Ft. Hood
November 7, 2009
Murder is a hideous act. Perhaps it's even more hideous when the persons killed were selected randomly, though I'm not sure about that. But in any case, when murder occurs, that's what should be the focus of our attention.
If someone decides to take the lives of other people, it's the decision to kill that ought be of primary concern. The attitudes, beliefs, and opinions that led up to the murder are so secondary they shouldn't be talked about in the same breath. After all, murders are said to occur for all sorts of so-called reasons - because someone is jealous, because someone is frustrated in traffic, because someone feels he has been insulted. But these are not the actual reasons. Most of us have been, at sometime, jealous, frustrated by other drivers, insulted. Our response was not to go out and commit murder.
It's true that certain subjects may have greater potential to push people over the edge than others. Religion, for example, is so packed with intensity it can, and often has, driven people crazy. We all know this. But usually when a person of a particular religious group does something terrible we don't castigate the beliefs of the other members of that group.
We have in the United States a much higher murder rate than occurs in any other Western nation. For example, the American murder rate is six times as high as it is in Germany. You would think we would be interested in why. Yet outside fairly narrow sociological circles and groups of civil rights activists that question is seldom examined. It's unlikely that Americans are more frustrated, more jealous, more insulted than other people. So, the ostensible "reasons" for murder are not an explanation. We need to know why, in America, killing is so often selected as a way of responding to dissatisfactions. Yet we make little effort to find out. Truth is, murder, as murder, doesn't draw a great deal of attention in the United States.
We are obsessed with the supposed motives of killers. These are spun out endlessly, and often quite ignorantly, on countless TV shows. If someone is disgruntled, we go on forever about the disgruntlement -- was it justified, was it insane, was it unpatriotic, was it petty? We don't find it bizarre, though, that someone should choose to kill other people as a result of disgruntlement.
Might it be that our expectation lies at the core of the explanation? We expect angry people to resort to murder. It becomes normal to say that if a person is angry enough he'll try to kill someone. So, we concentrate on the emotion and not the act. We bemuse ourselves with the notion that if we can subdue certain attitudes, certain beliefs, certain emotions then bad things won't happen. But the bad thing is not the emotion; the bad thing is the choice to kill.
If it's terrible to kill in one situation then it's terrible to kill in all situations. That's not to say that killing is never a sane option regardless of circumstances. Sometimes it is. But it's still terrible.
I suspect we have so much murder in the United States because we, in the main, don't think of killing as terrible. Often we believe it's just the right thing to do to solve our problems. And if we as a society think that, then the idea will filter down to individuals. Keep in mind that almost every murderer, at the moment of killing, thinks he is achieving something by taking other people's lives.
Stagnation
November 6, 2009
The political theme of the moment is that Obama, by trying to appease Republicans, lost the initiative that would have allowed him to win victories for himself and for the nation. I'm not sure that hypothesis is correct but I tend to think it is.
An element of knowing your enemy is to face the truth that he is, indeed, your enemy. Obama appears to have been beguiled by the notion that Republicans and Democrats could join hands and march together towards national grandeur. He forgot that what one party sees as grandeur the other sees as hell. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is not a quarrel over tactics. It is rather clashing desires about what they want the nation to be.
If everything Obama wants were brought into being and if it proved to function just as he said it would, the Republicans would still hate it. They don't want everybody to have health care. They think it should be reserved for people who deserve it, and it turns out that those who deserve it, in Republicans' minds, are people much like themselves. They are not racists or bigots, you know; they just don't like anyone who is not the same as they are. Consequently, there could not be health reform, no matter how well it worked or how little it cost, that Republicans would approve.
What we can say about health care, we can say about any other national policy -- foreign affairs, infrastructure, schools, environmental measures, banking, food supply, public religion and so on. Anything Democrats supported in those endeavors, Republicans would hate, and vice versa.
It would be pleasant if the adherents of the two major parties were not so at odds with one another. But they are and there's no sense in trying to hide from the truth.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats make up a majority of the nation. Together they probably comprise slightly over half. The rest are called independents, and the great political wisdom has pronounced that winning over the independents is the key to political heaven. There remains a question, though: what will win them?
Most political pundits go about answering that question in the wrong way because they don't know the nature of the people they are trying to answer it about. The wise heads think that if they can discover what the independents want, they can tell either party how to woo them. The truth, though, is that the independents don't want anything, or at least not anything that can be articulated in political terms. With rare exceptions the independents simply want everything to be okay so that they can feel good. This, they are convinced, they deserve.
So what is it that wins them over? Perceived success. If the Democrats seem to be carrying their program, the independents will flock to them. And they will flock just as avidly towards the Republicans if the GOP seems to be in the driver's seat.
Those who seize the initiative, regardless of what their opponents think, are the darlings of the independents. The Republicans understand this more clearly than the Democrats do. There is, however, one qualification of the rule. The initiative to be seized has to fall within the broad confines of sanity. This is a point the Republicans have missed.
You can, for example, pursue an aggressive foreign policy and carry the independents with you. But if you start talking about dropping atomic bombs on Iran, then the independents will begin to mumble and shake their heads.
It remains to be seen whether Obama has some long-range strategy that will catapult him to an appearance of success after having lulled his enemies by a deceptive timidity. I hope that's the case. Right now, though, I'm not sure it is.
The Way It Ought To Be
November 5, 2009
One of the heartening stories of medical research over the past decade has been the creation of a drug to control blood cancer which has, beyond doubt, saved thousands of lives. Since one of those lives belongs to my son-in-law, I have taken a strong interest in this discovery, and so I am glad to learn that the trio who built the drug, Brian J. Drucker, Nicholas B. Lydon and Charles L. Sawyers have won the Lasker-BeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the most prestigious prize in American medicine.
Before the drug, sold as Gleevec, became available, sufferers from chronic myeloid leukemia were virtually doomed. Those over forty had maybe a year to live, that is if they wanted to delay their deaths by taking a medication that made them sick all the time. Younger patients could risk a bone marrow transplant, which was extremely dangerous. Even those who survived it often had severe after effects.
Now, with Gleevec, those with myeloid leukemia can look forward to a normal life. It does, occasionally, have some unpleasant side effects but they are minor compared to what a patient with leukemia would have faced earlier.
Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times published an interview with Brian Drucker a few days ago, in which he explained how Gleevec came to be and what happened to patients before they could get it. It's a graphic story. During the latter part of the interview he also explained that he hasn't made a penny from the marketing of Gleevec. Two hundred thousand people around the world are now taking it and, as a consequence, are living rather than dying. Drucker says that's more than enough reward for him.
We don't need to feel sorry for Drucker. He's a leading research physician and has, I'm fairly sure, a more than decent income, which he amply earns. But I think it is worthwhile to compare him and his motives with those for whom the marketing of drugs is simply a means to rake in lots of money. Most of them, of course, don't discover anything. They just get patents and use them to sell drugs at high prices (Gleevec, by the way, costs a lot and Drucker has nothing to do with its price).
The basic problem in the world today is how we can get more people like Drucker and fewer like the heads of most big banks and corporations. We're not making much progress in that direction because our values are less than sterling. Still that's all the more reason to admire researchers like Drucker, who are using their brains and talent to make the world a less hideous place.
You can be sure of this: before Gleevec, myeloid leukemia was hideous.
A Mythical Point
November 4, 2009
Perhaps the most hoary admonition in American politics is the directive to move towards the center if you want to be successful. But what if you don't know where the center is? Even more puzzling, what if there is no center?
I confess that if I wanted to be a centrist I would have no idea what to do. How would I express my centrism? How would I change my current naive support of policies I think are healthy and opposition to those I think are harmful?
Take health care for instance. Republicans don't want health care reform. Democrats want changes that would make medical attention available to anyone who needed it. What does a centrist want? Changes that wouldn't make any difference?
If you run through the various issues that are driving political struggle in this country -- Afghanistan, rebuilding the infrastructure, strengthening employment, making big banks less toxic, investment in medical research, civil liberties, incarceration practices -- it's hard to know what the centrist position is or what it would produce.
The centrist problem is related to the question of how to appeal to independents, who are said to be the fastest growing segment of the electorate. Independents are people who don't want to associate themselves with either of the two principal political parties. But what does that tell you about what they do want? You could be a fascist and be independent; your neighbor could be a communist and independent. What might a politician say to the two of you together to win you over?
As far as I can tell, an independent centrist is generally a blank. He's a guy who sits around and says, "I don't know about all of this stuff. None of it makes much sense to me." Then when you ask him what does make sense, he says, "Well, I don't know; I just want them to do something that's good."
I'm weary of people who are independents and centrists. And I'm even more weary of the argument that appeals to them are the only means to achieve political success.
What's wrong with knowing what you support and why you support it? Is that terribly radical? Is it un-American?
There is no such thing as a centrist policy in the United States, and therefore no way to march to political glory by advocating it. The centrist prize will always slip away from the grasp of anyone who tries to seize it. It's the goal of people who don't have any goals. It's emptiness idealized.
Rake-Offs
November 3, 2009
The insurance giant Kaiser Permanente has compiled a series of charts depicting the costs for various medical procedures in the United States and Europe. In every case the cost in the United States is higher than elsewhere. Consider a CT scan, for example. In England, a scan costs $161; in the United States it costs between $950 and $1800, depending on where you get it.
In England, the $161 is sufficient to pay for everything necessary to complete the scan -- that is, the room, the scanning equipment, the salaries of the technicians, et cetera. But in the United States you have to pay about $1200 more to get the same thing. The question is, who gets the $1200. And the answer is, lots of people who have nothing to do with the effectiveness of the scan.
What enterprise means, basically, in America is finding ways to rake money out of processes without contributing anything to them. We think that's smart; we think that's clever; we think that demonstrates initiative. So many people have been doing it for so long they have come to think of it not only as normal but as a right to which they're entitled. And then we ask: why is reform so hard?
In the United States we fail to do much that needs doing because we spend our money on rake-offs rather than on useful products and services. We don't build and staff good schools. We don't have highways and bridges in good repair. We don't have an adequate electrical network. We don't generate energy in intelligent ways. We don't clean up the environment. And why not? Because hundreds of billions are going each year to people whose entire function is to milk the system.
You could argue, I suppose, that these people use the money they get to buy stuff, and thus to support the economy. The trouble is, they don't buy the things that make for a healthy society. The goods and services we need the most in the country right now are paid for with taxes. And in America we have gobbled up the notion that all taxes are bad. So, we can't have the things we need because a derogatory name has been put on the money we would use to pay for them.
Both in getting and spending we promote Fruit Loops over oatmeal -- so to speak. Our system is making us very sick. But those rakers really love their money.
Confidence
October 31, 2009
In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan explains that the reason our leaders can't make realistic appraisals and are little more than callous children is that they grew up in an era when they were being told that everything was great in America.
I seem to recall we were told that by the greatest of all American heroes, Ronald Reagan, the subject of Peggy adulatory biography. She's a brilliant pundit but she's not super good at putting things together.
When even Peggy Noonan tells us we should face up to reality, despite not knowing what reality is, it indicates we are going through a sea change about how we should regard ourselves.
For a generation we heard that self-esteem (or, as my friend Dan Noel used to call it, "the self as steam") was the key to all things great and wonderful. If we simply felt good about ourselves and recognized that we were the grandest people history has ever brought forth and showered scorn on a mythical American malaise, then the march to glory and the American goal of everyone's being rich would be unimpeded. Yet, somehow now, that message seems to be withering round the edges.
Barbara Ehrenreich has dared to write a book titled Bright-Sided in which she declares that unrestricted optimism -- eternal morning in America -- is not good for us. What's wrong with her?
The constant refrain from our politicians that the United States is the greatest country in the world suggests that Americans are obsessed with comparisons. We have to be Number One, whatever that means. And if we're not, what then? I guess we just sink into oblivion.
Why is it that the only means of experiencing confidence among us is to feel that we're better than someone else? What if you're not better than everyone else? You're still you, aren't you? You still have your life to live and, presumably, it's important to you.
Constant worrying about how we stack up against others, and whether we're great, and whether we're more competitive, and more enterprising, and have more get up and go than anyone else, is enough to drive a person nuts. The evidence is all around us.
If you want a bowl of Wheaties and have the ability to dish it up for yourself, why not take satisfaction in that? What does it matter if you dished it up better than all other dishers-up of Wheaties?
Actually, we know what concern about how we compare to others is. That's the thing we're really afraid of.
War's Requirement
October 30, 2009
Guess what? To find out what's to be done about Afghanistan David Brooks did what any good reporter should do. He consulted the military experts. He doesn't name a single one and he doesn't tell us how his list was compiled. But, still, he consulted them.
He found out that in war stubbornness is more to be prized than intelligence. The military experts aren't worried about Obama's intelligence. But they are extremely concerned about his stubbornness. They think he might not be stubborn enough.
What's stubborn enough? To persist in the war no matter how much it costs or how long it takes. If we put enough resources into the war and keep them coming long enough, then the war can be won. That seems to be what a real man would do, at least in the minds of the unnamed military experts that good reporter David Brooks consulted.
What a powerful word "enough" is.
If you're stubborn enough it doesn't matter even if you don't have enough stuff to win the war. Obviously, and this goes without saying, it also doesn't matter what else you have to give up to achieve victory. A real man, stubborn enough, will keep at it as the schools at home crumble, the debt rises to unmanageable levels, the infrastructure falls apart, the environment becomes ever more polluted. That's what real men do. They keep at it.
In war, no question of the allocation of resources arises, at least not among men stubborn enough.
I doubtless write too much about David Brooks. I'm stubborn that way. I do it because he represents, for me, a fascinating phenomenon, one that's on the rise. We now have a tribe of pundits in America who manage to crawl their way to the summit of journalistic success by employing an ample store of cleverness grounded on bedrock stupidity.
You wouldn't think the two attributes go together. But there's David with his band of military experts, all of whom are very stubborn.
Feigned Fear
October 29, 2009
A thing I've noticed about people who are vehemently critical of Barack Obama is that they often say he's trying to take away their Constitutional rights. But then they never mention any Constitutional right he's trying to take away. What's going on with that?
It's regularly charged that the passage of a health bill to guarantee medical care to all citizens would destroy Constitutional rights. Not once in the dozens of times I've read that claim has a provision of the Constitution been cited.
Gradually -- and believe me this has taken a long time -- I've begun to understand what's going on in the minds of people who assert they are fearful of the threat Obama poses to constitutionalism. They don't have the actual Constitution of the United States in their thoughts. The Constitution for them is an icon, not a document. It symbolizes everything they think they like. So if something comes up they don't like, it must be unconstitutional. That's perfectly logical, isn't it?
I've heard people announce with an air of certainty that the Constitution guarantees a system of free enterprise. I'm never quite sure what they mean by free enterprise because, usually, what they're advocating involves restricting the freedom of most people. But regardless of whether or not they have something clear in mind, the Constitution says nothing about free enterprise. It doesn't call for any particular economic system. What it says, In Article I, Section 8, is that "Congress shall have power to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." The Constitution doesn't prescribe which economic system Congress must use to regulate commerce. It simply says Congress has the power to do it.
Truth is, the powers of government laid out in the Constitution are much broader than avid opponents of the Obama administration want to admit. The framers wrote the Constitution so that future legislators could take the actions they saw fit to provide for the general welfare of the United States.
Much of the time when officials are charged with violating the constitution, particularly when welfare provisions are being proposed, their critics are not concerned with being faithful to the Constitution. Rather, they wish to use it like a religious sceptre to bash those they dislike.
Reading the actual words of the Constitution is a more rare event in America than we suppose.
Equality
October 28, 2009
The most striking revelation to emerge from the excitement over the character of Fox News is the discovery of how most journalists speak of opinion. It's a unitary thing. All manifestations of it are the same. Opinion is just opinion and there's nothing more to be said about it. Therefore, all opinion is equal.
You can't use measures like intelligence and stupidity, truthfulness and falsehood, sanity and insanity, evidence and non-evidence to gage the quality of opinion.
If Bill Kristol says that the United States should immediately launch a bombing attack against Iran and Roger Cohen argues that the consequences of a bombing attack would be injurious for everyone involved, you can agree with the one or the other. But you can't say that one is superior to the other because they're both just expressing their opinions.
If Glenn Beck says that President Obama is a racist who hates white culture and Bob Herbert says that high unemployment now will hamper American health for decades to come, you can't say that one of these statements is more serious than the other, because they're both opinions.
If Lou Dobbs says there are unanswered questions about where Barack Obama was born and Rachel Maddow says that the place of the president's birth has been amply documented, they're both just expressing opinion.
Fox News has defended itself against charges of bias by saying that four hours of its programming, from five o'clock till eleven, is opinion. Having said that there is, presumably, no obligation on Fox's part to say anything about the quality of the opinion that comes out of those four hours because -- you see -- there's no such thing as the quality of opinion. Rather, opinion is just a God-given right to say what one thinks.
Where did such a peculiar notion as the equality of all opinion come from? It's a concept you can hear propounded solemnly on TV every evening. But it's a concept no one believes. Everybody knows that some opinions are better than others. Everybody knows that some opinions are nuts. Everybody knows there is such a measure as intellectual integrity which can be applied to opinion.
Yet what everyone knows often seems to have no operative function in television journalism. Why is that?
Second Thoughts
October 28, 2009
Michael T. Flynn is a major general in the U.S, Army and, currently, the highest ranking military intelligence officer in Afghanistan. Here's what he says: "If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves."
Ahmed Wali Karzai is the brother of Afghanistan's president and widely regarded as a big drug dealer. He also has his own private army, which the New York Times says is largely paid for by the CIA. Karzai uses it to kill people the CIA wants killed and to kill people he thinks are not expressing the right political sentiments in the country.
It's a jolly world over there in Afghanistan. It can furnish us with the plots for television melodramas and action movies for decades to come. Entertainment in today's world is highly desirable, yet the cost of this particular show is getting to be very high. Some are even beginning to wonder if we can afford it.
I was astounded this morning to read that Tom Friedman thinks we are going overboard. George Will has already expressed a similar sentiment.
Almost every advocate for a robust counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan I have read said something like this: we need more military forces in the country but they won't do any good unless we also invest this and that and so on.
The trouble is, the this and the that and the so on always add up to something we don't have and wouldn't be willing to use up on Afghanistan even if we did have it. All of it together may constitute a wonderful imaginary idealism -- the generous United States, over twenty-five years, draining itself of its resources in order to transform Afghanistan into a replica of Denmark. But what does that have to with realistic politics?
I sympathize with Barack Obama's problem. In order to get elected, he had to talk tough. And Afghanistan was the only place he could talk tough about. Now, even if he understands that the whole Afghanistan adventure is futile, he can't back out of it completely. But surely he can start to put on the brakes a little.
I wonder, by the way, if Stanley McChrystal knows the details of the CIA's deal with Ahmed Wali Karzai. Or is that above his classification level?
The Lesson Giver
October 27, 2009
In an act of irony near perfect in its comedic effect, David Brooks today tells us that government regulators are overestimating their skill in moderating the pay of executives. People think they are smarter than they are, proclaims Mr. Brooks, in the preface to the main theme of his column. He's right, particularly when they begin to lecture us about how knowledge of human nature should hold us back from anything the right-wing doesn't like.
I wonder if David Brooks thinks he's making an honest argument (that's where the irony would come) or if he's consciously trying to conceal flackery behind a sententious philosophical conceit.
In the United States we have devised a system for putting vast amounts of money into the hands of a relatively few people who contribute virtually nothing to social well-being. So-called populism is angry about that. Most people don't like being told that a few are so "talented" they deserve to be paid a thousand times as much as those who teach school, or care for the sick, or help bring food to the ordinary family, particularly when those exemplars of talent have to draw on the taxes paid by the untalented to maintain their exalted positions.
I wish David Brooks would summon his extraordinary insights into flawed human nature to explain to us why the general populace shouldn't be angry about that. Or why they shouldn't want their government to do something about it.
Brooks knows as well as anyone that a political system constructed to help people pile up mountains of money, and to make available federal funds to keep the piles high, can't be changed overnight. The people with the piles are spending a portion of their desserts to make sure that the system never changes, or that it changes in only one direction, to create bigger piles for fewer people. So, presumably, the government should do nothing.
Actually, that's not quite fair. Brooks just wants the government to do nothing that it can do. He has a scheme for regulating compensation in the so-called financial industry. The relationship between executives and shareholders should be changed. Doing this would be humble rather than arrogant. It's just that he doesn't say how it might be done.
The government, meanwhile, is doing what it can do, exercising its power as a creditor to modify the behavior of the people who owe it vast amounts of money. It's the same thing that every bank in the land does. This in Brooks's mind constitutes hubris. In my mind it constitutes at least something. So I hope they'll keep at it, even if it does cause a bit of scurrying from one firm to another among the talented of the nation.
©John R. Turner
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