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Meme of Rivals

I’m fascinated by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Lincoln’s presidency, Team of Rivals.  But since I am trying to write a novel, a part of me also wants to get back to reading fiction so that I have some models and inspiration. 

That said, the book illuminates the motivations and consequences of human actions, and the warps and triumphs of human character, in ways that novelists should envy. Lincoln is a hero both saintly and strategic and also fallible. It is amazing to trace the incredibly complex process by which ideals get translated into reality. Lincoln understood popular opinion as a kind of character–flawed, sometimes base, but capable of growth.   

It is also interesting to note how the book is talked about in the press, where it is usually reduced to a prurient view of its title: oh goody, the cabinet might fight with each other. The phrase “team of rivals” is spoken in the tone of voice usually used to announce that there’s a fight going on behind the gym.

I’ve still got 100-some pages left in the book, but while there is infighting, Lincoln decided many questions himself, cancelled many cabinet meetings, and consulted his Secretaries of State and War while ignoring (but placating) lesser Secretaries. What Lincoln really seemed to want was a) high competence in the important tasks of fighting the war, funding the war, containing the war, and connecting the troops and their loved ones and b) a coalition which would keep both conservative Democrats and radical Republicans engaged. He was also strong to hear opposing views without being threatened by them. 

Lincoln and Seward, his closest confidante, understood that the highest matters of state–in this case, whether the state would survive, whether slaves would be freed–were shaped by the jealousies and flaws and vitalities of frail individual humans. The two men regularly escaped to the theater, which was then experiencing a golden age. They invited leading actors and actresses to their homes and quizzed them on their interpretations of characters.  They especially loved Shakespeare, perhaps because it so resembled their daily life.  

What We Talk About When We Talk About Bipartisanship

Obama has pledged to promote bipartisanship.

But that may require a far deeper change than even he can promise.  

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews says something about helping the President. It’s a sweet thing to say.  Of course, he’s lambasted by a guest journalist from Time and Joe Scarborough who both cite Walter Cronkite to effect that “I must be skeptical so the people do not become cynical.” But the authentically interesting Scarborough isn’t skeptical about what matters most: his own motivations and the motivations of his employer. Cable news is prurient and partisan so that it might spike its ratings.  When Haley Barbour wants to talk about a power plant that actually captures carbon, when he wants to talk about a solution that might actually help someone, Andrea Mitchell can’t contain her impatience, her boredom, her “Obama won student council but do you think he like totally might ask Hillary to head the dance committee” fecklessness. Olbermann announces yet again the three worst people in the world.  Maybe the worst person in the world is the person who becomes a millionaire by teaching Americans to hate each other.  In this respect, he is no different from Limbaugh. 

Partisanship is a business model. And partisanship is in me: it’s a gang membership, an affirmation, an endorphin, a vice that feels like a virtue. I am smarter than you; I am more decent than you; I am more sophisticated than you; I am the real America and you are not.   

Partisanship is pleasurable and distracting. I’ve had some experience with things that are pleasurable and distracting. They’re not that easy to give up.

***

My friend Maury shared a link to a Salon essay which pointed out that the last eight years have been hugely bipartisan in that almost all the important measures passed by Bush have received numerous Democratic votes and little serious opposition.  That’s true, and an incredibly useful fact to point out. But I think when Americans say they want bipartisanship, they mean something else.

When we say “bipartisanship” I think we mean a consensus which values the opinions of the minority, which is not achieved by bullying and slander, which does not indulge in the dubious pleasures of self-righteousness, which aligns actions and opinions, which doesn’t abuse the trust we place in a President in war time, which seeks solutions not just victory, which claims no privileged access to God’s will, which doesn’t relentlessly judge purity, which is shaped by gratefulness and humility, which values facts and experience, which is not tazared with charges of flip-flopping and is thus free to evolve its thinking and adapt its solutions.

NOTES OF A MODERATE: THREE VOTES (3 of 3)

I put myself through this whole process to force myself to publicly articulate my reasons for voting.  This leaves me with: 

Obama, enthusiastically.

It has become clear that

If you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run a country. McCain lacks the temperament and judgment to be a chief executive.  See the endorsement of Reagan’s Head of Arms Control, Ken Adelman.

Franken, grudgingly.

At its worst, this feels like the unctuous vs. the obnoxious.

I voted for Coleman for Mayor of Saint Paul because he is a hardworking, highly intelligent, extraordinarily effective politician. The liberal StarTrbune endorsed him for similiar reasons for Senate. His very opportunism suggests his course: a repudiation of the Bush legacy and an embrace of centrism.  A chastened but vigorous Republican minority in the Senate might serve as a useful counterweight to any excesses in an otherwise one party government. But Coleman has ultimately carried too much water for Bush. Why not let the Democrats have their team so they can be held responsible for their results? 

The Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, enthusiastically.

This is precisely the kind of public good that the government is supposed to further: clean water and land and a robust cultural legacy.  This is precisely what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant when he said, “Taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society.”   

The quality of the opposition to the amendment says much about the moral and intellectual quality of the Right these days. 

“They know this thing is a scam,” [Representative Tom Hackbarth] said, referring to the arts and culture component of the proposal that would capture about 20 percent of the total funding.

My dictionary defines a “scam” as a “dishonest scheme” or “con.” Yet the arts are explicitly included in the language of the Amendment. So where’s the con?  The alliance in the bill is explicit and not all that unnatural. Habitat, lakes and rivers, and the arts are a part of what might be called the spiritual infrastructure of the state.

A Conservation Legacy Report, requested by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and released in May . . . quotes Pawlenty: "Our beautiful lakes, streams, prairies and forest help define who we are as a state. They bring great pride and enjoyment to our people. We need to take proper care of them for future generations." Pawlenty was also instrumental in making sure the Guthrie got its funding.

Rod Grams resorts to what might called Argument by the Insertion of Vaguely Perjorative Adjectives:  

"We feel this is a tremendous abuse of the constitution, for it creates basically a slush fund for a lot of special interest groups to have their money to spend on pet projects,” said former U.S. Sen. Rod Grams, chairman of the No Constitutional Tax Increase Campaign.

•    Since this is a Constitutional Amendment, it is unclear how the Constitution can abuse itself. 
•    How does a slush fund differ from a fund?  (There are both oversight and limits in the Amendment.)
•    How do special interest groups differ from groups? “Pet projects”—as opposed to “projects they don’t much like?” (While any grant-making body can abuse its power, groups are required to explain how they serve the greater good.)

Read Gram’s statement with a more supportable mix of adjectives: 

We feel this creates a flexible, but limited fund for a lot of groups to have money to spend on broadly worthy but often politically vulnerable projects.

Ok, then.

NOTES OF A MODERATE: FOUR CONSERVATIVE MYTHS (2 of 3)

"After every Republican loss -- whatever the proximate cause -- it is worth recalling the words of Whittaker Chambers: "If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to masses of people -- why somebody else will. . .”

Michael Gerson, The Washington Post

The current Republican Party seems to embrace four myths–at least at the playground level that constitutes most campaigning.   When I look at my experience, and what I know of history, each myth starts with a kernel of truth.

1. Business always acts for the greater good.
Please understand: I am not someone who grudgingly accepts business as a necessary evil. I LOVE business. If I were independently wealthy, I might sit in on conference calls just for fun. My wife has remarked that the prospect of addressing marketing challenges “changes your brain chemistry. You get all happy.”  Business is amazingly good at generating innovation and prosperity. 

But business seeks its own profit, not any broader notion of goodness; it often overvalues short term gain, undervalues long term prosperity, and ignores any good it cannot monetize; it favors a mediocre idea backed with money and muscle to a good idea without those props; it often acts on half-assed information, weird personal agendas, and charismatic trends; and it assumes an educated workforce and an efficient infrastructure.

2. Government is always bad. 

I understand the conservative disdain for government. I have ventured into Johnston Hall, triplicate form in trembling hand, and been greeted with that special mix of simmering apathy and contemptuous incompetence that is the University of Minnesota Graduate School.

But against that experience, I weigh these facts: 

When my father was disabled, I received social security. When the private school I was in failed, I was able to attend a public school. When my widowed mother couldn’t afford college for me, I was first awarded grants and loans to a private college and then I was able to attend a quality public law school. Social security played an important part in my mother’s retirement.  Because of a Minnesota law, my wife and I, a company of two, can get health insurance. There are a number of things —from state parks to safe products to nuclear umbrellas, from an affordable mortgage to protected bank accounts—that I simply take for granted.  One of my best clients was a government agency. One of the absolute best customer experiences any can ever have is at the Roseville License Bureau. Without government, I would not enjoy the happiness and prosperity I enjoy now. 

3. Taxes are theft. The progressive income tax is socialism.

The Republicans have made the ridiculous charge that Obama’s proposed upper bracket rates of 39% are socialist (and that the McCain plan’s corresponding 36% rates are not.) While I oppose the high marginal tax rates such as we experienced in the late 70s, I agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes that “Taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society.”

Further, all but the greediest of us understand the reason for a progressive tax.

Adam Smith, the first theorist of capitalism and, evidently, the father of the double negative: “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” 

Small government poster boy Thomas Jefferson favored tariffs on imported goods, because they placed a disproportionate burden on the rich. McCain mentor Teddy Roosevelt introduced the progressive income tax. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower levied top bracket rates of–gasp–90%. Governor Palin taxes the rich oil companies who do business in her state and then literally redistributes the money to average Alaskans. John McCain has publicly defended higher taxes for the rich and voted against the initial Bush cuts.

If you are ever fortunate enough to make $250,000, and your first instinct is to whine, you suffer from a spiritual sickness far beyond the reach of politics.

4.  Volunteerism is sufficient.

Some genuinely charitable friends of mine disdain government assistance because it is inauthentic and inefficient. They have a point. The most meaningful charity is that voluntarily extended from one person to another. The most profound transformations take place in a private space that no government can reach. 

That said, in my experience, voluntary charity failed when it mattered. The people of Rollingstone tried to run a private school and they could not do it. If the public school
district had not stepped in, there would be no school.  Period. 

If we rely on private initiative to educate our children and take care of our unlucky, it will not happen.  

There are, of course, counter liberal myths:  that business is always bad, that government is always good, and that the only purpose of the evil rich is to write checks in a vain attempt to assuage their guilt.  If you don’t like being governed by people who embrace these myths, please just move the hell out of San Francisco.

Notes Of A Moderate: Thoughts On The Eve Of The Election (1 of 3)

As the election approaches, I have decided to write, in this semi-public forum, about politics. My goal is not to convince anyone of anything. My goal is, as a citizen, to impose some rigor on my own thoughts by exposing them to public scrutiny.

I am a moderate. Since that risks meaninglessness, I would define it this way:  I believe that conservatives underestimate the role of government in creating our security. I believe that liberals underestimate the role of business in creating our prosperity.

I am also moderate in that I think ideas from across the political spectrum have contributed to a society which is better today than it was a century ago.  I see political history not as a battle between good and evil, but a process of experience and correction.

From Teddy Roosevelt and his contemporaries, we have a progressive income tax, anti-trust laws, and the start of regulations to make sure the places we work and the products we consume are safe.   From Franklin Roosevelt, we have a willingness of government to carry our wounded and to mitigate the worst effects of economic catastrophe.  From the Sixties liberals—let’s say, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, the anti-war movement (and, I would add, the more thoughtful younger Vietnam-era officers such as Colin Powell)–we have a cluster of deep reforms: the Civil Rights Acts, consumer protection and environmental laws, the end of the Vietnam War and ongoing suspicion of our messier foreign interventions.

From the Reagan-era conservatives, we have an aversion to depressive marginal tax rates, a suspicion of those forms of government assistance that create more dependence than hope, a conviction that capitalism is broadly preferable to collectivism, and a heightened respect for the military and other traditional institutions.   The “we” is obviously most tenuous here.  Liberals don’t agree; conservatives may go much further.

On the other hand, Bush has added nothing to our collective sense of who we are when we are at our best.  It is not necessary to presume bad faith to draw this conclusion. I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Rove did what they thought was best for the country. But they are that most dangerous thing: Christians who seem to think they are incapable of sin.  They tried for eight years and they failed. I don’t want anything they have to offer:  Preemptive wars,  huge deficits, lax oversight, tax breaks and other largesse to the rich, an aggressively interpreted war powers clause, closed-off decision-making, slanderous campaigning, and a smirking public presence.

Well, almost nothing: E and I have talked about how Bush is a genuinely tolerant man who appointed a Black Secretary of State, a Black Woman Secretary of State, and a Hispanic Attorney General. 

That, as the election approaches, is where my sense of our political history rests. I want much of the last century. I want almost nothing of the past eight years.

A Phone Call

Someone called me today, introduced himself and asked me if I knew x. I had a little trouble placing the name or discerning the motive of the caller, so I answered, “Yes, a little. We’ve worked on a few projects together.”  Suspicion tinctures my phone interactions with strangers. The person the caller mentioned was someone who had worked for the Los Angeles office of a Minnesota client of mine; she was on the periphery of the solar system of my life, a voice on a few conference calls, a sending address for an email with some background I needed. 

“I’m calling because your name is on her Blackberry. I wanted to let you know that she died.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. There’s a 1-888 number for more information.” He gave it to me.  At first this seemed odd, but then it seemed sensible. It saved this good man, who was doing a favor for her brother, from recounting the details of her death to everyone in her address book.  I can imagine what that might entail: I have 375 names in my contact book, plus 128 linked in contacts and 58 facebook friends, many of which overlap.  If I were to die. E would know which it would be appropriate to call, and which it would be better to email. But this woman died single so there was no one to judge nuances of closeness.

Dialing the 1-888 number, I learned that she suffered a stroke while bicycling in a charity fundraiser. The stroke was a “lingering complication” of an aneurysm she  had suffered two and a half years earlier.  “She had reached her goal of returning to the things she loved:  riding with her friends and helping other people.”   

What He Said

I rarely write about politics because such writing is divisive and fruitless and especially ill-suited to the web. But yesterday I wrote both of my Senators and my Congresswoman, so maybe it is time to write here, too.   It is time for the recreational righteousness and bogus posturing that passes off for politics in this country to stop, at least for long enough to get this deal done.  The substantive details of the rescue are too complicated to go into here, but in an eight minute segment, Jon Stewart absolutely nails the political fecklessness: McCain's posturing, the House Republicans' childishness, the Democrats' self-congratulations on a job not done,  and the preposterousness of everyone taking Rosh Hoshannah off.  "Please mention that to your previous sentence." "What is this? Tee ball? Everyone gets a trophy."  Those sentences are smarter than anything that appear anywhere else on television.

A Few Words From My Brain, About My Brain, Before It Turns To Mush: Notes On TPT's Brain Special

I just took a brain health quiz.  If I am to have any hope at all of not immediately tipping into senility, I think I need to spend the rest of my life on a treadmill, reading Ullysses., while eating fish.   

The following things are evidently not good for my brain:  watching more than an hour's worth of television a day, spending more than a hour of non-work time on the computer, having more than two cups of coffee a day, getting less than six hours of sleep a day, missing exercise, falling off my diet, experiencing chronic stress,  ever feeling negative, worried, or angry.

I’m negative, worried, and angry right now.   

I would like to use the three brain cells which I can still spare for irony to point out that the show, "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life,” which the local PBS featured on its fund-raising drive, was one and a half hours long. 

And of course I know what Dr Amen (really) means.  There’s TV—the Colbert Report, the Office, 30 Rock, Chelsea Lately, my boys on PTI–and then there’s the depressing mediocrity that washes over you because you can’t bother to get off the couch.  There’s that link you follow that pushes the limits of human inanity. There is the physical and spiritual dehydration that makes life punchy and joyless. My life is an ongoing note to work on these things. 

Now what was I saying? How did I get here? Look, a doggy.   

*A little poking on the web revealed that the show, while broadcast by PBS affiliates, for PBS fund-raising, and featuring PBS on-air personalities, wasn't actually a PBS show, but a sort of infomercial for the turtleneck and blazer crowd and that the science behind the show's more controversial claims has been attacked by Dr Amen's peers. No wonder I'm not supposed to spend too much time on the web.

My Franco File: On Not Learning But Possibly Learning French

I have always assumed I could never learn a new language–what with the  F in junior high German and the mercy D in Ancient Greek in college.  In Montreal,  as E pronounced her French with a Parisian ease, I pronounced “Merci” like "Mersey" or maybe "Manganese."  The waiters spoke English to me immediately and stopped just short of asking me what part of Texas I was from.

But Montreal worked its quasi-European charms. Standing in Renaud Bray,  the predominantly Francophone bookstore, I felt with a special intensity the pressure and the possibility of the unread.

Then at dinner one night, we talked about how cool it would be to find some pretext to spend a year in the city and how we envied the students at McGill.  Of course, I assumed E would perfect her French and I would just rely on the kindness of English-speaking Montreal. But E pointed out that, no, I underestimated myself: I would learn French and I would learn it the way I learned English.

At about age three, my mouth struck a local sidewalk at great speed and my enunciation has never recovered. Phonics was torture as I hissed and mumbled and slurred my way through my own damn language.  But through sports magazines and junior encyclopedias I  learned the mute English of the page, the screen, the radio, and the Big Chief tablet.  I valued writing not as self-expression or even other-expression but as a calm, forgiving, energizing space in which I could finally master (sort of) what had always been fumble and frustration.  I learned English bumpily, but I learned it.

Even the idea of going through this again feels painful–waiters would wince, ticket takers would glare–but if the result would be a second language, the language of Montaigne and Rimbaud and Collette and Sartre,  in its untranslatable percussions and nuances, it would be worth a season in heck. If that year in Montreal ever materializes, we will seize it.

Impure Thoughts About Montreal

We visited Montreal in 1994 and now, again, in 2008 and we experienced two very different cities. The slice of the city we walked through fourteen years ago felt resentful, provincial, and fraught. The trip had its moments: a dinner on a table open to the sidewalk, a discovery at the National Film Board of Canada, the Gypsy Kings live. But the broth of culture–the dozen small encounters, the hundred overheard conversations, the glimpsed architecture and faces seeping into one’s mood–felt unwelcoming. The city felt like it was experiencing the aftermath of an unpleasant family fight. It felt like all the money had left. We did not make plans to return

I did not know then and don’t know now the justice of the grievances of the Separatist movement. My knowledge of the politics involved stems from 1980ish essays by Mordecai Richler, a few comments by Canadian goalie Ken Dryden in his book The Game, and a stray Robbie Robertson lyric. It does seem to me natural those who spoke English in a province surrounded by English speaking markets and connected to an English speaking commonwealth would accumulate more power and wealth than those who spoke an islanded language. Yet one’s language is one’s culture and one’s culture is one’s heart and to have it be dismissed is to have one’s self devalued. 

But there seems to have been a choice between resentfulness and insouciance, between peevishness and sophistication, between “or” and “and.” Montreal now feels like a city which has chosen “and.” The evidence for this is equally hard to pinpoint, but I felt in the voluble cab drivers, the friendly retail workers, the waiters who ask you if you prefer French or English, the helpful concierge. The first English title I saw in a predominantly French bookstore was William Shatner’s autobiography.  Without claiming to judge the art, I sensed a confidence in the humor of some of the art work in the Quebec triennial at the Museum d’art de Contemporain de Montreal: a housewife with appliances in her hair, a parody of karaoke, the exuberantly sardonic text accompanying two iconic bespectacled figures.   I felt this joy in the conversations in both French and English in the subway, among friends on Saint Urbain, at the table next to us late Friday night on Rue McGill. (The only English term used by four French-speaking students was “Brittney Spears,” uttered with a festive contempt.)   To hear French spoken by happy people is to hear a beautiful music; to see French titles in bookstores is to be called to be less provincial.

I tend to think of an essence as a pure thing, but as a tourist in Montreal, I suspect that the city’s essence is its impurity.

The politics of a city are the business of those who live there 365 days a year and any visit is impressionistic. But I know what I sensed and I know we want to return. And while I can’t judge grievance, I know from personal experience that resentment often does far more damage to its bearer than to its target.