown pharaoh? That King Tut’s father?

But I suppose writing “Akhenaten, King Tut’s father” would have been too precise, too informative. Or is this the new practice in modern journalism: e.g. “Sasha and Malia’s father” or “President Clinton’s wife?” Mies van der Rohe said “God is in the details.” The colloquial usage seems to favor the devil in the details. But either way, the point is that the details are important and shouldn’t be dispensed with or overlooked.

America’s Newspapers: Sort Of Informing America One Sloppy, Lazy, Careless Sentence at a Time.

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Two Days Conversant

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28 January 2010: There are Serious People out there. And they’re not talking.

Listening to Meet the Press today from January 24th: the first full thirty minutes equaled unparalleled asshattery. Valerie Jarrett, whom I admire, forgot to bring her brain. Maybe she thought since it was television, that would be okay. Talking points are one thing, but honest to God, why bother to make an argument if you’re not going to support it? Give numbers, data, proof. How about a little information to follow the well-rehearsed sound bite? Ms. Jarrett (and, oh, how they all do this) was pandering to everyone—so many words (sound, no fury) signifying nothing. Following Jarrett, there was Senator McConnell (R-KY), who had the nerve to talk about being ready for bipartisanship, wondering why the administration didn’t bother to show for it, speaking about the government’s duty to create jobs (although when/if the government does through stimulus, infrastructure, or what have you, well, “government doesn’t create jobs. The free market creates jobs.”). Senator McConnell, talking incessantly about the “ordinary American” as if he has ever bothered to really listen to one while he’s out shilling for votes. But most of all, Mitch McConnell, just being a Republican instead of a senator.

And then, there was the panel, striving valiantly to match the asshattery of the first half of the program. (Peggy Noonan, stop it.) The phrase “ordinary American” needs to be eliminated from the pundit vocabulary. It’s condescending and ignorant of the fact that “ordinary Americans” either don’t exist or have the most flexible of identities, interests and desires. And Ms. Noonan in particular is really good at using the expression to justify not making an argument: because “the ordinary American doesn’t care about” that, they care about jobs; they care only about what the government will do for them personally. And actually, while in general I rather like E.J. Dionne and Chuck Todd and the panel format on Meet the Press, why were they performing a post-mortem on the entire administration before the first official State of the Union address? Why reduce governance to politics and elections alone? And why assume that one state (MA) in one moment (last week’s election of Scott Brown) is realistically analogous to the entire country in the mid-terms of 2010 and the Big One in 2012? Instead of an informed discussion about stuff that matters, which they all are capable of, they spent the morning in fantasy football and assessing the contest for prom queen.

15 January 2011 Responds

Nearly a year later and the phrase “ordinary American” is still thick in the air, spouted liberally and equally by pundits and politicians, Left, Right, and Center. Regardless of media source or speaker, far too many important discussions devolve into the statement that the public cares only about jobs. And, yes, the public cares about jobs. That’s basic. But we care about everything else, too. And even if we didn’t, working toward job growth and creation (or just talking about it), doesn’t grant permission to stop working on or informing us about everything else—and there is so much else. It’s becoming the lazy man’s way to win an argument or evade an uncomfortable question. Just say “American,” then say “jobs.”

Besides, I still believe firmly that there is no such thing as an “ordinary American.” Most importantly, the whole assumption that underlies that carries the corollaries of “and they don’t know any better” and “they’re not part of this.” Yes, the government is supposed to serve the public, but I truly believe the government (and media) should never forget that they also are the public. They are we and we are they. And all of us, self included (I was clearly irritable on 28 January 2010), should speak temperately and use “Us/Them” divisions with greater care. While there seems to be a concentrated focus on the growing divisiveness in the country, rightfully, between parties and ideologies, it seems to me that the less frequently mentioned divide between government and public is just as harmful.

And I still think we all spend too much time on the political equivalences of fantasy football and prom queen elections instead of the stuff that matters.

28 January 2010: Domestic Appeasement

So, with a faux spending freeze, a faux and unpassable health bill, with every public utterance, the Democratic majority is practicing appeasement with the Republicans. And the punditry is exhorting the administration to do a better job of “feeling the pain of the people” or “communicating” with and “educating” them; exhorting the administration not to do the big, important stuff because the “ordinary American” wants to know “what you’re going to do for them.”  And the pandering to the minority Republicans and the pandering to the citizens just amounts to Domestic Appeasement. If it’s really a popularity contest instead of a government, fine. Give us ordinary citizens bread and circuses; give us huge tax refunds, with or without (preferably without) the sound bites and the pretense of actually, say, governing. Although, frankly, I’d really rather you just did your job. I’d really rather you stop “fighting” by saying that’s what you’re doing and just rolled up your sleeves and got to work. All of you. Domestic Appeasement is just evasion. It’s the Lowest Common Denominator triumphing over the Common Good. Is that really the point?

15 January 2011 Responds

Health care reform passed!

It did not include a public option. It does not come fully in effect until 2014. And, despite the current Republican desire to repeal it, it is, basically, a Republican and conservative piece of legislation (think back on the days of Hillary-care and remember the plans offered to counter it; think, too, of Romney’s Massachusetts health reform). It remains to be seen if it is as “faux” as I feared, if the subsidies will be enough to cover the millions of Americans who just can’t afford coverage. (And I still think focusing on coverage instead of access to actual care is probably the long way, the wrong way, but Middle Men need jobs, too, I suppose.) Still, it passed, and while I still see it as appeasement in some ways, it (a.) was the result of rolled-up sleeves and hard work and (b.) makes some things better. And that can’t be discounted.

And we got tax refunds, too, for everybody, as it turned out. (Which was a surprise, actually, and I’d sort of like to rescind that whole “bread-and-circuses” thing, as I’ve not room for an elephant and I’m not overly fond of clowns. I am, however, very fond of pumpernickel.) But that bit of Domestic Appeasement will contribute $700 billion to the deficit. Though, maybe it will, as Charles Krauthammer has said, end up being a “rather large stealth stimulus package.”

This year, post-Midterm election, I am less concerned with the administration appeasing recalcitrant senators. The power balance has shifted and things will have to get done. More responsibility for the Red team results in less need for pandering concessions on the part of the Democrats to get things through. But still, the appeasement of the public seems to me a concern. Case in point: focusing on the elimination of earmarks, which are unpopular but also a quirky way of getting some real things done in the U.S. (concrete, visible, needed things: school improvements, libraries, upgrades to infrastructure). No one likes ‘em, but they’re one method of allocating already budgeted resources. But because earmarks sound so toxic and so wasteful, they’re easy to use as popularity enhancers, never mind the practical need for them, or their paltry $15 billion price tag (again, of already budgeted money, so the earmarks themselves didn’t really cost anything); never mind that too often the loudest voices against earmarks are the same legislators who were responsible for the 16 billion dollar peak in earmarks in 2005.* Earmarks: an example of Domestic Appeasement replacing a politically disadvantageous “real” act.

Two more cases: Speaker Boehner’s speech opening the 112th Congress.  (See Ruth Marcus’s article, “Heavy on Platitudes”) And the reading of the Constitution as the first act of business for the 112th. While there’s a lot to be said positively for that act (though, seriously, if you’re going to do that, you have to read the whole thing, even the parts that have been superseded. Honestly, it’s just not that long, and if you’re going to do the whole symbolism thing, do it up right.) But while it’s a “charming little exercise,” it doesn’t “genuinely address the needs of growth, capital formation, and resuscitating the core of the American economy.”* It’s an act, not an action; politics instead of policy: Domestic Appeasement.

28 January 2010: And about the Lowest Common Denominator

Every time the phrase “ordinary American” is used by someone in power, it is clear that that is what they think of everyone who isn’t them. And every time a private citizen calls in to a talk show and asks when the government is going to save them personally from outsourcing (never mind that American labor for some commodities would result in thirty dollar pairs of socks and the like), from poor money management, from cancer, from the terrorists, it’s the lowest common denominator at work. And I am empathetic to all of it—the fear, the trepidation over the future, the environment, health care, college, security, employment. It’s scary. It’s too often sad. And the government should absolutely choose policies that make the best outcomes for the greatest number of people on all these fronts. But the government really should not pretend to provide, and nor should people expect it to provide, personal salvation. Think Bigger. Think of Others. In fact, just think.

The Lowest Common Denominator is everywhere. And I’m bone-weary in the most Kierkegaardian of ways about it. Tired of the people with degrees who neglected to get an education to go with it; tired of the false dichotomies; tired of the failures to admit or grapple with the realities of nuance and detail; tired of the assumptions and the failures on all sides. Tired of the name-calling and the snide comments. So tired of smart people settling for, contributing to, and encouraging the Lowest Common Denominator instead of making the most of the actual opportunity (which many people never get) to Do Something Real. To Do Something Good. Or at the very least, to do something just a bit Greater than the Lowest.

15 January Responds

It’s funny to me how, a year later, these notes have stuck in my head. “Ordinary American” and “Domestic Appeasement” are The Lowest Common Denominator at work. And, so, the L.C.D. is filling the ether of my world, all of our world. Sometimes, it’s the failure of people with power to do the hard things, the necessary things, even incrementally, to advance the greater good. Other times, it’s the failure of us—all of us—to do the small, easy things: it’s my own tendency to snark via Twitter, it’s the House Republicans getting rid of biodegradable forks because they break too easily, it’s the American people’s unwillingness to tolerate the noise level of the biodegradable Sun Chip bag, so now we have the wasteful non-biodegradable bag again. It’s any obvious failure to make the better choice, no matter how inane the decision at hand, or any obvious failure to be as smart or as kind as we actually are, as individuals, as businesses, as a culture, as media, as government.

But there is also a Greater Common Denominator. And it’s around, too. It’s George Clooney, working as a private citizen to prevent genocide in South Sudan. It’s Wikileaks revealing, along with everything else, that “the U.S. government, by and large, was doing in secret what it said it was doing in public.”* It’s Daniel Hernandez cradling Gabrielle Giffords in a Safeway parking lot.

I’m going to do better about remembering that.

*FactCheck.org

*Eliot Spitzer, Fareed Zakaria GPS, 12 January 2011

*David Sanger, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 9 December 2010

Caesar’s Breath (O Random! My Random!)

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Quotey  McQuoterson

“I thought equality was non-negotiable.” Lady Gaga

“What if we say ‘Okay, you can invade Iran, but it has to be all the gay guys.’“ Seth MacFarlane

“We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology. Instead of racing to catch up, we’re buying seeds and garden gnomes on Facebook. This won’t end well.” Daniel Lyons

“In a dream, you saw a way to survive and you were filled with joy.” Jenny Holzer

Children’s Hour

John McCain at a California fundraiser said that Barbara Boxer “is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her.”

Senator McCain, for starters, no, you didn’t have to. You’re the one who wanted to be on the big boy team. You were the one fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill and make the country better. And you chose to take it. But, honestly, no one made you serve…

And, if you’re going to play on the big boy team, you should know that at this point in this wonderfully modern and advanced society of ours, girls play there too and the optics of the homme picking on the femme might not be politically advantageous to said homme. Further, on the big boy team, sometimes there are other people on the team you don’t like. Work with them anyway. And be polite about it. See, outside of the Washington bubble in the real world, most of us have to (literally have to) work with one or two colleagues we dislike. But, being adults, most of us understand that to stand in front of a microphone and tout our disaffection, nay, our disdain for our “unpleasant” colleagues is to utterly destroy any chance of a productive working relationship. And makes us seem a little petty, infantile, and ill-mannered. Besides, sometimes we don’t wish to hurt people, even those we don’t enjoy working with, even those we actively dislike. So, as grown-ups do, we don’t say that sort of thing out loud. We certainly don’t say it where it might be heard, including in front of a live microphone at an event covered by the national media when we are, in theory, one of the grand elder statesmen of the country. Unless we are preferencing our temper tantrums over our gravitas, behaving like a toddler instead of a grown-up.

But maybe it’s the California air…after all, we had Ms. Fiorina channeling Lindsay Lohan in a Mean Girl moment, making fun of Senator Boxer’s hair.

So if people are wondering who’s watching the store or where the grown-ups are, or if you end up scratching your head and asking why John Q. Public doesn’t trust Washington, including you, Mr. McCain, perhaps it’s because from the outside your behavior appears exceptionally surly and utterly childish. And for all Boxer’s “bitter partisanship,” it has not included the very public expression of the “unpleasant experience of having” to serve with you, Senator.

Actually…

“If there’s anything voters don’t want to hear in 2010 it’s Washington inside talk.” (Mark Shields, NewsHour, 15 October 2010).

Oh, Mr. Shields, yes. Yes, actually, we do. We want to hear the guts of it all. We want to be spoken to as equals, as grown-ups, as fellow citizens and not an unknowing and uncaring gaggle of Ordinary Americans. We don’t care if CBO is mentioned (this was your example, and honestly, Congressional Budget Office is not so esoteric that it should count as “inside”). See, the abbreviations don’t really fuss us. We actually really, really do want to know the inside stuff, in detail, and in long form. Even if it’s bad news, even if it’s longer than a 30-second sound bite, even if it doesn’t guarantee a great job, sunshine and roses, and zero budget deficit with zero tax increases for everyone forever and ever, amen.

Really. Besides, Washington inside talk would sound like a choir of angels after the mindless, slogan-filled, short-form generic and/or jingoistic pablum that we’ve been fed and fed up with of late.

For Your Delectation: Read.

“Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” Vanity Fair, Michael Joseph Gross

“A Tea Party Taxonomy,” Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg

“Washington, We Have a Problem,” Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum

For Your Delectation: Watch. (Or listen. Podcast on itunes.)

“God in America,” three-part series from Frontline and American Experience.

 

Christine O’Donnell: Aphorism Fail

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Christine O’Donnell: “Where people fear government, there is tyranny. Where government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Okay. If we reverse the clauses, you might have a true statement: where there is tyranny, it is likely that people fear the government. But it just doesn’t work logically the way you’ve stated it any more than saying “where people speak English, there is America” or “where there are oranges, there is a grocery store.” But it doesn’t really work factually, either: how can you possibly look at the emotional response of a group and determine from the response its cause? How can you think there is even a “cause,” singular? You could finish that sentence so many ways, but you can’t walk it backward and still have it hold true. Where people fear government, they fear the government. And that’s about as far as you can take it in eight words and still have a statement that remains whole and valid.

And then there’s the second part of your statement. You can reverse the clauses and it’s not true either way. Where government fears the people (and by this, I’ll assume you mean the people in government, not, say, the actual government, since it couldn’t possibly experience thought or emotion, not having an amygdala of its very own), the government fears the people. It’s that not being able to determine causation thing again. You could finish the clause with things that are situationally correlative: “where government fears the people, there is a weak government (a restive populace, civic instability).” But to say that liberty is necessarily found where the government fears the people? It’s demonstrably untrue. Liberty is found in places where the governors do not fear the governed. And some places with fearful governments have the opposite of liberty (North Korea, anyone?).

And I wouldn’t wordsmith your pithy quote if not for the fact that it’s exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s catchy and quotable and provocative. It’s clearly an applause line and it worked for you: your audience hooted and hollered and would have grabbed pitchforks and tossed babies had you asked them to. And that’s what’s so frightening. Your line is based in poor logic, misattribution, false premises, and simplistic dichotomies. You tried to build an aphorism out of things that are conditionally true at best and untrue at worst and logically flawed throughout. Bad enough if the target were a person, but the crowd is already stoked to “take down the government.” Hyping up more misdirected blame at the government seems to me a really socially irresponsible thing to do.

International Day of Snow

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So: here it is, then, the topsy-turvy world I vaguely remember from Brave New World. A world where the absurdity is so great that it frequently occasionally feels as though the world has flipped absolutely over and up has become down and everything has changed so rapidly, so unalterably, and so inexplicably that nothing really makes sense.

For example, Chilean coal miners will have to live in a hole underground for three to four months, BP oil spills in the Gulf and we add chemicals on top of it and scientists admit that no one knows what any of it on that scale will mean in the long term. We routinely blast the tops from mountains and push the peaks into the rivers below, so we destroy two things simultaneously and we barely even shrug. We invent nuclear power. We expand its use,  even though we’re still not sure what to do with the spent rods when they can’t be recycled any longer. So we bury them: radioactive bones hidden by the dog-people.  We frack. And all of it, for what? So there can be a light in the refrigerator. So that even our closets can be air-conditioned. And things like that seem absurdly frivolous to exchange human lives and the earth for.

We feed grass-eating animals corn. And then we supplement the corn with soybeans. And then we supplement that with meat by-product. So we have cows eating cows and corn and soybeans and chickens unwittingly cannibalizing chickens. And then, because they seem so unhealthy, we hop them up on antibiotics. And then we decide that, with chickens especially, they’re really just too, well, chicken-like and so we genetically modify them. All of which seems less than humane. And why? So McDonald’s can give us nuggets for a quarter apiece on Thursdays and so kids will have an excuse to eat more ketchup. And that seems a bit strange, too.

And there’s the sex life of frogs to consider. You know, the frogs with three legs or six eyes or what have you. The ones with rapidly diminishing male populations because the assorted melange of Prozac, hormone replacements, Rogaine, pesticide, and road salt in the waterways seems to affect hormone production and encourage strange genetic mutations. Endocrine disruption from microscopic amounts of chemicals that can’t quite be filtered out or eradicated. And it seems to have hit certain amphibious species first, which really sucks if you’re a frog, but will eventually get to us, too. (And in some research, it already has: American male youths have lower levels of testosterone; the birth rate for males is actually decreasing, and there’s still the question of what’s causing all the ADHD, autism, depression, and cancers). And for all the unambiguous gains due to the use of chemicals, when the water contains trace amounts of every single thing we put on or in ourselves or our land and you’re contemplating genderless or mutated frogs incapable of reproducing, it’s a little difficult not to feel that something eerie and peculiar and upside-down is happening.

And there are the conflicts and the wars and the pretexts. And people shooting because that’s what they were once ordered to do. Then the other team has to shoot back. And so on. Sometimes there’s a reason. Sometimes we only say there is. And sometimes, in some places, even those fighting admit that they don’t know why: that’s just what they’ve always done. And how in Africa (of course it is Africa; these stories are always in Africa), just over the weekend in Congo, an entire village was gang-raped: all the women, including grandmothers, and many of the children. And in other villages, the children are simply kidnapped, handed weapons, told to kill their families, and to kill or be killed. They are turned into soldiers for a non-army in a non-war. They are fighting because that’s what they’ve always done and no one stopped to ask “what for?” and besides, the government (such as it is) is following them and they’d be in trouble if they stopped. And so they go on.

And even in small, trivial matters, it all seems a bit bizarre, if I think about it much. Here, where there’s the gift of peace and occasional leisure, we have a steady diet of reality shows which ostensibly are about design or art or food. And they can be fun to watch. But the whole point seems really to be not celebrating human ingenuity or creativity, but participating vicariously in the subtle thrills of back-biting, back-stabbling, and other assorted methods of carping, sniping, and judging. The most vicious, catty comment is the highlight. The tearing down of another person, if wittily done, is the most entertaining. Only: we as people have declared bear-baiting inhumane. We no longer gather at arenas to watch people in shackles try to outrun big game cats. We like to think we are more modern and enlightened than that. But what is all the snark if not just another bloodsport, really?

It just seems to me that we all arrive in this world and we learn it and accept it. And when we grow up, we are just too busy, too threatened, too inundated and distracted by the living of life that we never have the opportunity to look at it long enough to ask ourselves if it’s really the one we want. If this life, this world, is the one we wanted or the best we can do. And maybe it is. And that would be fine, too. But I wonder sometimes if what we really need is just to halt everything for one day. To close all the non-essential things (and some of the “essential” ones, too) so that everybody could just stop for one second and look. Daydream. Think. Question. Or just breathe.

I need a snow day. And, judging from the looks of things, the entire world needs one, too.

An Ass and a Pachyderm Walk Into a Bar

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Politics Drinking Game, 2010 Early Edition

Drink when a candidate/pundit/official says:

  • a host (drink twice for “whole host”)
  • take our government back (or any variant thereof)
  • at the end of the day
  • to be clear/let’s be clear here
  • gin up
  • meta (anything except “physical”, and drink twice just because it’s too darned cute by half)
  • low-hanging fruit
  • look (only when used at the beginning of a sentence)
  • disingenuous (everyone’s favorite disingenuous insult)
  • homeland (because it’s creepy)
  • make whole (ditto)
  • across the aisle
  • bail-out
  • with all due respect (because “all due respect” is French for “not really much at all”)
  • Obamacare (if you’re a D, for obvious reasons; if you’re an R, because it’s big government encroaching on your liberty)
  • 2012 (because the world is ending or because it’s already game on. Either way, you’ll need a drink)

Feel free to add your own. Slainte. (Um, cheers).

 

Conversing about Stupid with Mr. Steyn

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We’re too broke to be this stupid

Mr. Steyn: “…we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent.”

Me:  No kidding. Everybody is a lot less rich now. The US is no exception. And our situation isn’t going to improve. The future compounding of the interest on our debt, our labyrinthine (not to say willfully obfuscating) accounting practices which never seem to admit full responsibility for expenditures at the time they are made (or allow, budget, and pay for them), and the guaranteed exponential escalation of our entitlement programs make our economic future oh-so-very grim. In fact, we’re currently the 24th most stable economy in the world. If we don’t set some priorities, hold spending, or increase taxation there is no way our little money problem will go away. Feels like insolvency to me, my friend.

Mr. Steyn: “Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.”

Me: As it happens, I think the entire country would be more stable and prosperous if all of its citizens had access to basic health care, a solid education, technology that works, and roads and bridges that don’t crumble. I don’t know that people truly have equal opportunities without those things (and if they have the opportunities and then waste them, that’s another story altogether). It may be unaffordable for us in this current economic maybe-recovering-maybe-not crisis, especially since our taxes average at only 28% of our GDP and we’re fighting two previously un-financially-accounted-for wars (three, if you count miscellaneous drone wars), but it isn’t unaffordable. We’d just have to make some difficult decisions: to spend 15-17% on defense and security instead of 20%, for example, or raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits, and probably raise taxes to about 36-44% of GDP, as those European social democracies do. If it were so all-fired unaffordable, then why are ten of these European countries ranked above us in the stable economy index? And, the countries of the EU, despite the euro crisis, were still able to pull a low interest rate to toss money at Greece’s maw. It takes a certain amount of wealth to pull a decent interest rate.

But, you’re saying the Western world is broke. What caused this?

Mr. Steyn: “…we assumed that we were rich enough we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unwilling or unable to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents.”

Me: No way. You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re blaming this on poor people? Disabled people? The elderly? The sick? You’re blaming this on people “unwilling and unable?” You’re blaming the people who need the most help? Even though there are many reasons people can’t support themselves, like a slip-shod educational system, poor health, a lack of job opportunities or public transportation? Or how about the fact that many people work full-time jobs and still can’t make it: housing is expensive, food is expensive, energy prices are increasing, and health care costs are increasing. I mean, Mr. Steyn, the US is #42 in income inequality, ranked alongside countries like Uganda (39), Cameroon (43), and Iran (45). The middle class is some kind of myth, really. You’ve got people who have more money than God, you have a sliver of people who have some financial security, health care, and college money for their kids, but you have a gigantic portion of people living paycheck to paycheck, doing their darndest, and still unable to “support” themselves. And you would not only begrudge them the bits of relief that come their way (a sorry substitute for access to a doctor, a reasonably affordable college education, or any chance of ever achieving security) but you would blame them for the financial calamity facing the entire country? While there may be a handful of shameless schemers gaming the system, taking food stamps and buying Cadillacs, and otherwise behaving badly, I’d bet my life that most of them are people who either never had a chance to find a decent job or just can’t get ahead because their wages were never adequate and now are stagnating while everything they need to make things better (internet, a car, housing, food) has a price that seems to perpetually leap ahead out of the realm of possible attainment.

Mr. Steyn: “[But] to be poor in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes.”

Me: Umm, food deserts? Have you checked out the difference in food prices in poor neighborhoods as opposed to suburban markets, where the produce lives? If you’re making 7 bucks an hour and you have a cheap apartment that eats 30+% of your income and you have to feed the kids, fast food is the most available and the least expensive. If you buy the $4 salads at McD’s or wherever, and you’re feeding 3 people, you have to work 2 hours to pay for that one meal. And you’re still hungry. So are the kids. And living in a poor area, you may not feel safe wandering out for your daily constitutional to remain fit. And have you wandered into a school cafeteria lately? Taken a shifty at the cutting of physical education programs from schools to make more room for sharpening test-taking skills? Yeah, poor choices are sometimes to blame for the obesity among those with less than you think they should have, but not every time. Perhaps you could use a less wide brush for your tarring. (And would you really want your fellow citizens to be hungry and emaciated? Would that really be a less stupid thing to do than providing a little slice of public money for food stamps and free children’s lunches?)

Mr. Steyn: “It’s not so much the money as the stupidity, which massively expands under such generous subvention.”

Me: Yes, but stupidity will expand under any conditions. It’s human nature. We should embrace it without nourishing it. It’s part of our charm. It’s who we are, regardless of what else we are or aren’t or what our government is or isn’t paying. Stupid is probably just stupid, independent of subvention, generous or otherwise.

Mr. Steyn: “We’re too broke to be this stupid.” Cheers, Mr. Mark Steyn. That we are. We just disagree on the meaning of “stupidity.”

*And now for a moment of respectfully intended but still persnickety parsing: “the bad and peaceful conscience” doesn’t equate with a “remorseful” one. Remorse, if you’ve experienced it, is all bad and anything but peaceful. Loved the reference; loved the wit of your writing; agree that the West is probably in twilight. It’s decadence, alright. But if you’re arguing that we’re remorseful to a fault, our own and others’, well, I submit that’s not category 4 on the conscience spectrum.

Note: Even after the announcements this week of large-scale budget cuts in Germany and the UK, I still stand by my position that modified welfare capitalist governments are affordable and not in the least “stupid.” I agree with Angela Merkel that “solid finances are the best form of crisis prevention” but also believe that domestic social spending can also be smart spending. And, as has been pointed out in the news this week (BBC; The Economist), many of Germany’s cuts are due to political reasons (e.g.: to set an example to other Euro nations and to appease financial fears as Greece, Spain, and Portugal deal with their fiscal crises). 10 June 2010