Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Ghostly Jacket
The Long Strategy
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 26, 2010
I was a liberal Democrat when I was young. I used to wear a green Army jacket with political buttons on it — for Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. I even wore that jacket in my high school yearbook photo.
David Brooks
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It’s a magic green jacket. I can put it on today and, suddenly, my mind shifts back to the left. I start thinking like a Democrat, feeling a strange accompanying hunger for brown rice.
When I put on that magic jacket today, I feel beleaguered but kind of satisfied. I feel beleaguered because the political winds are blowing so ferociously against “my” party. But I feel satisfied because the Democrats have overseen a bunch of programs that, while unappreciated now, are probably going to do a lot of good in the long run.
For example, everybody now hates the bank bailouts and the stress tests. But, the fact is, these are some of the most successful programs in recent memory. They stabilized the financial system without costing much money. The auto bailout was criticized at the time, but it’s looking pretty good now that General Motors is recovering.
But the magic jacket-wearing me is nervous about the next few years. I’m afraid my party is going to get stuck in the same old debates that we always lose. First, we’re going to have the same old tax debate. We’re going to not extend the Bush tax cuts on the rich. The Republicans will blast us for killing growth and raising taxes as they did in 2000 and 2004.
Then we’ll get stuck in the same old spending debate. We’ll point to high unemployment and propose spending programs too small to make much difference. The Republicans will blast us for bankrupting the country with ineffective programs, and the voters are so distrustful of government these days that they’ll side with the Republicans on that one, too.
So I sit there in my magic green jacket and I wonder: What can my party do to avoid the big government tag that always leads to catastrophe? Then I remember President Obama’s vow to move us beyond the stale old debates. Maybe he couldn’t really do that in the first phase of his presidency when he was busy responding to the economic crisis, but perhaps he can do it now in the second phase.
It occurs to me that the Obama administration has done a number of (widely neglected) things that scramble the conventional categories and that are good policy besides. The administration has championed some potentially revolutionary education reforms. It has significantly increased investments in basic research. It has promoted energy innovation and helped entrepreneurs find new battery technologies. It has invested in infrastructure — not only roads and bridges, but also information-age infrastructure like the broadband spectrum.
These accomplishments aren’t big government versus small government; they’re using government to help set a context for private sector risk-taking and community initiative. They cut through the culture war that is now brewing between the Obama administration and the business community. They also address the core anxiety now afflicting the public. It’s not only short-term unemployment that bothers people. What really scares people is the sense that we’re frittering away our wealth. Americans fear we’re a nation in decline.
So I sit there in my green jacket, happily chewing on a Twizzler that I probably left in a pocket in 1979, and I think: What would happen if Obama sidestepped the fruitless and short-term stimulus debate and instead focused on the long term? He could explain that we’re facing deep fundamental problems: an aging population, overleveraged consumers, exploding government debt, state and local bankruptcies, declining human capital, widening inequality, a pattern of jobless recoveries, deteriorating trade imbalances and so on.
These long-term problems, Obama could say, won’t be solved either with centralized government or free market laissez-faire. Just as government laid railroads and built land grant colleges in the 19th century to foster deep growth, the government today should be doing the modern equivalents.
Not much is going to get passed in the next two years anyway, but the president could lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies. If the president is looking for a long-term growth agenda, he could read “Path to Prosperity,” co-edited by Jason Furman and Jason Bordoff, or “The Pro-Growth Progressive” written by Gene Sperling. Some of these guys already are on his staff.
Eventually, I see a party breaking out of old stereotypes, appealing to entrepreneurs and suburbanites again, and I start feeling good about the future. Then I take off the magic green jacket and return to my old center-right self. A chill sweeps over me: Gosh, what if the Democrats really did change in that way?
Sunday, July 25, 2010
The Upside down Parabola
Up until I was 13 years old, my life proceeded in large, bountiful steps. I talked early, walked early, read early. At the age of 8 I was enjoying literature books assigned in 9th grade. At age 6 adults people oohed and aahed at my ability to sketch what I see on paper. At age 10 I held conversations with adults. At age 5 I was that child reciting poetry on stage, and I did that every year until I was 10 or 11. I was the child on stage giving the welcome message to the audience. I was the adored one. I was the admired one.
Then when I hit 13 something happened. My life slowed down dramatically. For a long time I didn't notice. But when I hit 18, the age when everyone in the Western world heads off to college, I began reflecting on my life. My life had come to, as they say it here, a screeching halt. My parents couldn't remotely afford college in their dreams, so I had to work. A sense of hopelessly descended as I had to submit to the 9-to-5 daily grind in a starchy accounting firm where I was the ultimate anomaly. There I was bored to the edges of insanity. Riddled with petty, cruel but amiable people, it was my first encounter with the corporate world. I was largely friendless and ignored. I ate lunch alone. But in the summer/winter breaks when the college students (who were all children of the partners of the firm) come in to intern, I had some reprieve. The daughters were either haughty or super-cool, and two of the sons plus the delectable, law grad intern had crushes on me. Of course I was impenetrable, because I was 18 and full of angst. I'm not supposed to be working at some stinking accounting firm; I'm supposed to be studying biology. Angst congealed when they returned to college after the breaks leaving me the youngest among aged wolves and foxes. Those were very odd and strained days indeed. Because of those days, A wintry Bethesda has a crisp, distinct smell to me. It represents the Ivory Tower in whose basement I worked. Still I learned. I learned that anything that required a 9-to-5 office setting was not for me. Anything that discourages creative flexibility and insists on a strict adherence to precedents and the status quo is not for me
That was a while ago. A trough in my opinion. From there small steps. Montgomery College to UMBC to Johns Hopkins to Mayo.
Thank God for upside down quadratic functions. Thank God for that light at the end of the tunnel.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The White House Incites Disgust
Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 23, 2010
The Shirley Sherrod story tells us so much about ourselves, and none of it is pretty. The most obvious and shameful fact is that the Obama administration, which runs from race issues the way thoroughbreds bolt from the starting gate, did not offer this woman anything resembling fair or respectful treatment before firing and publicly humiliating her.
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Moving with the swiftness of fanatics on a hanging jury, big shots in the administration and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News came to exactly the same conclusion: Shirley Sherrod had to go — immediately! No time for facts. No time for justice.
What we have here is power run amok. Ms. Sherrod was not even called into an office to be fired face to face. She got the shocking news in her car. “They called me twice,” she told The Associated Press. “The last time, they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and submit my resignation on my BlackBerry, and that’s what I did.”
This woman was thrown to the wolves without even the courtesy of a conversation. Her side of the story? The truth? The administration wasn’t interested.
And the blame for that falls squarely on the people at the very top in the White House. Why didn’t President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden or Rahm (call me Rahmbo) Emanuel, or somebody somewhere in the upper echelon say, “Hey, what the heck are you doing? You can’t fire a person without hearing her side of the story. This is not the Kremlin. Are you nuts?”
And then, of course, there’s the media, and not just the wing nuts at Fox and the crazies in the right-wing blogosphere. A large segment of the mainstream crowd stampeded to condemn this woman solely on the basis of a grainy video clip, just two-and-a-half minutes long, that was trumpeted by a source whose track record should have set alarm bells ringing in the head of any responsible journalist.
This sorry episode shows the extent to which we’ve lost sight of the most basic elements of fair play, responsible reporting and common decency in this society. And we’ve turned the race issue entirely on its head. While racial discrimination is overwhelmingly directed against black people in the U.S., much of the nation and the media are poised to go berserk over the most specious allegations of racism against whites. Even the N.A.A.C.P. rushed to condemn Ms. Sherrod, calling her actions “shameful,” without bothering to seek out the facts — which, incredibly, had unfolded at an N.A.A.C.P. event!
Later, after officials at the organization had found and released a tape of Ms. Sherrod’s entire 45-minute speech, the group’s president, Ben Jealous, apologized and said the N.A.A.C.P. had been “snookered.”
Black people are in a terrible condition right now — economically, socially, educationally and otherwise — and there is no effective champion fighting for their interests. Mr. Jealous and the new edition of the N.A.A.C.P. have shown in this episode that they are not ready for prime time, and President Obama seems reluctant to even utter the word black. Or poor, for that matter.
We hear so much about the middle class, and it’s true that the middle class has suffered in this terrible recession. There’s a middle-class task force in the White House led by the vice president. But the people suffering most in this long economic tailspin are the poor and the black, and you don’t hear much about that.
Which brings us to the most important part of the Shirley Sherrod story. The point that Ms. Sherrod was making as she talked in her speech about the white farmer who had come to her for help was that we are all being sold a tragic bill of goods by the powerful forces that insist on pitting blacks, whites and other ethnic groups against one another.
Ms. Sherrod came to the realization, as she witnessed the plight of poverty-stricken white farmers in the South more than two decades ago, that the essential issue in this country “is really about those who have versus those who don’t.”
She explained how the wealthier classes have benefited from whites and blacks constantly being at each other’s throats, and how rampant racism has insidiously kept so many struggling whites from recognizing those many things they and their families have in common with economically struggling blacks, Hispanics and so on.
“It’s sad that we don’t have a roomful of whites and blacks here tonight,” she said, “because we have to overcome the divisions that we have.”
There is no way we’ll overcome those divisions if people who should know better keep bowing before and kowtowing to the toxic agenda of those on the right whose overriding goal is to foment hostility and hate.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Wings
I opened my eyes in water. It took me a good five minutes to realize I wasn't under water anymore. I was on my bed. The cell phone indicated that it was 6:04 am.
6:04 am: rolled out of bed exhaling air. Inhaling air. I'm already one hour late.
6:07 am: like a fish, I slip and slop down the hall towards the kitchen. Where did these white walls come from?
6:09 am: the morning light hung in the kitchen like a grainy suspension. I turned the light on. I turned the ceiling fan on.
6:10 am: press the big, salient "Bake" button on the stove. A beep follows, then the sound of gas gushing from aged Baltimore pipes.
6:11 am: roughly chopped up half of a Vidalia onion, and ~2 oz of fresh ginger and then popped them into the ginormous white blender I just stole from my mother.
6:12 am: As my finger descended unto the "grate" button I thought of my room mate crashing out of sleep and into the blaring light of reality because of the loud, bothersome blender.
6:12.5 am: I pushed the button.
6:14 am: pour contents into pot. Simmer -- so begins my secret barbecue sauce.
6:20 am: loud beep from ancient heatmonger. 405 degrees it is.
6:21 am: retrieve the wings from the fridge where they've been soaking for 9 hours in my secrete marinade. One last stir and into the heatmonger.
6:22 am: J Vernon McGee is talking about Israel and bible prophecy and some of the nutty inferences circulating out there. I like McGee -- he isn't afraid to call a spade a spade.
6:30 am: Paper work at the kitchen table.
6:40 am: Check the wings. Good. Check the bubbling sauce -- good but too peppery. Add some mayo. John McArthur is talking about not being ashamed to make our request known to God. I like McArthur -- he isn't afraid to call a spade a spade.
7:25 am: Sauce is perfect. Wings are ready for the icing. I pulled them out of the oven, carefully dunk each in the super secret sauce and popped them back in the oven.
7:26 am: sweating profusely. No A/C -- end of paper work.
7:50 am: Alistair Begg, Crete, wings are done. Transfer to aluminum tray. Cover, place in Mahalo bag.
8:13 am: Out the door. Wings and local Riesling as tribute.
3:56 pm: Everyone devoured the wings. Satiated, but light headed. The room is slowly twirling. Note to self: don't touch local Riesling again.
A lot of people don't know where that is
There was lots of translucent, pale blue water last night. A cage, a tank. Fish. In and out.
Swimming. A bond of sorts. Fear.
A distance. In and out.
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